CONTENTS
CHAPTER THREE Exile From Space
CHAPTER FOUR Connection Completed
CHAPTER FIVE The Shrine of Temptation
CHAPTER SEVEN The Lady Was A Tramp
CHAPTER NINE So Proudly We Hail
CHAPTER TEN The Deep Down Dragon
CHAPTER ELEVEN Whoever You Are
CHAPTER TWELVE Death Is The Penalty
Copyright © Judith Merril 1973
Artwork and cover design by Derek Carter
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publishers, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a magazine or newspaper. (Scanner's Note: Ha!)
Library of Congress Card Number: 73-85478 ISBN: 0 919588 07 7 (paper)
0 919588 08 5 (cloth)
KAKABEKA Publishing Company, P.O. Box 247,
Toronto, Ontario M4P 2G5
Printed and bound in Canada by Heritage Press
for Merril MacDonald and Ann Pohl and Kevin and Gregg and the Question Mark — for the Future
It might be argued that rather than writing science fiction, Canada contributes to making it. Prophets like Marshall McLuhan appear to come straight out of a sci fi world, and events like Expo '67 were sci fi in living colour. But science fiction itself is, as Judith Merril points Out, the imaginative creation of the probabalistic worlds that might come to be. Hers is an art of infinite curiosity and of a perpetual humane spirit subtly combined with a complex logic. Like all reasonably mature art forms, science fiction has its main-line and its avant-garde. Judith Merril, as anthologist, is a master at introducing avant-garde writers such as Brian Aldiss with his Joyce-like manoeuverings of Barefoot in the Head, J.G. Ballard and Harlan Ellison. But more important than her sense of the future of the science fiction field is her own restless curiosity about the future, which she demonstrates in her writings. While she is far from being a doctrinaire representative of woman's lib (for Judith as the reader will see is fortunately incapable of being doctrinaire about anything), she was undoubtedly the first woman to achieve major recognition as a writer of science fiction and she did it with stories whose character and quality were specifically those of a woman. Perhaps one quality, however, which cuts across the masculine-feminine line, is her most important: a deep sense of the human and an instinctive and natural humanism.
It is an extension of her own quest for the future, for the probabalistic worlds that will indicate where we ought to be going, that has led Judith Merril to Canada, for the North and particularly our North may be one of the new edges of history. It is a characteristic of Judith Merril as a science fiction writer that her curiosity for the new is a perpetual theme of her stories. There is no point in repeating what she herself will tell you as you read the continuity she has provided for this collection of fine science fiction stories. Yet the fact that she probed the problems of mutations such as those resulting from thalidomide and raised the question of the natural physical and psychological superiority of women in a space age in her stories "That Only a Mother" (which is reproduced in other collections) and "Survival Ship" (included here), demonstrates the way that she has kept a genuine human sensitivity linked to a curiosity about problems we may have to confront in the future. Perhaps most remarkable of all is her sense of the importance of the so-called spiritual in the realm of human affairs as man confronts the alternative futures provided by our intellectual ingenuity and our scientific competence. A story such as "The Shrine of Temptation" draws attention to the importance of the new social sciences of linguistics and anthropology and their potential for understanding, or misunderstanding, the spiritual phenomena present in different cultures.
But themes alone do not make the art of the writer, which is equally compounded of a sense of the human and a knowledge of literary structure. Judith Merril brings both of these together in stories such as "Survival Ship" (which came to be because she wanted to explore the possibility of writing a story without gender-identifying pronouns) and "The Lonely" where, like many other science fiction writers but with a competence of her own, she explores the perpetual presence of bureaucratese in the affairs of humans.
Judith's immigration to Canada appears like a logical extension of the constant concern that her science fiction writing has demonstrated about the growing dehumanization of an over-elaborate bureaucratization of knowledge. As such, these stories have a special relevance to Canada and Canadians at this time, since they are extrapolated from the experience of the probabalistic worlds which could come to be as a result of the wrong-directedness of the North American dream as conceived by the official portions of the present rulers of the United States. The ironies of stories like "So Proudly We Hail" (which I am glad is included even if the writer thought its inclusion debatable), and of stories such as "Death is the Penalty" (which is one of her favorites), probe the dimensions of a future in which the present activities of U.S. officialdom continues unchecked.
This collection of stories introduces Judith Merril to the Canadian audience. It is important that they contribute as they should to our critical awareness of the technological directedness and dehumanizing spirit of so many North Americans—U.S. or Canadian — and it is to be hoped that these stories not only give rise to many more stories, but that these stories generate within Canada a new interest in science fiction, which through its projection of possible worlds can provide both a critique and model for the future.
Donald F. Theall
McGill University July 19 73
My first science fiction story was published twenty-five years ago in Astounding (now Analog) — a rather unpleasant story called That Only a Mother . . . , concerned with the effects, on one small ordinary family, of life during a comparatively "clean" atomic war in (what was then) the near future.
In 1948, a lot of us were very worried about the imminence of that hypothetical war: not just about death and injury, injustice and destruction; and hardly at all about "winning" or "losing"; but mostly about the insidious aftereffects — cancers and leukemias that might follow years later for apparently untouched survivors — and the effects of sterility and mutations on plants, animals, and human beings for generations to come.
In 1946, 1947, 1948, a great deal was being published about these things. One read the Smythe Report and No Place to Hide and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and the publications of the World Federalists and the daily newspapers. If one also read the science fiction magazines, the information total was staggering, unarguable, and terrifying.
There has been very little change in that total in this quarter-century. We have, of course, learned a great deal meanwhile about bacteriological and chemical warfare, both in theory and in practice. But so far as strictly atomic doom is concerned, the most significant differences are that the more powerful bombs and swifter delivery systems which were then predicted have been realized; and that the global holocaust which was then widely anticipated has not occurred.
I think it has not occurred because it took such a short time — perhaps five or six years — for the information that was fully available in 1948 to be disseminated, absorbed, and understood by many people, including small ordinary families, and even heads of governments. I like to think this rapid understanding came at least in part from the fervent dramatizing efforts of science fiction writers.
"Where do you get those crazy ideas?" This is the question S-F writers hear most often. Well, for instance:
That Only a Mother . . . dealt with radiation-caused mutation, not in broad statistical terms, or among bomb-victims, but as a side-effect due to casual exposure in one family on the "winning" side. Its specific sources were two: one, a tiny back-page newspaper article saying that the U.S. Army of Occupation in Japan had definitely established that the "rumors" of wide-spread infanticides in the areas of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were unfounded (even in those days some of us automatically read certain kinds of official U.S. releases backwards); the other, a domestic incident which brought sharply home to me how easily a mother (this one, for instance) can fail/refuse to notice a child's imperfections. The result was a story whose horror was rooted in a familiar domestic truism applied to readily-available public information which most people had simply not yet assimilated.
"Where do you get those crazy ideas?" From the same daily experiences and communications, books, newspapers, broadcasts, we all share. It's not the ingredients that are so strange, but the unexpected juxtapositions: the trick of looking at something familiar against an alien background, or examining the new and different against a familiar setting.
Science fiction is not so much prophecy as "probability." If you put this and this and that together in a certain way, here's what might happen. Sometimes the writer hits frighteningly close to what will happen, though not always for the right reasons: when I wrote that story about the armless-legless baby in 1947, I was thinking about radioactivity, not thalidomide.
"Realistic" fiction is about things that have happened. "Fantasy" is about things (we are fairly sure) don't happen. "Science fiction" is about things that could happen.
Survival Ship
Half a million people actually made the round trip to Space Station One that day to watch the take-off in person. And back on Earth a hundred million video screens flashed the picture of Captain Melnick's gloved hand waving a dramatic farewell at the port, while the other hand slowly pressed down the lever that would fire the ship out beyond the orbit of the artificial satellite, past the Moon and the planets, into unknown space.
From Station One, Earth, and Moon, a hundred million winged wishes added their power to the surge of the jets, as a rising spiral of fire inside the greatest rocket tower ever built marked the departure of the thrice-blessed ship, Survival. In the great churches, from pole to pole, services were held all day, speeding the giant vessel on its way, calling on the aid of the Lord for the Twenty and Four who manned the ship.
At mountain-top telescopes a dozen cameras faithfully transmitted the messages of great unblinking glass eyes. Small home sets and massive pulpit screens alike looked to the sky to follow the flare dimming in the distance, to watch the man-made star falling away.
Inside the great ship Melnick's hand left the firing lever, then began adjusting the chin rest and the earphones of the acceleration couch. The indicator dashboard, designed for prone eye level, leaped into focus.
Securing the couch straps with the swift competence of habit, the captain intently watched the sweep of the big second hand around the take-off timer, aware at the same time that green lights were beginning to glow at the other end of the board. The indicator reached the first red mark.
"The show's over, everybody. We're in business!" The mike built into the chin rest carried the captain's taut voice all over the ship. "Report, all stations!"
"Number one, all secure!" Melnick mentally ticked off the first green light, glowing to prove the astrogator's couch was in use.
"Number two, all secure!"
"Number three . . ." "Four . . ." "Five." The rhythmic sing-song of pinpoint timing in take-off was second nature by now to the whole crew. One after another, the green lights glowed for safety, punctuating the litany, and the gong from the timer put a period neatly in place after the final "All secure!"
"Eight seconds to black out," the captain's voice warned. "Seven . . . six ... stand by." The first wave of acceleration shock reeled into twenty-four helmet-sheathed heads on twenty-four individually designed head rests. "Five—" It's got to work, Melnick was thinking, fighting off unconsciousness with fierce intensity. "Four—" It's got to . . . got to . . . "Three—" got to . . . got to . . . "two—" got to . . .
At the space station, a half-million watchers were slowly cleared from the giant take-off platform. They filed in long orderly lines down the ramps to the interior, and waited there for the smaller Earth rockets that would take them home. Waiting, they were at once elated and disappointed. They had seen no more than could be seen at the same place on any other day. The entire rocket area had been fenced off, with a double cordon of guards to make sure that too-curious visitors stayed out of range. Official explanations mentioned the new engine, the new fuel, the danger of escaping gases—but nobody believed it. Every one of the half-million visitors knew what the mystery was: the crew, and nothing else. Giant video screens all over the platform gave the crowd details and closeups, the same they would have seen had they stayed comfortably at home. They saw the captain's gloved hand, at the last, but not the captain's face.
There was muttering and complaining, but there was something else too. Each man, woman, and child who went to the station that day would be able to say, years later, "I was there when the Survival took off. You never saw anything so big in your life."
Because it wasn't just another planet hop. It wasn't just like the hundreds of other take-offs. It was the Survival, the greatest spaceship ever engineered. People didn't think of the Survival in terms of miles-per-second; they said, "Sirius in fifteen years!"
From Sunday supplements to dignified periodicals, nearly every medium of communication on Earth had carried the story. Brightly colored graphs made visibly simple the natural balance of life forces in which plants and animals could maintain a permanently fresh atmosphere as well as a self-perpetuating food supply. Lecture demonstrations and videocasts showed how centrifugal force would replace gravity.
For months before take-off, the press and video followed the preparations with daily intimate accounts. The world over, people knew the nicknames of pigs, calves, chickens, and crew members—and even the proper botanical name of the latest minor masterpiece of the biochemists, a hybrid plant whose root, stems, leaves, buds, blossoms, and fruit were all edible, nourishing, and delicious, and which had the added advantage of being the thirstiest CO2 drinker ever found.
The public knew the nicknames of the crew, and the proper name of the plant. But they never found out, not even the half million who went to the field to see for themselves, the real identity of the Twenty and Four who comprised the crew. They knew that thousands had applied; that it was necessary to be single, under twenty-five, and a graduate engineer in order to get as far as the physical exam; that the crew was mixed in sex, with the object of filling the specially equipped nursery and raising a second generation for the return trip, if, as was hoped, a lengthy stay on Sirius's planet proved possible. They knew, for that matter, all the small characteristics and personal idiosyncrasies of the crew members—what they ate, how they dressed, their favorite games, theaters, music, books, cigarettes, preachers, and political parties. There were only two things the public didn't know, and couldn't find out: the real names of the mysterious Twenty and Four, and the reason why those names were kept secret.
There were as many rumors as there were newsmen or radio reporters, of course. Hundreds of explanations were offered at one time or another. But still nobody knew—nobody except the half hundred Very Important Persons who had planned the project, and the Twenty and Four themselves.
And now, as the pinpoint of light faded out of the screens of televisors all over Earth, the linear and rotary acceleration of the great ship began to adjust to the needs of the human body. "Gravity" in the living quarters gradually approached Earth-normal. Tortured bodies relaxed in the acceleration couches, where the straps had held them securely positioned through the initial stage, so as to keep the blood and guts where they belonged, and to prevent the stomach from following its natural tendency to emerge through the backbone. Finally, stunned brain cells awoke to the recognition that danger signals were no longer coming through from shocked, excited tissues.
Captain Melnick was the first to awake. The row of lights on the board still glowed green. Fumbling a little with the straps, Melnick watched tensely to see if the indicator lights were functioning properly, sighing with relief as the one at the head of the board went dead, operated automatically by the removal of body weight from the couch.
It was right—it was essential—for the captain to wake up first. If any of the men had showed superior recuperative powers, it could be bad. Melnick thought wearily of the years and years ahead during which this artificial dominance had to be maintained in defiance of all Earth conditioning. But of course it would not be that bad, really. The crew had been picked for ability to conform to the unusual circumstances; they were all without strong family ties or prejudices. Habit would establish the new castes soon enough, but the beginning was crucial. Survival was more than a matter of plant-animal balance and automatic gravity.
While the captain watched, another light went out, and then another. Officers, both of them. Good. Three more lights died out together. Then men were beginning to awaken, and it was reassuring to know that their own couch panels would show them that the officers had revived first. In any case, there was no more time for worrying. There were things to be done.
A detail was sent off immediately to attend to the animals, release them from the confinement of the specially prepared acceleration pens, and check them for any possible damage incurred in spite of precautions. The proportions of human, animal, and plant life had been worked out carefully beforehand for maximum efficiency and for comfort. Now that the trip had started, the miniature world had to maintain its status quo or perish.
As soon as enough of the crew were awake, Lieutenant Johnson, the third officer, took a group of eight out to make an inspection of the hydroponic tanks that lined the hull. Nobody expected much trouble here. Being at the outermost part of the ship, the plants were exposed to high "gravity." The outward pull exerted on them by rotation should have held their roots in place, even through the tearing backward thrust of the acceleration. But there was certain to be a large amount of minor damage, to stems and leaves and buds, and whatever there was would need immediate repair. In the ship's economy the plants had the most vital function of all—absorbing carbon dioxide from dead air already used by humans and animals, and deriving from it the nourishment that enabled their chlorophyll systems to release fresh oxygen for re-use in breathing.
There was a vast area to inspect. Row upon row of tanks marched solidly from stem to stern of the giant ship, all around the inner circumference of the hull. Johnson split the group of eight into four teams, each with a biochemist in charge to locate and make notes of the extent of the damage, and an unclassified man as helper, to do the actual dirty work, crawling out along the catwalks to mend each broken stalk.
Other squads were assigned to check the engines and control mechanisms, and the last two women to awake got stuck with the booby prize—first shift in the galley. Melnick squashed their immediate protests with a stern reminder that they had hardly earned the right to complain; but privately the captain was pleased at the way it had worked out. This first meal on board was going to have to be something of an occasion. A bit of ceremony always helped; and above all, social procedures would have to be established immediately. A speech was indicated—a speech Melnick did not want to have to make in the presence of all twenty-four crew members. As it worked out, the Four would almost certainly be kept busy longer than the others. If these women had not happened to wake up last . . .
The buzzing of the intercom broke into the captain's speculations. "Lieutenant Johnson reporting, sir." Behind the proper, crisp manner, the young lieutenant's voice was frightened. Johnson was third in command, supervising the inspection of the tanks.
"Having trouble down there?" Melnick was deliberately informal, knowing the men could hear over the intercom, and anxious to set up an immediate feeling of unity among the officers.
"One of the men complaining, sir." The young lieutenant sounded more confident already. "There seems to be some objection to the division of work."
Melnick thought it over quickly and decided against any more public discussion on the intercom. "Stand by. I'll be right down."
All over the ship airducts and companionways led from the inner-level living quarters "down" to the outer level of tanks; Melnick took the steps three at a time and reached the trouble zone within seconds after the conversation ended.
"Who's the troublemaker here?"
"Kennedy—on assignment with Petty Officer Giorgio for plant maintenance."
"You have a complaint?" Melnick asked the swarthy, dungareed man whose face bore a look of sullen dissatisfaction.
"Yeah." The man's voice was deliberately insolent. The others had never heard him speak that way before, and he seemed to gain confidence from the shocked surprise they displayed. "I thought I was supposed to be a pampered darling this trip. How come I do all the dirty work here, and Georgie gets to keep so clean?"
His humor was too heavy to be effective. "Captain's orders, that's why," Melnick snapped. "Everybody has to work double time till things are squared away. If you don't like the job here, I can fix you up fine in the brig. Don't worry about your soft quarters. You'll get 'em later and plenty of 'em. It's going to be a long trip, and don't forget it." The captain pointed significantly to the chronometer built into the overhead. "But it's not much longer to dinner. You'd better get back to work if you want to hit the chow while it's hot. Mess call in thirty minutes."
Melnick took a chance and turned abruptly away, terminating the interview. It worked. Sullen but defeated, Kennedy hoisted himself back up on the catwalk, and then began crawling out to the spot Giorgio pointed out. Not daring to express their relief, lieutenant and captain exchanged one swift look of triumph before Melnick walked wordlessly off.
In the big control room that would be mess hall, social hall, and general meeting place for all of them for fifteen years to come—or twice that time if Sirius's planet turned out to be uninhabitable—the captain waited for the crew members to finish their checkup assignments. Slowly they gathered in the lounge, ignoring the upholstered benches around the sides and the waiting table in the center, standing instead in small awkward groups. An undercurrent of excitement ran through them all, evoking deadly silences and erupting in bursts of too-noisy conversation, destroying the joint attempt at an illusion of nonchalance. They all knew—or hoped they knew—what the subject of the captain's first speech would be, and behind the facade of bronzed faces and trimly muscled bodies they were all curious, even a little afraid.
Finally there were twenty of them in the room, and the captain rose and rapped for order.
"I suppose," Melnick began, "you will all want to know our present position and the results of the checkup." Nineteen heads turned as one, startled and disappointed at the opening. "However," the captain continued, smiling at the change of expressions the single word brought, "I imagine you're all as hungry and—er—impatient as I am, so I shall put off the more routine portions of my report until our other comrades have joined us. There is only one matter which should properly be discussed immediately."
Everyone in the room was acutely conscious of the Four. They had all known, of course, how it would be. But on Earth there had always been other, ordinary men around to make them less aware of it. Now the general effort to maintain an air of artificial ease and disinterest was entirely abandoned as the captain plunged into the subject most on everyone's mind.
"Our ship is called the Survival. You all know why. Back on Earth, people think they know why too; they think it's because of our plants and artificial gravity, and the hundreds of other engineering miracles that keep us going. Of course, they also know that our crew is mixed, and that our population is therefore"—the captain paused, letting an anticipatory titter circle the room—"is therefore by no means fixed. What they don't know, naturally, is the division of sexes in the crew.
"You're all aware of the reason for the secrecy. You know that our organization is in direct opposition to the ethical principles on which the peace was established after World War IV. And you know how the planners of this trip had to struggle with the authorities to get this project approved. When consent was granted, finally, it was only because the highest prelates clearly understood that the conditions of our small universe were in every way different from those on Earth—and that the division proposed was necessary for survival."
The captain paused, waiting for the last words to sink in, and studying the attitudes of the group. Even now, after a year's conditioning to counteract earthly mores, there were some present who listened to this public discussion of dangerous and intimate matters with flushed faces and embarrassed smiles.
"You all realize, of course, that this consent was based, finally, on the basic principle itself." Automatically, out of long habit unbroken by that year's intensive training, the captain made the sign of the olive branch. "Survival of the race is the first duty of every ethical man and woman." The command was intoned meaningfully, almost pontifically, and brought its reward as confusion cleared from some of the flushed faces. "What we are doing, our way of life now, has the full approval of the authorities. We must never forget that.
"On Earth, survival of the race is best served by the increasing strength of family ties. It was not thought wise to endanger those ties by letting the general public become aware of our—unorthodox—system here on board. A general understanding, on Earth, of the true meaning of the phrase, 'the Twenty and the Four,' could only have aroused a furor of discussion and argument that would, in the end, have impeded survival both there and here.
"The knowledge that there are twenty of one sex on board, and only four of the other—that children will be born outside of normal family groups, and raised jointly—I need not tell you how disastrous that would have been." Melnick paused, raising a hand to dispel the muttering in the room.
"I wanted to let you know, before the Four arrive, that I have made some plans which I hope will carry us through the initial period in which difficulties might well arise. Later, when the groups of six—five of us, and one of them in each—have been assigned their permanent quarters, I think it will be possible, in fact necessary, to allow a greater amount of autonomy within those groups. But for the time being, I have arranged a—shall we call it a dating schedule?" Again the captain paused, waiting for tension to relieve itself in laughter. "I have arranged dates for all of you with each of them during convenient free periods over the next month. Perhaps at the end of that time we will be able to choose groups; perhaps it will take longer. Maternity schedules, of course, will not be started until I am certain that the grouping is satisfactory to all. For the time being, remember this:
"We are not only more numerous than they, but we are stronger and, in our social placement here, more fortunate. We must become accustomed to the fact that they are our responsibility. It is because we are hardier, longer-lived, less susceptible to pain and illness, better able to withstand, mentally, the difficulties of a life of monotony, that we are placed as we are—and not alone because we are the bearers of children."
Over the sober silence of the crew, the captain's voice rang out. "Lieutenant Johnson," Melnick called to the golden-haired, sun-tanned woman near the door, "will you call the men in from the tank rooms now? They can finish their work after dinner."
Survival Ship was one of my first stories, and when I wrote it I was trying to perform a simple literary exercise, to write a story which contained no personal pronouns. I couldn't do it: I wound up with a story which had (almost) no gender pronouns.
The story was first published in Damon Knight's excellent but short-lived magazine, Worlds Beyond, and was reprinted in a couple of anthologies shortly afterwards. Its main appeal at the time was as a "clever" trick-ending story. Remember: this was a decade or more before the beginning of Project Apollo, almost two decades before the resurgence of Women's Liberation. In those remote days, everyone (and few they were) who thought much about spaceflight knew that women were the logical (though unlikely) choice for astronauts, if only (but not only) for reasons of size and weight.
"Gimmick stories" are seldom durable. Survival Ship was largely forgotten for fifteen years. Then suddenly lots of people were playing the no-gender-pronouns game, and Survival Ship was being reprinted again as an example of "women's lib science fiction".
Of course it is nothing of the sort, but maybe it has something of the same effect on new readers that it had on me as author: because after I wrote it, I began planning a novel which would make use of the same background to attempt an exploration of sex-role behaviour. How much of what we ordinarily consider "feminine" or "masculine" behaviour is culturally determined, and how much is built into the genes? One of the S-F games is a sort of psychodrama-on-paper: set up an environment-shift or a role-switch, and play out the action to see what will happen.
For ten years I kept adding notes to a card-file which eventually contained a "future history" of the "Mother-ships" launched by the "matriarchy" (a puritan-backlash anti-war Earth Government), as well as a detailed genealogy of the original Survival Ship, with notes on the experiences of its second generation.
The novel was one of those that didn't get written. But one short story out of the middle of it appeared in Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1958.
Wish Upon a Star
I WISH, I WISH, I WISH . . .
Sheik sat under the shadow of a broad-leaf shrub, his head back, eyes closed against the glare from overhead, mouth open for a shout of protest he could never voice.
He stifled the thought with the sound, pushed it out of his head as he pushed his body backward, throwing his weight straight-armed on the flat palms of his hands behind him. Flexing his calves below bent knees, he pulled against the long thigh sinews and tightened the slanting muscles of his back, driving all tension from his mind into his body as he raised his buttocks up off the ground and hung suspended, arching from knees to elbows, hands and feet rooted to the soil. Wholly intent on the immedate physical effort, he stayed so till the blood rushing to his head choked in his throat, and arms and legs were trembling beyond control. Then with a last summoning of purpose, he flipped over and sprawled contentedly collapsed on chest and stomach, head turned so one cheek also rested on the resilient softness of the granular stuff that made the plant beds. With each great breath of air his nostrils sucked up the rich sweet damp aroma of the roots.
For a moment there was peace; and then, again, I wish, I wish, I wish ...
Tears filled his eyes. He sat up and angrily and brushed them off. He was too old for crying. Crying wouldn't help. He was too old to be sitting idle here, wasting time, wasting wishes on absurdities. Old enough not to be bothered by anything Naomi said or did . . . but not yet old enough (smart enough?) to know better than to try to tell her anything.
She had listened so meekly, watched so quietly, while he repaired the rootpack she had broken, holding the torn parts—just so—together, tamping the soil down—just so—around the fiber, explaining as he worked why it was just this way. He let her silence fool him; well, it was no one's fault but his own. He should have known better by now.
When he was finished, she smiled, very sweetly. "It', so comforting to know you'll be here, Sheik," she said, "when I'm in charge. You're so efficient." Then a quick glance at the chrono, which she must have been watching all the time from the corner of her eye, or she couldn't have timed it all so perfectly. "Oh-OOOh! I better run! I'm late for Sessions now . . ." And she was off, flashing a hand free of dirt or work, leaving him, trowel in hand, to realize he had just finished doing her job for her.
It wasn't fair. Naomi was twelve and a half, more than a year younger than he was. In Standard School she was behind him in almost everything; and never, never as long as she lived, would she be able to handle a plant, to feel it and understand it, as he did. But she was the one in Special Sessions classes now, learning the things he ought to know. They'd make her read all the books he wanted, whether she cared or not, and put her to learn in the lab, mastering all the mysteries and intricacies of advanced Bichem. While he, Yashikazu, would go on day after day, trowel in hand, taking her jibes now, and later—much later, when he replaced Abdur in charge of the plantroom—taking her orders as Ab took his orders from Lieutenant Johnson.
It just wasn't fair!
I wish, I wish I was ...
He stopped it, cut it off sharply. He was not going to think that way any more. I wish Sarah was here, he finished the thought instead. Tonight, maybe, she would ask him again. He had nursery duty, but if he told Bob . . . if she asked him, that was . . . well, if she did, he'd get off duty somehow ...
Without even closing his eyes, he could see her there now, as she had been the night before last, sprawled on the rootpacks beside him, her shining long legs golden under the ultras, her face in the shadow of the leafy shrub a deep dark brown, but somehow giving out the gold-glow, too. Her eyes were closed and her hand, smooth and cool, soft and small, lay inside his as he watched her in warm and perfect comradeship.
For most of an hour, they had barely moved or talked: they just lay there together in the private shadow, sharing what had been his alone, thinking and dreaming silently but not separately at all.
Nothing Naomi said or did ought to matter now, because things-as-they-were had given him this special thing, a place and a significance, to share with Sarah. Never before had he told anyone about the shadows—how he felt about them. (No one but Ab, of course, but that was different; Ab knew.) She had seen them, naturally, most every day of her life; everyone in the ship had. The nursery-age children spent at least an hour each day hullside, for ultra exposure and exercise as well as their basic fichem. When they started with Standard School class-work, they were required to spend a half-hour of play-ti me every day under the lamps. But it was the light they came for; the shadows belonged to Sheik.
When he was just old enough to be allowed to go about alone, he started coming down hullside every chance he had; the shadows drew him. Later, the plants became important, too, and now he knew that they would be his work all his life. That was good in itself, but better because the shadows were part of the plants.
Nowhere else in the whole ship was there anything like it. Once in a while, the floorlight or one of the walls in the regular living and work rooms would go out of whack, and for a brief time the diffusion would be distorted and patches of dark-and-bright showed when people moved. But only here, where the thick rootpack lined the whole inner shell of the ship's hull, where then were only struts instead of walls, and the great ultra lamps glared day and night overhead, only here were there real shadows, under the plants, stationary, permanent, and shaped.
The ultras were never dimmed. They shone, Sheik thought, with the same brilliant fixity of time and purpose as the pinpointed stars on the black satin of the lounge viewplate. And in the center of this same clump of shrubbery where he lay now there was a hollow spot where some of the oldest, tallest plants grew so thick no light could penetrate, where it was dark, black, almost as black as the space between the stars: the way, he thought, a planet's night must be.
And this spot, where he had taken Sarah, was—depending where you held your head—a moonlit planet night, a "twilight," "morning," or "afternoon" . . . all words in books, until they took on meaning here where the leaves and lights produced an infinitude of ever-changing shades and combinations of black, gray, green, brown, and gold.
He had never told anyone how he thought about that. Not Abdur; not even Sarah, yet. But if she asked him to take her here again, he thought, he could tell her; she would really understand.
He sat up sharply, the faint rustling sound like an answer to a prayer. Sarah?
Two plant stalks parted cautiously and a small, round, brown face stared into his own.
"What are you doing down here now?" Sheik demanded. How had the fool kid found him here?
"I told 'm I'd find you," Hari said triumphantly. "I told 'm I could. You better hurry. Ab's mad at you. He has to work onna mew-tay-shuns," the small boy said the new word carefully, "an' you're supposed to be our teacher this time."
Sheik scrambled to his feet. Nursery class here already? That late? He'd spent half the afternoon doing nothing, dreaming . . . Ab must be mad, all right!
"You forgot about us," Hari said.
He hadn't forgotten; he had just forgotten time. "Come on, shrimpy," he told Harendra gruffly. "Better hop on if you want to get back quick." He squatted and Hari climbed on his shoulders—a rare and special treat; it would make up for his seeming to forget. He started for Abdur's workroom at a trot.
Harendra was three years old now, almost four, but he was Yoshikazu's favorite in the nursery still. He had been Sheik's first full-charge baby; sometimes he didn't seem too sure himself which one was his father, Abdur or Sheik. Certainly he didn't care; he loved them both with the same fierce intensity. And it upset him if Ab was angry with the Sheik.
Abdur had been spending all his time the past few days struggling to save a planting of mutant seedlings newly developed in the Bichem lab. It was a high-protein lentil with a new flavor, but some mysterious lack in root-pack nourishment—the kind of thing that showed up only in actual growth conditions—made it essential to nurse each plant with extra care while the lab techs tried to find the cause of the trouble.
The intricate, patient skill with which Abdur tended the delicate young plants was fascinating to Sheik. And the young children, he thought, would be interested in the luminous unfamiliar yellow of the sickly leaves.
Abdur agreed with evident satisfaction to having the children visit the sick patch. He rebuked Sheik only briefly and without heat for his forgetfulness, and set out immediately for his plants, taking the way cross-ship, through the central living section, to reach the area on the other side of the hull without further delay. Yoshikazu took his troupe of six around by the huflside route, routinely replying to the inevitable routine questions at each step: why was this plant taller, the other stalk thicker, a leaf a darker green or different shape. To most of the grown people on board, the endless rows of plants covering the whole inner surface of the ship's hull were monotonous 'and near identical. Abdur knew better; so did Sheik; and the nursery kids noticed things sometimes that Yoshikazu hadn't seen himself.
But this time he didn't want to stop at every plant. It was a slow enough trip with their short legs, and he hurried them past spots where he might otherwise have tried to show them something new or slightly changed. Then Dee, silly dimpled shrieking Dina, who, at barely two, should not (in Sheik's opinion) have come into the nursery class as yet, sat herself down on the rootpacks and refused to budge.
Yoshikazu bent to pick her up. He'd carry her, rather than waste time coaxing now. But she pointed to one root, growing wrong, malformed and upended, and stopped progress completely by-spilling out a spurt of only half-coherent but entirely fascinated inquiry.
Well, he had been wrong; she was old enough. Sheik sat down beside her and got to work, framing his answer, to her questions carefully, trying to give her a new mystery each time to provoke the next useful question. He pulled packing away from around the upended root, dug down, and placed the root where it belonged, giving all the children a chance to see how the other roots lay in the pack before he covered it. He explained how the roots drank nourishment from the soil, and floundered attempting to explain the action of the ultraviolet lamps.
All the while, Hari hung over his shoulder, watching the boy had seen it all before, when Dina was too little to care, but he drank in every sight and every word as if it were the first time for him, too.
"It's like being tucked in," he broke in suddenly, offering his own level of lucidity in place of Sheik's complications. "Like when your daddy tucks you in at night and kisses you and you feel warm and good all over you and you grow in your sleep."
Dina's black eyes were shining with excitement. "I know," she said. "Every night when I sleep I grow." She lifted a hand to prove the point. "Way up!"
"Well, that's how it is," Hari nodded commendation to his pupil. "Only the lights don't have to go out for the plants to sleep, because they're asleep all the time. Underneath there. That's why they never go anyplace."
His voice lost some confidence at the end. He looked to Yoshikazu for approval, and Dina looked for confirmation.
Sheik hesitated, failed to find words for a more adequate explanation, and decided Hari had probably put across more than he could for right now. He nodded and smiled at them both. "Come on, now, or we won't have time to see the new plants." They all ran after him.
Lieutenant Johnson was on duty at the children's supper that evening. She strolled casually from one of the four tables to another, listening to a scrap of conversation here, answering a question there, correcting a younger child somewhere else, reminding Fritzi—who at eleven had just become a table leader—to keep her group quieter.
At Sarah's table she paused only briefly; the officer on duty never had to stop there except for a greeting. Sarah and Sheik had seven in their group, more than anyone else, but they never had trouble. They were a good combination; Sheik glowed inwardly with his awareness of this, and with the feeling that the same thought was passing through Johnson's mind as she looked from one end of the table to the other. He didn't need any smiles from Johnson to keep him happy tonight, though. In the lounge, just before, Sarah had asked him. As soon as he could swap his evening duty, he was to meet her and take her down hullside again.
He caught her glance across the table as the Lieutenant walked away and saw her wink at him. With astonishment he thought, She's as happy as I am! She wants to go, too!
He knew, though he could not see as she bent over the carving, how her breasts had begun to swell under her shirt, and he knew by heart, though they were hidden behind the table, the long clean curves of those golden legs. Mechanically he added lentils to carrobeet top and passed a plate down, reminding Adolph Liebnitz that there was a fork at his place, and he should use it. He answered a question of Irma's without ever knowing what she asked, filled another plate, kept his eyes off Sarah thinking, This time . . . this time I'll ... Added a little extra greens to Justin's plate, skimping on the carrobeets the kid hated . . . This time I'll . . . Looked up, caught Sarah's eye again, felt himself going hot and red, and dropped the thought.
He was in a warm daze still when Lieutenant Johnson mounted the rostrum to conclude the meal with the evening prayer. Sheik chanted the familiar words of thanksgiving, suddenly meaningful, and looked directly at Sarah as they finished, saying to her and her alone, "Survive in Peace!"
The Lieutenant read off the cleanup assignments, and then, just as casually as if she were making a routine announcement instead of delivering a stomach punch, added, "There will be gameroom play for Classes Three and Four till bedtime. Special Sessions girls are invited to attend a staff meeting in the wardroom immediate!' after senior supper."
Sarah threw him a look of mild disappointment. "Tomorrow?" she mouthed. He didn't answer, pretended not to see. Tomorrow? Sure. What difference did it make to her?
And then he was angry at himself. It wasn't Sarah's fault. And you couldn't blame her for being excited about a wardroom meeting. It had to be something big for the Sessions to get asked in to wardroom. He tried to meet her eye again, but everyone was getting up; people were moving; he caught a glimpse of her back, and then couldn't see her at all. Desultorily, he drifted with the other older children to the lounge and stood staring at the big screen.
The sun was big now, filling one whole sixteenth sector Maybe the meeting . . . ? He couldn't get excited. There'd been too many false alarms when they began decelerating almost a year ago, rumors and counter rumors and waves of excitement about how the tapes were coming out of the calckers, how it was the planet . . . No, it was poisonous, ammonia atmosphere . . . No, it was just a barren sun . . . It was the right one after all; it had a perfect earth-type atmosphere, one-third the mass . . .
Meaningless words, after all, to those who had been born on board Survival; words out of books. The older people had been more excited than the kids. "Earth-type meant something to them.
But that was a year ago, and every day since, the sun had grown bigger on the plate, and no day had brought any real news, except somewhere along the way it had been confirmed officially that there were planets —type as yet unknown. Bob said he thought it would be four or five more months before they came in close enough to give the calckers anything to work on.
Last year, when they first been decelerating, Bob had talked a lot to Sheik, times when they were by themselves in quarters, the little ones napping or asleep for the night. It was the first time, really, since Sheik's nursery years that he and his father had been close. From the time he was six, when he was assigned for training in the plant rooms, Abdur had grown to fill the role of father-advisor more and more. But when the bright sun started to grow faintly brighter on the viewscreen, Bob's excitement was uncontainable; he poured it out on his son, a boy incredibly grown to where, by the time a landing was likely to take place, he would be in effect one of the men.
And the men, Bob told him, would have to work together when that happened. Things on a planet would not be quite the same as on board ship. For weeks, Bob reminisced and daydreamed, talking about Earth and its homes and families and governments, about the launching of the ship, Survival, and how and why things were set up on board ship as they were.
Some of it Sheik had heard in class; other parts he was cautioned to forget except in private. Everyone knew that the Survival was Earth's first starship, a colonizing expedition sent to find a planet—if there was one—suitable for the spillover of the world's crowded billions. Everyone knew the voyage might take years or decades; the ship was completely self-contained; the ion drive made it possible to carry fuel enough for a hundred years. There were living quarters on either side of those now in use that had never been unlocked; if a third or fourth generation grew up on board ship, they'd be needed.
But if it took that long, it would do Earth no good. If the ship could not return with news of an established colony within fifty years, then it was under orders not to return at all, but to remain and start over altogether in the new place.
This much was common knowledge, and one further fact: that the original crew of twenty-four had included twenty women and four men for obvious biological race-survival reasons.
What they didn't tell in classes was why all of the men were subordinates, none of them trained for astrogation, electronics, communications, or any of the skilled jobs of ship control; why all the officers were women. The children took it for granted as they grew; the ship was the way things were and always had been; the readers that spoke of families and pets and churches, towns and villages and lakes and oceans, aircraft and weather, were fascinating, and in a quaint way, true, no doubt; but reality was the ship with its four family units, domestic fathers, energetic women, school dorms, communal meals.
Bob's talk of men who "ran their own families" and ruled their homes, of male supremacy in the environment of a hostile world, of wives and husbands cleaving one to one faithfully, first intrigued Sheik, then excited him, while he regarded it as fairy-tale stuff. But when his father pointed out one day that there were just as many boys as girls among the children—a fact Yoshikazu somehow had not thought about before—everything the old man said struck home in a new way.
"Then why did they put the women in charge of everything?" he demanded for the first time.
Bob's answer was incoherent, angry and fantasizing. Later Sheik took his puzzlement to Ab, who explained, tight-lipped, that women were considered better suited to manage the psychological problems of an ingrown group, and to maintain with patience over many, many years, if needed, the functioning and purpose of the trip.
"Then when we land . . . ?"
"When we land, there will be time enough to think about it! Who's been talking to you about all this?"
"Well, I was asking Bob," Sheik said cautiously. "But . . ."
"But nothing," Abdur said sharply. "If you're smart, Sheik, you'll forget it now. If anyone else hears this kind of talk from you, your father will be in trouble. Or I will. Forget it."
And for the most part, he did. Bob never spoke of it again. And Ab spoke only as he always had, of sun and rain, forests and gardens, sunsets and hillsides and farmlands outdoors on a planet.
Sheik stared at the giant sun on the viewscreen; if they had found their planet, if they landed here, he was almost a man . . .
No. He was a man. He could do everything a man could do, and he was very strong, stronger than any of the girls. And Sarah, he thought, was very close to womanhood. She was the oldest of the girls; it would be natural. One man and one woman, Bob had said . . . the thought was exciting. There was no other woman he would want to have. Naomi or Fritzi or Beatrice, the other older girls, were nasty. As for the crew—Lieutenant Johnson, maybe, but—but when he thought of Sarah the idea of being at the call of four others besides was obscene somehow.
Sheik laughed abruptly and turned and left the lounge. He had spent enough time today dreaming fantasies. There was work to do.
Still, when the last of the little ones was tucked in bed, and the quarters were quiet, Sheik found himself pacing restlessly in the tiny pantry-service room. He had his schoolbooks with him, and had meant to study for the morning's class. But when he tried to read, plant shadows and Sarah's legs and all the things Bob had said raced through his mind, blurring the print. He wished Bob would come back from wherever he was. The kids were asleep; there was only one hour till he himself had to be in dorm, and he was obsessed with the need to go hull-side, to find his cool shadow-corner and lie there where peace was always to be found.
And obsessed, foolishly, with the idea that after the meeting Sarah might, just might, go down to look and see if he was there . . .
Bob didn't come. After a while Yoshikazu closed his book, wrote a quick note, "Hullside. Back in a minute," and went out.
He had never done such a thing before. He had broken rules, yes, but not when the children were in his care. But, really, what could happen? If one of them woke up, if anything went wrong, half an hour could not mean life or death. And ...
And he didn't care. He had to go.
Quickly and quietly, exhilarated beyond previous experience by the sense of his guilt, he went down cornpanionways towards the hull. He closed the last hatch behind him and stood on the top step looking down into the shadowed vastness of hullside. He was above the lamps. Beneath them was bright yellow light; then pale green, new leaves at the top of the plant stalks. Darker green below. Brownish-green stalks, some slender swaying things, some thick as his own arm. And underneath, the shadows. He started down, quietly still, but beginning already to feel more at ease.
Then he heard the voice. Bob's voice. Urgent, persuasive.
"I tell you it's true. This time it's true. I got it straight."
"Hell, Bob, every time they send in a tech to film something secret, you think that's it. You said the same thing six months ago, and how many times before that?" That was Sean, Sarah's father, who ran the livestock rooms.
"This time I know I'm right," Bob said quietly. His voice was convincing, even to Sheik.
"Well, if it is, what do you want us to do, Bob?" Abdur, this time, also quiet. The voices were coming, Sheik realized, from Abby's little private room near the seedbeds.
"Just that I think it should have been announced. I want to know what they're up to, with that meeting. Ab, have you ever stopped to think that maybe when the time came, the women wouldn't want to land?"
Silence, shocked silence; Sheik stood like a statue on his step.
"Come off it, man." Sean. "They're not that crazy."
"It's not so crazy, Sean," Abdur said thoughtfully, and then: "But I don't see what we could do about it if they didn't. And I don't think they'd hold back, even if they wanted to."
"You got a lot of trust in human nature, Ab."
"No-o-o-o. Well, yes. I guess I do. But that's not why. Listen, Robert, what do you think kept you from going off your nut those first five years?"
"What do you want me to say?" Bob asked bitterly. "God?"
"Well, He may have helped. But that wasn't what I meant. You were in bad shape for a while. After Alice . . ."
"Watch yourself, Ab." Bob growled.
"Take it easy and listen a minute. After what happened—how come you didn't do the same thing?"
Sheik eased himself down to a sitting position on the top step and listened.
A lot of it made no sense. Alice had been one of the women, of course; there were nineteen now. Funny he'd never thought of that before! She must have died when he was still a baby. Most of the kids wouldn't even know the name.
And Bob, Bob had had something to do with Alice. The conversational scraps and fragmentary references were incomplete, but Sheik had a picture, suddenly, of something that had happened to his father, of something like what was, maybe, happening with him and Sarah, and wasn't supposed to happen.
He tried to think how he would feel, what he would do, if Sarah suddenly—were no more. He could not imagine it. Nobody ever died. Nobody on the ship was more than forty-five. If Bob had felt that way, and then Alice died, he could see why his father was—funny, sometimes. Why he imagined things and made up stories about the time on Earth.
The twin revelation—the knowledge that what he thought and felt for Sarah had happened to other people, often, and the shocked glimpse of grief inside his father —almost obscured the more immediate importance of what the men said down there.
"Indoctrination," Ab was saying.
Alice was the only one who hadn't had it. She had been the ship's doctor; "they," the planners, had thought someone on board, the "stablest" one, should be free of "post-hypno." Words, some new, some old but out of context here. Indoctrinated . . . the women were indoctrinated, too; they couldn't refuse to land the ship. Ab said so.
The others agreed with him. Bob didn't, at first, but after a while, though he kept arguing, Sheik knew even Bob was convinced.
Gradually, the voices turned more casual; the conversation slowed. Sheik thought it must be getting close to dorm curfew. He raised the hatch above him cautiously, hoisted himself up through it and let it down with silent care. He reached his own family quarters again without meeting anyone.
Inside, he put his note down the disposall, checked on the sleeping children, and arranged himself in the galley with a book on his lap, his feet on the counter, and a yawn of boredom on his face. When Bob returned, he hung around hopefully a little while, but Bob was not feeling talkative.
Sheik had a few minutes till curfew still; without planning it, he found himself in the nightlit empty lounge, at the big screen, watching the giant sun, almost imagining he could see it grow bigger and closer against the dead black , of space, straining his eyes absurdly for the planet . . .
Planet!
***Proofed to Here***
The pieces began to come together.
Voices came down the corridor, and a far part of his mind remembered the wardroom meeting, Sarah, the evening's plans. Just coming out now? Maybe he could see her still. That was silly—curfew soon. Well, tomorrow . . . Just coming out now? That was some meeting ...
Meeting! And Bob said he knew for sure this time the tapes on the planet were through: It was a good one. They could land on it, and live.
Live on a planet.
His stomach felt funny for a minute, and he thought that was foolish, what was there to be afraid of?
Live on a planet. He thought the words slowly and purposefully. Planet. Plants. Plants on a planet. On a planet, plants grew everywhere, by themselves, naturally. That's what Ab said. He said they grew all over, so you'd have to tear them out to make a place to build your house.
House. Family. Inside-outside. They were all words in the books. Hills, sunsets, animals. Wild animals. Danger. But now he wasn't afraid; he liked the thought. Wild animals, he thought again, savoring it. Houses, inside and outside; inside, the family; outside, the animals. And plants. The sunshine . . . daytime . . . and night ...
Shadows!
The light brightened around him. On a planet, there would be shadows all the time everywhere. "Sheik . . ."
"Yes, ma'am." He turned. The response was automatic . . . "indoctrinated"; . . . even before his mind reoriented.
The room was daylit again. Five of the women were standing just inside the door. Lieutenant Johnson was smiling, watching him.
"Better hop, boy. Curfew."
"Yes, ma'am." He moved past the others. Johnson, closest to the doorway, reached out a hand and rumpled up his hair.
"Do your dreaming in bed, Sheik," she said tenderly, as if he were in the nursery still. But something was in her eyes that made him know she did not think he was a little boy. He felt better when he, got outside.
The girls' dorm was to the right; he could see the last of the senior class girls disappearing through the door. If he moved faster ...
He turned to the left, walked up to the boys' dorm, and almost missed hearing the sharp whispered noise from the cross-corridor beyond.
He looked back. No one in sight. Raced up the corridor, and she was there, waiting. Waiting for him.
"Sheik! Shhh . . . I just wanted to make sure . . . Tomorrow night?"
"Sure," he said.
Her eyes were shining. Like the Lieutenant, she was looking at him differently. But it was a different kind of difference, and he liked it. Very much.
"Sure," he said again. "Tomorrow night for sure." But neither one moved. A gong sounded softly. Curfew time.
"You better get back," she said. "I have a pass." Even her whispering voice was different. She was vibrating with excitement. It was true!
"Okay," he said. "Listen, Sarah. Let's not wait. What about tonight?"
"Tonight?"
"After inspection."
"You mean . . . ?"
"Sneak down. It's easy," he promised out of the practice of an hour ago, and lied. "I've done it lots of times."
"Who with?"
He smiled. From inside the lounge they heard voices. "Listen, I got to get back. Right now. I'll meet you in Cargo G in half an hour. Then I'll show you how."
"But, Sheik . . ."
He didn't wait for her answer. He didn't dare. Johnson or one of the others would be out for inspection any minute now. He ran on his toes, silently, back down the corridor, tore off his clothes, jumped into bed, pulled covers up, and did not open his eyes even to peek and see what officer it was when she came in to inspect the row of beds. He just lay there, astonished at what he had said and what he was—beyond hesitation—going to do.
He thought of the times he had waited and wanted and hoped for Sarah to ask him, to notice him, to pick him to dance with or play with or for a work partner. Now, all of a sudden, he had thrown himself at her head, suggested ...
He began to be horrified. It wasn't the idea of breaking curfew rules. Yesterday, even this afternoon, that would have shocked him, but now—knowing about the planet changed all that. What bothered him now was the brazenness of it, the way he had practically begged her to come, and hadn't even waited to find out ...
He wouldn't go. She'd never go. He was crazy to think ...
She was laughing at him now.
I wish, he thought miserably, I wish I was . . .
Only he didn't. He didn't envy girls any more.
He lay very quietly in bed for fifteen minutes. Then he got up and pulled on his shorts. He looked at the six other beds in the schoolboys' dorm. Joel, the youngest, was nine, still a kid. The others were twelve, thirteen, eleven, eleven, twelve. Five of them who would soon be men. Like Bob and Ab, Bomba and Sean, and Sheik himself. He left the dorm, slipped down the corridor, thinking as he went of the words he had read somewhere, that he "moved like a shadow."
I wish, he thought, and turned round a corner to safety, I wish that she comes. And then: I wish that we land on a planet very soon.
I grew up in the radical 'thirties. My mother had been a Suffragette. It never occurred to me that the Bad Old Days of Double Standard had anything to do with me.
The first strong intimation, actually, was when the editors of the mystery, western, and sports "pulp" magazines where I did my apprentice-writing, demanded masculine pen-names. But of course they were pulps, oriented to a masculine readership, and the whole thing was only an irritation: as soon as I turned to S-F, the problem disappeared.
At the end of World War II, the wonderful working-mothers' day-care centres all closed down, and from every side the news was shouted that Woman's Place was after all In The Home. Newspapers, magazines, counselling services told us firmly that children who had less than constant attention from their very own mothers were doomed to misery and delinquency; the greatest joy available to the "natural woman" was the pleasure of Building Her Man's Ego. (There were not enough jobs for returning veterans till the ladies went home.)
There was a lot of pressure; one couldn't help wondering. Could it be true? I didn't think so; neither did my returning husband. We were 'thirties-radicals after all, so what if it was the 'forties? But I was beginning to get a little bit of attention as a writer: and even he — and even I — found the resultant situation a bit embarrassing, a little uncomfortable.
Ten years later I had a growing "name" as a writer, a lot of good colleague/friends, and two divorces. Complicated. One worried, and kept trying to figure things out.
Exile From Space
I don't know where they got the car. We made three or four stops before the last one, and they must have picked it up one of those times. Anyhow, they got it, but they had to make a license plate, because it had the wrong kind on it.
They made me some clothes, too — a skirt and blouse and shoes that looked just like the ones we saw on television. They couldn't make me a lipstick or any of those things, because there was no way to figure out just what the chemical composition was. And they decided I'd be as well off without any driver's license or automobile registration as I would be with papers that weren't exactly perfect, so they didn't bother about making those either.
They were worried about what to do with my hair, and even thought about cutting it short, so it would look more like the women on television, but that was one time I was way ahead of them. I'd seen more shows than anyone else, of course — I watched them almost every minute, from the time they told me I was going — and there was one where I'd seen a way to make braids and put them around the top of your head. It wasn't very comfortable, but I practiced at it until it looked pretty good.
They made me a purse, too. It didn't have anything in it except the diamonds, but the women we saw always seemed to carry them, and they thought it might be a sort of superstition or ritual necessity, and that we'd better not take a chance on violating anything like that.
They made me spend a lot of time practicing with the car, because without a license, I couldn't take a chance on getting into any trouble. I must have put in the better part of an hour starting and stopping and backing that thing, and turning it around, and weaving through trees and rocks, before they were satisfied.
Then, all of a sudden, there was nothing left to do except go. They made me repeat everything one more time, about selling the diamonds, and how to register at the hotel, and what to do if I got into trouble, and how to get in touch with them when I wanted to come back. Then they said good-bye, and made me promise not to stay too long, and said they'd keep in touch the best they could. And then I got in the car, and drove down the hill into town.
I knew they didn't want to let me go. They were worried, maybe even a little afraid I wouldn't want to come back, but mostly worried that I might say something I shouldn't, or run into some difficulties they hadn't anticipated. And outside of that, they knew they were going to miss me. Yet they'd made up their minds to it; they planned it this way, and they felt it was the right thing to do, and certainly they'd put an awful lot of thought and effort and preparation into it.
If it hadn't been for that, I might have turned back at the last minute. Maybe they were worried; but I was petrified. Only of course, I wanted to go, really. I couldn't help being curious, and it never occurred to me then that I might miss them. It was the first time I'd ever been out on my own, and they'd promised me, for years and years, as far back as I could remember, that some day I'd go back, like this, by myself. But ...
Going back, when you've been away long enough, is not so much a homecoming as a dream deja vu. And for me, at least, the dream was not entirely a happy one. Everything I saw or heard or touched had a sense of haunting familiarity, and yet of wrongness, too — almost a nightmare feeling of the oppressively inevitable sequence of events, of faces and features and events just not-quite-remembered and not-quite-known.
I was born in this place, but it was not my home. Its people were not mine; its ways were not mine. All I knew of it was what I had been told, and what I had seen for myself these last weeks of preparation, on the television screen. And the dream-feeling was intensified, at first, by the fact that I did not know why I was there. I knew it had been planned this way, and I had been told it was necessary to complete my education. Certainly I was aware of the great effort that had been made to make the trip possible. But I did not yet understand just why.
Perhaps it was just that I had heard and watched and thought and dreamed too much about this place, and now I was actually there, the reality was — not so much a disappointment as — just sort of unreal. Different from what I knew when I didn't know.
The road unwound in a spreading spiral down the mountainside. Each time I came round, I could see the city below, closer and larger, and less distinct. From the top, with the sunlight sparkling on it, it had been a clean and gleaming pattern of human civilization. Halfway down, the symmetry was lost, and the smudge and smoke began to show.
Halfway down, too, I began to pass places of business: restaurants and gas stations and handicraft shops. I wanted to stop. For half an hour now I had been out on my own, and I still hadn't seen any of the people, except the three who had passed me behind the wheels of their cars, going up the road. One of the shops had a big sign on it, "COME IN AND LOOK AROUND." But I kept going. One thing I understood was that it was absolutely necessary to have money, and that I must stop nowhere, and attempt nothing, till after I had gotten some.
Farther down, the houses began coming closer together, and then the road stopped winding around, and became almost straight. By that time, I was used to the car, and didn't have to think about it much, and for a little while I really enjoyed myself. I could see into the houses sometimes, through the windows, and at one, a woman was opening the door, coming out with a broom in her hand. There were children playing in the yards. There were cars of all kinds parked around the houses, and I saw dogs and a couple of horses, and once a whole flock of chickens.
But just where it was beginning to get really interesting, when I was coming into the little town before the city, I had to stop watching it all, because there were too many other people driving. That was when I began to understand all the fuss about licenses and tests and traffic regulations. Watching it on television, it wasn't anything like being in the middle of it!
Of course, what I ran into there was really nothing; I found that out when I got into the city itself. But just at first, it seemed pretty bad. And I still don't understand it. These people are pretty bright mechanically. You'd think anybody who could build an automobile — let alone an atom bomb —could drive one easily enough. Especially with a lifetime to learn in. Maybe they just like to live dangerously ...
It was a good thing, though, that I'd already started watching out for what the other drivers were doing when I hit my first red light. That was something I'd overlooked entirely, watching street scenes on the screen, and I guess they'd never noticed either. They must have taken it for granted, the way I did, that people stopped their cars out of courtesy from time to time to let the other go by. As it was, I stopped because the others did, and just happened to notice that they began again when the light changed to green. It's really a very good system; I don't see why they don't have them at all the intersections.
From the first light, it was eight miles into the center of Colorado Springs. A sign on the road said so, and I was irrationally pleased when the speedometer on the car confirmed it. Proud, I suppose, that these natives from my own birthplace were such good gadgeteers. The road was better after that, too, and the cars didn't dart in and out off the side streets the way they had before. There was more traffic on the highway, but most of them behaved fairly intelligently. Until we got into town, that is. After that, it was everybody-for-himself, but by then I was prepared for it.
I found a place to park the car near a drugstore. That was the first thing I was supposed to do. Find a drugstore, where there would likely be a telephone directory, and go in and look up the address of a hock shop. I had a little trouble parking the car in the space they had marked off, but I could see from the way the others were stationed that you were supposed to get in between the white lines, with the front of the car next to the post on the sidewalk. I didn't know what the post was for, until I got out and read what it said, and then I didn't know what to do, because I didn't have any money. Not yet. And I didn't dare get into any trouble that might end up with a policeman asking to see my license, which always seemed to be the first thing they did on television, when they talked to anybody who was driving a car. I got back in the car and wriggled my way out of the hole between the other cars, and tried to think what to do. Then I remembered seeing a sign that said "Free Parking" somewhere, not too far away, and went back the way I'd come.
There was a sort of park, with a fountain spraying water all over the grass, and a big building opposite, and the white lines here were much more sensible. They were painted in diagonal strips, so you could get in and out quite easily, without all that backing and twisting and turning. I left the car there, and remembered to take the keys with me, and started walking back to the drugstore.
That was when it hit me.
Up to then, beginning I guess when I drove that little stretch coming into Manitou, with the houses on the hills, and the children and yards and dogs and chickens, I'd begun to feel almost as if I belonged here. The people seemed so much like me — as long as I wasn't right up against them. From a little distance, you'd think there was no difference at all. Then, I guess, when I was close enough to notice, driving through town, I'd been too much preoccupied with the car. It didn't really get to me till I got out and started walking.
They were all so big . . .
They were big, and their faces and noses and even the pores of their skin were too big. And their voices were too loud. And they smelled.
I didn't notice that last much till I got into the drugstore. Then I thought I was going to suffocate, and I had a kind of squeezing upside-down feeling in my stomach and diaphragm and throat, which I didn't realize till later was what they meant by "being sick." I stood over the directory rack, pretending to read, but really just struggling with my insides, and a man came along and shouted in my ear something that sounded like, "Vvvm trubbb 111-111-111 ay-dee?" (I didn't get that sorted out for hours afterwards, but I don't think I'll ever forget just the way it sounded at the time. Of course, he meant, "Having trouble, little lady?") But all I knew at the time was he was too big and smelled of all kinds of things that were unfamiliar and slightly sickening. I couldn't answer him. All I could do was turn away so as not to breathe him, and try to pretend I knew what I was doing with the directory. Then he hissed at me ("Sorry, no offense," I figured out later), and said clearly enough so I could understand even then, "Just trying to help," and walked away.
As soon as he was gone, I walked out myself. Directory or no directory, I had to get out of that store. I went back to where I'd left the car, but instead of getting in it, I sat down on a bench in the park, and waited till the turmoil inside me began to quiet down.
I went back into that drugstore once before I left, purposely, just to see if I could pin down what it was that had bothered me so much, because I never reacted that strongly afterwards, and I wondered if maybe it was just that it was the first time I was inside one of their buildings. But it was more than that; that place was a regular snake-pit of a treatment for a stranger, believe me! They had a tobacco counter, and a lunch counter and a perfume-and-toiletries section, and a nut-roasting machine, and just to top it off, in the back of the store, an open-to-look-at (and smell) pharmaceutical center! Everything, all mixed together, and compounded with stale human sweat, which was also new to me at the time. And no air conditioning.
Most of the air conditioning they have is bad enough on its own, with chemical smells, but those are comparatively easy to get used to ... and I'll take them any time, over what I got in that first dose of Odeur d'Earth.
Anyhow, I sat on the park bench about fifteen minutes, I guess, letting the sun and fresh air seep in, and trying to tabulate and memorize as many of the components of that drugstore smell as I could, for future reference. I was simply going to have to adjust to them, and next time I wanted to be prepared.
All the same, I didn't feel prepared to go back into the same place. Maybe another store wouldn't be quite as bad. I started walking in the opposite direction, staying on the wide main street, where all the big stores seemed to be, and two blocks down, I ran into luck, because there was a big bracket sticking out over the sidewalk from the front of a store halfway down a side street, and it had the three gold balls hanging from it that I knew, from television, meant the kind of place I wanted. When I walked down to it, I saw too that they had a sign painted over the window: "We buy old gold and diamonds."
Just how lucky that was, I didn't realize till quite some time later. I was going to look in the Classified Directory for "Hock Shops." I didn't know any other name for them then.
Inside, it looked exactly like what I expected, and even the smell was nothing to complain about. Camphor and dust and mustiness were strong enough to cover most of the sweaty smell, and those were smells of a kind I'd experienced before, in other places.
The whole procedure was reassuring, because it all went just the way it was supposed to, and I knew how to behave. I'd seen it in a show, and the man behind the grilled window even looked like the man on the screen, and talked the same way.
"What can we do for you, girlie?"
"I'd like to sell a diamond," I told him.
He didn't say anything at first, then he looked impatient. "You got it with you?"
"Oh, yes!" I opened my purse, and took out one of the little packages, and unwrapped it, and handed it to him. He screwed the lens into his eye, and walked back from the window and put it on a little scale, and turned back and unscrewed the lens and looked at me.
"Where'd you get this, lady?" he asked me.
"It's mine," I said. I knew just how to do it. We'd gone over this half a dozen times before I left, and he was behaving exactly the way we'd expected.
"I don't know," he said. "Can't do much with an unset stone like this." He pursed his lips, tossed the diamond carelessly in his hand, and then pushed it back at me across the counter. I had to keep myself from smiling. It was just the way they'd said it would be. The people here were still in the Mech Age, of course, and not nearly conscious enough to communicate anything at all complex or abstract any way except verbally. But there is nothing abstract about avarice, and between what I'd been told to expect, and what I could feel pouring out of him, I knew precisely what was going on in his mind.
"You mean you don't want it?" I said. "I thought it was worth quite a lot."
"Might have been once." He shrugged. "You can't do much with a stone like that any more. Where'd you get it, girlie?"
"My mother gave it to me. A long time ago. I wouldn't sell it, except ... Look," I said, and didn't have to work hard to sound desperate, because, in a way, I was. "Look, it must be worth something?"
He picked it up again. "Well ... what do you want for it?"
That went on for quite a while. I knew what it was supposed to be worth, of course, but I didn't hope to get even half of that. He offered seventy dollars, and I asked for five hundred, and after a while he gave me three-fifty, and I felt I'd done pretty well — for a greenhorn. I put the money in my purse, and went back to the car, and on the way I saw a policeman, so I stopped and asked him about a hotel. He looked me up and down, and started asking questions about how old I was, and what was my name and where did I live, and I began to realize that being so much smaller than the other people was going to make life complicated. I told him I'd come to visit my brother in the Academy, and he smiled, and said, "Your brother, is it?" Then he told me the name of a place just outside of town, near the Academy. It wasn't a hotel; it was a motel, which I didn't know about at that time, but he said I'd be better off there. A lot of what he said went right over my head at the time; later I realized what he meant about "a nice respectable couple" running the place. I found out later on, too, that he called them up to ask them to keep an eye on me; he thought I was a nice girl, but he was worried about my being alone there.
By this time, I was getting hungry, but I thought I'd better go and arrange about a place to stay first. I found the motel without much trouble, and went in and registered; I knew how to do that, at least — I'd seen it plenty of times. They gave me a key, and the man who ran the place asked me did I want any help with my bags.
"Oh, no," I said. "No, thanks. I haven't got much."
I'd forgotten all about that, and they'd never thought about it either! These people always have a lot of different clothes, not just one set, and you're supposed to have a suitcase full of things when you go to stay anyplace. I said I was hungry anyway, and wanted to go get something to eat, and do a couple of other things — I didn't say what — before I got settled. So the woman walked over with me, and showed me which cabin it was, and asked was everything all right?
It looked all right to me. The room had a big bed in it, with sheets and a blanket and pillows and a bedspread, just like the ones I'd seen on television. And there was a chest of drawers, and a table with more small drawers in it, and two chairs and a mirror and door that went into a closet and one that led to the bathroom. The fixtures in there were a little different from the ones they'd made for me to practice in, but functionally they seemed about the same.
I didn't look for any difficulty with anything there except the bed, and that wasn't her fault, so I assured her everything was just fine, and let her show me how to operate the gas-burner that was set in the wall for heat. Then we went out, and she very carefully locked the door, and handed me the key.
"You better keep that door locked," she said, just a little sharply. "You never know . . . "
I wanted to ask her what you never know, but had the impression that it was something everybody was supposed to know, so I just nodded and agreed instead.
"You want to get some lunch," she said then, "there's a place down the road isn't too bad. Clean, anyhow, and they don't cater too much to those . . . well, it's clean." She pointed the way; you could see the sign from where we were standing. I thanked her, and started the car, and decided I might as well go there as anyplace else, especially since I could see she was watching to find out whether I did or not.
These people are all too big. Or almost all of them. But the man behind the counter at the dinner was enormous. He was tall and fat with a beefy red face and large open pores and a fleshy mound of a nose. I didn't like to look at him, and when he talked, he boomed so loud I could hardly understand him. On top of all that, the smell in that place was awful: not quite as bad as the drugstore, but some ways similar to it. I kept my eyes on the menu, which was full of unfamiliar words, and tried to remember that I was hungry.
The man was shouting at me — or it was more like growling, I guess — and I couldn't make out the words at first. He said it again, and I sorted out syllables and matched them with the words on the card, and then I got it:
"Goulash is nice today, miss . . ."
I didn't know what goulash was, and the state my stomach was in, with the smells, I decided I'd better play safe, and ordered a glass of milk, and some vegetable soup.
The milk had a strange taste to it. Not bad — just different. But of course, this came from cows. That was all right. But the vegetable soup . . . !
It was quite literally putrid, made as near as I could figure out from dead animal juices, in which vegetables had been soaked and cooked till any trace of flavor or nourishment was entirely removed. I took one taste of that, and then I realized what the really nauseating part of the odor was, in the diner and the drugstore both. It was rotten meat, dead for some time, and then heated in preparation for eating.
The crackers that came with the soup were good; they had a nice salty tang. I ordered more of those, with another glass of milk, and sat back sipping slowly, trying to adjust to that smell, now that I realized I'd probably find it anywhere I could find food.
After a while, I got my insides enough in order so that I could look around a little and see the place, and the other people in it. That was when I turned around and saw Larry sitting next to me.
He was beautiful. He is beautiful. I know that's not what you're supposed to say about a man, and he wouldn't like it, but I can only say what I see, and of course that's partly a matter of my own training and my own feelings about myself.
At home on the ship, I always wanted to cut off my hair, because it was so black, and my skin was so white, and they didn't go together. But they wouldn't let me; they liked it that way, I guess, but I didn't. No child wants to feel like a freak, and nobody else had hair like that, or dead-white colorless skin, either.
Then, when I went down there, and saw all the humans, I was still a freak because I was so small.
Larry's small, too. Almost as small as I am. And he's all one color. He has hair, of course, but it's so light, and his skin is so dark (both from the sun, I found out), that he looks just about the same lovely golden color all over. Or at least as much of him as showed when I saw him that time, in the diner.
He was beautiful, and he was my size, and he didn't have ugly rough skin or big heavy hands. I stared at him, and I felt like grabbing on to him to make sure he didn't get away.
After a while I realized my mouth was half-open, and I was still holding a cracker, and I remembered that this was very bad manners. I put the cracker down and closed my mouth. He smiled. I didn't know if he was laughing at the odd way I was acting, or just being friendly, but I smiled back anyhow.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I mean, hello. How do you do, and I'm sorry if I startled you. I shouldn't have been staring."
"You" I said, and meant to finish. You were staring? But he went right on talking, so that I couldn't finish.
"I don't know what else you can expect, if you go around looking like that," he said.
"I'm sorry . . . " I started again.
"And you should be," he said sternly. "Anybody who walks into a place like this in the middle of a day like this looking the way you do has got to expect to get stared at a little."
The thing is, I wasn't used to the language; not used enough. I could communicate all right, and even understand some jokes, and I knew the spoken language, not some formal unusable version, because I learned it mostly watching those shows on the television screen. But I got confused this time, because "looking" means two different things, active and passive, and I was thinking about how I'd been looking at him, and . . .
That was my lucky day. I didn't want him to be angry at me, and the way I saw it, he was perfectly justified in scolding me, which is what I thought he was doing. But I knew he wasn't really angry; I'd have felt it if he was. So I said, "You're right. It was very rude of me, and I don't blame you for being annoyed. I won't do it any more."
He started laughing, and this time I knew it was friendly. Like I said, that was my lucky day; he thought I was being witty. And, from what he's told me since, I guess he realized then that I felt friendly too, because before that he'd just been bluffing it out, not knowing how to get to know me, and afraid I'd be sore at him, just for talking to me!
Which goes to show that sometimes you're better off not being too familiar with the local customs.
The trouble was there were too many things I didn't know, too many small ways to trip myself up. Things they couldn't have foreseen, or if they did, couldn't have done much about. All it took was a little caution and a lot of alertness, plus one big important item: staying in the background — not getting to know any one person too well — not giving any single individual a chance to observe too much about me.
But Larry didn't mean to let me do that. And I didn't want him to.
He asked questions; I tried to answer them. I did know enough at least of the conventions to realize that I didn't have to give detailed answers, or could, at any point, act offended at being questioned so much. I didn't know enough to realize that reluctance or irritation on my part wouldn't have made him go away. We sat on those stools at the diner for most of an hour, talking, and after a little while I found I could keep the conversation on safer ground by asking him about himself, and about the country thereabouts. He seemed to enjoy talking.
Eventually, he had to go back to work. As near as I could make out, he was a test-pilot, or something like it, for a small experimental aircraft plant near the city. He lived not too far from where I was staying, and he wanted to see me that evening.
I hadn't told him where the motel was, and I had at least enough caution left not to tell him, even then. I did agree to meet him at the diner, but for lunch the next day again, instead of that evening. For one thing, I had a lot to do; and for another, I'd seen enough on television shows to know that an evening date was likely to be pretty long-drawn-out, and I wasn't sure I could stand up under that much close scrutiny. I had some studying-up to do first. But the lunch-date was fine; the thought of not seeing him at all was terrifying — as if he were an old friend in a world full of strangers. That was how I felt, that first time, maybe just because he was almost as small as I. But I think it was more than that, really.
I drove downtown again, and found a store that seemed to sell all kinds of clothing for women. Then when I got inside, I didn't know where to start, or what to get. I thought of just buying one of everything, so as to fill up a suitcase; the things I had on seemed to be perfectly satisfactory for actual wearing purposes. They were quite remarkably — when you stopped to think of it — similar to what most of the women I'd seen that day were wearing, and of course they weren't subject to the same problems of dirtying and wrinkling and such as the clothes in the store were.
I walked around for a while, trying to figure out what all the different items, shapes, sizes, and colors, were for. Some racks and counters had signs, but most of them were unfamiliar words like brunchies, or Bermudas or scuffs; or else they seemed to be mislabeled, like dusters for a sort of button-down dress, and Postage Stamp Girdles at one section of a long counter devoted to "Foundation Garments." For half an hour or so, I wandered around in there, shaking my head every time a saleswoman came up to me, because I didn't know, and couldn't figure out, what to ask for, or how to ask for it.
The thing was, I didn't dare draw too much attention to myself by doing or saying the wrong things. I'd have to find out more about clothes, somehow, before I could do much buying.
I went out, and on the same block I found a show-window full of suitcases. That was easy. I went in and pointed to one I liked, and paid for it, and walked out with it, feeling a little braver. After all, nobody had to know there was nothing in it. On the corner, I saw some books displayed in the window of a drug store. It took all the courage I had to go in there, after my first trip into one that looked very much like it, but I wanted a dictionary. This place didn't smell quite so strong; I suppose the pharmacy was enclosed in back, and I don't believe it had a lunch counter. Anyhow, I got in and out quickly, and walked back to the car, and sat down with the dictionary.
It turned out to be entirely useless, at least as far as brunchies and Bermudas were concerned. It had "scuff, v.," with a definition; "v.," I found out, meant verb, so that wasn't the word I wanted, but when I remembered the slippers on the counter with the sign, it made sense in a way.
Not enough sense, though. I decided to forget about the clothes for a while. The next problem was a driver's license.
The policeman that morning had been helpful, if over-interested, and since policemen directed traffic, they ought to have the information I wanted. I found one of them standing on a streetcorner looking not too busy, and asked him, and if his hair hadn't been brown instead of reddish (and only half there) I'd have thought it was the same one I talked to before. He wanted to know how old I was, and where was I from, and what I was doing there, and did I have a car, and was I sure I was nineteen?
Well, of course, I wasn't sure, but they'd told me that by the local reckoning, that was my approximate age. And I almost slipped and said I had a car, until I realized that I didn't have a right to drive one till I had a license. After he asked that one question, I began to feel suspicious about everything else he asked, and the interest he expressed. He was helpful, but I had to remember too, that it was the police who were charged with watching for suspicious characters, and — well, it was the last time I asked a policeman for information.
He did tell me where I could rent a car to take my road test, though, and where to apply for the test. The Courthouse turned out to be the big building behind the square where I'd parked the car that morning, and arranging for the test turned out to be much simpler than, by then, I expected it to be. In a way, I suppose, all the questions I had to answer when I talked to the policeman had prepared me for the official session —though they didn't seem nearly so inquisitive there.
By this time, I'd come to expect that they wouldn't believe my age when I told them. The woman at the window behind the counter wanted to see a "birth certificate," and I produced the one piece of identification I had; an ancient and yellowed document they had kept for me all these years. From the information it contained, I suspected it might even be a birth certificate; whether or not, it apparently satisfied her, and after that all she wanted was things like my address and height and weight. Fortunately, they had taken the trouble, back on the ship, to determine these statistics for me, because things like that were always coming up on television shows, especially when people were being questioned by the police. For the address, of course, I used the motel. The rest I knew, and I guess we had the figures close enough to right so that at least the woman didn't question any of it.
I had my road test about half an hour later, in a rented car, and the examiner said I did very well. He seemed surprised, and I don't wonder, considering the way most of those people contrive to mismanage a simple mechanism like an automobile. I guess when they say Earth is still in the Mechanical Age, what they mean is that humans are just learning about machines.
The biggest single stroke of luck I had at any time came during that road test. We passed a public-looking building with a sign in front that I didn't understand.
"What's that place?" I asked the examiner, and he said, as if anyone would know what he meant, "That? Oh—the Library."
I looked it up in my dictionary as soon as I was done at the License Bureau, and when I found out what it was, everything became a great deal simpler.
There was a woman who worked there, who showed me, without any surprise at my ignorance, just how the card catalogue worked, and what the numbering system meant; she didn't ask me how old I was, or any other questions, or demand any proof of any kind to convince her I had a right to use the place. She didn't even bother me much with questions about what I was looking for. I told her there were a lot of things I wanted to know, and she seemed to think that was a good answer, and said if she could help me any way, not to hesitate to ask, and then she left me alone with those drawers and drawers full of letter-and-number keys to all the mysteries of an alien world.
I found a book on how to outfit your daughter for college, that started with underwear and worked its way through to jewelry and cosmetics. I also found a whole shelf full of law books, and in one of them, specific information about the motor vehicle regulations in different States. There was a wonderful book about diamonds and other precious stones, particularly fascinating because it went into the chemistry of the different stones, and gave me the best measuring-stick I found at any time to judge the general level of technology of that so-called Mechanical Age.
That was all I had time for. I couldn't believe it was so late, when the librarian came and told me they were closing up, and I guess my disappointment must have showed all over me, because she asked if I wouldn't like to have a card, so I could take books home?
I found out all I needed to get a card was identification. I was supposed to have a reference, too, but the woman said she thought perhaps it would be all right without one, in my case. And then, when I wanted to take a volume of the Encyclopedia Americana, she said they didn't usually circulate that, but if I thought I could bring it back within a day or two ...
I promised to, and I never did, and out of everything that happened, that's the one thing I feel badly about. I think she must have been a very unusual and good sort of woman, and I wish I had kept my promise to her.
Some of the stores downtown were still open. I bought the things I'd be expected to have, as near as I could make out from the book on college girls: panties and a garter belt and a brassiere, and stockings. A slip and another blouse, and a coat, because even in the early evening it was beginning to get chilly. Then the salesgirl talked me into gloves and a scarf and some earrings. I was halfway back to the car when I remembered about night clothes, and went back for a gown and robe and slippers. That didn't begin to complete the college girls' list, but it seemed like a good start. I'd need a dress, too, I thought, if I ever did go out with Larry in the evening . . . but that could wait.
I put everything into the suitcase, and drove back to the motel. On the way, I stopped at a food store and bought a large container of milk, and some crackers, and some fruit —oranges and bananas and apples. Back in my room, I put everything away in the drawers, and then sat down with my book and my food, and had a wonderful time. I was hungry, and everything tasted good, away from the dead meat smells, and what with clothes in the drawers and everything, I was beginning to feel like a real Earth-girl.
I even took a bath in the bathroom.
A good long one. Next to the library, that's the thing I miss most. It would be even better, if they made the tubs bigger, so you could swim around some. But just getting wet all over like that, and splashing in the water, is fun. Of course, we could never spare enough water for that on the ship.
Altogether, it was a good evening; everything was fine until I tried to sleep in that bed. I felt as if I was being suffocated all over. The floor was almost as bad, but in a different way. And once I got to sleep, I guess I slept well enough, because I felt fine in the morning. But then, I think I must have been on a mild oxygen jag all the time I was down there; nothing seemed to bother me too much. That morning, I felt so good I worked up my courage to go into a restaurant again — a different one. The smell was beginning to be familiar, and I could manage better. I experimented with a cereal called oatmeal, which was delicious, then I went back to the motel, packed up all my new belongings, left the key on the desk — as instructed by the sign on the door — and started out for Denver.
Denver, according to the Encyclopedia Americana, is more of a true metropolitan area than Colorado Springs; that means — on Earth — that it is dirtier, more crowded, far less pleasant to look at or live in, and a great deal more convenient and efficient to do business in. In Denver, and with the aid of a Colorado driver's license for casual identification, I was able to sell two of my larger diamonds fairly quickly, at two different places, for something approximating half of their full value. Then I parked the car they had given me on a side street, took my suitcase, coat, and book with me, and walked to the nearest car sales lot. I left the keys in the old car, for the convenience of anyone who might want it.
Everything went extraordinarily smoothly, with just one exception. I had found out everything I needed to know in that library, except that when dealing with humans, one must always allow for waste time. If I had realized that at the time I left Colorado Springs that morning, everything might have turned out very differently indeed — although when I try to think just what other way it could have turned out I don't quite know . . . and I wonder, too, how much they knew, or planned, before they sent me down there . . .
This much is sure: if I hadn't assumed that a 70-mile trip, with a 60-mile average speed limit, would take approximately an hour and a half, and if I had realized that buying an automobile was not the same simple process as buying a nightgown, I wouldn't have been late for my luncheon appointment. And if I'd been there on time, I'd never have made the date for that night. As it was, I started out at seven o'clock in the morning, and only by exceeding the speed limit on the last twenty miles of the return trip did I manage to pull into that diner parking space at five minutes before two.
His car was still there!
It is so easy to look back and spot the instant of recognition or of error. My relief when I saw his car ... my delight when I walked in and saw and felt his mixture of surprise and joy that I had come, with disappointment and frustration because it was so late, and he had to leave almost immediately. And my complete failure, in the midst of the complexities of these inter-reactions, to think logically, or to recognize that his ordinary perceptions were certainly the equivalent of my own ...
At that moment, I wasn't thinking about any of these things. I spent a delirious sort of five minute period absorbing his feelings about me, and releasing my own at him. I hadn't planned to do it, not so soon, not till I knew much more than I did — perhaps after another week's reading and going about—but when he said that since I'd got there so late for lunch, I'd have to meet him for dinner, I found I agreed with him perfectly.
That afternoon, I bought a dress. This, too, took a great deal of time, even more than the car, because in the one case I simply had to look at a number of component parts, and listen to the operation of the motor, and feel for the total response of the mechanism, to determine whether it was suitable or not—but in the other, I had nothing to guide me but my own untrained taste, and the dubious preferences of the salesgirl, plus what I thought Larry's reactions might be. Also, I had to determine, without seeming too ignorant, just what sort of dress might be suitable for a dinner date — and without knowing for sure just how elaborate Larry's plans for the evening might be.
I learned a lot, and was startled to find that I enjoyed myself tremendously. But I couldn't make up my mind, and bought three dresses instead of one. It was after that, emboldened by pleasure and success, that I went back to that first drugstore. The Encyclopedia volume I had taken from the library, besides containing the information I wanted on Colorado, had an article on Cosmetics. I decided powder was unnecessary, although I could understand easily enough how important it must be to the native women, with their thick skin and large pores and patchy coloring; that accounted for the fact that the men were mostly so much uglier . . . and I wondered if Larry used it, and if that was why his skin looked so much better than the others'.
Most of the perfumes made me literally ill; a few were inoffensive or mildly pleasant, if you thought of them just as smells, and not as something to be mistaken for one's own smell. Apparently, though, from the amount of space given over to them on the counter, and the number of advertisements I had seen or heard for one brand or another, they were an essential item. I picked out a faint lavender scent, and then bought some lipstick, mascara, and eyebrow pencil. On these last purchases, it was a relief to find that I had no opportunity to display my ignorance about nuances of coloring, or the merits of one brand over another. The woman behind the counter knew exactly what I should have, and was not interested in hearing any of my opinions. She even told me how to apply the mascara, which was helpful, since the other two were obvious, and anyhow I'd seen them used on television, and the lipstick especially I had seen women use since I'd been here.
It turned out to be a little more difficult than it looked, when I tried it. Cosmetics apparently take a good deal more experience than clothing, if you want to have it look right. Right by their standards, I mean, so that your face becomes a formal design, and will register only a minimum of actual emotion or response.
I was supposed to meet Larry in the cocktail lounge of a hotel in Manitou Springs, the smaller town I'd passed through the day before on my way down from the mountain. I drove back that way now, with all my possessions in my new car, including the purse that held not only my remaining diamonds and birth certificate, but also a car registration, driver's license, wallet, and makeup. A little more than halfway there, I saw a motel with a "Vacancy" sign out, and an attractive clean look about it. I pulled in and got myself a room with no more concern than if I'd been doing that sort of thing all my life.
This time there was no question about my age, nor was there later on that evening, in the cocktail lounge or anywhere else. I suppose it was the lipstick that made the difference, plus a certain increase in self-confidence; apparently I wasn't too small to be an adult, provided I looked and acted like one.
The new room did not have a bathtub. There was a shower, which was fun, but not as much as the tub had been. Dressing was not fun, and when I was finished, the whole effect still didn't look right, in terms of my own mental image of an Earth-woman dressed for a date.
It was the shoes, of course. This kind of dress wanted high heels. I had tried a pair in the store, and promptly rejected the whole notion. Now I wondered if I'd been too hasty, but I realized I could not conceivably have added that discomfort to the already-pressing difficulties of stockings and garter belt.
This last problem got so acute when I sat down and tried to drive the car, that I did some thinking about it, and decided to take them off. It seemed to me that I'd seen a lot of bare legs with flat heels. It was only with high heels that stockings were a real necessity. Anyhow, I pulled the car over to the side on an empty stretch of road, and wriggled out of things with a great deal of difficulty. I don't believe it made much difference in my appearance. No one seemed to notice, and I do think the lack of heels was more important.
All of this has been easy to put down. The next part is harder: partly because it's so important; partly because it's personal; partly because I just don't remember it all as clearly.
Larry was waiting for me when I got to the hotel. He stood up and walked over to me, looking at me as if I were the only person in the room besides himself, or as if he'd been waiting all his life, and only just that moment saw what it was he'd been waiting for. I don't know how I looked at him, but I know how I felt all of a sudden, and I don't think I can express it very well.
It was odd, because of the barriers to communication. The way he felt and the way I did are not things to put into words, and although I couldn't help but feel the impact of his emotion, I had to remember that he was deaf-and-blind to mine. All I could get from him for that matter, was a sort of generalized noise, loud but confused, without any features or details.
He smiled, and I smiled, and he said, "I didn't know if you'd really come . . . " and I said, "Am I late?" and he said, "Not much. What do you want to drink?"
I knew he meant something with alcohol in it, and I didn't dare, not till I'd experimented all alone first.
"Could I get some orange juice?" I asked.
He smiled again. "You can get anything you want. You don't drink?" He took my arm, and walked me over to a booth in the back corner, and went on without giving me a chance to answer. "No, of course you don't. Just orange juice and milk. Listen, Tina, I've been scared to ask you, but we might as well get it over with. How old are you anyhow? . . . " We sat down, but he still didn't give me a chance to answer. "No, that's not the right question. Who are you? What are you? What makes a girl like you exist at all? How come they let you run around on your own like this? Does your mother . . . Never mind me, honey. I've got no business asking anything. Sufficient unto the moment, and all that. I'm just talking so much because I'm so nervous. I haven't felt like this since . . . since I first went up for a solo in a Piper Cub. I didn't think you'd come, and you did, and you're still here in spite of me and my dumb yap. "Orange juice for the lady, please," he told the waiter, "and a beer for me. Draft."
I just sat there. As long as he kept talking, I didn't have to. He looked just as beautiful as he had in the diner, only maybe more so. His skin was smoother; I suppose he'd just shaved. And he was wearing a tan suit just a shade darker than his hair, and there was absolutely nothing I could say out loud in his language that would mean anything at all, so I waited to see if he'd start talking again.
"You're not mad at me, Tina?"
I smiled and shook my head.
"Well, say something then."
"It's more fun listening to you."
"You say that just like you mean it ... or do you mean funny?"
"No. I mean that it's hard for me to talk much. I don't know how to say a lot of the things I want to say. And most people don't say anything when they talk, and I don't like listening to their voices, but I do like yours, and ... I can't help liking what you say ... it's always so nice. About me, I mean. Complimentary. Flattering."
"You were right the first time. And you seem to be able to say what you mean very clearly."
Which was just the trouble. Not only able to, but unable not to. It didn't take any special planning or remembering to say or act the necessary lies to other humans. But Larry was the least alien person I'd ever known. Dishonesty to him was like lying to myself. Playing a role for him was pure schizophrenia.
Right then, I knew it was a mistake. I should never have made that date, or at least not nearly so soon. But even as I thought that, I had no more intention of cutting it short or backing out than I did of going back to the ship the next day. I just tried not to talk too much, and trusted to the certain knowledge that I was as important to him as he was to me —so perhaps whatever mistakes I made, whatever I said that sounded wrong, he would either accept or ignore or forgive.
But of course you can't just sit all night and say nothing. And the simplest things could trip me up. Like when he asked if I'd like to dance, and all I had to say was "No, thanks," and instead, because I wanted to try it, I said, "I don't know how."
Or when he said something about going to a movie, and I agreed enthusiastically, and he gave me a choice of three different ones that he wanted to see ... "Oh, anyone," I told him, "You're easy to please," he said, but he insisted on my making a choice. There was something he called "an old Astaire-Rogers," and something else that was made in England, and one current American one with stars I'd seen on television. I wanted to see either of the others. I could have named one, any one. Instead I heard myself blurting out that I'd never been to a movie.
At that point, of course, he began to ask questions in earnest. And at that point, schizoid or not, I had to lie. It was easier, though, because I'd been thoroughly briefed in my story, for just such emergencies as this — and because I could talk more or less uninterruptedly, with only pertinent questions thrown in, and without having to react so much to the emotional tensions between us.
I told him how my parents had died in an automobile accident when I was a baby; how my two uncles had claimed me at the hospital; about the old house up on the mountainside, and the convent school, and the two old men who hated the evils of the world; about the death of the first uncle, and at long last the death of the second, and the lawyers and the will and everything — the whole story, as we'd worked it out back on the ship.
It answered everything, explained everything — even the unexpected item of not being able to eat meat. My uncles were vegetarians, which was certainly a harmless eccentricity compared to most of the others I credited them with.
As a story, it was pretty far-fetched, but it hung together —and in certain ways, it wasn't even too far removed from the truth. It was, anyhow, the closest thing to the truth that I could tell — and I therefore delivered it with a fair degree of conviction. Of course it wasn't designed to stand up to the close and personal inspection Larry gave it; but then he wanted to believe me.
He seemed to swallow it. What he did, of course, was something any man who relies, as he did, on his reflexes and responses to stay alive, learns to do very early — he filed all questions and apparent discrepancies for reference, or for thinking over when there was time, and proceeded to make the most of the current situation.
We both made the most of it. It was a wonderful evening, from that point on. We went to the Astaire-Rogers picture, and although I missed a lot of the humor, since it was contemporary stuff from a time before I had any chance to learn about Earth, the music and dancing were fun. Later on, I found that dancing was not nearly as difficult or intricate as it looked — at least not with Larry. All I had to do was give in to a natural impulse to let my body follow his. It felt wonderful, from the feet on up.
Finally, we went back to the hotel, where we'd left my car, and I started to get out of his, but he reached out an arm, and stopped me.
"There's something else I guess you never did," he said. His voice sounded different from before. He put both his hands on my shoulders, and pulled me toward him, and leaned over and kissed me.
I'd seen it, of course, on television.
I'd seen it, but I had no idea ...
That first time, it was something I felt on my lips, and felt so sweetly and so strongly that the rest of me seemed to melt away entirely. I had no other sensations, except in that one place where his mouth touched mine. That was the first time.
When it stopped, the world stopped, and I began again, but I had to sort out the parts and pieces and put them all together to find out who I was. While I did this, his hands were still on my shoulders, where they'd been all along, only he was holding me at arm's distance away from him, and looking at me curiously.
"It really was, wasn't it?" he said.
"What?" I tried to say, but the sound didn't come out. I took a breath and "Was what?" I croaked.
"The first time." He smiled suddenly, and it was like the sun coming up in the morning, and then his arms went all the way around me. I don't know whether he moved over on the seat, or I did, or both of us. "Oh, baby, baby," he whispered in my ear, and then there was the second time.
The second time was like the first, and also like dancing, and some ways like the bathtub. This time none of me melted away; it was all there, and all close to him, and all warm, and all tingling with sensations. I was more completely alive right then than I had even been before in my life.
After we stopped kissing each other, we stayed very still, holding on to each other, for a while, and then he moved away just a little, enough to breathe better.
I didn't know what to do. I didn't want to get out of the car. I didn't even want to be separated from him by the two or three inches between us on the seat. But he was sitting next to me now, staring straight ahead, not saying anything, and I just didn't know what came next. On television, the kiss was always the end of the scene.
He started the car again. I said, "I have to . . . my car . . . I . . ."
"We'll come back," he said. "Don't worry about it. We'll come back. Let's just drive a little . . . ?" he pulled out past my car, and turned and looked at me for a minute. "You don't want to go now, do you? Right away?"
I shook my head, but he wasn't looking at me any more, so I took a breath and said out loud, "No."
We came off a twisty street onto the highway. "So that's how it hits you," he said. He wasn't exactly talking to me; more like thinking out loud. "Twenty-seven years a cool cat, and now it has to be a crazy little midget that gets to you." He had to stop then, for a red light — the same light I'd stopped at the first time on the way in. That seemed a long long time before.
Larry turned around and took my hand. He looked hard at my face. "I'm sorry, hon. I didn't mean that the way it sounded."
"What?" I said. "What do you mean?" I hadn't even tried to make sense out of what he was saying before; he wasn't talking to me anyhow.
"Kid," he said, "maybe that was the first time for you, but in a different way it was the first time for me too." His hand opened and closed around mine, and his mouth opened and closed too, but nothing came out. The light was green, he noticed, and started moving, but it turned red again. This time he kept watching it.
"I don't suppose anybody ever told you about the birds and the bees and the butterflies," he said.
"Told me what about them?" He didn't answer right away, so I thought about it. "All I can think of is they all have wings. They all fly."
"So do I. So does a fly. What I mean is . . . the hell with it!" He turned off the highway, and we went up a short hill and through a sort of gateway between two enormous rocks. "Have you ever been here?" he asked.
"I don't think so ..."
"They call it The Garden of the Gods. I don't know why. I like it here ... it's a good place to drive and think."
There was a lot of moonlight, and the Garden was all hills and drops and winding roads between low-growing brush, and everywhere, as if the creatures of some giant planet had dropped them, were those towering rocks, their shapes scooped out and chiseled and hollowed and twisted by wind, water, and sand. Yes, it was lovely, and it was non-instrusive. Just what he said — a good place to drive and think.
Once he came to the top of a hill, and stopped the car, and we looked out over the Garden, spreading out in every direction, with the moonlight shadowed in the sagebrush, and gleaming off the great rocks. Then we turned and looked at each other, and he reached out for me and kissed me again; after which he pulled away as if the touch of me hurt him, and grabbed hold of the wheel with a savage look on his face, and raced the motor, and raised a cloud of dust on the road behind us.
I didn't understand, and I felt hurt. I wanted to stop again. I wanted to be kissed again. I didn't like sitting alone on my side of the seat, with that growl in his throat not quite coming out.
I asked him to stop again. He shook his head, and made believe to smile.
"I'll buy you a book," he said. "All about the birds and the bees and a little thing we have around here we call sex. I'll buy it tomorrow, and you can read it — you do know how to read, don't you? — and then we'll take another ride, and we can park if you want to. Not tonight, baby."
"But I know . . ." I started, and then had sense enough to stop. I knew about sex; but what I knew about it didn't connect with kissing or parking the car, or sitting close . . . and it occurred to me that maybe it did, and maybe there was a lot I didn't know that wasn't on Television, and wasn't on the Ship's reference tapes either. Morals and mores, and nuances of behavior. So I shut up, and let him take me back to the hotel again, to my own car.
He leaned past me to open the door on my side, but he couldn't quite make it, and I had my fourth kiss. Then he let go again, and almost pushed me out of the car; but when I started to close the door behind me, he called out, "Tomorrow night?"
"I . . . all right," I said. "Yes. Tomorrow night."
"Can I pick you up?"
There was no reason not to this time. The first time I wouldn't tell him where I lived, because I knew I'd have to change places, and I didn't know where yet. I told him the name of the motel, and where it was.
"Six o'clock," he said.
"All right."
"Good night."
"Good night."
I don't remember driving back to my room. I think I slept on the bed that night, without ever stopping to determine whether it was comfortable or not. And when I woke up in the morning, and looked out the window at a white-coated landscape, the miracle of snow (which I had never seen before; not many planets have as much water vapor in their atmospheres as Earth does) in summer weather seemed trivial in comparison to what had happened to me.
Trivial, but beautiful. I was afraid it would be very cold, but it wasn't.
I had gathered, from the weather-talk in the place where I ate breakfast, that in this mountain-country (it was considered to be very high altitude there), snow at night and hot sun in the afternoon was not infrequent in the month of April, though it was unusual for May.
It was beautiful to look at, and nice to walk on, but it began melting as soon as the sun was properly up, and then it looked awful. The red dirt there is pretty, and so is the snow, but when they began merging into each other in patches and muddy spots, it was downright ugly.
Not that I cared. I ate oatmeal and drank milk and nibbled at a piece of toast, and tried to plan my activities for the day. To the library first, and take back the book they'd lent me. Book . . . all right then, get a book on sex. But that was foolish; I knew all about sex. At least I knew . . . what did I know? I knew their manner of reproduction, and ...
Just why, at that time and place, I should have let it come through to me, I don't know. I'd managed to stay in a golden daze from the time in the Garden till that moment, refusing to think through the implications of what Larry said.
Sex. Sex is mating and reproduction. Dating and dancing and kissing are parts of the courtship procedure. And the television shows all stop with kissing, because the mating itself is taboo. Very simple. Also very taboo.
Of course, they didn't say I couldn't .They never said anything about it at all. It was just obvious. It wouldn't even work. We were different, after all.
Oh, technically, biologically, of course, we were probably cross-fertile, but ...
The whole thing was so obviously impossible!
They should have warned me. I'd never have let it go this far, if I'd known.
Sex. Mating. Marriage. Tribal rites. Rituals and rigmaroles, and stay here forever. Never go back.
Never go back?
There was an instant's sheer terror, and then the comforting knowledge that they wouldn't let me do that. I had to go back.
Baby on a spaceship?
Well, I was a baby on a spaceship, but that was different. How different? I was older. I wasn't born there. Getting born is complicated. Oxygen, gravity, things like that. You can't raise a human baby on a spaceship . . . Human? What's human? What am I? Never mind the labels. It would be my baby ...
I didn't want a baby. I just wanted Larry to hold me close to him and kiss me.
I drove downtown and on the way to the library I passed a bookstore, so I stopped and went in there instead. That was better I could buy what I wanted, and not have to ask permission to take it out, and if there was more than one, I could have all I wanted.
I asked the man for books about sex. He looked so startled, I realized the taboo must apply on the verbal level too.
I didn't care. He showed me where the books were, and that's all that mattered. "Non-fiction here," he said. "That what you wanted, Miss?"
Non-fiction. Definitely. I thanked him, and picked out half a dozen different books. One was a survey of sexual behavior and morals; another was a manual of techniques; one was on the psychology of sex, and there was another about abnormal sex, and one on physiology, and just to play safe, considering the state of my own ignorance, one that announced itself as giving a "clear simple explanation of the facts of life for adolescents."
I took them all to the counter, and paid for them, and the man still looked startled, but he took the money. He insisted on wrapping them up, though, before I could leave.
The next part of this is really Larry's story, but unable as I am, even now, to be certain about his unspoken thoughts, I can only tell it as I experienced it. I didn't do anything all that day, except wade through the books I'd bought, piece-meal, reading a few pages here and a chapter there. The more I read, the more confused I got. Each writer contradicted all the others, except in regard to the few basic biological facts that I already knew. The only real addition to my factual knowledge was the information in the manual of technique about contraception — and that was rather shocking, even while it was tempting.
The mechanical contrivances these people made use of were foolish, of course, and typical of the stage of culture they are going through. If I wanted to prevent conception, while engaging in an act of sexual intercourse, I could do so, of course, but ...
The shock to the glandular system wouldn't be too severe; it was the psychological repercussions I was thinking about. The idea of pursuing a course of action whose sole motivation was the procreative urge, and simultaneously to decide s an act of will to refuse to procreate ...
I could do it, theoretically, but in practice new I never would.
I put the book down and went outside in the afternoon sunshine. The motel was run by a young married couple, and I watched the woman come out and put her baby in the playpen. She was laughing and talking to it; she looked happy; so did the baby.
But I wouldn't be. Not even if they let me. I couldn't live here and bring up a child — children? —on this primitive, almost barbaric, world. Never ever be able fully to communicate with anyone. Never, ever, be entirely honest with anyone.
Then I remembered what it was like to be in Larry's arms, and wondered what kind of communication I could want that might surpass that. Then I went inside and took a shower and began to dress for the evening.
It was too early to get dressed. I was ready too soon. I went out and got in the car, and pulled out onto the highway and started driving. I was halfway up the mountain before I knew where I was going, and then I doubled my speed.
I was scared. I ran away.
There was still some snow on the mountain top. Down below, it would be warm yet, but up there it was cold. The big empty house was full of dust and chill and I brought fear in with me. I wished I had known where I was going when I left my room; I wanted my coat. I wanted something to read while I waited. I remembered the library book and almost went back. Instead, I went to the dark room in back that had once been somebody's kitchen, and opened the cupboard and found the projector and yelled for help.
I didn't know where they were, how far away, whether cruising or landed somewhere, or how long it would take. All I could be sure of was that they couldn't come till after dark, full dark, and that would be, on the mountain top, at least another four hours.
There was a big round black stove in a front room, that looked as if it could burn wood safely. I went out and gathered up everything I could find nearby that looked to be combustible, and started a fire, and began to feel better. I beat the dust off a big soft chair, and pulled it over close to the stove, and curled up in it, warm and drowsy and knowing that help was on the way.
I fell asleep, and I was in the car with Larry again, in front of that hotel, every cell of my body tinglingly awake, and I woke up, and moved the chair farther back away from the fire, and watched the sun set through the window — till I fell asleep again, and dreamed again, and when I woke, the sun was gone, but the mountain top was brightly lit. I had forgotten about the moon.
I tried to remember what time it rose and when it set, but all I knew was it had shone as bright last night in the Garden of the Gods.
I walked around, and went outside, and got more wood, and when it was hot in the room again, I fell asleep, and Larry's hands were on my shoulders, but he wasn't kissing me.
He was shouting at me. He sounded furious, but I couldn't feel any anger. "You God-damn little idiot!" he shouted. "What in the name of all that's holy? . . .put you over my knee and ... For God's sake, baby," he stopped shouting, "what did you pull a dumb trick like this for?"
"I was scared. I didn't even plan to do it. I just did."
"Scared? My God, I should think you would be! Now listen, babe. I don't know yet what's going on, and I don't think I'm going to like it when I find out. I don't like it already that you told me a pack of lies last night. Just the same, God help me, I don't think it's what it sounds like. But I'm the only one who doesn't. Now you better give it to me straight, because they've got half the security personnel of this entire area out hunting for you, and nobody else is going to care much what the truth is. My God, on top of everything else, you had to run away! Now, give out, kid, and make it good. This one has got to stick."
I didn't understand a lot of what he said. I started trying to explain, but he wouldn't listen. He wanted something else, and I didn't know what.
Finally, he made me understand.
He'd almost believed my story the night before. Almost, but there was a detail somewhere that bothered him. He couldn't remember it at first; it kept nudging around the edge of his mind, but he didn't know what it was. He forgot about it for a while. Then, in the Garden, I made my second big mistake. (He didn't explain all of this then; he just accused, and I didn't understand this part completely until later.) I wanted him to park the car.
Any girl on Earth, no matter how sheltered, how inexperienced, would have known better than that. As he saw it, he had to decide whether I was just so carried away by the night and the mood and the moment that I didn't care — or whether my apparent innocence was a pose all along.
When we separated in front of the hotel that night, we both had to take the same road for a while. Larry was driving right behind me for a good three miles, before I turned off at the motel. And that was when he realized what the detail was that had been bothering him: my car.
The first time he saw me, I was driving a different make and model, with Massachusetts plates on it. He was sure of that, because he had copied it down when he left the luncheonette, the first time we met.
Larry had never told me very clearly about the kind of work he did. I knew it was something more or less "classified," having to do with aircraft — jet planes or experimental rockets, or something like that. And I knew, without his telling me, that the work — not just the job, but the work he did at it —was more important to him than anything else ever had been. More important, certainly, than he had ever expected any woman to be.
So, naturally, when he met me that day, and knew he wanted to see me again, but couldn't get my address or any other identifying information out of me, he had copied down the license number of my car, and turned it in, with my name, to the Security Officer on the Project. A man who has spent almost every waking moment from the age of nine planning and preparing to fit himself for a role in humanity's first big fling into space doesn't endanger his security status by risking involuntary contamination from an attractive girl. The little aircraft plant on the fringes of town was actually a top-secret key division in the Satellite project, and if you worked there, you took precautions.
The second time I met him at the luncheonette, he had been waiting so long, and had so nearly given up any hope of my coming, that he was no longer watching the road or the door when I finally got there — and when he left, he was so pleased at having gotten a dinner date with me, that he didn't notice much of anything at all. Not except out of the corner of one eye, and with only the slightest edge of subconscious recognition: just enough so that some niggling detail that was out-of-place kept bothering him thereafter; and just enough so that he made a point of stopping in the Security Office again that afternoon to add my new motel address to the information he'd given them the day before.
The three-mile drive in back of my Colorado plates was just about long enough, finally, to make the discrepancy register consciously.
Larry went home and spent a bad night. His feelings toward me, as I could hardly understand at the time, were a great deal stronger, or at least more clearly defined, than mine about him. But since he was more certain just what it was he wanted, and less certain what I did, every time he tried to fit my attitude in the car into the rest of what he knew, he'd come up with a different answer, and nine answers out of ten were angry and suspicious and agonizing.
"Now look, babe," he said, "you've got to see this. I trusted you; really, all the time, I did trust you. But I didn't trust me. By the time I went to work this morning, I was half-nuts. I didn't know what to think, that's all. And I finally sold myself on the idea that if you were what you said you were, nobody would get hurt, and — well, if you weren't on the level, I better find out, quick. You see that?"
"Yes," I said.
"Okay. So I told them about the license plates, and about — the other stuff."
What other stuff?" What else was there? How stupid could I be?
"I mean, the — in the car. The way you — Listen, kid," he said, his face grim and demanding again. "It's still just as true as it was then. I still don't know. They called me this evening, and said when they got around to the motel to question you, you'd skipped out. They also said that Massachusetts car was stolen. And there were a couple of other things they'd picked up that they wouldn't tell me, but they've got half the National Guard and all the Boy Scouts out after you by now. They wanted me to tell them anything I could think of that might help them find this place. I couldn't think of anything while I was talking to them. Right afterwards, I remembered plenty of things — which roads you were familiar with, and what you'd seen before and what you hadn't, stuff like that, so —"
"So you —?"
"So I came out myself. I wanted to find you first. Listen, babe, I love you. Maybe I'm a sucker, and maybe I'm nuts, and maybe I-don't-know-what. But I figured maybe I could find out more, and easier on you, than they could. And honey, it better be good, because I don't think I've got what it would take to turn you in, and now I've found you –"
He let it go there, but that was plenty. He was willing to listen. He wanted to believe in me, because he wanted me. And finding me in the house I'd described, where I'd said it was, had him half-convinced. But I still had to explain those Massachusetts plates. And I couldn't.
I was psychologically incapable of telling him another lie, now, when I knew I would never see him again, that this was the last time I could ever possibly be close to him in any way. I couldn't estrange myself by lying.
And I was also psychologically incapable – I found out –of telling the truth. They'd seen to that.
It was the first time I'd ever hated them. The first time, I suppose, that I fully realized my position with them.
I could not tell the truth, and I would not tell a lie; all I could do was explain this, and hope he would believe me. I could explain, too, that I was no spy, no enemy; that those who had prevented me from telling what I wanted to tell were no menace to his government or his people.
He believed me.
It was just that simple. He believed me, because I suppose he knew, without knowing how he knew it, that it was truth. Humans are not incapable of communication; they are simply unaware of it.
I told him, also, that they were coming for me, that I had called them, and – regretfully – that he had better leave before they came.
"You said they weren't enemies or criminals. You were telling the truth, weren't you?"
"Yes, I was. They won't harm you. But they might . . ." I couldn't say it. I didn't know the words when I tried to say it. Might take you away with them ... with us . . .
"Might what?"
"Might . . . oh, I don't know!"
Now he was suspicious again. "All right," he said. "I'll leave. You come with me."
It was just that simple. Go back with him. Let them come and not find me. What could they do? Their own rules would keep them from hunting for me. They couldn't come down among the people of Earth. Go back. Stop running.
We got into his car, and he turned around and smiled at me again, like the other time.
I smiled back, seeing him through a shiny kind of mist which must have been tears. I reached for him, and he reached for me at the same time.
When we let go, he tried to start the car, and it wouldn't work. Of course. I'd forgotten till then. I started laughing and crying at the same time in a sort of a crazy way, and took him back inside and showed him the projector. They'd forgotten to give me any commands about not doing that, I guess. Or they thought it wouldn't matter.
It did matter. Larry looked it over, and puzzled over it a little, and fooled around, and asked me some questions. I didn't have much technical knowledge, but I knew what it did, and he figured out the way it did it. Nothing with an electro-magnetic motor was going to work while that thing was turned on, not within a mile or so in any direction. And there wasn't any way to turn it off. It was a homing beam, and it was on to stay – foolproof.
That was when he looked at me, and said slowly, "You got here three days ago, didn't you, babe?"
I nodded.
"There was – God-damn it, it's too foolish! There was a –a flying saucer story in the paper that day. Somebody saw it land on a hilltop somewhere. Some crackpot. Some . . . how about it, kid?"
I couldn't say yes and I couldn't say no, and I did the only thing that was left, which was to get hysterical. In a big way.
He had to calm me down, of course. And I found out why the television shows stop with the kiss. The rest is very private and personal.
Author's note: This story was dictated to me by a five-year-old boy – word-for-word, except for a few editorial changes of my own. He is a very charming and bright youngster who plays with my own five-year-old daughter. One day he wandered into my office, and watched me typing for a while, then asked what I was doing. I answered (somewhat irritably, because the children are supposed to stay out of the room when I'm working) that I was trying to write a story.
"What kind of a story?"
"A grown-up story."
"But what kind?"
"A science-fiction story." The next thing I was going to do was to call my daughter, and ask her to take her company back to the playroom. I had my mouth open, but I never got a syllable out. Teddy was talking.
"I don't know where they got the car," he said. "They made three or four stops before the last . . . "He had a funny look on his face, and his eyes were glazed-looking.
I had seen some experimental work with hypnosis and post-hypnotic performance. After the first couple of sentences, I led Teddy into the living room, and switched on the tape-recorder. I left it on as long as he kept talking. I had to change tapes once, and missed a few more sentences. When he was done, I asked him, with the tape still running, where he had heard that story.
"What story?" he asked. He looked perfectly normal again. "The story you just told me."
He was obviously puzzled.
"The science-fiction story," I said.
"I don't know where they got the car," he began; his face was set and his eyes were blank.
I kept the tape running, and picked up the parts I'd missed before. Then I sent Teddy off to the playroom, and played back the tape, and thought for a while.
There was a little more, besides what you've read. Parts of it were confused, with some strange words mixed in, and with sentences half-completed, and a feeling of ambivalence or censorship or inhibition of some kind preventing much clarity. Other parts were quite clear. Of these, the only section I have omitted so far that seems to me to belong in the story is this one:—
The baby will have to be born on Earth! They have decided that themselves. And for the first time, I am glad that they cannot communicate with me as perfectly as they do among themselves. I can think some things they do not know about.
We are not coming back. I do not think that I will like it on Earth for very long, and I do not know — neither does Larry —what will happen to us when the Security people find us, and we cannot answer their questions. But—
I am a woman now, and I love like a woman. Larry will not be their pet; so I cannot be. I am not sure that I am fit to be what Larry thinks of as a "human being." He says I must learn to be "my own master." I am not at all sure I could do this, if it were necessary, but fortunately, this is one of Larry's areas of semantic confusion. The feminine of master is mistress, which has various meanings.
Also, there is the distinct possibility, from what Larry says, that we will not, either of us, be allowed even as much liberty as we have here.
There is also the matter of gratitude. They brought me up, took care of me, taught me, loved me, gave me a way of life, and a knowledge of myself, infinitely richer than I could ever have had on Earth. Perhaps they even saved my life, healing me when I was quite possibly beyond the power of Earthly medical science to save. But against all this—
They caused the damage to start with. It was their force-field that wrecked the car and killed my parents. They have paid for it; they are paying for it yet. They will continue to pay, for more years than make sense in terms of a human lifetime. They will continue to wander from planet to planet and system to system, because they have broken their own law, and now may never go home.
But I can.
I am a woman, and Larry is a man. We will go home and have our baby. And perhaps the baby will be the means of our freedom, some day. If we cannot speak to save ourselves, he may some day be able to speak for us.
I do not think the blocks they set in us will penetrate my womb as my own thoughts, I hope, already have.
Author's note: Before writing this story – as a story – I talked with Teddy's parents. I approached them cautiously. His mother is a big woman, and a brunette. His father is a friendly fat redhead. I already knew that neither of them reads science-fiction. The word is not likely to be mentioned in their household.
They moved to town about three years ago. Nobody here knew them before that, but there are rumors that Teddy is adopted. They did not volunteer any confirmation of that information when I talked to them, and they did not pick up on any of the leads I offered about his recitation.
Teddy himself is small and fair-haired. He takes after his paternal grandmother, his mother says . . .
Exile from Space was published in Fantastic Universe in 1956. A year later, the first manmade satellites went into space.
Orators and editorialists announced the dawning of the Space Age; science, they said, had caught up with science fiction. Unfortunately, they were wrong, because S-F had some years earlier gone on from its preoccupation with the hardware of space-flight to areas of wider scope and lesser certainty: among them, the survival potential of the human race (on or off Earth); the prospects for co-existence of different intelligent species (terrestrial or otherwise); the possible/probable directions of Homo Saps' future development (assuming he has any).
In the mid-fifties particularly, many of us were concentrating on an aspect of human experience which was then considered mostly "outside science". Some people called it "ESP", some called it "psionics", some called it "spiritualism". My own preference is for the more recent phrase, "primary communication".
Connection Completed
HELLO, DARLING. I'm glad you waited.
I couldn't do anything else. She smiled wryly. I'm glad I waited, too. Hello.
He saw her through the window, sitting alone in a pool of white light, on a white chair, at a white table, almost exactly centered in the expanse of white-tiled floor. She was wearing the green suit and the gray-green scarf with the narrow border of pink rose on it. Her back was toward him, but he knew beyond doubt it was she: her hair, over the scarf, was the same dark mist that floated in his mind, cool and caressing, tickling the filaments of his imagination.
He stood out there on the sidewalk in the chill city drizzle, staring in through the plate glass window of the cafeteria, waiting for her to make some move, any move that would confirm or deny: to turn around and show her face, looking as he knew it must; or to vanish as suddenly and completely as the elusive fantasy he also knew she had to be. He stood there waiting, mostly, for his own shock to give way to decision. Go in? Go away?
"Move along, Mac!"
Todd jerked his head around, eyes wide and startled, then narrowing in anger at the dough-faced cop.
"Is that a new law?" he sneered. "Something wrong with standing on the street?"
"Not so you just stand there," the policeman said. Then, in a different tone: "Sorry, doc. It was just the way you was looking in the window."
"You mean hungry?" Todd didn't feel like being reasonable. The apology was to his clothes anyhow; not to him. "Well, I am. You know any better reason to look in a restaurant?" If the cop got mad enough, there wouldn't be any impossible decision to make; he'd be in night court, paying a fine instead.
The cop didn't get mad. He shook his head tiredly and wandered off; muttering. Todd turned back to the window, and the girl had moved.
She was getting up. She had her check in her hand, and she was reaching for her raincoat on the next chair. Immediately, urgently, Todd wanted her not to go.
Sit still, he begged. You waited this long, don't spoil it now. I'm coming, kid. I shouldn't have stalled like that, but I'm coming in now. Just wait a minute.
He was walking fast up the block toward the door, watching her through the window all the time, and he saw her change her mind and settle back in the chair again. She never turned around. He still hadn't seen her face.
He pushed through the door into warm dry air, struggling with the corners of his mouth, keeping his smile underneath his skin. He couldn't very well walk in on her with a triumphant smirk all over his face. There was no reason to assume that she knew.
She didn't; he was sure of that when he saw the baffled defeat in the set of her shoulders as she leaned back in her chair and picked up the coffee cup again. The cup was empty; he knew that. She realized it a moment later, and set it down again, and looked up straight ahead of her at the big clock on the wall.
What on earth am I sitting here for? She made a restless, irritable motion toward her raincoat.
Hey, wait a minute! he pleaded. Don't go now. Just give me time to think of something.
What did she expect? To have him walk over and say "Pardon me, but aren't you the girl in my dreams?"
She didn't expect anything. She didn't even know who he was. But she turned and looked out the window while he crossed the big room to the counter at the back. It's still raining, she satisfied herself. I might as well sit here. She picked up a folded newspaper, and Todd stared across the perforated metal drip-board of the counter, into a dry, yellow-wrinkled face.
"Coffee—black," he said, and waited while brown liquid flushed slowly out of the urn into a thick tan mug. He tried to find her image in the mirror on the sidewall, but the angle was distorting; all he could tell was that she was still there, waiting.
For what?
He wasn't even sure who asked the question, let alone whether it had an answer. He couldn't trust the certainty he felt. He hadn't even seen her face yet.
The dry wrinkled face pushed a mug at him across the counter.
"Sugarncream?"
Todd shook his head. "No, thanks." He fumbled in his pocket for change, cursing his clumsy fingers, suddenly sure she would be gone when he turned around. Then:
Didn't I say "black" before? he wondered. He had to watch out. Ever since this thing started, he had been worried about things like that. How could you tell if you were just going off your rocker? How could you know whether you remembered to say things out loud at all?
You did. I heard you.
That's a big help! You heard me! I can hear you too, he snapped at her, and you never said a word out loud! Hell, I don't know if you even thought a word!
He could just as easily be talking to himself. He was, anyhow. Even if this was all real, actually happening—even if he wasn't just tripping a light fantastic down the path to a padded cell—he was still just talking to himself, effectively, until he was sure that she knew.
Stop fighting it, man! It's real, all right.
He had the dime in his hand finally, flung it across the counter, picked up his mug, slopping coffee over the siles, and headed toward her table, with the familiar feeling of her smile lingering in his head after the words began to fade.
The place was almost empty. There was no excuse for sitting at her table—except the obvious one, that he had come in for just that purpose. He sat down directly across from her, took one quick look at her face, and it was all wrong. It wasn't the face that went with the green suit. She wasn't smiling. And she didn't seem to be aware that he was there.
Todd burned his tongue on his coffee, and took another look over the edge of the cup. This time he caught her by surprise and she turned away swiftly when their glances met. She was aware of him, then; and she was frightened!
Scared stiff! she assured him. You're not real. I don't believe in you. Get out of here, will you? God damn it, get out!
The vehemence of it almost convinced him. He wouldn't be shrieking at himself that way—or would he? What did he know about how a person feels inside when he's slipping his gears? It made sense for her to feel just as scared and mad inside as he did . . . but if the whole thing was originating inside his own mind, it made even more sense for her to sound that way. . . .
He knew just where that train of thought went: round and round and all the way back round again. He put down his coffee cup, made a face over it, and looked straight at her.
"Would you pass the sugar please?" he said, and waited, watching.
She was scared, all right. Scared, or very tired, or both. He noticed, now, that there were long deep lines running down from the inside corners of her eyes, along her nose, outlining tight-bunched muscles; another set of lines striking down from the edges of her mouth; a taut set of defiance to her jaw. And in the same instant, he realized her eyes were gray-green like the scarf, as he knew they ought to be, and her lipstick was soft coral-pink like the roses on the scarf.
She was reaching for the jar of sugar automatically. Her face showed no reaction, no memory of what he thought had happened a few minutes earlier, at the counter. He tried transposing her features, in his mind, setting them in the other expression, the only one he'd "seen" before, relaxing all the tense muscles, turning up the lips into a smile of warm acceptance. . . .
"Here," she said impatiently, holding the jar under his nose. He looked from her face to her hand and back again, wondering how long she'd been holding it there while he stared at her. If she was the wrong girl—if there was no right girl—
There was a very small smile on her face now. Nothing like the look he was used to, but enough so he was certain it was the same face.
Well, do you want it or don't you?
She meant the sugar, he realized after an instant's pause. "Thanks. I don't usually use it," he started to explain, and watched the same struggle on her face that he remembered feeling on his own as he walked into the place: the effort to suppress apparently unwarranted laughter.
He let the explanation drift off, and realized he'd done what he'd been worried about all this time: answered aloud what he had heard only inside his ears.
In that case, she could be laughing at him just because of his confusion and insanity. She could . . . she could be anything or anyone, but she also could be the girl who had haunted his waking and sleeping dreams for the last six months.
"Thanks," he said again, and relieved her of the sugar jar.
You better think of something better than that. I can't keep sitting here much longer. "You're welcome," she said. I ... imagined ... I thought about you as a sort of fluent character. Not the tongue-tied kind ...
I don't usually have so much trouble. You're not yourself exactly, either ...
"Pardon me, miss," he asked courteously, "I wonder if you happen to know whether there's a post office open anywhere near here? At this hour, I mean?" Pretty feeble, I know, babe, but you're rushing me. . . .
"I don't think . . . there's one that might be open, but I'm not sure. It's just about five blocks. You turn to the left at the corner, and . . ."
He didn't listen to the rest. He didn't need a post office for anything.
Oh, my God! her voice screamed inside his head. What am I doing now? I've never seen this man before. I don't, I don't, I don't, know who he is or anything about him! He looks like . . . he looks like somebody I invented, but that's an accident, it has to be! Daydreaming isn't so bad . . . anybody who's lonely daydreams . . . but when you start having hallucinations ...
Yeah, I know! It's time to go look up a good reliable old-fashioned psychiatrist and tell him all your troubles. Don't think you're the only one, babe.
He watched her eyes flick to the phone booth in the corner, and realized he'd meant in the directory when he thought the words "look up."
There was a way to find out after all!
"I suppose I could call from here and find out if they're open," he said. Calm yourself, fellow, he told himself. You could have thought about the directory after she looked that way. It's hard to be sure about subjective time-sequence.
The thing to do was set it up ahead of time, make sure she knew what he was doing—or as sure as he could be—and then see what happened.
"That's a good idea," she said flatly ... and began making motions at her handbag and raincoat again. It took swering, of course, his remark about calling the post swering, of course, his remark about calling the post office.
"Nasty weather," he said brightly. "Hate to go wandering around out there for nothing." Please darling . . . stick it out a little longer . . . I know I'm being dumb, but I don't know much about picking up a girl.
Well, I don't usually get picked up!
"Would you care for some more coffee?" he said desperately, rising before she had a chance to get her things together. "Could I bring it back?" Listen, listen good, now . . . if you want to try a test of this thing, listen good ...
She hesitated, holding the bag in her hand, her arm half-extended toward the next chair where her raincoat was draped over the back of the seat.
Now, listen: if you want to try a test, just to find out, let me know by putting your bag in your other hand, and then putting it down on the table ...
He watched anxiously.
"Well-l-l ... thank you." She smiled tightly, and transferred her bag from her right hand to the left, then set it down, carefully, as though jarring might explode it, on the left-hand side of her empty cup.
Todd heard himself saying smoothly, naturally, "Do you take cream and sugar?" It was startling that his voice should behave so well, when every nerve cell and fiber in him was vibrating with incredulous exaltation. He wanted to reach out and grab her, hold her face between his two hands, pull her head to rest on his shoulder, soothe her, explain, reassure, until the sharp-etched lines of fear and tension vanished from her face and he could see her, really her, not in a dream or vision or in some unknown receptive part of his mind, but see her in the flesh, smiling with her whole face as she always had before.
And he couldn't do it.
Not yet.
He'd planned that first request to be a signal, nothing more. It wasn't enough to go on. It could be coincidence, accident; he might even have anticipated from some unconscious memory of an earlier action of hers, that that move was the one she would make, and so have set up the signal to get the answer he wanted.
This time it wouldn't be like that.
"I'll make that phone call, and bring the coffee back with me," he told her slowly and distinctly. She nodded, and then he thought as clearly as he could:
Only if you hear me, baby, if you understand and want to believe it like I do, don't wait for me to bring it back. You get the coffees while I'm in the booth. You understand? Do you, babe? You get the coffees while I go in the phone booth ... then I'll know for sure. You wouldn't do that for any other reason, see? That way I'll know. You just do that, and you can leave the rest to me . . . Understand?
She was nodding again. All right. Go ahead. I understand. But there was a feeling of irritation—or impatience? He couldn't tell. Go on. Hurry up.
Impatience. He turned and walked across the white-tiled floor, his heels sounding loud and hollow all the way. He didn't look around. He was sure she understood. He knew she was somehow irritated. He didn't know what she would do. But what he had to do was walk across the endless rows of tiles to the phone booth, and not give himself any chance to give her a signal of any kind—in case he was wrong.
He didn't trust himself to give her enough time if he faked it, so he looked up the post office in the directory, and stepped into the booth, pulled the door shut, without ever looking around, put his coin into the slot, and let the number ring twenty times before he hung up again and stepped out.
He glanced at the counter, and the wrinkle-faced man was leaning back against the wall next to the coffee urn, turning a racing form over in his hand. He looked toward the table, then, and she was gone.
Handbag, raincoat, green suit, scarf, and all. Gone.
You little fool!
The thought was hopeless and tender and the loneliest thought of his life. He was at the door, looking out, up and down the street but she was gone completely, vanished, like ...
Like the illusion she was?
He went back to the table, or tried to. He couldn't find it. He wanted to see her coffee cup there; he thought she might have left the newspaper she was reading. Something, anything, to prove she had been there, flesh and blood, a real girl. Not just an image his own mind had made for him six months ago, to live with and talk to—and love.
Nothing. All the tables in the center of the room were clear and clean. There was a boy dumping cups and clattering silver in the far corner. Todd strode over, stood behind him, and couldn't think what to say.
"Did you take two cups off a table over there?" It sounded ridiculous.
The boy looked around, sleepy, stupid, glazed-eyed. "Huh?"
I said, "Did you take some coffee cups off a table just now?"
"Sure, doc. That's what they pay me for."
Todd shook his head impatiently, like clicking a telephone receiver, trying to clear the line. "Look," he said slowly. "Right about the middle of the room there's a table I was sitting at. Then I went to the phone booth. When I came back, the dishes were gone. Did you just clear that table off?"
"Listen, Mister, if you wasn't done with your coffee, you shouldn't of left it there. All I know is, a table is empty, I clear it off. How should I know . . ."
"I was done." He made himself relax outwardly, realizing that his stance, his voice, his eyes were all threatening the youngster. "It's all right. I was finished. All I want to know is, were there . . . did you take a newspaper off of there?"
"A paper?" The boy looked doubtfully at the bottom rack of his pushwagon. "Lessee now . . . there was a paper on one of them tables. . . ." He reached and brought forth a folded sheet. Todd gazed at it helplessly. He hadn't noticed which paper she was reading. He couldn't tell if that was the one.
"Did you ... was that on a table with two coffee cups?"
"Gee, mister, I don't know. . . ." The boy was really trying to remember, Todd realized, with surprise. Trying hard. "Yeah I guess . . . listen, mister, if it's so important I won't kid you. I don't know, that's all see?"
"Okay kid. Thanks. Thanks a lot." Todd fished a coin out of his pocket, pushed it into the startled boy's hand, and turned and walked out. Where to, he didn't know; but he had to get out of there. The girl wasn't coming back, that much he was sure of. That is, if there was a girl. If ever there had been a girl with a green suit and a mist of dark hair, and a face that smiled for him in memory.
It was cold and wet outside, and that suited him fine. He paced the sidewalk, out of lamplight into shadow, and back into damp reflections of the light. Mica particles in the gray cement flashed like tiny distant stars or signaling fireflies under his eyes. Unseen drops of moisture chilled the back of his neck, damped the edge of his collar. He stepped off the curb, and a car screeched, braking, around the corner avoiding him by inches.
All these things he perceived, but without meaning. Perception was suddenly a frightening thing, to be examined and tested every time before you could trust it. What you saw was not necessarily there at all. What you wanted, you could not see, or else you saw without reality. He felt the cold rain on his skin, but put no faith in it, because it was all a part of the girl and the night and the illusion he had made for himself.
He turned a corner, walking faster. No sense trying to avoid obstacles, or dodge moving objects, if you didn't know for sure that they were there. He crossed another street, and walked faster still. He didn't know where he was going, and if he knew it wouldn't matter, because when he got to the end of the journey, he still wouldn't know where he was.
The city flashed its distractions. Sights and sounds and odors, moisture, temperature, touch assailed him, and could not penetrate his isolation.
A man lives all his life inside the wall of his own skull, making words into sentences, moving muscles to form gestures, so that he can make his existence and purposes known to others; and in the same way, absorbing his perceptions of the people and things around him, trying to interpret as best he can, so as to understand some part of their meaning for himself. But he never gets outside the bony barriers of his own head, or past the hardening defenses of others. For every human being, the word or the gesture has some slightly different meaning.
No two people ever meet completely without some slight or great distortion of intent or understanding, occurring in the jangled complexity of living cells that make up the expressive and interpretive mechanisms of the man.
Todd Harmacher made this discovery, as most men do, when he was very small. Each contact of the thirty-odd years since had served to confirm it. Each contact until, for a few brief minutes this evening, he had let himself believe that he was truly, entirely, in communication with another human being, rather than with some strangely shaped and ill-portented section of his own imagination.
Now he paced the city streets, oblivious to rain and cold, defying noise and light, aware of the potentialities of total loneliness as he had never quite envisioned it before.
He crossed another street and turned a corner, for no reason except the inner urgency that said, Turn! Here! Now!
Stop!
He stopped.
Perception invaded him. He was standing in front of an old stone building, a relic of the city's first pride in size and strength, gray and massive and dirty. A lamppost down the street threw a flood of light along the rain-soaked sidewalk, but the doorway directly in front of him was dark. And her smiling face was in his head again, framed by the soft scarf, the drifting mist of her hair touching gently against the bitterness and anger in his mind.
I'm sorry, dear, she told him, but I got so scared! I used to think I made you up, then for a while I thought you were real. Then I told myself that was nonsense, and I learned to live with a dream. . . .
I know. I know!
And then when I saw you, I got frightened. And when I started doing things I didn't mean to do. . . .
Poor darling! I shouldn't have ...
No! Don't you see? That's when I knew it was real! But then ...?
But then I knew you still didn't believe it yourself, and I thought, if I did as you asked each time, you'd never never know which one of us it was, or whether I was really here. So . . . so when you weren't looking, I ran out, and came here and called you and waited. . . .
He couldn't see her in the darkness of the doorway, but he knew. They both knew now. He knew, too, what her face would look like if he could see it at this moment, but, knowing, he didn't have to see it.
"Hi, babe," he said, stepping forward gladly into the dark doorway. "I'm glad you waited."
"I couldn't do anything else," she said wryly. Then he opened his arms to her, and she said, "I'm glad I waited, too. Hello."
Connection Completed was first published in Universe magazine in 1954. It was one of many attempts, by many S-F writers, to examine/understand/articulate something about the (still) barely-understood phenomena which are commonly perceived and described nowadays as "vibes" or (ugh!) "astral projection".
My own guess is that these experiences are much more closely related to such (equally mysterious, but more confidently named) phenomena as "hunch", "creativity", "empathy", etc., than to the esoteric complexities of "afterlife" or "astral planes". But until we understand how it works, we can neither give it a meaningful name, nor put it to use.
Several other stories in this book, as well as two of the novellas in Daughters of Earth and a novel, The Tomorrow People, were written in an attempt to pursue explorations of these phenomena in various possible directions. The novel in particular examined an idea which continues to intrigue me: that "primary communication" on a cellular level might be responsible for many instances of "miracle cures", "stigmata", "psychogenic" disease, etc. — and might, under full conscious control, allow a sentient organism to make much larger changes in morphology — which might permit anything from the legendary transformations of witches and werewolves to the idea of a single widely diffused individual existing on an airless planet, or even in empty space, its scattered cells surviving on radiant energy, plus perhaps the odd hydrogen atom.
The Shrine of Temptation
The name his own people called him was Lallayall. That was, of course, just his calling-name, and because it meant almost the same thing that he meant to us, we called him Lucky.
This was no transgression of courtesy, or culture-arrogance on our part. His true name, after the fashion of his people, was already long, and growing, a descriptive catalogue useful only for records and ritual occasions. A calling-name may be anything derived from the whole, so long as it suits, and the called one will answer it. Lucky was delighted to have a new nickname from us, in our language.
He was, when we came to the island, just eight years old as we reckon. His people count differently; to them, he was halfway through his Third Decade; in five more seasons, he would undergo the Apprenticeship Rites that would end his first age. Either way, he was just past the midpoint between babyhood and puberty. Like most of his race—and all others but us on the island—he was brown-skinned and dark-eyed, black-haired. Like most of his age, he was eager, questioning, rational, mystical, obedient, rebellious,-clumsy and courteous, graceful and quick. Like too few of them, he was generally happy and always healthy, serenely certain of parental love, highly intelligent and well-informed.
Certain of these things, and all of them to a degree, were the product of island culture. Lucky lived in a world he accepted as having been designed primarily for his own benefit and, largely, it had. Among his people, there were no fears, hungers, troubles, or questions that could not be voiced, and none—within the limits of the island's capacity—that would not be answered to the best extent of the child's understanding. All children were swift and bright; but among them, Lucky was especially blessed. Thus, his name.
He was the first in his age group to find his apprenticeship. When we came, he already knew what he wanted. A short time before that, he had spent his days, like the others, wandering from hunters to planners to makers to teachers to planters to singers, spreading' his wonders and askings impartially. The others still wandered, multiply curious, questioning the weavers and fishers and carpenters, healers and painters and crafters of food. It might be three or four seasons yet until, one by one, they singled out the preferred occupations to which they'd be bound in training at First Rites.
But Lucky already knew what he wanted. Before we came, he went, day after day, to the Shrine, or the House of Shrinemen, squatting patiently in the courtyard, waiting for the chance to carry sand (for stone scrubbing) or water or polishing cloths or firewood for a Shrineman, listening in silence to such talk as was carried on in his presence, storing up questions to ask them, hallall, when the time should be ripe. Part of each day he sat at the feet of the Figures, self-hypnotized by gleaming amber and blue, spinning out glorious fantasies of the Rebirth.
(His own fascination with the Shrine and Shrinemen, and the weight of mystery he gave to some words and phrases—which I have tried to translate with capitals and occasional sonorous phrases in this account—led us later to a misunderstanding of some proportion. But, hallall . . .)
His persistence was already recognized in the village.
The other children first, then his mothers and fathers, had noticed his absence from forest, fields, and shops. Then the Shrinemen began teasing him with familiar fondness at evening gatherings and rest-day games, so that everyone started to realize what he had chosen. And if it was something of a shock to parents and teachers, the boy did not know it.
Perhaps because we settled as close to the Shrine as we dared do—perhaps out of the same fascination with the unknown that had drawn him to the Shrine—Lucky was our first and most frequent visitor, and became, either in his own person or as interpreter, our chief source of information about both the Shrine and the islanders. He did not, at first, realize that our preoccupation with the Shrine was as great as his own; we did not share his confident artlessness in question-asking. I do not know just how he explained us to himself at first, or whether he even tried to. Perhaps he just waited to learn what he wanted to know—hallall.
It was not passive waiting. The first day, after his first attempt to speak with us, he sat in what must have been stunned bemusement for several hours, pondering the incredible fact of a second language. (We saw the squatting inward-turned boy as "a stolid impassive indigene." I blush to admit that the phrase is from my own notebook.) Then, having fully accepted that the phenomenon was not—obviously—impossible, but only previously unknown, it was he who approached us with the second overture.
We were just setting up the hand bellows for blowing foam into the camp wallforms. Lucky walked over, watched, walked away, and came back with a round stone, flattened, on one side, just right to prop up the foot that kept slipping.
He held it out. We all stopped and stared. George Lazslo was quickest. He reached out and took the stone, smiling. Lucky smiled back.
"Thank you," George said.
The boy touched the stone. "Sannacue?" His small brown face seemed to turn gold with joy of his smile. "Mertz," he said, tapping the stone. "Mertz–sannacue?"
Henry started to correct him, but Jenny and I both realized at the same time that it was better to let the error ride, and not confuse the issue. (Starting as a joke, we all got to where we found sannacue as natural a word as stone.)
The principle was established, and it was astonishing to us how rapidly he learned. Jenny was our linguist, and predictably proved quicker than the rest of us in learning the island language, but when they sat exchanging names and phrases, it was she, far more often than he, who had to be told twice. Once he heard it, and was sure he understood, he simply did not know how to forget. (For her fascinating account of the process, see pp. 324-359, in "Language in the Isolated Culture," Dr. Jennifer R. Boxill, S&S, 1985).
As scion as the bare minimum of mutual language was effective, Lucky (again) initiated the next step in cultural exchange. He had been showing up at the camp just after breakfast each morning; this day he came an hour earlier, with a basket of woven reeds on his arm. It was my day for KP, and I was opening a can of bacon when he came up and touched my arm, showing me the basket. "Try my food?" he said.
The basket was filled with fresh steamed fish, still hot, each on its own new-baked half-loaf of native meal bread. At the bottom, five small pots of blue clay—the same stuff the Guardian Figure was molded in—held a savory vegetable sauce to be poured over fish and bread.
It was very good, but that seemed, at the time, irrelevant. The greatest significance of the gift was learning that our self-appointed guide and mascot was, it seemed, fully accredited in his friendship by the—so far—invisible parents and elders of the village.
I should say, "parents or elders," because we were uncertain. When we asked if he'd prepared the food himself, he laughed uproariously and then said, with ostentatious patience, "Mothers cook food." Whether he meant mothers as a class (and in this case his mother), or several women of the class, mother, we did not know.
Both assumptions were wrong, as it happened. He meant his mothers.
It took us most of six months to reach a level of communication at which mistakes of this sort could be cleared up. And from that time on, it seemed as though most of our discussions consisted of substituting closer approximations for old misconceptions. The more we learned, the more complex was what we had to learn. As for Lucky's wrong assumptions about us, they took even longer for him to recognize, and more time yet for us to realize he'd had them. We had been on the island the best part of a year before we gained any comprehension of the extent to which our presence had affected the boy himself. And through all that time, we so carefully leaned over backwards to avoid showing special interest in the Shrine, that we had never learned of Lucky's particular infatuation with it!
All through our second season on the island (by their time reckoning), we were pumping a steady flow of information out of the boy. We learned the basic economy and social structure of the island; how to reckon seasons, and count age and status.
He explained the system of education and apprenticeship, the courtship and marriage customs. When he did not know answers to what we asked, he would say, "Hallall; hallall you will know." And next day, or next week, or even next season, he would come back with the answer. Most answers, that is. Sometimes the second answer too was, Hallall. But then, he would add, "Hallall, I shall know, and then you too."
We worried, occasionally, about what was happening to Lucky, in his own village—whether his contact with us singled him out for better or worse. What we never imagined was the delight of his parents (He had nine at the time; Dr. Henry Cogswell's article in Anthropological Review, II, 1983, pp. 19-26, gives a brief comprehensive analysis of island family relationships) and teachers and the older people in general at the effect we had on him.
In the pursuit of the knowledge we asked, Lucky had gone back to learn himself all the things he had scorned to observe before we came; now he watched weavers and planters and netters of fish, masons and flutists and arrow-makers, with a concentrated attention that he had reserved before only for matters concerning the Shrine. The older people watched, and were pleased. They had always thought well of the boy. He was marked as lucky from birth. When it had seemed clear he would be a Shrineman, they had been not disappointed so much as surprised. It did not seem quite suitable for one so lavishly endowed. Now he was learning, as they had expected, all matters of concern to the people. If it were what he wished, he would of course be a Shrineman; but they began speaking of him now as a future Firstman.
The pinky strangers ("Pinkies" was what they called us.) whose advent was otherwise inexplicable and perhaps a bit disturbing, had perhaps been sent to train a leader among the people, as the people themselves had not known how to do.
So they reasoned; at least, they decided, we were causing Lucky to learn what they had hoped he would, whether that was our purpose on coming or not. At the very least, it was indirectly due to us that they had made sure of his extraordinary capacities, which had been indicated as probable by various features of his birth and growth, but had never before been fully displayed. (The eidetic memory was as impressive to them as to us; and his intelligence was high, even in that high-average society. Chapter X of Dr. G. M. Lazslo's "Environment and Intelligence," S&S, 1987, deals with our findings on the island, for those who are interested.)
Two of his fathers came to thank us.
It was the first visit we had from anyone but Lucky. Out of simple courtesy, no adult would have come into our camp without some such cause. Out of simple caution, we might never have entered their village without that prior visit. It was our opening contact with the group as a whole.
The fathers were overjoyed to discover that Jennie spoke their language with some proficiency. That made it possible to dismiss Lucky and thank us without requiring him to translate praise of himself or of his friends. We told them in return how much we admired and relied on the boy—and how very pleased we were to learn that our influence had helped him adjust to his own world, and not put him out of tune with it.
This is what we meant to say, but Jennie did not know any word in their language for "adjust" or "maladjusted." She tried "out of season," and got only smiling puzzlement. She made a long speech full of metaphor and analogy, and finally one of them said, "Oklall?"
Oklall, Lucky had told us, was the opposite of hallall. They seemed to think we were concerned about Lucky yesterday, but not tomorrow. We let well enough alone at that point, and offered food instead of conversation. Lucky rejoined us, and took obvious pride in piloting his fathers' way through the strange meal. When they left, we had our invitation to visit the village—paradoxical when we thought of it, since what had occasioned the thanks-paying was our previous inability to go in person.
If the fathers had the same thought, it would not have worried them. If we understood, as we thought we did, what hallall meant, we would have known they'd see no cause to worry. They had seen Lallayall's potential, displayed clearly, and were naturally content to let his nature take its own course. Hallall, he would learn all he needed to know. Hallall he would grow to his proper adult place. If he needed help or encouragement, they would provide it. The expectations they had begun to have before his preoccupation with the Shrine, expectations based on his birth and early growth, now seemed once again probable. Perhaps, as time grew closer for a Rebirth, it was necessary for a future Firstman to know more of the Shrine than was usual. His unlikely interest in Shrinemen might then mean only that he would be Firstman at the time of a Rebirth. Lallayall—Lucky—indeed! He was well-called.
As for us, we were too busy and excited with our new observing privileges, and more than that, with the news of Lucky's special concern with the Shrine, to think of the oddity of that tomorrow-yesterday misunderstanding. We assumed, from his fathers' manner of mentioning it, that the Shrine was not in any way taboo. It began to seem more likely that we might eventually be allowed to examine it: if a child could spend his time there freely, when his parents disapproved, it was not unreasonable to hope that visitors might be invited.
One other assumption, based on our experience of Lucky's learning powers, proved unfounded: there was almost nothing he was able to tell us about the Shrine or Shrinemen, except just such visual descriptions as we now dared to hope might be redundant. He described the Figures, the blue Guardian on the Window of Light, and the amber Lifegiver on the scroll pedestal. He painted a vivid word picture of the reptiloid grace of the Lifegiver, the menacing power of the Guardian. About the Shrinemen and their lives he knew many minute details—but none of significance. They ate thus, slept so, conversed in the courtyard; they were celibate, wore brown robes with a design patterned on the Window of Light; they had daily rituals to say; they performed certain calculations. Hallall, they would officiate at the Recurrence, the Rebirth.
From the Oldest Men in the village, of whom there were three, in their Seventh Age, we learned more—if what we learned was fact. They could all recall, in young childhood, seeing the Life of the Shrine then extant. There had been no Recurrence since then, nor had it occurred in their lives, but before they were born.
In twenty-five decades, they said, the Life would Recur. It was soon, soon ...
And saying so, they glanced significantly at Lucky. Hallall, a Rebirth ...
That word again—hallall. In the village and fields, we heard it incessantly. It was the only no-answer a child evey got. No question was forbidden for young ones to ask—but some were not answered in First Age, and some not in Second. Hallall, they were told, hallall, ye shall know.
"When do we plant firstseed?" a child might ask.
"In the day following the third full moon of Seedfall," he would be told.
"Which seed is firstseed?"
And he would be shown.
"What comes of it?" "When do we harvest it?" "How is it stored?" "Who plants it?" "Who knows the full moon?"
All these would be answered and fully, readily. The people would lay down their work, if need be, to go with a questioning child and show him the answer.
But—"Why does it grow?" "How does the Firstman know which round moon is the full moon?" or "Why do people seed themselves all year round, but fawns and fish only in Greengrowth Season?"
Then the answer was always, "Hallall," given with a glad smile for the child who was thinking ahead of his years. First Age children were to learn only what could be seen, touched, smelled, or heard. Why and Wherefore were for Second Agers, the adolescent apprentices. So-
"Hallall, little one . . ."
It was listening to the teaching of the children that we finally came round to understand what the word meant. We had thought it was "tomorrow"—or "later," vaguely. Then for a while we thought it just an evasion, a sort of "I don't know either; perhaps some day we'll both find out." But what it meant, precisely, was, "In the fullness of time . . ."
The distinction is not nearly as much in the words as in the kind of thinking that must lie behind them. Shrine Islanders, for instance, fear death less than any society known—and' this with no trace of belief in discrete immortality. In the fullness of time one is born, grows and learns, loves, weds, and begets, rears children, teaches the younger ones, acquires status, grows feeble and dies. If death comes, then one's time is full.
From the answers that were and were not given youngsters in Lucky's Age Group we also came to understand how we must have troubled him with our determined questioning about the Shrinemen. Here, too, we had progressed through a series of dead-wrong assumptions. Because Lucky told us of books and calculations, of ideographs on the Shrine (which he could reproduce flawlessly, but with no comprehension); because he had never seen books in the village, or never spoke of them; because he, the brightest of his Age Group, went daily to the House of Shrinemen, we first took for granted that the Shrinemen were priestly scholars, perhaps the guardians of an ancient culture, their role symbolized by the red-mated blue Guardian Figure protecting the "Lifegiver"—a goddess, clearly, but perhaps of wisdom rather than fertility. The reptilian appearance suggested this strongly. Henry got very enthusiastic about the correlation of snakes and divinely protected knowledge. "Rebirth" could imply a predictable renaissance—and that suggested the ugly thought that the secrecy of the Shrinemen's rites and formulae was that of an unplanned bureaucracy perpetuating itself by withholding the knowledge it had been set up to protect and disseminate .. .
When we understood what hallall meant, we had to revise this unhappy picture, for much of what Lucky did not know was not secret at all—just hallall at his age. By that time, also, we had heard from the three Oldest Men such mutually confirming details of the appearance and function of the Life of the Shrine, that the whole notion of a usurping bureaucracy became absurd. "Rebirth" was not symbol, but a literal incarnation of new wisdom, presented at intervals of roughly—by our time—eighty years. The incarnation took the form of a froglike creature at least roughly resembling the statue and relief Figures at the Shrine. (The old men recalled an identical appearance, except for color, which was gray—but they were old and remembering a strongly suggestible childhood.)
So the Shrinemen became shamans, half-ignorant half-wise witchdoctors applying without understanding some ancient formulae designed to release increments of knowledge slowly to a population reverted—for what strange intriguing reasons?—to barbarism. The near-idyllic society we saw was the planned result of this program; and the quiet patience of the hallall philosophy made sense now; hallall, all would be known. We need only wait; hallall . . .
But for witchdoctors , the Shrinemen were poor showmen. Neither did they do healing (any more than they governed; both of these were functions of all other people who lived into the Second Decade of the Sixth Age). The shaman theory began to fall apart the night George found out the man next to him at a haybringing dance was a "shaman," off duty for the party; the putative witchdoctor invited us all, very casually, to visit him at the Shrine. There had never been any taboo; no one suspected we might be interested.
We found the Shrinemen, as we had first assumed they would be, educated and cultured, in the bookish sense, far above the level of the other islanders. They were intelligent men devoted to a faith, or more, to a duty. When Rebirth occurred, it was necessary that they he on hand, trained in the formulae of sacrifice. Without their precise weights and measures and chants, the Life of the Shrine would be .monstrous and harmful.
The Oldest Men, we suggested, were saying it was near Italian for Recurrence . . . ?
The Shrinemen nodded. They brought out a register, a long papyrus-like scroll. One fourth of its length was filled with ideographs—like those on the Shrine itself, tantalizingly like, but unlike, three different ancient languages Jenny did know . . .
On this scroll, they said, was the listing of dates and persons connected with Shrine Life. The first entry, in barely legible, long-faded ink, went back—they said—almost 350 decades, nearly 1200 years, as we reckon. One of them spread the scroll on a lectern, and began intoning with such singsong regularity it was evident he was reciting by rote, and not actually reading.
Yet there was an air of authenticity about their list; whether it was in the scroll or not, whether they could read the symbols or not, we somehow believed that the time intervals—ranging from nineteen to thirty decades between Recurrences—were legitimate history.
The question was—history of what?
The answer, of course, was—hallall.
If our supplies lasted until the Recurrence, we'd know what it was. Not why, or wherefore, but how and what, when and who. To the Life of the Shrine, it seemed, we were all as First Agers .. .
Thus we arrived at our last misconception regarding the Shrinemen. They were—obviously—an especially non-virulent academic breed of priest, serving their temple with civilized pleasant lives devoted to learning, discussion, and ritual. Hallall, what they re-memorized every day would be of not just use, but great need ...
Happily, by that time we understood Lucky at least better than we did the Shrine; as a result, we did not plague him with our latest errors—and plaguing they would have been, to say the least. Religion, as we know it, had no words in the Shrine Island language. Sin, priest, faith, morals, were not only, in complexity, subjects suitable only for adults—they were concepts unknown to the people. We did not intend to introduce them.
Since it would have been. Lucky to whom we expressed these thoughts first, it is doubly fortunate we did not do so, for Lucky was lucky. From the time of his birth on, it was the outstanding trait of his young life.
In the calendar of the Shrine Islanders, there are three seasons to mark the year's circuit: first is Greengrowth, when the soil is renewed, when the creatures of forest and river renew life, a time of thriving for all young things. Then comes Ripening, when fawns, fish, and fruit come to full size and ripeness. Last, there is Seedfall, when pods and clouds burst to shower the land with the next season's new life, when bucks rage in combat throughout the forest, and such spawning fish as survived the nets of the Season of Ripening spawn by the thousands far up the river.
The calendar of events, of people's lives, is composed of these seasons, in sets of ten. Each Decade of Seasons has separate significance in the course of lifetime. Three Decades make up an Age of Life.
It is auspicious among the people to have Greengrowth for the ruling season of one's First Age. Lucky, born lucky in Greengrowth, would come to his First Rites, dividing childhood from apprenticeship, innocence from approaching courtship, just as the seasons changed from Greengrowth to the appropriate Ripening. Three decades later, his Full Manhood Rites would coincide with the change of the natural world from Ripening to Seedfall.
Such children were known to be fortunate in their growing, somehow in tune with the world more than others. In Lucky's case, each sign at every stage of development had confirmed the extraordinary augury of his birth on the first morning of a Greengrowth season.
And it was for the same reason that his early interest in the Shrine had so startled his elders: a child of his sort was seldom attracted by abstraction or mental mystery; certainly, the children of Greengrowth were too much in tune with the soil to make likely celibates.
There is a certain innocence, when you think of it, implicit in the idea of luck. A truly lucky person has, always, a certain natural and glorious naivete—a sort of superior unconsciousness, which can do for some people, in their acts and impulses, precisely what the well-trained, reflex reactions of a star athlete do for his body. The special ability to seize the right moment with the right hand is as vulnerable to conscious thought as the act of high-jumping would be to a man who tried to think each muscle separately into action.
So it is well that we did not force on Lucky an exercise of the metaphysical part of his mind that his keen intelligence could never have refused, once offered.
We had been almost five full seasons on the island when the second ship came. Lucky, of course, with his rare instinct, was walking in the woods when it landed, not half a mile from where it came down.
Three people emerged—three more Pinkies! Rejoicing, the boy ran to greet them, one thought predominant in his young mind: here at last was the making of a Pinkie family! (Seven is the minimum number of adults in an island household. We had never attempted to explain our marriage customs to him; frankly, living on the island, we had come to feel a little ashamed of confessing our one-to-one possessiveness. We had simply allowed them to keep their first misimpression that we did not have children because we were too few in number for a proper household.)
With these thoughts in mind, he ran forward and greeted the strangers in clear pure English, offering to guide them immediately to our camp.
They seem to have managed a rapid recovery, when one considers the shock this must have provided. Politely, they excused themselves, and announced they had come, not to join us (whom they had never heard of, of course) but to pay their respects to the famous Shrine.
Lucky led them there. On the way, they talked pleasantly with him, pleasantly but wrongly. They did not sound like Pinkies—not like the Pinkies he knew. Vaguely, he sensed something oklall—unripe, green, out of place and time. Gradually, his answers to the oversweet probings of the female among them became less clear, so that by the time she asked the two crucial questions, he was almost incoherent.
They did not find out how many Pinkies were on the island, nor how many others spoke English. If they had known there were only four of us, unarmed academics, and only Lucky besides ourselves who would ever know how to tell the world outside what happened, they would surely have been less precipitate. As it was, they were on edge.
He took them directly to the Shrine Window. This in itself was odd; it was bad etiquette; he should have presented them first to the Shrinemen. But he was already acting under the impulse of that strange quality of luckiness that ruled his life.
Then he found himself staring at Lifegiver, terribly torn and uncertain, not knowing why he had done such a thing, or why he had spoken to them softly, in false friendship. The amber figure glowed in double light: sunlight cascading from the unroofed courtyard, and the golden glow from inside the Window.
He—I believe it was he—said later that he did what he did just because she was beautiful: a simple act of adoration. I suppose he was confused, aware of a responsibility too large for his young shoulders, and seeking guidance of some sort. That at least is more rational than the notion that he acted then out of the pure unconsciousness of his special—lucky—nature. I know, because I watched it happen, that he moved forward in an almost trancelike manner.
(Everything from the moment of the meeting in the forest up to this point I know only from having been told. What occurred in the courtyard I saw for myself. It was almost time for the Shrinemen's evening ritual, and Henry and I were on the hilltop, with binoculars, watching.)
This is what happened:
Lallayall stepped forward and fell to his knees before the statue of the Lifegiver. He reached up, and his lanky arms were just long enough to wrap around her smooth stone legs. He gazed up at her, and then bent his head, resting it against the carvings at the top of the scroll pedestal.
At the instant of contact, the mace fell from the hands of the Blue Guardian.
The two men were fast. One jumped for the mace, one for Lucky. While the second one held the boy still, the first studied the rod and the Figure, and then reached out with the red mace and seemed to be twisting it against something on the Window. (After much discussion and examination, we came to the conclusion that it was the Guardian's eye he was twisting. The open end of the rod is exactly the shape and size of the opal eye of the Guardian.)
We did not see the Window open. It opened inwards, and our angle of vision was wrong. But we knew what was happening from the oddly expressive way the three intruders stood and stared, at the Window and at each other—questioning, triumphant, frightened, uncertain. We also saw the Shrinemen coming, a split second before the woman did. We saw her point and heard her cry faintly from down below.
The others turned to look, and all three lost their irresolution. They moved as one, taking Lucky with them. All four vanished (from our angle of view) inside the Shrine.
The Shrinemen came to a full stop in front of the Window. Had it closed again? I looked at Henry for the first tithe, and found him turning to look at me; it occurred to us for the first time that we ought to be doing something to help.
"You stay," he said. "I'll get the others. Keep watching."
It was the sensible way to do it.
I nodded, and put the glasses back to my eyes. Incredibly, the Shrinemen were arranging themselves in their evening ritual position, as calmly as though it were any sundown; they formed their semicircle in front of the Window, and brought forth the shining silver-tipped quills that were their badge of office, held them up like dart-throwers, as they always did, and began their sundown chant!
Perhaps the Window had not closed before. If it had, it had opened again. My first thought was that the Guardian Figure had fallen. But it was not a Figure. It was alive.
It was blue and glistening, and it sprang down to the ground, crouched, alert, so clearly menacing in its intentions it was not necessary to see the face to understand the inherent malice. It had barely touched ground when a quill—a dart, rather—from the first Shrineman in the semicircle caught it in the face. (The eye, I have always assumed—the same left eye that must be the key to the Shrine?)
By that time, another had leaped out—and the next dart brought it down. It went so almost-casually, so rhythmically, so soundlessly, and with such economy of motion on both sides, that it seemed unreal. There were ten of the blue things altogether; at the sixth, I took my eyes from the glasses, blinked, shook my head, and looked back, unbelieving. I saw the same thing.
But remember—I did have that moment of doubt.
Without any break in the rhythm, the eleventh figure came out of the Shrine. It was not blue, or crouching or perilous; it was brown-gold of skin, and leaped like a dancer, and as it landed the Shrinemen who still held their darts poised, dropped them, and the whole semicircle burst into a chant of overwhelming joy and welcoming.
They faltered just once—when, still in the same timing, the twelfth creature came forth: then it rang out again, louder and more joyous.
But those who had dropped unused darts retrieved them.
They finished the song, the two Lives of the Shrine standing inside their circle, apart from the heap of lifeless blue bodies. Then—the Window must have closed meantime; they clearly knew the Rebirth was completed—four of them walked to the two shining creatures, bowed to them (in the islanders' bow of courtesy—not one of reverence), and led them into the House. The others approached the dead entities, picked them up, and carried them off, around the House, out of sight.
My stage was empty. I waited till dark, but saw no more. Not till I started down to the camp did I even wonder what had become of Henry and the others, who should have had time to arrive at the scene before the chant began. I found out when they joined me a few minutes after I. got back to camp: the gates of the Shrine courtyard had been closed and barred; they had knocked and called out and waited—also till dark—without answer. They had heard the chant of rejoicing; they had seen nothing.
I told them what I had seen. I told it hesitantly; I did not completely believe my own memory. When, next day, and days after that, all our questions and probings produced only mildly startled or baffled replies from villagers and Shrinemen alike, we decided I had been the victim of some extraordinarily powerful hypnotic illusion.
We felt fairly sure of what part of it Henry and I had seen together; and this was further supported by the presence of a strange ship in the forest, with no passengers —and by Lucky's disappearance.
We left the island a few weeks later. Our supplies might have lasted another month, but we all felt restless, and we missed Lucky, both personally and in our work. We knew there were answers we could not get from anyone, about what had happened. But we saw no likelihood of getting them by staying longer. And we had to report the strange ship.
We agreed that as far as we knew—as far as four so-called scientists could claim to know anything—four people had entered the Shrine; a watcher on the hilltop (Henry's article so describes me) experienced an extraordinarily vivid hallucination of hypnotic illusion afterwards, during the ritual chant.
For the others, that agreement was sufficient. They hadn't had the "hallucination."
I went back. And of course, we had left too soon.
Our questions had been, naturally, oklall. The life of the Shrine is never revealed until the next Rites ...
This time it was a tremendous revelation; never before had twin Lives occurred.
I stayed two full seasons on the island, that second trip. This time, I lived, in a special visitor's capacity, with Lallayall's family. I learned to speak their language much better, and I spent many hours in talk with the Shrinemen and with the Lives.
The Lives told me about Lucky's meeting with the strange Pinkies; they told me how he felt when he fell on his knees before the Lifegiver; they told me they were reborn of him in the Shrine.
They told me how it felt, but could not tell me how or why it happened. They did not know. We all speculated —the Lives, the Shrinemen, and I—on what the Shrine itself might be, and what sort of force could produce ten glistening blue demons from three evil humans, and two golden angels from one lucky boy.
With all the speculation, and all I was told, I came back with not one shred of scientific evidence that anything of the sort happened. For all I know, the Lives may still be a hypnotic illusion produced by the Shrinemen; they may be some sort of periodic mutation. They may be Lucky Reborn.
They do not know, any more than I, how the Shrine came to be there, or what happened inside a chamber which they describe only as "filled with great light."
I tried approaching the Lifegiver, as Lucky had. The Shrinemen gave full permission, clearly amused. Nothing happened, though I tried it often, with minute variations of head and hand positions.
I may have missed the exact pressure points; I may have had the wrong attitude. I believe, myself, that I simply do not have the kind of unconsciousness Lucky had.
My own tendency, also, is to believe that the Shrine is a sort of outpost of some other planet—but why this should feel any more "scientific" to me than the Shrinemen's belief in an ancient lost magic, I don't know.
The Shrinemen, by the way, are still worried over some things. The weight of the entering bodies was never ascertained, they point out. If there was unused mass left inside the Shrine, they cannot say what may come forth the next time a pure innocent embraces goodness for her own sake.
These things must be done by the formulae, they say. (They feel this Rebirth was most unscientific, you see.) The embracer is not supposed to enter the Shrine. A fawn of so-and-so much weight, precisely, is the only proper sacrifice.
But these minor worries are unimportant, beside the double miracle of two Lives of the Shrine at one Rebirth. The islanders generally feel they are alive at a time of great good luck. They are creating dozens of songs and stories and paintings and dances about Lallayall, the lucky one who brought luck to his people.
I present this account of what I saw, what I heard, what I know, of the Shrine and its Rebirth Recurrence. I have no evidence to prove its validity.
Shrine of Temptation was my first attempt to write a story around a cover — a not-uncommon practice in the hey-day of the "pulps", when the four-color covers for a whole chain of publications were sometimes printed up before half the material for the magazines had been purchased.
Other "categories" — love, war, westerns, sports, detectives — could often find a story in stock to suit the cover illustration well enough; but in science fiction and fantasy, where each bit of background was likely to be unique, the more usual custom of having the artist illustrate the writer's imagery was sometimes reversed.
The painting in this case was a jewel-toned representation of what became the "gateway" in the "cover story" of a 1963 issue of Fantastic Stories. Whether the story is to be thought of as "fantasy" or "science fiction" depends of course on the extent to which one accepts the idea of non-magical shape-changing.
But obviously that's not what the story was about. It was written at the height of the "McCarthy Era" in the U.S. — at the time of the Oppenheimer Trials — in the depths of look-alike think-alike blink-alike conformity-security-togetherness.
Peeping Tom was first published in Startling Stories in 1954. Before Vietnam, after Korea.
Peeping Tom
YOU TAKE a boy like Tommy Bender—a nice American boy, well brought-up in a nice, average, middle-class family; chock-full of vitamins, manners and baseball statistics; clean-shaven, soft-spoken, and respectful to women and his elders. You take a boy like that, fit him out with a uniform, teach him to operate the most modern means of manslaughter, reward him with a bright gold bar, and send him out to an exotic eastern land to prove his manhood and his patriotism.
You take a kid like that. Send him into combat in a steaming jungle inferno; teach him to sweat and swear with conviction; then wait till he makes just one wrong move, pick him out of the pool of drying blood, beat off the flies, and settle him safely on a hospital cot in an ill-equipped base behind the lines, cut off from everyone and everywhere, except the little native village nearby. Let him rest and rot there for a while. Then bring him home, and pin a medal on him, and give him his civvies and a pension to go with his limp. You take a boy like Tommy Bender, and do all that to him, you won't expect him to be quite the same nice, apple-cheeked youngster afterwards.
He wasn't.
When Tommy Bender came home, he was firmly disillusioned and grimly determined. He knew what he wanted out of life, had practically no hope of getting it, and didn't much care how he went about getting the next best things. And in a remarkably short time, he made it clear to his erstwhile friends and neighbors that he was almost certain to get anything he went after. He made money; he made love; he made enemies. Eventually, he made enough of a success so that the enemies could be as thoroughly ignored as yesterday's woman. The money, and the things it bought for him, he took good care of.
For almost five years after he came home, Tommy Bender continued to build a career and ruin reputations. People tried to understand what had happened to him; but they didn't really.
Then, abruptly, something happened to change Tommy. His business associates noticed it first; his family afterwards. The girls he was seeing at the time were the last to know, because he'd always been undependable with them, and not hearing from him for two or three weeks wasn't unusual.
What happened was a girl. Her name was Candace, and when she was married to Tommy, seven weeks after her arrival, the papers carried the whole romantic story. It was she who had nursed him back to health in that remote village on the edge of the jungle years ago. He'd been in love with her then, but she'd turned him down.
That last part wasn't in the news story of course, but it got around town just as fast as the paper did. Tommy's bitterness, it seemed, was due to his long-frustrated love. And anyone could see how he'd changed since Candace came back to him. His employees, his debtors, his old friends and discarded women, his nervous mother and his angry brother all sighed with relief and decided everything was going to be all right now. At last they really understood.
But they didn't. They didn't, for instance, understand what happened to Tommy Bender in that God-forsaken little town where he'd spent two months on crutches, waiting for his leg to heal enough to travel home.
It was hot and sticky in the shack. The mattress was lumpy. His leg itched to the very fringes of madness, and the man on his right had an erratically syncopated snore that took him past the raveled edge straight to insanity. All he needed to make the torture complete was the guy on his left—and the nurse.
The nurse was young and round and lithe, and she wore battle fatigues: slacks, and a khaki shirt that was always draped against her high, full breasts in the damp heat. Her hair, dark blonde or light brown, was just long enough to be pinned back in a tiny bun, and just short enough so wisps of it were always escaping to curl around her ears or over her forehead.
When she bent over him to do any of the small humiliating services he needed done for him, he could see tiny beads of sweat on her upper lip, and that somehow was always the one little touch too much.
So that after she moved on to the next bed, and beyond it, it would be torture to have Dake, the guy on the left, turn toward him and start describing, graphically, what he would do if he could just get his remaining arm out of the cast for fifteen minutes some day.
You see Tommy Bender was still a nice young man then—after the combat, and the wound, and the flies, and the rough hospitalization.
Dake was nothing of the sort. He'd been around, and he knew exactly what value he placed on a woman. And he enjoyed talking about it.
Tommy listened because there was no way not to, and he wriggled and sweated and suffered, and the itch in his leg got worse, and the stench from the garbage pile outside became unbearable. It went on that way, hour after hour and day after day, punctuated only by the morning visit from the medic, who would stop and look him over, and shake a weary, discouraged head, and then go on to the next man.
The leg was a long time healing. It was better after Dake left, and was replaced with a quietly dying man who'd got it in the belly. After him, there was a nice young Negro soldier, somewhat embarrassed about being in sick bay with nothing more dramatic than appendicitis. But at least, now, Tommy could keep his thoughts and dreams about Candace to himself, untarnished.
Then one day, when it had begun to seem as if nothing would ever change again in his life, except the occupants of the beds on either side of him, something happened to break the monotony of discomfort and despair. The medic stopped a little longer than usual in front of Tommy's cot, studied the neat chart Candy was always filling in, and furrowed his brow with concern. Then he muttered something to Candace, and she looked worried too. After that, they both turned and looked at Tommy as if they were seeing him for the first time, and Candy smiled, and the doctor frowned a little deeper.
"Well, young man," he said, "We're going to let you get up."
"Thanks, doc," Tommy said, talking like a GI was supposed to. "What should I do with the leg? Leave it in bed?"
"Ha, ha," the doctor laughed. Just like that. "Good to see you haven't lost your spirit." Then he moved on to the next bed, and Tommy lay there wondering. What would he do with the leg?
That afternoon, they came for him with a stretcher, and took him to the surgery shack, and cut off the cast. They all stood around, five or six of them, looking at it and shaking their heads and agreeing it was pretty bad. Then they put a new cast on, a little less bulky than the first one, and handed him a pair of crutches, and said: "Okay, boy, you're on your own."
An orderly showed him how to use them, and helped him get back to his own bed. The next day he practiced up a little, and by the day after that, he could really get around.
It made a difference.
Tommy Bender was a nice normal American boy, with all the usual impulses. He had been weeks on end in the jungle, and further weeks on his back in the cot. It was not strange that he should show a distinct tendency to follow Candy about from place to place, now he was on his feet again.
The pursuit was not so much hopeful as it was instinctive. He never, quite, made any direct advance to her. He ran little errands, and helped in every way he could, as soon as he was sufficiently adept in the handling of his crutches. She was certainly not ill-pleased by his devotion, but neither, he knew, was she inclined to any sort of romantic attachment to him.
Once or twice, acting on private advice from the more experienced ambulant patients, he made tentative approaches to some of the other nurses, but met always the same kindly advice that they felt chasing nurses would not be good for his leg. He accepted his rebuffs in good part, as a nice boy will, and continued to trail around after Candy.
It was she, quite inadvertently, who led him to a piece of good fortune. He saw her leave the base one early evening, laden with packages, and traveling on foot. Alone. For a GI, these phenomena might not have been unusual. For a nurse to depart in this manner was extraordinary, and Candace slipped out so quietly that Tommy felt certain no one but himself was aware of it.
He hesitated about following at first; then he started worrying about her, threw social caution to the winds, and went swinging down the narrow road behind her, till she heard him coming and turned to look, then to wait.
She was irritated at first; then, abruptly, she seemed to change her mind.
"All right, come along," she said. "It's just a visit I'm going to pay. You can't come in with me, but you can wait if you want to, and walk me back again."
He couldn't have been more pleased. Or curious.
Their walk took them directly into the native village, where Candace seemed to become confused. She led Tommy and his crutches up and down a number of dirty streets and evil-looking alleys before she located the small earthen hut she was looking for, with a wide stripe of blue clay over its door.
While they searched for the place, she explained nervously to Tommy that she was fulfilling a mission for a dead soldier, who had, in a period of false recovery just before the end, made friends with an old man of this village. The dying GI had entrusted her with messages and gifts for his friend—most notably a sealed envelope and his last month's cigarette ration. That had been three weeks ago, and she'd spent the time since working up her courage to make the trip. Now, she confessed, she was more than glad Tommy had come along.
When they found the hut at last, they found a comparatively clean old man sitting cross-legged by the doorway, completely enveloped in a long gray robe with a hood thrown back off his shaven head. There was a begging bowl at his side, and Tommy suggested that Candace might do best just to leave her offerings in the bowl. But when she bent down to do so, the old man raised his head and smiled at her.
"You are a friend of my friend, Karl?" he asked in astonishingly good English.
"Why . . . yes," she fumbled. "Yes. Karl Larsen. He said to bring you these. . . ."
"I thank you. You were most kind to come so soon." He stood up, and added, just to her, ignoring Tommy. "Will you come inside and drink tea with me, and speak with me of his death?"
"Why, I—" Suddenly she too smiled, apparently quite at ease once more. "Yes, I'd be glad to. Thank you. Tommy," she added, "would you mind waiting for me? I . . . I'd appreciate having someone to walk back with. It won't be long. Maybe—" she looked at the old man who was smiling, waiting—"maybe half an hour," she finished.
"A little more or less perhaps," he said, in his startlingly clear American diction. "Perhaps your friend would enjoy looking about our small village meanwhile, and you two can meet again here in front of my door?"
"Why, sure," Tommy said, but he wasn't sure at all. Because as he started to say it, he had no intention of moving away from that door at all while Candy was inside. He'd stay right there, within earshot. But by the time the second word was forming in his mouth, he had a sudden clear image of what he'd be doing during that time.
And he was right.
No sooner had Candy passed under the blue-topped doorway than a small boy appeared at Tommy's other elbow. The youngster's English was in no way comparable to that of the old man. He knew just two words, but they were sufficient. The first was: "Youguhcigarreh?" The second: "Iguhsisseh."
Tommy dug in his pockets, came out with a half-full pack, registered the boy's look of approval, and swung his crutches into action. He followed his young friend up and down several of the twisty village alleys, and out along a footpath into the forest. just about the time he was beginning to get worried, they came out into a small clearing, and a moment later "Sisseh" emerged from behind a tree at the far edge.
She was disconcertingly young, but also unexpectedly attractive: smooth-skinned, graceful, and roundly shaped. . . .
Somewhat later when he found his way back to the blue-topped door in the village, Candy was already waiting for him, looking thoughtful and a little sad. She seemed to be no more in the mood for conversation than was Tommy himself, and they walked back to the base in almost complete silence. Though he noted once or twice that her quiet mood was dictated by less happy considerations than his own, Tommy's ease of mind and body was too great at that moment to encourage much concern for even so desirable a symbol of American womanhood as the beautiful nurse, Candace.
Not that his devotion to her lessened. He dreamed of her still, but the dreams were more pleasantly romantic, and less distressingly carnal. And on those occasions when he found his thoughts of her verging once more toward the improper, he would wander off to the little village and regain what he felt was a more natural and suitable attitude toward life and love in general.
Then, inevitably, there came one such day when his young procurer was nowhere to be found. Tommy went out to the clearing where Sisseh usually met them, but it was quiet, empty and deserted. Back in the village again, he wandered aimlessly up and down narrow twisting streets, till he found himself passing the blue-topped doorway of the old man whose friendship with a dead GI had started the whole chain of events in motion.
"Good morning, sir," the old man said, and Tommy stopped politely to return the greeting.
"You are looking for your young friend?"
Tommy nodded, and hoped the warmth he could feel on his face didn't show. Small-town gossip, apparently, was much the same in one part of the world as in another.
"I think he will be busy for some time yet," the old man volunteered. "Perhaps another hour . . . his mother required his services for an errand to another village."
"Well, thanks," Tommy said. "Guess I'll come back this afternoon or something. Thanks a lot."
"You may wait here with me if you like. You are most welcome," the old man said hastily. "Perhaps you would care to come into my home and drink tea with me?"
Tommy's manners were good. He had been taught to be respectful to his elders, even to the old colored man who came to clip the hedges. And he knew that an invitation to tea can never be refused without excellent good reason. He had no such reason, and he did have a warm interest in seeing his dusky beauty just as soon as possible. He therefore overcame a natural reluctance to become a visitor in one of the (doubtless) vermin-infested native huts, thanked the old man politely, and accepted the invitation.
Those few steps, passing under the blue-topped doorway for the first time, into the earthen shack, were beyond doubt the most momentous of his young life. When he came out again, a full two hours later, there was nothing on the surface to show what had happened to him . . . except perhaps a more-than-usually thoughtful look on his face. But when Sisseh's little brother pursued him down the village street, Tommy only shook his head. And when the boy persisted, the soldier said briefly: "No got cigarettes."
The statement did not in any way express the empty-handed regret one might have expected. It was rather an impatient dismissal by a man too deeply immersed in weighty affairs to regard either the cigarettes or their value in trade as having much importance.
Not that Tommy had lost any of his vigorous interest in the pleasures of the flesh. He had simply acquired a more far-sighted point of view. He had plans for the future now, and they did not concern a native girl whose affection was exchangeable for half a pack of Camels.
Swinging along the jungle path on his crutches, Tommy was approaching a dazzling new vista of hope and ambition. The goals he had once considered quite out of reach now seemed to be just barely beyond his grasp, and he had already embarked on a course of action calculated to remedy that situation. Tommy was apprenticed to telepath.
The way it happened, the whole incredible notion seemed like a perfectly natural idea. Inside the one-room hut, the old man had introduced himself as Armod Something-or-other. (The last name was a confusion of clashing consonants and strangely inflected vowels that Tommy never quite got straight.) He then invited his young guest to make himself comfortable, and began the preparation of the tea by pouring water from a swan-necked glass bottle into a burnished copper kettle suspended by graceful chains from a wrought-iron tripod over a standard-brand hardware-store Sterno stove.
The arrangement was typical of everything in the room. East met West at every point with a surprising minimum of friction, once the first impact was absorbed and the psychological dislocation adjusted.
Tommy settled down at first on a low couch, really no more than a native mat covering some woven webbing, stretched across a frame that stood a few inches off the floor on carved ivory claws. But he discovered quickly enough that it did not provide much in the way of comfort for a long-legged young man equipped with a bulky cast. An awful lot of him seemed to be stretched out over the red-and-white tile pattern linoleum that covered the center of the dirt floor . . . and he noticed, too, that his crutches had left a trail of round dust-prints on the otherwise spotless surface.
He wiped off the padded bottoms of the crutches with his clean handkerchief, and struggled rather painfully back to his feet.
The whole place was astonishingly clean. Tommy wandered around, considerably relieved at the absence of any very noticeable insect life, examining the curious contents of the room, and politely refraining from asking the many questions that came to mind.
The furnishing consisted primarily of low stools and tables, with a few shelves somehow set into the clay wall. There was one large, magnificently carved mahogany chest, which might have contained Ali Baba's fortune; and on a teakwood table in the corner, with a pad on the floor for a seat, stood a large and shiny late-model American standard typewriter.
A bookshelf near the table caught Tommy's eye, and the old man, without turning around, invited his guest to inspect it. Here again was the curious mixture of East and West: new books on philosophy, psychology, semantics, cybernetics published in England and America. Several others, though fewer, on spiritualism, psychic phenomena, and radio-esthesia. And mixed in with them, apparently at random, short squat volumes and long thin ones, lettered in unfamiliar scripts and ideographs.
On the wall over the bookshelf hung two strips of parchment, such as may be seen in many eastern homes, covered with ideograph characters brilliantly illuminated. Between them was a glass-faced black frame containing the certification of Armod's license to practice medicine in the state of Idaho, U.S.A.
It did not seem in any way unnatural that Armod should come over and answer explicitly the obvious questions that this collection of anomalies brought to mind. In fact, it took half an hour or more of conversation before Tommy began to realize that his host was consistently replying to his thoughts rather than to his words. It took even longer for him to agree to the simple experiment that started him on his course of study.
But not much longer. An hour after he first entered the hut, Tommy Bender sat staring at eight slips of white paper on which were written, one word to each, the names of eight different objects in the room. The handwriting was careful, precise and clear. Not so the thoughts in Tommy's mind. He had "guessed," accurately, five of the eight objects, holding the faded piece of paper in his hand. He tried to tell himself it was coincidence; that some form of trickery might be involved. The hand is quicker than the eye. . . . But it was his own hand that held the paper; he himself unfolded it after making his guess. And Armod's calm certainty was no help in the direction of skepticism.
"Well," Tommy asked uncertainly, "what made you think I could do it?"
"Anyone can do it," Armod said quietly. "For some it is easier than for others. To bring it under control, to learn to do it accurately, every time, is another matter altogether. But the sense is there, in all of us."
Tommy was a bit crestfallen; whether he believed in it or not, he preferred to think there was something a bit special about it.
Armod smiled, and answered his disappointment. "For you, it is easier I think than for many others. You are—ah, I despise your psychiatric jargon, but there is no other way to say it so you will understand—you are at ease with yourself. Relaxed. You have few basic conflicts in your personality, so you can reach more easily into the —no it is not the 'subconscious.' It is a part of your mind you have simply not used before. You can use it. You can train it. You need only the awareness of it, and—practice."
Tommy thought that over, slowly, and one by one the implications of it dawned on him.
"You mean I can be a mind reader? Like the acts they do on the stage? I could do it professionally?"
"If you wished to. Few of those who pretend to read minds for the entertainment of others can really do so. Few who have the ability and training would use it in that way. You—ah, you are beginning to grasp some of the possibilities," the old man said, smiling.
"Go on," Tommy grinned. "Tell me what I'm thinking now."
"It would be most . . . indelicate. And . . . I will tell you; I do not believe you will have much chance of success, with her. She is an unusual young woman. Others . . . you will be startled, I think, to find how often a forbidding young lady is more hopeful even than willing."
"You're on," Tommy told him. "When do the lessons start, and how much?"
The price was easy; the practice was harder. Tommy gave up smoking entirely, suffered a bit, got over it, and turned his full attention to the procedures involved in gaining "awareness." He lay for hours on his cot, or sat by himself on a lonely hillside in the afternoon sun, learning to sense the presence of every part of himself as fully as that of the world around him.
He learned a dozen different ways of breathing, and discovered how each of them changed, to some slight degree, the way the rest of his body "felt" about things. He found out how to be completely receptive to impressions and sensations from outside himself; and after that, how to exclude them and be aware only of his own functioning organism. He discovered he could feel his heart beating and his food digesting, and later imagined he could feel the wound in his leg healing, and thought he was actually helping it along.
This last piece of news he took excitedly to Armodalong with his full ration of cigarettes—and was disappointed to have his mentor receive his excited outpourings with indifference.
"If you waste your substance on such side issues," Armod finally answered his insistence with downright disapproval, "you will be much longer in coming to the true understanding."
Tommy thought that over, swinging back along the jungle path on his crutches, and came to the conclusion that he could do without telepathy a little longer, if tic could just walk on his own two feet again. Not that
really believed the progress was anything but illusory—until he heard the medics' exclamations of surprise the next time they changed the cast.
After that, he was convinced. The whole rigamorole was producing some kind of result; maybe it would even, incredibly, do what Armod said it would.
Two weeks later, Tommy got his first flash of certainty. He was, by then, readily proficient in picking thoughts out of Armod's mind; but he knew, too, that the old man was "helping" him . . . maintaining no barriers at all against invasion. Other people had habitual defenses that they didn't even know how to let down. Getting through the walls of verbalization, habitual reaction, hurt, fear and anger, to find out what was really happening inside the mind of a telepathically "inert" person took skill and determination.
That first flash could not in any way be described as "mind reading." Tommy did not hear or read or see any words or images. All he got was a wave of feeling; he was sure it was not his own feeling only because he was just then on his way back from a solitary hillside session in which he had, with considerable thoroughness, identified all the sensations his body then contained.
He was crossing what was laughably referred to as the "lawn"—an area of barren ground decorated with unrootable clumps of tropical weeds, extending from the mess hall to the surgery shack and surrounded by the barracks buildings—when the overwhelming wave of emotion hit him.
It contained elements of affection, interest, and—he checked again to be certain—desire. Desire for a man. He was quite sure now that the feeling was not his, but somebody else's.
He looked about, with sudden dismay, aware for the first time of a difficulty he had not anticipated. That he was "receiving" someone else's emotions he was certain; whose, he did not know.
In front of the surgery shack, a group of nurses stood together, talking. No one else was in sight. Tommy realized, unhappily, that the lady who was currently feeling amorous did not necessarily have to be in his line of vision. He had learned enough about the nature of telepathy by then to understand that it could penetrate physical barriers with relative ease. But he had a hunch. . . .
He had learned enough, too, to understand some part of the meaning of that word, "hunch." He deliberately stopped thinking, insofar as he could, and followed his hunch across the lawn to the group of nurses. As he approached them, he let instinct take over entirely. Instead of speaking to them, he made as if to walk by, into the shack.
"Hey there, Lieutenant," one of them called out, and Tommy strained his muscles not to smile with delight. He turned around, innocently, inquiring.
"Surgery's closed now," the little red-headed one said sharply. That wasn't the one who'd called to him. It was the big blonde; he was almost sure.
"Oh?" he said. "I was out back of the base, on the hill there, and some damn bug bit me. Thought I ought to get some junk put on it. You never know what's hit you with the kind of skeeters they grow out here." He addressed the remark to the group in general, and threw in a grin that he had been told made him look most appealing like a little boy, meanwhile pulling up the trouser on his good leg to show a fortuitously placed two-day-old swelling. "One leg out of commission is enough for me," he added. "Thought maybe I ought to kind of keep a special eye on the one that still works." He looked up, and smiled straight at the big blonde.
She regarded the area of exposed skin with apparent lack of interest, hesitated, jangled a key in her pocket, and said abruptly, "All right, big boy."
Inside the shack, she locked the door behind them, without appearing to do anything the least bit unusual. Then she got a tube of something out of a cabinet on the wall, and told him to put his leg up on the table.
Right then, Tommy began to understand the real value of what he'd learned, and how to use it. There was nothing in her words or her brisk movements to show him how she felt. While she was smoothing the gooey disinfectant paste on his bite, and covering it with a bandage, she kept up a stream of light talk and banter that gave no clue at all to the way she was appraising him covertly. Tommy had nothing to do but make the proper responses—two sets of them.
Out loud, he described with appropriate humor the monstrous size and appearance of the bug that they both knew hadn't bitten him. But all the time he kept talking and kidding just as if he was still a nice American boy, he could feel her wanting him, until he began to get confused between what she wanted and what he did; and his eyes kept meeting hers, unrelated to the words either of them were saying, to let her know he knew.
Each time her hand touched his leg, it was a little more difficult to banter. When it got too difficult, he didn't.
Later, stretched out on his cot in the barracks, he reviewed the entire incident with approval, and made a mental note of one important item. The only overt act the girl made—locking the door—had been accompanied by a strong isolated thought surge of "Don't touch me!" Conversely, the more eager she felt, the more professional she acted. Without the aid of his special one-way window into her mind, he knew he would have made his play at precisely the wrong moment—assuming he'd had the courage to make it at all. As it was, he'd waited till there was no longer any reason for her to believe that he'd even noticed the locking of the door.
That was Lessen Number One about women: Wait! Wait till you're sure she's sure. Tommy repeated it happily to himself as he fell asleep that night; and only one small regret marred his contentment. It wasn't Candace. . . .
Lesson Number Two came more slowly, but Tommy was an apt pupil, and he learned it equally well: Don't wait too long! The same simple forthright maneuver, he found, that would sweep a normally co-operative young lady literally off her feet if the timing was right would, ten minutes later, earn him nothing more than an indignant slap in the face. By that time, the girl had already decided either that he wasn't interested (insulted); or that he wasn't experienced enough to do anything about it (contemptuous); or that he was entirely lacking in sensitivity, and couldn't possibly understand her at all (both).
These two lessons Tommy studied assiduously. Between them, they defined the limits of that most remarkable point in time, the Precise Moment. And the greatest practical value of his new skill, so far as Tommy could see, was in being able to locate that point with increasing accuracy. The most noticeable property of the human mind is its constant activity; it is a rare man—and notoriously an even rarer woman—who has only one point of view on a given subject, and can stick to it. Tommy discovered soon enough that whatever he was after, whether it was five bucks to get into a poker game, or a date with one of the nurses, the best way to get it was to wait for that particular moment when the other person really wanted to give it to him.
It should be noted that Tommy Bender retained some ethics during this period. After the first two games, he stopped playing poker. Possibly, he was affected by the fact that suspicious rumors about his "luck" were circulating too freely; but it is more likely that the game had lost its punch. He didn't really need the money out there anyhow. And the process of his embitterment was really just beginning.
Three weeks after the incident in the surgery shack, Tommy got his orders for transfer to a stateside hospital. During that short time, though still impeded by cast and crutches, he acquired a quantity and quality of experience with women that more than equaled the total of his previous successes. And along with it, he suffered a few shocks.
That Tommy had both manners and ethics has already been established. He also had morals. He thought he ought to go to church more often than he did; he took it for granted that all unmarried women were virgins till proved otherwise; he never (or hardly ever) used foul language in mixed company. That kind of thing.
It was, actually, one of the smaller shocks, discovering the kind of language some of those girls knew. Most of them were nurses, after all, he reminded himself; they heard a lot of guys talking when they were delirious or in pain, but—but that didn't explain how clearly they seemed to understand the words. Or that the ones who talked the most refined were almost always the worst offenders in their minds.
The men's faults he could take in stride; it was the women who dismayed him. Not that he didn't find some "pure" girls; he did, to his horror. But the kind of feminine innocence he'd grown up believing in just didn't seem to exist. The few remaining virgins fell into two categories: those who were so convinced of their own unattractiveness that they didn't even know it when a pass was being made at them; and those who were completely preoccupied with a sick kind of fear-and-loathing that Tommy couldn't even stand to peep at for very long.
Generally speaking, the girls who weren't actually looking for men (which they did with a gratifying but immoral enthusiasm), were either filled with terror and disgust, or were calculating wenches who made their choice for or against the primrose path entirely in terms of the possible profit involved, be it in fast cash or future wedded bliss.
Tommy did find one exception to this generally unpleasant picture. To his determined dismay, and secret pleasure, he discovered that Candace really lived up to his ideal of the American girl. Her mind was a lovely, orderly place, full of softness and a sort of generalized liking for almost everybody. Her thoughts on the subject of most interest to him were also in order: She was apparently well-informed in an impersonal sort of way; ignorant of any personal experience and rather hazily, pleasurably, anticipating the acquisition of that experience in some dim future when she pictured herself as happily in love and married.
As soon as he was quite sure of this state of affairs, Tommy proposed. Candace as promptly declined, and that, for the time being, terminated their relationship. The nurse went about her duties, and whatever personal matters occupied her in her free time. The soldier returned to his pursuit of parapsychology, women and disillusion.
Tommy had no intention of taking these troubles to his teacher. But neither did Armod have to wait for the young man to speak before he knew. This time he was neither stern nor impatient. He spoke once again of the necessity for continuing study till one arrived at the "true understanding," but now he was alternately pleading and encouraging. At one point he was even apologetic.
"I did not know that you would learn so quickly," he said. "If I had foreseen this—doubtless I would have done precisely what I did. One cannot withhold knowledge, and . . ."
He paused, smiling gently and with great sadness. "And the truth of the matter is, you did not ask for knowledge. I offered it. I sold it! Because I could not deny myself the petty pleasure of your cigarettes!"
"Well," Tommy put in uncomfortably, "You made good on it, didn't you? Seems to me you did what you said you would."
"Yes—no," he corrected himself. "I did nothing but show the way. What has been done you did for yourself, as all men must. I cannot see or smell or taste for you; no more could I open the way into men's hearts for you. I gave you a key, let us say, and with it you unlocked the door. Now you look on the other side, but you do not, you can not, understand what you see. It is as though one were to show an infant, just learning to use his eyes, a vision of violent death and bloody birth. He sees, but he does not know. . . ."
Tommy stirred on the low couch, where he could now sit, as the old man did, cross-legged and at ease. But he was uneasy now. He picked up the cane that had replaced the crutches, toying with it, thinking hopefully of departure. Armod understood, and said quickly, "Listen now: I am an old man, and weak in my way. But I have shown you that I have knowledge of a sort. There is much you have yet to learn. If you are to perceive so clearly the depths of the human soul, then it is essential that you learn also to understand. . . ."
The old man spoke on; the young one barely listened. He knew he was going home in another week. There was no sense talking about continuing his studies with Armod. And there was no need to continue; certainly no wish to. What he had already learned, Tommy felt, was very likely more than enough. He sat as quietly as he could, being patient till the old man was done talking. Then he stood up, and muttered something about getting back in time for lunch.
Armod shook his head and smiled, still sadly. "You will not hear me. Perhaps you are right. How can I speak to you of the true understanding, when I am still the willing victim of my own body's cravings? I am not fit. I am not fit. . . ."
Tommy Bender was a very disturbed young man. He was getting what he'd wanted, and he didn't like it. He was grateful to Armod, and also angry at him. His whole life seemed to be a string of contradictions.
He drifted along in this unsettled state for the remaining week of his foreign service. Then, in a sudden flurry of affection and making amends, the day he got his orders, he decided to see the old man just once more. Most of the morning he spent racing around the base rounding up all the cigarettes he could get with what cash he had on hand, plus a liberal use of the new skills Armod had taught him. Then he got his gear together quickly. He was due at the air strip at 1400 hours, and at 1130 he left the base for a last walk to the village, the cane in one hand, two full cartons of butts in the other.
He found Armod waiting for him in a state of some agitation, apparently expecting him. There ensued a brief formal presentation of Tommy's gift, and acceptance of it; then for the last time, the old man invited him to drink tea, and ceremoniously set the water to simmer in the copper pot.
They both made an effort, and managed to get through the tea-drinking with no more than light polite talk. But when Tommy stood up to leave, Armod broke down.
"Come back," he begged. "When you are free of your service, and have funds to travel, come back to study again."
"Why, sure, Armod," Tommy said. "Just as soon as I can manage it."
"Yes, I see. This is what they call a social lie. It is meant not to convince me, but to terminate the discussion. But listen, I beg you, one moment more. You can see and hear in the mind now; but you cannot talk, nor can you keep silence. Your own mind is open to all who come and know how to look—"
"Armod, please, I—"
"You can learn to project thought as I do. To build a barrier against intrusion. You can—"
"Listen, Armod," Tommy broke in determinedly again. "I don't have to know any of that stuff. In my home town, there isn't anybody else who can do this stuff. And there's no reason for me to ever come back here. Look, I'll tell you what I can do. When I get back home, I can send you all the cigarettes you want—"
"No!"
The old man jumped up from his mat on the floor, and took two rapid strides to the shelf where Tommy's present lay. He picked up the two cartons, and tossed them contemptuously across the room, to land on the couch next to the soldier.
"No!" he said again, just a little less shrilly. "I do not want your cigarettes! I want nothing, do you understand? Nothing for myself! Only to regain the peace of mind I have lost through my weakness! Go to another teacher, then," he was struggling for calm. "There are many others. In India. In China. Perhaps even in your own country. Go to one who is better fitted than I. But do not stop now! You can learn more, much more!"
He was trembling with emotion as he spoke, his skinny frame shaking, his black eyes popping as though they would burst out of his head. "As for your cigarettes," he concluded, "I want none of them. I vow now, until the day I die, I shall never again give way to this weakness!"
He was a silly, excitable old man, who was going to regret these words. Tommy stood up feeling the foolish apologetic grin on his face and unable to erase it. He did not pick up the cigarettes.
"Good-bye Armod," he said, and walked out for the last time through the blue-topped door.
But whatever either of them expected, and regardless of Tommy's own wishes, his education did not stop there. It had already gone too far to stop. The perception-awareness process seemed to be self-perpetuating, and though he practiced his exercises no more, his senses continued to become more acute—both the physical the psychological.
At the stateside hospital, where his leg rapidly improved, Tommy had some opportunity to get out and investigate the situation with the nice old-fashioned girls who'd stayed at home and didn't go to war. By that time, he could "see" and "hear" pretty clearly.
He didn't like what he found.
That did it, really. All along, out at the base hospital, he'd clung to the notion that the women at home would be different—that girls so far from civilization, were exposed to all sorts of indecencies a nice girl never had to face, and shouldn't have to. Small wonder they turned cynical and evil-minded.
The girls at home, he discovered, were less of the first, and far more of the second.
When Tommy Bender got home again, he was grimly determined and firmly disillusioned. He knew what he wanted out of life, saw no hope at all of ever getting it, and had very few scruples about the methods he used to get the next-best things.
In a remarkably short time, he made it clear to his erstwhile friends and neighbors that he was almost certain to get anything he went after. He made money; he made love; and of course he made enemies. All the while, his friends and neighbors tried to understand. Indeed, they thought they did. A lot of things can happen to a man when he's been through hell in combat, and then had to spend months rotting and recuperating in a lonely Far Eastern field hospital.
But of course they couldn't even begin to understand what had happened to Tommy. They didn't know what it was like to live on a steadily plunging spiral of anger and disillusionment, all the time liking people less, and always aware of how little they liked you.
To sign a contract with a man, knowing he would defraud you if he could; he couldn't, of course, because you got there first. But when you met him afterward, you rocked with the blast of hate and envy he threw at you.
To make love to a woman, and know she was the wrong woman for you or you the wrong man for her. And then to meet her afterward ...
Tommy had in the worst possible sense, got out of bed on the wrong side. When he first awoke to the knowledge of other people's minds, he had seen ugliness and fear wherever he looked, and that first impress of bitterness on his own mind had colored everything he had seen since.
For almost five years after he came home, Tommy Bender continued to build a career, and ruin reputations. People tried to understand what had happened to him . . . but how could they?
Then something happened. It started with an envelope in his morning mail. The envelope was marked "Personal," so it was unopened by his secretary, and left on the side of his desk along with three or four other thin, squarish, obviously non-business, envelopes. As a result, Tommy didn't read it till late that afternoon, when he was trying to decide which girl to see that night.
The return address said "C. Harper, Hotel Albemarle, Topeka, Kansas." He didn't know anyone in Topeka, but the name Harper was vaguely reminiscent. He was intrigued enough to open that one first, and the others never were opened at all.
"Dear Tommy," it read. "First of all, I hope you still remember me. It's been quite a long time, hasn't it? I just heard, from Lee Potter (the little, dark girl who came just before you left . . . remember her?)"—Tommy did, with some pleasure—"that you were living in Hartsdale, and had some real-estate connections there. Now I'd like to ask a favor. . . .
"I've just had word that I've been accepted as Assistant Superintendent of the Public Health Service therein Hartsdale—and I'm supposed to start work on the 22nd. The only thing is, I can't leave my job here till just the day before. So I wondered if you could help me find a place to stay beforehand? Sort of mail-order real estate service?
"I feel I'm being a little presumptuous, asking this, when perhaps you don't even remember me—but I do hope you won't mind. And please don't go to any special trouble. From what Lee said, I got the idea this might be right in your line of business. If it's not, don't worry. I'm sure I can find something when I get there.
"And thanks, ahead of time, for anything you can do.
"Cordially," it concluded, "Candace Harper."
Tommy answered the letter the same day, including a varied list of places and prices hurriedly worked up by his real-estate agent. That he owned real estate was true; that he dealt in it, not at all. His letter to Candy did not go into these details, just told her how vividly he remembered her, and how good it would be to see her again, with some questions about the kind of furnishings and decor she'd prefer. "If you're going to get in early enough on the 21st," he wound up, "how about having dinner with me? Let me know when you're coming, anyhow. I'd like to meet you, and help you get settled."
For the next eleven days, Tommy lived in an almost happy whirl of preparation, memory and anticipation. In all the years since he had proposed to Candace, he had never met another girl who filled so perfectly the mental image of the ideal woman with which he had first left home. He kept telling himself she wouldn't, couldn't, still be the same person. Even a non-telepath would get bitter and disillusioned in five years of the Wonderful Post-War World. She couldn't be the same. . . .
And she wasn't. She was older, more understanding, more tolerant, and if possible warmer and pleasanter than before. Tommy met her at the station, bought her some dinner, took her to the perfect small apartment where she was, unknown to herself, paying only half the rent. He stayed an hour, went down to run some errands for her, stayed another half-hour, and knew by then that in the most important respects she hadn't changed at all.
There wasn't going to be any "Precise Moment" with Candy; not that side of a wedding ceremony.
Tommy couldn't have been more pleased. Still, he was cautious. He didn't propose again till three weeks later, when he'd missed seeing her two days in a row due to business-social affairs. If they were married, he could have taken her along.
When he did propose, she lived up to all his qualifications again. She said she wanted to think it over. What she thought was: Oh, yes! Oh, yes, he's the one I want! But it's too quick! How do I know for sure? He never even thought of me all this time . . . all the time I was waiting and hoping to hear from him . . . how can he be sure so soon? He might be sorry. ...
"Let me think about it a few days, will you, Tommy?" she said, and he was afraid to take her in his arms for fear he'd crush her with his hunger.
Four weeks later they were married. And when Candy told him her answer, she also confessed what he already knew: that she'd regretted turning him down ever since he left the field hospital; that she'd been thinking of him, loving him, all the long years in between.
Candy was a perfect wife, just as she had been a perfect nurse, and an all-too-perfect dream girl. The Benders' wedding was talked about for years afterwards; it was one of those rare occasions when everything turned out just right. And the bride was so beautiful . . .
The honeymoon was the same way. They took six weeks to complete a tour of the Caribbean, by plane, ship and car. They stayed where they liked as long as they liked, and did what they liked, all the time. And not once in those six weeks was there any serious difference in what they liked. Candy's greatest wish at every point was to please Tommy, and that made things very easy for both of them.
And all the while, Tommy was gently, ardently, instructing his lovely bride in the arts of matrimony. He was tender, patient and understanding, as he had known beforehand he would have to be. A girl who gets to the age of twenty-six with her innocence intact is bound to require a little time for readjustment.
Still, by the time they came back, Tommy was beginning to feel a sense of failure. He knew that Candace had yet to experience the fulfillment she had hoped for, and that he had planned to give her.
Watching her across the breakfast table on the dining terrace of their new home, he was enthralled as ever. She was lovely in negligee, her soft hair falling around her face, her eyes shining with true love as they met his.
It was a warm day, and he saw, as he watched her, the tiny beads of sweat form on her upper lip. It took him back . . . way back . . . and from the vividness of the hospital scene, he skipped to an equally clear memory of that last visit to Armod, the teacher.
He smiled, and reached for his wife's hand, wondering if ever he would be able to tell her what had come of that walk they took to the village together. And he pressed her hand tighter, smiling again, as he realized that now, for the first time, he had a use for the further talents the old man had promised him.
That would be one way to show Candace the true pleasure she did not yet know. If he could project his own thoughts and emotions ...
He let go of her hand, and sat back, sipping his coffee, happy and content, with just the one small problem to think about. Maybe I should have gone back for a while, after all, he thought idly.
"Perhaps you should have, dear," said innocent Candace. "I did."
The Lady Was a Tramp
SHE HAD been lovely once, sleek-lined and proud, with shining flanks; and men had come to her with hungry hearts and star-filled eyes, and high pulse of adventure in their blood.
Now she was old. Her hide was scarred with use, her luster dulled; though there was beauty in her still it was hidden deep. A man had to know where to look—and he had to care.
The young man left the conditioned coolness of the Administration Building and paused outside the door to orient. Then he strode briskly forward, ignoring the heat that wilted his uniform collar and damply curled the edges of the freshly stamped papers in his breast pocket. He passed the inner tier of docks, refusing to look to left or right at the twin proud heights of gleaming Navy vessels.
Beyond them, alone in the outmost ring, the Lady Jane sat on her base in the concrete hole, waiting. In the white-light glare of the shadowless Dome, each smallest pit and pockmark of twenty years' usage stood out in cruel relief against the weathered darkness of her hull. Potbellied, dumpy, unbeautiful, she squatted without impatience inside the steel framework of supports, while her tanks were flushed and her tubes reamed clean. When the dock gang was done, and the ravages of the last voyage repaired insofar as could be, she would set forth once more on her rounds of the ports in space. Meantime, she rested.
The young man paused. It was his first good look at the Lady Jane. He half-turned back; but it was too late now. Fury, or training, or despair, or some of all of them, moved him on.
"That's him all right," Anita smiled, and turned a knob on the Lady Jane's viewpoint screen; the figure leaped toward them with focussed clarity, and the IBMan insignia showed up on the jacket sleeve.
"Mad dogs and eye-bee-men," Chan quoted softly, and leaned forward to study the young man with mock amazement. On the tenth "day" of Lunar sunlight it was still possible to keep moderately cool inside an unsealed ship, and the central Administration Building was kept at a steady seventy, day or night. But out in the atmosphere dome, it was hot. Yet the young man walking briskly toward the ship wore formal greens, and his shirt was bound at his neck with a knotted tie. Chandra leaned back, picked up a tall cold glass and shook his head.
"Look at him, Chan! He's a kid. . . ."
Chan shrugged. "You knew that before. You got the papers. . . ."
Impatiently, she shook her head. "I know. But look at him. . . ."
"I wasn't any older—" Chandra began.
"Yes you were! I don't know what your papers said, but—look at him. And you weren't an IBMan. And we were all younger then. And—darling, you were a man!"
He laughed and stood up, rumpling her hair as he passed. "Well, if that's all that's eating on you, babe—hell, four of us kept you happy half-way home."
He ducked through the bunk-room door as she started to rise. "Don't shoot," he called back.
"It ain't so funny, honey." She stood watching the screen. "What's bothering me is, who's going to keep him happy?"
Terence Hugh Carnahan, Lieutenant, U.N.N. Reserves, was twenty-four years old and newly commissioned. He was stuffed to the gills with eight full years of Academy training, precision, and knowledge. The shiny new stripes on his sleeve and the dampening papers inside his breast pocket were the prizes he'd worked for and dreamed of as long as it mattered. The fruits were sour now, and the dream was curdled. A man might approach the Lady incited by lust to a venture of greed; but the sight of her was enough to wipe out the last visions of glory.
The Lieutenant moved on, more slowly. He stopped as a three-wheeled red-and-white-striped baggage truck swung out in a wide crazy curve from behind the Navy ship to the left and careened to a stop at the Lady's side.
A tall thin man in rumpled full-dress whites leaped out of the bucket, swinging a canvas suitcase in his hand. He climbed aboard the ship's waiting elevator and it started up.
Terry walked on and waited beside the truck for the cage to come down. When it did, he produced his ID card, got inside, and rode up in silence.
In the open lock, the man in the dirty whites was waiting for him. He held out his hand, and for the first time Terry saw the pilot's jets on his lapels; and the boards on his shoulders spelled Commander.
"You the new IBMan?" the pilot asked. "Where's your gear?"
"I sent it on this morning." They shook, and the pilot's slim fingers were unexpectedly cool and dry.
"Welcome to our happy home," he said. "Glad to have you aboard. And all that sort of thing. Manuel Ramon Decardez, at your service. They call me Deke."
"I'm Terry Carnahan."
"Come on in. I guess they're all waiting." Deke led the way through the open inner valve.
In the suit room, the pilot turned back. "Just take it easy, kid," he said. "It ain't like the Navy in here."
It wasn't.
The Lieutenant had been on merchant ships before. It was part of his training to know the layout and standard equipment of every jump-ship ever made. He had been on inspection tours; and a Lady class ship was still in Academy use for cadet instruction trips. But that one was Navy-maintained and Navy-staffed.
This Lady had left the service thirteen years back. The crew quarters had been torn out to make an extra hold, and the rule book had gone by the wayside along with the hammocks.
"Up here," Deke said, and Terry followed him up the ladder to Officers' Country. Then he stood in the wardroom doorway and stared at the crazy carnival scene.
To start with, the overheads were off. The only light was diffused U-V out of the algy tanks that cut two-foot swaths along opposite bulkheads. In the yellow-green dimness, the, scattered lounging chairs and coffee cups and a tray with a bottle and glasses on the table, gave a ridiculous cocktail-bar effect to the whole place. And the first thing he saw was a hippy blonde, in tight black slacks and a loosely tied white shirt, who detached herself from the arm of a chair—and from the encircling arm of what looked like a naked brown-skinned man inside the chair. She ran across the room to fling herself on Deke, who picked her up bodily, kissed her with gusto.
"Where did you sneak in from?" she demanded. "We were waiting for—"
"Whoa, babe," Deke started. "If you mean—" He started to turn, began to move forward, to let Terry in, but from a shadowy corner a wiry little man in coveralls, with grease-stains on his hands and his hair and his face, broke in.
"What the hell! These two give me a pile of pitch about haulin' myself up here to give the new kid a big hello, and all I find is this old s.o.b. instead!" These two appeared to be the blonde and the naked man. Deke was the s.o.b.
"You bitchin' again, Mike?" The voice was a bull-roar; it came from the only member of the Lady's crew Terry had met before. The Captain came down the ladder from Control, sneakers and rolled-cuff workpants first, and then the tremendous bulk of chest and arms, bristled with wiry curling red-gold hair. The room had looked crowded before. With Karl Hillstrom's two-hundred-twenty pounds added, it was jammed. "Relax," he said. "Have a drink and relax. Nita said she saw the kid comin' . . ."
Deke had given up trying to interrupt. He turned back to Terry and shrugged. "I told you—" he started, and just then the blonde saw him.
"Oh, my God!" she said, and broke into helpless laughter; so did Deke. She took a step forward toward Terry, trying to talk. He ignored it.
"Captain Hillstrom?" he said formally, as loud as possible. He felt like a school-kid in a lousy play, doing a bad job of acting the part of the butler at a masquerade.
The big man turned. "Oh, there you are!" He held out a burly hand. "You met Deke already? Anita, this is our new IBMan, Terry Carnahan. Anita Filmord, our Medic. And Mike Gorevitch, our Chief—" that was the grease-stained one—"and Chan—Chandra Lal, our Biotech."
Terry fished in his pocket for the orders the Captain had failed to request, and noted with relief meantime that the Biotech, Chan, now unfolding himself from his chair, wasn't entirely naked after all.
It wasn't till then that he fully realized the hippy blonde was nobody's visiting daughter or friend, but a member of the crew and an officer in the Naval Reserve.
The blonde officer put a drink in his hand, and his last clear thought that night was that Deke was quite right: it wasn't like the Navy. Not at all.
When they gave him his commission, at the Examiner's Board, they had also delivered elaborate and resounding exhortations about the Great Trust being placed this day in his hands: how the work of an IBMan on a merchant ship was both more difficult and more important by far than anything done by an officer of equivalent rank on a Navy ship.
He knew all that. The ranking IBMan officer, on any ship, was fully responsible for the operation and maintenance of all material connected in any way with either solar navigation or space-warp jumps. On a tramp, there was likely to be just one IBMan to do it all, Navy Transports carried a full complement of four officers and five enlisted men. Fresh Academy graduates came on board with j.g. status only, and worked in charge of an enlisted maintenance crew on the "jump-along"—that abstract mechanical brain whose function it was to set up the obscure mathematic-symbolic relationships which made it possible for matter to be transmitted through the "holes" in space-time, enabling a ship to travel an infinite distance in an infinitesimal time.
On a Navy transport, a full Lieutenant IBMan would be in charge of SolNav only, with two petty officers under him, both qualified to handle maintenance, and one at least with a Navy rating, capable of relieving him on duty at the control board during the five or twelve or twenty hours it might take to navigate a jump-ship in or out of the obstacle course of clutter and junk and planets and orbits of any given System.
Even the senior officer, on a Navy Transport, would never have to jump "blind," except in the rare and nearly unheard-of instance of an analog failure; only tramps and Navy Scouts ever jumped willingly on anything but a 'log-computed course. The stellar analog computers were the Navy's Topmost Secret; when you used one, nothing was required except to make sure the jump-along itself was in perfect condition, and then to pull the switch. The 'log did the rest.
Merchant ships carried 'logs for their chartered ports of call—the Lady had two—but the charter ports were the smallest part of a merchant trip. The number of destinations for which Navy analogs were available was hardly a hatfull out of the galaxies. Without a 'log to point the way for him, it was up to the IBMan to plot coordinates for where a hole ought to be. With luck and skill he could bring the ship out into normal space again somewhere within SolNav reach of the destination. With the tiniest error in computation, a ship might be lost forever in some distant universe with no stars to steer her home.
Terry Carnahan had been hoping desperately for a Navy transport job—but only because it was the route to the Scouts: the Navy's glory-boys, the two-bunk blind-jump ships that went out alone to map the edges of man's universe. It was the Scout job he'd worked for those long eight years—and dreamed about five years before, while he sweated for credits to get into Academy.
He didn't argue with his tramp assignment; nobody argued with the Board. He knew that most of the men who drew Navy assignments would envy him; the money was in the Reserves. And most of the rest, the ones who drew Transport and liked it, were there because they couldn't jump blind, and they knew it.
He knew all that. But when his orders came, and they told him he drew a tramp because he was tenth in his class—that's what they said: tramp work was the toughest —he also knew how close he had come to the dream, because he also knew that the top five men had been sent to Scout training.
Eight years of the most he could give it just wasn't enough. The answer was NO! For good.
But you didn't throw out eight years of training for a good job either. Terry went for his psychs and medics, and met Captain (U.N.N. Reserve) Karl Hillstrom; he took his two weeks' leave and reported for duty.
That first night, he fell asleep with the bunkroom spinning around him, and an obvious simple solution to the whole mess spinning with it, just out of his reach, no matter how fast he turned. When he stopped whirling, the dreams began, the dreams about naked crewmen, one of whom might have been him, and a terrible wonderful blonde in a sea of stars, winkin' and blinkin' and nod in a herring tramp to the smiling moon-faced girl who asked him in. . . .
In the morning, Captain Karl Hillstrom showed him around Control. It was ship-shape and shiny up here, and the IBMan plunged gratefully into routine, checking and testing his board, and running off sample comps. He allowed himself only the briefest inspection of the jump-along and the keyboard and calckers attached. His first job would be solar navigation. Once they were clear of the System, there'd be three weeks on solar drive before they jumped—plenty of time to double-check the other equipment. Right now, the standard computers and solar 'log were what counted.
He worked steadily till he became aware of the Captain at his side.
"How does it look?"
"Fine so far, sir." Terry leaned back.
"Anything messed up there, you can blame it on me. I worked that board coming in. "
Terry remembered now—they had lost their IBMan on Betelgeuse IV, last trip, and come back short-handed, and with half the trade load still in the holds. Since no one but an IBMan could jump blind, they'd had to come back to pick up a new man—Terry.
"I haven't found anything wrong, sir," Terry said.
"You can drop the 'sir.' We go mostly by first names here." There was an edge of irritation in the Captain's voice. "It's chow time now. You want to knock off?"
Terry hesitated. This wasn't the Navy; it was a lousy tramp. If the pilot was drunk half the time, and the Chief had a dirty neck, and the Captain looked like a pirate or stevedore (the first of which he was, and the second had been), the IBMan was certainly free to work or eat when he chose.
"I'd just as lief stick with it for a while," Terry said cautiously.
"Sure. Suit yourself. Galley's open. Take what you want when you want it. . . ."
He disappeared. For a blessed two hours, alone with machines he knew and trusted, Terry ran off the standard tests and comps, noting with trained precision each tiniest deviation from perfect performance. The computer had never been built that could navigate without error. Maybe only in the tenth decimal, but that was enough for disaster. You had to know your 'log and your board and machines, and make your adjustments as automatically as a man makes allowance for the Sights on a rifle he's known and shot for years.
It took Terry four hours to learn this board, and he had started his first dry-run when the sandwich appeared on his arm-rest. A tall plastic glass with a straw in the top and a tempting froth came next.
"Well, thanks," he said, "but you didn't have to—" "It's chocolate," she told him. "I ordered strawberry when your papers came in, but they haven't sent it yet." "Chocolate is fine," he said weakly, and let himself look.
The loose-tied shirt and tight-fitting slacks of the evening had been replaced by standard-issue summer-weight fatigues. The blouse was zipped up, and she seemed to be wearing a bra underneath. Her shorts displayed no more than a reasonable length of shapely leg. She wore no makeup, and her face looked scrubbed and clean. You could hardly get mad at a woman for being good-looking. The sandwich looked toasted and crisp, and he found he was very hungry.
"Well, thanks," he said again, and took a bite, and picked up the pencil with his other hand.
"Karl had to go down to Ad," she said. He took his eyes off his paper, and figured that out. Administration office, she'd mean.
"They called him to bring down the Beetle 'log papers," she said. "He asked me to let you know—it'll be back in the morning."
He nodded, trying to match her casual air. The Betelgeuse analog was coming back from the shop tomorrow. And IBMan Carnahan would be due for his first installation—the first on his own command.
". . . we could finish your med-check in time for dinner," she was talking still. "You want to knock off up here pretty soon?"
He nodded again, and glanced over his board. The run he'd started would take most of an hour. Then some time for adjustments. . . . "Sixteen hours all right?" he asked.
"Fine. Dinner's at nineteen."
He sat there and stared at his sandwich and thought it all over, including the staggering fact of the Commander's silver leaves on the woman's faded green shirt collar.
The milkshake turned out to be good; the sandwich delicious. The run on the board got fouled up, and after a half an hour of grief, he had to admit his mind wasn't on it. There was a Manual on the wardroom shelf below, that would tell him the things he wanted to know. He switched off the board, and went down.
Page 532, Section six, was explicit. The Medical Officer for a six-man crew had to have junior psych, as well as a senior pharmacist's or nurse's rating—besides being qualified sub for the Biotech. With Commander's rank, it meant she likely had more actual years of training than he did. And: "The Medical Officer shall be supplied with dossiers . . . psych ratings and personality profiles ... responsible for well-being of personnel. . . ."
It explained some things: the milk shake and strawberry order, for instance; and why she should bother with either one. It did nothing to change the first impression of last night; or to make him forget his dreams; or —certainly—to make him feel any more at ease with Commander Anita Filmord. There were some things a woman shouldn't know about a man . . . or at least some women. . . .
There was very little Anita Filmord didn't know about Terry Carnahan three hours later. For the first half-hour she took smears and samples and scrapings with deft impersonal proficiency. Each labeled slide or tube went into its own slot or niche or clamp; then she threw a switch, and sat down to confront him with a questionnaire. To the familiar humming background of the diagnostics, she asked him all the questions he had answered twice a year for the past eight years.
"They put me through all this when I got my orders,' he said at the end. "How come . . ."
"We do it every time you come on board. I'll have to run samples on Karl this evening too." The machine had run itself down. She pulled out the tape, tossed it onto her desk for reading later. "I don't know what you've been doing the past two weeks," she pointed out, and he felt himself flush at the certainty of what she meant. "And we've got a good long time to be shut up on this ship together." She stood there looking at him. Her smile faded. "The prospect isn't too appealing, is it?"
"You are!" he might have said. This wasn't the Navy. The way she was dressed last night, the way she acted ...
Last night—was it one of those dreams? He couldn't be sure, but the memory came clearly. . . . He had heard a door close, and the murmur of voices, one high and one low. Before he fell asleep again—or in his dream?—a tall figure had entered the bunkroom and flopped in the last empty sack.
Five men and one woman ...
"You're goddam right it's not!" he wanted to say, but he shifted his gaze four inches, and the leaves on the collar of her short-sleeved shirt were still a Commander's.
He threw out all putative answers, and retreated to subordination.
"Yes, ma'am," he said blank-faced. "It surely is, ma'am." Five men and one woman . . . and Deke had it all tied up! . . .
"I'm glad to hear you say so, Lieutenant," she answered deadpan. "But if anything should turn up—any problems or questions or troubles of any kind—remember, that's why I'm here." Her smile was just a bit mechanical this time. Good!
"Just come if you need me," she said. "Any time . . ."
Five men and one woman . . . and come, she said, any time . . . maybe it wasn't just Deke. Maybe ...
He went to the spray room and stripped and turned on the shower full blast to shut out Chandra Lal's cheerful talk. When he was finished, Chan was still in a cloud of steam, the effects of a day cleaning algy tanks now removed. While Terry rubbed himself harshly dry, Chan resumed conversation.
"How do you like the old bitch?" he asked idly.
"I'm not an expert," Carnahan said, and rubbed faster.
"Who is? I've been here six years now, and I still get surprises. She may not look like much, but she's a hell of a mess of boat for five men to run ...
Five men and one woman . . . What the hell? Come off that track, boy. Chan was talking about the ship—not the Medic.
"You're right about that," Terry said, and escaped to his locker.
He wore his clean uniform like armor into the wardroom, accepted a cocktail, and sipped at it slowly. Deke, the pilot, and Captain Hillstrom were both drunk already, loudly replaying the ball game they'd just seen on the vid.
Hillstrom had shed his uniform as soon as he got back in the ship; he was bare-chested and rolled-cuffed again.
Deke at least dressed for dinner. So did Anita. Tonight, the tight-ass slacks were red, and she did wear a bra—also bright red—under her clear plastic shirt.
Mike wasn't dressed and he wasn't drunk. He came up just in time to sit down and eat with the rest, his face and coveralls both, if possible, one layer greasier than the day before. Chandra did not dress either: he emerged from the spray room, glowing, immaculate in the virtually non-existent trunks he'd worn the night before. Anita poured him a drink.
Obviously, she wouldn't care how—or if—Chan was dressed.
And if she didn't, who should?
Not Karl Hillstrom, that was clear; or perhaps he was too drunk to notice. .. .
Sleep didn't come easy that night. When all the crew's bunks but Deke's were filled, Terry gave up, and went out to the wardroom. He found Deke there, alone, watching a film. He tried to watch, too, but next to the screen, a red light on the Medic's door flashed, DON'T DISTURB! and his eyes kept seeing, instead of the picture, the curve of a thigh limned in the fiery red of her slacks, or perhaps of the bulb. . . .
He got up and prowled the room.
DON'T DISTURB: ". . . any time . . ."
The door opened. Karl Hillstrom came out. It closed behind him, and the light flicked off. She was alone now. She could be disturbed.
"Hi . . . late-late show?" Karl poured himself a drink and held up the bottle. "How about you?" "I had it," Deke said.
"Terry?"
"Thanks. I will . . . later." He poured his own, a big one, and took it back to his bunk.
. . . any time . . . Deke didn't have it tied up, not at all. .
At two in the morning, he remembered vaguely some provision in the Manual for refusal to serve in ships with a crew of less than ten, on grounds of personality stress. That meant a psych Board of course—and it had to go through the Medic . . . well, she might have reasons to make it easy for him. This wasn't the Navy, but it was still under Navy charter. Lousy tramp! He grinned, and promised himself to look it up, and went to sleep.
At three, he woke briefly, remembering she had said the Captain would have to have a new set of samples run that evening for his med records. Well, that could explain the DON'T DISTURB . . . At eight, they woke him to tell him the Beetle 'log was coming on board.
Mike Gorevitch drifted up from his engines to lend a hand, and the hand was a steady one, Terry found. By noon they were finished with a job that would have taken Terry more than a day by himself. His first installation was finished. Over a shared plate of cold meat in the galley, the IBMan found himself inexplicably pleased at the Chief's terse invitation to have a look below.
"Nothin' you didn't see before better on a Navy boat," Mike said, "But some of the stuff is rigged up my own way. You ever get stuck with a duty shift down there, you'll want to know . . ."
Like every jump-ship, the Lady was Navy built, equipped, and staffed. Even Hillstrom, who had made his stake in the Solar Fleet, had to get his Reserve Commission before they'd sell him his ship and lease him a stellar analog to hook onto the jump-along.
By now he had traded in that first cheap Sirius 'log for a prized Aldebaran, and had acquired a Betelgeuse besides. It was on Betelgeuse IV that Bailey, the IBMan who'd been with the Lady for nine of her thirteen years tramping, had lost his nerve. It was something that happened. The best jump-man reached the point where he'd figured he'd had it—the one more blind trip wouldn't work. Bailey quit cold, and declined even passage back.
This trip, the Lady carried a consignment of precision instruments for the new colony on Aldebaran III. But nobody ever got rich on consignment freight. It paid for the trip; that was all. The profit-shares came out of the other hold: the seeds and whisky and iron pigs and glassware and quick-freeze livestock embryos; the anything-and-whatsit barter goods that someone at some unchartered planet off the Analog routes would pay for in some way. That was the lure that kept the crews on merchant ships: you never knew when you'd come back with the barter-hold full of uranium, or cast-gold native artifacts, or robin-egg diamonds.
And if you also never knew for sure when you'd come back, or where from, or whether . . . well, that was the reason why IBMen went upstairs fast. For a man who could handle the job, there was pay and promotion, and almost anything else he might want.
What Carnahan wanted, the Lady didn't have.
For Mike Gorevitch, that was not the case.
The Lady was a tramp. She was scratched and dented and tarnished with age. She'd lost her polish, arid her shape was out of date. She'd been around, and it showed.
But she had beauty in her still, if you knew where to look, and you cared.
"There's a dance in the old girl yet," Mike said approvingly, when he saw the IBMan's hand linger with pleasure on the smooth perfect surface of the shaft he'd ground the night before. "You read Archy?" he asked.
Terry shook his head. "What's that?"
"You might not like it," Mike said doubtfully. He opened a locker and pulled out a battered grease-stained book. "Here. You can take it up with you if you want."
That night, Terry slept. He took the Manual and Mike's book both to the bunk with him right after dinner, and found what he wanted in one, then returned to the other. Both of them helped, and so did exhaustion.
But somewhere in the night he woke long enough to note that it was Deke who came in last again, and to identify the pattern of repeated sounds from two nights back. It had not been a dream.
Five men and one woman . . . He wondered why Bailey had quit. Nine years, and then . . . If you took it that long . . . Well, he had the same way out if he wanted it . . . any time ...
Next day, again, he worked at his board through the morning. This time it was Chandra who happened to be in the galley when Terry went down for his lunch. The pattern began to come clear: informal, haphazard, and unsystematic, but they were taking him over the ship, little by little.
The two of them sat on a white-painted bench in the Bio lab, and discoursed of algae and alien life-forms and also Anita. "Listen," Chan said abruptly, "has the blonde bombshell got you mixed up?"
"No," Terry said bitterly. "I wouldn't say that."
"It ain't like the Navy, is it kid?" Chan smiled, and it didn't matter if you knew the man had been trained for years to create just this feeling of empathy and understanding; he created it all the same. If he couldn't, they'd be in a hell of a spot on an alien planet. . . .
"Don't get me wrong," Terry said cautiously. "I like girls. If you think everyone sleeps in his own bed on a Navy ship . . ."
"I came out of Academy too," Chan reminded him.
"All right, then, you know what I mean. But this kind of deal—one dame, and the five of us, and—I just can't see it. If I go to a whore, I don't want her around me all day. And if I have a girl, I damn sure don't want every guy she sees to get into . . . you know what I mean!"
"Yeah." He was silent a moment. "I know what you mean, but I don't know if I can explain . . . Look, it's a small ship, and the payload counts. A girl friend for every guy would be nice, but . . . well, hell, kid, you'll see for yourself once we get going. All I wanted to say to begin
with was if you got the idea it was all for one guy, you were wrong. Deke's always kind of hopped up before we go, and he's the guy we have to count on to get us out safe. She just naturally . . . anyhow, don't let him monopolize anything—not if you want it, that is."
"I don't," Terry said, and they went back to algae and aliens. And at least one thing emerged: Mike wasn't the only man on board who cared. Just what it was that mattered so much to him or to Chan, Terry wasn't quite sure: their work, or the Lady herself, or the dead dream she stood for. Whatever exactly it was, the feeling was something that Terry could understand—and that Deke and Hillstrom never could ...
Hillstrom didn't have to. He owned the Lady. He wasn't obliged to understand her: only to pay the bills, and let the hired hands do their work for him. For her . . . ?
The hired help worked, all right. At least, Mike and Chan did, and Terry Carnahan. Even Deke put in a full morning up in Control, checking his board, and testing a dry run with Terry.
Even Deke? What the hell? Deke had been holding down the driver's seat on the Lady for four years now. He had to be good. And he was; the half-hour's test was enough to show his class.
In his bunk that night, Terry improved his acquaintance with Archy the poet-cockroach, and Mehitabel the cat. Archy's opinions amused him; but in the determined dignity of the lady-cat's earthy enthusiasms, he found a philosophy sadly appropriate for the life of a Lady ship: and it was difficult to continue to feel entirely sad about the fit of the shoe while Mehitabel danced her wild free whirling dance, defiant and tourjoursgai . wotthehell…wotthehell ...
Mehitabel, Mike, and Chandra all helped. But backing them all up was the Manual.
P. 549, at the bottom: "An IBMan specialist may exercise his privilege of declaring the psychological conditions on board a ship of the specified classes unfit for blind jump at any time before plotting navigation data to the jump-off point in question. In such cases, the ship will return by analog to Lunar Base; or if unequipped to do so, will remain in its current port, pending a hearing by the Commandant."
They wouldn't jump till after the Aldebaran hop. Six weeks out, two weeks in port: there was time to wait and find out whether one lousy tramp could ruin the work and the dreams of thirteen years.
As he fell asleep, the IBMan thought with surprise that grease and nudity were perhaps as fitting uniforms in their ways for engine maintenance and bio work as kniteedge trouser creases were for precision computing. . . .
The thirty-foot-wide metal collar that encircled the lower third of the Lady Jane, in drydock, rose slowly out of the concrete pit. When the Lady had been lifted some twenty feet, the trucks moved in and extended supporting yard-wide jacks up into smaller collars, set in the underside of the wide, upper flange.
The outer lock, 'midships, swung open, and the elevator cage started down. Five figures in full-gear pressure suits emerged and took their places on the flange. They fastened the chains and winches securing the jacks in their sockets and belted themselves in position to keep a watch on the winches during the overland voyage.
One by one their voices cleared over the suit-to-suit. "All secure here . . . Okay . . . Check . . . Secure ... That's it!" Hillstrom's was the last.
"All clear?" He waited five seconds, then waved the red flag at his side. The enormous pit jack sank downward; and the trucks started lifting alone. At fifty feet, the jet tubes were clear of the ramp. The trucks swivelled into alignment, and sixty-five earth-tons of wheelchair began to move the Lady away from drydock in lumbering state.
From his seat on the flange, Terence Hugh Carnahan surveyed man's moon, and found it good. Six hours away, the black knife-edge of lunar night sliced off the horizon. Ten minutes ahead, the mile-long launching tube yawned empty and waiting.
The suit-to-suit crackled with small talk and still-smaller humor. Terry almost gave in to the urge to turn it off. He'd been through the launching routine a hundred times, in mockups and dry runs, but this was his first time to ride a live ship over the face of the moon from the dock to the tube. If the schoolboy dreams of glory were dead forever . . . if the battered old hulk of the Lady was all he could have . . . even she had her dubious virtues, and among them the brightest was this . . . this moment, now, the fulfillment of, not a child's dream, but the Big Dream of a man, of mankind, for the stars.
It was sacrilege, nothing less, to be approaching the launch-site with a series of schoolboy double entendres supplying the background music.
He had actually reached for the switch, when a new voice floated in. "Still with us, Lieutenant?"
"Yes, ma'am!" He let his hand drop. The regulations made sense. Secured as they were in their seats, and spread round the bulge of the Lady, the audio was all the proof they had that each of them was still on post, alive and conscious. Even the Medic inside the sealed ship, watching the screens, couldn't be sure from what she could actually see, whether a man immobile inside a suit was effectively operative.
They came up to the tube, and the great cranes reached out steel fingers, stripping and lifting the Lady out of her wheelchair wrappings, pushing and nudging and sliding her into place on the runway. Six moon-suited figures slid down the jacks into the trucks, and were toted back up to the airlock by the tube elevator.
There was no time for small talk now. Five hours to see for the last time that the ship was secure; once the word, ready, went down, it was too late to look any more.
Terry covered his section with swift methodical care. Satisfied, he went to his chair, and strapped himself in; he did a last double check on his board; then he fastened his helmet back on, and began the slow conscious relaxing of muscles and breathing that ended the ritual.
When the count-down began, he was off in a floating dream of sunshine and sparkling water. Zero minus nine, and he sat up erect. Minus eight, and he forced himself back into limpness before they hit seven. Breathe in . . . out . . . hold . . . in . . . six . . . out . . . hold . . . in . . . hold . . . five . . . out . . . four . . . in . . . three . . . out . . . two . . . innnnnone-annnnou—out!
Off and out ... down and out . . . blackness and whirlpools and terror and kick back, up, out!
His finger punched the wake-up button before he was fully aware of consciousness again. The light ahead of him flashed green, and there was an instant's prideful notice that his was the second green on. Then he forgot to be proud, and forgot to be Terry Carnahan. Green lights flashed and steadied, then yellow and blue and red. The board was a Christmas-tree crossword constellation, each light a word or a number or place, their shifting patterns spelling out death and life.
Pressure eased; and the voices began—voices of engines and scanners and stresses and temps. Some he heard in the helmet and some the board told him with signals and lights. A voice in the helmet allowed him to take it off: the voice of the Bio board. A key on the pilot's board, at the chair up ahead, was depressed by a finger; the think-board, in this chair, flashed questioning lights. The think-board replied, and new figures lit up ahead, for the hands to use—the hands and direction and eyes of the Lady, up there at the pilot's board, steering her free of the multitude of menacing mites and pieces and bits of matter and mass in the populous planet-plied system.
The dance of escape begat rhythm to suit itself, and the old girl whirled on her axis, and pushed her way out to the stars, with a dance in her yet, wotthehell and the think-board was metal-and-plastic but flesh-and-blood too; part of her, of the streaming single mote which alone in this mote-filled single cell-of-Sol was bound to break out of bounds and escape to the endless entropic emptiness of Universe.
"Take a break, kid. We got a clear stretch here. Karl can take over."
He looked at the chrono, and didn't believe what he saw, and looked again. Five hours, and seventeen minutes past zero. Now aching muscles returned to sensation, and ego to Terry Carnahan.
Anita was standing beside him, one hand on a chair strap, the other held out to help.
"Whore!" he said. "Get away, bitch!"
She went away; Terry stayed where he was. What Deke could take, he could take too.
He took it for six hours more, through the last of the dust and debris of the System. He drank from the flask when it nuzzled his lips, and swallowed the pills she put in his mouth, and gave back what she needed: the readings and scannings and comps and corrections that went to the driver's seat, to the pilot's board, to Deke with the strength of ten and a tramp in his heart.
He stayed there and took it until there was no more to do. Then he reached for the straps, and her hands were already there, unfastening him.
Bitch! he thought. Tramp! You don't want me!
He let her lead him out of the room, down the ladder, through dim yellow-green, to the door where the light would be flashing red outside.
And there he stopped. There was something important to ask her, when he found out what it was, he started to smile. Which one do you want?
Which one? How could she possibly tell?
As well ask, Which one needs her?
He laughed and stepped forward ... and the tramp was his.
For a few years back there (before the Bay of Pigs and the Assassinations and Tonkin Gulf) it actually seemed we might start thinking, not just about how to avoid destruction, but how best to make use of our skills and knowledge.
The step into space would of course initiate a golden age of understanding and goodwill between human beings of all cultures, customs, colors — and sexes too?
In the mid-fifties — even after Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Dulles and McCarthy — it was still possible to regard my sense of taintedness as an American as something remediable. McCarthy, after all, was finally discredited; Korea was over; the Japanese occupation was coming to an end; the International Geophysical Year was perhaps about to inaugurate not only the Space Age, but a new kind of planetary cooperation and sanity.
One could not (or chose not to) foresee that satellite-orbiting and moon-landing would become bawdy gambits in the Cold War; that 1957's great year of international cooperation would degenerate into a "space race" backed by monster budgets tied in to yet-more ballistic missile development; that the satellites would go up not to look out at the stars, but to maintain surveillance over Earth; that, over and again, somehow, TV Spectacular moonshots would coincide with fresh bombing waves in Indochina.
Auction Pit
Prologue
Striped shirt or morning pants, white tie or none,
Smooth-shaven some, others strong of shoulder,
Men jostle lightly, push up to the platform,
With intricate courtesy, Queensbury rites, in the pit
Where the women are auctioned.
In the old days,
Till they stripped off the superstructure,
Hoopskirted ladies were trained to a gentler strain, spirit
Unlikely as limb was to show through the swaddling.
Then there were auctioneers, mothers and maiden aunts,
And elder sisters.
Streamlining, sequin sheath, and strictly divided
Breast-moulding bathing suit, have done for the body
What the unparallelled
High-educational fine opportunities
Offered by charm mags,
Moom-pitcher palaces, as well as success schools,
Business schools, sororities, and secretaryships
Have done for the mind and soul.
The girls cry their own wares now,
With style and strident art, full worthy
The masters of the antique trade.
Procession
This first in line today, she knows her points:
Displays the supple limbs and arching back.
This girl can be had for money, advertise
The swing of hips and sway of short fur
Chubby on her shoulders.
Here is no art nor artifice. She sells
Nothing but flesh for the bare bottom price of cash.
That slender piece back there, the one
With the whispering talk and the willowy walk: who has
The price for this must offer more than money.
Bid your attention, Gentlemen,
The soft voice sibilates:
I am not strong,
But I am sweet; I shall need all your care;
I'm woman-weak, and chill seeps from me
Through the flesh and spirit;
But for the warmth you give, I'll flower-worship
You as my sun, and thank you prettily
For all you pay.
This other is rounder and firm of step:
She would scorn money, needs no lingering care.
Her face is pretty, and sweet with love.
She sells simplicity; her body
Is built to a biologic frame; she'll take
Her pay in kind, from the strong-shouldered man:
The seed to form large noisy children;
The arm to build a wall against the world.
She wants no more.
For a man of simple and sturdy ways
She is cheap at the price, and the salt of
The earth; many will want her, but bidding
Is little likely to go high. She understands
No art of contract, and her needs are
Elementary, and the truth is
There are quite enough of her to go around.
They pass; they come and go.
The girl-child, dimpling, asks indulgence; and the
Spinster, cased in starch, shaped in her dress by an
Imperious iron, flat as a board, disdains affection,
Asks security.
And many more: this one in tweeds wants family; and that
In chiffon asks a lover's eyes to follow her eternally without
Results. Each one goes by. From time to time
A single bid, offered in ignorance, or out of passion,
Is seized upon, and then the crowd cries:
"Love—A marriage made in heaven,"
And the two depart, leaving the rest with sadness
In their hearts. But for the most,
The price runs high and low through the fleshy procession.
From one shape to the next across the boards, small choice
Except as fancy stretches with the purse.
Distinction
White Tie, eyeing the trading from an advanced
Position of disinterest to one side, straightens
His stance at the sound of a crisper cry
Than has been heard yet from the crowded stalls.
This straight proud woman mounts the steps
To sale, and displays
Indifference quite elaborate as his own. She cries no price,
But stipulates just that the bidding be precise.
This is not mother, daughter, whore, nor wife,
But courtesan; she has no choice, most feminine of women,
But to mould her rich
Endowment of nuance to what price buys her.
She sells suggestion:
of cleverness to carry off
The chic complexity of social stipend.
intelligence to build a sounding
Board, if she accept the bid of brain-prestige.
self-centered grace to shower on black
And silver service in a rich man's home.
of sensual calculation to fulfill
Desire, if admiration is her wage.
Love, money, home, adventure, intellect,
Society, fine clothes, fine words, or eminence ...
Some few or all of these White Tie must bid ...
And heavily, for now the price runs high.
All things to all these men, she waits to learn
What butcher, bravo, prince, or puritan
Will top the offers and command
Her being. A chimera, she changes shape to suit
Each bid, and as the price soars so her charms increase.
White Tie, impatient at the boorish crowd,
Spurning the men unworthy of this creature,
Always a spender and a self-willed man,
Must have the woman, and he crowns
Each bid with casual grace and smiling scorn.
She will be his; she was ordained for him.
Epilogue:
Off in a corner of the market place
a curious creature stands
in some confusion at the furious trading:
nor buyer, nor seller,
not engaged in commerce:
clearly untrained to perform although
just as clearly in the shape of woman.
Men brushing by, stop,
finding it beautiful
and pleasing among them.
From time to time the curious creature
falls into conversation with such men
—timid or haughty, too poor or too rich
to buy hastily—as bid infrequently
and can enjoy such strangely-neutral
entertainment while they wait
for an appropriate enticing cry
to prick them back to business from the auction block.
Some kindly souls,
instinctively protective-masculine,
stop to direct—or help
it to the crowded stalls:
a woman lost should be
returned to cover:
this one, in proper form,
might be a piece worth bidding
high and paying pretty for.
A few rude fellows rub against it now and then,
thinking, a woman-body for the asking:
but these are frightened easily by conversation
and stumble off pulling their pockets for the price
of something satisfying to a man's desires.
A curious creature:
not for sale;
yet not free.
Nor can it understand why,
being already among the men,
it must depart and make
a journey back on some one
single arm: selected,
signed and sealed—and delivered?
The men are wiser:
they are familiar
with profit as a function
of possession: happiness
surely lies in what they call
their own.
The curious creature mingling
in their midst will not
be owned.
They fondle it in passing,
smile and speak perhaps, pass by:
press forward to compete then bids
for proper women on the auction block.
Auction Pit is both the oldest and newest piece of work in this book — and the only selection that has never seen print before. It was written, mostly in 1946-47, before I dared to think of myself as A Writer (let alone A Poet, something infinitely Higher and Finer). During the score of years through which these and other formal distinctions still seemed meaningful to me, it yellowed with other earlier 'self-expression' efforts in a folder wistfully marked Poetry. In the process of putting this book together, I looked at it again: thought, if I update the images a bit . . . : thought again, left them as they were, finished some rough edges a bit, and put it in: hoping, perhaps, twenty-five years from now, with luck, the central image will seem dated too?
So Proudly We Hail
. . . at the twilight's last gleaming...
Great gray plain of poured concrete, level and bare, save for the network of construction at the center. There, ensnared in wood and metal, shadow shrouded, the clumsy bottom of the tapered rocket rested on the Earth. Far above, the nose pierced the thin air, a bloody beacon in the sunset.
A spiral ramp curved out from the high loading port, sweeping across the concrete to where the human builders of the spacebird lived and worked: twelve hollow cubes poured from the same concrete on which they stood.
Behind one lighted window, scattered groups of men and women lingered over the evening meal. They drummed their fingers, and shifted nervously between each other and the lurid light outside. They talked in quick soft voices, laughed too loud; sipped steaming coffee, or bit into bread and meat that could not satisfy the hungers they were feeling.
. . . in the rocket's red glare...
The words kept running through her head, absurdly appropriate, two solid centuries after they were written by a man who also had to wait till dawn. The old words hummed in her head, replacing the others — the one's she'd saved up for tonight. The ones she had to speak, soon, now:
"I guess I better tell you now."
In the wall mirror, Sue could see her own lips form the words, making precise movements against the set mask of her face. The careful mask of civilized conformity, red-and-white satin out of jars and boxes that could hide the pallor of fear and the blush of desire, both. She could see the words, but she couldn't hear them. She had no way of telling whether she spoke aloud, or whether the shapes in the mirror were only an echo of the intention in her mind.
He didn't hear. In the mirror she could see him too, his head turned from her to look out the window, watching the metal monster where it waited, crouched to spring at dawn.
He doesn't even know I'm here.
The thought came bitterly, perversely reassuring. She gulped at too-hot coffee, seeing over the rim of the cup the familiar thrusting angle of his shoulder, the slight backward tilt of his head.
But he'd know if I wasn't here, she reassured herself, and the coffee was bitter in her mouth.
"I guess I better tell you now," she said again, and this time she knew she spoke aloud. She could feel her mouth moving to make the words: the lips, tongue, teeth, jaw, muscles of the cheek, working habitual patterns of speech beneath the mask. "I guess I better not wait any longer," she said, and watched him start to turn, reluctantly, back toward her.
"Sure, Baby. What is it?"
She knew the suppressed impatience of that tone as she knew, intimately, every sound his mouth could make and every shape it had. His face was in profile, and she saw the pushed-out firmness of the lower lip that could completely hide the sensitivity of the upper; the stubborn set of jaw that made you forget how quickly the forehead wrinkled with trouble or tension. When she looked into his eyes, she knew what she would find there, too: a veil of tenderness not quite able to conceal the glitter or irritation.
"What is it, Baby?" he asked. "What's the matter?"
She shook her head. "Drink your coffee," she said, grotesquely wifelike. "You won't get any coffee on Mars, you know."
"Huh?" He shook his head once sharply, like a man immersed in sleep or fog. His eyes opened wide, and he looked down at the coffee cup with astonishment; shrugged and picked it up; sipped once, symbolically, not to disagree; then put it down to look away again.
Sudden brilliance flashed through the window, and she turned too, watching over his shoulder while the lights came on outside, to play through the night on the monster. She looked at the man, and past him, to the embodied dream outside, trying to see what he saw, to suffer the same bewitchment. But the dream was his. It was no longer, even by sharing, hers.
. . . o'er the ramparts we watched...
On the ramp, a gang of workmen was loading the last stack of crates into the ship, hauling and pushing, making wide gestures, shouting to each other in a last burst of eager energy.
Man and wife, they watched the scene together, and fascination held them both. It seemed impossible that he could sit there, close enough to touch, and still not know how great a distance the rocket had already made between them.
He was hypnotized, she thought, spellbound by the mesmeric movements of the work gang and the flashing lights outside.
He stared out the window, not thinking or feeling, not wanting to know, not letting her tell him. Whatever it was, it was nothing. Nothing that mattered. The rocket outside was proof enough of that: a symbol of rightness triumphant; a tower of silver that would roar skyward on bolts of lightning at dawn, carrying five hundred motes of humanity beyond blackness to the planet Mars. Married couples, mostly, like Sue and himself. Healthy and skilled, trained for the job over years of preparing; big men and big women and brawn and brains and courage and a sense of humor in time of adversity. The kind of people to build a frontier in the sky and make it thrive.
He had spent his whole life preparing himself for this. His whole life, and the last five years of it with Sue. She'd wanted it as he did ...
Or had she?
Face it, jerk! He felt her eyes on the back of his head, and had to struggle not to turn around. She was scared, that's all. Worried. Natural enough.
A woman gets that way, that's all. He knew what she was thinking. No sense talking about it, not any more. They'd be in it soon enough, and she'd see it wasn't as bad as her fears had built it up to be.
Or else she'd turn out to be right. It would be bad. A lot of it was bound to be. Okay! Why drag it out? Why make it worse before it happened?
If he turned around now, they'd go all through it again. About the first two expeditions, and what could have happened to them. About the mosses and lichens and red hills of Mars. About living in steel cubicles and breathing through an oxygen mask; Then later, with luck, living in pressure chambers instead. About all the dangers and trials and troubles she could dream up.
He wasn't going to talk about it any more. Now now. This one last night to get through, and then they'd be on board, and once it started, she'd get over worrying. They'd be too busy to worry.
One more night. Nothing at all, after two months. Two months of waiting since they got their OK slips. Nine weeks of watching the strain around her mouth pull her lips into angry lines; of meeting her eyes too seldom; of hearing her speak her love too often. Of talking and reassuring her about the worries she never voiced and wouldn't admit to.
It's your own damn fault! he told himself again. Just once, he'd laughed at her fears. A long time ago, but she didn't forget. She wouldn't, couldn't, admit it any more.
His eyes flickered sideways, to the mirror, took in the stiff mask of her face, and flickered back to the window, to the workmen finishing their job up high on the ramp. The contrast was funny, he thought. So funny it tied knots in his belly, and made his eyes burn for wanting to laugh.
... oh, say can you see? . . .
Dust whirled in slow eddies of illumination around the blast-revetments that girded the rocket's base. An Earth-breeze stirred the dust, an Earth-breeze that had wandered out of the Puget Sound, across Wyoming, and into Kansas where the concrete plain buried acres of flatland. The breeze sifted faint dust from the prairie all around, on the ramp and the bales and on the work gang that handled them. It whispered through the storm fence, and along the street between the concrete cubes into the cafeteria where they sat.
Sue felt the breeze on her face, and covered the cheek with the palm of her hand to keep the coolth, to hold it for some future need.
But the need is his, she thought. The breeze will still be mine tomorrow. The breeze and trees and grass, and the warm sun on ocean beaches that they'd known together. All hers, now.
"Will!" she said desperately. The name was a prayer.
He groped behind him for her hand. "What is it, Baby?" he said to the air in front of him, to the window, the rocket, the lights outside. He didn't turn around. "Something wrong?" he said.
Yes! The sudden wave of fury took her by surprise. It shocked her body, stiffening her spine; making her toes curl so her feet dug against the floor; winding her hands into tight fists under the table. It snapped her head back, so that when the shock-wave reached him and he turned to her at last, smiling a little sheepishly, her eyes were flashing straight into his.
And there it was again.
I love you, Will! The sudden sharp intake of breath; the reaching-forward feeling in her arms, spreading down through her whole body; the total sense of physical well-being, taking over after the tightness of the anger, that was gone now as quickly as it had come. Five years: five years of closeness, day after day, and it was still the same, whenever they returned to each other from even the most subtle of departures.
"I'm sorry, Baby." he said. "I guess I wasn't really listening." He sounded tired, as if it took great effort to say so little. But he was trying, anyhow. "What's the matter, Sue?"
"I love you, Will."
His eyes mapped her face, narrowing. There was a tightening at the corner of his jaw. "Why say it like that?" he asked finally. "You sound like it's something to say at a funeral." "Can you think of a better thing to say at a funeral?" "You're in a hell of a mood!"
Oh, you noticed, did you? She almost said the words out loud, but the song saved her, still running through her head. .. through the perilous fight . . .
"Sorry," she said.
Dismayed, he watched the stars film her eyes.
"What are you crying about?" He hadn't meant to growl like that.
"I'm not." She dabbed at her eyes.
"All right," he said. "Okay. Then there's nothing to worry about, I guess. Everything's just peachy. Hunky-dory." He was turning back to the window, when the loudspeaker over the door coughed and croaked at them officiously:
"All colonists report for final briefing and examination at nine o'clock. All colonists. White-slip holders, and yellow-slip reserve list, report to the Ad Building. There will be a warning siren at eight fifty-five."
The speaker coughed once more. Will turned back to his wife and took her hand in his. Now, if ever, he could pull her back with him, into the realization of the dream. Now.
Her hand was cold in his. He tried to squeeze warmth into it, to let his own thought and hope flow into her through their twined fingers. For just a moment he thought he had succeeded. Then the speaker cleared its throat again.
"Announcement: Provisions have been made for the accommodation of relatives of all colonists during the night. All authorized visitors who wish to remain until take-off may register for bedspace."
He didn't hear the rest of it, because she pulled her hand away, suddenly, jerkily, and he understood what he wouldn't yet say even to himself in words.
"There isn't much more time," she said, in a strange,tinny voice.
Forty-five minutes, he thought. Forty-four now . . . three. "What's that supposed to mean?" he demanded. Make her say it now.
"Well, they'll be ... the announcement..." She blinked her eyes, trying to dry them. "They said nine o'clo…"
"I heard it. All right, Sue, what is it? What do you want to say?"
Her eyes suddenly clear, were wide and warm. Big brown eyes a man could drown in. Looking straight at him, the way she always used to. No faking now. And love ... crazy love you couldn't doubt when she looked like that.
"I'm not going," she said.
"Yeah. That's what I figured." He felt nothing at all, not inside or out. He could see his hand still holding hers, but he couldn't feel the curl of his own fingers, or the skin of hers. "I'm glad you got around to telling me," he said, and found he could still manipulate his muscles. He disentangled his hand, and pushed back his chair. The legs scraped on the linoleum with nerve-splitting shrillness.
She was watching him, her eyes still wide, but baffled now. "Where are you ...?"
"Out," he told her. "I want to take a walk."
"All right." She started to get up, and he had to hold his left arm, the one near her, tight against his side to keep from shoving at her, forcing her back into the seat.
"Look, Sue," he said very evenly, casually, "I want to be alone for a while."
"But I…"
"I'll be back. Okay? I'll see you."
He walked off quickly, before she could answer, or make up her mind about sitting or standing. Walked out of the brightlit room into the dusk, and paused a moment on the steps to light his pipe. Smoke your pipe, Will, he jeered at himself, mimicking. You won't have any smoking oxygen on Mars!
He snorted his scorn, and strode down the steps, onto the ramp, up toward the storm fence. The breeze was cooler now, and it cooled his skin, but not the inferno raging inside him.
He wanted to hate her. He wanted to rend and tear and bellow.
Why? He twisted the blade of agony in the wound. How long? How long had she lied and cheated and tricked him? How long since she made up her mind?
No need to ask that; he knew how long. The night they celebrated; the night the white slips came. But — why?
Why did she have to lie at all? Why make a mockery of everything they'd had before by this last cheap pretense? How could she?
. . . and the angry red stare, the words bursting in air . . . the song had become a part of her by now, changing itself to suit her needs . . . gave proof through the night that our love was still there .. .
She tried to get up. She wanted to go after him, run after him, explain it all to him, but her legs were rubbery and useless. She dropped back into the chair, and sat there, helpless, till she heard a voice over her shoulder.
"Felling sick, lady?" the busboy asked.
"Oh. No," she said. "No, I'm all right. Thank you." She stood up. Her legs worked all right now. She smiled mechanically at the busboy. "Sorry. I guess you want to get the table cleared."
"We're getting ready to close up," he said. "I can get a doctor if you…"
"I'm just fine," she said. "I'm sorry."
She walked out steadily, and stood on the steps, shivering. In all the darkness around her the only thing she could see was the area of garish brilliance centered on the rocket. It hurt her eyes, and she turned from it till gradually her vision acclimated to the pink-fringed grayness that had followed the gory sunset. She could make out shapes of other buildings, and then the near part of the ramp; bits of the storm fence; and finally a few scattered figures.
Which one was Will she did not know. If she'd known, she wasn't sure any more that she'd have gone to find him.
Will! she pleaded, Will come back! I haven't told you yet. Will – please!
He said he knew. Maye he thought he knew. But he didn't. And maybe it was best that way. Maybe it was best for him never to know. To go hating her, as he did now. To leave without regrets.
You're going to Mars, Will. Alone. I can't go, Will. Don't you see? They wouldn't let me go. They turned me down...
But he didn't see. He couldn't. Because she hadn't told him. The words had deserted her. The words, the shining words, drilled daily for two months to march past her lips in shining ranks tonight; the treacherous, useless words had abandoned her in her hour of need.
She giggled, shivering again, wondering what to do. Silly to stand here in the cold, thinking melodramatic thoughts.
But if she left, he might not find her when he came back. The light went out in the cafeteria window, and she stood there, undecided. She opened her handbag, and reached down to the bottom, fingering the pink slip under the compact and the handkerchief. Too dark to read here if she took it out, but she didn't need to look at it. It was burned into memory behind her eyelids.
"Susan Barth," it said in neat typed letters on the mimeoed form. "3-45-A-7821. Disqualified. Medical Requ 44-B-3. Calcified node. Left lung."
That was all. Two lines of type on a pink slip, and the end of marriage, the end of plans and hopes and all that life meant to her.
And now it was ending again. A different end: the end of loving and lying; of hoping against hope; of hating. And waiting. For her, that is.
For him, for Will, it was the end of waiting only, and the beginning of the dream. The beginning of hate, maybe, too.
They'll tell him, she promised herself. They'll tell him later, on the rocket. Or after they land. It wasn't as if he'd go through life not knowing. He'd find out. No need to tell him now. It would be easier for him this way.
She went down one more step, and let herself look at the rocket. The workmen were still there. The metal dragon swallowed all they fed it, stolid, indifferent, letting itself be stuffed, for now, with bits and pieces of paraphernalia, oddments of fiber and metal, of glass and wood. But all the while it waited, knowing the feast that was coming soon, brooding and hungering for the living flesh that would feed it this night. Resting and planning for the moment of dawn when, with its belly full, it would belch fire and vanish from the earth.
... and the rocket's red glare, the bombs bursting in air . . . No sense waiting. It was better not to see him. She stood there, staring and shivering.
The wire of the storm fence was tearing his fingers and his hands. He made himself relax his clutching grip.
Coward! he raged futilely. Cheat and coward!
"Nervous, buddy?"
He whirled, his torn hands clenching into welcome fists, the muscles of his arms literally aching for trouble.
"Maybe," he said tightly.
It was one of the colonists, a man he knew by sight but not by name; a stocky, sandy-haired character with too many teeth in his smile. "Came out to get away from the wife a minute," the man said cheerfully. "Yakkety yakkety yak, that's all I get. And every other word about what a tough time we're in for. Your wife like that?"
"I – haven't got a wife."
"No kidding? I didn't know they were taking any bachelors. If I'd of known that ... Clara and I got married because both of us wanted to go."
"That's tough!"
"Yeah – Say! what'd you mean by that crack?"
"Beat it, Shorty," Will said coldly. "Unless you're looking for trouble." His knuckles itched with the urge to erase some of the expanse of tooth from the man's idiotic smile.
Shorty flushed, hitched up his belt. "I could use a little," he offered, "if you got some to spare."
They faced each other stonily for a few seconds. "A-a-a-h —skip it!" Will said, and turned back to stare through the fence again.
"Dame trouble?" Shorty asked, too sympathetically. Will shrugged.
"That's too bad." The other guy was going to go when he was good and ready, not just because Will told him to. "Another guy, huh?" The sympathy was laid on now, too obviously. But even Shorty seemed to know when he'd gone far enough.
Determinedly unresponsive, Will suffered himself to be jovially slapped on the back, and listened gratefully as he heard the man's footsteps recede into the distance. When he looked around again, he could no longer find the lighted square of window that had marked the cafeteria building. Just a huddle of squared-off silhouettes against the dark gray sky. In the center, on top of the Administration Building, a clock glowed a warning.
Twenty-five minutes till nine.
He had to go back. He told her he'd come back.
Another guy? Well, what about it? Why not? Another guy! It was the only possible answer, and he'd needed a grinning ape like Shorty to show it to him! Two months of worrying and wondering, noticing all the little changes, all the things that weren't quite right. Telling himself she was frightened. Telling himself he was wrong. Keeping the knowledge just below the surface of his mind. It spewed up now in all its rottenness, leaving him weak and clean.
It was the only possible explanation.
Will knocked his cold pipe against a fence-post, and put it back in his pocket. He considered slowly, surprisingly calm, what he wanted to do with the rest of the time. Nineteen minutes more, the clock told him.
Was she waiting, still?
Did he care?
He felt cool — indifferent or numb. It didn't matter which. He'd promised to come back. What difference did a promise make, to her? Another man — was she with him now, sharing the lovely joke? Telling him she loved him? Telling him she was free at last?
Will turned his back on the storm fence and the rocket. He paced slowly the hundred yards down the ramp. He didn't want to see her. He wanted to tell her that he understood. If there had been any emotion in him at all, he'd have wanted to denounce her, shame her, spit on her; what he might have felt now was not anger, but a bitter cold contempt.
Only he felt nothing.
. . . Oh, say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave...
The song still ran insanely through her head, and now she knew why, remembering the moment of getting the envelope, of opening it, of looking and seeing the two slips of paper, his and hers — white and pink. White for success and pink for failure. The song had been playing on the radio then, while she stood in the middle of the kitchen and stared at the incongruous slips of paper that didn't match. The first time ever that things hadn't somehow fitted together for her and Will.
Bit by bit, while the song played through and finished, and somebody started to make a speech, the meaning of it had penetrated to the vital centers of her consciousness.
I'm not going . . . the statement was complete at last, the lesson fully learned . . . I can't go.
She didn't show Will the slips that night. She had to think it through first, decide what to do, how to tell him. Because as soon as the lesson of failure was thoroughly learned for herself, another piece of knowledge took shape within her.
If she told him, he'd stay too. He'd stay at home, and go out to stand in the yard on starry nights. He'd stare at the sky, smoking his pipe, the way he always did — the way he always had — but it would be different. He would stand alone, and his hand would not touch her arm, nor would she be with him. And when he came back into the house, his eyes would avoid her, and he would hate.
You're going, Will, she promised in her heart when she understood that much. It's the thirst of your soul, and I shall see that you drink, though it drains me!
Well, she was entitled to a little melodrama in her private thoughts, and the phrase gave her strength to act.
Next day she checked with the medics. "Calcified node." Just a little hardened-over spot that would never give her any trouble on Earth — but could kill her on Mars.
"I don't care," she told them, pleading.
"I'm sorry, Mrs. Barth. You understand we can't use passenger space on the rocket for anyone who isn't as fit as possible to survive the rigors of colonization ..."
They were kindly, sympathetic, understanding — but firm.
By that night, she had the duplicate slip ready: the one that wasn't good enough to get her on the ship, but looked enough like Will's to convince him if he didn't question it. She showed him both, and they went out for dinner and got a little tight together, celebrating!
After he was asleep, she crept out of bed and went outside to stare at the sky herself. She sat on the soft grass and cried; and when he woke up too, and found her missing, and came out looking for her, he thought he understood. He carried her back inside, and was gay and tender and funny and strong. They made cocoa in the kitchen while he talked about the dangers they would face together, making a joke of them, reassuring her, promising all his strength and support to help her through.
That was the last time she cried. After that she schooled herself, night and day, to feel nothing but her love for Will, to do nothing, say nothing, be nothing but a perfect living lie designed to give him what he wanted if it killed them both!
And now at last it was safe to tell him. Safe because it was too late for him to change his mind. He wouldn't stay back now.
But now he didn't want to hear. And maybe
Maybe it was better that way.
Where is he? Why didn't he come back? He said he would ... For the first time she thought: I may never see him again! The words had no meaning in her mind, but she doubled over as though she'd been hit in the middle.
It's better this way, she told herself, straightening up painfully. Better for him . . . "Will! Here I am!"
He'd almost walked right past her. "Will ..."
"Oh . . . hi!"
Casual. Just like that. As if it was any night, and he'd gone for a walk. As if there was still a tomorrow.
For him, there was. I gave it to you, Will. Give me credit for that at least . . . And immediately, she was ashamed of the thought. What difference did blame or credit make now?
"I guess we might as well say goodbye." His face was a cold stone carving in the dark. "No sense in you hanging around till dawn," he said. "You told them, didn't you?" he asked. "I mean, I take it I'm the last to know?"
All right, he was mad. She didn't have to fight back. "I'd rather stay." she said, forcing the words through the dryness of her mouth. "But we can say goodbye now if you'd rather."
"I would."
He grinned, a tight stretching of lips across teeth that gave away the bravado of his nonchalance completely. "So long, Sue," he said, and one corner of his mouth quirked up. "It's been nice to know you."
He put his hands lightly on her shoulders, leaned forward and kissed her once, chastely, on the forehead.
Oh, no! Not this way, Will! Oh, no! Her own hurt, anger, sorrow faded to vanishing beside what she now understood of his. "Will, please," she said steadily. "Listen to me a minute. I want to tell you ..."
"Maybe you better not, Sue."
She swallowed slowly, moistened the caked dryness of her lips, blinked back the burning in her eyes, and started again. "I think it's better if I do. I'm ... I was dis ..."
"Maybe I don't want to hear it!" he exploded; and she saw his face tighten, his jaw tremble; felt his fingers bite into her shoulders as he struggled to maintain a semblance of calm.
Silence again. Frozen silence while the narrowed slits of his blue eyes locked with her wide brown ones.
"I—" She opened her mouth, but it was no longer possible to make the words come out. At last she managed a sort of croaking parody of speech: "Will, I ..."
"Skip it!" he said, and then with sudden gentleness: "It's all right, Baby. I understand." A spasm of bitterness twisted his mouth, belying his words; and he said again fiercely, "Just skip it, that's all!" Then the hands on her shoulders slid down her back, and his aching hunger crushed her too close for a breath to pass between them. For a moment, too close even for her own breath to leave or enter. But what need of breath, with his mouth covering hers, and the passion of a lost lifetime compressed into one everlasting moment?
He understands! For the little spell of the embrace she believed it, wanted to believe it. But as his arms released her, some cooler portion of her mind stood back in helpless laughter, mocking the kiss, the passion, her will to believe, and his stubborn refusal to listen, all at once. He understands! What did he think he understood? He had no way to know the truth. His anger proved he didn't know it.
I hate you! she thought, as she shifted her weight to regain her balance. I hate your wonderful guts for wanting to go so much!
"All right," she said quietly. "I'll skip it," and she smiled for a last time. This was a good way to say goodbye. The best she could have hoped for. No need to add anything now. He knew, he had to know after that kiss, that whatever her reason was, she loved him still and always. She watched him whirl around and stride away, and realized that she was going too; a part of her at least would be with him forever, wherever he went.
Six angry steps away, he turned back long enough to say: "And tell him for me, he better be worth it!"
Line up here. Get your papers stamped. Shots. Another line. Over here now. Final phys. ex.: no communicable diseases. Line up here now. Got your slips? Strip again. Standard issue coveralls. Clothing to be deposited in these containers, will be returned to next of kin. Shots. Another paper stamped. Final psych. ex.:
"You see, it's a bit unusual, Mr. Barth, for a husband or wife to decide to go ahead when the other's been disqualified."
Smile. No, that's not right. Just act the way the man expects you to. Think it out later. Line up here. Stamp that paper! Hold that line!
". . . disqualified!"
They were all through now, and an hour to go before takeoff. Someone came around with coffee and some pills.
Sedative? Stimulant? He didn't know. He swallowed the pills, gulped the coffee.
Disqualified?
But she never said . . . she didn't . . . she had a white slip just like his.
He stood up, to go find someone who would know, and remembered the psychofficer's words and doubtful attitude. If he asked any questions now, if they found out he hadn't known . . .
But he had to know.
Disqualified? What for? There was nothing wrong with her. Wrong . . . something wrong . . . what was it?
There must be someone who'd know. He couldn't go if ... couldn't go? But if she needed him . . . ?
You, you stupid little fool! he thought. What did you think you were doing?
"I love you, Will," she'd said. And he'd snarled back at her. Maybe he could see her now. Maybe she'd stayed over after all. Maybe — somebody around here would know.
. . . whose broad stripes and bright stars . . .
The hands of the clock were stripes, and the numbers were stars, and so she couldn't tell the time, and didn't have to know how long she had yet to wait. She edged over to her side on the narrow cot, trying not to make it squeak, not wanting to disturb the women on the other cots in the big room.
Are they asleep? she wondered. Or were they, too, turning over soundlessly, staring out the window at the clock on the Ad Building next door.
It was nineteen minutes after four. She must have slept a while after all. She remembered now, the roman candles and flaring sky-rockets of her dream, and right after that remembered his words again: ". . . tell him from me . . ."
She couldn't lie still any longer. She got up, walked the length of the room on tiptoe, barefoot, carrying her clothes. There was a bathroom at the other end. She went in, and closed the door, locking herself in with the sink and mirror and the blinding overhead light. She got into her clothes, rumpled and wrinkled from lying on the floor where she'd dropped them in the dark, a few hours ago.
Cold water on her face, and she was used to the light by then. The mirror was shock enough to wake her up. She fished in her bag for the compact, and felt the pink slip under it, and what difference did it make? She wouldn't see him, not to talk to. He wouldn't see her at all.
But if she went out now, and got there first, she could stand right near the gate. She knew which one they'd use. She'd almost be able to touch him as he went past.
Almost an hour till dawn. Probably other people had the same idea, though. She went out quickly, walked past the cafeteria where the light was on again, and people were drinking coffee, eating quick breakfasts.
It wasn't too late. She found a place with the other early-waiters, near the gate, and edged forward every time she saw an opening. By the time the band showed up and began tuning instruments, she was right next to the gate itself. When they started to play, she had to check the beginnings of hysteria. Everybody else started singing, so she sang too:
"Oh, say, can you see, by the dawn's early light ..."
Only it wasn't dawn yet. Not quite. When it was, the monstrous ship would be gone. It would be full of people, then, and Will would be one of them. Part of the human sacrifice that would slake the dragon's thirst, and make it go away .. .
The priests were coming now, herding the sacrifice along. Priests in business suits: presidents and professors and newspapermen.
Right behind them came the captives, all alike, five hundred heads, five hundred sets of arms and legs, all in the same white uniform, marching unmanacled, willingly, to their doom.
They marched past her, right under her nose, and some of them were smiling. Some were cowards, and they cried. She felt most sympathetic to the ones who just walked deadpan straight ahead.
A few of them looked at her, or right through her, as if they sought some other face or figure in the crowd that pressed behind her. One of them opened his mouth when he walked by. He seemed to speak, or try to speak.
His name was Will. He had seen her; he had said something. He ...
He doesn't know! He hates me! He thinks . . .
She couldn't remember what it was he thought. Something bad. Awful.
There was something she had to tell him, explain to him, to make it all right. Something he said to me . . . what was it?
What did he try to say when he walked past? She closed her eyes, remembered the face, the shape of the mouth, tried not to hear the sounds around her, or the band, or anything; just to hear what he'd been saying with his mouth that special shape.
She knew the shape; knew each and every shape his mouth could make. The word was "Baby." Another word was "love." But that was wrong. She was putting the shapes together wrong, because he hated her now.
Faint edge of light over the horizon, and the band was still, and one of the priests intoned a prayer.
And a shrill siren screamed, and screeched again, and the air was full of thunder, and people shouting.
"Stand back!"
"Get back, there, you!"
"Blastoff ... zero . . . Back!"
They pulled at her arms and legs, and somebody grabbed at her middle too, but they couldn't hold her. She was free now. Racing forward, running hard, before they could catch her.
They were afraid, she thought. Poor fools, afraid! They weren't following any more. They thought it was better to stay behind and live. They didn't know. Maybe for them it was better, poor fools, poor dears, let them live.
She had to let him know. Had to find out. What did he say, she say, could say, would say?
Baby . . . Love ...
"Love you, Will!"she whispered as the blast rent the air, and concrete shook under her feet with the final savagery of the dragon's pouncing departure. Then flame washed through her and she fell on the trembling ground, and lay still, watching, looking straight up to Will, who could see her, surely, through the flames on which he stood.
The last thought she had was blessed awareness: they'll tell him. He'll find out.
And the last thing she heard was the end of the song ". . . of the free, and the home of the brave."
When I started writing S-F, it was primarily a "pulp magazine" field; today it is basically a book field, and although a handful of the sturdiest magazines are still publishing, at least as much new short material appears first in anthologies of original stories, or in "book-magazines".
The first significant book-magazine was Frederik Pohl's Star series, published by Ballantine: So Proudly was written for the first of these in 1953.
In selecting stories for this book, I first eliminated titles readily available in print elsewhere (Daughters of Earth, for instance, and my two best-known shorts, That Only a Mother . . . and Dead Centre); then dropped out anything I found embarrassing to reread; then tried to weigh, with the remainder, the problem, particularly acute in S-F, of "datedness".
So Proudly was a borderline choice. When it was written, the presumption of planting a national flag on the Moon would have seemed like the work of a particularly poor hack writer: NASA P.R. had not yet curdled my pure-and-simple idealism about space. Now, sadly, it seems to me that the counterpoint I thought I wrote in using the tarnished-glory of the "rockets' red glare" as theme music for the New Glory, has merged to one ironic statement.
Among other changes, the prospects for those outgoing ships seems somewhat more remote now. And the question of who will or won't pass the exit examinations, eventually, seems much more complex.
The Deep Down Dragon
The girl's one duty was to look — and understand:
White flatness of the wide wall dissolved into mist as the room dimmed. Then whiteness itself broke apart, from all-color to each component.
Pinpoints of brightness swirled and coalesced into new patterns of color and shape. Pinks and yellows here. Silver, blue, black there. Brown, gray, green. Rainbow stripes.
First flat, like a painted scene, then deepening to its own kind of reality, the scene glowed in the center of nothingness where the wall had been before.
The scene had been exactly the same before, she remembered. There was the strangely clear-air atmosphere, thin and sharp. The sketched-in effect of the background — hills, oddly shaped? a domed structure closer? — was simply a matter of her focused attention, not distance haze. Through this transparent air detailed vision would be possible at a far distance. And the background hills were far; for the moment, however, they were only background.
What counted was front-center, bright-colored . . . as real as when she had seen it the first time, for herself.
The three footprints. The shoe. The square of cloth. The three bushes. In color, focus and meaning they were identical. Her own shoe, with the silly spike heel and lacy strap unfastened, was lying where it dropped on the pink-hued sand, alongside the alien prints. The first time she had not known why, exactly, the prints were "alien." Now she saw it was the shoe that accomplished the effect. Plenty of three-toed things left prints in sand, but nothing exactly the length of her own foot was tripartite.
Nothing on Earth.
It was the same thing with the brown-gray-green thorn bushes ... planted, she suddenly realized, by some insane gardener, to landscape that circular blockhouse thing in the background! Or maybe not so insane. Nowhere else in sight was there a growing or green thing at all. Poor green was better than none. Spikes, spines and thorns did grow. They were alive, if still — alien? Why? Of course, the same thing. The patterned robe. A square of cloth, from the same bolt from which she had made the robe, only last week, hung impaled on the farthest bush.
Farthest? Nearest! Nearest to the door of the house, from which the strange footprints curved down and off-scene.
Half the wall was filled now. Inch by slow fraction of inch the scene widened. She sat forward, breathing almost not at all, tensed with knowing the next print, or the one beyond it, would contain the print-maker, the — alien.
Alien? What an odd thought! That was the second — the third? — time she'd thought it. She did not remember the thought from the first seeing of the same scene. "Strange," maybe. "Unknown." Not "alien."
Odd . . . odder still, as her eyes went unwillingly from the forming print at the far edge of the scene, she saw her own sandal alongside the trail, silly spike heel and lacy strap, still fastened as it had been on her foot.
That wasn't just odd. It was wrong! And the torn strip of fabric ripped from her robe by the thornbush —
"That's not how it was! That's not the way it went," she thought, and the scene faded out.
The light brightened in the room as the wall came back to normality, and she realized that she had not just thought it, but spoken aloud.
"This is his, remember?" Gordon was smiling. "Only the very first frame is identical. It starts branching off right away. The colors, for instance?"
Ruth thought back and of course he was right. Hers had been much yellower. Pink sand was absurd.
She laughed out loud, at the absurdity of thinking anything in the projection absurd. Then she explained. "Pink sand. I was thinking how silly that was, and then I remembered that mine had little pink clouds floating over my pure yellow desert! Why on Earth do you think he'd have pink sand, though?"
Gordon smiled again as she realized how her own question had answered itself. ". . . On Earth . . ." she had said. Of course. Why should it be Earth at all?
With the questioning thought came concern. Why had hers been on Earth? Did that mean . . .? Were they showing her Charles' sequence just to explain, in the kindest way, why she failed?
She wouldn't finish the thoughts, even in her own head. But Gordon was chuckling quietly as he watched her. Of course he knew what had been crossing her—face, she decided, as well as her mind! Other people had been through this whole thing before. Half of them must have gone through the same thoughts.
Half of them would have been worried ... and how many of them had good cause to be?
"Relax, Ruth," he said warmly. "You haven't failed or passed yet. There's a lot more to it than the sequence. But I can tell you that it makes no difference where you make the setting, or when. At least —" he frowned faintly, and she knew it was impatience with his own imprecision in a vital communication. "At least, it makes no more difference — and no less —than your choice of colors or textures. A good bit less difference than clothing, for instance."
She looked at him gratefully.
"All right," she said. "I'll try to forget my own sequence."
"The best way is just to let yourself go, as completely as you can. There's no harm in being aware of the difference, just so you aren't contrasting. It won't rationalize. But you don't have to stop being you to be him for a while, you know." He smiled again.
She nodded and grinned. Some things did not have to be verbalized.
She shivered and settled back, ready to watch — to feel, to know, be, exist — in his mind and body.
Gordon didn't say any more. The room dimmed again, and once more the misting wall focused the scene.
When it had covered the wall, Ruth had forgotten that there was a wall there at all. Or that she was herself.
More completely than ever before, or again (unless and until they fused to a new person, their child) she was one with the man who had made her his own.
The trail of prints led tantalizingly out of sight, curving away behind a low ridge of dunes. Unless the creature, whatever it was, moved much more swiftly than the prints promised, it had been more than a few minutes since it happened.
He looked again at her slipper dropped on its side in the sand. The first glimpse had been more incongruous than anything else. The alienness of the prints contrasted ridiculously with the spiced femininity of Ruth's shoe on the orange-pink sand. Now it seemed to him that the slipper was not dropped but thrown. Or kicked.
Kicked off her foot? For the first time, fear grabbed him, a clawed fist of ice in his belly that turned him to look again at the bright rainbow of stuff draped and torn on the edge of the bush near the door. It was part of the skirt of the new robe, the one she made herself last week, after he noticed the new fabric in the shop window. He had liked it; so she had bought it and fashioned it into a garment to please him. Now it hung cruelly torn by spiked thorns. And she
He tore himself loose from the immobility of anxiety, and ran for the house. Somewhere in back of his mind the question was registered: What shop? Where? The nearest shop was forty million miles away. The question was registered, filed, and ticketed for later thought.
Right now he could not even stop to wonder why he had not noticed the door before. He had to have seen it, when he saw the bush. How do you not notice that the thick door of a pressure hut has been torn loose from its hinges? What kind of wild man speculates about his wife's robe when his home, in which he left her safe and protected, no more than five hours ago, has been violated?
That was a dangerous word. He unthought it, and the red haze cleared away. He could see again.
"Ruth!" he shouted. "Ruth!"
No answer. He had known there could not be one. "Ruth!" he kept shouting to thin-aired emptiness inside the dome that had been — five short hours ago — rich with Earth air and scents, sounds and solidity: Ruth.
His gun hung by the door. It had been a joke, he remembered. Pioneers ought to keep a gun by the front door. Damn right they should! He grabbed it as he ran, stride unbroken. He tore off down the trail of the monstrous prints, past the bushes and the sandal, fifty feet more. His lungs were on fire inside him. He would have cursed in his futility, but there was no strength or breath for self-anger; not even, just now, for anger better placed. It was not even possible now to run back to the copter. He had wasted too much strength. He had to drag himself full length along the sand, catching and holding the thin concentration of lichen's oxygen at the sand surface.
Inside the copter, lungs full again, he was coasting along fifteen feet above the prints of horned three-toed feet. He had time enough, and more than he wanted, to think and to question his idiocies. As if he had forgotten where he was. At the first hint of danger they faced he went into shock. As if he were back on Earth, wrapped in her warm air, strong-armed gravity.
Ancestral memories reacting for him in moment of panic? He sneered back at himself for that kind of excuse. The only part that applied was the single word, "panic."
He'd panicked. Okay. Don't forget it, boy. But don't let it slow you down, either. File for future reference. Take it out and examine it — later. Meantime, what counts is down there. Right now, you're just a pair of eyes. Later you may get to be arms and legs, a back, if you're lucky a gun. Right now — just eyes. And a computer.
He studied the prints. Two-footed or four? He couldn't decide — and then he saw the pattern, and it was not two or four, but three. Three? Distribute N pounds of weight — divided at any time on two of three feet, in prints that each dug in deeper than his own foot would, with his full weight on it. The damn thing was big. N pounds was too many.
That didn't make sense. What kind of Thing made prints like that on Mars? On a planet whose largest life-form was adapted to breathing air no more than two feet above ground? And even those didn't cross desert dryness. They lived in the still thinly moist and green valley of old sea bottoms.
The error was obvious. What kind of creature could make a print like a man's, on Mars? Largest native life-form, he had meant. So this Thing, with three-toed, three-legged stride, hard-bottomed foot digging too deep in dry sand, had a stride barely more than a man's, one meter maybe from print to print along the trail. It was not long enough to be that heavy. Not man, not Martian. Something else.
Alien.
He tried to think more, but either there were no more clues or the block was too great. Alien, from where? No way to know. What for? Where to? Why? When?
For the moment, the "when" was what counted the most. Whatever and whyever, It had Ruth with It. Was she still alive? Did she have an oxytank?
He tried to remember, aside from the door, what signs of violence, struggle or damage he'd seen in the house. He remembered none. The door, the robe and the slipper. That was all.
Ten minutes after the copter lifted, he came to the first rock outcroppings. For a while after that he could still follow the trail without too much trouble. The creature tended to stay on the sand-drifted crevices between hills. There were still plenty of prints clear enough to be seen from the height he had to maintain to stay clear of the jagged-edged, sand-scoured shapes of bare hilltops. But as the ground level rose, there was less and less sand between rocks to catch imprints, and it was more difficult to peer down and navigate at the same time.
Hard to say if he would be better off on the ground. He could spend hours trying wrong passages, backing and trying again, to search out the scattered prints that made the only trail now. Circling above, he could save time — maybe. Certainly, if he could stay in the air, he kept an advantage he'd never have face to face. (Face to chest? belly? thigh? No way at all to judge relative height.) Not to mention armament, general equipment. Inside the copter, he had the distilled and neatly packaged essence of Earth technology to fight for him. On foot in the hills, with whatever he could carry on his own back —?
It was obvious he had no choice. He had just noticed the time. Twilight would fall fast and dark across him in a half hour or less. Moonless, or as good as moonless, dark would follow short minutes after. The kind of cross-eyed trail-following and peak-hopping he could barely manage in sun light would then be impossible. Find a place where he could land, then. Now, quickly, while he still could.
The copter dropped, and he found a ledge just firm and wide enough. Charles went methodically through lockers, picking and choosing, till at last he had a pile he thought he could manage, with all the essentials, in one form or other.
Searchlight, rope, hand pickaxe, knife. Pistol-grip torch, which he thought of as a flame thrower. Plain old pistol. Extra airtank. Extra mask. Light warm blanket. Bullets, and gas for the torch. Food concentrates. Two water flasks. He climbed into his heat suit, discarded the blanket, and took her suit instead. He had thought to make a knapsack of the blanket, carrying the rest of the stuff on his back, but that was silly. He had to be able to get at whatever he needed, but fast. He got out a package of clip-back hooks and studded his suit with them, hanging himself like a grim Christmas tree inside-out: bright flame-red suit underneath; dull gray, brown and black tanks, handles, tools and weapons dangling all around.
He practiced bending over, sitting, squatting, reaching. He could climb. Okay. The weight was going to be hard to handle, but not impossible.
He added one more airtank, and one more flask. If it all got too heavy, he could leave a trail of his own behind him. At least the stuff would be nearer than here in the copter. He was half out of the hatch when he remembered it: The first aid kit.
He started into the hills with his searchlight flooding the pass at his feet just as darkness collapsed from the sky. He wondered as he stumbled forward and up — following an edge of toe here, of heel there — what else he had not thought to take.
Then the glare of light glinted off redness on rockside. A smear, that's all. Red blood. Not alien. Ruth's!
His gloved hand reached out, and the red smudged. Still wet? Impossible. In this atmosphere, the seconds they'd need to get out of sight would have dried blood. He looked closely at his gauntlet and moved forward more swiftly, with an exultation of knowledge and purpose he had not dared let himself hold until then. It was not blood. It was spilled red powder. Rouge! She was alive, able to think, to act! She knew he would have to come after, and she was helping by leaving a trail.
He no longer followed footprints. He followed the crimson trail blazes. And wondered how far back they'd started, how much time he might have gained had he abandoned the copter sooner.
No use wondering. No use thinking back. Now it was only the next moment and the next. Was he gaining or losing? This he had to know. He was traveling at his best speed. He went faster. If he lost ground now, he had no chance. The creature was making a path as straight as the hard rockside hills would permit; It knew where It was headed. The Thing could not climb, that was clear, so It would not have gone through the hills without cause. But wherever It was headed, presumably that spot offered It some protection. He had to find It and head It off first.
He found he could go faster still. And then, suddenly, he knew he'd better slow down. It was nothing he'd seen — surely nothing he'd heard. Inside the suit hood, even such sounds as carried through the thin air were stilled. Well, then.
He opened the mask, and he did hear. Maybe it was some vibration of the Thing's tread through the rock that had warned him first. Well, he would not give himself away by the same carelessness. He knew he was very close to It now.
He moved so carefully after that, it seemed agonizingly as if he were once more crawling belly-flat. But he knew he was gaining on them. The Thing was really slow!
He was close. Fool! he thought angrily, as he switched his light off. Creep up on the Thing with a searchlight to flood the scene in advance! The suit had an infrascope in the visor. He'd have had to close it soon anyhow. Five minutes was about maximum breathing without a tank; unless you cared to drag yourself flat as he'd done earlier.
The black-light scope came on. Charles paused with a new certainty under an overhang of rock at the next bend. And saw the Thing. And his wife.
He noticed, in a detached and extremely calm way, that what happened next all happened in seconds. Maybe a minute at most. No more, because with the sharp self-awareness exploding inside him, he could count his breaths while he did all the rest.
He inhaled exactly three times — deeply, evenly — while it occurred.
Before the first breath, there was again the ice-fingered grip of fear twisting his gut, squeezing the strength and air out of him.
He inhaled then. And let the retinal image go to his brain, instead of his belly.
It was twice the height of a man, weirdly elongated, the tripod base all ropy tendon, thin and hard. The trunk —thorax? — chest? — well, whatever, shelled or spacesuited or something, but shiny-hard — bulked enormous, four feet around surely at the center. At least four. And the Thing's head was turned just far enough to the side so that Charles could see clearly that his wife's face was in the gaping, reptilian maw of the Thing.
It held her under one arm. Her feet kicked at It's side. It seemed not to notice. Her arm, with the bright metal cosmetic case clutched in her hand, swung wide, reaching to hit the canyon wall whenever it could. Her head was half into the creature's mouth, firmly held, chin and forehead, by It's enormous stretched lips.
While he drew in the first breath, he saw all this clearly and knew he dared not act in such a way as to make It bite down — from fear or anger, made no difference. Charles could not see inside the great maw. What kind of teeth, what harm had been done, what could be done, he did not know . . . and knew he could not risk. He thought through and rejected five separate plans, while his hands found the items he'd need. He drew a new breath, and his legs moved beneath him.
He could not shoot first. And he could not simply follow and learn more about the Thing. Because another image came through from somewhere — the same eyes that watched every move of the Thing? Unlikely, but it had to be — of the gleaming column of metal too close ahead. A Thing-ship. So: no time.
He leaped, knife in hand. Pricked the creature, and jumped back.
It worked, as he'd prayed; no; as he had known, not just hoped or prayed, that it must. The Thing jumped, turned to look — and released his wife's head.
He did not waste effort in looking, but saw anyhow that her face was unharmed. He jumped again, drawing the third breath, and pricked at the arm that held her. She squirmed and pushed, exactly on time, like a part of himself — which she was — and her body was clear of his as he emptied the pistol at It's head.
He reached for the torch.
By that time he could not stop himself. He would have avoided the torch if he could. As it was he thundered at Ruth, above the explosion: Down! Keep down, babe!" And the blue flame of released oxygen missed her head by a foot …
He carried her back to the copter with strength he had not believed he could find. Nobody pursued.
She sat up, dazed, as the lights brightened slowly, and the white wall turned serenely opaque. She looked across at Gordon, and her face glowed with pleasure.
"No sillier than mine was," she said, laughing. "Was it?" "Not at all," Gordon said.
She sat politely, waiting.
Gordon stood up, grinned down at her, and offered his hand. "I think they must be done in there," he told her, nodding in the direction of the screenwall. "I imagine you'd like . . ." He let it trail off.
"You're a smart old thing, aren't you?" She took the hand and came to her feet. Then, on impulse, astonished at herself, she stood on tiptoe and placed a quick kiss on his cheek.
"What's more, you're a doll." She turned and ran, glad but embarrassed.
The door closed behind her. A mirrored door on the opposite wall opened, and a young man entered. Gordon greeted him warmly. "Well — what did you think?" His own enthusiasm was unmistakable.
"Outside of it being a great racket? Do they all react that way?"
"Well, not all. Matter of fact, this pair is practically classical. You don't often get a mesh like this one — you saw hers, didn't you?"
"I don't think so," the other said. "Unless it was one of the bunch you ran for us last night?"
"Could be. She worked out a sort of a junior-size Tyrannosaur. Out of Professor Challenger maybe? Future-past uncertainty, here on Earth. Had it threaten the children, and just when she was about to sacrifice herself to save them, old Charlie showed up in the nick of time to do the slaying."
The other nodded. "It's a fascinating technique," he said. "Damn glad to have this chance to see it work. One thing I don't follow — why do you show them each other's? That's pretty much against basic theory on joint therapy, isn't it?"
Gordon was smiling again. "Well," he said slowly. "This pair didn't really take the runs for therapy." He had a surprise to spring, and he was enjoying it. "You've heard about the new screening technique for colonists? You know the last expedition had only one broken couple and two psychotic collapses, out of fifty-six?"
The younger man whistled. Then he understood. "This is how you're doing it? Let them fantasy their own reactions? Well, hell. Sure! What's surprising is, nobody thought of using it before!"
"Of course not. It was right under our noses," Gordon said.
They both laughed.
"In this case," he added, "we've got everything. His sequence stressed readiness, thoughtful preparation, careful action. You saw that. Hers was strongest on instinct, physical wisdom, that whole set. He was moved to do things he couldn't possibly do — and knows he can't, by the way — in real life, because she was in danger. Her stimulus was a threat to home and children. And even then, she made sure he did the actual dragon-slaying job." He flicked a switch. Through the wall, now, they saw Ruth and Charles, standing, holding hands, smiling and squeezing a little. That was all.
The two doctors smiled as the paleskinned, ninety-five-pound, five-foot product of slum-crowded Earth threw a proud arm around his wife's narrow shoulder, and led her out.
"Doesn't look like much of a dragon-slayer," the younger one said.
"No. But as long as he is . . . " He paused, looked the visitor over with care, and said. "You asked about showing them to each other? Ever think how much more therapy there might be for him in knowing she knows he can handle a dragon? Or for her, knowing that he really can?"
Dragon was another "cover story", for Galaxy, in 1963. It is worth noting, perhaps, that the idea of using a projected image as a sort of super-Rorschach basis for the colonists' tests stemmed directly from the event that I myself was doing just that, writing the story around the cover-painting which depicted the opening scene of the "test".
Whoever You Are
THIS IS A love story. That is to say, it is a story of the greatest need and greatest fear men know. It is also a story of conquest and defeat, of courage and cowardice, and the heroism that is a product of both of them. It begins in security and isolation; it ends in victory and desecration. Whoever you are, this story has happened to you already, and will again. Whoever you are, however you live, you are writing the ending to the story with every breath you take, with every move you make.
In the cabin of the Service rocket, Scanliter Six, Sergeant Bolster and his new crewman, Pfc. Joe Fromm, were playing checkers. It was the bored third day of a routine one-week tour of duty on the Web, checking the activities of the scanner-satellites that held the tight-woven mesh of e-m-g in a hollow sphere of protective power cast around the System.
Fromm studied the board soberly, sighed, and moved a man into unavoidable trouble. Bolster smiled, and both of them looked up momentarily as they heard the click of the keys cutting tape on the receiver.
The sergeant returned his attention to the checker board, and jumped two men before he bothered to look up at the viewer. He saw a streak of light move upward and across the screen in a wide expected curve, from right to left; reached over to inspect the fresh-cut tape, and grunted approval.
"BB-3, coming in at 26°, 13', 37", all correct," he said. "Check 'em off, Joe. "That's nine, thirty-eight, and oneoh-seven at the point of entry. All in correlation. Transmission clear. It's your move."
Fromm picked up the clipboard with the scanlite-station checkoff chart, and marked three tiny squares with his initials, almost without looking. He was still staring at the view-screen, empty now of everything but the distant specks of light that were the stars.
"Hey," Bolster said again. "It's your move."
Joe Fromm didn't even hear him. The scanner outside completed its revolution around the small ship, and .. there it was again! The flaring trail of rockets traveled across the screen, independent of the up-and-down motion of the revolving scanner.
The sergeant grunted again. "What's the matter? Didn't you ever see one home before?"
"That's the first," Fromm said without turning. "Shouldn't we be recording the tape?"
"Not yet." Bolster surveyed the checker board sadly; he'd have a king on the next move . . . if Fromm ever made another move. "All we got now is radar-recog. Then . . . there you are . . ." He nodded at the renewed clacking of the keys. "That'll be the code-dope coming in. Then we wait till after it hits detection, and we get the last OK, before we send the tape to the Post."
He explained it all dutifully just the same. It used to be when they sent a new man out, they at least took him on a practice tour first. "Look, make a move will you? You got a whole year here to sit and look at 'em come in."
With difficulty, the Pfc. took his eyes off the viewer, touch a piece on the board at random, and pushed it forward, leaving Bolster with the choice of a three-man jump to nowhere, or the one-man jump that would net him his king. The private leaned forward to finger the tape as it emerged from the receiver, reading off the replies to code-dope demands, and signal responses, with a certain reverent intensity. "Did you ever see an illegal entry?" he asked. "I mean an attempt? Somebody told me there was one on this sect . . ."
At that instant the BB-3 hit the detector field awaiting it at the point of entry on the Web, and generated mechanical panic in an entire sequence of scanlite instruments. Synchronized pulses from the three scanlite stations circling the point of entry transmitted their frustration in the face of the unprecedented and unpredicted; and the tape in the cabin of Scanliter Six vibrated out of the recorder under the furious impact of the chattering keys.
Alarm bells began to shrill: first in the small cabin, directly over the sergeant's head; then in similar cabins on four other Scanliter rockets within range; finally, about two minutes later, in the Exec Office at Phobos Post, which was the nearest Solar Defense base to the point of entry at the time.
Pfc. Joe Fromm stopped his hesitant query in mid-word, feeling vaguely guilty for having brought the subject up. Sergeant Bolster knocked over the checker board reaching for the tape. He read it, paled visibly, passed it across to the private, and started transmitting to the Post almost at the same instant.
On Phobos, a Signal Tech. depressed three levers on his switchboard before he stopped to wonder what was wrong. Green alarm meant emergency calls to the O.D., Psychofficer, and P.R. Chief. The Tech. sent out the summons, then stopped to read the tape.
DYTEKTR FYLD RYPORT: BB-3 EM RADASHNZ INDKAT ALYN LIF—RYPYT ALYN LIF UBORD. RYPT: DYTEKTR FYLD RYPORT VIA SKANLITS 9-38-107 TU SKANLITR 6 SHOZ NO UMN LIF UBORD BB-3.
BOLSTER, SGT/SKNR 6
By the time the Phobos Post Commander got up from his dinner table, the Psychofficer put down the kitten he was playing with, and the Public Relations Deputy pushed back the stool at her dressing table, the crews of all five
Scanliters within range of the point of entry, as well as the Signals Tech. on Phobos, knew all the pertinent details of what had occurred.
The Baby Byrd III, a five-man starscout, under command of Captain James Malcolm, due back after almost a full year out of System, had approached a point of entry just outside the orbit of Saturn on the electromagneto-gravitic Web of force that surrounded the Solar System. It had signalled the correct radar recognition pattern, and replied to the challenge of the scanlite stations circling the point of entry with the anticipated code responses. Accordingly, the point had been softened to permit entry of the ship, and a standard detector set up around the soft spot.
Thus far, it was routine homecoming for a starscout. It was only when the BB-3 entered the detector field that the automatics on the scanner-satellite stations began to shrill the alarms for human help. The field registered no human electro-magnetic emanations on board the BB-3. The e-m pattern it got was undoubtedly alive ... and just as undeniably alien.
For the third time in the history of the Web, an attempt at entry had been made by unauthorized aliens; and those aliens were apparently in sole possession of a Solar starscout. The third attempt . . . and the third failure: the BB-3 was already secured in a slightly intensified smaller sphere of the same e-m-g mesh that made up the Web, suspended at midpoint between the three circling scanlite stations.
Eternal vigilance is most assuredly the price of the peace of the womb. The membrane of force that guarded the System from intrusion had, in turn, to be guarded and maintained by the men who lived within it. The scanner-satellites were as nearly infallible as a machine can be; they might have run effectively for centuries on their own very slowly diminishing feedback-power systems. But man's security was too precious a thing to trust entirely to the products of man's ingenuity. Each year a new group of the System's youth was called to Service, and at the end of the year, a few were chosen from among the volunteers to man the Scanliters that serviced the satellite stations which comprised the Web.
For even the most adventurous of youths, one further year of Scanliting was usually enough; they came back from their fifty tours Outside prepared to keep their feet on solid ground, and to forget the brief experience of facing the unknown. But each year, too, there were a few of them who learned to crave the intoxication of danger, who could no longer be content to settle back into the warm security of the System. It was these warped veterans of the Web who became Byrdmen.
Secure within the womb-enclosure of the Web, five billion Solar citizens could wreak their wills upon their little worlds, and carry on the ever more complex design for nourishment of all the intra-System castes and categories.
Outside, the emissaries of mankind streaked through the heavens on their chariots of fire, spreading the Solar culture through galactic space, spawning the seeds of men between the stars. First went the Baby Byrds, to scout new lands beyond the farthest outposts; then the Byrds, with their full complements of scientists, and giant laboratories, to test the promise of the newly-charted planets; and after them, the giant one-way starships went.
Somehow there were always just enough bold desperate souls, yearning for danger and ready to die for a dream, to fill the human cargo-couches of the colony ships: the Mayflowers and Livingstons and Columbos that left the safety of the Web forever to fix new germ-cells of humanity on far-flung planets in the speckled skies.
Inside the Web, on four inhabited planets and half a thousand habitable asteroids, men lived in the light of the sun by day, and drew their warmth and power from it. By night, they turned to rest at peace; each one under his own sector of the high-domed sky, the hollow sphere of force through which no alien source of light could penetrate and still retain identity.
The Web glowed always with the mingled and diffracted energy of all the universe Outside; no photon passed its portals, no smallest particle of energy came through without the necessary pause for hail-and-password that maintained the calm security of the Web's inner light.
Scanliter Six was already proceeding at full speed toward the trapped BB, acting on normal emergency procedures, when the keys taped out the order from Commander Harston on Phobos post to do just that. No stars showed on the viewer; they had stopped the rotation of the scanner and the screen held a steady picture of the three Scanlite stations with a fuzzy hump in the center that was too bright to look at comfortably. Scanner rays could not possibly penetrate the thick field that held the BB-3 suspended in the Web.
"Well," Bolster said sourly. "Here's your chance to be a hero, kid."
Joe Fromm knew it was childish of him to be excited. He tried not to look interested. "Yeah?" he said.
"Yeah. What happens now is, we get there and code in that the situation is as reported. Then the brass has a conference and they decide somebody has got to investigate, so they ask for volunteers. We're the laddies on the spot. The other boys are all on Stand-by according to this. . . ."
He waved the orders tape at Fromm, who caught it and read it through carefully.
"And if we were on Stand-by instead of Proceed, you know what we'd be doing right now?" the sergeant went on, enjoying his own discomfort as loudly as possible. "I'll tell you what. We'd be standing all right, right smack where we were when the tape came in. Not one second closer."
"Stand-by is supposed to mean that you get into the best position for observation," the Pfc. recited.
"Sure. The best position for observation, kid, is in-scan and out of blowup range. So you take your choice: you stay where you are when the tape comes in, or you back out as far as you can and stay in-scan. Anyhow, we're the boys on the spot, see? They're going to want a volunteer to board the Beebee, and I got a hunch," he finished with a faint note of hope, "that I might come out of this in one piece just on account of you are probably going to want to be a hero."
"Could be," Fromm said nonchalantly. "You're senior; after all, it's your privilege."
He was delighted that he managed to keep a poker face throughout the statement
Joe Fromm stepped out of the airlock into space, and let himself float free, orienting, for a slow count of five. He had done it a hundred times and more in drill, but it felt different now. As in the drill, he made a routine extra check of his equipment: tank, jetter, axe, welder, magnograpple mechitape recorder, (no radio in an insul-suit), knife, gun, signal mirror, medikit. All OK.
He set the jet at gentle and squirted off toward the glowing ball of force that held the starscout. Two more squirts, and he was as close as he could get. He flashed the mirror twice at Bolster in the Scanliter, to start the passageway in the sphere opening. This was the last contact till he came out again. If he ...
If I come out again . . . he thought the whole phrase through deliberately, and was surprised at the way his mind accepted the possibility, and dismissed it. He felt tremendously alive, almost as if each separate cell was tingling with some special vigor and awareness. And in the center of it all, in some hidden part of himself, he was dead calm, almost amused. Was this what they called courage?
He flashed the mirror again. Bolster was certainly taking his time. All he had to do was throw a switch. Fromm began flashing angry code with the mirror and kept it up, knowing Bolster couldn't answer and rejoicing in the knowledge, until he saw the opening appear in the ball of force, and begin to expand.
Then he realized it wasn't simply throwing a switch. Once the passageway-mechanism was put into operation, it had to keep going on its own, opening and closing at intervals so as to permit him egress, and still not let enough e-m-g through in either direction to disturb the power-stasis inside. It took only a little bit of computer work . . . but quite a bit more intricate checking of the relays, to make certain the automatics would not fail.
He had to hold himself back to keep from diving through as soon as the hole was as big as his suit . . . but he waited, as he had been trained to do, until it stopped enlarging. The computer knew better than he did how much space he needed.
Then he squirted forward and through. The BB looked strange, hanging there in the middle of nothing, with an air of polite impatience, waiting to finish its passage into the System.
Joe grinned, and duly spoke his thought out loud for the record. "Every single thing that passes through your head," they'd said over and over again in school. "When you're on any kind of solo operation, you want to be sure the guy who takes over knows everything you did, no matter how crazy it seems. An idea that doesn't connect for you could make sense to him."
So Joe Fromm told the mechitape attachment on' his suit that the starscout looked impatient. He kept talking, describing his actions and thoughts and emotions, as he approached the ship cautiously, and opened the outer lock door. More waiting, and he informed the tape that the air lock was in operating condition.
Then he was in the ship, and omitted to mention in his running commentary that he was scared silly. Down the corridor ... open the cabin doors one at a time ... empty, empty . . . not empty. Go on in, Joe; he's out cold; couldn't hurt a fly.
"One of the aliens is in this cabin. This is the third door I have opened, second cabin to the right going down the corridor from the lock to Control . . . he's either dead or unconscious . . . hope they're all like that . he's big . . . hope they're not all like that. Maybe ten feet tall, sort of curled up on the bunk, might have been asleep." Might still be, might wake up.
He gulped and decided he'd better put it on record. "Might still . . ." No, that was foolish. These characters had registered e.m. radiations on the instruments in the stations. They couldn't stay conscious inside the e.m.g. field without insul-suits. Anything strong enough to stop a BB in its tracks would stop a man too.
But it's not a man; it's . . . "It's definitely humanoid . . . hard to believe any alien creatures could evolve so much like humans. No tenacles, nothing like that. Arms and hands look like ours . . . fingers too. He's wearing some kind of robe . . . hard to get it loose with these gloves on, can't see the legs for sure, but the arms are human all right. Face is different, something funny about the mouth, sort of pursed-up-looking. Closed, can't see the inside ... guess I can try and open it ... no, later, maybe. I better take a look around. Anyhow, this guy is a lot like you and me only almost twice as big. Not very hairy, dark skin, big black eyes . . . how can anything that's not human have eyes that look at you like that, even when he's out cold? I don't know ... going out now, next cabin, second door on the left .. .
"Here's another one . . . on the floor this time, kind of crumpled up . . . must have been standing when the field hit, and fell down. Nothing new here . . . wait a minute, this fella must have cut his hand on something when he fell . . . yeah, there's an open locker door, with an edge. Blood is dried, looks like it's a lot darker than ours, but it's crazy how human it looks anyhow . . . Going out again now ... in the corridor, no more doors here . . ."
There were two more of them in the control room: one strapped in the pilot's seat, squeezed in really; he just about could make it. The other was slumped over the solar analog computer.
"Looks like he was checking the landing data," Fromm reported. "These guys sure were confident. Two of 'em off shift when they were coming in, and everything set for a normal landing. Didn't they figure on any trouble at all? They should have realized they couldn't just sit down on one of our planets. Hell, they knew about the Web; they gave the code-dope straight, and they decelerated to approach, and had the correct angle . . . I don't get it ... Here goes once around the room now. I will check all instruments.
"Starting from the door, and turning right: Star-chart microviewer intact and operating, films filed properly, I think. Won't take time to check them all now, but they look right. . . . Radio desk appears in normal condition for use, can't test. .. . Space suit locker is full of strange stuff, will come back to examine. . . . analog comps come next; this guy is sprawled all over them. . ."
He followed his nose around the cylindrical room, till he came back to the door again. Everything was, or seemed to be, in good working order. A few adjustments had been made in levers and handholds, to fit the aliens' larger hands; otherwise, virtually nothing had been touched except for normal use.
"Okay, I guess I better start on the locker now. . . ." But he didn't want to; he felt suddenly tired. Not scared any more . . . maybe that was it. Now he knew he was safe, and there weren't any booby traps or anything seriously wrong, he was feeling the strain. Let Bolster do some work too, he thought angrily, and almost said it out loud for the tape. Then he realized that his sudden pique was really just weariness, and at the same time he became acutely aware of hunger and an even more pressing biological urge. Time to go home, Joe. Always leave the party early, that's how to stay popular.
He ought at least to get the robe off one of the creatures first, and make sure about their anatomy, but he had an odd reluctance to do it. They were too human . . . it seemed as if it wasn't fair somehow to go poking around under their clothes.
Hell! Let Bolster do it! He left the ship.
Alone in the Scanliter, Joe Fromm played his mechitape into the permanent recorder, and turned up the volume so he could hear it himself, and get everything clear for his report to Phobos. Some of the stuff sounded crazy, but he could tell what part was fact and what was just his own imagination. He chewed on a pencil end, and occasionally noted down something he should be sure to remember.
Altogether, composing the report was more painful than visiting the ship had been. He had just started putting it onto the transmitter when he saw the indicater for the outer lock light up. Bolster sure hadn't stayed on that ship long! He felt better now about coming back himself.
The sergeant came inside shedding his insul-suit, and bursting with excitement.
"You should of looked in that locker, kid!" He was triumphant. "Anyway, it's a good thing for me you didn't. This is the kind of good luck bonuses are made of." He removed an envelope carefully from the storage pocket on the outside of the suit. "Got your stuff in yet? I want to shoot this to them fast!"
"I just started . . ." Fromm said.
"Well, we'll flash this, and you can finish up afterwards."
He handed the envelope to the younger man, and started climbing out of the leg pieces of the suit. "Go on! Read it, man!"
Fromm opened the flap and unfolded a piece of official Service stationary. To whom it may concern; it said on top, and then right underneath: To the Staff Officers of Solar Defense:
"The other men have asked me to write this message, and I guess I can do it all right, but I'm afraid I'll have to be pretty informal. I've tried to write it up in military report style, only it's just not the kind of thing that Service language fits.
"For one thing, the very first line of the report form stopped me, because we don't know where we are. Only the Captain knew our orders and he's dead now, and we couldn't find his log, or any of his papers, anywhere in the ship.
"We've set a course for the big fellas by backtracking on the analog comps. That means it will take them almost as long to get back as it took us to get there, but that's just as well, because it will bring them in about the time our tour is due up, and maybe that'll make it easier for them to get in.
"We've done our best to explain to them all the dangers involved—not being sure of the course, even, and being pretty sure you folks won't let them through. But we can't talk to them as easy as they talk to us. We can get over general ideas all right, and any kind of thought that has a solid object nearby to attach to, but the idea of people, of humans that is, not wanting to let them into the System—well, even if we talked the same language ... that is, if they talked a language at all that we could learn ... I don't think they could understand that idea.
"I'm not going to try to tell you anything about them because if they get far enough to show you this, they can explain everything themselves. This message is just to let you know that the four of us are here, safe and sound, and staying behind of our own free will. Since Captain Malcolm's suicide, there's nobody to order us home, and we like it here. Besides, there isn't room enough in the BB for more than five people—humans, I mean—or four of them (they need more food). And they want to send four along on the trip; I think they picked out their leading scientists in different fields, so they can get as much information as possible, and be able to answer your questions.
"I don't know. Probably a Psychofficer or some of our scientists will be able to communicate better with them on this kind of thing. We get along fine for everyday purposes, but you see, I'm not even sure what kind of scientists they're sending.
"The only thing the others and I are sure of, and that's what this message is for, is that you can trust these big fellas up to the limit. They've treated us fine, and they ... well, it's a funny way to put it, but "like" isn't strong enough . . . they just seem to love everybody, humans as well as their own kind.
"We will wait here for further orders. You can probably figure out where we are from the analog comp records.
"Respectfully yours,
"George Gentile, Byrdman 1st Class,
and on behalf of
"Johann Grauber By/2
Tsin Lao-Li, By/2
Arne Carlsen, By/ 3."
"I did a tour of duty with Jim Malcolm once," the Commander said slowly. "He was a pretty good guy. I ... liked him. It's hard to think of him committing suicide. I wish this Gentile had been a little more specific."
Lucille Ardin, Public Relations Deputy at Phobos Post, skimmed the message tape rapidly, and passed it along to the Psychofficer. She cocked one feathery eyebrow cynically. "These boys just don't make sense," she said. "They've been sold something all right . . . but what?"
The Commander shook his head, waiting for Dr. Schwartz to finish reading. "Well, Bob?" he said, as soon as the Psychofficer looked up. "What do you think?"
"I'd like to see that log," Schwartz said thoughtfully. "So would I!" Commander William Hartson had earned his position as Assistant Chief of Staff for Solar Defense. He was that rare thing: an officer admired equally by the general public and by the men who worked under him. At sixty-eight years of age, he was still in the prime of health and vitality—but old enough to have seen his fill of violence, danger, and death. He was decisive in action; but a decision involving the lives of others would be made with care.
Bob Schwartz had worked with Hartson long enough to understand these things. "This Captain . . . ?" he asked, "Malcolm? Would you say he was ... well, a fairly typical line officer?"
The Commander permitted himself a faint smile. "'Trying to figure the 'military mind' again, Bob? As a matter of fact, I think Jim Malcolm is—was one of the few officers who'd fit your picture pretty well. Courage, devotion, precision—a stubborn s.o.b., who went by the rule book himself and figured everybody else could do at least as much . . . but the kind who'd lay down his life for his Service without thinking twice. It's just suicide that doesn't make sense...."
Harston's voice broke off, and for a moment the only sound in the room was the shuffling of paper. Schwartz still held the message tape, running it through his fingers as if the feel of it would somehow help him to understand its meaning better. Lucy Ardin pushed away the pad on which she'd been scribbling Hartson's explanation of the forcesphere that was holding the BB-3 captive and its alien crew unconscious.
"God, what a story!" she whispered reverently into the silence. She ground out a half-smoked cigarette in the Commander's big ash-tray, and stood up; the silver-sequinned dinner gown in which she'd answered the alarm glittered painfully under the overhead light. It was entirely typical of Lucy that when the call-bell rang in her bedroom, she had pushed back the stool from her dressing table without taking even the extra instant's time to complete the slash of crimson on her lips. Then picking up the portfolio that was always ready for use, she had arrived at the Exec Office, with the lipsticking finished en route, within seconds after the two men who lived on the Post.
"All right," she said briskly. "What happens now? We stitch up some six-tentacled strait-jackets and make our visitors nice and safe, then we take the field off and haul 'em down? Where to? What do we do with them afterwards? Who gets to interview them?"
The Psychofficer looked up sharply, and Hartson chuckled. "Relax, Bob. I'm afraid it's our baby all the way down the line. I wish I was looking forward to it like you two are. I have a hunch it may turn out to be something of a mess. . . . The aliens, by the way, are humanoid, Miss Ardin. Perhaps you'd like to see the tape again? I believe there's a detailed description . . . hey Bob? You're done with it, aren't you?"
"Sorry." Schwartz handed it to the girl, and snapped out of his abstracted mood. "Is it safe to leave them in the stasis a little longer, Bill?" he asked.
"Can't say for sure. With humans, twelve hours doesn't do any harm. These fellas may be dead already for all we know. Best we can do is assume they react like us."
"It seems to me that log must be somewhere on the ship," the Psychofficer said. "If there's time, I think it might be a good idea to try and find it—before we decide anything. A man like Malcolm would have made sure the papers were safe, if he had any way to do it at all."
"You're right." Hartson, too, came up from his reflections and sprang into action. "You're damned right! If it's there we can find it. And if we can't—well, that's an answer too!"
Joe Fromm went back to the BB-3 with two other men from the stand-in Scanliters that had now been ordered up to assist. Between them, they searched the Byrd from nose to nozzles, and behind a panel in the electrical repair cabinet, they found the ship's papers: charts, orders, and the missing log.
Fromm took time to open the log and look at the last page: he hardly had to struggle with his conscience at all over it. Under the dateline, in neat typing, it said:
"Carlsen should have been back an hour ago. Under the circumstances, that means they've got him too. My error was in not leaving after I talked to Tsin last week. Three of us could have brought the ship back. Alone, I don't believe I can do it.
"I have considered taking off anyhow, simply in order to make certain the natives do not gain any further knowledge of the ship. My only choices now are betrayal or self-destruction, and between these two, I am afraid I have no real choice. I must therefore pick the most effective means of suicide, and after giving the matter careful thought, have determined that a systematic destruction of the control room is a wiser procedure than the complete removal of the ship from the planet.
"By following this course of action, I can at least hope that a future expedition, or perhaps even a rescue-ship, will find this log and understand the danger here.
"This evening, I shall have my last supper in style. Tomorrow, I shall finish the dismantling of the controls, and hide this book, together with the more important of the ship's papers . . . and may God have mercy on my soul!"
Below that, in almost equally neat and legible a script, were two paragraphs.
"Once more I have delayed too long. Gentile, my firstclassman, is at the outer lock now, and he has three of the natives with him. Apparently they now have him sufficiently under control so that he will do for them what they have not dared to do for themselves. They are coming into the ship.
"I expect they are coming for me, and I cannot risk exposing myself to their control. I know too much that they can use. The work of dismantling the controls is barely started; I'm afraid the enlisted men can still repair it readily, but none of them, after all, even know where we are; the star-charts and orders will be hidden with this log. I can only hope the papers remain hidden until the right people come to find them."
Underneath, there was a careful signature: "James Malcolm, Captain, Solar Byrd Service, in command Baby Byrd III," and in parenthesis below that, one word of macabre humor, "(deceased)."
They ordered Scanliter Six down to Phobos Post, to bring in the papers of the BB-3. There was too much material to transmit by radio.
Bolster grinned and slapped his Pfc. on the back. "We're both a couple of bloomin' heroes," he said. "Just the kind of a hero I like to be. Some other guys'll be around when they decide to blast that Baby, and you and me can watch it all from the Post."
"Blast it?" Joe looked up from the log, holding his finger in the page. "You're kidding. Why would they ..."
"Brother, you got the reason wrapped around your finger. One look at that, and they'll blow those babies clear back to where they come from! You can take a chance on a guy who fights fair, but these fellas—"
"How do you know they're fighting us?" Fromm demanded. "You saw the Byrdman's note, the one you brought in . . . This guy Malcolm was off his rocker!"
"Well, I'll buy that one, too. You can't tell with the brass when they get an idea in their heads. But look, kid, you gotta grow up some. That note I brought in—it's pretty easy to get a guy to write something like that if you got him hypnotized to start with, and you're twice his size anyhow—not to mention there being a whole planetful of your kind and only four of his. I can tell you any how, that's how the brass'll see it. Solar Defense doesn't take chances."
"Did you read what it says here?" Fromm insisted. "The part where Malcolm tells us about talking to Tsin? It just doesn't make sense to take it the way he did. He was space-happy, that's all. The Commander isn't going to swallow this stuff."
"You wait and see," the sergeant said again. "And when you do, you're gonna be awful glad you're down there instead of here."
"I . . . look, I know this sounds crazy . . ." Fromm put the log down finally, and blurted out the rest of it. "I'd like to stick around. If anybody goes back out there, I want a chance to take another look at those guys. You think you could take somebody from one of the other ships down with you, and leave me here?"
"It not only sounds crazy," Bolster said. "It is crazy. But it's your body, son. You want to stick around, you can bet nobody else does." He shook his head uncomprehendingly, and began punching out a message to Scanliter Twelve, where Chan Lal would jump at the chance to change spots with his weakwitted Pfc.
"I ordered him to return to ship immediately. He refused. His exact words, insofar as I recall them, were, 'Captain, I wish I could do as you desire me to—or even better that I could convince you to come with me and visit our friends. They are our friends. If you would give them a chance to talk with you, I think you might understand better. It is hard to explain with just words. But I simply cannot go back now. (Emphasis is mine . . . JM) You are a married man, sir. Perhaps I might feel differently if there were some love waiting for me at home too. But I am young and not yet married, and . . ."
"I broke in here, thinking that I might be able to use persuasion, where authority had failed. I pointed out that there was very little likelihood he would ever be married, if I decided to take up the ship, abandoning him and Gentile on the planet—as of course, I have every right to do in view of their outright insubordination. The natives here, for all their startingly humanoid appearance, are twice our size, and are almost certainly not suitable for breeding, from a purely biologic viewpoint.
"He replied quite earnestly that he hoped I would not take that drastic step . . . that he did not wish to remain permanently among the natives, but that he felt he 'had to' stay long enough to become fully acquainted with them and with their way of life, and to 'be healed of all the hurts and scars of a lifetime in the System.'
"The conversation went on for some time, but the parts I have already recorded contain the gist of it. There was one thing Tsin said, however, that I feel should be included here, along with the train of thought that followed it. If anything should happen to me or to my ship, I suspect it will in some way be connected with my low susceptibility to the emotional point he seemed to be trying to make.
"Tsin reminded me, during the conversation, of a story I have always considered rather bathetic: that of the little orphan girl, in the days before the creches, who threw a note over the high wall of the 'orphanage' saying: 'Whoever you are, I love you.'
"This anecdote, I gathered, was supposed to define for me the nature of the emotional 'healing' he was receiving at the hands—or I suppose I should say the minds—of the natives.
"This particular bit of bathos has been annoying me for years. I have had the story related to me at least three times previously, always to illustrate some similarly obscure emotional point. And I have always wondered afterwards what the end of the story might have been.
"Now it seems very important to be able to forsee the results of the child's action. What happened when the note was picked up and read? And why did the child write it?
"It is this last question, I think, that bothers me the most. A sentimentalist might answer that she meant it, but I find this unlikely. At best, I believe, she meant that she hoped whoever found it would love her; and that is the very best interpretation I can put on it. It seems even more likely that her motive was even more specific: if she threw such billet doux over the wall regularly, I should think eventually one of the sentimentalists would have found it, made some response, and provided the means for her to get over the orphanage wall into the world outside.
"The natives here have a fairly highly-developed technology, and quite obviously a very highly-developed psychology or mental science of some sort. They are telepaths, after all. And they have taken no pains to conceal from us their interest in acquiring a means of space travel.
"There is nothing to pin down, no way to make certain of their real attitudes towards us. They have greeted us warmly, and have done nothing to indicate any hostility or to harm us in any way—nothing but walk off with two of my crew in an apparently friendly fashion.
"Perhaps the wisest course of action would be to leave now, while I still have two men on board. But it is a hard decision to make—to maroon two of my men on an alien planet.
"If I believed for a moment that Gentile and Tsin are responsible for their own actions, I should not hesitate to make that decision. But their behavior is so entirely 'out of character' that I can see no explanation except that they are acting under some form of hypnotic control. As I see it, my duty is to make every effort, including main force, to return them to the ship before I leave."
Hartson read it for the fourth time, and slapped the typescript down on the desk. "I . . . hell, Jim Malcolm was a friend of mine! How can I tell? It sounds like him . . . sure! It sounds like every report he ever wrote, except where it sounds like him being pie-eyed in a bull-session."
He sat down, and let the blank bewilderment he felt show in his eyes as he faced the Psychofficer. "Well, what do you say? I can't decide this one by myself."
Courtesy turned him, halfway through the question to face the PR Chief on the other side of the desk. Courtesy, and common sense, both. Officially, Lucy's job was just to get out the news—or to keep it in, as seemed wisest. The catch was in that last phrase. In practice, she was both public censor and interpreter-at-large for the Post; and her Civil Service appointment made her the only authority on Phobos who was independent of the Service.
The Commander had been dealing with the P.R. Bureau long enough so that in six months at the Post, Lucy had never yet had any cause to remove her velvet glove. It was easy to forget sometimes about the iron beneath it; one might almost think that she forgot herself.
"I'll check to Doctor Schwartz," she demurred now.
Schwartz managed a smile. "Will you please stop being polite?" he asked. "You've got an opinion. Let's hear it." She hesitated, and he added: "I don't even like what I'm thinking. I better think it a little more before I say it."
"All right." Her voice was controlled, but her eyes gleamed with excitement. She was talking at Schwartz, almost ignoring the Commander. "I think these fellas have the biggest thing since e-m-g. It's the one thing we haven't been able to crack at all; you know it as well as I do. They've got the unbeatable weapon—the psychological weapon. You can't fight 'em, because you don't want to. People call modern P.R. mass hypnotism, but the techniques we've got are child's play compared to what these guys can do. They've got the real thing. The question is, can we get it away from them? Has Psych Section got any way of handling something this hot?"
"I take it," Hartson put in drily, "that you are convinced of the accuracy of Captain Malcolm's interpretation of the events?"
She looked puzzled. "Why . . . yes. How else can you explain it? Has there ever been a case of desertion like that before?"
"Never," he said crisply, and turned to the Psychofficer again. "All right, Bob. You've had some time now. Say your piece."
"Let me start this way" Schwartz said hesitantly. "I think Lucy is right on one respect anyway ... what they've got is an irresistible weapon. If it is a weapon. But to accept that idea, we'd have to presuppose the existence of a war, or at least hostility between them and us. There's a verse that's been running through my head for the last hour. I'm sorry, Bill, to be so roundabout. Just try to put up with me a few minutes, will you? I can't quite remember the whole thing, but it's about an 'enemy' who 'drew a circle to keep me out.' Then there's a line I remember clearly: 'But love and I knew better. We drew a circle to bring him in.' You see what I'm driving at? Certainly our basic attitude toward any alien is potientially hostile. They are guilty until proven innocent."
"We've been all over that ground, Bob," Hartson broke in. "I know your opinion, and you ought to know mine by now. I don't like it either, but it's the reason why we have been consistently successful in such contacts."
"Consistently victorious, I'd say. All right, let's just put it that I am emotionally more inclined to accept Gentile's attitude than Malcolm's. I see no evidence to support the view that these people are using a hypnotic weapon; it is at least as likely that the feeling they projected at our men was honest and uncalculated. Why not assume for a moment that the occupants of that ship really are four of their leading scientists, sent here to exchange knowledge with us?"
"You've got a point there," Lucy Ardin said unexpectedly. "An act of aggression against these four could make trouble if they were on the level to start with. I think it gets down to a good old-fashioned problem in shielding. Has Psych Section got any way of handling these boys if we bring them in, Doc?"
He considered for a moment.
"That depends. We've got anti-hypnotics, and we've got personnel specially trained against susceptibility to hypnosis. But the Beebee had the same drugs, and should have had some trained personnel too. There's a point, Bill. I'd like to see the basic psych ratings on all five of those men, if you can get 'em. Especially Malcolm's. I could get the papers myself," he added, smiling weakly, "Through channels, it wouldn't take more than three or four weeks. Can you get 'em fast?"
"I can try." Hartson jumped at the chance for concrete action. He rang for an aide, and scribbled an order to Records in his own handwriting. "Put this on the facscan," he said briskly, "and give it a top-rush priority. I think I see what you're getting at, Bob," he said, as the door closed behind the uniformed girl. "I remember I was kind of surprised myself when I heard Jim had gone into the Byrd Service. Couldn't imagine him going Outside voluntarily. He was an Earthman all the way through. Why he didn't even believe Marsmen were really human. Is that what you wanted to know?"
"Part of it. That much was pretty clear in his report. I want to know the comparative resistance of the crew members to hypnosis and what the other men's attitudes were toward alien life—things like that."
"I thought all Byrdmen had to pass standardized tests for that," the PR Chief said, just a little sharply.
"They do. At least, the enlisted men do. But there's still a range of individual variation. And officers . . . well, they have a tough time getting enough men to command the Beebees. I think just about any regular line officer who volunteered would pass the test. . . ."
He looked to Hartson for confirmation, and got a reluctant nod; then he went on. "Even with the men, it depends where they took their tests. That'll show on the papers. Psych Section isn't too—efficient—in some spots."
"I'll bear that in mind," Lucy said tautly. "But I'd still like to know just how much Psych Section right here is equipped to do. You say you've got the drugs and the personnel, Doctor. All right, then, if the Commander brings these fellows in alive, can you handle them? If you can't . . ." She shrugged.
"That depends." The Psychofficer declined the challenge of her tone and went on deliberately: "We can handle it all right ... if it's as simple a thing as hypnosis. It happens that I don't believe Captain Malcolm was right about that. I can tell better after I see his psych ratings. . . ."
"All right! Then I take it we're going to sit around here for the next few hours waiting to see what the tests say? That gives you a little more time to make up your mind. Well, if I'm going to spend the night here, I'd like to be a little more comfortable. Do you mind if I run home for a change of clothes while we're waiting, Commander?"
Hartson eyed the shimmering stiffness of her dinner gown unhappily. "I'm sorry, Miss Ardin. I hope you'll understand. This qualifies as a Major Policy decision, and I'm afraid I'll have to ask you not to leave until we are finished with whatever we decide."
She shrugged again, and sat down. "Could I have a typer then? I could be getting some of my story into shape."
Schwartz laughed. From the vantage point of the smoking jacket and carpet slippers in which he'd answered the emergency call, he said easily, "Bill, couldn't you order something from Supply for the lady? S.I. coveralls, or something like that? It might make a difference in our decision if she could be more comfortable."
"I can do that," Hartson said shortly. "And of course you may have any equipment you wish, Miss Ardin."
"Thank you, Commander," she said, too sweetly. "I'm sure it will help. I wonder if perhaps we could facilitate matters by sending for the doctor's uniform too? If I'm to be made more flexible, I suspect a change of clothes might make him more decisive."
Hartson grinned. "She's got a point there, Bob," he said mildly.
"All right!" The Psychofficer stood up abruptly, paced the length of the small room, and wheeled to face them. "All right, I'll tell you what I think. I think the human race is too damn scared and too damn hungry to be able to face this thing. Hungry for security, for reassurance, for comfort—for love. And scared! Scared of anything different, anything Outside, anything one degree more intense than the rules allow.
"Also—pardon my bluntness, Bill—I think Captain Malcolm's reaction was typical of all that's sickest in our System. The very fact that we are seriously sitting here considering how much of a menace these four individuals represent—four humanoid beings, who come armed with nothing but a message of love! That very fact—that we sit and stew over it, I mean—makes them dangerous.
"You want to know what I think? I think what they've got—whether it's a weapon or a natural way of life, whether it's hypnotism or open-hearted honesty, or anything else, is—not unbeatable, not ultimate, not any of the other adjectives that've been thrown around here tonight but, specifically, irresistible.
"I think all of us—you, Bill, wanting to do the 'blameless' thing—and you, suffering through hours of torment in those ridiculous clothes because they're supposed to make you 'attractive'—and maybe me most of all, hating to say what I know because it's brutal—all of us and the rest of the System too, have one crying need that the lousy culture we've made for ourselves can't possibly fulfill.
"We want love. We need love. Every poor blessed damned soul among us. And we need it so much, it can be used as a weapon against us!
"Understand, please, just because it's important to me to have it on the record, that I don't for a moment believe it's hypnotism they're using. I think they mean it. But ..."
"Well, at last!" Lucy Ardin sighed and moved a tense finger for the first time since he'd started talking. "Then you think you can handle it?"
Schwartz stared at her in amazement. "Didn't you hear anything I said? No. No, I don't think I can handle it, or that anybody else can. I don't believe it's hypnosis, but I can't see that that matters. Or rather, I might feel more at ease about it if I could believe that.
"Damn it, Bill, I hate this! I want you to understand clearly that the advice I am giving you is against my own inclinations and instincts. Now look: if it is to be regarded as a weapon—and I see no other way we may regard it from the point of view of Solar Defense—then it is irresistible. There is no way to tie or bind the minds of these—people—except by keeping them unconscious, which would automatically defeat any purpose of investigation."
He picked up his copy of the summary and excerpts from the log, riffled through the pages, and threw it down again, sadly. "Bill, I'd give all my ratings, and ten years off my life for the chance to talk to those guys myself, and find out . . . but my advice as an officer of Solar Defense is that we have no choice but to destroy the aliens before they regain consciousness."
Both the others were on their feet as he finished. "God damn it, Bob!" Hartson shouted. "You can't just . . ."
"Don't you see?" Lucy Ardin's crisp voice cut in. "All he's saying is he doesn't know; none of us know, and I want to find out! I'm not scared of it. Maybe you need love that bad, Psychofficer, but I don't!" She sat down again, triumphant and breathless.
The Commander ignored her. "Is that your last word, Bob? Shall I take that as your decision?"
"I'm afraid so, Bill. You heard Lucy just now. Remember what Malcolm was wondering, about the end of the story of the little orphan girl? That's one answer. In terms of the little girl, it would mean that whoever found the note took it back inside and told the authorities that one of their children was writing dirty notes—so the kid could be investigated. That's just one ending. There are lots of others, but don't forget the one he was afraid of. Don't forget all the sentimentalists—like me for instance. If I were to forget my duty as an officer of the Service, I would want nothing more than to get the little girl out of the orphanage, just so she could love them.
"And don't forget, either, that there would be any number of different answers besides. And that everyone would feel strongly about his own solution. You have your choice, Commander. You can destroy them in the name of Security and Safety—or you can risk a System-wide civil war, and total 'conquest' by an alien race. What'll you have?"
Commander Hartson smiled wryly. "I'll take vanilla," he said distinctly, and rang for an aide. The uniformed girl appeared in the doorway. "Jenny," he said, "I want orders typed up for countersigning to arrange all details for the moving of the Baby Byrd III to Deimos Isolation Post immediately. The ship will be piloted by Pfc. Joseph Fromm, now aboard the Scanliter Twelve. We will want a continuous radio report from the pilot starting with his entry into the ship.
"Separate orders are to go to Scanliters Seventeen and Twenty-two, to follow the BB-3 in with all artillery on the ready. They are to maintain radio silence, with vocal reception open. Private Fromm is to know nothing of the ready-fire orders. The word "apple" will be the signal to fire, if I decide it is necessary to destroy the ship. Is that all clear?"
"Yes, sir."
The door closed quietly behind her, and Bob Schwartz stood up and walked around the desk to shake the Commander's hand.
"They say you're a great man, Bill," he said quietly. "I'm beginning to think you are. Now, I'd like to ask a favor I'm not entitled to. I did my duty as I saw it, and gave you my advice as an officer of the S.D. Now I'm asking for a privilege as an old friend. If you're going to try bringing that ship in, I'd like to be aboard her on the way. I want to be there when they come to. I'm a qualified observer and it shouldn't take more than an hour to get me up there. It won't be much of a delay."
The Commander's voice was icy. "I think you know that's impossible, Bob. Certainly you're qualified—too qualified. We have to have a man on that ship, but we only need one man, and he has to be expendable. The only qualifications he needs are to know how to pilot the ship, and to be able to talk continuously. We already have a volunteer for the job, and he's acceptable. If you want to give him any instructions about what to look for or what to talk about, you have five minutes to prepare them. After that, the action will start. You understand, I am taking your advice. But I feel I must first prove to myself that your premises are correct. I want to see just how irresistible they are."
He turned to the P.R. Chief, and went on as coldly: "You are free to leave now, Miss Ardin. You'll want to hear the reports as they come in, I imagine. It should be about twenty minutes before the ship is actually under way."
Pfc. Joe Fromm walked through the inner airlock into the BB-3, climbed out of his space suit, and made a quick examination of the cabins. Three of the aliens, still unconscious, were bound ankle to ankle and wrist to wrist on the floor of one cabin. That door was to be locked. The other cabin was empty, as it was supposed to be.
"Cabins okay as planned," he muttered into the mouthpiece, strapped to his chest. "Corridor and cabinets clear." He entered the control room, and tested the manacles restraining the outside limbs of the alien who had formerly occupied the pilot's seat, and was now secured in a specially built chair. "Alien in control room unconscious and I'd say pretty safe, the way he's tied down. Instrument check: electronic controls, okay; radar, okay; rocket controls . . ."
He went down the list, cheerful with the familiar routine, talking easily, untroubled by the need for extra breaths between words that had plagued his inspection of the aliens.
"I am now strapping myself into the pilot-seat, and preparing for takeoff. Ready to leave as soon as I am signaled free . . . signal received, blasting off now ... utilizing minimum acceleration, coming in at Deimos on direct approach . . . the fella in the control room here seems to be wiggling his toes . . .you wouldn't think they'd have toes just like us, would you? . . . he's coming to, all right . . . I am on direct course to Deimos at min-axe still . . . I think maybe everything'11 work out okay . . . .
He had to watch the instruments with one eye and the alien with the other. The—whatever he was—didn't seem to be trying to bust loose at all.
"He's moving his head now, and looking around ... looking at his handcuffs, and the chair, trying to turn his head around to see where his legs are cuffed underneath, but he isn't struggling at all . . . looking me over now . . . I caught his eye for a minute just then, or he caught mine. I think he wants me to look at him again, but I'll try not to. He has to be able to fasten my attention on something to hypnotize me, doesn't he? I am moving my eyes around, checking instruments, and thinking as many different thoughts as I can. . . .
"We are now approaching an orbit around Mars, decelerating. My radar screen shows two Scanliters following us . . . should they be so close inside range in case it is necessary to fire on us? . . . Please don't . . . that's not my thought!
"It . . . he's thinking at me . . . they are telepaths, all right. He doesn't seem to, I don't know, the first thought I was sure wasn't mine was, please don't fire on us, we are friends. It seemed so natural I started to say it. His thoughts aren't in clear words now ... I heard once that to 'receive' stuff like this you have to not concentrate . . . something like that. Maybe I'm trying too hard . . . No. I'm too tense ... that was his thought, not mine, he was telling me not to be so tense and I'd understand. . . .
"He says—you can call it `says'; it's enough like talking —he says they're friends, they like us. They want to be friends. He keeps saying it different ways but it's the same feeling all the time, with different—pictures, I guess to go with it. . . ."
Pictures! Hey, stay out of there!
"He wants me to . . . to love him. That's what he says. He . . . men don't feel that way about each other . . . no! . . . loves me, he loves all—not men, some kind of thought for his own people, and all—living creatures —those are on his home planet. He loves all men, this time he means men."
That was silly of me . . . he wasn't being nasty . . . he just meant love . . . that picture was mine ...
"He says the pictures I get for meanings are all my own, so I might get his meaning wrong sometimes. He makes a picture in his mind, the way he'd visualize a thought on his world, but I see it the way it would be on mine. . . .
"Listen, Captain Malcolm just didn't understand. This is important . . . they don't mean the kind of thing we do when they say 'love.' They mean liking and sharing and . . . we haven't got the right words for it, but it's all right. It's not a grabby feeling, or taking anything, or hurting anybody. There's nothing to be afraid of. The only thing that Captain got right was that story about the kid. . . ."
On Phobos Base, Lucy Ardin's typer clacked eagerly, while Bill Hartson and Bob Schwartz turned from the viewer together. Hartson was a soldier; his face was stern and set, as he reached for the mike. The only emotion he showed was the single flash from his eyes to his friend's when he looked at Schwartz and saw the tears of frustration rolling unashamed down the psychofficer's face.
"... the one who threw the note over the wall. That is the way they feel. He's telling me now, to tell all of you, he's agreeing, he says I understand now, it's the way human beings love when they're kids, like the note the girl wrote: Whoever you are . . ."
The Commander spoke one word. "Apple."
"I love you."
"Where do you get those crazy ideas?"
Sometimes they were the result of intensive inbreeding. In this case, for instance: —
John W. Campbell, Jr., the late editor of Astounding/Analog, used to discuss his ideas for editorials with every writer who dropped in. On one occasion he talked about the idea of love-as-a-weapon. This was the source of an unusually large number of stories, most of which appeared in his own magazine. My version was published in Startling (1952), after some long-distance fertilization though correspondence with Mark Clifton, a friend and fellow-author now also dead, who wrote me the story of the little girl who threw the messages over the orphanage wall.
It is probably my own favorite among the stories here.
Death Is The Penalty
You come to a twisting path in the still shade of the giant trees, through random patches of green and brown coolness. A last sudden turn delivers you into the clearing, and waves of heat shimmer before you. The sun's rays are too white, the little stream impossibly blue. Squinting, your eyes seek relief and find it.
By the side of the stream, the two black figures have made an island of quiet for themselves. The area inside the unrepaired old fence is filled with the calm inwardness of their tender cold embrace.
The guide will stop here and wait, until everyone is in the clearing, until each face has turned questioningly toward the dark mystery. And when he speaks, the guide's voice will be quiet. Under the great trees he shouted, but in the presence of the lovers, a man does not speak too loudly.
"The permanents here," the guide will tell his crowd of sightseers, "are a memorial to the Boundaries." Over to the left, high above even the giant trees, a Boundary rises white in the sun. Nobody looks at it; all eyes are on the black figures in the clearing. But it is there, always there, a thing no one ever forgets completely.
"The incident," he says, still quietly, "was the last of many that resulted finally in the erection of the Boundaries. The permanents were left here, guarded by a fence for the visitor's safety, instead of being disposed of in the usual fashion. They are safe now, so you may examine them as closely as you like. The names of these two were David Carman and Janice Block ..."
". . . . David wandered down the path between the trees, his thoughts on the stream ahead, remembering its brilliant blueness; his body, hot and sticky, even in the shade, remembering the tingle of the water. It was a long walk from the lodge — but worth it when you got here. He came out in the clearing, and immediately disappointment struck at him. On the bank there was a book and a robe. From somewhere around the curve splashing sounded. He had wanted to be alone.
He walked over slowly, and stood over the swimmer's possessions on the shore. Then he saw the book, recognized it, and smiled a little.
He stripped off his own robe, and entered the water noisily, deliberately, to let the earlier swimmer know he was there. And in a moment, a brown arm flashed around the bend, cleaving through the bright blue. And then they met, for the first time.
It was a girl. A girl with brown limbs glistening from the fresh water, and bright brown hair tumbling in loose waves out of her bathing cap. A girl in a yellow bathing suit. A girl with a diffident, uneven-toothed smile and snapping brown eyes, lashes wet still from the water. They both stood up, facing each other in the water, and the magic must have hit them both at once, because neither one spoke a word.
They stood, a few feet apart, and then he laughed aloud, in delight, and she began to laugh, too. They both turned and walked up to the shore. He treasured the seconds, the feel of water pulling against his legs, the shore waiting ahead, the girl walking near him, the water pulling at her the same way, the shore looking the same to her. They sat down where she had left her robe, and he pulled cigarettes out of the pocket of his own. He handed her the pack, took one himself, and they smoked quietly, companionably.
She leaned back resting on one elbow, watching the man's face as he dragged deep on the cigarette. He was thin, tall and too thin, and when he sucked in the smoke, the concavities of his cheeks became deep hollows. His hair was tousled, sandy-colored, and she wondered about his eyes, shadowed under the bony brow-ridge. He was altogether a bony man, his cheek-bones standing out in sharp relief from the long planes of his face, his jaw a stubborn angular challenge to the world, his long lean hands thin enough to reveal the fine structure of tiny bones and veins. She watched him, quietly, not wanting to talk, to find out something that might spoil it, just thinking, "This is how it is. This is how it hits you, and some day, the man is the right one, and you stay hit."
He took the cigarette out of his mouth, held it in front of him watching the blue smoke turn white in the hot air, and disappear, and she knew he would speak. Desperately, she willed him not to.
Let him not say anything wrong. Please, please, let him not spoil it. Let him sit quiet for me to look at and pretend with.
"What do you think of his theory on the correlations on mass and individual reactions?"
She had been so afraid for him to speak that she didn't really hear the words at first. "His?" she said, stupidly.
"Mercken's." His voice was impatient. He turned toward her slowly, and she saw a shadow of disappointment fall over his face. "I saw the book," he said, now politely. "I thought it was yours — Psychology of The Mass —
Intelligence came into her eyes, and she saw the smile return in answer to his face. "It is mine," she said, breathless now. This was too much, too good. "You don't mean," she rushed on, not answering him, "it's your field, too? You… "
"Of course!" He was impatient again. "How far are you. . . "
She let herself breathe again. She stopped wondering and willing anything. She let go, and they were talking. She never remembered afterwards what they talked about that first half-hour. Some of it was psychology, and some of it themselves. Some of it was the woods, the trees and the sun and the brook. But when she began to think clearly again, she knew his name was David, and she was talking shop — again. She stopped, abashed.
"You have your own worries," she said. "I can handle my own job — I guess," then, because she wanted to tell him, she rushed on to explain. Maybe she'd been saying stupid things, and it was important to explain. She was telling him how she had worried about his talking, how she had been afraid whatever he said would spoil the wonderful minute. She could say that without worry; she knew he'd felt it, too. And then how impossibly perfect it was when he did begin to talk. He listened gravely. He didn't say anything; he nodded but in the nod she saw he knew about all the years, and all about the men who were just a little silly, a little juvenile, who came running when she smiled, but backed off in fright when she talked.
He listened, and nodded, and understood, and then as soon as she was done, he said, "I've been thinking about that problem of yours. We've been using inferentials on our work. Have you tried applying them to the quiz-reactions, to test ... "
"Inferentials?" she broke in, puzzled.
He took a stick, sketched the math of it quickly in the sand, and she watched with delight, as the simplicity and beauty of it emerged.
He moved the stick rapidly, wiped out what he had and started again. "You take the first four symbols… "
And then he stopped. "Janice," he said quickly, very low, and a deathly stillness fell, "Janice, where did you say you worked?"
"I didn't." She was sober. She didn't know, she didn't want to know, but she did know, even before she answered him. "California Open Labs," she said, letting each word fall flat to the ground, letting it ring with its leaden weight as it fell. There had had to be something; she'd known there would be something; so this was it. "You're at the Restricted Lodge?" It was a question as she said it, but it needed no answer. She knew.
Without looking at him, she stood up. "I'll try to forget it," she said, watching the shadows of the treetops on the ground, "I'll try not to let it —" She stopped. "You better go now," she said. Then she pulled the bathing cap down hard over her ears, and dashed for the water.
She ran, but he was faster than she. He caught her by the shoulders, roughly, before she got to the bank, swung her around, and waited till she lifted her eyes to his. His mouth opened but there was no word in it. There was nothing he could say. So instead of speaking, he pulled her close, and she was floating away from facts up into a world he brought her with the pressure of his lips.
He let her go slowly, and they sat down again, both of them shaken, too much moved to look at each other, or touch each other.
They tried.
They didn't ask any more questions, and they made no plans. It was the last time they would see each other — only it wasn't. Each of them came back alone, again and again, to the brook in the woods, came and sat alone and thought of how it might have been. And the day came, as it had to, when, rounding the twisting path through the trees, they were face to face again.
They stood without moving, and took no step toward each other. Then from both of them came a curious sigh, an exhalation as if each had held his breath too long. He reached out an arm, slowly, as if to make certain that this time his mind was not playing tricks. The shining brown hair, the sparkling brown eyes — this time they were real. His hands touched her shoulder, lightly, seeking, and then not so lightly, and they were wrapped in each other's arms, alone in a pounding beating universe, a private world of safety and companionship.
It could have been a minute or an hour, when, finally, he said, "Janice, I think I love you. It's crazy and it shouldn't have happened, but I love you."
Then she turned and met his eyes once more. "I love you, David." She heard the melody in her own voice, and wondered how it could sound that way when the world was crashing around her ears. "There's nothing we can do, is there?" she said facing it, putting it in words, the fact, for both of them.
"Nothing," he said.
The words were right. The words were true, but the music was wrong. Wrong because it was happy. Because all the truths in the world couldn't pull them apart now.
They walked back to the brook, arms entwined like children, and sat on the edge of the bright blue water for the rest of the afternoon, savoring each other's presence, talking only a little.
Still they made no plans. Not even an agreement — but after that they met every week. They met and sat there close by the edge of the brook, almost afraid to talk for fear of the things that might pass from him to her, but still not able to stay away altogether.
But it went on, and after a while the first fear slipped away. They were still cautious. They talked about themselves, their hopes, their dreams, anything but work. Once they thought they had found a safe subject. Something he had worked on that had since been released for Open research, and was now a problem in her hands. But that led them dangerously close to the borderline — the things he knew, that she could not. So they shied away, and talked again about themselves.
For Janice it was the first time. She knew he had understood from the beginning, so she poured out to him now all the lonely years. She told him how the exams in Secondary had just barely passed her by for Restricted work, how she was left among men who were pleasant, friendly, good at their work. But always, when she met someone, he stayed a little while, then went away. She was too good — too smart, too quick. A man doesn't want a woman who is greater than he is.
Janice had subjected them, one by one, to the hot inquiring searchlight of her intellect, probed at their minds, and, when she was not herself discarded, she had discarded them, each in turn. Because a woman doesn't want a man who is less than she is.
After a while, they all knew she was cold, that she somehow had missed the secret of soft womanliness — and then she was alone. Until David.
Now something had happened, the hot intensity of the searchlight had diffused as the sun did when you left the clearing for the woods. She had found a man, the man; she had stopped picking and judging and weighing, and she was learning to be still, to watch, to lean back. There was also, obscurely, a new vitality to her, and though she had never been beautiful, a kind of beauty. She worked well, too. The inquiring light played now sharply only on her work, and the job gained from it, as her personality gained from the gentle radiance it reflected. And it did not seem to impede her efficiency that she would stop sometimes for a moment to think of the warm spot in the clearing, of David, and of the sheltered loneliness of their love.
Clinically, she was curious about the happiness they had gathered from the total impossibility of their being together. Objectively, she knew it could not last, but resolutely, she shut her mind, as he was doing, to what the end must be.
Each week she went to the brook and sat, talking a little, close by David's side, telling him her secrets, listening to his. Each time she came back renewed in a daze of happiness. But each time, also, she came back troubled, aware of the consciousness that she had shut out, knowing things could not go on as they were, not forever. Some day there would have to be resolution — or an end.
The day came, of course, as it had to come, when they met, and suddenly let loose on each other the growing misery of the weeks, the unhappiness they had each hidden even from themselves. It was noon when they met. They talked, and she sobbed a little, on the bank of the stream, until the sun was half-way down in the sky. And by that time they knew what they had known at the start. There was no way, no possible way, that they could ever have more than what they had now — and even that much was too dangerous.
For Janice there was a new realization. "But I'm not risking a thing, David," she said. "It's all you. You're the only one who'll be punished. If I were — but I'm not. So they won't do a thing to me, when they — if —"
"When was closer, Jenny." He smiled, a very tired smile, that did nothing to relieve the drawn tension of his lean face. "You were right the first time. They will find out if we keep this up. Shall we stop?"
Abruptly, she stood up. "Yes," she said. "Yes, we will stop. This isn't worth it. Not worth what they'd do. . . "
Seated at her feet, he heard the words, and knew how completely right they were. It would be harder to stop, harder all the time. And as long as they continued, there were only two things that could happen. The best was a lifetime of this, years and years of secret meetings at the brook. His mind tricked him into a grin as he wondered what they'd do if it rained? He jumped to his feet, still grinning.
"I'll carry you off," he said. "I'll take you in my arms and run over the edge of the world and hide you there. I'll make a club and bow to catch your food — and manufacture a movie machine to keep you amused. We'll have a huge arsenal of b-bombs, and never let any one near. We'll ...
She stopped him, a firm hand pressed over his mouth. The old joke was no good now. Tears stood still in her eyes, waiting to move, as she tried to match his smile.
"No, darling, no, you won't. We shouldn't even talk about it, because if we do, some day we might try it. And there's no hiding place. Not in this world. There's no hiding place at all."
He took the hand that was pressed over his mouth, held it in both his own, and let his kiss fall into the container of the cupped palm, let it linger there, and then let the hand drop, nerveless, to her side. His arms went about her swiftly, needing her close for warmth, for support — and they never heard the footsteps.
"In the name of Security!"
Long habit sent them whirling apart. Lifelong conditioning put them both alertly at attention. And only in full view of the Security officer and his three assistants did either of them realize that they were on the wrong side of the Law, that they could not this time prepare to aid an officer of the State in the adjustment of Security. They were themselves a menace to all that held the nation safe.
The officer drew a warrant from his pocket, while a deputy held the gun on them steadily. "In the name of Security," he read, now, "David Carman, and Janice Block are hereby accused of infringement of Special Rule No. 107 of the Regulations as amended in the year 2074 A.D. 'That under these covenants, and in view of the necessity for preventing any possible leakage of information, it shall be especially forbidden to Restricted officers in the service of the State to engage in social intercourse in any shape, or form, or manner, with scientists in the Open fields, who shall in any way be capable of understanding, or retaining, or utilizing, any part of the Restricted information held by such Officers."
He stopped, dramatically. "You know the regulations, Mr. Carman?"
"Yes." What else could he say?
"Miss Block, you have been aware of the risk you were taking? You knew the occupation of this man?"
"Yes!"
"And you had informed him of your occupation?"
There was a way out. "No!" she shouted. "No, no, no!" She heard her own voice, thin and screaming. "No, I never told him. I wanted to see him, so I never ..."
David's hands on her shoulders stopped her. "It's no use, Jan." His voice was absurdly quiet, relaxed. "I investigated you. I had to, you see. I put through a query, saying I read your paper, the one you did last fall. I thought you should be reconsidered for Restricted, on the basis of the work you had done. I thought . . . well, it doesn't matter now, does it?"
They stood quiet, and the Security Officer read on. They knew what was coming. " . . . paper by Miss Block contained mathematical equations suspiciously similar to work in progress in the California Restricted Laboratories." Jan glanced up sharply, taken by surprise. But she had never used — and then of course she knew, her mind had tricked her. David had never finished showing her, but the hint was enough. She found a different way to the same result — a result her own background would never have found for her. So she had betrayed them, betrayed them while she worked, while she was happy, while she thought about coming here to this brook to see David again.
Again he took her hand, and pressed it. Just a little, but the little was enough. He knew, too, how it had happened, and he didn't blame her. She could let him die, not blaming her, and could she live — live the rest of her life — not blaming herself?
She wanted to laugh, to laugh, and laugh, but she knew better. Her own training warned her, held her. There might still be a chance, somehow, and she couldn't throw it away.
". . . David Carman is hereby indicted for treason, and Janice Block is commended to the care of a Refreshment Home until such time as the memories of this incident may have passed from her."
Janice's breath caught, whistled in through her teeth. Amnesiac shock, then! She was to lose David, lose him in the flesh, and let them wipe out his memory as well. No, no, NO!
"Are you prepared to accompany us, Mr. Carman?"
The formal words, the expected question. No! They couldn't take him. No! She wouldn't lose him! No!
She heard him breathe in deeply, saw his mouth open to form the word of acceptance. She reached out, clutched his arm with her own hand.
"No!" she screamed. "David, no! If they want to kill you, they'll have to kill both of us! You can't . . . you can't . . .!"
He had turned and his arms were around, disregarding the officers. He held her against him, without passion or strain, held her like a child, and waited till she was calm.
"I must, Jan. I have to." Again the awful quiet, complete resignation.
"I love you, Jan. You're the only woman I ever loved." He turned to the officers, and it was they who had trouble meeting his eye. "I'm ready,'' he said, and he took his arms from the girl.
"No." She wasn't screaming now. She was quiet, too. His touch, his arms about her, had given her that. She had to be quiet, or he wouldn't understand.
"David," she pleaded, "don't leave me. Don't go away and send me back to my loneliness. Stay with me." She nodded toward the pistol the man held. "Stay with me forever. David, I want it that way."
He turned from the men and faced her, searched her eyes. He took one step closer to her. Then, as they had in the water, they smiled at each other, and he put his arms out to her again.
"Officer!" she cried giddily. "Officer, can't you see? This man is resisting arrest!"
"They never knew," the guard will tell you, "when the immobilizer hit them. At that time," he will go on, "atomics were not well enough developed to make blast-pistols safe. The transmutation pistol was always used when Security officers had to display force in public.
"Ordinarily the permanents so created were safely dumped, to prevent radioactive effects. But it was directly resultant on this case that the force-boundaries" — all eyes wandered a little to the left — "were erected, to divide the social territories of the Restricted officers. So these two were left here as a memorial for visitors to the park."
There is much more to see, but you walk away thinking, and do not listen. You are wondering about the old days, when things were wild and free — before Civilization, before the Boundaries — before even Security.
Death is the Penalty was my second science fiction story, published in Astounding in 1949.
It was another borderline choice here: the political fury which inspired it in those early days of "security" and "classification" has been dulled, perhaps, by familiarity — and, perhaps, can stand to be rekindled as we move (perhaps?) toward elimination of some of the weight of "classification" and secrecy that has accumulated in the twenty-odd years since. ("We": the Pentagon Papers had stories to tell for Canada as well as the U.S.).
As for the other part of the story: it would be nice to feel that the plight of the lonely lady who needed a man smarter than herself is dated now.
The Lonely
TO: The Hon. Natarajan Roi Hennessy, Chairman, Committee on Intercultural Relations. Solar Council, Eros. FROM: Dr. Shlomo Mouna, Sr. Anthropologist, Project Ozma XII, Pluto 'Station.
DATE: 10/9/92, TC.
TRANSMISSION: VIA: Tight beam, scrambled. SENT: 1306 hrs, TST. RCDV: 1947 hrs, TST.
Dear Nat:
Herewith, a much condensed, heavily annotated, and top secret coded transcript of a program we just picked up. The official title is GU #79, and the content pretty well confirms some of our earlier assumptions about the whole series, as this one concerns us directly, and we have enough background information, including specific dates, to get a much more complete and stylistic translation than before.
I'd say the hypotheses that these messages represent a "Galactic University" lecture series broadcast from somewhere near Galactic Center, through some medium a damn sight faster than light, now seems very reasonable.
This one seemed to come from Altair, which would date transmission from there only a few years after some incidents described in script. Some of the material also indicates probable nature of original format, and I find it uncomfortable. Also reraises question of whether Altair, Arcturus, Castor, etc., relay stations are aimed at us? Although the content makes that doubtful.
Full transcript, film, etc., will go out through channels, as soon as you let me know which channels. This time I am not pleading for declassification. I think of some Spaserve reactions and—frankly I wonder if it shouldn't be limited to SC Intercult Chairmen and Ozma Sr. Anthropoids—and sometimes I wonder about thee.
Cheery reading.
Shlomo
TRANSCRIPT, GU #79, Condensed Version, edited SM, 10/9/92, TC. (NRH: All material in parens is in my words—summarizing, commenting, and/or describing visual material where indicated. Straight text is verbatim, though cut as indicated. Times, measurements, etc., have been translated from Standard Galactic or Aldebaran local to Terran Standard; and bear in mind that words like "perceive" are often very rough translations for SG concepts more inclusive than our language provided for. —SM)
(Open with distance shot of Spaserve crew visiting Woman of Earth statue on Aldebaran VI. Closeup of reverent faces. Shots of old L-1, still in orbit, and jump-ship trailing it. Repeat first shot, then to Lecturer. You may have seen this one before. Sort of electric eel type. Actually makes sparks when he's being funny.)
The image you have just perceived is symbolic, in several senses. First, the statue was created by the Arlemites, the native race of Aldebaran VI (!! Yes, Virginia, there are aborigines!!) in an effort to use emotional symbols to bridge the gap in communications between two highly dissimilar species. Second: due to the farcical failure of this original intent, the structure has now become a vitally significant symbol—you perceived the impact—to the other species involved, the Terrans, a newly emerged race from Sol III. (Note that "you perceived." We must accept the implication that the original broadcasting format provides means of projecting emotional content.) Finally, this twofold symbol relates in one sense (Shooting sparks like mad here. Professional humor pretty much the same all over, hey?) to the phenomenon of the paradox of absolute universality and infinite variety inherent in the symbolism.
(Next section is a sort of refresher-review of earlier lectures. Subject of the whole course appears to be, roughly, "Problems of disparate symbolism in interspecies communications." This lecture—don't laugh—is "Symbols of Sexuality." Excerpts from review:—)
The phenomenon of symbolism is an integral part of the development of communicating intelligence. Distinctions of biological construction, ecological situation, atmospheric and other geophysical conditions, do of course profoundly influence the radically infantile phases of intellectual-emotional-social development in all cultures . . . (but) . . . from approximately that point in the linear development of a civilization at which it is likely to make contact with other cultures—that is, from the commencement of cultural maturity, following the typically adolescent outburst of energy in which first contact is generally accomplished . . . (He describes this level at some length in terms of a complex of: 1, astrophysical knowledge; 2, control of basic matter-energy conversions, "mechanical or psial;" 3, self-awareness of whole culture and of individuals in it; and 4, some sociological phenomena for which I have no referents.) . . . all cultures appear to progress through a known sequence of i-e-s patterns .. . (and) . . . despite differences in the rate of development, the composite i-e-s curve for mature cultural development of all known species is familiar enough to permit reliable predictions for any civilization, once located on the curve.
(Then progresses to symbolism. Specific symbols, he says, vary even more, between cultures, than language or other means of conscious communication, as to wit—)
It is self-evident that the specific symbols utilized by, for instance, a septasexual, mechanophilic, auriphased species of freely locomotive discrete individuals, will vary greatly from those of, let us say, a mitotic, unicellular, intensely psioid, communal culture. (Which makes it all the more striking, that) it is specifically in the use of symbols, the general consciousness of their significance, the degree of sophistication of the popularly recognized symbols, and the uses to which they are put by the society as a whole, that we have found our most useful constant, so far, for purposes of locating a given culture on the curve.
(Much more here about other aspects of cultural development, some of which are cyclical, some linear—all fascinating but not essential to understanding of what follows.)
Sexuality has until recently been such a rare phenomenon among civilized species that we had casually assumed it to be something of a drawback to the development of intelligence. Such sexual races as we did know seemed to have developed in spite of their biological peculiarity, but usually not until after the mechanical flair that often seemed to accompany the phenomenon had enabled them to escape their planet of origin for a more favorable environment.
I say more favorable because sexuality does seem to develop as an evolutionary compensation where (some terms untranslatable, some very broad, but generally describing circumstances, like extra-dense atmosphere, in which the normal rate of cosmic radiation was reduced to, a degree that inhibited mutation and thus, evolution) . . .
As I said, this seemed almost a freak occurrence, and so it was, and is, here in the heart of the Galaxy. But in the more thinly populated spiral arms, the normal rate of radiation is considerably lower. It is only in the last centuries that we have begun to make contact with any considerable numbers of species from these sectors—and the incidence of sexuality among these peoples is markedly higher than before.
Recently, then, there has been fresh cause to investigate the causes and effects of sexuality; and there has been a comparative wealth of new material to work with.
(Here he goes into a rexiew of the variety of sexual modes, ranging from two to seventeen sexes within a species, and more exotica-erotica of means, manners, and mores than a mere two-sexed biped can readily imagine. Restrain yourself. It's all in the full transcript.)
But let me for the moment confine myself to the simplest and most common situation, involving only two sexes. Recent investigations indicate that there is an apparently inevitable psychological effect of combining two, essentially distinct subspecies in one genetic unit. (Sparks like mad.) I perceive that many of you have just experienced the same delight-dismay the first researchers felt at recognizing this so-obvious and so-overlooked parallel with the familiar cases of symbiosis.
The Terrans, mentioned earlier, are in many ways prototypical of sexuality in an intelligent species, and the unusual and rather dramatic events on Aldebaran VI have added greatly to our insights into the psychology of sexuality in general.
In this culture, dualism is very deep-rooted, affecting every aspect of the i-e-s complex: not just philosophy and engineering, but mathematics, for instance, and mystique.
This cultural attitude starts with a duality, or two-sided symmetry, of body-structure. (Throughout this discussion he uses visual material—photos, diagrams, etc., of human bodies, anatomy, physiology, habitat, eating and mating habits, etc. Also goes off into some intriguing speculation of the chicken-or-egg type: is physical structure influenced by mental attitudes, or is it some inherent tendency of a chromosome pattern with pairs of genes from pairs of parents?)
In this respect, the Terrans are almost perfect prototypes, with two pairs of limbs, for locomotion and manipulation, extending from a central—single—abdominal cavity, which, although containing some single organs as well as some in pairs, is so symmetrically proportioned that the first assumption from an exterior view would be that everything inside was equally mirror-imaged. Actually, the main breathing apparatus is paired; the digestive system is single—although food intake is through an orifice with paired lips and two rows of teeth. In both "male" and "female" types, the organ of sexual contact is single, whereas the gamete-producers are pairs. There is a single, roundish head set on top of the abdomen, containing the primary sensory organs, all of which occur in pairs. Even the brain is paired!
I mentioned earlier that it is typical of the sexual races that the flair for physical -engineering is rather stronger than the instinct for communication. This was an observed but little-understood fact for many centuries; it was not till this phenomenon of dualism (and triadism for the three-sexed, etc.) was studied that the earlier observation was clarified. If you will consider briefly the various sources of power and transport, you will realize that—outside of the psi-based techniques—most of these are involved with principles of symmetry and/or equivalence; these concepts are obvious to the two-sexed. On the other hand, the principle of unity, underlying all successful communication—physical, verbal, psial, or other—and which is also the basis for the application of psi to engineering problems—is for these species, in early stages, an almost mystical quality.
As with most life-forms, the reproductive act is, among sexual beings, both physically pleasurable and biologically compulsive, so that it is early equated with religio-mystic sensations. Among sexual species, these attitudes are intensified by the communicative aspects of the act. (Cartoon-type diagrams here which frankly gave me to think a bit!) We have much to learn yet about the psychology of this phenomenon, but enough has been established to make clear that the concept of unity for these races is initially almost entirely related to the use of their sexuality, and is later extended to other areas—religion and the arts of communication at first—with a mystical—indeed often reverent attitude!
I hardly need to remind you that the tendencies I have been discussing are the primitive and underlying ones. Obviously, at the point of contact, any species must have acquired at least enough sophistication in the field of physics—quanta, unified field theory, and atomic transmutation for a start—to have begun to look away from_ the essentially blind alley of dualistic thinking. But the extent to which these Terrans were still limited by their early developmental pattern is indicated by the almost unbelievable fact that they developed ultra-dimensional transport before discovering any more effective channels of communication than the electromagnetic!
Thus their first contacts with older civilizations were physical; and, limited as they still are almost entirely to aural and visual communication, they were actually unable to perceive their very first contact on Aldebaran VI.
(Shot of Prof. Eel in absolute sparkling convulsions goes to distance shots of planet and antiquated Earth spaceship in orbit: L-1 again. Then suborb launch drops, spirals to surface. Twenty bulky spacesuited figures emerge —not the same as in opening shots. This looks like actual photographic record of landing, which seems unlikely. Beautiful damn reconstruction, if so. Narration commences with Aldebaran date. I substitute Terran Calendar date we know for same, and accept gift of one more Rosetta Stone.)
The time is the year 2053. For more than six decades, this primitive giant of space has ployed its way through the restrictive medium of slow space. Twice before in its travels, the great ship has paused.
First at Procyon, where they found the system both uninhabited and uninviting; and at the time they did not yet know what urgent cause they had to make a landing. (Our date for Procyon exploration, from L-1 log, is 2016, which fits.)
Then at Saiph, two decades later, where they hoped for just a bare minimum of hospitality—no more than safe footing for their launches, in which they could live while they tried to ensure their future survival. But this system's planets offered little hope. One Earth-size enveloped in horror-film type gases and nasty moistures. (One more with dense atmosphere of high acid content: probe from ship corroded in minutes.)
They limped on. A half decade rater they came to a time of decision, and determined not to try for the next nearest star system, but for the closest one from which their radio had received signs of intelligent life: Aldebaran.
What they had learned between Procyon and Saiph was that those of their crew who were born in space were not viable. The ship had been planned to continue, if necessary, long beyond the lifespan of its first crew. The Terran planners had ingeniously bypassed their most acute psychosocial problem, and staffed the ship with a starting crew of just one sex. Forty females started the journey, with a supply of sperm from one hundred genetically selected males carefully preserved on board.
Sex determination in this species is in the male chromosome, and most of the supply had been selected for production of females. The plan was to maintain the ship in transit with single-sexed population and restore the normal balance only at the end of the journey.
The Terrans have apparently reached a level of self-awareness that enables them to avoid the worst dangers of their own divisive quality, while utilizing the advantages of this special (pun intended—Prof. Eel was sparking again) ambivalence. Their biological peculiarities have, among other things, developed a far greater tolerance in the females for the type of physical constraints and social pressures that were to accompany the long, slow voyage. Males, on the other hand, being more aggressive, and more responsive to hostile challenges, would be needed for colonizing a strange planet. (Dissertation on mammals here which says nothing new, but restates from an outsider's—rather admiring—viewpoint with some distinction. Should be a textbook classic—if we can ever release this thing.)
That was the plan. But when the first females born on the trip came to maturity, and could not conceive, the plan was changed. Three male infants were born to females of the original complement—less than half of whom, even then, were still alive and of child-bearing age.
(Well, he tells it effectively, but adds nothing to what we know from the log. Conflicts among the women led to death of one boy, eventual suicide of another at adolescence. Remaining mature male fails to impregnate known fertile women. Hope of landing while enough fertiles remained to start again pretty well frustrated at Saiph. Decision to try, for nearest system eight light years off—with Aldebaran still farther. Faint fantastic hope still at landing, with just one child-bearer left—the Matriarch, if you recall?)
Remembering the reasons for their choice of Aldebaran, you can imagine the reaction when that landing party, first, lost all radio signals as they descended; then, could find no trace whatsoever—to their senses—of habitation. The other planets were scouted, to no avail. The signals on the Mother Ship's more powerful radio continued to come from VI. One wild hypothesis was followed up by a thorough and fruitless search of the upper atmosphere. The atmosphere was barely adequate to sustain life at the surface. Beam tracing repeatedly located the signal beacon in a moutain of VI, which showed—to the Terrans —no other sign of intelligent life.
The only logical conclusion was that they had followed a "lighthouse beacon" to an empty world. The actual explanation, of course, was in the nature of the Arlemites, the natives of Aldebaran VI.
Originating as a social-colonizing lichen, on a heavy planet, with—even at its prime—a barely adequate atmosphere, the Arlemites combined smallness of individual size with limited locomotive powers and superior air and water retentive ability. They developed, inevitably, as a highly psioid culture—as far to one end of the psichophysical as the Terrans are to the other. (My spelling up there. I think it represents true meaning better than "psycho.") The constantly thinning choice was between physical relocation and a conscious evolutionary measure which this mature psioid race was far better equipped to undertake: the Arlemites now exist as a planet-wide diffusion of single-celled entities, comprising just one individual, and a whole species.
(Visual stuff here helps establish concept—as if you or I just extended the space between cells.)
It seems especially ironic that the Arlemites were not only one of the oldest and most psioid of peoples—so that they had virtually all the accumulated knowledge of the Galaxy at their disposal—but were also symbiote products. This background might have enabled them to comprehend the Terran mind and the problems confronting the visitors—except for the accidental combination of almost total psi-blindness in the Terrans, and the single-sexed complement of the ship.
The visitors could not perceive their hosts. The hosts could find no way to communicate with the visitors. The full complement of the ship,, eventually, came down in launches, and lived in them, hopelessly, while they learned that their viability had indeed been completely lost in space. There was no real effort to return to the ship and continue the voyage. The ranks thinned, discipline was lost, deaths proliferated. Finally, it was only a child's last act of rebelliousness that mitigated the futility of the tragedy.
The last child saw the last adult die, and saw this immobility as an opportunity to break the most inviolable of rules. She went out of the launch—into near-airlessness that killed her within minutes.
But minutes were more than enough, with the much longer time afterwards for examination of the dead brain. It was through the mind of this one child, young enough to be still partially free of the rigid mental framework that made adult Terrans so inaccessible to Arlemites, that the basis was gained for most of the knowledge we now have.
Sorrowingly, the Arlemites generated an organism to decompose the Terrans and their artifacts, removing all traces of tragedy from the planet's surface. Meanwhile, they studied what they had learned, against future needs.
The technological ingenuity of these young sexuals will be apparent when I tell you that only four decades after the departure of that ill-fated ship, they were experimenting with ultra-dimensional travel. Even at the time of the landing at Aldebaran, ultra-di scouts were already exploring the systems closest to Sol. Eventually—within a decade after the child's death—one of these came to Aldebaran, and sighted the still-orbiting Mother Ship.
A second landing was clearly imminent. The Arlemites had still devised no way to aid this species to live in safety on their planet, nor did they have any means to communicate adequately with psi-negatives whose primary perceptions were aural and visual. But they did have, from the child's mind, a working knowledge of the strongest emotional symbols the culture knew, and they had long since devised a warning sign they could erect for visual perception. The statue of the Woman of Earth was constructed in an incredibly brief time through the combined efforts of the whole Arlemite consciousness.
They had no way to know that the new ship, designed for exploration, not colonizing, and equipped with ultra-di drive, which obviated the long slow traveling, was crewed entirely by males. Even had they known, they did not yet comprehend the extreme duality of the two-sexed double-culture. So they built their warning to the shape of the strongest fear-and-hate symbols of—a female.
(Shot of statue, held for some time, angle moving slowly. No narration. Assuming that emotional-projection notion—and I think we must—the timing here is such that I believe they first project what they seem to think a human female would feel, looking at it. I tried women on staff here. They focused more on phallic than female component, but were just as positive in reactions as males.???? Anyhow, like I said, no narration. What follows, though out of parens, is my own reaction.)
It seems more a return than a venture.
The Woman waits, as she has waited . . . always? .. . to greet her sons, welcomes us . . . home? . . . She sits in beauty, in peacefulness, perfect, complete, clean and fresh-colored . . . new? . . . no, forever . . . open, welcoming, yet so impervious . . . warm and . . . untouchable? . . . rather, untouched . . . almost, but never, forgotten Goddess . . . Allmother, Woman of Earth .. . enveloped, enveloping, in warmth and peace .. .
One stands back a bit: this is the peace of loving insight, of unquesting womanhood, of great age and undying youth . . . the peace of the past, of life that is passed, of that immortality that nothing mortal can ever achieve except through the frozen impression of living consciousness that we call art.
The young men are deeply moved and they make jokes. "Allmother," one hears them say, sarcastically, "Old White Goddess, whaddya know?"
Then they look up and are quiet under the smiling stone eyes. Even the ancient obscenely placed spaceship in her lap is not quite absurd, as it will seem in museum models—or tragic, as is the original overhead.
(Prof. Eel goes on to summarize the conclusions that seem obvious to him. Something is awfully wrong; that's obvious to me. How did they manage to build something so powerful out of total miscomprehension? What are we up against, anyhow? And, to get back to the matter of channels, what do you think this little story would do to Spaserve brass egos? Do you want to hold it top secret a while?)
End of Transcript
TO: Dr. Shlomo Mouna, Sr. Anthropologist, Ozma XII, Pluto
FROM: N. R. Hennessy, Solar Council Dome. Eros DATE: 10/10/92
TRANSMISSION: VIA tight beam, scrambled. SENT: 0312 hrs. RCVD: 1027 hrs.
Dear Shlomo:
Absolutely, let me see the full package before we release it elsewhere. I've got a few more questions, like: Do they know we're receiving it? How do we straighten them out? Or should we? Instinct says yes. Tactics says it is advantageous to be underestimated. Think best you come with package, and we'll braintrust it. Meantime, in reply to your bafflement—
"L" class ships, you should have known, are for "Lysistrata." Five of them launched during brief Matriarchy at beginning of World Government on Terra, following Final War. So sort out your symbols now.
And good grief, where did the other four land?
NRH
Lonely was published in Worlds of Tomorrow in 1963; this is its first appearance in book form. It was another cover assignment, based on a painting of the giant statue of a woman holding a rocket in her lap, seated on an alien plateau. The whole thing fell immediately into the context of the "Matriarchy" and the "Mother-ships" of Survival Ship and Wish Upon a Star. I had long since given up on the long novel, so this one emerged as written long after the period of the voyages.
EPILOGUE
Selecting a group of one's past stories for a new book is a curious experience. All the mysteries one once set out to solve: all the conflicts one tried to resolve: all the unwritten stories one remembers in between those actually in print: all the issues one feels a quarter-century should somehow have settled — or at least defined?
There don't seem to be any answers here. But maybe more, and better, questions are what we need?