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What is the plot of the story?
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about Captain Midas by Alfred Coppel.
Relevant chunks:
explain the phenomena of the Ghost Ship? Was it really only a product of his imagination? What of all the others who had seen it? Was it possible for many different men under many different situations to have the same exact illusion? Reason denied that. But perhaps space itself denies reason. Grimly he retraced the legend of the Ghost Ship. A chance phrase here and a story there put together all that he knew: Doomed for all eternity to wander in the empty star-lanes, the Ghost Ship haunts the Solar System that gave it birth. And this is its tragedy,
course. What is it that girls in small offices do or eat or drink or wear that girls in large offices don't do or eat or drink or wear? What do writers and doctors do differently? Or poets and dentists? What are we missing? What—" In the outer office a girl cried out. A body thumped against a desk, then a chair, then to the floor. Two girls screamed. Andy bolted up from his chair. Racing to the door, he shouted back to Bettijean, "Get a staff doctor and a chemist from the lab." It was the girl who had
forty years ago or more. Resembled one? It was one! Unquestionably, though half-invisible and like a piece of glass immersed in water, it was a rocket ship. But the instruments on the control board could not lie. The presence of any material body within a hundred thousand miles would be revealed. But the needle on the gauge did not quiver. Nothing indicated the presence of a ship. But the evidence of his eyes was incontestable. Or was it? Doubt gripped him. Did the loneliness of all these years in space twist his mind till he was imagining the appearance of
"Get somebody—maybe even the President—on all radio and TV networks. Explain frankly about the four-centers and warn against licking any stamps. Then—" He broke off as his phone rang. Answering, he listened for a moment, then hung up and said, "But before the big announcement, get somebody checking on the security clearances at whatever plant it is where they print stamps. This's a big deal. Somebody may've been planted years ago for this operation. It shouldn't be too hard. "But there's no evidence it was a plot yet. Could be pure accident—some chemical in the stickum spoiled. Do they keep
deathly ill, but nobody dying. And doctors can't identify the poison until they have a fatality for an autopsy. People stricken in every part of the country, but the water systems are pure. How does it spread?" "In food?" "How? There must be hundreds of canneries and dairies and packing plants over the country. How could they all goof at the same time—even if it was sabotage?" "On the wind?" "But who could accurately predict every wind over the entire country—even Alaska and Hawaii—without hitting Canada or Mexico? And why wouldn't everybody get it in a given area?" Bettijean's smooth
Question:
What is the plot of the story?
Answer:
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[
"This story follows the Martian Maid’s journey and features its crew members: a captain nicknamed ‘Captain Midas’, Mister Spinelli the Third Officer, and various other shipmates. It is revealed that many of the crew members have a lust for making money, and an apt opportunity to do so is discovered when Mister Spinelli spots a derelict ship amongst the asteroids that could be claimed by them. After a first exploration, Midas ends up with a mystery metal collected from the starship. In his further investigation, he finds that this mystery metal transforms into a heavier metal with a yellow tinge - gold. At the same time, he finds that holding the metal evokes fatigue in him, particularly in his arms. This initial investigation was interrupted by Spinelli barging into Midas’ quarters and spotting the gold. Fearful of the other shipmates knowing and hence collecting it for themselves, Midas threatens Spinelli’s silence. \n\nMidas continues the acquisition of this derelict ship by sending a crew, led by Cohn, to further investigate and take control of the ship. With Midas and Spinelli left behind, they watch their shipmates enter the alien ship. While waiting to hear back from the crew, Midas notices that Spinelli has arranged the Maid’s gun to point at the derelict ship and their crew mates. Initially enraged, Midas soon calms down as he begins to suspect that the rest of the crew knows about the gold and may be hatching an alternate plan. Two days past the check-in time, the pair receives a garbled message from the crew. Midas orders them to disembark and depart, but the starship begins to divert its course. In arguing between something being wrong and Spinelli telling the crew about the gold, Spinelli begins to inch towards the firing panel for the gun and a tussle emerges between the two with Midas killing him. \n\nAfter re-catching the derelict ship, Midas boards the ship to look for the rest of his crew mates. He finds the walls to turn into yellow metal and the decks to have a yellowish cast as well. Inside the ship, he sees skeletal and rusty versions of his crew, and comes to the horrifying realization that the transformation of the metal into gold comes at the expense of him and his crew member’s youth and strength. Running from the ship, Midas reboards the Maid and quickly throws the alien ship back into space. Back on Callisto, the Foundation relieves him of his command as the illness spreads to the rest of his body. \n",
"This story is about the last spatial flight of Captain Midas. He lives in a time when humans have explored and deemed safe the Earth-Mars-Venus Triangle. At the beginning, he talks about greedy human nature and what it can cause. Years ago, he was a skipper of the Martian Maid spaceship flying to Callisto. His crew - Spinelli, Shelley, Cohn, Marvin, Zaleski - people with love for money, not noble pioneers. They detected a derelict in the supra-solar void between the EMV Triangle and the outer systems. First, they thought it was The Holcomb Foundation ship, but this one was the largest craft they had ever seen. It was on a near-collision course and probably came in from the direction of Coma Berenices - the stars. He gathered the crew and informed them that they were entitled to claim this derelict as salvage. Everyone got excited and started thinking about the money they could get for this craft. The skipper was supposed to report their finding to the EMV base. But Midas decided to do that after receiving the money for its parts. When they got near the craft, Midas noticed that the metal of its flanks was grained with glittering whorls. They realized it was a starship, and it probably had been roaming through space for millennia. It was gashed deeply by something. Cohn and three other men came back disappointed, saying there was nothing valuable inside. He brought two samples of the ship’s metal. Midas examined the chunks at his work-table, and soon the metal grew yellower. He spent some time testing the sample, and it became stable, drawing the necessary energy from somewhere, and turned into gold. Spinelli unexpectedly came into his office and noticed the piece of gold. He volunteers to go onboard the derelict, but Midas refuses. He also orders Spinelli not to say anything about the precious stone. Captain then saw Spinelli murmuring something to Zaleski and also felt inexplicably tired. He assigned Marvin and Chelly to accompany Cohn and Zaleski onto the hulk in case of mutiny. With time, the number of messages from Cohn started decreasing, and they came through garbled. They sent a strange message that stated that they had lost control. Spinelli got infuriated and almost fired at the big ship from the supersonic rifle. Midas aggressively ordered him to stop, and Spinelli attacked him. After a short fight, Midas killed the officer and immediately noticed that his hands were sickly purple. He put on a pressure suit and decided to go onboard the derelict. Inside he saw his crewmates, their skeletal bodies, and old faces. The walls around them were gold. Midas realized that the ship’s metal was taking the energy required to make it stable from people who touched it. He ran and threw all the gold away. Midas landed on Callisto and was relieved of his command. The illness slowly spread from his hands to other body parts. Now he’s in a hospital and looks eighty though he’s thirty two. \n\n\n",
"Captain Midas lives on the spacemen’s pension from Holcomb Foundation. He starts a story about his experience of once having a tremendous amount of treasure. The story begins with him and the crew members on the spaceship Martian Maid when they find a massive derelict in the outer system of the Earth-Mars-Venus Triangle in space. Mister Spinelli is the first one to find the derelict. After he reports to the captain, and the captain measures the course of the derelict, they decide to search over the hulk based on the Space Regulation that any derelict belongs to the discoverer. They sense the chance of treasure in the derelict, searching over it without reporting to the nearest EMV base. At first, they do not find anything valuable inside the ship, so they decide to bring the whole derelict. Mister Cohn brings two pieces of the metal constituting the derelict to the captain. When the captain examines the metal, he finds his hand grows bony and old while the metal becomes gold. He realizes that the metal can somehow transmute the energy to the property of metal, stabilizing itself to become gold. Mister Spinelli witnesses this discovery when the captain is trying in his room. When Mister Spinelli asks the captain whether he can help take the derelict abroad, the captain denies his request and orders him not to leak the information about the metal. Mister Spinelli tells Zaleski, who will take care of the derelict, about the metal. The captain orders the rest of the members to help Zaleski, ensuring that he cannot take the derelict himself. The captain sets the radar finder to watch the derelict. While Spinelli and the captain watch over the derelict with a turret pointing toward it, the message from Mister Cohn, who takes charge of the crew on the derelict, starts to decrease. When they find the derelict begins to get out of sight, Spinelli suspects them of betraying and attacks the captain, while the captain senses the danger of the decreasing message and fights back. The captain kills Mister Spinelli. As the captain examines his hand’s condition, he realizes something goes wrong. The captain controls the Maid to catch up with the derelict, attempting to shoot it but fails. He wears the pressure suit and goes to the derelict, finding the prize crew aged and caress the metal. He realizes that the energy the metal draws comes from organic life, which in this situation is humans. He runs to the Maid, throws away any alien metals, and flees. And now, he lives on the spacemen’s pension, old and weary when he should be young and strong.",
"The captain of the Martian Maid starts off describing gold and the greatness of the treasure. He begins to mention how old he is, and he is also poor because he would not be here otherwise. The man goes further on to describe how people of his generation did not let anything go because they were entitled to keep whatever they found. He begins talking about how he is the skipper of the Martian Maid, and the rest of the crew ride a golden ship that they paid for with their lives. He begins to talk about the experience not too long ago, how none of the crew would have known that this was their last flight. He thinks about the sweet payload they would pick up in Callisto from delivering all of the cargo. The captain also mentions how dangerous the asteroid belt was for astrogation at the time. The story then cuts to Spinelli reporting a derelict to the rest of the crew. Once they are near the collision, an abandoned spacer is found. However, even though they have claim over the ship, the captain’s calculations show that it came from beyond the stars. Everybody becomes excited at the prospect of money; the derelict is much bigger than anything the Foundation Yards have ever built. It is also damaged too, as there is a gash from the stem to the stern with a jagged rip in its bare mangled innards. Some of the men are sent to go explore the ship, but they come back disappointed that there is nothing worthy left inside. The ship itself was never built to carry humans, but the crew still decides to take her along. When the captain puts the metal through the metallurgical testing kit, however, he discovers that it is gold. Spinelli tells him that the derelict is ready, but the captain makes him stay on the Maid with him. A few other members of the crew seem to be planning something, and the captain wonders if there is a chance that they will take off with the treasure ship. Spinelli reveals later that he did tell Zaleski about the gold, but they receive a message about losing control on the ship. Spinelli leaps at the captain, and the two of them fight. When the captain realizes that Spinelli is dead, he suddenly looks at his arms and sees how old he has become. He goes to the gold ship and sees the rest of the crew as almost skeletal beings. Realizing that the gold draws energy from them, he discards all of it and speeds away in the Maid. He is relieved of his duty on Callisto, and the Foundation refuses him another ship. The captain is thirty-two, but he looks eighty and is stuck on a hospital cot. The bitterest part is people laugh and call him Captain Midas when he tells this story. "
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explain the phenomena of the Ghost Ship? Was it really only a product of his imagination? What of all the others who had seen it? Was it possible for many different men under many different situations to have the same exact illusion? Reason denied that. But perhaps space itself denies reason. Grimly he retraced the legend of the Ghost Ship. A chance phrase here and a story there put together all that he knew: Doomed for all eternity to wander in the empty star-lanes, the Ghost Ship haunts the Solar System that gave it birth. And this is its tragedy,
course. What is it that girls in small offices do or eat or drink or wear that girls in large offices don't do or eat or drink or wear? What do writers and doctors do differently? Or poets and dentists? What are we missing? What—" In the outer office a girl cried out. A body thumped against a desk, then a chair, then to the floor. Two girls screamed. Andy bolted up from his chair. Racing to the door, he shouted back to Bettijean, "Get a staff doctor and a chemist from the lab." It was the girl who had
forty years ago or more. Resembled one? It was one! Unquestionably, though half-invisible and like a piece of glass immersed in water, it was a rocket ship. But the instruments on the control board could not lie. The presence of any material body within a hundred thousand miles would be revealed. But the needle on the gauge did not quiver. Nothing indicated the presence of a ship. But the evidence of his eyes was incontestable. Or was it? Doubt gripped him. Did the loneliness of all these years in space twist his mind till he was imagining the appearance of
"Get somebody—maybe even the President—on all radio and TV networks. Explain frankly about the four-centers and warn against licking any stamps. Then—" He broke off as his phone rang. Answering, he listened for a moment, then hung up and said, "But before the big announcement, get somebody checking on the security clearances at whatever plant it is where they print stamps. This's a big deal. Somebody may've been planted years ago for this operation. It shouldn't be too hard. "But there's no evidence it was a plot yet. Could be pure accident—some chemical in the stickum spoiled. Do they keep
deathly ill, but nobody dying. And doctors can't identify the poison until they have a fatality for an autopsy. People stricken in every part of the country, but the water systems are pure. How does it spread?" "In food?" "How? There must be hundreds of canneries and dairies and packing plants over the country. How could they all goof at the same time—even if it was sabotage?" "On the wind?" "But who could accurately predict every wind over the entire country—even Alaska and Hawaii—without hitting Canada or Mexico? And why wouldn't everybody get it in a given area?" Bettijean's smooth
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Who is Dimanche, and how is he used in the story?
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about Delay in Transit by F. L. (Floyd L.) Wallace.
Relevant chunks:
a long journey, the first part of which already lay behind him. He had to go to Tunney 21 to see a man. That man wasn't important to anyone save the company that employed him, and possibly not even to them. The thug trailing him wouldn't be interested in Cassal himself, his mission, which was a commercial one, nor the man on Tunney. And money wasn't the objective, if Dimanche's analysis was right. What did the thug want? Secrets? Cassal had none, except, in a sense, Dimanche. And that was too well kept on Earth, where the instrument was invented
guards? What does Travelers Aid have that's so secret?" Cassal grunted and didn't answer. Dimanche could be annoyingly inquisitive at times. Cassal had entered one side of a block-square building. He came out on the other side. The agency was larger than he had thought. The old man was staring at a door as Cassal came out. He had apparently changed every sign in the building. His work finished, the technician was removing the visual projector from his head as Cassal came up to him. He turned and peered. "You stuck here, too?" he asked in the uneven voice of
the body. He glanced toward the boulevard. So far no one had been attracted by the violence. He bent down to retrieve the lighter-rapier. Dimanche shouted at him. Before he could react, someone landed on him. He fell forward, vainly trying to grasp the weapon. Strong fingers felt for his throat as he was forced to the ground. He threw the attacker off and staggered to his feet. He heard footsteps rushing away. A slight splash followed. Whoever it was, he was escaping by way of water. Whoever it was. The man he had thought he had slain was no
Cassal gazed at the body. Self-defense, of course, but would the police believe it? Assuming they did, they'd still have to investigate. The rapier was an illegal concealed weapon. And they would question him until they discovered Dimanche. Regrettable, but what could he do about it? Suppose he were detained long enough to miss the ship bound for Tunney 21? Grimly, he laid down the rapier. He might as well get to the bottom of this. Why had the man attacked? What did he want? "I don't know," replied Dimanche irritably. "I can interpret body data—a live body. I can't
a neat bundle, attached his name, and dropped it into the chute. "The woman, Murra Foray, the first counselor. She's a Huntner." "What's a Huntner?" "A sub-race of men on the other side of the Galaxy. She was vocalizing about her home planet when I managed to locate her." "Any other information?" "None. Electronic guards were sliding into place as soon as I reached her. I got out as fast as I could." "I see." The significance of that, if any, escaped him. Nevertheless, it sounded depressing. "What I want to know is," said Dimanche, "why such precautions as electronic
Question:
Who is Dimanche, and how is he used in the story?
Answer:
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[
"Dimanche is a device attached to Cassal's ear that is able to collect physiological data on a person, including nervous systems and physical reactions to stimuli. In addition, Dimanche is able to understand what people \"subvocalize\", or think to themselves in their subconscious. In the story, Dimanche's abilities are shown when he is able to read the thoughts of Cassal's attacker as well as his body's reactions to Cassal's movements, such as his heart rate and blood pressure. Dimanche's features also give Cassal an advantage in his work as a salesperson, as he is able to gauge people's thoughts, motives, and desires. Dimanche is a secret kept from the rest of the galaxy, and Cassal is hesitant to tell others about his abilities.",
"Dimanche is an electronic instrument that was invented on Earth. Cassal refers to Dimanche as a device. It is a secret instrument that very few know about. It has the ability to scan the nervous systems of individuals at short distances to collect and interpret data. He is used in the story to analyze the data that he collects from people nearby to complete a report of what a person says and thinks inside of their head. ",
"Dimanche is a device invented on Earth to help Cassal analyze people. Dimanche is first used to help Cassel notice a man that is stalking him, Dimanche gives his analysis and interpretations about that man, confirming his intention. Dimanche believes that there is some connection between the delay in the transit ship to Tunney 21 and the stalker. So Cassal decides to let the guy find him and see what he is trying to do. When the guy tries to hurt Cassal, Dimanche helps him to fight the man since Cassal cannot see the guy after dark. With Dimanche’s information, Cassal is able to stab the guy. Then he realizes that he has accidentally killed him after Dimanche found no heartbeat and he is not breathing. But neither Dimanche nor Cassal is aware of their ability to pretend to be dead. So before Cassal could react to Dimanche’s warning, he gets hit and his wallet is stolen by the guy. \n\nLater at the travelers aid bureau, we learn that Dimanche is quite crucial to bring the researcher back to Earth. Moreover, Dimanche thought there’s something weird about the Murra Foray, the first counselor of the travelers aid bureau, but he could not identify anything else before the electric guards slide into place. ",
"Dimanche is a device implanted next to the bone behind Denton Cassal’s ear which is able to detect various things about people in proximity to him. Among these things are heart rate, neural index, mental state, and motivation. An intelligent machine, Dimanche is also able to determine any concealed weapons, and can silently communicate with Cassal. Dimanche is an example of the advanced technology of Earth, and Cassal hopes to demonstrate it to a scientist on Tunney 21 to convince him to join Neuronics Inc., in developing instantaneous radio. \n\tCassal employs Dimanche’s capabilities several times throughout the story, often without giving explicit instructions. It is first employed in assessing the mental states and likely motivations of Cassal’s assailant. Dimanche is able to locate the assailant when Cassal’s eyes, in virtue of the poor lighting, could not, and is able to communicate his location to Cassal. Later, Dimanche is used in the Traveler’s Aid Bureau to gather information about Murra Fora, but, as it reaches her, electronic guards prevent it from gathering any information other than her planet of origin. \n"
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a long journey, the first part of which already lay behind him. He had to go to Tunney 21 to see a man. That man wasn't important to anyone save the company that employed him, and possibly not even to them. The thug trailing him wouldn't be interested in Cassal himself, his mission, which was a commercial one, nor the man on Tunney. And money wasn't the objective, if Dimanche's analysis was right. What did the thug want? Secrets? Cassal had none, except, in a sense, Dimanche. And that was too well kept on Earth, where the instrument was invented
guards? What does Travelers Aid have that's so secret?" Cassal grunted and didn't answer. Dimanche could be annoyingly inquisitive at times. Cassal had entered one side of a block-square building. He came out on the other side. The agency was larger than he had thought. The old man was staring at a door as Cassal came out. He had apparently changed every sign in the building. His work finished, the technician was removing the visual projector from his head as Cassal came up to him. He turned and peered. "You stuck here, too?" he asked in the uneven voice of
the body. He glanced toward the boulevard. So far no one had been attracted by the violence. He bent down to retrieve the lighter-rapier. Dimanche shouted at him. Before he could react, someone landed on him. He fell forward, vainly trying to grasp the weapon. Strong fingers felt for his throat as he was forced to the ground. He threw the attacker off and staggered to his feet. He heard footsteps rushing away. A slight splash followed. Whoever it was, he was escaping by way of water. Whoever it was. The man he had thought he had slain was no
Cassal gazed at the body. Self-defense, of course, but would the police believe it? Assuming they did, they'd still have to investigate. The rapier was an illegal concealed weapon. And they would question him until they discovered Dimanche. Regrettable, but what could he do about it? Suppose he were detained long enough to miss the ship bound for Tunney 21? Grimly, he laid down the rapier. He might as well get to the bottom of this. Why had the man attacked? What did he want? "I don't know," replied Dimanche irritably. "I can interpret body data—a live body. I can't
a neat bundle, attached his name, and dropped it into the chute. "The woman, Murra Foray, the first counselor. She's a Huntner." "What's a Huntner?" "A sub-race of men on the other side of the Galaxy. She was vocalizing about her home planet when I managed to locate her." "Any other information?" "None. Electronic guards were sliding into place as soon as I reached her. I got out as fast as I could." "I see." The significance of that, if any, escaped him. Nevertheless, it sounded depressing. "What I want to know is," said Dimanche, "why such precautions as electronic
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What is the relationship between Rat and Patti Gray?
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about Prison Planet by Wilson Tucker.
Relevant chunks:
asked. "We call him Rat," Roberds said. She didn't ask why. She said: "Why couldn't he pilot the ship, I mean? What is his record?" Peterson opened his mouth. "Shut up, Peterson!" the Chief snapped. "We don't talk about his record around here, Miss Gray. It's not a pretty thing to tell." "Stow it, Chief," said Peterson. "Miss Gray is no pantywaist." He turned to the nurse. "Ever hear of the Sansan massacre?" Patti Gray paled. "Yes," she whispered. "Was Rat in that?" Roberds shook his head. "He didn't take part in it. But Rat was attached to a very
him. "I never thought of it that way before. Why of course! If it protects from one temperature, it will protect from another. Isn't it silly of me not to know that?" Heat pressing on her face accented the fact. "What is your name?" she asked. "Your real one I mean." He grinned. "Big. You couldn't say it. Sound like Christmas and bottlenose together real fast. Just say Rat. Everybody does." His eyes swept the panel and flashed back to her. "Your name Gray. Have a front name?" "Patti." "Pretty, Patti." "No, just Patti. Say, what's the matter with the
His eyes drifted aft to the tank of water. She followed. "One tank water. All the rest fuel. Too bad, too bad. We get thirsty I think." They did get thirsty, soon. A damnable hot thirst accented by the knowledge that water was precious, a thirst increased by a dried-up-in-the-mouth sensation. Their first drink was strangely bitter; tragically disappointing. Patti Gray suddenly swung upright in the hammock and kicked her legs. She massaged her throat with a nervous hand, wiped damp hair from about her face. "I have to have a drink." Rat stared at her without answer. "I said,
window wide, saw him out there with arms upstretched. "Grit your teeth and hold on! Here we go." She picked up the blanketed girl in both arms and walked to the window. Rat took the girl easily as she was swung out, the blackness hid them both. But he appeared again instantly. "Better lock window," he cautioned. "Stall, if Boss call. Back soon...." and he was gone. To Nurse Gray the fifteen minute wait seemed like hours, impatient agonizing hours of tight-lipped anxiety. Feet first, she swung through the window, clutching a small bag in her hands. She never touched
many little pieces?" "I've never been to Earth before. Nice, I think." Patti Gray caught something new in the tone and stared at him. Gladney must have noticed it, too. The Centaurian moved sideways and pointed. Gray placed her eyes in the vacated position. "Earth!" she shouted. "Quite. Nice. Do me a favor?" "Just name it!" "Not drink long time. Some water?" Gray nodded and went to the faucet. The drumming seemed remote, the tension vanished. She was an uncommonly long time in returning, at last she appeared beside him, outstretched hands dry. "There isn't any left, Rat." Rat batted
Question:
What is the relationship between Rat and Patti Gray?
Answer:
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[
"From the very beginning Patti is keen one Rat. When their gazes first meet she almost smiles back. She has to hide her goodwill as Rat is despised by the crew of the ship. The nurse is interested in his background and asks Roberds and Peterson. After learning about him leaving the post she wonders why he wasn't executed and feel sympathy for Rat. She visits him in secret to ask to pilot the ship, because her and the sick girl need to get to Earth as fast as possible and believe he can help. Rat does everything in a fast and well-organized way and plans to reach Earth in six days without brakes. He instructs Patti to cover herself in blankets not to get too hot and decides how the water will be distributed. He also tells about trying to save a man being the reason for him leaving the post and Patti feels even more sympathy. Nevertheless, during the journey they have a fight when she starts panicking and demanding water and Rat beats her. He tries to enforce his rules on the ship and others ask him to brake, Patti hurts herself during Rat's manoeuvres between the meteorites but she stands it. ",
"Rat and Patti Gray first meet when Rat is being yelled at by Roberds. They exchange short glances and small smiles during this initial meeting. Patti asks for Rat’s help to get to Earth quicker instead of waiting for Roberds to take them. Rat agrees to help them readily accepts the request, quickly putting into action an escape plan. When Patti wakes up on the ship after the abrupt take off, she and Rat have a friendly conversation. Rat continuously smiles throughout the conversation and appears to be very friendly and happy to help Judith. ",
"Patti Gray is initially curious about Rat, prompting her to ask Roberds about his past. Once she asks Rat to pilot the ship, she is hesitant of him as a pilot. The two of them eventually converse once the ship takes off. They discuss the illness that Gladney and Judith are suffering from. She is curious about Rat's name, but he does not tell her because it is too long. He is also helpful, instructing Gray to keep the wool blanket on to preserve body heat and keep out the cold. Even when she swings a boot at him, he takes her to the water faucet and explains why the water is so hot. However, despite being helpful, Rat is quite rough towards Gray too. When she rolls along the deck and has a breakdown about not being able to keep up, he throws a handful of water into her face. He then kicks her to get up too. When he points out Earth to them, she is extremely grateful towards him for getting them to the planet so fast. Rat and Patti Gray do not share a very personal relationship. However, she learns more about him throughout their trip, and the two of them support each other in their own ways. \n",
"Patti Gray is wary of Rat and his history. She first asks Roberds and the Chief about Rat's name, and learns the story of Rat and his betrayal during the Sansan massacre. Despite being aware of this, Patti still reaches out to Rat and asks him to pilot the ship to Earth, at the request of Judith. Patti, being unknowledgeable of piloting ships, must listen to Rat's orders reluctantly. However, she still asks him about his life and eventually his side of the story at the massacre. Patti Gray becomes increasingly frustrated with Rat due to the conditions on the ship, particularly with the water supply. She maintains a respectful relationship with Rat despite her suspicions remaining."
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asked. "We call him Rat," Roberds said. She didn't ask why. She said: "Why couldn't he pilot the ship, I mean? What is his record?" Peterson opened his mouth. "Shut up, Peterson!" the Chief snapped. "We don't talk about his record around here, Miss Gray. It's not a pretty thing to tell." "Stow it, Chief," said Peterson. "Miss Gray is no pantywaist." He turned to the nurse. "Ever hear of the Sansan massacre?" Patti Gray paled. "Yes," she whispered. "Was Rat in that?" Roberds shook his head. "He didn't take part in it. But Rat was attached to a very
him. "I never thought of it that way before. Why of course! If it protects from one temperature, it will protect from another. Isn't it silly of me not to know that?" Heat pressing on her face accented the fact. "What is your name?" she asked. "Your real one I mean." He grinned. "Big. You couldn't say it. Sound like Christmas and bottlenose together real fast. Just say Rat. Everybody does." His eyes swept the panel and flashed back to her. "Your name Gray. Have a front name?" "Patti." "Pretty, Patti." "No, just Patti. Say, what's the matter with the
His eyes drifted aft to the tank of water. She followed. "One tank water. All the rest fuel. Too bad, too bad. We get thirsty I think." They did get thirsty, soon. A damnable hot thirst accented by the knowledge that water was precious, a thirst increased by a dried-up-in-the-mouth sensation. Their first drink was strangely bitter; tragically disappointing. Patti Gray suddenly swung upright in the hammock and kicked her legs. She massaged her throat with a nervous hand, wiped damp hair from about her face. "I have to have a drink." Rat stared at her without answer. "I said,
window wide, saw him out there with arms upstretched. "Grit your teeth and hold on! Here we go." She picked up the blanketed girl in both arms and walked to the window. Rat took the girl easily as she was swung out, the blackness hid them both. But he appeared again instantly. "Better lock window," he cautioned. "Stall, if Boss call. Back soon...." and he was gone. To Nurse Gray the fifteen minute wait seemed like hours, impatient agonizing hours of tight-lipped anxiety. Feet first, she swung through the window, clutching a small bag in her hands. She never touched
many little pieces?" "I've never been to Earth before. Nice, I think." Patti Gray caught something new in the tone and stared at him. Gladney must have noticed it, too. The Centaurian moved sideways and pointed. Gray placed her eyes in the vacated position. "Earth!" she shouted. "Quite. Nice. Do me a favor?" "Just name it!" "Not drink long time. Some water?" Gray nodded and went to the faucet. The drumming seemed remote, the tension vanished. She was an uncommonly long time in returning, at last she appeared beside him, outstretched hands dry. "There isn't any left, Rat." Rat batted
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Describe the setting of the story.
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about Breakdown by Herbert D. Kastle.
Relevant chunks:
started to rise, the wave of blackness warned me, and I restrained my ambition. "I will walk soon." "We will have much to talk about. Your friend has pointed to the stars and told me a strange story of your coming. We have walked around the ship. He has told me how it rides through the sky. I can hardly make myself believe." Tomboldo's eyes cast upward under the strong ridge of forehead where the eyebrows should have been. He was evidently trying to visualize the flight of a space ship. "We will have much to tell each other." "I
explain the phenomena of the Ghost Ship? Was it really only a product of his imagination? What of all the others who had seen it? Was it possible for many different men under many different situations to have the same exact illusion? Reason denied that. But perhaps space itself denies reason. Grimly he retraced the legend of the Ghost Ship. A chance phrase here and a story there put together all that he knew: Doomed for all eternity to wander in the empty star-lanes, the Ghost Ship haunts the Solar System that gave it birth. And this is its tragedy,
to kill it. It wouldn't do to go home with a bottle sticking out of his pocket. He stood there in the night wind, sipping at it, and watching the reddish moon come up in the east. The moon looked as phoney as the setting sun. He straightened in sudden determination. It had to be sometime. Get it over with, get it over with now. He opened the fence-gap, slipped through, and closed it firmly behind him. He retrieved his bag, and waded quietly through the tall grass until he reached the hedge which divided an area of sickly peach
men we were, and we were proud of it. We hung onto what we found because the risks were high and we were entitled to keep what we could out there. But there are strange things in the sky. Things that don't respond to all of our neat little Laws and Theories. There are things that are no part of the world of men, thick with danger—and horror. If you doubt that—and I can see you do—just look at me. I suppose you've never heard of the Martian Maid, and so you don't know the story of what happened to
HOME IS WHERE YOU LEFT IT By ADAM CHASE [Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories February 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] The chance of mass slaughter was their eternal nightmare. How black is the blackest treachery? Is the most callous traitor entitled to mercy? Steve pondered these questions. His decision? That at times the villain should possibly be spoken of as a hero. Only the shells of deserted mud-brick houses greeted Steve Cantwell when he reached the village. He poked around in them for a
Question:
Describe the setting of the story.
Answer:
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"The story is set on an ark that Doctor Hamming put money into creating. Although it resembles Iowa, the residents are fooled to believe that it is indeed Iowa. Each of the residents have their own farm and land area, and they are restricted to only staying inside a certain area. For the Burrs, they cannot go beyond the Shanks’ place. Harry’s farm area has his house, an area for the livestock, and a tractor shed that was supposed to be torn off. Their area also has a supply bin that is shaped like an old-fashioned wood bin for deliveries from the government. The land they live on is also shared with the Franklins. When Harry takes Plum out for a ride, they go up north past the Franklins to where the Bessers should be. Then, they reach a small Pangborn farm. Beyond Pangborn, there lies old Wallace Elverton’s place, which is known as the biggest farm in the country. There is barbed wire in this area, and he walks past it. Slowly, the earth becomes sand and then wood. There are also colored folks living here, when there shouldn’t have been, and a place called Piney Woods exists as well. The place where Doctor Hamming lives is two miles past Dugan’s farm. It resembles a hospital, but there is nobody else inside of it. ",
"This story is set in Iowa, perhaps a town, specifically, the farmhouse of Edna and Harry. This farmhouse had fields of land, a thriving vegetable patch, and a barn. Towards the road, there is a wooden supply in for deliveries and payment by the government. \n\nWhile on the horse, Harry encounters a farm fenced off with barbed wire. As he walked, the ground changed from beneath him. It went from earth to sand to wood. Here, he found a waist-high metal that when overlooked, revealed endless salty water - the ocean. \n\nAt the end of the story, Harry visits the doctor's place which is located in a new house past Dugan's farm. The house had long passageways and many. stairways, with gray walls and cold lighting. In there, there were windowless rooms. ",
"The story happens on a wooden ark floating on the ocean. The first scene is in Harry’s two-floor house. There are bedrooms, a kitchen, and a bathroom in his house. There is a blue armchair, a sofa, and a TV in the living room. Outside the house is the barn with the floor strewn with hay. Across the yard, there is a pigpen with four pigs inside. Behind the house, there is a half-acre truck farm. Across the front yard, there lies a wooden supply bin by the road. The road is empty, along which are unplanted fields. Ten-foot heavy steel mesh on top with three-foot barbed wire surrounds all the houses on the wooden ark. Near the edge of the ark, the floor is covered with hard-packed sand. On the edge of the ark is a metal railing circling the ark. The doctor’s house is big. Inside the house, at the end of a central passage and dozens of doors on both sides, a stairway downwards to at least two hundred yards depth, where the end leads to a ramp going upward. The grey plaster walls, black floors, and white lighting set a dull tone. An engine for the ark to move lies in the most central and deepest part of the house.",
"Harry and Edna think that they live in Iowa’s countryside. In the morning, they have a small conversation in the bedroom. Then Harry goes to the bathroom to wash, then to the kitchen. After eating, he spends some time in the barn and goes to the truck behind the house. Later, harry picks up a delivery in the front yard. He takes a nap and then eats in the kitchen. In the evening, their guests are seated on the sofa, and Edna is in the blue armchair. Later, Harry rides to the north. He trespasses on Phineas Grotton Farm. Then, he climbs over a high fence, and soon notices sand and later wood flooring beneath his feet. Finally, he sees the ocean. He runs back to his horse and decides to ride in the opposite direction along a residential road. He again reaches the railing and the ocean. The police officer gets him to doctor Hamming. This building is big: they go along the central passageway and see dozens of doors branched off it on both sides, and stairways go down from it in at least three places that Harry can see, and at the far end—a good two hundred yards away—a big ramp led upward. And it was all gray plaster walls, black floors, and cold white lighting, like a hospital, or a modern factory, or maybe a government building. He comes into a windowless room with a medical chair and a set of radios. At the end, after learning that he lives on an ark and immediately forgetting this, Harry comes back home.\n\n\n "
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started to rise, the wave of blackness warned me, and I restrained my ambition. "I will walk soon." "We will have much to talk about. Your friend has pointed to the stars and told me a strange story of your coming. We have walked around the ship. He has told me how it rides through the sky. I can hardly make myself believe." Tomboldo's eyes cast upward under the strong ridge of forehead where the eyebrows should have been. He was evidently trying to visualize the flight of a space ship. "We will have much to tell each other." "I
explain the phenomena of the Ghost Ship? Was it really only a product of his imagination? What of all the others who had seen it? Was it possible for many different men under many different situations to have the same exact illusion? Reason denied that. But perhaps space itself denies reason. Grimly he retraced the legend of the Ghost Ship. A chance phrase here and a story there put together all that he knew: Doomed for all eternity to wander in the empty star-lanes, the Ghost Ship haunts the Solar System that gave it birth. And this is its tragedy,
to kill it. It wouldn't do to go home with a bottle sticking out of his pocket. He stood there in the night wind, sipping at it, and watching the reddish moon come up in the east. The moon looked as phoney as the setting sun. He straightened in sudden determination. It had to be sometime. Get it over with, get it over with now. He opened the fence-gap, slipped through, and closed it firmly behind him. He retrieved his bag, and waded quietly through the tall grass until he reached the hedge which divided an area of sickly peach
men we were, and we were proud of it. We hung onto what we found because the risks were high and we were entitled to keep what we could out there. But there are strange things in the sky. Things that don't respond to all of our neat little Laws and Theories. There are things that are no part of the world of men, thick with danger—and horror. If you doubt that—and I can see you do—just look at me. I suppose you've never heard of the Martian Maid, and so you don't know the story of what happened to
HOME IS WHERE YOU LEFT IT By ADAM CHASE [Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories February 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] The chance of mass slaughter was their eternal nightmare. How black is the blackest treachery? Is the most callous traitor entitled to mercy? Steve pondered these questions. His decision? That at times the villain should possibly be spoken of as a hero. Only the shells of deserted mud-brick houses greeted Steve Cantwell when he reached the village. He poked around in them for a
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How does Sim gain his knowledge and absorb his surroundings?
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about THE CREATURES THAT TIME FORGOT by RAY BRADBURY.
Relevant chunks:
It flowered as you watched. Pale green tendrils appeared on scoured rocks. Seconds later, ripe globes of fruit twitched upon the blade-tips. Father gave Sim over to mother and harvested the momentary, volatile crop, thrust scarlet, blue, yellow fruits into a fur sack which hung at his waist. Mother tugged at the moist new grasses, laid them on Sim's tongue. His senses were being honed to a fine edge. He stored knowledge thirstily. He understood love, marriage, customs, anger, pity, rage, selfishness, shadings and subtleties, realities and reflections. One thing suggested another. The sight of green plant life whirled his
dying people, the withering and the insanity, surged through Sim's new, small head. How was it that he understood? A newborn child? Can a newborn child think, see, understand, interpret? No. It was wrong! It was impossible. Yet it was happening! To him. He had been alive an hour now. And in the next instant perhaps dead! His mother flung herself upon the back of his father, and beat down the weapon. Sim caught the terrific backwash of emotion from both their conflicting minds. "Let me kill him!" shouted the father, breathing harshly, sobbingly. "What has he to live for?"
the planet jumped, burst into life. Plants grew instantly, birds were flung like pellets across the sky. Smaller, legged animal life rushed frantically through the rocks; everything tried to get its living down in the brief hour of respite. It was an unbearable planet. Sim understood this, a matter of hours after birth. Racial memory bloomed in him. He would live his entire life in the caves, with two hours a day outside. Here, in stone channels of air he would talk, talk incessantly with his people, sleep never, think, think and lie upon his back, dreaming; but never sleeping.
was not strong enough, and the engulfing heat was drifting down from the cliffs even as he was half across the valley. Flowers were burnt into effigies, grasses sucked back into rocks like singed snakes, flower seeds whirled and fell in the sudden furnace blast of wind, sown far into gullies and crannies, ready to blossom at sunset tonight, and then go to seed and die again. Sim's father watched that child running, alone, out on the floor of the valley. He and his wife and Dark and Sim were safe in the mouth of their tunnel. "He'll never make
Their pulses quickened, two hundred, five hundred, a thousand beats a minute. Their skins thickened, their blood changed. Old age came rushing. Children were born in the caves. Swifter, swifter, swifter the process. Like all this world's wild life, the men and women from the crash lived and died in a week, leaving children to do likewise. So this is life, thought Sim. It was not spoken in his mind, for he knew no words, he knew only images, old memory, an awareness, a telepathy that could penetrate flesh, rock, metal. So I'm the five thousandth in a long line
Question:
How does Sim gain his knowledge and absorb his surroundings?
Answer:
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"During his first day, Sim knows no words and has not yet spoken. Yet, he gains a lot of knowledge from images, old memories, and a telepathic type of awareness that seems to penetrate everything. He observes much of his surroundings and is upset by his analysis of the horror that occurs every day on the planet. On the second day of his existence, Sim readily and eagerly acquires more knowledge about social customs and how his society worked. ",
"Children on the planet are constantly eating as food is the source of knowledge. People grow every minute and the length of life is eight days. Sim gains initial knowledge while he is in the womb. When he can't even move, he already understands basic concepts like family, danger, etc. Every minute he gains some new knowledge. He says his first word in a day. He walks the next morning. He starts talking to his sister and she shares her knowledge as she is older. He makes friends and enemies the next day and fall in love. People are constantly dying before him. He sees the ship and dreams to reach it and escape. ",
"Despite Sim's young age, he is quickly conscious of the images around him, as soon as an hour after he is born. He is able to recognize his mother and father, and he soon watches as people in the cave die around him. Sim quickly grows accustomed to the concept of death and picks up on the idea that people only live for eight days. He learns by observing the people around him, watching as they go outside at certain parts of the day. Sim is also able to understand things through inherited memory, which allows him to comprehend ideas such as life. He learns to understand emotions such as love through his relationship with his family, and after his parents die, his sister Dark acts as his mentor.",
"Sim gains knowledge as the days go by. The moment he is born, he begins to start learning about the world around him. Since humans only live for eight days, he is able to learn how to walk only one to two days after his birth. Despite being a baby for the first part of the story, he already has very intricate thoughts about wanting to live longer and how it is not fair that all the people will die so fast. When his parents take Dark and him out, his senses are honed, and he begins storing knowledge intensely. Sim begins to understand love, marriage, customs, anger, pity, rage, selfishness, shadings, subtleties, realities, and reflections. Because of the lack of time, his mind seeks and interprets material on its own instead of having to wait for somebody to teach it new concepts. Just as his parents die, he learns how to speak. All of these changes seem to be the process of his short life. \n"
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It flowered as you watched. Pale green tendrils appeared on scoured rocks. Seconds later, ripe globes of fruit twitched upon the blade-tips. Father gave Sim over to mother and harvested the momentary, volatile crop, thrust scarlet, blue, yellow fruits into a fur sack which hung at his waist. Mother tugged at the moist new grasses, laid them on Sim's tongue. His senses were being honed to a fine edge. He stored knowledge thirstily. He understood love, marriage, customs, anger, pity, rage, selfishness, shadings and subtleties, realities and reflections. One thing suggested another. The sight of green plant life whirled his
dying people, the withering and the insanity, surged through Sim's new, small head. How was it that he understood? A newborn child? Can a newborn child think, see, understand, interpret? No. It was wrong! It was impossible. Yet it was happening! To him. He had been alive an hour now. And in the next instant perhaps dead! His mother flung herself upon the back of his father, and beat down the weapon. Sim caught the terrific backwash of emotion from both their conflicting minds. "Let me kill him!" shouted the father, breathing harshly, sobbingly. "What has he to live for?"
the planet jumped, burst into life. Plants grew instantly, birds were flung like pellets across the sky. Smaller, legged animal life rushed frantically through the rocks; everything tried to get its living down in the brief hour of respite. It was an unbearable planet. Sim understood this, a matter of hours after birth. Racial memory bloomed in him. He would live his entire life in the caves, with two hours a day outside. Here, in stone channels of air he would talk, talk incessantly with his people, sleep never, think, think and lie upon his back, dreaming; but never sleeping.
was not strong enough, and the engulfing heat was drifting down from the cliffs even as he was half across the valley. Flowers were burnt into effigies, grasses sucked back into rocks like singed snakes, flower seeds whirled and fell in the sudden furnace blast of wind, sown far into gullies and crannies, ready to blossom at sunset tonight, and then go to seed and die again. Sim's father watched that child running, alone, out on the floor of the valley. He and his wife and Dark and Sim were safe in the mouth of their tunnel. "He'll never make
Their pulses quickened, two hundred, five hundred, a thousand beats a minute. Their skins thickened, their blood changed. Old age came rushing. Children were born in the caves. Swifter, swifter, swifter the process. Like all this world's wild life, the men and women from the crash lived and died in a week, leaving children to do likewise. So this is life, thought Sim. It was not spoken in his mind, for he knew no words, he knew only images, old memory, an awareness, a telepathy that could penetrate flesh, rock, metal. So I'm the five thousandth in a long line
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Who or what is the Lorelei?
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about The Lorelei Death by Nelson S. Bond.
Relevant chunks:
if your message was intercepted, you may have played into the very hands of—the Lorelei!" Chip stared at his friend bewilderedly for a moment. Then he grinned. "Hey—I must be getting slightly whacky in my old age. I stand here with an unopened bottle in my hands and hear things! For a minute I thought you said 'Lorelei.' The Lorelei, my space-cop friend, is a myth. An old Teutonic myth about a beautiful damsel who sits out in the middle of a sea on a treacherous rock, combing her golden locks, warbling and luring her fascinated admirers to destruction." He
THE LORELEI DEATH by NELSON S. BOND Far out in limitless Space she plied her deadly trade ... a Lorelei of the void, beckoning spacemen to death and destruction with her beautiful siren lure. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1941. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Chip Warren stood before an oblong of glass set into one wall of the spaceship Chickadee II , stared at what he saw reflected therefrom—and frowned. He didn't like it. Not a bit! It was too—too— He turned away
off the Chickadee's hull like hail off a tin roof. Chip, are you in any hurry to reach Earth? I thought not. What do you say we go after the Lorelei together ! I'll swear you in as a Deputy Patrolman; we'll take the Chickadee and—" "It's a deal!" declared Chip promptly. "You got any idea where this Lorelei's hangout is?" "That's why I'm here on Danae. I got a tip that one of the Lorelei's men put in here for supplies. I hoped maybe I could single him out somehow, follow him when he jetted for his base, and
Lorelei ... the crash! New strength, born of anger, surged through him. He lifted his head. "My—my companions?" he demanded weakly. The leader of those who encircled him, a mighty hulk of a man, massive of shoulder and thigh, black-haired, with an unshaven blue jaw, raven-bright eyes and a jutting, aquiline nose like the beak of a hawk, loosed a satisfied grunt. "Ah! Back to normal, eh, sailor? Damn near time!" Climbing to his feet sent a swift wave of giddiness through Chip—but he managed it. He fought down the vertigo which threatened to overwhelm him, and confronted the big
the Lorelei's men?" "The who? Never mind that, bucko, just talk. That ekalastron—where did it come from?" And it occurred to Warren suddenly that although the big man did hold the whip hand, he was still not in possession of the most important secret of all! While the location of the ekalastron mine remained a secret, a deadlock existed. "And if I won't tell—?" he countered shrewdly. "Why, then, sailor—" The pirate leader's hamlike fists tightened, and a cold light glinted in his eyes—"why, then I guess maybe I'll have to beat it out o' you!"
Question:
Who or what is the Lorelei?
Answer:
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"The Lorelei was first an ancient myth that plagued all spacemen. It was a Teutonic myth, similar to the sirens of ancient Greece, about a gorgeous blonde woman who combed her hair and sang to those around her. Her position on the rock lured all the men to their doom, as they would crash around her. That is where the Lorelei originated. In this turn of events, the story has evolved into a present-day pirating crew using the original myth to draw spacemen in. For the past two months, according to Space Patrolman Johnny Haldane, a pirate crew has a beautiful blonde woman calling for help to lure at least a dozen spaceships in before they kill the crew and capture all of their cargo. The pirates then turn on all of the control locks and send the empty ships back out, as they have no space for them in their current base. The Lorelei and her crew intercepted Chip’s message about the ekalastron and set their sights on his ship as their next target. ",
"The Lorelei is what Chip refers to as a myth, which his friend Johnny insists is true. According to the original stories, there was a woman who sat on a rock in the middle of a sea distracting people who went by, like the classic siren myths. Johnny had been tracking some of the related crewmen and was investigating a lead when he ran into Chip. Johnny explained the two months of destruction that had occured, including the testimony of the one survivor found in the wreckage of a ship. This myth was being tied to a lot of pirating in the area, with particularly powerful ships. This is why Johnny didn't dare try to attack the Lorelei until he learned the Chip's ship had special plating on it that could protect them. In some sense, the Lorelei is both a myth and also a symbol representing a specific cluster of pirating. ",
"In literature, the Lorelei is an old Teutonic myth about a beautiful woman on a rock in the middle of the sea. She sings and uses her beauty to lure sailors to her where their ships are then destroyed on the rock. In the story, the Lorelei is a trap created by a group of pirates. They manage to fill spaceships’ perilenses with the image of a beautiful young woman with a “come hither” look about her, motioning for the ship to approach her. Her voice is projected through the ships’ audio systems, and she entreats the space sailors to come to her aid. In the past two months, a dozen ships have fallen prey to the trap; the crews were murdered, the cargo stolen, and the empty vessels set adrift back into space. On one ship, however, a cabin boy avoided detection and lived to describe the Lorelei’s appearance and the attack. When the Lorelei image appears in the Chickadee’s perilens, Chip changes to a different frequency, but her image is on all of them; thus, the ship is flying blindly through space. This makes the Chickadee an easy target for the pirates to hit with their tractor-blast and take over. For Chip, though, the pirates know about his discovery of ek, so in addition to taking his cargo, they want to know the location of the remaining ek and plan to beat him until he gives them the information they want.",
"According to Chip, Lorelei is an old Teutonic myth about a beautiful, golden-haired damsel who sits on a rock in the middle of the sea, drawing in admirers to their ultimate doom. However, his space-cop friend Johnny informs Chip that the myth of Lorelei is very real, but instead of the middle of the sea, she makes her perch on an unknown asteroid in the middle of the Belt where she lures space-mariners to their death. Since she and her crew of pirates began attacking from the Belt, they have destroyed a dozen freighters, liners, and Patrolships, murdered their crew and stolen their cargo. Because she has no room on her hideout for ravaged ships, she locks the controls and sends them back into space as a kind of calling card. Johnny warns Chip that Lorelei and her crew will likely be waiting to ambush the Chickadee II as it passes through the Belt, and that is why they plan to join forces against her. However, one of Lorelei's men kills Johnny before they can, leading Chip to chase him down. During the chase, Lorelei appears on the Chickadee's perilens and entrances the men."
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if your message was intercepted, you may have played into the very hands of—the Lorelei!" Chip stared at his friend bewilderedly for a moment. Then he grinned. "Hey—I must be getting slightly whacky in my old age. I stand here with an unopened bottle in my hands and hear things! For a minute I thought you said 'Lorelei.' The Lorelei, my space-cop friend, is a myth. An old Teutonic myth about a beautiful damsel who sits out in the middle of a sea on a treacherous rock, combing her golden locks, warbling and luring her fascinated admirers to destruction." He
THE LORELEI DEATH by NELSON S. BOND Far out in limitless Space she plied her deadly trade ... a Lorelei of the void, beckoning spacemen to death and destruction with her beautiful siren lure. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1941. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Chip Warren stood before an oblong of glass set into one wall of the spaceship Chickadee II , stared at what he saw reflected therefrom—and frowned. He didn't like it. Not a bit! It was too—too— He turned away
off the Chickadee's hull like hail off a tin roof. Chip, are you in any hurry to reach Earth? I thought not. What do you say we go after the Lorelei together ! I'll swear you in as a Deputy Patrolman; we'll take the Chickadee and—" "It's a deal!" declared Chip promptly. "You got any idea where this Lorelei's hangout is?" "That's why I'm here on Danae. I got a tip that one of the Lorelei's men put in here for supplies. I hoped maybe I could single him out somehow, follow him when he jetted for his base, and
Lorelei ... the crash! New strength, born of anger, surged through him. He lifted his head. "My—my companions?" he demanded weakly. The leader of those who encircled him, a mighty hulk of a man, massive of shoulder and thigh, black-haired, with an unshaven blue jaw, raven-bright eyes and a jutting, aquiline nose like the beak of a hawk, loosed a satisfied grunt. "Ah! Back to normal, eh, sailor? Damn near time!" Climbing to his feet sent a swift wave of giddiness through Chip—but he managed it. He fought down the vertigo which threatened to overwhelm him, and confronted the big
the Lorelei's men?" "The who? Never mind that, bucko, just talk. That ekalastron—where did it come from?" And it occurred to Warren suddenly that although the big man did hold the whip hand, he was still not in possession of the most important secret of all! While the location of the ekalastron mine remained a secret, a deadlock existed. "And if I won't tell—?" he countered shrewdly. "Why, then, sailor—" The pirate leader's hamlike fists tightened, and a cold light glinted in his eyes—"why, then I guess maybe I'll have to beat it out o' you!"
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What is the significance of the Kumaji's in the story?
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about Home is Where You Left It by Stephen Marlowe.
Relevant chunks:
hardly remembered the rest of it. There was violence and death, but necessary death. He killed a man with the pike, and unhobbled one of the thlots . The animal screamed and two more Kumajis came sleepily through the night to see what was the matter. With the long edge of the pike's blade he decapitated one of them. He slammed the shaft of the weapon across the other's face, probably breaking his jaw. The camp was in a turmoil. In the darkness he flung Mary on the thlot's bare back in front of him, and they glided off across
turbojets during the night and had seen the small craft take off, but had assumed Steve had taken it up for some reason. Each day Steve had done so, reconnoitering for signs of the Kumaji. "But why?" someone asked. "Why?" At first there was no answer. Then a woman whose husband had died the day before said: "It's no secret Whiting has plenty of money—with the Kumaji." None of them looked at Mary. She stood there defiantly, not saying anything, and Steve squeezed her hand. "Now, wait a minute," one of Whiting's friends said. "Wait, nothing." This was Jeremy Gort,
Kumaji, they won't just give it to him—not by a long sight." "No?" someone asked. "No sir. They'll trade. For our location. And if Whiting went off like that without even saying good-bye to his girl here, my guess is he'll make the trade." His voice reflected some bitterness. Mary went to Gort and slapped his face. The elderly man did not even blink. "Well," he asked her gently, "did your pa tell you he was going?" "N-no," Mary said. There were tears in her eyes, but she did not cry. Gort turned to Steve. "Cantwell, can he get far
the Kumajis?" "Then—then I'll do whatever Steve asks me to. I promise." "That's good enough for me," Steve said. A few minutes later, armed with atorifles and their share of the food and water that was left, Steve and Mary set out northward across the sand while the caravan continued east. Fear of what they might find mounted. The first night, they camped in the lee of low sandhills. The second night they found a small spring with brackish but drinkable water. On the third day, having covered half the distance to the Kumaji settlement, they began to encounter Kumaji
the sand. Pursuit was disorganized—and unsuccessful. It was too dark for effective pursuit, as Steve had hoped it would be. They rode swiftly all night and continued riding with the dawn. They could have gone in any direction. The wind-driven sand would obliterate their trail. Two days later they reached the caravan. As they rode up, Mary said, "Steve, do you have to tell them?" "We can tell them this," Steve said. "Your father died a hero's death, sending the Kumajis off in the wrong direction." "And not—not what he'd planned to do at first." "No. We'll tell them that
Question:
What is the significance of the Kumaji's in the story?
Answer:
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[
"The Kumaji are the native tribesmen, and they have been raiding the Colony for many years. They also killed Steve’s parents in the past. Now they poison the village’s well, and his aunt dies from this water. They practically force the citizens to leave their homes and walk through the desert. The Kumaji are looking for the caravan to kill everyone else who remains alive. They have Tobias’ money which upsets him and makes him initially betray his people and try to trade their location for his fortune. They take him, Steve, and Mary captive and then end up being unable to stop the last two from running away. ",
"The Kumaji’s in the story are the main enemies of the colonists. They are the ones behind the raids, one of which killed Steve’s parents. The Kumajis are also described to be significant because they are the reason why the caravan has to leave as quickly as they can. Even though the poisoned water is the last straw, the Kumaji are also out to hunt the colonists and kill them. They are also the reason why Tobias Whiting decides to go to their camp, in hopes of deceiving them so that the rest of the colony can reach Oasis City safely. Everybody mistakenly believes, however, that Tobias is planning to betray them for money. Even so, the Kumaji are the reason why Tobias can be regarded as a hero and have his moment to make the ultimate sacrifice.",
"In this story, the Kumajis are portrayed as the enemy. They prey on the defenceless villagers by poisoning the only water supply and doggedly chase after them in the arid desert. However, the presence of the Kumajis are significant because it could be interpreted that the Earthmen are the enemy instead, as we are told in the story that this planet was first inhabited by the Kumajis and the desert is actually a part of their land. This is attributed by the Kumajis' natural ability to survive in the desert, as well as their command over the thlotback desert animals. ",
"The Kumaji’s are the native species in the story. They are very violent creatures, and constantly raid the colonies of humans in their country. They are described to be of a purple color, and seem to be very similar to the humans, except for the skin color. The Kumaji’s are a very important part of the plot, as they are who drive the humans out of Steve’s village and into a desert trek. Even after the humans left the village, they still wanted to hunt them down in their path to Oasis City."
] |
32890
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hardly remembered the rest of it. There was violence and death, but necessary death. He killed a man with the pike, and unhobbled one of the thlots . The animal screamed and two more Kumajis came sleepily through the night to see what was the matter. With the long edge of the pike's blade he decapitated one of them. He slammed the shaft of the weapon across the other's face, probably breaking his jaw. The camp was in a turmoil. In the darkness he flung Mary on the thlot's bare back in front of him, and they glided off across
turbojets during the night and had seen the small craft take off, but had assumed Steve had taken it up for some reason. Each day Steve had done so, reconnoitering for signs of the Kumaji. "But why?" someone asked. "Why?" At first there was no answer. Then a woman whose husband had died the day before said: "It's no secret Whiting has plenty of money—with the Kumaji." None of them looked at Mary. She stood there defiantly, not saying anything, and Steve squeezed her hand. "Now, wait a minute," one of Whiting's friends said. "Wait, nothing." This was Jeremy Gort,
Kumaji, they won't just give it to him—not by a long sight." "No?" someone asked. "No sir. They'll trade. For our location. And if Whiting went off like that without even saying good-bye to his girl here, my guess is he'll make the trade." His voice reflected some bitterness. Mary went to Gort and slapped his face. The elderly man did not even blink. "Well," he asked her gently, "did your pa tell you he was going?" "N-no," Mary said. There were tears in her eyes, but she did not cry. Gort turned to Steve. "Cantwell, can he get far
the Kumajis?" "Then—then I'll do whatever Steve asks me to. I promise." "That's good enough for me," Steve said. A few minutes later, armed with atorifles and their share of the food and water that was left, Steve and Mary set out northward across the sand while the caravan continued east. Fear of what they might find mounted. The first night, they camped in the lee of low sandhills. The second night they found a small spring with brackish but drinkable water. On the third day, having covered half the distance to the Kumaji settlement, they began to encounter Kumaji
the sand. Pursuit was disorganized—and unsuccessful. It was too dark for effective pursuit, as Steve had hoped it would be. They rode swiftly all night and continued riding with the dawn. They could have gone in any direction. The wind-driven sand would obliterate their trail. Two days later they reached the caravan. As they rode up, Mary said, "Steve, do you have to tell them?" "We can tell them this," Steve said. "Your father died a hero's death, sending the Kumajis off in the wrong direction." "And not—not what he'd planned to do at first." "No. We'll tell them that
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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 about Wanderers of the Wolf Moon by NELSON S. BOND.
Relevant chunks:
of futile sons? What can I do to save myself from dying eight days from now? Is there escape? His eyes widened, another image came to focus. Beyond this valley of cliffs, on a low mountain lay a perfect, unscarred metal seed. A metal ship, not rusted or touched by the avalanches. The ship was deserted, whole, intact. It was the only ship of all these that had crashed that was still a unit, still usable. But it was so far away. There was no one in it to help. This ship, then, on the far mountain, was the destiny
What is POSAT? By PHYLLIS STERLING SMITH Illustrated by ED ALEXANDER [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Of course coming events cast their shadows before, but this shadow was 400 years long! The following advertisement appeared in the July 1953 issue of several magazines: MASTERY OF ALL KNOWLEDGE CAN BE YOURS! What is the secret source of those profound principles that can solve the problems of life? Send for our FREE booklet of explanation. Do not be a
mission that huge and depressing in eight short, vanishing days? How had his people gotten into such a condition? As if at a button pressed, he saw an image. Metal seeds, blown across space from a distant green world, fighting with long flames, crashing on this bleak planet. From their shattered hulls tumble men and women. When? Long ago. Ten thousand days. The crash victims hid in the cliffs from the sun. Fire, ice and floods washed away the wreckage of the huge metal seeds. The victims were shaped and beaten like iron upon a forge. Solar radiations drenched them.
10:30." The following evening found Quidley on tenter-hooks. The snoll-doper mystery had acquired a new tang. He could hardly wait till the next message transfer took place. He decided to spend the evening plotting the epic novel which he intended to write someday. He set to work immediately. He plotted mentally, of course—notes were for the hacks and the other commercial non-geniuses who infested the modern literary world. Closing his eyes, he saw the whole vivid panorama of epic action and grand adventure flowing like a mighty and majestic river before his literary vision: the authentic and awe-inspiring background; the
the corner he halted. The street lights had not yet come on. The street was dim. Everything was vague. He looked around—and froze. From the telephone pole in front of the police station, something large and shapeless hung. It moved a little with the wind. What the hell was it? Mason approached it warily. He wanted to get home. He was tired and hungry. He thought of his wife, his kids, a hot meal on the dinner table. But there was something about the dark bundle, something ominous and ugly. The light was bad; he couldn't tell what it was.
Question:
What is the plot of the story?
Answer:
|
[
"Gregory Malcolm is a secretary to J. Foster Andrews, the wealthy leader of the Galactic Metals Corporation. In the control room of Andrews’s space yacht the Carefree, Sparks, the radioman, fails to downplay the seriousness of their situation to Malcolm: the Carefree has been sucked into an unpredictable vortex and the fate of the ship and its occupants is uncertain. \n\tMalcolm approaches the dining room, where Andrews and members of his family are enjoying breakfast. He is unnoticed by his employers, but takes note of Andrews’s beautiful daughter Crystal and her betrothed Ralph Breadon. Suddenly, Andrews calls Malcolm over to complain about the honey and to enquire about the state of the Galactic market. Malcolm, in virtue of the fact that the vortex has blocked communication to and from the Carefree, is unable to answer. Crystal asks Malcolm if they are in danger, but before he is able to answer the question, Crystal’s older brother Bert enters drunkenly and suggests that they are doomed. \nSparks abruptly enters the room and confirms Bert’s drunken suspicion: they have been caught in a gravitation downdraft and must evacuate to a life skiff. On the skiff with members of the Andrews family, Sparks, a cabin-boy, and Breadon, Malcolm navigates above a celestial body and observes the crash of the Carefree. Just as Malcolm surrenders control of the skiff to Breadon, its engines engage and they quickly fall towards the planet. Breadon deftly manipulates the controls, and they land safely. As Malcolm quickly congratulates Breadon on his landing, the latter blames and berates the secretary for the fall. The cabin-boy, however, points out that Breadon’s sleeve was responsible for their descent. \nMalcolm and Sparks examine the damage to the skiff, and Sparks shares his frustrations about Malcolm’s submissive, secretarial behaviour. Malcolm concludes that they are on a rarely-visited, unpopulated, vast, and dangerous moon of Saturn called Titan. Malcolm resolves not to tell the Andrews, fearing that the information would only make them panic. Meanwhile, the Andrews family are in disarray over how best to remove necessities from the skiff.\nBreadon delegates to Sparks the role of establishing communication. Sparks, however, responds poorly and reveals that they are on Titan, and that their chances of rescue are dim. \n",
"Gregory Malcolm is the secretary of J. Foster Andrews, a wealthy man in charge of the Galactic Metals Corporation. While aboard their ship, Hannigan, a radio operator and companion of Malcolm, discloses that they have entered a vortex and remain trapped with no transmission or radio signal. Hannigan advises that Malcolm doesn't tell the Andrews family and instead waits until there is more information. Malcolm enters the dining dome, where the Andrews family sits, including Crystal, their daughter who Malcolm admires, and Ralph Breadon, her suitor. J. Foster asks Malcolm for information about the corporation's business, to which Malcolm is unable to answer due to the lack of radio transmission. The Andrews family notices the odd situation outside the ship's port and questions Malcolm further, but a drunk Bert Andrews interrupts, panicking and revealing the dire situation at hand. Malcolm reassures the family that there is no immediate danger yet, but Hannigan then enters, urgently yelling at everyone to board the life skiff due to emergency. The team runs to the life skiff, where Malcolm and Hannigan frantically operate it until Breadon insists on taking over. Breadon gains control but the life skiff still faces danger, and as Malcolm and Hannigan scramble over the controls, Breadon steers the life skiff onto the ground; the team survives but the skiff is wrecked. Breadon blames Malcolm for the crash, and Malcolm leaves the situation alone, which Hannigan discourages. After inspection, Malcolm determines that the team has crashed on the planet Titan.",
"The story starts with Hannigan trying to tell Greg that the atmospherics don’t need to be worried, these are not worth reporting to the boss. However, Greg has studied astrogation and is sure that they are in a vortex. He knows that they have been in the vortex for more than eight hours, but he has no idea how much longer nor how far the ship will go. Agreeing not to tell the boss, Greg goes upstairs to the dining room. Right after he arrives by the door, J. Foster Andrews of Galactic Metals Corporation, starts calling him. He comes in and is asked about the transmission, which he says that there is none. Before he has time to finish explaining himself, Bert Andrews, one of J. Foster Andrews’ son, came in and told everyone that they have been in the vortex for a long time, and they could crash at any moment. J. Foster then turns to confirm with Greg, who explains that it is indeed true, only a bit exaggerated. However, Hannigan comes in and rushes everyone to get on Number Four life-skiff. They are about to crash. \n\nThey all rush to the life-skiff. And Breadon, the person that J. Foster Andrew daughter’s engaged to, tries to get the control from Greg. And in the middle of this, someone hit the control-keys and the motor is killed. Then all of a sudden, Greg, Breadon, and Hannigan all try to reach the control. However, in the end, it is the Breadon that performed the miracle in saving all of them. Later Greg and Hannigan goes to check the ship while others are all doing their own things. Looking around, Greg realizes that they are on Titan, one of Saturn’s satellites. Then Breadon orders Hannigan to send an SOS message to the nearest space cruiser. Hannigan asks Breadon, mockingly, what he should use, and if he knows where they are at. Breadon got stuck with so many questions coming at once, then it is Greg who said: they are on the northern hemisphere of the satellite. ",
"The story begins with Sparks and Malcolm discussing their predicament on the ship Carefree. The ship is trapped in a vortex that has blown it off course. Malcolm goes to the rotunda where food is being served to the Andrews family. The Andrews family is surrounding the table, including Crystal, who Malcolm fancies. After some loud talking from the family, eventually, Greg informs them that they are in an ionized field and the transmission does not work. The family becomes quite concerned at the news. The son of Andrews, Bert, walks into the doorway in a drunken manner. He tells everyone that they should be concerned. While Malcolm is trying to calm the family down, Sparks runs into the room yelling at everyone to head towards the life skiff. There is a mad rush towards the life skiff that caused a lot of confusion. The Carefree bursts into flames and Malcolm says that he is unsure if the other skiffs were able to escape in time. \n\nMalcolm is piloting the ship when Breadon commands him to hand over the controls. When he does, Breadon’s sleeve brushes against the control keys causing the motors to be turned off. Many people rush to fix the skiff, but Breadon is ultimately the person who guides the skiff to the ground. Breadon yells at Malcolm for interfering, but the cabin boy, Tommy, defends Malcolm. Breadon continues to belittle Malcolm. Sparks tells Malcolm that he is strange and he needs to defend himself against Breadon. \n\nEveryone disembarks from the ship. Bert tries to give orders, but the orders seem to be nonsensical. Malcolm is the first person to realize where the group has crash-landed. Breadon then commands Sparks to send an SOS message. Sparks mocks him by questioning how he should send a message and where he should say they are located, knowing that Breadon does not have the answer. Breadon is not able to specify exactly where they are located. Malcolm completes an experiment that is able to narrow down which hemisphere of the satellite they are located in, displaying a skill that Breadon does not possess. Maud Andrews is inquisitive of how Malcolm could have possibly been able to know where they crash-landed. \n"
] |
63048
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of futile sons? What can I do to save myself from dying eight days from now? Is there escape? His eyes widened, another image came to focus. Beyond this valley of cliffs, on a low mountain lay a perfect, unscarred metal seed. A metal ship, not rusted or touched by the avalanches. The ship was deserted, whole, intact. It was the only ship of all these that had crashed that was still a unit, still usable. But it was so far away. There was no one in it to help. This ship, then, on the far mountain, was the destiny
What is POSAT? By PHYLLIS STERLING SMITH Illustrated by ED ALEXANDER [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Of course coming events cast their shadows before, but this shadow was 400 years long! The following advertisement appeared in the July 1953 issue of several magazines: MASTERY OF ALL KNOWLEDGE CAN BE YOURS! What is the secret source of those profound principles that can solve the problems of life? Send for our FREE booklet of explanation. Do not be a
mission that huge and depressing in eight short, vanishing days? How had his people gotten into such a condition? As if at a button pressed, he saw an image. Metal seeds, blown across space from a distant green world, fighting with long flames, crashing on this bleak planet. From their shattered hulls tumble men and women. When? Long ago. Ten thousand days. The crash victims hid in the cliffs from the sun. Fire, ice and floods washed away the wreckage of the huge metal seeds. The victims were shaped and beaten like iron upon a forge. Solar radiations drenched them.
10:30." The following evening found Quidley on tenter-hooks. The snoll-doper mystery had acquired a new tang. He could hardly wait till the next message transfer took place. He decided to spend the evening plotting the epic novel which he intended to write someday. He set to work immediately. He plotted mentally, of course—notes were for the hacks and the other commercial non-geniuses who infested the modern literary world. Closing his eyes, he saw the whole vivid panorama of epic action and grand adventure flowing like a mighty and majestic river before his literary vision: the authentic and awe-inspiring background; the
the corner he halted. The street lights had not yet come on. The street was dim. Everything was vague. He looked around—and froze. From the telephone pole in front of the police station, something large and shapeless hung. It moved a little with the wind. What the hell was it? Mason approached it warily. He wanted to get home. He was tired and hungry. He thought of his wife, his kids, a hot meal on the dinner table. But there was something about the dark bundle, something ominous and ugly. The light was bad; he couldn't tell what it was.
|
How are people without psi-powers seen in this society?
|
After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about Jack of No Trades by Evelyn E. Smith.
Relevant chunks:
were afraid would turn human beings into hideous monsters. Instead, they developed the psi powers that had always been latent in the species until we developed into a race of supermen. I don't know why I say we —in 1960 or so, I might have been considered superior, but in 2102 I was just the Faradays' idiot boy. Exploring space should have been my hope. If there had been anything useful or interesting on any of the other planets, I might have found a niche for myself there. In totally new surroundings, the psi powers geared to another environment might
talent for stripping away my feeble attempts at privacy. Psi-powers usually included some ability to form a mental shield; being without one, I was necessarily devoid of the other. My attitude didn't matter, though, because it was definitely war. The aliens came back with a fleet clearly bent on our annihilation—even the 'paths couldn't figure out their motives, for the thought pattern was entirely different from ours—and the war was on. I had enjoyed learning first-aid; it was the first time I had ever worked with people as an equal. And I was good at it because psi-powers aren't much
capacity for primitive behavior wasn't just as latent in everybody else as the psi talent seemed latent in me. Tim must be right, I thought—I must have some undreamed-of power that only the right circumstances would bring out. But what was that power? For years I had speculated on what my potential talent might be, explored every wild possibility I could conceive of and found none productive of even an ambiguous result with which I could fool myself. As I approached adulthood, I began to concede that I was probably nothing more than what I seemed to be—a simple psi-negative.
but they also bored me after a while. I thought maybe I could develop a talent for composing or painting, which would classify me as a telesensitive—artistic ability being considered as the oldest, if least important, psi power—but I couldn't even do anything like that. About all there was left for me was to take long walks. Athletics were out of the question; I couldn't compete with psi-boys and they didn't want to compete with me. All the people in the neighborhood knew me and were nice to me, but I didn't need to be a 'path to tell what
all of his or her psi power, really understood me. Breakfast was finally over and the rest of my family dispersed to their various jobs. Father simply took his briefcase and disappeared—he was a traveling salesman and he had a morning appointment clear across the continent. The others, not having his particular gift, had to take the helibus to their different destinations. Mother, as I said, was a psychiatrist. Sylvia wrote advertising copy. Tim was a meteorologist. Dan was a junior executive in a furniture moving company and expected a promotion to senior rank as soon as he achieved a
Question:
How are people without psi-powers seen in this society?
Answer:
|
[
"Kevin thinks he is one of the 5% of the population that does not have psi-powers, and we can learn a lot about how society sees this group of people by his interactions with his peers and his family. Before realizing he had powers, Kevin had to stay at home to take care of the house. His family knew that he would not be able to make much money in any kind of job without powers, and it would shame their family for him to be working one of those jobs. Even when he is at home, he's often referred to as slow or useless. He has never had many friends because his peers hated playing sports with him, since they couldn't communicate with their minds, and so Kevin was always at a disadvantage. Similarly, even though he was likeable, girls never wanted to date him. He was also left out of other aspects of society, because a lot of news was delivered via \"tellies\" which is received through psi-powers, so he often has to learn about the goings-on in the society from his family. Kevin learns firsthand how big of a difference it meant for how he was treated once he realized he did have powers after all.",
"People without psi powers are called psi-deficients or classified as psi-negative. They are unique in a society dominated by individuals who developed superpowers over time because of the proliferation of nuclear radiation in Earth's air. Such superpowers include telekinesis, prognostication, teleportation, and most prominently, telepathy. Almost every psi-powered individual has some amount of telepathic ability, and they can also protect themselves from interference by others with the same ability by using a mind shield. Psi-deficient individuals do not have any kind of superpower, so they are susceptible to the whims of those who do have such powers. For example, Kevin cannot read the minds or emotions of his family members, and he cannot protect his own mind or emotions from being probed by his mother and sister. Because of his lack of psi power, most of his family treats him with condescension. They tip-toe around his feelings and fail to really engage with him. Kevin does not feel loved or even liked by most of them, except his brother Tim, who offers him hope by suggesting he will discover his power sometime in the future. This is true for psi-deficients in general. They are viewed as \"throwbacks to an earlier era\" when disease and sickness crippled people in a disorderly society. Because psi-deficients have a harder time adjusting to this new society, they are seen as a kind of burden.",
"People without psi-powers are considered imbeciles and generally little use to society. Before Kev discovers his psi-power, he describes staying at home and “watching the house” as his only real contribution to the family. People with psi-powers can do things so much more quickly and efficiently than those without, that people like Kev have little chance of holding jobs in this society.\nKevin describes how most psi-powers come with the ability to put up mental shields to stop the mind from being probed. Without psi-powers, the mind is completely transparent to mental probing by telepathy, meaning their thoughts are never private. \nThere are television-like telepathic projections in the society called “tellies” that can’t be received by people without psi-powers, isolating them from current events like the discovery of the inhabited alien planets in Alpha Centauri. Kevin only learns about the discovery reported on the tellies from his siblings who have psi-powers.\n",
"Individuals who are born with psi-powers, only five percent of the general population, are truly looked down upon in this society. After radioactive testing and explosions brought out the latent psi-powers in people, society quickly changes to accommodate these superhumans. Therefore, those that don’t fit into this society are outcasts, pitied, and often seen as failures by the rest of their family. Kevin is a perfect example. Before he discovered his powers, he was unable to work a menial job due to the shame it would bring his family. So, instead, he read books the primitive way, took walks around the park since he was unable to play sports thanks to his lack of psi-powers, and managed the machines that did all the housework. He truly served no purpose in society and felt great bitterness because of it. "
] |
49838
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were afraid would turn human beings into hideous monsters. Instead, they developed the psi powers that had always been latent in the species until we developed into a race of supermen. I don't know why I say we —in 1960 or so, I might have been considered superior, but in 2102 I was just the Faradays' idiot boy. Exploring space should have been my hope. If there had been anything useful or interesting on any of the other planets, I might have found a niche for myself there. In totally new surroundings, the psi powers geared to another environment might
talent for stripping away my feeble attempts at privacy. Psi-powers usually included some ability to form a mental shield; being without one, I was necessarily devoid of the other. My attitude didn't matter, though, because it was definitely war. The aliens came back with a fleet clearly bent on our annihilation—even the 'paths couldn't figure out their motives, for the thought pattern was entirely different from ours—and the war was on. I had enjoyed learning first-aid; it was the first time I had ever worked with people as an equal. And I was good at it because psi-powers aren't much
capacity for primitive behavior wasn't just as latent in everybody else as the psi talent seemed latent in me. Tim must be right, I thought—I must have some undreamed-of power that only the right circumstances would bring out. But what was that power? For years I had speculated on what my potential talent might be, explored every wild possibility I could conceive of and found none productive of even an ambiguous result with which I could fool myself. As I approached adulthood, I began to concede that I was probably nothing more than what I seemed to be—a simple psi-negative.
but they also bored me after a while. I thought maybe I could develop a talent for composing or painting, which would classify me as a telesensitive—artistic ability being considered as the oldest, if least important, psi power—but I couldn't even do anything like that. About all there was left for me was to take long walks. Athletics were out of the question; I couldn't compete with psi-boys and they didn't want to compete with me. All the people in the neighborhood knew me and were nice to me, but I didn't need to be a 'path to tell what
all of his or her psi power, really understood me. Breakfast was finally over and the rest of my family dispersed to their various jobs. Father simply took his briefcase and disappeared—he was a traveling salesman and he had a morning appointment clear across the continent. The others, not having his particular gift, had to take the helibus to their different destinations. Mother, as I said, was a psychiatrist. Sylvia wrote advertising copy. Tim was a meteorologist. Dan was a junior executive in a furniture moving company and expected a promotion to senior rank as soon as he achieved a
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What is the significance of memories in the story?
|
After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about Galactic Ghost by Walter Kubilius.
Relevant chunks:
explain the phenomena of the Ghost Ship? Was it really only a product of his imagination? What of all the others who had seen it? Was it possible for many different men under many different situations to have the same exact illusion? Reason denied that. But perhaps space itself denies reason. Grimly he retraced the legend of the Ghost Ship. A chance phrase here and a story there put together all that he knew: Doomed for all eternity to wander in the empty star-lanes, the Ghost Ship haunts the Solar System that gave it birth. And this is its tragedy,
forty years ago or more. Resembled one? It was one! Unquestionably, though half-invisible and like a piece of glass immersed in water, it was a rocket ship. But the instruments on the control board could not lie. The presence of any material body within a hundred thousand miles would be revealed. But the needle on the gauge did not quiver. Nothing indicated the presence of a ship. But the evidence of his eyes was incontestable. Or was it? Doubt gripped him. Did the loneliness of all these years in space twist his mind till he was imagining the appearance of
stinging forehead on his arms, cursing softly and crying. Finally he rolled over, pulled his foot out of the mess, and took off his shoes. They were full of mud—sticky sandy mud. The dark world was reeling about him, and the wind was dragging at his breath. He fell back against the sand pile and let his feet sink in the mud hole and wriggled his toes. He was laughing soundlessly, and his face was wet in the wind. He couldn't think. He couldn't remember where he was and why, and he stopped caring, and after a while he felt
course. What is it that girls in small offices do or eat or drink or wear that girls in large offices don't do or eat or drink or wear? What do writers and doctors do differently? Or poets and dentists? What are we missing? What—" In the outer office a girl cried out. A body thumped against a desk, then a chair, then to the floor. Two girls screamed. Andy bolted up from his chair. Racing to the door, he shouted back to Bettijean, "Get a staff doctor and a chemist from the lab." It was the girl who had
many millions of others. Dead, when the bombs fell. Dead, as everyone knew they would be and no one did anything to prevent. Dead. Perhaps the whole world is dead—except for us." Harry stared at him. "I can't take the time to explain it all. I have too much to do. Just three of us—myself and my two sons. My wife lost her mind. I should have helped her as I'm helping you." "I don't understand," Harry said. "I remember people, and things, and where are they now? Dead? People can die, but farms, cities...." "I haven't the time," the
Question:
What is the significance of memories in the story?
Answer:
|
[
"Both Dobbin and Willard have memories of Earth that sadden them and make them lonely. As Dobbin is dying, he remembers his life on Earth, and his greatest regret is that he will never see it again. Dobbin is satisfied with his life and experiences, but his Earth-loneliness prevents him from dying a happy man. Willard is also pained by his memories of Earth and what he has lost and will never have again. Alone in space, Willard considers his memories the only things of value to him. Because his memories cause him so much pain, Willard tries to ignore them or remove them, but they return in his dreams. His memories in his dreams are full of sensory details and other details that he did not notice when he was on Earth. However, when Willard is drugged and sleeping on the Ghost Ship, his dreams are of memories from the years he spent on the Mary Lou, and his dreams about people that he knew are unpleasant. Willard believes that if he could walk on Earth one more time, he would die a happy man.",
"Memories are both joys for Willard as well as his greatest anguish. The memories of his time on Earth, the sound of his friend’s voices, the feel of the ground beneath his feet, and even the sounds of the buildings and the city torture him since it gives him something to hope for. \nHe is not able to let go of his life because he longs to survive and live out the rest of his days on Earth. He spends almost 20 years alone while in space, holding on to his memories to keep him going. Unlike Dobbin, memories became Willard’s constant companion and the only thing that lasted with him throughout his time aboard the Mary Lou. \nIn the end, though, his memories basically haunted and tormented him. He would push them away, only to dream of them at night. His memories broke him and, without anyone beside him, Willard slowly faded away into nothing more than a shell of a man. \n",
"Memories function as a link to reality for Willard. The more he struggles to stay sane during his long periods of isolation, the more he relies on his vivid memories of Earth—walking along the streets of Arden, hearing the voices of his co-workers and scientists he used to know, the voices of his friends and wife–to keep him alive. Even as the “Mary Lou” slowly begins to lose its energy and shape and become a “ghost ship”, Willard is not aware that this process is even happening because his memories keep him grounded in a kind of reality. In this reality, his memories keep Willard alive because Willard believes he is alive and that a real ship has come to save him. The idea of returning to Earth and seeing those memories come to life again keeps Willard going for all those decades.",
"Memories are very significant in the story, because they both sustain Willard’s will to keep going and torment him when he is at his lowest points. He dreams of his Earth days at night and longs to hear the voices of his friends, family, and coworkers, and to see Earth again. When he is rescued by The Ghost Ship, he tells the Captain that the idea of seeing Earth is all that has kept him going. His Earth memories have also made him feel even lonelier as he has floated through space, and now on The Ghost Ship his memories of being stranded on the Mary Lou haunt him in his nightmares. His memories have alternately been a struggle and a lifeline, but are ultimately what have kept him connected to his humanity. \n"
] |
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explain the phenomena of the Ghost Ship? Was it really only a product of his imagination? What of all the others who had seen it? Was it possible for many different men under many different situations to have the same exact illusion? Reason denied that. But perhaps space itself denies reason. Grimly he retraced the legend of the Ghost Ship. A chance phrase here and a story there put together all that he knew: Doomed for all eternity to wander in the empty star-lanes, the Ghost Ship haunts the Solar System that gave it birth. And this is its tragedy,
forty years ago or more. Resembled one? It was one! Unquestionably, though half-invisible and like a piece of glass immersed in water, it was a rocket ship. But the instruments on the control board could not lie. The presence of any material body within a hundred thousand miles would be revealed. But the needle on the gauge did not quiver. Nothing indicated the presence of a ship. But the evidence of his eyes was incontestable. Or was it? Doubt gripped him. Did the loneliness of all these years in space twist his mind till he was imagining the appearance of
stinging forehead on his arms, cursing softly and crying. Finally he rolled over, pulled his foot out of the mess, and took off his shoes. They were full of mud—sticky sandy mud. The dark world was reeling about him, and the wind was dragging at his breath. He fell back against the sand pile and let his feet sink in the mud hole and wriggled his toes. He was laughing soundlessly, and his face was wet in the wind. He couldn't think. He couldn't remember where he was and why, and he stopped caring, and after a while he felt
course. What is it that girls in small offices do or eat or drink or wear that girls in large offices don't do or eat or drink or wear? What do writers and doctors do differently? Or poets and dentists? What are we missing? What—" In the outer office a girl cried out. A body thumped against a desk, then a chair, then to the floor. Two girls screamed. Andy bolted up from his chair. Racing to the door, he shouted back to Bettijean, "Get a staff doctor and a chemist from the lab." It was the girl who had
many millions of others. Dead, when the bombs fell. Dead, as everyone knew they would be and no one did anything to prevent. Dead. Perhaps the whole world is dead—except for us." Harry stared at him. "I can't take the time to explain it all. I have too much to do. Just three of us—myself and my two sons. My wife lost her mind. I should have helped her as I'm helping you." "I don't understand," Harry said. "I remember people, and things, and where are they now? Dead? People can die, but farms, cities...." "I haven't the time," the
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What is the cylinder and why is it significant?
|
After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about A City Near Centaurus by William R. Doede.
Relevant chunks:
presently in communication with you. No one can go back." Michaelson decided he try. "No!" Maota's thought was prickled with fear and anger. Michaelson did not know how to try, but he remembered the cylinder and gathered all the force of his mind in spite of Maota's protests, and gave his most violent command. At first he thought it didn't work. He got up and looked around, then it struck him. He was standing up! The cylinder. He knew it was the cylinder. That was the difference between himself and Maota. When he used the cylinder, that was where he
curiosity overwhelming his fear. It was warm. No mistake. And there was a faint vibration, a suggestion of power. He stood there in the darkness staring off into the darkness, trembling. Fear built up in him until it was a monstrous thing, drowning reason. He forgot the power of the cylinder behind his ear. He scrambled through the doorway. He got up and ran down the ancient sandy street until he came to the edge of the city. Here he stopped, gasping for air, feeling the pain throb in his head. Common sense said that he should go home, that
fool wanted, a fight he would get. The cylinder flicked him, at his command, across five hundred miles of desert and rocks to a small creek he remembered. Here he bathed his head in cool water until all the caked blood was dissolved from his hair. Feeling better, he went back. The wind had turned cool. Michaelson shivered, wishing he had brought a coat. The city was absolutely still except for small gusts of wind sighing through the frail spires. The ancient book still lay in the sand beside the dark spot of blood. He stooped over and picked it
shook his head. "One does not study a dead culture to learn how they made things, but how they thought. But we are wasting time. I must kill you now, so I can get some rest." The old man raised the gun. "Wait! You forget that I also have a weapon." He pointed to the spot behind his ear where the cylinder was buried. "I can move faster than you can fire the gun." Maota nodded. "I have heard how you travel. It does not matter. I will kill you anyway." "I suggest we negotiate." "No." "Why not?" Maota looked
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
Question:
What is the cylinder and why is it significant?
Answer:
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[
"The cylinder is an implement tailored to Mr. Michaelson that is tucked behind his ear and will allow him to go anywhere that he desires when it is pressed. He uses it several times in the story to travel to physical places, disappearing immediately and reappearing in a new location. Once, to travel to a cold stream to wash his bleeding wounds after being hit on the head with a book by Maota, and a second time to avoid being killed by Maota firing a weapon to kill him.\nAfter Maota presses the button of the “clock” in the dead city and appears to drop dead. Mr. Michaelson desperately attempts to gain the knowledge to understand what the clock device does. Rather radically, he decides that he must press the button to fully understand, not completely knowing that he won’t die when he does. When Mr. Michaelson sees his dead body below him in the city and communicates wordlessly with Maota in this spiritual dimension he begins to panic and search for ways to get back into his body. This is how he discovers that he can will the cylinder with his mind, and return into his physical body by doing so. Through this act he can traverse between the physical and spiritual realms, which ultimately makes him considered a god by Maota (greatly angering him).\n",
"The cylinder is a small device inserted under the flesh behind Michaelson’s ear and transports him to other locations instantly, operated by his thoughts. Each cylinder is tailored to the person for whom it is intended and will not work for anyone else. It instantly sends him 500 miles across the desert to a creek where he can wash and cool off after his head injury. The cylinder saves his life twice: first in the fight with Maota when Maota points the tube gun at him. Michaelson uses the cylinder to jump out of Maota’s line of sight and land behind him. The second time it saves his life is when he uses the clock device. Michaelson’s lifeless body is left behind as his mind journey’s to where Maota’s is, a place from which there is no return. However, Michaelson remembers the cylinder and tries to use it to return to his body, and it works. The cylinder, not the clock device, actually sent him to where Maota’s mind went. \n",
"The cylinder is a small, artificial implant that Mr. Michaelson receives behind his ear. The implant allows him to travel any distance, great or small, instantaneously and is triggered by a thought. The implant enables Michaelson to travel from Earth to Alpha Centaurus II, and he uses the implant again to locate the old city that he explores on foot. After Maota injures Michaelson with the poetry book, he uses the implant to transport himself to a small creek where he washes away the caked blood from his hair. Later, Michaelson again triggers the implant to avoid being shot by Maota when he attempts to kill him. Maota indicates he believes Michaelson is a god because of his ability to travel any distance in the blink of an eye. When Maota demonstrates the power of the clock-like device to transfer a person's spirit to another dimension, Michaelson realizes he maintains a connection to his corporeal body via the cylindrical implant. He uses this realization to his advantage by triggering the implant, which allows him to go back and forth between the fourth dimension and his corporeal form.",
"The cylinder is an innovative invention shared among Earthmen. It allows the person wearing it to travel between places in the blink of an eye. Michaelson wears his cylinder above the ear, and it is specifically tailored to his being. This device becomes incredibly important in the story as Michaelson uses it several times throughout his time in the ancient ruins. The first instance of significance was when Maota attempted to kill Michaelson with his weapon, but Michaelson simply disappeared in front of his eyes, only to reappear behind him and knock him out with a well-timed blow. The cylinder saved his life then and elevated him to god-like status in Maota’s eyes. \nAfter Maota travels through the mysterious clock and presumably dies, Michaelson spends several weeks deciding what to do. When he finally hits the button, his body also falls, just like Maota’s, and he regains consciousness in a spirit world where he can see everything on any planet he wants. Maota tells him that no one is able to leave, no matter how hard they try, and that they are stuck in this plane of existence. Michaelson, however, is able to use his cylinder to travel out of that dimension and back onto the planet. He does it again to prove that it truly works, leaving Maota crying out in anger. \n"
] |
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presently in communication with you. No one can go back." Michaelson decided he try. "No!" Maota's thought was prickled with fear and anger. Michaelson did not know how to try, but he remembered the cylinder and gathered all the force of his mind in spite of Maota's protests, and gave his most violent command. At first he thought it didn't work. He got up and looked around, then it struck him. He was standing up! The cylinder. He knew it was the cylinder. That was the difference between himself and Maota. When he used the cylinder, that was where he
curiosity overwhelming his fear. It was warm. No mistake. And there was a faint vibration, a suggestion of power. He stood there in the darkness staring off into the darkness, trembling. Fear built up in him until it was a monstrous thing, drowning reason. He forgot the power of the cylinder behind his ear. He scrambled through the doorway. He got up and ran down the ancient sandy street until he came to the edge of the city. Here he stopped, gasping for air, feeling the pain throb in his head. Common sense said that he should go home, that
fool wanted, a fight he would get. The cylinder flicked him, at his command, across five hundred miles of desert and rocks to a small creek he remembered. Here he bathed his head in cool water until all the caked blood was dissolved from his hair. Feeling better, he went back. The wind had turned cool. Michaelson shivered, wishing he had brought a coat. The city was absolutely still except for small gusts of wind sighing through the frail spires. The ancient book still lay in the sand beside the dark spot of blood. He stooped over and picked it
shook his head. "One does not study a dead culture to learn how they made things, but how they thought. But we are wasting time. I must kill you now, so I can get some rest." The old man raised the gun. "Wait! You forget that I also have a weapon." He pointed to the spot behind his ear where the cylinder was buried. "I can move faster than you can fire the gun." Maota nodded. "I have heard how you travel. It does not matter. I will kill you anyway." "I suggest we negotiate." "No." "Why not?" Maota looked
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
|
Who is Isobar Jones and what happens to him throughout the story?
|
After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about Trouble on Tycho by Nelson S. Bond.
Relevant chunks:
for you." "We-e-ell," said Wilkins, "if you say so. Orders is orders. But keep a sharp eye out, Mister Jones, in case Roberts and Brown should come back sudden-like." "I will," promised Isobar, "don't worry." Wilkins moved away. Isobar waited until the Patrolman was completely out of sight. Then swiftly he pulled open the massive gate, slipped through, and closed it behind him. A flood of warmth, exhilarating after the constantly regulated temperature of the Dome, descended upon him. Fresh air, thin, but fragrant with the scent of growing things, made his pulses stir with joyous abandon. He was Outside!
so we can hop in and get out of here! Watch the Grannies—they'll be after us the minute Isobar stops playing!" Then the answer from below. The fantastic answer in Sparks' familiar voice. The answer that caused the bagpipes to slip from Isobar's fingers as Isobar Jones passed out in a dead faint: "After you? Those Grannies? Hell's howling acres— those Grannies are stone dead !"
sickening, scented, reoxygenated stuff gushing from atmo-conditioning units. Excitement? Adventure? The romance he had been led to expect when he signed on for frontier service? Bah! Only a weary, monotonous, routine existence. "A pain!" declared Isobar Jones. "That's what it is; a pain in the stummick. Not even allowed to—Yeah?" It was Sparks, audioing from the Dome's transmission turret. He said, "Hyah, Jonesy! How comes with the report?" "Done," said Isobar. "I was just gettin' the sheets together for you." "O.Q. But just bring it . Nothing else." Isobar bridled. "I don't know what you're talkin' about." "Oh, no? Well,
two, grim, grey, gaunt figures that moved with astonishing speed despite their massive bulk, came three ... six ... a dozen of those lunarites whom all men feared. The Grannies! III Simultaneously with his recognition of the pair, Joe Roberts saw him. A gasp of relief escaped the wounded man. "Jones! Thank the Lord! Then you picked up our cry for help? Quick, man—where is it? Theres not a moment to waste!" "W-where," faltered Isobar feebly, "is what ?" "The tank, of course! Didn't you hear our telecast? We can't possibly make it back to the gate without an armored
appeared. "Report ready, Jones?" "Almost," acknowledged Isobar gloomily. "It prob'ly ain't right, though. How anybody can be expected to get anything right on this dagnabbed hunk o' green cheese—" "Send it up," interrupted Colonel Eagan, "as soon as you can. Sparks is making Terra contact now. That is all." "That ain't all!" declared Isobar indignantly. "How about my bag—?" It was all , so far as the D.C. was concerned. Isobar was talking to himself. The plate dulled. Isobar said, "Nuts!" and returned to his duties. He jotted neat ditto marks under the word "Clear" which, six months ago, he
Question:
Who is Isobar Jones and what happens to him throughout the story?
Answer:
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[
"Isobar Jones, real name Horatio, has been living on Luna III for six long months now. Working as a meteorologist for Earth and radio operator, he spends his days locked in the Experimental Dome of Luna meant to protect them from the Grannies, the indestructible creatures in the Outside. His only relief comes from playing his bagpipes, but his weariness, homesickness, and blues were catching up to him. \nAfter sending out his forecasts to Earth, Isobar reveals his deep desire to escape the dome and venture Outside. Caught by Colonel Eagon, he is punished by a new commandment stating that no musical instrument can be played as it disturbs the rest of the dome. An ardent player of the bagpipes, he is heartily disappointed and upset by the news. His weariness or weltschmertz as Dr. Loesch called it makes Isobar take his bagpipes Outside the dome so he can play in peace. He tricks the junior station manning the door and slips out once he’s out of sight. After walking for a long time through the beautiful scenery, he hears the sound of a gun firing. Knowing what this means, fear quickly strikes deep inside him. Roberts and Brown come towards him, followed by a dozen Grannies. Isobar helps them climb a tree while explaining that he doesn’t actually have the armored tank they called for. Once there, he explains his idea to them about playing his bagpipes so that the Dome would hear them and come to their rescue. The air conditioning valve was nearby, so the sound would carry. As he begins to play, the Grannies fall to the ground and remain there. Supposedly resting, Isobar keeps playing until backup arrives. They are shocked to find that Isobar’s playing didn’t just put the Grannies to sleep, it actually killed them. Isobar made a huge scientific discovery and rescued his companions. ",
"Horatio \"Isobar\" Jones is a meteorologist working a one-year term in the Experimental Dome at the Lunar III frontier outpost on Earth's moon, Luna. Isobar is lean and gangly and has a good working relationship with others at the outpost. However, Isobar has begun to miss Earth and the feeling of nature, since it is prohibited to leave the Dome due to the existential threat of the Grannies. He asks Sparks Riley to request the radioman show him the view outside when Sparks calls Earth to relay Isobar's weather report; when Sparks tells him Patrolmen Roberts and Brown have left the Dome to conduct routine maintenance Outside, Isobar feels jealous. He begins to loathe the recycled air in the dome and the clammy feeling it creates on his skin. Isobar becomes easily irritated and lashes out with profanities. Dr. Loesch suggests to Sparks that Isobar is the victim of \"weltschmertz\", an intense kind of world-weariness that can drive a person to extreme measures to feel happiness again. The only activity that brings Isobar joy anymore is playing the bagpipes, which disturbs his co-workers so much that Commander Eagan eventually orders him to stop playing it. This command sends Isobar over the edge, and he tricks Junior Patrolman Wilkins into giving up his post at the entrance gate so that he can leave the Dome and go outside to get some fresh air and play his bagpipes in peace. While he is outside, Isobar runs into Roberts and Brown, who are running away from a group of Grannies. After they take refuge up a tree, Isobar plays his bagpipes in order to signal Sparks for help. In the process, he learns that the music of the bagpipes has a powerful sedative effect upon the Grannies--so much so that it actually kills them.",
"Isobar Jones’s real name is Horatio. He joined the Frontier Services six months ago because he was eager to go on an adventure on the moon and do something exciting with his life. He is deeply disappointed in his decision because he gets very little joy out of his job. He enjoys making observations about the meteorological patterns on Earth, but he does not like the constant instructions from the Dome Commander. Most of all, he hates being trapped inside without fresh air and the familiar feeling of sunshine warming his skin. He brought his bagpipes to the Lunar III because playing music is one of his favorite hobbies, but his coworkers become annoyed with his incessant playing. There is nowhere for him to go and play that won’t bother others. The music travels through the air conditioning system, and it’s impossible to turn it off. After the Dome Commander receives several complaints, he decides to make a rule forbidding all instruments. Isobar is devastated. He was already feeling depressed and anxious, but prohibiting music is the final straw for him. He devises a plan to go Outside to play his bagpipes, which is strictly forbidden. He knows that there’s a real possibility that he will run into a Graniteback, but he assumes that he can run away from them quickly. After he tricks a guard into leaving his post, he moseys outside and travels two miles away from the gate to the building. There, he encounters Brown and Roberts, who both believe that Isobar has been sent to help them. Their calls to the station have gone unanswered, and they quickly realize that Isobar does not have an armored vehicle. He’s actually equipped with his bagpipes. Isobar’s idea to climb a nearby tree to escape a pack of Grannies buys the men time, and his next idea, to play his instrument to alert their colleagues that they're in need of help, actually saves their lives. Isobar does not intend to kill the Grannies with his music, but they fall to the ground and die after hearing him play. ",
"Isobar Jones (real name, Horatio Jones, also referred to in the story as Isobar or Jonesy) is a meteorological forecaster stationed on Luna. He has been there for six months, and is developing a kind of stir-craziness from the sterile living environment and being forbidden from his one true joy - playing the bagpipes. Dr. Loesch claims he has a sickness called weltschmertz, which is a dangerous mental condition of “world sickness” that can make a person do wild things.\nIsobar delivers a weather forecast to the transmission tower early in the story where he begs his colleague to have the Earth receiver person turn the video feed around to their window. This demonstrates how much Isobars longs for the outdoors that a video feed out a window on Earth soothes him. He is strictly forbidden from playing the bagpipes or from going “Outside” to the adjacent hemispheric dome that houses a lush valley by the Dome Commander Eagan. Being overcome with his desire for both the bagpipes and to go Outside, Isobar defies orders, tricks a guard into leaving his post, and sets into the lush Outside. It is deeply restorative for him, but he is snapped to reality when he discovers his colleagues, Brown and Roberts, are being attacked by Grannies. \nIsobar is helpless to assist them other than suggesting they all climb a tree. To their luck, the Grannies can’t climb, but they start ramming the tree until it is obvious that they will all die up there soon once they knock it over and devour them. Isobar starts playing the bagpipes to alert the attention of Sparks in the tower above them. He is successful in getting the attention of Sparks who comes with a tank to rescue them, but even more amazingly his bagpipe music has killed all the of the Grannies at the base of the tree. \nIsobar becomes the hero of the story, since his bagpipe music is the first thing known to be capable of killing the Grannies, which will allow humans to now study them and perhaps make advancements to their settlement on Luna. \n"
] |
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for you." "We-e-ell," said Wilkins, "if you say so. Orders is orders. But keep a sharp eye out, Mister Jones, in case Roberts and Brown should come back sudden-like." "I will," promised Isobar, "don't worry." Wilkins moved away. Isobar waited until the Patrolman was completely out of sight. Then swiftly he pulled open the massive gate, slipped through, and closed it behind him. A flood of warmth, exhilarating after the constantly regulated temperature of the Dome, descended upon him. Fresh air, thin, but fragrant with the scent of growing things, made his pulses stir with joyous abandon. He was Outside!
so we can hop in and get out of here! Watch the Grannies—they'll be after us the minute Isobar stops playing!" Then the answer from below. The fantastic answer in Sparks' familiar voice. The answer that caused the bagpipes to slip from Isobar's fingers as Isobar Jones passed out in a dead faint: "After you? Those Grannies? Hell's howling acres— those Grannies are stone dead !"
sickening, scented, reoxygenated stuff gushing from atmo-conditioning units. Excitement? Adventure? The romance he had been led to expect when he signed on for frontier service? Bah! Only a weary, monotonous, routine existence. "A pain!" declared Isobar Jones. "That's what it is; a pain in the stummick. Not even allowed to—Yeah?" It was Sparks, audioing from the Dome's transmission turret. He said, "Hyah, Jonesy! How comes with the report?" "Done," said Isobar. "I was just gettin' the sheets together for you." "O.Q. But just bring it . Nothing else." Isobar bridled. "I don't know what you're talkin' about." "Oh, no? Well,
two, grim, grey, gaunt figures that moved with astonishing speed despite their massive bulk, came three ... six ... a dozen of those lunarites whom all men feared. The Grannies! III Simultaneously with his recognition of the pair, Joe Roberts saw him. A gasp of relief escaped the wounded man. "Jones! Thank the Lord! Then you picked up our cry for help? Quick, man—where is it? Theres not a moment to waste!" "W-where," faltered Isobar feebly, "is what ?" "The tank, of course! Didn't you hear our telecast? We can't possibly make it back to the gate without an armored
appeared. "Report ready, Jones?" "Almost," acknowledged Isobar gloomily. "It prob'ly ain't right, though. How anybody can be expected to get anything right on this dagnabbed hunk o' green cheese—" "Send it up," interrupted Colonel Eagan, "as soon as you can. Sparks is making Terra contact now. That is all." "That ain't all!" declared Isobar indignantly. "How about my bag—?" It was all , so far as the D.C. was concerned. Isobar was talking to himself. The plate dulled. Isobar said, "Nuts!" and returned to his duties. He jotted neat ditto marks under the word "Clear" which, six months ago, he
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Describe the setting of the story.
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about Delay in Transit by F. L. (Floyd L.) Wallace.
Relevant chunks:
events of the day before dropping off to sleep. The troublesome Sally. The strange dream world of Armagon. The visit to the barber shop. The removal of Brundage's body. The conversations with the townspeople. Dawes' suspicious attitude ... Then sleep came. He was flanked by marble pillars, thrusting towards a high-domed ceiling. The room stretched long and wide before him, the walls bedecked in stunning purple draperies. He whirled at the sound of footsteps, echoing stridently on the stone floor. Someone was running towards him. It was Sally, pigtails streaming out behind her, the small body wearing a flowing white
tightening of the man's shoulder muscles that his presence was known. He looked down and saw that his feet made clear-cut depressions in the soft rich soil of the field. "Continue to work," he said to the young man. "Do not be too surprised at what I am about to tell you, Rold." He paused and watched the golden man's rather stupid face intently. "I am not a Misty One," Noork said. "I killed the owner of this strange garment I wear yesterday on the mainland. I have come to rescue the girl, Tholon Sarna, of whom you spoke." Rold's
bound to develop differently." "Is environment so important? Newman tells about a pair of identical twins separated from birth, unaware of each other's existence. They met by accident when they were twenty-one. Each was a telephone repairman. Each had a wife the same age. Each had a baby son. And each had a fox terrier called 'Trixie.' That's without trying to make environments similar. But suppose you did try. Suppose you saw to it that each of them had exactly the same experiences at the same times...." For a moment it seemed to Jack that the room was dimming and
from the side of her mouth. "Don't you know nothin' ?" " Arma gon," Dawes corrected. He looked sheepishly at the stranger. "Don't expect Mister—" He cocked an eyebrow. "What's the name?" "Becker." "Don't expect Mr. Becker knows anything about Armagon. It's just a dream, you know." He smiled apologetically. "Dream? You mean this—Armagon is a place you dream about?" "Yep," Dawes said. He lifted cup to lip. "Great coffee, Ma." He leaned back with a contented sigh. "Dream about it every night. Got so used to the place, I get all confused in the daytime." Mom said: "I get
the people there know nothing of a Lincoln or that war." Jeff looked blank. "What are they doing then?" The little man spread his hands. "What are the people doing now at Sixth and Main? Certainly not the same things they were doing the day of the fire. We're talking about a dimension, not an event. Don't you grasp the difference between the two?" "Nope. To me, 1865 means the end of the Civil War. How else can you speak of a point in time except by the events that happened then?" "Well, if you go to a place in
Question:
Describe the setting of the story.
Answer:
|
[
"The story takes place in a city on Godolph, a planet that acts as a transfer location in between stars. Godolph is a threatening and violent city, not safe for ordinary humans. A unique feature of Godolph is that its environment is specifically catered to natives, where the weather is controlled, often with heavy rain. The city is compared to Venice, where water is used as a mode of transport and essential to engineering. Additionally, at dusk the city becomes dark for travelers, but bright for its natives. ",
"The story is set on Godolph, in a Godolphian city. Violence occurs in these cities and they typically shut down at dusk. Being a human pedestrian at night is not a safe option. Cassal is on Godolph as it is in between Earth, which he left, and Tunney 21, where he intends to go. He describes Godolph as a backwards planet. As Cassal is walking on the street, there is a tide of water that is used by Godolphian’s as a transportation network. He is walking in the rain as that is the type of weather preferred by Godolphian’s. \n\nCassal heads down an alley at the direction of Dimanche. The alley is narrow and dark with a slow-moving, oily type of water jutting from one side and large walls standing overhead on the other side. \n\nEventually, Cassal finds himself at the Travelers Aid Bureau. The building is shaped like a square block. The Bureau was similar to a maze inside with many small counseling rooms. A\n\nCassal is only 1/3 of the distance to Tunnel 21. \n",
"The story is set at the place called Godolph. Godolph is the place that travelers transfer from a star that is located further from the Galaxy to the stars that are located near the center of the Galaxy. The story follows Cassal as he walk to the deserted intersection to fight with the guy since Dimanche suggests that there is a connection between him and the delay in his ship. After fighting with the guy, he gets the guys wallet but loses his. Without his identification, he comes to the travelers aid bureau. Here he has to answer questions in order to get a consultation. And during the consultation he learns about missing the ship and about someone who boarded the ship using his identity. Then the story ends with him walking out of the bureau building and asking an old man about Murra Foray, but apparently he is too afraid to answer him. ",
"The first scene of the story takes place on the poorly illuminated streets of the planet Godolph. The natives of the planet have sensitive eyes, and as a result the streets appear dimly lit for human eyes. It rains often on Godolph, whose climate is controlled by its amphibian inhabitants who are fond of rain. A means of transportation on Godolph is the transport tide, rapidly moving water which carries Godolphian natives to their destination quickly and quietly. In the scene where Cassal is confronted by an assailant, there is oily water moving on one side of a narrow alley, and high walls on the opposite side. \n\tThe second half of the story is set in the labyrinthine Travelers Aid Bureau, whose busy corridors are pocketed with small counseling rooms. In each counseling room is a small door into which visitors can deposit contributions to the agency. \n"
] |
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events of the day before dropping off to sleep. The troublesome Sally. The strange dream world of Armagon. The visit to the barber shop. The removal of Brundage's body. The conversations with the townspeople. Dawes' suspicious attitude ... Then sleep came. He was flanked by marble pillars, thrusting towards a high-domed ceiling. The room stretched long and wide before him, the walls bedecked in stunning purple draperies. He whirled at the sound of footsteps, echoing stridently on the stone floor. Someone was running towards him. It was Sally, pigtails streaming out behind her, the small body wearing a flowing white
tightening of the man's shoulder muscles that his presence was known. He looked down and saw that his feet made clear-cut depressions in the soft rich soil of the field. "Continue to work," he said to the young man. "Do not be too surprised at what I am about to tell you, Rold." He paused and watched the golden man's rather stupid face intently. "I am not a Misty One," Noork said. "I killed the owner of this strange garment I wear yesterday on the mainland. I have come to rescue the girl, Tholon Sarna, of whom you spoke." Rold's
bound to develop differently." "Is environment so important? Newman tells about a pair of identical twins separated from birth, unaware of each other's existence. They met by accident when they were twenty-one. Each was a telephone repairman. Each had a wife the same age. Each had a baby son. And each had a fox terrier called 'Trixie.' That's without trying to make environments similar. But suppose you did try. Suppose you saw to it that each of them had exactly the same experiences at the same times...." For a moment it seemed to Jack that the room was dimming and
from the side of her mouth. "Don't you know nothin' ?" " Arma gon," Dawes corrected. He looked sheepishly at the stranger. "Don't expect Mister—" He cocked an eyebrow. "What's the name?" "Becker." "Don't expect Mr. Becker knows anything about Armagon. It's just a dream, you know." He smiled apologetically. "Dream? You mean this—Armagon is a place you dream about?" "Yep," Dawes said. He lifted cup to lip. "Great coffee, Ma." He leaned back with a contented sigh. "Dream about it every night. Got so used to the place, I get all confused in the daytime." Mom said: "I get
the people there know nothing of a Lincoln or that war." Jeff looked blank. "What are they doing then?" The little man spread his hands. "What are the people doing now at Sixth and Main? Certainly not the same things they were doing the day of the fire. We're talking about a dimension, not an event. Don't you grasp the difference between the two?" "Nope. To me, 1865 means the end of the Civil War. How else can you speak of a point in time except by the events that happened then?" "Well, if you go to a place in
|
What is the plot of the story?
|
After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about Delay in Transit by F. L. (Floyd L.) Wallace.
Relevant chunks:
"Well," he said, "before you kill me, tell me about the book." He held it up for Maota to see. "What about the book?" "What kind of book is it?" "What does Mr. Earthgod mean, what kind of book? You have seen it. It is like any other book, except for the material and the fact that it talks." "No, no. I mean, what's in it?" "Poetry." "Poetry? For God's sake, why poetry? Why not mathematics or history? Why not tell how to make the metal of the book itself? Now there is a subject worthy of a book." Maota
events of the day before dropping off to sleep. The troublesome Sally. The strange dream world of Armagon. The visit to the barber shop. The removal of Brundage's body. The conversations with the townspeople. Dawes' suspicious attitude ... Then sleep came. He was flanked by marble pillars, thrusting towards a high-domed ceiling. The room stretched long and wide before him, the walls bedecked in stunning purple draperies. He whirled at the sound of footsteps, echoing stridently on the stone floor. Someone was running towards him. It was Sally, pigtails streaming out behind her, the small body wearing a flowing white
enemy city of Grath was beautiful. Perhaps she would love him for helping to rescue her and come willingly with him to Konto. "I will help you, stranger," he agreed. "Then tell me of the Skull, and of the priests, and of the prison where Tholon Sarna is held." The slave's fingers flew. "All the young female slaves are caged together in the pit beneath the Skull. When the sun is directly overhead the High Priest will choose one of them for sacrifice to mighty Uzdon, most potent of all gods. And with the dawning of the next day the
aunts tell me I was born there in the middle of the war." "What war?" he asked startledly, spilling some lemonade. "The World War, of course. What's the matter?" Jack Barr was staring down at the spilled lemonade and feeling a kind of terror he'd never experienced in his waking life. Nothing around him had changed. He could still feel the same hot sun on his shoulders, the same icy glass in his hand, scent the same lemon-acid odor in his nostrils. He could still hear the faint chop-chop of the waves. And yet everything had changed, gone dark and
tightening of the man's shoulder muscles that his presence was known. He looked down and saw that his feet made clear-cut depressions in the soft rich soil of the field. "Continue to work," he said to the young man. "Do not be too surprised at what I am about to tell you, Rold." He paused and watched the golden man's rather stupid face intently. "I am not a Misty One," Noork said. "I killed the owner of this strange garment I wear yesterday on the mainland. I have come to rescue the girl, Tholon Sarna, of whom you spoke." Rold's
Question:
What is the plot of the story?
Answer:
|
[
"Denton Cassal is a sales engineer of Neuronics, Inc., from Earth. On a business trip to Tunney 21, he awaits his next ship on the planet of Godolph. One evening, Cassal is warned by Dimanche, an informative electronic companion, that he is being stalked by a man. The man's motives are not completely known, but according to Dimanche, the man is intending to murder Cassal. One thing is known, which is that the man's objective is related to Cassal being stranded on Godolph. As it begins to rain heavily, Cassal attempts to evade the man with the help of Dimanche; he follows a Godolphian girl and turns into an alleyway. As they pass by the man, Dimanche notes that he is becoming increasingly suspicious. Cassal leads the man into an alleyway, and as the dusk turns to darkness, Dimanche assists him in dodging and fighting the man. With a lighter-turned-knife, Cassal is able to attack the man and stab him several times. According to Dimanche, the man is presumed dead, although moments later the man strangles Cassal and steals his wallet. The next day, Cassal visits the Travelers Aid Bureau, where Murra Foray, the First Counselor, prods him for information, including why he is on his way to Tunney 21. Avoiding the question, Cassal asks about the status of the next ship to Tunney 21. He learns that the ship departed from Godolph that morning, and that someone named Denton Cassal did board it; he then realizes that the man who attacked him the night before used the identification from his wallet to board that ship. Stranded and uncertain of how long he would have to wait for another ship, Cassal is out of options. He contributes a donation to the bureau as he leaves. Dimanche reports that he tried to gather information on Foray, but only got her home planet, as electronic guards were blocking the rest of the information, which Dimanche finds suspicious. On his way out of the agency, Cassal encounters a man that works for Traveler's Aid, but flees after being asked about Murra Foray. Cassal continues on as he remains stranded on Godolph. ",
"The story begins with Cassal concerned about someone following him. His electronic device alerts him that there is potential danger and directs him to walk down an alley. Cassal acknowledges that an alley is not the best choice to walk down if he is concerned about his safety. The person who was following him attacks him. Cassal is able to fend him off but his wallet is stolen. \n\nCassal begins to grow impatient because his ship has not arrived in weeks. He walks towards the Travel Agency Bureau to get counseling advice for his plan to go to Tunney 21. Marra talks about how unlikely it will be that he gets to planet Tunney 21. The ship that he was meant to be on, he did not make because he did not know when it would arrive. Marra tells him that there might not be another ship headed towards Tunney 21 for another 5 years. Even then, Cassal would not be able to board the ship without identification as the region Tunney 21 requires everyone who steps off the ship to present identification. Cassal becomes upset at this news and realizes why the man had attacked him – the man wanted Casals’s identification. Marra agrees to help Cassal for a price and Cassal agrees to the deal.\n\nWhen Cassal leaves the building, he asks an old man about his boss, Marra. The man becomes scared and does not answer Cassal, instead, he walks away. Cassal finds the old man’s behavior curious. \n",
"Denton Cassal is a sales engineer who was selected to see a man at Tunney 21. The story starts with Dimanche talking to Cassel where Dimanche is warning him that there could be a stalker who is harmful to him. After further analysis, Dimanche believed that the guy stalking him had murder in mind. Dimanche is a device that is designed on Earth and it’s able to analyze people. Then the readers learn that Cassal is on Godolph, a transfer center for the stars that are located near the center of the Galaxy. And Cassel is here to transfer from Earth to Tunney 21. He was supposed to get on the ship after a few days of landing in Godolph, but apparently the ship has not arrived and it has been almost three weeks. Hearing Dimanche’s analysis on the man’s connection to the delay, Cassal gets curious. \n\nThen Cassal is suggested by Dimanche to follow a girl in order to get closer to the stalker. Then he gets to a deserted intersection holding his cigarette so that the guy will follow, which he does. Because Godolphian won’t be seen when it’s dark, but they can see Cassal very well, so Dimanche becomes Cassal’s eyes once they entered the intersection. Cassal listens to him and follows his instructions. Luckily he is able to get the distance correct to injure the guy. Right after that, to Cassal’s surprise, Dimanche detects no heartbeat and the guy is not breathing anymore. Despite that he is horrified by the fact he has just murdered someone, Cassal wants to figure out who wants the man to attack him. So he looks through the man’s wallet and other personal items, but could find no connection. Then suddenly the supposed-to-be-dead man attacks Cassal and then runs away with his wallet. \n\nLater, Cassal found himself inside the travelers aid bureau answering questions in order to get a consultation. During the consultation, he realizes that he just missed the ship. Moreover, someone used his identity to get on to that ship. Then, Murra Foray, the first counselor of the travelers aid bureau offers him help if he donates to them. He is surprised by the amount they wish for, but he donates anyways. Then after he exits from the other side of the building, he sees a man who finishes with putting up the signs. But somehow he would not talk about Murra Foray as if he is afraid of her, which Cassal does not understand at all. ",
"On the planet Godolph, Neronics, Inc., salesman Denton Cassal is being stalked by a mysterious local. An intelligent implanted machine able to detect and interpret physiological data of nearby individuals, which Cassal calls Dimanche, tells him that the man likely intends to murder him. Dimanche gathers that the assassin's motivation is connected to Cassal’s being stranded on Godolph; Cassal had initially meant to stay in Godolph for only a couple days before continuing his journey to Tunney 21, but has been stuck there for several weeks. \nCassal moves closer to the man in order for Dimanche to better analyze him; Dimanche reveals that the man wields a concealed knife. Instructing Cassal to turn into an alley, Dimanche learns that the man expressed regret about having to kill Cassal, saying that one of them had to die. Suddenly, the assailant rushes Cassal, who narrowly dodges and deploys a hidden blade. Dimanche guides Cassal, whose eyes are unable to see in the dim Godolphian light, in a fight against the man, and Cassal seemingly dispatches the man. However, he quickly recovers and tackles Cassal, managing to steal his wallet and identification tab before running off. \n\tNow at the Travelers Aid Bureau, where an old technician is changing signs throughout the building, Cassal waits to enter a counseling room to ask about his onward journey to Tunney 21. Through a screen, he speaks with Murra Foray, who asks that he complete an onboarding questionnaire. He answers all the required questions, except for one which asks for his purpose in traveling to Tunney. We learn that Cassal aims to persuade a Tunnesian scientist to come to Earth in order to develop instantaneous radio, which would make them very wealthy. \n\tMurra reveals that the transport for which Cassal had been waiting had departed that morning, and that a man named Denton Cassal had been aboard it. Cassal concludes that his assailant from the previous night had stolen his identification tab with the intention of traveling to Tunney 21. Murra understands Cassal’s situation, and elicits a contribution from him in exchange for the Travelers Aid Bureau’s assistance. Throughout their conversation, Murra seems to bait Cassal into revealing his secret to success as a salesman; because of his possession of Dimanche, Cassal is able to successfully interpret his customers’ reactions. However, Cassal is wary of Murra’s line of questioning and reveals nothing. \n\tAs Cassal leaves the counseling room, he runs into the old man changing the signs, who reveals that Murra has recently assumed control of the Bureau. Cassal sees that the technician is afraid of Murra, but thinks nothing of it.\n"
] |
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"Well," he said, "before you kill me, tell me about the book." He held it up for Maota to see. "What about the book?" "What kind of book is it?" "What does Mr. Earthgod mean, what kind of book? You have seen it. It is like any other book, except for the material and the fact that it talks." "No, no. I mean, what's in it?" "Poetry." "Poetry? For God's sake, why poetry? Why not mathematics or history? Why not tell how to make the metal of the book itself? Now there is a subject worthy of a book." Maota
events of the day before dropping off to sleep. The troublesome Sally. The strange dream world of Armagon. The visit to the barber shop. The removal of Brundage's body. The conversations with the townspeople. Dawes' suspicious attitude ... Then sleep came. He was flanked by marble pillars, thrusting towards a high-domed ceiling. The room stretched long and wide before him, the walls bedecked in stunning purple draperies. He whirled at the sound of footsteps, echoing stridently on the stone floor. Someone was running towards him. It was Sally, pigtails streaming out behind her, the small body wearing a flowing white
enemy city of Grath was beautiful. Perhaps she would love him for helping to rescue her and come willingly with him to Konto. "I will help you, stranger," he agreed. "Then tell me of the Skull, and of the priests, and of the prison where Tholon Sarna is held." The slave's fingers flew. "All the young female slaves are caged together in the pit beneath the Skull. When the sun is directly overhead the High Priest will choose one of them for sacrifice to mighty Uzdon, most potent of all gods. And with the dawning of the next day the
aunts tell me I was born there in the middle of the war." "What war?" he asked startledly, spilling some lemonade. "The World War, of course. What's the matter?" Jack Barr was staring down at the spilled lemonade and feeling a kind of terror he'd never experienced in his waking life. Nothing around him had changed. He could still feel the same hot sun on his shoulders, the same icy glass in his hand, scent the same lemon-acid odor in his nostrils. He could still hear the faint chop-chop of the waves. And yet everything had changed, gone dark and
tightening of the man's shoulder muscles that his presence was known. He looked down and saw that his feet made clear-cut depressions in the soft rich soil of the field. "Continue to work," he said to the young man. "Do not be too surprised at what I am about to tell you, Rold." He paused and watched the golden man's rather stupid face intently. "I am not a Misty One," Noork said. "I killed the owner of this strange garment I wear yesterday on the mainland. I have come to rescue the girl, Tholon Sarna, of whom you spoke." Rold's
|
What is the significance of teleporter suits in the story?
|
After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about A BOTTLE OF Old Wine by Richard O. Lewis.
Relevant chunks:
Pleasurable things. He remembered the girl he had met the night before, and smiled smugly. Perhaps she would be awaiting him even now. If not, there would be another one.... He settled himself deeper into the chair, glanced once more at his wife, then let his head lean comfortably back against the chair's headrest. His hand upon his thigh felt the thin mesh that cloaked his body beneath his clothing like a sheer stocking. His fingers went again to the tiny switch. Again he hesitated. Herbert Hyrel knew no more about the telporter suit he wore than he did about
had left strict orders not to be disturbed until he had finished with them. Both would have terrific hangovers in the morning. But that, of course, would be fully compensated for by the memories of the evening. Hyrel chuckled. The situation struck him as being funny: the shadowy self got drunk and had a good time, and the outer husk suffered the hangover in the morning. Strange. Strange how a device such as the telporter suit could cause the shadow of each bodily cell to leave the body, materialize, and become a reality in its own right. And yet ...
outside. The icy wind cut through and into Bruce, but he didn't seem to notice. Anhauser's bulk loomed even larger in the special cold-resisting suiting. Jacobs' thin face frowned slyly at Bruce. "Come on in, boys, and get warm," Bruce invited. "Hey, poet, you're still here!" Anhauser said, looking astonished. "We thought you'd be running off somewhere," Jacobs said. Bruce reached for the suit on its hook, started climbing into it. "Where?" he asked. "Mars looks alike wherever you go. Where did you think I'd be running to?" "Any place just so it was away from here and us," Anhauser
after tonight until he received his monthly dole two weeks hence. She wouldn't wait that long. Someone else would have her. Unless ... Yes, he knew now that he was going to kill his wife as soon as the opportunity presented itself. It would be a simple matter. With the aid of the telporter suit, he could establish an iron-clad alibi. He took a long drink of whiskey and looked at the dancers about him. Sight of their gay costumes heightened his depression. He was wearing a cheap suit of satin, all he could afford. But some day soon he
I was much too excited to work at theoretical research as I usually did after a hard day of tramping around. I bathed, I paced a while, I sat and hummed nervously and got up and paced again. I turned on the telepuppets. There was a drama about the space pilots who fly the nonconformist prisoners to the forests and pulp-acetate plants on Mars. Seemed that the Southem political prisoners who are confined to the southern hemisphere of Mars, wanted to attack and conquer the north. The nonconformists, led by our pilot, came through for the State in the end.
Question:
What is the significance of teleporter suits in the story?
Answer:
|
[
"Teleporter suits play an important role in the relationship of Herbert and his wife, but also in the society that they live in more broadly. In terms of broad significance, the teleporter suits are important to the Riverside Club, as only people who own one are allowed to enter. They are illegal to own, so the club had to be careful about who they let in. Even though they are frowned upon, it seems they are a popular purchase for those who can afford them. Both Herbert and his wife own one, though we don't learn that his wife has one until the end of the story. For Herbert, the teleporter suit is his ticket to spend time outside of the house that he feels trapped in, in a relationship that he is not happy in. It allows him to visit this club and meet other people. At the same time, it is these suits that allowed his wife to follow him to the club and convince him to admit his plans, eventually ending in his death. After she shoots him, she hides her own suit but leaves his on his person. Because the body in the suit and the other copy of the body experience things differently, it was a sneaky way to kill her husband. ",
"Teleporter suits are an illegal yet highly sought-after and expensive tech gadget in this society. With this suit, the wearer can be transported to another realm, while their body remains in place. Their souls can have fun, dance the night away, drink as much as they want, and their partners or families will never know. The next morning, however, when they return to their corporeal body, they will carry last night’s hangover with them to the physical realm. \nThe teleporter suit allows Herbert Hyrel to escape his suffocating household and relish in his manly and sexual fantasies. He wants to prove himself to society and to brand himself as something he is not. In this other world, he can pretend to be a much richer, more powerful man. His rich wife makes him feel insignificant, so he takes his troubles to the shadow realm. \nThe teleporter suits allow the wearer to travel between realms, but a connection between the shadow self and body remains. Whatever happens to the shadow self, will also happen to the corporeal self, only the physical or visual element will not be there. So, if someone were to get hurt in the shadow realm, their physical body would feel the pain but would not bear the scars. \nThis allows Mrs. Herbert Hyrel to murder her husband in the shadow realm, and return to the physical world without blood or any incriminating evidence. \n",
"The telporter suits catalyze the major conflict in the story. In one sense, Herbert's telporter suit represents his ability to escape what he considers to be an emasculating, oppressive marriage. On the other hand, Mrs. Hyrel's secret telporter suit leads to Herbert's eventual demise. The suits are made of a thin mesh that fits the body like a stocking and can be worn underneath one's clothes. The telporter can be engaged by flicking a small switch, and it sends its wearer to a receiver at a previously-set location. Herbert installs his receiver at a small cabin in the woods a short distance away from the Riverside Club since he cannot afford the private rooms there. Herbert does not understand the mechanics behind the suit, but he grasps its basic function--the suits transport a person's \"shadowy self\" from one's body and the body is left in \"a conscious but dream-like state.\" When the shadowy self returns, the body does not retain any scars the shadowy self may have sustained but it does feel the pain of those injuries. Self-telportation is also illegal, although the Riverside Club maintains police protection by charging high prices and paying them off. Mrs. Hyrel uses to her advantage when she foils Herbert's plans to kill her and instead kills him and makes it appear as if he simply died while engaging in illegal activity.",
"\n\tThe teleporter suits provide people with a means of escape from their boring or unpleasant lives. Many people have them and use them to go to the Riverside Club where they can abandon their lives and live for the pleasure of the moment without anyone knowing who they are since everyone there wears costumes and masks. In addition, self-teleportation is illegal, so no one wants anyone else to know they have teleportation suits. When people use their teleporter suits, their real bodies stay where they are in reality while their “shadow” bodies travel to another place. People who teleport to the Riverside Club can do anything they want without their spouses or anyone else knowing what they are doing. Meanwhile, since their real bodies remain in “real life,” it looks as if the person is still there, doing nothing out of the ordinary that can draw suspicion or blame from anyone who knows them. \n"
] |
30004
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Pleasurable things. He remembered the girl he had met the night before, and smiled smugly. Perhaps she would be awaiting him even now. If not, there would be another one.... He settled himself deeper into the chair, glanced once more at his wife, then let his head lean comfortably back against the chair's headrest. His hand upon his thigh felt the thin mesh that cloaked his body beneath his clothing like a sheer stocking. His fingers went again to the tiny switch. Again he hesitated. Herbert Hyrel knew no more about the telporter suit he wore than he did about
had left strict orders not to be disturbed until he had finished with them. Both would have terrific hangovers in the morning. But that, of course, would be fully compensated for by the memories of the evening. Hyrel chuckled. The situation struck him as being funny: the shadowy self got drunk and had a good time, and the outer husk suffered the hangover in the morning. Strange. Strange how a device such as the telporter suit could cause the shadow of each bodily cell to leave the body, materialize, and become a reality in its own right. And yet ...
outside. The icy wind cut through and into Bruce, but he didn't seem to notice. Anhauser's bulk loomed even larger in the special cold-resisting suiting. Jacobs' thin face frowned slyly at Bruce. "Come on in, boys, and get warm," Bruce invited. "Hey, poet, you're still here!" Anhauser said, looking astonished. "We thought you'd be running off somewhere," Jacobs said. Bruce reached for the suit on its hook, started climbing into it. "Where?" he asked. "Mars looks alike wherever you go. Where did you think I'd be running to?" "Any place just so it was away from here and us," Anhauser
after tonight until he received his monthly dole two weeks hence. She wouldn't wait that long. Someone else would have her. Unless ... Yes, he knew now that he was going to kill his wife as soon as the opportunity presented itself. It would be a simple matter. With the aid of the telporter suit, he could establish an iron-clad alibi. He took a long drink of whiskey and looked at the dancers about him. Sight of their gay costumes heightened his depression. He was wearing a cheap suit of satin, all he could afford. But some day soon he
I was much too excited to work at theoretical research as I usually did after a hard day of tramping around. I bathed, I paced a while, I sat and hummed nervously and got up and paced again. I turned on the telepuppets. There was a drama about the space pilots who fly the nonconformist prisoners to the forests and pulp-acetate plants on Mars. Seemed that the Southem political prisoners who are confined to the southern hemisphere of Mars, wanted to attack and conquer the north. The nonconformists, led by our pilot, came through for the State in the end.
|
Who is Larry Dobbin, and what happens to him?
|
After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about Galactic Ghost by Walter Kubilius.
Relevant chunks:
man could. Silently the two men watched. Dobbin's eyes opened suddenly and a tremor seized his body. He turned painfully and looked at Willard. "I saw it!" his voice cracked, trembling. "Saw what?" "It's true! It's true! It comes whenever a space man dies! It's there!" "In heaven's name, Dobbin," Willard demanded, "What do you see? What is it?" Dobbin lifted his dark bony arm and pointed out into star-studded space. "The Ghost Ship!" Something clicked in Willard's memory. He had heard it spoken of in whispers by drunken space men and professional tellers of fairy tales. But he had
faint ghost-like rocket ships? The thought shot through his mind like a thunder bolt. Ghost Ship! Was this the thing that Dobbin had seen before he died? But that was impossible. Ghost Ships existed nowhere but in legends and tall tales told by men drunk with the liquors of Mars. "There is no ship there. There is no ship there," Willard told himself over and over again as he looked at the vague outline of the ship, now motionless a few hundred miles away. Deep within him a faint voice cried, " It's come—for me! " but Willard stilled it.
lonely wanderers would find their battered hulk of a ship in space and bring them home again. Dobbin motioned to him and, in answer to a last request, Willard lifted him so he faced the port window for a final look at the panorama of the stars. Dobbin's eyes, dimming and half closed, took in the vast play of the heavens and in his mind he relived the days when in a frail craft he first crossed interstellar space. But for Earth-loneliness Dobbin would die a happy man, knowing that he had lived as much and as deeply as any
never put any stock in them. In some forgotten corner of Dobbin's mind the legend of the Ghost Ship must have lain, to come up in this time of delirium. "There's nothing there," he said firmly. "It's come—for me!" Dobbin cried. He turned his head slowly toward Willard, tried to say something and then fell back upon the pillow. His mouth was open and his eyes stared unseeing ahead. Dobbin was now one with the vanished pioneers of yesterday. Willard was alone. For two days, reckoned in Earth time, Willard kept vigil over the body of his friend and space
But no phantom this! It was a life and blood rocket ship from Earth! Starlight shone on it and not through it! Its lines, window, vents were all solid and had none of the ghost-like quality he remembered seeing in the Ghost Ship in his youth. For another split second he thought that perhaps he, too, like Dobbin, had gone mad and that the ship would vanish just as it approached him. The tapping of the space-telegrapher reassured him. "CALLING SPACE SHIP MARY LOU," the message rapped out, "CALLING SPACE SHIP MARY LOU." With trembling fingers that he could scarcely
Question:
Who is Larry Dobbin, and what happens to him?
Answer:
|
[
"John Willard considers Larry Dobbin his best friend. They are both astronauts in a rocket ship that was on a voyage past Pluto to explore a possible planetoid. Their ship was struck by a meteor and can no longer fly, so they are drifting through space. When the story opens, Dobbin is dying. His breathing is erratic, and his fingertips are black. Dobbin has accepted his impending death, but Willard tries to convince Dobbin that he is not dying and that they will return to Earth. Dobbin longs to return to Earth and regrets that he will not see it again. He remembers his first space flight as Willard raises him to look out the port window at the stars. Before he dies, Dobbin declares that the Ghost Ship has come for him. He points to it out the window, but Willard does not see it. Willard believes that Dobbin has gone mad. Dobbin then dies. Dobbin is mentioned in a newspaper account thirteen years after the men left on their voyage when Willard’s son builds a larger version of their ship called the Mary Lou II. The article indicates they were never heard from again. \n",
"Larry Dobbin is John Willard’s right-hand man abroad the space ship Mary Lou. They blasted off from Rocket Port nine years before the beginning of the story. They went to space to explore the possibility of another planetoid hidden beyond Pluto. \nLarry Dobbin, as Willard’s companion and confidante, operated the Mary Lou from the control board, possibly co-piloting with Willard. \nHowever, less than five years into their adventure, the Mary Lou was struck by a meteor, which damaged the Mary Lou to no repair but only in certain areas. The meteor did not damage the assimilators and convertors, which meant the ship was livable, but not moveable. However, assumedly during the meteor strike, Dobbin was severely injured. At the beginning of the story, he is dying and sees a ship far in the distance. He claims it’s the ghost ship coming to take him away. After spotting the ship, Dobbin quickly passes. Willard mourns respectfully and follows the vigil ritual. Two days later, Willard disposed of Dobbin’s body, and his atoms were converted into pure energy for the Mary Lou. ",
"Larry Dobbin is Willard’s closest friend and fellow explorer who joins Willard on the “Mary Lou.” Their mission is to journey to a small planet that lies beyond Pluto. At some point in their expedition, a meteor hits their ship and damages it, causing the “Mary Lou” to drift through unknown space, unable to return to Earth. Dobbin becomes sick during this period, and Willard realizes he is going to die. Dobbin hopes to return to Earth prior to his death, and Willard entertains this fantasy in order to give him some hope and peace before his passing. Dobbin remembers his first journey into space, and as he peers out into the abyss towards the end of his life, he exclaims that he sees the Ghost Ship—a legend amongst sailors and spacemen who claim people see such a ship in the moments before death. Dobbin dies shortly after announcing his vision, and Willard is left alone.",
"Larry Dobbin (called “Harry Dobbin” by Willard) is the other space explorer on the Mary Lou with Willard. They embarked on a voyage to explore a planetoid beyond Pluto, and were never heard from on Earth again. As the story begins, they are four years into the mission and Dobbin is dying of an unspecified illness that has turned his finger tips black and made it difficult for him to breathe or speak. Willard lifts him to the window of the ship so he can see the stars one last time, and Dobbin says he sees The Ghost Ship and that it has come for him because he is dying. Willard assures him that isn’t the case as Dobbin passes away. Willard keeps vigil over Dobbin’s remains for two days before disposing of them in the ship’s engine. \n"
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man could. Silently the two men watched. Dobbin's eyes opened suddenly and a tremor seized his body. He turned painfully and looked at Willard. "I saw it!" his voice cracked, trembling. "Saw what?" "It's true! It's true! It comes whenever a space man dies! It's there!" "In heaven's name, Dobbin," Willard demanded, "What do you see? What is it?" Dobbin lifted his dark bony arm and pointed out into star-studded space. "The Ghost Ship!" Something clicked in Willard's memory. He had heard it spoken of in whispers by drunken space men and professional tellers of fairy tales. But he had
faint ghost-like rocket ships? The thought shot through his mind like a thunder bolt. Ghost Ship! Was this the thing that Dobbin had seen before he died? But that was impossible. Ghost Ships existed nowhere but in legends and tall tales told by men drunk with the liquors of Mars. "There is no ship there. There is no ship there," Willard told himself over and over again as he looked at the vague outline of the ship, now motionless a few hundred miles away. Deep within him a faint voice cried, " It's come—for me! " but Willard stilled it.
lonely wanderers would find their battered hulk of a ship in space and bring them home again. Dobbin motioned to him and, in answer to a last request, Willard lifted him so he faced the port window for a final look at the panorama of the stars. Dobbin's eyes, dimming and half closed, took in the vast play of the heavens and in his mind he relived the days when in a frail craft he first crossed interstellar space. But for Earth-loneliness Dobbin would die a happy man, knowing that he had lived as much and as deeply as any
never put any stock in them. In some forgotten corner of Dobbin's mind the legend of the Ghost Ship must have lain, to come up in this time of delirium. "There's nothing there," he said firmly. "It's come—for me!" Dobbin cried. He turned his head slowly toward Willard, tried to say something and then fell back upon the pillow. His mouth was open and his eyes stared unseeing ahead. Dobbin was now one with the vanished pioneers of yesterday. Willard was alone. For two days, reckoned in Earth time, Willard kept vigil over the body of his friend and space
But no phantom this! It was a life and blood rocket ship from Earth! Starlight shone on it and not through it! Its lines, window, vents were all solid and had none of the ghost-like quality he remembered seeing in the Ghost Ship in his youth. For another split second he thought that perhaps he, too, like Dobbin, had gone mad and that the ship would vanish just as it approached him. The tapping of the space-telegrapher reassured him. "CALLING SPACE SHIP MARY LOU," the message rapped out, "CALLING SPACE SHIP MARY LOU." With trembling fingers that he could scarcely
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What is the significance of Ghost Ships in the story?
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about Galactic Ghost by Walter Kubilius.
Relevant chunks:
explain the phenomena of the Ghost Ship? Was it really only a product of his imagination? What of all the others who had seen it? Was it possible for many different men under many different situations to have the same exact illusion? Reason denied that. But perhaps space itself denies reason. Grimly he retraced the legend of the Ghost Ship. A chance phrase here and a story there put together all that he knew: Doomed for all eternity to wander in the empty star-lanes, the Ghost Ship haunts the Solar System that gave it birth. And this is its tragedy,
This was no fantasy. There was a scientific reason for it. There must be! Or should there be? Throughout all Earth history there had been Ghost Ships sailing the Seven Seas—ships doomed to roam forever because their crew broke some unbreakable law. If this was true for the ships of the seas, why not for the ships of empty space? He looked again at the strange ship. It was motionless. At least it was not nearing him. Willard could see nothing but its vague outline. A moment later he could discern a faint motion. It was turning! The Ghost Ship
is the Ghost Ship and we are the Ghosts!" "Yes."
faint ghost-like rocket ships? The thought shot through his mind like a thunder bolt. Ghost Ship! Was this the thing that Dobbin had seen before he died? But that was impossible. Ghost Ships existed nowhere but in legends and tall tales told by men drunk with the liquors of Mars. "There is no ship there. There is no ship there," Willard told himself over and over again as he looked at the vague outline of the ship, now motionless a few hundred miles away. Deep within him a faint voice cried, " It's come—for me! " but Willard stilled it.
useless order, he thought bitterly, when there was no way whatever to get sufficient power to get back to Earth, long forgotten Earth. He was leaning back in his chair when a vague uneasiness seized him. He arose and slowly walked over to the window, his age already being marked in the ache of his bones. Looking out into the silent theater of the stars, he suddenly froze. There was a ship, coming toward him! For a moment the reason in his mind tottered on a balance. Doubt assailed him. Was this the Ghost Ship come to torment him again?
Question:
What is the significance of Ghost Ships in the story?
Answer:
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[
"There are legends and tall tales about the Ghost Ships, told mainly by drunken men and professional storytellers. Willard remembers that there are stories on Earth about Ghost Ships that sail the Seven Seas. The story goes that the crews of Ghost Ships have broken a particular law, and their punishment is to roam forever. The Ghost Ship in space is said to be the home of spacemen who could not return to Earth. When Dobbin is dying, he claims to see the Ghost Ship and that it has come for him, but when Willard looks for the ship, he does not see it. Later, when Willard sees the Ghost Ship for himself for the first time, he tries to convince himself it is not really there. He remembers the stories about oceangoing Ghost Ships and reasons that there could also be Ghost Ships in space. When the Ghost Ship turns to leave, Willard is almost sorry to see it go because he has been so lonely. When the Ghost Ship appears to Willard for the second time, it has pulled alongside the Mary Lou, and Willard thinks it is a real ship. Only when the Ghost Ship abruptly speeds away and Willard sees stars shining through it does Willard realize it was the Ghost Ship, and he believes it is mocking him. With his third sighting of the Ghost Ship, Willard immediately thinks it is the Ghost Ship but then convinces himself it is not when it messages him. After he is on the ship, he realizes it is indeed the Ghost Ship and that he is now a Ghost. \n",
"The Ghost Ship is a tale told by spacemen to frighten each other or warn them of this grave possibility. Many of those that came close to death in space, or those who witnessed others dying with no hope of a return to earth, mentioned seeing a ghost ship. A faint outline of a ship that had come to take them away forever. Before Dobbin’s death at the story of the story, he tells Willard that he sees the ghost ship. \nThis ghost ship serves as another form of torture for Willard during his many years of solitude. The ghost ship would essentially check up on him, float by and see if he was still alive or not. This gave Willard false hope as he would dream that the ghost ship was a real rocket ship that was coming to rescue him. In the end, Willard is taken away by a ghost ship, though he thinks it’s a rescue ship initially, and he is doomed to forever fly through the solar system as a ghost and nothing more. There is no hope for his return to Earth. The men of the ghost ship are truly ghosts, invisible to the naked eye and only visible to those on their deathbeds. \n",
"The Ghost Ship is a legend that sailors and space travelers alike have claimed people see in the moments before they die at sea or in space. In the seconds before Dobbin dies in Willard’s arms, he looks out the window of the “Mary Lou” and claims to see the Ghost Ship himself. Throughout Willard’s long periods of solitude aboard the “Mary Lou”, he thinks he sees the Ghost Ship several times. First, from a distance, as a blinking light advancing closer and closer before turning back and sailing off into dark space; later, he thinks he sees the ship return, only this time it passes nearer before turning back and leaving again. With each return of the Ghost Ship, Willard believes he sees it clearer than he had before. After decades adrift in space, Willard believes a ship has finally come to rescue him. He does not think it is the Ghost Ship because it is solid, and he is greeted by a crew of people. However, the captain explains that the longer a vessel spends lost in space, the more it loses itself and slips into a kind of un-reality, along with those aboard. The more the “Mary Lou” drifted into this space, the more real the Ghost Ship became to Willard. Willard realizes that the “Mary Lou” has become a “ghost ship” herself.",
"Ghost Ships frame the story and the idea of them haunts Willard on and off throughout it. At the beginning, when Dobbin exclaims that he sees a Ghost Ship prior to his death, Willard tells himself that it was a hallucination from somewhere deep in his dying friend’s subconscious, just the result of the memory of an old legend. However, the idea of a Ghost Ship never really leaves Willard’s mind throughout the rest of the story. When he sees a partially transparent rocket ship that turns away and disappears, he wonders if it could be a Ghost Ship but talks himself out of it. Later he wonders if it was a ghost ship that was “mocking him”. When he is rescued by a ship that looks more real, the thought still crosses his mind that it could be a Ghost Ship and he again shuts the idea down. Ultimately, Ghost Ships are incredibly significant in the story, because it turns out that both the Mary Lou, and his rescue ship/new home, while not exactly like the tall tale, are, in effect, Ghost Ships. \n"
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explain the phenomena of the Ghost Ship? Was it really only a product of his imagination? What of all the others who had seen it? Was it possible for many different men under many different situations to have the same exact illusion? Reason denied that. But perhaps space itself denies reason. Grimly he retraced the legend of the Ghost Ship. A chance phrase here and a story there put together all that he knew: Doomed for all eternity to wander in the empty star-lanes, the Ghost Ship haunts the Solar System that gave it birth. And this is its tragedy,
This was no fantasy. There was a scientific reason for it. There must be! Or should there be? Throughout all Earth history there had been Ghost Ships sailing the Seven Seas—ships doomed to roam forever because their crew broke some unbreakable law. If this was true for the ships of the seas, why not for the ships of empty space? He looked again at the strange ship. It was motionless. At least it was not nearing him. Willard could see nothing but its vague outline. A moment later he could discern a faint motion. It was turning! The Ghost Ship
is the Ghost Ship and we are the Ghosts!" "Yes."
faint ghost-like rocket ships? The thought shot through his mind like a thunder bolt. Ghost Ship! Was this the thing that Dobbin had seen before he died? But that was impossible. Ghost Ships existed nowhere but in legends and tall tales told by men drunk with the liquors of Mars. "There is no ship there. There is no ship there," Willard told himself over and over again as he looked at the vague outline of the ship, now motionless a few hundred miles away. Deep within him a faint voice cried, " It's come—for me! " but Willard stilled it.
useless order, he thought bitterly, when there was no way whatever to get sufficient power to get back to Earth, long forgotten Earth. He was leaning back in his chair when a vague uneasiness seized him. He arose and slowly walked over to the window, his age already being marked in the ache of his bones. Looking out into the silent theater of the stars, he suddenly froze. There was a ship, coming toward him! For a moment the reason in his mind tottered on a balance. Doubt assailed him. Was this the Ghost Ship come to torment him again?
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What is the importance of the crashing of the ship of Judith's father?
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about Prison Planet by Wilson Tucker.
Relevant chunks:
shipshape. You make likewise." Forcibly he shoved her into a hammock. "Wrap up tight. Straps tight. When we go, we go fast. Bang!" And he left her. "Hey! Where are you going now?" "To get Gladney. He sick too. Hush hush!" His voice floated back. "Where has he gone?" Judith called. "Back for another man. Remember the two miners who found us when we crashed? The burly one fell off a rock-bank as they were bringing us in. Stove in his ribs pretty badly. The other has a broken arm ... happened once while you were out. They wouldn't let
many days?" His only answer was an inhuman snarl, and the cruel blazing of those inhuman eyes. She fell face first to the floor. "I can't keep it up!" she cried. The sound of her voice rolled along the hot steel deck. "I cant! I cant!" A double handful of tepid water was thrown in her face. "Get up!" Rat stood over her, face twisted, his body hunched. "Get up!" She stared at him, dazed. He kicked her. "Get up!" The tepid water ran off her face and far away she heard Judith calling.... She forced herself up. Rat was
the uneven terrain. "Oh, the bag!" she gasped. "I've dropped it." He chuckled again. "Have got. You scare, I catch." She didn't see the ship because of the wind in her eyes, but without warning she plummeted down and her feet jarred on the lip of the lock. "Inside. No noise, no light. Easy." But in spite of his warning she tripped in the darkness. He helped her from the floor and guided her to the hammocks. "Judith?" she asked. "Here. Beside you, trussed up so tight I can hardly breathe." "No talk!" Rat insisted. "Much hush-hush needed. Other girl
lived to remember it. Until hospitals are built on this forlorn world, humans like you who haven't been properly conditioned will have to stay right at home." "How about these men that live and work here?" "They never get here until they've been through the mill first. Adenoids, appendix', all the extra parts they can get along without." "Well," Judith said. "I've certainly learned my lesson!" Gray didn't answer, but from out of the darkness surrounding her came a sound remarkably resembling a snort. "Gray?" Judith asked fearfully. "Yes?" "Hasn't the pilot been gone an awfully long time?" Rat himself
know...?" but he had gone again. Nurse Gray found herself addressing blackness. On the point of turning, she saw him back again. "Blankets," he instructed. "Wrap in blankets. Cold—hot too. Wrap good!" And he was gone again. Gray blinked away the illusion he disappeared upwards. She ran over to the girl. "Judith, if you want to back down, now is the time. He'll be back in a moment." "No!" Judith moaned. "No!" Gray smiled in the darkness and began wrapping the blankets around her. A light tapping at the window announced the return of Rat. The nurse pushed open the
Question:
What is the importance of the crashing of the ship of Judith's father?
Answer:
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[
"The crashing of the ship brings Judith and Patti to Mars where they meet two miners and then the whole crew of the spaceship including Rat. Judith wouldn't get that sick and lose the means to return to Earth if the ship didn't crash. The miners wouldn't suffer after helping the girls. Therefore, Judith wouldn't learn the lesson of breaking the law and leaving Earth. The crashing also leads to the necessity of Rat piloting the ship and all the party suffering from heat and thirst. The whole situation of danger and limitless occurs because the ship crashed and the girl gets sick on Mars, so she needs to get to Earth immediately. ",
"The ship crashed because Judith was piloting the ship and began to experience the symptoms of her appendicitis. It is unknown whether Judith’s father survived the crash. It is implied that the man that Rat helped in the desert is perhaps Judith’s father. Rat helping that man is what caused him to be declared AWOL and why he might have authorities after him for his failure to report to duty. If the ship had not crashed then Judith’s father would not have been alone and injured in the desert, and Rat would not have been AWOL trying to help the man. ",
"The crashing of the ship of Judith’s father is what sets up the story. Nurse Gray explains that Judith took her father’s cruiser as a pleasure jaunt and came over. Although the ship is supposed to be large and easy to handle, the journey ended after Judith lost control of the ship because of an attack of space-appendicitis. The ship's crashing is what leads her to be on Mars, and it is also the cause of her illness because she has not gone through the same mill that the men who live and work there have gone through. This past event also sets up the current events of Rat speed-driving the ship back to Earth to save her life. ",
"Judith's father's ship crashing leaves Judith and Patti Gray stranded on Mars. She initially wanted to recklessly travel to Mars, Gray coming along with her, and used her father's ship because it was easy to navigate. However, she was soon attacked by space-appendicitis and lost control of the ship, causing it to crash. This is significant because Judith and Patti Gray no longer have a way home, with Judith's illness becoming worse. They are desperate to return to Earth and thus resort to taking the ship with Rat as their pilot. "
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shipshape. You make likewise." Forcibly he shoved her into a hammock. "Wrap up tight. Straps tight. When we go, we go fast. Bang!" And he left her. "Hey! Where are you going now?" "To get Gladney. He sick too. Hush hush!" His voice floated back. "Where has he gone?" Judith called. "Back for another man. Remember the two miners who found us when we crashed? The burly one fell off a rock-bank as they were bringing us in. Stove in his ribs pretty badly. The other has a broken arm ... happened once while you were out. They wouldn't let
many days?" His only answer was an inhuman snarl, and the cruel blazing of those inhuman eyes. She fell face first to the floor. "I can't keep it up!" she cried. The sound of her voice rolled along the hot steel deck. "I cant! I cant!" A double handful of tepid water was thrown in her face. "Get up!" Rat stood over her, face twisted, his body hunched. "Get up!" She stared at him, dazed. He kicked her. "Get up!" The tepid water ran off her face and far away she heard Judith calling.... She forced herself up. Rat was
the uneven terrain. "Oh, the bag!" she gasped. "I've dropped it." He chuckled again. "Have got. You scare, I catch." She didn't see the ship because of the wind in her eyes, but without warning she plummeted down and her feet jarred on the lip of the lock. "Inside. No noise, no light. Easy." But in spite of his warning she tripped in the darkness. He helped her from the floor and guided her to the hammocks. "Judith?" she asked. "Here. Beside you, trussed up so tight I can hardly breathe." "No talk!" Rat insisted. "Much hush-hush needed. Other girl
lived to remember it. Until hospitals are built on this forlorn world, humans like you who haven't been properly conditioned will have to stay right at home." "How about these men that live and work here?" "They never get here until they've been through the mill first. Adenoids, appendix', all the extra parts they can get along without." "Well," Judith said. "I've certainly learned my lesson!" Gray didn't answer, but from out of the darkness surrounding her came a sound remarkably resembling a snort. "Gray?" Judith asked fearfully. "Yes?" "Hasn't the pilot been gone an awfully long time?" Rat himself
know...?" but he had gone again. Nurse Gray found herself addressing blackness. On the point of turning, she saw him back again. "Blankets," he instructed. "Wrap in blankets. Cold—hot too. Wrap good!" And he was gone again. Gray blinked away the illusion he disappeared upwards. She ran over to the girl. "Judith, if you want to back down, now is the time. He'll be back in a moment." "No!" Judith moaned. "No!" Gray smiled in the darkness and began wrapping the blankets around her. A light tapping at the window announced the return of Rat. The nurse pushed open the
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Describe the setting of the story.
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about A City Near Centaurus by William R. Doede.
Relevant chunks:
events of the day before dropping off to sleep. The troublesome Sally. The strange dream world of Armagon. The visit to the barber shop. The removal of Brundage's body. The conversations with the townspeople. Dawes' suspicious attitude ... Then sleep came. He was flanked by marble pillars, thrusting towards a high-domed ceiling. The room stretched long and wide before him, the walls bedecked in stunning purple draperies. He whirled at the sound of footsteps, echoing stridently on the stone floor. Someone was running towards him. It was Sally, pigtails streaming out behind her, the small body wearing a flowing white
tightening of the man's shoulder muscles that his presence was known. He looked down and saw that his feet made clear-cut depressions in the soft rich soil of the field. "Continue to work," he said to the young man. "Do not be too surprised at what I am about to tell you, Rold." He paused and watched the golden man's rather stupid face intently. "I am not a Misty One," Noork said. "I killed the owner of this strange garment I wear yesterday on the mainland. I have come to rescue the girl, Tholon Sarna, of whom you spoke." Rold's
bound to develop differently." "Is environment so important? Newman tells about a pair of identical twins separated from birth, unaware of each other's existence. They met by accident when they were twenty-one. Each was a telephone repairman. Each had a wife the same age. Each had a baby son. And each had a fox terrier called 'Trixie.' That's without trying to make environments similar. But suppose you did try. Suppose you saw to it that each of them had exactly the same experiences at the same times...." For a moment it seemed to Jack that the room was dimming and
from the side of her mouth. "Don't you know nothin' ?" " Arma gon," Dawes corrected. He looked sheepishly at the stranger. "Don't expect Mister—" He cocked an eyebrow. "What's the name?" "Becker." "Don't expect Mr. Becker knows anything about Armagon. It's just a dream, you know." He smiled apologetically. "Dream? You mean this—Armagon is a place you dream about?" "Yep," Dawes said. He lifted cup to lip. "Great coffee, Ma." He leaned back with a contented sigh. "Dream about it every night. Got so used to the place, I get all confused in the daytime." Mom said: "I get
the people there know nothing of a Lincoln or that war." Jeff looked blank. "What are they doing then?" The little man spread his hands. "What are the people doing now at Sixth and Main? Certainly not the same things they were doing the day of the fire. We're talking about a dimension, not an event. Don't you grasp the difference between the two?" "Nope. To me, 1865 means the end of the Civil War. How else can you speak of a point in time except by the events that happened then?" "Well, if you go to a place in
Question:
Describe the setting of the story.
Answer:
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[
"The story is set on Alpha Centaurus II, a planet with two moons and many unknowns and dangers. There is an Earth settlement on the planet, and the archeologist, Mr. Michaelson traverses around a sandy, desert-like area under a pale blue sky come to be referred to as the dead city which was last populated half a million years ago.\nThe dead city is a complex variety of buildings, including small homes, huge ones with spires, and all varieties of square and spherical shapes. Suspension bridges connected conical towers. Desert plants grew from rooftops and sand had blown down the streets and filled the doorways. Despite not believing in the spiritual, Mr. Michaelson experiences waves of energy communicating with him from the artifacts he finds in the dead city, giving it the feel of not being deserted at all.\nThrough the discovery of an important artifact (the “clock) that is radiating heat. The two characters Maota and Mr. Michaelson also discover that they can travel into a spiritual dimension setting where they look down on the planet, or anywhere in the universe, and communicate with their thoughts.\n",
"The story takes place on Alpha Centaurus II in the ancient remains of a city heretofore unknown by humans and where there are twin moons. The half a million year old city consists of both small and large buildings, with the smaller ones presumably houses. Some of the tall buildings have spires; some are square, while others are ellipsoid or spheroid. Elegant bridges connect tall towers. The structures are well preserved, although any inscriptions that were made have long since worn away. Piles of sand fill the doorways, and desert plants grow on rooftops. Artifacts are everywhere, some buried in the sand, including bowls, statues, and even books. A clock-like object is particularly fascinating, especially after Michaelson touches it to find it warm and vibrating—meaning that it is still operational. Many of the structures and objects are made of metal which has helped preserve them for such a long time. The book that Maota throws are Michaelson has metal pages and, surprisingly, speaks when Michaelson runs his fingers along the lines of text. \n\tHumans at this time have advanced technology for travel. They have invented personalized devices in the shape of a cylinder implanted behind a person's ear. With this device, the person can think of a place he wants to travel to, and the device instantly whisks him there. \n",
"The story takes place in an old city on Alpha Centaurus II. Not much is revealed about the planet itself except for the fact that it has a small population of webfooted humanoids who are not actually natives but come from a colony from the fifth planet of the system. They are curious and many are quite intelligent, including Maota, whom Michaelson meets when he arrives in the city. White clouds float in a pale blue sky, and at night silver moonlight from the two moons illuminates the ruins. Five hundred miles from the city is a small creek where Michaelson washes his head wound. The city itself is covered in sand and desert plants after hundreds of thousands of years of disuse. However, the buildings remain intact and include a complex variety of small homes, spire-topped, square, ellipsoid, and spheroid buildings. There are also conical towers with beautiful bridges connecting them. The ruins of the city are well-preserved and include a large number of fascinating archeological artifacts including bowls, metal, a small statue of a man, ancient books (including Maota's favorite book of poetry), and a clock-like device that can transport a person to another dimension. Just outside of the city is a sandy hill, where Michaelson eventually buries Maota's body. The final setting of the story is the fourth dimension where Maota and Michaelson transfer their spirits using the clock device. This dimension is characterized by utter silence and darkness. The only presence there is awareness and memory.",
"A City Near Centaurus by Bill Doede takes place on the planet Alpha Centaurus II sometime in the future. Mr. Michaelson comes across the ruins of an ancient city and walks through the sand-covered streets to discover more. Tall spires cast shadows across the roads, while wild plants grow out of the roofs of small buildings. Two moons shine light down on Alpha Centaurus II partially lighting up the night. Soaring towers are connected by swaying bridges, and smaller buildings clearly used to be houses. Each building has a slightly different shape whether that be spherical or square. The infrastructure is built of dark metal impervious to rust and general wear. The buildings themselves are full of various artifacts: talking books, transporting clocks, and silver bowls. "
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events of the day before dropping off to sleep. The troublesome Sally. The strange dream world of Armagon. The visit to the barber shop. The removal of Brundage's body. The conversations with the townspeople. Dawes' suspicious attitude ... Then sleep came. He was flanked by marble pillars, thrusting towards a high-domed ceiling. The room stretched long and wide before him, the walls bedecked in stunning purple draperies. He whirled at the sound of footsteps, echoing stridently on the stone floor. Someone was running towards him. It was Sally, pigtails streaming out behind her, the small body wearing a flowing white
tightening of the man's shoulder muscles that his presence was known. He looked down and saw that his feet made clear-cut depressions in the soft rich soil of the field. "Continue to work," he said to the young man. "Do not be too surprised at what I am about to tell you, Rold." He paused and watched the golden man's rather stupid face intently. "I am not a Misty One," Noork said. "I killed the owner of this strange garment I wear yesterday on the mainland. I have come to rescue the girl, Tholon Sarna, of whom you spoke." Rold's
bound to develop differently." "Is environment so important? Newman tells about a pair of identical twins separated from birth, unaware of each other's existence. They met by accident when they were twenty-one. Each was a telephone repairman. Each had a wife the same age. Each had a baby son. And each had a fox terrier called 'Trixie.' That's without trying to make environments similar. But suppose you did try. Suppose you saw to it that each of them had exactly the same experiences at the same times...." For a moment it seemed to Jack that the room was dimming and
from the side of her mouth. "Don't you know nothin' ?" " Arma gon," Dawes corrected. He looked sheepishly at the stranger. "Don't expect Mister—" He cocked an eyebrow. "What's the name?" "Becker." "Don't expect Mr. Becker knows anything about Armagon. It's just a dream, you know." He smiled apologetically. "Dream? You mean this—Armagon is a place you dream about?" "Yep," Dawes said. He lifted cup to lip. "Great coffee, Ma." He leaned back with a contented sigh. "Dream about it every night. Got so used to the place, I get all confused in the daytime." Mom said: "I get
the people there know nothing of a Lincoln or that war." Jeff looked blank. "What are they doing then?" The little man spread his hands. "What are the people doing now at Sixth and Main? Certainly not the same things they were doing the day of the fire. We're talking about a dimension, not an event. Don't you grasp the difference between the two?" "Nope. To me, 1865 means the end of the Civil War. How else can you speak of a point in time except by the events that happened then?" "Well, if you go to a place in
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Describe the dynamic between Herbert and his wife
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about A BOTTLE OF Old Wine by Richard O. Lewis.
Relevant chunks:
A grim tale of a future in which everyone is desperate to escape reality, and a hero who wants to have his wine and drink it, too. A BOTTLE OF Old Wine By Richard O. Lewis Illustrated by KELLY FREAS Herbert Hyrel settled himself more comfortably in his easy chair, extended his short legs further toward the fireplace, and let his eyes travel cautiously in the general direction of his wife. She was in her chair as usual, her long legs curled up beneath her, the upper half of her face hidden in the bulk of her personalized, three-dimensional telovis.
the present company, Miss Smith." "Call me Kay." They touched glasses: "Your liquor is as exquisite as your living room, Herbert. I shall have to come here more often." "I hope you will, Kay." "Though such conduct, I'm told, is morally reprehensible on the planet Earth." "Not in this particular circle. Your hair is lovely." "Thank you.... You haven't mentioned my perfume yet. Perhaps I'm standing too far away.... There!" "It's—it's as lovely as your hair, Kay." "Um, kiss me again." "I—I never figured—I mean, I engaged a caterer to serve us dinner at 9:30." "Call him up. Make it
Pleasurable things. He remembered the girl he had met the night before, and smiled smugly. Perhaps she would be awaiting him even now. If not, there would be another one.... He settled himself deeper into the chair, glanced once more at his wife, then let his head lean comfortably back against the chair's headrest. His hand upon his thigh felt the thin mesh that cloaked his body beneath his clothing like a sheer stocking. His fingers went again to the tiny switch. Again he hesitated. Herbert Hyrel knew no more about the telporter suit he wore than he did about
hordes of colorful characters; the handsome virile hero, the compelling Helenesque heroine.... God, it was going to be great! The best thing he'd ever done! See, already there was a crowd of book lovers in front of the bookstore, staring into the window where the new Herbert Quidley was on display, trying to force its way into the jammed interior.... Cut to interior. FIRST EAGER CUSTOMER: Tell me quickly, are there any more copies of the new Herbert Quidley left? BOOK CLERK: A few. You don't know how lucky you are to get here before the first printing ran out.
eyes stray to the dim light of the artificial flames in the fireplace. His hate for her was not bounded merely by those lonely hours she had forced upon him. No, it was far more encompassing. He hated her with a deep, burning savagery that was deadly in its passion. He hated her for her money, the money she kept securely from him. He hated her for the paltry allowance she doled out to him, as if he were an irresponsible child. It was as if she were constantly reminding him in every glance and gesture, "I made a bad
Question:
Describe the dynamic between Herbert and his wife
Answer:
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[
"The relationship Herbert and his wife have seems to have an infantilizing or patronizing tone to it. His wife seems to be fairly cold towards him, at least from the way she interacts with his death in the last scene of the story, but Herbert is harboring a large amount of hate and anger. A lot of this dynamic is driven by the control of money in the household, as Herbert's wife is in charge of these decisions, and Herbert does not agree with her on how much money he should have access to. His anger increases as he works on a plan to get away from her, as he spends what little he has to maintain access to the Riverside Club, paying rent on a cabin, buying a teleporter suit, and similar expenses. He is finally pushed to make the choice to finally want to kill her when he finds he does not have the spending money to be able to buy nice drinks or private rooms for himself and the woman he meets at the club, who turns out to be his wife. ",
"Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Hyrel have a constant struggle for power within their domestic relationship. Mrs. Hyrel’s family wealth insults Herbert, seeing as he has none. When she comes to the realization that he may only be with her because of her money, she starts to hide it from him and only gives him a monthly allowance. At that moment, Mrs. Hyrel took control and took most of Herbert’s power away from him. \nIt’s clear that Hyrel wants to be the man of the relationship or the one that wears the pants. So this action made him feel weak and unimportant. This further aggravated their marriage and led to a build-up of long-term resentment. \nMrs. Hyrel practically ignores Herbert, spending her evenings watching the televois. She doesn’t want to be bothered during this time either, since it would ruin the show. It’s later revealed that she also has a teleporter suit, so she may have been in the Riverside Club in other instances, not just watching the televois. This power struggle and wealth inequity led to Herbert’s murderous fantasies and his eventual murder. \n",
"The story never shows the Hyrels communicating outside of their shadowy selves; this emphasizes their dysfunction as a couple and highlights their mutual disdain. Herbert thinks his wife hates him because she believes he married her for her money, and he lives off the allowances she gives him. In turn, Herbert feels emasculated, and blames this on her, despite the fact that he does nothing but take her money and use it to attempt to seduce women at the Riverside Club. Herbert compares the thought of killing his wife to a bottle of old wine; the longer one marvels at a nice, expensive bottle of wine, the better it tastes when one finally drinks it. In the same way, he relishes his scheme, almost becoming intoxicated by it. When Herbert reunites with the woman at the Riverside Club, he cannot stop worrying that his wife will remove her telovis and discover him, and he continuously obsesses over his plan with increasing urgency. Herbert is so blinded by his rage and insecurities, that he fails to realize the woman is actually Mrs. Hyrel in disguise. ",
"The Hyrels have an unhappy marriage. In the evenings, they escape from each other, Mrs. Hyrel to her telovis shows and he to the Riverside Club. Herbert first resented Mrs. Hyrel’s hours-long escape each night that left him lonely in the evenings, but then he gets his teleporter suit and can’t wait for her to get wrapped up in her shows so that he can escape to the club. His resentment of his wife grew into hatred. Herbert does not have money of his own; his wife has money and gives him a “paltry” allowance as if he were a child. She seems to resent him, too, because he thinks she feels like she got a bad deal in marrying him and that she was trapped into marrying him without knowing what he was really like. Herbert has been thinking of killing his wife for some time, but he doesn’t want to do it right away because thinking about it is like the anticipation of enjoying an old bottle of wine. As long as the bottle is there, he can enjoy the hope of drinking it just as he can enjoy the hope of killing his wife. Even in her altered identity as the can-can dancer at the club, Mrs. Hyrel treats Herbert as inferior. She refuses to let him take her outside until he has bought her a glass of champagne; then she makes him wait a long time while she sips it. When he finally does take her outside, she refuses to do what he wants unless he can show her he has the money for a private room and to entertain her properly. Mrs. Hyrel knows that this will frustrate him even more and probably suspected that he wanted to kill her. In any case, she has planned to kill him because she brought her gun with her. When he states that he will kill his wife to have the money to entertain the girl, Mrs. Hyrel promptly shoots him. Her plan is well-thought-out because she has a hidden back to her medicine cabinet where she hides her teleporter suit before the police come. This hidden compartment has allowed her to keep her visits to the Riverside Club from Herbert and will prevent the police from suspecting her role in Herbert’s death.\n\n"
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A grim tale of a future in which everyone is desperate to escape reality, and a hero who wants to have his wine and drink it, too. A BOTTLE OF Old Wine By Richard O. Lewis Illustrated by KELLY FREAS Herbert Hyrel settled himself more comfortably in his easy chair, extended his short legs further toward the fireplace, and let his eyes travel cautiously in the general direction of his wife. She was in her chair as usual, her long legs curled up beneath her, the upper half of her face hidden in the bulk of her personalized, three-dimensional telovis.
the present company, Miss Smith." "Call me Kay." They touched glasses: "Your liquor is as exquisite as your living room, Herbert. I shall have to come here more often." "I hope you will, Kay." "Though such conduct, I'm told, is morally reprehensible on the planet Earth." "Not in this particular circle. Your hair is lovely." "Thank you.... You haven't mentioned my perfume yet. Perhaps I'm standing too far away.... There!" "It's—it's as lovely as your hair, Kay." "Um, kiss me again." "I—I never figured—I mean, I engaged a caterer to serve us dinner at 9:30." "Call him up. Make it
Pleasurable things. He remembered the girl he had met the night before, and smiled smugly. Perhaps she would be awaiting him even now. If not, there would be another one.... He settled himself deeper into the chair, glanced once more at his wife, then let his head lean comfortably back against the chair's headrest. His hand upon his thigh felt the thin mesh that cloaked his body beneath his clothing like a sheer stocking. His fingers went again to the tiny switch. Again he hesitated. Herbert Hyrel knew no more about the telporter suit he wore than he did about
hordes of colorful characters; the handsome virile hero, the compelling Helenesque heroine.... God, it was going to be great! The best thing he'd ever done! See, already there was a crowd of book lovers in front of the bookstore, staring into the window where the new Herbert Quidley was on display, trying to force its way into the jammed interior.... Cut to interior. FIRST EAGER CUSTOMER: Tell me quickly, are there any more copies of the new Herbert Quidley left? BOOK CLERK: A few. You don't know how lucky you are to get here before the first printing ran out.
eyes stray to the dim light of the artificial flames in the fireplace. His hate for her was not bounded merely by those lonely hours she had forced upon him. No, it was far more encompassing. He hated her with a deep, burning savagery that was deadly in its passion. He hated her for her money, the money she kept securely from him. He hated her for the paltry allowance she doled out to him, as if he were an irresponsible child. It was as if she were constantly reminding him in every glance and gesture, "I made a bad
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What is the role of the lockets in the story and how do they connect to the various societies
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about The Valley by Richard Stockham.
Relevant chunks:
migrate to another planet. We feel that hope must not be destroyed. And so another expedition is being sent out. It may be that, in time, on another planet, you'll be able to take your place in our society." He paused. "Is there anything you wish to say?" "Yes, there is." "Proceed." Michael stared straight at the President. After a long moment, he raised his hand to the tiny locket at his throat. "Perhaps you remember," he said, "the lockets given to every member of the expedition the night before we left. I still have mine." He raised it. "So
Her hand went to her throat and touched the tiny locket. "These lockets were given to us so we'd have a choice between suffering or quick painless death.... We still have a choice." He touched the locket at his own throat and was very still for a long moment. "So we threaten to kill ourselves, before their eyes. What would it do to them?" He was still for a long time. "Sometimes, Mary, I think I don't know you at all." A pause. "And so now you and I are back where we started. Which'll it be, space or Earth?"
We know it's there. That's enough. We couldn't bear the sight of it." He took a step back. "And we can't bear the sight of you any longer. Go now. Quickly!" Michael and Mary did not let go of the lockets as they watched the half circle of faces move backward, staring, as though at corpses that should sink to the floor. It was night. The city had been lost beyond the dead mounds of Earth that rolled away behind them, like a thousand ancient tombs. The ground car sat still on a crumbling road. Looking up through the car's
anger and fear. Arms waved and fists pounded. Hands clasped and unclasped and clawed at collars, and there was a pell mell rushing around the President. They yelled at each other and clasped each other by the shoulders, turned away and back again, and then suddenly became very still. Now they began to step down from the raised line of desks, the President leading them, and came close to the man and woman, gathering around them in a wide half circle. Michael and Mary were holding the lockets close to their throats. The half circle of people, with the President
know what we've found," said the woman. "They sent us out. They've waited so long—." He stared into space. "It's hopeless. If we'd found another planet they could live on, they'd do the same as they've done here." He touched the tiny golden locket that hung around his neck. "Right now, I could press this and scratch myself and the whole farce would be over." "No. A thousand of us died. You've got to think of them." "We'll go back out into space," he said. "It's clean out there. I'm tired. Two thousand years of reincarnation." She spoke softly. "We've
Question:
What is the role of the lockets in the story and how do they connect to the various societies
Answer:
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[
"Michael and Mary, who have both just returned from a long expedition in a spacecraft, each keep a small golden locket around their neck. They were given these when they left on their mission, as a sort of escape hatch: if they were ever caught in a dangerous situation where they would have to die painful deaths, they could scratch themselves with the locket and they would die a quick and painless death instead of suffering. This is the first hint we see at the society's growing avoidance of painful deaths. For the people on the expedition, they were a tool to be used in case of emergency for the sake of the person wearing them. In the context of the society on Earth, however, they were a tool to negotiate the terms of how Michael and Mary would live. They considered threatening using these lockets to kill themselves, which they eventually did in a discussion with the President and his council. After they used the lockets, although they would die painless deaths, it would look very painful to the witnesses as the bodies experienced shock, so President Davis didn't want his people to see this. ",
"The lockets were given to all of the many members of the expedition into space to find a new, untainted home planet. These necklaces were outfitted with a device that would kill the wearer, presumably when held up to their throats as is demonstrated in the story, painlessly and quickly. In the 2,000 years since Michael, Mary, and the rest of the expedition left Earth, humans grew unaccustomed to violence. In fact, the sight of a man being killed by a ground car on accident sent all witnesses into a state of utter insanity. This incapacity for violence turns out to be of great use to Michael and Mary, who saw the rest of their team die horrible, bloody deaths over the course of their two-thousand-year-long journey. \nAfter the President condemns Michael and Mary to isolation due to their findings and unwillingness to return to space or lie to the public, the two threaten to kill themselves in front of his whole congregation, which would send the room into shock and panic. People begin to freak out, whispering about how crazy they are, but the President and his colleagues see the real danger in this. They don’t believe Mary and Michael will actually do it, so they step closer to them, which only causes them to bring the lockets closer to their necks. The President and his people’s unfamiliarity with violence saves Michael and Mary from isolation, as the President grants all their wishes in return for their lives. \n",
"The lockets were given to the original cohort of space explorers, including Michael and Mary, that went out on a two thousand year mission to find other planets suitable for human colonization in the Milky Way galaxy. The function of the locket is to provide a quick and painless death to the wearer should they be in a situation where they are going to have a painful death. The wearer simply presses the locket and scratches themselves with it to kill themselves. Although painless to them, their bodies appear to writhe and convulse until they go lifeless. \nMichael and Mary use the threat of killing themselves with their lockets in front of the President and the council to demand they be allowed to leave the city in a ground car with supplies instead of being put into solitary confinement for the foreseen future. They cause an uproar in the council chambers when they hold the lockets to their necks, with onlookers shocked and frightened by the thought of their own horrible fate if they witness their death. This is effective, because the death from the locket appears violent to those watching and they fear going insane if they see it.\nLockets are a method for the explorers to kill themselves, which is an interesting juxtaposition to the society remaining on Earth. Their main objective is perpetuating themselves through scar tissue regeneration technology that essentially provides them with immortality, and strict avoidance of death. \n",
"Prior to leaving for the mission to find a habitable planet for humans to relocate to, Michael and Mary are both given lockets that can be triggered to cause immediate death. The purpose is to avoid a potentially violent and painful death from whatever threat might be encountered out in unknown space. When they return to Earth 2,000 years later, Michael wants to press the locket rather than return to inform the people of their failure. Mary insists they return, however, presumably because she misses home (in reality, it is because she is pregnant). After President Davis and the council meet privately to determine the couple's fate, Mary reminds Michael that they have a bargaining chip available to them that will allow them to determine their own fate: the lockets. Because humans have not seen violent death in hundreds of years, Mary knows that the council will yield to whatever they demand in exchange for not having to witness their suicides in person. In this way, Michael and Mary negotiate their release from the city and are effectively banished outside the force walls."
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migrate to another planet. We feel that hope must not be destroyed. And so another expedition is being sent out. It may be that, in time, on another planet, you'll be able to take your place in our society." He paused. "Is there anything you wish to say?" "Yes, there is." "Proceed." Michael stared straight at the President. After a long moment, he raised his hand to the tiny locket at his throat. "Perhaps you remember," he said, "the lockets given to every member of the expedition the night before we left. I still have mine." He raised it. "So
Her hand went to her throat and touched the tiny locket. "These lockets were given to us so we'd have a choice between suffering or quick painless death.... We still have a choice." He touched the locket at his own throat and was very still for a long moment. "So we threaten to kill ourselves, before their eyes. What would it do to them?" He was still for a long time. "Sometimes, Mary, I think I don't know you at all." A pause. "And so now you and I are back where we started. Which'll it be, space or Earth?"
We know it's there. That's enough. We couldn't bear the sight of it." He took a step back. "And we can't bear the sight of you any longer. Go now. Quickly!" Michael and Mary did not let go of the lockets as they watched the half circle of faces move backward, staring, as though at corpses that should sink to the floor. It was night. The city had been lost beyond the dead mounds of Earth that rolled away behind them, like a thousand ancient tombs. The ground car sat still on a crumbling road. Looking up through the car's
anger and fear. Arms waved and fists pounded. Hands clasped and unclasped and clawed at collars, and there was a pell mell rushing around the President. They yelled at each other and clasped each other by the shoulders, turned away and back again, and then suddenly became very still. Now they began to step down from the raised line of desks, the President leading them, and came close to the man and woman, gathering around them in a wide half circle. Michael and Mary were holding the lockets close to their throats. The half circle of people, with the President
know what we've found," said the woman. "They sent us out. They've waited so long—." He stared into space. "It's hopeless. If we'd found another planet they could live on, they'd do the same as they've done here." He touched the tiny golden locket that hung around his neck. "Right now, I could press this and scratch myself and the whole farce would be over." "No. A thousand of us died. You've got to think of them." "We'll go back out into space," he said. "It's clean out there. I'm tired. Two thousand years of reincarnation." She spoke softly. "We've
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What are the alien flies, and what are their characteristics?
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about The Hanging Stranger by Philip K. Dick.
Relevant chunks:
half-turn of its body as it reached him. What was it doing? A stinger. Loyce stabbed wildly at it. It retreated, buzzing frantically. Loyce rolled and crawled toward the door. Tommy and Janet stood still as statues, faces blank. Watching without expression. Loyce stabbed again. This time the knife connected. The thing shrieked and faltered. It bounced against the wall and fluttered down. Something lapped through his mind. A wall of force, energy, an alien mind probing into him. He was suddenly paralyzed. The mind entered his own, touched against him briefly, shockingly. An utterly alien presence, settling over him—and
this is a Hymenop experiment that really paid off? The Bees did some weird and wonderful things with human guinea pigs—what if they've created the ultimate booby trap here, and primed it with conditioned myrmidons in our own form? Suppose, he thought—and derided himself for thinking it—one of those suicidal old interstellar ventures did succeed? Xavier's voice, a mellow drone from the helihopper's Ringwave-powered visicom, cut sharply into his musing. "The ship has discovered the scouter and is training an electronic beam upon it. My instruments record an electromagnetic vibration pattern of low power but rapidly varying frequency. The operation
3000, but the Bees invaded before we could colonize. And that means we'll have to rule out any resurgent colonial group down there, because Six never had a colony in the beginning." "The Bees have been gone for over a hundred years," Stryker said. "Colonists might have migrated from another Terran-occupied planet." Gibson disagreed. "We've touched at every inhabited world in this sector, Lee, and not one surviving colony has developed space travel on its own. The Hymenops had a hundred years to condition their human slaves to ignorance of everything beyond their immediate environment—the motives behind that conditioning usually
this is another Hymenop experiment in condition ecology, then we're stumped to begin with," Gibson finished. "Because we're not equipped to evaluate the psychology of alien motivation. We've got to determine first which case applies here." He waited for Farrell's expected irony, and when the navigator forestalled him by remaining grimly quiet, continued. "The obvious premise is that a Terran ship must have been built by Terrans. Question: Was it flown here, or built here?" "It couldn't have been built here," Stryker said. "Alphard Six was surveyed just before the Bees took over in 3025, and there was nothing of
escape us, but that's beside the point—and they did a thorough job of it. The colonists have had no more than a century of freedom since the Bees pulled out, and four generations simply isn't enough time for any subjugated culture to climb from slavery to interstellar flight." Stryker made a padding turn about the control room, tugging unhappily at the scanty fringe of hair the years had left him. "If they're neither Hymenops nor resurgent colonists," he said, "then there's only one choice remaining—they're aliens from a system we haven't reached yet, beyond the old sphere of Terran exploration.
Question:
What are the alien flies, and what are their characteristics?
Answer:
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[
"The alien flies have multi-lensed inhuman eyes, wings, and a stinger. They are dark, coming from another dimension. They look like giant insects in their original form. When they move, they will produce a buzzing sound. They can mimic the appearance of humans, and they can control human minds. However, their mind control ability has its limit that they can control one area at one time, starting from the highest authority and widening down the control in a circle. When they control the whole town, they move to another area to continue. Their power flaw makes them unable to control everyone that someone may be overlooked. When that is the case, they set up a trap, using people who escape from the controlled town as bait to hang them in public, to lure people who are not under control to come to them by themselves. They anticipate their failures and are smart enough to make up for their flaws.",
"The alien flies are the creatures that invaded Ed’s town and started to control everyone. They entered the town above town hall through a portal-like chasm in swarms. They were described as large bugs, with human characteristics. They could easily imitate humans, which is why it was hard at first for Ed to distinguish who was who. They are described as violent and fearless, but they weren’t omnipotent. They made mistakes when controlling people, which is what allowed Ed to initially be free of their control. ",
"The alien flies are a strange type of species that have come in hopes of controlling the entire town. The Commissioner says that he has a theory of who they are. Most of the alien flies try to take over one area at a time, starting from the highest level and working down to widen the circle. Eventually, they move to a different town once the one they are currently controlling is firmly in their grasp. This has also been happening for thousands of years. Physically, they are giant insects with wings, capable of blending in as pseudo-men. When the one that resembles Jimmy attacks Loyce, he notes that it has wings and cold in-human eyes. There is also a stinger when it turns its body. The alien flies are dedicated to carrying out their mission of controlling the entire town. They do not have any personal emotions, but they are willing to get rid of any obstacle that stands in their way. The flies are very intelligent too, capable of mimicking humans almost perfectly and using bait to draw out the escaped ones. ",
"The alien flies are some unknown creatures that came to Pikeville through a slit in the shell of the universe and occupied the town’s citizens’ minds and bodies. They have been doing this for thousands of years - Ed remembered their image was in the Bible. They are smart and can disguise themselves as humans. They also can anticipate their own mistakes and create certain mechanisms to locate people whose minds they haven’t yet invaded. For example, they hang dead bodies in the central part of a town. This image can disturb only ones who are not aware of the aliens. \n\n"
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half-turn of its body as it reached him. What was it doing? A stinger. Loyce stabbed wildly at it. It retreated, buzzing frantically. Loyce rolled and crawled toward the door. Tommy and Janet stood still as statues, faces blank. Watching without expression. Loyce stabbed again. This time the knife connected. The thing shrieked and faltered. It bounced against the wall and fluttered down. Something lapped through his mind. A wall of force, energy, an alien mind probing into him. He was suddenly paralyzed. The mind entered his own, touched against him briefly, shockingly. An utterly alien presence, settling over him—and
this is a Hymenop experiment that really paid off? The Bees did some weird and wonderful things with human guinea pigs—what if they've created the ultimate booby trap here, and primed it with conditioned myrmidons in our own form? Suppose, he thought—and derided himself for thinking it—one of those suicidal old interstellar ventures did succeed? Xavier's voice, a mellow drone from the helihopper's Ringwave-powered visicom, cut sharply into his musing. "The ship has discovered the scouter and is training an electronic beam upon it. My instruments record an electromagnetic vibration pattern of low power but rapidly varying frequency. The operation
3000, but the Bees invaded before we could colonize. And that means we'll have to rule out any resurgent colonial group down there, because Six never had a colony in the beginning." "The Bees have been gone for over a hundred years," Stryker said. "Colonists might have migrated from another Terran-occupied planet." Gibson disagreed. "We've touched at every inhabited world in this sector, Lee, and not one surviving colony has developed space travel on its own. The Hymenops had a hundred years to condition their human slaves to ignorance of everything beyond their immediate environment—the motives behind that conditioning usually
this is another Hymenop experiment in condition ecology, then we're stumped to begin with," Gibson finished. "Because we're not equipped to evaluate the psychology of alien motivation. We've got to determine first which case applies here." He waited for Farrell's expected irony, and when the navigator forestalled him by remaining grimly quiet, continued. "The obvious premise is that a Terran ship must have been built by Terrans. Question: Was it flown here, or built here?" "It couldn't have been built here," Stryker said. "Alphard Six was surveyed just before the Bees took over in 3025, and there was nothing of
escape us, but that's beside the point—and they did a thorough job of it. The colonists have had no more than a century of freedom since the Bees pulled out, and four generations simply isn't enough time for any subjugated culture to climb from slavery to interstellar flight." Stryker made a padding turn about the control room, tugging unhappily at the scanty fringe of hair the years had left him. "If they're neither Hymenops nor resurgent colonists," he said, "then there's only one choice remaining—they're aliens from a system we haven't reached yet, beyond the old sphere of Terran exploration.
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What is the significance of the dream of townspeople?
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about Dream Town by Henry Slesar.
Relevant chunks:
this," the Sheriff warned. "This is a local matter, young man. You better stay in the shop while we go up." They filed past him and the crying Mrs. Brundage. When they were out of sight, Sol pleaded with her. "What happened? How did your husband die?" "Please ..." "You must tell me! Was it something to do with Armagon? Do you dream about the place, too?" She was shocked at the question. "Of course!" "And your husband? Did he have the same dream?" Fresh tears resulted. "Can't you leave me alone?" She turned her back. "I got things to
Henry Slesar, young New York advertising executive and by now no longer a new-comer to either this magazine or to this field, describes a strange little town that you, yourself, may blunder into one of these evenings. But, if you do, beware—beware of the Knights! dream town by ... HENRY SLESAR The woman in the doorway looked so harmless. Who was to tell she had some rather startling interests? The woman in the doorway looked like Mom in the homier political cartoons. She was plump, apple-cheeked, white-haired. She wore a fussy, old-fashioned nightgown, and was busily clutching a worn house-robe
events of the day before dropping off to sleep. The troublesome Sally. The strange dream world of Armagon. The visit to the barber shop. The removal of Brundage's body. The conversations with the townspeople. Dawes' suspicious attitude ... Then sleep came. He was flanked by marble pillars, thrusting towards a high-domed ceiling. The room stretched long and wide before him, the walls bedecked in stunning purple draperies. He whirled at the sound of footsteps, echoing stridently on the stone floor. Someone was running towards him. It was Sally, pigtails streaming out behind her, the small body wearing a flowing white
the depths of the Earth. "Finally, the dreams of the ESPs, which agree overwhelmingly in the following points: A group of beings separate themselves from a godlike and telepathic race because they insist on maintaining a degree of mental privacy. They flee in great boats or ships of some sort. They are pursued on such a scale that there is no hiding place for them anywhere in the universe. In some manner they successfully camouflage their ships. Eons pass and their still-fanatical pursuers do not penetrate their secret. Then, suddenly, they are detected." Edmund waited. "Do you see what I'm
alone." Dotty blinked and looked around and smiled at them all with a wholly little-girl smile. "Oh, Mummy," she said, and it was impossible to tell whether she spoke to Frieda or Rosalind or Celeste, "I've just had the funniest dream." "No, darling," said Rosalind gently, "it's we who had the dream. We've just awakened."
Question:
What is the significance of the dream of townspeople?
Answer:
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[
"The dream of the townspeople is what makes the town unique, and what puts Sol in danger. At the beginning Sol thought that the Dawes family shared a dream, but then he learned that everyone in the town had the same dream every night together. Also, the dream is a courtroom style, where Dawes is the king and can execute people. Charlie, the fat man that helps Dawes, is one of the knights in the Armagon. At the end, Sol attends this shared dream and it is implied that he is going to be killed by Dawes and the others. ",
"The dream of the townspeople is significant because it transports all of them to Armagon. Whenever they dream, they can go to an alternate reality that is completely different from the town. It is also worth noting that people, such as Dawes or Sally, suddenly become royalty whenever they dream. The townspeople also dream of the town every night, and it is considered to be a town secret that should not be easily told to anybody else. Since Armagon is their world, the townspeople all fulfill their roles in it. Some of the faces become knights, while others are in positions of power and have control over these forces. Anything that does not happen in the daytime, such as trials or executions, are also held in Armagon which is part of the dream. It is also important to note that anything that happens in the dream, even death, can possibly happen in real life as well. ",
"The dream of Armagon connects all the townspeople. They all go there every night, every time they fall asleep. It’s another reality with marble pillars, purple draperies, and a new hierarchical system in which Dawes is the king. This place has another set of rules and is as significant for people as their daily life. They value this dream and protect it from strangers, like Sol. It seems to be interconnected with reality because Vincent, who committed a crime in Armagon and got executed, also dies in real life, though from a heart attack. It interests Sol who tries to learn more but always faces passive aggression from those who are not eager to share the secrets of Armagon. At the end, he is being surrounded by the knights of Armagon and we don’t know what’s going to happen to Sol later. ",
"The dream of the townspeople is Armagon, a palace with marble pillars supporting a high-domed ceiling. The wall is decorated with purple draperies, and the room is wide and long. Townspeople seem to be the Knights of the Realm in the palace, and the Dawes family appears to be the royal family. Every night, townspeople dream of going to this same palace, which confuses Sol Becker, an outsider who lost his car. Sol tries to find out what this dream place is throughout the story, but the townspeople do not tell him a lot. Sol learns on the first morning of his stay at the Dawes' house that there was an execution the night before, in which the executed person seems to be the owner of the barbershop, Mr. Brundage, who died of a heart attack. Sol questions around the town, where he learns little about the place. In the end, Sol also gets into the dream place, where he is about to be executed, too. The dream of the townspeople is a secret that the protagonist tries to find out throughout the story, but when he finally gets there, it seems that he may also lose the ability to live in the future."
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this," the Sheriff warned. "This is a local matter, young man. You better stay in the shop while we go up." They filed past him and the crying Mrs. Brundage. When they were out of sight, Sol pleaded with her. "What happened? How did your husband die?" "Please ..." "You must tell me! Was it something to do with Armagon? Do you dream about the place, too?" She was shocked at the question. "Of course!" "And your husband? Did he have the same dream?" Fresh tears resulted. "Can't you leave me alone?" She turned her back. "I got things to
Henry Slesar, young New York advertising executive and by now no longer a new-comer to either this magazine or to this field, describes a strange little town that you, yourself, may blunder into one of these evenings. But, if you do, beware—beware of the Knights! dream town by ... HENRY SLESAR The woman in the doorway looked so harmless. Who was to tell she had some rather startling interests? The woman in the doorway looked like Mom in the homier political cartoons. She was plump, apple-cheeked, white-haired. She wore a fussy, old-fashioned nightgown, and was busily clutching a worn house-robe
events of the day before dropping off to sleep. The troublesome Sally. The strange dream world of Armagon. The visit to the barber shop. The removal of Brundage's body. The conversations with the townspeople. Dawes' suspicious attitude ... Then sleep came. He was flanked by marble pillars, thrusting towards a high-domed ceiling. The room stretched long and wide before him, the walls bedecked in stunning purple draperies. He whirled at the sound of footsteps, echoing stridently on the stone floor. Someone was running towards him. It was Sally, pigtails streaming out behind her, the small body wearing a flowing white
the depths of the Earth. "Finally, the dreams of the ESPs, which agree overwhelmingly in the following points: A group of beings separate themselves from a godlike and telepathic race because they insist on maintaining a degree of mental privacy. They flee in great boats or ships of some sort. They are pursued on such a scale that there is no hiding place for them anywhere in the universe. In some manner they successfully camouflage their ships. Eons pass and their still-fanatical pursuers do not penetrate their secret. Then, suddenly, they are detected." Edmund waited. "Do you see what I'm
alone." Dotty blinked and looked around and smiled at them all with a wholly little-girl smile. "Oh, Mummy," she said, and it was impossible to tell whether she spoke to Frieda or Rosalind or Celeste, "I've just had the funniest dream." "No, darling," said Rosalind gently, "it's we who had the dream. We've just awakened."
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What criteria for health safety do the members of the Explorer follow?
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about Contagion by Katherine MacLean.
Relevant chunks:
It was too late a long time ago. That, of course, is why the expedition was sent out. And now you've come back to us with this terrible news." He looked around, slowly, then back to Michael. "Can you give us any hope at all?" "None." "Another expedition? To Andromeda perhaps? With you the leader?" Michael shook his head. "We're finished with expeditions, Mr. President." There were mutterings in the council, and hastily whispered consultations. Now they were watching the man and woman again. "We feel," said the President, "it would be dangerous to allow you to go out among
cleared them of the disease." "Starting with me?" Pat asked. "Starting with you," Max told him ruefully, "as soon as you step on board." "More needles?" "Yes, and a few little extras thrown in." "Rough?" "It isn't easy." A few minutes later, standing in the stalls for spacesuit decontamination, being buffeted by jets of hot disinfectant, bathed in glares of sterilizing ultraviolet radiation, June remembered that and compared Pat Mead's treatment to theirs. In the Explorer , stored carefully in sealed tanks and containers, was the ultimate, multi-purpose cureall. It was a solution of enzymes so like the key catalysts
for breaking the Law of Contact or for dereliction of duty. And there was also the possibility, which abruptly occurred to him, that the robots might well be prepared to blow his ship to hell and gone. He stopped in the center of the deck. A whole new line of thought opened up. If the robots were armed and ready ... could this be an outpost? An outpost! He turned and raced for the bridge. If he went in and landed and was lost, then the League might never know in time. If he went in and stirred up trouble....
through. Come back with man, find horrible thing happen." "But why didn't you explain?" He grinned again. "Who believe? Sick man die soon after." Gladney sat up. He had heard the conversation between the two. "You're right, Rat. No one would have believed you then, and no one will now. You've been safe enough on Mars, but the police will nab you as soon as you get out of the ship." "They can't!" cried Patti Gray. "They can't hurt him after what he's done now." The Centaurian grinned in a cynical way. "Police not get me, Gladney. Gladney's memory damn
to watching Pat Mead. She felt disloyal. Pat was only a superb animal. Max was the man she loved. Or—was he? Of course he was, she told herself angrily. They had gone colonizing together because they wanted to spend their lives together; she had never thought of marrying any other man. Yet the sense of dissatisfaction persisted, and along with it a feeling of guilt. Len Marlow, the protein tank-culture technician responsible for the mushroom steaks, had wormed his way into the group and asked Pat a question. Now he was saying, "I don't dig you, Pat. It sounds like
Question:
What criteria for health safety do the members of the Explorer follow?
Answer:
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[
"Potential pathogens are of grave concern to the members of the Explorer. To ensure their safety, they send out a hunting party of medical doctors to gather data on the diseases present on the planet Minos. The doctors wear protective gear during this trip. \n\nWhen they bring Pat back to their ship, they require him to go through tests before he is allowed onto the ship. They include needing to de-microbe him and taking specimens from him. Max takes spinal fluid samples from Pat during this process. Pat then went through a long process where he was guided by mechanical voices to go through many different stages of decontamination. \n\nWhile the group of doctors do not have to go through the same process as Pat to board the ship, they go through their own decontamination process. There is a stall for spacesuit decontamination that shoots out disinfectants and baths of ultraviolet radiation for sterilization. \n\nThe ship was also governed by interplanetary health laws. These laws demanded that ship equipment protecting against diseases had to be completely mechanical in operation and efficient. \n",
"There is a protocol developed to prevent any danger. The ship has been to various planets and faced plague, so they are very cautious. The doctors exit the ship in spacesuits to explore the planet, while common people have to stay inside. The animals are tested on diseases. There are many laboratories and tools on the ship, even hamsters for experiments. There is a cureall stored aboard - a cure from any alien illness. All the procedures are done mechanically to avoid contact. There are different rooms for conducting all the possible testings and experiments. No contact is allowed before the test results. ",
"In order to avoid any risk of contracting disease, people on The Explorer do not interact with foreign people or environments unless they are sure that there is no present disease that can be spread. Because of this, people on The Explorer have been in isolation. When the medical crew first encounters Pat, they are wearing spacesuits outside to protect themselves from the atmosphere, and before he boards the ship, they run several tests on him and make him go through several cleansing procedures. In order to find out if Pat has any diseases, they draw his blood and inject it into hamsters, running an experiment to see if there is cause for concern.",
"The criteria for safety that all members of the Explorer follow involves many tests and disinfecting. Before Pat can enter, they must first check if he carries the germs of melting sickness. Even when the doctors go on, they must stand in stalls for spacesuit decontamination. This decontamination involves being buffeted by jets of hot disinfectant and being bathed in glares of sterilizing ultraviolet radiation. The Explorer also houses the Nucleocat Cureall, a solution of enzymes that disintegrates any non-human cell. However, as an extra precaution, there are stalls that loop similar to a rabbit maze. There is an area for soap and shower, a blood test, solutions to drink, a germicidal ultraviolet bath, sonic blast shaking, germicidal mists, and immunizing solutions. After all of this, there is also a room with high temperature and extreme dryness; more fluids are also dripped into the disinfecting person’s veins during this time. These are all necessary measures to ensure absolute cleanliness and destroy any chance of anyone being a suspected carrier of infection."
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It was too late a long time ago. That, of course, is why the expedition was sent out. And now you've come back to us with this terrible news." He looked around, slowly, then back to Michael. "Can you give us any hope at all?" "None." "Another expedition? To Andromeda perhaps? With you the leader?" Michael shook his head. "We're finished with expeditions, Mr. President." There were mutterings in the council, and hastily whispered consultations. Now they were watching the man and woman again. "We feel," said the President, "it would be dangerous to allow you to go out among
cleared them of the disease." "Starting with me?" Pat asked. "Starting with you," Max told him ruefully, "as soon as you step on board." "More needles?" "Yes, and a few little extras thrown in." "Rough?" "It isn't easy." A few minutes later, standing in the stalls for spacesuit decontamination, being buffeted by jets of hot disinfectant, bathed in glares of sterilizing ultraviolet radiation, June remembered that and compared Pat Mead's treatment to theirs. In the Explorer , stored carefully in sealed tanks and containers, was the ultimate, multi-purpose cureall. It was a solution of enzymes so like the key catalysts
for breaking the Law of Contact or for dereliction of duty. And there was also the possibility, which abruptly occurred to him, that the robots might well be prepared to blow his ship to hell and gone. He stopped in the center of the deck. A whole new line of thought opened up. If the robots were armed and ready ... could this be an outpost? An outpost! He turned and raced for the bridge. If he went in and landed and was lost, then the League might never know in time. If he went in and stirred up trouble....
through. Come back with man, find horrible thing happen." "But why didn't you explain?" He grinned again. "Who believe? Sick man die soon after." Gladney sat up. He had heard the conversation between the two. "You're right, Rat. No one would have believed you then, and no one will now. You've been safe enough on Mars, but the police will nab you as soon as you get out of the ship." "They can't!" cried Patti Gray. "They can't hurt him after what he's done now." The Centaurian grinned in a cynical way. "Police not get me, Gladney. Gladney's memory damn
to watching Pat Mead. She felt disloyal. Pat was only a superb animal. Max was the man she loved. Or—was he? Of course he was, she told herself angrily. They had gone colonizing together because they wanted to spend their lives together; she had never thought of marrying any other man. Yet the sense of dissatisfaction persisted, and along with it a feeling of guilt. Len Marlow, the protein tank-culture technician responsible for the mushroom steaks, had wormed his way into the group and asked Pat a question. Now he was saying, "I don't dig you, Pat. It sounds like
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Who is Hal and what is his role in the story?
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about Time In the Round by Fritz Leiber.
Relevant chunks:
choppers?" Hal looked down beside him. "Butch! How did you manage to get in?" "I don't see any blood. Where's the bodies?" "But how did you get in—Butcher?" The Butcher replied airily: "A red-headed man talked to me and said it certainly was sad for a future dictator not to be able to enjoy scenes of carnage in his youth, so I told him I'd been inside the Time Theater and just come out to get a drink of water and go to the eliminator, but then my sprained ankle had got worse—I kind of tried to get up and
probably seen him approaching for some time. He bowed to the hooded figure and handed him a small bag. "More atavistic cubs, big and little! Hold still, Cynthia," a new voice cut in. Hal turned and saw that two cold-eyed girls had been ushered into the cubicle. One was wiping her close-cropped hair with one hand while mopping a green stain from her friend's back with the other. Hal nudged Joggy and whispered: "Butch!" But Joggy was still hypnotized by the Time Bubble. "Then how is it, Hal," he asked, "that light comes out of the bubble, if the people
a dreadful frown and jabbed himself in the hand. He squeaked with pain and whisked the tube out of sight. "A kid can't do anything any more," he announced dramatically. "Can't break anything except the breakables they give him to break on purpose. Can't get dirty except in the dirt-pen—and they graduate him from that when he's two. Can't even be bitten by an uninj—it's contraprogrammed." "Where'd you ever get so fixated on dirt?" Hal asked in a gentle voice acquired from a robot adolescer. "I've been reading a book about a kid called Huckleberry Finn," the Butcher replied airily.
go traveling in the Time Bubble and have some excitement." "They are not. I guess they just know you'd get bored and wander away from your seats and maybe disturb the adults or upset the electronics or something. But don't worry about it, Butcher. The usher will take care of you." "Shut up—I'm thinking I'm World Director," the Butcher informed them, contorting his face diabolically. Hal spoke to the uninjes, pointing to the side of the corridor. Obediently four of them lined up. But Brute was peering down the corridor toward where it merged into a deeper darkness. His short
"Or Hitler?" A red-headed adult heard and smiled and paused to watch. A lock of hair had fallen down the middle of the Butcher's forehead, and as he sat Joggy like a charger, he did bear a faint resemblance to one of the grim little egomaniacs of the Dawn Era. "Wrong millennium," Hal said. "Tamerlane then?" the Butcher pressed. "He killed cities and piled the skulls. Blood-bath stuff. Oh, yes, and Tamerlane was a Scand of the Navies." Hal looked puzzled and then quickly erased the expression. "Well, even if it is about Tamerlane, you can't see it. How about
Question:
Who is Hal and what is his role in the story?
Answer:
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[
"Hal is one of the three boys who drives the narrative of the story; he is the oldest of the three, with the most experience and knowledge. He acts as a mentor to the Butcher and Joggy, the other two boys. Joggy is five, so he is able to go to the Time Theater for the first time, but the Butcher is not yet old enough. Hal tells the Butcher that his violent impulses will pass given time and conditioning, and tries to dissuade him from trying to enter the TIme Theater for the sake of safety. He is the one that wants to go to the theater, and asks the Butcher to walk with him. He scolds the Butcher once he reveals how he snuck into the theater, and is worried about the potential danger. Throughout the time in the theater, it is Hal who explains how the different beings in the society fit together, and the technology (and theories) around the Time Bubble, though the electronic narrator in the viewing box at the theater also helps fill in some details. Throughout the story more broadly, Hal maintains a patient tone with the Butcher, as he tries to be very understanding about his youthful inclinations towards violence, admitting his past urges but pointing towards positive change towards a more calm mindset. ",
"Hal is Butch and Joggy’s older friend. He knows a lot more about the Time Bubble and pre-civilization than his younger friends do. Hal is reasonable, patient, and conditioned by the society he is a part of. He agrees with the rules that govern his existence and understands the key differences between pre-civilization and now. Hal is kind to Butch even when he rebels or tries to act like he knows better than everyone else. When Butch tells his friends that he will start wars when he serves as World Director, Hal responds by telling him that everyone thinks that at his age. Hal is confident in his knowledge of the world and society and does not get frustrated with Butch’s fantastical ideas. \n\nHal enjoys his trips to the Time Theater and it’s his suggestion that convinces Joggy and Butch to go see the Time Bubble. He thinks that the Scandinavian warriors sound interesting. He agrees that Butch should walk him and Joggy there, but he is certain that Butch will not be allowed into the theater. Hal is convinced that an usher will stop Butch from entering, and he believes that allowing someone under the age of five to enter the sacred hall could be dangerous. \n\nHal tries to answer all of Joggy’s questions about the Time Bubble, but the truth is he doesn’t understand a lot of the mechanisms behind the mysterious machine. He is a little bit embarrassed when the interpreter has to keep responding to Joggy throughout the show. Hal is truly alarmed when Butch shows up unexpectedly in the transparent cubicle. He thinks it is immoral and wrong to convince the usher that he is older than he truly is, and he worries that there will be severe consequences for his actions. When the Scandinavian warrior comes out of the Time Bubble and becomes violent, Hal immediately blames Butch for the glitch. He is a rule follower, and regardless of the fact that Butch saved the day, he remains upset and angry at him for breaking protocol in the first place. \n",
"Hal is an older boy in the story, and he likes to remind his younger friends of his age and wisdom. He is more mature and sees the reasoning behind a lot of the rules that frustrate Butch, but his constant refrain of telling Butch that he’ll feel differently when he’s older only serves to irritate the younger boy and make him want to act out even more. Hal tells Butch that it’s dangerous for under-fives to be in the Time Room, and he grows increasingly frustrated with and anxious about Butch’s behavior when he lies his way in and starts messing with the Time Bubble. \n",
"Hal is the oldest of the three friends, and he seems to understand the most about how the Time Theater functions and how the bubble works. Whereas Butch is impulsive, impatient, and wants to use violence to solve problems, Hal is more adjusted to the standards of the post-violence society. He offers wise counsel to Butch, who resists him at every turn, and he educates Joggy, who is more eager to absorb the lessons he imparts. Hal contrasts pre-civilization with the current world they live in and suggests that with age, Butch will also understand the necessity of removing violence from the equation when it comes to resolving conflict. "
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choppers?" Hal looked down beside him. "Butch! How did you manage to get in?" "I don't see any blood. Where's the bodies?" "But how did you get in—Butcher?" The Butcher replied airily: "A red-headed man talked to me and said it certainly was sad for a future dictator not to be able to enjoy scenes of carnage in his youth, so I told him I'd been inside the Time Theater and just come out to get a drink of water and go to the eliminator, but then my sprained ankle had got worse—I kind of tried to get up and
probably seen him approaching for some time. He bowed to the hooded figure and handed him a small bag. "More atavistic cubs, big and little! Hold still, Cynthia," a new voice cut in. Hal turned and saw that two cold-eyed girls had been ushered into the cubicle. One was wiping her close-cropped hair with one hand while mopping a green stain from her friend's back with the other. Hal nudged Joggy and whispered: "Butch!" But Joggy was still hypnotized by the Time Bubble. "Then how is it, Hal," he asked, "that light comes out of the bubble, if the people
a dreadful frown and jabbed himself in the hand. He squeaked with pain and whisked the tube out of sight. "A kid can't do anything any more," he announced dramatically. "Can't break anything except the breakables they give him to break on purpose. Can't get dirty except in the dirt-pen—and they graduate him from that when he's two. Can't even be bitten by an uninj—it's contraprogrammed." "Where'd you ever get so fixated on dirt?" Hal asked in a gentle voice acquired from a robot adolescer. "I've been reading a book about a kid called Huckleberry Finn," the Butcher replied airily.
go traveling in the Time Bubble and have some excitement." "They are not. I guess they just know you'd get bored and wander away from your seats and maybe disturb the adults or upset the electronics or something. But don't worry about it, Butcher. The usher will take care of you." "Shut up—I'm thinking I'm World Director," the Butcher informed them, contorting his face diabolically. Hal spoke to the uninjes, pointing to the side of the corridor. Obediently four of them lined up. But Brute was peering down the corridor toward where it merged into a deeper darkness. His short
"Or Hitler?" A red-headed adult heard and smiled and paused to watch. A lock of hair had fallen down the middle of the Butcher's forehead, and as he sat Joggy like a charger, he did bear a faint resemblance to one of the grim little egomaniacs of the Dawn Era. "Wrong millennium," Hal said. "Tamerlane then?" the Butcher pressed. "He killed cities and piled the skulls. Blood-bath stuff. Oh, yes, and Tamerlane was a Scand of the Navies." Hal looked puzzled and then quickly erased the expression. "Well, even if it is about Tamerlane, you can't see it. How about
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Who is Mom, and what are her characteristics?
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about Dream Town by Henry Slesar.
Relevant chunks:
ever see an exelution?" "No. Did you ever see a little girl with her hide tanned?" "Huh?" " Sally! " Mom again, sterner. "You get out of there, or you-know-what ..." "Okay," the girl said blithely. "I'm goin' to the palace again. If I brush my teeth. Aren't you ever gonna get up?" She skipped out of the room, and Sol hastily sat up and reached for his trousers. When he had dressed, the clothes still damp and unpleasant against his skin, he went out of the parlor and found the kitchen. Mom was busy at the stove. He said:
bound to develop differently." "Is environment so important? Newman tells about a pair of identical twins separated from birth, unaware of each other's existence. They met by accident when they were twenty-one. Each was a telephone repairman. Each had a wife the same age. Each had a baby son. And each had a fox terrier called 'Trixie.' That's without trying to make environments similar. But suppose you did try. Suppose you saw to it that each of them had exactly the same experiences at the same times...." For a moment it seemed to Jack that the room was dimming and
open, and he pulled the towel protectively around his body and glared at the little girl with the rust-red pigtails. "Huh, mister?" she said, pushing a finger against her freckled nose. "Are you?" "No," he said angrily. "I'm not naked. Will you please go away?" "Sally!" It was Mom, appearing in the doorway of the parlor. "You leave the gentleman alone." She went off again. "Yes," Sol said. "Please let me get dressed. If you don't mind." The girl didn't move. "What time is it?" "Dunno," Sally shrugged. "I like poached eggs. They're my favorite eggs in the whole world."
and Sol told his story. He was promised nothing, and told to stay in town until he was contacted again by the authorities. Mom fixed him a light lunch, the greatest feature of which was some hot biscuits she plucked out of the oven. It made him feel almost normal. He wandered around the town some more after lunch, trying to spark conversation with the residents. He learned little. At five-thirty, he returned to the Dawes house, and was promptly leaped upon by little Sally. "Hi! Hi! Hi!" she said, clutching his right leg and almost toppling him over. "We
know what I mean, of course," Kesserich pressed. "The factors that make you you, and me me." "Heredity and environment," Jack parroted like a freshman. Kesserich nodded. "Suppose—this is just speculation—that we could control heredity and environment. Then we could re-create the same individual at will." Jack felt a shiver go through him. "To get exactly the same pattern of hereditary traits. That'd be far beyond us." "What about identical twins?" Kesserich pointed out. "And then there's parthenogenesis to be considered. One might produce a duplicate of the mother without the intervention of the male." Although his voice had grown
Question:
Who is Mom, and what are her characteristics?
Answer:
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[
"Mom is the wife of Willie Dawes, and is the kind woman who received Sol when his car was robbed and he was wet from the rain. She was very kind to give him the sofa, after which she hurried up to her room to attend the Armagon execution. She seems to be a very good mom, and she enjoys cooking for her family. She is very helpful to Sol, but she also makes it clear that she isn’t going to go out of her way to help him more, like he has to sleep on the sofa and that breakfast is at 7. ",
"Mom is the first person Sol meets when he arrives at her doorstep in the rain. She is described to look like a mother from the homier political cartoons. She is plump, apple-cheeked, and white-haired. She also wears a fussy, old-fashioned nightgown, and a well-worn houserobe when she meets Sol. Mom is very kind, instantly welcoming Sol inside of the house and letting him sleep on the couch. Although she apologizes about the temporary accommodations, she is kind enough to refuse any form of payment from Sol. Mom is also a very good cook, as she is in charge of making all of the meals in the house. Despite Mom’s kind side, she is also a strict parent towards Sally. She often tells her to stop annoying their guest and tells her to brush her teeth before anything. Mom also looks out for the other townspeople too, giving Mrs. Brundage a phone call after her husband is executed. When Sol reaches Armagon, Mom is wearing regal scarlet robes and scolding Sally to give the sheriff his helmet back. ",
"Mom is the second adult in the Dawes household and Sally’s mother. She is very kind and selfless. She allows Sol, a total stranger who knocks at her door at three at night, to sleep on their sofa and gives him a towel to clean himself. She makes him breakfast in the morning and refuses his money. Mom asks Dawes to help Sol get to the sheriff. She also decides to call Mrs. Brundage after her husband Vincent gets executed to express her condolences. She is a relatively good mother who can handle Sally’s rebellious nature and also a rather generous host who feeds her entire family and Sol every day. ",
"Mom is the housewife of the Dawes family, the wife of Mr. Dawes. She is called “Ma” by Mr. Dawes. She is plump, having apple cheeks and white hair. She wears a fussy, old-fashioned nightgown when Sol Becker, an engineer who lost his car on his way to a friend’s wedding, asks for a stay. She welcomes Sol to stay in their house and lets him sleep on the sofa. She is a cheerful woman when preparing the family’s meals. She is always busy in the kitchen, and she often educates Sally, her daughter, about not doing something inappropriate. She is strict with Sally. Sometimes, she gets confused between day and night because she goes to the dream place every night. In addition, she is a sympathetic woman because she remembers to call Mrs. Brundage to comfort her after the loss of her husband. When Sol asks for another stay in the house, she agrees and insists that he does not need to pay for it."
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ever see an exelution?" "No. Did you ever see a little girl with her hide tanned?" "Huh?" " Sally! " Mom again, sterner. "You get out of there, or you-know-what ..." "Okay," the girl said blithely. "I'm goin' to the palace again. If I brush my teeth. Aren't you ever gonna get up?" She skipped out of the room, and Sol hastily sat up and reached for his trousers. When he had dressed, the clothes still damp and unpleasant against his skin, he went out of the parlor and found the kitchen. Mom was busy at the stove. He said:
bound to develop differently." "Is environment so important? Newman tells about a pair of identical twins separated from birth, unaware of each other's existence. They met by accident when they were twenty-one. Each was a telephone repairman. Each had a wife the same age. Each had a baby son. And each had a fox terrier called 'Trixie.' That's without trying to make environments similar. But suppose you did try. Suppose you saw to it that each of them had exactly the same experiences at the same times...." For a moment it seemed to Jack that the room was dimming and
open, and he pulled the towel protectively around his body and glared at the little girl with the rust-red pigtails. "Huh, mister?" she said, pushing a finger against her freckled nose. "Are you?" "No," he said angrily. "I'm not naked. Will you please go away?" "Sally!" It was Mom, appearing in the doorway of the parlor. "You leave the gentleman alone." She went off again. "Yes," Sol said. "Please let me get dressed. If you don't mind." The girl didn't move. "What time is it?" "Dunno," Sally shrugged. "I like poached eggs. They're my favorite eggs in the whole world."
and Sol told his story. He was promised nothing, and told to stay in town until he was contacted again by the authorities. Mom fixed him a light lunch, the greatest feature of which was some hot biscuits she plucked out of the oven. It made him feel almost normal. He wandered around the town some more after lunch, trying to spark conversation with the residents. He learned little. At five-thirty, he returned to the Dawes house, and was promptly leaped upon by little Sally. "Hi! Hi! Hi!" she said, clutching his right leg and almost toppling him over. "We
know what I mean, of course," Kesserich pressed. "The factors that make you you, and me me." "Heredity and environment," Jack parroted like a freshman. Kesserich nodded. "Suppose—this is just speculation—that we could control heredity and environment. Then we could re-create the same individual at will." Jack felt a shiver go through him. "To get exactly the same pattern of hereditary traits. That'd be far beyond us." "What about identical twins?" Kesserich pointed out. "And then there's parthenogenesis to be considered. One might produce a duplicate of the mother without the intervention of the male." Although his voice had grown
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What is the plot of the story?
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about The Serpent River by Don Wilcox.
Relevant chunks:
explain the phenomena of the Ghost Ship? Was it really only a product of his imagination? What of all the others who had seen it? Was it possible for many different men under many different situations to have the same exact illusion? Reason denied that. But perhaps space itself denies reason. Grimly he retraced the legend of the Ghost Ship. A chance phrase here and a story there put together all that he knew: Doomed for all eternity to wander in the empty star-lanes, the Ghost Ship haunts the Solar System that gave it birth. And this is its tragedy,
course. What is it that girls in small offices do or eat or drink or wear that girls in large offices don't do or eat or drink or wear? What do writers and doctors do differently? Or poets and dentists? What are we missing? What—" In the outer office a girl cried out. A body thumped against a desk, then a chair, then to the floor. Two girls screamed. Andy bolted up from his chair. Racing to the door, he shouted back to Bettijean, "Get a staff doctor and a chemist from the lab." It was the girl who had
forty years ago or more. Resembled one? It was one! Unquestionably, though half-invisible and like a piece of glass immersed in water, it was a rocket ship. But the instruments on the control board could not lie. The presence of any material body within a hundred thousand miles would be revealed. But the needle on the gauge did not quiver. Nothing indicated the presence of a ship. But the evidence of his eyes was incontestable. Or was it? Doubt gripped him. Did the loneliness of all these years in space twist his mind till he was imagining the appearance of
"Get somebody—maybe even the President—on all radio and TV networks. Explain frankly about the four-centers and warn against licking any stamps. Then—" He broke off as his phone rang. Answering, he listened for a moment, then hung up and said, "But before the big announcement, get somebody checking on the security clearances at whatever plant it is where they print stamps. This's a big deal. Somebody may've been planted years ago for this operation. It shouldn't be too hard. "But there's no evidence it was a plot yet. Could be pure accident—some chemical in the stickum spoiled. Do they keep
deathly ill, but nobody dying. And doctors can't identify the poison until they have a fatality for an autopsy. People stricken in every part of the country, but the water systems are pure. How does it spread?" "In food?" "How? There must be hundreds of canneries and dairies and packing plants over the country. How could they all goof at the same time—even if it was sabotage?" "On the wind?" "But who could accurately predict every wind over the entire country—even Alaska and Hawaii—without hitting Canada or Mexico? And why wouldn't everybody get it in a given area?" Bettijean's smooth
Question:
What is the plot of the story?
Answer:
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[
"Captain Linden and his lieutenant \"Split\" Campbell make up the first manned expedition from Earth to this particular planet, aiming to investigate a large silver river on its surface. The seemingly-endless silvery strip that traveled the planet's surface was unidentifiable as of yet. They see the river-like thing early on, but Campbell spots a humanoid through his telescope--this being is much like a human man, including the fact that he wore clothing. Captain Linden decides it's time for introductions, as if he senses he can trust this being, but they watch as a female and then many other people join the first man on the surface, seemingly coming out of an underground city. Linden and Campbell think their ship is out of sight, and watch a ritual that the man is performing to the setting sun. The crowd of people continues to increase, and Linden notices that the landscape is moving: trees are shifting in the ground. He and Campbell stay in the ship and observe the various types of clothing and the ritual itself, as well as the moving trees which seemed to be moving to attack the people. They are indeed warriors starting an attack, and started swinging weapons. Linden tells Campbell to start the siren on their ship to scare away the attackers, and the first man they'd seen, presumably the leader, starts towards the ship. Once they are close enough, it is obvious that the humanoids don't have eyebrows or eye lashes. Captain Linden hands the leader a medallion that plays a song, as a token of friendship. Tomboldo, the leader, starts a round of introductions through a lot of gesturing. Linden hopes to learn about the Serpent River through the people to understand its cultural significance, and these people start to ask about the siren noises. The warriors attack again and panic ensues, pushing the humans to use weapons this time. Gravgak, the guard who had been escorting the humans, is knocked down. As Linden tries to tend to him, Gravgak knocks him out with his club. Linden is unconscious for a few weeks, and Vauna, Tomboldo's daughter, spends a lot of time by the Captian's side. Linden reminds Campbell that they weren't allowed to marry anyone from this planet, but mostly in an effort to warn himself to be careful around Vauna. He learns that these people are called the Benzendellas. Tomboldo is baffled by the technology that the humans have, but Linden is not able to communicate his questions about the Serpent River. He sees Gravgak, who apologizes for the accidental injury, but from Vauna's reaction Linden is not sure if he is telling the truth. Gravgak insists on talking to Vauna in private, but Vauna's father calls them back. It is Tomboldo's thanks to the humans that gives a glimpse into the meaning of the Serpent River: he says the humans will ride with them on the rope of life, which they call Kao-Wagwattl.",
"The story relates the experience of two agents who travel to an unnamed planet for Earth-Galaxy Good Will Expeditions (EGGWE). An unmanned camera has brought pictures from the planet back to Earth, showing two features of particular interest: 1) a human-like species, the Benzendella, living there, and 2) a rope-like, silvery undulating river. Captain Linden is the commander of the mission; his lieutenant is “Split” Campbell. After traveling millions of miles to reach the planet, the men land and use their telescope to check their surroundings before alighting from the spaceship. They see the river and the human-like beings who look like human ancestors from a million years ago. As they watch, the leader of the humans seems to perform a kind of ritual, but then, Linden notices some trees moving uphill and watches in horror as warriors toss the trees aside and launch an attack on the humans using clubs or whips with stones tied to the ends. To avert a massacre, Linden orders Campbell to hit the siren, which startles the attackers so that they retreat. Linden and Campbell then approach the people and give the leader, Tomboldo, a musical medallion on a chain. Introductions are exchanged, and some of the humans make the siren sound, indicating they want to hear it again, but the attackers return. Linden throws a capsule bomb at them, making them fall back briefly, but they quickly resume their attack. Finally, Linden and Campbell throw fire at the attackers, wounding many of them, and they retreat. One of the Benzendella men who acts as a guard, Gravgak, is injured, and Linden and Campbell treat and wrap his wounds; when they finish, they use smelling salts to rouse him, and he jumps up swinging one of the clubs he has picked up. The rock on the end of it hits Linden, causing a head injury and knocking him unconscious. While he is recuperating, Tomboldo’s daughter Vauna takes care of him, and when Linden regains consciousness, he falls in love with her and has to remind himself of Clause D of the EGGWE Code that restricts marriage between agents and natives. Gravgak visits him to say that he did not intentionally hit Linden with the rock, but Linden doubts his sincerity. Gravgak then orders Vauna to speak with him in private, but her father stops them to announce that the council has decided they will move back to the other part of their world. They will travel on the rope river and want Linden and Campbell to go with them.\n",
"Captain Jim Linden and \"Split\" Campbell travel to a planet previously photographed by unmanned rovers as representatives of the EGGWE, the Earth-Galaxy Good Will Expeditions. Thier purpose is to study new planets and forge peaceful relationships with native inhabitants in order to establish trade partnerships. The Keynes-Roy cameras had captured images of humanoid natives as well as a massive, silvery \"rope\" that appeared to move along the planet's surfaces, so Linden and Campbell hope to identify the \"rope.\" They station at a safe distance from it, since they are unsure of its purpose, and, during their observations, they witness a group of native Benzendella emerge from their underground city for some kind of sunset ritual. As the group gathers around their leader--a muscular individual clothed in a cream-colored robe and red headdress--Jim and Split notice a group of trees drifting slowly over the sand towards the Benzendellas. They quickly realize the trees disguise a hostile group intending to ambush the natives. When they throw off their disguises and begin to charge, Split triggers one of the ship's sirens, and the attackers retreat back to the trees. Jim and Split walk to meet the group's leader, Tomboldo, and they offer a gift as a gesture of good will. Tomboldo has a guard, Gravgak, protect them as they make their way back to the city, and Gravgak tells them to mimic the ship's siren in order to keep the attackers at bay. However, the antagonists attack again, and Jim deploys one of his capsule bombs. Gravgak retrieves one of the attacker's clubs and runs towards them. Jim cannot decide if this is a bold move to protect the Benzendellas or a kind of warning about Jim's weapons, which would reveal Gravgak's loyalties might not be completely steadfast. When Gravgak is injured in the ensuing battle, Jim and Split revive him, and Gravgak impulsively grabs the club again and whacks Jim with it, leaving him in a state of unconsciousness. For a length of time, Jim remains in this comatose state, drifting in and out of consciousness as Split plays records of the Benzendella language and Tomboldo's daughter, Vauna, helps nurse him back to health. During this period, Jim realizes he has developed strong feelings for Vauna, and she seems to share these emotions. He tells Split to remind him of the EGGWE's Code of Conduct which bars adherents from marrying natives on planets they explore. When he awakens, Gravgak apologizes although Jim suspects the apology is insincere, and that he is either jealous of his relationship to Vauna or he is, in fact, a traitor to the Benzendellas. Tomboldo announces that because of the threat to their people, they will use the silvery \"rope of life\" called Kao-Wagwattl to find another spot to live on the planet and bring Jim and Split with them.",
"Captain Linden and his awkward and studious lieutenant “Split” Campbell arrive as the first human expedition on a strange planet. They are members of the Earth-Galaxy Good Will Expeditions (EGGWE) and Split followed their rules dutifully. Thanks to photographs, they are aware that this planet is inhabited by human-like creatures and that there is a large, serpent-like thing running through it. They land on the planet and peer through the telescope. Soon, a man and a woman rise up from the earth and stand on top of the flat, empty rock to watch the sunset. They are joined by more and more people, around 40 eventually. Split and Linden watch in awe as the leader, a man in robes and a headdress, performs some sort of ritual. Linden notices that the trees are moving towards them, nothing too unusual. He’d seen sponge-trees before on other planets. However, these trees were being used as a cover for an attack. A horde of naked warriors rushes out with clubs and circles the ceremony. Linden orders Split to hit #16, and a siren wails out from their spaceship. It shakes the warriors to their core, and they retreat. Split and Linden gather up their supplies and exit the ship. The leader, having noticed their ship during the wailing, makes his way towards them. With 10-minutes left on the wailing, Linden believes they should be safe, but they carry small bombs (specifically special-purpose capsule bombs) with them as well. \nAs they get closer, Split notices how human these creatures look, aside from the lack of eyebrows and eyelashes. Linden offers their leader a gift, a singing necklace in the shape of a coin that plays “Trail of Stars” when pressed. The leader introduces himself as Tomboldo, and each member follows. Gravgak is introduced, a large, muscular alien covered in green and black painted diamonds, and he is tasked with protecting Linden and Split. Tomboldo invites them underground, where they can speak safely. They agree, needing to know more about the Serpent River. \nThey start wailing, just like the siren, in the hopes that it would keep the attackers at bay. However, the sponge-trees started moving again and danger struck. Linden and Split threw their bombs at the warriors and took them down, but not quick enough. Gravgak was injured and lay on the ground. Split and Linden bandaged him, and when he woke up, he “accidentally” hit Linden over the head with his club. \nLinden is taken care of by Vauna, Tomboldo’s daughter, and her assistant, Omosla. He was very injured, even needing surgery performed by Split. Eventually, his health is restored and he’s caught feelings for Vauna, despite Section Four Clause D of the conduct of EGGWE. Vauna and Gravgak are potentially in a relationship, but Tomboldo does not approve. The Benzendella are sleep-singers and their song echoes in the night. Tomboldo invites Linden and Split to accompany his people on a journey to safety aboard the Kao-Wagwattl, or the Serpent River. "
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explain the phenomena of the Ghost Ship? Was it really only a product of his imagination? What of all the others who had seen it? Was it possible for many different men under many different situations to have the same exact illusion? Reason denied that. But perhaps space itself denies reason. Grimly he retraced the legend of the Ghost Ship. A chance phrase here and a story there put together all that he knew: Doomed for all eternity to wander in the empty star-lanes, the Ghost Ship haunts the Solar System that gave it birth. And this is its tragedy,
course. What is it that girls in small offices do or eat or drink or wear that girls in large offices don't do or eat or drink or wear? What do writers and doctors do differently? Or poets and dentists? What are we missing? What—" In the outer office a girl cried out. A body thumped against a desk, then a chair, then to the floor. Two girls screamed. Andy bolted up from his chair. Racing to the door, he shouted back to Bettijean, "Get a staff doctor and a chemist from the lab." It was the girl who had
forty years ago or more. Resembled one? It was one! Unquestionably, though half-invisible and like a piece of glass immersed in water, it was a rocket ship. But the instruments on the control board could not lie. The presence of any material body within a hundred thousand miles would be revealed. But the needle on the gauge did not quiver. Nothing indicated the presence of a ship. But the evidence of his eyes was incontestable. Or was it? Doubt gripped him. Did the loneliness of all these years in space twist his mind till he was imagining the appearance of
"Get somebody—maybe even the President—on all radio and TV networks. Explain frankly about the four-centers and warn against licking any stamps. Then—" He broke off as his phone rang. Answering, he listened for a moment, then hung up and said, "But before the big announcement, get somebody checking on the security clearances at whatever plant it is where they print stamps. This's a big deal. Somebody may've been planted years ago for this operation. It shouldn't be too hard. "But there's no evidence it was a plot yet. Could be pure accident—some chemical in the stickum spoiled. Do they keep
deathly ill, but nobody dying. And doctors can't identify the poison until they have a fatality for an autopsy. People stricken in every part of the country, but the water systems are pure. How does it spread?" "In food?" "How? There must be hundreds of canneries and dairies and packing plants over the country. How could they all goof at the same time—even if it was sabotage?" "On the wind?" "But who could accurately predict every wind over the entire country—even Alaska and Hawaii—without hitting Canada or Mexico? And why wouldn't everybody get it in a given area?" Bettijean's smooth
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What leads Escher and MacDonald’s meeting in the story?
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about The Girls From Earth by Frank M. Robinson.
Relevant chunks:
going to be and why it was being thrown in their laps. MacDonald made himself comfortable and sat there for a few minutes, just looking grim and not saying anything. Escher knew the psychology by heart. A short preliminary silence is always more effective in browbeating subordinates than an initial furious bluster. He lit a cigarette and tried to outwait MacDonald. It wasn't easy—MacDonald had great staying powers, which was probably why he was the head of the department. Escher gave in first. "Okay, Mac, what's the trouble? What do we have tossed in our laps now?" "You know the
fire. He reached up and wiped his sweaty face with a muddy hand and brushed aside a straggly lock of tangled hair. It wouldn't hurt to try to look his best. The twinkling fire came nearer. II "A Mr. Macdonald to see you, Mr. Escher." Claude Escher flipped the intercom switch. "Please send him right in." That was entirely superfluous, he thought, because MacDonald would come in whether Escher wanted him to or not. The door opened and shut with a slightly harder bang than usual and Escher mentally braced himself. He had a good hunch what the problem was
Escher said quietly. "And pulling yourself up by your boot-straps. But I get the point. Nevertheless, women just don't want to colonize. And who can blame them? Why should they give up living in a luxury civilization, with as many modern conveniences as this one, to go homesteading on some wild, unexplored planet where they have to work their fingers to the bone and play footsie with wild animals and savages who would just as soon skin them alive as not?" "What do you advise I do, then?" MacDonald demanded. "Go back to the Board and tell them the problem
MacDonald stopped at the door. "There's another reason why they want it worked out. The number of men applying to the Colonization Board for emigration to the colony planets is falling off." "How come?" MacDonald smiled. "On the basis of statistics alone, would you want to emigrate from a planet where the women outnumber the men five to three?" When MacDonald had gone, Escher settled back in his chair and idly tapped his fingers on the desk-top. It was lucky that the Colonization Board worked on two levels. One was the well-publicized, idealistic level where nothing was too good and
You know why they are now?" Escher shook his head blankly. "Most of the girls in the past who didn't catch a husband," MacDonald continued, "grew up to be the type of old maid who's dedicated to improving the morals and what-not of the rest of the population. We've got more puritanical societies now than we ever had, and we have more silly little laws on the books as a result. You can be thrown in the pokey for things like violating a woman's privacy—whatever that means—and she's the one who decides whether what you say or do is a
Question:
What leads Escher and MacDonald’s meeting in the story?
Answer:
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[
"They are meeting because currently, there are not as many females on the colonized planets. And this is a huge problem. From the beginning of the colonization, there were more adventuresome males than females, thus they headed for the new world but most of the females stayed behind. The disproportional rate in the genders that gone to colonies lead to five females for every three males on Earth, while the colonies have the opposite. Hence, those girls needs to be shipped from their original planet, in this case the Earth, to colony planets for those males there. However, not many girls are applying to go. Another problem, states MacDonald, is the number of men applying for emigration to colonized planets have been dropping. MacDonald considers this reasonable since it seems illogical for a male to move away from a place that has more females than males. Escher then disregards the qualification for colonization and decides to focus on making the people that don’t want to colonize to colonize, whether it is through convincing or forcing. ",
"MacDonald and Escher meet because the Colonization Board has given MacDonald a blank check to get Escher to fix the gender ratio problem. The Colonization Board is worried about the effects that the gender ratio is having on Earth and the great psychological implications that it presents. They are concerned because it is also becoming more difficult to convince men to colonize planets because they do not want to leave Earth where they are easily favored by women due to their rarity. They have a greater advantage on Earth with their pick of women who cannot be easy picky with their choices. ",
"Escher and MacDonald meet to discuss the problems on Earth and how to encourage more people to immigrate to the colonies. They go over the concerning ratio between the two genders on Earth as a result of the colonization problem. Many of the men were initially eager to go into the stars, but the women did not follow as quickly. Many of the women are husbandless too, and men are refusing to emigrate to the colonies because there are so many women on Earth. Furthermore, the women who have grown husbandless have made the societies more puritanical than ever. The Colonization Board is looking for a solution to this problem, which leads MacDonald and Escher to meet. ",
"Escher and MacDonald meet to discuss how to get women to come to the newly colonised planets. When the planets were first colonised, more men than women went, as they had more sense of adventure, and women didn't want to leave the luxury of Earth to go live on a makeshift farm on a muddy planet. The men on these colonised planets need wives however, and they have been given the task of finding a way to get these women on Earth over to these new planets. They try to think of a solution, and come up with one that is in a very much legal, and moral grey area. They decide to give every woman who commits a petty crime a very serious ultimatum. They can either spend ten years in jail and pay a fine of ten thousand dollars, or they can go to these colonises and get a five hundred dollar bonus. "
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going to be and why it was being thrown in their laps. MacDonald made himself comfortable and sat there for a few minutes, just looking grim and not saying anything. Escher knew the psychology by heart. A short preliminary silence is always more effective in browbeating subordinates than an initial furious bluster. He lit a cigarette and tried to outwait MacDonald. It wasn't easy—MacDonald had great staying powers, which was probably why he was the head of the department. Escher gave in first. "Okay, Mac, what's the trouble? What do we have tossed in our laps now?" "You know the
fire. He reached up and wiped his sweaty face with a muddy hand and brushed aside a straggly lock of tangled hair. It wouldn't hurt to try to look his best. The twinkling fire came nearer. II "A Mr. Macdonald to see you, Mr. Escher." Claude Escher flipped the intercom switch. "Please send him right in." That was entirely superfluous, he thought, because MacDonald would come in whether Escher wanted him to or not. The door opened and shut with a slightly harder bang than usual and Escher mentally braced himself. He had a good hunch what the problem was
Escher said quietly. "And pulling yourself up by your boot-straps. But I get the point. Nevertheless, women just don't want to colonize. And who can blame them? Why should they give up living in a luxury civilization, with as many modern conveniences as this one, to go homesteading on some wild, unexplored planet where they have to work their fingers to the bone and play footsie with wild animals and savages who would just as soon skin them alive as not?" "What do you advise I do, then?" MacDonald demanded. "Go back to the Board and tell them the problem
MacDonald stopped at the door. "There's another reason why they want it worked out. The number of men applying to the Colonization Board for emigration to the colony planets is falling off." "How come?" MacDonald smiled. "On the basis of statistics alone, would you want to emigrate from a planet where the women outnumber the men five to three?" When MacDonald had gone, Escher settled back in his chair and idly tapped his fingers on the desk-top. It was lucky that the Colonization Board worked on two levels. One was the well-publicized, idealistic level where nothing was too good and
You know why they are now?" Escher shook his head blankly. "Most of the girls in the past who didn't catch a husband," MacDonald continued, "grew up to be the type of old maid who's dedicated to improving the morals and what-not of the rest of the population. We've got more puritanical societies now than we ever had, and we have more silly little laws on the books as a result. You can be thrown in the pokey for things like violating a woman's privacy—whatever that means—and she's the one who decides whether what you say or do is a
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What is the plot of the story?
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about Trouble on Tycho by Nelson S. Bond.
Relevant chunks:
of futile sons? What can I do to save myself from dying eight days from now? Is there escape? His eyes widened, another image came to focus. Beyond this valley of cliffs, on a low mountain lay a perfect, unscarred metal seed. A metal ship, not rusted or touched by the avalanches. The ship was deserted, whole, intact. It was the only ship of all these that had crashed that was still a unit, still usable. But it was so far away. There was no one in it to help. This ship, then, on the far mountain, was the destiny
What is POSAT? By PHYLLIS STERLING SMITH Illustrated by ED ALEXANDER [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Of course coming events cast their shadows before, but this shadow was 400 years long! The following advertisement appeared in the July 1953 issue of several magazines: MASTERY OF ALL KNOWLEDGE CAN BE YOURS! What is the secret source of those profound principles that can solve the problems of life? Send for our FREE booklet of explanation. Do not be a
mission that huge and depressing in eight short, vanishing days? How had his people gotten into such a condition? As if at a button pressed, he saw an image. Metal seeds, blown across space from a distant green world, fighting with long flames, crashing on this bleak planet. From their shattered hulls tumble men and women. When? Long ago. Ten thousand days. The crash victims hid in the cliffs from the sun. Fire, ice and floods washed away the wreckage of the huge metal seeds. The victims were shaped and beaten like iron upon a forge. Solar radiations drenched them.
10:30." The following evening found Quidley on tenter-hooks. The snoll-doper mystery had acquired a new tang. He could hardly wait till the next message transfer took place. He decided to spend the evening plotting the epic novel which he intended to write someday. He set to work immediately. He plotted mentally, of course—notes were for the hacks and the other commercial non-geniuses who infested the modern literary world. Closing his eyes, he saw the whole vivid panorama of epic action and grand adventure flowing like a mighty and majestic river before his literary vision: the authentic and awe-inspiring background; the
the corner he halted. The street lights had not yet come on. The street was dim. Everything was vague. He looked around—and froze. From the telephone pole in front of the police station, something large and shapeless hung. It moved a little with the wind. What the hell was it? Mason approached it warily. He wanted to get home. He was tired and hungry. He thought of his wife, his kids, a hot meal on the dinner table. But there was something about the dark bundle, something ominous and ugly. The light was bad; he couldn't tell what it was.
Question:
What is the plot of the story?
Answer:
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[
"Isobar Jones’ first call of the day was from Dome Commander Colonel Eagon telling him to deliver his weather reports to Riley Sparks, the Terra contact, ASAP. He works diligently but is soon called again, this time by Eagon’s niece who wants to know about the weather in a certain sector. Shyly, he answers then quickly finished his work. Sparks calls him and asks him to bring his reports to him, as well as informing him that Roberts and Browns were sent Outside for repair work. Sparks makes fun of Isobar’s bagpipes. \nIn Sparks’ office, Isobar delivers his work then waits for him to make the call. Once he’s delivered the report, Sparks asks the Earthman to turn his microphone around. As he does so, the video changes from his face to that of Earth, beautiful trees, and green grass. Isobar is grateful to Sparks and tells him so. They talk about Isobar’s homesickness until Colonel Eagon walks in to hear them discussing the Outisde. He quickly shuts it down and informs Isobar that it is now forbidden for him to play his bagpipe, due to the horrendous noise. Beyond frustrated, Isobar runs back to his rooms, grabs his bagpipes, and sneaks his way Outside by tricking the patrolman. Once he’s breathing in the thin air, he calms down and makes his way two miles out from the gate. Suddenly, he hears the sound of a gun and is brought back to reality. Roberts and Brown rush into view, both injured but grateful to see him, thinking he answered their distress call. However, he didn’t bring an armored tank with him, only a pair of bagpipes. A dozen Granniebacks run behind them, so Isobar helps Roberts and Brown climb a tree to escape. \nThe Grannies are unable to climb trees due to their significant size, but they can tear it down. As they pull and heave on the trunk, Isobar has the idea to play his bagpipes so the Dome will hear it and come looking for them. Roberts thinks it’s a good idea, so he begins to play, and slowly the Grannies all relax and lay down on the ground. They’re all amazed, but when Isobar stops playing, one of the Grannies starts to move again. He plays his entire repertoire and more before the armored tank arrives. The men from the dome reveal that the Grannies are dead, and the sound of the bagpipes must be what killed them. Isobar saved the team. \n",
"Horatio \"Isobar\" Jones lives and works in the Experimental Dome at Lunar III, a frontier outpost functioning as a rocket refueling station, teleradio transmission point, and meteorological base on Luna, Earth's moon. As a meteorologist forecasting weather for Earth, Isobar owes daily weather reports to Dome Commander Colonel Eagan, whose niece he also advises on forecasts for her personal travels. Isobar receives a call from his associate \"Sparks\" Riley, who manages communications with Earth in the Dome's transmission turret. Isobar tells \"Sparks\" he is about to bring him the report, and \"Sparks\" implores him to leave behind his bagpipe, the only item that brings Isobar any joy in the Dome. He also informs Isobar that the maintenance men Roberts and Brown have gone Outside to make foundation repairs to the Dome. Isobar gets jealous when he hears this, and when \"Sparks\" makes his call to Earth, Isobar asks him to request the Earth radioman to twist his mike so he can get a glimpse of Earth's nature that he misses so much. When Commander Eagan enters the room, he informs Isobar that he must stop playing his bagpipe, as the sounds travel through the air-conditioning system and disturb the other workers. Indignant, Isobar says he will go Outside the Dome, which is forbidden due to the existence of the Granitebacks, called \"Grannies\"--a fast-moving native species with impenetrable, protective carapaces known to kill humans. Eagan doubles down on his commands, and an angry Isobar returns to his quarters. In his absence, \"Sparks\" converses with Dr. Loesch, who diagnoses Isobar with \"weltschmertz\"--a deep world-weariness that makes the sufferer resort to radical acts in order to feel happiness. At the same time, Isobar takes his bagpipes, tricks the Junior Patrolman attending to the impervite gates, and goes outside to feel the sunlight on his face, breathe fresh air, and play his bagpipes in peace. Outside, Isobar walks several miles away from the entrance to the Dome, where he stumbles upon Roberts and Brown, who are injured and running away from a hostile group of Grannies. Because no weapons can pierce the thick carapaces of the Grannies, the men scurry up a nearby tree adjacent to \"Sparks'\" transmission turret. When the Grannies begin attacking the tree, the men believe they will die; however, Isobar decides to play his bagpipes, hoping the music will alert \"Sparks\" to their dilemma by way of the air-conditioning vent. As Isobar plays, the men notice the Grannies seem to be entranced by the music. Isobar continues to play until help arrives, and they all realize the music has actually killed the Grannies.",
"Horatio Jones, known as Isobar, is ready to report the weather to the Dome Commander, Colonel Eagen. Isobar is stationed on the moon at Lunar III. His job involves reporting the weather forecasts for Earth. When he signed up to be part of the Frontier Service, he expected an exciting adventure, but his life for the last six months has been boring. Isobar especially hates the stale air that he must breathe every day. \n\nWhen Isobar’s coworker Riley makes contact with Earth’s radioman, Isobar hangs around and begs him to ask the operator for a glimpse of Earth. He obliges. The grass, birds, and flowers make Isobar even more homesick. Riley says that there’s plenty of foliage to look at outside on the moon, but Isobar complains that he isn’t allowed to venture Outside. It’s too dangerous to leave the station because the Granitebacks, also known as Grannies, are ready to attack at any moment. In fact, Brown and Roberts are currently risking their lives to make repairs to the building. The Grannies are creatures that appear to be made of rock. They are not very intelligent, but they have exoskeletons harder than diamonds, and their speed allows them to take down humans in a matter of seconds.\n\nIsobar’s only pleasure is playing his bagpipe, and he has been informed that all instruments are banned. Isobar offers to go Outside to play his bagpipes, but he’s reminded that no one is allowed to leave the station unless it’s absolutely necessary.\n\nRiley sees Isobar is angry,, and he gets a kick out of it. On the other hand, Dr. Loesch, an older physicist, feels sorry for Isobar. He argues that Isobar is suffering from weltschmertz, or weariness of the world. Some men with the condition commit suicide while others rebel in unforeseen ways. He’s right because Isobar is lying to the guard so that he can go Outside and play his bagpipes.\n\nIsobar feels the warm air, and he is instantly happy. A short time later, he hears a pistol go off, and he sees Roberts and Brown. They believe he has received their calls for help, but that isn’t the case. The men are being chased by a dozen Grannies, and Isobar instructs them to climb up a tree. The group of Grannies begin to hurl their bodies at the tree like a battering ram. The three men believe they are about to die. Isobar decides to play his bagpipes to get his colleagues’ attention. As soon as the music begins, the Grannies stop attacking. Although the men believe the Grannies are deaf, they appear to be laying down on the ground, unmoving, to listen. Eventually, an armored tank comes to rescue the men, and Isobar passes out from playing the pipes so fervently. The Grannies, it turns out, were killed by the music\n",
"Horatio Jones (also called Isobar or Jonesy) is a meteorological forecaster at the Experimental Dome on Luna stationed within a hemispheric dome called Lunar III. He had spent six months there and would not get to go home for at least another six. It was a desolate place that only served as a rocket refueling station, transmission center, and meteorological base.\nIsobar is crunching the data to write a new weather report to be delivered to his colleagues Sparks and Riley to transmit to the station on Earth. After delivering the report, he lingers in the transmission tower, desperately wanting to get a peek at Earth during the video transmission of his work to Earth. The receiving person on Earth complies and turns the video feed around the room so that they get a view out of the window to the outdoors on Earth with green grass and people enjoying the day. \nIsobar reveals he longs to experience the flowers and trees again to his colleagues. There is a place that this can be done on Luna, in another adjacent hemispheric dome called “Outside” that contains a lush valley, but this is strictly forbidden other than absolute necessities for things like repairs due to extremely dangerous beasts called Granitebacks (Grannies). Dome Commander Eagan overhears Isobar’s admissions, becoming serious about how under no circumstances is he to go Outside or to play the bagpipes because the sound transmits to everyone through the air conditioning system. Seeing an opportunity for himself, Horatio suggests he go Outside to play his beloved bagpipes, citing that two of his colleagues (Brown and Roberts) are also Outside conducting orders. The Commander is steadfast in his decision and strictly forbids Isobar from going outside.\nHoratio returns to his room and immediately takes the bagpipes and goes Outside by convincing the patrol guard there were orders for him to take his post while he reports to general headquarters. He is enthralled by the lush life in the hemisphere, and wanders a great distance from the gates until he is underneath of Sparks’ radio turret and hears the loud firing of a Haemholtz ray pistol. Brown and Roberts are being attacked by a group of Grannies, and have radioed the Dome for help with no response. Isobar is helpless to assist other than suggesting they all climb a tree. To their luck, the Grannies can’t climb, but they start ramming the tree until it is obvious that they will all die up there soon once they knock it over and devour them. \nIsobar starts playing the bagpipes to alert the attention of Sparks in the tower above them. He is successful in getting the attention of Sparks who comes with a tank to rescue them, but even more amazingly the bagpipe music has killed all the of the Grannies at the base of the tree. Isobar saves the day with the bagpipe music everyone in the Dome hates.\n"
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of futile sons? What can I do to save myself from dying eight days from now? Is there escape? His eyes widened, another image came to focus. Beyond this valley of cliffs, on a low mountain lay a perfect, unscarred metal seed. A metal ship, not rusted or touched by the avalanches. The ship was deserted, whole, intact. It was the only ship of all these that had crashed that was still a unit, still usable. But it was so far away. There was no one in it to help. This ship, then, on the far mountain, was the destiny
What is POSAT? By PHYLLIS STERLING SMITH Illustrated by ED ALEXANDER [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Of course coming events cast their shadows before, but this shadow was 400 years long! The following advertisement appeared in the July 1953 issue of several magazines: MASTERY OF ALL KNOWLEDGE CAN BE YOURS! What is the secret source of those profound principles that can solve the problems of life? Send for our FREE booklet of explanation. Do not be a
mission that huge and depressing in eight short, vanishing days? How had his people gotten into such a condition? As if at a button pressed, he saw an image. Metal seeds, blown across space from a distant green world, fighting with long flames, crashing on this bleak planet. From their shattered hulls tumble men and women. When? Long ago. Ten thousand days. The crash victims hid in the cliffs from the sun. Fire, ice and floods washed away the wreckage of the huge metal seeds. The victims were shaped and beaten like iron upon a forge. Solar radiations drenched them.
10:30." The following evening found Quidley on tenter-hooks. The snoll-doper mystery had acquired a new tang. He could hardly wait till the next message transfer took place. He decided to spend the evening plotting the epic novel which he intended to write someday. He set to work immediately. He plotted mentally, of course—notes were for the hacks and the other commercial non-geniuses who infested the modern literary world. Closing his eyes, he saw the whole vivid panorama of epic action and grand adventure flowing like a mighty and majestic river before his literary vision: the authentic and awe-inspiring background; the
the corner he halted. The street lights had not yet come on. The street was dim. Everything was vague. He looked around—and froze. From the telephone pole in front of the police station, something large and shapeless hung. It moved a little with the wind. What the hell was it? Mason approached it warily. He wanted to get home. He was tired and hungry. He thought of his wife, his kids, a hot meal on the dinner table. But there was something about the dark bundle, something ominous and ugly. The light was bad; he couldn't tell what it was.
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What is the plot of the story?
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about Jack of No Trades by Evelyn E. Smith.
Relevant chunks:
explain the phenomena of the Ghost Ship? Was it really only a product of his imagination? What of all the others who had seen it? Was it possible for many different men under many different situations to have the same exact illusion? Reason denied that. But perhaps space itself denies reason. Grimly he retraced the legend of the Ghost Ship. A chance phrase here and a story there put together all that he knew: Doomed for all eternity to wander in the empty star-lanes, the Ghost Ship haunts the Solar System that gave it birth. And this is its tragedy,
course. What is it that girls in small offices do or eat or drink or wear that girls in large offices don't do or eat or drink or wear? What do writers and doctors do differently? Or poets and dentists? What are we missing? What—" In the outer office a girl cried out. A body thumped against a desk, then a chair, then to the floor. Two girls screamed. Andy bolted up from his chair. Racing to the door, he shouted back to Bettijean, "Get a staff doctor and a chemist from the lab." It was the girl who had
forty years ago or more. Resembled one? It was one! Unquestionably, though half-invisible and like a piece of glass immersed in water, it was a rocket ship. But the instruments on the control board could not lie. The presence of any material body within a hundred thousand miles would be revealed. But the needle on the gauge did not quiver. Nothing indicated the presence of a ship. But the evidence of his eyes was incontestable. Or was it? Doubt gripped him. Did the loneliness of all these years in space twist his mind till he was imagining the appearance of
"Get somebody—maybe even the President—on all radio and TV networks. Explain frankly about the four-centers and warn against licking any stamps. Then—" He broke off as his phone rang. Answering, he listened for a moment, then hung up and said, "But before the big announcement, get somebody checking on the security clearances at whatever plant it is where they print stamps. This's a big deal. Somebody may've been planted years ago for this operation. It shouldn't be too hard. "But there's no evidence it was a plot yet. Could be pure accident—some chemical in the stickum spoiled. Do they keep
deathly ill, but nobody dying. And doctors can't identify the poison until they have a fatality for an autopsy. People stricken in every part of the country, but the water systems are pure. How does it spread?" "In food?" "How? There must be hundreds of canneries and dairies and packing plants over the country. How could they all goof at the same time—even if it was sabotage?" "On the wind?" "But who could accurately predict every wind over the entire country—even Alaska and Hawaii—without hitting Canada or Mexico? And why wouldn't everybody get it in a given area?" Bettijean's smooth
Question:
What is the plot of the story?
Answer:
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[
"This story takes place in the year 2102 and centers around a family with powers, including telekenisis and teleportation. The narrator is Kevin, one of the sons: he is the only person in the family without powers, a \"psi-deficient\", so he stays at home to take care of the house. The story starts at the breakfast table, where the father teleports in, the mother probes the others' thoughts, and there is grumbling about the goings-on in the household. Timothy, the youngest brother, senses turmoil in the family but is also the most hopeful--he figures that Kevin has a gift they just haven't discovered yet, which is encouraging to Kevin. After everyone else in the family leaves for their jobs, Kevin is left to think about his situation, so he goes for a long walk. Reading is his only other real source of entertainment; he doesn't have many friends because nobody wanted to play sports with someone without telepathic abilities. He couldn't explore space because other planets weren't habitable, so he wondered what would make him stand out. The reader learns that the psi powers were latent in humans and developed with exposure to nuclear energy. When he gets home from his walk, Kevin's entire family is there, processing some news. There are two inhabited planets in Alpha Centauri, and the aliens there might be preparing for war. Kevin partly hoped there would be war for a change of pace, and his mom figured people should start learning first-aid, including Kevin. He had a benefit over his sister because he couldn't sense others' pain in the same way. He met a girl named Lucy in his first-aid class who he liked, and she was a \"low-grade telesensitive\" so he didn't have to worry about his thoughts being read. Once the aliens attacked, things got hard as Kevin had to face the injured people bought to his care. This was especially shocking because injury was not common in his world. This was where Kevin finally found his power: touching the injured people healed them almost instantly. It turned out he was the only human with this power, which was invaluable -- a hospital was even built just for Kevin to work in, where Lucy became his assistant. All at once, he became the most important human on the planet, but the humans had to hide this from their alien adversaries. Lucy was jealous of Kevin but also worried about what would happen to Kevin when the war ended, which it eventually did four months later. The story ends with Kevin returning home after the Vice President informed him that his services were no longer needed. ",
"Kevin Faraday is psi-deficient in a family of five with special psi powers living in a world largely free of disease and conflict. His father is telepathic and uses this ability to help him get to long-distance appointments as a traveling salesman. His middle brother, Danny, has the power of telekinesis and works as a junior partner in a moving company. Kevin's sister, Sylvia, can sense emotions in people, so she is able to tell when he purposefully intensifies his anger to make her feel uncomfortable. The youngest of the family is Timothy, who works as a weather forecaster thanks to his powerful gift of prognostication. Kevin's mother is a psychiatrist with telepathic powers that she uses to read his mind. In fact, most people in the world have some kind of telepathic powers--they can read the minds of others unprotected by mind shields. While the rest of the family treats him awkwardly and goes off to their respective jobs every day, Kevin stays at home to maintain the house. However, even this task makes him feel largely useless because most of the chores can be completed by household machines. Therefore, Kevin spends much of his time daydreaming about what life would have been like for him had he been living in 1960 instead of 2102. He feels a stronger empathy for dying plants than he does for other humans, and this has given him the reputation of callousness. Although Kevin is largely resigned to his fate as a psi-deficient in a world of people with special powers, his brother Tim insists that he has some ability; it simply hasn't been discovered yet. The rest of the family shrugs off this notion, but Kevin secretly latches onto this hope. Because of his inability to tap into the telepathically-broadcast news transmissions, Kevin's family one day alerts him that a starship has returned to Earth from Alpha Centauri, where its crew had discovered two Earth-type planets. This excites Kevin, but unfortunately, the inhabitants of these planets are hostile, and they eventually make their way to Earth to begin a war. In preparation for the war, Kevin's mother encourages him and Sylvia to learn first-aid techniques at the Psycho Center in order to be ready to help the injured. During his training, Kevin meets a girl named Lucy, who flirts with him and admires his strength. When Kevin gets his first patient, he is shocked to discover that he is able to heal the injured man with a simple touch of his hands. Having discovered his new ability, Kevin sets out to heal as many of the wounded as possible; later, he learns that he is the only psi-negative in the world with this ability. Eventually, he is given his own hospital and hailed as a hero by various dignitaries including the President. When the war ends and the aliens surrender, however, Earth is no longer in need of his services, and he is out of a job again.\n",
"In the year 2102, the Faraday family are setting the table and gathering for a meal together in their home. Humans have supernatural powers (psi-powers) that began to show after nuclear energy was developed in the 1960s, and most of the family have special abilities. Father can teleport, Mother (Amy) is a telepathic psychiatrist, Dan (Danny) can move objects via telekinesis, Sylvia is telesensitive, and Tim can predict the future. Kevin (Kev) has no apparent powers, and feels disconnected and isolated from most of his family because without powers he is of little use to society. The exception is his brother Tim, who suggests that there just isn’t a test yet for the powers that Kev has. His father asks if they should send him to a psychiatrist again, and his mother expresses disappointment at the amount of tests that have been run on Kev with no sign of psi-powers. \nKev is crestfallen that he doesn’t really have any life other than going on long walks and watching the house. He is sad he never had the chance to try exploring space, but by the time he was ten years old humans had already concluded that all the other planets were unsuited to human life. \nThere are television-like telepathic projections in the society called “tellies” that those with psi-powers receive. One day, a tellie reports that space explorers from Earth have found two inhabited Earth-type planets in Alpha Centauri. The aliens chased off the humans in their own spaceships and now it is possible that aliens could attack Earth in less than six months. Kev’s mother decides there will be a lot more people in need of medical training to treat casualties if there is an attack, and recruits Sylvia and Kev to train at the Psycho Center. During training, Kev meets a girl named Lucie who is a poet and they develop a fond relationship with each other. When alien weapons begin striking near their town, the casualties start rolling into the Psycho Center and Kev tries to run away at the first sight of the violent wounds. His mother forces him to stay and work. He is so shaky he can’t hold a sponge to clean the blood off a person that is missing half of their face and drops it, accidentally pushing his fingers into the bloody wound. Touching the wound this way cures it completely. Kev quickly grows into a famous sensation who is able to heal any wounds. He is the only person on Earth with this psi-ability, and there is a special clinic built just for him. Lucie becomes his assistant. Presidents and generals visit him and present him with medals and honors. After four months, the war ends and peace returns to Earth. The Vice President thanks Kev on behalf of the country.\n",
"Kevin is the only member of the Faraday family without psi-powers. His two brothers, sister, mother, and father are all extremely powerful individuals, but he, at the ripe age of 26 years old, had nothing. Because of this, he was considered an outcast and was forced to work in their home instead of in the outside world. People pitied him and looked down on him, which drove him crazy. The story begins at the breakfast table with Danny using his powers to levitate food in and out of the kitchen. Chaos ensues as the orange juice crashes into his sister, Sylvia, who senses Kevin’s displeasure at his brazen use of psi-power. Their father soon appears out of thin air with his briefcase, while his mother strolls down and instantly reads Kevin’s mind, only making him madder. The situation escalates until Tim, the youngest, strolls in and claims that Kevin’s powers have yet to present themselves, which gives Kevin hope. His family leaves for work, and Kevin is left at home alone again. \nKevin watches the servomechanisms as they clean and manage the house. Of course, sometimes they break down and he is needed, but largely he has nothing to do and is bored. In the year 2102, Kevin Faraday was considered useless. He takes a long walk that day, and when he returns home, his family is buzzing with the news. A spaceship returned from Alpha Centauri claiming they ran into inhabitable planets filled with humanoid aliens. One of the aliens followed them back to Earth, then turned around and headed home. They were hostile creatures and attacked them on sight. Earth had six months to prepare for the potential of war, so Kevin and his siblings learned first-aid techniques at the Psycho Center. There, Kevin meets Lucy, a cute blonde poetess who expresses interest in him. \nWhen the first bomb strikes, Kevin is faced with his first injured patient. His face had been blown up in the explosion, and Kevin can’t handle the sight, so he tries to run away. He is stopped by his mother, however, who scolds him and sends him back to his patient. As he is mopping his face with a sponge, his hand slips and he accidentally touches his patient skin-to-skin. Miraculously, his injuries are cured, and Kevin’s powers are finally discovered. He is a healer. \nHe heals the rest of the injured with just a touch and soon becomes the most important man in the world. He gets his own special hospital, where Lucy is his assistant, and visits from Presidents, cabinet members, and other people of power. He heals everyone who is injured in the war and loves the new attention. He is the only healer, and those who had his abilities in the past were kings. \nHowever, four months later, the war ends and the Centaurions blow themselves up in surrender. The story ends with a question: will Kevin still be as needed in a post-war society? \n"
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explain the phenomena of the Ghost Ship? Was it really only a product of his imagination? What of all the others who had seen it? Was it possible for many different men under many different situations to have the same exact illusion? Reason denied that. But perhaps space itself denies reason. Grimly he retraced the legend of the Ghost Ship. A chance phrase here and a story there put together all that he knew: Doomed for all eternity to wander in the empty star-lanes, the Ghost Ship haunts the Solar System that gave it birth. And this is its tragedy,
course. What is it that girls in small offices do or eat or drink or wear that girls in large offices don't do or eat or drink or wear? What do writers and doctors do differently? Or poets and dentists? What are we missing? What—" In the outer office a girl cried out. A body thumped against a desk, then a chair, then to the floor. Two girls screamed. Andy bolted up from his chair. Racing to the door, he shouted back to Bettijean, "Get a staff doctor and a chemist from the lab." It was the girl who had
forty years ago or more. Resembled one? It was one! Unquestionably, though half-invisible and like a piece of glass immersed in water, it was a rocket ship. But the instruments on the control board could not lie. The presence of any material body within a hundred thousand miles would be revealed. But the needle on the gauge did not quiver. Nothing indicated the presence of a ship. But the evidence of his eyes was incontestable. Or was it? Doubt gripped him. Did the loneliness of all these years in space twist his mind till he was imagining the appearance of
"Get somebody—maybe even the President—on all radio and TV networks. Explain frankly about the four-centers and warn against licking any stamps. Then—" He broke off as his phone rang. Answering, he listened for a moment, then hung up and said, "But before the big announcement, get somebody checking on the security clearances at whatever plant it is where they print stamps. This's a big deal. Somebody may've been planted years ago for this operation. It shouldn't be too hard. "But there's no evidence it was a plot yet. Could be pure accident—some chemical in the stickum spoiled. Do they keep
deathly ill, but nobody dying. And doctors can't identify the poison until they have a fatality for an autopsy. People stricken in every part of the country, but the water systems are pure. How does it spread?" "In food?" "How? There must be hundreds of canneries and dairies and packing plants over the country. How could they all goof at the same time—even if it was sabotage?" "On the wind?" "But who could accurately predict every wind over the entire country—even Alaska and Hawaii—without hitting Canada or Mexico? And why wouldn't everybody get it in a given area?" Bettijean's smooth
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Who is Magnan, and what is his role in and relevance to the story?
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about Aide Memoire by Keith Laumer.
Relevant chunks:
guest of honor," said Magnan, "a fine young fellow! Slop I believe his name is." "Slock," said Retief. "Eight feet of armor-plated orneriness. And—" Magnan rose and tapped on his glass. The Fustians winced at the, to them, supersonic vibrations. They looked at each other muttering. Magnan tapped louder. The Minister drew in his head, eyes closed. Some of the Fustians rose, tottered for the doors; the noise level rose. Magnan redoubled his efforts. The glass broke with a clatter and green wine gushed on the tablecloth. "What in the name of the Great Egg!" the Minister muttered. He blinked,
it might be a good idea to find out a little more about them," said Retief. "Who organizes them? There are three strong political parties here on Fust. What's the alignment of this SCARS organization?" "You forget, these are merely teenagers, so to speak," Magnan said. "Politics mean nothing to them ... yet." "Then there are the Groaci. Why their passionate interest in a two-horse world like Fust? Normally they're concerned with nothing but business. But what has Fust got that they could use?" "You may rule out the commercial aspect in this instance," said Magnan. "Fust possesses a vigorous
Slock roared suddenly, twisting violently. Whonk teetered, his grip loosened ... and Slock pulled free and was off the platform, butting his way through the milling oldsters on the dining room floor. Magnan watched, open-mouthed. "The Groaci were playing a double game, as usual," Retief said. "They intended to dispose of this fellow Slock, once he'd served their purpose." "Well, don't stand there," yelped Magnan over the uproar. "If Slock is the ring-leader of a delinquent gang...!" He moved to give chase. Retief grabbed his arm. "Don't jump down there! You'd have as much chance of getting through as a
"In my youth we were indentured to the dredge-masters. I myself drew a muck sledge." "But in these modern times," put in Magnan, "surely it's incumbent on us to make happy these golden hours." The minister snorted. "Last week I had a golden hour. They set upon me and pelted me with overripe stench-fruit." "But this was merely a manifestation of normal youthful frustrations," cried Magnan. "Their essential tenderness—" "You'd not find a tender spot on that lout yonder," the minister said, pointing with a fork at a newly arrived Youth, "if you drilled boreholes and blasted." "Why, that's our
the robed Fustian youth and beamed at the cameras. "How gratifying it is to take this opportunity to express once more the great pleasure we have in sponsoring SCARS," he said, talking slowly for the benefit of the scribbling reporters. "We'd like to think that in our modest way we're to be a part of all that the SCARS achieve during the years ahead." Magnan paused as a huge Fustian elder heaved his bulk up the two low steps to the rostrum, approached the guest of honor. He watched as the newcomer paused behind Slock, who did not see the
Question:
Who is Magnan, and what is his role in and relevance to the story?
Answer:
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[
"Magnan is the Ambassador to Fust, and thus is Retief’s boss. He is also a spineless, political wind-sniffing clod. His main role, or function in the story is as a foil to the hero, Retief. Magnan’s clueless blathering sets up Retief’s dry, sarcastic remarks – remarks which, if Magnan were not so oblivious, would perhaps offend Magnan to the point of firing Retief. \nWhile Retief is running around Fust getting into fist fights and spoiling terrorists’ plots, Magnan is back at the office shuffling whatever papers came in from the Terrestrial Embassy that day, implementing the “program of the week.” Magnan is flat. Retief is three-dimensional.\nMagnan’s main contributions to the story are to: \n1.\tIgnore Retief’s advice to check out the Fustian youth organizations before sponsoring them, which leads to the potential for the Terrestrial Embassy being embarrassed by the Groaci attempts to frame SCARS for the explosion they hoped to cause aboard the Moss Rock. \n2.\tSet up the banquet to honor SCARS where he grossly insults his Fustian counterparts by having the hired musicians play a dirge, the “Lament of Hatching,” and then shattering their ear drums by tapping on his wine glass.\n3.\tWhip up a meringue of obfuscation to hide the fiasco of the youth organization sponsorship program and try to make himself smell like a rose in the process\n4.\tStart a new sponsorship program for Fustian Senior Citizens.\nAt no point in the story does he do anything useful at all.\n",
"Magnan is the Terrestrial Ambassador to the Fustians. He is the figurehead of their influence on the Fustian planet, and works closely with Retief, the Terrestrial diplomat who uncovers a plot against the Terrestrials through the course of the story. He is the man who tries to convince Retief to sponsor the Youth Group SCARS in the beginning of the story, and we encounter him at the banquet near the end of the story. As the figurehead, he is responsible for announcing the role of the Terrestrials in funding the Youth Group, which creates an opportunity for Retief to announce the Grocian plot to everyone. Ambassador Magnan eventually joins Retief and Whonk as they leave the event to stop the criminals, but he is thrown into an alley by Whonk and doesn't have an opportunity to help directly. After the issue is dealt with by Whonk and Retief, Magnan resumes normal duty, and as the story ends he is looking at other groups that his government could potentially fund.\n",
"Magnan is an ambassador with the Terrestrial Embassy, and he assigns Retief the mission to sponsor the new youth movement (SCARS) on the planet Fust. Magnan seems eager for this sponsorship to proceed despite his general ignorance about the movement itself. His motivation for speed rather than understanding may be attributed to the haste with which the Groaci Embassy has moved to establish a connection with SCARS. Magnan, of course, is not aware of the secret dealings between the Groaci and the SCARS, whom they are working with to ultimately supplant the Fustian leadership and take control of the planet for themselves. Magnan’s vision is fairly straightforward and views this sponsorship as the surest way to curry good favor with the Fustians (and get good publicity for the Terrestrial Embassy). Magnan is impatient with Retief’s more meticulous, fact-finding methods and organizes the sponsorship ceremony before Retief has completed his research. At the ceremony, Magnan’s interactions with the Fustian minister reveal further his humorous ignorance about their species, particularly when he hurts their sensitive hearing by banging his glass louder and louder. After he invites Slock on stage to present him to the press as his guest of honor and representative of SCARS, Whonk and Retief capture Slock and expose his plan to Magnan. At first, Magnan does not believe them, but he is quickly convinced when Slock escapes. In the end, Magnan creates a story for the press that the sponsorship event was a ruse to apprehend the perpetrators of the attempted coup against the Fustian leadership. ",
"Magnan is the Ambassador at the Terrestrial Embassy on Fust and Councillor Retief’s boss. He wants Retief to sponsor the SCARS and stops just short of ordering him to do so. Magnan is very focused on his role as Ambassador and has little interest in anything not directly connected to his job. Magnan is not concerned about the passenger ship the Fustians are building or the fact that the Groacis are interested in the Fustians when their lives and economies are so different from each other. When Retief mentions the fact that the Groacis are interested in fission bombs, Magnan’s reaction is to wonder what market there could be for such devices since the world is at peace. He is politically correct and is shocked when Retief mentions the carapaces that the older Fustians has. He also pretends that he can hear the Fustians’ music when he clearly isn’t able to do so. Magnan is manipulative because he announces that Retief will sponsor SCARS even after Retief clearly tells him he is not interested. He misjudges character and refers to Slock as a fine young fellow when Slock is rude, violent, and mixed up in the scheme with the Groacis to begin conquering nearby worlds. At the end of the story when Magnan finally learns of the deceit of the young Fustians and the Groacis, he tries to act like he knew about it all along. His disinterest in anything not related to diplomacy gives Retief the leeway he needs to figure out the Fustian and Groaci crimes."
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guest of honor," said Magnan, "a fine young fellow! Slop I believe his name is." "Slock," said Retief. "Eight feet of armor-plated orneriness. And—" Magnan rose and tapped on his glass. The Fustians winced at the, to them, supersonic vibrations. They looked at each other muttering. Magnan tapped louder. The Minister drew in his head, eyes closed. Some of the Fustians rose, tottered for the doors; the noise level rose. Magnan redoubled his efforts. The glass broke with a clatter and green wine gushed on the tablecloth. "What in the name of the Great Egg!" the Minister muttered. He blinked,
it might be a good idea to find out a little more about them," said Retief. "Who organizes them? There are three strong political parties here on Fust. What's the alignment of this SCARS organization?" "You forget, these are merely teenagers, so to speak," Magnan said. "Politics mean nothing to them ... yet." "Then there are the Groaci. Why their passionate interest in a two-horse world like Fust? Normally they're concerned with nothing but business. But what has Fust got that they could use?" "You may rule out the commercial aspect in this instance," said Magnan. "Fust possesses a vigorous
Slock roared suddenly, twisting violently. Whonk teetered, his grip loosened ... and Slock pulled free and was off the platform, butting his way through the milling oldsters on the dining room floor. Magnan watched, open-mouthed. "The Groaci were playing a double game, as usual," Retief said. "They intended to dispose of this fellow Slock, once he'd served their purpose." "Well, don't stand there," yelped Magnan over the uproar. "If Slock is the ring-leader of a delinquent gang...!" He moved to give chase. Retief grabbed his arm. "Don't jump down there! You'd have as much chance of getting through as a
"In my youth we were indentured to the dredge-masters. I myself drew a muck sledge." "But in these modern times," put in Magnan, "surely it's incumbent on us to make happy these golden hours." The minister snorted. "Last week I had a golden hour. They set upon me and pelted me with overripe stench-fruit." "But this was merely a manifestation of normal youthful frustrations," cried Magnan. "Their essential tenderness—" "You'd not find a tender spot on that lout yonder," the minister said, pointing with a fork at a newly arrived Youth, "if you drilled boreholes and blasted." "Why, that's our
the robed Fustian youth and beamed at the cameras. "How gratifying it is to take this opportunity to express once more the great pleasure we have in sponsoring SCARS," he said, talking slowly for the benefit of the scribbling reporters. "We'd like to think that in our modest way we're to be a part of all that the SCARS achieve during the years ahead." Magnan paused as a huge Fustian elder heaved his bulk up the two low steps to the rostrum, approached the guest of honor. He watched as the newcomer paused behind Slock, who did not see the
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Why is Cassal on his way to Tunney 21?
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about Delay in Transit by F. L. (Floyd L.) Wallace.
Relevant chunks:
work on a piece of meat." Cassal searched the body thoroughly. Miscellaneous personal articles of no value in identifying the man. A clip with a startling amount of money in it. A small white card with something scribbled on it. A picture of a woman and a small child posed against a background which resembled no world Cassal had ever seen. That was all. Cassal stood up in bewilderment. Dimanche to the contrary, there seemed to be no connection between this dead man and his own problem of getting to Tunney 21. Right now, though, he had to dispose of
a long journey, the first part of which already lay behind him. He had to go to Tunney 21 to see a man. That man wasn't important to anyone save the company that employed him, and possibly not even to them. The thug trailing him wouldn't be interested in Cassal himself, his mission, which was a commercial one, nor the man on Tunney. And money wasn't the objective, if Dimanche's analysis was right. What did the thug want? Secrets? Cassal had none, except, in a sense, Dimanche. And that was too well kept on Earth, where the instrument was invented
Cassal gazed at the body. Self-defense, of course, but would the police believe it? Assuming they did, they'd still have to investigate. The rapier was an illegal concealed weapon. And they would question him until they discovered Dimanche. Regrettable, but what could he do about it? Suppose he were detained long enough to miss the ship bound for Tunney 21? Grimly, he laid down the rapier. He might as well get to the bottom of this. Why had the man attacked? What did he want? "I don't know," replied Dimanche irritably. "I can interpret body data—a live body. I can't
Earth, if he could . Literally, he had to guess the Tunnesian's price before the Tunnesian himself knew it. In addition, the reputation of Tunnesian scientists being exceeded only by their arrogance, Cassal had to convince him that he wouldn't be working for ignorant Earth savages. The existence of such an instrument as Dimanche was a key factor. Her voice broke through his thoughts. "Now, then, what's your problem?" "I was told on Earth I might have to wait a few days on Godolph. I've been here three weeks. I want information on the ship bound for Tunney 21." "Just
off a ship without an identification tab. They don't encourage immigration." In effect, that meant no ship bound for the center would take a passenger without identification. No ship owner would run the risk of having a permanent guest on board, someone who couldn't be rid of when his money was gone. Cassal held his head in his hands. Tunney 21 was inside the third ring. "Next time," she said, "don't let anyone take your identification." "I won't," he promised grimly. The woman looked directly at him. Her eyes were bright. He revised his estimate of her age drastically downward.
Question:
Why is Cassal on his way to Tunney 21?
Answer:
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[
"Cassal is sent on a business trip by Neuronics, Inc., to visit Tunney 21 to see a man. Tunney 21, according to the first counselor, is home to some of the galaxy's most genius scientists. It is later revealed that Neuronics, Inc. wants that man on their staff back on Earth. The man would work towards the company's goal of developing instantaneous radio; this radio system would impact the entire galaxy, technology that could share information with every planet with no time delay. This radio would dominate means of transportation, communications, and commerce. For these reasons, Cassal is not eager to disclose his plans for going to Tunney 21.",
"Denton Cassal was selected to make the journey to Tunney 21 because he is the best sales engineer at Neuronics, Inc. He is secretive about why he wants to go to Tunney 21. He reveals that he wants to go to Tunney 21 to find a research worker that could help Neuronics perfect their instantaneous radio. If he were able to convince the researcher to go to Earth and work on the radio, he would get a share of the profits. An instantaneous radio would be invaluable throughout the galaxy, the profits for both Neuronics and him would be large. ",
"Cassal is a sales engineer back on Earth where he did very good since he matched very well to his instrument. Thus he was selected to go on a trip to see a man. Since this man is at Tunney 21, Cassal has to travel all the way from Earth to Tunney 21. Tunney 21 has great scientists and especially the one that works on Neuronics. If Earth can get his help, then Earth will have perfect instantaneous radio that span the whole Galaxy. Because of its monopoly in instantaneousness and vastness, Earth can literally set its own price. Thus, for this trip to Tunney 21, with the help of Dimanche, Cassal needs to persuade the researcher to come with him to Earth. This way he can also gain profit from the instantaneous radio which will be build afterward.",
"Cassal is on his way to Tunney 21 in order to convince a Tunnesian scientist to join his company, Neuronics. From the pieces of the scientist’s research that had reached Earth, it was concluded that he would be instrumental in perfecting instantaneous radio, a technology which would revolutionize communication in the galaxy. Neuronics aims to monopolize the technology and amass great wealth, from which Cassal would receive a commission.\nCassal, because of his possession of Dimanche, an intelligent implant capable of determining the thoughts of those nearby, is in a good position to negotiate terms with the scientist for two reasons: firstly because he will be able to guess the Tunnesian’s price, and secondly because Dimanche’s sophisticated technology will convince him that Earth is an advanced civilization.\n"
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work on a piece of meat." Cassal searched the body thoroughly. Miscellaneous personal articles of no value in identifying the man. A clip with a startling amount of money in it. A small white card with something scribbled on it. A picture of a woman and a small child posed against a background which resembled no world Cassal had ever seen. That was all. Cassal stood up in bewilderment. Dimanche to the contrary, there seemed to be no connection between this dead man and his own problem of getting to Tunney 21. Right now, though, he had to dispose of
a long journey, the first part of which already lay behind him. He had to go to Tunney 21 to see a man. That man wasn't important to anyone save the company that employed him, and possibly not even to them. The thug trailing him wouldn't be interested in Cassal himself, his mission, which was a commercial one, nor the man on Tunney. And money wasn't the objective, if Dimanche's analysis was right. What did the thug want? Secrets? Cassal had none, except, in a sense, Dimanche. And that was too well kept on Earth, where the instrument was invented
Cassal gazed at the body. Self-defense, of course, but would the police believe it? Assuming they did, they'd still have to investigate. The rapier was an illegal concealed weapon. And they would question him until they discovered Dimanche. Regrettable, but what could he do about it? Suppose he were detained long enough to miss the ship bound for Tunney 21? Grimly, he laid down the rapier. He might as well get to the bottom of this. Why had the man attacked? What did he want? "I don't know," replied Dimanche irritably. "I can interpret body data—a live body. I can't
Earth, if he could . Literally, he had to guess the Tunnesian's price before the Tunnesian himself knew it. In addition, the reputation of Tunnesian scientists being exceeded only by their arrogance, Cassal had to convince him that he wouldn't be working for ignorant Earth savages. The existence of such an instrument as Dimanche was a key factor. Her voice broke through his thoughts. "Now, then, what's your problem?" "I was told on Earth I might have to wait a few days on Godolph. I've been here three weeks. I want information on the ship bound for Tunney 21." "Just
off a ship without an identification tab. They don't encourage immigration." In effect, that meant no ship bound for the center would take a passenger without identification. No ship owner would run the risk of having a permanent guest on board, someone who couldn't be rid of when his money was gone. Cassal held his head in his hands. Tunney 21 was inside the third ring. "Next time," she said, "don't let anyone take your identification." "I won't," he promised grimly. The woman looked directly at him. Her eyes were bright. He revised his estimate of her age drastically downward.
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How does Roddie figure out why he's different from his friends?
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about Bridge Crossing by Dave Dryfoos.
Relevant chunks:
Bridge Crossing
BY DAVE DRYFOOS
Illustrated by HARRISON
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction May 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
He knew the city was organized for his individual defense, for it had been that way since he was born. But who was his enemy?
In 1849, the mist that sometimes rolled through the Golden Gate was known as fog. In 2149, it had become far more frequent, and was known as smog. By 2349, it was fog again.
But tonight there was smoke mixed with the fog. Roddie could smell it. Somewhere in the forested ruins, fire was burning.
He wasn't worried. The small blaze that smoldered behind him on the cracked concrete floor had consumed everything burnable within blocks; what remained of the gutted concrete office building from which he peered was fire-proof.
But Roddie was himself aflame with anger. As always when Invaders broke in from the north, he'd been left behind with his nurse, Molly, while the soldiers went out to fight.
And nowadays Molly's presence wasn't the comfort it used to be. He felt almost ready to jump out of his skin, the way she rocked and knitted in that grating ruined chair, saying over and over again, "The soldiers don't want little boys. The soldiers don't want little boys. The soldiers don't—"
"I'm not a little boy!" Roddie suddenly shouted. "I'm full-grown and I've never even seen an Invader. Why won't you let me go and fight?"
Fiercely he crossed the bare, gritty floor and shook Molly's shoulder. She rattled under his jarring hand, and abruptly changed the subject.
"A is for Atom, B is for Bomb, C is for Corpse—" she chanted.
Roddie reached into her shapeless dress and pinched. Lately that had helped her over these spells. But this time, though it stopped the kindergarten song, the treatment only started something worse.
"Wuzzums hungry?" Molly cooed, still rocking.
Utterly disgusted, Roddie ripped her head off her neck.
It was a completely futile gesture. The complicated mind that had cared for him and taught him speech and the alphabet hadn't made him a mechanic, and his only tool was a broken-handled screwdriver.
He was still tinkering when the soldiers came in. While they lined up along the wall, he put Molly's head back on her neck.
She gaped coyly at the new arrivals. "Hello, boys," she simpered.
"Looking for a good time?"
Roddie slapped her to silence, reflecting briefly that there were many things he didn't know about Molly. But there was work to be done. Carefully he framed the ritual words she'd taught him: "Soldiers, come to attention and report!"
There were eleven of them, six feet tall, with four limbs and eight extremities. They stood uniformly, the thumbs on each pair of hands touching along the center line of the legs, front feet turned out at an angle of forty-five degrees, rear feet turned inward at thirty degrees.
"Sir," they chorused, "we have met the enemy and he is ours."
He inspected them. All were scratched and dented, but one in particular seemed badly damaged. His left arm was almost severed at the shoulder.
"Come here, fellow," Roddie said. "Let's see if I can fix that."
The soldier took a step forward, lurched suddenly, stopped, and whipped out a bayonet.
"Death to Invaders!" he yelled, and charged crazily.
Molly stepped in front of him.
"You aren't being very nice to my baby," she murmured, and thrust her knitting needles into his eyes.
Roddie jumped behind him, knocked off his helmet, and pressed a soft spot on his conical skull. The soldier collapsed to the floor.
Roddie salvaged and returned Molly's needles. Then he examined the patient, tearing him apart as a boy dismembers an alarm clock.
It was lucky he did. The left arm's pair of hands suddenly writhed off the floor in an effort to choke him. But because the arm was detached at the shoulder and therefore blind, he escaped the clutching onslaught and could goad the reflexing hands into assaulting one another harmlessly.
Meanwhile, the other soldiers left, except for one, apparently another casualty, who stumbled on his way out and fell into the fire. By the time Roddie had hauled him clear, damage was beyond repair. Roddie swore, then decided to try combining parts of this casualty with pieces of the other to make a whole one.
To get more light for the operation, he poked up the fire. Roddie was new at his work, and took it seriously. It alarmed him to watch the soldiers melt away, gradually succumbing to battle damage, shamed him to see the empty ruins burn section by section as the Invaders repeatedly broke through and had to be burned out.
Soon there would be nothing left of the Private Property Keep Out that, according to Molly's bedtime story, the Owners had entrusted to them when driven away by radioactivity. Soon the soldiers themselves would be gone. None would remain to guard the city but a few strayed servants like Molly, and an occasional Civil Defender.
And himself, Roddie reflected, spitting savagely into the fire. He might remain. But how he fitted into the picture, he didn't know. And Molly, who claimed to have found him in the ruins after a fight with Invaders twenty years before, couldn't or wouldn't say.
Well, for as long as possible, Roddie decided, he'd do his duty as the others did theirs—single-mindedly. Eventually the soldiers might accept him as one of themselves; meanwhile, this newly attempted first aid was useful to them.
He gave the fire a final poke and then paused, wondering if, when heated, his screwdriver could make an unfastened end of wire stick on the grayish spot where it seemed to belong.
Stretching prone to blow the embers hot so he could try out his new idea, Roddie got too close to the flames. Instantly the room filled with the stench of singed hair. Roddie drew angrily back, beating out the sparks in his uncut blond mane.
As he stood slapping his head and muttering, a deranged Civil Defense firefighter popped into the doorway and covered him with carbon dioxide foam.
Roddie fled. His life-long friends were not merely wearing out, they were unbearably wearing.
In the street, even before he'd wiped off the foam, he regretted his flight. The fire was back home. And here in the cold of this fog-shrouded canyon, a mere trail between heaped-up walls of rubble, the diaper he wore felt inadequate against the pre-dawn cold. His cherished weapon, a magnetic tack-hammer, was chill beneath the diaper's top, and the broken, radium-dialed wristwatch suspended from a string around his neck hung clammy against his chest. He stood irresolute on numbing bare feet, and considered returning to the more familiar bedlam.
But colder than cold was his shame at being cold. Molly never was, though she knew how to keep him warm, nor were the others. Hunger, thirst, pain and coldness were sensations never experienced by his friends. Like the growth he'd been undergoing till recently, these were things of ignominy, to be hidden as far as possible from inquiring eyes. Cold as it was, he'd have to hide.
Temporarily, the darkness concealed him, though it was not quite complete. From above the fog, the moon played vaguely deceptive light on the splinters of architecture looming toward it. Some distance off, an owl hooted, but here nocturnal rodents felt free to squeak and rustle as they scampered.
The world seemed ghostly. Yet it wasn't dead; it merely lurked. And as an irrepressible yawn reminded Roddie of his absurd need for sleep even in the midst of danger, he concluded for the thousandth time that the One who'd built him must have been an apprentice.
For just such reasons he'd developed the hideout toward which he now walked. It had been the haven of his adolescence, when the discovery of how much he differed from his friends had been a shock, and the shock itself a difference to be hidden.
His hiding place was a manhole, dead center in the dead street. A weathered bronze bar, carefully placed in the cover's slotted rim, was the levering key that opened its door.
Everything was wrong tonight! He couldn't even find the bar. Of course that spoiled things, because the bar was a roller on which to move the heavy cover from below, and a support that held it ajar for ventilation.
But the example of his friends had taught him above all else to carry out every purpose. Molly was a nurse; she had raised him despite all obstacles. The soldiers were guards; they protected the ruins against everything larger than a rat. The firefighter had put even him out when he was aflame....
Anyhow, the manhole cover had been loosened by his frequent handling. He lifted it aside by main strength, then flattened himself to the street, and felt with his feet for the top rung.
Halfway down the iron ladder, something made him pause. He looked, but saw only blackness. He listened, sniffed, found nothing. What could have entered through the iron cover?
He sneered at his own timidity and jumped to the bottom.
It was warm! The dry bottom of the hole had the temperature of body heat, as if a large animal had recently rested there!
Quickly, Roddie drew the hammer from his waist. Then, with weapon ready for an instantaneous blow, he stretched his left hand through the darkness. He touched something warm, softish. Gingerly he felt over that curving surface for identifying features.
While Roddie investigated by touch, his long fingers were suddenly seized and bitten. At the same time, his right shin received a savage kick. And his own retaliatory blow was checked in mid-swing by an unexpected voice.
"Get your filthy hands off me!" it whispered angrily. "Who do you think you are?"
Startled, he dropped his hammer. "I'm Roddie," he said, squatting to fumble for it. "Who do you think you are?"
"I'm Ida, naturally! Just how many girls are there in this raiding party?"
His first Invader—and he had dropped his weapon!
Scrabbling fearfully in the dust for his hammer, Roddie paused suddenly. This girl—whatever that was—seemed to think him one of her own kind. There was a chance, not much, but worth taking, to turn delay to advantage. Maybe he could learn something of value before he killed her. That would make the soldiers accept him!
He stalled, seeking a gambit. "How would I know how many girls there are?"
Half expecting a blow, he got instead an apology. "I'm sorry," the girl said. "I should have known. Never even heard your name before, either. Roddie.... Whose boat did you come in, Roddie?"
Boat? What was a boat? "How would I know?" he repeated, voice tight with fear of discovery.
If she noticed the tension, she didn't show it. Certainly her whisper was friendly enough. "Oh, you're one of the fellows from Bodega, then. They shoved a boy into our boat at the last minute, too. Tough, wasn't it, getting separated in the fog and tide like that? If only we didn't have to use boats.... But, say, how are we going to get away from here?"
"I wouldn't know," Roddie said, closing his fingers on the hammer, and rising. "How did you get in?"
"Followed your footprints. It was sundown and I saw human tracks in the dust and they led me here. Where were you?"
"Scouting around," Roddie said vaguely. "How did you know I was a man when I came back?"
"Because you couldn't see me, silly! You know perfectly well these androids are heat-sensitive and can locate us in the dark!"
Indeed he did know! Many times he'd felt ashamed that Molly could find him whenever she wanted to, even here in the manhole. But perhaps the manhole would help him now to redeem himself....
"I'd like to get a look at you," he said.
The girl laughed self-consciously. "It's getting gray out. You'll see me soon enough."
But she'd see him , Roddie realized. He had to talk fast.
"What'll we do when it's light?" he asked.
"Well, I guess the boats have gone," Ida said. "You could swim the Gate, I guess—you seem tall and strong enough. But I couldn't. You'll think it's crazy, but I've given this some thought, and even looked it over from the other side. I expect to try the Golden Gate Bridge!"
Now he was getting somewhere! The bridge was ruined, impassable. Even her own people had crossed the Strait by other means. But if there were a way over the bridge....
"It's broken," he said. "How in the world can we cross it?"
"Oh, you'll find out, if you take me up there. I—I don't want to be alone, Roddie. Will you go with me? Now?"
Well, she could be made to point out the route before he killed her— if nothing happened when she saw him.
Uneasy, Roddie hefted the hammer in his hand.
A giggle broke the pause. "It's nice of you to wait and let me go first up the ladder," the girl said. "But where the heck is the rusty old thing?"
"I'll go first," said Roddie. He might need the advantage. "The ladder's right behind me."
He climbed with hammer in teeth, and stretched his left hand from street level to grasp and neutralize the girl's right. Then, nervously fingering his weapon, he stared at her in the thin gray dawn.
She was short and lean, except for roundnesses here and there. From her shapeless doeskin dress stretched slender legs that tapered to feet that were bare, tiny, and, like her hands, only two in number.
Roddie was pleased. They were evenly matched as to members, and that would make things easy when the time came.
He looked into her face. It smiled at him, tanned and ruddy, with a full mouth and bright dark eyes that hid under long lashes when he looked too long.
Startling, those wary eyes. Concealing. For a moment he felt a rush of fear, but she gave his hand a squeeze before twisting loose, and burst into sudden laughter.
"Diapers!" she chortled, struggling to keep her voice low. "My big, strong, blond and blue-eyed hero goes into battle wearing diapers, and carrying only a hammer to fight with! You're the most unforgettable character I have ever known!"
He'd passed inspection, then—so far. He expelled his withheld breath, and said, "I think you'll find me a little odd, in some ways."
"Oh, not at all," Ida replied quickly. "Different, yes, but I wouldn't say odd."
When they started down the street, she was nervous despite Roddie's assertion that he knew where the soldiers were posted. He wondered if she felt some of the doubt he'd tried to conceal, shared his visions of what the soldiers might do if they found him brazenly strolling with an Invader. They might not believe he was only questioning a prisoner.
Every day, his friends were becoming more unpredictable.
For that very reason, because he didn't know what precautions would do any good, he took a chance and walked openly to the bridge by the most direct route. In time this apparent assurance stilled Ida's fears, and she began to talk.
Many of the things she said were beyond his experience and meaningless to him, but he did note with interest how effective the soldiers had been.
"It's awful," Ida said. "So few young men are left, so many casualties....
"But why do you—we—keep up the fight?" Roddie asked. "I mean, the soldiers will never leave the city; their purpose is to guard it and they can't leave, so they won't attack. Let them alone, and there'll be plenty of young men."
"Well!" said Ida, sharply. "You need indoctrination! Didn't they ever tell you that the city is our home, even if the stupid androids do keep us out? Don't you know how dependent we are on these raids for all our tools and things?"
She sounded suspicious. Roddie shot her a furtive, startled glance. But she wasn't standing off to fight him. On the contrary, she was too close for both comfort and combat. She bumped him hip and shoulder every few steps, and if he edged away, she followed.
He went on with his questioning. "Why are you here? I mean, sure, the others are after tools and things, but what's your purpose?"
Ida shrugged. "I'll admit no girl has ever done it before," she said,
"but I thought I could help with the wounded. That's why I have no weapon."
She hesitated, glanced covertly up at him, and went on with a rush of words. "It's the lack of men, I guess. All the girls are kind of bored and hopeless, so I got this bright idea and stowed away on one of the boats when it was dark and the fog had settled down. Do you think I was being silly?"
"No, but you do seem a little purposeless."
In silence they trudged through a vast area of charred wood and concrete foundations on the northern end of the city. Thick fog over the water hid Alcatraz, but in-shore visibility was better, and they could see the beginning of the bridge approach.
A stone rattled nearby. There was a clink of metal. Ida gasped, and clung to Roddie's arm.
"Behind me!" he whispered urgently. "Get behind me and hold on!"
He felt Ida's arms encircling his waist, her chin digging into his back below the left shoulder. Facing them, a hundred feet away, stood a soldier. He looked contemptuous, hostile.
"It's all right," Roddie said, his voice breaking.
There was a long, sullen, heart-stopping stare. Then the soldier turned and walked away.
Ida's grip loosened, and he could feel her sag behind him. Roddie turned and held her. With eyes closed, she pressed cold blue lips to his. He grimaced and turned away his head.
Ida's response was quick. "Forgive me," she breathed, and slipped from his arms, but she held herself erect. "I was so scared. And then we've had no sleep, no food or water."
Roddie was familiar with these signs of weakness, proud of appearing to deny his own humiliating needs.
"I guess you're not as strong as me," he said smugly. "I'll take care of you. Of course we can't sleep now, but I'll get food and water."
Leaving her to follow, he turned left to the ruins of a supermarket he had previously visited, demonstrating his superior strength by setting a pace Ida couldn't match. By the time she caught up with him, he had grubbed out a few cans of the special size that Molly always chose. Picking two that were neither dented, swollen, nor rusted, he smashed an end of each with his hammer, and gave Ida her choice of strained spinach or squash.
"Baby food!" she muttered. "Maybe it's just what we need, but to eat baby food with a man wearing a diaper.... Tell me, Roddie, how did you happen to know where to find it?"
"Well, this is the northern end of the city," he answered, shrugging.
"I've been here before."
"Why did the soldier let us go?"
"This watch," he said, touching the radium dial. "It's a talisman."
But Ida's eyes had widened, and the color was gone from her face. She was silent, too, except when asking him to fill his fast-emptied can with rain-water. She didn't finish her own portion, but lay back in the rubble with feet higher than her head, obviously trying to renew her strength.
And when they resumed their walk, her sullen, fear-clouded face showed plainly that he'd given himself away.
But to kill her now, before learning how she planned to cross the supposedly impassable bridge, seemed as purposeless and impulsive as Ida herself. Roddie didn't think, in any case, that her death would satisfy the soldiers. With new and useful information to offer, he might join them as an equal at last. But if his dalliance with this enemy seemed pointless, not even Molly's knitting needles could protect him.
He was sure the soldiers must be tracking the mysterious emanations of his watch dial, and had trouble to keep from glancing over his shoulder at every step. But arrival at the bridge approach ended the need for this self-restraint. Here, difficult going demanded full attention.
He'd never gone as far as the bridge before, not having wanted to look as if he might be leaving the city. The approach was a jungle of concrete with an underbrush of reinforcing-steel that reached for the unwary with rusted spines. Frequently they had to balance on cracked girders, and inch over roadless spots high off the ground.
Here Ida took the lead. When they got to where three approach roads made a clover-leaf, she led him down a side road and into a forest.
Roddie stopped, and seized her arm.
"What are you trying to do?" he demanded.
"I'm taking you with me," Ida said firmly. "Taking you where you belong!"
"No!" he blurted, drawing his hammer. "I can't go, nor let you go. I belong here!"
Ida gasped, twisted loose, and ran. Roddie ran after her.
She wasn't so easily caught. Like a frightened doe, she dashed in and out among the trees, leaped to the bridge's underpinnings where they thrust rustedly from a cliff, and scrambled up the ramp.
Roddie sighed and slowed down. The pavement ended just beyond the cable anchors. From there to the south tower, only an occasional dangling support wire showed where the actual bridge had been suspended. Ida was trapped.
He could take his time. Let the soldiers come up, as they undoubtedly would, to finish the job....
But Ida didn't seem to realize she was trapped. Without hesitation she dashed up the main left-hand suspension cable and ran along its curved steel surface.
For a moment, Roddie thought of letting her go, letting her run up the ever-steepening catenary until—because there were no guard-ropes or handgrips—she simply fell. That would solve his problem.
Except it wouldn't be his solution. Her death wouldn't prove him to his friends.
He set out quickly, before Ida was lost to sight in the thick fog that billowed in straight from the ocean. At first he ran erect along the top of the yard-wide cylinder of twisted metal, but soon the curve steepened. He had to go on all fours, clinging palm and sole.
Blood was on the cable where she'd passed. More blood stained it when he'd followed.
But because his friends knew neither pain nor fatigue, Roddie would admit none either. Nor would he give in to the fear that dizzied him at every downward look. He scrambled on like an automaton, watching only his holds, till he rammed Ida's rear with his head.
She had stopped, trembling and gasping. Roddie clung just below her and looked dazedly around. There was nothing in sight but fog, pierced by the rapier of rusted wire supporting them. Neither end of it was in sight.
Upward lay success, if death were not nearer on the cable. No soldier had ever come even this far, for soldiers, as he'd told Ida, never left the city, were not built to do so. But he was here; with luck, he could capitalize on the differences that had plagued him so long.
"Go on!" he ordered hoarsely. "Move!"
There was neither answer nor result. He broke off an end of loosened wire and jabbed her rear. Ida gasped and crawled on.
Up and up they went, chilled, wet, bleeding, pain-racked, exhausted. Never had Roddie felt so thoroughly the defects of his peculiar non-mechanical construction.
Without realizing it, he acquired a new purpose, a duty as compelling as that of any soldier or fire-watcher. He had to keep that trembling body of his alive, mount to the tall rust tower overhead.
He climbed and he made Ida climb, till, at nightmare's end, the fog thinned and they came into clear, windswept air and clawed up the last hundred feet to sanctuary.
They were completely spent. Without word or thought they crept within the tower, huddled together for warmth on its dank steel deck, and slept for several hours.
Roddie awoke as Ida finished struggling free of his unconscious grip. Limping, he joined her painful walk around the tower. From its openings they looked out on a strange and isolated world.
To the north, where Ida seemed drawn as though by instinct, Mount Tamalpais reared its brushy head, a looming island above a billowy white sea of fog. To the south were the Twin Peaks, a pair of buttons on a cotton sheet. Eastward lay Mount Diablo, bald and brooding, tallest of the peaks and most forbidding.
But westward over the ocean lay the land of gold—of all the kinds of gold there are, from brightest yellow to deepest orange. Only a small portion of the setting sun glared above the fog-bank; the rest seemed to have been broken off and smeared around by a child in love with its color.
Fascinated, Roddie stared for minutes, but turned when Ida showed no interest. She was intent on the tower itself. Following her eyes, Roddie saw his duty made suddenly clear.
Easy to make out even in the fading light was the route by which Invaders could cross to the foot of this tower on the remaining ruins of the road, climb to where he now stood, and then descend the cable over the bridge's gap and catch the city unaware. Easy to estimate was the advantage of even this perilous route over things that scattered on the water and prevented a landing in strength. Easy to see was the need to kill Ida before she carried home this knowledge.
Roddie took the hammer from his waist.
"Don't! Oh, don't!" Ida screamed. She burst into tears and covered her face with scratched and bloodied hands.
Surprised, Roddie withheld the blow. He had wept, as a child, and, weeping, had for the first time learned he differed from his friends. Ida's tears disturbed him, bringing unhappy memories.
"Why should you cry?" he asked comfortingly. "You know your people will come back to avenge you and will destroy my friends."
"But—but my people are your people, too," Ida wailed. "It's so senseless, now, after all our struggle to escape. Don't you see? Your friends are only machines, built by our ancestors. We are Men—and the city is ours, not theirs!"
"It can't be," Roddie objected. "The city surely belongs to those who are superior, and my friends are superior to your people, even to me. Each of us has a purpose, though, while you Invaders seem to be aimless. Each of us helps preserve the city; you only try to rob and end it by destroying it. My people must be the true Men, because they're so much more rational than yours.... And it isn't rational to let you escape."
Ida had turned up her tear-streaked face to stare at him.
"Rational! What's rational about murdering a defenseless girl in cold blood? Don't you realize we're the same sort of being, we two? Don't—don't you remember how we've been with each other all day?"
She paused. Roddie noticed that her eyes were dark and frightened, yet somehow soft, over scarlet cheeks. He had to look away. But he said nothing.
"Never mind!" Ida said viciously. "You can't make me beg. Go ahead and kill—see if it proves you're superior. My people will take over the city regardless of you and me, and regardless of your jumping-jack friends, too! Men can accomplish anything!"
Scornfully she turned and looked toward the western twilight. It was Roddie's turn to stand and stare.
"Purpose!" Ida flung at him over her shoulder. "Logic! Women hear so much of that from men! You're a man, all right! Men always call it logic when they want to destroy! Loyalty to your own sort, kindness, affection—all emotional, aren't they? Not a bit logical. Emotion is for creating, and it's so much more logical to destroy, isn't it?"
She whirled back toward him, advancing as if she wanted to sink her teeth into his throat. "Go ahead. Get it over with—if you have the courage."
It was hard for Roddie to look away from that wrath-crimsoned face, but it was even harder to keep staring into the blaze of her eyes. He compromised by gazing out an opening at the gathering dusk. He thought for a long time before he decided to tuck his hammer away.
"It isn't reasonable to kill you now," he said. "Too dark. You can't possibly get down that half-ruined manway tonight, so let's see how I feel in the morning."
Ida began to weep again, and Roddie found it necessary to comfort her.
And by morning he knew he was a Man.
Question:
How does Roddie figure out why he's different from his friends?
Answer:
|
[
"Put simply, Roddie is Man and his friends in the story are androids. Despite growing up with them and having been brought up by Molly, Roddie is human. One clear difference is the fact that Roddie is able to tear off the limbs of his friends and repair it back together. For example, he tore off Molly’s head when her “spells” became worse, and then later tinkered it back on her head. Another example of this difference is when Ida begins to cry at the end of the story, and Roddie internally expresses that the first time he wept was the first time he noted a difference between him and his android friends, who presumably cannot emote in the same way. Similarly, they do not know pain nor fatigue, so Roddie pretends he doesn’t either. At the very end of the story, he finally accepts that he is Man. \n",
"Roddie knows that he is weaker than Molly, his nursing android, and other soldiers as he has all the sensations, such as coldness, hunger, pain, and thirst, while they don’t. The growth he has been undergoing until recently is also a sign that he is different from his friends, the soldier androids in the city. His yearning to sleep amid the danger makes him think that he was built by an apprentice when he still believes he is one of the androids. He learns from Ida, a girl he meets in his hiding place, that all the androids are heat-sensitive to locate them in the dark. He also realizes the similarities between Ida and him when Ida is supposed to be the Invader. After going through all the obstacles with Ida to cross the bridge and feeling his weakness on the cable, he realizes the differences between his friends and him again. Recalling his memory of weeping after seeing Ida weep when she tries to convince him that he is a man, not an android, Roddie finally acknowledges himself as a man different from his friends.",
"Roddie always knew that he was different from the robots which he lived with. He didn’t have the same build, or the same gears and cables as them. Roddie always wanted to prove that he was the same, and that he could help them fight. When he meets Ida, who is very similar to him, he starts to doubt where he belongs. Ida helps him understand that he is in fact human, and not a robot. He learns that he belongs with the other humans outside the city, and not with the robots. ",
"\nThroughout the story, Roddie ponders the question of identity: he is different from Molly and the soldiers. Roddie can feel pain, he can be hot and cold, exhausted, hungry, or sleepy. While growing up, Roddie knew that the robots surrounding him did not have the same experience. He cried when he realized that he was different. This emotion also made him unique. After meeting Ida, he slowly analyzes her behavioral traits and sees how similar they are. She says that he is a human being, not a robot. He believes rationality creates the superior. But Roddie knows he’s not a completely rational creature - he has feelings, too. Roddie spends enough time with her to finally accept that he is a man, not a soldier. "
] |
51241
|
Bridge Crossing
BY DAVE DRYFOOS
Illustrated by HARRISON
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction May 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
He knew the city was organized for his individual defense, for it had been that way since he was born. But who was his enemy?
In 1849, the mist that sometimes rolled through the Golden Gate was known as fog. In 2149, it had become far more frequent, and was known as smog. By 2349, it was fog again.
But tonight there was smoke mixed with the fog. Roddie could smell it. Somewhere in the forested ruins, fire was burning.
He wasn't worried. The small blaze that smoldered behind him on the cracked concrete floor had consumed everything burnable within blocks; what remained of the gutted concrete office building from which he peered was fire-proof.
But Roddie was himself aflame with anger. As always when Invaders broke in from the north, he'd been left behind with his nurse, Molly, while the soldiers went out to fight.
And nowadays Molly's presence wasn't the comfort it used to be. He felt almost ready to jump out of his skin, the way she rocked and knitted in that grating ruined chair, saying over and over again, "The soldiers don't want little boys. The soldiers don't want little boys. The soldiers don't—"
"I'm not a little boy!" Roddie suddenly shouted. "I'm full-grown and I've never even seen an Invader. Why won't you let me go and fight?"
Fiercely he crossed the bare, gritty floor and shook Molly's shoulder. She rattled under his jarring hand, and abruptly changed the subject.
"A is for Atom, B is for Bomb, C is for Corpse—" she chanted.
Roddie reached into her shapeless dress and pinched. Lately that had helped her over these spells. But this time, though it stopped the kindergarten song, the treatment only started something worse.
"Wuzzums hungry?" Molly cooed, still rocking.
Utterly disgusted, Roddie ripped her head off her neck.
It was a completely futile gesture. The complicated mind that had cared for him and taught him speech and the alphabet hadn't made him a mechanic, and his only tool was a broken-handled screwdriver.
He was still tinkering when the soldiers came in. While they lined up along the wall, he put Molly's head back on her neck.
She gaped coyly at the new arrivals. "Hello, boys," she simpered.
"Looking for a good time?"
Roddie slapped her to silence, reflecting briefly that there were many things he didn't know about Molly. But there was work to be done. Carefully he framed the ritual words she'd taught him: "Soldiers, come to attention and report!"
There were eleven of them, six feet tall, with four limbs and eight extremities. They stood uniformly, the thumbs on each pair of hands touching along the center line of the legs, front feet turned out at an angle of forty-five degrees, rear feet turned inward at thirty degrees.
"Sir," they chorused, "we have met the enemy and he is ours."
He inspected them. All were scratched and dented, but one in particular seemed badly damaged. His left arm was almost severed at the shoulder.
"Come here, fellow," Roddie said. "Let's see if I can fix that."
The soldier took a step forward, lurched suddenly, stopped, and whipped out a bayonet.
"Death to Invaders!" he yelled, and charged crazily.
Molly stepped in front of him.
"You aren't being very nice to my baby," she murmured, and thrust her knitting needles into his eyes.
Roddie jumped behind him, knocked off his helmet, and pressed a soft spot on his conical skull. The soldier collapsed to the floor.
Roddie salvaged and returned Molly's needles. Then he examined the patient, tearing him apart as a boy dismembers an alarm clock.
It was lucky he did. The left arm's pair of hands suddenly writhed off the floor in an effort to choke him. But because the arm was detached at the shoulder and therefore blind, he escaped the clutching onslaught and could goad the reflexing hands into assaulting one another harmlessly.
Meanwhile, the other soldiers left, except for one, apparently another casualty, who stumbled on his way out and fell into the fire. By the time Roddie had hauled him clear, damage was beyond repair. Roddie swore, then decided to try combining parts of this casualty with pieces of the other to make a whole one.
To get more light for the operation, he poked up the fire. Roddie was new at his work, and took it seriously. It alarmed him to watch the soldiers melt away, gradually succumbing to battle damage, shamed him to see the empty ruins burn section by section as the Invaders repeatedly broke through and had to be burned out.
Soon there would be nothing left of the Private Property Keep Out that, according to Molly's bedtime story, the Owners had entrusted to them when driven away by radioactivity. Soon the soldiers themselves would be gone. None would remain to guard the city but a few strayed servants like Molly, and an occasional Civil Defender.
And himself, Roddie reflected, spitting savagely into the fire. He might remain. But how he fitted into the picture, he didn't know. And Molly, who claimed to have found him in the ruins after a fight with Invaders twenty years before, couldn't or wouldn't say.
Well, for as long as possible, Roddie decided, he'd do his duty as the others did theirs—single-mindedly. Eventually the soldiers might accept him as one of themselves; meanwhile, this newly attempted first aid was useful to them.
He gave the fire a final poke and then paused, wondering if, when heated, his screwdriver could make an unfastened end of wire stick on the grayish spot where it seemed to belong.
Stretching prone to blow the embers hot so he could try out his new idea, Roddie got too close to the flames. Instantly the room filled with the stench of singed hair. Roddie drew angrily back, beating out the sparks in his uncut blond mane.
As he stood slapping his head and muttering, a deranged Civil Defense firefighter popped into the doorway and covered him with carbon dioxide foam.
Roddie fled. His life-long friends were not merely wearing out, they were unbearably wearing.
In the street, even before he'd wiped off the foam, he regretted his flight. The fire was back home. And here in the cold of this fog-shrouded canyon, a mere trail between heaped-up walls of rubble, the diaper he wore felt inadequate against the pre-dawn cold. His cherished weapon, a magnetic tack-hammer, was chill beneath the diaper's top, and the broken, radium-dialed wristwatch suspended from a string around his neck hung clammy against his chest. He stood irresolute on numbing bare feet, and considered returning to the more familiar bedlam.
But colder than cold was his shame at being cold. Molly never was, though she knew how to keep him warm, nor were the others. Hunger, thirst, pain and coldness were sensations never experienced by his friends. Like the growth he'd been undergoing till recently, these were things of ignominy, to be hidden as far as possible from inquiring eyes. Cold as it was, he'd have to hide.
Temporarily, the darkness concealed him, though it was not quite complete. From above the fog, the moon played vaguely deceptive light on the splinters of architecture looming toward it. Some distance off, an owl hooted, but here nocturnal rodents felt free to squeak and rustle as they scampered.
The world seemed ghostly. Yet it wasn't dead; it merely lurked. And as an irrepressible yawn reminded Roddie of his absurd need for sleep even in the midst of danger, he concluded for the thousandth time that the One who'd built him must have been an apprentice.
For just such reasons he'd developed the hideout toward which he now walked. It had been the haven of his adolescence, when the discovery of how much he differed from his friends had been a shock, and the shock itself a difference to be hidden.
His hiding place was a manhole, dead center in the dead street. A weathered bronze bar, carefully placed in the cover's slotted rim, was the levering key that opened its door.
Everything was wrong tonight! He couldn't even find the bar. Of course that spoiled things, because the bar was a roller on which to move the heavy cover from below, and a support that held it ajar for ventilation.
But the example of his friends had taught him above all else to carry out every purpose. Molly was a nurse; she had raised him despite all obstacles. The soldiers were guards; they protected the ruins against everything larger than a rat. The firefighter had put even him out when he was aflame....
Anyhow, the manhole cover had been loosened by his frequent handling. He lifted it aside by main strength, then flattened himself to the street, and felt with his feet for the top rung.
Halfway down the iron ladder, something made him pause. He looked, but saw only blackness. He listened, sniffed, found nothing. What could have entered through the iron cover?
He sneered at his own timidity and jumped to the bottom.
It was warm! The dry bottom of the hole had the temperature of body heat, as if a large animal had recently rested there!
Quickly, Roddie drew the hammer from his waist. Then, with weapon ready for an instantaneous blow, he stretched his left hand through the darkness. He touched something warm, softish. Gingerly he felt over that curving surface for identifying features.
While Roddie investigated by touch, his long fingers were suddenly seized and bitten. At the same time, his right shin received a savage kick. And his own retaliatory blow was checked in mid-swing by an unexpected voice.
"Get your filthy hands off me!" it whispered angrily. "Who do you think you are?"
Startled, he dropped his hammer. "I'm Roddie," he said, squatting to fumble for it. "Who do you think you are?"
"I'm Ida, naturally! Just how many girls are there in this raiding party?"
His first Invader—and he had dropped his weapon!
Scrabbling fearfully in the dust for his hammer, Roddie paused suddenly. This girl—whatever that was—seemed to think him one of her own kind. There was a chance, not much, but worth taking, to turn delay to advantage. Maybe he could learn something of value before he killed her. That would make the soldiers accept him!
He stalled, seeking a gambit. "How would I know how many girls there are?"
Half expecting a blow, he got instead an apology. "I'm sorry," the girl said. "I should have known. Never even heard your name before, either. Roddie.... Whose boat did you come in, Roddie?"
Boat? What was a boat? "How would I know?" he repeated, voice tight with fear of discovery.
If she noticed the tension, she didn't show it. Certainly her whisper was friendly enough. "Oh, you're one of the fellows from Bodega, then. They shoved a boy into our boat at the last minute, too. Tough, wasn't it, getting separated in the fog and tide like that? If only we didn't have to use boats.... But, say, how are we going to get away from here?"
"I wouldn't know," Roddie said, closing his fingers on the hammer, and rising. "How did you get in?"
"Followed your footprints. It was sundown and I saw human tracks in the dust and they led me here. Where were you?"
"Scouting around," Roddie said vaguely. "How did you know I was a man when I came back?"
"Because you couldn't see me, silly! You know perfectly well these androids are heat-sensitive and can locate us in the dark!"
Indeed he did know! Many times he'd felt ashamed that Molly could find him whenever she wanted to, even here in the manhole. But perhaps the manhole would help him now to redeem himself....
"I'd like to get a look at you," he said.
The girl laughed self-consciously. "It's getting gray out. You'll see me soon enough."
But she'd see him , Roddie realized. He had to talk fast.
"What'll we do when it's light?" he asked.
"Well, I guess the boats have gone," Ida said. "You could swim the Gate, I guess—you seem tall and strong enough. But I couldn't. You'll think it's crazy, but I've given this some thought, and even looked it over from the other side. I expect to try the Golden Gate Bridge!"
Now he was getting somewhere! The bridge was ruined, impassable. Even her own people had crossed the Strait by other means. But if there were a way over the bridge....
"It's broken," he said. "How in the world can we cross it?"
"Oh, you'll find out, if you take me up there. I—I don't want to be alone, Roddie. Will you go with me? Now?"
Well, she could be made to point out the route before he killed her— if nothing happened when she saw him.
Uneasy, Roddie hefted the hammer in his hand.
A giggle broke the pause. "It's nice of you to wait and let me go first up the ladder," the girl said. "But where the heck is the rusty old thing?"
"I'll go first," said Roddie. He might need the advantage. "The ladder's right behind me."
He climbed with hammer in teeth, and stretched his left hand from street level to grasp and neutralize the girl's right. Then, nervously fingering his weapon, he stared at her in the thin gray dawn.
She was short and lean, except for roundnesses here and there. From her shapeless doeskin dress stretched slender legs that tapered to feet that were bare, tiny, and, like her hands, only two in number.
Roddie was pleased. They were evenly matched as to members, and that would make things easy when the time came.
He looked into her face. It smiled at him, tanned and ruddy, with a full mouth and bright dark eyes that hid under long lashes when he looked too long.
Startling, those wary eyes. Concealing. For a moment he felt a rush of fear, but she gave his hand a squeeze before twisting loose, and burst into sudden laughter.
"Diapers!" she chortled, struggling to keep her voice low. "My big, strong, blond and blue-eyed hero goes into battle wearing diapers, and carrying only a hammer to fight with! You're the most unforgettable character I have ever known!"
He'd passed inspection, then—so far. He expelled his withheld breath, and said, "I think you'll find me a little odd, in some ways."
"Oh, not at all," Ida replied quickly. "Different, yes, but I wouldn't say odd."
When they started down the street, she was nervous despite Roddie's assertion that he knew where the soldiers were posted. He wondered if she felt some of the doubt he'd tried to conceal, shared his visions of what the soldiers might do if they found him brazenly strolling with an Invader. They might not believe he was only questioning a prisoner.
Every day, his friends were becoming more unpredictable.
For that very reason, because he didn't know what precautions would do any good, he took a chance and walked openly to the bridge by the most direct route. In time this apparent assurance stilled Ida's fears, and she began to talk.
Many of the things she said were beyond his experience and meaningless to him, but he did note with interest how effective the soldiers had been.
"It's awful," Ida said. "So few young men are left, so many casualties....
"But why do you—we—keep up the fight?" Roddie asked. "I mean, the soldiers will never leave the city; their purpose is to guard it and they can't leave, so they won't attack. Let them alone, and there'll be plenty of young men."
"Well!" said Ida, sharply. "You need indoctrination! Didn't they ever tell you that the city is our home, even if the stupid androids do keep us out? Don't you know how dependent we are on these raids for all our tools and things?"
She sounded suspicious. Roddie shot her a furtive, startled glance. But she wasn't standing off to fight him. On the contrary, she was too close for both comfort and combat. She bumped him hip and shoulder every few steps, and if he edged away, she followed.
He went on with his questioning. "Why are you here? I mean, sure, the others are after tools and things, but what's your purpose?"
Ida shrugged. "I'll admit no girl has ever done it before," she said,
"but I thought I could help with the wounded. That's why I have no weapon."
She hesitated, glanced covertly up at him, and went on with a rush of words. "It's the lack of men, I guess. All the girls are kind of bored and hopeless, so I got this bright idea and stowed away on one of the boats when it was dark and the fog had settled down. Do you think I was being silly?"
"No, but you do seem a little purposeless."
In silence they trudged through a vast area of charred wood and concrete foundations on the northern end of the city. Thick fog over the water hid Alcatraz, but in-shore visibility was better, and they could see the beginning of the bridge approach.
A stone rattled nearby. There was a clink of metal. Ida gasped, and clung to Roddie's arm.
"Behind me!" he whispered urgently. "Get behind me and hold on!"
He felt Ida's arms encircling his waist, her chin digging into his back below the left shoulder. Facing them, a hundred feet away, stood a soldier. He looked contemptuous, hostile.
"It's all right," Roddie said, his voice breaking.
There was a long, sullen, heart-stopping stare. Then the soldier turned and walked away.
Ida's grip loosened, and he could feel her sag behind him. Roddie turned and held her. With eyes closed, she pressed cold blue lips to his. He grimaced and turned away his head.
Ida's response was quick. "Forgive me," she breathed, and slipped from his arms, but she held herself erect. "I was so scared. And then we've had no sleep, no food or water."
Roddie was familiar with these signs of weakness, proud of appearing to deny his own humiliating needs.
"I guess you're not as strong as me," he said smugly. "I'll take care of you. Of course we can't sleep now, but I'll get food and water."
Leaving her to follow, he turned left to the ruins of a supermarket he had previously visited, demonstrating his superior strength by setting a pace Ida couldn't match. By the time she caught up with him, he had grubbed out a few cans of the special size that Molly always chose. Picking two that were neither dented, swollen, nor rusted, he smashed an end of each with his hammer, and gave Ida her choice of strained spinach or squash.
"Baby food!" she muttered. "Maybe it's just what we need, but to eat baby food with a man wearing a diaper.... Tell me, Roddie, how did you happen to know where to find it?"
"Well, this is the northern end of the city," he answered, shrugging.
"I've been here before."
"Why did the soldier let us go?"
"This watch," he said, touching the radium dial. "It's a talisman."
But Ida's eyes had widened, and the color was gone from her face. She was silent, too, except when asking him to fill his fast-emptied can with rain-water. She didn't finish her own portion, but lay back in the rubble with feet higher than her head, obviously trying to renew her strength.
And when they resumed their walk, her sullen, fear-clouded face showed plainly that he'd given himself away.
But to kill her now, before learning how she planned to cross the supposedly impassable bridge, seemed as purposeless and impulsive as Ida herself. Roddie didn't think, in any case, that her death would satisfy the soldiers. With new and useful information to offer, he might join them as an equal at last. But if his dalliance with this enemy seemed pointless, not even Molly's knitting needles could protect him.
He was sure the soldiers must be tracking the mysterious emanations of his watch dial, and had trouble to keep from glancing over his shoulder at every step. But arrival at the bridge approach ended the need for this self-restraint. Here, difficult going demanded full attention.
He'd never gone as far as the bridge before, not having wanted to look as if he might be leaving the city. The approach was a jungle of concrete with an underbrush of reinforcing-steel that reached for the unwary with rusted spines. Frequently they had to balance on cracked girders, and inch over roadless spots high off the ground.
Here Ida took the lead. When they got to where three approach roads made a clover-leaf, she led him down a side road and into a forest.
Roddie stopped, and seized her arm.
"What are you trying to do?" he demanded.
"I'm taking you with me," Ida said firmly. "Taking you where you belong!"
"No!" he blurted, drawing his hammer. "I can't go, nor let you go. I belong here!"
Ida gasped, twisted loose, and ran. Roddie ran after her.
She wasn't so easily caught. Like a frightened doe, she dashed in and out among the trees, leaped to the bridge's underpinnings where they thrust rustedly from a cliff, and scrambled up the ramp.
Roddie sighed and slowed down. The pavement ended just beyond the cable anchors. From there to the south tower, only an occasional dangling support wire showed where the actual bridge had been suspended. Ida was trapped.
He could take his time. Let the soldiers come up, as they undoubtedly would, to finish the job....
But Ida didn't seem to realize she was trapped. Without hesitation she dashed up the main left-hand suspension cable and ran along its curved steel surface.
For a moment, Roddie thought of letting her go, letting her run up the ever-steepening catenary until—because there were no guard-ropes or handgrips—she simply fell. That would solve his problem.
Except it wouldn't be his solution. Her death wouldn't prove him to his friends.
He set out quickly, before Ida was lost to sight in the thick fog that billowed in straight from the ocean. At first he ran erect along the top of the yard-wide cylinder of twisted metal, but soon the curve steepened. He had to go on all fours, clinging palm and sole.
Blood was on the cable where she'd passed. More blood stained it when he'd followed.
But because his friends knew neither pain nor fatigue, Roddie would admit none either. Nor would he give in to the fear that dizzied him at every downward look. He scrambled on like an automaton, watching only his holds, till he rammed Ida's rear with his head.
She had stopped, trembling and gasping. Roddie clung just below her and looked dazedly around. There was nothing in sight but fog, pierced by the rapier of rusted wire supporting them. Neither end of it was in sight.
Upward lay success, if death were not nearer on the cable. No soldier had ever come even this far, for soldiers, as he'd told Ida, never left the city, were not built to do so. But he was here; with luck, he could capitalize on the differences that had plagued him so long.
"Go on!" he ordered hoarsely. "Move!"
There was neither answer nor result. He broke off an end of loosened wire and jabbed her rear. Ida gasped and crawled on.
Up and up they went, chilled, wet, bleeding, pain-racked, exhausted. Never had Roddie felt so thoroughly the defects of his peculiar non-mechanical construction.
Without realizing it, he acquired a new purpose, a duty as compelling as that of any soldier or fire-watcher. He had to keep that trembling body of his alive, mount to the tall rust tower overhead.
He climbed and he made Ida climb, till, at nightmare's end, the fog thinned and they came into clear, windswept air and clawed up the last hundred feet to sanctuary.
They were completely spent. Without word or thought they crept within the tower, huddled together for warmth on its dank steel deck, and slept for several hours.
Roddie awoke as Ida finished struggling free of his unconscious grip. Limping, he joined her painful walk around the tower. From its openings they looked out on a strange and isolated world.
To the north, where Ida seemed drawn as though by instinct, Mount Tamalpais reared its brushy head, a looming island above a billowy white sea of fog. To the south were the Twin Peaks, a pair of buttons on a cotton sheet. Eastward lay Mount Diablo, bald and brooding, tallest of the peaks and most forbidding.
But westward over the ocean lay the land of gold—of all the kinds of gold there are, from brightest yellow to deepest orange. Only a small portion of the setting sun glared above the fog-bank; the rest seemed to have been broken off and smeared around by a child in love with its color.
Fascinated, Roddie stared for minutes, but turned when Ida showed no interest. She was intent on the tower itself. Following her eyes, Roddie saw his duty made suddenly clear.
Easy to make out even in the fading light was the route by which Invaders could cross to the foot of this tower on the remaining ruins of the road, climb to where he now stood, and then descend the cable over the bridge's gap and catch the city unaware. Easy to estimate was the advantage of even this perilous route over things that scattered on the water and prevented a landing in strength. Easy to see was the need to kill Ida before she carried home this knowledge.
Roddie took the hammer from his waist.
"Don't! Oh, don't!" Ida screamed. She burst into tears and covered her face with scratched and bloodied hands.
Surprised, Roddie withheld the blow. He had wept, as a child, and, weeping, had for the first time learned he differed from his friends. Ida's tears disturbed him, bringing unhappy memories.
"Why should you cry?" he asked comfortingly. "You know your people will come back to avenge you and will destroy my friends."
"But—but my people are your people, too," Ida wailed. "It's so senseless, now, after all our struggle to escape. Don't you see? Your friends are only machines, built by our ancestors. We are Men—and the city is ours, not theirs!"
"It can't be," Roddie objected. "The city surely belongs to those who are superior, and my friends are superior to your people, even to me. Each of us has a purpose, though, while you Invaders seem to be aimless. Each of us helps preserve the city; you only try to rob and end it by destroying it. My people must be the true Men, because they're so much more rational than yours.... And it isn't rational to let you escape."
Ida had turned up her tear-streaked face to stare at him.
"Rational! What's rational about murdering a defenseless girl in cold blood? Don't you realize we're the same sort of being, we two? Don't—don't you remember how we've been with each other all day?"
She paused. Roddie noticed that her eyes were dark and frightened, yet somehow soft, over scarlet cheeks. He had to look away. But he said nothing.
"Never mind!" Ida said viciously. "You can't make me beg. Go ahead and kill—see if it proves you're superior. My people will take over the city regardless of you and me, and regardless of your jumping-jack friends, too! Men can accomplish anything!"
Scornfully she turned and looked toward the western twilight. It was Roddie's turn to stand and stare.
"Purpose!" Ida flung at him over her shoulder. "Logic! Women hear so much of that from men! You're a man, all right! Men always call it logic when they want to destroy! Loyalty to your own sort, kindness, affection—all emotional, aren't they? Not a bit logical. Emotion is for creating, and it's so much more logical to destroy, isn't it?"
She whirled back toward him, advancing as if she wanted to sink her teeth into his throat. "Go ahead. Get it over with—if you have the courage."
It was hard for Roddie to look away from that wrath-crimsoned face, but it was even harder to keep staring into the blaze of her eyes. He compromised by gazing out an opening at the gathering dusk. He thought for a long time before he decided to tuck his hammer away.
"It isn't reasonable to kill you now," he said. "Too dark. You can't possibly get down that half-ruined manway tonight, so let's see how I feel in the morning."
Ida began to weep again, and Roddie found it necessary to comfort her.
And by morning he knew he was a Man.
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What is the relationship between Dobbin and Willard?
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about Galactic Ghost by Walter Kubilius.
Relevant chunks:
GALACTIC GHOST
By WALTER KUBILIUS
The Flying Dutchman of space was a harbinger of death. But Willard wasn't superstitions. He had seen the phantom—and lived.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
The only friend in space Willard had ever known was dying. Dobbin's lips were parched and his breath came spasmodically. The tips of his fingers that had so many times caressed the control board of the Mary Lou were now black as meteor dust.
"We'll never see Earth again," he whispered feebly, plucked weakly at the cover.
"Nonsense!" Willard broke in hurriedly, hoping that the dying man would not see through the lie. "We've got the sun's gravity helping us drift back to Earth! We'll be there soon! You'll get well soon and we'll start to work again on a new idea of mine...." His voice trailed helplessly away and the words were lost. It was no use.
The sick man did not hear him. Two tears rolled down his cheeks. His face contorted as he tried to withhold a sob.
"To see Earth again!" he said weakly. "To walk on solid ground once more!"
"Four years!" Willard echoed faintly. He knew how his space mate felt. No man can spend four years away from his home planet, and fail to be anguished. A man could live without friends, without fortune, but no man could live without Earth. He was like Anteus, for only the feel of the solid ground under his feet could give him courage to go among the stars.
Willard also knew what he dared not admit to himself. He, too, like Dobbin, would never see Earth again. Perhaps, some thousand years from now, some lonely wanderers would find their battered hulk of a ship in space and bring them home again.
Dobbin motioned to him and, in answer to a last request, Willard lifted him so he faced the port window for a final look at the panorama of the stars.
Dobbin's eyes, dimming and half closed, took in the vast play of the heavens and in his mind he relived the days when in a frail craft he first crossed interstellar space. But for Earth-loneliness Dobbin would die a happy man, knowing that he had lived as much and as deeply as any man could.
Silently the two men watched. Dobbin's eyes opened suddenly and a tremor seized his body. He turned painfully and looked at Willard.
"I saw it!" his voice cracked, trembling.
"Saw what?"
"It's true! It's true! It comes whenever a space man dies! It's there!"
"In heaven's name, Dobbin," Willard demanded, "What do you see? What is it?"
Dobbin lifted his dark bony arm and pointed out into star-studded space.
"The Ghost Ship!"
Something clicked in Willard's memory. He had heard it spoken of in whispers by drunken space men and professional tellers of fairy tales. But he had never put any stock in them. In some forgotten corner of Dobbin's mind the legend of the Ghost Ship must have lain, to come up in this time of delirium.
"There's nothing there," he said firmly.
"It's come—for me!" Dobbin cried. He turned his head slowly toward Willard, tried to say something and then fell back upon the pillow. His mouth was open and his eyes stared unseeing ahead. Dobbin was now one with the vanished pioneers of yesterday. Willard was alone.
For two days, reckoned in Earth time, Willard kept vigil over the body of his friend and space mate. When the time was up he did what was necessary and nothing remained of Harry Dobbin, the best friend he had ever had. The atoms of his body were now pure energy stored away in the useless motors of the Mary Lou .
The weeks that followed were like a blur in Willard's mind. Though the ship was utterly incapable of motion, the chance meteor that damaged it had spared the convertors and assimilators. Through constant care and attention the frail balance that meant life or death could be kept. The substance of waste and refuse was torn down and rebuilt as precious food and air. It was even possible to create more than was needed.
When this was done, Willard immediately regretted it. For it would be then that the days and the weeks would roll by endlessly. Sometimes he thought he would go mad when, sitting at the useless control board, which was his habit, he would stare for hours and hours in the direction of the Sun where he knew the Earth would be. A great loneliness would then seize upon him and an agony that no man had ever known would tear at his heart. He would then turn away, full of despair and hopeless pain.
Two years after Dobbin's death a strange thing happened. Willard was sitting at his accustomed place facing the unmoving vista of the stars. A chance glance at Orion's belt froze him still. A star had flickered! Distinctly, as if a light veil had been placed over it and then lifted, it dimmed and turned bright again. What strange phenomena was this? He watched and then another star faded momentarily in the exact fashion. And then a third! And a fourth! And a fifth!
Willard's heart gave a leap and the lethargy of two years vanished instantly. Here, at last, was something to do. It might be only a few minutes before he would understand what it was, but those few minutes would help while away the maddening long hours. Perhaps it was a mass of fine meteorites or a pocket of gas that did not disperse, or even a moving warp of space-light. Whatever it was, it was a phenomena worth investigating and Willard seized upon it as a dying man seizes upon the last flashing seconds of life.
Willard traced its course by the flickering stars and gradually plotted its semi-circular course. It was not from the solar system but, instead, headed toward it. A rapid check-up on his calculations caused his heart to beat in ever quickening excitement. Whatever it was, it would reach the Mary Lou .
Again he looked out the port. Unquestionably the faint mass was nearing his ship. It was round in shape and almost invisible. The stars, though dimmed, could still be seen through it. There was something about its form that reminded him of an old-fashioned rocket ship. It resembled one of those that had done pioneer service in the lanes forty years ago or more. Resembled one? It was one! Unquestionably, though half-invisible and like a piece of glass immersed in water, it was a rocket ship.
But the instruments on the control board could not lie. The presence of any material body within a hundred thousand miles would be revealed. But the needle on the gauge did not quiver. Nothing indicated the presence of a ship. But the evidence of his eyes was incontestable.
Or was it? Doubt gripped him. Did the loneliness of all these years in space twist his mind till he was imagining the appearance of faint ghost-like rocket ships?
The thought shot through his mind like a thunder bolt. Ghost Ship! Was this the thing that Dobbin had seen before he died? But that was impossible. Ghost Ships existed nowhere but in legends and tall tales told by men drunk with the liquors of Mars.
"There is no ship there. There is no ship there," Willard told himself over and over again as he looked at the vague outline of the ship, now motionless a few hundred miles away.
Deep within him a faint voice cried, " It's come—for me! " but Willard stilled it. This was no fantasy. There was a scientific reason for it. There must be! Or should there be? Throughout all Earth history there had been Ghost Ships sailing the Seven Seas—ships doomed to roam forever because their crew broke some unbreakable law. If this was true for the ships of the seas, why not for the ships of empty space?
He looked again at the strange ship. It was motionless. At least it was not nearing him. Willard could see nothing but its vague outline. A moment later he could discern a faint motion. It was turning! The Ghost Ship was turning back! Unconsciously Willard reached out with his hand as if to hold it back, for when it was gone he would be alone again.
But the Ghost Ship went on. Its outline became smaller and smaller, fainter and fainter.
Trembling, Willard turned away from the window as he saw the rocket recede and vanish into the emptiness of space. Once more the dreaded loneliness of the stars descended upon him.
Seven years passed and back on Earth in a small newspaper that Willard would never see there was published a small item:
" Arden, Rocketport —Thirteen years ago the Space Ship Mary Lou under John Willard and Larry Dobbin left the Rocket Port for the exploration of an alleged planetoid beyond Pluto. The ship has not been seen or heard from since. J. Willard, II, son of the lost explorer, is planning the manufacture of a super-size exploration ship to be called Mary Lou II , in memory of his father."
Memories die hard. A man who is alone in space with nothing but the cold friendship of star-light looks back upon memories as the only things both dear and precious to him.
Willard, master and lone survivor of the Mary Lou , knew this well for he had tried to rip the memories of Earth out of his heart to ease the anguish of solitude within him. But it was a thing that could not be done.
And so it was that each night—for Willard did not give up the Earth-habit of keeping time—Willard dreamed of the days he had known on Earth.
In his mind's eye, he saw himself walking the streets of Arden and feeling the crunch of snow or the soft slap of rainwater under his feet. He heard again, in his mind, the voices of friends he knew. How beautiful and perfect was each voice! How filled with warmth and friendship! There was the voice of his beautiful wife whom he would never see again. There were the gruff and deep voices of his co-workers and scientists.
Above all there were the voices of the cities, and the fields and the shops where he had worked. All these had their individual voices. Odd that he had never realized it before, but things become clearer to a man who is alone.
Clearer? Perhaps not. Perhaps they become more clouded. How could he, for example, explain the phenomena of the Ghost Ship? Was it really only a product of his imagination? What of all the others who had seen it? Was it possible for many different men under many different situations to have the same exact illusion? Reason denied that. But perhaps space itself denies reason.
Grimly he retraced the legend of the Ghost Ship. A chance phrase here and a story there put together all that he knew:
Doomed for all eternity to wander in the empty star-lanes, the Ghost Ship haunts the Solar System that gave it birth. And this is its tragedy, for it is the home of spacemen who can never go home again. When your last measure of fuel is burnt and your ship becomes a lifeless hulk—the Ghost will come—for you!
And this is all there was to the legend. Merely a tale of some fairy ship told to amuse and to while away the days of a star-voyage. Bitterly, Willard dismissed it from his mind.
Another year of loneliness passed. And still another. Willard lost track of the days. It was difficult to keep time for to what purpose could time be kept. Here in space there was no time, nor was there reason for clocks and records. Days and months and years became meaningless words for things that once may have had meaning. About three years must have passed since his last record in the log book of the Mary Lou . At that time, he remembered, he suffered another great disappointment. On the port side there suddenly appeared a full-sized rocket ship. For many minutes Willard was half-mad with joy thinking that a passing ship was ready to rescue him. But the joy was short-lived, for the rocket ship abruptly turned away and slowly disappeared. As Willard watched it go away he saw the light of a distant star through the space ship. A heart-breaking agony fell upon him. It was not a ship from Earth. It was the Ghost Ship, mocking him.
Since then Willard did not look out the window of his craft. A vague fear troubled him that perhaps the Ghost Ship might be here, waiting and watching, and that he would go mad if he saw it.
How many years passed he could not tell. But this he knew. He was no longer a young man. Perhaps fifteen years has disappeared into nothing. Perhaps twenty. He did not know and he did not care.
Willard awoke from a deep sleep and prepared his bed. He did it, not because it was necessary, but because it was a habit that had long been ingrained in him through the years.
He checked and rechecked every part of the still functioning mechanism of the ship. The radio, even though there was no one to call, was in perfect order. The speed-recording dials, even though there was no speed to record, were in perfect order. And so with every machine. All was in perfect order. Perfect useless order, he thought bitterly, when there was no way whatever to get sufficient power to get back to Earth, long forgotten Earth.
He was leaning back in his chair when a vague uneasiness seized him. He arose and slowly walked over to the window, his age already being marked in the ache of his bones. Looking out into the silent theater of the stars, he suddenly froze.
There was a ship, coming toward him!
For a moment the reason in his mind tottered on a balance. Doubt assailed him. Was this the Ghost Ship come to torment him again? But no phantom this! It was a life and blood rocket ship from Earth! Starlight shone on it and not through it! Its lines, window, vents were all solid and had none of the ghost-like quality he remembered seeing in the Ghost Ship in his youth.
For another split second he thought that perhaps he, too, like Dobbin, had gone mad and that the ship would vanish just as it approached him.
The tapping of the space-telegrapher reassured him.
"CALLING SPACE SHIP MARY LOU," the message rapped out, "CALLING SPACE SHIP MARY LOU."
With trembling fingers that he could scarcely control, old Willard sent the answering message.
"SPACE SHIP MARY LOU REPLYING. RECEIVED MESSAGE. THANK GOD!"
He broke off, unable to continue. His heart was ready to burst within him and the tears of joy were already welling in his eyes. He listened to the happiest message he had ever heard:
"NOTICE THAT SPACE SHIP MARY LOU IS DISABLED AND NOT SPACE WORTHY. YOU ARE INVITED TO COME ABOARD. HAVE YOU SPACE SUIT AND—ARE YOU ABLE TO COME?"
Willard, already sobbing with joy, could send only two words.
"YES! COMING!"
The years of waiting were over. At last he was free of the Mary Lou . In a dream like trance, he dressed in his space suit, pathetically glad that he had already checked every detail of it a short time ago. He realized suddenly that everything about the Mary Lou was hateful to him. It was here that his best friend died, and it was here that twenty years of his life were wasted completely in solitude and despair.
He took one last look and stepped into the air-lock.
The Earth-ship, he did not see its name, was only a hundred yards away and a man was already at the air-lock waiting to help him. A rope was tossed to him. He reached for it and made his way to the ship, leaving the Mary Lou behind him forever.
Suddenly the world dropped away from him. Willard could neither see nor say anything. His heart was choked with emotion.
"It's all right," a kindly voice assured him, "You're safe now."
He had the sensation of being carried by several men and then placed in bed. The quiet of deep sleep descended upon him.
He woke many times in the following days, but the privations of the passing years had drained his strength and his mind, had made him so much of a hermit that the presence of other men frightened him to the point of gibbering insanity.
He knew that the food and drink were drugged, for after eating he never remembered seeing the men enter the room to care for him and to remove the dirty dishes. But there was enough sanity in his mind to also realize that, without the gradual reawakening of his senses to the value of human companionship, he might not be able to stand the mental shock of moving about among his people back on Earth.
During those passing days, he savored each new impression, comparing it with what he remembered from that age-long past when he and his friends had walked on Earth's great plains and ridden on the oceans' sleek ships or flown with the wings of birds over the mountain ranges. And each impression was doubly enjoyable, for his memory was hazy and confused.
Gradually, though, his mind cleared; he remembered the past, and he no longer was afraid of the men who visited him from time to time. But there was a strangeness about the men that he could not fathom; they refused to talk about anything, any subject, other than the actual running of the great ship. Always, when he asked his eager questions, they mumbled and drifted away.
And then in his third week on the rescue ship, he went to sleep one night while peering from the port hole at the blue ball of Earth swimming in the blackness of space. He slept and he dreamed of the years he had spent by himself in the drifting, lifeless hulk of the Mary Lou . His dreams were vivid, peopled with men and women he had once known, and were horrible with the fantasies of terror that years of solitary brooding had implanted deep in his mind.
He awoke with a start and a cry of alarm ran through him as he thought that perhaps he might still be in the Mary Lou . The warm, smiling face of a man quickly reassured him.
"I'll call the captain," the space man said. "He said to let him know when you came to."
Willard could only nod in weak and grateful acceptance. It was true! He pressed his head back against the bed's pillows. How soft! How warm! He yawned and stretched his arms as a thrill of happiness shot through his entire body.
He would see Earth again! That single thought ran over and over in his mind without stopping. He would see Earth again! Perhaps not this year and perhaps not the next—for the ship might be on some extra-Plutonian expedition. But even if it would take years before it returned to home base Willard knew that those years would fly quickly if Earth was at the end of the trail.
Though he had aged, he still had many years before him. And those years, he vowed, would be spent on Earth and nowhere else.
The captain, a pleasant old fellow, came into the room as Willard stood up and tried to walk. The gravity here was a bit different from that of his ship, but he would manage.
"How do you feel, Space Man Willard?"
"Oh, you know me?" Willard looked at him in surprise, and then smiled,
"Of course, you looked through the log book of the Mary Lou ."
The captain nodded and Willard noticed with surprise that he was a very old man.
"You don't know how much I suffered there," Willard said slowly, measuring each word. "Years in space—all alone! It's a horrible thing!"
"Yes?" the old captain said.
"Many times I thought I would go completely mad. It was only the thought and hope that some day, somehow, an Earth-ship would find me and help me get back to Earth. If it was not for that, I would have died. I could think of nothing but of Earth, of blue green water, of vast open spaces and the good brown earth. How beautiful it must be now!"
A note of sadness, matched only by that of Willard's, entered the captain's eyes.
"I want to walk on Earth just once—then I can die."
Willard stopped. A happy dreamy smile touched his lips.
"When will we go to Earth?" he asked.
The Captain did not answer. Willard waited and a strange memory tugged at him.
"You don't know," the Captain said. It was not a question or a statement. The Captain found it hard to say it. His lips moved slowly.
Willard stepped back and before the Captain told him, he knew .
"Matter is relative," he said, "the existent under one condition is non-existent under another. The real here is the non-real there. All things that wander alone in space are gradually drained of their mass and energy until nothing is left but mere shells. That is what happened to the Mary Lou . Your ship was real when we passed by twenty years ago. It is now like ours, a vague outline in space. We cannot feel the change ourselves, for change is relative. That is why we became more and more solid to you, as you became more and more faint to any Earth-ship that might have passed. We are real—to ourselves. But to some ship from Earth which has not been in space for more than fifteen years—to that ship, to all intents and purposes, we do not exist.
"Then this ship," Willard said, stunned, "you and I and everything on it..."
"... are doomed," the Captain said. "We cannot go to Earth for the simple reason that we would go through it!"
The vision of Earth and green trees faded. He would never see Earth again. He would never feel the crunch of ground under feet as he walked. Never would listen to the voices of friends and the songs of birds. Never. Never. Never....
"Then this is the Ghost Ship and we are the Ghosts!"
"Yes."
Question:
What is the relationship between Dobbin and Willard?
Answer:
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[
"Larry Dobbin and John Willard are astronauts together in space on a mission to explore a planetoid beyond Pluto. When a meteor damages their rocket, they both realize they will never return to Earth. Willard considers Dobbin the best friend he has ever had friend, and when Dobbin is dying, Willard tries to keep his spirits up by telling him that he has a new plan for a way for them to return to Earth. When Dobbin wants to see the stars one last time before he dies, Willard raises him so that he can see them out the port window. When Dobbins sees the Ghost Ship and says that it has come for him, Willard assures him that nothing is there. After Dobbin dies, Willard holds a wake for him for two days before he recycles Dobbin’s body because the ship can still break down waste and refuse to create food and air. Afterward, Willard regrets disposing of Dobbin’s body. With Dobbin gone, Willard experiences great pain and loneliness. Eventually, Willard sees the Ghost Ship and knows that his friend was right about it.",
"Dobbin and Willard are close friends, companions, and colleagues. As they co-pilot and run the Mary Lou together in outer space, their relationship continued to develop. Willard even said that Dobbin was his sole friend in space. Being the only two people on board the Mary Lou brought them closer together and helped their relationship evolve. \nAlthough the reader does not see them together much, the effects of Dobbin on Willard are very evident and show how close the two of them were. Willard watched over his body for two Earth days before respectfully disposing of it. This dedication to his brethren shows how close the two of them became. \n",
"John Willard and Larry Dobbin are both spacemen piloting the “Mary Lou” on a mission to explore a small planet far away from Earth, past Pluto. Due to their isolation and sheer amount of time spent together, they become close friends. In fact, they are the only friends each other has ever had in outer space. Following the meteor strike that disables their ship, Willard understands Dobbin’s desire to return to Earth as well as the importance of having hope that such a return would one day be possible. Willard offers Dobbin support in his dying moments, holding him up so he can see out the window. This is when Dobbin sees the Ghost Ship right before passing away. Dobbin’s vision would influence Willard’s struggle between belief and disbelief throughout the remainder of his time in space.",
"Dobbin and Willard are the two space explorers aboard the Mary Lou, a ship bound to explore past Pluto. At the beginning of the story, Willard describes Dobbin as his only friend in space, and the best friend he ever had. The loss of Dobbin sends Willard into a spiral of loneliness and depression that lasts decades, as Dobbin was his only companion and connection to Earth. Dobbin only survives the first few paragraphs of the story, but he continues to have an influence on his colleague and friend. Dobbin believed he saw The Ghost Ship before he died, and the idea of that sticks with Willard throughout the rest of his journey aboard the Mary Lou and beyond, despite his skepticism. \n"
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62244
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GALACTIC GHOST
By WALTER KUBILIUS
The Flying Dutchman of space was a harbinger of death. But Willard wasn't superstitions. He had seen the phantom—and lived.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
The only friend in space Willard had ever known was dying. Dobbin's lips were parched and his breath came spasmodically. The tips of his fingers that had so many times caressed the control board of the Mary Lou were now black as meteor dust.
"We'll never see Earth again," he whispered feebly, plucked weakly at the cover.
"Nonsense!" Willard broke in hurriedly, hoping that the dying man would not see through the lie. "We've got the sun's gravity helping us drift back to Earth! We'll be there soon! You'll get well soon and we'll start to work again on a new idea of mine...." His voice trailed helplessly away and the words were lost. It was no use.
The sick man did not hear him. Two tears rolled down his cheeks. His face contorted as he tried to withhold a sob.
"To see Earth again!" he said weakly. "To walk on solid ground once more!"
"Four years!" Willard echoed faintly. He knew how his space mate felt. No man can spend four years away from his home planet, and fail to be anguished. A man could live without friends, without fortune, but no man could live without Earth. He was like Anteus, for only the feel of the solid ground under his feet could give him courage to go among the stars.
Willard also knew what he dared not admit to himself. He, too, like Dobbin, would never see Earth again. Perhaps, some thousand years from now, some lonely wanderers would find their battered hulk of a ship in space and bring them home again.
Dobbin motioned to him and, in answer to a last request, Willard lifted him so he faced the port window for a final look at the panorama of the stars.
Dobbin's eyes, dimming and half closed, took in the vast play of the heavens and in his mind he relived the days when in a frail craft he first crossed interstellar space. But for Earth-loneliness Dobbin would die a happy man, knowing that he had lived as much and as deeply as any man could.
Silently the two men watched. Dobbin's eyes opened suddenly and a tremor seized his body. He turned painfully and looked at Willard.
"I saw it!" his voice cracked, trembling.
"Saw what?"
"It's true! It's true! It comes whenever a space man dies! It's there!"
"In heaven's name, Dobbin," Willard demanded, "What do you see? What is it?"
Dobbin lifted his dark bony arm and pointed out into star-studded space.
"The Ghost Ship!"
Something clicked in Willard's memory. He had heard it spoken of in whispers by drunken space men and professional tellers of fairy tales. But he had never put any stock in them. In some forgotten corner of Dobbin's mind the legend of the Ghost Ship must have lain, to come up in this time of delirium.
"There's nothing there," he said firmly.
"It's come—for me!" Dobbin cried. He turned his head slowly toward Willard, tried to say something and then fell back upon the pillow. His mouth was open and his eyes stared unseeing ahead. Dobbin was now one with the vanished pioneers of yesterday. Willard was alone.
For two days, reckoned in Earth time, Willard kept vigil over the body of his friend and space mate. When the time was up he did what was necessary and nothing remained of Harry Dobbin, the best friend he had ever had. The atoms of his body were now pure energy stored away in the useless motors of the Mary Lou .
The weeks that followed were like a blur in Willard's mind. Though the ship was utterly incapable of motion, the chance meteor that damaged it had spared the convertors and assimilators. Through constant care and attention the frail balance that meant life or death could be kept. The substance of waste and refuse was torn down and rebuilt as precious food and air. It was even possible to create more than was needed.
When this was done, Willard immediately regretted it. For it would be then that the days and the weeks would roll by endlessly. Sometimes he thought he would go mad when, sitting at the useless control board, which was his habit, he would stare for hours and hours in the direction of the Sun where he knew the Earth would be. A great loneliness would then seize upon him and an agony that no man had ever known would tear at his heart. He would then turn away, full of despair and hopeless pain.
Two years after Dobbin's death a strange thing happened. Willard was sitting at his accustomed place facing the unmoving vista of the stars. A chance glance at Orion's belt froze him still. A star had flickered! Distinctly, as if a light veil had been placed over it and then lifted, it dimmed and turned bright again. What strange phenomena was this? He watched and then another star faded momentarily in the exact fashion. And then a third! And a fourth! And a fifth!
Willard's heart gave a leap and the lethargy of two years vanished instantly. Here, at last, was something to do. It might be only a few minutes before he would understand what it was, but those few minutes would help while away the maddening long hours. Perhaps it was a mass of fine meteorites or a pocket of gas that did not disperse, or even a moving warp of space-light. Whatever it was, it was a phenomena worth investigating and Willard seized upon it as a dying man seizes upon the last flashing seconds of life.
Willard traced its course by the flickering stars and gradually plotted its semi-circular course. It was not from the solar system but, instead, headed toward it. A rapid check-up on his calculations caused his heart to beat in ever quickening excitement. Whatever it was, it would reach the Mary Lou .
Again he looked out the port. Unquestionably the faint mass was nearing his ship. It was round in shape and almost invisible. The stars, though dimmed, could still be seen through it. There was something about its form that reminded him of an old-fashioned rocket ship. It resembled one of those that had done pioneer service in the lanes forty years ago or more. Resembled one? It was one! Unquestionably, though half-invisible and like a piece of glass immersed in water, it was a rocket ship.
But the instruments on the control board could not lie. The presence of any material body within a hundred thousand miles would be revealed. But the needle on the gauge did not quiver. Nothing indicated the presence of a ship. But the evidence of his eyes was incontestable.
Or was it? Doubt gripped him. Did the loneliness of all these years in space twist his mind till he was imagining the appearance of faint ghost-like rocket ships?
The thought shot through his mind like a thunder bolt. Ghost Ship! Was this the thing that Dobbin had seen before he died? But that was impossible. Ghost Ships existed nowhere but in legends and tall tales told by men drunk with the liquors of Mars.
"There is no ship there. There is no ship there," Willard told himself over and over again as he looked at the vague outline of the ship, now motionless a few hundred miles away.
Deep within him a faint voice cried, " It's come—for me! " but Willard stilled it. This was no fantasy. There was a scientific reason for it. There must be! Or should there be? Throughout all Earth history there had been Ghost Ships sailing the Seven Seas—ships doomed to roam forever because their crew broke some unbreakable law. If this was true for the ships of the seas, why not for the ships of empty space?
He looked again at the strange ship. It was motionless. At least it was not nearing him. Willard could see nothing but its vague outline. A moment later he could discern a faint motion. It was turning! The Ghost Ship was turning back! Unconsciously Willard reached out with his hand as if to hold it back, for when it was gone he would be alone again.
But the Ghost Ship went on. Its outline became smaller and smaller, fainter and fainter.
Trembling, Willard turned away from the window as he saw the rocket recede and vanish into the emptiness of space. Once more the dreaded loneliness of the stars descended upon him.
Seven years passed and back on Earth in a small newspaper that Willard would never see there was published a small item:
" Arden, Rocketport —Thirteen years ago the Space Ship Mary Lou under John Willard and Larry Dobbin left the Rocket Port for the exploration of an alleged planetoid beyond Pluto. The ship has not been seen or heard from since. J. Willard, II, son of the lost explorer, is planning the manufacture of a super-size exploration ship to be called Mary Lou II , in memory of his father."
Memories die hard. A man who is alone in space with nothing but the cold friendship of star-light looks back upon memories as the only things both dear and precious to him.
Willard, master and lone survivor of the Mary Lou , knew this well for he had tried to rip the memories of Earth out of his heart to ease the anguish of solitude within him. But it was a thing that could not be done.
And so it was that each night—for Willard did not give up the Earth-habit of keeping time—Willard dreamed of the days he had known on Earth.
In his mind's eye, he saw himself walking the streets of Arden and feeling the crunch of snow or the soft slap of rainwater under his feet. He heard again, in his mind, the voices of friends he knew. How beautiful and perfect was each voice! How filled with warmth and friendship! There was the voice of his beautiful wife whom he would never see again. There were the gruff and deep voices of his co-workers and scientists.
Above all there were the voices of the cities, and the fields and the shops where he had worked. All these had their individual voices. Odd that he had never realized it before, but things become clearer to a man who is alone.
Clearer? Perhaps not. Perhaps they become more clouded. How could he, for example, explain the phenomena of the Ghost Ship? Was it really only a product of his imagination? What of all the others who had seen it? Was it possible for many different men under many different situations to have the same exact illusion? Reason denied that. But perhaps space itself denies reason.
Grimly he retraced the legend of the Ghost Ship. A chance phrase here and a story there put together all that he knew:
Doomed for all eternity to wander in the empty star-lanes, the Ghost Ship haunts the Solar System that gave it birth. And this is its tragedy, for it is the home of spacemen who can never go home again. When your last measure of fuel is burnt and your ship becomes a lifeless hulk—the Ghost will come—for you!
And this is all there was to the legend. Merely a tale of some fairy ship told to amuse and to while away the days of a star-voyage. Bitterly, Willard dismissed it from his mind.
Another year of loneliness passed. And still another. Willard lost track of the days. It was difficult to keep time for to what purpose could time be kept. Here in space there was no time, nor was there reason for clocks and records. Days and months and years became meaningless words for things that once may have had meaning. About three years must have passed since his last record in the log book of the Mary Lou . At that time, he remembered, he suffered another great disappointment. On the port side there suddenly appeared a full-sized rocket ship. For many minutes Willard was half-mad with joy thinking that a passing ship was ready to rescue him. But the joy was short-lived, for the rocket ship abruptly turned away and slowly disappeared. As Willard watched it go away he saw the light of a distant star through the space ship. A heart-breaking agony fell upon him. It was not a ship from Earth. It was the Ghost Ship, mocking him.
Since then Willard did not look out the window of his craft. A vague fear troubled him that perhaps the Ghost Ship might be here, waiting and watching, and that he would go mad if he saw it.
How many years passed he could not tell. But this he knew. He was no longer a young man. Perhaps fifteen years has disappeared into nothing. Perhaps twenty. He did not know and he did not care.
Willard awoke from a deep sleep and prepared his bed. He did it, not because it was necessary, but because it was a habit that had long been ingrained in him through the years.
He checked and rechecked every part of the still functioning mechanism of the ship. The radio, even though there was no one to call, was in perfect order. The speed-recording dials, even though there was no speed to record, were in perfect order. And so with every machine. All was in perfect order. Perfect useless order, he thought bitterly, when there was no way whatever to get sufficient power to get back to Earth, long forgotten Earth.
He was leaning back in his chair when a vague uneasiness seized him. He arose and slowly walked over to the window, his age already being marked in the ache of his bones. Looking out into the silent theater of the stars, he suddenly froze.
There was a ship, coming toward him!
For a moment the reason in his mind tottered on a balance. Doubt assailed him. Was this the Ghost Ship come to torment him again? But no phantom this! It was a life and blood rocket ship from Earth! Starlight shone on it and not through it! Its lines, window, vents were all solid and had none of the ghost-like quality he remembered seeing in the Ghost Ship in his youth.
For another split second he thought that perhaps he, too, like Dobbin, had gone mad and that the ship would vanish just as it approached him.
The tapping of the space-telegrapher reassured him.
"CALLING SPACE SHIP MARY LOU," the message rapped out, "CALLING SPACE SHIP MARY LOU."
With trembling fingers that he could scarcely control, old Willard sent the answering message.
"SPACE SHIP MARY LOU REPLYING. RECEIVED MESSAGE. THANK GOD!"
He broke off, unable to continue. His heart was ready to burst within him and the tears of joy were already welling in his eyes. He listened to the happiest message he had ever heard:
"NOTICE THAT SPACE SHIP MARY LOU IS DISABLED AND NOT SPACE WORTHY. YOU ARE INVITED TO COME ABOARD. HAVE YOU SPACE SUIT AND—ARE YOU ABLE TO COME?"
Willard, already sobbing with joy, could send only two words.
"YES! COMING!"
The years of waiting were over. At last he was free of the Mary Lou . In a dream like trance, he dressed in his space suit, pathetically glad that he had already checked every detail of it a short time ago. He realized suddenly that everything about the Mary Lou was hateful to him. It was here that his best friend died, and it was here that twenty years of his life were wasted completely in solitude and despair.
He took one last look and stepped into the air-lock.
The Earth-ship, he did not see its name, was only a hundred yards away and a man was already at the air-lock waiting to help him. A rope was tossed to him. He reached for it and made his way to the ship, leaving the Mary Lou behind him forever.
Suddenly the world dropped away from him. Willard could neither see nor say anything. His heart was choked with emotion.
"It's all right," a kindly voice assured him, "You're safe now."
He had the sensation of being carried by several men and then placed in bed. The quiet of deep sleep descended upon him.
He woke many times in the following days, but the privations of the passing years had drained his strength and his mind, had made him so much of a hermit that the presence of other men frightened him to the point of gibbering insanity.
He knew that the food and drink were drugged, for after eating he never remembered seeing the men enter the room to care for him and to remove the dirty dishes. But there was enough sanity in his mind to also realize that, without the gradual reawakening of his senses to the value of human companionship, he might not be able to stand the mental shock of moving about among his people back on Earth.
During those passing days, he savored each new impression, comparing it with what he remembered from that age-long past when he and his friends had walked on Earth's great plains and ridden on the oceans' sleek ships or flown with the wings of birds over the mountain ranges. And each impression was doubly enjoyable, for his memory was hazy and confused.
Gradually, though, his mind cleared; he remembered the past, and he no longer was afraid of the men who visited him from time to time. But there was a strangeness about the men that he could not fathom; they refused to talk about anything, any subject, other than the actual running of the great ship. Always, when he asked his eager questions, they mumbled and drifted away.
And then in his third week on the rescue ship, he went to sleep one night while peering from the port hole at the blue ball of Earth swimming in the blackness of space. He slept and he dreamed of the years he had spent by himself in the drifting, lifeless hulk of the Mary Lou . His dreams were vivid, peopled with men and women he had once known, and were horrible with the fantasies of terror that years of solitary brooding had implanted deep in his mind.
He awoke with a start and a cry of alarm ran through him as he thought that perhaps he might still be in the Mary Lou . The warm, smiling face of a man quickly reassured him.
"I'll call the captain," the space man said. "He said to let him know when you came to."
Willard could only nod in weak and grateful acceptance. It was true! He pressed his head back against the bed's pillows. How soft! How warm! He yawned and stretched his arms as a thrill of happiness shot through his entire body.
He would see Earth again! That single thought ran over and over in his mind without stopping. He would see Earth again! Perhaps not this year and perhaps not the next—for the ship might be on some extra-Plutonian expedition. But even if it would take years before it returned to home base Willard knew that those years would fly quickly if Earth was at the end of the trail.
Though he had aged, he still had many years before him. And those years, he vowed, would be spent on Earth and nowhere else.
The captain, a pleasant old fellow, came into the room as Willard stood up and tried to walk. The gravity here was a bit different from that of his ship, but he would manage.
"How do you feel, Space Man Willard?"
"Oh, you know me?" Willard looked at him in surprise, and then smiled,
"Of course, you looked through the log book of the Mary Lou ."
The captain nodded and Willard noticed with surprise that he was a very old man.
"You don't know how much I suffered there," Willard said slowly, measuring each word. "Years in space—all alone! It's a horrible thing!"
"Yes?" the old captain said.
"Many times I thought I would go completely mad. It was only the thought and hope that some day, somehow, an Earth-ship would find me and help me get back to Earth. If it was not for that, I would have died. I could think of nothing but of Earth, of blue green water, of vast open spaces and the good brown earth. How beautiful it must be now!"
A note of sadness, matched only by that of Willard's, entered the captain's eyes.
"I want to walk on Earth just once—then I can die."
Willard stopped. A happy dreamy smile touched his lips.
"When will we go to Earth?" he asked.
The Captain did not answer. Willard waited and a strange memory tugged at him.
"You don't know," the Captain said. It was not a question or a statement. The Captain found it hard to say it. His lips moved slowly.
Willard stepped back and before the Captain told him, he knew .
"Matter is relative," he said, "the existent under one condition is non-existent under another. The real here is the non-real there. All things that wander alone in space are gradually drained of their mass and energy until nothing is left but mere shells. That is what happened to the Mary Lou . Your ship was real when we passed by twenty years ago. It is now like ours, a vague outline in space. We cannot feel the change ourselves, for change is relative. That is why we became more and more solid to you, as you became more and more faint to any Earth-ship that might have passed. We are real—to ourselves. But to some ship from Earth which has not been in space for more than fifteen years—to that ship, to all intents and purposes, we do not exist.
"Then this ship," Willard said, stunned, "you and I and everything on it..."
"... are doomed," the Captain said. "We cannot go to Earth for the simple reason that we would go through it!"
The vision of Earth and green trees faded. He would never see Earth again. He would never feel the crunch of ground under feet as he walked. Never would listen to the voices of friends and the songs of birds. Never. Never. Never....
"Then this is the Ghost Ship and we are the Ghosts!"
"Yes."
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What is the setting of the story?
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about The Beast-Jewel of Mars by V. E. Thiessen.
Relevant chunks:
The Beast-Jewel of Mars
By V. E. THIESSEN
The city was strange, fantastic, beautiful. He'd never been there before, yet already he was a fabulous legend—a dire, hateful legend.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
He lay on his stomach, a lean man in faded one piece dungarees, and an odd metallic hat, peering over the side of the canal. Behind him the little winds sifted red dust into his collar, but he could not move; he could only sit there with his gaze riveted on the spires and minarets that twinkled in the distance, far down the bottom of the canal.
One part of his mind said, This is it, this is the fabled city of Mars. This is the beauty and the fantasy and the music of the legends, and I must go down there. Yet somewhere deeper in his mind, deep in the primal urges that kept him from death, the warning was taut and urgent. Get away. They have a part of your mind now. Get away from the city before you lose it all. Get away before your body becomes a husk, a soulless husk to walk the low canals with sightless eyes, like those who came before you.
He strained to push back from the edge, trying to get that fantastic beauty out of his sight. He fought the lids of his eyes, fought to close them while he pushed himself back, but they remained open, staring at the jeweled towers, and borne on the little winds the thin wail of music reached him, saying, Come into the city, come down into the fabled city .
He slid over the edge, sliding down the sloping sides of the canal. The rough sandstone tore at his dungarees, tore at his elbow where it touched but he did not feel the pain. His face was turned toward the towers, and the sound of his breathing was less than human.
His feet caught a projecting bit of stone and were slowed for an instant, so that he turned sideways and rolled on, down into the red dust bottom of the canal, to lie face down in the dust, with the chin strap of the odd metallic hat cutting cruelly into his chin.
He lay there an instant, knowing that now he had a chance. With his face down like this, and the dust smarting his eyes the image was gone for an instant. He had to get away, he knew that. He had to mount the sides of the canal and never look back.
He told himself, "I am Eric North, from Earth, the Third Planet of Sol, and this is not real."
He squirmed in the dust, feeling it bite his cheeks; he squirmed until he could get up and see nothing but the red sand stone walls of the canal. He ran at the walls and clawed his way up like an animal in his haste. He wouldn't look again.
The wind freshened and the tune of the music began to talk to him. It told of going barefoot over long streets of fur. It told of jewels, and wine, and women as fair as springtime. These and more were in the city, waiting for him to claim them.
He sobbed, and clawed forward. He stopped to rest, and slowly his head began to turn. He turned, and the spires and minarets twinkled at him, beautiful, soothing, stopping the tears that had welled down his cheeks.
When he reached the bottom of the canal he began to run toward the city.
When he came to the city there was a high wall around it, and a heavy gate carved with lotus blossoms. He beat against the gate and cried,
"Oh! Let me in. Let me in to the city!" The music was richer now, as if it were everywhere, and the gate swung open without the faintest sound.
A sentinel stood before the opened gate at the end of a long blue street. He was dressed in red silk with his sleeves edged in blue leopard skin, and he wore a belt with a jeweled short sword. He drew the sword from its scabbard, and bowed forward until the point of the sword touched the street of blue fur. He said, "I give you the welcome of my sword, and the welcome of the city. Speak your name so that it may be set in the records of the dreamers."
The music sang, and the spires twinkled, and Eric said, "I am Eric North!"
The sword point jerked, and the sentinel straightened. His face was white. He cried aloud, "It is Eric the Bronze. It is Eric of the Legend." He whirled the sword aloft, and smashed it upon Eric's metal hat, and the hatred was a blue flame in his eyes.
When Eric regained consciousness the people of the city were all about him. They were very fair, and the women were more beautiful than music. Yet now they stared at him with red hate in their eyes. An older man came forward and struck at the copper hat with a stick. The clang deafened Eric and the man cried, "You are right. It is Eric the Bronze. Bring the ships and let him be scourged from the city."
The man drew back the stick and struck again, and Eric's back took fire with the blow. The crowd chanted, "Whips, bring the whips," and fear forced Eric to his feet. He fled then, running on the heedless feet of panic, outstripping those who were behind him until he passed through the great gates into the red dust floor of the canal. The gates closed behind him, and the dust beat upon him, and he paused, his heart hammering inside his chest like a great bell clapper. He turned and looked behind to be sure he was safe.
The towers twinkled at him, and the music whispered to him, "Come back, Eric North. Come back to the city."
He turned and stumbled back to the great gate and hammered on it until his fists were raw, pleading for it to open and let him back.
And deep inside him some part of his mind said, "This is a madness you cannot escape. The city is evil, an evil like you have never known," and a fear as old as time coursed through his frame.
He seized the copper hat from his head, and beat on the lotus carvings of the great door, crying, "Let me in! Please, take me back into the city."
And as he beat the city changed. It became dull and sordid and evil, a city of disgust, with every part offensive to the eye. The spires and minarets were gargoyles of hatred, twisted and misshapen, and the sound of the city was a macabre song of hate.
He stared, and his back was chill with superstitions as old as the beginning of man. The city flickered, changing before his eyes until it was beautiful again.
He stood, amazed, and put the metal hat back on his head. With the motion the shift took place again, and beauty was ugliness. Amazed, he stared at the illusion, and the thought came to him that the metal hat had not entirely failed him after all.
He turned and began to walk away from the city, and when it began to call he took the hat off his head and found peace for a time. Then when it began again he replaced the hat, and revulsion sped his footsteps. And so, hat on, hat off, he made his way down the dusty floor of the canal, and up the rocky sides until he stood on the Martian desert, and the canal was a thin line behind him. He breathed easily then, for he was beyond the range of the illusions.
And now that his mind was his own again he began to study the problem, and to understand something of the nature of the forces against which he had been pitted.
The helmet contained an electrical circuit, designed as a shield against electrical waves tuned to affect his brain. But the hat had failed because the city, whatever it was, had adjusted to this revised pattern as he had approached it. Hence, the helmet had been no defense against illusion. However, when he had jerked the helmet off suddenly to beat on the door, his mental pattern had changed, too suddenly, and the machine caught up only after he had glimpsed another image. Then as the illusion adjusted replacing the helmet threw it off again.
He grinned wryly. He would have liked to know more about the city, whatever it was. He would have liked to know more about the people he had seen, whether they were real or part of the illusion, and if they were as ugly as the second city had been.
Yet the danger was too great. He would go back to his ship and make the arrangements to destroy the city. The ship was armed, and to deliver indirect fire over the edge of the canal would be simple enough. Garve North, his brother, waited back at the ship. If he knew of the city he would have to go there. Eric must not take a chance on that. After they had blasted whatever it was that lay in the canal floor, then it would be time enough to tell Garve, and go down to see what was left.
The ship rested easily on the flat sandstone area where he had established base camp. Its familiar lines brought a smile to Eric's face, a feeling of confidence now that tools and weapons were his again.
He opened the door and entered. The lock doors were left open so that he could enter directly into the body of the ship. He came in in a swift leap, calling, "Garve! Hey, Garve, where are you?"
The ship remained mute. He prowled through it, calling, "Garve," wondering where the young hothead had gone, and then he saw a note clipped to the control board of the ship. He tore it loose impatiently and began to read. Garve had scrawled:
"Funny thing, Eric. A while ago I thought I heard music. I walked down to the canal, and it seemed like there were lights, and a town of some sort far down the canal. I wanted to investigate, but thought I'd better come back. But the thing has been in my mind for hours now, and I'm going down to see what it is. If you want to follow, come straight down the canal."
Eric stared at the note, and the line of his jaw was white. Apparently Garve had seen the city from farther away, and its effect had not been so strong. Even so, Garve's natural curiosity had done the rest.
Garve had gone down to the city, and Garve had no shielded hat. Eric selected two high explosive grenades from the ship's arsenal. They were small but they packed a lot of power. He had a pistol packed with smaller pellets of the same explosive, and he had the hat. That should be adequate. He thrust the bronze hat back on his head and began walking back to the canal.
The return back to the city would always live in his mind as a phantasmagora, a montage of twisted hate and unseemly beauty. When he came again to the gate he did not attempt to enter, but circled the wall, hat on, hat off, stiff limbed like a puppet dancing to the same tune over and over again. He found a place where he could scale the wall, and thrust the helmet on his head, and clawed up the misshapen wall. It was all he could do to make himself drop into the ugly city.
He heard a familiar voice as he dropped. "Eric," the voice said. "Eric, you did come back." The voice was his brother's, and he whirled, seeking the voice. A figure stood before him, a twisted caricature of his brother. The figure cried, "The hat! You fool, get rid of that hat!" The caricature that was his brother seized the hat, and jerked so hard that the chin strap broke under Eric's chin. The hat was flung away and sailed high and far over the fence and outside the city.
The phantasm flickered, the illusion moved. Garve was now more handsome than ever, and the city was a dream of delight. Garve said, "Come," and Eric followed down a street of blue fur. He had no will to resist.
Garve said, "Keep your head down and your face hidden. If we meet someone you may not be recognized. They won't be expecting you from this side of the city."
Eric asked, "You knew I'd come after you?"
"Yes. The Legend said you'd be back."
Eric stopped and whirled to face his brother. "The Legend? Eric the Bronze? What is this wild fantasy?"
"Not so loud!" Garve's voice cautioned him. "Of course the crowd called you that because of the copper hat and your heavy tan. But the Elders believe so too. I don't know what it is, Eric, reincarnation, prophesy, superstition, I only know that when I was with the Elders I believed them. You are a part of a Legend. You are Eric the Bronze."
Eric looked down at his sun tanned hands and flexed them. He loosened the explosive pistol in its holster. At least he was going to be a well armed, well prepared Legend. And while one part of his mind marveled at the city and relaxed into a pleasure as deep as a dream, another struggled with the almost forgotten desire to rescue his brother and escape. He asked, "Who are the Elders?"
"We are going to them, to the center of the city." Garve's voice sharpened, "Keep your head down. I think the last two men we passed are looking after us. Don't look back."
After a moment Garve said, "I think they are following us. Get ready to run. If we are separated, keep going until you reach City Center. The Elders will be expecting you." Garve glanced back, and his voice sharpened, "Now! Run!"
They ran. But as they ran figures began to converge upon them. Farther up the street others appeared, cutting off their flight.
Garve cried, "In here," and pulled Eric into a crevice between two buildings. Eric drew his gun, and savagery began to dance in his eyes. The soft fur muffled sounds of pursuit closed in upon them.
Garve put one hand on Eric's gun hand and said, "Wait here. And if you value my life, don't use that gun." Then he was gone, running deerlike down the street.
For an instant Eric thought the ruse had succeeded. He heard cries and two men passed him running in pursuit. But then the cry came back. "Let him go. Get the other one. The other one."
Eric was seen an instant later, and the people of the city began to converge upon him. He could have destroyed them all with his charges in the gun, but his brother's warning shrieked in his ears, "If you value my life don't use the gun."
There was nothing he could do. Eric stood quietly until he was taken prisoner. They moved him to the center of the wide fur street. Two men held his arms, and twisted painfully. The crowd looked at him, coldly, calculatingly. One of them said, "Get the whips. If we whip him he will not come back." The city twinkled, and the music was so faint he could hardly hear it.
There was only one weapon Eric could use. He had gathered from Garve's words that these people were superstitious.
He laughed, a great chest-shattering laugh that gusted out into the thin Martian air. He laughed and cried in a great voice, "And can you so easily dispose of a Legend? If I am Eric of the Legend, can whips defeat the prophesy?"
There was an instant when he could have twisted loose. They stood, fear-bound at his words. But there was no place to hide, and without the use of his weapons Eric could not have gone far. He had to bluff it out.
Then one of the men cried, "Fools! It is true. We must take no chance with the whips. He would come back. But if he dies here before us now, then we may forget the prophesy."
The crowd murmured and a second voice cried, "Get the sword, get the guards, and kill him at once!"
Eric tensed to break away but now it was too late. His captors were alert. They increased the twist on his arms until he almost screamed with the pain.
The crowd parted, and the guard came through, his red silk clothing gleaming in the sun, his sword bright and deadly. He stopped before Eric, and the sword swirled up like a saber, ready for a slashing cut downward across Eric's neck.
A woman's voice, soft and yet authoritative, called, "Hold!" And a murmur of respect rippled through the crowd.
"Nolette! The Daughter of the City comes."
Eric turned his gaze to the side and saw the woman who had spoken. She was mounted upon a black horse with a jeweled bridle. She was young and her hair was long and free in the wind. She had ridden so softly across the fur street that no one had been aware of her presence.
She said, "Let me touch this man. Let me feel the pulse of his heart so that I may know if he is truly the Bronze one of the Legend. Give me your hand, stranger." She leaned down and grasped his hand. Eric shook his arms free, and reached up and clung to the offered hand, thinking,
"If I pull her down perhaps I can use her as a shield." He tensed his muscles and began to pull.
She cried, "No! You fool. Come up on the horse," and pulled back with an energy as fierce as his own. Then he had swung up on the horse, and the animal leaped forward, its muffled gallop beating out a tattoo of freedom.
Eric clung tightly to the girl's waist. He could feel the young suppleness of her body, and the fine strands of her hair kept swirling back into his face. It had a faint perfume, a clean and heady scent that made him more aware of the touch of her waist. He breathed deeply, oddly happy as they rode.
After five minutes ride they came to a building in the center of the city. The building was cubical, severe in line and architecture, and it contrasted oddly with the exquisite ornament of the rest of the city. It was as if it were a monolith from another time, a stranger crouched among enemies.
The girl halted before the structure and said, "Dismount here, Eric."
Eric swung down, his arms still tingling with pleasure where he had held her. She said, "Knock three times on the door. I will see you again inside. And thank your brother for sending me to bring you here."
Eric knocked on the door. The door was as plain as the building, made of a luminous plastic. It had all the beauty of the great gate door, but a more timeless, more functional beauty.
The door opened and an old man greeted Eric. "Come in. The Council awaits you. Follow me, please."
Eric followed down a hallway and into a large room. The room was obviously designed for a conference room. A great table stood in the room, made of the same luminous plastic as the door of the building. Six men sat at this conference table. Eric's guide placed him in a chair at the base of the T-shaped table.
There was one vacant seat beside the head of the T, and as Eric watched, the young woman who had rescued him entered and took her place there. She smiled at Eric, and the room took on a warmth that it had lacked with only the older men present. The man at her right, obviously presiding here looked at Eric and spoke. "I am Kroon, the eldest of the elders. We have brought you here to satisfy ourselves of your identity. In view of your danger in the City you are entitled to some sort of explanation." He glanced around the room and asked, "What is the judgment of the elders?"
Eric caught a faint nod here, a gesture there. Kroon nodded as if in satisfaction. He turned to the girl, "And what is your opinion, Daughter of the City?"
Nolette's expression held sorrow, as if she looked into the far future. She said, "He is Eric the Bronze. I have no doubt."
Eric asked, "And what is this Legend of Eric the Bronze? Why am I so despised in the city?"
Kroon answered, "According to the Ancient Legend you will destroy the city. This, and other things."
Eric gaped. No wonder the crowd had shown such hatred. But why were the elders so friendly? They were obviously the governing body, and if there was strife between them and the people it had not shown in the respect the crowd had accorded Nolette.
Kroon said, "I see you are puzzled. Let me tell you the story of the City. The City is old. It dates from long ago when the canals of Mars ran clear and green with water, and the deserts were vineyards and gardens. The drouth came, and the changes in climate, and soon it became plain that the people of Mars were doomed. They had ships, and could build more, and gradually they left to colonize other planets. Yet they could take little of their science. And fear and riots destroyed much. Also there were those who were filled with love for this homeland, and who thought that one day it might be habitable again. All the skill of the ancient Martian fathers went into the building of a giant machine, the machine that is the City, to protect a small colony of those who were chosen to remain on Mars."
"This whole city is a machine!" Eric asked.
"Yes, or the product of one. The heart of it lies underneath our feet, in caverns beneath this building. The nature of the machine is this, that it translates thought into reality."
Eric stared. The idea was staggering.
"This is essentially simple, although the technology is complex. It is necessary to have a recording device, to capture thought, a transmuting device capable of transmuting the red dust of the desert into any sort of material desired, and a construction device, to assemble this material into the pattern already recorded from thought." Kroon paused.
"You still doubt, my friend. Perhaps you are thirsty after your escape. Think strongly of a tall glass of cold water, visualize it in your mind, the sight and the fluidity and the touch of it."
Eric did so. Without warning a glass of water stood on the table before him. He touched the water to his lips. It was cool and satisfying. He drank it, convinced completely.
Eric asked, "And I am to destroy the City?"
"Yes. The time has come."
"But why?" Eric demanded. For an instant he could see the twinkling beauty as clearly as if he had stood outside the walls of this building.
Kroon said, "There are difficulties. The machine builds according to the mass will of the people, though it is sensitive to the individual in areas where it does not conflict with the imagination of the mass. We have had strangers, visitors, and even our own people, who grew drunk with the power of the machine, who dreamed more and more lust and greed into existence. These were banished from the city, and so strong is the call of the city that many of them became victims of their own evilness, and now walk mindlessly, with no thought but to seek for the beauty they have lost here."
Kroon sighed. "The people have lost the will to learn. Many do not even know of the machine. Our science is almost gone, and only a few of us, the dreamers, the elders, have kept alive the old knowledge of the machine and its history. By the collected powers of our imagination we build and control the outward appearance of the city.
"We have passed this down from father to son. A part of the ancient Legend is that the builders made provisions for the machine to be destroyed when contact with outsiders had been made once again, so that our people would again have to struggle forward to knowledge and power. The instrument of destruction was to be a man termed Eric the Bronze. It is not that you are reborn. It is just that sometime such a man would come."
Eric said, "I can understand the Bronze part. They had thought that a space man might well be sun tanned. They had thought that a science to protect against this beautiful illusion would provide a metal shield of some sort, probably copper in nature. That such a man should come is inevitable. But why Eric. Why the name Eric?"
For the first time Nolette spoke. She said quietly, "The name Eric was an honorable name of the ancient fathers. It must have been their thought that the new beginning should wait for some of their own far flung kind to return."
Eric nodded. He asked, "What happens now?"
"Nothing. Dwell here with us and you will be safe from our people. If the prediction is not soon fulfilled and you are not the Eric of the Legend, you may stay or go as you desire."
"My brother, Garve. What about him?"
"He loves the city. He will also stay, though he will be outside this building." Kroon clasped his hands. "Nolette, will you show Eric his quarters?"
Question:
What is the setting of the story?
Answer:
|
[
"The story begins in in the desert on Mars, on the edge of a canal. In the bottom of the canal there is a fabulous city with the spires and minarets. Following the main character, the setting moves closer to the city, all the way through red dust everywhere around. The city is surrounded with a high wall and a heavy gate carved with lotus blossoms. Inside the gate there is a sentinel with a sword and a crowd surrounds the character soon. He then escapes to the desert with its dust again and suddenly sees the city in an ugly way, the whole setting becomes disgusting and sordid. It keeps changing from beautiful to ugliness then while Eric goes away up the rocky sides of the canal to the desert. From there he moves to the ship. The ship is familiar to the character, though it's unlocked and empty. Eric returns to the city and starts going around the wall. Together with his brother he enters the city and heads to its center, the city seems beautiful and ugly at the same time while the helmet is still on Eric. Without it the city is more beautiful than ever. He follows his brother down a street of blue fur, then they ran from persecutors and Eric hid in a crevice between two buildings. from there some people captured Eric and moved to the center of the street.Then, Eric is saved by a girl and escapes on a horse. The setting moves to the door of the house of the Council and Eric enters. He goes into a large conference room through the hallway. There is a great T-table with six people sitting. ",
"The story is set on Mars. Eric finds himself in a pit, where a beautiful, almost magical city lies. It is more stunning than imagination, with bejewelled towers and a soft, sweet music that spills out over the city walls. Outside of this city are the deserts of Mars, which were once lush, and divided by streams of green water. On the desert plane is Eric and his brother's ship. Inside the city again is the headquarters where the Elders sit. It is a functional, cubic building, which is described as just as beautiful as the rest of the buildings of the city, but in a rather different way. \n",
"There is a canal that is filled with red dust, and there are spires and minarets which twinkles in the distance. The side of the canal has small slopes and rough sandstones. The city is surrounded by high walls and the gate is carved with lotus blossoms. The city, without the illusions, becomes dull and sordid. It was filled with disgust and hatred. Eric’s ship has a door that leads directly to the body of the ship. There is a control board where a note from Grave is clipped. Back at the city, the street is filled with blue fur. The crevice between two buildings is used for hiding, but soon Eric is taken down the fur road to the center. The city is filled with exquisite ornaments. On the other hand, the Elder’s building is cubical and in direct contrast with the city. It seems as if it is from another time. The door of this building is also very plain. The pathway from the door leads to a conference room which has a great T-shaped table made of the same luminous plastic as the door. Beneath the building, there is a machine that translates the mass will of the citizens into reality. ",
"The story is first set outside of the city. Eric is near a canal in a desert on Mars. There is red dust being sifted by the winds and rough sandstone everywhere. Once he reaches the city, it is illusioned to have high walls and a gate with lotus blossoms carved into it. Eric also sees a long blue street from where the sentinel stands. Once he begins to beat the door, causing his hat to fall off, the city’s appearance changes to one that has misshapen gargoyles of hatred as its spires and minarets. The previously beautiful music also changes to a song of hate. Eric’s ship is briefly described as having locked doors and being armed enough to destroy the city. Once Nolette and Eric reach the city’s center, the building is described as a monolith from another time. It is cubical and contrasts the rest of the city with its severe line and architecture. Even the door is plain and made out of luminous plastic, giving it a more timeless beauty. Down the hallway, there is a conference room with a T-shaped table made up of the same luminous plastic as the door. Beneath the building, caverns house the heart of the machine city. When Kroon mentions the past to Eric, he says that Mars once ran clear and green with water. Instead of deserts, there were vineyards and gardens. "
] |
63605
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The Beast-Jewel of Mars
By V. E. THIESSEN
The city was strange, fantastic, beautiful. He'd never been there before, yet already he was a fabulous legend—a dire, hateful legend.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
He lay on his stomach, a lean man in faded one piece dungarees, and an odd metallic hat, peering over the side of the canal. Behind him the little winds sifted red dust into his collar, but he could not move; he could only sit there with his gaze riveted on the spires and minarets that twinkled in the distance, far down the bottom of the canal.
One part of his mind said, This is it, this is the fabled city of Mars. This is the beauty and the fantasy and the music of the legends, and I must go down there. Yet somewhere deeper in his mind, deep in the primal urges that kept him from death, the warning was taut and urgent. Get away. They have a part of your mind now. Get away from the city before you lose it all. Get away before your body becomes a husk, a soulless husk to walk the low canals with sightless eyes, like those who came before you.
He strained to push back from the edge, trying to get that fantastic beauty out of his sight. He fought the lids of his eyes, fought to close them while he pushed himself back, but they remained open, staring at the jeweled towers, and borne on the little winds the thin wail of music reached him, saying, Come into the city, come down into the fabled city .
He slid over the edge, sliding down the sloping sides of the canal. The rough sandstone tore at his dungarees, tore at his elbow where it touched but he did not feel the pain. His face was turned toward the towers, and the sound of his breathing was less than human.
His feet caught a projecting bit of stone and were slowed for an instant, so that he turned sideways and rolled on, down into the red dust bottom of the canal, to lie face down in the dust, with the chin strap of the odd metallic hat cutting cruelly into his chin.
He lay there an instant, knowing that now he had a chance. With his face down like this, and the dust smarting his eyes the image was gone for an instant. He had to get away, he knew that. He had to mount the sides of the canal and never look back.
He told himself, "I am Eric North, from Earth, the Third Planet of Sol, and this is not real."
He squirmed in the dust, feeling it bite his cheeks; he squirmed until he could get up and see nothing but the red sand stone walls of the canal. He ran at the walls and clawed his way up like an animal in his haste. He wouldn't look again.
The wind freshened and the tune of the music began to talk to him. It told of going barefoot over long streets of fur. It told of jewels, and wine, and women as fair as springtime. These and more were in the city, waiting for him to claim them.
He sobbed, and clawed forward. He stopped to rest, and slowly his head began to turn. He turned, and the spires and minarets twinkled at him, beautiful, soothing, stopping the tears that had welled down his cheeks.
When he reached the bottom of the canal he began to run toward the city.
When he came to the city there was a high wall around it, and a heavy gate carved with lotus blossoms. He beat against the gate and cried,
"Oh! Let me in. Let me in to the city!" The music was richer now, as if it were everywhere, and the gate swung open without the faintest sound.
A sentinel stood before the opened gate at the end of a long blue street. He was dressed in red silk with his sleeves edged in blue leopard skin, and he wore a belt with a jeweled short sword. He drew the sword from its scabbard, and bowed forward until the point of the sword touched the street of blue fur. He said, "I give you the welcome of my sword, and the welcome of the city. Speak your name so that it may be set in the records of the dreamers."
The music sang, and the spires twinkled, and Eric said, "I am Eric North!"
The sword point jerked, and the sentinel straightened. His face was white. He cried aloud, "It is Eric the Bronze. It is Eric of the Legend." He whirled the sword aloft, and smashed it upon Eric's metal hat, and the hatred was a blue flame in his eyes.
When Eric regained consciousness the people of the city were all about him. They were very fair, and the women were more beautiful than music. Yet now they stared at him with red hate in their eyes. An older man came forward and struck at the copper hat with a stick. The clang deafened Eric and the man cried, "You are right. It is Eric the Bronze. Bring the ships and let him be scourged from the city."
The man drew back the stick and struck again, and Eric's back took fire with the blow. The crowd chanted, "Whips, bring the whips," and fear forced Eric to his feet. He fled then, running on the heedless feet of panic, outstripping those who were behind him until he passed through the great gates into the red dust floor of the canal. The gates closed behind him, and the dust beat upon him, and he paused, his heart hammering inside his chest like a great bell clapper. He turned and looked behind to be sure he was safe.
The towers twinkled at him, and the music whispered to him, "Come back, Eric North. Come back to the city."
He turned and stumbled back to the great gate and hammered on it until his fists were raw, pleading for it to open and let him back.
And deep inside him some part of his mind said, "This is a madness you cannot escape. The city is evil, an evil like you have never known," and a fear as old as time coursed through his frame.
He seized the copper hat from his head, and beat on the lotus carvings of the great door, crying, "Let me in! Please, take me back into the city."
And as he beat the city changed. It became dull and sordid and evil, a city of disgust, with every part offensive to the eye. The spires and minarets were gargoyles of hatred, twisted and misshapen, and the sound of the city was a macabre song of hate.
He stared, and his back was chill with superstitions as old as the beginning of man. The city flickered, changing before his eyes until it was beautiful again.
He stood, amazed, and put the metal hat back on his head. With the motion the shift took place again, and beauty was ugliness. Amazed, he stared at the illusion, and the thought came to him that the metal hat had not entirely failed him after all.
He turned and began to walk away from the city, and when it began to call he took the hat off his head and found peace for a time. Then when it began again he replaced the hat, and revulsion sped his footsteps. And so, hat on, hat off, he made his way down the dusty floor of the canal, and up the rocky sides until he stood on the Martian desert, and the canal was a thin line behind him. He breathed easily then, for he was beyond the range of the illusions.
And now that his mind was his own again he began to study the problem, and to understand something of the nature of the forces against which he had been pitted.
The helmet contained an electrical circuit, designed as a shield against electrical waves tuned to affect his brain. But the hat had failed because the city, whatever it was, had adjusted to this revised pattern as he had approached it. Hence, the helmet had been no defense against illusion. However, when he had jerked the helmet off suddenly to beat on the door, his mental pattern had changed, too suddenly, and the machine caught up only after he had glimpsed another image. Then as the illusion adjusted replacing the helmet threw it off again.
He grinned wryly. He would have liked to know more about the city, whatever it was. He would have liked to know more about the people he had seen, whether they were real or part of the illusion, and if they were as ugly as the second city had been.
Yet the danger was too great. He would go back to his ship and make the arrangements to destroy the city. The ship was armed, and to deliver indirect fire over the edge of the canal would be simple enough. Garve North, his brother, waited back at the ship. If he knew of the city he would have to go there. Eric must not take a chance on that. After they had blasted whatever it was that lay in the canal floor, then it would be time enough to tell Garve, and go down to see what was left.
The ship rested easily on the flat sandstone area where he had established base camp. Its familiar lines brought a smile to Eric's face, a feeling of confidence now that tools and weapons were his again.
He opened the door and entered. The lock doors were left open so that he could enter directly into the body of the ship. He came in in a swift leap, calling, "Garve! Hey, Garve, where are you?"
The ship remained mute. He prowled through it, calling, "Garve," wondering where the young hothead had gone, and then he saw a note clipped to the control board of the ship. He tore it loose impatiently and began to read. Garve had scrawled:
"Funny thing, Eric. A while ago I thought I heard music. I walked down to the canal, and it seemed like there were lights, and a town of some sort far down the canal. I wanted to investigate, but thought I'd better come back. But the thing has been in my mind for hours now, and I'm going down to see what it is. If you want to follow, come straight down the canal."
Eric stared at the note, and the line of his jaw was white. Apparently Garve had seen the city from farther away, and its effect had not been so strong. Even so, Garve's natural curiosity had done the rest.
Garve had gone down to the city, and Garve had no shielded hat. Eric selected two high explosive grenades from the ship's arsenal. They were small but they packed a lot of power. He had a pistol packed with smaller pellets of the same explosive, and he had the hat. That should be adequate. He thrust the bronze hat back on his head and began walking back to the canal.
The return back to the city would always live in his mind as a phantasmagora, a montage of twisted hate and unseemly beauty. When he came again to the gate he did not attempt to enter, but circled the wall, hat on, hat off, stiff limbed like a puppet dancing to the same tune over and over again. He found a place where he could scale the wall, and thrust the helmet on his head, and clawed up the misshapen wall. It was all he could do to make himself drop into the ugly city.
He heard a familiar voice as he dropped. "Eric," the voice said. "Eric, you did come back." The voice was his brother's, and he whirled, seeking the voice. A figure stood before him, a twisted caricature of his brother. The figure cried, "The hat! You fool, get rid of that hat!" The caricature that was his brother seized the hat, and jerked so hard that the chin strap broke under Eric's chin. The hat was flung away and sailed high and far over the fence and outside the city.
The phantasm flickered, the illusion moved. Garve was now more handsome than ever, and the city was a dream of delight. Garve said, "Come," and Eric followed down a street of blue fur. He had no will to resist.
Garve said, "Keep your head down and your face hidden. If we meet someone you may not be recognized. They won't be expecting you from this side of the city."
Eric asked, "You knew I'd come after you?"
"Yes. The Legend said you'd be back."
Eric stopped and whirled to face his brother. "The Legend? Eric the Bronze? What is this wild fantasy?"
"Not so loud!" Garve's voice cautioned him. "Of course the crowd called you that because of the copper hat and your heavy tan. But the Elders believe so too. I don't know what it is, Eric, reincarnation, prophesy, superstition, I only know that when I was with the Elders I believed them. You are a part of a Legend. You are Eric the Bronze."
Eric looked down at his sun tanned hands and flexed them. He loosened the explosive pistol in its holster. At least he was going to be a well armed, well prepared Legend. And while one part of his mind marveled at the city and relaxed into a pleasure as deep as a dream, another struggled with the almost forgotten desire to rescue his brother and escape. He asked, "Who are the Elders?"
"We are going to them, to the center of the city." Garve's voice sharpened, "Keep your head down. I think the last two men we passed are looking after us. Don't look back."
After a moment Garve said, "I think they are following us. Get ready to run. If we are separated, keep going until you reach City Center. The Elders will be expecting you." Garve glanced back, and his voice sharpened, "Now! Run!"
They ran. But as they ran figures began to converge upon them. Farther up the street others appeared, cutting off their flight.
Garve cried, "In here," and pulled Eric into a crevice between two buildings. Eric drew his gun, and savagery began to dance in his eyes. The soft fur muffled sounds of pursuit closed in upon them.
Garve put one hand on Eric's gun hand and said, "Wait here. And if you value my life, don't use that gun." Then he was gone, running deerlike down the street.
For an instant Eric thought the ruse had succeeded. He heard cries and two men passed him running in pursuit. But then the cry came back. "Let him go. Get the other one. The other one."
Eric was seen an instant later, and the people of the city began to converge upon him. He could have destroyed them all with his charges in the gun, but his brother's warning shrieked in his ears, "If you value my life don't use the gun."
There was nothing he could do. Eric stood quietly until he was taken prisoner. They moved him to the center of the wide fur street. Two men held his arms, and twisted painfully. The crowd looked at him, coldly, calculatingly. One of them said, "Get the whips. If we whip him he will not come back." The city twinkled, and the music was so faint he could hardly hear it.
There was only one weapon Eric could use. He had gathered from Garve's words that these people were superstitious.
He laughed, a great chest-shattering laugh that gusted out into the thin Martian air. He laughed and cried in a great voice, "And can you so easily dispose of a Legend? If I am Eric of the Legend, can whips defeat the prophesy?"
There was an instant when he could have twisted loose. They stood, fear-bound at his words. But there was no place to hide, and without the use of his weapons Eric could not have gone far. He had to bluff it out.
Then one of the men cried, "Fools! It is true. We must take no chance with the whips. He would come back. But if he dies here before us now, then we may forget the prophesy."
The crowd murmured and a second voice cried, "Get the sword, get the guards, and kill him at once!"
Eric tensed to break away but now it was too late. His captors were alert. They increased the twist on his arms until he almost screamed with the pain.
The crowd parted, and the guard came through, his red silk clothing gleaming in the sun, his sword bright and deadly. He stopped before Eric, and the sword swirled up like a saber, ready for a slashing cut downward across Eric's neck.
A woman's voice, soft and yet authoritative, called, "Hold!" And a murmur of respect rippled through the crowd.
"Nolette! The Daughter of the City comes."
Eric turned his gaze to the side and saw the woman who had spoken. She was mounted upon a black horse with a jeweled bridle. She was young and her hair was long and free in the wind. She had ridden so softly across the fur street that no one had been aware of her presence.
She said, "Let me touch this man. Let me feel the pulse of his heart so that I may know if he is truly the Bronze one of the Legend. Give me your hand, stranger." She leaned down and grasped his hand. Eric shook his arms free, and reached up and clung to the offered hand, thinking,
"If I pull her down perhaps I can use her as a shield." He tensed his muscles and began to pull.
She cried, "No! You fool. Come up on the horse," and pulled back with an energy as fierce as his own. Then he had swung up on the horse, and the animal leaped forward, its muffled gallop beating out a tattoo of freedom.
Eric clung tightly to the girl's waist. He could feel the young suppleness of her body, and the fine strands of her hair kept swirling back into his face. It had a faint perfume, a clean and heady scent that made him more aware of the touch of her waist. He breathed deeply, oddly happy as they rode.
After five minutes ride they came to a building in the center of the city. The building was cubical, severe in line and architecture, and it contrasted oddly with the exquisite ornament of the rest of the city. It was as if it were a monolith from another time, a stranger crouched among enemies.
The girl halted before the structure and said, "Dismount here, Eric."
Eric swung down, his arms still tingling with pleasure where he had held her. She said, "Knock three times on the door. I will see you again inside. And thank your brother for sending me to bring you here."
Eric knocked on the door. The door was as plain as the building, made of a luminous plastic. It had all the beauty of the great gate door, but a more timeless, more functional beauty.
The door opened and an old man greeted Eric. "Come in. The Council awaits you. Follow me, please."
Eric followed down a hallway and into a large room. The room was obviously designed for a conference room. A great table stood in the room, made of the same luminous plastic as the door of the building. Six men sat at this conference table. Eric's guide placed him in a chair at the base of the T-shaped table.
There was one vacant seat beside the head of the T, and as Eric watched, the young woman who had rescued him entered and took her place there. She smiled at Eric, and the room took on a warmth that it had lacked with only the older men present. The man at her right, obviously presiding here looked at Eric and spoke. "I am Kroon, the eldest of the elders. We have brought you here to satisfy ourselves of your identity. In view of your danger in the City you are entitled to some sort of explanation." He glanced around the room and asked, "What is the judgment of the elders?"
Eric caught a faint nod here, a gesture there. Kroon nodded as if in satisfaction. He turned to the girl, "And what is your opinion, Daughter of the City?"
Nolette's expression held sorrow, as if she looked into the far future. She said, "He is Eric the Bronze. I have no doubt."
Eric asked, "And what is this Legend of Eric the Bronze? Why am I so despised in the city?"
Kroon answered, "According to the Ancient Legend you will destroy the city. This, and other things."
Eric gaped. No wonder the crowd had shown such hatred. But why were the elders so friendly? They were obviously the governing body, and if there was strife between them and the people it had not shown in the respect the crowd had accorded Nolette.
Kroon said, "I see you are puzzled. Let me tell you the story of the City. The City is old. It dates from long ago when the canals of Mars ran clear and green with water, and the deserts were vineyards and gardens. The drouth came, and the changes in climate, and soon it became plain that the people of Mars were doomed. They had ships, and could build more, and gradually they left to colonize other planets. Yet they could take little of their science. And fear and riots destroyed much. Also there were those who were filled with love for this homeland, and who thought that one day it might be habitable again. All the skill of the ancient Martian fathers went into the building of a giant machine, the machine that is the City, to protect a small colony of those who were chosen to remain on Mars."
"This whole city is a machine!" Eric asked.
"Yes, or the product of one. The heart of it lies underneath our feet, in caverns beneath this building. The nature of the machine is this, that it translates thought into reality."
Eric stared. The idea was staggering.
"This is essentially simple, although the technology is complex. It is necessary to have a recording device, to capture thought, a transmuting device capable of transmuting the red dust of the desert into any sort of material desired, and a construction device, to assemble this material into the pattern already recorded from thought." Kroon paused.
"You still doubt, my friend. Perhaps you are thirsty after your escape. Think strongly of a tall glass of cold water, visualize it in your mind, the sight and the fluidity and the touch of it."
Eric did so. Without warning a glass of water stood on the table before him. He touched the water to his lips. It was cool and satisfying. He drank it, convinced completely.
Eric asked, "And I am to destroy the City?"
"Yes. The time has come."
"But why?" Eric demanded. For an instant he could see the twinkling beauty as clearly as if he had stood outside the walls of this building.
Kroon said, "There are difficulties. The machine builds according to the mass will of the people, though it is sensitive to the individual in areas where it does not conflict with the imagination of the mass. We have had strangers, visitors, and even our own people, who grew drunk with the power of the machine, who dreamed more and more lust and greed into existence. These were banished from the city, and so strong is the call of the city that many of them became victims of their own evilness, and now walk mindlessly, with no thought but to seek for the beauty they have lost here."
Kroon sighed. "The people have lost the will to learn. Many do not even know of the machine. Our science is almost gone, and only a few of us, the dreamers, the elders, have kept alive the old knowledge of the machine and its history. By the collected powers of our imagination we build and control the outward appearance of the city.
"We have passed this down from father to son. A part of the ancient Legend is that the builders made provisions for the machine to be destroyed when contact with outsiders had been made once again, so that our people would again have to struggle forward to knowledge and power. The instrument of destruction was to be a man termed Eric the Bronze. It is not that you are reborn. It is just that sometime such a man would come."
Eric said, "I can understand the Bronze part. They had thought that a space man might well be sun tanned. They had thought that a science to protect against this beautiful illusion would provide a metal shield of some sort, probably copper in nature. That such a man should come is inevitable. But why Eric. Why the name Eric?"
For the first time Nolette spoke. She said quietly, "The name Eric was an honorable name of the ancient fathers. It must have been their thought that the new beginning should wait for some of their own far flung kind to return."
Eric nodded. He asked, "What happens now?"
"Nothing. Dwell here with us and you will be safe from our people. If the prediction is not soon fulfilled and you are not the Eric of the Legend, you may stay or go as you desire."
"My brother, Garve. What about him?"
"He loves the city. He will also stay, though he will be outside this building." Kroon clasped his hands. "Nolette, will you show Eric his quarters?"
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What is the plot of the story?
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about Appointment In Tomorrow by Fritz Leiber.
Relevant chunks:
Appointment in Tomorrow
BY FRITZ LEIBER
Illustrated by ED ALEXANDER
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction July 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Is it possible to have a world without moral values? Or does lack of morality become a moral value, also?
The first angry rays of the sun—which, startlingly enough, still rose in the east at 24 hour intervals—pierced the lacy tops of Atlantic combers and touched thousands of sleeping Americans with unconscious fear, because of their unpleasant similarity to the rays from World War III's atomic bombs.
They turned to blood the witch-circle of rusty steel skeletons around Inferno in Manhattan. Without comment, they pointed a cosmic finger at the tarnished brass plaque commemorating the martyrdom of the Three Physicists after the dropping of the Hell Bomb. They tenderly touched the rosy skin and strawberry bruises on the naked shoulders of a girl sleeping off a drunk on the furry and radiantly heated floor of a nearby roof garden. They struck green magic from the glassy blot that was Old Washington. Twelve hours before, they had revealed things as eerily beautiful, and as ravaged, in Asia and Russia. They pinked the white walls of the Colonial dwelling of Morton Opperly near the Institute for Advanced Studies; upstairs they slanted impartially across the Pharoahlike and open-eyed face of the elderly physicist and the ugly, sleep-surly one of young Willard Farquar in the next room. And in nearby New Washington they made of the spire of the Thinkers' Foundation a blue and optimistic glory that outshone White House, Jr.
It was America approaching the end of the Twentieth Century. America of juke-box burlesque and your local radiation hospital. America of the mask-fad for women and Mystic Christianity. America of the off-the-bosom dress and the New Blue Laws. America of the Endless War and the loyalty detector. America of marvelous Maizie and the monthly rocket to Mars. America of the Thinkers and (a few remembered) the Institute. "Knock on titanium," "Whadya do for black-outs," "Please, lover, don't think when I'm around," America, as combat-shocked and crippled as the rest of the bomb-shattered planet.
Not one impudent photon of the sunlight penetrated the triple-paned, polarizing windows of Jorj Helmuth's bedroom in the Thinker's Foundation, yet the clock in his brain awakened him to the minute, or almost. Switching off the Educational Sandman in the midst of the phrase, "... applying tensor calculus to the nucleus," he took a deep, even breath and cast his mind to the limits of the world and his knowledge. It was a somewhat shadowy vision, but, he noted with impartial approval, definitely less shadowy than yesterday morning.
Employing a rapid mental scanning technique, he next cleared his memory chains of false associations, including those acquired while asleep. These chores completed, he held his finger on a bedside button, which rotated the polarizing window panes until the room slowly filled with a muted daylight. Then, still flat on his back, he turned his head until he could look at the remarkably beautiful blonde girl asleep beside him.
Remembering last night, he felt a pang of exasperation, which he instantly quelled by taking his mind to a higher and dispassionate level from which he could look down on the girl and even himself as quaint, clumsy animals. Still, he grumbled silently, Caddy might have had enough consideration to clear out before he awoke. He wondered if he shouldn't have used his hypnotic control of the girl to smooth their relationship last night, and for a moment the word that would send her into deep trance trembled on the tip of his tongue. But no, that special power of his over her was reserved for far more important purposes.
Pumping dynamic tension into his 20-year-old muscles and confidence into his 60-year-old mind, the 40-year-old Thinker rose from bed. No covers had to be thrown off; the nuclear heating unit made them unnecessary. He stepped into his clothing—the severe tunic, tights and sockassins of the modern business man. Next he glanced at the message tape beside his phone, washed down with ginger ale a vita-amino-enzyme tablet, and walked to the window. There, gazing along the rows of newly planted mutant oaks lining Decontamination Avenue, his smooth face broke into a smile.
It had come to him, the next big move in the intricate game making up his life—and mankind's. Come to him during sleep, as so many of his best decisions did, because he regularly employed the time-saving technique of somno-thought, which could function at the same time as somno-learning.
He set his who?-where? robot for "Rocket Physicist" and "Genius Class." While it worked, he dictated to his steno-robot the following brief message:
Dear Fellow Scientist:
A project is contemplated that will have a crucial bearing on man's future in deep space. Ample non-military Government funds are available. There was a time when professional men scoffed at the Thinkers. Then there was a time when the Thinkers perforce neglected the professional men. Now both times are past. May they never return! I would like to consult you this afternoon, three o'clock sharp, Thinkers' Foundation I.
Jorj Helmuth
Meanwhile the who?-where? had tossed out a dozen cards. He glanced through them, hesitated at the name "Willard Farquar," looked at the sleeping girl, then quickly tossed them all into the addresso-robot and plugged in the steno-robot.
The buzz-light blinked green and he switched the phone to audio.
"The President is waiting to see Maizie, sir," a clear feminine voice announced. "He has the general staff with him."
"Martian peace to him," Jorj Helmuth said. "Tell him I'll be down in a few minutes."
Huge as a primitive nuclear reactor, the great electronic brain loomed above the knot of hush-voiced men. It almost filled a two-story room in the Thinkers' Foundation. Its front was an orderly expanse of controls, indicators, telltales, and terminals, the upper ones reached by a chair on a boom.
Although, as far as anyone knew, it could sense only the information and questions fed into it on a tape, the human visitors could not resist the impulse to talk in whispers and glance uneasily at the great cryptic cube. After all, it had lately taken to moving some of its own controls—the permissible ones—and could doubtless improvise a hearing apparatus if it wanted to.
For this was the thinking machine beside which the Marks and Eniacs and Maniacs and Maddidas and Minervas and Mimirs were less than Morons. This was the machine with a million times as many synapses as the human brain, the machine that remembered by cutting delicate notches in the rims of molecules (instead of kindergarten paper-punching or the Coney Island shimmying of columns of mercury). This was the machine that had given instructions on building the last three-quarters of itself. This was the goal, perhaps, toward which fallible human reasoning and biased human judgment and feeble human ambition had evolved.
This was the machine that really thought—a million-plus!
This was the machine that the timid cyberneticists and stuffy professional scientists had said could not be built. Yet this was the machine that the Thinkers, with characteristic Yankee push, had built. And nicknamed, with characteristic Yankee irreverence and girl-fondness, "Maizie."
Gazing up at it, the President of the United States felt a chord plucked within him that hadn't been sounded for decades, the dark and shivery organ chord of his Baptist childhood. Here, in a strange sense, although his reason rejected it, he felt he stood face to face with the living God: infinitely stern with the sternness of reality, yet infinitely just. No tiniest error or wilful misstep could ever escape the scrutiny of this vast mentality. He shivered.
The grizzled general—there was also one who was gray—was thinking that this was a very odd link in the chain of command. Some shadowy and usually well-controlled memories from World War II faintly stirred his ire. Here he was giving orders to a being immeasurably more intelligent than himself. And always orders of the "Tell me how to kill that man" rather than the "Kill that man" sort. The distinction bothered him obscurely. It relieved him to know that Maizie had built-in controls which made her always the servant of humanity, or of humanity's right-minded leaders—even the Thinkers weren't certain which.
The gray general was thinking uneasily, and, like the President, at a more turbid level, of the resemblance between Papal infallibility and the dictates of the machine. Suddenly his bony wrists began to tremble. He asked himself: Was this the Second Coming? Mightn't an incarnation be in metal rather than flesh?
The austere Secretary of State was remembering what he'd taken such pains to make everyone forget: his youthful flirtation at Lake Success with Buddhism. Sitting before his guru , his teacher, feeling the Occidental's awe at the wisdom of the East, or its pretense, he had felt a little like this.
The burly Secretary of Space, who had come up through United Rockets, was thanking his stars that at any rate the professional scientists weren't responsible for this job. Like the grizzled general, he'd always felt suspicious of men who kept telling you how to do things, rather than doing them themselves. In World War III he'd had his fill of the professional physicists, with their eternal taint of a misty sort of radicalism and free-thinking. The Thinkers were better—more disciplined, more human. They'd called their brain-machine Maizie, which helped take the curse off her. Somewhat.
The President's Secretary, a paunchy veteran of party caucuses, was also glad that it was the Thinkers who had created the machine, though he trembled at the power that it gave them over the Administration. Still, you could do business with the Thinkers. And nobody (not even the Thinkers) could do business (that sort of business) with Maizie!
Before that great square face with its thousands of tiny metal features, only Jorj Helmuth seemed at ease, busily entering on the tape the complex Questions of the Day that the high officials had handed him: logistics for the Endless War in Pakistan, optimum size for next year's sugar-corn crop, current thought trends in average Soviet minds—profound questions, yet many of them phrased with surprising simplicity. For figures, technical jargon, and layman's language were alike to Maizie; there was no need to translate into mathematical shorthand, as with the lesser brain-machines.
The click of the taper went on until the Secretary of State had twice nervously fired a cigaret with his ultrasonic lighter and twice quickly put it away. No one spoke.
Jorj looked up at the Secretary of Space. "Section Five, Question Four—whom would that come from?"
The burly man frowned. "That would be the physics boys, Opperly's group. Is anything wrong?"
Jorj did not answer. A bit later he quit taping and began to adjust controls, going up on the boom-chair to reach some of them. Eventually he came down and touched a few more, then stood waiting.
From the great cube came a profound, steady purring. Involuntarily the six officials backed off a bit. Somehow it was impossible for a man to get used to the sound of Maizie starting to think.
Jorj turned, smiling. "And now, gentlemen, while we wait for Maizie to celebrate, there should be just enough time for us to watch the takeoff of the Mars rocket." He switched on a giant television screen. The others made a quarter turn, and there before them glowed the rich ochres and blues of a New Mexico sunrise and, in the middle distance, a silvery mighty spindle.
Like the generals, the Secretary of Space suppressed a scowl. Here was something that ought to be spang in the center of his official territory, and the Thinkers had locked him completely out of it. That rocket there—just an ordinary Earth satellite vehicle commandeered from the Army, but equipped by the Thinkers with Maizie-designed nuclear motors capable of the Mars journey and more. The first spaceship—and the Secretary of Space was not in on it!
Still, he told himself, Maizie had decreed it that way. And when he remembered what the Thinkers had done for him in rescuing him from breakdown with their mental science, in rescuing the whole Administration from collapse he realized he had to be satisfied. And that was without taking into consideration the amazing additional mental discoveries that the Thinkers were bringing down from Mars.
"Lord," the President said to Jorj as if voicing the Secretary's feeling, "I wish you people could bring a couple of those wise little devils back with you this trip. Be a good thing for the country."
Jorj looked at him a bit coldly. "It's quite unthinkable," he said.
"The telepathic abilities of the Martians make them extremely sensitive. The conflicts of ordinary Earth minds would impinge on them psychotically, even fatally. As you know, the Thinkers were able to contact them only because of our degree of learned mental poise and errorless memory-chains. So for the present it must be our task alone to glean from the Martians their astounding mental skills. Of course, some day in the future, when we have discovered how to armor the minds of the Martians—"
"Sure, I know," the President said hastily. "Shouldn't have mentioned it, Jorj."
Conversation ceased. They waited with growing tension for the great violet flames to bloom from the base of the silvery shaft.
Meanwhile the question tape, like a New Year's streamer tossed out a high window into the night, sped on its dark way along spinning rollers. Curling with an intricate aimlessness curiously like that of such a streamer, it tantalized the silvery fingers of a thousand relays, saucily evaded the glances of ten thousand electric eyes, impishly darted down a narrow black alleyway of memory banks, and, reaching the center of the cube, suddenly emerged into a small room where a suave fat man in shorts sat drinking beer.
He flipped the tape over to him with practiced finger, eyeing it as a stockbroker might have studied a ticker tape. He read the first question, closed his eyes and frowned for five seconds. Then with the staccato self-confidence of a hack writer, he began to tape out the answer.
For many minutes the only sounds were the rustle of the paper ribbon and the click of the taper, except for the seconds the fat man took to close his eyes, or to drink or pour beer. Once, too, he lifted a phone, asked a concise question, waited half a minute, listened to an answer, then went back to the grind.
Until he came to Section Five, Question Four. That time he did his thinking with his eyes open.
The question was: "Does Maizie stand for Maelzel?"
He sat for a while slowly scratching his thigh. His loose, persuasive lips tightened, without closing, into the shape of a snarl.
Suddenly he began to tape again.
"Maizie does not stand for Maelzel. Maizie stands for amazing, humorously given the form of a girl's name. Section Six, Answer One: The mid-term election viewcasts should be spaced as follows...."
But his lips didn't lose the shape of a snarl.
Five hundred miles above the ionosphere, the Mars rocket cut off its fuel and slumped gratefully into an orbit that would carry it effortlessly around the world at that altitude. The pilot unstrapped himself and stretched, but he didn't look out the viewport at the dried-mud disc that was Earth, cloaked in its haze of blue sky. He knew he had two maddening months ahead of him in which to do little more than that. Instead, he unstrapped Sappho.
Used to free fall from two previous experiences, and loving it, the fluffy little cat was soon bounding about the cabin in curves and gyrations that would have made her the envy of all back-alley and parlor felines on the planet below. A miracle cat in the dream world of free fall. For a long time she played with a string that the man would toss out lazily. Sometimes she caught the string on the fly, sometimes she swam for it frantically.
After a while the man grew bored with the game. He unlocked a drawer and began to study the details of the wisdom he would discover on Mars this trip—priceless spiritual insights that would be balm to war-battered mankind.
The cat carefully selected a spot three feet off the floor, curled up on the air, and went to sleep.
Jorj Helmuth snipped the emerging answer tape into sections and handed each to the appropriate man. Most of them carefully tucked theirs away with little more than a glance, but the Secretary of Space puzzled over his.
"Who the devil would Maelzel be?" he asked.
A remote look came into the eyes of the Secretary of State. "Edgar Allen Poe," he said frowningly, with eyes half-closed.
The grizzled general snapped his fingers. "Sure! Maelzel's Chess player. Read it when I was a kid. About an automaton that was supposed to play chess. Poe proved it hid a man inside it."
The Secretary of Space frowned. "Now what's the point in a fool question like that?"
"You said it came from Opperly's group?" Jorj asked sharply.
The Secretary of Space nodded. The others looked at the two men puzzledly.
"Who would that be?" Jorj pressed. "The group, I mean."
The Secretary of Space shrugged. "Oh, the usual little bunch over at the Institute. Hindeman, Gregory, Opperly himself. Oh, yes, and young Farquar."
"Sounds like Opperly's getting senile," Jorj commented coldly. "I'd investigate."
The Secretary of Space nodded. He suddenly looked tough. "I will. Right away."
Sunlight striking through French windows spotlighted a ballet of dust motes untroubled by air-conditioning. Morton Opperly's living room was well-kept but worn and quite behind the times. Instead of reading tapes there were books; instead of steno-robots, pen and ink; while in place of a four by six TV screen, a Picasso hung on the wall. Only Opperly knew that the painting was still faintly radioactive, that it had been riskily so when he'd smuggled it out of his bomb-singed apartment in New York City.
The two physicists fronted each other across a coffee table. The face of the elder was cadaverous, large-eyed, and tender—fined down by a long life of abstract thought. That of the younger was forceful, sensuous, bulky as his body, and exceptionally ugly. He looked rather like a bear.
Opperly was saying, "So when he asked who was responsible for the Maelzel question, I said I didn't remember." He smiled. "They still allow me my absent-mindedness, since it nourishes their contempt. Almost my sole remaining privilege." The smile faded. "Why do you keep on teasing the zoo animals, Willard?" he asked without rancor. "I've maintained many times that we shouldn't truckle to them by yielding to their demand that we ask Maizie questions. You and the rest have overruled me. But then to use those questions to convey veiled insults isn't reasonable. Apparently the Secretary of Space was bothered enough about this last one to pay me a 'copter call within twenty minutes of this morning's meeting at the Foundation. Why do you do it, Willard?"
The features of the other convulsed unpleasantly. "Because the Thinkers are charlatans who must be exposed," he rapped out. "We know their Maizie is no more than a tealeaf-reading fake. We've traced their Mars rockets and found they go nowhere. We know their Martian mental science is bunk."
"But we've already exposed the Thinkers very thoroughly," Opperly interposed quietly. "You know the good it did."
Farquar hunched his Japanese-wrestler shoulders. "Then it's got to be done until it takes."
Opperly studied the bowl of mutated flowers by the coffee pot. "I think you just want to tease the animals, for some personal reason of which you probably aren't aware."
Farquar scowled. "We're the ones in the cages."
Opperly continued his inspection of the flowers' bells. "All the more reason not to poke sticks through the bars at the lions and tigers strolling outside. No, Willard, I'm not counseling appeasement. But consider the age in which we live. It wants magicians." His voice grew especially tranquil. "A scientist tells people the truth. When times are good—that is, when the truth offers no threat—people don't mind. But when times are very, very bad...." A shadow darkened his eyes.
"Well, we all know what happened to—" And he mentioned three names that had been household words in the middle of the century. They were the names on the brass plaque dedicated to the martyred three physicists.
He went on, "A magician, on the other hand, tells people what they wish were true—that perpetual motion works, that cancer can be cured by colored lights, that a psychosis is no worse than a head cold, that they'll live forever. In good times magicians are laughed at. They're a luxury of the spoiled wealthy few. But in bad times people sell their souls for magic cures, and buy perpetual motion machines to power their war rockets."
Farquar clenched his fist. "All the more reason to keep chipping away at the Thinkers. Are we supposed to beg off from a job because it's difficult and dangerous?"
Opperly shook his head. "We're to keep clear of the infection of violence. In my day, Willard, I was one of the Frightened Men. Later I was one of the Angry Men and then one of the Minds of Despair. Now I'm convinced that all my reactions were futile."
"Exactly!" Farquar agreed harshly. "You reacted. You didn't act. If you men who discovered atomic energy had only formed a secret league, if you'd only had the foresight and the guts to use your tremendous bargaining position to demand the power to shape mankind's future...."
"By the time you were born, Willard," Opperly interrupted dreamily,
"Hitler was merely a name in the history books. We scientists weren't the stuff out of which cloak-and-dagger men are made. Can you imagine Oppenheimer wearing a mask or Einstein sneaking into the Old White House with a bomb in his briefcase?" He smiled. "Besides, that's not the way power is seized. New ideas aren't useful to the man bargaining for power—only established facts or lies are."
"Just the same, it would have been a good thing if you'd had a little violence in you."
"No," Opperly said.
"I've got violence in me," Farquar announced, shoving himself to his feet.
Opperly looked up from the flowers. "I think you have," he agreed.
"But what are we to do?" Farquar demanded. "Surrender the world to charlatans without a struggle?"
Opperly mused for a while. "I don't know what the world needs now. Everyone knows Newton as the great scientist. Few remember that he spent half his life muddling with alchemy, looking for the philosopher's stone. Which Newton did the world need then?"
"Now you are justifying the Thinkers!"
"No, I leave that to history."
"And history consists of the actions of men," Farquar concluded. "I intend to act. The Thinkers are vulnerable, their power fantastically precarious. What's it based on? A few lucky guesses. Faith-healing. Some science hocus-pocus, on the level of those juke-box burlesque acts between the strips. Dubious mental comfort given to a few nerve-torn neurotics in the Inner Cabinet—and their wives. The fact that the Thinkers' clever stage-managing won the President a doubtful election. The erroneous belief that the Soviets pulled out of Iraq and Iran because of the Thinkers' Mind Bomb threat. A brain-machine that's just a cover for Jan Tregarron's guesswork. Oh, yes, and that hogwash of
'Martian wisdom.' All of it mere bluff! A few pushes at the right times and points are all that are needed—and the Thinkers know it! I'll bet they're terrified already, and will be more so when they find that we're gunning for them. Eventually they'll be making overtures to us, turning to us for help. You wait and see."
"I am thinking again of Hitler," Opperly interposed quietly. "On his first half dozen big steps, he had nothing but bluff. His generals were against him. They knew they were in a cardboard fort. Yet he won every battle, until the last. Moreover," he pressed on, cutting Farquar short, "the power of the Thinkers isn't based on what they've got, but on what the world hasn't got—peace, honor, a good conscience...."
The front-door knocker clanked. Farquar answered it. A skinny old man with a radiation scar twisting across his temple handed him a tiny cylinder. "Radiogram for you, Willard." He grinned across the hall at Opperly. "When are you going to get a phone put in, Mr. Opperly?"
The physicist waved to him. "Next year, perhaps, Mr. Berry."
The old man snorted with good-humored incredulity and trudged off.
"What did I tell you about the Thinkers making overtures?" Farquar chortled suddenly. "It's come sooner than I expected. Look at this."
He held out the radiogram, but the older man didn't take it. Instead he asked, "Who's it from? Tregarron?"
"No, from Helmuth. There's a lot of sugar corn about man's future in deep space, but the real reason is clear. They know that they're going to have to produce an actual nuclear rocket pretty soon, and for that they'll need our help."
"An invitation?"
Farquar nodded. "For this afternoon." He noticed Opperly's anxious though distant frown. "What's the matter?" he asked. "Are you bothered about my going? Are you thinking it might be a trap—that after the Maelzel question they may figure I'm better rubbed out?"
The older man shook his head. "I'm not afraid for your life, Willard. That's yours to risk as you choose. No, I'm worried about other things they might do to you."
"What do you mean?" Farquar asked.
Opperly looked at him with a gentle appraisal. "You're a strong and vital man, Willard, with a strong man's prides and desires." His voice trailed off for a bit. Then, "Excuse me, Willard, but wasn't there a girl once? A Miss Arkady?"
Farquar's ungainly figure froze. He nodded curtly, face averted.
"And didn't she go off with a Thinker?"
"If girls find me ugly, that's their business," Farquar said harshly, still not looking at Opperly. "What's that got to do with this invitation?"
Opperly didn't answer the question. His eyes got more distant. Finally he said, "In my day we had it a lot easier. A scientist was an academician, cushioned by tradition."
Willard snorted. "Science had already entered the era of the police inspectors, with laboratory directors and political appointees stifling enterprise."
"Perhaps," Opperly agreed. "Still, the scientist lived the safe, restricted, highly respectable life of a university man. He wasn't exposed to the temptations of the world."
Farquar turned on him. "Are you implying that the Thinkers will somehow be able to buy me off?"
"Not exactly."
"You think I'll be persuaded to change my aims?" Farquar demanded angrily.
Opperly shrugged his helplessness. "No, I don't think you'll change your aims."
Clouds encroaching from the west blotted the parallelogram of sunlight between the two men.
As the slideway whisked him gently along the corridor toward his apartment, Jorj was thinking of his spaceship. For a moment the silver-winged vision crowded everything else out of his mind.
Just think, a spaceship with sails! He smiled a bit, marveling at the paradox.
Direct atomic power. Direct utilization of the force of the flying neutrons. No more ridiculous business of using a reactor to drive a steam engine, or boil off something for a jet exhaust—processes that were as primitive and wasteful as burning gunpowder to keep yourself warm.
Chemical jets would carry his spaceship above the atmosphere. Then would come the thrilling order, "Set sail for Mars!" The vast umbrella would unfold and open out around the stern, its rear or Earthward side a gleaming expanse of radioactive ribbon perhaps only an atom thick and backed with a material that would reflect neutrons. Atoms in the ribbon would split, blasting neutrons astern at fantastic velocities. Reaction would send the spaceship hurtling forward.
In airless space, the expanse of sails would naturally not retard the ship. More radioactive ribbon, manufactured as needed in the ship itself, would feed out onto the sail as that already there became exhausted.
A spaceship with direct nuclear drive—and he, a Thinker, had conceived it completely except for the technical details! Having strengthened his mind by hard years of somno-learning, mind-casting, memory-straightening, and sensory training, he had assured himself of the executive power to control the technicians and direct their specialized abilities. Together they would build the true Mars rocket.
But that would only be a beginning. They would build the true Mind Bomb. They would build the true Selective Microbe Slayer. They would discover the true laws of ESP and the inner life. They would even—his imagination hesitated a moment, then strode boldly forward—build the true Maizie!
And then ... then the Thinkers would be on even terms with the scientists. Rather, they'd be far ahead. No more deception.
He was so exalted by this thought that he almost let the slideway carry him past his door. He stepped inside and called, "Caddy!" He waited a moment, then walked through the apartment, but she wasn't there.
Confound the girl, he couldn't help thinking. This morning, when she should have made herself scarce, she'd sprawled about sleeping. Now, when he felt like seeing her, when her presence would have added a pleasant final touch to his glowing mood, she chose to be absent. He really should use his hypnotic control on her, he decided, and again there sprang into his mind the word—a pet form of her name—that would send her into obedient trance.
No, he told himself again, that was to be reserved for some moment of crisis or desperate danger, when he would need someone to strike suddenly and unquestioningly for himself and mankind. Caddy was merely a wilful and rather silly girl, incapable at present of understanding the tremendous tensions under which he operated. When he had time for it, he would train her up to be a fitting companion without hypnosis.
Yet the fact of her absence had a subtly disquieting effect. It shook his perfect self-confidence just a fraction. He asked himself if he'd been wise in summoning the rocket physicists without consulting Tregarron.
But this mood, too, he conquered quickly. Tregarron wasn't his boss, but just the Thinker's most clever salesman, an expert in the mumbo-jumbo so necessary for social control in this chaotic era. He himself, Jorj Helmuth, was the real leader in theoretics and all-over strategy, the mind behind the mind behind Maizie.
He stretched himself on the bed, almost instantly achieved maximum relaxation, turned on the somno-learner, and began the two hour rest he knew would be desirable before the big conference.
Question:
What is the plot of the story?
Answer:
|
[
"Following World War III at the end of the 20th century, American society is dependent upon a machine created by the Thinker's Foundation; this machine, named Maizie, has the ability to answer any question posed to it, and it is used often by politicians and public figures for societal decision making. Jorj Helmuth, a Thinker with hypnotic abilities, awakes with a girl, Caddy, asleep beside him. Jorj is struck with a revelation about new developments in his work towards space domination, and he sends a letter to a group of physicists calling for a meeting later that afternoon. Jorj is then alerted that the President has arrived to consult Maizie. He commences the daily procedure of feeding the machine questions through a tape, and meanwhile attention turns to a broadcast of a rocket taking off to Mars. The Secretary of Space, who joined the President, is wary of his exclusion in this project, but disregards it as he credits Maizie for the decision. Jorj discloses that the Thinkers plan to find ways to gain access to and control of Martian minds. As Maizie begins answering questions, one of them sparks curiosity, asking whether Maizie is short for Maelzel. The machine responds with \"no\" as the officials are perplexed by the question, which references a character in a story by Edgar Allen Poe in which a machine was found to be fake and operated by a man. Apparently, the question came from a member of Opperly's group, a team of physicists; Jorj advises that the issue be looked into. Later, scientists Opperly and Farquar discuss the previous events. Opperly says that he covered for Farquar, who submitted the question, but still disagrees with his decision to dig at the Thinkers. Farquar believes that the Thinkers, along with Maizie, are fakes and ought to be exposed. Farquar and Opperly go back and forth, debating whether or not exposing the Thinkers is worth violence or energy, when Farquar receives a message from Jorj regarding the meeting about his space project. Opperly is skeptical of Jorj's motives, but Farquar plans to go anyway. On his way home, Jorj ponders the future of the Thinkers with excitement, eagerly awaiting a future where they would be on the same level of the Scientists, and where they would build the true Maizie.",
"In an alternate history of America, wherein World War III has occurred, Jorj Helmuth wakes up and turns off the device which enables him to learn in his sleep. Jorj is a forty year old Thinker, a class of individuals who work with the US government on various projects, such as monthly rockets to Mars and a super-intelligent computer Maizie. As Jorj prepares for his day, he receives a call from the President, who is waiting to see Maizie. \nMaizie, a large computer with large panels, controls, indicators, and terminals occupies a two-story room in the Thinkers’ Foundation, in which the President and members of his cabinet are waiting. It is described as many times more intelligent than humans, and was built by the Thinkers despite the skepticism of cyberneticists and scientists. The president, his secretary, two generals, the Secretary of State, and the Secretary of Space regard Maizie with reverence, speaking in hushed tones for fear that it could overhear them despite the knowledge that it only receives input from the ticker tape fed to it. Jorj enters onto the tape questions from the officials, before noticing an errant question, which he learns is from Morton Opperly’s group of physicists. He feeds the tape to Maizie, which begins to emit a noise indicative of the start of its processes.\nAs they await Maizie’s answers, Jorj directs their attention to a television screen broadcasting the launch of a rocket to Mars. We learn that Martians have imparted profound wisdom through the Thinkers to the world, which still suffers from the effects of the third world war. In response to the President’s wish that Martians be brought to Earth to directly share their mental science, Jorj reminds him that only the Thinkers’ minds can safely interact with the Martians’. \nThe narrator reveals that inside Maizie is, rather than complicated machinery etching the edges of molecules to store information, a man who manually answers the input questions. He pauses when he reaches the question from Opperly’s group, which asks if Maizie stands for Maelzel. He types out a response in the negative and continues. It is also revealed that the rocket launched for Mars only travels acutely beyond the ionosphere, rather than to its advertised destination. The astronaut, who is accompanied by his cat, reads about the knowledge which he would pass off as Martian wisdom upon his descent to Earth. \nMaizie has returned the output tape, and the Secretary of Space wonders aloud who Maelzel is. One of the generals recalls that it is from a story about a chess automaton inside which was actually a man. They dismiss Opperly’s group as confused. \nIn Opperly’s residence however, Opperly and Willard Farquar discuss the Thinkers’ deception. Though Farquar aims to reveal the sham, Opperly is unsure he will succeed, citing that people want to be told what they wish were true. Farquhar receives an invitation from Jorj, which they surmise is because of a demand for rockets in the near future.\n",
"The story is set after World War III. Jorj is a Thinker that occasionally uses hypnotic control on a girl named Caddy to make her agreeable with him. The Thinkers have made big claims that they have achieved great technological feats. They claim that they have created a cubic brain-machine that is intelligent and knows everything. They say the machine event helped finished building itself. They also have claimed that they have nuclear powered Mars rockets. This too is not true. They send a person to space pretending that the person is headed towards Mars, when in reality that person will be circling the Earth for two months. Not everyone knows of the lies, the President and secretary of state do not. \n\nDuring a review of the tapes for Maizie, the group comes across an unusual question asking about Maizie. Jorj finds out that the question was written by Opperly’s group. Opperly and Farquar are two scientists that know of the Thinkers deception. Farquar is the one who wrote the question, to Opperly’s dismay. Caddy was previously with Farquar, before she went with Jorj. \n\nOpperly and Farquar disagree over how they should respond to the Thinker’s deceptions. Farquar wants to act with violence to continue to try to expose them. Opperly reasons that they tried to expose the Thinkers before and nothing happened, so they should cut their losses. Farquar suggests that the Thinkers are vulnerable because their technology does not exist and it would be easy to attack them. Opperly is concerned that the Thinkers may be able to buy Farquar off if they offer Caddy back to him. \n\nAt the end of the story, Jorj has plans to make sure the Thinkers no longer have to use deception. He excitedly thinks of how the Thinkers can build the true Mars rocket and even perhaps the true Maizie and goes to sleep with these thoughts in his mind. \n",
"After waking up, Jorj Helmuth, a Thinker, sends a message to Farquar and the other professionals so that he can get help in building a rocket. He states that he has funds from the government and wishes to work together. Importantly, the girl, who is sleeping next to Jorj, is controls hypnotically by Jorj, and she is somehow connected to Farquar. \n\nThe president then shows up waiting to see Maizie. Standing before the two stories high electrical brain, he feels like he is seeing the actual God. Not only does he feels so, the generals wonders if this is the Second Coming, the Secretary of State feels the power and respect in wisdom that this machine has, the Secretary of Space is relieved that the Thinks are the ones who built it rather than the professional physicists who does not get things done but simply tell you how things should be done. While surprised at the question that the Opperly’s group asked, Jorj simply entered all the questions for Maizie to solve on the tape. Then he suggests that the government officials should watch the takeoff of the rocket that is going to Mars. While the Secretary of Space is somewhat angry at Jorj for not even informing him about the spaceship, he tells himself that the Thinkers had rescued him from breakdowns and will be bringing mental discoveries from Mars. \n\nAs Maizie continues to work, the readers learn that there is actually a person that work on the questions as they enter into Maizie. He reads the questions and write down their answers. Interestingly, he also notices the question from the Opperly’s group. It makes him somewhat angry. After the rocket goes into space, Jorj gives the answers that are produced by Maizie to each government official. Then we learn that the Opperly’s group is asking about Maelzel. Maelzel was a chess playing machine that was proven to have a man hidden inside it. Later we learned that the Opperly’s group knows that Maizie also has a man hidden in it, and they wanted to tease them. Which is why they wrote the question. Apparently they succeeded, since the question got Jorj angry.\n\nWe then see two physicists, namely Opperly and Farquar, arguing over whether the world needs a magician or a physicist right now when the invitation that Jorj previously sent arrives. Opperly is suspicious of the invitation and what they will do to Farquar, mentioning the girl that ran off with a Thinker. Indeed, Jorj is not only thinking of building a Mars rocket, he also want to have other things built such as Maizie, so that the Thinkers will be farther ahead from with the scientists. But Farquar does not think so."
] |
51152
|
Appointment in Tomorrow
BY FRITZ LEIBER
Illustrated by ED ALEXANDER
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction July 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Is it possible to have a world without moral values? Or does lack of morality become a moral value, also?
The first angry rays of the sun—which, startlingly enough, still rose in the east at 24 hour intervals—pierced the lacy tops of Atlantic combers and touched thousands of sleeping Americans with unconscious fear, because of their unpleasant similarity to the rays from World War III's atomic bombs.
They turned to blood the witch-circle of rusty steel skeletons around Inferno in Manhattan. Without comment, they pointed a cosmic finger at the tarnished brass plaque commemorating the martyrdom of the Three Physicists after the dropping of the Hell Bomb. They tenderly touched the rosy skin and strawberry bruises on the naked shoulders of a girl sleeping off a drunk on the furry and radiantly heated floor of a nearby roof garden. They struck green magic from the glassy blot that was Old Washington. Twelve hours before, they had revealed things as eerily beautiful, and as ravaged, in Asia and Russia. They pinked the white walls of the Colonial dwelling of Morton Opperly near the Institute for Advanced Studies; upstairs they slanted impartially across the Pharoahlike and open-eyed face of the elderly physicist and the ugly, sleep-surly one of young Willard Farquar in the next room. And in nearby New Washington they made of the spire of the Thinkers' Foundation a blue and optimistic glory that outshone White House, Jr.
It was America approaching the end of the Twentieth Century. America of juke-box burlesque and your local radiation hospital. America of the mask-fad for women and Mystic Christianity. America of the off-the-bosom dress and the New Blue Laws. America of the Endless War and the loyalty detector. America of marvelous Maizie and the monthly rocket to Mars. America of the Thinkers and (a few remembered) the Institute. "Knock on titanium," "Whadya do for black-outs," "Please, lover, don't think when I'm around," America, as combat-shocked and crippled as the rest of the bomb-shattered planet.
Not one impudent photon of the sunlight penetrated the triple-paned, polarizing windows of Jorj Helmuth's bedroom in the Thinker's Foundation, yet the clock in his brain awakened him to the minute, or almost. Switching off the Educational Sandman in the midst of the phrase, "... applying tensor calculus to the nucleus," he took a deep, even breath and cast his mind to the limits of the world and his knowledge. It was a somewhat shadowy vision, but, he noted with impartial approval, definitely less shadowy than yesterday morning.
Employing a rapid mental scanning technique, he next cleared his memory chains of false associations, including those acquired while asleep. These chores completed, he held his finger on a bedside button, which rotated the polarizing window panes until the room slowly filled with a muted daylight. Then, still flat on his back, he turned his head until he could look at the remarkably beautiful blonde girl asleep beside him.
Remembering last night, he felt a pang of exasperation, which he instantly quelled by taking his mind to a higher and dispassionate level from which he could look down on the girl and even himself as quaint, clumsy animals. Still, he grumbled silently, Caddy might have had enough consideration to clear out before he awoke. He wondered if he shouldn't have used his hypnotic control of the girl to smooth their relationship last night, and for a moment the word that would send her into deep trance trembled on the tip of his tongue. But no, that special power of his over her was reserved for far more important purposes.
Pumping dynamic tension into his 20-year-old muscles and confidence into his 60-year-old mind, the 40-year-old Thinker rose from bed. No covers had to be thrown off; the nuclear heating unit made them unnecessary. He stepped into his clothing—the severe tunic, tights and sockassins of the modern business man. Next he glanced at the message tape beside his phone, washed down with ginger ale a vita-amino-enzyme tablet, and walked to the window. There, gazing along the rows of newly planted mutant oaks lining Decontamination Avenue, his smooth face broke into a smile.
It had come to him, the next big move in the intricate game making up his life—and mankind's. Come to him during sleep, as so many of his best decisions did, because he regularly employed the time-saving technique of somno-thought, which could function at the same time as somno-learning.
He set his who?-where? robot for "Rocket Physicist" and "Genius Class." While it worked, he dictated to his steno-robot the following brief message:
Dear Fellow Scientist:
A project is contemplated that will have a crucial bearing on man's future in deep space. Ample non-military Government funds are available. There was a time when professional men scoffed at the Thinkers. Then there was a time when the Thinkers perforce neglected the professional men. Now both times are past. May they never return! I would like to consult you this afternoon, three o'clock sharp, Thinkers' Foundation I.
Jorj Helmuth
Meanwhile the who?-where? had tossed out a dozen cards. He glanced through them, hesitated at the name "Willard Farquar," looked at the sleeping girl, then quickly tossed them all into the addresso-robot and plugged in the steno-robot.
The buzz-light blinked green and he switched the phone to audio.
"The President is waiting to see Maizie, sir," a clear feminine voice announced. "He has the general staff with him."
"Martian peace to him," Jorj Helmuth said. "Tell him I'll be down in a few minutes."
Huge as a primitive nuclear reactor, the great electronic brain loomed above the knot of hush-voiced men. It almost filled a two-story room in the Thinkers' Foundation. Its front was an orderly expanse of controls, indicators, telltales, and terminals, the upper ones reached by a chair on a boom.
Although, as far as anyone knew, it could sense only the information and questions fed into it on a tape, the human visitors could not resist the impulse to talk in whispers and glance uneasily at the great cryptic cube. After all, it had lately taken to moving some of its own controls—the permissible ones—and could doubtless improvise a hearing apparatus if it wanted to.
For this was the thinking machine beside which the Marks and Eniacs and Maniacs and Maddidas and Minervas and Mimirs were less than Morons. This was the machine with a million times as many synapses as the human brain, the machine that remembered by cutting delicate notches in the rims of molecules (instead of kindergarten paper-punching or the Coney Island shimmying of columns of mercury). This was the machine that had given instructions on building the last three-quarters of itself. This was the goal, perhaps, toward which fallible human reasoning and biased human judgment and feeble human ambition had evolved.
This was the machine that really thought—a million-plus!
This was the machine that the timid cyberneticists and stuffy professional scientists had said could not be built. Yet this was the machine that the Thinkers, with characteristic Yankee push, had built. And nicknamed, with characteristic Yankee irreverence and girl-fondness, "Maizie."
Gazing up at it, the President of the United States felt a chord plucked within him that hadn't been sounded for decades, the dark and shivery organ chord of his Baptist childhood. Here, in a strange sense, although his reason rejected it, he felt he stood face to face with the living God: infinitely stern with the sternness of reality, yet infinitely just. No tiniest error or wilful misstep could ever escape the scrutiny of this vast mentality. He shivered.
The grizzled general—there was also one who was gray—was thinking that this was a very odd link in the chain of command. Some shadowy and usually well-controlled memories from World War II faintly stirred his ire. Here he was giving orders to a being immeasurably more intelligent than himself. And always orders of the "Tell me how to kill that man" rather than the "Kill that man" sort. The distinction bothered him obscurely. It relieved him to know that Maizie had built-in controls which made her always the servant of humanity, or of humanity's right-minded leaders—even the Thinkers weren't certain which.
The gray general was thinking uneasily, and, like the President, at a more turbid level, of the resemblance between Papal infallibility and the dictates of the machine. Suddenly his bony wrists began to tremble. He asked himself: Was this the Second Coming? Mightn't an incarnation be in metal rather than flesh?
The austere Secretary of State was remembering what he'd taken such pains to make everyone forget: his youthful flirtation at Lake Success with Buddhism. Sitting before his guru , his teacher, feeling the Occidental's awe at the wisdom of the East, or its pretense, he had felt a little like this.
The burly Secretary of Space, who had come up through United Rockets, was thanking his stars that at any rate the professional scientists weren't responsible for this job. Like the grizzled general, he'd always felt suspicious of men who kept telling you how to do things, rather than doing them themselves. In World War III he'd had his fill of the professional physicists, with their eternal taint of a misty sort of radicalism and free-thinking. The Thinkers were better—more disciplined, more human. They'd called their brain-machine Maizie, which helped take the curse off her. Somewhat.
The President's Secretary, a paunchy veteran of party caucuses, was also glad that it was the Thinkers who had created the machine, though he trembled at the power that it gave them over the Administration. Still, you could do business with the Thinkers. And nobody (not even the Thinkers) could do business (that sort of business) with Maizie!
Before that great square face with its thousands of tiny metal features, only Jorj Helmuth seemed at ease, busily entering on the tape the complex Questions of the Day that the high officials had handed him: logistics for the Endless War in Pakistan, optimum size for next year's sugar-corn crop, current thought trends in average Soviet minds—profound questions, yet many of them phrased with surprising simplicity. For figures, technical jargon, and layman's language were alike to Maizie; there was no need to translate into mathematical shorthand, as with the lesser brain-machines.
The click of the taper went on until the Secretary of State had twice nervously fired a cigaret with his ultrasonic lighter and twice quickly put it away. No one spoke.
Jorj looked up at the Secretary of Space. "Section Five, Question Four—whom would that come from?"
The burly man frowned. "That would be the physics boys, Opperly's group. Is anything wrong?"
Jorj did not answer. A bit later he quit taping and began to adjust controls, going up on the boom-chair to reach some of them. Eventually he came down and touched a few more, then stood waiting.
From the great cube came a profound, steady purring. Involuntarily the six officials backed off a bit. Somehow it was impossible for a man to get used to the sound of Maizie starting to think.
Jorj turned, smiling. "And now, gentlemen, while we wait for Maizie to celebrate, there should be just enough time for us to watch the takeoff of the Mars rocket." He switched on a giant television screen. The others made a quarter turn, and there before them glowed the rich ochres and blues of a New Mexico sunrise and, in the middle distance, a silvery mighty spindle.
Like the generals, the Secretary of Space suppressed a scowl. Here was something that ought to be spang in the center of his official territory, and the Thinkers had locked him completely out of it. That rocket there—just an ordinary Earth satellite vehicle commandeered from the Army, but equipped by the Thinkers with Maizie-designed nuclear motors capable of the Mars journey and more. The first spaceship—and the Secretary of Space was not in on it!
Still, he told himself, Maizie had decreed it that way. And when he remembered what the Thinkers had done for him in rescuing him from breakdown with their mental science, in rescuing the whole Administration from collapse he realized he had to be satisfied. And that was without taking into consideration the amazing additional mental discoveries that the Thinkers were bringing down from Mars.
"Lord," the President said to Jorj as if voicing the Secretary's feeling, "I wish you people could bring a couple of those wise little devils back with you this trip. Be a good thing for the country."
Jorj looked at him a bit coldly. "It's quite unthinkable," he said.
"The telepathic abilities of the Martians make them extremely sensitive. The conflicts of ordinary Earth minds would impinge on them psychotically, even fatally. As you know, the Thinkers were able to contact them only because of our degree of learned mental poise and errorless memory-chains. So for the present it must be our task alone to glean from the Martians their astounding mental skills. Of course, some day in the future, when we have discovered how to armor the minds of the Martians—"
"Sure, I know," the President said hastily. "Shouldn't have mentioned it, Jorj."
Conversation ceased. They waited with growing tension for the great violet flames to bloom from the base of the silvery shaft.
Meanwhile the question tape, like a New Year's streamer tossed out a high window into the night, sped on its dark way along spinning rollers. Curling with an intricate aimlessness curiously like that of such a streamer, it tantalized the silvery fingers of a thousand relays, saucily evaded the glances of ten thousand electric eyes, impishly darted down a narrow black alleyway of memory banks, and, reaching the center of the cube, suddenly emerged into a small room where a suave fat man in shorts sat drinking beer.
He flipped the tape over to him with practiced finger, eyeing it as a stockbroker might have studied a ticker tape. He read the first question, closed his eyes and frowned for five seconds. Then with the staccato self-confidence of a hack writer, he began to tape out the answer.
For many minutes the only sounds were the rustle of the paper ribbon and the click of the taper, except for the seconds the fat man took to close his eyes, or to drink or pour beer. Once, too, he lifted a phone, asked a concise question, waited half a minute, listened to an answer, then went back to the grind.
Until he came to Section Five, Question Four. That time he did his thinking with his eyes open.
The question was: "Does Maizie stand for Maelzel?"
He sat for a while slowly scratching his thigh. His loose, persuasive lips tightened, without closing, into the shape of a snarl.
Suddenly he began to tape again.
"Maizie does not stand for Maelzel. Maizie stands for amazing, humorously given the form of a girl's name. Section Six, Answer One: The mid-term election viewcasts should be spaced as follows...."
But his lips didn't lose the shape of a snarl.
Five hundred miles above the ionosphere, the Mars rocket cut off its fuel and slumped gratefully into an orbit that would carry it effortlessly around the world at that altitude. The pilot unstrapped himself and stretched, but he didn't look out the viewport at the dried-mud disc that was Earth, cloaked in its haze of blue sky. He knew he had two maddening months ahead of him in which to do little more than that. Instead, he unstrapped Sappho.
Used to free fall from two previous experiences, and loving it, the fluffy little cat was soon bounding about the cabin in curves and gyrations that would have made her the envy of all back-alley and parlor felines on the planet below. A miracle cat in the dream world of free fall. For a long time she played with a string that the man would toss out lazily. Sometimes she caught the string on the fly, sometimes she swam for it frantically.
After a while the man grew bored with the game. He unlocked a drawer and began to study the details of the wisdom he would discover on Mars this trip—priceless spiritual insights that would be balm to war-battered mankind.
The cat carefully selected a spot three feet off the floor, curled up on the air, and went to sleep.
Jorj Helmuth snipped the emerging answer tape into sections and handed each to the appropriate man. Most of them carefully tucked theirs away with little more than a glance, but the Secretary of Space puzzled over his.
"Who the devil would Maelzel be?" he asked.
A remote look came into the eyes of the Secretary of State. "Edgar Allen Poe," he said frowningly, with eyes half-closed.
The grizzled general snapped his fingers. "Sure! Maelzel's Chess player. Read it when I was a kid. About an automaton that was supposed to play chess. Poe proved it hid a man inside it."
The Secretary of Space frowned. "Now what's the point in a fool question like that?"
"You said it came from Opperly's group?" Jorj asked sharply.
The Secretary of Space nodded. The others looked at the two men puzzledly.
"Who would that be?" Jorj pressed. "The group, I mean."
The Secretary of Space shrugged. "Oh, the usual little bunch over at the Institute. Hindeman, Gregory, Opperly himself. Oh, yes, and young Farquar."
"Sounds like Opperly's getting senile," Jorj commented coldly. "I'd investigate."
The Secretary of Space nodded. He suddenly looked tough. "I will. Right away."
Sunlight striking through French windows spotlighted a ballet of dust motes untroubled by air-conditioning. Morton Opperly's living room was well-kept but worn and quite behind the times. Instead of reading tapes there were books; instead of steno-robots, pen and ink; while in place of a four by six TV screen, a Picasso hung on the wall. Only Opperly knew that the painting was still faintly radioactive, that it had been riskily so when he'd smuggled it out of his bomb-singed apartment in New York City.
The two physicists fronted each other across a coffee table. The face of the elder was cadaverous, large-eyed, and tender—fined down by a long life of abstract thought. That of the younger was forceful, sensuous, bulky as his body, and exceptionally ugly. He looked rather like a bear.
Opperly was saying, "So when he asked who was responsible for the Maelzel question, I said I didn't remember." He smiled. "They still allow me my absent-mindedness, since it nourishes their contempt. Almost my sole remaining privilege." The smile faded. "Why do you keep on teasing the zoo animals, Willard?" he asked without rancor. "I've maintained many times that we shouldn't truckle to them by yielding to their demand that we ask Maizie questions. You and the rest have overruled me. But then to use those questions to convey veiled insults isn't reasonable. Apparently the Secretary of Space was bothered enough about this last one to pay me a 'copter call within twenty minutes of this morning's meeting at the Foundation. Why do you do it, Willard?"
The features of the other convulsed unpleasantly. "Because the Thinkers are charlatans who must be exposed," he rapped out. "We know their Maizie is no more than a tealeaf-reading fake. We've traced their Mars rockets and found they go nowhere. We know their Martian mental science is bunk."
"But we've already exposed the Thinkers very thoroughly," Opperly interposed quietly. "You know the good it did."
Farquar hunched his Japanese-wrestler shoulders. "Then it's got to be done until it takes."
Opperly studied the bowl of mutated flowers by the coffee pot. "I think you just want to tease the animals, for some personal reason of which you probably aren't aware."
Farquar scowled. "We're the ones in the cages."
Opperly continued his inspection of the flowers' bells. "All the more reason not to poke sticks through the bars at the lions and tigers strolling outside. No, Willard, I'm not counseling appeasement. But consider the age in which we live. It wants magicians." His voice grew especially tranquil. "A scientist tells people the truth. When times are good—that is, when the truth offers no threat—people don't mind. But when times are very, very bad...." A shadow darkened his eyes.
"Well, we all know what happened to—" And he mentioned three names that had been household words in the middle of the century. They were the names on the brass plaque dedicated to the martyred three physicists.
He went on, "A magician, on the other hand, tells people what they wish were true—that perpetual motion works, that cancer can be cured by colored lights, that a psychosis is no worse than a head cold, that they'll live forever. In good times magicians are laughed at. They're a luxury of the spoiled wealthy few. But in bad times people sell their souls for magic cures, and buy perpetual motion machines to power their war rockets."
Farquar clenched his fist. "All the more reason to keep chipping away at the Thinkers. Are we supposed to beg off from a job because it's difficult and dangerous?"
Opperly shook his head. "We're to keep clear of the infection of violence. In my day, Willard, I was one of the Frightened Men. Later I was one of the Angry Men and then one of the Minds of Despair. Now I'm convinced that all my reactions were futile."
"Exactly!" Farquar agreed harshly. "You reacted. You didn't act. If you men who discovered atomic energy had only formed a secret league, if you'd only had the foresight and the guts to use your tremendous bargaining position to demand the power to shape mankind's future...."
"By the time you were born, Willard," Opperly interrupted dreamily,
"Hitler was merely a name in the history books. We scientists weren't the stuff out of which cloak-and-dagger men are made. Can you imagine Oppenheimer wearing a mask or Einstein sneaking into the Old White House with a bomb in his briefcase?" He smiled. "Besides, that's not the way power is seized. New ideas aren't useful to the man bargaining for power—only established facts or lies are."
"Just the same, it would have been a good thing if you'd had a little violence in you."
"No," Opperly said.
"I've got violence in me," Farquar announced, shoving himself to his feet.
Opperly looked up from the flowers. "I think you have," he agreed.
"But what are we to do?" Farquar demanded. "Surrender the world to charlatans without a struggle?"
Opperly mused for a while. "I don't know what the world needs now. Everyone knows Newton as the great scientist. Few remember that he spent half his life muddling with alchemy, looking for the philosopher's stone. Which Newton did the world need then?"
"Now you are justifying the Thinkers!"
"No, I leave that to history."
"And history consists of the actions of men," Farquar concluded. "I intend to act. The Thinkers are vulnerable, their power fantastically precarious. What's it based on? A few lucky guesses. Faith-healing. Some science hocus-pocus, on the level of those juke-box burlesque acts between the strips. Dubious mental comfort given to a few nerve-torn neurotics in the Inner Cabinet—and their wives. The fact that the Thinkers' clever stage-managing won the President a doubtful election. The erroneous belief that the Soviets pulled out of Iraq and Iran because of the Thinkers' Mind Bomb threat. A brain-machine that's just a cover for Jan Tregarron's guesswork. Oh, yes, and that hogwash of
'Martian wisdom.' All of it mere bluff! A few pushes at the right times and points are all that are needed—and the Thinkers know it! I'll bet they're terrified already, and will be more so when they find that we're gunning for them. Eventually they'll be making overtures to us, turning to us for help. You wait and see."
"I am thinking again of Hitler," Opperly interposed quietly. "On his first half dozen big steps, he had nothing but bluff. His generals were against him. They knew they were in a cardboard fort. Yet he won every battle, until the last. Moreover," he pressed on, cutting Farquar short, "the power of the Thinkers isn't based on what they've got, but on what the world hasn't got—peace, honor, a good conscience...."
The front-door knocker clanked. Farquar answered it. A skinny old man with a radiation scar twisting across his temple handed him a tiny cylinder. "Radiogram for you, Willard." He grinned across the hall at Opperly. "When are you going to get a phone put in, Mr. Opperly?"
The physicist waved to him. "Next year, perhaps, Mr. Berry."
The old man snorted with good-humored incredulity and trudged off.
"What did I tell you about the Thinkers making overtures?" Farquar chortled suddenly. "It's come sooner than I expected. Look at this."
He held out the radiogram, but the older man didn't take it. Instead he asked, "Who's it from? Tregarron?"
"No, from Helmuth. There's a lot of sugar corn about man's future in deep space, but the real reason is clear. They know that they're going to have to produce an actual nuclear rocket pretty soon, and for that they'll need our help."
"An invitation?"
Farquar nodded. "For this afternoon." He noticed Opperly's anxious though distant frown. "What's the matter?" he asked. "Are you bothered about my going? Are you thinking it might be a trap—that after the Maelzel question they may figure I'm better rubbed out?"
The older man shook his head. "I'm not afraid for your life, Willard. That's yours to risk as you choose. No, I'm worried about other things they might do to you."
"What do you mean?" Farquar asked.
Opperly looked at him with a gentle appraisal. "You're a strong and vital man, Willard, with a strong man's prides and desires." His voice trailed off for a bit. Then, "Excuse me, Willard, but wasn't there a girl once? A Miss Arkady?"
Farquar's ungainly figure froze. He nodded curtly, face averted.
"And didn't she go off with a Thinker?"
"If girls find me ugly, that's their business," Farquar said harshly, still not looking at Opperly. "What's that got to do with this invitation?"
Opperly didn't answer the question. His eyes got more distant. Finally he said, "In my day we had it a lot easier. A scientist was an academician, cushioned by tradition."
Willard snorted. "Science had already entered the era of the police inspectors, with laboratory directors and political appointees stifling enterprise."
"Perhaps," Opperly agreed. "Still, the scientist lived the safe, restricted, highly respectable life of a university man. He wasn't exposed to the temptations of the world."
Farquar turned on him. "Are you implying that the Thinkers will somehow be able to buy me off?"
"Not exactly."
"You think I'll be persuaded to change my aims?" Farquar demanded angrily.
Opperly shrugged his helplessness. "No, I don't think you'll change your aims."
Clouds encroaching from the west blotted the parallelogram of sunlight between the two men.
As the slideway whisked him gently along the corridor toward his apartment, Jorj was thinking of his spaceship. For a moment the silver-winged vision crowded everything else out of his mind.
Just think, a spaceship with sails! He smiled a bit, marveling at the paradox.
Direct atomic power. Direct utilization of the force of the flying neutrons. No more ridiculous business of using a reactor to drive a steam engine, or boil off something for a jet exhaust—processes that were as primitive and wasteful as burning gunpowder to keep yourself warm.
Chemical jets would carry his spaceship above the atmosphere. Then would come the thrilling order, "Set sail for Mars!" The vast umbrella would unfold and open out around the stern, its rear or Earthward side a gleaming expanse of radioactive ribbon perhaps only an atom thick and backed with a material that would reflect neutrons. Atoms in the ribbon would split, blasting neutrons astern at fantastic velocities. Reaction would send the spaceship hurtling forward.
In airless space, the expanse of sails would naturally not retard the ship. More radioactive ribbon, manufactured as needed in the ship itself, would feed out onto the sail as that already there became exhausted.
A spaceship with direct nuclear drive—and he, a Thinker, had conceived it completely except for the technical details! Having strengthened his mind by hard years of somno-learning, mind-casting, memory-straightening, and sensory training, he had assured himself of the executive power to control the technicians and direct their specialized abilities. Together they would build the true Mars rocket.
But that would only be a beginning. They would build the true Mind Bomb. They would build the true Selective Microbe Slayer. They would discover the true laws of ESP and the inner life. They would even—his imagination hesitated a moment, then strode boldly forward—build the true Maizie!
And then ... then the Thinkers would be on even terms with the scientists. Rather, they'd be far ahead. No more deception.
He was so exalted by this thought that he almost let the slideway carry him past his door. He stepped inside and called, "Caddy!" He waited a moment, then walked through the apartment, but she wasn't there.
Confound the girl, he couldn't help thinking. This morning, when she should have made herself scarce, she'd sprawled about sleeping. Now, when he felt like seeing her, when her presence would have added a pleasant final touch to his glowing mood, she chose to be absent. He really should use his hypnotic control on her, he decided, and again there sprang into his mind the word—a pet form of her name—that would send her into obedient trance.
No, he told himself again, that was to be reserved for some moment of crisis or desperate danger, when he would need someone to strike suddenly and unquestioningly for himself and mankind. Caddy was merely a wilful and rather silly girl, incapable at present of understanding the tremendous tensions under which he operated. When he had time for it, he would train her up to be a fitting companion without hypnosis.
Yet the fact of her absence had a subtly disquieting effect. It shook his perfect self-confidence just a fraction. He asked himself if he'd been wise in summoning the rocket physicists without consulting Tregarron.
But this mood, too, he conquered quickly. Tregarron wasn't his boss, but just the Thinker's most clever salesman, an expert in the mumbo-jumbo so necessary for social control in this chaotic era. He himself, Jorj Helmuth, was the real leader in theoretics and all-over strategy, the mind behind the mind behind Maizie.
He stretched himself on the bed, almost instantly achieved maximum relaxation, turned on the somno-learner, and began the two hour rest he knew would be desirable before the big conference.
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What is the plot of the story?
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about Galactic Ghost by Walter Kubilius.
Relevant chunks:
GALACTIC GHOST
By WALTER KUBILIUS
The Flying Dutchman of space was a harbinger of death. But Willard wasn't superstitions. He had seen the phantom—and lived.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
The only friend in space Willard had ever known was dying. Dobbin's lips were parched and his breath came spasmodically. The tips of his fingers that had so many times caressed the control board of the Mary Lou were now black as meteor dust.
"We'll never see Earth again," he whispered feebly, plucked weakly at the cover.
"Nonsense!" Willard broke in hurriedly, hoping that the dying man would not see through the lie. "We've got the sun's gravity helping us drift back to Earth! We'll be there soon! You'll get well soon and we'll start to work again on a new idea of mine...." His voice trailed helplessly away and the words were lost. It was no use.
The sick man did not hear him. Two tears rolled down his cheeks. His face contorted as he tried to withhold a sob.
"To see Earth again!" he said weakly. "To walk on solid ground once more!"
"Four years!" Willard echoed faintly. He knew how his space mate felt. No man can spend four years away from his home planet, and fail to be anguished. A man could live without friends, without fortune, but no man could live without Earth. He was like Anteus, for only the feel of the solid ground under his feet could give him courage to go among the stars.
Willard also knew what he dared not admit to himself. He, too, like Dobbin, would never see Earth again. Perhaps, some thousand years from now, some lonely wanderers would find their battered hulk of a ship in space and bring them home again.
Dobbin motioned to him and, in answer to a last request, Willard lifted him so he faced the port window for a final look at the panorama of the stars.
Dobbin's eyes, dimming and half closed, took in the vast play of the heavens and in his mind he relived the days when in a frail craft he first crossed interstellar space. But for Earth-loneliness Dobbin would die a happy man, knowing that he had lived as much and as deeply as any man could.
Silently the two men watched. Dobbin's eyes opened suddenly and a tremor seized his body. He turned painfully and looked at Willard.
"I saw it!" his voice cracked, trembling.
"Saw what?"
"It's true! It's true! It comes whenever a space man dies! It's there!"
"In heaven's name, Dobbin," Willard demanded, "What do you see? What is it?"
Dobbin lifted his dark bony arm and pointed out into star-studded space.
"The Ghost Ship!"
Something clicked in Willard's memory. He had heard it spoken of in whispers by drunken space men and professional tellers of fairy tales. But he had never put any stock in them. In some forgotten corner of Dobbin's mind the legend of the Ghost Ship must have lain, to come up in this time of delirium.
"There's nothing there," he said firmly.
"It's come—for me!" Dobbin cried. He turned his head slowly toward Willard, tried to say something and then fell back upon the pillow. His mouth was open and his eyes stared unseeing ahead. Dobbin was now one with the vanished pioneers of yesterday. Willard was alone.
For two days, reckoned in Earth time, Willard kept vigil over the body of his friend and space mate. When the time was up he did what was necessary and nothing remained of Harry Dobbin, the best friend he had ever had. The atoms of his body were now pure energy stored away in the useless motors of the Mary Lou .
The weeks that followed were like a blur in Willard's mind. Though the ship was utterly incapable of motion, the chance meteor that damaged it had spared the convertors and assimilators. Through constant care and attention the frail balance that meant life or death could be kept. The substance of waste and refuse was torn down and rebuilt as precious food and air. It was even possible to create more than was needed.
When this was done, Willard immediately regretted it. For it would be then that the days and the weeks would roll by endlessly. Sometimes he thought he would go mad when, sitting at the useless control board, which was his habit, he would stare for hours and hours in the direction of the Sun where he knew the Earth would be. A great loneliness would then seize upon him and an agony that no man had ever known would tear at his heart. He would then turn away, full of despair and hopeless pain.
Two years after Dobbin's death a strange thing happened. Willard was sitting at his accustomed place facing the unmoving vista of the stars. A chance glance at Orion's belt froze him still. A star had flickered! Distinctly, as if a light veil had been placed over it and then lifted, it dimmed and turned bright again. What strange phenomena was this? He watched and then another star faded momentarily in the exact fashion. And then a third! And a fourth! And a fifth!
Willard's heart gave a leap and the lethargy of two years vanished instantly. Here, at last, was something to do. It might be only a few minutes before he would understand what it was, but those few minutes would help while away the maddening long hours. Perhaps it was a mass of fine meteorites or a pocket of gas that did not disperse, or even a moving warp of space-light. Whatever it was, it was a phenomena worth investigating and Willard seized upon it as a dying man seizes upon the last flashing seconds of life.
Willard traced its course by the flickering stars and gradually plotted its semi-circular course. It was not from the solar system but, instead, headed toward it. A rapid check-up on his calculations caused his heart to beat in ever quickening excitement. Whatever it was, it would reach the Mary Lou .
Again he looked out the port. Unquestionably the faint mass was nearing his ship. It was round in shape and almost invisible. The stars, though dimmed, could still be seen through it. There was something about its form that reminded him of an old-fashioned rocket ship. It resembled one of those that had done pioneer service in the lanes forty years ago or more. Resembled one? It was one! Unquestionably, though half-invisible and like a piece of glass immersed in water, it was a rocket ship.
But the instruments on the control board could not lie. The presence of any material body within a hundred thousand miles would be revealed. But the needle on the gauge did not quiver. Nothing indicated the presence of a ship. But the evidence of his eyes was incontestable.
Or was it? Doubt gripped him. Did the loneliness of all these years in space twist his mind till he was imagining the appearance of faint ghost-like rocket ships?
The thought shot through his mind like a thunder bolt. Ghost Ship! Was this the thing that Dobbin had seen before he died? But that was impossible. Ghost Ships existed nowhere but in legends and tall tales told by men drunk with the liquors of Mars.
"There is no ship there. There is no ship there," Willard told himself over and over again as he looked at the vague outline of the ship, now motionless a few hundred miles away.
Deep within him a faint voice cried, " It's come—for me! " but Willard stilled it. This was no fantasy. There was a scientific reason for it. There must be! Or should there be? Throughout all Earth history there had been Ghost Ships sailing the Seven Seas—ships doomed to roam forever because their crew broke some unbreakable law. If this was true for the ships of the seas, why not for the ships of empty space?
He looked again at the strange ship. It was motionless. At least it was not nearing him. Willard could see nothing but its vague outline. A moment later he could discern a faint motion. It was turning! The Ghost Ship was turning back! Unconsciously Willard reached out with his hand as if to hold it back, for when it was gone he would be alone again.
But the Ghost Ship went on. Its outline became smaller and smaller, fainter and fainter.
Trembling, Willard turned away from the window as he saw the rocket recede and vanish into the emptiness of space. Once more the dreaded loneliness of the stars descended upon him.
Seven years passed and back on Earth in a small newspaper that Willard would never see there was published a small item:
" Arden, Rocketport —Thirteen years ago the Space Ship Mary Lou under John Willard and Larry Dobbin left the Rocket Port for the exploration of an alleged planetoid beyond Pluto. The ship has not been seen or heard from since. J. Willard, II, son of the lost explorer, is planning the manufacture of a super-size exploration ship to be called Mary Lou II , in memory of his father."
Memories die hard. A man who is alone in space with nothing but the cold friendship of star-light looks back upon memories as the only things both dear and precious to him.
Willard, master and lone survivor of the Mary Lou , knew this well for he had tried to rip the memories of Earth out of his heart to ease the anguish of solitude within him. But it was a thing that could not be done.
And so it was that each night—for Willard did not give up the Earth-habit of keeping time—Willard dreamed of the days he had known on Earth.
In his mind's eye, he saw himself walking the streets of Arden and feeling the crunch of snow or the soft slap of rainwater under his feet. He heard again, in his mind, the voices of friends he knew. How beautiful and perfect was each voice! How filled with warmth and friendship! There was the voice of his beautiful wife whom he would never see again. There were the gruff and deep voices of his co-workers and scientists.
Above all there were the voices of the cities, and the fields and the shops where he had worked. All these had their individual voices. Odd that he had never realized it before, but things become clearer to a man who is alone.
Clearer? Perhaps not. Perhaps they become more clouded. How could he, for example, explain the phenomena of the Ghost Ship? Was it really only a product of his imagination? What of all the others who had seen it? Was it possible for many different men under many different situations to have the same exact illusion? Reason denied that. But perhaps space itself denies reason.
Grimly he retraced the legend of the Ghost Ship. A chance phrase here and a story there put together all that he knew:
Doomed for all eternity to wander in the empty star-lanes, the Ghost Ship haunts the Solar System that gave it birth. And this is its tragedy, for it is the home of spacemen who can never go home again. When your last measure of fuel is burnt and your ship becomes a lifeless hulk—the Ghost will come—for you!
And this is all there was to the legend. Merely a tale of some fairy ship told to amuse and to while away the days of a star-voyage. Bitterly, Willard dismissed it from his mind.
Another year of loneliness passed. And still another. Willard lost track of the days. It was difficult to keep time for to what purpose could time be kept. Here in space there was no time, nor was there reason for clocks and records. Days and months and years became meaningless words for things that once may have had meaning. About three years must have passed since his last record in the log book of the Mary Lou . At that time, he remembered, he suffered another great disappointment. On the port side there suddenly appeared a full-sized rocket ship. For many minutes Willard was half-mad with joy thinking that a passing ship was ready to rescue him. But the joy was short-lived, for the rocket ship abruptly turned away and slowly disappeared. As Willard watched it go away he saw the light of a distant star through the space ship. A heart-breaking agony fell upon him. It was not a ship from Earth. It was the Ghost Ship, mocking him.
Since then Willard did not look out the window of his craft. A vague fear troubled him that perhaps the Ghost Ship might be here, waiting and watching, and that he would go mad if he saw it.
How many years passed he could not tell. But this he knew. He was no longer a young man. Perhaps fifteen years has disappeared into nothing. Perhaps twenty. He did not know and he did not care.
Willard awoke from a deep sleep and prepared his bed. He did it, not because it was necessary, but because it was a habit that had long been ingrained in him through the years.
He checked and rechecked every part of the still functioning mechanism of the ship. The radio, even though there was no one to call, was in perfect order. The speed-recording dials, even though there was no speed to record, were in perfect order. And so with every machine. All was in perfect order. Perfect useless order, he thought bitterly, when there was no way whatever to get sufficient power to get back to Earth, long forgotten Earth.
He was leaning back in his chair when a vague uneasiness seized him. He arose and slowly walked over to the window, his age already being marked in the ache of his bones. Looking out into the silent theater of the stars, he suddenly froze.
There was a ship, coming toward him!
For a moment the reason in his mind tottered on a balance. Doubt assailed him. Was this the Ghost Ship come to torment him again? But no phantom this! It was a life and blood rocket ship from Earth! Starlight shone on it and not through it! Its lines, window, vents were all solid and had none of the ghost-like quality he remembered seeing in the Ghost Ship in his youth.
For another split second he thought that perhaps he, too, like Dobbin, had gone mad and that the ship would vanish just as it approached him.
The tapping of the space-telegrapher reassured him.
"CALLING SPACE SHIP MARY LOU," the message rapped out, "CALLING SPACE SHIP MARY LOU."
With trembling fingers that he could scarcely control, old Willard sent the answering message.
"SPACE SHIP MARY LOU REPLYING. RECEIVED MESSAGE. THANK GOD!"
He broke off, unable to continue. His heart was ready to burst within him and the tears of joy were already welling in his eyes. He listened to the happiest message he had ever heard:
"NOTICE THAT SPACE SHIP MARY LOU IS DISABLED AND NOT SPACE WORTHY. YOU ARE INVITED TO COME ABOARD. HAVE YOU SPACE SUIT AND—ARE YOU ABLE TO COME?"
Willard, already sobbing with joy, could send only two words.
"YES! COMING!"
The years of waiting were over. At last he was free of the Mary Lou . In a dream like trance, he dressed in his space suit, pathetically glad that he had already checked every detail of it a short time ago. He realized suddenly that everything about the Mary Lou was hateful to him. It was here that his best friend died, and it was here that twenty years of his life were wasted completely in solitude and despair.
He took one last look and stepped into the air-lock.
The Earth-ship, he did not see its name, was only a hundred yards away and a man was already at the air-lock waiting to help him. A rope was tossed to him. He reached for it and made his way to the ship, leaving the Mary Lou behind him forever.
Suddenly the world dropped away from him. Willard could neither see nor say anything. His heart was choked with emotion.
"It's all right," a kindly voice assured him, "You're safe now."
He had the sensation of being carried by several men and then placed in bed. The quiet of deep sleep descended upon him.
He woke many times in the following days, but the privations of the passing years had drained his strength and his mind, had made him so much of a hermit that the presence of other men frightened him to the point of gibbering insanity.
He knew that the food and drink were drugged, for after eating he never remembered seeing the men enter the room to care for him and to remove the dirty dishes. But there was enough sanity in his mind to also realize that, without the gradual reawakening of his senses to the value of human companionship, he might not be able to stand the mental shock of moving about among his people back on Earth.
During those passing days, he savored each new impression, comparing it with what he remembered from that age-long past when he and his friends had walked on Earth's great plains and ridden on the oceans' sleek ships or flown with the wings of birds over the mountain ranges. And each impression was doubly enjoyable, for his memory was hazy and confused.
Gradually, though, his mind cleared; he remembered the past, and he no longer was afraid of the men who visited him from time to time. But there was a strangeness about the men that he could not fathom; they refused to talk about anything, any subject, other than the actual running of the great ship. Always, when he asked his eager questions, they mumbled and drifted away.
And then in his third week on the rescue ship, he went to sleep one night while peering from the port hole at the blue ball of Earth swimming in the blackness of space. He slept and he dreamed of the years he had spent by himself in the drifting, lifeless hulk of the Mary Lou . His dreams were vivid, peopled with men and women he had once known, and were horrible with the fantasies of terror that years of solitary brooding had implanted deep in his mind.
He awoke with a start and a cry of alarm ran through him as he thought that perhaps he might still be in the Mary Lou . The warm, smiling face of a man quickly reassured him.
"I'll call the captain," the space man said. "He said to let him know when you came to."
Willard could only nod in weak and grateful acceptance. It was true! He pressed his head back against the bed's pillows. How soft! How warm! He yawned and stretched his arms as a thrill of happiness shot through his entire body.
He would see Earth again! That single thought ran over and over in his mind without stopping. He would see Earth again! Perhaps not this year and perhaps not the next—for the ship might be on some extra-Plutonian expedition. But even if it would take years before it returned to home base Willard knew that those years would fly quickly if Earth was at the end of the trail.
Though he had aged, he still had many years before him. And those years, he vowed, would be spent on Earth and nowhere else.
The captain, a pleasant old fellow, came into the room as Willard stood up and tried to walk. The gravity here was a bit different from that of his ship, but he would manage.
"How do you feel, Space Man Willard?"
"Oh, you know me?" Willard looked at him in surprise, and then smiled,
"Of course, you looked through the log book of the Mary Lou ."
The captain nodded and Willard noticed with surprise that he was a very old man.
"You don't know how much I suffered there," Willard said slowly, measuring each word. "Years in space—all alone! It's a horrible thing!"
"Yes?" the old captain said.
"Many times I thought I would go completely mad. It was only the thought and hope that some day, somehow, an Earth-ship would find me and help me get back to Earth. If it was not for that, I would have died. I could think of nothing but of Earth, of blue green water, of vast open spaces and the good brown earth. How beautiful it must be now!"
A note of sadness, matched only by that of Willard's, entered the captain's eyes.
"I want to walk on Earth just once—then I can die."
Willard stopped. A happy dreamy smile touched his lips.
"When will we go to Earth?" he asked.
The Captain did not answer. Willard waited and a strange memory tugged at him.
"You don't know," the Captain said. It was not a question or a statement. The Captain found it hard to say it. His lips moved slowly.
Willard stepped back and before the Captain told him, he knew .
"Matter is relative," he said, "the existent under one condition is non-existent under another. The real here is the non-real there. All things that wander alone in space are gradually drained of their mass and energy until nothing is left but mere shells. That is what happened to the Mary Lou . Your ship was real when we passed by twenty years ago. It is now like ours, a vague outline in space. We cannot feel the change ourselves, for change is relative. That is why we became more and more solid to you, as you became more and more faint to any Earth-ship that might have passed. We are real—to ourselves. But to some ship from Earth which has not been in space for more than fifteen years—to that ship, to all intents and purposes, we do not exist.
"Then this ship," Willard said, stunned, "you and I and everything on it..."
"... are doomed," the Captain said. "We cannot go to Earth for the simple reason that we would go through it!"
The vision of Earth and green trees faded. He would never see Earth again. He would never feel the crunch of ground under feet as he walked. Never would listen to the voices of friends and the songs of birds. Never. Never. Never....
"Then this is the Ghost Ship and we are the Ghosts!"
"Yes."
Question:
What is the plot of the story?
Answer:
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"John Willard and Larry Dobbin are astronauts who have been in space for four years on the rocket Mary Lou, and as Dobbin is dying, he regrets that he will not see Earth again. Willard assures him that they will make it back, but he knows that they will never make it back because their ship was damaged by a meteor. Although the ship can still carry out functions to support life, it is not navigable. After Willard helps Dobbin look at the stars one more time, Dobbin cries out that it’s true—when an astronaut is dying, the Ghost Ship comes for him. \n\nWillard recycles Dobbin’s body but feels regretful about it. He longs to see the Earth again and walk on it, but he knows this will never happen and feels intensely lonely. After two years, a strange thing happens. Willard is looking at the stars, and it seems that they are winking at him. Something seems to be moving toward him, and it turns out to be an ancient ship. Willard’s gauges do not register the ship’s presence although he sees it with his own eyes, and Willard realizes that it is the Ghost Ship coming for him. Strangely enough, however, the ship turns away and moves away from him.\n\nSeven years later, a newspaper on Earth publishes a story that Willard’s son, J. Willard II, plans to build a larger version of his father’s ship, the Mary Lou II, in memory of his father, but Willard Sr. is unaware of this. He continues to experience excruciating loneliness and dreams about his life on Earth—the people he knew, the sounds, and the cities. One day a giant rocket ship comes alongside the Mary Lou, and Willard is thrilled that he has been discovered. But the vessel turns away and leaves. Willard notices that he can see starlight through the ship and realizes it is the Ghost Ship. \n\nOne day he sees another ship and, at first, fears the Ghost Ship has returned. The new ship looks solid, though, and it contacts him, addressing the Mary Lou by name. Willard believes that this ship will take him back to Earth and eagerly boards it. Willard is kept drugged for a while but eventually is alert enough to speak with the captain. When Willard asks when they will return to Earth, the captain explains that they cannot return because matter in space loses its mass and energy until nothing is left. If they tried to return to Earth, they would pass through it. Willard then realizes he is on the Ghost Ship, and he is one of its Ghosts. \n\n",
"Galactic Ghost begins with death. John Willard is taking care of his co-pilot and best friend, Larry Dobbin as he dies. A meteor struck their rocket ship, the Mary Lou, and damaged both her and Dobbin. As Dobbin dies, Willard gently takes care of him and lifts him up to the port so he can see the stars one last time. Just before he passes, Dobbin cries out and says he saw the infamous ghost ship. It steals dying spacemen who have no hope of returning to Earth, cursing them to spend the rest of their lives as ghosts in space. \nAfter Dobbin passes, Willard watches over him for two days before removing his body and turning it into energy for the useless engine in the Mary Lou. Although the ship is livable, it is not flyable. Taking careful diligence to check every part of the ship, Willard manages to keep the Mary Lou from completely shutting down. He transforms waste into food and learns to survive. \nTwo years of great loneliness and despair pass. As Willard looks out the port, he sees blinking stars. Excited, he investigates and realizes that it was an old-fashioned spaceship from decades ago. He soon sees that half of it is invisible, hence the blinking star phenomenon. As the ship gets closer, his sensors remain quiet. Putting it all together, he concludes that this is the Ghost Ship, but pushes the thought away, claiming it’s impossible. Slowly, the ship turns around and travels away from him. \nFlash forward seven more years and a newspaper published a story about Willard and Dobbin on Earth. Sadly, he would never get to see it. Willard’s son was about to create his own ship called Mary Lou II to honor his father. Willard spends his years alone trying to survive and also trying to fight off his memories of home, as they torture him. He kept up with the days and nights of Earth for many years and made his bed. But the memories of his old friends, the cities he lived in, and the crunch of snow beneath his feet drove him mad. Quickly, he lost track of the days. Another ship came and went, torturing him with hope yet again. \nAlmost twenty years passed and he grew more anguished every day. A ship came toward him and asked if he wanted to board, seeing as his ship was unlivable. Grateful he had checked the space suit beforehand, Willard traveled to the other ship and quickly fell into a deep sleep, exhausted by his years of solitude. After being drugged and evaded, Willard finally gets to speak to the captain of the ship on the third week who reveals that this is the Ghost Ship. Willard was only able to perceive the Ghost Ship because he and the Mary Lou were already ghosts, faded to the human eye. They are only shells on the Ghost Ship, and Willard is doomed to join them forever. ",
"John Willard's and Larry Dobbin's ship the \"Mary Lou\" had been damaged by a meteor during its mission to explore a small planet beyond Pluto, and Willard and Dobbin are waiting to die in space. Eventually, Dobbin dies, and he claims to see the fabled \"Ghost Ship\" seconds before his passing. After Dobbin's death, Willard manages to stay alive thanks to the machines that could convert waste into food and air. Willard spends two years alone, lost in hopeless thought and agony. Eventually, he sees a blinking shape in the distance, which he soon determines is an old-fashioned rocket ship. However, his instruments indicate there is no ship despite what he sees. Willard oscillates between doubting his own vision and believing there must be a scientific explanation for it. As he struggles with these thoughts, the ship leaves, and Willard spends seven years alone. Meanwhile, back on Earth, a newspaper from his hometown of Arden publishes an obituary of Willard and Dobbin indicating Willard’s son’s intention to build a “Mary Lou II.” Willard recalls memories with his wife and co-workers and the feeling of walking around Arden. He thinks about the legend of the Ghost Ship, which is said to come for the spacemen who die in space alone. A few years pass, and Willard sees the Ghost Ship pass close to him and turn away again, appearing to taunt him. He begins to lose track of time and guesses that as many as twenty years pass; he spends his days going through the motions of managing the ship as he feels himself aging physically. Then, he sees a ship approach, and this time it is a real ship. The ship sends out a rescue calls and retrieves Willard from the “Mary Lou.” Willard spends the next few days reacquainting himself with human interaction and struggling with the horrible memories of his decades in solitude. Then, he starts to realize something is off about the crew of the ship that rescued him. They will not engage him in any conversation other than the operations of the ship. When Willard meets the captain later, he reveals he actually is on the Ghost Ship after all. It only appeared solid to Willard the more the “Mary Lou” lost its mass and energy and itself became a kind of “ghost ship” through its aimless wandering through space. Willard realizes he is dead and will never again return to Earth. ",
"John Willard and Larry Dobbin are the lone space explorers aboard the Mary Lou, a ship that can’t move due to meteor damage. As the story begins, WIllard tries to comfort Dobbin as Dobbin dies. Before passing away, Dobbin sees what he believes to be “The Ghost Ship”, a fabled ship that comes for dying spacemen. Willard believes Ghost Ships are just fairy tales and that Dobbin was delirious. \n\nTwo years later, Willard sees what looks like a partially invisible rocket ship, though his ship’s control board shows no sign of anything. As the ship turns away and disappears, Willard wonders if he imagined it or if it could be The Ghost Ship, but decides that is impossible. \n\nSeven more years go by, and we read a small article from Willard and Dobbin’s hometown newspaper (that we are told Willard will never see), about the thirteenth anniversary of Willard and Dobbin embarking on their mission, how they have never been heard from again, and how Willard’s son is having a large spaceship manufactured in his father’s honor. \n\nBack on the Mary Lou, Willard can’t help but dream of his Earth days each night. He grows more and more despondent and thinks about Ghost Ships. He stops looking out the window, and isn’t sure if fifteen or twenty years have passed. He wonders if he has gone mad when he sees a ship coming. Everything changes when he realizes that it’s a real ship that taps out a real message on his space-telegrapher.\n\nThe other ship invites him to come aboard and he gratefully accepts, boarding it and immediately falling asleep. Over the next few weeks he drifts in and out of consciousness, knowing that he must be being drugged but also realizing it would be difficult for him to acclimate to being around others so soon. His memories start to come back and his mind starts to clear, and he notices that none of the men caring for him want to give him any information or answer his questions. \n\nAfter Willard awakens fully, one of the men says he’ll get the captain, who wanted to see Willard when he came to. The captain comes to see him, and Willard notices that he is very old. He tells the captain that he can’t wait to get to Earth and asks when they’ll go. The captain explains that after floating around in space for as long as they and Willard have, things and people lose their mass and energy. Willard hadn’t yet lost his twenty years ago, which is why their ship didn’t look fully formed to him then. Now that he has, he is just a shell like them and can see them fully. \n\nAs Willard puts the pieces together, the captain explains that they can’t go to Earth because they would pass right through it. Willard realizes that this is, in fact, a Ghost Ship, and that they are the ghosts, and the captain confirms this. \n"
] |
62244
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GALACTIC GHOST
By WALTER KUBILIUS
The Flying Dutchman of space was a harbinger of death. But Willard wasn't superstitions. He had seen the phantom—and lived.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
The only friend in space Willard had ever known was dying. Dobbin's lips were parched and his breath came spasmodically. The tips of his fingers that had so many times caressed the control board of the Mary Lou were now black as meteor dust.
"We'll never see Earth again," he whispered feebly, plucked weakly at the cover.
"Nonsense!" Willard broke in hurriedly, hoping that the dying man would not see through the lie. "We've got the sun's gravity helping us drift back to Earth! We'll be there soon! You'll get well soon and we'll start to work again on a new idea of mine...." His voice trailed helplessly away and the words were lost. It was no use.
The sick man did not hear him. Two tears rolled down his cheeks. His face contorted as he tried to withhold a sob.
"To see Earth again!" he said weakly. "To walk on solid ground once more!"
"Four years!" Willard echoed faintly. He knew how his space mate felt. No man can spend four years away from his home planet, and fail to be anguished. A man could live without friends, without fortune, but no man could live without Earth. He was like Anteus, for only the feel of the solid ground under his feet could give him courage to go among the stars.
Willard also knew what he dared not admit to himself. He, too, like Dobbin, would never see Earth again. Perhaps, some thousand years from now, some lonely wanderers would find their battered hulk of a ship in space and bring them home again.
Dobbin motioned to him and, in answer to a last request, Willard lifted him so he faced the port window for a final look at the panorama of the stars.
Dobbin's eyes, dimming and half closed, took in the vast play of the heavens and in his mind he relived the days when in a frail craft he first crossed interstellar space. But for Earth-loneliness Dobbin would die a happy man, knowing that he had lived as much and as deeply as any man could.
Silently the two men watched. Dobbin's eyes opened suddenly and a tremor seized his body. He turned painfully and looked at Willard.
"I saw it!" his voice cracked, trembling.
"Saw what?"
"It's true! It's true! It comes whenever a space man dies! It's there!"
"In heaven's name, Dobbin," Willard demanded, "What do you see? What is it?"
Dobbin lifted his dark bony arm and pointed out into star-studded space.
"The Ghost Ship!"
Something clicked in Willard's memory. He had heard it spoken of in whispers by drunken space men and professional tellers of fairy tales. But he had never put any stock in them. In some forgotten corner of Dobbin's mind the legend of the Ghost Ship must have lain, to come up in this time of delirium.
"There's nothing there," he said firmly.
"It's come—for me!" Dobbin cried. He turned his head slowly toward Willard, tried to say something and then fell back upon the pillow. His mouth was open and his eyes stared unseeing ahead. Dobbin was now one with the vanished pioneers of yesterday. Willard was alone.
For two days, reckoned in Earth time, Willard kept vigil over the body of his friend and space mate. When the time was up he did what was necessary and nothing remained of Harry Dobbin, the best friend he had ever had. The atoms of his body were now pure energy stored away in the useless motors of the Mary Lou .
The weeks that followed were like a blur in Willard's mind. Though the ship was utterly incapable of motion, the chance meteor that damaged it had spared the convertors and assimilators. Through constant care and attention the frail balance that meant life or death could be kept. The substance of waste and refuse was torn down and rebuilt as precious food and air. It was even possible to create more than was needed.
When this was done, Willard immediately regretted it. For it would be then that the days and the weeks would roll by endlessly. Sometimes he thought he would go mad when, sitting at the useless control board, which was his habit, he would stare for hours and hours in the direction of the Sun where he knew the Earth would be. A great loneliness would then seize upon him and an agony that no man had ever known would tear at his heart. He would then turn away, full of despair and hopeless pain.
Two years after Dobbin's death a strange thing happened. Willard was sitting at his accustomed place facing the unmoving vista of the stars. A chance glance at Orion's belt froze him still. A star had flickered! Distinctly, as if a light veil had been placed over it and then lifted, it dimmed and turned bright again. What strange phenomena was this? He watched and then another star faded momentarily in the exact fashion. And then a third! And a fourth! And a fifth!
Willard's heart gave a leap and the lethargy of two years vanished instantly. Here, at last, was something to do. It might be only a few minutes before he would understand what it was, but those few minutes would help while away the maddening long hours. Perhaps it was a mass of fine meteorites or a pocket of gas that did not disperse, or even a moving warp of space-light. Whatever it was, it was a phenomena worth investigating and Willard seized upon it as a dying man seizes upon the last flashing seconds of life.
Willard traced its course by the flickering stars and gradually plotted its semi-circular course. It was not from the solar system but, instead, headed toward it. A rapid check-up on his calculations caused his heart to beat in ever quickening excitement. Whatever it was, it would reach the Mary Lou .
Again he looked out the port. Unquestionably the faint mass was nearing his ship. It was round in shape and almost invisible. The stars, though dimmed, could still be seen through it. There was something about its form that reminded him of an old-fashioned rocket ship. It resembled one of those that had done pioneer service in the lanes forty years ago or more. Resembled one? It was one! Unquestionably, though half-invisible and like a piece of glass immersed in water, it was a rocket ship.
But the instruments on the control board could not lie. The presence of any material body within a hundred thousand miles would be revealed. But the needle on the gauge did not quiver. Nothing indicated the presence of a ship. But the evidence of his eyes was incontestable.
Or was it? Doubt gripped him. Did the loneliness of all these years in space twist his mind till he was imagining the appearance of faint ghost-like rocket ships?
The thought shot through his mind like a thunder bolt. Ghost Ship! Was this the thing that Dobbin had seen before he died? But that was impossible. Ghost Ships existed nowhere but in legends and tall tales told by men drunk with the liquors of Mars.
"There is no ship there. There is no ship there," Willard told himself over and over again as he looked at the vague outline of the ship, now motionless a few hundred miles away.
Deep within him a faint voice cried, " It's come—for me! " but Willard stilled it. This was no fantasy. There was a scientific reason for it. There must be! Or should there be? Throughout all Earth history there had been Ghost Ships sailing the Seven Seas—ships doomed to roam forever because their crew broke some unbreakable law. If this was true for the ships of the seas, why not for the ships of empty space?
He looked again at the strange ship. It was motionless. At least it was not nearing him. Willard could see nothing but its vague outline. A moment later he could discern a faint motion. It was turning! The Ghost Ship was turning back! Unconsciously Willard reached out with his hand as if to hold it back, for when it was gone he would be alone again.
But the Ghost Ship went on. Its outline became smaller and smaller, fainter and fainter.
Trembling, Willard turned away from the window as he saw the rocket recede and vanish into the emptiness of space. Once more the dreaded loneliness of the stars descended upon him.
Seven years passed and back on Earth in a small newspaper that Willard would never see there was published a small item:
" Arden, Rocketport —Thirteen years ago the Space Ship Mary Lou under John Willard and Larry Dobbin left the Rocket Port for the exploration of an alleged planetoid beyond Pluto. The ship has not been seen or heard from since. J. Willard, II, son of the lost explorer, is planning the manufacture of a super-size exploration ship to be called Mary Lou II , in memory of his father."
Memories die hard. A man who is alone in space with nothing but the cold friendship of star-light looks back upon memories as the only things both dear and precious to him.
Willard, master and lone survivor of the Mary Lou , knew this well for he had tried to rip the memories of Earth out of his heart to ease the anguish of solitude within him. But it was a thing that could not be done.
And so it was that each night—for Willard did not give up the Earth-habit of keeping time—Willard dreamed of the days he had known on Earth.
In his mind's eye, he saw himself walking the streets of Arden and feeling the crunch of snow or the soft slap of rainwater under his feet. He heard again, in his mind, the voices of friends he knew. How beautiful and perfect was each voice! How filled with warmth and friendship! There was the voice of his beautiful wife whom he would never see again. There were the gruff and deep voices of his co-workers and scientists.
Above all there were the voices of the cities, and the fields and the shops where he had worked. All these had their individual voices. Odd that he had never realized it before, but things become clearer to a man who is alone.
Clearer? Perhaps not. Perhaps they become more clouded. How could he, for example, explain the phenomena of the Ghost Ship? Was it really only a product of his imagination? What of all the others who had seen it? Was it possible for many different men under many different situations to have the same exact illusion? Reason denied that. But perhaps space itself denies reason.
Grimly he retraced the legend of the Ghost Ship. A chance phrase here and a story there put together all that he knew:
Doomed for all eternity to wander in the empty star-lanes, the Ghost Ship haunts the Solar System that gave it birth. And this is its tragedy, for it is the home of spacemen who can never go home again. When your last measure of fuel is burnt and your ship becomes a lifeless hulk—the Ghost will come—for you!
And this is all there was to the legend. Merely a tale of some fairy ship told to amuse and to while away the days of a star-voyage. Bitterly, Willard dismissed it from his mind.
Another year of loneliness passed. And still another. Willard lost track of the days. It was difficult to keep time for to what purpose could time be kept. Here in space there was no time, nor was there reason for clocks and records. Days and months and years became meaningless words for things that once may have had meaning. About three years must have passed since his last record in the log book of the Mary Lou . At that time, he remembered, he suffered another great disappointment. On the port side there suddenly appeared a full-sized rocket ship. For many minutes Willard was half-mad with joy thinking that a passing ship was ready to rescue him. But the joy was short-lived, for the rocket ship abruptly turned away and slowly disappeared. As Willard watched it go away he saw the light of a distant star through the space ship. A heart-breaking agony fell upon him. It was not a ship from Earth. It was the Ghost Ship, mocking him.
Since then Willard did not look out the window of his craft. A vague fear troubled him that perhaps the Ghost Ship might be here, waiting and watching, and that he would go mad if he saw it.
How many years passed he could not tell. But this he knew. He was no longer a young man. Perhaps fifteen years has disappeared into nothing. Perhaps twenty. He did not know and he did not care.
Willard awoke from a deep sleep and prepared his bed. He did it, not because it was necessary, but because it was a habit that had long been ingrained in him through the years.
He checked and rechecked every part of the still functioning mechanism of the ship. The radio, even though there was no one to call, was in perfect order. The speed-recording dials, even though there was no speed to record, were in perfect order. And so with every machine. All was in perfect order. Perfect useless order, he thought bitterly, when there was no way whatever to get sufficient power to get back to Earth, long forgotten Earth.
He was leaning back in his chair when a vague uneasiness seized him. He arose and slowly walked over to the window, his age already being marked in the ache of his bones. Looking out into the silent theater of the stars, he suddenly froze.
There was a ship, coming toward him!
For a moment the reason in his mind tottered on a balance. Doubt assailed him. Was this the Ghost Ship come to torment him again? But no phantom this! It was a life and blood rocket ship from Earth! Starlight shone on it and not through it! Its lines, window, vents were all solid and had none of the ghost-like quality he remembered seeing in the Ghost Ship in his youth.
For another split second he thought that perhaps he, too, like Dobbin, had gone mad and that the ship would vanish just as it approached him.
The tapping of the space-telegrapher reassured him.
"CALLING SPACE SHIP MARY LOU," the message rapped out, "CALLING SPACE SHIP MARY LOU."
With trembling fingers that he could scarcely control, old Willard sent the answering message.
"SPACE SHIP MARY LOU REPLYING. RECEIVED MESSAGE. THANK GOD!"
He broke off, unable to continue. His heart was ready to burst within him and the tears of joy were already welling in his eyes. He listened to the happiest message he had ever heard:
"NOTICE THAT SPACE SHIP MARY LOU IS DISABLED AND NOT SPACE WORTHY. YOU ARE INVITED TO COME ABOARD. HAVE YOU SPACE SUIT AND—ARE YOU ABLE TO COME?"
Willard, already sobbing with joy, could send only two words.
"YES! COMING!"
The years of waiting were over. At last he was free of the Mary Lou . In a dream like trance, he dressed in his space suit, pathetically glad that he had already checked every detail of it a short time ago. He realized suddenly that everything about the Mary Lou was hateful to him. It was here that his best friend died, and it was here that twenty years of his life were wasted completely in solitude and despair.
He took one last look and stepped into the air-lock.
The Earth-ship, he did not see its name, was only a hundred yards away and a man was already at the air-lock waiting to help him. A rope was tossed to him. He reached for it and made his way to the ship, leaving the Mary Lou behind him forever.
Suddenly the world dropped away from him. Willard could neither see nor say anything. His heart was choked with emotion.
"It's all right," a kindly voice assured him, "You're safe now."
He had the sensation of being carried by several men and then placed in bed. The quiet of deep sleep descended upon him.
He woke many times in the following days, but the privations of the passing years had drained his strength and his mind, had made him so much of a hermit that the presence of other men frightened him to the point of gibbering insanity.
He knew that the food and drink were drugged, for after eating he never remembered seeing the men enter the room to care for him and to remove the dirty dishes. But there was enough sanity in his mind to also realize that, without the gradual reawakening of his senses to the value of human companionship, he might not be able to stand the mental shock of moving about among his people back on Earth.
During those passing days, he savored each new impression, comparing it with what he remembered from that age-long past when he and his friends had walked on Earth's great plains and ridden on the oceans' sleek ships or flown with the wings of birds over the mountain ranges. And each impression was doubly enjoyable, for his memory was hazy and confused.
Gradually, though, his mind cleared; he remembered the past, and he no longer was afraid of the men who visited him from time to time. But there was a strangeness about the men that he could not fathom; they refused to talk about anything, any subject, other than the actual running of the great ship. Always, when he asked his eager questions, they mumbled and drifted away.
And then in his third week on the rescue ship, he went to sleep one night while peering from the port hole at the blue ball of Earth swimming in the blackness of space. He slept and he dreamed of the years he had spent by himself in the drifting, lifeless hulk of the Mary Lou . His dreams were vivid, peopled with men and women he had once known, and were horrible with the fantasies of terror that years of solitary brooding had implanted deep in his mind.
He awoke with a start and a cry of alarm ran through him as he thought that perhaps he might still be in the Mary Lou . The warm, smiling face of a man quickly reassured him.
"I'll call the captain," the space man said. "He said to let him know when you came to."
Willard could only nod in weak and grateful acceptance. It was true! He pressed his head back against the bed's pillows. How soft! How warm! He yawned and stretched his arms as a thrill of happiness shot through his entire body.
He would see Earth again! That single thought ran over and over in his mind without stopping. He would see Earth again! Perhaps not this year and perhaps not the next—for the ship might be on some extra-Plutonian expedition. But even if it would take years before it returned to home base Willard knew that those years would fly quickly if Earth was at the end of the trail.
Though he had aged, he still had many years before him. And those years, he vowed, would be spent on Earth and nowhere else.
The captain, a pleasant old fellow, came into the room as Willard stood up and tried to walk. The gravity here was a bit different from that of his ship, but he would manage.
"How do you feel, Space Man Willard?"
"Oh, you know me?" Willard looked at him in surprise, and then smiled,
"Of course, you looked through the log book of the Mary Lou ."
The captain nodded and Willard noticed with surprise that he was a very old man.
"You don't know how much I suffered there," Willard said slowly, measuring each word. "Years in space—all alone! It's a horrible thing!"
"Yes?" the old captain said.
"Many times I thought I would go completely mad. It was only the thought and hope that some day, somehow, an Earth-ship would find me and help me get back to Earth. If it was not for that, I would have died. I could think of nothing but of Earth, of blue green water, of vast open spaces and the good brown earth. How beautiful it must be now!"
A note of sadness, matched only by that of Willard's, entered the captain's eyes.
"I want to walk on Earth just once—then I can die."
Willard stopped. A happy dreamy smile touched his lips.
"When will we go to Earth?" he asked.
The Captain did not answer. Willard waited and a strange memory tugged at him.
"You don't know," the Captain said. It was not a question or a statement. The Captain found it hard to say it. His lips moved slowly.
Willard stepped back and before the Captain told him, he knew .
"Matter is relative," he said, "the existent under one condition is non-existent under another. The real here is the non-real there. All things that wander alone in space are gradually drained of their mass and energy until nothing is left but mere shells. That is what happened to the Mary Lou . Your ship was real when we passed by twenty years ago. It is now like ours, a vague outline in space. We cannot feel the change ourselves, for change is relative. That is why we became more and more solid to you, as you became more and more faint to any Earth-ship that might have passed. We are real—to ourselves. But to some ship from Earth which has not been in space for more than fifteen years—to that ship, to all intents and purposes, we do not exist.
"Then this ship," Willard said, stunned, "you and I and everything on it..."
"... are doomed," the Captain said. "We cannot go to Earth for the simple reason that we would go through it!"
The vision of Earth and green trees faded. He would never see Earth again. He would never feel the crunch of ground under feet as he walked. Never would listen to the voices of friends and the songs of birds. Never. Never. Never....
"Then this is the Ghost Ship and we are the Ghosts!"
"Yes."
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What are Ed and Verana's relationship to each other?
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about The Snare by Richard Rein Smith.
Relevant chunks:
The Snare
By RICHARD R. SMITH
Illustrated by WEISS
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy January 1956. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
It's easy to find a solution when there is one—the trick is to do it if there is none!
I glanced at the path we had made across the Mare Serenitatis . The Latin translated as "the Sea of Serenity." It was well named because, as far as the eye could see in every direction, there was a smooth layer of pumice that resembled the surface of a calm sea. Scattered across the quiet sea of virgin Moon dust were occasional islands of rock that jutted abruptly toward the infinity of stars above. Considering everything, our surroundings conveyed a sense of serenity like none I had ever felt.
Our bounding path across the level expanse was clearly marked. Because of the light gravity, we had leaped high into the air with each step and every time we struck the ground, the impact had raised a cloud of dustlike pumice. Now the clouds of dust were slowly settling in the light gravity.
Above us, the stars were cold, motionless and crystal-clear. Indifferently, they sprayed a faint light on our surroundings ... a dim glow that was hardly sufficient for normal vision and was too weak to be reflected toward Earth.
We turned our head-lamps on the strange object before us. Five beams of light illuminated the smooth shape that protruded from the Moon's surface.
The incongruity was so awesome that for several minutes, we remained motionless and quiet. Miller broke the silence with his quavering voice, "Strange someone didn't notice it before."
Strange? The object rose a quarter of a mile above us, a huge, curving hulk of smooth metal. It was featureless and yet conveyed a sense of alienness . It was alien and yet it wasn't a natural formation. Something had made the thing, whatever it was. But was it strange that it hadn't been noticed before? Men had lived on the Moon for over a year, but the Moon was vast and the Mare Serenitatis covered three hundred and forty thousand square miles.
"What is it?" Marie asked breathlessly.
Her husband grunted his bafflement. "Who knows? But see how it curves? If it's a perfect sphere, it must be at least two miles in diameter!"
"If it's a perfect sphere," Miller suggested, "most of it must be beneath the Moon's surface."
"Maybe it isn't a sphere," my wife said. "Maybe this is all of it."
"Let's call Lunar City and tell the authorities about it." I reached for the radio controls on my suit.
Kane grabbed my arm. "No. Let's find out whatever we can by ourselves. If we tell the authorities, they'll order us to leave it alone. If we discover something really important, we'll be famous!"
I lowered my arm. His outburst seemed faintly childish to me. And yet it carried a good measure of common sense. If we discovered proof of an alien race, we would indeed be famous. The more we discovered for ourselves, the more famous we'd be. Fame was practically a synonym for prestige and wealth.
"All right," I conceded.
Miller stepped forward, moving slowly in the bulk of his spacesuit. Deliberately, he removed a small torch from his side and pressed the brilliant flame against the metal.
A few minutes later, the elderly mineralogist gave his opinion: "It's steel ... made thousands of years ago."
Someone gasped over the intercom, "Thousands of years! But wouldn't it be in worse shape than this if it was that old?"
Miller pointed at the small cut his torch had made in the metal. The notch was only a quarter of an inch deep. "I say steel because it's similar to steel. Actually, it's a much stronger alloy. Besides that, on the Moon, there's been no water or atmosphere to rust it. Not even a wind to disturb its surface. It's at least several thousand years old."
We slowly circled the alien structure. Several minutes later, Kane shouted, "Look!"
A few feet above the ground, the structure's smooth surface was broken by a circular opening that yawned invitingly. Kane ran ahead and flashed his head-lamp into the dark recess.
"There's a small room inside," he told us, and climbed through the opening.
We waited outside and focused our lamps through the five-foot opening to give him as much light as possible.
"Come on in, Marie," he called to his wife. "This is really something! It must be an alien race. There's all kinds of weird drawings on the walls and gadgets that look like controls for something...."
Briefly, my lamp flickered over Marie's pale face. Her features struggled with two conflicting emotions: She was frightened by the alienness of the thing and yet she wanted to be with her husband. She hesitated momentarily, then climbed through the passage.
"You want to go in?" my wife asked.
"Do you?"
"Let's."
I helped Verana through the opening, climbed through myself and turned to help Miller.
Miller was sixty years old. He was an excellent mineralogist, alert mentally, but with a body that was almost feeble. I reached out to help him as he stepped into the passageway.
For a brief second, he was framed in the opening, a dark silhouette against the star-studded sky.
The next second, he was thrown twenty yards into the air. He gasped with pain when he struck the ground. " Something pushed me!"
"Are you all right?"
"Yes."
He had fallen on a spot beyond our angle of vision. I started through the passage....
... and struck an invisible solid wall.
My eyes were on the circular opening. A metal panel emerged from a recess on one side and slid across the passage. The room darkened with the absence of starlight.
" What happened? "
"The door to this damned place closed," I explained.
" What? "
Before we could recover from the shock, the room filled with a brilliant glare. We turned off our lamps.
The room was approximately twelve feet long and nine feet wide. The ceiling was only a few inches above our heads and when I looked at the smooth, hard metal, I felt as if I were trapped in some alien vault.
The walls of the room were covered with strange drawings and instruments. Here and there, kaleidoscopic lights pulsed rhythmically.
Kane brushed past me and beat his gloved fists against the metal door that had imprisoned us.
"Miller!"
"Yes?"
"See if you can get this thing open from the outside."
I knelt before the door and explored its surface with my fingers. There were no visible recesses or controls.
Over the intercom network, everyone's breath mingled and formed a rough, harsh sound. I could discern the women's quick, frightened breaths that were almost sobs. Kane's breath was deep and strong; Miller's was faltering and weak.
"Miller, get help!"
"I'll—" The sound of his breathing ceased. We listened intently.
"What happened to him?"
"I'll phone Lunar City." My fingers fumbled at the radio controls and trembled beneath the thick gloves.
I turned the dials that would connect my radio with Lunar City....
Static grated against my ear drums.
Static!
I listened to the harsh, erratic sound and my voice was weak by comparison: "Calling Lunar City."
"Static!" Kane echoed my thoughts. His frown made deep clefts between his eyebrows. "There's no static between inter-lunar radio!"
Verana's voice was small and frightened. "That sounds like the static we hear over the bigger radios when we broadcast to Earth."
"It does," Marie agreed.
"But we wouldn't have that kind of static over our radio, unless—" Verana's eyes widened until the pupils were surrounded by circles of white—"unless we were in outer space!"
We stared at the metal door that had imprisoned us, afraid even to speak of our fantastic suspicion.
I deactivated my radio.
Marie screamed as an inner door opened to disclose a long, narrow corridor beyond.
Simultaneous with the opening of the second door, I felt air press against my spacesuit. Before, our suits had been puffed outward by the pressure of air inside. Now our spacesuits were slack and dangling on our bodies.
We looked at each other and then at the inviting corridor beyond the open door.
We went single file, first Kane, then his wife Marie. Verana followed next and I was the last.
We walked slowly, examining the strange construction. The walls were featureless but still seemed alien. At various places on the walls were the outlines of doors without handles or locks.
Kane pressed his shoulder against a door and shoved. The door was unyielding.
I manipulated the air-vent controls of my spacesuit, allowed a small amount of the corridor's air into my helmet and inhaled cautiously. It smelled all right. I waited and nothing happened. Gradually, I increased the intake, turned off the oxygenating machines and removed my helmet.
"Shut off your oxy," I suggested. "We might as well breathe the air in this place and save our supply. We may need the oxygen in our suits later."
They saw that I had removed my helmet and was still alive and one by one removed their own helmets.
At the end of the corridor, Kane stopped before a blank wall. The sweat on his face glistened dully; his chest rose and fell rapidly. Kane was a pilot and one of the prerequisites for the job of guiding tons of metal between Earth and the Moon was a good set of nerves. Kane excited easily, his temper was fiery, but his nerves were like steel.
"The end of the line," he grunted.
As though to disprove the statement, a door on his right side opened soundlessly.
He went through the doorway as if shoved violently by an invisible hand.
The door closed behind him.
Marie threw herself at the door and beat at the metal. "Harry!"
Verana rushed to her side. Another door on the opposite side of the corridor opened silently. The door was behind them; they didn't notice.
Before I could warn them, Marie floated across the corridor, through the doorway.
Verana and I stared at the darkness beyond the opening, our muscles frozen by shock.
The door closed behind Marie's screaming, struggling form.
Verana's face was white with fear. Apprehensively, she glanced at the other doors that lined the hall.
I put my arms around her, held her close.
"Antigravity machines, force rays," I suggested worriedly.
For several minutes, we remained motionless and silent. I recalled the preceding events of the day, searched for a sense of normality in them. The Kanes, Miller, Verana and I lived in Lunar City with hundreds of other people. Mankind had inhabited the Moon for over a year. Means of recreation were scarce. Many people explored the place to amuse themselves. After supper, we had decided to take a walk. As simple as that: a walk on the Moon.
We had expected only the familiar craters, chasms and weird rock formations. A twist of fate and here we were: imprisoned in an alien ship.
My legs quivered with fatigue, my heart throbbed heavily, Verana's perfume dizzied me. No, it wasn't a dream. Despite our incredible situation, there was no sensation of unreality.
I took Verana's hand and led her down the long corridor, retracing our steps.
We had walked not more than two yards when the rest of the doors opened soundlessly.
Verana's hand flew to her mouth to stifle a gasp.
Six doors were now open. The only two that remained closed were the ones that the Kanes had unwillingly entered.
This time, no invisible hand thrust us into any of the rooms.
I entered the nearest one. Verana followed hesitantly.
The walls of the large room were lined with shelves containing thousands of variously colored boxes and bottles. A table and four chairs were located in the center of the green, plasticlike floor. Each chair had no back, only a curving platform with a single supporting column.
"Ed!" I joined Verana on the other side of the room. She pointed a trembling finger at some crude drawings. "The things in this room are food!"
The drawings were so simple that anyone could have understood them. The first drawing portrayed a naked man and woman removing boxes and bottles from the shelves. The second picture showed the couple opening the containers. The third showed the man eating from one of the boxes and the woman drinking from a bottle.
"Let's see how it tastes," I said.
I selected an orange-colored box. The lid dissolved at the touch of my fingers.
The only contents were small cubes of a soft orange substance.
I tasted a small piece.
"Chocolate! Just like chocolate!"
Verana chose a nearby bottle and drank some of the bluish liquid.
"Milk!" she exclaimed.
"Perhaps we'd better look at the other rooms," I told her.
The next room we examined was obviously for recreation. Containers were filled with dozens of strange games and books of instructions in the form of simple drawings. The games were foreign, but designed in such a fashion that they would be interesting to Earthmen.
Two of the rooms were sleeping quarters. The floors were covered with a spongy substance and the lights were dim and soothing.
Another room contained a small bathing pool, running water, waste-disposal units and yellow cakes of soap.
The last room was an observatory. The ceiling and an entire wall were transparent. Outside, the stars shone clearly for a few seconds, then disappeared for an equal time, only to reappear in a different position.
"Hyper-space drive," Verana whispered softly. She was fascinated by the movement of the stars. For years, our scientists had sought a hyperspatial drive to conquer the stars.
We selected a comfortable chair facing the transparent wall, lit cigarettes and waited.
A few minutes later, Marie entered the room.
I noticed with some surprise that her face was calm. If she was excited, her actions didn't betray it.
She sat next to Verana.
"What happened?" my wife asked.
Marie crossed her legs and began in a rambling manner as if discussing a new recipe, "That was really a surprise, wasn't it? I was scared silly, at first. That room was dark and I didn't know what to expect. Something touched my head and I heard a telepathic voice—"
"Telepathic?" Verana interrupted.
"Yes. Well, this voice said not to worry and that it wasn't going to hurt me. It said it only wanted to learn something about us. It was the oddest feeling! All the time, this voice kept talking to me in a nice way and made me feel at ease ... and at the same time, I felt something search my mind and gather information. I could actually feel it search my memories!"
"What memories?" I inquired.
She frowned with concentration. "Memories of high school mostly. It seemed interested in English and history classes. And then it searched for memories of our customs and lives in general...."
Kane stalked into the room at that moment, his face red with anger.
" Do you know where we are? " he demanded. "When those damned aliens got me in that room, they explained what this is all about. We're guinea pigs!"
"Did they use telepathy to explain?" Verana asked. I suddenly remembered that she was a member of a club that investigated extra-sensory perception with the hope of learning how it operated. She was probably sorry she hadn't been contacted telepathically.
"Yeah," Kane replied. "I saw all sorts of mental pictures and they explained what they did to us. Those damned aliens want us for their zoo!"
"Start at the beginning," I suggested.
He flashed an angry glance at me, but seemed to calm somewhat. "This ship was made by a race from another galaxy. Thousands of years ago, they came to Earth in their spaceships when men were primitives living in caves. They wanted to know what our civilization would be like when we developed space flight. So they put this ship on the Moon as a sort of booby-trap. They put it there with the idea that when we made spaceships and went to the Moon, sooner or later, we'd find the ship and enter it— like rabbits in a snare! "
"And now the booby-trap is on its way home," I guessed.
"Yeah, this ship is taking us to their planet and they're going to keep us there while they study us."
"How long will the trip take?" I asked.
"Six months. We'll be bottled up in this crate for six whole damned months! And when we get there, we'll be prisoners!"
Marie's hypnotic spell was fading and once more her face showed the terror inside her.
"Don't feel so bad," I told Kane. "It could be worse. It should be interesting to see an alien race. We'll have our wives with us—"
"Maybe they'll dissect us!" Marie gasped.
Verana scoffed. "A race intelligent enough to build a ship like this? A race that was traveling between the stars when we were living in caves? Dissection is primitive. They won't have to dissect us in order to study us. They'll have more advanced methods."
"Maybe we can reach the ship's controls somehow," Kane said excitedly.
"We've got to try to change the ship's course and get back to the Moon!"
"It's impossible. Don't waste your time." The voice had no visible source and seemed to fill the room.
Verana snapped her fingers. "So that's why the aliens read Marie's mind! They wanted to learn our language so they could talk to us!"
Kane whirled in a complete circle, glaring at each of the four walls.
"Where are you? Who are you?"
"I'm located in a part of the ship you can't reach. I'm a machine."
"Is anyone else aboard besides ourselves?"
"No. I control the ship." Although the voice spoke without stilted phrases, the tone was cold and mechanical.
"What are your—your masters going to do with us?" Marie asked anxiously.
"You won't be harmed. My masters merely wish to question and examine you. Thousands of years ago, they wondered what your race would be like when it developed to the space-flight stage. They left this ship on your Moon only because they were curious. My masters have no animosity toward your race, only compassion and curiosity."
I remembered the way antigravity rays had shoved Miller from the ship and asked the machine, "Why didn't you let our fifth member board the ship?"
"The trip to my makers' planet will take six months. There are food, oxygen and living facilities for four only of your race. I had to prevent the fifth from entering the ship."
"Come on," Kane ordered. "We'll search this ship room by room and we'll find some way to make it take us back to Earth."
"It's useless," the ship warned us.
For five hours, we minutely examined every room. We had no tools to force our way through solid metal walls to the engine or control rooms. The only things in the ship that could be lifted and carried about were the containers of food and alien games. None were sufficiently heavy or hard enough to put even a scratch in the heavy metal.
Six rooms were open to our use. The two rooms in which the Kanes had been imprisoned were locked and there were no controls or locks to work on.
The rooms that we could enter were without doors, except the ones that opened into the corridor.
After intensive searching, we realized there was no way to damage the ship or reach any section other than our allotted space.
We gave up.
The women went to the sleeping compartments to rest and Kane I went to the "kitchen."
At random, we sampled the variously colored boxes and bottles and discussed our predicament.
"Trapped," Kane said angrily. "Trapped in a steel prison." He slammed his fist against the table top. "But there must be a way to get out! Every problem has a solution!"
"You sure?" I asked.
"What?"
" Does every problem have a solution? I don't believe it. Some problems are too great. Take the problem of a murderer in our civilization: John Doe has killed someone and his problem is to escape. Primarily, a murderer's problem is the same principle as ours. A murderer has to outwit an entire civilization. We have to outwit an entire civilization that was hundreds of times more advanced than ours is now when we were clubbing animals and eating the meat raw. Damned few criminals get away these days, even though they've got such crowds to lose themselves in. All we have is a ship that we can't control. I don't think we have a chance."
My resignation annoyed him. Each of us had reacted differently: Kane's wife was frightened, Verana was calm because of an inner serenity that few people have, I was resigned and Kane was angry.
For several minutes, we sampled the different foods. Every one had a distinctive flavor, comparable to that of a fruit or vegetable on Earth.
Kane lifted a brown bottle to his lips, took a huge gulp and almost choked.
"Whiskey!"
"My masters realized your race would develop intoxicants and tried to create a comparable one," the machine explained.
I selected a brown bottle and sampled the liquid. "A little stronger than our own," I informed the machine.
We drank until Kane was staggering about the room, shouting insults at the alien race and the mechanical voice that seemed to be everywhere. He beat his fist against a wall until blood trickled from bruised knuckles.
"Please don't hurt yourself," the machine pleaded.
" Why? " Kane screamed at the ceiling. "Why should you care?"
"My masters will be displeased with me if you arrive in a damaged condition."
Kane banged his head against a bulkhead; an ugly bruise formed rapidly.
"Shtop me, then!"
"I can't. My masters created no way for me to restrain or contact you other than use of your language."
It took fully fifteen minutes to drag Kane to his sleeping compartment.
After I left Kane in his wife's care, I went to the adjoining room and stretched out on the soft floor beside Verana.
I tried to think of some solution. We were locked in an alien ship at the start of a six months' journey to a strange planet. We had no tools or weapons.
Solution? I doubted if two dozen geniuses working steadily for years could think of one!
I wondered what the alien race was like. Intelligent, surely: They had foreseen our conquest of space flight when we hadn't even invented the wheel. That thought awed me—somehow they had analyzed our brains thousands of years ago and calculated what our future accomplishments would be.
They had been able to predict our scientific development, but they hadn't been able to tell how our civilization would develop. They were curious, so they had left an enormously elaborate piece of bait on the Moon.
The aliens were incredibly more advanced than ourselves. I couldn't help thinking, And to a rabbit in a snare, mankind must seem impossibly clever .
I decided to ask the machine about its makers in the "morning."
When I awoke, my head was throbbing painfully.
I opened my eyes and blinked several times to make sure they were functioning properly. I wasn't in the compartment where I had fallen asleep a few hours before.
I was tied to one of the chairs in the "kitchen." Beside me, Verana was bound to a chair by strips of cloth from her skirt, and across from us, Marie was secured to another chair.
Kane staggered into the room. Although he was visibly drunk, he appeared more sober than the night before. His dark hair was rumpled and his face was flushed, but his eyes gleamed with a growing alertness.
"Awake, huh?"
"What have you done, Harry?" his wife screamed at him. Her eyes were red with tears and her lips twisted in an expression of shame when she looked at him.
"Obvious, isn't it? While all of you were asleep, I conked each of you on the head, dragged you in here and tied you up." He smiled crookedly.
"It's amazing the things a person can do when he's pickled. I'm sorry I had to be so rough, but I have a plan and I knew you wouldn't agree or cooperate with me."
"What's your plan?" I asked.
He grinned wryly and crinkled bloodshot eyes. "I don't want to live in a zoo on an alien planet. I want to go home and prove my theory that this problem has a solution."
I grunted my disgust.
"The solution is simple," he said. "We're in a trap so strong that the aliens didn't establish any means to control our actions. When men put a lion in a strong cage, they don't worry about controlling the lion because the lion can't get out. We're in the same basic situation."
"So what?" Verana queried in a sarcastic tone.
"The aliens want us transported to their planet so they can examine and question us. Right?"
"Right."
"Ed, remember that remark the machine made last night?"
"What remark?"
"It said, ' My masters will be displeased with me if you arrive in a damaged condition.' What does that indicate to you?"
I assumed a baffled expression. I didn't have the slightest idea of what he was driving at and I told him so.
"Ed," he said, "if you could build an electronic brain capable of making decisions, how would you build it?"
"Hell, I don't know," I confessed.
"Well, if I could build an electronic brain like the one running this ship, I'd build it with a conscience so it'd do its best at all times."
"Machines always do their best," I argued. "Come on, untie us. I'm getting a crick in my back!" I didn't like the idea of being slugged while asleep. If Kane had been sober and if his wife hadn't been present, I would have let him know exactly what I thought of him.
" Our machines always do their best," he argued, "because we punch buttons and they respond in predetermined patterns. But the electronic brain in this ship isn't automatic. It makes decisions and I'll bet it even has to decide how much energy and time to put into each process!"
"So what?"
He shrugged muscular shoulders. "So this ship is operated by a thinking, conscientious machine. It's the first time I've encountered such a machine, but I think I know what will happen. I spent hours last night figuring—"
"What are you talking about?" I interrupted. "Are you so drunk that you don't know—"
"I'll show you, Ed."
He walked around the table and stood behind my chair. I felt his thick fingers around my throat and smelled the alcohol on his breath.
"Can you see me, machine?" he asked the empty air.
"Yes," the electronic brain replied.
"Watch!"
Kane tightened his fingers around my throat.
Verana and Marie screamed shrilly.
My head seemed to swell like a balloon; my throat gurgled painfully.
"Please stop," the machine pleaded.
"What will your masters think of you if I kill all of us? You'll return to them with a cargo of dead people!"
The machine didn't answer. I waited for the electronic brain to interfere and, with a cold knot in my stomach, realized the machine had said it had no way to control our actions!
"Your purpose won't be fulfilled, will it?" Kane demanded. "Not if you return with dead specimens!"
"No," the machine admitted.
"If you don't take us back to the Moon," Kane threatened, "I'll kill all of us !"
The alien electronic brain was silent.
By this time, I couldn't see and Kane's voice was a hollow, faraway thing that rang in my ears. I tugged at my bindings, but they only tightened as I struggled.
"If you take us back to the Moon, your masters will never know you failed in your mission. They won't know you failed because you won't bring them proof of your failure."
My fading consciousness tried to envision the alien mechanical brain as it struggled with the problem.
"Look at it this way," Kane persisted. "If you carry our corpses to your masters, all your efforts will have been useless. If you return us to the Moon alive, you'll still have a chance to carry out your mission later."
A long silence followed. Verana and Marie screamed at Kane to let go. A soft darkness seemed to fill the room, blurring everything, drowning even their shrieks in strangling blackness.
"You win," the machine conceded. "I'll return the ship to the Moon."
Kane released his grip on my throat.
"See?" he asked. "Didn't I tell you every problem has a solution?"
I didn't answer. I was too busy enjoying breathing again.
Question:
What are Ed and Verana's relationship to each other?
Answer:
|
[
"Ed and Verana are husband and wife. They live together in \"Lunar City, on the Moon, and have for the past year. Together, they're friends with the rest of the group. After Marie climbs into the star ship, Ed asks Verana if she wants to go in. They act as a team, always doing everything together. They are left in the passageway alone after Kane and Marie are taken. Ed holds Verana's hand as they walk down the corridor, a sign of affection. They explore the ship together first, always working together, discovering the meaning of the instructive drawings and the purpose of the different rooms. They sleep together in the same pod. ",
"Ed and Verana are husband and wife; the two have a pleasant dynamic and get along well. Before entering the strange object, the two ask each other if they want to go in, rather than trying to convince the other. When the two are left alone after Marie and Kane are taken into separate rooms, they work together to investigate the rest of the corridor and try to piece together bits of information cooperatively. Ed describes Verana as having an inner calmness and peacefulness, noting that it is a unique aspect of her personality. The two are similar in their rational approaches to the situation. ",
"Ed and Verana are married to each other. They get along well, and the two of them often stick together. Verana can stay calm in many situations because of an inner serenity that few people possess. On the other hand, Ed also tries to keep calm in most situations but gets nervous if it is potentially dangerous to him or his wife. When Verana is scared after what happens to Marie in the corridor, he puts his arm around her protectively and holds her close. Ed also knows Verana’s interests very well. He is aware that she is part of a group researching extra-sensory perception, and she most likely would have loved the opportunity to experience what Marie had.",
"Ed and Verana are married. They go side by side through the sphere, hesitating for a second before entry but making this decision together. When they are left alone in the corridor, Ed sees her fear and holds her close. Ed is also scared but he takes charge of the situation to lead his wife, and when other doors open the couple enters together. They follow each other through the rooms and each one does the same actions as another. Ed remembers about Verana's interest in extra-sensory perception and even wonders sarcastically if she is disappointed about not being contacted. The two are relatively calm and secure, they understand that nothing can be done and agree to it. Verana thinks logically and with inner serenity, Ed appreciates it and feels calm and resigned. They are similar and therefore make up a stable couple. Verana is scared for her husband when Kane is choking it as a normal wife would be, but overall the couple is as calm as possible. Moreover, both are rather interested in the aliens and support each other all the way, their couple is harmonious, especially on the contrast."
] |
49901
|
The Snare
By RICHARD R. SMITH
Illustrated by WEISS
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy January 1956. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
It's easy to find a solution when there is one—the trick is to do it if there is none!
I glanced at the path we had made across the Mare Serenitatis . The Latin translated as "the Sea of Serenity." It was well named because, as far as the eye could see in every direction, there was a smooth layer of pumice that resembled the surface of a calm sea. Scattered across the quiet sea of virgin Moon dust were occasional islands of rock that jutted abruptly toward the infinity of stars above. Considering everything, our surroundings conveyed a sense of serenity like none I had ever felt.
Our bounding path across the level expanse was clearly marked. Because of the light gravity, we had leaped high into the air with each step and every time we struck the ground, the impact had raised a cloud of dustlike pumice. Now the clouds of dust were slowly settling in the light gravity.
Above us, the stars were cold, motionless and crystal-clear. Indifferently, they sprayed a faint light on our surroundings ... a dim glow that was hardly sufficient for normal vision and was too weak to be reflected toward Earth.
We turned our head-lamps on the strange object before us. Five beams of light illuminated the smooth shape that protruded from the Moon's surface.
The incongruity was so awesome that for several minutes, we remained motionless and quiet. Miller broke the silence with his quavering voice, "Strange someone didn't notice it before."
Strange? The object rose a quarter of a mile above us, a huge, curving hulk of smooth metal. It was featureless and yet conveyed a sense of alienness . It was alien and yet it wasn't a natural formation. Something had made the thing, whatever it was. But was it strange that it hadn't been noticed before? Men had lived on the Moon for over a year, but the Moon was vast and the Mare Serenitatis covered three hundred and forty thousand square miles.
"What is it?" Marie asked breathlessly.
Her husband grunted his bafflement. "Who knows? But see how it curves? If it's a perfect sphere, it must be at least two miles in diameter!"
"If it's a perfect sphere," Miller suggested, "most of it must be beneath the Moon's surface."
"Maybe it isn't a sphere," my wife said. "Maybe this is all of it."
"Let's call Lunar City and tell the authorities about it." I reached for the radio controls on my suit.
Kane grabbed my arm. "No. Let's find out whatever we can by ourselves. If we tell the authorities, they'll order us to leave it alone. If we discover something really important, we'll be famous!"
I lowered my arm. His outburst seemed faintly childish to me. And yet it carried a good measure of common sense. If we discovered proof of an alien race, we would indeed be famous. The more we discovered for ourselves, the more famous we'd be. Fame was practically a synonym for prestige and wealth.
"All right," I conceded.
Miller stepped forward, moving slowly in the bulk of his spacesuit. Deliberately, he removed a small torch from his side and pressed the brilliant flame against the metal.
A few minutes later, the elderly mineralogist gave his opinion: "It's steel ... made thousands of years ago."
Someone gasped over the intercom, "Thousands of years! But wouldn't it be in worse shape than this if it was that old?"
Miller pointed at the small cut his torch had made in the metal. The notch was only a quarter of an inch deep. "I say steel because it's similar to steel. Actually, it's a much stronger alloy. Besides that, on the Moon, there's been no water or atmosphere to rust it. Not even a wind to disturb its surface. It's at least several thousand years old."
We slowly circled the alien structure. Several minutes later, Kane shouted, "Look!"
A few feet above the ground, the structure's smooth surface was broken by a circular opening that yawned invitingly. Kane ran ahead and flashed his head-lamp into the dark recess.
"There's a small room inside," he told us, and climbed through the opening.
We waited outside and focused our lamps through the five-foot opening to give him as much light as possible.
"Come on in, Marie," he called to his wife. "This is really something! It must be an alien race. There's all kinds of weird drawings on the walls and gadgets that look like controls for something...."
Briefly, my lamp flickered over Marie's pale face. Her features struggled with two conflicting emotions: She was frightened by the alienness of the thing and yet she wanted to be with her husband. She hesitated momentarily, then climbed through the passage.
"You want to go in?" my wife asked.
"Do you?"
"Let's."
I helped Verana through the opening, climbed through myself and turned to help Miller.
Miller was sixty years old. He was an excellent mineralogist, alert mentally, but with a body that was almost feeble. I reached out to help him as he stepped into the passageway.
For a brief second, he was framed in the opening, a dark silhouette against the star-studded sky.
The next second, he was thrown twenty yards into the air. He gasped with pain when he struck the ground. " Something pushed me!"
"Are you all right?"
"Yes."
He had fallen on a spot beyond our angle of vision. I started through the passage....
... and struck an invisible solid wall.
My eyes were on the circular opening. A metal panel emerged from a recess on one side and slid across the passage. The room darkened with the absence of starlight.
" What happened? "
"The door to this damned place closed," I explained.
" What? "
Before we could recover from the shock, the room filled with a brilliant glare. We turned off our lamps.
The room was approximately twelve feet long and nine feet wide. The ceiling was only a few inches above our heads and when I looked at the smooth, hard metal, I felt as if I were trapped in some alien vault.
The walls of the room were covered with strange drawings and instruments. Here and there, kaleidoscopic lights pulsed rhythmically.
Kane brushed past me and beat his gloved fists against the metal door that had imprisoned us.
"Miller!"
"Yes?"
"See if you can get this thing open from the outside."
I knelt before the door and explored its surface with my fingers. There were no visible recesses or controls.
Over the intercom network, everyone's breath mingled and formed a rough, harsh sound. I could discern the women's quick, frightened breaths that were almost sobs. Kane's breath was deep and strong; Miller's was faltering and weak.
"Miller, get help!"
"I'll—" The sound of his breathing ceased. We listened intently.
"What happened to him?"
"I'll phone Lunar City." My fingers fumbled at the radio controls and trembled beneath the thick gloves.
I turned the dials that would connect my radio with Lunar City....
Static grated against my ear drums.
Static!
I listened to the harsh, erratic sound and my voice was weak by comparison: "Calling Lunar City."
"Static!" Kane echoed my thoughts. His frown made deep clefts between his eyebrows. "There's no static between inter-lunar radio!"
Verana's voice was small and frightened. "That sounds like the static we hear over the bigger radios when we broadcast to Earth."
"It does," Marie agreed.
"But we wouldn't have that kind of static over our radio, unless—" Verana's eyes widened until the pupils were surrounded by circles of white—"unless we were in outer space!"
We stared at the metal door that had imprisoned us, afraid even to speak of our fantastic suspicion.
I deactivated my radio.
Marie screamed as an inner door opened to disclose a long, narrow corridor beyond.
Simultaneous with the opening of the second door, I felt air press against my spacesuit. Before, our suits had been puffed outward by the pressure of air inside. Now our spacesuits were slack and dangling on our bodies.
We looked at each other and then at the inviting corridor beyond the open door.
We went single file, first Kane, then his wife Marie. Verana followed next and I was the last.
We walked slowly, examining the strange construction. The walls were featureless but still seemed alien. At various places on the walls were the outlines of doors without handles or locks.
Kane pressed his shoulder against a door and shoved. The door was unyielding.
I manipulated the air-vent controls of my spacesuit, allowed a small amount of the corridor's air into my helmet and inhaled cautiously. It smelled all right. I waited and nothing happened. Gradually, I increased the intake, turned off the oxygenating machines and removed my helmet.
"Shut off your oxy," I suggested. "We might as well breathe the air in this place and save our supply. We may need the oxygen in our suits later."
They saw that I had removed my helmet and was still alive and one by one removed their own helmets.
At the end of the corridor, Kane stopped before a blank wall. The sweat on his face glistened dully; his chest rose and fell rapidly. Kane was a pilot and one of the prerequisites for the job of guiding tons of metal between Earth and the Moon was a good set of nerves. Kane excited easily, his temper was fiery, but his nerves were like steel.
"The end of the line," he grunted.
As though to disprove the statement, a door on his right side opened soundlessly.
He went through the doorway as if shoved violently by an invisible hand.
The door closed behind him.
Marie threw herself at the door and beat at the metal. "Harry!"
Verana rushed to her side. Another door on the opposite side of the corridor opened silently. The door was behind them; they didn't notice.
Before I could warn them, Marie floated across the corridor, through the doorway.
Verana and I stared at the darkness beyond the opening, our muscles frozen by shock.
The door closed behind Marie's screaming, struggling form.
Verana's face was white with fear. Apprehensively, she glanced at the other doors that lined the hall.
I put my arms around her, held her close.
"Antigravity machines, force rays," I suggested worriedly.
For several minutes, we remained motionless and silent. I recalled the preceding events of the day, searched for a sense of normality in them. The Kanes, Miller, Verana and I lived in Lunar City with hundreds of other people. Mankind had inhabited the Moon for over a year. Means of recreation were scarce. Many people explored the place to amuse themselves. After supper, we had decided to take a walk. As simple as that: a walk on the Moon.
We had expected only the familiar craters, chasms and weird rock formations. A twist of fate and here we were: imprisoned in an alien ship.
My legs quivered with fatigue, my heart throbbed heavily, Verana's perfume dizzied me. No, it wasn't a dream. Despite our incredible situation, there was no sensation of unreality.
I took Verana's hand and led her down the long corridor, retracing our steps.
We had walked not more than two yards when the rest of the doors opened soundlessly.
Verana's hand flew to her mouth to stifle a gasp.
Six doors were now open. The only two that remained closed were the ones that the Kanes had unwillingly entered.
This time, no invisible hand thrust us into any of the rooms.
I entered the nearest one. Verana followed hesitantly.
The walls of the large room were lined with shelves containing thousands of variously colored boxes and bottles. A table and four chairs were located in the center of the green, plasticlike floor. Each chair had no back, only a curving platform with a single supporting column.
"Ed!" I joined Verana on the other side of the room. She pointed a trembling finger at some crude drawings. "The things in this room are food!"
The drawings were so simple that anyone could have understood them. The first drawing portrayed a naked man and woman removing boxes and bottles from the shelves. The second picture showed the couple opening the containers. The third showed the man eating from one of the boxes and the woman drinking from a bottle.
"Let's see how it tastes," I said.
I selected an orange-colored box. The lid dissolved at the touch of my fingers.
The only contents were small cubes of a soft orange substance.
I tasted a small piece.
"Chocolate! Just like chocolate!"
Verana chose a nearby bottle and drank some of the bluish liquid.
"Milk!" she exclaimed.
"Perhaps we'd better look at the other rooms," I told her.
The next room we examined was obviously for recreation. Containers were filled with dozens of strange games and books of instructions in the form of simple drawings. The games were foreign, but designed in such a fashion that they would be interesting to Earthmen.
Two of the rooms were sleeping quarters. The floors were covered with a spongy substance and the lights were dim and soothing.
Another room contained a small bathing pool, running water, waste-disposal units and yellow cakes of soap.
The last room was an observatory. The ceiling and an entire wall were transparent. Outside, the stars shone clearly for a few seconds, then disappeared for an equal time, only to reappear in a different position.
"Hyper-space drive," Verana whispered softly. She was fascinated by the movement of the stars. For years, our scientists had sought a hyperspatial drive to conquer the stars.
We selected a comfortable chair facing the transparent wall, lit cigarettes and waited.
A few minutes later, Marie entered the room.
I noticed with some surprise that her face was calm. If she was excited, her actions didn't betray it.
She sat next to Verana.
"What happened?" my wife asked.
Marie crossed her legs and began in a rambling manner as if discussing a new recipe, "That was really a surprise, wasn't it? I was scared silly, at first. That room was dark and I didn't know what to expect. Something touched my head and I heard a telepathic voice—"
"Telepathic?" Verana interrupted.
"Yes. Well, this voice said not to worry and that it wasn't going to hurt me. It said it only wanted to learn something about us. It was the oddest feeling! All the time, this voice kept talking to me in a nice way and made me feel at ease ... and at the same time, I felt something search my mind and gather information. I could actually feel it search my memories!"
"What memories?" I inquired.
She frowned with concentration. "Memories of high school mostly. It seemed interested in English and history classes. And then it searched for memories of our customs and lives in general...."
Kane stalked into the room at that moment, his face red with anger.
" Do you know where we are? " he demanded. "When those damned aliens got me in that room, they explained what this is all about. We're guinea pigs!"
"Did they use telepathy to explain?" Verana asked. I suddenly remembered that she was a member of a club that investigated extra-sensory perception with the hope of learning how it operated. She was probably sorry she hadn't been contacted telepathically.
"Yeah," Kane replied. "I saw all sorts of mental pictures and they explained what they did to us. Those damned aliens want us for their zoo!"
"Start at the beginning," I suggested.
He flashed an angry glance at me, but seemed to calm somewhat. "This ship was made by a race from another galaxy. Thousands of years ago, they came to Earth in their spaceships when men were primitives living in caves. They wanted to know what our civilization would be like when we developed space flight. So they put this ship on the Moon as a sort of booby-trap. They put it there with the idea that when we made spaceships and went to the Moon, sooner or later, we'd find the ship and enter it— like rabbits in a snare! "
"And now the booby-trap is on its way home," I guessed.
"Yeah, this ship is taking us to their planet and they're going to keep us there while they study us."
"How long will the trip take?" I asked.
"Six months. We'll be bottled up in this crate for six whole damned months! And when we get there, we'll be prisoners!"
Marie's hypnotic spell was fading and once more her face showed the terror inside her.
"Don't feel so bad," I told Kane. "It could be worse. It should be interesting to see an alien race. We'll have our wives with us—"
"Maybe they'll dissect us!" Marie gasped.
Verana scoffed. "A race intelligent enough to build a ship like this? A race that was traveling between the stars when we were living in caves? Dissection is primitive. They won't have to dissect us in order to study us. They'll have more advanced methods."
"Maybe we can reach the ship's controls somehow," Kane said excitedly.
"We've got to try to change the ship's course and get back to the Moon!"
"It's impossible. Don't waste your time." The voice had no visible source and seemed to fill the room.
Verana snapped her fingers. "So that's why the aliens read Marie's mind! They wanted to learn our language so they could talk to us!"
Kane whirled in a complete circle, glaring at each of the four walls.
"Where are you? Who are you?"
"I'm located in a part of the ship you can't reach. I'm a machine."
"Is anyone else aboard besides ourselves?"
"No. I control the ship." Although the voice spoke without stilted phrases, the tone was cold and mechanical.
"What are your—your masters going to do with us?" Marie asked anxiously.
"You won't be harmed. My masters merely wish to question and examine you. Thousands of years ago, they wondered what your race would be like when it developed to the space-flight stage. They left this ship on your Moon only because they were curious. My masters have no animosity toward your race, only compassion and curiosity."
I remembered the way antigravity rays had shoved Miller from the ship and asked the machine, "Why didn't you let our fifth member board the ship?"
"The trip to my makers' planet will take six months. There are food, oxygen and living facilities for four only of your race. I had to prevent the fifth from entering the ship."
"Come on," Kane ordered. "We'll search this ship room by room and we'll find some way to make it take us back to Earth."
"It's useless," the ship warned us.
For five hours, we minutely examined every room. We had no tools to force our way through solid metal walls to the engine or control rooms. The only things in the ship that could be lifted and carried about were the containers of food and alien games. None were sufficiently heavy or hard enough to put even a scratch in the heavy metal.
Six rooms were open to our use. The two rooms in which the Kanes had been imprisoned were locked and there were no controls or locks to work on.
The rooms that we could enter were without doors, except the ones that opened into the corridor.
After intensive searching, we realized there was no way to damage the ship or reach any section other than our allotted space.
We gave up.
The women went to the sleeping compartments to rest and Kane I went to the "kitchen."
At random, we sampled the variously colored boxes and bottles and discussed our predicament.
"Trapped," Kane said angrily. "Trapped in a steel prison." He slammed his fist against the table top. "But there must be a way to get out! Every problem has a solution!"
"You sure?" I asked.
"What?"
" Does every problem have a solution? I don't believe it. Some problems are too great. Take the problem of a murderer in our civilization: John Doe has killed someone and his problem is to escape. Primarily, a murderer's problem is the same principle as ours. A murderer has to outwit an entire civilization. We have to outwit an entire civilization that was hundreds of times more advanced than ours is now when we were clubbing animals and eating the meat raw. Damned few criminals get away these days, even though they've got such crowds to lose themselves in. All we have is a ship that we can't control. I don't think we have a chance."
My resignation annoyed him. Each of us had reacted differently: Kane's wife was frightened, Verana was calm because of an inner serenity that few people have, I was resigned and Kane was angry.
For several minutes, we sampled the different foods. Every one had a distinctive flavor, comparable to that of a fruit or vegetable on Earth.
Kane lifted a brown bottle to his lips, took a huge gulp and almost choked.
"Whiskey!"
"My masters realized your race would develop intoxicants and tried to create a comparable one," the machine explained.
I selected a brown bottle and sampled the liquid. "A little stronger than our own," I informed the machine.
We drank until Kane was staggering about the room, shouting insults at the alien race and the mechanical voice that seemed to be everywhere. He beat his fist against a wall until blood trickled from bruised knuckles.
"Please don't hurt yourself," the machine pleaded.
" Why? " Kane screamed at the ceiling. "Why should you care?"
"My masters will be displeased with me if you arrive in a damaged condition."
Kane banged his head against a bulkhead; an ugly bruise formed rapidly.
"Shtop me, then!"
"I can't. My masters created no way for me to restrain or contact you other than use of your language."
It took fully fifteen minutes to drag Kane to his sleeping compartment.
After I left Kane in his wife's care, I went to the adjoining room and stretched out on the soft floor beside Verana.
I tried to think of some solution. We were locked in an alien ship at the start of a six months' journey to a strange planet. We had no tools or weapons.
Solution? I doubted if two dozen geniuses working steadily for years could think of one!
I wondered what the alien race was like. Intelligent, surely: They had foreseen our conquest of space flight when we hadn't even invented the wheel. That thought awed me—somehow they had analyzed our brains thousands of years ago and calculated what our future accomplishments would be.
They had been able to predict our scientific development, but they hadn't been able to tell how our civilization would develop. They were curious, so they had left an enormously elaborate piece of bait on the Moon.
The aliens were incredibly more advanced than ourselves. I couldn't help thinking, And to a rabbit in a snare, mankind must seem impossibly clever .
I decided to ask the machine about its makers in the "morning."
When I awoke, my head was throbbing painfully.
I opened my eyes and blinked several times to make sure they were functioning properly. I wasn't in the compartment where I had fallen asleep a few hours before.
I was tied to one of the chairs in the "kitchen." Beside me, Verana was bound to a chair by strips of cloth from her skirt, and across from us, Marie was secured to another chair.
Kane staggered into the room. Although he was visibly drunk, he appeared more sober than the night before. His dark hair was rumpled and his face was flushed, but his eyes gleamed with a growing alertness.
"Awake, huh?"
"What have you done, Harry?" his wife screamed at him. Her eyes were red with tears and her lips twisted in an expression of shame when she looked at him.
"Obvious, isn't it? While all of you were asleep, I conked each of you on the head, dragged you in here and tied you up." He smiled crookedly.
"It's amazing the things a person can do when he's pickled. I'm sorry I had to be so rough, but I have a plan and I knew you wouldn't agree or cooperate with me."
"What's your plan?" I asked.
He grinned wryly and crinkled bloodshot eyes. "I don't want to live in a zoo on an alien planet. I want to go home and prove my theory that this problem has a solution."
I grunted my disgust.
"The solution is simple," he said. "We're in a trap so strong that the aliens didn't establish any means to control our actions. When men put a lion in a strong cage, they don't worry about controlling the lion because the lion can't get out. We're in the same basic situation."
"So what?" Verana queried in a sarcastic tone.
"The aliens want us transported to their planet so they can examine and question us. Right?"
"Right."
"Ed, remember that remark the machine made last night?"
"What remark?"
"It said, ' My masters will be displeased with me if you arrive in a damaged condition.' What does that indicate to you?"
I assumed a baffled expression. I didn't have the slightest idea of what he was driving at and I told him so.
"Ed," he said, "if you could build an electronic brain capable of making decisions, how would you build it?"
"Hell, I don't know," I confessed.
"Well, if I could build an electronic brain like the one running this ship, I'd build it with a conscience so it'd do its best at all times."
"Machines always do their best," I argued. "Come on, untie us. I'm getting a crick in my back!" I didn't like the idea of being slugged while asleep. If Kane had been sober and if his wife hadn't been present, I would have let him know exactly what I thought of him.
" Our machines always do their best," he argued, "because we punch buttons and they respond in predetermined patterns. But the electronic brain in this ship isn't automatic. It makes decisions and I'll bet it even has to decide how much energy and time to put into each process!"
"So what?"
He shrugged muscular shoulders. "So this ship is operated by a thinking, conscientious machine. It's the first time I've encountered such a machine, but I think I know what will happen. I spent hours last night figuring—"
"What are you talking about?" I interrupted. "Are you so drunk that you don't know—"
"I'll show you, Ed."
He walked around the table and stood behind my chair. I felt his thick fingers around my throat and smelled the alcohol on his breath.
"Can you see me, machine?" he asked the empty air.
"Yes," the electronic brain replied.
"Watch!"
Kane tightened his fingers around my throat.
Verana and Marie screamed shrilly.
My head seemed to swell like a balloon; my throat gurgled painfully.
"Please stop," the machine pleaded.
"What will your masters think of you if I kill all of us? You'll return to them with a cargo of dead people!"
The machine didn't answer. I waited for the electronic brain to interfere and, with a cold knot in my stomach, realized the machine had said it had no way to control our actions!
"Your purpose won't be fulfilled, will it?" Kane demanded. "Not if you return with dead specimens!"
"No," the machine admitted.
"If you don't take us back to the Moon," Kane threatened, "I'll kill all of us !"
The alien electronic brain was silent.
By this time, I couldn't see and Kane's voice was a hollow, faraway thing that rang in my ears. I tugged at my bindings, but they only tightened as I struggled.
"If you take us back to the Moon, your masters will never know you failed in your mission. They won't know you failed because you won't bring them proof of your failure."
My fading consciousness tried to envision the alien mechanical brain as it struggled with the problem.
"Look at it this way," Kane persisted. "If you carry our corpses to your masters, all your efforts will have been useless. If you return us to the Moon alive, you'll still have a chance to carry out your mission later."
A long silence followed. Verana and Marie screamed at Kane to let go. A soft darkness seemed to fill the room, blurring everything, drowning even their shrieks in strangling blackness.
"You win," the machine conceded. "I'll return the ship to the Moon."
Kane released his grip on my throat.
"See?" he asked. "Didn't I tell you every problem has a solution?"
I didn't answer. I was too busy enjoying breathing again.
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What is the relationship between Roddie and Ida?
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about Bridge Crossing by Dave Dryfoos.
Relevant chunks:
Bridge Crossing
BY DAVE DRYFOOS
Illustrated by HARRISON
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction May 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
He knew the city was organized for his individual defense, for it had been that way since he was born. But who was his enemy?
In 1849, the mist that sometimes rolled through the Golden Gate was known as fog. In 2149, it had become far more frequent, and was known as smog. By 2349, it was fog again.
But tonight there was smoke mixed with the fog. Roddie could smell it. Somewhere in the forested ruins, fire was burning.
He wasn't worried. The small blaze that smoldered behind him on the cracked concrete floor had consumed everything burnable within blocks; what remained of the gutted concrete office building from which he peered was fire-proof.
But Roddie was himself aflame with anger. As always when Invaders broke in from the north, he'd been left behind with his nurse, Molly, while the soldiers went out to fight.
And nowadays Molly's presence wasn't the comfort it used to be. He felt almost ready to jump out of his skin, the way she rocked and knitted in that grating ruined chair, saying over and over again, "The soldiers don't want little boys. The soldiers don't want little boys. The soldiers don't—"
"I'm not a little boy!" Roddie suddenly shouted. "I'm full-grown and I've never even seen an Invader. Why won't you let me go and fight?"
Fiercely he crossed the bare, gritty floor and shook Molly's shoulder. She rattled under his jarring hand, and abruptly changed the subject.
"A is for Atom, B is for Bomb, C is for Corpse—" she chanted.
Roddie reached into her shapeless dress and pinched. Lately that had helped her over these spells. But this time, though it stopped the kindergarten song, the treatment only started something worse.
"Wuzzums hungry?" Molly cooed, still rocking.
Utterly disgusted, Roddie ripped her head off her neck.
It was a completely futile gesture. The complicated mind that had cared for him and taught him speech and the alphabet hadn't made him a mechanic, and his only tool was a broken-handled screwdriver.
He was still tinkering when the soldiers came in. While they lined up along the wall, he put Molly's head back on her neck.
She gaped coyly at the new arrivals. "Hello, boys," she simpered.
"Looking for a good time?"
Roddie slapped her to silence, reflecting briefly that there were many things he didn't know about Molly. But there was work to be done. Carefully he framed the ritual words she'd taught him: "Soldiers, come to attention and report!"
There were eleven of them, six feet tall, with four limbs and eight extremities. They stood uniformly, the thumbs on each pair of hands touching along the center line of the legs, front feet turned out at an angle of forty-five degrees, rear feet turned inward at thirty degrees.
"Sir," they chorused, "we have met the enemy and he is ours."
He inspected them. All were scratched and dented, but one in particular seemed badly damaged. His left arm was almost severed at the shoulder.
"Come here, fellow," Roddie said. "Let's see if I can fix that."
The soldier took a step forward, lurched suddenly, stopped, and whipped out a bayonet.
"Death to Invaders!" he yelled, and charged crazily.
Molly stepped in front of him.
"You aren't being very nice to my baby," she murmured, and thrust her knitting needles into his eyes.
Roddie jumped behind him, knocked off his helmet, and pressed a soft spot on his conical skull. The soldier collapsed to the floor.
Roddie salvaged and returned Molly's needles. Then he examined the patient, tearing him apart as a boy dismembers an alarm clock.
It was lucky he did. The left arm's pair of hands suddenly writhed off the floor in an effort to choke him. But because the arm was detached at the shoulder and therefore blind, he escaped the clutching onslaught and could goad the reflexing hands into assaulting one another harmlessly.
Meanwhile, the other soldiers left, except for one, apparently another casualty, who stumbled on his way out and fell into the fire. By the time Roddie had hauled him clear, damage was beyond repair. Roddie swore, then decided to try combining parts of this casualty with pieces of the other to make a whole one.
To get more light for the operation, he poked up the fire. Roddie was new at his work, and took it seriously. It alarmed him to watch the soldiers melt away, gradually succumbing to battle damage, shamed him to see the empty ruins burn section by section as the Invaders repeatedly broke through and had to be burned out.
Soon there would be nothing left of the Private Property Keep Out that, according to Molly's bedtime story, the Owners had entrusted to them when driven away by radioactivity. Soon the soldiers themselves would be gone. None would remain to guard the city but a few strayed servants like Molly, and an occasional Civil Defender.
And himself, Roddie reflected, spitting savagely into the fire. He might remain. But how he fitted into the picture, he didn't know. And Molly, who claimed to have found him in the ruins after a fight with Invaders twenty years before, couldn't or wouldn't say.
Well, for as long as possible, Roddie decided, he'd do his duty as the others did theirs—single-mindedly. Eventually the soldiers might accept him as one of themselves; meanwhile, this newly attempted first aid was useful to them.
He gave the fire a final poke and then paused, wondering if, when heated, his screwdriver could make an unfastened end of wire stick on the grayish spot where it seemed to belong.
Stretching prone to blow the embers hot so he could try out his new idea, Roddie got too close to the flames. Instantly the room filled with the stench of singed hair. Roddie drew angrily back, beating out the sparks in his uncut blond mane.
As he stood slapping his head and muttering, a deranged Civil Defense firefighter popped into the doorway and covered him with carbon dioxide foam.
Roddie fled. His life-long friends were not merely wearing out, they were unbearably wearing.
In the street, even before he'd wiped off the foam, he regretted his flight. The fire was back home. And here in the cold of this fog-shrouded canyon, a mere trail between heaped-up walls of rubble, the diaper he wore felt inadequate against the pre-dawn cold. His cherished weapon, a magnetic tack-hammer, was chill beneath the diaper's top, and the broken, radium-dialed wristwatch suspended from a string around his neck hung clammy against his chest. He stood irresolute on numbing bare feet, and considered returning to the more familiar bedlam.
But colder than cold was his shame at being cold. Molly never was, though she knew how to keep him warm, nor were the others. Hunger, thirst, pain and coldness were sensations never experienced by his friends. Like the growth he'd been undergoing till recently, these were things of ignominy, to be hidden as far as possible from inquiring eyes. Cold as it was, he'd have to hide.
Temporarily, the darkness concealed him, though it was not quite complete. From above the fog, the moon played vaguely deceptive light on the splinters of architecture looming toward it. Some distance off, an owl hooted, but here nocturnal rodents felt free to squeak and rustle as they scampered.
The world seemed ghostly. Yet it wasn't dead; it merely lurked. And as an irrepressible yawn reminded Roddie of his absurd need for sleep even in the midst of danger, he concluded for the thousandth time that the One who'd built him must have been an apprentice.
For just such reasons he'd developed the hideout toward which he now walked. It had been the haven of his adolescence, when the discovery of how much he differed from his friends had been a shock, and the shock itself a difference to be hidden.
His hiding place was a manhole, dead center in the dead street. A weathered bronze bar, carefully placed in the cover's slotted rim, was the levering key that opened its door.
Everything was wrong tonight! He couldn't even find the bar. Of course that spoiled things, because the bar was a roller on which to move the heavy cover from below, and a support that held it ajar for ventilation.
But the example of his friends had taught him above all else to carry out every purpose. Molly was a nurse; she had raised him despite all obstacles. The soldiers were guards; they protected the ruins against everything larger than a rat. The firefighter had put even him out when he was aflame....
Anyhow, the manhole cover had been loosened by his frequent handling. He lifted it aside by main strength, then flattened himself to the street, and felt with his feet for the top rung.
Halfway down the iron ladder, something made him pause. He looked, but saw only blackness. He listened, sniffed, found nothing. What could have entered through the iron cover?
He sneered at his own timidity and jumped to the bottom.
It was warm! The dry bottom of the hole had the temperature of body heat, as if a large animal had recently rested there!
Quickly, Roddie drew the hammer from his waist. Then, with weapon ready for an instantaneous blow, he stretched his left hand through the darkness. He touched something warm, softish. Gingerly he felt over that curving surface for identifying features.
While Roddie investigated by touch, his long fingers were suddenly seized and bitten. At the same time, his right shin received a savage kick. And his own retaliatory blow was checked in mid-swing by an unexpected voice.
"Get your filthy hands off me!" it whispered angrily. "Who do you think you are?"
Startled, he dropped his hammer. "I'm Roddie," he said, squatting to fumble for it. "Who do you think you are?"
"I'm Ida, naturally! Just how many girls are there in this raiding party?"
His first Invader—and he had dropped his weapon!
Scrabbling fearfully in the dust for his hammer, Roddie paused suddenly. This girl—whatever that was—seemed to think him one of her own kind. There was a chance, not much, but worth taking, to turn delay to advantage. Maybe he could learn something of value before he killed her. That would make the soldiers accept him!
He stalled, seeking a gambit. "How would I know how many girls there are?"
Half expecting a blow, he got instead an apology. "I'm sorry," the girl said. "I should have known. Never even heard your name before, either. Roddie.... Whose boat did you come in, Roddie?"
Boat? What was a boat? "How would I know?" he repeated, voice tight with fear of discovery.
If she noticed the tension, she didn't show it. Certainly her whisper was friendly enough. "Oh, you're one of the fellows from Bodega, then. They shoved a boy into our boat at the last minute, too. Tough, wasn't it, getting separated in the fog and tide like that? If only we didn't have to use boats.... But, say, how are we going to get away from here?"
"I wouldn't know," Roddie said, closing his fingers on the hammer, and rising. "How did you get in?"
"Followed your footprints. It was sundown and I saw human tracks in the dust and they led me here. Where were you?"
"Scouting around," Roddie said vaguely. "How did you know I was a man when I came back?"
"Because you couldn't see me, silly! You know perfectly well these androids are heat-sensitive and can locate us in the dark!"
Indeed he did know! Many times he'd felt ashamed that Molly could find him whenever she wanted to, even here in the manhole. But perhaps the manhole would help him now to redeem himself....
"I'd like to get a look at you," he said.
The girl laughed self-consciously. "It's getting gray out. You'll see me soon enough."
But she'd see him , Roddie realized. He had to talk fast.
"What'll we do when it's light?" he asked.
"Well, I guess the boats have gone," Ida said. "You could swim the Gate, I guess—you seem tall and strong enough. But I couldn't. You'll think it's crazy, but I've given this some thought, and even looked it over from the other side. I expect to try the Golden Gate Bridge!"
Now he was getting somewhere! The bridge was ruined, impassable. Even her own people had crossed the Strait by other means. But if there were a way over the bridge....
"It's broken," he said. "How in the world can we cross it?"
"Oh, you'll find out, if you take me up there. I—I don't want to be alone, Roddie. Will you go with me? Now?"
Well, she could be made to point out the route before he killed her— if nothing happened when she saw him.
Uneasy, Roddie hefted the hammer in his hand.
A giggle broke the pause. "It's nice of you to wait and let me go first up the ladder," the girl said. "But where the heck is the rusty old thing?"
"I'll go first," said Roddie. He might need the advantage. "The ladder's right behind me."
He climbed with hammer in teeth, and stretched his left hand from street level to grasp and neutralize the girl's right. Then, nervously fingering his weapon, he stared at her in the thin gray dawn.
She was short and lean, except for roundnesses here and there. From her shapeless doeskin dress stretched slender legs that tapered to feet that were bare, tiny, and, like her hands, only two in number.
Roddie was pleased. They were evenly matched as to members, and that would make things easy when the time came.
He looked into her face. It smiled at him, tanned and ruddy, with a full mouth and bright dark eyes that hid under long lashes when he looked too long.
Startling, those wary eyes. Concealing. For a moment he felt a rush of fear, but she gave his hand a squeeze before twisting loose, and burst into sudden laughter.
"Diapers!" she chortled, struggling to keep her voice low. "My big, strong, blond and blue-eyed hero goes into battle wearing diapers, and carrying only a hammer to fight with! You're the most unforgettable character I have ever known!"
He'd passed inspection, then—so far. He expelled his withheld breath, and said, "I think you'll find me a little odd, in some ways."
"Oh, not at all," Ida replied quickly. "Different, yes, but I wouldn't say odd."
When they started down the street, she was nervous despite Roddie's assertion that he knew where the soldiers were posted. He wondered if she felt some of the doubt he'd tried to conceal, shared his visions of what the soldiers might do if they found him brazenly strolling with an Invader. They might not believe he was only questioning a prisoner.
Every day, his friends were becoming more unpredictable.
For that very reason, because he didn't know what precautions would do any good, he took a chance and walked openly to the bridge by the most direct route. In time this apparent assurance stilled Ida's fears, and she began to talk.
Many of the things she said were beyond his experience and meaningless to him, but he did note with interest how effective the soldiers had been.
"It's awful," Ida said. "So few young men are left, so many casualties....
"But why do you—we—keep up the fight?" Roddie asked. "I mean, the soldiers will never leave the city; their purpose is to guard it and they can't leave, so they won't attack. Let them alone, and there'll be plenty of young men."
"Well!" said Ida, sharply. "You need indoctrination! Didn't they ever tell you that the city is our home, even if the stupid androids do keep us out? Don't you know how dependent we are on these raids for all our tools and things?"
She sounded suspicious. Roddie shot her a furtive, startled glance. But she wasn't standing off to fight him. On the contrary, she was too close for both comfort and combat. She bumped him hip and shoulder every few steps, and if he edged away, she followed.
He went on with his questioning. "Why are you here? I mean, sure, the others are after tools and things, but what's your purpose?"
Ida shrugged. "I'll admit no girl has ever done it before," she said,
"but I thought I could help with the wounded. That's why I have no weapon."
She hesitated, glanced covertly up at him, and went on with a rush of words. "It's the lack of men, I guess. All the girls are kind of bored and hopeless, so I got this bright idea and stowed away on one of the boats when it was dark and the fog had settled down. Do you think I was being silly?"
"No, but you do seem a little purposeless."
In silence they trudged through a vast area of charred wood and concrete foundations on the northern end of the city. Thick fog over the water hid Alcatraz, but in-shore visibility was better, and they could see the beginning of the bridge approach.
A stone rattled nearby. There was a clink of metal. Ida gasped, and clung to Roddie's arm.
"Behind me!" he whispered urgently. "Get behind me and hold on!"
He felt Ida's arms encircling his waist, her chin digging into his back below the left shoulder. Facing them, a hundred feet away, stood a soldier. He looked contemptuous, hostile.
"It's all right," Roddie said, his voice breaking.
There was a long, sullen, heart-stopping stare. Then the soldier turned and walked away.
Ida's grip loosened, and he could feel her sag behind him. Roddie turned and held her. With eyes closed, she pressed cold blue lips to his. He grimaced and turned away his head.
Ida's response was quick. "Forgive me," she breathed, and slipped from his arms, but she held herself erect. "I was so scared. And then we've had no sleep, no food or water."
Roddie was familiar with these signs of weakness, proud of appearing to deny his own humiliating needs.
"I guess you're not as strong as me," he said smugly. "I'll take care of you. Of course we can't sleep now, but I'll get food and water."
Leaving her to follow, he turned left to the ruins of a supermarket he had previously visited, demonstrating his superior strength by setting a pace Ida couldn't match. By the time she caught up with him, he had grubbed out a few cans of the special size that Molly always chose. Picking two that were neither dented, swollen, nor rusted, he smashed an end of each with his hammer, and gave Ida her choice of strained spinach or squash.
"Baby food!" she muttered. "Maybe it's just what we need, but to eat baby food with a man wearing a diaper.... Tell me, Roddie, how did you happen to know where to find it?"
"Well, this is the northern end of the city," he answered, shrugging.
"I've been here before."
"Why did the soldier let us go?"
"This watch," he said, touching the radium dial. "It's a talisman."
But Ida's eyes had widened, and the color was gone from her face. She was silent, too, except when asking him to fill his fast-emptied can with rain-water. She didn't finish her own portion, but lay back in the rubble with feet higher than her head, obviously trying to renew her strength.
And when they resumed their walk, her sullen, fear-clouded face showed plainly that he'd given himself away.
But to kill her now, before learning how she planned to cross the supposedly impassable bridge, seemed as purposeless and impulsive as Ida herself. Roddie didn't think, in any case, that her death would satisfy the soldiers. With new and useful information to offer, he might join them as an equal at last. But if his dalliance with this enemy seemed pointless, not even Molly's knitting needles could protect him.
He was sure the soldiers must be tracking the mysterious emanations of his watch dial, and had trouble to keep from glancing over his shoulder at every step. But arrival at the bridge approach ended the need for this self-restraint. Here, difficult going demanded full attention.
He'd never gone as far as the bridge before, not having wanted to look as if he might be leaving the city. The approach was a jungle of concrete with an underbrush of reinforcing-steel that reached for the unwary with rusted spines. Frequently they had to balance on cracked girders, and inch over roadless spots high off the ground.
Here Ida took the lead. When they got to where three approach roads made a clover-leaf, she led him down a side road and into a forest.
Roddie stopped, and seized her arm.
"What are you trying to do?" he demanded.
"I'm taking you with me," Ida said firmly. "Taking you where you belong!"
"No!" he blurted, drawing his hammer. "I can't go, nor let you go. I belong here!"
Ida gasped, twisted loose, and ran. Roddie ran after her.
She wasn't so easily caught. Like a frightened doe, she dashed in and out among the trees, leaped to the bridge's underpinnings where they thrust rustedly from a cliff, and scrambled up the ramp.
Roddie sighed and slowed down. The pavement ended just beyond the cable anchors. From there to the south tower, only an occasional dangling support wire showed where the actual bridge had been suspended. Ida was trapped.
He could take his time. Let the soldiers come up, as they undoubtedly would, to finish the job....
But Ida didn't seem to realize she was trapped. Without hesitation she dashed up the main left-hand suspension cable and ran along its curved steel surface.
For a moment, Roddie thought of letting her go, letting her run up the ever-steepening catenary until—because there were no guard-ropes or handgrips—she simply fell. That would solve his problem.
Except it wouldn't be his solution. Her death wouldn't prove him to his friends.
He set out quickly, before Ida was lost to sight in the thick fog that billowed in straight from the ocean. At first he ran erect along the top of the yard-wide cylinder of twisted metal, but soon the curve steepened. He had to go on all fours, clinging palm and sole.
Blood was on the cable where she'd passed. More blood stained it when he'd followed.
But because his friends knew neither pain nor fatigue, Roddie would admit none either. Nor would he give in to the fear that dizzied him at every downward look. He scrambled on like an automaton, watching only his holds, till he rammed Ida's rear with his head.
She had stopped, trembling and gasping. Roddie clung just below her and looked dazedly around. There was nothing in sight but fog, pierced by the rapier of rusted wire supporting them. Neither end of it was in sight.
Upward lay success, if death were not nearer on the cable. No soldier had ever come even this far, for soldiers, as he'd told Ida, never left the city, were not built to do so. But he was here; with luck, he could capitalize on the differences that had plagued him so long.
"Go on!" he ordered hoarsely. "Move!"
There was neither answer nor result. He broke off an end of loosened wire and jabbed her rear. Ida gasped and crawled on.
Up and up they went, chilled, wet, bleeding, pain-racked, exhausted. Never had Roddie felt so thoroughly the defects of his peculiar non-mechanical construction.
Without realizing it, he acquired a new purpose, a duty as compelling as that of any soldier or fire-watcher. He had to keep that trembling body of his alive, mount to the tall rust tower overhead.
He climbed and he made Ida climb, till, at nightmare's end, the fog thinned and they came into clear, windswept air and clawed up the last hundred feet to sanctuary.
They were completely spent. Without word or thought they crept within the tower, huddled together for warmth on its dank steel deck, and slept for several hours.
Roddie awoke as Ida finished struggling free of his unconscious grip. Limping, he joined her painful walk around the tower. From its openings they looked out on a strange and isolated world.
To the north, where Ida seemed drawn as though by instinct, Mount Tamalpais reared its brushy head, a looming island above a billowy white sea of fog. To the south were the Twin Peaks, a pair of buttons on a cotton sheet. Eastward lay Mount Diablo, bald and brooding, tallest of the peaks and most forbidding.
But westward over the ocean lay the land of gold—of all the kinds of gold there are, from brightest yellow to deepest orange. Only a small portion of the setting sun glared above the fog-bank; the rest seemed to have been broken off and smeared around by a child in love with its color.
Fascinated, Roddie stared for minutes, but turned when Ida showed no interest. She was intent on the tower itself. Following her eyes, Roddie saw his duty made suddenly clear.
Easy to make out even in the fading light was the route by which Invaders could cross to the foot of this tower on the remaining ruins of the road, climb to where he now stood, and then descend the cable over the bridge's gap and catch the city unaware. Easy to estimate was the advantage of even this perilous route over things that scattered on the water and prevented a landing in strength. Easy to see was the need to kill Ida before she carried home this knowledge.
Roddie took the hammer from his waist.
"Don't! Oh, don't!" Ida screamed. She burst into tears and covered her face with scratched and bloodied hands.
Surprised, Roddie withheld the blow. He had wept, as a child, and, weeping, had for the first time learned he differed from his friends. Ida's tears disturbed him, bringing unhappy memories.
"Why should you cry?" he asked comfortingly. "You know your people will come back to avenge you and will destroy my friends."
"But—but my people are your people, too," Ida wailed. "It's so senseless, now, after all our struggle to escape. Don't you see? Your friends are only machines, built by our ancestors. We are Men—and the city is ours, not theirs!"
"It can't be," Roddie objected. "The city surely belongs to those who are superior, and my friends are superior to your people, even to me. Each of us has a purpose, though, while you Invaders seem to be aimless. Each of us helps preserve the city; you only try to rob and end it by destroying it. My people must be the true Men, because they're so much more rational than yours.... And it isn't rational to let you escape."
Ida had turned up her tear-streaked face to stare at him.
"Rational! What's rational about murdering a defenseless girl in cold blood? Don't you realize we're the same sort of being, we two? Don't—don't you remember how we've been with each other all day?"
She paused. Roddie noticed that her eyes were dark and frightened, yet somehow soft, over scarlet cheeks. He had to look away. But he said nothing.
"Never mind!" Ida said viciously. "You can't make me beg. Go ahead and kill—see if it proves you're superior. My people will take over the city regardless of you and me, and regardless of your jumping-jack friends, too! Men can accomplish anything!"
Scornfully she turned and looked toward the western twilight. It was Roddie's turn to stand and stare.
"Purpose!" Ida flung at him over her shoulder. "Logic! Women hear so much of that from men! You're a man, all right! Men always call it logic when they want to destroy! Loyalty to your own sort, kindness, affection—all emotional, aren't they? Not a bit logical. Emotion is for creating, and it's so much more logical to destroy, isn't it?"
She whirled back toward him, advancing as if she wanted to sink her teeth into his throat. "Go ahead. Get it over with—if you have the courage."
It was hard for Roddie to look away from that wrath-crimsoned face, but it was even harder to keep staring into the blaze of her eyes. He compromised by gazing out an opening at the gathering dusk. He thought for a long time before he decided to tuck his hammer away.
"It isn't reasonable to kill you now," he said. "Too dark. You can't possibly get down that half-ruined manway tonight, so let's see how I feel in the morning."
Ida began to weep again, and Roddie found it necessary to comfort her.
And by morning he knew he was a Man.
Question:
What is the relationship between Roddie and Ida?
Answer:
|
[
"Although Roddie has been preparing his entire life for defense against something, someone, he never knows who his enemy is. Ida - by nature of being Man - is his enemy, as Roddie believes him to be an android. When they first meet in the darkness, Roddie is afraid that Ida may realize what he is. However, they have no trouble once they see each other and spend the entire day together. Roddie proudly takes the role of Ida’s caretaker, noting that she is scared of the soldiers and not as strong as he is, so he takes her to a supermarket and feeds her. \n\nHowever, when Roddie reveals the talisman that prevented the soldier from attacking, their relationship changes. Ida tries to take Roddie back to her boat where she proclaims he belongs and Roddie insists that he belongs in this android-ridden dystopia. In their chase, they end up atop a tower. Realizing Ida now has the knowledge to bring home to the Invaders on how to enter the city, Roddie feels a sense of duty to kill her. She is the enemy, as he thinks she wishes to harm his city. As Ida cries - something Roddie can do but his friends can’t - he realizes that he too is Man and decides not to kill her. \n",
"Roddie and Ida meet in the manhole, usually Roddie’s hiding place. Roddie learns information about Invaders and the relationship between Invaders and the androids. He also realizes the similarities between him and Ida, compared to his differences from the androids. When they walk towards the bridge, their relationship is the protector and the protected. It is the teacher-student relationship when Roddie learns many new and inexperienced things from Ida throughout the conversation. The hunting-hunted relationship is when Roddie tries to grab and kill Ida, and Ida escapes to the bridge. They have to support each other on the bridge cable as they can barely maintain their strength through climbing, where their relationship is supportive. But after they arrive and sleep in the tower, Roddie regains his energy and tries to kill Ida again. Their relationship becomes hostile again. When Ida finally convinces Roddie that he is also a man, they become mutually supportive.",
"The relationship between them is tense. Roddie wants to kill Ida because he believes that she is an invader, and he wants to prove to the robots that he can fight alongside them. Ida, on the other hand, wants to help Roddie and take him back to the humans, because it is where he belongs. They both learn a lot from each other, as Roddie had never seen an “invader” and Ida was in San Francisco for the first time, so she thought that only robots lived in the city. The relationship between them is tense and violent as Roddie chases her up the bridge. Then, they seem to become friends, and Roddie ends up not killing her. ",
"At the beginning, Roddie is apprehensive and uncomfortable because he has never seen another human being. Soon, Ida makes him feel better by chatting with him. Roddie, who thinks that he is a peculiar type of robot, realizes that she thinks that he is a human, like her. She makes fun of him and seems to be comfortable with Roddie. When he shows her his watch, she becomes tense, and Roddie realizes that she knows who he is. She tries to take the young man with her to other people, but he attacks her instead. Both stubborn, they spend hours climbing the suspension cable and then sleep in the tower, too tired to keep up the altercation. At the end, Ida is crying and explaining to Roddie why he is not a robot. He doesn’t want to accept it, but Ida’s crying expression and an emotional monologue keep him from killing her. He seems to accept his identity the next morning.\n"
] |
51241
|
Bridge Crossing
BY DAVE DRYFOOS
Illustrated by HARRISON
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction May 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
He knew the city was organized for his individual defense, for it had been that way since he was born. But who was his enemy?
In 1849, the mist that sometimes rolled through the Golden Gate was known as fog. In 2149, it had become far more frequent, and was known as smog. By 2349, it was fog again.
But tonight there was smoke mixed with the fog. Roddie could smell it. Somewhere in the forested ruins, fire was burning.
He wasn't worried. The small blaze that smoldered behind him on the cracked concrete floor had consumed everything burnable within blocks; what remained of the gutted concrete office building from which he peered was fire-proof.
But Roddie was himself aflame with anger. As always when Invaders broke in from the north, he'd been left behind with his nurse, Molly, while the soldiers went out to fight.
And nowadays Molly's presence wasn't the comfort it used to be. He felt almost ready to jump out of his skin, the way she rocked and knitted in that grating ruined chair, saying over and over again, "The soldiers don't want little boys. The soldiers don't want little boys. The soldiers don't—"
"I'm not a little boy!" Roddie suddenly shouted. "I'm full-grown and I've never even seen an Invader. Why won't you let me go and fight?"
Fiercely he crossed the bare, gritty floor and shook Molly's shoulder. She rattled under his jarring hand, and abruptly changed the subject.
"A is for Atom, B is for Bomb, C is for Corpse—" she chanted.
Roddie reached into her shapeless dress and pinched. Lately that had helped her over these spells. But this time, though it stopped the kindergarten song, the treatment only started something worse.
"Wuzzums hungry?" Molly cooed, still rocking.
Utterly disgusted, Roddie ripped her head off her neck.
It was a completely futile gesture. The complicated mind that had cared for him and taught him speech and the alphabet hadn't made him a mechanic, and his only tool was a broken-handled screwdriver.
He was still tinkering when the soldiers came in. While they lined up along the wall, he put Molly's head back on her neck.
She gaped coyly at the new arrivals. "Hello, boys," she simpered.
"Looking for a good time?"
Roddie slapped her to silence, reflecting briefly that there were many things he didn't know about Molly. But there was work to be done. Carefully he framed the ritual words she'd taught him: "Soldiers, come to attention and report!"
There were eleven of them, six feet tall, with four limbs and eight extremities. They stood uniformly, the thumbs on each pair of hands touching along the center line of the legs, front feet turned out at an angle of forty-five degrees, rear feet turned inward at thirty degrees.
"Sir," they chorused, "we have met the enemy and he is ours."
He inspected them. All were scratched and dented, but one in particular seemed badly damaged. His left arm was almost severed at the shoulder.
"Come here, fellow," Roddie said. "Let's see if I can fix that."
The soldier took a step forward, lurched suddenly, stopped, and whipped out a bayonet.
"Death to Invaders!" he yelled, and charged crazily.
Molly stepped in front of him.
"You aren't being very nice to my baby," she murmured, and thrust her knitting needles into his eyes.
Roddie jumped behind him, knocked off his helmet, and pressed a soft spot on his conical skull. The soldier collapsed to the floor.
Roddie salvaged and returned Molly's needles. Then he examined the patient, tearing him apart as a boy dismembers an alarm clock.
It was lucky he did. The left arm's pair of hands suddenly writhed off the floor in an effort to choke him. But because the arm was detached at the shoulder and therefore blind, he escaped the clutching onslaught and could goad the reflexing hands into assaulting one another harmlessly.
Meanwhile, the other soldiers left, except for one, apparently another casualty, who stumbled on his way out and fell into the fire. By the time Roddie had hauled him clear, damage was beyond repair. Roddie swore, then decided to try combining parts of this casualty with pieces of the other to make a whole one.
To get more light for the operation, he poked up the fire. Roddie was new at his work, and took it seriously. It alarmed him to watch the soldiers melt away, gradually succumbing to battle damage, shamed him to see the empty ruins burn section by section as the Invaders repeatedly broke through and had to be burned out.
Soon there would be nothing left of the Private Property Keep Out that, according to Molly's bedtime story, the Owners had entrusted to them when driven away by radioactivity. Soon the soldiers themselves would be gone. None would remain to guard the city but a few strayed servants like Molly, and an occasional Civil Defender.
And himself, Roddie reflected, spitting savagely into the fire. He might remain. But how he fitted into the picture, he didn't know. And Molly, who claimed to have found him in the ruins after a fight with Invaders twenty years before, couldn't or wouldn't say.
Well, for as long as possible, Roddie decided, he'd do his duty as the others did theirs—single-mindedly. Eventually the soldiers might accept him as one of themselves; meanwhile, this newly attempted first aid was useful to them.
He gave the fire a final poke and then paused, wondering if, when heated, his screwdriver could make an unfastened end of wire stick on the grayish spot where it seemed to belong.
Stretching prone to blow the embers hot so he could try out his new idea, Roddie got too close to the flames. Instantly the room filled with the stench of singed hair. Roddie drew angrily back, beating out the sparks in his uncut blond mane.
As he stood slapping his head and muttering, a deranged Civil Defense firefighter popped into the doorway and covered him with carbon dioxide foam.
Roddie fled. His life-long friends were not merely wearing out, they were unbearably wearing.
In the street, even before he'd wiped off the foam, he regretted his flight. The fire was back home. And here in the cold of this fog-shrouded canyon, a mere trail between heaped-up walls of rubble, the diaper he wore felt inadequate against the pre-dawn cold. His cherished weapon, a magnetic tack-hammer, was chill beneath the diaper's top, and the broken, radium-dialed wristwatch suspended from a string around his neck hung clammy against his chest. He stood irresolute on numbing bare feet, and considered returning to the more familiar bedlam.
But colder than cold was his shame at being cold. Molly never was, though she knew how to keep him warm, nor were the others. Hunger, thirst, pain and coldness were sensations never experienced by his friends. Like the growth he'd been undergoing till recently, these were things of ignominy, to be hidden as far as possible from inquiring eyes. Cold as it was, he'd have to hide.
Temporarily, the darkness concealed him, though it was not quite complete. From above the fog, the moon played vaguely deceptive light on the splinters of architecture looming toward it. Some distance off, an owl hooted, but here nocturnal rodents felt free to squeak and rustle as they scampered.
The world seemed ghostly. Yet it wasn't dead; it merely lurked. And as an irrepressible yawn reminded Roddie of his absurd need for sleep even in the midst of danger, he concluded for the thousandth time that the One who'd built him must have been an apprentice.
For just such reasons he'd developed the hideout toward which he now walked. It had been the haven of his adolescence, when the discovery of how much he differed from his friends had been a shock, and the shock itself a difference to be hidden.
His hiding place was a manhole, dead center in the dead street. A weathered bronze bar, carefully placed in the cover's slotted rim, was the levering key that opened its door.
Everything was wrong tonight! He couldn't even find the bar. Of course that spoiled things, because the bar was a roller on which to move the heavy cover from below, and a support that held it ajar for ventilation.
But the example of his friends had taught him above all else to carry out every purpose. Molly was a nurse; she had raised him despite all obstacles. The soldiers were guards; they protected the ruins against everything larger than a rat. The firefighter had put even him out when he was aflame....
Anyhow, the manhole cover had been loosened by his frequent handling. He lifted it aside by main strength, then flattened himself to the street, and felt with his feet for the top rung.
Halfway down the iron ladder, something made him pause. He looked, but saw only blackness. He listened, sniffed, found nothing. What could have entered through the iron cover?
He sneered at his own timidity and jumped to the bottom.
It was warm! The dry bottom of the hole had the temperature of body heat, as if a large animal had recently rested there!
Quickly, Roddie drew the hammer from his waist. Then, with weapon ready for an instantaneous blow, he stretched his left hand through the darkness. He touched something warm, softish. Gingerly he felt over that curving surface for identifying features.
While Roddie investigated by touch, his long fingers were suddenly seized and bitten. At the same time, his right shin received a savage kick. And his own retaliatory blow was checked in mid-swing by an unexpected voice.
"Get your filthy hands off me!" it whispered angrily. "Who do you think you are?"
Startled, he dropped his hammer. "I'm Roddie," he said, squatting to fumble for it. "Who do you think you are?"
"I'm Ida, naturally! Just how many girls are there in this raiding party?"
His first Invader—and he had dropped his weapon!
Scrabbling fearfully in the dust for his hammer, Roddie paused suddenly. This girl—whatever that was—seemed to think him one of her own kind. There was a chance, not much, but worth taking, to turn delay to advantage. Maybe he could learn something of value before he killed her. That would make the soldiers accept him!
He stalled, seeking a gambit. "How would I know how many girls there are?"
Half expecting a blow, he got instead an apology. "I'm sorry," the girl said. "I should have known. Never even heard your name before, either. Roddie.... Whose boat did you come in, Roddie?"
Boat? What was a boat? "How would I know?" he repeated, voice tight with fear of discovery.
If she noticed the tension, she didn't show it. Certainly her whisper was friendly enough. "Oh, you're one of the fellows from Bodega, then. They shoved a boy into our boat at the last minute, too. Tough, wasn't it, getting separated in the fog and tide like that? If only we didn't have to use boats.... But, say, how are we going to get away from here?"
"I wouldn't know," Roddie said, closing his fingers on the hammer, and rising. "How did you get in?"
"Followed your footprints. It was sundown and I saw human tracks in the dust and they led me here. Where were you?"
"Scouting around," Roddie said vaguely. "How did you know I was a man when I came back?"
"Because you couldn't see me, silly! You know perfectly well these androids are heat-sensitive and can locate us in the dark!"
Indeed he did know! Many times he'd felt ashamed that Molly could find him whenever she wanted to, even here in the manhole. But perhaps the manhole would help him now to redeem himself....
"I'd like to get a look at you," he said.
The girl laughed self-consciously. "It's getting gray out. You'll see me soon enough."
But she'd see him , Roddie realized. He had to talk fast.
"What'll we do when it's light?" he asked.
"Well, I guess the boats have gone," Ida said. "You could swim the Gate, I guess—you seem tall and strong enough. But I couldn't. You'll think it's crazy, but I've given this some thought, and even looked it over from the other side. I expect to try the Golden Gate Bridge!"
Now he was getting somewhere! The bridge was ruined, impassable. Even her own people had crossed the Strait by other means. But if there were a way over the bridge....
"It's broken," he said. "How in the world can we cross it?"
"Oh, you'll find out, if you take me up there. I—I don't want to be alone, Roddie. Will you go with me? Now?"
Well, she could be made to point out the route before he killed her— if nothing happened when she saw him.
Uneasy, Roddie hefted the hammer in his hand.
A giggle broke the pause. "It's nice of you to wait and let me go first up the ladder," the girl said. "But where the heck is the rusty old thing?"
"I'll go first," said Roddie. He might need the advantage. "The ladder's right behind me."
He climbed with hammer in teeth, and stretched his left hand from street level to grasp and neutralize the girl's right. Then, nervously fingering his weapon, he stared at her in the thin gray dawn.
She was short and lean, except for roundnesses here and there. From her shapeless doeskin dress stretched slender legs that tapered to feet that were bare, tiny, and, like her hands, only two in number.
Roddie was pleased. They were evenly matched as to members, and that would make things easy when the time came.
He looked into her face. It smiled at him, tanned and ruddy, with a full mouth and bright dark eyes that hid under long lashes when he looked too long.
Startling, those wary eyes. Concealing. For a moment he felt a rush of fear, but she gave his hand a squeeze before twisting loose, and burst into sudden laughter.
"Diapers!" she chortled, struggling to keep her voice low. "My big, strong, blond and blue-eyed hero goes into battle wearing diapers, and carrying only a hammer to fight with! You're the most unforgettable character I have ever known!"
He'd passed inspection, then—so far. He expelled his withheld breath, and said, "I think you'll find me a little odd, in some ways."
"Oh, not at all," Ida replied quickly. "Different, yes, but I wouldn't say odd."
When they started down the street, she was nervous despite Roddie's assertion that he knew where the soldiers were posted. He wondered if she felt some of the doubt he'd tried to conceal, shared his visions of what the soldiers might do if they found him brazenly strolling with an Invader. They might not believe he was only questioning a prisoner.
Every day, his friends were becoming more unpredictable.
For that very reason, because he didn't know what precautions would do any good, he took a chance and walked openly to the bridge by the most direct route. In time this apparent assurance stilled Ida's fears, and she began to talk.
Many of the things she said were beyond his experience and meaningless to him, but he did note with interest how effective the soldiers had been.
"It's awful," Ida said. "So few young men are left, so many casualties....
"But why do you—we—keep up the fight?" Roddie asked. "I mean, the soldiers will never leave the city; their purpose is to guard it and they can't leave, so they won't attack. Let them alone, and there'll be plenty of young men."
"Well!" said Ida, sharply. "You need indoctrination! Didn't they ever tell you that the city is our home, even if the stupid androids do keep us out? Don't you know how dependent we are on these raids for all our tools and things?"
She sounded suspicious. Roddie shot her a furtive, startled glance. But she wasn't standing off to fight him. On the contrary, she was too close for both comfort and combat. She bumped him hip and shoulder every few steps, and if he edged away, she followed.
He went on with his questioning. "Why are you here? I mean, sure, the others are after tools and things, but what's your purpose?"
Ida shrugged. "I'll admit no girl has ever done it before," she said,
"but I thought I could help with the wounded. That's why I have no weapon."
She hesitated, glanced covertly up at him, and went on with a rush of words. "It's the lack of men, I guess. All the girls are kind of bored and hopeless, so I got this bright idea and stowed away on one of the boats when it was dark and the fog had settled down. Do you think I was being silly?"
"No, but you do seem a little purposeless."
In silence they trudged through a vast area of charred wood and concrete foundations on the northern end of the city. Thick fog over the water hid Alcatraz, but in-shore visibility was better, and they could see the beginning of the bridge approach.
A stone rattled nearby. There was a clink of metal. Ida gasped, and clung to Roddie's arm.
"Behind me!" he whispered urgently. "Get behind me and hold on!"
He felt Ida's arms encircling his waist, her chin digging into his back below the left shoulder. Facing them, a hundred feet away, stood a soldier. He looked contemptuous, hostile.
"It's all right," Roddie said, his voice breaking.
There was a long, sullen, heart-stopping stare. Then the soldier turned and walked away.
Ida's grip loosened, and he could feel her sag behind him. Roddie turned and held her. With eyes closed, she pressed cold blue lips to his. He grimaced and turned away his head.
Ida's response was quick. "Forgive me," she breathed, and slipped from his arms, but she held herself erect. "I was so scared. And then we've had no sleep, no food or water."
Roddie was familiar with these signs of weakness, proud of appearing to deny his own humiliating needs.
"I guess you're not as strong as me," he said smugly. "I'll take care of you. Of course we can't sleep now, but I'll get food and water."
Leaving her to follow, he turned left to the ruins of a supermarket he had previously visited, demonstrating his superior strength by setting a pace Ida couldn't match. By the time she caught up with him, he had grubbed out a few cans of the special size that Molly always chose. Picking two that were neither dented, swollen, nor rusted, he smashed an end of each with his hammer, and gave Ida her choice of strained spinach or squash.
"Baby food!" she muttered. "Maybe it's just what we need, but to eat baby food with a man wearing a diaper.... Tell me, Roddie, how did you happen to know where to find it?"
"Well, this is the northern end of the city," he answered, shrugging.
"I've been here before."
"Why did the soldier let us go?"
"This watch," he said, touching the radium dial. "It's a talisman."
But Ida's eyes had widened, and the color was gone from her face. She was silent, too, except when asking him to fill his fast-emptied can with rain-water. She didn't finish her own portion, but lay back in the rubble with feet higher than her head, obviously trying to renew her strength.
And when they resumed their walk, her sullen, fear-clouded face showed plainly that he'd given himself away.
But to kill her now, before learning how she planned to cross the supposedly impassable bridge, seemed as purposeless and impulsive as Ida herself. Roddie didn't think, in any case, that her death would satisfy the soldiers. With new and useful information to offer, he might join them as an equal at last. But if his dalliance with this enemy seemed pointless, not even Molly's knitting needles could protect him.
He was sure the soldiers must be tracking the mysterious emanations of his watch dial, and had trouble to keep from glancing over his shoulder at every step. But arrival at the bridge approach ended the need for this self-restraint. Here, difficult going demanded full attention.
He'd never gone as far as the bridge before, not having wanted to look as if he might be leaving the city. The approach was a jungle of concrete with an underbrush of reinforcing-steel that reached for the unwary with rusted spines. Frequently they had to balance on cracked girders, and inch over roadless spots high off the ground.
Here Ida took the lead. When they got to where three approach roads made a clover-leaf, she led him down a side road and into a forest.
Roddie stopped, and seized her arm.
"What are you trying to do?" he demanded.
"I'm taking you with me," Ida said firmly. "Taking you where you belong!"
"No!" he blurted, drawing his hammer. "I can't go, nor let you go. I belong here!"
Ida gasped, twisted loose, and ran. Roddie ran after her.
She wasn't so easily caught. Like a frightened doe, she dashed in and out among the trees, leaped to the bridge's underpinnings where they thrust rustedly from a cliff, and scrambled up the ramp.
Roddie sighed and slowed down. The pavement ended just beyond the cable anchors. From there to the south tower, only an occasional dangling support wire showed where the actual bridge had been suspended. Ida was trapped.
He could take his time. Let the soldiers come up, as they undoubtedly would, to finish the job....
But Ida didn't seem to realize she was trapped. Without hesitation she dashed up the main left-hand suspension cable and ran along its curved steel surface.
For a moment, Roddie thought of letting her go, letting her run up the ever-steepening catenary until—because there were no guard-ropes or handgrips—she simply fell. That would solve his problem.
Except it wouldn't be his solution. Her death wouldn't prove him to his friends.
He set out quickly, before Ida was lost to sight in the thick fog that billowed in straight from the ocean. At first he ran erect along the top of the yard-wide cylinder of twisted metal, but soon the curve steepened. He had to go on all fours, clinging palm and sole.
Blood was on the cable where she'd passed. More blood stained it when he'd followed.
But because his friends knew neither pain nor fatigue, Roddie would admit none either. Nor would he give in to the fear that dizzied him at every downward look. He scrambled on like an automaton, watching only his holds, till he rammed Ida's rear with his head.
She had stopped, trembling and gasping. Roddie clung just below her and looked dazedly around. There was nothing in sight but fog, pierced by the rapier of rusted wire supporting them. Neither end of it was in sight.
Upward lay success, if death were not nearer on the cable. No soldier had ever come even this far, for soldiers, as he'd told Ida, never left the city, were not built to do so. But he was here; with luck, he could capitalize on the differences that had plagued him so long.
"Go on!" he ordered hoarsely. "Move!"
There was neither answer nor result. He broke off an end of loosened wire and jabbed her rear. Ida gasped and crawled on.
Up and up they went, chilled, wet, bleeding, pain-racked, exhausted. Never had Roddie felt so thoroughly the defects of his peculiar non-mechanical construction.
Without realizing it, he acquired a new purpose, a duty as compelling as that of any soldier or fire-watcher. He had to keep that trembling body of his alive, mount to the tall rust tower overhead.
He climbed and he made Ida climb, till, at nightmare's end, the fog thinned and they came into clear, windswept air and clawed up the last hundred feet to sanctuary.
They were completely spent. Without word or thought they crept within the tower, huddled together for warmth on its dank steel deck, and slept for several hours.
Roddie awoke as Ida finished struggling free of his unconscious grip. Limping, he joined her painful walk around the tower. From its openings they looked out on a strange and isolated world.
To the north, where Ida seemed drawn as though by instinct, Mount Tamalpais reared its brushy head, a looming island above a billowy white sea of fog. To the south were the Twin Peaks, a pair of buttons on a cotton sheet. Eastward lay Mount Diablo, bald and brooding, tallest of the peaks and most forbidding.
But westward over the ocean lay the land of gold—of all the kinds of gold there are, from brightest yellow to deepest orange. Only a small portion of the setting sun glared above the fog-bank; the rest seemed to have been broken off and smeared around by a child in love with its color.
Fascinated, Roddie stared for minutes, but turned when Ida showed no interest. She was intent on the tower itself. Following her eyes, Roddie saw his duty made suddenly clear.
Easy to make out even in the fading light was the route by which Invaders could cross to the foot of this tower on the remaining ruins of the road, climb to where he now stood, and then descend the cable over the bridge's gap and catch the city unaware. Easy to estimate was the advantage of even this perilous route over things that scattered on the water and prevented a landing in strength. Easy to see was the need to kill Ida before she carried home this knowledge.
Roddie took the hammer from his waist.
"Don't! Oh, don't!" Ida screamed. She burst into tears and covered her face with scratched and bloodied hands.
Surprised, Roddie withheld the blow. He had wept, as a child, and, weeping, had for the first time learned he differed from his friends. Ida's tears disturbed him, bringing unhappy memories.
"Why should you cry?" he asked comfortingly. "You know your people will come back to avenge you and will destroy my friends."
"But—but my people are your people, too," Ida wailed. "It's so senseless, now, after all our struggle to escape. Don't you see? Your friends are only machines, built by our ancestors. We are Men—and the city is ours, not theirs!"
"It can't be," Roddie objected. "The city surely belongs to those who are superior, and my friends are superior to your people, even to me. Each of us has a purpose, though, while you Invaders seem to be aimless. Each of us helps preserve the city; you only try to rob and end it by destroying it. My people must be the true Men, because they're so much more rational than yours.... And it isn't rational to let you escape."
Ida had turned up her tear-streaked face to stare at him.
"Rational! What's rational about murdering a defenseless girl in cold blood? Don't you realize we're the same sort of being, we two? Don't—don't you remember how we've been with each other all day?"
She paused. Roddie noticed that her eyes were dark and frightened, yet somehow soft, over scarlet cheeks. He had to look away. But he said nothing.
"Never mind!" Ida said viciously. "You can't make me beg. Go ahead and kill—see if it proves you're superior. My people will take over the city regardless of you and me, and regardless of your jumping-jack friends, too! Men can accomplish anything!"
Scornfully she turned and looked toward the western twilight. It was Roddie's turn to stand and stare.
"Purpose!" Ida flung at him over her shoulder. "Logic! Women hear so much of that from men! You're a man, all right! Men always call it logic when they want to destroy! Loyalty to your own sort, kindness, affection—all emotional, aren't they? Not a bit logical. Emotion is for creating, and it's so much more logical to destroy, isn't it?"
She whirled back toward him, advancing as if she wanted to sink her teeth into his throat. "Go ahead. Get it over with—if you have the courage."
It was hard for Roddie to look away from that wrath-crimsoned face, but it was even harder to keep staring into the blaze of her eyes. He compromised by gazing out an opening at the gathering dusk. He thought for a long time before he decided to tuck his hammer away.
"It isn't reasonable to kill you now," he said. "Too dark. You can't possibly get down that half-ruined manway tonight, so let's see how I feel in the morning."
Ida began to weep again, and Roddie found it necessary to comfort her.
And by morning he knew he was a Man.
|
Who is Mrs. Brundage, and what happens to her?
|
After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about Dream Town by Henry Slesar.
Relevant chunks:
Henry Slesar, young New York advertising executive and by now no
longer a new-comer to either this magazine or to this field, describes
a strange little town that you, yourself, may blunder into one of these
evenings. But, if you do, beware—beware of the Knights!
dream town
by ... HENRY SLESAR
The woman in the doorway looked so harmless. Who
was to tell she had some rather startling interests?
The
woman in the
doorway looked like Mom in
the homier political cartoons.
She was plump, apple-cheeked,
white-haired. She
wore a fussy, old-fashioned
nightgown, and was busily
clutching a worn house-robe
around her expansive middle.
She blinked at Sol Becker's
rain-flattened hair and hang-dog
expression, and said:
"What is it? What do you
want?"
"I'm sorry—" Sol's voice
was pained. "The man in the
diner said you might put me
up. I had my car stolen: a
hitchhiker; going to Salinas ..."
He was puffing.
"Hitchhiker? I don't understand."
She clucked at the
sight of the pool of water he
was creating in her foyer.
"Well, come inside, for heaven's
sake. You're soaking!"
"Thanks," Sol said gratefully.
With the door firmly shut
behind him, the warm interior
of the little house covered
him like a blanket. He
shivered, and let the warmth
seep over him. "I'm terribly
sorry. I know how late it is."
He looked at his watch, but
the face was too misty to
make out the hour.
"Must be nearly three," the
woman sniffed. "You couldn't
have come at a worse time. I
was just on my way to
court—"
The words slid by him. "If
I could just stay overnight.
Until the morning. I could
call some friends in San Fernando.
I'm very susceptible to
head colds," he added inanely.
"Well, take those shoes off,
first," the woman grumbled.
"You can undress in the parlor,
if you'll keep off the rug.
You won't mind using the
sofa?"
"No, of course not. I'd be
happy to pay—"
"Oh, tush, nobody's asking
you to pay. This isn't a hotel.
You mind if I go back upstairs?
They're gonna miss
me at the palace."
"No, of course not," Sol
said. He followed her into
the darkened parlor, and
watched as she turned the
screw on a hurricane-style
lamp, shedding a yellow pool
of light over half a flowery
sofa and a doily-covered wing
chair. "You go on up. I'll be
perfectly fine."
"Guess you can use a towel,
though. I'll get you one,
then I'm going up. We wake
pretty early in this house.
Breakfast's at seven; you'll
have to be up if you want
any."
"I really can't thank you
enough—"
"Tush," the woman said.
She scurried out, and returned
a moment later with a
thick bath towel. "Sorry I
can't give you any bedding.
But you'll find it nice and
warm in here." She squinted
at the dim face of a ship's-wheel
clock on the mantle,
and made a noise with her
tongue. "Three-thirty!" she
exclaimed. "I'll miss the
whole execution ..."
"The what?"
"Goodnight, young man,"
Mom said firmly.
She padded off, leaving Sol
holding the towel. He patted
his face, and then scrubbed
the wet tangle of brown hair.
Carefully, he stepped off the
carpet and onto the stone
floor in front of the fireplace.
He removed his
drenched coat and suit jacket,
and squeezed water out
over the ashes.
He stripped down to his
underwear, wondering about
next morning's possible embarrassment,
and decided to
use the damp bath towel as a
blanket. The sofa was downy
and comfortable. He curled
up under the towel, shivered
once, and closed his eyes.
He
was tired and very
sleepy, and his customary
nightly review was limited to
a few detached thoughts
about the wedding he was
supposed to attend in Salinas
that weekend ... the hoodlum
who had responded to his
good-nature by dumping him
out of his own car ... the slogging
walk to the village ...
the little round woman who
was hurrying off, like the
White Rabbit, to some mysterious
appointment on the
upper floor ...
Then he went to sleep.
A voice awoke him, shrill
and questioning.
"Are you nakkid ?"
His eyes flew open, and he
pulled the towel protectively
around his body and glared
at the little girl with the rust-red
pigtails.
"Huh, mister?" she said,
pushing a finger against her
freckled nose. "Are you?"
"No," he said angrily. "I'm
not naked. Will you please
go away?"
"Sally!" It was Mom, appearing
in the doorway of the
parlor. "You leave the gentleman
alone." She went off
again.
"Yes," Sol said. "Please let
me get dressed. If you don't
mind." The girl didn't move.
"What time is it?"
"Dunno," Sally shrugged.
"I like poached eggs. They're
my favorite eggs in the whole
world."
"That's good," Sol said desperately.
"Now why don't you
be a good girl and eat your
poached eggs. In the kitchen."
"Ain't ready yet. You going
to stay for breakfast?"
"I'm not going to do anything
until you get out of
here."
She put the end of a pigtail
in her mouth and sat down on
the chair opposite. "I went to
the palace last night. They
had an exelution."
"Please," Sol groaned. "Be
a good girl, Sally. If you let
me get dressed, I'll show you
how to take your thumb off."
"Oh, that's an old trick. Did
you ever see an exelution?"
"No. Did you ever see a little
girl with her hide
tanned?"
"Huh?"
" Sally! " Mom again, sterner.
"You get out of there, or
you-know-what ..."
"Okay," the girl said
blithely. "I'm goin' to the palace
again. If I brush my
teeth. Aren't you ever gonna
get up?" She skipped out of
the room, and Sol hastily sat
up and reached for his
trousers.
When he had dressed, the
clothes still damp and unpleasant
against his skin, he
went out of the parlor and
found the kitchen. Mom was
busy at the stove. He said:
"Good morning."
"Breakfast in ten minutes,"
she said cheerfully. "You like
poached eggs?"
"Sure. Do you have a telephone?"
"In the hallway. Party line,
so you may have to wait."
He tried for fifteen minutes
to get through, but there
was a woman on the line who
was terribly upset about a
cotton dress she had ordered
from Sears, and was telling
the world about it.
Finally, he got his call
through to Salinas, and a
sleepy-voiced Fred, his old
Army buddy, listened somewhat
indifferently to his tale
of woe. "I might miss the
wedding," Sol said unhappily.
"I'm awfully sorry." Fred
didn't seem to be half as sorry
as he was. When Sol hung
up, he was feeling more despondent
than ever.
A man, tall and rangy, with
a bobbing Adam's apple and
a lined face, came into the
hallway. "Hullo?" he said inquiringly.
"You the fella had
the car stolen?"
"Yes."
The man scratched his ear.
"Take you over to Sheriff
Coogan after breakfast. He'll
let the Stateys know about it.
My name's Dawes."
Sol accepted a careful
handshake.
"Don't get many people
comin' into town," Dawes
said, looking at him curiously.
"Ain't seen a stranger in
years. But you look like the
rest of us." He chuckled.
Mom called out: "Breakfast!"
At
the table, Dawes
asked his destination.
"Wedding in Salinas," he
explained. "Old Army friend
of mine. I picked this hitchhiker
up about two miles from
here. He seemed okay."
"Never can tell," Dawes
said placidly, munching egg.
"Hey, Ma. That why you
were so late comin' to court
last night?"
"That's right, Pa." She
poured the blackest coffee
Sol had ever seen. "Didn't
miss much, though."
"What court is that?" Sol
asked politely, his mouth full.
"Umagum," Sally said, a
piece of toast sticking out
from the side of her mouth.
"Don't you know nothin' ?"
" Arma gon," Dawes corrected.
He looked sheepishly at
the stranger. "Don't expect
Mister—" He cocked an eyebrow.
"What's the name?"
"Becker."
"Don't expect Mr. Becker
knows anything about Armagon.
It's just a dream, you
know." He smiled apologetically.
"Dream? You mean this—Armagon
is a place you dream
about?"
"Yep," Dawes said. He lifted
cup to lip. "Great coffee,
Ma." He leaned back with a
contented sigh. "Dream about
it every night. Got so used to
the place, I get all confused
in the daytime."
Mom said: "I get muddle-headed
too, sometimes."
"You mean—" Sol put his
napkin in his lap. "You mean you dream about the same
place?"
"Sure," Sally piped. "We
all go there at night. I'm goin'
to the palace again, too."
"If you brush your teeth,"
Mom said primly.
"If I brush my teeth. Boy,
you shoulda seen the exelution!"
"Execution," her father
said.
"Oh, my goodness!" Mom
got up hastily. "That reminds
me. I gotta call poor Mrs.
Brundage. It's the least I
could do."
"Good idea," Dawes nodded.
"And I'll have to round
up some folks and get old
Brundage out of there."
Sol was staring. He opened
his mouth, but couldn't think
of the right question to ask.
Then he blurted out: "What
execution?"
"None of your business,"
the man said coldly. "You eat
up, young man. If you want
me to get Sheriff Coogan
lookin' for your car."
The rest of the meal went
silently, except for Sally's insistence
upon singing her
school song between mouthfuls.
When Dawes was
through, he pushed back his
plate and ordered Sol to get
ready.
Sol grabbed his topcoat and
followed the man out the
door.
"Have to stop someplace
first," Dawes said. "But we'll
be pickin' up the Sheriff on
the way. Okay with you?"
"Fine," Sol said uneasily.
The rain had stopped, but
the heavy clouds seemed reluctant
to leave the skies over
the small town. There was a
skittish breeze blowing, and
Sol Becker tightened the collar
of his coat around his
neck as he tried to keep up
with the fast-stepping Dawes.
They
crossed the
street diagonally, and entered
a two-story wooden building.
Dawes took the stairs at a
brisk pace, and pushed open
the door on the second floor.
A fat man looked up from
behind a desk.
"Hi, Charlie. Thought I'd
see if you wanted to help
move Brundage."
The man batted his eyes.
"Oh, Brundage!" he said.
"You know, I clean forgot
about him?" He laughed.
"Imagine me forgetting
that?"
"Yeah." Dawes wasn't
amused. "And you Prince Regent."
"Aw, Willie—"
"Well, come on. Stir that
fat carcass. Gotta pick up
Sheriff Coogan, too. This
here gentleman has to see him
about somethin' else."
The man regarded Sol suspiciously.
"Never seen you
before. Night or day. Stranger?"
"Come on !" Dawes said.
The fat man grunted and
hoisted himself out of the
swivel chair. He followed
lamely behind the two men
as they went out into the
street again.
A woman, with an empty
market basket, nodded casually
to them. "Mornin', folks.
Enjoyed it last night.
Thought you made a right
nice speech, Mr. Dawes."
"Thanks," Dawes answered
gruffly, but obviously flattered.
"We were just goin'
over to Brundage's to pick up
the body. Ma's gonna pay a
call on Mrs. Brundage around
ten o'clock. You care to visit?"
"Why, I think that's very
nice," the woman said. "I'll
be sure and do that." She
smiled at the fat man. "Mornin',
Prince."
Sol's head was spinning. As
they left the woman and continued
their determined
march down the quiet street,
he tried to find answers.
"Look, Mr. Dawes." He was
panting; the pace was fast.
"Does she dream about this—Armagon,
too? That woman
back there?"
"Yep."
Charlie chuckled. "He's a
stranger, all right."
"And you, Mr.—" Sol
turned to the fat man. "You
also know about this palace
and everything?"
"I told you," Dawes said
testily. "Charlie here's Prince
Regent. But don't let the fancy
title fool you. He got no
more power than any Knight
of the Realm. He's just too
dern fat to do much more'n
sit on a throne and eat grapes.
That right, Charlie?"
The fat man giggled.
"Here's the Sheriff," Dawes
said.
The Sheriff, a sleepy-eyed
citizen with a long, sad face,
was rocking on a porch as
they approached his house,
trying to puff a half-lit pipe.
He lifted one hand wearily
when he saw them.
"Hi, Cookie," Dawes
grinned. "Thought you, me,
and Charlie would get Brundage's
body outa the house.
This here's Mr. Becker; he
got another problem. Mr.
Becker, meet Cookie Coogan."
The Sheriff joined the procession,
pausing only once to
inquire into Sol's predicament.
He described the hitchhiker
incident, but Coogan
listened stoically. He murmured
something about the
Troopers, and shuffled alongside
the puffing fat man.
Sol soon realized that their
destination was a barber shop.
Dawes cupped his hands
over the plate glass and
peered inside. Gold letters on
the glass advertised: HAIRCUT
SHAVE & MASSAGE
PARLOR. He reported: "Nobody
in the shop. Must be
upstairs."
The
fat man rang the
bell. It was a while before an
answer came.
It was a reedy woman in a
housecoat, her hair in curlers,
her eyes red and swollen.
"Now, now," Dawes said
gently. "Don't you take on
like that, Mrs. Brundage. You
heard the charges. It hadda
be this way."
"My poor Vincent," she
sobbed.
"Better let us up," the
Sheriff said kindly. "No use
just lettin' him lay there,
Mrs. Brundage."
"He didn't mean no harm,"
the woman snuffled. "He was
just purely ornery, Vincent
was. Just plain mean stubborn."
"The law's the law," the
fat man sighed.
Sol couldn't hold himself
in.
"What law? Who's dead?
How did it happen?"
Dawes looked at him disgustedly.
"Now is it any of your business? I mean, is it?"
"I don't know," Sol said
miserably.
"You better stay out of
this," the Sheriff warned.
"This is a local matter, young
man. You better stay in the
shop while we go up."
They filed past him and the
crying Mrs. Brundage.
When they were out of
sight, Sol pleaded with her.
"What happened? How did
your husband die?"
"Please ..."
"You must tell me! Was it
something to do with Armagon?
Do you dream about the
place, too?"
She was shocked at the
question. "Of course!"
"And your husband? Did
he have the same dream?"
Fresh tears resulted. "Can't
you leave me alone?" She
turned her back. "I got things
to do. You can make yourself
comfortable—" She indicated
the barber chairs, and left
through the back door.
Sol looked after her, and
then ambled over to the first
chair and slipped into the
high seat. His reflection in
the mirror, strangely gray in
the dim light, made him
groan. His clothes were a
mess, and he needed a shave.
If only Brundage had been
alive ...
He leaped out of the chair
as voices sounded behind the
door. Dawes was kicking it
open with his foot, his arms
laden with two rather large
feet, still encased in bedroom
slippers. Charlie was at the
other end of the burden,
which appeared to be a middle-aged
man in pajamas. The
Sheriff followed the trio up
with a sad, undertaker expression.
Behind him came Mrs.
Brundage, properly weeping.
"We'll take him to the funeral
parlor," Dawes said,
breathing hard. "Weighs a
ton, don't he?"
"What killed him?" Sol
said.
"Heart attack."
The fat man chuckled.
The tableau was grisly. Sol
looked away, towards the
comfortingly mundane atmosphere
of the barber shop. But
even the sight of the thick-padded
chairs, the shaving
mugs on the wall, the neat
rows of cutting instruments,
seemed grotesque and morbid.
"Listen," Sol said, as they
went through the doorway.
"About my car—"
The Sheriff turned and regarded
him lugubriously.
"Your car ? Young man, ain't
you got no respect ?"
Sol swallowed hard and fell
silent. He went outside with
them, the woman slamming
the barber-shop door behind
him. He waited in front of
the building while the men
toted away the corpse to some
new destination.
He
took a walk.
The town was just coming
to life. People were strolling
out of their houses, commenting
on the weather, chuckling
amiably about local affairs.
Kids on bicycles were beginning
to appear, jangling the
little bells and hooting to
each other. A woman, hanging
wash in the back yard,
called out to him, thinking
he was somebody else.
He found a little park, no
more than twenty yards in
circumference, centered
around a weatherbeaten monument
of some unrecognizable
military figure. Three
old men took their places on
the bench that circled the
General, and leaned on their
canes.
Sol was a civil engineer.
But he made like a reporter.
"Pardon me, sir." The old
man, leathery-faced, with a
fine yellow moustache, looked
at him dumbly. "Have you
ever heard of Armagon?"
"You a stranger?"
"Yes."
"Thought so."
Sol repeated the question.
"Course I did. Been goin'
there ever since I was a kid.
Night-times, that is."
"How—I mean, what kind
of place is it?"
"Said you're a stranger?"
"Yes."
"Then 'tain't your business."
That was that.
He left the park, and wandered
into a thriving luncheonette.
He tried questioning
the man behind the counter,
who merely snickered and
said: "You stayin' with the
Dawes, ain't you? Better ask
Willie, then. He knows the
place better than anybody."
He asked about the execution,
and the man stiffened.
"Don't think I can talk
about that. Fella broke one of
the Laws; that's about it.
Don't see where you come
into it."
At eleven o'clock, he returned
to the Dawes residence,
and found Mom in the
kitchen, surrounded by the
warm nostalgic odor of home-baked
bread. She told him
that her husband had left a
message for the stranger, informing
him that the State
Police would be around to get
his story.
He waited in the house,
gloomily turning the pages of
the local newspaper, searching
for references to Armagon.
He found nothing.
At eleven-thirty, a brown-faced
State Trooper came to
call, and Sol told his story.
He was promised nothing,
and told to stay in town until
he was contacted again by
the authorities.
Mom fixed him a light
lunch, the greatest feature of
which was some hot biscuits
she plucked out of the oven.
It made him feel almost normal.
He wandered around the
town some more after lunch,
trying to spark conversation
with the residents.
He learned little.
At
five-thirty, he returned
to the Dawes house, and was
promptly leaped upon by
little Sally.
"Hi! Hi! Hi!" she said,
clutching his right leg and
almost toppling him over.
"We had a party in school. I
had chocolate cake. You goin'
to stay with us?"
"Just another night," Sol
told her, trying to shake the
girl off. "If it's okay with
your folks. They haven't
found my car yet."
"Sally!" Mom was peering
out of the screen door. "You
let Mr. Becker alone and go
wash. Your Pa will be home
soon."
"Oh, pooh," the girl said,
her pigtails swinging. "Do
you got a girlfriend, mister?"
"No." Sol struggled towards
the house with her
dead weight on his leg.
"Would you mind? I can't
walk."
"Would you be my boyfriend?"
"Well, we'll talk about it.
If you let go my leg."
Inside the house, she said:
"We're having pot roast. You
stayin'?"
"Of course Mr. Becker's
stayin'," Mom said. "He's our
guest."
"That's very kind of you,"
Sol said. "I really wish you'd
let me pay something—"
"Don't want to hear another
word about pay."
Mr. Dawes
came home an
hour later, looking tired.
Mom pecked him lightly on
the forehead. He glanced at
the evening paper, and then
spoke to Sol.
"Hear you been asking
questions, Mr. Becker."
Sol nodded, embarrassed.
"Guess I have. I'm awfully
curious about this Armagon
place. Never heard of anything
like it before."
Dawes grunted. "You ain't
a reporter?"
"Oh, no. I'm an engineer. I
was just satisfying my own
curiosity."
"Uh-huh." Dawes looked
reflective. "You wouldn't be
thinkin' about writing us up
or anything. I mean, this is a
pretty private affair."
"Writing it up?" Sol
blinked. "I hadn't thought of
it. But you'll have to admit—it's
sure interesting."
"Yeah," Dawes said narrowly.
"I guess it would be."
"Supper!" Mom called.
After the meal, they spent
a quiet evening at home. Sally
went to bed, screaming her
reluctance, at eight-thirty.
Mom, dozing in the big chair
near the fireplace, padded upstairs
at nine. Then Dawes
yawned widely, stood up, and
said goodnight at quarter-of-ten.
He paused in the doorway
before leaving.
"I'd think about that," he
said. "Writing it up, I mean.
A lot of folks would think
you were just plum crazy."
Sol laughed feebly. "I
guess they would at that."
"Goodnight," Dawes said.
"Goodnight."
He read Sally's copy of Treasure Island for about
half an hour. Then he undressed,
made himself comfortable
on the sofa, snuggled
under the soft blanket
that Mom had provided, and
shut his eyes.
He reviewed the events of
the day before dropping off
to sleep. The troublesome
Sally. The strange dream
world of Armagon. The visit
to the barber shop. The removal
of Brundage's body.
The conversations with the
townspeople. Dawes' suspicious
attitude ...
Then sleep came.
He
was flanked by marble
pillars, thrusting towards
a high-domed ceiling.
The room stretched long
and wide before him, the
walls bedecked in stunning
purple draperies.
He whirled at the sound of
footsteps, echoing stridently
on the stone floor. Someone
was running towards him.
It was Sally, pigtails
streaming out behind her, the
small body wearing a flowing
white toga. She was shrieking,
laughing as she skittered
past him, clutching a gleaming
gold helmet.
He called out to her, but
she was too busy outdistancing
her pursuer. It was Sheriff
Coogan, puffing and huffing,
the metal-and-gold cloth
uniform ludicrous on his
lanky frame.
"Consarn kid!" he wheezed.
"Gimme my hat!"
Mom was following him,
her stout body regal in scarlet
robes. "Sally! You give
Sir Coogan his helmet! You
hear?"
"Mrs. Dawes!" Sol said.
"Why, Mr. Becker! How
nice to see you again! Pa! Pa! Look who's here!"
Willie Dawes appeared. No! Sol thought. This was King Dawes; nothing else
could explain the magnificence
of his attire.
"Yes," Dawes said craftily.
"So I see. Welcome to Armagon,
Mr. Becker."
"Armagon?" Sol gaped.
"Then this is the place
you've been dreaming about?"
"Yep," the King said. "And
now you're in it, too."
"Then I'm only dreaming!"
Charlie, the fat man,
clumsy as ever in his robes of
State, said: "So that's the
snooper, eh?"
"Yep," Dawes chuckled.
"Think you better round up
the Knights."
Sol said: "The Knights?"
"Exelution! Exelution!"
Sally shrieked.
"Now wait a minute—"
Charlie shouted.
Running feet, clanking of
armor. Sol backed up against
a pillar. "Now look here.
You've gone far enough—"
"Not quite," said the King.
The Knights stepped forward.
"Wait!" Sol screamed.
Familiar faces, under shining
helmets, moved towards
him; the tips of sharp-pointed
spears gleaming wickedly.
And Sol Becker wondered—would
he ever awake?
Question:
Who is Mrs. Brundage, and what happens to her?
Answer:
|
[
"Mrs. Brundage is one of the townspeople that live in the town that Sol got robbed in. She and her Husband own a barber shop, in which her husband was the barber. It is revealed that the execution in the Armagon from the first night was in fact Mr. Brundage, and that he was executed for breaking the rules. When Sol and Mr. Dawes picks up the body, she seems very distraught and sad, but she seems to understand the repercussions of her husband’s actions. ",
"Mrs. Brundage is the wife of Vincent Brundage. When Sol arrives in town, her husband has been executed. Mom explains that she has to give Mrs. Brundage a call the next day to comfort her. When they go to the parlor, Mrs. Brundage is in a housecoat with her hair in curlers and has puffy red eyes. She has been grieving all day, even though the others have come to collect Brundage’s body. She tries to plead with them, saying that her husband did nothing wrong. She insists that it was all because he was too stubborn, even though the others say that it had to be this way. Even though she continues to cry as Brundage’s body is taken out, she refuses to say anything about Armagon to Sol.",
"Mrs. Brundage is one of the citizens of the town. She’s Vincent Brundage’s wife and one of the people who visit Armagon at night. She witnesses the trial and the execution of her husband who apparently broke one of the laws. In the morning after his death, she gets visited by Dawes, Charlie, Sheriff Coogan, and Sol who is a stranger to her. The first three come to the barbershop to pick up the body. Becker tries to learn something from her about her husband’s trial or Armagon but she quickly leaves crying. At some point, she also gets a call from Mom",
"Mrs. Brundage is the wife of Vincent Brundage, the owner of a barbershop who seems to break the law in the dream place and get executed. Mrs. Brundage sobs when Mr. Dawes and the other three men come to her home because her husband died of a heart attack. She gets a call from Mrs. Dawes around ten about her husband’s death. She wears a housecoat, has her hair in curlers, and has swollen and red eyes. When Sol keeps asking her questions about her husband’s death and the dream place, she is shocked and cannot bear to take more, so she goes inside the house. When Mr. Dawes and the other two men carry her husband’s corpse out, she is weeping behind them. When they all leave, she slams the door."
] |
29193
|
Henry Slesar, young New York advertising executive and by now no
longer a new-comer to either this magazine or to this field, describes
a strange little town that you, yourself, may blunder into one of these
evenings. But, if you do, beware—beware of the Knights!
dream town
by ... HENRY SLESAR
The woman in the doorway looked so harmless. Who
was to tell she had some rather startling interests?
The
woman in the
doorway looked like Mom in
the homier political cartoons.
She was plump, apple-cheeked,
white-haired. She
wore a fussy, old-fashioned
nightgown, and was busily
clutching a worn house-robe
around her expansive middle.
She blinked at Sol Becker's
rain-flattened hair and hang-dog
expression, and said:
"What is it? What do you
want?"
"I'm sorry—" Sol's voice
was pained. "The man in the
diner said you might put me
up. I had my car stolen: a
hitchhiker; going to Salinas ..."
He was puffing.
"Hitchhiker? I don't understand."
She clucked at the
sight of the pool of water he
was creating in her foyer.
"Well, come inside, for heaven's
sake. You're soaking!"
"Thanks," Sol said gratefully.
With the door firmly shut
behind him, the warm interior
of the little house covered
him like a blanket. He
shivered, and let the warmth
seep over him. "I'm terribly
sorry. I know how late it is."
He looked at his watch, but
the face was too misty to
make out the hour.
"Must be nearly three," the
woman sniffed. "You couldn't
have come at a worse time. I
was just on my way to
court—"
The words slid by him. "If
I could just stay overnight.
Until the morning. I could
call some friends in San Fernando.
I'm very susceptible to
head colds," he added inanely.
"Well, take those shoes off,
first," the woman grumbled.
"You can undress in the parlor,
if you'll keep off the rug.
You won't mind using the
sofa?"
"No, of course not. I'd be
happy to pay—"
"Oh, tush, nobody's asking
you to pay. This isn't a hotel.
You mind if I go back upstairs?
They're gonna miss
me at the palace."
"No, of course not," Sol
said. He followed her into
the darkened parlor, and
watched as she turned the
screw on a hurricane-style
lamp, shedding a yellow pool
of light over half a flowery
sofa and a doily-covered wing
chair. "You go on up. I'll be
perfectly fine."
"Guess you can use a towel,
though. I'll get you one,
then I'm going up. We wake
pretty early in this house.
Breakfast's at seven; you'll
have to be up if you want
any."
"I really can't thank you
enough—"
"Tush," the woman said.
She scurried out, and returned
a moment later with a
thick bath towel. "Sorry I
can't give you any bedding.
But you'll find it nice and
warm in here." She squinted
at the dim face of a ship's-wheel
clock on the mantle,
and made a noise with her
tongue. "Three-thirty!" she
exclaimed. "I'll miss the
whole execution ..."
"The what?"
"Goodnight, young man,"
Mom said firmly.
She padded off, leaving Sol
holding the towel. He patted
his face, and then scrubbed
the wet tangle of brown hair.
Carefully, he stepped off the
carpet and onto the stone
floor in front of the fireplace.
He removed his
drenched coat and suit jacket,
and squeezed water out
over the ashes.
He stripped down to his
underwear, wondering about
next morning's possible embarrassment,
and decided to
use the damp bath towel as a
blanket. The sofa was downy
and comfortable. He curled
up under the towel, shivered
once, and closed his eyes.
He
was tired and very
sleepy, and his customary
nightly review was limited to
a few detached thoughts
about the wedding he was
supposed to attend in Salinas
that weekend ... the hoodlum
who had responded to his
good-nature by dumping him
out of his own car ... the slogging
walk to the village ...
the little round woman who
was hurrying off, like the
White Rabbit, to some mysterious
appointment on the
upper floor ...
Then he went to sleep.
A voice awoke him, shrill
and questioning.
"Are you nakkid ?"
His eyes flew open, and he
pulled the towel protectively
around his body and glared
at the little girl with the rust-red
pigtails.
"Huh, mister?" she said,
pushing a finger against her
freckled nose. "Are you?"
"No," he said angrily. "I'm
not naked. Will you please
go away?"
"Sally!" It was Mom, appearing
in the doorway of the
parlor. "You leave the gentleman
alone." She went off
again.
"Yes," Sol said. "Please let
me get dressed. If you don't
mind." The girl didn't move.
"What time is it?"
"Dunno," Sally shrugged.
"I like poached eggs. They're
my favorite eggs in the whole
world."
"That's good," Sol said desperately.
"Now why don't you
be a good girl and eat your
poached eggs. In the kitchen."
"Ain't ready yet. You going
to stay for breakfast?"
"I'm not going to do anything
until you get out of
here."
She put the end of a pigtail
in her mouth and sat down on
the chair opposite. "I went to
the palace last night. They
had an exelution."
"Please," Sol groaned. "Be
a good girl, Sally. If you let
me get dressed, I'll show you
how to take your thumb off."
"Oh, that's an old trick. Did
you ever see an exelution?"
"No. Did you ever see a little
girl with her hide
tanned?"
"Huh?"
" Sally! " Mom again, sterner.
"You get out of there, or
you-know-what ..."
"Okay," the girl said
blithely. "I'm goin' to the palace
again. If I brush my
teeth. Aren't you ever gonna
get up?" She skipped out of
the room, and Sol hastily sat
up and reached for his
trousers.
When he had dressed, the
clothes still damp and unpleasant
against his skin, he
went out of the parlor and
found the kitchen. Mom was
busy at the stove. He said:
"Good morning."
"Breakfast in ten minutes,"
she said cheerfully. "You like
poached eggs?"
"Sure. Do you have a telephone?"
"In the hallway. Party line,
so you may have to wait."
He tried for fifteen minutes
to get through, but there
was a woman on the line who
was terribly upset about a
cotton dress she had ordered
from Sears, and was telling
the world about it.
Finally, he got his call
through to Salinas, and a
sleepy-voiced Fred, his old
Army buddy, listened somewhat
indifferently to his tale
of woe. "I might miss the
wedding," Sol said unhappily.
"I'm awfully sorry." Fred
didn't seem to be half as sorry
as he was. When Sol hung
up, he was feeling more despondent
than ever.
A man, tall and rangy, with
a bobbing Adam's apple and
a lined face, came into the
hallway. "Hullo?" he said inquiringly.
"You the fella had
the car stolen?"
"Yes."
The man scratched his ear.
"Take you over to Sheriff
Coogan after breakfast. He'll
let the Stateys know about it.
My name's Dawes."
Sol accepted a careful
handshake.
"Don't get many people
comin' into town," Dawes
said, looking at him curiously.
"Ain't seen a stranger in
years. But you look like the
rest of us." He chuckled.
Mom called out: "Breakfast!"
At
the table, Dawes
asked his destination.
"Wedding in Salinas," he
explained. "Old Army friend
of mine. I picked this hitchhiker
up about two miles from
here. He seemed okay."
"Never can tell," Dawes
said placidly, munching egg.
"Hey, Ma. That why you
were so late comin' to court
last night?"
"That's right, Pa." She
poured the blackest coffee
Sol had ever seen. "Didn't
miss much, though."
"What court is that?" Sol
asked politely, his mouth full.
"Umagum," Sally said, a
piece of toast sticking out
from the side of her mouth.
"Don't you know nothin' ?"
" Arma gon," Dawes corrected.
He looked sheepishly at
the stranger. "Don't expect
Mister—" He cocked an eyebrow.
"What's the name?"
"Becker."
"Don't expect Mr. Becker
knows anything about Armagon.
It's just a dream, you
know." He smiled apologetically.
"Dream? You mean this—Armagon
is a place you dream
about?"
"Yep," Dawes said. He lifted
cup to lip. "Great coffee,
Ma." He leaned back with a
contented sigh. "Dream about
it every night. Got so used to
the place, I get all confused
in the daytime."
Mom said: "I get muddle-headed
too, sometimes."
"You mean—" Sol put his
napkin in his lap. "You mean you dream about the same
place?"
"Sure," Sally piped. "We
all go there at night. I'm goin'
to the palace again, too."
"If you brush your teeth,"
Mom said primly.
"If I brush my teeth. Boy,
you shoulda seen the exelution!"
"Execution," her father
said.
"Oh, my goodness!" Mom
got up hastily. "That reminds
me. I gotta call poor Mrs.
Brundage. It's the least I
could do."
"Good idea," Dawes nodded.
"And I'll have to round
up some folks and get old
Brundage out of there."
Sol was staring. He opened
his mouth, but couldn't think
of the right question to ask.
Then he blurted out: "What
execution?"
"None of your business,"
the man said coldly. "You eat
up, young man. If you want
me to get Sheriff Coogan
lookin' for your car."
The rest of the meal went
silently, except for Sally's insistence
upon singing her
school song between mouthfuls.
When Dawes was
through, he pushed back his
plate and ordered Sol to get
ready.
Sol grabbed his topcoat and
followed the man out the
door.
"Have to stop someplace
first," Dawes said. "But we'll
be pickin' up the Sheriff on
the way. Okay with you?"
"Fine," Sol said uneasily.
The rain had stopped, but
the heavy clouds seemed reluctant
to leave the skies over
the small town. There was a
skittish breeze blowing, and
Sol Becker tightened the collar
of his coat around his
neck as he tried to keep up
with the fast-stepping Dawes.
They
crossed the
street diagonally, and entered
a two-story wooden building.
Dawes took the stairs at a
brisk pace, and pushed open
the door on the second floor.
A fat man looked up from
behind a desk.
"Hi, Charlie. Thought I'd
see if you wanted to help
move Brundage."
The man batted his eyes.
"Oh, Brundage!" he said.
"You know, I clean forgot
about him?" He laughed.
"Imagine me forgetting
that?"
"Yeah." Dawes wasn't
amused. "And you Prince Regent."
"Aw, Willie—"
"Well, come on. Stir that
fat carcass. Gotta pick up
Sheriff Coogan, too. This
here gentleman has to see him
about somethin' else."
The man regarded Sol suspiciously.
"Never seen you
before. Night or day. Stranger?"
"Come on !" Dawes said.
The fat man grunted and
hoisted himself out of the
swivel chair. He followed
lamely behind the two men
as they went out into the
street again.
A woman, with an empty
market basket, nodded casually
to them. "Mornin', folks.
Enjoyed it last night.
Thought you made a right
nice speech, Mr. Dawes."
"Thanks," Dawes answered
gruffly, but obviously flattered.
"We were just goin'
over to Brundage's to pick up
the body. Ma's gonna pay a
call on Mrs. Brundage around
ten o'clock. You care to visit?"
"Why, I think that's very
nice," the woman said. "I'll
be sure and do that." She
smiled at the fat man. "Mornin',
Prince."
Sol's head was spinning. As
they left the woman and continued
their determined
march down the quiet street,
he tried to find answers.
"Look, Mr. Dawes." He was
panting; the pace was fast.
"Does she dream about this—Armagon,
too? That woman
back there?"
"Yep."
Charlie chuckled. "He's a
stranger, all right."
"And you, Mr.—" Sol
turned to the fat man. "You
also know about this palace
and everything?"
"I told you," Dawes said
testily. "Charlie here's Prince
Regent. But don't let the fancy
title fool you. He got no
more power than any Knight
of the Realm. He's just too
dern fat to do much more'n
sit on a throne and eat grapes.
That right, Charlie?"
The fat man giggled.
"Here's the Sheriff," Dawes
said.
The Sheriff, a sleepy-eyed
citizen with a long, sad face,
was rocking on a porch as
they approached his house,
trying to puff a half-lit pipe.
He lifted one hand wearily
when he saw them.
"Hi, Cookie," Dawes
grinned. "Thought you, me,
and Charlie would get Brundage's
body outa the house.
This here's Mr. Becker; he
got another problem. Mr.
Becker, meet Cookie Coogan."
The Sheriff joined the procession,
pausing only once to
inquire into Sol's predicament.
He described the hitchhiker
incident, but Coogan
listened stoically. He murmured
something about the
Troopers, and shuffled alongside
the puffing fat man.
Sol soon realized that their
destination was a barber shop.
Dawes cupped his hands
over the plate glass and
peered inside. Gold letters on
the glass advertised: HAIRCUT
SHAVE & MASSAGE
PARLOR. He reported: "Nobody
in the shop. Must be
upstairs."
The
fat man rang the
bell. It was a while before an
answer came.
It was a reedy woman in a
housecoat, her hair in curlers,
her eyes red and swollen.
"Now, now," Dawes said
gently. "Don't you take on
like that, Mrs. Brundage. You
heard the charges. It hadda
be this way."
"My poor Vincent," she
sobbed.
"Better let us up," the
Sheriff said kindly. "No use
just lettin' him lay there,
Mrs. Brundage."
"He didn't mean no harm,"
the woman snuffled. "He was
just purely ornery, Vincent
was. Just plain mean stubborn."
"The law's the law," the
fat man sighed.
Sol couldn't hold himself
in.
"What law? Who's dead?
How did it happen?"
Dawes looked at him disgustedly.
"Now is it any of your business? I mean, is it?"
"I don't know," Sol said
miserably.
"You better stay out of
this," the Sheriff warned.
"This is a local matter, young
man. You better stay in the
shop while we go up."
They filed past him and the
crying Mrs. Brundage.
When they were out of
sight, Sol pleaded with her.
"What happened? How did
your husband die?"
"Please ..."
"You must tell me! Was it
something to do with Armagon?
Do you dream about the
place, too?"
She was shocked at the
question. "Of course!"
"And your husband? Did
he have the same dream?"
Fresh tears resulted. "Can't
you leave me alone?" She
turned her back. "I got things
to do. You can make yourself
comfortable—" She indicated
the barber chairs, and left
through the back door.
Sol looked after her, and
then ambled over to the first
chair and slipped into the
high seat. His reflection in
the mirror, strangely gray in
the dim light, made him
groan. His clothes were a
mess, and he needed a shave.
If only Brundage had been
alive ...
He leaped out of the chair
as voices sounded behind the
door. Dawes was kicking it
open with his foot, his arms
laden with two rather large
feet, still encased in bedroom
slippers. Charlie was at the
other end of the burden,
which appeared to be a middle-aged
man in pajamas. The
Sheriff followed the trio up
with a sad, undertaker expression.
Behind him came Mrs.
Brundage, properly weeping.
"We'll take him to the funeral
parlor," Dawes said,
breathing hard. "Weighs a
ton, don't he?"
"What killed him?" Sol
said.
"Heart attack."
The fat man chuckled.
The tableau was grisly. Sol
looked away, towards the
comfortingly mundane atmosphere
of the barber shop. But
even the sight of the thick-padded
chairs, the shaving
mugs on the wall, the neat
rows of cutting instruments,
seemed grotesque and morbid.
"Listen," Sol said, as they
went through the doorway.
"About my car—"
The Sheriff turned and regarded
him lugubriously.
"Your car ? Young man, ain't
you got no respect ?"
Sol swallowed hard and fell
silent. He went outside with
them, the woman slamming
the barber-shop door behind
him. He waited in front of
the building while the men
toted away the corpse to some
new destination.
He
took a walk.
The town was just coming
to life. People were strolling
out of their houses, commenting
on the weather, chuckling
amiably about local affairs.
Kids on bicycles were beginning
to appear, jangling the
little bells and hooting to
each other. A woman, hanging
wash in the back yard,
called out to him, thinking
he was somebody else.
He found a little park, no
more than twenty yards in
circumference, centered
around a weatherbeaten monument
of some unrecognizable
military figure. Three
old men took their places on
the bench that circled the
General, and leaned on their
canes.
Sol was a civil engineer.
But he made like a reporter.
"Pardon me, sir." The old
man, leathery-faced, with a
fine yellow moustache, looked
at him dumbly. "Have you
ever heard of Armagon?"
"You a stranger?"
"Yes."
"Thought so."
Sol repeated the question.
"Course I did. Been goin'
there ever since I was a kid.
Night-times, that is."
"How—I mean, what kind
of place is it?"
"Said you're a stranger?"
"Yes."
"Then 'tain't your business."
That was that.
He left the park, and wandered
into a thriving luncheonette.
He tried questioning
the man behind the counter,
who merely snickered and
said: "You stayin' with the
Dawes, ain't you? Better ask
Willie, then. He knows the
place better than anybody."
He asked about the execution,
and the man stiffened.
"Don't think I can talk
about that. Fella broke one of
the Laws; that's about it.
Don't see where you come
into it."
At eleven o'clock, he returned
to the Dawes residence,
and found Mom in the
kitchen, surrounded by the
warm nostalgic odor of home-baked
bread. She told him
that her husband had left a
message for the stranger, informing
him that the State
Police would be around to get
his story.
He waited in the house,
gloomily turning the pages of
the local newspaper, searching
for references to Armagon.
He found nothing.
At eleven-thirty, a brown-faced
State Trooper came to
call, and Sol told his story.
He was promised nothing,
and told to stay in town until
he was contacted again by
the authorities.
Mom fixed him a light
lunch, the greatest feature of
which was some hot biscuits
she plucked out of the oven.
It made him feel almost normal.
He wandered around the
town some more after lunch,
trying to spark conversation
with the residents.
He learned little.
At
five-thirty, he returned
to the Dawes house, and was
promptly leaped upon by
little Sally.
"Hi! Hi! Hi!" she said,
clutching his right leg and
almost toppling him over.
"We had a party in school. I
had chocolate cake. You goin'
to stay with us?"
"Just another night," Sol
told her, trying to shake the
girl off. "If it's okay with
your folks. They haven't
found my car yet."
"Sally!" Mom was peering
out of the screen door. "You
let Mr. Becker alone and go
wash. Your Pa will be home
soon."
"Oh, pooh," the girl said,
her pigtails swinging. "Do
you got a girlfriend, mister?"
"No." Sol struggled towards
the house with her
dead weight on his leg.
"Would you mind? I can't
walk."
"Would you be my boyfriend?"
"Well, we'll talk about it.
If you let go my leg."
Inside the house, she said:
"We're having pot roast. You
stayin'?"
"Of course Mr. Becker's
stayin'," Mom said. "He's our
guest."
"That's very kind of you,"
Sol said. "I really wish you'd
let me pay something—"
"Don't want to hear another
word about pay."
Mr. Dawes
came home an
hour later, looking tired.
Mom pecked him lightly on
the forehead. He glanced at
the evening paper, and then
spoke to Sol.
"Hear you been asking
questions, Mr. Becker."
Sol nodded, embarrassed.
"Guess I have. I'm awfully
curious about this Armagon
place. Never heard of anything
like it before."
Dawes grunted. "You ain't
a reporter?"
"Oh, no. I'm an engineer. I
was just satisfying my own
curiosity."
"Uh-huh." Dawes looked
reflective. "You wouldn't be
thinkin' about writing us up
or anything. I mean, this is a
pretty private affair."
"Writing it up?" Sol
blinked. "I hadn't thought of
it. But you'll have to admit—it's
sure interesting."
"Yeah," Dawes said narrowly.
"I guess it would be."
"Supper!" Mom called.
After the meal, they spent
a quiet evening at home. Sally
went to bed, screaming her
reluctance, at eight-thirty.
Mom, dozing in the big chair
near the fireplace, padded upstairs
at nine. Then Dawes
yawned widely, stood up, and
said goodnight at quarter-of-ten.
He paused in the doorway
before leaving.
"I'd think about that," he
said. "Writing it up, I mean.
A lot of folks would think
you were just plum crazy."
Sol laughed feebly. "I
guess they would at that."
"Goodnight," Dawes said.
"Goodnight."
He read Sally's copy of Treasure Island for about
half an hour. Then he undressed,
made himself comfortable
on the sofa, snuggled
under the soft blanket
that Mom had provided, and
shut his eyes.
He reviewed the events of
the day before dropping off
to sleep. The troublesome
Sally. The strange dream
world of Armagon. The visit
to the barber shop. The removal
of Brundage's body.
The conversations with the
townspeople. Dawes' suspicious
attitude ...
Then sleep came.
He
was flanked by marble
pillars, thrusting towards
a high-domed ceiling.
The room stretched long
and wide before him, the
walls bedecked in stunning
purple draperies.
He whirled at the sound of
footsteps, echoing stridently
on the stone floor. Someone
was running towards him.
It was Sally, pigtails
streaming out behind her, the
small body wearing a flowing
white toga. She was shrieking,
laughing as she skittered
past him, clutching a gleaming
gold helmet.
He called out to her, but
she was too busy outdistancing
her pursuer. It was Sheriff
Coogan, puffing and huffing,
the metal-and-gold cloth
uniform ludicrous on his
lanky frame.
"Consarn kid!" he wheezed.
"Gimme my hat!"
Mom was following him,
her stout body regal in scarlet
robes. "Sally! You give
Sir Coogan his helmet! You
hear?"
"Mrs. Dawes!" Sol said.
"Why, Mr. Becker! How
nice to see you again! Pa! Pa! Look who's here!"
Willie Dawes appeared. No! Sol thought. This was King Dawes; nothing else
could explain the magnificence
of his attire.
"Yes," Dawes said craftily.
"So I see. Welcome to Armagon,
Mr. Becker."
"Armagon?" Sol gaped.
"Then this is the place
you've been dreaming about?"
"Yep," the King said. "And
now you're in it, too."
"Then I'm only dreaming!"
Charlie, the fat man,
clumsy as ever in his robes of
State, said: "So that's the
snooper, eh?"
"Yep," Dawes chuckled.
"Think you better round up
the Knights."
Sol said: "The Knights?"
"Exelution! Exelution!"
Sally shrieked.
"Now wait a minute—"
Charlie shouted.
Running feet, clanking of
armor. Sol backed up against
a pillar. "Now look here.
You've gone far enough—"
"Not quite," said the King.
The Knights stepped forward.
"Wait!" Sol screamed.
Familiar faces, under shining
helmets, moved towards
him; the tips of sharp-pointed
spears gleaming wickedly.
And Sol Becker wondered—would
he ever awake?
|
What is the plot of the story?
|
After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about I, the Unspeakable by Walter J. Sheldon.
Relevant chunks:
I, the Unspeakable
By WALT SHELDON
Illustrated by LOUIS MARCHETTI
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction April 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
"What's in a name?" might be very dangerous to ask in certain societies, in which sticks and stones are also a big problem!
I fought to be awake. I was dreaming, but I think I must have blushed. I must have blushed in my sleep.
" Do it! " she said. " Please do it! For me! "
It was the voice that always came, low, intense, seductive, the sound of your hand on silk ... and to a citizen of Northem, a conformist, it was shocking. I was a conformist then; I was still one that morning.
I awoke. The glowlight was on, slowly increasing. I was in my living machine in Center Four, where I belonged, and all the familiar things were about me, reality was back, but I was breathing very hard.
I lay on the pneumo a while before getting up. I looked at the chroner: 0703 hours, Day 17, Month IX, New Century Three. My morning nuro-tablets had already popped from the tube, and the timer had begun to boil an egg. The egg was there because the realfood allotment had been increased last month. The balance of trade with Southem had just swung a decimal or two our way.
I rose finally, stepped to the mirror, switched it to positive and looked at myself. New wrinkles—or maybe just a deepening of the old ones. It was beginning to show; the past two years were leaving traces.
I hadn't worried about my appearance when I'd been with the Office of Weapons. There, I'd been able to keep pretty much to myself, doing research on magnetic mechanics as applied to space drive. But other jobs, where you had to be among people, might be different. I needed every possible thing in my favor.
Yes, I still hoped for a job, even after two years. I still meant to keep on plugging, making the rounds.
I'd go out again today.
The timer clicked and my egg was ready. I swallowed the tablets and then took the egg to the table to savor it and make it last.
As I leaned forward to sit, the metal tag dangled from my neck, catching the glowlight. My identity tag.
Everything came back in a rush—
My name. The dream and her voice. And her suggestion.
Would I dare? Would I start out this very morning and take the risk, the terrible risk?
You remember renumbering. Two years ago. You remember how it was then; how everybody looked forward to his new designation, and how everybody made jokes about the way the letters came out, and how all the records were for a while fouled up beyond recognition.
The telecomics kidded renumbering. One went a little too far and they psycho-scanned him and then sent him to Marscol as a dangerous nonconform.
If you were disappointed with your new designation, you didn't complain. You didn't want a sudden visit from the Deacons during the night.
There had to be renumbering. We all understood that. With the population of Northem already past two billion, the old designations were too clumsy. Renumbering was efficient. It contributed to the good of Northem. It helped advance the warless struggle with Southem.
The equator is the boundary. I understand that once there was a political difference and that the two superstates sprawled longitudinally, not latitudinally, over the globe. Now they are pretty much the same. There is the truce, and they are both geared for war. They are both efficient states, as tightly controlled as an experiment with enzymes, as microsurgery, as the temper of a diplomat.
We were renumbered, then, in Northem. You know the system: everybody now has six digits and an additional prefix or suffix of four letters. Stateleader, for instance, has the designation AAAA-111/111. Now, to address somebody by calling off four letters is a little clumsy. We try to pronounce them when they are pronounceable. That is, no one says to Stateleader, "Good morning, A-A-A-A." They say, "Good morning, Aaaa."
Reading the last quote, I notice a curious effect. It says what I feel. Of course I didn't feel that way on that particular morning. I was still conformal; the last thing in my mind was that I would infract and be psycho-scanned.
Four letters then, and in many cases a pronounceable four letter word.
A four letter word.
Yes, you suspect already. You know what a four letter word can be.
Mine was.
It was unspeakable.
The slight weight on my forehead reminded me that I still wore my sleep-learner. I'd been studying administrative cybernetics, hoping to qualify in that field, although it was a poor substitute for a space drive expert. I removed the band and stepped across the room and turned off the oscillator. I went back to my egg and my bitter memories.
I will never forget the first day I received my new four letter combination and reported it to my chief, as required. I was unthinkably embarrassed. He didn't say anything. He just swallowed and choked and became crimson when he saw it. He didn't dare pass it to his secretarial engineer; he went to the administrative circuits and registered it himself.
I can't blame him for easing me out. He was trying to run an efficient organization, after all, and no doubt I upset its efficiency. My work was important—magnetic mechanics was the only way to handle quanta reaction, or the so-called non-energy drive, and was therefore the answer to feasible space travel beyond our present limit of Mars—and there were frequent inspection tours by Big Wheels and Very Important Persons.
Whenever anyone, especially a woman, asked my name, the embarrassment would become a crackling electric field all about us. The best tactic was just not to answer.
The chief called me in one day. He looked haggard.
"Er—old man," he said, not quite able to bring himself to utter my name, "I'm going to have to switch you to another department. How would you like to work on nutrition kits? Very interesting work."
"Nutrition kits? Me? On nutrition kits?"
"Well, I—er—know it sounds unusual, but it justifies. I just had the cybs work it over in the light of present regulations, and it justifies."
Everything had to justify, of course. Every act in the monthly report had to be covered by regulations and cross-regulations. Of course there were so many regulations that if you just took the time to work it out, you could justify damn near anything. I knew what the chief was up to. Just to remove me from my post would have taken a year of applications and hearings and innumerable visits to the capital in Center One. But if I should infract—deliberately infract—it would enable the chief to let me go. The equivalent of resigning.
"I'll infract," I said. "Rather than go on nutrition kits, I'll infract."
He looked vastly relieved. "Uh—fine," he said. "I rather hoped you would."
It took a week or so. Then I was on Non-Productive status and issued an N/P book for my necessities. Very few luxury coupons in the N/P book. I didn't really mind at first. My new living machine was smaller, but basically comfortable, and since I was still a loyal member of the state and a verified conformist, I wouldn't starve.
But I didn't know what I was in for.
I went from bureau to bureau, office to office, department to department—any place where they might use a space drive expert. A pattern began to emerge; the same story everywhere. When I mentioned my specialty they would look delighted. When I handed them my tag and they saw my name, they would go into immediate polite confusion. As soon as they recovered they would say they'd call me if anything turned up....
A few weeks of this and I became a bit dazed.
And then there was the problem of everyday existence. You might say it's lucky to be an N/P for a while. I've heard people say that. Basic needs provided, worlds of leisure time; on the surface it sounds attractive.
But let me give you an example. Say it is monthly realfood day. You go to the store, your mouth already watering in anticipation. You take your place in line and wait for your package. The distributor takes your coupon book and is all ready to reach for your package—and then he sees the fatal letters N/P. Non-Producer. A drone, a drain upon the State. You can see his stare curdle. He scowls at the book again.
"Not sure this is in order. Better go to the end of the line. We'll check it later."
You know what happens before the end of the line reaches the counter. No more packages.
Well, I couldn't get myself off N/P status until I got a post, and with my name I couldn't get a post.
Nor could I change my name. You know what happens when you try to change something already on the records. The very idea of wanting change implies criticism of the State. Unthinkable behavior.
That was why this curious dream voice shocked me so. The thing that it suggested was quite as embarrassing as its non-standard, emotional, provocative tone.
Bear with me; I'm getting to the voice—to her —in a moment.
I want to tell you first about the loneliness, the terrible loneliness. I could hardly join group games at any of the rec centers. I could join no special interest clubs or even State Loyalty chapters. Although I dabbled with theoretical research in my own quarters, I could scarcely submit any findings for publication—not with my name attached. A pseudonym would have been non-regulation and illegal.
But there was the worst thing of all. I could not mate.
Funny, I hadn't thought about mating until it became impossible. I remember the first time, out of sheer idleness, I wandered into a Eugenic Center. I filled out my form very carefully and submitted it for analysis and assignment. The clerk saw my name, and did the usual double-take. He coughed and swallowed and fidgeted.
He said, "Of course you understand that we must submit your application to the woman authorized to spend time in the mating booths with you, and that she has the right to refuse."
"Yes, I understand that."
"M'm," he said, and dismissed me with a nod.
I waited for a call in the next few weeks, still hoping, but I knew no woman would consent to meet a man with my name, let alone enter a mating booth with him.
The urge to reproduce myself became unbearable. I concocted all sorts of wild schemes.
I might infract socially and be classified a nonconform and sent to Marscol. I'd heard rumors that in that desolate land, on that desolate planet, both mingling and mating were rather disgustingly unrestricted. Casual mating would be terribly dangerous, of course, with all the wild irradiated genes from the atomic decade still around, but I felt I'd be willing to risk that. Well, almost....
About then I began to have these dreams. As I've told you, in the dream there was only this woman's seductive voice. The first time I heard it I awoke in a warm sweat and swore something had gone wrong with the sleep-learner. You never hear the actual words with this machine, of course; you simply absorb the concepts unconsciously. Still, it seemed an explanation. I checked thoroughly. Nothing wrong.
The next night I heard the woman's voice again.
" Try it ," she said. " Do it. Start tomorrow to get your name changed. There will be a way. There must be a way. The rules are so mixed up that a clever man can do almost anything. Do it, please—for me. "
She was not only trying to get me to commit nonconformity, but making heretical remarks besides. I awoke that time and half-expected a Deacon to pop out of the tube and turn his electric club upon me.
And I heard the voice nearly every night.
It hammered away.
" What if you do fail? Almost anything would be better than the miserable existence you're leading now! "
One morning I even caught myself wondering just how I'd go about this idea of hers. Wondering what the first step might be.
She seemed to read my thoughts. That night she said, " Consult the cybs in the Govpub office. If you look hard enough and long enough, you'll find a way. "
Now, on this morning of the seventeenth day in the ninth month, I ate my boiled egg slowly and actually toyed with the idea. I thought of being on productive status again. I had almost lost my fanatical craving to be useful to the State, but I did want to be busy—desperately. I didn't want to be despised any more. I didn't want to be lonely. I wanted to reproduce myself.
I made my decision suddenly. Waves of emotion carried me along. I got up, crossed the room to the directory, and pushbuttoned to find the location of the nearest Govpub office.
I didn't know what would happen and almost didn't care.
II
Like most important places, the Govpub Office in Center Four was underground. I could have taken a tunnelcar more quickly, but it seemed pleasanter to travel topside. Or maybe I just wanted to put this off a bit. Think about it. Compose myself.
At the entrance to the Govpub warren there was a big director cyb, a plate with a speaker and switch. The sign on it said to switch it on and get close to the speaker and I did.
The cyb's mechanical voice—they never seem to get the "th" sounds right—said, "This is Branch Four of the Office of Government Publications. Say, 'Publications,' and/or, 'Information desired,' as thoroughly and concisely as possible. Use approved voice and standard phraseology."
Well, simple enough so far. I had always rather prided myself on my knack for approved voice, those flat, emotionless tones that indicate efficiency. And I would never forget how to speak Statese. I said,
"Applicant desires all pertinent information relative assignment, change or amendment of State Serial designations, otherwise generally referred to as nomenclature."
There was a second's delay while the audio patterns tripped relays and brought the memory tubes in.
Then the cyb said, "Proceed to Numbering and Identity section. Consult alphabetical list and diagram on your left for location of same."
"Thanks," I said absent-mindedly.
I started to turn away and the cyb said, "Information on tanks is military information and classified. State authorization for—"
I switched it off.
Numbering and Identity wasn't hard to find. I took the shaft to the proper level and then it was only a walk of a few hundred yards through the glowlit corridors.
N. & I. turned out to be a big room, somewhat circular, very high-ceilinged, with banks of cyb controls covering the upper walls. Narrow passageways, like spokes, led off in several directions. There was an information desk in the center of the room.
I looked that way and my heart went into free fall.
There was a girl at the information desk. An exceptionally attractive girl. She was well within the limits of acceptable standard, and her features were even enough, and her hair a middle blonde—but she had something else. Hard to describe. It was a warmth, a buoyancy, a sense of life and intense animation. It didn't exactly show; it radiated. It seemed to sing out from her clear complexion, from her figure, which even a tunic could not hide, from everything about her.
And if I were to state my business, I would have to tell her my name.
I almost backed out right then. I stopped momentarily. And then common sense took hold and I realized that if I were to go through with this thing, here would be only the first of a long series of embarrassments and discomforts. It had to be done.
I walked up to the desk and the girl turned to face me, and I could have sworn that a faint smile crossed her lips. It was swift, like the shadow of a bird across one of the lawns in one of the great parks topside. Very non-standard. Yet I wasn't offended; if anything, I felt suddenly and disturbingly pleased.
"What information is desired?" she asked. Her voice was standard—or was it?
Again I had the feeling of restrained warmth.
I used colloquial. "I want to get the dope on State Serial designations, how they're assigned and so forth. Especially how they might be changed."
She put a handsteno on the desk top and said, "Name? Address? Post?"
I froze. I stood there and stared at her.
She looked up and said, "Well?"
"I—er—no post at present. N/P status."
Her fingers moved on the steno.
I gave her my address and she recorded that.
Then I paused again.
She said, "And your name?"
I took a deep breath and told her.
I didn't want to look into her eyes. I wanted to look away, but I couldn't find a decent excuse to. I saw her eyes become wide and noticed for the first time that they were a warm gray, almost a mouse color. I felt like laughing at that irrelevant observation, but more than that I felt like turning and running. I felt like climbing and dashing all over the walls like a frustrated cat and yelling at the top of my lungs. I felt like anything but standing there and looking stupid, meeting her stare—
She looked down quickly and recorded my name. It took her a little longer than necessary. In that time she recovered. Somewhat.
"All right," she said finally, "I'll make a search."
She turned to a row of buttons on a console in the center of the desk and began to press them in various combinations. A typer clicked away. She tore off a slip of paper, consulted it, and said, "Information desired is in Bank 29. Please follow me."
Well, following her was a pleasure, anyway. I could watch the movement of her hips and torso as she walked. She was not tall, but long-legged and extremely lithe. Graceful and rhythmic. Very, very feminine, almost beyond standard in that respect. I felt blood throb in my temples and was heartily ashamed of myself.
I would like to be in a mating booth with her, I thought, the full authorized twenty minutes. And I knew I was unconformist and the realization hardly scared me at all.
She led me down one of the long passageways.
A few moments later I said, "Don't you sometimes get—well, pretty lonely working here?" Personal talk at a time like this wasn't approved behavior, but I couldn't help it.
She answered hesitantly, but at least she answered. She said, "Not terribly. The cybs are company enough most of the time."
"You don't get many visitors, then."
"Not right here. N. & I. isn't a very popular section. Most people who come to Govpub spend their time researching in the ancient manuscript room. The—er—social habits of the pre-atomic civilization."
I laughed. I knew what she meant, all right. Pre-atomics and their ideas about free mating always fascinated people. I moved up beside her. "What's your name, by the way?"
"L-A-R-A 339/827."
I pronounced it. "Lara. Lah-rah. That's beautiful. Fits you, too."
She didn't answer; she kept her eyes straight ahead and I saw the faint spot of color on her cheek.
I had a sudden impulse to ask her to meet me after hours at one of the rec centers. If it had been my danger alone, I might have, but I couldn't very well ask her to risk discovery of a haphazard, unauthorized arrangement like that and the possibility of going to the psycho-scan.
We came to a turn in the corridor and something happened; I'm not sure just how it happened. I keep telling myself that my movements were not actually deliberate. I was to the right of her. The turn was to the left. She turned quickly, and I didn't, so that I bumped into her, knocking her off balance. I grabbed her to keep her from falling.
For a moment we stood there, face to face, touching each other lightly. I held her by the arms. I felt the primitive warmth of her breath. Our eyes held together ... proton ... electron ... I felt her tremble.
She broke from my grip suddenly and started off again.
After that she was very business-like.
We came finally to the controls of Bank 29 and she stood before them and began to press button combinations. I watched her work; I watched her move. I had almost forgotten why I'd come here. The lights blinked on and off and the typers clacked softly as the machine sorted out information.
She had a long printed sheet from the roll presently. She frowned at it and turned to me. "You can take this along and study it," she said,
"but I'm afraid what you have in mind may be—a little difficult."
She must have guessed what I had in mind. I said, "I didn't think it would be easy."
"It seems that the only agency authorized to change a State Serial under any circumstances is Opsych."
"Opsych?" You can't keep up with all these departments.
"The Office of Psychological Adjustment. They can change you if you go from a lower to higher E.A.C."
"I don't get it, exactly."
As she spoke I had the idea that there was sympathy in her voice. Just an overtone. "Well," she said, "as you know, the post a person is qualified to hold often depends largely on his Emotional Adjustment Category. Now if he improves and passes from, let us say, Grade 3 to Grade 4, he will probably change his place of work. In order to protect him from any associative maladjustments developed under the old E.A.C, he is permitted a new number."
I groaned. "But I'm already in the highest E.A.C.!"
"It looks very uncertain then."
"Sometimes I think I'd be better off in the mines, or on Marscol—or—in the hell of the pre-atomics!"
She looked amused. "What did you say your E.A.C. was?"
"Oh, all right. Sorry." I controlled myself and grinned. "I guess this whole thing has been just a little too much for me. Maybe my E.A.C.'s even gone down."
"That might be your chance then."
"How do you mean?"
"If you could get to the top man in Opsych and demonstrate that your number has inadvertently changed your E.A.C., he might be able to justify a change."
"By the State, he might!" I punched my palm. "Only how do I get to him?"
"I can find his location on the cyb here. Center One, the capital, for a guess. You'll have to get a travel permit to go there, of course. Just a moment."
She worked at the machine again, trying it on general data. The printed slip came out a moment later and she read it to me. Chief, Opsych, was in the capital all right. It didn't give the exact location of his office, but it did tell how to find the underground bay in Center One containing the Opsych offices.
We headed back through the passageway then and she kept well ahead of me. I couldn't keep my eyes from her walk, from the way she walked with everything below her shoulders. My blood was pounding at my temples again.
I tried to keep the conversation going. "Do you think it'll be hard to get a travel permit?"
"Not impossible. My guess is that you'll be at Travbur all day tomorrow, maybe even the next day. But you ought to be able to swing it if you hold out long enough."
I sighed. "I know. It's that way everywhere in Northem. Our motto ought to be, 'Why make it difficult when with just a little more effort you can make it impossible?'"
She started to laugh, and then, as she emerged from the passageway into the big circular room, she cut her laugh short.
A second later, as I came along, I saw why.
There were two Deacons by the central desk. They were burly and had that hard, pinched-face look and wore the usual black belts. Electric clubs hung from the belts. Spidery looking pistols were at their sides.
I didn't know whether these two had heard my crack or not. I know they kept looking at me.
Lara and I crossed the room silently, she back to her desk, I to the exit door. The Deacons' remote, disapproving eyes swung in azimuth, tracking us.
I walked out and wanted to turn and smile at Lara, and get into my smile something of the hope that someday, somewhere, I'd see her again—but of course I didn't dare.
III
I had the usual difficulties at Travbur the next day. I won't go into them, except to say that I was batted from office to office like a ping pong ball, and that, when I finally got my travel permit, I was made to feel that I had stolen an original Picasso from the State Museum.
I made it in a day. Just. I got my permit thirty seconds before closing time. I was to take the jetcopter to Center One at 0700 hours the following morning.
In my living machine that evening, I was much too excited to work at theoretical research as I usually did after a hard day of tramping around. I bathed, I paced a while, I sat and hummed nervously and got up and paced again. I turned on the telepuppets. There was a drama about the space pilots who fly the nonconformist prisoners to the forests and pulp-acetate plants on Mars. Seemed that the Southem political prisoners who are confined to the southern hemisphere of Mars, wanted to attack and conquer the north. The nonconformists, led by our pilot, came through for the State in the end. Corn is thicker than water. Standard.
There were, however, some good stereofilm shots of the limitless forests of Mars, and I wondered what it would be like to live there, in a green, fresh-smelling land. Pleasant, I supposed, if you could put up with the no doubt revolting morality of a prison planet.
And the drama seemed to point out that there was no more security for the nonconformists out there than for us here on Earth. Maybe somewhere in the universe, I thought, there would be peace for men. Somewhere beyond the solar system, perhaps, someday when we had the means to go there....
Yet instinct told me that wasn't the answer, either. I thought of a verse by an ancient pre-atomic poet named Hoffenstein. (People had unwieldy, random combinations of letters for names in those days.) The poem went:
Wherever I go,
I
go too,
And spoil everything.
That was it. The story of mankind.
I turned the glowlight down and lay on the pneumo after a while, but I didn't sleep for a long, long time.
Then, when I did sleep, when I had been sleeping, I heard the voice again. The low, seductive woman's voice—the startling, shocking voice out of my unconscious.
" You have taken the first step ," she said. " You are on your way to freedom. Don't stop now. Don't sink back into the lifelessness of conformity. Go on ... on and on. Keep struggling, for that is the only answer.... "
I didn't exactly talk back, but in the queer way of the dream, I thought objections. I was in my thirties, at the mid-point of my life, and the whole of that life had been spent under the State. I knew no other way to act. Suppressing what little individuality I might have was, for me, a way of survival. I was chockful of prescribed, stereotyped reactions, and I held onto them even when something within me told me what they were. This wasn't easy, this breaking away, not even this slight departure from the secure, camouflaged norm....
" The woman, Lara, attracts you ," said the voice.
I suppose at that point I twitched or rolled in my sleep. Yes, the voice was right, the woman Lara attracted me. So much that I ached with it.
" Take her. Find a way. When you succeed in changing your name, and know that you can do things, then find a way. There will be a way. "
The idea at once thrilled and frightened me.
I woke writhing and in a sweat again.
It was morning.
I dressed and headed for the jetcopter stage and the ship for Center One.
The ship was comfortable and departed on time, a transport with seats for about twenty passengers. I sat near the tail and moodily busied myself watching the gaunt brown earth far below. Between Centers there was mostly desert, only occasional patches of green. Before the atomic decade, I had heard, nearly all the earth was green and teemed with life ... birds, insects, animals, people, too. It was hard rock and sand now, with a few scrubs hanging on for life. The pre-atomics, who hadn't mastered synthesization, would have a hard time scratching existence from the earth today.
I tried to break the sad mood, and started to look around at some of the other passengers. That was when I first noticed the prisoners in the forward seats. Man and woman, they were, a youngish, rather non-descript couple, thin, very quiet. They were manacled and two Deacons sat across from them. The Deacons' backs were turned to me and I could see the prisoners' faces.
They had curious faces. Their eyes were indescribably sad, and yet their lips seemed to be ready to smile at any moment.
They were holding hands, not seeming to care about this vulgar emotional display.
I had the sudden crazy idea that Lara and I were sitting there, holding hands like that, nonconforming in the highest, and that we were wonderfully happy. Our eyes were sad too, but we were really happy, quietly happy, and that was why our lips stayed upon the brink of a smile.
Question:
What is the plot of the story?
Answer:
|
[
"The narrator is awoken by a female voice in his head. He recounts his time as a conformist citizen of Northem, a futuristic dystopian civilization: one day, he wakes up and regards himself in the mirror, observing signs of aging on his face. He sees the toll of the past two years, since the renumbering. \nThe narrator explains that, as part of ensuring the efficiency of Northem, the designation of each citizen is periodically changed. In the most recent one, everyone was assigned six numerical digits and a prefix or suffix of four letters, which often spelled something pronounceable – for the narrator, the four letters spelled an unspeakably vulgar word. As a result, the narrator is forced to infract from his job and assume non-productive status and begins encountering difficulties in quotidien tasks, such as receiving his realfood package. Furthermore, his designation prevents him from acquiring gainful employment and reassuming productive status, as well as the ability to mate. \nThe narrator then recounts hearing the woman’s voice for the first time. She encourages him to change his name, a difficult thing to do because of its implied criticism of the state. The voice returns in his sleep, nearly every night. Driven by his loneliness and social ostracization, the narrator brings himself to the Govpub Office, a sort of government center, in an attempt to change his designation. \nIn the underground office of his local Govpub Office, the narrator navigates his way to the Numbering and Identity section with help of a cyb, an automated assistant. In the round room that is the Number and Identity department, he observes a remarkably attractive woman at the information desk. Though he is nervous at first, fearing that he will have to share with her his embarrassing name, he dismisses his hesitance and approaches her. He reluctantly shares his name, and asks that she direct him to information concerning state serial designations. \nAs the girl, whose name she reveals is LARA, leads the narrator to information bank 29 where the requested information is stored, they share an inappropriate moment: Lara trips and the narrator grabs her arms. Lara’s demeanor changes, and she now conducts herself in an all-business fashion. At bank 29, Lara explains to the narrator the tasks he must complete in order to change his name, including traveling to the capital. On their way back to the main room, the narrator makes a joke which elicits a laugh from Lara. As she enters the rotunda, she abruptly stops laughing. The narrator, following closely behind, quickly realizes why: two Deacons, officers of the state, are at the central desk. \nOn the night before his departure to the capital, the narrator once again hears the mysterious female voice in his head. She tells him that he is attracted to Lara. On the transport to the capital the narrator sees a young couple holding hands, and pictures himself with Lara in their position.\n",
"The story starts with the main character having a dream that tells him to do something. Later we learn that the voice in his dream is telling him to escape from the life that he is living now. We learn that there had been an atomic disaster that changed the way people live. The main character explains that now everyone has a code as their name. It consists of six digits with a four letter prefix or suffix. And two years ago when he got his name, it was so unusual and embarrassing that no one even wanted to pronounce it. And the name is the reason he lost his job; it is the reason that he cannot get a woman who would agree to mate with him. He was okay at first with this N/P (Non-Producer) status, however, later he realizes that the boredom of being a N/P is too much. He goes looking for jobs. However, it disappointed him again. When the employer hears about his specialty, they look very delight. However, when he hands them his tag with his name on it, they always tell him that they will call if anything turns up. But just like what happened with the Eugenic Center, no one called. The main character further complains about being an N/P, it might sound great at first, but he cannot even get a package.\n\nFinally, with the voice in his dream telling him to “do it” every night, he decided to go to the Govpub Office in Center Four to look for ways that he can change his name. At the N. & I. he gets attracted to the information desk girl, L-A-R-A 339/827. He asked her for information regarding how State Serial, thus the names, are assigned, and how they can be changed. After hearing his name, she is a bit shocked, but then she decides to help him out. Then later she points out that he needs to get a travel permit in order to get to Opsych, The Office of Psychological Adjustment. Apparently, Opsych is the only place that can authorize a change to the State Serial. She tells him to explain how his State Serial has affected his E.A.C, and then there may be a chance that they will change it. Even though he is still doubtful that night, the next day he goes to the jetcopter stage and board the ship for Center One. ",
"The narrator awakes after hearing a feminine voice call out to him in his dreams; it is a voice he is used to hearing, but is nevertheless bothersome. As he wakes up, the chief calls him into work, where he practices magnetic mechanics in hopes of developing space travel beyond Mars. The chief tells the narrator that he would like to switch him to another department; the narrator responds by resigning from him job. The world of Mars, divided into the Northem and Southem, has practices in regulating its civilians. One of these was a renaming of everyone in the Northem, where everyone was given four letters and a series of numbers. The narrator's name is unfortunate and unspeakable, and creates difficulty in his profession, causing him to lose his job. The narrator then becomes unemployed, given the Non-Productive status, and struggles to find another job due to his name. The narrator's name also disrupts other aspects of daily life, including mating and social interaction. The narrator considers changing his name, but decides that it would be seen as criticism to the State. However, one night, the voice calls out to him again in his dreams, urging him to change his name. The next day, the narrator is led to the Govpub office by the voice. There, he is led to the Numbering and Identity section, where he meets Lara, sitting at the information desk. The narrator is immediately attracted to Lara, who tells him that names can be changed if he moves to a higher Emotional Adjustment Category. The narrator, already having achieved the highest EAC, argues that if anything, the difficulties his name has given him have lowered it. Lara advises that he pose this argument to the Office of Psychological Adjustment, where he gets a travel permit the next day. That night, the voice in his dreams encourages him yet again to go on this journey, and the following morning he boards the ship, where he notices two prisoners aboard, holding hands despite their lack of freedom. The narrator then considers what it would be like to be there with Lara, nonconforming but happy.",
"The plot begins with a narrator discussing his morning routine as a citizen of Northem. Northem is located on Earth after the atomic period. He discusses the process of renumbering. The narrator mentions how his designation has been unfortunate since he was assigned it as it is embarrassing and causes people not to want to associate with him. The narrator has an important job but is eventually let go because of his name. As a result of losing his job, he is placed on a Non-Productive status, limiting his ability to require goods and where he can live. An N/P status is not looked upon as good by other citizens of Northem. \n\nThe narrator describes how because of his name and he cannot get a job, mate, or have a social life. Because of the rules of the State, it is unthinkable to change a person’s assigned name. The narrator desperately wants to mate and thinks of ideas on how he might be able to mate. When he sleeps, a seductive voice comes to the narrator in his dreams. The voice encourages the narrator to change his name, even though the idea would be nonconformist according to Northem standards. On the 17th day of the 9th month, the narrator decides to try to change his name and heads to a Govpub office. He is then directed to the Numbering and Identity office where he meets a woman that he finds very attractive. He tells her his name and she reacts negatively, but then recovers. They talk casually, not a common occurrence in Northem. The narrator manages to make Lara, the girl in the office, blush. \n\nLara discusses how she can help the narrator change his name and tells him that he has to go to the Capital and go to the Office of Psychological Adjustment. He needs a travel permit to go to the capital. Over the next day, he is excited about the possibility of his name actually being changed. The voice in his dream continues to encourage him to get his name changed. While on the transportation to the capital, he sees two prisoners who appear to be a couple. They display emotions that he describes as vulgar. Yet, he is curious about their relationship as they sit holding hands. He expresses a desire to be in the same position as the couple, but with him and Lara instead. \n"
] |
51210
|
I, the Unspeakable
By WALT SHELDON
Illustrated by LOUIS MARCHETTI
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction April 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
"What's in a name?" might be very dangerous to ask in certain societies, in which sticks and stones are also a big problem!
I fought to be awake. I was dreaming, but I think I must have blushed. I must have blushed in my sleep.
" Do it! " she said. " Please do it! For me! "
It was the voice that always came, low, intense, seductive, the sound of your hand on silk ... and to a citizen of Northem, a conformist, it was shocking. I was a conformist then; I was still one that morning.
I awoke. The glowlight was on, slowly increasing. I was in my living machine in Center Four, where I belonged, and all the familiar things were about me, reality was back, but I was breathing very hard.
I lay on the pneumo a while before getting up. I looked at the chroner: 0703 hours, Day 17, Month IX, New Century Three. My morning nuro-tablets had already popped from the tube, and the timer had begun to boil an egg. The egg was there because the realfood allotment had been increased last month. The balance of trade with Southem had just swung a decimal or two our way.
I rose finally, stepped to the mirror, switched it to positive and looked at myself. New wrinkles—or maybe just a deepening of the old ones. It was beginning to show; the past two years were leaving traces.
I hadn't worried about my appearance when I'd been with the Office of Weapons. There, I'd been able to keep pretty much to myself, doing research on magnetic mechanics as applied to space drive. But other jobs, where you had to be among people, might be different. I needed every possible thing in my favor.
Yes, I still hoped for a job, even after two years. I still meant to keep on plugging, making the rounds.
I'd go out again today.
The timer clicked and my egg was ready. I swallowed the tablets and then took the egg to the table to savor it and make it last.
As I leaned forward to sit, the metal tag dangled from my neck, catching the glowlight. My identity tag.
Everything came back in a rush—
My name. The dream and her voice. And her suggestion.
Would I dare? Would I start out this very morning and take the risk, the terrible risk?
You remember renumbering. Two years ago. You remember how it was then; how everybody looked forward to his new designation, and how everybody made jokes about the way the letters came out, and how all the records were for a while fouled up beyond recognition.
The telecomics kidded renumbering. One went a little too far and they psycho-scanned him and then sent him to Marscol as a dangerous nonconform.
If you were disappointed with your new designation, you didn't complain. You didn't want a sudden visit from the Deacons during the night.
There had to be renumbering. We all understood that. With the population of Northem already past two billion, the old designations were too clumsy. Renumbering was efficient. It contributed to the good of Northem. It helped advance the warless struggle with Southem.
The equator is the boundary. I understand that once there was a political difference and that the two superstates sprawled longitudinally, not latitudinally, over the globe. Now they are pretty much the same. There is the truce, and they are both geared for war. They are both efficient states, as tightly controlled as an experiment with enzymes, as microsurgery, as the temper of a diplomat.
We were renumbered, then, in Northem. You know the system: everybody now has six digits and an additional prefix or suffix of four letters. Stateleader, for instance, has the designation AAAA-111/111. Now, to address somebody by calling off four letters is a little clumsy. We try to pronounce them when they are pronounceable. That is, no one says to Stateleader, "Good morning, A-A-A-A." They say, "Good morning, Aaaa."
Reading the last quote, I notice a curious effect. It says what I feel. Of course I didn't feel that way on that particular morning. I was still conformal; the last thing in my mind was that I would infract and be psycho-scanned.
Four letters then, and in many cases a pronounceable four letter word.
A four letter word.
Yes, you suspect already. You know what a four letter word can be.
Mine was.
It was unspeakable.
The slight weight on my forehead reminded me that I still wore my sleep-learner. I'd been studying administrative cybernetics, hoping to qualify in that field, although it was a poor substitute for a space drive expert. I removed the band and stepped across the room and turned off the oscillator. I went back to my egg and my bitter memories.
I will never forget the first day I received my new four letter combination and reported it to my chief, as required. I was unthinkably embarrassed. He didn't say anything. He just swallowed and choked and became crimson when he saw it. He didn't dare pass it to his secretarial engineer; he went to the administrative circuits and registered it himself.
I can't blame him for easing me out. He was trying to run an efficient organization, after all, and no doubt I upset its efficiency. My work was important—magnetic mechanics was the only way to handle quanta reaction, or the so-called non-energy drive, and was therefore the answer to feasible space travel beyond our present limit of Mars—and there were frequent inspection tours by Big Wheels and Very Important Persons.
Whenever anyone, especially a woman, asked my name, the embarrassment would become a crackling electric field all about us. The best tactic was just not to answer.
The chief called me in one day. He looked haggard.
"Er—old man," he said, not quite able to bring himself to utter my name, "I'm going to have to switch you to another department. How would you like to work on nutrition kits? Very interesting work."
"Nutrition kits? Me? On nutrition kits?"
"Well, I—er—know it sounds unusual, but it justifies. I just had the cybs work it over in the light of present regulations, and it justifies."
Everything had to justify, of course. Every act in the monthly report had to be covered by regulations and cross-regulations. Of course there were so many regulations that if you just took the time to work it out, you could justify damn near anything. I knew what the chief was up to. Just to remove me from my post would have taken a year of applications and hearings and innumerable visits to the capital in Center One. But if I should infract—deliberately infract—it would enable the chief to let me go. The equivalent of resigning.
"I'll infract," I said. "Rather than go on nutrition kits, I'll infract."
He looked vastly relieved. "Uh—fine," he said. "I rather hoped you would."
It took a week or so. Then I was on Non-Productive status and issued an N/P book for my necessities. Very few luxury coupons in the N/P book. I didn't really mind at first. My new living machine was smaller, but basically comfortable, and since I was still a loyal member of the state and a verified conformist, I wouldn't starve.
But I didn't know what I was in for.
I went from bureau to bureau, office to office, department to department—any place where they might use a space drive expert. A pattern began to emerge; the same story everywhere. When I mentioned my specialty they would look delighted. When I handed them my tag and they saw my name, they would go into immediate polite confusion. As soon as they recovered they would say they'd call me if anything turned up....
A few weeks of this and I became a bit dazed.
And then there was the problem of everyday existence. You might say it's lucky to be an N/P for a while. I've heard people say that. Basic needs provided, worlds of leisure time; on the surface it sounds attractive.
But let me give you an example. Say it is monthly realfood day. You go to the store, your mouth already watering in anticipation. You take your place in line and wait for your package. The distributor takes your coupon book and is all ready to reach for your package—and then he sees the fatal letters N/P. Non-Producer. A drone, a drain upon the State. You can see his stare curdle. He scowls at the book again.
"Not sure this is in order. Better go to the end of the line. We'll check it later."
You know what happens before the end of the line reaches the counter. No more packages.
Well, I couldn't get myself off N/P status until I got a post, and with my name I couldn't get a post.
Nor could I change my name. You know what happens when you try to change something already on the records. The very idea of wanting change implies criticism of the State. Unthinkable behavior.
That was why this curious dream voice shocked me so. The thing that it suggested was quite as embarrassing as its non-standard, emotional, provocative tone.
Bear with me; I'm getting to the voice—to her —in a moment.
I want to tell you first about the loneliness, the terrible loneliness. I could hardly join group games at any of the rec centers. I could join no special interest clubs or even State Loyalty chapters. Although I dabbled with theoretical research in my own quarters, I could scarcely submit any findings for publication—not with my name attached. A pseudonym would have been non-regulation and illegal.
But there was the worst thing of all. I could not mate.
Funny, I hadn't thought about mating until it became impossible. I remember the first time, out of sheer idleness, I wandered into a Eugenic Center. I filled out my form very carefully and submitted it for analysis and assignment. The clerk saw my name, and did the usual double-take. He coughed and swallowed and fidgeted.
He said, "Of course you understand that we must submit your application to the woman authorized to spend time in the mating booths with you, and that she has the right to refuse."
"Yes, I understand that."
"M'm," he said, and dismissed me with a nod.
I waited for a call in the next few weeks, still hoping, but I knew no woman would consent to meet a man with my name, let alone enter a mating booth with him.
The urge to reproduce myself became unbearable. I concocted all sorts of wild schemes.
I might infract socially and be classified a nonconform and sent to Marscol. I'd heard rumors that in that desolate land, on that desolate planet, both mingling and mating were rather disgustingly unrestricted. Casual mating would be terribly dangerous, of course, with all the wild irradiated genes from the atomic decade still around, but I felt I'd be willing to risk that. Well, almost....
About then I began to have these dreams. As I've told you, in the dream there was only this woman's seductive voice. The first time I heard it I awoke in a warm sweat and swore something had gone wrong with the sleep-learner. You never hear the actual words with this machine, of course; you simply absorb the concepts unconsciously. Still, it seemed an explanation. I checked thoroughly. Nothing wrong.
The next night I heard the woman's voice again.
" Try it ," she said. " Do it. Start tomorrow to get your name changed. There will be a way. There must be a way. The rules are so mixed up that a clever man can do almost anything. Do it, please—for me. "
She was not only trying to get me to commit nonconformity, but making heretical remarks besides. I awoke that time and half-expected a Deacon to pop out of the tube and turn his electric club upon me.
And I heard the voice nearly every night.
It hammered away.
" What if you do fail? Almost anything would be better than the miserable existence you're leading now! "
One morning I even caught myself wondering just how I'd go about this idea of hers. Wondering what the first step might be.
She seemed to read my thoughts. That night she said, " Consult the cybs in the Govpub office. If you look hard enough and long enough, you'll find a way. "
Now, on this morning of the seventeenth day in the ninth month, I ate my boiled egg slowly and actually toyed with the idea. I thought of being on productive status again. I had almost lost my fanatical craving to be useful to the State, but I did want to be busy—desperately. I didn't want to be despised any more. I didn't want to be lonely. I wanted to reproduce myself.
I made my decision suddenly. Waves of emotion carried me along. I got up, crossed the room to the directory, and pushbuttoned to find the location of the nearest Govpub office.
I didn't know what would happen and almost didn't care.
II
Like most important places, the Govpub Office in Center Four was underground. I could have taken a tunnelcar more quickly, but it seemed pleasanter to travel topside. Or maybe I just wanted to put this off a bit. Think about it. Compose myself.
At the entrance to the Govpub warren there was a big director cyb, a plate with a speaker and switch. The sign on it said to switch it on and get close to the speaker and I did.
The cyb's mechanical voice—they never seem to get the "th" sounds right—said, "This is Branch Four of the Office of Government Publications. Say, 'Publications,' and/or, 'Information desired,' as thoroughly and concisely as possible. Use approved voice and standard phraseology."
Well, simple enough so far. I had always rather prided myself on my knack for approved voice, those flat, emotionless tones that indicate efficiency. And I would never forget how to speak Statese. I said,
"Applicant desires all pertinent information relative assignment, change or amendment of State Serial designations, otherwise generally referred to as nomenclature."
There was a second's delay while the audio patterns tripped relays and brought the memory tubes in.
Then the cyb said, "Proceed to Numbering and Identity section. Consult alphabetical list and diagram on your left for location of same."
"Thanks," I said absent-mindedly.
I started to turn away and the cyb said, "Information on tanks is military information and classified. State authorization for—"
I switched it off.
Numbering and Identity wasn't hard to find. I took the shaft to the proper level and then it was only a walk of a few hundred yards through the glowlit corridors.
N. & I. turned out to be a big room, somewhat circular, very high-ceilinged, with banks of cyb controls covering the upper walls. Narrow passageways, like spokes, led off in several directions. There was an information desk in the center of the room.
I looked that way and my heart went into free fall.
There was a girl at the information desk. An exceptionally attractive girl. She was well within the limits of acceptable standard, and her features were even enough, and her hair a middle blonde—but she had something else. Hard to describe. It was a warmth, a buoyancy, a sense of life and intense animation. It didn't exactly show; it radiated. It seemed to sing out from her clear complexion, from her figure, which even a tunic could not hide, from everything about her.
And if I were to state my business, I would have to tell her my name.
I almost backed out right then. I stopped momentarily. And then common sense took hold and I realized that if I were to go through with this thing, here would be only the first of a long series of embarrassments and discomforts. It had to be done.
I walked up to the desk and the girl turned to face me, and I could have sworn that a faint smile crossed her lips. It was swift, like the shadow of a bird across one of the lawns in one of the great parks topside. Very non-standard. Yet I wasn't offended; if anything, I felt suddenly and disturbingly pleased.
"What information is desired?" she asked. Her voice was standard—or was it?
Again I had the feeling of restrained warmth.
I used colloquial. "I want to get the dope on State Serial designations, how they're assigned and so forth. Especially how they might be changed."
She put a handsteno on the desk top and said, "Name? Address? Post?"
I froze. I stood there and stared at her.
She looked up and said, "Well?"
"I—er—no post at present. N/P status."
Her fingers moved on the steno.
I gave her my address and she recorded that.
Then I paused again.
She said, "And your name?"
I took a deep breath and told her.
I didn't want to look into her eyes. I wanted to look away, but I couldn't find a decent excuse to. I saw her eyes become wide and noticed for the first time that they were a warm gray, almost a mouse color. I felt like laughing at that irrelevant observation, but more than that I felt like turning and running. I felt like climbing and dashing all over the walls like a frustrated cat and yelling at the top of my lungs. I felt like anything but standing there and looking stupid, meeting her stare—
She looked down quickly and recorded my name. It took her a little longer than necessary. In that time she recovered. Somewhat.
"All right," she said finally, "I'll make a search."
She turned to a row of buttons on a console in the center of the desk and began to press them in various combinations. A typer clicked away. She tore off a slip of paper, consulted it, and said, "Information desired is in Bank 29. Please follow me."
Well, following her was a pleasure, anyway. I could watch the movement of her hips and torso as she walked. She was not tall, but long-legged and extremely lithe. Graceful and rhythmic. Very, very feminine, almost beyond standard in that respect. I felt blood throb in my temples and was heartily ashamed of myself.
I would like to be in a mating booth with her, I thought, the full authorized twenty minutes. And I knew I was unconformist and the realization hardly scared me at all.
She led me down one of the long passageways.
A few moments later I said, "Don't you sometimes get—well, pretty lonely working here?" Personal talk at a time like this wasn't approved behavior, but I couldn't help it.
She answered hesitantly, but at least she answered. She said, "Not terribly. The cybs are company enough most of the time."
"You don't get many visitors, then."
"Not right here. N. & I. isn't a very popular section. Most people who come to Govpub spend their time researching in the ancient manuscript room. The—er—social habits of the pre-atomic civilization."
I laughed. I knew what she meant, all right. Pre-atomics and their ideas about free mating always fascinated people. I moved up beside her. "What's your name, by the way?"
"L-A-R-A 339/827."
I pronounced it. "Lara. Lah-rah. That's beautiful. Fits you, too."
She didn't answer; she kept her eyes straight ahead and I saw the faint spot of color on her cheek.
I had a sudden impulse to ask her to meet me after hours at one of the rec centers. If it had been my danger alone, I might have, but I couldn't very well ask her to risk discovery of a haphazard, unauthorized arrangement like that and the possibility of going to the psycho-scan.
We came to a turn in the corridor and something happened; I'm not sure just how it happened. I keep telling myself that my movements were not actually deliberate. I was to the right of her. The turn was to the left. She turned quickly, and I didn't, so that I bumped into her, knocking her off balance. I grabbed her to keep her from falling.
For a moment we stood there, face to face, touching each other lightly. I held her by the arms. I felt the primitive warmth of her breath. Our eyes held together ... proton ... electron ... I felt her tremble.
She broke from my grip suddenly and started off again.
After that she was very business-like.
We came finally to the controls of Bank 29 and she stood before them and began to press button combinations. I watched her work; I watched her move. I had almost forgotten why I'd come here. The lights blinked on and off and the typers clacked softly as the machine sorted out information.
She had a long printed sheet from the roll presently. She frowned at it and turned to me. "You can take this along and study it," she said,
"but I'm afraid what you have in mind may be—a little difficult."
She must have guessed what I had in mind. I said, "I didn't think it would be easy."
"It seems that the only agency authorized to change a State Serial under any circumstances is Opsych."
"Opsych?" You can't keep up with all these departments.
"The Office of Psychological Adjustment. They can change you if you go from a lower to higher E.A.C."
"I don't get it, exactly."
As she spoke I had the idea that there was sympathy in her voice. Just an overtone. "Well," she said, "as you know, the post a person is qualified to hold often depends largely on his Emotional Adjustment Category. Now if he improves and passes from, let us say, Grade 3 to Grade 4, he will probably change his place of work. In order to protect him from any associative maladjustments developed under the old E.A.C, he is permitted a new number."
I groaned. "But I'm already in the highest E.A.C.!"
"It looks very uncertain then."
"Sometimes I think I'd be better off in the mines, or on Marscol—or—in the hell of the pre-atomics!"
She looked amused. "What did you say your E.A.C. was?"
"Oh, all right. Sorry." I controlled myself and grinned. "I guess this whole thing has been just a little too much for me. Maybe my E.A.C.'s even gone down."
"That might be your chance then."
"How do you mean?"
"If you could get to the top man in Opsych and demonstrate that your number has inadvertently changed your E.A.C., he might be able to justify a change."
"By the State, he might!" I punched my palm. "Only how do I get to him?"
"I can find his location on the cyb here. Center One, the capital, for a guess. You'll have to get a travel permit to go there, of course. Just a moment."
She worked at the machine again, trying it on general data. The printed slip came out a moment later and she read it to me. Chief, Opsych, was in the capital all right. It didn't give the exact location of his office, but it did tell how to find the underground bay in Center One containing the Opsych offices.
We headed back through the passageway then and she kept well ahead of me. I couldn't keep my eyes from her walk, from the way she walked with everything below her shoulders. My blood was pounding at my temples again.
I tried to keep the conversation going. "Do you think it'll be hard to get a travel permit?"
"Not impossible. My guess is that you'll be at Travbur all day tomorrow, maybe even the next day. But you ought to be able to swing it if you hold out long enough."
I sighed. "I know. It's that way everywhere in Northem. Our motto ought to be, 'Why make it difficult when with just a little more effort you can make it impossible?'"
She started to laugh, and then, as she emerged from the passageway into the big circular room, she cut her laugh short.
A second later, as I came along, I saw why.
There were two Deacons by the central desk. They were burly and had that hard, pinched-face look and wore the usual black belts. Electric clubs hung from the belts. Spidery looking pistols were at their sides.
I didn't know whether these two had heard my crack or not. I know they kept looking at me.
Lara and I crossed the room silently, she back to her desk, I to the exit door. The Deacons' remote, disapproving eyes swung in azimuth, tracking us.
I walked out and wanted to turn and smile at Lara, and get into my smile something of the hope that someday, somewhere, I'd see her again—but of course I didn't dare.
III
I had the usual difficulties at Travbur the next day. I won't go into them, except to say that I was batted from office to office like a ping pong ball, and that, when I finally got my travel permit, I was made to feel that I had stolen an original Picasso from the State Museum.
I made it in a day. Just. I got my permit thirty seconds before closing time. I was to take the jetcopter to Center One at 0700 hours the following morning.
In my living machine that evening, I was much too excited to work at theoretical research as I usually did after a hard day of tramping around. I bathed, I paced a while, I sat and hummed nervously and got up and paced again. I turned on the telepuppets. There was a drama about the space pilots who fly the nonconformist prisoners to the forests and pulp-acetate plants on Mars. Seemed that the Southem political prisoners who are confined to the southern hemisphere of Mars, wanted to attack and conquer the north. The nonconformists, led by our pilot, came through for the State in the end. Corn is thicker than water. Standard.
There were, however, some good stereofilm shots of the limitless forests of Mars, and I wondered what it would be like to live there, in a green, fresh-smelling land. Pleasant, I supposed, if you could put up with the no doubt revolting morality of a prison planet.
And the drama seemed to point out that there was no more security for the nonconformists out there than for us here on Earth. Maybe somewhere in the universe, I thought, there would be peace for men. Somewhere beyond the solar system, perhaps, someday when we had the means to go there....
Yet instinct told me that wasn't the answer, either. I thought of a verse by an ancient pre-atomic poet named Hoffenstein. (People had unwieldy, random combinations of letters for names in those days.) The poem went:
Wherever I go,
I
go too,
And spoil everything.
That was it. The story of mankind.
I turned the glowlight down and lay on the pneumo after a while, but I didn't sleep for a long, long time.
Then, when I did sleep, when I had been sleeping, I heard the voice again. The low, seductive woman's voice—the startling, shocking voice out of my unconscious.
" You have taken the first step ," she said. " You are on your way to freedom. Don't stop now. Don't sink back into the lifelessness of conformity. Go on ... on and on. Keep struggling, for that is the only answer.... "
I didn't exactly talk back, but in the queer way of the dream, I thought objections. I was in my thirties, at the mid-point of my life, and the whole of that life had been spent under the State. I knew no other way to act. Suppressing what little individuality I might have was, for me, a way of survival. I was chockful of prescribed, stereotyped reactions, and I held onto them even when something within me told me what they were. This wasn't easy, this breaking away, not even this slight departure from the secure, camouflaged norm....
" The woman, Lara, attracts you ," said the voice.
I suppose at that point I twitched or rolled in my sleep. Yes, the voice was right, the woman Lara attracted me. So much that I ached with it.
" Take her. Find a way. When you succeed in changing your name, and know that you can do things, then find a way. There will be a way. "
The idea at once thrilled and frightened me.
I woke writhing and in a sweat again.
It was morning.
I dressed and headed for the jetcopter stage and the ship for Center One.
The ship was comfortable and departed on time, a transport with seats for about twenty passengers. I sat near the tail and moodily busied myself watching the gaunt brown earth far below. Between Centers there was mostly desert, only occasional patches of green. Before the atomic decade, I had heard, nearly all the earth was green and teemed with life ... birds, insects, animals, people, too. It was hard rock and sand now, with a few scrubs hanging on for life. The pre-atomics, who hadn't mastered synthesization, would have a hard time scratching existence from the earth today.
I tried to break the sad mood, and started to look around at some of the other passengers. That was when I first noticed the prisoners in the forward seats. Man and woman, they were, a youngish, rather non-descript couple, thin, very quiet. They were manacled and two Deacons sat across from them. The Deacons' backs were turned to me and I could see the prisoners' faces.
They had curious faces. Their eyes were indescribably sad, and yet their lips seemed to be ready to smile at any moment.
They were holding hands, not seeming to care about this vulgar emotional display.
I had the sudden crazy idea that Lara and I were sitting there, holding hands like that, nonconforming in the highest, and that we were wonderfully happy. Our eyes were sad too, but we were really happy, quietly happy, and that was why our lips stayed upon the brink of a smile.
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Who are the members aboard the life skiff with Malcolm?
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about Wanderers of the Wolf Moon by NELSON S. BOND.
Relevant chunks:
Wanderers of the Wolf Moon
By NELSON S. BOND
They were marooned on Titan, their ship wrecked, the radio smashed. Yet they had to exist, had to build a new life on a hostile world. And the man who assumed command was Gregory Malcolm, the bespectacled secretary—whose only adventures had come through the pages of a book.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Sparks snapped off the switches and followed him to the door of the radio turret. Sparks was a stunted, usually-grinning, little redhead named Hannigan. But he wasn't grinning now. He laid an anxious hand on Greg's arm. "If I was you," he said, "if I was you, Malcolm, I don't think I'd say nothing to the boss about this. Not just yet, anyhow."
Greg said, "Why not?"
Sparks spluttered and fussed and made heavy weather of answering.
"Well, for one thing, it ain't important. It would only worry him. And then there's the womenfolks, they scare easy. Which of course they ain't no cause to. Atmospherics don't mean nothing. I've rode out worse storms than this—plenty of times. And in worse crates than the Carefree ."
Greg studied him carefully from behind trim plasta-rimmed spectacles. He drew a deep breath. He said levelly, "So it's that bad, eh, Sparks?"
"What bad? I just told you—"
"I know. Sparks, I'm not a professional spaceman. But I've studied astrogation as few Earthlubbers have. It's been my hobby for years. And I think I know what we're up against.
"We hit a warp-eddy last night. We've been trapped in a vortex for more than eight hours. Lord only knows how many hundreds of thousands of miles we've been borne off our course. And now we've blasted into a super-ionized belt of atmospherics. Your radio signals are blanketed. You can't get signals in or out. We're a deaf-mute speck of metal being whirled headlong through space. Isn't that it?"
"I don't know what—" began Sparks hotly. Then he stopped, studied his companion thoughtfully, nodded. "O.Q.," he confessed, "that's it. But we ain't licked yet. We got three good men on the bridge. Townsend ... Graves ... Langhorn. They'll pull out of this if anybody can. And they ain't no sense in scaring the Old Man and his family."
"I won't tell them," said Greg. "I won't tell them unless I have to. But between you and me, what are the odds against us, Sparks?"
The radioman shrugged.
"Who knows? Vortices are unpredictable. Maybe the damn thing will toss us out on the very spot it picked us up. Maybe it will give us the old chuckeroo a million miles the other side of Pluto. Maybe it will crack us up on an asteroid or satellite. No way of telling till it happens."
"And the controls?"
"As useless," said Sparks, "as a cow in a cyclone."
"So?"
"We sit tight," said Sparks succinctly, "and hope."
Malcolm nodded quietly. He took off his spectacles, breathed on them, wiped them, replaced them. He was tall and fair; in his neat, crisply pressed business suit he appeared even slimmer than he was. But there was no nervousness in his movements. He moved measuredly. "Well," he said, "that appears to be that. I'm going up to the dining dome."
Sparks stared at him querulously.
"You're a queer duck, Malcolm. I don't think you've got a nerve in your body."
"Nerves are a luxury I can't afford," replied Greg. "If anything happens—and if there's time to do so—let me know." He paused at the door. "Good luck," he said.
"Clear ether!" said Sparks mechanically. He stared after the other man wonderingly for a long moment, then went back to his control banks, shaking his head and muttering.
Gregory Malcolm climbed down the Jacob's-ladder and strode briskly through the labyrinthine corridors that were the entrails of the space yacht Carefree . He paused once to peer through a perilens set into the ship's port plates. It was a weird sight that met his gaze. Not space, ebony-black and bejewelled with a myriad flaming splotches of color; not the old, familiar constellations treading their ever-lasting, inexorable paths about the perimeter of Sol's tiny universe, but a shimmering webwork of light, so tortured-violet that the eyes ached to look upon it. This was the mad typhoon of space-atmospherics through which the Carefree was now being twisted, topsy-turvy, toward a nameless goal.
He moved on, approaching at last the quartzite-paned observation rotunda which was the dining dome of the ship.
His footsteps slowed as he composed himself to face those within. As he hesitated in the dimly-lighted passage, a trick of lights on glass mirrored to him the room beyond. He could see the others while they were as yet unaware of his presence. Their voices reached him clearly.
J. Foster Andrews, his employer and the employer of the ten thousand or more men and women who worked for Galactic Metals Corporation, dominated the head of the table. He was a plump, impatient little Napoleon. Opposite him, calm, graceful, serene, tastefully garbed and elaborately coiffured even here in deep space, three weeks from the nearest beauty shop, sat his wife, Enid.
On Andrews' right sat his sister, Maud. Not young, features plain as a mud fence, but charming despite her age and homeliness simply because of her eyes; puckish, shrewdly intelligent eyes, constantly aglint with suppressed humor at—guessed Greg—the amusing foibles and frailties of those about her.
She gave her breakfast the enthusiastic attention of one too old and shapeless to be concerned with such folderol as calories and dietetics, pausing only from time to time to share smidgeons of food with a watery-eyed scrap of white, curly fluff beside her chair. Her pet poodle, whom she called by the opprobrious title of "Cuddles."
On J. Foster's left sat his daughter, Crystal. She it was who caused Gregory Malcolm's staid, respectable heart to give a little lurch as he glimpsed her reflected vision—all gold and crimson and cream—in the glistening walls. If Crystal was her name, so, too, was crystal her loveliness.
But—Greg shook his head—but she was not for him. She was already pledged to the young man seated beside her. Ralph Breadon. He turned to murmur something to her as Greg watched; Greg saw and admired and disliked his rangy height, his sturdy, well-knit strength, the rich brownness of his skin, his hair, his eyes.
The sound of his own name startled Greg.
"Malcolm!" called the man at the head of the table. "Malcolm! Now where in blazes is he, anyhow?" he demanded of no one in particular, everyone in general. He spooned a dab of liquid gold from a Limoges preserve jar, tongued it suspiciously, frowned. "Bitter!" he complained.
"It's the very best Martian honey," said his wife.
"Drylands clover," added Crystal.
"It's still bitter," said J. Foster petulantly.
His sister sniffed. "Nonsense! It's delightful."
"I say it's bitter," repeated Andrews sulkily. And lifted his voice again. " Malcolm! Where are you?"
"You called me, sir?" said Malcolm, moving into the room. He nodded politely to the others. "Good morning, Mrs. Andrews ... Miss Andrews ... Mr. Breadon...."
"Oh, sit down!" snapped J. Foster. "Sit down here and stop bobbing your head like a teetotum! Had your breakfast? The honey's no good; it's bitter." He glared at his sister challengingly. "Where have you been, anyway? What kind of secretary are you? Have you been up to the radio turret? How's the market today? Is Galactic up or down?"
Malcolm said, "I don't know, sir."
"Fine! Fine!" Andrews rattled on automatically before the words registered. Then he started, his face turning red. "Eh? What's that? Don't know! What do you mean, you don't know? I pay you to—"
"There's no transmission, sir," said Greg quietly.
"No trans—nonsense! Of course there's transmission! I put a million credits into this ship. Finest space-yacht ever built. Latest equipment throughout. Sparks is drunk, that's what you mean! Well, you hop right up there and—"
Maud Andrews put down her fork with a clatter. "Oh, for goodness sakes, Jonathan, shut up and give the boy time to explain! He's standing there with his mouth gaping like a rain-spout, trying to get a word in edgewise! What's the trouble, Gregory?" She turned to Greg, as Jonathan Foster Andrews wheezed into startled silence. " That? "
She glanced at the quartzite dome, beyond which the veil of iridescence wove and cross-wove and shimmered like a pallid aurora.
Greg nodded. "Yes, Miss Andrews."
Enid Andrews spoke languidly from the other end of the table.
"But what is it, Gregory? A local phenomenon?"
"You might call it that," said Greg, selecting his words cautiously.
"It's an ionized field into which we've blasted. It—it—shouldn't stay with us long. But while it persists, our radio will be blanketed out."
Breadon's chestnut head came up suddenly, sharply.
"Ionization! That means atmosphere!"
Greg said, "Yes."
"And an atmosphere means a body in space somewhere near—" Breadon stopped, bit his lip before the appeal in Malcolm's eyes, tried to pass it off easily. "Oh, well—a change of scenery, what?"
But the moment of alarm in his voice had not passed unnoticed. Crystal Andrews spoke for all of them, her voice preternaturally quiet.
"You're hiding something, Malcolm. What is it? Is there—danger?"
But Greg didn't have to answer that question. From the doorway a harsh, defiantly strident voice answered for him. The voice of Bert Andrews, Crystal's older brother.
"Danger? You're damn right there's danger! What's the matter with you folks—are you all deaf, dumb and blind? We've been caught in a space-vortex for hours. Now we're in the H-layer of a planet we can't even see—and in fifteen minutes or fifteen seconds we may all be smashed as flat as pancakes!"
The proclamation brought them out of their chairs. Greg's heart sank; his vain plea, "Mr. Andrews—" was lost in the medley of Crystal's sudden gasp, Enid Andrews' short, choking scream, J. Foster's bellowing roar at his only son.
"Bert—you're drunk!"
Bert weaved precariously from the doorway, laughed in his father's face.
"Sure I'm drunk! Why not? If you're smart you'll get drunk, too. The whole damn lot of you!" He flicked a derisive hand toward Greg. "You too, Boy Scout! What were you trying to do—hide the bad news from them? Well, it's no use. Everybody might as well know the worst. We're gone gooses ... geeses ... aw, what the hell! Dead ducks!" He fell into a chair, sprawled there laughing mirthlessly with fear riding the too-high notes of his laughter.
J. Foster turned to his secretary slowly. His ire had faded; there was only deep concern in his voice.
"Is he telling the truth, Malcolm?"
Greg said soberly, "Partly, sir. He's overstating the danger—but there is danger. We are caught in a space-vortex, and as Mr. Breadon realized, the presence of these ionics means we're in the Heaviside-layer of some heavenly body. But we may not crack up."
Maud Andrews glanced at him shrewdly.
"Is there anything we can do?"
"Not a thing. The officers on the bridge are doing everything possible."
"In that case," said the older woman, "we might as well finish our breakfast. Here, Cuddles! Come to momsy!" She sat down again. Greg looked at her admiringly. Ralph Breadon stroked his brown jaw. He said,
"The life-skiffs?"
"A last resort," said Greg. "Sparks promised he'd let me know if it were necessary. We'll hope it's not—"
But it was a vain hope, vainly spoken in the last, vain moment. For even as he phrased the hopeful words, came the sound of swift, racing footsteps up the corridor. Into the dining dome burst Hannigan, eyes hot with excitement. And his cry dispelled Greg's final hopes for safety.
"Everybody—the Number Four life-skiff— quick ! We've been caught in a grav-drag and we're going to crash!"
II
Those next hectic moments were never afterward very clear in Greg Malcolm's memory. He had a confused recollection of hearing Sparks' warning punctuated by a loud, shrill scream which he vaguely identified as emanating from Mrs. Andrews' throat ... he was conscious of feeling, suddenly, beneath his feet the sickening, quickening lurch of a ship out of control, gripped by gravitational forces beyond its power to allay ... he recalled his own voice dinning in his ears as, incredibly, with Sparks, he took command of the hasty flight from the dining dome down the corridor to the aft ramp, up the ramp, across girdered beams in the super-structure to the small, independently motored rocket-skiff cradled there.
He was aware, too, of strangely disconnected incidents happening around him, he being a part of them but seeming to be only a disinterested spectator to their strangeness. Of his forcing Maud Andrews toward the door of the dome ... of her pushing back against him with all the weight of her body ... of her irate voice, "Cuddles! I forgot him!" Then the shrill excited yapping of the poodle cradled against her as they charged on down the corridor.
J. Foster waddling beside him, tugging at his arm, panting, "The officers?" and his own unfelt assurance. "They can take care of themselves. It's a general 'bandon ship." Enid Andrews stumbling over the hem of a filmy peignoir ... himself bending to lift her boldly and bodily, sweating palms feeling the warm animal heat of her excited body hot beneath them ... Crystal Andrews stopping suddenly, crying,
"'Tina!" ... and Hannigan's reply, "Your maid? I woke her. She's in the life-skiff." Bert Andrews stopping suddenly, being sick in the middle of the corridor, his drunkenness losing itself in the thick, sure nausea of the ever-increasing unsteadiness beneath their feet.
Then the life-skiff, the clang of metal as Hannigan slammed the port behind the last of them, the fumbling for a lock-stud, the quick, grateful pant of the miniature hypos, and a weird feeling of weightlessness, rushingness, hurtlingness as his eardrums throbbed and his mouth tasted brassy and bloody with the fierce velocity of their escape.
Sense and meaning returned only when all this ended. As one waking from a nightmare dream, Greg Malcolm returned to a world he could recognize. A tiny world, encased within the walls of a forty-foot life-skiff. A world peopled too scantily. Andrews, his wife and sister, his son and daughter; 'Tina Laney, the maid; Breadon, Hannigan, young Tommy O'Doul, the cabin-boy (though where he had come from, or when, Greg did not know). And himself. In a life-skiff. In space.
Somewhere in space. He looked through the perilens . What he saw then he might better never have seen. For that shimmering pink-ochre veil had wisped away, now, and in the clean, cold, bitter-clear light of a distant sun he watched the death-dive of the yacht Carefree .
Like a vast silver top, spinning heedlessly, wildly, it streaked toward a mottled gray and green, brown and dun, hard and crushing-brutal terrain below. Still at its helm stood someone, for even in that last dreadful moment burst from its nose-jets a ruddy mushroom of flame that tried to, but could not, brake the dizzy fall.
For an instant Greg's eyes, stingingly blinded and wet, thought they glimpsed a wee black mote dancing from the bowels of the Carefree ; a mote that might be another skiff like their own. But he could not be sure, and then the Carefree was accelerating with such violence and speed that the eye could see it only as a flaming silver lance against the ugly earth-carcase beneath, and then it struck and a carmine bud of flame burst and flowered for an instant, and that was all....
And Greg Malcolm turned from the perilens , shaken.
Hannigan said, "It's over?" and Greg nodded.
Hannigan said, "The other skiffs? Did they break free, or were they caught?"
"I don't know. I couldn't see for sure."
"You must have seen. Are we the only ones?"
"I couldn't see for sure. Maybe. Maybe not."
Then a body scrambled forward, pressing through the tightness of other huddled bodies, and there was a hand upon his elbow. "I'll take over now, Malcolm."
It was Ralph Breadon. Gregory looked at him slowly, uncomprehendingly at first. His hand was reluctant to leave the guiding-gear of the small ship which was, now, all that remained to them of civilization and civilization's wondrous accomplishments. He had not realized until this moment that for a while ... for a short, eager, pulse-quickening while ... on his alertness, in his hands, had depended the destinies of ten men and women. But he knew, suddenly and completely, that it was for this single moment his whole lifetime had waited. It was for this brief moment of command that some intuition, some instinct greater than knowledge, had prepared him. This was why he, an Earthlubber, had studied astrogation, made a hobby of the empire of the stars. That he might be fitted to command when all others failed. And now—
And now the moment was past, and he was once again Gregory Malcolm, mild, lean, pale, bespectacled secretary to J. Foster Andrews. And the man at his side was Ralph Breadon, socialite and gentleman sportsman, trained pilot. And in Malcolm the habit of obedience was strong....
"Very well, sir," he said. And he turned over the controls.
What happened then was unfortunate. It might just as well have happened to Malcolm, though afterward no one could ever say with certainty. However that was, either by carelessness or malfortune or inefficiency, once-thwarted disaster struck again at the little party on the life-skiff. At the instant Breadon's hand seized the controls the skiff jerked suddenly as though struck with a ponderous fist, its throbbing motors choked and snarled in a high, rising crescendo of torment that lost itself in supersonic heights, and the ship that had been drifting easily and under control to the planet beneath now dipped viciously.
The misfortune was that too many huddled in the tiny space understood the operation of the life-skiff, and what must be done instantly. And that neither pilot was as yet in control of the ship. Breadon's hand leaped for the Dixie rod, so, too, did Malcolm's—and across both their bodies came the arm of Sparks Hannigan, searching the controls.
In the scramble someone's sleeve brushed the banks of control-keys. The motors, killed, soughed into silence. The ship rocked into a spin. Greg cried out, his voice a strange harshness in his ears; Breadon cursed; one of the women bleated fearfully.
Then Breadon, still cursing, fought all hands from the controls but his own. And the man was not without courage. For all could see plainly, in the illumined perilens , how near to swift death that moment of uncertainty had led them. The skiff, which an instant before had been high in the stratosphere of this unknown planet ... or satellite or whatever it might be ... was now flashing toward hard ground at lightning speed.
Only a miracle, Greg knew, could save them now. An impulse spun his head, he looked at Crystal Andrews. There was no fear in her eyes. Just a hotness and an inexplicable anger. Beside her was the other girl, the maid, 'Tina; she was frankly afraid. Her teeth were clenched in her nether lip, and her eyes were wide and anxious, but she did not cry out.
Only a miracle could save them now. But Breadon's hands performed that miracle; his quick, nerveless, trained hands. A stud here ... a lever there ... a swift wrenching toss of the shoulders. His face twisted back over his shoulder, and his straining lips pulled taut and bloodless away from his teeth. "Hold tight, folks! We're going to bounce—"
Then they struck!
But they struck glancingly, as Breadon had hoped, and planned for, and gambled on. They struck and bounced. The frail craft shivered and groaned in metal agony, jarred across harsh soil, bounced again, settled, nosed over and rocked to a standstill. Somewhere forward something snapped with a shrill, high ping! of stress; somewhere aft was the metallic flap-clanging of broken gear trailing behind them. But they were safe.
Breath, held so long that he could not remember its inhalation, escaped Greg's lungs in a long sigh. "Nice work, Mr. Breadon!" he cried. "Oh, nice work!"
But surprisingly, savagely, Breadon turned on him.
"It would have been better work, Malcolm, if you'd kept your damned hands off the controls! Now see what you've done? Smashed up our skiff! Our only—"
"He didn't do it!" piped the shrill voice of Tommy O'Doul. "You done it yourself, Mr. Breadon. Your sleeve. It caught the switch."
"Quiet!" Breadon, cheeks flushed, reached out smartly, stilled the youngster's defense with a swift, ungentle slap. "And you, Malcolm—after this, do as you're told, and don't try to assume responsibilities too great for you. All right, everybody. Let's get out and see how bad the damage is."
Instinctively Greg had surged a half step forward as Breadon silenced the cabin boy. Now old habit and common-sense halted him. He's overwrought, he reasoned. We're all excited and on edge. We've been to Bedlam. Our nerves are shot. In a little while we'll all be back to normal.
He said quietly, "Very well, Mr. Breadon." And he climbed from the broken skiff.
Hannigan said, "Looks bad, don't it?"
"Very," said Malcolm. He fingered a shard of loose metal flapping like a fin from the stern of the skiff. "Not hopeless, though. There should be an acetylene torch in the tool locker. With that—"
"You ought to of poked him," said Hannigan.
"What? Oh, you mean—?"
"Yeah. The kid was right, you know. He done it."
"His sleeve, you mean. Well, it was an accident," said Greg. "It could have happened to anyone. And he made a good landing. Considering everything. Anyhow—" Again he was Gregory Malcolm, serious-faced, efficient secretary. "Anyhow, we have been thrust into an extremely precarious circumstance. It would be silly to take umbrage at a man's nervous anger. We must have no quarreling, no bickering—"
"Umbrage!" snorted Sparks. "Bickering! They're big words. I ain't sure I know what they mean. I ain't exactly sure they mean anything ." He glanced at Greg oddly. "You're a queer jasper, Malcolm. Back there on the ship, I figured you for a sort of a stuffed-shirt. Yes-man to the boss. And then in the show-down, you come through like a movie hero—for a little while. Then you let that Breadon guy give you the spur without a squawk—"
Malcolm adjusted his plasta-rimmed spectacles. He said, almost stubbornly, "Our situation is grave. There must be no bickering."
"Bickering your Aunt Jenny! What do you call that?"
Sparks jerked a contemptuous thumb toward the group from which they were separated. Upon disembarking, only Greg and Sparks had moved to make a careful examination of their damaged craft. The others, more or less under the direction of Breadon, were making gestures toward removing certain necessaries from the skiff. Their efforts, slight and uncertain as they were, had already embroiled them in argument.
The gist of their argument, so far as Greg Malcolm could determine, was that everyone wanted "something" to be done, but no two could agree as to just what that something was, and no one seemed to have any bursting desire to participate in actual physical labor.
J. Foster Andrews, all traces of his former panic and confusion fled, was planted firmly, Napoleonically, some few yards from the open port of the life-skiff, barking impatient orders at little Tommy O'Doul who—as Greg watched—stumbled from the port bearing a huge armload of edibles.
'Tina, the maid, was in a frenzy of motion, trying to administer to the complaints and demands of Mrs. Andrews (whose immaculate hair-do had suffered in the frenetic minutes of their flight) and Crystal Andrews
(who knew perfectly well there were sweaters in the life-skiff) and Miss Maud (who wanted a can of prepared dog-food and a can-opener immediately, and look at poor Cuddles, momsy's 'ittle pet was so hungry)!
Bert Andrews was sulkily insisting that it was nonsense to leave the warmth and security of the skiff anyway, and he wished he had a drink, while the harassed, self-appointed commander of the refugee corps was shouting at whomever happened, at any given moment, to capture his divided and completely frantic attention. His orders were masterpieces of confusion, developing around one premise that the castaway crew should immediately set up a camp. Where, how, or with what nonexistent equipment, Breadon did not venture to say.
"You see what I mean?" demanded Sparks disgustedly.
Greg Malcolm saw. He also saw other things. That their landing-spot, while excellent for its purpose, was not by any manner of means an ideal campsite. It was a small, flat basin of sandy soil, rimmed by shallow mountains. His gaze sought these hills, looked approvingly on their greenness, upon the multitude of dark pock-marks dotting them. These caves, were they not the habitations of potential enemies, might well become the sanctuaries of spacewrecked men.
He saw, also, a thin ribbon of silver sheering the face of the northern hills. His gaze, rising still skyward, saw other things—
He nodded. He knew, now, where they were. Or approximately. There was but one planet in the solar system which boasted such a phenomenon. The apparent distance of the Sun, judged by its diminished disc, argued his judgment to be correct. The fact that they had surged through an atmospheric belt for some length of time before finally meeting with disaster.
"Titan," he said. "Hyperion possibly. But probably Titan."
Sparks' gaze, following Greg's upward, contracted in an expression of dismay.
"Dirty cow! You mean that's where we are?"
"I believe so. There's Saturn, our mother planet, looming above us as large as a dinner plate. And the grav-drag here is almost Earth norm. Titan has a 3,000 mile diameter. That, combined with the Saturnian tractile constant, would give us a strong pull."
Sparks wailed, "But Titan! Great morning, Malcolm, nobody ever comes to Titan! There ain't no mines here, no colonies, no—" He stopped suddenly, his eyes widening yet farther. "And, hey—this place is dangerous ! There are—"
"I know it," said Greg swiftly, quietly. "Shut up, Sparks. No use telling the others. If they don't guess it themselves, what they don't know won't alarm them. We've got to do something, though. Get ourselves organized into a defensive community. That's the only way—"
Ralph Breadon's sharp, dictatorial voice interrupted him. "Well, Malcolm, stop soldiering and make yourself useful!"
And J. Foster, not to have his authority usurped, supplemented the order. "Yes, Malcolm, let's get going! No time for day-dreaming, my man. We want action!"
Sparks said, "Maybe you'll get it now, fatty!" under his breath, and looked at Malcolm hopefully. But his companion merely nodded, moved forward toward the others, quietly obedient to the command.
"Yes, sir," he said.
Hannigan groaned and followed him.
III
Breadon said, "All right, Tommy, dump them here. I have a few words to say." He glanced about him pompously. "Now, folks, naturally we want to get away from here as soon as possible. Therefore I delegate you, Sparks, to immediately get a message off. An SOS to the nearest space cruiser."
Hannigan grinned. It was not a pleasant grin. He took his time answering. He spat thoughtfully on the ground before him, lifted his head. He said, "A message, huh?"
"That's what I said."
"And what'll I send it with?" drawled Sparks. "Tom-toms?"
Breadon flushed darkly.
"I believe the life-skiff was equipped with a radio? And theoretically you are a radio operator?"
"Finest radio money can buy!" interpolated J. Foster Andrews proudly.
"Put a million credits into the Carefree . Best equipment throughout."
Sparks looked from one to another of them, grinned insolently. "You're both right. I am a radio operator, and there was a radio. But we crashed, remember? On account of some dope's sleeve got caught in the master switch—"
"That will do!" snapped Breadon angrily. He stared at the bandy-legged little redhead. "You mean the radio was broken?"
"It wasn't helped none. The tubes was made out of glass, and glass don't bounce so good."
Greg Malcolm said thoughtfully, "Sparks, can't you fix it?"
"Well, mebbe. But not in five minutes. Maybe not in five years. I won't know till I get going on it."
Breadon frowned.
"I'll handle this, Malcolm," he crisped. Again to the radioman, "Well, you get to work on it immediately. And as soon as you get it fixed, send out an SOS advising the patrol where we are—"
"Speaking of which," insinuated Sparks, "where are we?"
Breadon glared at him wrathfully.
"Why—why on one of the satellites of Saturn, of course. Any fool can see that!"
"O.Q. But does any fool know which one? Or shall I tell you it's Titan? And when you know that, then what? Titan wasn't named that on account of it was a pimple. It's a big place. What'll I tell the Patrol? SOS. Stranded in the middle of we-don't-know-where, somewhere on Titan, maybe. They'll be hunting for us till we've got whiskers down to our knees."
Breadon's irate look vanished. He looked stricken. He said, "I—I don't know. We have a compass—"
Once again it was Gregory Malcolm who entered into the conversation. He had been toying, almost absentmindedly, with a funnel taken from the skiff's stores. Into this he had poured a small portion of water; his right forefinger was pressed to the bottom of the tube, closing it. He said, "I can answer part of that question now. Enough to cut the search in half, anyway. We're in the northern hemisphere of the satellite."
Maud Andrews looked at him sharply as if noticing him for the first time in her life.
"How," she asked, "did you know that, Malcolm?"
Question:
Who are the members aboard the life skiff with Malcolm?
Answer:
|
[
"On life skiff number four, the skiff onto which Gregory Malcolm had evacuated were himself, his employers J. Foster Andrews, the head of the Galactic Metals Corporations, and his family: Andrews’s tall and well-styled wife Enid, his plain-featured, out of shape but beautiful-eyed sister Maud, Maud’s poodle Cuddles, Andrews’s drunk son Bert, Andrews’s beautiful daughter Crystal, and the man to whom Crystal was promised, Ralph Breadon. Malcolm describes Ralph as tall and strong-knit, with tanned skin. Also aboard the skiff were the maid of the Andrews family, ‘Tina Laney, a cabin boy named Tommy O’Doul, and the radio engineer of the Carefree named Hannigan, who is also called Sparks. \n",
"Accompanying Malcolm on the life skiff are Hannigan, also known as Sparks, who is a radio operator, Tommy, a young cabin-boy, Tina, the maid, and the Andrews family and their company. The Andrews family consists of J. Foster Andrews, Malcolm's employer, his wife Enid, his sister Maud, his daughter Crystal, his son Bert, and Crystal's suitor, Ralph Breadon. The Andrews make up the majority of the members on the life skiff, while Malcom, Hannigan, Tommy, and Tina work under them and attempt to evade disaster. ",
"The members that boarded the life skiff with Malcolm are J. Foster Andrews, his wife, their daughter, the maid, Breadon, Hannigan, young Tommy O’Doul, and a cabin boy, whom Malcolm has no idea where he came from and when. J. Foster Andrews is the employer of people that are working for the Galatic Metals Corporation. His wife is Enid. Their daughter is Crystal, who is engaged to Breadon. Maud, the sister of Andrews is also on board. She and per puppy \"Cuddles\" board the life-skiff together. They were not able to see any other life-skiffs. They are unsure if they did break free of they got caught along with the ship. ",
"Those that were able to make it into the life skiff with Malcolm during the emergency include Andrew, Enid, Crystal, Ralph, Maud, Sparks, Tommy O’Doul, and Bert. Bert is Andrew’s son. Enid is the wife of Andrew. Maud is Andrew’s sister. Crystal is Andrew’s daughter. Ralph is the man Crystal is pledged to. Tommy is a cabin boy. Malcolm is Andrew’s secretary. Sparks Hannigan is a radio operator. Tommy, Malcolm, and Sparks are all employees of Andrews’ family. "
] |
63048
|
Wanderers of the Wolf Moon
By NELSON S. BOND
They were marooned on Titan, their ship wrecked, the radio smashed. Yet they had to exist, had to build a new life on a hostile world. And the man who assumed command was Gregory Malcolm, the bespectacled secretary—whose only adventures had come through the pages of a book.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Sparks snapped off the switches and followed him to the door of the radio turret. Sparks was a stunted, usually-grinning, little redhead named Hannigan. But he wasn't grinning now. He laid an anxious hand on Greg's arm. "If I was you," he said, "if I was you, Malcolm, I don't think I'd say nothing to the boss about this. Not just yet, anyhow."
Greg said, "Why not?"
Sparks spluttered and fussed and made heavy weather of answering.
"Well, for one thing, it ain't important. It would only worry him. And then there's the womenfolks, they scare easy. Which of course they ain't no cause to. Atmospherics don't mean nothing. I've rode out worse storms than this—plenty of times. And in worse crates than the Carefree ."
Greg studied him carefully from behind trim plasta-rimmed spectacles. He drew a deep breath. He said levelly, "So it's that bad, eh, Sparks?"
"What bad? I just told you—"
"I know. Sparks, I'm not a professional spaceman. But I've studied astrogation as few Earthlubbers have. It's been my hobby for years. And I think I know what we're up against.
"We hit a warp-eddy last night. We've been trapped in a vortex for more than eight hours. Lord only knows how many hundreds of thousands of miles we've been borne off our course. And now we've blasted into a super-ionized belt of atmospherics. Your radio signals are blanketed. You can't get signals in or out. We're a deaf-mute speck of metal being whirled headlong through space. Isn't that it?"
"I don't know what—" began Sparks hotly. Then he stopped, studied his companion thoughtfully, nodded. "O.Q.," he confessed, "that's it. But we ain't licked yet. We got three good men on the bridge. Townsend ... Graves ... Langhorn. They'll pull out of this if anybody can. And they ain't no sense in scaring the Old Man and his family."
"I won't tell them," said Greg. "I won't tell them unless I have to. But between you and me, what are the odds against us, Sparks?"
The radioman shrugged.
"Who knows? Vortices are unpredictable. Maybe the damn thing will toss us out on the very spot it picked us up. Maybe it will give us the old chuckeroo a million miles the other side of Pluto. Maybe it will crack us up on an asteroid or satellite. No way of telling till it happens."
"And the controls?"
"As useless," said Sparks, "as a cow in a cyclone."
"So?"
"We sit tight," said Sparks succinctly, "and hope."
Malcolm nodded quietly. He took off his spectacles, breathed on them, wiped them, replaced them. He was tall and fair; in his neat, crisply pressed business suit he appeared even slimmer than he was. But there was no nervousness in his movements. He moved measuredly. "Well," he said, "that appears to be that. I'm going up to the dining dome."
Sparks stared at him querulously.
"You're a queer duck, Malcolm. I don't think you've got a nerve in your body."
"Nerves are a luxury I can't afford," replied Greg. "If anything happens—and if there's time to do so—let me know." He paused at the door. "Good luck," he said.
"Clear ether!" said Sparks mechanically. He stared after the other man wonderingly for a long moment, then went back to his control banks, shaking his head and muttering.
Gregory Malcolm climbed down the Jacob's-ladder and strode briskly through the labyrinthine corridors that were the entrails of the space yacht Carefree . He paused once to peer through a perilens set into the ship's port plates. It was a weird sight that met his gaze. Not space, ebony-black and bejewelled with a myriad flaming splotches of color; not the old, familiar constellations treading their ever-lasting, inexorable paths about the perimeter of Sol's tiny universe, but a shimmering webwork of light, so tortured-violet that the eyes ached to look upon it. This was the mad typhoon of space-atmospherics through which the Carefree was now being twisted, topsy-turvy, toward a nameless goal.
He moved on, approaching at last the quartzite-paned observation rotunda which was the dining dome of the ship.
His footsteps slowed as he composed himself to face those within. As he hesitated in the dimly-lighted passage, a trick of lights on glass mirrored to him the room beyond. He could see the others while they were as yet unaware of his presence. Their voices reached him clearly.
J. Foster Andrews, his employer and the employer of the ten thousand or more men and women who worked for Galactic Metals Corporation, dominated the head of the table. He was a plump, impatient little Napoleon. Opposite him, calm, graceful, serene, tastefully garbed and elaborately coiffured even here in deep space, three weeks from the nearest beauty shop, sat his wife, Enid.
On Andrews' right sat his sister, Maud. Not young, features plain as a mud fence, but charming despite her age and homeliness simply because of her eyes; puckish, shrewdly intelligent eyes, constantly aglint with suppressed humor at—guessed Greg—the amusing foibles and frailties of those about her.
She gave her breakfast the enthusiastic attention of one too old and shapeless to be concerned with such folderol as calories and dietetics, pausing only from time to time to share smidgeons of food with a watery-eyed scrap of white, curly fluff beside her chair. Her pet poodle, whom she called by the opprobrious title of "Cuddles."
On J. Foster's left sat his daughter, Crystal. She it was who caused Gregory Malcolm's staid, respectable heart to give a little lurch as he glimpsed her reflected vision—all gold and crimson and cream—in the glistening walls. If Crystal was her name, so, too, was crystal her loveliness.
But—Greg shook his head—but she was not for him. She was already pledged to the young man seated beside her. Ralph Breadon. He turned to murmur something to her as Greg watched; Greg saw and admired and disliked his rangy height, his sturdy, well-knit strength, the rich brownness of his skin, his hair, his eyes.
The sound of his own name startled Greg.
"Malcolm!" called the man at the head of the table. "Malcolm! Now where in blazes is he, anyhow?" he demanded of no one in particular, everyone in general. He spooned a dab of liquid gold from a Limoges preserve jar, tongued it suspiciously, frowned. "Bitter!" he complained.
"It's the very best Martian honey," said his wife.
"Drylands clover," added Crystal.
"It's still bitter," said J. Foster petulantly.
His sister sniffed. "Nonsense! It's delightful."
"I say it's bitter," repeated Andrews sulkily. And lifted his voice again. " Malcolm! Where are you?"
"You called me, sir?" said Malcolm, moving into the room. He nodded politely to the others. "Good morning, Mrs. Andrews ... Miss Andrews ... Mr. Breadon...."
"Oh, sit down!" snapped J. Foster. "Sit down here and stop bobbing your head like a teetotum! Had your breakfast? The honey's no good; it's bitter." He glared at his sister challengingly. "Where have you been, anyway? What kind of secretary are you? Have you been up to the radio turret? How's the market today? Is Galactic up or down?"
Malcolm said, "I don't know, sir."
"Fine! Fine!" Andrews rattled on automatically before the words registered. Then he started, his face turning red. "Eh? What's that? Don't know! What do you mean, you don't know? I pay you to—"
"There's no transmission, sir," said Greg quietly.
"No trans—nonsense! Of course there's transmission! I put a million credits into this ship. Finest space-yacht ever built. Latest equipment throughout. Sparks is drunk, that's what you mean! Well, you hop right up there and—"
Maud Andrews put down her fork with a clatter. "Oh, for goodness sakes, Jonathan, shut up and give the boy time to explain! He's standing there with his mouth gaping like a rain-spout, trying to get a word in edgewise! What's the trouble, Gregory?" She turned to Greg, as Jonathan Foster Andrews wheezed into startled silence. " That? "
She glanced at the quartzite dome, beyond which the veil of iridescence wove and cross-wove and shimmered like a pallid aurora.
Greg nodded. "Yes, Miss Andrews."
Enid Andrews spoke languidly from the other end of the table.
"But what is it, Gregory? A local phenomenon?"
"You might call it that," said Greg, selecting his words cautiously.
"It's an ionized field into which we've blasted. It—it—shouldn't stay with us long. But while it persists, our radio will be blanketed out."
Breadon's chestnut head came up suddenly, sharply.
"Ionization! That means atmosphere!"
Greg said, "Yes."
"And an atmosphere means a body in space somewhere near—" Breadon stopped, bit his lip before the appeal in Malcolm's eyes, tried to pass it off easily. "Oh, well—a change of scenery, what?"
But the moment of alarm in his voice had not passed unnoticed. Crystal Andrews spoke for all of them, her voice preternaturally quiet.
"You're hiding something, Malcolm. What is it? Is there—danger?"
But Greg didn't have to answer that question. From the doorway a harsh, defiantly strident voice answered for him. The voice of Bert Andrews, Crystal's older brother.
"Danger? You're damn right there's danger! What's the matter with you folks—are you all deaf, dumb and blind? We've been caught in a space-vortex for hours. Now we're in the H-layer of a planet we can't even see—and in fifteen minutes or fifteen seconds we may all be smashed as flat as pancakes!"
The proclamation brought them out of their chairs. Greg's heart sank; his vain plea, "Mr. Andrews—" was lost in the medley of Crystal's sudden gasp, Enid Andrews' short, choking scream, J. Foster's bellowing roar at his only son.
"Bert—you're drunk!"
Bert weaved precariously from the doorway, laughed in his father's face.
"Sure I'm drunk! Why not? If you're smart you'll get drunk, too. The whole damn lot of you!" He flicked a derisive hand toward Greg. "You too, Boy Scout! What were you trying to do—hide the bad news from them? Well, it's no use. Everybody might as well know the worst. We're gone gooses ... geeses ... aw, what the hell! Dead ducks!" He fell into a chair, sprawled there laughing mirthlessly with fear riding the too-high notes of his laughter.
J. Foster turned to his secretary slowly. His ire had faded; there was only deep concern in his voice.
"Is he telling the truth, Malcolm?"
Greg said soberly, "Partly, sir. He's overstating the danger—but there is danger. We are caught in a space-vortex, and as Mr. Breadon realized, the presence of these ionics means we're in the Heaviside-layer of some heavenly body. But we may not crack up."
Maud Andrews glanced at him shrewdly.
"Is there anything we can do?"
"Not a thing. The officers on the bridge are doing everything possible."
"In that case," said the older woman, "we might as well finish our breakfast. Here, Cuddles! Come to momsy!" She sat down again. Greg looked at her admiringly. Ralph Breadon stroked his brown jaw. He said,
"The life-skiffs?"
"A last resort," said Greg. "Sparks promised he'd let me know if it were necessary. We'll hope it's not—"
But it was a vain hope, vainly spoken in the last, vain moment. For even as he phrased the hopeful words, came the sound of swift, racing footsteps up the corridor. Into the dining dome burst Hannigan, eyes hot with excitement. And his cry dispelled Greg's final hopes for safety.
"Everybody—the Number Four life-skiff— quick ! We've been caught in a grav-drag and we're going to crash!"
II
Those next hectic moments were never afterward very clear in Greg Malcolm's memory. He had a confused recollection of hearing Sparks' warning punctuated by a loud, shrill scream which he vaguely identified as emanating from Mrs. Andrews' throat ... he was conscious of feeling, suddenly, beneath his feet the sickening, quickening lurch of a ship out of control, gripped by gravitational forces beyond its power to allay ... he recalled his own voice dinning in his ears as, incredibly, with Sparks, he took command of the hasty flight from the dining dome down the corridor to the aft ramp, up the ramp, across girdered beams in the super-structure to the small, independently motored rocket-skiff cradled there.
He was aware, too, of strangely disconnected incidents happening around him, he being a part of them but seeming to be only a disinterested spectator to their strangeness. Of his forcing Maud Andrews toward the door of the dome ... of her pushing back against him with all the weight of her body ... of her irate voice, "Cuddles! I forgot him!" Then the shrill excited yapping of the poodle cradled against her as they charged on down the corridor.
J. Foster waddling beside him, tugging at his arm, panting, "The officers?" and his own unfelt assurance. "They can take care of themselves. It's a general 'bandon ship." Enid Andrews stumbling over the hem of a filmy peignoir ... himself bending to lift her boldly and bodily, sweating palms feeling the warm animal heat of her excited body hot beneath them ... Crystal Andrews stopping suddenly, crying,
"'Tina!" ... and Hannigan's reply, "Your maid? I woke her. She's in the life-skiff." Bert Andrews stopping suddenly, being sick in the middle of the corridor, his drunkenness losing itself in the thick, sure nausea of the ever-increasing unsteadiness beneath their feet.
Then the life-skiff, the clang of metal as Hannigan slammed the port behind the last of them, the fumbling for a lock-stud, the quick, grateful pant of the miniature hypos, and a weird feeling of weightlessness, rushingness, hurtlingness as his eardrums throbbed and his mouth tasted brassy and bloody with the fierce velocity of their escape.
Sense and meaning returned only when all this ended. As one waking from a nightmare dream, Greg Malcolm returned to a world he could recognize. A tiny world, encased within the walls of a forty-foot life-skiff. A world peopled too scantily. Andrews, his wife and sister, his son and daughter; 'Tina Laney, the maid; Breadon, Hannigan, young Tommy O'Doul, the cabin-boy (though where he had come from, or when, Greg did not know). And himself. In a life-skiff. In space.
Somewhere in space. He looked through the perilens . What he saw then he might better never have seen. For that shimmering pink-ochre veil had wisped away, now, and in the clean, cold, bitter-clear light of a distant sun he watched the death-dive of the yacht Carefree .
Like a vast silver top, spinning heedlessly, wildly, it streaked toward a mottled gray and green, brown and dun, hard and crushing-brutal terrain below. Still at its helm stood someone, for even in that last dreadful moment burst from its nose-jets a ruddy mushroom of flame that tried to, but could not, brake the dizzy fall.
For an instant Greg's eyes, stingingly blinded and wet, thought they glimpsed a wee black mote dancing from the bowels of the Carefree ; a mote that might be another skiff like their own. But he could not be sure, and then the Carefree was accelerating with such violence and speed that the eye could see it only as a flaming silver lance against the ugly earth-carcase beneath, and then it struck and a carmine bud of flame burst and flowered for an instant, and that was all....
And Greg Malcolm turned from the perilens , shaken.
Hannigan said, "It's over?" and Greg nodded.
Hannigan said, "The other skiffs? Did they break free, or were they caught?"
"I don't know. I couldn't see for sure."
"You must have seen. Are we the only ones?"
"I couldn't see for sure. Maybe. Maybe not."
Then a body scrambled forward, pressing through the tightness of other huddled bodies, and there was a hand upon his elbow. "I'll take over now, Malcolm."
It was Ralph Breadon. Gregory looked at him slowly, uncomprehendingly at first. His hand was reluctant to leave the guiding-gear of the small ship which was, now, all that remained to them of civilization and civilization's wondrous accomplishments. He had not realized until this moment that for a while ... for a short, eager, pulse-quickening while ... on his alertness, in his hands, had depended the destinies of ten men and women. But he knew, suddenly and completely, that it was for this single moment his whole lifetime had waited. It was for this brief moment of command that some intuition, some instinct greater than knowledge, had prepared him. This was why he, an Earthlubber, had studied astrogation, made a hobby of the empire of the stars. That he might be fitted to command when all others failed. And now—
And now the moment was past, and he was once again Gregory Malcolm, mild, lean, pale, bespectacled secretary to J. Foster Andrews. And the man at his side was Ralph Breadon, socialite and gentleman sportsman, trained pilot. And in Malcolm the habit of obedience was strong....
"Very well, sir," he said. And he turned over the controls.
What happened then was unfortunate. It might just as well have happened to Malcolm, though afterward no one could ever say with certainty. However that was, either by carelessness or malfortune or inefficiency, once-thwarted disaster struck again at the little party on the life-skiff. At the instant Breadon's hand seized the controls the skiff jerked suddenly as though struck with a ponderous fist, its throbbing motors choked and snarled in a high, rising crescendo of torment that lost itself in supersonic heights, and the ship that had been drifting easily and under control to the planet beneath now dipped viciously.
The misfortune was that too many huddled in the tiny space understood the operation of the life-skiff, and what must be done instantly. And that neither pilot was as yet in control of the ship. Breadon's hand leaped for the Dixie rod, so, too, did Malcolm's—and across both their bodies came the arm of Sparks Hannigan, searching the controls.
In the scramble someone's sleeve brushed the banks of control-keys. The motors, killed, soughed into silence. The ship rocked into a spin. Greg cried out, his voice a strange harshness in his ears; Breadon cursed; one of the women bleated fearfully.
Then Breadon, still cursing, fought all hands from the controls but his own. And the man was not without courage. For all could see plainly, in the illumined perilens , how near to swift death that moment of uncertainty had led them. The skiff, which an instant before had been high in the stratosphere of this unknown planet ... or satellite or whatever it might be ... was now flashing toward hard ground at lightning speed.
Only a miracle, Greg knew, could save them now. An impulse spun his head, he looked at Crystal Andrews. There was no fear in her eyes. Just a hotness and an inexplicable anger. Beside her was the other girl, the maid, 'Tina; she was frankly afraid. Her teeth were clenched in her nether lip, and her eyes were wide and anxious, but she did not cry out.
Only a miracle could save them now. But Breadon's hands performed that miracle; his quick, nerveless, trained hands. A stud here ... a lever there ... a swift wrenching toss of the shoulders. His face twisted back over his shoulder, and his straining lips pulled taut and bloodless away from his teeth. "Hold tight, folks! We're going to bounce—"
Then they struck!
But they struck glancingly, as Breadon had hoped, and planned for, and gambled on. They struck and bounced. The frail craft shivered and groaned in metal agony, jarred across harsh soil, bounced again, settled, nosed over and rocked to a standstill. Somewhere forward something snapped with a shrill, high ping! of stress; somewhere aft was the metallic flap-clanging of broken gear trailing behind them. But they were safe.
Breath, held so long that he could not remember its inhalation, escaped Greg's lungs in a long sigh. "Nice work, Mr. Breadon!" he cried. "Oh, nice work!"
But surprisingly, savagely, Breadon turned on him.
"It would have been better work, Malcolm, if you'd kept your damned hands off the controls! Now see what you've done? Smashed up our skiff! Our only—"
"He didn't do it!" piped the shrill voice of Tommy O'Doul. "You done it yourself, Mr. Breadon. Your sleeve. It caught the switch."
"Quiet!" Breadon, cheeks flushed, reached out smartly, stilled the youngster's defense with a swift, ungentle slap. "And you, Malcolm—after this, do as you're told, and don't try to assume responsibilities too great for you. All right, everybody. Let's get out and see how bad the damage is."
Instinctively Greg had surged a half step forward as Breadon silenced the cabin boy. Now old habit and common-sense halted him. He's overwrought, he reasoned. We're all excited and on edge. We've been to Bedlam. Our nerves are shot. In a little while we'll all be back to normal.
He said quietly, "Very well, Mr. Breadon." And he climbed from the broken skiff.
Hannigan said, "Looks bad, don't it?"
"Very," said Malcolm. He fingered a shard of loose metal flapping like a fin from the stern of the skiff. "Not hopeless, though. There should be an acetylene torch in the tool locker. With that—"
"You ought to of poked him," said Hannigan.
"What? Oh, you mean—?"
"Yeah. The kid was right, you know. He done it."
"His sleeve, you mean. Well, it was an accident," said Greg. "It could have happened to anyone. And he made a good landing. Considering everything. Anyhow—" Again he was Gregory Malcolm, serious-faced, efficient secretary. "Anyhow, we have been thrust into an extremely precarious circumstance. It would be silly to take umbrage at a man's nervous anger. We must have no quarreling, no bickering—"
"Umbrage!" snorted Sparks. "Bickering! They're big words. I ain't sure I know what they mean. I ain't exactly sure they mean anything ." He glanced at Greg oddly. "You're a queer jasper, Malcolm. Back there on the ship, I figured you for a sort of a stuffed-shirt. Yes-man to the boss. And then in the show-down, you come through like a movie hero—for a little while. Then you let that Breadon guy give you the spur without a squawk—"
Malcolm adjusted his plasta-rimmed spectacles. He said, almost stubbornly, "Our situation is grave. There must be no bickering."
"Bickering your Aunt Jenny! What do you call that?"
Sparks jerked a contemptuous thumb toward the group from which they were separated. Upon disembarking, only Greg and Sparks had moved to make a careful examination of their damaged craft. The others, more or less under the direction of Breadon, were making gestures toward removing certain necessaries from the skiff. Their efforts, slight and uncertain as they were, had already embroiled them in argument.
The gist of their argument, so far as Greg Malcolm could determine, was that everyone wanted "something" to be done, but no two could agree as to just what that something was, and no one seemed to have any bursting desire to participate in actual physical labor.
J. Foster Andrews, all traces of his former panic and confusion fled, was planted firmly, Napoleonically, some few yards from the open port of the life-skiff, barking impatient orders at little Tommy O'Doul who—as Greg watched—stumbled from the port bearing a huge armload of edibles.
'Tina, the maid, was in a frenzy of motion, trying to administer to the complaints and demands of Mrs. Andrews (whose immaculate hair-do had suffered in the frenetic minutes of their flight) and Crystal Andrews
(who knew perfectly well there were sweaters in the life-skiff) and Miss Maud (who wanted a can of prepared dog-food and a can-opener immediately, and look at poor Cuddles, momsy's 'ittle pet was so hungry)!
Bert Andrews was sulkily insisting that it was nonsense to leave the warmth and security of the skiff anyway, and he wished he had a drink, while the harassed, self-appointed commander of the refugee corps was shouting at whomever happened, at any given moment, to capture his divided and completely frantic attention. His orders were masterpieces of confusion, developing around one premise that the castaway crew should immediately set up a camp. Where, how, or with what nonexistent equipment, Breadon did not venture to say.
"You see what I mean?" demanded Sparks disgustedly.
Greg Malcolm saw. He also saw other things. That their landing-spot, while excellent for its purpose, was not by any manner of means an ideal campsite. It was a small, flat basin of sandy soil, rimmed by shallow mountains. His gaze sought these hills, looked approvingly on their greenness, upon the multitude of dark pock-marks dotting them. These caves, were they not the habitations of potential enemies, might well become the sanctuaries of spacewrecked men.
He saw, also, a thin ribbon of silver sheering the face of the northern hills. His gaze, rising still skyward, saw other things—
He nodded. He knew, now, where they were. Or approximately. There was but one planet in the solar system which boasted such a phenomenon. The apparent distance of the Sun, judged by its diminished disc, argued his judgment to be correct. The fact that they had surged through an atmospheric belt for some length of time before finally meeting with disaster.
"Titan," he said. "Hyperion possibly. But probably Titan."
Sparks' gaze, following Greg's upward, contracted in an expression of dismay.
"Dirty cow! You mean that's where we are?"
"I believe so. There's Saturn, our mother planet, looming above us as large as a dinner plate. And the grav-drag here is almost Earth norm. Titan has a 3,000 mile diameter. That, combined with the Saturnian tractile constant, would give us a strong pull."
Sparks wailed, "But Titan! Great morning, Malcolm, nobody ever comes to Titan! There ain't no mines here, no colonies, no—" He stopped suddenly, his eyes widening yet farther. "And, hey—this place is dangerous ! There are—"
"I know it," said Greg swiftly, quietly. "Shut up, Sparks. No use telling the others. If they don't guess it themselves, what they don't know won't alarm them. We've got to do something, though. Get ourselves organized into a defensive community. That's the only way—"
Ralph Breadon's sharp, dictatorial voice interrupted him. "Well, Malcolm, stop soldiering and make yourself useful!"
And J. Foster, not to have his authority usurped, supplemented the order. "Yes, Malcolm, let's get going! No time for day-dreaming, my man. We want action!"
Sparks said, "Maybe you'll get it now, fatty!" under his breath, and looked at Malcolm hopefully. But his companion merely nodded, moved forward toward the others, quietly obedient to the command.
"Yes, sir," he said.
Hannigan groaned and followed him.
III
Breadon said, "All right, Tommy, dump them here. I have a few words to say." He glanced about him pompously. "Now, folks, naturally we want to get away from here as soon as possible. Therefore I delegate you, Sparks, to immediately get a message off. An SOS to the nearest space cruiser."
Hannigan grinned. It was not a pleasant grin. He took his time answering. He spat thoughtfully on the ground before him, lifted his head. He said, "A message, huh?"
"That's what I said."
"And what'll I send it with?" drawled Sparks. "Tom-toms?"
Breadon flushed darkly.
"I believe the life-skiff was equipped with a radio? And theoretically you are a radio operator?"
"Finest radio money can buy!" interpolated J. Foster Andrews proudly.
"Put a million credits into the Carefree . Best equipment throughout."
Sparks looked from one to another of them, grinned insolently. "You're both right. I am a radio operator, and there was a radio. But we crashed, remember? On account of some dope's sleeve got caught in the master switch—"
"That will do!" snapped Breadon angrily. He stared at the bandy-legged little redhead. "You mean the radio was broken?"
"It wasn't helped none. The tubes was made out of glass, and glass don't bounce so good."
Greg Malcolm said thoughtfully, "Sparks, can't you fix it?"
"Well, mebbe. But not in five minutes. Maybe not in five years. I won't know till I get going on it."
Breadon frowned.
"I'll handle this, Malcolm," he crisped. Again to the radioman, "Well, you get to work on it immediately. And as soon as you get it fixed, send out an SOS advising the patrol where we are—"
"Speaking of which," insinuated Sparks, "where are we?"
Breadon glared at him wrathfully.
"Why—why on one of the satellites of Saturn, of course. Any fool can see that!"
"O.Q. But does any fool know which one? Or shall I tell you it's Titan? And when you know that, then what? Titan wasn't named that on account of it was a pimple. It's a big place. What'll I tell the Patrol? SOS. Stranded in the middle of we-don't-know-where, somewhere on Titan, maybe. They'll be hunting for us till we've got whiskers down to our knees."
Breadon's irate look vanished. He looked stricken. He said, "I—I don't know. We have a compass—"
Once again it was Gregory Malcolm who entered into the conversation. He had been toying, almost absentmindedly, with a funnel taken from the skiff's stores. Into this he had poured a small portion of water; his right forefinger was pressed to the bottom of the tube, closing it. He said, "I can answer part of that question now. Enough to cut the search in half, anyway. We're in the northern hemisphere of the satellite."
Maud Andrews looked at him sharply as if noticing him for the first time in her life.
"How," she asked, "did you know that, Malcolm?"
|
What is the relationship between The Goon and the band?
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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:
What is the relationship between The Goon and the band?
Answer:
|
[
"The Goon has many names and is also referred to as Ke-teeli and The Face. Ke-teeli is the boss of the three current members of the band, one member is out because he is injured. Ke-teeli owns an establishment that the band performs at. However, Ke-teeli repeatedly expresses his frustration and distaste over the band’s music. Jimmie Stanley believes that Ke-teeli is really more unhappy with the lack of money that his establishment, The Space Room, is earning. \n\nWhen John Smith joins the band with his Zloomph instrument, The Goon seems to respond well. More cash is flowing into the business as the audience agrees with the music. However, The Goon will not let the bandmates sign a contract with him for their unemployment unless they can guarantee that John Smith and his Zloomph instrument will join them. \n",
"The Goon is the boss of the band. He is upset that the bass fiddle man is missing. Jimmie mentions that The Goon will be angry if he finds out that there’s a cigarette hole burned in it. The band sometimes refers The Goon as Goon-Face and The Eye. This is the last week before the band’s contract with The Goon ends. The band is worried that The Goon will not continue the contract since he has been showing little enthusiasm for their music. He always comment either too fast and loud or too slow and soft. He even states that it is better to have the customers disappointed than have them hear bad music. After he sees The Goon staring at them, Jimmie decides to start playing. Once The Goon hears the beautiful music played by John, he looks very surprised and is enjoying it. In the end, The Goon states that there will be a contract if the fiddle player comes as well. ",
"Goon-Face is the boss of the band. He is a business man and is looking only for profit, which doesn't satisfy him. The contract is ending soon and he doesn't see the reason in prolonging it. He is very irritable and considers the band's music bad. He liked John, but without him he doesn't need the band. He is cold and direct, his speech is concise. It's impossible to convince him or beg for something, he stays indifferent. ",
"Goon-Face runs The Space Room and is considered to be the boss of the band. They have a contract with him to play their music at the establishment. However, Goon-Face is initially very displeased by the fact that there are only three members present. He is also unwilling to renew the contract and constantly criticizes the band’s music. Jimmie believes that the real reason is that there is not enough business in the establishment. Even when Jimmie says that the three of them will continue to play, if the fourth does not show up, Goon-Face is not impressed and says that having no music is better than bad music. He even tells them that if no bassist shows up, then they will go home. Once John Smith plays, he is pleased and beams like a kitten who has seen a quart of cream. Business begins to get better, but he is still cautious of the contract. He tells the band that he will only continue their contract if John Smith stays and signs it. After John disappears, he is furious again and refuses to discuss any contract because the bass fiddle man is gone. "
] |
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 the significance of enslavement in the story?
|
After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about Raiders of the Second Moon by Basil Wells.
Relevant chunks:
Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
Raiders of the Second Moon
By GENE ELLERMAN
A strange destiny had erased Noork's memory,
and had brought him to this tiny world—to
write an end to his first existence.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories Summer 1945.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Beyond earth swings that airless pocked mass of fused rock and gray
volcanic dust that we know as Luna. Of this our naked eyes assure us.
But of the smaller satellite, hidden forever from the mundane view by
Luna's bulk, we know little.
Small is Sekk, that second moon, less than five hundred miles in
diameter, but the period of its revolution is thirty two hours, and its
meaner mass retains a breathable atmosphere. There is life on Sekk,
life that centers around the sunken star-shaped cavity where an oval
lake gleams softly in the depths. And the eleven radiating tips of the
starry abyss are valleys green with jungle growth.
In one of those green valleys the white savage that the Vasads called
Noork squatted in the ample crotch of a jungle giant and watched the
trail forty feet below. For down there moved alertly a golden skinned
girl, her only weapons a puny polished bow of yellow wood and a
sheathed dagger.
Sight of the girl's flowing brown hair and the graceful feminine
contours of her smooth-limbed body beneath its skin-halter and the
insignificant breech-clout, made his brow wrinkle with concentration.
Not forever had he lived in this jungle world of valleys and ragged
cliffs. Since he had learned the tongue of the hairy Vasads of forest,
and the tongue of their gold-skinned leader, Gurn, the renegade, he had
confirmed that belief.
For a huge gleaming bird had carried him in its talons to the top of
the cliff above their valley and from the rock fire had risen to devour
the great bird. Somehow he had been flung clear and escaped the death
of the mysterious bird-thing. And in his delirium he had babbled the
words that caused the apish Vasads to name him Noork. Now he repeated
them aloud.
"New York," he said, "good ol' New York."
The girl heard. She looked upward fearfully, her rounded bare arm going
back to the bow slung across her shoulder. Swiftly she fitted an arrow
and stepped back against the friendly bole of a shaggy barked jungle
giant. Noork grinned.
"Tako, woman," he greeted her.
"Tako," she replied fearfully. "Who speaks to Tholon Sarna? Be you
hunter or escaped slave?"
"A friend," said Noork simply. "It was I who killed the spotted
narl
last night when it attacked you."
Doubtfully the girl put away her bow. Her fingers, however, were never
far from the hilt of her hunting dagger.
Noork swung outward from his perch, and then downward along the ladder
of limbs to her side. The girl exclaimed at his brown skin.
"Your hair is the color of the sun!" she said. "Your garb is Vasad, yet
you speak the language of the true men." Her violet oddly slanting eyes
opened yet wider. "Who are you?"
"I am Noork," the man told her. "For many days have I dwelt among the
wild Vasads of the jungle with their golden-skinned chief, Gurn, for
my friend."
The girl impulsively took a step nearer. "Gurn!" she cried. "Is he tall
and strong? Has he a bracelet of golden discs linked together with
human hair? Does he talk with his own shadow when he thinks?"
"That is Gurn," admitted Noork shortly. "He is also an exile from the
walled city of Grath. The city rulers call him a traitor. He has told
me the reason. Perhaps you know it as well?"
"Indeed I do," cried Sarna. "My brother said that we should no longer
make slaves of the captured Zurans from the other valleys."
Noork smiled. "I am glad he is your brother," he said simply.
The girl's eyes fell before his admiring gaze and warm blood flooded
into her rounded neck and lovely cheeks.
"Brown-skinned one!" she cried with a stamp of her shapely little
sandalled foot. "I am displeased with the noises of your tongue. I will
listen to it no more."
But her eyes gave the provocative lie to her words. This brown-skinned
giant with the sunlit hair was very attractive....
The girl was still talking much later, as they walked together along
the game-trail. "When my captors were but one day's march from their
foul city of Bis the warriors of the city of Konto, through whose
fertile valley we had journeyed by night, fell upon the slavers.
"And in the confusion of the attack five of us escaped. We returned
toward the valley of Grath, but to avoid the intervening valley where
our enemies, the men of Konto, lived, we swung close to the Lake of
Uzdon. And the Misty Ones from the Temple of the Skull trailed us. I
alone escaped."
Noork lifted the short, broad-bladed sword that swung in its sheath
at his belt and let it drop back into place with a satisfying whisper
of flexible leather on steel. He looked toward the east where lay the
mysterious long lake of the Misty Ones.
"Some day," he said reflectively, "I am going to visit the island of
the unseen evil beings who stole away your friends. Perhaps after I
have taken you to your brother's hidden village, and from there to
your city of Grath...." He smiled.
The girl did not answer. His keen ears, now that he was no longer
speaking, caught the scuffing of feet into the jungle behind him. He
turned quickly to find the girl had vanished, and with an instinctive
reflex of motion he flung himself to one side into the dense wall of
the jungle. As it was the unseen club thudded down along his right arm,
numbing it so he felt nothing for some time.
One armed as he was temporarily, and with an unseen foe to reckon with,
Noork awkwardly swung up into the comparative safety of the trees. Once
there, perched in the crotch of a mighty jungle monarch, he peered down
at the apparently empty stretch of sunken trail beneath.
Noork
At first he saw nothing out of the ordinary. Apparently there was no
stir of life along that leaf-shadowed way. And then he caught a glimpse
of blurring shadowy shapes, blotches of cottony mist that blended all
too well with the foliage. One of the things from the island in the
Lake of Uzdon moved, and he saw briefly the bottom of a foot dirtied
with the mud of the trail.
Noork squinted. So the Misty Ones were not entirely invisible. Pain
was growing in his numbed arm now, but as it came so came strength. He
climbed further out on the great branch to where sticky and overripe
fruit hung heavy. With a grin he locked his legs upon the forking of
the great limb and filled his arms with fruit.
A barrage of the juicy fruit blanketed the misty shapes. Stains spread
and grew. Patchy outlines took on a new color and sharpness. Noork
found that he was pelting a half-dozen hooded and robed creatures whose
arms and legs numbered the same as his own, and the last remnant of
superstitious fear instilled in his bruised brain by the shaggy Vasads
vanished.
These Misty Ones were living breathing creatures like himself! They
were not gods, or demons, or even the ghostly servants of demons. He
strung his bow quickly, the short powerful bow that Gurn had given him,
and rained arrows down upon the cowering robed creatures.
And the monsters fled. They fled down the trail or faded away into the
jungle. All but one of them. The arrow had pierced a vital portion of
this Misty One's body. He fell and moved no more.
A moment later Noork was ripping the stained cloak and hood from the
fallen creature, curious to learn what ghastly brute-thing hid beneath
them. His lip curled at what he saw.
The Misty One was almost like himself. His skin was not so golden as
that of the other men of Zuran, and his forehead was low and retreating
in a bestial fashion. Upon his body there was more hair, and his face
was made hideous with swollen colored scars that formed an irregular
design. He wore a sleeveless tunic of light green and his only weapons
were two long knives and a club.
"So," said Noork, "the men of the island prey upon their own kind. And
the Temple of Uzdon in the lake is guarded by cowardly warriors like
this."
Noork shrugged his shoulders and set off at a mile-devouring pace down
the game trail toward the lake where the Temple of the Skull and its
unseen guardians lay. Once he stopped at a leaf-choked pool to wash the
stains from the dead man's foggy robe.
The jungle was thinning out. Noork's teeth flashed as he lifted the
drying fabric of the mantle and donned it.
Ud tasted the scent of a man and sluggishly rolled his bullet head from
shoulder to shoulder as he tried to catch sight of his ages-old enemy.
For between the hairy quarter-ton beast men of the jungles of Sekk and
the golden men of the valley cities who enslaved them there was eternal
war.
A growl rumbled deep in the hairy half-man's chest. He could see no
enemy and yet the scent grew stronger with every breath.
"You hunt too near the lake," called a voice. "The demons of the water
will trap you."
Ud's great nostrils quivered. He tasted the odor of a friend mingled
with that of a strange Zuran. He squatted.
"It's Noork," he grunted. "Why do I not see you?"
"I have stolen the skin of a demon," answered the invisible man. "Go to
Gurn. Tell him to fear the demons no longer. Tell him the Misty Ones
can be trapped and skinned."
"Why you want their skins?" Ud scratched his hairy gray skull.
"Go to save Gurn's ..." and here Noork was stumped for words. "To save
his father's woman woman," he managed at last. "Father's woman woman
called Sarna."
And the misty blob of nothingness was gone again, its goal now the
marshy lowlands that extended upward perhaps a thousand feet from the
jungle's ragged fringe to end at last in the muddy shallows of the Lake
of Uzdon.
To Noork it seemed that all the world must be like these savage jungle
fastnesses of the twelve valleys and their central lake. He knew that
the giant bird had carried him from some other place that his battered
brain could not remember, but to him it seemed incredible that men
could live elsewhere than in a jungle valley.
But Noork was wrong. The giant bird that he had ridden into the depths
of Sekk's fertile valleys had come from a far different world. And the
other bird, for which Noork had been searching when he came upon the
golden-skinned girl, was from another world also.
The other bird had come from space several days before that of Noork,
the Vasads had told him, and it had landed somewhere within the land
of sunken valleys. Perhaps, thought Noork, the bird had come from the
same valley that had once been his home. He would find the bird and
perhaps then he could remember better who he had been.
So it was, ironically enough, that Stephen Dietrich—whose memory was
gone completely—again took up the trail of Doctor Karl Von Mark, last
of the Axis criminals at large. The trail that had led the red-haired
young American flier from rebuilding Greece into Africa and the hidden
valley where Doctor Von Mark worked feverishly to restore the crumbled
structure of Nazidom, and then had sent him hurtling spaceward in the
second of the Doctor's crude space-ships was now drawing to an end.
The Doctor and the young American pilot were both trapped here on this
little blob of cosmic matter that hides beyond the Moon's cratered bulk.
The Doctor's ship had landed safely on Sekk, the wily scientist
preferring the lesser gravity of this fertile world to that of the
lifeless Moon in the event that he returned again to Earth, but
Dietrich's spacer had crashed.
Two words linked Noork with the past, the two words that the Vasads
had slurred into his name: New York. And the battered wrist watch, its
crystal and hands gone, were all that remained of his Earthly garb.
Noork paddled the long flat dugout strongly away from the twilight
shore toward the shadowy loom of the central island. Though he could
not remember ever having held a paddle before he handled the ungainly
blade well.
After a time the clumsy prow of the craft rammed into a yielding
cushion of mud, and Noork pulled the dugout out of the water into the
roofing shelter of a clump of drooping trees growing at the water's
edge.
Sword in hand he pushed inward from the shore and ended with a
smothered exclamation against an unseen wall. Trees grew close up to
the wall and a moment later he had climbed out along a horizontal
branch beyond the wall's top, and was lowering his body with the aid of
a braided leather rope to the ground beyond.
He was in a cultivated field his feet and hands told him. And perhaps
half a mile away, faintly illumined by torches and red clots of
bonfires, towered a huge weathered white skull!
Secure in the knowledge that he wore the invisible robes of a Misty
One he found a solitary tree growing within the wall and climbed to a
comfortable crotch. In less than a minute he was asleep.
"The new slave," a rough voice cut across his slumber abruptly, "is the
daughter of Tholon Dist the merchant."
Noork was fully awake now. They were speaking of Sarna. Her father's
name was Tholon Dist. It was early morning in the fields of the Misty
Ones and he could see the two golden-skinned slaves who talked together
beneath his tree.
"That matters not to the priests of Uzdon," the slighter of the
two slaves, his hair almost white, said. "If she be chosen for the
sacrifice to great Uzdon her blood will stain the altar no redder than
another's."
"But it is always the youngest and most beautiful," complained the
younger slave, "that the priests chose. I wish to mate with a beautiful
woman. Tholon Sarna is such a one."
The old man chuckled dryly. "If your wife be plain," he said, "neither
master nor fellow slave will steal her love. A slave should choose a
good woman—and ugly, my son."
"Some night," snarled the slave, "I'm going over the wall. Even the
Misty Ones will not catch me once I have crossed the lake."
"Silence," hissed the white-haired man. "Such talk is madness. We are
safe here from wild animals. There are no spotted narls on the island
of Manak. The priests of most holy Uzdon, and their invisible minions,
are not unkind.
"Get at your weeding of the field, Rold," he finished, "and I will
complete my checking of the gardens."
Noork waited until the old man was gone before he descended from the
tree. He walked along the row until he reached the slave's bent back,
and he knew by the sudden tightening of the man's shoulder muscles
that his presence was known. He looked down and saw that his feet made
clear-cut depressions in the soft rich soil of the field.
"Continue to work," he said to the young man. "Do not be too surprised
at what I am about to tell you, Rold." He paused and watched the golden
man's rather stupid face intently.
"I am not a Misty One," Noork said. "I killed the owner of this strange
garment I wear yesterday on the mainland. I have come to rescue the
girl, Tholon Sarna, of whom you spoke."
Rold's mouth hung open but his hard blunt fingers continued to work.
"The Misty Ones, then," he said slowly, "are not immortal demons!" He
nodded his long-haired head. "They are but men. They too can die."
"If you will help me, Rold," said Noork, "to rescue the girl and escape
from the island I will take you along."
Rold was slow in answering. He had been born on the island and yet his
people were from the valley city of Konto. He knew that they would
welcome the news that the Misty Ones were not demons. And the girl from
the enemy city of Grath was beautiful. Perhaps she would love him for
helping to rescue her and come willingly with him to Konto.
"I will help you, stranger," he agreed.
"Then tell me of the Skull, and of the priests, and of the prison where
Tholon Sarna is held."
The slave's fingers flew. "All the young female slaves are caged
together in the pit beneath the Skull. When the sun is directly
overhead the High Priest will choose one of them for sacrifice to
mighty Uzdon, most potent of all gods. And with the dawning of the
next day the chosen one will be bound across the altar before great
Uzdon's image and her heart torn from her living breast." The slave's
mismatched eyes, one blue and the other brown, lifted from his work.
"Tholon Sarna is in the pit beneath the Temple with the other female
slaves. And the Misty Ones stand guard over the entrance to the temple
pits."
"It is enough," said Noork. "I will go to rescue her now. Be prepared
to join us as we return. I will have a robe for you if all goes well."
"If you are captured," cried Rold nervously, "you will not tell them I
talked with you?"
Noork laughed. "You never saw me," he told the slave.
The skull was a gigantic dome of shaped white stone. Where the
eye-sockets and gaping nose-hole should have been, black squares of
rock gave the illusion of vacancy. Slitted apertures that served for
windows circled the grisly whiteness of the temple's curving walls at
three distinct levels.
Noork drifted slowly up the huge series of long bench-like steps
that led up to the gaping jaws of the Skull. He saw red and
purple-robed priests with nodding head-dresses of painted plumes and
feathers climbing and descending the stairs. Among them moved the
squatty gnarled shapes of burdened Vasads, their shaggy bowed legs
fettered together with heavy copper or bronze chains, and cringing
golden-skinned slaves slipped furtively through the press of the
brilliant-robed ones. The stale sweaty odor of the slaves and the beast
men mingled with the musky stench of the incense from the temple.
Other misty blobs, the invisible guards of the ghastly temple, were
stationed at regular intervals across the great entrance into the
Skull's interior, but they paid Noork no heed. To them he was another
of their number.
He moved swiftly to cross the wide stone-slabbed entry within the
jaws, and a moment later was looking down into a sunken bowl whose
rocky floor was a score of feet below where he stood. Now he saw the
central raised altar where the gleam of precious stones and cunningly
worked metal—gold, silver and brass—vied with the faded garish
colors of the draperies beneath it. And on the same dais there loomed
two beast-headed stone images, the lion-headed god a male and the
wolf-headed shape a female.
These then were the two blood hungry deities that the men of Zura
worshipped—mighty Uzdon and his mate, Lornu!
Noork joined the descending throng that walked slowly down the central
ramp toward the altar. As he searched for the entrance to the lower
pits his eyes took in the stone steps that led upward into the two
upper levels. Only priests and the vague shapelessness of the Misty
Ones climbed those steps. The upper levels, then, were forbidden to
the slaves and common citizens of the island.
As he circled the curving inner wall a foul dank odor reached his
sensitive nostrils, and his eyes searched for its origin. He found it
there just before him, the opening that gave way to a descending flight
of clammy stone steps. He darted toward the door and from nowhere two
short swords rose to bar his way.
"None are to pass save the priests," spoke a voice from nowhere
gruffly. "The High Priest knows that we of the temple guards covet the
most beautiful of the slave women, but we are not to see them until the
sacrifice is chosen."
Noork moved backward a pace. He grumbled something inaudible and drew
his sword. Before him the two swords slowly drew aside.
In that instant Noork attacked. His keen sword, whetted to razor
sharpness on abrasive bits of rock, bit through the hidden neck and
shoulder of the guard on his right hand, and with the same forward
impetus of attack he smashed into the body of the startled guard on his
left.
His sword had wrenched from his hand as it jammed into the bony
structure of the decapitated Misty One's shoulder, and now both his
hands sought the throat of the guard. The unseen man's cry of warning
gurgled and died in his throat as Noork clamped his fingers shut upon
it, and his shortened sword stabbed at Noork's back.
The struggle overbalanced them. They rolled over and over down the
shadowy stair, the stone smashing at their softer flesh unmercifully.
For a moment the battling men brought up with a jolt as the obstruction
of the first guard's corpse arrested their downward course, and then
they jolted and jarred onward again from blood-slippery step to
blood-slippery step.
The sword clattered from the guardian Misty One's clutch and in the
same instant Noork's steel fingers snapped the neck of the other man
with a pistol-like report. The limp body beneath him struggled no more.
He sprang to his feet and became aware of a torch-lighted doorway but a
half-dozen paces further down along the descending shaft of steps.
In a moment, he thought, the fellows of this guard would come charging
out, swords in hand. They could not have failed to hear the struggle
on the stairs of stone, he reasoned, for here the noise and confusion
of the upper temple was muted to a murmur.
So it was that he ran quickly to the door, in his hand the sword that
had dropped from the dead man's fingers, and sprang inside, prepared to
battle there the Misty Ones, lest one escape to give the alarm.
He looked about the narrow stone-walled room with puzzled eyes. Two
warriors lay on a pallet of straw, one of them emitting hideous
gurgling sounds that filled the little room with unpleasing echoes.
Noork grinned.
From the floor beside the fatter of the two men, the guard who did not
snore, he took a club. Twice he struck and the gurgling sound changed
to a steady deep breathing. Noork knew that now the two guards would
not give the alarm for several hours. Thoughtfully he looked about the
room. There were several of the hooded cloaks hanging from pegs wedged
into the crevices of the chamber's wall, their outlines much plainer
here in the artificial light of the flickering torch.
Noork shed his own blood-stained robe quickly and donned one of the
others. The cloaks were rather bulky and so he could carry but two
others, rolled up, beneath his own protective covering.
The matter of his disguise thus taken care of he dragged the two bodies
from the stairway and hid them beneath their own fouled robes in the
chamber of the sleeping guards. Not until then did he hurry on down the
stone steps toward the prison pit where Tholon Sarna, the golden girl,
was held prisoner.
The steps opened into a dimly lit cavern. Pools of foul black water
dotted the uneven floor and reflected back faintly the light of the two
sputtering torches beside the entrance. One corner of the cavern was
walled off, save for a narrow door of interlocking brass strips, and
toward this Noork made his way.
He stood beside the door. "Sarna," he called softly, "Tholon Sarna."
There were a score of young women, lately captured from the mainland
by the Misty Ones, sitting dejectedly upon the foul dampness of the
rotting grass that was their bed. Most of them were clad in the simple
skirt and brief jacket, reaching but to the lower ribs, that is the
mark of the golden people who dwell in the city-states of Zura's
valleys, but a few wore a simple band of cloth about their hips and
confined their breasts with a strip of well-cured leopard or antelope
hide.
One of the women now came to her feet and as she neared the
metal-barred entrance Noork saw that she was indeed Sarna. He examined
the outer lock of the door and found it to be barred with a massive
timber and the timber locked in place with a metal spike slipped into a
prepared cavity in the prison's rocky wall.
"It is Noork," he said softly as she came closer. He saw her eyes go
wide with fear and sudden hope, and then reached for the spike.
"The priest," hissed the girl.
Noork had already heard the sound of approaching feet. He dropped the
spike and whirled. His sword was in his hand as though by magic, as he
faced the burly priest of the Skull.
Across the forehead and upper half of the priest's face a curved shield
of transparent tinted material was fastened. Noork's eyes narrowed as
he saw the sword and shield of the gigantic holy man.
"So," he said, "to the priests of Uzdon we are not invisible. You do
not trust your guards, then."
The priest laughed. "We also have robes of invisibility," he said, "and
the sacred window of Uzdon before our eyes." He snarled suddenly at the
silent figure of the white man. "Down on your knees, guard, and show me
your face before I kill you!"
Noork raised his sword. "Take my hood off if you dare, priest," he
offered.
The burly priest's answer was a bellow of rage and a lunge forward of
his sword arm. Their swords clicked together and slid apart with the
velvety smoothness of bronze on bronze. Noork's blade bit a chunk from
the priest's conical shield, and in return received a slashing cut that
drew blood from left shoulder to elbow.
The fighting grew more furious as the priest pressed the attack. He
was a skilled swordsman and only the superior agility of the white
man's legs kept Noork away from that darting priestly blade. Even so
his robe was slashed in a dozen places and blood reddened his bronzed
body. Once he slipped in a puddle of foul cavern water and only by the
slightest of margins did he escape death by the priest's weapon.
The priest was tiring rapidly, however. The soft living of the temple,
and the rich wines and over-cooked meats that served to pad his paunch
so well with fat, now served to rob him of breath. He opened his
mouth to bawl for assistance from the guard, although it is doubtful
whether any sound could have penetrated up into the madhouse of the
main temple's floor, and in that instant Noork flipped his sword at his
enemy.
Between the shield and the transparent bit of curving material the
sword drove, and buried itself deep in the priest's thick neck. Noork
leaped forward; he snatched the tinted face shield and his sword, and a
moment later he had torn the great wooden timber from its sockets.
Tholon Sarna stumbled through the door and he caught her in his arms.
Hurriedly he loosed one of the two robes fastened about his waist and
slipped it around her slim shivering shoulders.
"Are there other priests hidden here in the pits?" Noork asked tensely.
"No," came the girl's low voice, "I do not think so. I did not know
that this priest was here until he appeared behind you." A slow smile
crossed Noork's hidden features. "His robe must be close by," he told
the girl. "He must have been stationed here because the priests feared
the guards might spirit away some of the prisoners."
Slowly he angled back and forth across the floor until his foot touched
the soft material of the priest's discarded robe near the stairway
entrance. He slipped the thongs of the transparent mask, called by the
priest "Uzdon's window" over his hood, and then proceeded to don the
new robe.
"My own robe is slit in a dozen places," he explained to the girl's
curious violet eyes—-all that was visible through the narrow vision
slot of her hood. He finished adjusting the outer robe and took the
girl's hand.
"Come," he said, "let us escape over the wall before the alarm is
given."
Without incident they reached the field where Rold toiled among the
rows of vegetables. Another slave was working in a nearby field,
his crude wooden plow pulled by two sweating Vasads, but he was not
watching when Rold abruptly faded from view.
Noork was sweating with the weight of two cloaks and the airlessness of
the vision shield as they crossed the field toward his rope, but he had
no wish to discard them yet. The tinted shield had revealed that dozens
of the Misty Ones were stationed about the wall to guard against the
escape of the slaves.
They came to the wall and to Noork's great joy found the rope hanging
as he had left it. He climbed the wall first and then with Rold helping
from below, drew Sarna to his side. A moment later saw the three of
them climbing along the limb to the bole of the tree and so to the
jungle matted ground outside the wall.
"Will we hide here in the trees until night?" asked the girl's full
voice.
Noork held aside a mossy creeper until the girl had passed. "I think
not," he said. "The Misty Ones are continually passing from the island
to the shore. We are Misty Ones to any that watch from the wall. So we
will paddle boldly across the water."
"That is good," agreed the slave, "unless they see us put out from the
shore. Their two landing stages are further along the beach, opposite
the Temple of Uzdon."
"Then we must hug to the shore until we pass the tip of the island,"
said Noork thoughtfully. "In that way even if they detect us we will
have put a safe distance between us."
Shortly after midday Noork felt the oozy slime of the marshy lowlands
of the mainland beneath his paddle and the dugout ran ashore in the
grassy inlet for which they had been heading. His palms were blistered
and the heavy robes he yet wore were soaked with sweat.
"Once we reach the jungle," he told the girl, "off come these robes. I
am broiled alive."
Suddenly Noork froze in his tracks. He thrust the girl behind him.
"Misty Ones!" he hissed to Rold. "They crouch among the reeds. They
carry nets and clubs to trap us."
Rold turned back toward the boat with Noork and Sarna close at his
heels. But the Misty Ones were upon them and by sheer numbers they bore
them to the ground. Noork's mightier muscles smashed more than one
hooded face but in the end he too lay smothered beneath the nets and
bodies of the enemy.
A misty shape came to stand beside these three new captives as they
were stripped of their robes. His foot nudged at Noork's head curiously
and a guttural voice commanded the shield be removed. Then his voice
changed—thickened—as he saw the features of Noork.
"So," he barked in a tongue that should have been strange to Noork but
was not, "it is the trapper's turn to be trapped, eh Captain Dietrich?"
A fat, square-jawed face, harsh lines paralleling the ugly blob of a
nose, showed through the opened robe of the leader. The face was that
of Doctor Von Mark the treacherous Nazi scientist that Stephen Dietrich
had trailed across space to Sekk! But Noork knew nothing of that chase.
The man's face seemed familiar, and hateful, but that was all he
remembered.
"I see you have come from the island," said the Doctor. "Perhaps you
can tell me the secret of this invisible material I wear. With the
secret of invisibility I, Karl Von Mark, can again conquer Earth and
make the Fatherland invincible."
"I do not understand too well," said Noork hesitantly. "Are we enemies?
There is so much I have forgotten." He regarded the brutal face
thoughtfully.
"Perhaps you know from what valley the great bird brought me," he said.
"Or perhaps the other bird brought you here."
Von Mark's blue eyes widened and then he roared with a great noise
that was intended to be mirth. His foot slammed harder into Noork's
defenseless ribs.
"Perhaps you have forgotten, swine of an American," he roared suddenly,
and in his hand was an ugly looking automatic. He flung back his robe
and Noork saw the dress uniform of a general. "Perhaps," the scientist
repeated, "but I will take no chances. The amnesia is often but a
pretense."
His lip curled. "This is something for you to remember, Captain
Dietrich," he said as the ugly black muzzle of the gun centered on
Noork's bronzed chest.
And then Doctor Von Mark cursed as the gun dropped from his nerveless
fingers and his hands clawed weakly at the arrow buried in his wide
belly. He stumbled backward.
Arrows rained from the mistiness that had closed in about Von Mark and
his men. The men from Wari, their faces unshielded, fell like flies.
In a moment those yet alive had taken to their heels, and Noork felt
invisible fingers tearing at the nets that bound him.
As he rose to his feet the robed figure let its misty covering drop
aside. A handsome golden-skinned warrior stood revealed.
"Gurn!" cried Noork.
A glad cry came from the throat of Tholon Sarna as she saw her brother.
And then she crept closer to Noork's side as the invisible mantles
of Gurn's loyal Vasads opened to reveal the hairy beast men they
concealed. Rold whimpered fearfully.
"The message that Ud carried to me was good," laughed Gurn. "The Misty
Ones skin easily. We were trapping the Misty Ones as they came across
the lake," he looked at the dying Von Mark, "as were these others. Soon
we would have come to your rescue, Noork, my friend."
"Lucky I escaped first," Noork told him. "The priests of Uzdon would
have trapped you. To them the Misty Ones are visible."
He picked up the fallen vision shield that lay beside their feet. His
chest expanded proudly.
"No longer," he told Gurn, "am I a man without a name. I am Captain
Dietrich from a distant valley called America. I was hunting this evil
man when my bird died."
He smiled and his brown arm tightened around Sarna's golden body. "The
evil man is dead. My native valley is safe. Now I can live in peace
with you, Gurn, and with your sister, here in the jungle."
"It is good, Noork," smiled Tholon Sarna.
End of Project Gutenberg's Raiders of the Second Moon, by Gene Ellerman
Question:
What is the significance of enslavement in the story?
Answer:
|
[
"Enslavement and freedom as themes run throughout the story. When Noork and Sarna first meet each other in the opening scene, one of the ways they decide to trust one another is because of their mutual relationships with Gurn, a third character. Gurn has been exiled from the city of Grath because he says that his people should no longer enslave the captured Zurans from other valleys of Sekk. In the next scene, we learn that Sarna, Gurn's sister, was kidnapped by one group of slavers, escaped them with four others, and only narrowly escaped capture by a second group of slavers, the Misty Ones from the Temple of the Skull, who captured the other four of her group. Noork tells her that one day he will visit the island of Misty Ones who took her friends. At this time, he realizes that Sarna has disappeared, and he is attacked by the Misty Ones, though he is able to fight them off.\n\nDuring Noork's travels to the island of the Misty Ones, we learn his backstory: he is American pilot Stephen Dietrich, and he arrived on the moon of Sekk by following Doctor Karl Von Mark, last of the Nazi criminals at large. Dietrich's ship had crashed on Sekk, robbing him of his memory. In the conflict between the Allies and Nazis, we again see the conflict between enslavement and freedom: the Nazis forced those they considered racially \"impure\" into prison camps where they were either murdered outright or forced to engage in labor under inhumane conditions until they died; the Allied forces were a hope of freedom for these imprisoned, enslaved people.\n\nNoork spies on enslaved men in the fields outside the temple of the Misty Ones and hears them gossiping about Sarna. The older man suggests that their life is not so bad, but the younger man protests and states that one day he plans to escape. Noork approaches the younger man to find out where Sarna is being held and promises to take him along when he and Sarna escape. Noork then fights off multiple guards and a priest in order to free Sarna from the pit where she is held, which is dank and full of rotting grass mats and little light.\n\nWhile the story touches on themes of enslavement and freedom, it does not engage with them fully. The dungeon where the enslaved young women is held is described in foul terms, but Noork does not seem to free all the young women from their prison. That may happen as a result of Gurn's final attack on Doctor Von Mark and the Misty Ones, but Noork escapes only with Sarna and Rold. Rold is unhappy with being enslaved, not because he is being harmed or others are, but because he is not free to mate with attractive young women like Sarna. While the story should not need to spell out every reason why enslavement is wrong, it takes a very superficial approach to a deeply painful issue.",
"Enslavement is a major theme throughout the story. Gurn has been exiled for speaking out against the slavery that his people have inflicted on others, which is how he a Noork find one another. Noork’s travels during the action of the story are undertaken in an effort to save Sarna, who has now been enslaved twice. The person he enlists to help him, Rold, is also a slave. When Doctor Von Mark and the Misty Ones ambush Noork and the doctor recognizes him as Stephen Dietrich, he mentions that the trapper has now become the trapped. A moment later, Gurn and the other warriors free Noork from the doctor’s enslavement. Most of the story involves various people being enslaved or feeling a certain way about enslavement, and the element of Nazism in the story also lends it a broader theme of the enslavement that that regime inflicted and tried to inflict, and the continued possession of the Earth that Von Mark is working toward. \n",
"Enslavement seems to be the preferred way to deal with enemies on Sekk, and when Gurn speaks out against enslaving their Zuran captives, the city rulers label him a traitor and exile him from the city. His sister, Tholon, was captured by slavers but managed to escape with four others. However, when they passed near the Lake of Uzdon, the Misty Ones captured her four fellow escapees. And while Tholon is telling her story to Noork, she is kidnapped by the Misty Ones and spirited away to their city of Uzdon. The Misty Ones offer beautiful slave girls chosen by their priests as sacrifices to their god Uzdon, binding them to the altar and removing their hearts while still alive. The Misty Ones also enslave others to be workers. Slaves work in their cultivated fields and gardens, and in the skull, slaves are chained together with heavy chains. ",
"Enslavement is an important topic in the story as many of the Zuran peoples are enslaved by various groups. The men of Kanto are enemies of the Vasads and the people of Grath, but the city of Grath also enslaves people. When Gurn speaks out against the practice, he is exiled from Grath and becomes transient with his group of Vasads. When Noork first meets Tholon Sarna, she has fled her initial enslavement, narrowly avoided enslavement by the men of Kanto, and is then captured by the Misty Ones, who also have slaves working on the island of Manak. Noork frees Rold from his enslavement, and enlists his help to prevent Tholon Sarna from becoming a human sacrifice to Uzdon. When the Vasads defeat the Misty Ones and Dr. Von Mark, they are free to live in their own society without the constraints of slavery."
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Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
Raiders of the Second Moon
By GENE ELLERMAN
A strange destiny had erased Noork's memory,
and had brought him to this tiny world—to
write an end to his first existence.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories Summer 1945.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Beyond earth swings that airless pocked mass of fused rock and gray
volcanic dust that we know as Luna. Of this our naked eyes assure us.
But of the smaller satellite, hidden forever from the mundane view by
Luna's bulk, we know little.
Small is Sekk, that second moon, less than five hundred miles in
diameter, but the period of its revolution is thirty two hours, and its
meaner mass retains a breathable atmosphere. There is life on Sekk,
life that centers around the sunken star-shaped cavity where an oval
lake gleams softly in the depths. And the eleven radiating tips of the
starry abyss are valleys green with jungle growth.
In one of those green valleys the white savage that the Vasads called
Noork squatted in the ample crotch of a jungle giant and watched the
trail forty feet below. For down there moved alertly a golden skinned
girl, her only weapons a puny polished bow of yellow wood and a
sheathed dagger.
Sight of the girl's flowing brown hair and the graceful feminine
contours of her smooth-limbed body beneath its skin-halter and the
insignificant breech-clout, made his brow wrinkle with concentration.
Not forever had he lived in this jungle world of valleys and ragged
cliffs. Since he had learned the tongue of the hairy Vasads of forest,
and the tongue of their gold-skinned leader, Gurn, the renegade, he had
confirmed that belief.
For a huge gleaming bird had carried him in its talons to the top of
the cliff above their valley and from the rock fire had risen to devour
the great bird. Somehow he had been flung clear and escaped the death
of the mysterious bird-thing. And in his delirium he had babbled the
words that caused the apish Vasads to name him Noork. Now he repeated
them aloud.
"New York," he said, "good ol' New York."
The girl heard. She looked upward fearfully, her rounded bare arm going
back to the bow slung across her shoulder. Swiftly she fitted an arrow
and stepped back against the friendly bole of a shaggy barked jungle
giant. Noork grinned.
"Tako, woman," he greeted her.
"Tako," she replied fearfully. "Who speaks to Tholon Sarna? Be you
hunter or escaped slave?"
"A friend," said Noork simply. "It was I who killed the spotted
narl
last night when it attacked you."
Doubtfully the girl put away her bow. Her fingers, however, were never
far from the hilt of her hunting dagger.
Noork swung outward from his perch, and then downward along the ladder
of limbs to her side. The girl exclaimed at his brown skin.
"Your hair is the color of the sun!" she said. "Your garb is Vasad, yet
you speak the language of the true men." Her violet oddly slanting eyes
opened yet wider. "Who are you?"
"I am Noork," the man told her. "For many days have I dwelt among the
wild Vasads of the jungle with their golden-skinned chief, Gurn, for
my friend."
The girl impulsively took a step nearer. "Gurn!" she cried. "Is he tall
and strong? Has he a bracelet of golden discs linked together with
human hair? Does he talk with his own shadow when he thinks?"
"That is Gurn," admitted Noork shortly. "He is also an exile from the
walled city of Grath. The city rulers call him a traitor. He has told
me the reason. Perhaps you know it as well?"
"Indeed I do," cried Sarna. "My brother said that we should no longer
make slaves of the captured Zurans from the other valleys."
Noork smiled. "I am glad he is your brother," he said simply.
The girl's eyes fell before his admiring gaze and warm blood flooded
into her rounded neck and lovely cheeks.
"Brown-skinned one!" she cried with a stamp of her shapely little
sandalled foot. "I am displeased with the noises of your tongue. I will
listen to it no more."
But her eyes gave the provocative lie to her words. This brown-skinned
giant with the sunlit hair was very attractive....
The girl was still talking much later, as they walked together along
the game-trail. "When my captors were but one day's march from their
foul city of Bis the warriors of the city of Konto, through whose
fertile valley we had journeyed by night, fell upon the slavers.
"And in the confusion of the attack five of us escaped. We returned
toward the valley of Grath, but to avoid the intervening valley where
our enemies, the men of Konto, lived, we swung close to the Lake of
Uzdon. And the Misty Ones from the Temple of the Skull trailed us. I
alone escaped."
Noork lifted the short, broad-bladed sword that swung in its sheath
at his belt and let it drop back into place with a satisfying whisper
of flexible leather on steel. He looked toward the east where lay the
mysterious long lake of the Misty Ones.
"Some day," he said reflectively, "I am going to visit the island of
the unseen evil beings who stole away your friends. Perhaps after I
have taken you to your brother's hidden village, and from there to
your city of Grath...." He smiled.
The girl did not answer. His keen ears, now that he was no longer
speaking, caught the scuffing of feet into the jungle behind him. He
turned quickly to find the girl had vanished, and with an instinctive
reflex of motion he flung himself to one side into the dense wall of
the jungle. As it was the unseen club thudded down along his right arm,
numbing it so he felt nothing for some time.
One armed as he was temporarily, and with an unseen foe to reckon with,
Noork awkwardly swung up into the comparative safety of the trees. Once
there, perched in the crotch of a mighty jungle monarch, he peered down
at the apparently empty stretch of sunken trail beneath.
Noork
At first he saw nothing out of the ordinary. Apparently there was no
stir of life along that leaf-shadowed way. And then he caught a glimpse
of blurring shadowy shapes, blotches of cottony mist that blended all
too well with the foliage. One of the things from the island in the
Lake of Uzdon moved, and he saw briefly the bottom of a foot dirtied
with the mud of the trail.
Noork squinted. So the Misty Ones were not entirely invisible. Pain
was growing in his numbed arm now, but as it came so came strength. He
climbed further out on the great branch to where sticky and overripe
fruit hung heavy. With a grin he locked his legs upon the forking of
the great limb and filled his arms with fruit.
A barrage of the juicy fruit blanketed the misty shapes. Stains spread
and grew. Patchy outlines took on a new color and sharpness. Noork
found that he was pelting a half-dozen hooded and robed creatures whose
arms and legs numbered the same as his own, and the last remnant of
superstitious fear instilled in his bruised brain by the shaggy Vasads
vanished.
These Misty Ones were living breathing creatures like himself! They
were not gods, or demons, or even the ghostly servants of demons. He
strung his bow quickly, the short powerful bow that Gurn had given him,
and rained arrows down upon the cowering robed creatures.
And the monsters fled. They fled down the trail or faded away into the
jungle. All but one of them. The arrow had pierced a vital portion of
this Misty One's body. He fell and moved no more.
A moment later Noork was ripping the stained cloak and hood from the
fallen creature, curious to learn what ghastly brute-thing hid beneath
them. His lip curled at what he saw.
The Misty One was almost like himself. His skin was not so golden as
that of the other men of Zuran, and his forehead was low and retreating
in a bestial fashion. Upon his body there was more hair, and his face
was made hideous with swollen colored scars that formed an irregular
design. He wore a sleeveless tunic of light green and his only weapons
were two long knives and a club.
"So," said Noork, "the men of the island prey upon their own kind. And
the Temple of Uzdon in the lake is guarded by cowardly warriors like
this."
Noork shrugged his shoulders and set off at a mile-devouring pace down
the game trail toward the lake where the Temple of the Skull and its
unseen guardians lay. Once he stopped at a leaf-choked pool to wash the
stains from the dead man's foggy robe.
The jungle was thinning out. Noork's teeth flashed as he lifted the
drying fabric of the mantle and donned it.
Ud tasted the scent of a man and sluggishly rolled his bullet head from
shoulder to shoulder as he tried to catch sight of his ages-old enemy.
For between the hairy quarter-ton beast men of the jungles of Sekk and
the golden men of the valley cities who enslaved them there was eternal
war.
A growl rumbled deep in the hairy half-man's chest. He could see no
enemy and yet the scent grew stronger with every breath.
"You hunt too near the lake," called a voice. "The demons of the water
will trap you."
Ud's great nostrils quivered. He tasted the odor of a friend mingled
with that of a strange Zuran. He squatted.
"It's Noork," he grunted. "Why do I not see you?"
"I have stolen the skin of a demon," answered the invisible man. "Go to
Gurn. Tell him to fear the demons no longer. Tell him the Misty Ones
can be trapped and skinned."
"Why you want their skins?" Ud scratched his hairy gray skull.
"Go to save Gurn's ..." and here Noork was stumped for words. "To save
his father's woman woman," he managed at last. "Father's woman woman
called Sarna."
And the misty blob of nothingness was gone again, its goal now the
marshy lowlands that extended upward perhaps a thousand feet from the
jungle's ragged fringe to end at last in the muddy shallows of the Lake
of Uzdon.
To Noork it seemed that all the world must be like these savage jungle
fastnesses of the twelve valleys and their central lake. He knew that
the giant bird had carried him from some other place that his battered
brain could not remember, but to him it seemed incredible that men
could live elsewhere than in a jungle valley.
But Noork was wrong. The giant bird that he had ridden into the depths
of Sekk's fertile valleys had come from a far different world. And the
other bird, for which Noork had been searching when he came upon the
golden-skinned girl, was from another world also.
The other bird had come from space several days before that of Noork,
the Vasads had told him, and it had landed somewhere within the land
of sunken valleys. Perhaps, thought Noork, the bird had come from the
same valley that had once been his home. He would find the bird and
perhaps then he could remember better who he had been.
So it was, ironically enough, that Stephen Dietrich—whose memory was
gone completely—again took up the trail of Doctor Karl Von Mark, last
of the Axis criminals at large. The trail that had led the red-haired
young American flier from rebuilding Greece into Africa and the hidden
valley where Doctor Von Mark worked feverishly to restore the crumbled
structure of Nazidom, and then had sent him hurtling spaceward in the
second of the Doctor's crude space-ships was now drawing to an end.
The Doctor and the young American pilot were both trapped here on this
little blob of cosmic matter that hides beyond the Moon's cratered bulk.
The Doctor's ship had landed safely on Sekk, the wily scientist
preferring the lesser gravity of this fertile world to that of the
lifeless Moon in the event that he returned again to Earth, but
Dietrich's spacer had crashed.
Two words linked Noork with the past, the two words that the Vasads
had slurred into his name: New York. And the battered wrist watch, its
crystal and hands gone, were all that remained of his Earthly garb.
Noork paddled the long flat dugout strongly away from the twilight
shore toward the shadowy loom of the central island. Though he could
not remember ever having held a paddle before he handled the ungainly
blade well.
After a time the clumsy prow of the craft rammed into a yielding
cushion of mud, and Noork pulled the dugout out of the water into the
roofing shelter of a clump of drooping trees growing at the water's
edge.
Sword in hand he pushed inward from the shore and ended with a
smothered exclamation against an unseen wall. Trees grew close up to
the wall and a moment later he had climbed out along a horizontal
branch beyond the wall's top, and was lowering his body with the aid of
a braided leather rope to the ground beyond.
He was in a cultivated field his feet and hands told him. And perhaps
half a mile away, faintly illumined by torches and red clots of
bonfires, towered a huge weathered white skull!
Secure in the knowledge that he wore the invisible robes of a Misty
One he found a solitary tree growing within the wall and climbed to a
comfortable crotch. In less than a minute he was asleep.
"The new slave," a rough voice cut across his slumber abruptly, "is the
daughter of Tholon Dist the merchant."
Noork was fully awake now. They were speaking of Sarna. Her father's
name was Tholon Dist. It was early morning in the fields of the Misty
Ones and he could see the two golden-skinned slaves who talked together
beneath his tree.
"That matters not to the priests of Uzdon," the slighter of the
two slaves, his hair almost white, said. "If she be chosen for the
sacrifice to great Uzdon her blood will stain the altar no redder than
another's."
"But it is always the youngest and most beautiful," complained the
younger slave, "that the priests chose. I wish to mate with a beautiful
woman. Tholon Sarna is such a one."
The old man chuckled dryly. "If your wife be plain," he said, "neither
master nor fellow slave will steal her love. A slave should choose a
good woman—and ugly, my son."
"Some night," snarled the slave, "I'm going over the wall. Even the
Misty Ones will not catch me once I have crossed the lake."
"Silence," hissed the white-haired man. "Such talk is madness. We are
safe here from wild animals. There are no spotted narls on the island
of Manak. The priests of most holy Uzdon, and their invisible minions,
are not unkind.
"Get at your weeding of the field, Rold," he finished, "and I will
complete my checking of the gardens."
Noork waited until the old man was gone before he descended from the
tree. He walked along the row until he reached the slave's bent back,
and he knew by the sudden tightening of the man's shoulder muscles
that his presence was known. He looked down and saw that his feet made
clear-cut depressions in the soft rich soil of the field.
"Continue to work," he said to the young man. "Do not be too surprised
at what I am about to tell you, Rold." He paused and watched the golden
man's rather stupid face intently.
"I am not a Misty One," Noork said. "I killed the owner of this strange
garment I wear yesterday on the mainland. I have come to rescue the
girl, Tholon Sarna, of whom you spoke."
Rold's mouth hung open but his hard blunt fingers continued to work.
"The Misty Ones, then," he said slowly, "are not immortal demons!" He
nodded his long-haired head. "They are but men. They too can die."
"If you will help me, Rold," said Noork, "to rescue the girl and escape
from the island I will take you along."
Rold was slow in answering. He had been born on the island and yet his
people were from the valley city of Konto. He knew that they would
welcome the news that the Misty Ones were not demons. And the girl from
the enemy city of Grath was beautiful. Perhaps she would love him for
helping to rescue her and come willingly with him to Konto.
"I will help you, stranger," he agreed.
"Then tell me of the Skull, and of the priests, and of the prison where
Tholon Sarna is held."
The slave's fingers flew. "All the young female slaves are caged
together in the pit beneath the Skull. When the sun is directly
overhead the High Priest will choose one of them for sacrifice to
mighty Uzdon, most potent of all gods. And with the dawning of the
next day the chosen one will be bound across the altar before great
Uzdon's image and her heart torn from her living breast." The slave's
mismatched eyes, one blue and the other brown, lifted from his work.
"Tholon Sarna is in the pit beneath the Temple with the other female
slaves. And the Misty Ones stand guard over the entrance to the temple
pits."
"It is enough," said Noork. "I will go to rescue her now. Be prepared
to join us as we return. I will have a robe for you if all goes well."
"If you are captured," cried Rold nervously, "you will not tell them I
talked with you?"
Noork laughed. "You never saw me," he told the slave.
The skull was a gigantic dome of shaped white stone. Where the
eye-sockets and gaping nose-hole should have been, black squares of
rock gave the illusion of vacancy. Slitted apertures that served for
windows circled the grisly whiteness of the temple's curving walls at
three distinct levels.
Noork drifted slowly up the huge series of long bench-like steps
that led up to the gaping jaws of the Skull. He saw red and
purple-robed priests with nodding head-dresses of painted plumes and
feathers climbing and descending the stairs. Among them moved the
squatty gnarled shapes of burdened Vasads, their shaggy bowed legs
fettered together with heavy copper or bronze chains, and cringing
golden-skinned slaves slipped furtively through the press of the
brilliant-robed ones. The stale sweaty odor of the slaves and the beast
men mingled with the musky stench of the incense from the temple.
Other misty blobs, the invisible guards of the ghastly temple, were
stationed at regular intervals across the great entrance into the
Skull's interior, but they paid Noork no heed. To them he was another
of their number.
He moved swiftly to cross the wide stone-slabbed entry within the
jaws, and a moment later was looking down into a sunken bowl whose
rocky floor was a score of feet below where he stood. Now he saw the
central raised altar where the gleam of precious stones and cunningly
worked metal—gold, silver and brass—vied with the faded garish
colors of the draperies beneath it. And on the same dais there loomed
two beast-headed stone images, the lion-headed god a male and the
wolf-headed shape a female.
These then were the two blood hungry deities that the men of Zura
worshipped—mighty Uzdon and his mate, Lornu!
Noork joined the descending throng that walked slowly down the central
ramp toward the altar. As he searched for the entrance to the lower
pits his eyes took in the stone steps that led upward into the two
upper levels. Only priests and the vague shapelessness of the Misty
Ones climbed those steps. The upper levels, then, were forbidden to
the slaves and common citizens of the island.
As he circled the curving inner wall a foul dank odor reached his
sensitive nostrils, and his eyes searched for its origin. He found it
there just before him, the opening that gave way to a descending flight
of clammy stone steps. He darted toward the door and from nowhere two
short swords rose to bar his way.
"None are to pass save the priests," spoke a voice from nowhere
gruffly. "The High Priest knows that we of the temple guards covet the
most beautiful of the slave women, but we are not to see them until the
sacrifice is chosen."
Noork moved backward a pace. He grumbled something inaudible and drew
his sword. Before him the two swords slowly drew aside.
In that instant Noork attacked. His keen sword, whetted to razor
sharpness on abrasive bits of rock, bit through the hidden neck and
shoulder of the guard on his right hand, and with the same forward
impetus of attack he smashed into the body of the startled guard on his
left.
His sword had wrenched from his hand as it jammed into the bony
structure of the decapitated Misty One's shoulder, and now both his
hands sought the throat of the guard. The unseen man's cry of warning
gurgled and died in his throat as Noork clamped his fingers shut upon
it, and his shortened sword stabbed at Noork's back.
The struggle overbalanced them. They rolled over and over down the
shadowy stair, the stone smashing at their softer flesh unmercifully.
For a moment the battling men brought up with a jolt as the obstruction
of the first guard's corpse arrested their downward course, and then
they jolted and jarred onward again from blood-slippery step to
blood-slippery step.
The sword clattered from the guardian Misty One's clutch and in the
same instant Noork's steel fingers snapped the neck of the other man
with a pistol-like report. The limp body beneath him struggled no more.
He sprang to his feet and became aware of a torch-lighted doorway but a
half-dozen paces further down along the descending shaft of steps.
In a moment, he thought, the fellows of this guard would come charging
out, swords in hand. They could not have failed to hear the struggle
on the stairs of stone, he reasoned, for here the noise and confusion
of the upper temple was muted to a murmur.
So it was that he ran quickly to the door, in his hand the sword that
had dropped from the dead man's fingers, and sprang inside, prepared to
battle there the Misty Ones, lest one escape to give the alarm.
He looked about the narrow stone-walled room with puzzled eyes. Two
warriors lay on a pallet of straw, one of them emitting hideous
gurgling sounds that filled the little room with unpleasing echoes.
Noork grinned.
From the floor beside the fatter of the two men, the guard who did not
snore, he took a club. Twice he struck and the gurgling sound changed
to a steady deep breathing. Noork knew that now the two guards would
not give the alarm for several hours. Thoughtfully he looked about the
room. There were several of the hooded cloaks hanging from pegs wedged
into the crevices of the chamber's wall, their outlines much plainer
here in the artificial light of the flickering torch.
Noork shed his own blood-stained robe quickly and donned one of the
others. The cloaks were rather bulky and so he could carry but two
others, rolled up, beneath his own protective covering.
The matter of his disguise thus taken care of he dragged the two bodies
from the stairway and hid them beneath their own fouled robes in the
chamber of the sleeping guards. Not until then did he hurry on down the
stone steps toward the prison pit where Tholon Sarna, the golden girl,
was held prisoner.
The steps opened into a dimly lit cavern. Pools of foul black water
dotted the uneven floor and reflected back faintly the light of the two
sputtering torches beside the entrance. One corner of the cavern was
walled off, save for a narrow door of interlocking brass strips, and
toward this Noork made his way.
He stood beside the door. "Sarna," he called softly, "Tholon Sarna."
There were a score of young women, lately captured from the mainland
by the Misty Ones, sitting dejectedly upon the foul dampness of the
rotting grass that was their bed. Most of them were clad in the simple
skirt and brief jacket, reaching but to the lower ribs, that is the
mark of the golden people who dwell in the city-states of Zura's
valleys, but a few wore a simple band of cloth about their hips and
confined their breasts with a strip of well-cured leopard or antelope
hide.
One of the women now came to her feet and as she neared the
metal-barred entrance Noork saw that she was indeed Sarna. He examined
the outer lock of the door and found it to be barred with a massive
timber and the timber locked in place with a metal spike slipped into a
prepared cavity in the prison's rocky wall.
"It is Noork," he said softly as she came closer. He saw her eyes go
wide with fear and sudden hope, and then reached for the spike.
"The priest," hissed the girl.
Noork had already heard the sound of approaching feet. He dropped the
spike and whirled. His sword was in his hand as though by magic, as he
faced the burly priest of the Skull.
Across the forehead and upper half of the priest's face a curved shield
of transparent tinted material was fastened. Noork's eyes narrowed as
he saw the sword and shield of the gigantic holy man.
"So," he said, "to the priests of Uzdon we are not invisible. You do
not trust your guards, then."
The priest laughed. "We also have robes of invisibility," he said, "and
the sacred window of Uzdon before our eyes." He snarled suddenly at the
silent figure of the white man. "Down on your knees, guard, and show me
your face before I kill you!"
Noork raised his sword. "Take my hood off if you dare, priest," he
offered.
The burly priest's answer was a bellow of rage and a lunge forward of
his sword arm. Their swords clicked together and slid apart with the
velvety smoothness of bronze on bronze. Noork's blade bit a chunk from
the priest's conical shield, and in return received a slashing cut that
drew blood from left shoulder to elbow.
The fighting grew more furious as the priest pressed the attack. He
was a skilled swordsman and only the superior agility of the white
man's legs kept Noork away from that darting priestly blade. Even so
his robe was slashed in a dozen places and blood reddened his bronzed
body. Once he slipped in a puddle of foul cavern water and only by the
slightest of margins did he escape death by the priest's weapon.
The priest was tiring rapidly, however. The soft living of the temple,
and the rich wines and over-cooked meats that served to pad his paunch
so well with fat, now served to rob him of breath. He opened his
mouth to bawl for assistance from the guard, although it is doubtful
whether any sound could have penetrated up into the madhouse of the
main temple's floor, and in that instant Noork flipped his sword at his
enemy.
Between the shield and the transparent bit of curving material the
sword drove, and buried itself deep in the priest's thick neck. Noork
leaped forward; he snatched the tinted face shield and his sword, and a
moment later he had torn the great wooden timber from its sockets.
Tholon Sarna stumbled through the door and he caught her in his arms.
Hurriedly he loosed one of the two robes fastened about his waist and
slipped it around her slim shivering shoulders.
"Are there other priests hidden here in the pits?" Noork asked tensely.
"No," came the girl's low voice, "I do not think so. I did not know
that this priest was here until he appeared behind you." A slow smile
crossed Noork's hidden features. "His robe must be close by," he told
the girl. "He must have been stationed here because the priests feared
the guards might spirit away some of the prisoners."
Slowly he angled back and forth across the floor until his foot touched
the soft material of the priest's discarded robe near the stairway
entrance. He slipped the thongs of the transparent mask, called by the
priest "Uzdon's window" over his hood, and then proceeded to don the
new robe.
"My own robe is slit in a dozen places," he explained to the girl's
curious violet eyes—-all that was visible through the narrow vision
slot of her hood. He finished adjusting the outer robe and took the
girl's hand.
"Come," he said, "let us escape over the wall before the alarm is
given."
Without incident they reached the field where Rold toiled among the
rows of vegetables. Another slave was working in a nearby field,
his crude wooden plow pulled by two sweating Vasads, but he was not
watching when Rold abruptly faded from view.
Noork was sweating with the weight of two cloaks and the airlessness of
the vision shield as they crossed the field toward his rope, but he had
no wish to discard them yet. The tinted shield had revealed that dozens
of the Misty Ones were stationed about the wall to guard against the
escape of the slaves.
They came to the wall and to Noork's great joy found the rope hanging
as he had left it. He climbed the wall first and then with Rold helping
from below, drew Sarna to his side. A moment later saw the three of
them climbing along the limb to the bole of the tree and so to the
jungle matted ground outside the wall.
"Will we hide here in the trees until night?" asked the girl's full
voice.
Noork held aside a mossy creeper until the girl had passed. "I think
not," he said. "The Misty Ones are continually passing from the island
to the shore. We are Misty Ones to any that watch from the wall. So we
will paddle boldly across the water."
"That is good," agreed the slave, "unless they see us put out from the
shore. Their two landing stages are further along the beach, opposite
the Temple of Uzdon."
"Then we must hug to the shore until we pass the tip of the island,"
said Noork thoughtfully. "In that way even if they detect us we will
have put a safe distance between us."
Shortly after midday Noork felt the oozy slime of the marshy lowlands
of the mainland beneath his paddle and the dugout ran ashore in the
grassy inlet for which they had been heading. His palms were blistered
and the heavy robes he yet wore were soaked with sweat.
"Once we reach the jungle," he told the girl, "off come these robes. I
am broiled alive."
Suddenly Noork froze in his tracks. He thrust the girl behind him.
"Misty Ones!" he hissed to Rold. "They crouch among the reeds. They
carry nets and clubs to trap us."
Rold turned back toward the boat with Noork and Sarna close at his
heels. But the Misty Ones were upon them and by sheer numbers they bore
them to the ground. Noork's mightier muscles smashed more than one
hooded face but in the end he too lay smothered beneath the nets and
bodies of the enemy.
A misty shape came to stand beside these three new captives as they
were stripped of their robes. His foot nudged at Noork's head curiously
and a guttural voice commanded the shield be removed. Then his voice
changed—thickened—as he saw the features of Noork.
"So," he barked in a tongue that should have been strange to Noork but
was not, "it is the trapper's turn to be trapped, eh Captain Dietrich?"
A fat, square-jawed face, harsh lines paralleling the ugly blob of a
nose, showed through the opened robe of the leader. The face was that
of Doctor Von Mark the treacherous Nazi scientist that Stephen Dietrich
had trailed across space to Sekk! But Noork knew nothing of that chase.
The man's face seemed familiar, and hateful, but that was all he
remembered.
"I see you have come from the island," said the Doctor. "Perhaps you
can tell me the secret of this invisible material I wear. With the
secret of invisibility I, Karl Von Mark, can again conquer Earth and
make the Fatherland invincible."
"I do not understand too well," said Noork hesitantly. "Are we enemies?
There is so much I have forgotten." He regarded the brutal face
thoughtfully.
"Perhaps you know from what valley the great bird brought me," he said.
"Or perhaps the other bird brought you here."
Von Mark's blue eyes widened and then he roared with a great noise
that was intended to be mirth. His foot slammed harder into Noork's
defenseless ribs.
"Perhaps you have forgotten, swine of an American," he roared suddenly,
and in his hand was an ugly looking automatic. He flung back his robe
and Noork saw the dress uniform of a general. "Perhaps," the scientist
repeated, "but I will take no chances. The amnesia is often but a
pretense."
His lip curled. "This is something for you to remember, Captain
Dietrich," he said as the ugly black muzzle of the gun centered on
Noork's bronzed chest.
And then Doctor Von Mark cursed as the gun dropped from his nerveless
fingers and his hands clawed weakly at the arrow buried in his wide
belly. He stumbled backward.
Arrows rained from the mistiness that had closed in about Von Mark and
his men. The men from Wari, their faces unshielded, fell like flies.
In a moment those yet alive had taken to their heels, and Noork felt
invisible fingers tearing at the nets that bound him.
As he rose to his feet the robed figure let its misty covering drop
aside. A handsome golden-skinned warrior stood revealed.
"Gurn!" cried Noork.
A glad cry came from the throat of Tholon Sarna as she saw her brother.
And then she crept closer to Noork's side as the invisible mantles
of Gurn's loyal Vasads opened to reveal the hairy beast men they
concealed. Rold whimpered fearfully.
"The message that Ud carried to me was good," laughed Gurn. "The Misty
Ones skin easily. We were trapping the Misty Ones as they came across
the lake," he looked at the dying Von Mark, "as were these others. Soon
we would have come to your rescue, Noork, my friend."
"Lucky I escaped first," Noork told him. "The priests of Uzdon would
have trapped you. To them the Misty Ones are visible."
He picked up the fallen vision shield that lay beside their feet. His
chest expanded proudly.
"No longer," he told Gurn, "am I a man without a name. I am Captain
Dietrich from a distant valley called America. I was hunting this evil
man when my bird died."
He smiled and his brown arm tightened around Sarna's golden body. "The
evil man is dead. My native valley is safe. Now I can live in peace
with you, Gurn, and with your sister, here in the jungle."
"It is good, Noork," smiled Tholon Sarna.
End of Project Gutenberg's Raiders of the Second Moon, by Gene Ellerman
|
What is the melting sickness?
|
After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about Contagion by Katherine MacLean.
Relevant chunks:
CONTAGION
By KATHERINE MacLEAN
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction October 1950. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Minos was such a lovely planet. Not a thing seemed wrong with it. Excepting the food, perhaps. And a disease that wasn't really.
It was like an Earth forest in the fall, but it was not fall. The forest leaves were green and copper and purple and fiery red, and a wind sent patches of bright greenish sunlight dancing among the leaf shadows.
The hunt party of the Explorer filed along the narrow trail, guns ready, walking carefully, listening to the distant, half familiar cries of strange birds.
A faint crackle of static in their earphones indicated that a gun had been fired.
"Got anything?" asked June Walton. The helmet intercom carried her voice to the ears of the others without breaking the stillness of the forest.
"Took a shot at something," explained George Barton's cheerful voice in her earphones. She rounded a bend of the trail and came upon Barton standing peering up into the trees, his gun still raised. "It looked like a duck."
"This isn't Central Park," said Hal Barton, his brother, coming into sight. His green spacesuit struck an incongruous note against the bronze and red forest. "They won't all look like ducks," he said soberly.
"Maybe some will look like dragons. Don't get eaten by a dragon, June," came Max's voice quietly into her earphones. "Not while I still love you." He came out of the trees carrying the blood sample kit, and touched her glove with his, the grin on his ugly beloved face barely visible in the mingled light and shade. A patch of sunlight struck a greenish glint from his fishbowl helmet.
They walked on. A quarter of a mile back, the space ship Explorer towered over the forest like a tapering skyscraper, and the people of the ship looked out of the viewplates at fresh winds and sunlight and clouds, and they longed to be outside.
But the likeness to Earth was danger, and the cool wind might be death, for if the animals were like Earth animals, their diseases might be like Earth diseases, alike enough to be contagious, different enough to be impossible to treat. There was warning enough in the past. Colonies had vanished, and traveled spaceways drifted with the corpses of ships which had touched on some plague planet.
The people of the ship waited while their doctors, in airtight spacesuits, hunted animals to test them for contagion.
The four medicos, for June Walton was also a doctor, filed through the alien homelike forest, walking softly, watching for motion among the copper and purple shadows.
They saw it suddenly, a lighter moving copper patch among the darker browns. Reflex action swung June's gun into line, and behind her someone's gun went off with a faint crackle of static, and made a hole in the leaves beside the specimen. Then for a while no one moved.
This one looked like a man, a magnificently muscled, leanly graceful, humanlike animal. Even in its callused bare feet, it was a head taller than any of them. Red-haired, hawk-faced and darkly tanned, it stood breathing heavily, looking at them without expression. At its side hung a sheath knife, and a crossbow was slung across one wide shoulder.
They lowered their guns.
"It needs a shave," Max said reasonably in their earphones, and he reached up to his helmet and flipped the switch that let his voice be heard. "Something we could do for you, Mac?"
The friendly drawl was the first voice that had broken the forest sounds. June smiled suddenly. He was right. The strict logic of evolution did not demand beards; therefore a non-human would not be wearing a three day growth of red stubble.
Still panting, the tall figure licked dry lips and spoke. "Welcome to Minos. The Mayor sends greetings from Alexandria."
"English?" gasped June.
"We were afraid you would take off again before I could bring word to you.... It's three hundred miles.... We saw your scout plane pass twice, but we couldn't attract its attention."
June looked in stunned silence at the stranger leaning against the tree. Thirty-six light years—thirty-six times six trillion miles of monotonous space travel—to be told that the planet was already settled! "We didn't know there was a colony here," she said. "It is not on the map."
"We were afraid of that," the tall bronze man answered soberly. "We have been here three generations and yet no traders have come."
Max shifted the kit strap on his shoulder and offered a hand. "My name is Max Stark, M.D. This is June Walton, M.D., Hal Barton, M.D., and George Barton, Hal's brother, also M.D."
"Patrick Mead is the name," smiled the man, shaking hands casually.
"Just a hunter and bridge carpenter myself. Never met any medicos before."
The grip was effortless but even through her airproofed glove June could feel that the fingers that touched hers were as hard as padded steel.
"What—what is the population of Minos?" she asked.
He looked down at her curiously for a moment before answering. "Only one hundred and fifty." He smiled. "Don't worry, this isn't a city planet yet. There's room for a few more people." He shook hands with the Bartons quickly. "That is—you are people, aren't you?" he asked startlingly.
"Why not?" said Max with a poise that June admired.
"Well, you are all so—so—" Patrick Mead's eyes roamed across the faces of the group. "So varied."
They could find no meaning in that, and stood puzzled.
"I mean," Patrick Mead said into the silence, "all these—interesting different hair colors and face shapes and so forth—" He made a vague wave with one hand as if he had run out of words or was anxious not to insult them.
"Joke?" Max asked, bewildered.
June laid a hand on his arm. "No harm meant," she said to him over the intercom. "We're just as much of a shock to him as he is to us."
She addressed a question to the tall colonist on outside sound. "What should a person look like, Mr. Mead?"
He indicated her with a smile. "Like you."
June stepped closer and stood looking up at him, considering her own description. She was tall and tanned, like him; had a few freckles, like him; and wavy red hair, like his. She ignored the brightly humorous blue eyes.
"In other words," she said, "everyone on the planet looks like you and me?"
Patrick Mead took another look at their four faces and began to grin.
"Like me, I guess. But I hadn't thought of it before. I did not think that people could have different colored hair or that noses could fit so many ways onto faces. I was judging by my own appearance, but I suppose any fool can walk on his hands and say the world is upside down!" He laughed and sobered. "But then why wear spacesuits? The air is breathable."
"For safety," June told him. "We can't take any chances on plague."
Pat Mead was wearing nothing but a loin cloth and his weapons, and the wind ruffled his hair. He looked comfortable, and they longed to take off the stuffy spacesuits and feel the wind against their own skins. Minos was like home, like Earth.... But they were strangers.
"Plague," Pat Mead said thoughtfully. "We had one here. It came two years after the colony arrived and killed everyone except the Mead families. They were immune. I guess we look alike because we're all related, and that's why I grew up thinking that it is the only way people can look."
Plague. "What was the disease?" Hal Barton asked.
"Pretty gruesome, according to my father. They called it the melting sickness. The doctors died too soon to find out what it was or what to do about it."
"You should have trained for more doctors, or sent to civilization for some." A trace of impatience was in George Barton's voice.
Pat Mead explained patiently, "Our ship, with the power plant and all the books we needed, went off into the sky to avoid the contagion, and never came back. The crew must have died." Long years of hardship were indicated by that statement, a colony with electric power gone and machinery stilled, with key technicians dead and no way to replace them. June realized then the full meaning of the primitive sheath knife and bow.
"Any recurrence of melting sickness?" asked Hal Barton.
"No."
"Any other diseases?"
"Not a one."
Max was eyeing the bronze red-headed figure with something approaching awe. "Do you think all the Meads look like that?" he said to June on the intercom. "I wouldn't mind being a Mead myself!"
Their job had been made easy by the coming of Pat. They went back to the ship laughing, exchanging anecdotes with him. There was nothing now to keep Minos from being the home they wanted, except the melting sickness, and, forewarned against it, they could take precautions.
The polished silver and black column of the Explorer seemed to rise higher and higher over the trees as they neared it. Then its symmetry blurred all sense of specific size as they stepped out from among the trees and stood on the edge of the meadow, looking up.
"Nice!" said Pat. "Beautiful!" The admiration in his voice was warming.
"It was a yacht," Max said, still looking up, "second hand, an old-time beauty without a sign of wear. Synthetic diamond-studded control board and murals on the walls. It doesn't have the new speed drives, but it brought us thirty-six light years in one and a half subjective years. Plenty good enough."
The tall tanned man looked faintly wistful, and June realized that he had never had access to a full library, never seen a movie, never experienced luxury. He had been born and raised on Minos.
"May I go aboard?" Pat asked hopefully.
Max unslung the specimen kit from his shoulder, laid it on the carpet of plants that covered the ground and began to open it.
"Tests first," Hal Barton said. "We have to find out if you people still carry this so-called melting sickness. We'll have to de-microbe you and take specimens before we let you on board. Once on, you'll be no good as a check for what the other Meads might have."
Max was taking out a rack and a stand of preservative bottles and hypodermics.
"Are you going to jab me with those?" Pat asked with interest.
"You're just a specimen animal to me, bud!" Max grinned at Pat Mead, and Pat grinned back. June saw that they were friends already, the tall pantherish colonist, and the wry, black-haired doctor. She felt a stab of guilt because she loved Max and yet could pity him for being smaller and frailer than Pat Mead.
"Lie down," Max told him, "and hold still. We need two spinal fluid samples from the back, a body cavity one in front, and another from the arm."
Pat lay down obediently. Max knelt, and, as he spoke, expertly swabbed and inserted needles with the smooth speed that had made him a fine nerve surgeon on Earth.
High above them the scout helioplane came out of an opening in the ship and angled off toward the west, its buzz diminishing. Then, suddenly, it veered and headed back, and Reno Unrich's voice came tinnily from their earphones:
"What's that you've got? Hey, what are you docs doing down there?" He banked again and came to a stop, hovering fifty feet away. June could see his startled face looking through the glass at Pat.
Hal Barton switched to a narrow radio beam, explained rapidly and pointed in the direction of Alexandria. Reno's plane lifted and flew away over the odd-colored forest.
"The plane will drop a note on your town, telling them you got through to us," Hal Barton told Pat, who was sitting up watching Max dexterously put the blood and spinal fluids into the right bottles without exposing them to air.
"We won't be free to contact your people until we know if they still carry melting sickness," Max added. "You might be immune so it doesn't show on you, but still carry enough germs—if that's what caused it—to wipe out a planet."
"If you do carry melting sickness," said Hal Barton, "we won't be able to mingle with your people until we've cleared them of the disease."
"Starting with me?" Pat asked.
"Starting with you," Max told him ruefully, "as soon as you step on board."
"More needles?"
"Yes, and a few little extras thrown in."
"Rough?"
"It isn't easy."
A few minutes later, standing in the stalls for spacesuit decontamination, being buffeted by jets of hot disinfectant, bathed in glares of sterilizing ultraviolet radiation, June remembered that and compared Pat Mead's treatment to theirs.
In the Explorer , stored carefully in sealed tanks and containers, was the ultimate, multi-purpose cureall. It was a solution of enzymes so like the key catalysts of the human cell nucleus that it caused chemical derangement and disintegration in any non-human cell. Nothing could live in contact with it but human cells; any alien intruder to the body would die. Nucleocat Cureall was its trade name.
But the cureall alone was not enough for complete safety. Plagues had been known to slay too rapidly and universally to be checked by human treatment. Doctors are not reliable; they die. Therefore spaceways and interplanetary health law demanded that ship equipment for guarding against disease be totally mechanical in operation, rapid and efficient.
Somewhere near them, in a series of stalls which led around and around like a rabbit maze, Pat was being herded from stall to stall by peremptory mechanical voices, directed to soap and shower, ordered to insert his arm into a slot which took a sample of his blood, given solutions to drink, bathed in germicidal ultraviolet, shaken by sonic blasts, breathing air thick with sprays of germicidal mists, being directed to put his arms into other slots where they were anesthesized and injected with various immunizing solutions.
Finally, he would be put in a room of high temperature and extreme dryness, and instructed to sit for half an hour while more fluids were dripped into his veins through long thin tubes.
All legal spaceships were built for safety. No chance was taken of allowing a suspected carrier to bring an infection on board with him.
June stepped from the last shower stall into the locker room, zipped off her spacesuit with a sigh of relief, and contemplated herself in a wall mirror. Red hair, dark blue eyes, tall....
"I've got a good figure," she said thoughtfully.
Max turned at the door. "Why this sudden interest in your looks?" he asked suspiciously. "Do we stand here and admire you, or do we finally get something to eat?"
"Wait a minute." She went to a wall phone and dialed it carefully, using a combination from the ship's directory. "How're you doing, Pat?"
The phone picked up a hissing of water or spray. There was a startled chuckle. "Voices, too! Hello, June. How do you tell a machine to go jump in the lake?"
"Are you hungry?"
"No food since yesterday."
"We'll have a banquet ready for you when you get out," she told Pat and hung up, smiling. Pat Mead's voice had a vitality and enjoyment which made shipboard talk sound like sad artificial gaiety in contrast.
They looked into the nearby small laboratory where twelve squealing hamsters were protestingly submitting to a small injection each of Pat's blood. In most of them the injection was followed by one of antihistaminics and adaptives. Otherwise the hamster defense system would treat all non-hamster cells as enemies, even the harmless human blood cells, and fight back against them violently.
One hamster, the twelfth, was given an extra large dose of adaptive, so that if there were a disease, he would not fight it or the human cells, and thus succumb more rapidly.
"How ya doing, George?" Max asked.
"Routine," George Barton grunted absently.
On the way up the long spiral ramps to the dining hall, they passed a viewplate. It showed a long scene of mountains in the distance on the horizon, and between them, rising step by step as they grew farther away, the low rolling hills, bronze and red with patches of clear green where there were fields.
Someone was looking out, standing very still, as if she had been there a long time—Bess St. Clair, a Canadian woman. "It looks like Winnipeg," she told them as they paused. "When are you doctors going to let us out of this blithering barberpole? Look," she pointed. "See that patch of field on the south hillside, with the brook winding through it? I've staked that hillside for our house. When do we get out?"
Reno Ulrich's tiny scout plane buzzed slowly in from the distance and began circling lazily.
"Sooner than you think," Max told her. "We've discovered a castaway colony on the planet. They've done our tests for us by just living here. If there's anything here to catch, they've caught it."
"People on Minos?" Bess's handsome ruddy face grew alive with excitement.
"One of them is down in the medical department," June said. "He'll be out in twenty minutes."
"May I go see him?"
"Sure," said Max. "Show him the way to the dining hall when he gets out. Tell him we sent you."
"Right!" She turned and ran down the ramp like a small girl going to a fire. Max grinned at June and she grinned back. After a year and a half of isolation in space, everyone was hungry for the sight of new faces, the sound of unfamiliar voices.
They climbed the last two turns to the cafeteria, and entered to a rich subdued blend of soft music and quiet conversations. The cafeteria was a section of the old dining room, left when the rest of the ship had been converted to living and working quarters, and it still had the original finely grained wood of the ceiling and walls, the sound absorbency, the soft music spools and the intimate small light at each table where people leisurely ate and talked.
They stood in line at the hot foods counter, and behind her June could hear a girl's voice talking excitedly through the murmur of conversation.
"—new man, honest! I saw him through the viewplate when they came in. He's down in the medical department. A real frontiersman."
The line drew abreast of the counters, and she and Max chose three heaping trays, starting with hydroponic mushroom steak, raised in the growing trays of water and chemicals; sharp salad bowl with rose tomatoes and aromatic peppers; tank-grown fish with special sauce; four different desserts, and assorted beverages.
Presently they had three tottering trays successfully maneuvered to a table. Brant St. Clair came over. "I beg your pardon, Max, but they are saying something about Reno carrying messages to a colony of savages, for the medical department. Will he be back soon, do you know?"
Max smiled up at him, his square face affectionate. Everyone liked the shy Canadian. "He's back already. We just saw him come in."
"Oh, fine." St. Clair beamed. "I had an appointment with him to go out and confirm what looks like a nice vein of iron to the northeast. Have you seen Bess? Oh—there she is." He turned swiftly and hurried away.
A very tall man with fiery red hair came in surrounded by an eagerly talking crowd of ship people. It was Pat Mead. He stood in the doorway, alertly scanning the dining room. Sheer vitality made him seem even larger than he was. Sighting June, he smiled and began to thread toward their table.
"Look!" said someone. "There's the colonist!" Shelia, a pretty, jeweled woman, followed and caught his arm. "Did you really swim across a river to come here?"
Overflowing with good-will and curiosity, people approached from all directions. "Did you actually walk three hundred miles? Come, eat with us. Let me help choose your tray."
Everyone wanted him to eat at their table, everyone was a specialist and wanted data about Minos. They all wanted anecdotes about hunting wild animals with a bow and arrow.
"He needs to be rescued," Max said. "He won't have a chance to eat."
June and Max got up firmly, edged through the crowd, captured Pat and escorted him back to their table. June found herself pleased to be claiming the hero of the hour.
Pat sat in the simple, subtly designed chair and leaned back almost voluptuously, testing the way it gave and fitted itself to him. He ran his eyes over the bright tableware and heaped plates. He looked around at the rich grained walls and soft lights at each table. He said nothing, just looking and feeling and experiencing.
"When we build our town and leave the ship," June explained, "we will turn all the staterooms back into the lounges and ballrooms and cocktail bars that used to be inside."
"Oh, I'm not complaining," Pat said negligently. He cocked his head to the music, and tried to locate its source.
"That's big of you," said Max with gentle irony.
They fell to, Pat beginning the first meal he had had in more than a day.
Most of the other diners finished when they were halfway through, and began walking over, diffidently at first, then in another wave of smiling faces, handshakes, and introductions. Pat was asked about crops, about farming methods, about rainfall and floods, about farm animals and plant breeding, about the compatibility of imported Earth seeds with local ground, about mines and strata.
There was no need to protect him. He leaned back in his chair and drawled answers with the lazy ease of a panther; where he could think of no statistic, he would fill the gap with an anecdote. It developed that he enjoyed spinning campfire yarns and especially being the center of interest.
Between bouts of questions, he ate with undiminished and glowing relish.
June noticed that the female specialists were prolonging the questions more than they needed, clustering around the table laughing at his jokes, until presently Pat was almost surrounded by pretty faces, eager questions, and chiming laughs. Shelia the beautiful laughed most chimingly of all.
June nudged Max, and Max shrugged indifferently. It wasn't anything a man would pay attention to, perhaps. But June watched Pat for a moment more, then glanced uneasily back to Max. He was eating and listening to Pat's answers and did not feel her gaze. For some reason Max looked almost shrunken to her. He was shorter than she had realized; she had forgotten that he was only the same height as herself. She was dimly aware of the clear lilting chatter of female voices increasing at Pat's end of the table.
"That guy's a menace," Max said, and laughed to himself, cutting another slice of hydroponic mushroom steak. "What's eating you?" he added, glancing aside at her when he noticed her sudden stillness.
"Nothing," she said hastily, but she did not turn back to watching Pat Mead. She felt disloyal. Pat was only a superb animal. Max was the man she loved. Or—was he? Of course he was, she told herself angrily. They had gone colonizing together because they wanted to spend their lives together; she had never thought of marrying any other man. Yet the sense of dissatisfaction persisted, and along with it a feeling of guilt.
Len Marlow, the protein tank-culture technician responsible for the mushroom steaks, had wormed his way into the group and asked Pat a question. Now he was saying, "I don't dig you, Pat. It sounds like you're putting the people into the tanks instead of the vegetables!" He glanced at them, looking puzzled. "See if you two can make anything of this. It sounds medical to me."
Pat leaned back and smiled, sipping a glass of hydroponic burgundy.
"Wonderful stuff. You'll have to show us how to make it."
Len turned back to him. "You people live off the country, right? You hunt and bring in steaks and eat them, right? Well, say I have one of those steaks right here and I want to eat it, what happens?"
"Go ahead and eat it. It just wouldn't digest. You'd stay hungry."
"Why?" Len was aggrieved.
"Chemical differences in the basic protoplasm of Minos. Different amino linkages, left-handed instead of right-handed molecules in the carbohydrates, things like that. Nothing will be digestible here until you are adapted chemically by a little test-tube evolution. Till then you'd starve to death on a full stomach."
Pat's side of the table had been loaded with the dishes from two trays, but it was almost clear now and the dishes were stacked neatly to one side. He started on three desserts, thoughtfully tasting each in turn.
"Test-tube evolution?" Max repeated. "What's that? I thought you people had no doctors."
"It's a story." Pat leaned back again. "Alexander P. Mead, the head of the Mead clan, was a plant geneticist, a very determined personality and no man to argue with. He didn't want us to go through the struggle of killing off all Minos plants and putting in our own, spoiling the face of the planet and upsetting the balance of its ecology. He decided that he would adapt our genes to this planet or kill us trying. He did it all right.'"
"Did which?" asked June, suddenly feeling a sourceless prickle of fear.
"Adapted us to Minos. He took human cells—"
She listened intently, trying to find a reason for fear in the explanation. It would have taken many human generations to adapt to Minos by ordinary evolution, and that only at a heavy toll of death and hunger which evolution exacts. There was a shorter way: Human cells have the ability to return to their primeval condition of independence, hunting, eating and reproducing alone.
Alexander P. Mead took human cells and made them into phagocytes. He put them through the hard savage school of evolution—a thousand generations of multiplication, hardship and hunger, with the alien indigestible food always present, offering its reward of plenty to the cell that reluctantly learned to absorb it.
"Leucocytes can run through several thousand generations of evolution in six months," Pat Mead finished. "When they reached to a point where they would absorb Minos food, he planted them back in the people he had taken them from."
"What was supposed to happen then?" Max asked, leaning forward.
"I don't know exactly how it worked. He never told anybody much about it, and when I was a little boy he had gone loco and was wandering ha-ha-ing around waving a test tube. Fell down a ravine and broke his neck at the age of eighty."
"A character," Max said.
Why was she afraid? "It worked then?"
"Yes. He tried it on all the Meads the first year. The other settlers didn't want to be experimented on until they saw how it worked out. It worked. The Meads could hunt, and plant while the other settlers were still eating out of hydroponics tanks."
"It worked," said Max to Len. "You're a plant geneticist and a tank culture expert. There's a job for you."
"Uh- uh !" Len backed away. "It sounds like a medical problem to me. Human cell control—right up your alley."
"It is a one-way street," Pat warned. "Once it is done, you won't be able to digest ship food. I'll get no good from this protein. I ate it just for the taste."
Hal Barton appeared quietly beside the table. "Three of the twelve test hamsters have died," he reported, and turned to Pat. "Your people carry the germs of melting sickness, as you call it. The dead hamsters were injected with blood taken from you before you were de-infected. We can't settle here unless we de-infect everybody on Minos. Would they object?"
"We wouldn't want to give you folks germs," Pat smiled. "Anything for safety. But there'll have to be a vote on it first."
The doctors went to Reno Ulrich's table and walked with him to the hangar, explaining. He was to carry the proposal to Alexandria, mingle with the people, be persuasive and wait for them to vote before returning. He was to give himself shots of cureall every two hours on the hour or run the risk of disease.
Reno was pleased. He had dabbled in sociology before retraining as a mechanic for the expedition. "This gives me a chance to study their mores." He winked wickedly. "I may not be back for several nights." They watched through the viewplate as he took off, and then went over to the laboratory for a look at the hamsters.
Three were alive and healthy, munching lettuce. One was the control; the other two had been given shots of Pat's blood from before he entered the ship, but with no additional treatment. Apparently a hamster could fight off melting sickness easily if left alone. Three were still feverish and ruffled, with a low red blood count, but recovering. The three dead ones had been given strong shots of adaptive and counter histamine, so their bodies had not fought back against the attack.
June glanced at the dead animals hastily and looked away again. They lay twisted with a strange semi-fluid limpness, as if ready to dissolve. The last hamster, which had been given the heaviest dose of adaptive, had apparently lost all its hair before death. It was hairless and pink, like a still-born baby.
"We can find no micro-organisms," George Barton said. "None at all. Nothing in the body that should not be there. Leucosis and anemia. Fever only for the ones that fought it off." He handed Max some temperature charts and graphs of blood counts.
June wandered out into the hall. Pediatrics and obstetrics were her field; she left the cellular research to Max, and just helped him with laboratory routine. The strange mood followed her out into the hall, then abruptly lightened.
Coming toward her, busily telling a tale of adventure to the gorgeous Shelia Davenport, was a tall, red-headed, magnificently handsome man. It was his handsomeness which made Pat such a pleasure to look upon and talk with, she guiltily told herself, and it was his tremendous vitality.... It was like meeting a movie hero in the flesh, or a hero out of the pages of a book—Deer-slayer, John Clayton, Lord Greystoke.
She waited in the doorway to the laboratory and made no move to join them, merely acknowledged the two with a nod and a smile and a casual lift of the hand. They nodded and smiled back.
"Hello, June," said Pat and continued telling his tale, but as they passed he lightly touched her arm.
"Oh, pioneer!" she said mockingly and softly to his passing profile, and knew that he had heard.
Question:
What is the melting sickness?
Answer:
|
[
"The melting sickness is described as a type of plague by Pat. He informs the doctors that it arrived soon after the colony settled on the planet and killed all but one particular familiar which happened to be immune to the disease. The disease is described as being brutal and not even doctors were able to avoid it. According to Pat, there has not been any recurrence of the melting sickness and no other diseases to note. ",
"The melting sickness is the name the local colonists gave to some kind of a plague which killed all the colonists except the Meads families. It happened in a couple years after arrival and only the Meads turned out to be immune, that's why all the people on Minos look similar - they are related. The disease was so rapid and furious that it killed all the doctors and, therefore, wasn't studied. The rest of the colonists took off on the ship to escape, and left the Meads without any books or technologies, so they don't have doctors and hunt with bows. This disease is still carried by the Meads without harming them, it's also unable to record through testings - all the tests are good but the hamsters die.",
"The melting sickness is a plague that spread across the first colony on Minos. The melting sickness killed everyone except for the Mead family, who seemed to be immune to the disease. It is unsure what exactly the melting sickness is or its cure, because the doctors working to learn about it ended up dying during the plague. Since the, plague, there have been no more cases of the melting sickness on Minos, but the people on The Explorer still need to take precautions in case the germs prevailed. When the experiment is run on the hamsters, three of them die, one of them losing its hair. ",
"Melting sickness is the equivalent of a plague-type disease on Minos. Patrick does not know much about the melting sickness, but his father had explained it to him as being pretty gruesome. The doctors died too soon to find out what the disease was and what to do to cure it. It was also impossible to train more doctors or send them to civilization because their spaceship that served as a power plant with all of the necessary books went into the sky and never came back. Although Patrick says that there are no more recurrences of melting sickness, it is revealed that the colony peoples still carry the germs of the disease, which means that they must disinfect before establishing contact. The hamsters can fight off melting sickness alone, but the ones who died had strong shots of adaptive and counter histamine. George also says that they can not find any external micro-organisms. Everything present is leucosis and anemia; fever is only for the ones who fought it off. "
] |
50774
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CONTAGION
By KATHERINE MacLEAN
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction October 1950. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Minos was such a lovely planet. Not a thing seemed wrong with it. Excepting the food, perhaps. And a disease that wasn't really.
It was like an Earth forest in the fall, but it was not fall. The forest leaves were green and copper and purple and fiery red, and a wind sent patches of bright greenish sunlight dancing among the leaf shadows.
The hunt party of the Explorer filed along the narrow trail, guns ready, walking carefully, listening to the distant, half familiar cries of strange birds.
A faint crackle of static in their earphones indicated that a gun had been fired.
"Got anything?" asked June Walton. The helmet intercom carried her voice to the ears of the others without breaking the stillness of the forest.
"Took a shot at something," explained George Barton's cheerful voice in her earphones. She rounded a bend of the trail and came upon Barton standing peering up into the trees, his gun still raised. "It looked like a duck."
"This isn't Central Park," said Hal Barton, his brother, coming into sight. His green spacesuit struck an incongruous note against the bronze and red forest. "They won't all look like ducks," he said soberly.
"Maybe some will look like dragons. Don't get eaten by a dragon, June," came Max's voice quietly into her earphones. "Not while I still love you." He came out of the trees carrying the blood sample kit, and touched her glove with his, the grin on his ugly beloved face barely visible in the mingled light and shade. A patch of sunlight struck a greenish glint from his fishbowl helmet.
They walked on. A quarter of a mile back, the space ship Explorer towered over the forest like a tapering skyscraper, and the people of the ship looked out of the viewplates at fresh winds and sunlight and clouds, and they longed to be outside.
But the likeness to Earth was danger, and the cool wind might be death, for if the animals were like Earth animals, their diseases might be like Earth diseases, alike enough to be contagious, different enough to be impossible to treat. There was warning enough in the past. Colonies had vanished, and traveled spaceways drifted with the corpses of ships which had touched on some plague planet.
The people of the ship waited while their doctors, in airtight spacesuits, hunted animals to test them for contagion.
The four medicos, for June Walton was also a doctor, filed through the alien homelike forest, walking softly, watching for motion among the copper and purple shadows.
They saw it suddenly, a lighter moving copper patch among the darker browns. Reflex action swung June's gun into line, and behind her someone's gun went off with a faint crackle of static, and made a hole in the leaves beside the specimen. Then for a while no one moved.
This one looked like a man, a magnificently muscled, leanly graceful, humanlike animal. Even in its callused bare feet, it was a head taller than any of them. Red-haired, hawk-faced and darkly tanned, it stood breathing heavily, looking at them without expression. At its side hung a sheath knife, and a crossbow was slung across one wide shoulder.
They lowered their guns.
"It needs a shave," Max said reasonably in their earphones, and he reached up to his helmet and flipped the switch that let his voice be heard. "Something we could do for you, Mac?"
The friendly drawl was the first voice that had broken the forest sounds. June smiled suddenly. He was right. The strict logic of evolution did not demand beards; therefore a non-human would not be wearing a three day growth of red stubble.
Still panting, the tall figure licked dry lips and spoke. "Welcome to Minos. The Mayor sends greetings from Alexandria."
"English?" gasped June.
"We were afraid you would take off again before I could bring word to you.... It's three hundred miles.... We saw your scout plane pass twice, but we couldn't attract its attention."
June looked in stunned silence at the stranger leaning against the tree. Thirty-six light years—thirty-six times six trillion miles of monotonous space travel—to be told that the planet was already settled! "We didn't know there was a colony here," she said. "It is not on the map."
"We were afraid of that," the tall bronze man answered soberly. "We have been here three generations and yet no traders have come."
Max shifted the kit strap on his shoulder and offered a hand. "My name is Max Stark, M.D. This is June Walton, M.D., Hal Barton, M.D., and George Barton, Hal's brother, also M.D."
"Patrick Mead is the name," smiled the man, shaking hands casually.
"Just a hunter and bridge carpenter myself. Never met any medicos before."
The grip was effortless but even through her airproofed glove June could feel that the fingers that touched hers were as hard as padded steel.
"What—what is the population of Minos?" she asked.
He looked down at her curiously for a moment before answering. "Only one hundred and fifty." He smiled. "Don't worry, this isn't a city planet yet. There's room for a few more people." He shook hands with the Bartons quickly. "That is—you are people, aren't you?" he asked startlingly.
"Why not?" said Max with a poise that June admired.
"Well, you are all so—so—" Patrick Mead's eyes roamed across the faces of the group. "So varied."
They could find no meaning in that, and stood puzzled.
"I mean," Patrick Mead said into the silence, "all these—interesting different hair colors and face shapes and so forth—" He made a vague wave with one hand as if he had run out of words or was anxious not to insult them.
"Joke?" Max asked, bewildered.
June laid a hand on his arm. "No harm meant," she said to him over the intercom. "We're just as much of a shock to him as he is to us."
She addressed a question to the tall colonist on outside sound. "What should a person look like, Mr. Mead?"
He indicated her with a smile. "Like you."
June stepped closer and stood looking up at him, considering her own description. She was tall and tanned, like him; had a few freckles, like him; and wavy red hair, like his. She ignored the brightly humorous blue eyes.
"In other words," she said, "everyone on the planet looks like you and me?"
Patrick Mead took another look at their four faces and began to grin.
"Like me, I guess. But I hadn't thought of it before. I did not think that people could have different colored hair or that noses could fit so many ways onto faces. I was judging by my own appearance, but I suppose any fool can walk on his hands and say the world is upside down!" He laughed and sobered. "But then why wear spacesuits? The air is breathable."
"For safety," June told him. "We can't take any chances on plague."
Pat Mead was wearing nothing but a loin cloth and his weapons, and the wind ruffled his hair. He looked comfortable, and they longed to take off the stuffy spacesuits and feel the wind against their own skins. Minos was like home, like Earth.... But they were strangers.
"Plague," Pat Mead said thoughtfully. "We had one here. It came two years after the colony arrived and killed everyone except the Mead families. They were immune. I guess we look alike because we're all related, and that's why I grew up thinking that it is the only way people can look."
Plague. "What was the disease?" Hal Barton asked.
"Pretty gruesome, according to my father. They called it the melting sickness. The doctors died too soon to find out what it was or what to do about it."
"You should have trained for more doctors, or sent to civilization for some." A trace of impatience was in George Barton's voice.
Pat Mead explained patiently, "Our ship, with the power plant and all the books we needed, went off into the sky to avoid the contagion, and never came back. The crew must have died." Long years of hardship were indicated by that statement, a colony with electric power gone and machinery stilled, with key technicians dead and no way to replace them. June realized then the full meaning of the primitive sheath knife and bow.
"Any recurrence of melting sickness?" asked Hal Barton.
"No."
"Any other diseases?"
"Not a one."
Max was eyeing the bronze red-headed figure with something approaching awe. "Do you think all the Meads look like that?" he said to June on the intercom. "I wouldn't mind being a Mead myself!"
Their job had been made easy by the coming of Pat. They went back to the ship laughing, exchanging anecdotes with him. There was nothing now to keep Minos from being the home they wanted, except the melting sickness, and, forewarned against it, they could take precautions.
The polished silver and black column of the Explorer seemed to rise higher and higher over the trees as they neared it. Then its symmetry blurred all sense of specific size as they stepped out from among the trees and stood on the edge of the meadow, looking up.
"Nice!" said Pat. "Beautiful!" The admiration in his voice was warming.
"It was a yacht," Max said, still looking up, "second hand, an old-time beauty without a sign of wear. Synthetic diamond-studded control board and murals on the walls. It doesn't have the new speed drives, but it brought us thirty-six light years in one and a half subjective years. Plenty good enough."
The tall tanned man looked faintly wistful, and June realized that he had never had access to a full library, never seen a movie, never experienced luxury. He had been born and raised on Minos.
"May I go aboard?" Pat asked hopefully.
Max unslung the specimen kit from his shoulder, laid it on the carpet of plants that covered the ground and began to open it.
"Tests first," Hal Barton said. "We have to find out if you people still carry this so-called melting sickness. We'll have to de-microbe you and take specimens before we let you on board. Once on, you'll be no good as a check for what the other Meads might have."
Max was taking out a rack and a stand of preservative bottles and hypodermics.
"Are you going to jab me with those?" Pat asked with interest.
"You're just a specimen animal to me, bud!" Max grinned at Pat Mead, and Pat grinned back. June saw that they were friends already, the tall pantherish colonist, and the wry, black-haired doctor. She felt a stab of guilt because she loved Max and yet could pity him for being smaller and frailer than Pat Mead.
"Lie down," Max told him, "and hold still. We need two spinal fluid samples from the back, a body cavity one in front, and another from the arm."
Pat lay down obediently. Max knelt, and, as he spoke, expertly swabbed and inserted needles with the smooth speed that had made him a fine nerve surgeon on Earth.
High above them the scout helioplane came out of an opening in the ship and angled off toward the west, its buzz diminishing. Then, suddenly, it veered and headed back, and Reno Unrich's voice came tinnily from their earphones:
"What's that you've got? Hey, what are you docs doing down there?" He banked again and came to a stop, hovering fifty feet away. June could see his startled face looking through the glass at Pat.
Hal Barton switched to a narrow radio beam, explained rapidly and pointed in the direction of Alexandria. Reno's plane lifted and flew away over the odd-colored forest.
"The plane will drop a note on your town, telling them you got through to us," Hal Barton told Pat, who was sitting up watching Max dexterously put the blood and spinal fluids into the right bottles without exposing them to air.
"We won't be free to contact your people until we know if they still carry melting sickness," Max added. "You might be immune so it doesn't show on you, but still carry enough germs—if that's what caused it—to wipe out a planet."
"If you do carry melting sickness," said Hal Barton, "we won't be able to mingle with your people until we've cleared them of the disease."
"Starting with me?" Pat asked.
"Starting with you," Max told him ruefully, "as soon as you step on board."
"More needles?"
"Yes, and a few little extras thrown in."
"Rough?"
"It isn't easy."
A few minutes later, standing in the stalls for spacesuit decontamination, being buffeted by jets of hot disinfectant, bathed in glares of sterilizing ultraviolet radiation, June remembered that and compared Pat Mead's treatment to theirs.
In the Explorer , stored carefully in sealed tanks and containers, was the ultimate, multi-purpose cureall. It was a solution of enzymes so like the key catalysts of the human cell nucleus that it caused chemical derangement and disintegration in any non-human cell. Nothing could live in contact with it but human cells; any alien intruder to the body would die. Nucleocat Cureall was its trade name.
But the cureall alone was not enough for complete safety. Plagues had been known to slay too rapidly and universally to be checked by human treatment. Doctors are not reliable; they die. Therefore spaceways and interplanetary health law demanded that ship equipment for guarding against disease be totally mechanical in operation, rapid and efficient.
Somewhere near them, in a series of stalls which led around and around like a rabbit maze, Pat was being herded from stall to stall by peremptory mechanical voices, directed to soap and shower, ordered to insert his arm into a slot which took a sample of his blood, given solutions to drink, bathed in germicidal ultraviolet, shaken by sonic blasts, breathing air thick with sprays of germicidal mists, being directed to put his arms into other slots where they were anesthesized and injected with various immunizing solutions.
Finally, he would be put in a room of high temperature and extreme dryness, and instructed to sit for half an hour while more fluids were dripped into his veins through long thin tubes.
All legal spaceships were built for safety. No chance was taken of allowing a suspected carrier to bring an infection on board with him.
June stepped from the last shower stall into the locker room, zipped off her spacesuit with a sigh of relief, and contemplated herself in a wall mirror. Red hair, dark blue eyes, tall....
"I've got a good figure," she said thoughtfully.
Max turned at the door. "Why this sudden interest in your looks?" he asked suspiciously. "Do we stand here and admire you, or do we finally get something to eat?"
"Wait a minute." She went to a wall phone and dialed it carefully, using a combination from the ship's directory. "How're you doing, Pat?"
The phone picked up a hissing of water or spray. There was a startled chuckle. "Voices, too! Hello, June. How do you tell a machine to go jump in the lake?"
"Are you hungry?"
"No food since yesterday."
"We'll have a banquet ready for you when you get out," she told Pat and hung up, smiling. Pat Mead's voice had a vitality and enjoyment which made shipboard talk sound like sad artificial gaiety in contrast.
They looked into the nearby small laboratory where twelve squealing hamsters were protestingly submitting to a small injection each of Pat's blood. In most of them the injection was followed by one of antihistaminics and adaptives. Otherwise the hamster defense system would treat all non-hamster cells as enemies, even the harmless human blood cells, and fight back against them violently.
One hamster, the twelfth, was given an extra large dose of adaptive, so that if there were a disease, he would not fight it or the human cells, and thus succumb more rapidly.
"How ya doing, George?" Max asked.
"Routine," George Barton grunted absently.
On the way up the long spiral ramps to the dining hall, they passed a viewplate. It showed a long scene of mountains in the distance on the horizon, and between them, rising step by step as they grew farther away, the low rolling hills, bronze and red with patches of clear green where there were fields.
Someone was looking out, standing very still, as if she had been there a long time—Bess St. Clair, a Canadian woman. "It looks like Winnipeg," she told them as they paused. "When are you doctors going to let us out of this blithering barberpole? Look," she pointed. "See that patch of field on the south hillside, with the brook winding through it? I've staked that hillside for our house. When do we get out?"
Reno Ulrich's tiny scout plane buzzed slowly in from the distance and began circling lazily.
"Sooner than you think," Max told her. "We've discovered a castaway colony on the planet. They've done our tests for us by just living here. If there's anything here to catch, they've caught it."
"People on Minos?" Bess's handsome ruddy face grew alive with excitement.
"One of them is down in the medical department," June said. "He'll be out in twenty minutes."
"May I go see him?"
"Sure," said Max. "Show him the way to the dining hall when he gets out. Tell him we sent you."
"Right!" She turned and ran down the ramp like a small girl going to a fire. Max grinned at June and she grinned back. After a year and a half of isolation in space, everyone was hungry for the sight of new faces, the sound of unfamiliar voices.
They climbed the last two turns to the cafeteria, and entered to a rich subdued blend of soft music and quiet conversations. The cafeteria was a section of the old dining room, left when the rest of the ship had been converted to living and working quarters, and it still had the original finely grained wood of the ceiling and walls, the sound absorbency, the soft music spools and the intimate small light at each table where people leisurely ate and talked.
They stood in line at the hot foods counter, and behind her June could hear a girl's voice talking excitedly through the murmur of conversation.
"—new man, honest! I saw him through the viewplate when they came in. He's down in the medical department. A real frontiersman."
The line drew abreast of the counters, and she and Max chose three heaping trays, starting with hydroponic mushroom steak, raised in the growing trays of water and chemicals; sharp salad bowl with rose tomatoes and aromatic peppers; tank-grown fish with special sauce; four different desserts, and assorted beverages.
Presently they had three tottering trays successfully maneuvered to a table. Brant St. Clair came over. "I beg your pardon, Max, but they are saying something about Reno carrying messages to a colony of savages, for the medical department. Will he be back soon, do you know?"
Max smiled up at him, his square face affectionate. Everyone liked the shy Canadian. "He's back already. We just saw him come in."
"Oh, fine." St. Clair beamed. "I had an appointment with him to go out and confirm what looks like a nice vein of iron to the northeast. Have you seen Bess? Oh—there she is." He turned swiftly and hurried away.
A very tall man with fiery red hair came in surrounded by an eagerly talking crowd of ship people. It was Pat Mead. He stood in the doorway, alertly scanning the dining room. Sheer vitality made him seem even larger than he was. Sighting June, he smiled and began to thread toward their table.
"Look!" said someone. "There's the colonist!" Shelia, a pretty, jeweled woman, followed and caught his arm. "Did you really swim across a river to come here?"
Overflowing with good-will and curiosity, people approached from all directions. "Did you actually walk three hundred miles? Come, eat with us. Let me help choose your tray."
Everyone wanted him to eat at their table, everyone was a specialist and wanted data about Minos. They all wanted anecdotes about hunting wild animals with a bow and arrow.
"He needs to be rescued," Max said. "He won't have a chance to eat."
June and Max got up firmly, edged through the crowd, captured Pat and escorted him back to their table. June found herself pleased to be claiming the hero of the hour.
Pat sat in the simple, subtly designed chair and leaned back almost voluptuously, testing the way it gave and fitted itself to him. He ran his eyes over the bright tableware and heaped plates. He looked around at the rich grained walls and soft lights at each table. He said nothing, just looking and feeling and experiencing.
"When we build our town and leave the ship," June explained, "we will turn all the staterooms back into the lounges and ballrooms and cocktail bars that used to be inside."
"Oh, I'm not complaining," Pat said negligently. He cocked his head to the music, and tried to locate its source.
"That's big of you," said Max with gentle irony.
They fell to, Pat beginning the first meal he had had in more than a day.
Most of the other diners finished when they were halfway through, and began walking over, diffidently at first, then in another wave of smiling faces, handshakes, and introductions. Pat was asked about crops, about farming methods, about rainfall and floods, about farm animals and plant breeding, about the compatibility of imported Earth seeds with local ground, about mines and strata.
There was no need to protect him. He leaned back in his chair and drawled answers with the lazy ease of a panther; where he could think of no statistic, he would fill the gap with an anecdote. It developed that he enjoyed spinning campfire yarns and especially being the center of interest.
Between bouts of questions, he ate with undiminished and glowing relish.
June noticed that the female specialists were prolonging the questions more than they needed, clustering around the table laughing at his jokes, until presently Pat was almost surrounded by pretty faces, eager questions, and chiming laughs. Shelia the beautiful laughed most chimingly of all.
June nudged Max, and Max shrugged indifferently. It wasn't anything a man would pay attention to, perhaps. But June watched Pat for a moment more, then glanced uneasily back to Max. He was eating and listening to Pat's answers and did not feel her gaze. For some reason Max looked almost shrunken to her. He was shorter than she had realized; she had forgotten that he was only the same height as herself. She was dimly aware of the clear lilting chatter of female voices increasing at Pat's end of the table.
"That guy's a menace," Max said, and laughed to himself, cutting another slice of hydroponic mushroom steak. "What's eating you?" he added, glancing aside at her when he noticed her sudden stillness.
"Nothing," she said hastily, but she did not turn back to watching Pat Mead. She felt disloyal. Pat was only a superb animal. Max was the man she loved. Or—was he? Of course he was, she told herself angrily. They had gone colonizing together because they wanted to spend their lives together; she had never thought of marrying any other man. Yet the sense of dissatisfaction persisted, and along with it a feeling of guilt.
Len Marlow, the protein tank-culture technician responsible for the mushroom steaks, had wormed his way into the group and asked Pat a question. Now he was saying, "I don't dig you, Pat. It sounds like you're putting the people into the tanks instead of the vegetables!" He glanced at them, looking puzzled. "See if you two can make anything of this. It sounds medical to me."
Pat leaned back and smiled, sipping a glass of hydroponic burgundy.
"Wonderful stuff. You'll have to show us how to make it."
Len turned back to him. "You people live off the country, right? You hunt and bring in steaks and eat them, right? Well, say I have one of those steaks right here and I want to eat it, what happens?"
"Go ahead and eat it. It just wouldn't digest. You'd stay hungry."
"Why?" Len was aggrieved.
"Chemical differences in the basic protoplasm of Minos. Different amino linkages, left-handed instead of right-handed molecules in the carbohydrates, things like that. Nothing will be digestible here until you are adapted chemically by a little test-tube evolution. Till then you'd starve to death on a full stomach."
Pat's side of the table had been loaded with the dishes from two trays, but it was almost clear now and the dishes were stacked neatly to one side. He started on three desserts, thoughtfully tasting each in turn.
"Test-tube evolution?" Max repeated. "What's that? I thought you people had no doctors."
"It's a story." Pat leaned back again. "Alexander P. Mead, the head of the Mead clan, was a plant geneticist, a very determined personality and no man to argue with. He didn't want us to go through the struggle of killing off all Minos plants and putting in our own, spoiling the face of the planet and upsetting the balance of its ecology. He decided that he would adapt our genes to this planet or kill us trying. He did it all right.'"
"Did which?" asked June, suddenly feeling a sourceless prickle of fear.
"Adapted us to Minos. He took human cells—"
She listened intently, trying to find a reason for fear in the explanation. It would have taken many human generations to adapt to Minos by ordinary evolution, and that only at a heavy toll of death and hunger which evolution exacts. There was a shorter way: Human cells have the ability to return to their primeval condition of independence, hunting, eating and reproducing alone.
Alexander P. Mead took human cells and made them into phagocytes. He put them through the hard savage school of evolution—a thousand generations of multiplication, hardship and hunger, with the alien indigestible food always present, offering its reward of plenty to the cell that reluctantly learned to absorb it.
"Leucocytes can run through several thousand generations of evolution in six months," Pat Mead finished. "When they reached to a point where they would absorb Minos food, he planted them back in the people he had taken them from."
"What was supposed to happen then?" Max asked, leaning forward.
"I don't know exactly how it worked. He never told anybody much about it, and when I was a little boy he had gone loco and was wandering ha-ha-ing around waving a test tube. Fell down a ravine and broke his neck at the age of eighty."
"A character," Max said.
Why was she afraid? "It worked then?"
"Yes. He tried it on all the Meads the first year. The other settlers didn't want to be experimented on until they saw how it worked out. It worked. The Meads could hunt, and plant while the other settlers were still eating out of hydroponics tanks."
"It worked," said Max to Len. "You're a plant geneticist and a tank culture expert. There's a job for you."
"Uh- uh !" Len backed away. "It sounds like a medical problem to me. Human cell control—right up your alley."
"It is a one-way street," Pat warned. "Once it is done, you won't be able to digest ship food. I'll get no good from this protein. I ate it just for the taste."
Hal Barton appeared quietly beside the table. "Three of the twelve test hamsters have died," he reported, and turned to Pat. "Your people carry the germs of melting sickness, as you call it. The dead hamsters were injected with blood taken from you before you were de-infected. We can't settle here unless we de-infect everybody on Minos. Would they object?"
"We wouldn't want to give you folks germs," Pat smiled. "Anything for safety. But there'll have to be a vote on it first."
The doctors went to Reno Ulrich's table and walked with him to the hangar, explaining. He was to carry the proposal to Alexandria, mingle with the people, be persuasive and wait for them to vote before returning. He was to give himself shots of cureall every two hours on the hour or run the risk of disease.
Reno was pleased. He had dabbled in sociology before retraining as a mechanic for the expedition. "This gives me a chance to study their mores." He winked wickedly. "I may not be back for several nights." They watched through the viewplate as he took off, and then went over to the laboratory for a look at the hamsters.
Three were alive and healthy, munching lettuce. One was the control; the other two had been given shots of Pat's blood from before he entered the ship, but with no additional treatment. Apparently a hamster could fight off melting sickness easily if left alone. Three were still feverish and ruffled, with a low red blood count, but recovering. The three dead ones had been given strong shots of adaptive and counter histamine, so their bodies had not fought back against the attack.
June glanced at the dead animals hastily and looked away again. They lay twisted with a strange semi-fluid limpness, as if ready to dissolve. The last hamster, which had been given the heaviest dose of adaptive, had apparently lost all its hair before death. It was hairless and pink, like a still-born baby.
"We can find no micro-organisms," George Barton said. "None at all. Nothing in the body that should not be there. Leucosis and anemia. Fever only for the ones that fought it off." He handed Max some temperature charts and graphs of blood counts.
June wandered out into the hall. Pediatrics and obstetrics were her field; she left the cellular research to Max, and just helped him with laboratory routine. The strange mood followed her out into the hall, then abruptly lightened.
Coming toward her, busily telling a tale of adventure to the gorgeous Shelia Davenport, was a tall, red-headed, magnificently handsome man. It was his handsomeness which made Pat such a pleasure to look upon and talk with, she guiltily told herself, and it was his tremendous vitality.... It was like meeting a movie hero in the flesh, or a hero out of the pages of a book—Deer-slayer, John Clayton, Lord Greystoke.
She waited in the doorway to the laboratory and made no move to join them, merely acknowledged the two with a nod and a smile and a casual lift of the hand. They nodded and smiled back.
"Hello, June," said Pat and continued telling his tale, but as they passed he lightly touched her arm.
"Oh, pioneer!" she said mockingly and softly to his passing profile, and knew that he had heard.
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Describe what "pre-civilization" means in the context of this story
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about Time In the Round by Fritz Leiber.
Relevant chunks:
TIME IN THE ROUND
By FRITZ LEIBER
Illustrated by DILLON
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction May 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Poor Butcher suffered more than any dictator in history: everybody gave in to him because he was so puny and they were so impregnable!
From the other end of the Avenue of Wisdom that led across the Peace Park, a gray, hairless, heavily built dog was barking soundlessly at the towering crystal glory of the Time Theater. For a moment, the effect was almost frightening: a silent picture of the beginning of civilization challenging the end of it. Then a small boy caught up with the dog and it rolled over enthusiastically at his feet and the scene was normal again.
The small boy, however, seemed definitely pre-civilization. He studied the dog coldly and then inserted a thin metal tube under its eyelid and poked. The dog wagged its stumpy tail. The boy frowned, tightened his grip on the tube and jabbed hard. The dog's tail thumped the cushiony pavement and the four paws beat the air. The boy shortened his grip and suddenly jabbed the dog several times in the stomach. The stiff tube rebounded from the gray, hairless hide. The dog's face split in an upside-down grin, revealing formidable ivory fangs across which a long black tongue lolled.
The boy regarded the tongue speculatively and pocketed the metal tube with a grimace of utter disgust. He did not look up when someone called: "Hi, Butch! Sic 'em, Darter, sic 'em!"
A larger small boy and a somewhat older one were approaching across the luxurious, neatly cropped grass, preceded by a hurtling shape that, except for a black hide, was a replica of Butch's gray dog.
Butch shrugged his shoulders resignedly and said in a bored voice:
"Kill 'em, Brute."
The gray dog hurled itself on Darter. Jaws gaped to get a hold on necks so short and thick as to be mere courtesy terms. They whirled like a fanged merry-go-round. Three more dogs, one white, one slate blue and one pink, hurried up and tried to climb aboard.
Butch yawned.
"What's the matter?" inquired Darter's master. "I thought you liked dog fights, Butch."
"I do like dog fights," Butch said somberly, without looking around. "I don't like uninj fights. They're just a pretend, like everything else. Nobody gets hurt. And look here, Joggy—and you, too, Hal—when you talk to me, don't just say Butch. It's the Butcher, see?"
"That's not exactly a functional name," Hal observed with the judiciousness of budding maturity, while Joggy said agreeably: "All right, Butcher, I suppose you'd like to have lived way back when people were hurting each other all the time so the blood came out?"
"I certainly would," the Butcher replied. As Joggy and Hal turned back skeptically to watch the fight, he took out the metal tube, screwed up his face in a dreadful frown and jabbed himself in the hand. He squeaked with pain and whisked the tube out of sight.
"A kid can't do anything any more," he announced dramatically. "Can't break anything except the breakables they give him to break on purpose. Can't get dirty except in the dirt-pen—and they graduate him from that when he's two. Can't even be bitten by an uninj—it's contraprogrammed."
"Where'd you ever get so fixated on dirt?" Hal asked in a gentle voice acquired from a robot adolescer.
"I've been reading a book about a kid called Huckleberry Finn," the Butcher replied airily. "A swell book. That guy got dirtier than anything." His eyes became dreamy. "He even ate out of a garbage pail."
"What's a garbage pail?"
"I don't know, but it sounds great."
The battling uninjes careened into them. Brute had Darter by the ear and was whirling him around hilariously.
"Aw, quit it, Brute," the Butcher said in annoyance.
Brute obediently loosed his hold and returned to his master, paying no attention to his adversary's efforts to renew the fight.
The Butcher looked Brute squarely in the eyes. "You're making too much of a rumpus," he said. "I want to think."
He kicked Brute in the face. The dog squirmed joyously at his feet.
"Look," Joggy said, "you wouldn't hurt an uninj, for instance, would you?"
"How can you hurt something that's uninjurable?" the Butcher demanded scathingly. "An uninj isn't really a dog. It's just a lot of circuits and a micropack bedded in hyperplastic." He looked at Brute with guarded wistfulness.
"I don't know about that," Hal put in. "I've heard an uninj is programmed with so many genuine canine reactions that it practically has racial memory."
"I mean if you could hurt an uninj," Joggy amended.
"Well, maybe I wouldn't," the Butcher admitted grudgingly. "But shut up—I want to think."
"About what?" Hal asked with saintly reasonableness.
The Butcher achieved a fearful frown. "When I'm World Director," he said slowly, "I'm going to have warfare again."
"You think so now," Hal told him. "We all do at your age."
"We do not," the Butcher retorted. "I bet you didn't."
"Oh, yes, I was foolish, too," the older boy confessed readily. "All newborn organisms are self-centered and inconsiderate and ruthless. They have to be. That's why we have uninjes to work out on, and death games and fear houses, so that our emotions are cleared for adult conditioning. And it's just the same with newborn civilizations. Why, long after atom power and the space drive were discovered, people kept having wars and revolutions. It took ages to condition them differently. Of course, you can't appreciate it this year, but Man's greatest achievement was when he learned to automatically reject all violent solutions to problems. You'll realize that when you're older."
"I will not!" the Butcher countered hotly. "I'm not going to be a sissy." Hal and Joggy blinked at the unfamiliar word. "And what if we were attacked by bloodthirsty monsters from outside the Solar System?"
"The Space Fleet would take care of them," Hal replied calmly. "That's what it's for. Adults aren't conditioned to reject violent solutions to problems where non-human enemies are concerned. Look at what we did to viruses."
"But what if somebody got at us through the Time Bubble?"
"They can't. It's impossible."
"Yes, but suppose they did all the same."
"You've never been inside the Time Theater—you're not old enough yet—so you just can't know anything about it or about the reasons why it's impossible," Hal replied with friendly factuality. "The Time Bubble is just a viewer. You can only look through it, and just into the past, at that. But you can't travel through it because you can't change the past. Time traveling is a lot of kid stuff."
"I don't care," the Butcher asserted obstinately. "I'm still going to have warfare when I'm World Director."
"They'll condition you out of the idea," Hal assured him.
"They will not. I won't let 'em."
"It doesn't matter what you think now," Hal said with finality. "You'll have an altogether different opinion when you're six."
"Well, what if I will?" the Butcher snapped back. "You don't have to keep telling me about it, do you?"
The others were silent. Joggy began to bounce up and down abstractedly on the resilient pavement. Hal called in his three uninjes and said in soothing tones: "Joggy and I are going to swim over to the Time Theater. Want to walk us there, Butch?"
Butch scowled.
"How about it, Butch?"
Still Butch did not seem to hear.
The older boy shrugged and said: "Oh, well, how about it—Butcher?"
The Butcher swung around. "They won't let me in the Time Theater. You said so yourself."
"You could walk us over there."
"Well, maybe I will and maybe I won't."
"While you're deciding, we'll get swimming. Come along, Joggy."
Still scowling, the Butcher took a white soapy crayon from the bulging pocket in his silver shorts. Pressed into the pavement, it made a black mark. He scrawled pensively: KEEP ON THE GRASS.
He gazed at his handiwork. No, darn it, that was just what grownups wanted you to do. This grass couldn't be hurt. You couldn't pull it up or tear it off; it hurt your fingers to try. A rub with the side of the crayon removed the sign. He thought for a moment, then wrote: KEEP OFF THE GRASS.
With an untroubled countenance, he sprang up and hurried after the others.
Joggy and the older boy were swimming lazily through the air at shoulder height. In the pavement directly under each of them was a wide, saucer-shaped depression which swam along with them. The uninjes avoided the depressions. Darter was strutting on his hind legs, looking up inquiringly at his master.
"Gimme a ride, Hal, gimme a ride!" the Butcher called. The older boy ignored him. "Aw, gimme a ride, Joggy."
"Oh, all right." Joggy touched the small box attached to the front of his broad metal harness and dropped lightly to the ground. The Butcher climbed on his back. There was a moment of rocking and pitching, during which each boy accused the other of trying to upset them.
Then the Butcher got his balance and they began to swim along securely, though at a level several inches lower. Brute sprang up after his master and was invisibly rebuffed. He retired baffled, but a few minutes later, he was amusing himself by furious futile efforts to climb the hemispherical repulsor field.
Slowly the little cavalcade of boys and uninjes proceeded down the Avenue of Wisdom. Hal amused himself by stroking toward a tree. When he was about four feet from it, he was gently bounced away.
It was really a more tiring method of transportation than walking and quite useless against the wind. True, by rocking the repulsor hemisphere backward, you could get a brief forward push, but it would be nullified when you rocked forward. A slow swimming stroke was the simplest way to make progress.
The general sensation, however, was delightful and levitators were among the most prized of toys.
"There's the Theater," Joggy announced.
"I know ," the Butcher said irritably.
But even he sounded a little solemn and subdued. From the Great Ramp to the topmost airy finial, the Time Theater was the dream of a god realized in unearthly substance. It imparted the aura of demigods to the adults drifting up and down the ramp.
"My father remembers when there wasn't a Time Theater," Hal said softly as he scanned the facade's glowing charts and maps. "Say, they're viewing Earth, somewhere in Scandinavia around zero in the B.C.-A.D. time scale. It should be interesting."
"Will it be about Napoleon?" the Butcher asked eagerly. "Or Hitler?" A red-headed adult heard and smiled and paused to watch. A lock of hair had fallen down the middle of the Butcher's forehead, and as he sat Joggy like a charger, he did bear a faint resemblance to one of the grim little egomaniacs of the Dawn Era.
"Wrong millennium," Hal said.
"Tamerlane then?" the Butcher pressed. "He killed cities and piled the skulls. Blood-bath stuff. Oh, yes, and Tamerlane was a Scand of the Navies."
Hal looked puzzled and then quickly erased the expression. "Well, even if it is about Tamerlane, you can't see it. How about it, Joggy?"
"They won't let me in, either."
"Yes, they will. You're five years old now."
"But I don't feel any older," Joggy replied doubtfully.
"The feeling comes at six. Don't worry, the usher will notice the difference."
Hal and Joggy switched off their levitators and dropped to their feet. The Butcher came down rather hard, twisting an ankle. He opened his mouth to cry, then abruptly closed it hard, bearing his pain in tight-lipped silence like an ancient soldier—like Stalin, maybe, he thought. The red-headed adult's face twitched in half-humorous sympathy.
Hal and Joggy mounted the Ramp and entered a twilit corridor which drank their faint footsteps and returned pulses of light. The Butcher limped manfully after them, but when he got inside, he forgot his battle injury.
Hal looked back. "Honestly, the usher will stop you."
The Butcher shook his head. "I'm going to think my way in. I'm going to think old."
"You won't be able to fool the usher, Butcher. You under-fives simply aren't allowed in the Time Theater. There's a good reason for it—something dangerous might happen if an under-five got inside."
"Why?"
"I don't exactly know, but something."
"Hah! I bet they're scared we'd go traveling in the Time Bubble and have some excitement."
"They are not. I guess they just know you'd get bored and wander away from your seats and maybe disturb the adults or upset the electronics or something. But don't worry about it, Butcher. The usher will take care of you."
"Shut up—I'm thinking I'm World Director," the Butcher informed them, contorting his face diabolically.
Hal spoke to the uninjes, pointing to the side of the corridor. Obediently four of them lined up.
But Brute was peering down the corridor toward where it merged into a deeper darkness. His short legs stiffened, his neckless head seemed to retreat even further between his powerful shoulders, his lips writhed back to show his gleaming fangs, and a completely unfamiliar sound issued from his throat. A choked, grating sound. A growl. The other uninjes moved uneasily.
"Do you suppose something's the matter with his circuits?" Joggy whispered. "Maybe he's getting racial memories from the Scands."
"Of course not," Hal said irritably.
"Brute, get over there," the Butcher commanded. Unwillingly, eyes still fixed on the blackness ahead, Brute obeyed.
The three boys started on. Hal and Joggy experienced a vaguely electrical tingling that vanished almost immediately. They looked back. The Butcher had been stopped by an invisible wall.
"I told you you couldn't fool the usher," Hal said.
The Butcher hurled himself forward. The wall gave a little, then bounced him back with equal force.
"I bet it'll be a bum time view anyway," the Butcher said, not giving up, but not trying again. "And I still don't think the usher can tell how old you are. I bet there's an over-age teacher spying on you through a hole, and if he doesn't like your looks, he switches on the usher."
But the others had disappeared in the blackness. The Butcher waited and then sat down beside the uninjes. Brute laid his head on his knee and growled faintly down the corridor.
"Take it easy, Brute," the Butcher consoled him. "I don't think Tamerlane was really a Scand of the Navies anyhow."
Two chattering girls hardly bigger than himself stepped through the usher as if it weren't there.
The Butcher grimly slipped out the metal tube and put it to his lips. There were two closely spaced faint plops and a large green stain appeared on the bare back of one girl, while purple fluid dripped from the close-cropped hair of the other.
They glared at him and one of them said: "A cub!" But he had his arms folded and wasn't looking at them.
Meanwhile, subordinate ushers had guided Hal and Joggy away from the main entrance to the Time Theater. A sphincter dilated and they found themselves in a small transparent cubicle from which they could watch the show without disturbing the adult audience. They unstrapped their levitators, laid them on the floor and sat down.
The darkened auditorium was circular. Rising from a low central platform was a huge bubble of light, its lower surface somewhat flattened. The audience was seated in concentric rows around the bubble, their keen and compassionate faces dimly revealed by the pale central glow.
But it was the scene within the bubble that riveted the attention of the boys.
Great brooding trees, the trunks of the nearer ones sliced by the bubble's surface, formed the background. Through the dark, wet foliage appeared glimpses of a murky sky, while from the ceiling of the bubble, a ceaseless rain dripped mournfully. A hooded figure crouched beside a little fire partly shielded by a gnarled trunk. Squatting round about were wiry, blue-eyed men with shoulder-length blond hair and full blond beards. They were clothed in furs and metal-studded leather.
Here and there were scattered weapons and armor—long swords glistening with oil to guard them from rust, crudely painted circular shields, and helmets from which curved the horns of beasts. Back and forth, lean, wolflike dogs paced with restless monotony.
Sometimes the men seemed to speak together, or one would rise to peer down the misty forest vistas, but mostly they were motionless. Only the hooded figure, which they seemed to regard with a mingled wonder and fear, swayed incessantly to the rhythm of some unheard chant.
"The Time Bubble has been brought to rest in one of the barbaric cultures of the Dawn Era," a soft voice explained, so casually that Joggy looked around for the speaker, until Hal nudged him sharply, whispering with barely perceptible embarrassment: "Don't do that, Joggy. It's just the electronic interpreter. It senses our development and hears our questions and then it automats background and answers. But it's no more alive than an adolescer or a kinderobot. Got a billion microtapes, though."
The interpreter continued: "The skin-clad men we are viewing in Time in the Round seem to be a group of warriors of the sort who lived by pillage and rapine. The hooded figure is a most unusual find. We believe it to be that of a sorcerer who pretended to control the forces of nature and see into the future."
Joggy whispered: "How is it that we can't see the audience through the other side of the bubble? We can see through this side, all right."
"The bubble only shines light out," Hal told him hurriedly, to show he knew some things as well as the interpreter. "Nothing, not even light, can get into the bubble from outside. The audience on the other side of the bubble sees into it just as we do, only they're seeing the other way—for instance, they can't see the fire because the tree is in the way. And instead of seeing us beyond, they see more trees and sky."
Joggy nodded. "You mean that whatever way you look at the bubble, it's a kind of hole through time?"
"That's right." Hal cleared his throat and recited: "The bubble is the locus of an infinite number of one-way holes, all centering around two points in space-time, one now and one then. The bubble looks completely open, but if you tried to step inside, you'd be stopped—and so would an atom beam. It takes more energy than an atom beam just to maintain the bubble, let alone maneuver it."
"I see, I guess," Joggy whispered. "But if the hole works for light, why can't the people inside the bubble step out of it into our world?"
"Why—er—you see, Joggy—"
The interpreter took over. "The holes are one-way for light, but no-way for matter. If one of the individuals inside the bubble walked toward you, he would cross-section and disappear. But to the audience on the opposite side of the bubble, it would be obvious that he had walked away along the vista down which they are peering."
As if to provide an example, a figure suddenly materialized on their side of the bubble. The wolflike dogs bared their fangs. For an instant, there was only an eerie, distorted, rapidly growing silhouette, changing from blood-red to black as the boundary of the bubble cross-sectioned the intruding figure. Then they recognized the back of another long-haired warrior and realized that the audience on the other side of the bubble had probably seen him approaching for some time.
He bowed to the hooded figure and handed him a small bag.
"More atavistic cubs, big and little! Hold still, Cynthia," a new voice cut in.
Hal turned and saw that two cold-eyed girls had been ushered into the cubicle. One was wiping her close-cropped hair with one hand while mopping a green stain from her friend's back with the other.
Hal nudged Joggy and whispered: "Butch!"
But Joggy was still hypnotized by the Time Bubble.
"Then how is it, Hal," he asked, "that light comes out of the bubble, if the people don't? What I mean is, if one of the people walks toward us, he shrinks to a red blot and disappears. Why doesn't the light coming our way disappear, too?"
"Well—you see, Joggy, it isn't real light. It's—"
Once more the interpreter helped him out.
"The light that comes from the bubble is an isotope. Like atoms of one element, photons of a single frequency also have isotopes. It's more than a matter of polarization. One of these isotopes of light tends to leak futureward through holes in space-time. Most of the light goes down the vistas visible to the other side of the audience. But one isotope is diverted through the walls of the bubble into the Time Theater. Perhaps, because of the intense darkness of the theater, you haven't realized how dimly lit the scene is. That's because we're getting only a single isotope of the original light. Incidentally, no isotopes have been discovered that leak pastward, though attempts are being made to synthesize them."
"Oh, explanations!" murmured one of the newly arrived girls. "The cubs are always angling for them. Apple-polishers!"
" I like this show," a familiar voice announced serenely. "They cut anybody yet with those choppers?"
Hal looked down beside him. "Butch! How did you manage to get in?"
"I don't see any blood. Where's the bodies?"
"But how did you get in—Butcher?"
The Butcher replied airily: "A red-headed man talked to me and said it certainly was sad for a future dictator not to be able to enjoy scenes of carnage in his youth, so I told him I'd been inside the Time Theater and just come out to get a drink of water and go to the eliminator, but then my sprained ankle had got worse—I kind of tried to get up and fell down again—so he picked me up and carried me right through the usher."
"Butcher, that wasn't honest," Hal said a little worriedly. "You tricked him into thinking you were older and his brain waves blanketed yours, going through the usher. I really have heard it's dangerous for you under-fives to be in here."
"The way those cubs beg for babying and get it!" one of the girls commented. "Talk about sex favoritism!" She and her companion withdrew to the far end of the cubicle.
The Butcher grinned at them briefly and concentrated his attention on the scene in the Time Bubble.
"Those big dogs—" he began suddenly. "Brute must have smelled 'em."
"Don't be silly," Hal said. "Smells can't come out of the Time Bubble. Smells haven't any isotopes and—"
"I don't care," the Butcher asserted. "I bet somebody'll figure out someday how to use the bubble for time traveling."
"You can't travel in a point of view," Hal contradicted, "and that's all the bubble is. Besides, some scientists think the bubble isn't real at all, but a—uh—"
"I believe," the interpreter cut in smoothly, "that you're thinking of the theory that the Time Bubble operates by hypermemory. Some scientists would have us believe that all memory is time traveling and that the basic location of the bubble is not space-time at all, but ever-present eternity. Some of them go so far as to state that it is only a mental inability that prevents the Time Bubble from being used for time traveling—just as it may be a similar disability that keeps a robot with the same or even more scopeful memories from being a real man or animal.
"It is because of this minority theory that under-age individuals and other beings with impulsive mentalities are barred from the Time Theater. But do not be alarmed. Even if the minority theory should prove true—and no evidence for it has ever appeared—there are automatically operating safeguards to protect the audience from any harmful consequences of time traveling (almost certainly impossible, remember) in either direction."
"Sissies!" was the Butcher's comment.
"You're rather young to be here, aren't you?" the interpreter inquired.
The Butcher folded his arms and scowled.
The interpreter hesitated almost humanly, probably snatching through a quarter-million microtapes. "Well, you wouldn't have got in unless a qualified adult had certified you as plus-age. Enjoy yourself."
There was no need for the last injunction. The scene within the bubble had acquired a gripping interest. The shaggy warriors were taking up their swords, gathering about the hooded sorcerer. The hood fell back, revealing a face with hawklike, disturbing eyes that seemed to be looking straight out of the bubble at the future.
"This is getting good," the Butcher said, squirming toward the edge of his seat.
"Stop being an impulsive mentality," Hal warned him a little nervously.
"Hah!"
The sorcerer emptied the small bag on the fire and a thick cloud of smoke puffed toward the ceiling of the bubble. A clawlike hand waved wildly. The sorcerer appeared to be expostulating, commanding. The warriors stared uncomprehendingly, which seemed to exasperate the sorcerer.
"That's right," the Butcher approved loudly. "Sock it to 'em!"
"Butcher!" Hal admonished.
Suddenly the bubble grew very bright, as if the Sun had just shone forth in the ancient world, though the rain still dripped down.
"A viewing anomaly has occurred," the interpreter announced. "It may be necessary to collapse the Time Bubble for a short period."
In a frenzy, his ragged robes twisting like smoke, the sorcerer rushed at one of the warriors, pushing him backward so that in a moment he must cross-section.
"Attaboy!" the Butcher encouraged.
Then the warrior was standing outside the bubble, blinking toward the shadows, rain dripping from his beard and furs.
"Oh, boy !" the Butcher cheered in ecstasy.
"Butcher, you've done it!" Hal said, aghast.
"I sure did," the Butcher agreed blandly, "but that old guy in the bubble helped me. Must take two to work it."
"Keep your seats!" the interpreter said loudly. "We are energizing the safeguards!"
The warriors inside the bubble stared in stupid astonishment after the one who had disappeared from their view. The sorcerer leaped about, pushing them in his direction.
Abrupt light flooded the Time Theater. The warriors who had emerged from the bubble stiffened themselves, baring their teeth.
"The safeguards are now energized," the interpreter said.
A woman in a short golden tunic stood up uncertainly from the front row of the audience.
The first warrior looked her up and down, took one hesitant step forward, then another, then suddenly grabbed her and flung her over his left shoulder, looking around menacingly and swinging his sword in his right hand.
"I repeat, the safeguards have been fully energized! Keep your seats!" the interpreter enjoined.
In the cubicle, Hal and Joggy gasped, the two girls squeaked, but the Butcher yelled a "Hey!" of disapproval, snatched up something from the floor and darted out through the sphincter.
Here and there in the audience, other adults stood up. The emerged warriors formed a ring of swinging swords and questing eyes. Between their legs their wolfish dogs, emerged with them, crouched and snarled. Then the warriors began to fan out.
"There has been an unavoidable delay in energizing the safeguards," the interpreter said. "Please be patient."
At that moment, the Butcher entered the main auditorium, brandishing a levitator above his head and striding purposefully down the aisle. At his heels, five stocky forms trotted. In a definitely pre-civilization voice, or at least with pre-civilization volume, he bellowed: "Hey, you! You quit that!"
The first warrior looked toward him, gave his left shoulder a shake to quiet his wriggling captive, gave his right shoulder one to supple his sword arm, and waited until the dwarfish challenger came into range. Then his sword swished down in a flashing arc.
Next moment, the Butcher was on his knees and the warrior was staring at him open-mouthed. The sword had rebounded from something invisible an arm's length above the gnomelike creature's head. The warrior backed a step.
The Butcher stayed down, crouching half behind an aisle seat and digging for something in his pocket. But he didn't stay quiet. "Sic
'em, Brute!" he shrilled. "Sic 'em, Darter! Sic 'em, Pinkie and Whitie and Blue!" Then he stopped shouting and raised his hand to his mouth.
Growling quite unmechanically, the five uninjes hurled themselves forward and closed with the warrior's wolflike dogs. At the first encounter, Brute and Pinkie were grabbed by the throats, shaken, and tossed a dozen feet. The warriors snarled approval and advanced. But then Brute and Pinkie raced back eagerly to the fight—and suddenly the face of the leading warrior was drenched with scarlet. He blinked and touched his fingers to it, then looked at his hand in horror.
The Butcher spared a second to repeat his command to the uninjes. But already the battle was going against the larger dogs. The latter had the advantage of weight and could toss the smaller dogs like so many foxes. But their terrible fangs did no damage, and whenever an uninj clamped on a throat, that throat was torn out.
Meanwhile, great bloody stains had appeared on the bodies of all the warriors. They drew back in a knot, looking at each other fearfully. That was when the Butcher got to his feet and strode forward, hand clenching the levitator above his head.
"Get back where you belong, you big jerks! And drop that lady!"
The first warrior pointed toward him and hissed something. Immediately, a half dozen swords were smiting at the Butcher.
"We are working to energize the safeguards," the interpreter said in mechanical panic. "Remain patient and in your seats."
The uninjes leaped into the melee, at first tearing more fur than flesh. Swords caught them and sent them spinning through the air. They came yapping back for more. Brute fixed on the first warrior's ankle. He dropped the woman, stamped unavailingly on the uninj, and let out a screech.
Swords were still rebounding from the invisible shield under which the Butcher crouched, making terrible faces at his attackers. They drew back, looked again at their bloodstains, goggled at the demon dogs. At their leader's screech, they broke and plunged back into the Time Bubble, their leader stumbling limpingly after them. There they wasted no time on their own ragged sorcerer. Their swords rose and fell, and no repulsor field stayed them.
"Brute, come back!" the Butcher yelled.
The gray uninj let go his hold on the leader's ankle and scampered out of the Time Bubble, which swiftly dimmed to its original light intensity and then winked out.
For once in their very mature lives, all of the adults in the auditorium began to jabber at each other simultaneously.
"We are sorry, but the anomaly has made it necessary to collapse the Time Bubble," the interpreter said. "There will be no viewing until further announcement. Thank you for your patience."
Hal and Joggy caught up with the Butcher just as Brute jumped into his arms and the woman in gold picked him up and hugged him fiercely. The Butcher started to pull away, then grudgingly submitted.
"Cubs!" came a small cold voice from behind Hal and Joggy. "Always playing hero! Say, what's that awful smell, Cynthia? It must have come from those dirty past men."
Hal and Joggy were shouting at the Butcher, but he wasn't listening to them or to the older voices clamoring about "revised theories of reality" and other important things. He didn't even squirm as Brute licked his cheek and the woman in gold planted a big kiss practically on his mouth.
He smiled dreamily and stroked Brute's muzzle and murmured softly: "We came, we saw, we conquered, didn't we, Brute?"
Question:
Describe what "pre-civilization" means in the context of this story
Answer:
|
[
"The term pre-civilization points to anything that has a sense of violence or chaos in the lives of adults. For instance, raised voices and people talking over each other is considered pre-civilization, but so are violent wars. The society is built to get rid of these tendencies in children and recondition them as adults to be calm and peaceful members of society. When the Butcher is referred to as looking pre-civilization at the beginning of the story, it is because he seems to be up to something he isn't supposed to do, as he is potentially hurting or controlling Brute in some way with the use of a metal tube. ",
"In “Time in the Round,” the society is structured around perfection. Small children are given breakables, and those items are the only things that are physically capable of being broken. There are dirt-pens for kids to play in, and besides those areas, children are incapable of becoming dirty. The dirt-pens are only available to children aged 2 and younger. The society’s dogs, uninjes, are programmed not to bite or hurt the people, even when they are hit or stabbed themselves. They do not react like normal canines. \n\nYoung children are considered to be self-centered and ruthless, and they are provided with death games and fear houses to get out their emotions and prepare to be conditioned as adults. When children turn six years old, they feel differently than they did before. They are ready to enter the Time Theater and view the Time Bubble. They are taught about pre-civilization and the important differences between their own society and the past. They learn how to reject violent solutions to problems and live in peace. Even yelling is considered a pre-civilization act. When Butch enters the Time Theater and tries to get the Scandinavian warrior’s attention, he is using someithing called a “pre-civilization voice”. The Time Bubble is a tool that society uses to remind its current citizens what humans used to act barbarically, and that is not longer appropriate. \n",
"Pre-civilization seems to refer to the society that we know, and any society that predates the decision to make violence impossible and to control all aspects of societal behavior. Hal describes the process of conditioning humanity to reject violence in all forms, and pre-civilization points to a time before that process was undertaken. For example, Butch is referred to as “pre-civilization” when he continually abuses an uninj at the beginning of the story, because he is behaving in a violent way. He is described this way again at the end of the story when he is shouting battle orders. \n",
"Pre-civilization primarily refers to the time before the post-violent society where the central action of the story takes place. They are able to view this era by using the time-hole technology of the bubble on display at the Time Theater in the Peace Park at the end of the Avenue of Wisdom. \"Pre-civilization\" is characterized by famous historical figures such as Hitler, Stalin, and Tamerlane--individuals that the Butcher idealizes for their use of violence in resolving conflict. The climax of the story revolves around a viewing of Scandinavian men of the Dawn Era gone wrong when the simultaneous workings of a sorcerer and the Butcher's impulsive mind allow the Scandinavian men to pass through the bubble into the Time Theater. The ensuing battle highlights the barbarism of the Dawn Era--they use swords and real dogs in battle; it also demonstrates the Butcher's ability to weaponize technology meant to oppose violence as a way to protect this new society."
] |
51380
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TIME IN THE ROUND
By FRITZ LEIBER
Illustrated by DILLON
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction May 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Poor Butcher suffered more than any dictator in history: everybody gave in to him because he was so puny and they were so impregnable!
From the other end of the Avenue of Wisdom that led across the Peace Park, a gray, hairless, heavily built dog was barking soundlessly at the towering crystal glory of the Time Theater. For a moment, the effect was almost frightening: a silent picture of the beginning of civilization challenging the end of it. Then a small boy caught up with the dog and it rolled over enthusiastically at his feet and the scene was normal again.
The small boy, however, seemed definitely pre-civilization. He studied the dog coldly and then inserted a thin metal tube under its eyelid and poked. The dog wagged its stumpy tail. The boy frowned, tightened his grip on the tube and jabbed hard. The dog's tail thumped the cushiony pavement and the four paws beat the air. The boy shortened his grip and suddenly jabbed the dog several times in the stomach. The stiff tube rebounded from the gray, hairless hide. The dog's face split in an upside-down grin, revealing formidable ivory fangs across which a long black tongue lolled.
The boy regarded the tongue speculatively and pocketed the metal tube with a grimace of utter disgust. He did not look up when someone called: "Hi, Butch! Sic 'em, Darter, sic 'em!"
A larger small boy and a somewhat older one were approaching across the luxurious, neatly cropped grass, preceded by a hurtling shape that, except for a black hide, was a replica of Butch's gray dog.
Butch shrugged his shoulders resignedly and said in a bored voice:
"Kill 'em, Brute."
The gray dog hurled itself on Darter. Jaws gaped to get a hold on necks so short and thick as to be mere courtesy terms. They whirled like a fanged merry-go-round. Three more dogs, one white, one slate blue and one pink, hurried up and tried to climb aboard.
Butch yawned.
"What's the matter?" inquired Darter's master. "I thought you liked dog fights, Butch."
"I do like dog fights," Butch said somberly, without looking around. "I don't like uninj fights. They're just a pretend, like everything else. Nobody gets hurt. And look here, Joggy—and you, too, Hal—when you talk to me, don't just say Butch. It's the Butcher, see?"
"That's not exactly a functional name," Hal observed with the judiciousness of budding maturity, while Joggy said agreeably: "All right, Butcher, I suppose you'd like to have lived way back when people were hurting each other all the time so the blood came out?"
"I certainly would," the Butcher replied. As Joggy and Hal turned back skeptically to watch the fight, he took out the metal tube, screwed up his face in a dreadful frown and jabbed himself in the hand. He squeaked with pain and whisked the tube out of sight.
"A kid can't do anything any more," he announced dramatically. "Can't break anything except the breakables they give him to break on purpose. Can't get dirty except in the dirt-pen—and they graduate him from that when he's two. Can't even be bitten by an uninj—it's contraprogrammed."
"Where'd you ever get so fixated on dirt?" Hal asked in a gentle voice acquired from a robot adolescer.
"I've been reading a book about a kid called Huckleberry Finn," the Butcher replied airily. "A swell book. That guy got dirtier than anything." His eyes became dreamy. "He even ate out of a garbage pail."
"What's a garbage pail?"
"I don't know, but it sounds great."
The battling uninjes careened into them. Brute had Darter by the ear and was whirling him around hilariously.
"Aw, quit it, Brute," the Butcher said in annoyance.
Brute obediently loosed his hold and returned to his master, paying no attention to his adversary's efforts to renew the fight.
The Butcher looked Brute squarely in the eyes. "You're making too much of a rumpus," he said. "I want to think."
He kicked Brute in the face. The dog squirmed joyously at his feet.
"Look," Joggy said, "you wouldn't hurt an uninj, for instance, would you?"
"How can you hurt something that's uninjurable?" the Butcher demanded scathingly. "An uninj isn't really a dog. It's just a lot of circuits and a micropack bedded in hyperplastic." He looked at Brute with guarded wistfulness.
"I don't know about that," Hal put in. "I've heard an uninj is programmed with so many genuine canine reactions that it practically has racial memory."
"I mean if you could hurt an uninj," Joggy amended.
"Well, maybe I wouldn't," the Butcher admitted grudgingly. "But shut up—I want to think."
"About what?" Hal asked with saintly reasonableness.
The Butcher achieved a fearful frown. "When I'm World Director," he said slowly, "I'm going to have warfare again."
"You think so now," Hal told him. "We all do at your age."
"We do not," the Butcher retorted. "I bet you didn't."
"Oh, yes, I was foolish, too," the older boy confessed readily. "All newborn organisms are self-centered and inconsiderate and ruthless. They have to be. That's why we have uninjes to work out on, and death games and fear houses, so that our emotions are cleared for adult conditioning. And it's just the same with newborn civilizations. Why, long after atom power and the space drive were discovered, people kept having wars and revolutions. It took ages to condition them differently. Of course, you can't appreciate it this year, but Man's greatest achievement was when he learned to automatically reject all violent solutions to problems. You'll realize that when you're older."
"I will not!" the Butcher countered hotly. "I'm not going to be a sissy." Hal and Joggy blinked at the unfamiliar word. "And what if we were attacked by bloodthirsty monsters from outside the Solar System?"
"The Space Fleet would take care of them," Hal replied calmly. "That's what it's for. Adults aren't conditioned to reject violent solutions to problems where non-human enemies are concerned. Look at what we did to viruses."
"But what if somebody got at us through the Time Bubble?"
"They can't. It's impossible."
"Yes, but suppose they did all the same."
"You've never been inside the Time Theater—you're not old enough yet—so you just can't know anything about it or about the reasons why it's impossible," Hal replied with friendly factuality. "The Time Bubble is just a viewer. You can only look through it, and just into the past, at that. But you can't travel through it because you can't change the past. Time traveling is a lot of kid stuff."
"I don't care," the Butcher asserted obstinately. "I'm still going to have warfare when I'm World Director."
"They'll condition you out of the idea," Hal assured him.
"They will not. I won't let 'em."
"It doesn't matter what you think now," Hal said with finality. "You'll have an altogether different opinion when you're six."
"Well, what if I will?" the Butcher snapped back. "You don't have to keep telling me about it, do you?"
The others were silent. Joggy began to bounce up and down abstractedly on the resilient pavement. Hal called in his three uninjes and said in soothing tones: "Joggy and I are going to swim over to the Time Theater. Want to walk us there, Butch?"
Butch scowled.
"How about it, Butch?"
Still Butch did not seem to hear.
The older boy shrugged and said: "Oh, well, how about it—Butcher?"
The Butcher swung around. "They won't let me in the Time Theater. You said so yourself."
"You could walk us over there."
"Well, maybe I will and maybe I won't."
"While you're deciding, we'll get swimming. Come along, Joggy."
Still scowling, the Butcher took a white soapy crayon from the bulging pocket in his silver shorts. Pressed into the pavement, it made a black mark. He scrawled pensively: KEEP ON THE GRASS.
He gazed at his handiwork. No, darn it, that was just what grownups wanted you to do. This grass couldn't be hurt. You couldn't pull it up or tear it off; it hurt your fingers to try. A rub with the side of the crayon removed the sign. He thought for a moment, then wrote: KEEP OFF THE GRASS.
With an untroubled countenance, he sprang up and hurried after the others.
Joggy and the older boy were swimming lazily through the air at shoulder height. In the pavement directly under each of them was a wide, saucer-shaped depression which swam along with them. The uninjes avoided the depressions. Darter was strutting on his hind legs, looking up inquiringly at his master.
"Gimme a ride, Hal, gimme a ride!" the Butcher called. The older boy ignored him. "Aw, gimme a ride, Joggy."
"Oh, all right." Joggy touched the small box attached to the front of his broad metal harness and dropped lightly to the ground. The Butcher climbed on his back. There was a moment of rocking and pitching, during which each boy accused the other of trying to upset them.
Then the Butcher got his balance and they began to swim along securely, though at a level several inches lower. Brute sprang up after his master and was invisibly rebuffed. He retired baffled, but a few minutes later, he was amusing himself by furious futile efforts to climb the hemispherical repulsor field.
Slowly the little cavalcade of boys and uninjes proceeded down the Avenue of Wisdom. Hal amused himself by stroking toward a tree. When he was about four feet from it, he was gently bounced away.
It was really a more tiring method of transportation than walking and quite useless against the wind. True, by rocking the repulsor hemisphere backward, you could get a brief forward push, but it would be nullified when you rocked forward. A slow swimming stroke was the simplest way to make progress.
The general sensation, however, was delightful and levitators were among the most prized of toys.
"There's the Theater," Joggy announced.
"I know ," the Butcher said irritably.
But even he sounded a little solemn and subdued. From the Great Ramp to the topmost airy finial, the Time Theater was the dream of a god realized in unearthly substance. It imparted the aura of demigods to the adults drifting up and down the ramp.
"My father remembers when there wasn't a Time Theater," Hal said softly as he scanned the facade's glowing charts and maps. "Say, they're viewing Earth, somewhere in Scandinavia around zero in the B.C.-A.D. time scale. It should be interesting."
"Will it be about Napoleon?" the Butcher asked eagerly. "Or Hitler?" A red-headed adult heard and smiled and paused to watch. A lock of hair had fallen down the middle of the Butcher's forehead, and as he sat Joggy like a charger, he did bear a faint resemblance to one of the grim little egomaniacs of the Dawn Era.
"Wrong millennium," Hal said.
"Tamerlane then?" the Butcher pressed. "He killed cities and piled the skulls. Blood-bath stuff. Oh, yes, and Tamerlane was a Scand of the Navies."
Hal looked puzzled and then quickly erased the expression. "Well, even if it is about Tamerlane, you can't see it. How about it, Joggy?"
"They won't let me in, either."
"Yes, they will. You're five years old now."
"But I don't feel any older," Joggy replied doubtfully.
"The feeling comes at six. Don't worry, the usher will notice the difference."
Hal and Joggy switched off their levitators and dropped to their feet. The Butcher came down rather hard, twisting an ankle. He opened his mouth to cry, then abruptly closed it hard, bearing his pain in tight-lipped silence like an ancient soldier—like Stalin, maybe, he thought. The red-headed adult's face twitched in half-humorous sympathy.
Hal and Joggy mounted the Ramp and entered a twilit corridor which drank their faint footsteps and returned pulses of light. The Butcher limped manfully after them, but when he got inside, he forgot his battle injury.
Hal looked back. "Honestly, the usher will stop you."
The Butcher shook his head. "I'm going to think my way in. I'm going to think old."
"You won't be able to fool the usher, Butcher. You under-fives simply aren't allowed in the Time Theater. There's a good reason for it—something dangerous might happen if an under-five got inside."
"Why?"
"I don't exactly know, but something."
"Hah! I bet they're scared we'd go traveling in the Time Bubble and have some excitement."
"They are not. I guess they just know you'd get bored and wander away from your seats and maybe disturb the adults or upset the electronics or something. But don't worry about it, Butcher. The usher will take care of you."
"Shut up—I'm thinking I'm World Director," the Butcher informed them, contorting his face diabolically.
Hal spoke to the uninjes, pointing to the side of the corridor. Obediently four of them lined up.
But Brute was peering down the corridor toward where it merged into a deeper darkness. His short legs stiffened, his neckless head seemed to retreat even further between his powerful shoulders, his lips writhed back to show his gleaming fangs, and a completely unfamiliar sound issued from his throat. A choked, grating sound. A growl. The other uninjes moved uneasily.
"Do you suppose something's the matter with his circuits?" Joggy whispered. "Maybe he's getting racial memories from the Scands."
"Of course not," Hal said irritably.
"Brute, get over there," the Butcher commanded. Unwillingly, eyes still fixed on the blackness ahead, Brute obeyed.
The three boys started on. Hal and Joggy experienced a vaguely electrical tingling that vanished almost immediately. They looked back. The Butcher had been stopped by an invisible wall.
"I told you you couldn't fool the usher," Hal said.
The Butcher hurled himself forward. The wall gave a little, then bounced him back with equal force.
"I bet it'll be a bum time view anyway," the Butcher said, not giving up, but not trying again. "And I still don't think the usher can tell how old you are. I bet there's an over-age teacher spying on you through a hole, and if he doesn't like your looks, he switches on the usher."
But the others had disappeared in the blackness. The Butcher waited and then sat down beside the uninjes. Brute laid his head on his knee and growled faintly down the corridor.
"Take it easy, Brute," the Butcher consoled him. "I don't think Tamerlane was really a Scand of the Navies anyhow."
Two chattering girls hardly bigger than himself stepped through the usher as if it weren't there.
The Butcher grimly slipped out the metal tube and put it to his lips. There were two closely spaced faint plops and a large green stain appeared on the bare back of one girl, while purple fluid dripped from the close-cropped hair of the other.
They glared at him and one of them said: "A cub!" But he had his arms folded and wasn't looking at them.
Meanwhile, subordinate ushers had guided Hal and Joggy away from the main entrance to the Time Theater. A sphincter dilated and they found themselves in a small transparent cubicle from which they could watch the show without disturbing the adult audience. They unstrapped their levitators, laid them on the floor and sat down.
The darkened auditorium was circular. Rising from a low central platform was a huge bubble of light, its lower surface somewhat flattened. The audience was seated in concentric rows around the bubble, their keen and compassionate faces dimly revealed by the pale central glow.
But it was the scene within the bubble that riveted the attention of the boys.
Great brooding trees, the trunks of the nearer ones sliced by the bubble's surface, formed the background. Through the dark, wet foliage appeared glimpses of a murky sky, while from the ceiling of the bubble, a ceaseless rain dripped mournfully. A hooded figure crouched beside a little fire partly shielded by a gnarled trunk. Squatting round about were wiry, blue-eyed men with shoulder-length blond hair and full blond beards. They were clothed in furs and metal-studded leather.
Here and there were scattered weapons and armor—long swords glistening with oil to guard them from rust, crudely painted circular shields, and helmets from which curved the horns of beasts. Back and forth, lean, wolflike dogs paced with restless monotony.
Sometimes the men seemed to speak together, or one would rise to peer down the misty forest vistas, but mostly they were motionless. Only the hooded figure, which they seemed to regard with a mingled wonder and fear, swayed incessantly to the rhythm of some unheard chant.
"The Time Bubble has been brought to rest in one of the barbaric cultures of the Dawn Era," a soft voice explained, so casually that Joggy looked around for the speaker, until Hal nudged him sharply, whispering with barely perceptible embarrassment: "Don't do that, Joggy. It's just the electronic interpreter. It senses our development and hears our questions and then it automats background and answers. But it's no more alive than an adolescer or a kinderobot. Got a billion microtapes, though."
The interpreter continued: "The skin-clad men we are viewing in Time in the Round seem to be a group of warriors of the sort who lived by pillage and rapine. The hooded figure is a most unusual find. We believe it to be that of a sorcerer who pretended to control the forces of nature and see into the future."
Joggy whispered: "How is it that we can't see the audience through the other side of the bubble? We can see through this side, all right."
"The bubble only shines light out," Hal told him hurriedly, to show he knew some things as well as the interpreter. "Nothing, not even light, can get into the bubble from outside. The audience on the other side of the bubble sees into it just as we do, only they're seeing the other way—for instance, they can't see the fire because the tree is in the way. And instead of seeing us beyond, they see more trees and sky."
Joggy nodded. "You mean that whatever way you look at the bubble, it's a kind of hole through time?"
"That's right." Hal cleared his throat and recited: "The bubble is the locus of an infinite number of one-way holes, all centering around two points in space-time, one now and one then. The bubble looks completely open, but if you tried to step inside, you'd be stopped—and so would an atom beam. It takes more energy than an atom beam just to maintain the bubble, let alone maneuver it."
"I see, I guess," Joggy whispered. "But if the hole works for light, why can't the people inside the bubble step out of it into our world?"
"Why—er—you see, Joggy—"
The interpreter took over. "The holes are one-way for light, but no-way for matter. If one of the individuals inside the bubble walked toward you, he would cross-section and disappear. But to the audience on the opposite side of the bubble, it would be obvious that he had walked away along the vista down which they are peering."
As if to provide an example, a figure suddenly materialized on their side of the bubble. The wolflike dogs bared their fangs. For an instant, there was only an eerie, distorted, rapidly growing silhouette, changing from blood-red to black as the boundary of the bubble cross-sectioned the intruding figure. Then they recognized the back of another long-haired warrior and realized that the audience on the other side of the bubble had probably seen him approaching for some time.
He bowed to the hooded figure and handed him a small bag.
"More atavistic cubs, big and little! Hold still, Cynthia," a new voice cut in.
Hal turned and saw that two cold-eyed girls had been ushered into the cubicle. One was wiping her close-cropped hair with one hand while mopping a green stain from her friend's back with the other.
Hal nudged Joggy and whispered: "Butch!"
But Joggy was still hypnotized by the Time Bubble.
"Then how is it, Hal," he asked, "that light comes out of the bubble, if the people don't? What I mean is, if one of the people walks toward us, he shrinks to a red blot and disappears. Why doesn't the light coming our way disappear, too?"
"Well—you see, Joggy, it isn't real light. It's—"
Once more the interpreter helped him out.
"The light that comes from the bubble is an isotope. Like atoms of one element, photons of a single frequency also have isotopes. It's more than a matter of polarization. One of these isotopes of light tends to leak futureward through holes in space-time. Most of the light goes down the vistas visible to the other side of the audience. But one isotope is diverted through the walls of the bubble into the Time Theater. Perhaps, because of the intense darkness of the theater, you haven't realized how dimly lit the scene is. That's because we're getting only a single isotope of the original light. Incidentally, no isotopes have been discovered that leak pastward, though attempts are being made to synthesize them."
"Oh, explanations!" murmured one of the newly arrived girls. "The cubs are always angling for them. Apple-polishers!"
" I like this show," a familiar voice announced serenely. "They cut anybody yet with those choppers?"
Hal looked down beside him. "Butch! How did you manage to get in?"
"I don't see any blood. Where's the bodies?"
"But how did you get in—Butcher?"
The Butcher replied airily: "A red-headed man talked to me and said it certainly was sad for a future dictator not to be able to enjoy scenes of carnage in his youth, so I told him I'd been inside the Time Theater and just come out to get a drink of water and go to the eliminator, but then my sprained ankle had got worse—I kind of tried to get up and fell down again—so he picked me up and carried me right through the usher."
"Butcher, that wasn't honest," Hal said a little worriedly. "You tricked him into thinking you were older and his brain waves blanketed yours, going through the usher. I really have heard it's dangerous for you under-fives to be in here."
"The way those cubs beg for babying and get it!" one of the girls commented. "Talk about sex favoritism!" She and her companion withdrew to the far end of the cubicle.
The Butcher grinned at them briefly and concentrated his attention on the scene in the Time Bubble.
"Those big dogs—" he began suddenly. "Brute must have smelled 'em."
"Don't be silly," Hal said. "Smells can't come out of the Time Bubble. Smells haven't any isotopes and—"
"I don't care," the Butcher asserted. "I bet somebody'll figure out someday how to use the bubble for time traveling."
"You can't travel in a point of view," Hal contradicted, "and that's all the bubble is. Besides, some scientists think the bubble isn't real at all, but a—uh—"
"I believe," the interpreter cut in smoothly, "that you're thinking of the theory that the Time Bubble operates by hypermemory. Some scientists would have us believe that all memory is time traveling and that the basic location of the bubble is not space-time at all, but ever-present eternity. Some of them go so far as to state that it is only a mental inability that prevents the Time Bubble from being used for time traveling—just as it may be a similar disability that keeps a robot with the same or even more scopeful memories from being a real man or animal.
"It is because of this minority theory that under-age individuals and other beings with impulsive mentalities are barred from the Time Theater. But do not be alarmed. Even if the minority theory should prove true—and no evidence for it has ever appeared—there are automatically operating safeguards to protect the audience from any harmful consequences of time traveling (almost certainly impossible, remember) in either direction."
"Sissies!" was the Butcher's comment.
"You're rather young to be here, aren't you?" the interpreter inquired.
The Butcher folded his arms and scowled.
The interpreter hesitated almost humanly, probably snatching through a quarter-million microtapes. "Well, you wouldn't have got in unless a qualified adult had certified you as plus-age. Enjoy yourself."
There was no need for the last injunction. The scene within the bubble had acquired a gripping interest. The shaggy warriors were taking up their swords, gathering about the hooded sorcerer. The hood fell back, revealing a face with hawklike, disturbing eyes that seemed to be looking straight out of the bubble at the future.
"This is getting good," the Butcher said, squirming toward the edge of his seat.
"Stop being an impulsive mentality," Hal warned him a little nervously.
"Hah!"
The sorcerer emptied the small bag on the fire and a thick cloud of smoke puffed toward the ceiling of the bubble. A clawlike hand waved wildly. The sorcerer appeared to be expostulating, commanding. The warriors stared uncomprehendingly, which seemed to exasperate the sorcerer.
"That's right," the Butcher approved loudly. "Sock it to 'em!"
"Butcher!" Hal admonished.
Suddenly the bubble grew very bright, as if the Sun had just shone forth in the ancient world, though the rain still dripped down.
"A viewing anomaly has occurred," the interpreter announced. "It may be necessary to collapse the Time Bubble for a short period."
In a frenzy, his ragged robes twisting like smoke, the sorcerer rushed at one of the warriors, pushing him backward so that in a moment he must cross-section.
"Attaboy!" the Butcher encouraged.
Then the warrior was standing outside the bubble, blinking toward the shadows, rain dripping from his beard and furs.
"Oh, boy !" the Butcher cheered in ecstasy.
"Butcher, you've done it!" Hal said, aghast.
"I sure did," the Butcher agreed blandly, "but that old guy in the bubble helped me. Must take two to work it."
"Keep your seats!" the interpreter said loudly. "We are energizing the safeguards!"
The warriors inside the bubble stared in stupid astonishment after the one who had disappeared from their view. The sorcerer leaped about, pushing them in his direction.
Abrupt light flooded the Time Theater. The warriors who had emerged from the bubble stiffened themselves, baring their teeth.
"The safeguards are now energized," the interpreter said.
A woman in a short golden tunic stood up uncertainly from the front row of the audience.
The first warrior looked her up and down, took one hesitant step forward, then another, then suddenly grabbed her and flung her over his left shoulder, looking around menacingly and swinging his sword in his right hand.
"I repeat, the safeguards have been fully energized! Keep your seats!" the interpreter enjoined.
In the cubicle, Hal and Joggy gasped, the two girls squeaked, but the Butcher yelled a "Hey!" of disapproval, snatched up something from the floor and darted out through the sphincter.
Here and there in the audience, other adults stood up. The emerged warriors formed a ring of swinging swords and questing eyes. Between their legs their wolfish dogs, emerged with them, crouched and snarled. Then the warriors began to fan out.
"There has been an unavoidable delay in energizing the safeguards," the interpreter said. "Please be patient."
At that moment, the Butcher entered the main auditorium, brandishing a levitator above his head and striding purposefully down the aisle. At his heels, five stocky forms trotted. In a definitely pre-civilization voice, or at least with pre-civilization volume, he bellowed: "Hey, you! You quit that!"
The first warrior looked toward him, gave his left shoulder a shake to quiet his wriggling captive, gave his right shoulder one to supple his sword arm, and waited until the dwarfish challenger came into range. Then his sword swished down in a flashing arc.
Next moment, the Butcher was on his knees and the warrior was staring at him open-mouthed. The sword had rebounded from something invisible an arm's length above the gnomelike creature's head. The warrior backed a step.
The Butcher stayed down, crouching half behind an aisle seat and digging for something in his pocket. But he didn't stay quiet. "Sic
'em, Brute!" he shrilled. "Sic 'em, Darter! Sic 'em, Pinkie and Whitie and Blue!" Then he stopped shouting and raised his hand to his mouth.
Growling quite unmechanically, the five uninjes hurled themselves forward and closed with the warrior's wolflike dogs. At the first encounter, Brute and Pinkie were grabbed by the throats, shaken, and tossed a dozen feet. The warriors snarled approval and advanced. But then Brute and Pinkie raced back eagerly to the fight—and suddenly the face of the leading warrior was drenched with scarlet. He blinked and touched his fingers to it, then looked at his hand in horror.
The Butcher spared a second to repeat his command to the uninjes. But already the battle was going against the larger dogs. The latter had the advantage of weight and could toss the smaller dogs like so many foxes. But their terrible fangs did no damage, and whenever an uninj clamped on a throat, that throat was torn out.
Meanwhile, great bloody stains had appeared on the bodies of all the warriors. They drew back in a knot, looking at each other fearfully. That was when the Butcher got to his feet and strode forward, hand clenching the levitator above his head.
"Get back where you belong, you big jerks! And drop that lady!"
The first warrior pointed toward him and hissed something. Immediately, a half dozen swords were smiting at the Butcher.
"We are working to energize the safeguards," the interpreter said in mechanical panic. "Remain patient and in your seats."
The uninjes leaped into the melee, at first tearing more fur than flesh. Swords caught them and sent them spinning through the air. They came yapping back for more. Brute fixed on the first warrior's ankle. He dropped the woman, stamped unavailingly on the uninj, and let out a screech.
Swords were still rebounding from the invisible shield under which the Butcher crouched, making terrible faces at his attackers. They drew back, looked again at their bloodstains, goggled at the demon dogs. At their leader's screech, they broke and plunged back into the Time Bubble, their leader stumbling limpingly after them. There they wasted no time on their own ragged sorcerer. Their swords rose and fell, and no repulsor field stayed them.
"Brute, come back!" the Butcher yelled.
The gray uninj let go his hold on the leader's ankle and scampered out of the Time Bubble, which swiftly dimmed to its original light intensity and then winked out.
For once in their very mature lives, all of the adults in the auditorium began to jabber at each other simultaneously.
"We are sorry, but the anomaly has made it necessary to collapse the Time Bubble," the interpreter said. "There will be no viewing until further announcement. Thank you for your patience."
Hal and Joggy caught up with the Butcher just as Brute jumped into his arms and the woman in gold picked him up and hugged him fiercely. The Butcher started to pull away, then grudgingly submitted.
"Cubs!" came a small cold voice from behind Hal and Joggy. "Always playing hero! Say, what's that awful smell, Cynthia? It must have come from those dirty past men."
Hal and Joggy were shouting at the Butcher, but he wasn't listening to them or to the older voices clamoring about "revised theories of reality" and other important things. He didn't even squirm as Brute licked his cheek and the woman in gold planted a big kiss practically on his mouth.
He smiled dreamily and stroked Brute's muzzle and murmured softly: "We came, we saw, we conquered, didn't we, Brute?"
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What is the setting of the story?
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about Contagion by Katherine MacLean.
Relevant chunks:
CONTAGION
By KATHERINE MacLEAN
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction October 1950. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Minos was such a lovely planet. Not a thing seemed wrong with it. Excepting the food, perhaps. And a disease that wasn't really.
It was like an Earth forest in the fall, but it was not fall. The forest leaves were green and copper and purple and fiery red, and a wind sent patches of bright greenish sunlight dancing among the leaf shadows.
The hunt party of the Explorer filed along the narrow trail, guns ready, walking carefully, listening to the distant, half familiar cries of strange birds.
A faint crackle of static in their earphones indicated that a gun had been fired.
"Got anything?" asked June Walton. The helmet intercom carried her voice to the ears of the others without breaking the stillness of the forest.
"Took a shot at something," explained George Barton's cheerful voice in her earphones. She rounded a bend of the trail and came upon Barton standing peering up into the trees, his gun still raised. "It looked like a duck."
"This isn't Central Park," said Hal Barton, his brother, coming into sight. His green spacesuit struck an incongruous note against the bronze and red forest. "They won't all look like ducks," he said soberly.
"Maybe some will look like dragons. Don't get eaten by a dragon, June," came Max's voice quietly into her earphones. "Not while I still love you." He came out of the trees carrying the blood sample kit, and touched her glove with his, the grin on his ugly beloved face barely visible in the mingled light and shade. A patch of sunlight struck a greenish glint from his fishbowl helmet.
They walked on. A quarter of a mile back, the space ship Explorer towered over the forest like a tapering skyscraper, and the people of the ship looked out of the viewplates at fresh winds and sunlight and clouds, and they longed to be outside.
But the likeness to Earth was danger, and the cool wind might be death, for if the animals were like Earth animals, their diseases might be like Earth diseases, alike enough to be contagious, different enough to be impossible to treat. There was warning enough in the past. Colonies had vanished, and traveled spaceways drifted with the corpses of ships which had touched on some plague planet.
The people of the ship waited while their doctors, in airtight spacesuits, hunted animals to test them for contagion.
The four medicos, for June Walton was also a doctor, filed through the alien homelike forest, walking softly, watching for motion among the copper and purple shadows.
They saw it suddenly, a lighter moving copper patch among the darker browns. Reflex action swung June's gun into line, and behind her someone's gun went off with a faint crackle of static, and made a hole in the leaves beside the specimen. Then for a while no one moved.
This one looked like a man, a magnificently muscled, leanly graceful, humanlike animal. Even in its callused bare feet, it was a head taller than any of them. Red-haired, hawk-faced and darkly tanned, it stood breathing heavily, looking at them without expression. At its side hung a sheath knife, and a crossbow was slung across one wide shoulder.
They lowered their guns.
"It needs a shave," Max said reasonably in their earphones, and he reached up to his helmet and flipped the switch that let his voice be heard. "Something we could do for you, Mac?"
The friendly drawl was the first voice that had broken the forest sounds. June smiled suddenly. He was right. The strict logic of evolution did not demand beards; therefore a non-human would not be wearing a three day growth of red stubble.
Still panting, the tall figure licked dry lips and spoke. "Welcome to Minos. The Mayor sends greetings from Alexandria."
"English?" gasped June.
"We were afraid you would take off again before I could bring word to you.... It's three hundred miles.... We saw your scout plane pass twice, but we couldn't attract its attention."
June looked in stunned silence at the stranger leaning against the tree. Thirty-six light years—thirty-six times six trillion miles of monotonous space travel—to be told that the planet was already settled! "We didn't know there was a colony here," she said. "It is not on the map."
"We were afraid of that," the tall bronze man answered soberly. "We have been here three generations and yet no traders have come."
Max shifted the kit strap on his shoulder and offered a hand. "My name is Max Stark, M.D. This is June Walton, M.D., Hal Barton, M.D., and George Barton, Hal's brother, also M.D."
"Patrick Mead is the name," smiled the man, shaking hands casually.
"Just a hunter and bridge carpenter myself. Never met any medicos before."
The grip was effortless but even through her airproofed glove June could feel that the fingers that touched hers were as hard as padded steel.
"What—what is the population of Minos?" she asked.
He looked down at her curiously for a moment before answering. "Only one hundred and fifty." He smiled. "Don't worry, this isn't a city planet yet. There's room for a few more people." He shook hands with the Bartons quickly. "That is—you are people, aren't you?" he asked startlingly.
"Why not?" said Max with a poise that June admired.
"Well, you are all so—so—" Patrick Mead's eyes roamed across the faces of the group. "So varied."
They could find no meaning in that, and stood puzzled.
"I mean," Patrick Mead said into the silence, "all these—interesting different hair colors and face shapes and so forth—" He made a vague wave with one hand as if he had run out of words or was anxious not to insult them.
"Joke?" Max asked, bewildered.
June laid a hand on his arm. "No harm meant," she said to him over the intercom. "We're just as much of a shock to him as he is to us."
She addressed a question to the tall colonist on outside sound. "What should a person look like, Mr. Mead?"
He indicated her with a smile. "Like you."
June stepped closer and stood looking up at him, considering her own description. She was tall and tanned, like him; had a few freckles, like him; and wavy red hair, like his. She ignored the brightly humorous blue eyes.
"In other words," she said, "everyone on the planet looks like you and me?"
Patrick Mead took another look at their four faces and began to grin.
"Like me, I guess. But I hadn't thought of it before. I did not think that people could have different colored hair or that noses could fit so many ways onto faces. I was judging by my own appearance, but I suppose any fool can walk on his hands and say the world is upside down!" He laughed and sobered. "But then why wear spacesuits? The air is breathable."
"For safety," June told him. "We can't take any chances on plague."
Pat Mead was wearing nothing but a loin cloth and his weapons, and the wind ruffled his hair. He looked comfortable, and they longed to take off the stuffy spacesuits and feel the wind against their own skins. Minos was like home, like Earth.... But they were strangers.
"Plague," Pat Mead said thoughtfully. "We had one here. It came two years after the colony arrived and killed everyone except the Mead families. They were immune. I guess we look alike because we're all related, and that's why I grew up thinking that it is the only way people can look."
Plague. "What was the disease?" Hal Barton asked.
"Pretty gruesome, according to my father. They called it the melting sickness. The doctors died too soon to find out what it was or what to do about it."
"You should have trained for more doctors, or sent to civilization for some." A trace of impatience was in George Barton's voice.
Pat Mead explained patiently, "Our ship, with the power plant and all the books we needed, went off into the sky to avoid the contagion, and never came back. The crew must have died." Long years of hardship were indicated by that statement, a colony with electric power gone and machinery stilled, with key technicians dead and no way to replace them. June realized then the full meaning of the primitive sheath knife and bow.
"Any recurrence of melting sickness?" asked Hal Barton.
"No."
"Any other diseases?"
"Not a one."
Max was eyeing the bronze red-headed figure with something approaching awe. "Do you think all the Meads look like that?" he said to June on the intercom. "I wouldn't mind being a Mead myself!"
Their job had been made easy by the coming of Pat. They went back to the ship laughing, exchanging anecdotes with him. There was nothing now to keep Minos from being the home they wanted, except the melting sickness, and, forewarned against it, they could take precautions.
The polished silver and black column of the Explorer seemed to rise higher and higher over the trees as they neared it. Then its symmetry blurred all sense of specific size as they stepped out from among the trees and stood on the edge of the meadow, looking up.
"Nice!" said Pat. "Beautiful!" The admiration in his voice was warming.
"It was a yacht," Max said, still looking up, "second hand, an old-time beauty without a sign of wear. Synthetic diamond-studded control board and murals on the walls. It doesn't have the new speed drives, but it brought us thirty-six light years in one and a half subjective years. Plenty good enough."
The tall tanned man looked faintly wistful, and June realized that he had never had access to a full library, never seen a movie, never experienced luxury. He had been born and raised on Minos.
"May I go aboard?" Pat asked hopefully.
Max unslung the specimen kit from his shoulder, laid it on the carpet of plants that covered the ground and began to open it.
"Tests first," Hal Barton said. "We have to find out if you people still carry this so-called melting sickness. We'll have to de-microbe you and take specimens before we let you on board. Once on, you'll be no good as a check for what the other Meads might have."
Max was taking out a rack and a stand of preservative bottles and hypodermics.
"Are you going to jab me with those?" Pat asked with interest.
"You're just a specimen animal to me, bud!" Max grinned at Pat Mead, and Pat grinned back. June saw that they were friends already, the tall pantherish colonist, and the wry, black-haired doctor. She felt a stab of guilt because she loved Max and yet could pity him for being smaller and frailer than Pat Mead.
"Lie down," Max told him, "and hold still. We need two spinal fluid samples from the back, a body cavity one in front, and another from the arm."
Pat lay down obediently. Max knelt, and, as he spoke, expertly swabbed and inserted needles with the smooth speed that had made him a fine nerve surgeon on Earth.
High above them the scout helioplane came out of an opening in the ship and angled off toward the west, its buzz diminishing. Then, suddenly, it veered and headed back, and Reno Unrich's voice came tinnily from their earphones:
"What's that you've got? Hey, what are you docs doing down there?" He banked again and came to a stop, hovering fifty feet away. June could see his startled face looking through the glass at Pat.
Hal Barton switched to a narrow radio beam, explained rapidly and pointed in the direction of Alexandria. Reno's plane lifted and flew away over the odd-colored forest.
"The plane will drop a note on your town, telling them you got through to us," Hal Barton told Pat, who was sitting up watching Max dexterously put the blood and spinal fluids into the right bottles without exposing them to air.
"We won't be free to contact your people until we know if they still carry melting sickness," Max added. "You might be immune so it doesn't show on you, but still carry enough germs—if that's what caused it—to wipe out a planet."
"If you do carry melting sickness," said Hal Barton, "we won't be able to mingle with your people until we've cleared them of the disease."
"Starting with me?" Pat asked.
"Starting with you," Max told him ruefully, "as soon as you step on board."
"More needles?"
"Yes, and a few little extras thrown in."
"Rough?"
"It isn't easy."
A few minutes later, standing in the stalls for spacesuit decontamination, being buffeted by jets of hot disinfectant, bathed in glares of sterilizing ultraviolet radiation, June remembered that and compared Pat Mead's treatment to theirs.
In the Explorer , stored carefully in sealed tanks and containers, was the ultimate, multi-purpose cureall. It was a solution of enzymes so like the key catalysts of the human cell nucleus that it caused chemical derangement and disintegration in any non-human cell. Nothing could live in contact with it but human cells; any alien intruder to the body would die. Nucleocat Cureall was its trade name.
But the cureall alone was not enough for complete safety. Plagues had been known to slay too rapidly and universally to be checked by human treatment. Doctors are not reliable; they die. Therefore spaceways and interplanetary health law demanded that ship equipment for guarding against disease be totally mechanical in operation, rapid and efficient.
Somewhere near them, in a series of stalls which led around and around like a rabbit maze, Pat was being herded from stall to stall by peremptory mechanical voices, directed to soap and shower, ordered to insert his arm into a slot which took a sample of his blood, given solutions to drink, bathed in germicidal ultraviolet, shaken by sonic blasts, breathing air thick with sprays of germicidal mists, being directed to put his arms into other slots where they were anesthesized and injected with various immunizing solutions.
Finally, he would be put in a room of high temperature and extreme dryness, and instructed to sit for half an hour while more fluids were dripped into his veins through long thin tubes.
All legal spaceships were built for safety. No chance was taken of allowing a suspected carrier to bring an infection on board with him.
June stepped from the last shower stall into the locker room, zipped off her spacesuit with a sigh of relief, and contemplated herself in a wall mirror. Red hair, dark blue eyes, tall....
"I've got a good figure," she said thoughtfully.
Max turned at the door. "Why this sudden interest in your looks?" he asked suspiciously. "Do we stand here and admire you, or do we finally get something to eat?"
"Wait a minute." She went to a wall phone and dialed it carefully, using a combination from the ship's directory. "How're you doing, Pat?"
The phone picked up a hissing of water or spray. There was a startled chuckle. "Voices, too! Hello, June. How do you tell a machine to go jump in the lake?"
"Are you hungry?"
"No food since yesterday."
"We'll have a banquet ready for you when you get out," she told Pat and hung up, smiling. Pat Mead's voice had a vitality and enjoyment which made shipboard talk sound like sad artificial gaiety in contrast.
They looked into the nearby small laboratory where twelve squealing hamsters were protestingly submitting to a small injection each of Pat's blood. In most of them the injection was followed by one of antihistaminics and adaptives. Otherwise the hamster defense system would treat all non-hamster cells as enemies, even the harmless human blood cells, and fight back against them violently.
One hamster, the twelfth, was given an extra large dose of adaptive, so that if there were a disease, he would not fight it or the human cells, and thus succumb more rapidly.
"How ya doing, George?" Max asked.
"Routine," George Barton grunted absently.
On the way up the long spiral ramps to the dining hall, they passed a viewplate. It showed a long scene of mountains in the distance on the horizon, and between them, rising step by step as they grew farther away, the low rolling hills, bronze and red with patches of clear green where there were fields.
Someone was looking out, standing very still, as if she had been there a long time—Bess St. Clair, a Canadian woman. "It looks like Winnipeg," she told them as they paused. "When are you doctors going to let us out of this blithering barberpole? Look," she pointed. "See that patch of field on the south hillside, with the brook winding through it? I've staked that hillside for our house. When do we get out?"
Reno Ulrich's tiny scout plane buzzed slowly in from the distance and began circling lazily.
"Sooner than you think," Max told her. "We've discovered a castaway colony on the planet. They've done our tests for us by just living here. If there's anything here to catch, they've caught it."
"People on Minos?" Bess's handsome ruddy face grew alive with excitement.
"One of them is down in the medical department," June said. "He'll be out in twenty minutes."
"May I go see him?"
"Sure," said Max. "Show him the way to the dining hall when he gets out. Tell him we sent you."
"Right!" She turned and ran down the ramp like a small girl going to a fire. Max grinned at June and she grinned back. After a year and a half of isolation in space, everyone was hungry for the sight of new faces, the sound of unfamiliar voices.
They climbed the last two turns to the cafeteria, and entered to a rich subdued blend of soft music and quiet conversations. The cafeteria was a section of the old dining room, left when the rest of the ship had been converted to living and working quarters, and it still had the original finely grained wood of the ceiling and walls, the sound absorbency, the soft music spools and the intimate small light at each table where people leisurely ate and talked.
They stood in line at the hot foods counter, and behind her June could hear a girl's voice talking excitedly through the murmur of conversation.
"—new man, honest! I saw him through the viewplate when they came in. He's down in the medical department. A real frontiersman."
The line drew abreast of the counters, and she and Max chose three heaping trays, starting with hydroponic mushroom steak, raised in the growing trays of water and chemicals; sharp salad bowl with rose tomatoes and aromatic peppers; tank-grown fish with special sauce; four different desserts, and assorted beverages.
Presently they had three tottering trays successfully maneuvered to a table. Brant St. Clair came over. "I beg your pardon, Max, but they are saying something about Reno carrying messages to a colony of savages, for the medical department. Will he be back soon, do you know?"
Max smiled up at him, his square face affectionate. Everyone liked the shy Canadian. "He's back already. We just saw him come in."
"Oh, fine." St. Clair beamed. "I had an appointment with him to go out and confirm what looks like a nice vein of iron to the northeast. Have you seen Bess? Oh—there she is." He turned swiftly and hurried away.
A very tall man with fiery red hair came in surrounded by an eagerly talking crowd of ship people. It was Pat Mead. He stood in the doorway, alertly scanning the dining room. Sheer vitality made him seem even larger than he was. Sighting June, he smiled and began to thread toward their table.
"Look!" said someone. "There's the colonist!" Shelia, a pretty, jeweled woman, followed and caught his arm. "Did you really swim across a river to come here?"
Overflowing with good-will and curiosity, people approached from all directions. "Did you actually walk three hundred miles? Come, eat with us. Let me help choose your tray."
Everyone wanted him to eat at their table, everyone was a specialist and wanted data about Minos. They all wanted anecdotes about hunting wild animals with a bow and arrow.
"He needs to be rescued," Max said. "He won't have a chance to eat."
June and Max got up firmly, edged through the crowd, captured Pat and escorted him back to their table. June found herself pleased to be claiming the hero of the hour.
Pat sat in the simple, subtly designed chair and leaned back almost voluptuously, testing the way it gave and fitted itself to him. He ran his eyes over the bright tableware and heaped plates. He looked around at the rich grained walls and soft lights at each table. He said nothing, just looking and feeling and experiencing.
"When we build our town and leave the ship," June explained, "we will turn all the staterooms back into the lounges and ballrooms and cocktail bars that used to be inside."
"Oh, I'm not complaining," Pat said negligently. He cocked his head to the music, and tried to locate its source.
"That's big of you," said Max with gentle irony.
They fell to, Pat beginning the first meal he had had in more than a day.
Most of the other diners finished when they were halfway through, and began walking over, diffidently at first, then in another wave of smiling faces, handshakes, and introductions. Pat was asked about crops, about farming methods, about rainfall and floods, about farm animals and plant breeding, about the compatibility of imported Earth seeds with local ground, about mines and strata.
There was no need to protect him. He leaned back in his chair and drawled answers with the lazy ease of a panther; where he could think of no statistic, he would fill the gap with an anecdote. It developed that he enjoyed spinning campfire yarns and especially being the center of interest.
Between bouts of questions, he ate with undiminished and glowing relish.
June noticed that the female specialists were prolonging the questions more than they needed, clustering around the table laughing at his jokes, until presently Pat was almost surrounded by pretty faces, eager questions, and chiming laughs. Shelia the beautiful laughed most chimingly of all.
June nudged Max, and Max shrugged indifferently. It wasn't anything a man would pay attention to, perhaps. But June watched Pat for a moment more, then glanced uneasily back to Max. He was eating and listening to Pat's answers and did not feel her gaze. For some reason Max looked almost shrunken to her. He was shorter than she had realized; she had forgotten that he was only the same height as herself. She was dimly aware of the clear lilting chatter of female voices increasing at Pat's end of the table.
"That guy's a menace," Max said, and laughed to himself, cutting another slice of hydroponic mushroom steak. "What's eating you?" he added, glancing aside at her when he noticed her sudden stillness.
"Nothing," she said hastily, but she did not turn back to watching Pat Mead. She felt disloyal. Pat was only a superb animal. Max was the man she loved. Or—was he? Of course he was, she told herself angrily. They had gone colonizing together because they wanted to spend their lives together; she had never thought of marrying any other man. Yet the sense of dissatisfaction persisted, and along with it a feeling of guilt.
Len Marlow, the protein tank-culture technician responsible for the mushroom steaks, had wormed his way into the group and asked Pat a question. Now he was saying, "I don't dig you, Pat. It sounds like you're putting the people into the tanks instead of the vegetables!" He glanced at them, looking puzzled. "See if you two can make anything of this. It sounds medical to me."
Pat leaned back and smiled, sipping a glass of hydroponic burgundy.
"Wonderful stuff. You'll have to show us how to make it."
Len turned back to him. "You people live off the country, right? You hunt and bring in steaks and eat them, right? Well, say I have one of those steaks right here and I want to eat it, what happens?"
"Go ahead and eat it. It just wouldn't digest. You'd stay hungry."
"Why?" Len was aggrieved.
"Chemical differences in the basic protoplasm of Minos. Different amino linkages, left-handed instead of right-handed molecules in the carbohydrates, things like that. Nothing will be digestible here until you are adapted chemically by a little test-tube evolution. Till then you'd starve to death on a full stomach."
Pat's side of the table had been loaded with the dishes from two trays, but it was almost clear now and the dishes were stacked neatly to one side. He started on three desserts, thoughtfully tasting each in turn.
"Test-tube evolution?" Max repeated. "What's that? I thought you people had no doctors."
"It's a story." Pat leaned back again. "Alexander P. Mead, the head of the Mead clan, was a plant geneticist, a very determined personality and no man to argue with. He didn't want us to go through the struggle of killing off all Minos plants and putting in our own, spoiling the face of the planet and upsetting the balance of its ecology. He decided that he would adapt our genes to this planet or kill us trying. He did it all right.'"
"Did which?" asked June, suddenly feeling a sourceless prickle of fear.
"Adapted us to Minos. He took human cells—"
She listened intently, trying to find a reason for fear in the explanation. It would have taken many human generations to adapt to Minos by ordinary evolution, and that only at a heavy toll of death and hunger which evolution exacts. There was a shorter way: Human cells have the ability to return to their primeval condition of independence, hunting, eating and reproducing alone.
Alexander P. Mead took human cells and made them into phagocytes. He put them through the hard savage school of evolution—a thousand generations of multiplication, hardship and hunger, with the alien indigestible food always present, offering its reward of plenty to the cell that reluctantly learned to absorb it.
"Leucocytes can run through several thousand generations of evolution in six months," Pat Mead finished. "When they reached to a point where they would absorb Minos food, he planted them back in the people he had taken them from."
"What was supposed to happen then?" Max asked, leaning forward.
"I don't know exactly how it worked. He never told anybody much about it, and when I was a little boy he had gone loco and was wandering ha-ha-ing around waving a test tube. Fell down a ravine and broke his neck at the age of eighty."
"A character," Max said.
Why was she afraid? "It worked then?"
"Yes. He tried it on all the Meads the first year. The other settlers didn't want to be experimented on until they saw how it worked out. It worked. The Meads could hunt, and plant while the other settlers were still eating out of hydroponics tanks."
"It worked," said Max to Len. "You're a plant geneticist and a tank culture expert. There's a job for you."
"Uh- uh !" Len backed away. "It sounds like a medical problem to me. Human cell control—right up your alley."
"It is a one-way street," Pat warned. "Once it is done, you won't be able to digest ship food. I'll get no good from this protein. I ate it just for the taste."
Hal Barton appeared quietly beside the table. "Three of the twelve test hamsters have died," he reported, and turned to Pat. "Your people carry the germs of melting sickness, as you call it. The dead hamsters were injected with blood taken from you before you were de-infected. We can't settle here unless we de-infect everybody on Minos. Would they object?"
"We wouldn't want to give you folks germs," Pat smiled. "Anything for safety. But there'll have to be a vote on it first."
The doctors went to Reno Ulrich's table and walked with him to the hangar, explaining. He was to carry the proposal to Alexandria, mingle with the people, be persuasive and wait for them to vote before returning. He was to give himself shots of cureall every two hours on the hour or run the risk of disease.
Reno was pleased. He had dabbled in sociology before retraining as a mechanic for the expedition. "This gives me a chance to study their mores." He winked wickedly. "I may not be back for several nights." They watched through the viewplate as he took off, and then went over to the laboratory for a look at the hamsters.
Three were alive and healthy, munching lettuce. One was the control; the other two had been given shots of Pat's blood from before he entered the ship, but with no additional treatment. Apparently a hamster could fight off melting sickness easily if left alone. Three were still feverish and ruffled, with a low red blood count, but recovering. The three dead ones had been given strong shots of adaptive and counter histamine, so their bodies had not fought back against the attack.
June glanced at the dead animals hastily and looked away again. They lay twisted with a strange semi-fluid limpness, as if ready to dissolve. The last hamster, which had been given the heaviest dose of adaptive, had apparently lost all its hair before death. It was hairless and pink, like a still-born baby.
"We can find no micro-organisms," George Barton said. "None at all. Nothing in the body that should not be there. Leucosis and anemia. Fever only for the ones that fought it off." He handed Max some temperature charts and graphs of blood counts.
June wandered out into the hall. Pediatrics and obstetrics were her field; she left the cellular research to Max, and just helped him with laboratory routine. The strange mood followed her out into the hall, then abruptly lightened.
Coming toward her, busily telling a tale of adventure to the gorgeous Shelia Davenport, was a tall, red-headed, magnificently handsome man. It was his handsomeness which made Pat such a pleasure to look upon and talk with, she guiltily told herself, and it was his tremendous vitality.... It was like meeting a movie hero in the flesh, or a hero out of the pages of a book—Deer-slayer, John Clayton, Lord Greystoke.
She waited in the doorway to the laboratory and made no move to join them, merely acknowledged the two with a nod and a smile and a casual lift of the hand. They nodded and smiled back.
"Hello, June," said Pat and continued telling his tale, but as they passed he lightly touched her arm.
"Oh, pioneer!" she said mockingly and softly to his passing profile, and knew that he had heard.
Question:
What is the setting of the story?
Answer:
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[
"The story begins with the ship, the Explorer, landing on an unknown planet. It has an Earth-like forest in the fall. The leaves were of various colors, green, copper, purple, and red. To get to this planet, known as Minos, it took 36 light-years from Earth. The ship they traveled on is described as being like a silver and black column. It was previously a yacht that was retrofitted to become the Explorer. \n\nThey take Pat back to the ship and they all decontaminate. Once they are done, they go to the dining hall for food. After eating their food in the dining, June and some of the other doctors return to the laboratory to inspect the mice. \n",
"The story begins on Minos, a lovely planet reminding Earth. A party of doctors in spacesuits and earphones are moving through the forest, which looks like a beautiful Earth forest in the fall. The trail is narrow, and the spaceship, 'Explorer', towers behind. The ship is huge and it looks like a skyscraper within the forest. It is a polished silver and black column which used to be a yacht. There are many passengers abroad, staring at the planet through the windows. There are cabins, a cafeteria, a control room, a library and laboratories inside. Before coming in, Pat is tested on the ground near the ship. The ship has a cureall - a cure from any disease. Not to get sick before it's used, then testings are done by machines. There is Reno's plane which travels with the news and notions. There are hamsters in one of the laboratories. From the view plate mountains, forests, hills and fields are visible. The ship used to have ballrooms and dining rooms but all was transformed. ",
"The story is set on Minos, a planet that Earthmen had found and landed on in hopes of finding a habitable place to colonize. Minos is visually and physically very similar to Earth, with forests, meadows, clouds, and breathable air. The animals are also similar to Earth animals. However, there is uncertainty about Minos, and risk of the planet carrying diseases that would kill the humans. Part of the story takes place aboard The Explorer, a large yacht-converted-spaceship. The Explorer is silver and black and towers over the forests of Minos, and inside the ship has several compartments, including precautionary medical rooms, staterooms, and a dining hall.",
"The story is set on the planet of Minos. The forest that the doctors trek through is said to be similar to Earth in the fall, but it is not fall. The colors of the leaves themselves are green, copper, purple, and fiery red. There are also patches of bright greenish sunlight and wind. On the planet, the small town of Alexandria is also there. The Explorer itself is converted from a yacht with a synthetic diamond-studded control board and murals. However, it does not have the newest speed drives. Inside of the ship, there are multiple stalls and rooms for disinfecting. There is also a locker room with shower stalls and a wall mirror. The room has a wall phone too. The Explorer has a viewplate, showcasing the outside landscape of mountains on the horizon. The low rolling hills are bronze and red, with patches of clear green in the fields. The cafeteria is converted from an old dining room, so it still has the original finely grained wood of the ceilings and walls. It also features sound absorbance, soft music spools, and intimate small light tables to eat at. There are trays to use to take food back to a table too. The ship has many working and living quarters as well, including a laboratory to do experiments in and study the hamsters. "
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50774
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CONTAGION
By KATHERINE MacLEAN
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction October 1950. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Minos was such a lovely planet. Not a thing seemed wrong with it. Excepting the food, perhaps. And a disease that wasn't really.
It was like an Earth forest in the fall, but it was not fall. The forest leaves were green and copper and purple and fiery red, and a wind sent patches of bright greenish sunlight dancing among the leaf shadows.
The hunt party of the Explorer filed along the narrow trail, guns ready, walking carefully, listening to the distant, half familiar cries of strange birds.
A faint crackle of static in their earphones indicated that a gun had been fired.
"Got anything?" asked June Walton. The helmet intercom carried her voice to the ears of the others without breaking the stillness of the forest.
"Took a shot at something," explained George Barton's cheerful voice in her earphones. She rounded a bend of the trail and came upon Barton standing peering up into the trees, his gun still raised. "It looked like a duck."
"This isn't Central Park," said Hal Barton, his brother, coming into sight. His green spacesuit struck an incongruous note against the bronze and red forest. "They won't all look like ducks," he said soberly.
"Maybe some will look like dragons. Don't get eaten by a dragon, June," came Max's voice quietly into her earphones. "Not while I still love you." He came out of the trees carrying the blood sample kit, and touched her glove with his, the grin on his ugly beloved face barely visible in the mingled light and shade. A patch of sunlight struck a greenish glint from his fishbowl helmet.
They walked on. A quarter of a mile back, the space ship Explorer towered over the forest like a tapering skyscraper, and the people of the ship looked out of the viewplates at fresh winds and sunlight and clouds, and they longed to be outside.
But the likeness to Earth was danger, and the cool wind might be death, for if the animals were like Earth animals, their diseases might be like Earth diseases, alike enough to be contagious, different enough to be impossible to treat. There was warning enough in the past. Colonies had vanished, and traveled spaceways drifted with the corpses of ships which had touched on some plague planet.
The people of the ship waited while their doctors, in airtight spacesuits, hunted animals to test them for contagion.
The four medicos, for June Walton was also a doctor, filed through the alien homelike forest, walking softly, watching for motion among the copper and purple shadows.
They saw it suddenly, a lighter moving copper patch among the darker browns. Reflex action swung June's gun into line, and behind her someone's gun went off with a faint crackle of static, and made a hole in the leaves beside the specimen. Then for a while no one moved.
This one looked like a man, a magnificently muscled, leanly graceful, humanlike animal. Even in its callused bare feet, it was a head taller than any of them. Red-haired, hawk-faced and darkly tanned, it stood breathing heavily, looking at them without expression. At its side hung a sheath knife, and a crossbow was slung across one wide shoulder.
They lowered their guns.
"It needs a shave," Max said reasonably in their earphones, and he reached up to his helmet and flipped the switch that let his voice be heard. "Something we could do for you, Mac?"
The friendly drawl was the first voice that had broken the forest sounds. June smiled suddenly. He was right. The strict logic of evolution did not demand beards; therefore a non-human would not be wearing a three day growth of red stubble.
Still panting, the tall figure licked dry lips and spoke. "Welcome to Minos. The Mayor sends greetings from Alexandria."
"English?" gasped June.
"We were afraid you would take off again before I could bring word to you.... It's three hundred miles.... We saw your scout plane pass twice, but we couldn't attract its attention."
June looked in stunned silence at the stranger leaning against the tree. Thirty-six light years—thirty-six times six trillion miles of monotonous space travel—to be told that the planet was already settled! "We didn't know there was a colony here," she said. "It is not on the map."
"We were afraid of that," the tall bronze man answered soberly. "We have been here three generations and yet no traders have come."
Max shifted the kit strap on his shoulder and offered a hand. "My name is Max Stark, M.D. This is June Walton, M.D., Hal Barton, M.D., and George Barton, Hal's brother, also M.D."
"Patrick Mead is the name," smiled the man, shaking hands casually.
"Just a hunter and bridge carpenter myself. Never met any medicos before."
The grip was effortless but even through her airproofed glove June could feel that the fingers that touched hers were as hard as padded steel.
"What—what is the population of Minos?" she asked.
He looked down at her curiously for a moment before answering. "Only one hundred and fifty." He smiled. "Don't worry, this isn't a city planet yet. There's room for a few more people." He shook hands with the Bartons quickly. "That is—you are people, aren't you?" he asked startlingly.
"Why not?" said Max with a poise that June admired.
"Well, you are all so—so—" Patrick Mead's eyes roamed across the faces of the group. "So varied."
They could find no meaning in that, and stood puzzled.
"I mean," Patrick Mead said into the silence, "all these—interesting different hair colors and face shapes and so forth—" He made a vague wave with one hand as if he had run out of words or was anxious not to insult them.
"Joke?" Max asked, bewildered.
June laid a hand on his arm. "No harm meant," she said to him over the intercom. "We're just as much of a shock to him as he is to us."
She addressed a question to the tall colonist on outside sound. "What should a person look like, Mr. Mead?"
He indicated her with a smile. "Like you."
June stepped closer and stood looking up at him, considering her own description. She was tall and tanned, like him; had a few freckles, like him; and wavy red hair, like his. She ignored the brightly humorous blue eyes.
"In other words," she said, "everyone on the planet looks like you and me?"
Patrick Mead took another look at their four faces and began to grin.
"Like me, I guess. But I hadn't thought of it before. I did not think that people could have different colored hair or that noses could fit so many ways onto faces. I was judging by my own appearance, but I suppose any fool can walk on his hands and say the world is upside down!" He laughed and sobered. "But then why wear spacesuits? The air is breathable."
"For safety," June told him. "We can't take any chances on plague."
Pat Mead was wearing nothing but a loin cloth and his weapons, and the wind ruffled his hair. He looked comfortable, and they longed to take off the stuffy spacesuits and feel the wind against their own skins. Minos was like home, like Earth.... But they were strangers.
"Plague," Pat Mead said thoughtfully. "We had one here. It came two years after the colony arrived and killed everyone except the Mead families. They were immune. I guess we look alike because we're all related, and that's why I grew up thinking that it is the only way people can look."
Plague. "What was the disease?" Hal Barton asked.
"Pretty gruesome, according to my father. They called it the melting sickness. The doctors died too soon to find out what it was or what to do about it."
"You should have trained for more doctors, or sent to civilization for some." A trace of impatience was in George Barton's voice.
Pat Mead explained patiently, "Our ship, with the power plant and all the books we needed, went off into the sky to avoid the contagion, and never came back. The crew must have died." Long years of hardship were indicated by that statement, a colony with electric power gone and machinery stilled, with key technicians dead and no way to replace them. June realized then the full meaning of the primitive sheath knife and bow.
"Any recurrence of melting sickness?" asked Hal Barton.
"No."
"Any other diseases?"
"Not a one."
Max was eyeing the bronze red-headed figure with something approaching awe. "Do you think all the Meads look like that?" he said to June on the intercom. "I wouldn't mind being a Mead myself!"
Their job had been made easy by the coming of Pat. They went back to the ship laughing, exchanging anecdotes with him. There was nothing now to keep Minos from being the home they wanted, except the melting sickness, and, forewarned against it, they could take precautions.
The polished silver and black column of the Explorer seemed to rise higher and higher over the trees as they neared it. Then its symmetry blurred all sense of specific size as they stepped out from among the trees and stood on the edge of the meadow, looking up.
"Nice!" said Pat. "Beautiful!" The admiration in his voice was warming.
"It was a yacht," Max said, still looking up, "second hand, an old-time beauty without a sign of wear. Synthetic diamond-studded control board and murals on the walls. It doesn't have the new speed drives, but it brought us thirty-six light years in one and a half subjective years. Plenty good enough."
The tall tanned man looked faintly wistful, and June realized that he had never had access to a full library, never seen a movie, never experienced luxury. He had been born and raised on Minos.
"May I go aboard?" Pat asked hopefully.
Max unslung the specimen kit from his shoulder, laid it on the carpet of plants that covered the ground and began to open it.
"Tests first," Hal Barton said. "We have to find out if you people still carry this so-called melting sickness. We'll have to de-microbe you and take specimens before we let you on board. Once on, you'll be no good as a check for what the other Meads might have."
Max was taking out a rack and a stand of preservative bottles and hypodermics.
"Are you going to jab me with those?" Pat asked with interest.
"You're just a specimen animal to me, bud!" Max grinned at Pat Mead, and Pat grinned back. June saw that they were friends already, the tall pantherish colonist, and the wry, black-haired doctor. She felt a stab of guilt because she loved Max and yet could pity him for being smaller and frailer than Pat Mead.
"Lie down," Max told him, "and hold still. We need two spinal fluid samples from the back, a body cavity one in front, and another from the arm."
Pat lay down obediently. Max knelt, and, as he spoke, expertly swabbed and inserted needles with the smooth speed that had made him a fine nerve surgeon on Earth.
High above them the scout helioplane came out of an opening in the ship and angled off toward the west, its buzz diminishing. Then, suddenly, it veered and headed back, and Reno Unrich's voice came tinnily from their earphones:
"What's that you've got? Hey, what are you docs doing down there?" He banked again and came to a stop, hovering fifty feet away. June could see his startled face looking through the glass at Pat.
Hal Barton switched to a narrow radio beam, explained rapidly and pointed in the direction of Alexandria. Reno's plane lifted and flew away over the odd-colored forest.
"The plane will drop a note on your town, telling them you got through to us," Hal Barton told Pat, who was sitting up watching Max dexterously put the blood and spinal fluids into the right bottles without exposing them to air.
"We won't be free to contact your people until we know if they still carry melting sickness," Max added. "You might be immune so it doesn't show on you, but still carry enough germs—if that's what caused it—to wipe out a planet."
"If you do carry melting sickness," said Hal Barton, "we won't be able to mingle with your people until we've cleared them of the disease."
"Starting with me?" Pat asked.
"Starting with you," Max told him ruefully, "as soon as you step on board."
"More needles?"
"Yes, and a few little extras thrown in."
"Rough?"
"It isn't easy."
A few minutes later, standing in the stalls for spacesuit decontamination, being buffeted by jets of hot disinfectant, bathed in glares of sterilizing ultraviolet radiation, June remembered that and compared Pat Mead's treatment to theirs.
In the Explorer , stored carefully in sealed tanks and containers, was the ultimate, multi-purpose cureall. It was a solution of enzymes so like the key catalysts of the human cell nucleus that it caused chemical derangement and disintegration in any non-human cell. Nothing could live in contact with it but human cells; any alien intruder to the body would die. Nucleocat Cureall was its trade name.
But the cureall alone was not enough for complete safety. Plagues had been known to slay too rapidly and universally to be checked by human treatment. Doctors are not reliable; they die. Therefore spaceways and interplanetary health law demanded that ship equipment for guarding against disease be totally mechanical in operation, rapid and efficient.
Somewhere near them, in a series of stalls which led around and around like a rabbit maze, Pat was being herded from stall to stall by peremptory mechanical voices, directed to soap and shower, ordered to insert his arm into a slot which took a sample of his blood, given solutions to drink, bathed in germicidal ultraviolet, shaken by sonic blasts, breathing air thick with sprays of germicidal mists, being directed to put his arms into other slots where they were anesthesized and injected with various immunizing solutions.
Finally, he would be put in a room of high temperature and extreme dryness, and instructed to sit for half an hour while more fluids were dripped into his veins through long thin tubes.
All legal spaceships were built for safety. No chance was taken of allowing a suspected carrier to bring an infection on board with him.
June stepped from the last shower stall into the locker room, zipped off her spacesuit with a sigh of relief, and contemplated herself in a wall mirror. Red hair, dark blue eyes, tall....
"I've got a good figure," she said thoughtfully.
Max turned at the door. "Why this sudden interest in your looks?" he asked suspiciously. "Do we stand here and admire you, or do we finally get something to eat?"
"Wait a minute." She went to a wall phone and dialed it carefully, using a combination from the ship's directory. "How're you doing, Pat?"
The phone picked up a hissing of water or spray. There was a startled chuckle. "Voices, too! Hello, June. How do you tell a machine to go jump in the lake?"
"Are you hungry?"
"No food since yesterday."
"We'll have a banquet ready for you when you get out," she told Pat and hung up, smiling. Pat Mead's voice had a vitality and enjoyment which made shipboard talk sound like sad artificial gaiety in contrast.
They looked into the nearby small laboratory where twelve squealing hamsters were protestingly submitting to a small injection each of Pat's blood. In most of them the injection was followed by one of antihistaminics and adaptives. Otherwise the hamster defense system would treat all non-hamster cells as enemies, even the harmless human blood cells, and fight back against them violently.
One hamster, the twelfth, was given an extra large dose of adaptive, so that if there were a disease, he would not fight it or the human cells, and thus succumb more rapidly.
"How ya doing, George?" Max asked.
"Routine," George Barton grunted absently.
On the way up the long spiral ramps to the dining hall, they passed a viewplate. It showed a long scene of mountains in the distance on the horizon, and between them, rising step by step as they grew farther away, the low rolling hills, bronze and red with patches of clear green where there were fields.
Someone was looking out, standing very still, as if she had been there a long time—Bess St. Clair, a Canadian woman. "It looks like Winnipeg," she told them as they paused. "When are you doctors going to let us out of this blithering barberpole? Look," she pointed. "See that patch of field on the south hillside, with the brook winding through it? I've staked that hillside for our house. When do we get out?"
Reno Ulrich's tiny scout plane buzzed slowly in from the distance and began circling lazily.
"Sooner than you think," Max told her. "We've discovered a castaway colony on the planet. They've done our tests for us by just living here. If there's anything here to catch, they've caught it."
"People on Minos?" Bess's handsome ruddy face grew alive with excitement.
"One of them is down in the medical department," June said. "He'll be out in twenty minutes."
"May I go see him?"
"Sure," said Max. "Show him the way to the dining hall when he gets out. Tell him we sent you."
"Right!" She turned and ran down the ramp like a small girl going to a fire. Max grinned at June and she grinned back. After a year and a half of isolation in space, everyone was hungry for the sight of new faces, the sound of unfamiliar voices.
They climbed the last two turns to the cafeteria, and entered to a rich subdued blend of soft music and quiet conversations. The cafeteria was a section of the old dining room, left when the rest of the ship had been converted to living and working quarters, and it still had the original finely grained wood of the ceiling and walls, the sound absorbency, the soft music spools and the intimate small light at each table where people leisurely ate and talked.
They stood in line at the hot foods counter, and behind her June could hear a girl's voice talking excitedly through the murmur of conversation.
"—new man, honest! I saw him through the viewplate when they came in. He's down in the medical department. A real frontiersman."
The line drew abreast of the counters, and she and Max chose three heaping trays, starting with hydroponic mushroom steak, raised in the growing trays of water and chemicals; sharp salad bowl with rose tomatoes and aromatic peppers; tank-grown fish with special sauce; four different desserts, and assorted beverages.
Presently they had three tottering trays successfully maneuvered to a table. Brant St. Clair came over. "I beg your pardon, Max, but they are saying something about Reno carrying messages to a colony of savages, for the medical department. Will he be back soon, do you know?"
Max smiled up at him, his square face affectionate. Everyone liked the shy Canadian. "He's back already. We just saw him come in."
"Oh, fine." St. Clair beamed. "I had an appointment with him to go out and confirm what looks like a nice vein of iron to the northeast. Have you seen Bess? Oh—there she is." He turned swiftly and hurried away.
A very tall man with fiery red hair came in surrounded by an eagerly talking crowd of ship people. It was Pat Mead. He stood in the doorway, alertly scanning the dining room. Sheer vitality made him seem even larger than he was. Sighting June, he smiled and began to thread toward their table.
"Look!" said someone. "There's the colonist!" Shelia, a pretty, jeweled woman, followed and caught his arm. "Did you really swim across a river to come here?"
Overflowing with good-will and curiosity, people approached from all directions. "Did you actually walk three hundred miles? Come, eat with us. Let me help choose your tray."
Everyone wanted him to eat at their table, everyone was a specialist and wanted data about Minos. They all wanted anecdotes about hunting wild animals with a bow and arrow.
"He needs to be rescued," Max said. "He won't have a chance to eat."
June and Max got up firmly, edged through the crowd, captured Pat and escorted him back to their table. June found herself pleased to be claiming the hero of the hour.
Pat sat in the simple, subtly designed chair and leaned back almost voluptuously, testing the way it gave and fitted itself to him. He ran his eyes over the bright tableware and heaped plates. He looked around at the rich grained walls and soft lights at each table. He said nothing, just looking and feeling and experiencing.
"When we build our town and leave the ship," June explained, "we will turn all the staterooms back into the lounges and ballrooms and cocktail bars that used to be inside."
"Oh, I'm not complaining," Pat said negligently. He cocked his head to the music, and tried to locate its source.
"That's big of you," said Max with gentle irony.
They fell to, Pat beginning the first meal he had had in more than a day.
Most of the other diners finished when they were halfway through, and began walking over, diffidently at first, then in another wave of smiling faces, handshakes, and introductions. Pat was asked about crops, about farming methods, about rainfall and floods, about farm animals and plant breeding, about the compatibility of imported Earth seeds with local ground, about mines and strata.
There was no need to protect him. He leaned back in his chair and drawled answers with the lazy ease of a panther; where he could think of no statistic, he would fill the gap with an anecdote. It developed that he enjoyed spinning campfire yarns and especially being the center of interest.
Between bouts of questions, he ate with undiminished and glowing relish.
June noticed that the female specialists were prolonging the questions more than they needed, clustering around the table laughing at his jokes, until presently Pat was almost surrounded by pretty faces, eager questions, and chiming laughs. Shelia the beautiful laughed most chimingly of all.
June nudged Max, and Max shrugged indifferently. It wasn't anything a man would pay attention to, perhaps. But June watched Pat for a moment more, then glanced uneasily back to Max. He was eating and listening to Pat's answers and did not feel her gaze. For some reason Max looked almost shrunken to her. He was shorter than she had realized; she had forgotten that he was only the same height as herself. She was dimly aware of the clear lilting chatter of female voices increasing at Pat's end of the table.
"That guy's a menace," Max said, and laughed to himself, cutting another slice of hydroponic mushroom steak. "What's eating you?" he added, glancing aside at her when he noticed her sudden stillness.
"Nothing," she said hastily, but she did not turn back to watching Pat Mead. She felt disloyal. Pat was only a superb animal. Max was the man she loved. Or—was he? Of course he was, she told herself angrily. They had gone colonizing together because they wanted to spend their lives together; she had never thought of marrying any other man. Yet the sense of dissatisfaction persisted, and along with it a feeling of guilt.
Len Marlow, the protein tank-culture technician responsible for the mushroom steaks, had wormed his way into the group and asked Pat a question. Now he was saying, "I don't dig you, Pat. It sounds like you're putting the people into the tanks instead of the vegetables!" He glanced at them, looking puzzled. "See if you two can make anything of this. It sounds medical to me."
Pat leaned back and smiled, sipping a glass of hydroponic burgundy.
"Wonderful stuff. You'll have to show us how to make it."
Len turned back to him. "You people live off the country, right? You hunt and bring in steaks and eat them, right? Well, say I have one of those steaks right here and I want to eat it, what happens?"
"Go ahead and eat it. It just wouldn't digest. You'd stay hungry."
"Why?" Len was aggrieved.
"Chemical differences in the basic protoplasm of Minos. Different amino linkages, left-handed instead of right-handed molecules in the carbohydrates, things like that. Nothing will be digestible here until you are adapted chemically by a little test-tube evolution. Till then you'd starve to death on a full stomach."
Pat's side of the table had been loaded with the dishes from two trays, but it was almost clear now and the dishes were stacked neatly to one side. He started on three desserts, thoughtfully tasting each in turn.
"Test-tube evolution?" Max repeated. "What's that? I thought you people had no doctors."
"It's a story." Pat leaned back again. "Alexander P. Mead, the head of the Mead clan, was a plant geneticist, a very determined personality and no man to argue with. He didn't want us to go through the struggle of killing off all Minos plants and putting in our own, spoiling the face of the planet and upsetting the balance of its ecology. He decided that he would adapt our genes to this planet or kill us trying. He did it all right.'"
"Did which?" asked June, suddenly feeling a sourceless prickle of fear.
"Adapted us to Minos. He took human cells—"
She listened intently, trying to find a reason for fear in the explanation. It would have taken many human generations to adapt to Minos by ordinary evolution, and that only at a heavy toll of death and hunger which evolution exacts. There was a shorter way: Human cells have the ability to return to their primeval condition of independence, hunting, eating and reproducing alone.
Alexander P. Mead took human cells and made them into phagocytes. He put them through the hard savage school of evolution—a thousand generations of multiplication, hardship and hunger, with the alien indigestible food always present, offering its reward of plenty to the cell that reluctantly learned to absorb it.
"Leucocytes can run through several thousand generations of evolution in six months," Pat Mead finished. "When they reached to a point where they would absorb Minos food, he planted them back in the people he had taken them from."
"What was supposed to happen then?" Max asked, leaning forward.
"I don't know exactly how it worked. He never told anybody much about it, and when I was a little boy he had gone loco and was wandering ha-ha-ing around waving a test tube. Fell down a ravine and broke his neck at the age of eighty."
"A character," Max said.
Why was she afraid? "It worked then?"
"Yes. He tried it on all the Meads the first year. The other settlers didn't want to be experimented on until they saw how it worked out. It worked. The Meads could hunt, and plant while the other settlers were still eating out of hydroponics tanks."
"It worked," said Max to Len. "You're a plant geneticist and a tank culture expert. There's a job for you."
"Uh- uh !" Len backed away. "It sounds like a medical problem to me. Human cell control—right up your alley."
"It is a one-way street," Pat warned. "Once it is done, you won't be able to digest ship food. I'll get no good from this protein. I ate it just for the taste."
Hal Barton appeared quietly beside the table. "Three of the twelve test hamsters have died," he reported, and turned to Pat. "Your people carry the germs of melting sickness, as you call it. The dead hamsters were injected with blood taken from you before you were de-infected. We can't settle here unless we de-infect everybody on Minos. Would they object?"
"We wouldn't want to give you folks germs," Pat smiled. "Anything for safety. But there'll have to be a vote on it first."
The doctors went to Reno Ulrich's table and walked with him to the hangar, explaining. He was to carry the proposal to Alexandria, mingle with the people, be persuasive and wait for them to vote before returning. He was to give himself shots of cureall every two hours on the hour or run the risk of disease.
Reno was pleased. He had dabbled in sociology before retraining as a mechanic for the expedition. "This gives me a chance to study their mores." He winked wickedly. "I may not be back for several nights." They watched through the viewplate as he took off, and then went over to the laboratory for a look at the hamsters.
Three were alive and healthy, munching lettuce. One was the control; the other two had been given shots of Pat's blood from before he entered the ship, but with no additional treatment. Apparently a hamster could fight off melting sickness easily if left alone. Three were still feverish and ruffled, with a low red blood count, but recovering. The three dead ones had been given strong shots of adaptive and counter histamine, so their bodies had not fought back against the attack.
June glanced at the dead animals hastily and looked away again. They lay twisted with a strange semi-fluid limpness, as if ready to dissolve. The last hamster, which had been given the heaviest dose of adaptive, had apparently lost all its hair before death. It was hairless and pink, like a still-born baby.
"We can find no micro-organisms," George Barton said. "None at all. Nothing in the body that should not be there. Leucosis and anemia. Fever only for the ones that fought it off." He handed Max some temperature charts and graphs of blood counts.
June wandered out into the hall. Pediatrics and obstetrics were her field; she left the cellular research to Max, and just helped him with laboratory routine. The strange mood followed her out into the hall, then abruptly lightened.
Coming toward her, busily telling a tale of adventure to the gorgeous Shelia Davenport, was a tall, red-headed, magnificently handsome man. It was his handsomeness which made Pat such a pleasure to look upon and talk with, she guiltily told herself, and it was his tremendous vitality.... It was like meeting a movie hero in the flesh, or a hero out of the pages of a book—Deer-slayer, John Clayton, Lord Greystoke.
She waited in the doorway to the laboratory and made no move to join them, merely acknowledged the two with a nod and a smile and a casual lift of the hand. They nodded and smiled back.
"Hello, June," said Pat and continued telling his tale, but as they passed he lightly touched her arm.
"Oh, pioneer!" she said mockingly and softly to his passing profile, and knew that he had heard.
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What is the plot of the story?
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about The Hoofer by Walter M. Miller.
Relevant chunks:
A wayfarer's return from a far country to his wife and family may be a
shining experience, a kind of second honeymoon. Or it may be so shadowed
by Time's relentless tyranny that the changes which have occurred in his
absence can lead only to tragedy and despair. This rarely discerning, warmly
human story by a brilliant newcomer to the science fantasy field is told
with no pulling of punches, and its adroit unfolding will astound you.
the hoofer
by ... Walter M. Miller, Jr.
A space rover has no business with a family. But what can a man
in the full vigor of youth do—if his heart cries out for a home?
They all
knew he was a spacer
because of the white goggle marks
on his sun-scorched face, and so
they tolerated him and helped him.
They even made allowances for him
when he staggered and fell in the
aisle of the bus while pursuing the
harassed little housewife from seat
to seat and cajoling her to sit and
talk with him.
Having fallen, he decided to
sleep in the aisle. Two men helped
him to the back of the bus, dumped
him on the rear seat, and tucked his
gin bottle safely out of sight. After
all, he had not seen Earth for nine
months, and judging by the crusted
matter about his eyelids, he couldn't
have seen it too well now, even if
he had been sober. Glare-blindness,
gravity-legs, and agoraphobia were
excuses for a lot of things, when a
man was just back from Big Bottomless.
And who could blame a
man for acting strangely?
Minutes later, he was back up the
aisle and swaying giddily over the
little housewife. "How!" he said.
"Me Chief Broken Wing. You
wanta Indian wrestle?"
The girl, who sat nervously staring
at him, smiled wanly, and
shook her head.
"Quiet li'l pigeon, aren'tcha?" he
burbled affectionately, crashing into
the seat beside her.
The two men slid out of their
seats, and a hand clamped his shoulder.
"Come on, Broken Wing, let's
go back to bed."
"My name's Hogey," he said.
"Big Hogey Parker. I was just kidding
about being a Indian."
"Yeah. Come on, let's go have a
drink." They got him on his feet,
and led him stumbling back down
the aisle.
"My ma was half Cherokee, see?
That's how come I said it. You
wanta hear a war whoop? Real
stuff."
"Never mind."
He cupped his hands to his
mouth and favored them with a
blood-curdling proof of his ancestry,
while the female passengers
stirred restlessly and hunched in
their seats. The driver stopped the
bus and went back to warn him
against any further display. The
driver flashed a deputy's badge and
threatened to turn him over to a
constable.
"I gotta get home," Big Hogey
told him. "I got me a son now,
that's why. You know? A little
baby pigeon of a son. Haven't seen
him yet."
"Will you just sit still and be
quiet then, eh?"
Big Hogey nodded emphatically.
"Shorry, officer, I didn't mean to
make any trouble."
When the bus started again, he
fell on his side and lay still. He
made retching sounds for a time,
then rested, snoring softly. The bus
driver woke him again at Caine's
junction, retrieved his gin bottle
from behind the seat, and helped
him down the aisle and out of the
bus.
Big Hogey stumbled about for a
moment, then sat down hard in the
gravel at the shoulder of the road.
The driver paused with one foot on
the step, looking around. There was
not even a store at the road junction,
but only a freight building
next to the railroad track, a couple
of farmhouses at the edge of a side-road,
and, just across the way, a deserted
filling station with a sagging
roof. The land was Great Plains
country, treeless, barren, and rolling.
Big Hogey got up and staggered
around in front of the bus, clutching
at it for support, losing his
duffle bag.
"Hey, watch the traffic!" The
driver warned. With a surge of unwelcome
compassion he trotted
around after his troublesome passenger,
taking his arm as he sagged
again. "You crossing?"
"Yah," Hogey muttered. "Lemme
alone, I'm okay."
The driver started across the
highway with him. The traffic was
sparse, but fast and dangerous in
the central ninety-mile lane.
"I'm okay," Hogey kept protesting.
"I'm a tumbler, ya know?
Gravity's got me. Damn gravity.
I'm not used to gravity, ya know? I
used to be a tumbler— huk! —only
now I gotta be a hoofer. 'Count
of li'l Hogey. You know about li'l
Hogey?"
"Yeah. Your son. Come on."
"Say, you gotta son? I bet you
gotta son."
"Two kids," said the driver,
catching Hogey's bag as it slipped
from his shoulder. "Both girls."
"Say, you oughta be home with
them kids. Man oughta stick with
his family. You oughta get another
job." Hogey eyed him owlishly,
waggled a moralistic finger, skidded
on the gravel as they stepped
onto the opposite shoulder, and
sprawled again.
The driver blew a weary breath,
looked down at him, and shook his
head. Maybe it'd be kinder to find
a constable after all. This guy could
get himself killed, wandering
around loose.
"Somebody supposed to meet
you?" he asked, squinting around
at the dusty hills.
" Huk! —who, me?" Hogey giggled,
belched, and shook his head.
"Nope. Nobody knows I'm coming.
S'prise. I'm supposed to be here a
week ago." He looked up at the
driver with a pained expression.
"Week late, ya know? Marie's
gonna be sore—woo- hoo !—is she
gonna be sore!" He waggled his
head severely at the ground.
"Which way are you going?" the
driver grunted impatiently.
Hogey pointed down the side-road
that led back into the hills.
"Marie's pop's place. You know
where? 'Bout three miles from
here. Gotta walk, I guess."
"Don't," the driver warned.
"You sit there by the culvert till
you get a ride. Okay?"
Hogey nodded forlornly.
"Now stay out of the road," the
driver warned, then hurried back
across the highway. Moments later,
the atomic battery-driven motors
droned mournfully, and the bus
pulled away.
Big Hogey blinked after it, rubbing
the back of his neck. "Nice
people," he said. "Nice buncha people.
All hoofers."
With a grunt and a lurch, he got
to his feet, but his legs wouldn't
work right. With his tumbler's reflexes,
he fought to right himself
with frantic arm motions, but gravity
claimed him, and he went stumbling
into the ditch.
"Damn legs, damn crazy legs!"
he cried.
The bottom of the ditch was wet,
and he crawled up the embankment
with mud-soaked knees, and sat on
the shoulder again. The gin bottle
was still intact. He had himself a
long fiery drink, and it warmed him
deep down. He blinked around at
the gaunt and treeless land.
The sun was almost down, forge-red
on a dusty horizon. The blood-streaked
sky faded into sulphurous
yellow toward the zenith, and the
very air that hung over the land
seemed full of yellow smoke, the
omnipresent dust of the plains.
A farm truck turned onto the
side-road and moaned away, its
driver hardly glancing at the dark
young man who sat swaying on his
duffle bag near the culvert. Hogey
scarcely noticed the vehicle. He just
kept staring at the crazy sun.
He shook his head. It wasn't really
the sun. The sun, the real sun,
was a hateful eye-sizzling horror in
the dead black pit. It painted everything
with pure white pain, and you
saw things by the reflected pain-light.
The fat red sun was strictly a
phoney, and it didn't fool him any.
He hated it for what he knew it was
behind the gory mask, and for what
it had done to his eyes.
With a grunt, he got to his feet,
managed to shoulder the duffle bag,
and started off down the middle of
the farm road, lurching from side
to side, and keeping his eyes on the
rolling distances. Another car turned
onto the side-road, honking angrily.
Hogey tried to turn around to
look at it, but he forgot to shift his
footing. He staggered and went
down on the pavement. The car's
tires screeched on the hot asphalt.
Hogey lay there for a moment,
groaning. That one had hurt his
hip. A car door slammed and a big
man with a florid face got out and
stalked toward him, looking angry.
"What the hell's the matter with
you, fella?" he drawled. "You
soused? Man, you've really got a
load."
Hogey got up doggedly, shaking
his head to clear it. "Space legs," he
prevaricated. "Got space legs. Can't
stand the gravity."
The burly farmer retrieved his
gin bottle for him, still miraculously
unbroken. "Here's your gravity,"
he grunted. "Listen, fella, you better
get home pronto."
"Pronto? Hey, I'm no Mex. Honest,
I'm just space burned. You
know?"
"Yeah. Say, who are you, anyway?
Do you live around here?"
It was obvious that the big man
had taken him for a hobo or a
tramp. Hogey pulled himself together.
"Goin' to the Hauptman's
place. Marie. You know Marie?"
The farmer's eyebrows went up.
"Marie Hauptman? Sure I know
her. Only she's Marie Parker now.
Has been, nigh on six years. Say—"
He paused, then gaped. "You ain't
her husband by any chance?"
"Hogey, that's me. Big Hogey
Parker."
"Well, I'll be—! Get in the car.
I'm going right past John Hauptman's
place. Boy, you're in no
shape to walk it."
He grinned wryly, waggled his
head, and helped Hogey and his
bag into the back seat. A woman
with a sun-wrinkled neck sat rigidly
beside the farmer in the front,
and she neither greeted the passenger
nor looked around.
"They don't make cars like this
anymore," the farmer called over
the growl of the ancient gasoline
engine and the grind of gears.
"You can have them new atomics
with their loads of hot isotopes
under the seat. Ain't safe, I say—eh,
Martha?"
The woman with the sun-baked
neck quivered her head slightly.
"A car like this was good enough
for Pa, an' I reckon it's good
enough for us," she drawled mournfully.
Five minutes later the car drew
in to the side of the road. "Reckon
you can walk it from here," the
farmer said. "That's Hauptman's
road just up ahead."
He helped Hogey out of the car
and drove away without looking
back to see if Hogey stayed on his
feet. The woman with the sun-baked
neck was suddenly talking
garrulously in his direction.
It was twilight. The sun had set,
and the yellow sky was turning
gray. Hogey was too tired to go on,
and his legs would no longer hold
him. He blinked around at the land,
got his eyes focused, and found
what looked like Hauptman's place
on a distant hillside. It was a big
frame house surrounded by a wheatfield,
and a few scrawny trees. Having
located it, he stretched out in
the tall grass beyond the ditch to
take a little rest.
Somewhere dogs were barking,
and a cricket sang creaking monotony
in the grass. Once there was the
distant thunder of a rocket blast
from the launching station six miles
to the west, but it faded quickly. An
A-motored convertible whined past
on the road, but Hogey went unseen.
When he awoke, it was night,
and he was shivering. His stomach
was screeching, and his nerves dancing
with high voltages. He sat up
and groped for his watch, then remembered
he had pawned it after
the poker game. Remembering the
game and the results of the game
made him wince and bite his lip
and grope for the bottle again.
He sat breathing heavily for a
moment after the stiff drink. Equating
time to position had become
second nature with him, but he had
to think for a moment because his
defective vision prevented him from
seeing the Earth-crescent.
Vega was almost straight above
him in the late August sky, so he
knew it wasn't much after sundown—probably
about eight o'clock. He
braced himself with another swallow
of gin, picked himself up and
got back to the road, feeling a little
sobered after the nap.
He limped on up the pavement
and turned left at the narrow drive
that led between barbed-wire fences
toward the Hauptman farmhouse,
five hundred yards or so from the
farm road. The fields on his left
belonged to Marie's father, he
knew. He was getting close—close
to home and woman and child.
He dropped the bag suddenly
and leaned against a fence post,
rolling his head on his forearms
and choking in spasms of air. He
was shaking all over, and his belly
writhed. He wanted to turn and
run. He wanted to crawl out in the
grass and hide.
What were they going to say?
And Marie, Marie most of all.
How was he going to tell her about
the money?
Six hitches in space, and every
time the promise had been the
same: One more tour, baby, and
we'll have enough dough, and then
I'll quit for good. One more time,
and we'll have our stake—enough
to open a little business, or buy a
house with a mortgage and get a
job.
And she had waited, but the
money had never been quite enough
until this time. This time the tour
had lasted nine months, and he had
signed on for every run from station
to moon-base to pick up the
bonuses. And this time he'd made
it. Two weeks ago, there had been
forty-eight hundred in the bank.
And now ...
" Why? " he groaned, striking his
forehead against his forearms. His
arm slipped, and his head hit the
top of the fencepost, and the pain
blinded him for a moment. He staggered
back into the road with a
low roar, wiped blood from his
forehead, and savagely kicked his
bag.
It rolled a couple of yards up the
road. He leaped after it and kicked
it again. When he had finished
with it, he stood panting and angry,
but feeling better. He shouldered
the bag and hiked on toward the
farmhouse.
They're hoofers, that's all—just
an Earth-chained bunch of hoofers,
even Marie. And I'm a tumbler. A
born tumbler. Know what that
means? It means—God, what does
it mean? It means out in Big Bottomless,
where Earth's like a fat
moon with fuzzy mold growing on
it. Mold, that's all you are, just
mold.
A dog barked, and he wondered
if he had been muttering aloud. He
came to a fence-gap and paused in
the darkness. The road wound
around and came up the hill in
front of the house. Maybe they were
sitting on the porch. Maybe they'd
already heard him coming. Maybe ...
He was trembling again. He
fished the fifth of gin out of his
coat pocket and sloshed it. Still over
half a pint. He decided to kill it. It
wouldn't do to go home with a
bottle sticking out of his pocket.
He stood there in the night wind,
sipping at it, and watching the reddish
moon come up in the east. The
moon looked as phoney as the
setting sun.
He straightened in sudden determination.
It had to be sometime.
Get it over with, get it over with
now. He opened the fence-gap, slipped
through, and closed it firmly
behind him. He retrieved his bag,
and waded quietly through the tall
grass until he reached the hedge
which divided an area of sickly
peach trees from the field. He got
over the hedge somehow, and started
through the trees toward the
house. He stumbled over some old
boards, and they clattered.
" Shhh! " he hissed, and moved
on.
The dogs were barking angrily,
and he heard a screen door slam.
He stopped.
"Ho there!" a male voice called
experimentally from the house.
One of Marie's brothers. Hogey
stood frozen in the shadow of a
peach tree, waiting.
"Anybody out there?" the man
called again.
Hogey waited, then heard the
man muttering, "Sic 'im, boy, sic
'im."
The hound's bark became eager.
The animal came chasing down the
slope, and stopped ten feet away to
crouch and bark frantically at the
shadow in the gloom. He knew the
dog.
"Hooky!" he whispered. "Hooky
boy—here!"
The dog stopped barking, sniffed,
trotted closer, and went
" Rrrooff! " Then he started sniffing
suspiciously again.
"Easy, Hooky, here boy!" he
whispered.
The dog came forward silently,
sniffed his hand, and whined in
recognition. Then he trotted around
Hogey, panting doggy affection and
dancing an invitation to romp. The
man whistled from the porch. The
dog froze, then trotted quickly back
up the slope.
"Nothing, eh, Hooky?" the
man on the porch said. "Chasin'
armadillos again, eh?"
The screen door slammed again,
and the porch light went out.
Hogey stood there staring, unable
to think. Somewhere beyond the
window lights were—his woman,
his son.
What the hell was a tumbler doing
with a woman and a son?
After perhaps a minute, he stepped
forward again. He tripped over
a shovel, and his foot plunged into
something that went squelch and
swallowed the foot past the ankle.
He fell forward into a heap of
sand, and his foot went deeper into
the sloppy wetness.
He lay there with his stinging
forehead on his arms, cursing softly
and crying. Finally he rolled
over, pulled his foot out of the
mess, and took off his shoes. They
were full of mud—sticky sandy
mud.
The dark world was reeling
about him, and the wind was dragging
at his breath. He fell back
against the sand pile and let his
feet sink in the mud hole and wriggled
his toes. He was laughing
soundlessly, and his face was wet
in the wind. He couldn't think. He
couldn't remember where he was
and why, and he stopped caring,
and after a while he felt better.
The stars were swimming over
him, dancing crazily, and the mud
cooled his feet, and the sand was
soft behind him. He saw a rocket
go up on a tail of flame from the
station, and waited for the sound of
its blast, but he was already asleep
when it came.
It was far past midnight when he
became conscious of the dog licking
wetly at his ear and cheek. He
pushed the animal away with a low
curse and mopped at the side of his
face. He stirred, and groaned. His
feet were burning up! He tried to
pull them toward him, but they
wouldn't budge. There was something
wrong with his legs.
For an instant he stared wildly
around in the night. Then he remembered
where he was, closed his
eyes and shuddered. When he
opened them again, the moon had
emerged from behind a cloud, and
he could see clearly the cruel trap
into which he had accidentally
stumbled. A pile of old boards, a
careful stack of new lumber, a
pick and shovel, a sand-pile, heaps
of fresh-turned earth, and a concrete
mixer—well, it added up.
He gripped his ankles and pulled,
but his feet wouldn't budge. In
sudden terror, he tried to stand up,
but his ankles were clutched by the
concrete too, and he fell back in
the sand with a low moan. He lay
still for several minutes, considering
carefully.
He pulled at his left foot. It was
locked in a vise. He tugged even
more desperately at his right foot.
It was equally immovable.
He sat up with a whimper and
clawed at the rough concrete until
his nails tore and his fingertips
bled. The surface still felt damp,
but it had hardened while he slept.
He sat there stunned until Hooky
began licking at his scuffed fingers.
He shouldered the dog away, and
dug his hands into the sand-pile to
stop the bleeding. Hooky licked at
his face, panting love.
"Get away!" he croaked savagely.
The dog whined softly, trotted
a short distance away, circled, and
came back to crouch down in the
sand directly before Hogey, inching
forward experimentally.
Hogey gripped fistfuls of the dry
sand and cursed between his teeth,
while his eyes wandered over the
sky. They came to rest on the sliver
of light—the space station—rising
in the west, floating out in Big Bottomless
where the gang was—Nichols
and Guerrera and Lavrenti
and Fats. And he wasn't forgetting
Keesey, the rookie who'd replaced
him.
Keesey would have a rough time
for a while—rough as a cob. The pit
was no playground. The first time
you went out of the station in a
suit, the pit got you. Everything
was falling, and you fell, with it.
Everything. The skeletons of steel,
the tire-shaped station, the spheres
and docks and nightmare shapes—all
tied together by umbilical cables
and flexible tubes. Like some crazy
sea-thing they seemed, floating in a
black ocean with its tentacles bound
together by drifting strands in the
dark tide that bore it.
Everything was pain-bright or
dead black, and it wheeled around
you, and you went nuts trying to
figure which way was down. In fact,
it took you months to teach your
body that all ways were down and
that the pit was bottomless.
He became conscious of a plaintive
sound in the wind, and froze to
listen.
It was a baby crying.
It was nearly a minute before he
got the significance of it. It hit him
where he lived, and he began jerking
frantically at his encased feet
and sobbing low in his throat.
They'd hear him if he kept that up.
He stopped and covered his ears to
close out the cry of his firstborn. A
light went on in the house, and
when it went off again, the infant's
cry had ceased.
Another rocket went up from the
station, and he cursed it. Space was
a disease, and he had it.
"Help!" he cried out suddenly.
"I'm stuck! Help me, help me!"
He knew he was yelling hysterically
at the sky and fighting the relentless
concrete that clutched his
feet, and after a moment he stopped.
The light was on in the house
again, and he heard faint sounds.
The stirring-about woke the baby
again, and once more the infant's
wail came on the breeze.
Make the kid shut up, make the
kid shut up ...
But that was no good. It wasn't
the kid's fault. It wasn't Marie's
fault. No fathers allowed in space,
they said, but it wasn't their fault
either. They were right, and he had
only himself to blame. The kid was
an accident, but that didn't change
anything. Not a thing in the world.
It remained a tragedy.
A tumbler had no business with a
family, but what was a man going
to do? Take a skinning knife, boy,
and make yourself a eunuch. But
that was no good either. They needed
bulls out there in the pit, not
steers. And when a man came down
from a year's hitch, what was he
going to do? Live in a lonely shack
and read books for kicks? Because
you were a man, you sought out a
woman. And because she was a
woman, she got a kid, and that was
the end of it. It was nobody's fault,
nobody's at all.
He stared at the red eye of Mars
low in the southwest. They were
running out there now, and next
year he would have been on the
long long run ...
But there was no use thinking
about it. Next year and the years
after belonged to little Hogey.
He sat there with his feet locked
in the solid concrete of the footing,
staring out into Big Bottomless
while his son's cry came from the
house and the Hauptman menfolk
came wading through the tall grass
in search of someone who had cried
out. His feet were stuck tight, and
he wouldn't ever get them out. He
was sobbing softly when they found
him.
Question:
What is the plot of the story?
Answer:
|
[
"This story follows the protagonist, Hogey Parker’s, journey in heading back home after a long stint in space. His identity leans heavily on being a spacer - or a tumbler - with distinguishing sunburned marks and glare-blinded eyes. Parker is accompanied by a bottle of gin, and with it, stumbles onto a bus. In his drunken ramblings and stumblings - attributed by himself to him being a spaceman - Hogey creates a ruckus on the bus and disturbs its passengers. Fellow passengers give him allowances as he’s a spaceman and help him out. \n\nThroughout his journey, he is helped by various characters who further progress his journey back home. After being dropped off, the bus driver helps him across the road, where he is later then picked up by a farmer who drops Hogey off even closer to his farmhouse. In between, Hogey constantly looks up at the Big Bottomless space and thinks about his time in space with particular feelings of resentment and anger - one towards the sun for blinding him and another towards the rookie that replaced him. After finally making it close to his farmhouse, he sneaks through the grass past the fence and encounters the dog, who he quickly shushes when one of his wife’s brothers comes out to investigate the noise. Staring at his wife and son through the house, he stumbles into wet concrete and quickly becomes stuck in the sand as it dries. Despite his best efforts he is unable to claw himself out. At the end of the story, his cries at being stuck in the concrete echo at the same time the cries of his son as the Hauptmann men find him, stuck. \n",
"Big Hogey Parker, a tumbler who comes back to Earth from his nine-month stay in the space, can hardly behave appropriately on the bus because of his unaccustomedness to the gravity and the drunkenness. He harasses and annoys the passengers on the bus, gets warned by the driver, and sleeps on the rear seat of the bus. After the bus stop at Caine’s junction, the bus driver helps him get out of the bus and safely cross the road. While crossing the road, Hogey talks about the importance of family and learns that the driver has two daughters. After crossing the road, the driver asks whether someone will come and pick Hogey up, but Hogey tells him that he is a week late and nobody will come. The driver tells him to wait for a car and leaves. Hogey stares at the sun while waiting, feeling unfamiliar with the gravity.\n\nHogey starts to lurch in the middle of the road. A car almost hits him when he fails to control his balance. A man comes out of the car and shouts at him. The man realizes that Hogey is Marie’s husband through the conversation, so he drives Hogey to a place near Marie’s house. Hogey takes a nap in the grass near the ditch until the night. He swallows a few gins, checks the time with the star's position in the sky as he pawns his watch in the poker game that he lost all of the money, and walks toward the house. He is afraid of facing his wife and son as he lost all the money in a poker game two weeks ago after his wife had waited for him for so long to do all the space travel to earn money. He wants to run away. He walks through the fence, trampling through some boards when the dog barks. He hides in the shadow of the peach tree when Marie’s brother comes out to check. The dog comes at him, and Hogey calms the dog, waiting until the man goes inside the house. When Hogey keeps walking, he steps into a concrete mixer with sand and falls. He takes off his shoes and puts his bare feet back in the muddy sand. Laying on the sand, Hogey falls asleep. Past midnight, he gets awakened by the dog's licking, finding his feet stuck in the concrete. Reflecting on his time in the space and the people there, Hogey feels desperate. Suddenly, he hears his son cry. The cry brings Hogey’s consciousness back from the space to where he is, and the significance of his family strikes him. He calls out loud for help and sobs with his feet stuck tight. He will live on Earth with gravity from now on.\n",
"The story focuses on a man named Hogey. Hogey is trying to return to his wife and child, but seems to find it very difficult because he has been drinking, and because his body needs to adapt to being back on Earth. The story begins in a bus, where Hogey is very drunk and is trying to talk to other passengers. The other passengers help Hogey sleep, but he wakes up again and continues speaking with others. When the bus reaches his stop, Hogey clumsily gets off the bus. When the driver sees that Hogey needs help, he helps Hogey sit down in the street and tells him to wait for a ride instead of walking to his wife’s house. Hogey waits for a while, then decides to walk. He falls in a ditch, but he is helped by a couple who passes in a car. The man tells him that his wife remarried and that he is going to the new husband’s house. After the man drops him off, Hogey falls asleep close to the house. He sleeps for a while and afterwards he tries to go into the house, but he struggles mentally to accept what he is doing. He ends up falling in cement, and his feet get stuck. We learn that Hogey worked in space a lot, and that he was afraid to go back to earth because of the amount of time that he had been away. \n\n",
"Everybody immediately knows that Big Hogey Parker is a spacer and goes out of their way to help him even if he is harassing a housewife. He reveals that he was kidding about being an Indian, and there are two men who lead him back to his seat. When the driver threatens to turn him over, Big Hogey apologizes and sits in his seat until it is time to leave, and the driver asks if he is okay once he staggers to cross the highway. The man asks if somebody is supposed to meet Big Hogey, but he says that it is a surprise for everybody. He is redirected to sit at the culvert, but gravity makes it difficult for him to walk. As the sun sets, Hogey stares at it because he hates it for what it truly is and what it did to his eyes. A burly farmer angrily confronts him when he stumbles down the road again, but he reveals that he is married to Marie Hauptman. They offer to drop him off at the area near Hauptman's road, and Hogey finds himself too tired to go on because it is twilight. When he awakes again, it is night time. He takes another sip of his gin and decides how the meeting will go. Hogey is worried about the money, especially since he has gone on six hitches in space with the promise that each one would be his last one. As he goes near the house, a dog suddenly comes out and barks. One of Marie’s brothers comes out to investigate the situation too, but he finds nothing and returns home with the dog. He tries to think about why a tumbler like him would be married with a son, and he finds both his feet losing the strength to move. The dog, Hooky, comes up to greet him again, but he angrily sends it away. Hogey thinks back to his crew, and a baby begins to cry suddenly. He yells for help, and the lights come on again because the baby begins to cry more. The kid had been an accident, and he knows that a tumblr has no business with a family. However, there is nobody to blame for this. Big Hogey sits with his foot locked in the solid concrete and sobs when the rest of the men find him. "
] |
29170
|
A wayfarer's return from a far country to his wife and family may be a
shining experience, a kind of second honeymoon. Or it may be so shadowed
by Time's relentless tyranny that the changes which have occurred in his
absence can lead only to tragedy and despair. This rarely discerning, warmly
human story by a brilliant newcomer to the science fantasy field is told
with no pulling of punches, and its adroit unfolding will astound you.
the hoofer
by ... Walter M. Miller, Jr.
A space rover has no business with a family. But what can a man
in the full vigor of youth do—if his heart cries out for a home?
They all
knew he was a spacer
because of the white goggle marks
on his sun-scorched face, and so
they tolerated him and helped him.
They even made allowances for him
when he staggered and fell in the
aisle of the bus while pursuing the
harassed little housewife from seat
to seat and cajoling her to sit and
talk with him.
Having fallen, he decided to
sleep in the aisle. Two men helped
him to the back of the bus, dumped
him on the rear seat, and tucked his
gin bottle safely out of sight. After
all, he had not seen Earth for nine
months, and judging by the crusted
matter about his eyelids, he couldn't
have seen it too well now, even if
he had been sober. Glare-blindness,
gravity-legs, and agoraphobia were
excuses for a lot of things, when a
man was just back from Big Bottomless.
And who could blame a
man for acting strangely?
Minutes later, he was back up the
aisle and swaying giddily over the
little housewife. "How!" he said.
"Me Chief Broken Wing. You
wanta Indian wrestle?"
The girl, who sat nervously staring
at him, smiled wanly, and
shook her head.
"Quiet li'l pigeon, aren'tcha?" he
burbled affectionately, crashing into
the seat beside her.
The two men slid out of their
seats, and a hand clamped his shoulder.
"Come on, Broken Wing, let's
go back to bed."
"My name's Hogey," he said.
"Big Hogey Parker. I was just kidding
about being a Indian."
"Yeah. Come on, let's go have a
drink." They got him on his feet,
and led him stumbling back down
the aisle.
"My ma was half Cherokee, see?
That's how come I said it. You
wanta hear a war whoop? Real
stuff."
"Never mind."
He cupped his hands to his
mouth and favored them with a
blood-curdling proof of his ancestry,
while the female passengers
stirred restlessly and hunched in
their seats. The driver stopped the
bus and went back to warn him
against any further display. The
driver flashed a deputy's badge and
threatened to turn him over to a
constable.
"I gotta get home," Big Hogey
told him. "I got me a son now,
that's why. You know? A little
baby pigeon of a son. Haven't seen
him yet."
"Will you just sit still and be
quiet then, eh?"
Big Hogey nodded emphatically.
"Shorry, officer, I didn't mean to
make any trouble."
When the bus started again, he
fell on his side and lay still. He
made retching sounds for a time,
then rested, snoring softly. The bus
driver woke him again at Caine's
junction, retrieved his gin bottle
from behind the seat, and helped
him down the aisle and out of the
bus.
Big Hogey stumbled about for a
moment, then sat down hard in the
gravel at the shoulder of the road.
The driver paused with one foot on
the step, looking around. There was
not even a store at the road junction,
but only a freight building
next to the railroad track, a couple
of farmhouses at the edge of a side-road,
and, just across the way, a deserted
filling station with a sagging
roof. The land was Great Plains
country, treeless, barren, and rolling.
Big Hogey got up and staggered
around in front of the bus, clutching
at it for support, losing his
duffle bag.
"Hey, watch the traffic!" The
driver warned. With a surge of unwelcome
compassion he trotted
around after his troublesome passenger,
taking his arm as he sagged
again. "You crossing?"
"Yah," Hogey muttered. "Lemme
alone, I'm okay."
The driver started across the
highway with him. The traffic was
sparse, but fast and dangerous in
the central ninety-mile lane.
"I'm okay," Hogey kept protesting.
"I'm a tumbler, ya know?
Gravity's got me. Damn gravity.
I'm not used to gravity, ya know? I
used to be a tumbler— huk! —only
now I gotta be a hoofer. 'Count
of li'l Hogey. You know about li'l
Hogey?"
"Yeah. Your son. Come on."
"Say, you gotta son? I bet you
gotta son."
"Two kids," said the driver,
catching Hogey's bag as it slipped
from his shoulder. "Both girls."
"Say, you oughta be home with
them kids. Man oughta stick with
his family. You oughta get another
job." Hogey eyed him owlishly,
waggled a moralistic finger, skidded
on the gravel as they stepped
onto the opposite shoulder, and
sprawled again.
The driver blew a weary breath,
looked down at him, and shook his
head. Maybe it'd be kinder to find
a constable after all. This guy could
get himself killed, wandering
around loose.
"Somebody supposed to meet
you?" he asked, squinting around
at the dusty hills.
" Huk! —who, me?" Hogey giggled,
belched, and shook his head.
"Nope. Nobody knows I'm coming.
S'prise. I'm supposed to be here a
week ago." He looked up at the
driver with a pained expression.
"Week late, ya know? Marie's
gonna be sore—woo- hoo !—is she
gonna be sore!" He waggled his
head severely at the ground.
"Which way are you going?" the
driver grunted impatiently.
Hogey pointed down the side-road
that led back into the hills.
"Marie's pop's place. You know
where? 'Bout three miles from
here. Gotta walk, I guess."
"Don't," the driver warned.
"You sit there by the culvert till
you get a ride. Okay?"
Hogey nodded forlornly.
"Now stay out of the road," the
driver warned, then hurried back
across the highway. Moments later,
the atomic battery-driven motors
droned mournfully, and the bus
pulled away.
Big Hogey blinked after it, rubbing
the back of his neck. "Nice
people," he said. "Nice buncha people.
All hoofers."
With a grunt and a lurch, he got
to his feet, but his legs wouldn't
work right. With his tumbler's reflexes,
he fought to right himself
with frantic arm motions, but gravity
claimed him, and he went stumbling
into the ditch.
"Damn legs, damn crazy legs!"
he cried.
The bottom of the ditch was wet,
and he crawled up the embankment
with mud-soaked knees, and sat on
the shoulder again. The gin bottle
was still intact. He had himself a
long fiery drink, and it warmed him
deep down. He blinked around at
the gaunt and treeless land.
The sun was almost down, forge-red
on a dusty horizon. The blood-streaked
sky faded into sulphurous
yellow toward the zenith, and the
very air that hung over the land
seemed full of yellow smoke, the
omnipresent dust of the plains.
A farm truck turned onto the
side-road and moaned away, its
driver hardly glancing at the dark
young man who sat swaying on his
duffle bag near the culvert. Hogey
scarcely noticed the vehicle. He just
kept staring at the crazy sun.
He shook his head. It wasn't really
the sun. The sun, the real sun,
was a hateful eye-sizzling horror in
the dead black pit. It painted everything
with pure white pain, and you
saw things by the reflected pain-light.
The fat red sun was strictly a
phoney, and it didn't fool him any.
He hated it for what he knew it was
behind the gory mask, and for what
it had done to his eyes.
With a grunt, he got to his feet,
managed to shoulder the duffle bag,
and started off down the middle of
the farm road, lurching from side
to side, and keeping his eyes on the
rolling distances. Another car turned
onto the side-road, honking angrily.
Hogey tried to turn around to
look at it, but he forgot to shift his
footing. He staggered and went
down on the pavement. The car's
tires screeched on the hot asphalt.
Hogey lay there for a moment,
groaning. That one had hurt his
hip. A car door slammed and a big
man with a florid face got out and
stalked toward him, looking angry.
"What the hell's the matter with
you, fella?" he drawled. "You
soused? Man, you've really got a
load."
Hogey got up doggedly, shaking
his head to clear it. "Space legs," he
prevaricated. "Got space legs. Can't
stand the gravity."
The burly farmer retrieved his
gin bottle for him, still miraculously
unbroken. "Here's your gravity,"
he grunted. "Listen, fella, you better
get home pronto."
"Pronto? Hey, I'm no Mex. Honest,
I'm just space burned. You
know?"
"Yeah. Say, who are you, anyway?
Do you live around here?"
It was obvious that the big man
had taken him for a hobo or a
tramp. Hogey pulled himself together.
"Goin' to the Hauptman's
place. Marie. You know Marie?"
The farmer's eyebrows went up.
"Marie Hauptman? Sure I know
her. Only she's Marie Parker now.
Has been, nigh on six years. Say—"
He paused, then gaped. "You ain't
her husband by any chance?"
"Hogey, that's me. Big Hogey
Parker."
"Well, I'll be—! Get in the car.
I'm going right past John Hauptman's
place. Boy, you're in no
shape to walk it."
He grinned wryly, waggled his
head, and helped Hogey and his
bag into the back seat. A woman
with a sun-wrinkled neck sat rigidly
beside the farmer in the front,
and she neither greeted the passenger
nor looked around.
"They don't make cars like this
anymore," the farmer called over
the growl of the ancient gasoline
engine and the grind of gears.
"You can have them new atomics
with their loads of hot isotopes
under the seat. Ain't safe, I say—eh,
Martha?"
The woman with the sun-baked
neck quivered her head slightly.
"A car like this was good enough
for Pa, an' I reckon it's good
enough for us," she drawled mournfully.
Five minutes later the car drew
in to the side of the road. "Reckon
you can walk it from here," the
farmer said. "That's Hauptman's
road just up ahead."
He helped Hogey out of the car
and drove away without looking
back to see if Hogey stayed on his
feet. The woman with the sun-baked
neck was suddenly talking
garrulously in his direction.
It was twilight. The sun had set,
and the yellow sky was turning
gray. Hogey was too tired to go on,
and his legs would no longer hold
him. He blinked around at the land,
got his eyes focused, and found
what looked like Hauptman's place
on a distant hillside. It was a big
frame house surrounded by a wheatfield,
and a few scrawny trees. Having
located it, he stretched out in
the tall grass beyond the ditch to
take a little rest.
Somewhere dogs were barking,
and a cricket sang creaking monotony
in the grass. Once there was the
distant thunder of a rocket blast
from the launching station six miles
to the west, but it faded quickly. An
A-motored convertible whined past
on the road, but Hogey went unseen.
When he awoke, it was night,
and he was shivering. His stomach
was screeching, and his nerves dancing
with high voltages. He sat up
and groped for his watch, then remembered
he had pawned it after
the poker game. Remembering the
game and the results of the game
made him wince and bite his lip
and grope for the bottle again.
He sat breathing heavily for a
moment after the stiff drink. Equating
time to position had become
second nature with him, but he had
to think for a moment because his
defective vision prevented him from
seeing the Earth-crescent.
Vega was almost straight above
him in the late August sky, so he
knew it wasn't much after sundown—probably
about eight o'clock. He
braced himself with another swallow
of gin, picked himself up and
got back to the road, feeling a little
sobered after the nap.
He limped on up the pavement
and turned left at the narrow drive
that led between barbed-wire fences
toward the Hauptman farmhouse,
five hundred yards or so from the
farm road. The fields on his left
belonged to Marie's father, he
knew. He was getting close—close
to home and woman and child.
He dropped the bag suddenly
and leaned against a fence post,
rolling his head on his forearms
and choking in spasms of air. He
was shaking all over, and his belly
writhed. He wanted to turn and
run. He wanted to crawl out in the
grass and hide.
What were they going to say?
And Marie, Marie most of all.
How was he going to tell her about
the money?
Six hitches in space, and every
time the promise had been the
same: One more tour, baby, and
we'll have enough dough, and then
I'll quit for good. One more time,
and we'll have our stake—enough
to open a little business, or buy a
house with a mortgage and get a
job.
And she had waited, but the
money had never been quite enough
until this time. This time the tour
had lasted nine months, and he had
signed on for every run from station
to moon-base to pick up the
bonuses. And this time he'd made
it. Two weeks ago, there had been
forty-eight hundred in the bank.
And now ...
" Why? " he groaned, striking his
forehead against his forearms. His
arm slipped, and his head hit the
top of the fencepost, and the pain
blinded him for a moment. He staggered
back into the road with a
low roar, wiped blood from his
forehead, and savagely kicked his
bag.
It rolled a couple of yards up the
road. He leaped after it and kicked
it again. When he had finished
with it, he stood panting and angry,
but feeling better. He shouldered
the bag and hiked on toward the
farmhouse.
They're hoofers, that's all—just
an Earth-chained bunch of hoofers,
even Marie. And I'm a tumbler. A
born tumbler. Know what that
means? It means—God, what does
it mean? It means out in Big Bottomless,
where Earth's like a fat
moon with fuzzy mold growing on
it. Mold, that's all you are, just
mold.
A dog barked, and he wondered
if he had been muttering aloud. He
came to a fence-gap and paused in
the darkness. The road wound
around and came up the hill in
front of the house. Maybe they were
sitting on the porch. Maybe they'd
already heard him coming. Maybe ...
He was trembling again. He
fished the fifth of gin out of his
coat pocket and sloshed it. Still over
half a pint. He decided to kill it. It
wouldn't do to go home with a
bottle sticking out of his pocket.
He stood there in the night wind,
sipping at it, and watching the reddish
moon come up in the east. The
moon looked as phoney as the
setting sun.
He straightened in sudden determination.
It had to be sometime.
Get it over with, get it over with
now. He opened the fence-gap, slipped
through, and closed it firmly
behind him. He retrieved his bag,
and waded quietly through the tall
grass until he reached the hedge
which divided an area of sickly
peach trees from the field. He got
over the hedge somehow, and started
through the trees toward the
house. He stumbled over some old
boards, and they clattered.
" Shhh! " he hissed, and moved
on.
The dogs were barking angrily,
and he heard a screen door slam.
He stopped.
"Ho there!" a male voice called
experimentally from the house.
One of Marie's brothers. Hogey
stood frozen in the shadow of a
peach tree, waiting.
"Anybody out there?" the man
called again.
Hogey waited, then heard the
man muttering, "Sic 'im, boy, sic
'im."
The hound's bark became eager.
The animal came chasing down the
slope, and stopped ten feet away to
crouch and bark frantically at the
shadow in the gloom. He knew the
dog.
"Hooky!" he whispered. "Hooky
boy—here!"
The dog stopped barking, sniffed,
trotted closer, and went
" Rrrooff! " Then he started sniffing
suspiciously again.
"Easy, Hooky, here boy!" he
whispered.
The dog came forward silently,
sniffed his hand, and whined in
recognition. Then he trotted around
Hogey, panting doggy affection and
dancing an invitation to romp. The
man whistled from the porch. The
dog froze, then trotted quickly back
up the slope.
"Nothing, eh, Hooky?" the
man on the porch said. "Chasin'
armadillos again, eh?"
The screen door slammed again,
and the porch light went out.
Hogey stood there staring, unable
to think. Somewhere beyond the
window lights were—his woman,
his son.
What the hell was a tumbler doing
with a woman and a son?
After perhaps a minute, he stepped
forward again. He tripped over
a shovel, and his foot plunged into
something that went squelch and
swallowed the foot past the ankle.
He fell forward into a heap of
sand, and his foot went deeper into
the sloppy wetness.
He lay there with his stinging
forehead on his arms, cursing softly
and crying. Finally he rolled
over, pulled his foot out of the
mess, and took off his shoes. They
were full of mud—sticky sandy
mud.
The dark world was reeling
about him, and the wind was dragging
at his breath. He fell back
against the sand pile and let his
feet sink in the mud hole and wriggled
his toes. He was laughing
soundlessly, and his face was wet
in the wind. He couldn't think. He
couldn't remember where he was
and why, and he stopped caring,
and after a while he felt better.
The stars were swimming over
him, dancing crazily, and the mud
cooled his feet, and the sand was
soft behind him. He saw a rocket
go up on a tail of flame from the
station, and waited for the sound of
its blast, but he was already asleep
when it came.
It was far past midnight when he
became conscious of the dog licking
wetly at his ear and cheek. He
pushed the animal away with a low
curse and mopped at the side of his
face. He stirred, and groaned. His
feet were burning up! He tried to
pull them toward him, but they
wouldn't budge. There was something
wrong with his legs.
For an instant he stared wildly
around in the night. Then he remembered
where he was, closed his
eyes and shuddered. When he
opened them again, the moon had
emerged from behind a cloud, and
he could see clearly the cruel trap
into which he had accidentally
stumbled. A pile of old boards, a
careful stack of new lumber, a
pick and shovel, a sand-pile, heaps
of fresh-turned earth, and a concrete
mixer—well, it added up.
He gripped his ankles and pulled,
but his feet wouldn't budge. In
sudden terror, he tried to stand up,
but his ankles were clutched by the
concrete too, and he fell back in
the sand with a low moan. He lay
still for several minutes, considering
carefully.
He pulled at his left foot. It was
locked in a vise. He tugged even
more desperately at his right foot.
It was equally immovable.
He sat up with a whimper and
clawed at the rough concrete until
his nails tore and his fingertips
bled. The surface still felt damp,
but it had hardened while he slept.
He sat there stunned until Hooky
began licking at his scuffed fingers.
He shouldered the dog away, and
dug his hands into the sand-pile to
stop the bleeding. Hooky licked at
his face, panting love.
"Get away!" he croaked savagely.
The dog whined softly, trotted
a short distance away, circled, and
came back to crouch down in the
sand directly before Hogey, inching
forward experimentally.
Hogey gripped fistfuls of the dry
sand and cursed between his teeth,
while his eyes wandered over the
sky. They came to rest on the sliver
of light—the space station—rising
in the west, floating out in Big Bottomless
where the gang was—Nichols
and Guerrera and Lavrenti
and Fats. And he wasn't forgetting
Keesey, the rookie who'd replaced
him.
Keesey would have a rough time
for a while—rough as a cob. The pit
was no playground. The first time
you went out of the station in a
suit, the pit got you. Everything
was falling, and you fell, with it.
Everything. The skeletons of steel,
the tire-shaped station, the spheres
and docks and nightmare shapes—all
tied together by umbilical cables
and flexible tubes. Like some crazy
sea-thing they seemed, floating in a
black ocean with its tentacles bound
together by drifting strands in the
dark tide that bore it.
Everything was pain-bright or
dead black, and it wheeled around
you, and you went nuts trying to
figure which way was down. In fact,
it took you months to teach your
body that all ways were down and
that the pit was bottomless.
He became conscious of a plaintive
sound in the wind, and froze to
listen.
It was a baby crying.
It was nearly a minute before he
got the significance of it. It hit him
where he lived, and he began jerking
frantically at his encased feet
and sobbing low in his throat.
They'd hear him if he kept that up.
He stopped and covered his ears to
close out the cry of his firstborn. A
light went on in the house, and
when it went off again, the infant's
cry had ceased.
Another rocket went up from the
station, and he cursed it. Space was
a disease, and he had it.
"Help!" he cried out suddenly.
"I'm stuck! Help me, help me!"
He knew he was yelling hysterically
at the sky and fighting the relentless
concrete that clutched his
feet, and after a moment he stopped.
The light was on in the house
again, and he heard faint sounds.
The stirring-about woke the baby
again, and once more the infant's
wail came on the breeze.
Make the kid shut up, make the
kid shut up ...
But that was no good. It wasn't
the kid's fault. It wasn't Marie's
fault. No fathers allowed in space,
they said, but it wasn't their fault
either. They were right, and he had
only himself to blame. The kid was
an accident, but that didn't change
anything. Not a thing in the world.
It remained a tragedy.
A tumbler had no business with a
family, but what was a man going
to do? Take a skinning knife, boy,
and make yourself a eunuch. But
that was no good either. They needed
bulls out there in the pit, not
steers. And when a man came down
from a year's hitch, what was he
going to do? Live in a lonely shack
and read books for kicks? Because
you were a man, you sought out a
woman. And because she was a
woman, she got a kid, and that was
the end of it. It was nobody's fault,
nobody's at all.
He stared at the red eye of Mars
low in the southwest. They were
running out there now, and next
year he would have been on the
long long run ...
But there was no use thinking
about it. Next year and the years
after belonged to little Hogey.
He sat there with his feet locked
in the solid concrete of the footing,
staring out into Big Bottomless
while his son's cry came from the
house and the Hauptman menfolk
came wading through the tall grass
in search of someone who had cried
out. His feet were stuck tight, and
he wouldn't ever get them out. He
was sobbing softly when they found
him.
|
What is the relationship between Michael and Mr. Carpenter?
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about Tea Tray in the Sky by Evelyn E. Smith.
Relevant chunks:
Tea Tray in the Sky
By EVELYN E. SMITH
Illustrated by ASHMAN
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Visiting a society is tougher than being born into it. A 40 credit tour is no substitute!
The picture changed on the illuminated panel that filled the forward end of the shelf on which Michael lay. A haggard blonde woman sprawled apathetically in a chair.
"Rundown, nervous, hypertensive?" inquired a mellifluous voice. "In need of mental therapy? Buy Grugis juice; it's not expensive. And they swear by it on Meropé."
A disembodied pair of hands administered a spoonful of Grugis juice to the woman, whereupon her hair turned bright yellow, makeup bloomed on her face, her clothes grew briefer, and she burst into a fast Callistan clog.
"I see from your hair that you have been a member of one of the Brotherhoods," the passenger lying next to Michael on the shelf remarked inquisitively. He was a middle-aged man, his dust-brown hair thinning on top, his small blue eyes glittering preternaturally from the lenses fitted over his eyeballs.
Michael rubbed his fingers ruefully over the blond stubble on his scalp and wished he had waited until his tonsure were fully grown before he had ventured out into the world. But he had been so impatient to leave the Lodge, so impatient to exchange the flowing robes of the Brotherhood for the close-fitting breeches and tunic of the outer world that had seemed so glamorous and now proved so itchy.
"Yes," he replied courteously, for he knew the first rule of universal behavior, "I have been a Brother."
"Now why would a good-looking young fellow like you want to join a Brotherhood?" his shelf companion wanted to know. "Trouble over a female?"
Michael shook his head, smiling. "No, I have been a member of the Angeleno Brotherhood since I was an infant. My father brought me when he entered."
The other man clucked sympathetically. "No doubt he was grieved over the death of your mother."
Michael closed his eyes to shut out the sight of a baby protruding its fat face at him three-dimensionally, but he could not shut out its lisping voice: "Does your child refuse its food, grow wizened like a monkey? It will grow plump with oh-so-good Mealy Mush from Nunki."
"No, sir," Michael replied. "Father said that was one of the few blessings that brightened an otherwise benighted life."
Horror contorted his fellow traveller's plump features. "Be careful, young man!" he warned. "Lucky for you that you are talking to someone as broad-minded as I, but others aren't. You might be reported for violating a tabu. An Earth tabu, moreover."
"An Earth tabu?"
"Certainly. Motherhood is sacred here on Earth and so, of course, in the entire United Universe. You should have known that."
Michael blushed. He should indeed. For a year prior to his leaving the Lodge, he had carefully studied the customs and tabus of the Universe so that he should be able to enter the new life he planned for himself, with confidence and ease. Under the system of universal kinship, all the customs and all the tabus of all the planets were the law on all the other planets. For the Wise Ones had decided many years before that wars arose from not understanding one's fellows, not sympathizing with them. If every nation, every planet, every solar system had the same laws, customs, and habits, they reasoned, there would be no differences, and hence no wars.
Future events had proved them to be correct. For five hundred years there had been no war in the United Universe, and there was peace and plenty for all. Only one crime was recognized throughout the solar systems—injuring a fellow-creature by word or deed (and the telepaths of Aldebaran were still trying to add thought to the statute).
Why, then, Michael had questioned the Father Superior, was there any reason for the Lodge's existence, any reason for a group of humans to retire from the world and live in the simple ways of their primitive forefathers? When there had been war, injustice, tyranny, there had, perhaps, been an understandable emotional reason for fleeing the world. But now why refuse to face a desirable reality? Why turn one's face upon the present and deliberately go back to the life of the past—the high collars, vests and trousers, the inefficient coal furnaces, the rude gasoline tractors of medieval days?
The Father Superior had smiled. "You are not yet a fully fledged Brother, Michael. You cannot enter your novitiate until you've achieved your majority, and you won't be thirty for another five years. Why don't you spend some time outside and see how you like it?"
Michael had agreed, but before leaving he had spent months studying the ways of the United Universe. He had skimmed over Earth, because he had been so sure he'd know its ways instinctively. Remembering his preparations, he was astonished by his smug self-confidence.
A large scarlet pencil jumped merrily across the advideo screen. The face on the eraser opened its mouth and sang: "Our pencils are finest from point up to rubber, for the lead is from Yed, while the wood comes from Dschubba."
"Is there any way of turning that thing off?" Michael wanted to know.
The other man smiled. "If there were, my boy, do you think anybody would watch it? Furthermore, turning it off would violate the spirit of free enterprise. We wouldn't want that, would we?"
"Oh, no!" Michael agreed hastily. "Certainly not."
"And it might hurt the advertiser's feelings, cause him ego injury."
"How could I ever have had such a ridiculous idea?" Michael murmured, abashed.
"Allow me to introduce myself," said his companion. "My name is Pierce B. Carpenter. Aphrodisiacs are my line. Here's my card." He handed Michael a transparent tab with the photograph of Mr. Carpenter suspended inside, together with his registration number, his name, his address, and the Universal seal of approval. Clearly he was a character of the utmost respectability.
"My name's Michael Frey," the young man responded, smiling awkwardly.
"I'm afraid I don't have any cards."
"Well, you wouldn't have had any use for them where you were. Now, look here, son," Carpenter went on in a lowered voice, "I know you've just come from the Lodge and the mistakes you'll make will be through ignorance rather than deliberate malice. But the police wouldn't understand. You know what the sacred writings say: 'Ignorance of The Law is no excuse.' I'd be glad to give you any little tips I can. For instance, your hands...."
Michael spread his hands out in front of him. They were perfectly good hands, he thought. "Is there something wrong with them?"
Carpenter blushed and looked away. "Didn't you know that on Electra it is forbidden for anyone to appear in public with his hands bare?"
"Of course I know that," Michael said impatiently. "But what's that got to do with me?"
The salesman was wide-eyed. "But if it is forbidden on Electra, it becomes automatically prohibited here."
"But Electrans have eight fingers on each hand," Michael protested,
"with two fingernails on each—all covered with green scales."
Carpenter drew himself up as far as it was possible to do so while lying down. "Do eight fingers make one a lesser Universal?"
"Of course not, but—"
"Is he inferior to you then because he has sixteen fingernails?"
"Certainly not, but—"
"Would you like to be called guilty of—" Carpenter paused before the dreaded word—" intolerance ?"
"No, no, no !" Michael almost shrieked. It would be horrible for him to be arrested before he even had time to view Portyork. "I have lots of gloves in my pack," he babbled. "Lots and lots. I'll put some on right away."
With nervous haste, he pressed the lever which dropped his pack down from the storage compartment. It landed on his stomach. The device had been invented by one of the Dschubbans who are, as everyone knows, hoop-shaped.
Michael pushed the button marked Gloves A , and a pair of yellow gauntlets slid out.
Carpenter pressed his hands to his eyes. "Yellow is the color of death on Saturn, and you know how morbid the Saturnians are about passing away! No one ever wears yellow!"
"Sorry," Michael said humbly. The button marked Gloves B yielded a pair of rose-colored gloves which harmonized ill with his scarlet tunic and turquoise breeches, but he was past caring for esthetic effects.
"The quality's high," sang a quartet of beautiful female humanoids,
"but the price is meager. You know when you buy Plummy Fruitcake from Vega."
The salesman patted Michael's shoulder. "You staying a while in Portyork?" Michael nodded. "Then you'd better stick close to me for a while until you learn our ways. You can't run around loose by yourself until you've acquired civilized behavior patterns, or you'll get into trouble."
"Thank you, sir," Michael said gratefully. "It's very kind of you."
He twisted himself around—it was boiling hot inside the jet bus and his damp clothes were clinging uncomfortably—and struck his head against the bottom of the shelf above. "Awfully inconvenient arrangement here," he commented. "Wonder why they don't have seats."
"Because this arrangement," Carpenter said stiffly, "is the one that has proved suitable for the greatest number of intelligent life-forms."
"Oh, I see," Michael murmured. "I didn't get a look at the other passengers. Are there many extraterrestrials on the bus?"
"Dozens of them. Haven't you heard the Sirians singing?"
A low moaning noise had been pervading the bus, but Michael had thought it arose from defective jets.
"Oh, yes!" he agreed. "And very beautiful it is, too! But so sad."
"Sirians are always sad," the salesman told him. "Listen."
Michael strained his ears past the racket of the advideo. Sure enough, he could make out words: "Our wings were unfurled in a far distant world, our bodies are pain-racked, delirious. And never, it seems, will we see, save in dreams, the bright purple swamps of our Sirius...."
Carpenter brushed away a tear. "Poignant, isn't it?"
"Very, very touching," Michael agreed. "Are they sick or something?"
"Oh, no; they wouldn't have been permitted on the bus if they were. They're just homesick. Sirians love being homesick. That's why they leave Sirius in such great numbers."
"Fasten your suction disks, please," the stewardess, a pretty two-headed Denebian, ordered as she walked up and down the gangway.
"We're coming into Portyork. I have an announcement to make to all passengers on behalf of the United Universe. Zosma was admitted into the Union early this morning."
All the passengers cheered.
"Since it is considered immodest on Zosma," she continued, "ever to appear with the heads bare, henceforward it will be tabu to be seen in public without some sort of head-covering."
Wild scrabbling sounds indicated that all the passengers were searching their packs for headgear. Michael unearthed a violet cap.
The salesmen unfolded what looked like a medieval opera hat in piercingly bright green.
"Always got to keep on your toes," he whispered to the younger man.
"The Universe is expanding every minute."
The bus settled softly on the landing field and the passengers flew, floated, crawled, undulated, or walked out. Michael looked around him curiously. The Lodge had contained no extraterrestrials, for such of those as sought seclusion had Brotherhoods on their own planets.
Of course, even in Angeles he had seen other-worlders—humanoids from Vega, scaly Electrans, the wispy ubiquitous Sirians—but nothing to compare with the crowds that surged here. Scarlet Meropians rubbed tentacles with bulging-eyed Talithans; lumpish gray Jovians plodded alongside graceful, spidery Nunkians. And there were countless others whom he had seen pictured in books, but never before in reality.
The gaily colored costumes and bodies of these beings rendered kaleidoscopic a field already brilliant with red-and-green lights and banners. The effect was enhanced by Mr. Carpenter, whose emerald-green cloak was drawn back to reveal a chartreuse tunic and olive-green breeches which had apparently been designed for a taller and somewhat less pudgy man.
Carpenter rubbed modestly gloved hands together. "I have no immediate business, so supposing I start showing you the sights. What would you like to see first, Mr. Frey? Or would you prefer a nice, restful movid?"
"Frankly," Michael admitted, "the first thing I'd like to do is get myself something to eat. I didn't have any breakfast and I'm famished." Two small creatures standing close to him giggled nervously and scuttled off on six legs apiece.
"Shh, not so loud! There are females present." Carpenter drew the youth to a secluded corner. "Don't you know that on Theemim it's frightfully vulgar to as much as speak of eating in public?"
"But why?" Michael demanded in too loud a voice. "What's wrong with eating in public here on Earth?"
Carpenter clapped a hand over the young man's mouth. "Hush," he cautioned. "After all, on Earth there are things we don't do or even mention in public, aren't there?"
"Well, yes. But those are different."
"Not at all. Those rules might seem just as ridiculous to a Theemimian. But the Theemimians have accepted our customs just as we have accepted the Theemimians'. How would you like it if a Theemimian violated one of our tabus in public? You must consider the feelings of the Theemimians as equal to your own. Observe the golden rule: 'Do unto extraterrestrials as you would be done by.'"
"But I'm still hungry," Michael persisted, modulating his voice, however, to a decent whisper. "Do the proprieties demand that I starve to death, or can I get something to eat somewhere?"
"Naturally," the salesman whispered back. "Portyork provides for all bodily needs. Numerous feeding stations are conveniently located throughout the port, and there must be some on the field."
After gazing furtively over his shoulder to see that no females were watching, Carpenter approached a large map of the landing field and pressed a button. A tiny red light winked demurely for an instant.
"That's the nearest one," Carpenter explained.
Inside a small, white, functional-looking building unobtrusively marked "Feeding Station," Carpenter showed Michael where to insert a two-credit piece in a slot. A door slid back and admitted Michael into a tiny, austere room, furnished only with a table, a chair, a food compartment, and an advideo. The food consisted of tabloid synthetics and was tasteless. Michael knew that only primitive creatures waste time and energy in growing and preparing natural foods. It was all a matter of getting used to this stuff, he thought glumly, as he tried to chew food that was meant to be gulped.
A ferret-eyed Yeddan appeared on the advideo. "Do you suffer from gastric disorders? Does your viscera get in your hair? A horrid condition, but swift abolition is yours with Al-Brom from Altair."
Michael finished his meal in fifteen minutes and left the compartment to find Carpenter awaiting him in the lobby, impatiently glancing at the luminous time dial embedded in his wrist.
"Let's go to the Old Town," he suggested to Michael. "It will be of great interest to a student and a newcomer like yourself."
A few yards away from the feeding station, the travel agents were lined up in rows, each outside his spaceship, each shouting the advantages of the tour he offered:
"Better than a mustard plaster is a weekend spent on Castor."
"If you want to show you like her, take her for a week to Spica."
"Movid stars go to Mars."
Carpenter smiled politely at them. "No space trips for us today, gentlemen. We're staying on Terra." He guided the bewildered young man through the crowds and to the gates of the field. Outside, a number of surface vehicles were lined up, with the drivers loudly competing for business.
"Come, take a ride in my rocket car, suited to both gent and lady, lined with luxury hukka fur brought from afar, and perfumed with rare scents from Algedi."
"Whichever movid film you choose to view will be yours in my fine cab from Mizar. Just press a button—it won't cost you nuttin'—see a passionate drama of long-vanished Mu or the bloodhounds pursuing Eliza."
"All honor be laid at the feet of free trade, but, whatever your race or your birth, each passenger curls up with two dancing girls who rides in the taxi from Earth."
"Couldn't we—couldn't we walk? At least part of the way?" Michael faltered.
Carpenter stared. "Walk! Don't you know it's forbidden to walk more than two hundred yards in any one direction? Fomalhautians never walk."
"But they have no feet."
"That has nothing whatsoever to do with it."
Carpenter gently urged the young man into the Algedian cab ... which reeked. Michael held his nose, but his mentor shook his head. "No, no! Tpiu Number Five is the most esteemed aroma on Algedi. It would break the driver's heart if he thought you didn't like it. You wouldn't want to be had up for ego injury, would you?"
"Of course not," Michael whispered weakly.
"Brunettes are darker and blondes are fairer," the advideo informed him, "when they wash out their hair with shampoos made on Chara."
After a time, Michael got more or less used to Tpiu Number Five and was able to take some interest in the passing landscape. Portyork, the biggest spaceport in the United Universe, was, of course, the most cosmopolitan city—cosmopolitan in its architecture as well as its inhabitants. Silver domes of Earth were crowded next to the tall helical edifices of the Venusians.
"You'll notice that the current medieval revival has even reached architecture," Carpenter pointed out. "See those period houses in the Frank Lloyd Wright and Inigo Jones manner?"
"Very quaint," Michael commented.
Great floating red and green balls lit the streets, even though it was still daylight, and long scarlet-and-emerald streamers whipped out from the most unlikely places. As Michael opened his mouth to inquire about this, "We now interrupt the commercials," the advideo said, "to bring you a brand new version of one of the medieval ballads that are becoming so popular...."
"I shall scream," stated Carpenter, "if they play Beautiful Blue Deneb just once more.... No, thank the Wise Ones, I've never heard this before."
"Thuban, Thuban, I've been thinking," sang a buxom Betelgeusian, "what a Cosmos this could be, if land masses were transported to replace the wasteful sea."
"I guess the first thing for me to do," Michael began in a businesslike manner, "is to get myself a room at a hotel.... What have I said now?"
"The word hotel ," Carpenter explained through pursed lips, "is not used in polite society any more. It has come to have unpleasant connotations. It means—a place of dancing girls. I hardly think...."
"Certainly not," Michael agreed austerely. "I merely want a lodging."
"That word is also—well, you see," Carpenter told him, "on Zaniah it is unthinkable to go anywhere without one's family."
"They're a sort of ant, aren't they? The Zaniahans, I mean."
"More like bees. So those creatures who travel—" Carpenter lowered his voice modestly "— alone hire a family for the duration of their stay. There are a number of families available, but the better types come rather high. There has been talk of reviving the old-fashioned price controls, but the Wise Ones say this would limit free enterprise as much as—if you'll excuse my use of the expression—tariffs would."
The taxi let them off at a square meadow which was filled with transparent plastic domes housing clocks of all varieties, most of the antique type based on the old twenty-four hour day instead of the standard thirty hours. There were few extraterrestrial clocks because most non-humans had time sense, Michael knew, and needed no mechanical devices.
"This," said Carpenter, "is Times Square. Once it wasn't really square, but it is contrary to Nekkarian custom to do, say, imply, or permit the existence of anything that isn't true, so when Nekkar entered the Union, we had to square off the place. And, of course, install the clocks. Finest clock museum in the Union, I understand."
"The pictures in my history books—" Michael began.
"Did I hear you correctly, sir?" The capes of a bright blue cloak trembled with the indignation of a scarlet, many-tentacled being. "Did you use the word history ?" He pronounced it in terms of loathing. "I have been grossly insulted and I shall be forced to report you to the police, sir."
"Please don't!" Carpenter begged. "This youth has just come from one of the Brotherhoods and is not yet accustomed to the ways of our universe. I know that, because of the great sophistication for which your race is noted, you will overlook this little gaucherie on his part."
"Well," the red one conceded, "let it not be said that Meropians are not tolerant. But, be careful, young man," he warned Michael. "There are other beings less sophisticated than we. Guard your tongue, or you might find yourself in trouble."
He indicated the stalwart constable who, splendid in gold helmet and gold-spangled pink tights, surveyed the terrain haughtily from his floating platform in the air.
"I should have told you," Carpenter reproached himself as the Meropian swirled off. "Never mention the word 'history' in front of a Meropian. They rose from barbarism in one generation, and so they haven't any history at all. Naturally, they're sensitive in the extreme about it."
"Naturally," Michael said. "Tell me, Mr. Carpenter, is there some special reason for everything being decorated in red and green? I noticed it along the way and it's all over here, too."
"Why, Christmas is coming, my boy," Carpenter answered, surprised.
"It's July already—about time they got started fixing things up. Some places are so slack, they haven't even got their Mother's Week shrines cleared away."
A bevy of tiny golden-haired, winged creatures circled slowly over Times Square.
"Izarians," Carpenter explained "They're much in demand for Christmas displays."
The small mouths opened and clear soprano voices filled the air: "It came upon the midnight clear, that glorious song of old, from angels bending near the Earth to tune their harps of gold. Peace on Earth, good will to men, from Heaven's All-Celestial. Peace to the Universe as well and every extraterrestrial.... Beat the drum and clash the cymbals; buy your Christmas gifts at Nimble's."
"This beautiful walk you see before you," Carpenter said, waving an expository arm, "shaded by boogil trees from Dschubba, is called Broadway. To your left you will be delighted to see—"
"Listen, could we—" Michael began.
"—Forty-second Street, which is now actually the forty-second—"
"By the way—"
"It is extremely rude and hence illegal," Carpenter glared, "to interrupt anyone who is speaking."
"But I would like," Michael whispered very earnestly, "to get washed. If I might."
The other man frowned. "Let me see. I believe one of the old landmarks was converted into a lavatory. Only thing of suitable dimensions. Anyhow, it was absolutely useless for any other purpose. We have to take a taxi there; it's more than two hundred yards. Custom, you know."
"A taxi? Isn't there one closer?"
"Ah, impatient youth! There aren't too many altogether. The installations are extremely expensive."
They hailed the nearest taxi, which happened to be one of the variety equipped with dancing girls. Fortunately the ride was brief.
Michael gazed at the Empire State Building with interest. It was in a remarkable state of preservation and looked just like the pictures in his history—in his books, except that none of them showed the huge golden sign "Public-Washport" riding on its spire.
Attendants directed traffic from a large circular desk in the lobby.
"Mercurians, seventy-eighth floor. A group Vegans, fourteenth floor right. B group, fourteenth floor left. C group, fifteenth floor right. D group, fifteenth floor left. Sirians, forty-ninth floor. Female humans fiftieth floor right, males, fiftieth floor left. Uranians, basement...."
Carpenter and Michael shared an elevator with a group of sad-eyed, translucent Sirians, who were singing as usual and accompanying themselves on wemps , a cross between a harp and a flute. "Foreign planets are strange and we're subject to mange. Foreign atmospheres prove deleterious. Only with our mind's eye can we sail through the sky to the bright purple swamps of our Sirius."
The cost of the compartment was half that of the feeding station; one credit in the slot unlocked the door. There was an advideo here, too:
"Friend, do you clean yourself each day? Now, let's not be evasive, for each one has his favored way. Some use an abrasive and some use oil. Some shed their skins, in a brand-new hide emerging. Some rub with grease put up in tins. For others there's deterging. Some lick themselves to take off grime. Some beat it off with rope. Some cook it away in boiling lime. Old-fashioned ones use soap. More ways there are than I recall, and each of these will differ, but the only one that works for all is Omniclene from Kiffa."
"And now," smiled Carpenter as the two humans left the building, "we must see you registered for a nice family. Nothing too ostentatious, but, on the other hand, you mustn't count credits and ally yourself beneath your station."
Michael gazed pensively at two slender, snakelike Difdans writhing
"Only 99 Shopping Days Till Christmas" across an aquamarine sky.
"They won't be permanent?" he asked. "The family, I mean?"
"Certainly not. You merely hire them for whatever length of time you choose. But why are you so anxious?"
The young man blushed. "Well, I'm thinking of having a family of my own some day. Pretty soon, as a matter of fact."
Carpenter beamed. "That's nice; you're being adopted! I do hope it's an Earth family that's chosen you—it's so awkward being adopted by extraterrestrials."
"Oh, no! I'm planning to have my own. That is, I've got a—a girl, you see, and I thought after I had secured employment of some kind in Portyork, I'd send for her and we'd get married and...."
" Married! " Carpenter was now completely shocked. "You mustn't use that word! Don't you know marriage was outlawed years ago? Exclusive possession of a member of the opposite sex is slavery on Talitha. Furthermore, supposing somebody else saw your—er—friend and wanted her also; you wouldn't wish him to endure the frustration of not having her, would you?"
Michael squared his jaw. "You bet I would."
Carpenter drew himself away slightly, as if to avoid contamination.
"This is un-Universal. Young man, if I didn't have a kind heart, I would report you."
Michael was too preoccupied to be disturbed by this threat. "You mean if I bring my girl here, I'd have to share her?"
"Certainly. And she'd have to share you. If somebody wanted you, that is."
"Then I'm not staying here," Michael declared firmly, ashamed to admit even to himself how much relief his decision was bringing him. "I don't think I like it, anyhow. I'm going back to the Brotherhood."
There was a short cold silence.
"You know, son," Carpenter finally said, "I think you might be right. I don't want to hurt your feelings—you promise I won't hurt your feelings?" he asked anxiously, afraid, Michael realized, that he might call a policeman for ego injury.
"You won't hurt my feelings, Mr. Carpenter."
"Well, I believe that there are certain individuals who just cannot adapt themselves to civilized behavior patterns. It's much better for them to belong to a Brotherhood such as yours than to be placed in one of the government incarceratoriums, comfortable and commodious though they are."
"Much better," Michael agreed.
"By the way," Carpenter went on, "I realize this is just vulgar curiosity on my part and you have a right to refuse an answer without fear of hurting my feelings, but how do you happen to have a—er—girl when you belong to a Brotherhood?"
Michael laughed. "Oh, 'Brotherhood' is merely a generic term. Both sexes are represented in our society."
"On Talitha—" Carpenter began.
"I know," Michael interrupted him, like the crude primitive he was and always would be. "But our females don't mind being generic."
A group of Sirians was traveling on the shelf above him on the slow, very slow jet bus that was flying Michael back to Angeles, back to the Lodge, back to the Brotherhood, back to her. Their melancholy howling was getting on his nerves, but in a little while, he told himself, it would be all over. He would be back home, safe with his own kind.
"When our minds have grown tired, when our lives have expired, when our sorrows no longer can weary us, let our ashes return, neatly packed in an urn, to the bright purple swamps of our Sirius."
The advideo crackled: "The gown her fairy godmother once gave to Cinderella was created by the haute couture of fashion-wise Capella."
The ancient taxi was there, the one that Michael had taken from the Lodge, early that morning, to the little Angeleno landing field, as if it had been waiting for his return.
"I see you're back, son," the driver said without surprise. He set the noisy old rockets blasting. "I been to Portyork once. It's not a bad place to live in, but I hate to visit it."
"I'm back!" Michael sank into the motheaten sable cushions and gazed with pleasure at the familiar landmarks half seen in the darkness. "I'm back! And a loud sneer to civilization!"
"Better be careful, son," the driver warned. "I know this is a rural area, but civilization is spreading. There are secret police all over. How do you know I ain't a government spy? I could pull you in for insulting civilization."
The elderly black and white advideo flickered, broke into purring sound: "Do you find life continues to daze you? Do you find for a quick death you hanker? Why not try the new style euthanasia, performed by skilled workmen from Ancha?"
Not any more, Michael thought contentedly. He was going home.
Question:
What is the relationship between Michael and Mr. Carpenter?
Answer:
|
[
"Mr. Carpenter is the first acquaintance Michael makes on his trip into the world. They are companions on the bus to Portyork. At first, Michael is unwilling to talk and Carpenter is curious to know about the reasons for the former to join a Brotherhood. Soon, Carpenter realizes that Michael is unfamiliar with the ways of this world and decides to take charge and show the youth around. Carpenter forgives Michael's every mistake and explains it, warning the youth to become silent in case of danger. Carpenter is more forgiving and kind than many other citizens, which is the reason for him taking charge of Michael. The man shows the newcomer around the city and prevents him from getting in trouble. Carpenter even defends Michael before an offended Meropian, who wants to report to the police. Things change when Michael begins an argument with Carpenter regarding marriage, which has been outlawed. Michael's desire to possess his girl alone contradicts the norms of the world and the youth's obstinance in this desire shock Carpenter completely. When he learns that in the Brotherhood both sexes are represented and marriage, which equals slavery to him, exists, Carpenter becomes sure that Michael can't adapt to the civilized world. After that, each goes his way.\n",
"Michael and Mr. Carpenter are travel companions for the duration of his stay in Portyork. Mr. Carpenter first befriends Michael on the jet bus, and he decides to take the latter around after seeing that Michael does not know his way around Earth. He is quick to inform Michael of the rules of the United Universe and always corrects him immediately whenever there is a problem. Mr. Carpenter is very knowledgeable about Portyork, the rules of the United Universe, and even the extraterrestrials. Although he does get fearful of Michael’s illegal outbursts, he is kind enough not to report him to the police and teach him instead. While Mr. Carpenter concludes that Michael is unsuited for life on Earth and the United Universe, there is no bad blood between them, and Michael learns a lot from him. \n",
"Michael first met Mr. Carpenter on the jet bus heading towards Portyork. Carpenter notices that Michael comes from the Brotherhood and assumed that he was there because of trouble over women. Then Michael reveals that he has been in the Brotherhood for almost his whole life. After being reminded of a few tabus and customs that Michael is not even aware off, Carpenter asks Michael to stick around him for a while since he is unfamiliar with the civilized behaviors and can easily get in trouble. After exiting the jet bus, Carpenter mentions to Michael that he does not have anything to do this moment, thus he can show him around. Carpenter helps Michael to find the position of a “Feeding Station” so that he can get some food. Afterwards, Michael attempts to break more customs when trying to get to the Old Town. However, they were all stopped by Carpenter before anyone notices it. However, getting off the taxi, a being notices Carpenter stating the word “history” and threatens to report him to the police because history is something that the Meropians lack. Carpenter begs the being and blames himself for not warning Michael. Later, Michael interrupts Carpenter, asking for the lavatory. Thus, they get to the Empire State Building, which has been transformed into a lavatory, since, apparently, it has no other use. On their way out, Carpenter is shocked at Michael desiring for a permanent family, since there’s no marriage in the Union, and family is never permanent. Carpenter is very openminded, and agrees that there are individuals that do not apapt themselves to the civilization, the Brotherhood is a much better option for them. Later, Michael heads home to his Brotherhood. ",
"Mr.Carpenter acts as a kind of companion and advisor to Micheal. They first meet on the space bus on the way to Port York. Carpenter notices that Micheal is hopelessly lost in the social intricacies of the United Universe. Carpenter decides to take Micheal under his wing to make sure that he doesn't get in any trouble with the law as he tries to maneuver his way through this new society. They exit the bus together and make their way to a nourishing station, and then into the old town, where Carpenter points out various landmarks to Micheal. Carpenter keeps having to correct Micheal on his language, and eventually has to defend and apologize for him when he offends a Meropian. Carpenter often is shocked by Micheal's language and thoughts, but chalks it up to him not being experienced. Carpenter eventually agrees that it's better for Micheal to go home to the Brotherhood. They part amicably. "
] |
50847
|
Tea Tray in the Sky
By EVELYN E. SMITH
Illustrated by ASHMAN
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Visiting a society is tougher than being born into it. A 40 credit tour is no substitute!
The picture changed on the illuminated panel that filled the forward end of the shelf on which Michael lay. A haggard blonde woman sprawled apathetically in a chair.
"Rundown, nervous, hypertensive?" inquired a mellifluous voice. "In need of mental therapy? Buy Grugis juice; it's not expensive. And they swear by it on Meropé."
A disembodied pair of hands administered a spoonful of Grugis juice to the woman, whereupon her hair turned bright yellow, makeup bloomed on her face, her clothes grew briefer, and she burst into a fast Callistan clog.
"I see from your hair that you have been a member of one of the Brotherhoods," the passenger lying next to Michael on the shelf remarked inquisitively. He was a middle-aged man, his dust-brown hair thinning on top, his small blue eyes glittering preternaturally from the lenses fitted over his eyeballs.
Michael rubbed his fingers ruefully over the blond stubble on his scalp and wished he had waited until his tonsure were fully grown before he had ventured out into the world. But he had been so impatient to leave the Lodge, so impatient to exchange the flowing robes of the Brotherhood for the close-fitting breeches and tunic of the outer world that had seemed so glamorous and now proved so itchy.
"Yes," he replied courteously, for he knew the first rule of universal behavior, "I have been a Brother."
"Now why would a good-looking young fellow like you want to join a Brotherhood?" his shelf companion wanted to know. "Trouble over a female?"
Michael shook his head, smiling. "No, I have been a member of the Angeleno Brotherhood since I was an infant. My father brought me when he entered."
The other man clucked sympathetically. "No doubt he was grieved over the death of your mother."
Michael closed his eyes to shut out the sight of a baby protruding its fat face at him three-dimensionally, but he could not shut out its lisping voice: "Does your child refuse its food, grow wizened like a monkey? It will grow plump with oh-so-good Mealy Mush from Nunki."
"No, sir," Michael replied. "Father said that was one of the few blessings that brightened an otherwise benighted life."
Horror contorted his fellow traveller's plump features. "Be careful, young man!" he warned. "Lucky for you that you are talking to someone as broad-minded as I, but others aren't. You might be reported for violating a tabu. An Earth tabu, moreover."
"An Earth tabu?"
"Certainly. Motherhood is sacred here on Earth and so, of course, in the entire United Universe. You should have known that."
Michael blushed. He should indeed. For a year prior to his leaving the Lodge, he had carefully studied the customs and tabus of the Universe so that he should be able to enter the new life he planned for himself, with confidence and ease. Under the system of universal kinship, all the customs and all the tabus of all the planets were the law on all the other planets. For the Wise Ones had decided many years before that wars arose from not understanding one's fellows, not sympathizing with them. If every nation, every planet, every solar system had the same laws, customs, and habits, they reasoned, there would be no differences, and hence no wars.
Future events had proved them to be correct. For five hundred years there had been no war in the United Universe, and there was peace and plenty for all. Only one crime was recognized throughout the solar systems—injuring a fellow-creature by word or deed (and the telepaths of Aldebaran were still trying to add thought to the statute).
Why, then, Michael had questioned the Father Superior, was there any reason for the Lodge's existence, any reason for a group of humans to retire from the world and live in the simple ways of their primitive forefathers? When there had been war, injustice, tyranny, there had, perhaps, been an understandable emotional reason for fleeing the world. But now why refuse to face a desirable reality? Why turn one's face upon the present and deliberately go back to the life of the past—the high collars, vests and trousers, the inefficient coal furnaces, the rude gasoline tractors of medieval days?
The Father Superior had smiled. "You are not yet a fully fledged Brother, Michael. You cannot enter your novitiate until you've achieved your majority, and you won't be thirty for another five years. Why don't you spend some time outside and see how you like it?"
Michael had agreed, but before leaving he had spent months studying the ways of the United Universe. He had skimmed over Earth, because he had been so sure he'd know its ways instinctively. Remembering his preparations, he was astonished by his smug self-confidence.
A large scarlet pencil jumped merrily across the advideo screen. The face on the eraser opened its mouth and sang: "Our pencils are finest from point up to rubber, for the lead is from Yed, while the wood comes from Dschubba."
"Is there any way of turning that thing off?" Michael wanted to know.
The other man smiled. "If there were, my boy, do you think anybody would watch it? Furthermore, turning it off would violate the spirit of free enterprise. We wouldn't want that, would we?"
"Oh, no!" Michael agreed hastily. "Certainly not."
"And it might hurt the advertiser's feelings, cause him ego injury."
"How could I ever have had such a ridiculous idea?" Michael murmured, abashed.
"Allow me to introduce myself," said his companion. "My name is Pierce B. Carpenter. Aphrodisiacs are my line. Here's my card." He handed Michael a transparent tab with the photograph of Mr. Carpenter suspended inside, together with his registration number, his name, his address, and the Universal seal of approval. Clearly he was a character of the utmost respectability.
"My name's Michael Frey," the young man responded, smiling awkwardly.
"I'm afraid I don't have any cards."
"Well, you wouldn't have had any use for them where you were. Now, look here, son," Carpenter went on in a lowered voice, "I know you've just come from the Lodge and the mistakes you'll make will be through ignorance rather than deliberate malice. But the police wouldn't understand. You know what the sacred writings say: 'Ignorance of The Law is no excuse.' I'd be glad to give you any little tips I can. For instance, your hands...."
Michael spread his hands out in front of him. They were perfectly good hands, he thought. "Is there something wrong with them?"
Carpenter blushed and looked away. "Didn't you know that on Electra it is forbidden for anyone to appear in public with his hands bare?"
"Of course I know that," Michael said impatiently. "But what's that got to do with me?"
The salesman was wide-eyed. "But if it is forbidden on Electra, it becomes automatically prohibited here."
"But Electrans have eight fingers on each hand," Michael protested,
"with two fingernails on each—all covered with green scales."
Carpenter drew himself up as far as it was possible to do so while lying down. "Do eight fingers make one a lesser Universal?"
"Of course not, but—"
"Is he inferior to you then because he has sixteen fingernails?"
"Certainly not, but—"
"Would you like to be called guilty of—" Carpenter paused before the dreaded word—" intolerance ?"
"No, no, no !" Michael almost shrieked. It would be horrible for him to be arrested before he even had time to view Portyork. "I have lots of gloves in my pack," he babbled. "Lots and lots. I'll put some on right away."
With nervous haste, he pressed the lever which dropped his pack down from the storage compartment. It landed on his stomach. The device had been invented by one of the Dschubbans who are, as everyone knows, hoop-shaped.
Michael pushed the button marked Gloves A , and a pair of yellow gauntlets slid out.
Carpenter pressed his hands to his eyes. "Yellow is the color of death on Saturn, and you know how morbid the Saturnians are about passing away! No one ever wears yellow!"
"Sorry," Michael said humbly. The button marked Gloves B yielded a pair of rose-colored gloves which harmonized ill with his scarlet tunic and turquoise breeches, but he was past caring for esthetic effects.
"The quality's high," sang a quartet of beautiful female humanoids,
"but the price is meager. You know when you buy Plummy Fruitcake from Vega."
The salesman patted Michael's shoulder. "You staying a while in Portyork?" Michael nodded. "Then you'd better stick close to me for a while until you learn our ways. You can't run around loose by yourself until you've acquired civilized behavior patterns, or you'll get into trouble."
"Thank you, sir," Michael said gratefully. "It's very kind of you."
He twisted himself around—it was boiling hot inside the jet bus and his damp clothes were clinging uncomfortably—and struck his head against the bottom of the shelf above. "Awfully inconvenient arrangement here," he commented. "Wonder why they don't have seats."
"Because this arrangement," Carpenter said stiffly, "is the one that has proved suitable for the greatest number of intelligent life-forms."
"Oh, I see," Michael murmured. "I didn't get a look at the other passengers. Are there many extraterrestrials on the bus?"
"Dozens of them. Haven't you heard the Sirians singing?"
A low moaning noise had been pervading the bus, but Michael had thought it arose from defective jets.
"Oh, yes!" he agreed. "And very beautiful it is, too! But so sad."
"Sirians are always sad," the salesman told him. "Listen."
Michael strained his ears past the racket of the advideo. Sure enough, he could make out words: "Our wings were unfurled in a far distant world, our bodies are pain-racked, delirious. And never, it seems, will we see, save in dreams, the bright purple swamps of our Sirius...."
Carpenter brushed away a tear. "Poignant, isn't it?"
"Very, very touching," Michael agreed. "Are they sick or something?"
"Oh, no; they wouldn't have been permitted on the bus if they were. They're just homesick. Sirians love being homesick. That's why they leave Sirius in such great numbers."
"Fasten your suction disks, please," the stewardess, a pretty two-headed Denebian, ordered as she walked up and down the gangway.
"We're coming into Portyork. I have an announcement to make to all passengers on behalf of the United Universe. Zosma was admitted into the Union early this morning."
All the passengers cheered.
"Since it is considered immodest on Zosma," she continued, "ever to appear with the heads bare, henceforward it will be tabu to be seen in public without some sort of head-covering."
Wild scrabbling sounds indicated that all the passengers were searching their packs for headgear. Michael unearthed a violet cap.
The salesmen unfolded what looked like a medieval opera hat in piercingly bright green.
"Always got to keep on your toes," he whispered to the younger man.
"The Universe is expanding every minute."
The bus settled softly on the landing field and the passengers flew, floated, crawled, undulated, or walked out. Michael looked around him curiously. The Lodge had contained no extraterrestrials, for such of those as sought seclusion had Brotherhoods on their own planets.
Of course, even in Angeles he had seen other-worlders—humanoids from Vega, scaly Electrans, the wispy ubiquitous Sirians—but nothing to compare with the crowds that surged here. Scarlet Meropians rubbed tentacles with bulging-eyed Talithans; lumpish gray Jovians plodded alongside graceful, spidery Nunkians. And there were countless others whom he had seen pictured in books, but never before in reality.
The gaily colored costumes and bodies of these beings rendered kaleidoscopic a field already brilliant with red-and-green lights and banners. The effect was enhanced by Mr. Carpenter, whose emerald-green cloak was drawn back to reveal a chartreuse tunic and olive-green breeches which had apparently been designed for a taller and somewhat less pudgy man.
Carpenter rubbed modestly gloved hands together. "I have no immediate business, so supposing I start showing you the sights. What would you like to see first, Mr. Frey? Or would you prefer a nice, restful movid?"
"Frankly," Michael admitted, "the first thing I'd like to do is get myself something to eat. I didn't have any breakfast and I'm famished." Two small creatures standing close to him giggled nervously and scuttled off on six legs apiece.
"Shh, not so loud! There are females present." Carpenter drew the youth to a secluded corner. "Don't you know that on Theemim it's frightfully vulgar to as much as speak of eating in public?"
"But why?" Michael demanded in too loud a voice. "What's wrong with eating in public here on Earth?"
Carpenter clapped a hand over the young man's mouth. "Hush," he cautioned. "After all, on Earth there are things we don't do or even mention in public, aren't there?"
"Well, yes. But those are different."
"Not at all. Those rules might seem just as ridiculous to a Theemimian. But the Theemimians have accepted our customs just as we have accepted the Theemimians'. How would you like it if a Theemimian violated one of our tabus in public? You must consider the feelings of the Theemimians as equal to your own. Observe the golden rule: 'Do unto extraterrestrials as you would be done by.'"
"But I'm still hungry," Michael persisted, modulating his voice, however, to a decent whisper. "Do the proprieties demand that I starve to death, or can I get something to eat somewhere?"
"Naturally," the salesman whispered back. "Portyork provides for all bodily needs. Numerous feeding stations are conveniently located throughout the port, and there must be some on the field."
After gazing furtively over his shoulder to see that no females were watching, Carpenter approached a large map of the landing field and pressed a button. A tiny red light winked demurely for an instant.
"That's the nearest one," Carpenter explained.
Inside a small, white, functional-looking building unobtrusively marked "Feeding Station," Carpenter showed Michael where to insert a two-credit piece in a slot. A door slid back and admitted Michael into a tiny, austere room, furnished only with a table, a chair, a food compartment, and an advideo. The food consisted of tabloid synthetics and was tasteless. Michael knew that only primitive creatures waste time and energy in growing and preparing natural foods. It was all a matter of getting used to this stuff, he thought glumly, as he tried to chew food that was meant to be gulped.
A ferret-eyed Yeddan appeared on the advideo. "Do you suffer from gastric disorders? Does your viscera get in your hair? A horrid condition, but swift abolition is yours with Al-Brom from Altair."
Michael finished his meal in fifteen minutes and left the compartment to find Carpenter awaiting him in the lobby, impatiently glancing at the luminous time dial embedded in his wrist.
"Let's go to the Old Town," he suggested to Michael. "It will be of great interest to a student and a newcomer like yourself."
A few yards away from the feeding station, the travel agents were lined up in rows, each outside his spaceship, each shouting the advantages of the tour he offered:
"Better than a mustard plaster is a weekend spent on Castor."
"If you want to show you like her, take her for a week to Spica."
"Movid stars go to Mars."
Carpenter smiled politely at them. "No space trips for us today, gentlemen. We're staying on Terra." He guided the bewildered young man through the crowds and to the gates of the field. Outside, a number of surface vehicles were lined up, with the drivers loudly competing for business.
"Come, take a ride in my rocket car, suited to both gent and lady, lined with luxury hukka fur brought from afar, and perfumed with rare scents from Algedi."
"Whichever movid film you choose to view will be yours in my fine cab from Mizar. Just press a button—it won't cost you nuttin'—see a passionate drama of long-vanished Mu or the bloodhounds pursuing Eliza."
"All honor be laid at the feet of free trade, but, whatever your race or your birth, each passenger curls up with two dancing girls who rides in the taxi from Earth."
"Couldn't we—couldn't we walk? At least part of the way?" Michael faltered.
Carpenter stared. "Walk! Don't you know it's forbidden to walk more than two hundred yards in any one direction? Fomalhautians never walk."
"But they have no feet."
"That has nothing whatsoever to do with it."
Carpenter gently urged the young man into the Algedian cab ... which reeked. Michael held his nose, but his mentor shook his head. "No, no! Tpiu Number Five is the most esteemed aroma on Algedi. It would break the driver's heart if he thought you didn't like it. You wouldn't want to be had up for ego injury, would you?"
"Of course not," Michael whispered weakly.
"Brunettes are darker and blondes are fairer," the advideo informed him, "when they wash out their hair with shampoos made on Chara."
After a time, Michael got more or less used to Tpiu Number Five and was able to take some interest in the passing landscape. Portyork, the biggest spaceport in the United Universe, was, of course, the most cosmopolitan city—cosmopolitan in its architecture as well as its inhabitants. Silver domes of Earth were crowded next to the tall helical edifices of the Venusians.
"You'll notice that the current medieval revival has even reached architecture," Carpenter pointed out. "See those period houses in the Frank Lloyd Wright and Inigo Jones manner?"
"Very quaint," Michael commented.
Great floating red and green balls lit the streets, even though it was still daylight, and long scarlet-and-emerald streamers whipped out from the most unlikely places. As Michael opened his mouth to inquire about this, "We now interrupt the commercials," the advideo said, "to bring you a brand new version of one of the medieval ballads that are becoming so popular...."
"I shall scream," stated Carpenter, "if they play Beautiful Blue Deneb just once more.... No, thank the Wise Ones, I've never heard this before."
"Thuban, Thuban, I've been thinking," sang a buxom Betelgeusian, "what a Cosmos this could be, if land masses were transported to replace the wasteful sea."
"I guess the first thing for me to do," Michael began in a businesslike manner, "is to get myself a room at a hotel.... What have I said now?"
"The word hotel ," Carpenter explained through pursed lips, "is not used in polite society any more. It has come to have unpleasant connotations. It means—a place of dancing girls. I hardly think...."
"Certainly not," Michael agreed austerely. "I merely want a lodging."
"That word is also—well, you see," Carpenter told him, "on Zaniah it is unthinkable to go anywhere without one's family."
"They're a sort of ant, aren't they? The Zaniahans, I mean."
"More like bees. So those creatures who travel—" Carpenter lowered his voice modestly "— alone hire a family for the duration of their stay. There are a number of families available, but the better types come rather high. There has been talk of reviving the old-fashioned price controls, but the Wise Ones say this would limit free enterprise as much as—if you'll excuse my use of the expression—tariffs would."
The taxi let them off at a square meadow which was filled with transparent plastic domes housing clocks of all varieties, most of the antique type based on the old twenty-four hour day instead of the standard thirty hours. There were few extraterrestrial clocks because most non-humans had time sense, Michael knew, and needed no mechanical devices.
"This," said Carpenter, "is Times Square. Once it wasn't really square, but it is contrary to Nekkarian custom to do, say, imply, or permit the existence of anything that isn't true, so when Nekkar entered the Union, we had to square off the place. And, of course, install the clocks. Finest clock museum in the Union, I understand."
"The pictures in my history books—" Michael began.
"Did I hear you correctly, sir?" The capes of a bright blue cloak trembled with the indignation of a scarlet, many-tentacled being. "Did you use the word history ?" He pronounced it in terms of loathing. "I have been grossly insulted and I shall be forced to report you to the police, sir."
"Please don't!" Carpenter begged. "This youth has just come from one of the Brotherhoods and is not yet accustomed to the ways of our universe. I know that, because of the great sophistication for which your race is noted, you will overlook this little gaucherie on his part."
"Well," the red one conceded, "let it not be said that Meropians are not tolerant. But, be careful, young man," he warned Michael. "There are other beings less sophisticated than we. Guard your tongue, or you might find yourself in trouble."
He indicated the stalwart constable who, splendid in gold helmet and gold-spangled pink tights, surveyed the terrain haughtily from his floating platform in the air.
"I should have told you," Carpenter reproached himself as the Meropian swirled off. "Never mention the word 'history' in front of a Meropian. They rose from barbarism in one generation, and so they haven't any history at all. Naturally, they're sensitive in the extreme about it."
"Naturally," Michael said. "Tell me, Mr. Carpenter, is there some special reason for everything being decorated in red and green? I noticed it along the way and it's all over here, too."
"Why, Christmas is coming, my boy," Carpenter answered, surprised.
"It's July already—about time they got started fixing things up. Some places are so slack, they haven't even got their Mother's Week shrines cleared away."
A bevy of tiny golden-haired, winged creatures circled slowly over Times Square.
"Izarians," Carpenter explained "They're much in demand for Christmas displays."
The small mouths opened and clear soprano voices filled the air: "It came upon the midnight clear, that glorious song of old, from angels bending near the Earth to tune their harps of gold. Peace on Earth, good will to men, from Heaven's All-Celestial. Peace to the Universe as well and every extraterrestrial.... Beat the drum and clash the cymbals; buy your Christmas gifts at Nimble's."
"This beautiful walk you see before you," Carpenter said, waving an expository arm, "shaded by boogil trees from Dschubba, is called Broadway. To your left you will be delighted to see—"
"Listen, could we—" Michael began.
"—Forty-second Street, which is now actually the forty-second—"
"By the way—"
"It is extremely rude and hence illegal," Carpenter glared, "to interrupt anyone who is speaking."
"But I would like," Michael whispered very earnestly, "to get washed. If I might."
The other man frowned. "Let me see. I believe one of the old landmarks was converted into a lavatory. Only thing of suitable dimensions. Anyhow, it was absolutely useless for any other purpose. We have to take a taxi there; it's more than two hundred yards. Custom, you know."
"A taxi? Isn't there one closer?"
"Ah, impatient youth! There aren't too many altogether. The installations are extremely expensive."
They hailed the nearest taxi, which happened to be one of the variety equipped with dancing girls. Fortunately the ride was brief.
Michael gazed at the Empire State Building with interest. It was in a remarkable state of preservation and looked just like the pictures in his history—in his books, except that none of them showed the huge golden sign "Public-Washport" riding on its spire.
Attendants directed traffic from a large circular desk in the lobby.
"Mercurians, seventy-eighth floor. A group Vegans, fourteenth floor right. B group, fourteenth floor left. C group, fifteenth floor right. D group, fifteenth floor left. Sirians, forty-ninth floor. Female humans fiftieth floor right, males, fiftieth floor left. Uranians, basement...."
Carpenter and Michael shared an elevator with a group of sad-eyed, translucent Sirians, who were singing as usual and accompanying themselves on wemps , a cross between a harp and a flute. "Foreign planets are strange and we're subject to mange. Foreign atmospheres prove deleterious. Only with our mind's eye can we sail through the sky to the bright purple swamps of our Sirius."
The cost of the compartment was half that of the feeding station; one credit in the slot unlocked the door. There was an advideo here, too:
"Friend, do you clean yourself each day? Now, let's not be evasive, for each one has his favored way. Some use an abrasive and some use oil. Some shed their skins, in a brand-new hide emerging. Some rub with grease put up in tins. For others there's deterging. Some lick themselves to take off grime. Some beat it off with rope. Some cook it away in boiling lime. Old-fashioned ones use soap. More ways there are than I recall, and each of these will differ, but the only one that works for all is Omniclene from Kiffa."
"And now," smiled Carpenter as the two humans left the building, "we must see you registered for a nice family. Nothing too ostentatious, but, on the other hand, you mustn't count credits and ally yourself beneath your station."
Michael gazed pensively at two slender, snakelike Difdans writhing
"Only 99 Shopping Days Till Christmas" across an aquamarine sky.
"They won't be permanent?" he asked. "The family, I mean?"
"Certainly not. You merely hire them for whatever length of time you choose. But why are you so anxious?"
The young man blushed. "Well, I'm thinking of having a family of my own some day. Pretty soon, as a matter of fact."
Carpenter beamed. "That's nice; you're being adopted! I do hope it's an Earth family that's chosen you—it's so awkward being adopted by extraterrestrials."
"Oh, no! I'm planning to have my own. That is, I've got a—a girl, you see, and I thought after I had secured employment of some kind in Portyork, I'd send for her and we'd get married and...."
" Married! " Carpenter was now completely shocked. "You mustn't use that word! Don't you know marriage was outlawed years ago? Exclusive possession of a member of the opposite sex is slavery on Talitha. Furthermore, supposing somebody else saw your—er—friend and wanted her also; you wouldn't wish him to endure the frustration of not having her, would you?"
Michael squared his jaw. "You bet I would."
Carpenter drew himself away slightly, as if to avoid contamination.
"This is un-Universal. Young man, if I didn't have a kind heart, I would report you."
Michael was too preoccupied to be disturbed by this threat. "You mean if I bring my girl here, I'd have to share her?"
"Certainly. And she'd have to share you. If somebody wanted you, that is."
"Then I'm not staying here," Michael declared firmly, ashamed to admit even to himself how much relief his decision was bringing him. "I don't think I like it, anyhow. I'm going back to the Brotherhood."
There was a short cold silence.
"You know, son," Carpenter finally said, "I think you might be right. I don't want to hurt your feelings—you promise I won't hurt your feelings?" he asked anxiously, afraid, Michael realized, that he might call a policeman for ego injury.
"You won't hurt my feelings, Mr. Carpenter."
"Well, I believe that there are certain individuals who just cannot adapt themselves to civilized behavior patterns. It's much better for them to belong to a Brotherhood such as yours than to be placed in one of the government incarceratoriums, comfortable and commodious though they are."
"Much better," Michael agreed.
"By the way," Carpenter went on, "I realize this is just vulgar curiosity on my part and you have a right to refuse an answer without fear of hurting my feelings, but how do you happen to have a—er—girl when you belong to a Brotherhood?"
Michael laughed. "Oh, 'Brotherhood' is merely a generic term. Both sexes are represented in our society."
"On Talitha—" Carpenter began.
"I know," Michael interrupted him, like the crude primitive he was and always would be. "But our females don't mind being generic."
A group of Sirians was traveling on the shelf above him on the slow, very slow jet bus that was flying Michael back to Angeles, back to the Lodge, back to the Brotherhood, back to her. Their melancholy howling was getting on his nerves, but in a little while, he told himself, it would be all over. He would be back home, safe with his own kind.
"When our minds have grown tired, when our lives have expired, when our sorrows no longer can weary us, let our ashes return, neatly packed in an urn, to the bright purple swamps of our Sirius."
The advideo crackled: "The gown her fairy godmother once gave to Cinderella was created by the haute couture of fashion-wise Capella."
The ancient taxi was there, the one that Michael had taken from the Lodge, early that morning, to the little Angeleno landing field, as if it had been waiting for his return.
"I see you're back, son," the driver said without surprise. He set the noisy old rockets blasting. "I been to Portyork once. It's not a bad place to live in, but I hate to visit it."
"I'm back!" Michael sank into the motheaten sable cushions and gazed with pleasure at the familiar landmarks half seen in the darkness. "I'm back! And a loud sneer to civilization!"
"Better be careful, son," the driver warned. "I know this is a rural area, but civilization is spreading. There are secret police all over. How do you know I ain't a government spy? I could pull you in for insulting civilization."
The elderly black and white advideo flickered, broke into purring sound: "Do you find life continues to daze you? Do you find for a quick death you hanker? Why not try the new style euthanasia, performed by skilled workmen from Ancha?"
Not any more, Michael thought contentedly. He was going home.
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Describe the President's communciations to the public and the reasoning behind his choices
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about The Valley by Richard Stockham.
Relevant chunks:
Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from IF Worlds of Science Fiction June 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
THE VALLEY
By Richard Stockham
Illustrated by Ed Emsh
If you can't find it countless millions of miles in space, come back to Earth. You might find it just on the other side of the fence—where the grass is always greener.
The Ship dove into Earth's sea of atmosphere like a great, silver fish.
Inside the ship, a man and woman stood looking down at the expanse of land that curved away to a growing horizon. They saw the yellow ground cracked like a dried skin; and the polished stone of the mountains and the seas that were shrunken away in the dust. And they saw how the city circled the sea, as a circle of men surround a water hole in a desert under a blazing sun.
The ship's radio cried out. "You've made it! Thank God! You've made it!"
Another voice, shaking, said, "President—Davis is—overwhelmed. He can't go on. On his behalf and on behalf of all the people—with our hope that was almost dead, we greet you." A pause. "Please come in!"
The voice was silent. The air screamed against the hull of the ship.
"I can't tell them," said the man.
"Please come in!" said the radio. "Do you hear me?"
The woman looked up at the man. "You've got to Michael!"
"Two thousand years. From one end of the galaxy to the other. Not one grain of dust we can live on. Just Earth. And it's burned to a cinder."
A note of hysteria stabbed into the radio voice. "Are you all right? Stand by! We're sending a rescue ship."
"They've got a right to know what we've found," said the woman. "They sent us out. They've waited so long—."
He stared into space. "It's hopeless. If we'd found another planet they could live on, they'd do the same as they've done here."
He touched the tiny golden locket that hung around his neck. "Right now, I could press this and scratch myself and the whole farce would be over."
"No. A thousand of us died. You've got to think of them."
"We'll go back out into space," he said. "It's clean out there. I'm tired. Two thousand years of reincarnation."
She spoke softly. "We've been together for a long time. I've loved you. I've asked very little. But I need to stay on Earth. Please, Michael."
He looked at her for a moment. Then he flipped a switch. "Milky Way to Earth. Never mind the rescue ship. We're all right. We're coming in."
The great, white ship settled to Earth that was like a plain after flood waters have drained away.
The man and woman came out into the blazing sunlight.
A shout, like the crashing of a thousand surfs, rose and broke over them. The man and woman descended the gang-plank toward the officials gathered on the platform. They glanced around at the massed field of white faces beneath them; saw those same faces that had been turned toward them two thousand years past; remembered the cheers and the cries that had crashed around them then, as they and the thousand had stood before the towering spires of the ships, before the takeoff.
And, as then, there were no children among the milling, grasping throng. Only the same clutching hands and voices and arms, asking for an answer, a salvation, a happy end.
Now the officials gathered around the man and the woman, and spoke to them in voices of reverence.
A microphone was thrust into Michael's hand with the whispered admonition to tell the people of the great new life waiting for them, open and green and moist, on a virgin planet.
The cries of the people were slipping away and a stillness growing like an ocean calm and, within it, the sound of the pumps, throbbing, sucking the water from the seas.
And then Michael's voice, "The thousand who left with us are dead. For some time we've known the other planets in our solar system were uninhabitable. Now we've been from one end of the galaxy to the other. And this is what we've found.... We were given Earth. There's no place else for us. The rest of the planets in the galaxy were given to others. There's no place else for them. We've all had a chance to make the best of Earth. Instead we've made the worst of it. So we're here to stay—and die." He handed the microphone back.
The silence did not change.
The President grasped Michael's arm. "What're you saying?"
A buzzing rose up from the people like that of a swarm of frightened bees. The sea of white faces swayed and their voices began to cry. The din and motion held, long and drawn out, with a wail now and a fluttering beneath it.
Michael and the woman stood above them in the center of the pale, hovering faces of the officials.
"Good God," said the President. "You've got to tell them what you said isn't true!"
"We've been searching two thousand years for a truth," said Michael.
"A thousand of us have died finding it. I've told it. That's the way it's got to be."
The President swayed, took the microphone in his hands.
"There's been some mistake!" he cried. "Go back to the pumps and the distilleries! Go back to the water vats and the gardens and the flocks! Go back! Work and wait! We'll get the full truth to you. Everything's going to be all right !"
Obediently the mass of faces separated, as though they were being spun away on a whirling disk. Michael and the woman were swallowed up, like pebbles inside a closing hand, and carried away from the great, white ship.
They ushered the man and woman into the beamed and paneled council chambers and sat them in thick chairs before the wall of polished wood desks across which stared the line of faces, silent and waiting. And on a far wall, facing them all, hung a silver screen, fifty feet square.
The President stood. "Members of the council." He paused. "As you heard, they report—complete failure." He turned to Michael. "And now, the proof."
Michael stood beside the motion picture projector, close to his chair. The lights dimmed. There was only the sound of the pumps throbbing in the darkness close and far away, above and beneath and all around. Suddenly on the screen appeared an endless depth of blackness filled with a mass of glowing white, which extended into the room around the watching people, seeming to touch them and then spreading, like an ocean, farther away and out and out into an endless distance.
Now streaks of yellow fire shot into the picture, like a swarm of lightning bugs, the thin sharp nosed shadows of space ships, hurtling, like comets, toward the clustered star smear. And then silent thoughts flashed from the screen into the minds of the spectators; of time passing in months, years and centuries, passing and passing until they themselves seemed to be rushing and rushing into the blackness toward blinding balls of white light, the size of moons.
The dark shapes of smaller spheres circling the blinding ones moved forward into the picture; red, blue, green, yellow, purple and many mixtures of all these, and then one planet filled the screen, seeming to be inflated, like a balloon, into a shining red ball. There was a razor edge of horizon then and pink sky and an expanse of crimson. Flat, yellow creatures lay all around, expanding and contracting. A roaring rose and fell like the roaring of a million winds. Then fear flowed out of the picture into the minds of the watchers so that they gasped and cringed, and a silent voice told them that the atmosphere of this planet would disintegrate a human being.
Now the red ball seemed to pull away from them into the blackness and the blinding balls of light, and all around could be seen the streaks of rocket flame shooting away in all directions.
Suddenly a flash cut the blackness, like the flare of a match, and died, and the watchers caught from the screen the awareness of the death of a ship.
They were also aware of the rushing of time through centuries and they saw the streaking rocket flames and planets rushing at them; saw creatures in squares and circles, in threads wriggling, in lumps and blobs, rolling jumping and crawling; saw them in cloud forms whisking about, changing their shapes, and in flowing wavelets of water. They saw creatures hopping about on one leg and others crawling at incredible speeds on a thousand; saw some with all the numbers of legs and arms in between; and were aware of creatures that were there but invisible.
And those watching the screen on which time and distance were a compressed and distilled kaleidoscope, saw planet after planet and thousands at a time; heard strange noises; rasping and roaring, clinks and whistles, screams and crying, sighing and moaning. And they were aware through all this of atmosphere and ground inimical to man, some that would evaporate at the touch of a human body, or would burst into flame, or swallow, or turn from liquid to solid or solid to liquid. They saw and heard chemical analyses, were aware of this ocean of blackness and clouds of white through which man might move, and must ever move, because he could live only upon this floating dust speck that was Earth.
The picture faded in, close to one of the long, needle nosed crafts, showing inside, a man and a woman. Time was telescoped again while the man cut a tiny piece of scar tissue from his arm and that of the woman, put them in bottles and set them into compartments where solutions dripped rhythmically into the bottles, the temperature was held at that of the human body, and synthetic sunlight focused upon them from many pencil like tubes.
The watchers in the council chamber saw the bits of tissue swell into human embryos in a few seconds, and grow arms and legs and faces and extend themselves into babies. Saw them taken from the bottles and cared for, and become replicas of the man and woman controlling the ship, who, all this time were aging, until life went out of their bodies. Then the ones who had been the scar tissue disintegrated them in the coffin-like tubes and let their dust be sucked out into space—all this through millions of miles and a hundred years, compressed for the watchers into sixty seconds and a few feet of space.
Instantly there was black space on the screen again, with the fingers of flame pointing out behind the dark bodies of the ships.
And then the spectators saw one ship shudder and swerve into a blazing, bluish white star, like a gnat flying into a white hot poker; saw another drop away and away, out and out into the blackness past the swirling white rim of the galaxy, and sink into a dark nothingness.
Great balls of rock showered like hail onto other ships, smashing them into grotesque tin cans. The stream of fire at the tail of another ship suddenly died and the ship floated into an orbit around a great, yellow planet, ten times the size of Jupiter, then was sucked into it. Another burst like a bomb, flinging a man and woman out into the darkness, where they hung suspended, frozen into statues, like bodies drowned in the depths of an Arctic sea.
At this instant from the watching council, there were screams of horror and voices crying out, "Shut it off! Shut it off!" There was a moving about in the darkness. Murmurs and harsh cries of disapproval grew in volume.
Another ship in the picture was split down the side by a meteor and the bodies inside were impaled on jagged blades of steel, the contorted, bloody faces lighted by bursts of flame. And the screams and cries of the spectators rose higher, "Shut it off.... Oh Lord...."
Lights flashed through the room and the picture died.
Michael and Mary, both staring, saw, along the line of desks, the agonized faces, some staring like white stones, others hidden in clutching fingers, as though they had been confronted by a Medusa. There was the sound of heavy breathing that mixed with the throbbing of the pumps. The President held tightly to the edges of his desk to quiet his trembling.
"There—there've been changes," he said, "since you've been out in space. There isn't a person on Earth who's seen a violent death for hundreds of years."
Michael faced him, frowning. "I don't follow you."
"Dying violently happened so seldom on Earth that, after a long time, the sight of it began to drive some people mad. And then one day a man was struck by one of the ground cars and everyone who saw it went insane. Since then we've eliminated accidents, even the idea. Now, no one is aware that death by violence is even a possibility."
"I'm sorry," said Michael, "we've been so close to violent death for so long.... What you've seen is part of the proof you asked for."
"What you showed us was a picture," said the President. "If it had been real, we'd all be insane by now. If it were shown to the people there'd be mass hysteria."
"But even if we'd found another habitable planet, getting to it would involve just what we've shown you. Maybe only a tenth of the people who left Earth, or a hundredth, would ever reach a destination out in space."
"We couldn't tolerate such a possibility," said the President gravely. "We'd have to find a way around it."
The pumps throbbed like giant hearts all through the stillness in the council chambers. The faces along the line of desks were smoothing out; the terror in them was fading away.
"And yet the Earth is almost dead," said Michael quietly, "and you can't bring it back to life."
"The sins of our past, Mr. Nelson," said the President. "The Atomic wars five thousand years ago. And the greed. It was too late a long time ago. That, of course, is why the expedition was sent out. And now you've come back to us with this terrible news." He looked around, slowly, then back to Michael. "Can you give us any hope at all?"
"None."
"Another expedition? To Andromeda perhaps? With you the leader?"
Michael shook his head. "We're finished with expeditions, Mr. President."
There were mutterings in the council, and hastily whispered consultations. Now they were watching the man and woman again.
"We feel," said the President, "it would be dangerous to allow you to go out among the people. They've been informed that your statement wasn't entirely true. This was necessary, to avoid a panic. The people simply must not know the whole truth." He paused. "Now we ask you to keep in mind that whatever we decide about the two of you will be for the good of the people."
Michael and Mary were silent.
"You'll wait outside the council chambers," the President went on,
"until we have reached our decision."
As the man and woman were led away, the pumps beat in the stillness, and at the edge of the shrinking seas the salt thick waters were being pulled into the distilleries, and from them into the tier upon tier of artificial gardens that sat like giant bee hives all around the shoreline; and the mounds of salt glistening in the sunlight behind the gardens were growing into mountains.
In their rooms, Michael and Mary were talking through the hours, and waiting. All around them were fragile, form-fitting chairs and translucent walls and a ceiling that, holding the light of the sun when they had first seen it, was now filled with moonlight.
Standing at a circular window, ten feet in diameter, Michael saw, far below, the lights of the city extending into the darkness along the shoreline of the sea.
"We should have delivered our message by radio," he said, "and gone back into space."
"You could probably still go," she said quietly.
He came and stood beside her. "I couldn't stand being out in space, or anywhere, without you."
She looked up at him. "We could go out into the wilderness, Michael, outside the force walls. We could go far away."
He turned from her. "It's all dead. What would be the use?"
"I came from the Earth," she said quietly. "And I've got to go back to it. Space is so cold and frightening. Steel walls and blackness and the rockets and the little pinpoints of light. It's a prison."
"But to die out there in the desert, in that dust." Then he paused and looked away from her. "We're crazy—talking as though we had a choice."
"Maybe they'll have to give us a choice."
"What're you talking about?"
"They went into hysterics at the sight of those bodies in the picture. Those young bodies that didn't die of old age."
He waited.
"They can't stand the sight of people dying violently."
Her hand went to her throat and touched the tiny locket.
"These lockets were given to us so we'd have a choice between suffering or quick painless death.... We still have a choice."
He touched the locket at his own throat and was very still for a long moment. "So we threaten to kill ourselves, before their eyes. What would it do to them?"
He was still for a long time. "Sometimes, Mary, I think I don't know you at all." A pause. "And so now you and I are back where we started. Which'll it be, space or Earth?"
"Michael." Her voice trembled. "I—I don't know how to say this."
He waited, frowning, watching her intently.
"I'm—going to have a child."
His face went blank.
Then he stepped forward and took her by the shoulders. He saw the softness there in her face; saw her eyes bright as though the sun were shining in them; saw a flush in her cheeks, as though she had been running. And suddenly his throat was full.
"No," he said thickly. "I can't believe it."
"It's true."
He held her for a long time, then he turned his eyes aside.
"Yes, I can see it is."
"I—I can't put into words why I let it happen, Michael."
He shook his head. "I don't know—what to—to say. It's so incredible."
"Maybe—I got so—tired—just seeing the two of us over and over again and the culturing of the scar tissue, for twenty centuries. Maybe that was it. It was just—something I felt I had to do. Some— real life again. Something new. I felt a need to produce something out of myself. It all started way out in space, while we were getting close to the solar system. I began to wonder if we'd ever get out of the ship alive or if we'd ever see a sunset again or a dawn or the night or morning like we'd seen on Earth—so—so long ago. And then I had to let it happen. It was a vague and strange thing. There was something forcing me. But at the same time I wanted it, too. I seemed to be willing it, seemed to be feeling it was a necessary thing." She paused, frowning. "I didn't stop to think—it would be like this."
"Such a thing," he said, smiling grimly, "hasn't happened on Earth for three thousand years. I can remember in school, reading in the history books, how the whole Earth was overcrowded and how the food and water had to be rationed and then how the laws were passed forbidding birth and after that how the people died and there weren't any more babies born, until at last there was plenty of what the Earth had to give, for everyone. And then the news was broken to everyone about the culturing of the scar tissue, and there were a few dissenters but they were soon conditioned out of their dissension and the population was stabilized." He paused. "After all this past history, I don't think the council could endure what you've done."
"No," she said quietly. "I don't think they could."
"And so this will be just for us ." He took her in his arms. "If I remember rightly, this is a traditional action." A pause. "Now I'll go with you out onto the Earth—if we can swing it. When we get outside the city, or if we do—Well, we'll see."
They were very still together and then he turned and stood by the window and looked down upon the city and she came and stood beside him.
They both saw it at the same time. And they watched, without speaking, both knowing what was in the other's mind and heart. They watched the giant four dimensional screens all through the city. A green, lush planet showed bright and clear on them and there were ships standing among the trees and men walking through the grass, that moved gently like the swells on a calm ocean, while into their minds came the thoughts projected from the screen:
"This will be your new home. It was found and then lost. But another expedition will be sent out to find it again. Be of good hope. Everything will be all right."
Michael turned from the window. "So there's our evidence. Two thousand years. All the others killed getting it. And with a simple twist, it becomes a lie."
Mary sat down and buried her face in her hands.
"What a terrible failure there's been here," said Michael. "The neglect and destruction of a whole planet. It's like a family letting their home decay all around them, and living in smaller and smaller rooms of it, until at last the rooms are all gone, and since they can't find another home, they all die in the ruins of the last room."
"I can't face dying," Mary said quietly, "squeezed in with all these people, in this tomb they've made around the seas. I want to have the open sky and the quiet away from those awful pounding pumps when I die. I want the spread of the Earth all around and the clean air. I want to be a real part of the Earth again."
Michael barely nodded in agreement. He was standing very still now.
And then there was the sound of the door opening.
They both rose, like mourners at a funeral, and went into the council chambers.
Again they sat in the thick chairs before the wall of desks with the faces of the council looking across it like defenders.
The pumps were beating, beating all through the room and the quiet.
The President was standing. He faced Michael and Mary, and seemed to set himself as though to deliver a blow, or to receive one.
"Michael and Mary," he said, his voice struggling against a tightness,
"we've considered a long time concerning what is to be done with you and the report you brought back to us from the galaxy." He took another swallow of water. "To protect the sanity of the people, we've changed your report. We've also decided that the people must be protected from the possibility of your spreading the truth, as you did at the landing field. So, for the good of the people, you'll be isolated. All comforts will be given you. After all, in a sense, you are heroes and martyrs. Your scar tissue will be cultured as it has been in the past, and you will stay in solitary confinement until the time when, perhaps, we can migrate to another planet. We feel that hope must not be destroyed. And so another expedition is being sent out. It may be that, in time, on another planet, you'll be able to take your place in our society."
He paused. "Is there anything you wish to say?"
"Yes, there is."
"Proceed."
Michael stared straight at the President. After a long moment, he raised his hand to the tiny locket at his throat.
"Perhaps you remember," he said, "the lockets given to every member of the expedition the night before we left. I still have mine." He raised it. "So does my wife. They were designed to kill the wearer instantly and painlessly if he were ever faced with pain or a terror he couldn't endure."
The President was standing again. A stir ran along the barricade of desks.
"We can't endure the city," went on Michael, "or its life and the ways of the people." He glanced along the line of staring faces.
"If what I think you're about to say is true," said the President in a shaking voice, "it would have been better if you'd never been born."
"Let's face facts, Mr. President. We were born and haven't died—yet." A pause. "And we can kill ourselves right here before your eyes. It'd be painless to us. We'd be unconscious. But there would be horrible convulsions and grimaces. Our bodies would be twisted and torn. They'd thresh about. The deaths you saw in the picture happened a long time ago, in outer space. You all went into hysterics at the sight of them. Our deaths now would be close and terrible to see."
The President staggered as though about to faint. There was a stirring and muttering and a jumping up along the desks. Voices cried out, in anger and fear. Arms waved and fists pounded. Hands clasped and unclasped and clawed at collars, and there was a pell mell rushing around the President. They yelled at each other and clasped each other by the shoulders, turned away and back again, and then suddenly became very still.
Now they began to step down from the raised line of desks, the President leading them, and came close to the man and woman, gathering around them in a wide half circle.
Michael and Mary were holding the lockets close to their throats. The half circle of people, with the President at its center was moving closer and closer. They were sweaty faces and red ones and dry white ones and hands were raised to seize them.
Michael put his arm around Mary's waist. He felt the trembling in her body and the waiting for death.
"Stop!" he said quietly.
They halted, in slight confusion, barely drawing back.
"If you want to see us die—just come a step closer.... And remember what'll happen to you."
The faces began turning to each other and there was an undertone of muttering and whispering. "A ghastly thing.... Instant.... Nothing to do.... Space's broken their minds.... They'll do it.... Eyes're mad.... What can we do?... What?..." The sweaty faces, the cold white ones, the flushed hot ones: all began to turn to the President, who was staring at the two before him like a man watching himself die in a mirror.
"I command you," he suddenly said, in a choked voice, "to—to give me those—lockets! It's your—duty!"
"We've only one duty, Mr. President," said Michael sharply. "To ourselves."
"You're sick. Give yourselves over to us. We'll help you."
"We've made our choice. We want an answer. Quickly! Now!"
The President's body sagged. "What—what is it you want?"
Michael threw the words. "To go beyond the force fields of the city. To go far out onto the Earth and live as long as we can, and then to die a natural death."
The half circle of faces turned to each other and muttered and whispered again. "In the name of God.... Let them go.... Contaminate us.... Like animals.... Get them out of here.... Let them be finished.... Best for us all.... And them...."
There was a turning to the President again and hands thrusting him forward to within one step of Michael and Mary, who were standing there close together, as though attached.
Haltingly he said, "Go. Please go. Out onto the Earth—to die. You will die. The Earth is dead out there. You'll never see the city or your people again."
"We want a ground car," said Michael. "And supplies."
"A ground car," repeated the President. "And—supplies.... Yes."
"You can give us an escort, if you want to, out beyond the first range of mountains."
"There will be no escort," said the President firmly. "No one has been allowed to go out upon the Earth or to fly above it for many hundreds of years. We know it's there. That's enough. We couldn't bear the sight of it." He took a step back. "And we can't bear the sight of you any longer. Go now. Quickly!"
Michael and Mary did not let go of the lockets as they watched the half circle of faces move backward, staring, as though at corpses that should sink to the floor.
It was night. The city had been lost beyond the dead mounds of Earth that rolled away behind them, like a thousand ancient tombs. The ground car sat still on a crumbling road.
Looking up through the car's driving blister, they saw the stars sunk into the blue black ocean of space; saw the path of the Milky Way along which they had rushed, while they had been searching frantically for the place of salvation.
"If any one of the other couples had made it back," said Mary, "do you think they'd be with us?"
"I think they'd either be with us," he said, "or out in space again—or in prison."
She stared ahead along the beam of headlight that stabbed out into the night over the decaying road.
"How sorry are you," she said quietly, "coming with me?"
"All I know is, if I were out in space for long without you, I'd kill myself."
"Are we going to die out here, Michael?" she said, gesturing toward the wall of night that stood at the end of the headlight, "with the land?"
He turned from her, frowning, and drove the ground car forward, watching the headlights push back the darkness.
They followed the crumbling highway all night until light crept across the bald and cracked hills. The morning sun looked down upon the desolation ten feet above the horizon when the car stopped. They sat for a long time then, looking out upon the Earth's parched and inflamed skin. In the distance a wall of mountains rose like a great pile of bleached bones. Close ahead the rolling plains were motionless waves of dead Earth with a slight breeze stirring up little swirls of dust.
"I'm getting out," she said.
"I haven't the slightest idea how much farther to go, or why," said Michael shrugging. "It's all the same. Dirt and hills and mountains and sun and dust. It's really not much different from being out in space. We live in the car just like in a space ship. We've enough concentrated supplies to last for a year. How far do we go? Why? When?"
They stepped upon the Earth and felt the warmth of the sun and strolled toward the top of the hill.
"The air smells clean," he said.
"The ground feels good. I think I'll take off my shoes." She did.
"Take off your boots, Michael. Try it."
Wearily he pulled off his boots, stood in his bare feet. "It takes me back."
"Yes," she said and began walking toward the hilltop.
He followed, his boots slung around his neck. "There was a road somewhere, with the dust between my toes. Or was it a dream?"
"I guess when the past is old enough," she said, "it becomes a dream."
He watched her footprints in the dust. "God, listen to the quiet."
"I can't seem to remember so much quiet around me. There's always been the sound of a space ship, or the pumps back in the cities."
He did not answer but continued to watch her footsteps and to feel the dust squishing up between his toes. Then suddenly:
"Mary!"
She stopped, whirling around.
He was staring down at her feet.
She followed his gaze.
"It's grass!" He bent down. "Three blades."
She knelt beside him. They touched the green blades.
"They're new," he said.
They stared, like religious devotees concentrating upon some sacred object.
He rose, pulling her up with him. They hurried to the top of the hill and stood very still, looking down into a valley. There were tiny patches of green and little trees sprouting, and here and there, a pale flower. The green was in a cluster, in the center of the valley and there was a tiny glint of sunlight in its center.
"Oh!"
Her hand found his.
They ran down the gentle slope, feeling the patches of green touch their feet, smelling a new freshness in the air. And coming to the little spring, they stood beside it and watched the crystal water that trickled along the valley floor and lost itself around a bend. They saw a furry, little animal scurry away and heard the twitter of a bird and saw it resting on a slim, bending branch. They heard the buzz of a bee, saw it light on a pale flower at their feet and work at the sweetness inside.
Mary knelt down and drank from the spring.
"It's so cool. It must come from deep down."
"It does," he said. There were tears in his eyes and a tightness in his throat. "From deep down."
"We can live here, Michael!"
Slowly he looked all around until his sight stopped at the bottom of a hill. "We'll build our house just beyond those rocks. We'll dig and plant and you'll have the child."
"Yes!" she said. "Oh yes!"
"And the ones back in the city will know the Earth again. Sometime we'll lead them back here and show them the Earth is coming alive." He paused. "By following what we had to do for ourselves, we've found a way to save them."
They remained kneeling in the silence beside the pool for a long time. They felt the sun on their backs and looked into the clean depth of the water deeply aware of the new life breathing all around them and of themselves absorbing it, and at the same time giving back to it the life that was their own.
There was only this quiet and breathing and warmth until Michael stood and picked up a rock and walked toward the base of the hill where he had decided to build the house.
... THE END
Question:
Describe the President's communciations to the public and the reasoning behind his choices
Answer:
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"In the earth of the future that is at the center of this story, the society has managed to reduce accidents so much that violent deaths do not happen. This happened because some people reacted with hysterics to witnessing death of this type, so efforts were made to avoid the issue entirely, which had been successful for the past few hundred years. President Davis did not want the public to hear any more details about the expedition after Michael and Mary first addressed everyone. He says that the only reason the public has not lost all sense after seeing some of the footage from the expedition is that it was visual media and stories, but not something people witnessed first-hand for themselves. However, he does not want to expose the people to the violent deaths that the people on the expedition suffered, so he claims that Michael and Mary did not tell the truth, in an effort to save face. The President considers this type of lying to be for the good of the people, who cannot handle the reality of the expedition. He also does not think that the people could handle the loss of hope for another planet to live on, which is why he plays the ad campaigns for a new expediton in a different solar system that aims to eventually find (or rediscover, in his words) another planet for humans to inhabit, perhaps in Andromeda. In this way, the President thinks it is better for his people to have false hope instead of no hope at all. The reader sees the irony in this at the end of the story when Michael and Mary find the patch of life that has started to re-establish itself outside of the boundaries of the city they ventured from. ",
"Michael and Mary return to Earth after 2,000 years only to report the worst news possible: there is no other virgin planet in this galaxy that has the ability to shelter humans. They announce their news to the public, but the President quickly shuts down the conference and brings them inside so they can report their more detailed findings. After showing them the pictures of the various planets, aliens, and demises of their colleagues, they concur once again that Earth is their only home. However, the President lies to the public, releasing a broadcast stating that they found and lost a planet, and another expedition will be sent out shortly to relocate their new home. He claims that his people need hope to keep going, which may be true. After living for thousands of years through reincarnation on barren Earth, his people are desperate for hope and a new planet. Without hope, their entire society would fall apart, as their eventual deaths would become a very real future. ",
"When Michael and Mary land on Earth and report that there are no other habitable planets for humans to move to in the Milky Way galaxy after two thousand years of space exploration, President Davis quickly moves to silence their truth. The President begs Michael to take back what he has said to the people, and when he refuses, the President quickly pivots the message to the public. He declares that there has been a mistake, and tells them that everything will be “all right” and that they should all go back to the pumps and distilleries to work and wait for more information.\nMichael and Mary present deeply disturbing video evidence to the President and council detailing the gruesome deaths of their thousand other peers sent on the mission because of the dangers of space travel. Some died by explosions in meteor fields or getting sucked into the gravity of dangerous planetary bodies. The President knows that the people of Earth have not witnessed the image of a violent death in hundreds of years, and that the last time it was seen all the witnesses went insane. The President quickly denies the video evidence in front of the council, saying that what they showed was only a picture, and if it were screened for the rest of the people on Earth there would be mass hysteria.\nThe President is desperately trying to avoid any hysteria by the public, and fears that if they knew the real truth from Michael and Mary that their society would cease to function entirely. The council ultimately decides that Michael and Mary will never be allowed to mingle with the public on Earth because their truth is too dangerous for people to know. They will be taken care of, and allowed to continue their lives as they have been in solitary confinement. The President informs the public that the statement Michael made was untrue, and quickly begins a new ad campaign of hope in the city by announcing a new mission to explore a different galaxy for habitable planets.\n",
"When Michael and Mary return from space, President Davis is overwhelmed but hopeful that they have discovered a planet suitable for human life. When Michael unceremoniously reveals that the mission was a failure, President Davis immediately ushers them off stage and takes them before a small council, where they show them the visual footage with evidence proving their mission to be a failure along with the violent deaths of the rest of their thousand-person cohort. President Davis explains that the remaining humans have not seen a violent human death in hundreds of years and seeing such footage would surely drive them insane. The council members themselves lash out and insist the footage be turned off when they see it. After convening privately with the council, President Davis informs Michael and Mary that they have scrubbed the violent footage and replaced it with images intended to give the people hope that there is a habitable planet. He also informs them that they will be placed in solitary confinement with all necessities and comforts provided to them as thanks for their service to humankind. He reasons that keeping them away from the rest of the people will help preserve the image of hope he wants to foster amongst the people."
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Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from IF Worlds of Science Fiction June 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
THE VALLEY
By Richard Stockham
Illustrated by Ed Emsh
If you can't find it countless millions of miles in space, come back to Earth. You might find it just on the other side of the fence—where the grass is always greener.
The Ship dove into Earth's sea of atmosphere like a great, silver fish.
Inside the ship, a man and woman stood looking down at the expanse of land that curved away to a growing horizon. They saw the yellow ground cracked like a dried skin; and the polished stone of the mountains and the seas that were shrunken away in the dust. And they saw how the city circled the sea, as a circle of men surround a water hole in a desert under a blazing sun.
The ship's radio cried out. "You've made it! Thank God! You've made it!"
Another voice, shaking, said, "President—Davis is—overwhelmed. He can't go on. On his behalf and on behalf of all the people—with our hope that was almost dead, we greet you." A pause. "Please come in!"
The voice was silent. The air screamed against the hull of the ship.
"I can't tell them," said the man.
"Please come in!" said the radio. "Do you hear me?"
The woman looked up at the man. "You've got to Michael!"
"Two thousand years. From one end of the galaxy to the other. Not one grain of dust we can live on. Just Earth. And it's burned to a cinder."
A note of hysteria stabbed into the radio voice. "Are you all right? Stand by! We're sending a rescue ship."
"They've got a right to know what we've found," said the woman. "They sent us out. They've waited so long—."
He stared into space. "It's hopeless. If we'd found another planet they could live on, they'd do the same as they've done here."
He touched the tiny golden locket that hung around his neck. "Right now, I could press this and scratch myself and the whole farce would be over."
"No. A thousand of us died. You've got to think of them."
"We'll go back out into space," he said. "It's clean out there. I'm tired. Two thousand years of reincarnation."
She spoke softly. "We've been together for a long time. I've loved you. I've asked very little. But I need to stay on Earth. Please, Michael."
He looked at her for a moment. Then he flipped a switch. "Milky Way to Earth. Never mind the rescue ship. We're all right. We're coming in."
The great, white ship settled to Earth that was like a plain after flood waters have drained away.
The man and woman came out into the blazing sunlight.
A shout, like the crashing of a thousand surfs, rose and broke over them. The man and woman descended the gang-plank toward the officials gathered on the platform. They glanced around at the massed field of white faces beneath them; saw those same faces that had been turned toward them two thousand years past; remembered the cheers and the cries that had crashed around them then, as they and the thousand had stood before the towering spires of the ships, before the takeoff.
And, as then, there were no children among the milling, grasping throng. Only the same clutching hands and voices and arms, asking for an answer, a salvation, a happy end.
Now the officials gathered around the man and the woman, and spoke to them in voices of reverence.
A microphone was thrust into Michael's hand with the whispered admonition to tell the people of the great new life waiting for them, open and green and moist, on a virgin planet.
The cries of the people were slipping away and a stillness growing like an ocean calm and, within it, the sound of the pumps, throbbing, sucking the water from the seas.
And then Michael's voice, "The thousand who left with us are dead. For some time we've known the other planets in our solar system were uninhabitable. Now we've been from one end of the galaxy to the other. And this is what we've found.... We were given Earth. There's no place else for us. The rest of the planets in the galaxy were given to others. There's no place else for them. We've all had a chance to make the best of Earth. Instead we've made the worst of it. So we're here to stay—and die." He handed the microphone back.
The silence did not change.
The President grasped Michael's arm. "What're you saying?"
A buzzing rose up from the people like that of a swarm of frightened bees. The sea of white faces swayed and their voices began to cry. The din and motion held, long and drawn out, with a wail now and a fluttering beneath it.
Michael and the woman stood above them in the center of the pale, hovering faces of the officials.
"Good God," said the President. "You've got to tell them what you said isn't true!"
"We've been searching two thousand years for a truth," said Michael.
"A thousand of us have died finding it. I've told it. That's the way it's got to be."
The President swayed, took the microphone in his hands.
"There's been some mistake!" he cried. "Go back to the pumps and the distilleries! Go back to the water vats and the gardens and the flocks! Go back! Work and wait! We'll get the full truth to you. Everything's going to be all right !"
Obediently the mass of faces separated, as though they were being spun away on a whirling disk. Michael and the woman were swallowed up, like pebbles inside a closing hand, and carried away from the great, white ship.
They ushered the man and woman into the beamed and paneled council chambers and sat them in thick chairs before the wall of polished wood desks across which stared the line of faces, silent and waiting. And on a far wall, facing them all, hung a silver screen, fifty feet square.
The President stood. "Members of the council." He paused. "As you heard, they report—complete failure." He turned to Michael. "And now, the proof."
Michael stood beside the motion picture projector, close to his chair. The lights dimmed. There was only the sound of the pumps throbbing in the darkness close and far away, above and beneath and all around. Suddenly on the screen appeared an endless depth of blackness filled with a mass of glowing white, which extended into the room around the watching people, seeming to touch them and then spreading, like an ocean, farther away and out and out into an endless distance.
Now streaks of yellow fire shot into the picture, like a swarm of lightning bugs, the thin sharp nosed shadows of space ships, hurtling, like comets, toward the clustered star smear. And then silent thoughts flashed from the screen into the minds of the spectators; of time passing in months, years and centuries, passing and passing until they themselves seemed to be rushing and rushing into the blackness toward blinding balls of white light, the size of moons.
The dark shapes of smaller spheres circling the blinding ones moved forward into the picture; red, blue, green, yellow, purple and many mixtures of all these, and then one planet filled the screen, seeming to be inflated, like a balloon, into a shining red ball. There was a razor edge of horizon then and pink sky and an expanse of crimson. Flat, yellow creatures lay all around, expanding and contracting. A roaring rose and fell like the roaring of a million winds. Then fear flowed out of the picture into the minds of the watchers so that they gasped and cringed, and a silent voice told them that the atmosphere of this planet would disintegrate a human being.
Now the red ball seemed to pull away from them into the blackness and the blinding balls of light, and all around could be seen the streaks of rocket flame shooting away in all directions.
Suddenly a flash cut the blackness, like the flare of a match, and died, and the watchers caught from the screen the awareness of the death of a ship.
They were also aware of the rushing of time through centuries and they saw the streaking rocket flames and planets rushing at them; saw creatures in squares and circles, in threads wriggling, in lumps and blobs, rolling jumping and crawling; saw them in cloud forms whisking about, changing their shapes, and in flowing wavelets of water. They saw creatures hopping about on one leg and others crawling at incredible speeds on a thousand; saw some with all the numbers of legs and arms in between; and were aware of creatures that were there but invisible.
And those watching the screen on which time and distance were a compressed and distilled kaleidoscope, saw planet after planet and thousands at a time; heard strange noises; rasping and roaring, clinks and whistles, screams and crying, sighing and moaning. And they were aware through all this of atmosphere and ground inimical to man, some that would evaporate at the touch of a human body, or would burst into flame, or swallow, or turn from liquid to solid or solid to liquid. They saw and heard chemical analyses, were aware of this ocean of blackness and clouds of white through which man might move, and must ever move, because he could live only upon this floating dust speck that was Earth.
The picture faded in, close to one of the long, needle nosed crafts, showing inside, a man and a woman. Time was telescoped again while the man cut a tiny piece of scar tissue from his arm and that of the woman, put them in bottles and set them into compartments where solutions dripped rhythmically into the bottles, the temperature was held at that of the human body, and synthetic sunlight focused upon them from many pencil like tubes.
The watchers in the council chamber saw the bits of tissue swell into human embryos in a few seconds, and grow arms and legs and faces and extend themselves into babies. Saw them taken from the bottles and cared for, and become replicas of the man and woman controlling the ship, who, all this time were aging, until life went out of their bodies. Then the ones who had been the scar tissue disintegrated them in the coffin-like tubes and let their dust be sucked out into space—all this through millions of miles and a hundred years, compressed for the watchers into sixty seconds and a few feet of space.
Instantly there was black space on the screen again, with the fingers of flame pointing out behind the dark bodies of the ships.
And then the spectators saw one ship shudder and swerve into a blazing, bluish white star, like a gnat flying into a white hot poker; saw another drop away and away, out and out into the blackness past the swirling white rim of the galaxy, and sink into a dark nothingness.
Great balls of rock showered like hail onto other ships, smashing them into grotesque tin cans. The stream of fire at the tail of another ship suddenly died and the ship floated into an orbit around a great, yellow planet, ten times the size of Jupiter, then was sucked into it. Another burst like a bomb, flinging a man and woman out into the darkness, where they hung suspended, frozen into statues, like bodies drowned in the depths of an Arctic sea.
At this instant from the watching council, there were screams of horror and voices crying out, "Shut it off! Shut it off!" There was a moving about in the darkness. Murmurs and harsh cries of disapproval grew in volume.
Another ship in the picture was split down the side by a meteor and the bodies inside were impaled on jagged blades of steel, the contorted, bloody faces lighted by bursts of flame. And the screams and cries of the spectators rose higher, "Shut it off.... Oh Lord...."
Lights flashed through the room and the picture died.
Michael and Mary, both staring, saw, along the line of desks, the agonized faces, some staring like white stones, others hidden in clutching fingers, as though they had been confronted by a Medusa. There was the sound of heavy breathing that mixed with the throbbing of the pumps. The President held tightly to the edges of his desk to quiet his trembling.
"There—there've been changes," he said, "since you've been out in space. There isn't a person on Earth who's seen a violent death for hundreds of years."
Michael faced him, frowning. "I don't follow you."
"Dying violently happened so seldom on Earth that, after a long time, the sight of it began to drive some people mad. And then one day a man was struck by one of the ground cars and everyone who saw it went insane. Since then we've eliminated accidents, even the idea. Now, no one is aware that death by violence is even a possibility."
"I'm sorry," said Michael, "we've been so close to violent death for so long.... What you've seen is part of the proof you asked for."
"What you showed us was a picture," said the President. "If it had been real, we'd all be insane by now. If it were shown to the people there'd be mass hysteria."
"But even if we'd found another habitable planet, getting to it would involve just what we've shown you. Maybe only a tenth of the people who left Earth, or a hundredth, would ever reach a destination out in space."
"We couldn't tolerate such a possibility," said the President gravely. "We'd have to find a way around it."
The pumps throbbed like giant hearts all through the stillness in the council chambers. The faces along the line of desks were smoothing out; the terror in them was fading away.
"And yet the Earth is almost dead," said Michael quietly, "and you can't bring it back to life."
"The sins of our past, Mr. Nelson," said the President. "The Atomic wars five thousand years ago. And the greed. It was too late a long time ago. That, of course, is why the expedition was sent out. And now you've come back to us with this terrible news." He looked around, slowly, then back to Michael. "Can you give us any hope at all?"
"None."
"Another expedition? To Andromeda perhaps? With you the leader?"
Michael shook his head. "We're finished with expeditions, Mr. President."
There were mutterings in the council, and hastily whispered consultations. Now they were watching the man and woman again.
"We feel," said the President, "it would be dangerous to allow you to go out among the people. They've been informed that your statement wasn't entirely true. This was necessary, to avoid a panic. The people simply must not know the whole truth." He paused. "Now we ask you to keep in mind that whatever we decide about the two of you will be for the good of the people."
Michael and Mary were silent.
"You'll wait outside the council chambers," the President went on,
"until we have reached our decision."
As the man and woman were led away, the pumps beat in the stillness, and at the edge of the shrinking seas the salt thick waters were being pulled into the distilleries, and from them into the tier upon tier of artificial gardens that sat like giant bee hives all around the shoreline; and the mounds of salt glistening in the sunlight behind the gardens were growing into mountains.
In their rooms, Michael and Mary were talking through the hours, and waiting. All around them were fragile, form-fitting chairs and translucent walls and a ceiling that, holding the light of the sun when they had first seen it, was now filled with moonlight.
Standing at a circular window, ten feet in diameter, Michael saw, far below, the lights of the city extending into the darkness along the shoreline of the sea.
"We should have delivered our message by radio," he said, "and gone back into space."
"You could probably still go," she said quietly.
He came and stood beside her. "I couldn't stand being out in space, or anywhere, without you."
She looked up at him. "We could go out into the wilderness, Michael, outside the force walls. We could go far away."
He turned from her. "It's all dead. What would be the use?"
"I came from the Earth," she said quietly. "And I've got to go back to it. Space is so cold and frightening. Steel walls and blackness and the rockets and the little pinpoints of light. It's a prison."
"But to die out there in the desert, in that dust." Then he paused and looked away from her. "We're crazy—talking as though we had a choice."
"Maybe they'll have to give us a choice."
"What're you talking about?"
"They went into hysterics at the sight of those bodies in the picture. Those young bodies that didn't die of old age."
He waited.
"They can't stand the sight of people dying violently."
Her hand went to her throat and touched the tiny locket.
"These lockets were given to us so we'd have a choice between suffering or quick painless death.... We still have a choice."
He touched the locket at his own throat and was very still for a long moment. "So we threaten to kill ourselves, before their eyes. What would it do to them?"
He was still for a long time. "Sometimes, Mary, I think I don't know you at all." A pause. "And so now you and I are back where we started. Which'll it be, space or Earth?"
"Michael." Her voice trembled. "I—I don't know how to say this."
He waited, frowning, watching her intently.
"I'm—going to have a child."
His face went blank.
Then he stepped forward and took her by the shoulders. He saw the softness there in her face; saw her eyes bright as though the sun were shining in them; saw a flush in her cheeks, as though she had been running. And suddenly his throat was full.
"No," he said thickly. "I can't believe it."
"It's true."
He held her for a long time, then he turned his eyes aside.
"Yes, I can see it is."
"I—I can't put into words why I let it happen, Michael."
He shook his head. "I don't know—what to—to say. It's so incredible."
"Maybe—I got so—tired—just seeing the two of us over and over again and the culturing of the scar tissue, for twenty centuries. Maybe that was it. It was just—something I felt I had to do. Some— real life again. Something new. I felt a need to produce something out of myself. It all started way out in space, while we were getting close to the solar system. I began to wonder if we'd ever get out of the ship alive or if we'd ever see a sunset again or a dawn or the night or morning like we'd seen on Earth—so—so long ago. And then I had to let it happen. It was a vague and strange thing. There was something forcing me. But at the same time I wanted it, too. I seemed to be willing it, seemed to be feeling it was a necessary thing." She paused, frowning. "I didn't stop to think—it would be like this."
"Such a thing," he said, smiling grimly, "hasn't happened on Earth for three thousand years. I can remember in school, reading in the history books, how the whole Earth was overcrowded and how the food and water had to be rationed and then how the laws were passed forbidding birth and after that how the people died and there weren't any more babies born, until at last there was plenty of what the Earth had to give, for everyone. And then the news was broken to everyone about the culturing of the scar tissue, and there were a few dissenters but they were soon conditioned out of their dissension and the population was stabilized." He paused. "After all this past history, I don't think the council could endure what you've done."
"No," she said quietly. "I don't think they could."
"And so this will be just for us ." He took her in his arms. "If I remember rightly, this is a traditional action." A pause. "Now I'll go with you out onto the Earth—if we can swing it. When we get outside the city, or if we do—Well, we'll see."
They were very still together and then he turned and stood by the window and looked down upon the city and she came and stood beside him.
They both saw it at the same time. And they watched, without speaking, both knowing what was in the other's mind and heart. They watched the giant four dimensional screens all through the city. A green, lush planet showed bright and clear on them and there were ships standing among the trees and men walking through the grass, that moved gently like the swells on a calm ocean, while into their minds came the thoughts projected from the screen:
"This will be your new home. It was found and then lost. But another expedition will be sent out to find it again. Be of good hope. Everything will be all right."
Michael turned from the window. "So there's our evidence. Two thousand years. All the others killed getting it. And with a simple twist, it becomes a lie."
Mary sat down and buried her face in her hands.
"What a terrible failure there's been here," said Michael. "The neglect and destruction of a whole planet. It's like a family letting their home decay all around them, and living in smaller and smaller rooms of it, until at last the rooms are all gone, and since they can't find another home, they all die in the ruins of the last room."
"I can't face dying," Mary said quietly, "squeezed in with all these people, in this tomb they've made around the seas. I want to have the open sky and the quiet away from those awful pounding pumps when I die. I want the spread of the Earth all around and the clean air. I want to be a real part of the Earth again."
Michael barely nodded in agreement. He was standing very still now.
And then there was the sound of the door opening.
They both rose, like mourners at a funeral, and went into the council chambers.
Again they sat in the thick chairs before the wall of desks with the faces of the council looking across it like defenders.
The pumps were beating, beating all through the room and the quiet.
The President was standing. He faced Michael and Mary, and seemed to set himself as though to deliver a blow, or to receive one.
"Michael and Mary," he said, his voice struggling against a tightness,
"we've considered a long time concerning what is to be done with you and the report you brought back to us from the galaxy." He took another swallow of water. "To protect the sanity of the people, we've changed your report. We've also decided that the people must be protected from the possibility of your spreading the truth, as you did at the landing field. So, for the good of the people, you'll be isolated. All comforts will be given you. After all, in a sense, you are heroes and martyrs. Your scar tissue will be cultured as it has been in the past, and you will stay in solitary confinement until the time when, perhaps, we can migrate to another planet. We feel that hope must not be destroyed. And so another expedition is being sent out. It may be that, in time, on another planet, you'll be able to take your place in our society."
He paused. "Is there anything you wish to say?"
"Yes, there is."
"Proceed."
Michael stared straight at the President. After a long moment, he raised his hand to the tiny locket at his throat.
"Perhaps you remember," he said, "the lockets given to every member of the expedition the night before we left. I still have mine." He raised it. "So does my wife. They were designed to kill the wearer instantly and painlessly if he were ever faced with pain or a terror he couldn't endure."
The President was standing again. A stir ran along the barricade of desks.
"We can't endure the city," went on Michael, "or its life and the ways of the people." He glanced along the line of staring faces.
"If what I think you're about to say is true," said the President in a shaking voice, "it would have been better if you'd never been born."
"Let's face facts, Mr. President. We were born and haven't died—yet." A pause. "And we can kill ourselves right here before your eyes. It'd be painless to us. We'd be unconscious. But there would be horrible convulsions and grimaces. Our bodies would be twisted and torn. They'd thresh about. The deaths you saw in the picture happened a long time ago, in outer space. You all went into hysterics at the sight of them. Our deaths now would be close and terrible to see."
The President staggered as though about to faint. There was a stirring and muttering and a jumping up along the desks. Voices cried out, in anger and fear. Arms waved and fists pounded. Hands clasped and unclasped and clawed at collars, and there was a pell mell rushing around the President. They yelled at each other and clasped each other by the shoulders, turned away and back again, and then suddenly became very still.
Now they began to step down from the raised line of desks, the President leading them, and came close to the man and woman, gathering around them in a wide half circle.
Michael and Mary were holding the lockets close to their throats. The half circle of people, with the President at its center was moving closer and closer. They were sweaty faces and red ones and dry white ones and hands were raised to seize them.
Michael put his arm around Mary's waist. He felt the trembling in her body and the waiting for death.
"Stop!" he said quietly.
They halted, in slight confusion, barely drawing back.
"If you want to see us die—just come a step closer.... And remember what'll happen to you."
The faces began turning to each other and there was an undertone of muttering and whispering. "A ghastly thing.... Instant.... Nothing to do.... Space's broken their minds.... They'll do it.... Eyes're mad.... What can we do?... What?..." The sweaty faces, the cold white ones, the flushed hot ones: all began to turn to the President, who was staring at the two before him like a man watching himself die in a mirror.
"I command you," he suddenly said, in a choked voice, "to—to give me those—lockets! It's your—duty!"
"We've only one duty, Mr. President," said Michael sharply. "To ourselves."
"You're sick. Give yourselves over to us. We'll help you."
"We've made our choice. We want an answer. Quickly! Now!"
The President's body sagged. "What—what is it you want?"
Michael threw the words. "To go beyond the force fields of the city. To go far out onto the Earth and live as long as we can, and then to die a natural death."
The half circle of faces turned to each other and muttered and whispered again. "In the name of God.... Let them go.... Contaminate us.... Like animals.... Get them out of here.... Let them be finished.... Best for us all.... And them...."
There was a turning to the President again and hands thrusting him forward to within one step of Michael and Mary, who were standing there close together, as though attached.
Haltingly he said, "Go. Please go. Out onto the Earth—to die. You will die. The Earth is dead out there. You'll never see the city or your people again."
"We want a ground car," said Michael. "And supplies."
"A ground car," repeated the President. "And—supplies.... Yes."
"You can give us an escort, if you want to, out beyond the first range of mountains."
"There will be no escort," said the President firmly. "No one has been allowed to go out upon the Earth or to fly above it for many hundreds of years. We know it's there. That's enough. We couldn't bear the sight of it." He took a step back. "And we can't bear the sight of you any longer. Go now. Quickly!"
Michael and Mary did not let go of the lockets as they watched the half circle of faces move backward, staring, as though at corpses that should sink to the floor.
It was night. The city had been lost beyond the dead mounds of Earth that rolled away behind them, like a thousand ancient tombs. The ground car sat still on a crumbling road.
Looking up through the car's driving blister, they saw the stars sunk into the blue black ocean of space; saw the path of the Milky Way along which they had rushed, while they had been searching frantically for the place of salvation.
"If any one of the other couples had made it back," said Mary, "do you think they'd be with us?"
"I think they'd either be with us," he said, "or out in space again—or in prison."
She stared ahead along the beam of headlight that stabbed out into the night over the decaying road.
"How sorry are you," she said quietly, "coming with me?"
"All I know is, if I were out in space for long without you, I'd kill myself."
"Are we going to die out here, Michael?" she said, gesturing toward the wall of night that stood at the end of the headlight, "with the land?"
He turned from her, frowning, and drove the ground car forward, watching the headlights push back the darkness.
They followed the crumbling highway all night until light crept across the bald and cracked hills. The morning sun looked down upon the desolation ten feet above the horizon when the car stopped. They sat for a long time then, looking out upon the Earth's parched and inflamed skin. In the distance a wall of mountains rose like a great pile of bleached bones. Close ahead the rolling plains were motionless waves of dead Earth with a slight breeze stirring up little swirls of dust.
"I'm getting out," she said.
"I haven't the slightest idea how much farther to go, or why," said Michael shrugging. "It's all the same. Dirt and hills and mountains and sun and dust. It's really not much different from being out in space. We live in the car just like in a space ship. We've enough concentrated supplies to last for a year. How far do we go? Why? When?"
They stepped upon the Earth and felt the warmth of the sun and strolled toward the top of the hill.
"The air smells clean," he said.
"The ground feels good. I think I'll take off my shoes." She did.
"Take off your boots, Michael. Try it."
Wearily he pulled off his boots, stood in his bare feet. "It takes me back."
"Yes," she said and began walking toward the hilltop.
He followed, his boots slung around his neck. "There was a road somewhere, with the dust between my toes. Or was it a dream?"
"I guess when the past is old enough," she said, "it becomes a dream."
He watched her footprints in the dust. "God, listen to the quiet."
"I can't seem to remember so much quiet around me. There's always been the sound of a space ship, or the pumps back in the cities."
He did not answer but continued to watch her footsteps and to feel the dust squishing up between his toes. Then suddenly:
"Mary!"
She stopped, whirling around.
He was staring down at her feet.
She followed his gaze.
"It's grass!" He bent down. "Three blades."
She knelt beside him. They touched the green blades.
"They're new," he said.
They stared, like religious devotees concentrating upon some sacred object.
He rose, pulling her up with him. They hurried to the top of the hill and stood very still, looking down into a valley. There were tiny patches of green and little trees sprouting, and here and there, a pale flower. The green was in a cluster, in the center of the valley and there was a tiny glint of sunlight in its center.
"Oh!"
Her hand found his.
They ran down the gentle slope, feeling the patches of green touch their feet, smelling a new freshness in the air. And coming to the little spring, they stood beside it and watched the crystal water that trickled along the valley floor and lost itself around a bend. They saw a furry, little animal scurry away and heard the twitter of a bird and saw it resting on a slim, bending branch. They heard the buzz of a bee, saw it light on a pale flower at their feet and work at the sweetness inside.
Mary knelt down and drank from the spring.
"It's so cool. It must come from deep down."
"It does," he said. There were tears in his eyes and a tightness in his throat. "From deep down."
"We can live here, Michael!"
Slowly he looked all around until his sight stopped at the bottom of a hill. "We'll build our house just beyond those rocks. We'll dig and plant and you'll have the child."
"Yes!" she said. "Oh yes!"
"And the ones back in the city will know the Earth again. Sometime we'll lead them back here and show them the Earth is coming alive." He paused. "By following what we had to do for ourselves, we've found a way to save them."
They remained kneeling in the silence beside the pool for a long time. They felt the sun on their backs and looked into the clean depth of the water deeply aware of the new life breathing all around them and of themselves absorbing it, and at the same time giving back to it the life that was their own.
There was only this quiet and breathing and warmth until Michael stood and picked up a rock and walked toward the base of the hill where he had decided to build the house.
... THE END
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Describe the different expectations about women
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about The Girls From Earth by Frank M. Robinson.
Relevant chunks:
THE GIRLS FROM EARTH
By FRANK M. ROBINSON
Illustrated by EMSH
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction January 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Problem: How can you arrange marriages with men in one solar system, women in another—and neither willing to leave his own world?
I
"The beasts aren't much help, are they?"
Karl Allen snatched a breath of air and gave another heave on the line tied to the raft of parampa logs bobbing in the middle of the river.
"No," he grunted, "they're not. They always balk at a time like this, when they can see it'll be hard work."
Joseph Hill wiped his plump face and coiled some of the rope's slack around his thick waist.
"Together now, Karl. One! Two! "
They stood knee-deep in mud on the bank, pulling and straining on the rope, while some few yards distant, in the shade of a grove of trees, their tiny yllumphs nibbled grass and watched them critically, but made no effort to come closer.
"If we're late for ship's landing, Joe, we'll get crossed off the list."
Hill puffed and wheezed and took another hitch on the rope.
"That's what I've been thinking about," he said, worried.
They took a deep breath and hauled mightily on the raft rope. The raft bobbed nearer. For a moment the swift waters of the Karazoo threatened to tear it out of their grasp, and then it was beached, most of it solidly, on the muddy bank. One end of it still lay in the gurgling, rushing waters, but that didn't matter. They'd be back in ten hours or so, long before the heavy raft could be washed free.
"How much time have we got, Karl?"
The ground was thick with shadows, and Karl cast a critical eye at them. He estimated that even with the refusal of their yllumphs to help beach the raft, they still had a good two hours before the rocket put down at Landing City.
"Two hours, maybe a little more," he stated hastily when Hill looked more worried. "Time enough to get to Landing City and put in for our numbers on the list."
He turned back to the raft, untied the leather and horn saddles, and threw them over the backs of their reluctant mounts. He cinched his saddle and tied on some robes and furs behind it.
Hill watched him curiously. "What are you taking the furs for? This isn't the trading rocket."
"I know. I thought that when we come back tonight, it might be cold and maybe she'll appreciate the coverings then."
"You never would have thought of it yourself," Hill grunted. "Grundy must have told you to do it, the old fool. If you ask me, the less you give them, the less they'll come to expect. Once you spoil them, they'll expect you to do all the trapping and the farming and the family-raising yourself."
"You didn't have to sign up," Karl pointed out. "You could have applied for a wife from some different planet."
"One's probably just as good as another. They'll all have to work the farms and raise families."
Karl laughed and aimed a friendly blow at Hill. They finished saddling up and headed into the thick forest.
It was quiet as Karl guided his mount along the dimly marked trail and he caught himself thinking of the return trip he would be making that night. It would be nice to have somebody new to talk to. And it would be good to have somebody to help with the trapping and tanning, somebody who could tend the small vegetable garden at the rear of his shack and mend his socks and wash his clothes and cook his meals.
And it was time, he thought soberly, that he started to raise a family. He was mid-twenty now, old enough to want a wife and children.
"You going to raise a litter, Joe?"
Hill started. Karl realized that he had probably been thinking of the same thing.
"One of these days I'll need help around the sawmill," Hill answered defensively. "Need some kids to cut the trees, a couple more to pole them down the river, some to run the mill itself and maybe one to sell the lumber in Landing City. Can't do it all myself."
He paused a moment, thinking over something that had just occurred to him.
"I've been thinking of your plans for a garden, Karl. Maybe I ought to have one for my wife to take care of, too."
Karl chuckled. "I don't think she'll have the time!"
They left the leafy expanse of the forest and entered the grasslands that sloped toward Landing City. He could even see Landing City itself on the horizon, a smudge of rusting, corrugated steel shacks, muddy streets, and the small rocket port—a scorched thirty acres or so fenced off with barbed wire.
Karl looked out of the corner of his eye at Hill and felt a vague wave of uneasiness. Hill was a big, thick man wearing the soiled clothes and bristly stubble of a man who was used to living alone and who liked it. But once he took a wife, he would probably have to keep himself in clean clothes and shave every few days. It was even possible that the woman might object to Hill letting his yllumph share the hut.
The path was getting crowded, more of the colonists coming onto the main path from the small side trails.
Hill broke the silence first. "I wonder what they'll be like."
Karl looked wise and nodded knowingly. "They're Earthwomen, Joe. Earth! "
It was easy to act as though he had some inside information, but Karl had to admit to himself that he actually knew very little about it. He was a Second System colonist and had never even seen an Earthwoman. He had heard tales, though, and even discounting a large percentage of them, some of them must have been true. Old Grundy at the rocket office, who should know about these things if anybody did, seemed disturbingly lacking on definite information, though he had hinted broadly enough. He'd whistle softly and wink an eye and repeat the stories that Karl had already heard; but he had nothing definite to offer, no real facts at all.
Some of the other colonists whom they hadn't seen for the last few months shouted greetings, and Karl began to feel some of the carnival spirit. There was Jenkins, who had another trapping line fifty miles farther up the Karazoo; Leonard, who had the biggest farm on Midplanet; and then the fellow who specialized in catching and breaking in yllumphs, whose name Karl couldn't remember.
"They say they're good workers," Hill said.
Karl nodded. "Pretty, too."
They threaded their way through the crowded and muddy streets. Landing City wasn't big, compared to some of the cities on Altair, where he had been raised, but Karl was proud of it. Some day it would be as big as any city on any planet—maybe even have a population of ten thousand people or more.
"Joe," Karl said suddenly, "what's supposed to make women from Earth better than women from any other world?"
Hill located a faint itch and frowned. "I don't know, Karl. It's hard to say. They're—well, sophisticated, glamorous."
Karl absorbed this in silence. Those particular qualities were, he thought, rather hard to define.
The battered shack that served as rocket port office and headquarters for the colonial office on Midplanet loomed up in front of them. There was a crowd gathered in front of the building and they forced their way through to see what had caused it.
"We saw this the last time we were here," Hill said.
"I know," Karl agreed, "but I want to take another look." He was anxious to glean all the information that he could.
It was a poster of a beautiful woman leaning toward the viewer. The edges of the poster were curling and the colors had faded during the last six months, but the girl's smile seemed just as inviting as ever. She held a long-stemmed goblet in one hand and was blowing a kiss to her audience with the other. Her green eyes sparkled, her smile was provocative. A quoted sentence read: "I'm from Earth !" There was nothing more except a printed list of the different solar systems to which the colonial office was sending the women.
She was real pretty, Karl thought. A little on the thin side, maybe, and the dress she was wearing would hardly be practical on Midplanet, but she had a certain something. Glamour, maybe?
A loudspeaker blared.
"All colonists waiting for the wife draft assemble for your numbers! All colonists...."
There was a jostling for places and then they were in the rapidly moving line. Grundy, fat and important-looking, was handing out little blue slips with numbers on them, pausing every now and then to tell them some entertaining bit of information about the women. He had a great imagination, nothing else.
Karl drew the number 53 and hurried to the grassy lot beside the landing field that had been decorated with bunting and huge welcome signs for the new arrivals. A table was loaded with government pamphlets meant to be helpful to newly married colonists. Karl went over and stuffed a few in his pockets. Other tables had been set out and were loaded with luncheon food, fixed by the few colonial women in the community. Karl caught himself eyeing the women closely, wondering how the girls from Earth would compare with them.
He fingered the ticket in his pocket. What would the woman be like who had drawn the companion number 53 aboard the rocket? For when it landed, they would pair up by numbers. The method had its drawbacks, of course, but time was much too short to allow even a few days of getting acquainted. He'd have to get back to his trapping lines and he imagined that Hill would have to get back to his sawmill and the others to their farms. What the hell, you never knew what you were getting either way, till it was too late.
"Sandwich, mister? Pop?"
Karl flipped the boy a coin, picked up some food and a drink, and wandered over to the landing field with Hill. There were still ten minutes or so to go before the rocket landed, but he caught himself straining his sight at the blue sky, trying to see a telltale flicker of exhaust flame.
The field was crowded and he caught some of the buzzing conversation.
"... never knew one myself, but let me tell you...."
"... knew a fellow once who married one, never had a moment's rest afterward...."
"... no comparison with colonial women. They got culture...."
"... I'd give a lot to know the girl who's got number twenty-five...."
"Let's meet back here with the girls who have picked our numbers," Hill said. "Maybe we could trade."
Karl nodded, though privately he felt that the number system was just as good as depending on first impressions.
There was a murmur from the crowd and he found his gaze riveted overhead. High above, in the misty blue sky, was a sudden twinkle of fire.
He reached up and wiped his sweaty face with a muddy hand and brushed aside a straggly lock of tangled hair. It wouldn't hurt to try to look his best.
The twinkling fire came nearer.
II
"A Mr. Macdonald to see you, Mr. Escher."
Claude Escher flipped the intercom switch.
"Please send him right in."
That was entirely superfluous, he thought, because MacDonald would come in whether Escher wanted him to or not.
The door opened and shut with a slightly harder bang than usual and Escher mentally braced himself. He had a good hunch what the problem was going to be and why it was being thrown in their laps.
MacDonald made himself comfortable and sat there for a few minutes, just looking grim and not saying anything. Escher knew the psychology by heart. A short preliminary silence is always more effective in browbeating subordinates than an initial furious bluster.
He lit a cigarette and tried to outwait MacDonald. It wasn't easy—MacDonald had great staying powers, which was probably why he was the head of the department.
Escher gave in first. "Okay, Mac, what's the trouble? What do we have tossed in our laps now?"
"You know the one—colonization problem. You know that when we first started to colonize, quite a large percentage of the male population took to the stars, as the saying goes. The adventuresome, the gamblers, the frontier type all decided they wanted to head for other worlds, to get away from it all. The male of the species is far more adventuresome than the female; the men left—but the women didn't. At least, not in nearly the same large numbers.
"Well, you see the problem. The ratio of women to men here on Earth is now something like five to three. If you don't know what that means, ask any man with a daughter. Or any psychiatrist. Husband-hunting isn't just a pleasant pastime on Earth. It's an earnest cutthroat business and I'm not just using a literary phrase."
He threw a paper on Escher's desk. "You'll find most of the statistics about it in that, Claude. Notice the increase in crimes peculiar to women. Shoplifting, badger games, poisonings, that kind of thing. It's quite a list. You'll also notice the huge increase in petty crimes, a lot of which wouldn't have bothered the courts before. In fact, they wouldn't even have been considered crimes. You know why they are now?"
Escher shook his head blankly.
"Most of the girls in the past who didn't catch a husband," MacDonald continued, "grew up to be the type of old maid who's dedicated to improving the morals and what-not of the rest of the population. We've got more puritanical societies now than we ever had, and we have more silly little laws on the books as a result. You can be thrown in the pokey for things like violating a woman's privacy—whatever that means—and she's the one who decides whether what you say or do is a violation or not."
Escher looked bored. "Not to mention the new prohibition which forbids the use of alcohol in everything from cough medicines to hair tonics. Or the cleaned up moral code that reeks—if you'll pardon the expression—of purity. Sure, I know what you mean. And you know the solution. All we have to do is get the women to colonize."
MacDonald ran his fingers nervously through his hair.
"But it won't be easy, and that's why it's been given to us. It's your baby, Claude. Give it a lot of thought. Nothing's impossible, you know."
"Perpetual motion machines are," Escher said quietly. "And pulling yourself up by your boot-straps. But I get the point. Nevertheless, women just don't want to colonize. And who can blame them? Why should they give up living in a luxury civilization, with as many modern conveniences as this one, to go homesteading on some wild, unexplored planet where they have to work their fingers to the bone and play footsie with wild animals and savages who would just as soon skin them alive as not?"
"What do you advise I do, then?" MacDonald demanded. "Go back to the Board and tell them the problem is not solvable, that we can't think of anything?"
Escher looked hurt. "Did I say that? I just said it wouldn't be easy."
"The Board is giving you a blank check. Do anything you think will pay off. We have to stay within the letter of the law, of course, but not necessarily the spirit."
"When do they have to have a solution?"
"As soon as possible. At least within the year. By that time the situation will be very serious. The psychologists say that what will happen then won't be good."
"All right, by then we'll have the answer."
MacDonald stopped at the door. "There's another reason why they want it worked out. The number of men applying to the Colonization Board for emigration to the colony planets is falling off."
"How come?"
MacDonald smiled. "On the basis of statistics alone, would you want to emigrate from a planet where the women outnumber the men five to three?"
When MacDonald had gone, Escher settled back in his chair and idly tapped his fingers on the desk-top. It was lucky that the Colonization Board worked on two levels. One was the well-publicized, idealistic level where nothing was too good and every deal was 99 and 44/100 per cent pure. But when things got too difficult for it to handle on that level, they went to Escher and MacDonald's department. The coal mine level. Nothing was too low, so long as it worked. Of course, if it didn't work, you took the lumps, too.
He rummaged around in his drawer and found a list of the qualifications set up by the Board for potential colonists. He read the list slowly and frowned. You had to be physically fit for the rigors of space travel, naturally, but some of the qualifications were obviously silly. You couldn't guarantee physical perfection in the second generation, anyway.
He tore the qualification list in shreds and dropped it in the disposal chute. That would have to be the first to go.
There were other things that could be done immediately. For one thing, as it stood now, you were supposed to be financially able to colonize. Obviously a stupid and unappealing law. That would have to go next.
He picked up the sheet of statistics that MacDonald had left and read it carefully. The Board could legalize polygamy, but that was no solution in the long run. Probably cause more problems than it would solve. Even with women as easy to handle as they were nowadays, one was still enough.
Which still left him with the main problem of how to get people to colonize who didn't want to colonize.
The first point was to convince them that they wanted to. The second point was that it might not matter whether they wanted to or not.
No, it shouldn't be hard to solve at all—provided you held your nose, silenced your conscience, and were willing to forget that there was such a thing as a moral code.
III
Phyllis Hanson put the cover over her typewriter and locked the correspondence drawer. Another day was done, another evening about to begin.
She filed into the washroom with the other girls and carefully redid her face. It was getting hard to disguise the worry lines, to paint away the faint crow's-feet around her eyes.
She wasn't, she admitted to herself for the thousandth time, what you would call beautiful. She inspected herself carefully in her compact mirror. In a sudden flash of honesty, she had to admit that she wasn't even what you would call pretty. Her face was too broad, her nose a fraction too long, and her hair was dull. Not homely, exactly—but not pretty, either.
Conversation hummed around her, most of it from the little group in the corner, where the extreme few who were married sat as practically a race apart. Their advice was sought, their suggestions avidly followed.
"Going out tonight, Phyl?"
She hesitated a moment, then slowly painted on the rest of her mouth. The question was technically a privacy violator, but she thought she would sidestep it this time, instead of refusing to answer point-blank.
"I thought I'd stay home tonight. Have a few things I want to rinse out."
The black-haired girl next to her nodded sympathetically. "Sure, Phyl, I know what you mean. Just like the rest of us—waiting for the phone to ring."
Phyllis finished washing up and then left the office, carefully noting the girl who was waiting for the boss. The girl was beautiful in a hard sort of way, a platinum blonde with an entertainer's busty figure. Waiting for a plump, middle-aged man like a stagestruck kid outside a theatre.
At home, in her small two-room bachelor-girl apartment, she stripped and took a hot, sudsing shower, then stepped out and toweled herself in front of a mirror. She frowned slightly. You didn't know whether you should keep yourself in trim just on some off-chance, or give up and let yourself go.
She fixed dinner, took a moderately long time doing the dishes, and went through the standard routine of getting a book and curling up on the sofa. It was a good book of the boot-legged variety—scientifically written with enough surplus heroes and heroines and lushly described love affairs to hold anybody's interest.
It held hers for ten pages and then she threw the book across the room, getting a savage delight at the way the pages ripped and fluttered to the floor.
What was the use of kidding herself any longer, of trying to live vicariously and hoping that some day she would have a home and a husband? She was thirty now; the phone hadn't rung in the last three years. She might as well spend this evening as she had spent so many others—call up the girls for a bridge game and a little gossip, though heaven knew you always ended up envying the people you were gossiping about.
Perhaps she should have joined one of the organizations at the office that did something like that seven nights out of every seven. A bridge game or a benefit for some school or a talk on art. Or she could have joined the Lecture of the Week club, or the YWCA, or any one of the other government-sponsored clubs designed to fill the void in a woman's life.
But bridge games and benefits and lectures didn't take the place of a husband and family. She was kidding herself again.
She got up and retrieved the battered book, then went over to the mail slot. She hadn't had time to open her mail that morning; most of the time it wasn't worth the effort. Advertisements for book clubs, lecture clubs, how to win at bridge and canasta....
Her fingers sprang the metal tabs on a large envelope and she took out the contents and spread it wide.
She gasped. It was a large poster, about a yard square. A man was on it, straddling a tiny city and a small panorama of farms and forests at his feet. He was a handsome specimen, with wavy blond hair and blue eyes and a curly mat on his bare chest that was just enough to be attractive without being apelike. He held an axe in his hands and was eyeing her with a clearly inviting look of brazen self-confidence.
It was definitely a privacy violator and she should notify the authorities immediately!
Bright lettering at the top of the poster shrieked: "Come to the Colonies, the Planets of Romance!"
Whoever had mailed it should be arrested and imprisoned! Preying on....
The smaller print at the bottom was mostly full of facts and figures. The need for women out on the colony planets, the percentage of men to women—a startling disproportion—the comfortable cities that weren't nearly as primitive as people had imagined, and the recently reduced qualifications.
She caught herself admiring the man on the poster. Naturally, it was an artist's conception, but even so....
And the cities were far in advance of the frontier settlements, where you had to battle disease and dirty savages.
It was all a dream. She had never done anything like this and she wouldn't think of doing it now. And had any of her friends seen the poster? Of course, they probably wouldn't tell her even if they had.
But the poster was a violation of privacy. Whoever had sent it had taken advantage of information that was none of their business. It was up to her to notify the authorities!
She took another look at the poster.
The letter she finally finished writing was very short. She addressed it to the box number in the upper left-hand corner of the plain wrapper that the poster had come in.
IV
The dress lay on the counter, a small corner of it trailing off the edge. It was a beautiful thing, sheer sheen satin trimmed in gold nylon thread. It was the kind of gown that would make anybody who wore it look beautiful. The price was high, much too high for her to pay. She knew she would never be able to buy it.
But she didn't intend to buy it.
She looked casually around and noted that nobody was watching her. There was another woman a few counters down and a man, obviously embarrassed, at the lingerie counter. Nobody else was in sight. It was a perfect time. The clerk had left to look up a difficult item that she had purposely asked for and probably wouldn't be back for five minutes.
Time enough, at any rate.
The dress was lying loose, so she didn't have to pry it off any hangers. She took another quick look around, then hurriedly bundled it up and dropped it in her shopping bag.
She had taken two self-assured steps away from the counter when she felt a hand on her shoulder. The grip was firm and muscular and she knew she had lost the game. She also knew that she had to play it out to the end, to grasp any straw.
"Let go of me!" she ordered in a frostily offended voice.
"Sorry, miss," the man said politely, "but I think we have a short trip to take."
She thought for a moment of brazening it out further and then gave up. She'd get a few weeks or months in the local detention building, a probing into her background for the psychological reasons that prompted her to steal, and then she'd be out again.
They couldn't do anything to her that mattered.
She shrugged and followed the detective calmly. None of the shoppers had looked up. None seemed to notice anything out of the ordinary.
In the detention building she thanked her good luck that she was facing a man for the sentence, instead of one of the puritanical old biddies who served on the bench. She even found a certain satisfaction in the presence of the cigar smoke and the blunt, earthy language that floated in from the corridor.
"Why did you steal it?" the judge asked. He held up the dress, which, she noted furiously, didn't look nearly as nice as it had under the department store lights.
"I don't have anything to say," she said. "I want to see a lawyer."
She could imagine what he was thinking. Another tough one, another plain jane who was shoplifting for a thrill.
And she probably was. You had to do something nowadays. You couldn't just sit home and chew your fingernails, or run out and listen to the endless boring lectures on art and culture.
"Name?" he asked in a tired voice.
She knew the statistics he wanted. "Ruby Johnson, 32, 145 pounds, brown hair and green eyes. Prints on file."
The judge leaned down and mentioned something to the bailiff, who left and presently came back with a ledger. The judge opened it and ran his fingers down one of the pages.
The sentence would probably be the usual, she thought—six months and a fine, or perhaps a little more when they found out she had a record for shoplifting.
A stranger in the courtroom in the official linens of the government suddenly stepped up beside the judge and looked at the page. She could hear a little of what he said:
"... anxiety neurosis ... obvious feeling of not being wanted ... probably steals to attract attention ... recommend emigration."
"In view of some complicating factors, we're going to give you a choice," the judge finally said. "You can either go to the penitentiary for ten years and pay a $10,000 fine, or you can ship out to the colony planets and receive a five-hundred-dollar immigration bonus."
She thought for a minute that she hadn't heard right. Ten thousand dollars and ten years! It was obvious that the state was interested in neither the fine nor in paying her room and board for ten years. She could recognize a squeeze play when she saw it, but there was nothing she could do about it.
"I wouldn't call that a choice," she said sourly. "I'll ship out."
V
Suzanne was proud of the apartment. It had all the modern conveniences, like the needle shower with the perfume dispenser, the built-in soft-drink bar in the library, the all-communications set, and the electrical massager. It was a nice, comfortable setup, an illusion of security in an ever-changing world.
She lit a cigarette and chuckled. Mrs. Burger, the fat old landlady, thought she kept up the apartment by working as a buyer for one of the downtown stores.
Well, maybe some day she would.
But not today. And not tonight.
The phone rang and she answered in a casual tone. She talked for a minute, then let a trace of sultriness creep into her voice. The conversation wasn't long.
She let the receiver fall back on the base and went into the bedroom to get a hat box. She wouldn't need much; she'd probably be back that same night.
It was a nice night and since the address was only a few blocks away, she decided to walk it. She blithely ignored the curious stares from other pedestrians, attracted by the sharp, clicking sound of her heels on the sidewalk.
The address was a brownstone that looked more like an office building than anything else, but then you could never tell. She pressed the buzzer and waited a moment for the sound to echo back and forth on the inside. She pressed it again and a moment later a suave young man appeared in the doorway.
"Miss Carstens?"
She smiled pertly.
"We've been expecting you."
She wondered a little at the "we," but dutifully smiled and followed him in.
The glare of the lights inside the office blinded her for a moment. When she could focus them again, her smile became slightly blurry at the edges and then disappeared entirely. She wasn't alone. There was a battery of chairs against one side of the room. She recognized most of the girls sitting in them.
She forced a smile to her lips and tried to laugh.
"I'm sure there's been some mistake! Why, I never...."
The young man coughed politely. "I'm afraid there's been no mistake. Full name, please."
"Suzanne Carstens," she said grimly, and gave the other statistics he wanted. She idly wondered what stoolie had peddled the phone numbers.
"Suzanne Carstens," the young man noted, and slowly shook his head.
"A very pretty name, but no doubt not your own. It actually doesn't matter, though. Take a seat over there."
She did as he asked and he faced the entire group.
"I and the other gentlemen here represent the Colonization Board. We've interceded with the local authorities in order to offer you a choice. We would like to ship you out to the colony planets. Naturally, we will pay you the standard emigration bonus of five hundred dollars. The colonists need wives; they offer you—security."
He stressed the word slightly.
"Now, of course, if you don't prefer the colony planets, you can stay behind and face the penalties of ten years in jail and a fine of ten thousand dollars."
Suzanne felt that her lower jaw needed support. Ten thousand dollars and ten years! And in either case she'd lose the apartment she had worked so hard for, her symbol of security.
"Well, what do you say?" There was a dead silence. The young man from the Colonization Board turned to Suzanne. "How about you, Miss Carstens?"
She smiled sickly and nodded her head. "I love to travel!" she said.
It didn't sound at all witty even to herself.
Question:
Describe the different expectations about women
Answer:
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"First, Joe takes some furs that could help cover the girl, and Joe hopes that she will appreciate it. However, Hill believes that they should give less to the girls. Because the less you give, the less they will expect, and if they are spoiled, the men has to do all the farming and family raising yourself, which is all that they have to do. Joe thought of the girl as somebody he can talk to, somebody that can help him with the farm. Hill suggests for his wife to have a garden, but Karl doesn’t think she will have the time for a garden. However, it is important to note that the girls were considered as objects since Karl and Joe mentions trading them. In particular, Earthwomen are expected to be beautiful, sophisticated, glamorous, and hardworking. Moreover, Escher is thinking about persuading and forcing the girls to colonize while forgetting about the moral codes. The governments seems to expect the women without husbands to be satisfied with bridge games and benefits and lectures. ",
"The few women that were on the colonized planet where Karl and Joseph lived were expected to cook the food that was being served as part of the welcoming party for the wife draft. On Earth, the expectations for women are to find a husband. Phyliss is 30 years old and details her frustration with not being married at her age, complaining that nothing else can fill the emptiness that she feels from not having a husband. ",
"In the story, the women are expected to find husbands. This is especially apparent on Earth, where locking down a man has become an intense competition because of the five to three ratio between women and men. Furthermore, the Earthwomen are expected to be more sophisticated, cultured, prettier, and glamorous than the colonial women. These women are also expected to fulfill the traditional roles of raising families, helping colonize the planet, and supporting their husbands with whatever they need help with. The decision to send the women to the colonies is also made by men. On the other hand, women are expected to just follow along and accept the offer if they want any chance of landing a husband at all. \n",
"There are many expectations for women both on the colonised worlds, and on Earth. On Earth, women are expected to behave in a polite, civilised manner. They are also lucky to get a man of any kind, with women outnumbering men 5 to 3, so they are expected to take what they can get. Women on the colonised worlds are expected to obey their husbands, and take care of all tasks related to life on their farms. This includes: working the farms, and raising the families. \n"
] |
51268
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THE GIRLS FROM EARTH
By FRANK M. ROBINSON
Illustrated by EMSH
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction January 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Problem: How can you arrange marriages with men in one solar system, women in another—and neither willing to leave his own world?
I
"The beasts aren't much help, are they?"
Karl Allen snatched a breath of air and gave another heave on the line tied to the raft of parampa logs bobbing in the middle of the river.
"No," he grunted, "they're not. They always balk at a time like this, when they can see it'll be hard work."
Joseph Hill wiped his plump face and coiled some of the rope's slack around his thick waist.
"Together now, Karl. One! Two! "
They stood knee-deep in mud on the bank, pulling and straining on the rope, while some few yards distant, in the shade of a grove of trees, their tiny yllumphs nibbled grass and watched them critically, but made no effort to come closer.
"If we're late for ship's landing, Joe, we'll get crossed off the list."
Hill puffed and wheezed and took another hitch on the rope.
"That's what I've been thinking about," he said, worried.
They took a deep breath and hauled mightily on the raft rope. The raft bobbed nearer. For a moment the swift waters of the Karazoo threatened to tear it out of their grasp, and then it was beached, most of it solidly, on the muddy bank. One end of it still lay in the gurgling, rushing waters, but that didn't matter. They'd be back in ten hours or so, long before the heavy raft could be washed free.
"How much time have we got, Karl?"
The ground was thick with shadows, and Karl cast a critical eye at them. He estimated that even with the refusal of their yllumphs to help beach the raft, they still had a good two hours before the rocket put down at Landing City.
"Two hours, maybe a little more," he stated hastily when Hill looked more worried. "Time enough to get to Landing City and put in for our numbers on the list."
He turned back to the raft, untied the leather and horn saddles, and threw them over the backs of their reluctant mounts. He cinched his saddle and tied on some robes and furs behind it.
Hill watched him curiously. "What are you taking the furs for? This isn't the trading rocket."
"I know. I thought that when we come back tonight, it might be cold and maybe she'll appreciate the coverings then."
"You never would have thought of it yourself," Hill grunted. "Grundy must have told you to do it, the old fool. If you ask me, the less you give them, the less they'll come to expect. Once you spoil them, they'll expect you to do all the trapping and the farming and the family-raising yourself."
"You didn't have to sign up," Karl pointed out. "You could have applied for a wife from some different planet."
"One's probably just as good as another. They'll all have to work the farms and raise families."
Karl laughed and aimed a friendly blow at Hill. They finished saddling up and headed into the thick forest.
It was quiet as Karl guided his mount along the dimly marked trail and he caught himself thinking of the return trip he would be making that night. It would be nice to have somebody new to talk to. And it would be good to have somebody to help with the trapping and tanning, somebody who could tend the small vegetable garden at the rear of his shack and mend his socks and wash his clothes and cook his meals.
And it was time, he thought soberly, that he started to raise a family. He was mid-twenty now, old enough to want a wife and children.
"You going to raise a litter, Joe?"
Hill started. Karl realized that he had probably been thinking of the same thing.
"One of these days I'll need help around the sawmill," Hill answered defensively. "Need some kids to cut the trees, a couple more to pole them down the river, some to run the mill itself and maybe one to sell the lumber in Landing City. Can't do it all myself."
He paused a moment, thinking over something that had just occurred to him.
"I've been thinking of your plans for a garden, Karl. Maybe I ought to have one for my wife to take care of, too."
Karl chuckled. "I don't think she'll have the time!"
They left the leafy expanse of the forest and entered the grasslands that sloped toward Landing City. He could even see Landing City itself on the horizon, a smudge of rusting, corrugated steel shacks, muddy streets, and the small rocket port—a scorched thirty acres or so fenced off with barbed wire.
Karl looked out of the corner of his eye at Hill and felt a vague wave of uneasiness. Hill was a big, thick man wearing the soiled clothes and bristly stubble of a man who was used to living alone and who liked it. But once he took a wife, he would probably have to keep himself in clean clothes and shave every few days. It was even possible that the woman might object to Hill letting his yllumph share the hut.
The path was getting crowded, more of the colonists coming onto the main path from the small side trails.
Hill broke the silence first. "I wonder what they'll be like."
Karl looked wise and nodded knowingly. "They're Earthwomen, Joe. Earth! "
It was easy to act as though he had some inside information, but Karl had to admit to himself that he actually knew very little about it. He was a Second System colonist and had never even seen an Earthwoman. He had heard tales, though, and even discounting a large percentage of them, some of them must have been true. Old Grundy at the rocket office, who should know about these things if anybody did, seemed disturbingly lacking on definite information, though he had hinted broadly enough. He'd whistle softly and wink an eye and repeat the stories that Karl had already heard; but he had nothing definite to offer, no real facts at all.
Some of the other colonists whom they hadn't seen for the last few months shouted greetings, and Karl began to feel some of the carnival spirit. There was Jenkins, who had another trapping line fifty miles farther up the Karazoo; Leonard, who had the biggest farm on Midplanet; and then the fellow who specialized in catching and breaking in yllumphs, whose name Karl couldn't remember.
"They say they're good workers," Hill said.
Karl nodded. "Pretty, too."
They threaded their way through the crowded and muddy streets. Landing City wasn't big, compared to some of the cities on Altair, where he had been raised, but Karl was proud of it. Some day it would be as big as any city on any planet—maybe even have a population of ten thousand people or more.
"Joe," Karl said suddenly, "what's supposed to make women from Earth better than women from any other world?"
Hill located a faint itch and frowned. "I don't know, Karl. It's hard to say. They're—well, sophisticated, glamorous."
Karl absorbed this in silence. Those particular qualities were, he thought, rather hard to define.
The battered shack that served as rocket port office and headquarters for the colonial office on Midplanet loomed up in front of them. There was a crowd gathered in front of the building and they forced their way through to see what had caused it.
"We saw this the last time we were here," Hill said.
"I know," Karl agreed, "but I want to take another look." He was anxious to glean all the information that he could.
It was a poster of a beautiful woman leaning toward the viewer. The edges of the poster were curling and the colors had faded during the last six months, but the girl's smile seemed just as inviting as ever. She held a long-stemmed goblet in one hand and was blowing a kiss to her audience with the other. Her green eyes sparkled, her smile was provocative. A quoted sentence read: "I'm from Earth !" There was nothing more except a printed list of the different solar systems to which the colonial office was sending the women.
She was real pretty, Karl thought. A little on the thin side, maybe, and the dress she was wearing would hardly be practical on Midplanet, but she had a certain something. Glamour, maybe?
A loudspeaker blared.
"All colonists waiting for the wife draft assemble for your numbers! All colonists...."
There was a jostling for places and then they were in the rapidly moving line. Grundy, fat and important-looking, was handing out little blue slips with numbers on them, pausing every now and then to tell them some entertaining bit of information about the women. He had a great imagination, nothing else.
Karl drew the number 53 and hurried to the grassy lot beside the landing field that had been decorated with bunting and huge welcome signs for the new arrivals. A table was loaded with government pamphlets meant to be helpful to newly married colonists. Karl went over and stuffed a few in his pockets. Other tables had been set out and were loaded with luncheon food, fixed by the few colonial women in the community. Karl caught himself eyeing the women closely, wondering how the girls from Earth would compare with them.
He fingered the ticket in his pocket. What would the woman be like who had drawn the companion number 53 aboard the rocket? For when it landed, they would pair up by numbers. The method had its drawbacks, of course, but time was much too short to allow even a few days of getting acquainted. He'd have to get back to his trapping lines and he imagined that Hill would have to get back to his sawmill and the others to their farms. What the hell, you never knew what you were getting either way, till it was too late.
"Sandwich, mister? Pop?"
Karl flipped the boy a coin, picked up some food and a drink, and wandered over to the landing field with Hill. There were still ten minutes or so to go before the rocket landed, but he caught himself straining his sight at the blue sky, trying to see a telltale flicker of exhaust flame.
The field was crowded and he caught some of the buzzing conversation.
"... never knew one myself, but let me tell you...."
"... knew a fellow once who married one, never had a moment's rest afterward...."
"... no comparison with colonial women. They got culture...."
"... I'd give a lot to know the girl who's got number twenty-five...."
"Let's meet back here with the girls who have picked our numbers," Hill said. "Maybe we could trade."
Karl nodded, though privately he felt that the number system was just as good as depending on first impressions.
There was a murmur from the crowd and he found his gaze riveted overhead. High above, in the misty blue sky, was a sudden twinkle of fire.
He reached up and wiped his sweaty face with a muddy hand and brushed aside a straggly lock of tangled hair. It wouldn't hurt to try to look his best.
The twinkling fire came nearer.
II
"A Mr. Macdonald to see you, Mr. Escher."
Claude Escher flipped the intercom switch.
"Please send him right in."
That was entirely superfluous, he thought, because MacDonald would come in whether Escher wanted him to or not.
The door opened and shut with a slightly harder bang than usual and Escher mentally braced himself. He had a good hunch what the problem was going to be and why it was being thrown in their laps.
MacDonald made himself comfortable and sat there for a few minutes, just looking grim and not saying anything. Escher knew the psychology by heart. A short preliminary silence is always more effective in browbeating subordinates than an initial furious bluster.
He lit a cigarette and tried to outwait MacDonald. It wasn't easy—MacDonald had great staying powers, which was probably why he was the head of the department.
Escher gave in first. "Okay, Mac, what's the trouble? What do we have tossed in our laps now?"
"You know the one—colonization problem. You know that when we first started to colonize, quite a large percentage of the male population took to the stars, as the saying goes. The adventuresome, the gamblers, the frontier type all decided they wanted to head for other worlds, to get away from it all. The male of the species is far more adventuresome than the female; the men left—but the women didn't. At least, not in nearly the same large numbers.
"Well, you see the problem. The ratio of women to men here on Earth is now something like five to three. If you don't know what that means, ask any man with a daughter. Or any psychiatrist. Husband-hunting isn't just a pleasant pastime on Earth. It's an earnest cutthroat business and I'm not just using a literary phrase."
He threw a paper on Escher's desk. "You'll find most of the statistics about it in that, Claude. Notice the increase in crimes peculiar to women. Shoplifting, badger games, poisonings, that kind of thing. It's quite a list. You'll also notice the huge increase in petty crimes, a lot of which wouldn't have bothered the courts before. In fact, they wouldn't even have been considered crimes. You know why they are now?"
Escher shook his head blankly.
"Most of the girls in the past who didn't catch a husband," MacDonald continued, "grew up to be the type of old maid who's dedicated to improving the morals and what-not of the rest of the population. We've got more puritanical societies now than we ever had, and we have more silly little laws on the books as a result. You can be thrown in the pokey for things like violating a woman's privacy—whatever that means—and she's the one who decides whether what you say or do is a violation or not."
Escher looked bored. "Not to mention the new prohibition which forbids the use of alcohol in everything from cough medicines to hair tonics. Or the cleaned up moral code that reeks—if you'll pardon the expression—of purity. Sure, I know what you mean. And you know the solution. All we have to do is get the women to colonize."
MacDonald ran his fingers nervously through his hair.
"But it won't be easy, and that's why it's been given to us. It's your baby, Claude. Give it a lot of thought. Nothing's impossible, you know."
"Perpetual motion machines are," Escher said quietly. "And pulling yourself up by your boot-straps. But I get the point. Nevertheless, women just don't want to colonize. And who can blame them? Why should they give up living in a luxury civilization, with as many modern conveniences as this one, to go homesteading on some wild, unexplored planet where they have to work their fingers to the bone and play footsie with wild animals and savages who would just as soon skin them alive as not?"
"What do you advise I do, then?" MacDonald demanded. "Go back to the Board and tell them the problem is not solvable, that we can't think of anything?"
Escher looked hurt. "Did I say that? I just said it wouldn't be easy."
"The Board is giving you a blank check. Do anything you think will pay off. We have to stay within the letter of the law, of course, but not necessarily the spirit."
"When do they have to have a solution?"
"As soon as possible. At least within the year. By that time the situation will be very serious. The psychologists say that what will happen then won't be good."
"All right, by then we'll have the answer."
MacDonald stopped at the door. "There's another reason why they want it worked out. The number of men applying to the Colonization Board for emigration to the colony planets is falling off."
"How come?"
MacDonald smiled. "On the basis of statistics alone, would you want to emigrate from a planet where the women outnumber the men five to three?"
When MacDonald had gone, Escher settled back in his chair and idly tapped his fingers on the desk-top. It was lucky that the Colonization Board worked on two levels. One was the well-publicized, idealistic level where nothing was too good and every deal was 99 and 44/100 per cent pure. But when things got too difficult for it to handle on that level, they went to Escher and MacDonald's department. The coal mine level. Nothing was too low, so long as it worked. Of course, if it didn't work, you took the lumps, too.
He rummaged around in his drawer and found a list of the qualifications set up by the Board for potential colonists. He read the list slowly and frowned. You had to be physically fit for the rigors of space travel, naturally, but some of the qualifications were obviously silly. You couldn't guarantee physical perfection in the second generation, anyway.
He tore the qualification list in shreds and dropped it in the disposal chute. That would have to be the first to go.
There were other things that could be done immediately. For one thing, as it stood now, you were supposed to be financially able to colonize. Obviously a stupid and unappealing law. That would have to go next.
He picked up the sheet of statistics that MacDonald had left and read it carefully. The Board could legalize polygamy, but that was no solution in the long run. Probably cause more problems than it would solve. Even with women as easy to handle as they were nowadays, one was still enough.
Which still left him with the main problem of how to get people to colonize who didn't want to colonize.
The first point was to convince them that they wanted to. The second point was that it might not matter whether they wanted to or not.
No, it shouldn't be hard to solve at all—provided you held your nose, silenced your conscience, and were willing to forget that there was such a thing as a moral code.
III
Phyllis Hanson put the cover over her typewriter and locked the correspondence drawer. Another day was done, another evening about to begin.
She filed into the washroom with the other girls and carefully redid her face. It was getting hard to disguise the worry lines, to paint away the faint crow's-feet around her eyes.
She wasn't, she admitted to herself for the thousandth time, what you would call beautiful. She inspected herself carefully in her compact mirror. In a sudden flash of honesty, she had to admit that she wasn't even what you would call pretty. Her face was too broad, her nose a fraction too long, and her hair was dull. Not homely, exactly—but not pretty, either.
Conversation hummed around her, most of it from the little group in the corner, where the extreme few who were married sat as practically a race apart. Their advice was sought, their suggestions avidly followed.
"Going out tonight, Phyl?"
She hesitated a moment, then slowly painted on the rest of her mouth. The question was technically a privacy violator, but she thought she would sidestep it this time, instead of refusing to answer point-blank.
"I thought I'd stay home tonight. Have a few things I want to rinse out."
The black-haired girl next to her nodded sympathetically. "Sure, Phyl, I know what you mean. Just like the rest of us—waiting for the phone to ring."
Phyllis finished washing up and then left the office, carefully noting the girl who was waiting for the boss. The girl was beautiful in a hard sort of way, a platinum blonde with an entertainer's busty figure. Waiting for a plump, middle-aged man like a stagestruck kid outside a theatre.
At home, in her small two-room bachelor-girl apartment, she stripped and took a hot, sudsing shower, then stepped out and toweled herself in front of a mirror. She frowned slightly. You didn't know whether you should keep yourself in trim just on some off-chance, or give up and let yourself go.
She fixed dinner, took a moderately long time doing the dishes, and went through the standard routine of getting a book and curling up on the sofa. It was a good book of the boot-legged variety—scientifically written with enough surplus heroes and heroines and lushly described love affairs to hold anybody's interest.
It held hers for ten pages and then she threw the book across the room, getting a savage delight at the way the pages ripped and fluttered to the floor.
What was the use of kidding herself any longer, of trying to live vicariously and hoping that some day she would have a home and a husband? She was thirty now; the phone hadn't rung in the last three years. She might as well spend this evening as she had spent so many others—call up the girls for a bridge game and a little gossip, though heaven knew you always ended up envying the people you were gossiping about.
Perhaps she should have joined one of the organizations at the office that did something like that seven nights out of every seven. A bridge game or a benefit for some school or a talk on art. Or she could have joined the Lecture of the Week club, or the YWCA, or any one of the other government-sponsored clubs designed to fill the void in a woman's life.
But bridge games and benefits and lectures didn't take the place of a husband and family. She was kidding herself again.
She got up and retrieved the battered book, then went over to the mail slot. She hadn't had time to open her mail that morning; most of the time it wasn't worth the effort. Advertisements for book clubs, lecture clubs, how to win at bridge and canasta....
Her fingers sprang the metal tabs on a large envelope and she took out the contents and spread it wide.
She gasped. It was a large poster, about a yard square. A man was on it, straddling a tiny city and a small panorama of farms and forests at his feet. He was a handsome specimen, with wavy blond hair and blue eyes and a curly mat on his bare chest that was just enough to be attractive without being apelike. He held an axe in his hands and was eyeing her with a clearly inviting look of brazen self-confidence.
It was definitely a privacy violator and she should notify the authorities immediately!
Bright lettering at the top of the poster shrieked: "Come to the Colonies, the Planets of Romance!"
Whoever had mailed it should be arrested and imprisoned! Preying on....
The smaller print at the bottom was mostly full of facts and figures. The need for women out on the colony planets, the percentage of men to women—a startling disproportion—the comfortable cities that weren't nearly as primitive as people had imagined, and the recently reduced qualifications.
She caught herself admiring the man on the poster. Naturally, it was an artist's conception, but even so....
And the cities were far in advance of the frontier settlements, where you had to battle disease and dirty savages.
It was all a dream. She had never done anything like this and she wouldn't think of doing it now. And had any of her friends seen the poster? Of course, they probably wouldn't tell her even if they had.
But the poster was a violation of privacy. Whoever had sent it had taken advantage of information that was none of their business. It was up to her to notify the authorities!
She took another look at the poster.
The letter she finally finished writing was very short. She addressed it to the box number in the upper left-hand corner of the plain wrapper that the poster had come in.
IV
The dress lay on the counter, a small corner of it trailing off the edge. It was a beautiful thing, sheer sheen satin trimmed in gold nylon thread. It was the kind of gown that would make anybody who wore it look beautiful. The price was high, much too high for her to pay. She knew she would never be able to buy it.
But she didn't intend to buy it.
She looked casually around and noted that nobody was watching her. There was another woman a few counters down and a man, obviously embarrassed, at the lingerie counter. Nobody else was in sight. It was a perfect time. The clerk had left to look up a difficult item that she had purposely asked for and probably wouldn't be back for five minutes.
Time enough, at any rate.
The dress was lying loose, so she didn't have to pry it off any hangers. She took another quick look around, then hurriedly bundled it up and dropped it in her shopping bag.
She had taken two self-assured steps away from the counter when she felt a hand on her shoulder. The grip was firm and muscular and she knew she had lost the game. She also knew that she had to play it out to the end, to grasp any straw.
"Let go of me!" she ordered in a frostily offended voice.
"Sorry, miss," the man said politely, "but I think we have a short trip to take."
She thought for a moment of brazening it out further and then gave up. She'd get a few weeks or months in the local detention building, a probing into her background for the psychological reasons that prompted her to steal, and then she'd be out again.
They couldn't do anything to her that mattered.
She shrugged and followed the detective calmly. None of the shoppers had looked up. None seemed to notice anything out of the ordinary.
In the detention building she thanked her good luck that she was facing a man for the sentence, instead of one of the puritanical old biddies who served on the bench. She even found a certain satisfaction in the presence of the cigar smoke and the blunt, earthy language that floated in from the corridor.
"Why did you steal it?" the judge asked. He held up the dress, which, she noted furiously, didn't look nearly as nice as it had under the department store lights.
"I don't have anything to say," she said. "I want to see a lawyer."
She could imagine what he was thinking. Another tough one, another plain jane who was shoplifting for a thrill.
And she probably was. You had to do something nowadays. You couldn't just sit home and chew your fingernails, or run out and listen to the endless boring lectures on art and culture.
"Name?" he asked in a tired voice.
She knew the statistics he wanted. "Ruby Johnson, 32, 145 pounds, brown hair and green eyes. Prints on file."
The judge leaned down and mentioned something to the bailiff, who left and presently came back with a ledger. The judge opened it and ran his fingers down one of the pages.
The sentence would probably be the usual, she thought—six months and a fine, or perhaps a little more when they found out she had a record for shoplifting.
A stranger in the courtroom in the official linens of the government suddenly stepped up beside the judge and looked at the page. She could hear a little of what he said:
"... anxiety neurosis ... obvious feeling of not being wanted ... probably steals to attract attention ... recommend emigration."
"In view of some complicating factors, we're going to give you a choice," the judge finally said. "You can either go to the penitentiary for ten years and pay a $10,000 fine, or you can ship out to the colony planets and receive a five-hundred-dollar immigration bonus."
She thought for a minute that she hadn't heard right. Ten thousand dollars and ten years! It was obvious that the state was interested in neither the fine nor in paying her room and board for ten years. She could recognize a squeeze play when she saw it, but there was nothing she could do about it.
"I wouldn't call that a choice," she said sourly. "I'll ship out."
V
Suzanne was proud of the apartment. It had all the modern conveniences, like the needle shower with the perfume dispenser, the built-in soft-drink bar in the library, the all-communications set, and the electrical massager. It was a nice, comfortable setup, an illusion of security in an ever-changing world.
She lit a cigarette and chuckled. Mrs. Burger, the fat old landlady, thought she kept up the apartment by working as a buyer for one of the downtown stores.
Well, maybe some day she would.
But not today. And not tonight.
The phone rang and she answered in a casual tone. She talked for a minute, then let a trace of sultriness creep into her voice. The conversation wasn't long.
She let the receiver fall back on the base and went into the bedroom to get a hat box. She wouldn't need much; she'd probably be back that same night.
It was a nice night and since the address was only a few blocks away, she decided to walk it. She blithely ignored the curious stares from other pedestrians, attracted by the sharp, clicking sound of her heels on the sidewalk.
The address was a brownstone that looked more like an office building than anything else, but then you could never tell. She pressed the buzzer and waited a moment for the sound to echo back and forth on the inside. She pressed it again and a moment later a suave young man appeared in the doorway.
"Miss Carstens?"
She smiled pertly.
"We've been expecting you."
She wondered a little at the "we," but dutifully smiled and followed him in.
The glare of the lights inside the office blinded her for a moment. When she could focus them again, her smile became slightly blurry at the edges and then disappeared entirely. She wasn't alone. There was a battery of chairs against one side of the room. She recognized most of the girls sitting in them.
She forced a smile to her lips and tried to laugh.
"I'm sure there's been some mistake! Why, I never...."
The young man coughed politely. "I'm afraid there's been no mistake. Full name, please."
"Suzanne Carstens," she said grimly, and gave the other statistics he wanted. She idly wondered what stoolie had peddled the phone numbers.
"Suzanne Carstens," the young man noted, and slowly shook his head.
"A very pretty name, but no doubt not your own. It actually doesn't matter, though. Take a seat over there."
She did as he asked and he faced the entire group.
"I and the other gentlemen here represent the Colonization Board. We've interceded with the local authorities in order to offer you a choice. We would like to ship you out to the colony planets. Naturally, we will pay you the standard emigration bonus of five hundred dollars. The colonists need wives; they offer you—security."
He stressed the word slightly.
"Now, of course, if you don't prefer the colony planets, you can stay behind and face the penalties of ten years in jail and a fine of ten thousand dollars."
Suzanne felt that her lower jaw needed support. Ten thousand dollars and ten years! And in either case she'd lose the apartment she had worked so hard for, her symbol of security.
"Well, what do you say?" There was a dead silence. The young man from the Colonization Board turned to Suzanne. "How about you, Miss Carstens?"
She smiled sickly and nodded her head. "I love to travel!" she said.
It didn't sound at all witty even to herself.
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Who is Mackenzie, and what happens to him?
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about Desire No More by Algis Budrys.
Relevant chunks:
He had but one ambition, one desire: to pilot the first manned rocket to the moon. And he was prepared as no man had ever prepared himself before....
DESIRE NO MORE
by Algis Budrys
( illustrated by Milton Luros )
" Desire no more than to thy lot may fall.... "
—Chaucer
THE SMALL young man looked at his father, and shook his head.
"But you've got to learn a trade," his father said, exasperated. "I can't afford to send you to college; you know that."
"I've got a trade," he answered.
His father smiled thinly. "What?" he asked patronizingly.
"I'm a rocket pilot," the boy said, his thin jaw stretching the skin of his cheeks.
His father laughed in the way the boy had learned to anticipate and hate. "Yeah," he said. He leaned back in his chair and laughed so hard that the Sunday paper slipped off his wide lap and fell to the floor with an unnoticed stiff rustle.
"A rocket pilot!" His father's derision hooted through the quiet parlor. "A ro— oh, no! —a rocket pilot !"
The boy stared silently at the convulsed figure in the chair. His lips fell into a set white bar, and the corners of his jaws bulged with the tension in their muscles. Suddenly, he turned on his heel and stalked out of the parlor, through the hall, out the front door, to the porch. He stopped there, hesitating a little.
" Marty! " His father's shout followed him out of the parlor. It seemed to act like a hand between the shoulder-blades, because the boy almost ran as he got down the porch stairs.
"What is it, Howard?" Marty's mother asked in a worried voice as she came in from the kitchen, her damp hands rubbing themselves dry against the sides of her housedress.
"Crazy kid," Howard Isherwood muttered. He stared at the figure of his son as the boy reached the end of the walk and turned off into the street. " Come back here! " he shouted. "A rocket pilot," he cursed under his breath. "What's the kid been reading? Claiming he's a rocket pilot!"
Margaret Isherwood's brow furrowed into a faint, bewildered frown.
"But—isn't he a little young? I know they're teaching some very odd things in high schools these days, but it seems to me...."
"Oh, for Pete's sake, Marge, there aren't even any rockets yet! Come back here, you idiot! " Howard Isherwood was standing on his porch, his clenched fists trembling at the ends of his stiffly-held arms.
"Are you sure, Howard?" his wife asked faintly.
"Yes, I'm sure !"
"But, where's he going?"
" Stop that! Get off that bus! YOU hear me? Marty?"
" Howard! Stop acting like a child and talk to me! Where is that boy going?"
Howard Isherwood, stocky, red-faced, forty-seven, and defeated, turned away from the retreating bus and looked at his wife. "I don't know," he told her bitterly, between rushes of air into his jerkily heaving lungs.
"Maybe, the moon," he told her sarcastically.
Martin Isherwood, rocket pilot, weight 102, height 4', 11", had come of age at seventeen.
THE SMALL man looked at his faculty advisor. "No," he said. "I am not interested in working for a degree."
"But—" The faculty advisor unconsciously tapped the point of a yellow pencil against the fresh green of his desk blotter, leaving a rough arc of black flecks. "Look, Ish, you've got to either deliver or get off the basket. This program is just like the others you've followed for nine semesters; nothing but math and engineering. You've taken just about every undergrad course there is in those fields. How long are you going to keep this up?"
"I'm signed up for Astronomy 101," Isherwood pointed out.
The faculty advisor snorted. "A snap course. A breather, after you've studied the same stuff in Celestial Navigation. What's the matter, Ish? Scared of liberal arts?"
Isherwood shook his head. "Uh-unh. Not interested. No time. And that Astronomy course isn't a breather. Different slant from Cee Nav—they won't be talking about stars as check points, but as things in themselves." Something seemed to flicker across his face as he said it.
The advisor missed it; he was too engrossed in his argument. "Still a snap. What's the difference, how you look at a star?"
Isherwood almost winced. "Call it a hobby," he said. He looked down at his watch. "Come on, Dave. You're not going to convince me. You haven't convinced me any of the other times, either, so you might as well give up, don't you think? I've got a half hour before I go on the job. Let's go get some beer."
The advisor, not much older than Isherwood, shrugged, defeated. "Crazy," he muttered. But it was a hot day, and he was as thirsty as the next man.
The bar was air conditioned. The advisor shivered, half grinned, and softly quoted:
"Though I go bare, take ye no care, I am nothing a-cold; I stuff my skin so full within Of jolly good ale and old."
"Huh?" Ish was wearing the look with which he always reacted to the unfamiliar.
The advisor lifted two fingers to the bartender and shrugged. "It's a poem; about four hundred years old, as a matter of fact."
"Oh."
"Don't you give a damn?" the advisor asked, with some peevishness.
Ish laughed shortly, without embarrassment. "Sorry, Dave, but no. It's not my racket."
The advisor cramped his hand a little too tightly around his glass.
"Strictly a specialist, huh?"
Ish nodded. "Call it that."
"But what , for Pete's sake? What is this crazy specialty that blinds you to all the fine things that man has done?"
Ish took a swallow of his beer. "Well, now, if I was a poet, I'd say it was the finest thing that man has ever done."
The advisor's lips twisted in derision. "That's pretty fanatical, isn't it?"
"Uh-huh." Ish waved to the bartender for refills.
THE NAVION took a boiling thermal under its right wing and bucked upward suddenly, tilting at the same time, so that the pretty brunette girl in the other half of the side-by-side was thrown against him. Ish laughed, a sound that came out of his throat as turbulently as that sudden gust of heated air had shot up out of the Everglades, and corrected with a tilt of the wheel.
"Relax, Nan," he said, his words colored by the lingering laughter.
"It's only air; nasty old air."
The girl patted her short hair back into place. "I wish you wouldn't fly this low," she said, half-frightened.
" Low? Call this low?" Ish teased. "Here. Let's drop it a little, and you'll really get an idea of how fast we're going." He nudged the wheel forward, and the Navion dipped its nose in a shallow dive, flattening out thirty feet above the mangrove. The swamp howled with the chug of the dancing pistons and the claw of the propeller at the protesting air, and, from the cockpit, the Everglades resolved into a dirty-green blur that rocketed backward into the slipstream.
"Marty!"
Ish chuckled again. He couldn't have held the ship down much longer, anyway. He tugged back on the wheel suddenly, targeting a cumulous bank with his spinner. His lips peeled back from his teeth, and his jaw set. The Navion went up at the clouds, her engine turning over as fast as it could, her wings cushioned on the rising thrust of another thermal.
And, suddenly, it was as if there were no girl beside him, to be teased, and no air to rock the wings—there were no wings. His face lost all expression. Faint beads of sweat broke out above his eyes and under his nose. "Up," he grunted through his clenched teeth. His fists locked on the wheel. "Up!"
The Navion broke through the cloud, kept going. "Up." If he listened closely, in just the right way, he could almost hear ...
"Marty!"
... the rumble of a louder, prouder engine than the Earth had ever known. He sighed, the breath whispering through his parting teeth, and the aircraft leveled off as he pushed at the wheel with suddenly lax hands. Still half-lost, he turned and looked at the white-faced girl. "Scare you—?" he asked gently.
She nodded. Her fingertips were trembling on his forearm.
"Me too," he said. "Lost my head. Sorry."
"LOOK," HE told the girl, "You got any idea of what it costs to maintain a racing-plane? Everything I own is tied up in the Foo, my ground crew, my trailer, and that scrummy old Ryan that should have been salvaged ten years ago. I can't get married. Suppose I crack the Foo next week? You're dead broke, a widow, and with a funeral to pay for. The only smart thing to do is wait a while."
Nan's eyes clouded, and her lips trembled. "That's what I've been trying to say. Why do you have to win the Vandenberg Cup next week? Why can't you sell the Foo and go into some kind of business? You're a trained pilot."
He had been standing in front of her with his body unconsciously tense from the strain of trying to make her understand. Now he relaxed—more—he slumped—and something began to die in his face, and the first faint lines crept in to show that after it had died, it would not return to life, but would fossilize, leaving his features in the almost unreadable mask that the newspapers would come to know.
"I'm a good bit more than a trained pilot," he said quietly. "The Foo Is a means to an end. After I win the Vandenberg Cup, I can walk into any plant in the States—Douglas, North American, Boeing— any of them—and pick up the Chief Test Pilot's job for the asking. A few of them have as good as said so. After that—" His voice had regained some of its former animation from this new source. Now he broke off, and shrugged. "I've told you all this before."
The girl reached up, as if the physical touch could bring him back to her, and put her fingers around his wrist. "Darling!" she said. "If it's that rocket pilot business again...."
Somehow, his wrist was out of her encircling fingers. "It's always 'that rocket pilot business,'" he said, mimicking her voice. "Damn it, I'm the only trained rocket pilot in the world! I weigh a hundred and fifteen pounds, I'm five feet tall, and I know more navigation and math than anybody the Air Force or Navy have! I can use words like brennschluss and mass-ratio without running over to a copy of Colliers , and I—" He stopped himself, half-smiled, and shrugged again.
"I guess I was kidding myself. After the Cup, there'll be the test job, and after that, there'll be the rockets. You would have had to wait a long time."
All she could think of to say was, "But, Darling, there aren't any man-carrying rockets."
"That's not my fault," he said, and walked away from her.
A week later, he took his stripped-down F-110 across the last line with a scream like that of a hawk that brings its prey safely to its nest.
HE BROUGHT the Mark VII out of her orbit after two days of running rings around the spinning Earth, and the world loved him. He climbed out of the crackling, pinging ship, bearded and dirty, with oil on his face and in his hair, with food stains all over his whipcord, red-eyed, and huskily quiet as he said his few words into the network microphones. And he was not satisfied. There was no peace in his eyes, and his hands moved even more sharply in their expressive gestures as he gave an impromptu report to the technicians who were walking back to the personnel bunker with him.
Nan could see that. Four years ago, he had been different. Four years ago, if she had only known the right words, he wouldn't be so intent now on throwing himself away to the sky.
She was a woman scorned. She had to lie to herself. She broke out of the press section and ran over to him. "Marty!" She brushed past a technician.
He looked at her with faint surprise on his face. "Well, Nan!" he mumbled. But he did not put his hand over her own where it touched his shoulder.
"I'm sorry, Marty," she said in a rush. "I didn't understand. I couldn't see how much it all meant." Her face was flushed, and she spoke as rapidly as she could, not noticing that Ish had already gestured away the guards she was afraid would interrupt her.
"But it's all right, now. You got your rockets. You've done it. You trained yourself for it, and now it's over. You've flown your rocket!"
He looked up at her face and shook his head in quiet pity. One of the shocked technicians was trying to pull her away, and Ish made no move to stop him.
Suddenly, he was tired, there was something in him that was trying to break out against his will, and his reaction was that of a child whose candy is being taken away from him after only one bite.
"Rocket!" he shouted into her terrified face. " Rocket! Call that pile of tin a rocket?" He pointed at the weary Mark VII with a trembling arm.
"Who cares about the bloody machines ! If I thought roller-skating would get me there, I would have gone to work in a rink when I was seventeen! It's getting there that counts! Who gives a good goddam how it's done, or what with!"
And he stood there, shaking like a leaf, outraged, while the guards came and got her.
"SIT DOWN, Ish," the Flight Surgeon said.
They always begin that way , Isherwood thought. The standard medical opening. Sit down. What for? Did somebody really believe that anything he might hear would make him faint? He smiled with as much expression as he ever did, and chose a comfortable chair, rolling the white cylinder of a cigarette between his fingers. He glanced at his watch. Fourteen hours, thirty-six minutes, and four days to go.
"How's it?" the FS asked.
Ish grinned and shrugged. "All right." But he didn't usually grin. The realization disquieted him a little.
"Think you'll make it?"
Deliberately, rather than automatically, he fell back into his usual response-pattern. "Don't know. That's what I'm being paid to find out."
"Uh- huh ." The FS tapped the eraser of his pencil against his teeth.
"Look—you want to talk to a man for a while?"
"What man?" It didn't really matter. He had a feeling that anything he said or did now would have a bearing, somehow, on the trip. If they wanted him to do something for them, he was bloody well going to do it.
"Fellow named MacKenzie. Big gun in the head-thumping racket." The Flight Surgeon was trying to be as casual as he could. "Air Force insisted on it, as a matter of fact," he said. "Can't really blame them. After all, it's their beast."
"Don't want any hole-heads denting it up on them, huh?" Ish lit the cigarette and flipped his lighter shut with a snap of the lid. "Sure. Bring him on."
The FS smiled. "Good. He's—uh—he's in the next room. Okay to ask him in right now?"
"Sure." Something flickered in Isherwood's eyes. Amusement at the Flight Surgeon's discomfort was part of it. Worry was some of the rest.
MacKENZIE didn't seem to be taking any notes, or paying any special attention to the answers Ish was giving to his casual questions. But the questions fell into a pattern that was far from casual, and Ish could see the small button-mike of a portable tape-recorder nestling under the man's lapel.
"Been working your own way for the last seventeen years, haven't you?" MacKenzie seemed to mumble in a perfectly clear voice.
Ish nodded.
"How's that?"
The corners of Isherwood's mouth twitched, and he said "Yes" for the recorder's benefit.
"Odd jobs, first of all?"
"Something like that. Anything I could get, the first few months. After I was halfway set up, I stuck to garages and repair shops."
"Out at the airports around Miami, mostly, wasn't it?"
"Ahuh."
"Took some of your pay in flying lessons."
"Right."
MacKenzie's face passed no judgements—he simply hunched in his chair, seemingly dwarfed by the shoulders of his perfectly tailored suit, his stubby fingers twiddling a Phi Beta Kappa key. He was a spare man—only a step or two away from emaciation. Occasionally, he pushed a tired strand of washed-out hair away from his forehead.
Ish answered him truthfully, without more than ordinary reservations. This was the man who could ground him He was dangerous—red-letter dangerous—because of it.
"No family."
Ish shrugged. "Not that I know of. Cut out at seventeen. My father was making good money. He had a pension plan, insurance policies. No need to worry about them."
Ish knew the normal reaction a statement like that should have brought. MacKenzie's face did not go into a blank of repression—but it still passed no judgements.
"How's things between you and the opposite sex?"
"About normal."
"No wife—no steady girl."
"Not a very good idea, in my racket."
MacKenzie grunted. Suddenly, he sat bolt upright in his chair, and swung toward Ish. His lean arm shot out, and his index finger was aimed between Isherwood's eyes. "You can't go!"
Ish was on his feet, his fists clenched, the blood throbbing in his temple veins. "What!" he roared.
MacKenzie seemed to collapse in his chair. The brief commanding burst was over, and his face was apologetic, "Sorry," he said. He seemed genuinely abashed. "Shotgun therapy. Works best, sometimes. You can go, all right; I just wanted to get a fast check on your reactions and drives."
Ish could feel the anger that still ran through him—anger, and more fear than he wanted to admit. "I'm due at a briefing," he said tautly.
"You through with me?"
MacKenzie nodded, still embarrassed. "Sorry."
Ish ignored the man's obvious feelings. He stopped at the door to send a parting stroke at the thing that had frightened him. "Big gun in the psychiatry racket, huh? Well, your professional lingo's slipping, Doc. They did put some learning in my head at college, you know. Therapy, hell! Testing maybe, but you sure didn't do anything to help me!"
"I don't know," MacKenzie said softly. "I wish I did."
Ish slammed the door behind him. He stood in the corridor, jamming a fresh cigarette in his mouth. He threw a glance at his watch. Twelve hours, twenty-two minutes, and four days to go.
Damn! He was late for the briefing. Odd—that fool psychiatrist hadn't seemed to take up that much of his time.
He shrugged. What difference did it make? As he strode down the hall, he lost his momentary puzzlement under the flood of realization that nothing could stop him now, that the last hurdle was beaten. He was going. He was going, and if there were faint echoes of "Marty!" ringing in the dark background of his mind, they only served to push him faster, as they always had. Nothing but death could stop him now.
ISH LOOKED up bitterly at the Receptionist. "No," he said.
"But everybody fills out an application," she protested.
"No. I've got a job," he said as he had been saying for the last half hour.
The Receptionist sighed. "If you'll only read the literature I've given you, you'll understand that all your previous commitments have been cancelled."
"Look, Honey, I've seen company poop sheets before. Now, let's cut this nonsense. I've got to get back."
"But nobody goes back."
"Goddam it, I don't know what kind of place this is, but—" He stopped at the Receptionist's wince, and looked around, his mouth open. The reception desk was solid enough. There were IN and OUT and HOLD baskets on the desk, and the Receptionist seemed to see nothing extraordinary about it. But the room—a big room, he realized—seemed to fade out at the edges, rather than stop at walls. The lighting, too....
"Let's see your back!" he rapped out, his voice high.
She sighed in exasperation. "If you'd read the literature ..." She swiveled her chair slowly.
"No wings," he said.
"Of course not!" she snapped. She brushed her hair away from her forehead without his telling her to. "No horns, either."
"Streamlined, huh?" he said bitterly.
"It's a little different for everybody," she said with unexpected gentleness. "It would have to be, wouldn't it?"
"Yeah, I guess so," he admitted slowly. Then he lost his momentary awe, and his posture grew tense again. He glanced down at his wrist. Six hours, forty-seven minutes, and no days to go.
"Who do I see?"
She stared at him, bewildered at the sudden change in his voice. "See?"
"About getting out of here! Come on, come on," he barked, snapping his fingers impatiently. "I haven't got much time."
She smiled sweetly. "Oh, but you do."
"Can it! Who's your Section boss? Get him down here. On the double. Come on!" His face was streaming with perspiration but his voice was firm with the purpose that drove him.
Her lips closed into an angry line, and she jabbed a finger at a desk button. "I'll call the Personnel Manager."
"Thanks," he said sarcastically, and waited impatiently. Odd, the way the Receptionist looked a little like Nan.
THE PERSONNEL Manager wore a perfectly-tailored suit. He strode across the lobby floor toward Ish, his hand outstretched.
"Martin Isherwood!" he exclaimed enthusiastically. "I'm very glad to meet you!"
"I'll bet," Ish said dryly, giving the Personnel Manager's hand a short shake. "I've got other ideas. I want out."
"That's all he's been saying for the past forty-five minutes, Sir," the Receptionist said from behind her desk.
The Personnel Manager frowned. "Um. Yes. Well, that's not unprecedented."
"But hardly usual," he added.
Ish found himself liking the man. He had a job to do, and after the preliminary formality of the greeting had been passed, he was ready to buckle down to it. Oh, he—shucks?—the Receptionist wasn't such a bad girl, either. He smiled at her. "Sorry I lost my head," he said.
She smiled back. "It happens."
He took time to give her one more smile and a half-wink, and swung back to the Personnel Manager.
"Now. Let's get this thing straightened out. I've got—" He stopped to look at his watch. "Six hours and a few minutes. They're fueling the beast right now."
"Do you know how much red tape you'd have to cut?"
Ish shook his head. "I don't want to sound nasty, but that's your problem."
The Personnel Manager hesitated. "Look—you feel you've got a job unfinished. Or, anyway, that's the way you'd put it. But, let's face it—that's not really what's galling you. It's not really the job, is it? It's just that you think you've been cheated out of what you devoted your life to."
Ish could feel his jaw muscles bunching. "Don't put words in my mouth!" he snapped. "Just get me back, and we'll split hairs about it when I get around this way again." Suddenly, he found himself pleading. "All I need is a week," he said. "It'll be a rough week—no picnic, no pleasures of the flesh. No smoking, no liquor. I certainly won't be breaking any laws. One week. Get there, putter around for two days, and back again. Then, you can do anything you want to—as long as it doesn't look like the trip's responsible, of course."
The Personnel Manager hesitated. "Suppose—" he began, but Ish interrupted him.
"Look, they need it, down there. They've got to have a target, someplace to go. We're built for it. People have to have—but what am I telling you for. If you don't know, who does?"
The Personnel Manager smiled. "I was about to say something."
Ish stopped, abashed. "Sorry."
He waved the apology away with a short movement of his hand. "You've got to understand that what you've been saying isn't a valid claim. If it were, human history would be very different, wouldn't it?"
"Suppose I showed you something, first? Then, you could decide whether you want to stay, after all."
"How long's it going to take?" Ish flushed under the memory of having actually begged for something.
"Not long," the Personnel Manager said. He half-turned and pointed up at the Earth, hanging just beyond the wall of the crater in which they were suddenly standing.
"Earth," the Personnel Manager said.
Somehow, Ish was not astonished. He looked up at the Earth, touched by cloud and sunlight, marked with ocean and continent, crowned with ice. The unblinking stars filled the night.
He looked around him. The Moon was silent—quiet, patient, waiting. Somewhere, a metal glint against the planet above, if it were only large enough to be seen, was the Station, and the ship for which the Moon had waited.
Ish walked a short distance. He was leaving no tracks in the pumice the ages had sown. But it was the way he had thought of it, nevertheless. It was the way the image had slowly built up in his mind, through the years, through the training, through the work. It was what he had aimed the Navion at, that day over the Everglades.
"It's not the same," he said.
The Personnel Manager sighed.
"Don't you see," Ish said, "It can't be the same. I didn't push the beast up here. There wasn't any feel to it. There wasn't any sound of rockets."
The Personnel Manager sighed again. "There wouldn't be, you know. Taking off from the Station, landing here—vacuum."
Ish shook his head. "There'd still be a sound. Maybe not for anybody else to hear—and, maybe, maybe there would be. There'd be people, back on Earth, who'd hear it."
"All right," the Personnel Manager said. His face was grave, but his eyes were shining a little.
"ISH! HEY, Ish, wake up, will you!" There was a hand on his shoulder.
"Will you get a load of this guy!" the voice said to someone else. "An hour to go, and he's sleeping like the dead."
Ish willed his eyes to open. He felt his heart begin to move again, felt the blood sluggishly beginning to surge into his veins. His hands and feet were very cold.
"Come on, Ish," the Crew Chief said.
"All right," he mumbled. "Okay. I'm up." He sat on the edge of his bunk looking down at his hands. They were blue under the fingernails. He sighed, feeling the air moving down into his lungs.
Stiffly, he got to his feet and began to climb into his G suit.
The Moon opened its face to him. From where he lay, strapped into the control seat in the forward bubble, he looked at it emotionlessly, and began to brake for a landing.
He looked for footprints in the crater, though he knew he hadn't left any. Earth was a familiar sight over his right shoulder.
He brought the twin-bubble beast back to the station. They threw spotlights on it, for the TV pickups, and thrust microphones at him. He could see broad grins behind the faceplates of the suits the docking crew wore, and they were pounding his back. The interior of the Station was a babbling of voices, a tumult of congratulations. He looked at it all, dead-faced, his eyes empty.
"It was easy," he said over a world-wide network, and pushed the press representatives out of his way.
MacKENZIE was waiting for him in the crew section. Ish flicked his stolid eyes at him, shrugged, and stripped out of his clothes. He pulled a coverall out of a locker and climbed into it, then went over to his bunk and lay down on his side, facing the bulkhead.
"Ish."
It was MacKenzie, bending over him.
Ish grunted.
"It wasn't any good was it? You'd done it all before; you'd been there."
He was past emotions. "Yeah?"
"We couldn't take the chance." MacKenzie was trying desperately to explain. "You were the best there was—but you'd done something to yourself by becoming the best. You shut yourself off from your family. You had no close friends, no women. You had no other interests. You were a rocket pilot—nothing else. You've never read an adult book that wasn't a text; you've never listened to a symphony except by accident. You don't know Rembrandt from Norman Rockwell. Nothing. No ties, no props, nothing to sustain you if something went wrong. We couldn't take the chance, Ish! "
"So?"
"There was too much at stake. If we let you go, you might have forgotten to come back. You might have just kept going."
He remembered the time with the Navion , and nodded. "I might have."
"I hypnotized you," MacKenzie said. "You were never dead. I don't know what the details of your hallucination were, but the important part came through, all right. You thought you'd been to the Moon before. It took all the adventure out of the actual flight; it was just a workaday trip."
"I said it was easy," Ish said.
"There was no other way to do it! I had to cancel out the thrill that comes from challenging the unknown. You knew what death was like, and you knew what the Moon was like. Can you understand why I had to do it?"
"Yeah. Now get out before I kill you. "
He didn't live too long after that. He never entered a rocket again—he died on the Station, and was buried in space, while a grateful world mourned him. I wonder what it was like, in his mind, when he really died. But he spent the days he had, after the trip, just sitting at an observatory port, cursing the traitor stars with his dead and purposeless eyes.
TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected without note.
This etext was produced from Dynamic Science Fiction, January, 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
Question:
Who is Mackenzie, and what happens to him?
Answer:
|
[
"Mackenzie is an army therapist who first meets Martin when he is asked to vet him before he goes on a trip for the airforce. Mackenzie tries to test Martin a lot, but ends up clearing him and allowing him to fly. At the end, it is also Mackenzie who tells Martin what had actually happened to him, and that what he thought was a routine trip was in fact Martin’s first trip to the moon. Mackenzie struggles with telling Martin this, but ends up doing it. This news ends up hurting Martin mentally, and it is insinuated that Martin holds a grudge forever against Mackenzie.",
"MacKenzie is the therapist who Ish meets after the Flight Surgeon introduces him as a big gun in the head-thumping racket. MacKenzie specializes in shock therapy, and he starts off by asking Ish a lot about his life. He asks Ish questions such as whether he has any families or a woman; this is done in order to build a basic profile of the other man. MacKenzie is noted to be taking any notes, instead preferring to record their conversation with his portable tape-recorder. MacKenzie also administers shotgun therapy on Ish, which he does not realize the effects of until later. MacKenzie does not appear again until Ish is at the station, where he reveals that he hypnotized Ish in order to bring him back. He reveals that everything Ish felt about death and the moon is not real in order to not have him completely lost to the idea of being a rocket pilot. ",
"Mackenzie is a psychiatrist who is sent to Martin by the Air Force. The Flight Surgeon lets him into the room where Martin is sitting. The psychiatrist asks Martin several questions about his previous jobs at the airports near Miami, his family, and a possible girlfriend. Then he unexpectedly tells Martin that he can’t go to space which causes an immediate aggressive reaction from the pilot. Mackenzie apologizes and explains that he just decided to use shotgun therapy to check Martin’s reactions and drives. The doctor feels embarrassed. Then at some point, Mackenzie hypnotizes Martin, making him believe that he has already been to the Moon. When Martin comes back from the flight, the doctor tells him the truth, claiming that it was the only way to make sure that Martin comes back and doesn’t go farther. ",
"MacKenzie is a psychiatrist. He meets Martin Isherwood when the flight surgeon tells Martin to meet him. MacKenzie asks Martin several questions but does not pay special attention to his answers. He has a portable tape recorder under his lapel. His face always has no judgments whenever Ish responds to his questions. He wears a tailored suit. He is skinny. His hair is washed-out. At the end of his conversation with Ish, he suddenly commands Ish, making Ish angry. It turns out that it is some therapy, and MacKenzie is embarrassed. MacKenzie hypnotizes Ish. When Ish wakes up from the hallucination, MacKenzie tells him the truth."
] |
40968
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He had but one ambition, one desire: to pilot the first manned rocket to the moon. And he was prepared as no man had ever prepared himself before....
DESIRE NO MORE
by Algis Budrys
( illustrated by Milton Luros )
" Desire no more than to thy lot may fall.... "
—Chaucer
THE SMALL young man looked at his father, and shook his head.
"But you've got to learn a trade," his father said, exasperated. "I can't afford to send you to college; you know that."
"I've got a trade," he answered.
His father smiled thinly. "What?" he asked patronizingly.
"I'm a rocket pilot," the boy said, his thin jaw stretching the skin of his cheeks.
His father laughed in the way the boy had learned to anticipate and hate. "Yeah," he said. He leaned back in his chair and laughed so hard that the Sunday paper slipped off his wide lap and fell to the floor with an unnoticed stiff rustle.
"A rocket pilot!" His father's derision hooted through the quiet parlor. "A ro— oh, no! —a rocket pilot !"
The boy stared silently at the convulsed figure in the chair. His lips fell into a set white bar, and the corners of his jaws bulged with the tension in their muscles. Suddenly, he turned on his heel and stalked out of the parlor, through the hall, out the front door, to the porch. He stopped there, hesitating a little.
" Marty! " His father's shout followed him out of the parlor. It seemed to act like a hand between the shoulder-blades, because the boy almost ran as he got down the porch stairs.
"What is it, Howard?" Marty's mother asked in a worried voice as she came in from the kitchen, her damp hands rubbing themselves dry against the sides of her housedress.
"Crazy kid," Howard Isherwood muttered. He stared at the figure of his son as the boy reached the end of the walk and turned off into the street. " Come back here! " he shouted. "A rocket pilot," he cursed under his breath. "What's the kid been reading? Claiming he's a rocket pilot!"
Margaret Isherwood's brow furrowed into a faint, bewildered frown.
"But—isn't he a little young? I know they're teaching some very odd things in high schools these days, but it seems to me...."
"Oh, for Pete's sake, Marge, there aren't even any rockets yet! Come back here, you idiot! " Howard Isherwood was standing on his porch, his clenched fists trembling at the ends of his stiffly-held arms.
"Are you sure, Howard?" his wife asked faintly.
"Yes, I'm sure !"
"But, where's he going?"
" Stop that! Get off that bus! YOU hear me? Marty?"
" Howard! Stop acting like a child and talk to me! Where is that boy going?"
Howard Isherwood, stocky, red-faced, forty-seven, and defeated, turned away from the retreating bus and looked at his wife. "I don't know," he told her bitterly, between rushes of air into his jerkily heaving lungs.
"Maybe, the moon," he told her sarcastically.
Martin Isherwood, rocket pilot, weight 102, height 4', 11", had come of age at seventeen.
THE SMALL man looked at his faculty advisor. "No," he said. "I am not interested in working for a degree."
"But—" The faculty advisor unconsciously tapped the point of a yellow pencil against the fresh green of his desk blotter, leaving a rough arc of black flecks. "Look, Ish, you've got to either deliver or get off the basket. This program is just like the others you've followed for nine semesters; nothing but math and engineering. You've taken just about every undergrad course there is in those fields. How long are you going to keep this up?"
"I'm signed up for Astronomy 101," Isherwood pointed out.
The faculty advisor snorted. "A snap course. A breather, after you've studied the same stuff in Celestial Navigation. What's the matter, Ish? Scared of liberal arts?"
Isherwood shook his head. "Uh-unh. Not interested. No time. And that Astronomy course isn't a breather. Different slant from Cee Nav—they won't be talking about stars as check points, but as things in themselves." Something seemed to flicker across his face as he said it.
The advisor missed it; he was too engrossed in his argument. "Still a snap. What's the difference, how you look at a star?"
Isherwood almost winced. "Call it a hobby," he said. He looked down at his watch. "Come on, Dave. You're not going to convince me. You haven't convinced me any of the other times, either, so you might as well give up, don't you think? I've got a half hour before I go on the job. Let's go get some beer."
The advisor, not much older than Isherwood, shrugged, defeated. "Crazy," he muttered. But it was a hot day, and he was as thirsty as the next man.
The bar was air conditioned. The advisor shivered, half grinned, and softly quoted:
"Though I go bare, take ye no care, I am nothing a-cold; I stuff my skin so full within Of jolly good ale and old."
"Huh?" Ish was wearing the look with which he always reacted to the unfamiliar.
The advisor lifted two fingers to the bartender and shrugged. "It's a poem; about four hundred years old, as a matter of fact."
"Oh."
"Don't you give a damn?" the advisor asked, with some peevishness.
Ish laughed shortly, without embarrassment. "Sorry, Dave, but no. It's not my racket."
The advisor cramped his hand a little too tightly around his glass.
"Strictly a specialist, huh?"
Ish nodded. "Call it that."
"But what , for Pete's sake? What is this crazy specialty that blinds you to all the fine things that man has done?"
Ish took a swallow of his beer. "Well, now, if I was a poet, I'd say it was the finest thing that man has ever done."
The advisor's lips twisted in derision. "That's pretty fanatical, isn't it?"
"Uh-huh." Ish waved to the bartender for refills.
THE NAVION took a boiling thermal under its right wing and bucked upward suddenly, tilting at the same time, so that the pretty brunette girl in the other half of the side-by-side was thrown against him. Ish laughed, a sound that came out of his throat as turbulently as that sudden gust of heated air had shot up out of the Everglades, and corrected with a tilt of the wheel.
"Relax, Nan," he said, his words colored by the lingering laughter.
"It's only air; nasty old air."
The girl patted her short hair back into place. "I wish you wouldn't fly this low," she said, half-frightened.
" Low? Call this low?" Ish teased. "Here. Let's drop it a little, and you'll really get an idea of how fast we're going." He nudged the wheel forward, and the Navion dipped its nose in a shallow dive, flattening out thirty feet above the mangrove. The swamp howled with the chug of the dancing pistons and the claw of the propeller at the protesting air, and, from the cockpit, the Everglades resolved into a dirty-green blur that rocketed backward into the slipstream.
"Marty!"
Ish chuckled again. He couldn't have held the ship down much longer, anyway. He tugged back on the wheel suddenly, targeting a cumulous bank with his spinner. His lips peeled back from his teeth, and his jaw set. The Navion went up at the clouds, her engine turning over as fast as it could, her wings cushioned on the rising thrust of another thermal.
And, suddenly, it was as if there were no girl beside him, to be teased, and no air to rock the wings—there were no wings. His face lost all expression. Faint beads of sweat broke out above his eyes and under his nose. "Up," he grunted through his clenched teeth. His fists locked on the wheel. "Up!"
The Navion broke through the cloud, kept going. "Up." If he listened closely, in just the right way, he could almost hear ...
"Marty!"
... the rumble of a louder, prouder engine than the Earth had ever known. He sighed, the breath whispering through his parting teeth, and the aircraft leveled off as he pushed at the wheel with suddenly lax hands. Still half-lost, he turned and looked at the white-faced girl. "Scare you—?" he asked gently.
She nodded. Her fingertips were trembling on his forearm.
"Me too," he said. "Lost my head. Sorry."
"LOOK," HE told the girl, "You got any idea of what it costs to maintain a racing-plane? Everything I own is tied up in the Foo, my ground crew, my trailer, and that scrummy old Ryan that should have been salvaged ten years ago. I can't get married. Suppose I crack the Foo next week? You're dead broke, a widow, and with a funeral to pay for. The only smart thing to do is wait a while."
Nan's eyes clouded, and her lips trembled. "That's what I've been trying to say. Why do you have to win the Vandenberg Cup next week? Why can't you sell the Foo and go into some kind of business? You're a trained pilot."
He had been standing in front of her with his body unconsciously tense from the strain of trying to make her understand. Now he relaxed—more—he slumped—and something began to die in his face, and the first faint lines crept in to show that after it had died, it would not return to life, but would fossilize, leaving his features in the almost unreadable mask that the newspapers would come to know.
"I'm a good bit more than a trained pilot," he said quietly. "The Foo Is a means to an end. After I win the Vandenberg Cup, I can walk into any plant in the States—Douglas, North American, Boeing— any of them—and pick up the Chief Test Pilot's job for the asking. A few of them have as good as said so. After that—" His voice had regained some of its former animation from this new source. Now he broke off, and shrugged. "I've told you all this before."
The girl reached up, as if the physical touch could bring him back to her, and put her fingers around his wrist. "Darling!" she said. "If it's that rocket pilot business again...."
Somehow, his wrist was out of her encircling fingers. "It's always 'that rocket pilot business,'" he said, mimicking her voice. "Damn it, I'm the only trained rocket pilot in the world! I weigh a hundred and fifteen pounds, I'm five feet tall, and I know more navigation and math than anybody the Air Force or Navy have! I can use words like brennschluss and mass-ratio without running over to a copy of Colliers , and I—" He stopped himself, half-smiled, and shrugged again.
"I guess I was kidding myself. After the Cup, there'll be the test job, and after that, there'll be the rockets. You would have had to wait a long time."
All she could think of to say was, "But, Darling, there aren't any man-carrying rockets."
"That's not my fault," he said, and walked away from her.
A week later, he took his stripped-down F-110 across the last line with a scream like that of a hawk that brings its prey safely to its nest.
HE BROUGHT the Mark VII out of her orbit after two days of running rings around the spinning Earth, and the world loved him. He climbed out of the crackling, pinging ship, bearded and dirty, with oil on his face and in his hair, with food stains all over his whipcord, red-eyed, and huskily quiet as he said his few words into the network microphones. And he was not satisfied. There was no peace in his eyes, and his hands moved even more sharply in their expressive gestures as he gave an impromptu report to the technicians who were walking back to the personnel bunker with him.
Nan could see that. Four years ago, he had been different. Four years ago, if she had only known the right words, he wouldn't be so intent now on throwing himself away to the sky.
She was a woman scorned. She had to lie to herself. She broke out of the press section and ran over to him. "Marty!" She brushed past a technician.
He looked at her with faint surprise on his face. "Well, Nan!" he mumbled. But he did not put his hand over her own where it touched his shoulder.
"I'm sorry, Marty," she said in a rush. "I didn't understand. I couldn't see how much it all meant." Her face was flushed, and she spoke as rapidly as she could, not noticing that Ish had already gestured away the guards she was afraid would interrupt her.
"But it's all right, now. You got your rockets. You've done it. You trained yourself for it, and now it's over. You've flown your rocket!"
He looked up at her face and shook his head in quiet pity. One of the shocked technicians was trying to pull her away, and Ish made no move to stop him.
Suddenly, he was tired, there was something in him that was trying to break out against his will, and his reaction was that of a child whose candy is being taken away from him after only one bite.
"Rocket!" he shouted into her terrified face. " Rocket! Call that pile of tin a rocket?" He pointed at the weary Mark VII with a trembling arm.
"Who cares about the bloody machines ! If I thought roller-skating would get me there, I would have gone to work in a rink when I was seventeen! It's getting there that counts! Who gives a good goddam how it's done, or what with!"
And he stood there, shaking like a leaf, outraged, while the guards came and got her.
"SIT DOWN, Ish," the Flight Surgeon said.
They always begin that way , Isherwood thought. The standard medical opening. Sit down. What for? Did somebody really believe that anything he might hear would make him faint? He smiled with as much expression as he ever did, and chose a comfortable chair, rolling the white cylinder of a cigarette between his fingers. He glanced at his watch. Fourteen hours, thirty-six minutes, and four days to go.
"How's it?" the FS asked.
Ish grinned and shrugged. "All right." But he didn't usually grin. The realization disquieted him a little.
"Think you'll make it?"
Deliberately, rather than automatically, he fell back into his usual response-pattern. "Don't know. That's what I'm being paid to find out."
"Uh- huh ." The FS tapped the eraser of his pencil against his teeth.
"Look—you want to talk to a man for a while?"
"What man?" It didn't really matter. He had a feeling that anything he said or did now would have a bearing, somehow, on the trip. If they wanted him to do something for them, he was bloody well going to do it.
"Fellow named MacKenzie. Big gun in the head-thumping racket." The Flight Surgeon was trying to be as casual as he could. "Air Force insisted on it, as a matter of fact," he said. "Can't really blame them. After all, it's their beast."
"Don't want any hole-heads denting it up on them, huh?" Ish lit the cigarette and flipped his lighter shut with a snap of the lid. "Sure. Bring him on."
The FS smiled. "Good. He's—uh—he's in the next room. Okay to ask him in right now?"
"Sure." Something flickered in Isherwood's eyes. Amusement at the Flight Surgeon's discomfort was part of it. Worry was some of the rest.
MacKENZIE didn't seem to be taking any notes, or paying any special attention to the answers Ish was giving to his casual questions. But the questions fell into a pattern that was far from casual, and Ish could see the small button-mike of a portable tape-recorder nestling under the man's lapel.
"Been working your own way for the last seventeen years, haven't you?" MacKenzie seemed to mumble in a perfectly clear voice.
Ish nodded.
"How's that?"
The corners of Isherwood's mouth twitched, and he said "Yes" for the recorder's benefit.
"Odd jobs, first of all?"
"Something like that. Anything I could get, the first few months. After I was halfway set up, I stuck to garages and repair shops."
"Out at the airports around Miami, mostly, wasn't it?"
"Ahuh."
"Took some of your pay in flying lessons."
"Right."
MacKenzie's face passed no judgements—he simply hunched in his chair, seemingly dwarfed by the shoulders of his perfectly tailored suit, his stubby fingers twiddling a Phi Beta Kappa key. He was a spare man—only a step or two away from emaciation. Occasionally, he pushed a tired strand of washed-out hair away from his forehead.
Ish answered him truthfully, without more than ordinary reservations. This was the man who could ground him He was dangerous—red-letter dangerous—because of it.
"No family."
Ish shrugged. "Not that I know of. Cut out at seventeen. My father was making good money. He had a pension plan, insurance policies. No need to worry about them."
Ish knew the normal reaction a statement like that should have brought. MacKenzie's face did not go into a blank of repression—but it still passed no judgements.
"How's things between you and the opposite sex?"
"About normal."
"No wife—no steady girl."
"Not a very good idea, in my racket."
MacKenzie grunted. Suddenly, he sat bolt upright in his chair, and swung toward Ish. His lean arm shot out, and his index finger was aimed between Isherwood's eyes. "You can't go!"
Ish was on his feet, his fists clenched, the blood throbbing in his temple veins. "What!" he roared.
MacKenzie seemed to collapse in his chair. The brief commanding burst was over, and his face was apologetic, "Sorry," he said. He seemed genuinely abashed. "Shotgun therapy. Works best, sometimes. You can go, all right; I just wanted to get a fast check on your reactions and drives."
Ish could feel the anger that still ran through him—anger, and more fear than he wanted to admit. "I'm due at a briefing," he said tautly.
"You through with me?"
MacKenzie nodded, still embarrassed. "Sorry."
Ish ignored the man's obvious feelings. He stopped at the door to send a parting stroke at the thing that had frightened him. "Big gun in the psychiatry racket, huh? Well, your professional lingo's slipping, Doc. They did put some learning in my head at college, you know. Therapy, hell! Testing maybe, but you sure didn't do anything to help me!"
"I don't know," MacKenzie said softly. "I wish I did."
Ish slammed the door behind him. He stood in the corridor, jamming a fresh cigarette in his mouth. He threw a glance at his watch. Twelve hours, twenty-two minutes, and four days to go.
Damn! He was late for the briefing. Odd—that fool psychiatrist hadn't seemed to take up that much of his time.
He shrugged. What difference did it make? As he strode down the hall, he lost his momentary puzzlement under the flood of realization that nothing could stop him now, that the last hurdle was beaten. He was going. He was going, and if there were faint echoes of "Marty!" ringing in the dark background of his mind, they only served to push him faster, as they always had. Nothing but death could stop him now.
ISH LOOKED up bitterly at the Receptionist. "No," he said.
"But everybody fills out an application," she protested.
"No. I've got a job," he said as he had been saying for the last half hour.
The Receptionist sighed. "If you'll only read the literature I've given you, you'll understand that all your previous commitments have been cancelled."
"Look, Honey, I've seen company poop sheets before. Now, let's cut this nonsense. I've got to get back."
"But nobody goes back."
"Goddam it, I don't know what kind of place this is, but—" He stopped at the Receptionist's wince, and looked around, his mouth open. The reception desk was solid enough. There were IN and OUT and HOLD baskets on the desk, and the Receptionist seemed to see nothing extraordinary about it. But the room—a big room, he realized—seemed to fade out at the edges, rather than stop at walls. The lighting, too....
"Let's see your back!" he rapped out, his voice high.
She sighed in exasperation. "If you'd read the literature ..." She swiveled her chair slowly.
"No wings," he said.
"Of course not!" she snapped. She brushed her hair away from her forehead without his telling her to. "No horns, either."
"Streamlined, huh?" he said bitterly.
"It's a little different for everybody," she said with unexpected gentleness. "It would have to be, wouldn't it?"
"Yeah, I guess so," he admitted slowly. Then he lost his momentary awe, and his posture grew tense again. He glanced down at his wrist. Six hours, forty-seven minutes, and no days to go.
"Who do I see?"
She stared at him, bewildered at the sudden change in his voice. "See?"
"About getting out of here! Come on, come on," he barked, snapping his fingers impatiently. "I haven't got much time."
She smiled sweetly. "Oh, but you do."
"Can it! Who's your Section boss? Get him down here. On the double. Come on!" His face was streaming with perspiration but his voice was firm with the purpose that drove him.
Her lips closed into an angry line, and she jabbed a finger at a desk button. "I'll call the Personnel Manager."
"Thanks," he said sarcastically, and waited impatiently. Odd, the way the Receptionist looked a little like Nan.
THE PERSONNEL Manager wore a perfectly-tailored suit. He strode across the lobby floor toward Ish, his hand outstretched.
"Martin Isherwood!" he exclaimed enthusiastically. "I'm very glad to meet you!"
"I'll bet," Ish said dryly, giving the Personnel Manager's hand a short shake. "I've got other ideas. I want out."
"That's all he's been saying for the past forty-five minutes, Sir," the Receptionist said from behind her desk.
The Personnel Manager frowned. "Um. Yes. Well, that's not unprecedented."
"But hardly usual," he added.
Ish found himself liking the man. He had a job to do, and after the preliminary formality of the greeting had been passed, he was ready to buckle down to it. Oh, he—shucks?—the Receptionist wasn't such a bad girl, either. He smiled at her. "Sorry I lost my head," he said.
She smiled back. "It happens."
He took time to give her one more smile and a half-wink, and swung back to the Personnel Manager.
"Now. Let's get this thing straightened out. I've got—" He stopped to look at his watch. "Six hours and a few minutes. They're fueling the beast right now."
"Do you know how much red tape you'd have to cut?"
Ish shook his head. "I don't want to sound nasty, but that's your problem."
The Personnel Manager hesitated. "Look—you feel you've got a job unfinished. Or, anyway, that's the way you'd put it. But, let's face it—that's not really what's galling you. It's not really the job, is it? It's just that you think you've been cheated out of what you devoted your life to."
Ish could feel his jaw muscles bunching. "Don't put words in my mouth!" he snapped. "Just get me back, and we'll split hairs about it when I get around this way again." Suddenly, he found himself pleading. "All I need is a week," he said. "It'll be a rough week—no picnic, no pleasures of the flesh. No smoking, no liquor. I certainly won't be breaking any laws. One week. Get there, putter around for two days, and back again. Then, you can do anything you want to—as long as it doesn't look like the trip's responsible, of course."
The Personnel Manager hesitated. "Suppose—" he began, but Ish interrupted him.
"Look, they need it, down there. They've got to have a target, someplace to go. We're built for it. People have to have—but what am I telling you for. If you don't know, who does?"
The Personnel Manager smiled. "I was about to say something."
Ish stopped, abashed. "Sorry."
He waved the apology away with a short movement of his hand. "You've got to understand that what you've been saying isn't a valid claim. If it were, human history would be very different, wouldn't it?"
"Suppose I showed you something, first? Then, you could decide whether you want to stay, after all."
"How long's it going to take?" Ish flushed under the memory of having actually begged for something.
"Not long," the Personnel Manager said. He half-turned and pointed up at the Earth, hanging just beyond the wall of the crater in which they were suddenly standing.
"Earth," the Personnel Manager said.
Somehow, Ish was not astonished. He looked up at the Earth, touched by cloud and sunlight, marked with ocean and continent, crowned with ice. The unblinking stars filled the night.
He looked around him. The Moon was silent—quiet, patient, waiting. Somewhere, a metal glint against the planet above, if it were only large enough to be seen, was the Station, and the ship for which the Moon had waited.
Ish walked a short distance. He was leaving no tracks in the pumice the ages had sown. But it was the way he had thought of it, nevertheless. It was the way the image had slowly built up in his mind, through the years, through the training, through the work. It was what he had aimed the Navion at, that day over the Everglades.
"It's not the same," he said.
The Personnel Manager sighed.
"Don't you see," Ish said, "It can't be the same. I didn't push the beast up here. There wasn't any feel to it. There wasn't any sound of rockets."
The Personnel Manager sighed again. "There wouldn't be, you know. Taking off from the Station, landing here—vacuum."
Ish shook his head. "There'd still be a sound. Maybe not for anybody else to hear—and, maybe, maybe there would be. There'd be people, back on Earth, who'd hear it."
"All right," the Personnel Manager said. His face was grave, but his eyes were shining a little.
"ISH! HEY, Ish, wake up, will you!" There was a hand on his shoulder.
"Will you get a load of this guy!" the voice said to someone else. "An hour to go, and he's sleeping like the dead."
Ish willed his eyes to open. He felt his heart begin to move again, felt the blood sluggishly beginning to surge into his veins. His hands and feet were very cold.
"Come on, Ish," the Crew Chief said.
"All right," he mumbled. "Okay. I'm up." He sat on the edge of his bunk looking down at his hands. They were blue under the fingernails. He sighed, feeling the air moving down into his lungs.
Stiffly, he got to his feet and began to climb into his G suit.
The Moon opened its face to him. From where he lay, strapped into the control seat in the forward bubble, he looked at it emotionlessly, and began to brake for a landing.
He looked for footprints in the crater, though he knew he hadn't left any. Earth was a familiar sight over his right shoulder.
He brought the twin-bubble beast back to the station. They threw spotlights on it, for the TV pickups, and thrust microphones at him. He could see broad grins behind the faceplates of the suits the docking crew wore, and they were pounding his back. The interior of the Station was a babbling of voices, a tumult of congratulations. He looked at it all, dead-faced, his eyes empty.
"It was easy," he said over a world-wide network, and pushed the press representatives out of his way.
MacKENZIE was waiting for him in the crew section. Ish flicked his stolid eyes at him, shrugged, and stripped out of his clothes. He pulled a coverall out of a locker and climbed into it, then went over to his bunk and lay down on his side, facing the bulkhead.
"Ish."
It was MacKenzie, bending over him.
Ish grunted.
"It wasn't any good was it? You'd done it all before; you'd been there."
He was past emotions. "Yeah?"
"We couldn't take the chance." MacKenzie was trying desperately to explain. "You were the best there was—but you'd done something to yourself by becoming the best. You shut yourself off from your family. You had no close friends, no women. You had no other interests. You were a rocket pilot—nothing else. You've never read an adult book that wasn't a text; you've never listened to a symphony except by accident. You don't know Rembrandt from Norman Rockwell. Nothing. No ties, no props, nothing to sustain you if something went wrong. We couldn't take the chance, Ish! "
"So?"
"There was too much at stake. If we let you go, you might have forgotten to come back. You might have just kept going."
He remembered the time with the Navion , and nodded. "I might have."
"I hypnotized you," MacKenzie said. "You were never dead. I don't know what the details of your hallucination were, but the important part came through, all right. You thought you'd been to the Moon before. It took all the adventure out of the actual flight; it was just a workaday trip."
"I said it was easy," Ish said.
"There was no other way to do it! I had to cancel out the thrill that comes from challenging the unknown. You knew what death was like, and you knew what the Moon was like. Can you understand why I had to do it?"
"Yeah. Now get out before I kill you. "
He didn't live too long after that. He never entered a rocket again—he died on the Station, and was buried in space, while a grateful world mourned him. I wonder what it was like, in his mind, when he really died. But he spent the days he had, after the trip, just sitting at an observatory port, cursing the traitor stars with his dead and purposeless eyes.
TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected without note.
This etext was produced from Dynamic Science Fiction, January, 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
|
Who is Farrell and what happens to him throughout the story?
|
After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about Control Group by Roger D. Aycock.
Relevant chunks:
"Any problem posed by one group of
human beings can be resolved by any
other group." That's what the Handbook
said. But did that include primitive
humans? Or the Bees? Or a ...
CONTROL GROUP
By ROGER DEE
The
cool green disk of Alphard
Six on the screen was
infinitely welcome after the arid
desolation and stinking swamplands
of the inner planets, an
airy jewel of a world that might
have been designed specifically
for the hard-earned month of
rest ahead. Navigator Farrell,
youngest and certainly most impulsive
of the three-man Terran
Reclamations crew, would have
set the Marco Four down at
once but for the greater caution
of Stryker, nominally captain of
the group, and of Gibson, engineer,
and linguist. Xavier, the
ship's little mechanical, had—as
was usual and proper—no voice
in the matter.
"Reconnaissance spiral first,
Arthur," Stryker said firmly. He
chuckled at Farrell's instant
scowl, his little eyes twinkling
and his naked paunch quaking
over the belt of his shipboard
shorts. "Chapter One, Subsection
Five, Paragraph Twenty-seven: No planetfall on an unreclaimed
world shall be deemed
safe without proper— "
Farrell, as Stryker had expected,
interrupted with characteristic
impatience. "Do you sleep with that damned Reclamations
Handbook, Lee? Alphard Six
isn't an unreclaimed world—it
was never colonized before the
Hymenop invasion back in 3025,
so why should it be inhabited
now?"
Gibson, who for four hours
had not looked up from his interminable
chess game with
Xavier, paused with a beleaguered
knight in one blunt brown
hand.
"No point in taking chances,"
Gibson said in his neutral baritone.
He shrugged thick bare
shoulders, his humorless black-browed
face unmoved, when
Farrell included him in his
scowl. "We're two hundred twenty-six
light-years from Sol, at
the old limits of Terran expansion,
and there's no knowing
what we may turn up here. Alphard's
was one of the first systems
the Bees took over. It must
have been one of the last to be
abandoned when they pulled back
to 70 Ophiuchi."
"And I think you live for the
day," Farrell said acidly, "when
we'll stumble across a functioning
dome of live, buzzing Hymenops.
Damn it, Gib, the Bees
pulled out a hundred years ago,
before you and I were born—neither
of us ever saw a Hymenop,
and never will!"
"But I saw them," Stryker
said. "I fought them for the better
part of the century they were
here, and I learned there's no
predicting nor understanding
them. We never knew why they
came nor why they gave up and
left. How can we know whether
they'd leave a rear-guard or
booby trap here?"
He put a paternal hand on
Farrell's shoulder, understanding
the younger man's eagerness
and knowing that their close-knit
team would have been the
more poorly balanced without it.
"Gib's right," he said. He
nearly added as usual . "We're on
rest leave at the moment, yes,
but our mission is still to find
Terran colonies enslaved and
abandoned by the Bees, not to
risk our necks and a valuable
Reorientations ship by landing
blind on an unobserved planet.
We're too close already. Cut in
your shields and find a reconnaissance
spiral, will you?"
Grumbling, Farrell punched
coordinates on the Ringwave
board that lifted the Marco Four out of her descent and restored
the bluish enveloping haze of
her repellors.
Stryker's caution was justified
on the instant. The speeding
streamlined shape that had flashed
up unobserved from below
swerved sharply and exploded in
a cataclysmic blaze of atomic
fire that rocked the ship wildly
and flung the three men to the
floor in a jangling roar of
alarms.
"So the Handbook tacticians
knew what they were about,"
Stryker said minutes later. Deliberately
he adopted the smug
tone best calculated to sting Farrell
out of his first self-reproach,
and grinned when the navigator
bristled defensively. "Some of
their enjoinders seem a little
stuffy and obvious at times, but
they're eminently sensible."
When Farrell refused to be
baited Stryker turned to Gibson,
who was busily assessing the
damage done to the ship's more
fragile equipment, and to Xavier,
who searched the planet's
surface with the ship's magnoscanner.
The Marco Four , Ringwave
generators humming gently,
hung at the moment just
inside the orbit of Alphard Six's
single dun-colored moon.
Gibson put down a test meter
with an air of finality.
"Nothing damaged but the
Zero Interval Transfer computer.
I can realign that in a couple
of hours, but it'll have to be
done before we hit Transfer
again."
Stryker looked dubious.
"What if the issue is forced before
the ZIT unit is repaired?
Suppose they come up after us?"
"I doubt that they can. Any
installation crudely enough
equipped to trust in guided missiles
is hardly likely to have developed
efficient space craft."
Stryker was not reassured.
"That torpedo of theirs was
deadly enough," he said. "And
its nature reflects the nature of
the people who made it. Any race
vicious enough to use atomic
charges is too dangerous to
trifle with." Worry made comical
creases in his fat, good-humored
face. "We'll have to find
out who they are and why
they're here, you know."
"They can't be Hymenops,"
Gibson said promptly. "First,
because the Bees pinned their
faith on Ringwave energy fields,
as we did, rather than on missiles.
Second, because there's no
dome on Six."
"There were three empty
domes on Five, which is a desert
planet," Farrell pointed out.
"Why didn't they settle Six? It's
a more habitable world."
Gibson shrugged. "I know the
Bees always erected domes on
every planet they colonized, Arthur,
but precedent is a fallible
tool. And it's even more firmly
established that there's no possibility
of our rationalizing the
motivations of a culture as alien
as the Hymenops'—we've been
over that argument a hundred
times on other reclaimed
worlds."
"But this was never an unreclaimed
world," Farrell said
with the faint malice of one too
recently caught in the wrong.
"Alphard Six was surveyed and
seeded with Terran bacteria
around the year 3000, but the
Bees invaded before we could
colonize. And that means we'll
have to rule out any resurgent
colonial group down there, because
Six never had a colony in
the beginning."
"The Bees have been gone for
over a hundred years," Stryker
said. "Colonists might have migrated
from another Terran-occupied
planet."
Gibson disagreed.
"We've touched at every inhabited
world in this sector, Lee,
and not one surviving colony has
developed space travel on its
own. The Hymenops had a hundred
years to condition their human
slaves to ignorance of
everything beyond their immediate
environment—the motives
behind that conditioning usually
escape us, but that's beside the
point—and they did a thorough
job of it. The colonists have had
no more than a century of freedom
since the Bees pulled out,
and four generations simply
isn't enough time for any subjugated
culture to climb from
slavery to interstellar flight."
Stryker made a padding turn
about the control room, tugging
unhappily at the scanty fringe
of hair the years had left him.
"If they're neither Hymenops
nor resurgent colonists," he said,
"then there's only one choice remaining—they're
aliens from a
system we haven't reached yet,
beyond the old sphere of Terran
exploration. We always assumed
that we'd find other races out
here someday, and that they'd
be as different from us in form
and motivation as the Hymenops.
Why not now?"
Gibson said seriously, "Not
probable, Lee. The same objection
that rules out the Bees applies
to any trans-Alphardian
culture—they'd have to be beyond
the atomic fission stage,
else they'd never have attempted
interstellar flight. The Ringwave
with its Zero Interval Transfer
principle and instantaneous communications
applications is the
only answer to long-range travel,
and if they'd had that they
wouldn't have bothered with
atomics."
Stryker turned on him almost
angrily. "If they're not Hymenops
or humans or aliens, then
what in God's name are they?"
"Aye, there's the rub," Farrell
said, quoting a passage
whose aptness had somehow seen
it through a dozen reorganizations
of insular tongue and a
final translation to universal
Terran. "If they're none of those
three, we've only one conclusion
left. There's no one down there
at all—we're victims of the first
joint hallucination in psychiatric
history."
Stryker threw up his hands in
surrender. "We can't identify
them by theorizing, and that
brings us down to the business
of first-hand investigation.
Who's going to bell the cat this
time?"
"I'd like to go," Gibson said
at once. "The ZIT computer can
wait."
Stryker vetoed his offer as
promptly. "No, the ZIT comes
first. We may have to run for it,
and we can't set up a Transfer
jump without the computer. It's
got to be me or Arthur."
Farrell felt the familiar chill
of uneasiness that inevitably
preceded this moment of decision.
He was not lacking in courage,
else the circumstances under
which he had worked for the
past ten years—the sometimes
perilous, sometimes downright
charnel conditions left by the
fleeing Hymenop conquerors—would
have broken him long
ago. But that same hard experience
had honed rather than
blunted the edge of his imagination,
and the prospect of a close-quarters
stalking of an unknown
and patently hostile force was
anything but attractive.
"You two did the field work
on the last location," he said.
"It's high time I took my turn—and
God knows I'd go mad if
I had to stay inship and listen
to Lee memorizing his Handbook
subsections or to Gib practicing
dead languages with Xavier."
Stryker laughed for the first
time since the explosion that
had so nearly wrecked the Marco
Four .
"Good enough. Though it
wouldn't be more diverting to
listen for hours to you improvising
enharmonic variations on
the Lament for Old Terra with
your accordion."
Gibson, characteristically, had
a refinement to offer.
"They'll be alerted down there
for a reconnaissance sally," he
said. "Why not let Xavier take
the scouter down for overt diversion,
and drop Arthur off in
the helihopper for a low-level
check?"
Stryker looked at Farrell. "All
right, Arthur?"
"Good enough," Farrell said.
And to Xavier, who had not
moved from his post at the magnoscanner:
"How does it look,
Xav? Have you pinned down
their base yet?"
The mechanical answered him
in a voice as smooth and clear—and
as inflectionless—as a 'cello
note. "The planet seems uninhabited
except for a large island
some three hundred miles in
diameter. There are twenty-seven
small agrarian hamlets surrounded
by cultivated fields.
There is one city of perhaps a
thousand buildings with a central
square. In the square rests
a grounded spaceship of approximately
ten times the bulk
of the Marco Four ."
They crowded about the vision
screen, jostling Xavier's jointed
gray shape in their interest. The
central city lay in minutest detail
before them, the battered
hulk of the grounded ship glinting
rustily in the late afternoon
sunlight. Streets radiated away
from the square in orderly succession,
the whole so clearly
depicted that they could see the
throngs of people surging up
and down, tiny foreshortened
faces turned toward the sky.
"At least they're human,"
Farrell said. Relief replaced in
some measure his earlier uneasiness.
"Which means that they're
Terran, and can be dealt with
according to Reclamations routine.
Is that hulk spaceworthy,
Xav?"
Xavier's mellow drone assumed
the convention vibrato that
indicated stark puzzlement. "Its
breached hull makes the ship incapable
of flight. Apparently it
is used only to supply power to
the outlying hamlets."
The mechanical put a flexible
gray finger upon an indicator
graph derived from a composite
section of detector meters. "The
power transmitted seems to be
gross electric current conveyed
by metallic cables. It is generated
through a crudely governed
process of continuous atomic
fission."
Farrell, himself appalled by
the information, still found himself
able to chuckle at Stryker's
bellow of consternation.
" Continuous fission? Good
God, only madmen would deliberately
run a risk like that!"
Farrell prodded him with
cheerful malice. "Why say mad men ? Maybe they're humanoid
aliens who thrive on hard radiation
and look on the danger of
being blown to hell in the middle
of the night as a satisfactory
risk."
"They're not alien," Gibson
said positively. "Their architecture
is Terran, and so is their
ship. The ship is incredibly
primitive, though; those batteries
of tubes at either end—"
"Are thrust reaction jets,"
Stryker finished in an awed
voice. "Primitive isn't the word,
Gib—the thing is prehistoric!
Rocket propulsion hasn't been
used in spacecraft since—how
long, Xav?"
Xavier supplied the information
with mechanical infallibility.
"Since the year 2100 when
the Ringwave propulsion-communication
principle was discovered.
That principle has served
men since."
Farrell stared in blank disbelief
at the anomalous craft on
the screen. Primitive, as Stryker
had said, was not the word
for it: clumsily ovoid, studded
with torpedo domes and turrets
and bristling at either end with
propulsion tubes, it lay at the
center of its square like a rusted
relic of a past largely destroyed
and all but forgotten. What a
magnificent disregard its builders
must have had, he thought,
for their lives and the genetic
purity of their posterity! The
sullen atomic fires banked in
that oxidizing hulk—
Stryker said plaintively, "If
you're right, Gib, then we're
more in the dark than ever. How
could a Terran-built ship eleven
hundred years old get here ?"
Gibson, absorbed in his chess-player's
contemplation of alternatives,
seemed hardly to hear
him.
"Logic or not-logic," Gibson
said. "If it's a Terran artifact,
we can discover the reason for
its presence. If not—"
" Any problem posed by one
group of human beings ," Stryker
quoted his Handbook, " can be
resolved by any other group, regardless
of ideology or conditioning,
because the basic
perceptive abilities of both must
be the same through identical
heredity ."
"If it's an imitation, and this
is another Hymenop experiment
in condition ecology, then we're
stumped to begin with," Gibson
finished. "Because we're not
equipped to evaluate the psychology
of alien motivation. We've
got to determine first which case
applies here."
He waited for Farrell's expected
irony, and when the
navigator forestalled him by remaining
grimly quiet, continued.
"The obvious premise is that
a Terran ship must have been
built by Terrans. Question: Was
it flown here, or built here?"
"It couldn't have been built
here," Stryker said. "Alphard
Six was surveyed just before the
Bees took over in 3025, and there
was nothing of the sort here
then. It couldn't have been built
during the two and a quarter
centuries since; it's obviously
much older than that. It was
flown here."
"We progress," Farrell said
dryly. "Now if you'll tell us how ,
we're ready to move."
"I think the ship was built on
Terra during the Twenty-second
Century," Gibson said calmly.
"The atomic wars during that
period destroyed practically all
historical records along with the
technology of the time, but I've
read well-authenticated reports
of atomic-driven ships leaving
Terra before then for the nearer
stars. The human race climbed
out of its pit again during the
Twenty-third Century and developed
the technology that gave
us the Ringwave. Certainly no
atomic-powered ships were built
after the wars—our records are
complete from that time."
Farrell shook his head at the
inference. "I've read any number
of fanciful romances on the
theme, Gib, but it won't stand
up in practice. No shipboard society
could last through a thousand-year
space voyage. It's a
physical and psychological impossibility.
There's got to be
some other explanation."
Gibson shrugged. "We can
only eliminate the least likely
alternatives and accept the simplest
one remaining."
"Then we can eliminate this
one now," Farrell said flatly. "It
entails a thousand-year voyage,
which is an impossibility for any
gross reaction drive; the application
of suspended animation
or longevity or a successive-generation
program, and a final
penetration of Hymenop-occupied
space to set up a colony under
the very antennae of the
Bees. Longevity wasn't developed
until around the year 3000—Lee
here was one of the first to
profit by it, if you remember—and
suspended animation is still
to come. So there's one theory
you can forget."
"Arthur's right," Stryker said
reluctantly. "An atomic-powered
ship couldn't have made such a
trip, Gib. And such a lineal-descendant
project couldn't have
lasted through forty generations,
speculative fiction to the
contrary—the later generations
would have been too far removed
in ideology and intent from
their ancestors. They'd have
adapted to shipboard life as the
norm. They'd have atrophied
physically, perhaps even have
mutated—"
"And they'd never have
fought past the Bees during the
Hymenop invasion and occupation,"
Farrell finished triumphantly.
"The Bees had better
detection equipment than we
had. They'd have picked this
ship up long before it reached
Alphard Six."
"But the ship wasn't here in
3000," Gibson said, "and it is
now. Therefore it must have arrived
at some time during the
two hundred years of Hymenop
occupation and evacuation."
Farrell, tangled in contradictions,
swore bitterly. "But
why should the Bees let them
through? The three domes on
Five are over two hundred years
old, which means that the Bees
were here before the ship came.
Why didn't they blast it or enslave
its crew?"
"We haven't touched on all the
possibilities," Gibson reminded
him. "We haven't even established
yet that these people were
never under Hymenop control.
Precedent won't hold always, and
there's no predicting nor evaluating
the motives of an alien
race. We never understood the
Hymenops because there's no
common ground of logic between
us. Why try to interpret their
intentions now?"
Farrell threw up his hands in
disgust. "Next you'll say this is
an ancient Terran expedition
that actually succeeded! There's
only one way to answer the
questions we've raised, and
that's to go down and see for
ourselves. Ready, Xav?"
But uncertainty nagged uneasily
at him when Farrell found
himself alone in the helihopper
with the forest flowing beneath
like a leafy river and Xavier's
scouter disappearing bulletlike
into the dusk ahead.
We never found a colony so
advanced, Farrell thought. Suppose
this is a Hymenop experiment
that really paid off? The
Bees did some weird and wonderful
things with human
guinea pigs—what if they've
created the ultimate booby trap
here, and primed it with conditioned
myrmidons in our own
form?
Suppose, he thought—and derided
himself for thinking it—one
of those suicidal old interstellar
ventures did succeed?
Xavier's voice, a mellow
drone from the helihopper's
Ringwave-powered visicom, cut
sharply into his musing. "The
ship has discovered the scouter
and is training an electronic
beam upon it. My instruments
record an electromagnetic vibration
pattern of low power but
rapidly varying frequency. The
operation seems pointless."
Stryker's voice followed, querulous
with worry: "I'd better
pull Xav back. It may be something
lethal."
"Don't," Gibson's baritone advised.
Surprisingly, there was
excitement in the engineer's
voice. "I think they're trying to
communicate with us."
Farrell was on the point of
demanding acidly to know how
one went about communicating
by means of a fluctuating electric
field when the unexpected
cessation of forest diverted his
attention. The helihopper scudded
over a cultivated area
of considerable extent, fields
stretching below in a vague random
checkerboard of lighter and
darker earth, an undefined cluster
of buildings at their center.
There was a central bonfire that
burned like a wild red eye
against the lower gloom, and in
its plunging ruddy glow he made
out an urgent scurrying of shadowy
figures.
"I'm passing over a hamlet,"
Farrell reported. "The one nearest
the city, I think. There's
something odd going on
down—"
Catastrophe struck so suddenly
that he was caught completely
unprepared. The helihopper's
flimsy carriage bucked and
crumpled. There was a blinding
flare of electric discharge, a
pungent stink of ozone and a
stunning shock that flung him
headlong into darkness.
He awoke slowly with a brutal
headache and a conviction of
nightmare heightened by the
outlandish tone of his surroundings.
He lay on a narrow bed in
a whitely antiseptic infirmary,
an oblong metal cell cluttered
with a grimly utilitarian array
of tables and lockers and chests.
The lighting was harsh and
overbright and the air hung
thick with pungent unfamiliar
chemical odors. From somewhere,
far off yet at the same
time as near as the bulkhead
above him, came the unceasing
drone of machinery.
Farrell sat up, groaning,
when full consciousness made his
position clear. He had been shot
down by God knew what sort of
devastating unorthodox weapon
and was a prisoner in the
grounded ship.
At his rising, a white-smocked
fat man with anachronistic spectacles
and close-cropped gray
hair came into the room, moving
with the professional assurance
of a medic. The man stopped
short at Farrell's stare and
spoke; his words were utterly
unintelligible, but his gesture
was unmistakable.
Farrell followed him dumbly
out of the infirmary and down
a bare corridor whose metal
floor rang coldly underfoot. An
open port near the corridor's end
relieved the blankness of wall
and let in a flood of reddish Alphardian
sunlight; Farrell slowed
to look out, wondering how
long he had lain unconscious,
and felt panic knife at him
when he saw Xavier's scouter lying,
port open and undefended,
on the square outside.
The mechanical had been as
easily taken as himself, then.
Stryker and Gibson, for all their
professional caution, would fare
no better—they could not have
overlooked the capture of Farrell
and Xavier, and when they
tried as a matter of course to
rescue them the Marco would be
struck down in turn by the same
weapon.
The fat medic turned and
said something urgent in his
unintelligible tongue. Farrell,
dazed by the enormity of what
had happened, followed without
protest into an intersecting way
that led through a bewildering
succession of storage rooms and
hydroponics gardens, through a
small gymnasium fitted with
physical training equipment in
graduated sizes and finally into
a soundproofed place that could
have been nothing but a nursery.
The implication behind its
presence stopped Farrell short.
"A creche ," he said, stunned.
He had a wild vision of endless
generations of children growing
up in this dim and stuffy room,
to be taught from their first
toddling steps the functions they
must fulfill before the venture
of which they were a part could
be consummated.
One of those old ventures had succeeded, he thought, and was
awed by the daring of that thousand-year
odyssey. The realization
left him more alarmed than
before—for what technical marvels
might not an isolated group
of such dogged specialists have
developed during a millennium
of application?
Such a weapon as had brought
down the helihopper and scouter
was patently beyond reach of his
own latter-day technology. Perhaps,
he thought, its possession
explained the presence of these
people here in the first stronghold
of the Hymenops; perhaps
they had even fought and defeated
the Bees on their own invaded
ground.
He followed his white-smocked
guide through a power room
where great crude generators
whirred ponderously, pouring
out gross electric current into
arm-thick cables. They were
nearing the bow of the ship
when they passed by another
open port and Farrell, glancing
out over the lowered rampway,
saw that his fears for Stryker
and Gibson had been well
grounded.
The Marco Four , ports open,
lay grounded outside.
Farrell could not have said,
later, whether his next move
was planned or reflexive. The
whole desperate issue seemed to
hang suspended for a breathless
moment upon a hair-fine edge of
decision, and in that instant he
made his bid.
Without pausing in his stride
he sprang out and through the
port and down the steep plane
of the ramp. The rough stone
pavement of the square drummed
underfoot; sore muscles
tore at him, and weakness was
like a weight about his neck. He
expected momentarily to be
blasted out of existence.
He reached the Marco Four with the startled shouts of his
guide ringing unintelligibly in
his ears. The port yawned; he
plunged inside and stabbed at
controls without waiting to seat
himself. The ports swung shut.
The ship darted up under his
manipulation and arrowed into
space with an acceleration that
sprung his knees and made his
vision swim blackly.
He was so weak with strain
and with the success of his coup
that he all but fainted when
Stryker, his scanty hair tousled
and his fat face comical with bewilderment,
stumbled out of his
sleeping cubicle and bellowed at
him.
"What the hell are you doing,
Arthur? Take us down!"
Farrell gaped at him, speechless.
Stryker lumbered past him
and took the controls, spiraling
the Marco Four down. Men
swarmed outside the ports when
the Reclamations craft settled
gently to the square again. Gibson
and Xavier reached the ship
first; Gibson came inside quickly,
leaving the mechanical outside
making patient explanations
to an excited group of Alphardians.
Gibson put a reassuring hand
on Farrell's arm. "It's all right,
Arthur. There's no trouble."
Farrell said dumbly, "I don't
understand. They didn't shoot
you and Xav down too?"
It was Gibson's turn to stare.
"No one shot you down! These
people are primitive enough to
use metallic power lines to
carry electricity to their hamlets,
an anachronism you forgot
last night. You piloted the helihopper
into one of those lines,
and the crash put you out for
the rest of the night and most
of today. These Alphardians are
friendly, so desperately happy to
be found again that it's really
pathetic."
" Friendly? That torpedo—"
"It wasn't a torpedo at all,"
Stryker put in. Understanding
of the error under which Farrell
had labored erased his
earlier irritation, and he chuckled
commiseratingly. "They had
one small boat left for emergency
missions, and sent it up to
contact us in the fear that we
might overlook their settlement
and move on. The boat was
atomic powered, and our shield
screens set off its engines."
Farrell dropped into a chair at
the chart table, limp with reaction.
He was suddenly exhausted,
and his head ached dully.
"We cracked the communications
problem early last night,"
Gibson said. "These people use
an ancient system of electromagnetic
wave propagation called
frequency modulation, and once
Lee and I rigged up a suitable
transceiver the rest was simple.
Both Xav and I recognized the
old language; the natives reported
your accident, and we came
down at once."
"They really came from Terra?
They lived through a thousand
years of flight?"
"The ship left Terra for
Sirius in 2171," Gibson said.
"But not with these people
aboard, or their ancestors. That
expedition perished after less
than a light-year when its
hydroponics system failed. The
Hymenops found the ship derelict
when they invaded us, and
brought it to Alphard Six in
what was probably their first experiment
with human subjects.
The ship's log shows clearly
what happened to the original
complement. The rest is deducible
from the situation here."
Farrell put his hands to his
temples and groaned. "The crash
must have scrambled my wits.
Gib, where did they come from?"
"From one of the first peripheral
colonies conquered by the
Bees," Gibson said patiently.
"The Hymenops were long-range
planners, remember, and masters
of hypnotic conditioning. They
stocked the ship with a captive
crew of Terrans conditioned to
believe themselves descendants
of the original crew, and
grounded it here in disabled
condition. They left for Alphard
Five then, to watch developments.
"Succeeding generations of
colonists grew up accepting the
fact that their ship had missed
Sirius and made planetfall here—they
still don't know where
they really are—by luck. They
never knew about the Hymenops,
and they've struggled along
with an inadequate technology in
the hope that a later expedition
would find them. They found the
truth hard to take, but they're
eager to enjoy the fruits of Terran
assimilation."
Stryker, grinning, brought
Farrell a frosted drink that tinkled
invitingly. "An unusually
fortunate ending to a Hymenop
experiment," he said. "These
people progressed normally because
they've been let alone. Reorienting
them will be a simple
matter; they'll be properly spoiled
colonists within another generation."
Farrell sipped his drink appreciatively.
"But I don't see why the Bees
should go to such trouble to deceive
these people. Why did they
sit back and let them grow as
they pleased, Gib? It doesn't
make sense!"
"But it does, for once," Gibson
said. "The Bees set up this
colony as a control unit to study
the species they were invading,
and they had to give their
specimens a normal—if obsolete—background
in order to determine
their capabilities. The fact
that their experiment didn't tell
them what they wanted to know
may have had a direct bearing
on their decision to pull out."
Farrell shook his head. "It's
a reverse application, isn't it of
the old saw about Terrans being
incapable of understanding an
alien culture?"
"Of course," said Gibson, surprised.
"It's obvious enough,
surely—hard as they tried, the
Bees never understood us
either."
THE END
Question:
Who is Farrell and what happens to him throughout the story?
Answer:
|
[
"Arthur Farrell is the ship’s navigator, the youngest and most impulsive member of the crew. He tries to convince captain Stryker to land on Alphard Six, claiming that it cannot be inhabited. Stryker doesn’t agree and orders Farrell to find a reconnaissance spiral. After the torpedo explodes near the ship, they all discuss who the attackers could be. Farrell points out that there was no sign of life on Alphard Six around the year 3000, so the inhabitants appeared after this. Farrell agrees to be sent to the planet’s surface and explore. They continue talking and soon see an ancient ship in the center of the planet’s town. Farrell is quick to state that it couldn’t have come from Earth because it would've taken hundreds of years to travel here, and the ship’s ancient technology is not effective enough for such a voyage. Irritated, he interrupts the discussion and suggests he and Xavier go down and see who the inhabitants are. Farrell flies in a helihopper and notices a bonfire near the town. He starts reporting when the helihopper’s carriage crumples, an electric discharge blinds Farrell, and he momentarily loses consciousness. Later, he wakes up with a brutal headache in an infirmary inside the ancient ship. A medic with anachronistic spectacles and gray hair uses unintelligible words and gestures to Farrell to follow him. They pass several open ports, and he sees Xavier’s scouter and later the Marco Four. Shocked, he runs to the spaceship and takes off, when unexpectedly Stryker appears near him, ordering him to take the ship down. Soon Gibson explains that Farrell piloted into metallic power lines, and the crash put him out for almost a day. These Alphardians are incredibly friendly. The object the crew considered a torpedo was actually an emergency boat the inhabitants sent to the spaceship to make sure the people on board noticed their colony. Their spaceship’s technology set off the atomic engines of the boat, making it explode. Gibson and Xavier recognized an old language of frequency modulation the night before, heard about Farrell’s crash, and landed the ship to help. It turns out that the expedition that left Terra for Sirius in 2171 perished soon, and the Bees brought the spacecraft here. They also brought some people from their peripheral colonies conditioned to believe themselves descendants of the expedition. They have been let alone. Farrell understands that the Bees were trying to monitor this group and understand humans’ logic, but they never did. \n\n",
"Navigator Arthur Farrell is part of the Terran Reclamations crew on the Marco Four ship. He is part of a three-man crew with a mechanical named Xavier. Farrell is also considered to be the youngest and most impulsive member of the crew; he also jumps to conclusions quickly and often gets corrected by either Stryker or Gibson. At the beginning of the story, Farrell is excited to go to the Alphard Six and almost forgets about the reconnaissance spiral. He tries to prove that the planet was never unreclaimed, even though the other two members are much more cautious in case there are traces left behind by the Bees. When they discuss what could be on the planet, Farrell continues to argue that the Bees never colonized Six. He also says that they might have all been the victims of a joint hallucination. He later volunteers to do the field work with Xavier, as he is sick of staying on the ship with either of the other two men. Farrell later goes down on the helihopper and goes past a hamlet when a blinding flare of electric discharge knocks him out. He later wakes up in an infirmary and believes he was taken by the enemy. However, as the medic leads him out, he realizes that these people are a result of one of the old ventures. Farrell mistakenly believes that the Marco Four is grounded too, which is why he runs to the ship and pushes a few buttons to take off. Later, however, he is reprimanded for his actions and explained that the people here mean no harm. ",
"Arthur Farrell is the navigator and the youngest in the Terran Reclamations crew aboard the Marco Four. He is described to be impatient and impulsive but eager. Assigned to investigate the unknown colony they encounter, he disembarks into a helihopper to determine the planet's origins and inhabitants. As he begins to pull back, he passes over a hamlet and the helihopper suddenly crashes as Farrell falls unconscious. \n\nWhen he awakens, he finds himself in an infirmary and presumes himself to be prisoner. Following the medic out of the infirmary, Farrell marvels at the succession of rooms like the hydroponics garden and nursery that convinces him that previous old ventures on colonization had indeed succeeded. However, he is worried his fellow crewmates have been captured as well. When he sees the grounded ship, his fears comes true and he impulsively rushes aboard the ship to fly them away. Stopped short by Stryker, he soon finds out that no one was shot down by the colony. Instead, Farrell himself had flown into an electrical line and knocked himself out. In addition, the colony was friendly and eager to return to Terra with the crew, as they had been hoping for a while. ",
"Farrell is the navigator on the spaceship Marco Four. He is the youngest and the most impulsive among the crew. He is also called Arthur. He attempts to planetfall the unobserved planet without scouting at first. He does not recognize the importance of the Reclamations Handbook. After getting struck, Farrell volunteers to investigate the planet and the primitive village. When they find out the damaged spaceship on the land uses continuous atomic fission to supply power, they are astonished. Farrell teases Stryker with the hypothesis that the people below are humanoid. Farrell uses the helihopper to investigate the land, with Xavier’s scouter scouting ahead of him. When he reaches the field, he is struck by the power lines used to transmit electricity in the city and passes out. He is in an infirmary room when he wakes up, and an anachronistic man comes in. Farrell thinks that all the other crew members are captive when he sees their spaceship land with the port open. As all the assumptions become more apparent in his head, he dashes to the Marco Four and rises it up. Disrupted by Stryker, he drives the spaceship down again. Farrell learns from Stryker that all their hypotheses are wrong, and these people are harmless and primitive as they had thought."
] |
24949
|
"Any problem posed by one group of
human beings can be resolved by any
other group." That's what the Handbook
said. But did that include primitive
humans? Or the Bees? Or a ...
CONTROL GROUP
By ROGER DEE
The
cool green disk of Alphard
Six on the screen was
infinitely welcome after the arid
desolation and stinking swamplands
of the inner planets, an
airy jewel of a world that might
have been designed specifically
for the hard-earned month of
rest ahead. Navigator Farrell,
youngest and certainly most impulsive
of the three-man Terran
Reclamations crew, would have
set the Marco Four down at
once but for the greater caution
of Stryker, nominally captain of
the group, and of Gibson, engineer,
and linguist. Xavier, the
ship's little mechanical, had—as
was usual and proper—no voice
in the matter.
"Reconnaissance spiral first,
Arthur," Stryker said firmly. He
chuckled at Farrell's instant
scowl, his little eyes twinkling
and his naked paunch quaking
over the belt of his shipboard
shorts. "Chapter One, Subsection
Five, Paragraph Twenty-seven: No planetfall on an unreclaimed
world shall be deemed
safe without proper— "
Farrell, as Stryker had expected,
interrupted with characteristic
impatience. "Do you sleep with that damned Reclamations
Handbook, Lee? Alphard Six
isn't an unreclaimed world—it
was never colonized before the
Hymenop invasion back in 3025,
so why should it be inhabited
now?"
Gibson, who for four hours
had not looked up from his interminable
chess game with
Xavier, paused with a beleaguered
knight in one blunt brown
hand.
"No point in taking chances,"
Gibson said in his neutral baritone.
He shrugged thick bare
shoulders, his humorless black-browed
face unmoved, when
Farrell included him in his
scowl. "We're two hundred twenty-six
light-years from Sol, at
the old limits of Terran expansion,
and there's no knowing
what we may turn up here. Alphard's
was one of the first systems
the Bees took over. It must
have been one of the last to be
abandoned when they pulled back
to 70 Ophiuchi."
"And I think you live for the
day," Farrell said acidly, "when
we'll stumble across a functioning
dome of live, buzzing Hymenops.
Damn it, Gib, the Bees
pulled out a hundred years ago,
before you and I were born—neither
of us ever saw a Hymenop,
and never will!"
"But I saw them," Stryker
said. "I fought them for the better
part of the century they were
here, and I learned there's no
predicting nor understanding
them. We never knew why they
came nor why they gave up and
left. How can we know whether
they'd leave a rear-guard or
booby trap here?"
He put a paternal hand on
Farrell's shoulder, understanding
the younger man's eagerness
and knowing that their close-knit
team would have been the
more poorly balanced without it.
"Gib's right," he said. He
nearly added as usual . "We're on
rest leave at the moment, yes,
but our mission is still to find
Terran colonies enslaved and
abandoned by the Bees, not to
risk our necks and a valuable
Reorientations ship by landing
blind on an unobserved planet.
We're too close already. Cut in
your shields and find a reconnaissance
spiral, will you?"
Grumbling, Farrell punched
coordinates on the Ringwave
board that lifted the Marco Four out of her descent and restored
the bluish enveloping haze of
her repellors.
Stryker's caution was justified
on the instant. The speeding
streamlined shape that had flashed
up unobserved from below
swerved sharply and exploded in
a cataclysmic blaze of atomic
fire that rocked the ship wildly
and flung the three men to the
floor in a jangling roar of
alarms.
"So the Handbook tacticians
knew what they were about,"
Stryker said minutes later. Deliberately
he adopted the smug
tone best calculated to sting Farrell
out of his first self-reproach,
and grinned when the navigator
bristled defensively. "Some of
their enjoinders seem a little
stuffy and obvious at times, but
they're eminently sensible."
When Farrell refused to be
baited Stryker turned to Gibson,
who was busily assessing the
damage done to the ship's more
fragile equipment, and to Xavier,
who searched the planet's
surface with the ship's magnoscanner.
The Marco Four , Ringwave
generators humming gently,
hung at the moment just
inside the orbit of Alphard Six's
single dun-colored moon.
Gibson put down a test meter
with an air of finality.
"Nothing damaged but the
Zero Interval Transfer computer.
I can realign that in a couple
of hours, but it'll have to be
done before we hit Transfer
again."
Stryker looked dubious.
"What if the issue is forced before
the ZIT unit is repaired?
Suppose they come up after us?"
"I doubt that they can. Any
installation crudely enough
equipped to trust in guided missiles
is hardly likely to have developed
efficient space craft."
Stryker was not reassured.
"That torpedo of theirs was
deadly enough," he said. "And
its nature reflects the nature of
the people who made it. Any race
vicious enough to use atomic
charges is too dangerous to
trifle with." Worry made comical
creases in his fat, good-humored
face. "We'll have to find
out who they are and why
they're here, you know."
"They can't be Hymenops,"
Gibson said promptly. "First,
because the Bees pinned their
faith on Ringwave energy fields,
as we did, rather than on missiles.
Second, because there's no
dome on Six."
"There were three empty
domes on Five, which is a desert
planet," Farrell pointed out.
"Why didn't they settle Six? It's
a more habitable world."
Gibson shrugged. "I know the
Bees always erected domes on
every planet they colonized, Arthur,
but precedent is a fallible
tool. And it's even more firmly
established that there's no possibility
of our rationalizing the
motivations of a culture as alien
as the Hymenops'—we've been
over that argument a hundred
times on other reclaimed
worlds."
"But this was never an unreclaimed
world," Farrell said
with the faint malice of one too
recently caught in the wrong.
"Alphard Six was surveyed and
seeded with Terran bacteria
around the year 3000, but the
Bees invaded before we could
colonize. And that means we'll
have to rule out any resurgent
colonial group down there, because
Six never had a colony in
the beginning."
"The Bees have been gone for
over a hundred years," Stryker
said. "Colonists might have migrated
from another Terran-occupied
planet."
Gibson disagreed.
"We've touched at every inhabited
world in this sector, Lee,
and not one surviving colony has
developed space travel on its
own. The Hymenops had a hundred
years to condition their human
slaves to ignorance of
everything beyond their immediate
environment—the motives
behind that conditioning usually
escape us, but that's beside the
point—and they did a thorough
job of it. The colonists have had
no more than a century of freedom
since the Bees pulled out,
and four generations simply
isn't enough time for any subjugated
culture to climb from
slavery to interstellar flight."
Stryker made a padding turn
about the control room, tugging
unhappily at the scanty fringe
of hair the years had left him.
"If they're neither Hymenops
nor resurgent colonists," he said,
"then there's only one choice remaining—they're
aliens from a
system we haven't reached yet,
beyond the old sphere of Terran
exploration. We always assumed
that we'd find other races out
here someday, and that they'd
be as different from us in form
and motivation as the Hymenops.
Why not now?"
Gibson said seriously, "Not
probable, Lee. The same objection
that rules out the Bees applies
to any trans-Alphardian
culture—they'd have to be beyond
the atomic fission stage,
else they'd never have attempted
interstellar flight. The Ringwave
with its Zero Interval Transfer
principle and instantaneous communications
applications is the
only answer to long-range travel,
and if they'd had that they
wouldn't have bothered with
atomics."
Stryker turned on him almost
angrily. "If they're not Hymenops
or humans or aliens, then
what in God's name are they?"
"Aye, there's the rub," Farrell
said, quoting a passage
whose aptness had somehow seen
it through a dozen reorganizations
of insular tongue and a
final translation to universal
Terran. "If they're none of those
three, we've only one conclusion
left. There's no one down there
at all—we're victims of the first
joint hallucination in psychiatric
history."
Stryker threw up his hands in
surrender. "We can't identify
them by theorizing, and that
brings us down to the business
of first-hand investigation.
Who's going to bell the cat this
time?"
"I'd like to go," Gibson said
at once. "The ZIT computer can
wait."
Stryker vetoed his offer as
promptly. "No, the ZIT comes
first. We may have to run for it,
and we can't set up a Transfer
jump without the computer. It's
got to be me or Arthur."
Farrell felt the familiar chill
of uneasiness that inevitably
preceded this moment of decision.
He was not lacking in courage,
else the circumstances under
which he had worked for the
past ten years—the sometimes
perilous, sometimes downright
charnel conditions left by the
fleeing Hymenop conquerors—would
have broken him long
ago. But that same hard experience
had honed rather than
blunted the edge of his imagination,
and the prospect of a close-quarters
stalking of an unknown
and patently hostile force was
anything but attractive.
"You two did the field work
on the last location," he said.
"It's high time I took my turn—and
God knows I'd go mad if
I had to stay inship and listen
to Lee memorizing his Handbook
subsections or to Gib practicing
dead languages with Xavier."
Stryker laughed for the first
time since the explosion that
had so nearly wrecked the Marco
Four .
"Good enough. Though it
wouldn't be more diverting to
listen for hours to you improvising
enharmonic variations on
the Lament for Old Terra with
your accordion."
Gibson, characteristically, had
a refinement to offer.
"They'll be alerted down there
for a reconnaissance sally," he
said. "Why not let Xavier take
the scouter down for overt diversion,
and drop Arthur off in
the helihopper for a low-level
check?"
Stryker looked at Farrell. "All
right, Arthur?"
"Good enough," Farrell said.
And to Xavier, who had not
moved from his post at the magnoscanner:
"How does it look,
Xav? Have you pinned down
their base yet?"
The mechanical answered him
in a voice as smooth and clear—and
as inflectionless—as a 'cello
note. "The planet seems uninhabited
except for a large island
some three hundred miles in
diameter. There are twenty-seven
small agrarian hamlets surrounded
by cultivated fields.
There is one city of perhaps a
thousand buildings with a central
square. In the square rests
a grounded spaceship of approximately
ten times the bulk
of the Marco Four ."
They crowded about the vision
screen, jostling Xavier's jointed
gray shape in their interest. The
central city lay in minutest detail
before them, the battered
hulk of the grounded ship glinting
rustily in the late afternoon
sunlight. Streets radiated away
from the square in orderly succession,
the whole so clearly
depicted that they could see the
throngs of people surging up
and down, tiny foreshortened
faces turned toward the sky.
"At least they're human,"
Farrell said. Relief replaced in
some measure his earlier uneasiness.
"Which means that they're
Terran, and can be dealt with
according to Reclamations routine.
Is that hulk spaceworthy,
Xav?"
Xavier's mellow drone assumed
the convention vibrato that
indicated stark puzzlement. "Its
breached hull makes the ship incapable
of flight. Apparently it
is used only to supply power to
the outlying hamlets."
The mechanical put a flexible
gray finger upon an indicator
graph derived from a composite
section of detector meters. "The
power transmitted seems to be
gross electric current conveyed
by metallic cables. It is generated
through a crudely governed
process of continuous atomic
fission."
Farrell, himself appalled by
the information, still found himself
able to chuckle at Stryker's
bellow of consternation.
" Continuous fission? Good
God, only madmen would deliberately
run a risk like that!"
Farrell prodded him with
cheerful malice. "Why say mad men ? Maybe they're humanoid
aliens who thrive on hard radiation
and look on the danger of
being blown to hell in the middle
of the night as a satisfactory
risk."
"They're not alien," Gibson
said positively. "Their architecture
is Terran, and so is their
ship. The ship is incredibly
primitive, though; those batteries
of tubes at either end—"
"Are thrust reaction jets,"
Stryker finished in an awed
voice. "Primitive isn't the word,
Gib—the thing is prehistoric!
Rocket propulsion hasn't been
used in spacecraft since—how
long, Xav?"
Xavier supplied the information
with mechanical infallibility.
"Since the year 2100 when
the Ringwave propulsion-communication
principle was discovered.
That principle has served
men since."
Farrell stared in blank disbelief
at the anomalous craft on
the screen. Primitive, as Stryker
had said, was not the word
for it: clumsily ovoid, studded
with torpedo domes and turrets
and bristling at either end with
propulsion tubes, it lay at the
center of its square like a rusted
relic of a past largely destroyed
and all but forgotten. What a
magnificent disregard its builders
must have had, he thought,
for their lives and the genetic
purity of their posterity! The
sullen atomic fires banked in
that oxidizing hulk—
Stryker said plaintively, "If
you're right, Gib, then we're
more in the dark than ever. How
could a Terran-built ship eleven
hundred years old get here ?"
Gibson, absorbed in his chess-player's
contemplation of alternatives,
seemed hardly to hear
him.
"Logic or not-logic," Gibson
said. "If it's a Terran artifact,
we can discover the reason for
its presence. If not—"
" Any problem posed by one
group of human beings ," Stryker
quoted his Handbook, " can be
resolved by any other group, regardless
of ideology or conditioning,
because the basic
perceptive abilities of both must
be the same through identical
heredity ."
"If it's an imitation, and this
is another Hymenop experiment
in condition ecology, then we're
stumped to begin with," Gibson
finished. "Because we're not
equipped to evaluate the psychology
of alien motivation. We've
got to determine first which case
applies here."
He waited for Farrell's expected
irony, and when the
navigator forestalled him by remaining
grimly quiet, continued.
"The obvious premise is that
a Terran ship must have been
built by Terrans. Question: Was
it flown here, or built here?"
"It couldn't have been built
here," Stryker said. "Alphard
Six was surveyed just before the
Bees took over in 3025, and there
was nothing of the sort here
then. It couldn't have been built
during the two and a quarter
centuries since; it's obviously
much older than that. It was
flown here."
"We progress," Farrell said
dryly. "Now if you'll tell us how ,
we're ready to move."
"I think the ship was built on
Terra during the Twenty-second
Century," Gibson said calmly.
"The atomic wars during that
period destroyed practically all
historical records along with the
technology of the time, but I've
read well-authenticated reports
of atomic-driven ships leaving
Terra before then for the nearer
stars. The human race climbed
out of its pit again during the
Twenty-third Century and developed
the technology that gave
us the Ringwave. Certainly no
atomic-powered ships were built
after the wars—our records are
complete from that time."
Farrell shook his head at the
inference. "I've read any number
of fanciful romances on the
theme, Gib, but it won't stand
up in practice. No shipboard society
could last through a thousand-year
space voyage. It's a
physical and psychological impossibility.
There's got to be
some other explanation."
Gibson shrugged. "We can
only eliminate the least likely
alternatives and accept the simplest
one remaining."
"Then we can eliminate this
one now," Farrell said flatly. "It
entails a thousand-year voyage,
which is an impossibility for any
gross reaction drive; the application
of suspended animation
or longevity or a successive-generation
program, and a final
penetration of Hymenop-occupied
space to set up a colony under
the very antennae of the
Bees. Longevity wasn't developed
until around the year 3000—Lee
here was one of the first to
profit by it, if you remember—and
suspended animation is still
to come. So there's one theory
you can forget."
"Arthur's right," Stryker said
reluctantly. "An atomic-powered
ship couldn't have made such a
trip, Gib. And such a lineal-descendant
project couldn't have
lasted through forty generations,
speculative fiction to the
contrary—the later generations
would have been too far removed
in ideology and intent from
their ancestors. They'd have
adapted to shipboard life as the
norm. They'd have atrophied
physically, perhaps even have
mutated—"
"And they'd never have
fought past the Bees during the
Hymenop invasion and occupation,"
Farrell finished triumphantly.
"The Bees had better
detection equipment than we
had. They'd have picked this
ship up long before it reached
Alphard Six."
"But the ship wasn't here in
3000," Gibson said, "and it is
now. Therefore it must have arrived
at some time during the
two hundred years of Hymenop
occupation and evacuation."
Farrell, tangled in contradictions,
swore bitterly. "But
why should the Bees let them
through? The three domes on
Five are over two hundred years
old, which means that the Bees
were here before the ship came.
Why didn't they blast it or enslave
its crew?"
"We haven't touched on all the
possibilities," Gibson reminded
him. "We haven't even established
yet that these people were
never under Hymenop control.
Precedent won't hold always, and
there's no predicting nor evaluating
the motives of an alien
race. We never understood the
Hymenops because there's no
common ground of logic between
us. Why try to interpret their
intentions now?"
Farrell threw up his hands in
disgust. "Next you'll say this is
an ancient Terran expedition
that actually succeeded! There's
only one way to answer the
questions we've raised, and
that's to go down and see for
ourselves. Ready, Xav?"
But uncertainty nagged uneasily
at him when Farrell found
himself alone in the helihopper
with the forest flowing beneath
like a leafy river and Xavier's
scouter disappearing bulletlike
into the dusk ahead.
We never found a colony so
advanced, Farrell thought. Suppose
this is a Hymenop experiment
that really paid off? The
Bees did some weird and wonderful
things with human
guinea pigs—what if they've
created the ultimate booby trap
here, and primed it with conditioned
myrmidons in our own
form?
Suppose, he thought—and derided
himself for thinking it—one
of those suicidal old interstellar
ventures did succeed?
Xavier's voice, a mellow
drone from the helihopper's
Ringwave-powered visicom, cut
sharply into his musing. "The
ship has discovered the scouter
and is training an electronic
beam upon it. My instruments
record an electromagnetic vibration
pattern of low power but
rapidly varying frequency. The
operation seems pointless."
Stryker's voice followed, querulous
with worry: "I'd better
pull Xav back. It may be something
lethal."
"Don't," Gibson's baritone advised.
Surprisingly, there was
excitement in the engineer's
voice. "I think they're trying to
communicate with us."
Farrell was on the point of
demanding acidly to know how
one went about communicating
by means of a fluctuating electric
field when the unexpected
cessation of forest diverted his
attention. The helihopper scudded
over a cultivated area
of considerable extent, fields
stretching below in a vague random
checkerboard of lighter and
darker earth, an undefined cluster
of buildings at their center.
There was a central bonfire that
burned like a wild red eye
against the lower gloom, and in
its plunging ruddy glow he made
out an urgent scurrying of shadowy
figures.
"I'm passing over a hamlet,"
Farrell reported. "The one nearest
the city, I think. There's
something odd going on
down—"
Catastrophe struck so suddenly
that he was caught completely
unprepared. The helihopper's
flimsy carriage bucked and
crumpled. There was a blinding
flare of electric discharge, a
pungent stink of ozone and a
stunning shock that flung him
headlong into darkness.
He awoke slowly with a brutal
headache and a conviction of
nightmare heightened by the
outlandish tone of his surroundings.
He lay on a narrow bed in
a whitely antiseptic infirmary,
an oblong metal cell cluttered
with a grimly utilitarian array
of tables and lockers and chests.
The lighting was harsh and
overbright and the air hung
thick with pungent unfamiliar
chemical odors. From somewhere,
far off yet at the same
time as near as the bulkhead
above him, came the unceasing
drone of machinery.
Farrell sat up, groaning,
when full consciousness made his
position clear. He had been shot
down by God knew what sort of
devastating unorthodox weapon
and was a prisoner in the
grounded ship.
At his rising, a white-smocked
fat man with anachronistic spectacles
and close-cropped gray
hair came into the room, moving
with the professional assurance
of a medic. The man stopped
short at Farrell's stare and
spoke; his words were utterly
unintelligible, but his gesture
was unmistakable.
Farrell followed him dumbly
out of the infirmary and down
a bare corridor whose metal
floor rang coldly underfoot. An
open port near the corridor's end
relieved the blankness of wall
and let in a flood of reddish Alphardian
sunlight; Farrell slowed
to look out, wondering how
long he had lain unconscious,
and felt panic knife at him
when he saw Xavier's scouter lying,
port open and undefended,
on the square outside.
The mechanical had been as
easily taken as himself, then.
Stryker and Gibson, for all their
professional caution, would fare
no better—they could not have
overlooked the capture of Farrell
and Xavier, and when they
tried as a matter of course to
rescue them the Marco would be
struck down in turn by the same
weapon.
The fat medic turned and
said something urgent in his
unintelligible tongue. Farrell,
dazed by the enormity of what
had happened, followed without
protest into an intersecting way
that led through a bewildering
succession of storage rooms and
hydroponics gardens, through a
small gymnasium fitted with
physical training equipment in
graduated sizes and finally into
a soundproofed place that could
have been nothing but a nursery.
The implication behind its
presence stopped Farrell short.
"A creche ," he said, stunned.
He had a wild vision of endless
generations of children growing
up in this dim and stuffy room,
to be taught from their first
toddling steps the functions they
must fulfill before the venture
of which they were a part could
be consummated.
One of those old ventures had succeeded, he thought, and was
awed by the daring of that thousand-year
odyssey. The realization
left him more alarmed than
before—for what technical marvels
might not an isolated group
of such dogged specialists have
developed during a millennium
of application?
Such a weapon as had brought
down the helihopper and scouter
was patently beyond reach of his
own latter-day technology. Perhaps,
he thought, its possession
explained the presence of these
people here in the first stronghold
of the Hymenops; perhaps
they had even fought and defeated
the Bees on their own invaded
ground.
He followed his white-smocked
guide through a power room
where great crude generators
whirred ponderously, pouring
out gross electric current into
arm-thick cables. They were
nearing the bow of the ship
when they passed by another
open port and Farrell, glancing
out over the lowered rampway,
saw that his fears for Stryker
and Gibson had been well
grounded.
The Marco Four , ports open,
lay grounded outside.
Farrell could not have said,
later, whether his next move
was planned or reflexive. The
whole desperate issue seemed to
hang suspended for a breathless
moment upon a hair-fine edge of
decision, and in that instant he
made his bid.
Without pausing in his stride
he sprang out and through the
port and down the steep plane
of the ramp. The rough stone
pavement of the square drummed
underfoot; sore muscles
tore at him, and weakness was
like a weight about his neck. He
expected momentarily to be
blasted out of existence.
He reached the Marco Four with the startled shouts of his
guide ringing unintelligibly in
his ears. The port yawned; he
plunged inside and stabbed at
controls without waiting to seat
himself. The ports swung shut.
The ship darted up under his
manipulation and arrowed into
space with an acceleration that
sprung his knees and made his
vision swim blackly.
He was so weak with strain
and with the success of his coup
that he all but fainted when
Stryker, his scanty hair tousled
and his fat face comical with bewilderment,
stumbled out of his
sleeping cubicle and bellowed at
him.
"What the hell are you doing,
Arthur? Take us down!"
Farrell gaped at him, speechless.
Stryker lumbered past him
and took the controls, spiraling
the Marco Four down. Men
swarmed outside the ports when
the Reclamations craft settled
gently to the square again. Gibson
and Xavier reached the ship
first; Gibson came inside quickly,
leaving the mechanical outside
making patient explanations
to an excited group of Alphardians.
Gibson put a reassuring hand
on Farrell's arm. "It's all right,
Arthur. There's no trouble."
Farrell said dumbly, "I don't
understand. They didn't shoot
you and Xav down too?"
It was Gibson's turn to stare.
"No one shot you down! These
people are primitive enough to
use metallic power lines to
carry electricity to their hamlets,
an anachronism you forgot
last night. You piloted the helihopper
into one of those lines,
and the crash put you out for
the rest of the night and most
of today. These Alphardians are
friendly, so desperately happy to
be found again that it's really
pathetic."
" Friendly? That torpedo—"
"It wasn't a torpedo at all,"
Stryker put in. Understanding
of the error under which Farrell
had labored erased his
earlier irritation, and he chuckled
commiseratingly. "They had
one small boat left for emergency
missions, and sent it up to
contact us in the fear that we
might overlook their settlement
and move on. The boat was
atomic powered, and our shield
screens set off its engines."
Farrell dropped into a chair at
the chart table, limp with reaction.
He was suddenly exhausted,
and his head ached dully.
"We cracked the communications
problem early last night,"
Gibson said. "These people use
an ancient system of electromagnetic
wave propagation called
frequency modulation, and once
Lee and I rigged up a suitable
transceiver the rest was simple.
Both Xav and I recognized the
old language; the natives reported
your accident, and we came
down at once."
"They really came from Terra?
They lived through a thousand
years of flight?"
"The ship left Terra for
Sirius in 2171," Gibson said.
"But not with these people
aboard, or their ancestors. That
expedition perished after less
than a light-year when its
hydroponics system failed. The
Hymenops found the ship derelict
when they invaded us, and
brought it to Alphard Six in
what was probably their first experiment
with human subjects.
The ship's log shows clearly
what happened to the original
complement. The rest is deducible
from the situation here."
Farrell put his hands to his
temples and groaned. "The crash
must have scrambled my wits.
Gib, where did they come from?"
"From one of the first peripheral
colonies conquered by the
Bees," Gibson said patiently.
"The Hymenops were long-range
planners, remember, and masters
of hypnotic conditioning. They
stocked the ship with a captive
crew of Terrans conditioned to
believe themselves descendants
of the original crew, and
grounded it here in disabled
condition. They left for Alphard
Five then, to watch developments.
"Succeeding generations of
colonists grew up accepting the
fact that their ship had missed
Sirius and made planetfall here—they
still don't know where
they really are—by luck. They
never knew about the Hymenops,
and they've struggled along
with an inadequate technology in
the hope that a later expedition
would find them. They found the
truth hard to take, but they're
eager to enjoy the fruits of Terran
assimilation."
Stryker, grinning, brought
Farrell a frosted drink that tinkled
invitingly. "An unusually
fortunate ending to a Hymenop
experiment," he said. "These
people progressed normally because
they've been let alone. Reorienting
them will be a simple
matter; they'll be properly spoiled
colonists within another generation."
Farrell sipped his drink appreciatively.
"But I don't see why the Bees
should go to such trouble to deceive
these people. Why did they
sit back and let them grow as
they pleased, Gib? It doesn't
make sense!"
"But it does, for once," Gibson
said. "The Bees set up this
colony as a control unit to study
the species they were invading,
and they had to give their
specimens a normal—if obsolete—background
in order to determine
their capabilities. The fact
that their experiment didn't tell
them what they wanted to know
may have had a direct bearing
on their decision to pull out."
Farrell shook his head. "It's
a reverse application, isn't it of
the old saw about Terrans being
incapable of understanding an
alien culture?"
"Of course," said Gibson, surprised.
"It's obvious enough,
surely—hard as they tried, the
Bees never understood us
either."
THE END
|
What is the importance of the baby talk in the story?
|
After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about Growing up on Big Muddy by Charles V. De Vet.
Relevant chunks:
Well, naturally Kaiser would transmit baby talk messages to his mother ship! He was—
GROWING UP ON BIG MUDDY
By CHARLES V. DE VET
Illustrated by TURPIN
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction July 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Kaiser stared at the tape in his hand for a long uncomprehending minute. How long had the stuff been coming through in this inane baby talk? And why hadn't he noticed it before? Why had he had to read this last communication a third time before he recognized anything unusual about it?
He went over the words again, as though maybe this time they'd read as they should.
OO IS SICK, SMOKY. DO TO BEDDY-BY. KEEP UM WARM. WHEN UM FEELS BETTER, LET USNS KNOW.
SS II
Kaiser let himself ease back in the pilot chair and rolled the tape thoughtfully between his fingers. Overhead and to each side, large drops of rain thudded softly against the transparent walls of the scout ship and dripped wearily from the bottom ledge to the ground.
"Damn this climate!" Kaiser muttered irrelevantly. "Doesn't it ever do anything here except rain?"
His attention returned to the matter at hand. Why the baby talk? And why was his memory so hazy? How long had he been here? What had he been doing during that time?
Listlessly he reached for the towel at his elbow and wiped the moisture from his face and bare shoulders. The air conditioning had gone out when the scout ship cracked up. He'd have to repair the scout or he was stuck here for good. He remembered now that he had gone over the job very carefully and thoroughly, and had found it too big to handle alone—or without better equipment, at least. Yet there was little or no chance of his being able to find either here.
Calmly, deliberately, Kaiser collected his thoughts, his memories, and brought them out where he could look at them:
The mother ship, Soscites II , had been on the last leg of its planet-mapping tour. It had dropped Kaiser in the one remaining scout ship—the other seven had all been lost one way or another during the exploring of new worlds—and set itself into a giant orbit about this planet that Kaiser had named Big Muddy.
The Soscites II had to maintain its constant speed; it had no means of slowing, except to stop, and no way to start again once it did stop. Its limited range of maneuverability made it necessary to set up an orbit that would take it approximately one month, Earth time, to circle a pinpointed planet. And now its fuel was low.
Kaiser had that one month to repair his scout or be stranded here forever.
That was all he could remember. Nothing of what he had been doing recently.
A small shiver passed through his body as he glanced once again at the tape in his hand. Baby talk....
One thing he could find out: how long this had been going on. He turned to the communicator and unhooked the paper receptacle on its bottom. It held about a yard and a half of tape, probably his last several messages—both those sent and those received. He pulled it out impatiently and began reading.
The first was from himself:
YOUR SUGGESTIONS NO HELP. HOW AM I GOING TO REPAIR DAMAGE TO SCOUT WITHOUT PROPER EQUIPMENT? AND WHERE DO I GET IT? DO YOU THINK I FOUND A TOOL SHOP DOWN HERE? FOR GOD'S SAKE, COME UP WITH SOMETHING BETTER.
VISITED SEAL-PEOPLE AGAIN TODAY. STILL HAVE THEIR STINK IN MY NOSE. FOUND HUTS ALONG RIVER BANK, SO I GUESS THEY DON'T LIVE IN WATER. BUT THEY DO SPEND MOST OF THEIR TIME THERE. NO, I HAVE NO WAY OF ESTIMATING THEIR INTELLIGENCE. I WOULD JUDGE IT AVERAGES NO HIGHER THAN SEVEN-YEAR-OLD HUMAN. THEY DEFINITELY DO TALK TO ONE ANOTHER. WILL TRY TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THEM, BUT YOU GET TO WORK FAST ON HOW I REPAIR SCOUT.
SWELLING IN ARM WORSE AND AM DEVELOPING A FEVER. TEMPERATURE 102.7 AN HOUR AGO.
SMOKY
The ship must have answered immediately, for the return message time was six hours later than his own, the minimum interval necessary for two-way exchange.
DOING OUR BEST, SMOKY. YOUR IMMEDIATE PROBLEM, AS WE SEE IT, IS TO KEEP WELL. WE FED ALL THE INFORMATION YOU GAVE US INTO SAM, BUT YOU DIDN'T HAVE MUCH EXCEPT THE STING IN YOUR ARM. AS EXPECTED, ALL THAT CAME OUT WAS "DATA INSUFFICIENT." TRY TO GIVE US MORE. ALSO DETAIL ALL SYMPTOMS SINCE YOUR LAST REPORT. IN THE MEANTIME, WE'RE DOING EVERYTHING WE CAN AT THIS END. GOOD LUCK.
SS II
Sam, Kaiser knew, was the ship's mechanical diagnostician. His report followed:
ARM SWOLLEN. UNABLE TO KEEP DOWN FOOD LAST TWELVE HOURS. ABOUT TWO HOURS AGO, ENTIRE BODY TURNED LIVID RED. BRIEF PERIODS OF BLANKNESS. THINGS KEEP COMING AND GOING. SICK AS HELL. HURRY.
SMOKY
The ship's next message read:
INFECTION QUITE DEFINITE. BUT SOMETHING STRANGE THERE. GIVE US ANYTHING MORE YOU HAVE.
SS II
His own reply perplexed Kaiser:
LAST LETTER FUNNY. I NOT UNDERSTAND. WHY IS OO SENDING GARBLE TALK? DID USNS MAKE UP SECRET MESSAGES?
SMOKY
The expedition, apparently, was as puzzled as he:
WHAT'S THE MATTER, SMOKY? THAT LAST MESSAGE WAS IN PLAIN TERRAN. NO REASON WHY YOU COULDN'T READ IT. AND WHY THE BABY TALK? IF YOU'RE SPOOFING, STOP. GIVE US MORE SYMPTOMS. HOW ARE YOU FEELING NOW?
SS II
The baby talk was worse on Kaiser's next:
TWAZY. WHAT FOR OO TENDING TWAZY LETTERS? FINK UM CAN WEAD TWAZY LETTERS? SKIN ALL YELLOW NOW. COLD. COLD. CO
The ship's following communication was three hours late. It was the last on the tape—the one Kaiser had read earlier. Apparently they decided to humor him.
OO IS SICK, SMOKY. DO TO BEDDY-BY. KEEP UM WARM. WHEN UM FEELS BETTER, LET USNS KNOW.
SS II
That was not much help. All it told him was that he had been sick.
He felt better now, outside of a muscular weariness, as though convalescing from a long illness. He put the back of his hand to his forehead. Cool. No fever anyway.
He glanced at the clock-calendar on the instrument board and back at the date and time on the tape where he'd started his baby talk. Twenty hours. He hadn't been out of his head too long. He began punching the communicator keys while he nibbled at a biscuit.
SEEM TO BE FULLY RECOVERED. FEELING FINE. ANYTHING NEW FROM SAM? AND HOW ABOUT THE DAMAGE TO SCOUT? GIVE ME ANYTHING YOU HAVE ON EITHER OR BOTH.
SMOKY
Kaiser felt suddenly weary. He lay on the scout's bunk and tried to sleep. Soon he was in that phantasm land between sleep and wakefulness—he knew he was not sleeping, yet he did dream.
It was the same dream he had had many times before. In it, he was back home again, the home he had joined the space service to escape. He had realized soon after his marriage that his wife, Helene, did not love him. She had married him for the security his pay check provided. And though it soon became evident that she, too, regretted her bargain, she would not divorce him. Instead, she had her revenge on him by persistent nagging, by letting herself grow fat and querulous, and by caring for their house only in a slovenly way.
Her crippled brother had moved in with them the day they were married. His mind was as crippled as his body and he took an unhealthy delight in helping his sister torment Kaiser.
Kaiser came wide awake in a cold sweat. The clock showed that only an hour had passed since he had sent his last message to the ship. Still five more long hours to wait. He rose and wiped the sweat from his neck and shoulders and restlessly paced the small corridor of the scout.
After a few minutes, he stopped pacing and peered out into the gloom of Big Muddy. The rain seemed to have eased off some. Not much more than a heavy drizzle now.
Kaiser reached impulsively for the slicker he had thrown over a chest against one wall and put it on, then a pair of hip-high plastic boots and a plastic hat. He opened the door. The scout had come to rest with a slight tilt when it crashed, and Kaiser had to sit down and roll over onto his stomach to ease himself to the ground.
The weather outside was normal for Big Muddy: wet, humid, and warm.
Kaiser sank to his ankles in soft mud before his feet reached solid ground. He half walked and half slid to the rear of the scout. Beside the ship, the "octopus" was busily at work. Tentacles and antennae, extending from the yard-high box of its body, tested and recorded temperature, atmosphere, soil, and all other pertinent planetary conditions. The octopus was connected to the ship's communicator and all its findings were being transmitted to the mother ship for study.
Kaiser observed that it was working well and turned toward a wide, sluggish river, perhaps two hundred yards from the scout. Once there, he headed upstream. He could hear the pipings, and now and then a higher whistling, of the seal-people before he reached a bend and saw them. As usual, most were swimming in the river.
One old fellow, whose chocolate-brown fur showed a heavy intermixture of gray, was sitting on the bank of the river just at the bend. Perhaps a lookout. He pulled himself to his feet as he spied Kaiser and his toothless, hard-gummed mouth opened and emitted a long whistle that might have been a greeting—or a warning to the others that a stranger approached.
The native stood perhaps five feet tall, with the heavy, blubbery body of a seal, and short, thick arms. Membranes connected the arms to his body from shoulder-pits to mid-biceps. The arms ended in three-fingered, thumbless hands. His legs also were short and thick, with footpads that splayed out at forty-five-degree angles. They gave his legs the appearance of a split tail. About him hung a rank-fish smell that made Kaiser's stomach squirm.
The old fellow sounded a cheerful chirp as Kaiser came near. Feeling slightly ineffectual, Kaiser raised both hands and held them palm forward. The other chirped again and Kaiser went on toward the main group.
They had stopped their play and eating as Kaiser approached and now most of them swam in to shore and stood in the water, staring and piping. They varied in size from small seal-pups to full-grown adults. Some chewed on bunches of water weed, which they manipulated with their lips and drew into their mouths.
They had mammalian characteristics, Kaiser had noted before, so it was not difficult to distinguish the females from the males. The proportion was roughly fifty-fifty.
Several of the bolder males climbed up beside Kaiser and began pawing his plastic clothing. Kaiser stood still and tried to keep his breathing shallow, for their odor was almost more than he could bear. One native smeared Kaiser's face with an exploring paw and Kaiser gagged and pushed him roughly away. He was bound by regulations to display no hostility to newly discovered natives, but he couldn't take much more of this.
A young female splashed water on two young males who stood near and they turned with shrill pipings and chased her into the water. The entire group seemed to lose interest in Kaiser and joined in the chase, or went back to other diversions of their own. Kaiser's inspectors followed.
They were a mindless lot, Kaiser observed. The river supplied them with an easy existence, with food and living space, and apparently they had few natural enemies.
Kaiser walked away, following the long slow bend of the river, and came to a collection of perhaps two hundred dwellings built in three haphazard rows along the river bank. He took time to study their construction more closely this time.
They were all round domes, little more than the height of a man, built of blocks that appeared to be mud, packed with river weed and sand. How they were able to dry these to give them the necessary solidity, Kaiser did not know. He had found no signs that they knew how to use fire, and all apparent evidence was against their having it. They then had to have sunlight. Maybe it rained less during certain seasons.
The domes' construction was based on a series of four arches built in a circle. When the base covering the periphery had been laid, four others were built on and between them, and continued in successive tiers until the top was reached. Each tier thus furnished support for the next above. No other framework was needed. The final tier formed the roof. They made sound shelters, but Kaiser had peered into several and found them dark and dank—and as smelly as the natives themselves.
The few loungers in the village paid little attention to Kaiser and he wandered through the irregular streets until he became bored and returned to the scout.
The Soscites II sent little that helped during the next twelve hours and Kaiser occupied his time trying again to repair the damage to the scout.
The job appeared maddeningly simply. As the scout had glided in for a soft landing, its metal bottom had ridden a concealed rock and bent inward. The bent metal had carried up with it the tube supplying the fuel pump and flattened it against the motor casing.
Opening the tube again would not have been difficult, but first it had to be freed from under the ship. Kaiser had tried forcing the sheet metal back into place with a small crowbar—the best leverage he had on hand—but it resisted his best efforts. He still could think of no way to do the job, simple as it was, though he gave his concentration to it the rest of the day.
That evening, Kaiser received information from the Soscites II that was at least definite:
SET YOURSELF FOR A SHOCK, SMOKY. SAM FINALLY CAME THROUGH. YOU WON'T LIKE WHAT YOU HEAR. AT LEAST NOT AT FIRST. BUT IT COULD BE WORSE. YOU HAVE BEEN INVADED BY A SYMBIOTE—SIMILAR TO THE TYPE FOUND ON THE SAND WORLD, BARTEL-BLEETHERS. GIVE US A FEW MORE HOURS TO WORK WITH SAM AND WE'LL GET YOU ALL THE PARTICULARS HE CAN GIVE US. HANG ON NOW!
SOSCITES II
Kaiser's reply was short and succinct:
WHAT THE HELL?
SMOKY
Soscites II's next communication followed within twenty minutes and was signed by the ship's doctor:
JUST A FEW WORDS, SMOKY, IN CASE YOU'RE WORRIED. I THOUGHT I'D GET THIS OFF WHILE WE'RE WAITING FOR MORE INFORMATION FROM SAM. REMEMBER THAT A SYMBIOTE IS NOT A PARASITE. IT WILL NOT HARM YOU, EXCEPT INADVERTENTLY. YOUR WELFARE IS AS ESSENTIAL TO IT AS TO YOU. ALMOST CERTAINLY, IF YOU DIE, IT WILL DIE WITH YOU. ANY TROUBLE YOU'VE HAD SO FAR WAS PROBABLY CAUSED BY THE SYMBIOTE'S DIFFICULTY IN ADJUSTING ITSELF TO ITS NEW ENVIRONMENT. IN A WAY, I ENVY YOU. MORE LATER, WHEN WE FINISH WITH SAM.
J. G. ZARWELL
Kaiser did not answer. The news was so startling, so unforeseen, that his mind refused to accept the actuality. He lay on the scout's bunk and stared at the ceiling without conscious attention, and with very little clear thought, for several hours—until the next communication came in:
WELL, THIS IS WHAT SAM HAS TO SAY, SMOKY. SYMBIOTE AMICABLE AND APPARENTLY SWIFTLY ADAPTABLE. YOUR CHANGING COLOR, DIFFICULTY IN EATING AND EVEN BABY TALK WERE THE RESULT OF ITS EFFORTS TO GIVE YOU WHAT IT BELIEVED YOU NEEDED OR WANTED.
CHANGING COLOR: PROTECTIVE CAMOUFLAGE. TROUBLE KEEPING FOOD DOWN: IT KEPT YOUR STOMACH EMPTY BECAUSE IT SENSED YOU WERE IN TROUBLE AND MIGHT HAVE NEED FOR SHARP REFLEXES, WITH NO EXCESS WEIGHT TO CARRY. THE BABY TALK WE AREN'T TOO CERTAIN ABOUT, BUT OUR BEST CONCLUSION IS THAT WHEN YOU WERE A CHILD, YOU WERE MOST HAPPY. IT WAS TRYING TO GIVE YOU BACK THAT HAPPY STATE OF MIND. OBVIOUSLY IT QUICKLY RECOGNIZED THE MISTAKES IT MADE AND CORRECTED THEM.
SAM CAME UP WITH A FEW MORE IDEAS, BUT WE WANT TO WORK ON THEM A BIT BEFORE WE SEND THEM THROUGH. SLEEP ON THIS.
SS II
Kaiser could imagine that most of the crew were not too concerned about the trouble he was in. He was not the gregarious type and had no close friends on board. He had hoped to find the solitude he liked best in space, but he had been disappointed. True, there were fewer people here, but he was brought into such intimate contact with them that he would have been more contented living in a crowded city.
His naturally unsociable nature was more irksome to the crew because he was more intelligent and efficient than they were. He did his work well and painstakingly and was seldom in error. They would have liked him better had he been more prone to mistakes. He was certain that they respected him, but they did not like him. And he returned the dislike.
The suggestion that he get some sleep might not be a bad idea. He hadn't slept in over eighteen hours, Kaiser realized—and fell instantly asleep.
The communicator had a message waiting for him when he awoke:
SAM COULDN'T HELP US MUCH ON THIS PART, BUT AFTER RESEARCH AND MUCH DISCUSSION, WE ARRIVED AT THE FOLLOWING TWO CONCLUSIONS.
FIRST, PHYSICAL PROPERTY OF SYMBIOTE IS EITHER THAT OF A VERY THIN LIQUID OR, MORE PROBABLY, A VIRUS FORM WITH SWIFT PROPAGATION CHARACTERISTIC. IT UNDOUBTEDLY LIVES IN YOUR BLOOD STREAM AND PERMEATES YOUR SYSTEM.
SECOND, IT SEEMED TO US, AS IT MUST HAVE TO YOU, THAT THE SYMBIOTE COULD ONLY KNOW WHAT YOU WANTED BY READING YOUR MIND. HOWEVER, WE BELIEVE DIFFERENTLY NOW. WE THINK THAT IT HAS SUCH CLOSE CONTACT WITH YOUR GLANDS AND THEIR SECRETIONS, WHICH STIMULATE EMOTION, THAT IT CAN GAUGE YOUR FEELINGS EVEN MORE ACCURATELY THAN YOU YOURSELF CAN. THUS IT CAN JUDGE YOUR LIKES AND DISLIKES QUITE ACCURATELY.
WE WOULD LIKE TO HAVE YOU TEST OUR THEORY. THERE ARE DOZENS OF WAYS. IF YOU ARE STUMPED AND NEED SUGGESTIONS, JUST LET US KNOW. WE AWAIT WORD FROM YOU WITH GREAT INTEREST.
SS II
By now, Kaiser had accepted what had happened to him. His distress and anxiety were gone and he was impatient to do what he could to establish better contact with his uninvited tenant. With eager anticipation, he set to thinking how it could be done. After a few minutes, an idea occurred to him.
Taking a small scalpel from a medical kit, he made a shallow cut in his arm, just deep enough to bleed freely. He knew that the pain would supply the necessary glandular reaction. The cut bled a few slow drops—and as Kaiser watched, a shiny film formed and the bleeding stopped.
That checked pretty well with the ship's theory.
Perhaps the symbiote had made his senses more acute. He tried closing his eyes and fingering several objects in the room. It seemed to him that he could determine the texture of each better than before, but the test was inconclusive. Walking to the rear of the scout, he tried reading the printed words on the instrument panel. Each letter stood out sharp and clear!
Kaiser wondered if he might not make an immediate, practical use of the symbiote's apparent desire to help him. Concentrating on the discomfort of the high humidity and exaggerating his own displeasure with it, he waited. The result surprised and pleased him.
The temperature within the scout cabin seemed to lower, the moisture on his body vanished, and he was more comfortable than he had yet been here.
As a double check, he looked at the ship's thermometer. Temperature
102, humidity 113—just about the same as it had been on earlier readings.
During the next twenty-four hours, Kaiser and the mother ship exchanged messages at regular six-hour intervals. In between, he worked at repairing the damaged scout. He had no more success than before.
He tired easily and lay on the cot often to rest. Each time he seemed to drop off to sleep immediately—and awake at the exact times he had decided on beforehand. At first, despite the lack of success in straightening the bent metal of the scout bottom, there had been a subdued exhilaration in reporting each new discovery concerning the symbiote, but as time passed, his enthusiasm ebbed. His one really important problem was how to repair the scout and he was fast becoming discouraged.
At last Kaiser could bear the futility of his efforts no longer. He sent out a terse message to the Soscites II :
TAKING SHORT TRIP TO ANOTHER LOCATION ON RIVER. HOPE TO FIND MORE INTELLIGENT NATIVES. COULD BE THAT THE SETTLEMENT I FOUND HERE IS ANALOGOUS TO TRIBE OF MONKEYS ON EARTH. I KNOW THE CHANCE IS SMALL, BUT WHAT HAVE I TO LOSE? I CAN'T FIX SCOUT WITHOUT BETTER TOOLS, AND IF MY GUESS IS RIGHT, I MAY BE ABLE TO GET EQUIPMENT. EXPECT TO RETURN IN TEN OR TWELVE HOURS. PLEASE KEEP CONTACT WITH SCOUT.
SMOKY
Kaiser packed a mudsled with tent, portable generator and guard wires, a spare sidearm and ammunition, and food for two days. He had noticed that a range of high hills, which caused the bend in the river at the native settlement, seemed to continue its long curve, and he wondered if the hills might not turn the river in the shape of a giant horseshoe. He intended to find out.
Wrapping his equipment in a plastic tarp, Kaiser eased it out the doorway and tied it on the sled. He hooked a towline to a harness on his shoulders and began his journey—in the opposite direction from the first native settlement.
He walked for more than seven hours before he found that his surmise had been correct. And a second cluster of huts, and seal-people in the river, greeted his sight. He received a further pleasant surprise. This group was decidedly more advanced than the first!
They were little different in actual physical appearance; the change was mainly noticeable in their actions and demeanor. And their odor was more subdued, less repugnant.
By signs, Kaiser indicated that he came in peace, and they seemed to understand. A thick-bodied male went solemnly to the river bank and called to a second, who dived and brought up a mouthful of weed. The first male took the weed and brought it to Kaiser. This was obviously a gesture of friendship.
The weed had a white starchy core and looked edible. Kaiser cleaned part of it with his handkerchief, bit and chewed it.
The weed had a slight iron taste, but was not unpalatable. He swallowed the mouthful and tried another. He ate most of what had been given him and waited with some trepidation for a reaction.
As dusk fell, Kaiser set up his tent a few hundred yards back from the native settlement. All apprehension about how his stomach would react to the river weed had left him. Apparently it could be assimilated by his digestive system. Lying on his air mattress, he felt thoroughly at peace with this world.
Once, just before dropping off to sleep, he heard the snuffling noise of some large animal outside his tent and picked up a pistol, just in case. However, the first jolt of the guard-wire charge discouraged the beast and Kaiser heard it shuffle away, making puzzled mewing sounds as it went.
The next morning, Kaiser left off all his clothes except a pair of shorts and went swimming in the river. The seal-people were already in the water when he arrived and were very friendly.
That friendliness nearly resulted in disaster. The natives crowded around as he swam—they maneuvered with an otter-like proficiency—and often nudged him with their bodies when they came too close. He had difficulty keeping afloat and soon turned and started back. As he neared the river edge, a playful female grabbed him by the ankle and pulled him under.
Kaiser tried to break her hold, but she evidently thought he was clowning and wrapped her warm furred arms around him and held him helpless. They sank deeper.
When his breath threatened to burst from his lungs in a stream of bubbles, and he still could not free himself, Kaiser brought his knee up into her stomach and her grip loosened abruptly. He reached the surface, choking and coughing, and swam blindly toward shore until his feet hit the river bottom.
As he stood on the bank, getting his breath, the natives were quiet and seemed to be looking at him reproachfully. He stood for a time, trying to think of a way to explain the necessity of what he had done, but there was none. He shrugged helplessly.
There was no longer anything to be gained by staying here—if they had the tools he needed, he had no way of finding out or asking for them—and he packed and started back to the scout.
Kaiser's good spirits returned on his return journey. He had enjoyed the relief from the tedium of spending day after day in the scout, and now he enjoyed the exercise of pulling the mudsled. Above the waist, he wore only the harness and the large, soft drops of rain against his bare skin were pleasant to feel.
When he reached the scout, Kaiser began to unload the sled. The tarpaulin caught on the edge of a runner and he gave it a tug to free it. To his amazement, the heavy sled turned completely over, spilling the equipment to the ground.
Perplexed, Kaiser stooped and began replacing the spilled articles in the tarp. They felt exceptionally light. He paused again, and suddenly his eyes widened.
Moving quickly to the door of the scout, he shoved his equipment through and crawled in behind it. He did not consult the communicator, as he customarily did on entering, but went directly to the warped place on the floor and picked up the crowbar he had laid there.
Inserting the bar between the metal of the scout bottom and the engine casing, he lifted. Nothing happened. He rested a minute and tried again, this time concentrating on his desire to raise the bar. The metal beneath yielded slightly—but he felt the palms of his hands bruise against the lever.
Only after he dropped the bar did he realize the force he had exerted. His hands ached and tingled. His strength must have been increased tremendously. With his plastic coat wrapped around the lever, he tried again. The metal of the scout bottom gave slowly—until the fuel pump hung free!
Kaiser did not repair the tube immediately. He let the solution rest in his hands, like a package to be opened, the pleasure of its anticipation to be enjoyed as much as the final act.
He transmitted the news of what he had been able to do and sat down to read the two messages waiting for him.
The first was quite routine:
REPORTS FROM THE OCTOPUS INDICATE THAT BIG MUDDY UNDERGOES RADICAL WEATHER-CYCLE CHANGES DURING SPRING AND FALL SEASONS, FROM EXTREME MOISTURE TO EXTREME ARIDITY. AT HEIGHT OF DRY SEASON, PLANET MUST BE COMPLETELY DEVOID OF SURFACE LIQUID.
TO SURVIVE THESE UNUSUAL EXTREMES, SEAL-PEOPLE WOULD NEED EXTREME ADAPTABILITY. THIS VERIFIES OUR EARLIER GUESS THAT NATIVES HAVE SYMBIOSIS WITH THE SAME VIRUS FORM THAT INVADED YOU. WITH SYMBIOTES' AID, SUCH RADICAL PHYSICAL CHANGE COULD BE POSSIBLE. WILL KEEP YOU INFORMED.
GIVE US ANY NEW INFORMATION YOU MIGHT HAVE ON NATIVES.
SS II
The second report was not so routine. Kaiser thought he detected a note of uneasiness in it.
SUGGEST YOU DEVOTE ALL TIME AND EFFORT TO REPAIR OF SCOUT. INFORMATION ON SEAL-PEOPLE ADEQUATE FOR OUR PURPOSES.
SS II
Kaiser did not answer either communication. His earlier report had covered all that he had learned lately. He lay on his cot and went to sleep.
In the morning, another message was waiting:
VERY PLEASED TO HEAR OF PROGRESS ON REPAIR OF SCOUT. COMPLETE AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE AND RETURN HERE IMMEDIATELY.
SS II
Kaiser wondered about the abrupt recall. Could the Soscites II be experiencing some difficulty? He shrugged the thought aside. If they were, they would have told him. The last notes had had more than just a suggestion of urgency—there appeared to be a deliberate concealing of information.
Strangely, the messages indicated need for haste did not prod Kaiser. He knew now that the job could be done, perhaps in a few hours' time. And the Soscites II would not complete its orbit of the planet for two weeks yet.
Without putting on more than the shirt and trousers he had grown used to wearing, Kaiser went outside and wandered listlessly about the vicinity of the ship for several hours. When he became hungry, he went back inside.
Another message came in as he finished eating. This one was from the captain himself:
WHY HAVE WE RECEIVED NO VERIFICATION OF LAST INSTRUCTIONS? REPAIR SCOUT IMMEDIATELY AND RETURN WITHOUT FURTHER DELAY. THIS IS AN ORDER!
H. A. HESSE, CAPT.
Kaiser pushed the last of his meal—which he had been eating with his fingers—into his mouth, crumpled the tape, wiped the grease from his hands with it and dropped it to the floor.
He pondered mildly, as he packed his equipment, why he was disregarding the captain's message. For some reason, it seemed too trivial for serious consideration. He placated his slightly uneasy conscience only to the extent of packing the communicator in with his other equipment. It was a self-contained unit and he'd be able to receive messages from the ship on his trip.
The tracks of his earlier journey had been erased by the soft rain, and when Kaiser reached the river, he found that he had not returned to the village he had visited the day before. However, there were other seal-people here.
And they were almost human!
The resemblance was still not so much in their physical makeup—that was little changed from the first he had found—as in their obviously greater intelligence.
This was mainly noticeable in their facile expressions as they talked. Kaiser was even certain that he read smiles on their faces when he slipped on a particularly slick mud patch as he hurried toward them. Where the members of the first tribes had all looked almost exactly alike, these had very marked individual characteristics. Also, these had no odor—only a mild, rather pleasing scent. When they came to meet him, Kaiser could detect distinct syllabism in their pipings.
Most of the natives returned to the river after the first ten minutes of curious inspection, but two stayed behind as Kaiser set up his tent.
One was a female.
They made small noises while he went about his work. After a time, he understood that they were trying to give names to his paraphernalia. He tried saying "tent" and "wire" and "tarp" as he handled each object, but their piping voices could not repeat the words. Kaiser amused himself by trying to imitate their sounds for the articles. He was fairly successful. He was certain that he could soon learn enough to carry on a limited conversation.
The male became bored after a time and left, but the girl stayed until Kaiser finished. She motioned to him then to follow. When they reached the river bank, he saw that she wanted him to go into the water.
Before he had time to decide, Kaiser heard the small bell of the communicator from the tent behind him. He stood undecided for a moment, then returned and read the message on the tape:
STILL ANXIOUSLY AWAITING WORD FROM YOU.
IN MEANTIME, GIVE VERY CLOSE ATTENTION TO FOLLOWING.
WE KNOW THAT THE SYMBIOTES MUST BE ABLE TO MAKE RADICAL CHANGES IN THE PHYSIOLOGY OF THE SEAL-PEOPLE. THERE IS EVERY PROBABILITY THAT YOURS WILL ATTEMPT TO DO THE SAME TO YOU—TO BETTER FIT YOUR BODY TO ITS PRESENT ENVIRONMENT.
THE DANGER, WHICH WE HESITATED TO MENTION UNTIL NOW—WHEN YOU HAVE FORCED US BY YOUR OBSTINATE SILENCE—IS THAT IT CAN ALTER YOUR MIND ALSO. YOUR REPORT ON SECOND TRIBE OF SEAL-PEOPLE STRONGLY INDICATES THAT THIS IS ALREADY HAPPENING. THEY WERE PROBABLY NOT MORE INTELLIGENT AND HUMANLIKE THAN THE OTHERS. ON THE CONTRARY, YOU ARE BECOMING MORE LIKE THEM.
DANGER ACUTE. RETURN IMMEDIATELY. REPEAT: IMMEDIATELY!
SS II
Kaiser picked up a large rock and slowly, methodically pounded the communicator into a flattened jumble of metal and loose parts.
When he finished, he returned to the waiting girl on the river bank. She pointed at his plastic trousers and made laughing sounds in her throat. Kaiser returned the laugh and stripped off the trousers. They ran, still laughing, into the water.
Already the long pink hair that had been growing on his body during the past week was beginning to turn brown at the roots.
Question:
What is the importance of the baby talk in the story?
Answer:
|
[
"The fact that Kaiser at some point uses baby-talk helps Sam and other members of the Soscites II team determine what exactly caused Kaiser’s symptoms and how it can analyze his emotions and use them to give his body what it needs. The main reason why the man uses baby-talk seems to be that he was most happy in his childhood which also underscores his alienation from people, that he is a loner. Kaiser went to space to run away from his wife and her brother, his colleagues respect him but do not like him, and none of them is Kaiser’s friend. He’s naturally unsociable and was happier when he was a kid. ",
"The baby talk that Kaiser experiences is important because it is the effect of the symbiote being in his body. Without the baby talk, the ship would not have accurately determined that there is a symbiote in his body. It also sets off the story, because Kaiser would otherwise believe that he is perfectly fine on the planet. Although he is confused by the baby talk, he does realize that it disappears later. It is an effect of the symbiote, trying to bring him back to a happier time in his life which was childhood. Without the baby talk, it would have been impossible for Kaiser and the rest of the ship to realize the symbiote. It also later directly affects how Kaiser makes the choices regarding the seal-people and how he eventually destroys the communication device to join them. ",
"The baby talk is important because it is a clear sign of the symbiote having entered Kaiser's system and adapting him. His other symptoms like changing color or having trouble keeping food down could have been reasoned to a flu or virus, so the baby talk symptom was an important distinction for the doctor and those aboard SS II to identify what was going on. \n\nAdditionally, the reason behind the baby talk appearing hinted at why Kaiser may have more easily given into staying on Big Muddy and transforming into the seal-life creatures. Sam had said the symbiote instilled baby talk back into Kaiser because it believed that Ksier was most happy when he was a child - and wanted to provide Kaiser with this happy state of mind. This, along with Kaiser's feeling lonely and tormented aboard the SS and on Earth respectively, makes sense why Kaiser might choose another way of life for himself and his happiness. ",
"The baby talk is one of the symptoms that Kaiser shows at the beginning of the story. While communicating with the ship, he sent the ship weird messages. These messages replicated how babies talk. The ship’s doctor told Kaiser that it was a symptom of the symbiote entering Kaiser’s body, and that the baby talk could be explained. The symbiote wanted Kaiser to feel happy, and it believed that Kaiser had been most happy when he was a baby, so the symbiote tried to replicate those feelings. Overall, the baby talk was the initial sign of the control that the symbiote would have over Kaiser and his body, eventually leading to Kaiser slowly turning into a seal-person."
] |
51398
|
Well, naturally Kaiser would transmit baby talk messages to his mother ship! He was—
GROWING UP ON BIG MUDDY
By CHARLES V. DE VET
Illustrated by TURPIN
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction July 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Kaiser stared at the tape in his hand for a long uncomprehending minute. How long had the stuff been coming through in this inane baby talk? And why hadn't he noticed it before? Why had he had to read this last communication a third time before he recognized anything unusual about it?
He went over the words again, as though maybe this time they'd read as they should.
OO IS SICK, SMOKY. DO TO BEDDY-BY. KEEP UM WARM. WHEN UM FEELS BETTER, LET USNS KNOW.
SS II
Kaiser let himself ease back in the pilot chair and rolled the tape thoughtfully between his fingers. Overhead and to each side, large drops of rain thudded softly against the transparent walls of the scout ship and dripped wearily from the bottom ledge to the ground.
"Damn this climate!" Kaiser muttered irrelevantly. "Doesn't it ever do anything here except rain?"
His attention returned to the matter at hand. Why the baby talk? And why was his memory so hazy? How long had he been here? What had he been doing during that time?
Listlessly he reached for the towel at his elbow and wiped the moisture from his face and bare shoulders. The air conditioning had gone out when the scout ship cracked up. He'd have to repair the scout or he was stuck here for good. He remembered now that he had gone over the job very carefully and thoroughly, and had found it too big to handle alone—or without better equipment, at least. Yet there was little or no chance of his being able to find either here.
Calmly, deliberately, Kaiser collected his thoughts, his memories, and brought them out where he could look at them:
The mother ship, Soscites II , had been on the last leg of its planet-mapping tour. It had dropped Kaiser in the one remaining scout ship—the other seven had all been lost one way or another during the exploring of new worlds—and set itself into a giant orbit about this planet that Kaiser had named Big Muddy.
The Soscites II had to maintain its constant speed; it had no means of slowing, except to stop, and no way to start again once it did stop. Its limited range of maneuverability made it necessary to set up an orbit that would take it approximately one month, Earth time, to circle a pinpointed planet. And now its fuel was low.
Kaiser had that one month to repair his scout or be stranded here forever.
That was all he could remember. Nothing of what he had been doing recently.
A small shiver passed through his body as he glanced once again at the tape in his hand. Baby talk....
One thing he could find out: how long this had been going on. He turned to the communicator and unhooked the paper receptacle on its bottom. It held about a yard and a half of tape, probably his last several messages—both those sent and those received. He pulled it out impatiently and began reading.
The first was from himself:
YOUR SUGGESTIONS NO HELP. HOW AM I GOING TO REPAIR DAMAGE TO SCOUT WITHOUT PROPER EQUIPMENT? AND WHERE DO I GET IT? DO YOU THINK I FOUND A TOOL SHOP DOWN HERE? FOR GOD'S SAKE, COME UP WITH SOMETHING BETTER.
VISITED SEAL-PEOPLE AGAIN TODAY. STILL HAVE THEIR STINK IN MY NOSE. FOUND HUTS ALONG RIVER BANK, SO I GUESS THEY DON'T LIVE IN WATER. BUT THEY DO SPEND MOST OF THEIR TIME THERE. NO, I HAVE NO WAY OF ESTIMATING THEIR INTELLIGENCE. I WOULD JUDGE IT AVERAGES NO HIGHER THAN SEVEN-YEAR-OLD HUMAN. THEY DEFINITELY DO TALK TO ONE ANOTHER. WILL TRY TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THEM, BUT YOU GET TO WORK FAST ON HOW I REPAIR SCOUT.
SWELLING IN ARM WORSE AND AM DEVELOPING A FEVER. TEMPERATURE 102.7 AN HOUR AGO.
SMOKY
The ship must have answered immediately, for the return message time was six hours later than his own, the minimum interval necessary for two-way exchange.
DOING OUR BEST, SMOKY. YOUR IMMEDIATE PROBLEM, AS WE SEE IT, IS TO KEEP WELL. WE FED ALL THE INFORMATION YOU GAVE US INTO SAM, BUT YOU DIDN'T HAVE MUCH EXCEPT THE STING IN YOUR ARM. AS EXPECTED, ALL THAT CAME OUT WAS "DATA INSUFFICIENT." TRY TO GIVE US MORE. ALSO DETAIL ALL SYMPTOMS SINCE YOUR LAST REPORT. IN THE MEANTIME, WE'RE DOING EVERYTHING WE CAN AT THIS END. GOOD LUCK.
SS II
Sam, Kaiser knew, was the ship's mechanical diagnostician. His report followed:
ARM SWOLLEN. UNABLE TO KEEP DOWN FOOD LAST TWELVE HOURS. ABOUT TWO HOURS AGO, ENTIRE BODY TURNED LIVID RED. BRIEF PERIODS OF BLANKNESS. THINGS KEEP COMING AND GOING. SICK AS HELL. HURRY.
SMOKY
The ship's next message read:
INFECTION QUITE DEFINITE. BUT SOMETHING STRANGE THERE. GIVE US ANYTHING MORE YOU HAVE.
SS II
His own reply perplexed Kaiser:
LAST LETTER FUNNY. I NOT UNDERSTAND. WHY IS OO SENDING GARBLE TALK? DID USNS MAKE UP SECRET MESSAGES?
SMOKY
The expedition, apparently, was as puzzled as he:
WHAT'S THE MATTER, SMOKY? THAT LAST MESSAGE WAS IN PLAIN TERRAN. NO REASON WHY YOU COULDN'T READ IT. AND WHY THE BABY TALK? IF YOU'RE SPOOFING, STOP. GIVE US MORE SYMPTOMS. HOW ARE YOU FEELING NOW?
SS II
The baby talk was worse on Kaiser's next:
TWAZY. WHAT FOR OO TENDING TWAZY LETTERS? FINK UM CAN WEAD TWAZY LETTERS? SKIN ALL YELLOW NOW. COLD. COLD. CO
The ship's following communication was three hours late. It was the last on the tape—the one Kaiser had read earlier. Apparently they decided to humor him.
OO IS SICK, SMOKY. DO TO BEDDY-BY. KEEP UM WARM. WHEN UM FEELS BETTER, LET USNS KNOW.
SS II
That was not much help. All it told him was that he had been sick.
He felt better now, outside of a muscular weariness, as though convalescing from a long illness. He put the back of his hand to his forehead. Cool. No fever anyway.
He glanced at the clock-calendar on the instrument board and back at the date and time on the tape where he'd started his baby talk. Twenty hours. He hadn't been out of his head too long. He began punching the communicator keys while he nibbled at a biscuit.
SEEM TO BE FULLY RECOVERED. FEELING FINE. ANYTHING NEW FROM SAM? AND HOW ABOUT THE DAMAGE TO SCOUT? GIVE ME ANYTHING YOU HAVE ON EITHER OR BOTH.
SMOKY
Kaiser felt suddenly weary. He lay on the scout's bunk and tried to sleep. Soon he was in that phantasm land between sleep and wakefulness—he knew he was not sleeping, yet he did dream.
It was the same dream he had had many times before. In it, he was back home again, the home he had joined the space service to escape. He had realized soon after his marriage that his wife, Helene, did not love him. She had married him for the security his pay check provided. And though it soon became evident that she, too, regretted her bargain, she would not divorce him. Instead, she had her revenge on him by persistent nagging, by letting herself grow fat and querulous, and by caring for their house only in a slovenly way.
Her crippled brother had moved in with them the day they were married. His mind was as crippled as his body and he took an unhealthy delight in helping his sister torment Kaiser.
Kaiser came wide awake in a cold sweat. The clock showed that only an hour had passed since he had sent his last message to the ship. Still five more long hours to wait. He rose and wiped the sweat from his neck and shoulders and restlessly paced the small corridor of the scout.
After a few minutes, he stopped pacing and peered out into the gloom of Big Muddy. The rain seemed to have eased off some. Not much more than a heavy drizzle now.
Kaiser reached impulsively for the slicker he had thrown over a chest against one wall and put it on, then a pair of hip-high plastic boots and a plastic hat. He opened the door. The scout had come to rest with a slight tilt when it crashed, and Kaiser had to sit down and roll over onto his stomach to ease himself to the ground.
The weather outside was normal for Big Muddy: wet, humid, and warm.
Kaiser sank to his ankles in soft mud before his feet reached solid ground. He half walked and half slid to the rear of the scout. Beside the ship, the "octopus" was busily at work. Tentacles and antennae, extending from the yard-high box of its body, tested and recorded temperature, atmosphere, soil, and all other pertinent planetary conditions. The octopus was connected to the ship's communicator and all its findings were being transmitted to the mother ship for study.
Kaiser observed that it was working well and turned toward a wide, sluggish river, perhaps two hundred yards from the scout. Once there, he headed upstream. He could hear the pipings, and now and then a higher whistling, of the seal-people before he reached a bend and saw them. As usual, most were swimming in the river.
One old fellow, whose chocolate-brown fur showed a heavy intermixture of gray, was sitting on the bank of the river just at the bend. Perhaps a lookout. He pulled himself to his feet as he spied Kaiser and his toothless, hard-gummed mouth opened and emitted a long whistle that might have been a greeting—or a warning to the others that a stranger approached.
The native stood perhaps five feet tall, with the heavy, blubbery body of a seal, and short, thick arms. Membranes connected the arms to his body from shoulder-pits to mid-biceps. The arms ended in three-fingered, thumbless hands. His legs also were short and thick, with footpads that splayed out at forty-five-degree angles. They gave his legs the appearance of a split tail. About him hung a rank-fish smell that made Kaiser's stomach squirm.
The old fellow sounded a cheerful chirp as Kaiser came near. Feeling slightly ineffectual, Kaiser raised both hands and held them palm forward. The other chirped again and Kaiser went on toward the main group.
They had stopped their play and eating as Kaiser approached and now most of them swam in to shore and stood in the water, staring and piping. They varied in size from small seal-pups to full-grown adults. Some chewed on bunches of water weed, which they manipulated with their lips and drew into their mouths.
They had mammalian characteristics, Kaiser had noted before, so it was not difficult to distinguish the females from the males. The proportion was roughly fifty-fifty.
Several of the bolder males climbed up beside Kaiser and began pawing his plastic clothing. Kaiser stood still and tried to keep his breathing shallow, for their odor was almost more than he could bear. One native smeared Kaiser's face with an exploring paw and Kaiser gagged and pushed him roughly away. He was bound by regulations to display no hostility to newly discovered natives, but he couldn't take much more of this.
A young female splashed water on two young males who stood near and they turned with shrill pipings and chased her into the water. The entire group seemed to lose interest in Kaiser and joined in the chase, or went back to other diversions of their own. Kaiser's inspectors followed.
They were a mindless lot, Kaiser observed. The river supplied them with an easy existence, with food and living space, and apparently they had few natural enemies.
Kaiser walked away, following the long slow bend of the river, and came to a collection of perhaps two hundred dwellings built in three haphazard rows along the river bank. He took time to study their construction more closely this time.
They were all round domes, little more than the height of a man, built of blocks that appeared to be mud, packed with river weed and sand. How they were able to dry these to give them the necessary solidity, Kaiser did not know. He had found no signs that they knew how to use fire, and all apparent evidence was against their having it. They then had to have sunlight. Maybe it rained less during certain seasons.
The domes' construction was based on a series of four arches built in a circle. When the base covering the periphery had been laid, four others were built on and between them, and continued in successive tiers until the top was reached. Each tier thus furnished support for the next above. No other framework was needed. The final tier formed the roof. They made sound shelters, but Kaiser had peered into several and found them dark and dank—and as smelly as the natives themselves.
The few loungers in the village paid little attention to Kaiser and he wandered through the irregular streets until he became bored and returned to the scout.
The Soscites II sent little that helped during the next twelve hours and Kaiser occupied his time trying again to repair the damage to the scout.
The job appeared maddeningly simply. As the scout had glided in for a soft landing, its metal bottom had ridden a concealed rock and bent inward. The bent metal had carried up with it the tube supplying the fuel pump and flattened it against the motor casing.
Opening the tube again would not have been difficult, but first it had to be freed from under the ship. Kaiser had tried forcing the sheet metal back into place with a small crowbar—the best leverage he had on hand—but it resisted his best efforts. He still could think of no way to do the job, simple as it was, though he gave his concentration to it the rest of the day.
That evening, Kaiser received information from the Soscites II that was at least definite:
SET YOURSELF FOR A SHOCK, SMOKY. SAM FINALLY CAME THROUGH. YOU WON'T LIKE WHAT YOU HEAR. AT LEAST NOT AT FIRST. BUT IT COULD BE WORSE. YOU HAVE BEEN INVADED BY A SYMBIOTE—SIMILAR TO THE TYPE FOUND ON THE SAND WORLD, BARTEL-BLEETHERS. GIVE US A FEW MORE HOURS TO WORK WITH SAM AND WE'LL GET YOU ALL THE PARTICULARS HE CAN GIVE US. HANG ON NOW!
SOSCITES II
Kaiser's reply was short and succinct:
WHAT THE HELL?
SMOKY
Soscites II's next communication followed within twenty minutes and was signed by the ship's doctor:
JUST A FEW WORDS, SMOKY, IN CASE YOU'RE WORRIED. I THOUGHT I'D GET THIS OFF WHILE WE'RE WAITING FOR MORE INFORMATION FROM SAM. REMEMBER THAT A SYMBIOTE IS NOT A PARASITE. IT WILL NOT HARM YOU, EXCEPT INADVERTENTLY. YOUR WELFARE IS AS ESSENTIAL TO IT AS TO YOU. ALMOST CERTAINLY, IF YOU DIE, IT WILL DIE WITH YOU. ANY TROUBLE YOU'VE HAD SO FAR WAS PROBABLY CAUSED BY THE SYMBIOTE'S DIFFICULTY IN ADJUSTING ITSELF TO ITS NEW ENVIRONMENT. IN A WAY, I ENVY YOU. MORE LATER, WHEN WE FINISH WITH SAM.
J. G. ZARWELL
Kaiser did not answer. The news was so startling, so unforeseen, that his mind refused to accept the actuality. He lay on the scout's bunk and stared at the ceiling without conscious attention, and with very little clear thought, for several hours—until the next communication came in:
WELL, THIS IS WHAT SAM HAS TO SAY, SMOKY. SYMBIOTE AMICABLE AND APPARENTLY SWIFTLY ADAPTABLE. YOUR CHANGING COLOR, DIFFICULTY IN EATING AND EVEN BABY TALK WERE THE RESULT OF ITS EFFORTS TO GIVE YOU WHAT IT BELIEVED YOU NEEDED OR WANTED.
CHANGING COLOR: PROTECTIVE CAMOUFLAGE. TROUBLE KEEPING FOOD DOWN: IT KEPT YOUR STOMACH EMPTY BECAUSE IT SENSED YOU WERE IN TROUBLE AND MIGHT HAVE NEED FOR SHARP REFLEXES, WITH NO EXCESS WEIGHT TO CARRY. THE BABY TALK WE AREN'T TOO CERTAIN ABOUT, BUT OUR BEST CONCLUSION IS THAT WHEN YOU WERE A CHILD, YOU WERE MOST HAPPY. IT WAS TRYING TO GIVE YOU BACK THAT HAPPY STATE OF MIND. OBVIOUSLY IT QUICKLY RECOGNIZED THE MISTAKES IT MADE AND CORRECTED THEM.
SAM CAME UP WITH A FEW MORE IDEAS, BUT WE WANT TO WORK ON THEM A BIT BEFORE WE SEND THEM THROUGH. SLEEP ON THIS.
SS II
Kaiser could imagine that most of the crew were not too concerned about the trouble he was in. He was not the gregarious type and had no close friends on board. He had hoped to find the solitude he liked best in space, but he had been disappointed. True, there were fewer people here, but he was brought into such intimate contact with them that he would have been more contented living in a crowded city.
His naturally unsociable nature was more irksome to the crew because he was more intelligent and efficient than they were. He did his work well and painstakingly and was seldom in error. They would have liked him better had he been more prone to mistakes. He was certain that they respected him, but they did not like him. And he returned the dislike.
The suggestion that he get some sleep might not be a bad idea. He hadn't slept in over eighteen hours, Kaiser realized—and fell instantly asleep.
The communicator had a message waiting for him when he awoke:
SAM COULDN'T HELP US MUCH ON THIS PART, BUT AFTER RESEARCH AND MUCH DISCUSSION, WE ARRIVED AT THE FOLLOWING TWO CONCLUSIONS.
FIRST, PHYSICAL PROPERTY OF SYMBIOTE IS EITHER THAT OF A VERY THIN LIQUID OR, MORE PROBABLY, A VIRUS FORM WITH SWIFT PROPAGATION CHARACTERISTIC. IT UNDOUBTEDLY LIVES IN YOUR BLOOD STREAM AND PERMEATES YOUR SYSTEM.
SECOND, IT SEEMED TO US, AS IT MUST HAVE TO YOU, THAT THE SYMBIOTE COULD ONLY KNOW WHAT YOU WANTED BY READING YOUR MIND. HOWEVER, WE BELIEVE DIFFERENTLY NOW. WE THINK THAT IT HAS SUCH CLOSE CONTACT WITH YOUR GLANDS AND THEIR SECRETIONS, WHICH STIMULATE EMOTION, THAT IT CAN GAUGE YOUR FEELINGS EVEN MORE ACCURATELY THAN YOU YOURSELF CAN. THUS IT CAN JUDGE YOUR LIKES AND DISLIKES QUITE ACCURATELY.
WE WOULD LIKE TO HAVE YOU TEST OUR THEORY. THERE ARE DOZENS OF WAYS. IF YOU ARE STUMPED AND NEED SUGGESTIONS, JUST LET US KNOW. WE AWAIT WORD FROM YOU WITH GREAT INTEREST.
SS II
By now, Kaiser had accepted what had happened to him. His distress and anxiety were gone and he was impatient to do what he could to establish better contact with his uninvited tenant. With eager anticipation, he set to thinking how it could be done. After a few minutes, an idea occurred to him.
Taking a small scalpel from a medical kit, he made a shallow cut in his arm, just deep enough to bleed freely. He knew that the pain would supply the necessary glandular reaction. The cut bled a few slow drops—and as Kaiser watched, a shiny film formed and the bleeding stopped.
That checked pretty well with the ship's theory.
Perhaps the symbiote had made his senses more acute. He tried closing his eyes and fingering several objects in the room. It seemed to him that he could determine the texture of each better than before, but the test was inconclusive. Walking to the rear of the scout, he tried reading the printed words on the instrument panel. Each letter stood out sharp and clear!
Kaiser wondered if he might not make an immediate, practical use of the symbiote's apparent desire to help him. Concentrating on the discomfort of the high humidity and exaggerating his own displeasure with it, he waited. The result surprised and pleased him.
The temperature within the scout cabin seemed to lower, the moisture on his body vanished, and he was more comfortable than he had yet been here.
As a double check, he looked at the ship's thermometer. Temperature
102, humidity 113—just about the same as it had been on earlier readings.
During the next twenty-four hours, Kaiser and the mother ship exchanged messages at regular six-hour intervals. In between, he worked at repairing the damaged scout. He had no more success than before.
He tired easily and lay on the cot often to rest. Each time he seemed to drop off to sleep immediately—and awake at the exact times he had decided on beforehand. At first, despite the lack of success in straightening the bent metal of the scout bottom, there had been a subdued exhilaration in reporting each new discovery concerning the symbiote, but as time passed, his enthusiasm ebbed. His one really important problem was how to repair the scout and he was fast becoming discouraged.
At last Kaiser could bear the futility of his efforts no longer. He sent out a terse message to the Soscites II :
TAKING SHORT TRIP TO ANOTHER LOCATION ON RIVER. HOPE TO FIND MORE INTELLIGENT NATIVES. COULD BE THAT THE SETTLEMENT I FOUND HERE IS ANALOGOUS TO TRIBE OF MONKEYS ON EARTH. I KNOW THE CHANCE IS SMALL, BUT WHAT HAVE I TO LOSE? I CAN'T FIX SCOUT WITHOUT BETTER TOOLS, AND IF MY GUESS IS RIGHT, I MAY BE ABLE TO GET EQUIPMENT. EXPECT TO RETURN IN TEN OR TWELVE HOURS. PLEASE KEEP CONTACT WITH SCOUT.
SMOKY
Kaiser packed a mudsled with tent, portable generator and guard wires, a spare sidearm and ammunition, and food for two days. He had noticed that a range of high hills, which caused the bend in the river at the native settlement, seemed to continue its long curve, and he wondered if the hills might not turn the river in the shape of a giant horseshoe. He intended to find out.
Wrapping his equipment in a plastic tarp, Kaiser eased it out the doorway and tied it on the sled. He hooked a towline to a harness on his shoulders and began his journey—in the opposite direction from the first native settlement.
He walked for more than seven hours before he found that his surmise had been correct. And a second cluster of huts, and seal-people in the river, greeted his sight. He received a further pleasant surprise. This group was decidedly more advanced than the first!
They were little different in actual physical appearance; the change was mainly noticeable in their actions and demeanor. And their odor was more subdued, less repugnant.
By signs, Kaiser indicated that he came in peace, and they seemed to understand. A thick-bodied male went solemnly to the river bank and called to a second, who dived and brought up a mouthful of weed. The first male took the weed and brought it to Kaiser. This was obviously a gesture of friendship.
The weed had a white starchy core and looked edible. Kaiser cleaned part of it with his handkerchief, bit and chewed it.
The weed had a slight iron taste, but was not unpalatable. He swallowed the mouthful and tried another. He ate most of what had been given him and waited with some trepidation for a reaction.
As dusk fell, Kaiser set up his tent a few hundred yards back from the native settlement. All apprehension about how his stomach would react to the river weed had left him. Apparently it could be assimilated by his digestive system. Lying on his air mattress, he felt thoroughly at peace with this world.
Once, just before dropping off to sleep, he heard the snuffling noise of some large animal outside his tent and picked up a pistol, just in case. However, the first jolt of the guard-wire charge discouraged the beast and Kaiser heard it shuffle away, making puzzled mewing sounds as it went.
The next morning, Kaiser left off all his clothes except a pair of shorts and went swimming in the river. The seal-people were already in the water when he arrived and were very friendly.
That friendliness nearly resulted in disaster. The natives crowded around as he swam—they maneuvered with an otter-like proficiency—and often nudged him with their bodies when they came too close. He had difficulty keeping afloat and soon turned and started back. As he neared the river edge, a playful female grabbed him by the ankle and pulled him under.
Kaiser tried to break her hold, but she evidently thought he was clowning and wrapped her warm furred arms around him and held him helpless. They sank deeper.
When his breath threatened to burst from his lungs in a stream of bubbles, and he still could not free himself, Kaiser brought his knee up into her stomach and her grip loosened abruptly. He reached the surface, choking and coughing, and swam blindly toward shore until his feet hit the river bottom.
As he stood on the bank, getting his breath, the natives were quiet and seemed to be looking at him reproachfully. He stood for a time, trying to think of a way to explain the necessity of what he had done, but there was none. He shrugged helplessly.
There was no longer anything to be gained by staying here—if they had the tools he needed, he had no way of finding out or asking for them—and he packed and started back to the scout.
Kaiser's good spirits returned on his return journey. He had enjoyed the relief from the tedium of spending day after day in the scout, and now he enjoyed the exercise of pulling the mudsled. Above the waist, he wore only the harness and the large, soft drops of rain against his bare skin were pleasant to feel.
When he reached the scout, Kaiser began to unload the sled. The tarpaulin caught on the edge of a runner and he gave it a tug to free it. To his amazement, the heavy sled turned completely over, spilling the equipment to the ground.
Perplexed, Kaiser stooped and began replacing the spilled articles in the tarp. They felt exceptionally light. He paused again, and suddenly his eyes widened.
Moving quickly to the door of the scout, he shoved his equipment through and crawled in behind it. He did not consult the communicator, as he customarily did on entering, but went directly to the warped place on the floor and picked up the crowbar he had laid there.
Inserting the bar between the metal of the scout bottom and the engine casing, he lifted. Nothing happened. He rested a minute and tried again, this time concentrating on his desire to raise the bar. The metal beneath yielded slightly—but he felt the palms of his hands bruise against the lever.
Only after he dropped the bar did he realize the force he had exerted. His hands ached and tingled. His strength must have been increased tremendously. With his plastic coat wrapped around the lever, he tried again. The metal of the scout bottom gave slowly—until the fuel pump hung free!
Kaiser did not repair the tube immediately. He let the solution rest in his hands, like a package to be opened, the pleasure of its anticipation to be enjoyed as much as the final act.
He transmitted the news of what he had been able to do and sat down to read the two messages waiting for him.
The first was quite routine:
REPORTS FROM THE OCTOPUS INDICATE THAT BIG MUDDY UNDERGOES RADICAL WEATHER-CYCLE CHANGES DURING SPRING AND FALL SEASONS, FROM EXTREME MOISTURE TO EXTREME ARIDITY. AT HEIGHT OF DRY SEASON, PLANET MUST BE COMPLETELY DEVOID OF SURFACE LIQUID.
TO SURVIVE THESE UNUSUAL EXTREMES, SEAL-PEOPLE WOULD NEED EXTREME ADAPTABILITY. THIS VERIFIES OUR EARLIER GUESS THAT NATIVES HAVE SYMBIOSIS WITH THE SAME VIRUS FORM THAT INVADED YOU. WITH SYMBIOTES' AID, SUCH RADICAL PHYSICAL CHANGE COULD BE POSSIBLE. WILL KEEP YOU INFORMED.
GIVE US ANY NEW INFORMATION YOU MIGHT HAVE ON NATIVES.
SS II
The second report was not so routine. Kaiser thought he detected a note of uneasiness in it.
SUGGEST YOU DEVOTE ALL TIME AND EFFORT TO REPAIR OF SCOUT. INFORMATION ON SEAL-PEOPLE ADEQUATE FOR OUR PURPOSES.
SS II
Kaiser did not answer either communication. His earlier report had covered all that he had learned lately. He lay on his cot and went to sleep.
In the morning, another message was waiting:
VERY PLEASED TO HEAR OF PROGRESS ON REPAIR OF SCOUT. COMPLETE AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE AND RETURN HERE IMMEDIATELY.
SS II
Kaiser wondered about the abrupt recall. Could the Soscites II be experiencing some difficulty? He shrugged the thought aside. If they were, they would have told him. The last notes had had more than just a suggestion of urgency—there appeared to be a deliberate concealing of information.
Strangely, the messages indicated need for haste did not prod Kaiser. He knew now that the job could be done, perhaps in a few hours' time. And the Soscites II would not complete its orbit of the planet for two weeks yet.
Without putting on more than the shirt and trousers he had grown used to wearing, Kaiser went outside and wandered listlessly about the vicinity of the ship for several hours. When he became hungry, he went back inside.
Another message came in as he finished eating. This one was from the captain himself:
WHY HAVE WE RECEIVED NO VERIFICATION OF LAST INSTRUCTIONS? REPAIR SCOUT IMMEDIATELY AND RETURN WITHOUT FURTHER DELAY. THIS IS AN ORDER!
H. A. HESSE, CAPT.
Kaiser pushed the last of his meal—which he had been eating with his fingers—into his mouth, crumpled the tape, wiped the grease from his hands with it and dropped it to the floor.
He pondered mildly, as he packed his equipment, why he was disregarding the captain's message. For some reason, it seemed too trivial for serious consideration. He placated his slightly uneasy conscience only to the extent of packing the communicator in with his other equipment. It was a self-contained unit and he'd be able to receive messages from the ship on his trip.
The tracks of his earlier journey had been erased by the soft rain, and when Kaiser reached the river, he found that he had not returned to the village he had visited the day before. However, there were other seal-people here.
And they were almost human!
The resemblance was still not so much in their physical makeup—that was little changed from the first he had found—as in their obviously greater intelligence.
This was mainly noticeable in their facile expressions as they talked. Kaiser was even certain that he read smiles on their faces when he slipped on a particularly slick mud patch as he hurried toward them. Where the members of the first tribes had all looked almost exactly alike, these had very marked individual characteristics. Also, these had no odor—only a mild, rather pleasing scent. When they came to meet him, Kaiser could detect distinct syllabism in their pipings.
Most of the natives returned to the river after the first ten minutes of curious inspection, but two stayed behind as Kaiser set up his tent.
One was a female.
They made small noises while he went about his work. After a time, he understood that they were trying to give names to his paraphernalia. He tried saying "tent" and "wire" and "tarp" as he handled each object, but their piping voices could not repeat the words. Kaiser amused himself by trying to imitate their sounds for the articles. He was fairly successful. He was certain that he could soon learn enough to carry on a limited conversation.
The male became bored after a time and left, but the girl stayed until Kaiser finished. She motioned to him then to follow. When they reached the river bank, he saw that she wanted him to go into the water.
Before he had time to decide, Kaiser heard the small bell of the communicator from the tent behind him. He stood undecided for a moment, then returned and read the message on the tape:
STILL ANXIOUSLY AWAITING WORD FROM YOU.
IN MEANTIME, GIVE VERY CLOSE ATTENTION TO FOLLOWING.
WE KNOW THAT THE SYMBIOTES MUST BE ABLE TO MAKE RADICAL CHANGES IN THE PHYSIOLOGY OF THE SEAL-PEOPLE. THERE IS EVERY PROBABILITY THAT YOURS WILL ATTEMPT TO DO THE SAME TO YOU—TO BETTER FIT YOUR BODY TO ITS PRESENT ENVIRONMENT.
THE DANGER, WHICH WE HESITATED TO MENTION UNTIL NOW—WHEN YOU HAVE FORCED US BY YOUR OBSTINATE SILENCE—IS THAT IT CAN ALTER YOUR MIND ALSO. YOUR REPORT ON SECOND TRIBE OF SEAL-PEOPLE STRONGLY INDICATES THAT THIS IS ALREADY HAPPENING. THEY WERE PROBABLY NOT MORE INTELLIGENT AND HUMANLIKE THAN THE OTHERS. ON THE CONTRARY, YOU ARE BECOMING MORE LIKE THEM.
DANGER ACUTE. RETURN IMMEDIATELY. REPEAT: IMMEDIATELY!
SS II
Kaiser picked up a large rock and slowly, methodically pounded the communicator into a flattened jumble of metal and loose parts.
When he finished, he returned to the waiting girl on the river bank. She pointed at his plastic trousers and made laughing sounds in her throat. Kaiser returned the laugh and stripped off the trousers. They ran, still laughing, into the water.
Already the long pink hair that had been growing on his body during the past week was beginning to turn brown at the roots.
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What happens to Marie throughout the story?
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about The Snare by Richard Rein Smith.
Relevant chunks:
The Snare
By RICHARD R. SMITH
Illustrated by WEISS
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy January 1956. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
It's easy to find a solution when there is one—the trick is to do it if there is none!
I glanced at the path we had made across the Mare Serenitatis . The Latin translated as "the Sea of Serenity." It was well named because, as far as the eye could see in every direction, there was a smooth layer of pumice that resembled the surface of a calm sea. Scattered across the quiet sea of virgin Moon dust were occasional islands of rock that jutted abruptly toward the infinity of stars above. Considering everything, our surroundings conveyed a sense of serenity like none I had ever felt.
Our bounding path across the level expanse was clearly marked. Because of the light gravity, we had leaped high into the air with each step and every time we struck the ground, the impact had raised a cloud of dustlike pumice. Now the clouds of dust were slowly settling in the light gravity.
Above us, the stars were cold, motionless and crystal-clear. Indifferently, they sprayed a faint light on our surroundings ... a dim glow that was hardly sufficient for normal vision and was too weak to be reflected toward Earth.
We turned our head-lamps on the strange object before us. Five beams of light illuminated the smooth shape that protruded from the Moon's surface.
The incongruity was so awesome that for several minutes, we remained motionless and quiet. Miller broke the silence with his quavering voice, "Strange someone didn't notice it before."
Strange? The object rose a quarter of a mile above us, a huge, curving hulk of smooth metal. It was featureless and yet conveyed a sense of alienness . It was alien and yet it wasn't a natural formation. Something had made the thing, whatever it was. But was it strange that it hadn't been noticed before? Men had lived on the Moon for over a year, but the Moon was vast and the Mare Serenitatis covered three hundred and forty thousand square miles.
"What is it?" Marie asked breathlessly.
Her husband grunted his bafflement. "Who knows? But see how it curves? If it's a perfect sphere, it must be at least two miles in diameter!"
"If it's a perfect sphere," Miller suggested, "most of it must be beneath the Moon's surface."
"Maybe it isn't a sphere," my wife said. "Maybe this is all of it."
"Let's call Lunar City and tell the authorities about it." I reached for the radio controls on my suit.
Kane grabbed my arm. "No. Let's find out whatever we can by ourselves. If we tell the authorities, they'll order us to leave it alone. If we discover something really important, we'll be famous!"
I lowered my arm. His outburst seemed faintly childish to me. And yet it carried a good measure of common sense. If we discovered proof of an alien race, we would indeed be famous. The more we discovered for ourselves, the more famous we'd be. Fame was practically a synonym for prestige and wealth.
"All right," I conceded.
Miller stepped forward, moving slowly in the bulk of his spacesuit. Deliberately, he removed a small torch from his side and pressed the brilliant flame against the metal.
A few minutes later, the elderly mineralogist gave his opinion: "It's steel ... made thousands of years ago."
Someone gasped over the intercom, "Thousands of years! But wouldn't it be in worse shape than this if it was that old?"
Miller pointed at the small cut his torch had made in the metal. The notch was only a quarter of an inch deep. "I say steel because it's similar to steel. Actually, it's a much stronger alloy. Besides that, on the Moon, there's been no water or atmosphere to rust it. Not even a wind to disturb its surface. It's at least several thousand years old."
We slowly circled the alien structure. Several minutes later, Kane shouted, "Look!"
A few feet above the ground, the structure's smooth surface was broken by a circular opening that yawned invitingly. Kane ran ahead and flashed his head-lamp into the dark recess.
"There's a small room inside," he told us, and climbed through the opening.
We waited outside and focused our lamps through the five-foot opening to give him as much light as possible.
"Come on in, Marie," he called to his wife. "This is really something! It must be an alien race. There's all kinds of weird drawings on the walls and gadgets that look like controls for something...."
Briefly, my lamp flickered over Marie's pale face. Her features struggled with two conflicting emotions: She was frightened by the alienness of the thing and yet she wanted to be with her husband. She hesitated momentarily, then climbed through the passage.
"You want to go in?" my wife asked.
"Do you?"
"Let's."
I helped Verana through the opening, climbed through myself and turned to help Miller.
Miller was sixty years old. He was an excellent mineralogist, alert mentally, but with a body that was almost feeble. I reached out to help him as he stepped into the passageway.
For a brief second, he was framed in the opening, a dark silhouette against the star-studded sky.
The next second, he was thrown twenty yards into the air. He gasped with pain when he struck the ground. " Something pushed me!"
"Are you all right?"
"Yes."
He had fallen on a spot beyond our angle of vision. I started through the passage....
... and struck an invisible solid wall.
My eyes were on the circular opening. A metal panel emerged from a recess on one side and slid across the passage. The room darkened with the absence of starlight.
" What happened? "
"The door to this damned place closed," I explained.
" What? "
Before we could recover from the shock, the room filled with a brilliant glare. We turned off our lamps.
The room was approximately twelve feet long and nine feet wide. The ceiling was only a few inches above our heads and when I looked at the smooth, hard metal, I felt as if I were trapped in some alien vault.
The walls of the room were covered with strange drawings and instruments. Here and there, kaleidoscopic lights pulsed rhythmically.
Kane brushed past me and beat his gloved fists against the metal door that had imprisoned us.
"Miller!"
"Yes?"
"See if you can get this thing open from the outside."
I knelt before the door and explored its surface with my fingers. There were no visible recesses or controls.
Over the intercom network, everyone's breath mingled and formed a rough, harsh sound. I could discern the women's quick, frightened breaths that were almost sobs. Kane's breath was deep and strong; Miller's was faltering and weak.
"Miller, get help!"
"I'll—" The sound of his breathing ceased. We listened intently.
"What happened to him?"
"I'll phone Lunar City." My fingers fumbled at the radio controls and trembled beneath the thick gloves.
I turned the dials that would connect my radio with Lunar City....
Static grated against my ear drums.
Static!
I listened to the harsh, erratic sound and my voice was weak by comparison: "Calling Lunar City."
"Static!" Kane echoed my thoughts. His frown made deep clefts between his eyebrows. "There's no static between inter-lunar radio!"
Verana's voice was small and frightened. "That sounds like the static we hear over the bigger radios when we broadcast to Earth."
"It does," Marie agreed.
"But we wouldn't have that kind of static over our radio, unless—" Verana's eyes widened until the pupils were surrounded by circles of white—"unless we were in outer space!"
We stared at the metal door that had imprisoned us, afraid even to speak of our fantastic suspicion.
I deactivated my radio.
Marie screamed as an inner door opened to disclose a long, narrow corridor beyond.
Simultaneous with the opening of the second door, I felt air press against my spacesuit. Before, our suits had been puffed outward by the pressure of air inside. Now our spacesuits were slack and dangling on our bodies.
We looked at each other and then at the inviting corridor beyond the open door.
We went single file, first Kane, then his wife Marie. Verana followed next and I was the last.
We walked slowly, examining the strange construction. The walls were featureless but still seemed alien. At various places on the walls were the outlines of doors without handles or locks.
Kane pressed his shoulder against a door and shoved. The door was unyielding.
I manipulated the air-vent controls of my spacesuit, allowed a small amount of the corridor's air into my helmet and inhaled cautiously. It smelled all right. I waited and nothing happened. Gradually, I increased the intake, turned off the oxygenating machines and removed my helmet.
"Shut off your oxy," I suggested. "We might as well breathe the air in this place and save our supply. We may need the oxygen in our suits later."
They saw that I had removed my helmet and was still alive and one by one removed their own helmets.
At the end of the corridor, Kane stopped before a blank wall. The sweat on his face glistened dully; his chest rose and fell rapidly. Kane was a pilot and one of the prerequisites for the job of guiding tons of metal between Earth and the Moon was a good set of nerves. Kane excited easily, his temper was fiery, but his nerves were like steel.
"The end of the line," he grunted.
As though to disprove the statement, a door on his right side opened soundlessly.
He went through the doorway as if shoved violently by an invisible hand.
The door closed behind him.
Marie threw herself at the door and beat at the metal. "Harry!"
Verana rushed to her side. Another door on the opposite side of the corridor opened silently. The door was behind them; they didn't notice.
Before I could warn them, Marie floated across the corridor, through the doorway.
Verana and I stared at the darkness beyond the opening, our muscles frozen by shock.
The door closed behind Marie's screaming, struggling form.
Verana's face was white with fear. Apprehensively, she glanced at the other doors that lined the hall.
I put my arms around her, held her close.
"Antigravity machines, force rays," I suggested worriedly.
For several minutes, we remained motionless and silent. I recalled the preceding events of the day, searched for a sense of normality in them. The Kanes, Miller, Verana and I lived in Lunar City with hundreds of other people. Mankind had inhabited the Moon for over a year. Means of recreation were scarce. Many people explored the place to amuse themselves. After supper, we had decided to take a walk. As simple as that: a walk on the Moon.
We had expected only the familiar craters, chasms and weird rock formations. A twist of fate and here we were: imprisoned in an alien ship.
My legs quivered with fatigue, my heart throbbed heavily, Verana's perfume dizzied me. No, it wasn't a dream. Despite our incredible situation, there was no sensation of unreality.
I took Verana's hand and led her down the long corridor, retracing our steps.
We had walked not more than two yards when the rest of the doors opened soundlessly.
Verana's hand flew to her mouth to stifle a gasp.
Six doors were now open. The only two that remained closed were the ones that the Kanes had unwillingly entered.
This time, no invisible hand thrust us into any of the rooms.
I entered the nearest one. Verana followed hesitantly.
The walls of the large room were lined with shelves containing thousands of variously colored boxes and bottles. A table and four chairs were located in the center of the green, plasticlike floor. Each chair had no back, only a curving platform with a single supporting column.
"Ed!" I joined Verana on the other side of the room. She pointed a trembling finger at some crude drawings. "The things in this room are food!"
The drawings were so simple that anyone could have understood them. The first drawing portrayed a naked man and woman removing boxes and bottles from the shelves. The second picture showed the couple opening the containers. The third showed the man eating from one of the boxes and the woman drinking from a bottle.
"Let's see how it tastes," I said.
I selected an orange-colored box. The lid dissolved at the touch of my fingers.
The only contents were small cubes of a soft orange substance.
I tasted a small piece.
"Chocolate! Just like chocolate!"
Verana chose a nearby bottle and drank some of the bluish liquid.
"Milk!" she exclaimed.
"Perhaps we'd better look at the other rooms," I told her.
The next room we examined was obviously for recreation. Containers were filled with dozens of strange games and books of instructions in the form of simple drawings. The games were foreign, but designed in such a fashion that they would be interesting to Earthmen.
Two of the rooms were sleeping quarters. The floors were covered with a spongy substance and the lights were dim and soothing.
Another room contained a small bathing pool, running water, waste-disposal units and yellow cakes of soap.
The last room was an observatory. The ceiling and an entire wall were transparent. Outside, the stars shone clearly for a few seconds, then disappeared for an equal time, only to reappear in a different position.
"Hyper-space drive," Verana whispered softly. She was fascinated by the movement of the stars. For years, our scientists had sought a hyperspatial drive to conquer the stars.
We selected a comfortable chair facing the transparent wall, lit cigarettes and waited.
A few minutes later, Marie entered the room.
I noticed with some surprise that her face was calm. If she was excited, her actions didn't betray it.
She sat next to Verana.
"What happened?" my wife asked.
Marie crossed her legs and began in a rambling manner as if discussing a new recipe, "That was really a surprise, wasn't it? I was scared silly, at first. That room was dark and I didn't know what to expect. Something touched my head and I heard a telepathic voice—"
"Telepathic?" Verana interrupted.
"Yes. Well, this voice said not to worry and that it wasn't going to hurt me. It said it only wanted to learn something about us. It was the oddest feeling! All the time, this voice kept talking to me in a nice way and made me feel at ease ... and at the same time, I felt something search my mind and gather information. I could actually feel it search my memories!"
"What memories?" I inquired.
She frowned with concentration. "Memories of high school mostly. It seemed interested in English and history classes. And then it searched for memories of our customs and lives in general...."
Kane stalked into the room at that moment, his face red with anger.
" Do you know where we are? " he demanded. "When those damned aliens got me in that room, they explained what this is all about. We're guinea pigs!"
"Did they use telepathy to explain?" Verana asked. I suddenly remembered that she was a member of a club that investigated extra-sensory perception with the hope of learning how it operated. She was probably sorry she hadn't been contacted telepathically.
"Yeah," Kane replied. "I saw all sorts of mental pictures and they explained what they did to us. Those damned aliens want us for their zoo!"
"Start at the beginning," I suggested.
He flashed an angry glance at me, but seemed to calm somewhat. "This ship was made by a race from another galaxy. Thousands of years ago, they came to Earth in their spaceships when men were primitives living in caves. They wanted to know what our civilization would be like when we developed space flight. So they put this ship on the Moon as a sort of booby-trap. They put it there with the idea that when we made spaceships and went to the Moon, sooner or later, we'd find the ship and enter it— like rabbits in a snare! "
"And now the booby-trap is on its way home," I guessed.
"Yeah, this ship is taking us to their planet and they're going to keep us there while they study us."
"How long will the trip take?" I asked.
"Six months. We'll be bottled up in this crate for six whole damned months! And when we get there, we'll be prisoners!"
Marie's hypnotic spell was fading and once more her face showed the terror inside her.
"Don't feel so bad," I told Kane. "It could be worse. It should be interesting to see an alien race. We'll have our wives with us—"
"Maybe they'll dissect us!" Marie gasped.
Verana scoffed. "A race intelligent enough to build a ship like this? A race that was traveling between the stars when we were living in caves? Dissection is primitive. They won't have to dissect us in order to study us. They'll have more advanced methods."
"Maybe we can reach the ship's controls somehow," Kane said excitedly.
"We've got to try to change the ship's course and get back to the Moon!"
"It's impossible. Don't waste your time." The voice had no visible source and seemed to fill the room.
Verana snapped her fingers. "So that's why the aliens read Marie's mind! They wanted to learn our language so they could talk to us!"
Kane whirled in a complete circle, glaring at each of the four walls.
"Where are you? Who are you?"
"I'm located in a part of the ship you can't reach. I'm a machine."
"Is anyone else aboard besides ourselves?"
"No. I control the ship." Although the voice spoke without stilted phrases, the tone was cold and mechanical.
"What are your—your masters going to do with us?" Marie asked anxiously.
"You won't be harmed. My masters merely wish to question and examine you. Thousands of years ago, they wondered what your race would be like when it developed to the space-flight stage. They left this ship on your Moon only because they were curious. My masters have no animosity toward your race, only compassion and curiosity."
I remembered the way antigravity rays had shoved Miller from the ship and asked the machine, "Why didn't you let our fifth member board the ship?"
"The trip to my makers' planet will take six months. There are food, oxygen and living facilities for four only of your race. I had to prevent the fifth from entering the ship."
"Come on," Kane ordered. "We'll search this ship room by room and we'll find some way to make it take us back to Earth."
"It's useless," the ship warned us.
For five hours, we minutely examined every room. We had no tools to force our way through solid metal walls to the engine or control rooms. The only things in the ship that could be lifted and carried about were the containers of food and alien games. None were sufficiently heavy or hard enough to put even a scratch in the heavy metal.
Six rooms were open to our use. The two rooms in which the Kanes had been imprisoned were locked and there were no controls or locks to work on.
The rooms that we could enter were without doors, except the ones that opened into the corridor.
After intensive searching, we realized there was no way to damage the ship or reach any section other than our allotted space.
We gave up.
The women went to the sleeping compartments to rest and Kane I went to the "kitchen."
At random, we sampled the variously colored boxes and bottles and discussed our predicament.
"Trapped," Kane said angrily. "Trapped in a steel prison." He slammed his fist against the table top. "But there must be a way to get out! Every problem has a solution!"
"You sure?" I asked.
"What?"
" Does every problem have a solution? I don't believe it. Some problems are too great. Take the problem of a murderer in our civilization: John Doe has killed someone and his problem is to escape. Primarily, a murderer's problem is the same principle as ours. A murderer has to outwit an entire civilization. We have to outwit an entire civilization that was hundreds of times more advanced than ours is now when we were clubbing animals and eating the meat raw. Damned few criminals get away these days, even though they've got such crowds to lose themselves in. All we have is a ship that we can't control. I don't think we have a chance."
My resignation annoyed him. Each of us had reacted differently: Kane's wife was frightened, Verana was calm because of an inner serenity that few people have, I was resigned and Kane was angry.
For several minutes, we sampled the different foods. Every one had a distinctive flavor, comparable to that of a fruit or vegetable on Earth.
Kane lifted a brown bottle to his lips, took a huge gulp and almost choked.
"Whiskey!"
"My masters realized your race would develop intoxicants and tried to create a comparable one," the machine explained.
I selected a brown bottle and sampled the liquid. "A little stronger than our own," I informed the machine.
We drank until Kane was staggering about the room, shouting insults at the alien race and the mechanical voice that seemed to be everywhere. He beat his fist against a wall until blood trickled from bruised knuckles.
"Please don't hurt yourself," the machine pleaded.
" Why? " Kane screamed at the ceiling. "Why should you care?"
"My masters will be displeased with me if you arrive in a damaged condition."
Kane banged his head against a bulkhead; an ugly bruise formed rapidly.
"Shtop me, then!"
"I can't. My masters created no way for me to restrain or contact you other than use of your language."
It took fully fifteen minutes to drag Kane to his sleeping compartment.
After I left Kane in his wife's care, I went to the adjoining room and stretched out on the soft floor beside Verana.
I tried to think of some solution. We were locked in an alien ship at the start of a six months' journey to a strange planet. We had no tools or weapons.
Solution? I doubted if two dozen geniuses working steadily for years could think of one!
I wondered what the alien race was like. Intelligent, surely: They had foreseen our conquest of space flight when we hadn't even invented the wheel. That thought awed me—somehow they had analyzed our brains thousands of years ago and calculated what our future accomplishments would be.
They had been able to predict our scientific development, but they hadn't been able to tell how our civilization would develop. They were curious, so they had left an enormously elaborate piece of bait on the Moon.
The aliens were incredibly more advanced than ourselves. I couldn't help thinking, And to a rabbit in a snare, mankind must seem impossibly clever .
I decided to ask the machine about its makers in the "morning."
When I awoke, my head was throbbing painfully.
I opened my eyes and blinked several times to make sure they were functioning properly. I wasn't in the compartment where I had fallen asleep a few hours before.
I was tied to one of the chairs in the "kitchen." Beside me, Verana was bound to a chair by strips of cloth from her skirt, and across from us, Marie was secured to another chair.
Kane staggered into the room. Although he was visibly drunk, he appeared more sober than the night before. His dark hair was rumpled and his face was flushed, but his eyes gleamed with a growing alertness.
"Awake, huh?"
"What have you done, Harry?" his wife screamed at him. Her eyes were red with tears and her lips twisted in an expression of shame when she looked at him.
"Obvious, isn't it? While all of you were asleep, I conked each of you on the head, dragged you in here and tied you up." He smiled crookedly.
"It's amazing the things a person can do when he's pickled. I'm sorry I had to be so rough, but I have a plan and I knew you wouldn't agree or cooperate with me."
"What's your plan?" I asked.
He grinned wryly and crinkled bloodshot eyes. "I don't want to live in a zoo on an alien planet. I want to go home and prove my theory that this problem has a solution."
I grunted my disgust.
"The solution is simple," he said. "We're in a trap so strong that the aliens didn't establish any means to control our actions. When men put a lion in a strong cage, they don't worry about controlling the lion because the lion can't get out. We're in the same basic situation."
"So what?" Verana queried in a sarcastic tone.
"The aliens want us transported to their planet so they can examine and question us. Right?"
"Right."
"Ed, remember that remark the machine made last night?"
"What remark?"
"It said, ' My masters will be displeased with me if you arrive in a damaged condition.' What does that indicate to you?"
I assumed a baffled expression. I didn't have the slightest idea of what he was driving at and I told him so.
"Ed," he said, "if you could build an electronic brain capable of making decisions, how would you build it?"
"Hell, I don't know," I confessed.
"Well, if I could build an electronic brain like the one running this ship, I'd build it with a conscience so it'd do its best at all times."
"Machines always do their best," I argued. "Come on, untie us. I'm getting a crick in my back!" I didn't like the idea of being slugged while asleep. If Kane had been sober and if his wife hadn't been present, I would have let him know exactly what I thought of him.
" Our machines always do their best," he argued, "because we punch buttons and they respond in predetermined patterns. But the electronic brain in this ship isn't automatic. It makes decisions and I'll bet it even has to decide how much energy and time to put into each process!"
"So what?"
He shrugged muscular shoulders. "So this ship is operated by a thinking, conscientious machine. It's the first time I've encountered such a machine, but I think I know what will happen. I spent hours last night figuring—"
"What are you talking about?" I interrupted. "Are you so drunk that you don't know—"
"I'll show you, Ed."
He walked around the table and stood behind my chair. I felt his thick fingers around my throat and smelled the alcohol on his breath.
"Can you see me, machine?" he asked the empty air.
"Yes," the electronic brain replied.
"Watch!"
Kane tightened his fingers around my throat.
Verana and Marie screamed shrilly.
My head seemed to swell like a balloon; my throat gurgled painfully.
"Please stop," the machine pleaded.
"What will your masters think of you if I kill all of us? You'll return to them with a cargo of dead people!"
The machine didn't answer. I waited for the electronic brain to interfere and, with a cold knot in my stomach, realized the machine had said it had no way to control our actions!
"Your purpose won't be fulfilled, will it?" Kane demanded. "Not if you return with dead specimens!"
"No," the machine admitted.
"If you don't take us back to the Moon," Kane threatened, "I'll kill all of us !"
The alien electronic brain was silent.
By this time, I couldn't see and Kane's voice was a hollow, faraway thing that rang in my ears. I tugged at my bindings, but they only tightened as I struggled.
"If you take us back to the Moon, your masters will never know you failed in your mission. They won't know you failed because you won't bring them proof of your failure."
My fading consciousness tried to envision the alien mechanical brain as it struggled with the problem.
"Look at it this way," Kane persisted. "If you carry our corpses to your masters, all your efforts will have been useless. If you return us to the Moon alive, you'll still have a chance to carry out your mission later."
A long silence followed. Verana and Marie screamed at Kane to let go. A soft darkness seemed to fill the room, blurring everything, drowning even their shrieks in strangling blackness.
"You win," the machine conceded. "I'll return the ship to the Moon."
Kane released his grip on my throat.
"See?" he asked. "Didn't I tell you every problem has a solution?"
I didn't answer. I was too busy enjoying breathing again.
Question:
What happens to Marie throughout the story?
Answer:
|
[
"Marie is the wife of Kane, the sharp, brash anti-hero of the story. She begins on the walk with the rest of the crew, ending up on the alien spaceship. When Kane is thrown into a separate room from the rest of the crew, Marie throws herself against the door and tries with all her strength to get it to open, until she herself is put in a separate room. The room is dark, and she is touched by a telepathic voice that tells her not to worry. They won't hurt her, and they only want to learn something about her. The voice seems to search through her memories, looking at her high school days. It also looked at human customs and their lives in general. The room must be filled with some sort of happiness gas, because she comes out of it to join the rest of the crew in an airy, relaxed mood that soon wears off. She then searches the ship for a way to break out with the rest of the group but finds nothing. She goes to sleep with Verana. She wakes up to Kane having tied them all up. When Kane is strangling Ed, she screams at him to stop. Eventually though, the computer lets them go home. ",
"Marie is the wife of Harry Kane. She joins Harry, Ed, Miller, and Verana on a walk on the Moon at the beginning of the story. When they encounter the object, she is the second one to enter through its opening, following her husband despite being frightened. Marie and the rest of the group examine the object, walking down its large corridor, when she is suddenly pushed into a room by a mysterious force. Marie is then separated by the group, returning to them later and dizzily explaining how her mind was searched and prodded for memories. Once Marie falls out of her trance and Harry returns, she returns to being frightened and panicking. She rests that night with Verana, and awakes the next morning tied to a chair, where Kane is executing his plan.",
"\nMarie is the wife of Harry Kane. She initially follows her husband into the spaceship. Then, after he is pushed into one of the rooms, she floats across the corridor into another room. Marie screams and struggles, but she is taken away regardless. Later, she comes back into the observatory and says a voice spoke to her telepathically when she was in the dark room. She then says that the voice was interested in her memories, especially the high school ones about English and history. However, she could also feel it searching for memories of general life and customs. The voice spoke very nicely to her too, which made her happy and calm. Later, she is frightened again once the machine reveals what is going to happen to them. She cares for Kane after he has his violent outburst but becomes involved in his later plan again. \n\n",
"Marie approaches the sphere together with the whole group and follows Kane, her husband, inside. There she is as scared as everyone, passes the corridor, and when a door closes behind her husband she starts beating it violently. Then she floats into another door which shuts behind screaming Marie. In a while she appears in the observatory with a calm face. She tells about a telepathic voice in the dark which calmed her down and searched through her memories. While she listens to her husband's story about the experiment and their future as prisoners on an alien planet, the calm effect disappears and she is filled with terror of dissection, for example. Then she searches the ship together with the rest of the group without effect and goes to sleep. She was frightened all the way. Soon she is joined by her husband in bed. In the morning she finds herself bound to a chair together with Ed and Verana in the kitchen. She is upset and feels shame for her husband, she is also scared of him choking Ed. She asks her husband to let go of Ed. Eventually, she returns to the Moon together with the group. "
] |
49901
|
The Snare
By RICHARD R. SMITH
Illustrated by WEISS
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy January 1956. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
It's easy to find a solution when there is one—the trick is to do it if there is none!
I glanced at the path we had made across the Mare Serenitatis . The Latin translated as "the Sea of Serenity." It was well named because, as far as the eye could see in every direction, there was a smooth layer of pumice that resembled the surface of a calm sea. Scattered across the quiet sea of virgin Moon dust were occasional islands of rock that jutted abruptly toward the infinity of stars above. Considering everything, our surroundings conveyed a sense of serenity like none I had ever felt.
Our bounding path across the level expanse was clearly marked. Because of the light gravity, we had leaped high into the air with each step and every time we struck the ground, the impact had raised a cloud of dustlike pumice. Now the clouds of dust were slowly settling in the light gravity.
Above us, the stars were cold, motionless and crystal-clear. Indifferently, they sprayed a faint light on our surroundings ... a dim glow that was hardly sufficient for normal vision and was too weak to be reflected toward Earth.
We turned our head-lamps on the strange object before us. Five beams of light illuminated the smooth shape that protruded from the Moon's surface.
The incongruity was so awesome that for several minutes, we remained motionless and quiet. Miller broke the silence with his quavering voice, "Strange someone didn't notice it before."
Strange? The object rose a quarter of a mile above us, a huge, curving hulk of smooth metal. It was featureless and yet conveyed a sense of alienness . It was alien and yet it wasn't a natural formation. Something had made the thing, whatever it was. But was it strange that it hadn't been noticed before? Men had lived on the Moon for over a year, but the Moon was vast and the Mare Serenitatis covered three hundred and forty thousand square miles.
"What is it?" Marie asked breathlessly.
Her husband grunted his bafflement. "Who knows? But see how it curves? If it's a perfect sphere, it must be at least two miles in diameter!"
"If it's a perfect sphere," Miller suggested, "most of it must be beneath the Moon's surface."
"Maybe it isn't a sphere," my wife said. "Maybe this is all of it."
"Let's call Lunar City and tell the authorities about it." I reached for the radio controls on my suit.
Kane grabbed my arm. "No. Let's find out whatever we can by ourselves. If we tell the authorities, they'll order us to leave it alone. If we discover something really important, we'll be famous!"
I lowered my arm. His outburst seemed faintly childish to me. And yet it carried a good measure of common sense. If we discovered proof of an alien race, we would indeed be famous. The more we discovered for ourselves, the more famous we'd be. Fame was practically a synonym for prestige and wealth.
"All right," I conceded.
Miller stepped forward, moving slowly in the bulk of his spacesuit. Deliberately, he removed a small torch from his side and pressed the brilliant flame against the metal.
A few minutes later, the elderly mineralogist gave his opinion: "It's steel ... made thousands of years ago."
Someone gasped over the intercom, "Thousands of years! But wouldn't it be in worse shape than this if it was that old?"
Miller pointed at the small cut his torch had made in the metal. The notch was only a quarter of an inch deep. "I say steel because it's similar to steel. Actually, it's a much stronger alloy. Besides that, on the Moon, there's been no water or atmosphere to rust it. Not even a wind to disturb its surface. It's at least several thousand years old."
We slowly circled the alien structure. Several minutes later, Kane shouted, "Look!"
A few feet above the ground, the structure's smooth surface was broken by a circular opening that yawned invitingly. Kane ran ahead and flashed his head-lamp into the dark recess.
"There's a small room inside," he told us, and climbed through the opening.
We waited outside and focused our lamps through the five-foot opening to give him as much light as possible.
"Come on in, Marie," he called to his wife. "This is really something! It must be an alien race. There's all kinds of weird drawings on the walls and gadgets that look like controls for something...."
Briefly, my lamp flickered over Marie's pale face. Her features struggled with two conflicting emotions: She was frightened by the alienness of the thing and yet she wanted to be with her husband. She hesitated momentarily, then climbed through the passage.
"You want to go in?" my wife asked.
"Do you?"
"Let's."
I helped Verana through the opening, climbed through myself and turned to help Miller.
Miller was sixty years old. He was an excellent mineralogist, alert mentally, but with a body that was almost feeble. I reached out to help him as he stepped into the passageway.
For a brief second, he was framed in the opening, a dark silhouette against the star-studded sky.
The next second, he was thrown twenty yards into the air. He gasped with pain when he struck the ground. " Something pushed me!"
"Are you all right?"
"Yes."
He had fallen on a spot beyond our angle of vision. I started through the passage....
... and struck an invisible solid wall.
My eyes were on the circular opening. A metal panel emerged from a recess on one side and slid across the passage. The room darkened with the absence of starlight.
" What happened? "
"The door to this damned place closed," I explained.
" What? "
Before we could recover from the shock, the room filled with a brilliant glare. We turned off our lamps.
The room was approximately twelve feet long and nine feet wide. The ceiling was only a few inches above our heads and when I looked at the smooth, hard metal, I felt as if I were trapped in some alien vault.
The walls of the room were covered with strange drawings and instruments. Here and there, kaleidoscopic lights pulsed rhythmically.
Kane brushed past me and beat his gloved fists against the metal door that had imprisoned us.
"Miller!"
"Yes?"
"See if you can get this thing open from the outside."
I knelt before the door and explored its surface with my fingers. There were no visible recesses or controls.
Over the intercom network, everyone's breath mingled and formed a rough, harsh sound. I could discern the women's quick, frightened breaths that were almost sobs. Kane's breath was deep and strong; Miller's was faltering and weak.
"Miller, get help!"
"I'll—" The sound of his breathing ceased. We listened intently.
"What happened to him?"
"I'll phone Lunar City." My fingers fumbled at the radio controls and trembled beneath the thick gloves.
I turned the dials that would connect my radio with Lunar City....
Static grated against my ear drums.
Static!
I listened to the harsh, erratic sound and my voice was weak by comparison: "Calling Lunar City."
"Static!" Kane echoed my thoughts. His frown made deep clefts between his eyebrows. "There's no static between inter-lunar radio!"
Verana's voice was small and frightened. "That sounds like the static we hear over the bigger radios when we broadcast to Earth."
"It does," Marie agreed.
"But we wouldn't have that kind of static over our radio, unless—" Verana's eyes widened until the pupils were surrounded by circles of white—"unless we were in outer space!"
We stared at the metal door that had imprisoned us, afraid even to speak of our fantastic suspicion.
I deactivated my radio.
Marie screamed as an inner door opened to disclose a long, narrow corridor beyond.
Simultaneous with the opening of the second door, I felt air press against my spacesuit. Before, our suits had been puffed outward by the pressure of air inside. Now our spacesuits were slack and dangling on our bodies.
We looked at each other and then at the inviting corridor beyond the open door.
We went single file, first Kane, then his wife Marie. Verana followed next and I was the last.
We walked slowly, examining the strange construction. The walls were featureless but still seemed alien. At various places on the walls were the outlines of doors without handles or locks.
Kane pressed his shoulder against a door and shoved. The door was unyielding.
I manipulated the air-vent controls of my spacesuit, allowed a small amount of the corridor's air into my helmet and inhaled cautiously. It smelled all right. I waited and nothing happened. Gradually, I increased the intake, turned off the oxygenating machines and removed my helmet.
"Shut off your oxy," I suggested. "We might as well breathe the air in this place and save our supply. We may need the oxygen in our suits later."
They saw that I had removed my helmet and was still alive and one by one removed their own helmets.
At the end of the corridor, Kane stopped before a blank wall. The sweat on his face glistened dully; his chest rose and fell rapidly. Kane was a pilot and one of the prerequisites for the job of guiding tons of metal between Earth and the Moon was a good set of nerves. Kane excited easily, his temper was fiery, but his nerves were like steel.
"The end of the line," he grunted.
As though to disprove the statement, a door on his right side opened soundlessly.
He went through the doorway as if shoved violently by an invisible hand.
The door closed behind him.
Marie threw herself at the door and beat at the metal. "Harry!"
Verana rushed to her side. Another door on the opposite side of the corridor opened silently. The door was behind them; they didn't notice.
Before I could warn them, Marie floated across the corridor, through the doorway.
Verana and I stared at the darkness beyond the opening, our muscles frozen by shock.
The door closed behind Marie's screaming, struggling form.
Verana's face was white with fear. Apprehensively, she glanced at the other doors that lined the hall.
I put my arms around her, held her close.
"Antigravity machines, force rays," I suggested worriedly.
For several minutes, we remained motionless and silent. I recalled the preceding events of the day, searched for a sense of normality in them. The Kanes, Miller, Verana and I lived in Lunar City with hundreds of other people. Mankind had inhabited the Moon for over a year. Means of recreation were scarce. Many people explored the place to amuse themselves. After supper, we had decided to take a walk. As simple as that: a walk on the Moon.
We had expected only the familiar craters, chasms and weird rock formations. A twist of fate and here we were: imprisoned in an alien ship.
My legs quivered with fatigue, my heart throbbed heavily, Verana's perfume dizzied me. No, it wasn't a dream. Despite our incredible situation, there was no sensation of unreality.
I took Verana's hand and led her down the long corridor, retracing our steps.
We had walked not more than two yards when the rest of the doors opened soundlessly.
Verana's hand flew to her mouth to stifle a gasp.
Six doors were now open. The only two that remained closed were the ones that the Kanes had unwillingly entered.
This time, no invisible hand thrust us into any of the rooms.
I entered the nearest one. Verana followed hesitantly.
The walls of the large room were lined with shelves containing thousands of variously colored boxes and bottles. A table and four chairs were located in the center of the green, plasticlike floor. Each chair had no back, only a curving platform with a single supporting column.
"Ed!" I joined Verana on the other side of the room. She pointed a trembling finger at some crude drawings. "The things in this room are food!"
The drawings were so simple that anyone could have understood them. The first drawing portrayed a naked man and woman removing boxes and bottles from the shelves. The second picture showed the couple opening the containers. The third showed the man eating from one of the boxes and the woman drinking from a bottle.
"Let's see how it tastes," I said.
I selected an orange-colored box. The lid dissolved at the touch of my fingers.
The only contents were small cubes of a soft orange substance.
I tasted a small piece.
"Chocolate! Just like chocolate!"
Verana chose a nearby bottle and drank some of the bluish liquid.
"Milk!" she exclaimed.
"Perhaps we'd better look at the other rooms," I told her.
The next room we examined was obviously for recreation. Containers were filled with dozens of strange games and books of instructions in the form of simple drawings. The games were foreign, but designed in such a fashion that they would be interesting to Earthmen.
Two of the rooms were sleeping quarters. The floors were covered with a spongy substance and the lights were dim and soothing.
Another room contained a small bathing pool, running water, waste-disposal units and yellow cakes of soap.
The last room was an observatory. The ceiling and an entire wall were transparent. Outside, the stars shone clearly for a few seconds, then disappeared for an equal time, only to reappear in a different position.
"Hyper-space drive," Verana whispered softly. She was fascinated by the movement of the stars. For years, our scientists had sought a hyperspatial drive to conquer the stars.
We selected a comfortable chair facing the transparent wall, lit cigarettes and waited.
A few minutes later, Marie entered the room.
I noticed with some surprise that her face was calm. If she was excited, her actions didn't betray it.
She sat next to Verana.
"What happened?" my wife asked.
Marie crossed her legs and began in a rambling manner as if discussing a new recipe, "That was really a surprise, wasn't it? I was scared silly, at first. That room was dark and I didn't know what to expect. Something touched my head and I heard a telepathic voice—"
"Telepathic?" Verana interrupted.
"Yes. Well, this voice said not to worry and that it wasn't going to hurt me. It said it only wanted to learn something about us. It was the oddest feeling! All the time, this voice kept talking to me in a nice way and made me feel at ease ... and at the same time, I felt something search my mind and gather information. I could actually feel it search my memories!"
"What memories?" I inquired.
She frowned with concentration. "Memories of high school mostly. It seemed interested in English and history classes. And then it searched for memories of our customs and lives in general...."
Kane stalked into the room at that moment, his face red with anger.
" Do you know where we are? " he demanded. "When those damned aliens got me in that room, they explained what this is all about. We're guinea pigs!"
"Did they use telepathy to explain?" Verana asked. I suddenly remembered that she was a member of a club that investigated extra-sensory perception with the hope of learning how it operated. She was probably sorry she hadn't been contacted telepathically.
"Yeah," Kane replied. "I saw all sorts of mental pictures and they explained what they did to us. Those damned aliens want us for their zoo!"
"Start at the beginning," I suggested.
He flashed an angry glance at me, but seemed to calm somewhat. "This ship was made by a race from another galaxy. Thousands of years ago, they came to Earth in their spaceships when men were primitives living in caves. They wanted to know what our civilization would be like when we developed space flight. So they put this ship on the Moon as a sort of booby-trap. They put it there with the idea that when we made spaceships and went to the Moon, sooner or later, we'd find the ship and enter it— like rabbits in a snare! "
"And now the booby-trap is on its way home," I guessed.
"Yeah, this ship is taking us to their planet and they're going to keep us there while they study us."
"How long will the trip take?" I asked.
"Six months. We'll be bottled up in this crate for six whole damned months! And when we get there, we'll be prisoners!"
Marie's hypnotic spell was fading and once more her face showed the terror inside her.
"Don't feel so bad," I told Kane. "It could be worse. It should be interesting to see an alien race. We'll have our wives with us—"
"Maybe they'll dissect us!" Marie gasped.
Verana scoffed. "A race intelligent enough to build a ship like this? A race that was traveling between the stars when we were living in caves? Dissection is primitive. They won't have to dissect us in order to study us. They'll have more advanced methods."
"Maybe we can reach the ship's controls somehow," Kane said excitedly.
"We've got to try to change the ship's course and get back to the Moon!"
"It's impossible. Don't waste your time." The voice had no visible source and seemed to fill the room.
Verana snapped her fingers. "So that's why the aliens read Marie's mind! They wanted to learn our language so they could talk to us!"
Kane whirled in a complete circle, glaring at each of the four walls.
"Where are you? Who are you?"
"I'm located in a part of the ship you can't reach. I'm a machine."
"Is anyone else aboard besides ourselves?"
"No. I control the ship." Although the voice spoke without stilted phrases, the tone was cold and mechanical.
"What are your—your masters going to do with us?" Marie asked anxiously.
"You won't be harmed. My masters merely wish to question and examine you. Thousands of years ago, they wondered what your race would be like when it developed to the space-flight stage. They left this ship on your Moon only because they were curious. My masters have no animosity toward your race, only compassion and curiosity."
I remembered the way antigravity rays had shoved Miller from the ship and asked the machine, "Why didn't you let our fifth member board the ship?"
"The trip to my makers' planet will take six months. There are food, oxygen and living facilities for four only of your race. I had to prevent the fifth from entering the ship."
"Come on," Kane ordered. "We'll search this ship room by room and we'll find some way to make it take us back to Earth."
"It's useless," the ship warned us.
For five hours, we minutely examined every room. We had no tools to force our way through solid metal walls to the engine or control rooms. The only things in the ship that could be lifted and carried about were the containers of food and alien games. None were sufficiently heavy or hard enough to put even a scratch in the heavy metal.
Six rooms were open to our use. The two rooms in which the Kanes had been imprisoned were locked and there were no controls or locks to work on.
The rooms that we could enter were without doors, except the ones that opened into the corridor.
After intensive searching, we realized there was no way to damage the ship or reach any section other than our allotted space.
We gave up.
The women went to the sleeping compartments to rest and Kane I went to the "kitchen."
At random, we sampled the variously colored boxes and bottles and discussed our predicament.
"Trapped," Kane said angrily. "Trapped in a steel prison." He slammed his fist against the table top. "But there must be a way to get out! Every problem has a solution!"
"You sure?" I asked.
"What?"
" Does every problem have a solution? I don't believe it. Some problems are too great. Take the problem of a murderer in our civilization: John Doe has killed someone and his problem is to escape. Primarily, a murderer's problem is the same principle as ours. A murderer has to outwit an entire civilization. We have to outwit an entire civilization that was hundreds of times more advanced than ours is now when we were clubbing animals and eating the meat raw. Damned few criminals get away these days, even though they've got such crowds to lose themselves in. All we have is a ship that we can't control. I don't think we have a chance."
My resignation annoyed him. Each of us had reacted differently: Kane's wife was frightened, Verana was calm because of an inner serenity that few people have, I was resigned and Kane was angry.
For several minutes, we sampled the different foods. Every one had a distinctive flavor, comparable to that of a fruit or vegetable on Earth.
Kane lifted a brown bottle to his lips, took a huge gulp and almost choked.
"Whiskey!"
"My masters realized your race would develop intoxicants and tried to create a comparable one," the machine explained.
I selected a brown bottle and sampled the liquid. "A little stronger than our own," I informed the machine.
We drank until Kane was staggering about the room, shouting insults at the alien race and the mechanical voice that seemed to be everywhere. He beat his fist against a wall until blood trickled from bruised knuckles.
"Please don't hurt yourself," the machine pleaded.
" Why? " Kane screamed at the ceiling. "Why should you care?"
"My masters will be displeased with me if you arrive in a damaged condition."
Kane banged his head against a bulkhead; an ugly bruise formed rapidly.
"Shtop me, then!"
"I can't. My masters created no way for me to restrain or contact you other than use of your language."
It took fully fifteen minutes to drag Kane to his sleeping compartment.
After I left Kane in his wife's care, I went to the adjoining room and stretched out on the soft floor beside Verana.
I tried to think of some solution. We were locked in an alien ship at the start of a six months' journey to a strange planet. We had no tools or weapons.
Solution? I doubted if two dozen geniuses working steadily for years could think of one!
I wondered what the alien race was like. Intelligent, surely: They had foreseen our conquest of space flight when we hadn't even invented the wheel. That thought awed me—somehow they had analyzed our brains thousands of years ago and calculated what our future accomplishments would be.
They had been able to predict our scientific development, but they hadn't been able to tell how our civilization would develop. They were curious, so they had left an enormously elaborate piece of bait on the Moon.
The aliens were incredibly more advanced than ourselves. I couldn't help thinking, And to a rabbit in a snare, mankind must seem impossibly clever .
I decided to ask the machine about its makers in the "morning."
When I awoke, my head was throbbing painfully.
I opened my eyes and blinked several times to make sure they were functioning properly. I wasn't in the compartment where I had fallen asleep a few hours before.
I was tied to one of the chairs in the "kitchen." Beside me, Verana was bound to a chair by strips of cloth from her skirt, and across from us, Marie was secured to another chair.
Kane staggered into the room. Although he was visibly drunk, he appeared more sober than the night before. His dark hair was rumpled and his face was flushed, but his eyes gleamed with a growing alertness.
"Awake, huh?"
"What have you done, Harry?" his wife screamed at him. Her eyes were red with tears and her lips twisted in an expression of shame when she looked at him.
"Obvious, isn't it? While all of you were asleep, I conked each of you on the head, dragged you in here and tied you up." He smiled crookedly.
"It's amazing the things a person can do when he's pickled. I'm sorry I had to be so rough, but I have a plan and I knew you wouldn't agree or cooperate with me."
"What's your plan?" I asked.
He grinned wryly and crinkled bloodshot eyes. "I don't want to live in a zoo on an alien planet. I want to go home and prove my theory that this problem has a solution."
I grunted my disgust.
"The solution is simple," he said. "We're in a trap so strong that the aliens didn't establish any means to control our actions. When men put a lion in a strong cage, they don't worry about controlling the lion because the lion can't get out. We're in the same basic situation."
"So what?" Verana queried in a sarcastic tone.
"The aliens want us transported to their planet so they can examine and question us. Right?"
"Right."
"Ed, remember that remark the machine made last night?"
"What remark?"
"It said, ' My masters will be displeased with me if you arrive in a damaged condition.' What does that indicate to you?"
I assumed a baffled expression. I didn't have the slightest idea of what he was driving at and I told him so.
"Ed," he said, "if you could build an electronic brain capable of making decisions, how would you build it?"
"Hell, I don't know," I confessed.
"Well, if I could build an electronic brain like the one running this ship, I'd build it with a conscience so it'd do its best at all times."
"Machines always do their best," I argued. "Come on, untie us. I'm getting a crick in my back!" I didn't like the idea of being slugged while asleep. If Kane had been sober and if his wife hadn't been present, I would have let him know exactly what I thought of him.
" Our machines always do their best," he argued, "because we punch buttons and they respond in predetermined patterns. But the electronic brain in this ship isn't automatic. It makes decisions and I'll bet it even has to decide how much energy and time to put into each process!"
"So what?"
He shrugged muscular shoulders. "So this ship is operated by a thinking, conscientious machine. It's the first time I've encountered such a machine, but I think I know what will happen. I spent hours last night figuring—"
"What are you talking about?" I interrupted. "Are you so drunk that you don't know—"
"I'll show you, Ed."
He walked around the table and stood behind my chair. I felt his thick fingers around my throat and smelled the alcohol on his breath.
"Can you see me, machine?" he asked the empty air.
"Yes," the electronic brain replied.
"Watch!"
Kane tightened his fingers around my throat.
Verana and Marie screamed shrilly.
My head seemed to swell like a balloon; my throat gurgled painfully.
"Please stop," the machine pleaded.
"What will your masters think of you if I kill all of us? You'll return to them with a cargo of dead people!"
The machine didn't answer. I waited for the electronic brain to interfere and, with a cold knot in my stomach, realized the machine had said it had no way to control our actions!
"Your purpose won't be fulfilled, will it?" Kane demanded. "Not if you return with dead specimens!"
"No," the machine admitted.
"If you don't take us back to the Moon," Kane threatened, "I'll kill all of us !"
The alien electronic brain was silent.
By this time, I couldn't see and Kane's voice was a hollow, faraway thing that rang in my ears. I tugged at my bindings, but they only tightened as I struggled.
"If you take us back to the Moon, your masters will never know you failed in your mission. They won't know you failed because you won't bring them proof of your failure."
My fading consciousness tried to envision the alien mechanical brain as it struggled with the problem.
"Look at it this way," Kane persisted. "If you carry our corpses to your masters, all your efforts will have been useless. If you return us to the Moon alive, you'll still have a chance to carry out your mission later."
A long silence followed. Verana and Marie screamed at Kane to let go. A soft darkness seemed to fill the room, blurring everything, drowning even their shrieks in strangling blackness.
"You win," the machine conceded. "I'll return the ship to the Moon."
Kane released his grip on my throat.
"See?" he asked. "Didn't I tell you every problem has a solution?"
I didn't answer. I was too busy enjoying breathing again.
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How is the theme of responsibility explored in the story?
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about The First Man in Space by Heather Feldman.
Relevant chunks:
THE FIRST MAN INTO SPACE
Cadet Marshall Farnsworth woke from a nightmare of exploding novae and fouling rockets. After recovering from his fright, he laughed contemptuously at himself. “Here I was picked as the most stable of a group of two hundred cadets,” he thought, “and chosen to make man’s first trip into space, yet I’m shaking like a leaf.”
He got out of bed and went over to the window. From his father’s temporary apartment, he could see distant Skyharbor, the scene of the plunge into space tomorrow night. He had been awarded the frightening honor of making that trip.
10
As he watched teardrop cars whip along Phoenix, Arizona’s, double-decked streets, elevated over one another to avoid dangerous intersections and delaying stop lights, he thought back over the years; to the 1950’s, when mice and monkeys were sent up in Vikings to launch mankind’s first probing of the mysterious space beyond Earth, and the first satellites were launched; to the 1960’s, when huger, multiple-stage rockets finally conquered the problem of escape velocity; to 1975—today—when man was finally ready to send one of his own kind into the uninhabited deeps.
Marsh climbed back into bed, but sleep would not come.
In the adjoining room, he could hear the footsteps of mother and father. By their sound he knew they were the footsteps of worried people. This hurt Marsh more than his own uneasiness.
The anxiety had begun for them, he knew, when he had first signed up for space-cadet training. They had known there was an extremely high percentage of washouts, and after each test he passed, they had pretended to be glad. But Marsh knew that inwardly they had hoped he would fail, for they were aware of the ultimate goal that the space scientists were working for—the goal that had just now been reached.
Marsh finally fell into a troubled sleep that lasted until morning.
He woke early, before the alarm rang. He got up, showered, pulled on his blue-corded cadet uniform, and tugged on the polished gray boots. He took one final look around his room as though in farewell, then went out to the kitchen.
11
His folks were up ahead of time too, trying to act as though it were just another day. Dad was pretending to enjoy his morning paper, nodding only casually to Marsh as he came in. Mom was stirring scrambled eggs in the skillet, but she wasn’t a very good actor, Marsh noticed, for she furtively wiped her eyes with her free hand.
The eggs were cooked too hard and the toast had to be scraped, but no one seemed to care. The three of them sat down at the table, still speaking in monosyllables and of unimportant things. They made a pretense of eating.
“Well, Mom,” Dad suddenly said with a forced jollity that was intended to break the tension, “the Farnsworth family has finally got a celebrity in it.”
“I don’t see why they don’t send an older man!” Mom burst out, as though she had been holding it in as long as she could. “Sending a boy who isn’t even twenty-two—”
“Things are different nowadays, Mom,” Dad explained, still with the assumed calmness that masked his real feelings. “These days, men grow up faster and mature quicker. They’re stronger and more alert than older men—” His voice trailed off as if he were unable to convince himself.
“ Some body has to go,” Marsh said. “Why not a younger man without family and responsibility? That’s why they’re giving younger men more opportunities today than they used to.”
“It’s not younger men I’m talking about!” Mom blurted. “It’s you, Marsh!”
12
Dad leaned over and patted Mom on the shoulder.
“Now, Ruth, we promised not to get excited this morning.”
“I’m sorry,” Mom said weakly. “But Marsh is too young to—” She caught herself and put her hand over her mouth.
“Stop talking like that!” Dad said. “Marsh is coming back. There’ve been thousands of rockets sent aloft. The space engineers have made sure that every bug has been ironed out before risking a man’s life. Why, that rocket which Marsh is going up in is as safe as our auto in the garage, isn’t it, Marsh?”
“I hope so, Dad,” Marsh murmured.
Later, as Dad drove Marsh to the field, each brooded silently. Every scene along the way seemed to take on a new look for Marsh. He saw things that he had never noticed before. It was an uncomfortable feeling, almost as if he were seeing these things for the last as well as the first time.
Finally the airport came into view. The guards at the gate recognized Marsh and ushered the Farnsworth car through ahead of scores of others that crowded the entrance. Some eager news photographers slipped up close and shot off flash bulbs in Marsh’s eyes.
Skyharbor, once a small commercial field, had been taken over by the Air Force in recent years and converted into the largest rocket experimental center in the United States.
13
Dad drove up to the building that would be the scene of Marsh’s first exhaustive tests and briefings. He stopped the car, and Marsh jumped out. Their good-by was brief. Marsh saw his father’s mouth quiver. There was a tightness in his own throat. He had gone through any number of grueling tests to prove that he could take the rigors of space, but not one of them had prepared him for the hardest moments of parting.
When Dad had driven off, Marsh reported first to the psychiatrist who checked his condition.
“Pulse fast, a rise in blood pressure,” he said.
“You’re excited, aren’t you, son?”
“Yes, sir,” Marsh admitted. “Maybe they’ve got the wrong man, sir. I might fail them.”
The doctor grinned. “They don’t have the wrong man,” he said. “They might have, with a so-called iron-nerved fellow. He could contain his tension and fears until later, until maybe the moment of blast-off. Then he’d let go, and when he needed his calmest judgment he wouldn’t have it. No, Marshall, there isn’t a man alive who could make this history-making flight without some anxiety. Forget it. You’ll feel better as the day goes on. I’ll see you once more before the blast-off.”
Marsh felt more at ease already. He went on to the space surgeon, was given a complete physical examination, and was pronounced in perfect condition. Then began his review briefing on everything he would encounter during the flight.
14
Blast-off time was for 2230, an hour and a half before midnight. Since at night, in the Western Hemisphere, Earth was masking the sun, the complications of excessive temperatures in the outer reaches were avoided during the time Marsh would be outside the ship. Marsh would occupy the small upper third section of a three-stage rocket. The first two parts would be jettisoned after reaching their peak velocities. Top speed of the third stage would carry Marsh into a perpetual-flight orbit around Earth, along the route that a permanent space station was to be built after the results of the flight were studied. After spending a little while in this orbit, Marsh would begin the precarious journey back to Earth, in gliding flight.
He got a few hours of sleep after sunset. When an officer shook him, he rose from the cot he had been lying on in a private room of General Forsythe, Chief of Space Operations.
“It’s almost time, son,” the officer said. “Your CO wants to see you in the outside office.”
Marsh went into the adjoining room and found his cadet chief awaiting him. The youth detected an unusual warmth about the severe gentleman who previously had shown only a firm, uncompromising attitude. Colonel Tregasker was past middle age, and his white, sparse hair was smoothed down close to his head in regulation neatness.
15
“Well, this is it, Marshall,” the colonel said.
“How I envy you this honor of being the first human to enter space. However, I do feel that a part of me is going along too, since I had a small share in preparing you for the trip. If the training was harsh at times, I believe that shortly you will understand the reason for it.”
“I didn’t feel that the Colonel was either too soft or strict, sir,” Marsh said diplomatically.
A speaker out on the brilliantly lit field blared loudly in the cool desert night: “X minus forty minutes.”
“We can’t talk all night, Marshall,” the colonel said briskly. “You’ve got a job to do. But first, a few of your friends want to wish you luck.” He called into the anteroom, “You may come in, gentlemen!”
There filed smartly into the room ten youths who had survived the hard prespace course with Marsh and would be his successors in case he failed tonight. They formed a line and shook hands with Marsh. The first was Armen Norton who had gotten sick in the rugged centrifuge at a force of 9 G’s, then had rallied to pass the test.
“Good luck, Marsh,” he said.
Next was lanky Lawrence Egan who had been certain he would wash out during navigation phase in the planetarium. “All the luck in the world, Marsh,” he added.
Each cadet brought back a special memory of his training as they passed before him, wishing him success.
16
When they had gone and the speaker outside had announced: “X minus thirty minutes,” the colonel said that he and Marsh had better be leaving. Colonel Tregasker was to be Marsh’s escort to the ship.
Photographers and newspapermen swarmed about them as they climbed into the jeep that was to take them to the launching site farther out on the field. Questions were flung at the two from all sides, but the colonel deftly maneuvered the jeep through the mob and sped off over the asphalt.
At the blast-off site, Marsh could see that the police had their hands full keeping out thousands of spectators who were trying to get into the closed-off area. The field was choked with a tide of humanity milling about in wild confusion. Giant searchlights, both at the airport and in other parts of Phoenix, directed spears of light on the towering rocket that held the interest of all the world tonight. There was one light, far larger than the rest, with powerful condensing lenses and connected to a giant radar screen, which would guide Marsh home from his trip among the stars.
A high wire fence surrounded the launching ramp and blockhouses. International scientists and dignitaries with priorities formed a ring around the fence, but even they were not allowed inside the small circle of important activity. The guards waved the colonel and Marsh through the gate.
17
Marsh had spent many weeks in a mock-up of the tiny third stage in which he was to spend his time aloft, but he had never been close to the completely assembled ship until this moment. The three stages had been nicknamed, “Tom,” “Dick,” and “Harry.” Marsh swallowed as his eyes roved up the side of the great vessel, part of a project that had cost millions to perfect and was as high as a four-story building.
The gigantic base, “Big Tom,” was the section that would have the hardest job to do, that of thrusting the rocket through the densest part of the atmosphere, and this was a great deal larger than the other sections. Marsh knew that most of the ship’s bulk was made up of the propellant fuel of hydrazine hydrate and its oxidizer, nitric acid.
“We’re going into that blockhouse over there,” Colonel Tregasker said. “You’ll don your space gear in there.”
First a multitude of gadgets with wires were fastened to the cadet’s wrists, ankles, nose, and head. Marsh knew this to be one of the most important phases of the flight—to find out a man’s reaction to space flight under actual rocketing conditions. Each wire would telemeter certain information by radio back to the airport. After a tight inner G suit had been put on to prevent blackout, the plastic and rubber outer garment was zipped up around Marsh, and then he was ready except for his helmet, which would not be donned until later.
18
Marsh and the colonel went back outside. The open-cage elevator was lowered from the top of the big latticed platform that surrounded the rocket. The two got into the cage, and it rose with them. Marsh had lost most of his anxiety and tension during the activities of the day, but his knees felt rubbery in these final moments as the elevator carried him high above the noisy confusion of the airport. This was it.
As they stepped from the cage onto the platform of the third stage, Marsh heard the speaker below call out: “X minus twenty minutes.”
There were eleven engineers and workmen on the platform readying the compartment that Marsh would occupy. Marsh suddenly felt helpless and alone as he faced the small chamber that might very well be his death cell. Its intricate dials and wires were staggering in their complexity.
Marsh turned and shook hands with Colonel Tregasker.
“Good-by, sir,” he said in a quavering voice.
“I hope I remember everything the Corps taught me.” He tried to smile, but his facial muscles twitched uncontrollably.
“Good luck, son—lots of it,” the officer said huskily. Suddenly he leaned forward and embraced the youth with a firm, fatherly hug. “This is not regulations,” he mumbled gruffly, “but hang regulations!” He turned quickly and asked to be carried down to the ground.
A man brought Marsh’s helmet and placed it over his head, then clamped it to the suit. Knobs on the suit were twisted, and Marsh felt a warm, pressurized helium-oxygen mixture fill his suit and headpiece.
19
Marsh stepped through the hatch into the small compartment. He reclined in the soft contour chair, and the straps were fastened by one of the engineers over his chest, waist, and legs. The wires connected to various parts of his body had been brought together into a single unit in the helmet. A wire cable leading from the panel was plugged into the outside of the helmet to complete the circuit.
Final tests were run off to make sure everything was in proper working order, including the two-way short-wave radio that would have to penetrate the electrical ocean of the ionosphere. Then the double-hatch air lock was closed. Through his helmet receiver, Marsh could hear the final minutes and seconds being called off from inside the blockhouse.
“Everything O.K.?” Marsh was asked by someone on the platform.
“Yes, sir,” Marsh replied.
“Then you’re on your own,” were the final ominous words.
“X minus five minutes,” called the speaker.
20
It was the longest five minutes that Marsh could remember. He was painfully aware of his cramped quarters. He thought of the tons of explosive beneath him that presently would literally blow him sky-high. And he thought of the millions of people the world over who, at this moment, were hovering at radios and TV’s anxiously awaiting the dawn of the space age. Finally he thought of Dad and Mom, lost in that multitude of night watchers, and among the few who were not primarily concerned with the scientific aspect of the experiment. He wondered if he would ever see them again.
“X minus sixty seconds!”
Marsh knew that a warning flare was being sent up, to be followed by a whistle and a cloud of smoke from one of the blockhouses. As he felt fear trying to master him, he began reviewing all the things he must remember and, above all, what to do in an emergency.
“X minus ten seconds—five—four—three—two—one—FIRE!”
There was a mighty explosion at Skyharbor.
The initial jolt which Marsh felt was much fiercer than the gradually built up speed of the whirling centrifuge in training. He was crushed deeply into his contour chair. It felt as though someone were pressing on his eyeballs; indeed, as if every organ in his body were clinging to his backbone. But these first moments would be the worst. A gauge showed a force of 7 G’s on him—equal to half a ton.
He watched the Mach numbers rise on the dial in front of his eyes on an overhead panel. Each Mach number represented that much times the speed of sound, 1,090 feet per second, 740 miles an hour.
Marsh knew “Big Tom” would blast for about a minute and a half under control of the automatic pilot, at which time it would drop free at an altitude of twenty-five miles and sink Earthward in a metal mesh ’chute.
21
Marsh’s hurting eyes flicked to the outside temperature gauge. It was on a steady 67 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, and would be until he reached twenty miles. A reflecting prism gave him a square of view of the sky outside. The clear deep blue of the cloud-free stratosphere met his eyes.
Mach 5, Mach 6, Mach 7 passed very quickly. He heard a rumble and felt a jerk. “Big Tom” was breaking free. The first hurdle had been successfully overcome, and the ship had already begun tilting into its trajectory.
There was a new surge of agony on his body as the second stage picked up the acceleration at a force of 7 G’s again. Marsh clamped his jaws as the force pulled his lips back from his teeth and dragged his cheek muscles down. The Mach numbers continued to rise—11, 12, 13—to altitude 200 miles, the outer fringe of the earth’s atmosphere. There was a slight lifting of the pressure on his body. The rocket was still in the stratosphere, but the sky was getting purple.
Mach 14—10,000 miles an hour.
“Dick” would jettison any moment. Marsh had been aloft only about four minutes, but it had seemed an age, every tortured second of it.
22
There was another rumble as the second stage broke free. Marsh felt a new surge directly beneath him as his own occupied section, “Harry,” began blasting. It was comforting to realize he had successfully weathered those tons of exploding hydrazine and acid that could have reduced him to nothing if something had gone wrong. Although his speed was still building up, the weight on him began to ease steadily as his body’s inertia finally yielded to the sickeningly swift acceleration.
The speedometer needle climbed to Mach 21, the peak velocity of the rocket, 16,000 miles per hour. His altitude was 350 miles—man’s highest ascent. Slowly then, the speedometer began to drop back. Marsh heard the turbo pumps and jets go silent as the “lift” fuel was spent and rocket “Harry” began its free-flight orbit around Earth.
The ship had reached a speed which exactly counterbalanced the pull of gravity, and it could, theoretically, travel this way forever, provided no other outside force acted upon it. The effect on Marsh now was as if he had stopped moving. Relieved of the viselike pressure, his stomach and chest for a few seconds felt like inflated balloons.
“Cadet Farnsworth,” the voice of General Forsythe spoke into his helmet receiver, “are you all right?”
“Yes, sir,” Marsh replied. “That is, I think so.”
It was good to hear a human voice again, something to hold onto in this crazy unreal world into which he had been hurtled.
“We’re getting the electronic readings from your gauges O.K.,” the voice went on. “The doctor says your pulse is satisfactory under the circumstances.”
It was queer having your pulse read from 350 miles up in the air.
23
Marsh realized, of course, that he was not truly in the “air.” A glance at his air-pressure gauge confirmed this. He was virtually in a vacuum. The temperature and wind velocity outside might have astounded him if he were not prepared for the readings. The heat was over 2000 degrees Fahrenheit, and the wind velocity was of hurricane force! But these figures meant nothing because of the sparseness of air molecules. Temperature and wind applied only to the individual particles, which were thousands of feet apart.
“How is your cosmic-ray count?” asked the general.
Marsh checked the C-ray counter on the panel from which clicking sounds were coming. “It’s low, sir. Nothing to worry about.”
Cosmic rays, the most powerful emanations known, were the only radiation in space that could not be protected against. But in small doses they had been found not to be dangerous.
“As soon as our recorders get more of the figures your telemeter is giving us,” the operations chief said, “you can leave the rocket.”
When Marsh got the O.K. a few minutes later, he eagerly unstrapped the belts around his body. He could hardly contain his excitement at being the first person to view the globe of Earth from space. As he struggled to his feet, the lightness of zero gravity made him momentarily giddy, and it took some minutes for him to adjust to the terribly strange sensation.
24
He had disconnected the cable leading from his helmet to the ship’s transmitter and switched on the ship’s fast-lens movie camera that would photograph the area covered by “Harry.” Then he was ready to go outside. He pressed a button on the wall, and the first air-lock hatch opened. He floated into the narrow alcove and closed the door in the cramped chamber behind him. He watched a gauge, and when it showed normal pressure and temperature again, he opened the outside hatch, closing it behind him. Had Marsh permitted the vacuum of space to contact the interior of the ship’s quarters, delicate instruments would have been ruined by the sudden decompression and loss of heat. Marsh fastened his safety line to the ship so that there was no chance of his becoming separated from it.
Then he looked “downward,” to experience the thrill of his life. Like a gigantic relief map, the panorama of Earth stretched across his vision. A downy blanket of gray atmosphere spread over the whole of it, and patches of clouds were seen floating like phantom shapes beneath the clear vastness of the stratosphere. It was a stunning sight for Marsh, seeing the pinpoint lights of the night cities extending from horizon to horizon. It gave him an exhilarating feeling of being a king over it all.
25
Earth appeared to be rotating, but Marsh knew it was largely his own and the rocket’s fast speed that was responsible for the illusion. As he hung in this region of the exosphere, he was thankful for his cadet training in zero gravity. A special machine, developed only in recent years, simulated the weightlessness of space and trained the cadets for endurance in such artificial conditions.
“Describe some of the things you see, Marshall,” General Forsythe said over Marsh’s helmet receiver.
“I’ve just cut in a recorder.”
“It’s a scene almost beyond description, sir,” Marsh said into the helmet mike. “The sky is thickly powdered with stars. The Milky Way is very distinct, and I can make out lots of fuzzy spots that must be star clusters and nebulae and comets. Mars is like an extremely bright taillight, and the moon is so strong it hurts my eyes as much as the direct sun does on earth.”
Marsh saw a faintly luminous blur pass beyond the ship. It had been almost too sudden to catch. He believed it to be a meteor diving Earthward at a speed around forty-five miles a second. He reported this to the general.
As he brought his eyes down from the more distant fixtures of space to those closer by on Earth, a strange thing happened. He was suddenly seized with a fear of falling, although his zero-gravity training had been intended to prepare him against this very thing. A cold sweat come out over his body, and an uncontrollable panic threatened to take hold of him.
26
He made a sudden movement as though to catch himself. Forgetting the magnification of motion in frictionless space and his own weightlessness, he was shot quickly to the end of his safety line like a cracked whip. His body jerked at the taut end and then sped swiftly back in reaction toward the ship, head foremost. A collision could crack his helmet, exposing his body to decompression, causing him to swell like a balloon and finally explode.
In the grip of numbing fear, only at the last moment did he have the presence of mind to flip his body in a half-cartwheel and bring his boots up in front of him for protection. His feet bumped against the rocket’s side, and the motion sent him hurtling back out to the end of the safety line again. This back-and-forth action occurred several times before he could stop completely.
“I’ve got to be careful,” he panted to himself, as he thought of how close his space career had come to being ended scarcely before it had begun.
General Forsythe cut in with great concern, wondering what had happened. When Marsh had explained and the general seemed satisfied that Marsh had recovered himself, he had Marsh go on with his description.
His senseless fear having gone now, Marsh looked down calmly, entranced as the features of the United States passed below his gaze. He named the cities he could identify, also the mountain ranges, lakes, and rivers, explaining just how they looked from 350 miles up. In only a fraction of an hour’s time, the rocket had traversed the entire country and was approaching the twinkling phosphorescence of the Atlantic.
27
Marsh asked if “Tom” and “Dick” had landed safely.
“‘Tom’ landed near Roswell, New Mexico,” General Forsythe told him, “and the ’chute of the second section has been reported seen north of Dallas. I think you’d better start back now, Marshall. It’ll take us many months to analyze all the information we’ve gotten. We can’t contact you very well on the other side of the world either, and thirdly, I don’t want you exposed to the sun’s rays outside the atmosphere in the Eastern Hemisphere any longer than can be helped.”
Marsh tugged carefully on his safety line and floated slowly back toward the ship. He entered the air lock. Then, inside, he raised the angle of his contour chair to upright position, facing the console of the ship’s manual controls for the glide Earthward. He plugged in his telemeter helmet cable and buckled one of the straps across his waist.
Since he was still moving at many thousands of miles an hour, it would be suicide to plunge straight downward. He and the glider would be turned into a meteoric torch. Rather, he would have to spend considerable time soaring in and out of the atmosphere in braking ellipses until he reached much lower speed. Then the Earth’s gravitational pull would do the rest.
28
This was going to be the trickiest part of the operation, and the most dangerous. Where before, Marsh had depended on automatic controls to guide him, now much of the responsibility was on his own judgment. He remembered the many hours he had sweated through to log his flying time. Now he could look back on that period in his training and thank his lucky stars for it.
He took the manual controls and angled into the atmosphere. He carefully watched the AHF dial—the atmospheric heat friction gauge. When he had neared the dangerous incendiary point, with the ship having literally become red-hot, he soared into the frictionless vacuum again. He had to keep this up a long time in order to reduce his devastating speed.
It was something of a shock to him to leave the black midnight of Earth’s slumbering side for the brilliant hemisphere where the people of Europe and Asia were going about their daytime tasks. He would have liked to study this other half of the world which he had glimpsed only a few times before in his supersonic test flights, but he knew this would have to wait for future flights.
Finally, after a long time, his velocity was slowed enough so that the tug of gravity was stronger than the rocket’s ability to pull up out of the atmosphere. At this point, Marsh cut in “Harry’s” forward braking jets to check his falling speed.
“There’s something else to worry about,” he thought to himself. “Will old Harry hold together or will he fly apart in the crushing atmosphere?”
29
The directional radio signals from the powerful Skyharbor transmitter were growing stronger as Marsh neared the shores of California. He could see the winking lights of San Diego and Los Angeles, and farther inland the swinging thread that was the beacon at Skyharbor. All planes in his path of flight had been grounded for the past few hours because of the space flight. The only ground light scanning the skies was the gigantic space beacon in Phoenix.
When Marsh reached Arizona, he began spiraling downward over the state to kill the rest of his altitude and air speed. Even now the plane was a hurtling supersonic metal sliver streaking through the night skies like a comet. He topped the snow-capped summits of the towering San Francisco Peaks on the drive southward, and he recognized the sprawling serpent of the Grand Canyon. Then he was in the lower desert regions of moon-splashed sand and cactus. Although the fire-hot temperature of the outer skin had subsided, there had been damage done to the walls and instruments, and possibly to other parts, too. Marsh was worried lest his outside controls might be too warped to give him a good touchdown, if indeed he could get down safely at all.
A few thousand feet up, Marsh lowered his landing gear. Now the only problem left was to land himself and the valuable ship safely inside the narrow parallels of the airstrip. He circled the airport several times as his altitude continued to plummet.
30
The meter fell rapidly. His braking rocket fuel was gone now. From here on in, he would be on gliding power alone.
“Easy does it, Marshall,” the general said quietly into his ear. “You’re lining up fine. Level it out a little and keep straight with the approach lights. That’s fine. You’re just about in.”
The lights of the airport seeming to rush up at him, Marsh felt a jolt as the wheels touched ground on the west end of the runway. He kept the ship steady as it scurried along the smooth asphalt, losing the last of its once tremendous velocity. The plane hit the restraining wire across the strip and came to a sudden stop, shoving Marsh hard against the single safety belt he wore. Finally, incredibly, the ship was still and he was safe.
He unfastened his strap and removed his space helmet. The heat of the compartment brought the sweat out on his face. He rose on wobbly legs and pressed the buttons to the hatches. The last door flew open to admit the cool, bracing air of Earth which he had wondered if he would ever inhale again.
His aloneness was over then, suddenly and boisterously, as men swarmed over him with congratulations, eager questions, and looks of respect. Reporters’ flash bulbs popped, and he felt like a new Lindbergh as he was pulled down to the ground and mobbed. Finally the police came to his rescue and pushed back the curiosity seekers and newspapermen. Then only three men were allowed through the cordon.
Question:
How is the theme of responsibility explored in the story?
Answer:
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"Being the first man to go to space is a task of extreme responsibility. For years, the flight was worked through to make it as safe and well-organized as possible. Due to the need to choose only one man, long training and checkouts took place, and Marsh was decided to be the best. His success is the reason his friends are not able to go and their years of training were in vain. The generals and other higher standing participants trained and chose Marsh, so he has to meet their expectations. The whole globe is watching him with interest and attention, which is an additional pressure. He has to complete the mission successfully, because he was chosen and he can’t fail, he needs to be brave, calm and concentrated. Moreover, he is responsible before his parents to come back, not to make them lose their only son. Detailed instructions were given to him and failing to follow them means proving not good enough. This flight was prepared for too long, and if he fails, he moves the exploration years back. Understanding all of that, Marsh tries to calm him down every time and reminds himself of what has to be done. He does everything with caution, and when he loses control in space, he rapidly recovers and reminds himself to be careful. Under the burden of this responsibility, Marsh doesn’t let himself to get nervous. \n",
"The theme of responsibility is explored through the story via Marsh’s own experience in space. Although he undergoes training, Marsh is still given the responsibility of being the person who makes man’s first journey into space. He is responsible when piloting the rocket, too, and can execute all of the instructions that the general gives him. Marsh can safely disconnect the cables and prevent the ship’s delicate instruments from becoming damaged when he goes out to observe. Even during the trickiest part of the operation, Marsh can manually pilot the ship back to Earth. He demonstrates excellent responsibility here, as he manages to safely land and successfully fulfills the mission. ",
"The theme of responsibility features heavily in this story. Marsh feels the responsibility of the world to succeed in this flight. He doubts whether he was the right man for the job. He feels the responsibility to have the mission be a success for not only his team, but also himself, and his own life. The weight of the world is on his shoulders, and the future of space travel depends on him. \nMom and Dad feel the responsibility to keep their child safe. They are angered by the fact that he was chosen, and wish the space program had picked a grown man. \nThe entire team at the Skyharbour have the responsibility of keeping Marsh safe. They give him a full medical check, and wire him up to know the status of his vitals. \nThe Colonel has the responsibility of keeping a boy safe that he has known for a very long time. He is his CO, and as such, is the main person responsible for him at the station. \nThe general has the responsibility to make sure everything about the mission goes smoothly. \nThere is definitely a very clear theme of responsibility throughout the story. ",
"We learn that even though Marsh’s Mom and Dad does not want him to go to space, his exploration to the space can bring valuable finding to Earth. Firstly, he was able to spot a meteor that is heading towards Earth. He reports this back. He is also able to bring data back for months of analysis. While his parents hoped he would fail the exams, he passed and becomes the first pilot going into space. It is such an honor for him. Even Marsh himself was thrilled to see Earth from space, especially since he is the first man ever. "
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55801
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THE FIRST MAN INTO SPACE
Cadet Marshall Farnsworth woke from a nightmare of exploding novae and fouling rockets. After recovering from his fright, he laughed contemptuously at himself. “Here I was picked as the most stable of a group of two hundred cadets,” he thought, “and chosen to make man’s first trip into space, yet I’m shaking like a leaf.”
He got out of bed and went over to the window. From his father’s temporary apartment, he could see distant Skyharbor, the scene of the plunge into space tomorrow night. He had been awarded the frightening honor of making that trip.
10
As he watched teardrop cars whip along Phoenix, Arizona’s, double-decked streets, elevated over one another to avoid dangerous intersections and delaying stop lights, he thought back over the years; to the 1950’s, when mice and monkeys were sent up in Vikings to launch mankind’s first probing of the mysterious space beyond Earth, and the first satellites were launched; to the 1960’s, when huger, multiple-stage rockets finally conquered the problem of escape velocity; to 1975—today—when man was finally ready to send one of his own kind into the uninhabited deeps.
Marsh climbed back into bed, but sleep would not come.
In the adjoining room, he could hear the footsteps of mother and father. By their sound he knew they were the footsteps of worried people. This hurt Marsh more than his own uneasiness.
The anxiety had begun for them, he knew, when he had first signed up for space-cadet training. They had known there was an extremely high percentage of washouts, and after each test he passed, they had pretended to be glad. But Marsh knew that inwardly they had hoped he would fail, for they were aware of the ultimate goal that the space scientists were working for—the goal that had just now been reached.
Marsh finally fell into a troubled sleep that lasted until morning.
He woke early, before the alarm rang. He got up, showered, pulled on his blue-corded cadet uniform, and tugged on the polished gray boots. He took one final look around his room as though in farewell, then went out to the kitchen.
11
His folks were up ahead of time too, trying to act as though it were just another day. Dad was pretending to enjoy his morning paper, nodding only casually to Marsh as he came in. Mom was stirring scrambled eggs in the skillet, but she wasn’t a very good actor, Marsh noticed, for she furtively wiped her eyes with her free hand.
The eggs were cooked too hard and the toast had to be scraped, but no one seemed to care. The three of them sat down at the table, still speaking in monosyllables and of unimportant things. They made a pretense of eating.
“Well, Mom,” Dad suddenly said with a forced jollity that was intended to break the tension, “the Farnsworth family has finally got a celebrity in it.”
“I don’t see why they don’t send an older man!” Mom burst out, as though she had been holding it in as long as she could. “Sending a boy who isn’t even twenty-two—”
“Things are different nowadays, Mom,” Dad explained, still with the assumed calmness that masked his real feelings. “These days, men grow up faster and mature quicker. They’re stronger and more alert than older men—” His voice trailed off as if he were unable to convince himself.
“ Some body has to go,” Marsh said. “Why not a younger man without family and responsibility? That’s why they’re giving younger men more opportunities today than they used to.”
“It’s not younger men I’m talking about!” Mom blurted. “It’s you, Marsh!”
12
Dad leaned over and patted Mom on the shoulder.
“Now, Ruth, we promised not to get excited this morning.”
“I’m sorry,” Mom said weakly. “But Marsh is too young to—” She caught herself and put her hand over her mouth.
“Stop talking like that!” Dad said. “Marsh is coming back. There’ve been thousands of rockets sent aloft. The space engineers have made sure that every bug has been ironed out before risking a man’s life. Why, that rocket which Marsh is going up in is as safe as our auto in the garage, isn’t it, Marsh?”
“I hope so, Dad,” Marsh murmured.
Later, as Dad drove Marsh to the field, each brooded silently. Every scene along the way seemed to take on a new look for Marsh. He saw things that he had never noticed before. It was an uncomfortable feeling, almost as if he were seeing these things for the last as well as the first time.
Finally the airport came into view. The guards at the gate recognized Marsh and ushered the Farnsworth car through ahead of scores of others that crowded the entrance. Some eager news photographers slipped up close and shot off flash bulbs in Marsh’s eyes.
Skyharbor, once a small commercial field, had been taken over by the Air Force in recent years and converted into the largest rocket experimental center in the United States.
13
Dad drove up to the building that would be the scene of Marsh’s first exhaustive tests and briefings. He stopped the car, and Marsh jumped out. Their good-by was brief. Marsh saw his father’s mouth quiver. There was a tightness in his own throat. He had gone through any number of grueling tests to prove that he could take the rigors of space, but not one of them had prepared him for the hardest moments of parting.
When Dad had driven off, Marsh reported first to the psychiatrist who checked his condition.
“Pulse fast, a rise in blood pressure,” he said.
“You’re excited, aren’t you, son?”
“Yes, sir,” Marsh admitted. “Maybe they’ve got the wrong man, sir. I might fail them.”
The doctor grinned. “They don’t have the wrong man,” he said. “They might have, with a so-called iron-nerved fellow. He could contain his tension and fears until later, until maybe the moment of blast-off. Then he’d let go, and when he needed his calmest judgment he wouldn’t have it. No, Marshall, there isn’t a man alive who could make this history-making flight without some anxiety. Forget it. You’ll feel better as the day goes on. I’ll see you once more before the blast-off.”
Marsh felt more at ease already. He went on to the space surgeon, was given a complete physical examination, and was pronounced in perfect condition. Then began his review briefing on everything he would encounter during the flight.
14
Blast-off time was for 2230, an hour and a half before midnight. Since at night, in the Western Hemisphere, Earth was masking the sun, the complications of excessive temperatures in the outer reaches were avoided during the time Marsh would be outside the ship. Marsh would occupy the small upper third section of a three-stage rocket. The first two parts would be jettisoned after reaching their peak velocities. Top speed of the third stage would carry Marsh into a perpetual-flight orbit around Earth, along the route that a permanent space station was to be built after the results of the flight were studied. After spending a little while in this orbit, Marsh would begin the precarious journey back to Earth, in gliding flight.
He got a few hours of sleep after sunset. When an officer shook him, he rose from the cot he had been lying on in a private room of General Forsythe, Chief of Space Operations.
“It’s almost time, son,” the officer said. “Your CO wants to see you in the outside office.”
Marsh went into the adjoining room and found his cadet chief awaiting him. The youth detected an unusual warmth about the severe gentleman who previously had shown only a firm, uncompromising attitude. Colonel Tregasker was past middle age, and his white, sparse hair was smoothed down close to his head in regulation neatness.
15
“Well, this is it, Marshall,” the colonel said.
“How I envy you this honor of being the first human to enter space. However, I do feel that a part of me is going along too, since I had a small share in preparing you for the trip. If the training was harsh at times, I believe that shortly you will understand the reason for it.”
“I didn’t feel that the Colonel was either too soft or strict, sir,” Marsh said diplomatically.
A speaker out on the brilliantly lit field blared loudly in the cool desert night: “X minus forty minutes.”
“We can’t talk all night, Marshall,” the colonel said briskly. “You’ve got a job to do. But first, a few of your friends want to wish you luck.” He called into the anteroom, “You may come in, gentlemen!”
There filed smartly into the room ten youths who had survived the hard prespace course with Marsh and would be his successors in case he failed tonight. They formed a line and shook hands with Marsh. The first was Armen Norton who had gotten sick in the rugged centrifuge at a force of 9 G’s, then had rallied to pass the test.
“Good luck, Marsh,” he said.
Next was lanky Lawrence Egan who had been certain he would wash out during navigation phase in the planetarium. “All the luck in the world, Marsh,” he added.
Each cadet brought back a special memory of his training as they passed before him, wishing him success.
16
When they had gone and the speaker outside had announced: “X minus thirty minutes,” the colonel said that he and Marsh had better be leaving. Colonel Tregasker was to be Marsh’s escort to the ship.
Photographers and newspapermen swarmed about them as they climbed into the jeep that was to take them to the launching site farther out on the field. Questions were flung at the two from all sides, but the colonel deftly maneuvered the jeep through the mob and sped off over the asphalt.
At the blast-off site, Marsh could see that the police had their hands full keeping out thousands of spectators who were trying to get into the closed-off area. The field was choked with a tide of humanity milling about in wild confusion. Giant searchlights, both at the airport and in other parts of Phoenix, directed spears of light on the towering rocket that held the interest of all the world tonight. There was one light, far larger than the rest, with powerful condensing lenses and connected to a giant radar screen, which would guide Marsh home from his trip among the stars.
A high wire fence surrounded the launching ramp and blockhouses. International scientists and dignitaries with priorities formed a ring around the fence, but even they were not allowed inside the small circle of important activity. The guards waved the colonel and Marsh through the gate.
17
Marsh had spent many weeks in a mock-up of the tiny third stage in which he was to spend his time aloft, but he had never been close to the completely assembled ship until this moment. The three stages had been nicknamed, “Tom,” “Dick,” and “Harry.” Marsh swallowed as his eyes roved up the side of the great vessel, part of a project that had cost millions to perfect and was as high as a four-story building.
The gigantic base, “Big Tom,” was the section that would have the hardest job to do, that of thrusting the rocket through the densest part of the atmosphere, and this was a great deal larger than the other sections. Marsh knew that most of the ship’s bulk was made up of the propellant fuel of hydrazine hydrate and its oxidizer, nitric acid.
“We’re going into that blockhouse over there,” Colonel Tregasker said. “You’ll don your space gear in there.”
First a multitude of gadgets with wires were fastened to the cadet’s wrists, ankles, nose, and head. Marsh knew this to be one of the most important phases of the flight—to find out a man’s reaction to space flight under actual rocketing conditions. Each wire would telemeter certain information by radio back to the airport. After a tight inner G suit had been put on to prevent blackout, the plastic and rubber outer garment was zipped up around Marsh, and then he was ready except for his helmet, which would not be donned until later.
18
Marsh and the colonel went back outside. The open-cage elevator was lowered from the top of the big latticed platform that surrounded the rocket. The two got into the cage, and it rose with them. Marsh had lost most of his anxiety and tension during the activities of the day, but his knees felt rubbery in these final moments as the elevator carried him high above the noisy confusion of the airport. This was it.
As they stepped from the cage onto the platform of the third stage, Marsh heard the speaker below call out: “X minus twenty minutes.”
There were eleven engineers and workmen on the platform readying the compartment that Marsh would occupy. Marsh suddenly felt helpless and alone as he faced the small chamber that might very well be his death cell. Its intricate dials and wires were staggering in their complexity.
Marsh turned and shook hands with Colonel Tregasker.
“Good-by, sir,” he said in a quavering voice.
“I hope I remember everything the Corps taught me.” He tried to smile, but his facial muscles twitched uncontrollably.
“Good luck, son—lots of it,” the officer said huskily. Suddenly he leaned forward and embraced the youth with a firm, fatherly hug. “This is not regulations,” he mumbled gruffly, “but hang regulations!” He turned quickly and asked to be carried down to the ground.
A man brought Marsh’s helmet and placed it over his head, then clamped it to the suit. Knobs on the suit were twisted, and Marsh felt a warm, pressurized helium-oxygen mixture fill his suit and headpiece.
19
Marsh stepped through the hatch into the small compartment. He reclined in the soft contour chair, and the straps were fastened by one of the engineers over his chest, waist, and legs. The wires connected to various parts of his body had been brought together into a single unit in the helmet. A wire cable leading from the panel was plugged into the outside of the helmet to complete the circuit.
Final tests were run off to make sure everything was in proper working order, including the two-way short-wave radio that would have to penetrate the electrical ocean of the ionosphere. Then the double-hatch air lock was closed. Through his helmet receiver, Marsh could hear the final minutes and seconds being called off from inside the blockhouse.
“Everything O.K.?” Marsh was asked by someone on the platform.
“Yes, sir,” Marsh replied.
“Then you’re on your own,” were the final ominous words.
“X minus five minutes,” called the speaker.
20
It was the longest five minutes that Marsh could remember. He was painfully aware of his cramped quarters. He thought of the tons of explosive beneath him that presently would literally blow him sky-high. And he thought of the millions of people the world over who, at this moment, were hovering at radios and TV’s anxiously awaiting the dawn of the space age. Finally he thought of Dad and Mom, lost in that multitude of night watchers, and among the few who were not primarily concerned with the scientific aspect of the experiment. He wondered if he would ever see them again.
“X minus sixty seconds!”
Marsh knew that a warning flare was being sent up, to be followed by a whistle and a cloud of smoke from one of the blockhouses. As he felt fear trying to master him, he began reviewing all the things he must remember and, above all, what to do in an emergency.
“X minus ten seconds—five—four—three—two—one—FIRE!”
There was a mighty explosion at Skyharbor.
The initial jolt which Marsh felt was much fiercer than the gradually built up speed of the whirling centrifuge in training. He was crushed deeply into his contour chair. It felt as though someone were pressing on his eyeballs; indeed, as if every organ in his body were clinging to his backbone. But these first moments would be the worst. A gauge showed a force of 7 G’s on him—equal to half a ton.
He watched the Mach numbers rise on the dial in front of his eyes on an overhead panel. Each Mach number represented that much times the speed of sound, 1,090 feet per second, 740 miles an hour.
Marsh knew “Big Tom” would blast for about a minute and a half under control of the automatic pilot, at which time it would drop free at an altitude of twenty-five miles and sink Earthward in a metal mesh ’chute.
21
Marsh’s hurting eyes flicked to the outside temperature gauge. It was on a steady 67 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, and would be until he reached twenty miles. A reflecting prism gave him a square of view of the sky outside. The clear deep blue of the cloud-free stratosphere met his eyes.
Mach 5, Mach 6, Mach 7 passed very quickly. He heard a rumble and felt a jerk. “Big Tom” was breaking free. The first hurdle had been successfully overcome, and the ship had already begun tilting into its trajectory.
There was a new surge of agony on his body as the second stage picked up the acceleration at a force of 7 G’s again. Marsh clamped his jaws as the force pulled his lips back from his teeth and dragged his cheek muscles down. The Mach numbers continued to rise—11, 12, 13—to altitude 200 miles, the outer fringe of the earth’s atmosphere. There was a slight lifting of the pressure on his body. The rocket was still in the stratosphere, but the sky was getting purple.
Mach 14—10,000 miles an hour.
“Dick” would jettison any moment. Marsh had been aloft only about four minutes, but it had seemed an age, every tortured second of it.
22
There was another rumble as the second stage broke free. Marsh felt a new surge directly beneath him as his own occupied section, “Harry,” began blasting. It was comforting to realize he had successfully weathered those tons of exploding hydrazine and acid that could have reduced him to nothing if something had gone wrong. Although his speed was still building up, the weight on him began to ease steadily as his body’s inertia finally yielded to the sickeningly swift acceleration.
The speedometer needle climbed to Mach 21, the peak velocity of the rocket, 16,000 miles per hour. His altitude was 350 miles—man’s highest ascent. Slowly then, the speedometer began to drop back. Marsh heard the turbo pumps and jets go silent as the “lift” fuel was spent and rocket “Harry” began its free-flight orbit around Earth.
The ship had reached a speed which exactly counterbalanced the pull of gravity, and it could, theoretically, travel this way forever, provided no other outside force acted upon it. The effect on Marsh now was as if he had stopped moving. Relieved of the viselike pressure, his stomach and chest for a few seconds felt like inflated balloons.
“Cadet Farnsworth,” the voice of General Forsythe spoke into his helmet receiver, “are you all right?”
“Yes, sir,” Marsh replied. “That is, I think so.”
It was good to hear a human voice again, something to hold onto in this crazy unreal world into which he had been hurtled.
“We’re getting the electronic readings from your gauges O.K.,” the voice went on. “The doctor says your pulse is satisfactory under the circumstances.”
It was queer having your pulse read from 350 miles up in the air.
23
Marsh realized, of course, that he was not truly in the “air.” A glance at his air-pressure gauge confirmed this. He was virtually in a vacuum. The temperature and wind velocity outside might have astounded him if he were not prepared for the readings. The heat was over 2000 degrees Fahrenheit, and the wind velocity was of hurricane force! But these figures meant nothing because of the sparseness of air molecules. Temperature and wind applied only to the individual particles, which were thousands of feet apart.
“How is your cosmic-ray count?” asked the general.
Marsh checked the C-ray counter on the panel from which clicking sounds were coming. “It’s low, sir. Nothing to worry about.”
Cosmic rays, the most powerful emanations known, were the only radiation in space that could not be protected against. But in small doses they had been found not to be dangerous.
“As soon as our recorders get more of the figures your telemeter is giving us,” the operations chief said, “you can leave the rocket.”
When Marsh got the O.K. a few minutes later, he eagerly unstrapped the belts around his body. He could hardly contain his excitement at being the first person to view the globe of Earth from space. As he struggled to his feet, the lightness of zero gravity made him momentarily giddy, and it took some minutes for him to adjust to the terribly strange sensation.
24
He had disconnected the cable leading from his helmet to the ship’s transmitter and switched on the ship’s fast-lens movie camera that would photograph the area covered by “Harry.” Then he was ready to go outside. He pressed a button on the wall, and the first air-lock hatch opened. He floated into the narrow alcove and closed the door in the cramped chamber behind him. He watched a gauge, and when it showed normal pressure and temperature again, he opened the outside hatch, closing it behind him. Had Marsh permitted the vacuum of space to contact the interior of the ship’s quarters, delicate instruments would have been ruined by the sudden decompression and loss of heat. Marsh fastened his safety line to the ship so that there was no chance of his becoming separated from it.
Then he looked “downward,” to experience the thrill of his life. Like a gigantic relief map, the panorama of Earth stretched across his vision. A downy blanket of gray atmosphere spread over the whole of it, and patches of clouds were seen floating like phantom shapes beneath the clear vastness of the stratosphere. It was a stunning sight for Marsh, seeing the pinpoint lights of the night cities extending from horizon to horizon. It gave him an exhilarating feeling of being a king over it all.
25
Earth appeared to be rotating, but Marsh knew it was largely his own and the rocket’s fast speed that was responsible for the illusion. As he hung in this region of the exosphere, he was thankful for his cadet training in zero gravity. A special machine, developed only in recent years, simulated the weightlessness of space and trained the cadets for endurance in such artificial conditions.
“Describe some of the things you see, Marshall,” General Forsythe said over Marsh’s helmet receiver.
“I’ve just cut in a recorder.”
“It’s a scene almost beyond description, sir,” Marsh said into the helmet mike. “The sky is thickly powdered with stars. The Milky Way is very distinct, and I can make out lots of fuzzy spots that must be star clusters and nebulae and comets. Mars is like an extremely bright taillight, and the moon is so strong it hurts my eyes as much as the direct sun does on earth.”
Marsh saw a faintly luminous blur pass beyond the ship. It had been almost too sudden to catch. He believed it to be a meteor diving Earthward at a speed around forty-five miles a second. He reported this to the general.
As he brought his eyes down from the more distant fixtures of space to those closer by on Earth, a strange thing happened. He was suddenly seized with a fear of falling, although his zero-gravity training had been intended to prepare him against this very thing. A cold sweat come out over his body, and an uncontrollable panic threatened to take hold of him.
26
He made a sudden movement as though to catch himself. Forgetting the magnification of motion in frictionless space and his own weightlessness, he was shot quickly to the end of his safety line like a cracked whip. His body jerked at the taut end and then sped swiftly back in reaction toward the ship, head foremost. A collision could crack his helmet, exposing his body to decompression, causing him to swell like a balloon and finally explode.
In the grip of numbing fear, only at the last moment did he have the presence of mind to flip his body in a half-cartwheel and bring his boots up in front of him for protection. His feet bumped against the rocket’s side, and the motion sent him hurtling back out to the end of the safety line again. This back-and-forth action occurred several times before he could stop completely.
“I’ve got to be careful,” he panted to himself, as he thought of how close his space career had come to being ended scarcely before it had begun.
General Forsythe cut in with great concern, wondering what had happened. When Marsh had explained and the general seemed satisfied that Marsh had recovered himself, he had Marsh go on with his description.
His senseless fear having gone now, Marsh looked down calmly, entranced as the features of the United States passed below his gaze. He named the cities he could identify, also the mountain ranges, lakes, and rivers, explaining just how they looked from 350 miles up. In only a fraction of an hour’s time, the rocket had traversed the entire country and was approaching the twinkling phosphorescence of the Atlantic.
27
Marsh asked if “Tom” and “Dick” had landed safely.
“‘Tom’ landed near Roswell, New Mexico,” General Forsythe told him, “and the ’chute of the second section has been reported seen north of Dallas. I think you’d better start back now, Marshall. It’ll take us many months to analyze all the information we’ve gotten. We can’t contact you very well on the other side of the world either, and thirdly, I don’t want you exposed to the sun’s rays outside the atmosphere in the Eastern Hemisphere any longer than can be helped.”
Marsh tugged carefully on his safety line and floated slowly back toward the ship. He entered the air lock. Then, inside, he raised the angle of his contour chair to upright position, facing the console of the ship’s manual controls for the glide Earthward. He plugged in his telemeter helmet cable and buckled one of the straps across his waist.
Since he was still moving at many thousands of miles an hour, it would be suicide to plunge straight downward. He and the glider would be turned into a meteoric torch. Rather, he would have to spend considerable time soaring in and out of the atmosphere in braking ellipses until he reached much lower speed. Then the Earth’s gravitational pull would do the rest.
28
This was going to be the trickiest part of the operation, and the most dangerous. Where before, Marsh had depended on automatic controls to guide him, now much of the responsibility was on his own judgment. He remembered the many hours he had sweated through to log his flying time. Now he could look back on that period in his training and thank his lucky stars for it.
He took the manual controls and angled into the atmosphere. He carefully watched the AHF dial—the atmospheric heat friction gauge. When he had neared the dangerous incendiary point, with the ship having literally become red-hot, he soared into the frictionless vacuum again. He had to keep this up a long time in order to reduce his devastating speed.
It was something of a shock to him to leave the black midnight of Earth’s slumbering side for the brilliant hemisphere where the people of Europe and Asia were going about their daytime tasks. He would have liked to study this other half of the world which he had glimpsed only a few times before in his supersonic test flights, but he knew this would have to wait for future flights.
Finally, after a long time, his velocity was slowed enough so that the tug of gravity was stronger than the rocket’s ability to pull up out of the atmosphere. At this point, Marsh cut in “Harry’s” forward braking jets to check his falling speed.
“There’s something else to worry about,” he thought to himself. “Will old Harry hold together or will he fly apart in the crushing atmosphere?”
29
The directional radio signals from the powerful Skyharbor transmitter were growing stronger as Marsh neared the shores of California. He could see the winking lights of San Diego and Los Angeles, and farther inland the swinging thread that was the beacon at Skyharbor. All planes in his path of flight had been grounded for the past few hours because of the space flight. The only ground light scanning the skies was the gigantic space beacon in Phoenix.
When Marsh reached Arizona, he began spiraling downward over the state to kill the rest of his altitude and air speed. Even now the plane was a hurtling supersonic metal sliver streaking through the night skies like a comet. He topped the snow-capped summits of the towering San Francisco Peaks on the drive southward, and he recognized the sprawling serpent of the Grand Canyon. Then he was in the lower desert regions of moon-splashed sand and cactus. Although the fire-hot temperature of the outer skin had subsided, there had been damage done to the walls and instruments, and possibly to other parts, too. Marsh was worried lest his outside controls might be too warped to give him a good touchdown, if indeed he could get down safely at all.
A few thousand feet up, Marsh lowered his landing gear. Now the only problem left was to land himself and the valuable ship safely inside the narrow parallels of the airstrip. He circled the airport several times as his altitude continued to plummet.
30
The meter fell rapidly. His braking rocket fuel was gone now. From here on in, he would be on gliding power alone.
“Easy does it, Marshall,” the general said quietly into his ear. “You’re lining up fine. Level it out a little and keep straight with the approach lights. That’s fine. You’re just about in.”
The lights of the airport seeming to rush up at him, Marsh felt a jolt as the wheels touched ground on the west end of the runway. He kept the ship steady as it scurried along the smooth asphalt, losing the last of its once tremendous velocity. The plane hit the restraining wire across the strip and came to a sudden stop, shoving Marsh hard against the single safety belt he wore. Finally, incredibly, the ship was still and he was safe.
He unfastened his strap and removed his space helmet. The heat of the compartment brought the sweat out on his face. He rose on wobbly legs and pressed the buttons to the hatches. The last door flew open to admit the cool, bracing air of Earth which he had wondered if he would ever inhale again.
His aloneness was over then, suddenly and boisterously, as men swarmed over him with congratulations, eager questions, and looks of respect. Reporters’ flash bulbs popped, and he felt like a new Lindbergh as he was pulled down to the ground and mobbed. Finally the police came to his rescue and pushed back the curiosity seekers and newspapermen. Then only three men were allowed through the cordon.
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Describe the setting of the story?
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about DEATH STAR by TOM PACE.
Relevant chunks:
DEATH STAR
By TOM PACE
Trapped by the most feared of space pirates Devil Garrett, Starrett Blade was fighting for his life. Weaponless, his ship gone, he was pinning his hopes on a girl—who wanted him dead.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Starrett Blade crouched in the rocks by the tiny Centaurian lake. It was only about two or three hundred feet across, but probably thousands of feet deep. This lake, and hundreds of others like it, were the only things to break the monotony of the flat, rocky surface of Alpha Centauri III—called the most barren planet in space.
Ten minutes ago, Star Blade's ship had spun into the stagnant waters before him. An emergency release had flung the air-lock doors open, and the air pressure had flung Star out. And now he was waiting for Devil Garrett to come down to the water's edge to search for him.
For eight years, Devil Garrett had been the top space pirate in the void. For a year, Star himself had personally been hunting him. And on a tour over Alpha III, a Barden energy-beam had stabbed up at Blade's ship, and Star Blade had crashed into the lake.
That Barden Beam had Star worried and puzzled. It took a million volts of power for a split-second flash of the beam. Garrett didn't have an atomics plant on Alpha III—if he had, escaping rays would point it out, no matter how well it was camouflaged. There was no water power, for there was no running water. There were only the lakes ... and tidal power was out, for Alpha III had no moon.
However, that could wait. Star slid the electron knife from his water-proof sheath, gripped it firmly. He could hear quick footsteps as a man came down the trail that led directly past his hiding place.
It wasn't Garrett, which was disappointing. But it was one of his men, and he was heavily armed. That didn't worry Star.
His fighting had earned Starrett Blade the nickname of "Death Star."
The man walked to the water's edge, and peered out over the pool. He saw the bubbles that were coming up from the sinking ship, and he nodded, grunted in satisfaction, and started to turn back.
Star landed on him, knocking him sprawling on the rock. The pirate jerked up an arm, holding the jet-gun.
The stabbing lance of blue fire cracked from the electron knife, dug into the man's heart.
Star tossed the dead pirate's cloak over his shoulders, and thrust both electron blade and jet-gun into his belt. He straightened, and saw the leveled gun from the corner of his eye.
He got the jet in his right hand, the knife in his left, and went into a dive that flipped him behind a rock. The three actions took only a split-second, and the blast from the jet-gun flaked rock where he had been standing.
While a jet-gun is the most deadly weapon known, you have to press a loading stud to slide another blast-capsule into place. Death Star knew this very well. So he knew he was safe in coming up from behind the spur of stone to fire his own gun.
If his reflexes hadn't been as quick as they were, he would have blasted the girl.
He stopped, and stood for a second, staring at the girl. She was something to invite stares, too. In the moment that lasted between her next move, he had time to register that she was about five feet five tall, black-haired—the kind of black hair that looks like silken spun darkness—dark-eyed, and possessing both a face and a form that would make anyone stop and gulp.
Then the moment of half-awed survey was over, and she leveled the jet on him, and said in a trembling voice, "Drop those weapons, or I'll blast you ... pirate !"
Death Star said, "That jet-gun is empty. I can see the register on the magazine. And I'm not a pirate. I'm Starrett Blade."
The useless jet-gun slid out of the girl's hand, and she gave a half-gasp. "Starrett Blade! I—I don't believe ..." she broke off abruptly. "So you're Death Star! A fine story for a hired killer, a pirate."
Star reddened. "Look," he snapped, "I don't know who's been talking to you, but ..." he whirled, and his hand whipped the jet-gun from his belt. As he did so, the girl jerked up the jet-gun she had dropped, and flung it with all her strength. The blow landed on his arm and side, and paralyzed him long enough for the man who had leaped out behind him to land a stunning blow against his head. As Star went down, he dizzily cursed himself for becoming interested in the argument with the girl, so that he did not heed his reflexes in time ... and dimly, he wondered why it had seemed so important to convince the lovely dark-haired girl.
Then a bit of the cosmos seemed to fall on Star's head, and he was hurled into blackness.
An eternity seemed to pass.
Deep in the blackness, a light was born. It leaped toward him, a far-away comet rocketing along, coming from some far, unknown corner of the galaxy. It became a flaming sun in a gray-green space, and strangely, there seemed to be several odd planets circling about the sun. Some of them were vast pieces of queer electronic machinery. Some were vague, villainous-looking men. One was the dark-haired girl, and there was lovely contempt in her dark-star pools of eyes.
Then into the midst of this queer universe, there swam a new planet. It was the face of a man, and the man was Devil Garrett.
That brought Star up, out of his daze, onto his feet as though he had been doused with cold water. He stood there, not staring, just looking at Garrett.
The most famous killer in the void was big. He was six feet three, and twice as strong as he looked. He wore a huge high-velocity jet-gun, and a set of electron knives, all of the finest workmanship. He was sitting on a laboratory chair of steel, and the chair bent slightly under his great weight.
He smiled at Star, and there was a touch of hell in the smile. He said,
"Ah, Mr. Garrett."
Star's jaw dropped. "Garrett? What do you—" he broke off. A glance at the girl told him what the purpose was.
"Look, Mr. Devil Garrett," said the pirate, still smiling softly, "Miss Hinton is aware of your identity. There is no need to attempt to fool us.... I've known it was you ever since I flashed that beam at your ship. And you needn't flatter yourself that the Devil's luck is going to hold out as far as you are concerned. For in a very short while, I'm going to have you executed ... before a stellar vision screen, connected with Section Void Headquarters! I wish the authorities to see Devil Garrett die, so that I might collect the reward that is offered on you!"
Star stood quiet, and looked straight into Garrett's eyes. After a minute of silence, Garrett's lips twisted into a smile, and he said mockingly, "Well, pirate? What are you thinking of?"
Star said, in a low, cold voice, "I'm thinking of putting an electron fire-blade into your face, Devil Garrett!"
Garrett laughed ... huge, rather evil, bluff laughter. The mirth of a person who is both powerful and dangerous. And then the girl leaped forward, shaking with rage.
"You beast! Murderer! To accuse this man ... you fool, you might have been able to complete any scheme of escape you had, if you hadn't called yourself Starrett Blade! Mr. Blade...." She gestured toward Garrett, who made a mocking, sardonic bow. "... has given me ample proof that he is who he says! And this long before you came. He's shown me papers giving a description and showing a tri-dimension picture of you...."
Fire leaped in Star's eyes. "Listen ..." he snapped furiously, as he started to step forward. Then Garrett made a signal with his hand, and someone drove a fist against the base of Star's skull.
When Star came to, he was in a cell of sorts. A man standing by the door told him that he was to be executed, "... after Mr. Blade and the lady have eaten." Starrett swore at him, and the man went out, with a mocking "Goodbye, Mr. Garrett!"
Star got up. His head spun, and he almost fell at first, but the daze left in his head from the two blows quickly cleared away. He felt for various weapons which he had hidden about him ... and found them gone. Garrett's men had searched carefully.
Star sat down, his head spinning more now from mystery than from physical pain. He had to keep himself in a whole skin, of course. That was most important right now. But other things were bothering him, tugging at his mind like waves slapping around a swamped ship, each trying to shove it in a different direction.
There was the girl. Star wondered why she always leaped into his mind first. And there was the way Garrett was trying to leave the impression that he was Blade, so that he could kill Blade as Garrett.
Obviously, the reason for that was the girl, Miss Hinton, Garrett had called her. She had been shown faked papers by Garrett, papers proving that the two were ... were whatever Garrett had twisted the story into!
Star clutched at his head. He was in a mess. He was going to be killed, and he was going to die without knowing the score. And he didn't like that. Nor did he like dying as Star Blade shouldn't die; executed as a "wolf's-head" pirate. The girl would be watching, and he felt as if that would make it far worse.
His head came up, and he smiled flintily. He still had an ace card! One hand felt for it, and he shook his head slowly. It was a gamble ... but all the others had been found.
Blade looked up quickly, as the door opened. Two men came into the cell, carrying jet-guns. They motioned Blade to his feet. "Come on, Blade." One began, when the other hit him across the mouth.
"You fool!" he hissed. "You better not call him that; suppose that girl was to hear it? Until the boss gets what he wants on Earth, that girl has got to think that he's Blade! We're killing this guy as Devil Garrett! And a loud-mouthed fool like you ... look out!"
Blade had landed on the bickering men, and was grappling with the one who had called him by name. As the other leaped forward, swinging a clubbing blow with a jet-gun, Star tripped one man into the corner, and ducked under the gun. He hit the man in the stomach, drove a shoulder up under his arms, and smashed the man's face in with a series of sharp blows. The man went reeling backward across the room, and Star's hand leaped toward that "ace card" which he still held.
Devil Garrett stepped in the door, and made a mock out of a courteous bow. As he did so, Star snarled in rage, but stood very still, for the electron knife in Garrett's hand did not waver.
Garrett gestured silently toward the door, and Star, equally silent, walked over and out, at the point of the weapon.
Star Blade stood before a transmitter, and thought about death.
He was very close to it. Garrett stood five yards away, a gun in his hand, and the muzzle trained on Blade's chest. The gun was the universally used weapon of execution, an old projectile-firing weapon.
Star did not doubt that Devil Garrett was an excellent shot with it.
The girl, very round-eyed and nervous, sat by Garrett. He had explained to her that Garrett was the type of pirate that it is law to kill, or have executed, by anyone. Which was very true.
A man stepped away from the transmitter, and nodded to Garrett. Star felt a surge of hope, as he saw that it was a two-way transmitter. If the image of an Interstellar Command headquarters was tuned in—Garrett would undoubtedly do it, if only to show the police that he had killed Starrett Blade—then Garrett could not kill him and cut the beam in time to prevent one of the police from giving a cry that would echo over the sub-space beam arriving almost instantly in this room, and let the girl know that she had been tricked. And Garrett would not want that. Not that it would matter to Starrett Blade.
Then Star saw what kind of a transmitter it was, and he groaned. It was not a Hineson Sub-space beamer ... it was an old-style transmitter which had different wave speeds, because of the different space-bridger units in it.
The visual image would arrive many seconds before the sound did. Thus the girl would not hear Garrett revealed, but would see only Blade's death. And then ... whatever Garrett had planned, Blade wished heartily that he could have the chance to interfere.
The beam was coming in. Star saw the mists swimming on the screen change, solidify into a figure ... the figure of District Commander Weddel seated at a desk. He saw Weddel's eyebrows rise, saw his lips move—then Garrett stepped over a pace, and Weddel saw him, saw the gun in his hand....
The police officer yelled, silently, and came to his feet, an expression of shocked surprise on his face—surprise, Blade thought desperately, that the girl might interpret as shock at seeing Devil Garrett.
Which was right, in a way.
Then, as Commander Weddel leapt to his feet, as Devil Garrett's finger tightened on the trigger, as the girl sucked in her breath involuntarily, Star Blade scooped up a bit of metal—a fork—and flung it at the vision transmitter.
Not at the screen. But at the equipment behind the dial-board. At a certain small unit, which was almost covered by wires and braces for the large tubes. And the fork struck it, bit deep, and caused result.
Result in the form of a burned-out set. If television equipment can curse, that set cursed them. Its spitting of sparks and blue electric flame mingled with a strange, high-pitched whine.
It was the diversion that caused Garrett to miss Star, which gave him time to pull three or four of Garrett's men onto the floor with him. One of the men drove the butt of a jet-gun into the side of Star's head, and for the third time, he went very limp. The last thing he saw was the girl.
Somehow, the expression on her face was different from what it had been. He was searching for the difference, when the blow struck him. Somewhere in the space that lies between consciousness and unconsciousness, he reflected bitterly that if he kept staring at the girl when he should be fighting, he might not recover some day. This was the third time that he had been knocked out that way. It was not getting monotonous. He still felt it a novelty.
Star awoke in the same prison cell, facing the wall away from the door. He wondered if he were still alive, tried to move his head, and decided that he wasn't. He didn't even get up or look around when he dimly heard the door being opened.
But when he heard the girl's voice, he came up and around very swiftly, despite his head.
It was the girl all right. Even through the tumbled mists of his brain, he could see that she was not a dream. And as he reeled and fell against the wall, she was beside him in a flash, her arm supporting him.
At first he tried to push himself erect, his head whirling with sick dizziness, and bewilderment. Through a twisting haze, he peered up at the girl's face. It reflected a look that, amazingly, was one of—with no other phrase to do—compassion. Star half-sighed, and laid his head on the girl's breast, and closed his eyes.
In a minute or two, she said tensely, "Are you all right?" Star looked up at her.
"I guess so. Here—give a hand while I get my balance." She held him as he tried a step or two, and then he straightened. "I guess I'll be all right, now," he smiled. "My head feels like—say! How come you're doing this? What made you change your mind? And who are you?"
She said quickly, breathlessly, "I know you're Star Blade, now. That transmission set.... I can read lips! I knew what that officer was saying! It was just as if I had heard him say that ... that you were Starrett Blade and that man out there is Devil Garrett!" she made a choking sound. "And I've been here, alone, for a month! For a month!"
"A month? Huh—please—you...?"
Star took a breath, and started over. "You.... Who are you? What are you doing here?"
She said, "I'm Anne Hinton. My father is Old John Hinton. Have you heard of him?"
"Of course!" said Star. "He manufactures most of the equipment ' Blade Cosmian ' uses. Weapons, Hineson Sub-Spacers, Star-Traveler craft ... the ship I was in when Garrett brought me down was a Hinton craft. I should have recognized the name. But go on. What—"
"Garrett communicated with dad, secretly. He posed as Starrett Blade, as you, and told dad that he was developing certain new power processes. And he is! He has a new—or maybe it isn't so new—way of electrolyzing water to liberate hydrogen and oxygen."
"I think I understand," said Star quickly. "When the oxygen and hydrogen are allowed to combine, and produce an explosion which drive a turbine-generator. Then that could be hitched up to a cyclotron, and even the most barren of Alpha's lake-rock planets could be...."
"No," she shook her head puzzledly. "It's just electric power. He said that atomics would release stray rays that would attract pirates."
"I know," Star nodded, abstractedly. "I was thinking of another application of it ... hmm. But say! What was Garrett after? I know that he wouldn't do this just to get a secret process sold. He must have had another plan behind it. Got any idea?"
Anne shook her head slowly. "I don't know. I can't see...."
"Perhaps I could help you?" Devil Garrett asked smoothly from the door.
Star whirled, thrust Anne behind him, but there was no way out. Garrett stood in the door, and there were men behind him. The jet in his hand could kill both of the two at one shot. And they had no weapons to resist with.
Devil Garrett stepped them out of the room, and down the corridor, through a large door Star had noticed at the end of the passage, and into a huge room.
It must have been a thousand feet long, and half that wide. It was at least a hundred yards deep. And it was almost filled with gigantic machines.
Between the machinery, the spaces were almost filled with steel ladders and cat-walks. Crews of men swarmed over them. It was the largest mass of equipment Starrett had ever seen.
His eyes began to pick out details. Those huge vat-like things down at the far end, with the large cables running into them, and the mighty pumps connected to them ... they were probably the electrolysis chambers.
And those great pipes, they must carry the hydrogen and oxygen from the electro chambers to the large replicas of engines, which could be nothing else but the explosion chambers, where the gases were allowed to re-unite, and explode. And there by the giant engines, those must be turbines, which in turn connected with the vast-sized generators just under the platforms on which they stood.
Star Blade whistled softly through his teeth. A huge enterprise! It could be ... but for a moment he had forgotten Devil Garrett.
The girl standing by his side, Star turned toward Garrett. "Well?"
Garrett smiled his mocking grin. "You grasp the principle, of course. But let me show you ... you see those pipes that run from the turbines after the wheels?"
"Yes. They carry the gases off. Where do they lead?"
"Into giant subterranean caverns beneath the surface!" Garrett said.
"Now look over there, on the platforms across from us. Can you recognize a Barden energy-beamer, Blade? Run by power from my little plant here, which is run by water from a thousand lakes!
"Just imagine, if you can, hundreds of those plants all over Alpha III. And each one with dozens of high-powered Barden beams to protect it! And Hinton ray screens to protect us from radio-controlled rocket shells from space, or Barden Rays, or any other weapon of offence, or to warn if anyone lands on this planet!" Garrett leaned forward, his eyes aglow.
"Blade, I'll take over the few governing posts on this little planet, and I'll rule an entire world, a whole planet to myself! It'll be the first time in history! And it won't be the last. With the Hinton secret patents, the plans of all John Hinton's inventions and processes...."
Star twisted, and got his "ace card" out of its hiding place.
It was a jet weapon, little more than a jet-blast capsule for a jet-gun. The sides were thicker and stronger, and there was a device fixed on it so it could be fired. Altogether, it was somewhat smaller than an old-style fountain pen.
He twisted up from the floor, and moved faster than he had moved ever before. Star was famous for his speed and the quickness and alertness of his reflexes. He earned his fame a score of times over in that one instant.
And Devil Garrett died.
There was perhaps an eighth of a second between the staff of blue white fire from the tiny jet in Star's hand and the huge broadsword of fire from Garrett's gun. But in the split-second Star's fire knifed into Garrett's vitals, and Garrett gave a convulsive jerk, and fired even as his muscles started the jerking movement.
And the flame went over Star's head, singeing his scalp.
Of the four men with Garrett, one let go of the struggling Anne, and swore as he snatched at an electron knife in his belt. Anne's hand had already whipped the knife out, and without bothering to press the electron stud, she buried the knife in his back.
Two of the remaining men whirled, and went for the door as though a devil was after them. The other tried to get a jet-gun out. It was his final mistake. A blue lance from Anne's knife whipped close enough to him to make him dodge, and then Star got his hand on Garrett's jet.
The other two men had, in their flight, taken a door which led, not into the large corridor, but into a small room at one side, a room filled with instruments and recording devices for the machinery in the room below. Star leaped to the side of the door, and called, "Are you going to come out, or am I coming in to get you?"
There was a short silence, in which Anne heard one say hoarsely, "He can't get us ... we could get him if he came in the door."
"Oh, yes?" was the answer. "Do you know who that guy is? He's the one they call 'Death Star.' I'm not facing Starrett Blade in a gun fight. You can do what you like, but I'm leaving." Then he lifted his voice.
"Hey, Blade! I'm coming out. Don't shoot."
"Okay," threw back Star and the man appeared in the doorway, empty hands held high. After a second, the other joined him.
Anne turned to Star. "Now I know why they call you 'Death Star' Blade," she said, and gestured toward the men who had surrendered, and the two whom Starrett had shot down.
He mused there for a minute. Then Anne broke the silence with, "Star, what are we going to do now? Garrett's men will be up here in a little while. We can't get to a sub-space beam. What are we going to do when they come up to investigate?"
Starrett Blade laughed. "Do? Well, we could turn them over to Commander Weddel!"
" What? "
Grinning broadly, Star pointed, with a flourish, at the door. Anne spun about, and found Commander Weddel grinning in the door from the corridor.
"Very simple," said Star across the lounge to Anne. "When I smashed the vision set with that dinner fork, I broke a small unit which is included in all sets. You know, a direction finder doesn't work, except in the liner-beam principle, in space, because of the diffusing effect of unrestricted cosmic rays."
"Yes, I knew that," said Anne. "But how—"
Starrett grinned again. "A type of beam has been found which it is impossible for cosmics to disturb. But you can't send messages on it, so it is made in a little unit on every set. If that unit is broken, the set automatically releases a signal beam. This is a distress signal, and the location of the set that sent out the signal is recorded at the Section Headquarters. When Commander Weddel saw me throw something at the set, and it went dead, he looked at the automatic record, and found out that a signal had been sent in from a location on Alpha Cen's third planet. Then he had a high-velocity cruiser brought out and dropped in, in time to pick up some pieces." He stopped, and idly toyed with a sheaf of papers, then held them up. "See these papers?"
"Uh-huh. What are they, Star?"
"They are the main plans of Devil Garrett's power plant, and they're the one good thing he's ever done. These plans are going to bring the barren, rocky Centauri planets to life!"
He got up, and paced to the window, and stood there, looking out, and up through the plastic port. "The planets of Centauri!" he murmured softly. "Seven circling Alpha alone. And all seven are barren, rocky, level except for the thousands of lakes ... lakes that are going to be the life of Centauri!"
He turned back to the window. "And all because a pirate named Devil Garrett built a vast power plant to use to garner more power!"
"You know, Anne, as a mockery, and a warning, I think I'll propose that this planet be officially named ... 'Garrett'!"
She looked up at him, and there was laughter bright in her eyes, and tugging at her mouth. "Yes, there ought to be a reason," she murmured. Star wavered. She was so darn close.
After a minute, she turned her head, and looked up at him. "Star, how soon will there be those gardens and woods you described? I mean, how long before Garrett can be turned into that kind of world you described?"
"Why ... under pressure, we can do it in six months. Why?"
"Not half quick enough," she murmured happily, "but it'll have to do, Star." Laughing, she turned her face up to his. "Have you ever thought that planet Garrett will be wonderful for a honeymoon?"
Question:
Describe the setting of the story?
Answer:
|
[
"The story takes place on Alpha Centauri III, a planet that has many stagnant lakes that are only a few hundred feet across, but a few thousand feet deep. After Star’s ship fells into one of the lakes, he is knocked out and is captured by the girl and Garrett’s people to their craft. He is sitting on a lab chair where he realizes that he is being called “Garrett” instead of Star. He is still super surprised, but then is knocked out again. He wakes up in some kind of cell and is told he will be executed. He is brought to a room to be executed streaming to the Section Void Headquarters with a stellar vision screen. After some distraction, Garrett misses the shot. But Star is knocked out again to be brought back to the cell again. After acknowledging that the girl knows his true identity, Garrett notices them and brought them to see his grand operation that will allow him to rule over the world. However, he dies before he was able to finish introducing the rest of the machineries. ",
"The story begins on the surface of Alpha Centauri III, also known as the most barren planet in space. The surface of the planet is flat, with only lakes disrupting the flatness. The lakes, though only several hundred feet across, are several thousand feet deep. \nAs Starrett Blade, who is also known as Death Star, is taken to the lair of Devil Garrett, a space pirate, the setting changes to an underground space. Star wakes up in a cell, and is then taken to another room with a transmitter to be executed. However, the transmission goes awry, and Star is subdued and returned to his cell. \nUpon waking up again, Star is taken, alongside Anne Hinton, to a room a thousand feet long and five hundred feet wide, filled with machinery, ladders, and catwalks. The machinery includes vats connected to cables, in which the electrolysis of water is performed, and pipes leading from the vats to large engines in which hydrogen and oxygen gas are allowed to combust and turn turbines. \n",
"The story takes place on Alpha Centauri III, a barren planet with no life. Star finds himself in Garrett's lair, where he is held in a cell for much of the story. Star's execution takes place after Garrett and Anne have eaten in the dining room, where a large transmitter is located that will broadcast the execution to those across the galaxy. Garrett's place also holds turbines and chambers that would generate energy towards his plan of dominating Alpha III.",
"The story begins with Star Blade crouched by some rocks on a tiny lake that is about a couple of hundred feet across but thousands of feet deep. He is on the surface of Alpha Centauri III, the most barren planet in space as it has a mostly flat, rocky surface. There is no running water on the planet, only lakes exist. Tides do not exist on the planet because it does not have a moon which is required for tidal power. \n\nStar is taken to a prison cell by Garrett’s orders. Before his planned execution, Star stands in front of a transmitter that is meant to kill him. He is not killed by the transmitter and returns to his cell. \n\nGarrett shows Star a room that is about a thousand feet long and about 500 feet wide. The room is filled with very large machines and different ladders leading to various sections of the machines. \n"
] |
63419
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DEATH STAR
By TOM PACE
Trapped by the most feared of space pirates Devil Garrett, Starrett Blade was fighting for his life. Weaponless, his ship gone, he was pinning his hopes on a girl—who wanted him dead.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Starrett Blade crouched in the rocks by the tiny Centaurian lake. It was only about two or three hundred feet across, but probably thousands of feet deep. This lake, and hundreds of others like it, were the only things to break the monotony of the flat, rocky surface of Alpha Centauri III—called the most barren planet in space.
Ten minutes ago, Star Blade's ship had spun into the stagnant waters before him. An emergency release had flung the air-lock doors open, and the air pressure had flung Star out. And now he was waiting for Devil Garrett to come down to the water's edge to search for him.
For eight years, Devil Garrett had been the top space pirate in the void. For a year, Star himself had personally been hunting him. And on a tour over Alpha III, a Barden energy-beam had stabbed up at Blade's ship, and Star Blade had crashed into the lake.
That Barden Beam had Star worried and puzzled. It took a million volts of power for a split-second flash of the beam. Garrett didn't have an atomics plant on Alpha III—if he had, escaping rays would point it out, no matter how well it was camouflaged. There was no water power, for there was no running water. There were only the lakes ... and tidal power was out, for Alpha III had no moon.
However, that could wait. Star slid the electron knife from his water-proof sheath, gripped it firmly. He could hear quick footsteps as a man came down the trail that led directly past his hiding place.
It wasn't Garrett, which was disappointing. But it was one of his men, and he was heavily armed. That didn't worry Star.
His fighting had earned Starrett Blade the nickname of "Death Star."
The man walked to the water's edge, and peered out over the pool. He saw the bubbles that were coming up from the sinking ship, and he nodded, grunted in satisfaction, and started to turn back.
Star landed on him, knocking him sprawling on the rock. The pirate jerked up an arm, holding the jet-gun.
The stabbing lance of blue fire cracked from the electron knife, dug into the man's heart.
Star tossed the dead pirate's cloak over his shoulders, and thrust both electron blade and jet-gun into his belt. He straightened, and saw the leveled gun from the corner of his eye.
He got the jet in his right hand, the knife in his left, and went into a dive that flipped him behind a rock. The three actions took only a split-second, and the blast from the jet-gun flaked rock where he had been standing.
While a jet-gun is the most deadly weapon known, you have to press a loading stud to slide another blast-capsule into place. Death Star knew this very well. So he knew he was safe in coming up from behind the spur of stone to fire his own gun.
If his reflexes hadn't been as quick as they were, he would have blasted the girl.
He stopped, and stood for a second, staring at the girl. She was something to invite stares, too. In the moment that lasted between her next move, he had time to register that she was about five feet five tall, black-haired—the kind of black hair that looks like silken spun darkness—dark-eyed, and possessing both a face and a form that would make anyone stop and gulp.
Then the moment of half-awed survey was over, and she leveled the jet on him, and said in a trembling voice, "Drop those weapons, or I'll blast you ... pirate !"
Death Star said, "That jet-gun is empty. I can see the register on the magazine. And I'm not a pirate. I'm Starrett Blade."
The useless jet-gun slid out of the girl's hand, and she gave a half-gasp. "Starrett Blade! I—I don't believe ..." she broke off abruptly. "So you're Death Star! A fine story for a hired killer, a pirate."
Star reddened. "Look," he snapped, "I don't know who's been talking to you, but ..." he whirled, and his hand whipped the jet-gun from his belt. As he did so, the girl jerked up the jet-gun she had dropped, and flung it with all her strength. The blow landed on his arm and side, and paralyzed him long enough for the man who had leaped out behind him to land a stunning blow against his head. As Star went down, he dizzily cursed himself for becoming interested in the argument with the girl, so that he did not heed his reflexes in time ... and dimly, he wondered why it had seemed so important to convince the lovely dark-haired girl.
Then a bit of the cosmos seemed to fall on Star's head, and he was hurled into blackness.
An eternity seemed to pass.
Deep in the blackness, a light was born. It leaped toward him, a far-away comet rocketing along, coming from some far, unknown corner of the galaxy. It became a flaming sun in a gray-green space, and strangely, there seemed to be several odd planets circling about the sun. Some of them were vast pieces of queer electronic machinery. Some were vague, villainous-looking men. One was the dark-haired girl, and there was lovely contempt in her dark-star pools of eyes.
Then into the midst of this queer universe, there swam a new planet. It was the face of a man, and the man was Devil Garrett.
That brought Star up, out of his daze, onto his feet as though he had been doused with cold water. He stood there, not staring, just looking at Garrett.
The most famous killer in the void was big. He was six feet three, and twice as strong as he looked. He wore a huge high-velocity jet-gun, and a set of electron knives, all of the finest workmanship. He was sitting on a laboratory chair of steel, and the chair bent slightly under his great weight.
He smiled at Star, and there was a touch of hell in the smile. He said,
"Ah, Mr. Garrett."
Star's jaw dropped. "Garrett? What do you—" he broke off. A glance at the girl told him what the purpose was.
"Look, Mr. Devil Garrett," said the pirate, still smiling softly, "Miss Hinton is aware of your identity. There is no need to attempt to fool us.... I've known it was you ever since I flashed that beam at your ship. And you needn't flatter yourself that the Devil's luck is going to hold out as far as you are concerned. For in a very short while, I'm going to have you executed ... before a stellar vision screen, connected with Section Void Headquarters! I wish the authorities to see Devil Garrett die, so that I might collect the reward that is offered on you!"
Star stood quiet, and looked straight into Garrett's eyes. After a minute of silence, Garrett's lips twisted into a smile, and he said mockingly, "Well, pirate? What are you thinking of?"
Star said, in a low, cold voice, "I'm thinking of putting an electron fire-blade into your face, Devil Garrett!"
Garrett laughed ... huge, rather evil, bluff laughter. The mirth of a person who is both powerful and dangerous. And then the girl leaped forward, shaking with rage.
"You beast! Murderer! To accuse this man ... you fool, you might have been able to complete any scheme of escape you had, if you hadn't called yourself Starrett Blade! Mr. Blade...." She gestured toward Garrett, who made a mocking, sardonic bow. "... has given me ample proof that he is who he says! And this long before you came. He's shown me papers giving a description and showing a tri-dimension picture of you...."
Fire leaped in Star's eyes. "Listen ..." he snapped furiously, as he started to step forward. Then Garrett made a signal with his hand, and someone drove a fist against the base of Star's skull.
When Star came to, he was in a cell of sorts. A man standing by the door told him that he was to be executed, "... after Mr. Blade and the lady have eaten." Starrett swore at him, and the man went out, with a mocking "Goodbye, Mr. Garrett!"
Star got up. His head spun, and he almost fell at first, but the daze left in his head from the two blows quickly cleared away. He felt for various weapons which he had hidden about him ... and found them gone. Garrett's men had searched carefully.
Star sat down, his head spinning more now from mystery than from physical pain. He had to keep himself in a whole skin, of course. That was most important right now. But other things were bothering him, tugging at his mind like waves slapping around a swamped ship, each trying to shove it in a different direction.
There was the girl. Star wondered why she always leaped into his mind first. And there was the way Garrett was trying to leave the impression that he was Blade, so that he could kill Blade as Garrett.
Obviously, the reason for that was the girl, Miss Hinton, Garrett had called her. She had been shown faked papers by Garrett, papers proving that the two were ... were whatever Garrett had twisted the story into!
Star clutched at his head. He was in a mess. He was going to be killed, and he was going to die without knowing the score. And he didn't like that. Nor did he like dying as Star Blade shouldn't die; executed as a "wolf's-head" pirate. The girl would be watching, and he felt as if that would make it far worse.
His head came up, and he smiled flintily. He still had an ace card! One hand felt for it, and he shook his head slowly. It was a gamble ... but all the others had been found.
Blade looked up quickly, as the door opened. Two men came into the cell, carrying jet-guns. They motioned Blade to his feet. "Come on, Blade." One began, when the other hit him across the mouth.
"You fool!" he hissed. "You better not call him that; suppose that girl was to hear it? Until the boss gets what he wants on Earth, that girl has got to think that he's Blade! We're killing this guy as Devil Garrett! And a loud-mouthed fool like you ... look out!"
Blade had landed on the bickering men, and was grappling with the one who had called him by name. As the other leaped forward, swinging a clubbing blow with a jet-gun, Star tripped one man into the corner, and ducked under the gun. He hit the man in the stomach, drove a shoulder up under his arms, and smashed the man's face in with a series of sharp blows. The man went reeling backward across the room, and Star's hand leaped toward that "ace card" which he still held.
Devil Garrett stepped in the door, and made a mock out of a courteous bow. As he did so, Star snarled in rage, but stood very still, for the electron knife in Garrett's hand did not waver.
Garrett gestured silently toward the door, and Star, equally silent, walked over and out, at the point of the weapon.
Star Blade stood before a transmitter, and thought about death.
He was very close to it. Garrett stood five yards away, a gun in his hand, and the muzzle trained on Blade's chest. The gun was the universally used weapon of execution, an old projectile-firing weapon.
Star did not doubt that Devil Garrett was an excellent shot with it.
The girl, very round-eyed and nervous, sat by Garrett. He had explained to her that Garrett was the type of pirate that it is law to kill, or have executed, by anyone. Which was very true.
A man stepped away from the transmitter, and nodded to Garrett. Star felt a surge of hope, as he saw that it was a two-way transmitter. If the image of an Interstellar Command headquarters was tuned in—Garrett would undoubtedly do it, if only to show the police that he had killed Starrett Blade—then Garrett could not kill him and cut the beam in time to prevent one of the police from giving a cry that would echo over the sub-space beam arriving almost instantly in this room, and let the girl know that she had been tricked. And Garrett would not want that. Not that it would matter to Starrett Blade.
Then Star saw what kind of a transmitter it was, and he groaned. It was not a Hineson Sub-space beamer ... it was an old-style transmitter which had different wave speeds, because of the different space-bridger units in it.
The visual image would arrive many seconds before the sound did. Thus the girl would not hear Garrett revealed, but would see only Blade's death. And then ... whatever Garrett had planned, Blade wished heartily that he could have the chance to interfere.
The beam was coming in. Star saw the mists swimming on the screen change, solidify into a figure ... the figure of District Commander Weddel seated at a desk. He saw Weddel's eyebrows rise, saw his lips move—then Garrett stepped over a pace, and Weddel saw him, saw the gun in his hand....
The police officer yelled, silently, and came to his feet, an expression of shocked surprise on his face—surprise, Blade thought desperately, that the girl might interpret as shock at seeing Devil Garrett.
Which was right, in a way.
Then, as Commander Weddel leapt to his feet, as Devil Garrett's finger tightened on the trigger, as the girl sucked in her breath involuntarily, Star Blade scooped up a bit of metal—a fork—and flung it at the vision transmitter.
Not at the screen. But at the equipment behind the dial-board. At a certain small unit, which was almost covered by wires and braces for the large tubes. And the fork struck it, bit deep, and caused result.
Result in the form of a burned-out set. If television equipment can curse, that set cursed them. Its spitting of sparks and blue electric flame mingled with a strange, high-pitched whine.
It was the diversion that caused Garrett to miss Star, which gave him time to pull three or four of Garrett's men onto the floor with him. One of the men drove the butt of a jet-gun into the side of Star's head, and for the third time, he went very limp. The last thing he saw was the girl.
Somehow, the expression on her face was different from what it had been. He was searching for the difference, when the blow struck him. Somewhere in the space that lies between consciousness and unconsciousness, he reflected bitterly that if he kept staring at the girl when he should be fighting, he might not recover some day. This was the third time that he had been knocked out that way. It was not getting monotonous. He still felt it a novelty.
Star awoke in the same prison cell, facing the wall away from the door. He wondered if he were still alive, tried to move his head, and decided that he wasn't. He didn't even get up or look around when he dimly heard the door being opened.
But when he heard the girl's voice, he came up and around very swiftly, despite his head.
It was the girl all right. Even through the tumbled mists of his brain, he could see that she was not a dream. And as he reeled and fell against the wall, she was beside him in a flash, her arm supporting him.
At first he tried to push himself erect, his head whirling with sick dizziness, and bewilderment. Through a twisting haze, he peered up at the girl's face. It reflected a look that, amazingly, was one of—with no other phrase to do—compassion. Star half-sighed, and laid his head on the girl's breast, and closed his eyes.
In a minute or two, she said tensely, "Are you all right?" Star looked up at her.
"I guess so. Here—give a hand while I get my balance." She held him as he tried a step or two, and then he straightened. "I guess I'll be all right, now," he smiled. "My head feels like—say! How come you're doing this? What made you change your mind? And who are you?"
She said quickly, breathlessly, "I know you're Star Blade, now. That transmission set.... I can read lips! I knew what that officer was saying! It was just as if I had heard him say that ... that you were Starrett Blade and that man out there is Devil Garrett!" she made a choking sound. "And I've been here, alone, for a month! For a month!"
"A month? Huh—please—you...?"
Star took a breath, and started over. "You.... Who are you? What are you doing here?"
She said, "I'm Anne Hinton. My father is Old John Hinton. Have you heard of him?"
"Of course!" said Star. "He manufactures most of the equipment ' Blade Cosmian ' uses. Weapons, Hineson Sub-Spacers, Star-Traveler craft ... the ship I was in when Garrett brought me down was a Hinton craft. I should have recognized the name. But go on. What—"
"Garrett communicated with dad, secretly. He posed as Starrett Blade, as you, and told dad that he was developing certain new power processes. And he is! He has a new—or maybe it isn't so new—way of electrolyzing water to liberate hydrogen and oxygen."
"I think I understand," said Star quickly. "When the oxygen and hydrogen are allowed to combine, and produce an explosion which drive a turbine-generator. Then that could be hitched up to a cyclotron, and even the most barren of Alpha's lake-rock planets could be...."
"No," she shook her head puzzledly. "It's just electric power. He said that atomics would release stray rays that would attract pirates."
"I know," Star nodded, abstractedly. "I was thinking of another application of it ... hmm. But say! What was Garrett after? I know that he wouldn't do this just to get a secret process sold. He must have had another plan behind it. Got any idea?"
Anne shook her head slowly. "I don't know. I can't see...."
"Perhaps I could help you?" Devil Garrett asked smoothly from the door.
Star whirled, thrust Anne behind him, but there was no way out. Garrett stood in the door, and there were men behind him. The jet in his hand could kill both of the two at one shot. And they had no weapons to resist with.
Devil Garrett stepped them out of the room, and down the corridor, through a large door Star had noticed at the end of the passage, and into a huge room.
It must have been a thousand feet long, and half that wide. It was at least a hundred yards deep. And it was almost filled with gigantic machines.
Between the machinery, the spaces were almost filled with steel ladders and cat-walks. Crews of men swarmed over them. It was the largest mass of equipment Starrett had ever seen.
His eyes began to pick out details. Those huge vat-like things down at the far end, with the large cables running into them, and the mighty pumps connected to them ... they were probably the electrolysis chambers.
And those great pipes, they must carry the hydrogen and oxygen from the electro chambers to the large replicas of engines, which could be nothing else but the explosion chambers, where the gases were allowed to re-unite, and explode. And there by the giant engines, those must be turbines, which in turn connected with the vast-sized generators just under the platforms on which they stood.
Star Blade whistled softly through his teeth. A huge enterprise! It could be ... but for a moment he had forgotten Devil Garrett.
The girl standing by his side, Star turned toward Garrett. "Well?"
Garrett smiled his mocking grin. "You grasp the principle, of course. But let me show you ... you see those pipes that run from the turbines after the wheels?"
"Yes. They carry the gases off. Where do they lead?"
"Into giant subterranean caverns beneath the surface!" Garrett said.
"Now look over there, on the platforms across from us. Can you recognize a Barden energy-beamer, Blade? Run by power from my little plant here, which is run by water from a thousand lakes!
"Just imagine, if you can, hundreds of those plants all over Alpha III. And each one with dozens of high-powered Barden beams to protect it! And Hinton ray screens to protect us from radio-controlled rocket shells from space, or Barden Rays, or any other weapon of offence, or to warn if anyone lands on this planet!" Garrett leaned forward, his eyes aglow.
"Blade, I'll take over the few governing posts on this little planet, and I'll rule an entire world, a whole planet to myself! It'll be the first time in history! And it won't be the last. With the Hinton secret patents, the plans of all John Hinton's inventions and processes...."
Star twisted, and got his "ace card" out of its hiding place.
It was a jet weapon, little more than a jet-blast capsule for a jet-gun. The sides were thicker and stronger, and there was a device fixed on it so it could be fired. Altogether, it was somewhat smaller than an old-style fountain pen.
He twisted up from the floor, and moved faster than he had moved ever before. Star was famous for his speed and the quickness and alertness of his reflexes. He earned his fame a score of times over in that one instant.
And Devil Garrett died.
There was perhaps an eighth of a second between the staff of blue white fire from the tiny jet in Star's hand and the huge broadsword of fire from Garrett's gun. But in the split-second Star's fire knifed into Garrett's vitals, and Garrett gave a convulsive jerk, and fired even as his muscles started the jerking movement.
And the flame went over Star's head, singeing his scalp.
Of the four men with Garrett, one let go of the struggling Anne, and swore as he snatched at an electron knife in his belt. Anne's hand had already whipped the knife out, and without bothering to press the electron stud, she buried the knife in his back.
Two of the remaining men whirled, and went for the door as though a devil was after them. The other tried to get a jet-gun out. It was his final mistake. A blue lance from Anne's knife whipped close enough to him to make him dodge, and then Star got his hand on Garrett's jet.
The other two men had, in their flight, taken a door which led, not into the large corridor, but into a small room at one side, a room filled with instruments and recording devices for the machinery in the room below. Star leaped to the side of the door, and called, "Are you going to come out, or am I coming in to get you?"
There was a short silence, in which Anne heard one say hoarsely, "He can't get us ... we could get him if he came in the door."
"Oh, yes?" was the answer. "Do you know who that guy is? He's the one they call 'Death Star.' I'm not facing Starrett Blade in a gun fight. You can do what you like, but I'm leaving." Then he lifted his voice.
"Hey, Blade! I'm coming out. Don't shoot."
"Okay," threw back Star and the man appeared in the doorway, empty hands held high. After a second, the other joined him.
Anne turned to Star. "Now I know why they call you 'Death Star' Blade," she said, and gestured toward the men who had surrendered, and the two whom Starrett had shot down.
He mused there for a minute. Then Anne broke the silence with, "Star, what are we going to do now? Garrett's men will be up here in a little while. We can't get to a sub-space beam. What are we going to do when they come up to investigate?"
Starrett Blade laughed. "Do? Well, we could turn them over to Commander Weddel!"
" What? "
Grinning broadly, Star pointed, with a flourish, at the door. Anne spun about, and found Commander Weddel grinning in the door from the corridor.
"Very simple," said Star across the lounge to Anne. "When I smashed the vision set with that dinner fork, I broke a small unit which is included in all sets. You know, a direction finder doesn't work, except in the liner-beam principle, in space, because of the diffusing effect of unrestricted cosmic rays."
"Yes, I knew that," said Anne. "But how—"
Starrett grinned again. "A type of beam has been found which it is impossible for cosmics to disturb. But you can't send messages on it, so it is made in a little unit on every set. If that unit is broken, the set automatically releases a signal beam. This is a distress signal, and the location of the set that sent out the signal is recorded at the Section Headquarters. When Commander Weddel saw me throw something at the set, and it went dead, he looked at the automatic record, and found out that a signal had been sent in from a location on Alpha Cen's third planet. Then he had a high-velocity cruiser brought out and dropped in, in time to pick up some pieces." He stopped, and idly toyed with a sheaf of papers, then held them up. "See these papers?"
"Uh-huh. What are they, Star?"
"They are the main plans of Devil Garrett's power plant, and they're the one good thing he's ever done. These plans are going to bring the barren, rocky Centauri planets to life!"
He got up, and paced to the window, and stood there, looking out, and up through the plastic port. "The planets of Centauri!" he murmured softly. "Seven circling Alpha alone. And all seven are barren, rocky, level except for the thousands of lakes ... lakes that are going to be the life of Centauri!"
He turned back to the window. "And all because a pirate named Devil Garrett built a vast power plant to use to garner more power!"
"You know, Anne, as a mockery, and a warning, I think I'll propose that this planet be officially named ... 'Garrett'!"
She looked up at him, and there was laughter bright in her eyes, and tugging at her mouth. "Yes, there ought to be a reason," she murmured. Star wavered. She was so darn close.
After a minute, she turned her head, and looked up at him. "Star, how soon will there be those gardens and woods you described? I mean, how long before Garrett can be turned into that kind of world you described?"
"Why ... under pressure, we can do it in six months. Why?"
"Not half quick enough," she murmured happily, "but it'll have to do, Star." Laughing, she turned her face up to his. "Have you ever thought that planet Garrett will be wonderful for a honeymoon?"
|
Describe the setting of the story.
|
After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about Control Group by Roger D. Aycock.
Relevant chunks:
"Any problem posed by one group of
human beings can be resolved by any
other group." That's what the Handbook
said. But did that include primitive
humans? Or the Bees? Or a ...
CONTROL GROUP
By ROGER DEE
The
cool green disk of Alphard
Six on the screen was
infinitely welcome after the arid
desolation and stinking swamplands
of the inner planets, an
airy jewel of a world that might
have been designed specifically
for the hard-earned month of
rest ahead. Navigator Farrell,
youngest and certainly most impulsive
of the three-man Terran
Reclamations crew, would have
set the Marco Four down at
once but for the greater caution
of Stryker, nominally captain of
the group, and of Gibson, engineer,
and linguist. Xavier, the
ship's little mechanical, had—as
was usual and proper—no voice
in the matter.
"Reconnaissance spiral first,
Arthur," Stryker said firmly. He
chuckled at Farrell's instant
scowl, his little eyes twinkling
and his naked paunch quaking
over the belt of his shipboard
shorts. "Chapter One, Subsection
Five, Paragraph Twenty-seven: No planetfall on an unreclaimed
world shall be deemed
safe without proper— "
Farrell, as Stryker had expected,
interrupted with characteristic
impatience. "Do you sleep with that damned Reclamations
Handbook, Lee? Alphard Six
isn't an unreclaimed world—it
was never colonized before the
Hymenop invasion back in 3025,
so why should it be inhabited
now?"
Gibson, who for four hours
had not looked up from his interminable
chess game with
Xavier, paused with a beleaguered
knight in one blunt brown
hand.
"No point in taking chances,"
Gibson said in his neutral baritone.
He shrugged thick bare
shoulders, his humorless black-browed
face unmoved, when
Farrell included him in his
scowl. "We're two hundred twenty-six
light-years from Sol, at
the old limits of Terran expansion,
and there's no knowing
what we may turn up here. Alphard's
was one of the first systems
the Bees took over. It must
have been one of the last to be
abandoned when they pulled back
to 70 Ophiuchi."
"And I think you live for the
day," Farrell said acidly, "when
we'll stumble across a functioning
dome of live, buzzing Hymenops.
Damn it, Gib, the Bees
pulled out a hundred years ago,
before you and I were born—neither
of us ever saw a Hymenop,
and never will!"
"But I saw them," Stryker
said. "I fought them for the better
part of the century they were
here, and I learned there's no
predicting nor understanding
them. We never knew why they
came nor why they gave up and
left. How can we know whether
they'd leave a rear-guard or
booby trap here?"
He put a paternal hand on
Farrell's shoulder, understanding
the younger man's eagerness
and knowing that their close-knit
team would have been the
more poorly balanced without it.
"Gib's right," he said. He
nearly added as usual . "We're on
rest leave at the moment, yes,
but our mission is still to find
Terran colonies enslaved and
abandoned by the Bees, not to
risk our necks and a valuable
Reorientations ship by landing
blind on an unobserved planet.
We're too close already. Cut in
your shields and find a reconnaissance
spiral, will you?"
Grumbling, Farrell punched
coordinates on the Ringwave
board that lifted the Marco Four out of her descent and restored
the bluish enveloping haze of
her repellors.
Stryker's caution was justified
on the instant. The speeding
streamlined shape that had flashed
up unobserved from below
swerved sharply and exploded in
a cataclysmic blaze of atomic
fire that rocked the ship wildly
and flung the three men to the
floor in a jangling roar of
alarms.
"So the Handbook tacticians
knew what they were about,"
Stryker said minutes later. Deliberately
he adopted the smug
tone best calculated to sting Farrell
out of his first self-reproach,
and grinned when the navigator
bristled defensively. "Some of
their enjoinders seem a little
stuffy and obvious at times, but
they're eminently sensible."
When Farrell refused to be
baited Stryker turned to Gibson,
who was busily assessing the
damage done to the ship's more
fragile equipment, and to Xavier,
who searched the planet's
surface with the ship's magnoscanner.
The Marco Four , Ringwave
generators humming gently,
hung at the moment just
inside the orbit of Alphard Six's
single dun-colored moon.
Gibson put down a test meter
with an air of finality.
"Nothing damaged but the
Zero Interval Transfer computer.
I can realign that in a couple
of hours, but it'll have to be
done before we hit Transfer
again."
Stryker looked dubious.
"What if the issue is forced before
the ZIT unit is repaired?
Suppose they come up after us?"
"I doubt that they can. Any
installation crudely enough
equipped to trust in guided missiles
is hardly likely to have developed
efficient space craft."
Stryker was not reassured.
"That torpedo of theirs was
deadly enough," he said. "And
its nature reflects the nature of
the people who made it. Any race
vicious enough to use atomic
charges is too dangerous to
trifle with." Worry made comical
creases in his fat, good-humored
face. "We'll have to find
out who they are and why
they're here, you know."
"They can't be Hymenops,"
Gibson said promptly. "First,
because the Bees pinned their
faith on Ringwave energy fields,
as we did, rather than on missiles.
Second, because there's no
dome on Six."
"There were three empty
domes on Five, which is a desert
planet," Farrell pointed out.
"Why didn't they settle Six? It's
a more habitable world."
Gibson shrugged. "I know the
Bees always erected domes on
every planet they colonized, Arthur,
but precedent is a fallible
tool. And it's even more firmly
established that there's no possibility
of our rationalizing the
motivations of a culture as alien
as the Hymenops'—we've been
over that argument a hundred
times on other reclaimed
worlds."
"But this was never an unreclaimed
world," Farrell said
with the faint malice of one too
recently caught in the wrong.
"Alphard Six was surveyed and
seeded with Terran bacteria
around the year 3000, but the
Bees invaded before we could
colonize. And that means we'll
have to rule out any resurgent
colonial group down there, because
Six never had a colony in
the beginning."
"The Bees have been gone for
over a hundred years," Stryker
said. "Colonists might have migrated
from another Terran-occupied
planet."
Gibson disagreed.
"We've touched at every inhabited
world in this sector, Lee,
and not one surviving colony has
developed space travel on its
own. The Hymenops had a hundred
years to condition their human
slaves to ignorance of
everything beyond their immediate
environment—the motives
behind that conditioning usually
escape us, but that's beside the
point—and they did a thorough
job of it. The colonists have had
no more than a century of freedom
since the Bees pulled out,
and four generations simply
isn't enough time for any subjugated
culture to climb from
slavery to interstellar flight."
Stryker made a padding turn
about the control room, tugging
unhappily at the scanty fringe
of hair the years had left him.
"If they're neither Hymenops
nor resurgent colonists," he said,
"then there's only one choice remaining—they're
aliens from a
system we haven't reached yet,
beyond the old sphere of Terran
exploration. We always assumed
that we'd find other races out
here someday, and that they'd
be as different from us in form
and motivation as the Hymenops.
Why not now?"
Gibson said seriously, "Not
probable, Lee. The same objection
that rules out the Bees applies
to any trans-Alphardian
culture—they'd have to be beyond
the atomic fission stage,
else they'd never have attempted
interstellar flight. The Ringwave
with its Zero Interval Transfer
principle and instantaneous communications
applications is the
only answer to long-range travel,
and if they'd had that they
wouldn't have bothered with
atomics."
Stryker turned on him almost
angrily. "If they're not Hymenops
or humans or aliens, then
what in God's name are they?"
"Aye, there's the rub," Farrell
said, quoting a passage
whose aptness had somehow seen
it through a dozen reorganizations
of insular tongue and a
final translation to universal
Terran. "If they're none of those
three, we've only one conclusion
left. There's no one down there
at all—we're victims of the first
joint hallucination in psychiatric
history."
Stryker threw up his hands in
surrender. "We can't identify
them by theorizing, and that
brings us down to the business
of first-hand investigation.
Who's going to bell the cat this
time?"
"I'd like to go," Gibson said
at once. "The ZIT computer can
wait."
Stryker vetoed his offer as
promptly. "No, the ZIT comes
first. We may have to run for it,
and we can't set up a Transfer
jump without the computer. It's
got to be me or Arthur."
Farrell felt the familiar chill
of uneasiness that inevitably
preceded this moment of decision.
He was not lacking in courage,
else the circumstances under
which he had worked for the
past ten years—the sometimes
perilous, sometimes downright
charnel conditions left by the
fleeing Hymenop conquerors—would
have broken him long
ago. But that same hard experience
had honed rather than
blunted the edge of his imagination,
and the prospect of a close-quarters
stalking of an unknown
and patently hostile force was
anything but attractive.
"You two did the field work
on the last location," he said.
"It's high time I took my turn—and
God knows I'd go mad if
I had to stay inship and listen
to Lee memorizing his Handbook
subsections or to Gib practicing
dead languages with Xavier."
Stryker laughed for the first
time since the explosion that
had so nearly wrecked the Marco
Four .
"Good enough. Though it
wouldn't be more diverting to
listen for hours to you improvising
enharmonic variations on
the Lament for Old Terra with
your accordion."
Gibson, characteristically, had
a refinement to offer.
"They'll be alerted down there
for a reconnaissance sally," he
said. "Why not let Xavier take
the scouter down for overt diversion,
and drop Arthur off in
the helihopper for a low-level
check?"
Stryker looked at Farrell. "All
right, Arthur?"
"Good enough," Farrell said.
And to Xavier, who had not
moved from his post at the magnoscanner:
"How does it look,
Xav? Have you pinned down
their base yet?"
The mechanical answered him
in a voice as smooth and clear—and
as inflectionless—as a 'cello
note. "The planet seems uninhabited
except for a large island
some three hundred miles in
diameter. There are twenty-seven
small agrarian hamlets surrounded
by cultivated fields.
There is one city of perhaps a
thousand buildings with a central
square. In the square rests
a grounded spaceship of approximately
ten times the bulk
of the Marco Four ."
They crowded about the vision
screen, jostling Xavier's jointed
gray shape in their interest. The
central city lay in minutest detail
before them, the battered
hulk of the grounded ship glinting
rustily in the late afternoon
sunlight. Streets radiated away
from the square in orderly succession,
the whole so clearly
depicted that they could see the
throngs of people surging up
and down, tiny foreshortened
faces turned toward the sky.
"At least they're human,"
Farrell said. Relief replaced in
some measure his earlier uneasiness.
"Which means that they're
Terran, and can be dealt with
according to Reclamations routine.
Is that hulk spaceworthy,
Xav?"
Xavier's mellow drone assumed
the convention vibrato that
indicated stark puzzlement. "Its
breached hull makes the ship incapable
of flight. Apparently it
is used only to supply power to
the outlying hamlets."
The mechanical put a flexible
gray finger upon an indicator
graph derived from a composite
section of detector meters. "The
power transmitted seems to be
gross electric current conveyed
by metallic cables. It is generated
through a crudely governed
process of continuous atomic
fission."
Farrell, himself appalled by
the information, still found himself
able to chuckle at Stryker's
bellow of consternation.
" Continuous fission? Good
God, only madmen would deliberately
run a risk like that!"
Farrell prodded him with
cheerful malice. "Why say mad men ? Maybe they're humanoid
aliens who thrive on hard radiation
and look on the danger of
being blown to hell in the middle
of the night as a satisfactory
risk."
"They're not alien," Gibson
said positively. "Their architecture
is Terran, and so is their
ship. The ship is incredibly
primitive, though; those batteries
of tubes at either end—"
"Are thrust reaction jets,"
Stryker finished in an awed
voice. "Primitive isn't the word,
Gib—the thing is prehistoric!
Rocket propulsion hasn't been
used in spacecraft since—how
long, Xav?"
Xavier supplied the information
with mechanical infallibility.
"Since the year 2100 when
the Ringwave propulsion-communication
principle was discovered.
That principle has served
men since."
Farrell stared in blank disbelief
at the anomalous craft on
the screen. Primitive, as Stryker
had said, was not the word
for it: clumsily ovoid, studded
with torpedo domes and turrets
and bristling at either end with
propulsion tubes, it lay at the
center of its square like a rusted
relic of a past largely destroyed
and all but forgotten. What a
magnificent disregard its builders
must have had, he thought,
for their lives and the genetic
purity of their posterity! The
sullen atomic fires banked in
that oxidizing hulk—
Stryker said plaintively, "If
you're right, Gib, then we're
more in the dark than ever. How
could a Terran-built ship eleven
hundred years old get here ?"
Gibson, absorbed in his chess-player's
contemplation of alternatives,
seemed hardly to hear
him.
"Logic or not-logic," Gibson
said. "If it's a Terran artifact,
we can discover the reason for
its presence. If not—"
" Any problem posed by one
group of human beings ," Stryker
quoted his Handbook, " can be
resolved by any other group, regardless
of ideology or conditioning,
because the basic
perceptive abilities of both must
be the same through identical
heredity ."
"If it's an imitation, and this
is another Hymenop experiment
in condition ecology, then we're
stumped to begin with," Gibson
finished. "Because we're not
equipped to evaluate the psychology
of alien motivation. We've
got to determine first which case
applies here."
He waited for Farrell's expected
irony, and when the
navigator forestalled him by remaining
grimly quiet, continued.
"The obvious premise is that
a Terran ship must have been
built by Terrans. Question: Was
it flown here, or built here?"
"It couldn't have been built
here," Stryker said. "Alphard
Six was surveyed just before the
Bees took over in 3025, and there
was nothing of the sort here
then. It couldn't have been built
during the two and a quarter
centuries since; it's obviously
much older than that. It was
flown here."
"We progress," Farrell said
dryly. "Now if you'll tell us how ,
we're ready to move."
"I think the ship was built on
Terra during the Twenty-second
Century," Gibson said calmly.
"The atomic wars during that
period destroyed practically all
historical records along with the
technology of the time, but I've
read well-authenticated reports
of atomic-driven ships leaving
Terra before then for the nearer
stars. The human race climbed
out of its pit again during the
Twenty-third Century and developed
the technology that gave
us the Ringwave. Certainly no
atomic-powered ships were built
after the wars—our records are
complete from that time."
Farrell shook his head at the
inference. "I've read any number
of fanciful romances on the
theme, Gib, but it won't stand
up in practice. No shipboard society
could last through a thousand-year
space voyage. It's a
physical and psychological impossibility.
There's got to be
some other explanation."
Gibson shrugged. "We can
only eliminate the least likely
alternatives and accept the simplest
one remaining."
"Then we can eliminate this
one now," Farrell said flatly. "It
entails a thousand-year voyage,
which is an impossibility for any
gross reaction drive; the application
of suspended animation
or longevity or a successive-generation
program, and a final
penetration of Hymenop-occupied
space to set up a colony under
the very antennae of the
Bees. Longevity wasn't developed
until around the year 3000—Lee
here was one of the first to
profit by it, if you remember—and
suspended animation is still
to come. So there's one theory
you can forget."
"Arthur's right," Stryker said
reluctantly. "An atomic-powered
ship couldn't have made such a
trip, Gib. And such a lineal-descendant
project couldn't have
lasted through forty generations,
speculative fiction to the
contrary—the later generations
would have been too far removed
in ideology and intent from
their ancestors. They'd have
adapted to shipboard life as the
norm. They'd have atrophied
physically, perhaps even have
mutated—"
"And they'd never have
fought past the Bees during the
Hymenop invasion and occupation,"
Farrell finished triumphantly.
"The Bees had better
detection equipment than we
had. They'd have picked this
ship up long before it reached
Alphard Six."
"But the ship wasn't here in
3000," Gibson said, "and it is
now. Therefore it must have arrived
at some time during the
two hundred years of Hymenop
occupation and evacuation."
Farrell, tangled in contradictions,
swore bitterly. "But
why should the Bees let them
through? The three domes on
Five are over two hundred years
old, which means that the Bees
were here before the ship came.
Why didn't they blast it or enslave
its crew?"
"We haven't touched on all the
possibilities," Gibson reminded
him. "We haven't even established
yet that these people were
never under Hymenop control.
Precedent won't hold always, and
there's no predicting nor evaluating
the motives of an alien
race. We never understood the
Hymenops because there's no
common ground of logic between
us. Why try to interpret their
intentions now?"
Farrell threw up his hands in
disgust. "Next you'll say this is
an ancient Terran expedition
that actually succeeded! There's
only one way to answer the
questions we've raised, and
that's to go down and see for
ourselves. Ready, Xav?"
But uncertainty nagged uneasily
at him when Farrell found
himself alone in the helihopper
with the forest flowing beneath
like a leafy river and Xavier's
scouter disappearing bulletlike
into the dusk ahead.
We never found a colony so
advanced, Farrell thought. Suppose
this is a Hymenop experiment
that really paid off? The
Bees did some weird and wonderful
things with human
guinea pigs—what if they've
created the ultimate booby trap
here, and primed it with conditioned
myrmidons in our own
form?
Suppose, he thought—and derided
himself for thinking it—one
of those suicidal old interstellar
ventures did succeed?
Xavier's voice, a mellow
drone from the helihopper's
Ringwave-powered visicom, cut
sharply into his musing. "The
ship has discovered the scouter
and is training an electronic
beam upon it. My instruments
record an electromagnetic vibration
pattern of low power but
rapidly varying frequency. The
operation seems pointless."
Stryker's voice followed, querulous
with worry: "I'd better
pull Xav back. It may be something
lethal."
"Don't," Gibson's baritone advised.
Surprisingly, there was
excitement in the engineer's
voice. "I think they're trying to
communicate with us."
Farrell was on the point of
demanding acidly to know how
one went about communicating
by means of a fluctuating electric
field when the unexpected
cessation of forest diverted his
attention. The helihopper scudded
over a cultivated area
of considerable extent, fields
stretching below in a vague random
checkerboard of lighter and
darker earth, an undefined cluster
of buildings at their center.
There was a central bonfire that
burned like a wild red eye
against the lower gloom, and in
its plunging ruddy glow he made
out an urgent scurrying of shadowy
figures.
"I'm passing over a hamlet,"
Farrell reported. "The one nearest
the city, I think. There's
something odd going on
down—"
Catastrophe struck so suddenly
that he was caught completely
unprepared. The helihopper's
flimsy carriage bucked and
crumpled. There was a blinding
flare of electric discharge, a
pungent stink of ozone and a
stunning shock that flung him
headlong into darkness.
He awoke slowly with a brutal
headache and a conviction of
nightmare heightened by the
outlandish tone of his surroundings.
He lay on a narrow bed in
a whitely antiseptic infirmary,
an oblong metal cell cluttered
with a grimly utilitarian array
of tables and lockers and chests.
The lighting was harsh and
overbright and the air hung
thick with pungent unfamiliar
chemical odors. From somewhere,
far off yet at the same
time as near as the bulkhead
above him, came the unceasing
drone of machinery.
Farrell sat up, groaning,
when full consciousness made his
position clear. He had been shot
down by God knew what sort of
devastating unorthodox weapon
and was a prisoner in the
grounded ship.
At his rising, a white-smocked
fat man with anachronistic spectacles
and close-cropped gray
hair came into the room, moving
with the professional assurance
of a medic. The man stopped
short at Farrell's stare and
spoke; his words were utterly
unintelligible, but his gesture
was unmistakable.
Farrell followed him dumbly
out of the infirmary and down
a bare corridor whose metal
floor rang coldly underfoot. An
open port near the corridor's end
relieved the blankness of wall
and let in a flood of reddish Alphardian
sunlight; Farrell slowed
to look out, wondering how
long he had lain unconscious,
and felt panic knife at him
when he saw Xavier's scouter lying,
port open and undefended,
on the square outside.
The mechanical had been as
easily taken as himself, then.
Stryker and Gibson, for all their
professional caution, would fare
no better—they could not have
overlooked the capture of Farrell
and Xavier, and when they
tried as a matter of course to
rescue them the Marco would be
struck down in turn by the same
weapon.
The fat medic turned and
said something urgent in his
unintelligible tongue. Farrell,
dazed by the enormity of what
had happened, followed without
protest into an intersecting way
that led through a bewildering
succession of storage rooms and
hydroponics gardens, through a
small gymnasium fitted with
physical training equipment in
graduated sizes and finally into
a soundproofed place that could
have been nothing but a nursery.
The implication behind its
presence stopped Farrell short.
"A creche ," he said, stunned.
He had a wild vision of endless
generations of children growing
up in this dim and stuffy room,
to be taught from their first
toddling steps the functions they
must fulfill before the venture
of which they were a part could
be consummated.
One of those old ventures had succeeded, he thought, and was
awed by the daring of that thousand-year
odyssey. The realization
left him more alarmed than
before—for what technical marvels
might not an isolated group
of such dogged specialists have
developed during a millennium
of application?
Such a weapon as had brought
down the helihopper and scouter
was patently beyond reach of his
own latter-day technology. Perhaps,
he thought, its possession
explained the presence of these
people here in the first stronghold
of the Hymenops; perhaps
they had even fought and defeated
the Bees on their own invaded
ground.
He followed his white-smocked
guide through a power room
where great crude generators
whirred ponderously, pouring
out gross electric current into
arm-thick cables. They were
nearing the bow of the ship
when they passed by another
open port and Farrell, glancing
out over the lowered rampway,
saw that his fears for Stryker
and Gibson had been well
grounded.
The Marco Four , ports open,
lay grounded outside.
Farrell could not have said,
later, whether his next move
was planned or reflexive. The
whole desperate issue seemed to
hang suspended for a breathless
moment upon a hair-fine edge of
decision, and in that instant he
made his bid.
Without pausing in his stride
he sprang out and through the
port and down the steep plane
of the ramp. The rough stone
pavement of the square drummed
underfoot; sore muscles
tore at him, and weakness was
like a weight about his neck. He
expected momentarily to be
blasted out of existence.
He reached the Marco Four with the startled shouts of his
guide ringing unintelligibly in
his ears. The port yawned; he
plunged inside and stabbed at
controls without waiting to seat
himself. The ports swung shut.
The ship darted up under his
manipulation and arrowed into
space with an acceleration that
sprung his knees and made his
vision swim blackly.
He was so weak with strain
and with the success of his coup
that he all but fainted when
Stryker, his scanty hair tousled
and his fat face comical with bewilderment,
stumbled out of his
sleeping cubicle and bellowed at
him.
"What the hell are you doing,
Arthur? Take us down!"
Farrell gaped at him, speechless.
Stryker lumbered past him
and took the controls, spiraling
the Marco Four down. Men
swarmed outside the ports when
the Reclamations craft settled
gently to the square again. Gibson
and Xavier reached the ship
first; Gibson came inside quickly,
leaving the mechanical outside
making patient explanations
to an excited group of Alphardians.
Gibson put a reassuring hand
on Farrell's arm. "It's all right,
Arthur. There's no trouble."
Farrell said dumbly, "I don't
understand. They didn't shoot
you and Xav down too?"
It was Gibson's turn to stare.
"No one shot you down! These
people are primitive enough to
use metallic power lines to
carry electricity to their hamlets,
an anachronism you forgot
last night. You piloted the helihopper
into one of those lines,
and the crash put you out for
the rest of the night and most
of today. These Alphardians are
friendly, so desperately happy to
be found again that it's really
pathetic."
" Friendly? That torpedo—"
"It wasn't a torpedo at all,"
Stryker put in. Understanding
of the error under which Farrell
had labored erased his
earlier irritation, and he chuckled
commiseratingly. "They had
one small boat left for emergency
missions, and sent it up to
contact us in the fear that we
might overlook their settlement
and move on. The boat was
atomic powered, and our shield
screens set off its engines."
Farrell dropped into a chair at
the chart table, limp with reaction.
He was suddenly exhausted,
and his head ached dully.
"We cracked the communications
problem early last night,"
Gibson said. "These people use
an ancient system of electromagnetic
wave propagation called
frequency modulation, and once
Lee and I rigged up a suitable
transceiver the rest was simple.
Both Xav and I recognized the
old language; the natives reported
your accident, and we came
down at once."
"They really came from Terra?
They lived through a thousand
years of flight?"
"The ship left Terra for
Sirius in 2171," Gibson said.
"But not with these people
aboard, or their ancestors. That
expedition perished after less
than a light-year when its
hydroponics system failed. The
Hymenops found the ship derelict
when they invaded us, and
brought it to Alphard Six in
what was probably their first experiment
with human subjects.
The ship's log shows clearly
what happened to the original
complement. The rest is deducible
from the situation here."
Farrell put his hands to his
temples and groaned. "The crash
must have scrambled my wits.
Gib, where did they come from?"
"From one of the first peripheral
colonies conquered by the
Bees," Gibson said patiently.
"The Hymenops were long-range
planners, remember, and masters
of hypnotic conditioning. They
stocked the ship with a captive
crew of Terrans conditioned to
believe themselves descendants
of the original crew, and
grounded it here in disabled
condition. They left for Alphard
Five then, to watch developments.
"Succeeding generations of
colonists grew up accepting the
fact that their ship had missed
Sirius and made planetfall here—they
still don't know where
they really are—by luck. They
never knew about the Hymenops,
and they've struggled along
with an inadequate technology in
the hope that a later expedition
would find them. They found the
truth hard to take, but they're
eager to enjoy the fruits of Terran
assimilation."
Stryker, grinning, brought
Farrell a frosted drink that tinkled
invitingly. "An unusually
fortunate ending to a Hymenop
experiment," he said. "These
people progressed normally because
they've been let alone. Reorienting
them will be a simple
matter; they'll be properly spoiled
colonists within another generation."
Farrell sipped his drink appreciatively.
"But I don't see why the Bees
should go to such trouble to deceive
these people. Why did they
sit back and let them grow as
they pleased, Gib? It doesn't
make sense!"
"But it does, for once," Gibson
said. "The Bees set up this
colony as a control unit to study
the species they were invading,
and they had to give their
specimens a normal—if obsolete—background
in order to determine
their capabilities. The fact
that their experiment didn't tell
them what they wanted to know
may have had a direct bearing
on their decision to pull out."
Farrell shook his head. "It's
a reverse application, isn't it of
the old saw about Terrans being
incapable of understanding an
alien culture?"
"Of course," said Gibson, surprised.
"It's obvious enough,
surely—hard as they tried, the
Bees never understood us
either."
THE END
Question:
Describe the setting of the story.
Answer:
|
[
"The story begins on a spaceship called the Marco Four. It is working on Ringwave generators and hangs inside the orbit of a dun-colored moon of the green planet Alphard Six. This ship has several tools, including a magnoscanner, the Zero Interval Transfer computer, and a screen that shows the surface of the planet. Then Farrell gets on a helihopper and soon crashes. The next day he wakes up in an infirmary with white walls, tables, lockers, chests, and some unfamiliar chemical odor. It is one of the rooms of the ancient ship located in the central square of the town on Alphard Six. Farrell then walks down a bare corridor with a metal floor and rare open ports that let in a flood of reddish sunlight. He goes through storage rooms, hydroponics gardens, a gymnasium, a nursery, and a power room. He also notices the Marco Four parked near the square.\n",
"The story is initially set on the Marco Four, which is flying in the atmosphere of the Alphard Six. The ship has many controls, including a Ringwave generator, magnoscanner, and a Zero Interval Transfer computer. There is also an area for sleeping on the ship as well. Alphard Six itself is described to have a cool green disk and an airy jewel compared to the other areas. The planet itself is mostly uninhabited, but there is an island about three hundred miles in diameter that has signs of being habited. On the island, there are twenty-seven agrarian hamlets surrounded by cultivated fields. There is also a city with a thousand buildings and a central square. There is also a primitive spaceship there as well. When Farrell awakens later, he finds himself on a narrow bed in a whitely antiseptic infirmary. The infirmary is cluttered with tables, lockers, and chests full of material. When the medic guides him later, Farrell sees storage rooms, hydroponics gardens, a small gymnasium, and a nursery. ",
"This story is set within Alphard Six, one of the many inner planets. These planets have been explored, colonzied, and abandoned by Terrans, the Hymenops, and the Bees. Alphard Six is not unreclaimed nor uninhabited and are home to the Alphardians, who reside in hamlets on the planet. \n\nThis story also takes place on the ship, the Marco Four. It is where discussions between the crewmates occur as they debate the origins and potential inhabitants of Alphard Six. ",
"The story happens on the planet Alphard Six. There are barren, desolated lands and swamplands on the planet. The planet looks uninhabitable except for a large island. Twenty-seven small farmhouses are surrounded by the cultivated fields on the island, surrounded by the forest. There is a city strewn with many buildings, the center of which is a square that rests a damaged spaceship of a size ten times larger than Marco Four. The damaged spaceship is used for the power supply in the city. Streets stretch out from the square in order."
] |
24949
|
"Any problem posed by one group of
human beings can be resolved by any
other group." That's what the Handbook
said. But did that include primitive
humans? Or the Bees? Or a ...
CONTROL GROUP
By ROGER DEE
The
cool green disk of Alphard
Six on the screen was
infinitely welcome after the arid
desolation and stinking swamplands
of the inner planets, an
airy jewel of a world that might
have been designed specifically
for the hard-earned month of
rest ahead. Navigator Farrell,
youngest and certainly most impulsive
of the three-man Terran
Reclamations crew, would have
set the Marco Four down at
once but for the greater caution
of Stryker, nominally captain of
the group, and of Gibson, engineer,
and linguist. Xavier, the
ship's little mechanical, had—as
was usual and proper—no voice
in the matter.
"Reconnaissance spiral first,
Arthur," Stryker said firmly. He
chuckled at Farrell's instant
scowl, his little eyes twinkling
and his naked paunch quaking
over the belt of his shipboard
shorts. "Chapter One, Subsection
Five, Paragraph Twenty-seven: No planetfall on an unreclaimed
world shall be deemed
safe without proper— "
Farrell, as Stryker had expected,
interrupted with characteristic
impatience. "Do you sleep with that damned Reclamations
Handbook, Lee? Alphard Six
isn't an unreclaimed world—it
was never colonized before the
Hymenop invasion back in 3025,
so why should it be inhabited
now?"
Gibson, who for four hours
had not looked up from his interminable
chess game with
Xavier, paused with a beleaguered
knight in one blunt brown
hand.
"No point in taking chances,"
Gibson said in his neutral baritone.
He shrugged thick bare
shoulders, his humorless black-browed
face unmoved, when
Farrell included him in his
scowl. "We're two hundred twenty-six
light-years from Sol, at
the old limits of Terran expansion,
and there's no knowing
what we may turn up here. Alphard's
was one of the first systems
the Bees took over. It must
have been one of the last to be
abandoned when they pulled back
to 70 Ophiuchi."
"And I think you live for the
day," Farrell said acidly, "when
we'll stumble across a functioning
dome of live, buzzing Hymenops.
Damn it, Gib, the Bees
pulled out a hundred years ago,
before you and I were born—neither
of us ever saw a Hymenop,
and never will!"
"But I saw them," Stryker
said. "I fought them for the better
part of the century they were
here, and I learned there's no
predicting nor understanding
them. We never knew why they
came nor why they gave up and
left. How can we know whether
they'd leave a rear-guard or
booby trap here?"
He put a paternal hand on
Farrell's shoulder, understanding
the younger man's eagerness
and knowing that their close-knit
team would have been the
more poorly balanced without it.
"Gib's right," he said. He
nearly added as usual . "We're on
rest leave at the moment, yes,
but our mission is still to find
Terran colonies enslaved and
abandoned by the Bees, not to
risk our necks and a valuable
Reorientations ship by landing
blind on an unobserved planet.
We're too close already. Cut in
your shields and find a reconnaissance
spiral, will you?"
Grumbling, Farrell punched
coordinates on the Ringwave
board that lifted the Marco Four out of her descent and restored
the bluish enveloping haze of
her repellors.
Stryker's caution was justified
on the instant. The speeding
streamlined shape that had flashed
up unobserved from below
swerved sharply and exploded in
a cataclysmic blaze of atomic
fire that rocked the ship wildly
and flung the three men to the
floor in a jangling roar of
alarms.
"So the Handbook tacticians
knew what they were about,"
Stryker said minutes later. Deliberately
he adopted the smug
tone best calculated to sting Farrell
out of his first self-reproach,
and grinned when the navigator
bristled defensively. "Some of
their enjoinders seem a little
stuffy and obvious at times, but
they're eminently sensible."
When Farrell refused to be
baited Stryker turned to Gibson,
who was busily assessing the
damage done to the ship's more
fragile equipment, and to Xavier,
who searched the planet's
surface with the ship's magnoscanner.
The Marco Four , Ringwave
generators humming gently,
hung at the moment just
inside the orbit of Alphard Six's
single dun-colored moon.
Gibson put down a test meter
with an air of finality.
"Nothing damaged but the
Zero Interval Transfer computer.
I can realign that in a couple
of hours, but it'll have to be
done before we hit Transfer
again."
Stryker looked dubious.
"What if the issue is forced before
the ZIT unit is repaired?
Suppose they come up after us?"
"I doubt that they can. Any
installation crudely enough
equipped to trust in guided missiles
is hardly likely to have developed
efficient space craft."
Stryker was not reassured.
"That torpedo of theirs was
deadly enough," he said. "And
its nature reflects the nature of
the people who made it. Any race
vicious enough to use atomic
charges is too dangerous to
trifle with." Worry made comical
creases in his fat, good-humored
face. "We'll have to find
out who they are and why
they're here, you know."
"They can't be Hymenops,"
Gibson said promptly. "First,
because the Bees pinned their
faith on Ringwave energy fields,
as we did, rather than on missiles.
Second, because there's no
dome on Six."
"There were three empty
domes on Five, which is a desert
planet," Farrell pointed out.
"Why didn't they settle Six? It's
a more habitable world."
Gibson shrugged. "I know the
Bees always erected domes on
every planet they colonized, Arthur,
but precedent is a fallible
tool. And it's even more firmly
established that there's no possibility
of our rationalizing the
motivations of a culture as alien
as the Hymenops'—we've been
over that argument a hundred
times on other reclaimed
worlds."
"But this was never an unreclaimed
world," Farrell said
with the faint malice of one too
recently caught in the wrong.
"Alphard Six was surveyed and
seeded with Terran bacteria
around the year 3000, but the
Bees invaded before we could
colonize. And that means we'll
have to rule out any resurgent
colonial group down there, because
Six never had a colony in
the beginning."
"The Bees have been gone for
over a hundred years," Stryker
said. "Colonists might have migrated
from another Terran-occupied
planet."
Gibson disagreed.
"We've touched at every inhabited
world in this sector, Lee,
and not one surviving colony has
developed space travel on its
own. The Hymenops had a hundred
years to condition their human
slaves to ignorance of
everything beyond their immediate
environment—the motives
behind that conditioning usually
escape us, but that's beside the
point—and they did a thorough
job of it. The colonists have had
no more than a century of freedom
since the Bees pulled out,
and four generations simply
isn't enough time for any subjugated
culture to climb from
slavery to interstellar flight."
Stryker made a padding turn
about the control room, tugging
unhappily at the scanty fringe
of hair the years had left him.
"If they're neither Hymenops
nor resurgent colonists," he said,
"then there's only one choice remaining—they're
aliens from a
system we haven't reached yet,
beyond the old sphere of Terran
exploration. We always assumed
that we'd find other races out
here someday, and that they'd
be as different from us in form
and motivation as the Hymenops.
Why not now?"
Gibson said seriously, "Not
probable, Lee. The same objection
that rules out the Bees applies
to any trans-Alphardian
culture—they'd have to be beyond
the atomic fission stage,
else they'd never have attempted
interstellar flight. The Ringwave
with its Zero Interval Transfer
principle and instantaneous communications
applications is the
only answer to long-range travel,
and if they'd had that they
wouldn't have bothered with
atomics."
Stryker turned on him almost
angrily. "If they're not Hymenops
or humans or aliens, then
what in God's name are they?"
"Aye, there's the rub," Farrell
said, quoting a passage
whose aptness had somehow seen
it through a dozen reorganizations
of insular tongue and a
final translation to universal
Terran. "If they're none of those
three, we've only one conclusion
left. There's no one down there
at all—we're victims of the first
joint hallucination in psychiatric
history."
Stryker threw up his hands in
surrender. "We can't identify
them by theorizing, and that
brings us down to the business
of first-hand investigation.
Who's going to bell the cat this
time?"
"I'd like to go," Gibson said
at once. "The ZIT computer can
wait."
Stryker vetoed his offer as
promptly. "No, the ZIT comes
first. We may have to run for it,
and we can't set up a Transfer
jump without the computer. It's
got to be me or Arthur."
Farrell felt the familiar chill
of uneasiness that inevitably
preceded this moment of decision.
He was not lacking in courage,
else the circumstances under
which he had worked for the
past ten years—the sometimes
perilous, sometimes downright
charnel conditions left by the
fleeing Hymenop conquerors—would
have broken him long
ago. But that same hard experience
had honed rather than
blunted the edge of his imagination,
and the prospect of a close-quarters
stalking of an unknown
and patently hostile force was
anything but attractive.
"You two did the field work
on the last location," he said.
"It's high time I took my turn—and
God knows I'd go mad if
I had to stay inship and listen
to Lee memorizing his Handbook
subsections or to Gib practicing
dead languages with Xavier."
Stryker laughed for the first
time since the explosion that
had so nearly wrecked the Marco
Four .
"Good enough. Though it
wouldn't be more diverting to
listen for hours to you improvising
enharmonic variations on
the Lament for Old Terra with
your accordion."
Gibson, characteristically, had
a refinement to offer.
"They'll be alerted down there
for a reconnaissance sally," he
said. "Why not let Xavier take
the scouter down for overt diversion,
and drop Arthur off in
the helihopper for a low-level
check?"
Stryker looked at Farrell. "All
right, Arthur?"
"Good enough," Farrell said.
And to Xavier, who had not
moved from his post at the magnoscanner:
"How does it look,
Xav? Have you pinned down
their base yet?"
The mechanical answered him
in a voice as smooth and clear—and
as inflectionless—as a 'cello
note. "The planet seems uninhabited
except for a large island
some three hundred miles in
diameter. There are twenty-seven
small agrarian hamlets surrounded
by cultivated fields.
There is one city of perhaps a
thousand buildings with a central
square. In the square rests
a grounded spaceship of approximately
ten times the bulk
of the Marco Four ."
They crowded about the vision
screen, jostling Xavier's jointed
gray shape in their interest. The
central city lay in minutest detail
before them, the battered
hulk of the grounded ship glinting
rustily in the late afternoon
sunlight. Streets radiated away
from the square in orderly succession,
the whole so clearly
depicted that they could see the
throngs of people surging up
and down, tiny foreshortened
faces turned toward the sky.
"At least they're human,"
Farrell said. Relief replaced in
some measure his earlier uneasiness.
"Which means that they're
Terran, and can be dealt with
according to Reclamations routine.
Is that hulk spaceworthy,
Xav?"
Xavier's mellow drone assumed
the convention vibrato that
indicated stark puzzlement. "Its
breached hull makes the ship incapable
of flight. Apparently it
is used only to supply power to
the outlying hamlets."
The mechanical put a flexible
gray finger upon an indicator
graph derived from a composite
section of detector meters. "The
power transmitted seems to be
gross electric current conveyed
by metallic cables. It is generated
through a crudely governed
process of continuous atomic
fission."
Farrell, himself appalled by
the information, still found himself
able to chuckle at Stryker's
bellow of consternation.
" Continuous fission? Good
God, only madmen would deliberately
run a risk like that!"
Farrell prodded him with
cheerful malice. "Why say mad men ? Maybe they're humanoid
aliens who thrive on hard radiation
and look on the danger of
being blown to hell in the middle
of the night as a satisfactory
risk."
"They're not alien," Gibson
said positively. "Their architecture
is Terran, and so is their
ship. The ship is incredibly
primitive, though; those batteries
of tubes at either end—"
"Are thrust reaction jets,"
Stryker finished in an awed
voice. "Primitive isn't the word,
Gib—the thing is prehistoric!
Rocket propulsion hasn't been
used in spacecraft since—how
long, Xav?"
Xavier supplied the information
with mechanical infallibility.
"Since the year 2100 when
the Ringwave propulsion-communication
principle was discovered.
That principle has served
men since."
Farrell stared in blank disbelief
at the anomalous craft on
the screen. Primitive, as Stryker
had said, was not the word
for it: clumsily ovoid, studded
with torpedo domes and turrets
and bristling at either end with
propulsion tubes, it lay at the
center of its square like a rusted
relic of a past largely destroyed
and all but forgotten. What a
magnificent disregard its builders
must have had, he thought,
for their lives and the genetic
purity of their posterity! The
sullen atomic fires banked in
that oxidizing hulk—
Stryker said plaintively, "If
you're right, Gib, then we're
more in the dark than ever. How
could a Terran-built ship eleven
hundred years old get here ?"
Gibson, absorbed in his chess-player's
contemplation of alternatives,
seemed hardly to hear
him.
"Logic or not-logic," Gibson
said. "If it's a Terran artifact,
we can discover the reason for
its presence. If not—"
" Any problem posed by one
group of human beings ," Stryker
quoted his Handbook, " can be
resolved by any other group, regardless
of ideology or conditioning,
because the basic
perceptive abilities of both must
be the same through identical
heredity ."
"If it's an imitation, and this
is another Hymenop experiment
in condition ecology, then we're
stumped to begin with," Gibson
finished. "Because we're not
equipped to evaluate the psychology
of alien motivation. We've
got to determine first which case
applies here."
He waited for Farrell's expected
irony, and when the
navigator forestalled him by remaining
grimly quiet, continued.
"The obvious premise is that
a Terran ship must have been
built by Terrans. Question: Was
it flown here, or built here?"
"It couldn't have been built
here," Stryker said. "Alphard
Six was surveyed just before the
Bees took over in 3025, and there
was nothing of the sort here
then. It couldn't have been built
during the two and a quarter
centuries since; it's obviously
much older than that. It was
flown here."
"We progress," Farrell said
dryly. "Now if you'll tell us how ,
we're ready to move."
"I think the ship was built on
Terra during the Twenty-second
Century," Gibson said calmly.
"The atomic wars during that
period destroyed practically all
historical records along with the
technology of the time, but I've
read well-authenticated reports
of atomic-driven ships leaving
Terra before then for the nearer
stars. The human race climbed
out of its pit again during the
Twenty-third Century and developed
the technology that gave
us the Ringwave. Certainly no
atomic-powered ships were built
after the wars—our records are
complete from that time."
Farrell shook his head at the
inference. "I've read any number
of fanciful romances on the
theme, Gib, but it won't stand
up in practice. No shipboard society
could last through a thousand-year
space voyage. It's a
physical and psychological impossibility.
There's got to be
some other explanation."
Gibson shrugged. "We can
only eliminate the least likely
alternatives and accept the simplest
one remaining."
"Then we can eliminate this
one now," Farrell said flatly. "It
entails a thousand-year voyage,
which is an impossibility for any
gross reaction drive; the application
of suspended animation
or longevity or a successive-generation
program, and a final
penetration of Hymenop-occupied
space to set up a colony under
the very antennae of the
Bees. Longevity wasn't developed
until around the year 3000—Lee
here was one of the first to
profit by it, if you remember—and
suspended animation is still
to come. So there's one theory
you can forget."
"Arthur's right," Stryker said
reluctantly. "An atomic-powered
ship couldn't have made such a
trip, Gib. And such a lineal-descendant
project couldn't have
lasted through forty generations,
speculative fiction to the
contrary—the later generations
would have been too far removed
in ideology and intent from
their ancestors. They'd have
adapted to shipboard life as the
norm. They'd have atrophied
physically, perhaps even have
mutated—"
"And they'd never have
fought past the Bees during the
Hymenop invasion and occupation,"
Farrell finished triumphantly.
"The Bees had better
detection equipment than we
had. They'd have picked this
ship up long before it reached
Alphard Six."
"But the ship wasn't here in
3000," Gibson said, "and it is
now. Therefore it must have arrived
at some time during the
two hundred years of Hymenop
occupation and evacuation."
Farrell, tangled in contradictions,
swore bitterly. "But
why should the Bees let them
through? The three domes on
Five are over two hundred years
old, which means that the Bees
were here before the ship came.
Why didn't they blast it or enslave
its crew?"
"We haven't touched on all the
possibilities," Gibson reminded
him. "We haven't even established
yet that these people were
never under Hymenop control.
Precedent won't hold always, and
there's no predicting nor evaluating
the motives of an alien
race. We never understood the
Hymenops because there's no
common ground of logic between
us. Why try to interpret their
intentions now?"
Farrell threw up his hands in
disgust. "Next you'll say this is
an ancient Terran expedition
that actually succeeded! There's
only one way to answer the
questions we've raised, and
that's to go down and see for
ourselves. Ready, Xav?"
But uncertainty nagged uneasily
at him when Farrell found
himself alone in the helihopper
with the forest flowing beneath
like a leafy river and Xavier's
scouter disappearing bulletlike
into the dusk ahead.
We never found a colony so
advanced, Farrell thought. Suppose
this is a Hymenop experiment
that really paid off? The
Bees did some weird and wonderful
things with human
guinea pigs—what if they've
created the ultimate booby trap
here, and primed it with conditioned
myrmidons in our own
form?
Suppose, he thought—and derided
himself for thinking it—one
of those suicidal old interstellar
ventures did succeed?
Xavier's voice, a mellow
drone from the helihopper's
Ringwave-powered visicom, cut
sharply into his musing. "The
ship has discovered the scouter
and is training an electronic
beam upon it. My instruments
record an electromagnetic vibration
pattern of low power but
rapidly varying frequency. The
operation seems pointless."
Stryker's voice followed, querulous
with worry: "I'd better
pull Xav back. It may be something
lethal."
"Don't," Gibson's baritone advised.
Surprisingly, there was
excitement in the engineer's
voice. "I think they're trying to
communicate with us."
Farrell was on the point of
demanding acidly to know how
one went about communicating
by means of a fluctuating electric
field when the unexpected
cessation of forest diverted his
attention. The helihopper scudded
over a cultivated area
of considerable extent, fields
stretching below in a vague random
checkerboard of lighter and
darker earth, an undefined cluster
of buildings at their center.
There was a central bonfire that
burned like a wild red eye
against the lower gloom, and in
its plunging ruddy glow he made
out an urgent scurrying of shadowy
figures.
"I'm passing over a hamlet,"
Farrell reported. "The one nearest
the city, I think. There's
something odd going on
down—"
Catastrophe struck so suddenly
that he was caught completely
unprepared. The helihopper's
flimsy carriage bucked and
crumpled. There was a blinding
flare of electric discharge, a
pungent stink of ozone and a
stunning shock that flung him
headlong into darkness.
He awoke slowly with a brutal
headache and a conviction of
nightmare heightened by the
outlandish tone of his surroundings.
He lay on a narrow bed in
a whitely antiseptic infirmary,
an oblong metal cell cluttered
with a grimly utilitarian array
of tables and lockers and chests.
The lighting was harsh and
overbright and the air hung
thick with pungent unfamiliar
chemical odors. From somewhere,
far off yet at the same
time as near as the bulkhead
above him, came the unceasing
drone of machinery.
Farrell sat up, groaning,
when full consciousness made his
position clear. He had been shot
down by God knew what sort of
devastating unorthodox weapon
and was a prisoner in the
grounded ship.
At his rising, a white-smocked
fat man with anachronistic spectacles
and close-cropped gray
hair came into the room, moving
with the professional assurance
of a medic. The man stopped
short at Farrell's stare and
spoke; his words were utterly
unintelligible, but his gesture
was unmistakable.
Farrell followed him dumbly
out of the infirmary and down
a bare corridor whose metal
floor rang coldly underfoot. An
open port near the corridor's end
relieved the blankness of wall
and let in a flood of reddish Alphardian
sunlight; Farrell slowed
to look out, wondering how
long he had lain unconscious,
and felt panic knife at him
when he saw Xavier's scouter lying,
port open and undefended,
on the square outside.
The mechanical had been as
easily taken as himself, then.
Stryker and Gibson, for all their
professional caution, would fare
no better—they could not have
overlooked the capture of Farrell
and Xavier, and when they
tried as a matter of course to
rescue them the Marco would be
struck down in turn by the same
weapon.
The fat medic turned and
said something urgent in his
unintelligible tongue. Farrell,
dazed by the enormity of what
had happened, followed without
protest into an intersecting way
that led through a bewildering
succession of storage rooms and
hydroponics gardens, through a
small gymnasium fitted with
physical training equipment in
graduated sizes and finally into
a soundproofed place that could
have been nothing but a nursery.
The implication behind its
presence stopped Farrell short.
"A creche ," he said, stunned.
He had a wild vision of endless
generations of children growing
up in this dim and stuffy room,
to be taught from their first
toddling steps the functions they
must fulfill before the venture
of which they were a part could
be consummated.
One of those old ventures had succeeded, he thought, and was
awed by the daring of that thousand-year
odyssey. The realization
left him more alarmed than
before—for what technical marvels
might not an isolated group
of such dogged specialists have
developed during a millennium
of application?
Such a weapon as had brought
down the helihopper and scouter
was patently beyond reach of his
own latter-day technology. Perhaps,
he thought, its possession
explained the presence of these
people here in the first stronghold
of the Hymenops; perhaps
they had even fought and defeated
the Bees on their own invaded
ground.
He followed his white-smocked
guide through a power room
where great crude generators
whirred ponderously, pouring
out gross electric current into
arm-thick cables. They were
nearing the bow of the ship
when they passed by another
open port and Farrell, glancing
out over the lowered rampway,
saw that his fears for Stryker
and Gibson had been well
grounded.
The Marco Four , ports open,
lay grounded outside.
Farrell could not have said,
later, whether his next move
was planned or reflexive. The
whole desperate issue seemed to
hang suspended for a breathless
moment upon a hair-fine edge of
decision, and in that instant he
made his bid.
Without pausing in his stride
he sprang out and through the
port and down the steep plane
of the ramp. The rough stone
pavement of the square drummed
underfoot; sore muscles
tore at him, and weakness was
like a weight about his neck. He
expected momentarily to be
blasted out of existence.
He reached the Marco Four with the startled shouts of his
guide ringing unintelligibly in
his ears. The port yawned; he
plunged inside and stabbed at
controls without waiting to seat
himself. The ports swung shut.
The ship darted up under his
manipulation and arrowed into
space with an acceleration that
sprung his knees and made his
vision swim blackly.
He was so weak with strain
and with the success of his coup
that he all but fainted when
Stryker, his scanty hair tousled
and his fat face comical with bewilderment,
stumbled out of his
sleeping cubicle and bellowed at
him.
"What the hell are you doing,
Arthur? Take us down!"
Farrell gaped at him, speechless.
Stryker lumbered past him
and took the controls, spiraling
the Marco Four down. Men
swarmed outside the ports when
the Reclamations craft settled
gently to the square again. Gibson
and Xavier reached the ship
first; Gibson came inside quickly,
leaving the mechanical outside
making patient explanations
to an excited group of Alphardians.
Gibson put a reassuring hand
on Farrell's arm. "It's all right,
Arthur. There's no trouble."
Farrell said dumbly, "I don't
understand. They didn't shoot
you and Xav down too?"
It was Gibson's turn to stare.
"No one shot you down! These
people are primitive enough to
use metallic power lines to
carry electricity to their hamlets,
an anachronism you forgot
last night. You piloted the helihopper
into one of those lines,
and the crash put you out for
the rest of the night and most
of today. These Alphardians are
friendly, so desperately happy to
be found again that it's really
pathetic."
" Friendly? That torpedo—"
"It wasn't a torpedo at all,"
Stryker put in. Understanding
of the error under which Farrell
had labored erased his
earlier irritation, and he chuckled
commiseratingly. "They had
one small boat left for emergency
missions, and sent it up to
contact us in the fear that we
might overlook their settlement
and move on. The boat was
atomic powered, and our shield
screens set off its engines."
Farrell dropped into a chair at
the chart table, limp with reaction.
He was suddenly exhausted,
and his head ached dully.
"We cracked the communications
problem early last night,"
Gibson said. "These people use
an ancient system of electromagnetic
wave propagation called
frequency modulation, and once
Lee and I rigged up a suitable
transceiver the rest was simple.
Both Xav and I recognized the
old language; the natives reported
your accident, and we came
down at once."
"They really came from Terra?
They lived through a thousand
years of flight?"
"The ship left Terra for
Sirius in 2171," Gibson said.
"But not with these people
aboard, or their ancestors. That
expedition perished after less
than a light-year when its
hydroponics system failed. The
Hymenops found the ship derelict
when they invaded us, and
brought it to Alphard Six in
what was probably their first experiment
with human subjects.
The ship's log shows clearly
what happened to the original
complement. The rest is deducible
from the situation here."
Farrell put his hands to his
temples and groaned. "The crash
must have scrambled my wits.
Gib, where did they come from?"
"From one of the first peripheral
colonies conquered by the
Bees," Gibson said patiently.
"The Hymenops were long-range
planners, remember, and masters
of hypnotic conditioning. They
stocked the ship with a captive
crew of Terrans conditioned to
believe themselves descendants
of the original crew, and
grounded it here in disabled
condition. They left for Alphard
Five then, to watch developments.
"Succeeding generations of
colonists grew up accepting the
fact that their ship had missed
Sirius and made planetfall here—they
still don't know where
they really are—by luck. They
never knew about the Hymenops,
and they've struggled along
with an inadequate technology in
the hope that a later expedition
would find them. They found the
truth hard to take, but they're
eager to enjoy the fruits of Terran
assimilation."
Stryker, grinning, brought
Farrell a frosted drink that tinkled
invitingly. "An unusually
fortunate ending to a Hymenop
experiment," he said. "These
people progressed normally because
they've been let alone. Reorienting
them will be a simple
matter; they'll be properly spoiled
colonists within another generation."
Farrell sipped his drink appreciatively.
"But I don't see why the Bees
should go to such trouble to deceive
these people. Why did they
sit back and let them grow as
they pleased, Gib? It doesn't
make sense!"
"But it does, for once," Gibson
said. "The Bees set up this
colony as a control unit to study
the species they were invading,
and they had to give their
specimens a normal—if obsolete—background
in order to determine
their capabilities. The fact
that their experiment didn't tell
them what they wanted to know
may have had a direct bearing
on their decision to pull out."
Farrell shook his head. "It's
a reverse application, isn't it of
the old saw about Terrans being
incapable of understanding an
alien culture?"
"Of course," said Gibson, surprised.
"It's obvious enough,
surely—hard as they tried, the
Bees never understood us
either."
THE END
|
Describe the setting of this story.
|
After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about The Hoofer by Walter M. Miller.
Relevant chunks:
A wayfarer's return from a far country to his wife and family may be a
shining experience, a kind of second honeymoon. Or it may be so shadowed
by Time's relentless tyranny that the changes which have occurred in his
absence can lead only to tragedy and despair. This rarely discerning, warmly
human story by a brilliant newcomer to the science fantasy field is told
with no pulling of punches, and its adroit unfolding will astound you.
the hoofer
by ... Walter M. Miller, Jr.
A space rover has no business with a family. But what can a man
in the full vigor of youth do—if his heart cries out for a home?
They all
knew he was a spacer
because of the white goggle marks
on his sun-scorched face, and so
they tolerated him and helped him.
They even made allowances for him
when he staggered and fell in the
aisle of the bus while pursuing the
harassed little housewife from seat
to seat and cajoling her to sit and
talk with him.
Having fallen, he decided to
sleep in the aisle. Two men helped
him to the back of the bus, dumped
him on the rear seat, and tucked his
gin bottle safely out of sight. After
all, he had not seen Earth for nine
months, and judging by the crusted
matter about his eyelids, he couldn't
have seen it too well now, even if
he had been sober. Glare-blindness,
gravity-legs, and agoraphobia were
excuses for a lot of things, when a
man was just back from Big Bottomless.
And who could blame a
man for acting strangely?
Minutes later, he was back up the
aisle and swaying giddily over the
little housewife. "How!" he said.
"Me Chief Broken Wing. You
wanta Indian wrestle?"
The girl, who sat nervously staring
at him, smiled wanly, and
shook her head.
"Quiet li'l pigeon, aren'tcha?" he
burbled affectionately, crashing into
the seat beside her.
The two men slid out of their
seats, and a hand clamped his shoulder.
"Come on, Broken Wing, let's
go back to bed."
"My name's Hogey," he said.
"Big Hogey Parker. I was just kidding
about being a Indian."
"Yeah. Come on, let's go have a
drink." They got him on his feet,
and led him stumbling back down
the aisle.
"My ma was half Cherokee, see?
That's how come I said it. You
wanta hear a war whoop? Real
stuff."
"Never mind."
He cupped his hands to his
mouth and favored them with a
blood-curdling proof of his ancestry,
while the female passengers
stirred restlessly and hunched in
their seats. The driver stopped the
bus and went back to warn him
against any further display. The
driver flashed a deputy's badge and
threatened to turn him over to a
constable.
"I gotta get home," Big Hogey
told him. "I got me a son now,
that's why. You know? A little
baby pigeon of a son. Haven't seen
him yet."
"Will you just sit still and be
quiet then, eh?"
Big Hogey nodded emphatically.
"Shorry, officer, I didn't mean to
make any trouble."
When the bus started again, he
fell on his side and lay still. He
made retching sounds for a time,
then rested, snoring softly. The bus
driver woke him again at Caine's
junction, retrieved his gin bottle
from behind the seat, and helped
him down the aisle and out of the
bus.
Big Hogey stumbled about for a
moment, then sat down hard in the
gravel at the shoulder of the road.
The driver paused with one foot on
the step, looking around. There was
not even a store at the road junction,
but only a freight building
next to the railroad track, a couple
of farmhouses at the edge of a side-road,
and, just across the way, a deserted
filling station with a sagging
roof. The land was Great Plains
country, treeless, barren, and rolling.
Big Hogey got up and staggered
around in front of the bus, clutching
at it for support, losing his
duffle bag.
"Hey, watch the traffic!" The
driver warned. With a surge of unwelcome
compassion he trotted
around after his troublesome passenger,
taking his arm as he sagged
again. "You crossing?"
"Yah," Hogey muttered. "Lemme
alone, I'm okay."
The driver started across the
highway with him. The traffic was
sparse, but fast and dangerous in
the central ninety-mile lane.
"I'm okay," Hogey kept protesting.
"I'm a tumbler, ya know?
Gravity's got me. Damn gravity.
I'm not used to gravity, ya know? I
used to be a tumbler— huk! —only
now I gotta be a hoofer. 'Count
of li'l Hogey. You know about li'l
Hogey?"
"Yeah. Your son. Come on."
"Say, you gotta son? I bet you
gotta son."
"Two kids," said the driver,
catching Hogey's bag as it slipped
from his shoulder. "Both girls."
"Say, you oughta be home with
them kids. Man oughta stick with
his family. You oughta get another
job." Hogey eyed him owlishly,
waggled a moralistic finger, skidded
on the gravel as they stepped
onto the opposite shoulder, and
sprawled again.
The driver blew a weary breath,
looked down at him, and shook his
head. Maybe it'd be kinder to find
a constable after all. This guy could
get himself killed, wandering
around loose.
"Somebody supposed to meet
you?" he asked, squinting around
at the dusty hills.
" Huk! —who, me?" Hogey giggled,
belched, and shook his head.
"Nope. Nobody knows I'm coming.
S'prise. I'm supposed to be here a
week ago." He looked up at the
driver with a pained expression.
"Week late, ya know? Marie's
gonna be sore—woo- hoo !—is she
gonna be sore!" He waggled his
head severely at the ground.
"Which way are you going?" the
driver grunted impatiently.
Hogey pointed down the side-road
that led back into the hills.
"Marie's pop's place. You know
where? 'Bout three miles from
here. Gotta walk, I guess."
"Don't," the driver warned.
"You sit there by the culvert till
you get a ride. Okay?"
Hogey nodded forlornly.
"Now stay out of the road," the
driver warned, then hurried back
across the highway. Moments later,
the atomic battery-driven motors
droned mournfully, and the bus
pulled away.
Big Hogey blinked after it, rubbing
the back of his neck. "Nice
people," he said. "Nice buncha people.
All hoofers."
With a grunt and a lurch, he got
to his feet, but his legs wouldn't
work right. With his tumbler's reflexes,
he fought to right himself
with frantic arm motions, but gravity
claimed him, and he went stumbling
into the ditch.
"Damn legs, damn crazy legs!"
he cried.
The bottom of the ditch was wet,
and he crawled up the embankment
with mud-soaked knees, and sat on
the shoulder again. The gin bottle
was still intact. He had himself a
long fiery drink, and it warmed him
deep down. He blinked around at
the gaunt and treeless land.
The sun was almost down, forge-red
on a dusty horizon. The blood-streaked
sky faded into sulphurous
yellow toward the zenith, and the
very air that hung over the land
seemed full of yellow smoke, the
omnipresent dust of the plains.
A farm truck turned onto the
side-road and moaned away, its
driver hardly glancing at the dark
young man who sat swaying on his
duffle bag near the culvert. Hogey
scarcely noticed the vehicle. He just
kept staring at the crazy sun.
He shook his head. It wasn't really
the sun. The sun, the real sun,
was a hateful eye-sizzling horror in
the dead black pit. It painted everything
with pure white pain, and you
saw things by the reflected pain-light.
The fat red sun was strictly a
phoney, and it didn't fool him any.
He hated it for what he knew it was
behind the gory mask, and for what
it had done to his eyes.
With a grunt, he got to his feet,
managed to shoulder the duffle bag,
and started off down the middle of
the farm road, lurching from side
to side, and keeping his eyes on the
rolling distances. Another car turned
onto the side-road, honking angrily.
Hogey tried to turn around to
look at it, but he forgot to shift his
footing. He staggered and went
down on the pavement. The car's
tires screeched on the hot asphalt.
Hogey lay there for a moment,
groaning. That one had hurt his
hip. A car door slammed and a big
man with a florid face got out and
stalked toward him, looking angry.
"What the hell's the matter with
you, fella?" he drawled. "You
soused? Man, you've really got a
load."
Hogey got up doggedly, shaking
his head to clear it. "Space legs," he
prevaricated. "Got space legs. Can't
stand the gravity."
The burly farmer retrieved his
gin bottle for him, still miraculously
unbroken. "Here's your gravity,"
he grunted. "Listen, fella, you better
get home pronto."
"Pronto? Hey, I'm no Mex. Honest,
I'm just space burned. You
know?"
"Yeah. Say, who are you, anyway?
Do you live around here?"
It was obvious that the big man
had taken him for a hobo or a
tramp. Hogey pulled himself together.
"Goin' to the Hauptman's
place. Marie. You know Marie?"
The farmer's eyebrows went up.
"Marie Hauptman? Sure I know
her. Only she's Marie Parker now.
Has been, nigh on six years. Say—"
He paused, then gaped. "You ain't
her husband by any chance?"
"Hogey, that's me. Big Hogey
Parker."
"Well, I'll be—! Get in the car.
I'm going right past John Hauptman's
place. Boy, you're in no
shape to walk it."
He grinned wryly, waggled his
head, and helped Hogey and his
bag into the back seat. A woman
with a sun-wrinkled neck sat rigidly
beside the farmer in the front,
and she neither greeted the passenger
nor looked around.
"They don't make cars like this
anymore," the farmer called over
the growl of the ancient gasoline
engine and the grind of gears.
"You can have them new atomics
with their loads of hot isotopes
under the seat. Ain't safe, I say—eh,
Martha?"
The woman with the sun-baked
neck quivered her head slightly.
"A car like this was good enough
for Pa, an' I reckon it's good
enough for us," she drawled mournfully.
Five minutes later the car drew
in to the side of the road. "Reckon
you can walk it from here," the
farmer said. "That's Hauptman's
road just up ahead."
He helped Hogey out of the car
and drove away without looking
back to see if Hogey stayed on his
feet. The woman with the sun-baked
neck was suddenly talking
garrulously in his direction.
It was twilight. The sun had set,
and the yellow sky was turning
gray. Hogey was too tired to go on,
and his legs would no longer hold
him. He blinked around at the land,
got his eyes focused, and found
what looked like Hauptman's place
on a distant hillside. It was a big
frame house surrounded by a wheatfield,
and a few scrawny trees. Having
located it, he stretched out in
the tall grass beyond the ditch to
take a little rest.
Somewhere dogs were barking,
and a cricket sang creaking monotony
in the grass. Once there was the
distant thunder of a rocket blast
from the launching station six miles
to the west, but it faded quickly. An
A-motored convertible whined past
on the road, but Hogey went unseen.
When he awoke, it was night,
and he was shivering. His stomach
was screeching, and his nerves dancing
with high voltages. He sat up
and groped for his watch, then remembered
he had pawned it after
the poker game. Remembering the
game and the results of the game
made him wince and bite his lip
and grope for the bottle again.
He sat breathing heavily for a
moment after the stiff drink. Equating
time to position had become
second nature with him, but he had
to think for a moment because his
defective vision prevented him from
seeing the Earth-crescent.
Vega was almost straight above
him in the late August sky, so he
knew it wasn't much after sundown—probably
about eight o'clock. He
braced himself with another swallow
of gin, picked himself up and
got back to the road, feeling a little
sobered after the nap.
He limped on up the pavement
and turned left at the narrow drive
that led between barbed-wire fences
toward the Hauptman farmhouse,
five hundred yards or so from the
farm road. The fields on his left
belonged to Marie's father, he
knew. He was getting close—close
to home and woman and child.
He dropped the bag suddenly
and leaned against a fence post,
rolling his head on his forearms
and choking in spasms of air. He
was shaking all over, and his belly
writhed. He wanted to turn and
run. He wanted to crawl out in the
grass and hide.
What were they going to say?
And Marie, Marie most of all.
How was he going to tell her about
the money?
Six hitches in space, and every
time the promise had been the
same: One more tour, baby, and
we'll have enough dough, and then
I'll quit for good. One more time,
and we'll have our stake—enough
to open a little business, or buy a
house with a mortgage and get a
job.
And she had waited, but the
money had never been quite enough
until this time. This time the tour
had lasted nine months, and he had
signed on for every run from station
to moon-base to pick up the
bonuses. And this time he'd made
it. Two weeks ago, there had been
forty-eight hundred in the bank.
And now ...
" Why? " he groaned, striking his
forehead against his forearms. His
arm slipped, and his head hit the
top of the fencepost, and the pain
blinded him for a moment. He staggered
back into the road with a
low roar, wiped blood from his
forehead, and savagely kicked his
bag.
It rolled a couple of yards up the
road. He leaped after it and kicked
it again. When he had finished
with it, he stood panting and angry,
but feeling better. He shouldered
the bag and hiked on toward the
farmhouse.
They're hoofers, that's all—just
an Earth-chained bunch of hoofers,
even Marie. And I'm a tumbler. A
born tumbler. Know what that
means? It means—God, what does
it mean? It means out in Big Bottomless,
where Earth's like a fat
moon with fuzzy mold growing on
it. Mold, that's all you are, just
mold.
A dog barked, and he wondered
if he had been muttering aloud. He
came to a fence-gap and paused in
the darkness. The road wound
around and came up the hill in
front of the house. Maybe they were
sitting on the porch. Maybe they'd
already heard him coming. Maybe ...
He was trembling again. He
fished the fifth of gin out of his
coat pocket and sloshed it. Still over
half a pint. He decided to kill it. It
wouldn't do to go home with a
bottle sticking out of his pocket.
He stood there in the night wind,
sipping at it, and watching the reddish
moon come up in the east. The
moon looked as phoney as the
setting sun.
He straightened in sudden determination.
It had to be sometime.
Get it over with, get it over with
now. He opened the fence-gap, slipped
through, and closed it firmly
behind him. He retrieved his bag,
and waded quietly through the tall
grass until he reached the hedge
which divided an area of sickly
peach trees from the field. He got
over the hedge somehow, and started
through the trees toward the
house. He stumbled over some old
boards, and they clattered.
" Shhh! " he hissed, and moved
on.
The dogs were barking angrily,
and he heard a screen door slam.
He stopped.
"Ho there!" a male voice called
experimentally from the house.
One of Marie's brothers. Hogey
stood frozen in the shadow of a
peach tree, waiting.
"Anybody out there?" the man
called again.
Hogey waited, then heard the
man muttering, "Sic 'im, boy, sic
'im."
The hound's bark became eager.
The animal came chasing down the
slope, and stopped ten feet away to
crouch and bark frantically at the
shadow in the gloom. He knew the
dog.
"Hooky!" he whispered. "Hooky
boy—here!"
The dog stopped barking, sniffed,
trotted closer, and went
" Rrrooff! " Then he started sniffing
suspiciously again.
"Easy, Hooky, here boy!" he
whispered.
The dog came forward silently,
sniffed his hand, and whined in
recognition. Then he trotted around
Hogey, panting doggy affection and
dancing an invitation to romp. The
man whistled from the porch. The
dog froze, then trotted quickly back
up the slope.
"Nothing, eh, Hooky?" the
man on the porch said. "Chasin'
armadillos again, eh?"
The screen door slammed again,
and the porch light went out.
Hogey stood there staring, unable
to think. Somewhere beyond the
window lights were—his woman,
his son.
What the hell was a tumbler doing
with a woman and a son?
After perhaps a minute, he stepped
forward again. He tripped over
a shovel, and his foot plunged into
something that went squelch and
swallowed the foot past the ankle.
He fell forward into a heap of
sand, and his foot went deeper into
the sloppy wetness.
He lay there with his stinging
forehead on his arms, cursing softly
and crying. Finally he rolled
over, pulled his foot out of the
mess, and took off his shoes. They
were full of mud—sticky sandy
mud.
The dark world was reeling
about him, and the wind was dragging
at his breath. He fell back
against the sand pile and let his
feet sink in the mud hole and wriggled
his toes. He was laughing
soundlessly, and his face was wet
in the wind. He couldn't think. He
couldn't remember where he was
and why, and he stopped caring,
and after a while he felt better.
The stars were swimming over
him, dancing crazily, and the mud
cooled his feet, and the sand was
soft behind him. He saw a rocket
go up on a tail of flame from the
station, and waited for the sound of
its blast, but he was already asleep
when it came.
It was far past midnight when he
became conscious of the dog licking
wetly at his ear and cheek. He
pushed the animal away with a low
curse and mopped at the side of his
face. He stirred, and groaned. His
feet were burning up! He tried to
pull them toward him, but they
wouldn't budge. There was something
wrong with his legs.
For an instant he stared wildly
around in the night. Then he remembered
where he was, closed his
eyes and shuddered. When he
opened them again, the moon had
emerged from behind a cloud, and
he could see clearly the cruel trap
into which he had accidentally
stumbled. A pile of old boards, a
careful stack of new lumber, a
pick and shovel, a sand-pile, heaps
of fresh-turned earth, and a concrete
mixer—well, it added up.
He gripped his ankles and pulled,
but his feet wouldn't budge. In
sudden terror, he tried to stand up,
but his ankles were clutched by the
concrete too, and he fell back in
the sand with a low moan. He lay
still for several minutes, considering
carefully.
He pulled at his left foot. It was
locked in a vise. He tugged even
more desperately at his right foot.
It was equally immovable.
He sat up with a whimper and
clawed at the rough concrete until
his nails tore and his fingertips
bled. The surface still felt damp,
but it had hardened while he slept.
He sat there stunned until Hooky
began licking at his scuffed fingers.
He shouldered the dog away, and
dug his hands into the sand-pile to
stop the bleeding. Hooky licked at
his face, panting love.
"Get away!" he croaked savagely.
The dog whined softly, trotted
a short distance away, circled, and
came back to crouch down in the
sand directly before Hogey, inching
forward experimentally.
Hogey gripped fistfuls of the dry
sand and cursed between his teeth,
while his eyes wandered over the
sky. They came to rest on the sliver
of light—the space station—rising
in the west, floating out in Big Bottomless
where the gang was—Nichols
and Guerrera and Lavrenti
and Fats. And he wasn't forgetting
Keesey, the rookie who'd replaced
him.
Keesey would have a rough time
for a while—rough as a cob. The pit
was no playground. The first time
you went out of the station in a
suit, the pit got you. Everything
was falling, and you fell, with it.
Everything. The skeletons of steel,
the tire-shaped station, the spheres
and docks and nightmare shapes—all
tied together by umbilical cables
and flexible tubes. Like some crazy
sea-thing they seemed, floating in a
black ocean with its tentacles bound
together by drifting strands in the
dark tide that bore it.
Everything was pain-bright or
dead black, and it wheeled around
you, and you went nuts trying to
figure which way was down. In fact,
it took you months to teach your
body that all ways were down and
that the pit was bottomless.
He became conscious of a plaintive
sound in the wind, and froze to
listen.
It was a baby crying.
It was nearly a minute before he
got the significance of it. It hit him
where he lived, and he began jerking
frantically at his encased feet
and sobbing low in his throat.
They'd hear him if he kept that up.
He stopped and covered his ears to
close out the cry of his firstborn. A
light went on in the house, and
when it went off again, the infant's
cry had ceased.
Another rocket went up from the
station, and he cursed it. Space was
a disease, and he had it.
"Help!" he cried out suddenly.
"I'm stuck! Help me, help me!"
He knew he was yelling hysterically
at the sky and fighting the relentless
concrete that clutched his
feet, and after a moment he stopped.
The light was on in the house
again, and he heard faint sounds.
The stirring-about woke the baby
again, and once more the infant's
wail came on the breeze.
Make the kid shut up, make the
kid shut up ...
But that was no good. It wasn't
the kid's fault. It wasn't Marie's
fault. No fathers allowed in space,
they said, but it wasn't their fault
either. They were right, and he had
only himself to blame. The kid was
an accident, but that didn't change
anything. Not a thing in the world.
It remained a tragedy.
A tumbler had no business with a
family, but what was a man going
to do? Take a skinning knife, boy,
and make yourself a eunuch. But
that was no good either. They needed
bulls out there in the pit, not
steers. And when a man came down
from a year's hitch, what was he
going to do? Live in a lonely shack
and read books for kicks? Because
you were a man, you sought out a
woman. And because she was a
woman, she got a kid, and that was
the end of it. It was nobody's fault,
nobody's at all.
He stared at the red eye of Mars
low in the southwest. They were
running out there now, and next
year he would have been on the
long long run ...
But there was no use thinking
about it. Next year and the years
after belonged to little Hogey.
He sat there with his feet locked
in the solid concrete of the footing,
staring out into Big Bottomless
while his son's cry came from the
house and the Hauptman menfolk
came wading through the tall grass
in search of someone who had cried
out. His feet were stuck tight, and
he wouldn't ever get them out. He
was sobbing softly when they found
him.
Question:
Describe the setting of this story.
Answer:
|
[
"This story takes place on Earth. As we are following the protagonist’s journey home, the setting constantly changes in terms of transportation mode and the landscape. First, we can identify the setting as a public bus, where Hogey occupies the back seats of the bus as he falls asleep clutching his gin. Hogey gets off at his stop - Caine’s junction - which is a road junction with just a few farmhouses at the side and a derelict filling station. There is also a ditch, which he promptly stumbles into. The landscape reveals the Great Plains country, with descriptions of the setting being treeless and barren, and instead being full of rolling hills and fields of grass.\n\nTowards the end of the story, the setting changes to the Hauptman’s place where the farmhouse sits off the side of the road with a barbed-wire fence. Within the tall grass of the farmhouse also lies a sloppy heap of sand - concrete. \n",
"It is in late August. The first scene is on a bus. After the protagonist gets out of the bus, he sits at a road junction. Along the side of the road, there is gravel. Next to the railroad tracks, a freight building, several farmhouses, and a filling station stand across the road. The land is barren, unwooded, and rolling. The hills around are dusty. There is a ditch along the road, the bottom of which is wet and muddy. The protagonist’s house is about three miles from there. A wheat field and a few trees surround the house. Beyond the ditch next to the road, a tall grass lies. Six miles away to the west, there is a rocket launching station. A narrow path along with the barbed-wire fence leads toward the house. The hedge divides the peach trees from the field inside the fence gap. Some old boards, a shovel and pick, a sand pile, a stack of new lumbers, and a concrete mixer lie on the ground. There is a porch light next to the screen door of the house. ",
"The story takes place on Earth. It starts off in a bus, and then it continues to be set in what seems to be a side road off a highway. Hogey is on his way to his house, which is described to be isolated, like a farmhouse. The house is big and has dogs, which make it more similar to a farmhouse. Hogey also remembers his time in space, which was described as a floating station full of tubes and metal machines that continued falling, and the people inside fell with it. The story seems to be set in the future, but it could very well be set only a few from now. ",
"The story is set on Earth and on a bus. Hogey initially sits next to a housewife on the bus, but he is moved to the back after. There is a highway near the area where Hogey is dropped off, and he falls into a ditch when the sun goes down. There is a farm road to go into, and a side-road for cars to turn onto. At Hauptman's road, there is a narrow drive that leads to the barbed wire of the farmhouse. There is also a peach tree next to the house, and a porch. Eventually, Hogey gets himself stuck in concrete. There is a pile of wood boards, a careful stack of new lumber, a pick and a shovel, a sand-pile, heaps of freshly-turned earth, and a concrete mixer near the area that his feet are stuck inside of. "
] |
29170
|
A wayfarer's return from a far country to his wife and family may be a
shining experience, a kind of second honeymoon. Or it may be so shadowed
by Time's relentless tyranny that the changes which have occurred in his
absence can lead only to tragedy and despair. This rarely discerning, warmly
human story by a brilliant newcomer to the science fantasy field is told
with no pulling of punches, and its adroit unfolding will astound you.
the hoofer
by ... Walter M. Miller, Jr.
A space rover has no business with a family. But what can a man
in the full vigor of youth do—if his heart cries out for a home?
They all
knew he was a spacer
because of the white goggle marks
on his sun-scorched face, and so
they tolerated him and helped him.
They even made allowances for him
when he staggered and fell in the
aisle of the bus while pursuing the
harassed little housewife from seat
to seat and cajoling her to sit and
talk with him.
Having fallen, he decided to
sleep in the aisle. Two men helped
him to the back of the bus, dumped
him on the rear seat, and tucked his
gin bottle safely out of sight. After
all, he had not seen Earth for nine
months, and judging by the crusted
matter about his eyelids, he couldn't
have seen it too well now, even if
he had been sober. Glare-blindness,
gravity-legs, and agoraphobia were
excuses for a lot of things, when a
man was just back from Big Bottomless.
And who could blame a
man for acting strangely?
Minutes later, he was back up the
aisle and swaying giddily over the
little housewife. "How!" he said.
"Me Chief Broken Wing. You
wanta Indian wrestle?"
The girl, who sat nervously staring
at him, smiled wanly, and
shook her head.
"Quiet li'l pigeon, aren'tcha?" he
burbled affectionately, crashing into
the seat beside her.
The two men slid out of their
seats, and a hand clamped his shoulder.
"Come on, Broken Wing, let's
go back to bed."
"My name's Hogey," he said.
"Big Hogey Parker. I was just kidding
about being a Indian."
"Yeah. Come on, let's go have a
drink." They got him on his feet,
and led him stumbling back down
the aisle.
"My ma was half Cherokee, see?
That's how come I said it. You
wanta hear a war whoop? Real
stuff."
"Never mind."
He cupped his hands to his
mouth and favored them with a
blood-curdling proof of his ancestry,
while the female passengers
stirred restlessly and hunched in
their seats. The driver stopped the
bus and went back to warn him
against any further display. The
driver flashed a deputy's badge and
threatened to turn him over to a
constable.
"I gotta get home," Big Hogey
told him. "I got me a son now,
that's why. You know? A little
baby pigeon of a son. Haven't seen
him yet."
"Will you just sit still and be
quiet then, eh?"
Big Hogey nodded emphatically.
"Shorry, officer, I didn't mean to
make any trouble."
When the bus started again, he
fell on his side and lay still. He
made retching sounds for a time,
then rested, snoring softly. The bus
driver woke him again at Caine's
junction, retrieved his gin bottle
from behind the seat, and helped
him down the aisle and out of the
bus.
Big Hogey stumbled about for a
moment, then sat down hard in the
gravel at the shoulder of the road.
The driver paused with one foot on
the step, looking around. There was
not even a store at the road junction,
but only a freight building
next to the railroad track, a couple
of farmhouses at the edge of a side-road,
and, just across the way, a deserted
filling station with a sagging
roof. The land was Great Plains
country, treeless, barren, and rolling.
Big Hogey got up and staggered
around in front of the bus, clutching
at it for support, losing his
duffle bag.
"Hey, watch the traffic!" The
driver warned. With a surge of unwelcome
compassion he trotted
around after his troublesome passenger,
taking his arm as he sagged
again. "You crossing?"
"Yah," Hogey muttered. "Lemme
alone, I'm okay."
The driver started across the
highway with him. The traffic was
sparse, but fast and dangerous in
the central ninety-mile lane.
"I'm okay," Hogey kept protesting.
"I'm a tumbler, ya know?
Gravity's got me. Damn gravity.
I'm not used to gravity, ya know? I
used to be a tumbler— huk! —only
now I gotta be a hoofer. 'Count
of li'l Hogey. You know about li'l
Hogey?"
"Yeah. Your son. Come on."
"Say, you gotta son? I bet you
gotta son."
"Two kids," said the driver,
catching Hogey's bag as it slipped
from his shoulder. "Both girls."
"Say, you oughta be home with
them kids. Man oughta stick with
his family. You oughta get another
job." Hogey eyed him owlishly,
waggled a moralistic finger, skidded
on the gravel as they stepped
onto the opposite shoulder, and
sprawled again.
The driver blew a weary breath,
looked down at him, and shook his
head. Maybe it'd be kinder to find
a constable after all. This guy could
get himself killed, wandering
around loose.
"Somebody supposed to meet
you?" he asked, squinting around
at the dusty hills.
" Huk! —who, me?" Hogey giggled,
belched, and shook his head.
"Nope. Nobody knows I'm coming.
S'prise. I'm supposed to be here a
week ago." He looked up at the
driver with a pained expression.
"Week late, ya know? Marie's
gonna be sore—woo- hoo !—is she
gonna be sore!" He waggled his
head severely at the ground.
"Which way are you going?" the
driver grunted impatiently.
Hogey pointed down the side-road
that led back into the hills.
"Marie's pop's place. You know
where? 'Bout three miles from
here. Gotta walk, I guess."
"Don't," the driver warned.
"You sit there by the culvert till
you get a ride. Okay?"
Hogey nodded forlornly.
"Now stay out of the road," the
driver warned, then hurried back
across the highway. Moments later,
the atomic battery-driven motors
droned mournfully, and the bus
pulled away.
Big Hogey blinked after it, rubbing
the back of his neck. "Nice
people," he said. "Nice buncha people.
All hoofers."
With a grunt and a lurch, he got
to his feet, but his legs wouldn't
work right. With his tumbler's reflexes,
he fought to right himself
with frantic arm motions, but gravity
claimed him, and he went stumbling
into the ditch.
"Damn legs, damn crazy legs!"
he cried.
The bottom of the ditch was wet,
and he crawled up the embankment
with mud-soaked knees, and sat on
the shoulder again. The gin bottle
was still intact. He had himself a
long fiery drink, and it warmed him
deep down. He blinked around at
the gaunt and treeless land.
The sun was almost down, forge-red
on a dusty horizon. The blood-streaked
sky faded into sulphurous
yellow toward the zenith, and the
very air that hung over the land
seemed full of yellow smoke, the
omnipresent dust of the plains.
A farm truck turned onto the
side-road and moaned away, its
driver hardly glancing at the dark
young man who sat swaying on his
duffle bag near the culvert. Hogey
scarcely noticed the vehicle. He just
kept staring at the crazy sun.
He shook his head. It wasn't really
the sun. The sun, the real sun,
was a hateful eye-sizzling horror in
the dead black pit. It painted everything
with pure white pain, and you
saw things by the reflected pain-light.
The fat red sun was strictly a
phoney, and it didn't fool him any.
He hated it for what he knew it was
behind the gory mask, and for what
it had done to his eyes.
With a grunt, he got to his feet,
managed to shoulder the duffle bag,
and started off down the middle of
the farm road, lurching from side
to side, and keeping his eyes on the
rolling distances. Another car turned
onto the side-road, honking angrily.
Hogey tried to turn around to
look at it, but he forgot to shift his
footing. He staggered and went
down on the pavement. The car's
tires screeched on the hot asphalt.
Hogey lay there for a moment,
groaning. That one had hurt his
hip. A car door slammed and a big
man with a florid face got out and
stalked toward him, looking angry.
"What the hell's the matter with
you, fella?" he drawled. "You
soused? Man, you've really got a
load."
Hogey got up doggedly, shaking
his head to clear it. "Space legs," he
prevaricated. "Got space legs. Can't
stand the gravity."
The burly farmer retrieved his
gin bottle for him, still miraculously
unbroken. "Here's your gravity,"
he grunted. "Listen, fella, you better
get home pronto."
"Pronto? Hey, I'm no Mex. Honest,
I'm just space burned. You
know?"
"Yeah. Say, who are you, anyway?
Do you live around here?"
It was obvious that the big man
had taken him for a hobo or a
tramp. Hogey pulled himself together.
"Goin' to the Hauptman's
place. Marie. You know Marie?"
The farmer's eyebrows went up.
"Marie Hauptman? Sure I know
her. Only she's Marie Parker now.
Has been, nigh on six years. Say—"
He paused, then gaped. "You ain't
her husband by any chance?"
"Hogey, that's me. Big Hogey
Parker."
"Well, I'll be—! Get in the car.
I'm going right past John Hauptman's
place. Boy, you're in no
shape to walk it."
He grinned wryly, waggled his
head, and helped Hogey and his
bag into the back seat. A woman
with a sun-wrinkled neck sat rigidly
beside the farmer in the front,
and she neither greeted the passenger
nor looked around.
"They don't make cars like this
anymore," the farmer called over
the growl of the ancient gasoline
engine and the grind of gears.
"You can have them new atomics
with their loads of hot isotopes
under the seat. Ain't safe, I say—eh,
Martha?"
The woman with the sun-baked
neck quivered her head slightly.
"A car like this was good enough
for Pa, an' I reckon it's good
enough for us," she drawled mournfully.
Five minutes later the car drew
in to the side of the road. "Reckon
you can walk it from here," the
farmer said. "That's Hauptman's
road just up ahead."
He helped Hogey out of the car
and drove away without looking
back to see if Hogey stayed on his
feet. The woman with the sun-baked
neck was suddenly talking
garrulously in his direction.
It was twilight. The sun had set,
and the yellow sky was turning
gray. Hogey was too tired to go on,
and his legs would no longer hold
him. He blinked around at the land,
got his eyes focused, and found
what looked like Hauptman's place
on a distant hillside. It was a big
frame house surrounded by a wheatfield,
and a few scrawny trees. Having
located it, he stretched out in
the tall grass beyond the ditch to
take a little rest.
Somewhere dogs were barking,
and a cricket sang creaking monotony
in the grass. Once there was the
distant thunder of a rocket blast
from the launching station six miles
to the west, but it faded quickly. An
A-motored convertible whined past
on the road, but Hogey went unseen.
When he awoke, it was night,
and he was shivering. His stomach
was screeching, and his nerves dancing
with high voltages. He sat up
and groped for his watch, then remembered
he had pawned it after
the poker game. Remembering the
game and the results of the game
made him wince and bite his lip
and grope for the bottle again.
He sat breathing heavily for a
moment after the stiff drink. Equating
time to position had become
second nature with him, but he had
to think for a moment because his
defective vision prevented him from
seeing the Earth-crescent.
Vega was almost straight above
him in the late August sky, so he
knew it wasn't much after sundown—probably
about eight o'clock. He
braced himself with another swallow
of gin, picked himself up and
got back to the road, feeling a little
sobered after the nap.
He limped on up the pavement
and turned left at the narrow drive
that led between barbed-wire fences
toward the Hauptman farmhouse,
five hundred yards or so from the
farm road. The fields on his left
belonged to Marie's father, he
knew. He was getting close—close
to home and woman and child.
He dropped the bag suddenly
and leaned against a fence post,
rolling his head on his forearms
and choking in spasms of air. He
was shaking all over, and his belly
writhed. He wanted to turn and
run. He wanted to crawl out in the
grass and hide.
What were they going to say?
And Marie, Marie most of all.
How was he going to tell her about
the money?
Six hitches in space, and every
time the promise had been the
same: One more tour, baby, and
we'll have enough dough, and then
I'll quit for good. One more time,
and we'll have our stake—enough
to open a little business, or buy a
house with a mortgage and get a
job.
And she had waited, but the
money had never been quite enough
until this time. This time the tour
had lasted nine months, and he had
signed on for every run from station
to moon-base to pick up the
bonuses. And this time he'd made
it. Two weeks ago, there had been
forty-eight hundred in the bank.
And now ...
" Why? " he groaned, striking his
forehead against his forearms. His
arm slipped, and his head hit the
top of the fencepost, and the pain
blinded him for a moment. He staggered
back into the road with a
low roar, wiped blood from his
forehead, and savagely kicked his
bag.
It rolled a couple of yards up the
road. He leaped after it and kicked
it again. When he had finished
with it, he stood panting and angry,
but feeling better. He shouldered
the bag and hiked on toward the
farmhouse.
They're hoofers, that's all—just
an Earth-chained bunch of hoofers,
even Marie. And I'm a tumbler. A
born tumbler. Know what that
means? It means—God, what does
it mean? It means out in Big Bottomless,
where Earth's like a fat
moon with fuzzy mold growing on
it. Mold, that's all you are, just
mold.
A dog barked, and he wondered
if he had been muttering aloud. He
came to a fence-gap and paused in
the darkness. The road wound
around and came up the hill in
front of the house. Maybe they were
sitting on the porch. Maybe they'd
already heard him coming. Maybe ...
He was trembling again. He
fished the fifth of gin out of his
coat pocket and sloshed it. Still over
half a pint. He decided to kill it. It
wouldn't do to go home with a
bottle sticking out of his pocket.
He stood there in the night wind,
sipping at it, and watching the reddish
moon come up in the east. The
moon looked as phoney as the
setting sun.
He straightened in sudden determination.
It had to be sometime.
Get it over with, get it over with
now. He opened the fence-gap, slipped
through, and closed it firmly
behind him. He retrieved his bag,
and waded quietly through the tall
grass until he reached the hedge
which divided an area of sickly
peach trees from the field. He got
over the hedge somehow, and started
through the trees toward the
house. He stumbled over some old
boards, and they clattered.
" Shhh! " he hissed, and moved
on.
The dogs were barking angrily,
and he heard a screen door slam.
He stopped.
"Ho there!" a male voice called
experimentally from the house.
One of Marie's brothers. Hogey
stood frozen in the shadow of a
peach tree, waiting.
"Anybody out there?" the man
called again.
Hogey waited, then heard the
man muttering, "Sic 'im, boy, sic
'im."
The hound's bark became eager.
The animal came chasing down the
slope, and stopped ten feet away to
crouch and bark frantically at the
shadow in the gloom. He knew the
dog.
"Hooky!" he whispered. "Hooky
boy—here!"
The dog stopped barking, sniffed,
trotted closer, and went
" Rrrooff! " Then he started sniffing
suspiciously again.
"Easy, Hooky, here boy!" he
whispered.
The dog came forward silently,
sniffed his hand, and whined in
recognition. Then he trotted around
Hogey, panting doggy affection and
dancing an invitation to romp. The
man whistled from the porch. The
dog froze, then trotted quickly back
up the slope.
"Nothing, eh, Hooky?" the
man on the porch said. "Chasin'
armadillos again, eh?"
The screen door slammed again,
and the porch light went out.
Hogey stood there staring, unable
to think. Somewhere beyond the
window lights were—his woman,
his son.
What the hell was a tumbler doing
with a woman and a son?
After perhaps a minute, he stepped
forward again. He tripped over
a shovel, and his foot plunged into
something that went squelch and
swallowed the foot past the ankle.
He fell forward into a heap of
sand, and his foot went deeper into
the sloppy wetness.
He lay there with his stinging
forehead on his arms, cursing softly
and crying. Finally he rolled
over, pulled his foot out of the
mess, and took off his shoes. They
were full of mud—sticky sandy
mud.
The dark world was reeling
about him, and the wind was dragging
at his breath. He fell back
against the sand pile and let his
feet sink in the mud hole and wriggled
his toes. He was laughing
soundlessly, and his face was wet
in the wind. He couldn't think. He
couldn't remember where he was
and why, and he stopped caring,
and after a while he felt better.
The stars were swimming over
him, dancing crazily, and the mud
cooled his feet, and the sand was
soft behind him. He saw a rocket
go up on a tail of flame from the
station, and waited for the sound of
its blast, but he was already asleep
when it came.
It was far past midnight when he
became conscious of the dog licking
wetly at his ear and cheek. He
pushed the animal away with a low
curse and mopped at the side of his
face. He stirred, and groaned. His
feet were burning up! He tried to
pull them toward him, but they
wouldn't budge. There was something
wrong with his legs.
For an instant he stared wildly
around in the night. Then he remembered
where he was, closed his
eyes and shuddered. When he
opened them again, the moon had
emerged from behind a cloud, and
he could see clearly the cruel trap
into which he had accidentally
stumbled. A pile of old boards, a
careful stack of new lumber, a
pick and shovel, a sand-pile, heaps
of fresh-turned earth, and a concrete
mixer—well, it added up.
He gripped his ankles and pulled,
but his feet wouldn't budge. In
sudden terror, he tried to stand up,
but his ankles were clutched by the
concrete too, and he fell back in
the sand with a low moan. He lay
still for several minutes, considering
carefully.
He pulled at his left foot. It was
locked in a vise. He tugged even
more desperately at his right foot.
It was equally immovable.
He sat up with a whimper and
clawed at the rough concrete until
his nails tore and his fingertips
bled. The surface still felt damp,
but it had hardened while he slept.
He sat there stunned until Hooky
began licking at his scuffed fingers.
He shouldered the dog away, and
dug his hands into the sand-pile to
stop the bleeding. Hooky licked at
his face, panting love.
"Get away!" he croaked savagely.
The dog whined softly, trotted
a short distance away, circled, and
came back to crouch down in the
sand directly before Hogey, inching
forward experimentally.
Hogey gripped fistfuls of the dry
sand and cursed between his teeth,
while his eyes wandered over the
sky. They came to rest on the sliver
of light—the space station—rising
in the west, floating out in Big Bottomless
where the gang was—Nichols
and Guerrera and Lavrenti
and Fats. And he wasn't forgetting
Keesey, the rookie who'd replaced
him.
Keesey would have a rough time
for a while—rough as a cob. The pit
was no playground. The first time
you went out of the station in a
suit, the pit got you. Everything
was falling, and you fell, with it.
Everything. The skeletons of steel,
the tire-shaped station, the spheres
and docks and nightmare shapes—all
tied together by umbilical cables
and flexible tubes. Like some crazy
sea-thing they seemed, floating in a
black ocean with its tentacles bound
together by drifting strands in the
dark tide that bore it.
Everything was pain-bright or
dead black, and it wheeled around
you, and you went nuts trying to
figure which way was down. In fact,
it took you months to teach your
body that all ways were down and
that the pit was bottomless.
He became conscious of a plaintive
sound in the wind, and froze to
listen.
It was a baby crying.
It was nearly a minute before he
got the significance of it. It hit him
where he lived, and he began jerking
frantically at his encased feet
and sobbing low in his throat.
They'd hear him if he kept that up.
He stopped and covered his ears to
close out the cry of his firstborn. A
light went on in the house, and
when it went off again, the infant's
cry had ceased.
Another rocket went up from the
station, and he cursed it. Space was
a disease, and he had it.
"Help!" he cried out suddenly.
"I'm stuck! Help me, help me!"
He knew he was yelling hysterically
at the sky and fighting the relentless
concrete that clutched his
feet, and after a moment he stopped.
The light was on in the house
again, and he heard faint sounds.
The stirring-about woke the baby
again, and once more the infant's
wail came on the breeze.
Make the kid shut up, make the
kid shut up ...
But that was no good. It wasn't
the kid's fault. It wasn't Marie's
fault. No fathers allowed in space,
they said, but it wasn't their fault
either. They were right, and he had
only himself to blame. The kid was
an accident, but that didn't change
anything. Not a thing in the world.
It remained a tragedy.
A tumbler had no business with a
family, but what was a man going
to do? Take a skinning knife, boy,
and make yourself a eunuch. But
that was no good either. They needed
bulls out there in the pit, not
steers. And when a man came down
from a year's hitch, what was he
going to do? Live in a lonely shack
and read books for kicks? Because
you were a man, you sought out a
woman. And because she was a
woman, she got a kid, and that was
the end of it. It was nobody's fault,
nobody's at all.
He stared at the red eye of Mars
low in the southwest. They were
running out there now, and next
year he would have been on the
long long run ...
But there was no use thinking
about it. Next year and the years
after belonged to little Hogey.
He sat there with his feet locked
in the solid concrete of the footing,
staring out into Big Bottomless
while his son's cry came from the
house and the Hauptman menfolk
came wading through the tall grass
in search of someone who had cried
out. His feet were stuck tight, and
he wouldn't ever get them out. He
was sobbing softly when they found
him.
|
What is the significance of the cut wire?
|
After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about Soldier Boy by Michael Shaara.
Relevant chunks:
SOLDIER BOY
By MICHAEL SHAARA
Illustrated by EMSH
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction July 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
It's one thing to laugh at a man because his job is useless and outdated—another to depend on him when it suddenly isn't.
In the northland, deep, and in a great cave, by an everburning fire the Warrior sleeps. For this is the resting time, the time of peace, and so shall it be for a thousand years. And yet we shall summon him again, my children, when we are sore in need, and out of the north he will come, and again and again, each time we call, out of the dark and the cold, with the fire in his hands, he will come.
— Scandinavian legend
Throughout the night, thick clouds had been piling in the north; in the morning, it was misty and cold. By eight o'clock a wet, heavy, snow-smelling breeze had begun to set in, and because the crops were all down and the winter planting done, the colonists brewed hot coffee and remained inside. The wind blew steadily, icily from the north. It was well below freezing when, some time after nine, an army ship landed in a field near the settlement.
There was still time. There were some last brief moments in which the colonists could act and feel as they had always done. They therefore grumbled in annoyance. They wanted no soldiers here. The few who had convenient windows stared out with distaste and a mild curiosity, but no one went out to greet them.
After a while a rather tall, frail-looking man came out of the ship and stood upon the hard ground looking toward the village. He remained there, waiting stiffly, his face turned from the wind. It was a silly thing to do. He was obviously not coming in, either out of pride or just plain orneriness.
"Well, I never," a nice lady said.
"What's he just standing there for?" another lady said.
And all of them thought: well, God knows what's in the mind of a soldier, and right away many people concluded that he must be drunk. The seed of peace was deeply planted in these people, in the children and the women, very, very deep. And because they had been taught, oh so carefully, to hate war they had also been taught, quite incidentally, to despise soldiers.
The lone man kept standing in the freezing wind.
Eventually, because even a soldier can look small and cold and pathetic, Bob Rossel had to get up out of a nice, warm bed and go out in that miserable cold to meet him.
The soldier saluted. Like most soldiers, he was not too neat and not too clean and the salute was sloppy. Although he was bigger than Rossel he did not seem bigger. And, because of the cold, there were tears gathering in the ends of his eyes.
"Captain Dylan, sir." His voice was low and did not carry. "I have a message from Fleet Headquarters. Are you in charge here?"
Rossel, a small sober man, grunted. "Nobody's in charge here. If you want a spokesman I guess I'll do. What's up?"
The captain regarded him briefly out of pale blue, expressionless eyes. Then he pulled an envelope from an inside pocket, handed it to Rossel. It was a thick, official-looking thing and Rossel hefted it idly. He was about to ask again what was it all about when the airlock of the hovering ship swung open creakily. A beefy, black-haired young man appeared unsteadily in the doorway, called to Dylan.
"C'n I go now, Jim?"
Dylan turned and nodded.
"Be back for you tonight," the young man called, and then, grinning, he yelled "Catch" and tossed down a bottle. The captain caught it and put it unconcernedly into his pocket while Rossel stared in disgust. A moment later the airlock closed and the ship prepared to lift.
"Was he drunk ?" Rossel began angrily. "Was that a bottle of liquor ?"
The soldier was looking at him calmly, coldly. He indicated the envelope in Rossel's hand. "You'd better read that and get moving. We haven't much time."
He turned and walked toward the buildings and Rossel had to follow. As Rossel drew near the walls the watchers could see his lips moving but could not hear him. Just then the ship lifted and they turned to watch that, and followed it upward, red spark-tailed, into the gray spongy clouds and the cold.
After a while the ship went out of sight, and nobody ever saw it again.
The first contact Man had ever had with an intelligent alien race occurred out on the perimeter in a small quiet place a long way from home. Late in the year 2360—the exact date remains unknown—an alien force attacked and destroyed the colony at Lupus V. The wreckage and the dead were found by a mailship which flashed off screaming for the army.
When the army came it found this: Of the seventy registered colonists, thirty-one were dead. The rest, including some women and children, were missing. All technical equipment, all radios, guns, machines, even books, were also missing. The buildings had been burned, so were the bodies. Apparently the aliens had a heat ray. What else they had, nobody knew. After a few days of walking around in the ash, one soldier finally stumbled on something.
For security reasons, there was a detonator in one of the main buildings. In case of enemy attack, Security had provided a bomb to be buried in the center of each colony, because it was important to blow a whole village to hell and gone rather than let a hostile alien learn vital facts about human technology and body chemistry. There was a bomb at Lupus V too, and though it had been detonated it had not blown. The detonating wire had been cut.
In the heart of the camp, hidden from view under twelve inches of earth, the wire had been dug up and cut.
The army could not understand it and had no time to try. After five hundred years of peace and anti-war conditioning the army was small, weak and without respect. Therefore, the army did nothing but spread the news, and Man began to fall back.
In a thickening, hastening stream he came back from the hard-won stars, blowing up his homes behind him, stunned and cursing. Most of the colonists got out in time. A few, the farthest and loneliest, died in fire before the army ships could reach them. And the men in those ships, drinkers and gamblers and veterans of nothing, the dregs of a society which had grown beyond them, were for a long while the only defense Earth had.
This was the message Captain Dylan had brought, come out from Earth with a bottle on his hip.
An obscenely cheerful expression upon his gaunt, not too well shaven face, Captain Dylan perched himself upon the edge of a table and listened, one long booted leg swinging idly. One by one the colonists were beginning to understand. War is huge and comes with great suddenness and always without reason, and there is inevitably a wait, between acts, between the news and the motion, the fear and the rage.
Dylan waited. These people were taking it well, much better than those in the cities had taken it. But then, these were pioneers. Dylan grinned. Pioneers. Before you settle a planet you boil it and bake it and purge it of all possible disease. Then you step down gingerly and inflate your plastic houses, which harden and become warm and impregnable; and send your machines out to plant and harvest; and set up automatic factories to transmute dirt into coffee; and, without ever having lifted a finger, you have braved the wilderness, hewed a home out of the living rock and become a pioneer. Dylan grinned again. But at least this was better than the wailing of the cities.
This Dylan thought, although he was himself no fighter, no man at all by any standards. This he thought because he was a soldier and an outcast; to every drunken man the fall of the sober is a happy thing. He stirred restlessly.
By this time the colonists had begun to realize that there wasn't much to say, and a tall, handsome woman was murmuring distractedly: "Lupus, Lupus—doesn't that mean wolves or something?"
Dylan began to wish they would get moving, these pioneers. It was very possible that the aliens would be here soon, and there was no need for discussion. There was only one thing to do and that was to clear the hell out, quickly and without argument. They began to see it.
But, when the fear had died down, the resentment came. A number of women began to cluster around Dylan and complain, working up their anger. Dylan said nothing. Then the man Rossel pushed forward and confronted him, speaking with a vast annoyance.
"See here, soldier, this is our planet. I mean to say, this is our home . We demand some protection from the fleet. By God, we've been paying the freight for you boys all these years and it's high time you earned your keep. We demand...."
It went on and on while Dylan looked at the clock and waited. He hoped that he could end this quickly. A big gloomy man was in front of him now and giving him that name of ancient contempt, "soldier boy." The gloomy man wanted to know where the fleet was.
"There is no fleet. There are a few hundred half-shot old tubs that were obsolete before you were born. There are four or five new jobs for the brass and the government. That's all the fleet there is."
Dylan wanted to go on about that, to remind them that nobody had wanted the army, that the fleet had grown smaller and smaller ... but this was not the time. It was ten-thirty already and the damned aliens might be coming in right now for all he knew, and all they did was talk. He had realized a long time ago that no peace-loving nation in the history of Earth had ever kept itself strong, and although peace was a noble dream, it was ended now and it was time to move.
"We'd better get going," he finally said, and there was quiet.
"Lieutenant Bossio has gone on to your sister colony at Planet Three of this system. He'll return to pick me up by nightfall and I'm instructed to have you gone by then."
For a long moment they waited, and then one man abruptly walked off and the rest followed quickly; in a moment they were all gone. One or two stopped long enough to complain about the fleet, and the big gloomy man said he wanted guns, that's all, and there wouldn't nobody get him off his planet. When he left, Dylan breathed with relief and went out to check the bomb, grateful for the action.
Most of it had to be done in the open. He found a metal bar in the radio shack and began chopping at the frozen ground, following the wire. It was the first thing he had done with his hands in weeks, and it felt fine.
Dylan had been called up out of a bar—he and Bossio—and told what had happened, and in three weeks now they had cleared four colonies. This would be the last, and the tension here was beginning to get to him. After thirty years of hanging around and playing like the town drunk, a man could not be expected to rush out and plug the breach, just like that. It would take time.
He rested, sweating, took a pull from the bottle on his hip.
Before they sent him out on this trip they had made him a captain. Well, that was nice. After thirty years he was a captain. For thirty years he had bummed all over the west end of space, had scraped his way along the outer edges of Mankind, had waited and dozed and patrolled and got drunk, waiting always for something to happen. There were a lot of ways to pass the time while you waited for something to happen, and he had done them all.
Once he had even studied military tactics.
He could not help smiling at that, even now. Damn it, he'd been green. But he'd been only nineteen when his father died—of a hernia, of a crazy fool thing like a hernia that killed him just because he'd worked too long on a heavy planet—and in those days the anti-war conditioning out on the Rim was not very strong. They talked a lot about guardians of the frontier, and they got him and some other kids and a broken-down doctor. And ... now he was a captain.
He bent his back savagely, digging at the ground. You wait and you wait and the edge goes off. This thing he had waited for all those damn days was upon him now and there was nothing he could do but say the hell with it and go home. Somewhere along the line, in some dark corner of the bars or the jails, in one of the million soul-murdering insults which are reserved especially for peacetime soldiers, he had lost the core of himself, and it didn't particularly matter. That was the point: it made no particular difference if he never got it back. He owed nobody. He was tugging at the wire and trying to think of something pleasant from the old days, when the wire came loose in his hands.
Although he had been, in his cynical way, expecting it, for a moment it threw him and he just stared. The end was clean and bright. The wire had just been cut.
Dylan sat for a long while by the radio shack, holding the ends in his hands. He reached almost automatically for the bottle on his hip and then, for the first time he could remember, let it go. This was real, there was no time for that.
When Rossel came up, Dylan was still sitting. Rossel was so excited he did not notice the wire.
"Listen, soldier, how many people can your ship take?"
Dylan looked at him vaguely. "She sleeps two and won't take off with more'n ten. Why?"
His eyes bright and worried, Rossel leaned heavily against the shack.
"We're overloaded. There are sixty of us and our ship will only take forty. We came out in groups, we never thought...."
Dylan dropped his eyes, swearing silently. "You're sure? No baggage, no iron rations; you couldn't get ten more on?"
"Not a chance. She's only a little ship with one deck—she's all we could afford."
Dylan whistled. He had begun to feel light-headed. "It 'pears that somebody's gonna find out first hand what them aliens look like."
It was the wrong thing to say and he knew it. "All right," he said quickly, still staring at the clear-sliced wire, "we'll do what we can. Maybe the colony on Three has room. I'll call Bossio and ask."
The colonist had begun to look quite pitifully at the buildings around him and the scurrying people.
"Aren't there any fleet ships within radio distance?"
Dylan shook his head. "The fleet's spread out kind of thin nowadays." Because the other was leaning on him he felt a great irritation, but he said, as kindly as he could, "We'll get 'em all out. One way or another, we won't leave anybody."
It was then that Rossel saw the wire. Thickly, he asked what had happened.
Dylan showed him the two clean ends. "Somebody dug it up, cut it, then buried it again and packed it down real nice."
"The damn fool!" Rossel exploded.
"Who?"
"Why, one of ... of us, of course. I know nobody ever liked sitting on a live bomb like this, but I never...."
"You think one of your people did it?"
Rossel stared at him. "Isn't that obvious?"
"Why?"
"Well, they probably thought it was too dangerous, and silly too, like most government rules. Or maybe one of the kids...."
It was then that Dylan told him about the wire on Lupus V. Rossel was silent. Involuntarily, he glanced at the sky, then he said shakily,
"Maybe an animal?"
Dylan shook his head. "No animal did that. Wouldn't have buried it, or found it in the first place. Heck of a coincidence, don't you think? The wire at Lupus was cut just before an alien attack, and now this one is cut too—newly cut."
The colonist put one hand to his mouth, his eyes wide and white.
"So something," said Dylan, "knew enough about this camp to know that a bomb was buried here and also to know why it was here. And that something didn't want the camp destroyed and so came right into the center of the camp, traced the wire, dug it up and cut it. And then walked right out again."
"Listen," said Rossel, "I'd better go ask."
He started away but Dylan caught his arm.
"Tell them to arm," he said, "and try not to scare hell out of them. I'll be with you as soon as I've spliced this wire."
Rossel nodded and went off, running. Dylan knelt with the metal in his hands.
He began to feel that, by God, he was getting cold. He realized that he'd better go inside soon, but the wire had to be spliced. That was perhaps the most important thing he could do now, splice the wire.
All right, he asked himself for the thousandth time, who cut it? How? Telepathy? Could they somehow control one of us?
No. If they controlled one, then they could control all, and then there would be no need for an attack. But you don't know, you don't really know.
Were they small? Little animals?
Unlikely. Biology said that really intelligent life required a sizable brain and you would have to expect an alien to be at least as large as a dog. And every form of life on this planet had been screened long before a colony had been allowed in. If any new animals had suddenly shown up, Rossel would certainly know about it.
He would ask Rossel. He would damn sure have to ask Rossel.
He finished splicing the wire and tucked it into the ground. Then he straightened up and, before he went into the radio shack, he pulled out his pistol. He checked it, primed it, and tried to remember the last time he had fired it. He never had—he never had fired a gun.
The snow began falling near noon. There was nothing anybody could do but stand in the silence and watch it come down in a white rushing wall, and watch the trees and the hills drown in the whiteness, until there was nothing on the planet but the buildings and a few warm lights and the snow.
By one o'clock the visibility was down to zero and Dylan decided to try to contact Bossio again and tell him to hurry. But Bossio still didn't answer. Dylan stared long and thoughtfully out the window through the snow at the gray shrouded shapes of bushes and trees which were beginning to become horrifying. It must be that Bossio was still drunk—maybe sleeping it off before making planetfall on Three. Dylan held no grudge. Bossio was a kid and alone. It took a special kind of guts to take a ship out into space alone, when Things could be waiting....
A young girl, pink and lovely in a thick fur jacket, came into the shack and told him breathlessly that her father, Mr. Rush, would like to know if he wanted sentries posted. Dylan hadn't thought about it but he said yes right away, beginning to feel both pleased and irritated at the same time, because now they were coming to him.
He pushed out into the cold and went to find Rossel. With the snow it was bad enough, but if they were still here when the sun went down they wouldn't have a chance. Most of the men were out stripping down their ship and that would take a while. He wondered why Rossel hadn't yet put a call through to Three, asking about room on the ship there. The only answer he could find was that Rossel knew that there was no room, and he wanted to put off the answer as long as possible. And, in a way, you could not blame him.
Rossel was in his cabin with the big, gloomy man—who turned out to be Rush, the one who had asked about sentries. Rush was methodically cleaning an old hunting rifle. Rossel was surprisingly full of hope.
"Listen, there's a mail ship due in, been due since yesterday. We might get the rest of the folks out on that."
Dylan shrugged. "Don't count on it."
"But they have a contract!"
The soldier grinned.
The big man, Rush, was paying no attention. Quite suddenly he said:
"Who cut that wire, Cap?"
Dylan swung slowly to look at him. "As far as I can figure, an alien cut it."
Rush shook his head. "No. Ain't been no aliens near this camp, and no peculiar animals either. We got a planet-wide radar, and ain't no unidentified ships come near, not since we first landed more'n a year ago." He lifted the rifle and peered through the bore. "Uh-uh. One of us did it."
The man had been thinking. And he knew the planet.
"Telepathy?" asked Dylan.
"Might be."
"Can't see it. You people live too close, you'd notice right away if one of you wasn't ... himself. And, if they've got one, why not all?"
Rush calmly—at least outwardly calmly—lit his pipe. There was a strength in this man that Dylan had missed before.
"Don't know," he said gruffly. "But these are aliens, mister. And until I know different I'm keepin' an eye on my neighbor."
He gave Rossel a sour look and Rossel stared back, uncomprehending.
Then Rossel jumped. "My God!"
Dylan moved to quiet him. "Look, is there any animal at all that ever comes near here that's as large as a dog?"
After a pause, Rush answered. "Yep, there's one. The viggle. It's like a reg'lar monkey but with four legs. Biology cleared 'em before we landed. We shoot one now and then when they get pesky." He rose slowly, the rifle held under his arm. "I b'lieve we might just as well go post them sentries."
Dylan wanted to go on with this but there was nothing much else to say. Rossel went with them as far as the radio shack, with a strained expression on his face, to put through that call to Three.
When he was gone Rush asked Dylan, "Where you want them sentries? I got Walt Halloran and Web Eggers and six others lined up."
Dylan stopped and looked around grimly at the circling wall of snow.
"You know the site better than I do. Post 'em in a ring, on rises, within calling distance. Have 'em check with each other every five minutes. I'll go help your people at the ship."
The gloomy man nodded and fluffed up his collar. "Nice day for huntin'," he said, and then he was gone with the snow quickly covering his footprints.
The Alien lay wrapped in a thick electric cocoon, buried in a wide warm room beneath the base of a tree. The tree served him as antennae; curiously he gazed into a small view-screen and watched the humans come. He saw them fan out, eight of them, and sink down in the snow. He saw that they were armed.
He pulsed thoughtfully, extending a part of himself to absorb a spiced lizard. Since the morning, when the new ship had come, he had been watching steadily, and now it was apparent that the humans were aware of their danger. Undoubtedly they were preparing to leave.
That was unfortunate. The attack was not scheduled until late that night and he could not, of course, press the assault by day. But flexibility , he reminded himself sternly, is the first principle of absorption , and therefore he moved to alter his plans. A projection reached out to dial several knobs on a large box before him, and the hour of assault was moved forward to dusk. A glance at the chronometer told him that it was already well into the night on Planet Three, and that the attack there had probably begun.
The Alien felt the first tenuous pulsing of anticipation. He lay quietly, watching the small square lights of windows against the snow, thanking the Unexplainable that matters had been so devised that he would not have to venture out into that miserable cold.
Presently an alarming thought struck him. These humans moved with uncommon speed for intelligent creatures. Even without devices, it was distinctly possible that they could be gone before nightfall. He could take no chance, of course. He spun more dials and pressed a single button, and lay back again comfortably, warmly, to watch the disabling of the colonists' ship.
When Three did not answer, Rossel was nervously gazing at the snow, thinking of other things, and he called again. Several moments later the realization of what was happening struck him like a blow. Three had never once failed to answer. All they had to do when they heard the signal buzz was go into the radio shack and say hello. That was all they had to do. He called again and again, but nobody answered. There was no static and no interference and he didn't hear a thing. He checked frenziedly through his own apparatus and tried again, but the air was as dead as deep space. He raced out to tell Dylan.
Dylan accepted it. He had known none of the people on Three and what he felt now was a much greater urgency to be out of here. He said hopeful things to Rossel, and then went out to the ship and joined the men in lightening her. About the ship at least, he knew something and he was able to tell them what partitions and frames could go and what would have to stay or the ship would never get off the planet. But even stripped down, it couldn't take them all. When he knew that, he realized that he himself would have to stay here, for it was only then that he thought of Bossio.
Three was dead. Bossio had gone down there some time ago and, if Three was dead and Bossio had not called, then the fact was that Bossio was gone too. For a long, long moment Dylan stood rooted in the snow. More than the fact that he would have to stay here was the unspoken, unalterable, heart-numbing knowledge that Bossio was dead—the one thing that Dylan could not accept. Bossio was the only friend he had. In all this dog-eared, aimless, ape-run Universe Bossio was all his friendship and his trust.
He left the ship blindly and went back to the settlement. Now the people were quiet and really frightened, and some of the women were beginning to cry. He noticed now that they had begun to look at him with hope as he passed, and in his own grief, humanly, he swore.
Bossio—a big-grinning kid with no parents, no enemies, no grudges—Bossio was already dead because he had come out here and tried to help these people. People who had kicked or ignored him all the days of his life. And, in a short while, Dylan would also stay behind and die to save the life of somebody he never knew and who, twenty-four hours earlier, would have been ashamed to be found in his company. Now, when it was far, far too late, they were coming to the army for help.
But in the end, damn it, he could not hate these people. All they had ever wanted was peace, and even though they had never understood that the Universe is unknowable and that you must always have big shoulders, still they had always sought only for peace. If peace leads to no conflict at all and then decay, well, that was something that had to be learned. So he could not hate these people.
But he could not help them either. He turned from their eyes and went into the radio shack. It had begun to dawn on the women that they might be leaving without their husbands or sons, and he did not want to see the fierce struggle that he was sure would take place. He sat alone and tried, for the last time, to call Bossio.
After a while, an old woman found him and offered him coffee. It was a very decent thing to do, to think of him at a time like this, and he was so suddenly grateful he could only nod. The woman said that he must be cold in that thin army thing and that she had brought along a mackinaw for him. She poured the coffee and left him alone.
They were thinking of him now, he knew, because they were thinking of everyone who had to stay. Throw the dog a bone. Dammit, don't be like that, he told himself. He had not had anything to eat all day and the coffee was warm and strong. He decided he might be of some help at the ship.
It was stripped down now and they were loading. He was startled to see a great group of them standing in the snow, removing their clothes. Then he understood. The clothes of forty people would change the weight by enough to get a few more aboard. There was no fighting. Some of the women were almost hysterical and a few had refused to go and were still in their cabins, but the process was orderly. Children went automatically, as did the youngest husbands and all the women. The elders were shuffling around in the snow, waving their arms to keep themselves warm. Some of them were laughing to keep their spirits up.
In the end, the ship took forty-six people.
Rossel was one of the ones that would not be going. Dylan saw him standing by the airlock holding his wife in his arms, his face buried in her soft brown hair. A sense of great sympathy, totally unexpected, rose up in Dylan, and a little of the lostness of thirty years went slipping away. These were his people. It was a thing he had never understood before, because he had never once been among men in great trouble. He waited and watched, learning, trying to digest this while there was still time. Then the semi-naked colonists were inside and the airlock closed. But when the ship tried to lift, there was a sharp burning smell—she couldn't get off the ground.
Question:
What is the significance of the cut wire?
Answer:
|
[
"When the army investigates the destruction of Lupus V, it discovers that the wire to the bomb that would blow up the community had been cut. The wire was hidden 12 inches under the ground, so it would not have been easy to find. Since the wire was cut, the bomb didn’t explode, enabling the aliens to take the women and children, along with all the technology, from the planet. The purpose of the bomb was to prevent the aliens from gaining knowledge of human technology and body chemistry; presumably, aliens would be able to use this information against humans in the future. Because Dylan knows of the cut wire on Lupus V, he checks the wire for the bomb on the planet he has come to evacuate. When he discovers the wire is cut here, too, he notes that the ends are clean, so someone made the cut recently. The ground over the wire was packed down, so whoever cut it also wanted to hide that it had been tampered with. Rossel assumes one of the colonists must have cut the wire, possibly thinking it was dangerous for the colonists and just a silly government rule. After Dylan tells him about the wire being cut on Lupus V, Rossel plans to question everyone. Dylan wonders if the aliens could have cut it by telepathy of one of the colonists but rules that out because if they could control one human, they could control all of them. Dylan then wonders if an alien has done it. No one knows what the aliens look like, but for them to have intelligence, they would need a large brain, making the alien about the size of a large dog. Dylan knows all the animals on the planet had been vetted before the colony was settled. When he tells the others his suspicion, Rush says the only animal they’ve seen nearby is a viggle, which is something like a monkey with four legs. The viggle passed Biology’s screening, so the viggle is ruled out. Although Dylan doesn’t discover the alien hidden in its electric cocoon, he is convinced that aliens cut the wire. He is also convinced that the alien attack is imminent.\n",
"After the 70 colonists on Lupus V were either captured or killed, the soldiers discovered a cut wire leading to the detonator. The bombs were placed to protect human secrets, chemistry, and biology from prying alien hands. The fact that someone or something knew about the bomb and knew how to preven it from detonating suggests that the aliens are more intelligent about human life than everyone previously thought. \nWhen Captain Dylan finds the cut wire on the ice-cold colony, he realizes that they need to evacuate as quickly as possible, since this is the sign that the aliens are already here. \n",
"The wire being discussed is one which connects a detonator to a bomb mandated to be a the center of each human colony for security purposes. The bomb is intended to destroy the entire colony and all the people in it upon alien attach so that the aliens don’t learn about human technology and body chemistry.\nThe bomb on Lupus V, the first colony to be attacked, did not blow because the wire had been cut. Thus, the alien attack captured many of the humans there, potentially giving them access to their technology and biology that humans had been trying to keep secure. Similarly, the wire had been cut on the planet that Captain Dylan landed on to evacuate in the story, which he discovered by digging down to it almost a foot underground. The reader learns there is an alien hiding underground nearby controlling the attack that may have been capable of cutting the wire through something like telepathy. The significance that two wires were cut in the same way suggests that the aliens are mounting a concerted attack on many human colonies and disabling their detonators in order to gain advantages over humans by learning their secrets.\n",
"Each colony had a bomb buried in the center, which would be detonated in the event of an alien attack in order to prevent them from learning important facts about human technology and body chemistry. When the aliens attacked and destroyed Lupus V in 2360, the army investigated the remnants of the colony there; they discovered the wire that was hidden under a foot of earth and was intended to trigger the detonation had been dug up and cut, thereby preventing detonation. Dylan discovers a similar situation when he arrives at the unnamed colony of the story. When he finds the cut wire, Rossel believes it is one of the colonists lashing out against a government they do not respect. When Rush sees the wire, he agrees with Dylan that it must be some kind of telepathic alien intervention. In fact, an alien had cut the wire, presumably by deploying a box that allowed it to perform actions remotely from a subterranean control center. The cut wire provides the warning the colonists need in order to have time to evacuate before the alien attack."
] |
50848
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SOLDIER BOY
By MICHAEL SHAARA
Illustrated by EMSH
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction July 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
It's one thing to laugh at a man because his job is useless and outdated—another to depend on him when it suddenly isn't.
In the northland, deep, and in a great cave, by an everburning fire the Warrior sleeps. For this is the resting time, the time of peace, and so shall it be for a thousand years. And yet we shall summon him again, my children, when we are sore in need, and out of the north he will come, and again and again, each time we call, out of the dark and the cold, with the fire in his hands, he will come.
— Scandinavian legend
Throughout the night, thick clouds had been piling in the north; in the morning, it was misty and cold. By eight o'clock a wet, heavy, snow-smelling breeze had begun to set in, and because the crops were all down and the winter planting done, the colonists brewed hot coffee and remained inside. The wind blew steadily, icily from the north. It was well below freezing when, some time after nine, an army ship landed in a field near the settlement.
There was still time. There were some last brief moments in which the colonists could act and feel as they had always done. They therefore grumbled in annoyance. They wanted no soldiers here. The few who had convenient windows stared out with distaste and a mild curiosity, but no one went out to greet them.
After a while a rather tall, frail-looking man came out of the ship and stood upon the hard ground looking toward the village. He remained there, waiting stiffly, his face turned from the wind. It was a silly thing to do. He was obviously not coming in, either out of pride or just plain orneriness.
"Well, I never," a nice lady said.
"What's he just standing there for?" another lady said.
And all of them thought: well, God knows what's in the mind of a soldier, and right away many people concluded that he must be drunk. The seed of peace was deeply planted in these people, in the children and the women, very, very deep. And because they had been taught, oh so carefully, to hate war they had also been taught, quite incidentally, to despise soldiers.
The lone man kept standing in the freezing wind.
Eventually, because even a soldier can look small and cold and pathetic, Bob Rossel had to get up out of a nice, warm bed and go out in that miserable cold to meet him.
The soldier saluted. Like most soldiers, he was not too neat and not too clean and the salute was sloppy. Although he was bigger than Rossel he did not seem bigger. And, because of the cold, there were tears gathering in the ends of his eyes.
"Captain Dylan, sir." His voice was low and did not carry. "I have a message from Fleet Headquarters. Are you in charge here?"
Rossel, a small sober man, grunted. "Nobody's in charge here. If you want a spokesman I guess I'll do. What's up?"
The captain regarded him briefly out of pale blue, expressionless eyes. Then he pulled an envelope from an inside pocket, handed it to Rossel. It was a thick, official-looking thing and Rossel hefted it idly. He was about to ask again what was it all about when the airlock of the hovering ship swung open creakily. A beefy, black-haired young man appeared unsteadily in the doorway, called to Dylan.
"C'n I go now, Jim?"
Dylan turned and nodded.
"Be back for you tonight," the young man called, and then, grinning, he yelled "Catch" and tossed down a bottle. The captain caught it and put it unconcernedly into his pocket while Rossel stared in disgust. A moment later the airlock closed and the ship prepared to lift.
"Was he drunk ?" Rossel began angrily. "Was that a bottle of liquor ?"
The soldier was looking at him calmly, coldly. He indicated the envelope in Rossel's hand. "You'd better read that and get moving. We haven't much time."
He turned and walked toward the buildings and Rossel had to follow. As Rossel drew near the walls the watchers could see his lips moving but could not hear him. Just then the ship lifted and they turned to watch that, and followed it upward, red spark-tailed, into the gray spongy clouds and the cold.
After a while the ship went out of sight, and nobody ever saw it again.
The first contact Man had ever had with an intelligent alien race occurred out on the perimeter in a small quiet place a long way from home. Late in the year 2360—the exact date remains unknown—an alien force attacked and destroyed the colony at Lupus V. The wreckage and the dead were found by a mailship which flashed off screaming for the army.
When the army came it found this: Of the seventy registered colonists, thirty-one were dead. The rest, including some women and children, were missing. All technical equipment, all radios, guns, machines, even books, were also missing. The buildings had been burned, so were the bodies. Apparently the aliens had a heat ray. What else they had, nobody knew. After a few days of walking around in the ash, one soldier finally stumbled on something.
For security reasons, there was a detonator in one of the main buildings. In case of enemy attack, Security had provided a bomb to be buried in the center of each colony, because it was important to blow a whole village to hell and gone rather than let a hostile alien learn vital facts about human technology and body chemistry. There was a bomb at Lupus V too, and though it had been detonated it had not blown. The detonating wire had been cut.
In the heart of the camp, hidden from view under twelve inches of earth, the wire had been dug up and cut.
The army could not understand it and had no time to try. After five hundred years of peace and anti-war conditioning the army was small, weak and without respect. Therefore, the army did nothing but spread the news, and Man began to fall back.
In a thickening, hastening stream he came back from the hard-won stars, blowing up his homes behind him, stunned and cursing. Most of the colonists got out in time. A few, the farthest and loneliest, died in fire before the army ships could reach them. And the men in those ships, drinkers and gamblers and veterans of nothing, the dregs of a society which had grown beyond them, were for a long while the only defense Earth had.
This was the message Captain Dylan had brought, come out from Earth with a bottle on his hip.
An obscenely cheerful expression upon his gaunt, not too well shaven face, Captain Dylan perched himself upon the edge of a table and listened, one long booted leg swinging idly. One by one the colonists were beginning to understand. War is huge and comes with great suddenness and always without reason, and there is inevitably a wait, between acts, between the news and the motion, the fear and the rage.
Dylan waited. These people were taking it well, much better than those in the cities had taken it. But then, these were pioneers. Dylan grinned. Pioneers. Before you settle a planet you boil it and bake it and purge it of all possible disease. Then you step down gingerly and inflate your plastic houses, which harden and become warm and impregnable; and send your machines out to plant and harvest; and set up automatic factories to transmute dirt into coffee; and, without ever having lifted a finger, you have braved the wilderness, hewed a home out of the living rock and become a pioneer. Dylan grinned again. But at least this was better than the wailing of the cities.
This Dylan thought, although he was himself no fighter, no man at all by any standards. This he thought because he was a soldier and an outcast; to every drunken man the fall of the sober is a happy thing. He stirred restlessly.
By this time the colonists had begun to realize that there wasn't much to say, and a tall, handsome woman was murmuring distractedly: "Lupus, Lupus—doesn't that mean wolves or something?"
Dylan began to wish they would get moving, these pioneers. It was very possible that the aliens would be here soon, and there was no need for discussion. There was only one thing to do and that was to clear the hell out, quickly and without argument. They began to see it.
But, when the fear had died down, the resentment came. A number of women began to cluster around Dylan and complain, working up their anger. Dylan said nothing. Then the man Rossel pushed forward and confronted him, speaking with a vast annoyance.
"See here, soldier, this is our planet. I mean to say, this is our home . We demand some protection from the fleet. By God, we've been paying the freight for you boys all these years and it's high time you earned your keep. We demand...."
It went on and on while Dylan looked at the clock and waited. He hoped that he could end this quickly. A big gloomy man was in front of him now and giving him that name of ancient contempt, "soldier boy." The gloomy man wanted to know where the fleet was.
"There is no fleet. There are a few hundred half-shot old tubs that were obsolete before you were born. There are four or five new jobs for the brass and the government. That's all the fleet there is."
Dylan wanted to go on about that, to remind them that nobody had wanted the army, that the fleet had grown smaller and smaller ... but this was not the time. It was ten-thirty already and the damned aliens might be coming in right now for all he knew, and all they did was talk. He had realized a long time ago that no peace-loving nation in the history of Earth had ever kept itself strong, and although peace was a noble dream, it was ended now and it was time to move.
"We'd better get going," he finally said, and there was quiet.
"Lieutenant Bossio has gone on to your sister colony at Planet Three of this system. He'll return to pick me up by nightfall and I'm instructed to have you gone by then."
For a long moment they waited, and then one man abruptly walked off and the rest followed quickly; in a moment they were all gone. One or two stopped long enough to complain about the fleet, and the big gloomy man said he wanted guns, that's all, and there wouldn't nobody get him off his planet. When he left, Dylan breathed with relief and went out to check the bomb, grateful for the action.
Most of it had to be done in the open. He found a metal bar in the radio shack and began chopping at the frozen ground, following the wire. It was the first thing he had done with his hands in weeks, and it felt fine.
Dylan had been called up out of a bar—he and Bossio—and told what had happened, and in three weeks now they had cleared four colonies. This would be the last, and the tension here was beginning to get to him. After thirty years of hanging around and playing like the town drunk, a man could not be expected to rush out and plug the breach, just like that. It would take time.
He rested, sweating, took a pull from the bottle on his hip.
Before they sent him out on this trip they had made him a captain. Well, that was nice. After thirty years he was a captain. For thirty years he had bummed all over the west end of space, had scraped his way along the outer edges of Mankind, had waited and dozed and patrolled and got drunk, waiting always for something to happen. There were a lot of ways to pass the time while you waited for something to happen, and he had done them all.
Once he had even studied military tactics.
He could not help smiling at that, even now. Damn it, he'd been green. But he'd been only nineteen when his father died—of a hernia, of a crazy fool thing like a hernia that killed him just because he'd worked too long on a heavy planet—and in those days the anti-war conditioning out on the Rim was not very strong. They talked a lot about guardians of the frontier, and they got him and some other kids and a broken-down doctor. And ... now he was a captain.
He bent his back savagely, digging at the ground. You wait and you wait and the edge goes off. This thing he had waited for all those damn days was upon him now and there was nothing he could do but say the hell with it and go home. Somewhere along the line, in some dark corner of the bars or the jails, in one of the million soul-murdering insults which are reserved especially for peacetime soldiers, he had lost the core of himself, and it didn't particularly matter. That was the point: it made no particular difference if he never got it back. He owed nobody. He was tugging at the wire and trying to think of something pleasant from the old days, when the wire came loose in his hands.
Although he had been, in his cynical way, expecting it, for a moment it threw him and he just stared. The end was clean and bright. The wire had just been cut.
Dylan sat for a long while by the radio shack, holding the ends in his hands. He reached almost automatically for the bottle on his hip and then, for the first time he could remember, let it go. This was real, there was no time for that.
When Rossel came up, Dylan was still sitting. Rossel was so excited he did not notice the wire.
"Listen, soldier, how many people can your ship take?"
Dylan looked at him vaguely. "She sleeps two and won't take off with more'n ten. Why?"
His eyes bright and worried, Rossel leaned heavily against the shack.
"We're overloaded. There are sixty of us and our ship will only take forty. We came out in groups, we never thought...."
Dylan dropped his eyes, swearing silently. "You're sure? No baggage, no iron rations; you couldn't get ten more on?"
"Not a chance. She's only a little ship with one deck—she's all we could afford."
Dylan whistled. He had begun to feel light-headed. "It 'pears that somebody's gonna find out first hand what them aliens look like."
It was the wrong thing to say and he knew it. "All right," he said quickly, still staring at the clear-sliced wire, "we'll do what we can. Maybe the colony on Three has room. I'll call Bossio and ask."
The colonist had begun to look quite pitifully at the buildings around him and the scurrying people.
"Aren't there any fleet ships within radio distance?"
Dylan shook his head. "The fleet's spread out kind of thin nowadays." Because the other was leaning on him he felt a great irritation, but he said, as kindly as he could, "We'll get 'em all out. One way or another, we won't leave anybody."
It was then that Rossel saw the wire. Thickly, he asked what had happened.
Dylan showed him the two clean ends. "Somebody dug it up, cut it, then buried it again and packed it down real nice."
"The damn fool!" Rossel exploded.
"Who?"
"Why, one of ... of us, of course. I know nobody ever liked sitting on a live bomb like this, but I never...."
"You think one of your people did it?"
Rossel stared at him. "Isn't that obvious?"
"Why?"
"Well, they probably thought it was too dangerous, and silly too, like most government rules. Or maybe one of the kids...."
It was then that Dylan told him about the wire on Lupus V. Rossel was silent. Involuntarily, he glanced at the sky, then he said shakily,
"Maybe an animal?"
Dylan shook his head. "No animal did that. Wouldn't have buried it, or found it in the first place. Heck of a coincidence, don't you think? The wire at Lupus was cut just before an alien attack, and now this one is cut too—newly cut."
The colonist put one hand to his mouth, his eyes wide and white.
"So something," said Dylan, "knew enough about this camp to know that a bomb was buried here and also to know why it was here. And that something didn't want the camp destroyed and so came right into the center of the camp, traced the wire, dug it up and cut it. And then walked right out again."
"Listen," said Rossel, "I'd better go ask."
He started away but Dylan caught his arm.
"Tell them to arm," he said, "and try not to scare hell out of them. I'll be with you as soon as I've spliced this wire."
Rossel nodded and went off, running. Dylan knelt with the metal in his hands.
He began to feel that, by God, he was getting cold. He realized that he'd better go inside soon, but the wire had to be spliced. That was perhaps the most important thing he could do now, splice the wire.
All right, he asked himself for the thousandth time, who cut it? How? Telepathy? Could they somehow control one of us?
No. If they controlled one, then they could control all, and then there would be no need for an attack. But you don't know, you don't really know.
Were they small? Little animals?
Unlikely. Biology said that really intelligent life required a sizable brain and you would have to expect an alien to be at least as large as a dog. And every form of life on this planet had been screened long before a colony had been allowed in. If any new animals had suddenly shown up, Rossel would certainly know about it.
He would ask Rossel. He would damn sure have to ask Rossel.
He finished splicing the wire and tucked it into the ground. Then he straightened up and, before he went into the radio shack, he pulled out his pistol. He checked it, primed it, and tried to remember the last time he had fired it. He never had—he never had fired a gun.
The snow began falling near noon. There was nothing anybody could do but stand in the silence and watch it come down in a white rushing wall, and watch the trees and the hills drown in the whiteness, until there was nothing on the planet but the buildings and a few warm lights and the snow.
By one o'clock the visibility was down to zero and Dylan decided to try to contact Bossio again and tell him to hurry. But Bossio still didn't answer. Dylan stared long and thoughtfully out the window through the snow at the gray shrouded shapes of bushes and trees which were beginning to become horrifying. It must be that Bossio was still drunk—maybe sleeping it off before making planetfall on Three. Dylan held no grudge. Bossio was a kid and alone. It took a special kind of guts to take a ship out into space alone, when Things could be waiting....
A young girl, pink and lovely in a thick fur jacket, came into the shack and told him breathlessly that her father, Mr. Rush, would like to know if he wanted sentries posted. Dylan hadn't thought about it but he said yes right away, beginning to feel both pleased and irritated at the same time, because now they were coming to him.
He pushed out into the cold and went to find Rossel. With the snow it was bad enough, but if they were still here when the sun went down they wouldn't have a chance. Most of the men were out stripping down their ship and that would take a while. He wondered why Rossel hadn't yet put a call through to Three, asking about room on the ship there. The only answer he could find was that Rossel knew that there was no room, and he wanted to put off the answer as long as possible. And, in a way, you could not blame him.
Rossel was in his cabin with the big, gloomy man—who turned out to be Rush, the one who had asked about sentries. Rush was methodically cleaning an old hunting rifle. Rossel was surprisingly full of hope.
"Listen, there's a mail ship due in, been due since yesterday. We might get the rest of the folks out on that."
Dylan shrugged. "Don't count on it."
"But they have a contract!"
The soldier grinned.
The big man, Rush, was paying no attention. Quite suddenly he said:
"Who cut that wire, Cap?"
Dylan swung slowly to look at him. "As far as I can figure, an alien cut it."
Rush shook his head. "No. Ain't been no aliens near this camp, and no peculiar animals either. We got a planet-wide radar, and ain't no unidentified ships come near, not since we first landed more'n a year ago." He lifted the rifle and peered through the bore. "Uh-uh. One of us did it."
The man had been thinking. And he knew the planet.
"Telepathy?" asked Dylan.
"Might be."
"Can't see it. You people live too close, you'd notice right away if one of you wasn't ... himself. And, if they've got one, why not all?"
Rush calmly—at least outwardly calmly—lit his pipe. There was a strength in this man that Dylan had missed before.
"Don't know," he said gruffly. "But these are aliens, mister. And until I know different I'm keepin' an eye on my neighbor."
He gave Rossel a sour look and Rossel stared back, uncomprehending.
Then Rossel jumped. "My God!"
Dylan moved to quiet him. "Look, is there any animal at all that ever comes near here that's as large as a dog?"
After a pause, Rush answered. "Yep, there's one. The viggle. It's like a reg'lar monkey but with four legs. Biology cleared 'em before we landed. We shoot one now and then when they get pesky." He rose slowly, the rifle held under his arm. "I b'lieve we might just as well go post them sentries."
Dylan wanted to go on with this but there was nothing much else to say. Rossel went with them as far as the radio shack, with a strained expression on his face, to put through that call to Three.
When he was gone Rush asked Dylan, "Where you want them sentries? I got Walt Halloran and Web Eggers and six others lined up."
Dylan stopped and looked around grimly at the circling wall of snow.
"You know the site better than I do. Post 'em in a ring, on rises, within calling distance. Have 'em check with each other every five minutes. I'll go help your people at the ship."
The gloomy man nodded and fluffed up his collar. "Nice day for huntin'," he said, and then he was gone with the snow quickly covering his footprints.
The Alien lay wrapped in a thick electric cocoon, buried in a wide warm room beneath the base of a tree. The tree served him as antennae; curiously he gazed into a small view-screen and watched the humans come. He saw them fan out, eight of them, and sink down in the snow. He saw that they were armed.
He pulsed thoughtfully, extending a part of himself to absorb a spiced lizard. Since the morning, when the new ship had come, he had been watching steadily, and now it was apparent that the humans were aware of their danger. Undoubtedly they were preparing to leave.
That was unfortunate. The attack was not scheduled until late that night and he could not, of course, press the assault by day. But flexibility , he reminded himself sternly, is the first principle of absorption , and therefore he moved to alter his plans. A projection reached out to dial several knobs on a large box before him, and the hour of assault was moved forward to dusk. A glance at the chronometer told him that it was already well into the night on Planet Three, and that the attack there had probably begun.
The Alien felt the first tenuous pulsing of anticipation. He lay quietly, watching the small square lights of windows against the snow, thanking the Unexplainable that matters had been so devised that he would not have to venture out into that miserable cold.
Presently an alarming thought struck him. These humans moved with uncommon speed for intelligent creatures. Even without devices, it was distinctly possible that they could be gone before nightfall. He could take no chance, of course. He spun more dials and pressed a single button, and lay back again comfortably, warmly, to watch the disabling of the colonists' ship.
When Three did not answer, Rossel was nervously gazing at the snow, thinking of other things, and he called again. Several moments later the realization of what was happening struck him like a blow. Three had never once failed to answer. All they had to do when they heard the signal buzz was go into the radio shack and say hello. That was all they had to do. He called again and again, but nobody answered. There was no static and no interference and he didn't hear a thing. He checked frenziedly through his own apparatus and tried again, but the air was as dead as deep space. He raced out to tell Dylan.
Dylan accepted it. He had known none of the people on Three and what he felt now was a much greater urgency to be out of here. He said hopeful things to Rossel, and then went out to the ship and joined the men in lightening her. About the ship at least, he knew something and he was able to tell them what partitions and frames could go and what would have to stay or the ship would never get off the planet. But even stripped down, it couldn't take them all. When he knew that, he realized that he himself would have to stay here, for it was only then that he thought of Bossio.
Three was dead. Bossio had gone down there some time ago and, if Three was dead and Bossio had not called, then the fact was that Bossio was gone too. For a long, long moment Dylan stood rooted in the snow. More than the fact that he would have to stay here was the unspoken, unalterable, heart-numbing knowledge that Bossio was dead—the one thing that Dylan could not accept. Bossio was the only friend he had. In all this dog-eared, aimless, ape-run Universe Bossio was all his friendship and his trust.
He left the ship blindly and went back to the settlement. Now the people were quiet and really frightened, and some of the women were beginning to cry. He noticed now that they had begun to look at him with hope as he passed, and in his own grief, humanly, he swore.
Bossio—a big-grinning kid with no parents, no enemies, no grudges—Bossio was already dead because he had come out here and tried to help these people. People who had kicked or ignored him all the days of his life. And, in a short while, Dylan would also stay behind and die to save the life of somebody he never knew and who, twenty-four hours earlier, would have been ashamed to be found in his company. Now, when it was far, far too late, they were coming to the army for help.
But in the end, damn it, he could not hate these people. All they had ever wanted was peace, and even though they had never understood that the Universe is unknowable and that you must always have big shoulders, still they had always sought only for peace. If peace leads to no conflict at all and then decay, well, that was something that had to be learned. So he could not hate these people.
But he could not help them either. He turned from their eyes and went into the radio shack. It had begun to dawn on the women that they might be leaving without their husbands or sons, and he did not want to see the fierce struggle that he was sure would take place. He sat alone and tried, for the last time, to call Bossio.
After a while, an old woman found him and offered him coffee. It was a very decent thing to do, to think of him at a time like this, and he was so suddenly grateful he could only nod. The woman said that he must be cold in that thin army thing and that she had brought along a mackinaw for him. She poured the coffee and left him alone.
They were thinking of him now, he knew, because they were thinking of everyone who had to stay. Throw the dog a bone. Dammit, don't be like that, he told himself. He had not had anything to eat all day and the coffee was warm and strong. He decided he might be of some help at the ship.
It was stripped down now and they were loading. He was startled to see a great group of them standing in the snow, removing their clothes. Then he understood. The clothes of forty people would change the weight by enough to get a few more aboard. There was no fighting. Some of the women were almost hysterical and a few had refused to go and were still in their cabins, but the process was orderly. Children went automatically, as did the youngest husbands and all the women. The elders were shuffling around in the snow, waving their arms to keep themselves warm. Some of them were laughing to keep their spirits up.
In the end, the ship took forty-six people.
Rossel was one of the ones that would not be going. Dylan saw him standing by the airlock holding his wife in his arms, his face buried in her soft brown hair. A sense of great sympathy, totally unexpected, rose up in Dylan, and a little of the lostness of thirty years went slipping away. These were his people. It was a thing he had never understood before, because he had never once been among men in great trouble. He waited and watched, learning, trying to digest this while there was still time. Then the semi-naked colonists were inside and the airlock closed. But when the ship tried to lift, there was a sharp burning smell—she couldn't get off the ground.
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Describe the setting of the story.
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about Growing up on Big Muddy by Charles V. De Vet.
Relevant chunks:
Well, naturally Kaiser would transmit baby talk messages to his mother ship! He was—
GROWING UP ON BIG MUDDY
By CHARLES V. DE VET
Illustrated by TURPIN
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction July 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Kaiser stared at the tape in his hand for a long uncomprehending minute. How long had the stuff been coming through in this inane baby talk? And why hadn't he noticed it before? Why had he had to read this last communication a third time before he recognized anything unusual about it?
He went over the words again, as though maybe this time they'd read as they should.
OO IS SICK, SMOKY. DO TO BEDDY-BY. KEEP UM WARM. WHEN UM FEELS BETTER, LET USNS KNOW.
SS II
Kaiser let himself ease back in the pilot chair and rolled the tape thoughtfully between his fingers. Overhead and to each side, large drops of rain thudded softly against the transparent walls of the scout ship and dripped wearily from the bottom ledge to the ground.
"Damn this climate!" Kaiser muttered irrelevantly. "Doesn't it ever do anything here except rain?"
His attention returned to the matter at hand. Why the baby talk? And why was his memory so hazy? How long had he been here? What had he been doing during that time?
Listlessly he reached for the towel at his elbow and wiped the moisture from his face and bare shoulders. The air conditioning had gone out when the scout ship cracked up. He'd have to repair the scout or he was stuck here for good. He remembered now that he had gone over the job very carefully and thoroughly, and had found it too big to handle alone—or without better equipment, at least. Yet there was little or no chance of his being able to find either here.
Calmly, deliberately, Kaiser collected his thoughts, his memories, and brought them out where he could look at them:
The mother ship, Soscites II , had been on the last leg of its planet-mapping tour. It had dropped Kaiser in the one remaining scout ship—the other seven had all been lost one way or another during the exploring of new worlds—and set itself into a giant orbit about this planet that Kaiser had named Big Muddy.
The Soscites II had to maintain its constant speed; it had no means of slowing, except to stop, and no way to start again once it did stop. Its limited range of maneuverability made it necessary to set up an orbit that would take it approximately one month, Earth time, to circle a pinpointed planet. And now its fuel was low.
Kaiser had that one month to repair his scout or be stranded here forever.
That was all he could remember. Nothing of what he had been doing recently.
A small shiver passed through his body as he glanced once again at the tape in his hand. Baby talk....
One thing he could find out: how long this had been going on. He turned to the communicator and unhooked the paper receptacle on its bottom. It held about a yard and a half of tape, probably his last several messages—both those sent and those received. He pulled it out impatiently and began reading.
The first was from himself:
YOUR SUGGESTIONS NO HELP. HOW AM I GOING TO REPAIR DAMAGE TO SCOUT WITHOUT PROPER EQUIPMENT? AND WHERE DO I GET IT? DO YOU THINK I FOUND A TOOL SHOP DOWN HERE? FOR GOD'S SAKE, COME UP WITH SOMETHING BETTER.
VISITED SEAL-PEOPLE AGAIN TODAY. STILL HAVE THEIR STINK IN MY NOSE. FOUND HUTS ALONG RIVER BANK, SO I GUESS THEY DON'T LIVE IN WATER. BUT THEY DO SPEND MOST OF THEIR TIME THERE. NO, I HAVE NO WAY OF ESTIMATING THEIR INTELLIGENCE. I WOULD JUDGE IT AVERAGES NO HIGHER THAN SEVEN-YEAR-OLD HUMAN. THEY DEFINITELY DO TALK TO ONE ANOTHER. WILL TRY TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THEM, BUT YOU GET TO WORK FAST ON HOW I REPAIR SCOUT.
SWELLING IN ARM WORSE AND AM DEVELOPING A FEVER. TEMPERATURE 102.7 AN HOUR AGO.
SMOKY
The ship must have answered immediately, for the return message time was six hours later than his own, the minimum interval necessary for two-way exchange.
DOING OUR BEST, SMOKY. YOUR IMMEDIATE PROBLEM, AS WE SEE IT, IS TO KEEP WELL. WE FED ALL THE INFORMATION YOU GAVE US INTO SAM, BUT YOU DIDN'T HAVE MUCH EXCEPT THE STING IN YOUR ARM. AS EXPECTED, ALL THAT CAME OUT WAS "DATA INSUFFICIENT." TRY TO GIVE US MORE. ALSO DETAIL ALL SYMPTOMS SINCE YOUR LAST REPORT. IN THE MEANTIME, WE'RE DOING EVERYTHING WE CAN AT THIS END. GOOD LUCK.
SS II
Sam, Kaiser knew, was the ship's mechanical diagnostician. His report followed:
ARM SWOLLEN. UNABLE TO KEEP DOWN FOOD LAST TWELVE HOURS. ABOUT TWO HOURS AGO, ENTIRE BODY TURNED LIVID RED. BRIEF PERIODS OF BLANKNESS. THINGS KEEP COMING AND GOING. SICK AS HELL. HURRY.
SMOKY
The ship's next message read:
INFECTION QUITE DEFINITE. BUT SOMETHING STRANGE THERE. GIVE US ANYTHING MORE YOU HAVE.
SS II
His own reply perplexed Kaiser:
LAST LETTER FUNNY. I NOT UNDERSTAND. WHY IS OO SENDING GARBLE TALK? DID USNS MAKE UP SECRET MESSAGES?
SMOKY
The expedition, apparently, was as puzzled as he:
WHAT'S THE MATTER, SMOKY? THAT LAST MESSAGE WAS IN PLAIN TERRAN. NO REASON WHY YOU COULDN'T READ IT. AND WHY THE BABY TALK? IF YOU'RE SPOOFING, STOP. GIVE US MORE SYMPTOMS. HOW ARE YOU FEELING NOW?
SS II
The baby talk was worse on Kaiser's next:
TWAZY. WHAT FOR OO TENDING TWAZY LETTERS? FINK UM CAN WEAD TWAZY LETTERS? SKIN ALL YELLOW NOW. COLD. COLD. CO
The ship's following communication was three hours late. It was the last on the tape—the one Kaiser had read earlier. Apparently they decided to humor him.
OO IS SICK, SMOKY. DO TO BEDDY-BY. KEEP UM WARM. WHEN UM FEELS BETTER, LET USNS KNOW.
SS II
That was not much help. All it told him was that he had been sick.
He felt better now, outside of a muscular weariness, as though convalescing from a long illness. He put the back of his hand to his forehead. Cool. No fever anyway.
He glanced at the clock-calendar on the instrument board and back at the date and time on the tape where he'd started his baby talk. Twenty hours. He hadn't been out of his head too long. He began punching the communicator keys while he nibbled at a biscuit.
SEEM TO BE FULLY RECOVERED. FEELING FINE. ANYTHING NEW FROM SAM? AND HOW ABOUT THE DAMAGE TO SCOUT? GIVE ME ANYTHING YOU HAVE ON EITHER OR BOTH.
SMOKY
Kaiser felt suddenly weary. He lay on the scout's bunk and tried to sleep. Soon he was in that phantasm land between sleep and wakefulness—he knew he was not sleeping, yet he did dream.
It was the same dream he had had many times before. In it, he was back home again, the home he had joined the space service to escape. He had realized soon after his marriage that his wife, Helene, did not love him. She had married him for the security his pay check provided. And though it soon became evident that she, too, regretted her bargain, she would not divorce him. Instead, she had her revenge on him by persistent nagging, by letting herself grow fat and querulous, and by caring for their house only in a slovenly way.
Her crippled brother had moved in with them the day they were married. His mind was as crippled as his body and he took an unhealthy delight in helping his sister torment Kaiser.
Kaiser came wide awake in a cold sweat. The clock showed that only an hour had passed since he had sent his last message to the ship. Still five more long hours to wait. He rose and wiped the sweat from his neck and shoulders and restlessly paced the small corridor of the scout.
After a few minutes, he stopped pacing and peered out into the gloom of Big Muddy. The rain seemed to have eased off some. Not much more than a heavy drizzle now.
Kaiser reached impulsively for the slicker he had thrown over a chest against one wall and put it on, then a pair of hip-high plastic boots and a plastic hat. He opened the door. The scout had come to rest with a slight tilt when it crashed, and Kaiser had to sit down and roll over onto his stomach to ease himself to the ground.
The weather outside was normal for Big Muddy: wet, humid, and warm.
Kaiser sank to his ankles in soft mud before his feet reached solid ground. He half walked and half slid to the rear of the scout. Beside the ship, the "octopus" was busily at work. Tentacles and antennae, extending from the yard-high box of its body, tested and recorded temperature, atmosphere, soil, and all other pertinent planetary conditions. The octopus was connected to the ship's communicator and all its findings were being transmitted to the mother ship for study.
Kaiser observed that it was working well and turned toward a wide, sluggish river, perhaps two hundred yards from the scout. Once there, he headed upstream. He could hear the pipings, and now and then a higher whistling, of the seal-people before he reached a bend and saw them. As usual, most were swimming in the river.
One old fellow, whose chocolate-brown fur showed a heavy intermixture of gray, was sitting on the bank of the river just at the bend. Perhaps a lookout. He pulled himself to his feet as he spied Kaiser and his toothless, hard-gummed mouth opened and emitted a long whistle that might have been a greeting—or a warning to the others that a stranger approached.
The native stood perhaps five feet tall, with the heavy, blubbery body of a seal, and short, thick arms. Membranes connected the arms to his body from shoulder-pits to mid-biceps. The arms ended in three-fingered, thumbless hands. His legs also were short and thick, with footpads that splayed out at forty-five-degree angles. They gave his legs the appearance of a split tail. About him hung a rank-fish smell that made Kaiser's stomach squirm.
The old fellow sounded a cheerful chirp as Kaiser came near. Feeling slightly ineffectual, Kaiser raised both hands and held them palm forward. The other chirped again and Kaiser went on toward the main group.
They had stopped their play and eating as Kaiser approached and now most of them swam in to shore and stood in the water, staring and piping. They varied in size from small seal-pups to full-grown adults. Some chewed on bunches of water weed, which they manipulated with their lips and drew into their mouths.
They had mammalian characteristics, Kaiser had noted before, so it was not difficult to distinguish the females from the males. The proportion was roughly fifty-fifty.
Several of the bolder males climbed up beside Kaiser and began pawing his plastic clothing. Kaiser stood still and tried to keep his breathing shallow, for their odor was almost more than he could bear. One native smeared Kaiser's face with an exploring paw and Kaiser gagged and pushed him roughly away. He was bound by regulations to display no hostility to newly discovered natives, but he couldn't take much more of this.
A young female splashed water on two young males who stood near and they turned with shrill pipings and chased her into the water. The entire group seemed to lose interest in Kaiser and joined in the chase, or went back to other diversions of their own. Kaiser's inspectors followed.
They were a mindless lot, Kaiser observed. The river supplied them with an easy existence, with food and living space, and apparently they had few natural enemies.
Kaiser walked away, following the long slow bend of the river, and came to a collection of perhaps two hundred dwellings built in three haphazard rows along the river bank. He took time to study their construction more closely this time.
They were all round domes, little more than the height of a man, built of blocks that appeared to be mud, packed with river weed and sand. How they were able to dry these to give them the necessary solidity, Kaiser did not know. He had found no signs that they knew how to use fire, and all apparent evidence was against their having it. They then had to have sunlight. Maybe it rained less during certain seasons.
The domes' construction was based on a series of four arches built in a circle. When the base covering the periphery had been laid, four others were built on and between them, and continued in successive tiers until the top was reached. Each tier thus furnished support for the next above. No other framework was needed. The final tier formed the roof. They made sound shelters, but Kaiser had peered into several and found them dark and dank—and as smelly as the natives themselves.
The few loungers in the village paid little attention to Kaiser and he wandered through the irregular streets until he became bored and returned to the scout.
The Soscites II sent little that helped during the next twelve hours and Kaiser occupied his time trying again to repair the damage to the scout.
The job appeared maddeningly simply. As the scout had glided in for a soft landing, its metal bottom had ridden a concealed rock and bent inward. The bent metal had carried up with it the tube supplying the fuel pump and flattened it against the motor casing.
Opening the tube again would not have been difficult, but first it had to be freed from under the ship. Kaiser had tried forcing the sheet metal back into place with a small crowbar—the best leverage he had on hand—but it resisted his best efforts. He still could think of no way to do the job, simple as it was, though he gave his concentration to it the rest of the day.
That evening, Kaiser received information from the Soscites II that was at least definite:
SET YOURSELF FOR A SHOCK, SMOKY. SAM FINALLY CAME THROUGH. YOU WON'T LIKE WHAT YOU HEAR. AT LEAST NOT AT FIRST. BUT IT COULD BE WORSE. YOU HAVE BEEN INVADED BY A SYMBIOTE—SIMILAR TO THE TYPE FOUND ON THE SAND WORLD, BARTEL-BLEETHERS. GIVE US A FEW MORE HOURS TO WORK WITH SAM AND WE'LL GET YOU ALL THE PARTICULARS HE CAN GIVE US. HANG ON NOW!
SOSCITES II
Kaiser's reply was short and succinct:
WHAT THE HELL?
SMOKY
Soscites II's next communication followed within twenty minutes and was signed by the ship's doctor:
JUST A FEW WORDS, SMOKY, IN CASE YOU'RE WORRIED. I THOUGHT I'D GET THIS OFF WHILE WE'RE WAITING FOR MORE INFORMATION FROM SAM. REMEMBER THAT A SYMBIOTE IS NOT A PARASITE. IT WILL NOT HARM YOU, EXCEPT INADVERTENTLY. YOUR WELFARE IS AS ESSENTIAL TO IT AS TO YOU. ALMOST CERTAINLY, IF YOU DIE, IT WILL DIE WITH YOU. ANY TROUBLE YOU'VE HAD SO FAR WAS PROBABLY CAUSED BY THE SYMBIOTE'S DIFFICULTY IN ADJUSTING ITSELF TO ITS NEW ENVIRONMENT. IN A WAY, I ENVY YOU. MORE LATER, WHEN WE FINISH WITH SAM.
J. G. ZARWELL
Kaiser did not answer. The news was so startling, so unforeseen, that his mind refused to accept the actuality. He lay on the scout's bunk and stared at the ceiling without conscious attention, and with very little clear thought, for several hours—until the next communication came in:
WELL, THIS IS WHAT SAM HAS TO SAY, SMOKY. SYMBIOTE AMICABLE AND APPARENTLY SWIFTLY ADAPTABLE. YOUR CHANGING COLOR, DIFFICULTY IN EATING AND EVEN BABY TALK WERE THE RESULT OF ITS EFFORTS TO GIVE YOU WHAT IT BELIEVED YOU NEEDED OR WANTED.
CHANGING COLOR: PROTECTIVE CAMOUFLAGE. TROUBLE KEEPING FOOD DOWN: IT KEPT YOUR STOMACH EMPTY BECAUSE IT SENSED YOU WERE IN TROUBLE AND MIGHT HAVE NEED FOR SHARP REFLEXES, WITH NO EXCESS WEIGHT TO CARRY. THE BABY TALK WE AREN'T TOO CERTAIN ABOUT, BUT OUR BEST CONCLUSION IS THAT WHEN YOU WERE A CHILD, YOU WERE MOST HAPPY. IT WAS TRYING TO GIVE YOU BACK THAT HAPPY STATE OF MIND. OBVIOUSLY IT QUICKLY RECOGNIZED THE MISTAKES IT MADE AND CORRECTED THEM.
SAM CAME UP WITH A FEW MORE IDEAS, BUT WE WANT TO WORK ON THEM A BIT BEFORE WE SEND THEM THROUGH. SLEEP ON THIS.
SS II
Kaiser could imagine that most of the crew were not too concerned about the trouble he was in. He was not the gregarious type and had no close friends on board. He had hoped to find the solitude he liked best in space, but he had been disappointed. True, there were fewer people here, but he was brought into such intimate contact with them that he would have been more contented living in a crowded city.
His naturally unsociable nature was more irksome to the crew because he was more intelligent and efficient than they were. He did his work well and painstakingly and was seldom in error. They would have liked him better had he been more prone to mistakes. He was certain that they respected him, but they did not like him. And he returned the dislike.
The suggestion that he get some sleep might not be a bad idea. He hadn't slept in over eighteen hours, Kaiser realized—and fell instantly asleep.
The communicator had a message waiting for him when he awoke:
SAM COULDN'T HELP US MUCH ON THIS PART, BUT AFTER RESEARCH AND MUCH DISCUSSION, WE ARRIVED AT THE FOLLOWING TWO CONCLUSIONS.
FIRST, PHYSICAL PROPERTY OF SYMBIOTE IS EITHER THAT OF A VERY THIN LIQUID OR, MORE PROBABLY, A VIRUS FORM WITH SWIFT PROPAGATION CHARACTERISTIC. IT UNDOUBTEDLY LIVES IN YOUR BLOOD STREAM AND PERMEATES YOUR SYSTEM.
SECOND, IT SEEMED TO US, AS IT MUST HAVE TO YOU, THAT THE SYMBIOTE COULD ONLY KNOW WHAT YOU WANTED BY READING YOUR MIND. HOWEVER, WE BELIEVE DIFFERENTLY NOW. WE THINK THAT IT HAS SUCH CLOSE CONTACT WITH YOUR GLANDS AND THEIR SECRETIONS, WHICH STIMULATE EMOTION, THAT IT CAN GAUGE YOUR FEELINGS EVEN MORE ACCURATELY THAN YOU YOURSELF CAN. THUS IT CAN JUDGE YOUR LIKES AND DISLIKES QUITE ACCURATELY.
WE WOULD LIKE TO HAVE YOU TEST OUR THEORY. THERE ARE DOZENS OF WAYS. IF YOU ARE STUMPED AND NEED SUGGESTIONS, JUST LET US KNOW. WE AWAIT WORD FROM YOU WITH GREAT INTEREST.
SS II
By now, Kaiser had accepted what had happened to him. His distress and anxiety were gone and he was impatient to do what he could to establish better contact with his uninvited tenant. With eager anticipation, he set to thinking how it could be done. After a few minutes, an idea occurred to him.
Taking a small scalpel from a medical kit, he made a shallow cut in his arm, just deep enough to bleed freely. He knew that the pain would supply the necessary glandular reaction. The cut bled a few slow drops—and as Kaiser watched, a shiny film formed and the bleeding stopped.
That checked pretty well with the ship's theory.
Perhaps the symbiote had made his senses more acute. He tried closing his eyes and fingering several objects in the room. It seemed to him that he could determine the texture of each better than before, but the test was inconclusive. Walking to the rear of the scout, he tried reading the printed words on the instrument panel. Each letter stood out sharp and clear!
Kaiser wondered if he might not make an immediate, practical use of the symbiote's apparent desire to help him. Concentrating on the discomfort of the high humidity and exaggerating his own displeasure with it, he waited. The result surprised and pleased him.
The temperature within the scout cabin seemed to lower, the moisture on his body vanished, and he was more comfortable than he had yet been here.
As a double check, he looked at the ship's thermometer. Temperature
102, humidity 113—just about the same as it had been on earlier readings.
During the next twenty-four hours, Kaiser and the mother ship exchanged messages at regular six-hour intervals. In between, he worked at repairing the damaged scout. He had no more success than before.
He tired easily and lay on the cot often to rest. Each time he seemed to drop off to sleep immediately—and awake at the exact times he had decided on beforehand. At first, despite the lack of success in straightening the bent metal of the scout bottom, there had been a subdued exhilaration in reporting each new discovery concerning the symbiote, but as time passed, his enthusiasm ebbed. His one really important problem was how to repair the scout and he was fast becoming discouraged.
At last Kaiser could bear the futility of his efforts no longer. He sent out a terse message to the Soscites II :
TAKING SHORT TRIP TO ANOTHER LOCATION ON RIVER. HOPE TO FIND MORE INTELLIGENT NATIVES. COULD BE THAT THE SETTLEMENT I FOUND HERE IS ANALOGOUS TO TRIBE OF MONKEYS ON EARTH. I KNOW THE CHANCE IS SMALL, BUT WHAT HAVE I TO LOSE? I CAN'T FIX SCOUT WITHOUT BETTER TOOLS, AND IF MY GUESS IS RIGHT, I MAY BE ABLE TO GET EQUIPMENT. EXPECT TO RETURN IN TEN OR TWELVE HOURS. PLEASE KEEP CONTACT WITH SCOUT.
SMOKY
Kaiser packed a mudsled with tent, portable generator and guard wires, a spare sidearm and ammunition, and food for two days. He had noticed that a range of high hills, which caused the bend in the river at the native settlement, seemed to continue its long curve, and he wondered if the hills might not turn the river in the shape of a giant horseshoe. He intended to find out.
Wrapping his equipment in a plastic tarp, Kaiser eased it out the doorway and tied it on the sled. He hooked a towline to a harness on his shoulders and began his journey—in the opposite direction from the first native settlement.
He walked for more than seven hours before he found that his surmise had been correct. And a second cluster of huts, and seal-people in the river, greeted his sight. He received a further pleasant surprise. This group was decidedly more advanced than the first!
They were little different in actual physical appearance; the change was mainly noticeable in their actions and demeanor. And their odor was more subdued, less repugnant.
By signs, Kaiser indicated that he came in peace, and they seemed to understand. A thick-bodied male went solemnly to the river bank and called to a second, who dived and brought up a mouthful of weed. The first male took the weed and brought it to Kaiser. This was obviously a gesture of friendship.
The weed had a white starchy core and looked edible. Kaiser cleaned part of it with his handkerchief, bit and chewed it.
The weed had a slight iron taste, but was not unpalatable. He swallowed the mouthful and tried another. He ate most of what had been given him and waited with some trepidation for a reaction.
As dusk fell, Kaiser set up his tent a few hundred yards back from the native settlement. All apprehension about how his stomach would react to the river weed had left him. Apparently it could be assimilated by his digestive system. Lying on his air mattress, he felt thoroughly at peace with this world.
Once, just before dropping off to sleep, he heard the snuffling noise of some large animal outside his tent and picked up a pistol, just in case. However, the first jolt of the guard-wire charge discouraged the beast and Kaiser heard it shuffle away, making puzzled mewing sounds as it went.
The next morning, Kaiser left off all his clothes except a pair of shorts and went swimming in the river. The seal-people were already in the water when he arrived and were very friendly.
That friendliness nearly resulted in disaster. The natives crowded around as he swam—they maneuvered with an otter-like proficiency—and often nudged him with their bodies when they came too close. He had difficulty keeping afloat and soon turned and started back. As he neared the river edge, a playful female grabbed him by the ankle and pulled him under.
Kaiser tried to break her hold, but she evidently thought he was clowning and wrapped her warm furred arms around him and held him helpless. They sank deeper.
When his breath threatened to burst from his lungs in a stream of bubbles, and he still could not free himself, Kaiser brought his knee up into her stomach and her grip loosened abruptly. He reached the surface, choking and coughing, and swam blindly toward shore until his feet hit the river bottom.
As he stood on the bank, getting his breath, the natives were quiet and seemed to be looking at him reproachfully. He stood for a time, trying to think of a way to explain the necessity of what he had done, but there was none. He shrugged helplessly.
There was no longer anything to be gained by staying here—if they had the tools he needed, he had no way of finding out or asking for them—and he packed and started back to the scout.
Kaiser's good spirits returned on his return journey. He had enjoyed the relief from the tedium of spending day after day in the scout, and now he enjoyed the exercise of pulling the mudsled. Above the waist, he wore only the harness and the large, soft drops of rain against his bare skin were pleasant to feel.
When he reached the scout, Kaiser began to unload the sled. The tarpaulin caught on the edge of a runner and he gave it a tug to free it. To his amazement, the heavy sled turned completely over, spilling the equipment to the ground.
Perplexed, Kaiser stooped and began replacing the spilled articles in the tarp. They felt exceptionally light. He paused again, and suddenly his eyes widened.
Moving quickly to the door of the scout, he shoved his equipment through and crawled in behind it. He did not consult the communicator, as he customarily did on entering, but went directly to the warped place on the floor and picked up the crowbar he had laid there.
Inserting the bar between the metal of the scout bottom and the engine casing, he lifted. Nothing happened. He rested a minute and tried again, this time concentrating on his desire to raise the bar. The metal beneath yielded slightly—but he felt the palms of his hands bruise against the lever.
Only after he dropped the bar did he realize the force he had exerted. His hands ached and tingled. His strength must have been increased tremendously. With his plastic coat wrapped around the lever, he tried again. The metal of the scout bottom gave slowly—until the fuel pump hung free!
Kaiser did not repair the tube immediately. He let the solution rest in his hands, like a package to be opened, the pleasure of its anticipation to be enjoyed as much as the final act.
He transmitted the news of what he had been able to do and sat down to read the two messages waiting for him.
The first was quite routine:
REPORTS FROM THE OCTOPUS INDICATE THAT BIG MUDDY UNDERGOES RADICAL WEATHER-CYCLE CHANGES DURING SPRING AND FALL SEASONS, FROM EXTREME MOISTURE TO EXTREME ARIDITY. AT HEIGHT OF DRY SEASON, PLANET MUST BE COMPLETELY DEVOID OF SURFACE LIQUID.
TO SURVIVE THESE UNUSUAL EXTREMES, SEAL-PEOPLE WOULD NEED EXTREME ADAPTABILITY. THIS VERIFIES OUR EARLIER GUESS THAT NATIVES HAVE SYMBIOSIS WITH THE SAME VIRUS FORM THAT INVADED YOU. WITH SYMBIOTES' AID, SUCH RADICAL PHYSICAL CHANGE COULD BE POSSIBLE. WILL KEEP YOU INFORMED.
GIVE US ANY NEW INFORMATION YOU MIGHT HAVE ON NATIVES.
SS II
The second report was not so routine. Kaiser thought he detected a note of uneasiness in it.
SUGGEST YOU DEVOTE ALL TIME AND EFFORT TO REPAIR OF SCOUT. INFORMATION ON SEAL-PEOPLE ADEQUATE FOR OUR PURPOSES.
SS II
Kaiser did not answer either communication. His earlier report had covered all that he had learned lately. He lay on his cot and went to sleep.
In the morning, another message was waiting:
VERY PLEASED TO HEAR OF PROGRESS ON REPAIR OF SCOUT. COMPLETE AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE AND RETURN HERE IMMEDIATELY.
SS II
Kaiser wondered about the abrupt recall. Could the Soscites II be experiencing some difficulty? He shrugged the thought aside. If they were, they would have told him. The last notes had had more than just a suggestion of urgency—there appeared to be a deliberate concealing of information.
Strangely, the messages indicated need for haste did not prod Kaiser. He knew now that the job could be done, perhaps in a few hours' time. And the Soscites II would not complete its orbit of the planet for two weeks yet.
Without putting on more than the shirt and trousers he had grown used to wearing, Kaiser went outside and wandered listlessly about the vicinity of the ship for several hours. When he became hungry, he went back inside.
Another message came in as he finished eating. This one was from the captain himself:
WHY HAVE WE RECEIVED NO VERIFICATION OF LAST INSTRUCTIONS? REPAIR SCOUT IMMEDIATELY AND RETURN WITHOUT FURTHER DELAY. THIS IS AN ORDER!
H. A. HESSE, CAPT.
Kaiser pushed the last of his meal—which he had been eating with his fingers—into his mouth, crumpled the tape, wiped the grease from his hands with it and dropped it to the floor.
He pondered mildly, as he packed his equipment, why he was disregarding the captain's message. For some reason, it seemed too trivial for serious consideration. He placated his slightly uneasy conscience only to the extent of packing the communicator in with his other equipment. It was a self-contained unit and he'd be able to receive messages from the ship on his trip.
The tracks of his earlier journey had been erased by the soft rain, and when Kaiser reached the river, he found that he had not returned to the village he had visited the day before. However, there were other seal-people here.
And they were almost human!
The resemblance was still not so much in their physical makeup—that was little changed from the first he had found—as in their obviously greater intelligence.
This was mainly noticeable in their facile expressions as they talked. Kaiser was even certain that he read smiles on their faces when he slipped on a particularly slick mud patch as he hurried toward them. Where the members of the first tribes had all looked almost exactly alike, these had very marked individual characteristics. Also, these had no odor—only a mild, rather pleasing scent. When they came to meet him, Kaiser could detect distinct syllabism in their pipings.
Most of the natives returned to the river after the first ten minutes of curious inspection, but two stayed behind as Kaiser set up his tent.
One was a female.
They made small noises while he went about his work. After a time, he understood that they were trying to give names to his paraphernalia. He tried saying "tent" and "wire" and "tarp" as he handled each object, but their piping voices could not repeat the words. Kaiser amused himself by trying to imitate their sounds for the articles. He was fairly successful. He was certain that he could soon learn enough to carry on a limited conversation.
The male became bored after a time and left, but the girl stayed until Kaiser finished. She motioned to him then to follow. When they reached the river bank, he saw that she wanted him to go into the water.
Before he had time to decide, Kaiser heard the small bell of the communicator from the tent behind him. He stood undecided for a moment, then returned and read the message on the tape:
STILL ANXIOUSLY AWAITING WORD FROM YOU.
IN MEANTIME, GIVE VERY CLOSE ATTENTION TO FOLLOWING.
WE KNOW THAT THE SYMBIOTES MUST BE ABLE TO MAKE RADICAL CHANGES IN THE PHYSIOLOGY OF THE SEAL-PEOPLE. THERE IS EVERY PROBABILITY THAT YOURS WILL ATTEMPT TO DO THE SAME TO YOU—TO BETTER FIT YOUR BODY TO ITS PRESENT ENVIRONMENT.
THE DANGER, WHICH WE HESITATED TO MENTION UNTIL NOW—WHEN YOU HAVE FORCED US BY YOUR OBSTINATE SILENCE—IS THAT IT CAN ALTER YOUR MIND ALSO. YOUR REPORT ON SECOND TRIBE OF SEAL-PEOPLE STRONGLY INDICATES THAT THIS IS ALREADY HAPPENING. THEY WERE PROBABLY NOT MORE INTELLIGENT AND HUMANLIKE THAN THE OTHERS. ON THE CONTRARY, YOU ARE BECOMING MORE LIKE THEM.
DANGER ACUTE. RETURN IMMEDIATELY. REPEAT: IMMEDIATELY!
SS II
Kaiser picked up a large rock and slowly, methodically pounded the communicator into a flattened jumble of metal and loose parts.
When he finished, he returned to the waiting girl on the river bank. She pointed at his plastic trousers and made laughing sounds in her throat. Kaiser returned the laugh and stripped off the trousers. They ran, still laughing, into the water.
Already the long pink hair that had been growing on his body during the past week was beginning to turn brown at the roots.
Question:
Describe the setting of the story.
Answer:
|
[
"Kaiser left Earth on a mothership Soscites II, that soon, finishing its planet-mapping tour, approached a planet that the man named Big Muddy. He left the spacecraft in a small scout ship - which had a pilot chair, a communicator, and a bunk - and landed on the muddy surface. The other seven scouts got lost during the previous exploration of new worlds. It is wet, humid, and warm on Big muddy, constantly raining with different intensity. There is a wide sluggish river, which has the shape of a horseshoe, two hundred yards away from the scout and also a chain of hills. Farther, along the stream, there is a group of several hundred domed dwellings, built of mud blocks, packed with river weed and sand. Another group of seal-people lives near the riverbank in the opposite direction of Kaiser's first observational walk. ",
"The story is set on a planet that Kaiser has named the Big Muddy. It is extremely wet, warm, and humid. There is also a village of seal-people nearby, and they have huts alongside the river bank. Kaiser’s scout ship has places for controls and also to sleep. In the village, there are also round domes that were based on construction of a series of four arches in a circle. The climate also changes on the planet, which is why the seal-people change as time goes on. Although it rains a lot in general, there are seasons where it rains less than the others. This is evident because the domes are built by river weed, mud, and sand. Even though the seal-people do not know how to use fire, it is evident that there must be times where it rains less in order for them to build these domes. ",
"This story takes placed on Big Muddy. The current climate on this planet when Kaiser arrives is wet, humid and warm - and constantly raining. The landscape includes many river banks where the natives spend time, and the ground is often muddy and slippery. \n\nAlongside the riverbank, there are also two hundred dwellings. These dwellings - round domes - are constructed from bricks built from a dried combination of mud, river weed, and sand. The dome was built by constructing four arches ranging in a circle, with the roof forming the final layer. \n\n",
"The story is set on a planet in which there is little human presence. After Kaiser crashes on this planet, he is stuck on a small metal ship trying to fix it. The planet is described to be very rainy and humid, but it is also mentioned that the planet constantly changes weather. The weather can vary from very rainy and humid to very arid and sunny. The planet is inhabited by native seal-people. These natives live in settlements around the bank of a curling river, in small huts made from mud. The planet is also mentioned to have large foothills around the river. \n"
] |
51398
|
Well, naturally Kaiser would transmit baby talk messages to his mother ship! He was—
GROWING UP ON BIG MUDDY
By CHARLES V. DE VET
Illustrated by TURPIN
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction July 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Kaiser stared at the tape in his hand for a long uncomprehending minute. How long had the stuff been coming through in this inane baby talk? And why hadn't he noticed it before? Why had he had to read this last communication a third time before he recognized anything unusual about it?
He went over the words again, as though maybe this time they'd read as they should.
OO IS SICK, SMOKY. DO TO BEDDY-BY. KEEP UM WARM. WHEN UM FEELS BETTER, LET USNS KNOW.
SS II
Kaiser let himself ease back in the pilot chair and rolled the tape thoughtfully between his fingers. Overhead and to each side, large drops of rain thudded softly against the transparent walls of the scout ship and dripped wearily from the bottom ledge to the ground.
"Damn this climate!" Kaiser muttered irrelevantly. "Doesn't it ever do anything here except rain?"
His attention returned to the matter at hand. Why the baby talk? And why was his memory so hazy? How long had he been here? What had he been doing during that time?
Listlessly he reached for the towel at his elbow and wiped the moisture from his face and bare shoulders. The air conditioning had gone out when the scout ship cracked up. He'd have to repair the scout or he was stuck here for good. He remembered now that he had gone over the job very carefully and thoroughly, and had found it too big to handle alone—or without better equipment, at least. Yet there was little or no chance of his being able to find either here.
Calmly, deliberately, Kaiser collected his thoughts, his memories, and brought them out where he could look at them:
The mother ship, Soscites II , had been on the last leg of its planet-mapping tour. It had dropped Kaiser in the one remaining scout ship—the other seven had all been lost one way or another during the exploring of new worlds—and set itself into a giant orbit about this planet that Kaiser had named Big Muddy.
The Soscites II had to maintain its constant speed; it had no means of slowing, except to stop, and no way to start again once it did stop. Its limited range of maneuverability made it necessary to set up an orbit that would take it approximately one month, Earth time, to circle a pinpointed planet. And now its fuel was low.
Kaiser had that one month to repair his scout or be stranded here forever.
That was all he could remember. Nothing of what he had been doing recently.
A small shiver passed through his body as he glanced once again at the tape in his hand. Baby talk....
One thing he could find out: how long this had been going on. He turned to the communicator and unhooked the paper receptacle on its bottom. It held about a yard and a half of tape, probably his last several messages—both those sent and those received. He pulled it out impatiently and began reading.
The first was from himself:
YOUR SUGGESTIONS NO HELP. HOW AM I GOING TO REPAIR DAMAGE TO SCOUT WITHOUT PROPER EQUIPMENT? AND WHERE DO I GET IT? DO YOU THINK I FOUND A TOOL SHOP DOWN HERE? FOR GOD'S SAKE, COME UP WITH SOMETHING BETTER.
VISITED SEAL-PEOPLE AGAIN TODAY. STILL HAVE THEIR STINK IN MY NOSE. FOUND HUTS ALONG RIVER BANK, SO I GUESS THEY DON'T LIVE IN WATER. BUT THEY DO SPEND MOST OF THEIR TIME THERE. NO, I HAVE NO WAY OF ESTIMATING THEIR INTELLIGENCE. I WOULD JUDGE IT AVERAGES NO HIGHER THAN SEVEN-YEAR-OLD HUMAN. THEY DEFINITELY DO TALK TO ONE ANOTHER. WILL TRY TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THEM, BUT YOU GET TO WORK FAST ON HOW I REPAIR SCOUT.
SWELLING IN ARM WORSE AND AM DEVELOPING A FEVER. TEMPERATURE 102.7 AN HOUR AGO.
SMOKY
The ship must have answered immediately, for the return message time was six hours later than his own, the minimum interval necessary for two-way exchange.
DOING OUR BEST, SMOKY. YOUR IMMEDIATE PROBLEM, AS WE SEE IT, IS TO KEEP WELL. WE FED ALL THE INFORMATION YOU GAVE US INTO SAM, BUT YOU DIDN'T HAVE MUCH EXCEPT THE STING IN YOUR ARM. AS EXPECTED, ALL THAT CAME OUT WAS "DATA INSUFFICIENT." TRY TO GIVE US MORE. ALSO DETAIL ALL SYMPTOMS SINCE YOUR LAST REPORT. IN THE MEANTIME, WE'RE DOING EVERYTHING WE CAN AT THIS END. GOOD LUCK.
SS II
Sam, Kaiser knew, was the ship's mechanical diagnostician. His report followed:
ARM SWOLLEN. UNABLE TO KEEP DOWN FOOD LAST TWELVE HOURS. ABOUT TWO HOURS AGO, ENTIRE BODY TURNED LIVID RED. BRIEF PERIODS OF BLANKNESS. THINGS KEEP COMING AND GOING. SICK AS HELL. HURRY.
SMOKY
The ship's next message read:
INFECTION QUITE DEFINITE. BUT SOMETHING STRANGE THERE. GIVE US ANYTHING MORE YOU HAVE.
SS II
His own reply perplexed Kaiser:
LAST LETTER FUNNY. I NOT UNDERSTAND. WHY IS OO SENDING GARBLE TALK? DID USNS MAKE UP SECRET MESSAGES?
SMOKY
The expedition, apparently, was as puzzled as he:
WHAT'S THE MATTER, SMOKY? THAT LAST MESSAGE WAS IN PLAIN TERRAN. NO REASON WHY YOU COULDN'T READ IT. AND WHY THE BABY TALK? IF YOU'RE SPOOFING, STOP. GIVE US MORE SYMPTOMS. HOW ARE YOU FEELING NOW?
SS II
The baby talk was worse on Kaiser's next:
TWAZY. WHAT FOR OO TENDING TWAZY LETTERS? FINK UM CAN WEAD TWAZY LETTERS? SKIN ALL YELLOW NOW. COLD. COLD. CO
The ship's following communication was three hours late. It was the last on the tape—the one Kaiser had read earlier. Apparently they decided to humor him.
OO IS SICK, SMOKY. DO TO BEDDY-BY. KEEP UM WARM. WHEN UM FEELS BETTER, LET USNS KNOW.
SS II
That was not much help. All it told him was that he had been sick.
He felt better now, outside of a muscular weariness, as though convalescing from a long illness. He put the back of his hand to his forehead. Cool. No fever anyway.
He glanced at the clock-calendar on the instrument board and back at the date and time on the tape where he'd started his baby talk. Twenty hours. He hadn't been out of his head too long. He began punching the communicator keys while he nibbled at a biscuit.
SEEM TO BE FULLY RECOVERED. FEELING FINE. ANYTHING NEW FROM SAM? AND HOW ABOUT THE DAMAGE TO SCOUT? GIVE ME ANYTHING YOU HAVE ON EITHER OR BOTH.
SMOKY
Kaiser felt suddenly weary. He lay on the scout's bunk and tried to sleep. Soon he was in that phantasm land between sleep and wakefulness—he knew he was not sleeping, yet he did dream.
It was the same dream he had had many times before. In it, he was back home again, the home he had joined the space service to escape. He had realized soon after his marriage that his wife, Helene, did not love him. She had married him for the security his pay check provided. And though it soon became evident that she, too, regretted her bargain, she would not divorce him. Instead, she had her revenge on him by persistent nagging, by letting herself grow fat and querulous, and by caring for their house only in a slovenly way.
Her crippled brother had moved in with them the day they were married. His mind was as crippled as his body and he took an unhealthy delight in helping his sister torment Kaiser.
Kaiser came wide awake in a cold sweat. The clock showed that only an hour had passed since he had sent his last message to the ship. Still five more long hours to wait. He rose and wiped the sweat from his neck and shoulders and restlessly paced the small corridor of the scout.
After a few minutes, he stopped pacing and peered out into the gloom of Big Muddy. The rain seemed to have eased off some. Not much more than a heavy drizzle now.
Kaiser reached impulsively for the slicker he had thrown over a chest against one wall and put it on, then a pair of hip-high plastic boots and a plastic hat. He opened the door. The scout had come to rest with a slight tilt when it crashed, and Kaiser had to sit down and roll over onto his stomach to ease himself to the ground.
The weather outside was normal for Big Muddy: wet, humid, and warm.
Kaiser sank to his ankles in soft mud before his feet reached solid ground. He half walked and half slid to the rear of the scout. Beside the ship, the "octopus" was busily at work. Tentacles and antennae, extending from the yard-high box of its body, tested and recorded temperature, atmosphere, soil, and all other pertinent planetary conditions. The octopus was connected to the ship's communicator and all its findings were being transmitted to the mother ship for study.
Kaiser observed that it was working well and turned toward a wide, sluggish river, perhaps two hundred yards from the scout. Once there, he headed upstream. He could hear the pipings, and now and then a higher whistling, of the seal-people before he reached a bend and saw them. As usual, most were swimming in the river.
One old fellow, whose chocolate-brown fur showed a heavy intermixture of gray, was sitting on the bank of the river just at the bend. Perhaps a lookout. He pulled himself to his feet as he spied Kaiser and his toothless, hard-gummed mouth opened and emitted a long whistle that might have been a greeting—or a warning to the others that a stranger approached.
The native stood perhaps five feet tall, with the heavy, blubbery body of a seal, and short, thick arms. Membranes connected the arms to his body from shoulder-pits to mid-biceps. The arms ended in three-fingered, thumbless hands. His legs also were short and thick, with footpads that splayed out at forty-five-degree angles. They gave his legs the appearance of a split tail. About him hung a rank-fish smell that made Kaiser's stomach squirm.
The old fellow sounded a cheerful chirp as Kaiser came near. Feeling slightly ineffectual, Kaiser raised both hands and held them palm forward. The other chirped again and Kaiser went on toward the main group.
They had stopped their play and eating as Kaiser approached and now most of them swam in to shore and stood in the water, staring and piping. They varied in size from small seal-pups to full-grown adults. Some chewed on bunches of water weed, which they manipulated with their lips and drew into their mouths.
They had mammalian characteristics, Kaiser had noted before, so it was not difficult to distinguish the females from the males. The proportion was roughly fifty-fifty.
Several of the bolder males climbed up beside Kaiser and began pawing his plastic clothing. Kaiser stood still and tried to keep his breathing shallow, for their odor was almost more than he could bear. One native smeared Kaiser's face with an exploring paw and Kaiser gagged and pushed him roughly away. He was bound by regulations to display no hostility to newly discovered natives, but he couldn't take much more of this.
A young female splashed water on two young males who stood near and they turned with shrill pipings and chased her into the water. The entire group seemed to lose interest in Kaiser and joined in the chase, or went back to other diversions of their own. Kaiser's inspectors followed.
They were a mindless lot, Kaiser observed. The river supplied them with an easy existence, with food and living space, and apparently they had few natural enemies.
Kaiser walked away, following the long slow bend of the river, and came to a collection of perhaps two hundred dwellings built in three haphazard rows along the river bank. He took time to study their construction more closely this time.
They were all round domes, little more than the height of a man, built of blocks that appeared to be mud, packed with river weed and sand. How they were able to dry these to give them the necessary solidity, Kaiser did not know. He had found no signs that they knew how to use fire, and all apparent evidence was against their having it. They then had to have sunlight. Maybe it rained less during certain seasons.
The domes' construction was based on a series of four arches built in a circle. When the base covering the periphery had been laid, four others were built on and between them, and continued in successive tiers until the top was reached. Each tier thus furnished support for the next above. No other framework was needed. The final tier formed the roof. They made sound shelters, but Kaiser had peered into several and found them dark and dank—and as smelly as the natives themselves.
The few loungers in the village paid little attention to Kaiser and he wandered through the irregular streets until he became bored and returned to the scout.
The Soscites II sent little that helped during the next twelve hours and Kaiser occupied his time trying again to repair the damage to the scout.
The job appeared maddeningly simply. As the scout had glided in for a soft landing, its metal bottom had ridden a concealed rock and bent inward. The bent metal had carried up with it the tube supplying the fuel pump and flattened it against the motor casing.
Opening the tube again would not have been difficult, but first it had to be freed from under the ship. Kaiser had tried forcing the sheet metal back into place with a small crowbar—the best leverage he had on hand—but it resisted his best efforts. He still could think of no way to do the job, simple as it was, though he gave his concentration to it the rest of the day.
That evening, Kaiser received information from the Soscites II that was at least definite:
SET YOURSELF FOR A SHOCK, SMOKY. SAM FINALLY CAME THROUGH. YOU WON'T LIKE WHAT YOU HEAR. AT LEAST NOT AT FIRST. BUT IT COULD BE WORSE. YOU HAVE BEEN INVADED BY A SYMBIOTE—SIMILAR TO THE TYPE FOUND ON THE SAND WORLD, BARTEL-BLEETHERS. GIVE US A FEW MORE HOURS TO WORK WITH SAM AND WE'LL GET YOU ALL THE PARTICULARS HE CAN GIVE US. HANG ON NOW!
SOSCITES II
Kaiser's reply was short and succinct:
WHAT THE HELL?
SMOKY
Soscites II's next communication followed within twenty minutes and was signed by the ship's doctor:
JUST A FEW WORDS, SMOKY, IN CASE YOU'RE WORRIED. I THOUGHT I'D GET THIS OFF WHILE WE'RE WAITING FOR MORE INFORMATION FROM SAM. REMEMBER THAT A SYMBIOTE IS NOT A PARASITE. IT WILL NOT HARM YOU, EXCEPT INADVERTENTLY. YOUR WELFARE IS AS ESSENTIAL TO IT AS TO YOU. ALMOST CERTAINLY, IF YOU DIE, IT WILL DIE WITH YOU. ANY TROUBLE YOU'VE HAD SO FAR WAS PROBABLY CAUSED BY THE SYMBIOTE'S DIFFICULTY IN ADJUSTING ITSELF TO ITS NEW ENVIRONMENT. IN A WAY, I ENVY YOU. MORE LATER, WHEN WE FINISH WITH SAM.
J. G. ZARWELL
Kaiser did not answer. The news was so startling, so unforeseen, that his mind refused to accept the actuality. He lay on the scout's bunk and stared at the ceiling without conscious attention, and with very little clear thought, for several hours—until the next communication came in:
WELL, THIS IS WHAT SAM HAS TO SAY, SMOKY. SYMBIOTE AMICABLE AND APPARENTLY SWIFTLY ADAPTABLE. YOUR CHANGING COLOR, DIFFICULTY IN EATING AND EVEN BABY TALK WERE THE RESULT OF ITS EFFORTS TO GIVE YOU WHAT IT BELIEVED YOU NEEDED OR WANTED.
CHANGING COLOR: PROTECTIVE CAMOUFLAGE. TROUBLE KEEPING FOOD DOWN: IT KEPT YOUR STOMACH EMPTY BECAUSE IT SENSED YOU WERE IN TROUBLE AND MIGHT HAVE NEED FOR SHARP REFLEXES, WITH NO EXCESS WEIGHT TO CARRY. THE BABY TALK WE AREN'T TOO CERTAIN ABOUT, BUT OUR BEST CONCLUSION IS THAT WHEN YOU WERE A CHILD, YOU WERE MOST HAPPY. IT WAS TRYING TO GIVE YOU BACK THAT HAPPY STATE OF MIND. OBVIOUSLY IT QUICKLY RECOGNIZED THE MISTAKES IT MADE AND CORRECTED THEM.
SAM CAME UP WITH A FEW MORE IDEAS, BUT WE WANT TO WORK ON THEM A BIT BEFORE WE SEND THEM THROUGH. SLEEP ON THIS.
SS II
Kaiser could imagine that most of the crew were not too concerned about the trouble he was in. He was not the gregarious type and had no close friends on board. He had hoped to find the solitude he liked best in space, but he had been disappointed. True, there were fewer people here, but he was brought into such intimate contact with them that he would have been more contented living in a crowded city.
His naturally unsociable nature was more irksome to the crew because he was more intelligent and efficient than they were. He did his work well and painstakingly and was seldom in error. They would have liked him better had he been more prone to mistakes. He was certain that they respected him, but they did not like him. And he returned the dislike.
The suggestion that he get some sleep might not be a bad idea. He hadn't slept in over eighteen hours, Kaiser realized—and fell instantly asleep.
The communicator had a message waiting for him when he awoke:
SAM COULDN'T HELP US MUCH ON THIS PART, BUT AFTER RESEARCH AND MUCH DISCUSSION, WE ARRIVED AT THE FOLLOWING TWO CONCLUSIONS.
FIRST, PHYSICAL PROPERTY OF SYMBIOTE IS EITHER THAT OF A VERY THIN LIQUID OR, MORE PROBABLY, A VIRUS FORM WITH SWIFT PROPAGATION CHARACTERISTIC. IT UNDOUBTEDLY LIVES IN YOUR BLOOD STREAM AND PERMEATES YOUR SYSTEM.
SECOND, IT SEEMED TO US, AS IT MUST HAVE TO YOU, THAT THE SYMBIOTE COULD ONLY KNOW WHAT YOU WANTED BY READING YOUR MIND. HOWEVER, WE BELIEVE DIFFERENTLY NOW. WE THINK THAT IT HAS SUCH CLOSE CONTACT WITH YOUR GLANDS AND THEIR SECRETIONS, WHICH STIMULATE EMOTION, THAT IT CAN GAUGE YOUR FEELINGS EVEN MORE ACCURATELY THAN YOU YOURSELF CAN. THUS IT CAN JUDGE YOUR LIKES AND DISLIKES QUITE ACCURATELY.
WE WOULD LIKE TO HAVE YOU TEST OUR THEORY. THERE ARE DOZENS OF WAYS. IF YOU ARE STUMPED AND NEED SUGGESTIONS, JUST LET US KNOW. WE AWAIT WORD FROM YOU WITH GREAT INTEREST.
SS II
By now, Kaiser had accepted what had happened to him. His distress and anxiety were gone and he was impatient to do what he could to establish better contact with his uninvited tenant. With eager anticipation, he set to thinking how it could be done. After a few minutes, an idea occurred to him.
Taking a small scalpel from a medical kit, he made a shallow cut in his arm, just deep enough to bleed freely. He knew that the pain would supply the necessary glandular reaction. The cut bled a few slow drops—and as Kaiser watched, a shiny film formed and the bleeding stopped.
That checked pretty well with the ship's theory.
Perhaps the symbiote had made his senses more acute. He tried closing his eyes and fingering several objects in the room. It seemed to him that he could determine the texture of each better than before, but the test was inconclusive. Walking to the rear of the scout, he tried reading the printed words on the instrument panel. Each letter stood out sharp and clear!
Kaiser wondered if he might not make an immediate, practical use of the symbiote's apparent desire to help him. Concentrating on the discomfort of the high humidity and exaggerating his own displeasure with it, he waited. The result surprised and pleased him.
The temperature within the scout cabin seemed to lower, the moisture on his body vanished, and he was more comfortable than he had yet been here.
As a double check, he looked at the ship's thermometer. Temperature
102, humidity 113—just about the same as it had been on earlier readings.
During the next twenty-four hours, Kaiser and the mother ship exchanged messages at regular six-hour intervals. In between, he worked at repairing the damaged scout. He had no more success than before.
He tired easily and lay on the cot often to rest. Each time he seemed to drop off to sleep immediately—and awake at the exact times he had decided on beforehand. At first, despite the lack of success in straightening the bent metal of the scout bottom, there had been a subdued exhilaration in reporting each new discovery concerning the symbiote, but as time passed, his enthusiasm ebbed. His one really important problem was how to repair the scout and he was fast becoming discouraged.
At last Kaiser could bear the futility of his efforts no longer. He sent out a terse message to the Soscites II :
TAKING SHORT TRIP TO ANOTHER LOCATION ON RIVER. HOPE TO FIND MORE INTELLIGENT NATIVES. COULD BE THAT THE SETTLEMENT I FOUND HERE IS ANALOGOUS TO TRIBE OF MONKEYS ON EARTH. I KNOW THE CHANCE IS SMALL, BUT WHAT HAVE I TO LOSE? I CAN'T FIX SCOUT WITHOUT BETTER TOOLS, AND IF MY GUESS IS RIGHT, I MAY BE ABLE TO GET EQUIPMENT. EXPECT TO RETURN IN TEN OR TWELVE HOURS. PLEASE KEEP CONTACT WITH SCOUT.
SMOKY
Kaiser packed a mudsled with tent, portable generator and guard wires, a spare sidearm and ammunition, and food for two days. He had noticed that a range of high hills, which caused the bend in the river at the native settlement, seemed to continue its long curve, and he wondered if the hills might not turn the river in the shape of a giant horseshoe. He intended to find out.
Wrapping his equipment in a plastic tarp, Kaiser eased it out the doorway and tied it on the sled. He hooked a towline to a harness on his shoulders and began his journey—in the opposite direction from the first native settlement.
He walked for more than seven hours before he found that his surmise had been correct. And a second cluster of huts, and seal-people in the river, greeted his sight. He received a further pleasant surprise. This group was decidedly more advanced than the first!
They were little different in actual physical appearance; the change was mainly noticeable in their actions and demeanor. And their odor was more subdued, less repugnant.
By signs, Kaiser indicated that he came in peace, and they seemed to understand. A thick-bodied male went solemnly to the river bank and called to a second, who dived and brought up a mouthful of weed. The first male took the weed and brought it to Kaiser. This was obviously a gesture of friendship.
The weed had a white starchy core and looked edible. Kaiser cleaned part of it with his handkerchief, bit and chewed it.
The weed had a slight iron taste, but was not unpalatable. He swallowed the mouthful and tried another. He ate most of what had been given him and waited with some trepidation for a reaction.
As dusk fell, Kaiser set up his tent a few hundred yards back from the native settlement. All apprehension about how his stomach would react to the river weed had left him. Apparently it could be assimilated by his digestive system. Lying on his air mattress, he felt thoroughly at peace with this world.
Once, just before dropping off to sleep, he heard the snuffling noise of some large animal outside his tent and picked up a pistol, just in case. However, the first jolt of the guard-wire charge discouraged the beast and Kaiser heard it shuffle away, making puzzled mewing sounds as it went.
The next morning, Kaiser left off all his clothes except a pair of shorts and went swimming in the river. The seal-people were already in the water when he arrived and were very friendly.
That friendliness nearly resulted in disaster. The natives crowded around as he swam—they maneuvered with an otter-like proficiency—and often nudged him with their bodies when they came too close. He had difficulty keeping afloat and soon turned and started back. As he neared the river edge, a playful female grabbed him by the ankle and pulled him under.
Kaiser tried to break her hold, but she evidently thought he was clowning and wrapped her warm furred arms around him and held him helpless. They sank deeper.
When his breath threatened to burst from his lungs in a stream of bubbles, and he still could not free himself, Kaiser brought his knee up into her stomach and her grip loosened abruptly. He reached the surface, choking and coughing, and swam blindly toward shore until his feet hit the river bottom.
As he stood on the bank, getting his breath, the natives were quiet and seemed to be looking at him reproachfully. He stood for a time, trying to think of a way to explain the necessity of what he had done, but there was none. He shrugged helplessly.
There was no longer anything to be gained by staying here—if they had the tools he needed, he had no way of finding out or asking for them—and he packed and started back to the scout.
Kaiser's good spirits returned on his return journey. He had enjoyed the relief from the tedium of spending day after day in the scout, and now he enjoyed the exercise of pulling the mudsled. Above the waist, he wore only the harness and the large, soft drops of rain against his bare skin were pleasant to feel.
When he reached the scout, Kaiser began to unload the sled. The tarpaulin caught on the edge of a runner and he gave it a tug to free it. To his amazement, the heavy sled turned completely over, spilling the equipment to the ground.
Perplexed, Kaiser stooped and began replacing the spilled articles in the tarp. They felt exceptionally light. He paused again, and suddenly his eyes widened.
Moving quickly to the door of the scout, he shoved his equipment through and crawled in behind it. He did not consult the communicator, as he customarily did on entering, but went directly to the warped place on the floor and picked up the crowbar he had laid there.
Inserting the bar between the metal of the scout bottom and the engine casing, he lifted. Nothing happened. He rested a minute and tried again, this time concentrating on his desire to raise the bar. The metal beneath yielded slightly—but he felt the palms of his hands bruise against the lever.
Only after he dropped the bar did he realize the force he had exerted. His hands ached and tingled. His strength must have been increased tremendously. With his plastic coat wrapped around the lever, he tried again. The metal of the scout bottom gave slowly—until the fuel pump hung free!
Kaiser did not repair the tube immediately. He let the solution rest in his hands, like a package to be opened, the pleasure of its anticipation to be enjoyed as much as the final act.
He transmitted the news of what he had been able to do and sat down to read the two messages waiting for him.
The first was quite routine:
REPORTS FROM THE OCTOPUS INDICATE THAT BIG MUDDY UNDERGOES RADICAL WEATHER-CYCLE CHANGES DURING SPRING AND FALL SEASONS, FROM EXTREME MOISTURE TO EXTREME ARIDITY. AT HEIGHT OF DRY SEASON, PLANET MUST BE COMPLETELY DEVOID OF SURFACE LIQUID.
TO SURVIVE THESE UNUSUAL EXTREMES, SEAL-PEOPLE WOULD NEED EXTREME ADAPTABILITY. THIS VERIFIES OUR EARLIER GUESS THAT NATIVES HAVE SYMBIOSIS WITH THE SAME VIRUS FORM THAT INVADED YOU. WITH SYMBIOTES' AID, SUCH RADICAL PHYSICAL CHANGE COULD BE POSSIBLE. WILL KEEP YOU INFORMED.
GIVE US ANY NEW INFORMATION YOU MIGHT HAVE ON NATIVES.
SS II
The second report was not so routine. Kaiser thought he detected a note of uneasiness in it.
SUGGEST YOU DEVOTE ALL TIME AND EFFORT TO REPAIR OF SCOUT. INFORMATION ON SEAL-PEOPLE ADEQUATE FOR OUR PURPOSES.
SS II
Kaiser did not answer either communication. His earlier report had covered all that he had learned lately. He lay on his cot and went to sleep.
In the morning, another message was waiting:
VERY PLEASED TO HEAR OF PROGRESS ON REPAIR OF SCOUT. COMPLETE AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE AND RETURN HERE IMMEDIATELY.
SS II
Kaiser wondered about the abrupt recall. Could the Soscites II be experiencing some difficulty? He shrugged the thought aside. If they were, they would have told him. The last notes had had more than just a suggestion of urgency—there appeared to be a deliberate concealing of information.
Strangely, the messages indicated need for haste did not prod Kaiser. He knew now that the job could be done, perhaps in a few hours' time. And the Soscites II would not complete its orbit of the planet for two weeks yet.
Without putting on more than the shirt and trousers he had grown used to wearing, Kaiser went outside and wandered listlessly about the vicinity of the ship for several hours. When he became hungry, he went back inside.
Another message came in as he finished eating. This one was from the captain himself:
WHY HAVE WE RECEIVED NO VERIFICATION OF LAST INSTRUCTIONS? REPAIR SCOUT IMMEDIATELY AND RETURN WITHOUT FURTHER DELAY. THIS IS AN ORDER!
H. A. HESSE, CAPT.
Kaiser pushed the last of his meal—which he had been eating with his fingers—into his mouth, crumpled the tape, wiped the grease from his hands with it and dropped it to the floor.
He pondered mildly, as he packed his equipment, why he was disregarding the captain's message. For some reason, it seemed too trivial for serious consideration. He placated his slightly uneasy conscience only to the extent of packing the communicator in with his other equipment. It was a self-contained unit and he'd be able to receive messages from the ship on his trip.
The tracks of his earlier journey had been erased by the soft rain, and when Kaiser reached the river, he found that he had not returned to the village he had visited the day before. However, there were other seal-people here.
And they were almost human!
The resemblance was still not so much in their physical makeup—that was little changed from the first he had found—as in their obviously greater intelligence.
This was mainly noticeable in their facile expressions as they talked. Kaiser was even certain that he read smiles on their faces when he slipped on a particularly slick mud patch as he hurried toward them. Where the members of the first tribes had all looked almost exactly alike, these had very marked individual characteristics. Also, these had no odor—only a mild, rather pleasing scent. When they came to meet him, Kaiser could detect distinct syllabism in their pipings.
Most of the natives returned to the river after the first ten minutes of curious inspection, but two stayed behind as Kaiser set up his tent.
One was a female.
They made small noises while he went about his work. After a time, he understood that they were trying to give names to his paraphernalia. He tried saying "tent" and "wire" and "tarp" as he handled each object, but their piping voices could not repeat the words. Kaiser amused himself by trying to imitate their sounds for the articles. He was fairly successful. He was certain that he could soon learn enough to carry on a limited conversation.
The male became bored after a time and left, but the girl stayed until Kaiser finished. She motioned to him then to follow. When they reached the river bank, he saw that she wanted him to go into the water.
Before he had time to decide, Kaiser heard the small bell of the communicator from the tent behind him. He stood undecided for a moment, then returned and read the message on the tape:
STILL ANXIOUSLY AWAITING WORD FROM YOU.
IN MEANTIME, GIVE VERY CLOSE ATTENTION TO FOLLOWING.
WE KNOW THAT THE SYMBIOTES MUST BE ABLE TO MAKE RADICAL CHANGES IN THE PHYSIOLOGY OF THE SEAL-PEOPLE. THERE IS EVERY PROBABILITY THAT YOURS WILL ATTEMPT TO DO THE SAME TO YOU—TO BETTER FIT YOUR BODY TO ITS PRESENT ENVIRONMENT.
THE DANGER, WHICH WE HESITATED TO MENTION UNTIL NOW—WHEN YOU HAVE FORCED US BY YOUR OBSTINATE SILENCE—IS THAT IT CAN ALTER YOUR MIND ALSO. YOUR REPORT ON SECOND TRIBE OF SEAL-PEOPLE STRONGLY INDICATES THAT THIS IS ALREADY HAPPENING. THEY WERE PROBABLY NOT MORE INTELLIGENT AND HUMANLIKE THAN THE OTHERS. ON THE CONTRARY, YOU ARE BECOMING MORE LIKE THEM.
DANGER ACUTE. RETURN IMMEDIATELY. REPEAT: IMMEDIATELY!
SS II
Kaiser picked up a large rock and slowly, methodically pounded the communicator into a flattened jumble of metal and loose parts.
When he finished, he returned to the waiting girl on the river bank. She pointed at his plastic trousers and made laughing sounds in her throat. Kaiser returned the laugh and stripped off the trousers. They ran, still laughing, into the water.
Already the long pink hair that had been growing on his body during the past week was beginning to turn brown at the roots.
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What role does the snoll doper play in the story?
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about The Girls from Fieu Dayol by Robert F. Young.
Relevant chunks:
The Girls From Fieu Dayol
By ROBERT F. YOUNG
They were lovely and quick to learn—and their only faults were little ones!
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Up until the moment when he first looked into Hippolyte Adolphe Taine's History of English Literature , Herbert Quidley's penchant for old books had netted him nothing in the way of romance and intrigue. Not that he was a stranger to either. Far from it. But hitherto the background for both had been bedrooms and bars, not libraries.
On page 21 of the Taine tome he happened upon a sheet of yellow copy paper folded in four. Unfolding it, he read:
asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj Cai: Sities towms copeis wotnid. Gind snoll doper nckli! Wilbe Fieu Dayol fot ig habe mot toseo knwo—te bijk weil en snoll doper—Klio, asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj
Since when, Quidley wondered, refolding the paper and putting it back in the book, had high-school typing students taken to reading Taine? Thoughtfully he replaced the book on the shelf and moved deeper into the literature section.
He had just taken down Xenophon's Anabasis when he saw the girl walk in the door.
Let it be said forthwith that old books were not the only item on Herbert Quidley's penchant-list. He liked old wood, too, and old paintings, not to mention old wine and old whiskey. But most of all he liked young girls. He especially liked them when they looked the way Helen of Troy must have looked when Paris took one gander at her and started building his ladder. This one was tall, with hyacinth hair and liquid blue eyes, and she had a Grecian symmetry of shape that would have made Paris' eyes pop had he been around to take notice. Paris wasn't, but Quidley's eyes, did the job.
After coming in the door, the girl deposited a book on the librarian's desk and headed for the literature section. Quickly Quidley lowered his eyes to the Anabasis and henceforth followed her progress out of their corners. When she came to the O's she paused, took down a book and glanced through it. Then she replaced it and moved on to the P's ... the Q's ... the R's. Barely three feet from him she paused again and took down Taine's History of English Literature .
He simply could not believe it. The odds against two persons taking an interest in so esoteric a volume on a single night in a single library were ten thousand to one. And yet there was no gainsaying that the volume was in the girl's hands, and that she was riffling through it with the air of a seasoned browser.
Presently she returned the book to the shelf, selected another—seemingly at random—and took it over to the librarian's desk. She waited statuesquely while the librarian processed it, then tucked it under her arm and whisked out the door into the misty April night. As soon as she disappeared, Quidley stepped over to the T's and took Taine down once more. Just as he had suspected. The makeshift bookmark was gone.
He remembered how the asdf-;lkj exercise had given way to several lines of gibberish and then reappeared again. A camouflaged message? Or was it merely what it appeared to be on the surface—the efforts of an impatient typing student to type before his time?
He returned Taine to the shelf. After learning from the librarian that the girl's name was Kay Smith, he went out and got in his hardtop. The name rang a bell. Halfway home he realized why. The typing exercise had contained the word "Cai", and if you pronounced it with hard c, you got
"Kai"—or "Kay". Obviously, then, the exercise had been a message, and had been deliberately inserted in a book no average person would dream of borrowing.
By whom—her boy friend?
Quidley winced. He was allergic to the term. Not that he ever let the presence of a boy friend deter him when he set out to conquer, but because the term itself brought to mind the word "fiance," and the word
"fiance" brought to mind still another word, one which repelled him violently. I.e., "marriage". Just the same, he decided to keep Taine's History under observation for a while.
Her boy friend turned out to be her girl friend, and her girl friend turned out to be a tall and lissome, lovely with a Helenesque air of her own. From the vantage point of a strategically located reading table, where he was keeping company with his favorite little magazine, The Zeitgeist , Quidley watched her take a seemingly haphazard route to the shelf where Taine's History reposed, take the volume down, surreptitiously slip a folded sheet of yellow paper between its pages and return it to the shelf.
After she left he wasted no time in acquainting himself with the second message. It was as unintelligible as the first:
asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj Cai: Habe wotnid ig ist ending ifedererer te. T'lide sid Fieu Dayol po jestig toseo knwo, bijk weil en snoll doper entling—Yoolna. asdf ;lkj asdf
;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj
Well, perhaps not quite as unintelligible. He knew, at least, who Cai was, and he knew—from the reappearance of the words wotnid , Fieu Dayol and snoll doper —that the two communications were in the same code. And certainly it was reasonable to assume that the last word— Yoolna —was the name of the girl he had just seen, and that she was a different person from the Klio whose name had appended the first message.
He refolded the paper, replaced it between the pages, returned the book to the shelf and went back to the reading table and The Zeitgeist .
Kay didn't show up till almost closing time, and he was beginning to think that perhaps she wouldn't come around for the pickup till tomorrow when she finally walked in the door. She employed the same tactics she had employed the previous night, arriving, as though by chance, at the T-section and transferring the message with the same undetectable legerdemain to her purse. This time, when she walked out the door, he was not far behind her.
She climbed into a sleek convertible and pulled into the street. It took him but a moment to gain his hardtop and start out after her. When, several blocks later, she pulled to the curb in front of an all-night coffee bar, he followed suit. After that, it was merely a matter of following her inside.
He decided on Operation Spill-the-sugar. It had stood him in good stead before, and he was rather fond of it. The procedure was quite simple. First you took note of the position of the sugar dispensers, then you situated yourself so that your intended victim was between you and the nearest one, then you ordered coffee without sugar in a low voice, and after the counterman or countergirl had served you, you waited till he/she was out of earshot and asked your i.v. to please pass the sugar. When she did so you let the dispenser slip from your fingers in such a way that some of its contents spilled on her lap—
"I'm terribly sorry," he said, righting it. "Here, let me brush it off."
"It's all right, it's only sugar," she said, laughing.
"I'm hopelessly clumsy," he continued smoothly, brushing the gleaming crystals from her pleated skirt, noting the clean sweep of her thighs.
"I beseech you to forgive me."
"You're forgiven," she said, and he noticed then that she spoke with a slight accent.
"If you like, you can send it to the cleaners and have them send the bill to me. My address is 61 Park Place." He pulled out his wallet, chose an appropriate card, and handed it to her—
Herbert Quidley: Profiliste
Her forehead crinkled. " Profiliste? "
"I paint profiles with words," he said. "You may have run across some of my pieces in the Better Magazines. I employ a variety of pseudonyms, of course."
"How interesting." She pronounced it "anteresting."
"Not famous profiles, you understand. Just profiles that strike my fancy." He paused. She had raised her cup to her lips and was taking a dainty sip. "You have a rather striking profile yourself, Miss—"
"Smith. Kay Smith." She set the cup back on the counter and turned and faced him. For a second her eyes seemed to expand till they preoccupied his entire vision, till he could see nothing but their disturbingly clear—and suddenly cold—blueness. Panic touched him, then vanished when she said, "Would you really consider word-painting my profile, Mr. Quidley?"
Would he! "When can I call?"
She hesitated for a moment. Then: "I think it will be better if I call on you. There are quite a number of people living in our—our house. I'm afraid the quarters would be much too cramped for an artist like yourself to concentrate."
Quidley glowed. Usually it required two or three days, and sometimes a week, to reach the apartment phase. "Fine," he said. "When can I expect you?"
She stood up and he got to his feet beside her. She was even taller than he had thought. In fact, if he hadn't been wearing Cuban heels, she'd have been taller than he was. "I'll be in town night after next," she said. "Will nine o'clock be convenient for you?"
"Perfectly."
"Good-by for now then, Mr. Quidley."
He was so elated that when he arrived at his apartment he actually did try to write a profile. His own, of course. He sat down at his custom-built chrome-trimmed desk, inserted a blank sheet of paper in his custom-built typewriter and tried to arrange his thoughts. But as usual his mind raced ahead of the moment, and he saw the title, Self Profile , nestling noticeably on the contents page of one of the Better Magazines, and presently he saw the piece itself in all its splendid array of colorful rhetoric, sparkling imagery and scintillating wit, occupying a two-page spread.
It was some time before he returned to reality, and when he did the first thing that met his eyes was the uncompromisingly blank sheet of paper. Hurriedly he typed out a letter to his father, requesting an advance on his allowance, then, after a tall glass of vintage wine, he went to bed.
In telling him that she would be in town two nights hence, Kay had unwittingly apprised him that there would be no exchange of messages until that time, so the next evening he skipped his vigil at the library. The following evening, however, after readying his apartment for the forthcoming assignation, he hied himself to his reading-table post and took up The Zeitgeist once again.
He had not thought it possible that there could be a third such woman.
And yet there she was, walking in the door, tall and blue-eyed and graceful; dark of hair and noble of mien; browsing in the philosophy section now, now the fiction section, now moving leisurely into the literature aisle and toward the T's....
The camouflage had varied, but the message was typical enough:
fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; Cai: Gind en snoll doper nckli! Wotnid antwaterer Fieu Dayol hid jestig snoll doper ifedererer te. Dep gogensplo snoll dopers ensing!—Gorka. fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl;
Judging from the repeated use of the words, snoll dopers were the topic of the day. Annoyed, Quidley replaced the message and put the book back on the shelf. Then he returned to his apartment to await Kay.
He wondered what her reaction would be if he asked her point-blank what a snoll doper was; whether she would reveal the nature of the amateur secret society to which she and Klio and Yoolna and Gorka belonged. It virtually had to be an amateur secret society. Unless, of course, they were foreigners. But what on earth foreign organization would be quixotic enough to employ Taine's History of English Literature as a communications medium when there was a telephone in every drugstore and a mailbox on every corner?
Somehow the words "what on earth foreign organization" got turned around in his mind and became "what foreign organization on earth" and before he could summon his common sense to succor him, he experienced a rather bad moment. By the time the door chimes sounded he was his normal self again.
He straightened his tie with nervous fingers, checked to see if his shirt cuffs protruded the proper length from his coat sleeves, and looked around the room to see if everything was in place. Everything was—the typewriter uncovered and centered on the chrome-trimmed desk, with the sheaf of crinkly first-sheets beside it; the reference books stacked imposingly nearby; Harper's , The Atlantic and The Saturday Review showing conspicuously in the magazine rack; the newly opened bottle of bourbon and the two snifter glasses on the sideboard; the small table set cozily for two—
The chimes sounded again. He opened the door.
She walked in with a demure, "Hello." He took her wrap. When he saw what she was wearing he had to tilt his head back so that his eyes wouldn't fall out of their sockets.
Skin, mostly, in the upper regions. White, glowing skin on which her long hair lay like forest pools. As for her dress, it was as though she had fallen forward into immaculate snow, half-burying her breasts before catching herself on her elbows, then turning into a sitting position, the snow clinging to her skin in a glistening veneer; arising finally to her feet, resplendently attired.
He went over to the sideboard, picked up the bottle of bourbon. She followed. He set the two snifter glasses side by side and tilted the bottle. "Say when." "When!" "I admire your dress—never saw anything quite like it." "Thank you. The material is something new. Feel it."
"It's—it's almost like foam rubber. Cigarette?" "Thanks.... Is something wrong, Mr. Quidley?" "No, of course not. Why?" "Your hands are trembling." "Oh. I'm—I'm afraid it's the present company, Miss Smith." "Call me Kay."
They touched glasses: "Your liquor is as exquisite as your living room, Herbert. I shall have to come here more often." "I hope you will, Kay."
"Though such conduct, I'm told, is morally reprehensible on the planet Earth." "Not in this particular circle. Your hair is lovely." "Thank you.... You haven't mentioned my perfume yet. Perhaps I'm standing too far away.... There!" "It's—it's as lovely as your hair, Kay." "Um, kiss me again." "I—I never figured—I mean, I engaged a caterer to serve us dinner at 9:30." "Call him up. Make it 10:30."
The following evening found Quidley on tenter-hooks. The snoll-doper mystery had acquired a new tang. He could hardly wait till the next message transfer took place.
He decided to spend the evening plotting the epic novel which he intended to write someday. He set to work immediately. He plotted mentally, of course—notes were for the hacks and the other commercial non-geniuses who infested the modern literary world. Closing his eyes, he saw the whole vivid panorama of epic action and grand adventure flowing like a mighty and majestic river before his literary vision: the authentic and awe-inspiring background; the hordes of colorful characters; the handsome virile hero, the compelling Helenesque heroine.... God, it was going to be great! The best thing he'd ever done! See, already there was a crowd of book lovers in front of the bookstore, staring into the window where the new Herbert Quidley was on display, trying to force its way into the jammed interior.... Cut to interior. FIRST EAGER CUSTOMER: Tell me quickly, are there any more copies of the new Herbert Quidley left? BOOK CLERK: A few. You don't know how lucky you are to get here before the first printing ran out. FIRST EAGER CUSTOMER: Give me a dozen. I want to make sure that my children and my children's children have a plentiful supply. BOOK CLERK: Sorry. Only one to a customer. Next? SECOND EAGER CUSTOMER: Tell me quickly, are ... there ... any ... more ... copies ... of—
ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ....
Message no. 4, except for a slight variation in camouflage, ran true to form:
a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj Cai: Habe te snoll dopers ensing? Wotnid ne Fieu Dayol ist ifederereret, hid jestig snoll doper. Gind ed, olro—Jilka. a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj
Quidley sighed. What, he asked himself, standing in the library aisle and staring at the indecipherable words, was a normal girl like Kay doing in such a childish secret society? From the way she and her correspondents carried on you'd almost think they were Martian girl scouts on an interplanetary camping trip, trying for their merit badges in communications!
You could hardly call Kay a girl scout, though.
Nevertheless, she was the key figure in the snoll-doper enigma. The fact annoyed him, especially when he considered that a snoll doper , for all he knew, could be anything from a Chinese fortune cooky to an H-bomb.
He remembered Kay's odd accent. Was that the way a person would speak English if her own language ran something like " ist ifedereret, hid jestig snoll doper adwo ?"
He remembered the way she had looked at him in the coffee bar.
He remembered the material of her dress.
He remembered how she had come to his room.
"I didn't know you had a taste for Taine."
Her voice seemed to come from far away, but she was standing right beside him, tall and bewitching; Helenesque as ever. Her blue eyes became great wells into which he found himself falling. With an effort, he pulled himself back. "You're early tonight," he said lamely.
She appropriated the message, read it. "Put the book back," she said presently. Then, when he complied: "Come on."
"Where are we going?"
"I'm going to deliver a snoll doper to Jilka. After that I'm going to take you home to meet my folks."
The relieved sigh he heard was his own.
They climbed into her convertible and she nosed it into the moving line of cars. "How long have you been reading my mail?" she asked.
"Since the night before I met you."
"Was that the reason you spilled the sugar?"
"Part of the reason," he said. "What's a snoll doper ?"
She laughed. "I don't think I'd better tell you just yet."
He sighed again. "But if Jilka wanted a snoll doper ," he said after a while, "why in the world didn't she call you up and say so?"
"Regulations." She pulled over to the curb in front of a brick apartment building. "This is where Jilka lives. I'll explain when I get back."
He watched her get out, walk up the walk to the entrance and let herself in. He leaned his head back on the seat, lit a cigarette and exhaled a mixture of smoke and relief. On the way to meet her folks. So it was just an ordinary secret society after all. And here he'd been thinking that she was the key figure in a Martian plot to blow up Earth—
Her folks !
Abruptly the full implication of the words got through to him, and he sat bolt-up-right on the seat. He was starting to climb out of the car when he saw Kay coming down the walk. Anyway, running away wouldn't solve his problem. A complete disappearing act was in order, and a complete disappearing act would take time. Meanwhile he would play along with her.
A station wagon came up behind them, slowed, and matched its speed with theirs. "Someone's following us," Quidley said.
"Probably Jilka."
Five minutes later the station wagon turned down a side street and disappeared. "She's no longer with us," Quidley said.
"She's got to pick someone up. She'll meet us later."
"At your folks'?"
"At the ship."
The city was thinning out around them now, and a few stars were visible in the night sky. Quidley watched them thoughtfully for a while. Then:
"What ship?" he said.
"The one we're going to Fieu Dayol on."
" Fieu Dayol? "
"Persei 17 to you. I said I was going to take you home to meet my folks, didn't I?"
"In other words, you're kidnapping me."
She shook her head vehemently. "I most certainly am not! Neither according to interstellar law or your own. When you compromised me, you made yourself liable in the eyes of both."
"But why pick on me? There must be plenty of men on Fieu Dayol . Why don't you marry one of them?"
"For two reasons: one, you're the particular man who compromised me. Two, there are not plenty of men on Fieu Dayol . Our race is identical to yours in everything except population-balance between the sexes. At periodic intervals the women on Fieu Dayol so greatly outnumber the men that those of us who are temperamentally and emotionally unfitted to become spinsters have to look for wotnids —or mates—on other worlds. It's quite legal and quite respectable. As a matter of fact, we even have schools specializing in alien cultures to expedite our activities. Our biggest problem is the Interstellar statute forbidding us the use of local communications services and forbidding us to appear in public places. It was devised to facilitate the prosecution of interstellar black marketeers, but we're subject to it, too, and have to contrive communications systems of our own."
"But why were all the messages addressed to you?"
"They weren't messages. They were requisitions. I'm the ship's stock girl."
April fields stretched darkly away on either side of the highway. Presently she turned down a rutted road between two of them and they bounced and swayed back to a black blur of trees. "Here we are," she said.
Gradually he made out the sphere. It blended so flawlessly with its background that he wouldn't have been able to see it at all if he hadn't been informed of its existence. A gangplank sloped down from an open lock and came to rest just within the fringe of the trees.
Lights danced in the darkness behind them as another car jounced down the rutted road. "Jilka," Kay said. "I wonder if she got him."
Apparently she had. At least there was a man with her—a rather woebegone, wilted creature who didn't even look up as they passed. Quidley watched them ascend the gangplank, the man in the lead, and disappear into the ship.
"Next," Kay said.
Quidley shook his head. "You're not taking me to another planet!"
She opened her purse and pulled out a small metallic object "A little while ago you asked me what a snoll doper was," she said.
"Unfortunately interstellar law severely limits us in our choice of marriageable males, and we can take only those who refuse to conform to the sexual mores of their own societies." She did something to the object that caused it to extend itself into a long, tubular affair.
" This is a snoll doper ."
She prodded his ribs. "March," she said.
He marched. Halfway up the plank he glanced back over his shoulder for a better look at the object pressed against his back.
It bore a striking resemblance to a shotgun.
Question:
What role does the snoll doper play in the story?
Answer:
|
[
"Snoll doper appears in every letter that is hidden in History of English Literature by Hippolyte Adolphe Taine, a book favored by Hebert Quidley, from which he finds these letters and starts his observation. Quidley finds these words several times when he secretly reads the letters in the book whenever a girl comes to put a new letter in the book. He is fascinated by the first girl called Kay Smith who takes the first letter after he notices it. From then on, he has been guessing the meaning of snoll doper. At first, Quidley thinks that snoll doper means a person who has close relationships with Kay, like a boyfriend or a husband. He is annoyed by this possibility after having sexual behaviors with Kay, which causes him to secretly read the fourth letter before Kay comes to pick it up. When Kay finds out that Quidley has been reading her letter, she tells him to come with her to deliver the snoll doper to Jilka, where Quidley is relieved because he realizes that snoll doper is the name of an object, not an identity. On their way to Jilka’s place, Quidley keeps asking Kay what the meaning of snoll doper is, but Kay doesn’t tell him. At the end of the story, snoll doper turns out to be the name of a shotgun, which is what the letters are for, a requisition for the shotgun. Those letters are sent toward Kay because she is the ship’s stock girl who delivers the guns. In conclusion, snoll doper is a word that puzzles Quidley throughout the whole story and causes him to be caught by Kay, the purpose of those secret letters transmitted between Kay and other girls through the book, and an object that forces Quidley to go into the ship.",
"The snoll doper is an important part of the story because it was a part of all of the messages. When Herbert read all of the different messages scribbled in bookmarks, he saw that the names of the girls repeated in every message, as well as the words: snoll doper. He was very curious to understand what they meant, so he decided to meet Kay. After Kay tells Herbet who she is, Herbert asks her whan snoll dopers are. She responds by taking out a shotgun-like weapon and forcing him onto their ship. ",
"The snoll doper is mentioned in the very first message that Quidley reads. It is also this message that motivates him to investigate further into who Kay is and what exactly is a snoll doper. Most of the story revolves around him trying to crack the meaning behind snoll doper, and he wonders if he could just ask Kay directly about it when she comes to his apartment. The snoll dopper is also largely relevant in helping him figure out what the next The snoll doper is still relevant either, after he finds out Kay’s identity and has to go back to her planet with her. ",
"Snoll doper is one of the phrases that Quidley finds in the unintelligible messages from the library. It intrigues him because he doesn’t understand what it means. It makes him think about its potential meaning. Eventually, it leads to his mini-relationship with Kay. When he asks her about this term, she says she will share its meaning later. Thus, she brings him to the ship without any trouble and knows she can use her snoll doper in case Quidley refuses to go. When he does, she presses a snoll doper - a tool similar to a shotgun - against his back and orders him to enter the ship. "
] |
61048
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The Girls From Fieu Dayol
By ROBERT F. YOUNG
They were lovely and quick to learn—and their only faults were little ones!
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Up until the moment when he first looked into Hippolyte Adolphe Taine's History of English Literature , Herbert Quidley's penchant for old books had netted him nothing in the way of romance and intrigue. Not that he was a stranger to either. Far from it. But hitherto the background for both had been bedrooms and bars, not libraries.
On page 21 of the Taine tome he happened upon a sheet of yellow copy paper folded in four. Unfolding it, he read:
asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj Cai: Sities towms copeis wotnid. Gind snoll doper nckli! Wilbe Fieu Dayol fot ig habe mot toseo knwo—te bijk weil en snoll doper—Klio, asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj
Since when, Quidley wondered, refolding the paper and putting it back in the book, had high-school typing students taken to reading Taine? Thoughtfully he replaced the book on the shelf and moved deeper into the literature section.
He had just taken down Xenophon's Anabasis when he saw the girl walk in the door.
Let it be said forthwith that old books were not the only item on Herbert Quidley's penchant-list. He liked old wood, too, and old paintings, not to mention old wine and old whiskey. But most of all he liked young girls. He especially liked them when they looked the way Helen of Troy must have looked when Paris took one gander at her and started building his ladder. This one was tall, with hyacinth hair and liquid blue eyes, and she had a Grecian symmetry of shape that would have made Paris' eyes pop had he been around to take notice. Paris wasn't, but Quidley's eyes, did the job.
After coming in the door, the girl deposited a book on the librarian's desk and headed for the literature section. Quickly Quidley lowered his eyes to the Anabasis and henceforth followed her progress out of their corners. When she came to the O's she paused, took down a book and glanced through it. Then she replaced it and moved on to the P's ... the Q's ... the R's. Barely three feet from him she paused again and took down Taine's History of English Literature .
He simply could not believe it. The odds against two persons taking an interest in so esoteric a volume on a single night in a single library were ten thousand to one. And yet there was no gainsaying that the volume was in the girl's hands, and that she was riffling through it with the air of a seasoned browser.
Presently she returned the book to the shelf, selected another—seemingly at random—and took it over to the librarian's desk. She waited statuesquely while the librarian processed it, then tucked it under her arm and whisked out the door into the misty April night. As soon as she disappeared, Quidley stepped over to the T's and took Taine down once more. Just as he had suspected. The makeshift bookmark was gone.
He remembered how the asdf-;lkj exercise had given way to several lines of gibberish and then reappeared again. A camouflaged message? Or was it merely what it appeared to be on the surface—the efforts of an impatient typing student to type before his time?
He returned Taine to the shelf. After learning from the librarian that the girl's name was Kay Smith, he went out and got in his hardtop. The name rang a bell. Halfway home he realized why. The typing exercise had contained the word "Cai", and if you pronounced it with hard c, you got
"Kai"—or "Kay". Obviously, then, the exercise had been a message, and had been deliberately inserted in a book no average person would dream of borrowing.
By whom—her boy friend?
Quidley winced. He was allergic to the term. Not that he ever let the presence of a boy friend deter him when he set out to conquer, but because the term itself brought to mind the word "fiance," and the word
"fiance" brought to mind still another word, one which repelled him violently. I.e., "marriage". Just the same, he decided to keep Taine's History under observation for a while.
Her boy friend turned out to be her girl friend, and her girl friend turned out to be a tall and lissome, lovely with a Helenesque air of her own. From the vantage point of a strategically located reading table, where he was keeping company with his favorite little magazine, The Zeitgeist , Quidley watched her take a seemingly haphazard route to the shelf where Taine's History reposed, take the volume down, surreptitiously slip a folded sheet of yellow paper between its pages and return it to the shelf.
After she left he wasted no time in acquainting himself with the second message. It was as unintelligible as the first:
asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj Cai: Habe wotnid ig ist ending ifedererer te. T'lide sid Fieu Dayol po jestig toseo knwo, bijk weil en snoll doper entling—Yoolna. asdf ;lkj asdf
;lkj asdf ;lkj asdf ;lkj
Well, perhaps not quite as unintelligible. He knew, at least, who Cai was, and he knew—from the reappearance of the words wotnid , Fieu Dayol and snoll doper —that the two communications were in the same code. And certainly it was reasonable to assume that the last word— Yoolna —was the name of the girl he had just seen, and that she was a different person from the Klio whose name had appended the first message.
He refolded the paper, replaced it between the pages, returned the book to the shelf and went back to the reading table and The Zeitgeist .
Kay didn't show up till almost closing time, and he was beginning to think that perhaps she wouldn't come around for the pickup till tomorrow when she finally walked in the door. She employed the same tactics she had employed the previous night, arriving, as though by chance, at the T-section and transferring the message with the same undetectable legerdemain to her purse. This time, when she walked out the door, he was not far behind her.
She climbed into a sleek convertible and pulled into the street. It took him but a moment to gain his hardtop and start out after her. When, several blocks later, she pulled to the curb in front of an all-night coffee bar, he followed suit. After that, it was merely a matter of following her inside.
He decided on Operation Spill-the-sugar. It had stood him in good stead before, and he was rather fond of it. The procedure was quite simple. First you took note of the position of the sugar dispensers, then you situated yourself so that your intended victim was between you and the nearest one, then you ordered coffee without sugar in a low voice, and after the counterman or countergirl had served you, you waited till he/she was out of earshot and asked your i.v. to please pass the sugar. When she did so you let the dispenser slip from your fingers in such a way that some of its contents spilled on her lap—
"I'm terribly sorry," he said, righting it. "Here, let me brush it off."
"It's all right, it's only sugar," she said, laughing.
"I'm hopelessly clumsy," he continued smoothly, brushing the gleaming crystals from her pleated skirt, noting the clean sweep of her thighs.
"I beseech you to forgive me."
"You're forgiven," she said, and he noticed then that she spoke with a slight accent.
"If you like, you can send it to the cleaners and have them send the bill to me. My address is 61 Park Place." He pulled out his wallet, chose an appropriate card, and handed it to her—
Herbert Quidley: Profiliste
Her forehead crinkled. " Profiliste? "
"I paint profiles with words," he said. "You may have run across some of my pieces in the Better Magazines. I employ a variety of pseudonyms, of course."
"How interesting." She pronounced it "anteresting."
"Not famous profiles, you understand. Just profiles that strike my fancy." He paused. She had raised her cup to her lips and was taking a dainty sip. "You have a rather striking profile yourself, Miss—"
"Smith. Kay Smith." She set the cup back on the counter and turned and faced him. For a second her eyes seemed to expand till they preoccupied his entire vision, till he could see nothing but their disturbingly clear—and suddenly cold—blueness. Panic touched him, then vanished when she said, "Would you really consider word-painting my profile, Mr. Quidley?"
Would he! "When can I call?"
She hesitated for a moment. Then: "I think it will be better if I call on you. There are quite a number of people living in our—our house. I'm afraid the quarters would be much too cramped for an artist like yourself to concentrate."
Quidley glowed. Usually it required two or three days, and sometimes a week, to reach the apartment phase. "Fine," he said. "When can I expect you?"
She stood up and he got to his feet beside her. She was even taller than he had thought. In fact, if he hadn't been wearing Cuban heels, she'd have been taller than he was. "I'll be in town night after next," she said. "Will nine o'clock be convenient for you?"
"Perfectly."
"Good-by for now then, Mr. Quidley."
He was so elated that when he arrived at his apartment he actually did try to write a profile. His own, of course. He sat down at his custom-built chrome-trimmed desk, inserted a blank sheet of paper in his custom-built typewriter and tried to arrange his thoughts. But as usual his mind raced ahead of the moment, and he saw the title, Self Profile , nestling noticeably on the contents page of one of the Better Magazines, and presently he saw the piece itself in all its splendid array of colorful rhetoric, sparkling imagery and scintillating wit, occupying a two-page spread.
It was some time before he returned to reality, and when he did the first thing that met his eyes was the uncompromisingly blank sheet of paper. Hurriedly he typed out a letter to his father, requesting an advance on his allowance, then, after a tall glass of vintage wine, he went to bed.
In telling him that she would be in town two nights hence, Kay had unwittingly apprised him that there would be no exchange of messages until that time, so the next evening he skipped his vigil at the library. The following evening, however, after readying his apartment for the forthcoming assignation, he hied himself to his reading-table post and took up The Zeitgeist once again.
He had not thought it possible that there could be a third such woman.
And yet there she was, walking in the door, tall and blue-eyed and graceful; dark of hair and noble of mien; browsing in the philosophy section now, now the fiction section, now moving leisurely into the literature aisle and toward the T's....
The camouflage had varied, but the message was typical enough:
fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; Cai: Gind en snoll doper nckli! Wotnid antwaterer Fieu Dayol hid jestig snoll doper ifedererer te. Dep gogensplo snoll dopers ensing!—Gorka. fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl; fdsa jkl;
Judging from the repeated use of the words, snoll dopers were the topic of the day. Annoyed, Quidley replaced the message and put the book back on the shelf. Then he returned to his apartment to await Kay.
He wondered what her reaction would be if he asked her point-blank what a snoll doper was; whether she would reveal the nature of the amateur secret society to which she and Klio and Yoolna and Gorka belonged. It virtually had to be an amateur secret society. Unless, of course, they were foreigners. But what on earth foreign organization would be quixotic enough to employ Taine's History of English Literature as a communications medium when there was a telephone in every drugstore and a mailbox on every corner?
Somehow the words "what on earth foreign organization" got turned around in his mind and became "what foreign organization on earth" and before he could summon his common sense to succor him, he experienced a rather bad moment. By the time the door chimes sounded he was his normal self again.
He straightened his tie with nervous fingers, checked to see if his shirt cuffs protruded the proper length from his coat sleeves, and looked around the room to see if everything was in place. Everything was—the typewriter uncovered and centered on the chrome-trimmed desk, with the sheaf of crinkly first-sheets beside it; the reference books stacked imposingly nearby; Harper's , The Atlantic and The Saturday Review showing conspicuously in the magazine rack; the newly opened bottle of bourbon and the two snifter glasses on the sideboard; the small table set cozily for two—
The chimes sounded again. He opened the door.
She walked in with a demure, "Hello." He took her wrap. When he saw what she was wearing he had to tilt his head back so that his eyes wouldn't fall out of their sockets.
Skin, mostly, in the upper regions. White, glowing skin on which her long hair lay like forest pools. As for her dress, it was as though she had fallen forward into immaculate snow, half-burying her breasts before catching herself on her elbows, then turning into a sitting position, the snow clinging to her skin in a glistening veneer; arising finally to her feet, resplendently attired.
He went over to the sideboard, picked up the bottle of bourbon. She followed. He set the two snifter glasses side by side and tilted the bottle. "Say when." "When!" "I admire your dress—never saw anything quite like it." "Thank you. The material is something new. Feel it."
"It's—it's almost like foam rubber. Cigarette?" "Thanks.... Is something wrong, Mr. Quidley?" "No, of course not. Why?" "Your hands are trembling." "Oh. I'm—I'm afraid it's the present company, Miss Smith." "Call me Kay."
They touched glasses: "Your liquor is as exquisite as your living room, Herbert. I shall have to come here more often." "I hope you will, Kay."
"Though such conduct, I'm told, is morally reprehensible on the planet Earth." "Not in this particular circle. Your hair is lovely." "Thank you.... You haven't mentioned my perfume yet. Perhaps I'm standing too far away.... There!" "It's—it's as lovely as your hair, Kay." "Um, kiss me again." "I—I never figured—I mean, I engaged a caterer to serve us dinner at 9:30." "Call him up. Make it 10:30."
The following evening found Quidley on tenter-hooks. The snoll-doper mystery had acquired a new tang. He could hardly wait till the next message transfer took place.
He decided to spend the evening plotting the epic novel which he intended to write someday. He set to work immediately. He plotted mentally, of course—notes were for the hacks and the other commercial non-geniuses who infested the modern literary world. Closing his eyes, he saw the whole vivid panorama of epic action and grand adventure flowing like a mighty and majestic river before his literary vision: the authentic and awe-inspiring background; the hordes of colorful characters; the handsome virile hero, the compelling Helenesque heroine.... God, it was going to be great! The best thing he'd ever done! See, already there was a crowd of book lovers in front of the bookstore, staring into the window where the new Herbert Quidley was on display, trying to force its way into the jammed interior.... Cut to interior. FIRST EAGER CUSTOMER: Tell me quickly, are there any more copies of the new Herbert Quidley left? BOOK CLERK: A few. You don't know how lucky you are to get here before the first printing ran out. FIRST EAGER CUSTOMER: Give me a dozen. I want to make sure that my children and my children's children have a plentiful supply. BOOK CLERK: Sorry. Only one to a customer. Next? SECOND EAGER CUSTOMER: Tell me quickly, are ... there ... any ... more ... copies ... of—
ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ....
Message no. 4, except for a slight variation in camouflage, ran true to form:
a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj Cai: Habe te snoll dopers ensing? Wotnid ne Fieu Dayol ist ifederereret, hid jestig snoll doper. Gind ed, olro—Jilka. a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj a;sldkfj
Quidley sighed. What, he asked himself, standing in the library aisle and staring at the indecipherable words, was a normal girl like Kay doing in such a childish secret society? From the way she and her correspondents carried on you'd almost think they were Martian girl scouts on an interplanetary camping trip, trying for their merit badges in communications!
You could hardly call Kay a girl scout, though.
Nevertheless, she was the key figure in the snoll-doper enigma. The fact annoyed him, especially when he considered that a snoll doper , for all he knew, could be anything from a Chinese fortune cooky to an H-bomb.
He remembered Kay's odd accent. Was that the way a person would speak English if her own language ran something like " ist ifedereret, hid jestig snoll doper adwo ?"
He remembered the way she had looked at him in the coffee bar.
He remembered the material of her dress.
He remembered how she had come to his room.
"I didn't know you had a taste for Taine."
Her voice seemed to come from far away, but she was standing right beside him, tall and bewitching; Helenesque as ever. Her blue eyes became great wells into which he found himself falling. With an effort, he pulled himself back. "You're early tonight," he said lamely.
She appropriated the message, read it. "Put the book back," she said presently. Then, when he complied: "Come on."
"Where are we going?"
"I'm going to deliver a snoll doper to Jilka. After that I'm going to take you home to meet my folks."
The relieved sigh he heard was his own.
They climbed into her convertible and she nosed it into the moving line of cars. "How long have you been reading my mail?" she asked.
"Since the night before I met you."
"Was that the reason you spilled the sugar?"
"Part of the reason," he said. "What's a snoll doper ?"
She laughed. "I don't think I'd better tell you just yet."
He sighed again. "But if Jilka wanted a snoll doper ," he said after a while, "why in the world didn't she call you up and say so?"
"Regulations." She pulled over to the curb in front of a brick apartment building. "This is where Jilka lives. I'll explain when I get back."
He watched her get out, walk up the walk to the entrance and let herself in. He leaned his head back on the seat, lit a cigarette and exhaled a mixture of smoke and relief. On the way to meet her folks. So it was just an ordinary secret society after all. And here he'd been thinking that she was the key figure in a Martian plot to blow up Earth—
Her folks !
Abruptly the full implication of the words got through to him, and he sat bolt-up-right on the seat. He was starting to climb out of the car when he saw Kay coming down the walk. Anyway, running away wouldn't solve his problem. A complete disappearing act was in order, and a complete disappearing act would take time. Meanwhile he would play along with her.
A station wagon came up behind them, slowed, and matched its speed with theirs. "Someone's following us," Quidley said.
"Probably Jilka."
Five minutes later the station wagon turned down a side street and disappeared. "She's no longer with us," Quidley said.
"She's got to pick someone up. She'll meet us later."
"At your folks'?"
"At the ship."
The city was thinning out around them now, and a few stars were visible in the night sky. Quidley watched them thoughtfully for a while. Then:
"What ship?" he said.
"The one we're going to Fieu Dayol on."
" Fieu Dayol? "
"Persei 17 to you. I said I was going to take you home to meet my folks, didn't I?"
"In other words, you're kidnapping me."
She shook her head vehemently. "I most certainly am not! Neither according to interstellar law or your own. When you compromised me, you made yourself liable in the eyes of both."
"But why pick on me? There must be plenty of men on Fieu Dayol . Why don't you marry one of them?"
"For two reasons: one, you're the particular man who compromised me. Two, there are not plenty of men on Fieu Dayol . Our race is identical to yours in everything except population-balance between the sexes. At periodic intervals the women on Fieu Dayol so greatly outnumber the men that those of us who are temperamentally and emotionally unfitted to become spinsters have to look for wotnids —or mates—on other worlds. It's quite legal and quite respectable. As a matter of fact, we even have schools specializing in alien cultures to expedite our activities. Our biggest problem is the Interstellar statute forbidding us the use of local communications services and forbidding us to appear in public places. It was devised to facilitate the prosecution of interstellar black marketeers, but we're subject to it, too, and have to contrive communications systems of our own."
"But why were all the messages addressed to you?"
"They weren't messages. They were requisitions. I'm the ship's stock girl."
April fields stretched darkly away on either side of the highway. Presently she turned down a rutted road between two of them and they bounced and swayed back to a black blur of trees. "Here we are," she said.
Gradually he made out the sphere. It blended so flawlessly with its background that he wouldn't have been able to see it at all if he hadn't been informed of its existence. A gangplank sloped down from an open lock and came to rest just within the fringe of the trees.
Lights danced in the darkness behind them as another car jounced down the rutted road. "Jilka," Kay said. "I wonder if she got him."
Apparently she had. At least there was a man with her—a rather woebegone, wilted creature who didn't even look up as they passed. Quidley watched them ascend the gangplank, the man in the lead, and disappear into the ship.
"Next," Kay said.
Quidley shook his head. "You're not taking me to another planet!"
She opened her purse and pulled out a small metallic object "A little while ago you asked me what a snoll doper was," she said.
"Unfortunately interstellar law severely limits us in our choice of marriageable males, and we can take only those who refuse to conform to the sexual mores of their own societies." She did something to the object that caused it to extend itself into a long, tubular affair.
" This is a snoll doper ."
She prodded his ribs. "March," she said.
He marched. Halfway up the plank he glanced back over his shoulder for a better look at the object pressed against his back.
It bore a striking resemblance to a shotgun.
|
What is ekalastron or No. 97?
|
After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about The Lorelei Death by Nelson S. Bond.
Relevant chunks:
THE LORELEI DEATH
by NELSON S. BOND
Far out in limitless Space she plied her deadly trade ... a Lorelei of the void, beckoning spacemen to death and destruction with her beautiful siren lure.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1941. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Chip Warren stood before an oblong of glass set into one wall of the spaceship Chickadee II , stared at what he saw reflected therefrom—and frowned. He didn't like it. Not a bit! It was too—too—
He turned away angrily, ripped the offending article from about his neck, and chose another necktie from the rack. This one was brighter, gaudier, much more in keeping with the gaiety of his mood. He emitted a grunt of satisfaction, spun from the mirror to face his two companions triumphantly.
"There! How do you like that ?"
Syd Palmer, short and chubby, tow-headed and liquid-blue of eye, always languid save when engaged in the solution of some engineering problem concerned with the space vessel he mothered like a brooding hen, moaned insultingly and forced a shudder.
"Sunspots! Novae! Flying comets! And he wears 'em around his neck!"
"You," Chip told him serenely, "have no appreciation of beauty. What do you think of it, Padre?"
"Salvation" Smith, a tall, gangling scarecrow garbed in rusty black, a lean-jawed, hawkeyed man with tumbled locks of silver framing his weathered cheeks like a halo, concealed his grin poorly. "Well, my boy," he admitted, "there is some Biblical precedent for your—ahem!—clamorous raiment. 'So Joseph made for himself a coat which was of many colors—'"
"Both of you," declared Chip, "give me a pain in the pants! Stick-in-the-muds! Here we are in port for the first time in months, cargo-bins loaded to the gunwales with enough ekalastron to make us rich for life—and you sit here like a pair of stuffed owls!
"Well, not me! I'm going to take a night off, throw myself a party the likes of which was never seen around these parts. Put a candle in the window, chilluns, 'cause li'l' Chip won't be home till the wee, sma' hours!"
Syd chuckled.
"O.Q., big shot. But don't get too cozy with any of those joy-joint entertainers. Remember what happened to poor old Dougal MacNeer!"
Salvation said soberly, "Syd's just fooling, my boy. But I would be careful if I were you. We're in the Belt, you know. The forces of law and order do not always govern these wild outposts of civilization as well as might be hoped. The planetoids are dens of iniquity, violent and unheeding the words of Him who rules all—"
The old man's lips etched a straight line, reminding Chip that Salvation Smith was not one of those milk-and-water missionaries who espoused the principle of "turning the other cheek" to evildoers. Salvation was not the ordained emissary of any church. A devoutly religious man with the heart of an adventurer, he had taken upon himself the mission of carrying to outland tribes the story of the God he worshipped.
That his God was the fierce Yahveh of the Old Testament, a God of anger and retribution, was made evident by the methods Salvation sometimes employed in winning his converts. For not only was Salvation acknowledged the most pious man in space; he was also conceded to be the best hand with a gun!
Now Chip gave quiet answer. "I know, Padre: I'll be careful. Well, Syd—sure you won't change your mind and come along?"
"No can do, chum. The spaceport repair crew's still smearing this jalopy with ek. Got to stay and watch 'em."
"O.Q. I'm off alone, then. See you later!"
And, whistling, Chip Warren stepped through the lock of the Chickadee onto the soil of the asteroid Danae.
Danae was, thought Chip as he strolled along briskly toward the town beyond the spaceport, a most presentable hunk of rock. Nice lucentite Dome ... good atmo ... a fine artificial grav system based on Terra normal. It seemed to be a popular little fueling-stop, too, for its cradle-bins were laden with vessels from every planet in the System, and as he gained the main drag he found himself rubbing shoulders with citizens of every known world. Lumbering, albino Venusians, petal-headed Martians, Jovian runts, greenies from far Uranus, Earthman—all were here.
Quite a likely place, he thought happily, to chuck a brawl. A brilliantly gleaming xenon sign before him welcomed visitors to:
XU'UL'S SOLAREST Barroom—Casino—Dancing 100—Lovely Hostesses—100
He entered, and was immediately deluged by a bevy of charm-gals vying for the privilege of: (1) helping him beat the roulette wheel; (2) helping him drink the house dry, and/or (3) separating him as swiftly as possible from the credits in his money belt.
Chip shook them off, gently but firmly. He wanted a good time, true; but he wanted it solo. The main cabaret was too crowded; he passed through it and another equally blatant room wherein twoscore Venusians were straining the structure with a native "sing-stomp," and ended up finally, with a sigh of relief, in a small, dimly-lighted private bar unfrequented by anyone save a bored and listless Martian bartender.
The chrysanthemum-pated son of the desertland roused himself as Chip entered, rustled his petals and piped a ready greeting.
"Welcoom, ssirr! Trrink, pleasse?"
This was more like it! Chip grinned.
"Scotch," he said. " Old Spaceman. And let's have a new bottle, Curly. None of that doctored swill."
"Of courrsse, ssirr!" piped the bar-keep aggrievedly. He pushed a bottle across the mahogany; Chip flipped a golden credit-token back at him.
"Tell me when I've guzzled this, and I'll start work on another." He took a deep, appreciative sniff. "And don't let any of those dizzy dolls in here," he ordered. "I've got a lot of back drinking to catch up on, and I don't want to be disturbed— Hey! "
In his alarm, he almost dropped the bottle. For the door suddenly burst open, and in its frame loomed a figure in Space Patrol blues. A finger pointed in Chip's direction and a bull-o'-Bashan voice roared:
" Stop! Bartender—grab that man! He's a desperate criminal, wanted on four planets for murder!"
Shock momentarily immobilized Chip. Not so the bartender. He was, it seemed, an ardent pacifist. With a bleat of panic fear he scampered from his post, his metallic stilts clattering off in the distance. Chip's accuser moved forward from the shadows; dim light illumined his features. And—
" Johnny! " Chip's voice lifted in a note of jubilant surprise.
"Johnny Haldane—you old scoundrel! Where in the void did you drop from?"
The S.S.P. man chuckled and returned Chip's greeting with a bone-grinding handclasp.
"I might ask the same of you, chum! Lord, it's been ages since we've crossed 'jectory! When I saw you meandering across the Casino, you could have knocked me down with a jetblast! What's new? Is old Syd still with you?"
"We're still shipmates. But he's back at the spaceport. The jerry-crew is plating our crate with ek, and—"
"Ek! Plating a private cruiser!" Haldane stared at him in astonishment, then whistled. "Sweet Sacred Stars, you must be filthy with credits to be able to coat an entire ship with ekalastron!"
"You," boasted Chip, "ain't heard nothing yet!" And he told him how they had discovered an entire mountain of the previous new element, No.
97 in the periodic table, on frigid Titania, satellite of far Uranus.
"It was touch-and-go for a while," he admitted, "whether we'd be the luckiest three guys in space—or the deadest! But we passed through the flaming caverns like old Shadrach in the Bible—remember?—and here we are!"
[1]
Haldane was exuberant. "A mountain of ekalastron!" he gloated.
"That's the greatest contribution to spaceflight since Biggs' velocity-intensifier!" It was no overstatement. "Element No. 97 was a metal so light that a man could carry in one hand enough to coat the entire hull of a battleship—yet so adamant that a gossamer film of it would deflect a meteor! A metal strong enough to crush diamonds to ash—but so resilient that, when properly treated, it would rebound like rubber! What are you going to do with it, Chip? Put it on the open market?"
Warren shook his head.
"Not exactly. We talked it over carefully—Syd and Salvation and I—and we decided there are some space-rats to whom it shouldn't be made available. Privateers and outlaws, you know. So we turned control of the mines over to the Space Patrol at Uranus, and visiphoned the Earth authorities we were bringing in one cargo—"
"Visiphoned!" interrupted Haldane sharply. "Did you say visiphoned?"
"Why—why, yes."
"From where?"
"Oh, just before we reached the Belt. We don't have a very strong transmitter, you know. Sa-a-ay, what's all the excitement, pal? Did we do something that was wrong?"
Haldane frowned worriedly. "I don't know, Chip. It wasn't anything wrong , but what you did was damned dangerous. For if your message was intercepted, you may have played into the very hands of—the Lorelei!"
Chip stared at his friend bewilderedly for a moment. Then he grinned.
"Hey—I must be getting slightly whacky in my old age. I stand here with an unopened bottle in my hands and hear things! For a minute I thought you said 'Lorelei.' The Lorelei, my space-cop friend, is a myth. An old Teutonic myth about a beautiful damsel who sits out in the middle of a sea on a treacherous rock, combing her golden locks, warbling and luring her fascinated admirers to destruction."
He grunted. "A dirty trick, if you ask me. Catch a snort of this alleged Scotch, pal, and I'll torture your eardrums with the whole, sad story." He started to sing. "' Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten —'"
The Patrolman laid a hand on his arm, silenced him.
"It's not funny, Chip. You've described the Lorelei exactly. That's how she got her name. An incredibly beautiful woman who wantonly lures space-mariners to their death.
"The only difference is that her 'rock' is an asteroid somewhere in the Belt—and she does not sing, she calls! She began exercising her vicious appeal about two months ago, Earth reckoning. Since then, no less than a dozen spacecraft—freighters, liners, even one Patrolship—have fallen prey to her wiles. Their crews have been brutally murdered, their cargos stolen."
"Wait a minute!" interrupted Chip shrewdly. "How do you know about her if the crews have been murdered?"
"She has a habit of locking the controls," explained Haldane, "and setting ravaged ships adrift. Apparently there is no room on her hideout—wherever it is—for empty hulks. One of these ships was salvaged by a courageous cabin-boy who hid from the Lorelei and her pirate band beneath a closetful of soiled linens in the laundry. He described her. His description goes perfectly with less accurate glimpses seen over the visiphones of several score spacecraft!"
Chip said soberly, "So it's no joke, eh, pal? Sorry I popped off. I thought you were pulling my leg. Where do I come into this mess, though?"
"Ekalastron!" grunted Johnny succinctly. "A jackpot prize for any corsair! And you advertised a cargo of it over the etherwaves! The Lorelei will be waiting for you with her tongue hanging out. The only thing for you to do, kid, is go back to Jupiter or Io as fast as you can get there. Make the Patrol give you a convoy—"
A sudden light danced in Chip Warren's eyes. It was a light Syd Palmer would have groaned to see—for it usually presaged trouble. It was a bright, hard, reckless light.
"Hold your jets, Johnny!" drawled Chip. "Aren't you forgetting one thing? In a couple more hours, I can face the Lorelei and her whole mob—and be damned to them! She can't touch the Chickadee , because it's being plated right now!"
Haldane snapped his fingers in quick remembrance.
"By thunder, you're right! Her shells will ricochet off the Chickadee's hull like hail off a tin roof. Chip, are you in any hurry to reach Earth? I thought not. What do you say we go after the Lorelei together ! I'll swear you in as a Deputy Patrolman; we'll take the Chickadee and—"
"It's a deal!" declared Chip promptly. "You got any idea where this Lorelei's hangout is?"
"That's why I'm here on Danae. I got a tip that one of the Lorelei's men put in here for supplies. I hoped maybe I could single him out somehow, follow him when he jetted for his base, and in that way— Chip! Look out! "
Haldane shouted and moved at the same time. His arm lashed out wildly, thrusting, smashing Chip to the floor in a sprawling heap. The as-yet unopened bottle was now violently opened; it splintered into a thousand shards against a wall.
Bruised and shaken, Chip lifted his head to see what had caused Johnny's alarm. Even as he did so, the dull gloom of the bar was blazoned with searing effulgence. A lancet of flame leaped from the dark, rearward doorway, burst in Johnny Haldane's face!
The Patrolman cried once, a choking cry that died in a mewling whimper. His unused pistol slipped from slackening fingers, and he sagged to the floor. Again crimson lightning laced the shadows; Haldane's body jerked, and the air was raw with the hot, sickening stench of charred flesh.
With an instinct born of bitter years, Chip had come to his knees behind the shelter of the mahogany bar. But now his own flame-pistol was in his hand, and a dreadful rage was mingled with the agony in his heart. Reckless of results, he sprang to his feet, gun spewing livid death into the shadows.
His blast found a mark. For an instant flame haloed a human face drawn in inhuman pain. A heavy, sultry, bestial face, already puckered with one long, ugly scar that ran from right temple to jawbone, now newly scarred with the red brand of Chip's marksmanship.
Then, before Chip could fire again, came the rasp of pounding footsteps. The man turned and fled. Chip bent over his fallen friend, seeking, with hands that did not even feel the heat, fluttering life beneath still smoldering cloth.
He felt—nothing. Johnny was dead.
A snarl of sheer animal rage burst from Chip's lips. Someone would pay for this; pay dearly! Help was coming now. He himself would lead the hue-and-cry that would track a foul murderer to his lair. He spun as the footsteps drew nearer.
"Hurry!" he cried. "This way! Follow me—"
In a bound, he hurdled the bar, lingered at the door only long enough to let the others mark his course. For they had burst into the room, now, a full score of them. Excited, hard-bitten dogs of space, quick-triggered and willing. Once more he cried for help.
"After him! Come on! He—"
And then—disaster struck! For a reedy voice broke from the van of the mob. The voice of the Martian bartender.
"That's him!" he piped sibilantly. "That's the man! He's a desperate criminal, wanted on four planets for murder! The Patrolman came to arrest him— and now he's murdered the Spacie !"
II
The stunning injustice of that accusation came close to costing Chip Warren his life. For a split second he stood motionless in the doorway, gaping lips forming denial. Words which were never to be uttered, for suddenly a raw-boned miner wrenched a Moeller from its holster, leveled and fired.
The hot tongue of death licked hungrily at the young spaceman's cheek, scorched air crackled in his eardrums. Now was no time to squander in vain argument. Chip ducked, spun, and hurled himself through the doorway. There still remained one hope. That he might catch the real murderer, and in that way clear himself....
But the door led to a small, deserted vestibule, and it to an alleyway behind Xu'ul's Solarest. Viewing that maze of byways and passages, Chip knew his hope was futile. There remained but one thing to do. Get out of here. But quick!
It was no hard task. The labyrinth swallowed him as it had engulfed the scarred killer; in a few minutes even the footsteps of his pursuers could no longer be heard. And Chip worked his cautious way back to the spaceport, and to the bin wherein was cradled the Chickadee .
Syd Palmer looked up in surprise as Chip let himself in the electro-lock. The chubby engineer gasped, "Salvation, look what the cat drug in! His high-flying Nibs! What's the matter, Chip? Night-life too much for you?"
"Never mind that now!" panted Chip. "Is this tin can ready to roll? Warm the hypos. We're lifting gravs—"
Palmer said anxiously, "Now, wait a minute! The men haven't quite finished plating the hull, Chip!"
"Can't help that! We've got important business. In a very few minutes— Ahh! There he goes now!" Chip had gone to the perilens the moment he entered the ship; now he saw in its reflector that which he had expected. The gushing orange spume of a spaceship roaring from its cradle. "Hurry, Syd!"
There were a lot of things Syd Palmer wanted to ask. He wanted to know who went where ; he was bursting with curiosity about the "important business" which had brought his pal back from town in such a rush; his keen eye also had detected a needle-gun burn on Chip's coat-sleeve. But he was too good a companion to waste time now on such trivia.
"O.Q.," he snapped. "It's your pigeon!"
And he disappeared. They heard his voice calling to the workmen, the scuff of equipment being disengaged from the Chickadee's hull, the thin, high whine of warming hypatomics. Salvation looked at Warren quizzically.
"It smells," he ventured gently, "like trouble."
"It is trouble," Chip told him. "Plenty trouble!"
"In that case—" said the old man mildly—"I guess I'd better get the rotor stripped for action." He stepped to the gunnery turret, dropped the fore-irons and stripped their weapon for action. "'Be ye men of peace,'" he intoned, "'but gird firmly thy loins for righteous battle!' Thus saith the Lord God which is Jehovah. Selah!"
Then came Syd's cry from the depths of the hyporoom.
"All set, Chip! Lift gravs!"
Warren's finger found a stud. And with a gusty roar the Chickadee rocketed into space on a pillar of flame.
Two hours later, Chip was still following the bright pinpoint of scarlet which marked the course of his quarry.
In the time that had elapsed since their take-off, he had told his friends the whole story. When he told about the Lorelei, Salvation Smith's seamy old features screwed up in a perplexed grimace. "A woman pirate in the Belt, son? I find it hard to believe. Yet—" And when he described the death of Johnny Haldane, anger smoldered in the missionary's eyes, and Syd Palmer's hands knotted into tight, white fists. Said Syd, "A man with a scar, eh? Well, we'll catch him sooner or later. And when we do—" His tone boded no good to the man who had slain an old and loved friend.
"As a matter of fact," offered Salvation, "we've got him now. Any time you say the word, Chip. We're faster than he is. We can close in on him in five minutes."
"I know," nodded Warren grimly. "But we won't do it—yet. I'm borrowing a bit of Johnny's strategy. I've been plotting his course. As soon as I'm sure of his destination, we'll take care of him . But our first and most vital problem is to locate the Lorelei's hideaway."
Syd said, "That's all right with me, chum. I like a good scrap as much as the next guy. Better, maybe. But this isn't our concern, strictly speaking. What we ought to do is report this matter to the Space Patrol, let them take care of it."
Salvation shook his head.
"That's where you're mistaken, Sydney. This is very much our concern. So much so, in fact, that we dare not make port again until it's cleared up. I think you have forgotten that it is not the scar-faced man who is wanted for the killing of Haldane—but Chip!"
"B-but—" gasped Palmer—"b-but that's ridiculous! Chip and Johnny were old buddies. Lifelong friends!"
"Nevertheless, the circumstantial evidence indicates Chip's guilt. Twenty men saw him standing over Johnny's dead body, with a flame-pistol in his hand. And the barkeep heard Johnny 'arrest' Chip and accuse him of murder!"
Chip said ruefully, "That's right, Syd. It was only a joke, but it backfired. The bartender thought Johnny meant it. He scooted out of there like a bat out of Hades. I'm in it up to my neck unless we can bring back evidence that Scarface actually did the killing. And that may not be so easy."
He stirred restlessly. "But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Right now our job is to keep this rat in sight. We've gone farther already than I expected we would." He turned to the old preacher.
"Where do you think we're going, Padre? Out of the Belt entirely?"
"I've been wondering that myself, son. I don't know for sure, of course, but it looks to me as if we're going for the Bog. If so, you'd better keep a weather-eye peeled."
"The Bog!" Chip had never penetrated the planetoids so deeply before, but he knew of the Bog by hearsay. All men did. A treacherous region of tightly packed asteroids, a mad and whirling scramble of the gigantic rocks which, aeons ago, had been a planet. Few spacemen dared penetrate the Bog. Of those who did dare, few returned to tell the tale. "The Bog! Say! I'd better keep a sharp lookout!"
He turned to the perilens once more, fastened an eye to its lens. And then—
"Syd!" he cried. "Salvation! Look! She—she—!"
He pressed the plunger that transferred the perilens image to the central viewscreen. And as he did so, a phantom filled the area which should have revealed yawning space, gay with the spangles of a myriad glowing orbs. The vision of an unbelievably beautiful girl, the golden-crowned embodiment of a man's fondest dreaming, eyes wide with an indistinguishable emotion, arms stretched wide in mute appeal.
And from the throats of all came simultaneous recognition.
" The Lorelei! "
At the same moment came a plea from the enchantress of space through a second medium. For no reason anyone could explain, the ship's telaudio wakened to life; over it came to their ears the actual words of the girl:
" Help! Oh, help! Can anyone hear me? Help —"
Even though he knew this to be only a ruse, a deliberate, dastardly trap set for the unwary, Chip Warren's pulse leaped in hot response to that desperate plea. Even with the warning of Johnny Haldane fresh in his memory, some gallantry deep within him spurred him to the aid of this lovely vision. Here was a woman a man could live for, fight for, die for! A woman like no other in the universe.
Then common sense came to his rescue. He wrenched his gaze from the tempting shadow, cried: "Kill that wavelength! Tune the lens on another beam, Syd!"
Palmer, bedazzled but obedient, spun the dial of the perilens . Despite his vastly improved science Man had never yet succeeded in devising a transparent medium through which to view the void wherein he soared; the perilens was a device which translated impinging light-waves into a picture of that which lay outside the ship's hull. When or where electrical disturbances existed in space, its frequency could be changed for greater clarity. This was what Syd now attempted.
But to no avail! For it mattered not which cycle he tuned to—the image persisted. Still on the viewscreen that pleading figure beckoned piteously. And still the cabin rang to the prayers of that heart-tugging voice:
" Help! Oh, help! Can anyone hear me? Help —"
Gone, now, was any fascination that thrilling vision might previously have held for Chip Warren. Understanding of their plight dawned coldly upon him, and his brow became dark with anger.
" We're blanketed! Flying blind! Salvation, radio a general alarm! Syd, jazz the hypos to max. Shift trajectory to fourteen-oh-three North and loft ... fire No. 3 jet...."
He had hurled himself into the bucket-shaped pilot's seat; now his fingers played the controls like those of a mad organist. The Chickadee groaned from prow to stern, trembled like a tortured thing as he thrust it into a rising spiral.
It was a desperate chance he was taking. Increasing his speed thus, it was certain he would be spotted by the man he had been following; the flaming jets of the Chickadee must form a crimson arch against black space visible for hundreds—thousands!—of miles. Nor was there any way of knowing what lay in the path Chip thus blindly chose. Titanic death might loom on every side. But they had to fight clear of this spot of blindness, clear their instruments....
And then it came! A jarring concussion that smashed against the prow of the Chickadee like a battering ram. Chip flew headlong out of his bucket to spreadeagle on the heaving iron floor. He heard, above the grinding plaint of shattered steel the bellowing prayer of Salvation Smith:
"We've crashed! 'Into Thy hands, O Lord of old—'"
Then Syd's angry cry, "Crashed, hell! He's smashed us with a tractor-blast!"
Chip stared at his companion numbly.
"But—but that's impossible! We're plated with ek! A tractor-cannon couldn't hurt us—"
" Half-plated! " howled Syd savagely. "And those damn fools started working from the stern of the Chickadee ! We're vulnerable up front, and that's where he got us! In a minute this can will be leaking like a sieve. I'll get out bulgers. Hold 'er to her course, Chip!"
He dove for the lockers wherein were hung the space-suits, tore them hastily from their hangers. Chip again spun the perilens vernier. No good! No space ... no stars ... just a beautiful phantom crying them to certain doom. By now he was aware that from a dozen sprung plates air was seeping, but he fought down despair. While there remained hope, a man had to keep on fighting.
He scrambled back into the bucket-seat, experimented with controls that answered sluggishly. Salvation had sprung to the rotor-gun, was now angrily jerking its lanyard, lacing the void with death-dealing bursts that had no mark. The old man's eyes were brands of fire, his white hair clung wetly to his forehead. His rage was terrible to behold.
"'Yes, truly shall I destroy them!'" he cried, "'who loose their stealth upon me like a thief from the night—'"
Then suddenly there came a second and more frightful blow. The straining Chickadee stopped as though pole-axed by a gigantic fist. Stopped and shuddered and screamed in metal agony. This time inertia flung Chip headlong, helpless, into the control racks. Brazen studs took the impact of his body; crushing pain banded about his temples, and a red wetness ran into his eyes, blurring and blinding him, burning.
For an instant there flamed before him a universe of incandescent stars, weaving, shimmering, merging. The vision of a woman whose hair was a golden glory....
After that—nothing!
III
From a billion miles away, from a bourne unguessable thousands of light-years distant, came the faint, far whisper of a voice. Nearer and nearer it came, and ever faster, till it throbbed upon Chip's eardrums with booming savagery.
"—coming to, now. Good! We'll soon find out—"
Chip opened his eyes, too dazed, at first, to understand the situation in which he found himself. Gone was the familiar control-turret of the Chickadee , gone the bulger into which he had so hastily clambered. He lay on the parched, rocky soil of a—a something. A planetoid, perhaps. And he was surrounded by a motley crew of strangers: scum of all the planets that circle the Sun....
Then recollection flooded back upon him, sudden and complete. The chase ... the call of the fateful Lorelei ... the crash! New strength, born of anger, surged through him. He lifted his head.
"My—my companions?" he demanded weakly.
The leader of those who encircled him, a mighty hulk of a man, massive of shoulder and thigh, black-haired, with an unshaven blue jaw, raven-bright eyes and a jutting, aquiline nose like the beak of a hawk, loosed a satisfied grunt.
"Ah! Back to normal, eh, sailor? Damn near time!"
Climbing to his feet sent a swift wave of giddiness through Chip—but he managed it. He fought down the vertigo which threatened to overwhelm him, and confronted the big man boldly.
"What," he stormed, "is the meaning of this?"
The giant stared at him for a moment, his jaw slack. Then his raven-bright eyes glittered; he slapped a trunklike thigh and guffawed in boisterous mirth.
"Hear that?" he roared to his companions. "Quite a guy, ain't he?
'What's the meanin' o' this?' he asks! Game little fightin' cock, hey?" Then he sobered abruptly, and a grim light replaced the amusement in his eyes. Here was not a man to be trifled with, Chip realized. His tone assumed a biting edge. "The meanin' is, my bucko," he answered mirthlessly, "that you've run afoul o' your last reef. Unless you have a sane head on your shoulders, and you're willing to talk fast and straight!"
"Talk?"
"Don't stall. We've already unloaded your bins. We found it. And a nice haul, too. Thanks for lettin' us know it was on the way." The burly one chuckled coarsely. "We'd have took it, anyway, but you helped matters out by comin' to us."
Johnny Haldane had been right, then. Chip remembered his friend's ominous warning. "—if your message was intercepted, you may have played into the hands of—" He said slowly, "Then you are the Lorelei's men?"
"The who? Never mind that, bucko, just talk. That ekalastron—where did it come from?"
And it occurred to Warren suddenly that although the big man did hold the whip hand, he was still not in possession of the most important secret of all! While the location of the ekalastron mine remained a secret, a deadlock existed.
"And if I won't tell—?" he countered shrewdly.
"Why, then, sailor—" The pirate leader's hamlike fists tightened, and a cold light glinted in his eyes—"why, then I guess maybe I'll have to beat it out o' you!"
Question:
What is ekalastron or No. 97?
Answer:
|
[
"Ekalastron is the element No. 97 on the period table. It is an incredibly valuable material due to its properties. It’s an incredibly light metal, and yet it is also impenetrable. Johnny claims that it’s strong enough that a simple film of ekalastron would deflect an entire meteor. Of course, because of this, any amount of ekalastron could make a person very wealthy. Chip and his crew find an entire mountain of ekalastron on the chilly Titania, a satellite off of Uranus. They decided to turn over their find to the Uranus Space Patrol, and then let the Earth authorities know that they were bringing in some cargo. ",
"Ekalastron is a recently discovered element that takes up No. 97 on the periodic table. It is an extremely light metal that is also very strong and resiliant, so it could be worth a lot of money to the right people. Chip and his crew had found a mountain of it, which they had collected and begun to use to plate their ship to protect it from attack. The pirates who capture Chip at the end had intercepted Chip's message to Earth about the delivery of the shipment, but it seemed what they were really after was information on the location where Chip had mined this resource. This was worth far more, which made Chip realize he still had an advantage in the discussions.\n",
"Ekalastron (ek) is a recently discovered new element; on the periodic table, it is No. 97. Ek is extremely valuable due to its characteristics. It is such a lightweight metal that a man can carry enough in one hand to coat the entire hull of a battleship. Yet even the slightest layer of ek is strong enough to deflect a meteor. It is strong enough to crush the hardest materials but at the same time so resilient that it can rebound like rubber. A ship coated in ek will be invincible, so the element is highly desired by both government agencies and criminals alike. Chip’s men have a cargo of it, and all three will be rich for the rest of their lives.\n\tThe element has far-reaching implications for whoever has it; in the wrong hands, it will enable criminals like space pirates to attack and plunder with impunity. In the hands of the government and the Space Patrol, ek will ensure the safety of public officers and officials, guaranteeing that criminal elements will never be able to damage their ships. It also ensures tremendous wealth for whoever owns it. The ek shows the true character of Chip, Syd, and Salvation; while they take enough for their own wants and needs, they turn over the balance to the Space Patrol of Uranus, providing that organization with the opportunity to benefit from it and preventing it from falling into the wrong hands. They also notify Earth that they are bringing a cargo of ek, presumably to arrange a private sale to the government or law enforcement, again keeping the valuable mineral out of the hands of those who would use it for unlawful gain.\n",
"Ekalastron, colloquially referred to as \"ek\", is a light, but extremely durable metal discovered in vast quantities in the fiery mines of Uranus' moon Titania by Chip Warren and the crew of the Chickadee II. The metal is so strong that even a small sliver of it is sufficient to deflect a meteor striking a ship. It can easily crush diamonds into ash. For all of these reasons, ekalastron is a highly sought-after and valuable element (Number 97 on the periodic table). After discovering a mountain of ekalastron within the mines of Titania, Chip and his crew turns the reserves over to Space Patrol authorities on Uranus and begin the journey back to Earth, where they plan to deliver their ship's cargo of the element. To protect themselves on the journey, they stop at a spaceport on Donae where a jerry-crew begins covering the ship with a thin coat of ekalastron. Johnny Haldane offers to deputize Chip as a member of Space Patrol when he realizes his ship has this level of protection, so that Chip may help him in his pursuit of Lorelei and her band of pirates. Johnny warns Chip that her crew may have already intercepted his transmission to Earth revealing the cargo he is carrying, and they might be lying in wait to ambush Chip on his way back home; therefore, the two have a shared interest in working together. After Chip is captured by Lorelei's men, they demand to know where the rest of the ekalastron stores are."
] |
62039
|
THE LORELEI DEATH
by NELSON S. BOND
Far out in limitless Space she plied her deadly trade ... a Lorelei of the void, beckoning spacemen to death and destruction with her beautiful siren lure.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1941. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Chip Warren stood before an oblong of glass set into one wall of the spaceship Chickadee II , stared at what he saw reflected therefrom—and frowned. He didn't like it. Not a bit! It was too—too—
He turned away angrily, ripped the offending article from about his neck, and chose another necktie from the rack. This one was brighter, gaudier, much more in keeping with the gaiety of his mood. He emitted a grunt of satisfaction, spun from the mirror to face his two companions triumphantly.
"There! How do you like that ?"
Syd Palmer, short and chubby, tow-headed and liquid-blue of eye, always languid save when engaged in the solution of some engineering problem concerned with the space vessel he mothered like a brooding hen, moaned insultingly and forced a shudder.
"Sunspots! Novae! Flying comets! And he wears 'em around his neck!"
"You," Chip told him serenely, "have no appreciation of beauty. What do you think of it, Padre?"
"Salvation" Smith, a tall, gangling scarecrow garbed in rusty black, a lean-jawed, hawkeyed man with tumbled locks of silver framing his weathered cheeks like a halo, concealed his grin poorly. "Well, my boy," he admitted, "there is some Biblical precedent for your—ahem!—clamorous raiment. 'So Joseph made for himself a coat which was of many colors—'"
"Both of you," declared Chip, "give me a pain in the pants! Stick-in-the-muds! Here we are in port for the first time in months, cargo-bins loaded to the gunwales with enough ekalastron to make us rich for life—and you sit here like a pair of stuffed owls!
"Well, not me! I'm going to take a night off, throw myself a party the likes of which was never seen around these parts. Put a candle in the window, chilluns, 'cause li'l' Chip won't be home till the wee, sma' hours!"
Syd chuckled.
"O.Q., big shot. But don't get too cozy with any of those joy-joint entertainers. Remember what happened to poor old Dougal MacNeer!"
Salvation said soberly, "Syd's just fooling, my boy. But I would be careful if I were you. We're in the Belt, you know. The forces of law and order do not always govern these wild outposts of civilization as well as might be hoped. The planetoids are dens of iniquity, violent and unheeding the words of Him who rules all—"
The old man's lips etched a straight line, reminding Chip that Salvation Smith was not one of those milk-and-water missionaries who espoused the principle of "turning the other cheek" to evildoers. Salvation was not the ordained emissary of any church. A devoutly religious man with the heart of an adventurer, he had taken upon himself the mission of carrying to outland tribes the story of the God he worshipped.
That his God was the fierce Yahveh of the Old Testament, a God of anger and retribution, was made evident by the methods Salvation sometimes employed in winning his converts. For not only was Salvation acknowledged the most pious man in space; he was also conceded to be the best hand with a gun!
Now Chip gave quiet answer. "I know, Padre: I'll be careful. Well, Syd—sure you won't change your mind and come along?"
"No can do, chum. The spaceport repair crew's still smearing this jalopy with ek. Got to stay and watch 'em."
"O.Q. I'm off alone, then. See you later!"
And, whistling, Chip Warren stepped through the lock of the Chickadee onto the soil of the asteroid Danae.
Danae was, thought Chip as he strolled along briskly toward the town beyond the spaceport, a most presentable hunk of rock. Nice lucentite Dome ... good atmo ... a fine artificial grav system based on Terra normal. It seemed to be a popular little fueling-stop, too, for its cradle-bins were laden with vessels from every planet in the System, and as he gained the main drag he found himself rubbing shoulders with citizens of every known world. Lumbering, albino Venusians, petal-headed Martians, Jovian runts, greenies from far Uranus, Earthman—all were here.
Quite a likely place, he thought happily, to chuck a brawl. A brilliantly gleaming xenon sign before him welcomed visitors to:
XU'UL'S SOLAREST Barroom—Casino—Dancing 100—Lovely Hostesses—100
He entered, and was immediately deluged by a bevy of charm-gals vying for the privilege of: (1) helping him beat the roulette wheel; (2) helping him drink the house dry, and/or (3) separating him as swiftly as possible from the credits in his money belt.
Chip shook them off, gently but firmly. He wanted a good time, true; but he wanted it solo. The main cabaret was too crowded; he passed through it and another equally blatant room wherein twoscore Venusians were straining the structure with a native "sing-stomp," and ended up finally, with a sigh of relief, in a small, dimly-lighted private bar unfrequented by anyone save a bored and listless Martian bartender.
The chrysanthemum-pated son of the desertland roused himself as Chip entered, rustled his petals and piped a ready greeting.
"Welcoom, ssirr! Trrink, pleasse?"
This was more like it! Chip grinned.
"Scotch," he said. " Old Spaceman. And let's have a new bottle, Curly. None of that doctored swill."
"Of courrsse, ssirr!" piped the bar-keep aggrievedly. He pushed a bottle across the mahogany; Chip flipped a golden credit-token back at him.
"Tell me when I've guzzled this, and I'll start work on another." He took a deep, appreciative sniff. "And don't let any of those dizzy dolls in here," he ordered. "I've got a lot of back drinking to catch up on, and I don't want to be disturbed— Hey! "
In his alarm, he almost dropped the bottle. For the door suddenly burst open, and in its frame loomed a figure in Space Patrol blues. A finger pointed in Chip's direction and a bull-o'-Bashan voice roared:
" Stop! Bartender—grab that man! He's a desperate criminal, wanted on four planets for murder!"
Shock momentarily immobilized Chip. Not so the bartender. He was, it seemed, an ardent pacifist. With a bleat of panic fear he scampered from his post, his metallic stilts clattering off in the distance. Chip's accuser moved forward from the shadows; dim light illumined his features. And—
" Johnny! " Chip's voice lifted in a note of jubilant surprise.
"Johnny Haldane—you old scoundrel! Where in the void did you drop from?"
The S.S.P. man chuckled and returned Chip's greeting with a bone-grinding handclasp.
"I might ask the same of you, chum! Lord, it's been ages since we've crossed 'jectory! When I saw you meandering across the Casino, you could have knocked me down with a jetblast! What's new? Is old Syd still with you?"
"We're still shipmates. But he's back at the spaceport. The jerry-crew is plating our crate with ek, and—"
"Ek! Plating a private cruiser!" Haldane stared at him in astonishment, then whistled. "Sweet Sacred Stars, you must be filthy with credits to be able to coat an entire ship with ekalastron!"
"You," boasted Chip, "ain't heard nothing yet!" And he told him how they had discovered an entire mountain of the previous new element, No.
97 in the periodic table, on frigid Titania, satellite of far Uranus.
"It was touch-and-go for a while," he admitted, "whether we'd be the luckiest three guys in space—or the deadest! But we passed through the flaming caverns like old Shadrach in the Bible—remember?—and here we are!"
[1]
Haldane was exuberant. "A mountain of ekalastron!" he gloated.
"That's the greatest contribution to spaceflight since Biggs' velocity-intensifier!" It was no overstatement. "Element No. 97 was a metal so light that a man could carry in one hand enough to coat the entire hull of a battleship—yet so adamant that a gossamer film of it would deflect a meteor! A metal strong enough to crush diamonds to ash—but so resilient that, when properly treated, it would rebound like rubber! What are you going to do with it, Chip? Put it on the open market?"
Warren shook his head.
"Not exactly. We talked it over carefully—Syd and Salvation and I—and we decided there are some space-rats to whom it shouldn't be made available. Privateers and outlaws, you know. So we turned control of the mines over to the Space Patrol at Uranus, and visiphoned the Earth authorities we were bringing in one cargo—"
"Visiphoned!" interrupted Haldane sharply. "Did you say visiphoned?"
"Why—why, yes."
"From where?"
"Oh, just before we reached the Belt. We don't have a very strong transmitter, you know. Sa-a-ay, what's all the excitement, pal? Did we do something that was wrong?"
Haldane frowned worriedly. "I don't know, Chip. It wasn't anything wrong , but what you did was damned dangerous. For if your message was intercepted, you may have played into the very hands of—the Lorelei!"
Chip stared at his friend bewilderedly for a moment. Then he grinned.
"Hey—I must be getting slightly whacky in my old age. I stand here with an unopened bottle in my hands and hear things! For a minute I thought you said 'Lorelei.' The Lorelei, my space-cop friend, is a myth. An old Teutonic myth about a beautiful damsel who sits out in the middle of a sea on a treacherous rock, combing her golden locks, warbling and luring her fascinated admirers to destruction."
He grunted. "A dirty trick, if you ask me. Catch a snort of this alleged Scotch, pal, and I'll torture your eardrums with the whole, sad story." He started to sing. "' Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten —'"
The Patrolman laid a hand on his arm, silenced him.
"It's not funny, Chip. You've described the Lorelei exactly. That's how she got her name. An incredibly beautiful woman who wantonly lures space-mariners to their death.
"The only difference is that her 'rock' is an asteroid somewhere in the Belt—and she does not sing, she calls! She began exercising her vicious appeal about two months ago, Earth reckoning. Since then, no less than a dozen spacecraft—freighters, liners, even one Patrolship—have fallen prey to her wiles. Their crews have been brutally murdered, their cargos stolen."
"Wait a minute!" interrupted Chip shrewdly. "How do you know about her if the crews have been murdered?"
"She has a habit of locking the controls," explained Haldane, "and setting ravaged ships adrift. Apparently there is no room on her hideout—wherever it is—for empty hulks. One of these ships was salvaged by a courageous cabin-boy who hid from the Lorelei and her pirate band beneath a closetful of soiled linens in the laundry. He described her. His description goes perfectly with less accurate glimpses seen over the visiphones of several score spacecraft!"
Chip said soberly, "So it's no joke, eh, pal? Sorry I popped off. I thought you were pulling my leg. Where do I come into this mess, though?"
"Ekalastron!" grunted Johnny succinctly. "A jackpot prize for any corsair! And you advertised a cargo of it over the etherwaves! The Lorelei will be waiting for you with her tongue hanging out. The only thing for you to do, kid, is go back to Jupiter or Io as fast as you can get there. Make the Patrol give you a convoy—"
A sudden light danced in Chip Warren's eyes. It was a light Syd Palmer would have groaned to see—for it usually presaged trouble. It was a bright, hard, reckless light.
"Hold your jets, Johnny!" drawled Chip. "Aren't you forgetting one thing? In a couple more hours, I can face the Lorelei and her whole mob—and be damned to them! She can't touch the Chickadee , because it's being plated right now!"
Haldane snapped his fingers in quick remembrance.
"By thunder, you're right! Her shells will ricochet off the Chickadee's hull like hail off a tin roof. Chip, are you in any hurry to reach Earth? I thought not. What do you say we go after the Lorelei together ! I'll swear you in as a Deputy Patrolman; we'll take the Chickadee and—"
"It's a deal!" declared Chip promptly. "You got any idea where this Lorelei's hangout is?"
"That's why I'm here on Danae. I got a tip that one of the Lorelei's men put in here for supplies. I hoped maybe I could single him out somehow, follow him when he jetted for his base, and in that way— Chip! Look out! "
Haldane shouted and moved at the same time. His arm lashed out wildly, thrusting, smashing Chip to the floor in a sprawling heap. The as-yet unopened bottle was now violently opened; it splintered into a thousand shards against a wall.
Bruised and shaken, Chip lifted his head to see what had caused Johnny's alarm. Even as he did so, the dull gloom of the bar was blazoned with searing effulgence. A lancet of flame leaped from the dark, rearward doorway, burst in Johnny Haldane's face!
The Patrolman cried once, a choking cry that died in a mewling whimper. His unused pistol slipped from slackening fingers, and he sagged to the floor. Again crimson lightning laced the shadows; Haldane's body jerked, and the air was raw with the hot, sickening stench of charred flesh.
With an instinct born of bitter years, Chip had come to his knees behind the shelter of the mahogany bar. But now his own flame-pistol was in his hand, and a dreadful rage was mingled with the agony in his heart. Reckless of results, he sprang to his feet, gun spewing livid death into the shadows.
His blast found a mark. For an instant flame haloed a human face drawn in inhuman pain. A heavy, sultry, bestial face, already puckered with one long, ugly scar that ran from right temple to jawbone, now newly scarred with the red brand of Chip's marksmanship.
Then, before Chip could fire again, came the rasp of pounding footsteps. The man turned and fled. Chip bent over his fallen friend, seeking, with hands that did not even feel the heat, fluttering life beneath still smoldering cloth.
He felt—nothing. Johnny was dead.
A snarl of sheer animal rage burst from Chip's lips. Someone would pay for this; pay dearly! Help was coming now. He himself would lead the hue-and-cry that would track a foul murderer to his lair. He spun as the footsteps drew nearer.
"Hurry!" he cried. "This way! Follow me—"
In a bound, he hurdled the bar, lingered at the door only long enough to let the others mark his course. For they had burst into the room, now, a full score of them. Excited, hard-bitten dogs of space, quick-triggered and willing. Once more he cried for help.
"After him! Come on! He—"
And then—disaster struck! For a reedy voice broke from the van of the mob. The voice of the Martian bartender.
"That's him!" he piped sibilantly. "That's the man! He's a desperate criminal, wanted on four planets for murder! The Patrolman came to arrest him— and now he's murdered the Spacie !"
II
The stunning injustice of that accusation came close to costing Chip Warren his life. For a split second he stood motionless in the doorway, gaping lips forming denial. Words which were never to be uttered, for suddenly a raw-boned miner wrenched a Moeller from its holster, leveled and fired.
The hot tongue of death licked hungrily at the young spaceman's cheek, scorched air crackled in his eardrums. Now was no time to squander in vain argument. Chip ducked, spun, and hurled himself through the doorway. There still remained one hope. That he might catch the real murderer, and in that way clear himself....
But the door led to a small, deserted vestibule, and it to an alleyway behind Xu'ul's Solarest. Viewing that maze of byways and passages, Chip knew his hope was futile. There remained but one thing to do. Get out of here. But quick!
It was no hard task. The labyrinth swallowed him as it had engulfed the scarred killer; in a few minutes even the footsteps of his pursuers could no longer be heard. And Chip worked his cautious way back to the spaceport, and to the bin wherein was cradled the Chickadee .
Syd Palmer looked up in surprise as Chip let himself in the electro-lock. The chubby engineer gasped, "Salvation, look what the cat drug in! His high-flying Nibs! What's the matter, Chip? Night-life too much for you?"
"Never mind that now!" panted Chip. "Is this tin can ready to roll? Warm the hypos. We're lifting gravs—"
Palmer said anxiously, "Now, wait a minute! The men haven't quite finished plating the hull, Chip!"
"Can't help that! We've got important business. In a very few minutes— Ahh! There he goes now!" Chip had gone to the perilens the moment he entered the ship; now he saw in its reflector that which he had expected. The gushing orange spume of a spaceship roaring from its cradle. "Hurry, Syd!"
There were a lot of things Syd Palmer wanted to ask. He wanted to know who went where ; he was bursting with curiosity about the "important business" which had brought his pal back from town in such a rush; his keen eye also had detected a needle-gun burn on Chip's coat-sleeve. But he was too good a companion to waste time now on such trivia.
"O.Q.," he snapped. "It's your pigeon!"
And he disappeared. They heard his voice calling to the workmen, the scuff of equipment being disengaged from the Chickadee's hull, the thin, high whine of warming hypatomics. Salvation looked at Warren quizzically.
"It smells," he ventured gently, "like trouble."
"It is trouble," Chip told him. "Plenty trouble!"
"In that case—" said the old man mildly—"I guess I'd better get the rotor stripped for action." He stepped to the gunnery turret, dropped the fore-irons and stripped their weapon for action. "'Be ye men of peace,'" he intoned, "'but gird firmly thy loins for righteous battle!' Thus saith the Lord God which is Jehovah. Selah!"
Then came Syd's cry from the depths of the hyporoom.
"All set, Chip! Lift gravs!"
Warren's finger found a stud. And with a gusty roar the Chickadee rocketed into space on a pillar of flame.
Two hours later, Chip was still following the bright pinpoint of scarlet which marked the course of his quarry.
In the time that had elapsed since their take-off, he had told his friends the whole story. When he told about the Lorelei, Salvation Smith's seamy old features screwed up in a perplexed grimace. "A woman pirate in the Belt, son? I find it hard to believe. Yet—" And when he described the death of Johnny Haldane, anger smoldered in the missionary's eyes, and Syd Palmer's hands knotted into tight, white fists. Said Syd, "A man with a scar, eh? Well, we'll catch him sooner or later. And when we do—" His tone boded no good to the man who had slain an old and loved friend.
"As a matter of fact," offered Salvation, "we've got him now. Any time you say the word, Chip. We're faster than he is. We can close in on him in five minutes."
"I know," nodded Warren grimly. "But we won't do it—yet. I'm borrowing a bit of Johnny's strategy. I've been plotting his course. As soon as I'm sure of his destination, we'll take care of him . But our first and most vital problem is to locate the Lorelei's hideaway."
Syd said, "That's all right with me, chum. I like a good scrap as much as the next guy. Better, maybe. But this isn't our concern, strictly speaking. What we ought to do is report this matter to the Space Patrol, let them take care of it."
Salvation shook his head.
"That's where you're mistaken, Sydney. This is very much our concern. So much so, in fact, that we dare not make port again until it's cleared up. I think you have forgotten that it is not the scar-faced man who is wanted for the killing of Haldane—but Chip!"
"B-but—" gasped Palmer—"b-but that's ridiculous! Chip and Johnny were old buddies. Lifelong friends!"
"Nevertheless, the circumstantial evidence indicates Chip's guilt. Twenty men saw him standing over Johnny's dead body, with a flame-pistol in his hand. And the barkeep heard Johnny 'arrest' Chip and accuse him of murder!"
Chip said ruefully, "That's right, Syd. It was only a joke, but it backfired. The bartender thought Johnny meant it. He scooted out of there like a bat out of Hades. I'm in it up to my neck unless we can bring back evidence that Scarface actually did the killing. And that may not be so easy."
He stirred restlessly. "But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Right now our job is to keep this rat in sight. We've gone farther already than I expected we would." He turned to the old preacher.
"Where do you think we're going, Padre? Out of the Belt entirely?"
"I've been wondering that myself, son. I don't know for sure, of course, but it looks to me as if we're going for the Bog. If so, you'd better keep a weather-eye peeled."
"The Bog!" Chip had never penetrated the planetoids so deeply before, but he knew of the Bog by hearsay. All men did. A treacherous region of tightly packed asteroids, a mad and whirling scramble of the gigantic rocks which, aeons ago, had been a planet. Few spacemen dared penetrate the Bog. Of those who did dare, few returned to tell the tale. "The Bog! Say! I'd better keep a sharp lookout!"
He turned to the perilens once more, fastened an eye to its lens. And then—
"Syd!" he cried. "Salvation! Look! She—she—!"
He pressed the plunger that transferred the perilens image to the central viewscreen. And as he did so, a phantom filled the area which should have revealed yawning space, gay with the spangles of a myriad glowing orbs. The vision of an unbelievably beautiful girl, the golden-crowned embodiment of a man's fondest dreaming, eyes wide with an indistinguishable emotion, arms stretched wide in mute appeal.
And from the throats of all came simultaneous recognition.
" The Lorelei! "
At the same moment came a plea from the enchantress of space through a second medium. For no reason anyone could explain, the ship's telaudio wakened to life; over it came to their ears the actual words of the girl:
" Help! Oh, help! Can anyone hear me? Help —"
Even though he knew this to be only a ruse, a deliberate, dastardly trap set for the unwary, Chip Warren's pulse leaped in hot response to that desperate plea. Even with the warning of Johnny Haldane fresh in his memory, some gallantry deep within him spurred him to the aid of this lovely vision. Here was a woman a man could live for, fight for, die for! A woman like no other in the universe.
Then common sense came to his rescue. He wrenched his gaze from the tempting shadow, cried: "Kill that wavelength! Tune the lens on another beam, Syd!"
Palmer, bedazzled but obedient, spun the dial of the perilens . Despite his vastly improved science Man had never yet succeeded in devising a transparent medium through which to view the void wherein he soared; the perilens was a device which translated impinging light-waves into a picture of that which lay outside the ship's hull. When or where electrical disturbances existed in space, its frequency could be changed for greater clarity. This was what Syd now attempted.
But to no avail! For it mattered not which cycle he tuned to—the image persisted. Still on the viewscreen that pleading figure beckoned piteously. And still the cabin rang to the prayers of that heart-tugging voice:
" Help! Oh, help! Can anyone hear me? Help —"
Gone, now, was any fascination that thrilling vision might previously have held for Chip Warren. Understanding of their plight dawned coldly upon him, and his brow became dark with anger.
" We're blanketed! Flying blind! Salvation, radio a general alarm! Syd, jazz the hypos to max. Shift trajectory to fourteen-oh-three North and loft ... fire No. 3 jet...."
He had hurled himself into the bucket-shaped pilot's seat; now his fingers played the controls like those of a mad organist. The Chickadee groaned from prow to stern, trembled like a tortured thing as he thrust it into a rising spiral.
It was a desperate chance he was taking. Increasing his speed thus, it was certain he would be spotted by the man he had been following; the flaming jets of the Chickadee must form a crimson arch against black space visible for hundreds—thousands!—of miles. Nor was there any way of knowing what lay in the path Chip thus blindly chose. Titanic death might loom on every side. But they had to fight clear of this spot of blindness, clear their instruments....
And then it came! A jarring concussion that smashed against the prow of the Chickadee like a battering ram. Chip flew headlong out of his bucket to spreadeagle on the heaving iron floor. He heard, above the grinding plaint of shattered steel the bellowing prayer of Salvation Smith:
"We've crashed! 'Into Thy hands, O Lord of old—'"
Then Syd's angry cry, "Crashed, hell! He's smashed us with a tractor-blast!"
Chip stared at his companion numbly.
"But—but that's impossible! We're plated with ek! A tractor-cannon couldn't hurt us—"
" Half-plated! " howled Syd savagely. "And those damn fools started working from the stern of the Chickadee ! We're vulnerable up front, and that's where he got us! In a minute this can will be leaking like a sieve. I'll get out bulgers. Hold 'er to her course, Chip!"
He dove for the lockers wherein were hung the space-suits, tore them hastily from their hangers. Chip again spun the perilens vernier. No good! No space ... no stars ... just a beautiful phantom crying them to certain doom. By now he was aware that from a dozen sprung plates air was seeping, but he fought down despair. While there remained hope, a man had to keep on fighting.
He scrambled back into the bucket-seat, experimented with controls that answered sluggishly. Salvation had sprung to the rotor-gun, was now angrily jerking its lanyard, lacing the void with death-dealing bursts that had no mark. The old man's eyes were brands of fire, his white hair clung wetly to his forehead. His rage was terrible to behold.
"'Yes, truly shall I destroy them!'" he cried, "'who loose their stealth upon me like a thief from the night—'"
Then suddenly there came a second and more frightful blow. The straining Chickadee stopped as though pole-axed by a gigantic fist. Stopped and shuddered and screamed in metal agony. This time inertia flung Chip headlong, helpless, into the control racks. Brazen studs took the impact of his body; crushing pain banded about his temples, and a red wetness ran into his eyes, blurring and blinding him, burning.
For an instant there flamed before him a universe of incandescent stars, weaving, shimmering, merging. The vision of a woman whose hair was a golden glory....
After that—nothing!
III
From a billion miles away, from a bourne unguessable thousands of light-years distant, came the faint, far whisper of a voice. Nearer and nearer it came, and ever faster, till it throbbed upon Chip's eardrums with booming savagery.
"—coming to, now. Good! We'll soon find out—"
Chip opened his eyes, too dazed, at first, to understand the situation in which he found himself. Gone was the familiar control-turret of the Chickadee , gone the bulger into which he had so hastily clambered. He lay on the parched, rocky soil of a—a something. A planetoid, perhaps. And he was surrounded by a motley crew of strangers: scum of all the planets that circle the Sun....
Then recollection flooded back upon him, sudden and complete. The chase ... the call of the fateful Lorelei ... the crash! New strength, born of anger, surged through him. He lifted his head.
"My—my companions?" he demanded weakly.
The leader of those who encircled him, a mighty hulk of a man, massive of shoulder and thigh, black-haired, with an unshaven blue jaw, raven-bright eyes and a jutting, aquiline nose like the beak of a hawk, loosed a satisfied grunt.
"Ah! Back to normal, eh, sailor? Damn near time!"
Climbing to his feet sent a swift wave of giddiness through Chip—but he managed it. He fought down the vertigo which threatened to overwhelm him, and confronted the big man boldly.
"What," he stormed, "is the meaning of this?"
The giant stared at him for a moment, his jaw slack. Then his raven-bright eyes glittered; he slapped a trunklike thigh and guffawed in boisterous mirth.
"Hear that?" he roared to his companions. "Quite a guy, ain't he?
'What's the meanin' o' this?' he asks! Game little fightin' cock, hey?" Then he sobered abruptly, and a grim light replaced the amusement in his eyes. Here was not a man to be trifled with, Chip realized. His tone assumed a biting edge. "The meanin' is, my bucko," he answered mirthlessly, "that you've run afoul o' your last reef. Unless you have a sane head on your shoulders, and you're willing to talk fast and straight!"
"Talk?"
"Don't stall. We've already unloaded your bins. We found it. And a nice haul, too. Thanks for lettin' us know it was on the way." The burly one chuckled coarsely. "We'd have took it, anyway, but you helped matters out by comin' to us."
Johnny Haldane had been right, then. Chip remembered his friend's ominous warning. "—if your message was intercepted, you may have played into the hands of—" He said slowly, "Then you are the Lorelei's men?"
"The who? Never mind that, bucko, just talk. That ekalastron—where did it come from?"
And it occurred to Warren suddenly that although the big man did hold the whip hand, he was still not in possession of the most important secret of all! While the location of the ekalastron mine remained a secret, a deadlock existed.
"And if I won't tell—?" he countered shrewdly.
"Why, then, sailor—" The pirate leader's hamlike fists tightened, and a cold light glinted in his eyes—"why, then I guess maybe I'll have to beat it out o' you!"
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What is the plot of the story?
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about The Valley by Richard Stockham.
Relevant chunks:
Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from IF Worlds of Science Fiction June 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
THE VALLEY
By Richard Stockham
Illustrated by Ed Emsh
If you can't find it countless millions of miles in space, come back to Earth. You might find it just on the other side of the fence—where the grass is always greener.
The Ship dove into Earth's sea of atmosphere like a great, silver fish.
Inside the ship, a man and woman stood looking down at the expanse of land that curved away to a growing horizon. They saw the yellow ground cracked like a dried skin; and the polished stone of the mountains and the seas that were shrunken away in the dust. And they saw how the city circled the sea, as a circle of men surround a water hole in a desert under a blazing sun.
The ship's radio cried out. "You've made it! Thank God! You've made it!"
Another voice, shaking, said, "President—Davis is—overwhelmed. He can't go on. On his behalf and on behalf of all the people—with our hope that was almost dead, we greet you." A pause. "Please come in!"
The voice was silent. The air screamed against the hull of the ship.
"I can't tell them," said the man.
"Please come in!" said the radio. "Do you hear me?"
The woman looked up at the man. "You've got to Michael!"
"Two thousand years. From one end of the galaxy to the other. Not one grain of dust we can live on. Just Earth. And it's burned to a cinder."
A note of hysteria stabbed into the radio voice. "Are you all right? Stand by! We're sending a rescue ship."
"They've got a right to know what we've found," said the woman. "They sent us out. They've waited so long—."
He stared into space. "It's hopeless. If we'd found another planet they could live on, they'd do the same as they've done here."
He touched the tiny golden locket that hung around his neck. "Right now, I could press this and scratch myself and the whole farce would be over."
"No. A thousand of us died. You've got to think of them."
"We'll go back out into space," he said. "It's clean out there. I'm tired. Two thousand years of reincarnation."
She spoke softly. "We've been together for a long time. I've loved you. I've asked very little. But I need to stay on Earth. Please, Michael."
He looked at her for a moment. Then he flipped a switch. "Milky Way to Earth. Never mind the rescue ship. We're all right. We're coming in."
The great, white ship settled to Earth that was like a plain after flood waters have drained away.
The man and woman came out into the blazing sunlight.
A shout, like the crashing of a thousand surfs, rose and broke over them. The man and woman descended the gang-plank toward the officials gathered on the platform. They glanced around at the massed field of white faces beneath them; saw those same faces that had been turned toward them two thousand years past; remembered the cheers and the cries that had crashed around them then, as they and the thousand had stood before the towering spires of the ships, before the takeoff.
And, as then, there were no children among the milling, grasping throng. Only the same clutching hands and voices and arms, asking for an answer, a salvation, a happy end.
Now the officials gathered around the man and the woman, and spoke to them in voices of reverence.
A microphone was thrust into Michael's hand with the whispered admonition to tell the people of the great new life waiting for them, open and green and moist, on a virgin planet.
The cries of the people were slipping away and a stillness growing like an ocean calm and, within it, the sound of the pumps, throbbing, sucking the water from the seas.
And then Michael's voice, "The thousand who left with us are dead. For some time we've known the other planets in our solar system were uninhabitable. Now we've been from one end of the galaxy to the other. And this is what we've found.... We were given Earth. There's no place else for us. The rest of the planets in the galaxy were given to others. There's no place else for them. We've all had a chance to make the best of Earth. Instead we've made the worst of it. So we're here to stay—and die." He handed the microphone back.
The silence did not change.
The President grasped Michael's arm. "What're you saying?"
A buzzing rose up from the people like that of a swarm of frightened bees. The sea of white faces swayed and their voices began to cry. The din and motion held, long and drawn out, with a wail now and a fluttering beneath it.
Michael and the woman stood above them in the center of the pale, hovering faces of the officials.
"Good God," said the President. "You've got to tell them what you said isn't true!"
"We've been searching two thousand years for a truth," said Michael.
"A thousand of us have died finding it. I've told it. That's the way it's got to be."
The President swayed, took the microphone in his hands.
"There's been some mistake!" he cried. "Go back to the pumps and the distilleries! Go back to the water vats and the gardens and the flocks! Go back! Work and wait! We'll get the full truth to you. Everything's going to be all right !"
Obediently the mass of faces separated, as though they were being spun away on a whirling disk. Michael and the woman were swallowed up, like pebbles inside a closing hand, and carried away from the great, white ship.
They ushered the man and woman into the beamed and paneled council chambers and sat them in thick chairs before the wall of polished wood desks across which stared the line of faces, silent and waiting. And on a far wall, facing them all, hung a silver screen, fifty feet square.
The President stood. "Members of the council." He paused. "As you heard, they report—complete failure." He turned to Michael. "And now, the proof."
Michael stood beside the motion picture projector, close to his chair. The lights dimmed. There was only the sound of the pumps throbbing in the darkness close and far away, above and beneath and all around. Suddenly on the screen appeared an endless depth of blackness filled with a mass of glowing white, which extended into the room around the watching people, seeming to touch them and then spreading, like an ocean, farther away and out and out into an endless distance.
Now streaks of yellow fire shot into the picture, like a swarm of lightning bugs, the thin sharp nosed shadows of space ships, hurtling, like comets, toward the clustered star smear. And then silent thoughts flashed from the screen into the minds of the spectators; of time passing in months, years and centuries, passing and passing until they themselves seemed to be rushing and rushing into the blackness toward blinding balls of white light, the size of moons.
The dark shapes of smaller spheres circling the blinding ones moved forward into the picture; red, blue, green, yellow, purple and many mixtures of all these, and then one planet filled the screen, seeming to be inflated, like a balloon, into a shining red ball. There was a razor edge of horizon then and pink sky and an expanse of crimson. Flat, yellow creatures lay all around, expanding and contracting. A roaring rose and fell like the roaring of a million winds. Then fear flowed out of the picture into the minds of the watchers so that they gasped and cringed, and a silent voice told them that the atmosphere of this planet would disintegrate a human being.
Now the red ball seemed to pull away from them into the blackness and the blinding balls of light, and all around could be seen the streaks of rocket flame shooting away in all directions.
Suddenly a flash cut the blackness, like the flare of a match, and died, and the watchers caught from the screen the awareness of the death of a ship.
They were also aware of the rushing of time through centuries and they saw the streaking rocket flames and planets rushing at them; saw creatures in squares and circles, in threads wriggling, in lumps and blobs, rolling jumping and crawling; saw them in cloud forms whisking about, changing their shapes, and in flowing wavelets of water. They saw creatures hopping about on one leg and others crawling at incredible speeds on a thousand; saw some with all the numbers of legs and arms in between; and were aware of creatures that were there but invisible.
And those watching the screen on which time and distance were a compressed and distilled kaleidoscope, saw planet after planet and thousands at a time; heard strange noises; rasping and roaring, clinks and whistles, screams and crying, sighing and moaning. And they were aware through all this of atmosphere and ground inimical to man, some that would evaporate at the touch of a human body, or would burst into flame, or swallow, or turn from liquid to solid or solid to liquid. They saw and heard chemical analyses, were aware of this ocean of blackness and clouds of white through which man might move, and must ever move, because he could live only upon this floating dust speck that was Earth.
The picture faded in, close to one of the long, needle nosed crafts, showing inside, a man and a woman. Time was telescoped again while the man cut a tiny piece of scar tissue from his arm and that of the woman, put them in bottles and set them into compartments where solutions dripped rhythmically into the bottles, the temperature was held at that of the human body, and synthetic sunlight focused upon them from many pencil like tubes.
The watchers in the council chamber saw the bits of tissue swell into human embryos in a few seconds, and grow arms and legs and faces and extend themselves into babies. Saw them taken from the bottles and cared for, and become replicas of the man and woman controlling the ship, who, all this time were aging, until life went out of their bodies. Then the ones who had been the scar tissue disintegrated them in the coffin-like tubes and let their dust be sucked out into space—all this through millions of miles and a hundred years, compressed for the watchers into sixty seconds and a few feet of space.
Instantly there was black space on the screen again, with the fingers of flame pointing out behind the dark bodies of the ships.
And then the spectators saw one ship shudder and swerve into a blazing, bluish white star, like a gnat flying into a white hot poker; saw another drop away and away, out and out into the blackness past the swirling white rim of the galaxy, and sink into a dark nothingness.
Great balls of rock showered like hail onto other ships, smashing them into grotesque tin cans. The stream of fire at the tail of another ship suddenly died and the ship floated into an orbit around a great, yellow planet, ten times the size of Jupiter, then was sucked into it. Another burst like a bomb, flinging a man and woman out into the darkness, where they hung suspended, frozen into statues, like bodies drowned in the depths of an Arctic sea.
At this instant from the watching council, there were screams of horror and voices crying out, "Shut it off! Shut it off!" There was a moving about in the darkness. Murmurs and harsh cries of disapproval grew in volume.
Another ship in the picture was split down the side by a meteor and the bodies inside were impaled on jagged blades of steel, the contorted, bloody faces lighted by bursts of flame. And the screams and cries of the spectators rose higher, "Shut it off.... Oh Lord...."
Lights flashed through the room and the picture died.
Michael and Mary, both staring, saw, along the line of desks, the agonized faces, some staring like white stones, others hidden in clutching fingers, as though they had been confronted by a Medusa. There was the sound of heavy breathing that mixed with the throbbing of the pumps. The President held tightly to the edges of his desk to quiet his trembling.
"There—there've been changes," he said, "since you've been out in space. There isn't a person on Earth who's seen a violent death for hundreds of years."
Michael faced him, frowning. "I don't follow you."
"Dying violently happened so seldom on Earth that, after a long time, the sight of it began to drive some people mad. And then one day a man was struck by one of the ground cars and everyone who saw it went insane. Since then we've eliminated accidents, even the idea. Now, no one is aware that death by violence is even a possibility."
"I'm sorry," said Michael, "we've been so close to violent death for so long.... What you've seen is part of the proof you asked for."
"What you showed us was a picture," said the President. "If it had been real, we'd all be insane by now. If it were shown to the people there'd be mass hysteria."
"But even if we'd found another habitable planet, getting to it would involve just what we've shown you. Maybe only a tenth of the people who left Earth, or a hundredth, would ever reach a destination out in space."
"We couldn't tolerate such a possibility," said the President gravely. "We'd have to find a way around it."
The pumps throbbed like giant hearts all through the stillness in the council chambers. The faces along the line of desks were smoothing out; the terror in them was fading away.
"And yet the Earth is almost dead," said Michael quietly, "and you can't bring it back to life."
"The sins of our past, Mr. Nelson," said the President. "The Atomic wars five thousand years ago. And the greed. It was too late a long time ago. That, of course, is why the expedition was sent out. And now you've come back to us with this terrible news." He looked around, slowly, then back to Michael. "Can you give us any hope at all?"
"None."
"Another expedition? To Andromeda perhaps? With you the leader?"
Michael shook his head. "We're finished with expeditions, Mr. President."
There were mutterings in the council, and hastily whispered consultations. Now they were watching the man and woman again.
"We feel," said the President, "it would be dangerous to allow you to go out among the people. They've been informed that your statement wasn't entirely true. This was necessary, to avoid a panic. The people simply must not know the whole truth." He paused. "Now we ask you to keep in mind that whatever we decide about the two of you will be for the good of the people."
Michael and Mary were silent.
"You'll wait outside the council chambers," the President went on,
"until we have reached our decision."
As the man and woman were led away, the pumps beat in the stillness, and at the edge of the shrinking seas the salt thick waters were being pulled into the distilleries, and from them into the tier upon tier of artificial gardens that sat like giant bee hives all around the shoreline; and the mounds of salt glistening in the sunlight behind the gardens were growing into mountains.
In their rooms, Michael and Mary were talking through the hours, and waiting. All around them were fragile, form-fitting chairs and translucent walls and a ceiling that, holding the light of the sun when they had first seen it, was now filled with moonlight.
Standing at a circular window, ten feet in diameter, Michael saw, far below, the lights of the city extending into the darkness along the shoreline of the sea.
"We should have delivered our message by radio," he said, "and gone back into space."
"You could probably still go," she said quietly.
He came and stood beside her. "I couldn't stand being out in space, or anywhere, without you."
She looked up at him. "We could go out into the wilderness, Michael, outside the force walls. We could go far away."
He turned from her. "It's all dead. What would be the use?"
"I came from the Earth," she said quietly. "And I've got to go back to it. Space is so cold and frightening. Steel walls and blackness and the rockets and the little pinpoints of light. It's a prison."
"But to die out there in the desert, in that dust." Then he paused and looked away from her. "We're crazy—talking as though we had a choice."
"Maybe they'll have to give us a choice."
"What're you talking about?"
"They went into hysterics at the sight of those bodies in the picture. Those young bodies that didn't die of old age."
He waited.
"They can't stand the sight of people dying violently."
Her hand went to her throat and touched the tiny locket.
"These lockets were given to us so we'd have a choice between suffering or quick painless death.... We still have a choice."
He touched the locket at his own throat and was very still for a long moment. "So we threaten to kill ourselves, before their eyes. What would it do to them?"
He was still for a long time. "Sometimes, Mary, I think I don't know you at all." A pause. "And so now you and I are back where we started. Which'll it be, space or Earth?"
"Michael." Her voice trembled. "I—I don't know how to say this."
He waited, frowning, watching her intently.
"I'm—going to have a child."
His face went blank.
Then he stepped forward and took her by the shoulders. He saw the softness there in her face; saw her eyes bright as though the sun were shining in them; saw a flush in her cheeks, as though she had been running. And suddenly his throat was full.
"No," he said thickly. "I can't believe it."
"It's true."
He held her for a long time, then he turned his eyes aside.
"Yes, I can see it is."
"I—I can't put into words why I let it happen, Michael."
He shook his head. "I don't know—what to—to say. It's so incredible."
"Maybe—I got so—tired—just seeing the two of us over and over again and the culturing of the scar tissue, for twenty centuries. Maybe that was it. It was just—something I felt I had to do. Some— real life again. Something new. I felt a need to produce something out of myself. It all started way out in space, while we were getting close to the solar system. I began to wonder if we'd ever get out of the ship alive or if we'd ever see a sunset again or a dawn or the night or morning like we'd seen on Earth—so—so long ago. And then I had to let it happen. It was a vague and strange thing. There was something forcing me. But at the same time I wanted it, too. I seemed to be willing it, seemed to be feeling it was a necessary thing." She paused, frowning. "I didn't stop to think—it would be like this."
"Such a thing," he said, smiling grimly, "hasn't happened on Earth for three thousand years. I can remember in school, reading in the history books, how the whole Earth was overcrowded and how the food and water had to be rationed and then how the laws were passed forbidding birth and after that how the people died and there weren't any more babies born, until at last there was plenty of what the Earth had to give, for everyone. And then the news was broken to everyone about the culturing of the scar tissue, and there were a few dissenters but they were soon conditioned out of their dissension and the population was stabilized." He paused. "After all this past history, I don't think the council could endure what you've done."
"No," she said quietly. "I don't think they could."
"And so this will be just for us ." He took her in his arms. "If I remember rightly, this is a traditional action." A pause. "Now I'll go with you out onto the Earth—if we can swing it. When we get outside the city, or if we do—Well, we'll see."
They were very still together and then he turned and stood by the window and looked down upon the city and she came and stood beside him.
They both saw it at the same time. And they watched, without speaking, both knowing what was in the other's mind and heart. They watched the giant four dimensional screens all through the city. A green, lush planet showed bright and clear on them and there were ships standing among the trees and men walking through the grass, that moved gently like the swells on a calm ocean, while into their minds came the thoughts projected from the screen:
"This will be your new home. It was found and then lost. But another expedition will be sent out to find it again. Be of good hope. Everything will be all right."
Michael turned from the window. "So there's our evidence. Two thousand years. All the others killed getting it. And with a simple twist, it becomes a lie."
Mary sat down and buried her face in her hands.
"What a terrible failure there's been here," said Michael. "The neglect and destruction of a whole planet. It's like a family letting their home decay all around them, and living in smaller and smaller rooms of it, until at last the rooms are all gone, and since they can't find another home, they all die in the ruins of the last room."
"I can't face dying," Mary said quietly, "squeezed in with all these people, in this tomb they've made around the seas. I want to have the open sky and the quiet away from those awful pounding pumps when I die. I want the spread of the Earth all around and the clean air. I want to be a real part of the Earth again."
Michael barely nodded in agreement. He was standing very still now.
And then there was the sound of the door opening.
They both rose, like mourners at a funeral, and went into the council chambers.
Again they sat in the thick chairs before the wall of desks with the faces of the council looking across it like defenders.
The pumps were beating, beating all through the room and the quiet.
The President was standing. He faced Michael and Mary, and seemed to set himself as though to deliver a blow, or to receive one.
"Michael and Mary," he said, his voice struggling against a tightness,
"we've considered a long time concerning what is to be done with you and the report you brought back to us from the galaxy." He took another swallow of water. "To protect the sanity of the people, we've changed your report. We've also decided that the people must be protected from the possibility of your spreading the truth, as you did at the landing field. So, for the good of the people, you'll be isolated. All comforts will be given you. After all, in a sense, you are heroes and martyrs. Your scar tissue will be cultured as it has been in the past, and you will stay in solitary confinement until the time when, perhaps, we can migrate to another planet. We feel that hope must not be destroyed. And so another expedition is being sent out. It may be that, in time, on another planet, you'll be able to take your place in our society."
He paused. "Is there anything you wish to say?"
"Yes, there is."
"Proceed."
Michael stared straight at the President. After a long moment, he raised his hand to the tiny locket at his throat.
"Perhaps you remember," he said, "the lockets given to every member of the expedition the night before we left. I still have mine." He raised it. "So does my wife. They were designed to kill the wearer instantly and painlessly if he were ever faced with pain or a terror he couldn't endure."
The President was standing again. A stir ran along the barricade of desks.
"We can't endure the city," went on Michael, "or its life and the ways of the people." He glanced along the line of staring faces.
"If what I think you're about to say is true," said the President in a shaking voice, "it would have been better if you'd never been born."
"Let's face facts, Mr. President. We were born and haven't died—yet." A pause. "And we can kill ourselves right here before your eyes. It'd be painless to us. We'd be unconscious. But there would be horrible convulsions and grimaces. Our bodies would be twisted and torn. They'd thresh about. The deaths you saw in the picture happened a long time ago, in outer space. You all went into hysterics at the sight of them. Our deaths now would be close and terrible to see."
The President staggered as though about to faint. There was a stirring and muttering and a jumping up along the desks. Voices cried out, in anger and fear. Arms waved and fists pounded. Hands clasped and unclasped and clawed at collars, and there was a pell mell rushing around the President. They yelled at each other and clasped each other by the shoulders, turned away and back again, and then suddenly became very still.
Now they began to step down from the raised line of desks, the President leading them, and came close to the man and woman, gathering around them in a wide half circle.
Michael and Mary were holding the lockets close to their throats. The half circle of people, with the President at its center was moving closer and closer. They were sweaty faces and red ones and dry white ones and hands were raised to seize them.
Michael put his arm around Mary's waist. He felt the trembling in her body and the waiting for death.
"Stop!" he said quietly.
They halted, in slight confusion, barely drawing back.
"If you want to see us die—just come a step closer.... And remember what'll happen to you."
The faces began turning to each other and there was an undertone of muttering and whispering. "A ghastly thing.... Instant.... Nothing to do.... Space's broken their minds.... They'll do it.... Eyes're mad.... What can we do?... What?..." The sweaty faces, the cold white ones, the flushed hot ones: all began to turn to the President, who was staring at the two before him like a man watching himself die in a mirror.
"I command you," he suddenly said, in a choked voice, "to—to give me those—lockets! It's your—duty!"
"We've only one duty, Mr. President," said Michael sharply. "To ourselves."
"You're sick. Give yourselves over to us. We'll help you."
"We've made our choice. We want an answer. Quickly! Now!"
The President's body sagged. "What—what is it you want?"
Michael threw the words. "To go beyond the force fields of the city. To go far out onto the Earth and live as long as we can, and then to die a natural death."
The half circle of faces turned to each other and muttered and whispered again. "In the name of God.... Let them go.... Contaminate us.... Like animals.... Get them out of here.... Let them be finished.... Best for us all.... And them...."
There was a turning to the President again and hands thrusting him forward to within one step of Michael and Mary, who were standing there close together, as though attached.
Haltingly he said, "Go. Please go. Out onto the Earth—to die. You will die. The Earth is dead out there. You'll never see the city or your people again."
"We want a ground car," said Michael. "And supplies."
"A ground car," repeated the President. "And—supplies.... Yes."
"You can give us an escort, if you want to, out beyond the first range of mountains."
"There will be no escort," said the President firmly. "No one has been allowed to go out upon the Earth or to fly above it for many hundreds of years. We know it's there. That's enough. We couldn't bear the sight of it." He took a step back. "And we can't bear the sight of you any longer. Go now. Quickly!"
Michael and Mary did not let go of the lockets as they watched the half circle of faces move backward, staring, as though at corpses that should sink to the floor.
It was night. The city had been lost beyond the dead mounds of Earth that rolled away behind them, like a thousand ancient tombs. The ground car sat still on a crumbling road.
Looking up through the car's driving blister, they saw the stars sunk into the blue black ocean of space; saw the path of the Milky Way along which they had rushed, while they had been searching frantically for the place of salvation.
"If any one of the other couples had made it back," said Mary, "do you think they'd be with us?"
"I think they'd either be with us," he said, "or out in space again—or in prison."
She stared ahead along the beam of headlight that stabbed out into the night over the decaying road.
"How sorry are you," she said quietly, "coming with me?"
"All I know is, if I were out in space for long without you, I'd kill myself."
"Are we going to die out here, Michael?" she said, gesturing toward the wall of night that stood at the end of the headlight, "with the land?"
He turned from her, frowning, and drove the ground car forward, watching the headlights push back the darkness.
They followed the crumbling highway all night until light crept across the bald and cracked hills. The morning sun looked down upon the desolation ten feet above the horizon when the car stopped. They sat for a long time then, looking out upon the Earth's parched and inflamed skin. In the distance a wall of mountains rose like a great pile of bleached bones. Close ahead the rolling plains were motionless waves of dead Earth with a slight breeze stirring up little swirls of dust.
"I'm getting out," she said.
"I haven't the slightest idea how much farther to go, or why," said Michael shrugging. "It's all the same. Dirt and hills and mountains and sun and dust. It's really not much different from being out in space. We live in the car just like in a space ship. We've enough concentrated supplies to last for a year. How far do we go? Why? When?"
They stepped upon the Earth and felt the warmth of the sun and strolled toward the top of the hill.
"The air smells clean," he said.
"The ground feels good. I think I'll take off my shoes." She did.
"Take off your boots, Michael. Try it."
Wearily he pulled off his boots, stood in his bare feet. "It takes me back."
"Yes," she said and began walking toward the hilltop.
He followed, his boots slung around his neck. "There was a road somewhere, with the dust between my toes. Or was it a dream?"
"I guess when the past is old enough," she said, "it becomes a dream."
He watched her footprints in the dust. "God, listen to the quiet."
"I can't seem to remember so much quiet around me. There's always been the sound of a space ship, or the pumps back in the cities."
He did not answer but continued to watch her footsteps and to feel the dust squishing up between his toes. Then suddenly:
"Mary!"
She stopped, whirling around.
He was staring down at her feet.
She followed his gaze.
"It's grass!" He bent down. "Three blades."
She knelt beside him. They touched the green blades.
"They're new," he said.
They stared, like religious devotees concentrating upon some sacred object.
He rose, pulling her up with him. They hurried to the top of the hill and stood very still, looking down into a valley. There were tiny patches of green and little trees sprouting, and here and there, a pale flower. The green was in a cluster, in the center of the valley and there was a tiny glint of sunlight in its center.
"Oh!"
Her hand found his.
They ran down the gentle slope, feeling the patches of green touch their feet, smelling a new freshness in the air. And coming to the little spring, they stood beside it and watched the crystal water that trickled along the valley floor and lost itself around a bend. They saw a furry, little animal scurry away and heard the twitter of a bird and saw it resting on a slim, bending branch. They heard the buzz of a bee, saw it light on a pale flower at their feet and work at the sweetness inside.
Mary knelt down and drank from the spring.
"It's so cool. It must come from deep down."
"It does," he said. There were tears in his eyes and a tightness in his throat. "From deep down."
"We can live here, Michael!"
Slowly he looked all around until his sight stopped at the bottom of a hill. "We'll build our house just beyond those rocks. We'll dig and plant and you'll have the child."
"Yes!" she said. "Oh yes!"
"And the ones back in the city will know the Earth again. Sometime we'll lead them back here and show them the Earth is coming alive." He paused. "By following what we had to do for ourselves, we've found a way to save them."
They remained kneeling in the silence beside the pool for a long time. They felt the sun on their backs and looked into the clean depth of the water deeply aware of the new life breathing all around them and of themselves absorbing it, and at the same time giving back to it the life that was their own.
There was only this quiet and breathing and warmth until Michael stood and picked up a rock and walked toward the base of the hill where he had decided to build the house.
... THE END
Question:
What is the plot of the story?
Answer:
|
[
"Michael and Mary were sent to look for another planet for humans to live on. After looking for two thousand years, their \"Milky Way\" expedition had failed to find an alternative, but humans were desperate because Earth was scorched and not easily liveable. The President is taken aback by the news, and his council looked at some footage from the expedition, watching ships explode and seeing dangerous atmospheres that would not sustain human life. A thousand people were grown from cultured scar tissue only to die violent deaths, so people yelled for the video to be shut off. President Davis explains that violent death is an unfamiliar thing to the contemporary humans, so he decided to lie to the public about the expedition details. Michael had promised Mary they would stay on Earth, but the government lying to the public was hard--Mary suggests that Michael can still leave, but he doesn't want to go without her, and she wants to stay on the planet she came from, even if it means a difficult life on Earth. They remember their lockets, that give them the option of a quick death in case they had gotten trapped in a dangerous situation, but they don't want to threaten to kill themselves either. Mary admits she's pregnant, which is surprising because humans in this day are cultured from scar tissue. With heavy hearts, they looked out onto the city where the large TV screens were promising the public an idyllic planet that would one day be recovered again, through a different mission, which is disheartening because their own mission had turned into a lie. They went back into the council chambers and sat again. Michael and Mary were told they'd be kept in solitary confinement to protect the public, which was ironic since Mary wanted to stay on Earth to avoid loneliness. Michael reminds the President of the lockets he and his wife have, and there is panic--what is there to do? The President demanded they hand over the lockets, but Michael and Mary stay strong and ask to be let outside of the city's protective barrier so that they can experience a natural death. The President conceded, so that he didn't have to look at them anymore, and gave them the car that they asked for. They have supplies to last a year, but don't know where to go or what to do. They get out of their car and take their shoes off to walk around, experiencing quiet for the first time in memory. To their surprise, they found three blades of grass, and run to a hill to see other patches of green in the area, some animals, and a small spring. They have hope: they can build a house, have a child, and eventually they can show the ones in the city that there is hope much closer than they realized. ",
"Michael and Mary arrive back on Earth after a 2,000-year expedition scouting the galaxy for any potential new planets for humans to move to. After finding nothing, Michael is hesitant to report the news back to Earth and wants to stay in space. Mary, however, insists they return to Earth, so they step out of their spaceship and give the first press conference detailing their failed exploit. Michael does not hold back on the details and shocks the hopeful humans to their core. The President pulls them aside and interrogates them with his council. They share all the pictures from their adventures into the galaxy, showing yellow aliens, planets with deadly atmospheres, and horrific images of the other couples on the expedition dying. The council becomes ill at the images of their gruesome deaths, so the President shuts down the slideshow. Apparently, humans were no longer accustomed to violent deaths, as they hadn’t had to see any for thousands of years. The last time such an occurrence happened, a man was struck and killed by a ground car, and all the witnesses were driven mad. The President had shut down any potential violent deaths from then on. \nThe President asks for hope from Michael and Mary, but they are unable to give him any. They send them out of the chambers to deliberate their fate. Michael and Mary discuss their options. Mary wants to stay and die on Earth, while Michael wants to escape. They decide to use their lockets which cause instant death for the wearers to force the council’s hand. Mary reveals that she is pregnant, something that hasn’t occurred for three thousand years due to overpopulation laws, and Michael agrees to stay on Earth. \nThey return to the chambers, and the President delivers their verdict. They are condemned to isolation until the next expedition is set out, because he fears they will reveal the truth to Earth. He sent out a broadcast earlier saying there was hope after all, as they had found a planet, but lost it, so another expedition would be sent out soon. Michael and Mary refuse their isolation, and threaten to kill themselves with the lockets unless they are released and given a ground car and supplies. The President agrees after he and his congregation are thrown by the thought of watching someone die in front of their eyes. \nThe story flashes forward to Mary and Michael driving out of the city and into the sandy mountains. They come to a valley and step out of the car, placing their bare feet on the soil. Mary sees three blades of grass and shows Michael excitedly. They run down the hill and discover baby trees, flowers, wildlife, and a small stream. The Earth is healing itself, and they had the proof. Thrilled that htey will be able to live off the land, they start planning where they will put their cabin and when they will reintroduce this new Earth to humanity. \n",
"Michael and Mary are returning from a mission to discover other planets in the Milky Way suitable for human colonization. During their exploration, which spanned two thousand years, the one thousand other humans sent with them had all died. They are the lone survivors, returning to Earth with grave news that there is no other place in the galaxy humans can move to. The remaining humans on Earth are overjoyed when they make radio contact because their life on Earth is confined to a city huddled around a water hole in a desert where their technology for distilling the salty water is the only thing keeping them alive on a planet they condemn as devoid of any other resources.\n \nMichael is hesitant to land on Earth, but Mary is determined to spend the rest of her life there now. They land and deliver a speech to a cheering crowd of white faces that are the same as those that had cheered when their mission departed two thousand years ago. Humans have technology to tissue culture new bodies and effectively become immortal. Pregnancy was outlawed 3000 years ago to control the population, and ever since then they have been regenerating their bodies. Michael announces that there are no other habitable planets. President Davis begs Michael to retract what he has said, and tells the public that there has been a mistake, that everything will be “all right”, and that they should go back to work and wait for more information. \nMichael and Mary are brought to the council to deliver a 60 second video documenting their entire two thousand year mission. Most disturbing is that it shows the violent deaths of many explorers - some being sucked into the gravity of foreign planets, or their ships exploding after colliding with meteors. Violent death was last witnessed on Earth hundreds of years ago, and all of the witnesses went insane. The video is shocking and disturbing. The President quickly denies the validity of the video evidence, desperately trying to avoid any hysteria by the public. Michael and Mary are told to wait outside the council chambers while their fate is decided. \nMichael thinks they should have never landed on the planet, but Mary reveals she is pregnant and wants to remain on Earth. They plan to leave the city by threatening to kill themselves in front of the council. Out the window, they glimpse a public screen projection showing that there is going to be a new mission to space and everything will be “all right”. The council decides Michael and Mary will be placed in solitary confinement. The couple threaten to kill themselves using their lockets in front of the council, a violent death that would make those who see it go insane. They demand a ground car with a year of supplies, which they are granted. They leave the city together and soon discover an oasis with spring water to build a house next to and raise their child.",
"Michael and Mary return to Earth from a 2,000-year-long mission to find a planet suitable for human habitation because Earth's resources have slowly dwindled away due to human greed and atomic war. Michael would rather end his life than tell those remaining on Earth that their mission had failed, but Mary believes they owe it to the one thousand who had perished on the expedition to reveal the truth to them. Besides, 2,000 years away from Earth is a long time, and she misses home. A crowd eagerly welcomes them, including President Davis, and Michael soon confesses no planets exist that can support human life. He and Mary have returned to Earth to stay and die. President Davis whisks them away from the troubled crowd and brings them to the council chambers, where Michael and Mary reveal the documentary footage of their trip. They show the council hundreds of years' worth of visual evidence of all the planets they visited, all the strange creatures they encountered, and, worst of all, the explicit, violent deaths of their fellow travelers. Upon seeing these deaths, the council members insist Michael and Mary turn off the footage. They are horrified by the violent images because it has been hundreds of years since any human has died a violent death; seeing such images would drive them insane. As the President and council members discuss the couple's fate, Michael and Mary await their decision and discuss what to do next. Michael wants to go back to space, while Mary wants to stay on Earth because she has grown weary of traveling and exhausted by the process of reincarnation that has kept them both alive for 2,000 years. Mary reminds Michael of the lockets they carry--lockets that were given to them prior to departing for their journey that have the power to kill them instantly in order to avoid a painful death. Mary suggests using this locket as leverage against the council, who would grant whatever they asked in exchange for not having to witness their gruesome suicides in person. She also reveals she is pregnant. Later, President Davis announces the council has altered their documentary footage in order to spare the hope of their people, and he tells Michael and Mary that they will spend the rest of their lives in solitary confinement with everything provided for them, including the tools of reincarnation. At that moment, Michael threatens to trigger his locket unless the council gives him and Mary a ground car and provisions and lets them leave the force walls surrounding the last-remaining Earth settlement. President Davis grants their wish. Together, Michael and Mary head out into the desolation of Earth. Soon they discover evidence of new life on Earth including grass, birds, and water. They set out to build their home and prepare to restore civilization."
] |
32744
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Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from IF Worlds of Science Fiction June 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
THE VALLEY
By Richard Stockham
Illustrated by Ed Emsh
If you can't find it countless millions of miles in space, come back to Earth. You might find it just on the other side of the fence—where the grass is always greener.
The Ship dove into Earth's sea of atmosphere like a great, silver fish.
Inside the ship, a man and woman stood looking down at the expanse of land that curved away to a growing horizon. They saw the yellow ground cracked like a dried skin; and the polished stone of the mountains and the seas that were shrunken away in the dust. And they saw how the city circled the sea, as a circle of men surround a water hole in a desert under a blazing sun.
The ship's radio cried out. "You've made it! Thank God! You've made it!"
Another voice, shaking, said, "President—Davis is—overwhelmed. He can't go on. On his behalf and on behalf of all the people—with our hope that was almost dead, we greet you." A pause. "Please come in!"
The voice was silent. The air screamed against the hull of the ship.
"I can't tell them," said the man.
"Please come in!" said the radio. "Do you hear me?"
The woman looked up at the man. "You've got to Michael!"
"Two thousand years. From one end of the galaxy to the other. Not one grain of dust we can live on. Just Earth. And it's burned to a cinder."
A note of hysteria stabbed into the radio voice. "Are you all right? Stand by! We're sending a rescue ship."
"They've got a right to know what we've found," said the woman. "They sent us out. They've waited so long—."
He stared into space. "It's hopeless. If we'd found another planet they could live on, they'd do the same as they've done here."
He touched the tiny golden locket that hung around his neck. "Right now, I could press this and scratch myself and the whole farce would be over."
"No. A thousand of us died. You've got to think of them."
"We'll go back out into space," he said. "It's clean out there. I'm tired. Two thousand years of reincarnation."
She spoke softly. "We've been together for a long time. I've loved you. I've asked very little. But I need to stay on Earth. Please, Michael."
He looked at her for a moment. Then he flipped a switch. "Milky Way to Earth. Never mind the rescue ship. We're all right. We're coming in."
The great, white ship settled to Earth that was like a plain after flood waters have drained away.
The man and woman came out into the blazing sunlight.
A shout, like the crashing of a thousand surfs, rose and broke over them. The man and woman descended the gang-plank toward the officials gathered on the platform. They glanced around at the massed field of white faces beneath them; saw those same faces that had been turned toward them two thousand years past; remembered the cheers and the cries that had crashed around them then, as they and the thousand had stood before the towering spires of the ships, before the takeoff.
And, as then, there were no children among the milling, grasping throng. Only the same clutching hands and voices and arms, asking for an answer, a salvation, a happy end.
Now the officials gathered around the man and the woman, and spoke to them in voices of reverence.
A microphone was thrust into Michael's hand with the whispered admonition to tell the people of the great new life waiting for them, open and green and moist, on a virgin planet.
The cries of the people were slipping away and a stillness growing like an ocean calm and, within it, the sound of the pumps, throbbing, sucking the water from the seas.
And then Michael's voice, "The thousand who left with us are dead. For some time we've known the other planets in our solar system were uninhabitable. Now we've been from one end of the galaxy to the other. And this is what we've found.... We were given Earth. There's no place else for us. The rest of the planets in the galaxy were given to others. There's no place else for them. We've all had a chance to make the best of Earth. Instead we've made the worst of it. So we're here to stay—and die." He handed the microphone back.
The silence did not change.
The President grasped Michael's arm. "What're you saying?"
A buzzing rose up from the people like that of a swarm of frightened bees. The sea of white faces swayed and their voices began to cry. The din and motion held, long and drawn out, with a wail now and a fluttering beneath it.
Michael and the woman stood above them in the center of the pale, hovering faces of the officials.
"Good God," said the President. "You've got to tell them what you said isn't true!"
"We've been searching two thousand years for a truth," said Michael.
"A thousand of us have died finding it. I've told it. That's the way it's got to be."
The President swayed, took the microphone in his hands.
"There's been some mistake!" he cried. "Go back to the pumps and the distilleries! Go back to the water vats and the gardens and the flocks! Go back! Work and wait! We'll get the full truth to you. Everything's going to be all right !"
Obediently the mass of faces separated, as though they were being spun away on a whirling disk. Michael and the woman were swallowed up, like pebbles inside a closing hand, and carried away from the great, white ship.
They ushered the man and woman into the beamed and paneled council chambers and sat them in thick chairs before the wall of polished wood desks across which stared the line of faces, silent and waiting. And on a far wall, facing them all, hung a silver screen, fifty feet square.
The President stood. "Members of the council." He paused. "As you heard, they report—complete failure." He turned to Michael. "And now, the proof."
Michael stood beside the motion picture projector, close to his chair. The lights dimmed. There was only the sound of the pumps throbbing in the darkness close and far away, above and beneath and all around. Suddenly on the screen appeared an endless depth of blackness filled with a mass of glowing white, which extended into the room around the watching people, seeming to touch them and then spreading, like an ocean, farther away and out and out into an endless distance.
Now streaks of yellow fire shot into the picture, like a swarm of lightning bugs, the thin sharp nosed shadows of space ships, hurtling, like comets, toward the clustered star smear. And then silent thoughts flashed from the screen into the minds of the spectators; of time passing in months, years and centuries, passing and passing until they themselves seemed to be rushing and rushing into the blackness toward blinding balls of white light, the size of moons.
The dark shapes of smaller spheres circling the blinding ones moved forward into the picture; red, blue, green, yellow, purple and many mixtures of all these, and then one planet filled the screen, seeming to be inflated, like a balloon, into a shining red ball. There was a razor edge of horizon then and pink sky and an expanse of crimson. Flat, yellow creatures lay all around, expanding and contracting. A roaring rose and fell like the roaring of a million winds. Then fear flowed out of the picture into the minds of the watchers so that they gasped and cringed, and a silent voice told them that the atmosphere of this planet would disintegrate a human being.
Now the red ball seemed to pull away from them into the blackness and the blinding balls of light, and all around could be seen the streaks of rocket flame shooting away in all directions.
Suddenly a flash cut the blackness, like the flare of a match, and died, and the watchers caught from the screen the awareness of the death of a ship.
They were also aware of the rushing of time through centuries and they saw the streaking rocket flames and planets rushing at them; saw creatures in squares and circles, in threads wriggling, in lumps and blobs, rolling jumping and crawling; saw them in cloud forms whisking about, changing their shapes, and in flowing wavelets of water. They saw creatures hopping about on one leg and others crawling at incredible speeds on a thousand; saw some with all the numbers of legs and arms in between; and were aware of creatures that were there but invisible.
And those watching the screen on which time and distance were a compressed and distilled kaleidoscope, saw planet after planet and thousands at a time; heard strange noises; rasping and roaring, clinks and whistles, screams and crying, sighing and moaning. And they were aware through all this of atmosphere and ground inimical to man, some that would evaporate at the touch of a human body, or would burst into flame, or swallow, or turn from liquid to solid or solid to liquid. They saw and heard chemical analyses, were aware of this ocean of blackness and clouds of white through which man might move, and must ever move, because he could live only upon this floating dust speck that was Earth.
The picture faded in, close to one of the long, needle nosed crafts, showing inside, a man and a woman. Time was telescoped again while the man cut a tiny piece of scar tissue from his arm and that of the woman, put them in bottles and set them into compartments where solutions dripped rhythmically into the bottles, the temperature was held at that of the human body, and synthetic sunlight focused upon them from many pencil like tubes.
The watchers in the council chamber saw the bits of tissue swell into human embryos in a few seconds, and grow arms and legs and faces and extend themselves into babies. Saw them taken from the bottles and cared for, and become replicas of the man and woman controlling the ship, who, all this time were aging, until life went out of their bodies. Then the ones who had been the scar tissue disintegrated them in the coffin-like tubes and let their dust be sucked out into space—all this through millions of miles and a hundred years, compressed for the watchers into sixty seconds and a few feet of space.
Instantly there was black space on the screen again, with the fingers of flame pointing out behind the dark bodies of the ships.
And then the spectators saw one ship shudder and swerve into a blazing, bluish white star, like a gnat flying into a white hot poker; saw another drop away and away, out and out into the blackness past the swirling white rim of the galaxy, and sink into a dark nothingness.
Great balls of rock showered like hail onto other ships, smashing them into grotesque tin cans. The stream of fire at the tail of another ship suddenly died and the ship floated into an orbit around a great, yellow planet, ten times the size of Jupiter, then was sucked into it. Another burst like a bomb, flinging a man and woman out into the darkness, where they hung suspended, frozen into statues, like bodies drowned in the depths of an Arctic sea.
At this instant from the watching council, there were screams of horror and voices crying out, "Shut it off! Shut it off!" There was a moving about in the darkness. Murmurs and harsh cries of disapproval grew in volume.
Another ship in the picture was split down the side by a meteor and the bodies inside were impaled on jagged blades of steel, the contorted, bloody faces lighted by bursts of flame. And the screams and cries of the spectators rose higher, "Shut it off.... Oh Lord...."
Lights flashed through the room and the picture died.
Michael and Mary, both staring, saw, along the line of desks, the agonized faces, some staring like white stones, others hidden in clutching fingers, as though they had been confronted by a Medusa. There was the sound of heavy breathing that mixed with the throbbing of the pumps. The President held tightly to the edges of his desk to quiet his trembling.
"There—there've been changes," he said, "since you've been out in space. There isn't a person on Earth who's seen a violent death for hundreds of years."
Michael faced him, frowning. "I don't follow you."
"Dying violently happened so seldom on Earth that, after a long time, the sight of it began to drive some people mad. And then one day a man was struck by one of the ground cars and everyone who saw it went insane. Since then we've eliminated accidents, even the idea. Now, no one is aware that death by violence is even a possibility."
"I'm sorry," said Michael, "we've been so close to violent death for so long.... What you've seen is part of the proof you asked for."
"What you showed us was a picture," said the President. "If it had been real, we'd all be insane by now. If it were shown to the people there'd be mass hysteria."
"But even if we'd found another habitable planet, getting to it would involve just what we've shown you. Maybe only a tenth of the people who left Earth, or a hundredth, would ever reach a destination out in space."
"We couldn't tolerate such a possibility," said the President gravely. "We'd have to find a way around it."
The pumps throbbed like giant hearts all through the stillness in the council chambers. The faces along the line of desks were smoothing out; the terror in them was fading away.
"And yet the Earth is almost dead," said Michael quietly, "and you can't bring it back to life."
"The sins of our past, Mr. Nelson," said the President. "The Atomic wars five thousand years ago. And the greed. It was too late a long time ago. That, of course, is why the expedition was sent out. And now you've come back to us with this terrible news." He looked around, slowly, then back to Michael. "Can you give us any hope at all?"
"None."
"Another expedition? To Andromeda perhaps? With you the leader?"
Michael shook his head. "We're finished with expeditions, Mr. President."
There were mutterings in the council, and hastily whispered consultations. Now they were watching the man and woman again.
"We feel," said the President, "it would be dangerous to allow you to go out among the people. They've been informed that your statement wasn't entirely true. This was necessary, to avoid a panic. The people simply must not know the whole truth." He paused. "Now we ask you to keep in mind that whatever we decide about the two of you will be for the good of the people."
Michael and Mary were silent.
"You'll wait outside the council chambers," the President went on,
"until we have reached our decision."
As the man and woman were led away, the pumps beat in the stillness, and at the edge of the shrinking seas the salt thick waters were being pulled into the distilleries, and from them into the tier upon tier of artificial gardens that sat like giant bee hives all around the shoreline; and the mounds of salt glistening in the sunlight behind the gardens were growing into mountains.
In their rooms, Michael and Mary were talking through the hours, and waiting. All around them were fragile, form-fitting chairs and translucent walls and a ceiling that, holding the light of the sun when they had first seen it, was now filled with moonlight.
Standing at a circular window, ten feet in diameter, Michael saw, far below, the lights of the city extending into the darkness along the shoreline of the sea.
"We should have delivered our message by radio," he said, "and gone back into space."
"You could probably still go," she said quietly.
He came and stood beside her. "I couldn't stand being out in space, or anywhere, without you."
She looked up at him. "We could go out into the wilderness, Michael, outside the force walls. We could go far away."
He turned from her. "It's all dead. What would be the use?"
"I came from the Earth," she said quietly. "And I've got to go back to it. Space is so cold and frightening. Steel walls and blackness and the rockets and the little pinpoints of light. It's a prison."
"But to die out there in the desert, in that dust." Then he paused and looked away from her. "We're crazy—talking as though we had a choice."
"Maybe they'll have to give us a choice."
"What're you talking about?"
"They went into hysterics at the sight of those bodies in the picture. Those young bodies that didn't die of old age."
He waited.
"They can't stand the sight of people dying violently."
Her hand went to her throat and touched the tiny locket.
"These lockets were given to us so we'd have a choice between suffering or quick painless death.... We still have a choice."
He touched the locket at his own throat and was very still for a long moment. "So we threaten to kill ourselves, before their eyes. What would it do to them?"
He was still for a long time. "Sometimes, Mary, I think I don't know you at all." A pause. "And so now you and I are back where we started. Which'll it be, space or Earth?"
"Michael." Her voice trembled. "I—I don't know how to say this."
He waited, frowning, watching her intently.
"I'm—going to have a child."
His face went blank.
Then he stepped forward and took her by the shoulders. He saw the softness there in her face; saw her eyes bright as though the sun were shining in them; saw a flush in her cheeks, as though she had been running. And suddenly his throat was full.
"No," he said thickly. "I can't believe it."
"It's true."
He held her for a long time, then he turned his eyes aside.
"Yes, I can see it is."
"I—I can't put into words why I let it happen, Michael."
He shook his head. "I don't know—what to—to say. It's so incredible."
"Maybe—I got so—tired—just seeing the two of us over and over again and the culturing of the scar tissue, for twenty centuries. Maybe that was it. It was just—something I felt I had to do. Some— real life again. Something new. I felt a need to produce something out of myself. It all started way out in space, while we were getting close to the solar system. I began to wonder if we'd ever get out of the ship alive or if we'd ever see a sunset again or a dawn or the night or morning like we'd seen on Earth—so—so long ago. And then I had to let it happen. It was a vague and strange thing. There was something forcing me. But at the same time I wanted it, too. I seemed to be willing it, seemed to be feeling it was a necessary thing." She paused, frowning. "I didn't stop to think—it would be like this."
"Such a thing," he said, smiling grimly, "hasn't happened on Earth for three thousand years. I can remember in school, reading in the history books, how the whole Earth was overcrowded and how the food and water had to be rationed and then how the laws were passed forbidding birth and after that how the people died and there weren't any more babies born, until at last there was plenty of what the Earth had to give, for everyone. And then the news was broken to everyone about the culturing of the scar tissue, and there were a few dissenters but they were soon conditioned out of their dissension and the population was stabilized." He paused. "After all this past history, I don't think the council could endure what you've done."
"No," she said quietly. "I don't think they could."
"And so this will be just for us ." He took her in his arms. "If I remember rightly, this is a traditional action." A pause. "Now I'll go with you out onto the Earth—if we can swing it. When we get outside the city, or if we do—Well, we'll see."
They were very still together and then he turned and stood by the window and looked down upon the city and she came and stood beside him.
They both saw it at the same time. And they watched, without speaking, both knowing what was in the other's mind and heart. They watched the giant four dimensional screens all through the city. A green, lush planet showed bright and clear on them and there were ships standing among the trees and men walking through the grass, that moved gently like the swells on a calm ocean, while into their minds came the thoughts projected from the screen:
"This will be your new home. It was found and then lost. But another expedition will be sent out to find it again. Be of good hope. Everything will be all right."
Michael turned from the window. "So there's our evidence. Two thousand years. All the others killed getting it. And with a simple twist, it becomes a lie."
Mary sat down and buried her face in her hands.
"What a terrible failure there's been here," said Michael. "The neglect and destruction of a whole planet. It's like a family letting their home decay all around them, and living in smaller and smaller rooms of it, until at last the rooms are all gone, and since they can't find another home, they all die in the ruins of the last room."
"I can't face dying," Mary said quietly, "squeezed in with all these people, in this tomb they've made around the seas. I want to have the open sky and the quiet away from those awful pounding pumps when I die. I want the spread of the Earth all around and the clean air. I want to be a real part of the Earth again."
Michael barely nodded in agreement. He was standing very still now.
And then there was the sound of the door opening.
They both rose, like mourners at a funeral, and went into the council chambers.
Again they sat in the thick chairs before the wall of desks with the faces of the council looking across it like defenders.
The pumps were beating, beating all through the room and the quiet.
The President was standing. He faced Michael and Mary, and seemed to set himself as though to deliver a blow, or to receive one.
"Michael and Mary," he said, his voice struggling against a tightness,
"we've considered a long time concerning what is to be done with you and the report you brought back to us from the galaxy." He took another swallow of water. "To protect the sanity of the people, we've changed your report. We've also decided that the people must be protected from the possibility of your spreading the truth, as you did at the landing field. So, for the good of the people, you'll be isolated. All comforts will be given you. After all, in a sense, you are heroes and martyrs. Your scar tissue will be cultured as it has been in the past, and you will stay in solitary confinement until the time when, perhaps, we can migrate to another planet. We feel that hope must not be destroyed. And so another expedition is being sent out. It may be that, in time, on another planet, you'll be able to take your place in our society."
He paused. "Is there anything you wish to say?"
"Yes, there is."
"Proceed."
Michael stared straight at the President. After a long moment, he raised his hand to the tiny locket at his throat.
"Perhaps you remember," he said, "the lockets given to every member of the expedition the night before we left. I still have mine." He raised it. "So does my wife. They were designed to kill the wearer instantly and painlessly if he were ever faced with pain or a terror he couldn't endure."
The President was standing again. A stir ran along the barricade of desks.
"We can't endure the city," went on Michael, "or its life and the ways of the people." He glanced along the line of staring faces.
"If what I think you're about to say is true," said the President in a shaking voice, "it would have been better if you'd never been born."
"Let's face facts, Mr. President. We were born and haven't died—yet." A pause. "And we can kill ourselves right here before your eyes. It'd be painless to us. We'd be unconscious. But there would be horrible convulsions and grimaces. Our bodies would be twisted and torn. They'd thresh about. The deaths you saw in the picture happened a long time ago, in outer space. You all went into hysterics at the sight of them. Our deaths now would be close and terrible to see."
The President staggered as though about to faint. There was a stirring and muttering and a jumping up along the desks. Voices cried out, in anger and fear. Arms waved and fists pounded. Hands clasped and unclasped and clawed at collars, and there was a pell mell rushing around the President. They yelled at each other and clasped each other by the shoulders, turned away and back again, and then suddenly became very still.
Now they began to step down from the raised line of desks, the President leading them, and came close to the man and woman, gathering around them in a wide half circle.
Michael and Mary were holding the lockets close to their throats. The half circle of people, with the President at its center was moving closer and closer. They were sweaty faces and red ones and dry white ones and hands were raised to seize them.
Michael put his arm around Mary's waist. He felt the trembling in her body and the waiting for death.
"Stop!" he said quietly.
They halted, in slight confusion, barely drawing back.
"If you want to see us die—just come a step closer.... And remember what'll happen to you."
The faces began turning to each other and there was an undertone of muttering and whispering. "A ghastly thing.... Instant.... Nothing to do.... Space's broken their minds.... They'll do it.... Eyes're mad.... What can we do?... What?..." The sweaty faces, the cold white ones, the flushed hot ones: all began to turn to the President, who was staring at the two before him like a man watching himself die in a mirror.
"I command you," he suddenly said, in a choked voice, "to—to give me those—lockets! It's your—duty!"
"We've only one duty, Mr. President," said Michael sharply. "To ourselves."
"You're sick. Give yourselves over to us. We'll help you."
"We've made our choice. We want an answer. Quickly! Now!"
The President's body sagged. "What—what is it you want?"
Michael threw the words. "To go beyond the force fields of the city. To go far out onto the Earth and live as long as we can, and then to die a natural death."
The half circle of faces turned to each other and muttered and whispered again. "In the name of God.... Let them go.... Contaminate us.... Like animals.... Get them out of here.... Let them be finished.... Best for us all.... And them...."
There was a turning to the President again and hands thrusting him forward to within one step of Michael and Mary, who were standing there close together, as though attached.
Haltingly he said, "Go. Please go. Out onto the Earth—to die. You will die. The Earth is dead out there. You'll never see the city or your people again."
"We want a ground car," said Michael. "And supplies."
"A ground car," repeated the President. "And—supplies.... Yes."
"You can give us an escort, if you want to, out beyond the first range of mountains."
"There will be no escort," said the President firmly. "No one has been allowed to go out upon the Earth or to fly above it for many hundreds of years. We know it's there. That's enough. We couldn't bear the sight of it." He took a step back. "And we can't bear the sight of you any longer. Go now. Quickly!"
Michael and Mary did not let go of the lockets as they watched the half circle of faces move backward, staring, as though at corpses that should sink to the floor.
It was night. The city had been lost beyond the dead mounds of Earth that rolled away behind them, like a thousand ancient tombs. The ground car sat still on a crumbling road.
Looking up through the car's driving blister, they saw the stars sunk into the blue black ocean of space; saw the path of the Milky Way along which they had rushed, while they had been searching frantically for the place of salvation.
"If any one of the other couples had made it back," said Mary, "do you think they'd be with us?"
"I think they'd either be with us," he said, "or out in space again—or in prison."
She stared ahead along the beam of headlight that stabbed out into the night over the decaying road.
"How sorry are you," she said quietly, "coming with me?"
"All I know is, if I were out in space for long without you, I'd kill myself."
"Are we going to die out here, Michael?" she said, gesturing toward the wall of night that stood at the end of the headlight, "with the land?"
He turned from her, frowning, and drove the ground car forward, watching the headlights push back the darkness.
They followed the crumbling highway all night until light crept across the bald and cracked hills. The morning sun looked down upon the desolation ten feet above the horizon when the car stopped. They sat for a long time then, looking out upon the Earth's parched and inflamed skin. In the distance a wall of mountains rose like a great pile of bleached bones. Close ahead the rolling plains were motionless waves of dead Earth with a slight breeze stirring up little swirls of dust.
"I'm getting out," she said.
"I haven't the slightest idea how much farther to go, or why," said Michael shrugging. "It's all the same. Dirt and hills and mountains and sun and dust. It's really not much different from being out in space. We live in the car just like in a space ship. We've enough concentrated supplies to last for a year. How far do we go? Why? When?"
They stepped upon the Earth and felt the warmth of the sun and strolled toward the top of the hill.
"The air smells clean," he said.
"The ground feels good. I think I'll take off my shoes." She did.
"Take off your boots, Michael. Try it."
Wearily he pulled off his boots, stood in his bare feet. "It takes me back."
"Yes," she said and began walking toward the hilltop.
He followed, his boots slung around his neck. "There was a road somewhere, with the dust between my toes. Or was it a dream?"
"I guess when the past is old enough," she said, "it becomes a dream."
He watched her footprints in the dust. "God, listen to the quiet."
"I can't seem to remember so much quiet around me. There's always been the sound of a space ship, or the pumps back in the cities."
He did not answer but continued to watch her footsteps and to feel the dust squishing up between his toes. Then suddenly:
"Mary!"
She stopped, whirling around.
He was staring down at her feet.
She followed his gaze.
"It's grass!" He bent down. "Three blades."
She knelt beside him. They touched the green blades.
"They're new," he said.
They stared, like religious devotees concentrating upon some sacred object.
He rose, pulling her up with him. They hurried to the top of the hill and stood very still, looking down into a valley. There were tiny patches of green and little trees sprouting, and here and there, a pale flower. The green was in a cluster, in the center of the valley and there was a tiny glint of sunlight in its center.
"Oh!"
Her hand found his.
They ran down the gentle slope, feeling the patches of green touch their feet, smelling a new freshness in the air. And coming to the little spring, they stood beside it and watched the crystal water that trickled along the valley floor and lost itself around a bend. They saw a furry, little animal scurry away and heard the twitter of a bird and saw it resting on a slim, bending branch. They heard the buzz of a bee, saw it light on a pale flower at their feet and work at the sweetness inside.
Mary knelt down and drank from the spring.
"It's so cool. It must come from deep down."
"It does," he said. There were tears in his eyes and a tightness in his throat. "From deep down."
"We can live here, Michael!"
Slowly he looked all around until his sight stopped at the bottom of a hill. "We'll build our house just beyond those rocks. We'll dig and plant and you'll have the child."
"Yes!" she said. "Oh yes!"
"And the ones back in the city will know the Earth again. Sometime we'll lead them back here and show them the Earth is coming alive." He paused. "By following what we had to do for ourselves, we've found a way to save them."
They remained kneeling in the silence beside the pool for a long time. They felt the sun on their backs and looked into the clean depth of the water deeply aware of the new life breathing all around them and of themselves absorbing it, and at the same time giving back to it the life that was their own.
There was only this quiet and breathing and warmth until Michael stood and picked up a rock and walked toward the base of the hill where he had decided to build the house.
... THE END
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Who is Herbert's wife and what is her role in the story?
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about A BOTTLE OF Old Wine by Richard O. Lewis.
Relevant chunks:
A grim tale of a future in which everyone is desperate to escape reality, and a hero who wants to have his wine and drink it, too.
A BOTTLE OF
Old Wine
By Richard O. Lewis
Illustrated by KELLY FREAS
Herbert Hyrel
settled himself more comfortably in his easy chair, extended his short legs further toward the fireplace, and let his eyes travel cautiously in the general direction of his wife.
She was in her chair as usual, her long legs curled up beneath her, the upper half of her face hidden in the bulk of her personalized, three-dimensional telovis. The telovis, of a stereoscopic nature, seemingly brought the performers with all their tinsel and color directly into the room of the watcher.
Hyrel had no way of seeing into the plastic affair she wore, but he guessed from the expression on the lower half of her face that she was watching one of the newer black-market sex-operas. In any event, there would be no sound, movement, or sign of life from her for the next three hours. To break the thread of the play for even a moment would ruin all the previous emotional build-up.
There had been a time when he hated her for those long and silent evenings, lonely hours during which he was completely ignored. It was different now, however, for those hours furnished him with time for an escape of his own.
His lips curled into a tight smile and his right hand fondled the unobtrusive switch beneath his trouser leg. He did not press the switch. He would wait a few minutes longer. But it was comforting to know that it was there, exhilarating to know that he could escape for a few hours by a mere flick of his finger.
He let his eyes stray to the dim light of the artificial flames in the fireplace. His hate for her was not bounded merely by those lonely hours she had forced upon him. No, it was far more encompassing.
He hated her with a deep, burning savagery that was deadly in its passion. He hated her for her money, the money she kept securely from him. He hated her for the paltry allowance she doled out to him, as if he were an irresponsible child. It was as if she were constantly reminding him in every glance and gesture, "I made a bad bargain when I married you. You wanted me, my money, everything, and had nothing to give in return except your own doltish self. You set a trap for me, baited with lies and a false front. Now you are caught in your own trap and will remain there like a mouse to eat from my hand whatever crumbs I stoop to give you."
But some day his hate would be appeased. Yes, some day soon he would kill her!
He shot a sideways glance at her, wondering if by chance she suspected.... She hadn't moved. Her lips were pouted into a half smile; the sex-opera had probably reached one of its more pleasurable moments.
Hyrel let his eyes shift back to the fireplace again. Yes, he would kill her. Then he would claim a rightful share of her money, be rid of her debasing dominance.
He let the
thought run around through his head, savoring it with mental taste buds. He would not kill her tonight. No, nor the next night. He would wait, wait until he had sucked the last measure of pleasure from the thought.
It was like having a bottle of rare old wine on a shelf where it could be viewed daily. It was like being able to pause again and again before the bottle, hold it up to the light, and say to it, "Some day, when my desire for you has reached the ultimate, I shall unstopper you quietly and sip you slowly to the last soul-satisfying drop." As long as the bottle remained there upon the shelf it was symbolic of that pleasurable moment....
He snapped out of his reverie and realized he had been wasting precious moments. There would be time enough tomorrow for gloating. Tonight, there were other things to do. Pleasurable things. He remembered the girl he had met the night before, and smiled smugly. Perhaps she would be awaiting him even now. If not, there would be another one....
He settled himself deeper into the chair, glanced once more at his wife, then let his head lean comfortably back against the chair's headrest. His hand upon his thigh felt the thin mesh that cloaked his body beneath his clothing like a sheer stocking. His fingers went again to the tiny switch. Again he hesitated.
Herbert Hyrel knew no more about the telporter suit he wore than he did about the radio in the corner, the TV set against the wall, or the personalized telovis his wife was wearing. You pressed one of the buttons on the radio; music came out. You pressed a button and clicked a dial on the TV; music and pictures came out. You pressed a button and made an adjustment on the telovis; three-dimensional, emotion-colored pictures leaped into the room. You pressed a tiny switch on the telporter suit; you were whisked away to a receiving set you had previously set up in secret.
He knew that the music and the images of the performers on the TV and telovis were brought to his room by some form of electrical impulse or wave while the actual musicians and performers remained in the studio. He knew that when he pressed the switch on his thigh something within him—his ectoplasm, higher self, the thing spirits use for materialization, whatever its real name—streamed out of him along an invisible channel, leaving his body behind in the chair in a conscious but dream-like state. His other self materialized in a small cabin in a hidden nook between a highway and a river where he had installed the receiving set a month ago.
He thought once more of the girl who might be waiting for him, smiled, and pressed the switch.
The dank air
of the cabin was chill to Herbert Hyrel's naked flesh. He fumbled through the darkness for the clothing he kept there, found his shorts and trousers, got hurriedly into them, then flicked on a pocket lighter and ignited a stub of candle upon the table. By the wavering light, he finished dressing in the black satin clothing, the white shirt, the flowing necktie and tam. He invoiced the contents of his billfold. Not much. And his monthly pittance was still two weeks away....
He had skimped for six months to salvage enough money from his allowance to make a down payment on the telporter suit. Since then, his expenses—monthly payments for the suit, cabin rent, costly liquor—had forced him to place his nights of escape on strict ration. He could not go on this way, he realized. Not now. Not since he had met the girl. He had to have more money. Perhaps he could not afford the luxury of leaving the wine bottle longer upon the shelf....
Riverside Club, where Hyrel arrived by bus and a hundred yards of walking, was exclusive. It catered to a clientele that had but three things in common: money, a desire for utter self-abandonment, and a sales slip indicating ownership of a telporter suit. The club was of necessity expensive, for self-telportation was strictly illegal, and police protection came high.
Herbert Hyrel adjusted his white, silken mask carefully at the door and shoved his sales slip through a small aperture where it was thoroughly scanned by unseen eyes. A buzzer sounded an instant later, the lock on the door clicked, and Hyrel pushed through into the exhilarating warmth of music and laughter.
The main room was large. Hidden lights along the walls sent slow beams of red, blue, vermillion, green, yellow and pink trailing across the domed ceiling in a heterogeneous pattern. The colored beams mingled, diffused, spread, were caught up by mirrors of various tints which diffused and mingled the lights once more until the whole effect was an ever-changing panorama of softly-melting shades.
The gay and bizarre costumes of the masked revelers on the dance floor and at the tables, unearthly in themselves, were made even more so by the altering light. Music flooded the room from unseen sources. Laughter—hysterical, drunken, filled with utter abandonment—came from the dance floor, the tables, and the private booths and rooms hidden cleverly within the walls.
Hyrel pushed himself to an unoccupied table, sat down and ordered a bottle of cheap whiskey. He would have preferred champagne, but his depleted finances forbade the more discriminate taste.
When his order arrived, he poured a glass tumbler half full and consumed it eagerly while his eyes scanned the room in search of the girl. He couldn't see her in the dim swirl of color. Had she arrived? Perhaps she was wearing a different costume than she had the night before. If so, recognition might prove difficult.
He poured himself another drink, promising himself he would go in search of her when the liquor began to take effect.
A woman clad in the revealing garb of a Persian dancer threw an arm about him from behind and kissed him on the cheek through the veil which covered the lower part of her face.
"Hi, honey," she giggled into his ear. "Havin' a time?"
He reached for the white arm to pull her to him, but she eluded his grasp and reeled away into the waiting arms of a tall toreador. Hyrel gulped his whiskey and watched her nestle into the arms of her partner and begin with him a sinuous, suggestive dance. The whiskey had begun its warming effect, and he laughed.
This was the land of the lotus eaters, the sanctuary of the escapists, the haven of all who wished to cast off their shell of inhibition and become the thing they dreamed themselves to be. Here one could be among his own kind, an actor upon a gay stage, a gaudy butterfly metamorphosed from the slug, a knight of old.
The Persian dancing girl was probably the wife of a boorish oaf whose idea of romance was spending an evening telling his wife how he came to be a successful bank president. But she had found her means of escape. Perhaps she had pleaded a sick headache and had retired to her room. And there upon the bed now reposed her shell of reality while her inner self, the shadowy one, completely materialized, became an exotic thing from the East in this never-never land.
The man, the toreador, had probably closeted himself within his library with a set of account books and had left strict orders not to be disturbed until he had finished with them.
Both would have terrific hangovers in the morning. But that, of course, would be fully compensated for by the memories of the evening.
Hyrel chuckled. The situation struck him as being funny: the shadowy self got drunk and had a good time, and the outer husk suffered the hangover in the morning. Strange. Strange how a device such as the telporter suit could cause the shadow of each bodily cell to leave the body, materialize, and become a reality in its own right. And yet ...
He looked
at the heel of his left hand. There was a long, irregular scar there. It was the result of a cut he had received nearly three weeks ago when he had fallen over this very table and had rammed his hand into a sliver of broken champagne glass. Later that evening, upon re-telporting back home, the pain of the cut had remained in his hand, but there was no sign of the cut itself on the hand of his outer self. The scar was peculiar to the shadowy body only. There was something about the shadowy body that carried the hurts to the outer body, but not the scars....
Sudden laughter broke out near him, and he turned quickly in that direction. A group of gaily costumed revelers was standing in a semi-circle about a small mound of clothing upon the floor. It was the costume of the toreador.
Hyrel laughed, too. It had happened many times before—a costume suddenly left empty as its owner, due to a threat of discovery at home, had had to press the switch in haste to bring his shadowy self—and complete consciousness—back to his outer self in a hurry.
A waiter picked up the clothing. He would put it safely away so that the owner could claim it upon his next visit to the club. Another waiter placed a fresh bottle of whiskey on the table before Hyrel, and Hyrel paid him for it.
The whiskey, reaching his head now in surges of warm cheerfulness, was filling him with abandonment, courage, and a desire for merriment. He pushed himself up from the table, joined the merry throng, threw his arm about the Persian dancer, drew her close.
They began dancing slowly to the throbbing rhythm, dancing and holding on to each other tightly. Hyrel could feel her hot breath through her veil upon his neck, adding to the headiness of the liquor. His feeling of depression and inferiority flowed suddenly from him. Once again he was the all-conquering male.
His arm trembled as it drew her still closer to him and he began dancing directly and purposefully toward the shadows of a clump of artificial palms near one corner of the room. There was an exit to the garden behind the palms.
Half way there they passed a secluded booth from which protruded a long leg clad in black mesh stocking. Hyrel paused as he recognized that part of the costume. It was she! The girl! The one he had met so briefly the night before!
His arm slid away from the Persian dancer, took hold of the mesh-clad leg, and pulled. A female form followed the leg from the booth and fell into his arms. He held her tightly, kissed her white neck, let her perfume send his thoughts reeling.
"Been looking for me, honey?" she whispered, her voice deep and throaty.
"You know it!"
He began whisking her away toward the palms. The Persian girl was pulled into the booth.
Yes, she was wearing the same costume she had worn the night before, that of a can-can dancer of the 90's. The mesh hose that encased her shapely legs were held up by flowered supporters in such a manner as to leave four inches of white leg exposed between hose top and lacy panties. Her skirt, frilled to suggest innumerable petticoats, fell away at each hip, leaving the front open to expose the full length of legs. She wore a wig of platinum hair encrusted with jewels that sparkled in the lights. Her jewel-studded mask was as white as her hair and covered the upper half of her face, except for the large almond slits for her eyes. A white purse, jewel crusted, dangled from one arm.
He stopped once before reaching the palms, drew her closer, kissed her long and ardently. Then he began pulling her on again.
She drew back when they reached the shelter of the fronds.
"Champagne, first," she whispered huskily into his ear.
His heart sank. He had very little money left. Well, it might buy a cheap brand....
She sipped
her champagne slowly and provocatively across the table from him. Her eyes sparkled behind the almond slits of her mask, caught the color changes and cast them back. She was wearing contact lenses of a garish green.
He wished she would hurry with her drink. He had horrible visions of his wife at home taking off her telovis and coming to his chair. He would then have to press the switch that would jerk his shadowy self back along its invisible connecting cord, jerk him back and leave but a small mound of clothes upon the chair at the table.
Deep depression laid hold of him. He would not be able to see her after tonight until he received his monthly dole two weeks hence. She wouldn't wait that long. Someone else would have her.
Unless ...
Yes, he knew now that he was going to kill his wife as soon as the opportunity presented itself. It would be a simple matter. With the aid of the telporter suit, he could establish an iron-clad alibi.
He took a long drink of whiskey and looked at the dancers about him. Sight of their gay costumes heightened his depression. He was wearing a cheap suit of satin, all he could afford. But some day soon he would show them! Some time soon he would be dressed as gaily....
"Something troubling you, honey?"
His gaze shot back to her and she blurred slightly before his eyes.
"No. Nothing at all!" He summoned a sickly smile and clutched her hand in his. "Come on. Let's dance."
He drew her from the chair and into his arms. She melted toward him as if desiring to become a part of him. A tremor of excitement surged through him and threatened to turn his knees into quivering jelly. He could not make his feet conform to the flooding rhythm of the music. He half stumbled, half pushed her along past the booths.
In the shelter of the palms he drew her savagely to him. "Let's—let's go outside." His voice was little more than a croak.
"But, honey!" She pushed herself away, her low voice maddening him. "Don't you have a private room? A girl doesn't like to be taken outside...."
Her words bit into his brain like the blade of a hot knife.
No, he didn't have a private room at the club like the others. A private room for his telporter receiver, a private room where he could take a willing guest. No! He couldn't afford it! No! No! NO! His lot was a cheap suit of satin! Cheap whiskey! Cheap champagne! A cheap shack by the river....
An inarticulate cry escaped his twisted lips. He clutched her roughly to him and dragged her through the door and into the moonlight, whiskey and anger lending him brutal strength.
He pulled her through the deserted garden. All the others had private rooms! He pulled her to the far end, behind a clump of squatty firs. His hands clawed at her. He tried to smother her mouth with kisses.
She eluded him deftly. "But, honey !" Her voice had gone deeper into her throat. "I just want to be sure about things. If you can't afford one of the private rooms—if you can't afford to show me a good time—if you can't come here real often ..."
The whiskey pounded and throbbed at his brain like blows from an unseen club. His ego curled and twisted within him like a headless serpent.
"I'll have money!" he shouted, struggling to hold her. "I'll have plenty of money! After tonight!"
"Then we'll wait," she said.
"We'll wait until tomorrow night."
"No!" he screamed. "You don't believe me! You're like the others! You think I'm no good! But I'll show you! I'll show all of you!"
She had gone
coldly rigid in his arms, unyielding.
Madness added to the pounding in his brain. Tears welled into his eyes.
"I'll show you! I'll kill her! Then I'll have money!" The hands clutching her shoulders shook her drunkenly. "You wait here! I'll go home and kill her now! Then I'll be back!"
"Silly boy!" Her low laughter rang hollowly in his ears. "And just who is it you are going to kill?"
"My wife!" he cried. "My wife! I'll ..."
A sudden sobering thought struck him. He was talking too much. And he wasn't making sense. He shouldn't be telling her this. Anyway, he couldn't get the money tonight even if he did kill his wife.
"And so you are going to kill your wife...."
He blinked the tears from his eyes. His chest was heaving, his heart pounding. He looked at her shimmering form. "Y-yes," he whispered.
Her eyes glinted strangely in the light of the moon. Her handbag glinted as she opened it, and something she took from it glittered coldly in her hand.
"Fool!"
The first shot tore squarely through his heart. And while he stood staring at her, mouth agape, a second shot burned its way through his bewildered brain.
Mrs. Herbert Hyrel
removed the telovis from her head and laid it carefully aside. She uncoiled her long legs from beneath her, walked to her husband's chair, and stood for a long moment looking down at him, her lips drawn back in contempt. Then she bent over him and reached down his thigh until her fingers contacted the small switch.
Seconds later, a slight tremor shook Hyrel's body. His eyes snapped open, air escaped his lungs, his lower jaw sagged inanely, and his head lolled to one side.
She stood a moment longer, watching his eyes become glazed and sightless. Then she walked to the telephone.
"Police?" she said. "This is Mrs. Herbert Hyrel. Something horrible has happened to my husband. Please come over immediately. Bring a doctor."
She hung up, went to her bathroom, stripped off her clothing, and slid carefully out of her telporter suit. This she folded neatly and tucked away into the false back of the medicine cabinet. She found a fresh pair of blue, plastifur pajamas and got into them.
She was just arriving back into the living room, tying the cord of her dressing gown about her slim waist, when she heard the sound of the police siren out front.
THE END
Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from If Worlds of Science Fiction July 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.
Question:
Who is Herbert's wife and what is her role in the story?
Answer:
|
[
"Herbert's wife controls the financial affairs in their household. She is a fan of her telovis set, her preferred medium for escapist entertainment, and Herbert is under the impression that she likes to watch sex-operas, which are a longer experience that rely on emotional build-up. She makes most of the money but also controls it all, which Herbert resents her for--he thinks she is keeping it from him, and feels looked down upon when she gives him his allowance. This infantilizing attitude makes him extremely angry. She is devious and cunning, and hatches a plan to catch him in his act. It is her, after all, that drove him to want to escape. Either to confirm suspicions of a murder plot or to disrupt his own escapist time, she has her own teleporter suit that she uses to position herself to seduce her husband in the one place he figured he would be free from her. She dresses up covered in jewels and insists that he spend money on her to pressure him to admitting that he has none, which eventually pushes him to admit his plan. She kills him once she hears this, and calmly puts everything back in order as she reports something being wrong with her husband to the police, clearly not upset that her husband is dead. ",
"Mrs. Herbert Hyrel is the daughter of a wealthy family. Although she and Herbert most likely originally married for love, their relationship quickly spiraled out of control and soon their disparity in wealth became a pressing issue. \nMrs. Hyrel withdrew herself from her husband once she felt that he was only with her for her money. She allotted him a monthly allowance, but that was all. Since Herbert was not the breadwinner, he felt emasculated and out of control in his own home. She is the instigator for his violent fantasies of killing her, and the woman that draws him back to Riverside Club. \nHer jewel-studded flapper dress that reveals her legs reveals her wealth and status at the Riverside Club. She wears green contacts and a platinum wig to further disguise herself from Herbert. Despite being married, he fails to recognize her, and, after tempting him and berating him, he reveals to her his plans to murder his wife. She then murders him in the shadow realm, killing his soul there but leaving his corporeal body intact in the real world. After traveling back to their home, Mrs. Herbert Hyrel supposedly gets away with the murder by pretending to be the doting wife concerned for her husband’s health. She also has a rock-solid alibi with the televois and the fact that Hyrel was in an illegal teleporter suit. \n",
"Mrs. Herbert Hyrel is a strong, financially independent woman loathed by her husband because he feels she considers him less of a man because of his reliance upon her. At the beginning of the story, she wears a telovis--a device used to render 3-D images of remote performances in one's own living room. Herbert suspects she is using the device to watch a sex-opera, and that explains the slight smile on her face as he watches her. In reality, she is likely smiling because she is confident in her plan to catch Herbert at the Riverside Club and kill him there. Mrs. Hyrel provides Herbert a small allowance, which he saves up to purchase his own telporter suit, not knowing that she also has one. Mrs. Hyrel uses Herbert's tendency toward fantasy as an advantage in her plot against him. She takes on the persona of the mysterious woman, wearing a white mask, green contact lenses, and a platinum blonde wig. She seduces Herbert, and eventually kills him when he admits his plot to her. She knows she will get away with his murder because once his shadowy self transfers back into his body, there will be no visible wounds.",
"Herbert’s wife is the can-can girl that he met at the Riverside Club the night before, but he doesn’t recognize her. She detests Herbert and resents having to give him some of her money. She acts as if he tricked her into marrying him and now treats him like an irresponsible child. Every night, she escapes from him when she puts on her telovis and watches shows for three hours. The night in the story, we learn that she actually teleports to the Riverside Club, too. At the club the night before, she met Herbert and flirted with him so much that he couldn’t wait to see her again. When he goes to the club the night that the story takes place, he looks for her, finally finds her, and pulls her out of a booth to him. She wears a can-can dancer outfit that highlights her long legs. Herbert tries to take her outside immediately, but she insists on having champagne first. She drinks her champagne slowly while Herbert is anxious that he might have to teleport back. Herbert decides that he will go ahead and kill his wife, as he has been thinking about doing for quite some time. They dance, and then Herbert tries to pull her outside. Mrs. Hyrel asks if he doesn’t have a private room he can take her to. Frustrated, he drags her outside, but she pushes away from him and says she needs to know he can afford a private room, show her a good time, and come there often to see her. When he says he’ll have money after tomorrow night, she insists they will wait until then. Angry and desperate, Herbert vows he will kill his wife, and then he will have money. Mrs. Hyrel laughs and asks who he will kill, and he repeats it even though he realizes he shouldn’t. She removes a gun from her purse and shoots him in the heart and the head. She teleports back home, presses his teleporter button, and after he dies, she calls the police saying that something horrible has happened to her husband. Before the police arrive, she changes out of her teleporter suit and hides it behind a hidden back in the medicine cabinet.\n"
] |
30004
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A grim tale of a future in which everyone is desperate to escape reality, and a hero who wants to have his wine and drink it, too.
A BOTTLE OF
Old Wine
By Richard O. Lewis
Illustrated by KELLY FREAS
Herbert Hyrel
settled himself more comfortably in his easy chair, extended his short legs further toward the fireplace, and let his eyes travel cautiously in the general direction of his wife.
She was in her chair as usual, her long legs curled up beneath her, the upper half of her face hidden in the bulk of her personalized, three-dimensional telovis. The telovis, of a stereoscopic nature, seemingly brought the performers with all their tinsel and color directly into the room of the watcher.
Hyrel had no way of seeing into the plastic affair she wore, but he guessed from the expression on the lower half of her face that she was watching one of the newer black-market sex-operas. In any event, there would be no sound, movement, or sign of life from her for the next three hours. To break the thread of the play for even a moment would ruin all the previous emotional build-up.
There had been a time when he hated her for those long and silent evenings, lonely hours during which he was completely ignored. It was different now, however, for those hours furnished him with time for an escape of his own.
His lips curled into a tight smile and his right hand fondled the unobtrusive switch beneath his trouser leg. He did not press the switch. He would wait a few minutes longer. But it was comforting to know that it was there, exhilarating to know that he could escape for a few hours by a mere flick of his finger.
He let his eyes stray to the dim light of the artificial flames in the fireplace. His hate for her was not bounded merely by those lonely hours she had forced upon him. No, it was far more encompassing.
He hated her with a deep, burning savagery that was deadly in its passion. He hated her for her money, the money she kept securely from him. He hated her for the paltry allowance she doled out to him, as if he were an irresponsible child. It was as if she were constantly reminding him in every glance and gesture, "I made a bad bargain when I married you. You wanted me, my money, everything, and had nothing to give in return except your own doltish self. You set a trap for me, baited with lies and a false front. Now you are caught in your own trap and will remain there like a mouse to eat from my hand whatever crumbs I stoop to give you."
But some day his hate would be appeased. Yes, some day soon he would kill her!
He shot a sideways glance at her, wondering if by chance she suspected.... She hadn't moved. Her lips were pouted into a half smile; the sex-opera had probably reached one of its more pleasurable moments.
Hyrel let his eyes shift back to the fireplace again. Yes, he would kill her. Then he would claim a rightful share of her money, be rid of her debasing dominance.
He let the
thought run around through his head, savoring it with mental taste buds. He would not kill her tonight. No, nor the next night. He would wait, wait until he had sucked the last measure of pleasure from the thought.
It was like having a bottle of rare old wine on a shelf where it could be viewed daily. It was like being able to pause again and again before the bottle, hold it up to the light, and say to it, "Some day, when my desire for you has reached the ultimate, I shall unstopper you quietly and sip you slowly to the last soul-satisfying drop." As long as the bottle remained there upon the shelf it was symbolic of that pleasurable moment....
He snapped out of his reverie and realized he had been wasting precious moments. There would be time enough tomorrow for gloating. Tonight, there were other things to do. Pleasurable things. He remembered the girl he had met the night before, and smiled smugly. Perhaps she would be awaiting him even now. If not, there would be another one....
He settled himself deeper into the chair, glanced once more at his wife, then let his head lean comfortably back against the chair's headrest. His hand upon his thigh felt the thin mesh that cloaked his body beneath his clothing like a sheer stocking. His fingers went again to the tiny switch. Again he hesitated.
Herbert Hyrel knew no more about the telporter suit he wore than he did about the radio in the corner, the TV set against the wall, or the personalized telovis his wife was wearing. You pressed one of the buttons on the radio; music came out. You pressed a button and clicked a dial on the TV; music and pictures came out. You pressed a button and made an adjustment on the telovis; three-dimensional, emotion-colored pictures leaped into the room. You pressed a tiny switch on the telporter suit; you were whisked away to a receiving set you had previously set up in secret.
He knew that the music and the images of the performers on the TV and telovis were brought to his room by some form of electrical impulse or wave while the actual musicians and performers remained in the studio. He knew that when he pressed the switch on his thigh something within him—his ectoplasm, higher self, the thing spirits use for materialization, whatever its real name—streamed out of him along an invisible channel, leaving his body behind in the chair in a conscious but dream-like state. His other self materialized in a small cabin in a hidden nook between a highway and a river where he had installed the receiving set a month ago.
He thought once more of the girl who might be waiting for him, smiled, and pressed the switch.
The dank air
of the cabin was chill to Herbert Hyrel's naked flesh. He fumbled through the darkness for the clothing he kept there, found his shorts and trousers, got hurriedly into them, then flicked on a pocket lighter and ignited a stub of candle upon the table. By the wavering light, he finished dressing in the black satin clothing, the white shirt, the flowing necktie and tam. He invoiced the contents of his billfold. Not much. And his monthly pittance was still two weeks away....
He had skimped for six months to salvage enough money from his allowance to make a down payment on the telporter suit. Since then, his expenses—monthly payments for the suit, cabin rent, costly liquor—had forced him to place his nights of escape on strict ration. He could not go on this way, he realized. Not now. Not since he had met the girl. He had to have more money. Perhaps he could not afford the luxury of leaving the wine bottle longer upon the shelf....
Riverside Club, where Hyrel arrived by bus and a hundred yards of walking, was exclusive. It catered to a clientele that had but three things in common: money, a desire for utter self-abandonment, and a sales slip indicating ownership of a telporter suit. The club was of necessity expensive, for self-telportation was strictly illegal, and police protection came high.
Herbert Hyrel adjusted his white, silken mask carefully at the door and shoved his sales slip through a small aperture where it was thoroughly scanned by unseen eyes. A buzzer sounded an instant later, the lock on the door clicked, and Hyrel pushed through into the exhilarating warmth of music and laughter.
The main room was large. Hidden lights along the walls sent slow beams of red, blue, vermillion, green, yellow and pink trailing across the domed ceiling in a heterogeneous pattern. The colored beams mingled, diffused, spread, were caught up by mirrors of various tints which diffused and mingled the lights once more until the whole effect was an ever-changing panorama of softly-melting shades.
The gay and bizarre costumes of the masked revelers on the dance floor and at the tables, unearthly in themselves, were made even more so by the altering light. Music flooded the room from unseen sources. Laughter—hysterical, drunken, filled with utter abandonment—came from the dance floor, the tables, and the private booths and rooms hidden cleverly within the walls.
Hyrel pushed himself to an unoccupied table, sat down and ordered a bottle of cheap whiskey. He would have preferred champagne, but his depleted finances forbade the more discriminate taste.
When his order arrived, he poured a glass tumbler half full and consumed it eagerly while his eyes scanned the room in search of the girl. He couldn't see her in the dim swirl of color. Had she arrived? Perhaps she was wearing a different costume than she had the night before. If so, recognition might prove difficult.
He poured himself another drink, promising himself he would go in search of her when the liquor began to take effect.
A woman clad in the revealing garb of a Persian dancer threw an arm about him from behind and kissed him on the cheek through the veil which covered the lower part of her face.
"Hi, honey," she giggled into his ear. "Havin' a time?"
He reached for the white arm to pull her to him, but she eluded his grasp and reeled away into the waiting arms of a tall toreador. Hyrel gulped his whiskey and watched her nestle into the arms of her partner and begin with him a sinuous, suggestive dance. The whiskey had begun its warming effect, and he laughed.
This was the land of the lotus eaters, the sanctuary of the escapists, the haven of all who wished to cast off their shell of inhibition and become the thing they dreamed themselves to be. Here one could be among his own kind, an actor upon a gay stage, a gaudy butterfly metamorphosed from the slug, a knight of old.
The Persian dancing girl was probably the wife of a boorish oaf whose idea of romance was spending an evening telling his wife how he came to be a successful bank president. But she had found her means of escape. Perhaps she had pleaded a sick headache and had retired to her room. And there upon the bed now reposed her shell of reality while her inner self, the shadowy one, completely materialized, became an exotic thing from the East in this never-never land.
The man, the toreador, had probably closeted himself within his library with a set of account books and had left strict orders not to be disturbed until he had finished with them.
Both would have terrific hangovers in the morning. But that, of course, would be fully compensated for by the memories of the evening.
Hyrel chuckled. The situation struck him as being funny: the shadowy self got drunk and had a good time, and the outer husk suffered the hangover in the morning. Strange. Strange how a device such as the telporter suit could cause the shadow of each bodily cell to leave the body, materialize, and become a reality in its own right. And yet ...
He looked
at the heel of his left hand. There was a long, irregular scar there. It was the result of a cut he had received nearly three weeks ago when he had fallen over this very table and had rammed his hand into a sliver of broken champagne glass. Later that evening, upon re-telporting back home, the pain of the cut had remained in his hand, but there was no sign of the cut itself on the hand of his outer self. The scar was peculiar to the shadowy body only. There was something about the shadowy body that carried the hurts to the outer body, but not the scars....
Sudden laughter broke out near him, and he turned quickly in that direction. A group of gaily costumed revelers was standing in a semi-circle about a small mound of clothing upon the floor. It was the costume of the toreador.
Hyrel laughed, too. It had happened many times before—a costume suddenly left empty as its owner, due to a threat of discovery at home, had had to press the switch in haste to bring his shadowy self—and complete consciousness—back to his outer self in a hurry.
A waiter picked up the clothing. He would put it safely away so that the owner could claim it upon his next visit to the club. Another waiter placed a fresh bottle of whiskey on the table before Hyrel, and Hyrel paid him for it.
The whiskey, reaching his head now in surges of warm cheerfulness, was filling him with abandonment, courage, and a desire for merriment. He pushed himself up from the table, joined the merry throng, threw his arm about the Persian dancer, drew her close.
They began dancing slowly to the throbbing rhythm, dancing and holding on to each other tightly. Hyrel could feel her hot breath through her veil upon his neck, adding to the headiness of the liquor. His feeling of depression and inferiority flowed suddenly from him. Once again he was the all-conquering male.
His arm trembled as it drew her still closer to him and he began dancing directly and purposefully toward the shadows of a clump of artificial palms near one corner of the room. There was an exit to the garden behind the palms.
Half way there they passed a secluded booth from which protruded a long leg clad in black mesh stocking. Hyrel paused as he recognized that part of the costume. It was she! The girl! The one he had met so briefly the night before!
His arm slid away from the Persian dancer, took hold of the mesh-clad leg, and pulled. A female form followed the leg from the booth and fell into his arms. He held her tightly, kissed her white neck, let her perfume send his thoughts reeling.
"Been looking for me, honey?" she whispered, her voice deep and throaty.
"You know it!"
He began whisking her away toward the palms. The Persian girl was pulled into the booth.
Yes, she was wearing the same costume she had worn the night before, that of a can-can dancer of the 90's. The mesh hose that encased her shapely legs were held up by flowered supporters in such a manner as to leave four inches of white leg exposed between hose top and lacy panties. Her skirt, frilled to suggest innumerable petticoats, fell away at each hip, leaving the front open to expose the full length of legs. She wore a wig of platinum hair encrusted with jewels that sparkled in the lights. Her jewel-studded mask was as white as her hair and covered the upper half of her face, except for the large almond slits for her eyes. A white purse, jewel crusted, dangled from one arm.
He stopped once before reaching the palms, drew her closer, kissed her long and ardently. Then he began pulling her on again.
She drew back when they reached the shelter of the fronds.
"Champagne, first," she whispered huskily into his ear.
His heart sank. He had very little money left. Well, it might buy a cheap brand....
She sipped
her champagne slowly and provocatively across the table from him. Her eyes sparkled behind the almond slits of her mask, caught the color changes and cast them back. She was wearing contact lenses of a garish green.
He wished she would hurry with her drink. He had horrible visions of his wife at home taking off her telovis and coming to his chair. He would then have to press the switch that would jerk his shadowy self back along its invisible connecting cord, jerk him back and leave but a small mound of clothes upon the chair at the table.
Deep depression laid hold of him. He would not be able to see her after tonight until he received his monthly dole two weeks hence. She wouldn't wait that long. Someone else would have her.
Unless ...
Yes, he knew now that he was going to kill his wife as soon as the opportunity presented itself. It would be a simple matter. With the aid of the telporter suit, he could establish an iron-clad alibi.
He took a long drink of whiskey and looked at the dancers about him. Sight of their gay costumes heightened his depression. He was wearing a cheap suit of satin, all he could afford. But some day soon he would show them! Some time soon he would be dressed as gaily....
"Something troubling you, honey?"
His gaze shot back to her and she blurred slightly before his eyes.
"No. Nothing at all!" He summoned a sickly smile and clutched her hand in his. "Come on. Let's dance."
He drew her from the chair and into his arms. She melted toward him as if desiring to become a part of him. A tremor of excitement surged through him and threatened to turn his knees into quivering jelly. He could not make his feet conform to the flooding rhythm of the music. He half stumbled, half pushed her along past the booths.
In the shelter of the palms he drew her savagely to him. "Let's—let's go outside." His voice was little more than a croak.
"But, honey!" She pushed herself away, her low voice maddening him. "Don't you have a private room? A girl doesn't like to be taken outside...."
Her words bit into his brain like the blade of a hot knife.
No, he didn't have a private room at the club like the others. A private room for his telporter receiver, a private room where he could take a willing guest. No! He couldn't afford it! No! No! NO! His lot was a cheap suit of satin! Cheap whiskey! Cheap champagne! A cheap shack by the river....
An inarticulate cry escaped his twisted lips. He clutched her roughly to him and dragged her through the door and into the moonlight, whiskey and anger lending him brutal strength.
He pulled her through the deserted garden. All the others had private rooms! He pulled her to the far end, behind a clump of squatty firs. His hands clawed at her. He tried to smother her mouth with kisses.
She eluded him deftly. "But, honey !" Her voice had gone deeper into her throat. "I just want to be sure about things. If you can't afford one of the private rooms—if you can't afford to show me a good time—if you can't come here real often ..."
The whiskey pounded and throbbed at his brain like blows from an unseen club. His ego curled and twisted within him like a headless serpent.
"I'll have money!" he shouted, struggling to hold her. "I'll have plenty of money! After tonight!"
"Then we'll wait," she said.
"We'll wait until tomorrow night."
"No!" he screamed. "You don't believe me! You're like the others! You think I'm no good! But I'll show you! I'll show all of you!"
She had gone
coldly rigid in his arms, unyielding.
Madness added to the pounding in his brain. Tears welled into his eyes.
"I'll show you! I'll kill her! Then I'll have money!" The hands clutching her shoulders shook her drunkenly. "You wait here! I'll go home and kill her now! Then I'll be back!"
"Silly boy!" Her low laughter rang hollowly in his ears. "And just who is it you are going to kill?"
"My wife!" he cried. "My wife! I'll ..."
A sudden sobering thought struck him. He was talking too much. And he wasn't making sense. He shouldn't be telling her this. Anyway, he couldn't get the money tonight even if he did kill his wife.
"And so you are going to kill your wife...."
He blinked the tears from his eyes. His chest was heaving, his heart pounding. He looked at her shimmering form. "Y-yes," he whispered.
Her eyes glinted strangely in the light of the moon. Her handbag glinted as she opened it, and something she took from it glittered coldly in her hand.
"Fool!"
The first shot tore squarely through his heart. And while he stood staring at her, mouth agape, a second shot burned its way through his bewildered brain.
Mrs. Herbert Hyrel
removed the telovis from her head and laid it carefully aside. She uncoiled her long legs from beneath her, walked to her husband's chair, and stood for a long moment looking down at him, her lips drawn back in contempt. Then she bent over him and reached down his thigh until her fingers contacted the small switch.
Seconds later, a slight tremor shook Hyrel's body. His eyes snapped open, air escaped his lungs, his lower jaw sagged inanely, and his head lolled to one side.
She stood a moment longer, watching his eyes become glazed and sightless. Then she walked to the telephone.
"Police?" she said. "This is Mrs. Herbert Hyrel. Something horrible has happened to my husband. Please come over immediately. Bring a doctor."
She hung up, went to her bathroom, stripped off her clothing, and slid carefully out of her telporter suit. This she folded neatly and tucked away into the false back of the medicine cabinet. She found a fresh pair of blue, plastifur pajamas and got into them.
She was just arriving back into the living room, tying the cord of her dressing gown about her slim waist, when she heard the sound of the police siren out front.
THE END
Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from If Worlds of Science Fiction July 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.
|
How does Maizie work, and how is this significant to the story?
|
After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about Appointment In Tomorrow by Fritz Leiber.
Relevant chunks:
Appointment in Tomorrow
BY FRITZ LEIBER
Illustrated by ED ALEXANDER
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction July 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Is it possible to have a world without moral values? Or does lack of morality become a moral value, also?
The first angry rays of the sun—which, startlingly enough, still rose in the east at 24 hour intervals—pierced the lacy tops of Atlantic combers and touched thousands of sleeping Americans with unconscious fear, because of their unpleasant similarity to the rays from World War III's atomic bombs.
They turned to blood the witch-circle of rusty steel skeletons around Inferno in Manhattan. Without comment, they pointed a cosmic finger at the tarnished brass plaque commemorating the martyrdom of the Three Physicists after the dropping of the Hell Bomb. They tenderly touched the rosy skin and strawberry bruises on the naked shoulders of a girl sleeping off a drunk on the furry and radiantly heated floor of a nearby roof garden. They struck green magic from the glassy blot that was Old Washington. Twelve hours before, they had revealed things as eerily beautiful, and as ravaged, in Asia and Russia. They pinked the white walls of the Colonial dwelling of Morton Opperly near the Institute for Advanced Studies; upstairs they slanted impartially across the Pharoahlike and open-eyed face of the elderly physicist and the ugly, sleep-surly one of young Willard Farquar in the next room. And in nearby New Washington they made of the spire of the Thinkers' Foundation a blue and optimistic glory that outshone White House, Jr.
It was America approaching the end of the Twentieth Century. America of juke-box burlesque and your local radiation hospital. America of the mask-fad for women and Mystic Christianity. America of the off-the-bosom dress and the New Blue Laws. America of the Endless War and the loyalty detector. America of marvelous Maizie and the monthly rocket to Mars. America of the Thinkers and (a few remembered) the Institute. "Knock on titanium," "Whadya do for black-outs," "Please, lover, don't think when I'm around," America, as combat-shocked and crippled as the rest of the bomb-shattered planet.
Not one impudent photon of the sunlight penetrated the triple-paned, polarizing windows of Jorj Helmuth's bedroom in the Thinker's Foundation, yet the clock in his brain awakened him to the minute, or almost. Switching off the Educational Sandman in the midst of the phrase, "... applying tensor calculus to the nucleus," he took a deep, even breath and cast his mind to the limits of the world and his knowledge. It was a somewhat shadowy vision, but, he noted with impartial approval, definitely less shadowy than yesterday morning.
Employing a rapid mental scanning technique, he next cleared his memory chains of false associations, including those acquired while asleep. These chores completed, he held his finger on a bedside button, which rotated the polarizing window panes until the room slowly filled with a muted daylight. Then, still flat on his back, he turned his head until he could look at the remarkably beautiful blonde girl asleep beside him.
Remembering last night, he felt a pang of exasperation, which he instantly quelled by taking his mind to a higher and dispassionate level from which he could look down on the girl and even himself as quaint, clumsy animals. Still, he grumbled silently, Caddy might have had enough consideration to clear out before he awoke. He wondered if he shouldn't have used his hypnotic control of the girl to smooth their relationship last night, and for a moment the word that would send her into deep trance trembled on the tip of his tongue. But no, that special power of his over her was reserved for far more important purposes.
Pumping dynamic tension into his 20-year-old muscles and confidence into his 60-year-old mind, the 40-year-old Thinker rose from bed. No covers had to be thrown off; the nuclear heating unit made them unnecessary. He stepped into his clothing—the severe tunic, tights and sockassins of the modern business man. Next he glanced at the message tape beside his phone, washed down with ginger ale a vita-amino-enzyme tablet, and walked to the window. There, gazing along the rows of newly planted mutant oaks lining Decontamination Avenue, his smooth face broke into a smile.
It had come to him, the next big move in the intricate game making up his life—and mankind's. Come to him during sleep, as so many of his best decisions did, because he regularly employed the time-saving technique of somno-thought, which could function at the same time as somno-learning.
He set his who?-where? robot for "Rocket Physicist" and "Genius Class." While it worked, he dictated to his steno-robot the following brief message:
Dear Fellow Scientist:
A project is contemplated that will have a crucial bearing on man's future in deep space. Ample non-military Government funds are available. There was a time when professional men scoffed at the Thinkers. Then there was a time when the Thinkers perforce neglected the professional men. Now both times are past. May they never return! I would like to consult you this afternoon, three o'clock sharp, Thinkers' Foundation I.
Jorj Helmuth
Meanwhile the who?-where? had tossed out a dozen cards. He glanced through them, hesitated at the name "Willard Farquar," looked at the sleeping girl, then quickly tossed them all into the addresso-robot and plugged in the steno-robot.
The buzz-light blinked green and he switched the phone to audio.
"The President is waiting to see Maizie, sir," a clear feminine voice announced. "He has the general staff with him."
"Martian peace to him," Jorj Helmuth said. "Tell him I'll be down in a few minutes."
Huge as a primitive nuclear reactor, the great electronic brain loomed above the knot of hush-voiced men. It almost filled a two-story room in the Thinkers' Foundation. Its front was an orderly expanse of controls, indicators, telltales, and terminals, the upper ones reached by a chair on a boom.
Although, as far as anyone knew, it could sense only the information and questions fed into it on a tape, the human visitors could not resist the impulse to talk in whispers and glance uneasily at the great cryptic cube. After all, it had lately taken to moving some of its own controls—the permissible ones—and could doubtless improvise a hearing apparatus if it wanted to.
For this was the thinking machine beside which the Marks and Eniacs and Maniacs and Maddidas and Minervas and Mimirs were less than Morons. This was the machine with a million times as many synapses as the human brain, the machine that remembered by cutting delicate notches in the rims of molecules (instead of kindergarten paper-punching or the Coney Island shimmying of columns of mercury). This was the machine that had given instructions on building the last three-quarters of itself. This was the goal, perhaps, toward which fallible human reasoning and biased human judgment and feeble human ambition had evolved.
This was the machine that really thought—a million-plus!
This was the machine that the timid cyberneticists and stuffy professional scientists had said could not be built. Yet this was the machine that the Thinkers, with characteristic Yankee push, had built. And nicknamed, with characteristic Yankee irreverence and girl-fondness, "Maizie."
Gazing up at it, the President of the United States felt a chord plucked within him that hadn't been sounded for decades, the dark and shivery organ chord of his Baptist childhood. Here, in a strange sense, although his reason rejected it, he felt he stood face to face with the living God: infinitely stern with the sternness of reality, yet infinitely just. No tiniest error or wilful misstep could ever escape the scrutiny of this vast mentality. He shivered.
The grizzled general—there was also one who was gray—was thinking that this was a very odd link in the chain of command. Some shadowy and usually well-controlled memories from World War II faintly stirred his ire. Here he was giving orders to a being immeasurably more intelligent than himself. And always orders of the "Tell me how to kill that man" rather than the "Kill that man" sort. The distinction bothered him obscurely. It relieved him to know that Maizie had built-in controls which made her always the servant of humanity, or of humanity's right-minded leaders—even the Thinkers weren't certain which.
The gray general was thinking uneasily, and, like the President, at a more turbid level, of the resemblance between Papal infallibility and the dictates of the machine. Suddenly his bony wrists began to tremble. He asked himself: Was this the Second Coming? Mightn't an incarnation be in metal rather than flesh?
The austere Secretary of State was remembering what he'd taken such pains to make everyone forget: his youthful flirtation at Lake Success with Buddhism. Sitting before his guru , his teacher, feeling the Occidental's awe at the wisdom of the East, or its pretense, he had felt a little like this.
The burly Secretary of Space, who had come up through United Rockets, was thanking his stars that at any rate the professional scientists weren't responsible for this job. Like the grizzled general, he'd always felt suspicious of men who kept telling you how to do things, rather than doing them themselves. In World War III he'd had his fill of the professional physicists, with their eternal taint of a misty sort of radicalism and free-thinking. The Thinkers were better—more disciplined, more human. They'd called their brain-machine Maizie, which helped take the curse off her. Somewhat.
The President's Secretary, a paunchy veteran of party caucuses, was also glad that it was the Thinkers who had created the machine, though he trembled at the power that it gave them over the Administration. Still, you could do business with the Thinkers. And nobody (not even the Thinkers) could do business (that sort of business) with Maizie!
Before that great square face with its thousands of tiny metal features, only Jorj Helmuth seemed at ease, busily entering on the tape the complex Questions of the Day that the high officials had handed him: logistics for the Endless War in Pakistan, optimum size for next year's sugar-corn crop, current thought trends in average Soviet minds—profound questions, yet many of them phrased with surprising simplicity. For figures, technical jargon, and layman's language were alike to Maizie; there was no need to translate into mathematical shorthand, as with the lesser brain-machines.
The click of the taper went on until the Secretary of State had twice nervously fired a cigaret with his ultrasonic lighter and twice quickly put it away. No one spoke.
Jorj looked up at the Secretary of Space. "Section Five, Question Four—whom would that come from?"
The burly man frowned. "That would be the physics boys, Opperly's group. Is anything wrong?"
Jorj did not answer. A bit later he quit taping and began to adjust controls, going up on the boom-chair to reach some of them. Eventually he came down and touched a few more, then stood waiting.
From the great cube came a profound, steady purring. Involuntarily the six officials backed off a bit. Somehow it was impossible for a man to get used to the sound of Maizie starting to think.
Jorj turned, smiling. "And now, gentlemen, while we wait for Maizie to celebrate, there should be just enough time for us to watch the takeoff of the Mars rocket." He switched on a giant television screen. The others made a quarter turn, and there before them glowed the rich ochres and blues of a New Mexico sunrise and, in the middle distance, a silvery mighty spindle.
Like the generals, the Secretary of Space suppressed a scowl. Here was something that ought to be spang in the center of his official territory, and the Thinkers had locked him completely out of it. That rocket there—just an ordinary Earth satellite vehicle commandeered from the Army, but equipped by the Thinkers with Maizie-designed nuclear motors capable of the Mars journey and more. The first spaceship—and the Secretary of Space was not in on it!
Still, he told himself, Maizie had decreed it that way. And when he remembered what the Thinkers had done for him in rescuing him from breakdown with their mental science, in rescuing the whole Administration from collapse he realized he had to be satisfied. And that was without taking into consideration the amazing additional mental discoveries that the Thinkers were bringing down from Mars.
"Lord," the President said to Jorj as if voicing the Secretary's feeling, "I wish you people could bring a couple of those wise little devils back with you this trip. Be a good thing for the country."
Jorj looked at him a bit coldly. "It's quite unthinkable," he said.
"The telepathic abilities of the Martians make them extremely sensitive. The conflicts of ordinary Earth minds would impinge on them psychotically, even fatally. As you know, the Thinkers were able to contact them only because of our degree of learned mental poise and errorless memory-chains. So for the present it must be our task alone to glean from the Martians their astounding mental skills. Of course, some day in the future, when we have discovered how to armor the minds of the Martians—"
"Sure, I know," the President said hastily. "Shouldn't have mentioned it, Jorj."
Conversation ceased. They waited with growing tension for the great violet flames to bloom from the base of the silvery shaft.
Meanwhile the question tape, like a New Year's streamer tossed out a high window into the night, sped on its dark way along spinning rollers. Curling with an intricate aimlessness curiously like that of such a streamer, it tantalized the silvery fingers of a thousand relays, saucily evaded the glances of ten thousand electric eyes, impishly darted down a narrow black alleyway of memory banks, and, reaching the center of the cube, suddenly emerged into a small room where a suave fat man in shorts sat drinking beer.
He flipped the tape over to him with practiced finger, eyeing it as a stockbroker might have studied a ticker tape. He read the first question, closed his eyes and frowned for five seconds. Then with the staccato self-confidence of a hack writer, he began to tape out the answer.
For many minutes the only sounds were the rustle of the paper ribbon and the click of the taper, except for the seconds the fat man took to close his eyes, or to drink or pour beer. Once, too, he lifted a phone, asked a concise question, waited half a minute, listened to an answer, then went back to the grind.
Until he came to Section Five, Question Four. That time he did his thinking with his eyes open.
The question was: "Does Maizie stand for Maelzel?"
He sat for a while slowly scratching his thigh. His loose, persuasive lips tightened, without closing, into the shape of a snarl.
Suddenly he began to tape again.
"Maizie does not stand for Maelzel. Maizie stands for amazing, humorously given the form of a girl's name. Section Six, Answer One: The mid-term election viewcasts should be spaced as follows...."
But his lips didn't lose the shape of a snarl.
Five hundred miles above the ionosphere, the Mars rocket cut off its fuel and slumped gratefully into an orbit that would carry it effortlessly around the world at that altitude. The pilot unstrapped himself and stretched, but he didn't look out the viewport at the dried-mud disc that was Earth, cloaked in its haze of blue sky. He knew he had two maddening months ahead of him in which to do little more than that. Instead, he unstrapped Sappho.
Used to free fall from two previous experiences, and loving it, the fluffy little cat was soon bounding about the cabin in curves and gyrations that would have made her the envy of all back-alley and parlor felines on the planet below. A miracle cat in the dream world of free fall. For a long time she played with a string that the man would toss out lazily. Sometimes she caught the string on the fly, sometimes she swam for it frantically.
After a while the man grew bored with the game. He unlocked a drawer and began to study the details of the wisdom he would discover on Mars this trip—priceless spiritual insights that would be balm to war-battered mankind.
The cat carefully selected a spot three feet off the floor, curled up on the air, and went to sleep.
Jorj Helmuth snipped the emerging answer tape into sections and handed each to the appropriate man. Most of them carefully tucked theirs away with little more than a glance, but the Secretary of Space puzzled over his.
"Who the devil would Maelzel be?" he asked.
A remote look came into the eyes of the Secretary of State. "Edgar Allen Poe," he said frowningly, with eyes half-closed.
The grizzled general snapped his fingers. "Sure! Maelzel's Chess player. Read it when I was a kid. About an automaton that was supposed to play chess. Poe proved it hid a man inside it."
The Secretary of Space frowned. "Now what's the point in a fool question like that?"
"You said it came from Opperly's group?" Jorj asked sharply.
The Secretary of Space nodded. The others looked at the two men puzzledly.
"Who would that be?" Jorj pressed. "The group, I mean."
The Secretary of Space shrugged. "Oh, the usual little bunch over at the Institute. Hindeman, Gregory, Opperly himself. Oh, yes, and young Farquar."
"Sounds like Opperly's getting senile," Jorj commented coldly. "I'd investigate."
The Secretary of Space nodded. He suddenly looked tough. "I will. Right away."
Sunlight striking through French windows spotlighted a ballet of dust motes untroubled by air-conditioning. Morton Opperly's living room was well-kept but worn and quite behind the times. Instead of reading tapes there were books; instead of steno-robots, pen and ink; while in place of a four by six TV screen, a Picasso hung on the wall. Only Opperly knew that the painting was still faintly radioactive, that it had been riskily so when he'd smuggled it out of his bomb-singed apartment in New York City.
The two physicists fronted each other across a coffee table. The face of the elder was cadaverous, large-eyed, and tender—fined down by a long life of abstract thought. That of the younger was forceful, sensuous, bulky as his body, and exceptionally ugly. He looked rather like a bear.
Opperly was saying, "So when he asked who was responsible for the Maelzel question, I said I didn't remember." He smiled. "They still allow me my absent-mindedness, since it nourishes their contempt. Almost my sole remaining privilege." The smile faded. "Why do you keep on teasing the zoo animals, Willard?" he asked without rancor. "I've maintained many times that we shouldn't truckle to them by yielding to their demand that we ask Maizie questions. You and the rest have overruled me. But then to use those questions to convey veiled insults isn't reasonable. Apparently the Secretary of Space was bothered enough about this last one to pay me a 'copter call within twenty minutes of this morning's meeting at the Foundation. Why do you do it, Willard?"
The features of the other convulsed unpleasantly. "Because the Thinkers are charlatans who must be exposed," he rapped out. "We know their Maizie is no more than a tealeaf-reading fake. We've traced their Mars rockets and found they go nowhere. We know their Martian mental science is bunk."
"But we've already exposed the Thinkers very thoroughly," Opperly interposed quietly. "You know the good it did."
Farquar hunched his Japanese-wrestler shoulders. "Then it's got to be done until it takes."
Opperly studied the bowl of mutated flowers by the coffee pot. "I think you just want to tease the animals, for some personal reason of which you probably aren't aware."
Farquar scowled. "We're the ones in the cages."
Opperly continued his inspection of the flowers' bells. "All the more reason not to poke sticks through the bars at the lions and tigers strolling outside. No, Willard, I'm not counseling appeasement. But consider the age in which we live. It wants magicians." His voice grew especially tranquil. "A scientist tells people the truth. When times are good—that is, when the truth offers no threat—people don't mind. But when times are very, very bad...." A shadow darkened his eyes.
"Well, we all know what happened to—" And he mentioned three names that had been household words in the middle of the century. They were the names on the brass plaque dedicated to the martyred three physicists.
He went on, "A magician, on the other hand, tells people what they wish were true—that perpetual motion works, that cancer can be cured by colored lights, that a psychosis is no worse than a head cold, that they'll live forever. In good times magicians are laughed at. They're a luxury of the spoiled wealthy few. But in bad times people sell their souls for magic cures, and buy perpetual motion machines to power their war rockets."
Farquar clenched his fist. "All the more reason to keep chipping away at the Thinkers. Are we supposed to beg off from a job because it's difficult and dangerous?"
Opperly shook his head. "We're to keep clear of the infection of violence. In my day, Willard, I was one of the Frightened Men. Later I was one of the Angry Men and then one of the Minds of Despair. Now I'm convinced that all my reactions were futile."
"Exactly!" Farquar agreed harshly. "You reacted. You didn't act. If you men who discovered atomic energy had only formed a secret league, if you'd only had the foresight and the guts to use your tremendous bargaining position to demand the power to shape mankind's future...."
"By the time you were born, Willard," Opperly interrupted dreamily,
"Hitler was merely a name in the history books. We scientists weren't the stuff out of which cloak-and-dagger men are made. Can you imagine Oppenheimer wearing a mask or Einstein sneaking into the Old White House with a bomb in his briefcase?" He smiled. "Besides, that's not the way power is seized. New ideas aren't useful to the man bargaining for power—only established facts or lies are."
"Just the same, it would have been a good thing if you'd had a little violence in you."
"No," Opperly said.
"I've got violence in me," Farquar announced, shoving himself to his feet.
Opperly looked up from the flowers. "I think you have," he agreed.
"But what are we to do?" Farquar demanded. "Surrender the world to charlatans without a struggle?"
Opperly mused for a while. "I don't know what the world needs now. Everyone knows Newton as the great scientist. Few remember that he spent half his life muddling with alchemy, looking for the philosopher's stone. Which Newton did the world need then?"
"Now you are justifying the Thinkers!"
"No, I leave that to history."
"And history consists of the actions of men," Farquar concluded. "I intend to act. The Thinkers are vulnerable, their power fantastically precarious. What's it based on? A few lucky guesses. Faith-healing. Some science hocus-pocus, on the level of those juke-box burlesque acts between the strips. Dubious mental comfort given to a few nerve-torn neurotics in the Inner Cabinet—and their wives. The fact that the Thinkers' clever stage-managing won the President a doubtful election. The erroneous belief that the Soviets pulled out of Iraq and Iran because of the Thinkers' Mind Bomb threat. A brain-machine that's just a cover for Jan Tregarron's guesswork. Oh, yes, and that hogwash of
'Martian wisdom.' All of it mere bluff! A few pushes at the right times and points are all that are needed—and the Thinkers know it! I'll bet they're terrified already, and will be more so when they find that we're gunning for them. Eventually they'll be making overtures to us, turning to us for help. You wait and see."
"I am thinking again of Hitler," Opperly interposed quietly. "On his first half dozen big steps, he had nothing but bluff. His generals were against him. They knew they were in a cardboard fort. Yet he won every battle, until the last. Moreover," he pressed on, cutting Farquar short, "the power of the Thinkers isn't based on what they've got, but on what the world hasn't got—peace, honor, a good conscience...."
The front-door knocker clanked. Farquar answered it. A skinny old man with a radiation scar twisting across his temple handed him a tiny cylinder. "Radiogram for you, Willard." He grinned across the hall at Opperly. "When are you going to get a phone put in, Mr. Opperly?"
The physicist waved to him. "Next year, perhaps, Mr. Berry."
The old man snorted with good-humored incredulity and trudged off.
"What did I tell you about the Thinkers making overtures?" Farquar chortled suddenly. "It's come sooner than I expected. Look at this."
He held out the radiogram, but the older man didn't take it. Instead he asked, "Who's it from? Tregarron?"
"No, from Helmuth. There's a lot of sugar corn about man's future in deep space, but the real reason is clear. They know that they're going to have to produce an actual nuclear rocket pretty soon, and for that they'll need our help."
"An invitation?"
Farquar nodded. "For this afternoon." He noticed Opperly's anxious though distant frown. "What's the matter?" he asked. "Are you bothered about my going? Are you thinking it might be a trap—that after the Maelzel question they may figure I'm better rubbed out?"
The older man shook his head. "I'm not afraid for your life, Willard. That's yours to risk as you choose. No, I'm worried about other things they might do to you."
"What do you mean?" Farquar asked.
Opperly looked at him with a gentle appraisal. "You're a strong and vital man, Willard, with a strong man's prides and desires." His voice trailed off for a bit. Then, "Excuse me, Willard, but wasn't there a girl once? A Miss Arkady?"
Farquar's ungainly figure froze. He nodded curtly, face averted.
"And didn't she go off with a Thinker?"
"If girls find me ugly, that's their business," Farquar said harshly, still not looking at Opperly. "What's that got to do with this invitation?"
Opperly didn't answer the question. His eyes got more distant. Finally he said, "In my day we had it a lot easier. A scientist was an academician, cushioned by tradition."
Willard snorted. "Science had already entered the era of the police inspectors, with laboratory directors and political appointees stifling enterprise."
"Perhaps," Opperly agreed. "Still, the scientist lived the safe, restricted, highly respectable life of a university man. He wasn't exposed to the temptations of the world."
Farquar turned on him. "Are you implying that the Thinkers will somehow be able to buy me off?"
"Not exactly."
"You think I'll be persuaded to change my aims?" Farquar demanded angrily.
Opperly shrugged his helplessness. "No, I don't think you'll change your aims."
Clouds encroaching from the west blotted the parallelogram of sunlight between the two men.
As the slideway whisked him gently along the corridor toward his apartment, Jorj was thinking of his spaceship. For a moment the silver-winged vision crowded everything else out of his mind.
Just think, a spaceship with sails! He smiled a bit, marveling at the paradox.
Direct atomic power. Direct utilization of the force of the flying neutrons. No more ridiculous business of using a reactor to drive a steam engine, or boil off something for a jet exhaust—processes that were as primitive and wasteful as burning gunpowder to keep yourself warm.
Chemical jets would carry his spaceship above the atmosphere. Then would come the thrilling order, "Set sail for Mars!" The vast umbrella would unfold and open out around the stern, its rear or Earthward side a gleaming expanse of radioactive ribbon perhaps only an atom thick and backed with a material that would reflect neutrons. Atoms in the ribbon would split, blasting neutrons astern at fantastic velocities. Reaction would send the spaceship hurtling forward.
In airless space, the expanse of sails would naturally not retard the ship. More radioactive ribbon, manufactured as needed in the ship itself, would feed out onto the sail as that already there became exhausted.
A spaceship with direct nuclear drive—and he, a Thinker, had conceived it completely except for the technical details! Having strengthened his mind by hard years of somno-learning, mind-casting, memory-straightening, and sensory training, he had assured himself of the executive power to control the technicians and direct their specialized abilities. Together they would build the true Mars rocket.
But that would only be a beginning. They would build the true Mind Bomb. They would build the true Selective Microbe Slayer. They would discover the true laws of ESP and the inner life. They would even—his imagination hesitated a moment, then strode boldly forward—build the true Maizie!
And then ... then the Thinkers would be on even terms with the scientists. Rather, they'd be far ahead. No more deception.
He was so exalted by this thought that he almost let the slideway carry him past his door. He stepped inside and called, "Caddy!" He waited a moment, then walked through the apartment, but she wasn't there.
Confound the girl, he couldn't help thinking. This morning, when she should have made herself scarce, she'd sprawled about sleeping. Now, when he felt like seeing her, when her presence would have added a pleasant final touch to his glowing mood, she chose to be absent. He really should use his hypnotic control on her, he decided, and again there sprang into his mind the word—a pet form of her name—that would send her into obedient trance.
No, he told himself again, that was to be reserved for some moment of crisis or desperate danger, when he would need someone to strike suddenly and unquestioningly for himself and mankind. Caddy was merely a wilful and rather silly girl, incapable at present of understanding the tremendous tensions under which he operated. When he had time for it, he would train her up to be a fitting companion without hypnosis.
Yet the fact of her absence had a subtly disquieting effect. It shook his perfect self-confidence just a fraction. He asked himself if he'd been wise in summoning the rocket physicists without consulting Tregarron.
But this mood, too, he conquered quickly. Tregarron wasn't his boss, but just the Thinker's most clever salesman, an expert in the mumbo-jumbo so necessary for social control in this chaotic era. He himself, Jorj Helmuth, was the real leader in theoretics and all-over strategy, the mind behind the mind behind Maizie.
He stretched himself on the bed, almost instantly achieved maximum relaxation, turned on the somno-learner, and began the two hour rest he knew would be desirable before the big conference.
Question:
How does Maizie work, and how is this significant to the story?
Answer:
|
[
"Maizie is a large contraption that occupies a room in the Thinker's Foundation. It consists of various controls, cables, and synapses, more than the human brain. It reads questions through information fed on a tape. Once Maizie processes the questions and conjures up answers, it delivers information back through a man who translates the tape into an answer. The main point regarding Maizie is that little to no one knows how it truly works, which is why it is regarded even by the President as a superior guide for intelligence. Maizie appears to be intimidating with its incomprehensible parts and gadgets, but the process in which it delivers simple answers to questions allows the public to trust it with decisions.",
"Maizie, which is regarded as a super-intelligent computer capable of answering complex problems about governance and political strategy, is in fact merely a unit housing a man who manually answers the questions posed to the machine. Jorj Helmuth, a member of a group called the Thinkers, inputs questions onto tape which are fed to Maizie, and the tape rolls along inside the machine and emerges in the room containing the man. He tapes out answers, which are output and given by Jorj to those who asked the question. \nThis deception is a common strategy of the Thinkers, who have also faked travel to Mars, among other inventions. However, they hope to one day be able to construct all those things in order to stand on equal footing as scientists.\nMaizie is a means by which the Thinkers have influenced politics, and through which they have acquired power. It is hypothesized by Opperly, an elderly physicist, who knows how Maizie works, that the success of the deception is a result of their era, which yearns for fantastical solutions. The decision to reveal Maizie to the world is a topic of conversation between Opperly and a younger member of his group, Willard Farquar, who wants to expose the machine. \n",
"Maizie is a brain machine built by the Thinkers. The Thinkers publicly claim that is a million times more synapses than a human brain. They say that Maizie has incredible intelligent capabilities. The reason Maizie is significant to the story is that Opperly and Farquar reveal how Maizie is actually fake. Someone records the answers for Maizie to recite. The Thinkers came into power because they were able to present incredible feats of technology like Maizie, but the technology turns out to not actually exist. Jorj Helmuth claims to be the mind that is behind the ‘mind’ of Maizie. ",
"Maizie is supposed to be the thinking machine that has a million times more synapses than human brains have. It should take in the questions by humans entering it on the tape, and report answers back. Maizie was set up to work for the humans or the right-minded leaders of humans. However, Maizie does not work the way that the government believes it does, or the way that the Thinkers want them to believe. Instead, there is literally a fat man sitting in the middle of the room, he looks through the tapes that are sent in to his room and then writes down the answers to each of those questions. To the government officials, this is magical and believable, and they take advises from the machine. However, apparently the physicists knew the actual way that Maizie works, they do not want to be fooled and teased the Thinkers by sending them a question. On the question, it asks if Maizie stands for Maelzel. Maelzel is a chess playing machine that turned out to have a man inside it, exactly the same with Maizie. While the government officials did not seem to understand the mockery in it, the Thinkers did."
] |
51152
|
Appointment in Tomorrow
BY FRITZ LEIBER
Illustrated by ED ALEXANDER
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction July 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Is it possible to have a world without moral values? Or does lack of morality become a moral value, also?
The first angry rays of the sun—which, startlingly enough, still rose in the east at 24 hour intervals—pierced the lacy tops of Atlantic combers and touched thousands of sleeping Americans with unconscious fear, because of their unpleasant similarity to the rays from World War III's atomic bombs.
They turned to blood the witch-circle of rusty steel skeletons around Inferno in Manhattan. Without comment, they pointed a cosmic finger at the tarnished brass plaque commemorating the martyrdom of the Three Physicists after the dropping of the Hell Bomb. They tenderly touched the rosy skin and strawberry bruises on the naked shoulders of a girl sleeping off a drunk on the furry and radiantly heated floor of a nearby roof garden. They struck green magic from the glassy blot that was Old Washington. Twelve hours before, they had revealed things as eerily beautiful, and as ravaged, in Asia and Russia. They pinked the white walls of the Colonial dwelling of Morton Opperly near the Institute for Advanced Studies; upstairs they slanted impartially across the Pharoahlike and open-eyed face of the elderly physicist and the ugly, sleep-surly one of young Willard Farquar in the next room. And in nearby New Washington they made of the spire of the Thinkers' Foundation a blue and optimistic glory that outshone White House, Jr.
It was America approaching the end of the Twentieth Century. America of juke-box burlesque and your local radiation hospital. America of the mask-fad for women and Mystic Christianity. America of the off-the-bosom dress and the New Blue Laws. America of the Endless War and the loyalty detector. America of marvelous Maizie and the monthly rocket to Mars. America of the Thinkers and (a few remembered) the Institute. "Knock on titanium," "Whadya do for black-outs," "Please, lover, don't think when I'm around," America, as combat-shocked and crippled as the rest of the bomb-shattered planet.
Not one impudent photon of the sunlight penetrated the triple-paned, polarizing windows of Jorj Helmuth's bedroom in the Thinker's Foundation, yet the clock in his brain awakened him to the minute, or almost. Switching off the Educational Sandman in the midst of the phrase, "... applying tensor calculus to the nucleus," he took a deep, even breath and cast his mind to the limits of the world and his knowledge. It was a somewhat shadowy vision, but, he noted with impartial approval, definitely less shadowy than yesterday morning.
Employing a rapid mental scanning technique, he next cleared his memory chains of false associations, including those acquired while asleep. These chores completed, he held his finger on a bedside button, which rotated the polarizing window panes until the room slowly filled with a muted daylight. Then, still flat on his back, he turned his head until he could look at the remarkably beautiful blonde girl asleep beside him.
Remembering last night, he felt a pang of exasperation, which he instantly quelled by taking his mind to a higher and dispassionate level from which he could look down on the girl and even himself as quaint, clumsy animals. Still, he grumbled silently, Caddy might have had enough consideration to clear out before he awoke. He wondered if he shouldn't have used his hypnotic control of the girl to smooth their relationship last night, and for a moment the word that would send her into deep trance trembled on the tip of his tongue. But no, that special power of his over her was reserved for far more important purposes.
Pumping dynamic tension into his 20-year-old muscles and confidence into his 60-year-old mind, the 40-year-old Thinker rose from bed. No covers had to be thrown off; the nuclear heating unit made them unnecessary. He stepped into his clothing—the severe tunic, tights and sockassins of the modern business man. Next he glanced at the message tape beside his phone, washed down with ginger ale a vita-amino-enzyme tablet, and walked to the window. There, gazing along the rows of newly planted mutant oaks lining Decontamination Avenue, his smooth face broke into a smile.
It had come to him, the next big move in the intricate game making up his life—and mankind's. Come to him during sleep, as so many of his best decisions did, because he regularly employed the time-saving technique of somno-thought, which could function at the same time as somno-learning.
He set his who?-where? robot for "Rocket Physicist" and "Genius Class." While it worked, he dictated to his steno-robot the following brief message:
Dear Fellow Scientist:
A project is contemplated that will have a crucial bearing on man's future in deep space. Ample non-military Government funds are available. There was a time when professional men scoffed at the Thinkers. Then there was a time when the Thinkers perforce neglected the professional men. Now both times are past. May they never return! I would like to consult you this afternoon, three o'clock sharp, Thinkers' Foundation I.
Jorj Helmuth
Meanwhile the who?-where? had tossed out a dozen cards. He glanced through them, hesitated at the name "Willard Farquar," looked at the sleeping girl, then quickly tossed them all into the addresso-robot and plugged in the steno-robot.
The buzz-light blinked green and he switched the phone to audio.
"The President is waiting to see Maizie, sir," a clear feminine voice announced. "He has the general staff with him."
"Martian peace to him," Jorj Helmuth said. "Tell him I'll be down in a few minutes."
Huge as a primitive nuclear reactor, the great electronic brain loomed above the knot of hush-voiced men. It almost filled a two-story room in the Thinkers' Foundation. Its front was an orderly expanse of controls, indicators, telltales, and terminals, the upper ones reached by a chair on a boom.
Although, as far as anyone knew, it could sense only the information and questions fed into it on a tape, the human visitors could not resist the impulse to talk in whispers and glance uneasily at the great cryptic cube. After all, it had lately taken to moving some of its own controls—the permissible ones—and could doubtless improvise a hearing apparatus if it wanted to.
For this was the thinking machine beside which the Marks and Eniacs and Maniacs and Maddidas and Minervas and Mimirs were less than Morons. This was the machine with a million times as many synapses as the human brain, the machine that remembered by cutting delicate notches in the rims of molecules (instead of kindergarten paper-punching or the Coney Island shimmying of columns of mercury). This was the machine that had given instructions on building the last three-quarters of itself. This was the goal, perhaps, toward which fallible human reasoning and biased human judgment and feeble human ambition had evolved.
This was the machine that really thought—a million-plus!
This was the machine that the timid cyberneticists and stuffy professional scientists had said could not be built. Yet this was the machine that the Thinkers, with characteristic Yankee push, had built. And nicknamed, with characteristic Yankee irreverence and girl-fondness, "Maizie."
Gazing up at it, the President of the United States felt a chord plucked within him that hadn't been sounded for decades, the dark and shivery organ chord of his Baptist childhood. Here, in a strange sense, although his reason rejected it, he felt he stood face to face with the living God: infinitely stern with the sternness of reality, yet infinitely just. No tiniest error or wilful misstep could ever escape the scrutiny of this vast mentality. He shivered.
The grizzled general—there was also one who was gray—was thinking that this was a very odd link in the chain of command. Some shadowy and usually well-controlled memories from World War II faintly stirred his ire. Here he was giving orders to a being immeasurably more intelligent than himself. And always orders of the "Tell me how to kill that man" rather than the "Kill that man" sort. The distinction bothered him obscurely. It relieved him to know that Maizie had built-in controls which made her always the servant of humanity, or of humanity's right-minded leaders—even the Thinkers weren't certain which.
The gray general was thinking uneasily, and, like the President, at a more turbid level, of the resemblance between Papal infallibility and the dictates of the machine. Suddenly his bony wrists began to tremble. He asked himself: Was this the Second Coming? Mightn't an incarnation be in metal rather than flesh?
The austere Secretary of State was remembering what he'd taken such pains to make everyone forget: his youthful flirtation at Lake Success with Buddhism. Sitting before his guru , his teacher, feeling the Occidental's awe at the wisdom of the East, or its pretense, he had felt a little like this.
The burly Secretary of Space, who had come up through United Rockets, was thanking his stars that at any rate the professional scientists weren't responsible for this job. Like the grizzled general, he'd always felt suspicious of men who kept telling you how to do things, rather than doing them themselves. In World War III he'd had his fill of the professional physicists, with their eternal taint of a misty sort of radicalism and free-thinking. The Thinkers were better—more disciplined, more human. They'd called their brain-machine Maizie, which helped take the curse off her. Somewhat.
The President's Secretary, a paunchy veteran of party caucuses, was also glad that it was the Thinkers who had created the machine, though he trembled at the power that it gave them over the Administration. Still, you could do business with the Thinkers. And nobody (not even the Thinkers) could do business (that sort of business) with Maizie!
Before that great square face with its thousands of tiny metal features, only Jorj Helmuth seemed at ease, busily entering on the tape the complex Questions of the Day that the high officials had handed him: logistics for the Endless War in Pakistan, optimum size for next year's sugar-corn crop, current thought trends in average Soviet minds—profound questions, yet many of them phrased with surprising simplicity. For figures, technical jargon, and layman's language were alike to Maizie; there was no need to translate into mathematical shorthand, as with the lesser brain-machines.
The click of the taper went on until the Secretary of State had twice nervously fired a cigaret with his ultrasonic lighter and twice quickly put it away. No one spoke.
Jorj looked up at the Secretary of Space. "Section Five, Question Four—whom would that come from?"
The burly man frowned. "That would be the physics boys, Opperly's group. Is anything wrong?"
Jorj did not answer. A bit later he quit taping and began to adjust controls, going up on the boom-chair to reach some of them. Eventually he came down and touched a few more, then stood waiting.
From the great cube came a profound, steady purring. Involuntarily the six officials backed off a bit. Somehow it was impossible for a man to get used to the sound of Maizie starting to think.
Jorj turned, smiling. "And now, gentlemen, while we wait for Maizie to celebrate, there should be just enough time for us to watch the takeoff of the Mars rocket." He switched on a giant television screen. The others made a quarter turn, and there before them glowed the rich ochres and blues of a New Mexico sunrise and, in the middle distance, a silvery mighty spindle.
Like the generals, the Secretary of Space suppressed a scowl. Here was something that ought to be spang in the center of his official territory, and the Thinkers had locked him completely out of it. That rocket there—just an ordinary Earth satellite vehicle commandeered from the Army, but equipped by the Thinkers with Maizie-designed nuclear motors capable of the Mars journey and more. The first spaceship—and the Secretary of Space was not in on it!
Still, he told himself, Maizie had decreed it that way. And when he remembered what the Thinkers had done for him in rescuing him from breakdown with their mental science, in rescuing the whole Administration from collapse he realized he had to be satisfied. And that was without taking into consideration the amazing additional mental discoveries that the Thinkers were bringing down from Mars.
"Lord," the President said to Jorj as if voicing the Secretary's feeling, "I wish you people could bring a couple of those wise little devils back with you this trip. Be a good thing for the country."
Jorj looked at him a bit coldly. "It's quite unthinkable," he said.
"The telepathic abilities of the Martians make them extremely sensitive. The conflicts of ordinary Earth minds would impinge on them psychotically, even fatally. As you know, the Thinkers were able to contact them only because of our degree of learned mental poise and errorless memory-chains. So for the present it must be our task alone to glean from the Martians their astounding mental skills. Of course, some day in the future, when we have discovered how to armor the minds of the Martians—"
"Sure, I know," the President said hastily. "Shouldn't have mentioned it, Jorj."
Conversation ceased. They waited with growing tension for the great violet flames to bloom from the base of the silvery shaft.
Meanwhile the question tape, like a New Year's streamer tossed out a high window into the night, sped on its dark way along spinning rollers. Curling with an intricate aimlessness curiously like that of such a streamer, it tantalized the silvery fingers of a thousand relays, saucily evaded the glances of ten thousand electric eyes, impishly darted down a narrow black alleyway of memory banks, and, reaching the center of the cube, suddenly emerged into a small room where a suave fat man in shorts sat drinking beer.
He flipped the tape over to him with practiced finger, eyeing it as a stockbroker might have studied a ticker tape. He read the first question, closed his eyes and frowned for five seconds. Then with the staccato self-confidence of a hack writer, he began to tape out the answer.
For many minutes the only sounds were the rustle of the paper ribbon and the click of the taper, except for the seconds the fat man took to close his eyes, or to drink or pour beer. Once, too, he lifted a phone, asked a concise question, waited half a minute, listened to an answer, then went back to the grind.
Until he came to Section Five, Question Four. That time he did his thinking with his eyes open.
The question was: "Does Maizie stand for Maelzel?"
He sat for a while slowly scratching his thigh. His loose, persuasive lips tightened, without closing, into the shape of a snarl.
Suddenly he began to tape again.
"Maizie does not stand for Maelzel. Maizie stands for amazing, humorously given the form of a girl's name. Section Six, Answer One: The mid-term election viewcasts should be spaced as follows...."
But his lips didn't lose the shape of a snarl.
Five hundred miles above the ionosphere, the Mars rocket cut off its fuel and slumped gratefully into an orbit that would carry it effortlessly around the world at that altitude. The pilot unstrapped himself and stretched, but he didn't look out the viewport at the dried-mud disc that was Earth, cloaked in its haze of blue sky. He knew he had two maddening months ahead of him in which to do little more than that. Instead, he unstrapped Sappho.
Used to free fall from two previous experiences, and loving it, the fluffy little cat was soon bounding about the cabin in curves and gyrations that would have made her the envy of all back-alley and parlor felines on the planet below. A miracle cat in the dream world of free fall. For a long time she played with a string that the man would toss out lazily. Sometimes she caught the string on the fly, sometimes she swam for it frantically.
After a while the man grew bored with the game. He unlocked a drawer and began to study the details of the wisdom he would discover on Mars this trip—priceless spiritual insights that would be balm to war-battered mankind.
The cat carefully selected a spot three feet off the floor, curled up on the air, and went to sleep.
Jorj Helmuth snipped the emerging answer tape into sections and handed each to the appropriate man. Most of them carefully tucked theirs away with little more than a glance, but the Secretary of Space puzzled over his.
"Who the devil would Maelzel be?" he asked.
A remote look came into the eyes of the Secretary of State. "Edgar Allen Poe," he said frowningly, with eyes half-closed.
The grizzled general snapped his fingers. "Sure! Maelzel's Chess player. Read it when I was a kid. About an automaton that was supposed to play chess. Poe proved it hid a man inside it."
The Secretary of Space frowned. "Now what's the point in a fool question like that?"
"You said it came from Opperly's group?" Jorj asked sharply.
The Secretary of Space nodded. The others looked at the two men puzzledly.
"Who would that be?" Jorj pressed. "The group, I mean."
The Secretary of Space shrugged. "Oh, the usual little bunch over at the Institute. Hindeman, Gregory, Opperly himself. Oh, yes, and young Farquar."
"Sounds like Opperly's getting senile," Jorj commented coldly. "I'd investigate."
The Secretary of Space nodded. He suddenly looked tough. "I will. Right away."
Sunlight striking through French windows spotlighted a ballet of dust motes untroubled by air-conditioning. Morton Opperly's living room was well-kept but worn and quite behind the times. Instead of reading tapes there were books; instead of steno-robots, pen and ink; while in place of a four by six TV screen, a Picasso hung on the wall. Only Opperly knew that the painting was still faintly radioactive, that it had been riskily so when he'd smuggled it out of his bomb-singed apartment in New York City.
The two physicists fronted each other across a coffee table. The face of the elder was cadaverous, large-eyed, and tender—fined down by a long life of abstract thought. That of the younger was forceful, sensuous, bulky as his body, and exceptionally ugly. He looked rather like a bear.
Opperly was saying, "So when he asked who was responsible for the Maelzel question, I said I didn't remember." He smiled. "They still allow me my absent-mindedness, since it nourishes their contempt. Almost my sole remaining privilege." The smile faded. "Why do you keep on teasing the zoo animals, Willard?" he asked without rancor. "I've maintained many times that we shouldn't truckle to them by yielding to their demand that we ask Maizie questions. You and the rest have overruled me. But then to use those questions to convey veiled insults isn't reasonable. Apparently the Secretary of Space was bothered enough about this last one to pay me a 'copter call within twenty minutes of this morning's meeting at the Foundation. Why do you do it, Willard?"
The features of the other convulsed unpleasantly. "Because the Thinkers are charlatans who must be exposed," he rapped out. "We know their Maizie is no more than a tealeaf-reading fake. We've traced their Mars rockets and found they go nowhere. We know their Martian mental science is bunk."
"But we've already exposed the Thinkers very thoroughly," Opperly interposed quietly. "You know the good it did."
Farquar hunched his Japanese-wrestler shoulders. "Then it's got to be done until it takes."
Opperly studied the bowl of mutated flowers by the coffee pot. "I think you just want to tease the animals, for some personal reason of which you probably aren't aware."
Farquar scowled. "We're the ones in the cages."
Opperly continued his inspection of the flowers' bells. "All the more reason not to poke sticks through the bars at the lions and tigers strolling outside. No, Willard, I'm not counseling appeasement. But consider the age in which we live. It wants magicians." His voice grew especially tranquil. "A scientist tells people the truth. When times are good—that is, when the truth offers no threat—people don't mind. But when times are very, very bad...." A shadow darkened his eyes.
"Well, we all know what happened to—" And he mentioned three names that had been household words in the middle of the century. They were the names on the brass plaque dedicated to the martyred three physicists.
He went on, "A magician, on the other hand, tells people what they wish were true—that perpetual motion works, that cancer can be cured by colored lights, that a psychosis is no worse than a head cold, that they'll live forever. In good times magicians are laughed at. They're a luxury of the spoiled wealthy few. But in bad times people sell their souls for magic cures, and buy perpetual motion machines to power their war rockets."
Farquar clenched his fist. "All the more reason to keep chipping away at the Thinkers. Are we supposed to beg off from a job because it's difficult and dangerous?"
Opperly shook his head. "We're to keep clear of the infection of violence. In my day, Willard, I was one of the Frightened Men. Later I was one of the Angry Men and then one of the Minds of Despair. Now I'm convinced that all my reactions were futile."
"Exactly!" Farquar agreed harshly. "You reacted. You didn't act. If you men who discovered atomic energy had only formed a secret league, if you'd only had the foresight and the guts to use your tremendous bargaining position to demand the power to shape mankind's future...."
"By the time you were born, Willard," Opperly interrupted dreamily,
"Hitler was merely a name in the history books. We scientists weren't the stuff out of which cloak-and-dagger men are made. Can you imagine Oppenheimer wearing a mask or Einstein sneaking into the Old White House with a bomb in his briefcase?" He smiled. "Besides, that's not the way power is seized. New ideas aren't useful to the man bargaining for power—only established facts or lies are."
"Just the same, it would have been a good thing if you'd had a little violence in you."
"No," Opperly said.
"I've got violence in me," Farquar announced, shoving himself to his feet.
Opperly looked up from the flowers. "I think you have," he agreed.
"But what are we to do?" Farquar demanded. "Surrender the world to charlatans without a struggle?"
Opperly mused for a while. "I don't know what the world needs now. Everyone knows Newton as the great scientist. Few remember that he spent half his life muddling with alchemy, looking for the philosopher's stone. Which Newton did the world need then?"
"Now you are justifying the Thinkers!"
"No, I leave that to history."
"And history consists of the actions of men," Farquar concluded. "I intend to act. The Thinkers are vulnerable, their power fantastically precarious. What's it based on? A few lucky guesses. Faith-healing. Some science hocus-pocus, on the level of those juke-box burlesque acts between the strips. Dubious mental comfort given to a few nerve-torn neurotics in the Inner Cabinet—and their wives. The fact that the Thinkers' clever stage-managing won the President a doubtful election. The erroneous belief that the Soviets pulled out of Iraq and Iran because of the Thinkers' Mind Bomb threat. A brain-machine that's just a cover for Jan Tregarron's guesswork. Oh, yes, and that hogwash of
'Martian wisdom.' All of it mere bluff! A few pushes at the right times and points are all that are needed—and the Thinkers know it! I'll bet they're terrified already, and will be more so when they find that we're gunning for them. Eventually they'll be making overtures to us, turning to us for help. You wait and see."
"I am thinking again of Hitler," Opperly interposed quietly. "On his first half dozen big steps, he had nothing but bluff. His generals were against him. They knew they were in a cardboard fort. Yet he won every battle, until the last. Moreover," he pressed on, cutting Farquar short, "the power of the Thinkers isn't based on what they've got, but on what the world hasn't got—peace, honor, a good conscience...."
The front-door knocker clanked. Farquar answered it. A skinny old man with a radiation scar twisting across his temple handed him a tiny cylinder. "Radiogram for you, Willard." He grinned across the hall at Opperly. "When are you going to get a phone put in, Mr. Opperly?"
The physicist waved to him. "Next year, perhaps, Mr. Berry."
The old man snorted with good-humored incredulity and trudged off.
"What did I tell you about the Thinkers making overtures?" Farquar chortled suddenly. "It's come sooner than I expected. Look at this."
He held out the radiogram, but the older man didn't take it. Instead he asked, "Who's it from? Tregarron?"
"No, from Helmuth. There's a lot of sugar corn about man's future in deep space, but the real reason is clear. They know that they're going to have to produce an actual nuclear rocket pretty soon, and for that they'll need our help."
"An invitation?"
Farquar nodded. "For this afternoon." He noticed Opperly's anxious though distant frown. "What's the matter?" he asked. "Are you bothered about my going? Are you thinking it might be a trap—that after the Maelzel question they may figure I'm better rubbed out?"
The older man shook his head. "I'm not afraid for your life, Willard. That's yours to risk as you choose. No, I'm worried about other things they might do to you."
"What do you mean?" Farquar asked.
Opperly looked at him with a gentle appraisal. "You're a strong and vital man, Willard, with a strong man's prides and desires." His voice trailed off for a bit. Then, "Excuse me, Willard, but wasn't there a girl once? A Miss Arkady?"
Farquar's ungainly figure froze. He nodded curtly, face averted.
"And didn't she go off with a Thinker?"
"If girls find me ugly, that's their business," Farquar said harshly, still not looking at Opperly. "What's that got to do with this invitation?"
Opperly didn't answer the question. His eyes got more distant. Finally he said, "In my day we had it a lot easier. A scientist was an academician, cushioned by tradition."
Willard snorted. "Science had already entered the era of the police inspectors, with laboratory directors and political appointees stifling enterprise."
"Perhaps," Opperly agreed. "Still, the scientist lived the safe, restricted, highly respectable life of a university man. He wasn't exposed to the temptations of the world."
Farquar turned on him. "Are you implying that the Thinkers will somehow be able to buy me off?"
"Not exactly."
"You think I'll be persuaded to change my aims?" Farquar demanded angrily.
Opperly shrugged his helplessness. "No, I don't think you'll change your aims."
Clouds encroaching from the west blotted the parallelogram of sunlight between the two men.
As the slideway whisked him gently along the corridor toward his apartment, Jorj was thinking of his spaceship. For a moment the silver-winged vision crowded everything else out of his mind.
Just think, a spaceship with sails! He smiled a bit, marveling at the paradox.
Direct atomic power. Direct utilization of the force of the flying neutrons. No more ridiculous business of using a reactor to drive a steam engine, or boil off something for a jet exhaust—processes that were as primitive and wasteful as burning gunpowder to keep yourself warm.
Chemical jets would carry his spaceship above the atmosphere. Then would come the thrilling order, "Set sail for Mars!" The vast umbrella would unfold and open out around the stern, its rear or Earthward side a gleaming expanse of radioactive ribbon perhaps only an atom thick and backed with a material that would reflect neutrons. Atoms in the ribbon would split, blasting neutrons astern at fantastic velocities. Reaction would send the spaceship hurtling forward.
In airless space, the expanse of sails would naturally not retard the ship. More radioactive ribbon, manufactured as needed in the ship itself, would feed out onto the sail as that already there became exhausted.
A spaceship with direct nuclear drive—and he, a Thinker, had conceived it completely except for the technical details! Having strengthened his mind by hard years of somno-learning, mind-casting, memory-straightening, and sensory training, he had assured himself of the executive power to control the technicians and direct their specialized abilities. Together they would build the true Mars rocket.
But that would only be a beginning. They would build the true Mind Bomb. They would build the true Selective Microbe Slayer. They would discover the true laws of ESP and the inner life. They would even—his imagination hesitated a moment, then strode boldly forward—build the true Maizie!
And then ... then the Thinkers would be on even terms with the scientists. Rather, they'd be far ahead. No more deception.
He was so exalted by this thought that he almost let the slideway carry him past his door. He stepped inside and called, "Caddy!" He waited a moment, then walked through the apartment, but she wasn't there.
Confound the girl, he couldn't help thinking. This morning, when she should have made herself scarce, she'd sprawled about sleeping. Now, when he felt like seeing her, when her presence would have added a pleasant final touch to his glowing mood, she chose to be absent. He really should use his hypnotic control on her, he decided, and again there sprang into his mind the word—a pet form of her name—that would send her into obedient trance.
No, he told himself again, that was to be reserved for some moment of crisis or desperate danger, when he would need someone to strike suddenly and unquestioningly for himself and mankind. Caddy was merely a wilful and rather silly girl, incapable at present of understanding the tremendous tensions under which he operated. When he had time for it, he would train her up to be a fitting companion without hypnosis.
Yet the fact of her absence had a subtly disquieting effect. It shook his perfect self-confidence just a fraction. He asked himself if he'd been wise in summoning the rocket physicists without consulting Tregarron.
But this mood, too, he conquered quickly. Tregarron wasn't his boss, but just the Thinker's most clever salesman, an expert in the mumbo-jumbo so necessary for social control in this chaotic era. He himself, Jorj Helmuth, was the real leader in theoretics and all-over strategy, the mind behind the mind behind Maizie.
He stretched himself on the bed, almost instantly achieved maximum relaxation, turned on the somno-learner, and began the two hour rest he knew would be desirable before the big conference.
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What is the relationship between Bruce and Marsha?
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about The Highest Mountain by Bryce Walton.
Relevant chunks:
THE HIGHEST MOUNTAIN
By BRYCE WALTON
Illustrated by BOB HAYES
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
First one up this tallest summit in the Solar System was a rotten egg ... a very rotten egg!
Bruce heard their feet on the gravel outside and got up reluctantly to open the door for them. He'd been reading some of Byron's poems he'd sneaked aboard the ship; after that he had been on the point of dozing off, and now one of those strangely realistic dreams would have to be postponed for a while. Funny, those dreams. There were faces in them of human beings, or of ghosts, and other forms that weren't human at all, but seemed real and alive—except that they were also just parts of a last unconscious desire to escape death. Maybe that was it.
"'Oh that my young life were a lasting dream, my spirit not awakening till the beam of an eternity should bring the 'morrow," Bruce said. He smiled without feeling much of anything and added, "Thanks, Mr. Poe."
Jacobs and Anhauser stood outside. The icy wind cut through and into Bruce, but he didn't seem to notice. Anhauser's bulk loomed even larger in the special cold-resisting suiting. Jacobs' thin face frowned slyly at Bruce.
"Come on in, boys, and get warm," Bruce invited.
"Hey, poet, you're still here!" Anhauser said, looking astonished.
"We thought you'd be running off somewhere," Jacobs said.
Bruce reached for the suit on its hook, started climbing into it.
"Where?" he asked. "Mars looks alike wherever you go. Where did you think I'd be running to?"
"Any place just so it was away from here and us," Anhauser said.
"I don't have to do that. You are going away from me. That takes care of that, doesn't it?"
"Ah, come on, get the hell out of there," Jacobs said. He pulled the revolver from its holster and pointed it at Bruce. "We got to get some sleep. We're starting up that mountain at five in the morning."
"I know," Bruce said. "I'll be glad to see you climb the mountain."
Outside, in the weird light of the double moons, Bruce looked up at the gigantic overhang of the mountain. It was unbelievable. The mountain didn't seem to belong here. He'd thought so when they'd first hit Mars eight months back and discovered the other four rockets that had never got back to Earth—all lying side by side under the mountain's shadow, like little white chalk marks on a tallyboard.
They'd estimated its height at over 45,000 feet, which was a lot higher than any mountain on Earth. Yet Mars was much older, geologically. The entire face of the planet was smoothed into soft, undulating red hills by erosion. And there in the middle of barren nothingness rose that one incredible mountain. On certain nights when the stars were right, it had seemed to Bruce as though it were pointing an accusing finger at Earth—or a warning one.
With Jacobs and Anhauser and the remainder of the crew of the ship, Mars V , seven judges sat in a semi-circle and Bruce stood there in front of them for the inquest.
In the middle of the half-moon of inquisition, with his long legs stretched out and his hands folded on his belly, sat Captain Terrence. His uniform was black. On his arm was the silver fist insignia of the Conqueror Corps. Marsha Rennels sat on the extreme right and now there was no emotion at all on her trim, neat face.
He remembered her as she had been years ago, but at the moment he wasn't looking very hard to see anything on her face. It was too late. They had gotten her young and it was too late.
Terrence's big, square face frowned a little. Bruce was aware suddenly of the sound of the bleak, never-ending wind against the plastilene shelter. He remembered the strange misty shapes that had come to him in his dreams, the voices that had called to him, and how disappointed he had been when he woke from them.
"This is a mere formality," Terrence finally said, "since we all know you killed Lieutenant Doran a few hours ago. Marsha saw you kill him. Whatever you say goes on the record, of course."
"For whom?" Bruce asked.
"What kind of question is that? For the authorities on Earth when we get back."
"When you get back? Like the crews of those other four ships out there?" Bruce laughed without much humor.
Terrence rubbed a palm across his lips, dropped the hand quickly again to his belly. "You want to make a statement or not? You shot Doran in the head with a rifle. No provocation for the attack. You've wasted enough of my time with your damn arguments and anti-social behavior. This is a democratic group. Everyone has his say. But you've said too much, and done too much. Freedom doesn't allow you to go around killing fellow crew-members!"
"Any idea that there was any democracy or freedom left died on Venus," Bruce said.
"Now we get another lecture!" Terrence exploded. He leaned forward.
"You're sick, Bruce. They did a bad psych job on you. They should never have sent you on this trip. We need strength, all the strength we can find. You don't belong here."
"I know," Bruce agreed indifferently. "I was drafted for this trip. I told them I shouldn't be brought along. I said I didn't want any part of it."
"Because you're afraid. You're not Conqueror material. That's why you backed down when we all voted to climb the mountain. And what the devil does Venus—?"
Max Drexel's freckles slipped into the creases across his high forehead. "Haven't you heard him expounding on the injustice done to the Venusian aborigines, Captain? If you haven't, you aren't thoroughly educated to the crackpot idealism still infecting certain people."
"I haven't heard it," Terrence admitted. "What injustice?"
Bruce said, "I guess it couldn't really be considered an injustice any longer. Values have changed too much. Doran and I were part of the crew of that first ship to hit Venus, five years ago. Remember? One of the New Era's more infamous dates. Drexel says the Venusians were aborigines. No one ever got a chance to find out. We ran into this village. No one knows how old it was. There were intelligent beings there. One community left on the whole planet, maybe a few thousand inhabitants. They made their last mistake when they came out to greet us. Without even an attempt at communication, they were wiped out. The village was burned and everything alive in it was destroyed."
Bruce felt the old weakness coming into his knees, the sweat beginning to run down his face. He took a deep breath and stood there before the cold nihilistic stares of fourteen eyes.
"No," Bruce said. "I apologize. None of you know what I'm talking about."
Terrence nodded. "You're psycho. It's as simple as that. They pick the most capable for these conquests. Even the flights are processes of elimination. Eventually we get the very best, the most resilient, the real conquering blood. You just don't pass, Bruce. Listen, what do you think gives you the right to stand here in judgment against the laws of the whole Solar System?"
"There are plenty on Earth who agree with me," Bruce said. "I can say what I think now because you can't do more than kill me and you'll do that regardless...."
He stopped. This was ridiculous, a waste of his time. And theirs. They had established a kind of final totalitarianism since the New Era. The psychologists, the Pavlovian Reflex boys, had done that. If you didn't want to be reconditioned to fit into the social machine like a human vacuum tube, you kept your mouth shut. And for many, when the mouth was kept shut long enough, the mind pretty well forgot what it had wanted to open the mouth for in the first place.
A minority in both segments of a world split into two factions. Both had been warring diplomatically and sometimes physically, for centuries, clung to old ideas of freedom, democracy, self-determinism, individualism. To most, the words had no meaning now. It was a question of which set of conquering heroes could conquer the most space first. So far, only Venus had fallen. They had done a good, thorough job there. Four ships had come to Mars and their crews had disappeared. This was the fifth attempt—
Terrence said, "why did you shoot Doran?"
"I didn't like him enough to take the nonsense he was handing me, and when he shot the—" Bruce hesitated.
"What? When he shot what?"
Bruce felt an odd tingling in his stomach. The wind's voice seemed to sharpen and rise to a kind of wail.
"All right, I'll tell you. I was sleeping, having a dream. Doran woke me up. Marsha was with him. I'd forgotten about that geological job we were supposed to be working on. I've had these dreams ever since we got here."
"What kind of dreams?"
Someone laughed.
"Just fantastic stuff. Ask your Pavlovian there," Bruce said. "People talk to me, and there are other things in the dreams. Voices and some kind of shapes that aren't what you would call human at all."
Someone coughed. There was obvious embarrassment in the room.
"It's peculiar, but many faces and voices are those of crew members of some of the ships out there, the ones that never got back to Earth."
Terrence grinned. "Ghosts, Bruce?"
"Maybe. This planet may not be a dead ball of clay. I've had a feeling there's something real in the dreams, but I can't figure it out. You're still interested?"
Terrence nodded and glanced to either side.
"We've seen no indication of any kind of life whatsoever," Bruce pointed out. "Not even an insect, or any kind of plant life except some fungi and lichen down in the crevices. That never seemed logical to me from the start. We've covered the planet everywhere except one place—"
"The mountain," Terrence said. "You've been afraid even to talk about scaling it."
"Not afraid," Bruce objected. "I don't see any need to climb it. Coming to Mars, conquering space, isn't that enough? It happens that the crew of the first ship here decided to climb the mountain, and that set a precedent. Every ship that has come here has had to climb it. Why? Because they had to accept the challenge. And what's happened to them? Like you, they all had the necessary equipment to make a successful climb, but no one's ever come back down. No contact with anything up there.
"Captain, I'm not accepting a ridiculous challenge like that. Why should I? I didn't come here to conquer anything, even a mountain. The challenge of coming to Mars, of going on to where ever you guys intend going before something bigger than you are stops you—it doesn't interest me."
"Nothing's bigger than the destiny of Earth!" Terrence said, sitting up straight and rigid.
"I know," Bruce said. "Anyway, I got off the track. As I was saying, I woke up from this dream and Marsha and Doran were there. Doran was shaking me. But I didn't seem to have gotten entirely awake; either that or some part of the dream was real, because I looked out the window—something was out there, looking at me. It was late, and at first I thought it might be a shadow. But it wasn't. It was misty, almost translucent, but I think it was something alive. I had a feeling it was intelligent, maybe very intelligent. I could feel something in my mind. A kind of beauty and softness and warmth. I kept looking—"
His throat was getting tight. He had difficulty talking. "Doran asked me what I was looking at, and I told him. He laughed. But he looked. Then I realized that maybe I wasn't still dreaming. Doran saw it, too, or thought he did. He kept looking and finally he jumped and grabbed up his rifle and ran outside. I yelled at him. I kept on yelling and ran after him. 'It's intelligent, whatever it is!' I kept saying. 'How do you know it means any harm?' But I heard Doran's rifle go off before I could get to him. And whatever it was we saw, I didn't see it any more. Neither did Doran. Maybe he killed it. I don't know. He had to kill it. That's the way you think."
"What? Explain that remark."
"That's the philosophy of conquest—don't take any chances with aliens. They might hinder our advance across the Universe. So we kill everything. Doran acted without thinking at all. Conditioned to kill everything that doesn't look like us. So I hit Doran and took the gun away from him and killed him. I felt sick, crazy with rage. Maybe that's part of it. All I know is that I thought he deserved to die and that I had to kill him, so I did."
"Is that all, Bruce?"
"That's about all. Except that I'd like to kill all of you. And I would if I had the chance."
"That's what I figured." Terrence turned to the psychologist, a small wiry man who sat there constantly fingering his ear. "Stromberg, what do you think of this gobbledegook? We know he's crazy. But what hit him? You said his record was good up until a year ago."
Stromberg's voice was monotonous, like a voice off of a tape.
"Schizophrenia with mingled delusions of persecution. The schizophrenia is caused by inner conflict—indecision between the older values and our present ones which he hasn't been able to accept. A complete case history would tell why he can't accept our present attitudes. I would say that he has an incipient fear of personal inadequacy, which is why he fears our desire for conquest. He's rationalized, built up a defense which he's structured with his idealism, foundationed with Old Era values. Retreat into the past, an escape from his own present feelings of inadequacy. Also, he escapes into these dream fantasies."
"Yes," Terrence said. "But how does that account for Doran's action? Doran must have seen something—"
"Doran's charts show high suggestibility under stress. Another weak personality eliminated. Let's regard it that way. He imagined he saw something." He glanced at Marsha. "Did you see anything?"
She hesitated, avoiding Bruce's eyes. "Nothing at all. There wasn't anything out there to see, except the dust and rocks. That's all there is to see here. We could stay a million years and never see anything else. A shadow maybe—"
"All right," Terrence interrupted. "Now, Bruce, you know the law regulating the treatment of serious psycho cases in space?"
"Yes. Execution."
"No facilities for handling such cases en route back to Earth."
"I understand. No apologies necessary, Captain."
Terrence shifted his position. "However, we've voted to grant you a kind of leniency. In exchange for a little further service from you, you can remain here on Mars after we leave. You'll be left food-concentrates to last a long time."
"What kind of service?"
"Stay by the radio and take down what we report as we go up the mountain."
"Why not?" Bruce said. "You aren't certain you're coming back, then?"
"We might not," Terrence admitted calmly. "Something's happened to the others. We're going to find out what and we want it recorded. None of us want to back down and stay here. You can take our reports as they come in."
"I'll do that," Bruce said. "It should be interesting."
Bruce watched them go, away and up and around the immediate face of the mountain in the bleak cold of the Martian morning. He watched them disappear behind a high ledge, tied together with plastic rope like convicts.
He stayed by the radio. He lost track of time and didn't care much if he did. Sometimes he took a heavy sedative and slept. The sedative prevented the dreams. He had an idea that the dreams might be so pleasant that he wouldn't wake up. He wanted to listen to Terrence as long as the captain had anything to say. It was nothing but curiosity.
At fifteen thousand feet, Terrence reported only that they were climbing.
At twenty thousand feet, Terrence said, "We're still climbing, and that's all I can report, Bruce. It's worth coming to Mars for—to accept a challenge like this!"
At twenty-five thousand feet, Terrence reported, "We've put on oxygen masks. Jacobs and Drexel have developed some kind of altitude sickness and we're taking a little time out. It's a magnificent sight up here. I can imagine plenty of tourists coming to Mars one of these days, just to climb this mountain! Mt. Everest is a pimple compared with this! What a feeling of power, Bruce!"
From forty thousand feet, Terrence said, "We gauged this mountain at forty-five thousand. But here we are at forty and there doesn't seem to be any top. We can see up and up and the mountain keeps on going. I don't understand how we could have made such an error in our computations. I talked with Burton. He doesn't see how a mountain this high could still be here when the rest of the planet has been worn so smooth."
And then from fifty-three thousand feet, Terrence said with a voice that seemed slightly strained: "No sign of any of the crew of the other four ships yet. Ten in each crew, that makes fifty. Not a sign of any of them so far, but then we seem to have a long way left to climb—"
Bruce listened and noted and took sedatives and opened cans of food concentrates. He smoked and ate and slept. He had plenty of time. He had only time and the dreams which he knew he could utilize later to take care of the time.
From sixty thousand feet, Terrence reported, "I had to shoot Anhauser a few minutes ago! He was dissenting. Hear that, Bruce? One of my most dependable men. We took a vote. A mere formality, of course, whether we should continue climbing or not. We knew we'd all vote to keep on climbing. And then Anhauser dissented. He was hysterical. He refused to accept the majority decision. 'I'm going back down!' he yelled. So I had to shoot him. Imagine a man of his apparent caliber turning anti-democratic like that! This mountain will be a great tester for us in the future. We'll test everybody, find out quickly who the weaklings are."
Bruce listened to the wind. It seemed to rise higher and higher. Terrence, who had climbed still higher, was calling. "Think of it! What a conquest! No man's ever done a thing like this. Like Stromberg says, it's symbolic! We can build spaceships and reach other planets, but that's not actual physical conquest. We feel like gods up here. We can see what we are now. We can see how it's going to be—"
Once in a while Terrence demanded that Bruce say something to prove he was still there taking down what Terrence said. Bruce obliged. A long time passed, the way time does when no one cares. Bruce stopped taking the sedatives finally. The dreams came back and became, somehow, more real each time. He needed the companionship of the dreams.
It was very lonely sitting there without the dreams, with nothing but Terrence's voice ranting excitedly on and on. Terrence didn't seem real any more; certainly not as real as the dreams.
The problem of where to put the line between dream and reality began to worry Bruce. He would wake up and listen and take down what Terrence was saying, and then go to sleep again with increasing expectancy. His dream took on continuity. He could return to the point where he had left it, and it was the same—allowing even for the time difference necessitated by his periods of sleep.
He met people in the dreams, two girls and a man. They had names: Pietro, Marlene, Helene.
Helene he had seen from the beginning, but she became more real to him all the time, until he could talk with her. After that, he could also talk with Marlene and Pietro, and the conversations made sense. Consistently, they made sense.
The Martian landscape was entirely different in the dreams. Green valleys and rivers, or actually wide canals, with odd trees trailing their branches on the slow, peacefully gliding currents. Here and there were pastel-colored cities and there were things drifting through them that were alive and intelligent and soft and warm and wonderful to know.
' ... dreams, in their vivid coloring of life, as in that fleeting, shadowy, misty strife of semblance with reality which brings to the delirious eye more lovely things of paradise and love—and all our own!—than young Hope in his sunniest hour hath known.... '
So sometimes he read poetry, but even that was hardly equal to the dreams.
And then he would wake up and listen to Terrence's voice. He would look out the window over the barren frigid land where there was nothing but seams of worn land, like scabs under the brazen sky.
"If I had a choice," he thought, "I wouldn't ever wake up at all again. The dreams may not be more real, but they're preferable."
Dreams were supposed to be wishful thinking, primarily, but he couldn't live in them very long. His body would dry up and he would die. He had to stay awake enough to put a little energy back into himself. Of course, if he died and lost the dreams, there would be one compensation—he would also be free of Terrence and the rest of them who had learned that the only value in life lay in killing one's way across the Cosmos.
But then he had a feeling Terrence's voice wouldn't be annoying him much more anyway. The voice was unreal, coming out of some void. He could switch off Terrence any time now, but he was still curious.
"Bruce—Bruce, you still there? Listen, we're up here at what we figure to be five hundred thousand feet! It is impossible. We keep climbing and now we look up and we can see up and up and there the mountain is going up and up—"
And some time later: "Bruce, Marsha's dying! We don't know what's the matter. We can't find any reason for it. She's lying here and she keeps laughing and calling your name. She's a woman, so that's probably it. Women don't have real guts."
Bruce bent toward the radio. Outside the shelter, the wind whistled softly at the door.
"Marsha," he said.
"Bruce—"
She hadn't said his name that way for a long time.
"Marsha, remember how we used to talk about human values? I remember how you seemed to have something maybe different from the others. I never thought you'd really buy this will to conquer, and now it doesn't matter...."
He listened to her voice, first the crazy laughter, and then a whisper.
"Bruce, hello down there." Her voice was all mixed up with fear and hysteria and mockery. "Bruce darling, are you lonely down there? I wish I were with you, safe ... free ... warm. I love you. Do you hear that? I really love you, after all. After all...."
Her voice drifted away, came back to him. "We're climbing the highest mountain. What are you doing there, relaxing where it's peaceful and warm and sane? You always were such a calm guy. I remember now. What are you doing—reading poetry while we climb the mountain? What was that, Bruce—that one about the mountain you tried to quote to me last night before you ... I can't remember it now. Darling, what...?"
He stared at the radio. He hesitated, reached out and switched on the mike. He got through to her.
"Hello, hello, darling," he whispered. "Marsha, can you hear me?"
"Yes, yes. You down there, all warm and cozy, reading poetry, darling. Where you can see both ways instead of just up and down, up and down."
He tried to imagine where she was now as he spoke to her, how she looked. He thought of Earth and how it had been there, years ago, with Marsha. Things had seemed so different then. There was something of that hope in his voice now as he spoke to her, yet not directly to her, as he looked out the window at the naked frigid sky and the barren rocks.
"'... and there is nowhere to go from the top of a mountain,
But down, my dear;
And the springs that flow on the floor of the valley
Will never seem fresh or clear
For thinking of the glitter of the mountain water
In the feathery green of the year....'"
The wind stormed over the shelter in a burst of power, buried the sound of his own voice.
"Marsha, are you still there?"
"What the devil's the idea, poetry at a time like this, or any time?" Terrence demanded. "Listen, you taking this down? We haven't run into any signs of the others. Six hundred thousand feet, Bruce! We feel our destiny. We conquer the Solar System. And we'll go out and out, and we'll climb the highest mountain, the highest mountain anywhere. We're going up and up. We've voted on it. Unanimous. We go on. On to the top, Bruce! Nothing can stop us. If it takes ten years, a hundred, a thousand years, we'll find it. We'll find the top! Not the top of this world—the top of everything . The top of the
UNIVERSE
!"
Later, Terrence's voice broke off in the middle of something or other—Bruce couldn't make any sense out of it at all—and turned into crazy yells that faded out and never came back.
Bruce figured the others might still be climbing somewhere, or maybe they were dead. Either way it wouldn't make any difference to him. He knew they would never come back down.
He was switching off the radio for good when he saw the coloration break over the window. It was the same as the dream, but for an instant, dream and reality seemed fused like two superimposed film negatives.
He went to the window and looked out. The comfortable little city was out there, and the canal flowing past through a pleasantly cool yet sunny afternoon. Purple mist blanketed the knees of low hills and there was a valley, green and rich with the trees high and full beside the softly flowing canal water.
The filmy shapes that seemed alive, that were partly translucent, drifted along the water's edge, and birds as delicate as colored glass wavered down the wind.
He opened the shelter door and went out. The shelter looked the same, but useless now. How did the shelter of that bleak world get into this one, where the air was warm and fragrant, where there was no cold, from that world into this one of his dreams?
The girl—Helene—was standing there leaning against a tree, smoking a cigarette.
He walked toward her, and stopped. In the dream it had been easy, but now he was embarrassed, in spite of the intimacy that had grown between them. She wore the same casual slacks and sandals. Her hair was brown. She was not particularly beautiful, but she was comfortable to look at because she seemed so peaceful. Content, happy with what was and only what was.
He turned quickly. The shelter was still there, and behind it the row of spaceships—not like chalk marks on a tallyboard now, but like odd relics that didn't belong there in the thick green grass. Five ships instead of four.
There was his own individual shelter beyond the headquarters building, and the other buildings. He looked up.
There was no mountain.
For one shivery moment he knew fear. And then the fear went away, and he was ashamed of what he had felt. What he had feared was gone now, and he knew it was gone for good and he would never have to fear it again.
"Look here, Bruce. I wondered how long it would take to get it through that thick poetic head of yours!"
"Get what?" He began to suspect what it was all about now, but he wasn't quite sure yet.
"Smoke?" she said.
He took one of the cigarettes and she lighted it for him and put the lighter back into her pocket.
"It's real nice here," she said. "Isn't it?"
"I guess it's about perfect."
"It'll be easy. Staying here, I mean. We won't be going to Earth ever again, you know."
"I didn't know that, but I didn't think we ever would again."
"We wouldn't want to anyway, would we, Bruce?"
"No."
He kept on looking at the place where the mountain had been. Or maybe it still was; he couldn't make up his mind yet. Which was and which was not? That barren icy world without life, or this?
"' Is all that we see or seem ,'" he whispered, half to himself, "' but a dream within a dream? '"
She laughed softly. "Poe was ahead of his time," she said. "You still don't get it, do you? You don't know what's been happening?"
"Maybe I don't."
She shrugged, and looked in the direction of the ships. "Poor guys. I can't feel much hatred toward them now. The Martians give you a lot of understanding of the human mind—after they've accepted you, and after you've lived with them awhile. But the mountain climbers—we can see now—it's just luck, chance, we weren't like them. A deviant is a child of chance."
"Yes," Bruce said. "There's a lot of people like us on Earth, but they'll never get the chance—the chance we seem to have here, to live decently...."
"You're beginning to see now which was the dream," she said and smiled. "But don't be pessimistic. Those people on Earth will get their chance, too, one of these fine days. The Conquerors aren't getting far. Venus, and then Mars, and Mars is where they stop. They'll keep coming here and climbing the mountain and finally there won't be any more. It won't take so long."
She rose to her toes and waved and yelled. Bruce saw Pietro and Marlene walking hand in hand up the other side of the canal. They waved back and called and then pushed off into the water in a small boat, and drifted away and out of sight around a gentle turn.
She took his arm and they walked along the canal toward where the mountain had been, or still was—he didn't know.
A quarter of a mile beyond the canal, he saw the high mound of red, naked hill, corroded and ugly, rising up like a scar of the surrounding green.
She wasn't smiling now. There were shadows on her face as the pressure on his arm stopped him.
"I was on the first ship and Marlene on the second. None like us on the third, and on the fourth ship was Pietro. All the others had to climb the mountain—" She stopped talking for a moment, and then he felt the pressure of her fingers on his arm. "I'm very glad you came on the fifth," she whispered. "Are you glad now?"
"I'm very glad," he said.
"The Martians tested us," she explained. "They're masters of the mind. I guess they've been grinding along through the evolutionary mill a darn long time, longer than we could estimate now. They learned the horror we're capable of from the first ship—the Conquerors, the climbers. The Martians knew more like them would come and go on into space, killing, destroying for no other reason than their own sickness. Being masters of the mind, the Martians are also capable of hypnosis—no, that's not really the word, only the closest our language comes to naming it. Suggestion so deep and strong that it seems real to one human or a million or a billion; there's no limit to the number that can be influenced. What the people who came off those ships saw wasn't real. It was partly what the Martians wanted them to see and feel—but most of it, like the desire to climb the mountain, was as much a part of the Conquerors' own psychic drive as it was the suggestion of the Martians."
She waved her arm slowly to describe a peak. "The Martians made the mountain real. So real that it could be seen from space, measured by instruments ... even photographed and chipped for rock samples. But you'll see how that was done, Bruce, and realize that this and not the mountain of the Conquerors is the reality of Mars. This is the Mars no Conqueror will ever see."
They walked toward the ugly red mound that jutted above the green. When they came close enough, he saw the bodies lying there ... the remains, actually, of what had once been bodies. He felt too sickened to go on walking.
"It may seem cruel now," she said, "but the Martians realized that there is no cure for the will to conquer. There is no safety from it, either, as the people of Earth and Venus discovered, unless it is given an impossible obstacle to overcome. So the Martians provided the Conquerors with a mountain. They themselves wanted to climb. They had to."
He was hardly listening as he walked away from Helene toward the eroded hills. The crew members of the first four ships were skeletons tied together with imperishably strong rope about their waists. Far beyond them were those from Mars V , too freshly dead to have decayed much ... Anhauser with his rope cut, a bullet in his head; Jacobs and Marsha and the others ... Terrence much past them all. He had managed to climb higher than anyone else and he lay with his arms stretched out, his fingers still clutching at rock outcroppings.
The trail they left wound over the ground, chipped in places for holds, red elsewhere with blood from torn hands. Terrence was more than twelve miles from the ship—horizontally.
Bruce lifted Marsha and carried her back over the rocky dust, into the fresh fragrance of the high grass, and across it to the shade and peace beside the canal.
He put her down. She looked peaceful enough, more peaceful than that other time, years ago, when the two of them seemed to have shared so much, when the future had not yet destroyed her. He saw the shadow of Helene bend across Marsha's face against the background of the silently flowing water of the cool, green canal.
"You loved her?"
"Once," Bruce said. "She might have been sane. They got her when she was young. Too young to fight. But she would have, I think, if she'd been older when they got her."
He sat looking down at Marsha's face, and then at the water with the leaves floating down it.
"'... And the springs that flow on the floor of the valley will never seem fresh or clear for thinking of the glitter of the mountain water in the feathery green of the year....'"
He stood up, walked back with Helene along the canal toward the calm city. He didn't look back.
"They've all been dead quite a while," Bruce said wonderingly. "Yet I seemed to be hearing from Terrence until only a short time ago. Are—are the climbers still climbing—somewhere, Helene?"
"Who knows?" Helene answered softly. "Maybe. I doubt if even the Martians have the answer to that."
They entered the city.
Question:
What is the relationship between Bruce and Marsha?
Answer:
|
[
"Bruce and Marsha were close years ago when they lived on Earth. They shared similar values and loved each other, but eventually, Marsha became one of the conquerors, ready to expand the human territories. Now she’s almost emotionless. Bruce is disappointed and reckons that the other conquerors had gotten her young, and there was nothing he could do about it. When he’s interrogated, the psychologist asks if she saw any creature before Bruce shot Doran. She seems hesitant and doesn’t look at Bruce when denying seeing anything. When she is dying, she crazily laughs and admits that she is in love with him, asking Bruce to read her a poem. At the end, he finds Marsha’s body among the eroded hills and puts it beside the city canal. He says that he loved her once, and she could’ve been sane, different if the conquerors hadn’t got her when she was so young. \n",
"Bruce and Marsha do not interact much initially. Marsha is a witness of when Bruce shot Doran, but she makes no move to oppose the other members of the crew. She also hesitates to meet his eyes when she speaks, only following orders. Bruce mentions that they had gotten her when she was too young. Later, when Marsha is dying, she calls him darling and mentions how much she loves him. Even though she is hysterical, Bruce remembers the time when they used to talk about human values. He recites poetry to her and tries to think about the good times on Earth. Later, it is revealed that Bruce loved her before on Earth. However, it eventually meant nothing because she had been converted by the Conquerors too early and could not fight back. ",
"Bruce and Marsha appear to once have been romantic partners, with both proclaiming their love for each other. They used to share poetry and talk about human values and had a clear and affectionate connection back on Earth. \n\nHowever, Marsha and Bruce begin to distance as Marsha bought into the will to conquer, whereas Bruce leaned further away from this thought. This dissonance is apparent as she refuses to look at him during his inquest and at the fact that Marsha goes onto the climb. \n\nDespite this, when Marsha dies over the radio, they share a last moment of spoken affection. When Bruce sees her dead body, he takes care to rest her by the canal as he expresses his melancholy over \"they\" getting to her young. ",
"Bruce and Marsha used to be lovers years ago. Marsha is indifferent to Bruce when Bruce accepts his inquisition from other crewmembers for his murder. When Marsha is asked whether she saw anything when Bruce killed Doran, she says no, even though she might see it. According to Bruce, Marsha was reconditioned to accept the new values in New Era, where strength and conquest are prioritized as the most important thing, compared to Old Era, where mercy and compassion seem to exist. Marsha keeps calling Bruce’s name on the edge of death while climbing the mountain. She misses the warmth she used to have with Bruce, realizing that conquest is not everything. After she dies, Bruce places her corpse along the canals. Bruce and Marsha used to be in a romantic relationship, but after Marsha accepts the will to conquer, they become distant from each other. When Marsha is dying, Marsha finally regains herself and confesses to Bruce. Their relationship becomes tolerant and beloved."
] |
50868
|
THE HIGHEST MOUNTAIN
By BRYCE WALTON
Illustrated by BOB HAYES
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
First one up this tallest summit in the Solar System was a rotten egg ... a very rotten egg!
Bruce heard their feet on the gravel outside and got up reluctantly to open the door for them. He'd been reading some of Byron's poems he'd sneaked aboard the ship; after that he had been on the point of dozing off, and now one of those strangely realistic dreams would have to be postponed for a while. Funny, those dreams. There were faces in them of human beings, or of ghosts, and other forms that weren't human at all, but seemed real and alive—except that they were also just parts of a last unconscious desire to escape death. Maybe that was it.
"'Oh that my young life were a lasting dream, my spirit not awakening till the beam of an eternity should bring the 'morrow," Bruce said. He smiled without feeling much of anything and added, "Thanks, Mr. Poe."
Jacobs and Anhauser stood outside. The icy wind cut through and into Bruce, but he didn't seem to notice. Anhauser's bulk loomed even larger in the special cold-resisting suiting. Jacobs' thin face frowned slyly at Bruce.
"Come on in, boys, and get warm," Bruce invited.
"Hey, poet, you're still here!" Anhauser said, looking astonished.
"We thought you'd be running off somewhere," Jacobs said.
Bruce reached for the suit on its hook, started climbing into it.
"Where?" he asked. "Mars looks alike wherever you go. Where did you think I'd be running to?"
"Any place just so it was away from here and us," Anhauser said.
"I don't have to do that. You are going away from me. That takes care of that, doesn't it?"
"Ah, come on, get the hell out of there," Jacobs said. He pulled the revolver from its holster and pointed it at Bruce. "We got to get some sleep. We're starting up that mountain at five in the morning."
"I know," Bruce said. "I'll be glad to see you climb the mountain."
Outside, in the weird light of the double moons, Bruce looked up at the gigantic overhang of the mountain. It was unbelievable. The mountain didn't seem to belong here. He'd thought so when they'd first hit Mars eight months back and discovered the other four rockets that had never got back to Earth—all lying side by side under the mountain's shadow, like little white chalk marks on a tallyboard.
They'd estimated its height at over 45,000 feet, which was a lot higher than any mountain on Earth. Yet Mars was much older, geologically. The entire face of the planet was smoothed into soft, undulating red hills by erosion. And there in the middle of barren nothingness rose that one incredible mountain. On certain nights when the stars were right, it had seemed to Bruce as though it were pointing an accusing finger at Earth—or a warning one.
With Jacobs and Anhauser and the remainder of the crew of the ship, Mars V , seven judges sat in a semi-circle and Bruce stood there in front of them for the inquest.
In the middle of the half-moon of inquisition, with his long legs stretched out and his hands folded on his belly, sat Captain Terrence. His uniform was black. On his arm was the silver fist insignia of the Conqueror Corps. Marsha Rennels sat on the extreme right and now there was no emotion at all on her trim, neat face.
He remembered her as she had been years ago, but at the moment he wasn't looking very hard to see anything on her face. It was too late. They had gotten her young and it was too late.
Terrence's big, square face frowned a little. Bruce was aware suddenly of the sound of the bleak, never-ending wind against the plastilene shelter. He remembered the strange misty shapes that had come to him in his dreams, the voices that had called to him, and how disappointed he had been when he woke from them.
"This is a mere formality," Terrence finally said, "since we all know you killed Lieutenant Doran a few hours ago. Marsha saw you kill him. Whatever you say goes on the record, of course."
"For whom?" Bruce asked.
"What kind of question is that? For the authorities on Earth when we get back."
"When you get back? Like the crews of those other four ships out there?" Bruce laughed without much humor.
Terrence rubbed a palm across his lips, dropped the hand quickly again to his belly. "You want to make a statement or not? You shot Doran in the head with a rifle. No provocation for the attack. You've wasted enough of my time with your damn arguments and anti-social behavior. This is a democratic group. Everyone has his say. But you've said too much, and done too much. Freedom doesn't allow you to go around killing fellow crew-members!"
"Any idea that there was any democracy or freedom left died on Venus," Bruce said.
"Now we get another lecture!" Terrence exploded. He leaned forward.
"You're sick, Bruce. They did a bad psych job on you. They should never have sent you on this trip. We need strength, all the strength we can find. You don't belong here."
"I know," Bruce agreed indifferently. "I was drafted for this trip. I told them I shouldn't be brought along. I said I didn't want any part of it."
"Because you're afraid. You're not Conqueror material. That's why you backed down when we all voted to climb the mountain. And what the devil does Venus—?"
Max Drexel's freckles slipped into the creases across his high forehead. "Haven't you heard him expounding on the injustice done to the Venusian aborigines, Captain? If you haven't, you aren't thoroughly educated to the crackpot idealism still infecting certain people."
"I haven't heard it," Terrence admitted. "What injustice?"
Bruce said, "I guess it couldn't really be considered an injustice any longer. Values have changed too much. Doran and I were part of the crew of that first ship to hit Venus, five years ago. Remember? One of the New Era's more infamous dates. Drexel says the Venusians were aborigines. No one ever got a chance to find out. We ran into this village. No one knows how old it was. There were intelligent beings there. One community left on the whole planet, maybe a few thousand inhabitants. They made their last mistake when they came out to greet us. Without even an attempt at communication, they were wiped out. The village was burned and everything alive in it was destroyed."
Bruce felt the old weakness coming into his knees, the sweat beginning to run down his face. He took a deep breath and stood there before the cold nihilistic stares of fourteen eyes.
"No," Bruce said. "I apologize. None of you know what I'm talking about."
Terrence nodded. "You're psycho. It's as simple as that. They pick the most capable for these conquests. Even the flights are processes of elimination. Eventually we get the very best, the most resilient, the real conquering blood. You just don't pass, Bruce. Listen, what do you think gives you the right to stand here in judgment against the laws of the whole Solar System?"
"There are plenty on Earth who agree with me," Bruce said. "I can say what I think now because you can't do more than kill me and you'll do that regardless...."
He stopped. This was ridiculous, a waste of his time. And theirs. They had established a kind of final totalitarianism since the New Era. The psychologists, the Pavlovian Reflex boys, had done that. If you didn't want to be reconditioned to fit into the social machine like a human vacuum tube, you kept your mouth shut. And for many, when the mouth was kept shut long enough, the mind pretty well forgot what it had wanted to open the mouth for in the first place.
A minority in both segments of a world split into two factions. Both had been warring diplomatically and sometimes physically, for centuries, clung to old ideas of freedom, democracy, self-determinism, individualism. To most, the words had no meaning now. It was a question of which set of conquering heroes could conquer the most space first. So far, only Venus had fallen. They had done a good, thorough job there. Four ships had come to Mars and their crews had disappeared. This was the fifth attempt—
Terrence said, "why did you shoot Doran?"
"I didn't like him enough to take the nonsense he was handing me, and when he shot the—" Bruce hesitated.
"What? When he shot what?"
Bruce felt an odd tingling in his stomach. The wind's voice seemed to sharpen and rise to a kind of wail.
"All right, I'll tell you. I was sleeping, having a dream. Doran woke me up. Marsha was with him. I'd forgotten about that geological job we were supposed to be working on. I've had these dreams ever since we got here."
"What kind of dreams?"
Someone laughed.
"Just fantastic stuff. Ask your Pavlovian there," Bruce said. "People talk to me, and there are other things in the dreams. Voices and some kind of shapes that aren't what you would call human at all."
Someone coughed. There was obvious embarrassment in the room.
"It's peculiar, but many faces and voices are those of crew members of some of the ships out there, the ones that never got back to Earth."
Terrence grinned. "Ghosts, Bruce?"
"Maybe. This planet may not be a dead ball of clay. I've had a feeling there's something real in the dreams, but I can't figure it out. You're still interested?"
Terrence nodded and glanced to either side.
"We've seen no indication of any kind of life whatsoever," Bruce pointed out. "Not even an insect, or any kind of plant life except some fungi and lichen down in the crevices. That never seemed logical to me from the start. We've covered the planet everywhere except one place—"
"The mountain," Terrence said. "You've been afraid even to talk about scaling it."
"Not afraid," Bruce objected. "I don't see any need to climb it. Coming to Mars, conquering space, isn't that enough? It happens that the crew of the first ship here decided to climb the mountain, and that set a precedent. Every ship that has come here has had to climb it. Why? Because they had to accept the challenge. And what's happened to them? Like you, they all had the necessary equipment to make a successful climb, but no one's ever come back down. No contact with anything up there.
"Captain, I'm not accepting a ridiculous challenge like that. Why should I? I didn't come here to conquer anything, even a mountain. The challenge of coming to Mars, of going on to where ever you guys intend going before something bigger than you are stops you—it doesn't interest me."
"Nothing's bigger than the destiny of Earth!" Terrence said, sitting up straight and rigid.
"I know," Bruce said. "Anyway, I got off the track. As I was saying, I woke up from this dream and Marsha and Doran were there. Doran was shaking me. But I didn't seem to have gotten entirely awake; either that or some part of the dream was real, because I looked out the window—something was out there, looking at me. It was late, and at first I thought it might be a shadow. But it wasn't. It was misty, almost translucent, but I think it was something alive. I had a feeling it was intelligent, maybe very intelligent. I could feel something in my mind. A kind of beauty and softness and warmth. I kept looking—"
His throat was getting tight. He had difficulty talking. "Doran asked me what I was looking at, and I told him. He laughed. But he looked. Then I realized that maybe I wasn't still dreaming. Doran saw it, too, or thought he did. He kept looking and finally he jumped and grabbed up his rifle and ran outside. I yelled at him. I kept on yelling and ran after him. 'It's intelligent, whatever it is!' I kept saying. 'How do you know it means any harm?' But I heard Doran's rifle go off before I could get to him. And whatever it was we saw, I didn't see it any more. Neither did Doran. Maybe he killed it. I don't know. He had to kill it. That's the way you think."
"What? Explain that remark."
"That's the philosophy of conquest—don't take any chances with aliens. They might hinder our advance across the Universe. So we kill everything. Doran acted without thinking at all. Conditioned to kill everything that doesn't look like us. So I hit Doran and took the gun away from him and killed him. I felt sick, crazy with rage. Maybe that's part of it. All I know is that I thought he deserved to die and that I had to kill him, so I did."
"Is that all, Bruce?"
"That's about all. Except that I'd like to kill all of you. And I would if I had the chance."
"That's what I figured." Terrence turned to the psychologist, a small wiry man who sat there constantly fingering his ear. "Stromberg, what do you think of this gobbledegook? We know he's crazy. But what hit him? You said his record was good up until a year ago."
Stromberg's voice was monotonous, like a voice off of a tape.
"Schizophrenia with mingled delusions of persecution. The schizophrenia is caused by inner conflict—indecision between the older values and our present ones which he hasn't been able to accept. A complete case history would tell why he can't accept our present attitudes. I would say that he has an incipient fear of personal inadequacy, which is why he fears our desire for conquest. He's rationalized, built up a defense which he's structured with his idealism, foundationed with Old Era values. Retreat into the past, an escape from his own present feelings of inadequacy. Also, he escapes into these dream fantasies."
"Yes," Terrence said. "But how does that account for Doran's action? Doran must have seen something—"
"Doran's charts show high suggestibility under stress. Another weak personality eliminated. Let's regard it that way. He imagined he saw something." He glanced at Marsha. "Did you see anything?"
She hesitated, avoiding Bruce's eyes. "Nothing at all. There wasn't anything out there to see, except the dust and rocks. That's all there is to see here. We could stay a million years and never see anything else. A shadow maybe—"
"All right," Terrence interrupted. "Now, Bruce, you know the law regulating the treatment of serious psycho cases in space?"
"Yes. Execution."
"No facilities for handling such cases en route back to Earth."
"I understand. No apologies necessary, Captain."
Terrence shifted his position. "However, we've voted to grant you a kind of leniency. In exchange for a little further service from you, you can remain here on Mars after we leave. You'll be left food-concentrates to last a long time."
"What kind of service?"
"Stay by the radio and take down what we report as we go up the mountain."
"Why not?" Bruce said. "You aren't certain you're coming back, then?"
"We might not," Terrence admitted calmly. "Something's happened to the others. We're going to find out what and we want it recorded. None of us want to back down and stay here. You can take our reports as they come in."
"I'll do that," Bruce said. "It should be interesting."
Bruce watched them go, away and up and around the immediate face of the mountain in the bleak cold of the Martian morning. He watched them disappear behind a high ledge, tied together with plastic rope like convicts.
He stayed by the radio. He lost track of time and didn't care much if he did. Sometimes he took a heavy sedative and slept. The sedative prevented the dreams. He had an idea that the dreams might be so pleasant that he wouldn't wake up. He wanted to listen to Terrence as long as the captain had anything to say. It was nothing but curiosity.
At fifteen thousand feet, Terrence reported only that they were climbing.
At twenty thousand feet, Terrence said, "We're still climbing, and that's all I can report, Bruce. It's worth coming to Mars for—to accept a challenge like this!"
At twenty-five thousand feet, Terrence reported, "We've put on oxygen masks. Jacobs and Drexel have developed some kind of altitude sickness and we're taking a little time out. It's a magnificent sight up here. I can imagine plenty of tourists coming to Mars one of these days, just to climb this mountain! Mt. Everest is a pimple compared with this! What a feeling of power, Bruce!"
From forty thousand feet, Terrence said, "We gauged this mountain at forty-five thousand. But here we are at forty and there doesn't seem to be any top. We can see up and up and the mountain keeps on going. I don't understand how we could have made such an error in our computations. I talked with Burton. He doesn't see how a mountain this high could still be here when the rest of the planet has been worn so smooth."
And then from fifty-three thousand feet, Terrence said with a voice that seemed slightly strained: "No sign of any of the crew of the other four ships yet. Ten in each crew, that makes fifty. Not a sign of any of them so far, but then we seem to have a long way left to climb—"
Bruce listened and noted and took sedatives and opened cans of food concentrates. He smoked and ate and slept. He had plenty of time. He had only time and the dreams which he knew he could utilize later to take care of the time.
From sixty thousand feet, Terrence reported, "I had to shoot Anhauser a few minutes ago! He was dissenting. Hear that, Bruce? One of my most dependable men. We took a vote. A mere formality, of course, whether we should continue climbing or not. We knew we'd all vote to keep on climbing. And then Anhauser dissented. He was hysterical. He refused to accept the majority decision. 'I'm going back down!' he yelled. So I had to shoot him. Imagine a man of his apparent caliber turning anti-democratic like that! This mountain will be a great tester for us in the future. We'll test everybody, find out quickly who the weaklings are."
Bruce listened to the wind. It seemed to rise higher and higher. Terrence, who had climbed still higher, was calling. "Think of it! What a conquest! No man's ever done a thing like this. Like Stromberg says, it's symbolic! We can build spaceships and reach other planets, but that's not actual physical conquest. We feel like gods up here. We can see what we are now. We can see how it's going to be—"
Once in a while Terrence demanded that Bruce say something to prove he was still there taking down what Terrence said. Bruce obliged. A long time passed, the way time does when no one cares. Bruce stopped taking the sedatives finally. The dreams came back and became, somehow, more real each time. He needed the companionship of the dreams.
It was very lonely sitting there without the dreams, with nothing but Terrence's voice ranting excitedly on and on. Terrence didn't seem real any more; certainly not as real as the dreams.
The problem of where to put the line between dream and reality began to worry Bruce. He would wake up and listen and take down what Terrence was saying, and then go to sleep again with increasing expectancy. His dream took on continuity. He could return to the point where he had left it, and it was the same—allowing even for the time difference necessitated by his periods of sleep.
He met people in the dreams, two girls and a man. They had names: Pietro, Marlene, Helene.
Helene he had seen from the beginning, but she became more real to him all the time, until he could talk with her. After that, he could also talk with Marlene and Pietro, and the conversations made sense. Consistently, they made sense.
The Martian landscape was entirely different in the dreams. Green valleys and rivers, or actually wide canals, with odd trees trailing their branches on the slow, peacefully gliding currents. Here and there were pastel-colored cities and there were things drifting through them that were alive and intelligent and soft and warm and wonderful to know.
' ... dreams, in their vivid coloring of life, as in that fleeting, shadowy, misty strife of semblance with reality which brings to the delirious eye more lovely things of paradise and love—and all our own!—than young Hope in his sunniest hour hath known.... '
So sometimes he read poetry, but even that was hardly equal to the dreams.
And then he would wake up and listen to Terrence's voice. He would look out the window over the barren frigid land where there was nothing but seams of worn land, like scabs under the brazen sky.
"If I had a choice," he thought, "I wouldn't ever wake up at all again. The dreams may not be more real, but they're preferable."
Dreams were supposed to be wishful thinking, primarily, but he couldn't live in them very long. His body would dry up and he would die. He had to stay awake enough to put a little energy back into himself. Of course, if he died and lost the dreams, there would be one compensation—he would also be free of Terrence and the rest of them who had learned that the only value in life lay in killing one's way across the Cosmos.
But then he had a feeling Terrence's voice wouldn't be annoying him much more anyway. The voice was unreal, coming out of some void. He could switch off Terrence any time now, but he was still curious.
"Bruce—Bruce, you still there? Listen, we're up here at what we figure to be five hundred thousand feet! It is impossible. We keep climbing and now we look up and we can see up and up and there the mountain is going up and up—"
And some time later: "Bruce, Marsha's dying! We don't know what's the matter. We can't find any reason for it. She's lying here and she keeps laughing and calling your name. She's a woman, so that's probably it. Women don't have real guts."
Bruce bent toward the radio. Outside the shelter, the wind whistled softly at the door.
"Marsha," he said.
"Bruce—"
She hadn't said his name that way for a long time.
"Marsha, remember how we used to talk about human values? I remember how you seemed to have something maybe different from the others. I never thought you'd really buy this will to conquer, and now it doesn't matter...."
He listened to her voice, first the crazy laughter, and then a whisper.
"Bruce, hello down there." Her voice was all mixed up with fear and hysteria and mockery. "Bruce darling, are you lonely down there? I wish I were with you, safe ... free ... warm. I love you. Do you hear that? I really love you, after all. After all...."
Her voice drifted away, came back to him. "We're climbing the highest mountain. What are you doing there, relaxing where it's peaceful and warm and sane? You always were such a calm guy. I remember now. What are you doing—reading poetry while we climb the mountain? What was that, Bruce—that one about the mountain you tried to quote to me last night before you ... I can't remember it now. Darling, what...?"
He stared at the radio. He hesitated, reached out and switched on the mike. He got through to her.
"Hello, hello, darling," he whispered. "Marsha, can you hear me?"
"Yes, yes. You down there, all warm and cozy, reading poetry, darling. Where you can see both ways instead of just up and down, up and down."
He tried to imagine where she was now as he spoke to her, how she looked. He thought of Earth and how it had been there, years ago, with Marsha. Things had seemed so different then. There was something of that hope in his voice now as he spoke to her, yet not directly to her, as he looked out the window at the naked frigid sky and the barren rocks.
"'... and there is nowhere to go from the top of a mountain,
But down, my dear;
And the springs that flow on the floor of the valley
Will never seem fresh or clear
For thinking of the glitter of the mountain water
In the feathery green of the year....'"
The wind stormed over the shelter in a burst of power, buried the sound of his own voice.
"Marsha, are you still there?"
"What the devil's the idea, poetry at a time like this, or any time?" Terrence demanded. "Listen, you taking this down? We haven't run into any signs of the others. Six hundred thousand feet, Bruce! We feel our destiny. We conquer the Solar System. And we'll go out and out, and we'll climb the highest mountain, the highest mountain anywhere. We're going up and up. We've voted on it. Unanimous. We go on. On to the top, Bruce! Nothing can stop us. If it takes ten years, a hundred, a thousand years, we'll find it. We'll find the top! Not the top of this world—the top of everything . The top of the
UNIVERSE
!"
Later, Terrence's voice broke off in the middle of something or other—Bruce couldn't make any sense out of it at all—and turned into crazy yells that faded out and never came back.
Bruce figured the others might still be climbing somewhere, or maybe they were dead. Either way it wouldn't make any difference to him. He knew they would never come back down.
He was switching off the radio for good when he saw the coloration break over the window. It was the same as the dream, but for an instant, dream and reality seemed fused like two superimposed film negatives.
He went to the window and looked out. The comfortable little city was out there, and the canal flowing past through a pleasantly cool yet sunny afternoon. Purple mist blanketed the knees of low hills and there was a valley, green and rich with the trees high and full beside the softly flowing canal water.
The filmy shapes that seemed alive, that were partly translucent, drifted along the water's edge, and birds as delicate as colored glass wavered down the wind.
He opened the shelter door and went out. The shelter looked the same, but useless now. How did the shelter of that bleak world get into this one, where the air was warm and fragrant, where there was no cold, from that world into this one of his dreams?
The girl—Helene—was standing there leaning against a tree, smoking a cigarette.
He walked toward her, and stopped. In the dream it had been easy, but now he was embarrassed, in spite of the intimacy that had grown between them. She wore the same casual slacks and sandals. Her hair was brown. She was not particularly beautiful, but she was comfortable to look at because she seemed so peaceful. Content, happy with what was and only what was.
He turned quickly. The shelter was still there, and behind it the row of spaceships—not like chalk marks on a tallyboard now, but like odd relics that didn't belong there in the thick green grass. Five ships instead of four.
There was his own individual shelter beyond the headquarters building, and the other buildings. He looked up.
There was no mountain.
For one shivery moment he knew fear. And then the fear went away, and he was ashamed of what he had felt. What he had feared was gone now, and he knew it was gone for good and he would never have to fear it again.
"Look here, Bruce. I wondered how long it would take to get it through that thick poetic head of yours!"
"Get what?" He began to suspect what it was all about now, but he wasn't quite sure yet.
"Smoke?" she said.
He took one of the cigarettes and she lighted it for him and put the lighter back into her pocket.
"It's real nice here," she said. "Isn't it?"
"I guess it's about perfect."
"It'll be easy. Staying here, I mean. We won't be going to Earth ever again, you know."
"I didn't know that, but I didn't think we ever would again."
"We wouldn't want to anyway, would we, Bruce?"
"No."
He kept on looking at the place where the mountain had been. Or maybe it still was; he couldn't make up his mind yet. Which was and which was not? That barren icy world without life, or this?
"' Is all that we see or seem ,'" he whispered, half to himself, "' but a dream within a dream? '"
She laughed softly. "Poe was ahead of his time," she said. "You still don't get it, do you? You don't know what's been happening?"
"Maybe I don't."
She shrugged, and looked in the direction of the ships. "Poor guys. I can't feel much hatred toward them now. The Martians give you a lot of understanding of the human mind—after they've accepted you, and after you've lived with them awhile. But the mountain climbers—we can see now—it's just luck, chance, we weren't like them. A deviant is a child of chance."
"Yes," Bruce said. "There's a lot of people like us on Earth, but they'll never get the chance—the chance we seem to have here, to live decently...."
"You're beginning to see now which was the dream," she said and smiled. "But don't be pessimistic. Those people on Earth will get their chance, too, one of these fine days. The Conquerors aren't getting far. Venus, and then Mars, and Mars is where they stop. They'll keep coming here and climbing the mountain and finally there won't be any more. It won't take so long."
She rose to her toes and waved and yelled. Bruce saw Pietro and Marlene walking hand in hand up the other side of the canal. They waved back and called and then pushed off into the water in a small boat, and drifted away and out of sight around a gentle turn.
She took his arm and they walked along the canal toward where the mountain had been, or still was—he didn't know.
A quarter of a mile beyond the canal, he saw the high mound of red, naked hill, corroded and ugly, rising up like a scar of the surrounding green.
She wasn't smiling now. There were shadows on her face as the pressure on his arm stopped him.
"I was on the first ship and Marlene on the second. None like us on the third, and on the fourth ship was Pietro. All the others had to climb the mountain—" She stopped talking for a moment, and then he felt the pressure of her fingers on his arm. "I'm very glad you came on the fifth," she whispered. "Are you glad now?"
"I'm very glad," he said.
"The Martians tested us," she explained. "They're masters of the mind. I guess they've been grinding along through the evolutionary mill a darn long time, longer than we could estimate now. They learned the horror we're capable of from the first ship—the Conquerors, the climbers. The Martians knew more like them would come and go on into space, killing, destroying for no other reason than their own sickness. Being masters of the mind, the Martians are also capable of hypnosis—no, that's not really the word, only the closest our language comes to naming it. Suggestion so deep and strong that it seems real to one human or a million or a billion; there's no limit to the number that can be influenced. What the people who came off those ships saw wasn't real. It was partly what the Martians wanted them to see and feel—but most of it, like the desire to climb the mountain, was as much a part of the Conquerors' own psychic drive as it was the suggestion of the Martians."
She waved her arm slowly to describe a peak. "The Martians made the mountain real. So real that it could be seen from space, measured by instruments ... even photographed and chipped for rock samples. But you'll see how that was done, Bruce, and realize that this and not the mountain of the Conquerors is the reality of Mars. This is the Mars no Conqueror will ever see."
They walked toward the ugly red mound that jutted above the green. When they came close enough, he saw the bodies lying there ... the remains, actually, of what had once been bodies. He felt too sickened to go on walking.
"It may seem cruel now," she said, "but the Martians realized that there is no cure for the will to conquer. There is no safety from it, either, as the people of Earth and Venus discovered, unless it is given an impossible obstacle to overcome. So the Martians provided the Conquerors with a mountain. They themselves wanted to climb. They had to."
He was hardly listening as he walked away from Helene toward the eroded hills. The crew members of the first four ships were skeletons tied together with imperishably strong rope about their waists. Far beyond them were those from Mars V , too freshly dead to have decayed much ... Anhauser with his rope cut, a bullet in his head; Jacobs and Marsha and the others ... Terrence much past them all. He had managed to climb higher than anyone else and he lay with his arms stretched out, his fingers still clutching at rock outcroppings.
The trail they left wound over the ground, chipped in places for holds, red elsewhere with blood from torn hands. Terrence was more than twelve miles from the ship—horizontally.
Bruce lifted Marsha and carried her back over the rocky dust, into the fresh fragrance of the high grass, and across it to the shade and peace beside the canal.
He put her down. She looked peaceful enough, more peaceful than that other time, years ago, when the two of them seemed to have shared so much, when the future had not yet destroyed her. He saw the shadow of Helene bend across Marsha's face against the background of the silently flowing water of the cool, green canal.
"You loved her?"
"Once," Bruce said. "She might have been sane. They got her when she was young. Too young to fight. But she would have, I think, if she'd been older when they got her."
He sat looking down at Marsha's face, and then at the water with the leaves floating down it.
"'... And the springs that flow on the floor of the valley will never seem fresh or clear for thinking of the glitter of the mountain water in the feathery green of the year....'"
He stood up, walked back with Helene along the canal toward the calm city. He didn't look back.
"They've all been dead quite a while," Bruce said wonderingly. "Yet I seemed to be hearing from Terrence until only a short time ago. Are—are the climbers still climbing—somewhere, Helene?"
"Who knows?" Helene answered softly. "Maybe. I doubt if even the Martians have the answer to that."
They entered the city.
|
What is the plot of the story?
|
After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about The Plague by Teddy Keller.
Relevant chunks:
THE PLAGUE
By TEDDY KELLER
Suppose a strictly one hundred per cent American plague showed up.... One that attacked only people within the political borders of the United States!
Illustrated by Schoenherr
Sergeant Major Andrew McCloud ignored the jangling telephones and the excited jabber of a room full of brass, and lit a cigarette. Somebody had to keep his head in this mess. Everybody was about to flip.
Like the telephone. Two days ago Corporal Bettijean Baker had been answering the rare call on the single line—in that friendly, husky voice that gave even generals pause—by saying, "Good morning. Office of the Civil Health and Germ Warfare Protection Co-ordinator." Now there was a switchboard out in the hall with a web of lines running to a dozen girls at a half dozen desks wedged into the outer office. And now the harried girls answered with a hasty, "Germ War Protection."
All the brass hats in Washington had suddenly discovered this office deep in the recesses of the Pentagon. And none of them could quite comprehend what had happened. The situation might have been funny, or at least pathetic, if it hadn't been so desperate. Even so, Andy McCloud's nerves and patience had frayed thin.
"I told you, general," he snapped to the flustered brigadier, "Colonel Patterson was retired ten days ago. I don't know what happened. Maybe this replacement sawbones got strangled in red tape. Anyhow, the brand-new lieutenant hasn't showed up here. As far as I know, I'm in charge."
"But this is incredible," a two-star general wailed. "A mysterious epidemic is sweeping the country, possibly an insidious germ attack timed to precede an all-out invasion, and a noncom is sitting on top of the whole powder keg."
Andy's big hands clenched into fists and he had to wait a moment before he could speak safely. Doggone the freckles and the unruly mop of hair that give him such a boyish look. "May I remind you, general," he said, "that I've been entombed here for two years. My staff and I know what to do. If you'll give us some co-operation and a priority, we'll try to figure this thing out."
"But good heavens," a chicken colonel moaned, "this is all so irregular. A noncom!" He said it like a dirty word.
"Irregular, hell," the brigadier snorted, the message getting through.
"There're ways. Gentlemen, I suggest we clear out of here and let the sergeant get to work." He took a step toward the door, and the other officers, protesting and complaining, moved along after him. As they drifted out, he turned and said, "We'll clear your office for top priority." Then dead serious, he added, "Son, a whole nation could panic at any moment. You've got to come through."
Andy didn't waste time standing. He merely nodded to the general, snubbed out his cigarette, and buzzed the intercom. "Bettijean, will you bring me all the latest reports, please?" Then he peeled out of his be-ribboned blouse and rolled up his sleeves. He allowed himself one moment to enjoy the sight of the slim, black-headed corporal who entered his office.
Bettijean crossed briskly to his desk. She gave him a motherly smile as she put down a thick sheaf of papers. "You look beat," she said.
"Brass give you much trouble?"
"Not much. We're top priority now." He ran fingers through the thick, brown hair and massaged his scalp, trying to generate stimulation to his wary and confused brain. "What's new?"
"I've gone though some of these," she said. "Tried to save you a little time."
"Thanks. Sit down."
She pulled up a chair and thumbed through the papers. "So far, no fatalities. That's why there's no panic yet, I guess. But it's spreading like ... well, like a plague." Fear flickered deep in her dark eyes.
"Any water reports?" Andy asked.
"Wichita O.K., Indianapolis O.K., Tulsa O.K., Buffalo O.K.,—and a bunch more. No indication there. Except"—she fished out a one-page report—"some little town in Tennessee. Yesterday there was a campaign for everybody to write their congressman about some deal and today they were to vote on a new water system. Hardly anybody showed up at the polls. They've all got it."
Andy shrugged. "You can drink water, but don't vote for it. Oh, that's a big help." He rummaged through the clutter on his desk and came up with a crude chart. "Any trends yet?"
"It's hitting everybody," Bettijean said helplessly. "Not many kids so far, thank heavens. But housewives, businessmen, office workers, teachers, preachers—rich, poor—from Florida to Alaska. Just when you called me in, one of the girls thought she had a trend. The isolated mountain areas of the West and South. But reports are too fragmentary."
"What is it?" he cried suddenly, banging the desk. "People deathly ill, but nobody dying. And doctors can't identify the poison until they have a fatality for an autopsy. People stricken in every part of the country, but the water systems are pure. How does it spread?"
"In food?"
"How? There must be hundreds of canneries and dairies and packing plants over the country. How could they all goof at the same time—even if it was sabotage?"
"On the wind?"
"But who could accurately predict every wind over the entire country—even Alaska and Hawaii—without hitting Canada or Mexico? And why wouldn't everybody get it in a given area?"
Bettijean's smooth brow furrowed and she reached across the desk to grip his icy, sweating hands. "Andy, do ... do you think it's ... well, an enemy?"
"I don't know," he said. "I just don't know."
For a long moment he sat there, trying to draw strength from her, punishing his brain for the glimmer of an idea. Finally, shaking his head, he pushed back into his chair and reached for the sheaf of papers.
"We've got to find a clue—a trend—an inkling of something." He nodded toward the outer office. "Stop all in-coming calls. Get those girls on lines to hospitals in every city and town in the country. Have them contact individual doctors in rural areas. Then line up another relief crew, and get somebody carting in more coffee and sandwiches. And on those calls, be sure we learn the sex, age, and occupation of the victims. You and I'll start with Washington."
Bettijean snapped to her feet, grinned her encouragement and strode from the room. Andy could hear her crisp instructions to the girls on the phones. Sucking air through his teeth, he reached for his phone and directory.
He dialed until every finger of his right hand was sore. He spoke to worried doctors and frantic hospital administrators and hysterical nurses. His firm, fine penmanship deteriorated to a barely legible scrawl as writer's cramp knotted his hand and arm. His voice burned down to a rasping whisper. But columns climbed up his rough chart and broken lines pointed vaguely to trends.
It was hours later when Bettijean came back into the office with another stack of papers. Andy hung up his phone and reached for a cigarette. At that moment the door banged open. Nerves raw, Bettijean cried out. Andy's cigarette tumbled from his trembling fingers.
"Sergeant," the chicken colonel barked, parading into the office.
Andy swore under his breath and eyed the two young officers who trailed after the colonel. Emotionally exhausted, he had to clamp his jaw against a huge laugh that struggled up in his throat. For just an instant there, the colonel had reminded him of a movie version of General Rommel strutting up and down before his tanks. But it wasn't a swagger stick the colonel had tucked under his arm. It was a folded newspaper. Opening it, the colonel flung it down on Andy's desk.
"RED PLAGUE SWEEPS NATION," the scare headline screamed. Andy's first glance caught such phrases as "alleged Russian plot" and "germ warfare" and "authorities hopelessly baffled."
Snatching the paper, Andy balled it and hurled it from him. "That'll help a lot," he growled hoarsely.
"Well, then, Sergeant." The colonel tried to relax his square face, but tension rode every weathered wrinkle and fear glinted behind the pale gray eyes. "So you finally recognize the gravity of the situation."
Andy's head snapped up, heated words searing towards his lips. Bettijean stepped quickly around the desk and laid a steady hand on his shoulder.
"Colonel," she said levelly, "you should know better than that."
A shocked young captain exploded, "Corporal. Maybe you'd better report to—"
"All right," Andy said sharply.
For a long moment he stared at his clenched fists. Then he exhaled slowly and, to the colonel, flatly and without apology, he said,
"You'll have to excuse the people in this office if they overlook some of the G.I. niceties. We've been without sleep for two days, we're surviving on sandwiches and coffee, and we're fighting a war here that makes every other one look like a Sunday School picnic." He felt Bettijean's hand tighten reassuringly on his shoulder and he gave her a tired smile. Then he hunched forward and picked up a report. "So say what you came here to say and let us get back to work."
"Sergeant," the captain said, as if reading from a manual,
"insubordination cannot be tolerated, even under emergency conditions. Your conduct here will be noted and—"
"Oh, good heavens!" Bettijean cried, her fingers biting into Andy's shoulder. "Do you have to come in here trying to throw your weight around when this man—"
"That's enough," the colonel snapped. "I had hoped that you two would co-operate, but...." He let the sentence trail off as he swelled up a bit with his own importance. "I have turned Washington upside down to get these two officers from the surgeon general's office. Sergeant. Corporal. You are relieved of your duties as of this moment. You will report to my office at once for suitable disciplinary action."
Bettijean sucked in a strained breath and her hand flew to her mouth.
"But you can't—"
"Let's go," Andy said, pushing up from his chair. Ignoring the brass, he turned to her and brushed his lips across hers. "Let them sweat a while. Let 'em have the whole stinking business. Whatever they do to us, at least we can get some sleep."
"But you can't quit now," Bettijean protested. "These brass hats don't know from—"
"Corporal!" the colonel roared.
And from the door, an icy voice said, "Yes, colonel?"
The colonel and his captains wheeled, stared and saluted. "Oh, general," the colonel said. "I was just—"
"I know," the brigadier said, stepping into the room. "I've been listening to you. And I thought I suggested that everybody leave the sergeant and his staff alone."
"But, general, I—"
The general showed the colonel his back and motioned Andy into his chair. He glanced to Bettijean and a smile warmed his wedge face.
"Corporal, were you speaking just then as a woman or as a soldier?"
Crimson erupted into Bettijean's face and her tight laugh said many things. She shrugged. "Both I guess."
The general waved her to a chair and, oblivious of the colonel, pulled up a chair for himself. The last trace of humor drained from his face as he leaned elbows on the desk. "Andy, this is even worse than we had feared."
Andy fumbled for a cigarette and Bettijean passed him a match. A captain opened his mouth to speak, but the colonel shushed him.
"I've just come from Intelligence," the general said. "We haven't had a report—nothing from our agents, from the Diplomatic Corps, from the civilian newspapermen—not a word from any Iron Curtain country for a day and half. Everybody's frantic. The last item we had—it was a coded message the Reds'd tried to censor—was an indication of something big in the works."
"A day and half ago," Andy mused. "Just about the time we knew we had an epidemic. And about the time they knew it."
"It could be just propaganda," Bettijean said hopefully, "proving that they could cripple us from within."
The general nodded. "Or it could be the softening up for an all-out effort. Every American base in the world is alerted and every serviceman is being issued live ammunition. If we're wrong, we've still got an epidemic and panic that could touch it off. If we're right ... well, we've got to know. What can you do?"
Andy dropped his haggard face into his hands. His voice came through muffled. "I can sit here and cry." For an eternity he sat there, futility piling on helplessness, aware of Bettijean's hand on his arm. He heard the colonel try to speak and sensed the general's movement that silenced him.
Suddenly he sat upright and slapped a palm down on the desk. "We'll find your answers, sir. All we ask is co-operation."
The general gave both Andy and Bettijean a long, sober look, then launched himself from the chair. Pivoting, he said, "Colonel, you and your captains will be stationed by that switchboard out there. For the duration of this emergency, you will take orders only from the sergeant and the corporal here."
"But, general," the colonel wailed, "a noncom? I'm assigned—"
The general snorted. "Insubordination cannot be tolerated—unless you find a two-star general to outrank me. Now, as I said before, let's get out of here and let these people work."
The brass exited wordlessly. Bettijean sighed noisily. Andy found his cigarette dead and lit another. He fancied a tiny lever in his brain and he shifted gears to direct his thinking back into the proper channel. Abruptly his fatigue began to lift. He picked up the new pile of reports Bettijean had brought in.
She move around the desk and sat, noting the phone book he had used, studying the names he had crossed off. "Did you learn anything?" she asked.
Andy coughed, trying to clear his raw throat. "It's crazy," he said.
"From the Senate and House on down, I haven't found a single government worker sick."
"I found a few," she said. "Over in a Virginia hospital."
"But I did find," Andy said, flipping through pages of his own scrawl, "a society matron and her social secretary, a whole flock of office workers—business, not government—and new parents and newly engaged girls and...." He shrugged.
"Did you notice anything significant about those office workers?"
Andy nodded. "I was going to ask you the same, since I was just guessing. I hadn't had time to check it out."
"Well, I checked some. Practically none of my victims came from big offices, either business or industry. They were all out of one and two-girl offices or small businesses."
"That was my guess. And do you know that I didn't find a doctor, dentist or attorney?"
"Nor a single postal worker."
Andy tried to smile. "One thing we do know. It's not a communicable thing. Thank heaven for—"
He broke off as a cute blonde entered and put stacks of reports before both Andy and Bettijean. The girl hesitated, fidgeting, fingers to her teeth. Then, without speaking, she hurried out.
Andy stared at the top sheet and groaned. "This may be something. Half the adult population of Aspen, Colorado, is down."
"What?" Bettijean frowned over the report in her hands. "It's the same thing—only not quite as severe—in Taos and Santa Fe, New Mexico."
"Writers?"
"Mostly. Some artists, too, and musicians. And poets are among the hard hit."
"This is insane," Andy muttered. "Doctors and dentists are fine—writers and poets are sick. Make sense out of that."
Bettijean held up a paper and managed a confused smile. "Here's a country doctor in Tennessee. He doesn't even know what it's all about. Nobody's sick in his valley."
"Somebody in our outer office is organized," Andy said, pulling at his cigarette. "Here're reports from a dozen military installations all lumped together."
"What does it show?"
"Black-out. By order of somebody higher up—no medical releases. Must mean they've got it." He scratched the growing stubble on his chin.
"If this were a fifth column setup, wouldn't the armed forces be the first hit?"
"Sure," Bettijean brightened, then sobered. "Maybe not. The brass could keep it secret if an epidemic hit an army camp. And they could slap a control condition on any military area. But the panic will come from the general public."
"Here's another batch," Andy said. "Small college towns under twenty-five thousand population. All hard hit."
"Well, it's not split intellectually. Small colleges and small offices and writers get it. Doctors don't and dentists don't. But we can't tell who's got it on the military bases."
"And it's not geographical. Look, remember those two reports from Tennessee? That place where they voted on water bonds or something, everybody had it. But the country doctor in another section hadn't even heard of it." Andy could only shake his head.
Bettijean heaved herself up from the chair and trudged back to the outer office. She returned momentarily with a tray of food. Putting a paper cup of coffee and a sandwich in front of Andy, she sat down and nibbled at her snack like an exhausted chipmunk.
Andy banged a fist at his desk again. Coffee splashed over the rim of his cup onto the clutter of papers. "It's here," he said angrily.
"It's here somewhere, but we can't find it."
"The answer?"
"Of course. What is it that girls in small offices do or eat or drink or wear that girls in large offices don't do or eat or drink or wear? What do writers and doctors do differently? Or poets and dentists? What are we missing? What—"
In the outer office a girl cried out. A body thumped against a desk, then a chair, then to the floor. Two girls screamed.
Andy bolted up from his chair. Racing to the door, he shouted back to Bettijean, "Get a staff doctor and a chemist from the lab."
It was the girl who had been so nervous in his office earlier. Now she lay in a pathetic little heap between her desk and chair, whimpering, shivering, eyes wide with horror. The other girls clustered at the hall door, plainly ready to stampede.
"It's not contagious," Andy growled. "Find some blankets or coats to cover her. And get a glass of water."
The other girls, glad for the excuse, dashed away. Andy scooped up the fallen girl and put her down gently on the close-jammed desks. He used a chair cushion for a pillow. By then the other girls were back with a blanket and the glass of water. He covered the girl, gave her a sip of water and heard somebody murmur, "Poor Janis."
"Now," Andy said brightly, "how's that, Janis?"
She mustered a smile, and breathed, "Better. I ... I was so scared. Fever and dizzy ... symptoms like the epidemic."
"Now you know there's nothing to be afraid of," Andy said, feeling suddenly and ridiculously like a pill roller with a practiced bedside manner. "You know you may feel pretty miserable, but nobody's conked out with this stuff yet."
Janis breathed out and her taut body relaxed.
"Don't hurry," Andy said, "but I want you to tell me everything that you did—everything you ate or drank—in the last ... oh, twelve hours." He felt a pressure behind him and swiveled his head to see Bettijean standing there. He tried to smile.
"What time is it?" Janis asked weakly.
Andy glanced to a wall clock, then gave it a double take.
One of the girls said, "It's three o'clock in the morning." She edged nearer Andy, obviously eager to replace Janis as the center of attention. Andy ignored her.
"I ... I've been here since ... golly, yesterday morning at nine," Janis said. "I came to work as usual and...."
Slowly, haltingly, she recited the routine of a routine work day, then told about the quick snack that sufficed for supper and about staying on her phone and typewriter for another five hours. "It was about eleven when the relief crew came in."
"What did you do then?" Andy asked.
"I ... I took a break and...." Her ivory skin reddened, the color spreading into the roots of her fluffy curls, and she turned her face away from Andy. "And I had a sandwich and some coffee and got a little nap in the ladies' lounge and ... and that's all."
"And that's not all," Andy prompted. "What else?"
"Nothing," Janis said too quickly.
Andy shook his head. "Tell it all and maybe it'll help."
"But ... but...."
"Was it something against regulations?"
"I ... I don't know. I think...."
"I'll vouch for your job in this office."
"Well...." She seemed on the verge of tears and her pleading glance sought out Andy, then Bettijean, then her co-workers. Finally, resigned, she said, "I ... I wrote a letter to my mother."
Andy swallowed against his groan of disappointment. "And you told her about what we were doing here."
Janis nodded, and tears welled into her wide eyes.
"Did you mail it?"
"Y ... yes."
"You didn't use a government envelope to save a stamp?"
"Oh, no. I always carry a few stamps with me." She choked down a sob.
"Did I do wrong?"
"No, I don't think so," Andy said, patting her shoulder. "There's certainly nothing secret about this epidemic. Now you just take it easy and—. Oh, here's a doctor now."
The doctor, a white-headed Air Force major, bustled into the room. A lab technician in a white smock was close behind. Andy could only shrug and indicate the girl.
Turning away, lighting a cigarette, he tried to focus on the tangle of thoughts that spun through his head. Doctors, writers, society matrons, office workers—Aspen, Taos and college towns—thousands of people sick—but none in that valley in Tennessee—and few government workers—just one girl in his office—and she was sicker and more frightened about a letter—and....
"Hey, wait!" Andy yelled.
Everyone in the room froze as Andy spun around, dashed to Bettijean's desk and yanked out the wide, top drawer. He pawed through it, straightened, then leaped across to the desk Janis had used. He snatched open drawer after drawer. In a bottom one he found her purse. Ripping it open, he dumped the contents on the desk and clawed through the pile until he found what he wanted. Handing it to the lab technician, he said, "Get me a report. Fast."
The technician darted out.
Andy wheeled to Bettijean. "Get the brass in here. And call the general first." To the doctor, he said, "Give that girl the best of everything."
Then he ducked back to his own office and to the pile of reports. He was still poring over them when the general arrived. Half a dozen other brass hats, none of whom had been to bed, were close behind. The lab technician arrived a minute later. He shook his head as he handed his hastily scribbled report to Andy.
It was Bettijean who squeezed into the office and broke the brittle silence. "Andy, for heaven's sake, what is it?" Then she moved around the desk to stand behind him as he faced the officers.
"Have you got something?" the brigadier asked. "Some girl outside was babbling about writers and doctors, and dentists and college students, and little secretaries and big secretaries. Have you established a trend?"
Andy glanced at the lab report and his smile was as relieved as it was weary. "Our problem," he said, "was in figuring out what a writer does that a doctor doesn't—why girls from small offices were sick—and why senators and postal workers weren't—why college students caught the bug and people in a Tennessee community didn't.
"The lab report isn't complete. They haven't had time to isolate the poison and prescribe medication. But"—he held up a four-cent stamp—"here's the villain, gentlemen."
The big brass stood stunned and shocked. Mouths flapped open and eyes bugged at Andy, at the stamp.
Bettijean said, "Sure. College kids and engaged girls and new parents and especially writers and artists and poets—they'd all lick lots of stamps. Professional men have secretaries. Big offices have postage-meter machines. And government offices have free franking. And"—she threw her arms around the sergeant's neck—"Andy, you're wonderful."
"The old American ingenuity," the colonel said, reaching for Andy's phone. "I knew we could lick it. Now all we have to do—"
"At ease, colonel," the brigadier said sharply. He waited until the colonel had retreated, then addressed Andy. "It's your show. What do you suggest?"
"Get somebody—maybe even the President—on all radio and TV networks. Explain frankly about the four-centers and warn against licking any stamps. Then—"
He broke off as his phone rang. Answering, he listened for a moment, then hung up and said, "But before the big announcement, get somebody checking on the security clearances at whatever plant it is where they print stamps. This's a big deal. Somebody may've been planted years ago for this operation. It shouldn't be too hard.
"But there's no evidence it was a plot yet. Could be pure accident—some chemical in the stickum spoiled. Do they keep the stickum in barrels? Find out who had access. And ... oh, the phone call. That was the lab. The antidote's simple and the cure should be quick. They can phone or broadcast the medical information to doctors. The man on the phone said they could start emptying hospitals in six hours. And maybe we should release some propaganda. "United States whips mystery virus," or something like that. And we could send the Kremlin a stamp collection and.... Aw, you take it, sir. I'm pooped."
The general wheeled to fire a salvo of commands. Officers poured into the corridor. Only the brigadier remained, a puzzled frown crinkling his granite brow.
"But you said that postal workers weren't getting sick."
Andy chucked. "That's right. Did you ever see a post office clerk lick a stamp? They always use a sponge."
The general looked to Bettijean, to Andy, to the stamp. He grinned and the grin became a rumbling laugh. "How would you two like a thirty-day furlough to rest up—or to get better acquainted?"
Bettijean squealed. Andy reached for her hand.
"And while you're gone," the general continued, "I'll see what strings I can pull. If I can't wangle you a couple of battlefield commissions, I'll zip you both through O.C.S. so fast you won't even have time to pin on the bars."
But neither Andy nor Bettijean had heard a word after the mention of furlough. Like a pair of puppy-lovers, they were sinking into the depths of each other's eyes.
And the general was still chuckling as he picked up the lone four-cent stamp in his left hand, made a gun of his right hand, and marched the stamp out of the office under guard.
THE END
Question:
What is the plot of the story?
Answer:
|
[
"The Plague takes place in the modern United States of America. The story follows several government workers as they navigate a sudden and mysterious epidemic. Sergeant Major Andrew McCloud, mostly referred to as Andy, works at the Office of the Civil Health and Germ Welfare Protection located in the Pentagon. Corporal Bettijean Baker, his right-hand woman and new lover, picks up the phone one day, and then chaos ensues. \nA switchboard is put in the hallway to help receive the hundreds of calls being made to their office. This sudden influx of calls, attention, people, and disease leave the main characters feeling overwhelmed and desperate. \nSince the new lieutenant had not arrived (post Colonel Patterson’s retirement), Sergeant Andy is effectively in charge as a noncom, though not everyone is happy about that. Andy pushes their worries aside, and continues working. \nDespite the spread, no fatalities have been reported, and infections are random. No trend has been established yet, but they are searching desperately for one. Bettijean goes through reports with Sergeant Andy, revealing all she’s uncovered. It’s affecting workers, artists, and poets, but not necessarily those who work in government, or as doctors or businessmen. The water systems are ruled out, as well as wind and food. Bettijean and Andy are left with nothing, except the possibility of biological terrorism. \nFinally, Andy orders Bettijean to halt all in-coming calls, and redirect their attention to all hospitals. \nDespite their best efforts, no conclusion can be reached. The colonel reappears in Andy’s office, followed by two officers. He throws a newspaper down on his desk, proclaiming that this epidemic was allegedly caused by the Russians, and that all the authorities are baffled. It is hinted that the Colonel commissioned this article to throw doubt on Andy’s authority. Andy defends his employees and the work they’ve been doing. The Colonel forces Andy and Bettijean out of office, and Andy lets him, kissing Bettijean on the way out. Suddenly, the general walks in and gives Andy back his job, while telling him the news from Intelligence. The Iron Curtain’s not sent word for almost two days. Only a coded message that could have been about the epidemic. \nAndy promises to work hard again, and the general assigns the colonel and his two men to the switchboard in the hall. After brainstorming about potential causes, Janis, another employee, enters the room and puts another stack of reports down. Small college towns, newly engaged girls, poets, all these people have been infected. Janis falls to the floor, and everyone rushes to her. She’s been infected with the disease, and they question her about her activities for the past 12 hours. It’s revealed finally that she wrote a letter to her mother, and Andy finally figures it out. The poison was in the stamps. He lets his higher-ups know, and Janis is carted off to safety. Bettijean and Andy are given a 30-day vacation to relax and explore their relationship further. \n",
"Sergeant Major Andrew McCloud has found himself in charge of the Office of Civil Health and Germ Warfare Protection somewhat by accident. As he waits for a replacement, his superior officers nervously warn him about an epidemic that they don’t understand yet, that Andy will be in charge of the response for. Corporal Bettijean Baker is Andy’s assistant, in this previously under-the-radar department that is all of a sudden the most important aspect of the nation’s response. Andy and Bettijean work through reports together to look for a trend, hoping to find how the epidemic is spreading. It seems to be affecting only the United States of America, without affecting Canada even though it has reached Alaska. The dumbfounded officers decide to learn more about the people who have fallen sick. When Bettijean returned with more reports, two other officers came into Andy’s office to show him the headlines: the public panic had started, two days after the office had stopped sleeping to find the root of the issue. The colonel doesn’t appreciate the lack of military formality in the way that Andy and Bettijean are taking, and he angrily orders them to be disciplined before the general interrupts. The general gestures to Andy and Bettijean to continue their work, and sat down with them to talk solemnly. There’s some suspicion about the Soviet Union’s involvement. Recognizing Andy’s need for manpower, the general assigns the very unhappy colonel to report to Andy and Bettijean for as long as the epidemic is going on. Lighting a new cigarette, Andy gets back to work. The team found evidence of small business workers being sick, but no government workers (outside of some in a hospital), no doctors, and no postal workers. They take this as evidence that it’s not communicable, but they find some cities are more affected than others. Writers, poets, artists, and musicians in cities that are often vacation spots are hit hard, along with small college towns. They are interrupted by screams outside their door when Janis falls sick. When she’s able to talk, Andy asks Janis questions about the past twelve hours. She had written and mailed a letter to her mother about the epidemic, but nothing else seemed out of place. Andy pondered over another cigarette as the doctor saw to Janis. Andy suddenly had an idea, frantically searched for Janis’ purse, and handed one of her postage stamps to a lab technician. His hunch was right: the stamp was the problem, licking the glue was how people got sick. Andy starts on a plan to notify the public of the issue, and to investigate the source of the poison in the stamps. The lab was able to identify the toxin, and it would be simple to treat. The general took over giving orders, and gave Andy and Bettijean a month of furlough before marching the stamp out of the office as Andy and Bettijean looked at each other longingly. ",
"The story describes members of the U.S. military Germ Warfare Protection Division as they struggle to understand the cause of a mysterious illness. Sergeant Major Andy McCloud and his Corporal Bettijean Baker slowly learns the details of the pandemic. It is entirely confined to the United States and seems to affect people according to no discernable pattern. The illness is not passed person to person and has affected people regardless of age, location, and behavior while other people are spared.\n\nHigh ranking military officials (the brass) express to Andy the urgency of the situation. As the day wears on, Andymust deal with threats to his operation from officers that believe that, as a noncommissioned officer, He is not qualified to perform his task regardless of his obvious expertise.\n\nVague trends begin to emerge. Large offices see no cases while small ones do; doctors and dentists are mostly unaffected while writers and poets are.\n\nEventually a woman working the phones in the Germ Warfare Protection division falls ill and Andy solves the riddle of the illness. Stamp adhesive is determined to be the vector for the illness. With the mystery solved, a plan to halt the spread of the illness is formulated and the brass gives Andy and Bettijean a vacation furlough and promise of a promotion.",
"Sergeant Andrew McCloud is in charge of the office of Germ War Protection when a mysterious plague breaks out in the United States. His coworker Bettlejean tells him that all kinds of people are coming down with the illness, but no one has died yet. The strangest part about the new disease is that it has only affected Americans. Not even Canadians or Mexicans have become sick. \n\nMcCloud decides to send everyone who works in the office out to do some investigating about where the illness is coming from. He tells Bettlejean that the two of them will work in Washington. They begin to put together clues about the nature of the illness when suddenly a woman in the office, Janis, drops to the ground. She is red and feverish and extremely nervous. After some prodding, she admits that she broke an office rule when she mailed her mother a letter that included information about the outbreak. \n\nAfter a few moments of reflection, McCloud runs to Janis’s office and tears through her drawers to find her stamps. He sends the lab technician to test them, but he is already convinced that the stamps contain poison, and they are behind the mysterious illness. \n\nWhen his superior comes in to ask him what he has discovered, McCloud divulges his beliefs about the problematic stamps. McCloud suggests that the President make an announcement to the public about the poisonous stamps. However, he quickly realizes that the stamps could have been tainted accidentally, and this doesn’t necessarily point to an attack on the country. McCloud is interrupted by a phone call from the lab. The technician informs him that the illness the stamps cause has a quick fix, and the people who are ill are going to be just fine. McCloud allows someone else to take over. He’s too tired and elated to make any more decisions. \n\nThe general offers McCloud and Bettlejean many awards and some time off to get to know each other better. He can tell that they are quite fond of each other. \n\n\n"
] |
30062
|
THE PLAGUE
By TEDDY KELLER
Suppose a strictly one hundred per cent American plague showed up.... One that attacked only people within the political borders of the United States!
Illustrated by Schoenherr
Sergeant Major Andrew McCloud ignored the jangling telephones and the excited jabber of a room full of brass, and lit a cigarette. Somebody had to keep his head in this mess. Everybody was about to flip.
Like the telephone. Two days ago Corporal Bettijean Baker had been answering the rare call on the single line—in that friendly, husky voice that gave even generals pause—by saying, "Good morning. Office of the Civil Health and Germ Warfare Protection Co-ordinator." Now there was a switchboard out in the hall with a web of lines running to a dozen girls at a half dozen desks wedged into the outer office. And now the harried girls answered with a hasty, "Germ War Protection."
All the brass hats in Washington had suddenly discovered this office deep in the recesses of the Pentagon. And none of them could quite comprehend what had happened. The situation might have been funny, or at least pathetic, if it hadn't been so desperate. Even so, Andy McCloud's nerves and patience had frayed thin.
"I told you, general," he snapped to the flustered brigadier, "Colonel Patterson was retired ten days ago. I don't know what happened. Maybe this replacement sawbones got strangled in red tape. Anyhow, the brand-new lieutenant hasn't showed up here. As far as I know, I'm in charge."
"But this is incredible," a two-star general wailed. "A mysterious epidemic is sweeping the country, possibly an insidious germ attack timed to precede an all-out invasion, and a noncom is sitting on top of the whole powder keg."
Andy's big hands clenched into fists and he had to wait a moment before he could speak safely. Doggone the freckles and the unruly mop of hair that give him such a boyish look. "May I remind you, general," he said, "that I've been entombed here for two years. My staff and I know what to do. If you'll give us some co-operation and a priority, we'll try to figure this thing out."
"But good heavens," a chicken colonel moaned, "this is all so irregular. A noncom!" He said it like a dirty word.
"Irregular, hell," the brigadier snorted, the message getting through.
"There're ways. Gentlemen, I suggest we clear out of here and let the sergeant get to work." He took a step toward the door, and the other officers, protesting and complaining, moved along after him. As they drifted out, he turned and said, "We'll clear your office for top priority." Then dead serious, he added, "Son, a whole nation could panic at any moment. You've got to come through."
Andy didn't waste time standing. He merely nodded to the general, snubbed out his cigarette, and buzzed the intercom. "Bettijean, will you bring me all the latest reports, please?" Then he peeled out of his be-ribboned blouse and rolled up his sleeves. He allowed himself one moment to enjoy the sight of the slim, black-headed corporal who entered his office.
Bettijean crossed briskly to his desk. She gave him a motherly smile as she put down a thick sheaf of papers. "You look beat," she said.
"Brass give you much trouble?"
"Not much. We're top priority now." He ran fingers through the thick, brown hair and massaged his scalp, trying to generate stimulation to his wary and confused brain. "What's new?"
"I've gone though some of these," she said. "Tried to save you a little time."
"Thanks. Sit down."
She pulled up a chair and thumbed through the papers. "So far, no fatalities. That's why there's no panic yet, I guess. But it's spreading like ... well, like a plague." Fear flickered deep in her dark eyes.
"Any water reports?" Andy asked.
"Wichita O.K., Indianapolis O.K., Tulsa O.K., Buffalo O.K.,—and a bunch more. No indication there. Except"—she fished out a one-page report—"some little town in Tennessee. Yesterday there was a campaign for everybody to write their congressman about some deal and today they were to vote on a new water system. Hardly anybody showed up at the polls. They've all got it."
Andy shrugged. "You can drink water, but don't vote for it. Oh, that's a big help." He rummaged through the clutter on his desk and came up with a crude chart. "Any trends yet?"
"It's hitting everybody," Bettijean said helplessly. "Not many kids so far, thank heavens. But housewives, businessmen, office workers, teachers, preachers—rich, poor—from Florida to Alaska. Just when you called me in, one of the girls thought she had a trend. The isolated mountain areas of the West and South. But reports are too fragmentary."
"What is it?" he cried suddenly, banging the desk. "People deathly ill, but nobody dying. And doctors can't identify the poison until they have a fatality for an autopsy. People stricken in every part of the country, but the water systems are pure. How does it spread?"
"In food?"
"How? There must be hundreds of canneries and dairies and packing plants over the country. How could they all goof at the same time—even if it was sabotage?"
"On the wind?"
"But who could accurately predict every wind over the entire country—even Alaska and Hawaii—without hitting Canada or Mexico? And why wouldn't everybody get it in a given area?"
Bettijean's smooth brow furrowed and she reached across the desk to grip his icy, sweating hands. "Andy, do ... do you think it's ... well, an enemy?"
"I don't know," he said. "I just don't know."
For a long moment he sat there, trying to draw strength from her, punishing his brain for the glimmer of an idea. Finally, shaking his head, he pushed back into his chair and reached for the sheaf of papers.
"We've got to find a clue—a trend—an inkling of something." He nodded toward the outer office. "Stop all in-coming calls. Get those girls on lines to hospitals in every city and town in the country. Have them contact individual doctors in rural areas. Then line up another relief crew, and get somebody carting in more coffee and sandwiches. And on those calls, be sure we learn the sex, age, and occupation of the victims. You and I'll start with Washington."
Bettijean snapped to her feet, grinned her encouragement and strode from the room. Andy could hear her crisp instructions to the girls on the phones. Sucking air through his teeth, he reached for his phone and directory.
He dialed until every finger of his right hand was sore. He spoke to worried doctors and frantic hospital administrators and hysterical nurses. His firm, fine penmanship deteriorated to a barely legible scrawl as writer's cramp knotted his hand and arm. His voice burned down to a rasping whisper. But columns climbed up his rough chart and broken lines pointed vaguely to trends.
It was hours later when Bettijean came back into the office with another stack of papers. Andy hung up his phone and reached for a cigarette. At that moment the door banged open. Nerves raw, Bettijean cried out. Andy's cigarette tumbled from his trembling fingers.
"Sergeant," the chicken colonel barked, parading into the office.
Andy swore under his breath and eyed the two young officers who trailed after the colonel. Emotionally exhausted, he had to clamp his jaw against a huge laugh that struggled up in his throat. For just an instant there, the colonel had reminded him of a movie version of General Rommel strutting up and down before his tanks. But it wasn't a swagger stick the colonel had tucked under his arm. It was a folded newspaper. Opening it, the colonel flung it down on Andy's desk.
"RED PLAGUE SWEEPS NATION," the scare headline screamed. Andy's first glance caught such phrases as "alleged Russian plot" and "germ warfare" and "authorities hopelessly baffled."
Snatching the paper, Andy balled it and hurled it from him. "That'll help a lot," he growled hoarsely.
"Well, then, Sergeant." The colonel tried to relax his square face, but tension rode every weathered wrinkle and fear glinted behind the pale gray eyes. "So you finally recognize the gravity of the situation."
Andy's head snapped up, heated words searing towards his lips. Bettijean stepped quickly around the desk and laid a steady hand on his shoulder.
"Colonel," she said levelly, "you should know better than that."
A shocked young captain exploded, "Corporal. Maybe you'd better report to—"
"All right," Andy said sharply.
For a long moment he stared at his clenched fists. Then he exhaled slowly and, to the colonel, flatly and without apology, he said,
"You'll have to excuse the people in this office if they overlook some of the G.I. niceties. We've been without sleep for two days, we're surviving on sandwiches and coffee, and we're fighting a war here that makes every other one look like a Sunday School picnic." He felt Bettijean's hand tighten reassuringly on his shoulder and he gave her a tired smile. Then he hunched forward and picked up a report. "So say what you came here to say and let us get back to work."
"Sergeant," the captain said, as if reading from a manual,
"insubordination cannot be tolerated, even under emergency conditions. Your conduct here will be noted and—"
"Oh, good heavens!" Bettijean cried, her fingers biting into Andy's shoulder. "Do you have to come in here trying to throw your weight around when this man—"
"That's enough," the colonel snapped. "I had hoped that you two would co-operate, but...." He let the sentence trail off as he swelled up a bit with his own importance. "I have turned Washington upside down to get these two officers from the surgeon general's office. Sergeant. Corporal. You are relieved of your duties as of this moment. You will report to my office at once for suitable disciplinary action."
Bettijean sucked in a strained breath and her hand flew to her mouth.
"But you can't—"
"Let's go," Andy said, pushing up from his chair. Ignoring the brass, he turned to her and brushed his lips across hers. "Let them sweat a while. Let 'em have the whole stinking business. Whatever they do to us, at least we can get some sleep."
"But you can't quit now," Bettijean protested. "These brass hats don't know from—"
"Corporal!" the colonel roared.
And from the door, an icy voice said, "Yes, colonel?"
The colonel and his captains wheeled, stared and saluted. "Oh, general," the colonel said. "I was just—"
"I know," the brigadier said, stepping into the room. "I've been listening to you. And I thought I suggested that everybody leave the sergeant and his staff alone."
"But, general, I—"
The general showed the colonel his back and motioned Andy into his chair. He glanced to Bettijean and a smile warmed his wedge face.
"Corporal, were you speaking just then as a woman or as a soldier?"
Crimson erupted into Bettijean's face and her tight laugh said many things. She shrugged. "Both I guess."
The general waved her to a chair and, oblivious of the colonel, pulled up a chair for himself. The last trace of humor drained from his face as he leaned elbows on the desk. "Andy, this is even worse than we had feared."
Andy fumbled for a cigarette and Bettijean passed him a match. A captain opened his mouth to speak, but the colonel shushed him.
"I've just come from Intelligence," the general said. "We haven't had a report—nothing from our agents, from the Diplomatic Corps, from the civilian newspapermen—not a word from any Iron Curtain country for a day and half. Everybody's frantic. The last item we had—it was a coded message the Reds'd tried to censor—was an indication of something big in the works."
"A day and half ago," Andy mused. "Just about the time we knew we had an epidemic. And about the time they knew it."
"It could be just propaganda," Bettijean said hopefully, "proving that they could cripple us from within."
The general nodded. "Or it could be the softening up for an all-out effort. Every American base in the world is alerted and every serviceman is being issued live ammunition. If we're wrong, we've still got an epidemic and panic that could touch it off. If we're right ... well, we've got to know. What can you do?"
Andy dropped his haggard face into his hands. His voice came through muffled. "I can sit here and cry." For an eternity he sat there, futility piling on helplessness, aware of Bettijean's hand on his arm. He heard the colonel try to speak and sensed the general's movement that silenced him.
Suddenly he sat upright and slapped a palm down on the desk. "We'll find your answers, sir. All we ask is co-operation."
The general gave both Andy and Bettijean a long, sober look, then launched himself from the chair. Pivoting, he said, "Colonel, you and your captains will be stationed by that switchboard out there. For the duration of this emergency, you will take orders only from the sergeant and the corporal here."
"But, general," the colonel wailed, "a noncom? I'm assigned—"
The general snorted. "Insubordination cannot be tolerated—unless you find a two-star general to outrank me. Now, as I said before, let's get out of here and let these people work."
The brass exited wordlessly. Bettijean sighed noisily. Andy found his cigarette dead and lit another. He fancied a tiny lever in his brain and he shifted gears to direct his thinking back into the proper channel. Abruptly his fatigue began to lift. He picked up the new pile of reports Bettijean had brought in.
She move around the desk and sat, noting the phone book he had used, studying the names he had crossed off. "Did you learn anything?" she asked.
Andy coughed, trying to clear his raw throat. "It's crazy," he said.
"From the Senate and House on down, I haven't found a single government worker sick."
"I found a few," she said. "Over in a Virginia hospital."
"But I did find," Andy said, flipping through pages of his own scrawl, "a society matron and her social secretary, a whole flock of office workers—business, not government—and new parents and newly engaged girls and...." He shrugged.
"Did you notice anything significant about those office workers?"
Andy nodded. "I was going to ask you the same, since I was just guessing. I hadn't had time to check it out."
"Well, I checked some. Practically none of my victims came from big offices, either business or industry. They were all out of one and two-girl offices or small businesses."
"That was my guess. And do you know that I didn't find a doctor, dentist or attorney?"
"Nor a single postal worker."
Andy tried to smile. "One thing we do know. It's not a communicable thing. Thank heaven for—"
He broke off as a cute blonde entered and put stacks of reports before both Andy and Bettijean. The girl hesitated, fidgeting, fingers to her teeth. Then, without speaking, she hurried out.
Andy stared at the top sheet and groaned. "This may be something. Half the adult population of Aspen, Colorado, is down."
"What?" Bettijean frowned over the report in her hands. "It's the same thing—only not quite as severe—in Taos and Santa Fe, New Mexico."
"Writers?"
"Mostly. Some artists, too, and musicians. And poets are among the hard hit."
"This is insane," Andy muttered. "Doctors and dentists are fine—writers and poets are sick. Make sense out of that."
Bettijean held up a paper and managed a confused smile. "Here's a country doctor in Tennessee. He doesn't even know what it's all about. Nobody's sick in his valley."
"Somebody in our outer office is organized," Andy said, pulling at his cigarette. "Here're reports from a dozen military installations all lumped together."
"What does it show?"
"Black-out. By order of somebody higher up—no medical releases. Must mean they've got it." He scratched the growing stubble on his chin.
"If this were a fifth column setup, wouldn't the armed forces be the first hit?"
"Sure," Bettijean brightened, then sobered. "Maybe not. The brass could keep it secret if an epidemic hit an army camp. And they could slap a control condition on any military area. But the panic will come from the general public."
"Here's another batch," Andy said. "Small college towns under twenty-five thousand population. All hard hit."
"Well, it's not split intellectually. Small colleges and small offices and writers get it. Doctors don't and dentists don't. But we can't tell who's got it on the military bases."
"And it's not geographical. Look, remember those two reports from Tennessee? That place where they voted on water bonds or something, everybody had it. But the country doctor in another section hadn't even heard of it." Andy could only shake his head.
Bettijean heaved herself up from the chair and trudged back to the outer office. She returned momentarily with a tray of food. Putting a paper cup of coffee and a sandwich in front of Andy, she sat down and nibbled at her snack like an exhausted chipmunk.
Andy banged a fist at his desk again. Coffee splashed over the rim of his cup onto the clutter of papers. "It's here," he said angrily.
"It's here somewhere, but we can't find it."
"The answer?"
"Of course. What is it that girls in small offices do or eat or drink or wear that girls in large offices don't do or eat or drink or wear? What do writers and doctors do differently? Or poets and dentists? What are we missing? What—"
In the outer office a girl cried out. A body thumped against a desk, then a chair, then to the floor. Two girls screamed.
Andy bolted up from his chair. Racing to the door, he shouted back to Bettijean, "Get a staff doctor and a chemist from the lab."
It was the girl who had been so nervous in his office earlier. Now she lay in a pathetic little heap between her desk and chair, whimpering, shivering, eyes wide with horror. The other girls clustered at the hall door, plainly ready to stampede.
"It's not contagious," Andy growled. "Find some blankets or coats to cover her. And get a glass of water."
The other girls, glad for the excuse, dashed away. Andy scooped up the fallen girl and put her down gently on the close-jammed desks. He used a chair cushion for a pillow. By then the other girls were back with a blanket and the glass of water. He covered the girl, gave her a sip of water and heard somebody murmur, "Poor Janis."
"Now," Andy said brightly, "how's that, Janis?"
She mustered a smile, and breathed, "Better. I ... I was so scared. Fever and dizzy ... symptoms like the epidemic."
"Now you know there's nothing to be afraid of," Andy said, feeling suddenly and ridiculously like a pill roller with a practiced bedside manner. "You know you may feel pretty miserable, but nobody's conked out with this stuff yet."
Janis breathed out and her taut body relaxed.
"Don't hurry," Andy said, "but I want you to tell me everything that you did—everything you ate or drank—in the last ... oh, twelve hours." He felt a pressure behind him and swiveled his head to see Bettijean standing there. He tried to smile.
"What time is it?" Janis asked weakly.
Andy glanced to a wall clock, then gave it a double take.
One of the girls said, "It's three o'clock in the morning." She edged nearer Andy, obviously eager to replace Janis as the center of attention. Andy ignored her.
"I ... I've been here since ... golly, yesterday morning at nine," Janis said. "I came to work as usual and...."
Slowly, haltingly, she recited the routine of a routine work day, then told about the quick snack that sufficed for supper and about staying on her phone and typewriter for another five hours. "It was about eleven when the relief crew came in."
"What did you do then?" Andy asked.
"I ... I took a break and...." Her ivory skin reddened, the color spreading into the roots of her fluffy curls, and she turned her face away from Andy. "And I had a sandwich and some coffee and got a little nap in the ladies' lounge and ... and that's all."
"And that's not all," Andy prompted. "What else?"
"Nothing," Janis said too quickly.
Andy shook his head. "Tell it all and maybe it'll help."
"But ... but...."
"Was it something against regulations?"
"I ... I don't know. I think...."
"I'll vouch for your job in this office."
"Well...." She seemed on the verge of tears and her pleading glance sought out Andy, then Bettijean, then her co-workers. Finally, resigned, she said, "I ... I wrote a letter to my mother."
Andy swallowed against his groan of disappointment. "And you told her about what we were doing here."
Janis nodded, and tears welled into her wide eyes.
"Did you mail it?"
"Y ... yes."
"You didn't use a government envelope to save a stamp?"
"Oh, no. I always carry a few stamps with me." She choked down a sob.
"Did I do wrong?"
"No, I don't think so," Andy said, patting her shoulder. "There's certainly nothing secret about this epidemic. Now you just take it easy and—. Oh, here's a doctor now."
The doctor, a white-headed Air Force major, bustled into the room. A lab technician in a white smock was close behind. Andy could only shrug and indicate the girl.
Turning away, lighting a cigarette, he tried to focus on the tangle of thoughts that spun through his head. Doctors, writers, society matrons, office workers—Aspen, Taos and college towns—thousands of people sick—but none in that valley in Tennessee—and few government workers—just one girl in his office—and she was sicker and more frightened about a letter—and....
"Hey, wait!" Andy yelled.
Everyone in the room froze as Andy spun around, dashed to Bettijean's desk and yanked out the wide, top drawer. He pawed through it, straightened, then leaped across to the desk Janis had used. He snatched open drawer after drawer. In a bottom one he found her purse. Ripping it open, he dumped the contents on the desk and clawed through the pile until he found what he wanted. Handing it to the lab technician, he said, "Get me a report. Fast."
The technician darted out.
Andy wheeled to Bettijean. "Get the brass in here. And call the general first." To the doctor, he said, "Give that girl the best of everything."
Then he ducked back to his own office and to the pile of reports. He was still poring over them when the general arrived. Half a dozen other brass hats, none of whom had been to bed, were close behind. The lab technician arrived a minute later. He shook his head as he handed his hastily scribbled report to Andy.
It was Bettijean who squeezed into the office and broke the brittle silence. "Andy, for heaven's sake, what is it?" Then she moved around the desk to stand behind him as he faced the officers.
"Have you got something?" the brigadier asked. "Some girl outside was babbling about writers and doctors, and dentists and college students, and little secretaries and big secretaries. Have you established a trend?"
Andy glanced at the lab report and his smile was as relieved as it was weary. "Our problem," he said, "was in figuring out what a writer does that a doctor doesn't—why girls from small offices were sick—and why senators and postal workers weren't—why college students caught the bug and people in a Tennessee community didn't.
"The lab report isn't complete. They haven't had time to isolate the poison and prescribe medication. But"—he held up a four-cent stamp—"here's the villain, gentlemen."
The big brass stood stunned and shocked. Mouths flapped open and eyes bugged at Andy, at the stamp.
Bettijean said, "Sure. College kids and engaged girls and new parents and especially writers and artists and poets—they'd all lick lots of stamps. Professional men have secretaries. Big offices have postage-meter machines. And government offices have free franking. And"—she threw her arms around the sergeant's neck—"Andy, you're wonderful."
"The old American ingenuity," the colonel said, reaching for Andy's phone. "I knew we could lick it. Now all we have to do—"
"At ease, colonel," the brigadier said sharply. He waited until the colonel had retreated, then addressed Andy. "It's your show. What do you suggest?"
"Get somebody—maybe even the President—on all radio and TV networks. Explain frankly about the four-centers and warn against licking any stamps. Then—"
He broke off as his phone rang. Answering, he listened for a moment, then hung up and said, "But before the big announcement, get somebody checking on the security clearances at whatever plant it is where they print stamps. This's a big deal. Somebody may've been planted years ago for this operation. It shouldn't be too hard.
"But there's no evidence it was a plot yet. Could be pure accident—some chemical in the stickum spoiled. Do they keep the stickum in barrels? Find out who had access. And ... oh, the phone call. That was the lab. The antidote's simple and the cure should be quick. They can phone or broadcast the medical information to doctors. The man on the phone said they could start emptying hospitals in six hours. And maybe we should release some propaganda. "United States whips mystery virus," or something like that. And we could send the Kremlin a stamp collection and.... Aw, you take it, sir. I'm pooped."
The general wheeled to fire a salvo of commands. Officers poured into the corridor. Only the brigadier remained, a puzzled frown crinkling his granite brow.
"But you said that postal workers weren't getting sick."
Andy chucked. "That's right. Did you ever see a post office clerk lick a stamp? They always use a sponge."
The general looked to Bettijean, to Andy, to the stamp. He grinned and the grin became a rumbling laugh. "How would you two like a thirty-day furlough to rest up—or to get better acquainted?"
Bettijean squealed. Andy reached for her hand.
"And while you're gone," the general continued, "I'll see what strings I can pull. If I can't wangle you a couple of battlefield commissions, I'll zip you both through O.C.S. so fast you won't even have time to pin on the bars."
But neither Andy nor Bettijean had heard a word after the mention of furlough. Like a pair of puppy-lovers, they were sinking into the depths of each other's eyes.
And the general was still chuckling as he picked up the lone four-cent stamp in his left hand, made a gun of his right hand, and marched the stamp out of the office under guard.
THE END
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What are some of the government regulations that are imposed in the story?
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about Breakdown by Herbert D. Kastle.
Relevant chunks:
BREAKDOWN
By HERBERT D. KASTLE
Illustrated by COWLES
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine June 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
He didn't know exactly when it had started, but it had been going on for weeks. Edna begged him to see the doctor living in that new house two miles past Dugan's farm, but he refused. He point-blank refused to admit he was sick that way—in the head!
Of course, a man could grow forgetful. He had to admit there were moments when he had all sorts of mixed-up memories and thoughts in his mind. And sometimes—like right now, lying in bed beside Edna, watching the first hint of light touch the windows—he began sweating with fear. A horrible, gut-wrenching fear, all the more horrible because it was based on nothing.
The chicken-run came alive; the barn followed minutes later. There were chores to do, the same chores he'd done all his forty-one years. Except that now, with the new regulations about wheat and corn, he had only a vegetable patch to farm. Sure, he got paid for letting the fields remain empty. But it just didn't seem right, all that land going to waste....
Davie. Blond hair and a round, tanned face and strong arms growing stronger each day from helping out after school.
He turned and shook Edna. "What happened to Davie?"
She cleared her throat, mumbled, "Huh? What happened to who?"
"I said, what...." But then it slipped away. Davie? No, that was part of a dream he'd had last week. He and Edna had no children.
He felt the fear again, and got up fast to escape it. Edna opened her eyes as soon as his weight left the bed. "Like hotcakes for breakfast?"
"Eggs," he said. "Bacon." And then, seeing her face change, he remembered. "Course," he muttered. "Can't have bacon. Rationed."
She was fully awake now. "If you'd only go see Dr. Hamming, Harry. Just for a checkup. Or let me call him so he could—"
"You stop that! You stop that right now, and for good! I don't want to hear no more about doctors. I get laid up, I'll call one. And it won't be that Hamming who I ain't never seen in my life! It'll be Timkins, who took care'n us and brought our son into the world and...."
She began to cry, and he realized he'd said something crazy again. They had no son, never had a son. And Timkins—he'd died and they'd gone to his funeral. Or so Edna said.
He himself just couldn't remember it.
He went to the bed and sat down beside her. "Sorry. That was just a dream I had. I'm still half asleep this morning. Couldn't fall off last night, not till real late. Guess I'm a little nervous, what with all the new regulations and not working regular. I never meant we had a son." He waited then, hoping she'd say they had had a son, and he'd died or gone away. But of course she didn't.
He went to the bathroom and washed. By the time he came to the kitchen, Edna had hotcakes on a plate and coffee in a cup. He sat down and ate. Part way through the meal, he paused. "Got an awful craving for meat," he said. "Goddam those rations! Man can't even butcher his own stock for his own table!"
"We're having meat for lunch," she said placatingly. "Nice cut of multi-pro."
"Multi-pro," he scoffed. "God knows what's in it. Like spam put through a grinder a hundred times and then baked into slabs. Can't hardly taste any meat there."
"Well, we got no choice. Country's on emergency rations. The current crisis, you know."
The way she said it irritated him. Like it was Scripture; like no one could question one word of it without being damned to Hell. He finished quickly and without speaking went on out to the barn.
He milked and curried and fed and cleaned, and still was done inside of two hours. Then he walked slowly, head down, across the hay-strewn floor. He stopped, put out his hand as if to find a pole or beam that was too familiar to require raising his eyes, and almost fell as he leaned in that direction. Regaining his balance after a sideward staggering shuffle, he looked around, startled. "Why, this ain't the way I had my barn...."
He heard his own voice, and stopped. He fought the flash of senseless panic. Of course this was the way he'd had his barn built, because it was his barn!
He rubbed his hard hands together and said aloud, "Get down to the patch. Them tomatoes need fertilizer for tang." He walked outside and took a deep breath. Air was different, wasn't it? Sweet and pure and clean, like country air always was and always would be; but still, different somehow. Maybe sharper. Or was sharp the word? Maybe....
He went quickly across the yard, past the pig-pen—he'd had twelve pigs, hadn't he? Now he had four—behind the house to where the half-acre truck farm lay greening in the sun. He got to work. Sometime later, Edna called to him. "Delivery last night, Harry. I took some. Pick up rest?"
"Yes," he shouted.
She disappeared.
He walked slowly back to the house. As he came into the front yard, moving toward the road and the supply bin, something occurred to him. The car. He hadn't seen the old Chevvy in ... how long? It'd be nice to take a ride to town, see a movie, maybe have a few beers.
No. It was against the travel regulations. He couldn't go further than Walt and Gloria Shanks' place. They couldn't go further than his. And the gas rationing. Besides, he'd sold the car, hadn't he? Because it was no use to him lying in the tractor shed.
He whirled, staring out across the fields to his left. Why, the tractor shed had stood just fifty feet from the house!
No, he'd torn it down. The tractor was in town, being overhauled and all. He was leaving it there until he had use for it.
He went on toward the road, his head beginning to throb. Why should a man his age, hardly sick at all since he was a kid, suddenly start losing hold this way? Edna was worried. The Shanks had noticed it too.
He was at the supply bin—like an old-fashioned wood bin; a box with a sloping flap lid. Deliveries of food and clothing and home medicines and other things were left here. You wrote down what you needed, and they left it—or whatever they allowed you—with a bill. You paid the bill by leaving money in the bin, and the next week you found a receipt and your new stuff and your new bill. And almost always you found some money from the government, for not planting wheat or not planting corn. It came out just about even.
He hauled out a sack of flour, half the amount of sugar Edna had ordered, some dried fruit, a new Homekit Medicine Shelf. He carried it into the house, and noticed a slip of paper pinned to the sugar bag. A television program guide.
Edna hustled over excitedly. "Anything good on this week, Harry?"
He looked down the listings, and frowned. "All old movies. Still only one channel. Still only from nine to eleven at night." He gave it to her, turned away; then stopped and waited. He'd said the same thing last week. And she had said the films were all new to her.
She said it now. "Why Harry, I've never seen this movie with Clark Gable. Nor the comedy with Red Skeleton. Nor the other five neither."
"I'm gonna lie down," he said flatly. He turned and stepped forward, and found himself facing the stove. Not the door to the hall; the stove. "But the door...." he began. He cut himself short. He turned and saw the door a few feet to the left, beside the table. He went there and out and up the stairs (they too had moved; they too weren't right) and into the bedroom and lay down. The bedroom was wrong. The bed was wrong. The windows were wrong.
The world was wrong! Lord, the whole damned world was wrong!
Edna didn't wake him, so they had a late lunch. Then he went back to the barn and let the four cows and four sheep and two horses into the pastures. Then he checked to see that Edna had fed the chickens right. They had only a dozen or so now.
When had he sold the rest? And when had he sold his other livestock?
Or had they died somehow? A rough winter? Disease?
He stood in the yard, a tall, husky man with pale brown hair and a face that had once been long, lean and strong and was now only long and lean. He blinked gray eyes and tried hard to remember, then turned and went to the house. Edna was soaking dishes in the sink, according to regulations—one sinkful of dishwater a day. And one tub of bath water twice a week.
She was looking at him. He realized his anger and confusion must be showing. He managed a smile. "You remember how much we got for our livestock, Edna?"
"Same as everyone else," she said. "Government agents paid flat rates."
He remembered then, or thought he did. The headache was back. He went upstairs and slept again, but this time he had dreams, many of them, and all confused and all frightening. He was glad to get up. And he was glad to hear Walt and Gloria talking to Edna downstairs.
He washed his face, combed his hair and went down. Walt and Gloria were sitting on the sofa, Edna in the blue armchair. Walt was saying he'd gotten the new TV picture tube he'd ordered. "Found it in the supply bin this morning. Spent the whole day installing it according to the book of directions."
Harry said hi and they all said hi and he sat down and they talked about TV and gardens and livestock. Then Harry said, "How's Penny?"
"Fine," Gloria answered. "I'm starting her on the kindergarten book next week."
"She's five already?" Harry asked.
"Almost six," Walt said. "Emergency Education Regulations state that the child should be five years nine months old before embarking on kindergarten book."
"And Frances?" Harry asked. "Your oldest? She must be starting high...." He stopped, because they were all staring at him, and because he couldn't remember Frances clearly. "Just a joke," he said, laughing and rising. "Let's eat. I'm starved."
They ate in the kitchen. They talked—or rather Edna, Gloria and Walt did. Harry nodded and said uh-huh and used his mouth for chewing.
Walt and Gloria went home at ten-fifteen. They said goodbye at the door and Harry walked away. He heard Gloria whispering something about Doctor Hamming.
He was sitting in the living room when Edna came in. She was crying.
"Harry, please see the doctor."
He got up. "I'm going out. I might even sleep out!"
"But why, Harry, why?"
He couldn't stand to see her crying. He went to her, kissed her wet cheek, spoke more softly. "It'll do me good, like when I was a kid."
"If you say so, Harry."
He left quickly. He went outside and across the yard to the road. He looked up it and down it, to the north and to the south. It was a bright night with moon and stars, but he saw nothing, no one. The road was empty. It was always empty, except when Walt and Gloria walked over from their place a mile or so south. But once it hadn't been empty. Once there'd been cars, people....
He had to do something. Just sitting and looking at the sky wouldn't help him. He had to go somewhere, see someone.
He went to the barn and looked for his saddle. There was no saddle. But he'd had one hanging right behind the door. Or had he?
He threw a blanket over Plum, the big mare, and tied it with a piece of wash line. He used another piece for a bridle, since he couldn't find that either, and didn't bother making a bit. He mounted, and Plum moved out of the barn and onto the road. He headed north, toward town.
Then he realized he couldn't go along the road this way. He'd be reported. Breaking travel regulations was a serious offense. He didn't know what they did to you, but it wasn't anything easy like a fine.
He cut into an unfenced, unplanted field.
His headache was back, worse now than it had ever been. His entire head throbbed, and he leaned forward and put his cheek against Plum's mane. The mare whinnied uneasily, but he kicked her sides and she moved forward. He lay there, just wanting to go somewhere, just wanting to leave his headache and confusion behind.
He didn't know how long it was, but Plum was moving cautiously now. He raised his head. They were approaching a fence. He noticed a gate off to the right, and pulled the rope so Plum went that way. They reached the gate and he got down to open it, and saw the sign. "Phineas Grotton Farm." He looked up at the sky, found the constellations, turned his head, and nodded. He'd started north, and Plum had continued north. He'd crossed land belonging both to himself and the Franklins. Now he was leaving the Franklin farm. North of the Franklins were the Bessers. Who was this Phineas Grotton? Had he bought out Lon Besser? But anything like that would've gotten around.
Was he forgetting again?
Well, no matter. Mr. Grotton would have to excuse his trespass. He opened the gate, led Plum through it, closed the gate. He mounted and rode forward, still north, toward the small Pangborn place and after the Pangborns the biggest farm in the county—old Wallace Elverton's place. The fields here, as everywhere in the county, lay fallow. Seemed as if the government had so much grain stored up they'd be able to get along without crops for years more.
He looked around. Somehow, the country bothered him. He wasn't sure why, but ... everything was wrong.
His head weighed an agonized ton. He put it down again. Plum went sedately forward. After a while she stopped. Harry looked up. Another fence. And what a fence! About ten feet of heavy steel mesh, topped by three feet of barbed-wire—five separate strands. What in the world had Sam Pangborn been thinking of to put up a monster like this?
He looked around. The gate should be further west. He rode that way. He found no gate. He turned back, heading east. No gate. Nothing but fence. And wasn't the fence gradually curving inward? He looked back. Yes, there was a slight inward curve.
He dismounted and tied Plum to the fence, then stepped back and figured the best way to get to the other side.
The best way, the only way, was to claw, clutch and clamber, as they used to say back when he was a kid.
It took some doing. He tore his shirt on the barbed wire, but he got over and began walking, straight ahead, due north. The earth changed beneath his feet. He stooped and touched it. Sand. Hard-packed sand. He'd never seen the like of it in this county.
He walked on. A sound came to him; a rising-falling whisper. He listened to it, and looked up every so often at the sky, to make sure he was heading in the right direction.
And the sand ended. His shoes plunked over flooring.
Flooring!
He knelt to make sure, and his hand felt wooden planks. He rose, and glanced up to see if he was still outdoors. Then he laughed. It was a sick laugh, so he stopped it.
He took another step. His shoes sounded against the wood. He walked. More wood. Wood that went on, as the sand had. And the roaring sound growing louder. And the air changing, smelling like air never had before in Cultwait County.
His entire body trembled. His mind trembled too. He walked, and came to a waist-high metal railing, and made a tiny sound deep in his throat. He looked out over water, endless water rolling in endless waves under the night sky. Crashing water, topped with reflected silver from the moon. Pounding water, filling the air with spray.
He put out his hands and grasped the railing. It was wet. He raised damp fingers to his mouth. Salt.
He stepped back, back, and turned and ran. He ran wildly, blindly, until he could run no more. Then he fell, feeling the sand beneath him, and shut his eyes and mind to everything.
Much later, he got up and went to the fence and climbed it. He came down on the other side and looked around and saw Plum. He walked to her, mounted her, sat still. The thoughts, or dreams, or whatever they were which had been torturing him these past few weeks began torturing him again.
It was getting light. His head was splitting.
Davie. His son Davie. Fourteen years old. Going to high school in town....
Town! He should've gone there in the first place! He would ride east, to the road, then head south, back toward home. That would bring him right down Main Street. Regulations or not, he'd talk to people, find out what was happening.
He kicked Plum's sides. The mare began to move. He kept kicking until she broke into a brisk canter. He held on with hands and legs.
Why hadn't he seen the Pangborns and Elvertons lately—a long time lately?
The ocean. He'd seen the ocean. Not a reservoir or lake made by flooding and by damming, but salt water and enormous. An ocean, where there could be no ocean. The Pangborns and Elvertons had been where that ocean was now. And after the Elvertons had come the Dobsons. And after them the new plastics plant. And after that the city of Crossville. And after that....
He was passing his own farm. He hadn't come through town, and yet here he was at his own farm. Could he have forgotten where town was? Could it be north of his home, not south? Could a man get so confused as to forget things he'd known all his life?
He reached the Shanks' place, and passed it at a trot. Then he was beyond their boundaries and breaking regulations again. He stayed on the road. He went by a small house and saw colored folks in the yard. There'd been no colored folks here. There'd been Eli Bergen and his family and his mother, in a bigger, newer house. The colored folks heard Plum's hooves and looked up and stared. Then a man raised his voice. "Mistah, you breakin' regulations! Mistah, the police gonnah get you!"
He rode on. He came to another house, neat and white, with three children playing on a grassy lawn. They saw him and ran inside. A moment later, adult voices yelled after him:
"You theah! Stop!"
"Call the sheriff! He's headin' foah Piney Woods!"
There was no place called Piney Woods in this county.
Was this how a man's mind went?
He came to another house, and another. He passed ten all told, and people shouted at him for breaking regulations, and the last three or four sounded like Easterners. And their houses looked like pictures of New England he'd seen in magazines.
He rode on. He never did come to town. He came to a ten-foot fence with a three-foot barbed-wire extension. He got off Plum and ripped his clothing climbing. He walked over hard-packed sand, and then wood, and came to a low metal railing. He looked out at the ocean, gleaming in bright sunlight, surging and seething endlessly. He felt the earth sway beneath him. He staggered, and dropped to his hands and knees, and shook his head like a fighter hit too many times. Then he got up and went back to the fence and heard a sound. It was a familiar sound, yet strange too. He shaded his eyes against the climbing sun. Then he saw it—a car. A car!
It was one of those tiny foreign jobs that run on practically no gas at all. It stopped beside him and two men got out. Young men with lined, tired faces; they wore policemen's uniforms. "You broke regulations, Mr. Burr. You'll have to come with us."
He nodded. He wanted to. He wanted to be taken care of. He turned toward Plum.
The other officer was walking around the horse. "Rode her hard," he said, and he sounded real worried. "Shouldn't have done that, Mr. Burr. We have so very few now...."
The officer holding Harry's arm said, "Pete."
The officer examining Plum said, "It won't make any difference in a while."
Harry looked at both of them, and felt sharp, personal fear.
"Take the horse back to his farm," the officer holding Harry said. He opened the door of the little car and pushed Harry inside. He went around to the driver's side and got behind the wheel and drove away. Harry looked back. Pete was leading Plum after them; not riding him, walking him. "He sure must like horses," he said.
"Yes."
"Am I going to jail?"
"No."
"Where then?"
"The doctor's place."
They stopped in front of the new house two miles past Dugan's farm. Except he'd never seen it before. Or had he? Everyone seemed to know about it—or was everyone only Edna and the Shanks?
He got out of the car. The officer took his arm and led him up the path. Harry noticed that the new house was big.
When they came inside, he knew it wasn't like any house he'd ever seen or heard of. There was this long central passageway, and dozens of doors branched off it on both sides, and stairways went down from it in at least three places that he could see, and at the far end—a good two hundred yards away—a big ramp led upward. And it was all gray plaster walls and dull black floors and cold white lighting, like a hospital, or a modern factory, or maybe a government building. Except that he didn't see or hear people.
He did hear something ; a low, rumbling noise. The further they came along the hall, the louder the rumbling grew. It seemed to be deep down somewhere.
They went through one of the doors on the right, into a windowless room. A thin little man with bald head and frameless glasses was there, putting on a white coat. His veiny hands shook. He looked a hundred years old. "Where's Petey?" he asked.
"Pete's all right, Dad. Just leading a horse back to Burr's farm."
The old man sighed. "I didn't know what form it would take. I expected one or two cases, but I couldn't predict whether it would be gradual or sudden, whether or not it would lead to violence."
"No violence, Dad."
"Fine, Stan." He looked at Harry. "I'm going to give you a little treatment, Mr. Burr. It'll settle your nerves and make everything...."
"What happened to Davie?" Harry asked, things pushing at his brain again.
Stan helped him up. "Just step this way, Mr. Burr."
He didn't resist. He went through the second door into the room with the big chair. He sat down and let them strap his arms and legs and let them lower the metal thing over his head. He felt needles pierce his scalp and the back of his neck. He let them do what they wanted; he would let them kill him if they wanted. All he asked was one answer so as to know whether or not he was insane.
"What happened to my son Davie?"
The old man walked across the room and examined what looked like the insides of a dozen big radios. He turned, his hand on a switch.
"Please," Harry whispered. "Just tell me about my son."
The doctor blinked behind his glasses, and then his hand left the switch. "Dead," he said, his voice a rustling of dried leaves. "Like so many millions of others. Dead, when the bombs fell. Dead, as everyone knew they would be and no one did anything to prevent. Dead. Perhaps the whole world is dead—except for us."
Harry stared at him.
"I can't take the time to explain it all. I have too much to do. Just three of us—myself and my two sons. My wife lost her mind. I should have helped her as I'm helping you."
"I don't understand," Harry said. "I remember people, and things, and where are they now? Dead? People can die, but farms, cities...."
"I haven't the time," the doctor repeated, voice rising. "I have to run a world. Three of us, to run a world! I built it as best I could, but how large could I make it? The money. The years and years of work. The people calling me insane when they found out ... but a few giving me more money, and the work going on. And those few caught like everyone else, unprepared when the holocaust started, unprepared and unable to reach my world. So they died. As I knew they would. As they should have known they would."
Harry felt the rumbling beneath him. Engines?
"You survived," the doctor said. "Your wife. A few hundred others in the rural areas. One other family in your area. I survived because I lived for survival, like a mole deep in the earth, expecting the catastrophe every minute. I survived because I gave up living to survive." He laughed, high and thin.
His son said, "Please, Dad...."
"No! I want to talk to someone sane ! You and Petey and I—we're all insane, you know. Three years now, playing God, waiting for some land, any land, to become habitable. And knowing everything, and surrounded by people who are sane only because I made sure they would know nothing." He stepped forward, glaring at Harry. "Now do you understand? I went across the country, picking up a few of the few left alive. Most were farmers, and even where some weren't I picked the farmers anyway. Because farmers are what we'll need, and all the rest can evolve later. I put you and the others, eighty-six all told, from every section of the country, on my world, the only uncontaminated land left. I gave you back your old lives. I couldn't give you big crops because we don't need big crops. We would only exhaust our limited soil with big crops. But I gave you vegetable gardens and livestock and, best of all, sanity ! I wiped the insane moments from your minds. I gave you peace and consigned myself, my sons, my own wife...."
He choked and stopped.
Stan ran across the room to the switch. Harry watched him, and his brain struggled with an impossible concept. He heard the engines and remembered the ocean on two sides; on four sides had he bothered to check south and east; on all sides if that fence continued to curve inward. Ocean, and there was no ocean in Iowa.
And this wasn't Iowa.
The explosions had ripped the world, and he'd tried to get to town to save Davie, and there'd been no town and there'd been no people and there'd been only death and poison in the air and even those few people left had begun to die, and then the truck with the huge trailer had come, the gleaming trailer with the little man and his trembling wife and his two sons....
Suddenly, he understood. And understanding brought not peace but the greatest terror he'd ever known. He screamed, "We're on...." but the switch was thrown and there was no more speech. For an hour. Then he got out of the chair and said, "Sure glad I took my wife's advice and came to see you, Doctor Hamming. I feel better already, and after only one.... What do you call these treatments?"
"Diathermy," the little doctor muttered.
Harry gave him a five-dollar bill. The doctor gave him two singles in change. "That's certainly reasonable enough," Harry said.
The doctor nodded. "There's a police officer in the hall. He'll drive you home so there won't be any trouble with the travel regulations."
Harry said, "Thanks. Think we'll ever see the end of travel regulations and rationing and all the rest of the emergency?"
"You will, Mr. Burr."
Harry walked to the door.
"We're on an ark," the doctor said.
Harry turned around, smiling. "What?"
"A test, Mr. Burr. You passed it. Goodbye."
Harry went home. He told Edna he felt just great! She said she'd been worried when an officer found Plum wandering on the road; she thought maybe Harry had gone off somewhere and broken travel regulations.
"Me?" he exclaimed, amazed. "Break travel regulations? I'd as soon kill a pig!"
Question:
What are some of the government regulations that are imposed in the story?
Answer:
|
[
"One of the government restrictions that Edna reminds Harry about is the rationing of meat. Due to the crisis in the country, there is a shortage of meat. Instead of actual meat, most people eat multi-pro, which is similar to spam. The government also sets up boundaries for the residents to stay inside of, and they are not allowed to go past these regulations or else the police will come. The government also takes care of supplies, and most residents just have to write down what they want and pay a bill. In terms of money, the government takes care of it as well each week. Each farm receives the same number of animals because government agents paid flat rates. When Harry finds the stock of grain, he notes that the government has enough to keep going for a few years. Television is also restricted to old movies, playing only on one channel from nine to eleven at night. Later, it is revealed that these restrictions are imposed to keep the people alive on the ark long enough until they can begin to expand civilization again. ",
"Some of the government regulations included rationing the food. This included not being able to butcher their own meat, but rather, having multi-pro. There was also a regulation about the type of farming allowed. Despite all the land, the government would pay the farmers for letting the fields remain empty as long as they only farm vegetables, and not wheat or corn. \n\nAdditionally, there are regulations on travel and gas. You were not able to go further than your neighbor's house. There is also an education regulation that says children should be at least 5 years and 9 months old before beginning to learn and read through a kindergarten book. ",
"The travel regulation restricts the area that people can travel to, which means their own houses and the closest neighbor's house. Whoever breaks the travel regulation will be sent to see the doctor. People buy their living necessities through delivery weekly by the rationing regulation. The farming regulations prohibit the plantation of wheat and corn, only allowing vegetables to be grown, resulting in many fields fallow. People would get compensated by the government for not planting wheat or corn. The rationing regulation allocates foods and living necessities for each family, regulates the supplies people can get, and prohibits people from butchering their livestock. Everyone has the same amount of livestock. Gas and water are also rationed that each family can only have a sink of water for dishes each day and a tub of bath water twice a week. The television regulation limits the channel to one, restricts the watching time to only nine to eleven at night, and constrains the audience to watch the listed movies only. Emergency Education Regulations claim that children should be at least five years nine months old to learn kindergarten books.",
"They cannot cultivate wheat and corn, and these fields are not in use. There are meat rations that significantly limit the amount of meat one household can consume. Harry also thinks about the travel regulations - he can't go further than Walt and Gloria Shanks' place. They live a little more than a mile away from Harry and Edna. There is gas rationing. The livestock is controlled by the government, too - every household has the same number of chickens, sheep, cows, etc. We learn about the Emergency Education Regulations - every child should be five years nine months old before embarking on a kindergarten book. "
] |
51662
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BREAKDOWN
By HERBERT D. KASTLE
Illustrated by COWLES
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine June 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
He didn't know exactly when it had started, but it had been going on for weeks. Edna begged him to see the doctor living in that new house two miles past Dugan's farm, but he refused. He point-blank refused to admit he was sick that way—in the head!
Of course, a man could grow forgetful. He had to admit there were moments when he had all sorts of mixed-up memories and thoughts in his mind. And sometimes—like right now, lying in bed beside Edna, watching the first hint of light touch the windows—he began sweating with fear. A horrible, gut-wrenching fear, all the more horrible because it was based on nothing.
The chicken-run came alive; the barn followed minutes later. There were chores to do, the same chores he'd done all his forty-one years. Except that now, with the new regulations about wheat and corn, he had only a vegetable patch to farm. Sure, he got paid for letting the fields remain empty. But it just didn't seem right, all that land going to waste....
Davie. Blond hair and a round, tanned face and strong arms growing stronger each day from helping out after school.
He turned and shook Edna. "What happened to Davie?"
She cleared her throat, mumbled, "Huh? What happened to who?"
"I said, what...." But then it slipped away. Davie? No, that was part of a dream he'd had last week. He and Edna had no children.
He felt the fear again, and got up fast to escape it. Edna opened her eyes as soon as his weight left the bed. "Like hotcakes for breakfast?"
"Eggs," he said. "Bacon." And then, seeing her face change, he remembered. "Course," he muttered. "Can't have bacon. Rationed."
She was fully awake now. "If you'd only go see Dr. Hamming, Harry. Just for a checkup. Or let me call him so he could—"
"You stop that! You stop that right now, and for good! I don't want to hear no more about doctors. I get laid up, I'll call one. And it won't be that Hamming who I ain't never seen in my life! It'll be Timkins, who took care'n us and brought our son into the world and...."
She began to cry, and he realized he'd said something crazy again. They had no son, never had a son. And Timkins—he'd died and they'd gone to his funeral. Or so Edna said.
He himself just couldn't remember it.
He went to the bed and sat down beside her. "Sorry. That was just a dream I had. I'm still half asleep this morning. Couldn't fall off last night, not till real late. Guess I'm a little nervous, what with all the new regulations and not working regular. I never meant we had a son." He waited then, hoping she'd say they had had a son, and he'd died or gone away. But of course she didn't.
He went to the bathroom and washed. By the time he came to the kitchen, Edna had hotcakes on a plate and coffee in a cup. He sat down and ate. Part way through the meal, he paused. "Got an awful craving for meat," he said. "Goddam those rations! Man can't even butcher his own stock for his own table!"
"We're having meat for lunch," she said placatingly. "Nice cut of multi-pro."
"Multi-pro," he scoffed. "God knows what's in it. Like spam put through a grinder a hundred times and then baked into slabs. Can't hardly taste any meat there."
"Well, we got no choice. Country's on emergency rations. The current crisis, you know."
The way she said it irritated him. Like it was Scripture; like no one could question one word of it without being damned to Hell. He finished quickly and without speaking went on out to the barn.
He milked and curried and fed and cleaned, and still was done inside of two hours. Then he walked slowly, head down, across the hay-strewn floor. He stopped, put out his hand as if to find a pole or beam that was too familiar to require raising his eyes, and almost fell as he leaned in that direction. Regaining his balance after a sideward staggering shuffle, he looked around, startled. "Why, this ain't the way I had my barn...."
He heard his own voice, and stopped. He fought the flash of senseless panic. Of course this was the way he'd had his barn built, because it was his barn!
He rubbed his hard hands together and said aloud, "Get down to the patch. Them tomatoes need fertilizer for tang." He walked outside and took a deep breath. Air was different, wasn't it? Sweet and pure and clean, like country air always was and always would be; but still, different somehow. Maybe sharper. Or was sharp the word? Maybe....
He went quickly across the yard, past the pig-pen—he'd had twelve pigs, hadn't he? Now he had four—behind the house to where the half-acre truck farm lay greening in the sun. He got to work. Sometime later, Edna called to him. "Delivery last night, Harry. I took some. Pick up rest?"
"Yes," he shouted.
She disappeared.
He walked slowly back to the house. As he came into the front yard, moving toward the road and the supply bin, something occurred to him. The car. He hadn't seen the old Chevvy in ... how long? It'd be nice to take a ride to town, see a movie, maybe have a few beers.
No. It was against the travel regulations. He couldn't go further than Walt and Gloria Shanks' place. They couldn't go further than his. And the gas rationing. Besides, he'd sold the car, hadn't he? Because it was no use to him lying in the tractor shed.
He whirled, staring out across the fields to his left. Why, the tractor shed had stood just fifty feet from the house!
No, he'd torn it down. The tractor was in town, being overhauled and all. He was leaving it there until he had use for it.
He went on toward the road, his head beginning to throb. Why should a man his age, hardly sick at all since he was a kid, suddenly start losing hold this way? Edna was worried. The Shanks had noticed it too.
He was at the supply bin—like an old-fashioned wood bin; a box with a sloping flap lid. Deliveries of food and clothing and home medicines and other things were left here. You wrote down what you needed, and they left it—or whatever they allowed you—with a bill. You paid the bill by leaving money in the bin, and the next week you found a receipt and your new stuff and your new bill. And almost always you found some money from the government, for not planting wheat or not planting corn. It came out just about even.
He hauled out a sack of flour, half the amount of sugar Edna had ordered, some dried fruit, a new Homekit Medicine Shelf. He carried it into the house, and noticed a slip of paper pinned to the sugar bag. A television program guide.
Edna hustled over excitedly. "Anything good on this week, Harry?"
He looked down the listings, and frowned. "All old movies. Still only one channel. Still only from nine to eleven at night." He gave it to her, turned away; then stopped and waited. He'd said the same thing last week. And she had said the films were all new to her.
She said it now. "Why Harry, I've never seen this movie with Clark Gable. Nor the comedy with Red Skeleton. Nor the other five neither."
"I'm gonna lie down," he said flatly. He turned and stepped forward, and found himself facing the stove. Not the door to the hall; the stove. "But the door...." he began. He cut himself short. He turned and saw the door a few feet to the left, beside the table. He went there and out and up the stairs (they too had moved; they too weren't right) and into the bedroom and lay down. The bedroom was wrong. The bed was wrong. The windows were wrong.
The world was wrong! Lord, the whole damned world was wrong!
Edna didn't wake him, so they had a late lunch. Then he went back to the barn and let the four cows and four sheep and two horses into the pastures. Then he checked to see that Edna had fed the chickens right. They had only a dozen or so now.
When had he sold the rest? And when had he sold his other livestock?
Or had they died somehow? A rough winter? Disease?
He stood in the yard, a tall, husky man with pale brown hair and a face that had once been long, lean and strong and was now only long and lean. He blinked gray eyes and tried hard to remember, then turned and went to the house. Edna was soaking dishes in the sink, according to regulations—one sinkful of dishwater a day. And one tub of bath water twice a week.
She was looking at him. He realized his anger and confusion must be showing. He managed a smile. "You remember how much we got for our livestock, Edna?"
"Same as everyone else," she said. "Government agents paid flat rates."
He remembered then, or thought he did. The headache was back. He went upstairs and slept again, but this time he had dreams, many of them, and all confused and all frightening. He was glad to get up. And he was glad to hear Walt and Gloria talking to Edna downstairs.
He washed his face, combed his hair and went down. Walt and Gloria were sitting on the sofa, Edna in the blue armchair. Walt was saying he'd gotten the new TV picture tube he'd ordered. "Found it in the supply bin this morning. Spent the whole day installing it according to the book of directions."
Harry said hi and they all said hi and he sat down and they talked about TV and gardens and livestock. Then Harry said, "How's Penny?"
"Fine," Gloria answered. "I'm starting her on the kindergarten book next week."
"She's five already?" Harry asked.
"Almost six," Walt said. "Emergency Education Regulations state that the child should be five years nine months old before embarking on kindergarten book."
"And Frances?" Harry asked. "Your oldest? She must be starting high...." He stopped, because they were all staring at him, and because he couldn't remember Frances clearly. "Just a joke," he said, laughing and rising. "Let's eat. I'm starved."
They ate in the kitchen. They talked—or rather Edna, Gloria and Walt did. Harry nodded and said uh-huh and used his mouth for chewing.
Walt and Gloria went home at ten-fifteen. They said goodbye at the door and Harry walked away. He heard Gloria whispering something about Doctor Hamming.
He was sitting in the living room when Edna came in. She was crying.
"Harry, please see the doctor."
He got up. "I'm going out. I might even sleep out!"
"But why, Harry, why?"
He couldn't stand to see her crying. He went to her, kissed her wet cheek, spoke more softly. "It'll do me good, like when I was a kid."
"If you say so, Harry."
He left quickly. He went outside and across the yard to the road. He looked up it and down it, to the north and to the south. It was a bright night with moon and stars, but he saw nothing, no one. The road was empty. It was always empty, except when Walt and Gloria walked over from their place a mile or so south. But once it hadn't been empty. Once there'd been cars, people....
He had to do something. Just sitting and looking at the sky wouldn't help him. He had to go somewhere, see someone.
He went to the barn and looked for his saddle. There was no saddle. But he'd had one hanging right behind the door. Or had he?
He threw a blanket over Plum, the big mare, and tied it with a piece of wash line. He used another piece for a bridle, since he couldn't find that either, and didn't bother making a bit. He mounted, and Plum moved out of the barn and onto the road. He headed north, toward town.
Then he realized he couldn't go along the road this way. He'd be reported. Breaking travel regulations was a serious offense. He didn't know what they did to you, but it wasn't anything easy like a fine.
He cut into an unfenced, unplanted field.
His headache was back, worse now than it had ever been. His entire head throbbed, and he leaned forward and put his cheek against Plum's mane. The mare whinnied uneasily, but he kicked her sides and she moved forward. He lay there, just wanting to go somewhere, just wanting to leave his headache and confusion behind.
He didn't know how long it was, but Plum was moving cautiously now. He raised his head. They were approaching a fence. He noticed a gate off to the right, and pulled the rope so Plum went that way. They reached the gate and he got down to open it, and saw the sign. "Phineas Grotton Farm." He looked up at the sky, found the constellations, turned his head, and nodded. He'd started north, and Plum had continued north. He'd crossed land belonging both to himself and the Franklins. Now he was leaving the Franklin farm. North of the Franklins were the Bessers. Who was this Phineas Grotton? Had he bought out Lon Besser? But anything like that would've gotten around.
Was he forgetting again?
Well, no matter. Mr. Grotton would have to excuse his trespass. He opened the gate, led Plum through it, closed the gate. He mounted and rode forward, still north, toward the small Pangborn place and after the Pangborns the biggest farm in the county—old Wallace Elverton's place. The fields here, as everywhere in the county, lay fallow. Seemed as if the government had so much grain stored up they'd be able to get along without crops for years more.
He looked around. Somehow, the country bothered him. He wasn't sure why, but ... everything was wrong.
His head weighed an agonized ton. He put it down again. Plum went sedately forward. After a while she stopped. Harry looked up. Another fence. And what a fence! About ten feet of heavy steel mesh, topped by three feet of barbed-wire—five separate strands. What in the world had Sam Pangborn been thinking of to put up a monster like this?
He looked around. The gate should be further west. He rode that way. He found no gate. He turned back, heading east. No gate. Nothing but fence. And wasn't the fence gradually curving inward? He looked back. Yes, there was a slight inward curve.
He dismounted and tied Plum to the fence, then stepped back and figured the best way to get to the other side.
The best way, the only way, was to claw, clutch and clamber, as they used to say back when he was a kid.
It took some doing. He tore his shirt on the barbed wire, but he got over and began walking, straight ahead, due north. The earth changed beneath his feet. He stooped and touched it. Sand. Hard-packed sand. He'd never seen the like of it in this county.
He walked on. A sound came to him; a rising-falling whisper. He listened to it, and looked up every so often at the sky, to make sure he was heading in the right direction.
And the sand ended. His shoes plunked over flooring.
Flooring!
He knelt to make sure, and his hand felt wooden planks. He rose, and glanced up to see if he was still outdoors. Then he laughed. It was a sick laugh, so he stopped it.
He took another step. His shoes sounded against the wood. He walked. More wood. Wood that went on, as the sand had. And the roaring sound growing louder. And the air changing, smelling like air never had before in Cultwait County.
His entire body trembled. His mind trembled too. He walked, and came to a waist-high metal railing, and made a tiny sound deep in his throat. He looked out over water, endless water rolling in endless waves under the night sky. Crashing water, topped with reflected silver from the moon. Pounding water, filling the air with spray.
He put out his hands and grasped the railing. It was wet. He raised damp fingers to his mouth. Salt.
He stepped back, back, and turned and ran. He ran wildly, blindly, until he could run no more. Then he fell, feeling the sand beneath him, and shut his eyes and mind to everything.
Much later, he got up and went to the fence and climbed it. He came down on the other side and looked around and saw Plum. He walked to her, mounted her, sat still. The thoughts, or dreams, or whatever they were which had been torturing him these past few weeks began torturing him again.
It was getting light. His head was splitting.
Davie. His son Davie. Fourteen years old. Going to high school in town....
Town! He should've gone there in the first place! He would ride east, to the road, then head south, back toward home. That would bring him right down Main Street. Regulations or not, he'd talk to people, find out what was happening.
He kicked Plum's sides. The mare began to move. He kept kicking until she broke into a brisk canter. He held on with hands and legs.
Why hadn't he seen the Pangborns and Elvertons lately—a long time lately?
The ocean. He'd seen the ocean. Not a reservoir or lake made by flooding and by damming, but salt water and enormous. An ocean, where there could be no ocean. The Pangborns and Elvertons had been where that ocean was now. And after the Elvertons had come the Dobsons. And after them the new plastics plant. And after that the city of Crossville. And after that....
He was passing his own farm. He hadn't come through town, and yet here he was at his own farm. Could he have forgotten where town was? Could it be north of his home, not south? Could a man get so confused as to forget things he'd known all his life?
He reached the Shanks' place, and passed it at a trot. Then he was beyond their boundaries and breaking regulations again. He stayed on the road. He went by a small house and saw colored folks in the yard. There'd been no colored folks here. There'd been Eli Bergen and his family and his mother, in a bigger, newer house. The colored folks heard Plum's hooves and looked up and stared. Then a man raised his voice. "Mistah, you breakin' regulations! Mistah, the police gonnah get you!"
He rode on. He came to another house, neat and white, with three children playing on a grassy lawn. They saw him and ran inside. A moment later, adult voices yelled after him:
"You theah! Stop!"
"Call the sheriff! He's headin' foah Piney Woods!"
There was no place called Piney Woods in this county.
Was this how a man's mind went?
He came to another house, and another. He passed ten all told, and people shouted at him for breaking regulations, and the last three or four sounded like Easterners. And their houses looked like pictures of New England he'd seen in magazines.
He rode on. He never did come to town. He came to a ten-foot fence with a three-foot barbed-wire extension. He got off Plum and ripped his clothing climbing. He walked over hard-packed sand, and then wood, and came to a low metal railing. He looked out at the ocean, gleaming in bright sunlight, surging and seething endlessly. He felt the earth sway beneath him. He staggered, and dropped to his hands and knees, and shook his head like a fighter hit too many times. Then he got up and went back to the fence and heard a sound. It was a familiar sound, yet strange too. He shaded his eyes against the climbing sun. Then he saw it—a car. A car!
It was one of those tiny foreign jobs that run on practically no gas at all. It stopped beside him and two men got out. Young men with lined, tired faces; they wore policemen's uniforms. "You broke regulations, Mr. Burr. You'll have to come with us."
He nodded. He wanted to. He wanted to be taken care of. He turned toward Plum.
The other officer was walking around the horse. "Rode her hard," he said, and he sounded real worried. "Shouldn't have done that, Mr. Burr. We have so very few now...."
The officer holding Harry's arm said, "Pete."
The officer examining Plum said, "It won't make any difference in a while."
Harry looked at both of them, and felt sharp, personal fear.
"Take the horse back to his farm," the officer holding Harry said. He opened the door of the little car and pushed Harry inside. He went around to the driver's side and got behind the wheel and drove away. Harry looked back. Pete was leading Plum after them; not riding him, walking him. "He sure must like horses," he said.
"Yes."
"Am I going to jail?"
"No."
"Where then?"
"The doctor's place."
They stopped in front of the new house two miles past Dugan's farm. Except he'd never seen it before. Or had he? Everyone seemed to know about it—or was everyone only Edna and the Shanks?
He got out of the car. The officer took his arm and led him up the path. Harry noticed that the new house was big.
When they came inside, he knew it wasn't like any house he'd ever seen or heard of. There was this long central passageway, and dozens of doors branched off it on both sides, and stairways went down from it in at least three places that he could see, and at the far end—a good two hundred yards away—a big ramp led upward. And it was all gray plaster walls and dull black floors and cold white lighting, like a hospital, or a modern factory, or maybe a government building. Except that he didn't see or hear people.
He did hear something ; a low, rumbling noise. The further they came along the hall, the louder the rumbling grew. It seemed to be deep down somewhere.
They went through one of the doors on the right, into a windowless room. A thin little man with bald head and frameless glasses was there, putting on a white coat. His veiny hands shook. He looked a hundred years old. "Where's Petey?" he asked.
"Pete's all right, Dad. Just leading a horse back to Burr's farm."
The old man sighed. "I didn't know what form it would take. I expected one or two cases, but I couldn't predict whether it would be gradual or sudden, whether or not it would lead to violence."
"No violence, Dad."
"Fine, Stan." He looked at Harry. "I'm going to give you a little treatment, Mr. Burr. It'll settle your nerves and make everything...."
"What happened to Davie?" Harry asked, things pushing at his brain again.
Stan helped him up. "Just step this way, Mr. Burr."
He didn't resist. He went through the second door into the room with the big chair. He sat down and let them strap his arms and legs and let them lower the metal thing over his head. He felt needles pierce his scalp and the back of his neck. He let them do what they wanted; he would let them kill him if they wanted. All he asked was one answer so as to know whether or not he was insane.
"What happened to my son Davie?"
The old man walked across the room and examined what looked like the insides of a dozen big radios. He turned, his hand on a switch.
"Please," Harry whispered. "Just tell me about my son."
The doctor blinked behind his glasses, and then his hand left the switch. "Dead," he said, his voice a rustling of dried leaves. "Like so many millions of others. Dead, when the bombs fell. Dead, as everyone knew they would be and no one did anything to prevent. Dead. Perhaps the whole world is dead—except for us."
Harry stared at him.
"I can't take the time to explain it all. I have too much to do. Just three of us—myself and my two sons. My wife lost her mind. I should have helped her as I'm helping you."
"I don't understand," Harry said. "I remember people, and things, and where are they now? Dead? People can die, but farms, cities...."
"I haven't the time," the doctor repeated, voice rising. "I have to run a world. Three of us, to run a world! I built it as best I could, but how large could I make it? The money. The years and years of work. The people calling me insane when they found out ... but a few giving me more money, and the work going on. And those few caught like everyone else, unprepared when the holocaust started, unprepared and unable to reach my world. So they died. As I knew they would. As they should have known they would."
Harry felt the rumbling beneath him. Engines?
"You survived," the doctor said. "Your wife. A few hundred others in the rural areas. One other family in your area. I survived because I lived for survival, like a mole deep in the earth, expecting the catastrophe every minute. I survived because I gave up living to survive." He laughed, high and thin.
His son said, "Please, Dad...."
"No! I want to talk to someone sane ! You and Petey and I—we're all insane, you know. Three years now, playing God, waiting for some land, any land, to become habitable. And knowing everything, and surrounded by people who are sane only because I made sure they would know nothing." He stepped forward, glaring at Harry. "Now do you understand? I went across the country, picking up a few of the few left alive. Most were farmers, and even where some weren't I picked the farmers anyway. Because farmers are what we'll need, and all the rest can evolve later. I put you and the others, eighty-six all told, from every section of the country, on my world, the only uncontaminated land left. I gave you back your old lives. I couldn't give you big crops because we don't need big crops. We would only exhaust our limited soil with big crops. But I gave you vegetable gardens and livestock and, best of all, sanity ! I wiped the insane moments from your minds. I gave you peace and consigned myself, my sons, my own wife...."
He choked and stopped.
Stan ran across the room to the switch. Harry watched him, and his brain struggled with an impossible concept. He heard the engines and remembered the ocean on two sides; on four sides had he bothered to check south and east; on all sides if that fence continued to curve inward. Ocean, and there was no ocean in Iowa.
And this wasn't Iowa.
The explosions had ripped the world, and he'd tried to get to town to save Davie, and there'd been no town and there'd been no people and there'd been only death and poison in the air and even those few people left had begun to die, and then the truck with the huge trailer had come, the gleaming trailer with the little man and his trembling wife and his two sons....
Suddenly, he understood. And understanding brought not peace but the greatest terror he'd ever known. He screamed, "We're on...." but the switch was thrown and there was no more speech. For an hour. Then he got out of the chair and said, "Sure glad I took my wife's advice and came to see you, Doctor Hamming. I feel better already, and after only one.... What do you call these treatments?"
"Diathermy," the little doctor muttered.
Harry gave him a five-dollar bill. The doctor gave him two singles in change. "That's certainly reasonable enough," Harry said.
The doctor nodded. "There's a police officer in the hall. He'll drive you home so there won't be any trouble with the travel regulations."
Harry said, "Thanks. Think we'll ever see the end of travel regulations and rationing and all the rest of the emergency?"
"You will, Mr. Burr."
Harry walked to the door.
"We're on an ark," the doctor said.
Harry turned around, smiling. "What?"
"A test, Mr. Burr. You passed it. Goodbye."
Harry went home. He told Edna he felt just great! She said she'd been worried when an officer found Plum wandering on the road; she thought maybe Harry had gone off somewhere and broken travel regulations.
"Me?" he exclaimed, amazed. "Break travel regulations? I'd as soon kill a pig!"
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What is the plot of the story?
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about The Beast-Jewel of Mars by V. E. Thiessen.
Relevant chunks:
The Beast-Jewel of Mars
By V. E. THIESSEN
The city was strange, fantastic, beautiful. He'd never been there before, yet already he was a fabulous legend—a dire, hateful legend.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
He lay on his stomach, a lean man in faded one piece dungarees, and an odd metallic hat, peering over the side of the canal. Behind him the little winds sifted red dust into his collar, but he could not move; he could only sit there with his gaze riveted on the spires and minarets that twinkled in the distance, far down the bottom of the canal.
One part of his mind said, This is it, this is the fabled city of Mars. This is the beauty and the fantasy and the music of the legends, and I must go down there. Yet somewhere deeper in his mind, deep in the primal urges that kept him from death, the warning was taut and urgent. Get away. They have a part of your mind now. Get away from the city before you lose it all. Get away before your body becomes a husk, a soulless husk to walk the low canals with sightless eyes, like those who came before you.
He strained to push back from the edge, trying to get that fantastic beauty out of his sight. He fought the lids of his eyes, fought to close them while he pushed himself back, but they remained open, staring at the jeweled towers, and borne on the little winds the thin wail of music reached him, saying, Come into the city, come down into the fabled city .
He slid over the edge, sliding down the sloping sides of the canal. The rough sandstone tore at his dungarees, tore at his elbow where it touched but he did not feel the pain. His face was turned toward the towers, and the sound of his breathing was less than human.
His feet caught a projecting bit of stone and were slowed for an instant, so that he turned sideways and rolled on, down into the red dust bottom of the canal, to lie face down in the dust, with the chin strap of the odd metallic hat cutting cruelly into his chin.
He lay there an instant, knowing that now he had a chance. With his face down like this, and the dust smarting his eyes the image was gone for an instant. He had to get away, he knew that. He had to mount the sides of the canal and never look back.
He told himself, "I am Eric North, from Earth, the Third Planet of Sol, and this is not real."
He squirmed in the dust, feeling it bite his cheeks; he squirmed until he could get up and see nothing but the red sand stone walls of the canal. He ran at the walls and clawed his way up like an animal in his haste. He wouldn't look again.
The wind freshened and the tune of the music began to talk to him. It told of going barefoot over long streets of fur. It told of jewels, and wine, and women as fair as springtime. These and more were in the city, waiting for him to claim them.
He sobbed, and clawed forward. He stopped to rest, and slowly his head began to turn. He turned, and the spires and minarets twinkled at him, beautiful, soothing, stopping the tears that had welled down his cheeks.
When he reached the bottom of the canal he began to run toward the city.
When he came to the city there was a high wall around it, and a heavy gate carved with lotus blossoms. He beat against the gate and cried,
"Oh! Let me in. Let me in to the city!" The music was richer now, as if it were everywhere, and the gate swung open without the faintest sound.
A sentinel stood before the opened gate at the end of a long blue street. He was dressed in red silk with his sleeves edged in blue leopard skin, and he wore a belt with a jeweled short sword. He drew the sword from its scabbard, and bowed forward until the point of the sword touched the street of blue fur. He said, "I give you the welcome of my sword, and the welcome of the city. Speak your name so that it may be set in the records of the dreamers."
The music sang, and the spires twinkled, and Eric said, "I am Eric North!"
The sword point jerked, and the sentinel straightened. His face was white. He cried aloud, "It is Eric the Bronze. It is Eric of the Legend." He whirled the sword aloft, and smashed it upon Eric's metal hat, and the hatred was a blue flame in his eyes.
When Eric regained consciousness the people of the city were all about him. They were very fair, and the women were more beautiful than music. Yet now they stared at him with red hate in their eyes. An older man came forward and struck at the copper hat with a stick. The clang deafened Eric and the man cried, "You are right. It is Eric the Bronze. Bring the ships and let him be scourged from the city."
The man drew back the stick and struck again, and Eric's back took fire with the blow. The crowd chanted, "Whips, bring the whips," and fear forced Eric to his feet. He fled then, running on the heedless feet of panic, outstripping those who were behind him until he passed through the great gates into the red dust floor of the canal. The gates closed behind him, and the dust beat upon him, and he paused, his heart hammering inside his chest like a great bell clapper. He turned and looked behind to be sure he was safe.
The towers twinkled at him, and the music whispered to him, "Come back, Eric North. Come back to the city."
He turned and stumbled back to the great gate and hammered on it until his fists were raw, pleading for it to open and let him back.
And deep inside him some part of his mind said, "This is a madness you cannot escape. The city is evil, an evil like you have never known," and a fear as old as time coursed through his frame.
He seized the copper hat from his head, and beat on the lotus carvings of the great door, crying, "Let me in! Please, take me back into the city."
And as he beat the city changed. It became dull and sordid and evil, a city of disgust, with every part offensive to the eye. The spires and minarets were gargoyles of hatred, twisted and misshapen, and the sound of the city was a macabre song of hate.
He stared, and his back was chill with superstitions as old as the beginning of man. The city flickered, changing before his eyes until it was beautiful again.
He stood, amazed, and put the metal hat back on his head. With the motion the shift took place again, and beauty was ugliness. Amazed, he stared at the illusion, and the thought came to him that the metal hat had not entirely failed him after all.
He turned and began to walk away from the city, and when it began to call he took the hat off his head and found peace for a time. Then when it began again he replaced the hat, and revulsion sped his footsteps. And so, hat on, hat off, he made his way down the dusty floor of the canal, and up the rocky sides until he stood on the Martian desert, and the canal was a thin line behind him. He breathed easily then, for he was beyond the range of the illusions.
And now that his mind was his own again he began to study the problem, and to understand something of the nature of the forces against which he had been pitted.
The helmet contained an electrical circuit, designed as a shield against electrical waves tuned to affect his brain. But the hat had failed because the city, whatever it was, had adjusted to this revised pattern as he had approached it. Hence, the helmet had been no defense against illusion. However, when he had jerked the helmet off suddenly to beat on the door, his mental pattern had changed, too suddenly, and the machine caught up only after he had glimpsed another image. Then as the illusion adjusted replacing the helmet threw it off again.
He grinned wryly. He would have liked to know more about the city, whatever it was. He would have liked to know more about the people he had seen, whether they were real or part of the illusion, and if they were as ugly as the second city had been.
Yet the danger was too great. He would go back to his ship and make the arrangements to destroy the city. The ship was armed, and to deliver indirect fire over the edge of the canal would be simple enough. Garve North, his brother, waited back at the ship. If he knew of the city he would have to go there. Eric must not take a chance on that. After they had blasted whatever it was that lay in the canal floor, then it would be time enough to tell Garve, and go down to see what was left.
The ship rested easily on the flat sandstone area where he had established base camp. Its familiar lines brought a smile to Eric's face, a feeling of confidence now that tools and weapons were his again.
He opened the door and entered. The lock doors were left open so that he could enter directly into the body of the ship. He came in in a swift leap, calling, "Garve! Hey, Garve, where are you?"
The ship remained mute. He prowled through it, calling, "Garve," wondering where the young hothead had gone, and then he saw a note clipped to the control board of the ship. He tore it loose impatiently and began to read. Garve had scrawled:
"Funny thing, Eric. A while ago I thought I heard music. I walked down to the canal, and it seemed like there were lights, and a town of some sort far down the canal. I wanted to investigate, but thought I'd better come back. But the thing has been in my mind for hours now, and I'm going down to see what it is. If you want to follow, come straight down the canal."
Eric stared at the note, and the line of his jaw was white. Apparently Garve had seen the city from farther away, and its effect had not been so strong. Even so, Garve's natural curiosity had done the rest.
Garve had gone down to the city, and Garve had no shielded hat. Eric selected two high explosive grenades from the ship's arsenal. They were small but they packed a lot of power. He had a pistol packed with smaller pellets of the same explosive, and he had the hat. That should be adequate. He thrust the bronze hat back on his head and began walking back to the canal.
The return back to the city would always live in his mind as a phantasmagora, a montage of twisted hate and unseemly beauty. When he came again to the gate he did not attempt to enter, but circled the wall, hat on, hat off, stiff limbed like a puppet dancing to the same tune over and over again. He found a place where he could scale the wall, and thrust the helmet on his head, and clawed up the misshapen wall. It was all he could do to make himself drop into the ugly city.
He heard a familiar voice as he dropped. "Eric," the voice said. "Eric, you did come back." The voice was his brother's, and he whirled, seeking the voice. A figure stood before him, a twisted caricature of his brother. The figure cried, "The hat! You fool, get rid of that hat!" The caricature that was his brother seized the hat, and jerked so hard that the chin strap broke under Eric's chin. The hat was flung away and sailed high and far over the fence and outside the city.
The phantasm flickered, the illusion moved. Garve was now more handsome than ever, and the city was a dream of delight. Garve said, "Come," and Eric followed down a street of blue fur. He had no will to resist.
Garve said, "Keep your head down and your face hidden. If we meet someone you may not be recognized. They won't be expecting you from this side of the city."
Eric asked, "You knew I'd come after you?"
"Yes. The Legend said you'd be back."
Eric stopped and whirled to face his brother. "The Legend? Eric the Bronze? What is this wild fantasy?"
"Not so loud!" Garve's voice cautioned him. "Of course the crowd called you that because of the copper hat and your heavy tan. But the Elders believe so too. I don't know what it is, Eric, reincarnation, prophesy, superstition, I only know that when I was with the Elders I believed them. You are a part of a Legend. You are Eric the Bronze."
Eric looked down at his sun tanned hands and flexed them. He loosened the explosive pistol in its holster. At least he was going to be a well armed, well prepared Legend. And while one part of his mind marveled at the city and relaxed into a pleasure as deep as a dream, another struggled with the almost forgotten desire to rescue his brother and escape. He asked, "Who are the Elders?"
"We are going to them, to the center of the city." Garve's voice sharpened, "Keep your head down. I think the last two men we passed are looking after us. Don't look back."
After a moment Garve said, "I think they are following us. Get ready to run. If we are separated, keep going until you reach City Center. The Elders will be expecting you." Garve glanced back, and his voice sharpened, "Now! Run!"
They ran. But as they ran figures began to converge upon them. Farther up the street others appeared, cutting off their flight.
Garve cried, "In here," and pulled Eric into a crevice between two buildings. Eric drew his gun, and savagery began to dance in his eyes. The soft fur muffled sounds of pursuit closed in upon them.
Garve put one hand on Eric's gun hand and said, "Wait here. And if you value my life, don't use that gun." Then he was gone, running deerlike down the street.
For an instant Eric thought the ruse had succeeded. He heard cries and two men passed him running in pursuit. But then the cry came back. "Let him go. Get the other one. The other one."
Eric was seen an instant later, and the people of the city began to converge upon him. He could have destroyed them all with his charges in the gun, but his brother's warning shrieked in his ears, "If you value my life don't use the gun."
There was nothing he could do. Eric stood quietly until he was taken prisoner. They moved him to the center of the wide fur street. Two men held his arms, and twisted painfully. The crowd looked at him, coldly, calculatingly. One of them said, "Get the whips. If we whip him he will not come back." The city twinkled, and the music was so faint he could hardly hear it.
There was only one weapon Eric could use. He had gathered from Garve's words that these people were superstitious.
He laughed, a great chest-shattering laugh that gusted out into the thin Martian air. He laughed and cried in a great voice, "And can you so easily dispose of a Legend? If I am Eric of the Legend, can whips defeat the prophesy?"
There was an instant when he could have twisted loose. They stood, fear-bound at his words. But there was no place to hide, and without the use of his weapons Eric could not have gone far. He had to bluff it out.
Then one of the men cried, "Fools! It is true. We must take no chance with the whips. He would come back. But if he dies here before us now, then we may forget the prophesy."
The crowd murmured and a second voice cried, "Get the sword, get the guards, and kill him at once!"
Eric tensed to break away but now it was too late. His captors were alert. They increased the twist on his arms until he almost screamed with the pain.
The crowd parted, and the guard came through, his red silk clothing gleaming in the sun, his sword bright and deadly. He stopped before Eric, and the sword swirled up like a saber, ready for a slashing cut downward across Eric's neck.
A woman's voice, soft and yet authoritative, called, "Hold!" And a murmur of respect rippled through the crowd.
"Nolette! The Daughter of the City comes."
Eric turned his gaze to the side and saw the woman who had spoken. She was mounted upon a black horse with a jeweled bridle. She was young and her hair was long and free in the wind. She had ridden so softly across the fur street that no one had been aware of her presence.
She said, "Let me touch this man. Let me feel the pulse of his heart so that I may know if he is truly the Bronze one of the Legend. Give me your hand, stranger." She leaned down and grasped his hand. Eric shook his arms free, and reached up and clung to the offered hand, thinking,
"If I pull her down perhaps I can use her as a shield." He tensed his muscles and began to pull.
She cried, "No! You fool. Come up on the horse," and pulled back with an energy as fierce as his own. Then he had swung up on the horse, and the animal leaped forward, its muffled gallop beating out a tattoo of freedom.
Eric clung tightly to the girl's waist. He could feel the young suppleness of her body, and the fine strands of her hair kept swirling back into his face. It had a faint perfume, a clean and heady scent that made him more aware of the touch of her waist. He breathed deeply, oddly happy as they rode.
After five minutes ride they came to a building in the center of the city. The building was cubical, severe in line and architecture, and it contrasted oddly with the exquisite ornament of the rest of the city. It was as if it were a monolith from another time, a stranger crouched among enemies.
The girl halted before the structure and said, "Dismount here, Eric."
Eric swung down, his arms still tingling with pleasure where he had held her. She said, "Knock three times on the door. I will see you again inside. And thank your brother for sending me to bring you here."
Eric knocked on the door. The door was as plain as the building, made of a luminous plastic. It had all the beauty of the great gate door, but a more timeless, more functional beauty.
The door opened and an old man greeted Eric. "Come in. The Council awaits you. Follow me, please."
Eric followed down a hallway and into a large room. The room was obviously designed for a conference room. A great table stood in the room, made of the same luminous plastic as the door of the building. Six men sat at this conference table. Eric's guide placed him in a chair at the base of the T-shaped table.
There was one vacant seat beside the head of the T, and as Eric watched, the young woman who had rescued him entered and took her place there. She smiled at Eric, and the room took on a warmth that it had lacked with only the older men present. The man at her right, obviously presiding here looked at Eric and spoke. "I am Kroon, the eldest of the elders. We have brought you here to satisfy ourselves of your identity. In view of your danger in the City you are entitled to some sort of explanation." He glanced around the room and asked, "What is the judgment of the elders?"
Eric caught a faint nod here, a gesture there. Kroon nodded as if in satisfaction. He turned to the girl, "And what is your opinion, Daughter of the City?"
Nolette's expression held sorrow, as if she looked into the far future. She said, "He is Eric the Bronze. I have no doubt."
Eric asked, "And what is this Legend of Eric the Bronze? Why am I so despised in the city?"
Kroon answered, "According to the Ancient Legend you will destroy the city. This, and other things."
Eric gaped. No wonder the crowd had shown such hatred. But why were the elders so friendly? They were obviously the governing body, and if there was strife between them and the people it had not shown in the respect the crowd had accorded Nolette.
Kroon said, "I see you are puzzled. Let me tell you the story of the City. The City is old. It dates from long ago when the canals of Mars ran clear and green with water, and the deserts were vineyards and gardens. The drouth came, and the changes in climate, and soon it became plain that the people of Mars were doomed. They had ships, and could build more, and gradually they left to colonize other planets. Yet they could take little of their science. And fear and riots destroyed much. Also there were those who were filled with love for this homeland, and who thought that one day it might be habitable again. All the skill of the ancient Martian fathers went into the building of a giant machine, the machine that is the City, to protect a small colony of those who were chosen to remain on Mars."
"This whole city is a machine!" Eric asked.
"Yes, or the product of one. The heart of it lies underneath our feet, in caverns beneath this building. The nature of the machine is this, that it translates thought into reality."
Eric stared. The idea was staggering.
"This is essentially simple, although the technology is complex. It is necessary to have a recording device, to capture thought, a transmuting device capable of transmuting the red dust of the desert into any sort of material desired, and a construction device, to assemble this material into the pattern already recorded from thought." Kroon paused.
"You still doubt, my friend. Perhaps you are thirsty after your escape. Think strongly of a tall glass of cold water, visualize it in your mind, the sight and the fluidity and the touch of it."
Eric did so. Without warning a glass of water stood on the table before him. He touched the water to his lips. It was cool and satisfying. He drank it, convinced completely.
Eric asked, "And I am to destroy the City?"
"Yes. The time has come."
"But why?" Eric demanded. For an instant he could see the twinkling beauty as clearly as if he had stood outside the walls of this building.
Kroon said, "There are difficulties. The machine builds according to the mass will of the people, though it is sensitive to the individual in areas where it does not conflict with the imagination of the mass. We have had strangers, visitors, and even our own people, who grew drunk with the power of the machine, who dreamed more and more lust and greed into existence. These were banished from the city, and so strong is the call of the city that many of them became victims of their own evilness, and now walk mindlessly, with no thought but to seek for the beauty they have lost here."
Kroon sighed. "The people have lost the will to learn. Many do not even know of the machine. Our science is almost gone, and only a few of us, the dreamers, the elders, have kept alive the old knowledge of the machine and its history. By the collected powers of our imagination we build and control the outward appearance of the city.
"We have passed this down from father to son. A part of the ancient Legend is that the builders made provisions for the machine to be destroyed when contact with outsiders had been made once again, so that our people would again have to struggle forward to knowledge and power. The instrument of destruction was to be a man termed Eric the Bronze. It is not that you are reborn. It is just that sometime such a man would come."
Eric said, "I can understand the Bronze part. They had thought that a space man might well be sun tanned. They had thought that a science to protect against this beautiful illusion would provide a metal shield of some sort, probably copper in nature. That such a man should come is inevitable. But why Eric. Why the name Eric?"
For the first time Nolette spoke. She said quietly, "The name Eric was an honorable name of the ancient fathers. It must have been their thought that the new beginning should wait for some of their own far flung kind to return."
Eric nodded. He asked, "What happens now?"
"Nothing. Dwell here with us and you will be safe from our people. If the prediction is not soon fulfilled and you are not the Eric of the Legend, you may stay or go as you desire."
"My brother, Garve. What about him?"
"He loves the city. He will also stay, though he will be outside this building." Kroon clasped his hands. "Nolette, will you show Eric his quarters?"
Question:
What is the plot of the story?
Answer:
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[
"Eric North, a man from Earth, is lying on his stomach and thinking whether he should go down to the bottom of the canal before him, where the beauty of the fabled city of Mars calls the youth. After a short resistance, Eric surrenders to the call of the city, rushes towards it and starts beating the gate to get in. Upon hearing Eric's name, the sentinel screams it out loud and strikes the man with hatred, mentioning some kind of a legend. A crowd full of hatred gathers, but Eric manages to escape from the city. Nevertheless, it calls again and he starts pleading at the gates to be let back, even though he knows it's insane. Shortly after, Eric realizes, with the help of taking off his hat, that the beauty is an illusion and walks away on a safe distance. He figures out putting the hat on and off confuses the machine and the illusion disappears. He decides to destroy the city without exploring further not to put himself and his brother in danger. Nevertheless, turns out that Garve, the brother, followed his curiosity and went to the city. When the two meet, Garve takes off Eric's head and mentions the legend about Eric which everyone in the city believes. While heading to the city center, the two are followed and Garve asks his brother not to use the gun, which results in Eric's capture. Eric bluffs, threatening people with the prophecy, but they decide to kill him. A respected young woman, Nolette, suddenly saves him and brings before the council. There Eric learns the story of the city, which is a small colony of those who chose to remain on Mars during the drought and a machine was created there to translate thought into reality. Now people become lustful, lose their will to learn and many of those banished have lost their minds. That's why the city has to be destroyed and Eric is the instrument. Then Eric is led to his quarters in the building of the Elders, and his brother stays in the city as well, though in another place.",
"Eric North, from Earth, is trying to escape the illusion of a grand, but evil city on Mars. A machine buried deep under the city is controlling this facade, to make the city unspeakably beautiful, luring Eric in. He tries his best to avert his eyes from the city, but sweet music pours out of it, and he goes back, banging on the door to be let in. He wears a copper helmet, designed to shield him from the fabricated beauty of the place, but it doesn't seem to work. He is met by a sentinel guarding the city, who attacks him with a sword when he tells the guard his name. He exclaims that Eric is \"Eric the Bronze''. Eric wakes up with the people of the city crowding around him. They agree to execute him, but Eric is able to escape, making it back to his ship, where he expects to meet his brother Garve. He realises that if he continues to take the helmet he is wearing on and off, he can see past the illusion of the city, for what it truly is, and escapes it's pull. When he arrives on the ship, he sees a note from Garve, telling Eric that he heard the sweet music of the city, and has gone to explore it. Eric takes two grenades and his pistol, and goes to save Garve. He scales the outer wall of the city, soon meeting Garve. He steals the copper helmet away from Eric, throwing it over the wall. He tells Eric to keep his face hidden so the people of the city won't see him. He relays how the elders of the city told him the legend of Eric The Bronze, whom they are going to see now. They are soon spotted and taken by two men to the centre of the city, where the mob plan on killing him again. Just then, a woman on a black horse appears. Her name is Nolette, The Daughter of the City. She takes Eric to the building in which the elders preside. Eric enters the room where they are waiting. They Tell Eric of how the city came to be. How the once lush Mars died, and the city was created to protect those who keep the ancient skills and science of Mars. The city is really a machine under their feet, and it can be changed into whatever an inhabitant thinks of. However, over time, the people grew drunk with the power of creation and turned evil. And so, it is time for the city to be destroyed. And as the prophecy states, Eric will be the one to carry out the destruction. They invite him to stay in the city with his brother until this time comes, and if after a while it doesn't, and the prophecy is wrong, he is free to go. ",
"The story starts with Eric North, an Earth man, laying on the ground in the canal where he can see the spires and minarets in the distance. Those minarets and the city attracts him, but his mind fights this dangerous thought and reminds him the possibility of becoming a soulless husk. He refuses to look at it and walks away from the city. However, after reaching the bottom of the canal, he runs towards the city. As he gets nearer, he can hear richer music. The sentinel assumes that he is Eric the Bronze from the legend and hits Eric with his sword. The other people in the city also look at him with hatred and want to whip him. He gets so scared that he runs away. When he is attracted to come back again, he realizes that his metal helmet is able to defend the illusions for a short while. Thus, on his way back to his ship he keeps putting the helmet on and taking it off. He assumes that the helmet’s electrical circuit is able to defend against the illusion for a while since it takes some time for the illusions to adjust the waves to affect him. Even though he seems very curious to learn more about the city, he decides to go back to the ship to his brother Grave North. \n\nOn the ship, Eric realizes that Grave had also heard the beautiful music from the city. While the music did not force Grave, his curiosity lead him to the city. Eric gets some explosives and goes back to the city. Climbing the city’s wall, he is greeted by a caricature form of his brother. The caricature tells him to get rid of his hat as they walk to the city center where the Elders are expecting him. Realizing that they are being followed, they run separately. When Eric is finally captured, he remembers that his brother told him to not use the gun. Thus, he uses superstition and tells them that a Legend cannot be defeated with some simple whips. They decide to kill him instead. Before he is killed, Nolette, the Daughter of the City, carries him to the Council on a horse. There, he learns that Eric the Bronze will destroy this city. He also acknowledges that the city is a product of a machine that translates the mass will of the citizens into reality. From the Elders, he learns about the banished ones and the ancient Legend. Finally, he is then to stay inside this building for some time. If he is not Eric the Legend, then he will be able stay or leave as he desires. ",
"Eric North finds the fabled city of Mars and hears strange music that he cannot resist. Although he tries to turn away, the tune’s influence becomes too powerful. He runs to the city’s gates and demands to be let in. The gates swing open, and one of the well-dressed sentinels welcomes him. However, once he gives his name, the sentinel claims that he is Eric the Bronze and smashes his sword on Eric’s metal hat. When Eric wakes up again, he finds many beautiful citizens staring at him with hatred. He fears what the citizens will do and runs out of the city, despite the music telling him to come back. For a moment, the illusion of the beautiful city changes to one of evil and disgust. Eric walks away from the canal and examines how the illusions have affected him. His helmet has an electrical circuit that acts as a shield against any electrical waves that may affect his brain. Although Eric wants to know more, it is too dangerous. He finds his brother Garve North and plans to make arrangements to have the city destroyed. When Eric returns, Garve tells him about seeing the city and is going down to see it again. He selects two grenades and a pistol packed with explosive pellets as he goes back to investigate with Garve. After he returns, the illusion changes once again when he has his hat on and after Garve throws his hat out of the city walls. Garve reveals that he knows about Eric the Bronze legend and is taking him to see the Elders right now. The two of them are being followed by the citizens, and Garve tries to distract them. They realize that Eric is who they want; Eric wants to use his gun, but Garve warns him not to if he values his brother’s life. Instead, he tries to scare the citizens by bluffing, but they decide to kill him and stop the prophesy. Nolette, the Daughter of the City, suddenly appears and retrieves him from the angry crowd. She takes him to a building in the city center and tells him to go inside to see The Council. Six men and Nolette sit at a conference table, and they begin to discuss him. Nolette believes he is Eric the Bronze, while Kroon explains that he is prophesied to destroy the city. The city is also a machine built to protect the small colony of those on Mars after natural changes occurred. Kroon further explains that the Elders collectively control the city’s appearance, and the ancient builders prophesied that the machine would be destroyed by a man termed Eric the Bronze. The name Eric was chosen because it is an honorable name for the ancient fathers and a symbol of new beginnings for some. The Elders let Eric live with them, while Garve will live outside of the building. "
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63605
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The Beast-Jewel of Mars
By V. E. THIESSEN
The city was strange, fantastic, beautiful. He'd never been there before, yet already he was a fabulous legend—a dire, hateful legend.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
He lay on his stomach, a lean man in faded one piece dungarees, and an odd metallic hat, peering over the side of the canal. Behind him the little winds sifted red dust into his collar, but he could not move; he could only sit there with his gaze riveted on the spires and minarets that twinkled in the distance, far down the bottom of the canal.
One part of his mind said, This is it, this is the fabled city of Mars. This is the beauty and the fantasy and the music of the legends, and I must go down there. Yet somewhere deeper in his mind, deep in the primal urges that kept him from death, the warning was taut and urgent. Get away. They have a part of your mind now. Get away from the city before you lose it all. Get away before your body becomes a husk, a soulless husk to walk the low canals with sightless eyes, like those who came before you.
He strained to push back from the edge, trying to get that fantastic beauty out of his sight. He fought the lids of his eyes, fought to close them while he pushed himself back, but they remained open, staring at the jeweled towers, and borne on the little winds the thin wail of music reached him, saying, Come into the city, come down into the fabled city .
He slid over the edge, sliding down the sloping sides of the canal. The rough sandstone tore at his dungarees, tore at his elbow where it touched but he did not feel the pain. His face was turned toward the towers, and the sound of his breathing was less than human.
His feet caught a projecting bit of stone and were slowed for an instant, so that he turned sideways and rolled on, down into the red dust bottom of the canal, to lie face down in the dust, with the chin strap of the odd metallic hat cutting cruelly into his chin.
He lay there an instant, knowing that now he had a chance. With his face down like this, and the dust smarting his eyes the image was gone for an instant. He had to get away, he knew that. He had to mount the sides of the canal and never look back.
He told himself, "I am Eric North, from Earth, the Third Planet of Sol, and this is not real."
He squirmed in the dust, feeling it bite his cheeks; he squirmed until he could get up and see nothing but the red sand stone walls of the canal. He ran at the walls and clawed his way up like an animal in his haste. He wouldn't look again.
The wind freshened and the tune of the music began to talk to him. It told of going barefoot over long streets of fur. It told of jewels, and wine, and women as fair as springtime. These and more were in the city, waiting for him to claim them.
He sobbed, and clawed forward. He stopped to rest, and slowly his head began to turn. He turned, and the spires and minarets twinkled at him, beautiful, soothing, stopping the tears that had welled down his cheeks.
When he reached the bottom of the canal he began to run toward the city.
When he came to the city there was a high wall around it, and a heavy gate carved with lotus blossoms. He beat against the gate and cried,
"Oh! Let me in. Let me in to the city!" The music was richer now, as if it were everywhere, and the gate swung open without the faintest sound.
A sentinel stood before the opened gate at the end of a long blue street. He was dressed in red silk with his sleeves edged in blue leopard skin, and he wore a belt with a jeweled short sword. He drew the sword from its scabbard, and bowed forward until the point of the sword touched the street of blue fur. He said, "I give you the welcome of my sword, and the welcome of the city. Speak your name so that it may be set in the records of the dreamers."
The music sang, and the spires twinkled, and Eric said, "I am Eric North!"
The sword point jerked, and the sentinel straightened. His face was white. He cried aloud, "It is Eric the Bronze. It is Eric of the Legend." He whirled the sword aloft, and smashed it upon Eric's metal hat, and the hatred was a blue flame in his eyes.
When Eric regained consciousness the people of the city were all about him. They were very fair, and the women were more beautiful than music. Yet now they stared at him with red hate in their eyes. An older man came forward and struck at the copper hat with a stick. The clang deafened Eric and the man cried, "You are right. It is Eric the Bronze. Bring the ships and let him be scourged from the city."
The man drew back the stick and struck again, and Eric's back took fire with the blow. The crowd chanted, "Whips, bring the whips," and fear forced Eric to his feet. He fled then, running on the heedless feet of panic, outstripping those who were behind him until he passed through the great gates into the red dust floor of the canal. The gates closed behind him, and the dust beat upon him, and he paused, his heart hammering inside his chest like a great bell clapper. He turned and looked behind to be sure he was safe.
The towers twinkled at him, and the music whispered to him, "Come back, Eric North. Come back to the city."
He turned and stumbled back to the great gate and hammered on it until his fists were raw, pleading for it to open and let him back.
And deep inside him some part of his mind said, "This is a madness you cannot escape. The city is evil, an evil like you have never known," and a fear as old as time coursed through his frame.
He seized the copper hat from his head, and beat on the lotus carvings of the great door, crying, "Let me in! Please, take me back into the city."
And as he beat the city changed. It became dull and sordid and evil, a city of disgust, with every part offensive to the eye. The spires and minarets were gargoyles of hatred, twisted and misshapen, and the sound of the city was a macabre song of hate.
He stared, and his back was chill with superstitions as old as the beginning of man. The city flickered, changing before his eyes until it was beautiful again.
He stood, amazed, and put the metal hat back on his head. With the motion the shift took place again, and beauty was ugliness. Amazed, he stared at the illusion, and the thought came to him that the metal hat had not entirely failed him after all.
He turned and began to walk away from the city, and when it began to call he took the hat off his head and found peace for a time. Then when it began again he replaced the hat, and revulsion sped his footsteps. And so, hat on, hat off, he made his way down the dusty floor of the canal, and up the rocky sides until he stood on the Martian desert, and the canal was a thin line behind him. He breathed easily then, for he was beyond the range of the illusions.
And now that his mind was his own again he began to study the problem, and to understand something of the nature of the forces against which he had been pitted.
The helmet contained an electrical circuit, designed as a shield against electrical waves tuned to affect his brain. But the hat had failed because the city, whatever it was, had adjusted to this revised pattern as he had approached it. Hence, the helmet had been no defense against illusion. However, when he had jerked the helmet off suddenly to beat on the door, his mental pattern had changed, too suddenly, and the machine caught up only after he had glimpsed another image. Then as the illusion adjusted replacing the helmet threw it off again.
He grinned wryly. He would have liked to know more about the city, whatever it was. He would have liked to know more about the people he had seen, whether they were real or part of the illusion, and if they were as ugly as the second city had been.
Yet the danger was too great. He would go back to his ship and make the arrangements to destroy the city. The ship was armed, and to deliver indirect fire over the edge of the canal would be simple enough. Garve North, his brother, waited back at the ship. If he knew of the city he would have to go there. Eric must not take a chance on that. After they had blasted whatever it was that lay in the canal floor, then it would be time enough to tell Garve, and go down to see what was left.
The ship rested easily on the flat sandstone area where he had established base camp. Its familiar lines brought a smile to Eric's face, a feeling of confidence now that tools and weapons were his again.
He opened the door and entered. The lock doors were left open so that he could enter directly into the body of the ship. He came in in a swift leap, calling, "Garve! Hey, Garve, where are you?"
The ship remained mute. He prowled through it, calling, "Garve," wondering where the young hothead had gone, and then he saw a note clipped to the control board of the ship. He tore it loose impatiently and began to read. Garve had scrawled:
"Funny thing, Eric. A while ago I thought I heard music. I walked down to the canal, and it seemed like there were lights, and a town of some sort far down the canal. I wanted to investigate, but thought I'd better come back. But the thing has been in my mind for hours now, and I'm going down to see what it is. If you want to follow, come straight down the canal."
Eric stared at the note, and the line of his jaw was white. Apparently Garve had seen the city from farther away, and its effect had not been so strong. Even so, Garve's natural curiosity had done the rest.
Garve had gone down to the city, and Garve had no shielded hat. Eric selected two high explosive grenades from the ship's arsenal. They were small but they packed a lot of power. He had a pistol packed with smaller pellets of the same explosive, and he had the hat. That should be adequate. He thrust the bronze hat back on his head and began walking back to the canal.
The return back to the city would always live in his mind as a phantasmagora, a montage of twisted hate and unseemly beauty. When he came again to the gate he did not attempt to enter, but circled the wall, hat on, hat off, stiff limbed like a puppet dancing to the same tune over and over again. He found a place where he could scale the wall, and thrust the helmet on his head, and clawed up the misshapen wall. It was all he could do to make himself drop into the ugly city.
He heard a familiar voice as he dropped. "Eric," the voice said. "Eric, you did come back." The voice was his brother's, and he whirled, seeking the voice. A figure stood before him, a twisted caricature of his brother. The figure cried, "The hat! You fool, get rid of that hat!" The caricature that was his brother seized the hat, and jerked so hard that the chin strap broke under Eric's chin. The hat was flung away and sailed high and far over the fence and outside the city.
The phantasm flickered, the illusion moved. Garve was now more handsome than ever, and the city was a dream of delight. Garve said, "Come," and Eric followed down a street of blue fur. He had no will to resist.
Garve said, "Keep your head down and your face hidden. If we meet someone you may not be recognized. They won't be expecting you from this side of the city."
Eric asked, "You knew I'd come after you?"
"Yes. The Legend said you'd be back."
Eric stopped and whirled to face his brother. "The Legend? Eric the Bronze? What is this wild fantasy?"
"Not so loud!" Garve's voice cautioned him. "Of course the crowd called you that because of the copper hat and your heavy tan. But the Elders believe so too. I don't know what it is, Eric, reincarnation, prophesy, superstition, I only know that when I was with the Elders I believed them. You are a part of a Legend. You are Eric the Bronze."
Eric looked down at his sun tanned hands and flexed them. He loosened the explosive pistol in its holster. At least he was going to be a well armed, well prepared Legend. And while one part of his mind marveled at the city and relaxed into a pleasure as deep as a dream, another struggled with the almost forgotten desire to rescue his brother and escape. He asked, "Who are the Elders?"
"We are going to them, to the center of the city." Garve's voice sharpened, "Keep your head down. I think the last two men we passed are looking after us. Don't look back."
After a moment Garve said, "I think they are following us. Get ready to run. If we are separated, keep going until you reach City Center. The Elders will be expecting you." Garve glanced back, and his voice sharpened, "Now! Run!"
They ran. But as they ran figures began to converge upon them. Farther up the street others appeared, cutting off their flight.
Garve cried, "In here," and pulled Eric into a crevice between two buildings. Eric drew his gun, and savagery began to dance in his eyes. The soft fur muffled sounds of pursuit closed in upon them.
Garve put one hand on Eric's gun hand and said, "Wait here. And if you value my life, don't use that gun." Then he was gone, running deerlike down the street.
For an instant Eric thought the ruse had succeeded. He heard cries and two men passed him running in pursuit. But then the cry came back. "Let him go. Get the other one. The other one."
Eric was seen an instant later, and the people of the city began to converge upon him. He could have destroyed them all with his charges in the gun, but his brother's warning shrieked in his ears, "If you value my life don't use the gun."
There was nothing he could do. Eric stood quietly until he was taken prisoner. They moved him to the center of the wide fur street. Two men held his arms, and twisted painfully. The crowd looked at him, coldly, calculatingly. One of them said, "Get the whips. If we whip him he will not come back." The city twinkled, and the music was so faint he could hardly hear it.
There was only one weapon Eric could use. He had gathered from Garve's words that these people were superstitious.
He laughed, a great chest-shattering laugh that gusted out into the thin Martian air. He laughed and cried in a great voice, "And can you so easily dispose of a Legend? If I am Eric of the Legend, can whips defeat the prophesy?"
There was an instant when he could have twisted loose. They stood, fear-bound at his words. But there was no place to hide, and without the use of his weapons Eric could not have gone far. He had to bluff it out.
Then one of the men cried, "Fools! It is true. We must take no chance with the whips. He would come back. But if he dies here before us now, then we may forget the prophesy."
The crowd murmured and a second voice cried, "Get the sword, get the guards, and kill him at once!"
Eric tensed to break away but now it was too late. His captors were alert. They increased the twist on his arms until he almost screamed with the pain.
The crowd parted, and the guard came through, his red silk clothing gleaming in the sun, his sword bright and deadly. He stopped before Eric, and the sword swirled up like a saber, ready for a slashing cut downward across Eric's neck.
A woman's voice, soft and yet authoritative, called, "Hold!" And a murmur of respect rippled through the crowd.
"Nolette! The Daughter of the City comes."
Eric turned his gaze to the side and saw the woman who had spoken. She was mounted upon a black horse with a jeweled bridle. She was young and her hair was long and free in the wind. She had ridden so softly across the fur street that no one had been aware of her presence.
She said, "Let me touch this man. Let me feel the pulse of his heart so that I may know if he is truly the Bronze one of the Legend. Give me your hand, stranger." She leaned down and grasped his hand. Eric shook his arms free, and reached up and clung to the offered hand, thinking,
"If I pull her down perhaps I can use her as a shield." He tensed his muscles and began to pull.
She cried, "No! You fool. Come up on the horse," and pulled back with an energy as fierce as his own. Then he had swung up on the horse, and the animal leaped forward, its muffled gallop beating out a tattoo of freedom.
Eric clung tightly to the girl's waist. He could feel the young suppleness of her body, and the fine strands of her hair kept swirling back into his face. It had a faint perfume, a clean and heady scent that made him more aware of the touch of her waist. He breathed deeply, oddly happy as they rode.
After five minutes ride they came to a building in the center of the city. The building was cubical, severe in line and architecture, and it contrasted oddly with the exquisite ornament of the rest of the city. It was as if it were a monolith from another time, a stranger crouched among enemies.
The girl halted before the structure and said, "Dismount here, Eric."
Eric swung down, his arms still tingling with pleasure where he had held her. She said, "Knock three times on the door. I will see you again inside. And thank your brother for sending me to bring you here."
Eric knocked on the door. The door was as plain as the building, made of a luminous plastic. It had all the beauty of the great gate door, but a more timeless, more functional beauty.
The door opened and an old man greeted Eric. "Come in. The Council awaits you. Follow me, please."
Eric followed down a hallway and into a large room. The room was obviously designed for a conference room. A great table stood in the room, made of the same luminous plastic as the door of the building. Six men sat at this conference table. Eric's guide placed him in a chair at the base of the T-shaped table.
There was one vacant seat beside the head of the T, and as Eric watched, the young woman who had rescued him entered and took her place there. She smiled at Eric, and the room took on a warmth that it had lacked with only the older men present. The man at her right, obviously presiding here looked at Eric and spoke. "I am Kroon, the eldest of the elders. We have brought you here to satisfy ourselves of your identity. In view of your danger in the City you are entitled to some sort of explanation." He glanced around the room and asked, "What is the judgment of the elders?"
Eric caught a faint nod here, a gesture there. Kroon nodded as if in satisfaction. He turned to the girl, "And what is your opinion, Daughter of the City?"
Nolette's expression held sorrow, as if she looked into the far future. She said, "He is Eric the Bronze. I have no doubt."
Eric asked, "And what is this Legend of Eric the Bronze? Why am I so despised in the city?"
Kroon answered, "According to the Ancient Legend you will destroy the city. This, and other things."
Eric gaped. No wonder the crowd had shown such hatred. But why were the elders so friendly? They were obviously the governing body, and if there was strife between them and the people it had not shown in the respect the crowd had accorded Nolette.
Kroon said, "I see you are puzzled. Let me tell you the story of the City. The City is old. It dates from long ago when the canals of Mars ran clear and green with water, and the deserts were vineyards and gardens. The drouth came, and the changes in climate, and soon it became plain that the people of Mars were doomed. They had ships, and could build more, and gradually they left to colonize other planets. Yet they could take little of their science. And fear and riots destroyed much. Also there were those who were filled with love for this homeland, and who thought that one day it might be habitable again. All the skill of the ancient Martian fathers went into the building of a giant machine, the machine that is the City, to protect a small colony of those who were chosen to remain on Mars."
"This whole city is a machine!" Eric asked.
"Yes, or the product of one. The heart of it lies underneath our feet, in caverns beneath this building. The nature of the machine is this, that it translates thought into reality."
Eric stared. The idea was staggering.
"This is essentially simple, although the technology is complex. It is necessary to have a recording device, to capture thought, a transmuting device capable of transmuting the red dust of the desert into any sort of material desired, and a construction device, to assemble this material into the pattern already recorded from thought." Kroon paused.
"You still doubt, my friend. Perhaps you are thirsty after your escape. Think strongly of a tall glass of cold water, visualize it in your mind, the sight and the fluidity and the touch of it."
Eric did so. Without warning a glass of water stood on the table before him. He touched the water to his lips. It was cool and satisfying. He drank it, convinced completely.
Eric asked, "And I am to destroy the City?"
"Yes. The time has come."
"But why?" Eric demanded. For an instant he could see the twinkling beauty as clearly as if he had stood outside the walls of this building.
Kroon said, "There are difficulties. The machine builds according to the mass will of the people, though it is sensitive to the individual in areas where it does not conflict with the imagination of the mass. We have had strangers, visitors, and even our own people, who grew drunk with the power of the machine, who dreamed more and more lust and greed into existence. These were banished from the city, and so strong is the call of the city that many of them became victims of their own evilness, and now walk mindlessly, with no thought but to seek for the beauty they have lost here."
Kroon sighed. "The people have lost the will to learn. Many do not even know of the machine. Our science is almost gone, and only a few of us, the dreamers, the elders, have kept alive the old knowledge of the machine and its history. By the collected powers of our imagination we build and control the outward appearance of the city.
"We have passed this down from father to son. A part of the ancient Legend is that the builders made provisions for the machine to be destroyed when contact with outsiders had been made once again, so that our people would again have to struggle forward to knowledge and power. The instrument of destruction was to be a man termed Eric the Bronze. It is not that you are reborn. It is just that sometime such a man would come."
Eric said, "I can understand the Bronze part. They had thought that a space man might well be sun tanned. They had thought that a science to protect against this beautiful illusion would provide a metal shield of some sort, probably copper in nature. That such a man should come is inevitable. But why Eric. Why the name Eric?"
For the first time Nolette spoke. She said quietly, "The name Eric was an honorable name of the ancient fathers. It must have been their thought that the new beginning should wait for some of their own far flung kind to return."
Eric nodded. He asked, "What happens now?"
"Nothing. Dwell here with us and you will be safe from our people. If the prediction is not soon fulfilled and you are not the Eric of the Legend, you may stay or go as you desire."
"My brother, Garve. What about him?"
"He loves the city. He will also stay, though he will be outside this building." Kroon clasped his hands. "Nolette, will you show Eric his quarters?"
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What is the plot of the story?
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about Bridge Crossing by Dave Dryfoos.
Relevant chunks:
Bridge Crossing
BY DAVE DRYFOOS
Illustrated by HARRISON
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction May 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
He knew the city was organized for his individual defense, for it had been that way since he was born. But who was his enemy?
In 1849, the mist that sometimes rolled through the Golden Gate was known as fog. In 2149, it had become far more frequent, and was known as smog. By 2349, it was fog again.
But tonight there was smoke mixed with the fog. Roddie could smell it. Somewhere in the forested ruins, fire was burning.
He wasn't worried. The small blaze that smoldered behind him on the cracked concrete floor had consumed everything burnable within blocks; what remained of the gutted concrete office building from which he peered was fire-proof.
But Roddie was himself aflame with anger. As always when Invaders broke in from the north, he'd been left behind with his nurse, Molly, while the soldiers went out to fight.
And nowadays Molly's presence wasn't the comfort it used to be. He felt almost ready to jump out of his skin, the way she rocked and knitted in that grating ruined chair, saying over and over again, "The soldiers don't want little boys. The soldiers don't want little boys. The soldiers don't—"
"I'm not a little boy!" Roddie suddenly shouted. "I'm full-grown and I've never even seen an Invader. Why won't you let me go and fight?"
Fiercely he crossed the bare, gritty floor and shook Molly's shoulder. She rattled under his jarring hand, and abruptly changed the subject.
"A is for Atom, B is for Bomb, C is for Corpse—" she chanted.
Roddie reached into her shapeless dress and pinched. Lately that had helped her over these spells. But this time, though it stopped the kindergarten song, the treatment only started something worse.
"Wuzzums hungry?" Molly cooed, still rocking.
Utterly disgusted, Roddie ripped her head off her neck.
It was a completely futile gesture. The complicated mind that had cared for him and taught him speech and the alphabet hadn't made him a mechanic, and his only tool was a broken-handled screwdriver.
He was still tinkering when the soldiers came in. While they lined up along the wall, he put Molly's head back on her neck.
She gaped coyly at the new arrivals. "Hello, boys," she simpered.
"Looking for a good time?"
Roddie slapped her to silence, reflecting briefly that there were many things he didn't know about Molly. But there was work to be done. Carefully he framed the ritual words she'd taught him: "Soldiers, come to attention and report!"
There were eleven of them, six feet tall, with four limbs and eight extremities. They stood uniformly, the thumbs on each pair of hands touching along the center line of the legs, front feet turned out at an angle of forty-five degrees, rear feet turned inward at thirty degrees.
"Sir," they chorused, "we have met the enemy and he is ours."
He inspected them. All were scratched and dented, but one in particular seemed badly damaged. His left arm was almost severed at the shoulder.
"Come here, fellow," Roddie said. "Let's see if I can fix that."
The soldier took a step forward, lurched suddenly, stopped, and whipped out a bayonet.
"Death to Invaders!" he yelled, and charged crazily.
Molly stepped in front of him.
"You aren't being very nice to my baby," she murmured, and thrust her knitting needles into his eyes.
Roddie jumped behind him, knocked off his helmet, and pressed a soft spot on his conical skull. The soldier collapsed to the floor.
Roddie salvaged and returned Molly's needles. Then he examined the patient, tearing him apart as a boy dismembers an alarm clock.
It was lucky he did. The left arm's pair of hands suddenly writhed off the floor in an effort to choke him. But because the arm was detached at the shoulder and therefore blind, he escaped the clutching onslaught and could goad the reflexing hands into assaulting one another harmlessly.
Meanwhile, the other soldiers left, except for one, apparently another casualty, who stumbled on his way out and fell into the fire. By the time Roddie had hauled him clear, damage was beyond repair. Roddie swore, then decided to try combining parts of this casualty with pieces of the other to make a whole one.
To get more light for the operation, he poked up the fire. Roddie was new at his work, and took it seriously. It alarmed him to watch the soldiers melt away, gradually succumbing to battle damage, shamed him to see the empty ruins burn section by section as the Invaders repeatedly broke through and had to be burned out.
Soon there would be nothing left of the Private Property Keep Out that, according to Molly's bedtime story, the Owners had entrusted to them when driven away by radioactivity. Soon the soldiers themselves would be gone. None would remain to guard the city but a few strayed servants like Molly, and an occasional Civil Defender.
And himself, Roddie reflected, spitting savagely into the fire. He might remain. But how he fitted into the picture, he didn't know. And Molly, who claimed to have found him in the ruins after a fight with Invaders twenty years before, couldn't or wouldn't say.
Well, for as long as possible, Roddie decided, he'd do his duty as the others did theirs—single-mindedly. Eventually the soldiers might accept him as one of themselves; meanwhile, this newly attempted first aid was useful to them.
He gave the fire a final poke and then paused, wondering if, when heated, his screwdriver could make an unfastened end of wire stick on the grayish spot where it seemed to belong.
Stretching prone to blow the embers hot so he could try out his new idea, Roddie got too close to the flames. Instantly the room filled with the stench of singed hair. Roddie drew angrily back, beating out the sparks in his uncut blond mane.
As he stood slapping his head and muttering, a deranged Civil Defense firefighter popped into the doorway and covered him with carbon dioxide foam.
Roddie fled. His life-long friends were not merely wearing out, they were unbearably wearing.
In the street, even before he'd wiped off the foam, he regretted his flight. The fire was back home. And here in the cold of this fog-shrouded canyon, a mere trail between heaped-up walls of rubble, the diaper he wore felt inadequate against the pre-dawn cold. His cherished weapon, a magnetic tack-hammer, was chill beneath the diaper's top, and the broken, radium-dialed wristwatch suspended from a string around his neck hung clammy against his chest. He stood irresolute on numbing bare feet, and considered returning to the more familiar bedlam.
But colder than cold was his shame at being cold. Molly never was, though she knew how to keep him warm, nor were the others. Hunger, thirst, pain and coldness were sensations never experienced by his friends. Like the growth he'd been undergoing till recently, these were things of ignominy, to be hidden as far as possible from inquiring eyes. Cold as it was, he'd have to hide.
Temporarily, the darkness concealed him, though it was not quite complete. From above the fog, the moon played vaguely deceptive light on the splinters of architecture looming toward it. Some distance off, an owl hooted, but here nocturnal rodents felt free to squeak and rustle as they scampered.
The world seemed ghostly. Yet it wasn't dead; it merely lurked. And as an irrepressible yawn reminded Roddie of his absurd need for sleep even in the midst of danger, he concluded for the thousandth time that the One who'd built him must have been an apprentice.
For just such reasons he'd developed the hideout toward which he now walked. It had been the haven of his adolescence, when the discovery of how much he differed from his friends had been a shock, and the shock itself a difference to be hidden.
His hiding place was a manhole, dead center in the dead street. A weathered bronze bar, carefully placed in the cover's slotted rim, was the levering key that opened its door.
Everything was wrong tonight! He couldn't even find the bar. Of course that spoiled things, because the bar was a roller on which to move the heavy cover from below, and a support that held it ajar for ventilation.
But the example of his friends had taught him above all else to carry out every purpose. Molly was a nurse; she had raised him despite all obstacles. The soldiers were guards; they protected the ruins against everything larger than a rat. The firefighter had put even him out when he was aflame....
Anyhow, the manhole cover had been loosened by his frequent handling. He lifted it aside by main strength, then flattened himself to the street, and felt with his feet for the top rung.
Halfway down the iron ladder, something made him pause. He looked, but saw only blackness. He listened, sniffed, found nothing. What could have entered through the iron cover?
He sneered at his own timidity and jumped to the bottom.
It was warm! The dry bottom of the hole had the temperature of body heat, as if a large animal had recently rested there!
Quickly, Roddie drew the hammer from his waist. Then, with weapon ready for an instantaneous blow, he stretched his left hand through the darkness. He touched something warm, softish. Gingerly he felt over that curving surface for identifying features.
While Roddie investigated by touch, his long fingers were suddenly seized and bitten. At the same time, his right shin received a savage kick. And his own retaliatory blow was checked in mid-swing by an unexpected voice.
"Get your filthy hands off me!" it whispered angrily. "Who do you think you are?"
Startled, he dropped his hammer. "I'm Roddie," he said, squatting to fumble for it. "Who do you think you are?"
"I'm Ida, naturally! Just how many girls are there in this raiding party?"
His first Invader—and he had dropped his weapon!
Scrabbling fearfully in the dust for his hammer, Roddie paused suddenly. This girl—whatever that was—seemed to think him one of her own kind. There was a chance, not much, but worth taking, to turn delay to advantage. Maybe he could learn something of value before he killed her. That would make the soldiers accept him!
He stalled, seeking a gambit. "How would I know how many girls there are?"
Half expecting a blow, he got instead an apology. "I'm sorry," the girl said. "I should have known. Never even heard your name before, either. Roddie.... Whose boat did you come in, Roddie?"
Boat? What was a boat? "How would I know?" he repeated, voice tight with fear of discovery.
If she noticed the tension, she didn't show it. Certainly her whisper was friendly enough. "Oh, you're one of the fellows from Bodega, then. They shoved a boy into our boat at the last minute, too. Tough, wasn't it, getting separated in the fog and tide like that? If only we didn't have to use boats.... But, say, how are we going to get away from here?"
"I wouldn't know," Roddie said, closing his fingers on the hammer, and rising. "How did you get in?"
"Followed your footprints. It was sundown and I saw human tracks in the dust and they led me here. Where were you?"
"Scouting around," Roddie said vaguely. "How did you know I was a man when I came back?"
"Because you couldn't see me, silly! You know perfectly well these androids are heat-sensitive and can locate us in the dark!"
Indeed he did know! Many times he'd felt ashamed that Molly could find him whenever she wanted to, even here in the manhole. But perhaps the manhole would help him now to redeem himself....
"I'd like to get a look at you," he said.
The girl laughed self-consciously. "It's getting gray out. You'll see me soon enough."
But she'd see him , Roddie realized. He had to talk fast.
"What'll we do when it's light?" he asked.
"Well, I guess the boats have gone," Ida said. "You could swim the Gate, I guess—you seem tall and strong enough. But I couldn't. You'll think it's crazy, but I've given this some thought, and even looked it over from the other side. I expect to try the Golden Gate Bridge!"
Now he was getting somewhere! The bridge was ruined, impassable. Even her own people had crossed the Strait by other means. But if there were a way over the bridge....
"It's broken," he said. "How in the world can we cross it?"
"Oh, you'll find out, if you take me up there. I—I don't want to be alone, Roddie. Will you go with me? Now?"
Well, she could be made to point out the route before he killed her— if nothing happened when she saw him.
Uneasy, Roddie hefted the hammer in his hand.
A giggle broke the pause. "It's nice of you to wait and let me go first up the ladder," the girl said. "But where the heck is the rusty old thing?"
"I'll go first," said Roddie. He might need the advantage. "The ladder's right behind me."
He climbed with hammer in teeth, and stretched his left hand from street level to grasp and neutralize the girl's right. Then, nervously fingering his weapon, he stared at her in the thin gray dawn.
She was short and lean, except for roundnesses here and there. From her shapeless doeskin dress stretched slender legs that tapered to feet that were bare, tiny, and, like her hands, only two in number.
Roddie was pleased. They were evenly matched as to members, and that would make things easy when the time came.
He looked into her face. It smiled at him, tanned and ruddy, with a full mouth and bright dark eyes that hid under long lashes when he looked too long.
Startling, those wary eyes. Concealing. For a moment he felt a rush of fear, but she gave his hand a squeeze before twisting loose, and burst into sudden laughter.
"Diapers!" she chortled, struggling to keep her voice low. "My big, strong, blond and blue-eyed hero goes into battle wearing diapers, and carrying only a hammer to fight with! You're the most unforgettable character I have ever known!"
He'd passed inspection, then—so far. He expelled his withheld breath, and said, "I think you'll find me a little odd, in some ways."
"Oh, not at all," Ida replied quickly. "Different, yes, but I wouldn't say odd."
When they started down the street, she was nervous despite Roddie's assertion that he knew where the soldiers were posted. He wondered if she felt some of the doubt he'd tried to conceal, shared his visions of what the soldiers might do if they found him brazenly strolling with an Invader. They might not believe he was only questioning a prisoner.
Every day, his friends were becoming more unpredictable.
For that very reason, because he didn't know what precautions would do any good, he took a chance and walked openly to the bridge by the most direct route. In time this apparent assurance stilled Ida's fears, and she began to talk.
Many of the things she said were beyond his experience and meaningless to him, but he did note with interest how effective the soldiers had been.
"It's awful," Ida said. "So few young men are left, so many casualties....
"But why do you—we—keep up the fight?" Roddie asked. "I mean, the soldiers will never leave the city; their purpose is to guard it and they can't leave, so they won't attack. Let them alone, and there'll be plenty of young men."
"Well!" said Ida, sharply. "You need indoctrination! Didn't they ever tell you that the city is our home, even if the stupid androids do keep us out? Don't you know how dependent we are on these raids for all our tools and things?"
She sounded suspicious. Roddie shot her a furtive, startled glance. But she wasn't standing off to fight him. On the contrary, she was too close for both comfort and combat. She bumped him hip and shoulder every few steps, and if he edged away, she followed.
He went on with his questioning. "Why are you here? I mean, sure, the others are after tools and things, but what's your purpose?"
Ida shrugged. "I'll admit no girl has ever done it before," she said,
"but I thought I could help with the wounded. That's why I have no weapon."
She hesitated, glanced covertly up at him, and went on with a rush of words. "It's the lack of men, I guess. All the girls are kind of bored and hopeless, so I got this bright idea and stowed away on one of the boats when it was dark and the fog had settled down. Do you think I was being silly?"
"No, but you do seem a little purposeless."
In silence they trudged through a vast area of charred wood and concrete foundations on the northern end of the city. Thick fog over the water hid Alcatraz, but in-shore visibility was better, and they could see the beginning of the bridge approach.
A stone rattled nearby. There was a clink of metal. Ida gasped, and clung to Roddie's arm.
"Behind me!" he whispered urgently. "Get behind me and hold on!"
He felt Ida's arms encircling his waist, her chin digging into his back below the left shoulder. Facing them, a hundred feet away, stood a soldier. He looked contemptuous, hostile.
"It's all right," Roddie said, his voice breaking.
There was a long, sullen, heart-stopping stare. Then the soldier turned and walked away.
Ida's grip loosened, and he could feel her sag behind him. Roddie turned and held her. With eyes closed, she pressed cold blue lips to his. He grimaced and turned away his head.
Ida's response was quick. "Forgive me," she breathed, and slipped from his arms, but she held herself erect. "I was so scared. And then we've had no sleep, no food or water."
Roddie was familiar with these signs of weakness, proud of appearing to deny his own humiliating needs.
"I guess you're not as strong as me," he said smugly. "I'll take care of you. Of course we can't sleep now, but I'll get food and water."
Leaving her to follow, he turned left to the ruins of a supermarket he had previously visited, demonstrating his superior strength by setting a pace Ida couldn't match. By the time she caught up with him, he had grubbed out a few cans of the special size that Molly always chose. Picking two that were neither dented, swollen, nor rusted, he smashed an end of each with his hammer, and gave Ida her choice of strained spinach or squash.
"Baby food!" she muttered. "Maybe it's just what we need, but to eat baby food with a man wearing a diaper.... Tell me, Roddie, how did you happen to know where to find it?"
"Well, this is the northern end of the city," he answered, shrugging.
"I've been here before."
"Why did the soldier let us go?"
"This watch," he said, touching the radium dial. "It's a talisman."
But Ida's eyes had widened, and the color was gone from her face. She was silent, too, except when asking him to fill his fast-emptied can with rain-water. She didn't finish her own portion, but lay back in the rubble with feet higher than her head, obviously trying to renew her strength.
And when they resumed their walk, her sullen, fear-clouded face showed plainly that he'd given himself away.
But to kill her now, before learning how she planned to cross the supposedly impassable bridge, seemed as purposeless and impulsive as Ida herself. Roddie didn't think, in any case, that her death would satisfy the soldiers. With new and useful information to offer, he might join them as an equal at last. But if his dalliance with this enemy seemed pointless, not even Molly's knitting needles could protect him.
He was sure the soldiers must be tracking the mysterious emanations of his watch dial, and had trouble to keep from glancing over his shoulder at every step. But arrival at the bridge approach ended the need for this self-restraint. Here, difficult going demanded full attention.
He'd never gone as far as the bridge before, not having wanted to look as if he might be leaving the city. The approach was a jungle of concrete with an underbrush of reinforcing-steel that reached for the unwary with rusted spines. Frequently they had to balance on cracked girders, and inch over roadless spots high off the ground.
Here Ida took the lead. When they got to where three approach roads made a clover-leaf, she led him down a side road and into a forest.
Roddie stopped, and seized her arm.
"What are you trying to do?" he demanded.
"I'm taking you with me," Ida said firmly. "Taking you where you belong!"
"No!" he blurted, drawing his hammer. "I can't go, nor let you go. I belong here!"
Ida gasped, twisted loose, and ran. Roddie ran after her.
She wasn't so easily caught. Like a frightened doe, she dashed in and out among the trees, leaped to the bridge's underpinnings where they thrust rustedly from a cliff, and scrambled up the ramp.
Roddie sighed and slowed down. The pavement ended just beyond the cable anchors. From there to the south tower, only an occasional dangling support wire showed where the actual bridge had been suspended. Ida was trapped.
He could take his time. Let the soldiers come up, as they undoubtedly would, to finish the job....
But Ida didn't seem to realize she was trapped. Without hesitation she dashed up the main left-hand suspension cable and ran along its curved steel surface.
For a moment, Roddie thought of letting her go, letting her run up the ever-steepening catenary until—because there were no guard-ropes or handgrips—she simply fell. That would solve his problem.
Except it wouldn't be his solution. Her death wouldn't prove him to his friends.
He set out quickly, before Ida was lost to sight in the thick fog that billowed in straight from the ocean. At first he ran erect along the top of the yard-wide cylinder of twisted metal, but soon the curve steepened. He had to go on all fours, clinging palm and sole.
Blood was on the cable where she'd passed. More blood stained it when he'd followed.
But because his friends knew neither pain nor fatigue, Roddie would admit none either. Nor would he give in to the fear that dizzied him at every downward look. He scrambled on like an automaton, watching only his holds, till he rammed Ida's rear with his head.
She had stopped, trembling and gasping. Roddie clung just below her and looked dazedly around. There was nothing in sight but fog, pierced by the rapier of rusted wire supporting them. Neither end of it was in sight.
Upward lay success, if death were not nearer on the cable. No soldier had ever come even this far, for soldiers, as he'd told Ida, never left the city, were not built to do so. But he was here; with luck, he could capitalize on the differences that had plagued him so long.
"Go on!" he ordered hoarsely. "Move!"
There was neither answer nor result. He broke off an end of loosened wire and jabbed her rear. Ida gasped and crawled on.
Up and up they went, chilled, wet, bleeding, pain-racked, exhausted. Never had Roddie felt so thoroughly the defects of his peculiar non-mechanical construction.
Without realizing it, he acquired a new purpose, a duty as compelling as that of any soldier or fire-watcher. He had to keep that trembling body of his alive, mount to the tall rust tower overhead.
He climbed and he made Ida climb, till, at nightmare's end, the fog thinned and they came into clear, windswept air and clawed up the last hundred feet to sanctuary.
They were completely spent. Without word or thought they crept within the tower, huddled together for warmth on its dank steel deck, and slept for several hours.
Roddie awoke as Ida finished struggling free of his unconscious grip. Limping, he joined her painful walk around the tower. From its openings they looked out on a strange and isolated world.
To the north, where Ida seemed drawn as though by instinct, Mount Tamalpais reared its brushy head, a looming island above a billowy white sea of fog. To the south were the Twin Peaks, a pair of buttons on a cotton sheet. Eastward lay Mount Diablo, bald and brooding, tallest of the peaks and most forbidding.
But westward over the ocean lay the land of gold—of all the kinds of gold there are, from brightest yellow to deepest orange. Only a small portion of the setting sun glared above the fog-bank; the rest seemed to have been broken off and smeared around by a child in love with its color.
Fascinated, Roddie stared for minutes, but turned when Ida showed no interest. She was intent on the tower itself. Following her eyes, Roddie saw his duty made suddenly clear.
Easy to make out even in the fading light was the route by which Invaders could cross to the foot of this tower on the remaining ruins of the road, climb to where he now stood, and then descend the cable over the bridge's gap and catch the city unaware. Easy to estimate was the advantage of even this perilous route over things that scattered on the water and prevented a landing in strength. Easy to see was the need to kill Ida before she carried home this knowledge.
Roddie took the hammer from his waist.
"Don't! Oh, don't!" Ida screamed. She burst into tears and covered her face with scratched and bloodied hands.
Surprised, Roddie withheld the blow. He had wept, as a child, and, weeping, had for the first time learned he differed from his friends. Ida's tears disturbed him, bringing unhappy memories.
"Why should you cry?" he asked comfortingly. "You know your people will come back to avenge you and will destroy my friends."
"But—but my people are your people, too," Ida wailed. "It's so senseless, now, after all our struggle to escape. Don't you see? Your friends are only machines, built by our ancestors. We are Men—and the city is ours, not theirs!"
"It can't be," Roddie objected. "The city surely belongs to those who are superior, and my friends are superior to your people, even to me. Each of us has a purpose, though, while you Invaders seem to be aimless. Each of us helps preserve the city; you only try to rob and end it by destroying it. My people must be the true Men, because they're so much more rational than yours.... And it isn't rational to let you escape."
Ida had turned up her tear-streaked face to stare at him.
"Rational! What's rational about murdering a defenseless girl in cold blood? Don't you realize we're the same sort of being, we two? Don't—don't you remember how we've been with each other all day?"
She paused. Roddie noticed that her eyes were dark and frightened, yet somehow soft, over scarlet cheeks. He had to look away. But he said nothing.
"Never mind!" Ida said viciously. "You can't make me beg. Go ahead and kill—see if it proves you're superior. My people will take over the city regardless of you and me, and regardless of your jumping-jack friends, too! Men can accomplish anything!"
Scornfully she turned and looked toward the western twilight. It was Roddie's turn to stand and stare.
"Purpose!" Ida flung at him over her shoulder. "Logic! Women hear so much of that from men! You're a man, all right! Men always call it logic when they want to destroy! Loyalty to your own sort, kindness, affection—all emotional, aren't they? Not a bit logical. Emotion is for creating, and it's so much more logical to destroy, isn't it?"
She whirled back toward him, advancing as if she wanted to sink her teeth into his throat. "Go ahead. Get it over with—if you have the courage."
It was hard for Roddie to look away from that wrath-crimsoned face, but it was even harder to keep staring into the blaze of her eyes. He compromised by gazing out an opening at the gathering dusk. He thought for a long time before he decided to tuck his hammer away.
"It isn't reasonable to kill you now," he said. "Too dark. You can't possibly get down that half-ruined manway tonight, so let's see how I feel in the morning."
Ida began to weep again, and Roddie found it necessary to comfort her.
And by morning he knew he was a Man.
Question:
What is the plot of the story?
Answer:
|
[
"The protagonist of this story is Roddie, a young male character whose interactions with the characters around him include mechanical arms and robotic functionalities. It turns out that Roddie lives within a dystopian city, to which alongside his android friends, seek to defend the city against its enemy. Whilst going about his day, Roddie investigates the manhole he often frequents and finds that it has recently been visited by something warm. Further investigation reveals Ida to be the culprit, a human female who has decided to help the wounded in the city.\n\nDespite Roddie’s initial hesitance, Ida and Roddie strike up an easygoing acquaintance and gallivant around the city, with the latter guiding the former due to his experience. In addition to helping Ida find food and shelter, Roddie is able to ward off a potential attack from an android soldier with a talisman - his watch. However, this watch leads Ida to be suspicious of Roddie. As they neared the bridge, Ida insists on bringing Roddie back to where he belongs, fearing he had been wrongfully taken or indoctrinated. After a chase and climbing up the south tower, Roddie notices that Ida may be able to inform her fellow humans on how to infiltrate the city due to them being on top of the bridge. Choosing to defend his city and prove himself to his friends, Roddie does not hesitate to kill Ida and advances to do so. Ida begins to cry and defend her people - insisting that they are on the same side as Men and that the city belongs to the two of them, not Roddie’s friends. Initially in disbelief, Roddie continues to advance before deciding to leave it for the next morning before comforting Ida and later on, realizing that he too, is Man. \n",
"Roddie, a man, raised by the androids in the ruined city, is angry to be left behind with his nurse, Molly, whenever the soldiers go out to fight the Invaders from the north. When he complains about it with Molly, a nursing android, Molly’s robotic response irritates him, and he rips her head off her neck. The soldiers come back when Roddie is repairing Molly. Roddie orders the soldiers to line up and report, inspecting their damages. One soldier suddenly attacks Roddie as it seems to identify Roddie as one of the Invaders, but Molly protects Roddie, and he stops it. After the chaos has been eased, Roddie tries to fix and recombine the damaged soldier while reflecting on the dim future for him and the city. He accidentally burns his hair, and a civil defender firefighter covers him with carbon dioxide foam, irritating him and making him run away. \n\nOn the street, Roddie feels cold, being shamed by the sensation of coldness and reflecting on all the other differences that he has from the androids. The night comes, and he tries to find the way down to his usual hiding spot: a manhole under a bar. Once he arrives at the bottom of the manhole, he feels the warmth, realizing that something had just rested there. He prepares his hammer as a weapon, touches the thing in the darkness, and gets attacked by it. It is a girl named Ida who is one of the Invaders. She identifies Roddie as one of her sides. Roddie takes advantage of that, intending to kill her after gaining more information about the way to pass the impassable Golden Gate Bridge that connects the ruins and the Invaders’ area. After the conversation with Ida, Roddie climbs out of the manhole, followed by Ida. When he learns that Ida recognizes him as one of the Invaders, he thinks it is his chance to be accepted by his friends by giving them his achievement. Roddie learns many new things and beliefs from Ida on their way to the bridge. They also meet an android, but Roddie lets it go away without hurting them. Roddie finds canned baby food from the ruined supermarket to feed him and Ida. Once they arrive at the bridge, as Ida keeps going towards it, Roddie grabs her, but Ida loosens his grip and escapes from him. She climbs on the dangling wire, followed by him. Ida is scared and wants to stop on the wire, but Roddie forces her to keep climbing. After they arrive at the tower, Roddie tries to kill Ida as she may bring more Invaders to come, but Ida tells him that he is a human, not an android, and surrenders herself to him. After the dispute about his identity and the superiority of either the robot or the humans, Roddie decides to wait for a night. The following day, Roddie acknowledges himself as a man.",
"The story follows the journey of a man called Roddie. He lives in a destroyed San Francisco under the care of a robot called Molly. San Francisco is protected against “invaders” by other robots, who Roddie takes care of with his tools. Roddie believes that the robots are his friends and wishes to go out and fight with them against the invaders. Roddie knows that he is different from the robots, but still wishes to become a part of them. When Molly and other robots start to malfunction more and more, Roddie runs to a manhole which he uses as a hiding place. Here, he meets a girl called Ida. Roddie believes that he has to kill Ida in order to finally be able to fight side by side with the robots, but decides to first get information out of her. They traverse together to the Golden Gate Bridge, where Ida tells him that the invaders are in fact humans like them that go into the city in order to get food and supplies. Roddie doesn’t want to believe that he is like an invader, so he chases Ida to the top of the bridge in order to kill her. Here, they confront each other and Roddie was very close to killing her, but decides not to. At the end, it is insinuated that Roddie learns that he belongs with the humans at the other side of the bridge and not with the robots.",
"It’s the twenty-fourth century. San Francisco is ruined and now guarded by robot soldiers built by humans in the past. They fight with humans - Invaders - and don’t let them come to the city. Roddie lives with Molly - a robotic nurse who still treats him as a child - and hasn’t seen an invader. He sits with Molly and complains about not being allowed to fight alongside the soldiers. She starts singing a children’s song, and Roddie rips her head off her neck. Soldiers come back. Roddie tries to fix one of them, but the robot unexpectedly attacks the young man. Molly defends Roddie by thrusting needles into the robot’s eyes. Roddie is working and thinking about his desire to be accepted by the soldiers. His hair catches fire accidentally, and a Civil Defense firefighter covers him with carbon dioxide foam. Roddie gets frustrated and leaves. He is walking along cold streets and stone ruins toward his hideout. Roddie comes down to his manhole and realizes that someone was there. He starts moving in the darkness and soon finds Ida, a young human girl. Roddie understands that she thinks he is one of her kind and continues talking to her. She came on some boat and followed Roddie’s footprints to his hideout. Ida says she knows a way over the Golden Gate Bridge and invites Roddie to go with her. They leave the hole, and Ida starts laughing at the diapers he’s wearing. While walking, Ida tells him that men rely on raids for tools and that she left here to help the wounded. Suddenly they meet one of the soldiers, Roddie quickly tells him everything is fine, and the robot leaves. Ida kisses him after the shock. They go to a supermarket to get food, and Ida asks why the robot let them go. Roddie shows her his watch - a talisman, and she looks scared. They reach the bridge. Ida starts leading him somewhere unknown, saying that she’s taking him where he belongs. He refuses and starts chasing her with a hummer. While following her, Roddie starts walking along the suspension cable’s steel surface; soon, walking turns into crawling. He thinks about killing Ida - it will earn him a place among the robot soldiers. They keep going up, finally reach a tower, and fall asleep for several hours. They wake up, and Roddie decides to look around the tower. He can see Mount Tamalpais, the Twin Peaks, and Mount Diablo. He follows Ida’s gaze and finds the secret path the invaders are using. Roddie prepares to kill Ida, but she starts crying - it disturbs him. She tells him that he is a man, not a robot. Roddie says he believes the true men are rational and superior - thus, the robot soldiers are the real men. She asks him why killing a defenseless girl is rational and says that emotion is for creating. Roddie tucks his hammer away and comforts crying Ida.\n\n\n"
] |
51241
|
Bridge Crossing
BY DAVE DRYFOOS
Illustrated by HARRISON
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction May 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
He knew the city was organized for his individual defense, for it had been that way since he was born. But who was his enemy?
In 1849, the mist that sometimes rolled through the Golden Gate was known as fog. In 2149, it had become far more frequent, and was known as smog. By 2349, it was fog again.
But tonight there was smoke mixed with the fog. Roddie could smell it. Somewhere in the forested ruins, fire was burning.
He wasn't worried. The small blaze that smoldered behind him on the cracked concrete floor had consumed everything burnable within blocks; what remained of the gutted concrete office building from which he peered was fire-proof.
But Roddie was himself aflame with anger. As always when Invaders broke in from the north, he'd been left behind with his nurse, Molly, while the soldiers went out to fight.
And nowadays Molly's presence wasn't the comfort it used to be. He felt almost ready to jump out of his skin, the way she rocked and knitted in that grating ruined chair, saying over and over again, "The soldiers don't want little boys. The soldiers don't want little boys. The soldiers don't—"
"I'm not a little boy!" Roddie suddenly shouted. "I'm full-grown and I've never even seen an Invader. Why won't you let me go and fight?"
Fiercely he crossed the bare, gritty floor and shook Molly's shoulder. She rattled under his jarring hand, and abruptly changed the subject.
"A is for Atom, B is for Bomb, C is for Corpse—" she chanted.
Roddie reached into her shapeless dress and pinched. Lately that had helped her over these spells. But this time, though it stopped the kindergarten song, the treatment only started something worse.
"Wuzzums hungry?" Molly cooed, still rocking.
Utterly disgusted, Roddie ripped her head off her neck.
It was a completely futile gesture. The complicated mind that had cared for him and taught him speech and the alphabet hadn't made him a mechanic, and his only tool was a broken-handled screwdriver.
He was still tinkering when the soldiers came in. While they lined up along the wall, he put Molly's head back on her neck.
She gaped coyly at the new arrivals. "Hello, boys," she simpered.
"Looking for a good time?"
Roddie slapped her to silence, reflecting briefly that there were many things he didn't know about Molly. But there was work to be done. Carefully he framed the ritual words she'd taught him: "Soldiers, come to attention and report!"
There were eleven of them, six feet tall, with four limbs and eight extremities. They stood uniformly, the thumbs on each pair of hands touching along the center line of the legs, front feet turned out at an angle of forty-five degrees, rear feet turned inward at thirty degrees.
"Sir," they chorused, "we have met the enemy and he is ours."
He inspected them. All were scratched and dented, but one in particular seemed badly damaged. His left arm was almost severed at the shoulder.
"Come here, fellow," Roddie said. "Let's see if I can fix that."
The soldier took a step forward, lurched suddenly, stopped, and whipped out a bayonet.
"Death to Invaders!" he yelled, and charged crazily.
Molly stepped in front of him.
"You aren't being very nice to my baby," she murmured, and thrust her knitting needles into his eyes.
Roddie jumped behind him, knocked off his helmet, and pressed a soft spot on his conical skull. The soldier collapsed to the floor.
Roddie salvaged and returned Molly's needles. Then he examined the patient, tearing him apart as a boy dismembers an alarm clock.
It was lucky he did. The left arm's pair of hands suddenly writhed off the floor in an effort to choke him. But because the arm was detached at the shoulder and therefore blind, he escaped the clutching onslaught and could goad the reflexing hands into assaulting one another harmlessly.
Meanwhile, the other soldiers left, except for one, apparently another casualty, who stumbled on his way out and fell into the fire. By the time Roddie had hauled him clear, damage was beyond repair. Roddie swore, then decided to try combining parts of this casualty with pieces of the other to make a whole one.
To get more light for the operation, he poked up the fire. Roddie was new at his work, and took it seriously. It alarmed him to watch the soldiers melt away, gradually succumbing to battle damage, shamed him to see the empty ruins burn section by section as the Invaders repeatedly broke through and had to be burned out.
Soon there would be nothing left of the Private Property Keep Out that, according to Molly's bedtime story, the Owners had entrusted to them when driven away by radioactivity. Soon the soldiers themselves would be gone. None would remain to guard the city but a few strayed servants like Molly, and an occasional Civil Defender.
And himself, Roddie reflected, spitting savagely into the fire. He might remain. But how he fitted into the picture, he didn't know. And Molly, who claimed to have found him in the ruins after a fight with Invaders twenty years before, couldn't or wouldn't say.
Well, for as long as possible, Roddie decided, he'd do his duty as the others did theirs—single-mindedly. Eventually the soldiers might accept him as one of themselves; meanwhile, this newly attempted first aid was useful to them.
He gave the fire a final poke and then paused, wondering if, when heated, his screwdriver could make an unfastened end of wire stick on the grayish spot where it seemed to belong.
Stretching prone to blow the embers hot so he could try out his new idea, Roddie got too close to the flames. Instantly the room filled with the stench of singed hair. Roddie drew angrily back, beating out the sparks in his uncut blond mane.
As he stood slapping his head and muttering, a deranged Civil Defense firefighter popped into the doorway and covered him with carbon dioxide foam.
Roddie fled. His life-long friends were not merely wearing out, they were unbearably wearing.
In the street, even before he'd wiped off the foam, he regretted his flight. The fire was back home. And here in the cold of this fog-shrouded canyon, a mere trail between heaped-up walls of rubble, the diaper he wore felt inadequate against the pre-dawn cold. His cherished weapon, a magnetic tack-hammer, was chill beneath the diaper's top, and the broken, radium-dialed wristwatch suspended from a string around his neck hung clammy against his chest. He stood irresolute on numbing bare feet, and considered returning to the more familiar bedlam.
But colder than cold was his shame at being cold. Molly never was, though she knew how to keep him warm, nor were the others. Hunger, thirst, pain and coldness were sensations never experienced by his friends. Like the growth he'd been undergoing till recently, these were things of ignominy, to be hidden as far as possible from inquiring eyes. Cold as it was, he'd have to hide.
Temporarily, the darkness concealed him, though it was not quite complete. From above the fog, the moon played vaguely deceptive light on the splinters of architecture looming toward it. Some distance off, an owl hooted, but here nocturnal rodents felt free to squeak and rustle as they scampered.
The world seemed ghostly. Yet it wasn't dead; it merely lurked. And as an irrepressible yawn reminded Roddie of his absurd need for sleep even in the midst of danger, he concluded for the thousandth time that the One who'd built him must have been an apprentice.
For just such reasons he'd developed the hideout toward which he now walked. It had been the haven of his adolescence, when the discovery of how much he differed from his friends had been a shock, and the shock itself a difference to be hidden.
His hiding place was a manhole, dead center in the dead street. A weathered bronze bar, carefully placed in the cover's slotted rim, was the levering key that opened its door.
Everything was wrong tonight! He couldn't even find the bar. Of course that spoiled things, because the bar was a roller on which to move the heavy cover from below, and a support that held it ajar for ventilation.
But the example of his friends had taught him above all else to carry out every purpose. Molly was a nurse; she had raised him despite all obstacles. The soldiers were guards; they protected the ruins against everything larger than a rat. The firefighter had put even him out when he was aflame....
Anyhow, the manhole cover had been loosened by his frequent handling. He lifted it aside by main strength, then flattened himself to the street, and felt with his feet for the top rung.
Halfway down the iron ladder, something made him pause. He looked, but saw only blackness. He listened, sniffed, found nothing. What could have entered through the iron cover?
He sneered at his own timidity and jumped to the bottom.
It was warm! The dry bottom of the hole had the temperature of body heat, as if a large animal had recently rested there!
Quickly, Roddie drew the hammer from his waist. Then, with weapon ready for an instantaneous blow, he stretched his left hand through the darkness. He touched something warm, softish. Gingerly he felt over that curving surface for identifying features.
While Roddie investigated by touch, his long fingers were suddenly seized and bitten. At the same time, his right shin received a savage kick. And his own retaliatory blow was checked in mid-swing by an unexpected voice.
"Get your filthy hands off me!" it whispered angrily. "Who do you think you are?"
Startled, he dropped his hammer. "I'm Roddie," he said, squatting to fumble for it. "Who do you think you are?"
"I'm Ida, naturally! Just how many girls are there in this raiding party?"
His first Invader—and he had dropped his weapon!
Scrabbling fearfully in the dust for his hammer, Roddie paused suddenly. This girl—whatever that was—seemed to think him one of her own kind. There was a chance, not much, but worth taking, to turn delay to advantage. Maybe he could learn something of value before he killed her. That would make the soldiers accept him!
He stalled, seeking a gambit. "How would I know how many girls there are?"
Half expecting a blow, he got instead an apology. "I'm sorry," the girl said. "I should have known. Never even heard your name before, either. Roddie.... Whose boat did you come in, Roddie?"
Boat? What was a boat? "How would I know?" he repeated, voice tight with fear of discovery.
If she noticed the tension, she didn't show it. Certainly her whisper was friendly enough. "Oh, you're one of the fellows from Bodega, then. They shoved a boy into our boat at the last minute, too. Tough, wasn't it, getting separated in the fog and tide like that? If only we didn't have to use boats.... But, say, how are we going to get away from here?"
"I wouldn't know," Roddie said, closing his fingers on the hammer, and rising. "How did you get in?"
"Followed your footprints. It was sundown and I saw human tracks in the dust and they led me here. Where were you?"
"Scouting around," Roddie said vaguely. "How did you know I was a man when I came back?"
"Because you couldn't see me, silly! You know perfectly well these androids are heat-sensitive and can locate us in the dark!"
Indeed he did know! Many times he'd felt ashamed that Molly could find him whenever she wanted to, even here in the manhole. But perhaps the manhole would help him now to redeem himself....
"I'd like to get a look at you," he said.
The girl laughed self-consciously. "It's getting gray out. You'll see me soon enough."
But she'd see him , Roddie realized. He had to talk fast.
"What'll we do when it's light?" he asked.
"Well, I guess the boats have gone," Ida said. "You could swim the Gate, I guess—you seem tall and strong enough. But I couldn't. You'll think it's crazy, but I've given this some thought, and even looked it over from the other side. I expect to try the Golden Gate Bridge!"
Now he was getting somewhere! The bridge was ruined, impassable. Even her own people had crossed the Strait by other means. But if there were a way over the bridge....
"It's broken," he said. "How in the world can we cross it?"
"Oh, you'll find out, if you take me up there. I—I don't want to be alone, Roddie. Will you go with me? Now?"
Well, she could be made to point out the route before he killed her— if nothing happened when she saw him.
Uneasy, Roddie hefted the hammer in his hand.
A giggle broke the pause. "It's nice of you to wait and let me go first up the ladder," the girl said. "But where the heck is the rusty old thing?"
"I'll go first," said Roddie. He might need the advantage. "The ladder's right behind me."
He climbed with hammer in teeth, and stretched his left hand from street level to grasp and neutralize the girl's right. Then, nervously fingering his weapon, he stared at her in the thin gray dawn.
She was short and lean, except for roundnesses here and there. From her shapeless doeskin dress stretched slender legs that tapered to feet that were bare, tiny, and, like her hands, only two in number.
Roddie was pleased. They were evenly matched as to members, and that would make things easy when the time came.
He looked into her face. It smiled at him, tanned and ruddy, with a full mouth and bright dark eyes that hid under long lashes when he looked too long.
Startling, those wary eyes. Concealing. For a moment he felt a rush of fear, but she gave his hand a squeeze before twisting loose, and burst into sudden laughter.
"Diapers!" she chortled, struggling to keep her voice low. "My big, strong, blond and blue-eyed hero goes into battle wearing diapers, and carrying only a hammer to fight with! You're the most unforgettable character I have ever known!"
He'd passed inspection, then—so far. He expelled his withheld breath, and said, "I think you'll find me a little odd, in some ways."
"Oh, not at all," Ida replied quickly. "Different, yes, but I wouldn't say odd."
When they started down the street, she was nervous despite Roddie's assertion that he knew where the soldiers were posted. He wondered if she felt some of the doubt he'd tried to conceal, shared his visions of what the soldiers might do if they found him brazenly strolling with an Invader. They might not believe he was only questioning a prisoner.
Every day, his friends were becoming more unpredictable.
For that very reason, because he didn't know what precautions would do any good, he took a chance and walked openly to the bridge by the most direct route. In time this apparent assurance stilled Ida's fears, and she began to talk.
Many of the things she said were beyond his experience and meaningless to him, but he did note with interest how effective the soldiers had been.
"It's awful," Ida said. "So few young men are left, so many casualties....
"But why do you—we—keep up the fight?" Roddie asked. "I mean, the soldiers will never leave the city; their purpose is to guard it and they can't leave, so they won't attack. Let them alone, and there'll be plenty of young men."
"Well!" said Ida, sharply. "You need indoctrination! Didn't they ever tell you that the city is our home, even if the stupid androids do keep us out? Don't you know how dependent we are on these raids for all our tools and things?"
She sounded suspicious. Roddie shot her a furtive, startled glance. But she wasn't standing off to fight him. On the contrary, she was too close for both comfort and combat. She bumped him hip and shoulder every few steps, and if he edged away, she followed.
He went on with his questioning. "Why are you here? I mean, sure, the others are after tools and things, but what's your purpose?"
Ida shrugged. "I'll admit no girl has ever done it before," she said,
"but I thought I could help with the wounded. That's why I have no weapon."
She hesitated, glanced covertly up at him, and went on with a rush of words. "It's the lack of men, I guess. All the girls are kind of bored and hopeless, so I got this bright idea and stowed away on one of the boats when it was dark and the fog had settled down. Do you think I was being silly?"
"No, but you do seem a little purposeless."
In silence they trudged through a vast area of charred wood and concrete foundations on the northern end of the city. Thick fog over the water hid Alcatraz, but in-shore visibility was better, and they could see the beginning of the bridge approach.
A stone rattled nearby. There was a clink of metal. Ida gasped, and clung to Roddie's arm.
"Behind me!" he whispered urgently. "Get behind me and hold on!"
He felt Ida's arms encircling his waist, her chin digging into his back below the left shoulder. Facing them, a hundred feet away, stood a soldier. He looked contemptuous, hostile.
"It's all right," Roddie said, his voice breaking.
There was a long, sullen, heart-stopping stare. Then the soldier turned and walked away.
Ida's grip loosened, and he could feel her sag behind him. Roddie turned and held her. With eyes closed, she pressed cold blue lips to his. He grimaced and turned away his head.
Ida's response was quick. "Forgive me," she breathed, and slipped from his arms, but she held herself erect. "I was so scared. And then we've had no sleep, no food or water."
Roddie was familiar with these signs of weakness, proud of appearing to deny his own humiliating needs.
"I guess you're not as strong as me," he said smugly. "I'll take care of you. Of course we can't sleep now, but I'll get food and water."
Leaving her to follow, he turned left to the ruins of a supermarket he had previously visited, demonstrating his superior strength by setting a pace Ida couldn't match. By the time she caught up with him, he had grubbed out a few cans of the special size that Molly always chose. Picking two that were neither dented, swollen, nor rusted, he smashed an end of each with his hammer, and gave Ida her choice of strained spinach or squash.
"Baby food!" she muttered. "Maybe it's just what we need, but to eat baby food with a man wearing a diaper.... Tell me, Roddie, how did you happen to know where to find it?"
"Well, this is the northern end of the city," he answered, shrugging.
"I've been here before."
"Why did the soldier let us go?"
"This watch," he said, touching the radium dial. "It's a talisman."
But Ida's eyes had widened, and the color was gone from her face. She was silent, too, except when asking him to fill his fast-emptied can with rain-water. She didn't finish her own portion, but lay back in the rubble with feet higher than her head, obviously trying to renew her strength.
And when they resumed their walk, her sullen, fear-clouded face showed plainly that he'd given himself away.
But to kill her now, before learning how she planned to cross the supposedly impassable bridge, seemed as purposeless and impulsive as Ida herself. Roddie didn't think, in any case, that her death would satisfy the soldiers. With new and useful information to offer, he might join them as an equal at last. But if his dalliance with this enemy seemed pointless, not even Molly's knitting needles could protect him.
He was sure the soldiers must be tracking the mysterious emanations of his watch dial, and had trouble to keep from glancing over his shoulder at every step. But arrival at the bridge approach ended the need for this self-restraint. Here, difficult going demanded full attention.
He'd never gone as far as the bridge before, not having wanted to look as if he might be leaving the city. The approach was a jungle of concrete with an underbrush of reinforcing-steel that reached for the unwary with rusted spines. Frequently they had to balance on cracked girders, and inch over roadless spots high off the ground.
Here Ida took the lead. When they got to where three approach roads made a clover-leaf, she led him down a side road and into a forest.
Roddie stopped, and seized her arm.
"What are you trying to do?" he demanded.
"I'm taking you with me," Ida said firmly. "Taking you where you belong!"
"No!" he blurted, drawing his hammer. "I can't go, nor let you go. I belong here!"
Ida gasped, twisted loose, and ran. Roddie ran after her.
She wasn't so easily caught. Like a frightened doe, she dashed in and out among the trees, leaped to the bridge's underpinnings where they thrust rustedly from a cliff, and scrambled up the ramp.
Roddie sighed and slowed down. The pavement ended just beyond the cable anchors. From there to the south tower, only an occasional dangling support wire showed where the actual bridge had been suspended. Ida was trapped.
He could take his time. Let the soldiers come up, as they undoubtedly would, to finish the job....
But Ida didn't seem to realize she was trapped. Without hesitation she dashed up the main left-hand suspension cable and ran along its curved steel surface.
For a moment, Roddie thought of letting her go, letting her run up the ever-steepening catenary until—because there were no guard-ropes or handgrips—she simply fell. That would solve his problem.
Except it wouldn't be his solution. Her death wouldn't prove him to his friends.
He set out quickly, before Ida was lost to sight in the thick fog that billowed in straight from the ocean. At first he ran erect along the top of the yard-wide cylinder of twisted metal, but soon the curve steepened. He had to go on all fours, clinging palm and sole.
Blood was on the cable where she'd passed. More blood stained it when he'd followed.
But because his friends knew neither pain nor fatigue, Roddie would admit none either. Nor would he give in to the fear that dizzied him at every downward look. He scrambled on like an automaton, watching only his holds, till he rammed Ida's rear with his head.
She had stopped, trembling and gasping. Roddie clung just below her and looked dazedly around. There was nothing in sight but fog, pierced by the rapier of rusted wire supporting them. Neither end of it was in sight.
Upward lay success, if death were not nearer on the cable. No soldier had ever come even this far, for soldiers, as he'd told Ida, never left the city, were not built to do so. But he was here; with luck, he could capitalize on the differences that had plagued him so long.
"Go on!" he ordered hoarsely. "Move!"
There was neither answer nor result. He broke off an end of loosened wire and jabbed her rear. Ida gasped and crawled on.
Up and up they went, chilled, wet, bleeding, pain-racked, exhausted. Never had Roddie felt so thoroughly the defects of his peculiar non-mechanical construction.
Without realizing it, he acquired a new purpose, a duty as compelling as that of any soldier or fire-watcher. He had to keep that trembling body of his alive, mount to the tall rust tower overhead.
He climbed and he made Ida climb, till, at nightmare's end, the fog thinned and they came into clear, windswept air and clawed up the last hundred feet to sanctuary.
They were completely spent. Without word or thought they crept within the tower, huddled together for warmth on its dank steel deck, and slept for several hours.
Roddie awoke as Ida finished struggling free of his unconscious grip. Limping, he joined her painful walk around the tower. From its openings they looked out on a strange and isolated world.
To the north, where Ida seemed drawn as though by instinct, Mount Tamalpais reared its brushy head, a looming island above a billowy white sea of fog. To the south were the Twin Peaks, a pair of buttons on a cotton sheet. Eastward lay Mount Diablo, bald and brooding, tallest of the peaks and most forbidding.
But westward over the ocean lay the land of gold—of all the kinds of gold there are, from brightest yellow to deepest orange. Only a small portion of the setting sun glared above the fog-bank; the rest seemed to have been broken off and smeared around by a child in love with its color.
Fascinated, Roddie stared for minutes, but turned when Ida showed no interest. She was intent on the tower itself. Following her eyes, Roddie saw his duty made suddenly clear.
Easy to make out even in the fading light was the route by which Invaders could cross to the foot of this tower on the remaining ruins of the road, climb to where he now stood, and then descend the cable over the bridge's gap and catch the city unaware. Easy to estimate was the advantage of even this perilous route over things that scattered on the water and prevented a landing in strength. Easy to see was the need to kill Ida before she carried home this knowledge.
Roddie took the hammer from his waist.
"Don't! Oh, don't!" Ida screamed. She burst into tears and covered her face with scratched and bloodied hands.
Surprised, Roddie withheld the blow. He had wept, as a child, and, weeping, had for the first time learned he differed from his friends. Ida's tears disturbed him, bringing unhappy memories.
"Why should you cry?" he asked comfortingly. "You know your people will come back to avenge you and will destroy my friends."
"But—but my people are your people, too," Ida wailed. "It's so senseless, now, after all our struggle to escape. Don't you see? Your friends are only machines, built by our ancestors. We are Men—and the city is ours, not theirs!"
"It can't be," Roddie objected. "The city surely belongs to those who are superior, and my friends are superior to your people, even to me. Each of us has a purpose, though, while you Invaders seem to be aimless. Each of us helps preserve the city; you only try to rob and end it by destroying it. My people must be the true Men, because they're so much more rational than yours.... And it isn't rational to let you escape."
Ida had turned up her tear-streaked face to stare at him.
"Rational! What's rational about murdering a defenseless girl in cold blood? Don't you realize we're the same sort of being, we two? Don't—don't you remember how we've been with each other all day?"
She paused. Roddie noticed that her eyes were dark and frightened, yet somehow soft, over scarlet cheeks. He had to look away. But he said nothing.
"Never mind!" Ida said viciously. "You can't make me beg. Go ahead and kill—see if it proves you're superior. My people will take over the city regardless of you and me, and regardless of your jumping-jack friends, too! Men can accomplish anything!"
Scornfully she turned and looked toward the western twilight. It was Roddie's turn to stand and stare.
"Purpose!" Ida flung at him over her shoulder. "Logic! Women hear so much of that from men! You're a man, all right! Men always call it logic when they want to destroy! Loyalty to your own sort, kindness, affection—all emotional, aren't they? Not a bit logical. Emotion is for creating, and it's so much more logical to destroy, isn't it?"
She whirled back toward him, advancing as if she wanted to sink her teeth into his throat. "Go ahead. Get it over with—if you have the courage."
It was hard for Roddie to look away from that wrath-crimsoned face, but it was even harder to keep staring into the blaze of her eyes. He compromised by gazing out an opening at the gathering dusk. He thought for a long time before he decided to tuck his hammer away.
"It isn't reasonable to kill you now," he said. "Too dark. You can't possibly get down that half-ruined manway tonight, so let's see how I feel in the morning."
Ida began to weep again, and Roddie found it necessary to comfort her.
And by morning he knew he was a Man.
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Describe the structure of the society in this story
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about Time In the Round by Fritz Leiber.
Relevant chunks:
TIME IN THE ROUND
By FRITZ LEIBER
Illustrated by DILLON
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction May 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Poor Butcher suffered more than any dictator in history: everybody gave in to him because he was so puny and they were so impregnable!
From the other end of the Avenue of Wisdom that led across the Peace Park, a gray, hairless, heavily built dog was barking soundlessly at the towering crystal glory of the Time Theater. For a moment, the effect was almost frightening: a silent picture of the beginning of civilization challenging the end of it. Then a small boy caught up with the dog and it rolled over enthusiastically at his feet and the scene was normal again.
The small boy, however, seemed definitely pre-civilization. He studied the dog coldly and then inserted a thin metal tube under its eyelid and poked. The dog wagged its stumpy tail. The boy frowned, tightened his grip on the tube and jabbed hard. The dog's tail thumped the cushiony pavement and the four paws beat the air. The boy shortened his grip and suddenly jabbed the dog several times in the stomach. The stiff tube rebounded from the gray, hairless hide. The dog's face split in an upside-down grin, revealing formidable ivory fangs across which a long black tongue lolled.
The boy regarded the tongue speculatively and pocketed the metal tube with a grimace of utter disgust. He did not look up when someone called: "Hi, Butch! Sic 'em, Darter, sic 'em!"
A larger small boy and a somewhat older one were approaching across the luxurious, neatly cropped grass, preceded by a hurtling shape that, except for a black hide, was a replica of Butch's gray dog.
Butch shrugged his shoulders resignedly and said in a bored voice:
"Kill 'em, Brute."
The gray dog hurled itself on Darter. Jaws gaped to get a hold on necks so short and thick as to be mere courtesy terms. They whirled like a fanged merry-go-round. Three more dogs, one white, one slate blue and one pink, hurried up and tried to climb aboard.
Butch yawned.
"What's the matter?" inquired Darter's master. "I thought you liked dog fights, Butch."
"I do like dog fights," Butch said somberly, without looking around. "I don't like uninj fights. They're just a pretend, like everything else. Nobody gets hurt. And look here, Joggy—and you, too, Hal—when you talk to me, don't just say Butch. It's the Butcher, see?"
"That's not exactly a functional name," Hal observed with the judiciousness of budding maturity, while Joggy said agreeably: "All right, Butcher, I suppose you'd like to have lived way back when people were hurting each other all the time so the blood came out?"
"I certainly would," the Butcher replied. As Joggy and Hal turned back skeptically to watch the fight, he took out the metal tube, screwed up his face in a dreadful frown and jabbed himself in the hand. He squeaked with pain and whisked the tube out of sight.
"A kid can't do anything any more," he announced dramatically. "Can't break anything except the breakables they give him to break on purpose. Can't get dirty except in the dirt-pen—and they graduate him from that when he's two. Can't even be bitten by an uninj—it's contraprogrammed."
"Where'd you ever get so fixated on dirt?" Hal asked in a gentle voice acquired from a robot adolescer.
"I've been reading a book about a kid called Huckleberry Finn," the Butcher replied airily. "A swell book. That guy got dirtier than anything." His eyes became dreamy. "He even ate out of a garbage pail."
"What's a garbage pail?"
"I don't know, but it sounds great."
The battling uninjes careened into them. Brute had Darter by the ear and was whirling him around hilariously.
"Aw, quit it, Brute," the Butcher said in annoyance.
Brute obediently loosed his hold and returned to his master, paying no attention to his adversary's efforts to renew the fight.
The Butcher looked Brute squarely in the eyes. "You're making too much of a rumpus," he said. "I want to think."
He kicked Brute in the face. The dog squirmed joyously at his feet.
"Look," Joggy said, "you wouldn't hurt an uninj, for instance, would you?"
"How can you hurt something that's uninjurable?" the Butcher demanded scathingly. "An uninj isn't really a dog. It's just a lot of circuits and a micropack bedded in hyperplastic." He looked at Brute with guarded wistfulness.
"I don't know about that," Hal put in. "I've heard an uninj is programmed with so many genuine canine reactions that it practically has racial memory."
"I mean if you could hurt an uninj," Joggy amended.
"Well, maybe I wouldn't," the Butcher admitted grudgingly. "But shut up—I want to think."
"About what?" Hal asked with saintly reasonableness.
The Butcher achieved a fearful frown. "When I'm World Director," he said slowly, "I'm going to have warfare again."
"You think so now," Hal told him. "We all do at your age."
"We do not," the Butcher retorted. "I bet you didn't."
"Oh, yes, I was foolish, too," the older boy confessed readily. "All newborn organisms are self-centered and inconsiderate and ruthless. They have to be. That's why we have uninjes to work out on, and death games and fear houses, so that our emotions are cleared for adult conditioning. And it's just the same with newborn civilizations. Why, long after atom power and the space drive were discovered, people kept having wars and revolutions. It took ages to condition them differently. Of course, you can't appreciate it this year, but Man's greatest achievement was when he learned to automatically reject all violent solutions to problems. You'll realize that when you're older."
"I will not!" the Butcher countered hotly. "I'm not going to be a sissy." Hal and Joggy blinked at the unfamiliar word. "And what if we were attacked by bloodthirsty monsters from outside the Solar System?"
"The Space Fleet would take care of them," Hal replied calmly. "That's what it's for. Adults aren't conditioned to reject violent solutions to problems where non-human enemies are concerned. Look at what we did to viruses."
"But what if somebody got at us through the Time Bubble?"
"They can't. It's impossible."
"Yes, but suppose they did all the same."
"You've never been inside the Time Theater—you're not old enough yet—so you just can't know anything about it or about the reasons why it's impossible," Hal replied with friendly factuality. "The Time Bubble is just a viewer. You can only look through it, and just into the past, at that. But you can't travel through it because you can't change the past. Time traveling is a lot of kid stuff."
"I don't care," the Butcher asserted obstinately. "I'm still going to have warfare when I'm World Director."
"They'll condition you out of the idea," Hal assured him.
"They will not. I won't let 'em."
"It doesn't matter what you think now," Hal said with finality. "You'll have an altogether different opinion when you're six."
"Well, what if I will?" the Butcher snapped back. "You don't have to keep telling me about it, do you?"
The others were silent. Joggy began to bounce up and down abstractedly on the resilient pavement. Hal called in his three uninjes and said in soothing tones: "Joggy and I are going to swim over to the Time Theater. Want to walk us there, Butch?"
Butch scowled.
"How about it, Butch?"
Still Butch did not seem to hear.
The older boy shrugged and said: "Oh, well, how about it—Butcher?"
The Butcher swung around. "They won't let me in the Time Theater. You said so yourself."
"You could walk us over there."
"Well, maybe I will and maybe I won't."
"While you're deciding, we'll get swimming. Come along, Joggy."
Still scowling, the Butcher took a white soapy crayon from the bulging pocket in his silver shorts. Pressed into the pavement, it made a black mark. He scrawled pensively: KEEP ON THE GRASS.
He gazed at his handiwork. No, darn it, that was just what grownups wanted you to do. This grass couldn't be hurt. You couldn't pull it up or tear it off; it hurt your fingers to try. A rub with the side of the crayon removed the sign. He thought for a moment, then wrote: KEEP OFF THE GRASS.
With an untroubled countenance, he sprang up and hurried after the others.
Joggy and the older boy were swimming lazily through the air at shoulder height. In the pavement directly under each of them was a wide, saucer-shaped depression which swam along with them. The uninjes avoided the depressions. Darter was strutting on his hind legs, looking up inquiringly at his master.
"Gimme a ride, Hal, gimme a ride!" the Butcher called. The older boy ignored him. "Aw, gimme a ride, Joggy."
"Oh, all right." Joggy touched the small box attached to the front of his broad metal harness and dropped lightly to the ground. The Butcher climbed on his back. There was a moment of rocking and pitching, during which each boy accused the other of trying to upset them.
Then the Butcher got his balance and they began to swim along securely, though at a level several inches lower. Brute sprang up after his master and was invisibly rebuffed. He retired baffled, but a few minutes later, he was amusing himself by furious futile efforts to climb the hemispherical repulsor field.
Slowly the little cavalcade of boys and uninjes proceeded down the Avenue of Wisdom. Hal amused himself by stroking toward a tree. When he was about four feet from it, he was gently bounced away.
It was really a more tiring method of transportation than walking and quite useless against the wind. True, by rocking the repulsor hemisphere backward, you could get a brief forward push, but it would be nullified when you rocked forward. A slow swimming stroke was the simplest way to make progress.
The general sensation, however, was delightful and levitators were among the most prized of toys.
"There's the Theater," Joggy announced.
"I know ," the Butcher said irritably.
But even he sounded a little solemn and subdued. From the Great Ramp to the topmost airy finial, the Time Theater was the dream of a god realized in unearthly substance. It imparted the aura of demigods to the adults drifting up and down the ramp.
"My father remembers when there wasn't a Time Theater," Hal said softly as he scanned the facade's glowing charts and maps. "Say, they're viewing Earth, somewhere in Scandinavia around zero in the B.C.-A.D. time scale. It should be interesting."
"Will it be about Napoleon?" the Butcher asked eagerly. "Or Hitler?" A red-headed adult heard and smiled and paused to watch. A lock of hair had fallen down the middle of the Butcher's forehead, and as he sat Joggy like a charger, he did bear a faint resemblance to one of the grim little egomaniacs of the Dawn Era.
"Wrong millennium," Hal said.
"Tamerlane then?" the Butcher pressed. "He killed cities and piled the skulls. Blood-bath stuff. Oh, yes, and Tamerlane was a Scand of the Navies."
Hal looked puzzled and then quickly erased the expression. "Well, even if it is about Tamerlane, you can't see it. How about it, Joggy?"
"They won't let me in, either."
"Yes, they will. You're five years old now."
"But I don't feel any older," Joggy replied doubtfully.
"The feeling comes at six. Don't worry, the usher will notice the difference."
Hal and Joggy switched off their levitators and dropped to their feet. The Butcher came down rather hard, twisting an ankle. He opened his mouth to cry, then abruptly closed it hard, bearing his pain in tight-lipped silence like an ancient soldier—like Stalin, maybe, he thought. The red-headed adult's face twitched in half-humorous sympathy.
Hal and Joggy mounted the Ramp and entered a twilit corridor which drank their faint footsteps and returned pulses of light. The Butcher limped manfully after them, but when he got inside, he forgot his battle injury.
Hal looked back. "Honestly, the usher will stop you."
The Butcher shook his head. "I'm going to think my way in. I'm going to think old."
"You won't be able to fool the usher, Butcher. You under-fives simply aren't allowed in the Time Theater. There's a good reason for it—something dangerous might happen if an under-five got inside."
"Why?"
"I don't exactly know, but something."
"Hah! I bet they're scared we'd go traveling in the Time Bubble and have some excitement."
"They are not. I guess they just know you'd get bored and wander away from your seats and maybe disturb the adults or upset the electronics or something. But don't worry about it, Butcher. The usher will take care of you."
"Shut up—I'm thinking I'm World Director," the Butcher informed them, contorting his face diabolically.
Hal spoke to the uninjes, pointing to the side of the corridor. Obediently four of them lined up.
But Brute was peering down the corridor toward where it merged into a deeper darkness. His short legs stiffened, his neckless head seemed to retreat even further between his powerful shoulders, his lips writhed back to show his gleaming fangs, and a completely unfamiliar sound issued from his throat. A choked, grating sound. A growl. The other uninjes moved uneasily.
"Do you suppose something's the matter with his circuits?" Joggy whispered. "Maybe he's getting racial memories from the Scands."
"Of course not," Hal said irritably.
"Brute, get over there," the Butcher commanded. Unwillingly, eyes still fixed on the blackness ahead, Brute obeyed.
The three boys started on. Hal and Joggy experienced a vaguely electrical tingling that vanished almost immediately. They looked back. The Butcher had been stopped by an invisible wall.
"I told you you couldn't fool the usher," Hal said.
The Butcher hurled himself forward. The wall gave a little, then bounced him back with equal force.
"I bet it'll be a bum time view anyway," the Butcher said, not giving up, but not trying again. "And I still don't think the usher can tell how old you are. I bet there's an over-age teacher spying on you through a hole, and if he doesn't like your looks, he switches on the usher."
But the others had disappeared in the blackness. The Butcher waited and then sat down beside the uninjes. Brute laid his head on his knee and growled faintly down the corridor.
"Take it easy, Brute," the Butcher consoled him. "I don't think Tamerlane was really a Scand of the Navies anyhow."
Two chattering girls hardly bigger than himself stepped through the usher as if it weren't there.
The Butcher grimly slipped out the metal tube and put it to his lips. There were two closely spaced faint plops and a large green stain appeared on the bare back of one girl, while purple fluid dripped from the close-cropped hair of the other.
They glared at him and one of them said: "A cub!" But he had his arms folded and wasn't looking at them.
Meanwhile, subordinate ushers had guided Hal and Joggy away from the main entrance to the Time Theater. A sphincter dilated and they found themselves in a small transparent cubicle from which they could watch the show without disturbing the adult audience. They unstrapped their levitators, laid them on the floor and sat down.
The darkened auditorium was circular. Rising from a low central platform was a huge bubble of light, its lower surface somewhat flattened. The audience was seated in concentric rows around the bubble, their keen and compassionate faces dimly revealed by the pale central glow.
But it was the scene within the bubble that riveted the attention of the boys.
Great brooding trees, the trunks of the nearer ones sliced by the bubble's surface, formed the background. Through the dark, wet foliage appeared glimpses of a murky sky, while from the ceiling of the bubble, a ceaseless rain dripped mournfully. A hooded figure crouched beside a little fire partly shielded by a gnarled trunk. Squatting round about were wiry, blue-eyed men with shoulder-length blond hair and full blond beards. They were clothed in furs and metal-studded leather.
Here and there were scattered weapons and armor—long swords glistening with oil to guard them from rust, crudely painted circular shields, and helmets from which curved the horns of beasts. Back and forth, lean, wolflike dogs paced with restless monotony.
Sometimes the men seemed to speak together, or one would rise to peer down the misty forest vistas, but mostly they were motionless. Only the hooded figure, which they seemed to regard with a mingled wonder and fear, swayed incessantly to the rhythm of some unheard chant.
"The Time Bubble has been brought to rest in one of the barbaric cultures of the Dawn Era," a soft voice explained, so casually that Joggy looked around for the speaker, until Hal nudged him sharply, whispering with barely perceptible embarrassment: "Don't do that, Joggy. It's just the electronic interpreter. It senses our development and hears our questions and then it automats background and answers. But it's no more alive than an adolescer or a kinderobot. Got a billion microtapes, though."
The interpreter continued: "The skin-clad men we are viewing in Time in the Round seem to be a group of warriors of the sort who lived by pillage and rapine. The hooded figure is a most unusual find. We believe it to be that of a sorcerer who pretended to control the forces of nature and see into the future."
Joggy whispered: "How is it that we can't see the audience through the other side of the bubble? We can see through this side, all right."
"The bubble only shines light out," Hal told him hurriedly, to show he knew some things as well as the interpreter. "Nothing, not even light, can get into the bubble from outside. The audience on the other side of the bubble sees into it just as we do, only they're seeing the other way—for instance, they can't see the fire because the tree is in the way. And instead of seeing us beyond, they see more trees and sky."
Joggy nodded. "You mean that whatever way you look at the bubble, it's a kind of hole through time?"
"That's right." Hal cleared his throat and recited: "The bubble is the locus of an infinite number of one-way holes, all centering around two points in space-time, one now and one then. The bubble looks completely open, but if you tried to step inside, you'd be stopped—and so would an atom beam. It takes more energy than an atom beam just to maintain the bubble, let alone maneuver it."
"I see, I guess," Joggy whispered. "But if the hole works for light, why can't the people inside the bubble step out of it into our world?"
"Why—er—you see, Joggy—"
The interpreter took over. "The holes are one-way for light, but no-way for matter. If one of the individuals inside the bubble walked toward you, he would cross-section and disappear. But to the audience on the opposite side of the bubble, it would be obvious that he had walked away along the vista down which they are peering."
As if to provide an example, a figure suddenly materialized on their side of the bubble. The wolflike dogs bared their fangs. For an instant, there was only an eerie, distorted, rapidly growing silhouette, changing from blood-red to black as the boundary of the bubble cross-sectioned the intruding figure. Then they recognized the back of another long-haired warrior and realized that the audience on the other side of the bubble had probably seen him approaching for some time.
He bowed to the hooded figure and handed him a small bag.
"More atavistic cubs, big and little! Hold still, Cynthia," a new voice cut in.
Hal turned and saw that two cold-eyed girls had been ushered into the cubicle. One was wiping her close-cropped hair with one hand while mopping a green stain from her friend's back with the other.
Hal nudged Joggy and whispered: "Butch!"
But Joggy was still hypnotized by the Time Bubble.
"Then how is it, Hal," he asked, "that light comes out of the bubble, if the people don't? What I mean is, if one of the people walks toward us, he shrinks to a red blot and disappears. Why doesn't the light coming our way disappear, too?"
"Well—you see, Joggy, it isn't real light. It's—"
Once more the interpreter helped him out.
"The light that comes from the bubble is an isotope. Like atoms of one element, photons of a single frequency also have isotopes. It's more than a matter of polarization. One of these isotopes of light tends to leak futureward through holes in space-time. Most of the light goes down the vistas visible to the other side of the audience. But one isotope is diverted through the walls of the bubble into the Time Theater. Perhaps, because of the intense darkness of the theater, you haven't realized how dimly lit the scene is. That's because we're getting only a single isotope of the original light. Incidentally, no isotopes have been discovered that leak pastward, though attempts are being made to synthesize them."
"Oh, explanations!" murmured one of the newly arrived girls. "The cubs are always angling for them. Apple-polishers!"
" I like this show," a familiar voice announced serenely. "They cut anybody yet with those choppers?"
Hal looked down beside him. "Butch! How did you manage to get in?"
"I don't see any blood. Where's the bodies?"
"But how did you get in—Butcher?"
The Butcher replied airily: "A red-headed man talked to me and said it certainly was sad for a future dictator not to be able to enjoy scenes of carnage in his youth, so I told him I'd been inside the Time Theater and just come out to get a drink of water and go to the eliminator, but then my sprained ankle had got worse—I kind of tried to get up and fell down again—so he picked me up and carried me right through the usher."
"Butcher, that wasn't honest," Hal said a little worriedly. "You tricked him into thinking you were older and his brain waves blanketed yours, going through the usher. I really have heard it's dangerous for you under-fives to be in here."
"The way those cubs beg for babying and get it!" one of the girls commented. "Talk about sex favoritism!" She and her companion withdrew to the far end of the cubicle.
The Butcher grinned at them briefly and concentrated his attention on the scene in the Time Bubble.
"Those big dogs—" he began suddenly. "Brute must have smelled 'em."
"Don't be silly," Hal said. "Smells can't come out of the Time Bubble. Smells haven't any isotopes and—"
"I don't care," the Butcher asserted. "I bet somebody'll figure out someday how to use the bubble for time traveling."
"You can't travel in a point of view," Hal contradicted, "and that's all the bubble is. Besides, some scientists think the bubble isn't real at all, but a—uh—"
"I believe," the interpreter cut in smoothly, "that you're thinking of the theory that the Time Bubble operates by hypermemory. Some scientists would have us believe that all memory is time traveling and that the basic location of the bubble is not space-time at all, but ever-present eternity. Some of them go so far as to state that it is only a mental inability that prevents the Time Bubble from being used for time traveling—just as it may be a similar disability that keeps a robot with the same or even more scopeful memories from being a real man or animal.
"It is because of this minority theory that under-age individuals and other beings with impulsive mentalities are barred from the Time Theater. But do not be alarmed. Even if the minority theory should prove true—and no evidence for it has ever appeared—there are automatically operating safeguards to protect the audience from any harmful consequences of time traveling (almost certainly impossible, remember) in either direction."
"Sissies!" was the Butcher's comment.
"You're rather young to be here, aren't you?" the interpreter inquired.
The Butcher folded his arms and scowled.
The interpreter hesitated almost humanly, probably snatching through a quarter-million microtapes. "Well, you wouldn't have got in unless a qualified adult had certified you as plus-age. Enjoy yourself."
There was no need for the last injunction. The scene within the bubble had acquired a gripping interest. The shaggy warriors were taking up their swords, gathering about the hooded sorcerer. The hood fell back, revealing a face with hawklike, disturbing eyes that seemed to be looking straight out of the bubble at the future.
"This is getting good," the Butcher said, squirming toward the edge of his seat.
"Stop being an impulsive mentality," Hal warned him a little nervously.
"Hah!"
The sorcerer emptied the small bag on the fire and a thick cloud of smoke puffed toward the ceiling of the bubble. A clawlike hand waved wildly. The sorcerer appeared to be expostulating, commanding. The warriors stared uncomprehendingly, which seemed to exasperate the sorcerer.
"That's right," the Butcher approved loudly. "Sock it to 'em!"
"Butcher!" Hal admonished.
Suddenly the bubble grew very bright, as if the Sun had just shone forth in the ancient world, though the rain still dripped down.
"A viewing anomaly has occurred," the interpreter announced. "It may be necessary to collapse the Time Bubble for a short period."
In a frenzy, his ragged robes twisting like smoke, the sorcerer rushed at one of the warriors, pushing him backward so that in a moment he must cross-section.
"Attaboy!" the Butcher encouraged.
Then the warrior was standing outside the bubble, blinking toward the shadows, rain dripping from his beard and furs.
"Oh, boy !" the Butcher cheered in ecstasy.
"Butcher, you've done it!" Hal said, aghast.
"I sure did," the Butcher agreed blandly, "but that old guy in the bubble helped me. Must take two to work it."
"Keep your seats!" the interpreter said loudly. "We are energizing the safeguards!"
The warriors inside the bubble stared in stupid astonishment after the one who had disappeared from their view. The sorcerer leaped about, pushing them in his direction.
Abrupt light flooded the Time Theater. The warriors who had emerged from the bubble stiffened themselves, baring their teeth.
"The safeguards are now energized," the interpreter said.
A woman in a short golden tunic stood up uncertainly from the front row of the audience.
The first warrior looked her up and down, took one hesitant step forward, then another, then suddenly grabbed her and flung her over his left shoulder, looking around menacingly and swinging his sword in his right hand.
"I repeat, the safeguards have been fully energized! Keep your seats!" the interpreter enjoined.
In the cubicle, Hal and Joggy gasped, the two girls squeaked, but the Butcher yelled a "Hey!" of disapproval, snatched up something from the floor and darted out through the sphincter.
Here and there in the audience, other adults stood up. The emerged warriors formed a ring of swinging swords and questing eyes. Between their legs their wolfish dogs, emerged with them, crouched and snarled. Then the warriors began to fan out.
"There has been an unavoidable delay in energizing the safeguards," the interpreter said. "Please be patient."
At that moment, the Butcher entered the main auditorium, brandishing a levitator above his head and striding purposefully down the aisle. At his heels, five stocky forms trotted. In a definitely pre-civilization voice, or at least with pre-civilization volume, he bellowed: "Hey, you! You quit that!"
The first warrior looked toward him, gave his left shoulder a shake to quiet his wriggling captive, gave his right shoulder one to supple his sword arm, and waited until the dwarfish challenger came into range. Then his sword swished down in a flashing arc.
Next moment, the Butcher was on his knees and the warrior was staring at him open-mouthed. The sword had rebounded from something invisible an arm's length above the gnomelike creature's head. The warrior backed a step.
The Butcher stayed down, crouching half behind an aisle seat and digging for something in his pocket. But he didn't stay quiet. "Sic
'em, Brute!" he shrilled. "Sic 'em, Darter! Sic 'em, Pinkie and Whitie and Blue!" Then he stopped shouting and raised his hand to his mouth.
Growling quite unmechanically, the five uninjes hurled themselves forward and closed with the warrior's wolflike dogs. At the first encounter, Brute and Pinkie were grabbed by the throats, shaken, and tossed a dozen feet. The warriors snarled approval and advanced. But then Brute and Pinkie raced back eagerly to the fight—and suddenly the face of the leading warrior was drenched with scarlet. He blinked and touched his fingers to it, then looked at his hand in horror.
The Butcher spared a second to repeat his command to the uninjes. But already the battle was going against the larger dogs. The latter had the advantage of weight and could toss the smaller dogs like so many foxes. But their terrible fangs did no damage, and whenever an uninj clamped on a throat, that throat was torn out.
Meanwhile, great bloody stains had appeared on the bodies of all the warriors. They drew back in a knot, looking at each other fearfully. That was when the Butcher got to his feet and strode forward, hand clenching the levitator above his head.
"Get back where you belong, you big jerks! And drop that lady!"
The first warrior pointed toward him and hissed something. Immediately, a half dozen swords were smiting at the Butcher.
"We are working to energize the safeguards," the interpreter said in mechanical panic. "Remain patient and in your seats."
The uninjes leaped into the melee, at first tearing more fur than flesh. Swords caught them and sent them spinning through the air. They came yapping back for more. Brute fixed on the first warrior's ankle. He dropped the woman, stamped unavailingly on the uninj, and let out a screech.
Swords were still rebounding from the invisible shield under which the Butcher crouched, making terrible faces at his attackers. They drew back, looked again at their bloodstains, goggled at the demon dogs. At their leader's screech, they broke and plunged back into the Time Bubble, their leader stumbling limpingly after them. There they wasted no time on their own ragged sorcerer. Their swords rose and fell, and no repulsor field stayed them.
"Brute, come back!" the Butcher yelled.
The gray uninj let go his hold on the leader's ankle and scampered out of the Time Bubble, which swiftly dimmed to its original light intensity and then winked out.
For once in their very mature lives, all of the adults in the auditorium began to jabber at each other simultaneously.
"We are sorry, but the anomaly has made it necessary to collapse the Time Bubble," the interpreter said. "There will be no viewing until further announcement. Thank you for your patience."
Hal and Joggy caught up with the Butcher just as Brute jumped into his arms and the woman in gold picked him up and hugged him fiercely. The Butcher started to pull away, then grudgingly submitted.
"Cubs!" came a small cold voice from behind Hal and Joggy. "Always playing hero! Say, what's that awful smell, Cynthia? It must have come from those dirty past men."
Hal and Joggy were shouting at the Butcher, but he wasn't listening to them or to the older voices clamoring about "revised theories of reality" and other important things. He didn't even squirm as Brute licked his cheek and the woman in gold planted a big kiss practically on his mouth.
He smiled dreamily and stroked Brute's muzzle and murmured softly: "We came, we saw, we conquered, didn't we, Brute?"
Question:
Describe the structure of the society in this story
Answer:
|
[
"This society is organized around a reconditioning of thoughts that happens as children transition into adulthood, starting at age six. Adults who have already been reconditioned are passive and polite members of society, who supposedly do not have traces of violent tendencies anymore. Before this, however, there are a few levels of separation from the rest of the society. Five year olds are allowed to go to the Time Theater to view whatever is showing through the Time Bubble, a view into other societies throughout time, but anyone younger than five is not allowed. This is presumably because of safety concerns--Hal thinks that young children are a nuisance to adults in these settings. The society has a number of systems in place specifically for these younger children who have not yet been conditioned. There are things called death games and fear houses, which we do not see details of in this story, that are meant to clear out the childrens' emotional space. It also seems that uninjes, the robotic dogs that the boys have, are also for this purpose: Hal says that they are part of the society's options for letting kids work out their ruthless and inconsiderate impulses. These impulses are restructured when they are aimed at other people, but violent alien beings and viruses or other medical concerns are still considered threats worth responding to in full force. The particular focus on avoiding violent patterns seen in other civilizations is highlighted by the grand nature of the Time Theater, and its position at the end of a major street in a large public park.",
"In “Time in the Round,” the society is structured around perfection. Small children are given breakables, and those items are the only things that are physically capable of being broken. There are dirt-pens for kids to play in, and besides those areas, children are incapable of becoming dirty. The dirt-pens are only available to children aged 2 and younger. The society’s dogs, uninjes, are programmed not to bite or hurt the people, even when they are hit or stabbed themselves. They do not react like normal canines. \n\nYoung children are considered to be self-centered and ruthless, and they are provided with death games and fear houses to get out their emotions and prepare to be conditioned as adults. When children turn six years old, they feel differently than they did before. They are ready to enter the Time Theater and view the Time Bubble. They are taught about pre-civilization and the important differences between their own society and the past. They learn how to reject violent solutions to problems and live in peace. \n",
"The structure of society is based on age, and very specific behaviors are allowed and prohibited at different ages. Very young children are allowed to play and get dirty, but after a certain age they are no longer allowed to do so. Certain ages are considered too young for certain ideas, and aren’t allowed in the Time Building or are only allowed in certain parts of it. Younger children are sometimes called “cubs”, and it seems to be commonplace for older members of society to treat younger members with sweet derision. This society puts a strong emphasis on maturity and carefully controls what people are allowed to do at what ages and when they are allowed to learn concepts or do activities. The core principle is nonviolence but the results are near-total uniformity and strict constraints. \n",
"The society the main characters inhabit is post-violence. While children below five are given uninjes, death games, and fear houses in order to clear their emotions, adults are systematically re-programmed to believe that violence has no place in this new society. While violence is never used to resolve conflicts between humans, the Space Fleet will still use violence in defense against alien enemies. There are a number of protections in place to prevent violence upon humans from repulsor shields to the protective uninjes. The bubble at the Time Theater offers adults and those with the appropriate mental facilities a view into the pre-civilization world so that they may learn from the past and understand why a lack of violence became necessary in the new society."
] |
51380
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TIME IN THE ROUND
By FRITZ LEIBER
Illustrated by DILLON
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction May 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Poor Butcher suffered more than any dictator in history: everybody gave in to him because he was so puny and they were so impregnable!
From the other end of the Avenue of Wisdom that led across the Peace Park, a gray, hairless, heavily built dog was barking soundlessly at the towering crystal glory of the Time Theater. For a moment, the effect was almost frightening: a silent picture of the beginning of civilization challenging the end of it. Then a small boy caught up with the dog and it rolled over enthusiastically at his feet and the scene was normal again.
The small boy, however, seemed definitely pre-civilization. He studied the dog coldly and then inserted a thin metal tube under its eyelid and poked. The dog wagged its stumpy tail. The boy frowned, tightened his grip on the tube and jabbed hard. The dog's tail thumped the cushiony pavement and the four paws beat the air. The boy shortened his grip and suddenly jabbed the dog several times in the stomach. The stiff tube rebounded from the gray, hairless hide. The dog's face split in an upside-down grin, revealing formidable ivory fangs across which a long black tongue lolled.
The boy regarded the tongue speculatively and pocketed the metal tube with a grimace of utter disgust. He did not look up when someone called: "Hi, Butch! Sic 'em, Darter, sic 'em!"
A larger small boy and a somewhat older one were approaching across the luxurious, neatly cropped grass, preceded by a hurtling shape that, except for a black hide, was a replica of Butch's gray dog.
Butch shrugged his shoulders resignedly and said in a bored voice:
"Kill 'em, Brute."
The gray dog hurled itself on Darter. Jaws gaped to get a hold on necks so short and thick as to be mere courtesy terms. They whirled like a fanged merry-go-round. Three more dogs, one white, one slate blue and one pink, hurried up and tried to climb aboard.
Butch yawned.
"What's the matter?" inquired Darter's master. "I thought you liked dog fights, Butch."
"I do like dog fights," Butch said somberly, without looking around. "I don't like uninj fights. They're just a pretend, like everything else. Nobody gets hurt. And look here, Joggy—and you, too, Hal—when you talk to me, don't just say Butch. It's the Butcher, see?"
"That's not exactly a functional name," Hal observed with the judiciousness of budding maturity, while Joggy said agreeably: "All right, Butcher, I suppose you'd like to have lived way back when people were hurting each other all the time so the blood came out?"
"I certainly would," the Butcher replied. As Joggy and Hal turned back skeptically to watch the fight, he took out the metal tube, screwed up his face in a dreadful frown and jabbed himself in the hand. He squeaked with pain and whisked the tube out of sight.
"A kid can't do anything any more," he announced dramatically. "Can't break anything except the breakables they give him to break on purpose. Can't get dirty except in the dirt-pen—and they graduate him from that when he's two. Can't even be bitten by an uninj—it's contraprogrammed."
"Where'd you ever get so fixated on dirt?" Hal asked in a gentle voice acquired from a robot adolescer.
"I've been reading a book about a kid called Huckleberry Finn," the Butcher replied airily. "A swell book. That guy got dirtier than anything." His eyes became dreamy. "He even ate out of a garbage pail."
"What's a garbage pail?"
"I don't know, but it sounds great."
The battling uninjes careened into them. Brute had Darter by the ear and was whirling him around hilariously.
"Aw, quit it, Brute," the Butcher said in annoyance.
Brute obediently loosed his hold and returned to his master, paying no attention to his adversary's efforts to renew the fight.
The Butcher looked Brute squarely in the eyes. "You're making too much of a rumpus," he said. "I want to think."
He kicked Brute in the face. The dog squirmed joyously at his feet.
"Look," Joggy said, "you wouldn't hurt an uninj, for instance, would you?"
"How can you hurt something that's uninjurable?" the Butcher demanded scathingly. "An uninj isn't really a dog. It's just a lot of circuits and a micropack bedded in hyperplastic." He looked at Brute with guarded wistfulness.
"I don't know about that," Hal put in. "I've heard an uninj is programmed with so many genuine canine reactions that it practically has racial memory."
"I mean if you could hurt an uninj," Joggy amended.
"Well, maybe I wouldn't," the Butcher admitted grudgingly. "But shut up—I want to think."
"About what?" Hal asked with saintly reasonableness.
The Butcher achieved a fearful frown. "When I'm World Director," he said slowly, "I'm going to have warfare again."
"You think so now," Hal told him. "We all do at your age."
"We do not," the Butcher retorted. "I bet you didn't."
"Oh, yes, I was foolish, too," the older boy confessed readily. "All newborn organisms are self-centered and inconsiderate and ruthless. They have to be. That's why we have uninjes to work out on, and death games and fear houses, so that our emotions are cleared for adult conditioning. And it's just the same with newborn civilizations. Why, long after atom power and the space drive were discovered, people kept having wars and revolutions. It took ages to condition them differently. Of course, you can't appreciate it this year, but Man's greatest achievement was when he learned to automatically reject all violent solutions to problems. You'll realize that when you're older."
"I will not!" the Butcher countered hotly. "I'm not going to be a sissy." Hal and Joggy blinked at the unfamiliar word. "And what if we were attacked by bloodthirsty monsters from outside the Solar System?"
"The Space Fleet would take care of them," Hal replied calmly. "That's what it's for. Adults aren't conditioned to reject violent solutions to problems where non-human enemies are concerned. Look at what we did to viruses."
"But what if somebody got at us through the Time Bubble?"
"They can't. It's impossible."
"Yes, but suppose they did all the same."
"You've never been inside the Time Theater—you're not old enough yet—so you just can't know anything about it or about the reasons why it's impossible," Hal replied with friendly factuality. "The Time Bubble is just a viewer. You can only look through it, and just into the past, at that. But you can't travel through it because you can't change the past. Time traveling is a lot of kid stuff."
"I don't care," the Butcher asserted obstinately. "I'm still going to have warfare when I'm World Director."
"They'll condition you out of the idea," Hal assured him.
"They will not. I won't let 'em."
"It doesn't matter what you think now," Hal said with finality. "You'll have an altogether different opinion when you're six."
"Well, what if I will?" the Butcher snapped back. "You don't have to keep telling me about it, do you?"
The others were silent. Joggy began to bounce up and down abstractedly on the resilient pavement. Hal called in his three uninjes and said in soothing tones: "Joggy and I are going to swim over to the Time Theater. Want to walk us there, Butch?"
Butch scowled.
"How about it, Butch?"
Still Butch did not seem to hear.
The older boy shrugged and said: "Oh, well, how about it—Butcher?"
The Butcher swung around. "They won't let me in the Time Theater. You said so yourself."
"You could walk us over there."
"Well, maybe I will and maybe I won't."
"While you're deciding, we'll get swimming. Come along, Joggy."
Still scowling, the Butcher took a white soapy crayon from the bulging pocket in his silver shorts. Pressed into the pavement, it made a black mark. He scrawled pensively: KEEP ON THE GRASS.
He gazed at his handiwork. No, darn it, that was just what grownups wanted you to do. This grass couldn't be hurt. You couldn't pull it up or tear it off; it hurt your fingers to try. A rub with the side of the crayon removed the sign. He thought for a moment, then wrote: KEEP OFF THE GRASS.
With an untroubled countenance, he sprang up and hurried after the others.
Joggy and the older boy were swimming lazily through the air at shoulder height. In the pavement directly under each of them was a wide, saucer-shaped depression which swam along with them. The uninjes avoided the depressions. Darter was strutting on his hind legs, looking up inquiringly at his master.
"Gimme a ride, Hal, gimme a ride!" the Butcher called. The older boy ignored him. "Aw, gimme a ride, Joggy."
"Oh, all right." Joggy touched the small box attached to the front of his broad metal harness and dropped lightly to the ground. The Butcher climbed on his back. There was a moment of rocking and pitching, during which each boy accused the other of trying to upset them.
Then the Butcher got his balance and they began to swim along securely, though at a level several inches lower. Brute sprang up after his master and was invisibly rebuffed. He retired baffled, but a few minutes later, he was amusing himself by furious futile efforts to climb the hemispherical repulsor field.
Slowly the little cavalcade of boys and uninjes proceeded down the Avenue of Wisdom. Hal amused himself by stroking toward a tree. When he was about four feet from it, he was gently bounced away.
It was really a more tiring method of transportation than walking and quite useless against the wind. True, by rocking the repulsor hemisphere backward, you could get a brief forward push, but it would be nullified when you rocked forward. A slow swimming stroke was the simplest way to make progress.
The general sensation, however, was delightful and levitators were among the most prized of toys.
"There's the Theater," Joggy announced.
"I know ," the Butcher said irritably.
But even he sounded a little solemn and subdued. From the Great Ramp to the topmost airy finial, the Time Theater was the dream of a god realized in unearthly substance. It imparted the aura of demigods to the adults drifting up and down the ramp.
"My father remembers when there wasn't a Time Theater," Hal said softly as he scanned the facade's glowing charts and maps. "Say, they're viewing Earth, somewhere in Scandinavia around zero in the B.C.-A.D. time scale. It should be interesting."
"Will it be about Napoleon?" the Butcher asked eagerly. "Or Hitler?" A red-headed adult heard and smiled and paused to watch. A lock of hair had fallen down the middle of the Butcher's forehead, and as he sat Joggy like a charger, he did bear a faint resemblance to one of the grim little egomaniacs of the Dawn Era.
"Wrong millennium," Hal said.
"Tamerlane then?" the Butcher pressed. "He killed cities and piled the skulls. Blood-bath stuff. Oh, yes, and Tamerlane was a Scand of the Navies."
Hal looked puzzled and then quickly erased the expression. "Well, even if it is about Tamerlane, you can't see it. How about it, Joggy?"
"They won't let me in, either."
"Yes, they will. You're five years old now."
"But I don't feel any older," Joggy replied doubtfully.
"The feeling comes at six. Don't worry, the usher will notice the difference."
Hal and Joggy switched off their levitators and dropped to their feet. The Butcher came down rather hard, twisting an ankle. He opened his mouth to cry, then abruptly closed it hard, bearing his pain in tight-lipped silence like an ancient soldier—like Stalin, maybe, he thought. The red-headed adult's face twitched in half-humorous sympathy.
Hal and Joggy mounted the Ramp and entered a twilit corridor which drank their faint footsteps and returned pulses of light. The Butcher limped manfully after them, but when he got inside, he forgot his battle injury.
Hal looked back. "Honestly, the usher will stop you."
The Butcher shook his head. "I'm going to think my way in. I'm going to think old."
"You won't be able to fool the usher, Butcher. You under-fives simply aren't allowed in the Time Theater. There's a good reason for it—something dangerous might happen if an under-five got inside."
"Why?"
"I don't exactly know, but something."
"Hah! I bet they're scared we'd go traveling in the Time Bubble and have some excitement."
"They are not. I guess they just know you'd get bored and wander away from your seats and maybe disturb the adults or upset the electronics or something. But don't worry about it, Butcher. The usher will take care of you."
"Shut up—I'm thinking I'm World Director," the Butcher informed them, contorting his face diabolically.
Hal spoke to the uninjes, pointing to the side of the corridor. Obediently four of them lined up.
But Brute was peering down the corridor toward where it merged into a deeper darkness. His short legs stiffened, his neckless head seemed to retreat even further between his powerful shoulders, his lips writhed back to show his gleaming fangs, and a completely unfamiliar sound issued from his throat. A choked, grating sound. A growl. The other uninjes moved uneasily.
"Do you suppose something's the matter with his circuits?" Joggy whispered. "Maybe he's getting racial memories from the Scands."
"Of course not," Hal said irritably.
"Brute, get over there," the Butcher commanded. Unwillingly, eyes still fixed on the blackness ahead, Brute obeyed.
The three boys started on. Hal and Joggy experienced a vaguely electrical tingling that vanished almost immediately. They looked back. The Butcher had been stopped by an invisible wall.
"I told you you couldn't fool the usher," Hal said.
The Butcher hurled himself forward. The wall gave a little, then bounced him back with equal force.
"I bet it'll be a bum time view anyway," the Butcher said, not giving up, but not trying again. "And I still don't think the usher can tell how old you are. I bet there's an over-age teacher spying on you through a hole, and if he doesn't like your looks, he switches on the usher."
But the others had disappeared in the blackness. The Butcher waited and then sat down beside the uninjes. Brute laid his head on his knee and growled faintly down the corridor.
"Take it easy, Brute," the Butcher consoled him. "I don't think Tamerlane was really a Scand of the Navies anyhow."
Two chattering girls hardly bigger than himself stepped through the usher as if it weren't there.
The Butcher grimly slipped out the metal tube and put it to his lips. There were two closely spaced faint plops and a large green stain appeared on the bare back of one girl, while purple fluid dripped from the close-cropped hair of the other.
They glared at him and one of them said: "A cub!" But he had his arms folded and wasn't looking at them.
Meanwhile, subordinate ushers had guided Hal and Joggy away from the main entrance to the Time Theater. A sphincter dilated and they found themselves in a small transparent cubicle from which they could watch the show without disturbing the adult audience. They unstrapped their levitators, laid them on the floor and sat down.
The darkened auditorium was circular. Rising from a low central platform was a huge bubble of light, its lower surface somewhat flattened. The audience was seated in concentric rows around the bubble, their keen and compassionate faces dimly revealed by the pale central glow.
But it was the scene within the bubble that riveted the attention of the boys.
Great brooding trees, the trunks of the nearer ones sliced by the bubble's surface, formed the background. Through the dark, wet foliage appeared glimpses of a murky sky, while from the ceiling of the bubble, a ceaseless rain dripped mournfully. A hooded figure crouched beside a little fire partly shielded by a gnarled trunk. Squatting round about were wiry, blue-eyed men with shoulder-length blond hair and full blond beards. They were clothed in furs and metal-studded leather.
Here and there were scattered weapons and armor—long swords glistening with oil to guard them from rust, crudely painted circular shields, and helmets from which curved the horns of beasts. Back and forth, lean, wolflike dogs paced with restless monotony.
Sometimes the men seemed to speak together, or one would rise to peer down the misty forest vistas, but mostly they were motionless. Only the hooded figure, which they seemed to regard with a mingled wonder and fear, swayed incessantly to the rhythm of some unheard chant.
"The Time Bubble has been brought to rest in one of the barbaric cultures of the Dawn Era," a soft voice explained, so casually that Joggy looked around for the speaker, until Hal nudged him sharply, whispering with barely perceptible embarrassment: "Don't do that, Joggy. It's just the electronic interpreter. It senses our development and hears our questions and then it automats background and answers. But it's no more alive than an adolescer or a kinderobot. Got a billion microtapes, though."
The interpreter continued: "The skin-clad men we are viewing in Time in the Round seem to be a group of warriors of the sort who lived by pillage and rapine. The hooded figure is a most unusual find. We believe it to be that of a sorcerer who pretended to control the forces of nature and see into the future."
Joggy whispered: "How is it that we can't see the audience through the other side of the bubble? We can see through this side, all right."
"The bubble only shines light out," Hal told him hurriedly, to show he knew some things as well as the interpreter. "Nothing, not even light, can get into the bubble from outside. The audience on the other side of the bubble sees into it just as we do, only they're seeing the other way—for instance, they can't see the fire because the tree is in the way. And instead of seeing us beyond, they see more trees and sky."
Joggy nodded. "You mean that whatever way you look at the bubble, it's a kind of hole through time?"
"That's right." Hal cleared his throat and recited: "The bubble is the locus of an infinite number of one-way holes, all centering around two points in space-time, one now and one then. The bubble looks completely open, but if you tried to step inside, you'd be stopped—and so would an atom beam. It takes more energy than an atom beam just to maintain the bubble, let alone maneuver it."
"I see, I guess," Joggy whispered. "But if the hole works for light, why can't the people inside the bubble step out of it into our world?"
"Why—er—you see, Joggy—"
The interpreter took over. "The holes are one-way for light, but no-way for matter. If one of the individuals inside the bubble walked toward you, he would cross-section and disappear. But to the audience on the opposite side of the bubble, it would be obvious that he had walked away along the vista down which they are peering."
As if to provide an example, a figure suddenly materialized on their side of the bubble. The wolflike dogs bared their fangs. For an instant, there was only an eerie, distorted, rapidly growing silhouette, changing from blood-red to black as the boundary of the bubble cross-sectioned the intruding figure. Then they recognized the back of another long-haired warrior and realized that the audience on the other side of the bubble had probably seen him approaching for some time.
He bowed to the hooded figure and handed him a small bag.
"More atavistic cubs, big and little! Hold still, Cynthia," a new voice cut in.
Hal turned and saw that two cold-eyed girls had been ushered into the cubicle. One was wiping her close-cropped hair with one hand while mopping a green stain from her friend's back with the other.
Hal nudged Joggy and whispered: "Butch!"
But Joggy was still hypnotized by the Time Bubble.
"Then how is it, Hal," he asked, "that light comes out of the bubble, if the people don't? What I mean is, if one of the people walks toward us, he shrinks to a red blot and disappears. Why doesn't the light coming our way disappear, too?"
"Well—you see, Joggy, it isn't real light. It's—"
Once more the interpreter helped him out.
"The light that comes from the bubble is an isotope. Like atoms of one element, photons of a single frequency also have isotopes. It's more than a matter of polarization. One of these isotopes of light tends to leak futureward through holes in space-time. Most of the light goes down the vistas visible to the other side of the audience. But one isotope is diverted through the walls of the bubble into the Time Theater. Perhaps, because of the intense darkness of the theater, you haven't realized how dimly lit the scene is. That's because we're getting only a single isotope of the original light. Incidentally, no isotopes have been discovered that leak pastward, though attempts are being made to synthesize them."
"Oh, explanations!" murmured one of the newly arrived girls. "The cubs are always angling for them. Apple-polishers!"
" I like this show," a familiar voice announced serenely. "They cut anybody yet with those choppers?"
Hal looked down beside him. "Butch! How did you manage to get in?"
"I don't see any blood. Where's the bodies?"
"But how did you get in—Butcher?"
The Butcher replied airily: "A red-headed man talked to me and said it certainly was sad for a future dictator not to be able to enjoy scenes of carnage in his youth, so I told him I'd been inside the Time Theater and just come out to get a drink of water and go to the eliminator, but then my sprained ankle had got worse—I kind of tried to get up and fell down again—so he picked me up and carried me right through the usher."
"Butcher, that wasn't honest," Hal said a little worriedly. "You tricked him into thinking you were older and his brain waves blanketed yours, going through the usher. I really have heard it's dangerous for you under-fives to be in here."
"The way those cubs beg for babying and get it!" one of the girls commented. "Talk about sex favoritism!" She and her companion withdrew to the far end of the cubicle.
The Butcher grinned at them briefly and concentrated his attention on the scene in the Time Bubble.
"Those big dogs—" he began suddenly. "Brute must have smelled 'em."
"Don't be silly," Hal said. "Smells can't come out of the Time Bubble. Smells haven't any isotopes and—"
"I don't care," the Butcher asserted. "I bet somebody'll figure out someday how to use the bubble for time traveling."
"You can't travel in a point of view," Hal contradicted, "and that's all the bubble is. Besides, some scientists think the bubble isn't real at all, but a—uh—"
"I believe," the interpreter cut in smoothly, "that you're thinking of the theory that the Time Bubble operates by hypermemory. Some scientists would have us believe that all memory is time traveling and that the basic location of the bubble is not space-time at all, but ever-present eternity. Some of them go so far as to state that it is only a mental inability that prevents the Time Bubble from being used for time traveling—just as it may be a similar disability that keeps a robot with the same or even more scopeful memories from being a real man or animal.
"It is because of this minority theory that under-age individuals and other beings with impulsive mentalities are barred from the Time Theater. But do not be alarmed. Even if the minority theory should prove true—and no evidence for it has ever appeared—there are automatically operating safeguards to protect the audience from any harmful consequences of time traveling (almost certainly impossible, remember) in either direction."
"Sissies!" was the Butcher's comment.
"You're rather young to be here, aren't you?" the interpreter inquired.
The Butcher folded his arms and scowled.
The interpreter hesitated almost humanly, probably snatching through a quarter-million microtapes. "Well, you wouldn't have got in unless a qualified adult had certified you as plus-age. Enjoy yourself."
There was no need for the last injunction. The scene within the bubble had acquired a gripping interest. The shaggy warriors were taking up their swords, gathering about the hooded sorcerer. The hood fell back, revealing a face with hawklike, disturbing eyes that seemed to be looking straight out of the bubble at the future.
"This is getting good," the Butcher said, squirming toward the edge of his seat.
"Stop being an impulsive mentality," Hal warned him a little nervously.
"Hah!"
The sorcerer emptied the small bag on the fire and a thick cloud of smoke puffed toward the ceiling of the bubble. A clawlike hand waved wildly. The sorcerer appeared to be expostulating, commanding. The warriors stared uncomprehendingly, which seemed to exasperate the sorcerer.
"That's right," the Butcher approved loudly. "Sock it to 'em!"
"Butcher!" Hal admonished.
Suddenly the bubble grew very bright, as if the Sun had just shone forth in the ancient world, though the rain still dripped down.
"A viewing anomaly has occurred," the interpreter announced. "It may be necessary to collapse the Time Bubble for a short period."
In a frenzy, his ragged robes twisting like smoke, the sorcerer rushed at one of the warriors, pushing him backward so that in a moment he must cross-section.
"Attaboy!" the Butcher encouraged.
Then the warrior was standing outside the bubble, blinking toward the shadows, rain dripping from his beard and furs.
"Oh, boy !" the Butcher cheered in ecstasy.
"Butcher, you've done it!" Hal said, aghast.
"I sure did," the Butcher agreed blandly, "but that old guy in the bubble helped me. Must take two to work it."
"Keep your seats!" the interpreter said loudly. "We are energizing the safeguards!"
The warriors inside the bubble stared in stupid astonishment after the one who had disappeared from their view. The sorcerer leaped about, pushing them in his direction.
Abrupt light flooded the Time Theater. The warriors who had emerged from the bubble stiffened themselves, baring their teeth.
"The safeguards are now energized," the interpreter said.
A woman in a short golden tunic stood up uncertainly from the front row of the audience.
The first warrior looked her up and down, took one hesitant step forward, then another, then suddenly grabbed her and flung her over his left shoulder, looking around menacingly and swinging his sword in his right hand.
"I repeat, the safeguards have been fully energized! Keep your seats!" the interpreter enjoined.
In the cubicle, Hal and Joggy gasped, the two girls squeaked, but the Butcher yelled a "Hey!" of disapproval, snatched up something from the floor and darted out through the sphincter.
Here and there in the audience, other adults stood up. The emerged warriors formed a ring of swinging swords and questing eyes. Between their legs their wolfish dogs, emerged with them, crouched and snarled. Then the warriors began to fan out.
"There has been an unavoidable delay in energizing the safeguards," the interpreter said. "Please be patient."
At that moment, the Butcher entered the main auditorium, brandishing a levitator above his head and striding purposefully down the aisle. At his heels, five stocky forms trotted. In a definitely pre-civilization voice, or at least with pre-civilization volume, he bellowed: "Hey, you! You quit that!"
The first warrior looked toward him, gave his left shoulder a shake to quiet his wriggling captive, gave his right shoulder one to supple his sword arm, and waited until the dwarfish challenger came into range. Then his sword swished down in a flashing arc.
Next moment, the Butcher was on his knees and the warrior was staring at him open-mouthed. The sword had rebounded from something invisible an arm's length above the gnomelike creature's head. The warrior backed a step.
The Butcher stayed down, crouching half behind an aisle seat and digging for something in his pocket. But he didn't stay quiet. "Sic
'em, Brute!" he shrilled. "Sic 'em, Darter! Sic 'em, Pinkie and Whitie and Blue!" Then he stopped shouting and raised his hand to his mouth.
Growling quite unmechanically, the five uninjes hurled themselves forward and closed with the warrior's wolflike dogs. At the first encounter, Brute and Pinkie were grabbed by the throats, shaken, and tossed a dozen feet. The warriors snarled approval and advanced. But then Brute and Pinkie raced back eagerly to the fight—and suddenly the face of the leading warrior was drenched with scarlet. He blinked and touched his fingers to it, then looked at his hand in horror.
The Butcher spared a second to repeat his command to the uninjes. But already the battle was going against the larger dogs. The latter had the advantage of weight and could toss the smaller dogs like so many foxes. But their terrible fangs did no damage, and whenever an uninj clamped on a throat, that throat was torn out.
Meanwhile, great bloody stains had appeared on the bodies of all the warriors. They drew back in a knot, looking at each other fearfully. That was when the Butcher got to his feet and strode forward, hand clenching the levitator above his head.
"Get back where you belong, you big jerks! And drop that lady!"
The first warrior pointed toward him and hissed something. Immediately, a half dozen swords were smiting at the Butcher.
"We are working to energize the safeguards," the interpreter said in mechanical panic. "Remain patient and in your seats."
The uninjes leaped into the melee, at first tearing more fur than flesh. Swords caught them and sent them spinning through the air. They came yapping back for more. Brute fixed on the first warrior's ankle. He dropped the woman, stamped unavailingly on the uninj, and let out a screech.
Swords were still rebounding from the invisible shield under which the Butcher crouched, making terrible faces at his attackers. They drew back, looked again at their bloodstains, goggled at the demon dogs. At their leader's screech, they broke and plunged back into the Time Bubble, their leader stumbling limpingly after them. There they wasted no time on their own ragged sorcerer. Their swords rose and fell, and no repulsor field stayed them.
"Brute, come back!" the Butcher yelled.
The gray uninj let go his hold on the leader's ankle and scampered out of the Time Bubble, which swiftly dimmed to its original light intensity and then winked out.
For once in their very mature lives, all of the adults in the auditorium began to jabber at each other simultaneously.
"We are sorry, but the anomaly has made it necessary to collapse the Time Bubble," the interpreter said. "There will be no viewing until further announcement. Thank you for your patience."
Hal and Joggy caught up with the Butcher just as Brute jumped into his arms and the woman in gold picked him up and hugged him fiercely. The Butcher started to pull away, then grudgingly submitted.
"Cubs!" came a small cold voice from behind Hal and Joggy. "Always playing hero! Say, what's that awful smell, Cynthia? It must have come from those dirty past men."
Hal and Joggy were shouting at the Butcher, but he wasn't listening to them or to the older voices clamoring about "revised theories of reality" and other important things. He didn't even squirm as Brute licked his cheek and the woman in gold planted a big kiss practically on his mouth.
He smiled dreamily and stroked Brute's muzzle and murmured softly: "We came, we saw, we conquered, didn't we, Brute?"
|
What is the setting of the story?
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about Trouble on Tycho by Nelson S. Bond.
Relevant chunks:
TROUBLE ON TYCHO
By NELSON S. BOND
Isobar and his squeeze-pipes were the bane of the Moon Station's existence. But there came the day when his comrades found that the worth of a man lies sometimes in his nuisance value.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories March 1943. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
The audiophone buzzed thrice—one long, followed by two shorts—and Isobar Jones pressed the stud activating its glowing scanner-disc.
"Hummm?" he said absent-mindedly.
The selenoplate glowed faintly, and the image of the Dome Commander appeared.
"Report ready, Jones?"
"Almost," acknowledged Isobar gloomily. "It prob'ly ain't right, though. How anybody can be expected to get anything right on this dagnabbed hunk o' green cheese—"
"Send it up," interrupted Colonel Eagan, "as soon as you can. Sparks is making Terra contact now. That is all."
"That ain't all!" declared Isobar indignantly. "How about my bag—?"
It was all , so far as the D.C. was concerned. Isobar was talking to himself. The plate dulled. Isobar said, "Nuts!" and returned to his duties. He jotted neat ditto marks under the word "Clear" which, six months ago, he had placed beneath the column headed: Cond. of Obs. He noted the proper figures under the headings Sun Spots : Max Freq. — Min. Freq. ; then he sketched careful curves in blue and red ink upon the Mercator projection of Earth which was his daily work sheet.
This done, he drew a clean sheet of paper out of his desk drawer, frowned thoughtfully at the tabulated results of his observations, and began writing.
" Weather forecast for Terra ," he wrote, his pen making scratching sounds.
The audiophone rasped again. Isobar jabbed the stud and answered without looking.
"O.Q.," he said wearily. "O.Q. I told you it would be ready in a couple o' minutes. Keep your pants on!"
"I—er—I beg your pardon, Isobar?" queried a mild voice.
Isobar started. His sallow cheeks achieved a sickly salmon hue. He blinked nervously.
"Oh, jumpin' jimminy!" he gulped. " You , Miss Sally! Golly—'scuse me! I didn't realize—"
The Dome Commander's niece giggled.
"That's all right, Isobar. I just called to ask you about the weather in Oceania Sector 4B next week. I've got a swimming date at Waikiki, but I won't make the shuttle unless the weather's going to be nice."
"It is," promised Isobar. "It'll be swell all weekend, Miss Sally. Fine sunshiny weather. You can go."
"That's wonderful. Thanks so much, Isobar."
"Don't mention it, ma'am," said Isobar, and returned to his work.
South America. Africa. Asia. Pan-Europa. Swiftly he outlined the meteorological prospects for each sector. He enjoyed this part of his job. As he wrote forecasts for each area, in his mind's eye he saw himself enjoying such pastimes as each geographical division's terrain rendered possible.
If home is where the heart is, Horatio Jones—known better as "Isobar" to his associates at the Experimental Dome on Luna—was a long, long way from home. His lean, gangling frame was immured, and had been for six tedious Earth months, beneath the impervite hemisphere of Lunar III—that frontier outpost which served as a rocket refueling station, teleradio transmission point and meteorological base.
"Six solid months! Six sad, dreary months!" thought Isobar, "Locked up in an airtight Dome like—like a goldfish in a glass bowl!" Sunlight? Oh, sure! But filtered through ultraviolet wave-traps so it could not burn, it left the skin pale and lustreless and clammy as the belly of a toad. Fresh air? Pooh! Nothing but that everlasting sickening, scented, reoxygenated stuff gushing from atmo-conditioning units.
Excitement? Adventure? The romance he had been led to expect when he signed on for frontier service? Bah! Only a weary, monotonous, routine existence.
"A pain!" declared Isobar Jones. "That's what it is; a pain in the stummick. Not even allowed to—Yeah?"
It was Sparks, audioing from the Dome's transmission turret. He said,
"Hyah, Jonesy! How comes with the report?"
"Done," said Isobar. "I was just gettin' the sheets together for you."
"O.Q. But just bring it . Nothing else."
Isobar bridled.
"I don't know what you're talkin' about."
"Oh, no? Well, I'm talking about that squawk-filled doodlesack of yours, sonny boy. Don't bring that bag-full of noise up here with you."
Isobar said defiantly, "It ain't a doodlesack. It's a bagpipe. And I guess I can play it if I want to—"
"Not," said Sparks emphatically, "in my cubby! I've got sensitive eardrums. Well, stir your stumps! I've got to get the report rolling quick today. Big doings up here."
"Yeah? What?"
"Well, it's Roberts and Brown—"
"What about 'em?"
"They've gone Outside to make foundation repairs."
"Lucky stiffs!" commented Isobar ruefully.
"Lucky, no. Stiffs, maybe—if they should meet any Grannies. Well, scoot along. I'm on the ether in four point sixteen minutes."
"Be right up," promised Isobar, and, sheets in hand, he ambled from his cloistered cell toward the central section of the Dome.
He didn't leave Sparks' turret after the sheets were delivered. Instead, he hung around, fidgeting so obtrusively that Riley finally turned to him in sheer exasperation.
"Sweet snakes of Saturn, Jonesy, what's the trouble? Bugs in your britches?"
Isobar said, "H-huh? Oh, you mean—Oh, thanks, no! I just thought mebbe you wouldn't mind if I—well—er—"
"I get it!" Sparks grinned. "Want to play peekaboo while the contact's open, eh? Well, O.Q. Watch the birdie!"
He twisted dials, adjusted verniers, fingered a host of incomprehensible keys. Current hummed and howled. Then a plate before him cleared, and the voice of the Earth operator came in, enunciating with painstaking clarity:
"Earth answering Luna. Earth answering Luna's call. Can you hear me, Luna? Can you hear—?"
"I can not only hear you," snorted Riley, "I can see you and smell you, as well. Stop hamming it, stupid! You're lousing up the earth!"
The now-visible face of the Earth radioman drew into a grimace of displeasure.
"Oh, it's you ? Funny man, eh? Funny man Riley?"
"Sure," said Riley agreeably. "I'm a scream. Four-alarm Riley, the cosmic comedian—didn't you know? Flick on your dictacoder, oyster-puss; here's the weather report." He read it. "' Weather forecast for Terra, week of May 15-21 —'"
"Ask him," whispered Isobar eagerly. "Sparks, don't forget to ask him!"
Riley motioned for silence, but nodded. He finished the weather report, entered the Dome Commander's log upon the Home Office records, and dictated a short entry from the Luna Biological Commission. Then:
"That is all," he concluded.
"O.Q.," verified the other radioman. Isobar writhed anxiously, prodded Riley's shoulder.
"Ask him, Sparks! Go on ask him!"
"Oh, cut jets, will you?" snapped Sparks. The Terra operator looked startled.
"How's that? I didn't say a word—"
"Don't be a dope," said Sparks, "you dope! I wasn't talking to you. I'm entertaining a visitor, a refugee from a cuckoo clock. Look, do me a favor, chum? Can you twist your mike around so it's pointing out a window?"
"What? Why—why, yes, but—"
"Without buts," said Sparks grumpily. "Yours not to reason why; yours but to do or don't. Will you do it?"
"Well, sure. But I don't understand—" The silver platter which had mirrored the radioman's face clouded as the Earth operator twirled the inconoscope. Walls and desks of an ordinary broadcasting office spun briefly into view; then the plate reflected a glimpse of an Earthly landscape. Soft blue sky warmed by an atmosphere-shielded sun ... green trees firmly rooted in still-greener grass ... flowers ... birds ... people....
"Enough?" asked Sparks.
Isobar Jones awakened from his trance, eyes dulling. Reluctantly he nodded. Riley stared at him strangely, almost gently. To the other radioman, "O.Q., pal," he said. "Cut!"
"Cut!" agreed the other. The plate blanked out.
"Thanks, Sparks," said Isobar.
"Nothing," shrugged Riley " He twisted the mike; not me. But—how come you always want to take a squint at Earth when the circuit's open, Jonesy? Homesick?"
"Sort of," admitted Isobar guiltily.
"Well, hell, aren't we all? But we can't leave here for another six months at least. Not till our tricks are up. I should think it'd only make you feel worse to see Earth."
"It ain't Earth I'm homesick for," explained Isobar. "It's—well, it's the things that go with it. I mean things like grass and flowers and trees."
Sparks grinned; a mirthless, lopsided grin.
"We've got them right here on Luna. Go look out the tower window, Jonesy. The Dome's nestled smack in the middle of the prettiest, greenest little valley you ever saw."
"I know," complained Isobar. "And that's what makes it even worse. All that pretty, soft, green stuff Outside—and we ain't allowed to go out in it. Sometimes I get so mad I'd like to—"
"To," interrupted a crisp voice, "what?"
Isobar spun, flushing; his eyes dropped before those of Dome Commander Eagan. He squirmed.
"N-nothing, sir. I was only saying—"
"I heard you, Jones. And please let me hear no more of such talk, sir! It is strictly forbidden for anyone to go Outside except in cases of absolute necessity. Such labor as caused Patrolmen Brown and Roberts to go, for example—"
"Any word from them yet, sir?" asked Sparks eagerly.
"Not yet. But we're expecting them to return at any minute now. Jones! Where are you going?"
"Why—why, just back to my quarters, sir."
"That's what I thought. And what did you plan to do there?"
Isobar said stubbornly, "Well, I sort of figured I'd amuse myself for a while—"
"I thought that, too. And with what , pray, Jones?"
"With the only dratted thing," said Isobar, suddenly petulant, "that gives me any fun around this dagnabbed place! With my bagpipe."
Commander Eagan said, "You'd better find some new way of amusing yourself, Jones. Have you read General Order 17?"
Isobar said, "I seen it. But if you think—"
"It says," stated Eagan deliberately, "' In order that work or rest periods of the Dome's staff may not be disturbed, it is hereby ordered that the playing or practicing of all or any musical instruments must be discontinued immediately. By order of the Dome Commander ,' That means you, Jones!"
"But, dingbust it!" keened Isobar, "it don't disturb nobody for me to play my bagpipes! I know these lunks around here don't appreciate good music, so I always go in my office and lock the door after me—"
"But the Dome," pointed out Commander Eagan, "has an air-conditioning system which can't be shut off. The ungodly moans of your—er—so-called musical instrument can be heard through the entire structure."
He suddenly seemed to gain stature.
"No, Jones, this order is final! You cannot disrupt our entire organization for your own—er—amusement."
"But—" said Isobar.
"No!"
Isobar wriggled desperately. Life on Luna was sorry enough already. If now they took from him the last remaining solace he had, the last amusement which lightened his moments of freedom—
"Look, Commander!" he pleaded, "I tell you what I'll do. I won't bother nobody. I'll go Outside and play it—"
"Outside!" Eagan stared at him incredulously. "Are you mad? How about the Grannies?"
Isobar knew all about the Grannies. The only mobile form of life found by space-questing man on Earth's satellite, their name was an abbreviation of the descriptive one applied to them by the first Lunar exployers: Granitebacks. This was no exaggeration; if anything, it was an understatement. For the Grannies, though possessed of certain low intelligence, had quickly proven themselves a deadly, unyielding and implacable foe.
Worse yet, they were an enemy almost indestructible! No man had ever yet brought to Earth laboratories the carcass of a Grannie; science was completely baffled in its endeavors to explain the composition of Graniteback physiology—but it was known, from bitter experience, that the carapace or exoskeleton of the Grannies was formed of something harder than steel, diamond, or battleplate! This flesh could be penetrated by no weapon known to man; neither by steel nor flame, by electronic nor ionic wave, nor by the lethal, newly discovered atomo-needle dispenser.
All this Isobar knew about the Grannies. Yet:
"They ain't been any Grannies seen around the Dome," he said, "for a 'coon's age. Anyhow, if I seen any comin', I could run right back inside—"
"No!" said Commander Eagan flatly. "Absolutely, no ! I have no time for such nonsense. You know the orders—obey them! And now, gentlemen, good afternoon!"
He left. Sparks turned to Isobar, grinning.
"Well," he said, "one man's fish—hey, Jonesy? Too bad you can't play your doodlesack any more, but frankly, I'm just as glad. Of all the awful screeching wails—"
But Isobar Jones, generally mild and gentle, was now in a perfect fury. His pale eyes blazed, he stomped his foot on the floor, and from his lips poured a stream of such angry invective that Riley looked startled. Words that, to Isobar, were the utter dregs of violent profanity.
"Oh, dagnab it!" fumed Isobar Jones. "Oh, tarnation and dingbust! Oh— fiddlesticks !"
II
"And so," chuckled Riley, "he left, bubbling like a kettle on a red-hot oven. But, boy! was he ever mad! Just about ready to bust, he was."
Some minutes had passed since Isobar had left; Riley was talking to Dr. Loesch, head of the Dome's Physics Research Division. The older man nodded commiseratingly.
"It is funny, yes," he agreed, "but at the same time it is not altogether amusing. I feel sorry for him. He is a very unhappy man, our poor Isobar."
"Yeah, I know," said Riley, "but, hell, we all get a little bit homesick now and then. He ought to learn to—"
"Excuse me, my boy," interrupted the aged physicist, his voice gentle,
"it is not mere homesickness that troubles our friend. It is something deeper, much more vital and serious. It is what my people call: weltschmertz . There is no accurate translation in English. It means
'world sickness,' or better, 'world weariness'—something like that but intensified a thousandfold.
"It is a deeply-rooted mental condition, sometimes a dangerous frame of mind. Under its grip, men do wild things. Hating the world on which they find themselves, they rebel in curious ways. Suicide ... mad acts of valor ... deeds of cunning or knavery...."
"You mean," demanded Sparks anxiously, "Isobar ain't got all his buttons?"
"Not that exactly. He is perfectly sane. But he is in a dark morass of despair. He may try anything to retrieve his lost happiness, rid his soul of its dark oppression. His world-sickness is like a crying hunger—By the way, where is he now?"
"Below, I guess. In his quarters."
"Ah, good! Perhaps he is sleeping. Let us hope so. In slumber he will find peace and forgetfulness."
But Dr. Loesch would have been far less sanguine had some power the
"giftie gi'en" him of watching Isobar Jones at that moment.
Isobar was not asleep. Far from it. Wide awake and very much astir, he was acting in a singularly sinister role: that of a slinking, furtive culprit.
Returning to his private cubicle after his conversation with Dome Commander Eagan, he had stalked straightway to the cabinet wherein was encased his precious set of bagpipes. These he had taken from their pegs, gazed upon defiantly, and fondled with almost parental affection.
"So I can't play you, huh?" he muttered darkly. "It disturbs the peace o' the dingfounded, dumblasted Dome staff, does it? Well, we'll see about that!"
And tucking the bag under his arm, he had cautiously slipped from the room, down little-used corridors, and now he stood before the huge impervite gates which were the entrance to the Dome and the doorway to Outside.
On all save those occasions when a spacecraft landed in the cradle adjacent the gateway, these portals were doubly locked and barred. But today they had been unbolted that the two maintenance men might venture out. And since it was quite possible that Brown and Roberts might have to get inside in a hurry, their bolts remained drawn. Sole guardian of the entrance was a very bored Junior Patrolman.
Up to this worthy strode Isobar Jones, confident and assured, exuding an aura of propriety.
"Very well, Wilkins," he said. "I'll take over now. You may go to the meeting."
Wilkins looked at him bewilderedly.
"Huh? Whuzzat, Mr. Jones?"
Isobar's eyebrows arched.
"You mean you haven't been notified?"
"Notified of what ?"
"Why, the general council of all Patrolmen! Weren't you told that I would take your place here while you reported to G.H.Q.?"
"I ain't," puzzled Wilkins, "heard nothing about it. Maybe I ought to call the office, maybe?"
And he moved the wall-audio. But Isobar said swiftly. "That—er—won't be necessary, Wilkins. My orders were plain enough. Now, you just run along. I'll watch this entrance for you."
"We-e-ell," said Wilkins, "if you say so. Orders is orders. But keep a sharp eye out, Mister Jones, in case Roberts and Brown should come back sudden-like."
"I will," promised Isobar, "don't worry."
Wilkins moved away. Isobar waited until the Patrolman was completely out of sight. Then swiftly he pulled open the massive gate, slipped through, and closed it behind him.
A flood of warmth, exhilarating after the constantly regulated temperature of the Dome, descended upon him. Fresh air, thin, but fragrant with the scent of growing things, made his pulses stir with joyous abandon. He was Outside! He was Outside, in good sunlight, at last! After six long and dreary months!
Raptly, blissfully, all thought of caution tossed to the gentle breezes that ruffled his sparse hair, Isobar Jones stepped forward into the lunar valley....
How long he wandered thus, carefree and utterly content, he could not afterward say. It seemed like minutes; it must have been longer. He only knew that the grass was green beneath his feet, the trees were a lacy network through which warm sunlight filtered benevolently, the chirrupings of small insects and the rustling whisper of the breezes formed a tiny symphony of happiness through which he moved as one charmed.
It did not occur to him that he had wandered too far from the Dome's entrance until, strolling through an enchanting flower-decked glade, he was startled to hear—off to his right—the sharp, explosive bark of a Haemholtz ray pistol.
He whirled, staring about him wildly, and discovered that though his meandering had kept him near the Dome, he had unconsciously followed its hemispherical perimeter to a point nearly two miles from the Gateway. By the placement of ports and windows, Isobar was able to judge his location perfectly; he was opposite that portion of the structure which housed Sparks' radio turret.
And the shooting? That could only be—
He did not have to name its reason, even to himself. For at that moment, there came racing around the curve of the Dome a pair of figures, Patrolmen clad in fatigue drab. Roberts and Brown. Roberts was staggering, one foot dragged awkwardly as he ran; Brown's left arm, bloodstained from shoulder to elbow, hung limply at his side, but in his good right fist he held a spitting Haemholtz with which he tried to cover his comrade's sluggish retreat.
And behind these two, grim, grey, gaunt figures that moved with astonishing speed despite their massive bulk, came three ... six ... a dozen of those lunarites whom all men feared. The Grannies!
III
Simultaneously with his recognition of the pair, Joe Roberts saw him. A gasp of relief escaped the wounded man.
"Jones! Thank the Lord! Then you picked up our cry for help? Quick, man—where is it? Theres not a moment to waste!"
"W-where," faltered Isobar feebly, "is what ?"
"The tank, of course! Didn't you hear our telecast? We can't possibly make it back to the gate without an armored car. My foot's broken, and—" Roberts stopped suddenly, an abrupt horror in his eyes. "You don't have one! You're here alone ! Then you didn't pick up our call? But, why—?"
"Never mind that," snapped Isobar, "now!" Placid by nature, he could move when urgency drove. His quick mind saw the immediateness of their peril. Unarmed, he could not help the Patrolmen fight a delaying action against their foes, nor could he hasten their retreat. Anyway, weapons were useless, and time was of the essence. There was but one temporary way of staving off disaster. "Over here ... this tree! Quick! Up you go! Give him a lift, Brown—There! That's the stuff!"
He was the last to scramble up the gnarled bole to a tentative leafy sanctuary. He had barely gained the security of the lowermost bough when a thundering crash resounded, the sturdy trunk trembled beneath his clutch. Stony claws gouged yellow parallels in the bark scant inches beneath one kicking foot, then the Granny fell back with a thud. The Graniteback was not a climber. It was far too ungainly, much too weighty for that.
Roberts said weakly, "Th-thanks, Jonesy! That was a close call."
"That goes for me, too, Jonesy," added Brown from an upper bough.
"But I'm afraid you just delayed matters. This tree's O.Q. as long as it lasts, but—" He stared down upon the gathering knot of Grannies unhappily—"it's not going to last long with that bunch of superdreadnaughts working out on it! Hold tight, fellows! Here they come!"
For the Grannies, who had huddled for a moment as if in telepathic consultation, now joined forces, turned, and as one body charged headlong toward the tree. The unified force of their attack was like the shattering impact of a battering ram. Bark rasped and gritted beneath the besieged men's hands, dry leaves and twigs pelted about them in a tiny rain, tormented fibrous sinews groaned as the aged forest monarch shuddered in agony.
Desperately they clung to their perches. Though the great tree bent, it did not break. But when it stopped trembling, it was canted drunkenly to one side, and the erstwhile solid earth about its base was broken and cracked—revealing fleshy tentacles uprooted from ancient moorings!
Brown stared at this evidence of the Grannies' power with terror-fascinated eyes. His voice was none too firm.
"Lord! Piledrivers! A couple more like that—"
Isobar nodded. He knew what falling into the clutch of the Grannies meant. He had once seen the grisly aftermath of a Graniteback feast. Even now their adversaries had drawn back for a second attack. A sudden idea struck him. A straw of hope at which he grasped feverishly.
"You telecast a message to the Dome? Help should be on the way by now. If we can just hold out—"
But Roberts shook his head.
"We sent a message, Jonesy, but I don't think it got through. I've just been looking at my portable. It seems to be busted. Happened when they first attacked us, I guess. I tripped and fell on it."
Isobar's last hope flickered out.
"Then I—I guess it won't be long now," he mourned. "If we could have only got a message through, they would have sent out an armored car to pick us up. But as it is—"
Brown's shrug displayed a bravado he did not feel.
"Well, that's the way it goes. We knew what we were risking when we volunteered to come Outside. This damn moon! It'll never be worth a plugged credit until men find some way to fight those murderous stones-on-legs!"
Roberts said, "That's right. But what are you doing out here, Isobar? And why, for Pete's sake, the bagpipes?"
"Oh—the pipes?" Isobar flushed painfully. He had almost forgotten his original reason for adventuring Outside, had quite forgotten his instrument, and was now rather amazed to discover that somehow throughout all the excitement he had held onto it. "Why, I just happened to—Oh! the pipes! "
"Hold on!" roared Roberts. His warning came just in time. Once more, the three tree-sitters shook like dried peas in a pod as their leafy refuge trembled before the locomotive onslaught of the lunar beasts. This time the already-exposed roots strained and lifted, several snapped; when the Grannies again withdrew, complacently unaware that the "lethal ray" of Brown's Haemholtz was wasting itself upon their adamant hides in futile fury, the tree was bent at a precarious angle.
Brown sobbed, not with fear but with impotent anger, and in a gesture of enraged desperation, hurled his now-empty weapon at the retreating Grannies.
"No good! Not a damn bit of good! Oh, if there was only some way of fighting those filthy things—"
But Isobar Jones had a one-track mind. "The pipes!" he cried again, excitedly. "That's the answer!" And he drew the instrument into playing position, bag cuddled beneath one arm-pit, drones stiffly erect over his shoulder, blow-pipe at his lips. His cheeks puffed, his breath expelled. The giant lung swelled, the chaunter emitted its distinctive, fearsome, " Kaa-aa-o-o-o-oro-oong! "
Roberts moaned.
"Oh, Lord! A guy can't even die in peace!"
And Brown stared at him hopelessly.
"It's no use, Isobar. You trying to scare them off? They have no sense of hearing. That's been proven—"
Isobar took his lips from the reed to explain.
"It's not that. I'm trying to rouse the boys in the Dome. We're right opposite the atmosphere-conditioning-unit. See that grilled duct over there? That's an inhalation-vent. The portable transmitter's out of order, and our voices ain't strong enough to carry into the Dome—but the sound of these pipes is! And Commander Eagan told me just a short while ago that the sound of the pipes carries all over the building!
"If they hear this, they'll get mad because I'm disobeyin' orders. They'll start lookin' for me. If they can't find me inside, maybe they'll look Outside. See that window? That's Sparks' turret. If we can make him look out here—"
" Stop talking! " roared Roberts. "Stop talking, guy, and start blowing! I think you've got something there. Anyhow, it's our last hope. Blow! "
"And quick!" appended Brown. "For here they come!"
Isobar played, blew with all his might, while the Grannies raged below.
He meant the Grannies. Again they were huddling for attack, once more, a solid phalanx of indestructible, granite flesh, they were smashing down upon the tree.
" Haa-a-roong! " blew Isobar Jones.
IV
And—even he could not have foreseen the astounding results of his piping! What happened next was as astonishing as it was incomprehensible. For as the pipes, filled now and primed to burst into whatever substitute for melody they were prodded into, wailed into action—the Grannies' rush came to an abrupt halt!
As one, they stopped cold in their tracks and turned dull, colorless, questioning eyes upward into the tree whence came this weird and vibrant droning!
So stunned with surprise was Isobar that his grip on the pipes relaxed, his lips almost slipped from the reed. But Brown's delighted bellow lifted his paralysis.
"Sacred rings of Saturn-look! They like it! Keep playing, Jonesy! Play, boy, like you never played before!"
And Roberts roared, above the skirling of the piobaireachd into which Isobar had instinctively swung, "Music hath charms to soothe the savage beast! Then we were wrong. They can hear, after all! See that? They're lying down to listen—like so many lambs! Keep playing, Isobar! For once in my life I'm glad to hear that lovely, wonderful music!"
Isobar needed no urging. He, too, had noted how the Grannies' attack had stopped, how every last one of the gaunt grey beasts had suddenly, quietly, almost happily, dropped to its haunches at the base of the tree.
There was no doubt about it; the Grannies liked this music. Eyes raptly fixed, unblinking, unwavering, they froze into postures of gentle beatitude. One stirred once, dangerously, as for a moment Isobar paused to catch his breath, but Isobar hastily lipped the blow-pipe with redoubled eagerness, and the Granny relapsed into quietude.
Followed then what, under somewhat different circumstances, should have been a piper's dream. For Isobar had an audience which would not—and in two cases dared not—allow him to stop playing. And to this audience he played over and over again his entire repertoire. Marches, flings, dances—the stirring Rhoderik Dhu and the lilting Lassies O'Skye , the mournful Coghiegh nha Shie whose keening is like the sound of a sobbing nation.
The Cock o' the North , he played, and Mironton ... Wee Flow'r o' Dee and MacArthur's March ... La Cucuracha and—
And his lungs were parched, his lips dry as swabs of cotton. Blood pounded through his temples, throbbing in time to the drone of the chaunter, and a dark mist gathered before his eyes. He tore the blow-pipe from his lips, gasped,
"Keep playing!" came the dim, distant howl of Johnny Brown. "Just a few minutes longer, Jonesy! Relief is on the way. Sparks saw us from his turret window five minutes ago!"
And Isobar played on. How, or what, he did not know. The memory of those next few minutes was never afterward clear in his mind. All he knew was that above the skirling drone of his pipes there came another sound, the metallic clanking of a man-made machine ... an armored tank, sent from the Dome to rescue the beleaguered trio.
He was conscious, then, of a friendly voice shouting words of encouragement, of Joe Roberts calling a warning to those below.
"Careful, boys! Drive the tank right up beneath us so we can hop in and get out of here! Watch the Grannies—they'll be after us the minute Isobar stops playing!"
Then the answer from below. The fantastic answer in Sparks' familiar voice. The answer that caused the bagpipes to slip from Isobar's fingers as Isobar Jones passed out in a dead faint:
"After you? Those Grannies? Hell's howling acres— those Grannies are stone dead !"
Question:
What is the setting of the story?
Answer:
|
[
"Trouble on Tycho takes place on Luna III, a new frontier for space technology. The planet itself is lush and green, with a beautiful network of trees and greenery. However, it is inhabited by Granitebacks, an unbeatable foe known to kill any Earthmen who dare cross their path. So, the new inhabitants of Luna III built a giant dome to keep themselves safe from the Grannies, at least until they devised a way to beat them. The dome allows its residents to see out but makes it very difficult for them to escape. The inhabitants are there to provide Earth with news from space as well as other meteorological forecasts. The dome has air-conditioning and thick glass walls, so there’s no fresh air or real sunlight, only the meager, filtered kind. ",
"The story takes place on Earth's moon, Luna. Since the first Lunar expedition, humans have established Lunar III, a frontier outpost that operates as a rocket refueling station, teleradio transmission point, and meteorological base. Resting in a lunar valley rich with grass, flowers, insects, sunlight, trees, and fresh air, the outpost is comprised of several domes, including the Experimental Dome from which Isobar Jones observes and reports weather on Earth. The Dome has a transmission turret, operated by Sparks Riley, which allows communication with Earth, and the atmosphere of the entire outpost is controlled with atmo-conditioning units reoxygenating the air. Isobar plays his bagpipes locked inside his office, but everyone in the Dome can hear him thanks to the air-conditioning system that can't be shut off. To prevent people from leaving and to protect against the Granitebacks, massive impervite gates protect the entrance to the Dome. The moon's only mobile, native species are the Granitebacks, called \"Grannies\", who are dangerous to humans and have bodies protected by thick exoskeletons impenetrable to any known weapon.",
"“Trouble on Tycho” is set on Earth’s moon, and it mostly takes place on Lunar III, a frontier outpost which is used for rocket refueling, teleradio transmission, and meteorological observances. There are airtight domes in the station that make Isobar feel like a goldfish in a glass bowl. The sunlight is filtered through ultraviolet wave-traps so the workers’ skin does not get burnt, and this makes them very pale. The air is constantly recycled through atmo-conditioning units, and it’s anything but fresh. The men who work on Lunar III have beautiful views to take in, but they are not allowed to go Outside. Outside the post is a beautiful valley filled with green foliage and small insects. A warm breeze blows through the flowery meadows. However, the picturesque scenery is ruined by the Granitebacks, or Grannies, that will attack humans without provocation. \n",
"The story is set in an Experimental Dome on Luna, and the main character, Isobar is stationed within a hemispheric dome unit called Lunar III. There are separate quarters for the employees and towers for transmitting video and radio signals to Earth. Sunlight is filtered through ultraviolet wave-traps, which leaves Isobars skin pale and clammy. The air is scented and reoxygenated and is pumped in through atmo-conditioning units. Isobar has been stationed there for six months, and will be there for at least six more, leading to a kind of disdain for these features.\nIn the transmission tower that communicates with Earth there are desks like a typical broadcasting office and a plate on the wall that projects the video from Earth. Out the window on the Earth side of the video feed, there is blue sky, trees, birds, flowers, and people. \nThere is an “Outside” hemispherical dome which houses a lush valley adjacent to the air conditioned living quarters the employees are confined to, and guarded under heavy gates. “Outside” is warm with thin, fragrant breezes, good sunlight, and abundant forest flora that make Isobar feel replenished after being in the sanitized quarters of the Dome.\n"
] |
62260
|
TROUBLE ON TYCHO
By NELSON S. BOND
Isobar and his squeeze-pipes were the bane of the Moon Station's existence. But there came the day when his comrades found that the worth of a man lies sometimes in his nuisance value.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories March 1943. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
The audiophone buzzed thrice—one long, followed by two shorts—and Isobar Jones pressed the stud activating its glowing scanner-disc.
"Hummm?" he said absent-mindedly.
The selenoplate glowed faintly, and the image of the Dome Commander appeared.
"Report ready, Jones?"
"Almost," acknowledged Isobar gloomily. "It prob'ly ain't right, though. How anybody can be expected to get anything right on this dagnabbed hunk o' green cheese—"
"Send it up," interrupted Colonel Eagan, "as soon as you can. Sparks is making Terra contact now. That is all."
"That ain't all!" declared Isobar indignantly. "How about my bag—?"
It was all , so far as the D.C. was concerned. Isobar was talking to himself. The plate dulled. Isobar said, "Nuts!" and returned to his duties. He jotted neat ditto marks under the word "Clear" which, six months ago, he had placed beneath the column headed: Cond. of Obs. He noted the proper figures under the headings Sun Spots : Max Freq. — Min. Freq. ; then he sketched careful curves in blue and red ink upon the Mercator projection of Earth which was his daily work sheet.
This done, he drew a clean sheet of paper out of his desk drawer, frowned thoughtfully at the tabulated results of his observations, and began writing.
" Weather forecast for Terra ," he wrote, his pen making scratching sounds.
The audiophone rasped again. Isobar jabbed the stud and answered without looking.
"O.Q.," he said wearily. "O.Q. I told you it would be ready in a couple o' minutes. Keep your pants on!"
"I—er—I beg your pardon, Isobar?" queried a mild voice.
Isobar started. His sallow cheeks achieved a sickly salmon hue. He blinked nervously.
"Oh, jumpin' jimminy!" he gulped. " You , Miss Sally! Golly—'scuse me! I didn't realize—"
The Dome Commander's niece giggled.
"That's all right, Isobar. I just called to ask you about the weather in Oceania Sector 4B next week. I've got a swimming date at Waikiki, but I won't make the shuttle unless the weather's going to be nice."
"It is," promised Isobar. "It'll be swell all weekend, Miss Sally. Fine sunshiny weather. You can go."
"That's wonderful. Thanks so much, Isobar."
"Don't mention it, ma'am," said Isobar, and returned to his work.
South America. Africa. Asia. Pan-Europa. Swiftly he outlined the meteorological prospects for each sector. He enjoyed this part of his job. As he wrote forecasts for each area, in his mind's eye he saw himself enjoying such pastimes as each geographical division's terrain rendered possible.
If home is where the heart is, Horatio Jones—known better as "Isobar" to his associates at the Experimental Dome on Luna—was a long, long way from home. His lean, gangling frame was immured, and had been for six tedious Earth months, beneath the impervite hemisphere of Lunar III—that frontier outpost which served as a rocket refueling station, teleradio transmission point and meteorological base.
"Six solid months! Six sad, dreary months!" thought Isobar, "Locked up in an airtight Dome like—like a goldfish in a glass bowl!" Sunlight? Oh, sure! But filtered through ultraviolet wave-traps so it could not burn, it left the skin pale and lustreless and clammy as the belly of a toad. Fresh air? Pooh! Nothing but that everlasting sickening, scented, reoxygenated stuff gushing from atmo-conditioning units.
Excitement? Adventure? The romance he had been led to expect when he signed on for frontier service? Bah! Only a weary, monotonous, routine existence.
"A pain!" declared Isobar Jones. "That's what it is; a pain in the stummick. Not even allowed to—Yeah?"
It was Sparks, audioing from the Dome's transmission turret. He said,
"Hyah, Jonesy! How comes with the report?"
"Done," said Isobar. "I was just gettin' the sheets together for you."
"O.Q. But just bring it . Nothing else."
Isobar bridled.
"I don't know what you're talkin' about."
"Oh, no? Well, I'm talking about that squawk-filled doodlesack of yours, sonny boy. Don't bring that bag-full of noise up here with you."
Isobar said defiantly, "It ain't a doodlesack. It's a bagpipe. And I guess I can play it if I want to—"
"Not," said Sparks emphatically, "in my cubby! I've got sensitive eardrums. Well, stir your stumps! I've got to get the report rolling quick today. Big doings up here."
"Yeah? What?"
"Well, it's Roberts and Brown—"
"What about 'em?"
"They've gone Outside to make foundation repairs."
"Lucky stiffs!" commented Isobar ruefully.
"Lucky, no. Stiffs, maybe—if they should meet any Grannies. Well, scoot along. I'm on the ether in four point sixteen minutes."
"Be right up," promised Isobar, and, sheets in hand, he ambled from his cloistered cell toward the central section of the Dome.
He didn't leave Sparks' turret after the sheets were delivered. Instead, he hung around, fidgeting so obtrusively that Riley finally turned to him in sheer exasperation.
"Sweet snakes of Saturn, Jonesy, what's the trouble? Bugs in your britches?"
Isobar said, "H-huh? Oh, you mean—Oh, thanks, no! I just thought mebbe you wouldn't mind if I—well—er—"
"I get it!" Sparks grinned. "Want to play peekaboo while the contact's open, eh? Well, O.Q. Watch the birdie!"
He twisted dials, adjusted verniers, fingered a host of incomprehensible keys. Current hummed and howled. Then a plate before him cleared, and the voice of the Earth operator came in, enunciating with painstaking clarity:
"Earth answering Luna. Earth answering Luna's call. Can you hear me, Luna? Can you hear—?"
"I can not only hear you," snorted Riley, "I can see you and smell you, as well. Stop hamming it, stupid! You're lousing up the earth!"
The now-visible face of the Earth radioman drew into a grimace of displeasure.
"Oh, it's you ? Funny man, eh? Funny man Riley?"
"Sure," said Riley agreeably. "I'm a scream. Four-alarm Riley, the cosmic comedian—didn't you know? Flick on your dictacoder, oyster-puss; here's the weather report." He read it. "' Weather forecast for Terra, week of May 15-21 —'"
"Ask him," whispered Isobar eagerly. "Sparks, don't forget to ask him!"
Riley motioned for silence, but nodded. He finished the weather report, entered the Dome Commander's log upon the Home Office records, and dictated a short entry from the Luna Biological Commission. Then:
"That is all," he concluded.
"O.Q.," verified the other radioman. Isobar writhed anxiously, prodded Riley's shoulder.
"Ask him, Sparks! Go on ask him!"
"Oh, cut jets, will you?" snapped Sparks. The Terra operator looked startled.
"How's that? I didn't say a word—"
"Don't be a dope," said Sparks, "you dope! I wasn't talking to you. I'm entertaining a visitor, a refugee from a cuckoo clock. Look, do me a favor, chum? Can you twist your mike around so it's pointing out a window?"
"What? Why—why, yes, but—"
"Without buts," said Sparks grumpily. "Yours not to reason why; yours but to do or don't. Will you do it?"
"Well, sure. But I don't understand—" The silver platter which had mirrored the radioman's face clouded as the Earth operator twirled the inconoscope. Walls and desks of an ordinary broadcasting office spun briefly into view; then the plate reflected a glimpse of an Earthly landscape. Soft blue sky warmed by an atmosphere-shielded sun ... green trees firmly rooted in still-greener grass ... flowers ... birds ... people....
"Enough?" asked Sparks.
Isobar Jones awakened from his trance, eyes dulling. Reluctantly he nodded. Riley stared at him strangely, almost gently. To the other radioman, "O.Q., pal," he said. "Cut!"
"Cut!" agreed the other. The plate blanked out.
"Thanks, Sparks," said Isobar.
"Nothing," shrugged Riley " He twisted the mike; not me. But—how come you always want to take a squint at Earth when the circuit's open, Jonesy? Homesick?"
"Sort of," admitted Isobar guiltily.
"Well, hell, aren't we all? But we can't leave here for another six months at least. Not till our tricks are up. I should think it'd only make you feel worse to see Earth."
"It ain't Earth I'm homesick for," explained Isobar. "It's—well, it's the things that go with it. I mean things like grass and flowers and trees."
Sparks grinned; a mirthless, lopsided grin.
"We've got them right here on Luna. Go look out the tower window, Jonesy. The Dome's nestled smack in the middle of the prettiest, greenest little valley you ever saw."
"I know," complained Isobar. "And that's what makes it even worse. All that pretty, soft, green stuff Outside—and we ain't allowed to go out in it. Sometimes I get so mad I'd like to—"
"To," interrupted a crisp voice, "what?"
Isobar spun, flushing; his eyes dropped before those of Dome Commander Eagan. He squirmed.
"N-nothing, sir. I was only saying—"
"I heard you, Jones. And please let me hear no more of such talk, sir! It is strictly forbidden for anyone to go Outside except in cases of absolute necessity. Such labor as caused Patrolmen Brown and Roberts to go, for example—"
"Any word from them yet, sir?" asked Sparks eagerly.
"Not yet. But we're expecting them to return at any minute now. Jones! Where are you going?"
"Why—why, just back to my quarters, sir."
"That's what I thought. And what did you plan to do there?"
Isobar said stubbornly, "Well, I sort of figured I'd amuse myself for a while—"
"I thought that, too. And with what , pray, Jones?"
"With the only dratted thing," said Isobar, suddenly petulant, "that gives me any fun around this dagnabbed place! With my bagpipe."
Commander Eagan said, "You'd better find some new way of amusing yourself, Jones. Have you read General Order 17?"
Isobar said, "I seen it. But if you think—"
"It says," stated Eagan deliberately, "' In order that work or rest periods of the Dome's staff may not be disturbed, it is hereby ordered that the playing or practicing of all or any musical instruments must be discontinued immediately. By order of the Dome Commander ,' That means you, Jones!"
"But, dingbust it!" keened Isobar, "it don't disturb nobody for me to play my bagpipes! I know these lunks around here don't appreciate good music, so I always go in my office and lock the door after me—"
"But the Dome," pointed out Commander Eagan, "has an air-conditioning system which can't be shut off. The ungodly moans of your—er—so-called musical instrument can be heard through the entire structure."
He suddenly seemed to gain stature.
"No, Jones, this order is final! You cannot disrupt our entire organization for your own—er—amusement."
"But—" said Isobar.
"No!"
Isobar wriggled desperately. Life on Luna was sorry enough already. If now they took from him the last remaining solace he had, the last amusement which lightened his moments of freedom—
"Look, Commander!" he pleaded, "I tell you what I'll do. I won't bother nobody. I'll go Outside and play it—"
"Outside!" Eagan stared at him incredulously. "Are you mad? How about the Grannies?"
Isobar knew all about the Grannies. The only mobile form of life found by space-questing man on Earth's satellite, their name was an abbreviation of the descriptive one applied to them by the first Lunar exployers: Granitebacks. This was no exaggeration; if anything, it was an understatement. For the Grannies, though possessed of certain low intelligence, had quickly proven themselves a deadly, unyielding and implacable foe.
Worse yet, they were an enemy almost indestructible! No man had ever yet brought to Earth laboratories the carcass of a Grannie; science was completely baffled in its endeavors to explain the composition of Graniteback physiology—but it was known, from bitter experience, that the carapace or exoskeleton of the Grannies was formed of something harder than steel, diamond, or battleplate! This flesh could be penetrated by no weapon known to man; neither by steel nor flame, by electronic nor ionic wave, nor by the lethal, newly discovered atomo-needle dispenser.
All this Isobar knew about the Grannies. Yet:
"They ain't been any Grannies seen around the Dome," he said, "for a 'coon's age. Anyhow, if I seen any comin', I could run right back inside—"
"No!" said Commander Eagan flatly. "Absolutely, no ! I have no time for such nonsense. You know the orders—obey them! And now, gentlemen, good afternoon!"
He left. Sparks turned to Isobar, grinning.
"Well," he said, "one man's fish—hey, Jonesy? Too bad you can't play your doodlesack any more, but frankly, I'm just as glad. Of all the awful screeching wails—"
But Isobar Jones, generally mild and gentle, was now in a perfect fury. His pale eyes blazed, he stomped his foot on the floor, and from his lips poured a stream of such angry invective that Riley looked startled. Words that, to Isobar, were the utter dregs of violent profanity.
"Oh, dagnab it!" fumed Isobar Jones. "Oh, tarnation and dingbust! Oh— fiddlesticks !"
II
"And so," chuckled Riley, "he left, bubbling like a kettle on a red-hot oven. But, boy! was he ever mad! Just about ready to bust, he was."
Some minutes had passed since Isobar had left; Riley was talking to Dr. Loesch, head of the Dome's Physics Research Division. The older man nodded commiseratingly.
"It is funny, yes," he agreed, "but at the same time it is not altogether amusing. I feel sorry for him. He is a very unhappy man, our poor Isobar."
"Yeah, I know," said Riley, "but, hell, we all get a little bit homesick now and then. He ought to learn to—"
"Excuse me, my boy," interrupted the aged physicist, his voice gentle,
"it is not mere homesickness that troubles our friend. It is something deeper, much more vital and serious. It is what my people call: weltschmertz . There is no accurate translation in English. It means
'world sickness,' or better, 'world weariness'—something like that but intensified a thousandfold.
"It is a deeply-rooted mental condition, sometimes a dangerous frame of mind. Under its grip, men do wild things. Hating the world on which they find themselves, they rebel in curious ways. Suicide ... mad acts of valor ... deeds of cunning or knavery...."
"You mean," demanded Sparks anxiously, "Isobar ain't got all his buttons?"
"Not that exactly. He is perfectly sane. But he is in a dark morass of despair. He may try anything to retrieve his lost happiness, rid his soul of its dark oppression. His world-sickness is like a crying hunger—By the way, where is he now?"
"Below, I guess. In his quarters."
"Ah, good! Perhaps he is sleeping. Let us hope so. In slumber he will find peace and forgetfulness."
But Dr. Loesch would have been far less sanguine had some power the
"giftie gi'en" him of watching Isobar Jones at that moment.
Isobar was not asleep. Far from it. Wide awake and very much astir, he was acting in a singularly sinister role: that of a slinking, furtive culprit.
Returning to his private cubicle after his conversation with Dome Commander Eagan, he had stalked straightway to the cabinet wherein was encased his precious set of bagpipes. These he had taken from their pegs, gazed upon defiantly, and fondled with almost parental affection.
"So I can't play you, huh?" he muttered darkly. "It disturbs the peace o' the dingfounded, dumblasted Dome staff, does it? Well, we'll see about that!"
And tucking the bag under his arm, he had cautiously slipped from the room, down little-used corridors, and now he stood before the huge impervite gates which were the entrance to the Dome and the doorway to Outside.
On all save those occasions when a spacecraft landed in the cradle adjacent the gateway, these portals were doubly locked and barred. But today they had been unbolted that the two maintenance men might venture out. And since it was quite possible that Brown and Roberts might have to get inside in a hurry, their bolts remained drawn. Sole guardian of the entrance was a very bored Junior Patrolman.
Up to this worthy strode Isobar Jones, confident and assured, exuding an aura of propriety.
"Very well, Wilkins," he said. "I'll take over now. You may go to the meeting."
Wilkins looked at him bewilderedly.
"Huh? Whuzzat, Mr. Jones?"
Isobar's eyebrows arched.
"You mean you haven't been notified?"
"Notified of what ?"
"Why, the general council of all Patrolmen! Weren't you told that I would take your place here while you reported to G.H.Q.?"
"I ain't," puzzled Wilkins, "heard nothing about it. Maybe I ought to call the office, maybe?"
And he moved the wall-audio. But Isobar said swiftly. "That—er—won't be necessary, Wilkins. My orders were plain enough. Now, you just run along. I'll watch this entrance for you."
"We-e-ell," said Wilkins, "if you say so. Orders is orders. But keep a sharp eye out, Mister Jones, in case Roberts and Brown should come back sudden-like."
"I will," promised Isobar, "don't worry."
Wilkins moved away. Isobar waited until the Patrolman was completely out of sight. Then swiftly he pulled open the massive gate, slipped through, and closed it behind him.
A flood of warmth, exhilarating after the constantly regulated temperature of the Dome, descended upon him. Fresh air, thin, but fragrant with the scent of growing things, made his pulses stir with joyous abandon. He was Outside! He was Outside, in good sunlight, at last! After six long and dreary months!
Raptly, blissfully, all thought of caution tossed to the gentle breezes that ruffled his sparse hair, Isobar Jones stepped forward into the lunar valley....
How long he wandered thus, carefree and utterly content, he could not afterward say. It seemed like minutes; it must have been longer. He only knew that the grass was green beneath his feet, the trees were a lacy network through which warm sunlight filtered benevolently, the chirrupings of small insects and the rustling whisper of the breezes formed a tiny symphony of happiness through which he moved as one charmed.
It did not occur to him that he had wandered too far from the Dome's entrance until, strolling through an enchanting flower-decked glade, he was startled to hear—off to his right—the sharp, explosive bark of a Haemholtz ray pistol.
He whirled, staring about him wildly, and discovered that though his meandering had kept him near the Dome, he had unconsciously followed its hemispherical perimeter to a point nearly two miles from the Gateway. By the placement of ports and windows, Isobar was able to judge his location perfectly; he was opposite that portion of the structure which housed Sparks' radio turret.
And the shooting? That could only be—
He did not have to name its reason, even to himself. For at that moment, there came racing around the curve of the Dome a pair of figures, Patrolmen clad in fatigue drab. Roberts and Brown. Roberts was staggering, one foot dragged awkwardly as he ran; Brown's left arm, bloodstained from shoulder to elbow, hung limply at his side, but in his good right fist he held a spitting Haemholtz with which he tried to cover his comrade's sluggish retreat.
And behind these two, grim, grey, gaunt figures that moved with astonishing speed despite their massive bulk, came three ... six ... a dozen of those lunarites whom all men feared. The Grannies!
III
Simultaneously with his recognition of the pair, Joe Roberts saw him. A gasp of relief escaped the wounded man.
"Jones! Thank the Lord! Then you picked up our cry for help? Quick, man—where is it? Theres not a moment to waste!"
"W-where," faltered Isobar feebly, "is what ?"
"The tank, of course! Didn't you hear our telecast? We can't possibly make it back to the gate without an armored car. My foot's broken, and—" Roberts stopped suddenly, an abrupt horror in his eyes. "You don't have one! You're here alone ! Then you didn't pick up our call? But, why—?"
"Never mind that," snapped Isobar, "now!" Placid by nature, he could move when urgency drove. His quick mind saw the immediateness of their peril. Unarmed, he could not help the Patrolmen fight a delaying action against their foes, nor could he hasten their retreat. Anyway, weapons were useless, and time was of the essence. There was but one temporary way of staving off disaster. "Over here ... this tree! Quick! Up you go! Give him a lift, Brown—There! That's the stuff!"
He was the last to scramble up the gnarled bole to a tentative leafy sanctuary. He had barely gained the security of the lowermost bough when a thundering crash resounded, the sturdy trunk trembled beneath his clutch. Stony claws gouged yellow parallels in the bark scant inches beneath one kicking foot, then the Granny fell back with a thud. The Graniteback was not a climber. It was far too ungainly, much too weighty for that.
Roberts said weakly, "Th-thanks, Jonesy! That was a close call."
"That goes for me, too, Jonesy," added Brown from an upper bough.
"But I'm afraid you just delayed matters. This tree's O.Q. as long as it lasts, but—" He stared down upon the gathering knot of Grannies unhappily—"it's not going to last long with that bunch of superdreadnaughts working out on it! Hold tight, fellows! Here they come!"
For the Grannies, who had huddled for a moment as if in telepathic consultation, now joined forces, turned, and as one body charged headlong toward the tree. The unified force of their attack was like the shattering impact of a battering ram. Bark rasped and gritted beneath the besieged men's hands, dry leaves and twigs pelted about them in a tiny rain, tormented fibrous sinews groaned as the aged forest monarch shuddered in agony.
Desperately they clung to their perches. Though the great tree bent, it did not break. But when it stopped trembling, it was canted drunkenly to one side, and the erstwhile solid earth about its base was broken and cracked—revealing fleshy tentacles uprooted from ancient moorings!
Brown stared at this evidence of the Grannies' power with terror-fascinated eyes. His voice was none too firm.
"Lord! Piledrivers! A couple more like that—"
Isobar nodded. He knew what falling into the clutch of the Grannies meant. He had once seen the grisly aftermath of a Graniteback feast. Even now their adversaries had drawn back for a second attack. A sudden idea struck him. A straw of hope at which he grasped feverishly.
"You telecast a message to the Dome? Help should be on the way by now. If we can just hold out—"
But Roberts shook his head.
"We sent a message, Jonesy, but I don't think it got through. I've just been looking at my portable. It seems to be busted. Happened when they first attacked us, I guess. I tripped and fell on it."
Isobar's last hope flickered out.
"Then I—I guess it won't be long now," he mourned. "If we could have only got a message through, they would have sent out an armored car to pick us up. But as it is—"
Brown's shrug displayed a bravado he did not feel.
"Well, that's the way it goes. We knew what we were risking when we volunteered to come Outside. This damn moon! It'll never be worth a plugged credit until men find some way to fight those murderous stones-on-legs!"
Roberts said, "That's right. But what are you doing out here, Isobar? And why, for Pete's sake, the bagpipes?"
"Oh—the pipes?" Isobar flushed painfully. He had almost forgotten his original reason for adventuring Outside, had quite forgotten his instrument, and was now rather amazed to discover that somehow throughout all the excitement he had held onto it. "Why, I just happened to—Oh! the pipes! "
"Hold on!" roared Roberts. His warning came just in time. Once more, the three tree-sitters shook like dried peas in a pod as their leafy refuge trembled before the locomotive onslaught of the lunar beasts. This time the already-exposed roots strained and lifted, several snapped; when the Grannies again withdrew, complacently unaware that the "lethal ray" of Brown's Haemholtz was wasting itself upon their adamant hides in futile fury, the tree was bent at a precarious angle.
Brown sobbed, not with fear but with impotent anger, and in a gesture of enraged desperation, hurled his now-empty weapon at the retreating Grannies.
"No good! Not a damn bit of good! Oh, if there was only some way of fighting those filthy things—"
But Isobar Jones had a one-track mind. "The pipes!" he cried again, excitedly. "That's the answer!" And he drew the instrument into playing position, bag cuddled beneath one arm-pit, drones stiffly erect over his shoulder, blow-pipe at his lips. His cheeks puffed, his breath expelled. The giant lung swelled, the chaunter emitted its distinctive, fearsome, " Kaa-aa-o-o-o-oro-oong! "
Roberts moaned.
"Oh, Lord! A guy can't even die in peace!"
And Brown stared at him hopelessly.
"It's no use, Isobar. You trying to scare them off? They have no sense of hearing. That's been proven—"
Isobar took his lips from the reed to explain.
"It's not that. I'm trying to rouse the boys in the Dome. We're right opposite the atmosphere-conditioning-unit. See that grilled duct over there? That's an inhalation-vent. The portable transmitter's out of order, and our voices ain't strong enough to carry into the Dome—but the sound of these pipes is! And Commander Eagan told me just a short while ago that the sound of the pipes carries all over the building!
"If they hear this, they'll get mad because I'm disobeyin' orders. They'll start lookin' for me. If they can't find me inside, maybe they'll look Outside. See that window? That's Sparks' turret. If we can make him look out here—"
" Stop talking! " roared Roberts. "Stop talking, guy, and start blowing! I think you've got something there. Anyhow, it's our last hope. Blow! "
"And quick!" appended Brown. "For here they come!"
Isobar played, blew with all his might, while the Grannies raged below.
He meant the Grannies. Again they were huddling for attack, once more, a solid phalanx of indestructible, granite flesh, they were smashing down upon the tree.
" Haa-a-roong! " blew Isobar Jones.
IV
And—even he could not have foreseen the astounding results of his piping! What happened next was as astonishing as it was incomprehensible. For as the pipes, filled now and primed to burst into whatever substitute for melody they were prodded into, wailed into action—the Grannies' rush came to an abrupt halt!
As one, they stopped cold in their tracks and turned dull, colorless, questioning eyes upward into the tree whence came this weird and vibrant droning!
So stunned with surprise was Isobar that his grip on the pipes relaxed, his lips almost slipped from the reed. But Brown's delighted bellow lifted his paralysis.
"Sacred rings of Saturn-look! They like it! Keep playing, Jonesy! Play, boy, like you never played before!"
And Roberts roared, above the skirling of the piobaireachd into which Isobar had instinctively swung, "Music hath charms to soothe the savage beast! Then we were wrong. They can hear, after all! See that? They're lying down to listen—like so many lambs! Keep playing, Isobar! For once in my life I'm glad to hear that lovely, wonderful music!"
Isobar needed no urging. He, too, had noted how the Grannies' attack had stopped, how every last one of the gaunt grey beasts had suddenly, quietly, almost happily, dropped to its haunches at the base of the tree.
There was no doubt about it; the Grannies liked this music. Eyes raptly fixed, unblinking, unwavering, they froze into postures of gentle beatitude. One stirred once, dangerously, as for a moment Isobar paused to catch his breath, but Isobar hastily lipped the blow-pipe with redoubled eagerness, and the Granny relapsed into quietude.
Followed then what, under somewhat different circumstances, should have been a piper's dream. For Isobar had an audience which would not—and in two cases dared not—allow him to stop playing. And to this audience he played over and over again his entire repertoire. Marches, flings, dances—the stirring Rhoderik Dhu and the lilting Lassies O'Skye , the mournful Coghiegh nha Shie whose keening is like the sound of a sobbing nation.
The Cock o' the North , he played, and Mironton ... Wee Flow'r o' Dee and MacArthur's March ... La Cucuracha and—
And his lungs were parched, his lips dry as swabs of cotton. Blood pounded through his temples, throbbing in time to the drone of the chaunter, and a dark mist gathered before his eyes. He tore the blow-pipe from his lips, gasped,
"Keep playing!" came the dim, distant howl of Johnny Brown. "Just a few minutes longer, Jonesy! Relief is on the way. Sparks saw us from his turret window five minutes ago!"
And Isobar played on. How, or what, he did not know. The memory of those next few minutes was never afterward clear in his mind. All he knew was that above the skirling drone of his pipes there came another sound, the metallic clanking of a man-made machine ... an armored tank, sent from the Dome to rescue the beleaguered trio.
He was conscious, then, of a friendly voice shouting words of encouragement, of Joe Roberts calling a warning to those below.
"Careful, boys! Drive the tank right up beneath us so we can hop in and get out of here! Watch the Grannies—they'll be after us the minute Isobar stops playing!"
Then the answer from below. The fantastic answer in Sparks' familiar voice. The answer that caused the bagpipes to slip from Isobar's fingers as Isobar Jones passed out in a dead faint:
"After you? Those Grannies? Hell's howling acres— those Grannies are stone dead !"
|
What is the significance of the old man in the story?
|
After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about Home is Where You Left It by Stephen Marlowe.
Relevant chunks:
HOME IS WHERE YOU LEFT IT
By ADAM CHASE
[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories February
1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
copyright on this publication was renewed.]
The chance of mass slaughter was their eternal nightmare.
How black is the blackest treachery? Is the most callous
traitor entitled to mercy? Steve pondered these questions. His decision?
That at times the villain should possibly be spoken of as a hero.
Only the shells of deserted mud-brick houses greeted Steve Cantwell when
he reached the village.
He poked around in them for a while. The desert heat was searing,
parching, and the Sirian sun gleamed balefully off the blades of Steve's
unicopter, which had brought him from Oasis City, almost five hundred
miles away. He had remembered heat from his childhood here on Sirius'
second planet with the Earth colony, but not heat like this. It was like
a magnet drawing all the moisture out of his body.
He walked among the buildings, surprise and perhaps sadness etched on
his gaunt, weather-beaten face. Childhood memories flooded back: the
single well from which all the families drew their water, the mud-brick
house, hardly different from the others and just four walls and a roof
now, in which he'd lived with his aunt after his parents had been killed
in a Kumaji raid, the community center where he'd spent his happiest
time as a boy.
He went to the well and hoisted up a pailful of water. The winch creaked
as he remembered. He ladled out the water, suddenly very thirsty, and
brought the ladle to his lips.
He hurled the ladle away. The water was bitter. Not brackish.
Poisoned.
He spat with fury, then kneeled and stuffed his mouth with sand, almost
gagging. After a while he spat out the sand too and opened his canteen
and rinsed his mouth. His lips and mouth were paralyzed by contact with
the poison. He walked quickly across the well-square to his aunt's
house. Inside, it was dim but hardly cooler. Steve was sweating, the
saline sweat making him blink. He scowled, not understanding. The table
was set in his aunt's house. A coffeepot was on the stove and last
night's partially-consumed dinner still on the table.
The well had been poisoned, the town had been deserted on the spur of
the moment, and Steve had returned to his boyhood home from Earth—too
late for anything.
He went outside into the square. A lizard was sunning itself and staring
at him with lidless eyes. When he moved across the square, the lizard
scurried away.
"Earthman!" a quavering voice called.
Steve ran toward the sound. In the scant shadow of the community center,
a Kumaji was resting. He was a withered old man, all skin and bones and
sweat-stiffened tunic, with enormous red-rimmed eyes. His purple skin,
which had been blasted by the merciless sun, was almost black.
Steve held the canteen to his lips and watched his throat working almost
spasmodically to get the water down. After a while Steve withdrew the
canteen and said:
"What happened here?"
"They're gone. All gone."
"Yes, but what happened?"
"The Kumaji—"
"You're Kumaji."
"This is my town," the old man said. "I lived with the Earthmen. Now
they're gone."
"But you stayed here—"
"To die," the old man said, without self-pity. "I'm too old to flee, too
old to fight, too old for anything but death. More water."
Steve gave him another drink. "You still haven't told me what happened."
Actually, though, Steve could guess. With the twenty-second century
Earth population hovering at the eleven billion mark, colonies were
sought everywhere. Even on a parched desert wasteland like this. The
Kumaji tribesmen had never accepted the colony as a fact of their life
on the desert, and in a way Steve could not blame them. It meant one
oasis less for their own nomadic sustenance. When Steve was a boy,
Kumaji raids were frequent. At school on Earth and Luna he'd read about
the raids, how they'd increased in violence, how the Earth government,
so far away and utterly unable to protect its distant colony, had
suggested withdrawal from the Kumaji desert settlement, especially since
a colony could exist there under only the most primitive conditions,
almost like the purple-skinned Kumaji natives themselves.
"When did it happen?" Steve demanded.
"Last night." It was now midafternoon. "Three folks died," the Kumaji
said in his almost perfect English, "from the poisoning of the well. The
well was the last straw. The colonists had no choice. They had to go,
and go fast, taking what little water they had left in the houses."
"Will they try to walk all the way through to Oasis City?" Oasis City,
built at the confluence of two underground rivers which came to the
surface there and flowed the rest of the way to the sea above ground,
was almost five hundred miles from the colony. Five hundred miles of
trackless sands and hundred-and-thirty-degree heat....
"They have to," the old man said. "And they have to hurry. Men, women
and children. The Kumaji are after them."
Steve felt irrational hatred then. He thought it would help if he could
find some of the nomadic tribesmen and kill them. It might help the way
he felt, he knew, but it certainly wouldn't help the fleeing colonists,
trekking across a parched wilderness—to the safety of Oasis City—or
death.
"Come on," Steve said, making up his mind. "The unicopter can hold two
in a pinch."
"You're going after them?"
"I've got to. They're my people. I've been away too long."
"Say, you're young Cantwell, aren't you? Now I remember."
"Yes, I'm Steve Cantwell."
"I'm not going anyplace, young fellow."
"But you can't stay here, without any good water to drink, without—"
"I'm staying," the old man said, still without self-pity, just
matter-of-factly. "The Earth folks have no room for me and I can't blame
'em. The Kumaji'll kill me for a renegade, I figure. I lived a good,
long life. I've no regrets. Go after your people, young fellow. They'll
need every extra strong right arm they can get. You got any weapons?"
"No," Steve said.
"Too bad. Well, good-bye and good luck."
"But you can't—"
"Oh, I'm staying. I want to stay. This is my home. It's the only home
I'll ever have. Good luck, young fellow."
Slowly, Steve walked to his unicopter. It was nothing more than a small
metal disk on which to stand, and a shaft with four turbo-blades. It
could do sixty miles an hour at an elevation of two thousand feet.
Steve turned the little turbo-jet engine over, then on impulse ran back
to the old man and gave him his canteen, turning away before it could be
refused and striding quickly back to the unicopter and getting himself
airborne without looking at the deserted village or the old man again.
The old man's voice called after him: "Tell the people ... hurry ...
Kumaji looking for them to kill ... desert wind ought to wipe out their
trail ... but hurry...."
The voice faded into the faint rushing sound of the hot desert wind.
Steve gazed down on bare sun-blasted rock, on rippled dunes, on
hate-haze. He circled wider and wider, seeking his people.
Hours later he spotted the caravan in the immensity of sand and
wasteland. He brought the unicopter down quickly, with a rush of air and
a whine of turbojets. He alighted in the sand in front of the
slow-moving column. It was like something out of Earth's Middle
East—and Middle Ages. They had even imported camels for their life here
on the Sirian desert, deciding the Earth camel was a better beast of
burden than anything the Sirius II wastelands had to offer. They walked
beside the great-humped beasts of burden, the animals piled high with
the swaying baggage of their belongings. They moved through the sands
with agonizing slowness. Already, after only one day's travel, Steve
could see that some of the people were spent and exhausted and had to
ride on camelback. They had gone perhaps fifteen miles, with almost five
hundred to go across searing desert, the Kumaji seeking them....
"Hullo!" Steve shouted, and a man armed with an atorifle came striding
clumsily through the sand toward him. "Cantwell's the name," Steve said.
"I'm one of you."
Bleak hostility in his face, the man approached. "Cantwell. Yeah, I
remember you. Colony wasn't good enough for young Steve Cantwell. Oh,
no. Had to go off to Earth to get himself educated. What are you doing
here now on that fancy aircraft of yours, coming to crow at our wake?"
The bitterness surprised Steve. He recognized the man now as Tobias
Whiting, who had been the Colony's most successful man when Steve was a
boy. Except for his bitterness and for the bleak self-pity and defeat in
his eyes, the years had been good to Tobias Whiting. He was probably in
his mid-forties now, twenty years Steve's senior, but he was
well-muscled, his flesh was solid, his step bold and strong. He was a
big muscular man with a craggy, handsome face. In ten years he had
hardly changed at all, while Steve Cantwell, the boy, had become Steve
Cantwell the man. He had been the Colony's official trader with the
Kumajis, and had grown rich—by colony standards—at his business. Now,
Steve realized, all that was behind him, and he could only flee with the
others—either back to the terribly crowded Earth or on in search of a
new colony on some other outworld, if they could get the transportation.
Perhaps that explained his bitterness.
"So you've come back, eh? You sure picked a time, Cantwell."
The refugees were still about a quarter of a mile off, coming up slowly.
They hardly seemed to be moving at all. "Is my aunt all right?" Steve
said. She was the only family he remembered.
Tobias Whiting shook his head slowly. "I hate to be the one to tell you
this. Brace yourself for a shock. Your aunt was one of those who died
from the poisoned water last night."
For a long moment, Steve said nothing. The only emotion he felt was
pity—pity for the hard life his aunt had lived, and the hard death.
Sadness would come later, if there was to be a time for sadness.
The caravan reached them then. The first person Steve saw was a girl.
She wore the shroud-like desert garment and her face—it would be a
pretty face under other circumstances, Steve realized—was etched with
lines of fatigue. Steve did not recognize her. "Who is he, Dad?" the
girl said.
"Young Cantwell. Remember?"
So this was Mary Whiting, Steve thought. Why, she'd been a moppet ten
years ago! How old? Ten years old maybe. The years crowded him suddenly.
She was a woman now....
"Steve Cantwell?" Mary said. "Of course I remember. Hello, Steve. I—I'm
sorry you had to come back at a time like this. I'm sorry about your
aunt. If there's anything I can do...."
Steve shook his head, then shook the hand she offered him. She was a
slim, strong girl with a firm handshake. Her concern for him at a time
like this was little short of amazing, especially since it was
completely genuine.
He appreciated it.
Tobias Whiting said: "Shame of it is, Cantwell, some of us could get
along with the Kumaji. I had a pretty good business here, you know
that." He looked with bitterness at the dusty file of refugees. "But I
never got a credit out of it. Wherever we wind up, my girl and I will be
poor again. We could have been rich."
Steve asked, "What happened to all your profits?"
"Tied up with a Kumaji moneylender, but thanks to what happened I'll
never see it again."
Mary winced, as if her father's words and his self-pity were painful to
her. Then others came up and a few minutes were spent in back-pounding
and hand-shaking as some of the men who had been boys with Steve came up
to recognize and be recognized. Their greeting was warm, as Tobias
Whiting's had been cool. Despite the knowledge of what lay behind all of
them, and what still lay ahead, it was a little like homecoming.
But Steve liked Mary Whiting's warm, friendly smile best of all. It was
comforting and reassuring.
Three days later, Tobias Whiting disappeared.
The caravan had been making no more than ten or fifteen miles a day.
Their water supply was almost gone but on the fourth day they hoped to
reach an oasis in the desert. Two of the older folks had died of
fatigue. A third was critically ill and there was little that could be
done for him. The food supply was running short, but they could always
slaughter their camels for food and make their way to Oasis City, still
four hundred and some miles away, with nothing but the clothes on their
backs.
And then, during the fourth night, Tobias Whiting disappeared, taking
Steve's unicopter. A sentry had heard the low muffled whine of the
turbojets during the night and had seen the small craft take off, but
had assumed Steve had taken it up for some reason. Each day Steve had
done so, reconnoitering for signs of the Kumaji.
"But why?" someone asked. "Why?"
At first there was no answer. Then a woman whose husband had died the
day before said: "It's no secret Whiting has plenty of money—with the
Kumaji."
None of them looked at Mary. She stood there defiantly, not saying
anything, and Steve squeezed her hand.
"Now, wait a minute," one of Whiting's friends said.
"Wait, nothing." This was Jeremy Gort, who twice had been mayor of the
colony. "I know how Whiting's mind works. He slaved all his life for
that money, that's the way he'll see it. Cantwell, didn't you say the
Kumaji were looking for us, to kill us?"
"That's what I was told," Steve said.
"All right," Gort went on relentlessly. "Then this is what I figure must
have happened. Whiting got to brooding over his lost fortune and finally
decided he had to have it. So, he went off at night in Cantwell's
'copter, determined to get it. Only catch is, folks, if I know the
Kumaji, they won't just give it to him—not by a long sight."
"No?" someone asked.
"No sir. They'll trade. For our location. And if Whiting went off like
that without even saying good-bye to his girl here, my guess is he'll
make the trade." His voice reflected some bitterness.
Mary went to Gort and slapped his face. The elderly man did not even
blink. "Well," he asked her gently, "did your pa tell you he was going?"
"N-no," Mary said. There were tears in her eyes, but she did not cry.
Gort turned to Steve. "Cantwell, can he get far in that 'copter?"
Steve shook his head. "Ten or fifteen miles is all. Almost out of fuel,
Mr. Gort. You saw how I took her up for only a quick mile swing each
day. He won't get far."
"He'll crash in the desert?"
"Crash or crash-land," Steve said.
Mary sobbed, and bit her lip, and was silent.
"We've got to stop him," Gort said. "And fast. If he gets to the Kumaji,
they'll send down a raiding party and we'll be finished. We could never
fight them off without the protection of our village. Near as I can
figure, there's a Kumaji base fifty miles due north of here. Whiting
knows it too, so that's where he'll be going, I figure. Can't spare more
than a couple of men to look for him, though, in case the Kumaji find
us—or are led to us—and attack."
Steve said, "I should have taken something out of the 'copter every
night, so it couldn't start. I'll go."
Mary came forward boldly. "I have to go. He's my father. If he crashed
out there, he may be hurt. He may be—dying."
Gort looked at her. "And if he's trying to sell us out to the Kumajis?"
"Then—then I'll do whatever Steve asks me to. I promise."
"That's good enough for me," Steve said.
A few minutes later, armed with atorifles and their share of the food
and water that was left, Steve and Mary set out northward across the
sand while the caravan continued east. Fear of what they might find
mounted.
The first night, they camped in the lee of low sandhills. The second
night they found a small spring with brackish but drinkable water. On
the third day, having covered half the distance to the Kumaji
settlement, they began to encounter Kumaji patrols, on foot or thlotback , the six-legged desert animals running so swiftly over the
sands and so low to the ground that they almost seemed to be gliding.
Steve and Mary hardly spoke. Talk was unnecessary. But slowly a bond
grew between them. Steve liked this slim silent girl who had come out
here with him risking her life although she must have known deep in her
heart that her father had almost certainly decided to turn traitor in
order to regain his fortune.
On the fourth day, they spotted the unicopter from a long way off and
made their way toward it. It had come much further than Steve had
expected. With sinking heart he realized that Tobias Whiting, if he
escaped the crash-landing without injury, must surely have reached the
Kumaji encampment by now.
"It doesn't seem badly damaged," Mary said.
The platform had buckled slightly, the 'copter was tilted over, one of
the rotors twisted, its end buried in sand. Tobias Whiting wasn't there.
"No," Steve said. "It's hardly damaged at all. Your father got out of it
all right."
"To go—to them?"
"I think so, Mary. I don't want to pass judgment until we're sure. I'm
sorry."
"Oh, Steve! Steve! What will we do? What can we do?"
"Find him, if it isn't too late. Come on."
"North?"
"North."
"And if by some miracle we find him?"
Steve said nothing. The answer—capture or death—was obvious. But you
couldn't tell that to a traitor's daughter, could you?
As it turned out, they did not find Tobias Whiting through their own
efforts. Half an hour after setting out from the unicopter, they were
spotted by a roving band of Kumajis, who came streaking toward them on
their thlots . Mary raised her atorifle, but Steve struck the barrel
aside. "They'd kill us," he said. "We can only surrender."
They were hobbled and led painfully across the sand. They were taken
that way to a small Kumaji encampment, and thrust within a circular
tent.
Tobias Whiting was in there.
"Mary!" he cried. "My God! Mary...."
"We came for you, Dad," she said coldly. "To stop you. To ... to kill
you if necessary."
"Mary...."
"Oh, Dad, why did you do it? Why?"
"We couldn't start all over again, could we? You have a right to live
the sort of life I planned for you. You...."
"Whiting," Steve said, "did you tell them yet?"
"No. No, I haven't. I have information to trade, sure. But I want to
make sure it's going to the right people. I want to get our...."
"Dad! Our money, and all those deaths?"
"It doesn't matter now. I—I had changed my mind, Mary. Truly. But now,
now that you're a prisoner, what if I don't talk? Don't you see, they'll
torture you. They'll make you talk. And that way—we get nothing. I
couldn't stand to see them hurt you."
"They can do—what they think they have to do. I'll tell them nothing."
"You won't have to," Whiting said. "I'll tell them when we reach the
larger settlement. They're taking us there tomorrow, they told me."
"Then we've got to get out of here tonight," Steve said.
The low sun cast the shadow of their guard against the thlot skin wall
of their tent. He was a single man, armed with a long, pike-like weapon.
When darkness came, if the guard were not increased....
They were brought a pasty gruel for their supper, and ate in silence and
distaste, ate because they needed the strength. Mary said, "Dad, I don't
want you to tell them anything. Dad, please. If you thought you were
doing it for me...."
"I've made up my mind," Tobias Whiting said.
Mary turned to Steve, in despair. "Steve," she said. "Steve.
Do—whatever you have to do. I—I'll understand."
Steve didn't answer her. Wasn't Whiting right now? he thought. If Steve
silenced him, wouldn't the Kumaji torture them for the information?
Steve could stand up to it perhaps—but he couldn't stand to see them
hurt Mary. He'd talk if they did that....
Then silencing Whiting wasn't the answer. But the Kumajis had one
willing prisoner and two unwilling ones. They knew that. If the willing
one yelled for help but the yelling was kept to a minimum so only one
guard, the man outside, came....
Darkness in the Kumaji encampment.
Far off, a lone tribesman singing a chant old as the desert.
"Are you asleep?" Mary asked.
"No," Steve said.
"Dad is. Listen to the way he's breathing—like a baby. As if—as if he
wasn't going to betray all our people. Oh, I hate him, I hate him!"
Steve crawled to where the older man was sleeping. Tobias Whiting's
voice surprised him. "I'm not asleep. I was thinking. I—"
"I'm going to kill you," Steve said very softly, and sprang at Whiting.
He paused, though. It was a calculated pause, and Whiting cried out as
Steve had hoped he would. Then his hands found the older man's throat
and closed there—not to kill him but to keep him from crying out again.
Sand stirred, the tentflap lifted, and a bulky figure rushed inside.
Steve got up, met him halfway, felt the jarring contact of their bodies.
The pike came up dimly in the darkness, the point scraping against
Steve's ribs as the guard lunged awkwardly. Steve's fingers sought the
thick-muscled neck, clamped there—squeezing.
The guard writhed. His feet drummed the sand. With one hand he stabbed
out wildly with the unwieldy pike. There was a cry from Mary and the
guard managed a low squawking noise. Outside, the rest of the camp
seemed undisturbed. There was death in Steve's strong tightening
fingers. There had to be death there. Death for the Kumaji guard—or
death for the fleeing Earthmen, who had lost one colony and must seek
another.
They fell together on the sand, the guard still struggling. Steve
couldn't release his throat to grab the pike. The guard stabbed out
awkwardly, blindly with it, kicking up sand. Then Tobias Whiting moaned,
but Steve hardly heard him.
When the guard's legs stopped drumming, Steve released him. The man was
either dead or so close to death that he would be out for hours. Steve
had never killed a man before, had never in violence and with intent to
kill attacked a man....
"Steve!"
It was Mary, calling his name and crying.
"It's Dad. Dad was—hit. The pike, a wild stab. He's hit bad—"
Steve crawled over to them. It was very dark. He could barely make out
Tobias Whiting's pain-contorted face.
"My stomach," Whiting said, gasping for breath. "The pain...."
Steve probed with his hands, found the wound. Blood was rushing out. He
couldn't stop it and he knew it and he thought Whiting knew it too. He
touched Mary's hand, and held it. Mary sobbed against him, crying
softly.
"You two ..." Whiting gasped. "You two ... Mary, Mary girl. Is—he—what
you want?"
"Yes, Dad. Oh, yes!"
"You can get her out of here, Cantwell?"
"I think so," Steve said.
"Then go. Go while you can. I'll tell them—due south. The Earthmen are
heading due south. They'll go—south. They won't find the caravan.
You'll—all—get away. If it's—what you want, Mary."
She leaned away from Steve, kissing her father. She asked Steve: "Isn't
there anything we can do for him?"
Steve shook his head. "But he's got to live long enough to tell them, to
deceive them."
"I'll live long enough," Whiting said, and Steve knew then that he
would. "Luck to—all of you. From a—very foolish—man...."
Steve took Mary's hand and pulled her out into the hot, dark, wind-blown
night. He carried the dead Kumaji's pike and they slipped across the
sand to where the thlots were hobbled for the night. He hardly
remembered the rest of it. There was violence and death, but necessary
death. He killed a man with the pike, and unhobbled one of the thlots .
The animal screamed and two more Kumajis came sleepily through the night
to see what was the matter. With the long edge of the pike's blade he
decapitated one of them. He slammed the shaft of the weapon across the
other's face, probably breaking his jaw. The camp was in a turmoil. In
the darkness he flung Mary on the thlot's bare back in front of him,
and they glided off across the sand.
Pursuit was disorganized—and unsuccessful. It was too dark for
effective pursuit, as Steve had hoped it would be. They rode swiftly all
night and continued riding with the dawn. They could have gone in any
direction. The wind-driven sand would obliterate their trail.
Two days later they reached the caravan. As they rode up, Mary said,
"Steve, do you have to tell them?"
"We can tell them this," Steve said. "Your father died a hero's death,
sending the Kumajis off in the wrong direction."
"And not—not what he'd planned to do at first."
"No. We'll tell them that was his intention all the while. A man can
make a mistake, can't he?"
"I love you, Steve. I love you."
Then they rode down on the caravan. Somehow Steve knew they would all
reach Oasis City in safety.
With Mary he would find a new world out in the vastness of space.
Question:
What is the significance of the old man in the story?
Answer:
|
[
"When Steve arrives at the Colony, he sees deserted buildings and realizes that the well water is poisoned. The old man - the Kumaji who lived with the humans - tells him that the day before, three people died from the poisoned drinking water. The Kumaji are behind this and are trying to locate the others who left the Colony. They want to find the caravan, and even though the desert wind will wipe out the humans' trail, they still need to be informed about this danger. Knowing all of this allows Steve to find the caravan and eventually save them from the Kumaji, who could learn their location from Tobias Whiting. ",
"\nThe old man serves as a guide for Steve in the story. Initially, he is the one who tells him about the colonists leaving because of the poisoned water. He also explains that the Kumaji are out to get them and that the colonists are desperate to get to Oasis City. His words also give Steve the motivation to go and help his people, despite being away for so long on Earth. Furthermore, the old man is also proof that Kumaji and humans can live together. Although he is a Kumaji, he has lived with humans and can speak perfect English. He does not hold any malice and even says that this is the only home he has ever had. Therefore, he will not leave this place and wishes Steve good luck to helping his people. ",
"The old man plays the role of the messenger. He has a strong role in the beginning of the story and sets up young Steve Cantwell with the background of what happened to the colony, as well as driving him with the mission of catching up to the travelling colony in order to warn them of the pursuing Kumajis. \n\nHe is significant because the old man, by face, is a Kumaji. Despite this, he has lived with the Earth colony and is insistent on dying in the village, which he proclaims as his town. This hints at the fact that Kumajis and the Earthmen could have actually cohabited peacefully, and even form strong bonds when their communities interacted and lived with each other. ",
"The old man is a very important figure in the plot. After Steve finds his village abandoned and dead, the old man is the only one who stayed behind. He is also revealed to be of the Kumaji species, but he has lived with the humans in the village for such a long time that he has no ties to them. He helps Steve figure out what happened, and tells him where the people went in order for Steve to find them. He ends up staying in the village, even though Steve offered to take him to the others. He did this because he was already dying, and wanted to die in his village. "
] |
32890
|
HOME IS WHERE YOU LEFT IT
By ADAM CHASE
[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories February
1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
copyright on this publication was renewed.]
The chance of mass slaughter was their eternal nightmare.
How black is the blackest treachery? Is the most callous
traitor entitled to mercy? Steve pondered these questions. His decision?
That at times the villain should possibly be spoken of as a hero.
Only the shells of deserted mud-brick houses greeted Steve Cantwell when
he reached the village.
He poked around in them for a while. The desert heat was searing,
parching, and the Sirian sun gleamed balefully off the blades of Steve's
unicopter, which had brought him from Oasis City, almost five hundred
miles away. He had remembered heat from his childhood here on Sirius'
second planet with the Earth colony, but not heat like this. It was like
a magnet drawing all the moisture out of his body.
He walked among the buildings, surprise and perhaps sadness etched on
his gaunt, weather-beaten face. Childhood memories flooded back: the
single well from which all the families drew their water, the mud-brick
house, hardly different from the others and just four walls and a roof
now, in which he'd lived with his aunt after his parents had been killed
in a Kumaji raid, the community center where he'd spent his happiest
time as a boy.
He went to the well and hoisted up a pailful of water. The winch creaked
as he remembered. He ladled out the water, suddenly very thirsty, and
brought the ladle to his lips.
He hurled the ladle away. The water was bitter. Not brackish.
Poisoned.
He spat with fury, then kneeled and stuffed his mouth with sand, almost
gagging. After a while he spat out the sand too and opened his canteen
and rinsed his mouth. His lips and mouth were paralyzed by contact with
the poison. He walked quickly across the well-square to his aunt's
house. Inside, it was dim but hardly cooler. Steve was sweating, the
saline sweat making him blink. He scowled, not understanding. The table
was set in his aunt's house. A coffeepot was on the stove and last
night's partially-consumed dinner still on the table.
The well had been poisoned, the town had been deserted on the spur of
the moment, and Steve had returned to his boyhood home from Earth—too
late for anything.
He went outside into the square. A lizard was sunning itself and staring
at him with lidless eyes. When he moved across the square, the lizard
scurried away.
"Earthman!" a quavering voice called.
Steve ran toward the sound. In the scant shadow of the community center,
a Kumaji was resting. He was a withered old man, all skin and bones and
sweat-stiffened tunic, with enormous red-rimmed eyes. His purple skin,
which had been blasted by the merciless sun, was almost black.
Steve held the canteen to his lips and watched his throat working almost
spasmodically to get the water down. After a while Steve withdrew the
canteen and said:
"What happened here?"
"They're gone. All gone."
"Yes, but what happened?"
"The Kumaji—"
"You're Kumaji."
"This is my town," the old man said. "I lived with the Earthmen. Now
they're gone."
"But you stayed here—"
"To die," the old man said, without self-pity. "I'm too old to flee, too
old to fight, too old for anything but death. More water."
Steve gave him another drink. "You still haven't told me what happened."
Actually, though, Steve could guess. With the twenty-second century
Earth population hovering at the eleven billion mark, colonies were
sought everywhere. Even on a parched desert wasteland like this. The
Kumaji tribesmen had never accepted the colony as a fact of their life
on the desert, and in a way Steve could not blame them. It meant one
oasis less for their own nomadic sustenance. When Steve was a boy,
Kumaji raids were frequent. At school on Earth and Luna he'd read about
the raids, how they'd increased in violence, how the Earth government,
so far away and utterly unable to protect its distant colony, had
suggested withdrawal from the Kumaji desert settlement, especially since
a colony could exist there under only the most primitive conditions,
almost like the purple-skinned Kumaji natives themselves.
"When did it happen?" Steve demanded.
"Last night." It was now midafternoon. "Three folks died," the Kumaji
said in his almost perfect English, "from the poisoning of the well. The
well was the last straw. The colonists had no choice. They had to go,
and go fast, taking what little water they had left in the houses."
"Will they try to walk all the way through to Oasis City?" Oasis City,
built at the confluence of two underground rivers which came to the
surface there and flowed the rest of the way to the sea above ground,
was almost five hundred miles from the colony. Five hundred miles of
trackless sands and hundred-and-thirty-degree heat....
"They have to," the old man said. "And they have to hurry. Men, women
and children. The Kumaji are after them."
Steve felt irrational hatred then. He thought it would help if he could
find some of the nomadic tribesmen and kill them. It might help the way
he felt, he knew, but it certainly wouldn't help the fleeing colonists,
trekking across a parched wilderness—to the safety of Oasis City—or
death.
"Come on," Steve said, making up his mind. "The unicopter can hold two
in a pinch."
"You're going after them?"
"I've got to. They're my people. I've been away too long."
"Say, you're young Cantwell, aren't you? Now I remember."
"Yes, I'm Steve Cantwell."
"I'm not going anyplace, young fellow."
"But you can't stay here, without any good water to drink, without—"
"I'm staying," the old man said, still without self-pity, just
matter-of-factly. "The Earth folks have no room for me and I can't blame
'em. The Kumaji'll kill me for a renegade, I figure. I lived a good,
long life. I've no regrets. Go after your people, young fellow. They'll
need every extra strong right arm they can get. You got any weapons?"
"No," Steve said.
"Too bad. Well, good-bye and good luck."
"But you can't—"
"Oh, I'm staying. I want to stay. This is my home. It's the only home
I'll ever have. Good luck, young fellow."
Slowly, Steve walked to his unicopter. It was nothing more than a small
metal disk on which to stand, and a shaft with four turbo-blades. It
could do sixty miles an hour at an elevation of two thousand feet.
Steve turned the little turbo-jet engine over, then on impulse ran back
to the old man and gave him his canteen, turning away before it could be
refused and striding quickly back to the unicopter and getting himself
airborne without looking at the deserted village or the old man again.
The old man's voice called after him: "Tell the people ... hurry ...
Kumaji looking for them to kill ... desert wind ought to wipe out their
trail ... but hurry...."
The voice faded into the faint rushing sound of the hot desert wind.
Steve gazed down on bare sun-blasted rock, on rippled dunes, on
hate-haze. He circled wider and wider, seeking his people.
Hours later he spotted the caravan in the immensity of sand and
wasteland. He brought the unicopter down quickly, with a rush of air and
a whine of turbojets. He alighted in the sand in front of the
slow-moving column. It was like something out of Earth's Middle
East—and Middle Ages. They had even imported camels for their life here
on the Sirian desert, deciding the Earth camel was a better beast of
burden than anything the Sirius II wastelands had to offer. They walked
beside the great-humped beasts of burden, the animals piled high with
the swaying baggage of their belongings. They moved through the sands
with agonizing slowness. Already, after only one day's travel, Steve
could see that some of the people were spent and exhausted and had to
ride on camelback. They had gone perhaps fifteen miles, with almost five
hundred to go across searing desert, the Kumaji seeking them....
"Hullo!" Steve shouted, and a man armed with an atorifle came striding
clumsily through the sand toward him. "Cantwell's the name," Steve said.
"I'm one of you."
Bleak hostility in his face, the man approached. "Cantwell. Yeah, I
remember you. Colony wasn't good enough for young Steve Cantwell. Oh,
no. Had to go off to Earth to get himself educated. What are you doing
here now on that fancy aircraft of yours, coming to crow at our wake?"
The bitterness surprised Steve. He recognized the man now as Tobias
Whiting, who had been the Colony's most successful man when Steve was a
boy. Except for his bitterness and for the bleak self-pity and defeat in
his eyes, the years had been good to Tobias Whiting. He was probably in
his mid-forties now, twenty years Steve's senior, but he was
well-muscled, his flesh was solid, his step bold and strong. He was a
big muscular man with a craggy, handsome face. In ten years he had
hardly changed at all, while Steve Cantwell, the boy, had become Steve
Cantwell the man. He had been the Colony's official trader with the
Kumajis, and had grown rich—by colony standards—at his business. Now,
Steve realized, all that was behind him, and he could only flee with the
others—either back to the terribly crowded Earth or on in search of a
new colony on some other outworld, if they could get the transportation.
Perhaps that explained his bitterness.
"So you've come back, eh? You sure picked a time, Cantwell."
The refugees were still about a quarter of a mile off, coming up slowly.
They hardly seemed to be moving at all. "Is my aunt all right?" Steve
said. She was the only family he remembered.
Tobias Whiting shook his head slowly. "I hate to be the one to tell you
this. Brace yourself for a shock. Your aunt was one of those who died
from the poisoned water last night."
For a long moment, Steve said nothing. The only emotion he felt was
pity—pity for the hard life his aunt had lived, and the hard death.
Sadness would come later, if there was to be a time for sadness.
The caravan reached them then. The first person Steve saw was a girl.
She wore the shroud-like desert garment and her face—it would be a
pretty face under other circumstances, Steve realized—was etched with
lines of fatigue. Steve did not recognize her. "Who is he, Dad?" the
girl said.
"Young Cantwell. Remember?"
So this was Mary Whiting, Steve thought. Why, she'd been a moppet ten
years ago! How old? Ten years old maybe. The years crowded him suddenly.
She was a woman now....
"Steve Cantwell?" Mary said. "Of course I remember. Hello, Steve. I—I'm
sorry you had to come back at a time like this. I'm sorry about your
aunt. If there's anything I can do...."
Steve shook his head, then shook the hand she offered him. She was a
slim, strong girl with a firm handshake. Her concern for him at a time
like this was little short of amazing, especially since it was
completely genuine.
He appreciated it.
Tobias Whiting said: "Shame of it is, Cantwell, some of us could get
along with the Kumaji. I had a pretty good business here, you know
that." He looked with bitterness at the dusty file of refugees. "But I
never got a credit out of it. Wherever we wind up, my girl and I will be
poor again. We could have been rich."
Steve asked, "What happened to all your profits?"
"Tied up with a Kumaji moneylender, but thanks to what happened I'll
never see it again."
Mary winced, as if her father's words and his self-pity were painful to
her. Then others came up and a few minutes were spent in back-pounding
and hand-shaking as some of the men who had been boys with Steve came up
to recognize and be recognized. Their greeting was warm, as Tobias
Whiting's had been cool. Despite the knowledge of what lay behind all of
them, and what still lay ahead, it was a little like homecoming.
But Steve liked Mary Whiting's warm, friendly smile best of all. It was
comforting and reassuring.
Three days later, Tobias Whiting disappeared.
The caravan had been making no more than ten or fifteen miles a day.
Their water supply was almost gone but on the fourth day they hoped to
reach an oasis in the desert. Two of the older folks had died of
fatigue. A third was critically ill and there was little that could be
done for him. The food supply was running short, but they could always
slaughter their camels for food and make their way to Oasis City, still
four hundred and some miles away, with nothing but the clothes on their
backs.
And then, during the fourth night, Tobias Whiting disappeared, taking
Steve's unicopter. A sentry had heard the low muffled whine of the
turbojets during the night and had seen the small craft take off, but
had assumed Steve had taken it up for some reason. Each day Steve had
done so, reconnoitering for signs of the Kumaji.
"But why?" someone asked. "Why?"
At first there was no answer. Then a woman whose husband had died the
day before said: "It's no secret Whiting has plenty of money—with the
Kumaji."
None of them looked at Mary. She stood there defiantly, not saying
anything, and Steve squeezed her hand.
"Now, wait a minute," one of Whiting's friends said.
"Wait, nothing." This was Jeremy Gort, who twice had been mayor of the
colony. "I know how Whiting's mind works. He slaved all his life for
that money, that's the way he'll see it. Cantwell, didn't you say the
Kumaji were looking for us, to kill us?"
"That's what I was told," Steve said.
"All right," Gort went on relentlessly. "Then this is what I figure must
have happened. Whiting got to brooding over his lost fortune and finally
decided he had to have it. So, he went off at night in Cantwell's
'copter, determined to get it. Only catch is, folks, if I know the
Kumaji, they won't just give it to him—not by a long sight."
"No?" someone asked.
"No sir. They'll trade. For our location. And if Whiting went off like
that without even saying good-bye to his girl here, my guess is he'll
make the trade." His voice reflected some bitterness.
Mary went to Gort and slapped his face. The elderly man did not even
blink. "Well," he asked her gently, "did your pa tell you he was going?"
"N-no," Mary said. There were tears in her eyes, but she did not cry.
Gort turned to Steve. "Cantwell, can he get far in that 'copter?"
Steve shook his head. "Ten or fifteen miles is all. Almost out of fuel,
Mr. Gort. You saw how I took her up for only a quick mile swing each
day. He won't get far."
"He'll crash in the desert?"
"Crash or crash-land," Steve said.
Mary sobbed, and bit her lip, and was silent.
"We've got to stop him," Gort said. "And fast. If he gets to the Kumaji,
they'll send down a raiding party and we'll be finished. We could never
fight them off without the protection of our village. Near as I can
figure, there's a Kumaji base fifty miles due north of here. Whiting
knows it too, so that's where he'll be going, I figure. Can't spare more
than a couple of men to look for him, though, in case the Kumaji find
us—or are led to us—and attack."
Steve said, "I should have taken something out of the 'copter every
night, so it couldn't start. I'll go."
Mary came forward boldly. "I have to go. He's my father. If he crashed
out there, he may be hurt. He may be—dying."
Gort looked at her. "And if he's trying to sell us out to the Kumajis?"
"Then—then I'll do whatever Steve asks me to. I promise."
"That's good enough for me," Steve said.
A few minutes later, armed with atorifles and their share of the food
and water that was left, Steve and Mary set out northward across the
sand while the caravan continued east. Fear of what they might find
mounted.
The first night, they camped in the lee of low sandhills. The second
night they found a small spring with brackish but drinkable water. On
the third day, having covered half the distance to the Kumaji
settlement, they began to encounter Kumaji patrols, on foot or thlotback , the six-legged desert animals running so swiftly over the
sands and so low to the ground that they almost seemed to be gliding.
Steve and Mary hardly spoke. Talk was unnecessary. But slowly a bond
grew between them. Steve liked this slim silent girl who had come out
here with him risking her life although she must have known deep in her
heart that her father had almost certainly decided to turn traitor in
order to regain his fortune.
On the fourth day, they spotted the unicopter from a long way off and
made their way toward it. It had come much further than Steve had
expected. With sinking heart he realized that Tobias Whiting, if he
escaped the crash-landing without injury, must surely have reached the
Kumaji encampment by now.
"It doesn't seem badly damaged," Mary said.
The platform had buckled slightly, the 'copter was tilted over, one of
the rotors twisted, its end buried in sand. Tobias Whiting wasn't there.
"No," Steve said. "It's hardly damaged at all. Your father got out of it
all right."
"To go—to them?"
"I think so, Mary. I don't want to pass judgment until we're sure. I'm
sorry."
"Oh, Steve! Steve! What will we do? What can we do?"
"Find him, if it isn't too late. Come on."
"North?"
"North."
"And if by some miracle we find him?"
Steve said nothing. The answer—capture or death—was obvious. But you
couldn't tell that to a traitor's daughter, could you?
As it turned out, they did not find Tobias Whiting through their own
efforts. Half an hour after setting out from the unicopter, they were
spotted by a roving band of Kumajis, who came streaking toward them on
their thlots . Mary raised her atorifle, but Steve struck the barrel
aside. "They'd kill us," he said. "We can only surrender."
They were hobbled and led painfully across the sand. They were taken
that way to a small Kumaji encampment, and thrust within a circular
tent.
Tobias Whiting was in there.
"Mary!" he cried. "My God! Mary...."
"We came for you, Dad," she said coldly. "To stop you. To ... to kill
you if necessary."
"Mary...."
"Oh, Dad, why did you do it? Why?"
"We couldn't start all over again, could we? You have a right to live
the sort of life I planned for you. You...."
"Whiting," Steve said, "did you tell them yet?"
"No. No, I haven't. I have information to trade, sure. But I want to
make sure it's going to the right people. I want to get our...."
"Dad! Our money, and all those deaths?"
"It doesn't matter now. I—I had changed my mind, Mary. Truly. But now,
now that you're a prisoner, what if I don't talk? Don't you see, they'll
torture you. They'll make you talk. And that way—we get nothing. I
couldn't stand to see them hurt you."
"They can do—what they think they have to do. I'll tell them nothing."
"You won't have to," Whiting said. "I'll tell them when we reach the
larger settlement. They're taking us there tomorrow, they told me."
"Then we've got to get out of here tonight," Steve said.
The low sun cast the shadow of their guard against the thlot skin wall
of their tent. He was a single man, armed with a long, pike-like weapon.
When darkness came, if the guard were not increased....
They were brought a pasty gruel for their supper, and ate in silence and
distaste, ate because they needed the strength. Mary said, "Dad, I don't
want you to tell them anything. Dad, please. If you thought you were
doing it for me...."
"I've made up my mind," Tobias Whiting said.
Mary turned to Steve, in despair. "Steve," she said. "Steve.
Do—whatever you have to do. I—I'll understand."
Steve didn't answer her. Wasn't Whiting right now? he thought. If Steve
silenced him, wouldn't the Kumaji torture them for the information?
Steve could stand up to it perhaps—but he couldn't stand to see them
hurt Mary. He'd talk if they did that....
Then silencing Whiting wasn't the answer. But the Kumajis had one
willing prisoner and two unwilling ones. They knew that. If the willing
one yelled for help but the yelling was kept to a minimum so only one
guard, the man outside, came....
Darkness in the Kumaji encampment.
Far off, a lone tribesman singing a chant old as the desert.
"Are you asleep?" Mary asked.
"No," Steve said.
"Dad is. Listen to the way he's breathing—like a baby. As if—as if he
wasn't going to betray all our people. Oh, I hate him, I hate him!"
Steve crawled to where the older man was sleeping. Tobias Whiting's
voice surprised him. "I'm not asleep. I was thinking. I—"
"I'm going to kill you," Steve said very softly, and sprang at Whiting.
He paused, though. It was a calculated pause, and Whiting cried out as
Steve had hoped he would. Then his hands found the older man's throat
and closed there—not to kill him but to keep him from crying out again.
Sand stirred, the tentflap lifted, and a bulky figure rushed inside.
Steve got up, met him halfway, felt the jarring contact of their bodies.
The pike came up dimly in the darkness, the point scraping against
Steve's ribs as the guard lunged awkwardly. Steve's fingers sought the
thick-muscled neck, clamped there—squeezing.
The guard writhed. His feet drummed the sand. With one hand he stabbed
out wildly with the unwieldy pike. There was a cry from Mary and the
guard managed a low squawking noise. Outside, the rest of the camp
seemed undisturbed. There was death in Steve's strong tightening
fingers. There had to be death there. Death for the Kumaji guard—or
death for the fleeing Earthmen, who had lost one colony and must seek
another.
They fell together on the sand, the guard still struggling. Steve
couldn't release his throat to grab the pike. The guard stabbed out
awkwardly, blindly with it, kicking up sand. Then Tobias Whiting moaned,
but Steve hardly heard him.
When the guard's legs stopped drumming, Steve released him. The man was
either dead or so close to death that he would be out for hours. Steve
had never killed a man before, had never in violence and with intent to
kill attacked a man....
"Steve!"
It was Mary, calling his name and crying.
"It's Dad. Dad was—hit. The pike, a wild stab. He's hit bad—"
Steve crawled over to them. It was very dark. He could barely make out
Tobias Whiting's pain-contorted face.
"My stomach," Whiting said, gasping for breath. "The pain...."
Steve probed with his hands, found the wound. Blood was rushing out. He
couldn't stop it and he knew it and he thought Whiting knew it too. He
touched Mary's hand, and held it. Mary sobbed against him, crying
softly.
"You two ..." Whiting gasped. "You two ... Mary, Mary girl. Is—he—what
you want?"
"Yes, Dad. Oh, yes!"
"You can get her out of here, Cantwell?"
"I think so," Steve said.
"Then go. Go while you can. I'll tell them—due south. The Earthmen are
heading due south. They'll go—south. They won't find the caravan.
You'll—all—get away. If it's—what you want, Mary."
She leaned away from Steve, kissing her father. She asked Steve: "Isn't
there anything we can do for him?"
Steve shook his head. "But he's got to live long enough to tell them, to
deceive them."
"I'll live long enough," Whiting said, and Steve knew then that he
would. "Luck to—all of you. From a—very foolish—man...."
Steve took Mary's hand and pulled her out into the hot, dark, wind-blown
night. He carried the dead Kumaji's pike and they slipped across the
sand to where the thlots were hobbled for the night. He hardly
remembered the rest of it. There was violence and death, but necessary
death. He killed a man with the pike, and unhobbled one of the thlots .
The animal screamed and two more Kumajis came sleepily through the night
to see what was the matter. With the long edge of the pike's blade he
decapitated one of them. He slammed the shaft of the weapon across the
other's face, probably breaking his jaw. The camp was in a turmoil. In
the darkness he flung Mary on the thlot's bare back in front of him,
and they glided off across the sand.
Pursuit was disorganized—and unsuccessful. It was too dark for
effective pursuit, as Steve had hoped it would be. They rode swiftly all
night and continued riding with the dawn. They could have gone in any
direction. The wind-driven sand would obliterate their trail.
Two days later they reached the caravan. As they rode up, Mary said,
"Steve, do you have to tell them?"
"We can tell them this," Steve said. "Your father died a hero's death,
sending the Kumajis off in the wrong direction."
"And not—not what he'd planned to do at first."
"No. We'll tell them that was his intention all the while. A man can
make a mistake, can't he?"
"I love you, Steve. I love you."
Then they rode down on the caravan. Somehow Steve knew they would all
reach Oasis City in safety.
With Mary he would find a new world out in the vastness of space.
|
Describe the setting of the story.
|
After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about Signal Red by Henry Guth.
Relevant chunks:
SIGNAL RED
By HENRY GUTH
They tried to stop him. Earth Flight 21 was a suicide run, a coffin ship, they told him. Uranian death lay athwart the space lanes. But Shano already knew this was his last ride.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1949. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Mercurian night settled black and thick over the Q City Spaceport. Tentative fingers of light flicked and probed the sky, and winked out.
"Here she comes," somebody in the line ahead said.
Shano coughed, his whole skeletal body jerking. Arthritic joints sent flashes of pain along his limbs. Here she comes, he thought, feeling neither glad nor sad.
He coughed and slipped polarized goggles over his eyes.
The spaceport emerged bathed in infra red. Hangars, cradles, freighter catapults and long runways stood out in sharp, diamond-clear detail. High up, beyond the cone of illumination, a detached triple row of bright specks—portholes of the liner Stardust —sank slowly down.
There was no eagerness in him. Only a tiredness. A relief. Relief from a lifetime of beating around the planets. A life of digging, lifting, lugging and pounding. Like a work-worn Martian camel, he was going home to die.
As though on oiled pistons the ship sank into the light, its long shark-like hull glowing soft and silvery, and settled with a feathery snuggle into the cradle's ribs.
The passenger line quivered as a loud-speaker boomed:
" Stardust, now arrived at Cradle Six! Stardust, Cradle Six! All passengers for Venus and Earth prepare to board in ten minutes. "
Shano coughed, and wiped phlegm from his thin lips, his hand following around the bony contours of his face, feeling the hollows and the beard stubble and loose skin of his neck. He coughed and thought of the vanium mines of Pluto, and his gum-clogged lungs. A vague, pressing desire for home overwhelmed him. It had been so long.
" Attention! Attention, Stardust passengers! The signal is red. The signal is red. Refunds now being made. Refunds now. Take-off in five minutes. "
The man ahead swore and flicked up an arm. "Red," he groaned. "By the infinite galaxies, this is the last straw!" He charged away, knocking Shano aside as he passed.
Red signal. In bewildered anxiety Shano lifted the goggles from his eyes and stared into the sudden blackness. The red signal. Danger out there. Passengers advised to ground themselves, or travel at their own risk.
He felt the passengers bump and fumble past him, grumbling vexatiously.
A hot dread assailed him, and he coughed, plucking at his chest. Plucking at an urgency there.
Dropping the goggles to his rheumy eyes, he saw that the passenger line had dissolved. He moved, shuffling, to the gate, thrust his ticket into the scanner slot, and pushed through the turnstile when it clicked.
" Flight twenty-one, now arriving from Venus ," the loud-speaker said monotonously. Shano glanced briefly upward and saw the gleaming belly of twenty-one sinking into the spaceport cone of light.
He clawed his way up the gangway and thrust out his ticket to the lieutenant standing alone at the air lock. The lieutenant, a sullen, chunky man with a queer nick in his jawbone, refused the ticket.
"Haven't you heard, mister? Red signal. Go on back."
Shano coughed, and peered through the lenses of his goggles. "Please," he said. "Want to go home. I've a right." The nicked jaw stirred faint memories within his glazed mind.
The lieutenant punched his ticket. "It's your funeral, old man."
The loud-speaker blared. " Stardust, taking off in thirty seconds. The signal is red. Stardust, taking— "
With the words dinning in his ears, Shano stepped into the air lock. The officer followed, spun wheels, and the lock closed. The outside was shut off.
Lifting goggles they entered the hull, through a series of two more locks, closing each behind them.
"We're afloat," the officer said. "We've taken off." A fleck of light danced far back in his eye. Shano felt the pressure of acceleration gradually increasing, increasing, and hurried in.
Captain Menthlo, a silver-mustached Jupiterian, broad, huge, yet crushable as a beetle, talked while his hands manipulated a panel of studs in the control room. The pilot, his back encased in leather, sat in a bucket seat before him, listening into earphones.
"Surprised to learn of a passenger aboard," the captain said, glancing briefly sideways. "You're entitled to know of the danger ahead." He flicked a final stud, spoke to the pilot and at last turned a serious, squared face to Shano. "Old man," he said. "There's a Uranian fleet out there. We don't know how many ships in this sector. Flight twenty-one, which just landed, had a skirmish with one, and got away. We may not be so lucky. You know how these Uranian devils are."
Shano coughed, and wiped his mouth. "Dirty devils," he said. "I was driv' off the planet once, before this war started. I know things about them Uranian devils. Heard them in the mines around. Hears things, a laborer does."
The captain seemed for the first time to realize the social status of his lone passenger, and he became a little gruff.
"Want you to sign this waiver, saying you're traveling at your own risk. We'll expect you to keep to your cabin as much as possible. When the trouble comes we can't bother with a passenger. In a few hours we'll shut down the ship entirely, and every mechanical device aboard, to try to avoid detection." His mustaches rose like two spears from each side of his squared nose as his face changed to an alert watchfulness. "Going home, eh?" he said. "You've knocked around some, by the looks of you. Pluto, from the sound of that cough."
Shano scrawled his signature on the waiver. "Yeah," he said. "Pluto. Where a man's lungs fights gas." He blinked watery eyes. "Captain, what's a notched jaw mean to you?"
"Well, old man," the captain grasped Shano's shoulder and turned him around. "It means somebody cut himself, shaving. You stick tight to your cabin." He nodded curtly and indicated the door.
Descending the companionway to the next deck Shano observed the nick-jawed lieutenant staring out the viewport, apparently idling. The man turned and gripped Shano's thin arm.
"A light?" he said, tapping a cigarette. Shano produced a lighter disk and the chunky man puffed. He was an Earthman and his jaw seemed cut with a knife, notched like a piece of wood. Across the breast of his tunic was a purple band, with the name Rourke . "Why are you so anxious to get aboard, old man?" He searched Shano's face. "There's trouble ahead, you know."
Shano coughed, wracking his body, as forgotten memories stirred sluggishly in his mind. "Yup," he said, and jerked free and stumbled down the steel deck.
In his cabin he lay on the bunk, lighted a cigarette and smoked, coughing and staring at the rivet-studded bulkhead. The slow movement of his mind resolved into a struggle, one idea groping for the other.
What were the things he'd heard about nicked jaws? And where had he heard them? Digging ore on Pluto; talk in the pits? Secretive suspicions voiced in smoke-laden saloons of Mars? In the labor gangs of Uranus? Where? Shano smoked and didn't know. But he knew there was a rumor, and that it was the talk of ignorant men. The captain had evaded it. Shano smoked and coughed and stared at the steel bulkhead and waited.
The ship's alarm clanged. Shano jerked from his bunk like a broken watch spring. He crouched, trembling, on arthritic joints, as a loud-speaker blared throughout the ship.
" All hands! We now maintain dead silence. Close down and stop all machinery. Power off and lights out. An enemy fleet is out there, listening and watching for mechanical and electronic disturbance. Atmosphere will be maintained from emergency oxygen cylinders. Stop pumps. "
Shano crouched and listened as the ship's steady drone ceased and the vibrations ceased. The pumps stopped, the lights went out.
Pressing the cold steel bulkhead, Shano heard oxygen hiss through the pipes. Hiss and hiss and then flow soundlessly, filling the cabin and his lungs. He choked.
The cabin was like a mine shaft, dark and cold. Feet pounded on the deck outside.
Shano clawed open the door. He peered out anxiously.
Cold blobs of light, phosphorescent bulbs held in the fists of men, glimmered by. Phosphorescent bulbs, because the power was off. Shano blinked. He saw officers and men, their faces tight and pinched, hurrying in all directions. Hurrying to shut down the ship.
He acted impulsively. A young ensign strode by, drawn blaster in hand. Shano followed him; followed the bluish glow of his bulb, through labyrinthine passages and down a companionway, coughing and leering against the pain in his joints. The blue light winked out in the distance and Shano stopped.
He was suddenly alarmed. The captain had warned him to stay in his cabin. He looked back and forth, wondering how to return.
A bell clanged.
Shano saw a cold bulb glowing down the passageway, and he shuffled hopefully toward it. The bulb moved away. He saw an indistinct figure disappear through a door marked, ENGINE ROOM.
Shano paused uncertainly at the end of the passageway. A thick cluster of vertical pipes filled the corner. He peered at the pipes and saw a gray box snuggled behind them. It had two toggle switches and a radium dial that quivered delicately.
Shano scratched his scalp as boots pounded on the decks, above and below. He listened attentively to the ship's familiar noises diminishing one by one. And finally even the pounding of feet died out; everything became still. The silence shrieked in his ears.
The ship coasted. Shano could sense it coasting. He couldn't feel it or hear it, but he knew it was sliding ghost-like through space like a submarine dead under water, slipping quietly past a listening enemy.
The ship's speaker rasped softly. " Emergency. Battle posts. "
The captain's voice. Calm, brief. It sent a tremor through Shano's body. He heard a quick scuffle of feet again, running feet, directly overhead, and the captain's voice, more urgently, "Power on. They've heard us."
The words carried no accusation, but Shano realized what they meant. A slip-up. Something left running. Vibrations picked up quickly by detectors of the Uranian space fleet.
Shano coughed and heard the ship come to life around him. He pulled himself out of the spasm, cursing Pluto. Cursing his diseased, gum-clogged lungs. Cursing the Uranian fleet that was trying to prevent his going home—even to die.
This was a strange battle. Strange indeed. It was mostly silence.
Occasionally, as though from another world, came a brief, curt order.
"Port guns alert." Then hush and tension.
The deck lurched and the ship swung this way and that. Maybe dodging, maybe maneuvering—Shano didn't know. He felt the deck lurch, that was all.
"Fire number seven."
He heard the weird scream of a ray gun, and felt the constricting terror that seemed to belt the ship like an iron band.
This was a battle in space, and out there were Uranian cruisers trying to blast the Stardust out of the sky. Trying and trying, while the captain dodged and fired back—pitted his skill and knowledge against an enemy Shano couldn't see.
He wanted desperately to help the captain break through, and get to Earth. But he could only cling to the plastic pipes and cough.
The ship jounced and slid beneath his feet, and was filled with sound. It rocked and rolled. Shano caromed off the bulkhead.
"Hold fire."
He crawled to his knees on the slippery deck, grabbed the pipes and pulled himself erect, hand over hand. His eyes came level with the gray metal box behind the pipes. He squinted, fascinated, at the quivering dial needle. "Hey!" he said.
"Stand by."
Shano puzzled it out, his mind groping. He wasn't used to thinking. Only working with his hands.
This box. This needle that had quivered when the ship was closed down....
"It's over. Chased them off. Ready guns before laying to. Third watch on duty."
Shano sighed at the sudden release of tension throughout the space liner Stardust .
Smoke spewed from his nostrils. His forehead wrinkled with concentration. Those rumors: "Man sells out to Uranus, gets a nick cut in his jaw. Ever see a man with a nick in his jaw? Watch him, he's up to something." The talk of ignorant men. Shano remembered.
He poked behind the pipes and angrily slapped the toggle switches on the box. The captain would only scoff. He'd never believe there was a traitor aboard who had planted an electronic signal box, giving away the ship's position. He'd never believe the babblings of an old man.
He straightened up, glaring angrily. He knew. And the knowledge made him cold and furious. He watched the engine room emergency exit as it opened cautiously.
A chunky man backed out, holstering a flat blaster. He turned and saw Shano, standing smoking. He walked over and nudged Shano, his face dark. Shano blew smoke into the dark face.
"Old man," said Rourke. "What're you doing down here?"
Shano blinked.
Rourke fingered the nick in his jaw, eyes glinting. "You're supposed to be in your cabin," he said. "Didn't I warn you we'd run into trouble?"
Shano smoked and contemplated the chunky man. Estimated his strength and youth and felt the anger and frustration mount in him. "Devil," he said.
"Devil," he said and dug his cigarette into the other's face.
He lunged then, clawing. He dug the cigarette into Rourke's flushed face, and clung to his body. Rourke howled. He fell backward to the deck, slapping at his blistered face. He thrashed around and Shano clung to him, battered, pressing the cigarette relentlessly, coughing, cursing the pain in his joints.
Shano grasped Rourke's neck with his hands. He twisted the neck with his gnarled hands. Strong hands that had worked.
He got up when Rourke stopped thrashing. The face was purple and he was dead. Shano shivered. He crouched in the passageway shivering and coughing.
A tremendous grinding sounded amid-ships. Loud rending noises of protesting metal. The ship bucked like a hooked fish. Then it was still. An empty clank echoed through the hull. The captain's voice came, almost yelling. "Emergency! Emergency! Back to your posts. Engine room—report! Engine room—"
Shano picked himself off the deck, his mind muddled. He coughed and put a cigarette to his lips, flicking a lighter disk jerkily from his pocket. He blew smoke from his nostrils and heard the renewed pounding of feet. What was going on now?
"Engine room! Your screen is dead! Switch onto loud-speaker system. Engine room!"
Giddily, Shano heard clicks and rasps and then a thick voice, atom motors whirring in the background.
"Selector's gone, sir. Direct hit. Heat ray through the deck plates. We've sealed the tear. Might repair selector in five hours."
Shano coughed and sent a burst of smoke from his mouth.
"Captain!" A rasping, grating sound ensued from a grill above Shano's head, then a disconnected voice. "Get the men out of there. It's useless. Hurry it up!" A series of clicks and the heavy voice of the chief engineer. "Captain! Somebody's smashed the selector chamber. Engine room's full of toxia gas!"
Shano jumped. He prodded the body on the deck with his toe.
The Stardust's mechanical voice bellowed: "Engine room!" It reproduced the captain's heavy breathing and his tired voice. "We're about midway to Venus," it said. "There were two ships and we drove them off. But there may be others. They'll be coming back. They know we've been hit. We have to get away fast!"
Shano could see the captain in his mind, worried, squared face slick with moisture. Shouting into a control room mike. Trying to find out what the matter was with his space ship.
The engineer's answer came from the grill. "Impossible, sir. Engine room full of toxia gas. Not a suit aboard prepared to withstand it. And we have to keep it in there. Selector filaments won't function without the gas. Our only chance was to put a man in the engine room to repair the broken selector valve rods or keep them running by hand."
"Blast it!" roared the captain. "No way of getting in there? Can't you by-pass the selector?"
"No. It's the heart of the new cosmic drive, sir. The fuels must pass through selector valves before entering the tube chambers. Filaments will operate so long as toxia gas is there to burn, and will keep trying to open the valves and compensate for fluctuating engine temperature. But the rod pins have melted down, sir—they're common tungsten steel—and when the rods pull a valve open, they slip off and drop down, useless. It's a mess. If we could only get a man in there he might lift up the dropped end of a rod and slip it into place each time it fell, and keep the valves working and feeding fuel."
The speaker spluttered and Shano smoked thoughtfully, listening to the talk back and forth, between the captain and the engineer. He didn't understand it, but knew that everything was ended. They were broken down in space and would never make Earth. Those Uranian devils would come streaking back. Catch them floating, helpless, and blast them to bits. And he would never get home to die.
Shano coughed, and cursed his lungs. Time was when these gum-clogged lungs had saved his life. In the Plutonian mines. Gas explosions in the tunnels. Toxia gas, seeping in, burning the men's insides. But with gum-clogged lungs he'd been able to work himself clear. Just getting sick where other men had died, their insides burned out.
Shano smoked and thought.
They wouldn't even know, he told himself, squirming through the emergency exit into the engine room, and sealing it after him. And they wouldn't understand if they did. Pink mist swirled about him. Toxia gas. Shano coughed.
He squinted around at the massive, incomprehensible machinery. The guts of the space ship.
Then he saw the shattered, gold-gleaming cylinder, gas hissing from a fine nozzle, and filaments glowing bluish inside it, still working away. He saw five heavy Carrsteel rods hanging useless, on melted-down pins, and the slots their pronged ends hooked into. He looked at his hands, and shook his head.
"One try," he said to himself. "One try, Shano. One important thing in your life. Here's your opportunity. The toxia gas will get you. It'll kill you at this concentration. But you'll last for maybe twelve hours. Another man wouldn't last a minute. Another man's lungs aren't clogged with Juno gum."
He grasped a rod and lifted it, sweating under the weight, and slipped the forked end into its slot. Going home to die, he thought. Well, maybe not going home. Couldn't remember what Earth looked like anyway.
What was that again? Oh yeah—just lift them up, and when they drop off, lift them up again.
Shano coughed, and lifted the heavy rods into position. One jerked back suddenly and smoothly, and something went, "Pop, pop," behind him and machinery whirred. He lifted the rod and slipped it back on. Another jerked, pulled open a large valve, and dropped off. Shano bent, and lifted, coughing and coughing. He forgot what he was doing, mind blank the way it went when he worked. Just rhythmically fell into the job, the way a laborer does. He waited for a rod to slip and fall, then lifted it up and slipped it in place, skin sweating, joints shooting pain along his limbs. He heard the machinery working. He heard the high, howling whine of cosmic jets. He, Shano, was making the machinery go. He was running the cosmic drive.
A bell clanged somewhere. "Engine room! Engine room! We're under way! What happened?"
Silence, while Shano coughed and made the machinery go, thinking about the Earth he hadn't seen for many years.
"Captain!" the speaker bawled. "There's a man in there! Working the valve rods! Somebody is in the engine room and the gas isn't...."
Shano grinned, feeling good. Feeling happy. Lifting the heavy steel rods, driving the ship. Keeping the jets screaming and hurtling the liner Stardust toward Venus. He wondered if they'd found Rourke yet. If he could keep going for twelve hours they would get to Venus. After that....
"Home," he coughed. "Hell! Who wants to go home?"
He plucked at his agitated chest, thinking of a whole damn Uranian fleet swooping down on a spot in space, expecting to find a crippled ship there with a spy inside it. And finding nothing. Because of Shano. A useless old man.
Coughing came out all mixed up with laughing.
Question:
Describe the setting of the story.
Answer:
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[
"The very first setting of the story is the Q City Spaceport. Many space liners come in and out, making the space very busy. The spaceport also features freighter catapults, long runaways, cradles, and hangars. Inside, there are also ticket scanners and turnstiles that the passengers go through before boarding the ship.\n\nThe second and primary setting is the Stardust space liner. The space liner has an air lock that closes when the ship begins to fly. There is a control room with buttons and seats for the pilot to sit in as well. Although Shano is the only passenger on board, there are many cabins for the passengers to use. The cabin that Shano stays in also has a bunk to sleep on. Other basic parts include numerous steel decks and companionways. Later, the ship is revealed to have an engine room too, where the most crucial mechanical parts of the ship are. These parts are all advanced technology, including a new cosmic drive, selector valves (Carrsteel rods), and tube chambers to keep the filaments operating. These parts are essential to operate the jets of the liner and keep them running smoothly. ",
"The story begins in the Q City Spaceport. A ship called Stardust lands to set off to Earth. Red signal is on. One old man gets on the ship and the crew is in. On board there is a control room from where one can descend to the next deck with a viewpoint. Then everything is turned off and the whole ship is dark and silent. Shano's cabin is dark and cold. Outside men are hurrying in all directions. Everyone follows the orders, there is an atmosphere of tension. Engine room is the most important place and the selector there is broken, the room is full of toxic gas. There is a massive machinery in the emergency room and a shattered cylinder all in gas with Shano making it work.",
"The story sets in the Q City Spaceport, where the lights flicked and probed the sky. The spaceport appears to be infra red as the ship sank into the light. The speaker in the spaceport makes the announcement stating that the signal has now turned red. Afterward, Shano still decides to aboard the ship, by going through a turnstile connected to a gangway. The ship has a control room which has a panel of studs and a leather seat; there is also a companionway leading to the next deck. In Shano’s cabin, there is a bunk bed; when the ship’s machinery stopped, the room feels cold and dark. From his cabin, there is a passageway leading toward the Engine Room; an emergency exit door connects the Engine Room to the passageway. The passageway also leads to a deck. Above the room is where the captain and the crew were standing. And in the engine room is a smashed selector chamber, which has broken valve rods. ",
"The story is mostly set on the spaceship \"Stardust\". When the story begins, Shano is standing in the dead of night on Mercury, before he goes to the gate to wait for the ship. He quickly boards the vessel. There is an airlock going onto the ship, with two more doors after it. There is a control room where the captain sits in a bucket seat. In Shano's cabin there is a bunk, with a \"riveted studded bulkhead\". The cabin was dark and cold. There is an engine room. At the end of the passageway is a group of pipes in the corner. \n"
] |
63860
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SIGNAL RED
By HENRY GUTH
They tried to stop him. Earth Flight 21 was a suicide run, a coffin ship, they told him. Uranian death lay athwart the space lanes. But Shano already knew this was his last ride.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1949. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Mercurian night settled black and thick over the Q City Spaceport. Tentative fingers of light flicked and probed the sky, and winked out.
"Here she comes," somebody in the line ahead said.
Shano coughed, his whole skeletal body jerking. Arthritic joints sent flashes of pain along his limbs. Here she comes, he thought, feeling neither glad nor sad.
He coughed and slipped polarized goggles over his eyes.
The spaceport emerged bathed in infra red. Hangars, cradles, freighter catapults and long runways stood out in sharp, diamond-clear detail. High up, beyond the cone of illumination, a detached triple row of bright specks—portholes of the liner Stardust —sank slowly down.
There was no eagerness in him. Only a tiredness. A relief. Relief from a lifetime of beating around the planets. A life of digging, lifting, lugging and pounding. Like a work-worn Martian camel, he was going home to die.
As though on oiled pistons the ship sank into the light, its long shark-like hull glowing soft and silvery, and settled with a feathery snuggle into the cradle's ribs.
The passenger line quivered as a loud-speaker boomed:
" Stardust, now arrived at Cradle Six! Stardust, Cradle Six! All passengers for Venus and Earth prepare to board in ten minutes. "
Shano coughed, and wiped phlegm from his thin lips, his hand following around the bony contours of his face, feeling the hollows and the beard stubble and loose skin of his neck. He coughed and thought of the vanium mines of Pluto, and his gum-clogged lungs. A vague, pressing desire for home overwhelmed him. It had been so long.
" Attention! Attention, Stardust passengers! The signal is red. The signal is red. Refunds now being made. Refunds now. Take-off in five minutes. "
The man ahead swore and flicked up an arm. "Red," he groaned. "By the infinite galaxies, this is the last straw!" He charged away, knocking Shano aside as he passed.
Red signal. In bewildered anxiety Shano lifted the goggles from his eyes and stared into the sudden blackness. The red signal. Danger out there. Passengers advised to ground themselves, or travel at their own risk.
He felt the passengers bump and fumble past him, grumbling vexatiously.
A hot dread assailed him, and he coughed, plucking at his chest. Plucking at an urgency there.
Dropping the goggles to his rheumy eyes, he saw that the passenger line had dissolved. He moved, shuffling, to the gate, thrust his ticket into the scanner slot, and pushed through the turnstile when it clicked.
" Flight twenty-one, now arriving from Venus ," the loud-speaker said monotonously. Shano glanced briefly upward and saw the gleaming belly of twenty-one sinking into the spaceport cone of light.
He clawed his way up the gangway and thrust out his ticket to the lieutenant standing alone at the air lock. The lieutenant, a sullen, chunky man with a queer nick in his jawbone, refused the ticket.
"Haven't you heard, mister? Red signal. Go on back."
Shano coughed, and peered through the lenses of his goggles. "Please," he said. "Want to go home. I've a right." The nicked jaw stirred faint memories within his glazed mind.
The lieutenant punched his ticket. "It's your funeral, old man."
The loud-speaker blared. " Stardust, taking off in thirty seconds. The signal is red. Stardust, taking— "
With the words dinning in his ears, Shano stepped into the air lock. The officer followed, spun wheels, and the lock closed. The outside was shut off.
Lifting goggles they entered the hull, through a series of two more locks, closing each behind them.
"We're afloat," the officer said. "We've taken off." A fleck of light danced far back in his eye. Shano felt the pressure of acceleration gradually increasing, increasing, and hurried in.
Captain Menthlo, a silver-mustached Jupiterian, broad, huge, yet crushable as a beetle, talked while his hands manipulated a panel of studs in the control room. The pilot, his back encased in leather, sat in a bucket seat before him, listening into earphones.
"Surprised to learn of a passenger aboard," the captain said, glancing briefly sideways. "You're entitled to know of the danger ahead." He flicked a final stud, spoke to the pilot and at last turned a serious, squared face to Shano. "Old man," he said. "There's a Uranian fleet out there. We don't know how many ships in this sector. Flight twenty-one, which just landed, had a skirmish with one, and got away. We may not be so lucky. You know how these Uranian devils are."
Shano coughed, and wiped his mouth. "Dirty devils," he said. "I was driv' off the planet once, before this war started. I know things about them Uranian devils. Heard them in the mines around. Hears things, a laborer does."
The captain seemed for the first time to realize the social status of his lone passenger, and he became a little gruff.
"Want you to sign this waiver, saying you're traveling at your own risk. We'll expect you to keep to your cabin as much as possible. When the trouble comes we can't bother with a passenger. In a few hours we'll shut down the ship entirely, and every mechanical device aboard, to try to avoid detection." His mustaches rose like two spears from each side of his squared nose as his face changed to an alert watchfulness. "Going home, eh?" he said. "You've knocked around some, by the looks of you. Pluto, from the sound of that cough."
Shano scrawled his signature on the waiver. "Yeah," he said. "Pluto. Where a man's lungs fights gas." He blinked watery eyes. "Captain, what's a notched jaw mean to you?"
"Well, old man," the captain grasped Shano's shoulder and turned him around. "It means somebody cut himself, shaving. You stick tight to your cabin." He nodded curtly and indicated the door.
Descending the companionway to the next deck Shano observed the nick-jawed lieutenant staring out the viewport, apparently idling. The man turned and gripped Shano's thin arm.
"A light?" he said, tapping a cigarette. Shano produced a lighter disk and the chunky man puffed. He was an Earthman and his jaw seemed cut with a knife, notched like a piece of wood. Across the breast of his tunic was a purple band, with the name Rourke . "Why are you so anxious to get aboard, old man?" He searched Shano's face. "There's trouble ahead, you know."
Shano coughed, wracking his body, as forgotten memories stirred sluggishly in his mind. "Yup," he said, and jerked free and stumbled down the steel deck.
In his cabin he lay on the bunk, lighted a cigarette and smoked, coughing and staring at the rivet-studded bulkhead. The slow movement of his mind resolved into a struggle, one idea groping for the other.
What were the things he'd heard about nicked jaws? And where had he heard them? Digging ore on Pluto; talk in the pits? Secretive suspicions voiced in smoke-laden saloons of Mars? In the labor gangs of Uranus? Where? Shano smoked and didn't know. But he knew there was a rumor, and that it was the talk of ignorant men. The captain had evaded it. Shano smoked and coughed and stared at the steel bulkhead and waited.
The ship's alarm clanged. Shano jerked from his bunk like a broken watch spring. He crouched, trembling, on arthritic joints, as a loud-speaker blared throughout the ship.
" All hands! We now maintain dead silence. Close down and stop all machinery. Power off and lights out. An enemy fleet is out there, listening and watching for mechanical and electronic disturbance. Atmosphere will be maintained from emergency oxygen cylinders. Stop pumps. "
Shano crouched and listened as the ship's steady drone ceased and the vibrations ceased. The pumps stopped, the lights went out.
Pressing the cold steel bulkhead, Shano heard oxygen hiss through the pipes. Hiss and hiss and then flow soundlessly, filling the cabin and his lungs. He choked.
The cabin was like a mine shaft, dark and cold. Feet pounded on the deck outside.
Shano clawed open the door. He peered out anxiously.
Cold blobs of light, phosphorescent bulbs held in the fists of men, glimmered by. Phosphorescent bulbs, because the power was off. Shano blinked. He saw officers and men, their faces tight and pinched, hurrying in all directions. Hurrying to shut down the ship.
He acted impulsively. A young ensign strode by, drawn blaster in hand. Shano followed him; followed the bluish glow of his bulb, through labyrinthine passages and down a companionway, coughing and leering against the pain in his joints. The blue light winked out in the distance and Shano stopped.
He was suddenly alarmed. The captain had warned him to stay in his cabin. He looked back and forth, wondering how to return.
A bell clanged.
Shano saw a cold bulb glowing down the passageway, and he shuffled hopefully toward it. The bulb moved away. He saw an indistinct figure disappear through a door marked, ENGINE ROOM.
Shano paused uncertainly at the end of the passageway. A thick cluster of vertical pipes filled the corner. He peered at the pipes and saw a gray box snuggled behind them. It had two toggle switches and a radium dial that quivered delicately.
Shano scratched his scalp as boots pounded on the decks, above and below. He listened attentively to the ship's familiar noises diminishing one by one. And finally even the pounding of feet died out; everything became still. The silence shrieked in his ears.
The ship coasted. Shano could sense it coasting. He couldn't feel it or hear it, but he knew it was sliding ghost-like through space like a submarine dead under water, slipping quietly past a listening enemy.
The ship's speaker rasped softly. " Emergency. Battle posts. "
The captain's voice. Calm, brief. It sent a tremor through Shano's body. He heard a quick scuffle of feet again, running feet, directly overhead, and the captain's voice, more urgently, "Power on. They've heard us."
The words carried no accusation, but Shano realized what they meant. A slip-up. Something left running. Vibrations picked up quickly by detectors of the Uranian space fleet.
Shano coughed and heard the ship come to life around him. He pulled himself out of the spasm, cursing Pluto. Cursing his diseased, gum-clogged lungs. Cursing the Uranian fleet that was trying to prevent his going home—even to die.
This was a strange battle. Strange indeed. It was mostly silence.
Occasionally, as though from another world, came a brief, curt order.
"Port guns alert." Then hush and tension.
The deck lurched and the ship swung this way and that. Maybe dodging, maybe maneuvering—Shano didn't know. He felt the deck lurch, that was all.
"Fire number seven."
He heard the weird scream of a ray gun, and felt the constricting terror that seemed to belt the ship like an iron band.
This was a battle in space, and out there were Uranian cruisers trying to blast the Stardust out of the sky. Trying and trying, while the captain dodged and fired back—pitted his skill and knowledge against an enemy Shano couldn't see.
He wanted desperately to help the captain break through, and get to Earth. But he could only cling to the plastic pipes and cough.
The ship jounced and slid beneath his feet, and was filled with sound. It rocked and rolled. Shano caromed off the bulkhead.
"Hold fire."
He crawled to his knees on the slippery deck, grabbed the pipes and pulled himself erect, hand over hand. His eyes came level with the gray metal box behind the pipes. He squinted, fascinated, at the quivering dial needle. "Hey!" he said.
"Stand by."
Shano puzzled it out, his mind groping. He wasn't used to thinking. Only working with his hands.
This box. This needle that had quivered when the ship was closed down....
"It's over. Chased them off. Ready guns before laying to. Third watch on duty."
Shano sighed at the sudden release of tension throughout the space liner Stardust .
Smoke spewed from his nostrils. His forehead wrinkled with concentration. Those rumors: "Man sells out to Uranus, gets a nick cut in his jaw. Ever see a man with a nick in his jaw? Watch him, he's up to something." The talk of ignorant men. Shano remembered.
He poked behind the pipes and angrily slapped the toggle switches on the box. The captain would only scoff. He'd never believe there was a traitor aboard who had planted an electronic signal box, giving away the ship's position. He'd never believe the babblings of an old man.
He straightened up, glaring angrily. He knew. And the knowledge made him cold and furious. He watched the engine room emergency exit as it opened cautiously.
A chunky man backed out, holstering a flat blaster. He turned and saw Shano, standing smoking. He walked over and nudged Shano, his face dark. Shano blew smoke into the dark face.
"Old man," said Rourke. "What're you doing down here?"
Shano blinked.
Rourke fingered the nick in his jaw, eyes glinting. "You're supposed to be in your cabin," he said. "Didn't I warn you we'd run into trouble?"
Shano smoked and contemplated the chunky man. Estimated his strength and youth and felt the anger and frustration mount in him. "Devil," he said.
"Devil," he said and dug his cigarette into the other's face.
He lunged then, clawing. He dug the cigarette into Rourke's flushed face, and clung to his body. Rourke howled. He fell backward to the deck, slapping at his blistered face. He thrashed around and Shano clung to him, battered, pressing the cigarette relentlessly, coughing, cursing the pain in his joints.
Shano grasped Rourke's neck with his hands. He twisted the neck with his gnarled hands. Strong hands that had worked.
He got up when Rourke stopped thrashing. The face was purple and he was dead. Shano shivered. He crouched in the passageway shivering and coughing.
A tremendous grinding sounded amid-ships. Loud rending noises of protesting metal. The ship bucked like a hooked fish. Then it was still. An empty clank echoed through the hull. The captain's voice came, almost yelling. "Emergency! Emergency! Back to your posts. Engine room—report! Engine room—"
Shano picked himself off the deck, his mind muddled. He coughed and put a cigarette to his lips, flicking a lighter disk jerkily from his pocket. He blew smoke from his nostrils and heard the renewed pounding of feet. What was going on now?
"Engine room! Your screen is dead! Switch onto loud-speaker system. Engine room!"
Giddily, Shano heard clicks and rasps and then a thick voice, atom motors whirring in the background.
"Selector's gone, sir. Direct hit. Heat ray through the deck plates. We've sealed the tear. Might repair selector in five hours."
Shano coughed and sent a burst of smoke from his mouth.
"Captain!" A rasping, grating sound ensued from a grill above Shano's head, then a disconnected voice. "Get the men out of there. It's useless. Hurry it up!" A series of clicks and the heavy voice of the chief engineer. "Captain! Somebody's smashed the selector chamber. Engine room's full of toxia gas!"
Shano jumped. He prodded the body on the deck with his toe.
The Stardust's mechanical voice bellowed: "Engine room!" It reproduced the captain's heavy breathing and his tired voice. "We're about midway to Venus," it said. "There were two ships and we drove them off. But there may be others. They'll be coming back. They know we've been hit. We have to get away fast!"
Shano could see the captain in his mind, worried, squared face slick with moisture. Shouting into a control room mike. Trying to find out what the matter was with his space ship.
The engineer's answer came from the grill. "Impossible, sir. Engine room full of toxia gas. Not a suit aboard prepared to withstand it. And we have to keep it in there. Selector filaments won't function without the gas. Our only chance was to put a man in the engine room to repair the broken selector valve rods or keep them running by hand."
"Blast it!" roared the captain. "No way of getting in there? Can't you by-pass the selector?"
"No. It's the heart of the new cosmic drive, sir. The fuels must pass through selector valves before entering the tube chambers. Filaments will operate so long as toxia gas is there to burn, and will keep trying to open the valves and compensate for fluctuating engine temperature. But the rod pins have melted down, sir—they're common tungsten steel—and when the rods pull a valve open, they slip off and drop down, useless. It's a mess. If we could only get a man in there he might lift up the dropped end of a rod and slip it into place each time it fell, and keep the valves working and feeding fuel."
The speaker spluttered and Shano smoked thoughtfully, listening to the talk back and forth, between the captain and the engineer. He didn't understand it, but knew that everything was ended. They were broken down in space and would never make Earth. Those Uranian devils would come streaking back. Catch them floating, helpless, and blast them to bits. And he would never get home to die.
Shano coughed, and cursed his lungs. Time was when these gum-clogged lungs had saved his life. In the Plutonian mines. Gas explosions in the tunnels. Toxia gas, seeping in, burning the men's insides. But with gum-clogged lungs he'd been able to work himself clear. Just getting sick where other men had died, their insides burned out.
Shano smoked and thought.
They wouldn't even know, he told himself, squirming through the emergency exit into the engine room, and sealing it after him. And they wouldn't understand if they did. Pink mist swirled about him. Toxia gas. Shano coughed.
He squinted around at the massive, incomprehensible machinery. The guts of the space ship.
Then he saw the shattered, gold-gleaming cylinder, gas hissing from a fine nozzle, and filaments glowing bluish inside it, still working away. He saw five heavy Carrsteel rods hanging useless, on melted-down pins, and the slots their pronged ends hooked into. He looked at his hands, and shook his head.
"One try," he said to himself. "One try, Shano. One important thing in your life. Here's your opportunity. The toxia gas will get you. It'll kill you at this concentration. But you'll last for maybe twelve hours. Another man wouldn't last a minute. Another man's lungs aren't clogged with Juno gum."
He grasped a rod and lifted it, sweating under the weight, and slipped the forked end into its slot. Going home to die, he thought. Well, maybe not going home. Couldn't remember what Earth looked like anyway.
What was that again? Oh yeah—just lift them up, and when they drop off, lift them up again.
Shano coughed, and lifted the heavy rods into position. One jerked back suddenly and smoothly, and something went, "Pop, pop," behind him and machinery whirred. He lifted the rod and slipped it back on. Another jerked, pulled open a large valve, and dropped off. Shano bent, and lifted, coughing and coughing. He forgot what he was doing, mind blank the way it went when he worked. Just rhythmically fell into the job, the way a laborer does. He waited for a rod to slip and fall, then lifted it up and slipped it in place, skin sweating, joints shooting pain along his limbs. He heard the machinery working. He heard the high, howling whine of cosmic jets. He, Shano, was making the machinery go. He was running the cosmic drive.
A bell clanged somewhere. "Engine room! Engine room! We're under way! What happened?"
Silence, while Shano coughed and made the machinery go, thinking about the Earth he hadn't seen for many years.
"Captain!" the speaker bawled. "There's a man in there! Working the valve rods! Somebody is in the engine room and the gas isn't...."
Shano grinned, feeling good. Feeling happy. Lifting the heavy steel rods, driving the ship. Keeping the jets screaming and hurtling the liner Stardust toward Venus. He wondered if they'd found Rourke yet. If he could keep going for twelve hours they would get to Venus. After that....
"Home," he coughed. "Hell! Who wants to go home?"
He plucked at his agitated chest, thinking of a whole damn Uranian fleet swooping down on a spot in space, expecting to find a crippled ship there with a spy inside it. And finding nothing. Because of Shano. A useless old man.
Coughing came out all mixed up with laughing.
|
Who is Stryker and what are his characteristics?
|
After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about Control Group by Roger D. Aycock.
Relevant chunks:
"Any problem posed by one group of
human beings can be resolved by any
other group." That's what the Handbook
said. But did that include primitive
humans? Or the Bees? Or a ...
CONTROL GROUP
By ROGER DEE
The
cool green disk of Alphard
Six on the screen was
infinitely welcome after the arid
desolation and stinking swamplands
of the inner planets, an
airy jewel of a world that might
have been designed specifically
for the hard-earned month of
rest ahead. Navigator Farrell,
youngest and certainly most impulsive
of the three-man Terran
Reclamations crew, would have
set the Marco Four down at
once but for the greater caution
of Stryker, nominally captain of
the group, and of Gibson, engineer,
and linguist. Xavier, the
ship's little mechanical, had—as
was usual and proper—no voice
in the matter.
"Reconnaissance spiral first,
Arthur," Stryker said firmly. He
chuckled at Farrell's instant
scowl, his little eyes twinkling
and his naked paunch quaking
over the belt of his shipboard
shorts. "Chapter One, Subsection
Five, Paragraph Twenty-seven: No planetfall on an unreclaimed
world shall be deemed
safe without proper— "
Farrell, as Stryker had expected,
interrupted with characteristic
impatience. "Do you sleep with that damned Reclamations
Handbook, Lee? Alphard Six
isn't an unreclaimed world—it
was never colonized before the
Hymenop invasion back in 3025,
so why should it be inhabited
now?"
Gibson, who for four hours
had not looked up from his interminable
chess game with
Xavier, paused with a beleaguered
knight in one blunt brown
hand.
"No point in taking chances,"
Gibson said in his neutral baritone.
He shrugged thick bare
shoulders, his humorless black-browed
face unmoved, when
Farrell included him in his
scowl. "We're two hundred twenty-six
light-years from Sol, at
the old limits of Terran expansion,
and there's no knowing
what we may turn up here. Alphard's
was one of the first systems
the Bees took over. It must
have been one of the last to be
abandoned when they pulled back
to 70 Ophiuchi."
"And I think you live for the
day," Farrell said acidly, "when
we'll stumble across a functioning
dome of live, buzzing Hymenops.
Damn it, Gib, the Bees
pulled out a hundred years ago,
before you and I were born—neither
of us ever saw a Hymenop,
and never will!"
"But I saw them," Stryker
said. "I fought them for the better
part of the century they were
here, and I learned there's no
predicting nor understanding
them. We never knew why they
came nor why they gave up and
left. How can we know whether
they'd leave a rear-guard or
booby trap here?"
He put a paternal hand on
Farrell's shoulder, understanding
the younger man's eagerness
and knowing that their close-knit
team would have been the
more poorly balanced without it.
"Gib's right," he said. He
nearly added as usual . "We're on
rest leave at the moment, yes,
but our mission is still to find
Terran colonies enslaved and
abandoned by the Bees, not to
risk our necks and a valuable
Reorientations ship by landing
blind on an unobserved planet.
We're too close already. Cut in
your shields and find a reconnaissance
spiral, will you?"
Grumbling, Farrell punched
coordinates on the Ringwave
board that lifted the Marco Four out of her descent and restored
the bluish enveloping haze of
her repellors.
Stryker's caution was justified
on the instant. The speeding
streamlined shape that had flashed
up unobserved from below
swerved sharply and exploded in
a cataclysmic blaze of atomic
fire that rocked the ship wildly
and flung the three men to the
floor in a jangling roar of
alarms.
"So the Handbook tacticians
knew what they were about,"
Stryker said minutes later. Deliberately
he adopted the smug
tone best calculated to sting Farrell
out of his first self-reproach,
and grinned when the navigator
bristled defensively. "Some of
their enjoinders seem a little
stuffy and obvious at times, but
they're eminently sensible."
When Farrell refused to be
baited Stryker turned to Gibson,
who was busily assessing the
damage done to the ship's more
fragile equipment, and to Xavier,
who searched the planet's
surface with the ship's magnoscanner.
The Marco Four , Ringwave
generators humming gently,
hung at the moment just
inside the orbit of Alphard Six's
single dun-colored moon.
Gibson put down a test meter
with an air of finality.
"Nothing damaged but the
Zero Interval Transfer computer.
I can realign that in a couple
of hours, but it'll have to be
done before we hit Transfer
again."
Stryker looked dubious.
"What if the issue is forced before
the ZIT unit is repaired?
Suppose they come up after us?"
"I doubt that they can. Any
installation crudely enough
equipped to trust in guided missiles
is hardly likely to have developed
efficient space craft."
Stryker was not reassured.
"That torpedo of theirs was
deadly enough," he said. "And
its nature reflects the nature of
the people who made it. Any race
vicious enough to use atomic
charges is too dangerous to
trifle with." Worry made comical
creases in his fat, good-humored
face. "We'll have to find
out who they are and why
they're here, you know."
"They can't be Hymenops,"
Gibson said promptly. "First,
because the Bees pinned their
faith on Ringwave energy fields,
as we did, rather than on missiles.
Second, because there's no
dome on Six."
"There were three empty
domes on Five, which is a desert
planet," Farrell pointed out.
"Why didn't they settle Six? It's
a more habitable world."
Gibson shrugged. "I know the
Bees always erected domes on
every planet they colonized, Arthur,
but precedent is a fallible
tool. And it's even more firmly
established that there's no possibility
of our rationalizing the
motivations of a culture as alien
as the Hymenops'—we've been
over that argument a hundred
times on other reclaimed
worlds."
"But this was never an unreclaimed
world," Farrell said
with the faint malice of one too
recently caught in the wrong.
"Alphard Six was surveyed and
seeded with Terran bacteria
around the year 3000, but the
Bees invaded before we could
colonize. And that means we'll
have to rule out any resurgent
colonial group down there, because
Six never had a colony in
the beginning."
"The Bees have been gone for
over a hundred years," Stryker
said. "Colonists might have migrated
from another Terran-occupied
planet."
Gibson disagreed.
"We've touched at every inhabited
world in this sector, Lee,
and not one surviving colony has
developed space travel on its
own. The Hymenops had a hundred
years to condition their human
slaves to ignorance of
everything beyond their immediate
environment—the motives
behind that conditioning usually
escape us, but that's beside the
point—and they did a thorough
job of it. The colonists have had
no more than a century of freedom
since the Bees pulled out,
and four generations simply
isn't enough time for any subjugated
culture to climb from
slavery to interstellar flight."
Stryker made a padding turn
about the control room, tugging
unhappily at the scanty fringe
of hair the years had left him.
"If they're neither Hymenops
nor resurgent colonists," he said,
"then there's only one choice remaining—they're
aliens from a
system we haven't reached yet,
beyond the old sphere of Terran
exploration. We always assumed
that we'd find other races out
here someday, and that they'd
be as different from us in form
and motivation as the Hymenops.
Why not now?"
Gibson said seriously, "Not
probable, Lee. The same objection
that rules out the Bees applies
to any trans-Alphardian
culture—they'd have to be beyond
the atomic fission stage,
else they'd never have attempted
interstellar flight. The Ringwave
with its Zero Interval Transfer
principle and instantaneous communications
applications is the
only answer to long-range travel,
and if they'd had that they
wouldn't have bothered with
atomics."
Stryker turned on him almost
angrily. "If they're not Hymenops
or humans or aliens, then
what in God's name are they?"
"Aye, there's the rub," Farrell
said, quoting a passage
whose aptness had somehow seen
it through a dozen reorganizations
of insular tongue and a
final translation to universal
Terran. "If they're none of those
three, we've only one conclusion
left. There's no one down there
at all—we're victims of the first
joint hallucination in psychiatric
history."
Stryker threw up his hands in
surrender. "We can't identify
them by theorizing, and that
brings us down to the business
of first-hand investigation.
Who's going to bell the cat this
time?"
"I'd like to go," Gibson said
at once. "The ZIT computer can
wait."
Stryker vetoed his offer as
promptly. "No, the ZIT comes
first. We may have to run for it,
and we can't set up a Transfer
jump without the computer. It's
got to be me or Arthur."
Farrell felt the familiar chill
of uneasiness that inevitably
preceded this moment of decision.
He was not lacking in courage,
else the circumstances under
which he had worked for the
past ten years—the sometimes
perilous, sometimes downright
charnel conditions left by the
fleeing Hymenop conquerors—would
have broken him long
ago. But that same hard experience
had honed rather than
blunted the edge of his imagination,
and the prospect of a close-quarters
stalking of an unknown
and patently hostile force was
anything but attractive.
"You two did the field work
on the last location," he said.
"It's high time I took my turn—and
God knows I'd go mad if
I had to stay inship and listen
to Lee memorizing his Handbook
subsections or to Gib practicing
dead languages with Xavier."
Stryker laughed for the first
time since the explosion that
had so nearly wrecked the Marco
Four .
"Good enough. Though it
wouldn't be more diverting to
listen for hours to you improvising
enharmonic variations on
the Lament for Old Terra with
your accordion."
Gibson, characteristically, had
a refinement to offer.
"They'll be alerted down there
for a reconnaissance sally," he
said. "Why not let Xavier take
the scouter down for overt diversion,
and drop Arthur off in
the helihopper for a low-level
check?"
Stryker looked at Farrell. "All
right, Arthur?"
"Good enough," Farrell said.
And to Xavier, who had not
moved from his post at the magnoscanner:
"How does it look,
Xav? Have you pinned down
their base yet?"
The mechanical answered him
in a voice as smooth and clear—and
as inflectionless—as a 'cello
note. "The planet seems uninhabited
except for a large island
some three hundred miles in
diameter. There are twenty-seven
small agrarian hamlets surrounded
by cultivated fields.
There is one city of perhaps a
thousand buildings with a central
square. In the square rests
a grounded spaceship of approximately
ten times the bulk
of the Marco Four ."
They crowded about the vision
screen, jostling Xavier's jointed
gray shape in their interest. The
central city lay in minutest detail
before them, the battered
hulk of the grounded ship glinting
rustily in the late afternoon
sunlight. Streets radiated away
from the square in orderly succession,
the whole so clearly
depicted that they could see the
throngs of people surging up
and down, tiny foreshortened
faces turned toward the sky.
"At least they're human,"
Farrell said. Relief replaced in
some measure his earlier uneasiness.
"Which means that they're
Terran, and can be dealt with
according to Reclamations routine.
Is that hulk spaceworthy,
Xav?"
Xavier's mellow drone assumed
the convention vibrato that
indicated stark puzzlement. "Its
breached hull makes the ship incapable
of flight. Apparently it
is used only to supply power to
the outlying hamlets."
The mechanical put a flexible
gray finger upon an indicator
graph derived from a composite
section of detector meters. "The
power transmitted seems to be
gross electric current conveyed
by metallic cables. It is generated
through a crudely governed
process of continuous atomic
fission."
Farrell, himself appalled by
the information, still found himself
able to chuckle at Stryker's
bellow of consternation.
" Continuous fission? Good
God, only madmen would deliberately
run a risk like that!"
Farrell prodded him with
cheerful malice. "Why say mad men ? Maybe they're humanoid
aliens who thrive on hard radiation
and look on the danger of
being blown to hell in the middle
of the night as a satisfactory
risk."
"They're not alien," Gibson
said positively. "Their architecture
is Terran, and so is their
ship. The ship is incredibly
primitive, though; those batteries
of tubes at either end—"
"Are thrust reaction jets,"
Stryker finished in an awed
voice. "Primitive isn't the word,
Gib—the thing is prehistoric!
Rocket propulsion hasn't been
used in spacecraft since—how
long, Xav?"
Xavier supplied the information
with mechanical infallibility.
"Since the year 2100 when
the Ringwave propulsion-communication
principle was discovered.
That principle has served
men since."
Farrell stared in blank disbelief
at the anomalous craft on
the screen. Primitive, as Stryker
had said, was not the word
for it: clumsily ovoid, studded
with torpedo domes and turrets
and bristling at either end with
propulsion tubes, it lay at the
center of its square like a rusted
relic of a past largely destroyed
and all but forgotten. What a
magnificent disregard its builders
must have had, he thought,
for their lives and the genetic
purity of their posterity! The
sullen atomic fires banked in
that oxidizing hulk—
Stryker said plaintively, "If
you're right, Gib, then we're
more in the dark than ever. How
could a Terran-built ship eleven
hundred years old get here ?"
Gibson, absorbed in his chess-player's
contemplation of alternatives,
seemed hardly to hear
him.
"Logic or not-logic," Gibson
said. "If it's a Terran artifact,
we can discover the reason for
its presence. If not—"
" Any problem posed by one
group of human beings ," Stryker
quoted his Handbook, " can be
resolved by any other group, regardless
of ideology or conditioning,
because the basic
perceptive abilities of both must
be the same through identical
heredity ."
"If it's an imitation, and this
is another Hymenop experiment
in condition ecology, then we're
stumped to begin with," Gibson
finished. "Because we're not
equipped to evaluate the psychology
of alien motivation. We've
got to determine first which case
applies here."
He waited for Farrell's expected
irony, and when the
navigator forestalled him by remaining
grimly quiet, continued.
"The obvious premise is that
a Terran ship must have been
built by Terrans. Question: Was
it flown here, or built here?"
"It couldn't have been built
here," Stryker said. "Alphard
Six was surveyed just before the
Bees took over in 3025, and there
was nothing of the sort here
then. It couldn't have been built
during the two and a quarter
centuries since; it's obviously
much older than that. It was
flown here."
"We progress," Farrell said
dryly. "Now if you'll tell us how ,
we're ready to move."
"I think the ship was built on
Terra during the Twenty-second
Century," Gibson said calmly.
"The atomic wars during that
period destroyed practically all
historical records along with the
technology of the time, but I've
read well-authenticated reports
of atomic-driven ships leaving
Terra before then for the nearer
stars. The human race climbed
out of its pit again during the
Twenty-third Century and developed
the technology that gave
us the Ringwave. Certainly no
atomic-powered ships were built
after the wars—our records are
complete from that time."
Farrell shook his head at the
inference. "I've read any number
of fanciful romances on the
theme, Gib, but it won't stand
up in practice. No shipboard society
could last through a thousand-year
space voyage. It's a
physical and psychological impossibility.
There's got to be
some other explanation."
Gibson shrugged. "We can
only eliminate the least likely
alternatives and accept the simplest
one remaining."
"Then we can eliminate this
one now," Farrell said flatly. "It
entails a thousand-year voyage,
which is an impossibility for any
gross reaction drive; the application
of suspended animation
or longevity or a successive-generation
program, and a final
penetration of Hymenop-occupied
space to set up a colony under
the very antennae of the
Bees. Longevity wasn't developed
until around the year 3000—Lee
here was one of the first to
profit by it, if you remember—and
suspended animation is still
to come. So there's one theory
you can forget."
"Arthur's right," Stryker said
reluctantly. "An atomic-powered
ship couldn't have made such a
trip, Gib. And such a lineal-descendant
project couldn't have
lasted through forty generations,
speculative fiction to the
contrary—the later generations
would have been too far removed
in ideology and intent from
their ancestors. They'd have
adapted to shipboard life as the
norm. They'd have atrophied
physically, perhaps even have
mutated—"
"And they'd never have
fought past the Bees during the
Hymenop invasion and occupation,"
Farrell finished triumphantly.
"The Bees had better
detection equipment than we
had. They'd have picked this
ship up long before it reached
Alphard Six."
"But the ship wasn't here in
3000," Gibson said, "and it is
now. Therefore it must have arrived
at some time during the
two hundred years of Hymenop
occupation and evacuation."
Farrell, tangled in contradictions,
swore bitterly. "But
why should the Bees let them
through? The three domes on
Five are over two hundred years
old, which means that the Bees
were here before the ship came.
Why didn't they blast it or enslave
its crew?"
"We haven't touched on all the
possibilities," Gibson reminded
him. "We haven't even established
yet that these people were
never under Hymenop control.
Precedent won't hold always, and
there's no predicting nor evaluating
the motives of an alien
race. We never understood the
Hymenops because there's no
common ground of logic between
us. Why try to interpret their
intentions now?"
Farrell threw up his hands in
disgust. "Next you'll say this is
an ancient Terran expedition
that actually succeeded! There's
only one way to answer the
questions we've raised, and
that's to go down and see for
ourselves. Ready, Xav?"
But uncertainty nagged uneasily
at him when Farrell found
himself alone in the helihopper
with the forest flowing beneath
like a leafy river and Xavier's
scouter disappearing bulletlike
into the dusk ahead.
We never found a colony so
advanced, Farrell thought. Suppose
this is a Hymenop experiment
that really paid off? The
Bees did some weird and wonderful
things with human
guinea pigs—what if they've
created the ultimate booby trap
here, and primed it with conditioned
myrmidons in our own
form?
Suppose, he thought—and derided
himself for thinking it—one
of those suicidal old interstellar
ventures did succeed?
Xavier's voice, a mellow
drone from the helihopper's
Ringwave-powered visicom, cut
sharply into his musing. "The
ship has discovered the scouter
and is training an electronic
beam upon it. My instruments
record an electromagnetic vibration
pattern of low power but
rapidly varying frequency. The
operation seems pointless."
Stryker's voice followed, querulous
with worry: "I'd better
pull Xav back. It may be something
lethal."
"Don't," Gibson's baritone advised.
Surprisingly, there was
excitement in the engineer's
voice. "I think they're trying to
communicate with us."
Farrell was on the point of
demanding acidly to know how
one went about communicating
by means of a fluctuating electric
field when the unexpected
cessation of forest diverted his
attention. The helihopper scudded
over a cultivated area
of considerable extent, fields
stretching below in a vague random
checkerboard of lighter and
darker earth, an undefined cluster
of buildings at their center.
There was a central bonfire that
burned like a wild red eye
against the lower gloom, and in
its plunging ruddy glow he made
out an urgent scurrying of shadowy
figures.
"I'm passing over a hamlet,"
Farrell reported. "The one nearest
the city, I think. There's
something odd going on
down—"
Catastrophe struck so suddenly
that he was caught completely
unprepared. The helihopper's
flimsy carriage bucked and
crumpled. There was a blinding
flare of electric discharge, a
pungent stink of ozone and a
stunning shock that flung him
headlong into darkness.
He awoke slowly with a brutal
headache and a conviction of
nightmare heightened by the
outlandish tone of his surroundings.
He lay on a narrow bed in
a whitely antiseptic infirmary,
an oblong metal cell cluttered
with a grimly utilitarian array
of tables and lockers and chests.
The lighting was harsh and
overbright and the air hung
thick with pungent unfamiliar
chemical odors. From somewhere,
far off yet at the same
time as near as the bulkhead
above him, came the unceasing
drone of machinery.
Farrell sat up, groaning,
when full consciousness made his
position clear. He had been shot
down by God knew what sort of
devastating unorthodox weapon
and was a prisoner in the
grounded ship.
At his rising, a white-smocked
fat man with anachronistic spectacles
and close-cropped gray
hair came into the room, moving
with the professional assurance
of a medic. The man stopped
short at Farrell's stare and
spoke; his words were utterly
unintelligible, but his gesture
was unmistakable.
Farrell followed him dumbly
out of the infirmary and down
a bare corridor whose metal
floor rang coldly underfoot. An
open port near the corridor's end
relieved the blankness of wall
and let in a flood of reddish Alphardian
sunlight; Farrell slowed
to look out, wondering how
long he had lain unconscious,
and felt panic knife at him
when he saw Xavier's scouter lying,
port open and undefended,
on the square outside.
The mechanical had been as
easily taken as himself, then.
Stryker and Gibson, for all their
professional caution, would fare
no better—they could not have
overlooked the capture of Farrell
and Xavier, and when they
tried as a matter of course to
rescue them the Marco would be
struck down in turn by the same
weapon.
The fat medic turned and
said something urgent in his
unintelligible tongue. Farrell,
dazed by the enormity of what
had happened, followed without
protest into an intersecting way
that led through a bewildering
succession of storage rooms and
hydroponics gardens, through a
small gymnasium fitted with
physical training equipment in
graduated sizes and finally into
a soundproofed place that could
have been nothing but a nursery.
The implication behind its
presence stopped Farrell short.
"A creche ," he said, stunned.
He had a wild vision of endless
generations of children growing
up in this dim and stuffy room,
to be taught from their first
toddling steps the functions they
must fulfill before the venture
of which they were a part could
be consummated.
One of those old ventures had succeeded, he thought, and was
awed by the daring of that thousand-year
odyssey. The realization
left him more alarmed than
before—for what technical marvels
might not an isolated group
of such dogged specialists have
developed during a millennium
of application?
Such a weapon as had brought
down the helihopper and scouter
was patently beyond reach of his
own latter-day technology. Perhaps,
he thought, its possession
explained the presence of these
people here in the first stronghold
of the Hymenops; perhaps
they had even fought and defeated
the Bees on their own invaded
ground.
He followed his white-smocked
guide through a power room
where great crude generators
whirred ponderously, pouring
out gross electric current into
arm-thick cables. They were
nearing the bow of the ship
when they passed by another
open port and Farrell, glancing
out over the lowered rampway,
saw that his fears for Stryker
and Gibson had been well
grounded.
The Marco Four , ports open,
lay grounded outside.
Farrell could not have said,
later, whether his next move
was planned or reflexive. The
whole desperate issue seemed to
hang suspended for a breathless
moment upon a hair-fine edge of
decision, and in that instant he
made his bid.
Without pausing in his stride
he sprang out and through the
port and down the steep plane
of the ramp. The rough stone
pavement of the square drummed
underfoot; sore muscles
tore at him, and weakness was
like a weight about his neck. He
expected momentarily to be
blasted out of existence.
He reached the Marco Four with the startled shouts of his
guide ringing unintelligibly in
his ears. The port yawned; he
plunged inside and stabbed at
controls without waiting to seat
himself. The ports swung shut.
The ship darted up under his
manipulation and arrowed into
space with an acceleration that
sprung his knees and made his
vision swim blackly.
He was so weak with strain
and with the success of his coup
that he all but fainted when
Stryker, his scanty hair tousled
and his fat face comical with bewilderment,
stumbled out of his
sleeping cubicle and bellowed at
him.
"What the hell are you doing,
Arthur? Take us down!"
Farrell gaped at him, speechless.
Stryker lumbered past him
and took the controls, spiraling
the Marco Four down. Men
swarmed outside the ports when
the Reclamations craft settled
gently to the square again. Gibson
and Xavier reached the ship
first; Gibson came inside quickly,
leaving the mechanical outside
making patient explanations
to an excited group of Alphardians.
Gibson put a reassuring hand
on Farrell's arm. "It's all right,
Arthur. There's no trouble."
Farrell said dumbly, "I don't
understand. They didn't shoot
you and Xav down too?"
It was Gibson's turn to stare.
"No one shot you down! These
people are primitive enough to
use metallic power lines to
carry electricity to their hamlets,
an anachronism you forgot
last night. You piloted the helihopper
into one of those lines,
and the crash put you out for
the rest of the night and most
of today. These Alphardians are
friendly, so desperately happy to
be found again that it's really
pathetic."
" Friendly? That torpedo—"
"It wasn't a torpedo at all,"
Stryker put in. Understanding
of the error under which Farrell
had labored erased his
earlier irritation, and he chuckled
commiseratingly. "They had
one small boat left for emergency
missions, and sent it up to
contact us in the fear that we
might overlook their settlement
and move on. The boat was
atomic powered, and our shield
screens set off its engines."
Farrell dropped into a chair at
the chart table, limp with reaction.
He was suddenly exhausted,
and his head ached dully.
"We cracked the communications
problem early last night,"
Gibson said. "These people use
an ancient system of electromagnetic
wave propagation called
frequency modulation, and once
Lee and I rigged up a suitable
transceiver the rest was simple.
Both Xav and I recognized the
old language; the natives reported
your accident, and we came
down at once."
"They really came from Terra?
They lived through a thousand
years of flight?"
"The ship left Terra for
Sirius in 2171," Gibson said.
"But not with these people
aboard, or their ancestors. That
expedition perished after less
than a light-year when its
hydroponics system failed. The
Hymenops found the ship derelict
when they invaded us, and
brought it to Alphard Six in
what was probably their first experiment
with human subjects.
The ship's log shows clearly
what happened to the original
complement. The rest is deducible
from the situation here."
Farrell put his hands to his
temples and groaned. "The crash
must have scrambled my wits.
Gib, where did they come from?"
"From one of the first peripheral
colonies conquered by the
Bees," Gibson said patiently.
"The Hymenops were long-range
planners, remember, and masters
of hypnotic conditioning. They
stocked the ship with a captive
crew of Terrans conditioned to
believe themselves descendants
of the original crew, and
grounded it here in disabled
condition. They left for Alphard
Five then, to watch developments.
"Succeeding generations of
colonists grew up accepting the
fact that their ship had missed
Sirius and made planetfall here—they
still don't know where
they really are—by luck. They
never knew about the Hymenops,
and they've struggled along
with an inadequate technology in
the hope that a later expedition
would find them. They found the
truth hard to take, but they're
eager to enjoy the fruits of Terran
assimilation."
Stryker, grinning, brought
Farrell a frosted drink that tinkled
invitingly. "An unusually
fortunate ending to a Hymenop
experiment," he said. "These
people progressed normally because
they've been let alone. Reorienting
them will be a simple
matter; they'll be properly spoiled
colonists within another generation."
Farrell sipped his drink appreciatively.
"But I don't see why the Bees
should go to such trouble to deceive
these people. Why did they
sit back and let them grow as
they pleased, Gib? It doesn't
make sense!"
"But it does, for once," Gibson
said. "The Bees set up this
colony as a control unit to study
the species they were invading,
and they had to give their
specimens a normal—if obsolete—background
in order to determine
their capabilities. The fact
that their experiment didn't tell
them what they wanted to know
may have had a direct bearing
on their decision to pull out."
Farrell shook his head. "It's
a reverse application, isn't it of
the old saw about Terrans being
incapable of understanding an
alien culture?"
"Of course," said Gibson, surprised.
"It's obvious enough,
surely—hard as they tried, the
Bees never understood us
either."
THE END
Question:
Who is Stryker and what are his characteristics?
Answer:
|
[
"Stryker is a crew member of the Marco Four, nominally captain of the group sent on a mission to locate the Terran slaves that were abandoned by the Bees. He seems experienced, calm, and disciplined, always following the Reclamation Handbook. Stryker has fought the Hymenops and spent a lot of time trying to understand their behavior. He values his team and doesn’t want to risk them or their ship in the search for the unknown and, for example, was ready to pull Xavier back when they just detected the waves, fearing it could be something lethal. He appreciates Farrell’s eagerness to find the new and enjoys bantering with him; he also respects other crew members, like Gibson and Xavier, and attentively listens to them when they discuss the origin of the atomic-powered ship. Stryker is intelligent enough to determine that this ancient ship couldn’t have been constructed on this planet - it was brought from somewhere else.\n",
"Lee Stryker is one of the other members of the Terran Reclamations crew. He is the one with experience fighting the Hymenops and always cautious of any remains of the enemy. Stryker is also very careful too, constantly citing lines from the Reclamations Handbook on the ship or to Farrell. He enjoys proving Farrell wrong as well, knowing how impulsive the younger member is in most situations. Stryker’s cautiousness does come in handy, as they do get into an explosion later on while in the atmosphere of the Alphard Six. Even though he is very cautious and knowledgeable, there are times where he becomes impatient out of curiosity. However, Stryker is a lot more reasonable than Farrell, rushing to land the ship again after Farrell starts it. He takes the time to explain to Farrell about their current situation as well. ",
"Stryker is the captain of the Marco Four and the crew. He is described to be the most knowledgeable, not only in regard to the Reclamations Handbook but also first hand, as he had fought the Hymenops. Physically, he has a bare fringe and a fat face. \n\nHe is intelligent as he leads the crew in theorising multiple explanations for the explosion as well as the potential inhabitants of the planet they encounter, as well as later deescalating Farrell's fear later on in the story. ",
"Stryker is the captain of the Terran Reclamation crew Marco Four. He has a Reclamations Handbook that he constantly checks. He fought with the Bees before and learned that humans and the Bees, an alien species, would never understand each other. He is also called Lee by Farrell. He likes to tease Farrell, the youngest in the crew, to teach him the importance of abiding Reclamations Handbook for safety. He is tolerant and communicative that whenever Farrell acts impulsively or argues with other crew members, he will ease Farrell’s irritation and negotiate the solution among different ideas from the crew members. He is rational and practical that when all crew members theorize the possible situation after being struck, he concludes that they should investigate the land first-handly instead of denying every hypothesis."
] |
24949
|
"Any problem posed by one group of
human beings can be resolved by any
other group." That's what the Handbook
said. But did that include primitive
humans? Or the Bees? Or a ...
CONTROL GROUP
By ROGER DEE
The
cool green disk of Alphard
Six on the screen was
infinitely welcome after the arid
desolation and stinking swamplands
of the inner planets, an
airy jewel of a world that might
have been designed specifically
for the hard-earned month of
rest ahead. Navigator Farrell,
youngest and certainly most impulsive
of the three-man Terran
Reclamations crew, would have
set the Marco Four down at
once but for the greater caution
of Stryker, nominally captain of
the group, and of Gibson, engineer,
and linguist. Xavier, the
ship's little mechanical, had—as
was usual and proper—no voice
in the matter.
"Reconnaissance spiral first,
Arthur," Stryker said firmly. He
chuckled at Farrell's instant
scowl, his little eyes twinkling
and his naked paunch quaking
over the belt of his shipboard
shorts. "Chapter One, Subsection
Five, Paragraph Twenty-seven: No planetfall on an unreclaimed
world shall be deemed
safe without proper— "
Farrell, as Stryker had expected,
interrupted with characteristic
impatience. "Do you sleep with that damned Reclamations
Handbook, Lee? Alphard Six
isn't an unreclaimed world—it
was never colonized before the
Hymenop invasion back in 3025,
so why should it be inhabited
now?"
Gibson, who for four hours
had not looked up from his interminable
chess game with
Xavier, paused with a beleaguered
knight in one blunt brown
hand.
"No point in taking chances,"
Gibson said in his neutral baritone.
He shrugged thick bare
shoulders, his humorless black-browed
face unmoved, when
Farrell included him in his
scowl. "We're two hundred twenty-six
light-years from Sol, at
the old limits of Terran expansion,
and there's no knowing
what we may turn up here. Alphard's
was one of the first systems
the Bees took over. It must
have been one of the last to be
abandoned when they pulled back
to 70 Ophiuchi."
"And I think you live for the
day," Farrell said acidly, "when
we'll stumble across a functioning
dome of live, buzzing Hymenops.
Damn it, Gib, the Bees
pulled out a hundred years ago,
before you and I were born—neither
of us ever saw a Hymenop,
and never will!"
"But I saw them," Stryker
said. "I fought them for the better
part of the century they were
here, and I learned there's no
predicting nor understanding
them. We never knew why they
came nor why they gave up and
left. How can we know whether
they'd leave a rear-guard or
booby trap here?"
He put a paternal hand on
Farrell's shoulder, understanding
the younger man's eagerness
and knowing that their close-knit
team would have been the
more poorly balanced without it.
"Gib's right," he said. He
nearly added as usual . "We're on
rest leave at the moment, yes,
but our mission is still to find
Terran colonies enslaved and
abandoned by the Bees, not to
risk our necks and a valuable
Reorientations ship by landing
blind on an unobserved planet.
We're too close already. Cut in
your shields and find a reconnaissance
spiral, will you?"
Grumbling, Farrell punched
coordinates on the Ringwave
board that lifted the Marco Four out of her descent and restored
the bluish enveloping haze of
her repellors.
Stryker's caution was justified
on the instant. The speeding
streamlined shape that had flashed
up unobserved from below
swerved sharply and exploded in
a cataclysmic blaze of atomic
fire that rocked the ship wildly
and flung the three men to the
floor in a jangling roar of
alarms.
"So the Handbook tacticians
knew what they were about,"
Stryker said minutes later. Deliberately
he adopted the smug
tone best calculated to sting Farrell
out of his first self-reproach,
and grinned when the navigator
bristled defensively. "Some of
their enjoinders seem a little
stuffy and obvious at times, but
they're eminently sensible."
When Farrell refused to be
baited Stryker turned to Gibson,
who was busily assessing the
damage done to the ship's more
fragile equipment, and to Xavier,
who searched the planet's
surface with the ship's magnoscanner.
The Marco Four , Ringwave
generators humming gently,
hung at the moment just
inside the orbit of Alphard Six's
single dun-colored moon.
Gibson put down a test meter
with an air of finality.
"Nothing damaged but the
Zero Interval Transfer computer.
I can realign that in a couple
of hours, but it'll have to be
done before we hit Transfer
again."
Stryker looked dubious.
"What if the issue is forced before
the ZIT unit is repaired?
Suppose they come up after us?"
"I doubt that they can. Any
installation crudely enough
equipped to trust in guided missiles
is hardly likely to have developed
efficient space craft."
Stryker was not reassured.
"That torpedo of theirs was
deadly enough," he said. "And
its nature reflects the nature of
the people who made it. Any race
vicious enough to use atomic
charges is too dangerous to
trifle with." Worry made comical
creases in his fat, good-humored
face. "We'll have to find
out who they are and why
they're here, you know."
"They can't be Hymenops,"
Gibson said promptly. "First,
because the Bees pinned their
faith on Ringwave energy fields,
as we did, rather than on missiles.
Second, because there's no
dome on Six."
"There were three empty
domes on Five, which is a desert
planet," Farrell pointed out.
"Why didn't they settle Six? It's
a more habitable world."
Gibson shrugged. "I know the
Bees always erected domes on
every planet they colonized, Arthur,
but precedent is a fallible
tool. And it's even more firmly
established that there's no possibility
of our rationalizing the
motivations of a culture as alien
as the Hymenops'—we've been
over that argument a hundred
times on other reclaimed
worlds."
"But this was never an unreclaimed
world," Farrell said
with the faint malice of one too
recently caught in the wrong.
"Alphard Six was surveyed and
seeded with Terran bacteria
around the year 3000, but the
Bees invaded before we could
colonize. And that means we'll
have to rule out any resurgent
colonial group down there, because
Six never had a colony in
the beginning."
"The Bees have been gone for
over a hundred years," Stryker
said. "Colonists might have migrated
from another Terran-occupied
planet."
Gibson disagreed.
"We've touched at every inhabited
world in this sector, Lee,
and not one surviving colony has
developed space travel on its
own. The Hymenops had a hundred
years to condition their human
slaves to ignorance of
everything beyond their immediate
environment—the motives
behind that conditioning usually
escape us, but that's beside the
point—and they did a thorough
job of it. The colonists have had
no more than a century of freedom
since the Bees pulled out,
and four generations simply
isn't enough time for any subjugated
culture to climb from
slavery to interstellar flight."
Stryker made a padding turn
about the control room, tugging
unhappily at the scanty fringe
of hair the years had left him.
"If they're neither Hymenops
nor resurgent colonists," he said,
"then there's only one choice remaining—they're
aliens from a
system we haven't reached yet,
beyond the old sphere of Terran
exploration. We always assumed
that we'd find other races out
here someday, and that they'd
be as different from us in form
and motivation as the Hymenops.
Why not now?"
Gibson said seriously, "Not
probable, Lee. The same objection
that rules out the Bees applies
to any trans-Alphardian
culture—they'd have to be beyond
the atomic fission stage,
else they'd never have attempted
interstellar flight. The Ringwave
with its Zero Interval Transfer
principle and instantaneous communications
applications is the
only answer to long-range travel,
and if they'd had that they
wouldn't have bothered with
atomics."
Stryker turned on him almost
angrily. "If they're not Hymenops
or humans or aliens, then
what in God's name are they?"
"Aye, there's the rub," Farrell
said, quoting a passage
whose aptness had somehow seen
it through a dozen reorganizations
of insular tongue and a
final translation to universal
Terran. "If they're none of those
three, we've only one conclusion
left. There's no one down there
at all—we're victims of the first
joint hallucination in psychiatric
history."
Stryker threw up his hands in
surrender. "We can't identify
them by theorizing, and that
brings us down to the business
of first-hand investigation.
Who's going to bell the cat this
time?"
"I'd like to go," Gibson said
at once. "The ZIT computer can
wait."
Stryker vetoed his offer as
promptly. "No, the ZIT comes
first. We may have to run for it,
and we can't set up a Transfer
jump without the computer. It's
got to be me or Arthur."
Farrell felt the familiar chill
of uneasiness that inevitably
preceded this moment of decision.
He was not lacking in courage,
else the circumstances under
which he had worked for the
past ten years—the sometimes
perilous, sometimes downright
charnel conditions left by the
fleeing Hymenop conquerors—would
have broken him long
ago. But that same hard experience
had honed rather than
blunted the edge of his imagination,
and the prospect of a close-quarters
stalking of an unknown
and patently hostile force was
anything but attractive.
"You two did the field work
on the last location," he said.
"It's high time I took my turn—and
God knows I'd go mad if
I had to stay inship and listen
to Lee memorizing his Handbook
subsections or to Gib practicing
dead languages with Xavier."
Stryker laughed for the first
time since the explosion that
had so nearly wrecked the Marco
Four .
"Good enough. Though it
wouldn't be more diverting to
listen for hours to you improvising
enharmonic variations on
the Lament for Old Terra with
your accordion."
Gibson, characteristically, had
a refinement to offer.
"They'll be alerted down there
for a reconnaissance sally," he
said. "Why not let Xavier take
the scouter down for overt diversion,
and drop Arthur off in
the helihopper for a low-level
check?"
Stryker looked at Farrell. "All
right, Arthur?"
"Good enough," Farrell said.
And to Xavier, who had not
moved from his post at the magnoscanner:
"How does it look,
Xav? Have you pinned down
their base yet?"
The mechanical answered him
in a voice as smooth and clear—and
as inflectionless—as a 'cello
note. "The planet seems uninhabited
except for a large island
some three hundred miles in
diameter. There are twenty-seven
small agrarian hamlets surrounded
by cultivated fields.
There is one city of perhaps a
thousand buildings with a central
square. In the square rests
a grounded spaceship of approximately
ten times the bulk
of the Marco Four ."
They crowded about the vision
screen, jostling Xavier's jointed
gray shape in their interest. The
central city lay in minutest detail
before them, the battered
hulk of the grounded ship glinting
rustily in the late afternoon
sunlight. Streets radiated away
from the square in orderly succession,
the whole so clearly
depicted that they could see the
throngs of people surging up
and down, tiny foreshortened
faces turned toward the sky.
"At least they're human,"
Farrell said. Relief replaced in
some measure his earlier uneasiness.
"Which means that they're
Terran, and can be dealt with
according to Reclamations routine.
Is that hulk spaceworthy,
Xav?"
Xavier's mellow drone assumed
the convention vibrato that
indicated stark puzzlement. "Its
breached hull makes the ship incapable
of flight. Apparently it
is used only to supply power to
the outlying hamlets."
The mechanical put a flexible
gray finger upon an indicator
graph derived from a composite
section of detector meters. "The
power transmitted seems to be
gross electric current conveyed
by metallic cables. It is generated
through a crudely governed
process of continuous atomic
fission."
Farrell, himself appalled by
the information, still found himself
able to chuckle at Stryker's
bellow of consternation.
" Continuous fission? Good
God, only madmen would deliberately
run a risk like that!"
Farrell prodded him with
cheerful malice. "Why say mad men ? Maybe they're humanoid
aliens who thrive on hard radiation
and look on the danger of
being blown to hell in the middle
of the night as a satisfactory
risk."
"They're not alien," Gibson
said positively. "Their architecture
is Terran, and so is their
ship. The ship is incredibly
primitive, though; those batteries
of tubes at either end—"
"Are thrust reaction jets,"
Stryker finished in an awed
voice. "Primitive isn't the word,
Gib—the thing is prehistoric!
Rocket propulsion hasn't been
used in spacecraft since—how
long, Xav?"
Xavier supplied the information
with mechanical infallibility.
"Since the year 2100 when
the Ringwave propulsion-communication
principle was discovered.
That principle has served
men since."
Farrell stared in blank disbelief
at the anomalous craft on
the screen. Primitive, as Stryker
had said, was not the word
for it: clumsily ovoid, studded
with torpedo domes and turrets
and bristling at either end with
propulsion tubes, it lay at the
center of its square like a rusted
relic of a past largely destroyed
and all but forgotten. What a
magnificent disregard its builders
must have had, he thought,
for their lives and the genetic
purity of their posterity! The
sullen atomic fires banked in
that oxidizing hulk—
Stryker said plaintively, "If
you're right, Gib, then we're
more in the dark than ever. How
could a Terran-built ship eleven
hundred years old get here ?"
Gibson, absorbed in his chess-player's
contemplation of alternatives,
seemed hardly to hear
him.
"Logic or not-logic," Gibson
said. "If it's a Terran artifact,
we can discover the reason for
its presence. If not—"
" Any problem posed by one
group of human beings ," Stryker
quoted his Handbook, " can be
resolved by any other group, regardless
of ideology or conditioning,
because the basic
perceptive abilities of both must
be the same through identical
heredity ."
"If it's an imitation, and this
is another Hymenop experiment
in condition ecology, then we're
stumped to begin with," Gibson
finished. "Because we're not
equipped to evaluate the psychology
of alien motivation. We've
got to determine first which case
applies here."
He waited for Farrell's expected
irony, and when the
navigator forestalled him by remaining
grimly quiet, continued.
"The obvious premise is that
a Terran ship must have been
built by Terrans. Question: Was
it flown here, or built here?"
"It couldn't have been built
here," Stryker said. "Alphard
Six was surveyed just before the
Bees took over in 3025, and there
was nothing of the sort here
then. It couldn't have been built
during the two and a quarter
centuries since; it's obviously
much older than that. It was
flown here."
"We progress," Farrell said
dryly. "Now if you'll tell us how ,
we're ready to move."
"I think the ship was built on
Terra during the Twenty-second
Century," Gibson said calmly.
"The atomic wars during that
period destroyed practically all
historical records along with the
technology of the time, but I've
read well-authenticated reports
of atomic-driven ships leaving
Terra before then for the nearer
stars. The human race climbed
out of its pit again during the
Twenty-third Century and developed
the technology that gave
us the Ringwave. Certainly no
atomic-powered ships were built
after the wars—our records are
complete from that time."
Farrell shook his head at the
inference. "I've read any number
of fanciful romances on the
theme, Gib, but it won't stand
up in practice. No shipboard society
could last through a thousand-year
space voyage. It's a
physical and psychological impossibility.
There's got to be
some other explanation."
Gibson shrugged. "We can
only eliminate the least likely
alternatives and accept the simplest
one remaining."
"Then we can eliminate this
one now," Farrell said flatly. "It
entails a thousand-year voyage,
which is an impossibility for any
gross reaction drive; the application
of suspended animation
or longevity or a successive-generation
program, and a final
penetration of Hymenop-occupied
space to set up a colony under
the very antennae of the
Bees. Longevity wasn't developed
until around the year 3000—Lee
here was one of the first to
profit by it, if you remember—and
suspended animation is still
to come. So there's one theory
you can forget."
"Arthur's right," Stryker said
reluctantly. "An atomic-powered
ship couldn't have made such a
trip, Gib. And such a lineal-descendant
project couldn't have
lasted through forty generations,
speculative fiction to the
contrary—the later generations
would have been too far removed
in ideology and intent from
their ancestors. They'd have
adapted to shipboard life as the
norm. They'd have atrophied
physically, perhaps even have
mutated—"
"And they'd never have
fought past the Bees during the
Hymenop invasion and occupation,"
Farrell finished triumphantly.
"The Bees had better
detection equipment than we
had. They'd have picked this
ship up long before it reached
Alphard Six."
"But the ship wasn't here in
3000," Gibson said, "and it is
now. Therefore it must have arrived
at some time during the
two hundred years of Hymenop
occupation and evacuation."
Farrell, tangled in contradictions,
swore bitterly. "But
why should the Bees let them
through? The three domes on
Five are over two hundred years
old, which means that the Bees
were here before the ship came.
Why didn't they blast it or enslave
its crew?"
"We haven't touched on all the
possibilities," Gibson reminded
him. "We haven't even established
yet that these people were
never under Hymenop control.
Precedent won't hold always, and
there's no predicting nor evaluating
the motives of an alien
race. We never understood the
Hymenops because there's no
common ground of logic between
us. Why try to interpret their
intentions now?"
Farrell threw up his hands in
disgust. "Next you'll say this is
an ancient Terran expedition
that actually succeeded! There's
only one way to answer the
questions we've raised, and
that's to go down and see for
ourselves. Ready, Xav?"
But uncertainty nagged uneasily
at him when Farrell found
himself alone in the helihopper
with the forest flowing beneath
like a leafy river and Xavier's
scouter disappearing bulletlike
into the dusk ahead.
We never found a colony so
advanced, Farrell thought. Suppose
this is a Hymenop experiment
that really paid off? The
Bees did some weird and wonderful
things with human
guinea pigs—what if they've
created the ultimate booby trap
here, and primed it with conditioned
myrmidons in our own
form?
Suppose, he thought—and derided
himself for thinking it—one
of those suicidal old interstellar
ventures did succeed?
Xavier's voice, a mellow
drone from the helihopper's
Ringwave-powered visicom, cut
sharply into his musing. "The
ship has discovered the scouter
and is training an electronic
beam upon it. My instruments
record an electromagnetic vibration
pattern of low power but
rapidly varying frequency. The
operation seems pointless."
Stryker's voice followed, querulous
with worry: "I'd better
pull Xav back. It may be something
lethal."
"Don't," Gibson's baritone advised.
Surprisingly, there was
excitement in the engineer's
voice. "I think they're trying to
communicate with us."
Farrell was on the point of
demanding acidly to know how
one went about communicating
by means of a fluctuating electric
field when the unexpected
cessation of forest diverted his
attention. The helihopper scudded
over a cultivated area
of considerable extent, fields
stretching below in a vague random
checkerboard of lighter and
darker earth, an undefined cluster
of buildings at their center.
There was a central bonfire that
burned like a wild red eye
against the lower gloom, and in
its plunging ruddy glow he made
out an urgent scurrying of shadowy
figures.
"I'm passing over a hamlet,"
Farrell reported. "The one nearest
the city, I think. There's
something odd going on
down—"
Catastrophe struck so suddenly
that he was caught completely
unprepared. The helihopper's
flimsy carriage bucked and
crumpled. There was a blinding
flare of electric discharge, a
pungent stink of ozone and a
stunning shock that flung him
headlong into darkness.
He awoke slowly with a brutal
headache and a conviction of
nightmare heightened by the
outlandish tone of his surroundings.
He lay on a narrow bed in
a whitely antiseptic infirmary,
an oblong metal cell cluttered
with a grimly utilitarian array
of tables and lockers and chests.
The lighting was harsh and
overbright and the air hung
thick with pungent unfamiliar
chemical odors. From somewhere,
far off yet at the same
time as near as the bulkhead
above him, came the unceasing
drone of machinery.
Farrell sat up, groaning,
when full consciousness made his
position clear. He had been shot
down by God knew what sort of
devastating unorthodox weapon
and was a prisoner in the
grounded ship.
At his rising, a white-smocked
fat man with anachronistic spectacles
and close-cropped gray
hair came into the room, moving
with the professional assurance
of a medic. The man stopped
short at Farrell's stare and
spoke; his words were utterly
unintelligible, but his gesture
was unmistakable.
Farrell followed him dumbly
out of the infirmary and down
a bare corridor whose metal
floor rang coldly underfoot. An
open port near the corridor's end
relieved the blankness of wall
and let in a flood of reddish Alphardian
sunlight; Farrell slowed
to look out, wondering how
long he had lain unconscious,
and felt panic knife at him
when he saw Xavier's scouter lying,
port open and undefended,
on the square outside.
The mechanical had been as
easily taken as himself, then.
Stryker and Gibson, for all their
professional caution, would fare
no better—they could not have
overlooked the capture of Farrell
and Xavier, and when they
tried as a matter of course to
rescue them the Marco would be
struck down in turn by the same
weapon.
The fat medic turned and
said something urgent in his
unintelligible tongue. Farrell,
dazed by the enormity of what
had happened, followed without
protest into an intersecting way
that led through a bewildering
succession of storage rooms and
hydroponics gardens, through a
small gymnasium fitted with
physical training equipment in
graduated sizes and finally into
a soundproofed place that could
have been nothing but a nursery.
The implication behind its
presence stopped Farrell short.
"A creche ," he said, stunned.
He had a wild vision of endless
generations of children growing
up in this dim and stuffy room,
to be taught from their first
toddling steps the functions they
must fulfill before the venture
of which they were a part could
be consummated.
One of those old ventures had succeeded, he thought, and was
awed by the daring of that thousand-year
odyssey. The realization
left him more alarmed than
before—for what technical marvels
might not an isolated group
of such dogged specialists have
developed during a millennium
of application?
Such a weapon as had brought
down the helihopper and scouter
was patently beyond reach of his
own latter-day technology. Perhaps,
he thought, its possession
explained the presence of these
people here in the first stronghold
of the Hymenops; perhaps
they had even fought and defeated
the Bees on their own invaded
ground.
He followed his white-smocked
guide through a power room
where great crude generators
whirred ponderously, pouring
out gross electric current into
arm-thick cables. They were
nearing the bow of the ship
when they passed by another
open port and Farrell, glancing
out over the lowered rampway,
saw that his fears for Stryker
and Gibson had been well
grounded.
The Marco Four , ports open,
lay grounded outside.
Farrell could not have said,
later, whether his next move
was planned or reflexive. The
whole desperate issue seemed to
hang suspended for a breathless
moment upon a hair-fine edge of
decision, and in that instant he
made his bid.
Without pausing in his stride
he sprang out and through the
port and down the steep plane
of the ramp. The rough stone
pavement of the square drummed
underfoot; sore muscles
tore at him, and weakness was
like a weight about his neck. He
expected momentarily to be
blasted out of existence.
He reached the Marco Four with the startled shouts of his
guide ringing unintelligibly in
his ears. The port yawned; he
plunged inside and stabbed at
controls without waiting to seat
himself. The ports swung shut.
The ship darted up under his
manipulation and arrowed into
space with an acceleration that
sprung his knees and made his
vision swim blackly.
He was so weak with strain
and with the success of his coup
that he all but fainted when
Stryker, his scanty hair tousled
and his fat face comical with bewilderment,
stumbled out of his
sleeping cubicle and bellowed at
him.
"What the hell are you doing,
Arthur? Take us down!"
Farrell gaped at him, speechless.
Stryker lumbered past him
and took the controls, spiraling
the Marco Four down. Men
swarmed outside the ports when
the Reclamations craft settled
gently to the square again. Gibson
and Xavier reached the ship
first; Gibson came inside quickly,
leaving the mechanical outside
making patient explanations
to an excited group of Alphardians.
Gibson put a reassuring hand
on Farrell's arm. "It's all right,
Arthur. There's no trouble."
Farrell said dumbly, "I don't
understand. They didn't shoot
you and Xav down too?"
It was Gibson's turn to stare.
"No one shot you down! These
people are primitive enough to
use metallic power lines to
carry electricity to their hamlets,
an anachronism you forgot
last night. You piloted the helihopper
into one of those lines,
and the crash put you out for
the rest of the night and most
of today. These Alphardians are
friendly, so desperately happy to
be found again that it's really
pathetic."
" Friendly? That torpedo—"
"It wasn't a torpedo at all,"
Stryker put in. Understanding
of the error under which Farrell
had labored erased his
earlier irritation, and he chuckled
commiseratingly. "They had
one small boat left for emergency
missions, and sent it up to
contact us in the fear that we
might overlook their settlement
and move on. The boat was
atomic powered, and our shield
screens set off its engines."
Farrell dropped into a chair at
the chart table, limp with reaction.
He was suddenly exhausted,
and his head ached dully.
"We cracked the communications
problem early last night,"
Gibson said. "These people use
an ancient system of electromagnetic
wave propagation called
frequency modulation, and once
Lee and I rigged up a suitable
transceiver the rest was simple.
Both Xav and I recognized the
old language; the natives reported
your accident, and we came
down at once."
"They really came from Terra?
They lived through a thousand
years of flight?"
"The ship left Terra for
Sirius in 2171," Gibson said.
"But not with these people
aboard, or their ancestors. That
expedition perished after less
than a light-year when its
hydroponics system failed. The
Hymenops found the ship derelict
when they invaded us, and
brought it to Alphard Six in
what was probably their first experiment
with human subjects.
The ship's log shows clearly
what happened to the original
complement. The rest is deducible
from the situation here."
Farrell put his hands to his
temples and groaned. "The crash
must have scrambled my wits.
Gib, where did they come from?"
"From one of the first peripheral
colonies conquered by the
Bees," Gibson said patiently.
"The Hymenops were long-range
planners, remember, and masters
of hypnotic conditioning. They
stocked the ship with a captive
crew of Terrans conditioned to
believe themselves descendants
of the original crew, and
grounded it here in disabled
condition. They left for Alphard
Five then, to watch developments.
"Succeeding generations of
colonists grew up accepting the
fact that their ship had missed
Sirius and made planetfall here—they
still don't know where
they really are—by luck. They
never knew about the Hymenops,
and they've struggled along
with an inadequate technology in
the hope that a later expedition
would find them. They found the
truth hard to take, but they're
eager to enjoy the fruits of Terran
assimilation."
Stryker, grinning, brought
Farrell a frosted drink that tinkled
invitingly. "An unusually
fortunate ending to a Hymenop
experiment," he said. "These
people progressed normally because
they've been let alone. Reorienting
them will be a simple
matter; they'll be properly spoiled
colonists within another generation."
Farrell sipped his drink appreciatively.
"But I don't see why the Bees
should go to such trouble to deceive
these people. Why did they
sit back and let them grow as
they pleased, Gib? It doesn't
make sense!"
"But it does, for once," Gibson
said. "The Bees set up this
colony as a control unit to study
the species they were invading,
and they had to give their
specimens a normal—if obsolete—background
in order to determine
their capabilities. The fact
that their experiment didn't tell
them what they wanted to know
may have had a direct bearing
on their decision to pull out."
Farrell shook his head. "It's
a reverse application, isn't it of
the old saw about Terrans being
incapable of understanding an
alien culture?"
"Of course," said Gibson, surprised.
"It's obvious enough,
surely—hard as they tried, the
Bees never understood us
either."
THE END
|
Describe the relationship between Kevin and his mother
|
After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about Jack of No Trades by Evelyn E. Smith.
Relevant chunks:
Jack of No Trades
By EVELYN E. SMITH
Illustrated by CAVAT
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy October 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
I was psick of Psi powers, not having any. Or didn't I? Maybe they'd psee otherwise psomeday!
I walked into the dining room and collided with a floating mass of fabric, which promptly draped itself over me like a sentient shroud.
"Oh, for God's sake, Kevin!" my middle brother's voice came muffled through the folds. "If you can't help, at least don't hinder!"
I managed to struggle out of the tablecloth, even though it seemed to be trying to wrap itself around me. When Danny got excited, he lost his mental grip.
"I could help," I yelled as soon as I got my head free, "if anybody would let me and, what's more, I could set the table a damn sight faster by hand than you do with 'kinesis."
Just then Father appeared at the head of the table. He could as easily have walked downstairs as teleported, but I belonged to a family of exhibitionists. And Father tended to show off as if he were still a kid. Not that he looked his age—he was big and blond, like Danny and Tim and me, and could have passed for our older brother.
"Boys, boys!" he reproved us. "Danny, you ought to be ashamed of yourself—picking on poor Kev."
Even if it hadn't been Danny's fault, he would still have been blamed.
Nobody was ever supposed to raise a voice or a hand or a thought to poor afflicted Kev, because nature had picked on me enough. And the nicer everybody was to me, the nastier I became, since only when they lost their tempers could I get—or so I believed—their true attitude toward me.
How else could I tell?
"Sorry, fella," Dan apologized to me. The tablecloth spread itself out on the table. "Wrinkles," he grumbled to himself. "Wrinkles. And I had it so nice and smooth before. Mother will be furious."
"If she were going to be furious, she'd be furious already," Father reminded him sadly. It must be tough to be married to a deep-probe telepath, I thought, and I felt a sudden wave of sympathy for him. It was so seldom I got the chance to feel sorry for anyone except myself.
"But I think you'll find she understands."
"She knows, all right," Danny remarked as he went on into the kitchen,
"but I'm not sure she always understands."
I was surprised to find him so perceptive on the abstract level, because he wasn't what you might call an understanding person, either.
"There are tensions in this room," my sister announced as she slouched in, not quite awake yet, "and hatred. I could feel them all the way upstairs. And today I'm working on the Sleepsweet Mattress copy, so I must feel absolutely tranquil. Everyone will think beautiful thoughts, please."
She sat down just as a glass of orange juice was arriving at her place; Danny apparently didn't know she'd come in already. The glass bumped into the back of her neck, tilted and poured its contents over her shoulder and down her very considerable decolletage. Being a mere primitive, I couldn't help laughing.
"Danny, you fumbler!" she screamed.
Danny erupted from the kitchen. "How many times have I asked all of you not to sit down until I've got everything on the table? Always a lot of interfering busybodies getting in the way."
"I don't see why you have to set the table at all," she retorted. "A robot could do it better and faster than you. Even Kev could." She turned quickly toward me. "Oh, I am sorry, Kevin."
I didn't say anything; I was too busy pressing my hands down on the back of the chair to make my knuckles turn white.
Sylvia's face turned even whiter. "Father, stop him— stop him! He's hating again! I can't stand it!"
Father looked at me, then at her. "I don't think he can help it, Sylvia."
I grinned. "That's right—I'm just a poor atavism with no control over myself a-tall."
Finally my mother came in from the kitchen; she was an old-fashioned woman and didn't hold with robocooks. One quick glance at me gave her the complete details, even though I quickly protested, "It's illegal to probe anyone without permission."
"I used to probe you to find out when you needed your diapers changed," she said tartly, "and I'll probe you now. You should watch yourself, Sylvia—poor Kevin isn't responsible."
She didn't need to probe to get the blast of naked emotion that spurted out from me. My sister screamed and even Father looked uncomfortable. Danny stomped back into the kitchen, muttering to himself.
Mother's lips tightened. "Sylvia, go upstairs and change your dress. Kevin, do I have to make an appointment for you at the clinic again?" A psychiatrist never diagnosed members of his own family—that is, not officially; they couldn't help offering thumbnail diagnoses any more than they could help having thumbnails.
"No use," I said, deciding it was safe to drop into my chair. "Who can adjust me to an environment to which I'm fundamentally unsuited?"
"Maybe there is something physically wrong with him, Amy," my father suggested hopefully. "Maybe you should make an appointment for him at the cure-all?"
Mother shook her neatly coiffed head. "He's been to it dozens of times and he always checks out in splendid shape. None of us can spare the time to go with him again, just on an off-chance, and he could hardly be allowed to make such a long trip all by himself. Pity there isn't a machine in every community, but, then, we don't really need them."
Now that the virus diseases had been licked, people hardly ever got sick any more and, when they did, it was mostly psychosomatic. Life was so well organized that there weren't even many accidents these days. It was a safe, orderly existence for those who fitted into it—which accounted for more than ninety-five per cent of the population. The only ones who didn't adjust were those who couldn't, like me—psi-deficients, throwbacks to an earlier era. There were no physical cripples, because anybody could have a new arm or a new leg grafted on, but you couldn't graft psi powers onto an atavism or, if you could, the technique hadn't been developed yet.
"I feel a sense of impending doom brooding over this household," my youngest brother remarked cheerfully as he vaulted into his chair.
"You always do, Timothy," my mother said, unfolding her napkin. "And I must say it's not in good taste, especially at breakfast."
He reached for his juice. "Guess this is a doomed household. And what was all that emotional uproar about?"
"The usual," Sylvia said from the doorway before anyone else could answer. She slid warily into her chair. "Hey, Dan, I'm here!" she called. "If anything else comes in, it comes in manually, understand?"
"Oh, all right." Dan emerged from the kitchen with a tray of food floating ahead of him.
"The usual? Trouble with Kev?" Tim looked at me narrowly. "Somehow my sense of ominousness is connected with him."
"Well, that's perfectly natural—" Sylvia began, then stopped as Mother caught her eye.
"I didn't mean that," Tim said. "I still say Kev's got something we can't figure out."
"You've been saying that for years," Danny protested, "and he's been tested for every faculty under the Sun. He can't telepath or teleport or telekinesthesize or even teletype. He can't precognize or prefix or prepossess. He can't—"
"Strictly a bundle of no-talent, that's me," I interrupted, trying to keep my animal feelings from getting the better of me. That was how my family thought of me, I knew—as an animal, and not a very lovable one, either.
"No," Tim said, "he's just got something we haven't developed a test for. It'll come out some day, you'll see." He smiled at me.
I smiled at him gratefully; he was the only member of my family who really seemed to like me in spite of my handicap. "It won't work, Tim. I know you're trying to be kind, but—"
"He's not saying it just to be kind," my mother put in. "He means it. Not that I want to arouse false hopes, Kevin," she added with grim scrupulousness. "Tim's awfully young yet and I wouldn't trust his extracurricular prognostications too far."
Nonetheless, I couldn't help feeling a feeble renewal of old hopes. After all, young or not, Tim was a hell of a good prognosticator; he wouldn't have risen so rapidly to the position he held in the Weather Bureau if he hadn't been pretty near tops in foreboding.
Mother smiled sadly at my thoughts, but I didn't let that discourage me. As Danny had said, she knew but she didn't really understand . Nobody, for all of his or her psi power, really understood me.
Breakfast was finally over and the rest of my family dispersed to their various jobs. Father simply took his briefcase and disappeared—he was a traveling salesman and he had a morning appointment clear across the continent. The others, not having his particular gift, had to take the helibus to their different destinations. Mother, as I said, was a psychiatrist. Sylvia wrote advertising copy. Tim was a meteorologist. Dan was a junior executive in a furniture moving company and expected a promotion to senior rank as soon as he achieved a better mental grip on pianos.
Only I had no job, no profession, no place in life. Of course there were certain menial tasks a psi-negative could perform, but my parents would have none of them—partly for my sake, but mostly for the sake of their own community standing.
"We don't need what little money Kev could bring in," my father always said. "I can afford to support my family. He can stay home and take care of the house."
And that's what I did. Not that there was much to do except call a techno whenever one of the servomechanisms missed a beat. True enough, those things had to be watched mighty carefully because, if they broke down, it sometimes took days before the repair and/or replacement robots could come. There never were enough of them because ours was a constructive society. Still, being a machine-sitter isn't very much of a career. And every function that wasn't the prerogative of a machine could be done ten times more quickly and efficiently by some member of my family than I could do it. If I went ahead and did something anyway, they would just do it all over again when they got home.
So I had nothing to do all day. I had a special dispensation to take books out of the local Archives, because I was a deficient and couldn't receive the tellie programs. Almost everybody on Earth was telepathic to some degree and could get the amplified projections even if he couldn't transmit or receive with his natural powers. But I got nothing. I had to derive all my recreation from reading, and you can get awfully tired of books, especially when they're all at least a hundred years old and written by primitives. I could borrow sound tapes, but they also bored me after a while.
I thought maybe I could develop a talent for composing or painting, which would classify me as a telesensitive—artistic ability being considered as the oldest, if least important, psi power—but I couldn't even do anything like that.
About all there was left for me was to take long walks. Athletics were out of the question; I couldn't compete with psi-boys and they didn't want to compete with me. All the people in the neighborhood knew me and were nice to me, but I didn't need to be a 'path to tell what they were saying to one another when I hove into sight. "There's that oldest Faraday boy. Pity, such a talented family, to have a defective."
I didn't have a girl, either. Although some of them were sort of attracted to me—I could see that—they could hardly go out with me without exposing themselves to ridicule. In their sandals, I would have done the same thing, but that didn't stop me from hating them.
I wished I had been born a couple of hundred years ago—before people started playing around with nuclear energy and filling the air with radiations that they were afraid would turn human beings into hideous monsters. Instead, they developed the psi powers that had always been latent in the species until we developed into a race of supermen. I don't know why I say we —in 1960 or so, I might have been considered superior, but in 2102 I was just the Faradays' idiot boy.
Exploring space should have been my hope. If there had been anything useful or interesting on any of the other planets, I might have found a niche for myself there. In totally new surroundings, the psi powers geared to another environment might not be an advantage. But by the time I was ten, it was discovered that the other planets were just barren hunks of rock, with pressures and climates and atmospheres drastically unsuited to human life. A year or so before, the hyperdrive had been developed on Earth and ships had been sent out to explore the stars, but I had no hope left in that direction any more.
I was an atavism in a world of peace and plenty. Peace, because people couldn't indulge in war or even crime with so many telepaths running around—not because, I told myself, the capacity for primitive behavior wasn't just as latent in everybody else as the psi talent seemed latent in me. Tim must be right, I thought—I must have some undreamed-of power that only the right circumstances would bring out. But what was that power?
For years I had speculated on what my potential talent might be, explored every wild possibility I could conceive of and found none productive of even an ambiguous result with which I could fool myself. As I approached adulthood, I began to concede that I was probably nothing more than what I seemed to be—a simple psi-negative. Yet, from time to time, hope surged up again, as it had today, in spite of my knowledge that my hope was an impossibility. Who ever heard of latent psi powers showing themselves in an individual as old as twenty-six?
I was almost alone in the parks where I used to walk, because people liked to commune with one another those days rather than with nature. Even gardening had very little popularity. But I found myself most at home in those woodland—or, rather, pseudo-woodland—surroundings, able to identify more readily with the trees and flowers than I could with my own kind. A fallen tree or a broken blossom would excite more sympathy from me than the minor catastrophes that will beset any household, no matter how gifted, and I would shy away from bloody noses or cut fingers, thus giving myself a reputation for callousness as well as extrasensory imbecility.
However, I was no more callous in steering clear of human breakdowns than I was in not shedding tears over the household machines when they broke down, for I felt no more closely akin to my parents and siblings than I did to the mechanisms that served and, sometimes, failed us.
On that day, I walked farther than I had intended and, by the time I got back home, I found the rest of my family had returned before me. They seemed to be excited about something and were surprised to see me so calm.
"Aren't you even interested in anything outside your own immediate concerns, Kev?" Sylvia demanded, despite Father's efforts to shush her.
"Can't you remember that Kev isn't able to receive the tellies?" Tim shot back at her. "He probably doesn't even know what's happened."
"Well, what did happen?" I asked, trying not to snap.
"One starship got back from Alpha Centauri," Danny said excitedly.
"There are two inhabited Earth-type planets there!"
This was for me; this was it at last! I tried not to show my enthusiasm, though I knew that was futile. My relatives could keep their thoughts and emotions from me; I couldn't keep mine from them.
"What kind of life inhabits them? Humanoid?"
"Uh-uh." Danny shook his head. "And hostile. The crew of the starship says they were attacked immediately on landing. When they turned and left, they were followed here by one of the alien ships. Must be a pretty advanced race to have spaceships. Anyhow, the extraterrestrial ship headed back as soon as it got a fix on where ours was going."
"But if they're hostile," I said thoughtfully, "it might mean war."
"Of course. That's why everybody's so wrought up. We hope it's peace, but we'll have to prepare for war just in case."
There hadn't been a war on Earth for well over a hundred years, but we hadn't been so foolish as to obliterate all knowledge of military techniques and weapons. The alien ship wouldn't be able to come back with reinforcements—if such were its intention—in less than six months. This meant time to get together a stockpile of weapons, though we had no idea of how effective our defenses would be against the aliens' armament.
They might have strange and terrible weapons against which we would be powerless. On the other hand, our side would have the benefits of telekinetically guided missiles, teleported saboteurs, telepaths to pick up the alien strategy, and prognosticators to determine the outcome of each battle and see whether it was worth fighting in the first place.
Everybody on Earth hoped for peace. Everybody, that is, except me. I had been unable to achieve any sense of identity with the world in which I lived, and it was almost worth the loss of personal survival to know that my own smug species could look silly against a still more talented race.
"It isn't so much our defense that worries me," my mother muttered, "as lack of adequate medical machinery. War is bound to mean casualties and there aren't enough cure-alls on the planet to take care of them. It's useless to expect the government to build more right now; they'll be too busy producing weapons. Sylvia, you'd better take a leave of absence from your job and come down to Psycho Center to learn first-aid techniques. And you too, Kevin," she added, obviously a little surprised herself at what she was saying. "Probably you'd be even better at it than Sylvia since you aren't sensitive to other people's pain."
I looked at her.
"It is an ill wind," she agreed, smiling wryly, "but don't let me catch you thinking that way, Kevin. Can't you see it would be better that there should be no war and you should remain useless?"
I couldn't see it, of course, and she knew that, with her wretched talent for stripping away my feeble attempts at privacy. Psi-powers usually included some ability to form a mental shield; being without one, I was necessarily devoid of the other.
My attitude didn't matter, though, because it was definitely war. The aliens came back with a fleet clearly bent on our annihilation—even the 'paths couldn't figure out their motives, for the thought pattern was entirely different from ours—and the war was on.
I had enjoyed learning first-aid; it was the first time I had ever worked with people as an equal. And I was good at it because psi-powers aren't much of an advantage there. Telekinesis maybe a little, but I was big enough to lift anybody without needing any superhuman abilities—normal human abilities, rather.
"Gee, Mr. Faraday," one of the other students breathed, "you're so strong. And without 'kinesis or anything."
I looked at her and liked what I saw. She was blonde and pretty. "My name's not Mr. Faraday," I said. "It's Kevin."
"My name's Lucy," she giggled.
No girl had ever giggled at me in that way before. Immediately I started to envision a beautiful future for the two of us, then flushed when I realized that she might be a telepath. But she was winding a tourniquet around the arm of another member of the class with apparent unconcern.
"Hey, quit that!" the windee yelled. "You're making it too tight! I'll be mortified!"
So Lucy was obviously not a telepath. Later I found out she was only a low-grade telesensitive—just a poetess—so I had nothing to worry about as far as having my thoughts read went. I was a little afraid of Sylvia's kidding me about my first romance, but, as it happened, she got interested in one of the guys who was taking the class with us, and she was not only too busy to be bothered with me, but in too vulnerable a position herself.
However, when the actual bombs—or their alien equivalent—struck near our town, I wasn't nearly so happy, especially after they started carrying the wounded into the Psycho Center, which had been turned into a hospital for the duration. I took one look at the gory scene—I had never seen anybody really injured before; few people had, as a matter of fact—and started for the door. But Mother was already blocking the way. It was easy to see from which side of the family Tim had got his talent for prognostication.
"If the telepaths who can pick up all the pain can stand this, Kevin," she said, " you certainly can." And there was no kindness at all in the you .
She gave me a shove toward the nearest stretcher. "Go on—now's your chance to show you're of some use in this world."
Gritting my teeth, I turned to the man on the stretcher. Something had pretty near torn half his face away. It was all there, but not in the right place, and it wasn't pretty. I turned away, caught my mother's eye, and then I didn't even dare to throw up. I looked at that smashed face again and all the first-aid lessons I'd had flew out of my head as if some super-psi had plucked them from me.
The man was bleeding terribly. I had never seen blood pouring out like that before. The first thing to do, I figured sickly, was mop it up. I wet a sponge and dabbed gingerly at the face, but my hands were shaking so hard that the sponge slipped and my fingers were on the raw gaping wound. I could feel the warm viscosity of the blood and nothing, not even my mother, could keep my meal down this time, I thought.
Mother had uttered a sound of exasperation as I dropped the sponge. I could hear her coming toward me. Then I heard her gasp. I looked at my patient and my mouth dropped open. For suddenly there was no wound, no wound at all—just a little blood and the fellow's face was whole again. Not even a scar.
"Wha—wha happened?" he asked. "It doesn't hurt any more!"
He touched his cheek and looked up at me with frightened eyes. And I was frightened, too—too frightened to be sick, too frightened to do anything but stare witlessly at him.
"Touch some of the others, quick!" my mother commanded, pushing astounded attendants away from stretchers.
I touched broken limbs and torn bodies and shattered heads, and they were whole again right away. Everybody in the room was looking at me in the way I had always dreamed of being looked at. Lucy was opening and shutting her beautiful mouth like a beautiful fish. In fact, the whole thing was just like a dream, except that I was awake. I couldn't have imagined all those horrors.
But the horrors soon weren't horrors any more. I began to find them almost pleasing; the worse a wound was, the more I appreciated it. There was so much more satisfaction, virtually an esthetic thrill, in seeing a horrible jagged tear smooth away, heal, not in days, as it would have done under the cure-all, but in seconds.
"Timothy was right," my mother said, her eyes filled with tears, "and I was wrong ever to have doubted. You have a gift, son—" and she said the word son loud and clear so that everybody could hear it—"the greatest gift of all, that of healing." She looked at me proudly. And Lucy and the others looked at me as if I were a god or something.
I felt ... well, good.
"I wonder why we never thought of healing as a potential psi-power," my mother said to me later, when I was catching a snatch of rest and she was lighting cigarettes and offering me cups of coffee in an attempt to make up twenty-six years of indifference, perhaps dislike, all at once.
"The ability to heal is recorded in history, only we never paid much attention to it."
"Recorded?" I asked, a little jealously.
"Of course," she smiled. "Remember the King's Evil?"
I should have known without her reminding me, after all the old books I had read. "Scrofula, wasn't it? They called it that because the touch of certain kings was supposed to cure it ... and other diseases, too, I guess."
She nodded. "Certain people must have had the healing power and that's probably why they originally got to be the rulers."
In a very short time, I became a pretty important person. All the other deficients in the world were tested for the healing power and all of them turned out negative. I proved to be the only human healer alive, and not only that, I could work a thousand times more efficiently and effectively than any of the machines. The government built a hospital just for my work! Wounded people were ferried there from all over the world and I cured them. I could do practically everything except raise the dead and sometimes I wondered whether, with a little practice, I wouldn't be able to do even that.
When I came to my new office, whom did I find waiting there for me but Lucy, her trim figure enhanced by a snug blue and white uniform. "I'm your assistant, Kev," she said shyly.
I looked at her. "You are?"
"I—I hope you want me," she went on, coyness now mixing with apprehension.
I gave her shoulder a squeeze. "I do want you, Lucy. More than I can tell you now. After all this is over, there's something more I want to say. But right now—" I clapped her arm—"there's a job to be done."
"Yes, Kevin," she said, glaring at me for some reason I didn't have time to investigate or interpret at the moment. My patients were waiting for me.
They gave me everything else I could possibly need, except enough sleep, and I myself didn't want that. I wanted to heal. I wanted to show my fellow human beings that, though I couldn't receive or transmit thoughts or foretell the future or move things with my mind, all those powers were useless without life, and that was what I could give.
I took pride in my work. It was good to stop pain and ugliness, to know that, if it weren't for me, these people would be dead or permanently disfigured. In a sense, they were—well, my children; I felt a warm glow of affection toward them.
They felt the same way toward me. I knew because the secret of the hospital soon leaked out—during all those years of peace, the government had lost whatever facility it had for keeping secrets—and people used to come in droves, hoping for a glimpse of me.
The government pointed out that such crowds outside the building might attract the enemy's attention. I was the most important individual on Earth, they told my followers, and my safety couldn't be risked. The human race at this stage was pretty docile. The crowds went away. And it was right that they should; I didn't want to be risked any more than they wanted to risk me.
Plenty of people did come to see me officially—the President, generals, all kinds of big wheels, bringing citations, medals and other obsolete honors they'd revived primarily for me. It was wonderful. I began to love everybody.
"Don't you think you're putting too much of yourself into this, Kev?" Lucy asked me one day.
I gave her an incredulous glance. "You mean I shouldn't help people?"
"Of course you should help them. I didn't mean anything like that. Just ... well, you're getting too bound up in your work."
"Why shouldn't I be?" Then the truth, as I thought, dawned on me. "Are you jealous, Lucy?"
She lowered her eyes. "Not only that, but the war's bound to come to an end, you know, and—"
It was the first part of her sentence that interested me. "Why, do you mean—"
And just then a fresh batch of casualties arrived and I had to tend to them. For the next few days, I was so busy, I didn't get the chance to have the long talk with Lucy I'd wanted....
Then, after only four months, the war suddenly stopped. It seemed that the aliens' weapons, despite their undeniable mysteriousness, were not equal to ours. And they had the added disadvantage of being light-years away from home base. So the remnant of their fleet took off and blew itself up just outside of Mars, which we understood to be the equivalent of unconditional surrender. And it was; we never heard from the Centaurians again.
Peace once more. I had a little mopping up to do at the hospital; then I collected my possessions and went back home after a dignitary—only the Vice President this time—had thanked me on behalf of a grateful country. I wasn't needed any more.
Question:
Describe the relationship between Kevin and his mother
Answer:
|
[
"Kevin's mother is a psychiatrist, but she does not want to diagnose her own family member, so she has to entrust Kevin's care to people outside the household. There is a lot of tension between Kevin and his mother at the beginning of the story, and she feels sorry for him whenever he feels hope for the future. It seems that the family knows she can feel the specific thoughts but they don't think she can necessarily where they're coming from, and doesn't have context for these feelings. Even though he is slower at some things than his siblings, his mom encourages him to get trained for first-aid once they know a war is coming; in some sense, he finally has a chance to directly contribute to society, according to his mom, and wouldn't be useless anymore. She also thinks he might have an advantage since he won't feel the others' pain as much. After Kevin finds out that he does have powers, his mom seems to be trying to make up for lost time, trying to bond with him, because she recognizes him as useful now, and is no longer indifferent (or even directly mean) towards him. \n",
"Kevin's mother is a psychiatrist at the Psycho Center with strong telepathic ability. She can read Kevin's mind from the kitchen when he is sitting in the dining room. Although Kevin's mother clearly harbors a bias against psi-deficient people, she also rejects some of the technological advancements of the new society, including the robocooks. Instead, she prefers to cook her own food. Like Kevin's other family members, Kevin's mother walks on eggshells around Kevin, never really truly engaging with him other than to remind the other children to not insult him for his deficiency. As a psychiatrist, his mother won't officially diagnose Kevin herself, but she wants him to make an appointment at the Psycho Center to help him because better adjusted to society. Kevin becomes emotionally disconnected from other people thanks to his own parents' emotional distance from him, and this lack of communication leads them to not understand each other very well. When Earth begins to anticipate war with the aliens from planets near Alpha Centauri, Kevin's mother orders him to train in first-aid in order to contribute. Since the world lacks hospitals because of the exponential decrease in sickness and disease, they have to turn the Psycho Center into a makeshift hospital. This is where Kevin discovers his power to heal people by touching them with his hands. When his mother witnesses his new ability, she is proud to call him her son and reminds him that the leaders of the old world had a similar ability. This encourages Kevin to use his newly-found power for the good of humanity.",
"Kevin’s mother (Amy) reluctantly accepts that her son lacks supernatural (psi-power) abilities after he undergoes all possible medical tests and psychological evaluations. Kev feels disconnected and like a disappointment to his mother and the rest of his family. His mother is telepathic, and uses this power to probe Kev’s mind and read his thoughts without permission. She encourages Kev to not get his hopes up when Tim, his prognosticating brother, declares that Kev must have a psi-power they have not discovered a test for yet. When the potential for alien attack becomes apparent and she decides to train as many medics as possible to treat casualties, she surprises herself by choosing to bring Kev along because it is a job even someone without powers can do. \nTheir relationship totally changes when Kevin discovers his psi-power of healing - the greatest gift of all. When his mother witnesses him healing a casualty of the alien attack for the first time at the Psycho Center, she is shocked and apologizes for ever doubting Kevin. She tells him that he has a gift, and looks at him with a pride that he has not before felt from her.\n",
"Kevin’s mother, Amy, is a psychiatrist and a deep-probe telepath, meaning she only has to glance at Kevin to read exactly what’s passing through his mind at that moment. Since Kevin is psi-deficient and her only child to be that way, their relationship is rather strained. The rest of her children are very talented individuals and hold important jobs, even the youngest Tim. Kevin, on the other hand, works at home watching over the machines that do the housework for them. In some ways, Amy both resents and pities him for his lack of powers. \nKevin feels the tension and acts out because of it. As can be seen at the breakfast table, he feels violated by his mother’s ability and his inability to defend himself against her. As well, she clearly has no sympathy for his cause and tells him to make himself useful when the war comes. He trains in first-aid, but at the sight of his first patient who had half his face ripped off, he tries to run away. His mother stops him and scolds him, claiming that if all the telepaths can handle the pain, he can at least look at him. He heals him with his touch and discovers his psi-power. Soon, Kevin becomes the most important man in the world thanks to his healing ability and is irreplaceable in the war. \n"
] |
49838
|
Jack of No Trades
By EVELYN E. SMITH
Illustrated by CAVAT
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy October 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
I was psick of Psi powers, not having any. Or didn't I? Maybe they'd psee otherwise psomeday!
I walked into the dining room and collided with a floating mass of fabric, which promptly draped itself over me like a sentient shroud.
"Oh, for God's sake, Kevin!" my middle brother's voice came muffled through the folds. "If you can't help, at least don't hinder!"
I managed to struggle out of the tablecloth, even though it seemed to be trying to wrap itself around me. When Danny got excited, he lost his mental grip.
"I could help," I yelled as soon as I got my head free, "if anybody would let me and, what's more, I could set the table a damn sight faster by hand than you do with 'kinesis."
Just then Father appeared at the head of the table. He could as easily have walked downstairs as teleported, but I belonged to a family of exhibitionists. And Father tended to show off as if he were still a kid. Not that he looked his age—he was big and blond, like Danny and Tim and me, and could have passed for our older brother.
"Boys, boys!" he reproved us. "Danny, you ought to be ashamed of yourself—picking on poor Kev."
Even if it hadn't been Danny's fault, he would still have been blamed.
Nobody was ever supposed to raise a voice or a hand or a thought to poor afflicted Kev, because nature had picked on me enough. And the nicer everybody was to me, the nastier I became, since only when they lost their tempers could I get—or so I believed—their true attitude toward me.
How else could I tell?
"Sorry, fella," Dan apologized to me. The tablecloth spread itself out on the table. "Wrinkles," he grumbled to himself. "Wrinkles. And I had it so nice and smooth before. Mother will be furious."
"If she were going to be furious, she'd be furious already," Father reminded him sadly. It must be tough to be married to a deep-probe telepath, I thought, and I felt a sudden wave of sympathy for him. It was so seldom I got the chance to feel sorry for anyone except myself.
"But I think you'll find she understands."
"She knows, all right," Danny remarked as he went on into the kitchen,
"but I'm not sure she always understands."
I was surprised to find him so perceptive on the abstract level, because he wasn't what you might call an understanding person, either.
"There are tensions in this room," my sister announced as she slouched in, not quite awake yet, "and hatred. I could feel them all the way upstairs. And today I'm working on the Sleepsweet Mattress copy, so I must feel absolutely tranquil. Everyone will think beautiful thoughts, please."
She sat down just as a glass of orange juice was arriving at her place; Danny apparently didn't know she'd come in already. The glass bumped into the back of her neck, tilted and poured its contents over her shoulder and down her very considerable decolletage. Being a mere primitive, I couldn't help laughing.
"Danny, you fumbler!" she screamed.
Danny erupted from the kitchen. "How many times have I asked all of you not to sit down until I've got everything on the table? Always a lot of interfering busybodies getting in the way."
"I don't see why you have to set the table at all," she retorted. "A robot could do it better and faster than you. Even Kev could." She turned quickly toward me. "Oh, I am sorry, Kevin."
I didn't say anything; I was too busy pressing my hands down on the back of the chair to make my knuckles turn white.
Sylvia's face turned even whiter. "Father, stop him— stop him! He's hating again! I can't stand it!"
Father looked at me, then at her. "I don't think he can help it, Sylvia."
I grinned. "That's right—I'm just a poor atavism with no control over myself a-tall."
Finally my mother came in from the kitchen; she was an old-fashioned woman and didn't hold with robocooks. One quick glance at me gave her the complete details, even though I quickly protested, "It's illegal to probe anyone without permission."
"I used to probe you to find out when you needed your diapers changed," she said tartly, "and I'll probe you now. You should watch yourself, Sylvia—poor Kevin isn't responsible."
She didn't need to probe to get the blast of naked emotion that spurted out from me. My sister screamed and even Father looked uncomfortable. Danny stomped back into the kitchen, muttering to himself.
Mother's lips tightened. "Sylvia, go upstairs and change your dress. Kevin, do I have to make an appointment for you at the clinic again?" A psychiatrist never diagnosed members of his own family—that is, not officially; they couldn't help offering thumbnail diagnoses any more than they could help having thumbnails.
"No use," I said, deciding it was safe to drop into my chair. "Who can adjust me to an environment to which I'm fundamentally unsuited?"
"Maybe there is something physically wrong with him, Amy," my father suggested hopefully. "Maybe you should make an appointment for him at the cure-all?"
Mother shook her neatly coiffed head. "He's been to it dozens of times and he always checks out in splendid shape. None of us can spare the time to go with him again, just on an off-chance, and he could hardly be allowed to make such a long trip all by himself. Pity there isn't a machine in every community, but, then, we don't really need them."
Now that the virus diseases had been licked, people hardly ever got sick any more and, when they did, it was mostly psychosomatic. Life was so well organized that there weren't even many accidents these days. It was a safe, orderly existence for those who fitted into it—which accounted for more than ninety-five per cent of the population. The only ones who didn't adjust were those who couldn't, like me—psi-deficients, throwbacks to an earlier era. There were no physical cripples, because anybody could have a new arm or a new leg grafted on, but you couldn't graft psi powers onto an atavism or, if you could, the technique hadn't been developed yet.
"I feel a sense of impending doom brooding over this household," my youngest brother remarked cheerfully as he vaulted into his chair.
"You always do, Timothy," my mother said, unfolding her napkin. "And I must say it's not in good taste, especially at breakfast."
He reached for his juice. "Guess this is a doomed household. And what was all that emotional uproar about?"
"The usual," Sylvia said from the doorway before anyone else could answer. She slid warily into her chair. "Hey, Dan, I'm here!" she called. "If anything else comes in, it comes in manually, understand?"
"Oh, all right." Dan emerged from the kitchen with a tray of food floating ahead of him.
"The usual? Trouble with Kev?" Tim looked at me narrowly. "Somehow my sense of ominousness is connected with him."
"Well, that's perfectly natural—" Sylvia began, then stopped as Mother caught her eye.
"I didn't mean that," Tim said. "I still say Kev's got something we can't figure out."
"You've been saying that for years," Danny protested, "and he's been tested for every faculty under the Sun. He can't telepath or teleport or telekinesthesize or even teletype. He can't precognize or prefix or prepossess. He can't—"
"Strictly a bundle of no-talent, that's me," I interrupted, trying to keep my animal feelings from getting the better of me. That was how my family thought of me, I knew—as an animal, and not a very lovable one, either.
"No," Tim said, "he's just got something we haven't developed a test for. It'll come out some day, you'll see." He smiled at me.
I smiled at him gratefully; he was the only member of my family who really seemed to like me in spite of my handicap. "It won't work, Tim. I know you're trying to be kind, but—"
"He's not saying it just to be kind," my mother put in. "He means it. Not that I want to arouse false hopes, Kevin," she added with grim scrupulousness. "Tim's awfully young yet and I wouldn't trust his extracurricular prognostications too far."
Nonetheless, I couldn't help feeling a feeble renewal of old hopes. After all, young or not, Tim was a hell of a good prognosticator; he wouldn't have risen so rapidly to the position he held in the Weather Bureau if he hadn't been pretty near tops in foreboding.
Mother smiled sadly at my thoughts, but I didn't let that discourage me. As Danny had said, she knew but she didn't really understand . Nobody, for all of his or her psi power, really understood me.
Breakfast was finally over and the rest of my family dispersed to their various jobs. Father simply took his briefcase and disappeared—he was a traveling salesman and he had a morning appointment clear across the continent. The others, not having his particular gift, had to take the helibus to their different destinations. Mother, as I said, was a psychiatrist. Sylvia wrote advertising copy. Tim was a meteorologist. Dan was a junior executive in a furniture moving company and expected a promotion to senior rank as soon as he achieved a better mental grip on pianos.
Only I had no job, no profession, no place in life. Of course there were certain menial tasks a psi-negative could perform, but my parents would have none of them—partly for my sake, but mostly for the sake of their own community standing.
"We don't need what little money Kev could bring in," my father always said. "I can afford to support my family. He can stay home and take care of the house."
And that's what I did. Not that there was much to do except call a techno whenever one of the servomechanisms missed a beat. True enough, those things had to be watched mighty carefully because, if they broke down, it sometimes took days before the repair and/or replacement robots could come. There never were enough of them because ours was a constructive society. Still, being a machine-sitter isn't very much of a career. And every function that wasn't the prerogative of a machine could be done ten times more quickly and efficiently by some member of my family than I could do it. If I went ahead and did something anyway, they would just do it all over again when they got home.
So I had nothing to do all day. I had a special dispensation to take books out of the local Archives, because I was a deficient and couldn't receive the tellie programs. Almost everybody on Earth was telepathic to some degree and could get the amplified projections even if he couldn't transmit or receive with his natural powers. But I got nothing. I had to derive all my recreation from reading, and you can get awfully tired of books, especially when they're all at least a hundred years old and written by primitives. I could borrow sound tapes, but they also bored me after a while.
I thought maybe I could develop a talent for composing or painting, which would classify me as a telesensitive—artistic ability being considered as the oldest, if least important, psi power—but I couldn't even do anything like that.
About all there was left for me was to take long walks. Athletics were out of the question; I couldn't compete with psi-boys and they didn't want to compete with me. All the people in the neighborhood knew me and were nice to me, but I didn't need to be a 'path to tell what they were saying to one another when I hove into sight. "There's that oldest Faraday boy. Pity, such a talented family, to have a defective."
I didn't have a girl, either. Although some of them were sort of attracted to me—I could see that—they could hardly go out with me without exposing themselves to ridicule. In their sandals, I would have done the same thing, but that didn't stop me from hating them.
I wished I had been born a couple of hundred years ago—before people started playing around with nuclear energy and filling the air with radiations that they were afraid would turn human beings into hideous monsters. Instead, they developed the psi powers that had always been latent in the species until we developed into a race of supermen. I don't know why I say we —in 1960 or so, I might have been considered superior, but in 2102 I was just the Faradays' idiot boy.
Exploring space should have been my hope. If there had been anything useful or interesting on any of the other planets, I might have found a niche for myself there. In totally new surroundings, the psi powers geared to another environment might not be an advantage. But by the time I was ten, it was discovered that the other planets were just barren hunks of rock, with pressures and climates and atmospheres drastically unsuited to human life. A year or so before, the hyperdrive had been developed on Earth and ships had been sent out to explore the stars, but I had no hope left in that direction any more.
I was an atavism in a world of peace and plenty. Peace, because people couldn't indulge in war or even crime with so many telepaths running around—not because, I told myself, the capacity for primitive behavior wasn't just as latent in everybody else as the psi talent seemed latent in me. Tim must be right, I thought—I must have some undreamed-of power that only the right circumstances would bring out. But what was that power?
For years I had speculated on what my potential talent might be, explored every wild possibility I could conceive of and found none productive of even an ambiguous result with which I could fool myself. As I approached adulthood, I began to concede that I was probably nothing more than what I seemed to be—a simple psi-negative. Yet, from time to time, hope surged up again, as it had today, in spite of my knowledge that my hope was an impossibility. Who ever heard of latent psi powers showing themselves in an individual as old as twenty-six?
I was almost alone in the parks where I used to walk, because people liked to commune with one another those days rather than with nature. Even gardening had very little popularity. But I found myself most at home in those woodland—or, rather, pseudo-woodland—surroundings, able to identify more readily with the trees and flowers than I could with my own kind. A fallen tree or a broken blossom would excite more sympathy from me than the minor catastrophes that will beset any household, no matter how gifted, and I would shy away from bloody noses or cut fingers, thus giving myself a reputation for callousness as well as extrasensory imbecility.
However, I was no more callous in steering clear of human breakdowns than I was in not shedding tears over the household machines when they broke down, for I felt no more closely akin to my parents and siblings than I did to the mechanisms that served and, sometimes, failed us.
On that day, I walked farther than I had intended and, by the time I got back home, I found the rest of my family had returned before me. They seemed to be excited about something and were surprised to see me so calm.
"Aren't you even interested in anything outside your own immediate concerns, Kev?" Sylvia demanded, despite Father's efforts to shush her.
"Can't you remember that Kev isn't able to receive the tellies?" Tim shot back at her. "He probably doesn't even know what's happened."
"Well, what did happen?" I asked, trying not to snap.
"One starship got back from Alpha Centauri," Danny said excitedly.
"There are two inhabited Earth-type planets there!"
This was for me; this was it at last! I tried not to show my enthusiasm, though I knew that was futile. My relatives could keep their thoughts and emotions from me; I couldn't keep mine from them.
"What kind of life inhabits them? Humanoid?"
"Uh-uh." Danny shook his head. "And hostile. The crew of the starship says they were attacked immediately on landing. When they turned and left, they were followed here by one of the alien ships. Must be a pretty advanced race to have spaceships. Anyhow, the extraterrestrial ship headed back as soon as it got a fix on where ours was going."
"But if they're hostile," I said thoughtfully, "it might mean war."
"Of course. That's why everybody's so wrought up. We hope it's peace, but we'll have to prepare for war just in case."
There hadn't been a war on Earth for well over a hundred years, but we hadn't been so foolish as to obliterate all knowledge of military techniques and weapons. The alien ship wouldn't be able to come back with reinforcements—if such were its intention—in less than six months. This meant time to get together a stockpile of weapons, though we had no idea of how effective our defenses would be against the aliens' armament.
They might have strange and terrible weapons against which we would be powerless. On the other hand, our side would have the benefits of telekinetically guided missiles, teleported saboteurs, telepaths to pick up the alien strategy, and prognosticators to determine the outcome of each battle and see whether it was worth fighting in the first place.
Everybody on Earth hoped for peace. Everybody, that is, except me. I had been unable to achieve any sense of identity with the world in which I lived, and it was almost worth the loss of personal survival to know that my own smug species could look silly against a still more talented race.
"It isn't so much our defense that worries me," my mother muttered, "as lack of adequate medical machinery. War is bound to mean casualties and there aren't enough cure-alls on the planet to take care of them. It's useless to expect the government to build more right now; they'll be too busy producing weapons. Sylvia, you'd better take a leave of absence from your job and come down to Psycho Center to learn first-aid techniques. And you too, Kevin," she added, obviously a little surprised herself at what she was saying. "Probably you'd be even better at it than Sylvia since you aren't sensitive to other people's pain."
I looked at her.
"It is an ill wind," she agreed, smiling wryly, "but don't let me catch you thinking that way, Kevin. Can't you see it would be better that there should be no war and you should remain useless?"
I couldn't see it, of course, and she knew that, with her wretched talent for stripping away my feeble attempts at privacy. Psi-powers usually included some ability to form a mental shield; being without one, I was necessarily devoid of the other.
My attitude didn't matter, though, because it was definitely war. The aliens came back with a fleet clearly bent on our annihilation—even the 'paths couldn't figure out their motives, for the thought pattern was entirely different from ours—and the war was on.
I had enjoyed learning first-aid; it was the first time I had ever worked with people as an equal. And I was good at it because psi-powers aren't much of an advantage there. Telekinesis maybe a little, but I was big enough to lift anybody without needing any superhuman abilities—normal human abilities, rather.
"Gee, Mr. Faraday," one of the other students breathed, "you're so strong. And without 'kinesis or anything."
I looked at her and liked what I saw. She was blonde and pretty. "My name's not Mr. Faraday," I said. "It's Kevin."
"My name's Lucy," she giggled.
No girl had ever giggled at me in that way before. Immediately I started to envision a beautiful future for the two of us, then flushed when I realized that she might be a telepath. But she was winding a tourniquet around the arm of another member of the class with apparent unconcern.
"Hey, quit that!" the windee yelled. "You're making it too tight! I'll be mortified!"
So Lucy was obviously not a telepath. Later I found out she was only a low-grade telesensitive—just a poetess—so I had nothing to worry about as far as having my thoughts read went. I was a little afraid of Sylvia's kidding me about my first romance, but, as it happened, she got interested in one of the guys who was taking the class with us, and she was not only too busy to be bothered with me, but in too vulnerable a position herself.
However, when the actual bombs—or their alien equivalent—struck near our town, I wasn't nearly so happy, especially after they started carrying the wounded into the Psycho Center, which had been turned into a hospital for the duration. I took one look at the gory scene—I had never seen anybody really injured before; few people had, as a matter of fact—and started for the door. But Mother was already blocking the way. It was easy to see from which side of the family Tim had got his talent for prognostication.
"If the telepaths who can pick up all the pain can stand this, Kevin," she said, " you certainly can." And there was no kindness at all in the you .
She gave me a shove toward the nearest stretcher. "Go on—now's your chance to show you're of some use in this world."
Gritting my teeth, I turned to the man on the stretcher. Something had pretty near torn half his face away. It was all there, but not in the right place, and it wasn't pretty. I turned away, caught my mother's eye, and then I didn't even dare to throw up. I looked at that smashed face again and all the first-aid lessons I'd had flew out of my head as if some super-psi had plucked them from me.
The man was bleeding terribly. I had never seen blood pouring out like that before. The first thing to do, I figured sickly, was mop it up. I wet a sponge and dabbed gingerly at the face, but my hands were shaking so hard that the sponge slipped and my fingers were on the raw gaping wound. I could feel the warm viscosity of the blood and nothing, not even my mother, could keep my meal down this time, I thought.
Mother had uttered a sound of exasperation as I dropped the sponge. I could hear her coming toward me. Then I heard her gasp. I looked at my patient and my mouth dropped open. For suddenly there was no wound, no wound at all—just a little blood and the fellow's face was whole again. Not even a scar.
"Wha—wha happened?" he asked. "It doesn't hurt any more!"
He touched his cheek and looked up at me with frightened eyes. And I was frightened, too—too frightened to be sick, too frightened to do anything but stare witlessly at him.
"Touch some of the others, quick!" my mother commanded, pushing astounded attendants away from stretchers.
I touched broken limbs and torn bodies and shattered heads, and they were whole again right away. Everybody in the room was looking at me in the way I had always dreamed of being looked at. Lucy was opening and shutting her beautiful mouth like a beautiful fish. In fact, the whole thing was just like a dream, except that I was awake. I couldn't have imagined all those horrors.
But the horrors soon weren't horrors any more. I began to find them almost pleasing; the worse a wound was, the more I appreciated it. There was so much more satisfaction, virtually an esthetic thrill, in seeing a horrible jagged tear smooth away, heal, not in days, as it would have done under the cure-all, but in seconds.
"Timothy was right," my mother said, her eyes filled with tears, "and I was wrong ever to have doubted. You have a gift, son—" and she said the word son loud and clear so that everybody could hear it—"the greatest gift of all, that of healing." She looked at me proudly. And Lucy and the others looked at me as if I were a god or something.
I felt ... well, good.
"I wonder why we never thought of healing as a potential psi-power," my mother said to me later, when I was catching a snatch of rest and she was lighting cigarettes and offering me cups of coffee in an attempt to make up twenty-six years of indifference, perhaps dislike, all at once.
"The ability to heal is recorded in history, only we never paid much attention to it."
"Recorded?" I asked, a little jealously.
"Of course," she smiled. "Remember the King's Evil?"
I should have known without her reminding me, after all the old books I had read. "Scrofula, wasn't it? They called it that because the touch of certain kings was supposed to cure it ... and other diseases, too, I guess."
She nodded. "Certain people must have had the healing power and that's probably why they originally got to be the rulers."
In a very short time, I became a pretty important person. All the other deficients in the world were tested for the healing power and all of them turned out negative. I proved to be the only human healer alive, and not only that, I could work a thousand times more efficiently and effectively than any of the machines. The government built a hospital just for my work! Wounded people were ferried there from all over the world and I cured them. I could do practically everything except raise the dead and sometimes I wondered whether, with a little practice, I wouldn't be able to do even that.
When I came to my new office, whom did I find waiting there for me but Lucy, her trim figure enhanced by a snug blue and white uniform. "I'm your assistant, Kev," she said shyly.
I looked at her. "You are?"
"I—I hope you want me," she went on, coyness now mixing with apprehension.
I gave her shoulder a squeeze. "I do want you, Lucy. More than I can tell you now. After all this is over, there's something more I want to say. But right now—" I clapped her arm—"there's a job to be done."
"Yes, Kevin," she said, glaring at me for some reason I didn't have time to investigate or interpret at the moment. My patients were waiting for me.
They gave me everything else I could possibly need, except enough sleep, and I myself didn't want that. I wanted to heal. I wanted to show my fellow human beings that, though I couldn't receive or transmit thoughts or foretell the future or move things with my mind, all those powers were useless without life, and that was what I could give.
I took pride in my work. It was good to stop pain and ugliness, to know that, if it weren't for me, these people would be dead or permanently disfigured. In a sense, they were—well, my children; I felt a warm glow of affection toward them.
They felt the same way toward me. I knew because the secret of the hospital soon leaked out—during all those years of peace, the government had lost whatever facility it had for keeping secrets—and people used to come in droves, hoping for a glimpse of me.
The government pointed out that such crowds outside the building might attract the enemy's attention. I was the most important individual on Earth, they told my followers, and my safety couldn't be risked. The human race at this stage was pretty docile. The crowds went away. And it was right that they should; I didn't want to be risked any more than they wanted to risk me.
Plenty of people did come to see me officially—the President, generals, all kinds of big wheels, bringing citations, medals and other obsolete honors they'd revived primarily for me. It was wonderful. I began to love everybody.
"Don't you think you're putting too much of yourself into this, Kev?" Lucy asked me one day.
I gave her an incredulous glance. "You mean I shouldn't help people?"
"Of course you should help them. I didn't mean anything like that. Just ... well, you're getting too bound up in your work."
"Why shouldn't I be?" Then the truth, as I thought, dawned on me. "Are you jealous, Lucy?"
She lowered her eyes. "Not only that, but the war's bound to come to an end, you know, and—"
It was the first part of her sentence that interested me. "Why, do you mean—"
And just then a fresh batch of casualties arrived and I had to tend to them. For the next few days, I was so busy, I didn't get the chance to have the long talk with Lucy I'd wanted....
Then, after only four months, the war suddenly stopped. It seemed that the aliens' weapons, despite their undeniable mysteriousness, were not equal to ours. And they had the added disadvantage of being light-years away from home base. So the remnant of their fleet took off and blew itself up just outside of Mars, which we understood to be the equivalent of unconditional surrender. And it was; we never heard from the Centaurians again.
Peace once more. I had a little mopping up to do at the hospital; then I collected my possessions and went back home after a dignitary—only the Vice President this time—had thanked me on behalf of a grateful country. I wasn't needed any more.
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How do Bill and Elizabeth contribute to the story?
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about What is POSAT? by Phyllis Sterling Smith.
Relevant chunks:
What is POSAT?
By PHYLLIS STERLING SMITH
Illustrated by ED ALEXANDER
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Of course coming events cast their shadows before, but this shadow was 400 years long!
The following advertisement appeared in the July 1953 issue of several magazines:
MASTERY OF ALL KNOWLEDGE CAN BE YOURS!
What is the secret source of those profound principles that can solve the problems of life? Send for our FREE booklet of explanation.
Do not be a leaf in the wind! YOU can alter the course of your life!
Tap the treasury of Wisdom through the ages!
The Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth
POSAT
an ancient secret society
Most readers passed it by with scarcely a glance. It was, after all, similar to the many that had appeared through the years under the name of that same society. Other readers, as their eyes slid over the familiar format of the ad, speculated idly about the persistent and mildly mysterious organization behind it. A few even resolved to clip the attached coupon and send for the booklet—sometime—when a pen or pencil was nearer at hand.
Bill Evans, an unemployed pharmacist, saw the ad in a copy of Your Life and Psychology that had been abandoned on his seat in the bus. He filled out the blanks on the coupon with a scrap of stubby pencil.
"You can alter the course of your life!" he read again. He particularly liked that thought, even though he had long since ceased to believe it. He actually took the trouble to mail the coupon. After all, he had, literally, nothing to lose, and nothing else to occupy his time.
Miss Elizabeth Arnable was one of the few to whom the advertisement was unfamiliar. As a matter of fact, she very seldom read a magazine. The radio in her room took the place of reading matter, and she always liked to think that it amused her cats as well as herself. Reading would be so selfish under the circumstances, wouldn't it? Not but what the cats weren't almost smart enough to read, she always said.
It just so happened, however, that she had bought a copy of the Antivivisectionist Gazette the day before. She pounced upon the POSAT ad as a trout might snap at a particularly attractive fly. Having filled out the coupon with violet ink, she invented an errand that would take her past the neighborhood post office so that she could post it as soon as possible.
Donald Alford, research physicist, came across the POSAT ad tucked at the bottom of a column in The Bulletin of Physical Research . He was engrossed in the latest paper by Dr. Crandon, a man whom he admired from the point of view of both a former student and a fellow research worker. Consequently, he was one of the many who passed over the POSAT ad with the disregard accorded to any common object.
He read with interest to the end of the article before he realized that some component of the advertisement had been noted by a region of his brain just beyond consciousness. It teased at him like a tickle that couldn't be scratched until he turned back to the page.
It was the symbol or emblem of POSAT, he realized, that had caught his attention. The perpendicularly crossed ellipses centered with a small black circle might almost be a conventionalized version of the Bohr atom of helium. He smiled with mild skepticism as he read through the printed matter that accompanied it.
"I wonder what their racket is," he mused. Then, because his typewriter was conveniently at hand, he carefully tore out the coupon and inserted it in the machine. The spacing of the typewriter didn't fit the dotted lines on the coupon, of course, but he didn't bother to correct it. He addressed an envelope, laid it with other mail to be posted, and promptly forgot all about it. Since he was a methodical man, it was entrusted to the U.S. mail early the next morning, together with his other letters.
Three identical forms accompanied the booklet which POSAT sent in response to the three inquiries. The booklet gave no more information than had the original advertisement, but with considerable more volubility. It promised the recipient the secrets of the Cosmos and the key that would unlock the hidden knowledge within himself—if he would merely fill out the enclosed form.
Bill Evans, the unemployed pharmacist, let the paper lie unanswered for several days. To be quite honest, he was disappointed. Although he had mentally disclaimed all belief in anything that POSAT might offer, he had watched the return mails with anticipation. His own resources were almost at an end, and he had reached the point where intervention by something supernatural, or at least superhuman, seemed the only hope.
He had hoped, unreasonably, that POSAT had an answer. But time lay heavily upon him, and he used it one evening to write the requested information—about his employment (ha!), his religious beliefs, his reason for inquiring about POSAT, his financial situation. Without quite knowing that he did so, he communicated in his terse answers some of his desperation and sense of futility.
Miss Arnable was delighted with the opportunity for autobiographical composition. It required five extra sheets of paper to convey all the information that she wished to give—all about her poor, dear father who had been a missionary to China, and the kinship that she felt toward the mystic cults of the East, her belief that her cats were reincarnations of her loved ones (which, she stated, derived from a religion of the Persians; or was it the Egyptians?) and in her complete and absolute acceptance of everything that POSAT had stated in their booklet. And what would the dues be? She wished to join immediately. Fortunately, dear father had left her in a comfortable financial situation.
To Donald Alford, the booklet seemed to confirm his suspicion that POSAT was a racket of some sort. Why else would they be interested in his employment or financial position? It also served to increase his curiosity.
"What do you suppose they're driving at?" he asked his wife Betty, handing her the booklet and questionnaire.
"I don't really know what to say," she answered, squinting a little as she usually did when puzzled. "I know one thing, though, and that's that you won't stop until you find out!"
"The scientific attitude," he acknowledged with a grin.
"Why don't you fill out this questionnaire incognito, though?" she suggested. "Pretend that we're wealthy and see if they try to get our money. Do they have anything yet except your name and address?"
Don was shocked. "If I send this back to them, it will have to be with correct answers!"
"The scientific attitude again," Betty sighed. "Don't you ever let your imagination run away with the facts a bit? What are you going to give for your reasons for asking about POSAT?"
"Curiosity," he replied, and, pulling his fountain pen from his vest pocket, he wrote exactly that, in small, neat script.
It was unfortunate for his curiosity that Don could not see the contents of the three envelopes that were mailed from the offices of POSAT the following week. For this time they differed.
Bill Evans was once again disappointed. The pamphlet that was enclosed gave what apparently meant to be final answers to life's problems. They were couched in vaguely metaphysical terms and offered absolutely no help to him.
His disappointment was tempered, however, by the knowledge that he had unexpectedly found a job. Or, rather, it had fallen into his lap. When he had thought that every avenue of employment had been tried, a position had been offered him in a wholesale pharmacy in the older industrial part of the city. It was not a particularly attractive place to work, located as it was next to a large warehouse, but to him it was hope for the future.
It amused him to discover that the offices of POSAT were located on the other side of the same warehouse, at the end of a blind alley. Blind alley indeed! He felt vaguely ashamed for having placed any confidence in them.
Miss Arnable was thrilled to discover that her envelope contained not only several pamphlets, (she scanned the titles rapidly and found that one of them concerned the sacred cats of ancient Egypt), but that it contained also a small pin with the symbol of POSAT wrought in gold and black enamel. The covering letter said that she had been accepted as an active member of POSAT and that the dues were five dollars per month; please remit by return mail. She wrote a check immediately, and settled contentedly into a chair to peruse the article on sacred cats.
After a while she began to read aloud so that her own cats could enjoy it, too.
Don Alford would not have been surprised if his envelope had shown contents similar to the ones that the others received. The folded sheets of paper that he pulled forth, however, made him stiffen with sharp surprise.
"Come here a minute, Betty," he called, spreading them out carefully on the dining room table. "What do you make of these?"
She came, dish cloth in hand, and thoughtfully examined them, one by one. "Multiple choice questions! It looks like a psychological test of some sort."
"This isn't the kind of thing I expected them to send me," worried Don. "Look at the type of thing they ask. 'If you had discovered a new and virulent poison that could be compounded from common household ingredients, would you (1) publish the information in a daily newspaper, (2) manufacture it secretly and sell it as rodent exterminator, (3) give the information to the armed forces for use as a secret weapon, or (4) withhold the information entirely as too dangerous to be passed on?'"
"Could they be a spy ring?" asked Betty. "Subversive agents? Anxious to find out your scientific secrets like that classified stuff that you're so careful of when you bring it home from the lab?"
Don scanned the papers quickly. "There's nothing here that looks like an attempt to get information. Besides, I've told them nothing about my work except that I do research in physics. They don't even know what company I work for. If this is a psychological test, it measures attitudes, nothing else. Why should they want to know my attitudes?"
"Do you suppose that POSAT is really what it claims to be—a secret society—and that they actually screen their applicants?"
He smiled wryly. "Wouldn't it be interesting if I didn't make the grade after starting out to expose their racket?"
He pulled out his pen and sat down to the task of resolving the dilemmas before him.
His next communication from POSAT came to his business address and, paradoxically, was more personal than its forerunners.
Dear Doctor Alford:
We have examined with interest the information that you have sent to us. We are happy to inform you that, thus far, you have satisfied the requirements for membership in the Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth. Before accepting new members into this ancient and honorable secret society, we find it desirable that they have a personal interview with the Grand Chairman of POSAT.
Accordingly, you are cordially invited to an audience with our Grand Chairman on Tuesday, July 10, at 2:30 P.M. Please let us know if this arrangement is acceptable to you. If not, we will attempt to make another appointment for you.
The time specified for the appointment was hardly a convenient one for Don. At 2:30 P.M. on most Tuesdays, he would be at work in the laboratory. And while his employers made no complaint if he took his research problems home with him and worried over them half the night, they were not equally enthusiastic when he used working hours for pursuing unrelated interests. Moreover, the headquarters of POSAT was in a town almost a hundred miles distant. Could he afford to take a whole day off for chasing will-o-wisps?
It hardly seemed worth the trouble. He wondered if Betty would be disappointed if he dropped the whole matter. Since the letter had been sent to the laboratory instead of his home, he couldn't consult her about it without telephoning.
Since the letter had been sent to the laboratory instead of his home! But it was impossible!
He searched feverishly through his pile of daily mail for the envelope in which the letter had come. The address stared up at him, unmistakably and fearfully legible. The name of his company. The number of the room he worked in. In short, the address that he had never given them!
"Get hold of yourself," he commanded his frightened mind. "There's some perfectly logical, easy explanation for this. They looked it up in the directory of the Institute of Physics. Or in the alumni directory of the university. Or—or—"
But the more he thought about it, the more sinister it seemed. His laboratory address was available, but why should POSAT take the trouble of looking it up? Some prudent impulse had led him to withhold that particular bit of information, yet now, for some reason of their own, POSAT had unearthed the information.
His wife's words echoed in his mind, "Could they be a spy ring? Subversive agents?"
Don shook his head as though to clear away the confusion. His conservative habit of thought made him reject that explanation as too melodramatic.
At least one decision was easier to reach because of his doubts. Now he knew he had to keep his appointment with the Grand Chairman of POSAT.
He scribbled a memo to the department office stating that he would not be at work on Tuesday.
At first Don Alford had some trouble locating the POSAT headquarters. It seemed to him that the block in which the street number would fall was occupied entirely by a huge sprawling warehouse, of concrete construction, and almost entirely windowless. It was recessed from the street in several places to make room for the small, shabby buildings of a wholesale pharmacy, a printer's plant, an upholstering shop, and was also indented by alleys lined with loading platforms.
It was at the back of one of the alleys that he finally found a door marked with the now familiar emblem of POSAT.
He opened the frosted glass door with a feeling of misgiving, and faced a dark flight of stairs leading to the upper floor. Somewhere above him a buzzer sounded, evidently indicating his arrival. He picked his way up through the murky stairwell.
The reception room was hardly a cheerful place, with its battered desk facing the view of the empty alley, and a film of dust obscuring the pattern of the gray-looking wallpaper and worn rug. But the light of the summer afternoon filtering through the window scattered the gloom somewhat, enough to help Don doubt that he would find the menace here that he had come to expect.
The girl addressing envelopes at the desk looked very ordinary. Not the Mata-Hari type , thought Don, with an inward chuckle at his own suspicions. He handed her the letter.
She smiled. "We've been expecting you, Dr. Alford. If you'll just step into the next room—"
She opened a door opposite the stairwell, and Don stepped through it.
The sight of the luxurious room before him struck his eyes with the shock of a dentist's drill, so great was the contrast between it and the shabby reception room. For a moment Don had difficulty breathing. The rug—Don had seen one like it before, but it had been in a museum. The paintings on the walls, ornately framed in gilt carving, were surely old masters—of the Renaissance period, he guessed. Although he recognized none of the pictures, he felt that he could almost name the artists. That glowing one near the corner would probably be a Titian. Or was it Tintorretto? He regretted for a moment the lost opportunities of his college days, when he had passed up Art History in favor of Operational Circuit Analysis.
The girl opened a filing cabinet, the front of which was set flush with the wall, and, selecting a folder from it, disappeared through another door.
Don sprang to examine the picture near the corner. It was hung at eye level—that is, at the eye level of the average person. Don had to bend over a bit to see it properly. He searched for a signature. Apparently there was none. But did artists sign their pictures back in those days? He wished he knew more about such things.
Each of the paintings was individually lighted by a fluorescent tube held on brackets directly above it. As Don straightened up from his scrutiny of the picture, he inadvertently hit his head against the light. The tube, dislodged from its brackets, fell to the rug with a muffled thud.
Now I've done it! thought Don with dismay. But at least the tube hadn't shattered.
In fact—it was still glowing brightly! His eyes registered the fact, even while his mind refused to believe it. He raised his eyes to the brackets. They were simple pieces of solid hardware designed to support the tube.
There were no wires!
Don picked up the slender, glowing cylinder and held it between trembling fingers. Although it was delivering as much light as a two or three hundred watt bulb, it was cool to the touch. He examined it minutely. There was no possibility of concealed batteries.
The thumping of his heart was caused not by the fact that he had never seen a similar tube before, but because he had. He had never held one in his hands, though. The ones which his company had produced as experimental models had been unsuccessful at converting all of the radioactivity into light, and had, of necessity, been heavily shielded.
Right now, two of his colleagues back in the laboratory would still be searching for the right combination of fluorescent material and radioactive salts with which to make the simple, efficient, self-contained lighting unit that he was holding in his hand at this moment!
But this is impossible! he thought. We're the only company that's working on this, and it's secret. There can't be any in actual production!
And even if one had actually been successfully produced, how would it have fallen into the possession of POSAT, an Ancient Secret Society, The Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth?
The conviction grew in Don's mind that here was something much deeper and more sinister than he would be able to cope with. He should have asked for help, should have stated his suspicions to the police or the F.B.I. Even now—
With sudden decision, he thrust the lighting tube into his pocket and stepped swiftly to the outer door. He grasped the knob and shook it impatiently when it stuck and refused to turn. He yanked at it. His impatience changed to panic. It was locked!
A soft sound behind him made him whirl about. The secretary had entered again through the inner door. She glanced at the vacant light bracket, then significantly at his bulging pocket. Her gaze was still as bland and innocent as when he had entered, but to Don she no longer seemed ordinary. Her very calmness in the face of his odd actions was distressingly ominous.
"Our Grand Chairman will see you now," she said in a quiet voice.
Don realized that he was half crouched in the position of an animal expecting attack. He straightened up with what dignity he could manage to find.
She opened the inner door again and Don followed her into what he supposed to be the office of the Grand Chairman of POSAT.
Instead he found himself on a balcony along the side of a vast room, which must have been the interior of the warehouse that he had noted outside. The girl motioned him toward the far end of the balcony, where a frosted glass door marked the office of the Grand Chairman.
But Don could not will his legs to move. His heart beat at the sight of the room below him. It was a laboratory, but a laboratory the like of which he had never seen before. Most of the equipment was unfamiliar to him. Whatever he did recognize was of a different design than he had ever used, and there was something about it that convinced him that this was more advanced. The men who bent busily over their instruments did not raise their eyes to the figures on the balcony.
"Good Lord!" Don gasped. "That's an atomic reactor down there!" There could be no doubt about it, even though he could see it only obscurely through the bluish-green plastic shielding it.
His thoughts were so clamorous that he hardly realized that he had spoken aloud, or that the door at the end of the balcony had opened.
He was only dimly aware of the approaching footsteps as he speculated wildly on the nature of the shielding material. What could be so dense that only an inch would provide adequate shielding and yet remain semitransparent?
His scientist's mind applauded the genius who had developed it, even as the alarming conviction grew that he wouldn't—couldn't—be allowed to leave here any more. Surely no man would be allowed to leave this place alive to tell the fantastic story to the world!
"Hello, Don," said a quiet voice beside him. "It's good to see you again."
"Dr. Crandon!" he heard his own voice reply. " You're the Grand Chairman of POSAT?"
He felt betrayed and sick at heart. The very voice with which Crandon had spoken conjured up visions of quiet lecture halls and his own youthful excitement at the masterful and orderly disclosure of scientific facts. To find him here in this mad and treacherous place—didn't anything make sense any longer?
"I think we have rather abused you, Don," Dr. Crandon continued. His voice sounded so gentle that Don found it hard to think there was any evil in it. "I can see that you are suspicious of us, and—yes—afraid."
Don stared at the scene below him. After his initial glance to confirm his identification of Crandon, Don could not bear to look at him.
Crandon's voice suddenly hardened, became abrupt. "You're partly right about us, of course. I hate to think how many laws this organization has broken. Don't condemn us yet, though. You'll be a member yourself before the day is over."
Don was shocked by such confidence in his corruptibility.
"What do you use?" he asked bitterly. "Drugs? Hypnosis?"
Crandon sighed. "I forgot how little you know, Don. I have a long story to tell you. You'll find it hard to believe at first. But try to trust me. Try to believe me, as you once did. When I say that much of what POSAT does is illegal, I do not mean immoral. We're probably the most moral organization in the world. Get over the idea that you have stumbled into a den of thieves."
Crandon paused as though searching for words with which to continue.
"Did you notice the paintings in the waiting room as you entered?"
Don nodded, too bewildered to speak.
"They were donated by the founder of our Organization. They were part of his personal collection—which, incidentally, he bought from the artists themselves. He also designed the atomic reactor we use for power here in the laboratory."
"Then the pictures are modern," said Don, aware that his mouth was hanging open foolishly. "I thought one was a Titian—"
"It is," said Crandon. "We have several original Titians, although I really don't know too much about them."
"But how could a man alive today buy paintings from an artist of the Renaissance?"
"He is not alive today. POSAT is actually what our advertisements claim—an ancient secret society. Our founder has been dead for over four centuries."
"But you said that he designed your atomic reactor."
"Yes. This particular one has been in use for only twenty years, however."
Don's confusion was complete. Crandon looked at him kindly. "Let's start at the beginning," he said, and Don was back again in the classroom with the deep voice of Professor Crandon unfolding the pages of knowledge in clear and logical manner. "Four hundred years ago, in the time of the Italian Renaissance, a man lived who was a super-genius. His was the kind of incredible mentality that appears not in every generation, or even every century, but once in thousands of years.
"Probably the man who invented what we call the phonetic alphabet was one like him. That man lived seven thousand years ago in Mesopotamia, and his discovery was so original, so far from the natural course of man's thinking, that not once in the intervening seven thousand years has that device been rediscovered. It still exists only in the civilizations to which it has been passed on directly.
"The super-genius who was our founder was not a semanticist. He was a physical scientist and mathematician. Starting with the meager heritage that existed in these fields in his time, he began tackling physical puzzles one by one. Sitting in his study, using as his principal tool his own great mind, he invented calculus, developed the quantum theory of light, moved on to electromagnetic radiation and what we call Maxwell's equations—although, of course, he antedated Maxwell by centuries—developed the special and general theories of relativity, the tool of wave mechanics, and finally, toward the end of his life, he mathematically derived the packing fraction that describes the binding energy of nuclei—"
"But it can't be done," Don objected. "It's an observed phenomenon. It hasn't been derived." Every conservative instinct that he possessed cried out against this impossible fantasy. And yet—there sat the reactor, sheathed in its strange shield. Crandon watched the direction of Don's glance.
"Yes, the reactor," said Crandon. "He built one like it. It confirmed his theories. His calculations showed him something else too. He saw the destructive potentialities of an atomic explosion. He himself could not have built an atomic bomb; he didn't have the facilities. But his knowledge would have enabled other men to do so. He looked about him. He saw a political setup of warring principalities, rival states, intrigue, and squabbles over political power. Giving the men of his time atomic energy would have been like handing a baby a firecracker with a lighted fuse.
"What should he have done? Let his secrets die with him? He didn't think so. No one else in his age could have derived the knowledge that he did. But it was an age of brilliant men. Leonardo. Michelangelo. There were men capable of learning his science, even as men can learn it today. He gathered some of them together and founded this society. It served two purposes. It perpetuated his discoveries and at the same time it maintained the greatest secrecy about them. He urged that the secrets be kept until the time when men could use them safely. The other purpose was to make that time come about as soon as possible."
Crandon looked at Don's unbelieving face. "How can I make you see that it is the truth? Think of the eons that man or manlike creatures have walked the Earth. Think what a small fraction of that time is four hundred years. Is it so strange that atomic energy was discovered a little early, by this displacement in time that is so tiny after all?"
"But by one man," Don argued.
Crandon shrugged. "Compared with him, Don, you and I are stupid men. So are the scientists who slowly plodded down the same road he had come, stumbling first on one truth and then the succeeding one. We know that inventions and discoveries do not occur at random. Each is based on the one that preceded it. We are all aware of the phenomenon of simultaneous invention. The path to truth is a straight one. It is only our own stupidity that makes it seem slow and tortuous.
"He merely followed the straight path," Crandon finished simply.
Don's incredulity thawed a little. It was not entirely beyond the realm of possibility.
But if it were true! A vast panorama of possible achievements spread before him.
"Four hundred years!" he murmured with awe. "You've had four hundred years head-start on the rest of the world! What wonders you must have uncovered in that time!"
"Our technical achievements may disappoint you," warned Crandon.
"Oh, they're way beyond anything that you are familiar with. You've undoubtedly noticed the shielding material on the reactor. That's a fairly recent development of our metallurgical department. There are other things in the laboratory that I can't even explain to you until you have caught up on the technical basis for understanding them.
"Our emphasis has not been on physical sciences, however, except as they contribute to our central project. We want to change civilization so that it can use physical science without disaster."
For a moment Don had been fired with enthusiasm. But at these words his heart sank.
"Then you've failed," he said bitterly. "In spite of centuries of advance warning, you've failed to change the rest of us enough to prevent us from trying to blow ourselves off the Earth. Here we are, still snarling and snapping at our neighbors' throats—and we've caught up with you. We have the atomic bomb. What's POSAT been doing all that time? Or have you found that human nature really can't be changed?"
"Come with me," said Crandon.
He led the way along the narrow balcony to another door, then down a steep flight of stairs. He opened a door at the bottom, and Don saw what must have been the world's largest computing machine.
"This is our answer," said Crandon. "Oh, rather, it's the tool by which we find our answer. For two centuries we have been working on the newest of the sciences—that of human motivation. Soon we will be ready to put some of our new knowledge to work. But you are right in one respect, we are working now against time. We must hurry if we are to save our civilization. That's why you are here. We have work for you to do. Will you join us, Don?"
"But why the hocus-pocus?" asked Don. "Why do you hide behind such a weird front as POSAT? Why do you advertise in magazines and invite just anyone to join? Why didn't you approach me directly, if you have work for me to do? And if you really have the answers to our problems, why haven't you gathered together all the scientists in the world to work on this project—before it's too late?"
Crandon took a sighing breath. "How I wish that we could do just that! But you forget that one of the prime purposes of our organization is to maintain the secrecy of our discoveries until they can be safely disclosed. We must be absolutely certain that anyone who enters this building will have joined POSAT before he leaves. What if we approached the wrong scientist? Centuries of accomplishment might be wasted if they attempted either to reveal it or to exploit it!
"Do you recall the questionnaires that you answered before you were invited here? We fed the answers to this machine and, as a result, we know more about how you will react in any given situation than you do yourself. Even if you should fail to join us, our secrets would be safe with you. Of course, we miss a few of the scientists who might be perfect material for our organization. You'd be surprised, though, at how clever our advertisements are at attracting exactly the men we want. With the help of our new science, we have baited our ads well, and we know how to maintain interest. Curiosity is, to the men we want, a powerful motivator."
"But what about the others?" asked Don. "There must be hundreds of applicants who would be of no use to you at all."
"Oh, yes," replied Crandon. "There are the mild religious fanatics. We enroll them as members and keep them interested by sending pamphlets in line with their interests. We even let them contribute to our upkeep, if they seem to want to. They never get beyond the reception room if they come to call on us. But they are additional people through whom we can act when the time finally comes.
"There are also the desperate people who try POSAT as a last resort—lost ones who can't find their direction in life. For them we put into practice some of our newly won knowledge. We rehabilitate them—anonymously, of course. Even find jobs or patch up homes. It's good practice for us.
"I think I've answered most of your questions, Don. But you haven't answered mine. Will you join us?"
Don looked solemnly at the orderly array of the computer before him. He had one more question.
"Will it really work? Can it actually tell you how to motivate the stubborn, quarrelsome, opinionated people one finds on this Earth?"
Crandon smiled. "You're here, aren't you?"
Don nodded, his tense features relaxing.
"Enroll me as a member," he said.
Question:
How do Bill and Elizabeth contribute to the story?
Answer:
|
[
"Bill and Elizabeth are minor characters in the story, but they are key in demonstrating how POSAT’S recruiting efforts work. Bill, Elizabeth, and Don all see the same magazine advertisement and decide to send their coupons in the mail and receive an informational pamphlet in return. Bill is motivated by his desire to change his life. He has lost his job and feels useless and dejected. Elizabeth wants to join the ancient society because she truly believes it can offer her profound wisdom. She also believes that her cats are her family members reincarnated, so she’s clearly a gullible person who hopes to find magic and miracles in her everyday life. Don is curious about the advertisement, and as a naturally skeptical person, he assumes it’s all a hoax.\n\nPOSAT’s correspondence with the three highly different individuals starts out the same, but after gaining a little bit of insight into each person’s background, job, religious beliefs, and motivation for joining the society, the people at POSAT individualize Bill, Elizabeth, and Don’s responses. Bill receives a pamphlet with vague answers to life’s problems, while Elizabeth gets literature about topics like the sacred cats of ancient Egypt. She is also offered an official membership to the group and told to contribute $5 per month. Don, however, is given an in-depth psychological exam. \n\nTowards the end of the story, Mr. Crandon reveals how POSAT’s magazine advertisements work to attract people to the secret society. The new supercomputer they have invented has created the perfect combination of intrigue, symbolism, and promise of knowledge to get the right peoples’ attention. Don, for example, was immediately taken by POSAT’s logo, although he could not explain why. When people like Bill and Elizabeth apply to become members, they are pacified through other means. Elizabeth is an example of a religious fanatic who contributes to the society financially while also feeling deeply satisfied at her inclusion. Bill is an example of someone who is desperate and wants to try to join the society as a way to change his life. Since POSAT wants a more civilized and peaceful society, they work with those people by finding them new jobs or renovating their homes. \n",
"Bill Evans is a pharmacist who does not currently have a job, and is hesitant to fill out the long form he was given in return for his request for a POSAT booklet. Elizabeth Arnable, on the other hand, is overjoyed to have the chance to talk about herself and send in the form, providing much more information than was requested of her. Not only do the two different people allow the reader to see that POSAT sends different responses in the mail to different people, but we learn at the end of the story that these different people play different roles in the organization. Neither Bill nor Elizabeth will contribute scientific knowledge but each have their place in the organization. People like Elizabeth, for instance, are kept interested with various pamphlets, and contribute to the organization if they want to--Elizabeth asks how much dues are, so she is given the chance to contribute financially. Bill, on the other hand, is someone who looks to the organization as a last resort, so POSAT takes advantage of the opportunity to study human motivation, practicing their newly developed theories by providing Bill with a pharmacy job and keeping an eye on him. ",
"Bill Evans is an unemployed pharmacist, who turns to POSAT as a last-ditch effort to escape the financial ruin of his current situation. He discovers an advertisement for POSAT in a copy of Your Life and Psychology on an empty bus seat, and writes in to get more information on its promise that its secrets can \"alter the course of your life!\" Likewise, Elizabeth Arnable discovers the advertisement in a copy of Antivivisectionist Gazette, a magazine she reads by chance despite the fact that she rarely reads and prefers listening to the radio with her cats. Most likely due to the fact that she believes her cats are reincarnated family members, the vague mysticism of the advertisement attracts her, and she immediately wants to become a POSAT member. Although this same messaging disappoints Bill, he is pleased that around the same time that he receives his information packet from POSAT, he receives a job offer at a pharmacy that shares the same building as their headquarters. Elizabeth receives pamphlets of information about the sacred cats of ancient Egypt, a POSAT membership pin, and details about membership fees. Later, Dr. Crandon explains these fees are collected from people who view their POSAT membership with religious fervor to cover operational expenses. The pharmacy where Bill Evans works was built in an effort to employ those who turn to POSAT out of desperation, and there they become the subjects of covert rehabilitation to help them reenter society using POSAT's knowledge and discoveries.",
"Bill and Elizabeth are two other people who responded to the POSAT ad in a magazine. They are examples of the two other things that may happen to people who apply to POSAT, but are not the correct person to get in. \nBill was down on his luck and searching for cosmic change. He needed a job, a better life, and he needed it fast. He responded to the advertisement as his last hope and was disappointed to only receive a metaphysical text in return. However, he was also offered a job at a wholesale pharmacy right next to the POSAT headquarters. Dr. Crandon later reveals that they give back to the world by finding housing, jobs, and more for people down on their luck who apply to POSAT in the hopes of a change. \nElizabeth, on the other hand, is a completely different applicant. She was interested and enthralled by the idea of a secret society, but wouldn’t actually be qualified to join or dedicated to the task at hand. So, POSAT enrolled her, but only sends pamphlets that she would be interested in. For example, they sent her a pamphlet about Egyptian cats, since she had mentioned her cats in her original letter to POSAT. Since she asked about dues, they asked her to contribute $5 monthly which she will do happily. \n"
] |
51336
|
What is POSAT?
By PHYLLIS STERLING SMITH
Illustrated by ED ALEXANDER
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Of course coming events cast their shadows before, but this shadow was 400 years long!
The following advertisement appeared in the July 1953 issue of several magazines:
MASTERY OF ALL KNOWLEDGE CAN BE YOURS!
What is the secret source of those profound principles that can solve the problems of life? Send for our FREE booklet of explanation.
Do not be a leaf in the wind! YOU can alter the course of your life!
Tap the treasury of Wisdom through the ages!
The Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth
POSAT
an ancient secret society
Most readers passed it by with scarcely a glance. It was, after all, similar to the many that had appeared through the years under the name of that same society. Other readers, as their eyes slid over the familiar format of the ad, speculated idly about the persistent and mildly mysterious organization behind it. A few even resolved to clip the attached coupon and send for the booklet—sometime—when a pen or pencil was nearer at hand.
Bill Evans, an unemployed pharmacist, saw the ad in a copy of Your Life and Psychology that had been abandoned on his seat in the bus. He filled out the blanks on the coupon with a scrap of stubby pencil.
"You can alter the course of your life!" he read again. He particularly liked that thought, even though he had long since ceased to believe it. He actually took the trouble to mail the coupon. After all, he had, literally, nothing to lose, and nothing else to occupy his time.
Miss Elizabeth Arnable was one of the few to whom the advertisement was unfamiliar. As a matter of fact, she very seldom read a magazine. The radio in her room took the place of reading matter, and she always liked to think that it amused her cats as well as herself. Reading would be so selfish under the circumstances, wouldn't it? Not but what the cats weren't almost smart enough to read, she always said.
It just so happened, however, that she had bought a copy of the Antivivisectionist Gazette the day before. She pounced upon the POSAT ad as a trout might snap at a particularly attractive fly. Having filled out the coupon with violet ink, she invented an errand that would take her past the neighborhood post office so that she could post it as soon as possible.
Donald Alford, research physicist, came across the POSAT ad tucked at the bottom of a column in The Bulletin of Physical Research . He was engrossed in the latest paper by Dr. Crandon, a man whom he admired from the point of view of both a former student and a fellow research worker. Consequently, he was one of the many who passed over the POSAT ad with the disregard accorded to any common object.
He read with interest to the end of the article before he realized that some component of the advertisement had been noted by a region of his brain just beyond consciousness. It teased at him like a tickle that couldn't be scratched until he turned back to the page.
It was the symbol or emblem of POSAT, he realized, that had caught his attention. The perpendicularly crossed ellipses centered with a small black circle might almost be a conventionalized version of the Bohr atom of helium. He smiled with mild skepticism as he read through the printed matter that accompanied it.
"I wonder what their racket is," he mused. Then, because his typewriter was conveniently at hand, he carefully tore out the coupon and inserted it in the machine. The spacing of the typewriter didn't fit the dotted lines on the coupon, of course, but he didn't bother to correct it. He addressed an envelope, laid it with other mail to be posted, and promptly forgot all about it. Since he was a methodical man, it was entrusted to the U.S. mail early the next morning, together with his other letters.
Three identical forms accompanied the booklet which POSAT sent in response to the three inquiries. The booklet gave no more information than had the original advertisement, but with considerable more volubility. It promised the recipient the secrets of the Cosmos and the key that would unlock the hidden knowledge within himself—if he would merely fill out the enclosed form.
Bill Evans, the unemployed pharmacist, let the paper lie unanswered for several days. To be quite honest, he was disappointed. Although he had mentally disclaimed all belief in anything that POSAT might offer, he had watched the return mails with anticipation. His own resources were almost at an end, and he had reached the point where intervention by something supernatural, or at least superhuman, seemed the only hope.
He had hoped, unreasonably, that POSAT had an answer. But time lay heavily upon him, and he used it one evening to write the requested information—about his employment (ha!), his religious beliefs, his reason for inquiring about POSAT, his financial situation. Without quite knowing that he did so, he communicated in his terse answers some of his desperation and sense of futility.
Miss Arnable was delighted with the opportunity for autobiographical composition. It required five extra sheets of paper to convey all the information that she wished to give—all about her poor, dear father who had been a missionary to China, and the kinship that she felt toward the mystic cults of the East, her belief that her cats were reincarnations of her loved ones (which, she stated, derived from a religion of the Persians; or was it the Egyptians?) and in her complete and absolute acceptance of everything that POSAT had stated in their booklet. And what would the dues be? She wished to join immediately. Fortunately, dear father had left her in a comfortable financial situation.
To Donald Alford, the booklet seemed to confirm his suspicion that POSAT was a racket of some sort. Why else would they be interested in his employment or financial position? It also served to increase his curiosity.
"What do you suppose they're driving at?" he asked his wife Betty, handing her the booklet and questionnaire.
"I don't really know what to say," she answered, squinting a little as she usually did when puzzled. "I know one thing, though, and that's that you won't stop until you find out!"
"The scientific attitude," he acknowledged with a grin.
"Why don't you fill out this questionnaire incognito, though?" she suggested. "Pretend that we're wealthy and see if they try to get our money. Do they have anything yet except your name and address?"
Don was shocked. "If I send this back to them, it will have to be with correct answers!"
"The scientific attitude again," Betty sighed. "Don't you ever let your imagination run away with the facts a bit? What are you going to give for your reasons for asking about POSAT?"
"Curiosity," he replied, and, pulling his fountain pen from his vest pocket, he wrote exactly that, in small, neat script.
It was unfortunate for his curiosity that Don could not see the contents of the three envelopes that were mailed from the offices of POSAT the following week. For this time they differed.
Bill Evans was once again disappointed. The pamphlet that was enclosed gave what apparently meant to be final answers to life's problems. They were couched in vaguely metaphysical terms and offered absolutely no help to him.
His disappointment was tempered, however, by the knowledge that he had unexpectedly found a job. Or, rather, it had fallen into his lap. When he had thought that every avenue of employment had been tried, a position had been offered him in a wholesale pharmacy in the older industrial part of the city. It was not a particularly attractive place to work, located as it was next to a large warehouse, but to him it was hope for the future.
It amused him to discover that the offices of POSAT were located on the other side of the same warehouse, at the end of a blind alley. Blind alley indeed! He felt vaguely ashamed for having placed any confidence in them.
Miss Arnable was thrilled to discover that her envelope contained not only several pamphlets, (she scanned the titles rapidly and found that one of them concerned the sacred cats of ancient Egypt), but that it contained also a small pin with the symbol of POSAT wrought in gold and black enamel. The covering letter said that she had been accepted as an active member of POSAT and that the dues were five dollars per month; please remit by return mail. She wrote a check immediately, and settled contentedly into a chair to peruse the article on sacred cats.
After a while she began to read aloud so that her own cats could enjoy it, too.
Don Alford would not have been surprised if his envelope had shown contents similar to the ones that the others received. The folded sheets of paper that he pulled forth, however, made him stiffen with sharp surprise.
"Come here a minute, Betty," he called, spreading them out carefully on the dining room table. "What do you make of these?"
She came, dish cloth in hand, and thoughtfully examined them, one by one. "Multiple choice questions! It looks like a psychological test of some sort."
"This isn't the kind of thing I expected them to send me," worried Don. "Look at the type of thing they ask. 'If you had discovered a new and virulent poison that could be compounded from common household ingredients, would you (1) publish the information in a daily newspaper, (2) manufacture it secretly and sell it as rodent exterminator, (3) give the information to the armed forces for use as a secret weapon, or (4) withhold the information entirely as too dangerous to be passed on?'"
"Could they be a spy ring?" asked Betty. "Subversive agents? Anxious to find out your scientific secrets like that classified stuff that you're so careful of when you bring it home from the lab?"
Don scanned the papers quickly. "There's nothing here that looks like an attempt to get information. Besides, I've told them nothing about my work except that I do research in physics. They don't even know what company I work for. If this is a psychological test, it measures attitudes, nothing else. Why should they want to know my attitudes?"
"Do you suppose that POSAT is really what it claims to be—a secret society—and that they actually screen their applicants?"
He smiled wryly. "Wouldn't it be interesting if I didn't make the grade after starting out to expose their racket?"
He pulled out his pen and sat down to the task of resolving the dilemmas before him.
His next communication from POSAT came to his business address and, paradoxically, was more personal than its forerunners.
Dear Doctor Alford:
We have examined with interest the information that you have sent to us. We are happy to inform you that, thus far, you have satisfied the requirements for membership in the Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth. Before accepting new members into this ancient and honorable secret society, we find it desirable that they have a personal interview with the Grand Chairman of POSAT.
Accordingly, you are cordially invited to an audience with our Grand Chairman on Tuesday, July 10, at 2:30 P.M. Please let us know if this arrangement is acceptable to you. If not, we will attempt to make another appointment for you.
The time specified for the appointment was hardly a convenient one for Don. At 2:30 P.M. on most Tuesdays, he would be at work in the laboratory. And while his employers made no complaint if he took his research problems home with him and worried over them half the night, they were not equally enthusiastic when he used working hours for pursuing unrelated interests. Moreover, the headquarters of POSAT was in a town almost a hundred miles distant. Could he afford to take a whole day off for chasing will-o-wisps?
It hardly seemed worth the trouble. He wondered if Betty would be disappointed if he dropped the whole matter. Since the letter had been sent to the laboratory instead of his home, he couldn't consult her about it without telephoning.
Since the letter had been sent to the laboratory instead of his home! But it was impossible!
He searched feverishly through his pile of daily mail for the envelope in which the letter had come. The address stared up at him, unmistakably and fearfully legible. The name of his company. The number of the room he worked in. In short, the address that he had never given them!
"Get hold of yourself," he commanded his frightened mind. "There's some perfectly logical, easy explanation for this. They looked it up in the directory of the Institute of Physics. Or in the alumni directory of the university. Or—or—"
But the more he thought about it, the more sinister it seemed. His laboratory address was available, but why should POSAT take the trouble of looking it up? Some prudent impulse had led him to withhold that particular bit of information, yet now, for some reason of their own, POSAT had unearthed the information.
His wife's words echoed in his mind, "Could they be a spy ring? Subversive agents?"
Don shook his head as though to clear away the confusion. His conservative habit of thought made him reject that explanation as too melodramatic.
At least one decision was easier to reach because of his doubts. Now he knew he had to keep his appointment with the Grand Chairman of POSAT.
He scribbled a memo to the department office stating that he would not be at work on Tuesday.
At first Don Alford had some trouble locating the POSAT headquarters. It seemed to him that the block in which the street number would fall was occupied entirely by a huge sprawling warehouse, of concrete construction, and almost entirely windowless. It was recessed from the street in several places to make room for the small, shabby buildings of a wholesale pharmacy, a printer's plant, an upholstering shop, and was also indented by alleys lined with loading platforms.
It was at the back of one of the alleys that he finally found a door marked with the now familiar emblem of POSAT.
He opened the frosted glass door with a feeling of misgiving, and faced a dark flight of stairs leading to the upper floor. Somewhere above him a buzzer sounded, evidently indicating his arrival. He picked his way up through the murky stairwell.
The reception room was hardly a cheerful place, with its battered desk facing the view of the empty alley, and a film of dust obscuring the pattern of the gray-looking wallpaper and worn rug. But the light of the summer afternoon filtering through the window scattered the gloom somewhat, enough to help Don doubt that he would find the menace here that he had come to expect.
The girl addressing envelopes at the desk looked very ordinary. Not the Mata-Hari type , thought Don, with an inward chuckle at his own suspicions. He handed her the letter.
She smiled. "We've been expecting you, Dr. Alford. If you'll just step into the next room—"
She opened a door opposite the stairwell, and Don stepped through it.
The sight of the luxurious room before him struck his eyes with the shock of a dentist's drill, so great was the contrast between it and the shabby reception room. For a moment Don had difficulty breathing. The rug—Don had seen one like it before, but it had been in a museum. The paintings on the walls, ornately framed in gilt carving, were surely old masters—of the Renaissance period, he guessed. Although he recognized none of the pictures, he felt that he could almost name the artists. That glowing one near the corner would probably be a Titian. Or was it Tintorretto? He regretted for a moment the lost opportunities of his college days, when he had passed up Art History in favor of Operational Circuit Analysis.
The girl opened a filing cabinet, the front of which was set flush with the wall, and, selecting a folder from it, disappeared through another door.
Don sprang to examine the picture near the corner. It was hung at eye level—that is, at the eye level of the average person. Don had to bend over a bit to see it properly. He searched for a signature. Apparently there was none. But did artists sign their pictures back in those days? He wished he knew more about such things.
Each of the paintings was individually lighted by a fluorescent tube held on brackets directly above it. As Don straightened up from his scrutiny of the picture, he inadvertently hit his head against the light. The tube, dislodged from its brackets, fell to the rug with a muffled thud.
Now I've done it! thought Don with dismay. But at least the tube hadn't shattered.
In fact—it was still glowing brightly! His eyes registered the fact, even while his mind refused to believe it. He raised his eyes to the brackets. They were simple pieces of solid hardware designed to support the tube.
There were no wires!
Don picked up the slender, glowing cylinder and held it between trembling fingers. Although it was delivering as much light as a two or three hundred watt bulb, it was cool to the touch. He examined it minutely. There was no possibility of concealed batteries.
The thumping of his heart was caused not by the fact that he had never seen a similar tube before, but because he had. He had never held one in his hands, though. The ones which his company had produced as experimental models had been unsuccessful at converting all of the radioactivity into light, and had, of necessity, been heavily shielded.
Right now, two of his colleagues back in the laboratory would still be searching for the right combination of fluorescent material and radioactive salts with which to make the simple, efficient, self-contained lighting unit that he was holding in his hand at this moment!
But this is impossible! he thought. We're the only company that's working on this, and it's secret. There can't be any in actual production!
And even if one had actually been successfully produced, how would it have fallen into the possession of POSAT, an Ancient Secret Society, The Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth?
The conviction grew in Don's mind that here was something much deeper and more sinister than he would be able to cope with. He should have asked for help, should have stated his suspicions to the police or the F.B.I. Even now—
With sudden decision, he thrust the lighting tube into his pocket and stepped swiftly to the outer door. He grasped the knob and shook it impatiently when it stuck and refused to turn. He yanked at it. His impatience changed to panic. It was locked!
A soft sound behind him made him whirl about. The secretary had entered again through the inner door. She glanced at the vacant light bracket, then significantly at his bulging pocket. Her gaze was still as bland and innocent as when he had entered, but to Don she no longer seemed ordinary. Her very calmness in the face of his odd actions was distressingly ominous.
"Our Grand Chairman will see you now," she said in a quiet voice.
Don realized that he was half crouched in the position of an animal expecting attack. He straightened up with what dignity he could manage to find.
She opened the inner door again and Don followed her into what he supposed to be the office of the Grand Chairman of POSAT.
Instead he found himself on a balcony along the side of a vast room, which must have been the interior of the warehouse that he had noted outside. The girl motioned him toward the far end of the balcony, where a frosted glass door marked the office of the Grand Chairman.
But Don could not will his legs to move. His heart beat at the sight of the room below him. It was a laboratory, but a laboratory the like of which he had never seen before. Most of the equipment was unfamiliar to him. Whatever he did recognize was of a different design than he had ever used, and there was something about it that convinced him that this was more advanced. The men who bent busily over their instruments did not raise their eyes to the figures on the balcony.
"Good Lord!" Don gasped. "That's an atomic reactor down there!" There could be no doubt about it, even though he could see it only obscurely through the bluish-green plastic shielding it.
His thoughts were so clamorous that he hardly realized that he had spoken aloud, or that the door at the end of the balcony had opened.
He was only dimly aware of the approaching footsteps as he speculated wildly on the nature of the shielding material. What could be so dense that only an inch would provide adequate shielding and yet remain semitransparent?
His scientist's mind applauded the genius who had developed it, even as the alarming conviction grew that he wouldn't—couldn't—be allowed to leave here any more. Surely no man would be allowed to leave this place alive to tell the fantastic story to the world!
"Hello, Don," said a quiet voice beside him. "It's good to see you again."
"Dr. Crandon!" he heard his own voice reply. " You're the Grand Chairman of POSAT?"
He felt betrayed and sick at heart. The very voice with which Crandon had spoken conjured up visions of quiet lecture halls and his own youthful excitement at the masterful and orderly disclosure of scientific facts. To find him here in this mad and treacherous place—didn't anything make sense any longer?
"I think we have rather abused you, Don," Dr. Crandon continued. His voice sounded so gentle that Don found it hard to think there was any evil in it. "I can see that you are suspicious of us, and—yes—afraid."
Don stared at the scene below him. After his initial glance to confirm his identification of Crandon, Don could not bear to look at him.
Crandon's voice suddenly hardened, became abrupt. "You're partly right about us, of course. I hate to think how many laws this organization has broken. Don't condemn us yet, though. You'll be a member yourself before the day is over."
Don was shocked by such confidence in his corruptibility.
"What do you use?" he asked bitterly. "Drugs? Hypnosis?"
Crandon sighed. "I forgot how little you know, Don. I have a long story to tell you. You'll find it hard to believe at first. But try to trust me. Try to believe me, as you once did. When I say that much of what POSAT does is illegal, I do not mean immoral. We're probably the most moral organization in the world. Get over the idea that you have stumbled into a den of thieves."
Crandon paused as though searching for words with which to continue.
"Did you notice the paintings in the waiting room as you entered?"
Don nodded, too bewildered to speak.
"They were donated by the founder of our Organization. They were part of his personal collection—which, incidentally, he bought from the artists themselves. He also designed the atomic reactor we use for power here in the laboratory."
"Then the pictures are modern," said Don, aware that his mouth was hanging open foolishly. "I thought one was a Titian—"
"It is," said Crandon. "We have several original Titians, although I really don't know too much about them."
"But how could a man alive today buy paintings from an artist of the Renaissance?"
"He is not alive today. POSAT is actually what our advertisements claim—an ancient secret society. Our founder has been dead for over four centuries."
"But you said that he designed your atomic reactor."
"Yes. This particular one has been in use for only twenty years, however."
Don's confusion was complete. Crandon looked at him kindly. "Let's start at the beginning," he said, and Don was back again in the classroom with the deep voice of Professor Crandon unfolding the pages of knowledge in clear and logical manner. "Four hundred years ago, in the time of the Italian Renaissance, a man lived who was a super-genius. His was the kind of incredible mentality that appears not in every generation, or even every century, but once in thousands of years.
"Probably the man who invented what we call the phonetic alphabet was one like him. That man lived seven thousand years ago in Mesopotamia, and his discovery was so original, so far from the natural course of man's thinking, that not once in the intervening seven thousand years has that device been rediscovered. It still exists only in the civilizations to which it has been passed on directly.
"The super-genius who was our founder was not a semanticist. He was a physical scientist and mathematician. Starting with the meager heritage that existed in these fields in his time, he began tackling physical puzzles one by one. Sitting in his study, using as his principal tool his own great mind, he invented calculus, developed the quantum theory of light, moved on to electromagnetic radiation and what we call Maxwell's equations—although, of course, he antedated Maxwell by centuries—developed the special and general theories of relativity, the tool of wave mechanics, and finally, toward the end of his life, he mathematically derived the packing fraction that describes the binding energy of nuclei—"
"But it can't be done," Don objected. "It's an observed phenomenon. It hasn't been derived." Every conservative instinct that he possessed cried out against this impossible fantasy. And yet—there sat the reactor, sheathed in its strange shield. Crandon watched the direction of Don's glance.
"Yes, the reactor," said Crandon. "He built one like it. It confirmed his theories. His calculations showed him something else too. He saw the destructive potentialities of an atomic explosion. He himself could not have built an atomic bomb; he didn't have the facilities. But his knowledge would have enabled other men to do so. He looked about him. He saw a political setup of warring principalities, rival states, intrigue, and squabbles over political power. Giving the men of his time atomic energy would have been like handing a baby a firecracker with a lighted fuse.
"What should he have done? Let his secrets die with him? He didn't think so. No one else in his age could have derived the knowledge that he did. But it was an age of brilliant men. Leonardo. Michelangelo. There were men capable of learning his science, even as men can learn it today. He gathered some of them together and founded this society. It served two purposes. It perpetuated his discoveries and at the same time it maintained the greatest secrecy about them. He urged that the secrets be kept until the time when men could use them safely. The other purpose was to make that time come about as soon as possible."
Crandon looked at Don's unbelieving face. "How can I make you see that it is the truth? Think of the eons that man or manlike creatures have walked the Earth. Think what a small fraction of that time is four hundred years. Is it so strange that atomic energy was discovered a little early, by this displacement in time that is so tiny after all?"
"But by one man," Don argued.
Crandon shrugged. "Compared with him, Don, you and I are stupid men. So are the scientists who slowly plodded down the same road he had come, stumbling first on one truth and then the succeeding one. We know that inventions and discoveries do not occur at random. Each is based on the one that preceded it. We are all aware of the phenomenon of simultaneous invention. The path to truth is a straight one. It is only our own stupidity that makes it seem slow and tortuous.
"He merely followed the straight path," Crandon finished simply.
Don's incredulity thawed a little. It was not entirely beyond the realm of possibility.
But if it were true! A vast panorama of possible achievements spread before him.
"Four hundred years!" he murmured with awe. "You've had four hundred years head-start on the rest of the world! What wonders you must have uncovered in that time!"
"Our technical achievements may disappoint you," warned Crandon.
"Oh, they're way beyond anything that you are familiar with. You've undoubtedly noticed the shielding material on the reactor. That's a fairly recent development of our metallurgical department. There are other things in the laboratory that I can't even explain to you until you have caught up on the technical basis for understanding them.
"Our emphasis has not been on physical sciences, however, except as they contribute to our central project. We want to change civilization so that it can use physical science without disaster."
For a moment Don had been fired with enthusiasm. But at these words his heart sank.
"Then you've failed," he said bitterly. "In spite of centuries of advance warning, you've failed to change the rest of us enough to prevent us from trying to blow ourselves off the Earth. Here we are, still snarling and snapping at our neighbors' throats—and we've caught up with you. We have the atomic bomb. What's POSAT been doing all that time? Or have you found that human nature really can't be changed?"
"Come with me," said Crandon.
He led the way along the narrow balcony to another door, then down a steep flight of stairs. He opened a door at the bottom, and Don saw what must have been the world's largest computing machine.
"This is our answer," said Crandon. "Oh, rather, it's the tool by which we find our answer. For two centuries we have been working on the newest of the sciences—that of human motivation. Soon we will be ready to put some of our new knowledge to work. But you are right in one respect, we are working now against time. We must hurry if we are to save our civilization. That's why you are here. We have work for you to do. Will you join us, Don?"
"But why the hocus-pocus?" asked Don. "Why do you hide behind such a weird front as POSAT? Why do you advertise in magazines and invite just anyone to join? Why didn't you approach me directly, if you have work for me to do? And if you really have the answers to our problems, why haven't you gathered together all the scientists in the world to work on this project—before it's too late?"
Crandon took a sighing breath. "How I wish that we could do just that! But you forget that one of the prime purposes of our organization is to maintain the secrecy of our discoveries until they can be safely disclosed. We must be absolutely certain that anyone who enters this building will have joined POSAT before he leaves. What if we approached the wrong scientist? Centuries of accomplishment might be wasted if they attempted either to reveal it or to exploit it!
"Do you recall the questionnaires that you answered before you were invited here? We fed the answers to this machine and, as a result, we know more about how you will react in any given situation than you do yourself. Even if you should fail to join us, our secrets would be safe with you. Of course, we miss a few of the scientists who might be perfect material for our organization. You'd be surprised, though, at how clever our advertisements are at attracting exactly the men we want. With the help of our new science, we have baited our ads well, and we know how to maintain interest. Curiosity is, to the men we want, a powerful motivator."
"But what about the others?" asked Don. "There must be hundreds of applicants who would be of no use to you at all."
"Oh, yes," replied Crandon. "There are the mild religious fanatics. We enroll them as members and keep them interested by sending pamphlets in line with their interests. We even let them contribute to our upkeep, if they seem to want to. They never get beyond the reception room if they come to call on us. But they are additional people through whom we can act when the time finally comes.
"There are also the desperate people who try POSAT as a last resort—lost ones who can't find their direction in life. For them we put into practice some of our newly won knowledge. We rehabilitate them—anonymously, of course. Even find jobs or patch up homes. It's good practice for us.
"I think I've answered most of your questions, Don. But you haven't answered mine. Will you join us?"
Don looked solemnly at the orderly array of the computer before him. He had one more question.
"Will it really work? Can it actually tell you how to motivate the stubborn, quarrelsome, opinionated people one finds on this Earth?"
Crandon smiled. "You're here, aren't you?"
Don nodded, his tense features relaxing.
"Enroll me as a member," he said.
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What is the setting of the story?
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about The Girls From Earth by Frank M. Robinson.
Relevant chunks:
THE GIRLS FROM EARTH
By FRANK M. ROBINSON
Illustrated by EMSH
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction January 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Problem: How can you arrange marriages with men in one solar system, women in another—and neither willing to leave his own world?
I
"The beasts aren't much help, are they?"
Karl Allen snatched a breath of air and gave another heave on the line tied to the raft of parampa logs bobbing in the middle of the river.
"No," he grunted, "they're not. They always balk at a time like this, when they can see it'll be hard work."
Joseph Hill wiped his plump face and coiled some of the rope's slack around his thick waist.
"Together now, Karl. One! Two! "
They stood knee-deep in mud on the bank, pulling and straining on the rope, while some few yards distant, in the shade of a grove of trees, their tiny yllumphs nibbled grass and watched them critically, but made no effort to come closer.
"If we're late for ship's landing, Joe, we'll get crossed off the list."
Hill puffed and wheezed and took another hitch on the rope.
"That's what I've been thinking about," he said, worried.
They took a deep breath and hauled mightily on the raft rope. The raft bobbed nearer. For a moment the swift waters of the Karazoo threatened to tear it out of their grasp, and then it was beached, most of it solidly, on the muddy bank. One end of it still lay in the gurgling, rushing waters, but that didn't matter. They'd be back in ten hours or so, long before the heavy raft could be washed free.
"How much time have we got, Karl?"
The ground was thick with shadows, and Karl cast a critical eye at them. He estimated that even with the refusal of their yllumphs to help beach the raft, they still had a good two hours before the rocket put down at Landing City.
"Two hours, maybe a little more," he stated hastily when Hill looked more worried. "Time enough to get to Landing City and put in for our numbers on the list."
He turned back to the raft, untied the leather and horn saddles, and threw them over the backs of their reluctant mounts. He cinched his saddle and tied on some robes and furs behind it.
Hill watched him curiously. "What are you taking the furs for? This isn't the trading rocket."
"I know. I thought that when we come back tonight, it might be cold and maybe she'll appreciate the coverings then."
"You never would have thought of it yourself," Hill grunted. "Grundy must have told you to do it, the old fool. If you ask me, the less you give them, the less they'll come to expect. Once you spoil them, they'll expect you to do all the trapping and the farming and the family-raising yourself."
"You didn't have to sign up," Karl pointed out. "You could have applied for a wife from some different planet."
"One's probably just as good as another. They'll all have to work the farms and raise families."
Karl laughed and aimed a friendly blow at Hill. They finished saddling up and headed into the thick forest.
It was quiet as Karl guided his mount along the dimly marked trail and he caught himself thinking of the return trip he would be making that night. It would be nice to have somebody new to talk to. And it would be good to have somebody to help with the trapping and tanning, somebody who could tend the small vegetable garden at the rear of his shack and mend his socks and wash his clothes and cook his meals.
And it was time, he thought soberly, that he started to raise a family. He was mid-twenty now, old enough to want a wife and children.
"You going to raise a litter, Joe?"
Hill started. Karl realized that he had probably been thinking of the same thing.
"One of these days I'll need help around the sawmill," Hill answered defensively. "Need some kids to cut the trees, a couple more to pole them down the river, some to run the mill itself and maybe one to sell the lumber in Landing City. Can't do it all myself."
He paused a moment, thinking over something that had just occurred to him.
"I've been thinking of your plans for a garden, Karl. Maybe I ought to have one for my wife to take care of, too."
Karl chuckled. "I don't think she'll have the time!"
They left the leafy expanse of the forest and entered the grasslands that sloped toward Landing City. He could even see Landing City itself on the horizon, a smudge of rusting, corrugated steel shacks, muddy streets, and the small rocket port—a scorched thirty acres or so fenced off with barbed wire.
Karl looked out of the corner of his eye at Hill and felt a vague wave of uneasiness. Hill was a big, thick man wearing the soiled clothes and bristly stubble of a man who was used to living alone and who liked it. But once he took a wife, he would probably have to keep himself in clean clothes and shave every few days. It was even possible that the woman might object to Hill letting his yllumph share the hut.
The path was getting crowded, more of the colonists coming onto the main path from the small side trails.
Hill broke the silence first. "I wonder what they'll be like."
Karl looked wise and nodded knowingly. "They're Earthwomen, Joe. Earth! "
It was easy to act as though he had some inside information, but Karl had to admit to himself that he actually knew very little about it. He was a Second System colonist and had never even seen an Earthwoman. He had heard tales, though, and even discounting a large percentage of them, some of them must have been true. Old Grundy at the rocket office, who should know about these things if anybody did, seemed disturbingly lacking on definite information, though he had hinted broadly enough. He'd whistle softly and wink an eye and repeat the stories that Karl had already heard; but he had nothing definite to offer, no real facts at all.
Some of the other colonists whom they hadn't seen for the last few months shouted greetings, and Karl began to feel some of the carnival spirit. There was Jenkins, who had another trapping line fifty miles farther up the Karazoo; Leonard, who had the biggest farm on Midplanet; and then the fellow who specialized in catching and breaking in yllumphs, whose name Karl couldn't remember.
"They say they're good workers," Hill said.
Karl nodded. "Pretty, too."
They threaded their way through the crowded and muddy streets. Landing City wasn't big, compared to some of the cities on Altair, where he had been raised, but Karl was proud of it. Some day it would be as big as any city on any planet—maybe even have a population of ten thousand people or more.
"Joe," Karl said suddenly, "what's supposed to make women from Earth better than women from any other world?"
Hill located a faint itch and frowned. "I don't know, Karl. It's hard to say. They're—well, sophisticated, glamorous."
Karl absorbed this in silence. Those particular qualities were, he thought, rather hard to define.
The battered shack that served as rocket port office and headquarters for the colonial office on Midplanet loomed up in front of them. There was a crowd gathered in front of the building and they forced their way through to see what had caused it.
"We saw this the last time we were here," Hill said.
"I know," Karl agreed, "but I want to take another look." He was anxious to glean all the information that he could.
It was a poster of a beautiful woman leaning toward the viewer. The edges of the poster were curling and the colors had faded during the last six months, but the girl's smile seemed just as inviting as ever. She held a long-stemmed goblet in one hand and was blowing a kiss to her audience with the other. Her green eyes sparkled, her smile was provocative. A quoted sentence read: "I'm from Earth !" There was nothing more except a printed list of the different solar systems to which the colonial office was sending the women.
She was real pretty, Karl thought. A little on the thin side, maybe, and the dress she was wearing would hardly be practical on Midplanet, but she had a certain something. Glamour, maybe?
A loudspeaker blared.
"All colonists waiting for the wife draft assemble for your numbers! All colonists...."
There was a jostling for places and then they were in the rapidly moving line. Grundy, fat and important-looking, was handing out little blue slips with numbers on them, pausing every now and then to tell them some entertaining bit of information about the women. He had a great imagination, nothing else.
Karl drew the number 53 and hurried to the grassy lot beside the landing field that had been decorated with bunting and huge welcome signs for the new arrivals. A table was loaded with government pamphlets meant to be helpful to newly married colonists. Karl went over and stuffed a few in his pockets. Other tables had been set out and were loaded with luncheon food, fixed by the few colonial women in the community. Karl caught himself eyeing the women closely, wondering how the girls from Earth would compare with them.
He fingered the ticket in his pocket. What would the woman be like who had drawn the companion number 53 aboard the rocket? For when it landed, they would pair up by numbers. The method had its drawbacks, of course, but time was much too short to allow even a few days of getting acquainted. He'd have to get back to his trapping lines and he imagined that Hill would have to get back to his sawmill and the others to their farms. What the hell, you never knew what you were getting either way, till it was too late.
"Sandwich, mister? Pop?"
Karl flipped the boy a coin, picked up some food and a drink, and wandered over to the landing field with Hill. There were still ten minutes or so to go before the rocket landed, but he caught himself straining his sight at the blue sky, trying to see a telltale flicker of exhaust flame.
The field was crowded and he caught some of the buzzing conversation.
"... never knew one myself, but let me tell you...."
"... knew a fellow once who married one, never had a moment's rest afterward...."
"... no comparison with colonial women. They got culture...."
"... I'd give a lot to know the girl who's got number twenty-five...."
"Let's meet back here with the girls who have picked our numbers," Hill said. "Maybe we could trade."
Karl nodded, though privately he felt that the number system was just as good as depending on first impressions.
There was a murmur from the crowd and he found his gaze riveted overhead. High above, in the misty blue sky, was a sudden twinkle of fire.
He reached up and wiped his sweaty face with a muddy hand and brushed aside a straggly lock of tangled hair. It wouldn't hurt to try to look his best.
The twinkling fire came nearer.
II
"A Mr. Macdonald to see you, Mr. Escher."
Claude Escher flipped the intercom switch.
"Please send him right in."
That was entirely superfluous, he thought, because MacDonald would come in whether Escher wanted him to or not.
The door opened and shut with a slightly harder bang than usual and Escher mentally braced himself. He had a good hunch what the problem was going to be and why it was being thrown in their laps.
MacDonald made himself comfortable and sat there for a few minutes, just looking grim and not saying anything. Escher knew the psychology by heart. A short preliminary silence is always more effective in browbeating subordinates than an initial furious bluster.
He lit a cigarette and tried to outwait MacDonald. It wasn't easy—MacDonald had great staying powers, which was probably why he was the head of the department.
Escher gave in first. "Okay, Mac, what's the trouble? What do we have tossed in our laps now?"
"You know the one—colonization problem. You know that when we first started to colonize, quite a large percentage of the male population took to the stars, as the saying goes. The adventuresome, the gamblers, the frontier type all decided they wanted to head for other worlds, to get away from it all. The male of the species is far more adventuresome than the female; the men left—but the women didn't. At least, not in nearly the same large numbers.
"Well, you see the problem. The ratio of women to men here on Earth is now something like five to three. If you don't know what that means, ask any man with a daughter. Or any psychiatrist. Husband-hunting isn't just a pleasant pastime on Earth. It's an earnest cutthroat business and I'm not just using a literary phrase."
He threw a paper on Escher's desk. "You'll find most of the statistics about it in that, Claude. Notice the increase in crimes peculiar to women. Shoplifting, badger games, poisonings, that kind of thing. It's quite a list. You'll also notice the huge increase in petty crimes, a lot of which wouldn't have bothered the courts before. In fact, they wouldn't even have been considered crimes. You know why they are now?"
Escher shook his head blankly.
"Most of the girls in the past who didn't catch a husband," MacDonald continued, "grew up to be the type of old maid who's dedicated to improving the morals and what-not of the rest of the population. We've got more puritanical societies now than we ever had, and we have more silly little laws on the books as a result. You can be thrown in the pokey for things like violating a woman's privacy—whatever that means—and she's the one who decides whether what you say or do is a violation or not."
Escher looked bored. "Not to mention the new prohibition which forbids the use of alcohol in everything from cough medicines to hair tonics. Or the cleaned up moral code that reeks—if you'll pardon the expression—of purity. Sure, I know what you mean. And you know the solution. All we have to do is get the women to colonize."
MacDonald ran his fingers nervously through his hair.
"But it won't be easy, and that's why it's been given to us. It's your baby, Claude. Give it a lot of thought. Nothing's impossible, you know."
"Perpetual motion machines are," Escher said quietly. "And pulling yourself up by your boot-straps. But I get the point. Nevertheless, women just don't want to colonize. And who can blame them? Why should they give up living in a luxury civilization, with as many modern conveniences as this one, to go homesteading on some wild, unexplored planet where they have to work their fingers to the bone and play footsie with wild animals and savages who would just as soon skin them alive as not?"
"What do you advise I do, then?" MacDonald demanded. "Go back to the Board and tell them the problem is not solvable, that we can't think of anything?"
Escher looked hurt. "Did I say that? I just said it wouldn't be easy."
"The Board is giving you a blank check. Do anything you think will pay off. We have to stay within the letter of the law, of course, but not necessarily the spirit."
"When do they have to have a solution?"
"As soon as possible. At least within the year. By that time the situation will be very serious. The psychologists say that what will happen then won't be good."
"All right, by then we'll have the answer."
MacDonald stopped at the door. "There's another reason why they want it worked out. The number of men applying to the Colonization Board for emigration to the colony planets is falling off."
"How come?"
MacDonald smiled. "On the basis of statistics alone, would you want to emigrate from a planet where the women outnumber the men five to three?"
When MacDonald had gone, Escher settled back in his chair and idly tapped his fingers on the desk-top. It was lucky that the Colonization Board worked on two levels. One was the well-publicized, idealistic level where nothing was too good and every deal was 99 and 44/100 per cent pure. But when things got too difficult for it to handle on that level, they went to Escher and MacDonald's department. The coal mine level. Nothing was too low, so long as it worked. Of course, if it didn't work, you took the lumps, too.
He rummaged around in his drawer and found a list of the qualifications set up by the Board for potential colonists. He read the list slowly and frowned. You had to be physically fit for the rigors of space travel, naturally, but some of the qualifications were obviously silly. You couldn't guarantee physical perfection in the second generation, anyway.
He tore the qualification list in shreds and dropped it in the disposal chute. That would have to be the first to go.
There were other things that could be done immediately. For one thing, as it stood now, you were supposed to be financially able to colonize. Obviously a stupid and unappealing law. That would have to go next.
He picked up the sheet of statistics that MacDonald had left and read it carefully. The Board could legalize polygamy, but that was no solution in the long run. Probably cause more problems than it would solve. Even with women as easy to handle as they were nowadays, one was still enough.
Which still left him with the main problem of how to get people to colonize who didn't want to colonize.
The first point was to convince them that they wanted to. The second point was that it might not matter whether they wanted to or not.
No, it shouldn't be hard to solve at all—provided you held your nose, silenced your conscience, and were willing to forget that there was such a thing as a moral code.
III
Phyllis Hanson put the cover over her typewriter and locked the correspondence drawer. Another day was done, another evening about to begin.
She filed into the washroom with the other girls and carefully redid her face. It was getting hard to disguise the worry lines, to paint away the faint crow's-feet around her eyes.
She wasn't, she admitted to herself for the thousandth time, what you would call beautiful. She inspected herself carefully in her compact mirror. In a sudden flash of honesty, she had to admit that she wasn't even what you would call pretty. Her face was too broad, her nose a fraction too long, and her hair was dull. Not homely, exactly—but not pretty, either.
Conversation hummed around her, most of it from the little group in the corner, where the extreme few who were married sat as practically a race apart. Their advice was sought, their suggestions avidly followed.
"Going out tonight, Phyl?"
She hesitated a moment, then slowly painted on the rest of her mouth. The question was technically a privacy violator, but she thought she would sidestep it this time, instead of refusing to answer point-blank.
"I thought I'd stay home tonight. Have a few things I want to rinse out."
The black-haired girl next to her nodded sympathetically. "Sure, Phyl, I know what you mean. Just like the rest of us—waiting for the phone to ring."
Phyllis finished washing up and then left the office, carefully noting the girl who was waiting for the boss. The girl was beautiful in a hard sort of way, a platinum blonde with an entertainer's busty figure. Waiting for a plump, middle-aged man like a stagestruck kid outside a theatre.
At home, in her small two-room bachelor-girl apartment, she stripped and took a hot, sudsing shower, then stepped out and toweled herself in front of a mirror. She frowned slightly. You didn't know whether you should keep yourself in trim just on some off-chance, or give up and let yourself go.
She fixed dinner, took a moderately long time doing the dishes, and went through the standard routine of getting a book and curling up on the sofa. It was a good book of the boot-legged variety—scientifically written with enough surplus heroes and heroines and lushly described love affairs to hold anybody's interest.
It held hers for ten pages and then she threw the book across the room, getting a savage delight at the way the pages ripped and fluttered to the floor.
What was the use of kidding herself any longer, of trying to live vicariously and hoping that some day she would have a home and a husband? She was thirty now; the phone hadn't rung in the last three years. She might as well spend this evening as she had spent so many others—call up the girls for a bridge game and a little gossip, though heaven knew you always ended up envying the people you were gossiping about.
Perhaps she should have joined one of the organizations at the office that did something like that seven nights out of every seven. A bridge game or a benefit for some school or a talk on art. Or she could have joined the Lecture of the Week club, or the YWCA, or any one of the other government-sponsored clubs designed to fill the void in a woman's life.
But bridge games and benefits and lectures didn't take the place of a husband and family. She was kidding herself again.
She got up and retrieved the battered book, then went over to the mail slot. She hadn't had time to open her mail that morning; most of the time it wasn't worth the effort. Advertisements for book clubs, lecture clubs, how to win at bridge and canasta....
Her fingers sprang the metal tabs on a large envelope and she took out the contents and spread it wide.
She gasped. It was a large poster, about a yard square. A man was on it, straddling a tiny city and a small panorama of farms and forests at his feet. He was a handsome specimen, with wavy blond hair and blue eyes and a curly mat on his bare chest that was just enough to be attractive without being apelike. He held an axe in his hands and was eyeing her with a clearly inviting look of brazen self-confidence.
It was definitely a privacy violator and she should notify the authorities immediately!
Bright lettering at the top of the poster shrieked: "Come to the Colonies, the Planets of Romance!"
Whoever had mailed it should be arrested and imprisoned! Preying on....
The smaller print at the bottom was mostly full of facts and figures. The need for women out on the colony planets, the percentage of men to women—a startling disproportion—the comfortable cities that weren't nearly as primitive as people had imagined, and the recently reduced qualifications.
She caught herself admiring the man on the poster. Naturally, it was an artist's conception, but even so....
And the cities were far in advance of the frontier settlements, where you had to battle disease and dirty savages.
It was all a dream. She had never done anything like this and she wouldn't think of doing it now. And had any of her friends seen the poster? Of course, they probably wouldn't tell her even if they had.
But the poster was a violation of privacy. Whoever had sent it had taken advantage of information that was none of their business. It was up to her to notify the authorities!
She took another look at the poster.
The letter she finally finished writing was very short. She addressed it to the box number in the upper left-hand corner of the plain wrapper that the poster had come in.
IV
The dress lay on the counter, a small corner of it trailing off the edge. It was a beautiful thing, sheer sheen satin trimmed in gold nylon thread. It was the kind of gown that would make anybody who wore it look beautiful. The price was high, much too high for her to pay. She knew she would never be able to buy it.
But she didn't intend to buy it.
She looked casually around and noted that nobody was watching her. There was another woman a few counters down and a man, obviously embarrassed, at the lingerie counter. Nobody else was in sight. It was a perfect time. The clerk had left to look up a difficult item that she had purposely asked for and probably wouldn't be back for five minutes.
Time enough, at any rate.
The dress was lying loose, so she didn't have to pry it off any hangers. She took another quick look around, then hurriedly bundled it up and dropped it in her shopping bag.
She had taken two self-assured steps away from the counter when she felt a hand on her shoulder. The grip was firm and muscular and she knew she had lost the game. She also knew that she had to play it out to the end, to grasp any straw.
"Let go of me!" she ordered in a frostily offended voice.
"Sorry, miss," the man said politely, "but I think we have a short trip to take."
She thought for a moment of brazening it out further and then gave up. She'd get a few weeks or months in the local detention building, a probing into her background for the psychological reasons that prompted her to steal, and then she'd be out again.
They couldn't do anything to her that mattered.
She shrugged and followed the detective calmly. None of the shoppers had looked up. None seemed to notice anything out of the ordinary.
In the detention building she thanked her good luck that she was facing a man for the sentence, instead of one of the puritanical old biddies who served on the bench. She even found a certain satisfaction in the presence of the cigar smoke and the blunt, earthy language that floated in from the corridor.
"Why did you steal it?" the judge asked. He held up the dress, which, she noted furiously, didn't look nearly as nice as it had under the department store lights.
"I don't have anything to say," she said. "I want to see a lawyer."
She could imagine what he was thinking. Another tough one, another plain jane who was shoplifting for a thrill.
And she probably was. You had to do something nowadays. You couldn't just sit home and chew your fingernails, or run out and listen to the endless boring lectures on art and culture.
"Name?" he asked in a tired voice.
She knew the statistics he wanted. "Ruby Johnson, 32, 145 pounds, brown hair and green eyes. Prints on file."
The judge leaned down and mentioned something to the bailiff, who left and presently came back with a ledger. The judge opened it and ran his fingers down one of the pages.
The sentence would probably be the usual, she thought—six months and a fine, or perhaps a little more when they found out she had a record for shoplifting.
A stranger in the courtroom in the official linens of the government suddenly stepped up beside the judge and looked at the page. She could hear a little of what he said:
"... anxiety neurosis ... obvious feeling of not being wanted ... probably steals to attract attention ... recommend emigration."
"In view of some complicating factors, we're going to give you a choice," the judge finally said. "You can either go to the penitentiary for ten years and pay a $10,000 fine, or you can ship out to the colony planets and receive a five-hundred-dollar immigration bonus."
She thought for a minute that she hadn't heard right. Ten thousand dollars and ten years! It was obvious that the state was interested in neither the fine nor in paying her room and board for ten years. She could recognize a squeeze play when she saw it, but there was nothing she could do about it.
"I wouldn't call that a choice," she said sourly. "I'll ship out."
V
Suzanne was proud of the apartment. It had all the modern conveniences, like the needle shower with the perfume dispenser, the built-in soft-drink bar in the library, the all-communications set, and the electrical massager. It was a nice, comfortable setup, an illusion of security in an ever-changing world.
She lit a cigarette and chuckled. Mrs. Burger, the fat old landlady, thought she kept up the apartment by working as a buyer for one of the downtown stores.
Well, maybe some day she would.
But not today. And not tonight.
The phone rang and she answered in a casual tone. She talked for a minute, then let a trace of sultriness creep into her voice. The conversation wasn't long.
She let the receiver fall back on the base and went into the bedroom to get a hat box. She wouldn't need much; she'd probably be back that same night.
It was a nice night and since the address was only a few blocks away, she decided to walk it. She blithely ignored the curious stares from other pedestrians, attracted by the sharp, clicking sound of her heels on the sidewalk.
The address was a brownstone that looked more like an office building than anything else, but then you could never tell. She pressed the buzzer and waited a moment for the sound to echo back and forth on the inside. She pressed it again and a moment later a suave young man appeared in the doorway.
"Miss Carstens?"
She smiled pertly.
"We've been expecting you."
She wondered a little at the "we," but dutifully smiled and followed him in.
The glare of the lights inside the office blinded her for a moment. When she could focus them again, her smile became slightly blurry at the edges and then disappeared entirely. She wasn't alone. There was a battery of chairs against one side of the room. She recognized most of the girls sitting in them.
She forced a smile to her lips and tried to laugh.
"I'm sure there's been some mistake! Why, I never...."
The young man coughed politely. "I'm afraid there's been no mistake. Full name, please."
"Suzanne Carstens," she said grimly, and gave the other statistics he wanted. She idly wondered what stoolie had peddled the phone numbers.
"Suzanne Carstens," the young man noted, and slowly shook his head.
"A very pretty name, but no doubt not your own. It actually doesn't matter, though. Take a seat over there."
She did as he asked and he faced the entire group.
"I and the other gentlemen here represent the Colonization Board. We've interceded with the local authorities in order to offer you a choice. We would like to ship you out to the colony planets. Naturally, we will pay you the standard emigration bonus of five hundred dollars. The colonists need wives; they offer you—security."
He stressed the word slightly.
"Now, of course, if you don't prefer the colony planets, you can stay behind and face the penalties of ten years in jail and a fine of ten thousand dollars."
Suzanne felt that her lower jaw needed support. Ten thousand dollars and ten years! And in either case she'd lose the apartment she had worked so hard for, her symbol of security.
"Well, what do you say?" There was a dead silence. The young man from the Colonization Board turned to Suzanne. "How about you, Miss Carstens?"
She smiled sickly and nodded her head. "I love to travel!" she said.
It didn't sound at all witty even to herself.
Question:
What is the setting of the story?
Answer:
|
[
"The story first sets next to the river on Midplanet. The road connecting the river to the Landing City goes from forest to grassland, multiple small trails connects to the large one, leading towards the city. The Landing City is not really that big, especially comparing to Altair. The battered shack and headquarters building appears as they reach the Landing City. There is a grassy lot next to the landing field. The landing field is decorated with bunting and welcome signs. There is a table with government pamphlets as well as tables for luncheon food. \n\nInside Mr. Eescher’s room, there is an intercom switch, some seats, and on his desk, there was also a drawer. Phyllis’ in an office that has a typewriter which is put inside a drawer. There is a washroom along with a mirror where she notices her worry lines. She owns a small two-room bachelor-girl apartment, in the bathroom there’s a mirror. She is on the sofa reading a book when she throws it across the room. There’s also a mail slot where she finds the odd poster. Rudy is in shop, and there’s a dress laying on the counter. In a courtroom in the detention building, there’s a judge and he has a ledger with him. Suzanne’s apartment has needle shower with perfume dispenser, build-in soft-drink bar in the library, as well as all-communications set and electrical massager. There is also a telephone, and her bedroom has a hat box. She arrives at a brownstone office building, there’s a buzzer and a then a young man appears in the doorway. There are bright lights inside the room, and there was a battery of chairs against one side of the room where the girls are sitting. ",
"The story begins with Karl and Joseph working with water and trying to tie logs together. Karl describes the ground as being thick with shadows. When they finish their work, they walk on a trail through a forest towards Landing City. Landing City is described as having rusting, steel shacks with muddy streets. When they get to Landing City, they begin to line up on the landing field that is decorated with welcome signs in anticipation for the wife draft that is going to begin soon. There are tables on the landing field filled with informational pamphlets and food. \n\nWhen the story goes to Phyllis Hanson it details her leaving work and going to her apartment. Her apartment is a small two-room p[lace. \n\nRuby’s Johnson story begins at a clothing store. She is soon taken to a court for trial after she is caught stealing. \n\nSuzanne’s story is originally set at her apartment. After receiving a call, she leaves and walks to a nearby brownstone that looks like an office building. Once in the brownstone, she is instructed to sit in a room filled with chairs where other women that she recognizes are sitting. \n",
"The story begins near Landing City on Altair. There is a river in the thick forest where Hill and Karl work, while their tiny yllumphs nibble on grass in a nearby grove of trees. Landing City is a smudge of corrugated steel shacks that are rusting, muddy streets, and a small rocket port of thirty acres fenced off with barbed wire. Even the main office and headquarter is a dirty shack. The grassy field beside the landing port is decorated with huge welcome signs for the new arrivals. A table with luncheon food has also been set up. \n\nPhyllis Hansen has a typewriter on her desk and correspondence drawer at the office she works at. There is also a washroom for the ladies' to do their makeup. Her home is a two-room bachelor girl apartment, with a bathroom. The bathroom has a mirror and a shower. There is also a kitchen area to cook, a sink to do the dishes, books, and a sofa to sit on. There is a mail slot to receive mail in too. \n\nRuby Johnson's story takes place in a department store with many counters, including a lingerie one that a man and woman are in. There is also a counter from which Ruby takes the dress. Later, she is sent to the detention center and the courtroom. \n\nFinally, Suzanne Carsten's 'rented' apartment has the latest conveniences, such as a needle shower and perfume dispenser. There is also a built-in soft drink bar in the library, an all-communications set, and an electrical massager. The building that she goes to later is a brownstone one, resembling more of an office building than anything else. Inside, there is a battery of chairs on one side, where many other women are seated. ",
"The story is set in many different places. The story begins on the newly colonised planet, where Karl and Joseph are in a river. They haul themselves out and make their way to the ramshackle city of the area. It is muddy and the buildings are mostly makeshift huts. \nMr. Macdonald and Mr. Escher discuss their issue in the office building of the colonisation board.\nPhyllis Hanson walks home after taking a trip to the bathroom in her office. At home, she goes into the kitchen to make dinner, gets ready for bed in the bathroom and finally curls up on the sofa to read a book. \nRuby Johnson movies from a brightly lit department store, to a courtroom in her part of the story. \nSuzanne begins her story in her comfortable apartment. It has a needle shoer that sprays perfume, a built-in soft drink bar, a library, an all communications set and a massage chair. She then walks the streets to an unusual brownstone office building, where she is taken inside, to a brightly lit room. "
] |
51268
|
THE GIRLS FROM EARTH
By FRANK M. ROBINSON
Illustrated by EMSH
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction January 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Problem: How can you arrange marriages with men in one solar system, women in another—and neither willing to leave his own world?
I
"The beasts aren't much help, are they?"
Karl Allen snatched a breath of air and gave another heave on the line tied to the raft of parampa logs bobbing in the middle of the river.
"No," he grunted, "they're not. They always balk at a time like this, when they can see it'll be hard work."
Joseph Hill wiped his plump face and coiled some of the rope's slack around his thick waist.
"Together now, Karl. One! Two! "
They stood knee-deep in mud on the bank, pulling and straining on the rope, while some few yards distant, in the shade of a grove of trees, their tiny yllumphs nibbled grass and watched them critically, but made no effort to come closer.
"If we're late for ship's landing, Joe, we'll get crossed off the list."
Hill puffed and wheezed and took another hitch on the rope.
"That's what I've been thinking about," he said, worried.
They took a deep breath and hauled mightily on the raft rope. The raft bobbed nearer. For a moment the swift waters of the Karazoo threatened to tear it out of their grasp, and then it was beached, most of it solidly, on the muddy bank. One end of it still lay in the gurgling, rushing waters, but that didn't matter. They'd be back in ten hours or so, long before the heavy raft could be washed free.
"How much time have we got, Karl?"
The ground was thick with shadows, and Karl cast a critical eye at them. He estimated that even with the refusal of their yllumphs to help beach the raft, they still had a good two hours before the rocket put down at Landing City.
"Two hours, maybe a little more," he stated hastily when Hill looked more worried. "Time enough to get to Landing City and put in for our numbers on the list."
He turned back to the raft, untied the leather and horn saddles, and threw them over the backs of their reluctant mounts. He cinched his saddle and tied on some robes and furs behind it.
Hill watched him curiously. "What are you taking the furs for? This isn't the trading rocket."
"I know. I thought that when we come back tonight, it might be cold and maybe she'll appreciate the coverings then."
"You never would have thought of it yourself," Hill grunted. "Grundy must have told you to do it, the old fool. If you ask me, the less you give them, the less they'll come to expect. Once you spoil them, they'll expect you to do all the trapping and the farming and the family-raising yourself."
"You didn't have to sign up," Karl pointed out. "You could have applied for a wife from some different planet."
"One's probably just as good as another. They'll all have to work the farms and raise families."
Karl laughed and aimed a friendly blow at Hill. They finished saddling up and headed into the thick forest.
It was quiet as Karl guided his mount along the dimly marked trail and he caught himself thinking of the return trip he would be making that night. It would be nice to have somebody new to talk to. And it would be good to have somebody to help with the trapping and tanning, somebody who could tend the small vegetable garden at the rear of his shack and mend his socks and wash his clothes and cook his meals.
And it was time, he thought soberly, that he started to raise a family. He was mid-twenty now, old enough to want a wife and children.
"You going to raise a litter, Joe?"
Hill started. Karl realized that he had probably been thinking of the same thing.
"One of these days I'll need help around the sawmill," Hill answered defensively. "Need some kids to cut the trees, a couple more to pole them down the river, some to run the mill itself and maybe one to sell the lumber in Landing City. Can't do it all myself."
He paused a moment, thinking over something that had just occurred to him.
"I've been thinking of your plans for a garden, Karl. Maybe I ought to have one for my wife to take care of, too."
Karl chuckled. "I don't think she'll have the time!"
They left the leafy expanse of the forest and entered the grasslands that sloped toward Landing City. He could even see Landing City itself on the horizon, a smudge of rusting, corrugated steel shacks, muddy streets, and the small rocket port—a scorched thirty acres or so fenced off with barbed wire.
Karl looked out of the corner of his eye at Hill and felt a vague wave of uneasiness. Hill was a big, thick man wearing the soiled clothes and bristly stubble of a man who was used to living alone and who liked it. But once he took a wife, he would probably have to keep himself in clean clothes and shave every few days. It was even possible that the woman might object to Hill letting his yllumph share the hut.
The path was getting crowded, more of the colonists coming onto the main path from the small side trails.
Hill broke the silence first. "I wonder what they'll be like."
Karl looked wise and nodded knowingly. "They're Earthwomen, Joe. Earth! "
It was easy to act as though he had some inside information, but Karl had to admit to himself that he actually knew very little about it. He was a Second System colonist and had never even seen an Earthwoman. He had heard tales, though, and even discounting a large percentage of them, some of them must have been true. Old Grundy at the rocket office, who should know about these things if anybody did, seemed disturbingly lacking on definite information, though he had hinted broadly enough. He'd whistle softly and wink an eye and repeat the stories that Karl had already heard; but he had nothing definite to offer, no real facts at all.
Some of the other colonists whom they hadn't seen for the last few months shouted greetings, and Karl began to feel some of the carnival spirit. There was Jenkins, who had another trapping line fifty miles farther up the Karazoo; Leonard, who had the biggest farm on Midplanet; and then the fellow who specialized in catching and breaking in yllumphs, whose name Karl couldn't remember.
"They say they're good workers," Hill said.
Karl nodded. "Pretty, too."
They threaded their way through the crowded and muddy streets. Landing City wasn't big, compared to some of the cities on Altair, where he had been raised, but Karl was proud of it. Some day it would be as big as any city on any planet—maybe even have a population of ten thousand people or more.
"Joe," Karl said suddenly, "what's supposed to make women from Earth better than women from any other world?"
Hill located a faint itch and frowned. "I don't know, Karl. It's hard to say. They're—well, sophisticated, glamorous."
Karl absorbed this in silence. Those particular qualities were, he thought, rather hard to define.
The battered shack that served as rocket port office and headquarters for the colonial office on Midplanet loomed up in front of them. There was a crowd gathered in front of the building and they forced their way through to see what had caused it.
"We saw this the last time we were here," Hill said.
"I know," Karl agreed, "but I want to take another look." He was anxious to glean all the information that he could.
It was a poster of a beautiful woman leaning toward the viewer. The edges of the poster were curling and the colors had faded during the last six months, but the girl's smile seemed just as inviting as ever. She held a long-stemmed goblet in one hand and was blowing a kiss to her audience with the other. Her green eyes sparkled, her smile was provocative. A quoted sentence read: "I'm from Earth !" There was nothing more except a printed list of the different solar systems to which the colonial office was sending the women.
She was real pretty, Karl thought. A little on the thin side, maybe, and the dress she was wearing would hardly be practical on Midplanet, but she had a certain something. Glamour, maybe?
A loudspeaker blared.
"All colonists waiting for the wife draft assemble for your numbers! All colonists...."
There was a jostling for places and then they were in the rapidly moving line. Grundy, fat and important-looking, was handing out little blue slips with numbers on them, pausing every now and then to tell them some entertaining bit of information about the women. He had a great imagination, nothing else.
Karl drew the number 53 and hurried to the grassy lot beside the landing field that had been decorated with bunting and huge welcome signs for the new arrivals. A table was loaded with government pamphlets meant to be helpful to newly married colonists. Karl went over and stuffed a few in his pockets. Other tables had been set out and were loaded with luncheon food, fixed by the few colonial women in the community. Karl caught himself eyeing the women closely, wondering how the girls from Earth would compare with them.
He fingered the ticket in his pocket. What would the woman be like who had drawn the companion number 53 aboard the rocket? For when it landed, they would pair up by numbers. The method had its drawbacks, of course, but time was much too short to allow even a few days of getting acquainted. He'd have to get back to his trapping lines and he imagined that Hill would have to get back to his sawmill and the others to their farms. What the hell, you never knew what you were getting either way, till it was too late.
"Sandwich, mister? Pop?"
Karl flipped the boy a coin, picked up some food and a drink, and wandered over to the landing field with Hill. There were still ten minutes or so to go before the rocket landed, but he caught himself straining his sight at the blue sky, trying to see a telltale flicker of exhaust flame.
The field was crowded and he caught some of the buzzing conversation.
"... never knew one myself, but let me tell you...."
"... knew a fellow once who married one, never had a moment's rest afterward...."
"... no comparison with colonial women. They got culture...."
"... I'd give a lot to know the girl who's got number twenty-five...."
"Let's meet back here with the girls who have picked our numbers," Hill said. "Maybe we could trade."
Karl nodded, though privately he felt that the number system was just as good as depending on first impressions.
There was a murmur from the crowd and he found his gaze riveted overhead. High above, in the misty blue sky, was a sudden twinkle of fire.
He reached up and wiped his sweaty face with a muddy hand and brushed aside a straggly lock of tangled hair. It wouldn't hurt to try to look his best.
The twinkling fire came nearer.
II
"A Mr. Macdonald to see you, Mr. Escher."
Claude Escher flipped the intercom switch.
"Please send him right in."
That was entirely superfluous, he thought, because MacDonald would come in whether Escher wanted him to or not.
The door opened and shut with a slightly harder bang than usual and Escher mentally braced himself. He had a good hunch what the problem was going to be and why it was being thrown in their laps.
MacDonald made himself comfortable and sat there for a few minutes, just looking grim and not saying anything. Escher knew the psychology by heart. A short preliminary silence is always more effective in browbeating subordinates than an initial furious bluster.
He lit a cigarette and tried to outwait MacDonald. It wasn't easy—MacDonald had great staying powers, which was probably why he was the head of the department.
Escher gave in first. "Okay, Mac, what's the trouble? What do we have tossed in our laps now?"
"You know the one—colonization problem. You know that when we first started to colonize, quite a large percentage of the male population took to the stars, as the saying goes. The adventuresome, the gamblers, the frontier type all decided they wanted to head for other worlds, to get away from it all. The male of the species is far more adventuresome than the female; the men left—but the women didn't. At least, not in nearly the same large numbers.
"Well, you see the problem. The ratio of women to men here on Earth is now something like five to three. If you don't know what that means, ask any man with a daughter. Or any psychiatrist. Husband-hunting isn't just a pleasant pastime on Earth. It's an earnest cutthroat business and I'm not just using a literary phrase."
He threw a paper on Escher's desk. "You'll find most of the statistics about it in that, Claude. Notice the increase in crimes peculiar to women. Shoplifting, badger games, poisonings, that kind of thing. It's quite a list. You'll also notice the huge increase in petty crimes, a lot of which wouldn't have bothered the courts before. In fact, they wouldn't even have been considered crimes. You know why they are now?"
Escher shook his head blankly.
"Most of the girls in the past who didn't catch a husband," MacDonald continued, "grew up to be the type of old maid who's dedicated to improving the morals and what-not of the rest of the population. We've got more puritanical societies now than we ever had, and we have more silly little laws on the books as a result. You can be thrown in the pokey for things like violating a woman's privacy—whatever that means—and she's the one who decides whether what you say or do is a violation or not."
Escher looked bored. "Not to mention the new prohibition which forbids the use of alcohol in everything from cough medicines to hair tonics. Or the cleaned up moral code that reeks—if you'll pardon the expression—of purity. Sure, I know what you mean. And you know the solution. All we have to do is get the women to colonize."
MacDonald ran his fingers nervously through his hair.
"But it won't be easy, and that's why it's been given to us. It's your baby, Claude. Give it a lot of thought. Nothing's impossible, you know."
"Perpetual motion machines are," Escher said quietly. "And pulling yourself up by your boot-straps. But I get the point. Nevertheless, women just don't want to colonize. And who can blame them? Why should they give up living in a luxury civilization, with as many modern conveniences as this one, to go homesteading on some wild, unexplored planet where they have to work their fingers to the bone and play footsie with wild animals and savages who would just as soon skin them alive as not?"
"What do you advise I do, then?" MacDonald demanded. "Go back to the Board and tell them the problem is not solvable, that we can't think of anything?"
Escher looked hurt. "Did I say that? I just said it wouldn't be easy."
"The Board is giving you a blank check. Do anything you think will pay off. We have to stay within the letter of the law, of course, but not necessarily the spirit."
"When do they have to have a solution?"
"As soon as possible. At least within the year. By that time the situation will be very serious. The psychologists say that what will happen then won't be good."
"All right, by then we'll have the answer."
MacDonald stopped at the door. "There's another reason why they want it worked out. The number of men applying to the Colonization Board for emigration to the colony planets is falling off."
"How come?"
MacDonald smiled. "On the basis of statistics alone, would you want to emigrate from a planet where the women outnumber the men five to three?"
When MacDonald had gone, Escher settled back in his chair and idly tapped his fingers on the desk-top. It was lucky that the Colonization Board worked on two levels. One was the well-publicized, idealistic level where nothing was too good and every deal was 99 and 44/100 per cent pure. But when things got too difficult for it to handle on that level, they went to Escher and MacDonald's department. The coal mine level. Nothing was too low, so long as it worked. Of course, if it didn't work, you took the lumps, too.
He rummaged around in his drawer and found a list of the qualifications set up by the Board for potential colonists. He read the list slowly and frowned. You had to be physically fit for the rigors of space travel, naturally, but some of the qualifications were obviously silly. You couldn't guarantee physical perfection in the second generation, anyway.
He tore the qualification list in shreds and dropped it in the disposal chute. That would have to be the first to go.
There were other things that could be done immediately. For one thing, as it stood now, you were supposed to be financially able to colonize. Obviously a stupid and unappealing law. That would have to go next.
He picked up the sheet of statistics that MacDonald had left and read it carefully. The Board could legalize polygamy, but that was no solution in the long run. Probably cause more problems than it would solve. Even with women as easy to handle as they were nowadays, one was still enough.
Which still left him with the main problem of how to get people to colonize who didn't want to colonize.
The first point was to convince them that they wanted to. The second point was that it might not matter whether they wanted to or not.
No, it shouldn't be hard to solve at all—provided you held your nose, silenced your conscience, and were willing to forget that there was such a thing as a moral code.
III
Phyllis Hanson put the cover over her typewriter and locked the correspondence drawer. Another day was done, another evening about to begin.
She filed into the washroom with the other girls and carefully redid her face. It was getting hard to disguise the worry lines, to paint away the faint crow's-feet around her eyes.
She wasn't, she admitted to herself for the thousandth time, what you would call beautiful. She inspected herself carefully in her compact mirror. In a sudden flash of honesty, she had to admit that she wasn't even what you would call pretty. Her face was too broad, her nose a fraction too long, and her hair was dull. Not homely, exactly—but not pretty, either.
Conversation hummed around her, most of it from the little group in the corner, where the extreme few who were married sat as practically a race apart. Their advice was sought, their suggestions avidly followed.
"Going out tonight, Phyl?"
She hesitated a moment, then slowly painted on the rest of her mouth. The question was technically a privacy violator, but she thought she would sidestep it this time, instead of refusing to answer point-blank.
"I thought I'd stay home tonight. Have a few things I want to rinse out."
The black-haired girl next to her nodded sympathetically. "Sure, Phyl, I know what you mean. Just like the rest of us—waiting for the phone to ring."
Phyllis finished washing up and then left the office, carefully noting the girl who was waiting for the boss. The girl was beautiful in a hard sort of way, a platinum blonde with an entertainer's busty figure. Waiting for a plump, middle-aged man like a stagestruck kid outside a theatre.
At home, in her small two-room bachelor-girl apartment, she stripped and took a hot, sudsing shower, then stepped out and toweled herself in front of a mirror. She frowned slightly. You didn't know whether you should keep yourself in trim just on some off-chance, or give up and let yourself go.
She fixed dinner, took a moderately long time doing the dishes, and went through the standard routine of getting a book and curling up on the sofa. It was a good book of the boot-legged variety—scientifically written with enough surplus heroes and heroines and lushly described love affairs to hold anybody's interest.
It held hers for ten pages and then she threw the book across the room, getting a savage delight at the way the pages ripped and fluttered to the floor.
What was the use of kidding herself any longer, of trying to live vicariously and hoping that some day she would have a home and a husband? She was thirty now; the phone hadn't rung in the last three years. She might as well spend this evening as she had spent so many others—call up the girls for a bridge game and a little gossip, though heaven knew you always ended up envying the people you were gossiping about.
Perhaps she should have joined one of the organizations at the office that did something like that seven nights out of every seven. A bridge game or a benefit for some school or a talk on art. Or she could have joined the Lecture of the Week club, or the YWCA, or any one of the other government-sponsored clubs designed to fill the void in a woman's life.
But bridge games and benefits and lectures didn't take the place of a husband and family. She was kidding herself again.
She got up and retrieved the battered book, then went over to the mail slot. She hadn't had time to open her mail that morning; most of the time it wasn't worth the effort. Advertisements for book clubs, lecture clubs, how to win at bridge and canasta....
Her fingers sprang the metal tabs on a large envelope and she took out the contents and spread it wide.
She gasped. It was a large poster, about a yard square. A man was on it, straddling a tiny city and a small panorama of farms and forests at his feet. He was a handsome specimen, with wavy blond hair and blue eyes and a curly mat on his bare chest that was just enough to be attractive without being apelike. He held an axe in his hands and was eyeing her with a clearly inviting look of brazen self-confidence.
It was definitely a privacy violator and she should notify the authorities immediately!
Bright lettering at the top of the poster shrieked: "Come to the Colonies, the Planets of Romance!"
Whoever had mailed it should be arrested and imprisoned! Preying on....
The smaller print at the bottom was mostly full of facts and figures. The need for women out on the colony planets, the percentage of men to women—a startling disproportion—the comfortable cities that weren't nearly as primitive as people had imagined, and the recently reduced qualifications.
She caught herself admiring the man on the poster. Naturally, it was an artist's conception, but even so....
And the cities were far in advance of the frontier settlements, where you had to battle disease and dirty savages.
It was all a dream. She had never done anything like this and she wouldn't think of doing it now. And had any of her friends seen the poster? Of course, they probably wouldn't tell her even if they had.
But the poster was a violation of privacy. Whoever had sent it had taken advantage of information that was none of their business. It was up to her to notify the authorities!
She took another look at the poster.
The letter she finally finished writing was very short. She addressed it to the box number in the upper left-hand corner of the plain wrapper that the poster had come in.
IV
The dress lay on the counter, a small corner of it trailing off the edge. It was a beautiful thing, sheer sheen satin trimmed in gold nylon thread. It was the kind of gown that would make anybody who wore it look beautiful. The price was high, much too high for her to pay. She knew she would never be able to buy it.
But she didn't intend to buy it.
She looked casually around and noted that nobody was watching her. There was another woman a few counters down and a man, obviously embarrassed, at the lingerie counter. Nobody else was in sight. It was a perfect time. The clerk had left to look up a difficult item that she had purposely asked for and probably wouldn't be back for five minutes.
Time enough, at any rate.
The dress was lying loose, so she didn't have to pry it off any hangers. She took another quick look around, then hurriedly bundled it up and dropped it in her shopping bag.
She had taken two self-assured steps away from the counter when she felt a hand on her shoulder. The grip was firm and muscular and she knew she had lost the game. She also knew that she had to play it out to the end, to grasp any straw.
"Let go of me!" she ordered in a frostily offended voice.
"Sorry, miss," the man said politely, "but I think we have a short trip to take."
She thought for a moment of brazening it out further and then gave up. She'd get a few weeks or months in the local detention building, a probing into her background for the psychological reasons that prompted her to steal, and then she'd be out again.
They couldn't do anything to her that mattered.
She shrugged and followed the detective calmly. None of the shoppers had looked up. None seemed to notice anything out of the ordinary.
In the detention building she thanked her good luck that she was facing a man for the sentence, instead of one of the puritanical old biddies who served on the bench. She even found a certain satisfaction in the presence of the cigar smoke and the blunt, earthy language that floated in from the corridor.
"Why did you steal it?" the judge asked. He held up the dress, which, she noted furiously, didn't look nearly as nice as it had under the department store lights.
"I don't have anything to say," she said. "I want to see a lawyer."
She could imagine what he was thinking. Another tough one, another plain jane who was shoplifting for a thrill.
And she probably was. You had to do something nowadays. You couldn't just sit home and chew your fingernails, or run out and listen to the endless boring lectures on art and culture.
"Name?" he asked in a tired voice.
She knew the statistics he wanted. "Ruby Johnson, 32, 145 pounds, brown hair and green eyes. Prints on file."
The judge leaned down and mentioned something to the bailiff, who left and presently came back with a ledger. The judge opened it and ran his fingers down one of the pages.
The sentence would probably be the usual, she thought—six months and a fine, or perhaps a little more when they found out she had a record for shoplifting.
A stranger in the courtroom in the official linens of the government suddenly stepped up beside the judge and looked at the page. She could hear a little of what he said:
"... anxiety neurosis ... obvious feeling of not being wanted ... probably steals to attract attention ... recommend emigration."
"In view of some complicating factors, we're going to give you a choice," the judge finally said. "You can either go to the penitentiary for ten years and pay a $10,000 fine, or you can ship out to the colony planets and receive a five-hundred-dollar immigration bonus."
She thought for a minute that she hadn't heard right. Ten thousand dollars and ten years! It was obvious that the state was interested in neither the fine nor in paying her room and board for ten years. She could recognize a squeeze play when she saw it, but there was nothing she could do about it.
"I wouldn't call that a choice," she said sourly. "I'll ship out."
V
Suzanne was proud of the apartment. It had all the modern conveniences, like the needle shower with the perfume dispenser, the built-in soft-drink bar in the library, the all-communications set, and the electrical massager. It was a nice, comfortable setup, an illusion of security in an ever-changing world.
She lit a cigarette and chuckled. Mrs. Burger, the fat old landlady, thought she kept up the apartment by working as a buyer for one of the downtown stores.
Well, maybe some day she would.
But not today. And not tonight.
The phone rang and she answered in a casual tone. She talked for a minute, then let a trace of sultriness creep into her voice. The conversation wasn't long.
She let the receiver fall back on the base and went into the bedroom to get a hat box. She wouldn't need much; she'd probably be back that same night.
It was a nice night and since the address was only a few blocks away, she decided to walk it. She blithely ignored the curious stares from other pedestrians, attracted by the sharp, clicking sound of her heels on the sidewalk.
The address was a brownstone that looked more like an office building than anything else, but then you could never tell. She pressed the buzzer and waited a moment for the sound to echo back and forth on the inside. She pressed it again and a moment later a suave young man appeared in the doorway.
"Miss Carstens?"
She smiled pertly.
"We've been expecting you."
She wondered a little at the "we," but dutifully smiled and followed him in.
The glare of the lights inside the office blinded her for a moment. When she could focus them again, her smile became slightly blurry at the edges and then disappeared entirely. She wasn't alone. There was a battery of chairs against one side of the room. She recognized most of the girls sitting in them.
She forced a smile to her lips and tried to laugh.
"I'm sure there's been some mistake! Why, I never...."
The young man coughed politely. "I'm afraid there's been no mistake. Full name, please."
"Suzanne Carstens," she said grimly, and gave the other statistics he wanted. She idly wondered what stoolie had peddled the phone numbers.
"Suzanne Carstens," the young man noted, and slowly shook his head.
"A very pretty name, but no doubt not your own. It actually doesn't matter, though. Take a seat over there."
She did as he asked and he faced the entire group.
"I and the other gentlemen here represent the Colonization Board. We've interceded with the local authorities in order to offer you a choice. We would like to ship you out to the colony planets. Naturally, we will pay you the standard emigration bonus of five hundred dollars. The colonists need wives; they offer you—security."
He stressed the word slightly.
"Now, of course, if you don't prefer the colony planets, you can stay behind and face the penalties of ten years in jail and a fine of ten thousand dollars."
Suzanne felt that her lower jaw needed support. Ten thousand dollars and ten years! And in either case she'd lose the apartment she had worked so hard for, her symbol of security.
"Well, what do you say?" There was a dead silence. The young man from the Colonization Board turned to Suzanne. "How about you, Miss Carstens?"
She smiled sickly and nodded her head. "I love to travel!" she said.
It didn't sound at all witty even to herself.
|
What is the plot of the story?
|
After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about Prison Planet by Wilson Tucker.
Relevant chunks:
PRISON PLANET
By BOB TUCKER
To remain on Mars meant death from agonizing space-sickness, but Earth-surgery lay days of flight away. And there was only a surface rocket in which to escape—with a traitorous Ganymedean for its pilot.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
"Listen, Rat!" Roberds said, "what I say goes around here. It doesn't happen to be any of your business. I'm still in possession of my wits, and I know Peterson can't handle that ship. Furthermore Gladney will be in it too, right along side of that sick girl in there! And Rat, get this: I'm going to pilot that ship. Understand? Consulate or no Consulate, job or no job, I'm wheeling that crate to Earth because this is an emergency. And the emergency happens to be bigger than my position, to me at any rate." His tone dropped to a deadly softness.
"Now will you kindly remove your stinking carcass from this office?"
Unheeding, Rat swung his eyes around in the gloom and discovered the woman, a nurse in uniform. He blinked at her and she returned the look, wavering. She bit her lip and determination flowed back. She met the stare of his boring, off-colored eyes. Rat grinned suddenly. Nurse Gray almost smiled back, stopped before the others could see it.
"Won't go!" The Centaurian resumed his fight. "You not go, lose job, black-listed. Never get another. Look at me. I know." He retreated a precious step to escape a rolled up fist. "Little ship carry four nice. Rip out lockers and bunks. Swing hammocks. Put fuel in water tanks. Live on concentrates. Earth hospital fix bellyache afterwards, allright. I pilot ship. Yes?"
"No!" Roberds screamed.
Almost in answer, a moan issued from a small side room. The men in the office froze as Nurse Gray ran across the room. She disappeared through the narrow door.
"Peterson," the field manager ordered, "come over here and help me throw this rat out...." He went for Rat. Peterson swung up out of his chair with balled fist. The outlander backed rapidly.
"No need, no need, no need!" he said quickly. "I go." Still backing, he blindly kicked at the door and stepped into the night.
When the door slammed shut Roberds locked it. Peterson slumped in the chair.
"Do you mean that, Chief? About taking the ship yourself?"
"True enough." Roberds cast an anxious glance at the partly closed door, lowered his voice. "It'll cost me my job, but that girl in there has to be taken to a hospital quickly! And it's her luck to be landed on a planet that doesn't boast even one! So it's Earth ... or she dies. I'd feel a lot better too if we could get Gladney to a hospital, I'm not too confident of that patching job." He pulled a pipe from a jacket pocket. "So, might as well kill two birds with one stone ... and that wasn't meant to be funny!"
Peterson said nothing, sat watching the door.
"Rat has the right idea," Roberds continued, "but I had already thought of it. About the bunks and lockers. Greaseball has been out there all night tearing them out. We just might be able to hop by dawn ... and hell of a long, grinding hop it will be!"
The nurse came out of the door.
"How is she?" Roberds asked.
"Sleeping," Gray whispered. "But sinking...."
"We can take off at dawn, I think." He filled the pipe and didn't look at her. "You'll have to spend most of the trip in a hammock."
"I can take it." Suddenly she smiled, wanly. "I was with the Fleet. How long will it take?"
"Eight days, in that ship."
Roberds lit his pipe, and carefully hid his emotions. He knew Peterson was harboring the same thoughts. Eight days in space, in a small ship meant for two, and built for planetary surface flights. Eight days in that untrustworthy crate, hurtling to save the lives of that girl and Gladney.
"Who was that ... man? The one you put out?" Gray asked.
"We call him Rat," Roberds said.
She didn't ask why. She said: "Why couldn't he pilot the ship, I mean? What is his record?"
Peterson opened his mouth.
"Shut up, Peterson!" the Chief snapped. "We don't talk about his record around here, Miss Gray. It's not a pretty thing to tell."
"Stow it, Chief," said Peterson. "Miss Gray is no pantywaist." He turned to the nurse. "Ever hear of the Sansan massacre?"
Patti Gray paled. "Yes," she whispered. "Was Rat in that?"
Roberds shook his head. "He didn't take part in it. But Rat was attached to a very important office at the time, the outpost watch. And when Mad Barry Sansan and his gang of thugs swooped down on the Ganymedean colony, there was no warning. Our friend Rat was AWOL.
"As to who he is ... well, just one of those freaks from up around Centauria somewhere. He's been hanging around all the fields and dumps on Mars a long time, finally landed up here."
"But," protested Miss Gray, "I don't understand? I always thought that leaving one's post under such circumstances meant execution."
The Chief Consul nodded. "It does, usually. But this was a freak case. It would take hours to explain. However, I'll just sum it up in one word: politics. Politics, with which Rat had no connection saved him."
The girl shook her head, more in sympathy than condemnation.
"Are you expecting the others in soon?" she asked. "It wouldn't be right to leave Peterson."
"They will be in, in a day or two. Peterson will beat it over to Base station for repairs, and to notify Earth we're coming. He'll be all right."
Abruptly she stood up. "Goodnight gentlemen. Call me if I'm needed."
Roberds nodded acknowledgement. The door to the side room closed behind her. Peterson hauled his chair over to the desk. He sniffed the air.
"Damned rat!" he whispered harshly. "They ought to make a law forcing him to wear dark glasses!"
Roberds smiled wearily. "His eyes do get a man, don't they?"
"I'd like to burn 'em out!" Peterson snarled.
Rat helped Greaseball fill the water tanks to capacity with fuel, checked the concentrated rations and grunted.
Greaseball looked over the interior and chuckled. "The boss said strip her, and strip her I did. All right, Rat, outside." He followed the Centaurian out, and pulled the ladder away from the lip of the lock. The two walked across the strip of sandy soil to the office building. On tiptoes, Greaseball poked his head through the door panel. "All set."
Roberds nodded at him. "Stick with it!" and jerked a thumb at Rat outside. Grease nodded understanding.
"Okay, Rat, you can go to bed now." He dropped the ladder against the wall and sat on it. "Good night." He watched Rat walk slowly away.
Swinging down the path towards his own rambling shack, Rat caught a sibilant whisper. Pausing, undecided, he heard it again.
"Here ... can you see me?" A white clad arm waved in the gloom. Rat regarded the arm in the window. Another impatient gesture, and he stepped to the sill.
"Yes?"—in the softest of whispers. The voices of the men in droning conversation drifted in. "What you want?"
Nothing but silence for a few hanging seconds, and then: "Can you pilot that ship?" Her voice was shaky.
He didn't answer, stared at her confused. He felt her fear as clearly as he detected it in her words.
"Well, can you?" she demanded.
"Damn yes!" he stated simply. "It now necessary?"
"Very! She is becoming worse. I'm afraid to wait until daylight. And ... well, we want you to pilot it! She refuses to risk Mr. Roberds' job. She favors you."
Rat stepped back, astonished. "She?"
Nurse Gray moved from the window and Rat saw the second form in the room, a slight, quiet figure on a small cot. "My patient," Nurse Gray explained. "She overheard our conversation awhile ago. Quick, please, can you?"
Rat looked at her and then at the girl on the cot. He vanished from the window. Almost immediately, he was back again.
"When?" he whispered.
"As soon as possible. Yes. Do you know...?" but he had gone again. Nurse Gray found herself addressing blackness. On the point of turning, she saw him back again.
"Blankets," he instructed. "Wrap in blankets. Cold—hot too. Wrap good!" And he was gone again. Gray blinked away the illusion he disappeared upwards.
She ran over to the girl. "Judith, if you want to back down, now is the time. He'll be back in a moment."
"No!" Judith moaned. "No!" Gray smiled in the darkness and began wrapping the blankets around her. A light tapping at the window announced the return of Rat. The nurse pushed open the window wide, saw him out there with arms upstretched.
"Grit your teeth and hold on! Here we go." She picked up the blanketed girl in both arms and walked to the window. Rat took the girl easily as she was swung out, the blackness hid them both. But he appeared again instantly.
"Better lock window," he cautioned. "Stall, if Boss call. Back soon...." and he was gone.
To Nurse Gray the fifteen minute wait seemed like hours, impatient agonizing hours of tight-lipped anxiety.
Feet first, she swung through the window, clutching a small bag in her hands. She never touched ground. Rat whispered "Hold tight!" in her ear and the wind was abruptly yanked from her! The ground fell away in a dizzy rush, unseen but felt, in the night! Her feet scraped on some projection, and she felt herself being lifted still higher. Wind returned to her throat, and she breathed again.
"I'm sorry," she managed to get out, gaspingly. "I wasn't expecting that. I had forgotten you—"
"—had wings," he finished and chuckled. "So likewise Greaseball." The pale office lights dropped away as they sped over the field. On the far horizon, a tinge of dawn crept along the uneven terrain.
"Oh, the bag!" she gasped. "I've dropped it."
He chuckled again. "Have got. You scare, I catch."
She didn't see the ship because of the wind in her eyes, but without warning she plummeted down and her feet jarred on the lip of the lock.
"Inside. No noise, no light. Easy." But in spite of his warning she tripped in the darkness. He helped her from the floor and guided her to the hammocks.
"Judith?" she asked.
"Here. Beside you, trussed up so tight I can hardly breathe."
"No talk!" Rat insisted. "Much hush-hush needed. Other girl shipshape. You make likewise." Forcibly he shoved her into a hammock. "Wrap up tight. Straps tight. When we go, we go fast. Bang!" And he left her.
"Hey! Where are you going now?"
"To get Gladney. He sick too. Hush hush!" His voice floated back.
"Where has he gone?" Judith called.
"Back for another man. Remember the two miners who found us when we crashed? The burly one fell off a rock-bank as they were bringing us in. Stove in his ribs pretty badly. The other has a broken arm ... happened once while you were out. They wouldn't let me say anything for fear of worrying you."
The girl did not answer then and a hushed expectancy fell over the ship. Somewhere aft a small motor was running. Wind whistled past the open lock.
"I've caused plenty of trouble haven't I?" she asked aloud, finally.
"This was certainly a fool stunt, and I'm guilty of a lot of fool stunts! I just didn't realize until now the why of that law."
"Don't talk so much," the nurse admonished. "A lot of people have found out the why of that law the hard way, just as you are doing, and lived to remember it. Until hospitals are built on this forlorn world, humans like you who haven't been properly conditioned will have to stay right at home."
"How about these men that live and work here?"
"They never get here until they've been through the mill first. Adenoids, appendix', all the extra parts they can get along without."
"Well," Judith said. "I've certainly learned my lesson!"
Gray didn't answer, but from out of the darkness surrounding her came a sound remarkably resembling a snort.
"Gray?" Judith asked fearfully.
"Yes?"
"Hasn't the pilot been gone an awfully long time?"
Rat himself provided the answer by alighting at the lip with a jar that shook the ship. He was breathing heavily and lugging something in his arms. The burden groaned.
"Gladney!" Nurse Gray exclaimed.
"I got." Rat confirmed. "Yes, Gladney. Damn heavy, Gladney."
"But how?" she demanded. "What of Roberds and Peterson?"
"Trick," he sniggered. "I burn down my shack. Boss run out. I run in. Very simple." He packed Gladney into the remaining hammock and snapped buckles.
"And Peterson?" she prompted.
"Oh yes. Peterson. So sorry about Peterson. Had to fan him."
" Fan him? I don't understand."
"Fan. With chair. Everything all right. I apologized." Rat finished up and was walking back to the lock. They heard a slight rustling of wings as he padded away.
He was back instantly, duplicating his feat of a short time ago. Cursing shouts were slung on the night air, and the deadly spang of bullets bounced on the hull! Some entered the lock. The Centaurian snapped it shut. Chunks of lead continued to pound the ship. Rat leaped for the pilot's chair, heavily, a wing drooping.
"You've been hurt!" Gray cried. A small panel light outlined his features. She tried to struggle up.
"Lie still! We go. Boss get wise." With lightning fingers he flicked several switches on the panel, turned to her. "Hold belly. Zoom!"
Gray folded her hands across her stomach and closed her eyes.
Rat unlocked the master level and shoved!
"Whew!" Nurse Gray came back to throbbing awareness, the all too familiar feeling of a misplaced stomach attempting to force its crowded way into her boots plaguing her. Rockets roared in the rear. She loosened a few straps and twisted over. Judith was still out, her face tensed in pain. Gray bit her lip and twisted the other way. The Centaurian was grinning at her.
"Do you always leave in a hurry?" she demanded, and instantly wished she hadn't said it. He gave no outward sign.
"Long-time sleep," he announced. "Four, five hours maybe." The chest strap was lying loose at his side.
"That long!" she was incredulous. "I'm never out more than three hours!" Unloosening more straps, she sat up, glanced at the control panel.
"Not taking time," he stated simply and pointed to a dial. Gray shook her head and looked at the others.
"That isn't doing either of them any good!"
Rat nodded unhappily. "What's her matter—?" pointing.
"Appendix. Something about this atmosphere sends it haywire. The thing itself isn't diseased, but it starts manufacturing poison. Patient dies in a week unless it is taken out."
"Don't know it," he said briefly.
"Do you mean to say you don't have an appendix?" she demanded.
Rat folded his arms and considered this. "Don't know. Maybe yes, maybe no. Where's it hurt?"
Gray pointed out the location. The Centaurian considered this further and drifted into long contemplation. Watching him, Gray remembered his eyes that night ... only last night ... in the office. Peterson had refused to meet them. After awhile Rat came out of it.
"No," he waved. "No appendix. Never nowhere appendix."
"Then Mother Nature has finally woke up!" she exclaimed. "But why do Centaurians rate it exclusively?"
Rat ignored this and asked one of her. "What you and her doing up there?" He pointed back and up, to where Mars obliterated the stars.
"You might call it a pleasure jaunt. She's only seventeen. We came over in a cruiser belonging to her father; it was rather large and easy to handle. But the cruise ended when she lost control of the ship because of an attack of space-appendicitis. The rest you know."
"So you?"
"So I'm a combination nurse, governess, guard and what have you. Or will be until we get back. After this, I'll probably be looking for work." She shivered.
"Cold?" he inquired concernedly.
"On the contrary, I'm too warm." She started to remove the blanket. Rat threw up a hand to stop her.
"Leave on! Hot out here."
"But I'm too hot now. I want to take it off!"
"No. Leave on. Wool blanket. Keep in body heat, yes. Keep out cold, yes. Keep in, keep out, likewise. See?"
Gray stared at him. "I never thought of it that way before. Why of course! If it protects from one temperature, it will protect from another. Isn't it silly of me not to know that?" Heat pressing on her face accented the fact.
"What is your name?" she asked. "Your real one I mean."
He grinned. "Big. You couldn't say it. Sound like Christmas and bottlenose together real fast. Just say Rat. Everybody does." His eyes swept the panel and flashed back to her. "Your name Gray. Have a front name?"
"Patti."
"Pretty, Patti."
"No, just Patti. Say, what's the matter with the cooling system?"
"Damn punk," he said. "This crate for surface work. No space. Cooling system groan, damn punk. Won't keep cool here."
"And ..." she followed up, "it will get warmer as we go out?"
Rat turned back to his board in a brown study and carefully ignored her. Gray grasped an inkling of what the coming week could bring.
"But how about water?" she demanded next. "Is there enough?"
He faced about. "For her—" nodding to Judith, "and him—" to Gladney,
"yes. Sparingly. Four hours every time, maybe." Back to Gray. "You, me ... twice a day. Too bad." His eyes drifted aft to the tank of water. She followed. "One tank water. All the rest fuel. Too bad, too bad. We get thirsty I think."
They did get thirsty, soon. A damnable hot thirst accented by the knowledge that water was precious, a thirst increased by a dried-up-in-the-mouth sensation. Their first drink was strangely bitter; tragically disappointing. Patti Gray suddenly swung upright in the hammock and kicked her legs. She massaged her throat with a nervous hand, wiped damp hair from about her face.
"I have to have a drink."
Rat stared at her without answer.
"I said, I have to have a drink!"
"Heard you."
"Well...?"
"Well, nothing. Stall. Keep water longer."
She swung a vicious boot and missed by inches. Rat grinned, and made his way aft, hand over hand. He treaded cautiously along the deck. "Do like this," he called over his shoulder. "Gravity punk too. Back and under, gravity." He waited until she joined him at the water tap.
They stood there glaring idiotically at each other.
She burst out laughing. "They even threw the drinking cups out!" Rat inched the handle grudgingly and she applied lips to the faucet.
"Faugh!" Gray sprang back, forgot herself and lost her balance, sat down on the deck and spat out the water. "It's hot! It tastes like hell and it's hot! It must be fuel!"
Rat applied his lips to the tap and sampled. Coming up with a mouthful he swished it around on his tongue like mouthwash. Abruptly he contrived a facial contortion between a grin and a grimace, and let some of the water trickle from the edges of his mouth. He swallowed and it cost him something.
"No. I mean yes, I think. Water, no doubt. Yes. Fuel out, water in. Swish-swush. Dammit, Greaseball forget to wash tank!"
"But what makes it so hot?" She worked her mouth to dry-rinse the taste of the fuel.
"Ship get hot. Water on sun side. H-m-m-m-m-m-m."
"H-m-m-m-m-m-m-m what?"
"Flip-flop." He could talk with his hands as well. "Hot side over like pancake." Rat hobbled over to the board and sat down. An experimental flick on a lever produced nothing. Another flick, this time followed by a quivering jar. He contemplated the panel board while fastening his belt.
"H-m-m-m-m-m-m," the lower lip protruded.
Gray protested. "Oh, stop humming and do something! That wa—" the word was queerly torn from her throat, and a scream magically filled the vacancy. Nurse Gray sat up and rubbed a painful spot that had suddenly appeared on her arm. She found her nose bleeding and another new, swelling bruise on the side of her head. Around her the place was empty. Bare.
No, not quite. A wispy something was hanging just out of sight in the corner of the eye; the water tap was now moulded upward , beads glistening on its handle. The wispy thing caught her attention again and she looked up.
Two people, tightly wrapped and bound in hammocks, were staring down at her, amazed, swinging on their stomachs. Craning further, she saw Rat. He was hanging upside down in the chair, grinning at her in reverse.
"Flip-flop," he laconically explained.
"For cripes sakes, Jehosaphat!" Gladney groaned. "Turn me over on my back! Do something!" Gray stood on tiptoes and just could pivot the hammocks on their rope-axis.
"And now, please, just how do I get into mine?" she bit at Rat.
Existence dragged. Paradoxically, time dropped away like a cloak as the sense of individual hours and minutes vanished, and into its place crept a slow-torturing substitute. As the ship revolved, monotonously, first the ceiling and then the floor took on dullish, maddening aspects, eyes ached continuously from staring at them time and again without surcease. The steady, drumming rockets crashed into the mind and the walls shrieked malevolently on the eyeballs. Dull, throbbing sameness of the poorly filtered air, a growing taint in the nostrils. Damp warm skin, reeking blankets. The taste of fuel in the mouth for refreshment. Slowly mounting mental duress. And above all the drumming of the rockets.
Once, a sudden, frightening change of pitch in the rockets and a wild, sickening lurch. Meteor rain. Maddening, plunging swings to the far right and left, made without warning. A torn lip as a sudden lurch tears the faucet from her mouth. A shattered tooth.
"Sorry!" Rat whispered.
"Shut up and drive!" she cried.
"Patti ..." Judith called out, in pain.
Peace of mind followed peace of body into a forgotten limbo of lost things, a slyly climbing madness directed at one another. Waspish words uttered in pain, fatigue and temper. Fractiousness. A hot, confined, stale hell. Sleep became a hollow mockery, as bad water and concentrated tablets brought on stomach pains to plague them. Consciousness punctured only by spasms of lethargy, shared to some extent by the invalids. Above all, crawling lassitude and incalescent tempers.
Rat watched the white, drawn face swing in the hammock beside him. And his hands never faltered on the controls.
Never a slackening of the terrific pace; abnormal speed, gruelling drive ... drive ... drive. Fear. Tantalizing fear made worse because Rat couldn't understand. Smothered moaning that ate at his nerves. Grim-faced, sleep-wracked, belted to the chair, driving!
"How many days? How many days!" Gray begged of him thousands of times until the very repetition grated on her eardrums. "How many days?" His only answer was an inhuman snarl, and the cruel blazing of those inhuman eyes.
She fell face first to the floor. "I can't keep it up!" she cried. The sound of her voice rolled along the hot steel deck. "I cant! I cant!"
A double handful of tepid water was thrown in her face. "Get up!" Rat stood over her, face twisted, his body hunched. "Get up!" She stared at him, dazed. He kicked her. "Get up!" The tepid water ran off her face and far away she heard Judith calling.... She forced herself up. Rat was back in the chair.
Gladney unexpectedly exploded. He had been awake for a long time, watching Rat at the board. Wrenching loose a chest strap he attempted to sit up.
"Rat! Damn you Rat, listen to me! When're you going to start braking , Rat?"
"I hear you." He turned on Gladney with dulled eyes. "Lie down. You sick."
"I'll be damned if I'm going to lie here and let you drive us to Orion! We must be near the half-way line! When are you going to start braking?"
"Not brake," Rat answered sullenly. "No, not brake."
" Not brake? " Gladney screamed and sat bolt upright. Nurse Gray jumped for him. "Are you crazy, you skinny rat?" Gray secured a hold on his shoulders and forced him down. "You gotta brake! Don't you understand that? You have to, you vacuum-skull!" Gray was pleading with him to shut-up like a good fellow. He appealed to her. "He's gotta brake! Make him!"
"He has a good point there, Rat," she spoke up. "What about this half-way line?"
He turned to her with a weary ghost of the old smile on his face. "We passed line. Three days ago, maybe." A shrug of shoulders.
"Passed!" Gray and Gladney exclaimed in unison.
"You catch on quick," Rat nodded. "This six day, don't you know?"
Gladney sank back, exhausted. The nurse crept over to the pilot.
"Getting your figures mixed, aren't you?"
Rat shook his head and said nothing.
"But Roberds said eight days, and he—"
"—he on Mars. I here. Boss nuts, too sad. He drive, it be eight days. Now only six." He cast a glance at Judith and found her eyes closed.
"Six days, no brake. No."
"I see your point, and appreciate it," Gray cut in. "But now what? This deceleration business ... there is a whole lot I don't know, but some things I do!"
Rat refused the expected answer. "Land tonight, I think. Never been to Earth before. Somebody meet us, I think."
"You can bet your leather boots somebody will meet us!" Gladney cried. Gray turned to him. "The Chief'll have the whole planet waiting for you !" He laughed with real satisfaction. "Oh yes, Rat, they'll be somebody waiting for us all right." And then he added: "If we land."
"Oh, we land." Rat confided, glad to share a secret.
"Yeah," Gladney grated. "But in how many little pieces?"
"I've never been to Earth before. Nice, I think." Patti Gray caught something new in the tone and stared at him. Gladney must have noticed it, too.
The Centaurian moved sideways and pointed. Gray placed her eyes in the vacated position.
"Earth!" she shouted.
"Quite. Nice. Do me a favor?"
"Just name it!"
"Not drink long time. Some water?"
Gray nodded and went to the faucet. The drumming seemed remote, the tension vanished. She was an uncommonly long time in returning, at last she appeared beside him, outstretched hands dry.
"There isn't any left, Rat."
Rat batted his tired eyes expressively. "Tasted punk," he grinned at her.
She sat down on the floor suddenly and buried her face.
"Rat," she said presently, "I want to ask you something, rather personal? Your ... name. 'Rat'? Roberds told me something about your record. But ... please tell me, Rat. You didn't know the attack was coming, did you?"
He grinned again and waggled his head at her. "No. Who tell Rat?" Suddenly he was deadly serious as he spoke to her. "Rat a.w.o.l., go out to help sick man alone in desert. Rat leave post. Not time send call through. Come back with man, find horrible thing happen."
"But why didn't you explain?"
He grinned again. "Who believe? Sick man die soon after."
Gladney sat up. He had heard the conversation between the two. "You're right, Rat. No one would have believed you then, and no one will now. You've been safe enough on Mars, but the police will nab you as soon as you get out of the ship."
"They can't!" cried Patti Gray. "They can't hurt him after what he's done now."
The Centaurian grinned in a cynical way.
"Police not get me, Gladney. Gladney's memory damn punk, I think. Earth pretty nice place, maybe. But not for Rat."
Gladney stared at him for minutes. Then: "Say, I get it ... you're—"
"Shut up!" Rat cut him off sharply. "You talk too much." He cast a glance at Nurse Gray and then threw a meaning look at Gladney.
Question:
What is the plot of the story?
Answer:
|
[
"There is a gravely sick girl on a spaceship near Mars and the crew argues what to do. Roberds decides to pilot the ship to Earth breaking the command due to an emergency. Rat argues with him and wants to pilot the ship himself, which leads to him being forced to leave. Roberds and Peterson then explain to nurse Gray, who is looking after the sick girl, that Rat left his post once and therefore didn't warn anyone about the Sansan massacre, so now he is out of favor. The nurse, nevertheless, visits Rat in secret and asks to pilot the ship. She says the sick wants him to and Rat takes Judith, the sick girl covered in blankets, and the nurse to the hammocks on his wings. The girls then wait for him to return with another sick man who was injured after finding and saving the crashed girls in the past. Judith feels bad for breaking the law and causing so much trouble by leaving Earth, now her appendix hurts and they have to take charge of the ship and travel to a hospital on Earth. Rat returns with sick Gladney and learns that Judith and Patti Gray were attacked during their cruise to space, which is the reason they got to Mars. The trip begins, soon everyone gets thirsty and hot, Gray is hurt when the ship moves between a meteor rain, she is devastated with suffering. Rat refuses to brake and is going to make the trip in six days instead of eight. He then tells his part of the story about the Sansan massacre - he left the post to save a sick man but nobody believed it back then.",
"The story begins with Roberds yelling that he is going to pilot the ship no matter the consequences. Roberds is saying that an ill girl needs to be taken to a hospital and that he plans to take her to Earth where she can be treated. He then asks Patti for the status of Judith and she communicates that Judith is holding in but will not be able to do so for long as her health continues to fail. \n\nSeparately, Rat and Greaseball are helping complete tasks to prepare the ship for its flight to Earth. Once they are done, Greaseball tells Rat that he can go to bed. As Rat is heading to his bed, Patti whispers to him through a window. She does not want to wait to fly to Earth and asks Rat to take them instead. Rat readily agrees to do so and begins to enact their escape plan. He flies both of the girls to the ship and instructs them to be quiet on the ship so they do not attract attention. Before they head off on their trip, Rat says he is going to get Gladney and bring him too as he is also sick. When Rat returns to the ship with Gladney, they are found out and the ship begins to be attacked. One of Rat’s wings is damaged in the process. Rat pilots the ship to a very fast takeoff and they head towards Earth. At the beginning of the trip, Rat finds out that Judith is ill because of her appendix. \n\nPatti continues talking to Rat and answering questions about herself and Judith. During the conversation with Rat, she begins to realize the trip is going to be very uncomfortable as the cooling system is not working and they have a very limited supply of water. Patti becomes dehydrated and grows increasingly upset about the conditions on the cramped ship. In exasperation, she repeatedly asks him how many more days they have to spend on the ship. \n\nGladney suddenly wakes up and in an excited manner tells Rat that he needs to begin braking. Gladney begins asking Patti for help in convincing Rat to apply the brakes to make sure they get to Earth safely. Rat explains that he is cutting the trip time down from an expected 78 days to just 6 days with no breaks. Suddenly, they spot Earth in the distance. Patti starts to ask Rat about the attack that the Chief mentioned earlier and Rat says that he was just trying to help someone but knew no one would listen to his story. Gladney interrupts the conversation and taunts Rat that he will be arrested when they get to Earth to the dismay of Patti. Rat replies by cryptically stating that Earth seems like a nice place but not one for him. \n",
"Gladney and Judith are two ill patients who require surgery on Earth. A Centaurian named Rat asks the Chief Consul Roberds if he can pilot the ship, but the field manager angrily denies him the opportunity. He asks Peterson to help get rid of Rat, and Rat leaves quickly. Roberds is determined to take the ship for himself because both patients will get the necessary treatment, and he mentions that Greaseball has stayed up all night, tearing the bunks and lockers out to prepare. Nurse Gray comes back after checking on the patient, and he tells her that she will be sleeping in a hammock for their eight-day trip. Gray asks about Rat, to which Peterson explains that he was part of the Sansan massacre. Rat was a member of the outpost watch, but he went AWOL from the Ganymedean colony when Mad Barry Sansan attacked and was saved by politics. Gray tells Roberds to call her if needed and then leaves the room. The story cuts to Rat helping Greaseball fill the water tanks with fuel and check the concentrated rations. Just as Rat is about to go to bed, Nurse Gray gets his attention and tells him that her patient wants him to pilot the ship. He instructs the nurse to wrap Judith up and takes them to the ship by flying. After dropping both of them inside, Rat leaves to transport Gladney. Judith laments about having learned her lesson the hard way and notices that the pilot has been gone for a long time. Just then, Rat returns with Gladney after tricking Roberds and Peterson by burning down his shack. Rat then takes off with the ship. They get thirsty from the heat, but there is only one water tank because the rest is full of fuel. The water they drink is hot because the ship itself is heating up. Gray realizes that the hammocks have also turned upside down. The ship is hell as the journey continues because of the uncomfortable conditions, lack of sleep, and increasing heat. However, Rat continues to drive the ship. Even when Nurse Gray continuously asks him how long the trip is and breaks down, he makes her get up. Gladney wants Rat to brake too, but he refuses and explains that this is a six-day journey. He also says that they will land tonight. Nurse Gray asks him about his knowledge of the attack in the Sansan massacre; Rat responds that he left his post to help a sick man in the desert when the attack happened. Gladney tells him that the police will get him the moment they land, while Rat only grins and says that Earth is not a place for Rat. Gladney realizes what he implies, but Rat tells him to shut up because he talks too much. ",
"The story opens on Mars, with Chief Roberds and Peterson speaking to Rat, a Centaurian. Peterson refuses to allow Rat to pilot an emergency surface ship to Earth after several people have fallen sick due to a space illness. The two argue briefly, before Rat storms out. As Peterson and the Chief discuss the fate of the ship, and advise that Roberds pilot the ship despite it possibly costing him his job, nurse Patti Gray appears in the doorway. She tells them that her patient, seventeen year old Judith, is falling ill quickly and asks when the trip was planned to take place. She also asks about Rat, and it is revealed that he has a record due to his role in the Sansan massacre, where he abandoned his post, causing destruction to their colony. Roberds plans to take off at dawn. However, that night, Patti finds Rat and asks him to pilot the ship; Judith requested him specifically and they fear waiting until dawn. Rat agrees, and carries them to the ship using his wings. He additionally brings Gladney along, who is also sick. As the ship prepares to take off, they are suddenly attacked with bullets. Rat is injured slightly but they manage to get away. On the ship, Rat asks Patti what is wrong with Judith, and she replies saying that she has appendicitis; Rat remarks that Centaurians do not have an appendix. There are challenges on the ship, namely the temperature and the lack of water supply; Patti and Rat are only allowed two drinks a day, and the water remains hot. As time passes, the crew begins to go mad, and Gladney erupts in rage, telling Rat to begin braking the ship. Rat reveals that they had long since passed the halfway mark, and he does not intend to brake. Gladney angrily tells Rat that the police will be waiting for him on Earth."
] |
62212
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PRISON PLANET
By BOB TUCKER
To remain on Mars meant death from agonizing space-sickness, but Earth-surgery lay days of flight away. And there was only a surface rocket in which to escape—with a traitorous Ganymedean for its pilot.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
"Listen, Rat!" Roberds said, "what I say goes around here. It doesn't happen to be any of your business. I'm still in possession of my wits, and I know Peterson can't handle that ship. Furthermore Gladney will be in it too, right along side of that sick girl in there! And Rat, get this: I'm going to pilot that ship. Understand? Consulate or no Consulate, job or no job, I'm wheeling that crate to Earth because this is an emergency. And the emergency happens to be bigger than my position, to me at any rate." His tone dropped to a deadly softness.
"Now will you kindly remove your stinking carcass from this office?"
Unheeding, Rat swung his eyes around in the gloom and discovered the woman, a nurse in uniform. He blinked at her and she returned the look, wavering. She bit her lip and determination flowed back. She met the stare of his boring, off-colored eyes. Rat grinned suddenly. Nurse Gray almost smiled back, stopped before the others could see it.
"Won't go!" The Centaurian resumed his fight. "You not go, lose job, black-listed. Never get another. Look at me. I know." He retreated a precious step to escape a rolled up fist. "Little ship carry four nice. Rip out lockers and bunks. Swing hammocks. Put fuel in water tanks. Live on concentrates. Earth hospital fix bellyache afterwards, allright. I pilot ship. Yes?"
"No!" Roberds screamed.
Almost in answer, a moan issued from a small side room. The men in the office froze as Nurse Gray ran across the room. She disappeared through the narrow door.
"Peterson," the field manager ordered, "come over here and help me throw this rat out...." He went for Rat. Peterson swung up out of his chair with balled fist. The outlander backed rapidly.
"No need, no need, no need!" he said quickly. "I go." Still backing, he blindly kicked at the door and stepped into the night.
When the door slammed shut Roberds locked it. Peterson slumped in the chair.
"Do you mean that, Chief? About taking the ship yourself?"
"True enough." Roberds cast an anxious glance at the partly closed door, lowered his voice. "It'll cost me my job, but that girl in there has to be taken to a hospital quickly! And it's her luck to be landed on a planet that doesn't boast even one! So it's Earth ... or she dies. I'd feel a lot better too if we could get Gladney to a hospital, I'm not too confident of that patching job." He pulled a pipe from a jacket pocket. "So, might as well kill two birds with one stone ... and that wasn't meant to be funny!"
Peterson said nothing, sat watching the door.
"Rat has the right idea," Roberds continued, "but I had already thought of it. About the bunks and lockers. Greaseball has been out there all night tearing them out. We just might be able to hop by dawn ... and hell of a long, grinding hop it will be!"
The nurse came out of the door.
"How is she?" Roberds asked.
"Sleeping," Gray whispered. "But sinking...."
"We can take off at dawn, I think." He filled the pipe and didn't look at her. "You'll have to spend most of the trip in a hammock."
"I can take it." Suddenly she smiled, wanly. "I was with the Fleet. How long will it take?"
"Eight days, in that ship."
Roberds lit his pipe, and carefully hid his emotions. He knew Peterson was harboring the same thoughts. Eight days in space, in a small ship meant for two, and built for planetary surface flights. Eight days in that untrustworthy crate, hurtling to save the lives of that girl and Gladney.
"Who was that ... man? The one you put out?" Gray asked.
"We call him Rat," Roberds said.
She didn't ask why. She said: "Why couldn't he pilot the ship, I mean? What is his record?"
Peterson opened his mouth.
"Shut up, Peterson!" the Chief snapped. "We don't talk about his record around here, Miss Gray. It's not a pretty thing to tell."
"Stow it, Chief," said Peterson. "Miss Gray is no pantywaist." He turned to the nurse. "Ever hear of the Sansan massacre?"
Patti Gray paled. "Yes," she whispered. "Was Rat in that?"
Roberds shook his head. "He didn't take part in it. But Rat was attached to a very important office at the time, the outpost watch. And when Mad Barry Sansan and his gang of thugs swooped down on the Ganymedean colony, there was no warning. Our friend Rat was AWOL.
"As to who he is ... well, just one of those freaks from up around Centauria somewhere. He's been hanging around all the fields and dumps on Mars a long time, finally landed up here."
"But," protested Miss Gray, "I don't understand? I always thought that leaving one's post under such circumstances meant execution."
The Chief Consul nodded. "It does, usually. But this was a freak case. It would take hours to explain. However, I'll just sum it up in one word: politics. Politics, with which Rat had no connection saved him."
The girl shook her head, more in sympathy than condemnation.
"Are you expecting the others in soon?" she asked. "It wouldn't be right to leave Peterson."
"They will be in, in a day or two. Peterson will beat it over to Base station for repairs, and to notify Earth we're coming. He'll be all right."
Abruptly she stood up. "Goodnight gentlemen. Call me if I'm needed."
Roberds nodded acknowledgement. The door to the side room closed behind her. Peterson hauled his chair over to the desk. He sniffed the air.
"Damned rat!" he whispered harshly. "They ought to make a law forcing him to wear dark glasses!"
Roberds smiled wearily. "His eyes do get a man, don't they?"
"I'd like to burn 'em out!" Peterson snarled.
Rat helped Greaseball fill the water tanks to capacity with fuel, checked the concentrated rations and grunted.
Greaseball looked over the interior and chuckled. "The boss said strip her, and strip her I did. All right, Rat, outside." He followed the Centaurian out, and pulled the ladder away from the lip of the lock. The two walked across the strip of sandy soil to the office building. On tiptoes, Greaseball poked his head through the door panel. "All set."
Roberds nodded at him. "Stick with it!" and jerked a thumb at Rat outside. Grease nodded understanding.
"Okay, Rat, you can go to bed now." He dropped the ladder against the wall and sat on it. "Good night." He watched Rat walk slowly away.
Swinging down the path towards his own rambling shack, Rat caught a sibilant whisper. Pausing, undecided, he heard it again.
"Here ... can you see me?" A white clad arm waved in the gloom. Rat regarded the arm in the window. Another impatient gesture, and he stepped to the sill.
"Yes?"—in the softest of whispers. The voices of the men in droning conversation drifted in. "What you want?"
Nothing but silence for a few hanging seconds, and then: "Can you pilot that ship?" Her voice was shaky.
He didn't answer, stared at her confused. He felt her fear as clearly as he detected it in her words.
"Well, can you?" she demanded.
"Damn yes!" he stated simply. "It now necessary?"
"Very! She is becoming worse. I'm afraid to wait until daylight. And ... well, we want you to pilot it! She refuses to risk Mr. Roberds' job. She favors you."
Rat stepped back, astonished. "She?"
Nurse Gray moved from the window and Rat saw the second form in the room, a slight, quiet figure on a small cot. "My patient," Nurse Gray explained. "She overheard our conversation awhile ago. Quick, please, can you?"
Rat looked at her and then at the girl on the cot. He vanished from the window. Almost immediately, he was back again.
"When?" he whispered.
"As soon as possible. Yes. Do you know...?" but he had gone again. Nurse Gray found herself addressing blackness. On the point of turning, she saw him back again.
"Blankets," he instructed. "Wrap in blankets. Cold—hot too. Wrap good!" And he was gone again. Gray blinked away the illusion he disappeared upwards.
She ran over to the girl. "Judith, if you want to back down, now is the time. He'll be back in a moment."
"No!" Judith moaned. "No!" Gray smiled in the darkness and began wrapping the blankets around her. A light tapping at the window announced the return of Rat. The nurse pushed open the window wide, saw him out there with arms upstretched.
"Grit your teeth and hold on! Here we go." She picked up the blanketed girl in both arms and walked to the window. Rat took the girl easily as she was swung out, the blackness hid them both. But he appeared again instantly.
"Better lock window," he cautioned. "Stall, if Boss call. Back soon...." and he was gone.
To Nurse Gray the fifteen minute wait seemed like hours, impatient agonizing hours of tight-lipped anxiety.
Feet first, she swung through the window, clutching a small bag in her hands. She never touched ground. Rat whispered "Hold tight!" in her ear and the wind was abruptly yanked from her! The ground fell away in a dizzy rush, unseen but felt, in the night! Her feet scraped on some projection, and she felt herself being lifted still higher. Wind returned to her throat, and she breathed again.
"I'm sorry," she managed to get out, gaspingly. "I wasn't expecting that. I had forgotten you—"
"—had wings," he finished and chuckled. "So likewise Greaseball." The pale office lights dropped away as they sped over the field. On the far horizon, a tinge of dawn crept along the uneven terrain.
"Oh, the bag!" she gasped. "I've dropped it."
He chuckled again. "Have got. You scare, I catch."
She didn't see the ship because of the wind in her eyes, but without warning she plummeted down and her feet jarred on the lip of the lock.
"Inside. No noise, no light. Easy." But in spite of his warning she tripped in the darkness. He helped her from the floor and guided her to the hammocks.
"Judith?" she asked.
"Here. Beside you, trussed up so tight I can hardly breathe."
"No talk!" Rat insisted. "Much hush-hush needed. Other girl shipshape. You make likewise." Forcibly he shoved her into a hammock. "Wrap up tight. Straps tight. When we go, we go fast. Bang!" And he left her.
"Hey! Where are you going now?"
"To get Gladney. He sick too. Hush hush!" His voice floated back.
"Where has he gone?" Judith called.
"Back for another man. Remember the two miners who found us when we crashed? The burly one fell off a rock-bank as they were bringing us in. Stove in his ribs pretty badly. The other has a broken arm ... happened once while you were out. They wouldn't let me say anything for fear of worrying you."
The girl did not answer then and a hushed expectancy fell over the ship. Somewhere aft a small motor was running. Wind whistled past the open lock.
"I've caused plenty of trouble haven't I?" she asked aloud, finally.
"This was certainly a fool stunt, and I'm guilty of a lot of fool stunts! I just didn't realize until now the why of that law."
"Don't talk so much," the nurse admonished. "A lot of people have found out the why of that law the hard way, just as you are doing, and lived to remember it. Until hospitals are built on this forlorn world, humans like you who haven't been properly conditioned will have to stay right at home."
"How about these men that live and work here?"
"They never get here until they've been through the mill first. Adenoids, appendix', all the extra parts they can get along without."
"Well," Judith said. "I've certainly learned my lesson!"
Gray didn't answer, but from out of the darkness surrounding her came a sound remarkably resembling a snort.
"Gray?" Judith asked fearfully.
"Yes?"
"Hasn't the pilot been gone an awfully long time?"
Rat himself provided the answer by alighting at the lip with a jar that shook the ship. He was breathing heavily and lugging something in his arms. The burden groaned.
"Gladney!" Nurse Gray exclaimed.
"I got." Rat confirmed. "Yes, Gladney. Damn heavy, Gladney."
"But how?" she demanded. "What of Roberds and Peterson?"
"Trick," he sniggered. "I burn down my shack. Boss run out. I run in. Very simple." He packed Gladney into the remaining hammock and snapped buckles.
"And Peterson?" she prompted.
"Oh yes. Peterson. So sorry about Peterson. Had to fan him."
" Fan him? I don't understand."
"Fan. With chair. Everything all right. I apologized." Rat finished up and was walking back to the lock. They heard a slight rustling of wings as he padded away.
He was back instantly, duplicating his feat of a short time ago. Cursing shouts were slung on the night air, and the deadly spang of bullets bounced on the hull! Some entered the lock. The Centaurian snapped it shut. Chunks of lead continued to pound the ship. Rat leaped for the pilot's chair, heavily, a wing drooping.
"You've been hurt!" Gray cried. A small panel light outlined his features. She tried to struggle up.
"Lie still! We go. Boss get wise." With lightning fingers he flicked several switches on the panel, turned to her. "Hold belly. Zoom!"
Gray folded her hands across her stomach and closed her eyes.
Rat unlocked the master level and shoved!
"Whew!" Nurse Gray came back to throbbing awareness, the all too familiar feeling of a misplaced stomach attempting to force its crowded way into her boots plaguing her. Rockets roared in the rear. She loosened a few straps and twisted over. Judith was still out, her face tensed in pain. Gray bit her lip and twisted the other way. The Centaurian was grinning at her.
"Do you always leave in a hurry?" she demanded, and instantly wished she hadn't said it. He gave no outward sign.
"Long-time sleep," he announced. "Four, five hours maybe." The chest strap was lying loose at his side.
"That long!" she was incredulous. "I'm never out more than three hours!" Unloosening more straps, she sat up, glanced at the control panel.
"Not taking time," he stated simply and pointed to a dial. Gray shook her head and looked at the others.
"That isn't doing either of them any good!"
Rat nodded unhappily. "What's her matter—?" pointing.
"Appendix. Something about this atmosphere sends it haywire. The thing itself isn't diseased, but it starts manufacturing poison. Patient dies in a week unless it is taken out."
"Don't know it," he said briefly.
"Do you mean to say you don't have an appendix?" she demanded.
Rat folded his arms and considered this. "Don't know. Maybe yes, maybe no. Where's it hurt?"
Gray pointed out the location. The Centaurian considered this further and drifted into long contemplation. Watching him, Gray remembered his eyes that night ... only last night ... in the office. Peterson had refused to meet them. After awhile Rat came out of it.
"No," he waved. "No appendix. Never nowhere appendix."
"Then Mother Nature has finally woke up!" she exclaimed. "But why do Centaurians rate it exclusively?"
Rat ignored this and asked one of her. "What you and her doing up there?" He pointed back and up, to where Mars obliterated the stars.
"You might call it a pleasure jaunt. She's only seventeen. We came over in a cruiser belonging to her father; it was rather large and easy to handle. But the cruise ended when she lost control of the ship because of an attack of space-appendicitis. The rest you know."
"So you?"
"So I'm a combination nurse, governess, guard and what have you. Or will be until we get back. After this, I'll probably be looking for work." She shivered.
"Cold?" he inquired concernedly.
"On the contrary, I'm too warm." She started to remove the blanket. Rat threw up a hand to stop her.
"Leave on! Hot out here."
"But I'm too hot now. I want to take it off!"
"No. Leave on. Wool blanket. Keep in body heat, yes. Keep out cold, yes. Keep in, keep out, likewise. See?"
Gray stared at him. "I never thought of it that way before. Why of course! If it protects from one temperature, it will protect from another. Isn't it silly of me not to know that?" Heat pressing on her face accented the fact.
"What is your name?" she asked. "Your real one I mean."
He grinned. "Big. You couldn't say it. Sound like Christmas and bottlenose together real fast. Just say Rat. Everybody does." His eyes swept the panel and flashed back to her. "Your name Gray. Have a front name?"
"Patti."
"Pretty, Patti."
"No, just Patti. Say, what's the matter with the cooling system?"
"Damn punk," he said. "This crate for surface work. No space. Cooling system groan, damn punk. Won't keep cool here."
"And ..." she followed up, "it will get warmer as we go out?"
Rat turned back to his board in a brown study and carefully ignored her. Gray grasped an inkling of what the coming week could bring.
"But how about water?" she demanded next. "Is there enough?"
He faced about. "For her—" nodding to Judith, "and him—" to Gladney,
"yes. Sparingly. Four hours every time, maybe." Back to Gray. "You, me ... twice a day. Too bad." His eyes drifted aft to the tank of water. She followed. "One tank water. All the rest fuel. Too bad, too bad. We get thirsty I think."
They did get thirsty, soon. A damnable hot thirst accented by the knowledge that water was precious, a thirst increased by a dried-up-in-the-mouth sensation. Their first drink was strangely bitter; tragically disappointing. Patti Gray suddenly swung upright in the hammock and kicked her legs. She massaged her throat with a nervous hand, wiped damp hair from about her face.
"I have to have a drink."
Rat stared at her without answer.
"I said, I have to have a drink!"
"Heard you."
"Well...?"
"Well, nothing. Stall. Keep water longer."
She swung a vicious boot and missed by inches. Rat grinned, and made his way aft, hand over hand. He treaded cautiously along the deck. "Do like this," he called over his shoulder. "Gravity punk too. Back and under, gravity." He waited until she joined him at the water tap.
They stood there glaring idiotically at each other.
She burst out laughing. "They even threw the drinking cups out!" Rat inched the handle grudgingly and she applied lips to the faucet.
"Faugh!" Gray sprang back, forgot herself and lost her balance, sat down on the deck and spat out the water. "It's hot! It tastes like hell and it's hot! It must be fuel!"
Rat applied his lips to the tap and sampled. Coming up with a mouthful he swished it around on his tongue like mouthwash. Abruptly he contrived a facial contortion between a grin and a grimace, and let some of the water trickle from the edges of his mouth. He swallowed and it cost him something.
"No. I mean yes, I think. Water, no doubt. Yes. Fuel out, water in. Swish-swush. Dammit, Greaseball forget to wash tank!"
"But what makes it so hot?" She worked her mouth to dry-rinse the taste of the fuel.
"Ship get hot. Water on sun side. H-m-m-m-m-m-m."
"H-m-m-m-m-m-m-m what?"
"Flip-flop." He could talk with his hands as well. "Hot side over like pancake." Rat hobbled over to the board and sat down. An experimental flick on a lever produced nothing. Another flick, this time followed by a quivering jar. He contemplated the panel board while fastening his belt.
"H-m-m-m-m-m-m," the lower lip protruded.
Gray protested. "Oh, stop humming and do something! That wa—" the word was queerly torn from her throat, and a scream magically filled the vacancy. Nurse Gray sat up and rubbed a painful spot that had suddenly appeared on her arm. She found her nose bleeding and another new, swelling bruise on the side of her head. Around her the place was empty. Bare.
No, not quite. A wispy something was hanging just out of sight in the corner of the eye; the water tap was now moulded upward , beads glistening on its handle. The wispy thing caught her attention again and she looked up.
Two people, tightly wrapped and bound in hammocks, were staring down at her, amazed, swinging on their stomachs. Craning further, she saw Rat. He was hanging upside down in the chair, grinning at her in reverse.
"Flip-flop," he laconically explained.
"For cripes sakes, Jehosaphat!" Gladney groaned. "Turn me over on my back! Do something!" Gray stood on tiptoes and just could pivot the hammocks on their rope-axis.
"And now, please, just how do I get into mine?" she bit at Rat.
Existence dragged. Paradoxically, time dropped away like a cloak as the sense of individual hours and minutes vanished, and into its place crept a slow-torturing substitute. As the ship revolved, monotonously, first the ceiling and then the floor took on dullish, maddening aspects, eyes ached continuously from staring at them time and again without surcease. The steady, drumming rockets crashed into the mind and the walls shrieked malevolently on the eyeballs. Dull, throbbing sameness of the poorly filtered air, a growing taint in the nostrils. Damp warm skin, reeking blankets. The taste of fuel in the mouth for refreshment. Slowly mounting mental duress. And above all the drumming of the rockets.
Once, a sudden, frightening change of pitch in the rockets and a wild, sickening lurch. Meteor rain. Maddening, plunging swings to the far right and left, made without warning. A torn lip as a sudden lurch tears the faucet from her mouth. A shattered tooth.
"Sorry!" Rat whispered.
"Shut up and drive!" she cried.
"Patti ..." Judith called out, in pain.
Peace of mind followed peace of body into a forgotten limbo of lost things, a slyly climbing madness directed at one another. Waspish words uttered in pain, fatigue and temper. Fractiousness. A hot, confined, stale hell. Sleep became a hollow mockery, as bad water and concentrated tablets brought on stomach pains to plague them. Consciousness punctured only by spasms of lethargy, shared to some extent by the invalids. Above all, crawling lassitude and incalescent tempers.
Rat watched the white, drawn face swing in the hammock beside him. And his hands never faltered on the controls.
Never a slackening of the terrific pace; abnormal speed, gruelling drive ... drive ... drive. Fear. Tantalizing fear made worse because Rat couldn't understand. Smothered moaning that ate at his nerves. Grim-faced, sleep-wracked, belted to the chair, driving!
"How many days? How many days!" Gray begged of him thousands of times until the very repetition grated on her eardrums. "How many days?" His only answer was an inhuman snarl, and the cruel blazing of those inhuman eyes.
She fell face first to the floor. "I can't keep it up!" she cried. The sound of her voice rolled along the hot steel deck. "I cant! I cant!"
A double handful of tepid water was thrown in her face. "Get up!" Rat stood over her, face twisted, his body hunched. "Get up!" She stared at him, dazed. He kicked her. "Get up!" The tepid water ran off her face and far away she heard Judith calling.... She forced herself up. Rat was back in the chair.
Gladney unexpectedly exploded. He had been awake for a long time, watching Rat at the board. Wrenching loose a chest strap he attempted to sit up.
"Rat! Damn you Rat, listen to me! When're you going to start braking , Rat?"
"I hear you." He turned on Gladney with dulled eyes. "Lie down. You sick."
"I'll be damned if I'm going to lie here and let you drive us to Orion! We must be near the half-way line! When are you going to start braking?"
"Not brake," Rat answered sullenly. "No, not brake."
" Not brake? " Gladney screamed and sat bolt upright. Nurse Gray jumped for him. "Are you crazy, you skinny rat?" Gray secured a hold on his shoulders and forced him down. "You gotta brake! Don't you understand that? You have to, you vacuum-skull!" Gray was pleading with him to shut-up like a good fellow. He appealed to her. "He's gotta brake! Make him!"
"He has a good point there, Rat," she spoke up. "What about this half-way line?"
He turned to her with a weary ghost of the old smile on his face. "We passed line. Three days ago, maybe." A shrug of shoulders.
"Passed!" Gray and Gladney exclaimed in unison.
"You catch on quick," Rat nodded. "This six day, don't you know?"
Gladney sank back, exhausted. The nurse crept over to the pilot.
"Getting your figures mixed, aren't you?"
Rat shook his head and said nothing.
"But Roberds said eight days, and he—"
"—he on Mars. I here. Boss nuts, too sad. He drive, it be eight days. Now only six." He cast a glance at Judith and found her eyes closed.
"Six days, no brake. No."
"I see your point, and appreciate it," Gray cut in. "But now what? This deceleration business ... there is a whole lot I don't know, but some things I do!"
Rat refused the expected answer. "Land tonight, I think. Never been to Earth before. Somebody meet us, I think."
"You can bet your leather boots somebody will meet us!" Gladney cried. Gray turned to him. "The Chief'll have the whole planet waiting for you !" He laughed with real satisfaction. "Oh yes, Rat, they'll be somebody waiting for us all right." And then he added: "If we land."
"Oh, we land." Rat confided, glad to share a secret.
"Yeah," Gladney grated. "But in how many little pieces?"
"I've never been to Earth before. Nice, I think." Patti Gray caught something new in the tone and stared at him. Gladney must have noticed it, too.
The Centaurian moved sideways and pointed. Gray placed her eyes in the vacated position.
"Earth!" she shouted.
"Quite. Nice. Do me a favor?"
"Just name it!"
"Not drink long time. Some water?"
Gray nodded and went to the faucet. The drumming seemed remote, the tension vanished. She was an uncommonly long time in returning, at last she appeared beside him, outstretched hands dry.
"There isn't any left, Rat."
Rat batted his tired eyes expressively. "Tasted punk," he grinned at her.
She sat down on the floor suddenly and buried her face.
"Rat," she said presently, "I want to ask you something, rather personal? Your ... name. 'Rat'? Roberds told me something about your record. But ... please tell me, Rat. You didn't know the attack was coming, did you?"
He grinned again and waggled his head at her. "No. Who tell Rat?" Suddenly he was deadly serious as he spoke to her. "Rat a.w.o.l., go out to help sick man alone in desert. Rat leave post. Not time send call through. Come back with man, find horrible thing happen."
"But why didn't you explain?"
He grinned again. "Who believe? Sick man die soon after."
Gladney sat up. He had heard the conversation between the two. "You're right, Rat. No one would have believed you then, and no one will now. You've been safe enough on Mars, but the police will nab you as soon as you get out of the ship."
"They can't!" cried Patti Gray. "They can't hurt him after what he's done now."
The Centaurian grinned in a cynical way.
"Police not get me, Gladney. Gladney's memory damn punk, I think. Earth pretty nice place, maybe. But not for Rat."
Gladney stared at him for minutes. Then: "Say, I get it ... you're—"
"Shut up!" Rat cut him off sharply. "You talk too much." He cast a glance at Nurse Gray and then threw a meaning look at Gladney.
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What is the role of technology in this society?
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about Time In the Round by Fritz Leiber.
Relevant chunks:
TIME IN THE ROUND
By FRITZ LEIBER
Illustrated by DILLON
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction May 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Poor Butcher suffered more than any dictator in history: everybody gave in to him because he was so puny and they were so impregnable!
From the other end of the Avenue of Wisdom that led across the Peace Park, a gray, hairless, heavily built dog was barking soundlessly at the towering crystal glory of the Time Theater. For a moment, the effect was almost frightening: a silent picture of the beginning of civilization challenging the end of it. Then a small boy caught up with the dog and it rolled over enthusiastically at his feet and the scene was normal again.
The small boy, however, seemed definitely pre-civilization. He studied the dog coldly and then inserted a thin metal tube under its eyelid and poked. The dog wagged its stumpy tail. The boy frowned, tightened his grip on the tube and jabbed hard. The dog's tail thumped the cushiony pavement and the four paws beat the air. The boy shortened his grip and suddenly jabbed the dog several times in the stomach. The stiff tube rebounded from the gray, hairless hide. The dog's face split in an upside-down grin, revealing formidable ivory fangs across which a long black tongue lolled.
The boy regarded the tongue speculatively and pocketed the metal tube with a grimace of utter disgust. He did not look up when someone called: "Hi, Butch! Sic 'em, Darter, sic 'em!"
A larger small boy and a somewhat older one were approaching across the luxurious, neatly cropped grass, preceded by a hurtling shape that, except for a black hide, was a replica of Butch's gray dog.
Butch shrugged his shoulders resignedly and said in a bored voice:
"Kill 'em, Brute."
The gray dog hurled itself on Darter. Jaws gaped to get a hold on necks so short and thick as to be mere courtesy terms. They whirled like a fanged merry-go-round. Three more dogs, one white, one slate blue and one pink, hurried up and tried to climb aboard.
Butch yawned.
"What's the matter?" inquired Darter's master. "I thought you liked dog fights, Butch."
"I do like dog fights," Butch said somberly, without looking around. "I don't like uninj fights. They're just a pretend, like everything else. Nobody gets hurt. And look here, Joggy—and you, too, Hal—when you talk to me, don't just say Butch. It's the Butcher, see?"
"That's not exactly a functional name," Hal observed with the judiciousness of budding maturity, while Joggy said agreeably: "All right, Butcher, I suppose you'd like to have lived way back when people were hurting each other all the time so the blood came out?"
"I certainly would," the Butcher replied. As Joggy and Hal turned back skeptically to watch the fight, he took out the metal tube, screwed up his face in a dreadful frown and jabbed himself in the hand. He squeaked with pain and whisked the tube out of sight.
"A kid can't do anything any more," he announced dramatically. "Can't break anything except the breakables they give him to break on purpose. Can't get dirty except in the dirt-pen—and they graduate him from that when he's two. Can't even be bitten by an uninj—it's contraprogrammed."
"Where'd you ever get so fixated on dirt?" Hal asked in a gentle voice acquired from a robot adolescer.
"I've been reading a book about a kid called Huckleberry Finn," the Butcher replied airily. "A swell book. That guy got dirtier than anything." His eyes became dreamy. "He even ate out of a garbage pail."
"What's a garbage pail?"
"I don't know, but it sounds great."
The battling uninjes careened into them. Brute had Darter by the ear and was whirling him around hilariously.
"Aw, quit it, Brute," the Butcher said in annoyance.
Brute obediently loosed his hold and returned to his master, paying no attention to his adversary's efforts to renew the fight.
The Butcher looked Brute squarely in the eyes. "You're making too much of a rumpus," he said. "I want to think."
He kicked Brute in the face. The dog squirmed joyously at his feet.
"Look," Joggy said, "you wouldn't hurt an uninj, for instance, would you?"
"How can you hurt something that's uninjurable?" the Butcher demanded scathingly. "An uninj isn't really a dog. It's just a lot of circuits and a micropack bedded in hyperplastic." He looked at Brute with guarded wistfulness.
"I don't know about that," Hal put in. "I've heard an uninj is programmed with so many genuine canine reactions that it practically has racial memory."
"I mean if you could hurt an uninj," Joggy amended.
"Well, maybe I wouldn't," the Butcher admitted grudgingly. "But shut up—I want to think."
"About what?" Hal asked with saintly reasonableness.
The Butcher achieved a fearful frown. "When I'm World Director," he said slowly, "I'm going to have warfare again."
"You think so now," Hal told him. "We all do at your age."
"We do not," the Butcher retorted. "I bet you didn't."
"Oh, yes, I was foolish, too," the older boy confessed readily. "All newborn organisms are self-centered and inconsiderate and ruthless. They have to be. That's why we have uninjes to work out on, and death games and fear houses, so that our emotions are cleared for adult conditioning. And it's just the same with newborn civilizations. Why, long after atom power and the space drive were discovered, people kept having wars and revolutions. It took ages to condition them differently. Of course, you can't appreciate it this year, but Man's greatest achievement was when he learned to automatically reject all violent solutions to problems. You'll realize that when you're older."
"I will not!" the Butcher countered hotly. "I'm not going to be a sissy." Hal and Joggy blinked at the unfamiliar word. "And what if we were attacked by bloodthirsty monsters from outside the Solar System?"
"The Space Fleet would take care of them," Hal replied calmly. "That's what it's for. Adults aren't conditioned to reject violent solutions to problems where non-human enemies are concerned. Look at what we did to viruses."
"But what if somebody got at us through the Time Bubble?"
"They can't. It's impossible."
"Yes, but suppose they did all the same."
"You've never been inside the Time Theater—you're not old enough yet—so you just can't know anything about it or about the reasons why it's impossible," Hal replied with friendly factuality. "The Time Bubble is just a viewer. You can only look through it, and just into the past, at that. But you can't travel through it because you can't change the past. Time traveling is a lot of kid stuff."
"I don't care," the Butcher asserted obstinately. "I'm still going to have warfare when I'm World Director."
"They'll condition you out of the idea," Hal assured him.
"They will not. I won't let 'em."
"It doesn't matter what you think now," Hal said with finality. "You'll have an altogether different opinion when you're six."
"Well, what if I will?" the Butcher snapped back. "You don't have to keep telling me about it, do you?"
The others were silent. Joggy began to bounce up and down abstractedly on the resilient pavement. Hal called in his three uninjes and said in soothing tones: "Joggy and I are going to swim over to the Time Theater. Want to walk us there, Butch?"
Butch scowled.
"How about it, Butch?"
Still Butch did not seem to hear.
The older boy shrugged and said: "Oh, well, how about it—Butcher?"
The Butcher swung around. "They won't let me in the Time Theater. You said so yourself."
"You could walk us over there."
"Well, maybe I will and maybe I won't."
"While you're deciding, we'll get swimming. Come along, Joggy."
Still scowling, the Butcher took a white soapy crayon from the bulging pocket in his silver shorts. Pressed into the pavement, it made a black mark. He scrawled pensively: KEEP ON THE GRASS.
He gazed at his handiwork. No, darn it, that was just what grownups wanted you to do. This grass couldn't be hurt. You couldn't pull it up or tear it off; it hurt your fingers to try. A rub with the side of the crayon removed the sign. He thought for a moment, then wrote: KEEP OFF THE GRASS.
With an untroubled countenance, he sprang up and hurried after the others.
Joggy and the older boy were swimming lazily through the air at shoulder height. In the pavement directly under each of them was a wide, saucer-shaped depression which swam along with them. The uninjes avoided the depressions. Darter was strutting on his hind legs, looking up inquiringly at his master.
"Gimme a ride, Hal, gimme a ride!" the Butcher called. The older boy ignored him. "Aw, gimme a ride, Joggy."
"Oh, all right." Joggy touched the small box attached to the front of his broad metal harness and dropped lightly to the ground. The Butcher climbed on his back. There was a moment of rocking and pitching, during which each boy accused the other of trying to upset them.
Then the Butcher got his balance and they began to swim along securely, though at a level several inches lower. Brute sprang up after his master and was invisibly rebuffed. He retired baffled, but a few minutes later, he was amusing himself by furious futile efforts to climb the hemispherical repulsor field.
Slowly the little cavalcade of boys and uninjes proceeded down the Avenue of Wisdom. Hal amused himself by stroking toward a tree. When he was about four feet from it, he was gently bounced away.
It was really a more tiring method of transportation than walking and quite useless against the wind. True, by rocking the repulsor hemisphere backward, you could get a brief forward push, but it would be nullified when you rocked forward. A slow swimming stroke was the simplest way to make progress.
The general sensation, however, was delightful and levitators were among the most prized of toys.
"There's the Theater," Joggy announced.
"I know ," the Butcher said irritably.
But even he sounded a little solemn and subdued. From the Great Ramp to the topmost airy finial, the Time Theater was the dream of a god realized in unearthly substance. It imparted the aura of demigods to the adults drifting up and down the ramp.
"My father remembers when there wasn't a Time Theater," Hal said softly as he scanned the facade's glowing charts and maps. "Say, they're viewing Earth, somewhere in Scandinavia around zero in the B.C.-A.D. time scale. It should be interesting."
"Will it be about Napoleon?" the Butcher asked eagerly. "Or Hitler?" A red-headed adult heard and smiled and paused to watch. A lock of hair had fallen down the middle of the Butcher's forehead, and as he sat Joggy like a charger, he did bear a faint resemblance to one of the grim little egomaniacs of the Dawn Era.
"Wrong millennium," Hal said.
"Tamerlane then?" the Butcher pressed. "He killed cities and piled the skulls. Blood-bath stuff. Oh, yes, and Tamerlane was a Scand of the Navies."
Hal looked puzzled and then quickly erased the expression. "Well, even if it is about Tamerlane, you can't see it. How about it, Joggy?"
"They won't let me in, either."
"Yes, they will. You're five years old now."
"But I don't feel any older," Joggy replied doubtfully.
"The feeling comes at six. Don't worry, the usher will notice the difference."
Hal and Joggy switched off their levitators and dropped to their feet. The Butcher came down rather hard, twisting an ankle. He opened his mouth to cry, then abruptly closed it hard, bearing his pain in tight-lipped silence like an ancient soldier—like Stalin, maybe, he thought. The red-headed adult's face twitched in half-humorous sympathy.
Hal and Joggy mounted the Ramp and entered a twilit corridor which drank their faint footsteps and returned pulses of light. The Butcher limped manfully after them, but when he got inside, he forgot his battle injury.
Hal looked back. "Honestly, the usher will stop you."
The Butcher shook his head. "I'm going to think my way in. I'm going to think old."
"You won't be able to fool the usher, Butcher. You under-fives simply aren't allowed in the Time Theater. There's a good reason for it—something dangerous might happen if an under-five got inside."
"Why?"
"I don't exactly know, but something."
"Hah! I bet they're scared we'd go traveling in the Time Bubble and have some excitement."
"They are not. I guess they just know you'd get bored and wander away from your seats and maybe disturb the adults or upset the electronics or something. But don't worry about it, Butcher. The usher will take care of you."
"Shut up—I'm thinking I'm World Director," the Butcher informed them, contorting his face diabolically.
Hal spoke to the uninjes, pointing to the side of the corridor. Obediently four of them lined up.
But Brute was peering down the corridor toward where it merged into a deeper darkness. His short legs stiffened, his neckless head seemed to retreat even further between his powerful shoulders, his lips writhed back to show his gleaming fangs, and a completely unfamiliar sound issued from his throat. A choked, grating sound. A growl. The other uninjes moved uneasily.
"Do you suppose something's the matter with his circuits?" Joggy whispered. "Maybe he's getting racial memories from the Scands."
"Of course not," Hal said irritably.
"Brute, get over there," the Butcher commanded. Unwillingly, eyes still fixed on the blackness ahead, Brute obeyed.
The three boys started on. Hal and Joggy experienced a vaguely electrical tingling that vanished almost immediately. They looked back. The Butcher had been stopped by an invisible wall.
"I told you you couldn't fool the usher," Hal said.
The Butcher hurled himself forward. The wall gave a little, then bounced him back with equal force.
"I bet it'll be a bum time view anyway," the Butcher said, not giving up, but not trying again. "And I still don't think the usher can tell how old you are. I bet there's an over-age teacher spying on you through a hole, and if he doesn't like your looks, he switches on the usher."
But the others had disappeared in the blackness. The Butcher waited and then sat down beside the uninjes. Brute laid his head on his knee and growled faintly down the corridor.
"Take it easy, Brute," the Butcher consoled him. "I don't think Tamerlane was really a Scand of the Navies anyhow."
Two chattering girls hardly bigger than himself stepped through the usher as if it weren't there.
The Butcher grimly slipped out the metal tube and put it to his lips. There were two closely spaced faint plops and a large green stain appeared on the bare back of one girl, while purple fluid dripped from the close-cropped hair of the other.
They glared at him and one of them said: "A cub!" But he had his arms folded and wasn't looking at them.
Meanwhile, subordinate ushers had guided Hal and Joggy away from the main entrance to the Time Theater. A sphincter dilated and they found themselves in a small transparent cubicle from which they could watch the show without disturbing the adult audience. They unstrapped their levitators, laid them on the floor and sat down.
The darkened auditorium was circular. Rising from a low central platform was a huge bubble of light, its lower surface somewhat flattened. The audience was seated in concentric rows around the bubble, their keen and compassionate faces dimly revealed by the pale central glow.
But it was the scene within the bubble that riveted the attention of the boys.
Great brooding trees, the trunks of the nearer ones sliced by the bubble's surface, formed the background. Through the dark, wet foliage appeared glimpses of a murky sky, while from the ceiling of the bubble, a ceaseless rain dripped mournfully. A hooded figure crouched beside a little fire partly shielded by a gnarled trunk. Squatting round about were wiry, blue-eyed men with shoulder-length blond hair and full blond beards. They were clothed in furs and metal-studded leather.
Here and there were scattered weapons and armor—long swords glistening with oil to guard them from rust, crudely painted circular shields, and helmets from which curved the horns of beasts. Back and forth, lean, wolflike dogs paced with restless monotony.
Sometimes the men seemed to speak together, or one would rise to peer down the misty forest vistas, but mostly they were motionless. Only the hooded figure, which they seemed to regard with a mingled wonder and fear, swayed incessantly to the rhythm of some unheard chant.
"The Time Bubble has been brought to rest in one of the barbaric cultures of the Dawn Era," a soft voice explained, so casually that Joggy looked around for the speaker, until Hal nudged him sharply, whispering with barely perceptible embarrassment: "Don't do that, Joggy. It's just the electronic interpreter. It senses our development and hears our questions and then it automats background and answers. But it's no more alive than an adolescer or a kinderobot. Got a billion microtapes, though."
The interpreter continued: "The skin-clad men we are viewing in Time in the Round seem to be a group of warriors of the sort who lived by pillage and rapine. The hooded figure is a most unusual find. We believe it to be that of a sorcerer who pretended to control the forces of nature and see into the future."
Joggy whispered: "How is it that we can't see the audience through the other side of the bubble? We can see through this side, all right."
"The bubble only shines light out," Hal told him hurriedly, to show he knew some things as well as the interpreter. "Nothing, not even light, can get into the bubble from outside. The audience on the other side of the bubble sees into it just as we do, only they're seeing the other way—for instance, they can't see the fire because the tree is in the way. And instead of seeing us beyond, they see more trees and sky."
Joggy nodded. "You mean that whatever way you look at the bubble, it's a kind of hole through time?"
"That's right." Hal cleared his throat and recited: "The bubble is the locus of an infinite number of one-way holes, all centering around two points in space-time, one now and one then. The bubble looks completely open, but if you tried to step inside, you'd be stopped—and so would an atom beam. It takes more energy than an atom beam just to maintain the bubble, let alone maneuver it."
"I see, I guess," Joggy whispered. "But if the hole works for light, why can't the people inside the bubble step out of it into our world?"
"Why—er—you see, Joggy—"
The interpreter took over. "The holes are one-way for light, but no-way for matter. If one of the individuals inside the bubble walked toward you, he would cross-section and disappear. But to the audience on the opposite side of the bubble, it would be obvious that he had walked away along the vista down which they are peering."
As if to provide an example, a figure suddenly materialized on their side of the bubble. The wolflike dogs bared their fangs. For an instant, there was only an eerie, distorted, rapidly growing silhouette, changing from blood-red to black as the boundary of the bubble cross-sectioned the intruding figure. Then they recognized the back of another long-haired warrior and realized that the audience on the other side of the bubble had probably seen him approaching for some time.
He bowed to the hooded figure and handed him a small bag.
"More atavistic cubs, big and little! Hold still, Cynthia," a new voice cut in.
Hal turned and saw that two cold-eyed girls had been ushered into the cubicle. One was wiping her close-cropped hair with one hand while mopping a green stain from her friend's back with the other.
Hal nudged Joggy and whispered: "Butch!"
But Joggy was still hypnotized by the Time Bubble.
"Then how is it, Hal," he asked, "that light comes out of the bubble, if the people don't? What I mean is, if one of the people walks toward us, he shrinks to a red blot and disappears. Why doesn't the light coming our way disappear, too?"
"Well—you see, Joggy, it isn't real light. It's—"
Once more the interpreter helped him out.
"The light that comes from the bubble is an isotope. Like atoms of one element, photons of a single frequency also have isotopes. It's more than a matter of polarization. One of these isotopes of light tends to leak futureward through holes in space-time. Most of the light goes down the vistas visible to the other side of the audience. But one isotope is diverted through the walls of the bubble into the Time Theater. Perhaps, because of the intense darkness of the theater, you haven't realized how dimly lit the scene is. That's because we're getting only a single isotope of the original light. Incidentally, no isotopes have been discovered that leak pastward, though attempts are being made to synthesize them."
"Oh, explanations!" murmured one of the newly arrived girls. "The cubs are always angling for them. Apple-polishers!"
" I like this show," a familiar voice announced serenely. "They cut anybody yet with those choppers?"
Hal looked down beside him. "Butch! How did you manage to get in?"
"I don't see any blood. Where's the bodies?"
"But how did you get in—Butcher?"
The Butcher replied airily: "A red-headed man talked to me and said it certainly was sad for a future dictator not to be able to enjoy scenes of carnage in his youth, so I told him I'd been inside the Time Theater and just come out to get a drink of water and go to the eliminator, but then my sprained ankle had got worse—I kind of tried to get up and fell down again—so he picked me up and carried me right through the usher."
"Butcher, that wasn't honest," Hal said a little worriedly. "You tricked him into thinking you were older and his brain waves blanketed yours, going through the usher. I really have heard it's dangerous for you under-fives to be in here."
"The way those cubs beg for babying and get it!" one of the girls commented. "Talk about sex favoritism!" She and her companion withdrew to the far end of the cubicle.
The Butcher grinned at them briefly and concentrated his attention on the scene in the Time Bubble.
"Those big dogs—" he began suddenly. "Brute must have smelled 'em."
"Don't be silly," Hal said. "Smells can't come out of the Time Bubble. Smells haven't any isotopes and—"
"I don't care," the Butcher asserted. "I bet somebody'll figure out someday how to use the bubble for time traveling."
"You can't travel in a point of view," Hal contradicted, "and that's all the bubble is. Besides, some scientists think the bubble isn't real at all, but a—uh—"
"I believe," the interpreter cut in smoothly, "that you're thinking of the theory that the Time Bubble operates by hypermemory. Some scientists would have us believe that all memory is time traveling and that the basic location of the bubble is not space-time at all, but ever-present eternity. Some of them go so far as to state that it is only a mental inability that prevents the Time Bubble from being used for time traveling—just as it may be a similar disability that keeps a robot with the same or even more scopeful memories from being a real man or animal.
"It is because of this minority theory that under-age individuals and other beings with impulsive mentalities are barred from the Time Theater. But do not be alarmed. Even if the minority theory should prove true—and no evidence for it has ever appeared—there are automatically operating safeguards to protect the audience from any harmful consequences of time traveling (almost certainly impossible, remember) in either direction."
"Sissies!" was the Butcher's comment.
"You're rather young to be here, aren't you?" the interpreter inquired.
The Butcher folded his arms and scowled.
The interpreter hesitated almost humanly, probably snatching through a quarter-million microtapes. "Well, you wouldn't have got in unless a qualified adult had certified you as plus-age. Enjoy yourself."
There was no need for the last injunction. The scene within the bubble had acquired a gripping interest. The shaggy warriors were taking up their swords, gathering about the hooded sorcerer. The hood fell back, revealing a face with hawklike, disturbing eyes that seemed to be looking straight out of the bubble at the future.
"This is getting good," the Butcher said, squirming toward the edge of his seat.
"Stop being an impulsive mentality," Hal warned him a little nervously.
"Hah!"
The sorcerer emptied the small bag on the fire and a thick cloud of smoke puffed toward the ceiling of the bubble. A clawlike hand waved wildly. The sorcerer appeared to be expostulating, commanding. The warriors stared uncomprehendingly, which seemed to exasperate the sorcerer.
"That's right," the Butcher approved loudly. "Sock it to 'em!"
"Butcher!" Hal admonished.
Suddenly the bubble grew very bright, as if the Sun had just shone forth in the ancient world, though the rain still dripped down.
"A viewing anomaly has occurred," the interpreter announced. "It may be necessary to collapse the Time Bubble for a short period."
In a frenzy, his ragged robes twisting like smoke, the sorcerer rushed at one of the warriors, pushing him backward so that in a moment he must cross-section.
"Attaboy!" the Butcher encouraged.
Then the warrior was standing outside the bubble, blinking toward the shadows, rain dripping from his beard and furs.
"Oh, boy !" the Butcher cheered in ecstasy.
"Butcher, you've done it!" Hal said, aghast.
"I sure did," the Butcher agreed blandly, "but that old guy in the bubble helped me. Must take two to work it."
"Keep your seats!" the interpreter said loudly. "We are energizing the safeguards!"
The warriors inside the bubble stared in stupid astonishment after the one who had disappeared from their view. The sorcerer leaped about, pushing them in his direction.
Abrupt light flooded the Time Theater. The warriors who had emerged from the bubble stiffened themselves, baring their teeth.
"The safeguards are now energized," the interpreter said.
A woman in a short golden tunic stood up uncertainly from the front row of the audience.
The first warrior looked her up and down, took one hesitant step forward, then another, then suddenly grabbed her and flung her over his left shoulder, looking around menacingly and swinging his sword in his right hand.
"I repeat, the safeguards have been fully energized! Keep your seats!" the interpreter enjoined.
In the cubicle, Hal and Joggy gasped, the two girls squeaked, but the Butcher yelled a "Hey!" of disapproval, snatched up something from the floor and darted out through the sphincter.
Here and there in the audience, other adults stood up. The emerged warriors formed a ring of swinging swords and questing eyes. Between their legs their wolfish dogs, emerged with them, crouched and snarled. Then the warriors began to fan out.
"There has been an unavoidable delay in energizing the safeguards," the interpreter said. "Please be patient."
At that moment, the Butcher entered the main auditorium, brandishing a levitator above his head and striding purposefully down the aisle. At his heels, five stocky forms trotted. In a definitely pre-civilization voice, or at least with pre-civilization volume, he bellowed: "Hey, you! You quit that!"
The first warrior looked toward him, gave his left shoulder a shake to quiet his wriggling captive, gave his right shoulder one to supple his sword arm, and waited until the dwarfish challenger came into range. Then his sword swished down in a flashing arc.
Next moment, the Butcher was on his knees and the warrior was staring at him open-mouthed. The sword had rebounded from something invisible an arm's length above the gnomelike creature's head. The warrior backed a step.
The Butcher stayed down, crouching half behind an aisle seat and digging for something in his pocket. But he didn't stay quiet. "Sic
'em, Brute!" he shrilled. "Sic 'em, Darter! Sic 'em, Pinkie and Whitie and Blue!" Then he stopped shouting and raised his hand to his mouth.
Growling quite unmechanically, the five uninjes hurled themselves forward and closed with the warrior's wolflike dogs. At the first encounter, Brute and Pinkie were grabbed by the throats, shaken, and tossed a dozen feet. The warriors snarled approval and advanced. But then Brute and Pinkie raced back eagerly to the fight—and suddenly the face of the leading warrior was drenched with scarlet. He blinked and touched his fingers to it, then looked at his hand in horror.
The Butcher spared a second to repeat his command to the uninjes. But already the battle was going against the larger dogs. The latter had the advantage of weight and could toss the smaller dogs like so many foxes. But their terrible fangs did no damage, and whenever an uninj clamped on a throat, that throat was torn out.
Meanwhile, great bloody stains had appeared on the bodies of all the warriors. They drew back in a knot, looking at each other fearfully. That was when the Butcher got to his feet and strode forward, hand clenching the levitator above his head.
"Get back where you belong, you big jerks! And drop that lady!"
The first warrior pointed toward him and hissed something. Immediately, a half dozen swords were smiting at the Butcher.
"We are working to energize the safeguards," the interpreter said in mechanical panic. "Remain patient and in your seats."
The uninjes leaped into the melee, at first tearing more fur than flesh. Swords caught them and sent them spinning through the air. They came yapping back for more. Brute fixed on the first warrior's ankle. He dropped the woman, stamped unavailingly on the uninj, and let out a screech.
Swords were still rebounding from the invisible shield under which the Butcher crouched, making terrible faces at his attackers. They drew back, looked again at their bloodstains, goggled at the demon dogs. At their leader's screech, they broke and plunged back into the Time Bubble, their leader stumbling limpingly after them. There they wasted no time on their own ragged sorcerer. Their swords rose and fell, and no repulsor field stayed them.
"Brute, come back!" the Butcher yelled.
The gray uninj let go his hold on the leader's ankle and scampered out of the Time Bubble, which swiftly dimmed to its original light intensity and then winked out.
For once in their very mature lives, all of the adults in the auditorium began to jabber at each other simultaneously.
"We are sorry, but the anomaly has made it necessary to collapse the Time Bubble," the interpreter said. "There will be no viewing until further announcement. Thank you for your patience."
Hal and Joggy caught up with the Butcher just as Brute jumped into his arms and the woman in gold picked him up and hugged him fiercely. The Butcher started to pull away, then grudgingly submitted.
"Cubs!" came a small cold voice from behind Hal and Joggy. "Always playing hero! Say, what's that awful smell, Cynthia? It must have come from those dirty past men."
Hal and Joggy were shouting at the Butcher, but he wasn't listening to them or to the older voices clamoring about "revised theories of reality" and other important things. He didn't even squirm as Brute licked his cheek and the woman in gold planted a big kiss practically on his mouth.
He smiled dreamily and stroked Brute's muzzle and murmured softly: "We came, we saw, we conquered, didn't we, Brute?"
Question:
What is the role of technology in this society?
Answer:
|
[
"There are two major types of technology highlighted in the story: the first is the mechanical kind that allows for hovering travel, the development of uninjes, and the systems in place in the theater like the ushers and the protective mechanisms. The other major thing that could be categorized as technology is the Time Bubble itself; it acts as a form of entertainment but also as a warning to avoid the habits of people of the past. Focusing on the engineering technology that does not directly relate to potential time-travel, it is strongly hinted that the children in the story might be partly mechanical themselves, though this is not clarified. It is pointed out that there are \"adolescers\" and \"kinderobots\", which could be referring to the age groups of these children, and the dogs that follow the people around are also technological creations. The \"uninjes\" are like dogs, and are built to have canine reactions to be as close to real dogs as possible, but cannot be harmed and in the end are still collections of circuits with a battery and molded plastic. There are a number of pieces of technology in the theater, including forcefields used by ushers to block children who are too young to enter, and a number of safeguards like forcefields to protect people inc ase something went wrong with the Time Bubble. The bubble itself is a marvel of technology but nobody understands exactly how it works. Most of the discourse surrounding this is about the theories of time travel. ",
"The technology in this world helps the children and people from getting injured. The boys use metal harnesses, levitators, and the hemisphere repulsor to keep them from hitting their bodies against trees, the ground, walls, or anything else that could potentially inflict pain. These technologies create an invisible shield around them and gently bounce them away from objects. \n\nThe Time Theater is a very important place that houses the society’s Time Bubble, their most prized possession. It allows the adults to feel like gods because they are able to look back at any time or place and recognize how much their society has improved from simpler times. Upon entering the theater, Hal and Joggy feel a shock of electricity. Butch, however, is repelled by an invisible wall that knows he is not yet of age to enter the sacred space. There is also technology to keep the children separated from the adults in the theater. \n \nThe electronic interpreter in the theater helps the audience members understand what it is they’re seeing and how the machine works. It is capable of hearing the audience members’ questions and it quickly provides answers. \nThe Time Bubble is supposed to keep everything, even light, from entering the theater. It is only supposed to give viewers a look into the past, not a real experience. Some scientists in the society believe that the Time Bubble uses real peoples’ memories to time travel. The Time Bubble malfunctions and allows the Scandinavian warriors in the Bubble to enter the theater. The men from the past are shocked when they see that Butch is protected by an invisible shield and the uninjes are incapable of being injured the way real dogs would. \nThe society’s new technology saves the audience members’ lives from a real attack from people of the past. Even when their technology malfunctions, they are able to protect themselves from the swords and wolvish dogs. \n",
"Technology is a huge part of this society, as it prevents bloodshed and is central to their way of life. Hal mentions fear houses and death games, as well as the invincible robot dogs known as uninjs. He explains that over time humans have been conditioned to reject violence. He also mentions a Space Fleet that they rely on in case of an outside attack. This society has also created a setting that is difficult or impossible to tarnish or disrupt. The children use levitators to “swim” through the air, and the Time Bubble is used as a source of historical exposure (and possibly propaganda). Until Butch is able to use the Time Bubble for actual space travel, the primary role of technology in this society seems to be to maintain peace, pleasantness, and control. \n",
"Technology plays an important role in the story, particularly as a buffer against violence in the new civilization as well as a window into the pre-civilization era. The boys use special levitation devices to swim through the air; these devices also release a kind of repulsor shield that protects them from running into things while they're swimming such as trees. The Butcher later utilizes this technology to protect himself against the sword attacks of the Scandinavian men when they are pushed through the bubble into the Time Theater. The uninjes are robotic canines that cannot be hurt and are programmed against hurting humans themselves. However, they also protect the humans against the attacks of the Scandinavian men later in the story. The Time Theater utilizes time-hole technology to open windows into previous eras for observation and study, and the interpreter intuits viewers' questions and answers them in real-time. The \"usher\" is a kind of force field as well, which has the ability to determine a person's age as they attempt to pass through it. All of this technology is imperfect, and, as the Butcher later demonstrates, malleable if in the hands of someone with impulsive instincts."
] |
51380
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TIME IN THE ROUND
By FRITZ LEIBER
Illustrated by DILLON
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction May 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Poor Butcher suffered more than any dictator in history: everybody gave in to him because he was so puny and they were so impregnable!
From the other end of the Avenue of Wisdom that led across the Peace Park, a gray, hairless, heavily built dog was barking soundlessly at the towering crystal glory of the Time Theater. For a moment, the effect was almost frightening: a silent picture of the beginning of civilization challenging the end of it. Then a small boy caught up with the dog and it rolled over enthusiastically at his feet and the scene was normal again.
The small boy, however, seemed definitely pre-civilization. He studied the dog coldly and then inserted a thin metal tube under its eyelid and poked. The dog wagged its stumpy tail. The boy frowned, tightened his grip on the tube and jabbed hard. The dog's tail thumped the cushiony pavement and the four paws beat the air. The boy shortened his grip and suddenly jabbed the dog several times in the stomach. The stiff tube rebounded from the gray, hairless hide. The dog's face split in an upside-down grin, revealing formidable ivory fangs across which a long black tongue lolled.
The boy regarded the tongue speculatively and pocketed the metal tube with a grimace of utter disgust. He did not look up when someone called: "Hi, Butch! Sic 'em, Darter, sic 'em!"
A larger small boy and a somewhat older one were approaching across the luxurious, neatly cropped grass, preceded by a hurtling shape that, except for a black hide, was a replica of Butch's gray dog.
Butch shrugged his shoulders resignedly and said in a bored voice:
"Kill 'em, Brute."
The gray dog hurled itself on Darter. Jaws gaped to get a hold on necks so short and thick as to be mere courtesy terms. They whirled like a fanged merry-go-round. Three more dogs, one white, one slate blue and one pink, hurried up and tried to climb aboard.
Butch yawned.
"What's the matter?" inquired Darter's master. "I thought you liked dog fights, Butch."
"I do like dog fights," Butch said somberly, without looking around. "I don't like uninj fights. They're just a pretend, like everything else. Nobody gets hurt. And look here, Joggy—and you, too, Hal—when you talk to me, don't just say Butch. It's the Butcher, see?"
"That's not exactly a functional name," Hal observed with the judiciousness of budding maturity, while Joggy said agreeably: "All right, Butcher, I suppose you'd like to have lived way back when people were hurting each other all the time so the blood came out?"
"I certainly would," the Butcher replied. As Joggy and Hal turned back skeptically to watch the fight, he took out the metal tube, screwed up his face in a dreadful frown and jabbed himself in the hand. He squeaked with pain and whisked the tube out of sight.
"A kid can't do anything any more," he announced dramatically. "Can't break anything except the breakables they give him to break on purpose. Can't get dirty except in the dirt-pen—and they graduate him from that when he's two. Can't even be bitten by an uninj—it's contraprogrammed."
"Where'd you ever get so fixated on dirt?" Hal asked in a gentle voice acquired from a robot adolescer.
"I've been reading a book about a kid called Huckleberry Finn," the Butcher replied airily. "A swell book. That guy got dirtier than anything." His eyes became dreamy. "He even ate out of a garbage pail."
"What's a garbage pail?"
"I don't know, but it sounds great."
The battling uninjes careened into them. Brute had Darter by the ear and was whirling him around hilariously.
"Aw, quit it, Brute," the Butcher said in annoyance.
Brute obediently loosed his hold and returned to his master, paying no attention to his adversary's efforts to renew the fight.
The Butcher looked Brute squarely in the eyes. "You're making too much of a rumpus," he said. "I want to think."
He kicked Brute in the face. The dog squirmed joyously at his feet.
"Look," Joggy said, "you wouldn't hurt an uninj, for instance, would you?"
"How can you hurt something that's uninjurable?" the Butcher demanded scathingly. "An uninj isn't really a dog. It's just a lot of circuits and a micropack bedded in hyperplastic." He looked at Brute with guarded wistfulness.
"I don't know about that," Hal put in. "I've heard an uninj is programmed with so many genuine canine reactions that it practically has racial memory."
"I mean if you could hurt an uninj," Joggy amended.
"Well, maybe I wouldn't," the Butcher admitted grudgingly. "But shut up—I want to think."
"About what?" Hal asked with saintly reasonableness.
The Butcher achieved a fearful frown. "When I'm World Director," he said slowly, "I'm going to have warfare again."
"You think so now," Hal told him. "We all do at your age."
"We do not," the Butcher retorted. "I bet you didn't."
"Oh, yes, I was foolish, too," the older boy confessed readily. "All newborn organisms are self-centered and inconsiderate and ruthless. They have to be. That's why we have uninjes to work out on, and death games and fear houses, so that our emotions are cleared for adult conditioning. And it's just the same with newborn civilizations. Why, long after atom power and the space drive were discovered, people kept having wars and revolutions. It took ages to condition them differently. Of course, you can't appreciate it this year, but Man's greatest achievement was when he learned to automatically reject all violent solutions to problems. You'll realize that when you're older."
"I will not!" the Butcher countered hotly. "I'm not going to be a sissy." Hal and Joggy blinked at the unfamiliar word. "And what if we were attacked by bloodthirsty monsters from outside the Solar System?"
"The Space Fleet would take care of them," Hal replied calmly. "That's what it's for. Adults aren't conditioned to reject violent solutions to problems where non-human enemies are concerned. Look at what we did to viruses."
"But what if somebody got at us through the Time Bubble?"
"They can't. It's impossible."
"Yes, but suppose they did all the same."
"You've never been inside the Time Theater—you're not old enough yet—so you just can't know anything about it or about the reasons why it's impossible," Hal replied with friendly factuality. "The Time Bubble is just a viewer. You can only look through it, and just into the past, at that. But you can't travel through it because you can't change the past. Time traveling is a lot of kid stuff."
"I don't care," the Butcher asserted obstinately. "I'm still going to have warfare when I'm World Director."
"They'll condition you out of the idea," Hal assured him.
"They will not. I won't let 'em."
"It doesn't matter what you think now," Hal said with finality. "You'll have an altogether different opinion when you're six."
"Well, what if I will?" the Butcher snapped back. "You don't have to keep telling me about it, do you?"
The others were silent. Joggy began to bounce up and down abstractedly on the resilient pavement. Hal called in his three uninjes and said in soothing tones: "Joggy and I are going to swim over to the Time Theater. Want to walk us there, Butch?"
Butch scowled.
"How about it, Butch?"
Still Butch did not seem to hear.
The older boy shrugged and said: "Oh, well, how about it—Butcher?"
The Butcher swung around. "They won't let me in the Time Theater. You said so yourself."
"You could walk us over there."
"Well, maybe I will and maybe I won't."
"While you're deciding, we'll get swimming. Come along, Joggy."
Still scowling, the Butcher took a white soapy crayon from the bulging pocket in his silver shorts. Pressed into the pavement, it made a black mark. He scrawled pensively: KEEP ON THE GRASS.
He gazed at his handiwork. No, darn it, that was just what grownups wanted you to do. This grass couldn't be hurt. You couldn't pull it up or tear it off; it hurt your fingers to try. A rub with the side of the crayon removed the sign. He thought for a moment, then wrote: KEEP OFF THE GRASS.
With an untroubled countenance, he sprang up and hurried after the others.
Joggy and the older boy were swimming lazily through the air at shoulder height. In the pavement directly under each of them was a wide, saucer-shaped depression which swam along with them. The uninjes avoided the depressions. Darter was strutting on his hind legs, looking up inquiringly at his master.
"Gimme a ride, Hal, gimme a ride!" the Butcher called. The older boy ignored him. "Aw, gimme a ride, Joggy."
"Oh, all right." Joggy touched the small box attached to the front of his broad metal harness and dropped lightly to the ground. The Butcher climbed on his back. There was a moment of rocking and pitching, during which each boy accused the other of trying to upset them.
Then the Butcher got his balance and they began to swim along securely, though at a level several inches lower. Brute sprang up after his master and was invisibly rebuffed. He retired baffled, but a few minutes later, he was amusing himself by furious futile efforts to climb the hemispherical repulsor field.
Slowly the little cavalcade of boys and uninjes proceeded down the Avenue of Wisdom. Hal amused himself by stroking toward a tree. When he was about four feet from it, he was gently bounced away.
It was really a more tiring method of transportation than walking and quite useless against the wind. True, by rocking the repulsor hemisphere backward, you could get a brief forward push, but it would be nullified when you rocked forward. A slow swimming stroke was the simplest way to make progress.
The general sensation, however, was delightful and levitators were among the most prized of toys.
"There's the Theater," Joggy announced.
"I know ," the Butcher said irritably.
But even he sounded a little solemn and subdued. From the Great Ramp to the topmost airy finial, the Time Theater was the dream of a god realized in unearthly substance. It imparted the aura of demigods to the adults drifting up and down the ramp.
"My father remembers when there wasn't a Time Theater," Hal said softly as he scanned the facade's glowing charts and maps. "Say, they're viewing Earth, somewhere in Scandinavia around zero in the B.C.-A.D. time scale. It should be interesting."
"Will it be about Napoleon?" the Butcher asked eagerly. "Or Hitler?" A red-headed adult heard and smiled and paused to watch. A lock of hair had fallen down the middle of the Butcher's forehead, and as he sat Joggy like a charger, he did bear a faint resemblance to one of the grim little egomaniacs of the Dawn Era.
"Wrong millennium," Hal said.
"Tamerlane then?" the Butcher pressed. "He killed cities and piled the skulls. Blood-bath stuff. Oh, yes, and Tamerlane was a Scand of the Navies."
Hal looked puzzled and then quickly erased the expression. "Well, even if it is about Tamerlane, you can't see it. How about it, Joggy?"
"They won't let me in, either."
"Yes, they will. You're five years old now."
"But I don't feel any older," Joggy replied doubtfully.
"The feeling comes at six. Don't worry, the usher will notice the difference."
Hal and Joggy switched off their levitators and dropped to their feet. The Butcher came down rather hard, twisting an ankle. He opened his mouth to cry, then abruptly closed it hard, bearing his pain in tight-lipped silence like an ancient soldier—like Stalin, maybe, he thought. The red-headed adult's face twitched in half-humorous sympathy.
Hal and Joggy mounted the Ramp and entered a twilit corridor which drank their faint footsteps and returned pulses of light. The Butcher limped manfully after them, but when he got inside, he forgot his battle injury.
Hal looked back. "Honestly, the usher will stop you."
The Butcher shook his head. "I'm going to think my way in. I'm going to think old."
"You won't be able to fool the usher, Butcher. You under-fives simply aren't allowed in the Time Theater. There's a good reason for it—something dangerous might happen if an under-five got inside."
"Why?"
"I don't exactly know, but something."
"Hah! I bet they're scared we'd go traveling in the Time Bubble and have some excitement."
"They are not. I guess they just know you'd get bored and wander away from your seats and maybe disturb the adults or upset the electronics or something. But don't worry about it, Butcher. The usher will take care of you."
"Shut up—I'm thinking I'm World Director," the Butcher informed them, contorting his face diabolically.
Hal spoke to the uninjes, pointing to the side of the corridor. Obediently four of them lined up.
But Brute was peering down the corridor toward where it merged into a deeper darkness. His short legs stiffened, his neckless head seemed to retreat even further between his powerful shoulders, his lips writhed back to show his gleaming fangs, and a completely unfamiliar sound issued from his throat. A choked, grating sound. A growl. The other uninjes moved uneasily.
"Do you suppose something's the matter with his circuits?" Joggy whispered. "Maybe he's getting racial memories from the Scands."
"Of course not," Hal said irritably.
"Brute, get over there," the Butcher commanded. Unwillingly, eyes still fixed on the blackness ahead, Brute obeyed.
The three boys started on. Hal and Joggy experienced a vaguely electrical tingling that vanished almost immediately. They looked back. The Butcher had been stopped by an invisible wall.
"I told you you couldn't fool the usher," Hal said.
The Butcher hurled himself forward. The wall gave a little, then bounced him back with equal force.
"I bet it'll be a bum time view anyway," the Butcher said, not giving up, but not trying again. "And I still don't think the usher can tell how old you are. I bet there's an over-age teacher spying on you through a hole, and if he doesn't like your looks, he switches on the usher."
But the others had disappeared in the blackness. The Butcher waited and then sat down beside the uninjes. Brute laid his head on his knee and growled faintly down the corridor.
"Take it easy, Brute," the Butcher consoled him. "I don't think Tamerlane was really a Scand of the Navies anyhow."
Two chattering girls hardly bigger than himself stepped through the usher as if it weren't there.
The Butcher grimly slipped out the metal tube and put it to his lips. There were two closely spaced faint plops and a large green stain appeared on the bare back of one girl, while purple fluid dripped from the close-cropped hair of the other.
They glared at him and one of them said: "A cub!" But he had his arms folded and wasn't looking at them.
Meanwhile, subordinate ushers had guided Hal and Joggy away from the main entrance to the Time Theater. A sphincter dilated and they found themselves in a small transparent cubicle from which they could watch the show without disturbing the adult audience. They unstrapped their levitators, laid them on the floor and sat down.
The darkened auditorium was circular. Rising from a low central platform was a huge bubble of light, its lower surface somewhat flattened. The audience was seated in concentric rows around the bubble, their keen and compassionate faces dimly revealed by the pale central glow.
But it was the scene within the bubble that riveted the attention of the boys.
Great brooding trees, the trunks of the nearer ones sliced by the bubble's surface, formed the background. Through the dark, wet foliage appeared glimpses of a murky sky, while from the ceiling of the bubble, a ceaseless rain dripped mournfully. A hooded figure crouched beside a little fire partly shielded by a gnarled trunk. Squatting round about were wiry, blue-eyed men with shoulder-length blond hair and full blond beards. They were clothed in furs and metal-studded leather.
Here and there were scattered weapons and armor—long swords glistening with oil to guard them from rust, crudely painted circular shields, and helmets from which curved the horns of beasts. Back and forth, lean, wolflike dogs paced with restless monotony.
Sometimes the men seemed to speak together, or one would rise to peer down the misty forest vistas, but mostly they were motionless. Only the hooded figure, which they seemed to regard with a mingled wonder and fear, swayed incessantly to the rhythm of some unheard chant.
"The Time Bubble has been brought to rest in one of the barbaric cultures of the Dawn Era," a soft voice explained, so casually that Joggy looked around for the speaker, until Hal nudged him sharply, whispering with barely perceptible embarrassment: "Don't do that, Joggy. It's just the electronic interpreter. It senses our development and hears our questions and then it automats background and answers. But it's no more alive than an adolescer or a kinderobot. Got a billion microtapes, though."
The interpreter continued: "The skin-clad men we are viewing in Time in the Round seem to be a group of warriors of the sort who lived by pillage and rapine. The hooded figure is a most unusual find. We believe it to be that of a sorcerer who pretended to control the forces of nature and see into the future."
Joggy whispered: "How is it that we can't see the audience through the other side of the bubble? We can see through this side, all right."
"The bubble only shines light out," Hal told him hurriedly, to show he knew some things as well as the interpreter. "Nothing, not even light, can get into the bubble from outside. The audience on the other side of the bubble sees into it just as we do, only they're seeing the other way—for instance, they can't see the fire because the tree is in the way. And instead of seeing us beyond, they see more trees and sky."
Joggy nodded. "You mean that whatever way you look at the bubble, it's a kind of hole through time?"
"That's right." Hal cleared his throat and recited: "The bubble is the locus of an infinite number of one-way holes, all centering around two points in space-time, one now and one then. The bubble looks completely open, but if you tried to step inside, you'd be stopped—and so would an atom beam. It takes more energy than an atom beam just to maintain the bubble, let alone maneuver it."
"I see, I guess," Joggy whispered. "But if the hole works for light, why can't the people inside the bubble step out of it into our world?"
"Why—er—you see, Joggy—"
The interpreter took over. "The holes are one-way for light, but no-way for matter. If one of the individuals inside the bubble walked toward you, he would cross-section and disappear. But to the audience on the opposite side of the bubble, it would be obvious that he had walked away along the vista down which they are peering."
As if to provide an example, a figure suddenly materialized on their side of the bubble. The wolflike dogs bared their fangs. For an instant, there was only an eerie, distorted, rapidly growing silhouette, changing from blood-red to black as the boundary of the bubble cross-sectioned the intruding figure. Then they recognized the back of another long-haired warrior and realized that the audience on the other side of the bubble had probably seen him approaching for some time.
He bowed to the hooded figure and handed him a small bag.
"More atavistic cubs, big and little! Hold still, Cynthia," a new voice cut in.
Hal turned and saw that two cold-eyed girls had been ushered into the cubicle. One was wiping her close-cropped hair with one hand while mopping a green stain from her friend's back with the other.
Hal nudged Joggy and whispered: "Butch!"
But Joggy was still hypnotized by the Time Bubble.
"Then how is it, Hal," he asked, "that light comes out of the bubble, if the people don't? What I mean is, if one of the people walks toward us, he shrinks to a red blot and disappears. Why doesn't the light coming our way disappear, too?"
"Well—you see, Joggy, it isn't real light. It's—"
Once more the interpreter helped him out.
"The light that comes from the bubble is an isotope. Like atoms of one element, photons of a single frequency also have isotopes. It's more than a matter of polarization. One of these isotopes of light tends to leak futureward through holes in space-time. Most of the light goes down the vistas visible to the other side of the audience. But one isotope is diverted through the walls of the bubble into the Time Theater. Perhaps, because of the intense darkness of the theater, you haven't realized how dimly lit the scene is. That's because we're getting only a single isotope of the original light. Incidentally, no isotopes have been discovered that leak pastward, though attempts are being made to synthesize them."
"Oh, explanations!" murmured one of the newly arrived girls. "The cubs are always angling for them. Apple-polishers!"
" I like this show," a familiar voice announced serenely. "They cut anybody yet with those choppers?"
Hal looked down beside him. "Butch! How did you manage to get in?"
"I don't see any blood. Where's the bodies?"
"But how did you get in—Butcher?"
The Butcher replied airily: "A red-headed man talked to me and said it certainly was sad for a future dictator not to be able to enjoy scenes of carnage in his youth, so I told him I'd been inside the Time Theater and just come out to get a drink of water and go to the eliminator, but then my sprained ankle had got worse—I kind of tried to get up and fell down again—so he picked me up and carried me right through the usher."
"Butcher, that wasn't honest," Hal said a little worriedly. "You tricked him into thinking you were older and his brain waves blanketed yours, going through the usher. I really have heard it's dangerous for you under-fives to be in here."
"The way those cubs beg for babying and get it!" one of the girls commented. "Talk about sex favoritism!" She and her companion withdrew to the far end of the cubicle.
The Butcher grinned at them briefly and concentrated his attention on the scene in the Time Bubble.
"Those big dogs—" he began suddenly. "Brute must have smelled 'em."
"Don't be silly," Hal said. "Smells can't come out of the Time Bubble. Smells haven't any isotopes and—"
"I don't care," the Butcher asserted. "I bet somebody'll figure out someday how to use the bubble for time traveling."
"You can't travel in a point of view," Hal contradicted, "and that's all the bubble is. Besides, some scientists think the bubble isn't real at all, but a—uh—"
"I believe," the interpreter cut in smoothly, "that you're thinking of the theory that the Time Bubble operates by hypermemory. Some scientists would have us believe that all memory is time traveling and that the basic location of the bubble is not space-time at all, but ever-present eternity. Some of them go so far as to state that it is only a mental inability that prevents the Time Bubble from being used for time traveling—just as it may be a similar disability that keeps a robot with the same or even more scopeful memories from being a real man or animal.
"It is because of this minority theory that under-age individuals and other beings with impulsive mentalities are barred from the Time Theater. But do not be alarmed. Even if the minority theory should prove true—and no evidence for it has ever appeared—there are automatically operating safeguards to protect the audience from any harmful consequences of time traveling (almost certainly impossible, remember) in either direction."
"Sissies!" was the Butcher's comment.
"You're rather young to be here, aren't you?" the interpreter inquired.
The Butcher folded his arms and scowled.
The interpreter hesitated almost humanly, probably snatching through a quarter-million microtapes. "Well, you wouldn't have got in unless a qualified adult had certified you as plus-age. Enjoy yourself."
There was no need for the last injunction. The scene within the bubble had acquired a gripping interest. The shaggy warriors were taking up their swords, gathering about the hooded sorcerer. The hood fell back, revealing a face with hawklike, disturbing eyes that seemed to be looking straight out of the bubble at the future.
"This is getting good," the Butcher said, squirming toward the edge of his seat.
"Stop being an impulsive mentality," Hal warned him a little nervously.
"Hah!"
The sorcerer emptied the small bag on the fire and a thick cloud of smoke puffed toward the ceiling of the bubble. A clawlike hand waved wildly. The sorcerer appeared to be expostulating, commanding. The warriors stared uncomprehendingly, which seemed to exasperate the sorcerer.
"That's right," the Butcher approved loudly. "Sock it to 'em!"
"Butcher!" Hal admonished.
Suddenly the bubble grew very bright, as if the Sun had just shone forth in the ancient world, though the rain still dripped down.
"A viewing anomaly has occurred," the interpreter announced. "It may be necessary to collapse the Time Bubble for a short period."
In a frenzy, his ragged robes twisting like smoke, the sorcerer rushed at one of the warriors, pushing him backward so that in a moment he must cross-section.
"Attaboy!" the Butcher encouraged.
Then the warrior was standing outside the bubble, blinking toward the shadows, rain dripping from his beard and furs.
"Oh, boy !" the Butcher cheered in ecstasy.
"Butcher, you've done it!" Hal said, aghast.
"I sure did," the Butcher agreed blandly, "but that old guy in the bubble helped me. Must take two to work it."
"Keep your seats!" the interpreter said loudly. "We are energizing the safeguards!"
The warriors inside the bubble stared in stupid astonishment after the one who had disappeared from their view. The sorcerer leaped about, pushing them in his direction.
Abrupt light flooded the Time Theater. The warriors who had emerged from the bubble stiffened themselves, baring their teeth.
"The safeguards are now energized," the interpreter said.
A woman in a short golden tunic stood up uncertainly from the front row of the audience.
The first warrior looked her up and down, took one hesitant step forward, then another, then suddenly grabbed her and flung her over his left shoulder, looking around menacingly and swinging his sword in his right hand.
"I repeat, the safeguards have been fully energized! Keep your seats!" the interpreter enjoined.
In the cubicle, Hal and Joggy gasped, the two girls squeaked, but the Butcher yelled a "Hey!" of disapproval, snatched up something from the floor and darted out through the sphincter.
Here and there in the audience, other adults stood up. The emerged warriors formed a ring of swinging swords and questing eyes. Between their legs their wolfish dogs, emerged with them, crouched and snarled. Then the warriors began to fan out.
"There has been an unavoidable delay in energizing the safeguards," the interpreter said. "Please be patient."
At that moment, the Butcher entered the main auditorium, brandishing a levitator above his head and striding purposefully down the aisle. At his heels, five stocky forms trotted. In a definitely pre-civilization voice, or at least with pre-civilization volume, he bellowed: "Hey, you! You quit that!"
The first warrior looked toward him, gave his left shoulder a shake to quiet his wriggling captive, gave his right shoulder one to supple his sword arm, and waited until the dwarfish challenger came into range. Then his sword swished down in a flashing arc.
Next moment, the Butcher was on his knees and the warrior was staring at him open-mouthed. The sword had rebounded from something invisible an arm's length above the gnomelike creature's head. The warrior backed a step.
The Butcher stayed down, crouching half behind an aisle seat and digging for something in his pocket. But he didn't stay quiet. "Sic
'em, Brute!" he shrilled. "Sic 'em, Darter! Sic 'em, Pinkie and Whitie and Blue!" Then he stopped shouting and raised his hand to his mouth.
Growling quite unmechanically, the five uninjes hurled themselves forward and closed with the warrior's wolflike dogs. At the first encounter, Brute and Pinkie were grabbed by the throats, shaken, and tossed a dozen feet. The warriors snarled approval and advanced. But then Brute and Pinkie raced back eagerly to the fight—and suddenly the face of the leading warrior was drenched with scarlet. He blinked and touched his fingers to it, then looked at his hand in horror.
The Butcher spared a second to repeat his command to the uninjes. But already the battle was going against the larger dogs. The latter had the advantage of weight and could toss the smaller dogs like so many foxes. But their terrible fangs did no damage, and whenever an uninj clamped on a throat, that throat was torn out.
Meanwhile, great bloody stains had appeared on the bodies of all the warriors. They drew back in a knot, looking at each other fearfully. That was when the Butcher got to his feet and strode forward, hand clenching the levitator above his head.
"Get back where you belong, you big jerks! And drop that lady!"
The first warrior pointed toward him and hissed something. Immediately, a half dozen swords were smiting at the Butcher.
"We are working to energize the safeguards," the interpreter said in mechanical panic. "Remain patient and in your seats."
The uninjes leaped into the melee, at first tearing more fur than flesh. Swords caught them and sent them spinning through the air. They came yapping back for more. Brute fixed on the first warrior's ankle. He dropped the woman, stamped unavailingly on the uninj, and let out a screech.
Swords were still rebounding from the invisible shield under which the Butcher crouched, making terrible faces at his attackers. They drew back, looked again at their bloodstains, goggled at the demon dogs. At their leader's screech, they broke and plunged back into the Time Bubble, their leader stumbling limpingly after them. There they wasted no time on their own ragged sorcerer. Their swords rose and fell, and no repulsor field stayed them.
"Brute, come back!" the Butcher yelled.
The gray uninj let go his hold on the leader's ankle and scampered out of the Time Bubble, which swiftly dimmed to its original light intensity and then winked out.
For once in their very mature lives, all of the adults in the auditorium began to jabber at each other simultaneously.
"We are sorry, but the anomaly has made it necessary to collapse the Time Bubble," the interpreter said. "There will be no viewing until further announcement. Thank you for your patience."
Hal and Joggy caught up with the Butcher just as Brute jumped into his arms and the woman in gold picked him up and hugged him fiercely. The Butcher started to pull away, then grudgingly submitted.
"Cubs!" came a small cold voice from behind Hal and Joggy. "Always playing hero! Say, what's that awful smell, Cynthia? It must have come from those dirty past men."
Hal and Joggy were shouting at the Butcher, but he wasn't listening to them or to the older voices clamoring about "revised theories of reality" and other important things. He didn't even squirm as Brute licked his cheek and the woman in gold planted a big kiss practically on his mouth.
He smiled dreamily and stroked Brute's muzzle and murmured softly: "We came, we saw, we conquered, didn't we, Brute?"
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What is the plot of the story?
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about The First Man in Space by Heather Feldman.
Relevant chunks:
THE FIRST MAN INTO SPACE
Cadet Marshall Farnsworth woke from a nightmare of exploding novae and fouling rockets. After recovering from his fright, he laughed contemptuously at himself. “Here I was picked as the most stable of a group of two hundred cadets,” he thought, “and chosen to make man’s first trip into space, yet I’m shaking like a leaf.”
He got out of bed and went over to the window. From his father’s temporary apartment, he could see distant Skyharbor, the scene of the plunge into space tomorrow night. He had been awarded the frightening honor of making that trip.
10
As he watched teardrop cars whip along Phoenix, Arizona’s, double-decked streets, elevated over one another to avoid dangerous intersections and delaying stop lights, he thought back over the years; to the 1950’s, when mice and monkeys were sent up in Vikings to launch mankind’s first probing of the mysterious space beyond Earth, and the first satellites were launched; to the 1960’s, when huger, multiple-stage rockets finally conquered the problem of escape velocity; to 1975—today—when man was finally ready to send one of his own kind into the uninhabited deeps.
Marsh climbed back into bed, but sleep would not come.
In the adjoining room, he could hear the footsteps of mother and father. By their sound he knew they were the footsteps of worried people. This hurt Marsh more than his own uneasiness.
The anxiety had begun for them, he knew, when he had first signed up for space-cadet training. They had known there was an extremely high percentage of washouts, and after each test he passed, they had pretended to be glad. But Marsh knew that inwardly they had hoped he would fail, for they were aware of the ultimate goal that the space scientists were working for—the goal that had just now been reached.
Marsh finally fell into a troubled sleep that lasted until morning.
He woke early, before the alarm rang. He got up, showered, pulled on his blue-corded cadet uniform, and tugged on the polished gray boots. He took one final look around his room as though in farewell, then went out to the kitchen.
11
His folks were up ahead of time too, trying to act as though it were just another day. Dad was pretending to enjoy his morning paper, nodding only casually to Marsh as he came in. Mom was stirring scrambled eggs in the skillet, but she wasn’t a very good actor, Marsh noticed, for she furtively wiped her eyes with her free hand.
The eggs were cooked too hard and the toast had to be scraped, but no one seemed to care. The three of them sat down at the table, still speaking in monosyllables and of unimportant things. They made a pretense of eating.
“Well, Mom,” Dad suddenly said with a forced jollity that was intended to break the tension, “the Farnsworth family has finally got a celebrity in it.”
“I don’t see why they don’t send an older man!” Mom burst out, as though she had been holding it in as long as she could. “Sending a boy who isn’t even twenty-two—”
“Things are different nowadays, Mom,” Dad explained, still with the assumed calmness that masked his real feelings. “These days, men grow up faster and mature quicker. They’re stronger and more alert than older men—” His voice trailed off as if he were unable to convince himself.
“ Some body has to go,” Marsh said. “Why not a younger man without family and responsibility? That’s why they’re giving younger men more opportunities today than they used to.”
“It’s not younger men I’m talking about!” Mom blurted. “It’s you, Marsh!”
12
Dad leaned over and patted Mom on the shoulder.
“Now, Ruth, we promised not to get excited this morning.”
“I’m sorry,” Mom said weakly. “But Marsh is too young to—” She caught herself and put her hand over her mouth.
“Stop talking like that!” Dad said. “Marsh is coming back. There’ve been thousands of rockets sent aloft. The space engineers have made sure that every bug has been ironed out before risking a man’s life. Why, that rocket which Marsh is going up in is as safe as our auto in the garage, isn’t it, Marsh?”
“I hope so, Dad,” Marsh murmured.
Later, as Dad drove Marsh to the field, each brooded silently. Every scene along the way seemed to take on a new look for Marsh. He saw things that he had never noticed before. It was an uncomfortable feeling, almost as if he were seeing these things for the last as well as the first time.
Finally the airport came into view. The guards at the gate recognized Marsh and ushered the Farnsworth car through ahead of scores of others that crowded the entrance. Some eager news photographers slipped up close and shot off flash bulbs in Marsh’s eyes.
Skyharbor, once a small commercial field, had been taken over by the Air Force in recent years and converted into the largest rocket experimental center in the United States.
13
Dad drove up to the building that would be the scene of Marsh’s first exhaustive tests and briefings. He stopped the car, and Marsh jumped out. Their good-by was brief. Marsh saw his father’s mouth quiver. There was a tightness in his own throat. He had gone through any number of grueling tests to prove that he could take the rigors of space, but not one of them had prepared him for the hardest moments of parting.
When Dad had driven off, Marsh reported first to the psychiatrist who checked his condition.
“Pulse fast, a rise in blood pressure,” he said.
“You’re excited, aren’t you, son?”
“Yes, sir,” Marsh admitted. “Maybe they’ve got the wrong man, sir. I might fail them.”
The doctor grinned. “They don’t have the wrong man,” he said. “They might have, with a so-called iron-nerved fellow. He could contain his tension and fears until later, until maybe the moment of blast-off. Then he’d let go, and when he needed his calmest judgment he wouldn’t have it. No, Marshall, there isn’t a man alive who could make this history-making flight without some anxiety. Forget it. You’ll feel better as the day goes on. I’ll see you once more before the blast-off.”
Marsh felt more at ease already. He went on to the space surgeon, was given a complete physical examination, and was pronounced in perfect condition. Then began his review briefing on everything he would encounter during the flight.
14
Blast-off time was for 2230, an hour and a half before midnight. Since at night, in the Western Hemisphere, Earth was masking the sun, the complications of excessive temperatures in the outer reaches were avoided during the time Marsh would be outside the ship. Marsh would occupy the small upper third section of a three-stage rocket. The first two parts would be jettisoned after reaching their peak velocities. Top speed of the third stage would carry Marsh into a perpetual-flight orbit around Earth, along the route that a permanent space station was to be built after the results of the flight were studied. After spending a little while in this orbit, Marsh would begin the precarious journey back to Earth, in gliding flight.
He got a few hours of sleep after sunset. When an officer shook him, he rose from the cot he had been lying on in a private room of General Forsythe, Chief of Space Operations.
“It’s almost time, son,” the officer said. “Your CO wants to see you in the outside office.”
Marsh went into the adjoining room and found his cadet chief awaiting him. The youth detected an unusual warmth about the severe gentleman who previously had shown only a firm, uncompromising attitude. Colonel Tregasker was past middle age, and his white, sparse hair was smoothed down close to his head in regulation neatness.
15
“Well, this is it, Marshall,” the colonel said.
“How I envy you this honor of being the first human to enter space. However, I do feel that a part of me is going along too, since I had a small share in preparing you for the trip. If the training was harsh at times, I believe that shortly you will understand the reason for it.”
“I didn’t feel that the Colonel was either too soft or strict, sir,” Marsh said diplomatically.
A speaker out on the brilliantly lit field blared loudly in the cool desert night: “X minus forty minutes.”
“We can’t talk all night, Marshall,” the colonel said briskly. “You’ve got a job to do. But first, a few of your friends want to wish you luck.” He called into the anteroom, “You may come in, gentlemen!”
There filed smartly into the room ten youths who had survived the hard prespace course with Marsh and would be his successors in case he failed tonight. They formed a line and shook hands with Marsh. The first was Armen Norton who had gotten sick in the rugged centrifuge at a force of 9 G’s, then had rallied to pass the test.
“Good luck, Marsh,” he said.
Next was lanky Lawrence Egan who had been certain he would wash out during navigation phase in the planetarium. “All the luck in the world, Marsh,” he added.
Each cadet brought back a special memory of his training as they passed before him, wishing him success.
16
When they had gone and the speaker outside had announced: “X minus thirty minutes,” the colonel said that he and Marsh had better be leaving. Colonel Tregasker was to be Marsh’s escort to the ship.
Photographers and newspapermen swarmed about them as they climbed into the jeep that was to take them to the launching site farther out on the field. Questions were flung at the two from all sides, but the colonel deftly maneuvered the jeep through the mob and sped off over the asphalt.
At the blast-off site, Marsh could see that the police had their hands full keeping out thousands of spectators who were trying to get into the closed-off area. The field was choked with a tide of humanity milling about in wild confusion. Giant searchlights, both at the airport and in other parts of Phoenix, directed spears of light on the towering rocket that held the interest of all the world tonight. There was one light, far larger than the rest, with powerful condensing lenses and connected to a giant radar screen, which would guide Marsh home from his trip among the stars.
A high wire fence surrounded the launching ramp and blockhouses. International scientists and dignitaries with priorities formed a ring around the fence, but even they were not allowed inside the small circle of important activity. The guards waved the colonel and Marsh through the gate.
17
Marsh had spent many weeks in a mock-up of the tiny third stage in which he was to spend his time aloft, but he had never been close to the completely assembled ship until this moment. The three stages had been nicknamed, “Tom,” “Dick,” and “Harry.” Marsh swallowed as his eyes roved up the side of the great vessel, part of a project that had cost millions to perfect and was as high as a four-story building.
The gigantic base, “Big Tom,” was the section that would have the hardest job to do, that of thrusting the rocket through the densest part of the atmosphere, and this was a great deal larger than the other sections. Marsh knew that most of the ship’s bulk was made up of the propellant fuel of hydrazine hydrate and its oxidizer, nitric acid.
“We’re going into that blockhouse over there,” Colonel Tregasker said. “You’ll don your space gear in there.”
First a multitude of gadgets with wires were fastened to the cadet’s wrists, ankles, nose, and head. Marsh knew this to be one of the most important phases of the flight—to find out a man’s reaction to space flight under actual rocketing conditions. Each wire would telemeter certain information by radio back to the airport. After a tight inner G suit had been put on to prevent blackout, the plastic and rubber outer garment was zipped up around Marsh, and then he was ready except for his helmet, which would not be donned until later.
18
Marsh and the colonel went back outside. The open-cage elevator was lowered from the top of the big latticed platform that surrounded the rocket. The two got into the cage, and it rose with them. Marsh had lost most of his anxiety and tension during the activities of the day, but his knees felt rubbery in these final moments as the elevator carried him high above the noisy confusion of the airport. This was it.
As they stepped from the cage onto the platform of the third stage, Marsh heard the speaker below call out: “X minus twenty minutes.”
There were eleven engineers and workmen on the platform readying the compartment that Marsh would occupy. Marsh suddenly felt helpless and alone as he faced the small chamber that might very well be his death cell. Its intricate dials and wires were staggering in their complexity.
Marsh turned and shook hands with Colonel Tregasker.
“Good-by, sir,” he said in a quavering voice.
“I hope I remember everything the Corps taught me.” He tried to smile, but his facial muscles twitched uncontrollably.
“Good luck, son—lots of it,” the officer said huskily. Suddenly he leaned forward and embraced the youth with a firm, fatherly hug. “This is not regulations,” he mumbled gruffly, “but hang regulations!” He turned quickly and asked to be carried down to the ground.
A man brought Marsh’s helmet and placed it over his head, then clamped it to the suit. Knobs on the suit were twisted, and Marsh felt a warm, pressurized helium-oxygen mixture fill his suit and headpiece.
19
Marsh stepped through the hatch into the small compartment. He reclined in the soft contour chair, and the straps were fastened by one of the engineers over his chest, waist, and legs. The wires connected to various parts of his body had been brought together into a single unit in the helmet. A wire cable leading from the panel was plugged into the outside of the helmet to complete the circuit.
Final tests were run off to make sure everything was in proper working order, including the two-way short-wave radio that would have to penetrate the electrical ocean of the ionosphere. Then the double-hatch air lock was closed. Through his helmet receiver, Marsh could hear the final minutes and seconds being called off from inside the blockhouse.
“Everything O.K.?” Marsh was asked by someone on the platform.
“Yes, sir,” Marsh replied.
“Then you’re on your own,” were the final ominous words.
“X minus five minutes,” called the speaker.
20
It was the longest five minutes that Marsh could remember. He was painfully aware of his cramped quarters. He thought of the tons of explosive beneath him that presently would literally blow him sky-high. And he thought of the millions of people the world over who, at this moment, were hovering at radios and TV’s anxiously awaiting the dawn of the space age. Finally he thought of Dad and Mom, lost in that multitude of night watchers, and among the few who were not primarily concerned with the scientific aspect of the experiment. He wondered if he would ever see them again.
“X minus sixty seconds!”
Marsh knew that a warning flare was being sent up, to be followed by a whistle and a cloud of smoke from one of the blockhouses. As he felt fear trying to master him, he began reviewing all the things he must remember and, above all, what to do in an emergency.
“X minus ten seconds—five—four—three—two—one—FIRE!”
There was a mighty explosion at Skyharbor.
The initial jolt which Marsh felt was much fiercer than the gradually built up speed of the whirling centrifuge in training. He was crushed deeply into his contour chair. It felt as though someone were pressing on his eyeballs; indeed, as if every organ in his body were clinging to his backbone. But these first moments would be the worst. A gauge showed a force of 7 G’s on him—equal to half a ton.
He watched the Mach numbers rise on the dial in front of his eyes on an overhead panel. Each Mach number represented that much times the speed of sound, 1,090 feet per second, 740 miles an hour.
Marsh knew “Big Tom” would blast for about a minute and a half under control of the automatic pilot, at which time it would drop free at an altitude of twenty-five miles and sink Earthward in a metal mesh ’chute.
21
Marsh’s hurting eyes flicked to the outside temperature gauge. It was on a steady 67 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, and would be until he reached twenty miles. A reflecting prism gave him a square of view of the sky outside. The clear deep blue of the cloud-free stratosphere met his eyes.
Mach 5, Mach 6, Mach 7 passed very quickly. He heard a rumble and felt a jerk. “Big Tom” was breaking free. The first hurdle had been successfully overcome, and the ship had already begun tilting into its trajectory.
There was a new surge of agony on his body as the second stage picked up the acceleration at a force of 7 G’s again. Marsh clamped his jaws as the force pulled his lips back from his teeth and dragged his cheek muscles down. The Mach numbers continued to rise—11, 12, 13—to altitude 200 miles, the outer fringe of the earth’s atmosphere. There was a slight lifting of the pressure on his body. The rocket was still in the stratosphere, but the sky was getting purple.
Mach 14—10,000 miles an hour.
“Dick” would jettison any moment. Marsh had been aloft only about four minutes, but it had seemed an age, every tortured second of it.
22
There was another rumble as the second stage broke free. Marsh felt a new surge directly beneath him as his own occupied section, “Harry,” began blasting. It was comforting to realize he had successfully weathered those tons of exploding hydrazine and acid that could have reduced him to nothing if something had gone wrong. Although his speed was still building up, the weight on him began to ease steadily as his body’s inertia finally yielded to the sickeningly swift acceleration.
The speedometer needle climbed to Mach 21, the peak velocity of the rocket, 16,000 miles per hour. His altitude was 350 miles—man’s highest ascent. Slowly then, the speedometer began to drop back. Marsh heard the turbo pumps and jets go silent as the “lift” fuel was spent and rocket “Harry” began its free-flight orbit around Earth.
The ship had reached a speed which exactly counterbalanced the pull of gravity, and it could, theoretically, travel this way forever, provided no other outside force acted upon it. The effect on Marsh now was as if he had stopped moving. Relieved of the viselike pressure, his stomach and chest for a few seconds felt like inflated balloons.
“Cadet Farnsworth,” the voice of General Forsythe spoke into his helmet receiver, “are you all right?”
“Yes, sir,” Marsh replied. “That is, I think so.”
It was good to hear a human voice again, something to hold onto in this crazy unreal world into which he had been hurtled.
“We’re getting the electronic readings from your gauges O.K.,” the voice went on. “The doctor says your pulse is satisfactory under the circumstances.”
It was queer having your pulse read from 350 miles up in the air.
23
Marsh realized, of course, that he was not truly in the “air.” A glance at his air-pressure gauge confirmed this. He was virtually in a vacuum. The temperature and wind velocity outside might have astounded him if he were not prepared for the readings. The heat was over 2000 degrees Fahrenheit, and the wind velocity was of hurricane force! But these figures meant nothing because of the sparseness of air molecules. Temperature and wind applied only to the individual particles, which were thousands of feet apart.
“How is your cosmic-ray count?” asked the general.
Marsh checked the C-ray counter on the panel from which clicking sounds were coming. “It’s low, sir. Nothing to worry about.”
Cosmic rays, the most powerful emanations known, were the only radiation in space that could not be protected against. But in small doses they had been found not to be dangerous.
“As soon as our recorders get more of the figures your telemeter is giving us,” the operations chief said, “you can leave the rocket.”
When Marsh got the O.K. a few minutes later, he eagerly unstrapped the belts around his body. He could hardly contain his excitement at being the first person to view the globe of Earth from space. As he struggled to his feet, the lightness of zero gravity made him momentarily giddy, and it took some minutes for him to adjust to the terribly strange sensation.
24
He had disconnected the cable leading from his helmet to the ship’s transmitter and switched on the ship’s fast-lens movie camera that would photograph the area covered by “Harry.” Then he was ready to go outside. He pressed a button on the wall, and the first air-lock hatch opened. He floated into the narrow alcove and closed the door in the cramped chamber behind him. He watched a gauge, and when it showed normal pressure and temperature again, he opened the outside hatch, closing it behind him. Had Marsh permitted the vacuum of space to contact the interior of the ship’s quarters, delicate instruments would have been ruined by the sudden decompression and loss of heat. Marsh fastened his safety line to the ship so that there was no chance of his becoming separated from it.
Then he looked “downward,” to experience the thrill of his life. Like a gigantic relief map, the panorama of Earth stretched across his vision. A downy blanket of gray atmosphere spread over the whole of it, and patches of clouds were seen floating like phantom shapes beneath the clear vastness of the stratosphere. It was a stunning sight for Marsh, seeing the pinpoint lights of the night cities extending from horizon to horizon. It gave him an exhilarating feeling of being a king over it all.
25
Earth appeared to be rotating, but Marsh knew it was largely his own and the rocket’s fast speed that was responsible for the illusion. As he hung in this region of the exosphere, he was thankful for his cadet training in zero gravity. A special machine, developed only in recent years, simulated the weightlessness of space and trained the cadets for endurance in such artificial conditions.
“Describe some of the things you see, Marshall,” General Forsythe said over Marsh’s helmet receiver.
“I’ve just cut in a recorder.”
“It’s a scene almost beyond description, sir,” Marsh said into the helmet mike. “The sky is thickly powdered with stars. The Milky Way is very distinct, and I can make out lots of fuzzy spots that must be star clusters and nebulae and comets. Mars is like an extremely bright taillight, and the moon is so strong it hurts my eyes as much as the direct sun does on earth.”
Marsh saw a faintly luminous blur pass beyond the ship. It had been almost too sudden to catch. He believed it to be a meteor diving Earthward at a speed around forty-five miles a second. He reported this to the general.
As he brought his eyes down from the more distant fixtures of space to those closer by on Earth, a strange thing happened. He was suddenly seized with a fear of falling, although his zero-gravity training had been intended to prepare him against this very thing. A cold sweat come out over his body, and an uncontrollable panic threatened to take hold of him.
26
He made a sudden movement as though to catch himself. Forgetting the magnification of motion in frictionless space and his own weightlessness, he was shot quickly to the end of his safety line like a cracked whip. His body jerked at the taut end and then sped swiftly back in reaction toward the ship, head foremost. A collision could crack his helmet, exposing his body to decompression, causing him to swell like a balloon and finally explode.
In the grip of numbing fear, only at the last moment did he have the presence of mind to flip his body in a half-cartwheel and bring his boots up in front of him for protection. His feet bumped against the rocket’s side, and the motion sent him hurtling back out to the end of the safety line again. This back-and-forth action occurred several times before he could stop completely.
“I’ve got to be careful,” he panted to himself, as he thought of how close his space career had come to being ended scarcely before it had begun.
General Forsythe cut in with great concern, wondering what had happened. When Marsh had explained and the general seemed satisfied that Marsh had recovered himself, he had Marsh go on with his description.
His senseless fear having gone now, Marsh looked down calmly, entranced as the features of the United States passed below his gaze. He named the cities he could identify, also the mountain ranges, lakes, and rivers, explaining just how they looked from 350 miles up. In only a fraction of an hour’s time, the rocket had traversed the entire country and was approaching the twinkling phosphorescence of the Atlantic.
27
Marsh asked if “Tom” and “Dick” had landed safely.
“‘Tom’ landed near Roswell, New Mexico,” General Forsythe told him, “and the ’chute of the second section has been reported seen north of Dallas. I think you’d better start back now, Marshall. It’ll take us many months to analyze all the information we’ve gotten. We can’t contact you very well on the other side of the world either, and thirdly, I don’t want you exposed to the sun’s rays outside the atmosphere in the Eastern Hemisphere any longer than can be helped.”
Marsh tugged carefully on his safety line and floated slowly back toward the ship. He entered the air lock. Then, inside, he raised the angle of his contour chair to upright position, facing the console of the ship’s manual controls for the glide Earthward. He plugged in his telemeter helmet cable and buckled one of the straps across his waist.
Since he was still moving at many thousands of miles an hour, it would be suicide to plunge straight downward. He and the glider would be turned into a meteoric torch. Rather, he would have to spend considerable time soaring in and out of the atmosphere in braking ellipses until he reached much lower speed. Then the Earth’s gravitational pull would do the rest.
28
This was going to be the trickiest part of the operation, and the most dangerous. Where before, Marsh had depended on automatic controls to guide him, now much of the responsibility was on his own judgment. He remembered the many hours he had sweated through to log his flying time. Now he could look back on that period in his training and thank his lucky stars for it.
He took the manual controls and angled into the atmosphere. He carefully watched the AHF dial—the atmospheric heat friction gauge. When he had neared the dangerous incendiary point, with the ship having literally become red-hot, he soared into the frictionless vacuum again. He had to keep this up a long time in order to reduce his devastating speed.
It was something of a shock to him to leave the black midnight of Earth’s slumbering side for the brilliant hemisphere where the people of Europe and Asia were going about their daytime tasks. He would have liked to study this other half of the world which he had glimpsed only a few times before in his supersonic test flights, but he knew this would have to wait for future flights.
Finally, after a long time, his velocity was slowed enough so that the tug of gravity was stronger than the rocket’s ability to pull up out of the atmosphere. At this point, Marsh cut in “Harry’s” forward braking jets to check his falling speed.
“There’s something else to worry about,” he thought to himself. “Will old Harry hold together or will he fly apart in the crushing atmosphere?”
29
The directional radio signals from the powerful Skyharbor transmitter were growing stronger as Marsh neared the shores of California. He could see the winking lights of San Diego and Los Angeles, and farther inland the swinging thread that was the beacon at Skyharbor. All planes in his path of flight had been grounded for the past few hours because of the space flight. The only ground light scanning the skies was the gigantic space beacon in Phoenix.
When Marsh reached Arizona, he began spiraling downward over the state to kill the rest of his altitude and air speed. Even now the plane was a hurtling supersonic metal sliver streaking through the night skies like a comet. He topped the snow-capped summits of the towering San Francisco Peaks on the drive southward, and he recognized the sprawling serpent of the Grand Canyon. Then he was in the lower desert regions of moon-splashed sand and cactus. Although the fire-hot temperature of the outer skin had subsided, there had been damage done to the walls and instruments, and possibly to other parts, too. Marsh was worried lest his outside controls might be too warped to give him a good touchdown, if indeed he could get down safely at all.
A few thousand feet up, Marsh lowered his landing gear. Now the only problem left was to land himself and the valuable ship safely inside the narrow parallels of the airstrip. He circled the airport several times as his altitude continued to plummet.
30
The meter fell rapidly. His braking rocket fuel was gone now. From here on in, he would be on gliding power alone.
“Easy does it, Marshall,” the general said quietly into his ear. “You’re lining up fine. Level it out a little and keep straight with the approach lights. That’s fine. You’re just about in.”
The lights of the airport seeming to rush up at him, Marsh felt a jolt as the wheels touched ground on the west end of the runway. He kept the ship steady as it scurried along the smooth asphalt, losing the last of its once tremendous velocity. The plane hit the restraining wire across the strip and came to a sudden stop, shoving Marsh hard against the single safety belt he wore. Finally, incredibly, the ship was still and he was safe.
He unfastened his strap and removed his space helmet. The heat of the compartment brought the sweat out on his face. He rose on wobbly legs and pressed the buttons to the hatches. The last door flew open to admit the cool, bracing air of Earth which he had wondered if he would ever inhale again.
His aloneness was over then, suddenly and boisterously, as men swarmed over him with congratulations, eager questions, and looks of respect. Reporters’ flash bulbs popped, and he felt like a new Lindbergh as he was pulled down to the ground and mobbed. Finally the police came to his rescue and pushed back the curiosity seekers and newspapermen. Then only three men were allowed through the cordon.
Question:
What is the plot of the story?
Answer:
|
[
"Cadet Marshall Farnsworth wakes up at night, frightened by the sound of rockets. He looks in the window and thinks about his upcoming trip to space, as a first man, reflecting upon the history of mankind and space interaction. The next morning he has a short but difficult talk with his anxious parents. Marsh's dad takes him to the Skyharbor, the young man feels uneasy. Then he goes through a check up at psychiatrist's and space surgeon's, revises the route, and takes a nap. Then his Colonel gives him a brief speech, and his cadet friends wish him luck. Thousands of spectators and reporters try to see Marsh on his way to the rocket. Various gadgets are put on Marsh, he rises to the platform, says warm goodbye to the Colonel, and puts the helmet on. Inside the ship Marsh is fastened and final tests take place before he is left alone with his nerves. The last five minutes are long, Marsh thinks about his planet and parents, and then the ship sets off. Minutes seem an eternity, the first phase is behind, and upon reaching the peak velocity the speed starts to drop back. The free-flight orbit is reached and Marsh hears General Forsythe's earthly and calming voice. All the indicators are good and Marsh gets excited to be the first one to leave the rocket and look at the globe from space. He takes all the precautions and the first glance \"downward\" makes him feel like the king of the universe. Suddenly, he feels like he is falling and makes a forbidden movement, which leads to him bouncing from and back to the rocket a couple times, when he has to try hard to stop. When he calms down after the fright, he starts describing what he sees. General orders Marsh to go back and he returns to his cabin. The hardest part begins, as the speed of the ship is high and needs to be reduced. When Marsh succeeds in doing so, the ship heads back to Earth. Marsh has to make a couple spirals and near the airport the braking fuel is gone. Eventually, he manages to exit and breathe the air of Earth and is attacked by the reporters, until he is left with only three men. \n",
"Cadet Marshall Farnsworth is chosen out of two hundred cadets to make man's first trip into space. He is considered one of the most stable, but he is still nervous after waking up from a nightmare. Marsh tries to sleep again, but he is unable to because of the anxious footsteps of his mother and father. He finally falls asleep until the alarm goes off in the morning and prepares himself for the big day. Marsh's parents pretend to be happy the next day, but he knows that they do not want him to go. They try to convince themselves that he will be the Farnsworth family celebrity and completely safe in the rocket. When his father drops him off, they share a brief goodbye, and he begins to go through his pre-flight examinations. Further instructions regarding Marsh's take-off time and position are given to him. He manages to sleep for a few more hours before he talks to Colonel Tregasker. The Colonel wishes him luck and brings in ten more cadets who would be Marsh's replacement should he fail the trip. He then escorts Mash to the ship once the speaker announces that there are less than thirty minutes. There are crowds of photographers and newspapermen in the area, looking for a chance to interview Marsh. However, the Colonel leads him to a blockhouse where he puts on his space gear. He puts on a multitude of gadgets, and the two of them get into the cage that takes them to the platform of the third stage. Marsh begins to feel fear, even though there are workmen and engineers preparing the compartment because he also thinks that this may be his death chamber. He says his goodbye to the Colonel, and a man hands him his helmet. He waits inside the compartment, and the rocket launches soon after. The rocket then fires, and Marsh begins to see the mach numbers rise. After seeing the other parts rise, the voice of General Forsythe speaks to him and tells him that everything is going fine so far. When Marsh gets the O.K. signal, he exits the rocket and begins eagerly describing what he sees in space, such as the rotating Earth and the Milky Way. Marsh no longer feels any fear anymore as he observes space. The General then tells him to go back to avoid further danger, and he prepares himself to return to Earth's atmosphere. He comes back safely, sees many familiar sights along the way, and prepares to land the valuable ship. The General reassures him, and he safely returns to the ground again after gliding. Many reporters come to greet him, but the police safely escort him. Only three men are allowed to follow through the cordon.",
"Cadet Marshall Farnsworth is to be the first man to ever go into space. He wakes up the morning of the day he is meant to take off, and has breakfast with his parents. His Dad drives him to the airport \"Skyharbour\" where the rocket is waiting to launch. Marsh goes through various checks with doctors to make sure he is in shape for flying. Blast off is set for 22:30. As the day goes on he becomes more calm, and goes for a nap in the general's office. He is awoken and goes to met with his CO, Colonel Tregasker. They talk for a while and then are met by Marshall's comrades, who wish him luck. The Colonel and Marshall make their way to the blockhouse, where Marshall changes into his space suit. He is plastered with different wires to convey information back to the station about his state. They move to the elevator that takes them to the door hatch of the rocket. They say their goodbyes and Marsh steps into the compartment. Some final tests are done and then the countdown begins. The rocket blasts off, Marsh being thrown back in his seat in agony. The first part of the rocket breaks off, then the second, until he is left with just his compartment outside of the atmosphere, just as planned. When Marsh gets into a steady orbit, he exits the cabin, attached to the ship by his tether. He talks to the general about what he can see of Earth. He then looks under his feet and gets the sense of falling and becomes panicked, pushing himself to the end of his tether, and then knocking against the ship, back and forth. He eventually regains himself and re-enters the cabin. After that he starts his initial descent, swerving in and out of the atmosphere to avoid burning up on re-entry. Slowly, he makes it down to the surface, using his training. He makes it back in one piece, and is greeted by crowds of people. ",
"The Air Force is getting ready for a rocket blast off the next day. And the rocket is scheduled to blast off at 10:30 PM in the evening. It will go into the orbit around Earth, and once it is stable cadet Marshall Farnsworth, the trained astronaut, will go take a trip to the outside of the rocket, in space, then it would return, carrying Marsh back to Earth. The rocket consists of three parts, where two of them will fall off after the fuel are used and before entering into the orbit. \n\nThe story starts with Marsh having a bad dream about not able to make it to space and back. Apparently, he is not the only one worried, so are his parents. The next morning, his parents tries to act as if they are glad for him, but later his mom was not able to hold it anymore, luckily Dad is able to stop her so that the morning will not be filled with sadness. After Dad drives Marsh to Skyharbor, where the rocket will be blasting, they quickly said goodbye to each other, and Marsh goes to get a physical examination and a briefing. After a quick nap, he is woken up by the colonel and greets his classmates whom he went through the trainings with. \n\nWhen it was thirty minutes until the blast off, the colonel escorts Marsh to the ship to have his gears put on except his helmet. Then, he takes the lift that gets him to the platform surrounding the rocket, where he puts on his helmet and steps into the ship to make sure everything works fine. The countdown goes to zero and the rocket rises into the sky. \n\nAs he keeps on rising, the two parts of the rocket drop as they are supposed to. Then he successfully goes into the orbit as predicted. After a few minutes, he gets the order to leave the rocket. Where he sees the stunning view of Earth from space. Despite a small accident with no injuries, his trip outside the rocket goes well. Then he is ready to get back to Earth. He uses his skills and talents, after a long time, he finally lands safely. After a few seconds of aloneness, men come running and congratulating him. "
] |
55801
|
THE FIRST MAN INTO SPACE
Cadet Marshall Farnsworth woke from a nightmare of exploding novae and fouling rockets. After recovering from his fright, he laughed contemptuously at himself. “Here I was picked as the most stable of a group of two hundred cadets,” he thought, “and chosen to make man’s first trip into space, yet I’m shaking like a leaf.”
He got out of bed and went over to the window. From his father’s temporary apartment, he could see distant Skyharbor, the scene of the plunge into space tomorrow night. He had been awarded the frightening honor of making that trip.
10
As he watched teardrop cars whip along Phoenix, Arizona’s, double-decked streets, elevated over one another to avoid dangerous intersections and delaying stop lights, he thought back over the years; to the 1950’s, when mice and monkeys were sent up in Vikings to launch mankind’s first probing of the mysterious space beyond Earth, and the first satellites were launched; to the 1960’s, when huger, multiple-stage rockets finally conquered the problem of escape velocity; to 1975—today—when man was finally ready to send one of his own kind into the uninhabited deeps.
Marsh climbed back into bed, but sleep would not come.
In the adjoining room, he could hear the footsteps of mother and father. By their sound he knew they were the footsteps of worried people. This hurt Marsh more than his own uneasiness.
The anxiety had begun for them, he knew, when he had first signed up for space-cadet training. They had known there was an extremely high percentage of washouts, and after each test he passed, they had pretended to be glad. But Marsh knew that inwardly they had hoped he would fail, for they were aware of the ultimate goal that the space scientists were working for—the goal that had just now been reached.
Marsh finally fell into a troubled sleep that lasted until morning.
He woke early, before the alarm rang. He got up, showered, pulled on his blue-corded cadet uniform, and tugged on the polished gray boots. He took one final look around his room as though in farewell, then went out to the kitchen.
11
His folks were up ahead of time too, trying to act as though it were just another day. Dad was pretending to enjoy his morning paper, nodding only casually to Marsh as he came in. Mom was stirring scrambled eggs in the skillet, but she wasn’t a very good actor, Marsh noticed, for she furtively wiped her eyes with her free hand.
The eggs were cooked too hard and the toast had to be scraped, but no one seemed to care. The three of them sat down at the table, still speaking in monosyllables and of unimportant things. They made a pretense of eating.
“Well, Mom,” Dad suddenly said with a forced jollity that was intended to break the tension, “the Farnsworth family has finally got a celebrity in it.”
“I don’t see why they don’t send an older man!” Mom burst out, as though she had been holding it in as long as she could. “Sending a boy who isn’t even twenty-two—”
“Things are different nowadays, Mom,” Dad explained, still with the assumed calmness that masked his real feelings. “These days, men grow up faster and mature quicker. They’re stronger and more alert than older men—” His voice trailed off as if he were unable to convince himself.
“ Some body has to go,” Marsh said. “Why not a younger man without family and responsibility? That’s why they’re giving younger men more opportunities today than they used to.”
“It’s not younger men I’m talking about!” Mom blurted. “It’s you, Marsh!”
12
Dad leaned over and patted Mom on the shoulder.
“Now, Ruth, we promised not to get excited this morning.”
“I’m sorry,” Mom said weakly. “But Marsh is too young to—” She caught herself and put her hand over her mouth.
“Stop talking like that!” Dad said. “Marsh is coming back. There’ve been thousands of rockets sent aloft. The space engineers have made sure that every bug has been ironed out before risking a man’s life. Why, that rocket which Marsh is going up in is as safe as our auto in the garage, isn’t it, Marsh?”
“I hope so, Dad,” Marsh murmured.
Later, as Dad drove Marsh to the field, each brooded silently. Every scene along the way seemed to take on a new look for Marsh. He saw things that he had never noticed before. It was an uncomfortable feeling, almost as if he were seeing these things for the last as well as the first time.
Finally the airport came into view. The guards at the gate recognized Marsh and ushered the Farnsworth car through ahead of scores of others that crowded the entrance. Some eager news photographers slipped up close and shot off flash bulbs in Marsh’s eyes.
Skyharbor, once a small commercial field, had been taken over by the Air Force in recent years and converted into the largest rocket experimental center in the United States.
13
Dad drove up to the building that would be the scene of Marsh’s first exhaustive tests and briefings. He stopped the car, and Marsh jumped out. Their good-by was brief. Marsh saw his father’s mouth quiver. There was a tightness in his own throat. He had gone through any number of grueling tests to prove that he could take the rigors of space, but not one of them had prepared him for the hardest moments of parting.
When Dad had driven off, Marsh reported first to the psychiatrist who checked his condition.
“Pulse fast, a rise in blood pressure,” he said.
“You’re excited, aren’t you, son?”
“Yes, sir,” Marsh admitted. “Maybe they’ve got the wrong man, sir. I might fail them.”
The doctor grinned. “They don’t have the wrong man,” he said. “They might have, with a so-called iron-nerved fellow. He could contain his tension and fears until later, until maybe the moment of blast-off. Then he’d let go, and when he needed his calmest judgment he wouldn’t have it. No, Marshall, there isn’t a man alive who could make this history-making flight without some anxiety. Forget it. You’ll feel better as the day goes on. I’ll see you once more before the blast-off.”
Marsh felt more at ease already. He went on to the space surgeon, was given a complete physical examination, and was pronounced in perfect condition. Then began his review briefing on everything he would encounter during the flight.
14
Blast-off time was for 2230, an hour and a half before midnight. Since at night, in the Western Hemisphere, Earth was masking the sun, the complications of excessive temperatures in the outer reaches were avoided during the time Marsh would be outside the ship. Marsh would occupy the small upper third section of a three-stage rocket. The first two parts would be jettisoned after reaching their peak velocities. Top speed of the third stage would carry Marsh into a perpetual-flight orbit around Earth, along the route that a permanent space station was to be built after the results of the flight were studied. After spending a little while in this orbit, Marsh would begin the precarious journey back to Earth, in gliding flight.
He got a few hours of sleep after sunset. When an officer shook him, he rose from the cot he had been lying on in a private room of General Forsythe, Chief of Space Operations.
“It’s almost time, son,” the officer said. “Your CO wants to see you in the outside office.”
Marsh went into the adjoining room and found his cadet chief awaiting him. The youth detected an unusual warmth about the severe gentleman who previously had shown only a firm, uncompromising attitude. Colonel Tregasker was past middle age, and his white, sparse hair was smoothed down close to his head in regulation neatness.
15
“Well, this is it, Marshall,” the colonel said.
“How I envy you this honor of being the first human to enter space. However, I do feel that a part of me is going along too, since I had a small share in preparing you for the trip. If the training was harsh at times, I believe that shortly you will understand the reason for it.”
“I didn’t feel that the Colonel was either too soft or strict, sir,” Marsh said diplomatically.
A speaker out on the brilliantly lit field blared loudly in the cool desert night: “X minus forty minutes.”
“We can’t talk all night, Marshall,” the colonel said briskly. “You’ve got a job to do. But first, a few of your friends want to wish you luck.” He called into the anteroom, “You may come in, gentlemen!”
There filed smartly into the room ten youths who had survived the hard prespace course with Marsh and would be his successors in case he failed tonight. They formed a line and shook hands with Marsh. The first was Armen Norton who had gotten sick in the rugged centrifuge at a force of 9 G’s, then had rallied to pass the test.
“Good luck, Marsh,” he said.
Next was lanky Lawrence Egan who had been certain he would wash out during navigation phase in the planetarium. “All the luck in the world, Marsh,” he added.
Each cadet brought back a special memory of his training as they passed before him, wishing him success.
16
When they had gone and the speaker outside had announced: “X minus thirty minutes,” the colonel said that he and Marsh had better be leaving. Colonel Tregasker was to be Marsh’s escort to the ship.
Photographers and newspapermen swarmed about them as they climbed into the jeep that was to take them to the launching site farther out on the field. Questions were flung at the two from all sides, but the colonel deftly maneuvered the jeep through the mob and sped off over the asphalt.
At the blast-off site, Marsh could see that the police had their hands full keeping out thousands of spectators who were trying to get into the closed-off area. The field was choked with a tide of humanity milling about in wild confusion. Giant searchlights, both at the airport and in other parts of Phoenix, directed spears of light on the towering rocket that held the interest of all the world tonight. There was one light, far larger than the rest, with powerful condensing lenses and connected to a giant radar screen, which would guide Marsh home from his trip among the stars.
A high wire fence surrounded the launching ramp and blockhouses. International scientists and dignitaries with priorities formed a ring around the fence, but even they were not allowed inside the small circle of important activity. The guards waved the colonel and Marsh through the gate.
17
Marsh had spent many weeks in a mock-up of the tiny third stage in which he was to spend his time aloft, but he had never been close to the completely assembled ship until this moment. The three stages had been nicknamed, “Tom,” “Dick,” and “Harry.” Marsh swallowed as his eyes roved up the side of the great vessel, part of a project that had cost millions to perfect and was as high as a four-story building.
The gigantic base, “Big Tom,” was the section that would have the hardest job to do, that of thrusting the rocket through the densest part of the atmosphere, and this was a great deal larger than the other sections. Marsh knew that most of the ship’s bulk was made up of the propellant fuel of hydrazine hydrate and its oxidizer, nitric acid.
“We’re going into that blockhouse over there,” Colonel Tregasker said. “You’ll don your space gear in there.”
First a multitude of gadgets with wires were fastened to the cadet’s wrists, ankles, nose, and head. Marsh knew this to be one of the most important phases of the flight—to find out a man’s reaction to space flight under actual rocketing conditions. Each wire would telemeter certain information by radio back to the airport. After a tight inner G suit had been put on to prevent blackout, the plastic and rubber outer garment was zipped up around Marsh, and then he was ready except for his helmet, which would not be donned until later.
18
Marsh and the colonel went back outside. The open-cage elevator was lowered from the top of the big latticed platform that surrounded the rocket. The two got into the cage, and it rose with them. Marsh had lost most of his anxiety and tension during the activities of the day, but his knees felt rubbery in these final moments as the elevator carried him high above the noisy confusion of the airport. This was it.
As they stepped from the cage onto the platform of the third stage, Marsh heard the speaker below call out: “X minus twenty minutes.”
There were eleven engineers and workmen on the platform readying the compartment that Marsh would occupy. Marsh suddenly felt helpless and alone as he faced the small chamber that might very well be his death cell. Its intricate dials and wires were staggering in their complexity.
Marsh turned and shook hands with Colonel Tregasker.
“Good-by, sir,” he said in a quavering voice.
“I hope I remember everything the Corps taught me.” He tried to smile, but his facial muscles twitched uncontrollably.
“Good luck, son—lots of it,” the officer said huskily. Suddenly he leaned forward and embraced the youth with a firm, fatherly hug. “This is not regulations,” he mumbled gruffly, “but hang regulations!” He turned quickly and asked to be carried down to the ground.
A man brought Marsh’s helmet and placed it over his head, then clamped it to the suit. Knobs on the suit were twisted, and Marsh felt a warm, pressurized helium-oxygen mixture fill his suit and headpiece.
19
Marsh stepped through the hatch into the small compartment. He reclined in the soft contour chair, and the straps were fastened by one of the engineers over his chest, waist, and legs. The wires connected to various parts of his body had been brought together into a single unit in the helmet. A wire cable leading from the panel was plugged into the outside of the helmet to complete the circuit.
Final tests were run off to make sure everything was in proper working order, including the two-way short-wave radio that would have to penetrate the electrical ocean of the ionosphere. Then the double-hatch air lock was closed. Through his helmet receiver, Marsh could hear the final minutes and seconds being called off from inside the blockhouse.
“Everything O.K.?” Marsh was asked by someone on the platform.
“Yes, sir,” Marsh replied.
“Then you’re on your own,” were the final ominous words.
“X minus five minutes,” called the speaker.
20
It was the longest five minutes that Marsh could remember. He was painfully aware of his cramped quarters. He thought of the tons of explosive beneath him that presently would literally blow him sky-high. And he thought of the millions of people the world over who, at this moment, were hovering at radios and TV’s anxiously awaiting the dawn of the space age. Finally he thought of Dad and Mom, lost in that multitude of night watchers, and among the few who were not primarily concerned with the scientific aspect of the experiment. He wondered if he would ever see them again.
“X minus sixty seconds!”
Marsh knew that a warning flare was being sent up, to be followed by a whistle and a cloud of smoke from one of the blockhouses. As he felt fear trying to master him, he began reviewing all the things he must remember and, above all, what to do in an emergency.
“X minus ten seconds—five—four—three—two—one—FIRE!”
There was a mighty explosion at Skyharbor.
The initial jolt which Marsh felt was much fiercer than the gradually built up speed of the whirling centrifuge in training. He was crushed deeply into his contour chair. It felt as though someone were pressing on his eyeballs; indeed, as if every organ in his body were clinging to his backbone. But these first moments would be the worst. A gauge showed a force of 7 G’s on him—equal to half a ton.
He watched the Mach numbers rise on the dial in front of his eyes on an overhead panel. Each Mach number represented that much times the speed of sound, 1,090 feet per second, 740 miles an hour.
Marsh knew “Big Tom” would blast for about a minute and a half under control of the automatic pilot, at which time it would drop free at an altitude of twenty-five miles and sink Earthward in a metal mesh ’chute.
21
Marsh’s hurting eyes flicked to the outside temperature gauge. It was on a steady 67 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, and would be until he reached twenty miles. A reflecting prism gave him a square of view of the sky outside. The clear deep blue of the cloud-free stratosphere met his eyes.
Mach 5, Mach 6, Mach 7 passed very quickly. He heard a rumble and felt a jerk. “Big Tom” was breaking free. The first hurdle had been successfully overcome, and the ship had already begun tilting into its trajectory.
There was a new surge of agony on his body as the second stage picked up the acceleration at a force of 7 G’s again. Marsh clamped his jaws as the force pulled his lips back from his teeth and dragged his cheek muscles down. The Mach numbers continued to rise—11, 12, 13—to altitude 200 miles, the outer fringe of the earth’s atmosphere. There was a slight lifting of the pressure on his body. The rocket was still in the stratosphere, but the sky was getting purple.
Mach 14—10,000 miles an hour.
“Dick” would jettison any moment. Marsh had been aloft only about four minutes, but it had seemed an age, every tortured second of it.
22
There was another rumble as the second stage broke free. Marsh felt a new surge directly beneath him as his own occupied section, “Harry,” began blasting. It was comforting to realize he had successfully weathered those tons of exploding hydrazine and acid that could have reduced him to nothing if something had gone wrong. Although his speed was still building up, the weight on him began to ease steadily as his body’s inertia finally yielded to the sickeningly swift acceleration.
The speedometer needle climbed to Mach 21, the peak velocity of the rocket, 16,000 miles per hour. His altitude was 350 miles—man’s highest ascent. Slowly then, the speedometer began to drop back. Marsh heard the turbo pumps and jets go silent as the “lift” fuel was spent and rocket “Harry” began its free-flight orbit around Earth.
The ship had reached a speed which exactly counterbalanced the pull of gravity, and it could, theoretically, travel this way forever, provided no other outside force acted upon it. The effect on Marsh now was as if he had stopped moving. Relieved of the viselike pressure, his stomach and chest for a few seconds felt like inflated balloons.
“Cadet Farnsworth,” the voice of General Forsythe spoke into his helmet receiver, “are you all right?”
“Yes, sir,” Marsh replied. “That is, I think so.”
It was good to hear a human voice again, something to hold onto in this crazy unreal world into which he had been hurtled.
“We’re getting the electronic readings from your gauges O.K.,” the voice went on. “The doctor says your pulse is satisfactory under the circumstances.”
It was queer having your pulse read from 350 miles up in the air.
23
Marsh realized, of course, that he was not truly in the “air.” A glance at his air-pressure gauge confirmed this. He was virtually in a vacuum. The temperature and wind velocity outside might have astounded him if he were not prepared for the readings. The heat was over 2000 degrees Fahrenheit, and the wind velocity was of hurricane force! But these figures meant nothing because of the sparseness of air molecules. Temperature and wind applied only to the individual particles, which were thousands of feet apart.
“How is your cosmic-ray count?” asked the general.
Marsh checked the C-ray counter on the panel from which clicking sounds were coming. “It’s low, sir. Nothing to worry about.”
Cosmic rays, the most powerful emanations known, were the only radiation in space that could not be protected against. But in small doses they had been found not to be dangerous.
“As soon as our recorders get more of the figures your telemeter is giving us,” the operations chief said, “you can leave the rocket.”
When Marsh got the O.K. a few minutes later, he eagerly unstrapped the belts around his body. He could hardly contain his excitement at being the first person to view the globe of Earth from space. As he struggled to his feet, the lightness of zero gravity made him momentarily giddy, and it took some minutes for him to adjust to the terribly strange sensation.
24
He had disconnected the cable leading from his helmet to the ship’s transmitter and switched on the ship’s fast-lens movie camera that would photograph the area covered by “Harry.” Then he was ready to go outside. He pressed a button on the wall, and the first air-lock hatch opened. He floated into the narrow alcove and closed the door in the cramped chamber behind him. He watched a gauge, and when it showed normal pressure and temperature again, he opened the outside hatch, closing it behind him. Had Marsh permitted the vacuum of space to contact the interior of the ship’s quarters, delicate instruments would have been ruined by the sudden decompression and loss of heat. Marsh fastened his safety line to the ship so that there was no chance of his becoming separated from it.
Then he looked “downward,” to experience the thrill of his life. Like a gigantic relief map, the panorama of Earth stretched across his vision. A downy blanket of gray atmosphere spread over the whole of it, and patches of clouds were seen floating like phantom shapes beneath the clear vastness of the stratosphere. It was a stunning sight for Marsh, seeing the pinpoint lights of the night cities extending from horizon to horizon. It gave him an exhilarating feeling of being a king over it all.
25
Earth appeared to be rotating, but Marsh knew it was largely his own and the rocket’s fast speed that was responsible for the illusion. As he hung in this region of the exosphere, he was thankful for his cadet training in zero gravity. A special machine, developed only in recent years, simulated the weightlessness of space and trained the cadets for endurance in such artificial conditions.
“Describe some of the things you see, Marshall,” General Forsythe said over Marsh’s helmet receiver.
“I’ve just cut in a recorder.”
“It’s a scene almost beyond description, sir,” Marsh said into the helmet mike. “The sky is thickly powdered with stars. The Milky Way is very distinct, and I can make out lots of fuzzy spots that must be star clusters and nebulae and comets. Mars is like an extremely bright taillight, and the moon is so strong it hurts my eyes as much as the direct sun does on earth.”
Marsh saw a faintly luminous blur pass beyond the ship. It had been almost too sudden to catch. He believed it to be a meteor diving Earthward at a speed around forty-five miles a second. He reported this to the general.
As he brought his eyes down from the more distant fixtures of space to those closer by on Earth, a strange thing happened. He was suddenly seized with a fear of falling, although his zero-gravity training had been intended to prepare him against this very thing. A cold sweat come out over his body, and an uncontrollable panic threatened to take hold of him.
26
He made a sudden movement as though to catch himself. Forgetting the magnification of motion in frictionless space and his own weightlessness, he was shot quickly to the end of his safety line like a cracked whip. His body jerked at the taut end and then sped swiftly back in reaction toward the ship, head foremost. A collision could crack his helmet, exposing his body to decompression, causing him to swell like a balloon and finally explode.
In the grip of numbing fear, only at the last moment did he have the presence of mind to flip his body in a half-cartwheel and bring his boots up in front of him for protection. His feet bumped against the rocket’s side, and the motion sent him hurtling back out to the end of the safety line again. This back-and-forth action occurred several times before he could stop completely.
“I’ve got to be careful,” he panted to himself, as he thought of how close his space career had come to being ended scarcely before it had begun.
General Forsythe cut in with great concern, wondering what had happened. When Marsh had explained and the general seemed satisfied that Marsh had recovered himself, he had Marsh go on with his description.
His senseless fear having gone now, Marsh looked down calmly, entranced as the features of the United States passed below his gaze. He named the cities he could identify, also the mountain ranges, lakes, and rivers, explaining just how they looked from 350 miles up. In only a fraction of an hour’s time, the rocket had traversed the entire country and was approaching the twinkling phosphorescence of the Atlantic.
27
Marsh asked if “Tom” and “Dick” had landed safely.
“‘Tom’ landed near Roswell, New Mexico,” General Forsythe told him, “and the ’chute of the second section has been reported seen north of Dallas. I think you’d better start back now, Marshall. It’ll take us many months to analyze all the information we’ve gotten. We can’t contact you very well on the other side of the world either, and thirdly, I don’t want you exposed to the sun’s rays outside the atmosphere in the Eastern Hemisphere any longer than can be helped.”
Marsh tugged carefully on his safety line and floated slowly back toward the ship. He entered the air lock. Then, inside, he raised the angle of his contour chair to upright position, facing the console of the ship’s manual controls for the glide Earthward. He plugged in his telemeter helmet cable and buckled one of the straps across his waist.
Since he was still moving at many thousands of miles an hour, it would be suicide to plunge straight downward. He and the glider would be turned into a meteoric torch. Rather, he would have to spend considerable time soaring in and out of the atmosphere in braking ellipses until he reached much lower speed. Then the Earth’s gravitational pull would do the rest.
28
This was going to be the trickiest part of the operation, and the most dangerous. Where before, Marsh had depended on automatic controls to guide him, now much of the responsibility was on his own judgment. He remembered the many hours he had sweated through to log his flying time. Now he could look back on that period in his training and thank his lucky stars for it.
He took the manual controls and angled into the atmosphere. He carefully watched the AHF dial—the atmospheric heat friction gauge. When he had neared the dangerous incendiary point, with the ship having literally become red-hot, he soared into the frictionless vacuum again. He had to keep this up a long time in order to reduce his devastating speed.
It was something of a shock to him to leave the black midnight of Earth’s slumbering side for the brilliant hemisphere where the people of Europe and Asia were going about their daytime tasks. He would have liked to study this other half of the world which he had glimpsed only a few times before in his supersonic test flights, but he knew this would have to wait for future flights.
Finally, after a long time, his velocity was slowed enough so that the tug of gravity was stronger than the rocket’s ability to pull up out of the atmosphere. At this point, Marsh cut in “Harry’s” forward braking jets to check his falling speed.
“There’s something else to worry about,” he thought to himself. “Will old Harry hold together or will he fly apart in the crushing atmosphere?”
29
The directional radio signals from the powerful Skyharbor transmitter were growing stronger as Marsh neared the shores of California. He could see the winking lights of San Diego and Los Angeles, and farther inland the swinging thread that was the beacon at Skyharbor. All planes in his path of flight had been grounded for the past few hours because of the space flight. The only ground light scanning the skies was the gigantic space beacon in Phoenix.
When Marsh reached Arizona, he began spiraling downward over the state to kill the rest of his altitude and air speed. Even now the plane was a hurtling supersonic metal sliver streaking through the night skies like a comet. He topped the snow-capped summits of the towering San Francisco Peaks on the drive southward, and he recognized the sprawling serpent of the Grand Canyon. Then he was in the lower desert regions of moon-splashed sand and cactus. Although the fire-hot temperature of the outer skin had subsided, there had been damage done to the walls and instruments, and possibly to other parts, too. Marsh was worried lest his outside controls might be too warped to give him a good touchdown, if indeed he could get down safely at all.
A few thousand feet up, Marsh lowered his landing gear. Now the only problem left was to land himself and the valuable ship safely inside the narrow parallels of the airstrip. He circled the airport several times as his altitude continued to plummet.
30
The meter fell rapidly. His braking rocket fuel was gone now. From here on in, he would be on gliding power alone.
“Easy does it, Marshall,” the general said quietly into his ear. “You’re lining up fine. Level it out a little and keep straight with the approach lights. That’s fine. You’re just about in.”
The lights of the airport seeming to rush up at him, Marsh felt a jolt as the wheels touched ground on the west end of the runway. He kept the ship steady as it scurried along the smooth asphalt, losing the last of its once tremendous velocity. The plane hit the restraining wire across the strip and came to a sudden stop, shoving Marsh hard against the single safety belt he wore. Finally, incredibly, the ship was still and he was safe.
He unfastened his strap and removed his space helmet. The heat of the compartment brought the sweat out on his face. He rose on wobbly legs and pressed the buttons to the hatches. The last door flew open to admit the cool, bracing air of Earth which he had wondered if he would ever inhale again.
His aloneness was over then, suddenly and boisterously, as men swarmed over him with congratulations, eager questions, and looks of respect. Reporters’ flash bulbs popped, and he felt like a new Lindbergh as he was pulled down to the ground and mobbed. Finally the police came to his rescue and pushed back the curiosity seekers and newspapermen. Then only three men were allowed through the cordon.
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What is the plot of the story?
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about The Hanging Stranger by Philip K. Dick.
Relevant chunks:
THE HANGING STRANGER
BY PHILIP K. DICK
ILLUSTRATED BY SMITH
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Science Fiction Adventures Magazine December 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Ed had always been a practical man, when he saw something was wrong he tried to correct it. Then one day he saw
it
hanging in the town square.
Five o'clock Ed Loyce washed up, tossed on his hat and coat, got his car out and headed across town toward his TV sales store. He was tired. His back and shoulders ached from digging dirt out of the basement and wheeling it into the back yard. But for a forty-year-old man he had done okay. Janet could get a new vase with the money he had saved; and he liked the idea of repairing the foundations himself!
It was getting dark. The setting sun cast long rays over the scurrying commuters, tired and grim-faced, women loaded down with bundles and packages, students swarming home from the university, mixing with clerks and businessmen and drab secretaries. He stopped his Packard for a red light and then started it up again. The store had been open without him; he'd arrive just in time to spell the help for dinner, go over the records of the day, maybe even close a couple of sales himself. He drove slowly past the small square of green in the center of the street, the town park. There were no parking places in front of LOYCE TV SALES AND SERVICE. He cursed under his breath and swung the car in a U-turn. Again he passed the little square of green with its lonely drinking fountain and bench and single lamppost.
From the lamppost something was hanging. A shapeless dark bundle, swinging a little with the wind. Like a dummy of some sort. Loyce rolled down his window and peered out. What the hell was it? A display of some kind? Sometimes the Chamber of Commerce put up displays in the square.
Again he made a U-turn and brought his car around. He passed the park and concentrated on the dark bundle. It wasn't a dummy. And if it was a display it was a strange kind. The hackles on his neck rose and he swallowed uneasily. Sweat slid out on his face and hands.
It was a body. A human body.
"Look at it!" Loyce snapped. "Come on out here!"
Don Fergusson came slowly out of the store, buttoning his pin-stripe coat with dignity. "This is a big deal, Ed. I can't just leave the guy standing there."
"See it?" Ed pointed into the gathering gloom. The lamppost jutted up against the sky—the post and the bundle swinging from it. "There it is. How the hell long has it been there?" His voice rose excitedly. "What's wrong with everybody? They just walk on past!"
Don Fergusson lit a cigarette slowly. "Take it easy, old man. There must be a good reason, or it wouldn't be there."
"A reason! What kind of a reason?"
Fergusson shrugged. "Like the time the Traffic Safety Council put that wrecked Buick there. Some sort of civic thing. How would I know?"
Jack Potter from the shoe shop joined them. "What's up, boys?"
"There's a body hanging from the lamppost," Loyce said. "I'm going to call the cops."
"They must know about it," Potter said. "Or otherwise it wouldn't be there."
"I got to get back in." Fergusson headed back into the store. "Business before pleasure."
Loyce began to get hysterical. "You see it? You see it hanging there? A man's body! A dead man!"
"Sure, Ed. I saw it this afternoon when I went out for coffee."
"You mean it's been there all afternoon?"
"Sure. What's the matter?" Potter glanced at his watch. "Have to run. See you later, Ed."
Potter hurried off, joining the flow of people moving along the sidewalk. Men and women, passing by the park. A few glanced up curiously at the dark bundle—and then went on. Nobody stopped. Nobody paid any attention.
"I'm going nuts," Loyce whispered. He made his way to the curb and crossed out into traffic, among the cars. Horns honked angrily at him. He gained the curb and stepped up onto the little square of green.
The man had been middle-aged. His clothing was ripped and torn, a gray suit, splashed and caked with dried mud. A stranger. Loyce had never seen him before. Not a local man. His face was partly turned, away, and in the evening wind he spun a little, turning gently, silently. His skin was gouged and cut. Red gashes, deep scratches of congealed blood. A pair of steel-rimmed glasses hung from one ear, dangling foolishly. His eyes bulged. His mouth was open, tongue thick and ugly blue.
"For Heaven's sake," Loyce muttered, sickened. He pushed down his nausea and made his way back to the sidewalk. He was shaking all over, with revulsion—and fear.
Why? Who was the man? Why was he hanging there? What did it mean?
And—why didn't anybody notice?
He bumped into a small man hurrying along the sidewalk. "Watch it!" the man grated, "Oh, it's you, Ed."
Ed nodded dazedly. "Hello, Jenkins."
"What's the matter?" The stationery clerk caught Ed's arm. "You look sick."
"The body. There in the park."
"Sure, Ed." Jenkins led him into the alcove of LOYCE TV SALES AND SERVICE. "Take it easy."
Margaret Henderson from the jewelry store joined them. "Something wrong?"
"Ed's not feeling well."
Loyce yanked himself free. "How can you stand here? Don't you see it? For God's sake—"
"What's he talking about?" Margaret asked nervously.
"The body!" Ed shouted. "The body hanging there!"
More people collected. "Is he sick? It's Ed Loyce. You okay, Ed?"
"The body!" Loyce screamed, struggling to get past them. Hands caught at him. He tore loose. "Let me go! The police! Get the police!"
"Ed—"
"Better get a doctor!"
"He must be sick."
"Or drunk."
Loyce fought his way through the people. He stumbled and half fell. Through a blur he saw rows of faces, curious, concerned, anxious. Men and women halting to see what the disturbance was. He fought past them toward his store. He could see Fergusson inside talking to a man, showing him an Emerson TV set. Pete Foley in the back at the service counter, setting up a new Philco. Loyce shouted at them frantically. His voice was lost in the roar of traffic and the murmur around him.
"Do something!" he screamed. "Don't stand there! Do something! Something's wrong! Something's happened! Things are going on!"
The crowd melted respectfully for the two heavy-set cops moving efficiently toward Loyce.
"Name?" the cop with the notebook murmured.
"Loyce." He mopped his forehead wearily. "Edward C. Loyce. Listen to me. Back there—"
"Address?" the cop demanded. The police car moved swiftly through traffic, shooting among the cars and buses. Loyce sagged against the seat, exhausted and confused. He took a deep shuddering breath.
"1368 Hurst Road."
"That's here in Pikeville?"
"That's right." Loyce pulled himself up with a violent effort. "Listen to me. Back there. In the square. Hanging from the lamppost—"
"Where were you today?" the cop behind the wheel demanded.
"Where?" Loyce echoed.
"You weren't in your shop, were you?"
"No." He shook his head. "No, I was home. Down in the basement."
"In the basement ?"
"Digging. A new foundation. Getting out the dirt to pour a cement frame. Why? What has that to do with—"
"Was anybody else down there with you?"
"No. My wife was downtown. My kids were at school." Loyce looked from one heavy-set cop to the other. Hope flicked across his face, wild hope.
"You mean because I was down there I missed—the explanation? I didn't get in on it? Like everybody else?"
After a pause the cop with the notebook said: "That's right. You missed the explanation."
"Then it's official? The body—it's supposed to be hanging there?"
"It's supposed to be hanging there. For everybody to see."
Ed Loyce grinned weakly. "Good Lord. I guess I sort of went off the deep end. I thought maybe something had happened. You know, something like the Ku Klux Klan. Some kind of violence. Communists or Fascists taking over." He wiped his face with his breast-pocket handkerchief, his hands shaking. "I'm glad to know it's on the level."
"It's on the level." The police car was getting near the Hall of Justice. The sun had set. The streets were gloomy and dark. The lights had not yet come on.
"I feel better," Loyce said. "I was pretty excited there, for a minute. I guess I got all stirred up. Now that I understand, there's no need to take me in, is there?"
The two cops said nothing.
"I should be back at my store. The boys haven't had dinner. I'm all right, now. No more trouble. Is there any need of—"
"This won't take long," the cop behind the wheel interrupted. "A short process. Only a few minutes."
"I hope it's short," Loyce muttered. The car slowed down for a stoplight. "I guess I sort of disturbed the peace. Funny, getting excited like that and—"
Loyce yanked the door open. He sprawled out into the street and rolled to his feet. Cars were moving all around him, gaining speed as the light changed. Loyce leaped onto the curb and raced among the people, burrowing into the swarming crowds. Behind him he heard sounds, shouts, people running.
They weren't cops. He had realized that right away. He knew every cop in Pikeville. A man couldn't own a store, operate a business in a small town for twenty-five years without getting to know all the cops.
They weren't cops—and there hadn't been any explanation. Potter, Fergusson, Jenkins, none of them knew why it was there. They didn't know—and they didn't care. That was the strange part.
Loyce ducked into a hardware store. He raced toward the back, past the startled clerks and customers, into the shipping room and through the back door. He tripped over a garbage can and ran up a flight of concrete steps. He climbed over a fence and jumped down on the other side, gasping and panting.
There was no sound behind him. He had got away.
He was at the entrance of an alley, dark and strewn with boards and ruined boxes and tires. He could see the street at the far end. A street light wavered and came on. Men and women. Stores. Neon signs. Cars.
And to his right—the police station.
He was close, terribly close. Past the loading platform of a grocery store rose the white concrete side of the Hall of Justice. Barred windows. The police antenna. A great concrete wall rising up in the darkness. A bad place for him to be near. He was too close. He had to keep moving, get farther away from them.
Them?
Loyce moved cautiously down the alley. Beyond the police station was the City Hall, the old-fashioned yellow structure of wood and gilded brass and broad cement steps. He could see the endless rows of offices, dark windows, the cedars and beds of flowers on each side of the entrance.
And—something else.
Above the City Hall was a patch of darkness, a cone of gloom denser than the surrounding night. A prism of black that spread out and was lost into the sky.
He listened. Good God, he could hear something. Something that made him struggle frantically to close his ears, his mind, to shut out the sound. A buzzing. A distant, muted hum like a great swarm of bees.
Loyce gazed up, rigid with horror. The splotch of darkness, hanging over the City Hall. Darkness so thick it seemed almost solid. In the vortex something moved. Flickering shapes. Things, descending from the sky, pausing momentarily above the City Hall, fluttering over it in a dense swarm and then dropping silently onto the roof.
Shapes. Fluttering shapes from the sky. From the crack of darkness that hung above him.
He was seeing—them.
For a long time Loyce watched, crouched behind a sagging fence in a pool of scummy water.
They were landing. Coming down in groups, landing on the roof of the City Hall and disappearing inside. They had wings. Like giant insects of some kind. They flew and fluttered and came to rest—and then crawled crab-fashion, sideways, across the roof and into the building.
He was sickened. And fascinated. Cold night wind blew around him and he shuddered. He was tired, dazed with shock. On the front steps of the City Hall were men, standing here and there. Groups of men coming out of the building and halting for a moment before going on.
Were there more of them?
It didn't seem possible. What he saw descending from the black chasm weren't men. They were alien—from some other world, some other dimension. Sliding through this slit, this break in the shell of the universe. Entering through this gap, winged insects from another realm of being.
On the steps of the City Hall a group of men broke up. A few moved toward a waiting car. One of the remaining shapes started to re-enter the City Hall. It changed its mind and turned to follow the others.
Loyce closed his eyes in horror. His senses reeled. He hung on tight, clutching at the sagging fence. The shape, the man-shape, had abruptly fluttered up and flapped after the others. It flew to the sidewalk and came to rest among them.
Pseudo-men. Imitation men. Insects with ability to disguise themselves as men. Like other insects familiar to Earth. Protective coloration. Mimicry.
Loyce pulled himself away. He got slowly to his feet. It was night. The alley was totally dark. But maybe they could see in the dark. Maybe darkness made no difference to them.
He left the alley cautiously and moved out onto the street. Men and women flowed past, but not so many, now. At the bus-stops stood waiting groups. A huge bus lumbered along the street, its lights flashing in the evening gloom.
Loyce moved forward. He pushed his way among those waiting and when the bus halted he boarded it and took a seat in the rear, by the door. A moment later the bus moved into life and rumbled down the street.
Loyce relaxed a little. He studied the people around him. Dulled, tired faces. People going home from work. Quite ordinary faces. None of them paid any attention to him. All sat quietly, sunk down in their seats, jiggling with the motion of the bus.
The man sitting next to him unfolded a newspaper. He began to read the sports section, his lips moving. An ordinary man. Blue suit. Tie. A businessman, or a salesman. On his way home to his wife and family.
Across the aisle a young woman, perhaps twenty. Dark eyes and hair, a package on her lap. Nylons and heels. Red coat and white angora sweater. Gazing absently ahead of her.
A high school boy in jeans and black jacket.
A great triple-chinned woman with an immense shopping bag loaded with packages and parcels. Her thick face dim with weariness.
Ordinary people. The kind that rode the bus every evening. Going home to their families. To dinner.
Going home—with their minds dead. Controlled, filmed over with the mask of an alien being that had appeared and taken possession of them, their town, their lives. Himself, too. Except that he happened to be deep in his cellar instead of in the store. Somehow, he had been overlooked. They had missed him. Their control wasn't perfect, foolproof.
Maybe there were others.
Hope flickered in Loyce. They weren't omnipotent. They had made a mistake, not got control of him. Their net, their field of control, had passed over him. He had emerged from his cellar as he had gone down. Apparently their power-zone was limited.
A few seats down the aisle a man was watching him. Loyce broke off his chain of thought. A slender man, with dark hair and a small mustache. Well-dressed, brown suit and shiny shoes. A book between his small hands. He was watching Loyce, studying him intently. He turned quickly away.
Loyce tensed. One of them ? Or—another they had missed?
The man was watching him again. Small dark eyes, alive and clever. Shrewd. A man too shrewd for them—or one of the things itself, an alien insect from beyond.
The bus halted. An elderly man got on slowly and dropped his token into the box. He moved down the aisle and took a seat opposite Loyce.
The elderly man caught the sharp-eyed man's gaze. For a split second something passed between them.
A look rich with meaning.
Loyce got to his feet. The bus was moving. He ran to the door. One step down into the well. He yanked the emergency door release. The rubber door swung open.
"Hey!" the driver shouted, jamming on the brakes. "What the hell—"
Loyce squirmed through. The bus was slowing down. Houses on all sides. A residential district, lawns and tall apartment buildings. Behind him, the bright-eyed man had leaped up. The elderly man was also on his feet. They were coming after him.
Loyce leaped. He hit the pavement with terrific force and rolled against the curb. Pain lapped over him. Pain and a vast tide of blackness. Desperately, he fought it off. He struggled to his knees and then slid down again. The bus had stopped. People were getting off.
Loyce groped around. His fingers closed over something. A rock, lying in the gutter. He crawled to his feet, grunting with pain. A shape loomed before him. A man, the bright-eyed man with the book.
Loyce kicked. The man gasped and fell. Loyce brought the rock down. The man screamed and tried to roll away. " Stop! For God's sake listen—"
He struck again. A hideous crunching sound. The man's voice cut off and dissolved in a bubbling wail. Loyce scrambled up and back. The others were there, now. All around him. He ran, awkwardly, down the sidewalk, up a driveway. None of them followed him. They had stopped and were bending over the inert body of the man with the book, the bright-eyed man who had come after him.
Had he made a mistake?
But it was too late to worry about that. He had to get out—away from them. Out of Pikeville, beyond the crack of darkness, the rent between their world and his.
"Ed!" Janet Loyce backed away nervously. "What is it? What—"
Ed Loyce slammed the door behind him and came into the living room.
"Pull down the shades. Quick."
Janet moved toward the window. "But—"
"Do as I say. Who else is here besides you?"
"Nobody. Just the twins. They're upstairs in their room. What's happened? You look so strange. Why are you home?"
Ed locked the front door. He prowled around the house, into the kitchen. From the drawer under the sink he slid out the big butcher knife and ran his finger along it. Sharp. Plenty sharp. He returned to the living room.
"Listen to me," he said. "I don't have much time. They know I escaped and they'll be looking for me."
"Escaped?" Janet's face twisted with bewilderment and fear. "Who?"
"The town has been taken over. They're in control. I've got it pretty well figured out. They started at the top, at the City Hall and police department. What they did with the real humans they—"
"What are you talking about?"
"We've been invaded. From some other universe, some other dimension. They're insects. Mimicry. And more. Power to control minds. Your mind."
"My mind?"
"Their entrance is here , in Pikeville. They've taken over all of you. The whole town—except me. We're up against an incredibly powerful enemy, but they have their limitations. That's our hope. They're limited! They can make mistakes!"
Janet shook her head. "I don't understand, Ed. You must be insane."
"Insane? No. Just lucky. If I hadn't been down in the basement I'd be like all the rest of you." Loyce peered out the window. "But I can't stand here talking. Get your coat."
"My coat?"
"We're getting out of here. Out of Pikeville. We've got to get help. Fight this thing. They can be beaten. They're not infallible. It's going to be close—but we may make it if we hurry. Come on!" He grabbed her arm roughly. "Get your coat and call the twins. We're all leaving. Don't stop to pack. There's no time for that."
White-faced, his wife moved toward the closet and got down her coat.
"Where are we going?"
Ed pulled open the desk drawer and spilled the contents out onto the floor. He grabbed up a road map and spread it open. "They'll have the highway covered, of course. But there's a back road. To Oak Grove. I got onto it once. It's practically abandoned. Maybe they'll forget about it."
"The old Ranch Road? Good Lord—it's completely closed. Nobody's supposed to drive over it."
"I know." Ed thrust the map grimly into his coat. "That's our best chance. Now call down the twins and let's get going. Your car is full of gas, isn't it?"
Janet was dazed.
"The Chevy? I had it filled up yesterday afternoon." Janet moved toward the stairs. "Ed, I—"
"Call the twins!" Ed unlocked the front door and peered out. Nothing stirred. No sign of life. All right so far.
"Come on downstairs," Janet called in a wavering voice. "We're—going out for awhile."
"Now?" Tommy's voice came.
"Hurry up," Ed barked. "Get down here, both of you."
Tommy appeared at the top of the stairs. "I was doing my home work. We're starting fractions. Miss Parker says if we don't get this done—"
"You can forget about fractions." Ed grabbed his son as he came down the stairs and propelled him toward the door. "Where's Jim?"
"He's coming."
Jim started slowly down the stairs. "What's up, Dad?"
"We're going for a ride."
"A ride? Where?"
Ed turned to Janet. "We'll leave the lights on. And the TV set. Go turn it on." He pushed her toward the set. "So they'll think we're still—"
He heard the buzz. And dropped instantly, the long butcher knife out. Sickened, he saw it coming down the stairs at him, wings a blur of motion as it aimed itself. It still bore a vague resemblance to Jimmy. It was small, a baby one. A brief glimpse—the thing hurtling at him, cold, multi-lensed inhuman eyes. Wings, body still clothed in yellow T-shirt and jeans, the mimic outline still stamped on it. A strange half-turn of its body as it reached him. What was it doing?
A stinger.
Loyce stabbed wildly at it. It retreated, buzzing frantically. Loyce rolled and crawled toward the door. Tommy and Janet stood still as statues, faces blank. Watching without expression. Loyce stabbed again. This time the knife connected. The thing shrieked and faltered. It bounced against the wall and fluttered down.
Something lapped through his mind. A wall of force, energy, an alien mind probing into him. He was suddenly paralyzed. The mind entered his own, touched against him briefly, shockingly. An utterly alien presence, settling over him—and then it flickered out as the thing collapsed in a broken heap on the rug.
It was dead. He turned it over with his foot. It was an insect, a fly of some kind. Yellow T-shirt, jeans. His son Jimmy.... He closed his mind tight. It was too late to think about that. Savagely he scooped up his knife and headed toward the door. Janet and Tommy stood stone-still, neither of them moving.
The car was out. He'd never get through. They'd be waiting for him. It was ten miles on foot. Ten long miles over rough ground, gulleys and open fields and hills of uncut forest. He'd have to go alone.
Loyce opened the door. For a brief second he looked back at his wife and son. Then he slammed the door behind him and raced down the porch steps.
A moment later he was on his way, hurrying swiftly through the darkness toward the edge of town.
The early morning sunlight was blinding. Loyce halted, gasping for breath, swaying back and forth. Sweat ran down in his eyes. His clothing was torn, shredded by the brush and thorns through which he had crawled. Ten miles—on his hands and knees. Crawling, creeping through the night. His shoes were mud-caked. He was scratched and limping, utterly exhausted.
But ahead of him lay Oak Grove.
He took a deep breath and started down the hill. Twice he stumbled and fell, picking himself up and trudging on. His ears rang. Everything receded and wavered. But he was there. He had got out, away from Pikeville.
A farmer in a field gaped at him. From a house a young woman watched in wonder. Loyce reached the road and turned onto it. Ahead of him was a gasoline station and a drive-in. A couple of trucks, some chickens pecking in the dirt, a dog tied with a string.
The white-clad attendant watched suspiciously as he dragged himself up to the station. "Thank God." He caught hold of the wall. "I didn't think I was going to make it. They followed me most of the way. I could hear them buzzing. Buzzing and flitting around behind me."
"What happened?" the attendant demanded. "You in a wreck? A hold-up?"
Loyce shook his head wearily. "They have the whole town. The City Hall and the police station. They hung a man from the lamppost. That was the first thing I saw. They've got all the roads blocked. I saw them hovering over the cars coming in. About four this morning I got beyond them. I knew it right away. I could feel them leave. And then the sun came up."
The attendant licked his lip nervously. "You're out of your head. I better get a doctor."
"Get me into Oak Grove," Loyce gasped. He sank down on the gravel.
"We've got to get started—cleaning them out. Got to get started right away."
They kept a tape recorder going all the time he talked. When he had finished the Commissioner snapped off the recorder and got to his feet. He stood for a moment, deep in thought. Finally he got out his cigarettes and lit up slowly, a frown on his beefy face.
"You don't believe me," Loyce said.
The Commissioner offered him a cigarette. Loyce pushed it impatiently away. "Suit yourself." The Commissioner moved over to the window and stood for a time looking out at the town of Oak Grove. "I believe you," he said abruptly.
Loyce sagged. "Thank God."
"So you got away." The Commissioner shook his head. "You were down in your cellar instead of at work. A freak chance. One in a million."
Loyce sipped some of the black coffee they had brought him. "I have a theory," he murmured.
"What is it?"
"About them. Who they are. They take over one area at a time. Starting at the top—the highest level of authority. Working down from there in a widening circle. When they're firmly in control they go on to the next town. They spread, slowly, very gradually. I think it's been going on for a long time."
"A long time?"
"Thousands of years. I don't think it's new."
"Why do you say that?"
"When I was a kid.... A picture they showed us in Bible League. A religious picture—an old print. The enemy gods, defeated by Jehovah. Moloch, Beelzebub, Moab, Baalin, Ashtaroth—"
"So?"
"They were all represented by figures." Loyce looked up at the Commissioner. "Beelzebub was represented as—a giant fly."
The Commissioner grunted. "An old struggle."
"They've been defeated. The Bible is an account of their defeats. They make gains—but finally they're defeated."
"Why defeated?"
"They can't get everyone. They didn't get me. And they never got the Hebrews. The Hebrews carried the message to the whole world. The realization of the danger. The two men on the bus. I think they understood. Had escaped, like I did." He clenched his fists. "I killed one of them. I made a mistake. I was afraid to take a chance."
The Commissioner nodded. "Yes, they undoubtedly had escaped, as you did. Freak accidents. But the rest of the town was firmly in control." He turned from the window. "Well, Mr. Loyce. You seem to have figured everything out."
"Not everything. The hanging man. The dead man hanging from the lamppost. I don't understand that. Why? Why did they deliberately hang him there?"
"That would seem simple." The Commissioner smiled faintly. " Bait. "
Loyce stiffened. His heart stopped beating. "Bait? What do you mean?"
"To draw you out. Make you declare yourself. So they'd know who was under control—and who had escaped."
Loyce recoiled with horror. "Then they expected failures! They anticipated—" He broke off. "They were ready with a trap."
"And you showed yourself. You reacted. You made yourself known." The Commissioner abruptly moved toward the door. "Come along, Loyce. There's a lot to do. We must get moving. There's no time to waste."
Loyce started slowly to his feet, numbed. "And the man. Who was the man? I never saw him before. He wasn't a local man. He was a stranger. All muddy and dirty, his face cut, slashed—"
There was a strange look on the Commissioner's face as he answered.
"Maybe," he said softly, "you'll understand that, too. Come along with me, Mr. Loyce." He held the door open, his eyes gleaming. Loyce caught a glimpse of the street in front of the police station. Policemen, a platform of some sort. A telephone pole—and a rope! "Right this way," the Commissioner said, smiling coldly.
As the sun set, the vice-president of the Oak Grove Merchants' Bank came up out of the vault, threw the heavy time locks, put on his hat and coat, and hurried outside onto the sidewalk. Only a few people were there, hurrying home to dinner.
"Good night," the guard said, locking the door after him.
"Good night," Clarence Mason murmured. He started along the street toward his car. He was tired. He had been working all day down in the vault, examining the lay-out of the safety deposit boxes to see if there was room for another tier. He was glad to be finished.
At the corner he halted. The street lights had not yet come on. The street was dim. Everything was vague. He looked around—and froze.
From the telephone pole in front of the police station, something large and shapeless hung. It moved a little with the wind.
What the hell was it?
Mason approached it warily. He wanted to get home. He was tired and hungry. He thought of his wife, his kids, a hot meal on the dinner table. But there was something about the dark bundle, something ominous and ugly. The light was bad; he couldn't tell what it was. Yet it drew him on, made him move closer for a better look. The shapeless thing made him uneasy. He was frightened by it. Frightened—and fascinated.
And the strange part was that nobody else seemed to notice it.
Question:
What is the plot of the story?
Answer:
|
[
"Edward Loyce spends the whole day repairing the foundation. When he drives past the town park, he sees a thing hanging under the lamppost. He realizes that it’s a hanging human. Ed is frightened because of the hanged body and because everyone seems to not care about it. People walk past and ignore it. Ed tells the owners of other shops, trying to figure out the situation. However, both the owners think it is normal. After realizing he is the only one who feels strange, Ed gets closer to the hanged body, noticing that it’s a stranger. He bumps into Jenkins, a stationary clerk. Through the conversation with Jenkins and the jewelry store owner, he realizes that he is the only normal person in the town. He shouts to get the police, makes his way through the crowd, and finally gets into the police’s car.\n\nWhen he tries to understand the situation from the police, he realizes that the police are fake because he knows every cop in the town. He escapes from the fake police. When he gets closer to the police station, he sees a swarm of alien flies landing on the roof of City Hall and flying inside of the building, disguising themselves as men coming out of the City Hall. Ed realizes that they are aliens from other dimensions trying to control the humans and already control the minds of town people, except for him, as he escapes from it when repairing the foundation. He cautiously leaves and takes the bus. People on the bus are mind-controlled. A man with a book is looking at him, and Ed guesses the identity of the seemingly mind-clear man. When another older man ascends the bus and looks at the man with the book, Ed realizes the strangeness and escapes from the bus. Two men come after Ed, and Ed kills the man with the book and runs away. A doubt about killing the wrong person flashes through his mind, but he has no time to think.\n\nHe tells his wife to get ready to leave when he gets home. He picks up a butcher knife and explains everything to his wife. When the twins come down, he sees a baby alien fly come toward him. Ed kills the alien, abandons his dazed wife and child, and flees. He runs ten miles towards Oak Grove. He explains everything to the Commissioner. The Commissioner records and agrees with his saying. Ed talks about his theory of the alien, but he cannot figure out the purpose of the hanged body. Finally, the Commissioner tells him that it is bait to lure people like him who escape successfully. Ed is frightened and realizes that he will be hanged in Oak Grove, just like the hanged body in Pikeville. That evening, Clarence Mason, the vice president of the Oak Grove Merchant’s Bank, sees a hanging object under the telephone pole in front of the police station.\n",
"The story follows a regular man named Ed. The story follows Ed as he goes from his house to a shop that he owns. On his way there, he sees a dead body hanging from a tree in the town square. When he tells his coworkers, no one seems to understand the true implications of the hanging body, and Ed is the only one that takes it seriously. Ed starts to ask his coworkers why they are taking the hanging body so well, and Ed ends up being arrested by the town’s police. In the police car, Ed tries to explain his reaction to the policemen. He realizes that they aren’t real policemen, as Ed already knew every policeman in the town. Ed manages to escape and tries to head back home. While running, he sees a swarm of large alien-like bugs. He learns that they can control humans and imitate their actions. After seeing this, he gets on a bus and realizes that almost everyone in the bus is being controlled by the bugs. He also sees 2 people that seem different. He escapes the bus and is followed by the 2 same men. He gets into a fight with them and ends up killing one of them with a rock, thinking that they were controlled by bugs. He runs to his house to get his family and escape the town, but when he gets there he realizes that they were already being controlled by the bugs. He kills one of his sons and escapes alone. He gets to another town where he tries to explain everything to a police officer, but the police officer seemed very calm after everything that Ed had said, and the same cycle continues when another man finds a hanging body again.",
"Ed Loyce goes to his TV store at five o’clock, and he is tired from digging dirt out of the basement. He stops his Packard at a red light while observing other people; the store has been open without him all day. There is no place to park in front of LOYCE TV SALES AND SERVICE, but he does a shapeless dark bundle swinging a little from the wind. As he brings his car around, he realizes that it is a human body. Loyce tells his co-workers Don Fergusson and Jack Potter about the body, but they seem untroubled about it. Nobody pays attention to the body, and Loyce feels sick. He bumps into Jenkins and Margaret Henderson, both who assume that he is sick because of his reactions. Two cops show up, and they tell him that he missed the announcement earlier today. As he gets into the police car, he realizes that they weren’t cops in Pikeville. Loyce manages to get away, stopping at the entrance of an alley. He heads towards the City Hall and sees fluttering shapes from the sky. The shapes are similar to giant insects with wings, and he wonders if there are more. Loyce realizes that they are aliens with the ability to change into man, and he boards a bus to get out of the area. Everyone seems fairly normal, but he notices a man watching him with shrewd eyes. He rushes out of the bus, and the man follows him. Loyce strikes the man with a rock and runs away as other people begin to gather. Janet asks what is happening when he returns him, and he tells her that the entire town is under control of the aliens now. The twins are called down, as Loyce tells him that they are going on a ride. Suddenly, there is a buzz and one of the aliens that bears a resemblance to Jimmy hurls itself at him. Loyce stabs it, realizing that his wife and other son are also controlled because of how expressionless they are. Eventually, he reaches Oak Grove and talks to the Commissioner. The Commissioner explains that he thinks this has been going on for a long time, and Loyce thinks about the man he accidentally killed. It turns out that the dead man was bait to draw out who had escaped, and the Commissioner tells him to come along as there is no time to waste. The last thing Loyce sees is a telephone pole and a rope on the street in front of the police station. The story then cuts to Clarence Mason preparing to go home after a long day working in the vaults. However, he notices a shapeless thing that looks like an ominous bundle hanging. He finds it strange that nobody else has noticed it. ",
"Ed Loyce is the owner of a TV sales store. After a day of digging in his basement, he decided to drive to his store in the evening. While searching for a parking spot, he notices some bundle hanging from a lamppost in a town park, not far from his store. Moments later, he realizes it’s a human body. Loyce is shocked and starts asking his salesman Don Fergusson about the body but gets an indefinite answer. Jack Potter, a shoe shop’s employee, also calmly states that there has to be some valid reason behind it. Don goes back to work, surprisingly unbothered. Ed walks to the park to look at the dead man: not a local, his skin is cut gouged. Ed then meets a clerk named Jenkins, who asks why Ed looks sick. Loyce becomes hysterical, and people start gathering around him, wondering why someone is screaming. Two cops detain him and decide to drive Ed to the Hall of Justice. They start asking questions: his name, where he was during the day. Ed knows they are not real policemen - he knows all the cops of Pikeville - and eventually jumps out of the car when it slows down. He runs away and then sees a splotch of darkness above the City Hall and some alien figures coming through this slit. They can disguise themselves as men. He gets on the bus and inspects the other passengers - they seem to be under the influence of the alien creatures. Two men look at Ed with suspicion, and he quickly gets off the bus. He kills one of them with a rock while running away. Ed comes home and orders his wife and kids to get ready to leave the town immediately. His younger son seems to be under the control of a small alien. Ed stabs the creature, killing it. His wife and the other son are not reacting - they are subservient to the aliens, too. Ed runs away alone. He gets to a patrol station after crawling and limping for ten miles. The station’s attendant hears Ed’s story and looks confused. Loyce asks the man to get him to Oak Grove. Later, he tells his story to the Commissioner of Oak Grove, the officer believes him. Ed suggests that these creatures have been inhabiting the planet’s towns for a long time. He thinks the Jewish people defeated them and showed it in the Bible, illustrating Beelzebub as a giant fly, an alien insect. The Commissioner then explains that the dead body probably served as bait for people who were not yet under the aliens’ control. He asks Loyce to come with him somewhere. In the next scene, the vice president of the Oak Grove Merchants’ Bank leaves work after spending the day in the vault, examining deposit boxes. He suddenly sees a dark bundle hanging in front of the police station. \n"
] |
41562
|
THE HANGING STRANGER
BY PHILIP K. DICK
ILLUSTRATED BY SMITH
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Science Fiction Adventures Magazine December 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Ed had always been a practical man, when he saw something was wrong he tried to correct it. Then one day he saw
it
hanging in the town square.
Five o'clock Ed Loyce washed up, tossed on his hat and coat, got his car out and headed across town toward his TV sales store. He was tired. His back and shoulders ached from digging dirt out of the basement and wheeling it into the back yard. But for a forty-year-old man he had done okay. Janet could get a new vase with the money he had saved; and he liked the idea of repairing the foundations himself!
It was getting dark. The setting sun cast long rays over the scurrying commuters, tired and grim-faced, women loaded down with bundles and packages, students swarming home from the university, mixing with clerks and businessmen and drab secretaries. He stopped his Packard for a red light and then started it up again. The store had been open without him; he'd arrive just in time to spell the help for dinner, go over the records of the day, maybe even close a couple of sales himself. He drove slowly past the small square of green in the center of the street, the town park. There were no parking places in front of LOYCE TV SALES AND SERVICE. He cursed under his breath and swung the car in a U-turn. Again he passed the little square of green with its lonely drinking fountain and bench and single lamppost.
From the lamppost something was hanging. A shapeless dark bundle, swinging a little with the wind. Like a dummy of some sort. Loyce rolled down his window and peered out. What the hell was it? A display of some kind? Sometimes the Chamber of Commerce put up displays in the square.
Again he made a U-turn and brought his car around. He passed the park and concentrated on the dark bundle. It wasn't a dummy. And if it was a display it was a strange kind. The hackles on his neck rose and he swallowed uneasily. Sweat slid out on his face and hands.
It was a body. A human body.
"Look at it!" Loyce snapped. "Come on out here!"
Don Fergusson came slowly out of the store, buttoning his pin-stripe coat with dignity. "This is a big deal, Ed. I can't just leave the guy standing there."
"See it?" Ed pointed into the gathering gloom. The lamppost jutted up against the sky—the post and the bundle swinging from it. "There it is. How the hell long has it been there?" His voice rose excitedly. "What's wrong with everybody? They just walk on past!"
Don Fergusson lit a cigarette slowly. "Take it easy, old man. There must be a good reason, or it wouldn't be there."
"A reason! What kind of a reason?"
Fergusson shrugged. "Like the time the Traffic Safety Council put that wrecked Buick there. Some sort of civic thing. How would I know?"
Jack Potter from the shoe shop joined them. "What's up, boys?"
"There's a body hanging from the lamppost," Loyce said. "I'm going to call the cops."
"They must know about it," Potter said. "Or otherwise it wouldn't be there."
"I got to get back in." Fergusson headed back into the store. "Business before pleasure."
Loyce began to get hysterical. "You see it? You see it hanging there? A man's body! A dead man!"
"Sure, Ed. I saw it this afternoon when I went out for coffee."
"You mean it's been there all afternoon?"
"Sure. What's the matter?" Potter glanced at his watch. "Have to run. See you later, Ed."
Potter hurried off, joining the flow of people moving along the sidewalk. Men and women, passing by the park. A few glanced up curiously at the dark bundle—and then went on. Nobody stopped. Nobody paid any attention.
"I'm going nuts," Loyce whispered. He made his way to the curb and crossed out into traffic, among the cars. Horns honked angrily at him. He gained the curb and stepped up onto the little square of green.
The man had been middle-aged. His clothing was ripped and torn, a gray suit, splashed and caked with dried mud. A stranger. Loyce had never seen him before. Not a local man. His face was partly turned, away, and in the evening wind he spun a little, turning gently, silently. His skin was gouged and cut. Red gashes, deep scratches of congealed blood. A pair of steel-rimmed glasses hung from one ear, dangling foolishly. His eyes bulged. His mouth was open, tongue thick and ugly blue.
"For Heaven's sake," Loyce muttered, sickened. He pushed down his nausea and made his way back to the sidewalk. He was shaking all over, with revulsion—and fear.
Why? Who was the man? Why was he hanging there? What did it mean?
And—why didn't anybody notice?
He bumped into a small man hurrying along the sidewalk. "Watch it!" the man grated, "Oh, it's you, Ed."
Ed nodded dazedly. "Hello, Jenkins."
"What's the matter?" The stationery clerk caught Ed's arm. "You look sick."
"The body. There in the park."
"Sure, Ed." Jenkins led him into the alcove of LOYCE TV SALES AND SERVICE. "Take it easy."
Margaret Henderson from the jewelry store joined them. "Something wrong?"
"Ed's not feeling well."
Loyce yanked himself free. "How can you stand here? Don't you see it? For God's sake—"
"What's he talking about?" Margaret asked nervously.
"The body!" Ed shouted. "The body hanging there!"
More people collected. "Is he sick? It's Ed Loyce. You okay, Ed?"
"The body!" Loyce screamed, struggling to get past them. Hands caught at him. He tore loose. "Let me go! The police! Get the police!"
"Ed—"
"Better get a doctor!"
"He must be sick."
"Or drunk."
Loyce fought his way through the people. He stumbled and half fell. Through a blur he saw rows of faces, curious, concerned, anxious. Men and women halting to see what the disturbance was. He fought past them toward his store. He could see Fergusson inside talking to a man, showing him an Emerson TV set. Pete Foley in the back at the service counter, setting up a new Philco. Loyce shouted at them frantically. His voice was lost in the roar of traffic and the murmur around him.
"Do something!" he screamed. "Don't stand there! Do something! Something's wrong! Something's happened! Things are going on!"
The crowd melted respectfully for the two heavy-set cops moving efficiently toward Loyce.
"Name?" the cop with the notebook murmured.
"Loyce." He mopped his forehead wearily. "Edward C. Loyce. Listen to me. Back there—"
"Address?" the cop demanded. The police car moved swiftly through traffic, shooting among the cars and buses. Loyce sagged against the seat, exhausted and confused. He took a deep shuddering breath.
"1368 Hurst Road."
"That's here in Pikeville?"
"That's right." Loyce pulled himself up with a violent effort. "Listen to me. Back there. In the square. Hanging from the lamppost—"
"Where were you today?" the cop behind the wheel demanded.
"Where?" Loyce echoed.
"You weren't in your shop, were you?"
"No." He shook his head. "No, I was home. Down in the basement."
"In the basement ?"
"Digging. A new foundation. Getting out the dirt to pour a cement frame. Why? What has that to do with—"
"Was anybody else down there with you?"
"No. My wife was downtown. My kids were at school." Loyce looked from one heavy-set cop to the other. Hope flicked across his face, wild hope.
"You mean because I was down there I missed—the explanation? I didn't get in on it? Like everybody else?"
After a pause the cop with the notebook said: "That's right. You missed the explanation."
"Then it's official? The body—it's supposed to be hanging there?"
"It's supposed to be hanging there. For everybody to see."
Ed Loyce grinned weakly. "Good Lord. I guess I sort of went off the deep end. I thought maybe something had happened. You know, something like the Ku Klux Klan. Some kind of violence. Communists or Fascists taking over." He wiped his face with his breast-pocket handkerchief, his hands shaking. "I'm glad to know it's on the level."
"It's on the level." The police car was getting near the Hall of Justice. The sun had set. The streets were gloomy and dark. The lights had not yet come on.
"I feel better," Loyce said. "I was pretty excited there, for a minute. I guess I got all stirred up. Now that I understand, there's no need to take me in, is there?"
The two cops said nothing.
"I should be back at my store. The boys haven't had dinner. I'm all right, now. No more trouble. Is there any need of—"
"This won't take long," the cop behind the wheel interrupted. "A short process. Only a few minutes."
"I hope it's short," Loyce muttered. The car slowed down for a stoplight. "I guess I sort of disturbed the peace. Funny, getting excited like that and—"
Loyce yanked the door open. He sprawled out into the street and rolled to his feet. Cars were moving all around him, gaining speed as the light changed. Loyce leaped onto the curb and raced among the people, burrowing into the swarming crowds. Behind him he heard sounds, shouts, people running.
They weren't cops. He had realized that right away. He knew every cop in Pikeville. A man couldn't own a store, operate a business in a small town for twenty-five years without getting to know all the cops.
They weren't cops—and there hadn't been any explanation. Potter, Fergusson, Jenkins, none of them knew why it was there. They didn't know—and they didn't care. That was the strange part.
Loyce ducked into a hardware store. He raced toward the back, past the startled clerks and customers, into the shipping room and through the back door. He tripped over a garbage can and ran up a flight of concrete steps. He climbed over a fence and jumped down on the other side, gasping and panting.
There was no sound behind him. He had got away.
He was at the entrance of an alley, dark and strewn with boards and ruined boxes and tires. He could see the street at the far end. A street light wavered and came on. Men and women. Stores. Neon signs. Cars.
And to his right—the police station.
He was close, terribly close. Past the loading platform of a grocery store rose the white concrete side of the Hall of Justice. Barred windows. The police antenna. A great concrete wall rising up in the darkness. A bad place for him to be near. He was too close. He had to keep moving, get farther away from them.
Them?
Loyce moved cautiously down the alley. Beyond the police station was the City Hall, the old-fashioned yellow structure of wood and gilded brass and broad cement steps. He could see the endless rows of offices, dark windows, the cedars and beds of flowers on each side of the entrance.
And—something else.
Above the City Hall was a patch of darkness, a cone of gloom denser than the surrounding night. A prism of black that spread out and was lost into the sky.
He listened. Good God, he could hear something. Something that made him struggle frantically to close his ears, his mind, to shut out the sound. A buzzing. A distant, muted hum like a great swarm of bees.
Loyce gazed up, rigid with horror. The splotch of darkness, hanging over the City Hall. Darkness so thick it seemed almost solid. In the vortex something moved. Flickering shapes. Things, descending from the sky, pausing momentarily above the City Hall, fluttering over it in a dense swarm and then dropping silently onto the roof.
Shapes. Fluttering shapes from the sky. From the crack of darkness that hung above him.
He was seeing—them.
For a long time Loyce watched, crouched behind a sagging fence in a pool of scummy water.
They were landing. Coming down in groups, landing on the roof of the City Hall and disappearing inside. They had wings. Like giant insects of some kind. They flew and fluttered and came to rest—and then crawled crab-fashion, sideways, across the roof and into the building.
He was sickened. And fascinated. Cold night wind blew around him and he shuddered. He was tired, dazed with shock. On the front steps of the City Hall were men, standing here and there. Groups of men coming out of the building and halting for a moment before going on.
Were there more of them?
It didn't seem possible. What he saw descending from the black chasm weren't men. They were alien—from some other world, some other dimension. Sliding through this slit, this break in the shell of the universe. Entering through this gap, winged insects from another realm of being.
On the steps of the City Hall a group of men broke up. A few moved toward a waiting car. One of the remaining shapes started to re-enter the City Hall. It changed its mind and turned to follow the others.
Loyce closed his eyes in horror. His senses reeled. He hung on tight, clutching at the sagging fence. The shape, the man-shape, had abruptly fluttered up and flapped after the others. It flew to the sidewalk and came to rest among them.
Pseudo-men. Imitation men. Insects with ability to disguise themselves as men. Like other insects familiar to Earth. Protective coloration. Mimicry.
Loyce pulled himself away. He got slowly to his feet. It was night. The alley was totally dark. But maybe they could see in the dark. Maybe darkness made no difference to them.
He left the alley cautiously and moved out onto the street. Men and women flowed past, but not so many, now. At the bus-stops stood waiting groups. A huge bus lumbered along the street, its lights flashing in the evening gloom.
Loyce moved forward. He pushed his way among those waiting and when the bus halted he boarded it and took a seat in the rear, by the door. A moment later the bus moved into life and rumbled down the street.
Loyce relaxed a little. He studied the people around him. Dulled, tired faces. People going home from work. Quite ordinary faces. None of them paid any attention to him. All sat quietly, sunk down in their seats, jiggling with the motion of the bus.
The man sitting next to him unfolded a newspaper. He began to read the sports section, his lips moving. An ordinary man. Blue suit. Tie. A businessman, or a salesman. On his way home to his wife and family.
Across the aisle a young woman, perhaps twenty. Dark eyes and hair, a package on her lap. Nylons and heels. Red coat and white angora sweater. Gazing absently ahead of her.
A high school boy in jeans and black jacket.
A great triple-chinned woman with an immense shopping bag loaded with packages and parcels. Her thick face dim with weariness.
Ordinary people. The kind that rode the bus every evening. Going home to their families. To dinner.
Going home—with their minds dead. Controlled, filmed over with the mask of an alien being that had appeared and taken possession of them, their town, their lives. Himself, too. Except that he happened to be deep in his cellar instead of in the store. Somehow, he had been overlooked. They had missed him. Their control wasn't perfect, foolproof.
Maybe there were others.
Hope flickered in Loyce. They weren't omnipotent. They had made a mistake, not got control of him. Their net, their field of control, had passed over him. He had emerged from his cellar as he had gone down. Apparently their power-zone was limited.
A few seats down the aisle a man was watching him. Loyce broke off his chain of thought. A slender man, with dark hair and a small mustache. Well-dressed, brown suit and shiny shoes. A book between his small hands. He was watching Loyce, studying him intently. He turned quickly away.
Loyce tensed. One of them ? Or—another they had missed?
The man was watching him again. Small dark eyes, alive and clever. Shrewd. A man too shrewd for them—or one of the things itself, an alien insect from beyond.
The bus halted. An elderly man got on slowly and dropped his token into the box. He moved down the aisle and took a seat opposite Loyce.
The elderly man caught the sharp-eyed man's gaze. For a split second something passed between them.
A look rich with meaning.
Loyce got to his feet. The bus was moving. He ran to the door. One step down into the well. He yanked the emergency door release. The rubber door swung open.
"Hey!" the driver shouted, jamming on the brakes. "What the hell—"
Loyce squirmed through. The bus was slowing down. Houses on all sides. A residential district, lawns and tall apartment buildings. Behind him, the bright-eyed man had leaped up. The elderly man was also on his feet. They were coming after him.
Loyce leaped. He hit the pavement with terrific force and rolled against the curb. Pain lapped over him. Pain and a vast tide of blackness. Desperately, he fought it off. He struggled to his knees and then slid down again. The bus had stopped. People were getting off.
Loyce groped around. His fingers closed over something. A rock, lying in the gutter. He crawled to his feet, grunting with pain. A shape loomed before him. A man, the bright-eyed man with the book.
Loyce kicked. The man gasped and fell. Loyce brought the rock down. The man screamed and tried to roll away. " Stop! For God's sake listen—"
He struck again. A hideous crunching sound. The man's voice cut off and dissolved in a bubbling wail. Loyce scrambled up and back. The others were there, now. All around him. He ran, awkwardly, down the sidewalk, up a driveway. None of them followed him. They had stopped and were bending over the inert body of the man with the book, the bright-eyed man who had come after him.
Had he made a mistake?
But it was too late to worry about that. He had to get out—away from them. Out of Pikeville, beyond the crack of darkness, the rent between their world and his.
"Ed!" Janet Loyce backed away nervously. "What is it? What—"
Ed Loyce slammed the door behind him and came into the living room.
"Pull down the shades. Quick."
Janet moved toward the window. "But—"
"Do as I say. Who else is here besides you?"
"Nobody. Just the twins. They're upstairs in their room. What's happened? You look so strange. Why are you home?"
Ed locked the front door. He prowled around the house, into the kitchen. From the drawer under the sink he slid out the big butcher knife and ran his finger along it. Sharp. Plenty sharp. He returned to the living room.
"Listen to me," he said. "I don't have much time. They know I escaped and they'll be looking for me."
"Escaped?" Janet's face twisted with bewilderment and fear. "Who?"
"The town has been taken over. They're in control. I've got it pretty well figured out. They started at the top, at the City Hall and police department. What they did with the real humans they—"
"What are you talking about?"
"We've been invaded. From some other universe, some other dimension. They're insects. Mimicry. And more. Power to control minds. Your mind."
"My mind?"
"Their entrance is here , in Pikeville. They've taken over all of you. The whole town—except me. We're up against an incredibly powerful enemy, but they have their limitations. That's our hope. They're limited! They can make mistakes!"
Janet shook her head. "I don't understand, Ed. You must be insane."
"Insane? No. Just lucky. If I hadn't been down in the basement I'd be like all the rest of you." Loyce peered out the window. "But I can't stand here talking. Get your coat."
"My coat?"
"We're getting out of here. Out of Pikeville. We've got to get help. Fight this thing. They can be beaten. They're not infallible. It's going to be close—but we may make it if we hurry. Come on!" He grabbed her arm roughly. "Get your coat and call the twins. We're all leaving. Don't stop to pack. There's no time for that."
White-faced, his wife moved toward the closet and got down her coat.
"Where are we going?"
Ed pulled open the desk drawer and spilled the contents out onto the floor. He grabbed up a road map and spread it open. "They'll have the highway covered, of course. But there's a back road. To Oak Grove. I got onto it once. It's practically abandoned. Maybe they'll forget about it."
"The old Ranch Road? Good Lord—it's completely closed. Nobody's supposed to drive over it."
"I know." Ed thrust the map grimly into his coat. "That's our best chance. Now call down the twins and let's get going. Your car is full of gas, isn't it?"
Janet was dazed.
"The Chevy? I had it filled up yesterday afternoon." Janet moved toward the stairs. "Ed, I—"
"Call the twins!" Ed unlocked the front door and peered out. Nothing stirred. No sign of life. All right so far.
"Come on downstairs," Janet called in a wavering voice. "We're—going out for awhile."
"Now?" Tommy's voice came.
"Hurry up," Ed barked. "Get down here, both of you."
Tommy appeared at the top of the stairs. "I was doing my home work. We're starting fractions. Miss Parker says if we don't get this done—"
"You can forget about fractions." Ed grabbed his son as he came down the stairs and propelled him toward the door. "Where's Jim?"
"He's coming."
Jim started slowly down the stairs. "What's up, Dad?"
"We're going for a ride."
"A ride? Where?"
Ed turned to Janet. "We'll leave the lights on. And the TV set. Go turn it on." He pushed her toward the set. "So they'll think we're still—"
He heard the buzz. And dropped instantly, the long butcher knife out. Sickened, he saw it coming down the stairs at him, wings a blur of motion as it aimed itself. It still bore a vague resemblance to Jimmy. It was small, a baby one. A brief glimpse—the thing hurtling at him, cold, multi-lensed inhuman eyes. Wings, body still clothed in yellow T-shirt and jeans, the mimic outline still stamped on it. A strange half-turn of its body as it reached him. What was it doing?
A stinger.
Loyce stabbed wildly at it. It retreated, buzzing frantically. Loyce rolled and crawled toward the door. Tommy and Janet stood still as statues, faces blank. Watching without expression. Loyce stabbed again. This time the knife connected. The thing shrieked and faltered. It bounced against the wall and fluttered down.
Something lapped through his mind. A wall of force, energy, an alien mind probing into him. He was suddenly paralyzed. The mind entered his own, touched against him briefly, shockingly. An utterly alien presence, settling over him—and then it flickered out as the thing collapsed in a broken heap on the rug.
It was dead. He turned it over with his foot. It was an insect, a fly of some kind. Yellow T-shirt, jeans. His son Jimmy.... He closed his mind tight. It was too late to think about that. Savagely he scooped up his knife and headed toward the door. Janet and Tommy stood stone-still, neither of them moving.
The car was out. He'd never get through. They'd be waiting for him. It was ten miles on foot. Ten long miles over rough ground, gulleys and open fields and hills of uncut forest. He'd have to go alone.
Loyce opened the door. For a brief second he looked back at his wife and son. Then he slammed the door behind him and raced down the porch steps.
A moment later he was on his way, hurrying swiftly through the darkness toward the edge of town.
The early morning sunlight was blinding. Loyce halted, gasping for breath, swaying back and forth. Sweat ran down in his eyes. His clothing was torn, shredded by the brush and thorns through which he had crawled. Ten miles—on his hands and knees. Crawling, creeping through the night. His shoes were mud-caked. He was scratched and limping, utterly exhausted.
But ahead of him lay Oak Grove.
He took a deep breath and started down the hill. Twice he stumbled and fell, picking himself up and trudging on. His ears rang. Everything receded and wavered. But he was there. He had got out, away from Pikeville.
A farmer in a field gaped at him. From a house a young woman watched in wonder. Loyce reached the road and turned onto it. Ahead of him was a gasoline station and a drive-in. A couple of trucks, some chickens pecking in the dirt, a dog tied with a string.
The white-clad attendant watched suspiciously as he dragged himself up to the station. "Thank God." He caught hold of the wall. "I didn't think I was going to make it. They followed me most of the way. I could hear them buzzing. Buzzing and flitting around behind me."
"What happened?" the attendant demanded. "You in a wreck? A hold-up?"
Loyce shook his head wearily. "They have the whole town. The City Hall and the police station. They hung a man from the lamppost. That was the first thing I saw. They've got all the roads blocked. I saw them hovering over the cars coming in. About four this morning I got beyond them. I knew it right away. I could feel them leave. And then the sun came up."
The attendant licked his lip nervously. "You're out of your head. I better get a doctor."
"Get me into Oak Grove," Loyce gasped. He sank down on the gravel.
"We've got to get started—cleaning them out. Got to get started right away."
They kept a tape recorder going all the time he talked. When he had finished the Commissioner snapped off the recorder and got to his feet. He stood for a moment, deep in thought. Finally he got out his cigarettes and lit up slowly, a frown on his beefy face.
"You don't believe me," Loyce said.
The Commissioner offered him a cigarette. Loyce pushed it impatiently away. "Suit yourself." The Commissioner moved over to the window and stood for a time looking out at the town of Oak Grove. "I believe you," he said abruptly.
Loyce sagged. "Thank God."
"So you got away." The Commissioner shook his head. "You were down in your cellar instead of at work. A freak chance. One in a million."
Loyce sipped some of the black coffee they had brought him. "I have a theory," he murmured.
"What is it?"
"About them. Who they are. They take over one area at a time. Starting at the top—the highest level of authority. Working down from there in a widening circle. When they're firmly in control they go on to the next town. They spread, slowly, very gradually. I think it's been going on for a long time."
"A long time?"
"Thousands of years. I don't think it's new."
"Why do you say that?"
"When I was a kid.... A picture they showed us in Bible League. A religious picture—an old print. The enemy gods, defeated by Jehovah. Moloch, Beelzebub, Moab, Baalin, Ashtaroth—"
"So?"
"They were all represented by figures." Loyce looked up at the Commissioner. "Beelzebub was represented as—a giant fly."
The Commissioner grunted. "An old struggle."
"They've been defeated. The Bible is an account of their defeats. They make gains—but finally they're defeated."
"Why defeated?"
"They can't get everyone. They didn't get me. And they never got the Hebrews. The Hebrews carried the message to the whole world. The realization of the danger. The two men on the bus. I think they understood. Had escaped, like I did." He clenched his fists. "I killed one of them. I made a mistake. I was afraid to take a chance."
The Commissioner nodded. "Yes, they undoubtedly had escaped, as you did. Freak accidents. But the rest of the town was firmly in control." He turned from the window. "Well, Mr. Loyce. You seem to have figured everything out."
"Not everything. The hanging man. The dead man hanging from the lamppost. I don't understand that. Why? Why did they deliberately hang him there?"
"That would seem simple." The Commissioner smiled faintly. " Bait. "
Loyce stiffened. His heart stopped beating. "Bait? What do you mean?"
"To draw you out. Make you declare yourself. So they'd know who was under control—and who had escaped."
Loyce recoiled with horror. "Then they expected failures! They anticipated—" He broke off. "They were ready with a trap."
"And you showed yourself. You reacted. You made yourself known." The Commissioner abruptly moved toward the door. "Come along, Loyce. There's a lot to do. We must get moving. There's no time to waste."
Loyce started slowly to his feet, numbed. "And the man. Who was the man? I never saw him before. He wasn't a local man. He was a stranger. All muddy and dirty, his face cut, slashed—"
There was a strange look on the Commissioner's face as he answered.
"Maybe," he said softly, "you'll understand that, too. Come along with me, Mr. Loyce." He held the door open, his eyes gleaming. Loyce caught a glimpse of the street in front of the police station. Policemen, a platform of some sort. A telephone pole—and a rope! "Right this way," the Commissioner said, smiling coldly.
As the sun set, the vice-president of the Oak Grove Merchants' Bank came up out of the vault, threw the heavy time locks, put on his hat and coat, and hurried outside onto the sidewalk. Only a few people were there, hurrying home to dinner.
"Good night," the guard said, locking the door after him.
"Good night," Clarence Mason murmured. He started along the street toward his car. He was tired. He had been working all day down in the vault, examining the lay-out of the safety deposit boxes to see if there was room for another tier. He was glad to be finished.
At the corner he halted. The street lights had not yet come on. The street was dim. Everything was vague. He looked around—and froze.
From the telephone pole in front of the police station, something large and shapeless hung. It moved a little with the wind.
What the hell was it?
Mason approached it warily. He wanted to get home. He was tired and hungry. He thought of his wife, his kids, a hot meal on the dinner table. But there was something about the dark bundle, something ominous and ugly. The light was bad; he couldn't tell what it was. Yet it drew him on, made him move closer for a better look. The shapeless thing made him uneasy. He was frightened by it. Frightened—and fascinated.
And the strange part was that nobody else seemed to notice it.
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Why does Steffens decide to engage with the robots?
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about Orphans of the Void by Michael Shaara.
Relevant chunks:
Orphans of the Void
By MICHAEL SHAARA
Illustrated by EMSH
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Finding a cause worth dying for is no great trick—the Universe is full of them. Finding one worth living for is the genuine problem!
In the region of the Coal Sack Nebula, on the dead fourth planet of a star called Tyban, Captain Steffens of the Mapping Command stood counting buildings. Eleven. No, twelve. He wondered if there was any significance in the number. He had no idea.
"What do you make of it?" he asked.
Lieutenant Ball, the executive officer of the ship, almost tried to scratch his head before he remembered that he was wearing a spacesuit.
"Looks like a temporary camp," Ball said. "Very few buildings, and all built out of native materials, the only stuff available. Castaways, maybe?"
Steffens was silent as he walked up onto the rise. The flat weathered stone jutted out of the sand before him.
"No inscriptions," he pointed out.
"They would have been worn away. See the wind grooves? Anyway, there's not another building on the whole damn planet. You wouldn't call it much of a civilization."
"You don't think these are native?"
Ball said he didn't. Steffens nodded.
Standing there and gazing at the stone, Steffens felt the awe of great age. He had a hunch, deep and intuitive, that this was old— too old. He reached out a gloved hand, ran it gently over the smooth stone ridges of the wall. Although the atmosphere was very thin, he noticed that the buildings had no airlocks.
Ball's voice sounded in his helmet: "Want to set up shop, Skipper?"
Steffens paused. "All right, if you think it will do any good."
"You never can tell. Excavation probably won't be much use. These things are on a raised rock foundation, swept clean by the wind. And you can see that the rock itself is native—" he indicated the ledge beneath their feet—"and was cut out a long while back."
"How long?"
Ball toed the sand uncomfortably. "I wouldn't like to say off-hand."
"Make a rough estimate."
Ball looked at the captain, knowing what was in his mind. He smiled wryly and said: "Five thousand years? Ten thousand? I don't know."
Steffens whistled.
Ball pointed again at the wall. "Look at the striations. You can tell from that alone. It would take even a brisk Earth wind at least several thousand years to cut that deep, and the wind here has only a fraction of that force."
The two men stood for a long moment in silence. Man had been in interstellar space for three hundred years and this was the first uncovered evidence of an advanced, space-crossing, alien race. It was an historic moment, but neither of them was thinking about history.
Man had been in space for only three hundred years. Whatever had built these had been in space for thousands of years.
Which ought to give them , thought Steffens uncomfortably, one hell of a good head-start.
While the excav crew worked steadily, turning up nothing, Steffens remained alone among the buildings. Ball came out to him, looked dryly at the walls.
"Well," he said, "whoever they were, we haven't heard from them since."
"No? How can you be sure?" Steffens grunted. "A space-borne race was roaming this part of the Galaxy while men were still pitching spears at each other, that long ago. And this planet is only a parsec from Varius II, a civilization as old as Earth's. Did whoever built these get to Varius? Or did they get to Earth? How can you know?"
He kicked at the sand distractedly. "And most important, where are they now? A race with several thousand years...."
"Fifteen thousand," Ball said. When Steffens looked up, he added:
"That's what the geology boys say. Fifteen thousand, at the least."
Steffens turned to stare unhappily at the buildings. When he realized now how really old they were, a sudden thought struck him.
"But why buildings? Why did they have to build in stone, to last? There's something wrong with that. They shouldn't have had a need to build, unless they were castaways. And castaways would have left something behind. The only reason they would need a camp would be—"
"If the ship left and some of them stayed."
Steffens nodded. "But then the ship must have come back. Where did it go?" He ceased kicking at the sand and looked up into the blue-black midday sky. "We'll never know."
"How about the other planets?" Ball asked.
"The report was negative. Inner too hot, outer too heavy and cold. The third planet is the only one with a decent temperature range, but it has a CO
2
atmosphere."
"How about moons?"
Steffens shrugged. "We could try them and find out."
The third planet was a blank, gleaming ball until they were in close, and then the blankness resolved into folds and piling clouds and dimly, in places, the surface showed through. The ship went down through the clouds, falling the last few miles on her brakers. They came into the misty gas below, leveled off and moved along the edge of the twilight zone.
The moons of this solar system had yielded nothing. The third planet, a hot, heavy world which had no free oxygen and from which the monitors had detected nothing, was all that was left. Steffens expected nothing, but he had to try.
At a height of several miles, the ship moved up the zone, scanning, moving in the familiar slow spiral of the Mapping Command. Faint dark outlines of bare rocks and hills moved by below.
Steffens turned the screen to full magnification and watched silently.
After a while he saw a city.
The main screen being on, the whole crew saw it. Someone shouted and they stopped to stare, and Steffens was about to call for altitude when he saw that the city was dead.
He looked down on splintered walls that were like cloudy glass pieces rising above a plain, rising in a shattered circle. Near the center of the city, there was a huge, charred hole at least three miles in diameter and very deep. In all the piled rubble, nothing moved.
Steffens went down low to make sure, then brought the ship around and headed out across the main continent into the bright area of the sun. The rocks rolled by below, there was no vegetation at all, and then there were more cities—all with the black depression, the circular stamp that blotted away and fused the buildings into nothing.
No one on the ship had anything to say. None had ever seen a war, for there had not been war on Earth or near it for more than three hundred years.
The ship circled around to the dark side of the planet. When they were down below a mile, the radiation counters began to react. It became apparent, from the dials, that there could be nothing alive.
After a while Ball said: "Well, which do you figure? Did our friends from the fourth planet do this, or were they the same people as these?"
Steffens did not take his eyes from the screen. They were coming around to the daylight side.
"We'll go down and look for the answer," he said. "Break out the radiation suits."
He paused, thinking. If the ones on the fourth planet were alien to this world, they were from outer space, could not have come from one of the other planets here. They had starships and were warlike. Then, thousands of years ago. He began to realize how important it really was that Ball's question be answered.
When the ship had gone very low, looking for a landing site, Steffens was still by the screen. It was Steffens, then, who saw the thing move.
Down far below, it had been a still black shadow, and then it moved. Steffens froze. And he knew, even at that distance, that it was a robot.
Tiny and black, a mass of hanging arms and legs, the thing went gliding down the slope of a hill. Steffens saw it clearly for a full second, saw the dull ball of its head tilt upward as the ship came over, and then the hill was past.
Quickly Steffens called for height. The ship bucked beneath him and blasted straight up; some of the crew went crashing to the deck. Steffens remained by the screen, increasing the magnification as the ship drew away. And he saw another, then two, then a black gliding group, all matched with bunches of hanging arms.
Nothing alive but robots, he thought, robots . He adjusted to full close up as quickly as he could and the picture focused on the screen. Behind him he heard a crewman grunt in amazement.
A band of clear, plasticlike stuff ran round the head—it would be the eye, a band of eye that saw all ways. On the top of the head was a single round spot of the plastic, and the rest was black metal, joined, he realized, with fantastic perfection. The angle of sight was now almost perpendicular. He could see very little of the branching arms of the trunk, but what had been on the screen was enough. They were the most perfect robots he had ever seen.
The ship leveled off. Steffens had no idea what to do; the sudden sight of the moving things had unnerved him. He had already sounded the alert, flicked out the defense screens. Now he had nothing to do. He tried to concentrate on what the League Law would have him do.
The Law was no help. Contact with planet-bound races was forbidden under any circumstances. But could a bunch of robots be called a race? The Law said nothing about robots because Earthmen had none. The building of imaginative robots was expressly forbidden. But at any rate, Steffens thought, he had made contact already.
While Steffens stood by the screen, completely bewildered for the first time in his space career, Lieutenant Ball came up, hobbling slightly. From the bright new bruise on his cheek, Steffens guessed that the sudden climb had caught him unaware. The exec was pale with surprise.
"What were they?" he said blankly. "Lord, they looked like robots!"
"They were."
Ball stared confoundedly at the screen. The things were now a confusion of dots in the mist.
"Almost humanoid," Steffens said, "but not quite."
Ball was slowly absorbing the situation. He turned to gaze inquiringly at Steffens.
"Well, what do we do now?"
Steffens shrugged. "They saw us. We could leave now and let them quite possibly make a ... a legend out of our visit, or we could go down and see if they tie in with the buildings on Tyban IV."
" Can we go down?"
"Legally? I don't know. If they are robots, yes, since robots cannot constitute a race. But there's another possibility." He tapped his fingers on the screen confusedly. "They don't have to be robots at all. They could be the natives."
Ball gulped. "I don't follow you."
"They could be the original inhabitants of this planet—the brains of them, at least, protected in radiation-proof metal. Anyway," he added,
"they're the most perfect mechanicals I've ever seen."
Ball shook his head, sat down abruptly. Steffens turned from the screen, strode nervously across the Main Deck, thinking.
The Mapping Command, they called it. Theoretically, all he was supposed to do was make a closeup examination of unexplored systems, checking for the presence of life-forms as well as for the possibilities of human colonization. Make a check and nothing else. But he knew very clearly that if he returned to Sirius base without investigating this robot situation, he could very well be court-martialed one way or the other, either for breaking the Law of Contact or for dereliction of duty.
And there was also the possibility, which abruptly occurred to him, that the robots might well be prepared to blow his ship to hell and gone.
He stopped in the center of the deck. A whole new line of thought opened up. If the robots were armed and ready ... could this be an outpost?
An outpost!
He turned and raced for the bridge. If he went in and landed and was lost, then the League might never know in time. If he went in and stirred up trouble....
The thought in his mind was scattered suddenly, like a mist blown away. A voice was speaking in his mind, a deep calm voice that seemed to say:
" Greetings. Do not be alarmed. We do not wish you to be alarmed. Our desire is only to serve.... "
"Greetings, it said! Greetings!" Ball was mumbling incredulously through shocked lips.
Everyone on the ship had heard the voice. When it spoke again, Steffens was not sure whether it was just one voice or many voices.
"We await your coming," it said gravely, and repeated: "Our desire is only to serve."
And then the robots sent a picture .
As perfect and as clear as a tridim movie, a rectangular plate took shape in Steffens' mind. On the face of the plate, standing alone against a background of red-brown, bare rocks, was one of the robots. With slow, perfect movement, the robot carefully lifted one of the hanging arms of its side, of its right side, and extended it toward Steffens, a graciously offered hand.
Steffens felt a peculiar, compelling urge to take the hand, realized right away that the urge to take the hand was not entirely his. The robot mind had helped.
When the picture vanished, he knew that the others had seen it. He waited for a while; there was no further contact, but the feeling of the robot's urging was still strong within him. He had an idea that, if they wanted to, the robots could control his mind. So when nothing more happened, he began to lose his fear.
While the crew watched in fascination, Steffens tried to talk back. He concentrated hard on what he was saying, said it aloud for good measure, then held his own hand extended in the robot manner of shaking hands.
"Greetings," he said, because it was what they had said, and explained: "We have come from the stars."
It was overly dramatic, but so was the whole situation. He wondered baffledly if he should have let the Alien Contact crew handle it. Order someone to stand there, feeling like a fool, and think a message?
No, it was his responsibility; he had to go on:
"We request—we respectfully request permission to land upon your planet."
Steffens had not realized that there were so many.
They had been gathering since his ship was first seen, and now there were hundreds of them clustered upon the hill. Others were arriving even as the skiff landed; they glided in over the rocky hills with fantastic ease and power, so that Steffens felt a momentary anxiety. Most of the robots were standing with the silent immobility of metal. Others threaded their way to the fore and came near the skiff, but none touched it, and a circle was cleared for Steffens when he came out.
One of the near robots came forward alone, moving, as Steffens now saw, on a number of short, incredibly strong and agile legs. The black thing paused before him, extended a hand as it had done in the picture. Steffens took it, he hoped, warmly; felt the power of the metal through the glove of his suit.
"Welcome," the robot said, speaking again to his mind, and now Steffens detected a peculiar alteration in the robot's tone. It was less friendly now, less—Steffens could not understand—somehow less interested , as if the robot had been—expecting someone else.
"Thank you," Steffens said. "We are deeply grateful for your permission to land."
"Our desire," the robot repeated mechanically, "is only to serve."
Suddenly, Steffens began to feel alone, surrounded by machines. He tried to push the thought out of his mind, because he knew that they should seem inhuman. But....
"Will the others come down?" asked the robot, still mechanically.
Steffens felt his embarrassment. The ship lay high in the mist above, jets throbbing gently.
"They must remain with the ship," Steffens said aloud, trusting to the robot's formality not to ask him why. Although, if they could read his mind, there was no need to ask.
For a long while, neither spoke, long enough for Steffens to grow tense and uncomfortable. He could not think of a thing to say, the robot was obviously waiting, and so, in desperation, he signaled the Aliencon men to come on out of the skiff.
They came, wonderingly, and the ring of robots widened. Steffens heard the one robot speak again. The voice was now much more friendly.
"We hope you will forgive us for intruding upon your thought. It is our—custom—not to communicate unless we are called upon. But when we observed that you were in ignorance of our real—nature—and were about to leave our planet, we decided to put aside our custom, so that you might base your decision upon sufficient data."
Steffens replied haltingly that he appreciated their action.
"We perceive," the robot went on, "that you are unaware of our complete access to your mind, and would perhaps be—dismayed—to learn that we have been gathering information from you. We must—apologize. Our only purpose was so that we could communicate with you. Only that information was taken which is necessary for communication and—understanding. We will enter your minds henceforth only at your request."
Steffens did not react to the news that his mind was being probed as violently as he might have. Nevertheless it was a shock, and he retreated into observant silence as the Aliencon men went to work.
The robot which seemed to have been doing the speaking was in no way different from any of the others in the group. Since each of the robots was immediately aware of all that was being said or thought, Steffens guessed that they had sent one forward just for appearance's sake, because they perceived that the Earthmen would feel more at home. The picture of the extended hand, the characteristic handshake of Earthmen, had probably been borrowed, too, for the same purpose of making him and the others feel at ease. The one jarring note was the robot's momentary lapse, those unexplainable few seconds when the things had seemed almost disappointed. Steffens gave up wondering about that and began to examine the first robot in detail.
It was not very tall, being at least a foot shorter than the Earthmen. The most peculiar thing about it, except for the circling eye-band of the head, was a mass of symbols which were apparently engraved upon the metal chest. Symbols in row upon row—numbers, perhaps—were upon the chest, and repeated again below the level of the arms, and continued in orderly rows across the front of the robot, all the way down to the base of the trunk. If they were numbers, Steffens thought, then it was a remarkably complicated system. But he noticed the same pattern on the nearer robots, all apparently identical. He was forced to conclude that the symbols were merely decoration and let it go tentatively at that, although the answer seemed illogical.
It wasn't until he was on his way home that Steffens remembered the symbols again. And only then did he realized what they were.
After a while, convinced that there was no danger, Steffens had the ship brought down. When the crew came out of the airlock, they were met by the robots, and each man found himself with a robot at his side, humbly requesting to be of service. There were literally thousands of the robots now, come from all over the barren horizon. The mass of them stood apart, immobile on a plain near the ship, glinting in the sun like a vast, metallic field of black wheat.
The robots had obviously been built to serve. Steffens began to feel their pleasure, to sense it in spite of the blank, expressionless faces. They were almost like children in their eagerness, yet they were still reserved. Whoever had built them, Steffens thought in wonder, had built them well.
Ball came to join Steffens, staring at the robots through the clear plastic of his helmet with baffledly widened eyes. A robot moved out from the mass in the field, allied itself to him. The first to speak had remained with Steffens.
Realizing that the robot could hear every word he was saying, Ball was for a while apprehensive. But the sheer unreality of standing and talking with a multi-limbed, intelligent hunk of dead metal upon the bare rock of a dead, ancient world, the unreality of it slowly died. It was impossible not to like the things. There was something in their very lines which was pleasant and relaxing.
Their builders, Steffens thought, had probably thought of that, too.
"There's no harm in them," said Ball at last, openly, not minding if the robots heard. "They seem actually glad we're here. My God, whoever heard of a robot being glad?"
Steffens, embarrassed, spoke quickly to the nearest mechanical: "I hope you will forgive us our curiosity, but—yours is a remarkable race. We have never before made contact with a race like yours." It was said haltingly, but it was the best he could do.
The robot made a singularly human nodding motion of its head.
"I perceive that the nature of our construction is unfamiliar to you. Your question is whether or not we are entirely 'mechanical.' I am not exactly certain as to what the word 'mechanical' is intended to convey—I would have to examine your thought more fully—but I believe that there is fundamental similarity between our structures."
The robot paused. Steffens had a distinct impression that it was disconcerted.
"I must tell you," the thing went on, "that we ourselves are—curious." It stopped suddenly, struggling with a word it could not comprehend. Steffens waited, listening with absolute interest. It said at length:
"We know of only two types of living structure. Ours, which is largely metallic, and that of the Makers , which would appear to be somewhat more like yours. I am not a—doctor—and therefore cannot acquaint you with the specific details of the Makers' composition, but if you are interested I will have a doctor brought forward. It will be glad to be of assistance."
It was Steffens' turn to struggle, and the robot waited patiently while Ball and the second robot looked on in silence. The Makers, obviously, were whoever or whatever had built the robots, and the "doctors," Steffens decided, were probably just that—doctor-robots, designed specifically to care for the apparently flesh-bodies of the Makers.
The efficiency of the things continued to amaze him, but the question he had been waiting to ask came out now with a rush:
"Can you tell us where the Makers are?"
Both robots stood motionless. It occurred to Steffens that he couldn't really be sure which was speaking. The voice that came to him spoke with difficulty.
"The Makers—are not here."
Steffens stared in puzzlement. The robot detected his confusion and went on:
"The Makers have gone away. They have been gone for a very long time."
Could that be pain in its voice, Steffens wondered, and then the spectre of the ruined cities rose harsh in his mind.
War. The Makers had all been killed in that war. And these had not been killed.
He tried to grasp it, but he couldn't. There were robots here in the midst of a radiation so lethal that nothing , nothing could live; robots on a dead planet, living in an atmosphere of carbon dioxide.
The carbon dioxide brought him up sharp.
If there had been life here once, there would have been plant life as well, and therefore oxygen. If the war had been so long ago that the free oxygen had since gone out of the atmosphere—good God, how old were the robots? Steffens looked at Ball, then at the silent robots, then out across the field to where the rest of them stood. The black wheat. Steffens felt a deep chill.
Were they immortal?
"Would you like to see a doctor?"
Steffens jumped at the familiar words, then realized to what the robot was referring.
"No, not yet," he said, "thank you." He swallowed hard as the robots continued waiting patiently.
"Could you tell me," he said at last, "how old you are? Individually?"
"By your reckoning," said his robot, and paused to make the calculation, "I am forty-four years, seven months, and eighteen days of age, with ten years and approximately nine months yet to be alive."
Steffens tried to understand that.
"It would perhaps simplify our conversations," said the robot, "if you were to refer to me by a name, as is your custom. Using the first—letters—of my designation, my name would translate as Elb."
"Glad to meet you," Steffens mumbled.
"You are called 'Stef,'" said the robot obligingly. Then it added, pointing an arm at the robot near Ball: "The age of—Peb—is seventeen years, one month and four days. Peb has therefore remaining some thirty-eight years."
Steffens was trying to keep up. Then the life span was obviously about fifty-five years. But the cities, and the carbon dioxide? The robot, Elb, had said that the Makers were similar to him, and therefore oxygen and plant life would have been needed. Unless—
He remembered the buildings on Tyban IV.
Unless the Makers had not come from this planet at all.
His mind helplessly began to revolve. It was Ball who restored order.
"Do you build yourselves?" the exec asked.
Peb answered quickly, that faint note of happiness again apparent, as if the robot was glad for the opportunity of answering.
"No, we do not build ourselves. We are made by the—" another pause for a word—"by the Factory ."
"The Factory?"
"Yes. It was built by the Makers. Would you care to see it?"
Both of the Earthmen nodded dumbly.
"Would you prefer to use your—skiff? It is quite a long way from here."
It was indeed a long way, even by skiff. Some of the Aliencon crew went along with them. And near the edge of the twilight zone, on the other side of the world, they saw the Factory outlined in the dim light of dusk. A huge, fantastic block, wrought of gray and cloudy metal, lay in a valley between two worn mountains. Steffens went down low, circling in the skiff, stared in awe at the size of the building. Robots moved outside the thing, little black bugs in the distance—moving around their birthplace.
The Earthmen remained for several weeks. During that time, Steffens was usually with Elb, talking now as often as he listened, and the Aliencon team roamed the planet freely, investigating what was certainly the strangest culture in history. There was still the mystery of those buildings on Tyban IV; that, as well as the robots' origin, would have to be cleared up before they could leave.
Surprisingly, Steffens did not think about the future. Whenever he came near a robot, he sensed such a general, comfortable air of good feeling that it warmed him, and he was so preoccupied with watching the robots that he did little thinking.
Something he had not realized at the beginning was that he was as unusual to the robots as they were to him. It came to him with a great shock that not one of the robots had ever seen a living thing. Not a bug, a worm, a leaf. They did not know what flesh was. Only the doctors knew that, and none of them could readily understand what was meant by the words "organic matter." It had taken them some time to recognize that the Earthmen wore suits which were not parts of their bodies, and it was even more difficult for them to understand why the suits were needed.
But when they did understand, the robots did a surprising thing.
At first, because of the excessive radiation, none of the Earthmen could remain outside the ship for long, even in radiation suits. And one morning, when Steffens came out of the ship, it was to discover that hundreds of the robots, working through the night, had effectively decontaminated the entire area.
It was at this point that Steffens asked how many robots there were. He learned to his amazement that there were more than nine million. The great mass of them had politely remained a great distance from the ship, spread out over the planet, since they were highly radioactive.
Steffens, meanwhile, courteously allowed Elb to probe into his mind. The robot extracted all the knowledge of matter that Steffens held, pondered over the knowledge and tried to digest it, and passed it on to the other robots. Steffens, in turn, had a difficult time picturing the mind of a thing that had never known life.
He had a vague idea of the robot's history—more, perhaps, then they knew themselves—but he refrained from forming an opinion until Aliencon made its report. What fascinated him was Elb's amazing philosophy, the only outlook, really, that the robot could have had.
"What do you do ?" Steffens asked.
Elb replied quickly, with characteristic simplicity: "We can do very little. A certain amount of physical knowledge was imparted to us at birth by the Makers. We spend the main part of our time expanding that knowledge wherever possible. We have made some progress in the natural sciences, and some in mathematics. Our purpose in being, you see, is to serve the Makers. Any ability we can acquire will make us that much more fit to serve when the Makers return."
"When they return?" It had not occurred to Steffens until now that the robots expected the Makers to do so.
Elb regarded him out of the band of the circling eye. "I see you had surmised that the Makers were not coming back."
If the robot could have laughed, Steffens thought it would have, then. But it just stood there, motionless, its tone politely emphatic.
"It has always been our belief that the Makers would return. Why else would we have been built?"
Steffens thought the robot would go on, but it didn't. The question, to Elb, was no question at all.
Although Steffens knew already what the robot could not possibly have known—that the Makers were gone and would never come back—he was a long time understanding. What he did was push this speculation into the back of his mind, to keep it from Elb. He had no desire to destroy a faith.
But it created a problem in him. He had begun to picture for Elb the structure of human society, and the robot—a machine which did not eat or sleep—listened gravely and tried to understand. One day Steffens mentioned God.
"God?" the robot repeated without comprehension. "What is God?"
Steffens explained briefly, and the robot answered:
"It is a matter which has troubled us. We thought at first that you were the Makers returning—" Steffens remembered the brief lapse, the seeming disappointment he had sensed—"but then we probed your minds and found that you were not, that you were another kind of being, unlike either the Makers or ourselves. You were not even—" Elb caught himself—"you did not happen to be telepaths. Therefore we troubled over who made you. We did detect the word 'Maker' in your theology, but it seemed to have a peculiar—" Elb paused for a long while—"an untouchable, intangible meaning which varies among you."
Steffens understood. He nodded.
The Makers were the robots' God, were all the God they needed. The Makers had built them, the planet, the universe. If he were to ask them who made the Makers, it would be like their asking him who made God.
It was an ironic parallel, and he smiled to himself.
But on that planet, it was the last time he smiled.
Question:
Why does Steffens decide to engage with the robots?
Answer:
|
[
"Steffens was stumped as to what to do when they visually discovered robots on the Third planet. He proactively sounded an alert and put defense screens on the ship, but wondered about what his governing League Law would have him do.\nContact with races on foreign planets was forbidden, but he was unsure if robots could be called a race. Earth didn’t have robots because imaginative robots were expressly forbidden to build. Steffens thought it was possible the robots were the brains of natives encased in metal.\nSince Steffens is under “The Mapping Command”, he is supposed to go no further than examining unexplored systems, checking for life-forms and the possibilities of human colonization. His conundrum was that, “if he returned to Sirius base without investigating this robot situation, he could very well be court-martialed one way or the other, either for breaking the Law of Contact or for dereliction of duty.”\nThe robots reach out telepathically, saying in words that they are only here to serve, and communicating a photo to the minds of the crew of a robot extending a hand for a handshake. Although Steffens wonders about letting the Alien Contact crew handle the situation, he ultimately decides it is his responsibility - and he goes on to initiate contact by requesting to land. He is encouraged to stay and explore by the kind nature of the robots.\n",
"When Steffens and his crew flew from Tyban IV to check out this other planet, they had no idea that they would find life or even robotic humanoids on this planet. The Mapping Command is simply meant to check off boxes (was there life on this planet? Is it inhabitable for humans?), not to interact with the potential life forms below. However, Steffens is faced with a serious dilemma when he encounters the robots. He has already technically made contact by accident since he flew so close to the surface to investigate the burnt city. Whether or not he interacted with them more or flew away, he would be in trouble with the Commissioner. Contact with races is expressly forbidden, however, he wonders if robots could really be defined as a race since they were more of an invention. So, he decided to learn more about the robots by staying. ",
"At first, Steffens isn't sure if he should engage with the robots because the League Law forbids contact with planet-bound races, but the robots were not necessarily a race. Because Earthmen did not have robots, they were a new type of encounter for him, and he decided that it would be okay since they had effectively already made contact. He isn't even sure if they are native beings with some kind of casing to protect their organs or even just brains from the elements, or if they are entirely robots. In the end, though, it was a Catch-22: if he made contact, he could be breaking the Law of Contact, but if he went back to base without making contact, it could be said that he did not complete his duty. ",
"Steffens decides to engage with the robots because they seem to be openly and graciously inviting the spaceship and its men to visit them. The robots send a friendly greeting, explaining that they do not wish the humans harm and that their only desire is to serve. They also send an image of one of the robots lifting its arm and graciously offering its hand. In addition, since the robots communicate with the humans telepathically, their messages are persuasive, and Steffens feels a strong urge to take the robot’s proffered hand. Another reason he decides to engage with the robots is that while the Law of Contact forbids making contact with life-forms, the robots are not life-forms, and Steffens could very well face a court-martial for dereliction of duty if he does not make contact with them. On top of that, Steffens is immensely curious about the robots and their makers."
] |
50827
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Orphans of the Void
By MICHAEL SHAARA
Illustrated by EMSH
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Finding a cause worth dying for is no great trick—the Universe is full of them. Finding one worth living for is the genuine problem!
In the region of the Coal Sack Nebula, on the dead fourth planet of a star called Tyban, Captain Steffens of the Mapping Command stood counting buildings. Eleven. No, twelve. He wondered if there was any significance in the number. He had no idea.
"What do you make of it?" he asked.
Lieutenant Ball, the executive officer of the ship, almost tried to scratch his head before he remembered that he was wearing a spacesuit.
"Looks like a temporary camp," Ball said. "Very few buildings, and all built out of native materials, the only stuff available. Castaways, maybe?"
Steffens was silent as he walked up onto the rise. The flat weathered stone jutted out of the sand before him.
"No inscriptions," he pointed out.
"They would have been worn away. See the wind grooves? Anyway, there's not another building on the whole damn planet. You wouldn't call it much of a civilization."
"You don't think these are native?"
Ball said he didn't. Steffens nodded.
Standing there and gazing at the stone, Steffens felt the awe of great age. He had a hunch, deep and intuitive, that this was old— too old. He reached out a gloved hand, ran it gently over the smooth stone ridges of the wall. Although the atmosphere was very thin, he noticed that the buildings had no airlocks.
Ball's voice sounded in his helmet: "Want to set up shop, Skipper?"
Steffens paused. "All right, if you think it will do any good."
"You never can tell. Excavation probably won't be much use. These things are on a raised rock foundation, swept clean by the wind. And you can see that the rock itself is native—" he indicated the ledge beneath their feet—"and was cut out a long while back."
"How long?"
Ball toed the sand uncomfortably. "I wouldn't like to say off-hand."
"Make a rough estimate."
Ball looked at the captain, knowing what was in his mind. He smiled wryly and said: "Five thousand years? Ten thousand? I don't know."
Steffens whistled.
Ball pointed again at the wall. "Look at the striations. You can tell from that alone. It would take even a brisk Earth wind at least several thousand years to cut that deep, and the wind here has only a fraction of that force."
The two men stood for a long moment in silence. Man had been in interstellar space for three hundred years and this was the first uncovered evidence of an advanced, space-crossing, alien race. It was an historic moment, but neither of them was thinking about history.
Man had been in space for only three hundred years. Whatever had built these had been in space for thousands of years.
Which ought to give them , thought Steffens uncomfortably, one hell of a good head-start.
While the excav crew worked steadily, turning up nothing, Steffens remained alone among the buildings. Ball came out to him, looked dryly at the walls.
"Well," he said, "whoever they were, we haven't heard from them since."
"No? How can you be sure?" Steffens grunted. "A space-borne race was roaming this part of the Galaxy while men were still pitching spears at each other, that long ago. And this planet is only a parsec from Varius II, a civilization as old as Earth's. Did whoever built these get to Varius? Or did they get to Earth? How can you know?"
He kicked at the sand distractedly. "And most important, where are they now? A race with several thousand years...."
"Fifteen thousand," Ball said. When Steffens looked up, he added:
"That's what the geology boys say. Fifteen thousand, at the least."
Steffens turned to stare unhappily at the buildings. When he realized now how really old they were, a sudden thought struck him.
"But why buildings? Why did they have to build in stone, to last? There's something wrong with that. They shouldn't have had a need to build, unless they were castaways. And castaways would have left something behind. The only reason they would need a camp would be—"
"If the ship left and some of them stayed."
Steffens nodded. "But then the ship must have come back. Where did it go?" He ceased kicking at the sand and looked up into the blue-black midday sky. "We'll never know."
"How about the other planets?" Ball asked.
"The report was negative. Inner too hot, outer too heavy and cold. The third planet is the only one with a decent temperature range, but it has a CO
2
atmosphere."
"How about moons?"
Steffens shrugged. "We could try them and find out."
The third planet was a blank, gleaming ball until they were in close, and then the blankness resolved into folds and piling clouds and dimly, in places, the surface showed through. The ship went down through the clouds, falling the last few miles on her brakers. They came into the misty gas below, leveled off and moved along the edge of the twilight zone.
The moons of this solar system had yielded nothing. The third planet, a hot, heavy world which had no free oxygen and from which the monitors had detected nothing, was all that was left. Steffens expected nothing, but he had to try.
At a height of several miles, the ship moved up the zone, scanning, moving in the familiar slow spiral of the Mapping Command. Faint dark outlines of bare rocks and hills moved by below.
Steffens turned the screen to full magnification and watched silently.
After a while he saw a city.
The main screen being on, the whole crew saw it. Someone shouted and they stopped to stare, and Steffens was about to call for altitude when he saw that the city was dead.
He looked down on splintered walls that were like cloudy glass pieces rising above a plain, rising in a shattered circle. Near the center of the city, there was a huge, charred hole at least three miles in diameter and very deep. In all the piled rubble, nothing moved.
Steffens went down low to make sure, then brought the ship around and headed out across the main continent into the bright area of the sun. The rocks rolled by below, there was no vegetation at all, and then there were more cities—all with the black depression, the circular stamp that blotted away and fused the buildings into nothing.
No one on the ship had anything to say. None had ever seen a war, for there had not been war on Earth or near it for more than three hundred years.
The ship circled around to the dark side of the planet. When they were down below a mile, the radiation counters began to react. It became apparent, from the dials, that there could be nothing alive.
After a while Ball said: "Well, which do you figure? Did our friends from the fourth planet do this, or were they the same people as these?"
Steffens did not take his eyes from the screen. They were coming around to the daylight side.
"We'll go down and look for the answer," he said. "Break out the radiation suits."
He paused, thinking. If the ones on the fourth planet were alien to this world, they were from outer space, could not have come from one of the other planets here. They had starships and were warlike. Then, thousands of years ago. He began to realize how important it really was that Ball's question be answered.
When the ship had gone very low, looking for a landing site, Steffens was still by the screen. It was Steffens, then, who saw the thing move.
Down far below, it had been a still black shadow, and then it moved. Steffens froze. And he knew, even at that distance, that it was a robot.
Tiny and black, a mass of hanging arms and legs, the thing went gliding down the slope of a hill. Steffens saw it clearly for a full second, saw the dull ball of its head tilt upward as the ship came over, and then the hill was past.
Quickly Steffens called for height. The ship bucked beneath him and blasted straight up; some of the crew went crashing to the deck. Steffens remained by the screen, increasing the magnification as the ship drew away. And he saw another, then two, then a black gliding group, all matched with bunches of hanging arms.
Nothing alive but robots, he thought, robots . He adjusted to full close up as quickly as he could and the picture focused on the screen. Behind him he heard a crewman grunt in amazement.
A band of clear, plasticlike stuff ran round the head—it would be the eye, a band of eye that saw all ways. On the top of the head was a single round spot of the plastic, and the rest was black metal, joined, he realized, with fantastic perfection. The angle of sight was now almost perpendicular. He could see very little of the branching arms of the trunk, but what had been on the screen was enough. They were the most perfect robots he had ever seen.
The ship leveled off. Steffens had no idea what to do; the sudden sight of the moving things had unnerved him. He had already sounded the alert, flicked out the defense screens. Now he had nothing to do. He tried to concentrate on what the League Law would have him do.
The Law was no help. Contact with planet-bound races was forbidden under any circumstances. But could a bunch of robots be called a race? The Law said nothing about robots because Earthmen had none. The building of imaginative robots was expressly forbidden. But at any rate, Steffens thought, he had made contact already.
While Steffens stood by the screen, completely bewildered for the first time in his space career, Lieutenant Ball came up, hobbling slightly. From the bright new bruise on his cheek, Steffens guessed that the sudden climb had caught him unaware. The exec was pale with surprise.
"What were they?" he said blankly. "Lord, they looked like robots!"
"They were."
Ball stared confoundedly at the screen. The things were now a confusion of dots in the mist.
"Almost humanoid," Steffens said, "but not quite."
Ball was slowly absorbing the situation. He turned to gaze inquiringly at Steffens.
"Well, what do we do now?"
Steffens shrugged. "They saw us. We could leave now and let them quite possibly make a ... a legend out of our visit, or we could go down and see if they tie in with the buildings on Tyban IV."
" Can we go down?"
"Legally? I don't know. If they are robots, yes, since robots cannot constitute a race. But there's another possibility." He tapped his fingers on the screen confusedly. "They don't have to be robots at all. They could be the natives."
Ball gulped. "I don't follow you."
"They could be the original inhabitants of this planet—the brains of them, at least, protected in radiation-proof metal. Anyway," he added,
"they're the most perfect mechanicals I've ever seen."
Ball shook his head, sat down abruptly. Steffens turned from the screen, strode nervously across the Main Deck, thinking.
The Mapping Command, they called it. Theoretically, all he was supposed to do was make a closeup examination of unexplored systems, checking for the presence of life-forms as well as for the possibilities of human colonization. Make a check and nothing else. But he knew very clearly that if he returned to Sirius base without investigating this robot situation, he could very well be court-martialed one way or the other, either for breaking the Law of Contact or for dereliction of duty.
And there was also the possibility, which abruptly occurred to him, that the robots might well be prepared to blow his ship to hell and gone.
He stopped in the center of the deck. A whole new line of thought opened up. If the robots were armed and ready ... could this be an outpost?
An outpost!
He turned and raced for the bridge. If he went in and landed and was lost, then the League might never know in time. If he went in and stirred up trouble....
The thought in his mind was scattered suddenly, like a mist blown away. A voice was speaking in his mind, a deep calm voice that seemed to say:
" Greetings. Do not be alarmed. We do not wish you to be alarmed. Our desire is only to serve.... "
"Greetings, it said! Greetings!" Ball was mumbling incredulously through shocked lips.
Everyone on the ship had heard the voice. When it spoke again, Steffens was not sure whether it was just one voice or many voices.
"We await your coming," it said gravely, and repeated: "Our desire is only to serve."
And then the robots sent a picture .
As perfect and as clear as a tridim movie, a rectangular plate took shape in Steffens' mind. On the face of the plate, standing alone against a background of red-brown, bare rocks, was one of the robots. With slow, perfect movement, the robot carefully lifted one of the hanging arms of its side, of its right side, and extended it toward Steffens, a graciously offered hand.
Steffens felt a peculiar, compelling urge to take the hand, realized right away that the urge to take the hand was not entirely his. The robot mind had helped.
When the picture vanished, he knew that the others had seen it. He waited for a while; there was no further contact, but the feeling of the robot's urging was still strong within him. He had an idea that, if they wanted to, the robots could control his mind. So when nothing more happened, he began to lose his fear.
While the crew watched in fascination, Steffens tried to talk back. He concentrated hard on what he was saying, said it aloud for good measure, then held his own hand extended in the robot manner of shaking hands.
"Greetings," he said, because it was what they had said, and explained: "We have come from the stars."
It was overly dramatic, but so was the whole situation. He wondered baffledly if he should have let the Alien Contact crew handle it. Order someone to stand there, feeling like a fool, and think a message?
No, it was his responsibility; he had to go on:
"We request—we respectfully request permission to land upon your planet."
Steffens had not realized that there were so many.
They had been gathering since his ship was first seen, and now there were hundreds of them clustered upon the hill. Others were arriving even as the skiff landed; they glided in over the rocky hills with fantastic ease and power, so that Steffens felt a momentary anxiety. Most of the robots were standing with the silent immobility of metal. Others threaded their way to the fore and came near the skiff, but none touched it, and a circle was cleared for Steffens when he came out.
One of the near robots came forward alone, moving, as Steffens now saw, on a number of short, incredibly strong and agile legs. The black thing paused before him, extended a hand as it had done in the picture. Steffens took it, he hoped, warmly; felt the power of the metal through the glove of his suit.
"Welcome," the robot said, speaking again to his mind, and now Steffens detected a peculiar alteration in the robot's tone. It was less friendly now, less—Steffens could not understand—somehow less interested , as if the robot had been—expecting someone else.
"Thank you," Steffens said. "We are deeply grateful for your permission to land."
"Our desire," the robot repeated mechanically, "is only to serve."
Suddenly, Steffens began to feel alone, surrounded by machines. He tried to push the thought out of his mind, because he knew that they should seem inhuman. But....
"Will the others come down?" asked the robot, still mechanically.
Steffens felt his embarrassment. The ship lay high in the mist above, jets throbbing gently.
"They must remain with the ship," Steffens said aloud, trusting to the robot's formality not to ask him why. Although, if they could read his mind, there was no need to ask.
For a long while, neither spoke, long enough for Steffens to grow tense and uncomfortable. He could not think of a thing to say, the robot was obviously waiting, and so, in desperation, he signaled the Aliencon men to come on out of the skiff.
They came, wonderingly, and the ring of robots widened. Steffens heard the one robot speak again. The voice was now much more friendly.
"We hope you will forgive us for intruding upon your thought. It is our—custom—not to communicate unless we are called upon. But when we observed that you were in ignorance of our real—nature—and were about to leave our planet, we decided to put aside our custom, so that you might base your decision upon sufficient data."
Steffens replied haltingly that he appreciated their action.
"We perceive," the robot went on, "that you are unaware of our complete access to your mind, and would perhaps be—dismayed—to learn that we have been gathering information from you. We must—apologize. Our only purpose was so that we could communicate with you. Only that information was taken which is necessary for communication and—understanding. We will enter your minds henceforth only at your request."
Steffens did not react to the news that his mind was being probed as violently as he might have. Nevertheless it was a shock, and he retreated into observant silence as the Aliencon men went to work.
The robot which seemed to have been doing the speaking was in no way different from any of the others in the group. Since each of the robots was immediately aware of all that was being said or thought, Steffens guessed that they had sent one forward just for appearance's sake, because they perceived that the Earthmen would feel more at home. The picture of the extended hand, the characteristic handshake of Earthmen, had probably been borrowed, too, for the same purpose of making him and the others feel at ease. The one jarring note was the robot's momentary lapse, those unexplainable few seconds when the things had seemed almost disappointed. Steffens gave up wondering about that and began to examine the first robot in detail.
It was not very tall, being at least a foot shorter than the Earthmen. The most peculiar thing about it, except for the circling eye-band of the head, was a mass of symbols which were apparently engraved upon the metal chest. Symbols in row upon row—numbers, perhaps—were upon the chest, and repeated again below the level of the arms, and continued in orderly rows across the front of the robot, all the way down to the base of the trunk. If they were numbers, Steffens thought, then it was a remarkably complicated system. But he noticed the same pattern on the nearer robots, all apparently identical. He was forced to conclude that the symbols were merely decoration and let it go tentatively at that, although the answer seemed illogical.
It wasn't until he was on his way home that Steffens remembered the symbols again. And only then did he realized what they were.
After a while, convinced that there was no danger, Steffens had the ship brought down. When the crew came out of the airlock, they were met by the robots, and each man found himself with a robot at his side, humbly requesting to be of service. There were literally thousands of the robots now, come from all over the barren horizon. The mass of them stood apart, immobile on a plain near the ship, glinting in the sun like a vast, metallic field of black wheat.
The robots had obviously been built to serve. Steffens began to feel their pleasure, to sense it in spite of the blank, expressionless faces. They were almost like children in their eagerness, yet they were still reserved. Whoever had built them, Steffens thought in wonder, had built them well.
Ball came to join Steffens, staring at the robots through the clear plastic of his helmet with baffledly widened eyes. A robot moved out from the mass in the field, allied itself to him. The first to speak had remained with Steffens.
Realizing that the robot could hear every word he was saying, Ball was for a while apprehensive. But the sheer unreality of standing and talking with a multi-limbed, intelligent hunk of dead metal upon the bare rock of a dead, ancient world, the unreality of it slowly died. It was impossible not to like the things. There was something in their very lines which was pleasant and relaxing.
Their builders, Steffens thought, had probably thought of that, too.
"There's no harm in them," said Ball at last, openly, not minding if the robots heard. "They seem actually glad we're here. My God, whoever heard of a robot being glad?"
Steffens, embarrassed, spoke quickly to the nearest mechanical: "I hope you will forgive us our curiosity, but—yours is a remarkable race. We have never before made contact with a race like yours." It was said haltingly, but it was the best he could do.
The robot made a singularly human nodding motion of its head.
"I perceive that the nature of our construction is unfamiliar to you. Your question is whether or not we are entirely 'mechanical.' I am not exactly certain as to what the word 'mechanical' is intended to convey—I would have to examine your thought more fully—but I believe that there is fundamental similarity between our structures."
The robot paused. Steffens had a distinct impression that it was disconcerted.
"I must tell you," the thing went on, "that we ourselves are—curious." It stopped suddenly, struggling with a word it could not comprehend. Steffens waited, listening with absolute interest. It said at length:
"We know of only two types of living structure. Ours, which is largely metallic, and that of the Makers , which would appear to be somewhat more like yours. I am not a—doctor—and therefore cannot acquaint you with the specific details of the Makers' composition, but if you are interested I will have a doctor brought forward. It will be glad to be of assistance."
It was Steffens' turn to struggle, and the robot waited patiently while Ball and the second robot looked on in silence. The Makers, obviously, were whoever or whatever had built the robots, and the "doctors," Steffens decided, were probably just that—doctor-robots, designed specifically to care for the apparently flesh-bodies of the Makers.
The efficiency of the things continued to amaze him, but the question he had been waiting to ask came out now with a rush:
"Can you tell us where the Makers are?"
Both robots stood motionless. It occurred to Steffens that he couldn't really be sure which was speaking. The voice that came to him spoke with difficulty.
"The Makers—are not here."
Steffens stared in puzzlement. The robot detected his confusion and went on:
"The Makers have gone away. They have been gone for a very long time."
Could that be pain in its voice, Steffens wondered, and then the spectre of the ruined cities rose harsh in his mind.
War. The Makers had all been killed in that war. And these had not been killed.
He tried to grasp it, but he couldn't. There were robots here in the midst of a radiation so lethal that nothing , nothing could live; robots on a dead planet, living in an atmosphere of carbon dioxide.
The carbon dioxide brought him up sharp.
If there had been life here once, there would have been plant life as well, and therefore oxygen. If the war had been so long ago that the free oxygen had since gone out of the atmosphere—good God, how old were the robots? Steffens looked at Ball, then at the silent robots, then out across the field to where the rest of them stood. The black wheat. Steffens felt a deep chill.
Were they immortal?
"Would you like to see a doctor?"
Steffens jumped at the familiar words, then realized to what the robot was referring.
"No, not yet," he said, "thank you." He swallowed hard as the robots continued waiting patiently.
"Could you tell me," he said at last, "how old you are? Individually?"
"By your reckoning," said his robot, and paused to make the calculation, "I am forty-four years, seven months, and eighteen days of age, with ten years and approximately nine months yet to be alive."
Steffens tried to understand that.
"It would perhaps simplify our conversations," said the robot, "if you were to refer to me by a name, as is your custom. Using the first—letters—of my designation, my name would translate as Elb."
"Glad to meet you," Steffens mumbled.
"You are called 'Stef,'" said the robot obligingly. Then it added, pointing an arm at the robot near Ball: "The age of—Peb—is seventeen years, one month and four days. Peb has therefore remaining some thirty-eight years."
Steffens was trying to keep up. Then the life span was obviously about fifty-five years. But the cities, and the carbon dioxide? The robot, Elb, had said that the Makers were similar to him, and therefore oxygen and plant life would have been needed. Unless—
He remembered the buildings on Tyban IV.
Unless the Makers had not come from this planet at all.
His mind helplessly began to revolve. It was Ball who restored order.
"Do you build yourselves?" the exec asked.
Peb answered quickly, that faint note of happiness again apparent, as if the robot was glad for the opportunity of answering.
"No, we do not build ourselves. We are made by the—" another pause for a word—"by the Factory ."
"The Factory?"
"Yes. It was built by the Makers. Would you care to see it?"
Both of the Earthmen nodded dumbly.
"Would you prefer to use your—skiff? It is quite a long way from here."
It was indeed a long way, even by skiff. Some of the Aliencon crew went along with them. And near the edge of the twilight zone, on the other side of the world, they saw the Factory outlined in the dim light of dusk. A huge, fantastic block, wrought of gray and cloudy metal, lay in a valley between two worn mountains. Steffens went down low, circling in the skiff, stared in awe at the size of the building. Robots moved outside the thing, little black bugs in the distance—moving around their birthplace.
The Earthmen remained for several weeks. During that time, Steffens was usually with Elb, talking now as often as he listened, and the Aliencon team roamed the planet freely, investigating what was certainly the strangest culture in history. There was still the mystery of those buildings on Tyban IV; that, as well as the robots' origin, would have to be cleared up before they could leave.
Surprisingly, Steffens did not think about the future. Whenever he came near a robot, he sensed such a general, comfortable air of good feeling that it warmed him, and he was so preoccupied with watching the robots that he did little thinking.
Something he had not realized at the beginning was that he was as unusual to the robots as they were to him. It came to him with a great shock that not one of the robots had ever seen a living thing. Not a bug, a worm, a leaf. They did not know what flesh was. Only the doctors knew that, and none of them could readily understand what was meant by the words "organic matter." It had taken them some time to recognize that the Earthmen wore suits which were not parts of their bodies, and it was even more difficult for them to understand why the suits were needed.
But when they did understand, the robots did a surprising thing.
At first, because of the excessive radiation, none of the Earthmen could remain outside the ship for long, even in radiation suits. And one morning, when Steffens came out of the ship, it was to discover that hundreds of the robots, working through the night, had effectively decontaminated the entire area.
It was at this point that Steffens asked how many robots there were. He learned to his amazement that there were more than nine million. The great mass of them had politely remained a great distance from the ship, spread out over the planet, since they were highly radioactive.
Steffens, meanwhile, courteously allowed Elb to probe into his mind. The robot extracted all the knowledge of matter that Steffens held, pondered over the knowledge and tried to digest it, and passed it on to the other robots. Steffens, in turn, had a difficult time picturing the mind of a thing that had never known life.
He had a vague idea of the robot's history—more, perhaps, then they knew themselves—but he refrained from forming an opinion until Aliencon made its report. What fascinated him was Elb's amazing philosophy, the only outlook, really, that the robot could have had.
"What do you do ?" Steffens asked.
Elb replied quickly, with characteristic simplicity: "We can do very little. A certain amount of physical knowledge was imparted to us at birth by the Makers. We spend the main part of our time expanding that knowledge wherever possible. We have made some progress in the natural sciences, and some in mathematics. Our purpose in being, you see, is to serve the Makers. Any ability we can acquire will make us that much more fit to serve when the Makers return."
"When they return?" It had not occurred to Steffens until now that the robots expected the Makers to do so.
Elb regarded him out of the band of the circling eye. "I see you had surmised that the Makers were not coming back."
If the robot could have laughed, Steffens thought it would have, then. But it just stood there, motionless, its tone politely emphatic.
"It has always been our belief that the Makers would return. Why else would we have been built?"
Steffens thought the robot would go on, but it didn't. The question, to Elb, was no question at all.
Although Steffens knew already what the robot could not possibly have known—that the Makers were gone and would never come back—he was a long time understanding. What he did was push this speculation into the back of his mind, to keep it from Elb. He had no desire to destroy a faith.
But it created a problem in him. He had begun to picture for Elb the structure of human society, and the robot—a machine which did not eat or sleep—listened gravely and tried to understand. One day Steffens mentioned God.
"God?" the robot repeated without comprehension. "What is God?"
Steffens explained briefly, and the robot answered:
"It is a matter which has troubled us. We thought at first that you were the Makers returning—" Steffens remembered the brief lapse, the seeming disappointment he had sensed—"but then we probed your minds and found that you were not, that you were another kind of being, unlike either the Makers or ourselves. You were not even—" Elb caught himself—"you did not happen to be telepaths. Therefore we troubled over who made you. We did detect the word 'Maker' in your theology, but it seemed to have a peculiar—" Elb paused for a long while—"an untouchable, intangible meaning which varies among you."
Steffens understood. He nodded.
The Makers were the robots' God, were all the God they needed. The Makers had built them, the planet, the universe. If he were to ask them who made the Makers, it would be like their asking him who made God.
It was an ironic parallel, and he smiled to himself.
But on that planet, it was the last time he smiled.
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How does Roddie figure out why he's different from his friends?
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about Bridge Crossing by Dave Dryfoos.
Relevant chunks:
do you mean, you don't know? I pay you to—" "There's no transmission, sir," said Greg quietly. "No trans—nonsense! Of course there's transmission! I put a million credits into this ship. Finest space-yacht ever built. Latest equipment throughout. Sparks is drunk, that's what you mean! Well, you hop right up there and—" Maud Andrews put down her fork with a clatter. "Oh, for goodness sakes, Jonathan, shut up and give the boy time to explain! He's standing there with his mouth gaping like a rain-spout, trying to get a word in edgewise! What's the trouble, Gregory?" She turned to Greg,
was as if he'd waited for an enemy of person as well as scene. He had already understood the avalanches, the heat, the cold, the shortness of life, but these were things of places, of scene—mute, extravagant manifestations of unthinking nature, not motivated save by gravity and radiation. Here, now, in this stridulent Chion he recognized a thinking enemy! Chion darted off, turned at a distance, tauntingly crying: "Tomorrow I will be big enough to kill you!" And he vanished around a rock. More children ran, giggling, by Sim. Which of them would be friends, enemies? How could friends and
the Mesa? That was the ship from Mars—the escort they were sending with the power cylinder. The power's coming in again." He turned to greet a coin-tapping newcomer, added over his shoulder: "You know what that means, Ryd. Some life around here again. Jobs for all the bums in this town—even for you." He left Ryd frowning, thinking fuzzily. A warming gulp seemed to clear his head. Jobs. So they thought they could put that over on him again, huh? Well, he'd show them. He was smart; he was a damn good helio man—no, that had been ten years ago.
But now he was out of the habit of working, anyway. No job for Ryd Randl. They gave him one once and then took it away. He drank still more deeply. The man on Ryd's immediate right leaned toward him. He laid a hand on his arm, gripping it hard, and said quietly: "So you're Ryd Randl." Ryd had a bad moment before he saw that the face wasn't that of any plain-clothes man he knew. For that matter, it didn't belong to anybody he had ever known—an odd, big-boned face, strikingly ugly, with a beak-nose that was yet not
that man or manlike creatures have walked the Earth. Think what a small fraction of that time is four hundred years. Is it so strange that atomic energy was discovered a little early, by this displacement in time that is so tiny after all?" "But by one man," Don argued. Crandon shrugged. "Compared with him, Don, you and I are stupid men. So are the scientists who slowly plodded down the same road he had come, stumbling first on one truth and then the succeeding one. We know that inventions and discoveries do not occur at random. Each is based
Question:
How does Roddie figure out why he's different from his friends?
Answer:
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[
"Put simply, Roddie is Man and his friends in the story are androids. Despite growing up with them and having been brought up by Molly, Roddie is human. One clear difference is the fact that Roddie is able to tear off the limbs of his friends and repair it back together. For example, he tore off Molly’s head when her “spells” became worse, and then later tinkered it back on her head. Another example of this difference is when Ida begins to cry at the end of the story, and Roddie internally expresses that the first time he wept was the first time he noted a difference between him and his android friends, who presumably cannot emote in the same way. Similarly, they do not know pain nor fatigue, so Roddie pretends he doesn’t either. At the very end of the story, he finally accepts that he is Man. \n",
"Roddie knows that he is weaker than Molly, his nursing android, and other soldiers as he has all the sensations, such as coldness, hunger, pain, and thirst, while they don’t. The growth he has been undergoing until recently is also a sign that he is different from his friends, the soldier androids in the city. His yearning to sleep amid the danger makes him think that he was built by an apprentice when he still believes he is one of the androids. He learns from Ida, a girl he meets in his hiding place, that all the androids are heat-sensitive to locate them in the dark. He also realizes the similarities between Ida and him when Ida is supposed to be the Invader. After going through all the obstacles with Ida to cross the bridge and feeling his weakness on the cable, he realizes the differences between his friends and him again. Recalling his memory of weeping after seeing Ida weep when she tries to convince him that he is a man, not an android, Roddie finally acknowledges himself as a man different from his friends.",
"Roddie always knew that he was different from the robots which he lived with. He didn’t have the same build, or the same gears and cables as them. Roddie always wanted to prove that he was the same, and that he could help them fight. When he meets Ida, who is very similar to him, he starts to doubt where he belongs. Ida helps him understand that he is in fact human, and not a robot. He learns that he belongs with the other humans outside the city, and not with the robots. ",
"\nThroughout the story, Roddie ponders the question of identity: he is different from Molly and the soldiers. Roddie can feel pain, he can be hot and cold, exhausted, hungry, or sleepy. While growing up, Roddie knew that the robots surrounding him did not have the same experience. He cried when he realized that he was different. This emotion also made him unique. After meeting Ida, he slowly analyzes her behavioral traits and sees how similar they are. She says that he is a human being, not a robot. He believes rationality creates the superior. But Roddie knows he’s not a completely rational creature - he has feelings, too. Roddie spends enough time with her to finally accept that he is a man, not a soldier. "
] |
51241
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do you mean, you don't know? I pay you to—" "There's no transmission, sir," said Greg quietly. "No trans—nonsense! Of course there's transmission! I put a million credits into this ship. Finest space-yacht ever built. Latest equipment throughout. Sparks is drunk, that's what you mean! Well, you hop right up there and—" Maud Andrews put down her fork with a clatter. "Oh, for goodness sakes, Jonathan, shut up and give the boy time to explain! He's standing there with his mouth gaping like a rain-spout, trying to get a word in edgewise! What's the trouble, Gregory?" She turned to Greg,
was as if he'd waited for an enemy of person as well as scene. He had already understood the avalanches, the heat, the cold, the shortness of life, but these were things of places, of scene—mute, extravagant manifestations of unthinking nature, not motivated save by gravity and radiation. Here, now, in this stridulent Chion he recognized a thinking enemy! Chion darted off, turned at a distance, tauntingly crying: "Tomorrow I will be big enough to kill you!" And he vanished around a rock. More children ran, giggling, by Sim. Which of them would be friends, enemies? How could friends and
the Mesa? That was the ship from Mars—the escort they were sending with the power cylinder. The power's coming in again." He turned to greet a coin-tapping newcomer, added over his shoulder: "You know what that means, Ryd. Some life around here again. Jobs for all the bums in this town—even for you." He left Ryd frowning, thinking fuzzily. A warming gulp seemed to clear his head. Jobs. So they thought they could put that over on him again, huh? Well, he'd show them. He was smart; he was a damn good helio man—no, that had been ten years ago.
But now he was out of the habit of working, anyway. No job for Ryd Randl. They gave him one once and then took it away. He drank still more deeply. The man on Ryd's immediate right leaned toward him. He laid a hand on his arm, gripping it hard, and said quietly: "So you're Ryd Randl." Ryd had a bad moment before he saw that the face wasn't that of any plain-clothes man he knew. For that matter, it didn't belong to anybody he had ever known—an odd, big-boned face, strikingly ugly, with a beak-nose that was yet not
that man or manlike creatures have walked the Earth. Think what a small fraction of that time is four hundred years. Is it so strange that atomic energy was discovered a little early, by this displacement in time that is so tiny after all?" "But by one man," Don argued. Crandon shrugged. "Compared with him, Don, you and I are stupid men. So are the scientists who slowly plodded down the same road he had come, stumbling first on one truth and then the succeeding one. We know that inventions and discoveries do not occur at random. Each is based
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What is the relationship between Dobbin and Willard?
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about Galactic Ghost by Walter Kubilius.
Relevant chunks:
I, the Unspeakable By WALT SHELDON Illustrated by LOUIS MARCHETTI [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction April 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] "What's in a name?" might be very dangerous to ask in certain societies, in which sticks and stones are also a big problem! I fought to be awake. I was dreaming, but I think I must have blushed. I must have blushed in my sleep. " Do it! " she said. " Please do it! For me! " It was the voice
he wrote exactly that, in small, neat script. It was unfortunate for his curiosity that Don could not see the contents of the three envelopes that were mailed from the offices of POSAT the following week. For this time they differed. Bill Evans was once again disappointed. The pamphlet that was enclosed gave what apparently meant to be final answers to life's problems. They were couched in vaguely metaphysical terms and offered absolutely no help to him. His disappointment was tempered, however, by the knowledge that he had unexpectedly found a job. Or, rather, it had fallen into his lap.
THE HIGHEST MOUNTAIN By BRYCE WALTON Illustrated by BOB HAYES [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] First one up this tallest summit in the Solar System was a rotten egg ... a very rotten egg! Bruce heard their feet on the gravel outside and got up reluctantly to open the door for them. He'd been reading some of Byron's poems he'd sneaked aboard the ship; after that he had been on the point of dozing off, and now
Wanderers of the Wolf Moon By NELSON S. BOND They were marooned on Titan, their ship wrecked, the radio smashed. Yet they had to exist, had to build a new life on a hostile world. And the man who assumed command was Gregory Malcolm, the bespectacled secretary—whose only adventures had come through the pages of a book. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Sparks snapped off the switches and followed him to the door of the radio turret. Sparks
What is POSAT? By PHYLLIS STERLING SMITH Illustrated by ED ALEXANDER [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Of course coming events cast their shadows before, but this shadow was 400 years long! The following advertisement appeared in the July 1953 issue of several magazines: MASTERY OF ALL KNOWLEDGE CAN BE YOURS! What is the secret source of those profound principles that can solve the problems of life? Send for our FREE booklet of explanation. Do not be a
Question:
What is the relationship between Dobbin and Willard?
Answer:
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[
"Larry Dobbin and John Willard are astronauts together in space on a mission to explore a planetoid beyond Pluto. When a meteor damages their rocket, they both realize they will never return to Earth. Willard considers Dobbin the best friend he has ever had friend, and when Dobbin is dying, Willard tries to keep his spirits up by telling him that he has a new plan for a way for them to return to Earth. When Dobbin wants to see the stars one last time before he dies, Willard raises him so that he can see them out the port window. When Dobbins sees the Ghost Ship and says that it has come for him, Willard assures him that nothing is there. After Dobbin dies, Willard holds a wake for him for two days before he recycles Dobbin’s body because the ship can still break down waste and refuse to create food and air. Afterward, Willard regrets disposing of Dobbin’s body. With Dobbin gone, Willard experiences great pain and loneliness. Eventually, Willard sees the Ghost Ship and knows that his friend was right about it.",
"Dobbin and Willard are close friends, companions, and colleagues. As they co-pilot and run the Mary Lou together in outer space, their relationship continued to develop. Willard even said that Dobbin was his sole friend in space. Being the only two people on board the Mary Lou brought them closer together and helped their relationship evolve. \nAlthough the reader does not see them together much, the effects of Dobbin on Willard are very evident and show how close the two of them were. Willard watched over his body for two Earth days before respectfully disposing of it. This dedication to his brethren shows how close the two of them became. \n",
"John Willard and Larry Dobbin are both spacemen piloting the “Mary Lou” on a mission to explore a small planet far away from Earth, past Pluto. Due to their isolation and sheer amount of time spent together, they become close friends. In fact, they are the only friends each other has ever had in outer space. Following the meteor strike that disables their ship, Willard understands Dobbin’s desire to return to Earth as well as the importance of having hope that such a return would one day be possible. Willard offers Dobbin support in his dying moments, holding him up so he can see out the window. This is when Dobbin sees the Ghost Ship right before passing away. Dobbin’s vision would influence Willard’s struggle between belief and disbelief throughout the remainder of his time in space.",
"Dobbin and Willard are the two space explorers aboard the Mary Lou, a ship bound to explore past Pluto. At the beginning of the story, Willard describes Dobbin as his only friend in space, and the best friend he ever had. The loss of Dobbin sends Willard into a spiral of loneliness and depression that lasts decades, as Dobbin was his only companion and connection to Earth. Dobbin only survives the first few paragraphs of the story, but he continues to have an influence on his colleague and friend. Dobbin believed he saw The Ghost Ship before he died, and the idea of that sticks with Willard throughout the rest of his journey aboard the Mary Lou and beyond, despite his skepticism. \n"
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I, the Unspeakable By WALT SHELDON Illustrated by LOUIS MARCHETTI [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction April 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] "What's in a name?" might be very dangerous to ask in certain societies, in which sticks and stones are also a big problem! I fought to be awake. I was dreaming, but I think I must have blushed. I must have blushed in my sleep. " Do it! " she said. " Please do it! For me! " It was the voice
he wrote exactly that, in small, neat script. It was unfortunate for his curiosity that Don could not see the contents of the three envelopes that were mailed from the offices of POSAT the following week. For this time they differed. Bill Evans was once again disappointed. The pamphlet that was enclosed gave what apparently meant to be final answers to life's problems. They were couched in vaguely metaphysical terms and offered absolutely no help to him. His disappointment was tempered, however, by the knowledge that he had unexpectedly found a job. Or, rather, it had fallen into his lap.
THE HIGHEST MOUNTAIN By BRYCE WALTON Illustrated by BOB HAYES [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] First one up this tallest summit in the Solar System was a rotten egg ... a very rotten egg! Bruce heard their feet on the gravel outside and got up reluctantly to open the door for them. He'd been reading some of Byron's poems he'd sneaked aboard the ship; after that he had been on the point of dozing off, and now
Wanderers of the Wolf Moon By NELSON S. BOND They were marooned on Titan, their ship wrecked, the radio smashed. Yet they had to exist, had to build a new life on a hostile world. And the man who assumed command was Gregory Malcolm, the bespectacled secretary—whose only adventures had come through the pages of a book. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Sparks snapped off the switches and followed him to the door of the radio turret. Sparks
What is POSAT? By PHYLLIS STERLING SMITH Illustrated by ED ALEXANDER [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Of course coming events cast their shadows before, but this shadow was 400 years long! The following advertisement appeared in the July 1953 issue of several magazines: MASTERY OF ALL KNOWLEDGE CAN BE YOURS! What is the secret source of those profound principles that can solve the problems of life? Send for our FREE booklet of explanation. Do not be a
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What is the setting of the story?
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about The Beast-Jewel of Mars by V. E. Thiessen.
Relevant chunks:
explain the phenomena of the Ghost Ship? Was it really only a product of his imagination? What of all the others who had seen it? Was it possible for many different men under many different situations to have the same exact illusion? Reason denied that. But perhaps space itself denies reason. Grimly he retraced the legend of the Ghost Ship. A chance phrase here and a story there put together all that he knew: Doomed for all eternity to wander in the empty star-lanes, the Ghost Ship haunts the Solar System that gave it birth. And this is its tragedy,
course. What is it that girls in small offices do or eat or drink or wear that girls in large offices don't do or eat or drink or wear? What do writers and doctors do differently? Or poets and dentists? What are we missing? What—" In the outer office a girl cried out. A body thumped against a desk, then a chair, then to the floor. Two girls screamed. Andy bolted up from his chair. Racing to the door, he shouted back to Bettijean, "Get a staff doctor and a chemist from the lab." It was the girl who had
This was no fantasy. There was a scientific reason for it. There must be! Or should there be? Throughout all Earth history there had been Ghost Ships sailing the Seven Seas—ships doomed to roam forever because their crew broke some unbreakable law. If this was true for the ships of the seas, why not for the ships of empty space? He looked again at the strange ship. It was motionless. At least it was not nearing him. Willard could see nothing but its vague outline. A moment later he could discern a faint motion. It was turning! The Ghost Ship
HOME IS WHERE YOU LEFT IT By ADAM CHASE [Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories February 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] The chance of mass slaughter was their eternal nightmare. How black is the blackest treachery? Is the most callous traitor entitled to mercy? Steve pondered these questions. His decision? That at times the villain should possibly be spoken of as a hero. Only the shells of deserted mud-brick houses greeted Steve Cantwell when he reached the village. He poked around in them for a
stinging forehead on his arms, cursing softly and crying. Finally he rolled over, pulled his foot out of the mess, and took off his shoes. They were full of mud—sticky sandy mud. The dark world was reeling about him, and the wind was dragging at his breath. He fell back against the sand pile and let his feet sink in the mud hole and wriggled his toes. He was laughing soundlessly, and his face was wet in the wind. He couldn't think. He couldn't remember where he was and why, and he stopped caring, and after a while he felt
Question:
What is the setting of the story?
Answer:
|
[
"The story begins in in the desert on Mars, on the edge of a canal. In the bottom of the canal there is a fabulous city with the spires and minarets. Following the main character, the setting moves closer to the city, all the way through red dust everywhere around. The city is surrounded with a high wall and a heavy gate carved with lotus blossoms. Inside the gate there is a sentinel with a sword and a crowd surrounds the character soon. He then escapes to the desert with its dust again and suddenly sees the city in an ugly way, the whole setting becomes disgusting and sordid. It keeps changing from beautiful to ugliness then while Eric goes away up the rocky sides of the canal to the desert. From there he moves to the ship. The ship is familiar to the character, though it's unlocked and empty. Eric returns to the city and starts going around the wall. Together with his brother he enters the city and heads to its center, the city seems beautiful and ugly at the same time while the helmet is still on Eric. Without it the city is more beautiful than ever. He follows his brother down a street of blue fur, then they ran from persecutors and Eric hid in a crevice between two buildings. from there some people captured Eric and moved to the center of the street.Then, Eric is saved by a girl and escapes on a horse. The setting moves to the door of the house of the Council and Eric enters. He goes into a large conference room through the hallway. There is a great T-table with six people sitting. ",
"The story is set on Mars. Eric finds himself in a pit, where a beautiful, almost magical city lies. It is more stunning than imagination, with bejewelled towers and a soft, sweet music that spills out over the city walls. Outside of this city are the deserts of Mars, which were once lush, and divided by streams of green water. On the desert plane is Eric and his brother's ship. Inside the city again is the headquarters where the Elders sit. It is a functional, cubic building, which is described as just as beautiful as the rest of the buildings of the city, but in a rather different way. \n",
"There is a canal that is filled with red dust, and there are spires and minarets which twinkles in the distance. The side of the canal has small slopes and rough sandstones. The city is surrounded by high walls and the gate is carved with lotus blossoms. The city, without the illusions, becomes dull and sordid. It was filled with disgust and hatred. Eric’s ship has a door that leads directly to the body of the ship. There is a control board where a note from Grave is clipped. Back at the city, the street is filled with blue fur. The crevice between two buildings is used for hiding, but soon Eric is taken down the fur road to the center. The city is filled with exquisite ornaments. On the other hand, the Elder’s building is cubical and in direct contrast with the city. It seems as if it is from another time. The door of this building is also very plain. The pathway from the door leads to a conference room which has a great T-shaped table made of the same luminous plastic as the door. Beneath the building, there is a machine that translates the mass will of the citizens into reality. ",
"The story is first set outside of the city. Eric is near a canal in a desert on Mars. There is red dust being sifted by the winds and rough sandstone everywhere. Once he reaches the city, it is illusioned to have high walls and a gate with lotus blossoms carved into it. Eric also sees a long blue street from where the sentinel stands. Once he begins to beat the door, causing his hat to fall off, the city’s appearance changes to one that has misshapen gargoyles of hatred as its spires and minarets. The previously beautiful music also changes to a song of hate. Eric’s ship is briefly described as having locked doors and being armed enough to destroy the city. Once Nolette and Eric reach the city’s center, the building is described as a monolith from another time. It is cubical and contrasts the rest of the city with its severe line and architecture. Even the door is plain and made out of luminous plastic, giving it a more timeless beauty. Down the hallway, there is a conference room with a T-shaped table made up of the same luminous plastic as the door. Beneath the building, caverns house the heart of the machine city. When Kroon mentions the past to Eric, he says that Mars once ran clear and green with water. Instead of deserts, there were vineyards and gardens. "
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explain the phenomena of the Ghost Ship? Was it really only a product of his imagination? What of all the others who had seen it? Was it possible for many different men under many different situations to have the same exact illusion? Reason denied that. But perhaps space itself denies reason. Grimly he retraced the legend of the Ghost Ship. A chance phrase here and a story there put together all that he knew: Doomed for all eternity to wander in the empty star-lanes, the Ghost Ship haunts the Solar System that gave it birth. And this is its tragedy,
course. What is it that girls in small offices do or eat or drink or wear that girls in large offices don't do or eat or drink or wear? What do writers and doctors do differently? Or poets and dentists? What are we missing? What—" In the outer office a girl cried out. A body thumped against a desk, then a chair, then to the floor. Two girls screamed. Andy bolted up from his chair. Racing to the door, he shouted back to Bettijean, "Get a staff doctor and a chemist from the lab." It was the girl who had
This was no fantasy. There was a scientific reason for it. There must be! Or should there be? Throughout all Earth history there had been Ghost Ships sailing the Seven Seas—ships doomed to roam forever because their crew broke some unbreakable law. If this was true for the ships of the seas, why not for the ships of empty space? He looked again at the strange ship. It was motionless. At least it was not nearing him. Willard could see nothing but its vague outline. A moment later he could discern a faint motion. It was turning! The Ghost Ship
HOME IS WHERE YOU LEFT IT By ADAM CHASE [Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories February 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] The chance of mass slaughter was their eternal nightmare. How black is the blackest treachery? Is the most callous traitor entitled to mercy? Steve pondered these questions. His decision? That at times the villain should possibly be spoken of as a hero. Only the shells of deserted mud-brick houses greeted Steve Cantwell when he reached the village. He poked around in them for a
stinging forehead on his arms, cursing softly and crying. Finally he rolled over, pulled his foot out of the mess, and took off his shoes. They were full of mud—sticky sandy mud. The dark world was reeling about him, and the wind was dragging at his breath. He fell back against the sand pile and let his feet sink in the mud hole and wriggled his toes. He was laughing soundlessly, and his face was wet in the wind. He couldn't think. He couldn't remember where he was and why, and he stopped caring, and after a while he felt
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What is the plot of the story?
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about Appointment In Tomorrow by Fritz Leiber.
Relevant chunks:
and didn't look at her. "You'll have to spend most of the trip in a hammock." "I can take it." Suddenly she smiled, wanly. "I was with the Fleet. How long will it take?" "Eight days, in that ship." Roberds lit his pipe, and carefully hid his emotions. He knew Peterson was harboring the same thoughts. Eight days in space, in a small ship meant for two, and built for planetary surface flights. Eight days in that untrustworthy crate, hurtling to save the lives of that girl and Gladney. "Who was that ... man? The one you put out?" Gray
its own folly. In other words, should he become the MASTER OF LIFE AND DEATH? CAST OF CHARACTERS ROY WALTON He had to adopt the motto— the ends justify the means . FITZMAUGHAM His reward for devoted service was—an assassin's bullet. FRED WALTON His ambition was to fill his brother's shoes—but he underestimated their size. LEE PERCY His specialty was sugarcoating bitter pills. PRIOR With the pen as his only weapon, could he save his son? DR. LAMARRE He died for discovering the secret of immortality. Contents I The offices of the Bureau of Population Equalization, vulgarly known as Popeek,
asked. "We call him Rat," Roberds said. She didn't ask why. She said: "Why couldn't he pilot the ship, I mean? What is his record?" Peterson opened his mouth. "Shut up, Peterson!" the Chief snapped. "We don't talk about his record around here, Miss Gray. It's not a pretty thing to tell." "Stow it, Chief," said Peterson. "Miss Gray is no pantywaist." He turned to the nurse. "Ever hear of the Sansan massacre?" Patti Gray paled. "Yes," she whispered. "Was Rat in that?" Roberds shook his head. "He didn't take part in it. But Rat was attached to a very
many days?" His only answer was an inhuman snarl, and the cruel blazing of those inhuman eyes. She fell face first to the floor. "I can't keep it up!" she cried. The sound of her voice rolled along the hot steel deck. "I cant! I cant!" A double handful of tepid water was thrown in her face. "Get up!" Rat stood over her, face twisted, his body hunched. "Get up!" She stared at him, dazed. He kicked her. "Get up!" The tepid water ran off her face and far away she heard Judith calling.... She forced herself up. Rat was
moving things had unnerved him. He had already sounded the alert, flicked out the defense screens. Now he had nothing to do. He tried to concentrate on what the League Law would have him do. The Law was no help. Contact with planet-bound races was forbidden under any circumstances. But could a bunch of robots be called a race? The Law said nothing about robots because Earthmen had none. The building of imaginative robots was expressly forbidden. But at any rate, Steffens thought, he had made contact already. While Steffens stood by the screen, completely bewildered for the first time
Question:
What is the plot of the story?
Answer:
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[
"Following World War III at the end of the 20th century, American society is dependent upon a machine created by the Thinker's Foundation; this machine, named Maizie, has the ability to answer any question posed to it, and it is used often by politicians and public figures for societal decision making. Jorj Helmuth, a Thinker with hypnotic abilities, awakes with a girl, Caddy, asleep beside him. Jorj is struck with a revelation about new developments in his work towards space domination, and he sends a letter to a group of physicists calling for a meeting later that afternoon. Jorj is then alerted that the President has arrived to consult Maizie. He commences the daily procedure of feeding the machine questions through a tape, and meanwhile attention turns to a broadcast of a rocket taking off to Mars. The Secretary of Space, who joined the President, is wary of his exclusion in this project, but disregards it as he credits Maizie for the decision. Jorj discloses that the Thinkers plan to find ways to gain access to and control of Martian minds. As Maizie begins answering questions, one of them sparks curiosity, asking whether Maizie is short for Maelzel. The machine responds with \"no\" as the officials are perplexed by the question, which references a character in a story by Edgar Allen Poe in which a machine was found to be fake and operated by a man. Apparently, the question came from a member of Opperly's group, a team of physicists; Jorj advises that the issue be looked into. Later, scientists Opperly and Farquar discuss the previous events. Opperly says that he covered for Farquar, who submitted the question, but still disagrees with his decision to dig at the Thinkers. Farquar believes that the Thinkers, along with Maizie, are fakes and ought to be exposed. Farquar and Opperly go back and forth, debating whether or not exposing the Thinkers is worth violence or energy, when Farquar receives a message from Jorj regarding the meeting about his space project. Opperly is skeptical of Jorj's motives, but Farquar plans to go anyway. On his way home, Jorj ponders the future of the Thinkers with excitement, eagerly awaiting a future where they would be on the same level of the Scientists, and where they would build the true Maizie.",
"In an alternate history of America, wherein World War III has occurred, Jorj Helmuth wakes up and turns off the device which enables him to learn in his sleep. Jorj is a forty year old Thinker, a class of individuals who work with the US government on various projects, such as monthly rockets to Mars and a super-intelligent computer Maizie. As Jorj prepares for his day, he receives a call from the President, who is waiting to see Maizie. \nMaizie, a large computer with large panels, controls, indicators, and terminals occupies a two-story room in the Thinkers’ Foundation, in which the President and members of his cabinet are waiting. It is described as many times more intelligent than humans, and was built by the Thinkers despite the skepticism of cyberneticists and scientists. The president, his secretary, two generals, the Secretary of State, and the Secretary of Space regard Maizie with reverence, speaking in hushed tones for fear that it could overhear them despite the knowledge that it only receives input from the ticker tape fed to it. Jorj enters onto the tape questions from the officials, before noticing an errant question, which he learns is from Morton Opperly’s group of physicists. He feeds the tape to Maizie, which begins to emit a noise indicative of the start of its processes.\nAs they await Maizie’s answers, Jorj directs their attention to a television screen broadcasting the launch of a rocket to Mars. We learn that Martians have imparted profound wisdom through the Thinkers to the world, which still suffers from the effects of the third world war. In response to the President’s wish that Martians be brought to Earth to directly share their mental science, Jorj reminds him that only the Thinkers’ minds can safely interact with the Martians’. \nThe narrator reveals that inside Maizie is, rather than complicated machinery etching the edges of molecules to store information, a man who manually answers the input questions. He pauses when he reaches the question from Opperly’s group, which asks if Maizie stands for Maelzel. He types out a response in the negative and continues. It is also revealed that the rocket launched for Mars only travels acutely beyond the ionosphere, rather than to its advertised destination. The astronaut, who is accompanied by his cat, reads about the knowledge which he would pass off as Martian wisdom upon his descent to Earth. \nMaizie has returned the output tape, and the Secretary of Space wonders aloud who Maelzel is. One of the generals recalls that it is from a story about a chess automaton inside which was actually a man. They dismiss Opperly’s group as confused. \nIn Opperly’s residence however, Opperly and Willard Farquar discuss the Thinkers’ deception. Though Farquar aims to reveal the sham, Opperly is unsure he will succeed, citing that people want to be told what they wish were true. Farquhar receives an invitation from Jorj, which they surmise is because of a demand for rockets in the near future.\n",
"The story is set after World War III. Jorj is a Thinker that occasionally uses hypnotic control on a girl named Caddy to make her agreeable with him. The Thinkers have made big claims that they have achieved great technological feats. They claim that they have created a cubic brain-machine that is intelligent and knows everything. They say the machine event helped finished building itself. They also have claimed that they have nuclear powered Mars rockets. This too is not true. They send a person to space pretending that the person is headed towards Mars, when in reality that person will be circling the Earth for two months. Not everyone knows of the lies, the President and secretary of state do not. \n\nDuring a review of the tapes for Maizie, the group comes across an unusual question asking about Maizie. Jorj finds out that the question was written by Opperly’s group. Opperly and Farquar are two scientists that know of the Thinkers deception. Farquar is the one who wrote the question, to Opperly’s dismay. Caddy was previously with Farquar, before she went with Jorj. \n\nOpperly and Farquar disagree over how they should respond to the Thinker’s deceptions. Farquar wants to act with violence to continue to try to expose them. Opperly reasons that they tried to expose the Thinkers before and nothing happened, so they should cut their losses. Farquar suggests that the Thinkers are vulnerable because their technology does not exist and it would be easy to attack them. Opperly is concerned that the Thinkers may be able to buy Farquar off if they offer Caddy back to him. \n\nAt the end of the story, Jorj has plans to make sure the Thinkers no longer have to use deception. He excitedly thinks of how the Thinkers can build the true Mars rocket and even perhaps the true Maizie and goes to sleep with these thoughts in his mind. \n",
"After waking up, Jorj Helmuth, a Thinker, sends a message to Farquar and the other professionals so that he can get help in building a rocket. He states that he has funds from the government and wishes to work together. Importantly, the girl, who is sleeping next to Jorj, is controls hypnotically by Jorj, and she is somehow connected to Farquar. \n\nThe president then shows up waiting to see Maizie. Standing before the two stories high electrical brain, he feels like he is seeing the actual God. Not only does he feels so, the generals wonders if this is the Second Coming, the Secretary of State feels the power and respect in wisdom that this machine has, the Secretary of Space is relieved that the Thinks are the ones who built it rather than the professional physicists who does not get things done but simply tell you how things should be done. While surprised at the question that the Opperly’s group asked, Jorj simply entered all the questions for Maizie to solve on the tape. Then he suggests that the government officials should watch the takeoff of the rocket that is going to Mars. While the Secretary of Space is somewhat angry at Jorj for not even informing him about the spaceship, he tells himself that the Thinkers had rescued him from breakdowns and will be bringing mental discoveries from Mars. \n\nAs Maizie continues to work, the readers learn that there is actually a person that work on the questions as they enter into Maizie. He reads the questions and write down their answers. Interestingly, he also notices the question from the Opperly’s group. It makes him somewhat angry. After the rocket goes into space, Jorj gives the answers that are produced by Maizie to each government official. Then we learn that the Opperly’s group is asking about Maelzel. Maelzel was a chess playing machine that was proven to have a man hidden inside it. Later we learned that the Opperly’s group knows that Maizie also has a man hidden in it, and they wanted to tease them. Which is why they wrote the question. Apparently they succeeded, since the question got Jorj angry.\n\nWe then see two physicists, namely Opperly and Farquar, arguing over whether the world needs a magician or a physicist right now when the invitation that Jorj previously sent arrives. Opperly is suspicious of the invitation and what they will do to Farquar, mentioning the girl that ran off with a Thinker. Indeed, Jorj is not only thinking of building a Mars rocket, he also want to have other things built such as Maizie, so that the Thinkers will be farther ahead from with the scientists. But Farquar does not think so."
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and didn't look at her. "You'll have to spend most of the trip in a hammock." "I can take it." Suddenly she smiled, wanly. "I was with the Fleet. How long will it take?" "Eight days, in that ship." Roberds lit his pipe, and carefully hid his emotions. He knew Peterson was harboring the same thoughts. Eight days in space, in a small ship meant for two, and built for planetary surface flights. Eight days in that untrustworthy crate, hurtling to save the lives of that girl and Gladney. "Who was that ... man? The one you put out?" Gray
its own folly. In other words, should he become the MASTER OF LIFE AND DEATH? CAST OF CHARACTERS ROY WALTON He had to adopt the motto— the ends justify the means . FITZMAUGHAM His reward for devoted service was—an assassin's bullet. FRED WALTON His ambition was to fill his brother's shoes—but he underestimated their size. LEE PERCY His specialty was sugarcoating bitter pills. PRIOR With the pen as his only weapon, could he save his son? DR. LAMARRE He died for discovering the secret of immortality. Contents I The offices of the Bureau of Population Equalization, vulgarly known as Popeek,
asked. "We call him Rat," Roberds said. She didn't ask why. She said: "Why couldn't he pilot the ship, I mean? What is his record?" Peterson opened his mouth. "Shut up, Peterson!" the Chief snapped. "We don't talk about his record around here, Miss Gray. It's not a pretty thing to tell." "Stow it, Chief," said Peterson. "Miss Gray is no pantywaist." He turned to the nurse. "Ever hear of the Sansan massacre?" Patti Gray paled. "Yes," she whispered. "Was Rat in that?" Roberds shook his head. "He didn't take part in it. But Rat was attached to a very
many days?" His only answer was an inhuman snarl, and the cruel blazing of those inhuman eyes. She fell face first to the floor. "I can't keep it up!" she cried. The sound of her voice rolled along the hot steel deck. "I cant! I cant!" A double handful of tepid water was thrown in her face. "Get up!" Rat stood over her, face twisted, his body hunched. "Get up!" She stared at him, dazed. He kicked her. "Get up!" The tepid water ran off her face and far away she heard Judith calling.... She forced herself up. Rat was
moving things had unnerved him. He had already sounded the alert, flicked out the defense screens. Now he had nothing to do. He tried to concentrate on what the League Law would have him do. The Law was no help. Contact with planet-bound races was forbidden under any circumstances. But could a bunch of robots be called a race? The Law said nothing about robots because Earthmen had none. The building of imaginative robots was expressly forbidden. But at any rate, Steffens thought, he had made contact already. While Steffens stood by the screen, completely bewildered for the first time
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What is the plot of the story?
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about Galactic Ghost by Walter Kubilius.
Relevant chunks:
and didn't look at her. "You'll have to spend most of the trip in a hammock." "I can take it." Suddenly she smiled, wanly. "I was with the Fleet. How long will it take?" "Eight days, in that ship." Roberds lit his pipe, and carefully hid his emotions. He knew Peterson was harboring the same thoughts. Eight days in space, in a small ship meant for two, and built for planetary surface flights. Eight days in that untrustworthy crate, hurtling to save the lives of that girl and Gladney. "Who was that ... man? The one you put out?" Gray
its own folly. In other words, should he become the MASTER OF LIFE AND DEATH? CAST OF CHARACTERS ROY WALTON He had to adopt the motto— the ends justify the means . FITZMAUGHAM His reward for devoted service was—an assassin's bullet. FRED WALTON His ambition was to fill his brother's shoes—but he underestimated their size. LEE PERCY His specialty was sugarcoating bitter pills. PRIOR With the pen as his only weapon, could he save his son? DR. LAMARRE He died for discovering the secret of immortality. Contents I The offices of the Bureau of Population Equalization, vulgarly known as Popeek,
asked. "We call him Rat," Roberds said. She didn't ask why. She said: "Why couldn't he pilot the ship, I mean? What is his record?" Peterson opened his mouth. "Shut up, Peterson!" the Chief snapped. "We don't talk about his record around here, Miss Gray. It's not a pretty thing to tell." "Stow it, Chief," said Peterson. "Miss Gray is no pantywaist." He turned to the nurse. "Ever hear of the Sansan massacre?" Patti Gray paled. "Yes," she whispered. "Was Rat in that?" Roberds shook his head. "He didn't take part in it. But Rat was attached to a very
many days?" His only answer was an inhuman snarl, and the cruel blazing of those inhuman eyes. She fell face first to the floor. "I can't keep it up!" she cried. The sound of her voice rolled along the hot steel deck. "I cant! I cant!" A double handful of tepid water was thrown in her face. "Get up!" Rat stood over her, face twisted, his body hunched. "Get up!" She stared at him, dazed. He kicked her. "Get up!" The tepid water ran off her face and far away she heard Judith calling.... She forced herself up. Rat was
moving things had unnerved him. He had already sounded the alert, flicked out the defense screens. Now he had nothing to do. He tried to concentrate on what the League Law would have him do. The Law was no help. Contact with planet-bound races was forbidden under any circumstances. But could a bunch of robots be called a race? The Law said nothing about robots because Earthmen had none. The building of imaginative robots was expressly forbidden. But at any rate, Steffens thought, he had made contact already. While Steffens stood by the screen, completely bewildered for the first time
Question:
What is the plot of the story?
Answer:
|
[
"John Willard and Larry Dobbin are astronauts who have been in space for four years on the rocket Mary Lou, and as Dobbin is dying, he regrets that he will not see Earth again. Willard assures him that they will make it back, but he knows that they will never make it back because their ship was damaged by a meteor. Although the ship can still carry out functions to support life, it is not navigable. After Willard helps Dobbin look at the stars one more time, Dobbin cries out that it’s true—when an astronaut is dying, the Ghost Ship comes for him. \n\nWillard recycles Dobbin’s body but feels regretful about it. He longs to see the Earth again and walk on it, but he knows this will never happen and feels intensely lonely. After two years, a strange thing happens. Willard is looking at the stars, and it seems that they are winking at him. Something seems to be moving toward him, and it turns out to be an ancient ship. Willard’s gauges do not register the ship’s presence although he sees it with his own eyes, and Willard realizes that it is the Ghost Ship coming for him. Strangely enough, however, the ship turns away and moves away from him.\n\nSeven years later, a newspaper on Earth publishes a story that Willard’s son, J. Willard II, plans to build a larger version of his father’s ship, the Mary Lou II, in memory of his father, but Willard Sr. is unaware of this. He continues to experience excruciating loneliness and dreams about his life on Earth—the people he knew, the sounds, and the cities. One day a giant rocket ship comes alongside the Mary Lou, and Willard is thrilled that he has been discovered. But the vessel turns away and leaves. Willard notices that he can see starlight through the ship and realizes it is the Ghost Ship. \n\nOne day he sees another ship and, at first, fears the Ghost Ship has returned. The new ship looks solid, though, and it contacts him, addressing the Mary Lou by name. Willard believes that this ship will take him back to Earth and eagerly boards it. Willard is kept drugged for a while but eventually is alert enough to speak with the captain. When Willard asks when they will return to Earth, the captain explains that they cannot return because matter in space loses its mass and energy until nothing is left. If they tried to return to Earth, they would pass through it. Willard then realizes he is on the Ghost Ship, and he is one of its Ghosts. \n\n",
"Galactic Ghost begins with death. John Willard is taking care of his co-pilot and best friend, Larry Dobbin as he dies. A meteor struck their rocket ship, the Mary Lou, and damaged both her and Dobbin. As Dobbin dies, Willard gently takes care of him and lifts him up to the port so he can see the stars one last time. Just before he passes, Dobbin cries out and says he saw the infamous ghost ship. It steals dying spacemen who have no hope of returning to Earth, cursing them to spend the rest of their lives as ghosts in space. \nAfter Dobbin passes, Willard watches over him for two days before removing his body and turning it into energy for the useless engine in the Mary Lou. Although the ship is livable, it is not flyable. Taking careful diligence to check every part of the ship, Willard manages to keep the Mary Lou from completely shutting down. He transforms waste into food and learns to survive. \nTwo years of great loneliness and despair pass. As Willard looks out the port, he sees blinking stars. Excited, he investigates and realizes that it was an old-fashioned spaceship from decades ago. He soon sees that half of it is invisible, hence the blinking star phenomenon. As the ship gets closer, his sensors remain quiet. Putting it all together, he concludes that this is the Ghost Ship, but pushes the thought away, claiming it’s impossible. Slowly, the ship turns around and travels away from him. \nFlash forward seven more years and a newspaper published a story about Willard and Dobbin on Earth. Sadly, he would never get to see it. Willard’s son was about to create his own ship called Mary Lou II to honor his father. Willard spends his years alone trying to survive and also trying to fight off his memories of home, as they torture him. He kept up with the days and nights of Earth for many years and made his bed. But the memories of his old friends, the cities he lived in, and the crunch of snow beneath his feet drove him mad. Quickly, he lost track of the days. Another ship came and went, torturing him with hope yet again. \nAlmost twenty years passed and he grew more anguished every day. A ship came toward him and asked if he wanted to board, seeing as his ship was unlivable. Grateful he had checked the space suit beforehand, Willard traveled to the other ship and quickly fell into a deep sleep, exhausted by his years of solitude. After being drugged and evaded, Willard finally gets to speak to the captain of the ship on the third week who reveals that this is the Ghost Ship. Willard was only able to perceive the Ghost Ship because he and the Mary Lou were already ghosts, faded to the human eye. They are only shells on the Ghost Ship, and Willard is doomed to join them forever. ",
"John Willard's and Larry Dobbin's ship the \"Mary Lou\" had been damaged by a meteor during its mission to explore a small planet beyond Pluto, and Willard and Dobbin are waiting to die in space. Eventually, Dobbin dies, and he claims to see the fabled \"Ghost Ship\" seconds before his passing. After Dobbin's death, Willard manages to stay alive thanks to the machines that could convert waste into food and air. Willard spends two years alone, lost in hopeless thought and agony. Eventually, he sees a blinking shape in the distance, which he soon determines is an old-fashioned rocket ship. However, his instruments indicate there is no ship despite what he sees. Willard oscillates between doubting his own vision and believing there must be a scientific explanation for it. As he struggles with these thoughts, the ship leaves, and Willard spends seven years alone. Meanwhile, back on Earth, a newspaper from his hometown of Arden publishes an obituary of Willard and Dobbin indicating Willard’s son’s intention to build a “Mary Lou II.” Willard recalls memories with his wife and co-workers and the feeling of walking around Arden. He thinks about the legend of the Ghost Ship, which is said to come for the spacemen who die in space alone. A few years pass, and Willard sees the Ghost Ship pass close to him and turn away again, appearing to taunt him. He begins to lose track of time and guesses that as many as twenty years pass; he spends his days going through the motions of managing the ship as he feels himself aging physically. Then, he sees a ship approach, and this time it is a real ship. The ship sends out a rescue calls and retrieves Willard from the “Mary Lou.” Willard spends the next few days reacquainting himself with human interaction and struggling with the horrible memories of his decades in solitude. Then, he starts to realize something is off about the crew of the ship that rescued him. They will not engage him in any conversation other than the operations of the ship. When Willard meets the captain later, he reveals he actually is on the Ghost Ship after all. It only appeared solid to Willard the more the “Mary Lou” lost its mass and energy and itself became a kind of “ghost ship” through its aimless wandering through space. Willard realizes he is dead and will never again return to Earth. ",
"John Willard and Larry Dobbin are the lone space explorers aboard the Mary Lou, a ship that can’t move due to meteor damage. As the story begins, WIllard tries to comfort Dobbin as Dobbin dies. Before passing away, Dobbin sees what he believes to be “The Ghost Ship”, a fabled ship that comes for dying spacemen. Willard believes Ghost Ships are just fairy tales and that Dobbin was delirious. \n\nTwo years later, Willard sees what looks like a partially invisible rocket ship, though his ship’s control board shows no sign of anything. As the ship turns away and disappears, Willard wonders if he imagined it or if it could be The Ghost Ship, but decides that is impossible. \n\nSeven more years go by, and we read a small article from Willard and Dobbin’s hometown newspaper (that we are told Willard will never see), about the thirteenth anniversary of Willard and Dobbin embarking on their mission, how they have never been heard from again, and how Willard’s son is having a large spaceship manufactured in his father’s honor. \n\nBack on the Mary Lou, Willard can’t help but dream of his Earth days each night. He grows more and more despondent and thinks about Ghost Ships. He stops looking out the window, and isn’t sure if fifteen or twenty years have passed. He wonders if he has gone mad when he sees a ship coming. Everything changes when he realizes that it’s a real ship that taps out a real message on his space-telegrapher.\n\nThe other ship invites him to come aboard and he gratefully accepts, boarding it and immediately falling asleep. Over the next few weeks he drifts in and out of consciousness, knowing that he must be being drugged but also realizing it would be difficult for him to acclimate to being around others so soon. His memories start to come back and his mind starts to clear, and he notices that none of the men caring for him want to give him any information or answer his questions. \n\nAfter Willard awakens fully, one of the men says he’ll get the captain, who wanted to see Willard when he came to. The captain comes to see him, and Willard notices that he is very old. He tells the captain that he can’t wait to get to Earth and asks when they’ll go. The captain explains that after floating around in space for as long as they and Willard have, things and people lose their mass and energy. Willard hadn’t yet lost his twenty years ago, which is why their ship didn’t look fully formed to him then. Now that he has, he is just a shell like them and can see them fully. \n\nAs Willard puts the pieces together, the captain explains that they can’t go to Earth because they would pass right through it. Willard realizes that this is, in fact, a Ghost Ship, and that they are the ghosts, and the captain confirms this. \n"
] |
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and didn't look at her. "You'll have to spend most of the trip in a hammock." "I can take it." Suddenly she smiled, wanly. "I was with the Fleet. How long will it take?" "Eight days, in that ship." Roberds lit his pipe, and carefully hid his emotions. He knew Peterson was harboring the same thoughts. Eight days in space, in a small ship meant for two, and built for planetary surface flights. Eight days in that untrustworthy crate, hurtling to save the lives of that girl and Gladney. "Who was that ... man? The one you put out?" Gray
its own folly. In other words, should he become the MASTER OF LIFE AND DEATH? CAST OF CHARACTERS ROY WALTON He had to adopt the motto— the ends justify the means . FITZMAUGHAM His reward for devoted service was—an assassin's bullet. FRED WALTON His ambition was to fill his brother's shoes—but he underestimated their size. LEE PERCY His specialty was sugarcoating bitter pills. PRIOR With the pen as his only weapon, could he save his son? DR. LAMARRE He died for discovering the secret of immortality. Contents I The offices of the Bureau of Population Equalization, vulgarly known as Popeek,
asked. "We call him Rat," Roberds said. She didn't ask why. She said: "Why couldn't he pilot the ship, I mean? What is his record?" Peterson opened his mouth. "Shut up, Peterson!" the Chief snapped. "We don't talk about his record around here, Miss Gray. It's not a pretty thing to tell." "Stow it, Chief," said Peterson. "Miss Gray is no pantywaist." He turned to the nurse. "Ever hear of the Sansan massacre?" Patti Gray paled. "Yes," she whispered. "Was Rat in that?" Roberds shook his head. "He didn't take part in it. But Rat was attached to a very
many days?" His only answer was an inhuman snarl, and the cruel blazing of those inhuman eyes. She fell face first to the floor. "I can't keep it up!" she cried. The sound of her voice rolled along the hot steel deck. "I cant! I cant!" A double handful of tepid water was thrown in her face. "Get up!" Rat stood over her, face twisted, his body hunched. "Get up!" She stared at him, dazed. He kicked her. "Get up!" The tepid water ran off her face and far away she heard Judith calling.... She forced herself up. Rat was
moving things had unnerved him. He had already sounded the alert, flicked out the defense screens. Now he had nothing to do. He tried to concentrate on what the League Law would have him do. The Law was no help. Contact with planet-bound races was forbidden under any circumstances. But could a bunch of robots be called a race? The Law said nothing about robots because Earthmen had none. The building of imaginative robots was expressly forbidden. But at any rate, Steffens thought, he had made contact already. While Steffens stood by the screen, completely bewildered for the first time
|
What are Ed and Verana's relationship to each other?
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about The Snare by Richard Rein Smith.
Relevant chunks:
rent between their world and his. "Ed!" Janet Loyce backed away nervously. "What is it? What—" Ed Loyce slammed the door behind him and came into the living room. "Pull down the shades. Quick." Janet moved toward the window. "But—" "Do as I say. Who else is here besides you?" "Nobody. Just the twins. They're upstairs in their room. What's happened? You look so strange. Why are you home?" Ed locked the front door. He prowled around the house, into the kitchen. From the drawer under the sink he slid out the big butcher knife and ran his finger along
into the alcove of LOYCE TV SALES AND SERVICE. "Take it easy." Margaret Henderson from the jewelry store joined them. "Something wrong?" "Ed's not feeling well." Loyce yanked himself free. "How can you stand here? Don't you see it? For God's sake—" "What's he talking about?" Margaret asked nervously. "The body!" Ed shouted. "The body hanging there!" More people collected. "Is he sick? It's Ed Loyce. You okay, Ed?" "The body!" Loyce screamed, struggling to get past them. Hands caught at him. He tore loose. "Let me go! The police! Get the police!" "Ed—" "Better get a doctor!" "He must
THE HANGING STRANGER BY PHILIP K. DICK ILLUSTRATED BY SMITH [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Science Fiction Adventures Magazine December 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Ed had always been a practical man, when he saw something was wrong he tried to correct it. Then one day he saw it hanging in the town square. Five o'clock Ed Loyce washed up, tossed on his hat and coat, got his car out and headed across town toward his TV sales store. He was tired. His back and shoulders
back road. To Oak Grove. I got onto it once. It's practically abandoned. Maybe they'll forget about it." "The old Ranch Road? Good Lord—it's completely closed. Nobody's supposed to drive over it." "I know." Ed thrust the map grimly into his coat. "That's our best chance. Now call down the twins and let's get going. Your car is full of gas, isn't it?" Janet was dazed. "The Chevy? I had it filled up yesterday afternoon." Janet moved toward the stairs. "Ed, I—" "Call the twins!" Ed unlocked the front door and peered out. Nothing stirred. No sign of life. All
mouth was open, tongue thick and ugly blue. "For Heaven's sake," Loyce muttered, sickened. He pushed down his nausea and made his way back to the sidewalk. He was shaking all over, with revulsion—and fear. Why? Who was the man? Why was he hanging there? What did it mean? And—why didn't anybody notice? He bumped into a small man hurrying along the sidewalk. "Watch it!" the man grated, "Oh, it's you, Ed." Ed nodded dazedly. "Hello, Jenkins." "What's the matter?" The stationery clerk caught Ed's arm. "You look sick." "The body. There in the park." "Sure, Ed." Jenkins led him
Question:
What are Ed and Verana's relationship to each other?
Answer:
|
[
"Ed and Verana are husband and wife. They live together in \"Lunar City, on the Moon, and have for the past year. Together, they're friends with the rest of the group. After Marie climbs into the star ship, Ed asks Verana if she wants to go in. They act as a team, always doing everything together. They are left in the passageway alone after Kane and Marie are taken. Ed holds Verana's hand as they walk down the corridor, a sign of affection. They explore the ship together first, always working together, discovering the meaning of the instructive drawings and the purpose of the different rooms. They sleep together in the same pod. ",
"Ed and Verana are husband and wife; the two have a pleasant dynamic and get along well. Before entering the strange object, the two ask each other if they want to go in, rather than trying to convince the other. When the two are left alone after Marie and Kane are taken into separate rooms, they work together to investigate the rest of the corridor and try to piece together bits of information cooperatively. Ed describes Verana as having an inner calmness and peacefulness, noting that it is a unique aspect of her personality. The two are similar in their rational approaches to the situation. ",
"Ed and Verana are married to each other. They get along well, and the two of them often stick together. Verana can stay calm in many situations because of an inner serenity that few people possess. On the other hand, Ed also tries to keep calm in most situations but gets nervous if it is potentially dangerous to him or his wife. When Verana is scared after what happens to Marie in the corridor, he puts his arm around her protectively and holds her close. Ed also knows Verana’s interests very well. He is aware that she is part of a group researching extra-sensory perception, and she most likely would have loved the opportunity to experience what Marie had.",
"Ed and Verana are married. They go side by side through the sphere, hesitating for a second before entry but making this decision together. When they are left alone in the corridor, Ed sees her fear and holds her close. Ed is also scared but he takes charge of the situation to lead his wife, and when other doors open the couple enters together. They follow each other through the rooms and each one does the same actions as another. Ed remembers about Verana's interest in extra-sensory perception and even wonders sarcastically if she is disappointed about not being contacted. The two are relatively calm and secure, they understand that nothing can be done and agree to it. Verana thinks logically and with inner serenity, Ed appreciates it and feels calm and resigned. They are similar and therefore make up a stable couple. Verana is scared for her husband when Kane is choking it as a normal wife would be, but overall the couple is as calm as possible. Moreover, both are rather interested in the aliens and support each other all the way, their couple is harmonious, especially on the contrast."
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rent between their world and his. "Ed!" Janet Loyce backed away nervously. "What is it? What—" Ed Loyce slammed the door behind him and came into the living room. "Pull down the shades. Quick." Janet moved toward the window. "But—" "Do as I say. Who else is here besides you?" "Nobody. Just the twins. They're upstairs in their room. What's happened? You look so strange. Why are you home?" Ed locked the front door. He prowled around the house, into the kitchen. From the drawer under the sink he slid out the big butcher knife and ran his finger along
into the alcove of LOYCE TV SALES AND SERVICE. "Take it easy." Margaret Henderson from the jewelry store joined them. "Something wrong?" "Ed's not feeling well." Loyce yanked himself free. "How can you stand here? Don't you see it? For God's sake—" "What's he talking about?" Margaret asked nervously. "The body!" Ed shouted. "The body hanging there!" More people collected. "Is he sick? It's Ed Loyce. You okay, Ed?" "The body!" Loyce screamed, struggling to get past them. Hands caught at him. He tore loose. "Let me go! The police! Get the police!" "Ed—" "Better get a doctor!" "He must
THE HANGING STRANGER BY PHILIP K. DICK ILLUSTRATED BY SMITH [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Science Fiction Adventures Magazine December 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Ed had always been a practical man, when he saw something was wrong he tried to correct it. Then one day he saw it hanging in the town square. Five o'clock Ed Loyce washed up, tossed on his hat and coat, got his car out and headed across town toward his TV sales store. He was tired. His back and shoulders
back road. To Oak Grove. I got onto it once. It's practically abandoned. Maybe they'll forget about it." "The old Ranch Road? Good Lord—it's completely closed. Nobody's supposed to drive over it." "I know." Ed thrust the map grimly into his coat. "That's our best chance. Now call down the twins and let's get going. Your car is full of gas, isn't it?" Janet was dazed. "The Chevy? I had it filled up yesterday afternoon." Janet moved toward the stairs. "Ed, I—" "Call the twins!" Ed unlocked the front door and peered out. Nothing stirred. No sign of life. All
mouth was open, tongue thick and ugly blue. "For Heaven's sake," Loyce muttered, sickened. He pushed down his nausea and made his way back to the sidewalk. He was shaking all over, with revulsion—and fear. Why? Who was the man? Why was he hanging there? What did it mean? And—why didn't anybody notice? He bumped into a small man hurrying along the sidewalk. "Watch it!" the man grated, "Oh, it's you, Ed." Ed nodded dazedly. "Hello, Jenkins." "What's the matter?" The stationery clerk caught Ed's arm. "You look sick." "The body. There in the park." "Sure, Ed." Jenkins led him
|
What is the relationship between Roddie and Ida?
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about Bridge Crossing by Dave Dryfoos.
Relevant chunks:
that man or manlike creatures have walked the Earth. Think what a small fraction of that time is four hundred years. Is it so strange that atomic energy was discovered a little early, by this displacement in time that is so tiny after all?" "But by one man," Don argued. Crandon shrugged. "Compared with him, Don, you and I are stupid men. So are the scientists who slowly plodded down the same road he had come, stumbling first on one truth and then the succeeding one. We know that inventions and discoveries do not occur at random. Each is based
at his arm, panting, "The officers?" and his own unfelt assurance. "They can take care of themselves. It's a general 'bandon ship." Enid Andrews stumbling over the hem of a filmy peignoir ... himself bending to lift her boldly and bodily, sweating palms feeling the warm animal heat of her excited body hot beneath them ... Crystal Andrews stopping suddenly, crying, "'Tina!" ... and Hannigan's reply, "Your maid? I woke her. She's in the life-skiff." Bert Andrews stopping suddenly, being sick in the middle of the corridor, his drunkenness losing itself in the thick, sure nausea of the ever-increasing unsteadiness
sardonic black eyes of the Panclast. "No use now for firearms," said Mury. "All the guns we could carry wouldn't help us if we were caught out there. That gun is just a stage property for the little play we're going to give in about three minutes—when you'll act a guardsman escorting me, a Poligerent of Dynamopolis, aboard the towship Shahrazad ." For a moment Ryd felt relief—he had hazily imagined that Mury's hatred of Mars and all things Martian might have led him to try to sabotage the Martian warship which lay somewhere on the runways beyond the long,
principles of dynamitism, war, and panclasm—that was We . The question hung in the air for a long moment. Then Ryd, with an effort, said, "Sure." A moment later it struck him that the monosyllabic assent was suspicious; he added quickly, "I got nothing to lose, see?" It was, he realized, the cold truth. "You won't lose," said Mury. He seemed to relax. But the menace with which he had clothed himself clung, as he turned back on the way they had come. Ryd followed dog-like, his feet in their worn shoes moving without his volition. He was frightened. Out
the Mesa? That was the ship from Mars—the escort they were sending with the power cylinder. The power's coming in again." He turned to greet a coin-tapping newcomer, added over his shoulder: "You know what that means, Ryd. Some life around here again. Jobs for all the bums in this town—even for you." He left Ryd frowning, thinking fuzzily. A warming gulp seemed to clear his head. Jobs. So they thought they could put that over on him again, huh? Well, he'd show them. He was smart; he was a damn good helio man—no, that had been ten years ago.
Question:
What is the relationship between Roddie and Ida?
Answer:
|
[
"Although Roddie has been preparing his entire life for defense against something, someone, he never knows who his enemy is. Ida - by nature of being Man - is his enemy, as Roddie believes him to be an android. When they first meet in the darkness, Roddie is afraid that Ida may realize what he is. However, they have no trouble once they see each other and spend the entire day together. Roddie proudly takes the role of Ida’s caretaker, noting that she is scared of the soldiers and not as strong as he is, so he takes her to a supermarket and feeds her. \n\nHowever, when Roddie reveals the talisman that prevented the soldier from attacking, their relationship changes. Ida tries to take Roddie back to her boat where she proclaims he belongs and Roddie insists that he belongs in this android-ridden dystopia. In their chase, they end up atop a tower. Realizing Ida now has the knowledge to bring home to the Invaders on how to enter the city, Roddie feels a sense of duty to kill her. She is the enemy, as he thinks she wishes to harm his city. As Ida cries - something Roddie can do but his friends can’t - he realizes that he too is Man and decides not to kill her. \n",
"Roddie and Ida meet in the manhole, usually Roddie’s hiding place. Roddie learns information about Invaders and the relationship between Invaders and the androids. He also realizes the similarities between him and Ida, compared to his differences from the androids. When they walk towards the bridge, their relationship is the protector and the protected. It is the teacher-student relationship when Roddie learns many new and inexperienced things from Ida throughout the conversation. The hunting-hunted relationship is when Roddie tries to grab and kill Ida, and Ida escapes to the bridge. They have to support each other on the bridge cable as they can barely maintain their strength through climbing, where their relationship is supportive. But after they arrive and sleep in the tower, Roddie regains his energy and tries to kill Ida again. Their relationship becomes hostile again. When Ida finally convinces Roddie that he is also a man, they become mutually supportive.",
"The relationship between them is tense. Roddie wants to kill Ida because he believes that she is an invader, and he wants to prove to the robots that he can fight alongside them. Ida, on the other hand, wants to help Roddie and take him back to the humans, because it is where he belongs. They both learn a lot from each other, as Roddie had never seen an “invader” and Ida was in San Francisco for the first time, so she thought that only robots lived in the city. The relationship between them is tense and violent as Roddie chases her up the bridge. Then, they seem to become friends, and Roddie ends up not killing her. ",
"At the beginning, Roddie is apprehensive and uncomfortable because he has never seen another human being. Soon, Ida makes him feel better by chatting with him. Roddie, who thinks that he is a peculiar type of robot, realizes that she thinks that he is a human, like her. She makes fun of him and seems to be comfortable with Roddie. When he shows her his watch, she becomes tense, and Roddie realizes that she knows who he is. She tries to take the young man with her to other people, but he attacks her instead. Both stubborn, they spend hours climbing the suspension cable and then sleep in the tower, too tired to keep up the altercation. At the end, Ida is crying and explaining to Roddie why he is not a robot. He doesn’t want to accept it, but Ida’s crying expression and an emotional monologue keep him from killing her. He seems to accept his identity the next morning.\n"
] |
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that man or manlike creatures have walked the Earth. Think what a small fraction of that time is four hundred years. Is it so strange that atomic energy was discovered a little early, by this displacement in time that is so tiny after all?" "But by one man," Don argued. Crandon shrugged. "Compared with him, Don, you and I are stupid men. So are the scientists who slowly plodded down the same road he had come, stumbling first on one truth and then the succeeding one. We know that inventions and discoveries do not occur at random. Each is based
at his arm, panting, "The officers?" and his own unfelt assurance. "They can take care of themselves. It's a general 'bandon ship." Enid Andrews stumbling over the hem of a filmy peignoir ... himself bending to lift her boldly and bodily, sweating palms feeling the warm animal heat of her excited body hot beneath them ... Crystal Andrews stopping suddenly, crying, "'Tina!" ... and Hannigan's reply, "Your maid? I woke her. She's in the life-skiff." Bert Andrews stopping suddenly, being sick in the middle of the corridor, his drunkenness losing itself in the thick, sure nausea of the ever-increasing unsteadiness
sardonic black eyes of the Panclast. "No use now for firearms," said Mury. "All the guns we could carry wouldn't help us if we were caught out there. That gun is just a stage property for the little play we're going to give in about three minutes—when you'll act a guardsman escorting me, a Poligerent of Dynamopolis, aboard the towship Shahrazad ." For a moment Ryd felt relief—he had hazily imagined that Mury's hatred of Mars and all things Martian might have led him to try to sabotage the Martian warship which lay somewhere on the runways beyond the long,
principles of dynamitism, war, and panclasm—that was We . The question hung in the air for a long moment. Then Ryd, with an effort, said, "Sure." A moment later it struck him that the monosyllabic assent was suspicious; he added quickly, "I got nothing to lose, see?" It was, he realized, the cold truth. "You won't lose," said Mury. He seemed to relax. But the menace with which he had clothed himself clung, as he turned back on the way they had come. Ryd followed dog-like, his feet in their worn shoes moving without his volition. He was frightened. Out
the Mesa? That was the ship from Mars—the escort they were sending with the power cylinder. The power's coming in again." He turned to greet a coin-tapping newcomer, added over his shoulder: "You know what that means, Ryd. Some life around here again. Jobs for all the bums in this town—even for you." He left Ryd frowning, thinking fuzzily. A warming gulp seemed to clear his head. Jobs. So they thought they could put that over on him again, huh? Well, he'd show them. He was smart; he was a damn good helio man—no, that had been ten years ago.
|
Who is Mrs. Brundage, and what happens to her?
|
After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about Dream Town by Henry Slesar.
Relevant chunks:
A wayfarer's return from a far country to his wife and family may be a shining experience, a kind of second honeymoon. Or it may be so shadowed by Time's relentless tyranny that the changes which have occurred in his absence can lead only to tragedy and despair. This rarely discerning, warmly human story by a brilliant newcomer to the science fantasy field is told with no pulling of punches, and its adroit unfolding will astound you. the hoofer by ... Walter M. Miller, Jr. A space rover has no business with a family. But what can a man in
will always wonder what might have happened if he hadn't called them! Was my distrust of Gravgak justified? Had I become merely a jealous lover—or was I right in my hunch that the tall muscular guard was a potential traitor?) Vauna reappeared at once. I believe she was glad that she had been called back. Gravgak came sullenly. At the edge of the crowd in the arched doorway he stood scowling. "While we are together," old Tomboldo said quietly, looking around at the assemblage, "I must tell you the decision of the council. Soon we will move back to the
course. What is it that girls in small offices do or eat or drink or wear that girls in large offices don't do or eat or drink or wear? What do writers and doctors do differently? Or poets and dentists? What are we missing? What—" In the outer office a girl cried out. A body thumped against a desk, then a chair, then to the floor. Two girls screamed. Andy bolted up from his chair. Racing to the door, he shouted back to Bettijean, "Get a staff doctor and a chemist from the lab." It was the girl who had
probably seen him approaching for some time. He bowed to the hooded figure and handed him a small bag. "More atavistic cubs, big and little! Hold still, Cynthia," a new voice cut in. Hal turned and saw that two cold-eyed girls had been ushered into the cubicle. One was wiping her close-cropped hair with one hand while mopping a green stain from her friend's back with the other. Hal nudged Joggy and whispered: "Butch!" But Joggy was still hypnotized by the Time Bubble. "Then how is it, Hal," he asked, "that light comes out of the bubble, if the people
alone." She started. I reached and barely touched her hand. She stopped. "I will talk with you later, Gravgak." "Now!" he shouted. "Alone." He stalked off. A moment later Vauna, after exchanging a word with her father, excused herself from the crowd and followed Gravgak. From the way those in the room looked, I knew this must be a dramatic moment. It was as if she had acknowledged Gravgak as her master—or her lover. He had called for her. She had followed. But her old father was still the master. He stepped toward the door. "Vauna!... Gravgak!... Come back." (I
Question:
Who is Mrs. Brundage, and what happens to her?
Answer:
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[
"Mrs. Brundage is one of the townspeople that live in the town that Sol got robbed in. She and her Husband own a barber shop, in which her husband was the barber. It is revealed that the execution in the Armagon from the first night was in fact Mr. Brundage, and that he was executed for breaking the rules. When Sol and Mr. Dawes picks up the body, she seems very distraught and sad, but she seems to understand the repercussions of her husband’s actions. ",
"Mrs. Brundage is the wife of Vincent Brundage. When Sol arrives in town, her husband has been executed. Mom explains that she has to give Mrs. Brundage a call the next day to comfort her. When they go to the parlor, Mrs. Brundage is in a housecoat with her hair in curlers and has puffy red eyes. She has been grieving all day, even though the others have come to collect Brundage’s body. She tries to plead with them, saying that her husband did nothing wrong. She insists that it was all because he was too stubborn, even though the others say that it had to be this way. Even though she continues to cry as Brundage’s body is taken out, she refuses to say anything about Armagon to Sol.",
"Mrs. Brundage is one of the citizens of the town. She’s Vincent Brundage’s wife and one of the people who visit Armagon at night. She witnesses the trial and the execution of her husband who apparently broke one of the laws. In the morning after his death, she gets visited by Dawes, Charlie, Sheriff Coogan, and Sol who is a stranger to her. The first three come to the barbershop to pick up the body. Becker tries to learn something from her about her husband’s trial or Armagon but she quickly leaves crying. At some point, she also gets a call from Mom",
"Mrs. Brundage is the wife of Vincent Brundage, the owner of a barbershop who seems to break the law in the dream place and get executed. Mrs. Brundage sobs when Mr. Dawes and the other three men come to her home because her husband died of a heart attack. She gets a call from Mrs. Dawes around ten about her husband’s death. She wears a housecoat, has her hair in curlers, and has swollen and red eyes. When Sol keeps asking her questions about her husband’s death and the dream place, she is shocked and cannot bear to take more, so she goes inside the house. When Mr. Dawes and the other two men carry her husband’s corpse out, she is weeping behind them. When they all leave, she slams the door."
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A wayfarer's return from a far country to his wife and family may be a shining experience, a kind of second honeymoon. Or it may be so shadowed by Time's relentless tyranny that the changes which have occurred in his absence can lead only to tragedy and despair. This rarely discerning, warmly human story by a brilliant newcomer to the science fantasy field is told with no pulling of punches, and its adroit unfolding will astound you. the hoofer by ... Walter M. Miller, Jr. A space rover has no business with a family. But what can a man in
will always wonder what might have happened if he hadn't called them! Was my distrust of Gravgak justified? Had I become merely a jealous lover—or was I right in my hunch that the tall muscular guard was a potential traitor?) Vauna reappeared at once. I believe she was glad that she had been called back. Gravgak came sullenly. At the edge of the crowd in the arched doorway he stood scowling. "While we are together," old Tomboldo said quietly, looking around at the assemblage, "I must tell you the decision of the council. Soon we will move back to the
course. What is it that girls in small offices do or eat or drink or wear that girls in large offices don't do or eat or drink or wear? What do writers and doctors do differently? Or poets and dentists? What are we missing? What—" In the outer office a girl cried out. A body thumped against a desk, then a chair, then to the floor. Two girls screamed. Andy bolted up from his chair. Racing to the door, he shouted back to Bettijean, "Get a staff doctor and a chemist from the lab." It was the girl who had
probably seen him approaching for some time. He bowed to the hooded figure and handed him a small bag. "More atavistic cubs, big and little! Hold still, Cynthia," a new voice cut in. Hal turned and saw that two cold-eyed girls had been ushered into the cubicle. One was wiping her close-cropped hair with one hand while mopping a green stain from her friend's back with the other. Hal nudged Joggy and whispered: "Butch!" But Joggy was still hypnotized by the Time Bubble. "Then how is it, Hal," he asked, "that light comes out of the bubble, if the people
alone." She started. I reached and barely touched her hand. She stopped. "I will talk with you later, Gravgak." "Now!" he shouted. "Alone." He stalked off. A moment later Vauna, after exchanging a word with her father, excused herself from the crowd and followed Gravgak. From the way those in the room looked, I knew this must be a dramatic moment. It was as if she had acknowledged Gravgak as her master—or her lover. He had called for her. She had followed. But her old father was still the master. He stepped toward the door. "Vauna!... Gravgak!... Come back." (I
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What is the plot of the story?
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about I, the Unspeakable by Walter J. Sheldon.
Relevant chunks:
and didn't look at her. "You'll have to spend most of the trip in a hammock." "I can take it." Suddenly she smiled, wanly. "I was with the Fleet. How long will it take?" "Eight days, in that ship." Roberds lit his pipe, and carefully hid his emotions. He knew Peterson was harboring the same thoughts. Eight days in space, in a small ship meant for two, and built for planetary surface flights. Eight days in that untrustworthy crate, hurtling to save the lives of that girl and Gladney. "Who was that ... man? The one you put out?" Gray
its own folly. In other words, should he become the MASTER OF LIFE AND DEATH? CAST OF CHARACTERS ROY WALTON He had to adopt the motto— the ends justify the means . FITZMAUGHAM His reward for devoted service was—an assassin's bullet. FRED WALTON His ambition was to fill his brother's shoes—but he underestimated their size. LEE PERCY His specialty was sugarcoating bitter pills. PRIOR With the pen as his only weapon, could he save his son? DR. LAMARRE He died for discovering the secret of immortality. Contents I The offices of the Bureau of Population Equalization, vulgarly known as Popeek,
asked. "We call him Rat," Roberds said. She didn't ask why. She said: "Why couldn't he pilot the ship, I mean? What is his record?" Peterson opened his mouth. "Shut up, Peterson!" the Chief snapped. "We don't talk about his record around here, Miss Gray. It's not a pretty thing to tell." "Stow it, Chief," said Peterson. "Miss Gray is no pantywaist." He turned to the nurse. "Ever hear of the Sansan massacre?" Patti Gray paled. "Yes," she whispered. "Was Rat in that?" Roberds shook his head. "He didn't take part in it. But Rat was attached to a very
many days?" His only answer was an inhuman snarl, and the cruel blazing of those inhuman eyes. She fell face first to the floor. "I can't keep it up!" she cried. The sound of her voice rolled along the hot steel deck. "I cant! I cant!" A double handful of tepid water was thrown in her face. "Get up!" Rat stood over her, face twisted, his body hunched. "Get up!" She stared at him, dazed. He kicked her. "Get up!" The tepid water ran off her face and far away she heard Judith calling.... She forced herself up. Rat was
moving things had unnerved him. He had already sounded the alert, flicked out the defense screens. Now he had nothing to do. He tried to concentrate on what the League Law would have him do. The Law was no help. Contact with planet-bound races was forbidden under any circumstances. But could a bunch of robots be called a race? The Law said nothing about robots because Earthmen had none. The building of imaginative robots was expressly forbidden. But at any rate, Steffens thought, he had made contact already. While Steffens stood by the screen, completely bewildered for the first time
Question:
What is the plot of the story?
Answer:
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[
"The narrator is awoken by a female voice in his head. He recounts his time as a conformist citizen of Northem, a futuristic dystopian civilization: one day, he wakes up and regards himself in the mirror, observing signs of aging on his face. He sees the toll of the past two years, since the renumbering. \nThe narrator explains that, as part of ensuring the efficiency of Northem, the designation of each citizen is periodically changed. In the most recent one, everyone was assigned six numerical digits and a prefix or suffix of four letters, which often spelled something pronounceable – for the narrator, the four letters spelled an unspeakably vulgar word. As a result, the narrator is forced to infract from his job and assume non-productive status and begins encountering difficulties in quotidien tasks, such as receiving his realfood package. Furthermore, his designation prevents him from acquiring gainful employment and reassuming productive status, as well as the ability to mate. \nThe narrator then recounts hearing the woman’s voice for the first time. She encourages him to change his name, a difficult thing to do because of its implied criticism of the state. The voice returns in his sleep, nearly every night. Driven by his loneliness and social ostracization, the narrator brings himself to the Govpub Office, a sort of government center, in an attempt to change his designation. \nIn the underground office of his local Govpub Office, the narrator navigates his way to the Numbering and Identity section with help of a cyb, an automated assistant. In the round room that is the Number and Identity department, he observes a remarkably attractive woman at the information desk. Though he is nervous at first, fearing that he will have to share with her his embarrassing name, he dismisses his hesitance and approaches her. He reluctantly shares his name, and asks that she direct him to information concerning state serial designations. \nAs the girl, whose name she reveals is LARA, leads the narrator to information bank 29 where the requested information is stored, they share an inappropriate moment: Lara trips and the narrator grabs her arms. Lara’s demeanor changes, and she now conducts herself in an all-business fashion. At bank 29, Lara explains to the narrator the tasks he must complete in order to change his name, including traveling to the capital. On their way back to the main room, the narrator makes a joke which elicits a laugh from Lara. As she enters the rotunda, she abruptly stops laughing. The narrator, following closely behind, quickly realizes why: two Deacons, officers of the state, are at the central desk. \nOn the night before his departure to the capital, the narrator once again hears the mysterious female voice in his head. She tells him that he is attracted to Lara. On the transport to the capital the narrator sees a young couple holding hands, and pictures himself with Lara in their position.\n",
"The story starts with the main character having a dream that tells him to do something. Later we learn that the voice in his dream is telling him to escape from the life that he is living now. We learn that there had been an atomic disaster that changed the way people live. The main character explains that now everyone has a code as their name. It consists of six digits with a four letter prefix or suffix. And two years ago when he got his name, it was so unusual and embarrassing that no one even wanted to pronounce it. And the name is the reason he lost his job; it is the reason that he cannot get a woman who would agree to mate with him. He was okay at first with this N/P (Non-Producer) status, however, later he realizes that the boredom of being a N/P is too much. He goes looking for jobs. However, it disappointed him again. When the employer hears about his specialty, they look very delight. However, when he hands them his tag with his name on it, they always tell him that they will call if anything turns up. But just like what happened with the Eugenic Center, no one called. The main character further complains about being an N/P, it might sound great at first, but he cannot even get a package.\n\nFinally, with the voice in his dream telling him to “do it” every night, he decided to go to the Govpub Office in Center Four to look for ways that he can change his name. At the N. & I. he gets attracted to the information desk girl, L-A-R-A 339/827. He asked her for information regarding how State Serial, thus the names, are assigned, and how they can be changed. After hearing his name, she is a bit shocked, but then she decides to help him out. Then later she points out that he needs to get a travel permit in order to get to Opsych, The Office of Psychological Adjustment. Apparently, Opsych is the only place that can authorize a change to the State Serial. She tells him to explain how his State Serial has affected his E.A.C, and then there may be a chance that they will change it. Even though he is still doubtful that night, the next day he goes to the jetcopter stage and board the ship for Center One. ",
"The narrator awakes after hearing a feminine voice call out to him in his dreams; it is a voice he is used to hearing, but is nevertheless bothersome. As he wakes up, the chief calls him into work, where he practices magnetic mechanics in hopes of developing space travel beyond Mars. The chief tells the narrator that he would like to switch him to another department; the narrator responds by resigning from him job. The world of Mars, divided into the Northem and Southem, has practices in regulating its civilians. One of these was a renaming of everyone in the Northem, where everyone was given four letters and a series of numbers. The narrator's name is unfortunate and unspeakable, and creates difficulty in his profession, causing him to lose his job. The narrator then becomes unemployed, given the Non-Productive status, and struggles to find another job due to his name. The narrator's name also disrupts other aspects of daily life, including mating and social interaction. The narrator considers changing his name, but decides that it would be seen as criticism to the State. However, one night, the voice calls out to him again in his dreams, urging him to change his name. The next day, the narrator is led to the Govpub office by the voice. There, he is led to the Numbering and Identity section, where he meets Lara, sitting at the information desk. The narrator is immediately attracted to Lara, who tells him that names can be changed if he moves to a higher Emotional Adjustment Category. The narrator, already having achieved the highest EAC, argues that if anything, the difficulties his name has given him have lowered it. Lara advises that he pose this argument to the Office of Psychological Adjustment, where he gets a travel permit the next day. That night, the voice in his dreams encourages him yet again to go on this journey, and the following morning he boards the ship, where he notices two prisoners aboard, holding hands despite their lack of freedom. The narrator then considers what it would be like to be there with Lara, nonconforming but happy.",
"The plot begins with a narrator discussing his morning routine as a citizen of Northem. Northem is located on Earth after the atomic period. He discusses the process of renumbering. The narrator mentions how his designation has been unfortunate since he was assigned it as it is embarrassing and causes people not to want to associate with him. The narrator has an important job but is eventually let go because of his name. As a result of losing his job, he is placed on a Non-Productive status, limiting his ability to require goods and where he can live. An N/P status is not looked upon as good by other citizens of Northem. \n\nThe narrator describes how because of his name and he cannot get a job, mate, or have a social life. Because of the rules of the State, it is unthinkable to change a person’s assigned name. The narrator desperately wants to mate and thinks of ideas on how he might be able to mate. When he sleeps, a seductive voice comes to the narrator in his dreams. The voice encourages the narrator to change his name, even though the idea would be nonconformist according to Northem standards. On the 17th day of the 9th month, the narrator decides to try to change his name and heads to a Govpub office. He is then directed to the Numbering and Identity office where he meets a woman that he finds very attractive. He tells her his name and she reacts negatively, but then recovers. They talk casually, not a common occurrence in Northem. The narrator manages to make Lara, the girl in the office, blush. \n\nLara discusses how she can help the narrator change his name and tells him that he has to go to the Capital and go to the Office of Psychological Adjustment. He needs a travel permit to go to the capital. Over the next day, he is excited about the possibility of his name actually being changed. The voice in his dream continues to encourage him to get his name changed. While on the transportation to the capital, he sees two prisoners who appear to be a couple. They display emotions that he describes as vulgar. Yet, he is curious about their relationship as they sit holding hands. He expresses a desire to be in the same position as the couple, but with him and Lara instead. \n"
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and didn't look at her. "You'll have to spend most of the trip in a hammock." "I can take it." Suddenly she smiled, wanly. "I was with the Fleet. How long will it take?" "Eight days, in that ship." Roberds lit his pipe, and carefully hid his emotions. He knew Peterson was harboring the same thoughts. Eight days in space, in a small ship meant for two, and built for planetary surface flights. Eight days in that untrustworthy crate, hurtling to save the lives of that girl and Gladney. "Who was that ... man? The one you put out?" Gray
its own folly. In other words, should he become the MASTER OF LIFE AND DEATH? CAST OF CHARACTERS ROY WALTON He had to adopt the motto— the ends justify the means . FITZMAUGHAM His reward for devoted service was—an assassin's bullet. FRED WALTON His ambition was to fill his brother's shoes—but he underestimated their size. LEE PERCY His specialty was sugarcoating bitter pills. PRIOR With the pen as his only weapon, could he save his son? DR. LAMARRE He died for discovering the secret of immortality. Contents I The offices of the Bureau of Population Equalization, vulgarly known as Popeek,
asked. "We call him Rat," Roberds said. She didn't ask why. She said: "Why couldn't he pilot the ship, I mean? What is his record?" Peterson opened his mouth. "Shut up, Peterson!" the Chief snapped. "We don't talk about his record around here, Miss Gray. It's not a pretty thing to tell." "Stow it, Chief," said Peterson. "Miss Gray is no pantywaist." He turned to the nurse. "Ever hear of the Sansan massacre?" Patti Gray paled. "Yes," she whispered. "Was Rat in that?" Roberds shook his head. "He didn't take part in it. But Rat was attached to a very
many days?" His only answer was an inhuman snarl, and the cruel blazing of those inhuman eyes. She fell face first to the floor. "I can't keep it up!" she cried. The sound of her voice rolled along the hot steel deck. "I cant! I cant!" A double handful of tepid water was thrown in her face. "Get up!" Rat stood over her, face twisted, his body hunched. "Get up!" She stared at him, dazed. He kicked her. "Get up!" The tepid water ran off her face and far away she heard Judith calling.... She forced herself up. Rat was
moving things had unnerved him. He had already sounded the alert, flicked out the defense screens. Now he had nothing to do. He tried to concentrate on what the League Law would have him do. The Law was no help. Contact with planet-bound races was forbidden under any circumstances. But could a bunch of robots be called a race? The Law said nothing about robots because Earthmen had none. The building of imaginative robots was expressly forbidden. But at any rate, Steffens thought, he had made contact already. While Steffens stood by the screen, completely bewildered for the first time
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Who are the members aboard the life skiff with Malcolm?
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about Wanderers of the Wolf Moon by NELSON S. BOND.
Relevant chunks:
COME UP WITH SOMETHING BETTER. VISITED SEAL-PEOPLE AGAIN TODAY. STILL HAVE THEIR STINK IN MY NOSE. FOUND HUTS ALONG RIVER BANK, SO I GUESS THEY DON'T LIVE IN WATER. BUT THEY DO SPEND MOST OF THEIR TIME THERE. NO, I HAVE NO WAY OF ESTIMATING THEIR INTELLIGENCE. I WOULD JUDGE IT AVERAGES NO HIGHER THAN SEVEN-YEAR-OLD HUMAN. THEY DEFINITELY DO TALK TO ONE ANOTHER. WILL TRY TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THEM, BUT YOU GET TO WORK FAST ON HOW I REPAIR SCOUT. SWELLING IN ARM WORSE AND AM DEVELOPING A FEVER. TEMPERATURE 102.7 AN HOUR AGO. SMOKY The ship
THAT WHEN YOU WERE A CHILD, YOU WERE MOST HAPPY. IT WAS TRYING TO GIVE YOU BACK THAT HAPPY STATE OF MIND. OBVIOUSLY IT QUICKLY RECOGNIZED THE MISTAKES IT MADE AND CORRECTED THEM. SAM CAME UP WITH A FEW MORE IDEAS, BUT WE WANT TO WORK ON THEM A BIT BEFORE WE SEND THEM THROUGH. SLEEP ON THIS. SS II Kaiser could imagine that most of the crew were not too concerned about the trouble he was in. He was not the gregarious type and had no close friends on board. He had hoped to find the solitude he liked
on the pavement, oozing purple. The other two club members departed hastily, seriously dented but still mobile. Retief leaned on his club, breathing hard. "Tough heads these kids have got. I'm tempted to chase those two lads down, but I've got another errand to run. I don't know who the Groaci intended to blast, but I have a sneaking suspicion somebody of importance was scheduled for a boat ride in the next few hours. And three drums of titanite is enough to vaporize this tub and everyone aboard her." "The plot is foiled," said Whonk. "But what reason did they
The men haven't quite finished plating the hull, Chip!" "Can't help that! We've got important business. In a very few minutes— Ahh! There he goes now!" Chip had gone to the perilens the moment he entered the ship; now he saw in its reflector that which he had expected. The gushing orange spume of a spaceship roaring from its cradle. "Hurry, Syd!" There were a lot of things Syd Palmer wanted to ask. He wanted to know who went where ; he was bursting with curiosity about the "important business" which had brought his pal back from town in such
said Whonk. "Go get 'em, old-timer." Retief stooped, picked up one of the pry-bars. "I'll jump around and distract them." Whonk let out a whistling roar and charged for the immature Fustians. They fanned out ... and one tripped, sprawled on his face. Retief whirled the metal bar he had thrust between the Fustian's legs, slammed it against the skull of another, who shook his head, turned on Retief ... and bounced off the steel hull of the Moss Rock as Whonk took him in full charge. Retief used the bar on another head. His third blow laid the Fustian
Question:
Who are the members aboard the life skiff with Malcolm?
Answer:
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[
"On life skiff number four, the skiff onto which Gregory Malcolm had evacuated were himself, his employers J. Foster Andrews, the head of the Galactic Metals Corporations, and his family: Andrews’s tall and well-styled wife Enid, his plain-featured, out of shape but beautiful-eyed sister Maud, Maud’s poodle Cuddles, Andrews’s drunk son Bert, Andrews’s beautiful daughter Crystal, and the man to whom Crystal was promised, Ralph Breadon. Malcolm describes Ralph as tall and strong-knit, with tanned skin. Also aboard the skiff were the maid of the Andrews family, ‘Tina Laney, a cabin boy named Tommy O’Doul, and the radio engineer of the Carefree named Hannigan, who is also called Sparks. \n",
"Accompanying Malcolm on the life skiff are Hannigan, also known as Sparks, who is a radio operator, Tommy, a young cabin-boy, Tina, the maid, and the Andrews family and their company. The Andrews family consists of J. Foster Andrews, Malcolm's employer, his wife Enid, his sister Maud, his daughter Crystal, his son Bert, and Crystal's suitor, Ralph Breadon. The Andrews make up the majority of the members on the life skiff, while Malcom, Hannigan, Tommy, and Tina work under them and attempt to evade disaster. ",
"The members that boarded the life skiff with Malcolm are J. Foster Andrews, his wife, their daughter, the maid, Breadon, Hannigan, young Tommy O’Doul, and a cabin boy, whom Malcolm has no idea where he came from and when. J. Foster Andrews is the employer of people that are working for the Galatic Metals Corporation. His wife is Enid. Their daughter is Crystal, who is engaged to Breadon. Maud, the sister of Andrews is also on board. She and per puppy \"Cuddles\" board the life-skiff together. They were not able to see any other life-skiffs. They are unsure if they did break free of they got caught along with the ship. ",
"Those that were able to make it into the life skiff with Malcolm during the emergency include Andrew, Enid, Crystal, Ralph, Maud, Sparks, Tommy O’Doul, and Bert. Bert is Andrew’s son. Enid is the wife of Andrew. Maud is Andrew’s sister. Crystal is Andrew’s daughter. Ralph is the man Crystal is pledged to. Tommy is a cabin boy. Malcolm is Andrew’s secretary. Sparks Hannigan is a radio operator. Tommy, Malcolm, and Sparks are all employees of Andrews’ family. "
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COME UP WITH SOMETHING BETTER. VISITED SEAL-PEOPLE AGAIN TODAY. STILL HAVE THEIR STINK IN MY NOSE. FOUND HUTS ALONG RIVER BANK, SO I GUESS THEY DON'T LIVE IN WATER. BUT THEY DO SPEND MOST OF THEIR TIME THERE. NO, I HAVE NO WAY OF ESTIMATING THEIR INTELLIGENCE. I WOULD JUDGE IT AVERAGES NO HIGHER THAN SEVEN-YEAR-OLD HUMAN. THEY DEFINITELY DO TALK TO ONE ANOTHER. WILL TRY TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THEM, BUT YOU GET TO WORK FAST ON HOW I REPAIR SCOUT. SWELLING IN ARM WORSE AND AM DEVELOPING A FEVER. TEMPERATURE 102.7 AN HOUR AGO. SMOKY The ship
THAT WHEN YOU WERE A CHILD, YOU WERE MOST HAPPY. IT WAS TRYING TO GIVE YOU BACK THAT HAPPY STATE OF MIND. OBVIOUSLY IT QUICKLY RECOGNIZED THE MISTAKES IT MADE AND CORRECTED THEM. SAM CAME UP WITH A FEW MORE IDEAS, BUT WE WANT TO WORK ON THEM A BIT BEFORE WE SEND THEM THROUGH. SLEEP ON THIS. SS II Kaiser could imagine that most of the crew were not too concerned about the trouble he was in. He was not the gregarious type and had no close friends on board. He had hoped to find the solitude he liked
on the pavement, oozing purple. The other two club members departed hastily, seriously dented but still mobile. Retief leaned on his club, breathing hard. "Tough heads these kids have got. I'm tempted to chase those two lads down, but I've got another errand to run. I don't know who the Groaci intended to blast, but I have a sneaking suspicion somebody of importance was scheduled for a boat ride in the next few hours. And three drums of titanite is enough to vaporize this tub and everyone aboard her." "The plot is foiled," said Whonk. "But what reason did they
The men haven't quite finished plating the hull, Chip!" "Can't help that! We've got important business. In a very few minutes— Ahh! There he goes now!" Chip had gone to the perilens the moment he entered the ship; now he saw in its reflector that which he had expected. The gushing orange spume of a spaceship roaring from its cradle. "Hurry, Syd!" There were a lot of things Syd Palmer wanted to ask. He wanted to know who went where ; he was bursting with curiosity about the "important business" which had brought his pal back from town in such
said Whonk. "Go get 'em, old-timer." Retief stooped, picked up one of the pry-bars. "I'll jump around and distract them." Whonk let out a whistling roar and charged for the immature Fustians. They fanned out ... and one tripped, sprawled on his face. Retief whirled the metal bar he had thrust between the Fustian's legs, slammed it against the skull of another, who shook his head, turned on Retief ... and bounced off the steel hull of the Moss Rock as Whonk took him in full charge. Retief used the bar on another head. His third blow laid the Fustian
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What is the relationship between The Goon and the band?
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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:
it might be a good idea to find out a little more about them," said Retief. "Who organizes them? There are three strong political parties here on Fust. What's the alignment of this SCARS organization?" "You forget, these are merely teenagers, so to speak," Magnan said. "Politics mean nothing to them ... yet." "Then there are the Groaci. Why their passionate interest in a two-horse world like Fust? Normally they're concerned with nothing but business. But what has Fust got that they could use?" "You may rule out the commercial aspect in this instance," said Magnan. "Fust possesses a vigorous
IN PLAIN TERRAN. NO REASON WHY YOU COULDN'T READ IT. AND WHY THE BABY TALK? IF YOU'RE SPOOFING, STOP. GIVE US MORE SYMPTOMS. HOW ARE YOU FEELING NOW? SS II The baby talk was worse on Kaiser's next: TWAZY. WHAT FOR OO TENDING TWAZY LETTERS? FINK UM CAN WEAD TWAZY LETTERS? SKIN ALL YELLOW NOW. COLD. COLD. CO The ship's following communication was three hours late. It was the last on the tape—the one Kaiser had read earlier. Apparently they decided to humor him. OO IS SICK, SMOKY. DO TO BEDDY-BY. KEEP UM WARM. WHEN UM FEELS BETTER, LET USNS
on the pavement, oozing purple. The other two club members departed hastily, seriously dented but still mobile. Retief leaned on his club, breathing hard. "Tough heads these kids have got. I'm tempted to chase those two lads down, but I've got another errand to run. I don't know who the Groaci intended to blast, but I have a sneaking suspicion somebody of importance was scheduled for a boat ride in the next few hours. And three drums of titanite is enough to vaporize this tub and everyone aboard her." "The plot is foiled," said Whonk. "But what reason did they
Slock roared suddenly, twisting violently. Whonk teetered, his grip loosened ... and Slock pulled free and was off the platform, butting his way through the milling oldsters on the dining room floor. Magnan watched, open-mouthed. "The Groaci were playing a double game, as usual," Retief said. "They intended to dispose of this fellow Slock, once he'd served their purpose." "Well, don't stand there," yelped Magnan over the uproar. "If Slock is the ring-leader of a delinquent gang...!" He moved to give chase. Retief grabbed his arm. "Don't jump down there! You'd have as much chance of getting through as a
He knelt, sniffed at the spot. "What kind of cargo was stacked here, Whonk? And where is it now?" Whonk considered. "There were drums," he said. "Four of them, quite small, painted an evil green, the property of the Soft Ones, the Groaci. They lay here a day and a night. At full dark of the first period they came with stevedores and loaded them aboard the barge Moss Rock ." "The VIP boat. Who's scheduled to use it?" "I know not. But what matters this? Let us discuss cargo movements after I have settled a score with certain Youths."
Question:
What is the relationship between The Goon and the band?
Answer:
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"The Goon has many names and is also referred to as Ke-teeli and The Face. Ke-teeli is the boss of the three current members of the band, one member is out because he is injured. Ke-teeli owns an establishment that the band performs at. However, Ke-teeli repeatedly expresses his frustration and distaste over the band’s music. Jimmie Stanley believes that Ke-teeli is really more unhappy with the lack of money that his establishment, The Space Room, is earning. \n\nWhen John Smith joins the band with his Zloomph instrument, The Goon seems to respond well. More cash is flowing into the business as the audience agrees with the music. However, The Goon will not let the bandmates sign a contract with him for their unemployment unless they can guarantee that John Smith and his Zloomph instrument will join them. \n",
"The Goon is the boss of the band. He is upset that the bass fiddle man is missing. Jimmie mentions that The Goon will be angry if he finds out that there’s a cigarette hole burned in it. The band sometimes refers The Goon as Goon-Face and The Eye. This is the last week before the band’s contract with The Goon ends. The band is worried that The Goon will not continue the contract since he has been showing little enthusiasm for their music. He always comment either too fast and loud or too slow and soft. He even states that it is better to have the customers disappointed than have them hear bad music. After he sees The Goon staring at them, Jimmie decides to start playing. Once The Goon hears the beautiful music played by John, he looks very surprised and is enjoying it. In the end, The Goon states that there will be a contract if the fiddle player comes as well. ",
"Goon-Face is the boss of the band. He is a business man and is looking only for profit, which doesn't satisfy him. The contract is ending soon and he doesn't see the reason in prolonging it. He is very irritable and considers the band's music bad. He liked John, but without him he doesn't need the band. He is cold and direct, his speech is concise. It's impossible to convince him or beg for something, he stays indifferent. ",
"Goon-Face runs The Space Room and is considered to be the boss of the band. They have a contract with him to play their music at the establishment. However, Goon-Face is initially very displeased by the fact that there are only three members present. He is also unwilling to renew the contract and constantly criticizes the band’s music. Jimmie believes that the real reason is that there is not enough business in the establishment. Even when Jimmie says that the three of them will continue to play, if the fourth does not show up, Goon-Face is not impressed and says that having no music is better than bad music. He even tells them that if no bassist shows up, then they will go home. Once John Smith plays, he is pleased and beams like a kitten who has seen a quart of cream. Business begins to get better, but he is still cautious of the contract. He tells the band that he will only continue their contract if John Smith stays and signs it. After John disappears, he is furious again and refuses to discuss any contract because the bass fiddle man is gone. "
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it might be a good idea to find out a little more about them," said Retief. "Who organizes them? There are three strong political parties here on Fust. What's the alignment of this SCARS organization?" "You forget, these are merely teenagers, so to speak," Magnan said. "Politics mean nothing to them ... yet." "Then there are the Groaci. Why their passionate interest in a two-horse world like Fust? Normally they're concerned with nothing but business. But what has Fust got that they could use?" "You may rule out the commercial aspect in this instance," said Magnan. "Fust possesses a vigorous
IN PLAIN TERRAN. NO REASON WHY YOU COULDN'T READ IT. AND WHY THE BABY TALK? IF YOU'RE SPOOFING, STOP. GIVE US MORE SYMPTOMS. HOW ARE YOU FEELING NOW? SS II The baby talk was worse on Kaiser's next: TWAZY. WHAT FOR OO TENDING TWAZY LETTERS? FINK UM CAN WEAD TWAZY LETTERS? SKIN ALL YELLOW NOW. COLD. COLD. CO The ship's following communication was three hours late. It was the last on the tape—the one Kaiser had read earlier. Apparently they decided to humor him. OO IS SICK, SMOKY. DO TO BEDDY-BY. KEEP UM WARM. WHEN UM FEELS BETTER, LET USNS
on the pavement, oozing purple. The other two club members departed hastily, seriously dented but still mobile. Retief leaned on his club, breathing hard. "Tough heads these kids have got. I'm tempted to chase those two lads down, but I've got another errand to run. I don't know who the Groaci intended to blast, but I have a sneaking suspicion somebody of importance was scheduled for a boat ride in the next few hours. And three drums of titanite is enough to vaporize this tub and everyone aboard her." "The plot is foiled," said Whonk. "But what reason did they
Slock roared suddenly, twisting violently. Whonk teetered, his grip loosened ... and Slock pulled free and was off the platform, butting his way through the milling oldsters on the dining room floor. Magnan watched, open-mouthed. "The Groaci were playing a double game, as usual," Retief said. "They intended to dispose of this fellow Slock, once he'd served their purpose." "Well, don't stand there," yelped Magnan over the uproar. "If Slock is the ring-leader of a delinquent gang...!" He moved to give chase. Retief grabbed his arm. "Don't jump down there! You'd have as much chance of getting through as a
He knelt, sniffed at the spot. "What kind of cargo was stacked here, Whonk? And where is it now?" Whonk considered. "There were drums," he said. "Four of them, quite small, painted an evil green, the property of the Soft Ones, the Groaci. They lay here a day and a night. At full dark of the first period they came with stevedores and loaded them aboard the barge Moss Rock ." "The VIP boat. Who's scheduled to use it?" "I know not. But what matters this? Let us discuss cargo movements after I have settled a score with certain Youths."
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What is the significance of enslavement in the story?
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about Raiders of the Second Moon by Basil Wells.
Relevant chunks:
its own folly. In other words, should he become the MASTER OF LIFE AND DEATH? CAST OF CHARACTERS ROY WALTON He had to adopt the motto— the ends justify the means . FITZMAUGHAM His reward for devoted service was—an assassin's bullet. FRED WALTON His ambition was to fill his brother's shoes—but he underestimated their size. LEE PERCY His specialty was sugarcoating bitter pills. PRIOR With the pen as his only weapon, could he save his son? DR. LAMARRE He died for discovering the secret of immortality. Contents I The offices of the Bureau of Population Equalization, vulgarly known as Popeek,
many days?" His only answer was an inhuman snarl, and the cruel blazing of those inhuman eyes. She fell face first to the floor. "I can't keep it up!" she cried. The sound of her voice rolled along the hot steel deck. "I cant! I cant!" A double handful of tepid water was thrown in her face. "Get up!" Rat stood over her, face twisted, his body hunched. "Get up!" She stared at him, dazed. He kicked her. "Get up!" The tepid water ran off her face and far away she heard Judith calling.... She forced herself up. Rat was
Orphans of the Void By MICHAEL SHAARA Illustrated by EMSH [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Finding a cause worth dying for is no great trick—the Universe is full of them. Finding one worth living for is the genuine problem! In the region of the Coal Sack Nebula, on the dead fourth planet of a star called Tyban, Captain Steffens of the Mapping Command stood counting buildings. Eleven. No, twelve. He wondered if there was any significance in
had the power to enforce those measures. But though his job was in the service of humanity, he soon found himself the most hated man in the world. For it was his job to tell parents their children were unfit to live; he had to uproot people from their homes and send them to remote areas of the world. Now, threatened by mobs of outraged citizens, denounced and blackened by the press, Roy Walton had to make a decision: resign his post, or use his power to destroy his enemies, become a dictator in the hopes of saving humanity from
Why else would we have been built?" Steffens thought the robot would go on, but it didn't. The question, to Elb, was no question at all. Although Steffens knew already what the robot could not possibly have known—that the Makers were gone and would never come back—he was a long time understanding. What he did was push this speculation into the back of his mind, to keep it from Elb. He had no desire to destroy a faith. But it created a problem in him. He had begun to picture for Elb the structure of human society, and the robot—a
Question:
What is the significance of enslavement in the story?
Answer:
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"Enslavement and freedom as themes run throughout the story. When Noork and Sarna first meet each other in the opening scene, one of the ways they decide to trust one another is because of their mutual relationships with Gurn, a third character. Gurn has been exiled from the city of Grath because he says that his people should no longer enslave the captured Zurans from other valleys of Sekk. In the next scene, we learn that Sarna, Gurn's sister, was kidnapped by one group of slavers, escaped them with four others, and only narrowly escaped capture by a second group of slavers, the Misty Ones from the Temple of the Skull, who captured the other four of her group. Noork tells her that one day he will visit the island of Misty Ones who took her friends. At this time, he realizes that Sarna has disappeared, and he is attacked by the Misty Ones, though he is able to fight them off.\n\nDuring Noork's travels to the island of the Misty Ones, we learn his backstory: he is American pilot Stephen Dietrich, and he arrived on the moon of Sekk by following Doctor Karl Von Mark, last of the Nazi criminals at large. Dietrich's ship had crashed on Sekk, robbing him of his memory. In the conflict between the Allies and Nazis, we again see the conflict between enslavement and freedom: the Nazis forced those they considered racially \"impure\" into prison camps where they were either murdered outright or forced to engage in labor under inhumane conditions until they died; the Allied forces were a hope of freedom for these imprisoned, enslaved people.\n\nNoork spies on enslaved men in the fields outside the temple of the Misty Ones and hears them gossiping about Sarna. The older man suggests that their life is not so bad, but the younger man protests and states that one day he plans to escape. Noork approaches the younger man to find out where Sarna is being held and promises to take him along when he and Sarna escape. Noork then fights off multiple guards and a priest in order to free Sarna from the pit where she is held, which is dank and full of rotting grass mats and little light.\n\nWhile the story touches on themes of enslavement and freedom, it does not engage with them fully. The dungeon where the enslaved young women is held is described in foul terms, but Noork does not seem to free all the young women from their prison. That may happen as a result of Gurn's final attack on Doctor Von Mark and the Misty Ones, but Noork escapes only with Sarna and Rold. Rold is unhappy with being enslaved, not because he is being harmed or others are, but because he is not free to mate with attractive young women like Sarna. While the story should not need to spell out every reason why enslavement is wrong, it takes a very superficial approach to a deeply painful issue.",
"Enslavement is a major theme throughout the story. Gurn has been exiled for speaking out against the slavery that his people have inflicted on others, which is how he a Noork find one another. Noork’s travels during the action of the story are undertaken in an effort to save Sarna, who has now been enslaved twice. The person he enlists to help him, Rold, is also a slave. When Doctor Von Mark and the Misty Ones ambush Noork and the doctor recognizes him as Stephen Dietrich, he mentions that the trapper has now become the trapped. A moment later, Gurn and the other warriors free Noork from the doctor’s enslavement. Most of the story involves various people being enslaved or feeling a certain way about enslavement, and the element of Nazism in the story also lends it a broader theme of the enslavement that that regime inflicted and tried to inflict, and the continued possession of the Earth that Von Mark is working toward. \n",
"Enslavement seems to be the preferred way to deal with enemies on Sekk, and when Gurn speaks out against enslaving their Zuran captives, the city rulers label him a traitor and exile him from the city. His sister, Tholon, was captured by slavers but managed to escape with four others. However, when they passed near the Lake of Uzdon, the Misty Ones captured her four fellow escapees. And while Tholon is telling her story to Noork, she is kidnapped by the Misty Ones and spirited away to their city of Uzdon. The Misty Ones offer beautiful slave girls chosen by their priests as sacrifices to their god Uzdon, binding them to the altar and removing their hearts while still alive. The Misty Ones also enslave others to be workers. Slaves work in their cultivated fields and gardens, and in the skull, slaves are chained together with heavy chains. ",
"Enslavement is an important topic in the story as many of the Zuran peoples are enslaved by various groups. The men of Kanto are enemies of the Vasads and the people of Grath, but the city of Grath also enslaves people. When Gurn speaks out against the practice, he is exiled from Grath and becomes transient with his group of Vasads. When Noork first meets Tholon Sarna, she has fled her initial enslavement, narrowly avoided enslavement by the men of Kanto, and is then captured by the Misty Ones, who also have slaves working on the island of Manak. Noork frees Rold from his enslavement, and enlists his help to prevent Tholon Sarna from becoming a human sacrifice to Uzdon. When the Vasads defeat the Misty Ones and Dr. Von Mark, they are free to live in their own society without the constraints of slavery."
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its own folly. In other words, should he become the MASTER OF LIFE AND DEATH? CAST OF CHARACTERS ROY WALTON He had to adopt the motto— the ends justify the means . FITZMAUGHAM His reward for devoted service was—an assassin's bullet. FRED WALTON His ambition was to fill his brother's shoes—but he underestimated their size. LEE PERCY His specialty was sugarcoating bitter pills. PRIOR With the pen as his only weapon, could he save his son? DR. LAMARRE He died for discovering the secret of immortality. Contents I The offices of the Bureau of Population Equalization, vulgarly known as Popeek,
many days?" His only answer was an inhuman snarl, and the cruel blazing of those inhuman eyes. She fell face first to the floor. "I can't keep it up!" she cried. The sound of her voice rolled along the hot steel deck. "I cant! I cant!" A double handful of tepid water was thrown in her face. "Get up!" Rat stood over her, face twisted, his body hunched. "Get up!" She stared at him, dazed. He kicked her. "Get up!" The tepid water ran off her face and far away she heard Judith calling.... She forced herself up. Rat was
Orphans of the Void By MICHAEL SHAARA Illustrated by EMSH [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Finding a cause worth dying for is no great trick—the Universe is full of them. Finding one worth living for is the genuine problem! In the region of the Coal Sack Nebula, on the dead fourth planet of a star called Tyban, Captain Steffens of the Mapping Command stood counting buildings. Eleven. No, twelve. He wondered if there was any significance in
had the power to enforce those measures. But though his job was in the service of humanity, he soon found himself the most hated man in the world. For it was his job to tell parents their children were unfit to live; he had to uproot people from their homes and send them to remote areas of the world. Now, threatened by mobs of outraged citizens, denounced and blackened by the press, Roy Walton had to make a decision: resign his post, or use his power to destroy his enemies, become a dictator in the hopes of saving humanity from
Why else would we have been built?" Steffens thought the robot would go on, but it didn't. The question, to Elb, was no question at all. Although Steffens knew already what the robot could not possibly have known—that the Makers were gone and would never come back—he was a long time understanding. What he did was push this speculation into the back of his mind, to keep it from Elb. He had no desire to destroy a faith. But it created a problem in him. He had begun to picture for Elb the structure of human society, and the robot—a
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What is the melting sickness?
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about Contagion by Katherine MacLean.
Relevant chunks:
the ship's mechanical diagnostician. His report followed: ARM SWOLLEN. UNABLE TO KEEP DOWN FOOD LAST TWELVE HOURS. ABOUT TWO HOURS AGO, ENTIRE BODY TURNED LIVID RED. BRIEF PERIODS OF BLANKNESS. THINGS KEEP COMING AND GOING. SICK AS HELL. HURRY. SMOKY The ship's next message read: INFECTION QUITE DEFINITE. BUT SOMETHING STRANGE THERE. GIVE US ANYTHING MORE YOU HAVE. SS II His own reply perplexed Kaiser: LAST LETTER FUNNY. I NOT UNDERSTAND. WHY IS OO SENDING GARBLE TALK? DID USNS MAKE UP SECRET MESSAGES? SMOKY The expedition, apparently, was as puzzled as he: WHAT'S THE MATTER, SMOKY? THAT LAST MESSAGE WAS
IN PLAIN TERRAN. NO REASON WHY YOU COULDN'T READ IT. AND WHY THE BABY TALK? IF YOU'RE SPOOFING, STOP. GIVE US MORE SYMPTOMS. HOW ARE YOU FEELING NOW? SS II The baby talk was worse on Kaiser's next: TWAZY. WHAT FOR OO TENDING TWAZY LETTERS? FINK UM CAN WEAD TWAZY LETTERS? SKIN ALL YELLOW NOW. COLD. COLD. CO The ship's following communication was three hours late. It was the last on the tape—the one Kaiser had read earlier. Apparently they decided to humor him. OO IS SICK, SMOKY. DO TO BEDDY-BY. KEEP UM WARM. WHEN UM FEELS BETTER, LET USNS
by one the colonists were beginning to understand. War is huge and comes with great suddenness and always without reason, and there is inevitably a wait, between acts, between the news and the motion, the fear and the rage. Dylan waited. These people were taking it well, much better than those in the cities had taken it. But then, these were pioneers. Dylan grinned. Pioneers. Before you settle a planet you boil it and bake it and purge it of all possible disease. Then you step down gingerly and inflate your plastic houses, which harden and become warm and impregnable;
RECOVERED. FEELING FINE. ANYTHING NEW FROM SAM? AND HOW ABOUT THE DAMAGE TO SCOUT? GIVE ME ANYTHING YOU HAVE ON EITHER OR BOTH. SMOKY Kaiser felt suddenly weary. He lay on the scout's bunk and tried to sleep. Soon he was in that phantasm land between sleep and wakefulness—he knew he was not sleeping, yet he did dream. It was the same dream he had had many times before. In it, he was back home again, the home he had joined the space service to escape. He had realized soon after his marriage that his wife, Helene, did not love
COME UP WITH SOMETHING BETTER. VISITED SEAL-PEOPLE AGAIN TODAY. STILL HAVE THEIR STINK IN MY NOSE. FOUND HUTS ALONG RIVER BANK, SO I GUESS THEY DON'T LIVE IN WATER. BUT THEY DO SPEND MOST OF THEIR TIME THERE. NO, I HAVE NO WAY OF ESTIMATING THEIR INTELLIGENCE. I WOULD JUDGE IT AVERAGES NO HIGHER THAN SEVEN-YEAR-OLD HUMAN. THEY DEFINITELY DO TALK TO ONE ANOTHER. WILL TRY TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THEM, BUT YOU GET TO WORK FAST ON HOW I REPAIR SCOUT. SWELLING IN ARM WORSE AND AM DEVELOPING A FEVER. TEMPERATURE 102.7 AN HOUR AGO. SMOKY The ship
Question:
What is the melting sickness?
Answer:
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[
"The melting sickness is described as a type of plague by Pat. He informs the doctors that it arrived soon after the colony settled on the planet and killed all but one particular familiar which happened to be immune to the disease. The disease is described as being brutal and not even doctors were able to avoid it. According to Pat, there has not been any recurrence of the melting sickness and no other diseases to note. ",
"The melting sickness is the name the local colonists gave to some kind of a plague which killed all the colonists except the Meads families. It happened in a couple years after arrival and only the Meads turned out to be immune, that's why all the people on Minos look similar - they are related. The disease was so rapid and furious that it killed all the doctors and, therefore, wasn't studied. The rest of the colonists took off on the ship to escape, and left the Meads without any books or technologies, so they don't have doctors and hunt with bows. This disease is still carried by the Meads without harming them, it's also unable to record through testings - all the tests are good but the hamsters die.",
"The melting sickness is a plague that spread across the first colony on Minos. The melting sickness killed everyone except for the Mead family, who seemed to be immune to the disease. It is unsure what exactly the melting sickness is or its cure, because the doctors working to learn about it ended up dying during the plague. Since the, plague, there have been no more cases of the melting sickness on Minos, but the people on The Explorer still need to take precautions in case the germs prevailed. When the experiment is run on the hamsters, three of them die, one of them losing its hair. ",
"Melting sickness is the equivalent of a plague-type disease on Minos. Patrick does not know much about the melting sickness, but his father had explained it to him as being pretty gruesome. The doctors died too soon to find out what the disease was and what to do to cure it. It was also impossible to train more doctors or send them to civilization because their spaceship that served as a power plant with all of the necessary books went into the sky and never came back. Although Patrick says that there are no more recurrences of melting sickness, it is revealed that the colony peoples still carry the germs of the disease, which means that they must disinfect before establishing contact. The hamsters can fight off melting sickness alone, but the ones who died had strong shots of adaptive and counter histamine. George also says that they can not find any external micro-organisms. Everything present is leucosis and anemia; fever is only for the ones who fought it off. "
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the ship's mechanical diagnostician. His report followed: ARM SWOLLEN. UNABLE TO KEEP DOWN FOOD LAST TWELVE HOURS. ABOUT TWO HOURS AGO, ENTIRE BODY TURNED LIVID RED. BRIEF PERIODS OF BLANKNESS. THINGS KEEP COMING AND GOING. SICK AS HELL. HURRY. SMOKY The ship's next message read: INFECTION QUITE DEFINITE. BUT SOMETHING STRANGE THERE. GIVE US ANYTHING MORE YOU HAVE. SS II His own reply perplexed Kaiser: LAST LETTER FUNNY. I NOT UNDERSTAND. WHY IS OO SENDING GARBLE TALK? DID USNS MAKE UP SECRET MESSAGES? SMOKY The expedition, apparently, was as puzzled as he: WHAT'S THE MATTER, SMOKY? THAT LAST MESSAGE WAS
IN PLAIN TERRAN. NO REASON WHY YOU COULDN'T READ IT. AND WHY THE BABY TALK? IF YOU'RE SPOOFING, STOP. GIVE US MORE SYMPTOMS. HOW ARE YOU FEELING NOW? SS II The baby talk was worse on Kaiser's next: TWAZY. WHAT FOR OO TENDING TWAZY LETTERS? FINK UM CAN WEAD TWAZY LETTERS? SKIN ALL YELLOW NOW. COLD. COLD. CO The ship's following communication was three hours late. It was the last on the tape—the one Kaiser had read earlier. Apparently they decided to humor him. OO IS SICK, SMOKY. DO TO BEDDY-BY. KEEP UM WARM. WHEN UM FEELS BETTER, LET USNS
by one the colonists were beginning to understand. War is huge and comes with great suddenness and always without reason, and there is inevitably a wait, between acts, between the news and the motion, the fear and the rage. Dylan waited. These people were taking it well, much better than those in the cities had taken it. But then, these were pioneers. Dylan grinned. Pioneers. Before you settle a planet you boil it and bake it and purge it of all possible disease. Then you step down gingerly and inflate your plastic houses, which harden and become warm and impregnable;
RECOVERED. FEELING FINE. ANYTHING NEW FROM SAM? AND HOW ABOUT THE DAMAGE TO SCOUT? GIVE ME ANYTHING YOU HAVE ON EITHER OR BOTH. SMOKY Kaiser felt suddenly weary. He lay on the scout's bunk and tried to sleep. Soon he was in that phantasm land between sleep and wakefulness—he knew he was not sleeping, yet he did dream. It was the same dream he had had many times before. In it, he was back home again, the home he had joined the space service to escape. He had realized soon after his marriage that his wife, Helene, did not love
COME UP WITH SOMETHING BETTER. VISITED SEAL-PEOPLE AGAIN TODAY. STILL HAVE THEIR STINK IN MY NOSE. FOUND HUTS ALONG RIVER BANK, SO I GUESS THEY DON'T LIVE IN WATER. BUT THEY DO SPEND MOST OF THEIR TIME THERE. NO, I HAVE NO WAY OF ESTIMATING THEIR INTELLIGENCE. I WOULD JUDGE IT AVERAGES NO HIGHER THAN SEVEN-YEAR-OLD HUMAN. THEY DEFINITELY DO TALK TO ONE ANOTHER. WILL TRY TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THEM, BUT YOU GET TO WORK FAST ON HOW I REPAIR SCOUT. SWELLING IN ARM WORSE AND AM DEVELOPING A FEVER. TEMPERATURE 102.7 AN HOUR AGO. SMOKY The ship
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Describe what "pre-civilization" means in the context of this story
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about Time In the Round by Fritz Leiber.
Relevant chunks:
A CITY NEAR CENTAURUS By BILL DOEDE Illustrated by WEST [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine October 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] The city was sacred, but not to its gods. Michaelson was a god—but far from sacred! Crouched in the ancient doorway like an animal peering out from his burrow, Mr. Michaelson saw the native. At first he was startled, thinking it might be someone else from the Earth settlement who had discovered the old city before him. Then he saw the glint of
himself about some particular artifact, marveling at its state of preservation, holding it this way and that to catch the late afternoon sun, smiling, clucking gleefully. He crawled over the rubble through old doorways half filled with the accumulation of ages. He dug experimentally in the sand with his hands, like a dog, under a roof that had weathered half a million years of rain and sun. Then he crawled out again, covered with dust and cobwebs. The native stood in the street less than a hundred feet away, waving his arms madly. "Mr. Earthgod," he cried. "It is sacred
story is there, once we decipher it." "Leave!" The native's lined, weathered old face was working around the mouth in anger. Michaelson was almost sorry he had mocked him. He was deadly serious. "Look," he said. "No spirits are ever coming back here. Don't you know that? And even if they did, spirits care nothing for old cities half covered with sand and dirt." He walked away from the old man, heading for another building. The sun had already gone below the horizon, coloring the high clouds. He glanced backward. The webfoot was following. "Mr. Earthgod!" the webfoot cried, so
them swung toward the inner door. Dotty was standing there, a sleep-stupefied little girl with a blanket caught up around her and dragging behind. Their own daughter. But in her eyes was a look from which they cringed. She said, "I am a creature somewhat older than what your geologists call the Archeozoic Era. I am speaking to you through a number of telepathically sensitive individuals among your kind. In each case my thoughts suit themselves to your level of comprehension. I inhabit the disguised and jetless spaceship which is your Earth." Celeste swayed a step forward. "Baby...." she implored.
intelligent, and you must be educated, the way you talk. That gadget looks like a time-piece of some sort. What is it? What does it measure?" "I insist that you go." The webfoot held something in his hand. "No." Michaelson looked off down the street, trying to ignore the native, trying to feel the life of the city as it might have been. "You are sensitive," the native said in his ear. "It takes a sensitive god to feel the spirits moving in the houses and walking in these old streets." "Say it any way you want to. This is
Question:
Describe what "pre-civilization" means in the context of this story
Answer:
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[
"The term pre-civilization points to anything that has a sense of violence or chaos in the lives of adults. For instance, raised voices and people talking over each other is considered pre-civilization, but so are violent wars. The society is built to get rid of these tendencies in children and recondition them as adults to be calm and peaceful members of society. When the Butcher is referred to as looking pre-civilization at the beginning of the story, it is because he seems to be up to something he isn't supposed to do, as he is potentially hurting or controlling Brute in some way with the use of a metal tube. ",
"In “Time in the Round,” the society is structured around perfection. Small children are given breakables, and those items are the only things that are physically capable of being broken. There are dirt-pens for kids to play in, and besides those areas, children are incapable of becoming dirty. The dirt-pens are only available to children aged 2 and younger. The society’s dogs, uninjes, are programmed not to bite or hurt the people, even when they are hit or stabbed themselves. They do not react like normal canines. \n\nYoung children are considered to be self-centered and ruthless, and they are provided with death games and fear houses to get out their emotions and prepare to be conditioned as adults. When children turn six years old, they feel differently than they did before. They are ready to enter the Time Theater and view the Time Bubble. They are taught about pre-civilization and the important differences between their own society and the past. They learn how to reject violent solutions to problems and live in peace. Even yelling is considered a pre-civilization act. When Butch enters the Time Theater and tries to get the Scandinavian warrior’s attention, he is using someithing called a “pre-civilization voice”. The Time Bubble is a tool that society uses to remind its current citizens what humans used to act barbarically, and that is not longer appropriate. \n",
"Pre-civilization seems to refer to the society that we know, and any society that predates the decision to make violence impossible and to control all aspects of societal behavior. Hal describes the process of conditioning humanity to reject violence in all forms, and pre-civilization points to a time before that process was undertaken. For example, Butch is referred to as “pre-civilization” when he continually abuses an uninj at the beginning of the story, because he is behaving in a violent way. He is described this way again at the end of the story when he is shouting battle orders. \n",
"Pre-civilization primarily refers to the time before the post-violent society where the central action of the story takes place. They are able to view this era by using the time-hole technology of the bubble on display at the Time Theater in the Peace Park at the end of the Avenue of Wisdom. \"Pre-civilization\" is characterized by famous historical figures such as Hitler, Stalin, and Tamerlane--individuals that the Butcher idealizes for their use of violence in resolving conflict. The climax of the story revolves around a viewing of Scandinavian men of the Dawn Era gone wrong when the simultaneous workings of a sorcerer and the Butcher's impulsive mind allow the Scandinavian men to pass through the bubble into the Time Theater. The ensuing battle highlights the barbarism of the Dawn Era--they use swords and real dogs in battle; it also demonstrates the Butcher's ability to weaponize technology meant to oppose violence as a way to protect this new society."
] |
51380
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A CITY NEAR CENTAURUS By BILL DOEDE Illustrated by WEST [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine October 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] The city was sacred, but not to its gods. Michaelson was a god—but far from sacred! Crouched in the ancient doorway like an animal peering out from his burrow, Mr. Michaelson saw the native. At first he was startled, thinking it might be someone else from the Earth settlement who had discovered the old city before him. Then he saw the glint of
himself about some particular artifact, marveling at its state of preservation, holding it this way and that to catch the late afternoon sun, smiling, clucking gleefully. He crawled over the rubble through old doorways half filled with the accumulation of ages. He dug experimentally in the sand with his hands, like a dog, under a roof that had weathered half a million years of rain and sun. Then he crawled out again, covered with dust and cobwebs. The native stood in the street less than a hundred feet away, waving his arms madly. "Mr. Earthgod," he cried. "It is sacred
story is there, once we decipher it." "Leave!" The native's lined, weathered old face was working around the mouth in anger. Michaelson was almost sorry he had mocked him. He was deadly serious. "Look," he said. "No spirits are ever coming back here. Don't you know that? And even if they did, spirits care nothing for old cities half covered with sand and dirt." He walked away from the old man, heading for another building. The sun had already gone below the horizon, coloring the high clouds. He glanced backward. The webfoot was following. "Mr. Earthgod!" the webfoot cried, so
them swung toward the inner door. Dotty was standing there, a sleep-stupefied little girl with a blanket caught up around her and dragging behind. Their own daughter. But in her eyes was a look from which they cringed. She said, "I am a creature somewhat older than what your geologists call the Archeozoic Era. I am speaking to you through a number of telepathically sensitive individuals among your kind. In each case my thoughts suit themselves to your level of comprehension. I inhabit the disguised and jetless spaceship which is your Earth." Celeste swayed a step forward. "Baby...." she implored.
intelligent, and you must be educated, the way you talk. That gadget looks like a time-piece of some sort. What is it? What does it measure?" "I insist that you go." The webfoot held something in his hand. "No." Michaelson looked off down the street, trying to ignore the native, trying to feel the life of the city as it might have been. "You are sensitive," the native said in his ear. "It takes a sensitive god to feel the spirits moving in the houses and walking in these old streets." "Say it any way you want to. This is
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What is the setting of the story?
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After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about Contagion by Katherine MacLean.
Relevant chunks:
explain the phenomena of the Ghost Ship? Was it really only a product of his imagination? What of all the others who had seen it? Was it possible for many different men under many different situations to have the same exact illusion? Reason denied that. But perhaps space itself denies reason. Grimly he retraced the legend of the Ghost Ship. A chance phrase here and a story there put together all that he knew: Doomed for all eternity to wander in the empty star-lanes, the Ghost Ship haunts the Solar System that gave it birth. And this is its tragedy,
course. What is it that girls in small offices do or eat or drink or wear that girls in large offices don't do or eat or drink or wear? What do writers and doctors do differently? Or poets and dentists? What are we missing? What—" In the outer office a girl cried out. A body thumped against a desk, then a chair, then to the floor. Two girls screamed. Andy bolted up from his chair. Racing to the door, he shouted back to Bettijean, "Get a staff doctor and a chemist from the lab." It was the girl who had
This was no fantasy. There was a scientific reason for it. There must be! Or should there be? Throughout all Earth history there had been Ghost Ships sailing the Seven Seas—ships doomed to roam forever because their crew broke some unbreakable law. If this was true for the ships of the seas, why not for the ships of empty space? He looked again at the strange ship. It was motionless. At least it was not nearing him. Willard could see nothing but its vague outline. A moment later he could discern a faint motion. It was turning! The Ghost Ship
HOME IS WHERE YOU LEFT IT By ADAM CHASE [Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories February 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] The chance of mass slaughter was their eternal nightmare. How black is the blackest treachery? Is the most callous traitor entitled to mercy? Steve pondered these questions. His decision? That at times the villain should possibly be spoken of as a hero. Only the shells of deserted mud-brick houses greeted Steve Cantwell when he reached the village. He poked around in them for a
stinging forehead on his arms, cursing softly and crying. Finally he rolled over, pulled his foot out of the mess, and took off his shoes. They were full of mud—sticky sandy mud. The dark world was reeling about him, and the wind was dragging at his breath. He fell back against the sand pile and let his feet sink in the mud hole and wriggled his toes. He was laughing soundlessly, and his face was wet in the wind. He couldn't think. He couldn't remember where he was and why, and he stopped caring, and after a while he felt
Question:
What is the setting of the story?
Answer:
|
[
"The story begins with the ship, the Explorer, landing on an unknown planet. It has an Earth-like forest in the fall. The leaves were of various colors, green, copper, purple, and red. To get to this planet, known as Minos, it took 36 light-years from Earth. The ship they traveled on is described as being like a silver and black column. It was previously a yacht that was retrofitted to become the Explorer. \n\nThey take Pat back to the ship and they all decontaminate. Once they are done, they go to the dining hall for food. After eating their food in the dining, June and some of the other doctors return to the laboratory to inspect the mice. \n",
"The story begins on Minos, a lovely planet reminding Earth. A party of doctors in spacesuits and earphones are moving through the forest, which looks like a beautiful Earth forest in the fall. The trail is narrow, and the spaceship, 'Explorer', towers behind. The ship is huge and it looks like a skyscraper within the forest. It is a polished silver and black column which used to be a yacht. There are many passengers abroad, staring at the planet through the windows. There are cabins, a cafeteria, a control room, a library and laboratories inside. Before coming in, Pat is tested on the ground near the ship. The ship has a cureall - a cure from any disease. Not to get sick before it's used, then testings are done by machines. There is Reno's plane which travels with the news and notions. There are hamsters in one of the laboratories. From the view plate mountains, forests, hills and fields are visible. The ship used to have ballrooms and dining rooms but all was transformed. ",
"The story is set on Minos, a planet that Earthmen had found and landed on in hopes of finding a habitable place to colonize. Minos is visually and physically very similar to Earth, with forests, meadows, clouds, and breathable air. The animals are also similar to Earth animals. However, there is uncertainty about Minos, and risk of the planet carrying diseases that would kill the humans. Part of the story takes place aboard The Explorer, a large yacht-converted-spaceship. The Explorer is silver and black and towers over the forests of Minos, and inside the ship has several compartments, including precautionary medical rooms, staterooms, and a dining hall.",
"The story is set on the planet of Minos. The forest that the doctors trek through is said to be similar to Earth in the fall, but it is not fall. The colors of the leaves themselves are green, copper, purple, and fiery red. There are also patches of bright greenish sunlight and wind. On the planet, the small town of Alexandria is also there. The Explorer itself is converted from a yacht with a synthetic diamond-studded control board and murals. However, it does not have the newest speed drives. Inside of the ship, there are multiple stalls and rooms for disinfecting. There is also a locker room with shower stalls and a wall mirror. The room has a wall phone too. The Explorer has a viewplate, showcasing the outside landscape of mountains on the horizon. The low rolling hills are bronze and red, with patches of clear green in the fields. The cafeteria is converted from an old dining room, so it still has the original finely grained wood of the ceilings and walls. It also features sound absorbance, soft music spools, and intimate small light tables to eat at. There are trays to use to take food back to a table too. The ship has many working and living quarters as well, including a laboratory to do experiments in and study the hamsters. "
] |
50774
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explain the phenomena of the Ghost Ship? Was it really only a product of his imagination? What of all the others who had seen it? Was it possible for many different men under many different situations to have the same exact illusion? Reason denied that. But perhaps space itself denies reason. Grimly he retraced the legend of the Ghost Ship. A chance phrase here and a story there put together all that he knew: Doomed for all eternity to wander in the empty star-lanes, the Ghost Ship haunts the Solar System that gave it birth. And this is its tragedy,
course. What is it that girls in small offices do or eat or drink or wear that girls in large offices don't do or eat or drink or wear? What do writers and doctors do differently? Or poets and dentists? What are we missing? What—" In the outer office a girl cried out. A body thumped against a desk, then a chair, then to the floor. Two girls screamed. Andy bolted up from his chair. Racing to the door, he shouted back to Bettijean, "Get a staff doctor and a chemist from the lab." It was the girl who had
This was no fantasy. There was a scientific reason for it. There must be! Or should there be? Throughout all Earth history there had been Ghost Ships sailing the Seven Seas—ships doomed to roam forever because their crew broke some unbreakable law. If this was true for the ships of the seas, why not for the ships of empty space? He looked again at the strange ship. It was motionless. At least it was not nearing him. Willard could see nothing but its vague outline. A moment later he could discern a faint motion. It was turning! The Ghost Ship
HOME IS WHERE YOU LEFT IT By ADAM CHASE [Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories February 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] The chance of mass slaughter was their eternal nightmare. How black is the blackest treachery? Is the most callous traitor entitled to mercy? Steve pondered these questions. His decision? That at times the villain should possibly be spoken of as a hero. Only the shells of deserted mud-brick houses greeted Steve Cantwell when he reached the village. He poked around in them for a
stinging forehead on his arms, cursing softly and crying. Finally he rolled over, pulled his foot out of the mess, and took off his shoes. They were full of mud—sticky sandy mud. The dark world was reeling about him, and the wind was dragging at his breath. He fell back against the sand pile and let his feet sink in the mud hole and wriggled his toes. He was laughing soundlessly, and his face was wet in the wind. He couldn't think. He couldn't remember where he was and why, and he stopped caring, and after a while he felt
|
What is the plot of the story?
|
After carefully reading the provided chunks, write a detailed response to the following question about The Hoofer by Walter M. Miller.
Relevant chunks:
and didn't look at her. "You'll have to spend most of the trip in a hammock." "I can take it." Suddenly she smiled, wanly. "I was with the Fleet. How long will it take?" "Eight days, in that ship." Roberds lit his pipe, and carefully hid his emotions. He knew Peterson was harboring the same thoughts. Eight days in space, in a small ship meant for two, and built for planetary surface flights. Eight days in that untrustworthy crate, hurtling to save the lives of that girl and Gladney. "Who was that ... man? The one you put out?" Gray
its own folly. In other words, should he become the MASTER OF LIFE AND DEATH? CAST OF CHARACTERS ROY WALTON He had to adopt the motto— the ends justify the means . FITZMAUGHAM His reward for devoted service was—an assassin's bullet. FRED WALTON His ambition was to fill his brother's shoes—but he underestimated their size. LEE PERCY His specialty was sugarcoating bitter pills. PRIOR With the pen as his only weapon, could he save his son? DR. LAMARRE He died for discovering the secret of immortality. Contents I The offices of the Bureau of Population Equalization, vulgarly known as Popeek,
asked. "We call him Rat," Roberds said. She didn't ask why. She said: "Why couldn't he pilot the ship, I mean? What is his record?" Peterson opened his mouth. "Shut up, Peterson!" the Chief snapped. "We don't talk about his record around here, Miss Gray. It's not a pretty thing to tell." "Stow it, Chief," said Peterson. "Miss Gray is no pantywaist." He turned to the nurse. "Ever hear of the Sansan massacre?" Patti Gray paled. "Yes," she whispered. "Was Rat in that?" Roberds shook his head. "He didn't take part in it. But Rat was attached to a very
many days?" His only answer was an inhuman snarl, and the cruel blazing of those inhuman eyes. She fell face first to the floor. "I can't keep it up!" she cried. The sound of her voice rolled along the hot steel deck. "I cant! I cant!" A double handful of tepid water was thrown in her face. "Get up!" Rat stood over her, face twisted, his body hunched. "Get up!" She stared at him, dazed. He kicked her. "Get up!" The tepid water ran off her face and far away she heard Judith calling.... She forced herself up. Rat was
moving things had unnerved him. He had already sounded the alert, flicked out the defense screens. Now he had nothing to do. He tried to concentrate on what the League Law would have him do. The Law was no help. Contact with planet-bound races was forbidden under any circumstances. But could a bunch of robots be called a race? The Law said nothing about robots because Earthmen had none. The building of imaginative robots was expressly forbidden. But at any rate, Steffens thought, he had made contact already. While Steffens stood by the screen, completely bewildered for the first time
Question:
What is the plot of the story?
Answer:
|
[
"This story follows the protagonist, Hogey Parker’s, journey in heading back home after a long stint in space. His identity leans heavily on being a spacer - or a tumbler - with distinguishing sunburned marks and glare-blinded eyes. Parker is accompanied by a bottle of gin, and with it, stumbles onto a bus. In his drunken ramblings and stumblings - attributed by himself to him being a spaceman - Hogey creates a ruckus on the bus and disturbs its passengers. Fellow passengers give him allowances as he’s a spaceman and help him out. \n\nThroughout his journey, he is helped by various characters who further progress his journey back home. After being dropped off, the bus driver helps him across the road, where he is later then picked up by a farmer who drops Hogey off even closer to his farmhouse. In between, Hogey constantly looks up at the Big Bottomless space and thinks about his time in space with particular feelings of resentment and anger - one towards the sun for blinding him and another towards the rookie that replaced him. After finally making it close to his farmhouse, he sneaks through the grass past the fence and encounters the dog, who he quickly shushes when one of his wife’s brothers comes out to investigate the noise. Staring at his wife and son through the house, he stumbles into wet concrete and quickly becomes stuck in the sand as it dries. Despite his best efforts he is unable to claw himself out. At the end of the story, his cries at being stuck in the concrete echo at the same time the cries of his son as the Hauptmann men find him, stuck. \n",
"Big Hogey Parker, a tumbler who comes back to Earth from his nine-month stay in the space, can hardly behave appropriately on the bus because of his unaccustomedness to the gravity and the drunkenness. He harasses and annoys the passengers on the bus, gets warned by the driver, and sleeps on the rear seat of the bus. After the bus stop at Caine’s junction, the bus driver helps him get out of the bus and safely cross the road. While crossing the road, Hogey talks about the importance of family and learns that the driver has two daughters. After crossing the road, the driver asks whether someone will come and pick Hogey up, but Hogey tells him that he is a week late and nobody will come. The driver tells him to wait for a car and leaves. Hogey stares at the sun while waiting, feeling unfamiliar with the gravity.\n\nHogey starts to lurch in the middle of the road. A car almost hits him when he fails to control his balance. A man comes out of the car and shouts at him. The man realizes that Hogey is Marie’s husband through the conversation, so he drives Hogey to a place near Marie’s house. Hogey takes a nap in the grass near the ditch until the night. He swallows a few gins, checks the time with the star's position in the sky as he pawns his watch in the poker game that he lost all of the money, and walks toward the house. He is afraid of facing his wife and son as he lost all the money in a poker game two weeks ago after his wife had waited for him for so long to do all the space travel to earn money. He wants to run away. He walks through the fence, trampling through some boards when the dog barks. He hides in the shadow of the peach tree when Marie’s brother comes out to check. The dog comes at him, and Hogey calms the dog, waiting until the man goes inside the house. When Hogey keeps walking, he steps into a concrete mixer with sand and falls. He takes off his shoes and puts his bare feet back in the muddy sand. Laying on the sand, Hogey falls asleep. Past midnight, he gets awakened by the dog's licking, finding his feet stuck in the concrete. Reflecting on his time in the space and the people there, Hogey feels desperate. Suddenly, he hears his son cry. The cry brings Hogey’s consciousness back from the space to where he is, and the significance of his family strikes him. He calls out loud for help and sobs with his feet stuck tight. He will live on Earth with gravity from now on.\n",
"The story focuses on a man named Hogey. Hogey is trying to return to his wife and child, but seems to find it very difficult because he has been drinking, and because his body needs to adapt to being back on Earth. The story begins in a bus, where Hogey is very drunk and is trying to talk to other passengers. The other passengers help Hogey sleep, but he wakes up again and continues speaking with others. When the bus reaches his stop, Hogey clumsily gets off the bus. When the driver sees that Hogey needs help, he helps Hogey sit down in the street and tells him to wait for a ride instead of walking to his wife’s house. Hogey waits for a while, then decides to walk. He falls in a ditch, but he is helped by a couple who passes in a car. The man tells him that his wife remarried and that he is going to the new husband’s house. After the man drops him off, Hogey falls asleep close to the house. He sleeps for a while and afterwards he tries to go into the house, but he struggles mentally to accept what he is doing. He ends up falling in cement, and his feet get stuck. We learn that Hogey worked in space a lot, and that he was afraid to go back to earth because of the amount of time that he had been away. \n\n",
"Everybody immediately knows that Big Hogey Parker is a spacer and goes out of their way to help him even if he is harassing a housewife. He reveals that he was kidding about being an Indian, and there are two men who lead him back to his seat. When the driver threatens to turn him over, Big Hogey apologizes and sits in his seat until it is time to leave, and the driver asks if he is okay once he staggers to cross the highway. The man asks if somebody is supposed to meet Big Hogey, but he says that it is a surprise for everybody. He is redirected to sit at the culvert, but gravity makes it difficult for him to walk. As the sun sets, Hogey stares at it because he hates it for what it truly is and what it did to his eyes. A burly farmer angrily confronts him when he stumbles down the road again, but he reveals that he is married to Marie Hauptman. They offer to drop him off at the area near Hauptman's road, and Hogey finds himself too tired to go on because it is twilight. When he awakes again, it is night time. He takes another sip of his gin and decides how the meeting will go. Hogey is worried about the money, especially since he has gone on six hitches in space with the promise that each one would be his last one. As he goes near the house, a dog suddenly comes out and barks. One of Marie’s brothers comes out to investigate the situation too, but he finds nothing and returns home with the dog. He tries to think about why a tumbler like him would be married with a son, and he finds both his feet losing the strength to move. The dog, Hooky, comes up to greet him again, but he angrily sends it away. Hogey thinks back to his crew, and a baby begins to cry suddenly. He yells for help, and the lights come on again because the baby begins to cry more. The kid had been an accident, and he knows that a tumblr has no business with a family. However, there is nobody to blame for this. Big Hogey sits with his foot locked in the solid concrete and sobs when the rest of the men find him. "
] |
29170
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and didn't look at her. "You'll have to spend most of the trip in a hammock." "I can take it." Suddenly she smiled, wanly. "I was with the Fleet. How long will it take?" "Eight days, in that ship." Roberds lit his pipe, and carefully hid his emotions. He knew Peterson was harboring the same thoughts. Eight days in space, in a small ship meant for two, and built for planetary surface flights. Eight days in that untrustworthy crate, hurtling to save the lives of that girl and Gladney. "Who was that ... man? The one you put out?" Gray
its own folly. In other words, should he become the MASTER OF LIFE AND DEATH? CAST OF CHARACTERS ROY WALTON He had to adopt the motto— the ends justify the means . FITZMAUGHAM His reward for devoted service was—an assassin's bullet. FRED WALTON His ambition was to fill his brother's shoes—but he underestimated their size. LEE PERCY His specialty was sugarcoating bitter pills. PRIOR With the pen as his only weapon, could he save his son? DR. LAMARRE He died for discovering the secret of immortality. Contents I The offices of the Bureau of Population Equalization, vulgarly known as Popeek,
asked. "We call him Rat," Roberds said. She didn't ask why. She said: "Why couldn't he pilot the ship, I mean? What is his record?" Peterson opened his mouth. "Shut up, Peterson!" the Chief snapped. "We don't talk about his record around here, Miss Gray. It's not a pretty thing to tell." "Stow it, Chief," said Peterson. "Miss Gray is no pantywaist." He turned to the nurse. "Ever hear of the Sansan massacre?" Patti Gray paled. "Yes," she whispered. "Was Rat in that?" Roberds shook his head. "He didn't take part in it. But Rat was attached to a very
many days?" His only answer was an inhuman snarl, and the cruel blazing of those inhuman eyes. She fell face first to the floor. "I can't keep it up!" she cried. The sound of her voice rolled along the hot steel deck. "I cant! I cant!" A double handful of tepid water was thrown in her face. "Get up!" Rat stood over her, face twisted, his body hunched. "Get up!" She stared at him, dazed. He kicked her. "Get up!" The tepid water ran off her face and far away she heard Judith calling.... She forced herself up. Rat was
moving things had unnerved him. He had already sounded the alert, flicked out the defense screens. Now he had nothing to do. He tried to concentrate on what the League Law would have him do. The Law was no help. Contact with planet-bound races was forbidden under any circumstances. But could a bunch of robots be called a race? The Law said nothing about robots because Earthmen had none. The building of imaginative robots was expressly forbidden. But at any rate, Steffens thought, he had made contact already. While Steffens stood by the screen, completely bewildered for the first time
|
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