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20071_15Q853LR_6 | Which character does the author feel represents the perplexity at the center of Boys Don't Cry? | Boys Do Bleed
Fight Club is silly
stuff, sensationalism that mistakes itself for satire, but it's also a brash
and transporting piece of moviemaking, like Raging Bull on acid. The
film opens with--literally--a surge of adrenalin, which travels through the
bloodstream and into the brain of its protagonist, Jack (Edward Norton), who's
viewed, as the camera pulls out of his insides, with a gun stuck in his mouth.
How'd he get into this pickle? He's going to tell you, breezily, and the
director, David Fincher, is going to illustrate his narrative--violently.
Fincher ( Seven , 1995; The Game , 1997) is out to bombard you with
so much feverish imagery that you have no choice but to succumb to the movie's
reeling, punch-drunk worldview. By the end, you might feel as if you, too, have
a mouthful of blood.
Not to mention a hole in your head. Fight
Club careers from one resonant satirical idea to the next without quite
deciding whether its characters are full of crap or are Gen X prophets. It
always gives you a rush, though. At first, it goofs on the absurd feminization
of an absurdly macho culture. An increasingly desperate insomniac, Jack finds
relief (and release) only at meetings for the terminally ill. At a testicular
cancer group, he's enfolded in the ample arms of Bob (the singer Meat Loaf
Aday), a former bodybuilder who ruined his health with steroids and now has
"bitch tits." Jack and Bob subscribe to a new form of male bonding: They cling
to each other and sob. But Jack's idyll is rudely disrupted by--wouldn't you
know it?--a woman. A dark-eyed, sepulchral head case named Marla Singer (Helena
Bonham Carter) begins showing up at all the same disparate meetings for
essentially the same voyeuristic ends, and the presence of this "tourist" makes
it impossible for Jack to emote.
Jack finds another
outlet, though. On a plane, he meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a cryptic
hipster with a penchant for subversive acts both large (he makes high-priced
soaps from liposuctioned human fat) and small (he splices frames from porn
flicks into kiddie movies). When Jack's apartment mysteriously explodes--along
with his carefully chosen IKEA furniture--he moves into Tyler's squalid
warehouse and helps to found a new religion: Fight Club, in which young males
gather after hours in the basement of a nightclub to pound one another (and be
pounded) to a bloody pulp. That last parenthesis isn't so parenthetical. In
some ways, it's the longing to be beaten into oblivion that's the strongest.
"Self-improvement," explains Tyler, "is masturbation"; self-destruction is the
new way. Tyler's manifesto calls for an end to consumerism ("Things you own end
up owning you"), and since society is going down ("Martha Stewart is polishing
brass on the Titanic "), the only creative outlet left is annihilation.
"It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything," he
says.
Fincher and his screenwriter, Jim Uhls, seem to think
they've broken new ground in Fight
Club , that their metaphor for
our discontents hits harder than anyone else's. Certainly it produces more
bloody splatter. But 20 years ago, the same impulse was called punk and, as
Greil Marcus documents in Lipstick Traces , it was other things before
that. Yes, the mixture of Johnny Rotten, Jake La Motta, and Jesus is unique;
and the Faludi-esque emasculation themes are more explicit. But there's
something deeply movie-ish about the whole conceit, as if the novelist and
director were weaned on Martin Scorsese pictures and never stopped dreaming of
recapturing that first masochistic rush.
The novel, the first by
Chuck Palahniuk (the surname sounds like Eskimo for "palooka"--which somehow
fits), walks a line between the straight and ironic--it isn't always clear if
its glib sociological pronouncements are meant to be taken straight or as the
ravings of a delusional mama's boy. But onscreen, when Pitt announces to the
assembled fighters that they are the "middle children of history" with "no
purpose and no place"--emasculated on one hand by the lack of a unifying crisis
(a world war or depression) and on the other by lack of material wealth as
promised by television--he seems meant to be intoning gospel. "We are a
generation of men raised by women," Tyler announces, and adds, "If our fathers
bail, what does that tell you about God?" (I give up: What?)
F ight
Club could use a few different
perspectives: a woman's, obviously, but also an African-American's--someone
who'd have a different take on the "healing" properties of violence. It's also
unclear just what has emasculated Jack: Is it that he's a materialist or that
the materials themselves (i.e., IKEA's lacquered particle boards) don't measure
up to his fantasies of opulence? Is he motivated by spiritual hunger or envy?
Tyler's subsequent idea of confining his group's mayhem to franchise coffee
bars and corporate-subsidized art is a witty one--it's like a parody of
neo-Nazism as re-enacted by yuppies. It might have been a howl if performed by,
say, the troupe of artsy German nihilists in Joel and Ethan Coen's The Big
Lebowski (1998). Somehow Brad Pitt doesn't have the same piquancy.
Actually, Pitt isn't as terrible as usual: He's
playing not a character but a conceit, and he can bask in his movie-idol
arrogance, which seems to be the most authentic emotion he has. But the film
belongs to Norton. As a ferocious skinhead in last year's American History
X , Norton was taut and ropy, his long torso curled into a sneer; here, he's
skinny and wilting, a quivering pansy. Even when he fights he doesn't
transform--he's a raging wimp. The performance is marvelous, and it makes
poetic sense in light of the movie's climactic twist. But that twist will annoy
more people than it will delight, if only because it shifts the drama from the
realm of the sociological to that of the psychoanalytic. The finale, scored
with the Pixies' great "Where Is My Mind?" comes off facetiously--as if Fincher
is throwing the movie away.
Until then, however, he
has done a fabulous job of keeping it spinning. The most thrilling thing about
Fight Club isn't what it says but how Uhls and Fincher pull you into its
narrator's head and simulate his adrenalin rushes. A veteran of rock videos,
Fincher is one of those filmmakers who helps make the case that MTV--along with
digital editing--has transformed cinema for better as well as worse. The syntax
has become more intricate. Voice-over narration, once considered uncinematic,
is back in style, along with novelistic asides, digressions, fantasies, and
flashbacks. To make a point, you can jazzily interject anything--even, as in
Three Kings , a shot of a bullet slicing through internal organs. Films
like Fight Club might not gel, but they have a breathless,
free-associational quality that points to new possibilities in storytelling. Or
maybe old possibilities: The language of movies hasn't seemed this unfettered
since the pre-sound days of Sergei Eisenstein and Abel Gance.
An actress named Hilary Swank gives one of the most
rapturous performances I've ever seen as the cross-dressing Brandon Teena (a k
a Teena Brandon) in Kimberly Peirce's stark and astonishingly beautiful debut
feature,
Boys Don't Cry
. The movie opens with Teena
being shorn of her hated female tresses and becoming "Brandon," who swaggers
around in tight jeans and leather jackets. The joy is in watching the actor
transform, and I don't just mean Swank: I mean Teena Brandon playing Brandon
Teena--the role she has been longing for her whole life. In a redneck Nebraska
bar, Brandon throws back a shot of whiskey and the gesture--a macho
cliché--becomes an act of self-discovery. Every gesture does. "You're gonna
have a shiner in the morning," someone tells Brandon after a barroom brawl, and
he takes the news with a glee that's almost mystical: "I am????? Oh, shit!!!"
he cries, grinning. That might be my favorite moment in the picture, because
Swank's ecstatic expression carries us through the next hour, as Brandon acts
out his urban-cowboy fantasies--"surfing" from the bumper of a pickup truck,
rolling in the mud, and straddling a barstool with one hand on a brewski and
the other on the shoulder of a gorgeous babe.
That the people with whom Brandon feels most at home
would kill him if they knew his true gender is the movie's most tragic
irony--and the one that lifts it out of the realm of gay-martyr hagiography and
into something more complex and irreducible: a meditation on the irrelevance of
gender. Peirce's triumph is to make these scenes at once exuberant
(occasionally hilarious) and foreboding, so that all the seeds of Brandon's
killing are right there on the screen. John (Peter Sarsgaard), one of his
future rapists and murderers, calls him "little buddy" and seems almost
attracted to him; Sarsgaard's performance is a finely chiseled study of how
unresolved emotion can suddenly resolve itself into violence.
Though harrowing, the
second half of Boys Don't Cry isn't as great as the first. The early
scenes evoke elation and dread simultaneously, the later ones just dread; and
the last half-hour is unrelieved torture. What keeps the movie tantalizing is
Chloë Sevigny's Lana, who might or might not know that Brandon is a girl but
who's entranced by him anyway. With her lank hair, hooded eyes, and air of
sleepy sensuality, Sevigny--maybe even more than Swank--embodies the mystery of
sex that's at the core of Boys Don't Cry . Everything she does is
deliberate, ironic, slightly unreadable--and unyielding. She's could be saying,
"I'm in this world but not of it. ... You'd never dream what's
underneath."
I n
brief: If a friend tells you
you'll love
Happy Texas
, rethink the friendship. This
clunky mistaken-identity comedy about escaped cons who impersonate gay pageant
directors doesn't even make sense on its own low farcical terms; it's mostly
one lame homo joke after another. The only bright spot is Steve Zahn, who could
be the offspring of Michael J. Fox and Crispin Glover if they'd mated on the
set of Back to the Future (1985).
It's hard to make a serious case for Lawrence
Kasdan's
Mumford
, which has apparently flopped but
which you can still catch at second- and third-tier theaters. It looks
peculiar--a Norman Rockwell painting with noir shadows. And its tale of a small
town healed by a depressive (Loren Dean) posing as a psychologist is full of
doddering misconceptions about psychotherapy. I almost don't know why I loved
it, but the relaxed pacing and the witty turns by Martin Short, Ted Danson,
David Paymer, and Mary McDonnell surely helped. I can't decide if the weirdly
affectless Dean is inspired or inept, but my indecision suggests why he works
in the role. There's no doubt, however, about his even more depressive love
object, Hope Davis, who posseses the cinema's most expressive honking-nasal
voice and who slumps through the movie like the world's most lyrical
anti-ballerina. Even her puffy cheeks are eloquent: They made me think of
Mumford as the home of the psychological mumps. | [
"Brandon Teena",
"Lana",
"John",
"Pierce"
] | 1 |
20071_15Q853LR_7 | How does the author feel about Mumford? | Boys Do Bleed
Fight Club is silly
stuff, sensationalism that mistakes itself for satire, but it's also a brash
and transporting piece of moviemaking, like Raging Bull on acid. The
film opens with--literally--a surge of adrenalin, which travels through the
bloodstream and into the brain of its protagonist, Jack (Edward Norton), who's
viewed, as the camera pulls out of his insides, with a gun stuck in his mouth.
How'd he get into this pickle? He's going to tell you, breezily, and the
director, David Fincher, is going to illustrate his narrative--violently.
Fincher ( Seven , 1995; The Game , 1997) is out to bombard you with
so much feverish imagery that you have no choice but to succumb to the movie's
reeling, punch-drunk worldview. By the end, you might feel as if you, too, have
a mouthful of blood.
Not to mention a hole in your head. Fight
Club careers from one resonant satirical idea to the next without quite
deciding whether its characters are full of crap or are Gen X prophets. It
always gives you a rush, though. At first, it goofs on the absurd feminization
of an absurdly macho culture. An increasingly desperate insomniac, Jack finds
relief (and release) only at meetings for the terminally ill. At a testicular
cancer group, he's enfolded in the ample arms of Bob (the singer Meat Loaf
Aday), a former bodybuilder who ruined his health with steroids and now has
"bitch tits." Jack and Bob subscribe to a new form of male bonding: They cling
to each other and sob. But Jack's idyll is rudely disrupted by--wouldn't you
know it?--a woman. A dark-eyed, sepulchral head case named Marla Singer (Helena
Bonham Carter) begins showing up at all the same disparate meetings for
essentially the same voyeuristic ends, and the presence of this "tourist" makes
it impossible for Jack to emote.
Jack finds another
outlet, though. On a plane, he meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a cryptic
hipster with a penchant for subversive acts both large (he makes high-priced
soaps from liposuctioned human fat) and small (he splices frames from porn
flicks into kiddie movies). When Jack's apartment mysteriously explodes--along
with his carefully chosen IKEA furniture--he moves into Tyler's squalid
warehouse and helps to found a new religion: Fight Club, in which young males
gather after hours in the basement of a nightclub to pound one another (and be
pounded) to a bloody pulp. That last parenthesis isn't so parenthetical. In
some ways, it's the longing to be beaten into oblivion that's the strongest.
"Self-improvement," explains Tyler, "is masturbation"; self-destruction is the
new way. Tyler's manifesto calls for an end to consumerism ("Things you own end
up owning you"), and since society is going down ("Martha Stewart is polishing
brass on the Titanic "), the only creative outlet left is annihilation.
"It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything," he
says.
Fincher and his screenwriter, Jim Uhls, seem to think
they've broken new ground in Fight
Club , that their metaphor for
our discontents hits harder than anyone else's. Certainly it produces more
bloody splatter. But 20 years ago, the same impulse was called punk and, as
Greil Marcus documents in Lipstick Traces , it was other things before
that. Yes, the mixture of Johnny Rotten, Jake La Motta, and Jesus is unique;
and the Faludi-esque emasculation themes are more explicit. But there's
something deeply movie-ish about the whole conceit, as if the novelist and
director were weaned on Martin Scorsese pictures and never stopped dreaming of
recapturing that first masochistic rush.
The novel, the first by
Chuck Palahniuk (the surname sounds like Eskimo for "palooka"--which somehow
fits), walks a line between the straight and ironic--it isn't always clear if
its glib sociological pronouncements are meant to be taken straight or as the
ravings of a delusional mama's boy. But onscreen, when Pitt announces to the
assembled fighters that they are the "middle children of history" with "no
purpose and no place"--emasculated on one hand by the lack of a unifying crisis
(a world war or depression) and on the other by lack of material wealth as
promised by television--he seems meant to be intoning gospel. "We are a
generation of men raised by women," Tyler announces, and adds, "If our fathers
bail, what does that tell you about God?" (I give up: What?)
F ight
Club could use a few different
perspectives: a woman's, obviously, but also an African-American's--someone
who'd have a different take on the "healing" properties of violence. It's also
unclear just what has emasculated Jack: Is it that he's a materialist or that
the materials themselves (i.e., IKEA's lacquered particle boards) don't measure
up to his fantasies of opulence? Is he motivated by spiritual hunger or envy?
Tyler's subsequent idea of confining his group's mayhem to franchise coffee
bars and corporate-subsidized art is a witty one--it's like a parody of
neo-Nazism as re-enacted by yuppies. It might have been a howl if performed by,
say, the troupe of artsy German nihilists in Joel and Ethan Coen's The Big
Lebowski (1998). Somehow Brad Pitt doesn't have the same piquancy.
Actually, Pitt isn't as terrible as usual: He's
playing not a character but a conceit, and he can bask in his movie-idol
arrogance, which seems to be the most authentic emotion he has. But the film
belongs to Norton. As a ferocious skinhead in last year's American History
X , Norton was taut and ropy, his long torso curled into a sneer; here, he's
skinny and wilting, a quivering pansy. Even when he fights he doesn't
transform--he's a raging wimp. The performance is marvelous, and it makes
poetic sense in light of the movie's climactic twist. But that twist will annoy
more people than it will delight, if only because it shifts the drama from the
realm of the sociological to that of the psychoanalytic. The finale, scored
with the Pixies' great "Where Is My Mind?" comes off facetiously--as if Fincher
is throwing the movie away.
Until then, however, he
has done a fabulous job of keeping it spinning. The most thrilling thing about
Fight Club isn't what it says but how Uhls and Fincher pull you into its
narrator's head and simulate his adrenalin rushes. A veteran of rock videos,
Fincher is one of those filmmakers who helps make the case that MTV--along with
digital editing--has transformed cinema for better as well as worse. The syntax
has become more intricate. Voice-over narration, once considered uncinematic,
is back in style, along with novelistic asides, digressions, fantasies, and
flashbacks. To make a point, you can jazzily interject anything--even, as in
Three Kings , a shot of a bullet slicing through internal organs. Films
like Fight Club might not gel, but they have a breathless,
free-associational quality that points to new possibilities in storytelling. Or
maybe old possibilities: The language of movies hasn't seemed this unfettered
since the pre-sound days of Sergei Eisenstein and Abel Gance.
An actress named Hilary Swank gives one of the most
rapturous performances I've ever seen as the cross-dressing Brandon Teena (a k
a Teena Brandon) in Kimberly Peirce's stark and astonishingly beautiful debut
feature,
Boys Don't Cry
. The movie opens with Teena
being shorn of her hated female tresses and becoming "Brandon," who swaggers
around in tight jeans and leather jackets. The joy is in watching the actor
transform, and I don't just mean Swank: I mean Teena Brandon playing Brandon
Teena--the role she has been longing for her whole life. In a redneck Nebraska
bar, Brandon throws back a shot of whiskey and the gesture--a macho
cliché--becomes an act of self-discovery. Every gesture does. "You're gonna
have a shiner in the morning," someone tells Brandon after a barroom brawl, and
he takes the news with a glee that's almost mystical: "I am????? Oh, shit!!!"
he cries, grinning. That might be my favorite moment in the picture, because
Swank's ecstatic expression carries us through the next hour, as Brandon acts
out his urban-cowboy fantasies--"surfing" from the bumper of a pickup truck,
rolling in the mud, and straddling a barstool with one hand on a brewski and
the other on the shoulder of a gorgeous babe.
That the people with whom Brandon feels most at home
would kill him if they knew his true gender is the movie's most tragic
irony--and the one that lifts it out of the realm of gay-martyr hagiography and
into something more complex and irreducible: a meditation on the irrelevance of
gender. Peirce's triumph is to make these scenes at once exuberant
(occasionally hilarious) and foreboding, so that all the seeds of Brandon's
killing are right there on the screen. John (Peter Sarsgaard), one of his
future rapists and murderers, calls him "little buddy" and seems almost
attracted to him; Sarsgaard's performance is a finely chiseled study of how
unresolved emotion can suddenly resolve itself into violence.
Though harrowing, the
second half of Boys Don't Cry isn't as great as the first. The early
scenes evoke elation and dread simultaneously, the later ones just dread; and
the last half-hour is unrelieved torture. What keeps the movie tantalizing is
Chloë Sevigny's Lana, who might or might not know that Brandon is a girl but
who's entranced by him anyway. With her lank hair, hooded eyes, and air of
sleepy sensuality, Sevigny--maybe even more than Swank--embodies the mystery of
sex that's at the core of Boys Don't Cry . Everything she does is
deliberate, ironic, slightly unreadable--and unyielding. She's could be saying,
"I'm in this world but not of it. ... You'd never dream what's
underneath."
I n
brief: If a friend tells you
you'll love
Happy Texas
, rethink the friendship. This
clunky mistaken-identity comedy about escaped cons who impersonate gay pageant
directors doesn't even make sense on its own low farcical terms; it's mostly
one lame homo joke after another. The only bright spot is Steve Zahn, who could
be the offspring of Michael J. Fox and Crispin Glover if they'd mated on the
set of Back to the Future (1985).
It's hard to make a serious case for Lawrence
Kasdan's
Mumford
, which has apparently flopped but
which you can still catch at second- and third-tier theaters. It looks
peculiar--a Norman Rockwell painting with noir shadows. And its tale of a small
town healed by a depressive (Loren Dean) posing as a psychologist is full of
doddering misconceptions about psychotherapy. I almost don't know why I loved
it, but the relaxed pacing and the witty turns by Martin Short, Ted Danson,
David Paymer, and Mary McDonnell surely helped. I can't decide if the weirdly
affectless Dean is inspired or inept, but my indecision suggests why he works
in the role. There's no doubt, however, about his even more depressive love
object, Hope Davis, who posseses the cinema's most expressive honking-nasal
voice and who slumps through the movie like the world's most lyrical
anti-ballerina. Even her puffy cheeks are eloquent: They made me think of
Mumford as the home of the psychological mumps. | [
"It was a flop.",
"It's like a noir Norman Rockwell painting.",
"The author loved it, even though it was a flop.",
"The film gave the author psychological mumps."
] | 2 |
20071_15Q853LR_8 | To which actor did the author credit a slightly better than normal performance? | Boys Do Bleed
Fight Club is silly
stuff, sensationalism that mistakes itself for satire, but it's also a brash
and transporting piece of moviemaking, like Raging Bull on acid. The
film opens with--literally--a surge of adrenalin, which travels through the
bloodstream and into the brain of its protagonist, Jack (Edward Norton), who's
viewed, as the camera pulls out of his insides, with a gun stuck in his mouth.
How'd he get into this pickle? He's going to tell you, breezily, and the
director, David Fincher, is going to illustrate his narrative--violently.
Fincher ( Seven , 1995; The Game , 1997) is out to bombard you with
so much feverish imagery that you have no choice but to succumb to the movie's
reeling, punch-drunk worldview. By the end, you might feel as if you, too, have
a mouthful of blood.
Not to mention a hole in your head. Fight
Club careers from one resonant satirical idea to the next without quite
deciding whether its characters are full of crap or are Gen X prophets. It
always gives you a rush, though. At first, it goofs on the absurd feminization
of an absurdly macho culture. An increasingly desperate insomniac, Jack finds
relief (and release) only at meetings for the terminally ill. At a testicular
cancer group, he's enfolded in the ample arms of Bob (the singer Meat Loaf
Aday), a former bodybuilder who ruined his health with steroids and now has
"bitch tits." Jack and Bob subscribe to a new form of male bonding: They cling
to each other and sob. But Jack's idyll is rudely disrupted by--wouldn't you
know it?--a woman. A dark-eyed, sepulchral head case named Marla Singer (Helena
Bonham Carter) begins showing up at all the same disparate meetings for
essentially the same voyeuristic ends, and the presence of this "tourist" makes
it impossible for Jack to emote.
Jack finds another
outlet, though. On a plane, he meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a cryptic
hipster with a penchant for subversive acts both large (he makes high-priced
soaps from liposuctioned human fat) and small (he splices frames from porn
flicks into kiddie movies). When Jack's apartment mysteriously explodes--along
with his carefully chosen IKEA furniture--he moves into Tyler's squalid
warehouse and helps to found a new religion: Fight Club, in which young males
gather after hours in the basement of a nightclub to pound one another (and be
pounded) to a bloody pulp. That last parenthesis isn't so parenthetical. In
some ways, it's the longing to be beaten into oblivion that's the strongest.
"Self-improvement," explains Tyler, "is masturbation"; self-destruction is the
new way. Tyler's manifesto calls for an end to consumerism ("Things you own end
up owning you"), and since society is going down ("Martha Stewart is polishing
brass on the Titanic "), the only creative outlet left is annihilation.
"It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything," he
says.
Fincher and his screenwriter, Jim Uhls, seem to think
they've broken new ground in Fight
Club , that their metaphor for
our discontents hits harder than anyone else's. Certainly it produces more
bloody splatter. But 20 years ago, the same impulse was called punk and, as
Greil Marcus documents in Lipstick Traces , it was other things before
that. Yes, the mixture of Johnny Rotten, Jake La Motta, and Jesus is unique;
and the Faludi-esque emasculation themes are more explicit. But there's
something deeply movie-ish about the whole conceit, as if the novelist and
director were weaned on Martin Scorsese pictures and never stopped dreaming of
recapturing that first masochistic rush.
The novel, the first by
Chuck Palahniuk (the surname sounds like Eskimo for "palooka"--which somehow
fits), walks a line between the straight and ironic--it isn't always clear if
its glib sociological pronouncements are meant to be taken straight or as the
ravings of a delusional mama's boy. But onscreen, when Pitt announces to the
assembled fighters that they are the "middle children of history" with "no
purpose and no place"--emasculated on one hand by the lack of a unifying crisis
(a world war or depression) and on the other by lack of material wealth as
promised by television--he seems meant to be intoning gospel. "We are a
generation of men raised by women," Tyler announces, and adds, "If our fathers
bail, what does that tell you about God?" (I give up: What?)
F ight
Club could use a few different
perspectives: a woman's, obviously, but also an African-American's--someone
who'd have a different take on the "healing" properties of violence. It's also
unclear just what has emasculated Jack: Is it that he's a materialist or that
the materials themselves (i.e., IKEA's lacquered particle boards) don't measure
up to his fantasies of opulence? Is he motivated by spiritual hunger or envy?
Tyler's subsequent idea of confining his group's mayhem to franchise coffee
bars and corporate-subsidized art is a witty one--it's like a parody of
neo-Nazism as re-enacted by yuppies. It might have been a howl if performed by,
say, the troupe of artsy German nihilists in Joel and Ethan Coen's The Big
Lebowski (1998). Somehow Brad Pitt doesn't have the same piquancy.
Actually, Pitt isn't as terrible as usual: He's
playing not a character but a conceit, and he can bask in his movie-idol
arrogance, which seems to be the most authentic emotion he has. But the film
belongs to Norton. As a ferocious skinhead in last year's American History
X , Norton was taut and ropy, his long torso curled into a sneer; here, he's
skinny and wilting, a quivering pansy. Even when he fights he doesn't
transform--he's a raging wimp. The performance is marvelous, and it makes
poetic sense in light of the movie's climactic twist. But that twist will annoy
more people than it will delight, if only because it shifts the drama from the
realm of the sociological to that of the psychoanalytic. The finale, scored
with the Pixies' great "Where Is My Mind?" comes off facetiously--as if Fincher
is throwing the movie away.
Until then, however, he
has done a fabulous job of keeping it spinning. The most thrilling thing about
Fight Club isn't what it says but how Uhls and Fincher pull you into its
narrator's head and simulate his adrenalin rushes. A veteran of rock videos,
Fincher is one of those filmmakers who helps make the case that MTV--along with
digital editing--has transformed cinema for better as well as worse. The syntax
has become more intricate. Voice-over narration, once considered uncinematic,
is back in style, along with novelistic asides, digressions, fantasies, and
flashbacks. To make a point, you can jazzily interject anything--even, as in
Three Kings , a shot of a bullet slicing through internal organs. Films
like Fight Club might not gel, but they have a breathless,
free-associational quality that points to new possibilities in storytelling. Or
maybe old possibilities: The language of movies hasn't seemed this unfettered
since the pre-sound days of Sergei Eisenstein and Abel Gance.
An actress named Hilary Swank gives one of the most
rapturous performances I've ever seen as the cross-dressing Brandon Teena (a k
a Teena Brandon) in Kimberly Peirce's stark and astonishingly beautiful debut
feature,
Boys Don't Cry
. The movie opens with Teena
being shorn of her hated female tresses and becoming "Brandon," who swaggers
around in tight jeans and leather jackets. The joy is in watching the actor
transform, and I don't just mean Swank: I mean Teena Brandon playing Brandon
Teena--the role she has been longing for her whole life. In a redneck Nebraska
bar, Brandon throws back a shot of whiskey and the gesture--a macho
cliché--becomes an act of self-discovery. Every gesture does. "You're gonna
have a shiner in the morning," someone tells Brandon after a barroom brawl, and
he takes the news with a glee that's almost mystical: "I am????? Oh, shit!!!"
he cries, grinning. That might be my favorite moment in the picture, because
Swank's ecstatic expression carries us through the next hour, as Brandon acts
out his urban-cowboy fantasies--"surfing" from the bumper of a pickup truck,
rolling in the mud, and straddling a barstool with one hand on a brewski and
the other on the shoulder of a gorgeous babe.
That the people with whom Brandon feels most at home
would kill him if they knew his true gender is the movie's most tragic
irony--and the one that lifts it out of the realm of gay-martyr hagiography and
into something more complex and irreducible: a meditation on the irrelevance of
gender. Peirce's triumph is to make these scenes at once exuberant
(occasionally hilarious) and foreboding, so that all the seeds of Brandon's
killing are right there on the screen. John (Peter Sarsgaard), one of his
future rapists and murderers, calls him "little buddy" and seems almost
attracted to him; Sarsgaard's performance is a finely chiseled study of how
unresolved emotion can suddenly resolve itself into violence.
Though harrowing, the
second half of Boys Don't Cry isn't as great as the first. The early
scenes evoke elation and dread simultaneously, the later ones just dread; and
the last half-hour is unrelieved torture. What keeps the movie tantalizing is
Chloë Sevigny's Lana, who might or might not know that Brandon is a girl but
who's entranced by him anyway. With her lank hair, hooded eyes, and air of
sleepy sensuality, Sevigny--maybe even more than Swank--embodies the mystery of
sex that's at the core of Boys Don't Cry . Everything she does is
deliberate, ironic, slightly unreadable--and unyielding. She's could be saying,
"I'm in this world but not of it. ... You'd never dream what's
underneath."
I n
brief: If a friend tells you
you'll love
Happy Texas
, rethink the friendship. This
clunky mistaken-identity comedy about escaped cons who impersonate gay pageant
directors doesn't even make sense on its own low farcical terms; it's mostly
one lame homo joke after another. The only bright spot is Steve Zahn, who could
be the offspring of Michael J. Fox and Crispin Glover if they'd mated on the
set of Back to the Future (1985).
It's hard to make a serious case for Lawrence
Kasdan's
Mumford
, which has apparently flopped but
which you can still catch at second- and third-tier theaters. It looks
peculiar--a Norman Rockwell painting with noir shadows. And its tale of a small
town healed by a depressive (Loren Dean) posing as a psychologist is full of
doddering misconceptions about psychotherapy. I almost don't know why I loved
it, but the relaxed pacing and the witty turns by Martin Short, Ted Danson,
David Paymer, and Mary McDonnell surely helped. I can't decide if the weirdly
affectless Dean is inspired or inept, but my indecision suggests why he works
in the role. There's no doubt, however, about his even more depressive love
object, Hope Davis, who posseses the cinema's most expressive honking-nasal
voice and who slumps through the movie like the world's most lyrical
anti-ballerina. Even her puffy cheeks are eloquent: They made me think of
Mumford as the home of the psychological mumps. | [
"Ted Danson",
"Loren Dean",
"Brad Pitt",
"Steve Zahn"
] | 2 |
51651_QFG6OVXX_1 | What is the most dangerous aspect of the neutroids and other mutant animals? | Conditionally Human
By WALTER M. MILLER, JR.
Illustrated by DAVID STONE
They were such cute synthetic creatures, it
was impossible not to love them. Of course,
that was precisely why they were dangerous!
There was no use hanging around after breakfast. His wife was in a hurt
mood, and he could neither endure the hurt nor remove it. He put on his
coat in the kitchen and stood for a moment with his hat in his hands.
His wife was still at the table, absently fingering the handle of her
cup and staring fixedly out the window at the kennels behind the house.
He moved quietly up behind her and touched her silk-clad shoulder. The
shoulder shivered away from him, and her dark hair swung shiningly as
she shuddered. He drew his hand back and his bewildered face went slack
and miserable.
"Honeymoon's over, huh?"
She said nothing, but shrugged faintly.
"You knew I worked for the F.B.A.," he said. "You knew I'd have charge
of a district pound. You knew it before we got married."
"I didn't know you killed them," she said venomously.
"I won't have to kill many. Besides, they're only animals."
"
Intelligent
animals!"
"Intelligent as a human imbecile, maybe."
"A small child is an imbecile. Would you kill a small child?"
"You're taking intelligence as the only criterion of humanity," he
protested hopelessly, knowing that a logical defense was useless
against sentimentality. "Baby—"
"Don't call me baby! Call
them
baby!"
Norris backed a few steps toward the door. Against his better judgment,
he spoke again. "Anne honey, look! Think of the
good
things about the
job. Sure, everything has its ugly angles. But think—we get this house
rent-free; I've got my own district with no bosses around; I make my
own hours; you'll meet lots of people that stop in at the pound. It's a
fine
job, honey!"
She sipped her coffee and appeared to be listening, so he went on.
"And what can I do? You know how the Federation handles employment.
They looked over my aptitude tests and sent me to Bio-Administration.
If I don't want to follow my aptitudes, the only choice is common
labor. That's the
law
."
"I suppose you have an aptitude for killing babies?" she said sweetly.
Norris withered. His voice went desperate. "They assigned me to it
because I
liked
babies. And because I have a B.S. in biology and an
aptitude for dealing with people. Can't you understand? Destroying
unclaimed units is the smallest part of it. Honey, before the
evolvotron, before Anthropos went into the mutant-animal business,
people used to elect dogcatchers. Think of it that way—I'm just a
dogcatcher."
Her cool green eyes turned slowly to meet his gaze. Her face was
delicately cut from cold marble. She was a small woman, slender and
fragile, but her quiet contempt made her loom.
He backed closer to the door.
"Well, I've got to get on the job." He put on his hat and picked at a
splinter on the door. He frowned studiously at the splinter. "I—I'll
see you tonight." He ripped the splinter loose when it became obvious
that she didn't want to be kissed.
He grunted a nervous good-by and stumbled down the hall and out of the
house. The honeymoon was over, all right.
He climbed in the kennel-truck and drove east toward the highway. The
suburban street wound among the pastel plasticoid cottages that were
set approximately two to an acre on the lightly wooded land. With its
population legally fixed at three hundred million, most of the country
had become one big suburb, dotted with community centers and lined
with narrow belts of industrial development. Norris wished there were
someplace where he could be completely alone.
As he approached an intersection, he saw a small animal sitting on the
curb, wrapped in its own bushy tail. Its oversized head was bald on
top, but the rest of its body was covered with blue-gray fur. Its tiny
pink tongue was licking daintily at small forepaws with prehensile
thumbs. It was a cat-Q-5. It glanced curiously at the truck as Norris
pulled to a halt.
He smiled at it from the window and called, "What's your name, kitten?"
The cat-Q-5 stared at him impassively for a moment, let out a
stuttering high-pitched wail, then: "Kiyi Rorry."
"Whose child are you, Rorry?" he asked. "Where do you live?"
The cat-Q-5 took its time about answering. There were no houses near
the intersection, and Norris feared that the animal might be lost.
It blinked at him, sleepily bored, and resumed its paw-washing. He
repeated the questions.
"Mama kiyi," said the cat-Q-5 disgustedly.
"That's right, Mama's kitty. But where is Mama? Do you suppose she ran
away?"
The cat-Q-5 looked startled. It stuttered for a moment, and its fur
crept slowly erect. It glanced around hurriedly, then shot off down the
street at a fast scamper. He followed it in the truck until it darted
onto a porch and began wailing through the screen, "Mama no run ray!
Mama no run ray!"
Norris grinned and drove on. A class-C couple, allowed no children
of their own, could get quite attached to a cat-Q-5. The felines
were emotionally safer than the quasi-human chimp-K series called
"neutroids." When a pet neutroid died, a family was broken with grief;
but most couples could endure the death of a cat-Q or a dog-F. Class-C
couples were allowed two lesser units or one neutroid.
His grin faded as he wondered which Anne would choose. The Norrises
were class-C—defective heredity.
He found himself in Sherman III Community Center—eight blocks of
commercial buildings, serving the surrounding suburbs. He stopped at
the message office to pick up his mail. There was a memo from Chief
Franklin. He tore it open nervously and read it in the truck. It was
something he had been expecting for several days.
Attention All District Inspectors:
Subject: Deviant Neutroid.
You will immediately begin a systematic and thorough survey of all
animals whose serial numbers fall in the Bermuda-K-99 series for
birth dates during July 2234. This is in connection with the Delmont
Negligency Case. Seize all animals in this category, impound, and run
proper sections of normalcy tests. Watch for mental and glandular
deviation. Delmont has confessed to passing only one non-standard
unit, but there may be others. He disclaims memory of deviant's serial
number. This could be a ruse to bring a stop to investigations when
one animal is found. Be thorough.
If allowed to reach age-set or adulthood, such a deviant could be
dangerous to its owner or to others. Hold all seized K-99s who show
the slightest abnormality in the normalcy tests. Forward to central
lab. Return standard units to their owners. Accomplish entire survey
project within seven days.
C. Franklin
Norris frowned at the last sentence. His district covered about two
hundred square miles. Its replacement-quota of new neutroids was around
three hundred animals a month. He tried to estimate how many of July's
influx had been K-99s from Bermuda Factory. Forty, at least. Could he
do it in a week? And there were only eleven empty neutroid cages in his
kennel. The other forty-nine were occupied by the previous inspector's
"unclaimed" inventory—awaiting destruction.
He wadded the memo in his pocket, then nosed the truck onto the highway
and headed toward Wylo City and the district wholesale offices of
Anthropos, Inc. They should be able to give him a list of all July's
Bermuda K-99 serial numbers that had entered his territory, together
with the retailers to whom the animals had been sold. A week's deadline
for finding and testing forty neutroids would put him in a tight
squeeze.
He was halfway to Wylo City when the radiophone buzzed on his
dashboard. He pulled into the slow lane and answered quickly, hoping
for Anne's voice. A polite professional purr came instead.
"Inspector Norris? This is Doctor Georges. We haven't met, but I
imagine we will. Are you extremely busy at the moment?"
Norris hesitated. "Extremely," he said.
"Well, this won't take long. One of my patients—a Mrs. Sarah
Glubbes—called a while ago and said her baby was sick. I must be
getting absent-minded, because I forgot she was class C until I got
there." He hesitated. "The baby turned out to be a neutroid. It's
dying. Eighteenth order virus."
"So?"
"Well, she's—uh—rather a
peculiar
woman, Inspector. Keeps telling
me how much trouble she had in childbirth, and how she can't ever
have another one. It's pathetic. She
believes
it's her own. Do you
understand?"
"I think so," Norris replied slowly. "But what do you want me to do?
Can't you send the neutroid to a vet?"
"She insists it's going to a hospital. Worst part is that she's heard
of the disease. Knows it can be cured with the proper treatment—in
humans. Of course, no hospital would play along with her fantasy and
take a neutroid, especially since she couldn't pay for its treatment."
"I still don't see—"
"I thought perhaps you could help me fake a substitution. It's a K-48
series, five-year-old, three-year set. Do you have one in the pound
that's not claimed?"
Norris thought for a moment. "I think I have
one
. You're welcome to
it, Doctor, but you can't fake a serial number. She'll know it. And
even though they look exactly alike, the new one won't recognize her.
It'll be spooky."
There was a long pause, followed by a sigh. "I'll try it anyway. Can I
come get the animal now?"
"I'm on the highway—"
"Please, Norris! This is urgent. That woman will lose her mind
completely if—"
"All right, I'll call my wife and tell her to open the pound for you.
Pick out the K-48 and sign for it. And listen—"
"Yes?"
"Don't let me catch you falsifying a serial number."
Doctor Georges laughed faintly. "I won't, Norris. Thanks a million." He
hung up quickly.
Norris immediately regretted his consent. It bordered on being illegal.
But he saw it as a quick way to get rid of an animal that might later
have to be killed.
He called Anne. Her voice was dull. She seemed depressed, but not
angry. When he finished talking, she said, "All right, Terry," and hung
up.
By noon, he had finished checking the shipping lists at the wholesale
house in Wylo City. Only thirty-five of July's Bermuda-K-99s had
entered his territory, and they were about equally divided among five
pet shops, three of which were in Wylo City.
After lunch, he called each of the retail dealers, read them the serial
numbers, and asked them to check the sales records for names and
addresses of individual buyers. By three o'clock, he had the entire
list filled out, and the task began to look easier. All that remained
was to pick up the thirty-five animals.
And
that
, he thought, was like trying to take a year-old baby away
from its doting mother. He sighed and drove to the Wylo suburbs to
begin his rounds.
Anne met him at the door when he came home at six. He stood on the
porch for a moment, smiling at her weakly. The smile was not returned.
"Doctor Georges came," she told him. "He signed for the—" She stopped
to stare at him. "Darling, your face! What happened?"
Gingerly he touch the livid welts down the side of his cheek. "Just
scratched a little," he muttered. He pushed past her and went to the
phone in the hall. He sat eying it distastefully for a moment, not
liking what he had to do. Anne came to stand beside him and examine the
scratches.
Finally he lifted the phone and dialed the Wylo exchange. A grating
mechanical voice answered, "Locator center. Your party, please."
"Sheriff Yates," Norris grunted.
The robot operator, which had on tape the working habits of each Wylo
City citizen, began calling numbers. It found the off-duty sheriff on
its third try, in a Wylo pool hall.
"I'm getting so I hate that infernal gadget," Yates grumbled. "I think
it's got me psyched. What do you want, Norris?"
"Cooperation. I'm mailing you three letters charging three Wylo
citizens with resisting a Federal official—namely
me
—and charging
one of them with assault. I tried to pick up their neutroids for a
pound inspection—"
Yates bellowed lusty laughter into the phone.
"It's not funny. I've got to get those neutroids. It's in connection
with the Delmont case."
Yates stopped laughing. "Oh. Well, I'll take care of it."
"It's a rush-order, Sheriff. Can you get the warrants tonight and pick
up the animals in the morning?"
"Easy on those warrants, boy. Judge Charleman can't be disturbed just
any time. I can get the newts to you by noon, I guess, provided we
don't have to get a helicopter posse to chase down the mothers."
"That'll be all right. And listen, Yates—fix it so the charges will
be dropped if they cooperate. Don't shake those warrants around unless
they just won't listen to reason. But get those neutroids."
"Okay, boy. Gotcha."
Norris gave him the names and addresses of the three unwilling mothers.
As soon as he hung up, Anne touched his shoulders and said, "Sit
still." She began smoothing a chilly ointment over his burning cheek.
"Hard day?" she asked.
"Not too hard. Those were just three out of fifteen. I got the other
twelve. They're in the truck."
"That's good," she said. "You've got only twelve empty cages."
He neglected to tell her that he had stopped at twelve for just this
reason. "Guess I better get them unloaded," he said, standing up.
"Can I help you?"
He stared at her for a moment, saying nothing. She smiled a little and
looked aside. "Terry, I'm sorry—about this morning. I—I know you've
got a job that has to be—" Her lip quivered slightly.
Norris grinned, caught her shoulders, and pulled her close.
"Honeymoon's on again, huh?" she whispered against his neck.
"Come on," he grunted. "Let's unload some neutroids, before I forget
all about work."
They went out to the kennels together. The cages were inside a
sprawling concrete barn, which was divided into three large rooms—one
for the fragile neuter humanoid creatures, and another for the lesser
mutants, such as cat-Qs, dog-Fs, dwarf bears, and foot-high lambs that
never matured into sheep. The third room contained a small gas chamber
with a conveyor belt leading from it to a crematory-incinerator.
Norris kept the third locked lest his wife see its furnishings.
The doll-like neutroids began their mindless chatter as soon as their
keepers entered the building. Dozens of blazing blond heads began
dancing about their cages. Their bodies thwacked against the wire mesh
as they leaped about their compartments with monkey grace.
Their human appearance was broken by only two distinct features: short
beaverlike tails decorated with fluffy curls of fur, and an erect
thatch of scalp-hair that grew up into a bright candleflame. Otherwise,
they appeared completely human, with baby-pink skin, quick little
smiles, and cherubic faces. They were sexually neuter and never grew
beyond a predetermined age-set which varied for each series. Age-sets
were available from one to ten years human equivalent. Once a neutroid
reached its age-set, it remained at the set's child-development level
until death.
"They must be getting to know you pretty well," Anne said, glancing
around at the cages.
Norris was wearing a slight frown as he inspected the room. "They've
never gotten this excited before."
He walked along a row of cages, then stopped by a K-76 to stare.
"
Apple cores!
" He turned to face his wife. "How did apples get in
there?"
She reddened. "I felt sorry for them, eating that goo from the
mechanical feeder. I drove down to Sherman III and bought six dozen
cooking apples."
"That was a mistake."
She frowned irritably. "We can afford it."
"That's not the point. There's a reason for the mechanical feeders." He
paused, wondering how he could tell her the truth. He blundered on:
"They get to love whoever feeds them."
"I can't see—"
"How would you feel about disposing of something that loved you?"
Anne folded her arms and stared at him. "Planning to dispose of any
soon?" she asked acidly.
"Honeymoon's off again, eh?"
She turned away. "I'm sorry, Terry. I'll try not to mention it again."
He began unloading the truck, pulling the frightened and squirming
doll-things forth one at a time with a snare-pole. They were one-man
pets, always frightened of strangers.
"What's the Delmont case, Terry?" Anne asked while he worked.
"Huh?"
"I heard you mention it on the phone. Anything to do with why you got
your face scratched?"
He nodded sourly. "Indirectly, yes. It's a long story."
"Tell me."
"Well, Delmont was a green-horn evolvotron operator at the Bermuda
plant. His job was taking the unfertilized chimpanzee ova out of the
egg-multiplier, mounting them in his machine, and bombarding the
gene structure with sub-atomic particles. It's tricky business. He
flashes a huge enlargement of the ovum on the electron microscope
screen—large enough so he can see the individual protein molecules. He
has an artificial gene pattern to compare it with. It's like shooting
sub-atomic billiards. He's got to fire alpha-particles into the gene
structure and displace certain links by just the right amount. And
he's got to be quick about it before the ovum dies from an overdose of
radiation from the enlarger. A good operator can get one success out of
seven tries.
"Well, Delmont worked a week and spoiled over a hundred ova without a
single success. They threatened to fire him. I guess he got hysterical.
Anyway, he reported one success the next day. It was faked. The ovum
had a couple of flaws—something wrong in the central nervous system's
determinants, and in the glandular makeup. Not a standard neutroid
ovum. He passed it on to the incubators to get a credit, knowing it
wouldn't be caught until after birth."
"It wasn't caught at all?" Anne asked.
"Funny thing, he was afraid it wouldn't be. He got to worrying about
it, thought maybe a mental-deviant would pass, and that it might be
dangerous. So he went back to its incubator and cut off the hormone
flow into its compartment."
"Why that?"
"So it
would
develop sexuality. A neutroid would be born a female
if they didn't give it suppressive doses of male hormone prenatally.
That keeps ovaries from developing and it comes out neuter. But
Delmont figured a female would be caught and stopped before the final
inspection. They'd dispose of her without even bothering to examine for
the other defects. And he could blame the sexuality on an equipment
malfunction. He thought it was pretty smart. Trouble was they didn't
catch the female. She went on through; they all
look
female."
"How did they find out about it now?"
"He got caught last month, trying it again. And he confessed to doing
it once before. No telling how many times he
really
did it."
Norris held up the final kicking, squealing, tassel-haired doll from
the back of the kennel-truck. He grinned at his wife. "This little
fellow, for instance. It might be a potential she. It might also be a
potential murderer.
All
these kiddos are from the machines in the
section where Delmont worked."
Anne snorted and caught the baby-creature in her arms. It struggled and
tried to bite, but subsided a little when she disentangled it from the
snare. "Kkr-r-reee," it cooed nervously. "Kkr-r-reee!"
"You tell him you're no murderer," Anne purred to it.
Norris watched disapprovingly while she fondled it. One thing he had
learned: to steer clear of emotional attachments. It was eight months
old and looked like a child of two years—a year short of its age-set.
And it was designed to be as affectionate as a human child.
"Put it in the cage, Anne," he said quietly.
She looked up and shook her head.
"It belongs to somebody else. If it fixes a libido attachment on you,
you're actually robbing its owner. They can't love many people at once."
She snorted, but installed the thing in its cage.
"Anne—" Norris hesitated, hating to approach the subject. "Do
you—want one—for yourself? I can sign an unclaimed one over to you to
keep in the house. It won't cost us anything."
Slowly she shook her head, and her pale eyes went moody and luminous.
"I'm going to have one of my own," she said.
He stood in the back of the truck, staring down at her. "Do you realize
what—"
"I know what I'm saying. We're class-C on account of heart-trouble in
both our families. Well, I don't care, Terry. I'm not going to waste a
heart over one of these pathetic little artificial animals. We're going
to have a baby."
"You know what they'd do to us?"
"If they catch us, yes—compulsory divorce, sterilization. But they
won't catch us. I'll have it at home, Terry. Not even a doctor. We'll
hide it."
"I won't let you do such a thing."
She faced him angrily. "Oh, this whole rotten
world
!" she choked.
Suddenly she turned and fled out of the building. She was sobbing.
Norris climbed slowly down from the truck and wandered on into the
house. She was not in the kitchen nor the living room. The bedroom door
was locked. He shrugged and went to sit on the sofa. The television
set was on, and a newscast was coming from a local station.
"... we were unable to get shots of the body," the announcer was
saying. "But here is a view of the Georges residence. I'll switch you
to our mobile unit in Sherman II, James Duncan reporting."
Norris frowned with bewilderment as the scene shifted to a two-story
plasticoid house among the elm trees. It was after dark, but the mobile
unit's powerful floodlights made daylight of the house and its yard and
the police 'copters sitting in a side lot. An ambulance was parked in
the street. A new voice came on the audio.
"This is James Duncan, ladies and gentlemen, speaking to you from our
mobile unit in front of the late Doctor Hiram Georges' residence just
west of Sherman II. We are waiting for the stretcher to be brought out,
and Police Chief Erskine Miler is standing here beside me to give us a
word about the case. Doctor Georges' death has shocked the community
deeply. Most of you local listeners have known him for many years—some
of you have depended upon his services as a family physician. He was a
man well known, well loved. But now let's listen to Chief Miler."
Norris sat breathing quickly. There could scarcely be two Doctor
Georges in the community, but only this morning....
A growling drawl came from the audio. "This's Chief Miler speaking,
folks. I just want to say that if any of you know the whereabouts of a
Mrs. Sarah Glubbes, call me immediately. She's wanted for questioning."
"Thank you, Chief. This is James Duncan again. I'll review the facts
for you briefly again, ladies and gentlemen. At seven o'clock,
less than an hour ago, a woman—allegedly Mrs. Glubbes—burst into
Doctor Georges' dining room while the family was at dinner. She was
brandishing a pistol and screaming, 'You stole my baby! You gave me the
wrong baby! Where's my baby?'
"When the doctor assured her that there was no other baby, she fired,
shattering his salad plate. Glancing off it, the bullet pierced his
heart. The woman fled. A peculiar feature of the case is that Mrs.
Glubbes, the alleged intruder,
has no baby
. Just a minute—just a
minute—here comes the stretcher now."
Norris turned the set off and went to call the police. He told them
what he knew and promised to make himself available for questioning if
it became necessary. When he turned from the phone, Anne was standing
in the bedroom doorway. She might have been crying a little, but she
concealed it well.
"What was all that?" she asked.
"Woman killed a man. I happened to know the motive."
"What was it?"
"Neutroid trouble."
"You meet up with a lot of unpleasantness in this business, don't you?"
"Lot of unpleasant emotions tangled up in it," he admitted.
"I know. Well, supper's been keeping hot for two hours. Shall we eat?"
They went to bed at midnight, but it was after one when he became
certain that his wife was asleep. He lay in darkness for a time,
listening to her even breathing. Then he cautiously eased himself out
of bed and tiptoed quietly through the door, carrying his shoes and
trousers. He put them on in the kitchen and stole silently out to the
kennels. A half moon hung low in a misty sky, and the wind was chilly
out of the north.
He went into the neutroid room and flicked a switch. A few sleepy
chatters greeted the light.
One at a time, he awoke twenty-three of the older doll-things and
carried them to a large glass-walled compartment. These were the
long-time residents; they knew him well, and they came with him
willingly—like children after the Piper of Hamlin. When he had gotten
them in the glass chamber, he sealed the door and turned on the gas.
The conveyor would automatically carry them on to the incinerator.
Now he had enough cages for the Bermuda-K-99s.
He hurriedly quit the kennels and went to sit on the back steps. His
eyes were burning, but the thought of tears made him sicker. It was
like an assassin crying while he stabbed his victim. It was more honest
just to retch.
When he tiptoed back inside, he got as far as the hall. Then he saw
Anne's small figure framed in the bedroom window, silhouetted against
the moonlit yard. She had slipped into her negligee and was sitting on
the narrow windowstool, staring silently out at the dull red tongue of
exhaust gases from the crematory's chimney.
Norris backed away. He went to the parlor and lay down on the couch.
After a while he heard her come into the room. She paused in the center
of the rug, a fragile mist in the darkness. He turned his face away and
waited for the rasping accusation. But soon she came to sit on the edge
of the sofa. She said nothing. Her hand crept out and touched his cheek
lightly. He felt her cool finger-tips trace a soft line up his temple.
"It's all right, Terry," she whispered.
He kept his face averted. Her fingers traced a last stroke. Then she
padded quietly back to the bedroom. He lay awake until dawn, knowing
that it would never be all right, neither the creating nor the killing,
until he—and the whole world—completely lost sanity. And then
everything would be all right, only it still wouldn't make sense.
Anne was asleep when he left the house. The night mist had gathered
into clouds that made a gloomy morning of it. He drove on out in the
kennel-truck, meaning to get the rest of the Bermuda-K-99s so that he
could begin his testing.
Still he felt the night's guilt, like a sticky dew that refused to
depart with morning. Why should he have to kill the things? The answer
was obvious. Society manufactured them because killing them was
permissible. Human babies could not be disposed of when the market
became glutted. The neutroids offered solace to childless women, kept
them satisfied with a restricted birth rate. And why a restricted
birth rate? Because by keeping the population at five billions, the
Federation could insure a decent living standard for everybody.
Where there was giving, Norris thought glumly, there was also taking
away. Man had always deluded himself by thinking that he "created," but
he created nothing. He thought that he had created—with his medical
science and his end to wars—a longer life for the individual. But he
found that he had only taken the lives of the unborn and added them to
the years of the aged. Man now had a life expectancy of eighty, except
that he had damn little chance of being born to enjoy it.
A neutroid filled the cradle in his stead. A neutroid that never ate
as much, or grew up to be unemployed. A neutroid could be killed if
things got tough, but could still satisfy a woman's craving to mother
something small.
Norris gave up thinking about it. Eventually he would have to adjust
to it. He was already adjusted to a world that loved the artificial
mutants as children. He had been brought up in it. Emotion came in
conflict with the grim necessities of his job. Somehow he would have
to love them in the parlor and kill them in the kennel. It was only a
matter of adjustment.
At noon, he brought back another dozen K-99s and installed them in his
cages. There had been two highly reluctant mothers, but he skipped
them and left the seizure to the local authorities. Yates had already
brought in the three from yesterday.
"No more scratches?" Anne asked him while they ate lunch. They did not
speak of the night's mass-disposal.
Norris smiled mechanically. "I learned my lesson yesterday. If
they bare their fangs, I get out without another word. Funny thing
though—I've got a feeling one mother pulled a fast one."
"What happened?"
"Well, I told her what I wanted and why. She didn't like it, but she
let me in. I started out with her newt, but she wanted a receipt. So I
gave her one; took the serial number off my checklist. She looked at
it and said, 'Why, that's not Chichi's number!' I looked at the newt's
foot, and sure enough it wasn't. I had to leave it. It was a K-99, but
not even from Bermuda."
"I thought they were all registered," Anne said.
"They are. I told her she had the wrong neutroid, but she got mad. Went
and got the sales receipt. It checked with her newt, and it was from
O'Reilley's pet shop—right place, wrong number. I just don't get it."
"Nothing to worry about, is it Terry?"
He looked at her peculiarly. "Ever think what might happen if someone
started a black market in neutroids?"
They finished the meal in silence. After lunch he went out again to
gather up the rest of the group. By four o'clock, he had gotten all
that were to be had without the threat of a warrant. The screams and
pleas and tears of the owners left him gloomily despising himself.
If Delmont's falsification had been widespread, he might have to turn
several of the thirty-five over to central lab for dissection and
ultimate destruction. That would bring the murderous wrath of their
owners down upon him. He began to understand why bio-inspectors were
frequently shifted from one territory to another.
On the way home, he stopped in Sherman II to check on the missing
number. It was the largest of the Sherman communities, covering fifty
blocks of commercial buildings. He parked in the outskirts and took a
sidewalk escalator toward O'Reilley's address.
It was on a dingy sidestreet, reminiscent of past centuries, a street
of small bars and bowling alleys and cigar stores. There was even a
shop with three gold balls above the entrance, but the place was now
an antique store. A light mist was falling when he stepped off the
escalator and stood in front of the pet shop. A sign hung out over the
sidewalk, announcing:
J. "DOGGY" O'REILLEY
PETS FOR SALE
DUMB BLONDES AND GOLDFISH
MUTANTS FOR THE CHILDLESS
BUY A BUNDLE OF JOY
Norris frowned at the sign and wandered inside. The place was warm
and gloomy. He wrinkled his nose at the strong musk of animal odors.
O'Reilley's was not a shining example of cleanliness.
Somewhere a puppy was yapping, and a parrot croaked the lyrics of
A
Chimp to Call My Own
, which Norris recognized as the theme song of a
popular soap-opera about a lady evolvotron operator.
He paused briefly by a tank of silk-draped goldfish. The shop had a
customer. An elderly lady was haggling with a wizened manager over the
price of a half grown second-hand dog-F. She was shaking her last dog's
death certificate under his nose and demanding a guarantee of the dog's
alleged F-5 intelligence. The old man offered to swear on a Bible, but
he demurred when it came to swearing on a ledger.
The dog was saying, "Don' sell me, Dada. Don' sell me."
Norris smiled sardonically to himself. The non-human pets were smarter
than the neutroids. A K-108 could speak a dozen words, and a K-99
never got farther than "mamma," "pappa," and "cookie." Anthropos was
afraid to make the quasi-humans too intelligent, lest sentimentalists
proclaim them really human.
He wandered on toward the back of the building, pausing briefly by
the cash register to inspect O'Reilley's license, which hung in a
dusty frame on the wall behind the counter. "James Fallon
O'Reilley ... authorized dealer in mutant animals ... all non-predatory
mammals including chimpanzee-K series ... license expires June 1, 2235."
It seemed in order, although the expiration date was approaching. He
started toward a bank of neutroid cages along the opposite wall, but
O'Reilley was mincing across the floor to meet him. The customer had
gone. The little manager wore an elfin professional smile, and his bald
head bobbled in a welcoming nod.
"Good day, sir, good day! May I show you a dwarf kangaroo, or a—" He
stopped and adjusted his spectacles. He blinked and peered as Norris
flashed his badge. His smile waned.
"I'm Agent Norris, Mr. O'Reilley. Called you yesterday for that rundown
on K-99 sales."
O'Reilley looked suddenly nervous. "Oh, yes. Find 'em all?"
Norris shook his head. "No. That's why I stopped by. There's some
mistake on—" he glanced at his list—"on K-99-LJZ-351. Let's check it
again."
O'Reilley seemed to cringe. "No mistake. I gave you the buyer's name."
"She has a different number."
"Can I help it if she traded with somebody?"
"She didn't. She bought it here. I saw the receipt."
"Then she traded with one of my other customers!" snapped the old man.
"Two of your customers have the same name—Adelia Schultz? Not likely.
Let's see your duplicate receipt book."
O'Reilley's wrinkled face set itself into a stubborn mask. "Doubt if
it's still around."
Norris frowned. "Look, pop, I've had a rough day. I
could
start
naming some things around here that need fixing—sanitary violations
and such. Not to mention that sign—'dumb blondes.' They outlawed that
one when they executed that shyster doctor for shooting K-108s full
of growth hormones, trying to raise himself a harem to sell. Besides,
you're required to keep sales records until they've been micro-filmed.
There hasn't been a microfilming since July."
The wrinkled face twitched with frustrated anger. O'Reilley shuffled
to the counter while Norris followed. He got a fat binder from under
the register and started toward a wooden stairway.
"Where you going?" Norris called.
"Get my old glasses," the manager grumbled. "Can't see through these
new things."
"Leave the book here and
I'll
check it," Norris offered.
But O'Reilley was already limping quickly up the stairs. He seemed not
to hear. He shut the door behind him, and Norris heard the lock click.
The bio-agent waited. Again the thought of a black market troubled him.
Unauthorized neutroids could mean lots of trouble. | [
"Because they are grouped together in isolated areas, it is possible that they could use their adorable appearance and innocent demeanor to hide the fact that they are conspiring to overthrow the society.",
"Because they only live up until a certain age, they often act with a level of invincibility that is threatening to society and its systems of social stratification.",
"Their cute appearance causes others to underestimate their high predatory instincts and behaviors, and many injuries and deaths result because of this incongruency.",
"Their cute appearance makes it easy for humans to get attached to them, and mass levels of attachment could potentially thwart current methods of classifying members of society."
] | 3 |
51651_QFG6OVXX_2 | How are citizens organized into different classes in society? | Conditionally Human
By WALTER M. MILLER, JR.
Illustrated by DAVID STONE
They were such cute synthetic creatures, it
was impossible not to love them. Of course,
that was precisely why they were dangerous!
There was no use hanging around after breakfast. His wife was in a hurt
mood, and he could neither endure the hurt nor remove it. He put on his
coat in the kitchen and stood for a moment with his hat in his hands.
His wife was still at the table, absently fingering the handle of her
cup and staring fixedly out the window at the kennels behind the house.
He moved quietly up behind her and touched her silk-clad shoulder. The
shoulder shivered away from him, and her dark hair swung shiningly as
she shuddered. He drew his hand back and his bewildered face went slack
and miserable.
"Honeymoon's over, huh?"
She said nothing, but shrugged faintly.
"You knew I worked for the F.B.A.," he said. "You knew I'd have charge
of a district pound. You knew it before we got married."
"I didn't know you killed them," she said venomously.
"I won't have to kill many. Besides, they're only animals."
"
Intelligent
animals!"
"Intelligent as a human imbecile, maybe."
"A small child is an imbecile. Would you kill a small child?"
"You're taking intelligence as the only criterion of humanity," he
protested hopelessly, knowing that a logical defense was useless
against sentimentality. "Baby—"
"Don't call me baby! Call
them
baby!"
Norris backed a few steps toward the door. Against his better judgment,
he spoke again. "Anne honey, look! Think of the
good
things about the
job. Sure, everything has its ugly angles. But think—we get this house
rent-free; I've got my own district with no bosses around; I make my
own hours; you'll meet lots of people that stop in at the pound. It's a
fine
job, honey!"
She sipped her coffee and appeared to be listening, so he went on.
"And what can I do? You know how the Federation handles employment.
They looked over my aptitude tests and sent me to Bio-Administration.
If I don't want to follow my aptitudes, the only choice is common
labor. That's the
law
."
"I suppose you have an aptitude for killing babies?" she said sweetly.
Norris withered. His voice went desperate. "They assigned me to it
because I
liked
babies. And because I have a B.S. in biology and an
aptitude for dealing with people. Can't you understand? Destroying
unclaimed units is the smallest part of it. Honey, before the
evolvotron, before Anthropos went into the mutant-animal business,
people used to elect dogcatchers. Think of it that way—I'm just a
dogcatcher."
Her cool green eyes turned slowly to meet his gaze. Her face was
delicately cut from cold marble. She was a small woman, slender and
fragile, but her quiet contempt made her loom.
He backed closer to the door.
"Well, I've got to get on the job." He put on his hat and picked at a
splinter on the door. He frowned studiously at the splinter. "I—I'll
see you tonight." He ripped the splinter loose when it became obvious
that she didn't want to be kissed.
He grunted a nervous good-by and stumbled down the hall and out of the
house. The honeymoon was over, all right.
He climbed in the kennel-truck and drove east toward the highway. The
suburban street wound among the pastel plasticoid cottages that were
set approximately two to an acre on the lightly wooded land. With its
population legally fixed at three hundred million, most of the country
had become one big suburb, dotted with community centers and lined
with narrow belts of industrial development. Norris wished there were
someplace where he could be completely alone.
As he approached an intersection, he saw a small animal sitting on the
curb, wrapped in its own bushy tail. Its oversized head was bald on
top, but the rest of its body was covered with blue-gray fur. Its tiny
pink tongue was licking daintily at small forepaws with prehensile
thumbs. It was a cat-Q-5. It glanced curiously at the truck as Norris
pulled to a halt.
He smiled at it from the window and called, "What's your name, kitten?"
The cat-Q-5 stared at him impassively for a moment, let out a
stuttering high-pitched wail, then: "Kiyi Rorry."
"Whose child are you, Rorry?" he asked. "Where do you live?"
The cat-Q-5 took its time about answering. There were no houses near
the intersection, and Norris feared that the animal might be lost.
It blinked at him, sleepily bored, and resumed its paw-washing. He
repeated the questions.
"Mama kiyi," said the cat-Q-5 disgustedly.
"That's right, Mama's kitty. But where is Mama? Do you suppose she ran
away?"
The cat-Q-5 looked startled. It stuttered for a moment, and its fur
crept slowly erect. It glanced around hurriedly, then shot off down the
street at a fast scamper. He followed it in the truck until it darted
onto a porch and began wailing through the screen, "Mama no run ray!
Mama no run ray!"
Norris grinned and drove on. A class-C couple, allowed no children
of their own, could get quite attached to a cat-Q-5. The felines
were emotionally safer than the quasi-human chimp-K series called
"neutroids." When a pet neutroid died, a family was broken with grief;
but most couples could endure the death of a cat-Q or a dog-F. Class-C
couples were allowed two lesser units or one neutroid.
His grin faded as he wondered which Anne would choose. The Norrises
were class-C—defective heredity.
He found himself in Sherman III Community Center—eight blocks of
commercial buildings, serving the surrounding suburbs. He stopped at
the message office to pick up his mail. There was a memo from Chief
Franklin. He tore it open nervously and read it in the truck. It was
something he had been expecting for several days.
Attention All District Inspectors:
Subject: Deviant Neutroid.
You will immediately begin a systematic and thorough survey of all
animals whose serial numbers fall in the Bermuda-K-99 series for
birth dates during July 2234. This is in connection with the Delmont
Negligency Case. Seize all animals in this category, impound, and run
proper sections of normalcy tests. Watch for mental and glandular
deviation. Delmont has confessed to passing only one non-standard
unit, but there may be others. He disclaims memory of deviant's serial
number. This could be a ruse to bring a stop to investigations when
one animal is found. Be thorough.
If allowed to reach age-set or adulthood, such a deviant could be
dangerous to its owner or to others. Hold all seized K-99s who show
the slightest abnormality in the normalcy tests. Forward to central
lab. Return standard units to their owners. Accomplish entire survey
project within seven days.
C. Franklin
Norris frowned at the last sentence. His district covered about two
hundred square miles. Its replacement-quota of new neutroids was around
three hundred animals a month. He tried to estimate how many of July's
influx had been K-99s from Bermuda Factory. Forty, at least. Could he
do it in a week? And there were only eleven empty neutroid cages in his
kennel. The other forty-nine were occupied by the previous inspector's
"unclaimed" inventory—awaiting destruction.
He wadded the memo in his pocket, then nosed the truck onto the highway
and headed toward Wylo City and the district wholesale offices of
Anthropos, Inc. They should be able to give him a list of all July's
Bermuda K-99 serial numbers that had entered his territory, together
with the retailers to whom the animals had been sold. A week's deadline
for finding and testing forty neutroids would put him in a tight
squeeze.
He was halfway to Wylo City when the radiophone buzzed on his
dashboard. He pulled into the slow lane and answered quickly, hoping
for Anne's voice. A polite professional purr came instead.
"Inspector Norris? This is Doctor Georges. We haven't met, but I
imagine we will. Are you extremely busy at the moment?"
Norris hesitated. "Extremely," he said.
"Well, this won't take long. One of my patients—a Mrs. Sarah
Glubbes—called a while ago and said her baby was sick. I must be
getting absent-minded, because I forgot she was class C until I got
there." He hesitated. "The baby turned out to be a neutroid. It's
dying. Eighteenth order virus."
"So?"
"Well, she's—uh—rather a
peculiar
woman, Inspector. Keeps telling
me how much trouble she had in childbirth, and how she can't ever
have another one. It's pathetic. She
believes
it's her own. Do you
understand?"
"I think so," Norris replied slowly. "But what do you want me to do?
Can't you send the neutroid to a vet?"
"She insists it's going to a hospital. Worst part is that she's heard
of the disease. Knows it can be cured with the proper treatment—in
humans. Of course, no hospital would play along with her fantasy and
take a neutroid, especially since she couldn't pay for its treatment."
"I still don't see—"
"I thought perhaps you could help me fake a substitution. It's a K-48
series, five-year-old, three-year set. Do you have one in the pound
that's not claimed?"
Norris thought for a moment. "I think I have
one
. You're welcome to
it, Doctor, but you can't fake a serial number. She'll know it. And
even though they look exactly alike, the new one won't recognize her.
It'll be spooky."
There was a long pause, followed by a sigh. "I'll try it anyway. Can I
come get the animal now?"
"I'm on the highway—"
"Please, Norris! This is urgent. That woman will lose her mind
completely if—"
"All right, I'll call my wife and tell her to open the pound for you.
Pick out the K-48 and sign for it. And listen—"
"Yes?"
"Don't let me catch you falsifying a serial number."
Doctor Georges laughed faintly. "I won't, Norris. Thanks a million." He
hung up quickly.
Norris immediately regretted his consent. It bordered on being illegal.
But he saw it as a quick way to get rid of an animal that might later
have to be killed.
He called Anne. Her voice was dull. She seemed depressed, but not
angry. When he finished talking, she said, "All right, Terry," and hung
up.
By noon, he had finished checking the shipping lists at the wholesale
house in Wylo City. Only thirty-five of July's Bermuda-K-99s had
entered his territory, and they were about equally divided among five
pet shops, three of which were in Wylo City.
After lunch, he called each of the retail dealers, read them the serial
numbers, and asked them to check the sales records for names and
addresses of individual buyers. By three o'clock, he had the entire
list filled out, and the task began to look easier. All that remained
was to pick up the thirty-five animals.
And
that
, he thought, was like trying to take a year-old baby away
from its doting mother. He sighed and drove to the Wylo suburbs to
begin his rounds.
Anne met him at the door when he came home at six. He stood on the
porch for a moment, smiling at her weakly. The smile was not returned.
"Doctor Georges came," she told him. "He signed for the—" She stopped
to stare at him. "Darling, your face! What happened?"
Gingerly he touch the livid welts down the side of his cheek. "Just
scratched a little," he muttered. He pushed past her and went to the
phone in the hall. He sat eying it distastefully for a moment, not
liking what he had to do. Anne came to stand beside him and examine the
scratches.
Finally he lifted the phone and dialed the Wylo exchange. A grating
mechanical voice answered, "Locator center. Your party, please."
"Sheriff Yates," Norris grunted.
The robot operator, which had on tape the working habits of each Wylo
City citizen, began calling numbers. It found the off-duty sheriff on
its third try, in a Wylo pool hall.
"I'm getting so I hate that infernal gadget," Yates grumbled. "I think
it's got me psyched. What do you want, Norris?"
"Cooperation. I'm mailing you three letters charging three Wylo
citizens with resisting a Federal official—namely
me
—and charging
one of them with assault. I tried to pick up their neutroids for a
pound inspection—"
Yates bellowed lusty laughter into the phone.
"It's not funny. I've got to get those neutroids. It's in connection
with the Delmont case."
Yates stopped laughing. "Oh. Well, I'll take care of it."
"It's a rush-order, Sheriff. Can you get the warrants tonight and pick
up the animals in the morning?"
"Easy on those warrants, boy. Judge Charleman can't be disturbed just
any time. I can get the newts to you by noon, I guess, provided we
don't have to get a helicopter posse to chase down the mothers."
"That'll be all right. And listen, Yates—fix it so the charges will
be dropped if they cooperate. Don't shake those warrants around unless
they just won't listen to reason. But get those neutroids."
"Okay, boy. Gotcha."
Norris gave him the names and addresses of the three unwilling mothers.
As soon as he hung up, Anne touched his shoulders and said, "Sit
still." She began smoothing a chilly ointment over his burning cheek.
"Hard day?" she asked.
"Not too hard. Those were just three out of fifteen. I got the other
twelve. They're in the truck."
"That's good," she said. "You've got only twelve empty cages."
He neglected to tell her that he had stopped at twelve for just this
reason. "Guess I better get them unloaded," he said, standing up.
"Can I help you?"
He stared at her for a moment, saying nothing. She smiled a little and
looked aside. "Terry, I'm sorry—about this morning. I—I know you've
got a job that has to be—" Her lip quivered slightly.
Norris grinned, caught her shoulders, and pulled her close.
"Honeymoon's on again, huh?" she whispered against his neck.
"Come on," he grunted. "Let's unload some neutroids, before I forget
all about work."
They went out to the kennels together. The cages were inside a
sprawling concrete barn, which was divided into three large rooms—one
for the fragile neuter humanoid creatures, and another for the lesser
mutants, such as cat-Qs, dog-Fs, dwarf bears, and foot-high lambs that
never matured into sheep. The third room contained a small gas chamber
with a conveyor belt leading from it to a crematory-incinerator.
Norris kept the third locked lest his wife see its furnishings.
The doll-like neutroids began their mindless chatter as soon as their
keepers entered the building. Dozens of blazing blond heads began
dancing about their cages. Their bodies thwacked against the wire mesh
as they leaped about their compartments with monkey grace.
Their human appearance was broken by only two distinct features: short
beaverlike tails decorated with fluffy curls of fur, and an erect
thatch of scalp-hair that grew up into a bright candleflame. Otherwise,
they appeared completely human, with baby-pink skin, quick little
smiles, and cherubic faces. They were sexually neuter and never grew
beyond a predetermined age-set which varied for each series. Age-sets
were available from one to ten years human equivalent. Once a neutroid
reached its age-set, it remained at the set's child-development level
until death.
"They must be getting to know you pretty well," Anne said, glancing
around at the cages.
Norris was wearing a slight frown as he inspected the room. "They've
never gotten this excited before."
He walked along a row of cages, then stopped by a K-76 to stare.
"
Apple cores!
" He turned to face his wife. "How did apples get in
there?"
She reddened. "I felt sorry for them, eating that goo from the
mechanical feeder. I drove down to Sherman III and bought six dozen
cooking apples."
"That was a mistake."
She frowned irritably. "We can afford it."
"That's not the point. There's a reason for the mechanical feeders." He
paused, wondering how he could tell her the truth. He blundered on:
"They get to love whoever feeds them."
"I can't see—"
"How would you feel about disposing of something that loved you?"
Anne folded her arms and stared at him. "Planning to dispose of any
soon?" she asked acidly.
"Honeymoon's off again, eh?"
She turned away. "I'm sorry, Terry. I'll try not to mention it again."
He began unloading the truck, pulling the frightened and squirming
doll-things forth one at a time with a snare-pole. They were one-man
pets, always frightened of strangers.
"What's the Delmont case, Terry?" Anne asked while he worked.
"Huh?"
"I heard you mention it on the phone. Anything to do with why you got
your face scratched?"
He nodded sourly. "Indirectly, yes. It's a long story."
"Tell me."
"Well, Delmont was a green-horn evolvotron operator at the Bermuda
plant. His job was taking the unfertilized chimpanzee ova out of the
egg-multiplier, mounting them in his machine, and bombarding the
gene structure with sub-atomic particles. It's tricky business. He
flashes a huge enlargement of the ovum on the electron microscope
screen—large enough so he can see the individual protein molecules. He
has an artificial gene pattern to compare it with. It's like shooting
sub-atomic billiards. He's got to fire alpha-particles into the gene
structure and displace certain links by just the right amount. And
he's got to be quick about it before the ovum dies from an overdose of
radiation from the enlarger. A good operator can get one success out of
seven tries.
"Well, Delmont worked a week and spoiled over a hundred ova without a
single success. They threatened to fire him. I guess he got hysterical.
Anyway, he reported one success the next day. It was faked. The ovum
had a couple of flaws—something wrong in the central nervous system's
determinants, and in the glandular makeup. Not a standard neutroid
ovum. He passed it on to the incubators to get a credit, knowing it
wouldn't be caught until after birth."
"It wasn't caught at all?" Anne asked.
"Funny thing, he was afraid it wouldn't be. He got to worrying about
it, thought maybe a mental-deviant would pass, and that it might be
dangerous. So he went back to its incubator and cut off the hormone
flow into its compartment."
"Why that?"
"So it
would
develop sexuality. A neutroid would be born a female
if they didn't give it suppressive doses of male hormone prenatally.
That keeps ovaries from developing and it comes out neuter. But
Delmont figured a female would be caught and stopped before the final
inspection. They'd dispose of her without even bothering to examine for
the other defects. And he could blame the sexuality on an equipment
malfunction. He thought it was pretty smart. Trouble was they didn't
catch the female. She went on through; they all
look
female."
"How did they find out about it now?"
"He got caught last month, trying it again. And he confessed to doing
it once before. No telling how many times he
really
did it."
Norris held up the final kicking, squealing, tassel-haired doll from
the back of the kennel-truck. He grinned at his wife. "This little
fellow, for instance. It might be a potential she. It might also be a
potential murderer.
All
these kiddos are from the machines in the
section where Delmont worked."
Anne snorted and caught the baby-creature in her arms. It struggled and
tried to bite, but subsided a little when she disentangled it from the
snare. "Kkr-r-reee," it cooed nervously. "Kkr-r-reee!"
"You tell him you're no murderer," Anne purred to it.
Norris watched disapprovingly while she fondled it. One thing he had
learned: to steer clear of emotional attachments. It was eight months
old and looked like a child of two years—a year short of its age-set.
And it was designed to be as affectionate as a human child.
"Put it in the cage, Anne," he said quietly.
She looked up and shook her head.
"It belongs to somebody else. If it fixes a libido attachment on you,
you're actually robbing its owner. They can't love many people at once."
She snorted, but installed the thing in its cage.
"Anne—" Norris hesitated, hating to approach the subject. "Do
you—want one—for yourself? I can sign an unclaimed one over to you to
keep in the house. It won't cost us anything."
Slowly she shook her head, and her pale eyes went moody and luminous.
"I'm going to have one of my own," she said.
He stood in the back of the truck, staring down at her. "Do you realize
what—"
"I know what I'm saying. We're class-C on account of heart-trouble in
both our families. Well, I don't care, Terry. I'm not going to waste a
heart over one of these pathetic little artificial animals. We're going
to have a baby."
"You know what they'd do to us?"
"If they catch us, yes—compulsory divorce, sterilization. But they
won't catch us. I'll have it at home, Terry. Not even a doctor. We'll
hide it."
"I won't let you do such a thing."
She faced him angrily. "Oh, this whole rotten
world
!" she choked.
Suddenly she turned and fled out of the building. She was sobbing.
Norris climbed slowly down from the truck and wandered on into the
house. She was not in the kitchen nor the living room. The bedroom door
was locked. He shrugged and went to sit on the sofa. The television
set was on, and a newscast was coming from a local station.
"... we were unable to get shots of the body," the announcer was
saying. "But here is a view of the Georges residence. I'll switch you
to our mobile unit in Sherman II, James Duncan reporting."
Norris frowned with bewilderment as the scene shifted to a two-story
plasticoid house among the elm trees. It was after dark, but the mobile
unit's powerful floodlights made daylight of the house and its yard and
the police 'copters sitting in a side lot. An ambulance was parked in
the street. A new voice came on the audio.
"This is James Duncan, ladies and gentlemen, speaking to you from our
mobile unit in front of the late Doctor Hiram Georges' residence just
west of Sherman II. We are waiting for the stretcher to be brought out,
and Police Chief Erskine Miler is standing here beside me to give us a
word about the case. Doctor Georges' death has shocked the community
deeply. Most of you local listeners have known him for many years—some
of you have depended upon his services as a family physician. He was a
man well known, well loved. But now let's listen to Chief Miler."
Norris sat breathing quickly. There could scarcely be two Doctor
Georges in the community, but only this morning....
A growling drawl came from the audio. "This's Chief Miler speaking,
folks. I just want to say that if any of you know the whereabouts of a
Mrs. Sarah Glubbes, call me immediately. She's wanted for questioning."
"Thank you, Chief. This is James Duncan again. I'll review the facts
for you briefly again, ladies and gentlemen. At seven o'clock,
less than an hour ago, a woman—allegedly Mrs. Glubbes—burst into
Doctor Georges' dining room while the family was at dinner. She was
brandishing a pistol and screaming, 'You stole my baby! You gave me the
wrong baby! Where's my baby?'
"When the doctor assured her that there was no other baby, she fired,
shattering his salad plate. Glancing off it, the bullet pierced his
heart. The woman fled. A peculiar feature of the case is that Mrs.
Glubbes, the alleged intruder,
has no baby
. Just a minute—just a
minute—here comes the stretcher now."
Norris turned the set off and went to call the police. He told them
what he knew and promised to make himself available for questioning if
it became necessary. When he turned from the phone, Anne was standing
in the bedroom doorway. She might have been crying a little, but she
concealed it well.
"What was all that?" she asked.
"Woman killed a man. I happened to know the motive."
"What was it?"
"Neutroid trouble."
"You meet up with a lot of unpleasantness in this business, don't you?"
"Lot of unpleasant emotions tangled up in it," he admitted.
"I know. Well, supper's been keeping hot for two hours. Shall we eat?"
They went to bed at midnight, but it was after one when he became
certain that his wife was asleep. He lay in darkness for a time,
listening to her even breathing. Then he cautiously eased himself out
of bed and tiptoed quietly through the door, carrying his shoes and
trousers. He put them on in the kitchen and stole silently out to the
kennels. A half moon hung low in a misty sky, and the wind was chilly
out of the north.
He went into the neutroid room and flicked a switch. A few sleepy
chatters greeted the light.
One at a time, he awoke twenty-three of the older doll-things and
carried them to a large glass-walled compartment. These were the
long-time residents; they knew him well, and they came with him
willingly—like children after the Piper of Hamlin. When he had gotten
them in the glass chamber, he sealed the door and turned on the gas.
The conveyor would automatically carry them on to the incinerator.
Now he had enough cages for the Bermuda-K-99s.
He hurriedly quit the kennels and went to sit on the back steps. His
eyes were burning, but the thought of tears made him sicker. It was
like an assassin crying while he stabbed his victim. It was more honest
just to retch.
When he tiptoed back inside, he got as far as the hall. Then he saw
Anne's small figure framed in the bedroom window, silhouetted against
the moonlit yard. She had slipped into her negligee and was sitting on
the narrow windowstool, staring silently out at the dull red tongue of
exhaust gases from the crematory's chimney.
Norris backed away. He went to the parlor and lay down on the couch.
After a while he heard her come into the room. She paused in the center
of the rug, a fragile mist in the darkness. He turned his face away and
waited for the rasping accusation. But soon she came to sit on the edge
of the sofa. She said nothing. Her hand crept out and touched his cheek
lightly. He felt her cool finger-tips trace a soft line up his temple.
"It's all right, Terry," she whispered.
He kept his face averted. Her fingers traced a last stroke. Then she
padded quietly back to the bedroom. He lay awake until dawn, knowing
that it would never be all right, neither the creating nor the killing,
until he—and the whole world—completely lost sanity. And then
everything would be all right, only it still wouldn't make sense.
Anne was asleep when he left the house. The night mist had gathered
into clouds that made a gloomy morning of it. He drove on out in the
kennel-truck, meaning to get the rest of the Bermuda-K-99s so that he
could begin his testing.
Still he felt the night's guilt, like a sticky dew that refused to
depart with morning. Why should he have to kill the things? The answer
was obvious. Society manufactured them because killing them was
permissible. Human babies could not be disposed of when the market
became glutted. The neutroids offered solace to childless women, kept
them satisfied with a restricted birth rate. And why a restricted
birth rate? Because by keeping the population at five billions, the
Federation could insure a decent living standard for everybody.
Where there was giving, Norris thought glumly, there was also taking
away. Man had always deluded himself by thinking that he "created," but
he created nothing. He thought that he had created—with his medical
science and his end to wars—a longer life for the individual. But he
found that he had only taken the lives of the unborn and added them to
the years of the aged. Man now had a life expectancy of eighty, except
that he had damn little chance of being born to enjoy it.
A neutroid filled the cradle in his stead. A neutroid that never ate
as much, or grew up to be unemployed. A neutroid could be killed if
things got tough, but could still satisfy a woman's craving to mother
something small.
Norris gave up thinking about it. Eventually he would have to adjust
to it. He was already adjusted to a world that loved the artificial
mutants as children. He had been brought up in it. Emotion came in
conflict with the grim necessities of his job. Somehow he would have
to love them in the parlor and kill them in the kennel. It was only a
matter of adjustment.
At noon, he brought back another dozen K-99s and installed them in his
cages. There had been two highly reluctant mothers, but he skipped
them and left the seizure to the local authorities. Yates had already
brought in the three from yesterday.
"No more scratches?" Anne asked him while they ate lunch. They did not
speak of the night's mass-disposal.
Norris smiled mechanically. "I learned my lesson yesterday. If
they bare their fangs, I get out without another word. Funny thing
though—I've got a feeling one mother pulled a fast one."
"What happened?"
"Well, I told her what I wanted and why. She didn't like it, but she
let me in. I started out with her newt, but she wanted a receipt. So I
gave her one; took the serial number off my checklist. She looked at
it and said, 'Why, that's not Chichi's number!' I looked at the newt's
foot, and sure enough it wasn't. I had to leave it. It was a K-99, but
not even from Bermuda."
"I thought they were all registered," Anne said.
"They are. I told her she had the wrong neutroid, but she got mad. Went
and got the sales receipt. It checked with her newt, and it was from
O'Reilley's pet shop—right place, wrong number. I just don't get it."
"Nothing to worry about, is it Terry?"
He looked at her peculiarly. "Ever think what might happen if someone
started a black market in neutroids?"
They finished the meal in silence. After lunch he went out again to
gather up the rest of the group. By four o'clock, he had gotten all
that were to be had without the threat of a warrant. The screams and
pleas and tears of the owners left him gloomily despising himself.
If Delmont's falsification had been widespread, he might have to turn
several of the thirty-five over to central lab for dissection and
ultimate destruction. That would bring the murderous wrath of their
owners down upon him. He began to understand why bio-inspectors were
frequently shifted from one territory to another.
On the way home, he stopped in Sherman II to check on the missing
number. It was the largest of the Sherman communities, covering fifty
blocks of commercial buildings. He parked in the outskirts and took a
sidewalk escalator toward O'Reilley's address.
It was on a dingy sidestreet, reminiscent of past centuries, a street
of small bars and bowling alleys and cigar stores. There was even a
shop with three gold balls above the entrance, but the place was now
an antique store. A light mist was falling when he stepped off the
escalator and stood in front of the pet shop. A sign hung out over the
sidewalk, announcing:
J. "DOGGY" O'REILLEY
PETS FOR SALE
DUMB BLONDES AND GOLDFISH
MUTANTS FOR THE CHILDLESS
BUY A BUNDLE OF JOY
Norris frowned at the sign and wandered inside. The place was warm
and gloomy. He wrinkled his nose at the strong musk of animal odors.
O'Reilley's was not a shining example of cleanliness.
Somewhere a puppy was yapping, and a parrot croaked the lyrics of
A
Chimp to Call My Own
, which Norris recognized as the theme song of a
popular soap-opera about a lady evolvotron operator.
He paused briefly by a tank of silk-draped goldfish. The shop had a
customer. An elderly lady was haggling with a wizened manager over the
price of a half grown second-hand dog-F. She was shaking her last dog's
death certificate under his nose and demanding a guarantee of the dog's
alleged F-5 intelligence. The old man offered to swear on a Bible, but
he demurred when it came to swearing on a ledger.
The dog was saying, "Don' sell me, Dada. Don' sell me."
Norris smiled sardonically to himself. The non-human pets were smarter
than the neutroids. A K-108 could speak a dozen words, and a K-99
never got farther than "mamma," "pappa," and "cookie." Anthropos was
afraid to make the quasi-humans too intelligent, lest sentimentalists
proclaim them really human.
He wandered on toward the back of the building, pausing briefly by
the cash register to inspect O'Reilley's license, which hung in a
dusty frame on the wall behind the counter. "James Fallon
O'Reilley ... authorized dealer in mutant animals ... all non-predatory
mammals including chimpanzee-K series ... license expires June 1, 2235."
It seemed in order, although the expiration date was approaching. He
started toward a bank of neutroid cages along the opposite wall, but
O'Reilley was mincing across the floor to meet him. The customer had
gone. The little manager wore an elfin professional smile, and his bald
head bobbled in a welcoming nod.
"Good day, sir, good day! May I show you a dwarf kangaroo, or a—" He
stopped and adjusted his spectacles. He blinked and peered as Norris
flashed his badge. His smile waned.
"I'm Agent Norris, Mr. O'Reilley. Called you yesterday for that rundown
on K-99 sales."
O'Reilley looked suddenly nervous. "Oh, yes. Find 'em all?"
Norris shook his head. "No. That's why I stopped by. There's some
mistake on—" he glanced at his list—"on K-99-LJZ-351. Let's check it
again."
O'Reilley seemed to cringe. "No mistake. I gave you the buyer's name."
"She has a different number."
"Can I help it if she traded with somebody?"
"She didn't. She bought it here. I saw the receipt."
"Then she traded with one of my other customers!" snapped the old man.
"Two of your customers have the same name—Adelia Schultz? Not likely.
Let's see your duplicate receipt book."
O'Reilley's wrinkled face set itself into a stubborn mask. "Doubt if
it's still around."
Norris frowned. "Look, pop, I've had a rough day. I
could
start
naming some things around here that need fixing—sanitary violations
and such. Not to mention that sign—'dumb blondes.' They outlawed that
one when they executed that shyster doctor for shooting K-108s full
of growth hormones, trying to raise himself a harem to sell. Besides,
you're required to keep sales records until they've been micro-filmed.
There hasn't been a microfilming since July."
The wrinkled face twitched with frustrated anger. O'Reilley shuffled
to the counter while Norris followed. He got a fat binder from under
the register and started toward a wooden stairway.
"Where you going?" Norris called.
"Get my old glasses," the manager grumbled. "Can't see through these
new things."
"Leave the book here and
I'll
check it," Norris offered.
But O'Reilley was already limping quickly up the stairs. He seemed not
to hear. He shut the door behind him, and Norris heard the lock click.
The bio-agent waited. Again the thought of a black market troubled him.
Unauthorized neutroids could mean lots of trouble. | [
"Through random assignment at birth",
"According to their socioeconomic status",
"After a lengthy interview with Anthropos upon reaching a specific age-set",
"By an analysis of their genes and heredity"
] | 3 |
51651_QFG6OVXX_3 | Which of the following is NOT true of Class C citizens? | Conditionally Human
By WALTER M. MILLER, JR.
Illustrated by DAVID STONE
They were such cute synthetic creatures, it
was impossible not to love them. Of course,
that was precisely why they were dangerous!
There was no use hanging around after breakfast. His wife was in a hurt
mood, and he could neither endure the hurt nor remove it. He put on his
coat in the kitchen and stood for a moment with his hat in his hands.
His wife was still at the table, absently fingering the handle of her
cup and staring fixedly out the window at the kennels behind the house.
He moved quietly up behind her and touched her silk-clad shoulder. The
shoulder shivered away from him, and her dark hair swung shiningly as
she shuddered. He drew his hand back and his bewildered face went slack
and miserable.
"Honeymoon's over, huh?"
She said nothing, but shrugged faintly.
"You knew I worked for the F.B.A.," he said. "You knew I'd have charge
of a district pound. You knew it before we got married."
"I didn't know you killed them," she said venomously.
"I won't have to kill many. Besides, they're only animals."
"
Intelligent
animals!"
"Intelligent as a human imbecile, maybe."
"A small child is an imbecile. Would you kill a small child?"
"You're taking intelligence as the only criterion of humanity," he
protested hopelessly, knowing that a logical defense was useless
against sentimentality. "Baby—"
"Don't call me baby! Call
them
baby!"
Norris backed a few steps toward the door. Against his better judgment,
he spoke again. "Anne honey, look! Think of the
good
things about the
job. Sure, everything has its ugly angles. But think—we get this house
rent-free; I've got my own district with no bosses around; I make my
own hours; you'll meet lots of people that stop in at the pound. It's a
fine
job, honey!"
She sipped her coffee and appeared to be listening, so he went on.
"And what can I do? You know how the Federation handles employment.
They looked over my aptitude tests and sent me to Bio-Administration.
If I don't want to follow my aptitudes, the only choice is common
labor. That's the
law
."
"I suppose you have an aptitude for killing babies?" she said sweetly.
Norris withered. His voice went desperate. "They assigned me to it
because I
liked
babies. And because I have a B.S. in biology and an
aptitude for dealing with people. Can't you understand? Destroying
unclaimed units is the smallest part of it. Honey, before the
evolvotron, before Anthropos went into the mutant-animal business,
people used to elect dogcatchers. Think of it that way—I'm just a
dogcatcher."
Her cool green eyes turned slowly to meet his gaze. Her face was
delicately cut from cold marble. She was a small woman, slender and
fragile, but her quiet contempt made her loom.
He backed closer to the door.
"Well, I've got to get on the job." He put on his hat and picked at a
splinter on the door. He frowned studiously at the splinter. "I—I'll
see you tonight." He ripped the splinter loose when it became obvious
that she didn't want to be kissed.
He grunted a nervous good-by and stumbled down the hall and out of the
house. The honeymoon was over, all right.
He climbed in the kennel-truck and drove east toward the highway. The
suburban street wound among the pastel plasticoid cottages that were
set approximately two to an acre on the lightly wooded land. With its
population legally fixed at three hundred million, most of the country
had become one big suburb, dotted with community centers and lined
with narrow belts of industrial development. Norris wished there were
someplace where he could be completely alone.
As he approached an intersection, he saw a small animal sitting on the
curb, wrapped in its own bushy tail. Its oversized head was bald on
top, but the rest of its body was covered with blue-gray fur. Its tiny
pink tongue was licking daintily at small forepaws with prehensile
thumbs. It was a cat-Q-5. It glanced curiously at the truck as Norris
pulled to a halt.
He smiled at it from the window and called, "What's your name, kitten?"
The cat-Q-5 stared at him impassively for a moment, let out a
stuttering high-pitched wail, then: "Kiyi Rorry."
"Whose child are you, Rorry?" he asked. "Where do you live?"
The cat-Q-5 took its time about answering. There were no houses near
the intersection, and Norris feared that the animal might be lost.
It blinked at him, sleepily bored, and resumed its paw-washing. He
repeated the questions.
"Mama kiyi," said the cat-Q-5 disgustedly.
"That's right, Mama's kitty. But where is Mama? Do you suppose she ran
away?"
The cat-Q-5 looked startled. It stuttered for a moment, and its fur
crept slowly erect. It glanced around hurriedly, then shot off down the
street at a fast scamper. He followed it in the truck until it darted
onto a porch and began wailing through the screen, "Mama no run ray!
Mama no run ray!"
Norris grinned and drove on. A class-C couple, allowed no children
of their own, could get quite attached to a cat-Q-5. The felines
were emotionally safer than the quasi-human chimp-K series called
"neutroids." When a pet neutroid died, a family was broken with grief;
but most couples could endure the death of a cat-Q or a dog-F. Class-C
couples were allowed two lesser units or one neutroid.
His grin faded as he wondered which Anne would choose. The Norrises
were class-C—defective heredity.
He found himself in Sherman III Community Center—eight blocks of
commercial buildings, serving the surrounding suburbs. He stopped at
the message office to pick up his mail. There was a memo from Chief
Franklin. He tore it open nervously and read it in the truck. It was
something he had been expecting for several days.
Attention All District Inspectors:
Subject: Deviant Neutroid.
You will immediately begin a systematic and thorough survey of all
animals whose serial numbers fall in the Bermuda-K-99 series for
birth dates during July 2234. This is in connection with the Delmont
Negligency Case. Seize all animals in this category, impound, and run
proper sections of normalcy tests. Watch for mental and glandular
deviation. Delmont has confessed to passing only one non-standard
unit, but there may be others. He disclaims memory of deviant's serial
number. This could be a ruse to bring a stop to investigations when
one animal is found. Be thorough.
If allowed to reach age-set or adulthood, such a deviant could be
dangerous to its owner or to others. Hold all seized K-99s who show
the slightest abnormality in the normalcy tests. Forward to central
lab. Return standard units to their owners. Accomplish entire survey
project within seven days.
C. Franklin
Norris frowned at the last sentence. His district covered about two
hundred square miles. Its replacement-quota of new neutroids was around
three hundred animals a month. He tried to estimate how many of July's
influx had been K-99s from Bermuda Factory. Forty, at least. Could he
do it in a week? And there were only eleven empty neutroid cages in his
kennel. The other forty-nine were occupied by the previous inspector's
"unclaimed" inventory—awaiting destruction.
He wadded the memo in his pocket, then nosed the truck onto the highway
and headed toward Wylo City and the district wholesale offices of
Anthropos, Inc. They should be able to give him a list of all July's
Bermuda K-99 serial numbers that had entered his territory, together
with the retailers to whom the animals had been sold. A week's deadline
for finding and testing forty neutroids would put him in a tight
squeeze.
He was halfway to Wylo City when the radiophone buzzed on his
dashboard. He pulled into the slow lane and answered quickly, hoping
for Anne's voice. A polite professional purr came instead.
"Inspector Norris? This is Doctor Georges. We haven't met, but I
imagine we will. Are you extremely busy at the moment?"
Norris hesitated. "Extremely," he said.
"Well, this won't take long. One of my patients—a Mrs. Sarah
Glubbes—called a while ago and said her baby was sick. I must be
getting absent-minded, because I forgot she was class C until I got
there." He hesitated. "The baby turned out to be a neutroid. It's
dying. Eighteenth order virus."
"So?"
"Well, she's—uh—rather a
peculiar
woman, Inspector. Keeps telling
me how much trouble she had in childbirth, and how she can't ever
have another one. It's pathetic. She
believes
it's her own. Do you
understand?"
"I think so," Norris replied slowly. "But what do you want me to do?
Can't you send the neutroid to a vet?"
"She insists it's going to a hospital. Worst part is that she's heard
of the disease. Knows it can be cured with the proper treatment—in
humans. Of course, no hospital would play along with her fantasy and
take a neutroid, especially since she couldn't pay for its treatment."
"I still don't see—"
"I thought perhaps you could help me fake a substitution. It's a K-48
series, five-year-old, three-year set. Do you have one in the pound
that's not claimed?"
Norris thought for a moment. "I think I have
one
. You're welcome to
it, Doctor, but you can't fake a serial number. She'll know it. And
even though they look exactly alike, the new one won't recognize her.
It'll be spooky."
There was a long pause, followed by a sigh. "I'll try it anyway. Can I
come get the animal now?"
"I'm on the highway—"
"Please, Norris! This is urgent. That woman will lose her mind
completely if—"
"All right, I'll call my wife and tell her to open the pound for you.
Pick out the K-48 and sign for it. And listen—"
"Yes?"
"Don't let me catch you falsifying a serial number."
Doctor Georges laughed faintly. "I won't, Norris. Thanks a million." He
hung up quickly.
Norris immediately regretted his consent. It bordered on being illegal.
But he saw it as a quick way to get rid of an animal that might later
have to be killed.
He called Anne. Her voice was dull. She seemed depressed, but not
angry. When he finished talking, she said, "All right, Terry," and hung
up.
By noon, he had finished checking the shipping lists at the wholesale
house in Wylo City. Only thirty-five of July's Bermuda-K-99s had
entered his territory, and they were about equally divided among five
pet shops, three of which were in Wylo City.
After lunch, he called each of the retail dealers, read them the serial
numbers, and asked them to check the sales records for names and
addresses of individual buyers. By three o'clock, he had the entire
list filled out, and the task began to look easier. All that remained
was to pick up the thirty-five animals.
And
that
, he thought, was like trying to take a year-old baby away
from its doting mother. He sighed and drove to the Wylo suburbs to
begin his rounds.
Anne met him at the door when he came home at six. He stood on the
porch for a moment, smiling at her weakly. The smile was not returned.
"Doctor Georges came," she told him. "He signed for the—" She stopped
to stare at him. "Darling, your face! What happened?"
Gingerly he touch the livid welts down the side of his cheek. "Just
scratched a little," he muttered. He pushed past her and went to the
phone in the hall. He sat eying it distastefully for a moment, not
liking what he had to do. Anne came to stand beside him and examine the
scratches.
Finally he lifted the phone and dialed the Wylo exchange. A grating
mechanical voice answered, "Locator center. Your party, please."
"Sheriff Yates," Norris grunted.
The robot operator, which had on tape the working habits of each Wylo
City citizen, began calling numbers. It found the off-duty sheriff on
its third try, in a Wylo pool hall.
"I'm getting so I hate that infernal gadget," Yates grumbled. "I think
it's got me psyched. What do you want, Norris?"
"Cooperation. I'm mailing you three letters charging three Wylo
citizens with resisting a Federal official—namely
me
—and charging
one of them with assault. I tried to pick up their neutroids for a
pound inspection—"
Yates bellowed lusty laughter into the phone.
"It's not funny. I've got to get those neutroids. It's in connection
with the Delmont case."
Yates stopped laughing. "Oh. Well, I'll take care of it."
"It's a rush-order, Sheriff. Can you get the warrants tonight and pick
up the animals in the morning?"
"Easy on those warrants, boy. Judge Charleman can't be disturbed just
any time. I can get the newts to you by noon, I guess, provided we
don't have to get a helicopter posse to chase down the mothers."
"That'll be all right. And listen, Yates—fix it so the charges will
be dropped if they cooperate. Don't shake those warrants around unless
they just won't listen to reason. But get those neutroids."
"Okay, boy. Gotcha."
Norris gave him the names and addresses of the three unwilling mothers.
As soon as he hung up, Anne touched his shoulders and said, "Sit
still." She began smoothing a chilly ointment over his burning cheek.
"Hard day?" she asked.
"Not too hard. Those were just three out of fifteen. I got the other
twelve. They're in the truck."
"That's good," she said. "You've got only twelve empty cages."
He neglected to tell her that he had stopped at twelve for just this
reason. "Guess I better get them unloaded," he said, standing up.
"Can I help you?"
He stared at her for a moment, saying nothing. She smiled a little and
looked aside. "Terry, I'm sorry—about this morning. I—I know you've
got a job that has to be—" Her lip quivered slightly.
Norris grinned, caught her shoulders, and pulled her close.
"Honeymoon's on again, huh?" she whispered against his neck.
"Come on," he grunted. "Let's unload some neutroids, before I forget
all about work."
They went out to the kennels together. The cages were inside a
sprawling concrete barn, which was divided into three large rooms—one
for the fragile neuter humanoid creatures, and another for the lesser
mutants, such as cat-Qs, dog-Fs, dwarf bears, and foot-high lambs that
never matured into sheep. The third room contained a small gas chamber
with a conveyor belt leading from it to a crematory-incinerator.
Norris kept the third locked lest his wife see its furnishings.
The doll-like neutroids began their mindless chatter as soon as their
keepers entered the building. Dozens of blazing blond heads began
dancing about their cages. Their bodies thwacked against the wire mesh
as they leaped about their compartments with monkey grace.
Their human appearance was broken by only two distinct features: short
beaverlike tails decorated with fluffy curls of fur, and an erect
thatch of scalp-hair that grew up into a bright candleflame. Otherwise,
they appeared completely human, with baby-pink skin, quick little
smiles, and cherubic faces. They were sexually neuter and never grew
beyond a predetermined age-set which varied for each series. Age-sets
were available from one to ten years human equivalent. Once a neutroid
reached its age-set, it remained at the set's child-development level
until death.
"They must be getting to know you pretty well," Anne said, glancing
around at the cages.
Norris was wearing a slight frown as he inspected the room. "They've
never gotten this excited before."
He walked along a row of cages, then stopped by a K-76 to stare.
"
Apple cores!
" He turned to face his wife. "How did apples get in
there?"
She reddened. "I felt sorry for them, eating that goo from the
mechanical feeder. I drove down to Sherman III and bought six dozen
cooking apples."
"That was a mistake."
She frowned irritably. "We can afford it."
"That's not the point. There's a reason for the mechanical feeders." He
paused, wondering how he could tell her the truth. He blundered on:
"They get to love whoever feeds them."
"I can't see—"
"How would you feel about disposing of something that loved you?"
Anne folded her arms and stared at him. "Planning to dispose of any
soon?" she asked acidly.
"Honeymoon's off again, eh?"
She turned away. "I'm sorry, Terry. I'll try not to mention it again."
He began unloading the truck, pulling the frightened and squirming
doll-things forth one at a time with a snare-pole. They were one-man
pets, always frightened of strangers.
"What's the Delmont case, Terry?" Anne asked while he worked.
"Huh?"
"I heard you mention it on the phone. Anything to do with why you got
your face scratched?"
He nodded sourly. "Indirectly, yes. It's a long story."
"Tell me."
"Well, Delmont was a green-horn evolvotron operator at the Bermuda
plant. His job was taking the unfertilized chimpanzee ova out of the
egg-multiplier, mounting them in his machine, and bombarding the
gene structure with sub-atomic particles. It's tricky business. He
flashes a huge enlargement of the ovum on the electron microscope
screen—large enough so he can see the individual protein molecules. He
has an artificial gene pattern to compare it with. It's like shooting
sub-atomic billiards. He's got to fire alpha-particles into the gene
structure and displace certain links by just the right amount. And
he's got to be quick about it before the ovum dies from an overdose of
radiation from the enlarger. A good operator can get one success out of
seven tries.
"Well, Delmont worked a week and spoiled over a hundred ova without a
single success. They threatened to fire him. I guess he got hysterical.
Anyway, he reported one success the next day. It was faked. The ovum
had a couple of flaws—something wrong in the central nervous system's
determinants, and in the glandular makeup. Not a standard neutroid
ovum. He passed it on to the incubators to get a credit, knowing it
wouldn't be caught until after birth."
"It wasn't caught at all?" Anne asked.
"Funny thing, he was afraid it wouldn't be. He got to worrying about
it, thought maybe a mental-deviant would pass, and that it might be
dangerous. So he went back to its incubator and cut off the hormone
flow into its compartment."
"Why that?"
"So it
would
develop sexuality. A neutroid would be born a female
if they didn't give it suppressive doses of male hormone prenatally.
That keeps ovaries from developing and it comes out neuter. But
Delmont figured a female would be caught and stopped before the final
inspection. They'd dispose of her without even bothering to examine for
the other defects. And he could blame the sexuality on an equipment
malfunction. He thought it was pretty smart. Trouble was they didn't
catch the female. She went on through; they all
look
female."
"How did they find out about it now?"
"He got caught last month, trying it again. And he confessed to doing
it once before. No telling how many times he
really
did it."
Norris held up the final kicking, squealing, tassel-haired doll from
the back of the kennel-truck. He grinned at his wife. "This little
fellow, for instance. It might be a potential she. It might also be a
potential murderer.
All
these kiddos are from the machines in the
section where Delmont worked."
Anne snorted and caught the baby-creature in her arms. It struggled and
tried to bite, but subsided a little when she disentangled it from the
snare. "Kkr-r-reee," it cooed nervously. "Kkr-r-reee!"
"You tell him you're no murderer," Anne purred to it.
Norris watched disapprovingly while she fondled it. One thing he had
learned: to steer clear of emotional attachments. It was eight months
old and looked like a child of two years—a year short of its age-set.
And it was designed to be as affectionate as a human child.
"Put it in the cage, Anne," he said quietly.
She looked up and shook her head.
"It belongs to somebody else. If it fixes a libido attachment on you,
you're actually robbing its owner. They can't love many people at once."
She snorted, but installed the thing in its cage.
"Anne—" Norris hesitated, hating to approach the subject. "Do
you—want one—for yourself? I can sign an unclaimed one over to you to
keep in the house. It won't cost us anything."
Slowly she shook her head, and her pale eyes went moody and luminous.
"I'm going to have one of my own," she said.
He stood in the back of the truck, staring down at her. "Do you realize
what—"
"I know what I'm saying. We're class-C on account of heart-trouble in
both our families. Well, I don't care, Terry. I'm not going to waste a
heart over one of these pathetic little artificial animals. We're going
to have a baby."
"You know what they'd do to us?"
"If they catch us, yes—compulsory divorce, sterilization. But they
won't catch us. I'll have it at home, Terry. Not even a doctor. We'll
hide it."
"I won't let you do such a thing."
She faced him angrily. "Oh, this whole rotten
world
!" she choked.
Suddenly she turned and fled out of the building. She was sobbing.
Norris climbed slowly down from the truck and wandered on into the
house. She was not in the kitchen nor the living room. The bedroom door
was locked. He shrugged and went to sit on the sofa. The television
set was on, and a newscast was coming from a local station.
"... we were unable to get shots of the body," the announcer was
saying. "But here is a view of the Georges residence. I'll switch you
to our mobile unit in Sherman II, James Duncan reporting."
Norris frowned with bewilderment as the scene shifted to a two-story
plasticoid house among the elm trees. It was after dark, but the mobile
unit's powerful floodlights made daylight of the house and its yard and
the police 'copters sitting in a side lot. An ambulance was parked in
the street. A new voice came on the audio.
"This is James Duncan, ladies and gentlemen, speaking to you from our
mobile unit in front of the late Doctor Hiram Georges' residence just
west of Sherman II. We are waiting for the stretcher to be brought out,
and Police Chief Erskine Miler is standing here beside me to give us a
word about the case. Doctor Georges' death has shocked the community
deeply. Most of you local listeners have known him for many years—some
of you have depended upon his services as a family physician. He was a
man well known, well loved. But now let's listen to Chief Miler."
Norris sat breathing quickly. There could scarcely be two Doctor
Georges in the community, but only this morning....
A growling drawl came from the audio. "This's Chief Miler speaking,
folks. I just want to say that if any of you know the whereabouts of a
Mrs. Sarah Glubbes, call me immediately. She's wanted for questioning."
"Thank you, Chief. This is James Duncan again. I'll review the facts
for you briefly again, ladies and gentlemen. At seven o'clock,
less than an hour ago, a woman—allegedly Mrs. Glubbes—burst into
Doctor Georges' dining room while the family was at dinner. She was
brandishing a pistol and screaming, 'You stole my baby! You gave me the
wrong baby! Where's my baby?'
"When the doctor assured her that there was no other baby, she fired,
shattering his salad plate. Glancing off it, the bullet pierced his
heart. The woman fled. A peculiar feature of the case is that Mrs.
Glubbes, the alleged intruder,
has no baby
. Just a minute—just a
minute—here comes the stretcher now."
Norris turned the set off and went to call the police. He told them
what he knew and promised to make himself available for questioning if
it became necessary. When he turned from the phone, Anne was standing
in the bedroom doorway. She might have been crying a little, but she
concealed it well.
"What was all that?" she asked.
"Woman killed a man. I happened to know the motive."
"What was it?"
"Neutroid trouble."
"You meet up with a lot of unpleasantness in this business, don't you?"
"Lot of unpleasant emotions tangled up in it," he admitted.
"I know. Well, supper's been keeping hot for two hours. Shall we eat?"
They went to bed at midnight, but it was after one when he became
certain that his wife was asleep. He lay in darkness for a time,
listening to her even breathing. Then he cautiously eased himself out
of bed and tiptoed quietly through the door, carrying his shoes and
trousers. He put them on in the kitchen and stole silently out to the
kennels. A half moon hung low in a misty sky, and the wind was chilly
out of the north.
He went into the neutroid room and flicked a switch. A few sleepy
chatters greeted the light.
One at a time, he awoke twenty-three of the older doll-things and
carried them to a large glass-walled compartment. These were the
long-time residents; they knew him well, and they came with him
willingly—like children after the Piper of Hamlin. When he had gotten
them in the glass chamber, he sealed the door and turned on the gas.
The conveyor would automatically carry them on to the incinerator.
Now he had enough cages for the Bermuda-K-99s.
He hurriedly quit the kennels and went to sit on the back steps. His
eyes were burning, but the thought of tears made him sicker. It was
like an assassin crying while he stabbed his victim. It was more honest
just to retch.
When he tiptoed back inside, he got as far as the hall. Then he saw
Anne's small figure framed in the bedroom window, silhouetted against
the moonlit yard. She had slipped into her negligee and was sitting on
the narrow windowstool, staring silently out at the dull red tongue of
exhaust gases from the crematory's chimney.
Norris backed away. He went to the parlor and lay down on the couch.
After a while he heard her come into the room. She paused in the center
of the rug, a fragile mist in the darkness. He turned his face away and
waited for the rasping accusation. But soon she came to sit on the edge
of the sofa. She said nothing. Her hand crept out and touched his cheek
lightly. He felt her cool finger-tips trace a soft line up his temple.
"It's all right, Terry," she whispered.
He kept his face averted. Her fingers traced a last stroke. Then she
padded quietly back to the bedroom. He lay awake until dawn, knowing
that it would never be all right, neither the creating nor the killing,
until he—and the whole world—completely lost sanity. And then
everything would be all right, only it still wouldn't make sense.
Anne was asleep when he left the house. The night mist had gathered
into clouds that made a gloomy morning of it. He drove on out in the
kennel-truck, meaning to get the rest of the Bermuda-K-99s so that he
could begin his testing.
Still he felt the night's guilt, like a sticky dew that refused to
depart with morning. Why should he have to kill the things? The answer
was obvious. Society manufactured them because killing them was
permissible. Human babies could not be disposed of when the market
became glutted. The neutroids offered solace to childless women, kept
them satisfied with a restricted birth rate. And why a restricted
birth rate? Because by keeping the population at five billions, the
Federation could insure a decent living standard for everybody.
Where there was giving, Norris thought glumly, there was also taking
away. Man had always deluded himself by thinking that he "created," but
he created nothing. He thought that he had created—with his medical
science and his end to wars—a longer life for the individual. But he
found that he had only taken the lives of the unborn and added them to
the years of the aged. Man now had a life expectancy of eighty, except
that he had damn little chance of being born to enjoy it.
A neutroid filled the cradle in his stead. A neutroid that never ate
as much, or grew up to be unemployed. A neutroid could be killed if
things got tough, but could still satisfy a woman's craving to mother
something small.
Norris gave up thinking about it. Eventually he would have to adjust
to it. He was already adjusted to a world that loved the artificial
mutants as children. He had been brought up in it. Emotion came in
conflict with the grim necessities of his job. Somehow he would have
to love them in the parlor and kill them in the kennel. It was only a
matter of adjustment.
At noon, he brought back another dozen K-99s and installed them in his
cages. There had been two highly reluctant mothers, but he skipped
them and left the seizure to the local authorities. Yates had already
brought in the three from yesterday.
"No more scratches?" Anne asked him while they ate lunch. They did not
speak of the night's mass-disposal.
Norris smiled mechanically. "I learned my lesson yesterday. If
they bare their fangs, I get out without another word. Funny thing
though—I've got a feeling one mother pulled a fast one."
"What happened?"
"Well, I told her what I wanted and why. She didn't like it, but she
let me in. I started out with her newt, but she wanted a receipt. So I
gave her one; took the serial number off my checklist. She looked at
it and said, 'Why, that's not Chichi's number!' I looked at the newt's
foot, and sure enough it wasn't. I had to leave it. It was a K-99, but
not even from Bermuda."
"I thought they were all registered," Anne said.
"They are. I told her she had the wrong neutroid, but she got mad. Went
and got the sales receipt. It checked with her newt, and it was from
O'Reilley's pet shop—right place, wrong number. I just don't get it."
"Nothing to worry about, is it Terry?"
He looked at her peculiarly. "Ever think what might happen if someone
started a black market in neutroids?"
They finished the meal in silence. After lunch he went out again to
gather up the rest of the group. By four o'clock, he had gotten all
that were to be had without the threat of a warrant. The screams and
pleas and tears of the owners left him gloomily despising himself.
If Delmont's falsification had been widespread, he might have to turn
several of the thirty-five over to central lab for dissection and
ultimate destruction. That would bring the murderous wrath of their
owners down upon him. He began to understand why bio-inspectors were
frequently shifted from one territory to another.
On the way home, he stopped in Sherman II to check on the missing
number. It was the largest of the Sherman communities, covering fifty
blocks of commercial buildings. He parked in the outskirts and took a
sidewalk escalator toward O'Reilley's address.
It was on a dingy sidestreet, reminiscent of past centuries, a street
of small bars and bowling alleys and cigar stores. There was even a
shop with three gold balls above the entrance, but the place was now
an antique store. A light mist was falling when he stepped off the
escalator and stood in front of the pet shop. A sign hung out over the
sidewalk, announcing:
J. "DOGGY" O'REILLEY
PETS FOR SALE
DUMB BLONDES AND GOLDFISH
MUTANTS FOR THE CHILDLESS
BUY A BUNDLE OF JOY
Norris frowned at the sign and wandered inside. The place was warm
and gloomy. He wrinkled his nose at the strong musk of animal odors.
O'Reilley's was not a shining example of cleanliness.
Somewhere a puppy was yapping, and a parrot croaked the lyrics of
A
Chimp to Call My Own
, which Norris recognized as the theme song of a
popular soap-opera about a lady evolvotron operator.
He paused briefly by a tank of silk-draped goldfish. The shop had a
customer. An elderly lady was haggling with a wizened manager over the
price of a half grown second-hand dog-F. She was shaking her last dog's
death certificate under his nose and demanding a guarantee of the dog's
alleged F-5 intelligence. The old man offered to swear on a Bible, but
he demurred when it came to swearing on a ledger.
The dog was saying, "Don' sell me, Dada. Don' sell me."
Norris smiled sardonically to himself. The non-human pets were smarter
than the neutroids. A K-108 could speak a dozen words, and a K-99
never got farther than "mamma," "pappa," and "cookie." Anthropos was
afraid to make the quasi-humans too intelligent, lest sentimentalists
proclaim them really human.
He wandered on toward the back of the building, pausing briefly by
the cash register to inspect O'Reilley's license, which hung in a
dusty frame on the wall behind the counter. "James Fallon
O'Reilley ... authorized dealer in mutant animals ... all non-predatory
mammals including chimpanzee-K series ... license expires June 1, 2235."
It seemed in order, although the expiration date was approaching. He
started toward a bank of neutroid cages along the opposite wall, but
O'Reilley was mincing across the floor to meet him. The customer had
gone. The little manager wore an elfin professional smile, and his bald
head bobbled in a welcoming nod.
"Good day, sir, good day! May I show you a dwarf kangaroo, or a—" He
stopped and adjusted his spectacles. He blinked and peered as Norris
flashed his badge. His smile waned.
"I'm Agent Norris, Mr. O'Reilley. Called you yesterday for that rundown
on K-99 sales."
O'Reilley looked suddenly nervous. "Oh, yes. Find 'em all?"
Norris shook his head. "No. That's why I stopped by. There's some
mistake on—" he glanced at his list—"on K-99-LJZ-351. Let's check it
again."
O'Reilley seemed to cringe. "No mistake. I gave you the buyer's name."
"She has a different number."
"Can I help it if she traded with somebody?"
"She didn't. She bought it here. I saw the receipt."
"Then she traded with one of my other customers!" snapped the old man.
"Two of your customers have the same name—Adelia Schultz? Not likely.
Let's see your duplicate receipt book."
O'Reilley's wrinkled face set itself into a stubborn mask. "Doubt if
it's still around."
Norris frowned. "Look, pop, I've had a rough day. I
could
start
naming some things around here that need fixing—sanitary violations
and such. Not to mention that sign—'dumb blondes.' They outlawed that
one when they executed that shyster doctor for shooting K-108s full
of growth hormones, trying to raise himself a harem to sell. Besides,
you're required to keep sales records until they've been micro-filmed.
There hasn't been a microfilming since July."
The wrinkled face twitched with frustrated anger. O'Reilley shuffled
to the counter while Norris followed. He got a fat binder from under
the register and started toward a wooden stairway.
"Where you going?" Norris called.
"Get my old glasses," the manager grumbled. "Can't see through these
new things."
"Leave the book here and
I'll
check it," Norris offered.
But O'Reilley was already limping quickly up the stairs. He seemed not
to hear. He shut the door behind him, and Norris heard the lock click.
The bio-agent waited. Again the thought of a black market troubled him.
Unauthorized neutroids could mean lots of trouble. | [
"They are not legally permitted to reproduce and bear human children.",
"They are not legally permitted to go against the results of their aptitude tests.",
"There is a 100% chance that they will develop and/or die from a significant physical or mental illness.",
"It is difficult for them to access news and information, such as a viral outbreak."
] | 3 |
51651_QFG6OVXX_4 | What act suggests that Terry empathizes with the owners of the neutroids he confiscates as part of his job? | Conditionally Human
By WALTER M. MILLER, JR.
Illustrated by DAVID STONE
They were such cute synthetic creatures, it
was impossible not to love them. Of course,
that was precisely why they were dangerous!
There was no use hanging around after breakfast. His wife was in a hurt
mood, and he could neither endure the hurt nor remove it. He put on his
coat in the kitchen and stood for a moment with his hat in his hands.
His wife was still at the table, absently fingering the handle of her
cup and staring fixedly out the window at the kennels behind the house.
He moved quietly up behind her and touched her silk-clad shoulder. The
shoulder shivered away from him, and her dark hair swung shiningly as
she shuddered. He drew his hand back and his bewildered face went slack
and miserable.
"Honeymoon's over, huh?"
She said nothing, but shrugged faintly.
"You knew I worked for the F.B.A.," he said. "You knew I'd have charge
of a district pound. You knew it before we got married."
"I didn't know you killed them," she said venomously.
"I won't have to kill many. Besides, they're only animals."
"
Intelligent
animals!"
"Intelligent as a human imbecile, maybe."
"A small child is an imbecile. Would you kill a small child?"
"You're taking intelligence as the only criterion of humanity," he
protested hopelessly, knowing that a logical defense was useless
against sentimentality. "Baby—"
"Don't call me baby! Call
them
baby!"
Norris backed a few steps toward the door. Against his better judgment,
he spoke again. "Anne honey, look! Think of the
good
things about the
job. Sure, everything has its ugly angles. But think—we get this house
rent-free; I've got my own district with no bosses around; I make my
own hours; you'll meet lots of people that stop in at the pound. It's a
fine
job, honey!"
She sipped her coffee and appeared to be listening, so he went on.
"And what can I do? You know how the Federation handles employment.
They looked over my aptitude tests and sent me to Bio-Administration.
If I don't want to follow my aptitudes, the only choice is common
labor. That's the
law
."
"I suppose you have an aptitude for killing babies?" she said sweetly.
Norris withered. His voice went desperate. "They assigned me to it
because I
liked
babies. And because I have a B.S. in biology and an
aptitude for dealing with people. Can't you understand? Destroying
unclaimed units is the smallest part of it. Honey, before the
evolvotron, before Anthropos went into the mutant-animal business,
people used to elect dogcatchers. Think of it that way—I'm just a
dogcatcher."
Her cool green eyes turned slowly to meet his gaze. Her face was
delicately cut from cold marble. She was a small woman, slender and
fragile, but her quiet contempt made her loom.
He backed closer to the door.
"Well, I've got to get on the job." He put on his hat and picked at a
splinter on the door. He frowned studiously at the splinter. "I—I'll
see you tonight." He ripped the splinter loose when it became obvious
that she didn't want to be kissed.
He grunted a nervous good-by and stumbled down the hall and out of the
house. The honeymoon was over, all right.
He climbed in the kennel-truck and drove east toward the highway. The
suburban street wound among the pastel plasticoid cottages that were
set approximately two to an acre on the lightly wooded land. With its
population legally fixed at three hundred million, most of the country
had become one big suburb, dotted with community centers and lined
with narrow belts of industrial development. Norris wished there were
someplace where he could be completely alone.
As he approached an intersection, he saw a small animal sitting on the
curb, wrapped in its own bushy tail. Its oversized head was bald on
top, but the rest of its body was covered with blue-gray fur. Its tiny
pink tongue was licking daintily at small forepaws with prehensile
thumbs. It was a cat-Q-5. It glanced curiously at the truck as Norris
pulled to a halt.
He smiled at it from the window and called, "What's your name, kitten?"
The cat-Q-5 stared at him impassively for a moment, let out a
stuttering high-pitched wail, then: "Kiyi Rorry."
"Whose child are you, Rorry?" he asked. "Where do you live?"
The cat-Q-5 took its time about answering. There were no houses near
the intersection, and Norris feared that the animal might be lost.
It blinked at him, sleepily bored, and resumed its paw-washing. He
repeated the questions.
"Mama kiyi," said the cat-Q-5 disgustedly.
"That's right, Mama's kitty. But where is Mama? Do you suppose she ran
away?"
The cat-Q-5 looked startled. It stuttered for a moment, and its fur
crept slowly erect. It glanced around hurriedly, then shot off down the
street at a fast scamper. He followed it in the truck until it darted
onto a porch and began wailing through the screen, "Mama no run ray!
Mama no run ray!"
Norris grinned and drove on. A class-C couple, allowed no children
of their own, could get quite attached to a cat-Q-5. The felines
were emotionally safer than the quasi-human chimp-K series called
"neutroids." When a pet neutroid died, a family was broken with grief;
but most couples could endure the death of a cat-Q or a dog-F. Class-C
couples were allowed two lesser units or one neutroid.
His grin faded as he wondered which Anne would choose. The Norrises
were class-C—defective heredity.
He found himself in Sherman III Community Center—eight blocks of
commercial buildings, serving the surrounding suburbs. He stopped at
the message office to pick up his mail. There was a memo from Chief
Franklin. He tore it open nervously and read it in the truck. It was
something he had been expecting for several days.
Attention All District Inspectors:
Subject: Deviant Neutroid.
You will immediately begin a systematic and thorough survey of all
animals whose serial numbers fall in the Bermuda-K-99 series for
birth dates during July 2234. This is in connection with the Delmont
Negligency Case. Seize all animals in this category, impound, and run
proper sections of normalcy tests. Watch for mental and glandular
deviation. Delmont has confessed to passing only one non-standard
unit, but there may be others. He disclaims memory of deviant's serial
number. This could be a ruse to bring a stop to investigations when
one animal is found. Be thorough.
If allowed to reach age-set or adulthood, such a deviant could be
dangerous to its owner or to others. Hold all seized K-99s who show
the slightest abnormality in the normalcy tests. Forward to central
lab. Return standard units to their owners. Accomplish entire survey
project within seven days.
C. Franklin
Norris frowned at the last sentence. His district covered about two
hundred square miles. Its replacement-quota of new neutroids was around
three hundred animals a month. He tried to estimate how many of July's
influx had been K-99s from Bermuda Factory. Forty, at least. Could he
do it in a week? And there were only eleven empty neutroid cages in his
kennel. The other forty-nine were occupied by the previous inspector's
"unclaimed" inventory—awaiting destruction.
He wadded the memo in his pocket, then nosed the truck onto the highway
and headed toward Wylo City and the district wholesale offices of
Anthropos, Inc. They should be able to give him a list of all July's
Bermuda K-99 serial numbers that had entered his territory, together
with the retailers to whom the animals had been sold. A week's deadline
for finding and testing forty neutroids would put him in a tight
squeeze.
He was halfway to Wylo City when the radiophone buzzed on his
dashboard. He pulled into the slow lane and answered quickly, hoping
for Anne's voice. A polite professional purr came instead.
"Inspector Norris? This is Doctor Georges. We haven't met, but I
imagine we will. Are you extremely busy at the moment?"
Norris hesitated. "Extremely," he said.
"Well, this won't take long. One of my patients—a Mrs. Sarah
Glubbes—called a while ago and said her baby was sick. I must be
getting absent-minded, because I forgot she was class C until I got
there." He hesitated. "The baby turned out to be a neutroid. It's
dying. Eighteenth order virus."
"So?"
"Well, she's—uh—rather a
peculiar
woman, Inspector. Keeps telling
me how much trouble she had in childbirth, and how she can't ever
have another one. It's pathetic. She
believes
it's her own. Do you
understand?"
"I think so," Norris replied slowly. "But what do you want me to do?
Can't you send the neutroid to a vet?"
"She insists it's going to a hospital. Worst part is that she's heard
of the disease. Knows it can be cured with the proper treatment—in
humans. Of course, no hospital would play along with her fantasy and
take a neutroid, especially since she couldn't pay for its treatment."
"I still don't see—"
"I thought perhaps you could help me fake a substitution. It's a K-48
series, five-year-old, three-year set. Do you have one in the pound
that's not claimed?"
Norris thought for a moment. "I think I have
one
. You're welcome to
it, Doctor, but you can't fake a serial number. She'll know it. And
even though they look exactly alike, the new one won't recognize her.
It'll be spooky."
There was a long pause, followed by a sigh. "I'll try it anyway. Can I
come get the animal now?"
"I'm on the highway—"
"Please, Norris! This is urgent. That woman will lose her mind
completely if—"
"All right, I'll call my wife and tell her to open the pound for you.
Pick out the K-48 and sign for it. And listen—"
"Yes?"
"Don't let me catch you falsifying a serial number."
Doctor Georges laughed faintly. "I won't, Norris. Thanks a million." He
hung up quickly.
Norris immediately regretted his consent. It bordered on being illegal.
But he saw it as a quick way to get rid of an animal that might later
have to be killed.
He called Anne. Her voice was dull. She seemed depressed, but not
angry. When he finished talking, she said, "All right, Terry," and hung
up.
By noon, he had finished checking the shipping lists at the wholesale
house in Wylo City. Only thirty-five of July's Bermuda-K-99s had
entered his territory, and they were about equally divided among five
pet shops, three of which were in Wylo City.
After lunch, he called each of the retail dealers, read them the serial
numbers, and asked them to check the sales records for names and
addresses of individual buyers. By three o'clock, he had the entire
list filled out, and the task began to look easier. All that remained
was to pick up the thirty-five animals.
And
that
, he thought, was like trying to take a year-old baby away
from its doting mother. He sighed and drove to the Wylo suburbs to
begin his rounds.
Anne met him at the door when he came home at six. He stood on the
porch for a moment, smiling at her weakly. The smile was not returned.
"Doctor Georges came," she told him. "He signed for the—" She stopped
to stare at him. "Darling, your face! What happened?"
Gingerly he touch the livid welts down the side of his cheek. "Just
scratched a little," he muttered. He pushed past her and went to the
phone in the hall. He sat eying it distastefully for a moment, not
liking what he had to do. Anne came to stand beside him and examine the
scratches.
Finally he lifted the phone and dialed the Wylo exchange. A grating
mechanical voice answered, "Locator center. Your party, please."
"Sheriff Yates," Norris grunted.
The robot operator, which had on tape the working habits of each Wylo
City citizen, began calling numbers. It found the off-duty sheriff on
its third try, in a Wylo pool hall.
"I'm getting so I hate that infernal gadget," Yates grumbled. "I think
it's got me psyched. What do you want, Norris?"
"Cooperation. I'm mailing you three letters charging three Wylo
citizens with resisting a Federal official—namely
me
—and charging
one of them with assault. I tried to pick up their neutroids for a
pound inspection—"
Yates bellowed lusty laughter into the phone.
"It's not funny. I've got to get those neutroids. It's in connection
with the Delmont case."
Yates stopped laughing. "Oh. Well, I'll take care of it."
"It's a rush-order, Sheriff. Can you get the warrants tonight and pick
up the animals in the morning?"
"Easy on those warrants, boy. Judge Charleman can't be disturbed just
any time. I can get the newts to you by noon, I guess, provided we
don't have to get a helicopter posse to chase down the mothers."
"That'll be all right. And listen, Yates—fix it so the charges will
be dropped if they cooperate. Don't shake those warrants around unless
they just won't listen to reason. But get those neutroids."
"Okay, boy. Gotcha."
Norris gave him the names and addresses of the three unwilling mothers.
As soon as he hung up, Anne touched his shoulders and said, "Sit
still." She began smoothing a chilly ointment over his burning cheek.
"Hard day?" she asked.
"Not too hard. Those were just three out of fifteen. I got the other
twelve. They're in the truck."
"That's good," she said. "You've got only twelve empty cages."
He neglected to tell her that he had stopped at twelve for just this
reason. "Guess I better get them unloaded," he said, standing up.
"Can I help you?"
He stared at her for a moment, saying nothing. She smiled a little and
looked aside. "Terry, I'm sorry—about this morning. I—I know you've
got a job that has to be—" Her lip quivered slightly.
Norris grinned, caught her shoulders, and pulled her close.
"Honeymoon's on again, huh?" she whispered against his neck.
"Come on," he grunted. "Let's unload some neutroids, before I forget
all about work."
They went out to the kennels together. The cages were inside a
sprawling concrete barn, which was divided into three large rooms—one
for the fragile neuter humanoid creatures, and another for the lesser
mutants, such as cat-Qs, dog-Fs, dwarf bears, and foot-high lambs that
never matured into sheep. The third room contained a small gas chamber
with a conveyor belt leading from it to a crematory-incinerator.
Norris kept the third locked lest his wife see its furnishings.
The doll-like neutroids began their mindless chatter as soon as their
keepers entered the building. Dozens of blazing blond heads began
dancing about their cages. Their bodies thwacked against the wire mesh
as they leaped about their compartments with monkey grace.
Their human appearance was broken by only two distinct features: short
beaverlike tails decorated with fluffy curls of fur, and an erect
thatch of scalp-hair that grew up into a bright candleflame. Otherwise,
they appeared completely human, with baby-pink skin, quick little
smiles, and cherubic faces. They were sexually neuter and never grew
beyond a predetermined age-set which varied for each series. Age-sets
were available from one to ten years human equivalent. Once a neutroid
reached its age-set, it remained at the set's child-development level
until death.
"They must be getting to know you pretty well," Anne said, glancing
around at the cages.
Norris was wearing a slight frown as he inspected the room. "They've
never gotten this excited before."
He walked along a row of cages, then stopped by a K-76 to stare.
"
Apple cores!
" He turned to face his wife. "How did apples get in
there?"
She reddened. "I felt sorry for them, eating that goo from the
mechanical feeder. I drove down to Sherman III and bought six dozen
cooking apples."
"That was a mistake."
She frowned irritably. "We can afford it."
"That's not the point. There's a reason for the mechanical feeders." He
paused, wondering how he could tell her the truth. He blundered on:
"They get to love whoever feeds them."
"I can't see—"
"How would you feel about disposing of something that loved you?"
Anne folded her arms and stared at him. "Planning to dispose of any
soon?" she asked acidly.
"Honeymoon's off again, eh?"
She turned away. "I'm sorry, Terry. I'll try not to mention it again."
He began unloading the truck, pulling the frightened and squirming
doll-things forth one at a time with a snare-pole. They were one-man
pets, always frightened of strangers.
"What's the Delmont case, Terry?" Anne asked while he worked.
"Huh?"
"I heard you mention it on the phone. Anything to do with why you got
your face scratched?"
He nodded sourly. "Indirectly, yes. It's a long story."
"Tell me."
"Well, Delmont was a green-horn evolvotron operator at the Bermuda
plant. His job was taking the unfertilized chimpanzee ova out of the
egg-multiplier, mounting them in his machine, and bombarding the
gene structure with sub-atomic particles. It's tricky business. He
flashes a huge enlargement of the ovum on the electron microscope
screen—large enough so he can see the individual protein molecules. He
has an artificial gene pattern to compare it with. It's like shooting
sub-atomic billiards. He's got to fire alpha-particles into the gene
structure and displace certain links by just the right amount. And
he's got to be quick about it before the ovum dies from an overdose of
radiation from the enlarger. A good operator can get one success out of
seven tries.
"Well, Delmont worked a week and spoiled over a hundred ova without a
single success. They threatened to fire him. I guess he got hysterical.
Anyway, he reported one success the next day. It was faked. The ovum
had a couple of flaws—something wrong in the central nervous system's
determinants, and in the glandular makeup. Not a standard neutroid
ovum. He passed it on to the incubators to get a credit, knowing it
wouldn't be caught until after birth."
"It wasn't caught at all?" Anne asked.
"Funny thing, he was afraid it wouldn't be. He got to worrying about
it, thought maybe a mental-deviant would pass, and that it might be
dangerous. So he went back to its incubator and cut off the hormone
flow into its compartment."
"Why that?"
"So it
would
develop sexuality. A neutroid would be born a female
if they didn't give it suppressive doses of male hormone prenatally.
That keeps ovaries from developing and it comes out neuter. But
Delmont figured a female would be caught and stopped before the final
inspection. They'd dispose of her without even bothering to examine for
the other defects. And he could blame the sexuality on an equipment
malfunction. He thought it was pretty smart. Trouble was they didn't
catch the female. She went on through; they all
look
female."
"How did they find out about it now?"
"He got caught last month, trying it again. And he confessed to doing
it once before. No telling how many times he
really
did it."
Norris held up the final kicking, squealing, tassel-haired doll from
the back of the kennel-truck. He grinned at his wife. "This little
fellow, for instance. It might be a potential she. It might also be a
potential murderer.
All
these kiddos are from the machines in the
section where Delmont worked."
Anne snorted and caught the baby-creature in her arms. It struggled and
tried to bite, but subsided a little when she disentangled it from the
snare. "Kkr-r-reee," it cooed nervously. "Kkr-r-reee!"
"You tell him you're no murderer," Anne purred to it.
Norris watched disapprovingly while she fondled it. One thing he had
learned: to steer clear of emotional attachments. It was eight months
old and looked like a child of two years—a year short of its age-set.
And it was designed to be as affectionate as a human child.
"Put it in the cage, Anne," he said quietly.
She looked up and shook her head.
"It belongs to somebody else. If it fixes a libido attachment on you,
you're actually robbing its owner. They can't love many people at once."
She snorted, but installed the thing in its cage.
"Anne—" Norris hesitated, hating to approach the subject. "Do
you—want one—for yourself? I can sign an unclaimed one over to you to
keep in the house. It won't cost us anything."
Slowly she shook her head, and her pale eyes went moody and luminous.
"I'm going to have one of my own," she said.
He stood in the back of the truck, staring down at her. "Do you realize
what—"
"I know what I'm saying. We're class-C on account of heart-trouble in
both our families. Well, I don't care, Terry. I'm not going to waste a
heart over one of these pathetic little artificial animals. We're going
to have a baby."
"You know what they'd do to us?"
"If they catch us, yes—compulsory divorce, sterilization. But they
won't catch us. I'll have it at home, Terry. Not even a doctor. We'll
hide it."
"I won't let you do such a thing."
She faced him angrily. "Oh, this whole rotten
world
!" she choked.
Suddenly she turned and fled out of the building. She was sobbing.
Norris climbed slowly down from the truck and wandered on into the
house. She was not in the kitchen nor the living room. The bedroom door
was locked. He shrugged and went to sit on the sofa. The television
set was on, and a newscast was coming from a local station.
"... we were unable to get shots of the body," the announcer was
saying. "But here is a view of the Georges residence. I'll switch you
to our mobile unit in Sherman II, James Duncan reporting."
Norris frowned with bewilderment as the scene shifted to a two-story
plasticoid house among the elm trees. It was after dark, but the mobile
unit's powerful floodlights made daylight of the house and its yard and
the police 'copters sitting in a side lot. An ambulance was parked in
the street. A new voice came on the audio.
"This is James Duncan, ladies and gentlemen, speaking to you from our
mobile unit in front of the late Doctor Hiram Georges' residence just
west of Sherman II. We are waiting for the stretcher to be brought out,
and Police Chief Erskine Miler is standing here beside me to give us a
word about the case. Doctor Georges' death has shocked the community
deeply. Most of you local listeners have known him for many years—some
of you have depended upon his services as a family physician. He was a
man well known, well loved. But now let's listen to Chief Miler."
Norris sat breathing quickly. There could scarcely be two Doctor
Georges in the community, but only this morning....
A growling drawl came from the audio. "This's Chief Miler speaking,
folks. I just want to say that if any of you know the whereabouts of a
Mrs. Sarah Glubbes, call me immediately. She's wanted for questioning."
"Thank you, Chief. This is James Duncan again. I'll review the facts
for you briefly again, ladies and gentlemen. At seven o'clock,
less than an hour ago, a woman—allegedly Mrs. Glubbes—burst into
Doctor Georges' dining room while the family was at dinner. She was
brandishing a pistol and screaming, 'You stole my baby! You gave me the
wrong baby! Where's my baby?'
"When the doctor assured her that there was no other baby, she fired,
shattering his salad plate. Glancing off it, the bullet pierced his
heart. The woman fled. A peculiar feature of the case is that Mrs.
Glubbes, the alleged intruder,
has no baby
. Just a minute—just a
minute—here comes the stretcher now."
Norris turned the set off and went to call the police. He told them
what he knew and promised to make himself available for questioning if
it became necessary. When he turned from the phone, Anne was standing
in the bedroom doorway. She might have been crying a little, but she
concealed it well.
"What was all that?" she asked.
"Woman killed a man. I happened to know the motive."
"What was it?"
"Neutroid trouble."
"You meet up with a lot of unpleasantness in this business, don't you?"
"Lot of unpleasant emotions tangled up in it," he admitted.
"I know. Well, supper's been keeping hot for two hours. Shall we eat?"
They went to bed at midnight, but it was after one when he became
certain that his wife was asleep. He lay in darkness for a time,
listening to her even breathing. Then he cautiously eased himself out
of bed and tiptoed quietly through the door, carrying his shoes and
trousers. He put them on in the kitchen and stole silently out to the
kennels. A half moon hung low in a misty sky, and the wind was chilly
out of the north.
He went into the neutroid room and flicked a switch. A few sleepy
chatters greeted the light.
One at a time, he awoke twenty-three of the older doll-things and
carried them to a large glass-walled compartment. These were the
long-time residents; they knew him well, and they came with him
willingly—like children after the Piper of Hamlin. When he had gotten
them in the glass chamber, he sealed the door and turned on the gas.
The conveyor would automatically carry them on to the incinerator.
Now he had enough cages for the Bermuda-K-99s.
He hurriedly quit the kennels and went to sit on the back steps. His
eyes were burning, but the thought of tears made him sicker. It was
like an assassin crying while he stabbed his victim. It was more honest
just to retch.
When he tiptoed back inside, he got as far as the hall. Then he saw
Anne's small figure framed in the bedroom window, silhouetted against
the moonlit yard. She had slipped into her negligee and was sitting on
the narrow windowstool, staring silently out at the dull red tongue of
exhaust gases from the crematory's chimney.
Norris backed away. He went to the parlor and lay down on the couch.
After a while he heard her come into the room. She paused in the center
of the rug, a fragile mist in the darkness. He turned his face away and
waited for the rasping accusation. But soon she came to sit on the edge
of the sofa. She said nothing. Her hand crept out and touched his cheek
lightly. He felt her cool finger-tips trace a soft line up his temple.
"It's all right, Terry," she whispered.
He kept his face averted. Her fingers traced a last stroke. Then she
padded quietly back to the bedroom. He lay awake until dawn, knowing
that it would never be all right, neither the creating nor the killing,
until he—and the whole world—completely lost sanity. And then
everything would be all right, only it still wouldn't make sense.
Anne was asleep when he left the house. The night mist had gathered
into clouds that made a gloomy morning of it. He drove on out in the
kennel-truck, meaning to get the rest of the Bermuda-K-99s so that he
could begin his testing.
Still he felt the night's guilt, like a sticky dew that refused to
depart with morning. Why should he have to kill the things? The answer
was obvious. Society manufactured them because killing them was
permissible. Human babies could not be disposed of when the market
became glutted. The neutroids offered solace to childless women, kept
them satisfied with a restricted birth rate. And why a restricted
birth rate? Because by keeping the population at five billions, the
Federation could insure a decent living standard for everybody.
Where there was giving, Norris thought glumly, there was also taking
away. Man had always deluded himself by thinking that he "created," but
he created nothing. He thought that he had created—with his medical
science and his end to wars—a longer life for the individual. But he
found that he had only taken the lives of the unborn and added them to
the years of the aged. Man now had a life expectancy of eighty, except
that he had damn little chance of being born to enjoy it.
A neutroid filled the cradle in his stead. A neutroid that never ate
as much, or grew up to be unemployed. A neutroid could be killed if
things got tough, but could still satisfy a woman's craving to mother
something small.
Norris gave up thinking about it. Eventually he would have to adjust
to it. He was already adjusted to a world that loved the artificial
mutants as children. He had been brought up in it. Emotion came in
conflict with the grim necessities of his job. Somehow he would have
to love them in the parlor and kill them in the kennel. It was only a
matter of adjustment.
At noon, he brought back another dozen K-99s and installed them in his
cages. There had been two highly reluctant mothers, but he skipped
them and left the seizure to the local authorities. Yates had already
brought in the three from yesterday.
"No more scratches?" Anne asked him while they ate lunch. They did not
speak of the night's mass-disposal.
Norris smiled mechanically. "I learned my lesson yesterday. If
they bare their fangs, I get out without another word. Funny thing
though—I've got a feeling one mother pulled a fast one."
"What happened?"
"Well, I told her what I wanted and why. She didn't like it, but she
let me in. I started out with her newt, but she wanted a receipt. So I
gave her one; took the serial number off my checklist. She looked at
it and said, 'Why, that's not Chichi's number!' I looked at the newt's
foot, and sure enough it wasn't. I had to leave it. It was a K-99, but
not even from Bermuda."
"I thought they were all registered," Anne said.
"They are. I told her she had the wrong neutroid, but she got mad. Went
and got the sales receipt. It checked with her newt, and it was from
O'Reilley's pet shop—right place, wrong number. I just don't get it."
"Nothing to worry about, is it Terry?"
He looked at her peculiarly. "Ever think what might happen if someone
started a black market in neutroids?"
They finished the meal in silence. After lunch he went out again to
gather up the rest of the group. By four o'clock, he had gotten all
that were to be had without the threat of a warrant. The screams and
pleas and tears of the owners left him gloomily despising himself.
If Delmont's falsification had been widespread, he might have to turn
several of the thirty-five over to central lab for dissection and
ultimate destruction. That would bring the murderous wrath of their
owners down upon him. He began to understand why bio-inspectors were
frequently shifted from one territory to another.
On the way home, he stopped in Sherman II to check on the missing
number. It was the largest of the Sherman communities, covering fifty
blocks of commercial buildings. He parked in the outskirts and took a
sidewalk escalator toward O'Reilley's address.
It was on a dingy sidestreet, reminiscent of past centuries, a street
of small bars and bowling alleys and cigar stores. There was even a
shop with three gold balls above the entrance, but the place was now
an antique store. A light mist was falling when he stepped off the
escalator and stood in front of the pet shop. A sign hung out over the
sidewalk, announcing:
J. "DOGGY" O'REILLEY
PETS FOR SALE
DUMB BLONDES AND GOLDFISH
MUTANTS FOR THE CHILDLESS
BUY A BUNDLE OF JOY
Norris frowned at the sign and wandered inside. The place was warm
and gloomy. He wrinkled his nose at the strong musk of animal odors.
O'Reilley's was not a shining example of cleanliness.
Somewhere a puppy was yapping, and a parrot croaked the lyrics of
A
Chimp to Call My Own
, which Norris recognized as the theme song of a
popular soap-opera about a lady evolvotron operator.
He paused briefly by a tank of silk-draped goldfish. The shop had a
customer. An elderly lady was haggling with a wizened manager over the
price of a half grown second-hand dog-F. She was shaking her last dog's
death certificate under his nose and demanding a guarantee of the dog's
alleged F-5 intelligence. The old man offered to swear on a Bible, but
he demurred when it came to swearing on a ledger.
The dog was saying, "Don' sell me, Dada. Don' sell me."
Norris smiled sardonically to himself. The non-human pets were smarter
than the neutroids. A K-108 could speak a dozen words, and a K-99
never got farther than "mamma," "pappa," and "cookie." Anthropos was
afraid to make the quasi-humans too intelligent, lest sentimentalists
proclaim them really human.
He wandered on toward the back of the building, pausing briefly by
the cash register to inspect O'Reilley's license, which hung in a
dusty frame on the wall behind the counter. "James Fallon
O'Reilley ... authorized dealer in mutant animals ... all non-predatory
mammals including chimpanzee-K series ... license expires June 1, 2235."
It seemed in order, although the expiration date was approaching. He
started toward a bank of neutroid cages along the opposite wall, but
O'Reilley was mincing across the floor to meet him. The customer had
gone. The little manager wore an elfin professional smile, and his bald
head bobbled in a welcoming nod.
"Good day, sir, good day! May I show you a dwarf kangaroo, or a—" He
stopped and adjusted his spectacles. He blinked and peered as Norris
flashed his badge. His smile waned.
"I'm Agent Norris, Mr. O'Reilley. Called you yesterday for that rundown
on K-99 sales."
O'Reilley looked suddenly nervous. "Oh, yes. Find 'em all?"
Norris shook his head. "No. That's why I stopped by. There's some
mistake on—" he glanced at his list—"on K-99-LJZ-351. Let's check it
again."
O'Reilley seemed to cringe. "No mistake. I gave you the buyer's name."
"She has a different number."
"Can I help it if she traded with somebody?"
"She didn't. She bought it here. I saw the receipt."
"Then she traded with one of my other customers!" snapped the old man.
"Two of your customers have the same name—Adelia Schultz? Not likely.
Let's see your duplicate receipt book."
O'Reilley's wrinkled face set itself into a stubborn mask. "Doubt if
it's still around."
Norris frowned. "Look, pop, I've had a rough day. I
could
start
naming some things around here that need fixing—sanitary violations
and such. Not to mention that sign—'dumb blondes.' They outlawed that
one when they executed that shyster doctor for shooting K-108s full
of growth hormones, trying to raise himself a harem to sell. Besides,
you're required to keep sales records until they've been micro-filmed.
There hasn't been a microfilming since July."
The wrinkled face twitched with frustrated anger. O'Reilley shuffled
to the counter while Norris followed. He got a fat binder from under
the register and started toward a wooden stairway.
"Where you going?" Norris called.
"Get my old glasses," the manager grumbled. "Can't see through these
new things."
"Leave the book here and
I'll
check it," Norris offered.
But O'Reilley was already limping quickly up the stairs. He seemed not
to hear. He shut the door behind him, and Norris heard the lock click.
The bio-agent waited. Again the thought of a black market troubled him.
Unauthorized neutroids could mean lots of trouble. | [
"He returns lost neutroids to their owners instead of taking them to the pound and incinerating them.",
"He drops charges after they assault him if they agree to cooperate with authorities.",
"He ignores discrepancies in serial number checks even though it could cost him his job.",
"He thinks about stealing a neutroid for his wife, but ultimately feels bad and returns it to its owner."
] | 1 |
51651_QFG6OVXX_5 | The barn and kennels are allusions to: | Conditionally Human
By WALTER M. MILLER, JR.
Illustrated by DAVID STONE
They were such cute synthetic creatures, it
was impossible not to love them. Of course,
that was precisely why they were dangerous!
There was no use hanging around after breakfast. His wife was in a hurt
mood, and he could neither endure the hurt nor remove it. He put on his
coat in the kitchen and stood for a moment with his hat in his hands.
His wife was still at the table, absently fingering the handle of her
cup and staring fixedly out the window at the kennels behind the house.
He moved quietly up behind her and touched her silk-clad shoulder. The
shoulder shivered away from him, and her dark hair swung shiningly as
she shuddered. He drew his hand back and his bewildered face went slack
and miserable.
"Honeymoon's over, huh?"
She said nothing, but shrugged faintly.
"You knew I worked for the F.B.A.," he said. "You knew I'd have charge
of a district pound. You knew it before we got married."
"I didn't know you killed them," she said venomously.
"I won't have to kill many. Besides, they're only animals."
"
Intelligent
animals!"
"Intelligent as a human imbecile, maybe."
"A small child is an imbecile. Would you kill a small child?"
"You're taking intelligence as the only criterion of humanity," he
protested hopelessly, knowing that a logical defense was useless
against sentimentality. "Baby—"
"Don't call me baby! Call
them
baby!"
Norris backed a few steps toward the door. Against his better judgment,
he spoke again. "Anne honey, look! Think of the
good
things about the
job. Sure, everything has its ugly angles. But think—we get this house
rent-free; I've got my own district with no bosses around; I make my
own hours; you'll meet lots of people that stop in at the pound. It's a
fine
job, honey!"
She sipped her coffee and appeared to be listening, so he went on.
"And what can I do? You know how the Federation handles employment.
They looked over my aptitude tests and sent me to Bio-Administration.
If I don't want to follow my aptitudes, the only choice is common
labor. That's the
law
."
"I suppose you have an aptitude for killing babies?" she said sweetly.
Norris withered. His voice went desperate. "They assigned me to it
because I
liked
babies. And because I have a B.S. in biology and an
aptitude for dealing with people. Can't you understand? Destroying
unclaimed units is the smallest part of it. Honey, before the
evolvotron, before Anthropos went into the mutant-animal business,
people used to elect dogcatchers. Think of it that way—I'm just a
dogcatcher."
Her cool green eyes turned slowly to meet his gaze. Her face was
delicately cut from cold marble. She was a small woman, slender and
fragile, but her quiet contempt made her loom.
He backed closer to the door.
"Well, I've got to get on the job." He put on his hat and picked at a
splinter on the door. He frowned studiously at the splinter. "I—I'll
see you tonight." He ripped the splinter loose when it became obvious
that she didn't want to be kissed.
He grunted a nervous good-by and stumbled down the hall and out of the
house. The honeymoon was over, all right.
He climbed in the kennel-truck and drove east toward the highway. The
suburban street wound among the pastel plasticoid cottages that were
set approximately two to an acre on the lightly wooded land. With its
population legally fixed at three hundred million, most of the country
had become one big suburb, dotted with community centers and lined
with narrow belts of industrial development. Norris wished there were
someplace where he could be completely alone.
As he approached an intersection, he saw a small animal sitting on the
curb, wrapped in its own bushy tail. Its oversized head was bald on
top, but the rest of its body was covered with blue-gray fur. Its tiny
pink tongue was licking daintily at small forepaws with prehensile
thumbs. It was a cat-Q-5. It glanced curiously at the truck as Norris
pulled to a halt.
He smiled at it from the window and called, "What's your name, kitten?"
The cat-Q-5 stared at him impassively for a moment, let out a
stuttering high-pitched wail, then: "Kiyi Rorry."
"Whose child are you, Rorry?" he asked. "Where do you live?"
The cat-Q-5 took its time about answering. There were no houses near
the intersection, and Norris feared that the animal might be lost.
It blinked at him, sleepily bored, and resumed its paw-washing. He
repeated the questions.
"Mama kiyi," said the cat-Q-5 disgustedly.
"That's right, Mama's kitty. But where is Mama? Do you suppose she ran
away?"
The cat-Q-5 looked startled. It stuttered for a moment, and its fur
crept slowly erect. It glanced around hurriedly, then shot off down the
street at a fast scamper. He followed it in the truck until it darted
onto a porch and began wailing through the screen, "Mama no run ray!
Mama no run ray!"
Norris grinned and drove on. A class-C couple, allowed no children
of their own, could get quite attached to a cat-Q-5. The felines
were emotionally safer than the quasi-human chimp-K series called
"neutroids." When a pet neutroid died, a family was broken with grief;
but most couples could endure the death of a cat-Q or a dog-F. Class-C
couples were allowed two lesser units or one neutroid.
His grin faded as he wondered which Anne would choose. The Norrises
were class-C—defective heredity.
He found himself in Sherman III Community Center—eight blocks of
commercial buildings, serving the surrounding suburbs. He stopped at
the message office to pick up his mail. There was a memo from Chief
Franklin. He tore it open nervously and read it in the truck. It was
something he had been expecting for several days.
Attention All District Inspectors:
Subject: Deviant Neutroid.
You will immediately begin a systematic and thorough survey of all
animals whose serial numbers fall in the Bermuda-K-99 series for
birth dates during July 2234. This is in connection with the Delmont
Negligency Case. Seize all animals in this category, impound, and run
proper sections of normalcy tests. Watch for mental and glandular
deviation. Delmont has confessed to passing only one non-standard
unit, but there may be others. He disclaims memory of deviant's serial
number. This could be a ruse to bring a stop to investigations when
one animal is found. Be thorough.
If allowed to reach age-set or adulthood, such a deviant could be
dangerous to its owner or to others. Hold all seized K-99s who show
the slightest abnormality in the normalcy tests. Forward to central
lab. Return standard units to their owners. Accomplish entire survey
project within seven days.
C. Franklin
Norris frowned at the last sentence. His district covered about two
hundred square miles. Its replacement-quota of new neutroids was around
three hundred animals a month. He tried to estimate how many of July's
influx had been K-99s from Bermuda Factory. Forty, at least. Could he
do it in a week? And there were only eleven empty neutroid cages in his
kennel. The other forty-nine were occupied by the previous inspector's
"unclaimed" inventory—awaiting destruction.
He wadded the memo in his pocket, then nosed the truck onto the highway
and headed toward Wylo City and the district wholesale offices of
Anthropos, Inc. They should be able to give him a list of all July's
Bermuda K-99 serial numbers that had entered his territory, together
with the retailers to whom the animals had been sold. A week's deadline
for finding and testing forty neutroids would put him in a tight
squeeze.
He was halfway to Wylo City when the radiophone buzzed on his
dashboard. He pulled into the slow lane and answered quickly, hoping
for Anne's voice. A polite professional purr came instead.
"Inspector Norris? This is Doctor Georges. We haven't met, but I
imagine we will. Are you extremely busy at the moment?"
Norris hesitated. "Extremely," he said.
"Well, this won't take long. One of my patients—a Mrs. Sarah
Glubbes—called a while ago and said her baby was sick. I must be
getting absent-minded, because I forgot she was class C until I got
there." He hesitated. "The baby turned out to be a neutroid. It's
dying. Eighteenth order virus."
"So?"
"Well, she's—uh—rather a
peculiar
woman, Inspector. Keeps telling
me how much trouble she had in childbirth, and how she can't ever
have another one. It's pathetic. She
believes
it's her own. Do you
understand?"
"I think so," Norris replied slowly. "But what do you want me to do?
Can't you send the neutroid to a vet?"
"She insists it's going to a hospital. Worst part is that she's heard
of the disease. Knows it can be cured with the proper treatment—in
humans. Of course, no hospital would play along with her fantasy and
take a neutroid, especially since she couldn't pay for its treatment."
"I still don't see—"
"I thought perhaps you could help me fake a substitution. It's a K-48
series, five-year-old, three-year set. Do you have one in the pound
that's not claimed?"
Norris thought for a moment. "I think I have
one
. You're welcome to
it, Doctor, but you can't fake a serial number. She'll know it. And
even though they look exactly alike, the new one won't recognize her.
It'll be spooky."
There was a long pause, followed by a sigh. "I'll try it anyway. Can I
come get the animal now?"
"I'm on the highway—"
"Please, Norris! This is urgent. That woman will lose her mind
completely if—"
"All right, I'll call my wife and tell her to open the pound for you.
Pick out the K-48 and sign for it. And listen—"
"Yes?"
"Don't let me catch you falsifying a serial number."
Doctor Georges laughed faintly. "I won't, Norris. Thanks a million." He
hung up quickly.
Norris immediately regretted his consent. It bordered on being illegal.
But he saw it as a quick way to get rid of an animal that might later
have to be killed.
He called Anne. Her voice was dull. She seemed depressed, but not
angry. When he finished talking, she said, "All right, Terry," and hung
up.
By noon, he had finished checking the shipping lists at the wholesale
house in Wylo City. Only thirty-five of July's Bermuda-K-99s had
entered his territory, and they were about equally divided among five
pet shops, three of which were in Wylo City.
After lunch, he called each of the retail dealers, read them the serial
numbers, and asked them to check the sales records for names and
addresses of individual buyers. By three o'clock, he had the entire
list filled out, and the task began to look easier. All that remained
was to pick up the thirty-five animals.
And
that
, he thought, was like trying to take a year-old baby away
from its doting mother. He sighed and drove to the Wylo suburbs to
begin his rounds.
Anne met him at the door when he came home at six. He stood on the
porch for a moment, smiling at her weakly. The smile was not returned.
"Doctor Georges came," she told him. "He signed for the—" She stopped
to stare at him. "Darling, your face! What happened?"
Gingerly he touch the livid welts down the side of his cheek. "Just
scratched a little," he muttered. He pushed past her and went to the
phone in the hall. He sat eying it distastefully for a moment, not
liking what he had to do. Anne came to stand beside him and examine the
scratches.
Finally he lifted the phone and dialed the Wylo exchange. A grating
mechanical voice answered, "Locator center. Your party, please."
"Sheriff Yates," Norris grunted.
The robot operator, which had on tape the working habits of each Wylo
City citizen, began calling numbers. It found the off-duty sheriff on
its third try, in a Wylo pool hall.
"I'm getting so I hate that infernal gadget," Yates grumbled. "I think
it's got me psyched. What do you want, Norris?"
"Cooperation. I'm mailing you three letters charging three Wylo
citizens with resisting a Federal official—namely
me
—and charging
one of them with assault. I tried to pick up their neutroids for a
pound inspection—"
Yates bellowed lusty laughter into the phone.
"It's not funny. I've got to get those neutroids. It's in connection
with the Delmont case."
Yates stopped laughing. "Oh. Well, I'll take care of it."
"It's a rush-order, Sheriff. Can you get the warrants tonight and pick
up the animals in the morning?"
"Easy on those warrants, boy. Judge Charleman can't be disturbed just
any time. I can get the newts to you by noon, I guess, provided we
don't have to get a helicopter posse to chase down the mothers."
"That'll be all right. And listen, Yates—fix it so the charges will
be dropped if they cooperate. Don't shake those warrants around unless
they just won't listen to reason. But get those neutroids."
"Okay, boy. Gotcha."
Norris gave him the names and addresses of the three unwilling mothers.
As soon as he hung up, Anne touched his shoulders and said, "Sit
still." She began smoothing a chilly ointment over his burning cheek.
"Hard day?" she asked.
"Not too hard. Those were just three out of fifteen. I got the other
twelve. They're in the truck."
"That's good," she said. "You've got only twelve empty cages."
He neglected to tell her that he had stopped at twelve for just this
reason. "Guess I better get them unloaded," he said, standing up.
"Can I help you?"
He stared at her for a moment, saying nothing. She smiled a little and
looked aside. "Terry, I'm sorry—about this morning. I—I know you've
got a job that has to be—" Her lip quivered slightly.
Norris grinned, caught her shoulders, and pulled her close.
"Honeymoon's on again, huh?" she whispered against his neck.
"Come on," he grunted. "Let's unload some neutroids, before I forget
all about work."
They went out to the kennels together. The cages were inside a
sprawling concrete barn, which was divided into three large rooms—one
for the fragile neuter humanoid creatures, and another for the lesser
mutants, such as cat-Qs, dog-Fs, dwarf bears, and foot-high lambs that
never matured into sheep. The third room contained a small gas chamber
with a conveyor belt leading from it to a crematory-incinerator.
Norris kept the third locked lest his wife see its furnishings.
The doll-like neutroids began their mindless chatter as soon as their
keepers entered the building. Dozens of blazing blond heads began
dancing about their cages. Their bodies thwacked against the wire mesh
as they leaped about their compartments with monkey grace.
Their human appearance was broken by only two distinct features: short
beaverlike tails decorated with fluffy curls of fur, and an erect
thatch of scalp-hair that grew up into a bright candleflame. Otherwise,
they appeared completely human, with baby-pink skin, quick little
smiles, and cherubic faces. They were sexually neuter and never grew
beyond a predetermined age-set which varied for each series. Age-sets
were available from one to ten years human equivalent. Once a neutroid
reached its age-set, it remained at the set's child-development level
until death.
"They must be getting to know you pretty well," Anne said, glancing
around at the cages.
Norris was wearing a slight frown as he inspected the room. "They've
never gotten this excited before."
He walked along a row of cages, then stopped by a K-76 to stare.
"
Apple cores!
" He turned to face his wife. "How did apples get in
there?"
She reddened. "I felt sorry for them, eating that goo from the
mechanical feeder. I drove down to Sherman III and bought six dozen
cooking apples."
"That was a mistake."
She frowned irritably. "We can afford it."
"That's not the point. There's a reason for the mechanical feeders." He
paused, wondering how he could tell her the truth. He blundered on:
"They get to love whoever feeds them."
"I can't see—"
"How would you feel about disposing of something that loved you?"
Anne folded her arms and stared at him. "Planning to dispose of any
soon?" she asked acidly.
"Honeymoon's off again, eh?"
She turned away. "I'm sorry, Terry. I'll try not to mention it again."
He began unloading the truck, pulling the frightened and squirming
doll-things forth one at a time with a snare-pole. They were one-man
pets, always frightened of strangers.
"What's the Delmont case, Terry?" Anne asked while he worked.
"Huh?"
"I heard you mention it on the phone. Anything to do with why you got
your face scratched?"
He nodded sourly. "Indirectly, yes. It's a long story."
"Tell me."
"Well, Delmont was a green-horn evolvotron operator at the Bermuda
plant. His job was taking the unfertilized chimpanzee ova out of the
egg-multiplier, mounting them in his machine, and bombarding the
gene structure with sub-atomic particles. It's tricky business. He
flashes a huge enlargement of the ovum on the electron microscope
screen—large enough so he can see the individual protein molecules. He
has an artificial gene pattern to compare it with. It's like shooting
sub-atomic billiards. He's got to fire alpha-particles into the gene
structure and displace certain links by just the right amount. And
he's got to be quick about it before the ovum dies from an overdose of
radiation from the enlarger. A good operator can get one success out of
seven tries.
"Well, Delmont worked a week and spoiled over a hundred ova without a
single success. They threatened to fire him. I guess he got hysterical.
Anyway, he reported one success the next day. It was faked. The ovum
had a couple of flaws—something wrong in the central nervous system's
determinants, and in the glandular makeup. Not a standard neutroid
ovum. He passed it on to the incubators to get a credit, knowing it
wouldn't be caught until after birth."
"It wasn't caught at all?" Anne asked.
"Funny thing, he was afraid it wouldn't be. He got to worrying about
it, thought maybe a mental-deviant would pass, and that it might be
dangerous. So he went back to its incubator and cut off the hormone
flow into its compartment."
"Why that?"
"So it
would
develop sexuality. A neutroid would be born a female
if they didn't give it suppressive doses of male hormone prenatally.
That keeps ovaries from developing and it comes out neuter. But
Delmont figured a female would be caught and stopped before the final
inspection. They'd dispose of her without even bothering to examine for
the other defects. And he could blame the sexuality on an equipment
malfunction. He thought it was pretty smart. Trouble was they didn't
catch the female. She went on through; they all
look
female."
"How did they find out about it now?"
"He got caught last month, trying it again. And he confessed to doing
it once before. No telling how many times he
really
did it."
Norris held up the final kicking, squealing, tassel-haired doll from
the back of the kennel-truck. He grinned at his wife. "This little
fellow, for instance. It might be a potential she. It might also be a
potential murderer.
All
these kiddos are from the machines in the
section where Delmont worked."
Anne snorted and caught the baby-creature in her arms. It struggled and
tried to bite, but subsided a little when she disentangled it from the
snare. "Kkr-r-reee," it cooed nervously. "Kkr-r-reee!"
"You tell him you're no murderer," Anne purred to it.
Norris watched disapprovingly while she fondled it. One thing he had
learned: to steer clear of emotional attachments. It was eight months
old and looked like a child of two years—a year short of its age-set.
And it was designed to be as affectionate as a human child.
"Put it in the cage, Anne," he said quietly.
She looked up and shook her head.
"It belongs to somebody else. If it fixes a libido attachment on you,
you're actually robbing its owner. They can't love many people at once."
She snorted, but installed the thing in its cage.
"Anne—" Norris hesitated, hating to approach the subject. "Do
you—want one—for yourself? I can sign an unclaimed one over to you to
keep in the house. It won't cost us anything."
Slowly she shook her head, and her pale eyes went moody and luminous.
"I'm going to have one of my own," she said.
He stood in the back of the truck, staring down at her. "Do you realize
what—"
"I know what I'm saying. We're class-C on account of heart-trouble in
both our families. Well, I don't care, Terry. I'm not going to waste a
heart over one of these pathetic little artificial animals. We're going
to have a baby."
"You know what they'd do to us?"
"If they catch us, yes—compulsory divorce, sterilization. But they
won't catch us. I'll have it at home, Terry. Not even a doctor. We'll
hide it."
"I won't let you do such a thing."
She faced him angrily. "Oh, this whole rotten
world
!" she choked.
Suddenly she turned and fled out of the building. She was sobbing.
Norris climbed slowly down from the truck and wandered on into the
house. She was not in the kitchen nor the living room. The bedroom door
was locked. He shrugged and went to sit on the sofa. The television
set was on, and a newscast was coming from a local station.
"... we were unable to get shots of the body," the announcer was
saying. "But here is a view of the Georges residence. I'll switch you
to our mobile unit in Sherman II, James Duncan reporting."
Norris frowned with bewilderment as the scene shifted to a two-story
plasticoid house among the elm trees. It was after dark, but the mobile
unit's powerful floodlights made daylight of the house and its yard and
the police 'copters sitting in a side lot. An ambulance was parked in
the street. A new voice came on the audio.
"This is James Duncan, ladies and gentlemen, speaking to you from our
mobile unit in front of the late Doctor Hiram Georges' residence just
west of Sherman II. We are waiting for the stretcher to be brought out,
and Police Chief Erskine Miler is standing here beside me to give us a
word about the case. Doctor Georges' death has shocked the community
deeply. Most of you local listeners have known him for many years—some
of you have depended upon his services as a family physician. He was a
man well known, well loved. But now let's listen to Chief Miler."
Norris sat breathing quickly. There could scarcely be two Doctor
Georges in the community, but only this morning....
A growling drawl came from the audio. "This's Chief Miler speaking,
folks. I just want to say that if any of you know the whereabouts of a
Mrs. Sarah Glubbes, call me immediately. She's wanted for questioning."
"Thank you, Chief. This is James Duncan again. I'll review the facts
for you briefly again, ladies and gentlemen. At seven o'clock,
less than an hour ago, a woman—allegedly Mrs. Glubbes—burst into
Doctor Georges' dining room while the family was at dinner. She was
brandishing a pistol and screaming, 'You stole my baby! You gave me the
wrong baby! Where's my baby?'
"When the doctor assured her that there was no other baby, she fired,
shattering his salad plate. Glancing off it, the bullet pierced his
heart. The woman fled. A peculiar feature of the case is that Mrs.
Glubbes, the alleged intruder,
has no baby
. Just a minute—just a
minute—here comes the stretcher now."
Norris turned the set off and went to call the police. He told them
what he knew and promised to make himself available for questioning if
it became necessary. When he turned from the phone, Anne was standing
in the bedroom doorway. She might have been crying a little, but she
concealed it well.
"What was all that?" she asked.
"Woman killed a man. I happened to know the motive."
"What was it?"
"Neutroid trouble."
"You meet up with a lot of unpleasantness in this business, don't you?"
"Lot of unpleasant emotions tangled up in it," he admitted.
"I know. Well, supper's been keeping hot for two hours. Shall we eat?"
They went to bed at midnight, but it was after one when he became
certain that his wife was asleep. He lay in darkness for a time,
listening to her even breathing. Then he cautiously eased himself out
of bed and tiptoed quietly through the door, carrying his shoes and
trousers. He put them on in the kitchen and stole silently out to the
kennels. A half moon hung low in a misty sky, and the wind was chilly
out of the north.
He went into the neutroid room and flicked a switch. A few sleepy
chatters greeted the light.
One at a time, he awoke twenty-three of the older doll-things and
carried them to a large glass-walled compartment. These were the
long-time residents; they knew him well, and they came with him
willingly—like children after the Piper of Hamlin. When he had gotten
them in the glass chamber, he sealed the door and turned on the gas.
The conveyor would automatically carry them on to the incinerator.
Now he had enough cages for the Bermuda-K-99s.
He hurriedly quit the kennels and went to sit on the back steps. His
eyes were burning, but the thought of tears made him sicker. It was
like an assassin crying while he stabbed his victim. It was more honest
just to retch.
When he tiptoed back inside, he got as far as the hall. Then he saw
Anne's small figure framed in the bedroom window, silhouetted against
the moonlit yard. She had slipped into her negligee and was sitting on
the narrow windowstool, staring silently out at the dull red tongue of
exhaust gases from the crematory's chimney.
Norris backed away. He went to the parlor and lay down on the couch.
After a while he heard her come into the room. She paused in the center
of the rug, a fragile mist in the darkness. He turned his face away and
waited for the rasping accusation. But soon she came to sit on the edge
of the sofa. She said nothing. Her hand crept out and touched his cheek
lightly. He felt her cool finger-tips trace a soft line up his temple.
"It's all right, Terry," she whispered.
He kept his face averted. Her fingers traced a last stroke. Then she
padded quietly back to the bedroom. He lay awake until dawn, knowing
that it would never be all right, neither the creating nor the killing,
until he—and the whole world—completely lost sanity. And then
everything would be all right, only it still wouldn't make sense.
Anne was asleep when he left the house. The night mist had gathered
into clouds that made a gloomy morning of it. He drove on out in the
kennel-truck, meaning to get the rest of the Bermuda-K-99s so that he
could begin his testing.
Still he felt the night's guilt, like a sticky dew that refused to
depart with morning. Why should he have to kill the things? The answer
was obvious. Society manufactured them because killing them was
permissible. Human babies could not be disposed of when the market
became glutted. The neutroids offered solace to childless women, kept
them satisfied with a restricted birth rate. And why a restricted
birth rate? Because by keeping the population at five billions, the
Federation could insure a decent living standard for everybody.
Where there was giving, Norris thought glumly, there was also taking
away. Man had always deluded himself by thinking that he "created," but
he created nothing. He thought that he had created—with his medical
science and his end to wars—a longer life for the individual. But he
found that he had only taken the lives of the unborn and added them to
the years of the aged. Man now had a life expectancy of eighty, except
that he had damn little chance of being born to enjoy it.
A neutroid filled the cradle in his stead. A neutroid that never ate
as much, or grew up to be unemployed. A neutroid could be killed if
things got tough, but could still satisfy a woman's craving to mother
something small.
Norris gave up thinking about it. Eventually he would have to adjust
to it. He was already adjusted to a world that loved the artificial
mutants as children. He had been brought up in it. Emotion came in
conflict with the grim necessities of his job. Somehow he would have
to love them in the parlor and kill them in the kennel. It was only a
matter of adjustment.
At noon, he brought back another dozen K-99s and installed them in his
cages. There had been two highly reluctant mothers, but he skipped
them and left the seizure to the local authorities. Yates had already
brought in the three from yesterday.
"No more scratches?" Anne asked him while they ate lunch. They did not
speak of the night's mass-disposal.
Norris smiled mechanically. "I learned my lesson yesterday. If
they bare their fangs, I get out without another word. Funny thing
though—I've got a feeling one mother pulled a fast one."
"What happened?"
"Well, I told her what I wanted and why. She didn't like it, but she
let me in. I started out with her newt, but she wanted a receipt. So I
gave her one; took the serial number off my checklist. She looked at
it and said, 'Why, that's not Chichi's number!' I looked at the newt's
foot, and sure enough it wasn't. I had to leave it. It was a K-99, but
not even from Bermuda."
"I thought they were all registered," Anne said.
"They are. I told her she had the wrong neutroid, but she got mad. Went
and got the sales receipt. It checked with her newt, and it was from
O'Reilley's pet shop—right place, wrong number. I just don't get it."
"Nothing to worry about, is it Terry?"
He looked at her peculiarly. "Ever think what might happen if someone
started a black market in neutroids?"
They finished the meal in silence. After lunch he went out again to
gather up the rest of the group. By four o'clock, he had gotten all
that were to be had without the threat of a warrant. The screams and
pleas and tears of the owners left him gloomily despising himself.
If Delmont's falsification had been widespread, he might have to turn
several of the thirty-five over to central lab for dissection and
ultimate destruction. That would bring the murderous wrath of their
owners down upon him. He began to understand why bio-inspectors were
frequently shifted from one territory to another.
On the way home, he stopped in Sherman II to check on the missing
number. It was the largest of the Sherman communities, covering fifty
blocks of commercial buildings. He parked in the outskirts and took a
sidewalk escalator toward O'Reilley's address.
It was on a dingy sidestreet, reminiscent of past centuries, a street
of small bars and bowling alleys and cigar stores. There was even a
shop with three gold balls above the entrance, but the place was now
an antique store. A light mist was falling when he stepped off the
escalator and stood in front of the pet shop. A sign hung out over the
sidewalk, announcing:
J. "DOGGY" O'REILLEY
PETS FOR SALE
DUMB BLONDES AND GOLDFISH
MUTANTS FOR THE CHILDLESS
BUY A BUNDLE OF JOY
Norris frowned at the sign and wandered inside. The place was warm
and gloomy. He wrinkled his nose at the strong musk of animal odors.
O'Reilley's was not a shining example of cleanliness.
Somewhere a puppy was yapping, and a parrot croaked the lyrics of
A
Chimp to Call My Own
, which Norris recognized as the theme song of a
popular soap-opera about a lady evolvotron operator.
He paused briefly by a tank of silk-draped goldfish. The shop had a
customer. An elderly lady was haggling with a wizened manager over the
price of a half grown second-hand dog-F. She was shaking her last dog's
death certificate under his nose and demanding a guarantee of the dog's
alleged F-5 intelligence. The old man offered to swear on a Bible, but
he demurred when it came to swearing on a ledger.
The dog was saying, "Don' sell me, Dada. Don' sell me."
Norris smiled sardonically to himself. The non-human pets were smarter
than the neutroids. A K-108 could speak a dozen words, and a K-99
never got farther than "mamma," "pappa," and "cookie." Anthropos was
afraid to make the quasi-humans too intelligent, lest sentimentalists
proclaim them really human.
He wandered on toward the back of the building, pausing briefly by
the cash register to inspect O'Reilley's license, which hung in a
dusty frame on the wall behind the counter. "James Fallon
O'Reilley ... authorized dealer in mutant animals ... all non-predatory
mammals including chimpanzee-K series ... license expires June 1, 2235."
It seemed in order, although the expiration date was approaching. He
started toward a bank of neutroid cages along the opposite wall, but
O'Reilley was mincing across the floor to meet him. The customer had
gone. The little manager wore an elfin professional smile, and his bald
head bobbled in a welcoming nod.
"Good day, sir, good day! May I show you a dwarf kangaroo, or a—" He
stopped and adjusted his spectacles. He blinked and peered as Norris
flashed his badge. His smile waned.
"I'm Agent Norris, Mr. O'Reilley. Called you yesterday for that rundown
on K-99 sales."
O'Reilley looked suddenly nervous. "Oh, yes. Find 'em all?"
Norris shook his head. "No. That's why I stopped by. There's some
mistake on—" he glanced at his list—"on K-99-LJZ-351. Let's check it
again."
O'Reilley seemed to cringe. "No mistake. I gave you the buyer's name."
"She has a different number."
"Can I help it if she traded with somebody?"
"She didn't. She bought it here. I saw the receipt."
"Then she traded with one of my other customers!" snapped the old man.
"Two of your customers have the same name—Adelia Schultz? Not likely.
Let's see your duplicate receipt book."
O'Reilley's wrinkled face set itself into a stubborn mask. "Doubt if
it's still around."
Norris frowned. "Look, pop, I've had a rough day. I
could
start
naming some things around here that need fixing—sanitary violations
and such. Not to mention that sign—'dumb blondes.' They outlawed that
one when they executed that shyster doctor for shooting K-108s full
of growth hormones, trying to raise himself a harem to sell. Besides,
you're required to keep sales records until they've been micro-filmed.
There hasn't been a microfilming since July."
The wrinkled face twitched with frustrated anger. O'Reilley shuffled
to the counter while Norris followed. He got a fat binder from under
the register and started toward a wooden stairway.
"Where you going?" Norris called.
"Get my old glasses," the manager grumbled. "Can't see through these
new things."
"Leave the book here and
I'll
check it," Norris offered.
But O'Reilley was already limping quickly up the stairs. He seemed not
to hear. He shut the door behind him, and Norris heard the lock click.
The bio-agent waited. Again the thought of a black market troubled him.
Unauthorized neutroids could mean lots of trouble. | [
"Ethnic experimentation labs",
"Torture chambers",
"Unethical animal testing facilities",
"Concentration camps"
] | 3 |
51651_QFG6OVXX_6 | Which answer best represents a prominent theme of this passage? | Conditionally Human
By WALTER M. MILLER, JR.
Illustrated by DAVID STONE
They were such cute synthetic creatures, it
was impossible not to love them. Of course,
that was precisely why they were dangerous!
There was no use hanging around after breakfast. His wife was in a hurt
mood, and he could neither endure the hurt nor remove it. He put on his
coat in the kitchen and stood for a moment with his hat in his hands.
His wife was still at the table, absently fingering the handle of her
cup and staring fixedly out the window at the kennels behind the house.
He moved quietly up behind her and touched her silk-clad shoulder. The
shoulder shivered away from him, and her dark hair swung shiningly as
she shuddered. He drew his hand back and his bewildered face went slack
and miserable.
"Honeymoon's over, huh?"
She said nothing, but shrugged faintly.
"You knew I worked for the F.B.A.," he said. "You knew I'd have charge
of a district pound. You knew it before we got married."
"I didn't know you killed them," she said venomously.
"I won't have to kill many. Besides, they're only animals."
"
Intelligent
animals!"
"Intelligent as a human imbecile, maybe."
"A small child is an imbecile. Would you kill a small child?"
"You're taking intelligence as the only criterion of humanity," he
protested hopelessly, knowing that a logical defense was useless
against sentimentality. "Baby—"
"Don't call me baby! Call
them
baby!"
Norris backed a few steps toward the door. Against his better judgment,
he spoke again. "Anne honey, look! Think of the
good
things about the
job. Sure, everything has its ugly angles. But think—we get this house
rent-free; I've got my own district with no bosses around; I make my
own hours; you'll meet lots of people that stop in at the pound. It's a
fine
job, honey!"
She sipped her coffee and appeared to be listening, so he went on.
"And what can I do? You know how the Federation handles employment.
They looked over my aptitude tests and sent me to Bio-Administration.
If I don't want to follow my aptitudes, the only choice is common
labor. That's the
law
."
"I suppose you have an aptitude for killing babies?" she said sweetly.
Norris withered. His voice went desperate. "They assigned me to it
because I
liked
babies. And because I have a B.S. in biology and an
aptitude for dealing with people. Can't you understand? Destroying
unclaimed units is the smallest part of it. Honey, before the
evolvotron, before Anthropos went into the mutant-animal business,
people used to elect dogcatchers. Think of it that way—I'm just a
dogcatcher."
Her cool green eyes turned slowly to meet his gaze. Her face was
delicately cut from cold marble. She was a small woman, slender and
fragile, but her quiet contempt made her loom.
He backed closer to the door.
"Well, I've got to get on the job." He put on his hat and picked at a
splinter on the door. He frowned studiously at the splinter. "I—I'll
see you tonight." He ripped the splinter loose when it became obvious
that she didn't want to be kissed.
He grunted a nervous good-by and stumbled down the hall and out of the
house. The honeymoon was over, all right.
He climbed in the kennel-truck and drove east toward the highway. The
suburban street wound among the pastel plasticoid cottages that were
set approximately two to an acre on the lightly wooded land. With its
population legally fixed at three hundred million, most of the country
had become one big suburb, dotted with community centers and lined
with narrow belts of industrial development. Norris wished there were
someplace where he could be completely alone.
As he approached an intersection, he saw a small animal sitting on the
curb, wrapped in its own bushy tail. Its oversized head was bald on
top, but the rest of its body was covered with blue-gray fur. Its tiny
pink tongue was licking daintily at small forepaws with prehensile
thumbs. It was a cat-Q-5. It glanced curiously at the truck as Norris
pulled to a halt.
He smiled at it from the window and called, "What's your name, kitten?"
The cat-Q-5 stared at him impassively for a moment, let out a
stuttering high-pitched wail, then: "Kiyi Rorry."
"Whose child are you, Rorry?" he asked. "Where do you live?"
The cat-Q-5 took its time about answering. There were no houses near
the intersection, and Norris feared that the animal might be lost.
It blinked at him, sleepily bored, and resumed its paw-washing. He
repeated the questions.
"Mama kiyi," said the cat-Q-5 disgustedly.
"That's right, Mama's kitty. But where is Mama? Do you suppose she ran
away?"
The cat-Q-5 looked startled. It stuttered for a moment, and its fur
crept slowly erect. It glanced around hurriedly, then shot off down the
street at a fast scamper. He followed it in the truck until it darted
onto a porch and began wailing through the screen, "Mama no run ray!
Mama no run ray!"
Norris grinned and drove on. A class-C couple, allowed no children
of their own, could get quite attached to a cat-Q-5. The felines
were emotionally safer than the quasi-human chimp-K series called
"neutroids." When a pet neutroid died, a family was broken with grief;
but most couples could endure the death of a cat-Q or a dog-F. Class-C
couples were allowed two lesser units or one neutroid.
His grin faded as he wondered which Anne would choose. The Norrises
were class-C—defective heredity.
He found himself in Sherman III Community Center—eight blocks of
commercial buildings, serving the surrounding suburbs. He stopped at
the message office to pick up his mail. There was a memo from Chief
Franklin. He tore it open nervously and read it in the truck. It was
something he had been expecting for several days.
Attention All District Inspectors:
Subject: Deviant Neutroid.
You will immediately begin a systematic and thorough survey of all
animals whose serial numbers fall in the Bermuda-K-99 series for
birth dates during July 2234. This is in connection with the Delmont
Negligency Case. Seize all animals in this category, impound, and run
proper sections of normalcy tests. Watch for mental and glandular
deviation. Delmont has confessed to passing only one non-standard
unit, but there may be others. He disclaims memory of deviant's serial
number. This could be a ruse to bring a stop to investigations when
one animal is found. Be thorough.
If allowed to reach age-set or adulthood, such a deviant could be
dangerous to its owner or to others. Hold all seized K-99s who show
the slightest abnormality in the normalcy tests. Forward to central
lab. Return standard units to their owners. Accomplish entire survey
project within seven days.
C. Franklin
Norris frowned at the last sentence. His district covered about two
hundred square miles. Its replacement-quota of new neutroids was around
three hundred animals a month. He tried to estimate how many of July's
influx had been K-99s from Bermuda Factory. Forty, at least. Could he
do it in a week? And there were only eleven empty neutroid cages in his
kennel. The other forty-nine were occupied by the previous inspector's
"unclaimed" inventory—awaiting destruction.
He wadded the memo in his pocket, then nosed the truck onto the highway
and headed toward Wylo City and the district wholesale offices of
Anthropos, Inc. They should be able to give him a list of all July's
Bermuda K-99 serial numbers that had entered his territory, together
with the retailers to whom the animals had been sold. A week's deadline
for finding and testing forty neutroids would put him in a tight
squeeze.
He was halfway to Wylo City when the radiophone buzzed on his
dashboard. He pulled into the slow lane and answered quickly, hoping
for Anne's voice. A polite professional purr came instead.
"Inspector Norris? This is Doctor Georges. We haven't met, but I
imagine we will. Are you extremely busy at the moment?"
Norris hesitated. "Extremely," he said.
"Well, this won't take long. One of my patients—a Mrs. Sarah
Glubbes—called a while ago and said her baby was sick. I must be
getting absent-minded, because I forgot she was class C until I got
there." He hesitated. "The baby turned out to be a neutroid. It's
dying. Eighteenth order virus."
"So?"
"Well, she's—uh—rather a
peculiar
woman, Inspector. Keeps telling
me how much trouble she had in childbirth, and how she can't ever
have another one. It's pathetic. She
believes
it's her own. Do you
understand?"
"I think so," Norris replied slowly. "But what do you want me to do?
Can't you send the neutroid to a vet?"
"She insists it's going to a hospital. Worst part is that she's heard
of the disease. Knows it can be cured with the proper treatment—in
humans. Of course, no hospital would play along with her fantasy and
take a neutroid, especially since she couldn't pay for its treatment."
"I still don't see—"
"I thought perhaps you could help me fake a substitution. It's a K-48
series, five-year-old, three-year set. Do you have one in the pound
that's not claimed?"
Norris thought for a moment. "I think I have
one
. You're welcome to
it, Doctor, but you can't fake a serial number. She'll know it. And
even though they look exactly alike, the new one won't recognize her.
It'll be spooky."
There was a long pause, followed by a sigh. "I'll try it anyway. Can I
come get the animal now?"
"I'm on the highway—"
"Please, Norris! This is urgent. That woman will lose her mind
completely if—"
"All right, I'll call my wife and tell her to open the pound for you.
Pick out the K-48 and sign for it. And listen—"
"Yes?"
"Don't let me catch you falsifying a serial number."
Doctor Georges laughed faintly. "I won't, Norris. Thanks a million." He
hung up quickly.
Norris immediately regretted his consent. It bordered on being illegal.
But he saw it as a quick way to get rid of an animal that might later
have to be killed.
He called Anne. Her voice was dull. She seemed depressed, but not
angry. When he finished talking, she said, "All right, Terry," and hung
up.
By noon, he had finished checking the shipping lists at the wholesale
house in Wylo City. Only thirty-five of July's Bermuda-K-99s had
entered his territory, and they were about equally divided among five
pet shops, three of which were in Wylo City.
After lunch, he called each of the retail dealers, read them the serial
numbers, and asked them to check the sales records for names and
addresses of individual buyers. By three o'clock, he had the entire
list filled out, and the task began to look easier. All that remained
was to pick up the thirty-five animals.
And
that
, he thought, was like trying to take a year-old baby away
from its doting mother. He sighed and drove to the Wylo suburbs to
begin his rounds.
Anne met him at the door when he came home at six. He stood on the
porch for a moment, smiling at her weakly. The smile was not returned.
"Doctor Georges came," she told him. "He signed for the—" She stopped
to stare at him. "Darling, your face! What happened?"
Gingerly he touch the livid welts down the side of his cheek. "Just
scratched a little," he muttered. He pushed past her and went to the
phone in the hall. He sat eying it distastefully for a moment, not
liking what he had to do. Anne came to stand beside him and examine the
scratches.
Finally he lifted the phone and dialed the Wylo exchange. A grating
mechanical voice answered, "Locator center. Your party, please."
"Sheriff Yates," Norris grunted.
The robot operator, which had on tape the working habits of each Wylo
City citizen, began calling numbers. It found the off-duty sheriff on
its third try, in a Wylo pool hall.
"I'm getting so I hate that infernal gadget," Yates grumbled. "I think
it's got me psyched. What do you want, Norris?"
"Cooperation. I'm mailing you three letters charging three Wylo
citizens with resisting a Federal official—namely
me
—and charging
one of them with assault. I tried to pick up their neutroids for a
pound inspection—"
Yates bellowed lusty laughter into the phone.
"It's not funny. I've got to get those neutroids. It's in connection
with the Delmont case."
Yates stopped laughing. "Oh. Well, I'll take care of it."
"It's a rush-order, Sheriff. Can you get the warrants tonight and pick
up the animals in the morning?"
"Easy on those warrants, boy. Judge Charleman can't be disturbed just
any time. I can get the newts to you by noon, I guess, provided we
don't have to get a helicopter posse to chase down the mothers."
"That'll be all right. And listen, Yates—fix it so the charges will
be dropped if they cooperate. Don't shake those warrants around unless
they just won't listen to reason. But get those neutroids."
"Okay, boy. Gotcha."
Norris gave him the names and addresses of the three unwilling mothers.
As soon as he hung up, Anne touched his shoulders and said, "Sit
still." She began smoothing a chilly ointment over his burning cheek.
"Hard day?" she asked.
"Not too hard. Those were just three out of fifteen. I got the other
twelve. They're in the truck."
"That's good," she said. "You've got only twelve empty cages."
He neglected to tell her that he had stopped at twelve for just this
reason. "Guess I better get them unloaded," he said, standing up.
"Can I help you?"
He stared at her for a moment, saying nothing. She smiled a little and
looked aside. "Terry, I'm sorry—about this morning. I—I know you've
got a job that has to be—" Her lip quivered slightly.
Norris grinned, caught her shoulders, and pulled her close.
"Honeymoon's on again, huh?" she whispered against his neck.
"Come on," he grunted. "Let's unload some neutroids, before I forget
all about work."
They went out to the kennels together. The cages were inside a
sprawling concrete barn, which was divided into three large rooms—one
for the fragile neuter humanoid creatures, and another for the lesser
mutants, such as cat-Qs, dog-Fs, dwarf bears, and foot-high lambs that
never matured into sheep. The third room contained a small gas chamber
with a conveyor belt leading from it to a crematory-incinerator.
Norris kept the third locked lest his wife see its furnishings.
The doll-like neutroids began their mindless chatter as soon as their
keepers entered the building. Dozens of blazing blond heads began
dancing about their cages. Their bodies thwacked against the wire mesh
as they leaped about their compartments with monkey grace.
Their human appearance was broken by only two distinct features: short
beaverlike tails decorated with fluffy curls of fur, and an erect
thatch of scalp-hair that grew up into a bright candleflame. Otherwise,
they appeared completely human, with baby-pink skin, quick little
smiles, and cherubic faces. They were sexually neuter and never grew
beyond a predetermined age-set which varied for each series. Age-sets
were available from one to ten years human equivalent. Once a neutroid
reached its age-set, it remained at the set's child-development level
until death.
"They must be getting to know you pretty well," Anne said, glancing
around at the cages.
Norris was wearing a slight frown as he inspected the room. "They've
never gotten this excited before."
He walked along a row of cages, then stopped by a K-76 to stare.
"
Apple cores!
" He turned to face his wife. "How did apples get in
there?"
She reddened. "I felt sorry for them, eating that goo from the
mechanical feeder. I drove down to Sherman III and bought six dozen
cooking apples."
"That was a mistake."
She frowned irritably. "We can afford it."
"That's not the point. There's a reason for the mechanical feeders." He
paused, wondering how he could tell her the truth. He blundered on:
"They get to love whoever feeds them."
"I can't see—"
"How would you feel about disposing of something that loved you?"
Anne folded her arms and stared at him. "Planning to dispose of any
soon?" she asked acidly.
"Honeymoon's off again, eh?"
She turned away. "I'm sorry, Terry. I'll try not to mention it again."
He began unloading the truck, pulling the frightened and squirming
doll-things forth one at a time with a snare-pole. They were one-man
pets, always frightened of strangers.
"What's the Delmont case, Terry?" Anne asked while he worked.
"Huh?"
"I heard you mention it on the phone. Anything to do with why you got
your face scratched?"
He nodded sourly. "Indirectly, yes. It's a long story."
"Tell me."
"Well, Delmont was a green-horn evolvotron operator at the Bermuda
plant. His job was taking the unfertilized chimpanzee ova out of the
egg-multiplier, mounting them in his machine, and bombarding the
gene structure with sub-atomic particles. It's tricky business. He
flashes a huge enlargement of the ovum on the electron microscope
screen—large enough so he can see the individual protein molecules. He
has an artificial gene pattern to compare it with. It's like shooting
sub-atomic billiards. He's got to fire alpha-particles into the gene
structure and displace certain links by just the right amount. And
he's got to be quick about it before the ovum dies from an overdose of
radiation from the enlarger. A good operator can get one success out of
seven tries.
"Well, Delmont worked a week and spoiled over a hundred ova without a
single success. They threatened to fire him. I guess he got hysterical.
Anyway, he reported one success the next day. It was faked. The ovum
had a couple of flaws—something wrong in the central nervous system's
determinants, and in the glandular makeup. Not a standard neutroid
ovum. He passed it on to the incubators to get a credit, knowing it
wouldn't be caught until after birth."
"It wasn't caught at all?" Anne asked.
"Funny thing, he was afraid it wouldn't be. He got to worrying about
it, thought maybe a mental-deviant would pass, and that it might be
dangerous. So he went back to its incubator and cut off the hormone
flow into its compartment."
"Why that?"
"So it
would
develop sexuality. A neutroid would be born a female
if they didn't give it suppressive doses of male hormone prenatally.
That keeps ovaries from developing and it comes out neuter. But
Delmont figured a female would be caught and stopped before the final
inspection. They'd dispose of her without even bothering to examine for
the other defects. And he could blame the sexuality on an equipment
malfunction. He thought it was pretty smart. Trouble was they didn't
catch the female. She went on through; they all
look
female."
"How did they find out about it now?"
"He got caught last month, trying it again. And he confessed to doing
it once before. No telling how many times he
really
did it."
Norris held up the final kicking, squealing, tassel-haired doll from
the back of the kennel-truck. He grinned at his wife. "This little
fellow, for instance. It might be a potential she. It might also be a
potential murderer.
All
these kiddos are from the machines in the
section where Delmont worked."
Anne snorted and caught the baby-creature in her arms. It struggled and
tried to bite, but subsided a little when she disentangled it from the
snare. "Kkr-r-reee," it cooed nervously. "Kkr-r-reee!"
"You tell him you're no murderer," Anne purred to it.
Norris watched disapprovingly while she fondled it. One thing he had
learned: to steer clear of emotional attachments. It was eight months
old and looked like a child of two years—a year short of its age-set.
And it was designed to be as affectionate as a human child.
"Put it in the cage, Anne," he said quietly.
She looked up and shook her head.
"It belongs to somebody else. If it fixes a libido attachment on you,
you're actually robbing its owner. They can't love many people at once."
She snorted, but installed the thing in its cage.
"Anne—" Norris hesitated, hating to approach the subject. "Do
you—want one—for yourself? I can sign an unclaimed one over to you to
keep in the house. It won't cost us anything."
Slowly she shook her head, and her pale eyes went moody and luminous.
"I'm going to have one of my own," she said.
He stood in the back of the truck, staring down at her. "Do you realize
what—"
"I know what I'm saying. We're class-C on account of heart-trouble in
both our families. Well, I don't care, Terry. I'm not going to waste a
heart over one of these pathetic little artificial animals. We're going
to have a baby."
"You know what they'd do to us?"
"If they catch us, yes—compulsory divorce, sterilization. But they
won't catch us. I'll have it at home, Terry. Not even a doctor. We'll
hide it."
"I won't let you do such a thing."
She faced him angrily. "Oh, this whole rotten
world
!" she choked.
Suddenly she turned and fled out of the building. She was sobbing.
Norris climbed slowly down from the truck and wandered on into the
house. She was not in the kitchen nor the living room. The bedroom door
was locked. He shrugged and went to sit on the sofa. The television
set was on, and a newscast was coming from a local station.
"... we were unable to get shots of the body," the announcer was
saying. "But here is a view of the Georges residence. I'll switch you
to our mobile unit in Sherman II, James Duncan reporting."
Norris frowned with bewilderment as the scene shifted to a two-story
plasticoid house among the elm trees. It was after dark, but the mobile
unit's powerful floodlights made daylight of the house and its yard and
the police 'copters sitting in a side lot. An ambulance was parked in
the street. A new voice came on the audio.
"This is James Duncan, ladies and gentlemen, speaking to you from our
mobile unit in front of the late Doctor Hiram Georges' residence just
west of Sherman II. We are waiting for the stretcher to be brought out,
and Police Chief Erskine Miler is standing here beside me to give us a
word about the case. Doctor Georges' death has shocked the community
deeply. Most of you local listeners have known him for many years—some
of you have depended upon his services as a family physician. He was a
man well known, well loved. But now let's listen to Chief Miler."
Norris sat breathing quickly. There could scarcely be two Doctor
Georges in the community, but only this morning....
A growling drawl came from the audio. "This's Chief Miler speaking,
folks. I just want to say that if any of you know the whereabouts of a
Mrs. Sarah Glubbes, call me immediately. She's wanted for questioning."
"Thank you, Chief. This is James Duncan again. I'll review the facts
for you briefly again, ladies and gentlemen. At seven o'clock,
less than an hour ago, a woman—allegedly Mrs. Glubbes—burst into
Doctor Georges' dining room while the family was at dinner. She was
brandishing a pistol and screaming, 'You stole my baby! You gave me the
wrong baby! Where's my baby?'
"When the doctor assured her that there was no other baby, she fired,
shattering his salad plate. Glancing off it, the bullet pierced his
heart. The woman fled. A peculiar feature of the case is that Mrs.
Glubbes, the alleged intruder,
has no baby
. Just a minute—just a
minute—here comes the stretcher now."
Norris turned the set off and went to call the police. He told them
what he knew and promised to make himself available for questioning if
it became necessary. When he turned from the phone, Anne was standing
in the bedroom doorway. She might have been crying a little, but she
concealed it well.
"What was all that?" she asked.
"Woman killed a man. I happened to know the motive."
"What was it?"
"Neutroid trouble."
"You meet up with a lot of unpleasantness in this business, don't you?"
"Lot of unpleasant emotions tangled up in it," he admitted.
"I know. Well, supper's been keeping hot for two hours. Shall we eat?"
They went to bed at midnight, but it was after one when he became
certain that his wife was asleep. He lay in darkness for a time,
listening to her even breathing. Then he cautiously eased himself out
of bed and tiptoed quietly through the door, carrying his shoes and
trousers. He put them on in the kitchen and stole silently out to the
kennels. A half moon hung low in a misty sky, and the wind was chilly
out of the north.
He went into the neutroid room and flicked a switch. A few sleepy
chatters greeted the light.
One at a time, he awoke twenty-three of the older doll-things and
carried them to a large glass-walled compartment. These were the
long-time residents; they knew him well, and they came with him
willingly—like children after the Piper of Hamlin. When he had gotten
them in the glass chamber, he sealed the door and turned on the gas.
The conveyor would automatically carry them on to the incinerator.
Now he had enough cages for the Bermuda-K-99s.
He hurriedly quit the kennels and went to sit on the back steps. His
eyes were burning, but the thought of tears made him sicker. It was
like an assassin crying while he stabbed his victim. It was more honest
just to retch.
When he tiptoed back inside, he got as far as the hall. Then he saw
Anne's small figure framed in the bedroom window, silhouetted against
the moonlit yard. She had slipped into her negligee and was sitting on
the narrow windowstool, staring silently out at the dull red tongue of
exhaust gases from the crematory's chimney.
Norris backed away. He went to the parlor and lay down on the couch.
After a while he heard her come into the room. She paused in the center
of the rug, a fragile mist in the darkness. He turned his face away and
waited for the rasping accusation. But soon she came to sit on the edge
of the sofa. She said nothing. Her hand crept out and touched his cheek
lightly. He felt her cool finger-tips trace a soft line up his temple.
"It's all right, Terry," she whispered.
He kept his face averted. Her fingers traced a last stroke. Then she
padded quietly back to the bedroom. He lay awake until dawn, knowing
that it would never be all right, neither the creating nor the killing,
until he—and the whole world—completely lost sanity. And then
everything would be all right, only it still wouldn't make sense.
Anne was asleep when he left the house. The night mist had gathered
into clouds that made a gloomy morning of it. He drove on out in the
kennel-truck, meaning to get the rest of the Bermuda-K-99s so that he
could begin his testing.
Still he felt the night's guilt, like a sticky dew that refused to
depart with morning. Why should he have to kill the things? The answer
was obvious. Society manufactured them because killing them was
permissible. Human babies could not be disposed of when the market
became glutted. The neutroids offered solace to childless women, kept
them satisfied with a restricted birth rate. And why a restricted
birth rate? Because by keeping the population at five billions, the
Federation could insure a decent living standard for everybody.
Where there was giving, Norris thought glumly, there was also taking
away. Man had always deluded himself by thinking that he "created," but
he created nothing. He thought that he had created—with his medical
science and his end to wars—a longer life for the individual. But he
found that he had only taken the lives of the unborn and added them to
the years of the aged. Man now had a life expectancy of eighty, except
that he had damn little chance of being born to enjoy it.
A neutroid filled the cradle in his stead. A neutroid that never ate
as much, or grew up to be unemployed. A neutroid could be killed if
things got tough, but could still satisfy a woman's craving to mother
something small.
Norris gave up thinking about it. Eventually he would have to adjust
to it. He was already adjusted to a world that loved the artificial
mutants as children. He had been brought up in it. Emotion came in
conflict with the grim necessities of his job. Somehow he would have
to love them in the parlor and kill them in the kennel. It was only a
matter of adjustment.
At noon, he brought back another dozen K-99s and installed them in his
cages. There had been two highly reluctant mothers, but he skipped
them and left the seizure to the local authorities. Yates had already
brought in the three from yesterday.
"No more scratches?" Anne asked him while they ate lunch. They did not
speak of the night's mass-disposal.
Norris smiled mechanically. "I learned my lesson yesterday. If
they bare their fangs, I get out without another word. Funny thing
though—I've got a feeling one mother pulled a fast one."
"What happened?"
"Well, I told her what I wanted and why. She didn't like it, but she
let me in. I started out with her newt, but she wanted a receipt. So I
gave her one; took the serial number off my checklist. She looked at
it and said, 'Why, that's not Chichi's number!' I looked at the newt's
foot, and sure enough it wasn't. I had to leave it. It was a K-99, but
not even from Bermuda."
"I thought they were all registered," Anne said.
"They are. I told her she had the wrong neutroid, but she got mad. Went
and got the sales receipt. It checked with her newt, and it was from
O'Reilley's pet shop—right place, wrong number. I just don't get it."
"Nothing to worry about, is it Terry?"
He looked at her peculiarly. "Ever think what might happen if someone
started a black market in neutroids?"
They finished the meal in silence. After lunch he went out again to
gather up the rest of the group. By four o'clock, he had gotten all
that were to be had without the threat of a warrant. The screams and
pleas and tears of the owners left him gloomily despising himself.
If Delmont's falsification had been widespread, he might have to turn
several of the thirty-five over to central lab for dissection and
ultimate destruction. That would bring the murderous wrath of their
owners down upon him. He began to understand why bio-inspectors were
frequently shifted from one territory to another.
On the way home, he stopped in Sherman II to check on the missing
number. It was the largest of the Sherman communities, covering fifty
blocks of commercial buildings. He parked in the outskirts and took a
sidewalk escalator toward O'Reilley's address.
It was on a dingy sidestreet, reminiscent of past centuries, a street
of small bars and bowling alleys and cigar stores. There was even a
shop with three gold balls above the entrance, but the place was now
an antique store. A light mist was falling when he stepped off the
escalator and stood in front of the pet shop. A sign hung out over the
sidewalk, announcing:
J. "DOGGY" O'REILLEY
PETS FOR SALE
DUMB BLONDES AND GOLDFISH
MUTANTS FOR THE CHILDLESS
BUY A BUNDLE OF JOY
Norris frowned at the sign and wandered inside. The place was warm
and gloomy. He wrinkled his nose at the strong musk of animal odors.
O'Reilley's was not a shining example of cleanliness.
Somewhere a puppy was yapping, and a parrot croaked the lyrics of
A
Chimp to Call My Own
, which Norris recognized as the theme song of a
popular soap-opera about a lady evolvotron operator.
He paused briefly by a tank of silk-draped goldfish. The shop had a
customer. An elderly lady was haggling with a wizened manager over the
price of a half grown second-hand dog-F. She was shaking her last dog's
death certificate under his nose and demanding a guarantee of the dog's
alleged F-5 intelligence. The old man offered to swear on a Bible, but
he demurred when it came to swearing on a ledger.
The dog was saying, "Don' sell me, Dada. Don' sell me."
Norris smiled sardonically to himself. The non-human pets were smarter
than the neutroids. A K-108 could speak a dozen words, and a K-99
never got farther than "mamma," "pappa," and "cookie." Anthropos was
afraid to make the quasi-humans too intelligent, lest sentimentalists
proclaim them really human.
He wandered on toward the back of the building, pausing briefly by
the cash register to inspect O'Reilley's license, which hung in a
dusty frame on the wall behind the counter. "James Fallon
O'Reilley ... authorized dealer in mutant animals ... all non-predatory
mammals including chimpanzee-K series ... license expires June 1, 2235."
It seemed in order, although the expiration date was approaching. He
started toward a bank of neutroid cages along the opposite wall, but
O'Reilley was mincing across the floor to meet him. The customer had
gone. The little manager wore an elfin professional smile, and his bald
head bobbled in a welcoming nod.
"Good day, sir, good day! May I show you a dwarf kangaroo, or a—" He
stopped and adjusted his spectacles. He blinked and peered as Norris
flashed his badge. His smile waned.
"I'm Agent Norris, Mr. O'Reilley. Called you yesterday for that rundown
on K-99 sales."
O'Reilley looked suddenly nervous. "Oh, yes. Find 'em all?"
Norris shook his head. "No. That's why I stopped by. There's some
mistake on—" he glanced at his list—"on K-99-LJZ-351. Let's check it
again."
O'Reilley seemed to cringe. "No mistake. I gave you the buyer's name."
"She has a different number."
"Can I help it if she traded with somebody?"
"She didn't. She bought it here. I saw the receipt."
"Then she traded with one of my other customers!" snapped the old man.
"Two of your customers have the same name—Adelia Schultz? Not likely.
Let's see your duplicate receipt book."
O'Reilley's wrinkled face set itself into a stubborn mask. "Doubt if
it's still around."
Norris frowned. "Look, pop, I've had a rough day. I
could
start
naming some things around here that need fixing—sanitary violations
and such. Not to mention that sign—'dumb blondes.' They outlawed that
one when they executed that shyster doctor for shooting K-108s full
of growth hormones, trying to raise himself a harem to sell. Besides,
you're required to keep sales records until they've been micro-filmed.
There hasn't been a microfilming since July."
The wrinkled face twitched with frustrated anger. O'Reilley shuffled
to the counter while Norris followed. He got a fat binder from under
the register and started toward a wooden stairway.
"Where you going?" Norris called.
"Get my old glasses," the manager grumbled. "Can't see through these
new things."
"Leave the book here and
I'll
check it," Norris offered.
But O'Reilley was already limping quickly up the stairs. He seemed not
to hear. He shut the door behind him, and Norris heard the lock click.
The bio-agent waited. Again the thought of a black market troubled him.
Unauthorized neutroids could mean lots of trouble. | [
"If you're going to break a law, be prepared to deal with the consequences.",
"It is physically and emotionally dangerous to get too attached to others.",
"Government actions made in the name of equality can sometimes cause more harm than good.",
"Too much technological advancement can destroy a thriving society."
] | 2 |
51651_QFG6OVXX_7 | What is the most likely reason for Mrs. Sarah Glubbes calling her neutroid a baby? | Conditionally Human
By WALTER M. MILLER, JR.
Illustrated by DAVID STONE
They were such cute synthetic creatures, it
was impossible not to love them. Of course,
that was precisely why they were dangerous!
There was no use hanging around after breakfast. His wife was in a hurt
mood, and he could neither endure the hurt nor remove it. He put on his
coat in the kitchen and stood for a moment with his hat in his hands.
His wife was still at the table, absently fingering the handle of her
cup and staring fixedly out the window at the kennels behind the house.
He moved quietly up behind her and touched her silk-clad shoulder. The
shoulder shivered away from him, and her dark hair swung shiningly as
she shuddered. He drew his hand back and his bewildered face went slack
and miserable.
"Honeymoon's over, huh?"
She said nothing, but shrugged faintly.
"You knew I worked for the F.B.A.," he said. "You knew I'd have charge
of a district pound. You knew it before we got married."
"I didn't know you killed them," she said venomously.
"I won't have to kill many. Besides, they're only animals."
"
Intelligent
animals!"
"Intelligent as a human imbecile, maybe."
"A small child is an imbecile. Would you kill a small child?"
"You're taking intelligence as the only criterion of humanity," he
protested hopelessly, knowing that a logical defense was useless
against sentimentality. "Baby—"
"Don't call me baby! Call
them
baby!"
Norris backed a few steps toward the door. Against his better judgment,
he spoke again. "Anne honey, look! Think of the
good
things about the
job. Sure, everything has its ugly angles. But think—we get this house
rent-free; I've got my own district with no bosses around; I make my
own hours; you'll meet lots of people that stop in at the pound. It's a
fine
job, honey!"
She sipped her coffee and appeared to be listening, so he went on.
"And what can I do? You know how the Federation handles employment.
They looked over my aptitude tests and sent me to Bio-Administration.
If I don't want to follow my aptitudes, the only choice is common
labor. That's the
law
."
"I suppose you have an aptitude for killing babies?" she said sweetly.
Norris withered. His voice went desperate. "They assigned me to it
because I
liked
babies. And because I have a B.S. in biology and an
aptitude for dealing with people. Can't you understand? Destroying
unclaimed units is the smallest part of it. Honey, before the
evolvotron, before Anthropos went into the mutant-animal business,
people used to elect dogcatchers. Think of it that way—I'm just a
dogcatcher."
Her cool green eyes turned slowly to meet his gaze. Her face was
delicately cut from cold marble. She was a small woman, slender and
fragile, but her quiet contempt made her loom.
He backed closer to the door.
"Well, I've got to get on the job." He put on his hat and picked at a
splinter on the door. He frowned studiously at the splinter. "I—I'll
see you tonight." He ripped the splinter loose when it became obvious
that she didn't want to be kissed.
He grunted a nervous good-by and stumbled down the hall and out of the
house. The honeymoon was over, all right.
He climbed in the kennel-truck and drove east toward the highway. The
suburban street wound among the pastel plasticoid cottages that were
set approximately two to an acre on the lightly wooded land. With its
population legally fixed at three hundred million, most of the country
had become one big suburb, dotted with community centers and lined
with narrow belts of industrial development. Norris wished there were
someplace where he could be completely alone.
As he approached an intersection, he saw a small animal sitting on the
curb, wrapped in its own bushy tail. Its oversized head was bald on
top, but the rest of its body was covered with blue-gray fur. Its tiny
pink tongue was licking daintily at small forepaws with prehensile
thumbs. It was a cat-Q-5. It glanced curiously at the truck as Norris
pulled to a halt.
He smiled at it from the window and called, "What's your name, kitten?"
The cat-Q-5 stared at him impassively for a moment, let out a
stuttering high-pitched wail, then: "Kiyi Rorry."
"Whose child are you, Rorry?" he asked. "Where do you live?"
The cat-Q-5 took its time about answering. There were no houses near
the intersection, and Norris feared that the animal might be lost.
It blinked at him, sleepily bored, and resumed its paw-washing. He
repeated the questions.
"Mama kiyi," said the cat-Q-5 disgustedly.
"That's right, Mama's kitty. But where is Mama? Do you suppose she ran
away?"
The cat-Q-5 looked startled. It stuttered for a moment, and its fur
crept slowly erect. It glanced around hurriedly, then shot off down the
street at a fast scamper. He followed it in the truck until it darted
onto a porch and began wailing through the screen, "Mama no run ray!
Mama no run ray!"
Norris grinned and drove on. A class-C couple, allowed no children
of their own, could get quite attached to a cat-Q-5. The felines
were emotionally safer than the quasi-human chimp-K series called
"neutroids." When a pet neutroid died, a family was broken with grief;
but most couples could endure the death of a cat-Q or a dog-F. Class-C
couples were allowed two lesser units or one neutroid.
His grin faded as he wondered which Anne would choose. The Norrises
were class-C—defective heredity.
He found himself in Sherman III Community Center—eight blocks of
commercial buildings, serving the surrounding suburbs. He stopped at
the message office to pick up his mail. There was a memo from Chief
Franklin. He tore it open nervously and read it in the truck. It was
something he had been expecting for several days.
Attention All District Inspectors:
Subject: Deviant Neutroid.
You will immediately begin a systematic and thorough survey of all
animals whose serial numbers fall in the Bermuda-K-99 series for
birth dates during July 2234. This is in connection with the Delmont
Negligency Case. Seize all animals in this category, impound, and run
proper sections of normalcy tests. Watch for mental and glandular
deviation. Delmont has confessed to passing only one non-standard
unit, but there may be others. He disclaims memory of deviant's serial
number. This could be a ruse to bring a stop to investigations when
one animal is found. Be thorough.
If allowed to reach age-set or adulthood, such a deviant could be
dangerous to its owner or to others. Hold all seized K-99s who show
the slightest abnormality in the normalcy tests. Forward to central
lab. Return standard units to their owners. Accomplish entire survey
project within seven days.
C. Franklin
Norris frowned at the last sentence. His district covered about two
hundred square miles. Its replacement-quota of new neutroids was around
three hundred animals a month. He tried to estimate how many of July's
influx had been K-99s from Bermuda Factory. Forty, at least. Could he
do it in a week? And there were only eleven empty neutroid cages in his
kennel. The other forty-nine were occupied by the previous inspector's
"unclaimed" inventory—awaiting destruction.
He wadded the memo in his pocket, then nosed the truck onto the highway
and headed toward Wylo City and the district wholesale offices of
Anthropos, Inc. They should be able to give him a list of all July's
Bermuda K-99 serial numbers that had entered his territory, together
with the retailers to whom the animals had been sold. A week's deadline
for finding and testing forty neutroids would put him in a tight
squeeze.
He was halfway to Wylo City when the radiophone buzzed on his
dashboard. He pulled into the slow lane and answered quickly, hoping
for Anne's voice. A polite professional purr came instead.
"Inspector Norris? This is Doctor Georges. We haven't met, but I
imagine we will. Are you extremely busy at the moment?"
Norris hesitated. "Extremely," he said.
"Well, this won't take long. One of my patients—a Mrs. Sarah
Glubbes—called a while ago and said her baby was sick. I must be
getting absent-minded, because I forgot she was class C until I got
there." He hesitated. "The baby turned out to be a neutroid. It's
dying. Eighteenth order virus."
"So?"
"Well, she's—uh—rather a
peculiar
woman, Inspector. Keeps telling
me how much trouble she had in childbirth, and how she can't ever
have another one. It's pathetic. She
believes
it's her own. Do you
understand?"
"I think so," Norris replied slowly. "But what do you want me to do?
Can't you send the neutroid to a vet?"
"She insists it's going to a hospital. Worst part is that she's heard
of the disease. Knows it can be cured with the proper treatment—in
humans. Of course, no hospital would play along with her fantasy and
take a neutroid, especially since she couldn't pay for its treatment."
"I still don't see—"
"I thought perhaps you could help me fake a substitution. It's a K-48
series, five-year-old, three-year set. Do you have one in the pound
that's not claimed?"
Norris thought for a moment. "I think I have
one
. You're welcome to
it, Doctor, but you can't fake a serial number. She'll know it. And
even though they look exactly alike, the new one won't recognize her.
It'll be spooky."
There was a long pause, followed by a sigh. "I'll try it anyway. Can I
come get the animal now?"
"I'm on the highway—"
"Please, Norris! This is urgent. That woman will lose her mind
completely if—"
"All right, I'll call my wife and tell her to open the pound for you.
Pick out the K-48 and sign for it. And listen—"
"Yes?"
"Don't let me catch you falsifying a serial number."
Doctor Georges laughed faintly. "I won't, Norris. Thanks a million." He
hung up quickly.
Norris immediately regretted his consent. It bordered on being illegal.
But he saw it as a quick way to get rid of an animal that might later
have to be killed.
He called Anne. Her voice was dull. She seemed depressed, but not
angry. When he finished talking, she said, "All right, Terry," and hung
up.
By noon, he had finished checking the shipping lists at the wholesale
house in Wylo City. Only thirty-five of July's Bermuda-K-99s had
entered his territory, and they were about equally divided among five
pet shops, three of which were in Wylo City.
After lunch, he called each of the retail dealers, read them the serial
numbers, and asked them to check the sales records for names and
addresses of individual buyers. By three o'clock, he had the entire
list filled out, and the task began to look easier. All that remained
was to pick up the thirty-five animals.
And
that
, he thought, was like trying to take a year-old baby away
from its doting mother. He sighed and drove to the Wylo suburbs to
begin his rounds.
Anne met him at the door when he came home at six. He stood on the
porch for a moment, smiling at her weakly. The smile was not returned.
"Doctor Georges came," she told him. "He signed for the—" She stopped
to stare at him. "Darling, your face! What happened?"
Gingerly he touch the livid welts down the side of his cheek. "Just
scratched a little," he muttered. He pushed past her and went to the
phone in the hall. He sat eying it distastefully for a moment, not
liking what he had to do. Anne came to stand beside him and examine the
scratches.
Finally he lifted the phone and dialed the Wylo exchange. A grating
mechanical voice answered, "Locator center. Your party, please."
"Sheriff Yates," Norris grunted.
The robot operator, which had on tape the working habits of each Wylo
City citizen, began calling numbers. It found the off-duty sheriff on
its third try, in a Wylo pool hall.
"I'm getting so I hate that infernal gadget," Yates grumbled. "I think
it's got me psyched. What do you want, Norris?"
"Cooperation. I'm mailing you three letters charging three Wylo
citizens with resisting a Federal official—namely
me
—and charging
one of them with assault. I tried to pick up their neutroids for a
pound inspection—"
Yates bellowed lusty laughter into the phone.
"It's not funny. I've got to get those neutroids. It's in connection
with the Delmont case."
Yates stopped laughing. "Oh. Well, I'll take care of it."
"It's a rush-order, Sheriff. Can you get the warrants tonight and pick
up the animals in the morning?"
"Easy on those warrants, boy. Judge Charleman can't be disturbed just
any time. I can get the newts to you by noon, I guess, provided we
don't have to get a helicopter posse to chase down the mothers."
"That'll be all right. And listen, Yates—fix it so the charges will
be dropped if they cooperate. Don't shake those warrants around unless
they just won't listen to reason. But get those neutroids."
"Okay, boy. Gotcha."
Norris gave him the names and addresses of the three unwilling mothers.
As soon as he hung up, Anne touched his shoulders and said, "Sit
still." She began smoothing a chilly ointment over his burning cheek.
"Hard day?" she asked.
"Not too hard. Those were just three out of fifteen. I got the other
twelve. They're in the truck."
"That's good," she said. "You've got only twelve empty cages."
He neglected to tell her that he had stopped at twelve for just this
reason. "Guess I better get them unloaded," he said, standing up.
"Can I help you?"
He stared at her for a moment, saying nothing. She smiled a little and
looked aside. "Terry, I'm sorry—about this morning. I—I know you've
got a job that has to be—" Her lip quivered slightly.
Norris grinned, caught her shoulders, and pulled her close.
"Honeymoon's on again, huh?" she whispered against his neck.
"Come on," he grunted. "Let's unload some neutroids, before I forget
all about work."
They went out to the kennels together. The cages were inside a
sprawling concrete barn, which was divided into three large rooms—one
for the fragile neuter humanoid creatures, and another for the lesser
mutants, such as cat-Qs, dog-Fs, dwarf bears, and foot-high lambs that
never matured into sheep. The third room contained a small gas chamber
with a conveyor belt leading from it to a crematory-incinerator.
Norris kept the third locked lest his wife see its furnishings.
The doll-like neutroids began their mindless chatter as soon as their
keepers entered the building. Dozens of blazing blond heads began
dancing about their cages. Their bodies thwacked against the wire mesh
as they leaped about their compartments with monkey grace.
Their human appearance was broken by only two distinct features: short
beaverlike tails decorated with fluffy curls of fur, and an erect
thatch of scalp-hair that grew up into a bright candleflame. Otherwise,
they appeared completely human, with baby-pink skin, quick little
smiles, and cherubic faces. They were sexually neuter and never grew
beyond a predetermined age-set which varied for each series. Age-sets
were available from one to ten years human equivalent. Once a neutroid
reached its age-set, it remained at the set's child-development level
until death.
"They must be getting to know you pretty well," Anne said, glancing
around at the cages.
Norris was wearing a slight frown as he inspected the room. "They've
never gotten this excited before."
He walked along a row of cages, then stopped by a K-76 to stare.
"
Apple cores!
" He turned to face his wife. "How did apples get in
there?"
She reddened. "I felt sorry for them, eating that goo from the
mechanical feeder. I drove down to Sherman III and bought six dozen
cooking apples."
"That was a mistake."
She frowned irritably. "We can afford it."
"That's not the point. There's a reason for the mechanical feeders." He
paused, wondering how he could tell her the truth. He blundered on:
"They get to love whoever feeds them."
"I can't see—"
"How would you feel about disposing of something that loved you?"
Anne folded her arms and stared at him. "Planning to dispose of any
soon?" she asked acidly.
"Honeymoon's off again, eh?"
She turned away. "I'm sorry, Terry. I'll try not to mention it again."
He began unloading the truck, pulling the frightened and squirming
doll-things forth one at a time with a snare-pole. They were one-man
pets, always frightened of strangers.
"What's the Delmont case, Terry?" Anne asked while he worked.
"Huh?"
"I heard you mention it on the phone. Anything to do with why you got
your face scratched?"
He nodded sourly. "Indirectly, yes. It's a long story."
"Tell me."
"Well, Delmont was a green-horn evolvotron operator at the Bermuda
plant. His job was taking the unfertilized chimpanzee ova out of the
egg-multiplier, mounting them in his machine, and bombarding the
gene structure with sub-atomic particles. It's tricky business. He
flashes a huge enlargement of the ovum on the electron microscope
screen—large enough so he can see the individual protein molecules. He
has an artificial gene pattern to compare it with. It's like shooting
sub-atomic billiards. He's got to fire alpha-particles into the gene
structure and displace certain links by just the right amount. And
he's got to be quick about it before the ovum dies from an overdose of
radiation from the enlarger. A good operator can get one success out of
seven tries.
"Well, Delmont worked a week and spoiled over a hundred ova without a
single success. They threatened to fire him. I guess he got hysterical.
Anyway, he reported one success the next day. It was faked. The ovum
had a couple of flaws—something wrong in the central nervous system's
determinants, and in the glandular makeup. Not a standard neutroid
ovum. He passed it on to the incubators to get a credit, knowing it
wouldn't be caught until after birth."
"It wasn't caught at all?" Anne asked.
"Funny thing, he was afraid it wouldn't be. He got to worrying about
it, thought maybe a mental-deviant would pass, and that it might be
dangerous. So he went back to its incubator and cut off the hormone
flow into its compartment."
"Why that?"
"So it
would
develop sexuality. A neutroid would be born a female
if they didn't give it suppressive doses of male hormone prenatally.
That keeps ovaries from developing and it comes out neuter. But
Delmont figured a female would be caught and stopped before the final
inspection. They'd dispose of her without even bothering to examine for
the other defects. And he could blame the sexuality on an equipment
malfunction. He thought it was pretty smart. Trouble was they didn't
catch the female. She went on through; they all
look
female."
"How did they find out about it now?"
"He got caught last month, trying it again. And he confessed to doing
it once before. No telling how many times he
really
did it."
Norris held up the final kicking, squealing, tassel-haired doll from
the back of the kennel-truck. He grinned at his wife. "This little
fellow, for instance. It might be a potential she. It might also be a
potential murderer.
All
these kiddos are from the machines in the
section where Delmont worked."
Anne snorted and caught the baby-creature in her arms. It struggled and
tried to bite, but subsided a little when she disentangled it from the
snare. "Kkr-r-reee," it cooed nervously. "Kkr-r-reee!"
"You tell him you're no murderer," Anne purred to it.
Norris watched disapprovingly while she fondled it. One thing he had
learned: to steer clear of emotional attachments. It was eight months
old and looked like a child of two years—a year short of its age-set.
And it was designed to be as affectionate as a human child.
"Put it in the cage, Anne," he said quietly.
She looked up and shook her head.
"It belongs to somebody else. If it fixes a libido attachment on you,
you're actually robbing its owner. They can't love many people at once."
She snorted, but installed the thing in its cage.
"Anne—" Norris hesitated, hating to approach the subject. "Do
you—want one—for yourself? I can sign an unclaimed one over to you to
keep in the house. It won't cost us anything."
Slowly she shook her head, and her pale eyes went moody and luminous.
"I'm going to have one of my own," she said.
He stood in the back of the truck, staring down at her. "Do you realize
what—"
"I know what I'm saying. We're class-C on account of heart-trouble in
both our families. Well, I don't care, Terry. I'm not going to waste a
heart over one of these pathetic little artificial animals. We're going
to have a baby."
"You know what they'd do to us?"
"If they catch us, yes—compulsory divorce, sterilization. But they
won't catch us. I'll have it at home, Terry. Not even a doctor. We'll
hide it."
"I won't let you do such a thing."
She faced him angrily. "Oh, this whole rotten
world
!" she choked.
Suddenly she turned and fled out of the building. She was sobbing.
Norris climbed slowly down from the truck and wandered on into the
house. She was not in the kitchen nor the living room. The bedroom door
was locked. He shrugged and went to sit on the sofa. The television
set was on, and a newscast was coming from a local station.
"... we were unable to get shots of the body," the announcer was
saying. "But here is a view of the Georges residence. I'll switch you
to our mobile unit in Sherman II, James Duncan reporting."
Norris frowned with bewilderment as the scene shifted to a two-story
plasticoid house among the elm trees. It was after dark, but the mobile
unit's powerful floodlights made daylight of the house and its yard and
the police 'copters sitting in a side lot. An ambulance was parked in
the street. A new voice came on the audio.
"This is James Duncan, ladies and gentlemen, speaking to you from our
mobile unit in front of the late Doctor Hiram Georges' residence just
west of Sherman II. We are waiting for the stretcher to be brought out,
and Police Chief Erskine Miler is standing here beside me to give us a
word about the case. Doctor Georges' death has shocked the community
deeply. Most of you local listeners have known him for many years—some
of you have depended upon his services as a family physician. He was a
man well known, well loved. But now let's listen to Chief Miler."
Norris sat breathing quickly. There could scarcely be two Doctor
Georges in the community, but only this morning....
A growling drawl came from the audio. "This's Chief Miler speaking,
folks. I just want to say that if any of you know the whereabouts of a
Mrs. Sarah Glubbes, call me immediately. She's wanted for questioning."
"Thank you, Chief. This is James Duncan again. I'll review the facts
for you briefly again, ladies and gentlemen. At seven o'clock,
less than an hour ago, a woman—allegedly Mrs. Glubbes—burst into
Doctor Georges' dining room while the family was at dinner. She was
brandishing a pistol and screaming, 'You stole my baby! You gave me the
wrong baby! Where's my baby?'
"When the doctor assured her that there was no other baby, she fired,
shattering his salad plate. Glancing off it, the bullet pierced his
heart. The woman fled. A peculiar feature of the case is that Mrs.
Glubbes, the alleged intruder,
has no baby
. Just a minute—just a
minute—here comes the stretcher now."
Norris turned the set off and went to call the police. He told them
what he knew and promised to make himself available for questioning if
it became necessary. When he turned from the phone, Anne was standing
in the bedroom doorway. She might have been crying a little, but she
concealed it well.
"What was all that?" she asked.
"Woman killed a man. I happened to know the motive."
"What was it?"
"Neutroid trouble."
"You meet up with a lot of unpleasantness in this business, don't you?"
"Lot of unpleasant emotions tangled up in it," he admitted.
"I know. Well, supper's been keeping hot for two hours. Shall we eat?"
They went to bed at midnight, but it was after one when he became
certain that his wife was asleep. He lay in darkness for a time,
listening to her even breathing. Then he cautiously eased himself out
of bed and tiptoed quietly through the door, carrying his shoes and
trousers. He put them on in the kitchen and stole silently out to the
kennels. A half moon hung low in a misty sky, and the wind was chilly
out of the north.
He went into the neutroid room and flicked a switch. A few sleepy
chatters greeted the light.
One at a time, he awoke twenty-three of the older doll-things and
carried them to a large glass-walled compartment. These were the
long-time residents; they knew him well, and they came with him
willingly—like children after the Piper of Hamlin. When he had gotten
them in the glass chamber, he sealed the door and turned on the gas.
The conveyor would automatically carry them on to the incinerator.
Now he had enough cages for the Bermuda-K-99s.
He hurriedly quit the kennels and went to sit on the back steps. His
eyes were burning, but the thought of tears made him sicker. It was
like an assassin crying while he stabbed his victim. It was more honest
just to retch.
When he tiptoed back inside, he got as far as the hall. Then he saw
Anne's small figure framed in the bedroom window, silhouetted against
the moonlit yard. She had slipped into her negligee and was sitting on
the narrow windowstool, staring silently out at the dull red tongue of
exhaust gases from the crematory's chimney.
Norris backed away. He went to the parlor and lay down on the couch.
After a while he heard her come into the room. She paused in the center
of the rug, a fragile mist in the darkness. He turned his face away and
waited for the rasping accusation. But soon she came to sit on the edge
of the sofa. She said nothing. Her hand crept out and touched his cheek
lightly. He felt her cool finger-tips trace a soft line up his temple.
"It's all right, Terry," she whispered.
He kept his face averted. Her fingers traced a last stroke. Then she
padded quietly back to the bedroom. He lay awake until dawn, knowing
that it would never be all right, neither the creating nor the killing,
until he—and the whole world—completely lost sanity. And then
everything would be all right, only it still wouldn't make sense.
Anne was asleep when he left the house. The night mist had gathered
into clouds that made a gloomy morning of it. He drove on out in the
kennel-truck, meaning to get the rest of the Bermuda-K-99s so that he
could begin his testing.
Still he felt the night's guilt, like a sticky dew that refused to
depart with morning. Why should he have to kill the things? The answer
was obvious. Society manufactured them because killing them was
permissible. Human babies could not be disposed of when the market
became glutted. The neutroids offered solace to childless women, kept
them satisfied with a restricted birth rate. And why a restricted
birth rate? Because by keeping the population at five billions, the
Federation could insure a decent living standard for everybody.
Where there was giving, Norris thought glumly, there was also taking
away. Man had always deluded himself by thinking that he "created," but
he created nothing. He thought that he had created—with his medical
science and his end to wars—a longer life for the individual. But he
found that he had only taken the lives of the unborn and added them to
the years of the aged. Man now had a life expectancy of eighty, except
that he had damn little chance of being born to enjoy it.
A neutroid filled the cradle in his stead. A neutroid that never ate
as much, or grew up to be unemployed. A neutroid could be killed if
things got tough, but could still satisfy a woman's craving to mother
something small.
Norris gave up thinking about it. Eventually he would have to adjust
to it. He was already adjusted to a world that loved the artificial
mutants as children. He had been brought up in it. Emotion came in
conflict with the grim necessities of his job. Somehow he would have
to love them in the parlor and kill them in the kennel. It was only a
matter of adjustment.
At noon, he brought back another dozen K-99s and installed them in his
cages. There had been two highly reluctant mothers, but he skipped
them and left the seizure to the local authorities. Yates had already
brought in the three from yesterday.
"No more scratches?" Anne asked him while they ate lunch. They did not
speak of the night's mass-disposal.
Norris smiled mechanically. "I learned my lesson yesterday. If
they bare their fangs, I get out without another word. Funny thing
though—I've got a feeling one mother pulled a fast one."
"What happened?"
"Well, I told her what I wanted and why. She didn't like it, but she
let me in. I started out with her newt, but she wanted a receipt. So I
gave her one; took the serial number off my checklist. She looked at
it and said, 'Why, that's not Chichi's number!' I looked at the newt's
foot, and sure enough it wasn't. I had to leave it. It was a K-99, but
not even from Bermuda."
"I thought they were all registered," Anne said.
"They are. I told her she had the wrong neutroid, but she got mad. Went
and got the sales receipt. It checked with her newt, and it was from
O'Reilley's pet shop—right place, wrong number. I just don't get it."
"Nothing to worry about, is it Terry?"
He looked at her peculiarly. "Ever think what might happen if someone
started a black market in neutroids?"
They finished the meal in silence. After lunch he went out again to
gather up the rest of the group. By four o'clock, he had gotten all
that were to be had without the threat of a warrant. The screams and
pleas and tears of the owners left him gloomily despising himself.
If Delmont's falsification had been widespread, he might have to turn
several of the thirty-five over to central lab for dissection and
ultimate destruction. That would bring the murderous wrath of their
owners down upon him. He began to understand why bio-inspectors were
frequently shifted from one territory to another.
On the way home, he stopped in Sherman II to check on the missing
number. It was the largest of the Sherman communities, covering fifty
blocks of commercial buildings. He parked in the outskirts and took a
sidewalk escalator toward O'Reilley's address.
It was on a dingy sidestreet, reminiscent of past centuries, a street
of small bars and bowling alleys and cigar stores. There was even a
shop with three gold balls above the entrance, but the place was now
an antique store. A light mist was falling when he stepped off the
escalator and stood in front of the pet shop. A sign hung out over the
sidewalk, announcing:
J. "DOGGY" O'REILLEY
PETS FOR SALE
DUMB BLONDES AND GOLDFISH
MUTANTS FOR THE CHILDLESS
BUY A BUNDLE OF JOY
Norris frowned at the sign and wandered inside. The place was warm
and gloomy. He wrinkled his nose at the strong musk of animal odors.
O'Reilley's was not a shining example of cleanliness.
Somewhere a puppy was yapping, and a parrot croaked the lyrics of
A
Chimp to Call My Own
, which Norris recognized as the theme song of a
popular soap-opera about a lady evolvotron operator.
He paused briefly by a tank of silk-draped goldfish. The shop had a
customer. An elderly lady was haggling with a wizened manager over the
price of a half grown second-hand dog-F. She was shaking her last dog's
death certificate under his nose and demanding a guarantee of the dog's
alleged F-5 intelligence. The old man offered to swear on a Bible, but
he demurred when it came to swearing on a ledger.
The dog was saying, "Don' sell me, Dada. Don' sell me."
Norris smiled sardonically to himself. The non-human pets were smarter
than the neutroids. A K-108 could speak a dozen words, and a K-99
never got farther than "mamma," "pappa," and "cookie." Anthropos was
afraid to make the quasi-humans too intelligent, lest sentimentalists
proclaim them really human.
He wandered on toward the back of the building, pausing briefly by
the cash register to inspect O'Reilley's license, which hung in a
dusty frame on the wall behind the counter. "James Fallon
O'Reilley ... authorized dealer in mutant animals ... all non-predatory
mammals including chimpanzee-K series ... license expires June 1, 2235."
It seemed in order, although the expiration date was approaching. He
started toward a bank of neutroid cages along the opposite wall, but
O'Reilley was mincing across the floor to meet him. The customer had
gone. The little manager wore an elfin professional smile, and his bald
head bobbled in a welcoming nod.
"Good day, sir, good day! May I show you a dwarf kangaroo, or a—" He
stopped and adjusted his spectacles. He blinked and peered as Norris
flashed his badge. His smile waned.
"I'm Agent Norris, Mr. O'Reilley. Called you yesterday for that rundown
on K-99 sales."
O'Reilley looked suddenly nervous. "Oh, yes. Find 'em all?"
Norris shook his head. "No. That's why I stopped by. There's some
mistake on—" he glanced at his list—"on K-99-LJZ-351. Let's check it
again."
O'Reilley seemed to cringe. "No mistake. I gave you the buyer's name."
"She has a different number."
"Can I help it if she traded with somebody?"
"She didn't. She bought it here. I saw the receipt."
"Then she traded with one of my other customers!" snapped the old man.
"Two of your customers have the same name—Adelia Schultz? Not likely.
Let's see your duplicate receipt book."
O'Reilley's wrinkled face set itself into a stubborn mask. "Doubt if
it's still around."
Norris frowned. "Look, pop, I've had a rough day. I
could
start
naming some things around here that need fixing—sanitary violations
and such. Not to mention that sign—'dumb blondes.' They outlawed that
one when they executed that shyster doctor for shooting K-108s full
of growth hormones, trying to raise himself a harem to sell. Besides,
you're required to keep sales records until they've been micro-filmed.
There hasn't been a microfilming since July."
The wrinkled face twitched with frustrated anger. O'Reilley shuffled
to the counter while Norris followed. He got a fat binder from under
the register and started toward a wooden stairway.
"Where you going?" Norris called.
"Get my old glasses," the manager grumbled. "Can't see through these
new things."
"Leave the book here and
I'll
check it," Norris offered.
But O'Reilley was already limping quickly up the stairs. He seemed not
to hear. He shut the door behind him, and Norris heard the lock click.
The bio-agent waited. Again the thought of a black market troubled him.
Unauthorized neutroids could mean lots of trouble. | [
"She is a Class C citizen and likely has a mental or emotional disorder.",
"She became too attached to her neutroid.",
"She is trying to distract the authorities from the neutroid black market.",
"The neutroid is actually a human child."
] | 1 |
51651_QFG6OVXX_8 | Which terms best describe the tone of the passage in which Terry incinerates 23 of his long-term barn residents? | Conditionally Human
By WALTER M. MILLER, JR.
Illustrated by DAVID STONE
They were such cute synthetic creatures, it
was impossible not to love them. Of course,
that was precisely why they were dangerous!
There was no use hanging around after breakfast. His wife was in a hurt
mood, and he could neither endure the hurt nor remove it. He put on his
coat in the kitchen and stood for a moment with his hat in his hands.
His wife was still at the table, absently fingering the handle of her
cup and staring fixedly out the window at the kennels behind the house.
He moved quietly up behind her and touched her silk-clad shoulder. The
shoulder shivered away from him, and her dark hair swung shiningly as
she shuddered. He drew his hand back and his bewildered face went slack
and miserable.
"Honeymoon's over, huh?"
She said nothing, but shrugged faintly.
"You knew I worked for the F.B.A.," he said. "You knew I'd have charge
of a district pound. You knew it before we got married."
"I didn't know you killed them," she said venomously.
"I won't have to kill many. Besides, they're only animals."
"
Intelligent
animals!"
"Intelligent as a human imbecile, maybe."
"A small child is an imbecile. Would you kill a small child?"
"You're taking intelligence as the only criterion of humanity," he
protested hopelessly, knowing that a logical defense was useless
against sentimentality. "Baby—"
"Don't call me baby! Call
them
baby!"
Norris backed a few steps toward the door. Against his better judgment,
he spoke again. "Anne honey, look! Think of the
good
things about the
job. Sure, everything has its ugly angles. But think—we get this house
rent-free; I've got my own district with no bosses around; I make my
own hours; you'll meet lots of people that stop in at the pound. It's a
fine
job, honey!"
She sipped her coffee and appeared to be listening, so he went on.
"And what can I do? You know how the Federation handles employment.
They looked over my aptitude tests and sent me to Bio-Administration.
If I don't want to follow my aptitudes, the only choice is common
labor. That's the
law
."
"I suppose you have an aptitude for killing babies?" she said sweetly.
Norris withered. His voice went desperate. "They assigned me to it
because I
liked
babies. And because I have a B.S. in biology and an
aptitude for dealing with people. Can't you understand? Destroying
unclaimed units is the smallest part of it. Honey, before the
evolvotron, before Anthropos went into the mutant-animal business,
people used to elect dogcatchers. Think of it that way—I'm just a
dogcatcher."
Her cool green eyes turned slowly to meet his gaze. Her face was
delicately cut from cold marble. She was a small woman, slender and
fragile, but her quiet contempt made her loom.
He backed closer to the door.
"Well, I've got to get on the job." He put on his hat and picked at a
splinter on the door. He frowned studiously at the splinter. "I—I'll
see you tonight." He ripped the splinter loose when it became obvious
that she didn't want to be kissed.
He grunted a nervous good-by and stumbled down the hall and out of the
house. The honeymoon was over, all right.
He climbed in the kennel-truck and drove east toward the highway. The
suburban street wound among the pastel plasticoid cottages that were
set approximately two to an acre on the lightly wooded land. With its
population legally fixed at three hundred million, most of the country
had become one big suburb, dotted with community centers and lined
with narrow belts of industrial development. Norris wished there were
someplace where he could be completely alone.
As he approached an intersection, he saw a small animal sitting on the
curb, wrapped in its own bushy tail. Its oversized head was bald on
top, but the rest of its body was covered with blue-gray fur. Its tiny
pink tongue was licking daintily at small forepaws with prehensile
thumbs. It was a cat-Q-5. It glanced curiously at the truck as Norris
pulled to a halt.
He smiled at it from the window and called, "What's your name, kitten?"
The cat-Q-5 stared at him impassively for a moment, let out a
stuttering high-pitched wail, then: "Kiyi Rorry."
"Whose child are you, Rorry?" he asked. "Where do you live?"
The cat-Q-5 took its time about answering. There were no houses near
the intersection, and Norris feared that the animal might be lost.
It blinked at him, sleepily bored, and resumed its paw-washing. He
repeated the questions.
"Mama kiyi," said the cat-Q-5 disgustedly.
"That's right, Mama's kitty. But where is Mama? Do you suppose she ran
away?"
The cat-Q-5 looked startled. It stuttered for a moment, and its fur
crept slowly erect. It glanced around hurriedly, then shot off down the
street at a fast scamper. He followed it in the truck until it darted
onto a porch and began wailing through the screen, "Mama no run ray!
Mama no run ray!"
Norris grinned and drove on. A class-C couple, allowed no children
of their own, could get quite attached to a cat-Q-5. The felines
were emotionally safer than the quasi-human chimp-K series called
"neutroids." When a pet neutroid died, a family was broken with grief;
but most couples could endure the death of a cat-Q or a dog-F. Class-C
couples were allowed two lesser units or one neutroid.
His grin faded as he wondered which Anne would choose. The Norrises
were class-C—defective heredity.
He found himself in Sherman III Community Center—eight blocks of
commercial buildings, serving the surrounding suburbs. He stopped at
the message office to pick up his mail. There was a memo from Chief
Franklin. He tore it open nervously and read it in the truck. It was
something he had been expecting for several days.
Attention All District Inspectors:
Subject: Deviant Neutroid.
You will immediately begin a systematic and thorough survey of all
animals whose serial numbers fall in the Bermuda-K-99 series for
birth dates during July 2234. This is in connection with the Delmont
Negligency Case. Seize all animals in this category, impound, and run
proper sections of normalcy tests. Watch for mental and glandular
deviation. Delmont has confessed to passing only one non-standard
unit, but there may be others. He disclaims memory of deviant's serial
number. This could be a ruse to bring a stop to investigations when
one animal is found. Be thorough.
If allowed to reach age-set or adulthood, such a deviant could be
dangerous to its owner or to others. Hold all seized K-99s who show
the slightest abnormality in the normalcy tests. Forward to central
lab. Return standard units to their owners. Accomplish entire survey
project within seven days.
C. Franklin
Norris frowned at the last sentence. His district covered about two
hundred square miles. Its replacement-quota of new neutroids was around
three hundred animals a month. He tried to estimate how many of July's
influx had been K-99s from Bermuda Factory. Forty, at least. Could he
do it in a week? And there were only eleven empty neutroid cages in his
kennel. The other forty-nine were occupied by the previous inspector's
"unclaimed" inventory—awaiting destruction.
He wadded the memo in his pocket, then nosed the truck onto the highway
and headed toward Wylo City and the district wholesale offices of
Anthropos, Inc. They should be able to give him a list of all July's
Bermuda K-99 serial numbers that had entered his territory, together
with the retailers to whom the animals had been sold. A week's deadline
for finding and testing forty neutroids would put him in a tight
squeeze.
He was halfway to Wylo City when the radiophone buzzed on his
dashboard. He pulled into the slow lane and answered quickly, hoping
for Anne's voice. A polite professional purr came instead.
"Inspector Norris? This is Doctor Georges. We haven't met, but I
imagine we will. Are you extremely busy at the moment?"
Norris hesitated. "Extremely," he said.
"Well, this won't take long. One of my patients—a Mrs. Sarah
Glubbes—called a while ago and said her baby was sick. I must be
getting absent-minded, because I forgot she was class C until I got
there." He hesitated. "The baby turned out to be a neutroid. It's
dying. Eighteenth order virus."
"So?"
"Well, she's—uh—rather a
peculiar
woman, Inspector. Keeps telling
me how much trouble she had in childbirth, and how she can't ever
have another one. It's pathetic. She
believes
it's her own. Do you
understand?"
"I think so," Norris replied slowly. "But what do you want me to do?
Can't you send the neutroid to a vet?"
"She insists it's going to a hospital. Worst part is that she's heard
of the disease. Knows it can be cured with the proper treatment—in
humans. Of course, no hospital would play along with her fantasy and
take a neutroid, especially since she couldn't pay for its treatment."
"I still don't see—"
"I thought perhaps you could help me fake a substitution. It's a K-48
series, five-year-old, three-year set. Do you have one in the pound
that's not claimed?"
Norris thought for a moment. "I think I have
one
. You're welcome to
it, Doctor, but you can't fake a serial number. She'll know it. And
even though they look exactly alike, the new one won't recognize her.
It'll be spooky."
There was a long pause, followed by a sigh. "I'll try it anyway. Can I
come get the animal now?"
"I'm on the highway—"
"Please, Norris! This is urgent. That woman will lose her mind
completely if—"
"All right, I'll call my wife and tell her to open the pound for you.
Pick out the K-48 and sign for it. And listen—"
"Yes?"
"Don't let me catch you falsifying a serial number."
Doctor Georges laughed faintly. "I won't, Norris. Thanks a million." He
hung up quickly.
Norris immediately regretted his consent. It bordered on being illegal.
But he saw it as a quick way to get rid of an animal that might later
have to be killed.
He called Anne. Her voice was dull. She seemed depressed, but not
angry. When he finished talking, she said, "All right, Terry," and hung
up.
By noon, he had finished checking the shipping lists at the wholesale
house in Wylo City. Only thirty-five of July's Bermuda-K-99s had
entered his territory, and they were about equally divided among five
pet shops, three of which were in Wylo City.
After lunch, he called each of the retail dealers, read them the serial
numbers, and asked them to check the sales records for names and
addresses of individual buyers. By three o'clock, he had the entire
list filled out, and the task began to look easier. All that remained
was to pick up the thirty-five animals.
And
that
, he thought, was like trying to take a year-old baby away
from its doting mother. He sighed and drove to the Wylo suburbs to
begin his rounds.
Anne met him at the door when he came home at six. He stood on the
porch for a moment, smiling at her weakly. The smile was not returned.
"Doctor Georges came," she told him. "He signed for the—" She stopped
to stare at him. "Darling, your face! What happened?"
Gingerly he touch the livid welts down the side of his cheek. "Just
scratched a little," he muttered. He pushed past her and went to the
phone in the hall. He sat eying it distastefully for a moment, not
liking what he had to do. Anne came to stand beside him and examine the
scratches.
Finally he lifted the phone and dialed the Wylo exchange. A grating
mechanical voice answered, "Locator center. Your party, please."
"Sheriff Yates," Norris grunted.
The robot operator, which had on tape the working habits of each Wylo
City citizen, began calling numbers. It found the off-duty sheriff on
its third try, in a Wylo pool hall.
"I'm getting so I hate that infernal gadget," Yates grumbled. "I think
it's got me psyched. What do you want, Norris?"
"Cooperation. I'm mailing you three letters charging three Wylo
citizens with resisting a Federal official—namely
me
—and charging
one of them with assault. I tried to pick up their neutroids for a
pound inspection—"
Yates bellowed lusty laughter into the phone.
"It's not funny. I've got to get those neutroids. It's in connection
with the Delmont case."
Yates stopped laughing. "Oh. Well, I'll take care of it."
"It's a rush-order, Sheriff. Can you get the warrants tonight and pick
up the animals in the morning?"
"Easy on those warrants, boy. Judge Charleman can't be disturbed just
any time. I can get the newts to you by noon, I guess, provided we
don't have to get a helicopter posse to chase down the mothers."
"That'll be all right. And listen, Yates—fix it so the charges will
be dropped if they cooperate. Don't shake those warrants around unless
they just won't listen to reason. But get those neutroids."
"Okay, boy. Gotcha."
Norris gave him the names and addresses of the three unwilling mothers.
As soon as he hung up, Anne touched his shoulders and said, "Sit
still." She began smoothing a chilly ointment over his burning cheek.
"Hard day?" she asked.
"Not too hard. Those were just three out of fifteen. I got the other
twelve. They're in the truck."
"That's good," she said. "You've got only twelve empty cages."
He neglected to tell her that he had stopped at twelve for just this
reason. "Guess I better get them unloaded," he said, standing up.
"Can I help you?"
He stared at her for a moment, saying nothing. She smiled a little and
looked aside. "Terry, I'm sorry—about this morning. I—I know you've
got a job that has to be—" Her lip quivered slightly.
Norris grinned, caught her shoulders, and pulled her close.
"Honeymoon's on again, huh?" she whispered against his neck.
"Come on," he grunted. "Let's unload some neutroids, before I forget
all about work."
They went out to the kennels together. The cages were inside a
sprawling concrete barn, which was divided into three large rooms—one
for the fragile neuter humanoid creatures, and another for the lesser
mutants, such as cat-Qs, dog-Fs, dwarf bears, and foot-high lambs that
never matured into sheep. The third room contained a small gas chamber
with a conveyor belt leading from it to a crematory-incinerator.
Norris kept the third locked lest his wife see its furnishings.
The doll-like neutroids began their mindless chatter as soon as their
keepers entered the building. Dozens of blazing blond heads began
dancing about their cages. Their bodies thwacked against the wire mesh
as they leaped about their compartments with monkey grace.
Their human appearance was broken by only two distinct features: short
beaverlike tails decorated with fluffy curls of fur, and an erect
thatch of scalp-hair that grew up into a bright candleflame. Otherwise,
they appeared completely human, with baby-pink skin, quick little
smiles, and cherubic faces. They were sexually neuter and never grew
beyond a predetermined age-set which varied for each series. Age-sets
were available from one to ten years human equivalent. Once a neutroid
reached its age-set, it remained at the set's child-development level
until death.
"They must be getting to know you pretty well," Anne said, glancing
around at the cages.
Norris was wearing a slight frown as he inspected the room. "They've
never gotten this excited before."
He walked along a row of cages, then stopped by a K-76 to stare.
"
Apple cores!
" He turned to face his wife. "How did apples get in
there?"
She reddened. "I felt sorry for them, eating that goo from the
mechanical feeder. I drove down to Sherman III and bought six dozen
cooking apples."
"That was a mistake."
She frowned irritably. "We can afford it."
"That's not the point. There's a reason for the mechanical feeders." He
paused, wondering how he could tell her the truth. He blundered on:
"They get to love whoever feeds them."
"I can't see—"
"How would you feel about disposing of something that loved you?"
Anne folded her arms and stared at him. "Planning to dispose of any
soon?" she asked acidly.
"Honeymoon's off again, eh?"
She turned away. "I'm sorry, Terry. I'll try not to mention it again."
He began unloading the truck, pulling the frightened and squirming
doll-things forth one at a time with a snare-pole. They were one-man
pets, always frightened of strangers.
"What's the Delmont case, Terry?" Anne asked while he worked.
"Huh?"
"I heard you mention it on the phone. Anything to do with why you got
your face scratched?"
He nodded sourly. "Indirectly, yes. It's a long story."
"Tell me."
"Well, Delmont was a green-horn evolvotron operator at the Bermuda
plant. His job was taking the unfertilized chimpanzee ova out of the
egg-multiplier, mounting them in his machine, and bombarding the
gene structure with sub-atomic particles. It's tricky business. He
flashes a huge enlargement of the ovum on the electron microscope
screen—large enough so he can see the individual protein molecules. He
has an artificial gene pattern to compare it with. It's like shooting
sub-atomic billiards. He's got to fire alpha-particles into the gene
structure and displace certain links by just the right amount. And
he's got to be quick about it before the ovum dies from an overdose of
radiation from the enlarger. A good operator can get one success out of
seven tries.
"Well, Delmont worked a week and spoiled over a hundred ova without a
single success. They threatened to fire him. I guess he got hysterical.
Anyway, he reported one success the next day. It was faked. The ovum
had a couple of flaws—something wrong in the central nervous system's
determinants, and in the glandular makeup. Not a standard neutroid
ovum. He passed it on to the incubators to get a credit, knowing it
wouldn't be caught until after birth."
"It wasn't caught at all?" Anne asked.
"Funny thing, he was afraid it wouldn't be. He got to worrying about
it, thought maybe a mental-deviant would pass, and that it might be
dangerous. So he went back to its incubator and cut off the hormone
flow into its compartment."
"Why that?"
"So it
would
develop sexuality. A neutroid would be born a female
if they didn't give it suppressive doses of male hormone prenatally.
That keeps ovaries from developing and it comes out neuter. But
Delmont figured a female would be caught and stopped before the final
inspection. They'd dispose of her without even bothering to examine for
the other defects. And he could blame the sexuality on an equipment
malfunction. He thought it was pretty smart. Trouble was they didn't
catch the female. She went on through; they all
look
female."
"How did they find out about it now?"
"He got caught last month, trying it again. And he confessed to doing
it once before. No telling how many times he
really
did it."
Norris held up the final kicking, squealing, tassel-haired doll from
the back of the kennel-truck. He grinned at his wife. "This little
fellow, for instance. It might be a potential she. It might also be a
potential murderer.
All
these kiddos are from the machines in the
section where Delmont worked."
Anne snorted and caught the baby-creature in her arms. It struggled and
tried to bite, but subsided a little when she disentangled it from the
snare. "Kkr-r-reee," it cooed nervously. "Kkr-r-reee!"
"You tell him you're no murderer," Anne purred to it.
Norris watched disapprovingly while she fondled it. One thing he had
learned: to steer clear of emotional attachments. It was eight months
old and looked like a child of two years—a year short of its age-set.
And it was designed to be as affectionate as a human child.
"Put it in the cage, Anne," he said quietly.
She looked up and shook her head.
"It belongs to somebody else. If it fixes a libido attachment on you,
you're actually robbing its owner. They can't love many people at once."
She snorted, but installed the thing in its cage.
"Anne—" Norris hesitated, hating to approach the subject. "Do
you—want one—for yourself? I can sign an unclaimed one over to you to
keep in the house. It won't cost us anything."
Slowly she shook her head, and her pale eyes went moody and luminous.
"I'm going to have one of my own," she said.
He stood in the back of the truck, staring down at her. "Do you realize
what—"
"I know what I'm saying. We're class-C on account of heart-trouble in
both our families. Well, I don't care, Terry. I'm not going to waste a
heart over one of these pathetic little artificial animals. We're going
to have a baby."
"You know what they'd do to us?"
"If they catch us, yes—compulsory divorce, sterilization. But they
won't catch us. I'll have it at home, Terry. Not even a doctor. We'll
hide it."
"I won't let you do such a thing."
She faced him angrily. "Oh, this whole rotten
world
!" she choked.
Suddenly she turned and fled out of the building. She was sobbing.
Norris climbed slowly down from the truck and wandered on into the
house. She was not in the kitchen nor the living room. The bedroom door
was locked. He shrugged and went to sit on the sofa. The television
set was on, and a newscast was coming from a local station.
"... we were unable to get shots of the body," the announcer was
saying. "But here is a view of the Georges residence. I'll switch you
to our mobile unit in Sherman II, James Duncan reporting."
Norris frowned with bewilderment as the scene shifted to a two-story
plasticoid house among the elm trees. It was after dark, but the mobile
unit's powerful floodlights made daylight of the house and its yard and
the police 'copters sitting in a side lot. An ambulance was parked in
the street. A new voice came on the audio.
"This is James Duncan, ladies and gentlemen, speaking to you from our
mobile unit in front of the late Doctor Hiram Georges' residence just
west of Sherman II. We are waiting for the stretcher to be brought out,
and Police Chief Erskine Miler is standing here beside me to give us a
word about the case. Doctor Georges' death has shocked the community
deeply. Most of you local listeners have known him for many years—some
of you have depended upon his services as a family physician. He was a
man well known, well loved. But now let's listen to Chief Miler."
Norris sat breathing quickly. There could scarcely be two Doctor
Georges in the community, but only this morning....
A growling drawl came from the audio. "This's Chief Miler speaking,
folks. I just want to say that if any of you know the whereabouts of a
Mrs. Sarah Glubbes, call me immediately. She's wanted for questioning."
"Thank you, Chief. This is James Duncan again. I'll review the facts
for you briefly again, ladies and gentlemen. At seven o'clock,
less than an hour ago, a woman—allegedly Mrs. Glubbes—burst into
Doctor Georges' dining room while the family was at dinner. She was
brandishing a pistol and screaming, 'You stole my baby! You gave me the
wrong baby! Where's my baby?'
"When the doctor assured her that there was no other baby, she fired,
shattering his salad plate. Glancing off it, the bullet pierced his
heart. The woman fled. A peculiar feature of the case is that Mrs.
Glubbes, the alleged intruder,
has no baby
. Just a minute—just a
minute—here comes the stretcher now."
Norris turned the set off and went to call the police. He told them
what he knew and promised to make himself available for questioning if
it became necessary. When he turned from the phone, Anne was standing
in the bedroom doorway. She might have been crying a little, but she
concealed it well.
"What was all that?" she asked.
"Woman killed a man. I happened to know the motive."
"What was it?"
"Neutroid trouble."
"You meet up with a lot of unpleasantness in this business, don't you?"
"Lot of unpleasant emotions tangled up in it," he admitted.
"I know. Well, supper's been keeping hot for two hours. Shall we eat?"
They went to bed at midnight, but it was after one when he became
certain that his wife was asleep. He lay in darkness for a time,
listening to her even breathing. Then he cautiously eased himself out
of bed and tiptoed quietly through the door, carrying his shoes and
trousers. He put them on in the kitchen and stole silently out to the
kennels. A half moon hung low in a misty sky, and the wind was chilly
out of the north.
He went into the neutroid room and flicked a switch. A few sleepy
chatters greeted the light.
One at a time, he awoke twenty-three of the older doll-things and
carried them to a large glass-walled compartment. These were the
long-time residents; they knew him well, and they came with him
willingly—like children after the Piper of Hamlin. When he had gotten
them in the glass chamber, he sealed the door and turned on the gas.
The conveyor would automatically carry them on to the incinerator.
Now he had enough cages for the Bermuda-K-99s.
He hurriedly quit the kennels and went to sit on the back steps. His
eyes were burning, but the thought of tears made him sicker. It was
like an assassin crying while he stabbed his victim. It was more honest
just to retch.
When he tiptoed back inside, he got as far as the hall. Then he saw
Anne's small figure framed in the bedroom window, silhouetted against
the moonlit yard. She had slipped into her negligee and was sitting on
the narrow windowstool, staring silently out at the dull red tongue of
exhaust gases from the crematory's chimney.
Norris backed away. He went to the parlor and lay down on the couch.
After a while he heard her come into the room. She paused in the center
of the rug, a fragile mist in the darkness. He turned his face away and
waited for the rasping accusation. But soon she came to sit on the edge
of the sofa. She said nothing. Her hand crept out and touched his cheek
lightly. He felt her cool finger-tips trace a soft line up his temple.
"It's all right, Terry," she whispered.
He kept his face averted. Her fingers traced a last stroke. Then she
padded quietly back to the bedroom. He lay awake until dawn, knowing
that it would never be all right, neither the creating nor the killing,
until he—and the whole world—completely lost sanity. And then
everything would be all right, only it still wouldn't make sense.
Anne was asleep when he left the house. The night mist had gathered
into clouds that made a gloomy morning of it. He drove on out in the
kennel-truck, meaning to get the rest of the Bermuda-K-99s so that he
could begin his testing.
Still he felt the night's guilt, like a sticky dew that refused to
depart with morning. Why should he have to kill the things? The answer
was obvious. Society manufactured them because killing them was
permissible. Human babies could not be disposed of when the market
became glutted. The neutroids offered solace to childless women, kept
them satisfied with a restricted birth rate. And why a restricted
birth rate? Because by keeping the population at five billions, the
Federation could insure a decent living standard for everybody.
Where there was giving, Norris thought glumly, there was also taking
away. Man had always deluded himself by thinking that he "created," but
he created nothing. He thought that he had created—with his medical
science and his end to wars—a longer life for the individual. But he
found that he had only taken the lives of the unborn and added them to
the years of the aged. Man now had a life expectancy of eighty, except
that he had damn little chance of being born to enjoy it.
A neutroid filled the cradle in his stead. A neutroid that never ate
as much, or grew up to be unemployed. A neutroid could be killed if
things got tough, but could still satisfy a woman's craving to mother
something small.
Norris gave up thinking about it. Eventually he would have to adjust
to it. He was already adjusted to a world that loved the artificial
mutants as children. He had been brought up in it. Emotion came in
conflict with the grim necessities of his job. Somehow he would have
to love them in the parlor and kill them in the kennel. It was only a
matter of adjustment.
At noon, he brought back another dozen K-99s and installed them in his
cages. There had been two highly reluctant mothers, but he skipped
them and left the seizure to the local authorities. Yates had already
brought in the three from yesterday.
"No more scratches?" Anne asked him while they ate lunch. They did not
speak of the night's mass-disposal.
Norris smiled mechanically. "I learned my lesson yesterday. If
they bare their fangs, I get out without another word. Funny thing
though—I've got a feeling one mother pulled a fast one."
"What happened?"
"Well, I told her what I wanted and why. She didn't like it, but she
let me in. I started out with her newt, but she wanted a receipt. So I
gave her one; took the serial number off my checklist. She looked at
it and said, 'Why, that's not Chichi's number!' I looked at the newt's
foot, and sure enough it wasn't. I had to leave it. It was a K-99, but
not even from Bermuda."
"I thought they were all registered," Anne said.
"They are. I told her she had the wrong neutroid, but she got mad. Went
and got the sales receipt. It checked with her newt, and it was from
O'Reilley's pet shop—right place, wrong number. I just don't get it."
"Nothing to worry about, is it Terry?"
He looked at her peculiarly. "Ever think what might happen if someone
started a black market in neutroids?"
They finished the meal in silence. After lunch he went out again to
gather up the rest of the group. By four o'clock, he had gotten all
that were to be had without the threat of a warrant. The screams and
pleas and tears of the owners left him gloomily despising himself.
If Delmont's falsification had been widespread, he might have to turn
several of the thirty-five over to central lab for dissection and
ultimate destruction. That would bring the murderous wrath of their
owners down upon him. He began to understand why bio-inspectors were
frequently shifted from one territory to another.
On the way home, he stopped in Sherman II to check on the missing
number. It was the largest of the Sherman communities, covering fifty
blocks of commercial buildings. He parked in the outskirts and took a
sidewalk escalator toward O'Reilley's address.
It was on a dingy sidestreet, reminiscent of past centuries, a street
of small bars and bowling alleys and cigar stores. There was even a
shop with three gold balls above the entrance, but the place was now
an antique store. A light mist was falling when he stepped off the
escalator and stood in front of the pet shop. A sign hung out over the
sidewalk, announcing:
J. "DOGGY" O'REILLEY
PETS FOR SALE
DUMB BLONDES AND GOLDFISH
MUTANTS FOR THE CHILDLESS
BUY A BUNDLE OF JOY
Norris frowned at the sign and wandered inside. The place was warm
and gloomy. He wrinkled his nose at the strong musk of animal odors.
O'Reilley's was not a shining example of cleanliness.
Somewhere a puppy was yapping, and a parrot croaked the lyrics of
A
Chimp to Call My Own
, which Norris recognized as the theme song of a
popular soap-opera about a lady evolvotron operator.
He paused briefly by a tank of silk-draped goldfish. The shop had a
customer. An elderly lady was haggling with a wizened manager over the
price of a half grown second-hand dog-F. She was shaking her last dog's
death certificate under his nose and demanding a guarantee of the dog's
alleged F-5 intelligence. The old man offered to swear on a Bible, but
he demurred when it came to swearing on a ledger.
The dog was saying, "Don' sell me, Dada. Don' sell me."
Norris smiled sardonically to himself. The non-human pets were smarter
than the neutroids. A K-108 could speak a dozen words, and a K-99
never got farther than "mamma," "pappa," and "cookie." Anthropos was
afraid to make the quasi-humans too intelligent, lest sentimentalists
proclaim them really human.
He wandered on toward the back of the building, pausing briefly by
the cash register to inspect O'Reilley's license, which hung in a
dusty frame on the wall behind the counter. "James Fallon
O'Reilley ... authorized dealer in mutant animals ... all non-predatory
mammals including chimpanzee-K series ... license expires June 1, 2235."
It seemed in order, although the expiration date was approaching. He
started toward a bank of neutroid cages along the opposite wall, but
O'Reilley was mincing across the floor to meet him. The customer had
gone. The little manager wore an elfin professional smile, and his bald
head bobbled in a welcoming nod.
"Good day, sir, good day! May I show you a dwarf kangaroo, or a—" He
stopped and adjusted his spectacles. He blinked and peered as Norris
flashed his badge. His smile waned.
"I'm Agent Norris, Mr. O'Reilley. Called you yesterday for that rundown
on K-99 sales."
O'Reilley looked suddenly nervous. "Oh, yes. Find 'em all?"
Norris shook his head. "No. That's why I stopped by. There's some
mistake on—" he glanced at his list—"on K-99-LJZ-351. Let's check it
again."
O'Reilley seemed to cringe. "No mistake. I gave you the buyer's name."
"She has a different number."
"Can I help it if she traded with somebody?"
"She didn't. She bought it here. I saw the receipt."
"Then she traded with one of my other customers!" snapped the old man.
"Two of your customers have the same name—Adelia Schultz? Not likely.
Let's see your duplicate receipt book."
O'Reilley's wrinkled face set itself into a stubborn mask. "Doubt if
it's still around."
Norris frowned. "Look, pop, I've had a rough day. I
could
start
naming some things around here that need fixing—sanitary violations
and such. Not to mention that sign—'dumb blondes.' They outlawed that
one when they executed that shyster doctor for shooting K-108s full
of growth hormones, trying to raise himself a harem to sell. Besides,
you're required to keep sales records until they've been micro-filmed.
There hasn't been a microfilming since July."
The wrinkled face twitched with frustrated anger. O'Reilley shuffled
to the counter while Norris followed. He got a fat binder from under
the register and started toward a wooden stairway.
"Where you going?" Norris called.
"Get my old glasses," the manager grumbled. "Can't see through these
new things."
"Leave the book here and
I'll
check it," Norris offered.
But O'Reilley was already limping quickly up the stairs. He seemed not
to hear. He shut the door behind him, and Norris heard the lock click.
The bio-agent waited. Again the thought of a black market troubled him.
Unauthorized neutroids could mean lots of trouble. | [
"Excited and reinvigorated",
"Relieved and composed",
"Hopeless and unsettled",
"Unphased and unapologetic"
] | 2 |
51651_QFG6OVXX_9 | J "Doggy" O'Reilley is most likely: | Conditionally Human
By WALTER M. MILLER, JR.
Illustrated by DAVID STONE
They were such cute synthetic creatures, it
was impossible not to love them. Of course,
that was precisely why they were dangerous!
There was no use hanging around after breakfast. His wife was in a hurt
mood, and he could neither endure the hurt nor remove it. He put on his
coat in the kitchen and stood for a moment with his hat in his hands.
His wife was still at the table, absently fingering the handle of her
cup and staring fixedly out the window at the kennels behind the house.
He moved quietly up behind her and touched her silk-clad shoulder. The
shoulder shivered away from him, and her dark hair swung shiningly as
she shuddered. He drew his hand back and his bewildered face went slack
and miserable.
"Honeymoon's over, huh?"
She said nothing, but shrugged faintly.
"You knew I worked for the F.B.A.," he said. "You knew I'd have charge
of a district pound. You knew it before we got married."
"I didn't know you killed them," she said venomously.
"I won't have to kill many. Besides, they're only animals."
"
Intelligent
animals!"
"Intelligent as a human imbecile, maybe."
"A small child is an imbecile. Would you kill a small child?"
"You're taking intelligence as the only criterion of humanity," he
protested hopelessly, knowing that a logical defense was useless
against sentimentality. "Baby—"
"Don't call me baby! Call
them
baby!"
Norris backed a few steps toward the door. Against his better judgment,
he spoke again. "Anne honey, look! Think of the
good
things about the
job. Sure, everything has its ugly angles. But think—we get this house
rent-free; I've got my own district with no bosses around; I make my
own hours; you'll meet lots of people that stop in at the pound. It's a
fine
job, honey!"
She sipped her coffee and appeared to be listening, so he went on.
"And what can I do? You know how the Federation handles employment.
They looked over my aptitude tests and sent me to Bio-Administration.
If I don't want to follow my aptitudes, the only choice is common
labor. That's the
law
."
"I suppose you have an aptitude for killing babies?" she said sweetly.
Norris withered. His voice went desperate. "They assigned me to it
because I
liked
babies. And because I have a B.S. in biology and an
aptitude for dealing with people. Can't you understand? Destroying
unclaimed units is the smallest part of it. Honey, before the
evolvotron, before Anthropos went into the mutant-animal business,
people used to elect dogcatchers. Think of it that way—I'm just a
dogcatcher."
Her cool green eyes turned slowly to meet his gaze. Her face was
delicately cut from cold marble. She was a small woman, slender and
fragile, but her quiet contempt made her loom.
He backed closer to the door.
"Well, I've got to get on the job." He put on his hat and picked at a
splinter on the door. He frowned studiously at the splinter. "I—I'll
see you tonight." He ripped the splinter loose when it became obvious
that she didn't want to be kissed.
He grunted a nervous good-by and stumbled down the hall and out of the
house. The honeymoon was over, all right.
He climbed in the kennel-truck and drove east toward the highway. The
suburban street wound among the pastel plasticoid cottages that were
set approximately two to an acre on the lightly wooded land. With its
population legally fixed at three hundred million, most of the country
had become one big suburb, dotted with community centers and lined
with narrow belts of industrial development. Norris wished there were
someplace where he could be completely alone.
As he approached an intersection, he saw a small animal sitting on the
curb, wrapped in its own bushy tail. Its oversized head was bald on
top, but the rest of its body was covered with blue-gray fur. Its tiny
pink tongue was licking daintily at small forepaws with prehensile
thumbs. It was a cat-Q-5. It glanced curiously at the truck as Norris
pulled to a halt.
He smiled at it from the window and called, "What's your name, kitten?"
The cat-Q-5 stared at him impassively for a moment, let out a
stuttering high-pitched wail, then: "Kiyi Rorry."
"Whose child are you, Rorry?" he asked. "Where do you live?"
The cat-Q-5 took its time about answering. There were no houses near
the intersection, and Norris feared that the animal might be lost.
It blinked at him, sleepily bored, and resumed its paw-washing. He
repeated the questions.
"Mama kiyi," said the cat-Q-5 disgustedly.
"That's right, Mama's kitty. But where is Mama? Do you suppose she ran
away?"
The cat-Q-5 looked startled. It stuttered for a moment, and its fur
crept slowly erect. It glanced around hurriedly, then shot off down the
street at a fast scamper. He followed it in the truck until it darted
onto a porch and began wailing through the screen, "Mama no run ray!
Mama no run ray!"
Norris grinned and drove on. A class-C couple, allowed no children
of their own, could get quite attached to a cat-Q-5. The felines
were emotionally safer than the quasi-human chimp-K series called
"neutroids." When a pet neutroid died, a family was broken with grief;
but most couples could endure the death of a cat-Q or a dog-F. Class-C
couples were allowed two lesser units or one neutroid.
His grin faded as he wondered which Anne would choose. The Norrises
were class-C—defective heredity.
He found himself in Sherman III Community Center—eight blocks of
commercial buildings, serving the surrounding suburbs. He stopped at
the message office to pick up his mail. There was a memo from Chief
Franklin. He tore it open nervously and read it in the truck. It was
something he had been expecting for several days.
Attention All District Inspectors:
Subject: Deviant Neutroid.
You will immediately begin a systematic and thorough survey of all
animals whose serial numbers fall in the Bermuda-K-99 series for
birth dates during July 2234. This is in connection with the Delmont
Negligency Case. Seize all animals in this category, impound, and run
proper sections of normalcy tests. Watch for mental and glandular
deviation. Delmont has confessed to passing only one non-standard
unit, but there may be others. He disclaims memory of deviant's serial
number. This could be a ruse to bring a stop to investigations when
one animal is found. Be thorough.
If allowed to reach age-set or adulthood, such a deviant could be
dangerous to its owner or to others. Hold all seized K-99s who show
the slightest abnormality in the normalcy tests. Forward to central
lab. Return standard units to their owners. Accomplish entire survey
project within seven days.
C. Franklin
Norris frowned at the last sentence. His district covered about two
hundred square miles. Its replacement-quota of new neutroids was around
three hundred animals a month. He tried to estimate how many of July's
influx had been K-99s from Bermuda Factory. Forty, at least. Could he
do it in a week? And there were only eleven empty neutroid cages in his
kennel. The other forty-nine were occupied by the previous inspector's
"unclaimed" inventory—awaiting destruction.
He wadded the memo in his pocket, then nosed the truck onto the highway
and headed toward Wylo City and the district wholesale offices of
Anthropos, Inc. They should be able to give him a list of all July's
Bermuda K-99 serial numbers that had entered his territory, together
with the retailers to whom the animals had been sold. A week's deadline
for finding and testing forty neutroids would put him in a tight
squeeze.
He was halfway to Wylo City when the radiophone buzzed on his
dashboard. He pulled into the slow lane and answered quickly, hoping
for Anne's voice. A polite professional purr came instead.
"Inspector Norris? This is Doctor Georges. We haven't met, but I
imagine we will. Are you extremely busy at the moment?"
Norris hesitated. "Extremely," he said.
"Well, this won't take long. One of my patients—a Mrs. Sarah
Glubbes—called a while ago and said her baby was sick. I must be
getting absent-minded, because I forgot she was class C until I got
there." He hesitated. "The baby turned out to be a neutroid. It's
dying. Eighteenth order virus."
"So?"
"Well, she's—uh—rather a
peculiar
woman, Inspector. Keeps telling
me how much trouble she had in childbirth, and how she can't ever
have another one. It's pathetic. She
believes
it's her own. Do you
understand?"
"I think so," Norris replied slowly. "But what do you want me to do?
Can't you send the neutroid to a vet?"
"She insists it's going to a hospital. Worst part is that she's heard
of the disease. Knows it can be cured with the proper treatment—in
humans. Of course, no hospital would play along with her fantasy and
take a neutroid, especially since she couldn't pay for its treatment."
"I still don't see—"
"I thought perhaps you could help me fake a substitution. It's a K-48
series, five-year-old, three-year set. Do you have one in the pound
that's not claimed?"
Norris thought for a moment. "I think I have
one
. You're welcome to
it, Doctor, but you can't fake a serial number. She'll know it. And
even though they look exactly alike, the new one won't recognize her.
It'll be spooky."
There was a long pause, followed by a sigh. "I'll try it anyway. Can I
come get the animal now?"
"I'm on the highway—"
"Please, Norris! This is urgent. That woman will lose her mind
completely if—"
"All right, I'll call my wife and tell her to open the pound for you.
Pick out the K-48 and sign for it. And listen—"
"Yes?"
"Don't let me catch you falsifying a serial number."
Doctor Georges laughed faintly. "I won't, Norris. Thanks a million." He
hung up quickly.
Norris immediately regretted his consent. It bordered on being illegal.
But he saw it as a quick way to get rid of an animal that might later
have to be killed.
He called Anne. Her voice was dull. She seemed depressed, but not
angry. When he finished talking, she said, "All right, Terry," and hung
up.
By noon, he had finished checking the shipping lists at the wholesale
house in Wylo City. Only thirty-five of July's Bermuda-K-99s had
entered his territory, and they were about equally divided among five
pet shops, three of which were in Wylo City.
After lunch, he called each of the retail dealers, read them the serial
numbers, and asked them to check the sales records for names and
addresses of individual buyers. By three o'clock, he had the entire
list filled out, and the task began to look easier. All that remained
was to pick up the thirty-five animals.
And
that
, he thought, was like trying to take a year-old baby away
from its doting mother. He sighed and drove to the Wylo suburbs to
begin his rounds.
Anne met him at the door when he came home at six. He stood on the
porch for a moment, smiling at her weakly. The smile was not returned.
"Doctor Georges came," she told him. "He signed for the—" She stopped
to stare at him. "Darling, your face! What happened?"
Gingerly he touch the livid welts down the side of his cheek. "Just
scratched a little," he muttered. He pushed past her and went to the
phone in the hall. He sat eying it distastefully for a moment, not
liking what he had to do. Anne came to stand beside him and examine the
scratches.
Finally he lifted the phone and dialed the Wylo exchange. A grating
mechanical voice answered, "Locator center. Your party, please."
"Sheriff Yates," Norris grunted.
The robot operator, which had on tape the working habits of each Wylo
City citizen, began calling numbers. It found the off-duty sheriff on
its third try, in a Wylo pool hall.
"I'm getting so I hate that infernal gadget," Yates grumbled. "I think
it's got me psyched. What do you want, Norris?"
"Cooperation. I'm mailing you three letters charging three Wylo
citizens with resisting a Federal official—namely
me
—and charging
one of them with assault. I tried to pick up their neutroids for a
pound inspection—"
Yates bellowed lusty laughter into the phone.
"It's not funny. I've got to get those neutroids. It's in connection
with the Delmont case."
Yates stopped laughing. "Oh. Well, I'll take care of it."
"It's a rush-order, Sheriff. Can you get the warrants tonight and pick
up the animals in the morning?"
"Easy on those warrants, boy. Judge Charleman can't be disturbed just
any time. I can get the newts to you by noon, I guess, provided we
don't have to get a helicopter posse to chase down the mothers."
"That'll be all right. And listen, Yates—fix it so the charges will
be dropped if they cooperate. Don't shake those warrants around unless
they just won't listen to reason. But get those neutroids."
"Okay, boy. Gotcha."
Norris gave him the names and addresses of the three unwilling mothers.
As soon as he hung up, Anne touched his shoulders and said, "Sit
still." She began smoothing a chilly ointment over his burning cheek.
"Hard day?" she asked.
"Not too hard. Those were just three out of fifteen. I got the other
twelve. They're in the truck."
"That's good," she said. "You've got only twelve empty cages."
He neglected to tell her that he had stopped at twelve for just this
reason. "Guess I better get them unloaded," he said, standing up.
"Can I help you?"
He stared at her for a moment, saying nothing. She smiled a little and
looked aside. "Terry, I'm sorry—about this morning. I—I know you've
got a job that has to be—" Her lip quivered slightly.
Norris grinned, caught her shoulders, and pulled her close.
"Honeymoon's on again, huh?" she whispered against his neck.
"Come on," he grunted. "Let's unload some neutroids, before I forget
all about work."
They went out to the kennels together. The cages were inside a
sprawling concrete barn, which was divided into three large rooms—one
for the fragile neuter humanoid creatures, and another for the lesser
mutants, such as cat-Qs, dog-Fs, dwarf bears, and foot-high lambs that
never matured into sheep. The third room contained a small gas chamber
with a conveyor belt leading from it to a crematory-incinerator.
Norris kept the third locked lest his wife see its furnishings.
The doll-like neutroids began their mindless chatter as soon as their
keepers entered the building. Dozens of blazing blond heads began
dancing about their cages. Their bodies thwacked against the wire mesh
as they leaped about their compartments with monkey grace.
Their human appearance was broken by only two distinct features: short
beaverlike tails decorated with fluffy curls of fur, and an erect
thatch of scalp-hair that grew up into a bright candleflame. Otherwise,
they appeared completely human, with baby-pink skin, quick little
smiles, and cherubic faces. They were sexually neuter and never grew
beyond a predetermined age-set which varied for each series. Age-sets
were available from one to ten years human equivalent. Once a neutroid
reached its age-set, it remained at the set's child-development level
until death.
"They must be getting to know you pretty well," Anne said, glancing
around at the cages.
Norris was wearing a slight frown as he inspected the room. "They've
never gotten this excited before."
He walked along a row of cages, then stopped by a K-76 to stare.
"
Apple cores!
" He turned to face his wife. "How did apples get in
there?"
She reddened. "I felt sorry for them, eating that goo from the
mechanical feeder. I drove down to Sherman III and bought six dozen
cooking apples."
"That was a mistake."
She frowned irritably. "We can afford it."
"That's not the point. There's a reason for the mechanical feeders." He
paused, wondering how he could tell her the truth. He blundered on:
"They get to love whoever feeds them."
"I can't see—"
"How would you feel about disposing of something that loved you?"
Anne folded her arms and stared at him. "Planning to dispose of any
soon?" she asked acidly.
"Honeymoon's off again, eh?"
She turned away. "I'm sorry, Terry. I'll try not to mention it again."
He began unloading the truck, pulling the frightened and squirming
doll-things forth one at a time with a snare-pole. They were one-man
pets, always frightened of strangers.
"What's the Delmont case, Terry?" Anne asked while he worked.
"Huh?"
"I heard you mention it on the phone. Anything to do with why you got
your face scratched?"
He nodded sourly. "Indirectly, yes. It's a long story."
"Tell me."
"Well, Delmont was a green-horn evolvotron operator at the Bermuda
plant. His job was taking the unfertilized chimpanzee ova out of the
egg-multiplier, mounting them in his machine, and bombarding the
gene structure with sub-atomic particles. It's tricky business. He
flashes a huge enlargement of the ovum on the electron microscope
screen—large enough so he can see the individual protein molecules. He
has an artificial gene pattern to compare it with. It's like shooting
sub-atomic billiards. He's got to fire alpha-particles into the gene
structure and displace certain links by just the right amount. And
he's got to be quick about it before the ovum dies from an overdose of
radiation from the enlarger. A good operator can get one success out of
seven tries.
"Well, Delmont worked a week and spoiled over a hundred ova without a
single success. They threatened to fire him. I guess he got hysterical.
Anyway, he reported one success the next day. It was faked. The ovum
had a couple of flaws—something wrong in the central nervous system's
determinants, and in the glandular makeup. Not a standard neutroid
ovum. He passed it on to the incubators to get a credit, knowing it
wouldn't be caught until after birth."
"It wasn't caught at all?" Anne asked.
"Funny thing, he was afraid it wouldn't be. He got to worrying about
it, thought maybe a mental-deviant would pass, and that it might be
dangerous. So he went back to its incubator and cut off the hormone
flow into its compartment."
"Why that?"
"So it
would
develop sexuality. A neutroid would be born a female
if they didn't give it suppressive doses of male hormone prenatally.
That keeps ovaries from developing and it comes out neuter. But
Delmont figured a female would be caught and stopped before the final
inspection. They'd dispose of her without even bothering to examine for
the other defects. And he could blame the sexuality on an equipment
malfunction. He thought it was pretty smart. Trouble was they didn't
catch the female. She went on through; they all
look
female."
"How did they find out about it now?"
"He got caught last month, trying it again. And he confessed to doing
it once before. No telling how many times he
really
did it."
Norris held up the final kicking, squealing, tassel-haired doll from
the back of the kennel-truck. He grinned at his wife. "This little
fellow, for instance. It might be a potential she. It might also be a
potential murderer.
All
these kiddos are from the machines in the
section where Delmont worked."
Anne snorted and caught the baby-creature in her arms. It struggled and
tried to bite, but subsided a little when she disentangled it from the
snare. "Kkr-r-reee," it cooed nervously. "Kkr-r-reee!"
"You tell him you're no murderer," Anne purred to it.
Norris watched disapprovingly while she fondled it. One thing he had
learned: to steer clear of emotional attachments. It was eight months
old and looked like a child of two years—a year short of its age-set.
And it was designed to be as affectionate as a human child.
"Put it in the cage, Anne," he said quietly.
She looked up and shook her head.
"It belongs to somebody else. If it fixes a libido attachment on you,
you're actually robbing its owner. They can't love many people at once."
She snorted, but installed the thing in its cage.
"Anne—" Norris hesitated, hating to approach the subject. "Do
you—want one—for yourself? I can sign an unclaimed one over to you to
keep in the house. It won't cost us anything."
Slowly she shook her head, and her pale eyes went moody and luminous.
"I'm going to have one of my own," she said.
He stood in the back of the truck, staring down at her. "Do you realize
what—"
"I know what I'm saying. We're class-C on account of heart-trouble in
both our families. Well, I don't care, Terry. I'm not going to waste a
heart over one of these pathetic little artificial animals. We're going
to have a baby."
"You know what they'd do to us?"
"If they catch us, yes—compulsory divorce, sterilization. But they
won't catch us. I'll have it at home, Terry. Not even a doctor. We'll
hide it."
"I won't let you do such a thing."
She faced him angrily. "Oh, this whole rotten
world
!" she choked.
Suddenly she turned and fled out of the building. She was sobbing.
Norris climbed slowly down from the truck and wandered on into the
house. She was not in the kitchen nor the living room. The bedroom door
was locked. He shrugged and went to sit on the sofa. The television
set was on, and a newscast was coming from a local station.
"... we were unable to get shots of the body," the announcer was
saying. "But here is a view of the Georges residence. I'll switch you
to our mobile unit in Sherman II, James Duncan reporting."
Norris frowned with bewilderment as the scene shifted to a two-story
plasticoid house among the elm trees. It was after dark, but the mobile
unit's powerful floodlights made daylight of the house and its yard and
the police 'copters sitting in a side lot. An ambulance was parked in
the street. A new voice came on the audio.
"This is James Duncan, ladies and gentlemen, speaking to you from our
mobile unit in front of the late Doctor Hiram Georges' residence just
west of Sherman II. We are waiting for the stretcher to be brought out,
and Police Chief Erskine Miler is standing here beside me to give us a
word about the case. Doctor Georges' death has shocked the community
deeply. Most of you local listeners have known him for many years—some
of you have depended upon his services as a family physician. He was a
man well known, well loved. But now let's listen to Chief Miler."
Norris sat breathing quickly. There could scarcely be two Doctor
Georges in the community, but only this morning....
A growling drawl came from the audio. "This's Chief Miler speaking,
folks. I just want to say that if any of you know the whereabouts of a
Mrs. Sarah Glubbes, call me immediately. She's wanted for questioning."
"Thank you, Chief. This is James Duncan again. I'll review the facts
for you briefly again, ladies and gentlemen. At seven o'clock,
less than an hour ago, a woman—allegedly Mrs. Glubbes—burst into
Doctor Georges' dining room while the family was at dinner. She was
brandishing a pistol and screaming, 'You stole my baby! You gave me the
wrong baby! Where's my baby?'
"When the doctor assured her that there was no other baby, she fired,
shattering his salad plate. Glancing off it, the bullet pierced his
heart. The woman fled. A peculiar feature of the case is that Mrs.
Glubbes, the alleged intruder,
has no baby
. Just a minute—just a
minute—here comes the stretcher now."
Norris turned the set off and went to call the police. He told them
what he knew and promised to make himself available for questioning if
it became necessary. When he turned from the phone, Anne was standing
in the bedroom doorway. She might have been crying a little, but she
concealed it well.
"What was all that?" she asked.
"Woman killed a man. I happened to know the motive."
"What was it?"
"Neutroid trouble."
"You meet up with a lot of unpleasantness in this business, don't you?"
"Lot of unpleasant emotions tangled up in it," he admitted.
"I know. Well, supper's been keeping hot for two hours. Shall we eat?"
They went to bed at midnight, but it was after one when he became
certain that his wife was asleep. He lay in darkness for a time,
listening to her even breathing. Then he cautiously eased himself out
of bed and tiptoed quietly through the door, carrying his shoes and
trousers. He put them on in the kitchen and stole silently out to the
kennels. A half moon hung low in a misty sky, and the wind was chilly
out of the north.
He went into the neutroid room and flicked a switch. A few sleepy
chatters greeted the light.
One at a time, he awoke twenty-three of the older doll-things and
carried them to a large glass-walled compartment. These were the
long-time residents; they knew him well, and they came with him
willingly—like children after the Piper of Hamlin. When he had gotten
them in the glass chamber, he sealed the door and turned on the gas.
The conveyor would automatically carry them on to the incinerator.
Now he had enough cages for the Bermuda-K-99s.
He hurriedly quit the kennels and went to sit on the back steps. His
eyes were burning, but the thought of tears made him sicker. It was
like an assassin crying while he stabbed his victim. It was more honest
just to retch.
When he tiptoed back inside, he got as far as the hall. Then he saw
Anne's small figure framed in the bedroom window, silhouetted against
the moonlit yard. She had slipped into her negligee and was sitting on
the narrow windowstool, staring silently out at the dull red tongue of
exhaust gases from the crematory's chimney.
Norris backed away. He went to the parlor and lay down on the couch.
After a while he heard her come into the room. She paused in the center
of the rug, a fragile mist in the darkness. He turned his face away and
waited for the rasping accusation. But soon she came to sit on the edge
of the sofa. She said nothing. Her hand crept out and touched his cheek
lightly. He felt her cool finger-tips trace a soft line up his temple.
"It's all right, Terry," she whispered.
He kept his face averted. Her fingers traced a last stroke. Then she
padded quietly back to the bedroom. He lay awake until dawn, knowing
that it would never be all right, neither the creating nor the killing,
until he—and the whole world—completely lost sanity. And then
everything would be all right, only it still wouldn't make sense.
Anne was asleep when he left the house. The night mist had gathered
into clouds that made a gloomy morning of it. He drove on out in the
kennel-truck, meaning to get the rest of the Bermuda-K-99s so that he
could begin his testing.
Still he felt the night's guilt, like a sticky dew that refused to
depart with morning. Why should he have to kill the things? The answer
was obvious. Society manufactured them because killing them was
permissible. Human babies could not be disposed of when the market
became glutted. The neutroids offered solace to childless women, kept
them satisfied with a restricted birth rate. And why a restricted
birth rate? Because by keeping the population at five billions, the
Federation could insure a decent living standard for everybody.
Where there was giving, Norris thought glumly, there was also taking
away. Man had always deluded himself by thinking that he "created," but
he created nothing. He thought that he had created—with his medical
science and his end to wars—a longer life for the individual. But he
found that he had only taken the lives of the unborn and added them to
the years of the aged. Man now had a life expectancy of eighty, except
that he had damn little chance of being born to enjoy it.
A neutroid filled the cradle in his stead. A neutroid that never ate
as much, or grew up to be unemployed. A neutroid could be killed if
things got tough, but could still satisfy a woman's craving to mother
something small.
Norris gave up thinking about it. Eventually he would have to adjust
to it. He was already adjusted to a world that loved the artificial
mutants as children. He had been brought up in it. Emotion came in
conflict with the grim necessities of his job. Somehow he would have
to love them in the parlor and kill them in the kennel. It was only a
matter of adjustment.
At noon, he brought back another dozen K-99s and installed them in his
cages. There had been two highly reluctant mothers, but he skipped
them and left the seizure to the local authorities. Yates had already
brought in the three from yesterday.
"No more scratches?" Anne asked him while they ate lunch. They did not
speak of the night's mass-disposal.
Norris smiled mechanically. "I learned my lesson yesterday. If
they bare their fangs, I get out without another word. Funny thing
though—I've got a feeling one mother pulled a fast one."
"What happened?"
"Well, I told her what I wanted and why. She didn't like it, but she
let me in. I started out with her newt, but she wanted a receipt. So I
gave her one; took the serial number off my checklist. She looked at
it and said, 'Why, that's not Chichi's number!' I looked at the newt's
foot, and sure enough it wasn't. I had to leave it. It was a K-99, but
not even from Bermuda."
"I thought they were all registered," Anne said.
"They are. I told her she had the wrong neutroid, but she got mad. Went
and got the sales receipt. It checked with her newt, and it was from
O'Reilley's pet shop—right place, wrong number. I just don't get it."
"Nothing to worry about, is it Terry?"
He looked at her peculiarly. "Ever think what might happen if someone
started a black market in neutroids?"
They finished the meal in silence. After lunch he went out again to
gather up the rest of the group. By four o'clock, he had gotten all
that were to be had without the threat of a warrant. The screams and
pleas and tears of the owners left him gloomily despising himself.
If Delmont's falsification had been widespread, he might have to turn
several of the thirty-five over to central lab for dissection and
ultimate destruction. That would bring the murderous wrath of their
owners down upon him. He began to understand why bio-inspectors were
frequently shifted from one territory to another.
On the way home, he stopped in Sherman II to check on the missing
number. It was the largest of the Sherman communities, covering fifty
blocks of commercial buildings. He parked in the outskirts and took a
sidewalk escalator toward O'Reilley's address.
It was on a dingy sidestreet, reminiscent of past centuries, a street
of small bars and bowling alleys and cigar stores. There was even a
shop with three gold balls above the entrance, but the place was now
an antique store. A light mist was falling when he stepped off the
escalator and stood in front of the pet shop. A sign hung out over the
sidewalk, announcing:
J. "DOGGY" O'REILLEY
PETS FOR SALE
DUMB BLONDES AND GOLDFISH
MUTANTS FOR THE CHILDLESS
BUY A BUNDLE OF JOY
Norris frowned at the sign and wandered inside. The place was warm
and gloomy. He wrinkled his nose at the strong musk of animal odors.
O'Reilley's was not a shining example of cleanliness.
Somewhere a puppy was yapping, and a parrot croaked the lyrics of
A
Chimp to Call My Own
, which Norris recognized as the theme song of a
popular soap-opera about a lady evolvotron operator.
He paused briefly by a tank of silk-draped goldfish. The shop had a
customer. An elderly lady was haggling with a wizened manager over the
price of a half grown second-hand dog-F. She was shaking her last dog's
death certificate under his nose and demanding a guarantee of the dog's
alleged F-5 intelligence. The old man offered to swear on a Bible, but
he demurred when it came to swearing on a ledger.
The dog was saying, "Don' sell me, Dada. Don' sell me."
Norris smiled sardonically to himself. The non-human pets were smarter
than the neutroids. A K-108 could speak a dozen words, and a K-99
never got farther than "mamma," "pappa," and "cookie." Anthropos was
afraid to make the quasi-humans too intelligent, lest sentimentalists
proclaim them really human.
He wandered on toward the back of the building, pausing briefly by
the cash register to inspect O'Reilley's license, which hung in a
dusty frame on the wall behind the counter. "James Fallon
O'Reilley ... authorized dealer in mutant animals ... all non-predatory
mammals including chimpanzee-K series ... license expires June 1, 2235."
It seemed in order, although the expiration date was approaching. He
started toward a bank of neutroid cages along the opposite wall, but
O'Reilley was mincing across the floor to meet him. The customer had
gone. The little manager wore an elfin professional smile, and his bald
head bobbled in a welcoming nod.
"Good day, sir, good day! May I show you a dwarf kangaroo, or a—" He
stopped and adjusted his spectacles. He blinked and peered as Norris
flashed his badge. His smile waned.
"I'm Agent Norris, Mr. O'Reilley. Called you yesterday for that rundown
on K-99 sales."
O'Reilley looked suddenly nervous. "Oh, yes. Find 'em all?"
Norris shook his head. "No. That's why I stopped by. There's some
mistake on—" he glanced at his list—"on K-99-LJZ-351. Let's check it
again."
O'Reilley seemed to cringe. "No mistake. I gave you the buyer's name."
"She has a different number."
"Can I help it if she traded with somebody?"
"She didn't. She bought it here. I saw the receipt."
"Then she traded with one of my other customers!" snapped the old man.
"Two of your customers have the same name—Adelia Schultz? Not likely.
Let's see your duplicate receipt book."
O'Reilley's wrinkled face set itself into a stubborn mask. "Doubt if
it's still around."
Norris frowned. "Look, pop, I've had a rough day. I
could
start
naming some things around here that need fixing—sanitary violations
and such. Not to mention that sign—'dumb blondes.' They outlawed that
one when they executed that shyster doctor for shooting K-108s full
of growth hormones, trying to raise himself a harem to sell. Besides,
you're required to keep sales records until they've been micro-filmed.
There hasn't been a microfilming since July."
The wrinkled face twitched with frustrated anger. O'Reilley shuffled
to the counter while Norris followed. He got a fat binder from under
the register and started toward a wooden stairway.
"Where you going?" Norris called.
"Get my old glasses," the manager grumbled. "Can't see through these
new things."
"Leave the book here and
I'll
check it," Norris offered.
But O'Reilley was already limping quickly up the stairs. He seemed not
to hear. He shut the door behind him, and Norris heard the lock click.
The bio-agent waited. Again the thought of a black market troubled him.
Unauthorized neutroids could mean lots of trouble. | [
"A Delmont \"flaw\" that passed",
"A Class C citizen",
"A neutroid",
"A federal officer"
] | 1 |
51407_3ARTW1HP_1 | The first paragraph in the passage foreshadows which theme of "Sea Legs"? | SEA LEGS
By FRANK QUATTROCCHI
Illustrated by EMSH
Rootless and footloose, a man in space can't help
but dream of coming home. But something nobody should
do is bet on the validity of a homesick dream!
Flight Officer Robert Craig surrendered the tube containing his service
record tapes and stood waiting while the bored process clerk examined
the seal.
"Your clearance," said the clerk.
Craig handed him a battered punch card and watched the man insert it in
the reproducer. He felt anxiety as the much-handled card refused for a
time to match the instrument's metal contact points. The line of men
behind Craig fidgeted.
"You got to get this punched by Territorial," said the clerk. "Take it
back to your unit's clearance office."
"Look again, Sergeant," Craig said, repressing his irritation.
"It ain't notched."
"The hell it isn't."
The man examined the card with squinting care and nodded finally. "It's
so damn notched," he complained. "You ought to take care of that card;
can't get on without one."
Craig hesitated before moving.
"Next," said the clerk, "What you waiting for?"
"Don't I take my 201 file?"
"We send it on ahead. Go to Grav 1 desk."
A murmur greeted the order. Craig experienced the thrill of knowing
the envy of the others. Grav 1—that meant Terra. He crossed the long,
dreary room, knowing the eyes of the other men were upon him.
"Your service tapes," the next noncom said. "Where you going?"
"Grav 1—Terra," fumbled Craig. "Los Angeles."
"Los Angeles, eh? Where in Los Angeles?"
"I—I—" Craig muttered, fumbling in his pockets.
"No specific destination," supplied the man as he punched a key on a
small instrument, "Air-lock ahead and to your right. Strip and follow
the robot's orders. Any metal?"
"Metal?" asked Craig.
"You know,
metal
."
"Well, my identification key."
"Here," commanded the clerk, extending a plastic envelope.
Craig moved in the direction indicated. He fought the irrational fear
that he had missed an important step in the complicated clerical
process. He cursed the grudging attitude of the headquarters satellite
personnel and felt the impotence of a spaceman who had long forgotten
the bureaucracy of a rear area base. The knowledge that much of it was
motivated by envy soothed him as he clumsily let himself into the lock.
"Place your clothing in the receptacle provided and assume a stationary
position on the raised podium in the center of the lock."
Craig obeyed the robot voice and began reluctantly to remove his flight
jacket. Its incredibly fine-grained leather would carry none of the
strange, foreign associations for the base station clerk who would
appropriate it. He would never know the beautiful, gentle beast that
supplied this skin.
"You are retarding the progress of others. Please respond more quickly
to your orders."
Craig quickly removed the last of his clothing. It was impossible
to hate a robot, but one could certainly hate those who set it into
operation.
"You will find a red button at your feet. Lower your head and depress
that button."
Stepping on the button with his bare foot produced an instant of
brilliant blue illumination. A small scratch on his arm stung briefly
and he was somewhat blinded by the flash even through his eyelids, but
that was all there was to the sterilizing process.
"Your clothing and effects will be in the dressing room immediately
beyond the locked door."
He found his clothing cleanly and neatly hung on plastic hangers just
inside the door to the dressing room. The few personal items he carried
in his pockets were still there. The Schtann flight jacket was actually
there, looking like new, its space-blue unfaded and as wonderfully
pliant as before.
"Insert your right arm into the instrument on the central table,"
commanded the same voice he had heard before. "Turn your arm until the
scratch is in contact with the metal plate. There will be a slight
pain, but it is necessary to treat the small injury you have been
disregarding."
Craig obeyed and clenched his teeth against a sharp stinging. His
respect for the robot-controlled equipment of bases had risen. When
he withdrew his arm, the scratch was neatly coated with a layer of
flesh-colored plastic material.
He dressed quickly and was on the verge of asking the robot for
instructions, when a man appeared in the open doorway.
"I am Captain Wyandotte," said the man in a pleasant voice.
"Well, what's next?" asked Craig somewhat more belligerently than he
had intended.
The man smiled. "Your reaction is quite natural. You are somewhat
aggressive after Clerical, eh?"
"I'm a little anxious to get home, I suppose," said Craig defensively.
"By 'home' you mean Terra. But you've never been there, have you?"
"No, but my father—"
"Your parents left Terra during the Second Colonization of Cassiopeia
II, didn't they?"
"Yes," Craig said. He was uncomfortable; Wyandotte seemed to know all
about him.
"We might say you've been away quite a while, eh?"
"I was entered as a spaceman when I was 16," Craig said. "I've never
been down for any period as yet."
"You mean you haven't been in a gravity system?"
"Oh, I've landed a few times, even walked around for a while...."
"With the help of paraoxylnebutal," supplied the captain.
"Well, sure."
"Mr. Craig, I suppose you've guessed that the next step in our little
torture system here is psych."
"So I gathered."
The captain laughed reassuringly. "No, don't put up your guard again.
The worst is over. Short of Gravitational conditioning, there is
nothing to stop you from going to Terra."
"Sorry, I guess I'm a little touchy. This is my first time...."
"Quite natural. But it being your first time—in quite a number of
ways, I might add—it will be necessary for you to undergo some
conditioning."
"Conditioning?" asked Craig.
"Yes. You have spent eleven years in space. Your body is conditioned to
a normal state of free fall, or at best to a state of acceleration."
"Yeah, I know. Once on Gerymeade...."
"You were ill, couldn't keep your balance, felt dizzy. That is why
all spacemen carry PON, paraoxylnebutal, with them. It helps
suppress certain physiological reactions to an entirely new set of
conditions. Channels of the ear, for example. They play an important
part in our awareness of balance. They operate on a simple gravity
principle. Without gravity they act up for a time, then gradually lose
function. Returning to gravity is rather frightening at first."
"I know all about this, Captain."
"You've undoubtedly read popularizations in tapezines. But you have
experienced it briefly."
"I expect to have some trouble at first." Craig was disturbed by the
wordy psychologist. What was the man actually saying?
"Do you know what sailors of ancient times meant by 'sea legs?'" asked
Wyandotte. "Men on a rolling ocean acclimated themselves to a rolling
horizontal. They had trouble when they went ashore and the horizontal
didn't roll any more.
"It meant more than that. There were excellent psychological reasons
for the old stereotype, the 'drunken sailor.' A port city was a
frightening thing to an old sailor—but let's begin our little job at
the beginning. I'll turn you over to psychometry for the usual tests
and pick you up tomorrow morning at, say, 0900."
During the days that followed, the psychologist seemed to Craig to
become progressively more didactic. He would deliver long speeches
about the "freedom of open space." He spoke repetitiously of the
"growing complexity of Terran society." And yet the man could not
be pinned down to any specific condition the spaceman would find
intolerable.
Craig began to hate the delay that kept him from Terra. Through the
ports of the headquarters base satellite, he scanned the constellations
for the scores of worlds he had visited during his eleven years in
space. They were incredibly varied, even those that supported life. He
had weathered difficult landings on worlds with rip-tide gravities, had
felt the pull of the incredible star-tides imparted by twin and even
triple star systems. He had been on Einstein IV, the planet of eight
moons, and had felt the pulse of all eight of the satellites at once
that no PON could completely nullify.
But even if he could accept the psychologist's authority for the
cumulative effect of a gravity system, he could not understand the
unspoken warning he felt underlying all that the man said.
"Of course it has changed," Craig was protesting. "Anyway, I never
really knew very much about Terra. So what? I know it won't be as it
was in tapezines either."
"Yet you are so completely sure you will want to live out your life
there, that you are willing to give up space service for it."
"We've gone through this time and time again," Craig said wearily. "I
gave you my reasons for quitting space. We analyzed them. You agreed
that you could not decide that for me and that my decision is logical.
You tell me spacemen don't settle down on Terra. Yet you won't—or
can't—tell me why. I've got a damned good job there—"
"You may find that 'damned good jobs' become boring."
"So I'll transfer. I don't know what you're trying to get at, Captain,
but you're not talking me out of going back. If the service needs men
so badly, let them get somebody else. I've put in
my
time."
"Do you really think that's my reason?"
"Sure. What else can it be?"
"Mr. Craig," the psychologist said slowly, "you have my authorization
for you to return to Terra as a private citizen of that planet. You
will be given a very liberal supply of PON—which you will
definitely need. Good luck. You'll need that too."
On the eighth day, two attendants, who showed the effects of massive
doses of PON to protect themselves from the centrifugal force,
had to carry a man out of the tank. Many others asked to be removed,
begged to be allowed to withdraw their resignations.
"The twelfth day is the worst," a grizzled spaceman told Craig. "That's
when the best of 'em want out."
Craig clenched the iron rung of his bed and struggled to bring the old
man's face into focus.
"How ... how do they know when you ought ... to come out?" he asked
between waves of nausea.
"Blood pressure. They get you just before you go into shock."
"How can they tell?" Craig fought down his growing panic. "I can't."
"That strap around your belly. You mean you ain't noticed it?"
"Haven't noticed much of anything."
"Well, it's keyed to give them some kind of signal."
The old man lapsed into silence. Craig wished him to continue. He
desperately wanted something to distract his mind from the ghastly
conditioning process.
Slowly at first, the lines formed by seams in the metal ceiling began
to bend. Here it came again!
"Old man!" shouted Craig.
"Yeah, son. They've dropped it down a notch."
"Dropped ... it ... down?"
"Maybe that ain't scientific, but it's the way I always think of it."
"Can't they ... drop it down continuously?"
"They tried that a few times—once when I was aboard. You wouldn't like
it, kid. You wouldn't like it at all."
"How ... many times ... do they drop it?"
"Four times during the day, three at night. Twenty days."
A nightmare of visual sensations ebbed into Craig's mind. He was
vaguely aware of the moans of other men in the vaultlike room. Wave
upon wave of nausea swept him as he watched the seam lines bend and
warp fantastically. He snapped his eyelids shut, only to begin feeling
the nightmarish bodily sensations once more. He felt the cot slowly
rise longitudinally, felt himself upside down, then the snap of turning
right side up once more—and he knew that neither he nor the cot had
moved so much as an inch.
Craig heard the voices around him, muffled, as though talking through
wadding.
"... got it bad."
"We better take him out."
"... pretty bad."
"He'll go into shock."
"... never make it the twelfth."
"We better yank him."
"I'm ... all right," Craig mumbled at the voices. He struggled with the
bonds of his cot. With terrible effort he forced his eyes open. Two
white-clad figures, ridiculously out of proportion, hovered wraithlike
over him. Four elongated eyes peered at him.
Attendants coming for to take me home....
"Touch me and I'll kick your teeth in!" he yelled. "I'm going to Terra.
Wish you were going to Terra?"
Then it was better. Oddly, he passed the twelfth day easily. By the
fourteenth day, Craig knew he could stand Grav 1. The whine of the
centrifuge's motors had diminished to a low hum. Either that or they
had begun to produce ultra-sonic waves. Craig was not sure.
Most of the men had passed through the torments of gravitational
conditioning. The huge headquarters base centrifuge aboard the man-made
satellite had gradually caused their bodies to respond once more to a
single source of pull. They were now ready to become inhabitants of
planets again, instead of free-falling ships.
On the eighteenth day, automatic machinery freed them from their
imprisoning cots. Clumsily and awkwardly at first, the men began to
walk, to hold their heads and arms in proper attitudes. They laughed
and joked about it and kidded those who were slow at adjusting.
Then they again began taking paraoxylnebutal in preparation for the
free-fall flight to Terra.
Only one of the score of men in the centrifuge tank remained
voluntarily in his cot.
"Space article violator," the old man informed Craig. "Psycho, I think.
Went amuck with some extraterritorials. Killed a dozen."
"What will they do, exile him?"
"Not to Chociante, if that's what you mean. They just jerked his space
card and gave him a one-way ticket to Terra."
"For twelve murders?" asked Craig incredulously.
"That's enough, son." The old man eyed Craig for an instant before
looking away. "Pick something to talk about. What do you figure on
doing when you get to Terra, for instance?"
"I'm going into Import. My father was in it for twenty years."
"Sure," said the old spaceman, watching a group of young crewmen
engaged in an animated conversation.
"It's a good job. There's a future to it."
"Yeah."
Why did he have to explain anything at all to the old space tramp?
"Once I get set up, I'll probably try to open my own business."
"And spend your weekends on Luna."
Craig half rose from his cot, jarred into anger.
But the old spaceman turned, smiling wryly. "Don't get hot, kid. I
guess I spent too long in Zone V." He paused to examine his wrinkled
hands. They were indelibly marked with lever callouses. "You get to
thinking anyone who stays closer'n eighty light years from Terra is a
land-lubber."
Craig relaxed, realizing he had acted childishly. "Used to think the
same. Then I took the exam and got this job."
"Whereabouts?"
"Los Angeles."
The old man looked up at Craig. "You don't know much about Terra, do
you, son?"
"Not much."
"Yeah. Well, I hope you ain't disappointed."
"My father was born there, but I never saw it. Never hit the Solar
System, matter of fact. Never saw much of anything close up. I stood it
a long time, old man, this hitting atmospheres all over the Universe."
But the spaceman seemed to have lost interest. He was unpacking some
personal belongings from a kit.
"What are you doing in Grav 1?" Craig asked.
The old man's face clouded for an instant. "In the old days, they used
to say us old-timers acted like clocks. They used to say we just ran
down. Now they got some fancy psychology name for it."
Craig regretted his question. He would have muttered some word of
apology, but the old man continued.
"Maybe you've read some of the old sea stories, or more'n likely had
'em read to you. Sailors could go to sea until they just sort of dried
up. The sea tanned their skins and stiffened their bones, but it never
stiffened their hearts. When they got old, it just pulled them in.
"But space is different. Space is raw and new. It tugs at your guts. It
sends the blood rushing through your veins. It's like loving. You don't
become a part of space the way you do the old sea, though. It leaves
you strictly alone. Except that it sucks you dry, takes all the soup
out of you, leaves you brittle and old—old as a dehydrated piece of
split leather.
"Then one day it shoots a spurt of blood around in one of your old
veins. Something gives. Space is through with you then. And if you can
stand this whirligig conditioning, you're through with space."
"
You can't figure it. Some of 'em urp all over and turn six shades of
green.
"
"
You got to watch the ones that don't.
"
"
Yeah, you got to watch the ones that don't. Especially the old ones.
"
"
He's old. You think it was his heart?
"
"
Who knows?
"
"
They'll dump him, won't they?
"
"
After a tracer is sent through. But it won't do any good.
"
"
He probably outlived everybody that ever knew him.
"
"
Wouldn't be surprised. Here, grab his leg.
"
Robert Craig folded the flight jacket tightly and stuffed it into the
cylindrical carton. A sleeve unwound just as he did so, making it
difficult to fit into the place he had made for it. Exasperated, he
refolded it and jammed it in place. Smaller rolls of underclothing were
then fitted in. When he was satisfied with the layer, he tossed in a
small handful of crystals and began to fill the next layer. After the
carton was completely filled, he ignited the sealing strip and watched
as the plastic melted into a single, seamless whole. It was ready for
irradiation. Probably in another ten years his son-to-be would put it
on and play spaceman. But Craig swore he'd make sure that the kid knew
what a stinking life it was.
At 1300 hours, the ferry bumped heavily alongside the starboard lock.
It was the signal for relief in the passengers' quarters; many were
beginning to feel a reaction to the short free-fall flight from the
headquarters satellite.
The audio called out: "Flight Officer Robert Craig. Flight Officer
Robert Craig. Report to Orderly 12. Report to Orderly 12 through the
aft door."
With pangs of anxiety he could not completely suppress, Craig obeyed.
Orderly 12 handed him a message container.
"Who's it from? Somebody on Terra?"
"From a private spaceman named Morgan Brockman."
"
Brockman?
"
"He was with you in the grav tank."
"The old man!"
The message container produced a battered punch card. Craig
straightened it and was about to reach into his pocket for a hand
transcriber. But then he noticed the card bore only a few irregular
punches and was covered with rough hand printing.
Son, when the flunkies get around to giving you this, they'll have
shot me out the tube. How do I know? Same way you know when your
turbos are going to throw a blade. It's good this way.
There's something you can do for me if you want to. Way back, some
fifty years ago, there was a woman. She was my wife. It's a long story
I won't bother you with. Anyway, I left her. Wanted to take her along
with me, but she wouldn't go.
Earth was a lot different then than it is now. They don't have to tell
me; I know. I saw it coming and so did Ethel. We talked about it and I
knew I had to go. She wouldn't or couldn't go. Wanted me to stay, but
I couldn't.
I tried to send her some units once in a while. Don't know if she ever
got them. Sometimes I forgot to send them at all. You know, you're way
out across the Galaxy, while she's home.
Go see her if you can, son. Will you? Make sure she gets the unit
transfer I made out. It isn't much out of seventy years of living,
but she may need it. And maybe you can tell her a little bit about
what it means to be out there. Tell her it's open and free and when
you got hold of those levers and you're trying for an orbit on
something big and new and green.... Hell, you remember. You know how
to tell her.
Her name is Ethel Brockman. I know she'll still use my name. Her
address is or was East 71, North 101, Number 4. You can trace her
easy if she moved. Women don't generally shove off and not leave a
forwarding address. Not Ethel, at least.
Craig put the battered card in his pocket and walked back through the
door to the passenger room. How did you explain to an old woman why her
husband deserted her fifty years before? Some kind of story about one's
duty to the Universe? No, the old man had not been in Intergalactic. He
had been a tramp spaceman. Well, why
had
he left?
Fifty years in space.
Fifty
years! Zone V had been beyond anybody's
imagination that long ago. He must have been in on the first Cetusian
flights and shot the early landings in Cetus II. God only knew how many
times he had battled Zone 111b pirates....
Damn the old man! How did one explain?
Craig descended the ramp from the huge jet and concentrated on his
impressions. One day he would recall this moment, his first on the
planet Terra. He tried to recall his first thrill at seeing Los
Angeles, 1500 square miles of it, from the ship as it entered the
atmosphere.
He was about to step off the last step when a man appeared hurriedly. A
rather plump man, he displayed a toothy smile on his puffy red face.
"A moment, sir. Just a little greeting from the Terra. You understand,
of course. Purely routine."
Craig remained on the final step of the ramp, puzzled. The man turned
to a companion at his right.
"We can see that this gentleman has come from a long, long way off,
can't we?"
The other man did not look up. He was peering into what seemed to Craig
to be a kind of camera.
"We can allow the gentlemen to continue now, can't we? It wasn't that
we believed for a minute, you understand ... purely routine."
Both men were gone in an instant, leaving Craig completely bewildered.
"You goin' to move on, buddy, or you want to go back?"
Craig turned to face a line of his fellow passengers up the ramp behind
him.
"Who was that?" Craig asked.
"Customs. Bet you never got such a smooth screening before, eh?"
"You mean he
screened
me? What for?"
"Hard to say," the other passenger said. "You'll get used to this. They
get it over with quick."
Craig made his way toward the spaceport administration building. His
first physical contact with Terra had passed unnoticed.
"Sir! Sir!" cried a voice behind him.
He wheeled to see a man walking briskly toward him.
"You dropped this, sir. Quite by accident, of course."
Craig examined the small object the man had given him before rushing
off toward an exit.
It was an empty PON tube he had just discarded. He couldn't
understand why the man had bothered until he realized that the
plastaloid floor of the lobby displayed not the faintest scrap of paper
nor trace of dirt.
The Import personnel man was toying with a small chip of gleaming
metal. He did not look directly at Craig for more than an instant at a
time, and commented on Craig's description of his trip through the city
only very briefly between questions.
"It's a good deal bigger than I imagined," Craig was saying. "Haven't
seen much of it, of course. Thought I'd check in here with you first."
"Yes, naturally."
"Thought you could give me some idea of conditions...."
"Conditions?"
"For instance, what part of the city I should live in. That is, what
part is closest to where I'll work."
"I see," said the man noncommittally. It seemed to Craig that he was
about to add something. He did not, however, but instead rose from his
chair and walked to the large window overlooking an enormous section of
the city far below. He stared out the window for a time, leaving Craig
seated uncomfortably in the silent room. There was a distracted quality
about him, Craig thought.
"You are the first man we have had from the Intergalactic Service," the
personnel man said finally.
"That so?"
"Yes." He turned to face Craig briefly before continuing. "You must
find it very strange here."
"Well, I've never seen a city so big."
"Yes, so big. And also...." He seemed to consider many words before
completing the sentence. "And also different."
"I haven't been here very long," said Craig. "Matter of fact, I haven't
been anywhere very long. This is my first real experience with life on
a planet. As an adult, anyway."
The personnel man seated himself once more and pressed a button on a
small instrument. A secretary entered the office from a door to Craig's
left.
"Miss Wendel, this is Mr. Craig. Mr. Craig, my secretary. Mr. Craig
will enter Minerals and Metals, Zone V."
They exchanged formal greetings. She was a moderately pretty girl of
medium height and, to Craig, a pleasantly rounded figure. He would have
attempted to catch her eye had she not immediately occupied herself
with unfolding the legs of a small instrument she was carrying.
"This is Mr. Craig's first landing on Terra, Miss Wendel," the
personnel man continued. "Actually, we shall have to consider him in
much the same way we would an extraterrestrial."
The girl glanced at Craig, casting him a cool, impersonal smile.
"He was formerly a flight officer in the Intergalactic Space Service."
The statement was delivered in an almost exaggeratedly casual tone.
The girl glanced at him once more, this time with a definite quizzical
look in her brown eyes.
"Three complete tours of duty, I believe."
"Four," corrected Craig. "Four tours of three years each, minus a
year's terminal leave."
"I take it you have no identification card?" the man asked.
"The one I held in the service. It's pretty comprehensive."
The other turned to the secretary. "You'll see that he is assisted in
filing his application, won't you? A provisional Code II. That will
enable you to enter all Import offices freely, Mr. Craig."
"Will he need a food and—clothing ration also?" asked the girl,
without looking at Craig.
"Yes." The man laughed. "You'll excuse us, Mr. Craig. We realize that
you couldn't be expected to be familiar with Terra's fashions. In your
present outfit you would certainly be typed as a ... well, you'd be
made uncomfortable."
Craig reddened in spite of himself. He had bought the suit on Ghandii.
"A hick," he supplied.
"I wouldn't go that far, but some people might."
Craig noted the pleasant way the girl filled her trim, rather severe
business suit. He amused himself by calculating stress patterns in its
plain woven material as she assembled the forms for him.
"Here, Mr. Craig. I believe these are complete."
"They look pretty complicated."
"Not at all. The questions are quite explicit."
Craig looked them over quickly.
"I guess so. Say, Miss Wendel, I was wondering—I don't know the city
at all. Maybe you could go with me to have dinner. It must be almost
dinnertime now. You could sort of check me out on some...."
"I'm afraid that would be quite impossible. You couldn't gain
admittance to any office you need to visit tonight. Therefore, it is
impossible for me to be of any assistance to you."
"Oh, come now, Miss Wendel. There are women aboard spaceships. I'm not
a starved wolf."
"Certainly you are not, Mr. Craig. But it is not possible for me...."
"You said that already, but you can have dinner with me. Just company."
"I'm afraid I don't understand."
The Galactic hotel strove to preserve an archaic tone of hospitality.
It advertised "a night's lodgings" and it possessed a bellboy. The
bellboy actually carried Craig's plasticarton and large file of punch
cards and forms to his room. Tired from the long, confusing day, Craig
was not impressed. He vaguely wondered if the little drama of the
hotel carried so far as a small fee to be paid the bellboy, and he
hoped he would have the right size of Terran units in his wallet.
Outside the door to the room, the bellboy stopped and turned to Craig.
"For five I'll tell you where it is," he said in a subdued tone.
"Tell me where what is?"
"You know, the mike."
"Mike?"
"All right, mister, three units, then. I wasn't trying to hold you up."
"You mean a microphone?" asked Craig, mechanically fishing for his
wallet.
"Sure, they don't put in screens here. Wanted to, but the boss
convinced 'em there aren't any Freedomites ever stay here."
"Where is the microphone?" Craig asked as he found a ten unit note.
He was too puzzled to wonder what he was expected to do with the
information.
"It's in the bed illuminator. You can short it out with a razor blade.
Or I'll do it for another two."
"Never mind," Craig said wearily. He waited while the bellboy inserted
a key into the door and opened it for him.
"I can get you a sensatia-tape," whispered the boy when they had
entered. He nudged Craig wickedly. "You know what they're like?"
"Yeah," Craig said disgustedly. Traffic in the illicit mental-image
tapes was known as far into space as lonely men had penetrated.
Intergalactic considered them as great a menace to mental and moral
stability as the hectopiates. Craig wearily got the man out of the
room, took a PON pill, and eased himself into the bed.
It had been a weird day and he had not liked it. There was no telling
how long it would take him to shake his—sea legs, the psychologist
had called it. One thing was sure: Terra aggressively went after its
strangers. | [
"Society tends to neglect those who have served",
"If you don't like it, you can always leave",
"The grass is always greener on the other side",
"People shouldn't count on places to stay the same"
] | 3 |
51407_3ARTW1HP_2 | What is the purpose of paraoxynebutal? | SEA LEGS
By FRANK QUATTROCCHI
Illustrated by EMSH
Rootless and footloose, a man in space can't help
but dream of coming home. But something nobody should
do is bet on the validity of a homesick dream!
Flight Officer Robert Craig surrendered the tube containing his service
record tapes and stood waiting while the bored process clerk examined
the seal.
"Your clearance," said the clerk.
Craig handed him a battered punch card and watched the man insert it in
the reproducer. He felt anxiety as the much-handled card refused for a
time to match the instrument's metal contact points. The line of men
behind Craig fidgeted.
"You got to get this punched by Territorial," said the clerk. "Take it
back to your unit's clearance office."
"Look again, Sergeant," Craig said, repressing his irritation.
"It ain't notched."
"The hell it isn't."
The man examined the card with squinting care and nodded finally. "It's
so damn notched," he complained. "You ought to take care of that card;
can't get on without one."
Craig hesitated before moving.
"Next," said the clerk, "What you waiting for?"
"Don't I take my 201 file?"
"We send it on ahead. Go to Grav 1 desk."
A murmur greeted the order. Craig experienced the thrill of knowing
the envy of the others. Grav 1—that meant Terra. He crossed the long,
dreary room, knowing the eyes of the other men were upon him.
"Your service tapes," the next noncom said. "Where you going?"
"Grav 1—Terra," fumbled Craig. "Los Angeles."
"Los Angeles, eh? Where in Los Angeles?"
"I—I—" Craig muttered, fumbling in his pockets.
"No specific destination," supplied the man as he punched a key on a
small instrument, "Air-lock ahead and to your right. Strip and follow
the robot's orders. Any metal?"
"Metal?" asked Craig.
"You know,
metal
."
"Well, my identification key."
"Here," commanded the clerk, extending a plastic envelope.
Craig moved in the direction indicated. He fought the irrational fear
that he had missed an important step in the complicated clerical
process. He cursed the grudging attitude of the headquarters satellite
personnel and felt the impotence of a spaceman who had long forgotten
the bureaucracy of a rear area base. The knowledge that much of it was
motivated by envy soothed him as he clumsily let himself into the lock.
"Place your clothing in the receptacle provided and assume a stationary
position on the raised podium in the center of the lock."
Craig obeyed the robot voice and began reluctantly to remove his flight
jacket. Its incredibly fine-grained leather would carry none of the
strange, foreign associations for the base station clerk who would
appropriate it. He would never know the beautiful, gentle beast that
supplied this skin.
"You are retarding the progress of others. Please respond more quickly
to your orders."
Craig quickly removed the last of his clothing. It was impossible
to hate a robot, but one could certainly hate those who set it into
operation.
"You will find a red button at your feet. Lower your head and depress
that button."
Stepping on the button with his bare foot produced an instant of
brilliant blue illumination. A small scratch on his arm stung briefly
and he was somewhat blinded by the flash even through his eyelids, but
that was all there was to the sterilizing process.
"Your clothing and effects will be in the dressing room immediately
beyond the locked door."
He found his clothing cleanly and neatly hung on plastic hangers just
inside the door to the dressing room. The few personal items he carried
in his pockets were still there. The Schtann flight jacket was actually
there, looking like new, its space-blue unfaded and as wonderfully
pliant as before.
"Insert your right arm into the instrument on the central table,"
commanded the same voice he had heard before. "Turn your arm until the
scratch is in contact with the metal plate. There will be a slight
pain, but it is necessary to treat the small injury you have been
disregarding."
Craig obeyed and clenched his teeth against a sharp stinging. His
respect for the robot-controlled equipment of bases had risen. When
he withdrew his arm, the scratch was neatly coated with a layer of
flesh-colored plastic material.
He dressed quickly and was on the verge of asking the robot for
instructions, when a man appeared in the open doorway.
"I am Captain Wyandotte," said the man in a pleasant voice.
"Well, what's next?" asked Craig somewhat more belligerently than he
had intended.
The man smiled. "Your reaction is quite natural. You are somewhat
aggressive after Clerical, eh?"
"I'm a little anxious to get home, I suppose," said Craig defensively.
"By 'home' you mean Terra. But you've never been there, have you?"
"No, but my father—"
"Your parents left Terra during the Second Colonization of Cassiopeia
II, didn't they?"
"Yes," Craig said. He was uncomfortable; Wyandotte seemed to know all
about him.
"We might say you've been away quite a while, eh?"
"I was entered as a spaceman when I was 16," Craig said. "I've never
been down for any period as yet."
"You mean you haven't been in a gravity system?"
"Oh, I've landed a few times, even walked around for a while...."
"With the help of paraoxylnebutal," supplied the captain.
"Well, sure."
"Mr. Craig, I suppose you've guessed that the next step in our little
torture system here is psych."
"So I gathered."
The captain laughed reassuringly. "No, don't put up your guard again.
The worst is over. Short of Gravitational conditioning, there is
nothing to stop you from going to Terra."
"Sorry, I guess I'm a little touchy. This is my first time...."
"Quite natural. But it being your first time—in quite a number of
ways, I might add—it will be necessary for you to undergo some
conditioning."
"Conditioning?" asked Craig.
"Yes. You have spent eleven years in space. Your body is conditioned to
a normal state of free fall, or at best to a state of acceleration."
"Yeah, I know. Once on Gerymeade...."
"You were ill, couldn't keep your balance, felt dizzy. That is why
all spacemen carry PON, paraoxylnebutal, with them. It helps
suppress certain physiological reactions to an entirely new set of
conditions. Channels of the ear, for example. They play an important
part in our awareness of balance. They operate on a simple gravity
principle. Without gravity they act up for a time, then gradually lose
function. Returning to gravity is rather frightening at first."
"I know all about this, Captain."
"You've undoubtedly read popularizations in tapezines. But you have
experienced it briefly."
"I expect to have some trouble at first." Craig was disturbed by the
wordy psychologist. What was the man actually saying?
"Do you know what sailors of ancient times meant by 'sea legs?'" asked
Wyandotte. "Men on a rolling ocean acclimated themselves to a rolling
horizontal. They had trouble when they went ashore and the horizontal
didn't roll any more.
"It meant more than that. There were excellent psychological reasons
for the old stereotype, the 'drunken sailor.' A port city was a
frightening thing to an old sailor—but let's begin our little job at
the beginning. I'll turn you over to psychometry for the usual tests
and pick you up tomorrow morning at, say, 0900."
During the days that followed, the psychologist seemed to Craig to
become progressively more didactic. He would deliver long speeches
about the "freedom of open space." He spoke repetitiously of the
"growing complexity of Terran society." And yet the man could not
be pinned down to any specific condition the spaceman would find
intolerable.
Craig began to hate the delay that kept him from Terra. Through the
ports of the headquarters base satellite, he scanned the constellations
for the scores of worlds he had visited during his eleven years in
space. They were incredibly varied, even those that supported life. He
had weathered difficult landings on worlds with rip-tide gravities, had
felt the pull of the incredible star-tides imparted by twin and even
triple star systems. He had been on Einstein IV, the planet of eight
moons, and had felt the pulse of all eight of the satellites at once
that no PON could completely nullify.
But even if he could accept the psychologist's authority for the
cumulative effect of a gravity system, he could not understand the
unspoken warning he felt underlying all that the man said.
"Of course it has changed," Craig was protesting. "Anyway, I never
really knew very much about Terra. So what? I know it won't be as it
was in tapezines either."
"Yet you are so completely sure you will want to live out your life
there, that you are willing to give up space service for it."
"We've gone through this time and time again," Craig said wearily. "I
gave you my reasons for quitting space. We analyzed them. You agreed
that you could not decide that for me and that my decision is logical.
You tell me spacemen don't settle down on Terra. Yet you won't—or
can't—tell me why. I've got a damned good job there—"
"You may find that 'damned good jobs' become boring."
"So I'll transfer. I don't know what you're trying to get at, Captain,
but you're not talking me out of going back. If the service needs men
so badly, let them get somebody else. I've put in
my
time."
"Do you really think that's my reason?"
"Sure. What else can it be?"
"Mr. Craig," the psychologist said slowly, "you have my authorization
for you to return to Terra as a private citizen of that planet. You
will be given a very liberal supply of PON—which you will
definitely need. Good luck. You'll need that too."
On the eighth day, two attendants, who showed the effects of massive
doses of PON to protect themselves from the centrifugal force,
had to carry a man out of the tank. Many others asked to be removed,
begged to be allowed to withdraw their resignations.
"The twelfth day is the worst," a grizzled spaceman told Craig. "That's
when the best of 'em want out."
Craig clenched the iron rung of his bed and struggled to bring the old
man's face into focus.
"How ... how do they know when you ought ... to come out?" he asked
between waves of nausea.
"Blood pressure. They get you just before you go into shock."
"How can they tell?" Craig fought down his growing panic. "I can't."
"That strap around your belly. You mean you ain't noticed it?"
"Haven't noticed much of anything."
"Well, it's keyed to give them some kind of signal."
The old man lapsed into silence. Craig wished him to continue. He
desperately wanted something to distract his mind from the ghastly
conditioning process.
Slowly at first, the lines formed by seams in the metal ceiling began
to bend. Here it came again!
"Old man!" shouted Craig.
"Yeah, son. They've dropped it down a notch."
"Dropped ... it ... down?"
"Maybe that ain't scientific, but it's the way I always think of it."
"Can't they ... drop it down continuously?"
"They tried that a few times—once when I was aboard. You wouldn't like
it, kid. You wouldn't like it at all."
"How ... many times ... do they drop it?"
"Four times during the day, three at night. Twenty days."
A nightmare of visual sensations ebbed into Craig's mind. He was
vaguely aware of the moans of other men in the vaultlike room. Wave
upon wave of nausea swept him as he watched the seam lines bend and
warp fantastically. He snapped his eyelids shut, only to begin feeling
the nightmarish bodily sensations once more. He felt the cot slowly
rise longitudinally, felt himself upside down, then the snap of turning
right side up once more—and he knew that neither he nor the cot had
moved so much as an inch.
Craig heard the voices around him, muffled, as though talking through
wadding.
"... got it bad."
"We better take him out."
"... pretty bad."
"He'll go into shock."
"... never make it the twelfth."
"We better yank him."
"I'm ... all right," Craig mumbled at the voices. He struggled with the
bonds of his cot. With terrible effort he forced his eyes open. Two
white-clad figures, ridiculously out of proportion, hovered wraithlike
over him. Four elongated eyes peered at him.
Attendants coming for to take me home....
"Touch me and I'll kick your teeth in!" he yelled. "I'm going to Terra.
Wish you were going to Terra?"
Then it was better. Oddly, he passed the twelfth day easily. By the
fourteenth day, Craig knew he could stand Grav 1. The whine of the
centrifuge's motors had diminished to a low hum. Either that or they
had begun to produce ultra-sonic waves. Craig was not sure.
Most of the men had passed through the torments of gravitational
conditioning. The huge headquarters base centrifuge aboard the man-made
satellite had gradually caused their bodies to respond once more to a
single source of pull. They were now ready to become inhabitants of
planets again, instead of free-falling ships.
On the eighteenth day, automatic machinery freed them from their
imprisoning cots. Clumsily and awkwardly at first, the men began to
walk, to hold their heads and arms in proper attitudes. They laughed
and joked about it and kidded those who were slow at adjusting.
Then they again began taking paraoxylnebutal in preparation for the
free-fall flight to Terra.
Only one of the score of men in the centrifuge tank remained
voluntarily in his cot.
"Space article violator," the old man informed Craig. "Psycho, I think.
Went amuck with some extraterritorials. Killed a dozen."
"What will they do, exile him?"
"Not to Chociante, if that's what you mean. They just jerked his space
card and gave him a one-way ticket to Terra."
"For twelve murders?" asked Craig incredulously.
"That's enough, son." The old man eyed Craig for an instant before
looking away. "Pick something to talk about. What do you figure on
doing when you get to Terra, for instance?"
"I'm going into Import. My father was in it for twenty years."
"Sure," said the old spaceman, watching a group of young crewmen
engaged in an animated conversation.
"It's a good job. There's a future to it."
"Yeah."
Why did he have to explain anything at all to the old space tramp?
"Once I get set up, I'll probably try to open my own business."
"And spend your weekends on Luna."
Craig half rose from his cot, jarred into anger.
But the old spaceman turned, smiling wryly. "Don't get hot, kid. I
guess I spent too long in Zone V." He paused to examine his wrinkled
hands. They were indelibly marked with lever callouses. "You get to
thinking anyone who stays closer'n eighty light years from Terra is a
land-lubber."
Craig relaxed, realizing he had acted childishly. "Used to think the
same. Then I took the exam and got this job."
"Whereabouts?"
"Los Angeles."
The old man looked up at Craig. "You don't know much about Terra, do
you, son?"
"Not much."
"Yeah. Well, I hope you ain't disappointed."
"My father was born there, but I never saw it. Never hit the Solar
System, matter of fact. Never saw much of anything close up. I stood it
a long time, old man, this hitting atmospheres all over the Universe."
But the spaceman seemed to have lost interest. He was unpacking some
personal belongings from a kit.
"What are you doing in Grav 1?" Craig asked.
The old man's face clouded for an instant. "In the old days, they used
to say us old-timers acted like clocks. They used to say we just ran
down. Now they got some fancy psychology name for it."
Craig regretted his question. He would have muttered some word of
apology, but the old man continued.
"Maybe you've read some of the old sea stories, or more'n likely had
'em read to you. Sailors could go to sea until they just sort of dried
up. The sea tanned their skins and stiffened their bones, but it never
stiffened their hearts. When they got old, it just pulled them in.
"But space is different. Space is raw and new. It tugs at your guts. It
sends the blood rushing through your veins. It's like loving. You don't
become a part of space the way you do the old sea, though. It leaves
you strictly alone. Except that it sucks you dry, takes all the soup
out of you, leaves you brittle and old—old as a dehydrated piece of
split leather.
"Then one day it shoots a spurt of blood around in one of your old
veins. Something gives. Space is through with you then. And if you can
stand this whirligig conditioning, you're through with space."
"
You can't figure it. Some of 'em urp all over and turn six shades of
green.
"
"
You got to watch the ones that don't.
"
"
Yeah, you got to watch the ones that don't. Especially the old ones.
"
"
He's old. You think it was his heart?
"
"
Who knows?
"
"
They'll dump him, won't they?
"
"
After a tracer is sent through. But it won't do any good.
"
"
He probably outlived everybody that ever knew him.
"
"
Wouldn't be surprised. Here, grab his leg.
"
Robert Craig folded the flight jacket tightly and stuffed it into the
cylindrical carton. A sleeve unwound just as he did so, making it
difficult to fit into the place he had made for it. Exasperated, he
refolded it and jammed it in place. Smaller rolls of underclothing were
then fitted in. When he was satisfied with the layer, he tossed in a
small handful of crystals and began to fill the next layer. After the
carton was completely filled, he ignited the sealing strip and watched
as the plastic melted into a single, seamless whole. It was ready for
irradiation. Probably in another ten years his son-to-be would put it
on and play spaceman. But Craig swore he'd make sure that the kid knew
what a stinking life it was.
At 1300 hours, the ferry bumped heavily alongside the starboard lock.
It was the signal for relief in the passengers' quarters; many were
beginning to feel a reaction to the short free-fall flight from the
headquarters satellite.
The audio called out: "Flight Officer Robert Craig. Flight Officer
Robert Craig. Report to Orderly 12. Report to Orderly 12 through the
aft door."
With pangs of anxiety he could not completely suppress, Craig obeyed.
Orderly 12 handed him a message container.
"Who's it from? Somebody on Terra?"
"From a private spaceman named Morgan Brockman."
"
Brockman?
"
"He was with you in the grav tank."
"The old man!"
The message container produced a battered punch card. Craig
straightened it and was about to reach into his pocket for a hand
transcriber. But then he noticed the card bore only a few irregular
punches and was covered with rough hand printing.
Son, when the flunkies get around to giving you this, they'll have
shot me out the tube. How do I know? Same way you know when your
turbos are going to throw a blade. It's good this way.
There's something you can do for me if you want to. Way back, some
fifty years ago, there was a woman. She was my wife. It's a long story
I won't bother you with. Anyway, I left her. Wanted to take her along
with me, but she wouldn't go.
Earth was a lot different then than it is now. They don't have to tell
me; I know. I saw it coming and so did Ethel. We talked about it and I
knew I had to go. She wouldn't or couldn't go. Wanted me to stay, but
I couldn't.
I tried to send her some units once in a while. Don't know if she ever
got them. Sometimes I forgot to send them at all. You know, you're way
out across the Galaxy, while she's home.
Go see her if you can, son. Will you? Make sure she gets the unit
transfer I made out. It isn't much out of seventy years of living,
but she may need it. And maybe you can tell her a little bit about
what it means to be out there. Tell her it's open and free and when
you got hold of those levers and you're trying for an orbit on
something big and new and green.... Hell, you remember. You know how
to tell her.
Her name is Ethel Brockman. I know she'll still use my name. Her
address is or was East 71, North 101, Number 4. You can trace her
easy if she moved. Women don't generally shove off and not leave a
forwarding address. Not Ethel, at least.
Craig put the battered card in his pocket and walked back through the
door to the passenger room. How did you explain to an old woman why her
husband deserted her fifty years before? Some kind of story about one's
duty to the Universe? No, the old man had not been in Intergalactic. He
had been a tramp spaceman. Well, why
had
he left?
Fifty years in space.
Fifty
years! Zone V had been beyond anybody's
imagination that long ago. He must have been in on the first Cetusian
flights and shot the early landings in Cetus II. God only knew how many
times he had battled Zone 111b pirates....
Damn the old man! How did one explain?
Craig descended the ramp from the huge jet and concentrated on his
impressions. One day he would recall this moment, his first on the
planet Terra. He tried to recall his first thrill at seeing Los
Angeles, 1500 square miles of it, from the ship as it entered the
atmosphere.
He was about to step off the last step when a man appeared hurriedly. A
rather plump man, he displayed a toothy smile on his puffy red face.
"A moment, sir. Just a little greeting from the Terra. You understand,
of course. Purely routine."
Craig remained on the final step of the ramp, puzzled. The man turned
to a companion at his right.
"We can see that this gentleman has come from a long, long way off,
can't we?"
The other man did not look up. He was peering into what seemed to Craig
to be a kind of camera.
"We can allow the gentlemen to continue now, can't we? It wasn't that
we believed for a minute, you understand ... purely routine."
Both men were gone in an instant, leaving Craig completely bewildered.
"You goin' to move on, buddy, or you want to go back?"
Craig turned to face a line of his fellow passengers up the ramp behind
him.
"Who was that?" Craig asked.
"Customs. Bet you never got such a smooth screening before, eh?"
"You mean he
screened
me? What for?"
"Hard to say," the other passenger said. "You'll get used to this. They
get it over with quick."
Craig made his way toward the spaceport administration building. His
first physical contact with Terra had passed unnoticed.
"Sir! Sir!" cried a voice behind him.
He wheeled to see a man walking briskly toward him.
"You dropped this, sir. Quite by accident, of course."
Craig examined the small object the man had given him before rushing
off toward an exit.
It was an empty PON tube he had just discarded. He couldn't
understand why the man had bothered until he realized that the
plastaloid floor of the lobby displayed not the faintest scrap of paper
nor trace of dirt.
The Import personnel man was toying with a small chip of gleaming
metal. He did not look directly at Craig for more than an instant at a
time, and commented on Craig's description of his trip through the city
only very briefly between questions.
"It's a good deal bigger than I imagined," Craig was saying. "Haven't
seen much of it, of course. Thought I'd check in here with you first."
"Yes, naturally."
"Thought you could give me some idea of conditions...."
"Conditions?"
"For instance, what part of the city I should live in. That is, what
part is closest to where I'll work."
"I see," said the man noncommittally. It seemed to Craig that he was
about to add something. He did not, however, but instead rose from his
chair and walked to the large window overlooking an enormous section of
the city far below. He stared out the window for a time, leaving Craig
seated uncomfortably in the silent room. There was a distracted quality
about him, Craig thought.
"You are the first man we have had from the Intergalactic Service," the
personnel man said finally.
"That so?"
"Yes." He turned to face Craig briefly before continuing. "You must
find it very strange here."
"Well, I've never seen a city so big."
"Yes, so big. And also...." He seemed to consider many words before
completing the sentence. "And also different."
"I haven't been here very long," said Craig. "Matter of fact, I haven't
been anywhere very long. This is my first real experience with life on
a planet. As an adult, anyway."
The personnel man seated himself once more and pressed a button on a
small instrument. A secretary entered the office from a door to Craig's
left.
"Miss Wendel, this is Mr. Craig. Mr. Craig, my secretary. Mr. Craig
will enter Minerals and Metals, Zone V."
They exchanged formal greetings. She was a moderately pretty girl of
medium height and, to Craig, a pleasantly rounded figure. He would have
attempted to catch her eye had she not immediately occupied herself
with unfolding the legs of a small instrument she was carrying.
"This is Mr. Craig's first landing on Terra, Miss Wendel," the
personnel man continued. "Actually, we shall have to consider him in
much the same way we would an extraterrestrial."
The girl glanced at Craig, casting him a cool, impersonal smile.
"He was formerly a flight officer in the Intergalactic Space Service."
The statement was delivered in an almost exaggeratedly casual tone.
The girl glanced at him once more, this time with a definite quizzical
look in her brown eyes.
"Three complete tours of duty, I believe."
"Four," corrected Craig. "Four tours of three years each, minus a
year's terminal leave."
"I take it you have no identification card?" the man asked.
"The one I held in the service. It's pretty comprehensive."
The other turned to the secretary. "You'll see that he is assisted in
filing his application, won't you? A provisional Code II. That will
enable you to enter all Import offices freely, Mr. Craig."
"Will he need a food and—clothing ration also?" asked the girl,
without looking at Craig.
"Yes." The man laughed. "You'll excuse us, Mr. Craig. We realize that
you couldn't be expected to be familiar with Terra's fashions. In your
present outfit you would certainly be typed as a ... well, you'd be
made uncomfortable."
Craig reddened in spite of himself. He had bought the suit on Ghandii.
"A hick," he supplied.
"I wouldn't go that far, but some people might."
Craig noted the pleasant way the girl filled her trim, rather severe
business suit. He amused himself by calculating stress patterns in its
plain woven material as she assembled the forms for him.
"Here, Mr. Craig. I believe these are complete."
"They look pretty complicated."
"Not at all. The questions are quite explicit."
Craig looked them over quickly.
"I guess so. Say, Miss Wendel, I was wondering—I don't know the city
at all. Maybe you could go with me to have dinner. It must be almost
dinnertime now. You could sort of check me out on some...."
"I'm afraid that would be quite impossible. You couldn't gain
admittance to any office you need to visit tonight. Therefore, it is
impossible for me to be of any assistance to you."
"Oh, come now, Miss Wendel. There are women aboard spaceships. I'm not
a starved wolf."
"Certainly you are not, Mr. Craig. But it is not possible for me...."
"You said that already, but you can have dinner with me. Just company."
"I'm afraid I don't understand."
The Galactic hotel strove to preserve an archaic tone of hospitality.
It advertised "a night's lodgings" and it possessed a bellboy. The
bellboy actually carried Craig's plasticarton and large file of punch
cards and forms to his room. Tired from the long, confusing day, Craig
was not impressed. He vaguely wondered if the little drama of the
hotel carried so far as a small fee to be paid the bellboy, and he
hoped he would have the right size of Terran units in his wallet.
Outside the door to the room, the bellboy stopped and turned to Craig.
"For five I'll tell you where it is," he said in a subdued tone.
"Tell me where what is?"
"You know, the mike."
"Mike?"
"All right, mister, three units, then. I wasn't trying to hold you up."
"You mean a microphone?" asked Craig, mechanically fishing for his
wallet.
"Sure, they don't put in screens here. Wanted to, but the boss
convinced 'em there aren't any Freedomites ever stay here."
"Where is the microphone?" Craig asked as he found a ten unit note.
He was too puzzled to wonder what he was expected to do with the
information.
"It's in the bed illuminator. You can short it out with a razor blade.
Or I'll do it for another two."
"Never mind," Craig said wearily. He waited while the bellboy inserted
a key into the door and opened it for him.
"I can get you a sensatia-tape," whispered the boy when they had
entered. He nudged Craig wickedly. "You know what they're like?"
"Yeah," Craig said disgustedly. Traffic in the illicit mental-image
tapes was known as far into space as lonely men had penetrated.
Intergalactic considered them as great a menace to mental and moral
stability as the hectopiates. Craig wearily got the man out of the
room, took a PON pill, and eased himself into the bed.
It had been a weird day and he had not liked it. There was no telling
how long it would take him to shake his—sea legs, the psychologist
had called it. One thing was sure: Terra aggressively went after its
strangers. | [
"It relaxes the sympathetic nervous system",
"It puts a human to sleep for up to 12 days",
"It helps people adjust to changes in gravity",
"It opens the airways to allow for easier breathing"
] | 2 |
51407_3ARTW1HP_3 | Which activity is part of the psychometric evaluation? | SEA LEGS
By FRANK QUATTROCCHI
Illustrated by EMSH
Rootless and footloose, a man in space can't help
but dream of coming home. But something nobody should
do is bet on the validity of a homesick dream!
Flight Officer Robert Craig surrendered the tube containing his service
record tapes and stood waiting while the bored process clerk examined
the seal.
"Your clearance," said the clerk.
Craig handed him a battered punch card and watched the man insert it in
the reproducer. He felt anxiety as the much-handled card refused for a
time to match the instrument's metal contact points. The line of men
behind Craig fidgeted.
"You got to get this punched by Territorial," said the clerk. "Take it
back to your unit's clearance office."
"Look again, Sergeant," Craig said, repressing his irritation.
"It ain't notched."
"The hell it isn't."
The man examined the card with squinting care and nodded finally. "It's
so damn notched," he complained. "You ought to take care of that card;
can't get on without one."
Craig hesitated before moving.
"Next," said the clerk, "What you waiting for?"
"Don't I take my 201 file?"
"We send it on ahead. Go to Grav 1 desk."
A murmur greeted the order. Craig experienced the thrill of knowing
the envy of the others. Grav 1—that meant Terra. He crossed the long,
dreary room, knowing the eyes of the other men were upon him.
"Your service tapes," the next noncom said. "Where you going?"
"Grav 1—Terra," fumbled Craig. "Los Angeles."
"Los Angeles, eh? Where in Los Angeles?"
"I—I—" Craig muttered, fumbling in his pockets.
"No specific destination," supplied the man as he punched a key on a
small instrument, "Air-lock ahead and to your right. Strip and follow
the robot's orders. Any metal?"
"Metal?" asked Craig.
"You know,
metal
."
"Well, my identification key."
"Here," commanded the clerk, extending a plastic envelope.
Craig moved in the direction indicated. He fought the irrational fear
that he had missed an important step in the complicated clerical
process. He cursed the grudging attitude of the headquarters satellite
personnel and felt the impotence of a spaceman who had long forgotten
the bureaucracy of a rear area base. The knowledge that much of it was
motivated by envy soothed him as he clumsily let himself into the lock.
"Place your clothing in the receptacle provided and assume a stationary
position on the raised podium in the center of the lock."
Craig obeyed the robot voice and began reluctantly to remove his flight
jacket. Its incredibly fine-grained leather would carry none of the
strange, foreign associations for the base station clerk who would
appropriate it. He would never know the beautiful, gentle beast that
supplied this skin.
"You are retarding the progress of others. Please respond more quickly
to your orders."
Craig quickly removed the last of his clothing. It was impossible
to hate a robot, but one could certainly hate those who set it into
operation.
"You will find a red button at your feet. Lower your head and depress
that button."
Stepping on the button with his bare foot produced an instant of
brilliant blue illumination. A small scratch on his arm stung briefly
and he was somewhat blinded by the flash even through his eyelids, but
that was all there was to the sterilizing process.
"Your clothing and effects will be in the dressing room immediately
beyond the locked door."
He found his clothing cleanly and neatly hung on plastic hangers just
inside the door to the dressing room. The few personal items he carried
in his pockets were still there. The Schtann flight jacket was actually
there, looking like new, its space-blue unfaded and as wonderfully
pliant as before.
"Insert your right arm into the instrument on the central table,"
commanded the same voice he had heard before. "Turn your arm until the
scratch is in contact with the metal plate. There will be a slight
pain, but it is necessary to treat the small injury you have been
disregarding."
Craig obeyed and clenched his teeth against a sharp stinging. His
respect for the robot-controlled equipment of bases had risen. When
he withdrew his arm, the scratch was neatly coated with a layer of
flesh-colored plastic material.
He dressed quickly and was on the verge of asking the robot for
instructions, when a man appeared in the open doorway.
"I am Captain Wyandotte," said the man in a pleasant voice.
"Well, what's next?" asked Craig somewhat more belligerently than he
had intended.
The man smiled. "Your reaction is quite natural. You are somewhat
aggressive after Clerical, eh?"
"I'm a little anxious to get home, I suppose," said Craig defensively.
"By 'home' you mean Terra. But you've never been there, have you?"
"No, but my father—"
"Your parents left Terra during the Second Colonization of Cassiopeia
II, didn't they?"
"Yes," Craig said. He was uncomfortable; Wyandotte seemed to know all
about him.
"We might say you've been away quite a while, eh?"
"I was entered as a spaceman when I was 16," Craig said. "I've never
been down for any period as yet."
"You mean you haven't been in a gravity system?"
"Oh, I've landed a few times, even walked around for a while...."
"With the help of paraoxylnebutal," supplied the captain.
"Well, sure."
"Mr. Craig, I suppose you've guessed that the next step in our little
torture system here is psych."
"So I gathered."
The captain laughed reassuringly. "No, don't put up your guard again.
The worst is over. Short of Gravitational conditioning, there is
nothing to stop you from going to Terra."
"Sorry, I guess I'm a little touchy. This is my first time...."
"Quite natural. But it being your first time—in quite a number of
ways, I might add—it will be necessary for you to undergo some
conditioning."
"Conditioning?" asked Craig.
"Yes. You have spent eleven years in space. Your body is conditioned to
a normal state of free fall, or at best to a state of acceleration."
"Yeah, I know. Once on Gerymeade...."
"You were ill, couldn't keep your balance, felt dizzy. That is why
all spacemen carry PON, paraoxylnebutal, with them. It helps
suppress certain physiological reactions to an entirely new set of
conditions. Channels of the ear, for example. They play an important
part in our awareness of balance. They operate on a simple gravity
principle. Without gravity they act up for a time, then gradually lose
function. Returning to gravity is rather frightening at first."
"I know all about this, Captain."
"You've undoubtedly read popularizations in tapezines. But you have
experienced it briefly."
"I expect to have some trouble at first." Craig was disturbed by the
wordy psychologist. What was the man actually saying?
"Do you know what sailors of ancient times meant by 'sea legs?'" asked
Wyandotte. "Men on a rolling ocean acclimated themselves to a rolling
horizontal. They had trouble when they went ashore and the horizontal
didn't roll any more.
"It meant more than that. There were excellent psychological reasons
for the old stereotype, the 'drunken sailor.' A port city was a
frightening thing to an old sailor—but let's begin our little job at
the beginning. I'll turn you over to psychometry for the usual tests
and pick you up tomorrow morning at, say, 0900."
During the days that followed, the psychologist seemed to Craig to
become progressively more didactic. He would deliver long speeches
about the "freedom of open space." He spoke repetitiously of the
"growing complexity of Terran society." And yet the man could not
be pinned down to any specific condition the spaceman would find
intolerable.
Craig began to hate the delay that kept him from Terra. Through the
ports of the headquarters base satellite, he scanned the constellations
for the scores of worlds he had visited during his eleven years in
space. They were incredibly varied, even those that supported life. He
had weathered difficult landings on worlds with rip-tide gravities, had
felt the pull of the incredible star-tides imparted by twin and even
triple star systems. He had been on Einstein IV, the planet of eight
moons, and had felt the pulse of all eight of the satellites at once
that no PON could completely nullify.
But even if he could accept the psychologist's authority for the
cumulative effect of a gravity system, he could not understand the
unspoken warning he felt underlying all that the man said.
"Of course it has changed," Craig was protesting. "Anyway, I never
really knew very much about Terra. So what? I know it won't be as it
was in tapezines either."
"Yet you are so completely sure you will want to live out your life
there, that you are willing to give up space service for it."
"We've gone through this time and time again," Craig said wearily. "I
gave you my reasons for quitting space. We analyzed them. You agreed
that you could not decide that for me and that my decision is logical.
You tell me spacemen don't settle down on Terra. Yet you won't—or
can't—tell me why. I've got a damned good job there—"
"You may find that 'damned good jobs' become boring."
"So I'll transfer. I don't know what you're trying to get at, Captain,
but you're not talking me out of going back. If the service needs men
so badly, let them get somebody else. I've put in
my
time."
"Do you really think that's my reason?"
"Sure. What else can it be?"
"Mr. Craig," the psychologist said slowly, "you have my authorization
for you to return to Terra as a private citizen of that planet. You
will be given a very liberal supply of PON—which you will
definitely need. Good luck. You'll need that too."
On the eighth day, two attendants, who showed the effects of massive
doses of PON to protect themselves from the centrifugal force,
had to carry a man out of the tank. Many others asked to be removed,
begged to be allowed to withdraw their resignations.
"The twelfth day is the worst," a grizzled spaceman told Craig. "That's
when the best of 'em want out."
Craig clenched the iron rung of his bed and struggled to bring the old
man's face into focus.
"How ... how do they know when you ought ... to come out?" he asked
between waves of nausea.
"Blood pressure. They get you just before you go into shock."
"How can they tell?" Craig fought down his growing panic. "I can't."
"That strap around your belly. You mean you ain't noticed it?"
"Haven't noticed much of anything."
"Well, it's keyed to give them some kind of signal."
The old man lapsed into silence. Craig wished him to continue. He
desperately wanted something to distract his mind from the ghastly
conditioning process.
Slowly at first, the lines formed by seams in the metal ceiling began
to bend. Here it came again!
"Old man!" shouted Craig.
"Yeah, son. They've dropped it down a notch."
"Dropped ... it ... down?"
"Maybe that ain't scientific, but it's the way I always think of it."
"Can't they ... drop it down continuously?"
"They tried that a few times—once when I was aboard. You wouldn't like
it, kid. You wouldn't like it at all."
"How ... many times ... do they drop it?"
"Four times during the day, three at night. Twenty days."
A nightmare of visual sensations ebbed into Craig's mind. He was
vaguely aware of the moans of other men in the vaultlike room. Wave
upon wave of nausea swept him as he watched the seam lines bend and
warp fantastically. He snapped his eyelids shut, only to begin feeling
the nightmarish bodily sensations once more. He felt the cot slowly
rise longitudinally, felt himself upside down, then the snap of turning
right side up once more—and he knew that neither he nor the cot had
moved so much as an inch.
Craig heard the voices around him, muffled, as though talking through
wadding.
"... got it bad."
"We better take him out."
"... pretty bad."
"He'll go into shock."
"... never make it the twelfth."
"We better yank him."
"I'm ... all right," Craig mumbled at the voices. He struggled with the
bonds of his cot. With terrible effort he forced his eyes open. Two
white-clad figures, ridiculously out of proportion, hovered wraithlike
over him. Four elongated eyes peered at him.
Attendants coming for to take me home....
"Touch me and I'll kick your teeth in!" he yelled. "I'm going to Terra.
Wish you were going to Terra?"
Then it was better. Oddly, he passed the twelfth day easily. By the
fourteenth day, Craig knew he could stand Grav 1. The whine of the
centrifuge's motors had diminished to a low hum. Either that or they
had begun to produce ultra-sonic waves. Craig was not sure.
Most of the men had passed through the torments of gravitational
conditioning. The huge headquarters base centrifuge aboard the man-made
satellite had gradually caused their bodies to respond once more to a
single source of pull. They were now ready to become inhabitants of
planets again, instead of free-falling ships.
On the eighteenth day, automatic machinery freed them from their
imprisoning cots. Clumsily and awkwardly at first, the men began to
walk, to hold their heads and arms in proper attitudes. They laughed
and joked about it and kidded those who were slow at adjusting.
Then they again began taking paraoxylnebutal in preparation for the
free-fall flight to Terra.
Only one of the score of men in the centrifuge tank remained
voluntarily in his cot.
"Space article violator," the old man informed Craig. "Psycho, I think.
Went amuck with some extraterritorials. Killed a dozen."
"What will they do, exile him?"
"Not to Chociante, if that's what you mean. They just jerked his space
card and gave him a one-way ticket to Terra."
"For twelve murders?" asked Craig incredulously.
"That's enough, son." The old man eyed Craig for an instant before
looking away. "Pick something to talk about. What do you figure on
doing when you get to Terra, for instance?"
"I'm going into Import. My father was in it for twenty years."
"Sure," said the old spaceman, watching a group of young crewmen
engaged in an animated conversation.
"It's a good job. There's a future to it."
"Yeah."
Why did he have to explain anything at all to the old space tramp?
"Once I get set up, I'll probably try to open my own business."
"And spend your weekends on Luna."
Craig half rose from his cot, jarred into anger.
But the old spaceman turned, smiling wryly. "Don't get hot, kid. I
guess I spent too long in Zone V." He paused to examine his wrinkled
hands. They were indelibly marked with lever callouses. "You get to
thinking anyone who stays closer'n eighty light years from Terra is a
land-lubber."
Craig relaxed, realizing he had acted childishly. "Used to think the
same. Then I took the exam and got this job."
"Whereabouts?"
"Los Angeles."
The old man looked up at Craig. "You don't know much about Terra, do
you, son?"
"Not much."
"Yeah. Well, I hope you ain't disappointed."
"My father was born there, but I never saw it. Never hit the Solar
System, matter of fact. Never saw much of anything close up. I stood it
a long time, old man, this hitting atmospheres all over the Universe."
But the spaceman seemed to have lost interest. He was unpacking some
personal belongings from a kit.
"What are you doing in Grav 1?" Craig asked.
The old man's face clouded for an instant. "In the old days, they used
to say us old-timers acted like clocks. They used to say we just ran
down. Now they got some fancy psychology name for it."
Craig regretted his question. He would have muttered some word of
apology, but the old man continued.
"Maybe you've read some of the old sea stories, or more'n likely had
'em read to you. Sailors could go to sea until they just sort of dried
up. The sea tanned their skins and stiffened their bones, but it never
stiffened their hearts. When they got old, it just pulled them in.
"But space is different. Space is raw and new. It tugs at your guts. It
sends the blood rushing through your veins. It's like loving. You don't
become a part of space the way you do the old sea, though. It leaves
you strictly alone. Except that it sucks you dry, takes all the soup
out of you, leaves you brittle and old—old as a dehydrated piece of
split leather.
"Then one day it shoots a spurt of blood around in one of your old
veins. Something gives. Space is through with you then. And if you can
stand this whirligig conditioning, you're through with space."
"
You can't figure it. Some of 'em urp all over and turn six shades of
green.
"
"
You got to watch the ones that don't.
"
"
Yeah, you got to watch the ones that don't. Especially the old ones.
"
"
He's old. You think it was his heart?
"
"
Who knows?
"
"
They'll dump him, won't they?
"
"
After a tracer is sent through. But it won't do any good.
"
"
He probably outlived everybody that ever knew him.
"
"
Wouldn't be surprised. Here, grab his leg.
"
Robert Craig folded the flight jacket tightly and stuffed it into the
cylindrical carton. A sleeve unwound just as he did so, making it
difficult to fit into the place he had made for it. Exasperated, he
refolded it and jammed it in place. Smaller rolls of underclothing were
then fitted in. When he was satisfied with the layer, he tossed in a
small handful of crystals and began to fill the next layer. After the
carton was completely filled, he ignited the sealing strip and watched
as the plastic melted into a single, seamless whole. It was ready for
irradiation. Probably in another ten years his son-to-be would put it
on and play spaceman. But Craig swore he'd make sure that the kid knew
what a stinking life it was.
At 1300 hours, the ferry bumped heavily alongside the starboard lock.
It was the signal for relief in the passengers' quarters; many were
beginning to feel a reaction to the short free-fall flight from the
headquarters satellite.
The audio called out: "Flight Officer Robert Craig. Flight Officer
Robert Craig. Report to Orderly 12. Report to Orderly 12 through the
aft door."
With pangs of anxiety he could not completely suppress, Craig obeyed.
Orderly 12 handed him a message container.
"Who's it from? Somebody on Terra?"
"From a private spaceman named Morgan Brockman."
"
Brockman?
"
"He was with you in the grav tank."
"The old man!"
The message container produced a battered punch card. Craig
straightened it and was about to reach into his pocket for a hand
transcriber. But then he noticed the card bore only a few irregular
punches and was covered with rough hand printing.
Son, when the flunkies get around to giving you this, they'll have
shot me out the tube. How do I know? Same way you know when your
turbos are going to throw a blade. It's good this way.
There's something you can do for me if you want to. Way back, some
fifty years ago, there was a woman. She was my wife. It's a long story
I won't bother you with. Anyway, I left her. Wanted to take her along
with me, but she wouldn't go.
Earth was a lot different then than it is now. They don't have to tell
me; I know. I saw it coming and so did Ethel. We talked about it and I
knew I had to go. She wouldn't or couldn't go. Wanted me to stay, but
I couldn't.
I tried to send her some units once in a while. Don't know if she ever
got them. Sometimes I forgot to send them at all. You know, you're way
out across the Galaxy, while she's home.
Go see her if you can, son. Will you? Make sure she gets the unit
transfer I made out. It isn't much out of seventy years of living,
but she may need it. And maybe you can tell her a little bit about
what it means to be out there. Tell her it's open and free and when
you got hold of those levers and you're trying for an orbit on
something big and new and green.... Hell, you remember. You know how
to tell her.
Her name is Ethel Brockman. I know she'll still use my name. Her
address is or was East 71, North 101, Number 4. You can trace her
easy if she moved. Women don't generally shove off and not leave a
forwarding address. Not Ethel, at least.
Craig put the battered card in his pocket and walked back through the
door to the passenger room. How did you explain to an old woman why her
husband deserted her fifty years before? Some kind of story about one's
duty to the Universe? No, the old man had not been in Intergalactic. He
had been a tramp spaceman. Well, why
had
he left?
Fifty years in space.
Fifty
years! Zone V had been beyond anybody's
imagination that long ago. He must have been in on the first Cetusian
flights and shot the early landings in Cetus II. God only knew how many
times he had battled Zone 111b pirates....
Damn the old man! How did one explain?
Craig descended the ramp from the huge jet and concentrated on his
impressions. One day he would recall this moment, his first on the
planet Terra. He tried to recall his first thrill at seeing Los
Angeles, 1500 square miles of it, from the ship as it entered the
atmosphere.
He was about to step off the last step when a man appeared hurriedly. A
rather plump man, he displayed a toothy smile on his puffy red face.
"A moment, sir. Just a little greeting from the Terra. You understand,
of course. Purely routine."
Craig remained on the final step of the ramp, puzzled. The man turned
to a companion at his right.
"We can see that this gentleman has come from a long, long way off,
can't we?"
The other man did not look up. He was peering into what seemed to Craig
to be a kind of camera.
"We can allow the gentlemen to continue now, can't we? It wasn't that
we believed for a minute, you understand ... purely routine."
Both men were gone in an instant, leaving Craig completely bewildered.
"You goin' to move on, buddy, or you want to go back?"
Craig turned to face a line of his fellow passengers up the ramp behind
him.
"Who was that?" Craig asked.
"Customs. Bet you never got such a smooth screening before, eh?"
"You mean he
screened
me? What for?"
"Hard to say," the other passenger said. "You'll get used to this. They
get it over with quick."
Craig made his way toward the spaceport administration building. His
first physical contact with Terra had passed unnoticed.
"Sir! Sir!" cried a voice behind him.
He wheeled to see a man walking briskly toward him.
"You dropped this, sir. Quite by accident, of course."
Craig examined the small object the man had given him before rushing
off toward an exit.
It was an empty PON tube he had just discarded. He couldn't
understand why the man had bothered until he realized that the
plastaloid floor of the lobby displayed not the faintest scrap of paper
nor trace of dirt.
The Import personnel man was toying with a small chip of gleaming
metal. He did not look directly at Craig for more than an instant at a
time, and commented on Craig's description of his trip through the city
only very briefly between questions.
"It's a good deal bigger than I imagined," Craig was saying. "Haven't
seen much of it, of course. Thought I'd check in here with you first."
"Yes, naturally."
"Thought you could give me some idea of conditions...."
"Conditions?"
"For instance, what part of the city I should live in. That is, what
part is closest to where I'll work."
"I see," said the man noncommittally. It seemed to Craig that he was
about to add something. He did not, however, but instead rose from his
chair and walked to the large window overlooking an enormous section of
the city far below. He stared out the window for a time, leaving Craig
seated uncomfortably in the silent room. There was a distracted quality
about him, Craig thought.
"You are the first man we have had from the Intergalactic Service," the
personnel man said finally.
"That so?"
"Yes." He turned to face Craig briefly before continuing. "You must
find it very strange here."
"Well, I've never seen a city so big."
"Yes, so big. And also...." He seemed to consider many words before
completing the sentence. "And also different."
"I haven't been here very long," said Craig. "Matter of fact, I haven't
been anywhere very long. This is my first real experience with life on
a planet. As an adult, anyway."
The personnel man seated himself once more and pressed a button on a
small instrument. A secretary entered the office from a door to Craig's
left.
"Miss Wendel, this is Mr. Craig. Mr. Craig, my secretary. Mr. Craig
will enter Minerals and Metals, Zone V."
They exchanged formal greetings. She was a moderately pretty girl of
medium height and, to Craig, a pleasantly rounded figure. He would have
attempted to catch her eye had she not immediately occupied herself
with unfolding the legs of a small instrument she was carrying.
"This is Mr. Craig's first landing on Terra, Miss Wendel," the
personnel man continued. "Actually, we shall have to consider him in
much the same way we would an extraterrestrial."
The girl glanced at Craig, casting him a cool, impersonal smile.
"He was formerly a flight officer in the Intergalactic Space Service."
The statement was delivered in an almost exaggeratedly casual tone.
The girl glanced at him once more, this time with a definite quizzical
look in her brown eyes.
"Three complete tours of duty, I believe."
"Four," corrected Craig. "Four tours of three years each, minus a
year's terminal leave."
"I take it you have no identification card?" the man asked.
"The one I held in the service. It's pretty comprehensive."
The other turned to the secretary. "You'll see that he is assisted in
filing his application, won't you? A provisional Code II. That will
enable you to enter all Import offices freely, Mr. Craig."
"Will he need a food and—clothing ration also?" asked the girl,
without looking at Craig.
"Yes." The man laughed. "You'll excuse us, Mr. Craig. We realize that
you couldn't be expected to be familiar with Terra's fashions. In your
present outfit you would certainly be typed as a ... well, you'd be
made uncomfortable."
Craig reddened in spite of himself. He had bought the suit on Ghandii.
"A hick," he supplied.
"I wouldn't go that far, but some people might."
Craig noted the pleasant way the girl filled her trim, rather severe
business suit. He amused himself by calculating stress patterns in its
plain woven material as she assembled the forms for him.
"Here, Mr. Craig. I believe these are complete."
"They look pretty complicated."
"Not at all. The questions are quite explicit."
Craig looked them over quickly.
"I guess so. Say, Miss Wendel, I was wondering—I don't know the city
at all. Maybe you could go with me to have dinner. It must be almost
dinnertime now. You could sort of check me out on some...."
"I'm afraid that would be quite impossible. You couldn't gain
admittance to any office you need to visit tonight. Therefore, it is
impossible for me to be of any assistance to you."
"Oh, come now, Miss Wendel. There are women aboard spaceships. I'm not
a starved wolf."
"Certainly you are not, Mr. Craig. But it is not possible for me...."
"You said that already, but you can have dinner with me. Just company."
"I'm afraid I don't understand."
The Galactic hotel strove to preserve an archaic tone of hospitality.
It advertised "a night's lodgings" and it possessed a bellboy. The
bellboy actually carried Craig's plasticarton and large file of punch
cards and forms to his room. Tired from the long, confusing day, Craig
was not impressed. He vaguely wondered if the little drama of the
hotel carried so far as a small fee to be paid the bellboy, and he
hoped he would have the right size of Terran units in his wallet.
Outside the door to the room, the bellboy stopped and turned to Craig.
"For five I'll tell you where it is," he said in a subdued tone.
"Tell me where what is?"
"You know, the mike."
"Mike?"
"All right, mister, three units, then. I wasn't trying to hold you up."
"You mean a microphone?" asked Craig, mechanically fishing for his
wallet.
"Sure, they don't put in screens here. Wanted to, but the boss
convinced 'em there aren't any Freedomites ever stay here."
"Where is the microphone?" Craig asked as he found a ten unit note.
He was too puzzled to wonder what he was expected to do with the
information.
"It's in the bed illuminator. You can short it out with a razor blade.
Or I'll do it for another two."
"Never mind," Craig said wearily. He waited while the bellboy inserted
a key into the door and opened it for him.
"I can get you a sensatia-tape," whispered the boy when they had
entered. He nudged Craig wickedly. "You know what they're like?"
"Yeah," Craig said disgustedly. Traffic in the illicit mental-image
tapes was known as far into space as lonely men had penetrated.
Intergalactic considered them as great a menace to mental and moral
stability as the hectopiates. Craig wearily got the man out of the
room, took a PON pill, and eased himself into the bed.
It had been a weird day and he had not liked it. There was no telling
how long it would take him to shake his—sea legs, the psychologist
had called it. One thing was sure: Terra aggressively went after its
strangers. | [
"A trial period of exposure to gravity conditions on Terra",
"Role playing worst case scenarios on Terra",
"Exposure to video and audio footage from Terra",
"Lengthy interviews with multiple officials who have been to Terra"
] | 0 |
51407_3ARTW1HP_4 | What happened to Morgan Brockman by the end of the passage? | SEA LEGS
By FRANK QUATTROCCHI
Illustrated by EMSH
Rootless and footloose, a man in space can't help
but dream of coming home. But something nobody should
do is bet on the validity of a homesick dream!
Flight Officer Robert Craig surrendered the tube containing his service
record tapes and stood waiting while the bored process clerk examined
the seal.
"Your clearance," said the clerk.
Craig handed him a battered punch card and watched the man insert it in
the reproducer. He felt anxiety as the much-handled card refused for a
time to match the instrument's metal contact points. The line of men
behind Craig fidgeted.
"You got to get this punched by Territorial," said the clerk. "Take it
back to your unit's clearance office."
"Look again, Sergeant," Craig said, repressing his irritation.
"It ain't notched."
"The hell it isn't."
The man examined the card with squinting care and nodded finally. "It's
so damn notched," he complained. "You ought to take care of that card;
can't get on without one."
Craig hesitated before moving.
"Next," said the clerk, "What you waiting for?"
"Don't I take my 201 file?"
"We send it on ahead. Go to Grav 1 desk."
A murmur greeted the order. Craig experienced the thrill of knowing
the envy of the others. Grav 1—that meant Terra. He crossed the long,
dreary room, knowing the eyes of the other men were upon him.
"Your service tapes," the next noncom said. "Where you going?"
"Grav 1—Terra," fumbled Craig. "Los Angeles."
"Los Angeles, eh? Where in Los Angeles?"
"I—I—" Craig muttered, fumbling in his pockets.
"No specific destination," supplied the man as he punched a key on a
small instrument, "Air-lock ahead and to your right. Strip and follow
the robot's orders. Any metal?"
"Metal?" asked Craig.
"You know,
metal
."
"Well, my identification key."
"Here," commanded the clerk, extending a plastic envelope.
Craig moved in the direction indicated. He fought the irrational fear
that he had missed an important step in the complicated clerical
process. He cursed the grudging attitude of the headquarters satellite
personnel and felt the impotence of a spaceman who had long forgotten
the bureaucracy of a rear area base. The knowledge that much of it was
motivated by envy soothed him as he clumsily let himself into the lock.
"Place your clothing in the receptacle provided and assume a stationary
position on the raised podium in the center of the lock."
Craig obeyed the robot voice and began reluctantly to remove his flight
jacket. Its incredibly fine-grained leather would carry none of the
strange, foreign associations for the base station clerk who would
appropriate it. He would never know the beautiful, gentle beast that
supplied this skin.
"You are retarding the progress of others. Please respond more quickly
to your orders."
Craig quickly removed the last of his clothing. It was impossible
to hate a robot, but one could certainly hate those who set it into
operation.
"You will find a red button at your feet. Lower your head and depress
that button."
Stepping on the button with his bare foot produced an instant of
brilliant blue illumination. A small scratch on his arm stung briefly
and he was somewhat blinded by the flash even through his eyelids, but
that was all there was to the sterilizing process.
"Your clothing and effects will be in the dressing room immediately
beyond the locked door."
He found his clothing cleanly and neatly hung on plastic hangers just
inside the door to the dressing room. The few personal items he carried
in his pockets were still there. The Schtann flight jacket was actually
there, looking like new, its space-blue unfaded and as wonderfully
pliant as before.
"Insert your right arm into the instrument on the central table,"
commanded the same voice he had heard before. "Turn your arm until the
scratch is in contact with the metal plate. There will be a slight
pain, but it is necessary to treat the small injury you have been
disregarding."
Craig obeyed and clenched his teeth against a sharp stinging. His
respect for the robot-controlled equipment of bases had risen. When
he withdrew his arm, the scratch was neatly coated with a layer of
flesh-colored plastic material.
He dressed quickly and was on the verge of asking the robot for
instructions, when a man appeared in the open doorway.
"I am Captain Wyandotte," said the man in a pleasant voice.
"Well, what's next?" asked Craig somewhat more belligerently than he
had intended.
The man smiled. "Your reaction is quite natural. You are somewhat
aggressive after Clerical, eh?"
"I'm a little anxious to get home, I suppose," said Craig defensively.
"By 'home' you mean Terra. But you've never been there, have you?"
"No, but my father—"
"Your parents left Terra during the Second Colonization of Cassiopeia
II, didn't they?"
"Yes," Craig said. He was uncomfortable; Wyandotte seemed to know all
about him.
"We might say you've been away quite a while, eh?"
"I was entered as a spaceman when I was 16," Craig said. "I've never
been down for any period as yet."
"You mean you haven't been in a gravity system?"
"Oh, I've landed a few times, even walked around for a while...."
"With the help of paraoxylnebutal," supplied the captain.
"Well, sure."
"Mr. Craig, I suppose you've guessed that the next step in our little
torture system here is psych."
"So I gathered."
The captain laughed reassuringly. "No, don't put up your guard again.
The worst is over. Short of Gravitational conditioning, there is
nothing to stop you from going to Terra."
"Sorry, I guess I'm a little touchy. This is my first time...."
"Quite natural. But it being your first time—in quite a number of
ways, I might add—it will be necessary for you to undergo some
conditioning."
"Conditioning?" asked Craig.
"Yes. You have spent eleven years in space. Your body is conditioned to
a normal state of free fall, or at best to a state of acceleration."
"Yeah, I know. Once on Gerymeade...."
"You were ill, couldn't keep your balance, felt dizzy. That is why
all spacemen carry PON, paraoxylnebutal, with them. It helps
suppress certain physiological reactions to an entirely new set of
conditions. Channels of the ear, for example. They play an important
part in our awareness of balance. They operate on a simple gravity
principle. Without gravity they act up for a time, then gradually lose
function. Returning to gravity is rather frightening at first."
"I know all about this, Captain."
"You've undoubtedly read popularizations in tapezines. But you have
experienced it briefly."
"I expect to have some trouble at first." Craig was disturbed by the
wordy psychologist. What was the man actually saying?
"Do you know what sailors of ancient times meant by 'sea legs?'" asked
Wyandotte. "Men on a rolling ocean acclimated themselves to a rolling
horizontal. They had trouble when they went ashore and the horizontal
didn't roll any more.
"It meant more than that. There were excellent psychological reasons
for the old stereotype, the 'drunken sailor.' A port city was a
frightening thing to an old sailor—but let's begin our little job at
the beginning. I'll turn you over to psychometry for the usual tests
and pick you up tomorrow morning at, say, 0900."
During the days that followed, the psychologist seemed to Craig to
become progressively more didactic. He would deliver long speeches
about the "freedom of open space." He spoke repetitiously of the
"growing complexity of Terran society." And yet the man could not
be pinned down to any specific condition the spaceman would find
intolerable.
Craig began to hate the delay that kept him from Terra. Through the
ports of the headquarters base satellite, he scanned the constellations
for the scores of worlds he had visited during his eleven years in
space. They were incredibly varied, even those that supported life. He
had weathered difficult landings on worlds with rip-tide gravities, had
felt the pull of the incredible star-tides imparted by twin and even
triple star systems. He had been on Einstein IV, the planet of eight
moons, and had felt the pulse of all eight of the satellites at once
that no PON could completely nullify.
But even if he could accept the psychologist's authority for the
cumulative effect of a gravity system, he could not understand the
unspoken warning he felt underlying all that the man said.
"Of course it has changed," Craig was protesting. "Anyway, I never
really knew very much about Terra. So what? I know it won't be as it
was in tapezines either."
"Yet you are so completely sure you will want to live out your life
there, that you are willing to give up space service for it."
"We've gone through this time and time again," Craig said wearily. "I
gave you my reasons for quitting space. We analyzed them. You agreed
that you could not decide that for me and that my decision is logical.
You tell me spacemen don't settle down on Terra. Yet you won't—or
can't—tell me why. I've got a damned good job there—"
"You may find that 'damned good jobs' become boring."
"So I'll transfer. I don't know what you're trying to get at, Captain,
but you're not talking me out of going back. If the service needs men
so badly, let them get somebody else. I've put in
my
time."
"Do you really think that's my reason?"
"Sure. What else can it be?"
"Mr. Craig," the psychologist said slowly, "you have my authorization
for you to return to Terra as a private citizen of that planet. You
will be given a very liberal supply of PON—which you will
definitely need. Good luck. You'll need that too."
On the eighth day, two attendants, who showed the effects of massive
doses of PON to protect themselves from the centrifugal force,
had to carry a man out of the tank. Many others asked to be removed,
begged to be allowed to withdraw their resignations.
"The twelfth day is the worst," a grizzled spaceman told Craig. "That's
when the best of 'em want out."
Craig clenched the iron rung of his bed and struggled to bring the old
man's face into focus.
"How ... how do they know when you ought ... to come out?" he asked
between waves of nausea.
"Blood pressure. They get you just before you go into shock."
"How can they tell?" Craig fought down his growing panic. "I can't."
"That strap around your belly. You mean you ain't noticed it?"
"Haven't noticed much of anything."
"Well, it's keyed to give them some kind of signal."
The old man lapsed into silence. Craig wished him to continue. He
desperately wanted something to distract his mind from the ghastly
conditioning process.
Slowly at first, the lines formed by seams in the metal ceiling began
to bend. Here it came again!
"Old man!" shouted Craig.
"Yeah, son. They've dropped it down a notch."
"Dropped ... it ... down?"
"Maybe that ain't scientific, but it's the way I always think of it."
"Can't they ... drop it down continuously?"
"They tried that a few times—once when I was aboard. You wouldn't like
it, kid. You wouldn't like it at all."
"How ... many times ... do they drop it?"
"Four times during the day, three at night. Twenty days."
A nightmare of visual sensations ebbed into Craig's mind. He was
vaguely aware of the moans of other men in the vaultlike room. Wave
upon wave of nausea swept him as he watched the seam lines bend and
warp fantastically. He snapped his eyelids shut, only to begin feeling
the nightmarish bodily sensations once more. He felt the cot slowly
rise longitudinally, felt himself upside down, then the snap of turning
right side up once more—and he knew that neither he nor the cot had
moved so much as an inch.
Craig heard the voices around him, muffled, as though talking through
wadding.
"... got it bad."
"We better take him out."
"... pretty bad."
"He'll go into shock."
"... never make it the twelfth."
"We better yank him."
"I'm ... all right," Craig mumbled at the voices. He struggled with the
bonds of his cot. With terrible effort he forced his eyes open. Two
white-clad figures, ridiculously out of proportion, hovered wraithlike
over him. Four elongated eyes peered at him.
Attendants coming for to take me home....
"Touch me and I'll kick your teeth in!" he yelled. "I'm going to Terra.
Wish you were going to Terra?"
Then it was better. Oddly, he passed the twelfth day easily. By the
fourteenth day, Craig knew he could stand Grav 1. The whine of the
centrifuge's motors had diminished to a low hum. Either that or they
had begun to produce ultra-sonic waves. Craig was not sure.
Most of the men had passed through the torments of gravitational
conditioning. The huge headquarters base centrifuge aboard the man-made
satellite had gradually caused their bodies to respond once more to a
single source of pull. They were now ready to become inhabitants of
planets again, instead of free-falling ships.
On the eighteenth day, automatic machinery freed them from their
imprisoning cots. Clumsily and awkwardly at first, the men began to
walk, to hold their heads and arms in proper attitudes. They laughed
and joked about it and kidded those who were slow at adjusting.
Then they again began taking paraoxylnebutal in preparation for the
free-fall flight to Terra.
Only one of the score of men in the centrifuge tank remained
voluntarily in his cot.
"Space article violator," the old man informed Craig. "Psycho, I think.
Went amuck with some extraterritorials. Killed a dozen."
"What will they do, exile him?"
"Not to Chociante, if that's what you mean. They just jerked his space
card and gave him a one-way ticket to Terra."
"For twelve murders?" asked Craig incredulously.
"That's enough, son." The old man eyed Craig for an instant before
looking away. "Pick something to talk about. What do you figure on
doing when you get to Terra, for instance?"
"I'm going into Import. My father was in it for twenty years."
"Sure," said the old spaceman, watching a group of young crewmen
engaged in an animated conversation.
"It's a good job. There's a future to it."
"Yeah."
Why did he have to explain anything at all to the old space tramp?
"Once I get set up, I'll probably try to open my own business."
"And spend your weekends on Luna."
Craig half rose from his cot, jarred into anger.
But the old spaceman turned, smiling wryly. "Don't get hot, kid. I
guess I spent too long in Zone V." He paused to examine his wrinkled
hands. They were indelibly marked with lever callouses. "You get to
thinking anyone who stays closer'n eighty light years from Terra is a
land-lubber."
Craig relaxed, realizing he had acted childishly. "Used to think the
same. Then I took the exam and got this job."
"Whereabouts?"
"Los Angeles."
The old man looked up at Craig. "You don't know much about Terra, do
you, son?"
"Not much."
"Yeah. Well, I hope you ain't disappointed."
"My father was born there, but I never saw it. Never hit the Solar
System, matter of fact. Never saw much of anything close up. I stood it
a long time, old man, this hitting atmospheres all over the Universe."
But the spaceman seemed to have lost interest. He was unpacking some
personal belongings from a kit.
"What are you doing in Grav 1?" Craig asked.
The old man's face clouded for an instant. "In the old days, they used
to say us old-timers acted like clocks. They used to say we just ran
down. Now they got some fancy psychology name for it."
Craig regretted his question. He would have muttered some word of
apology, but the old man continued.
"Maybe you've read some of the old sea stories, or more'n likely had
'em read to you. Sailors could go to sea until they just sort of dried
up. The sea tanned their skins and stiffened their bones, but it never
stiffened their hearts. When they got old, it just pulled them in.
"But space is different. Space is raw and new. It tugs at your guts. It
sends the blood rushing through your veins. It's like loving. You don't
become a part of space the way you do the old sea, though. It leaves
you strictly alone. Except that it sucks you dry, takes all the soup
out of you, leaves you brittle and old—old as a dehydrated piece of
split leather.
"Then one day it shoots a spurt of blood around in one of your old
veins. Something gives. Space is through with you then. And if you can
stand this whirligig conditioning, you're through with space."
"
You can't figure it. Some of 'em urp all over and turn six shades of
green.
"
"
You got to watch the ones that don't.
"
"
Yeah, you got to watch the ones that don't. Especially the old ones.
"
"
He's old. You think it was his heart?
"
"
Who knows?
"
"
They'll dump him, won't they?
"
"
After a tracer is sent through. But it won't do any good.
"
"
He probably outlived everybody that ever knew him.
"
"
Wouldn't be surprised. Here, grab his leg.
"
Robert Craig folded the flight jacket tightly and stuffed it into the
cylindrical carton. A sleeve unwound just as he did so, making it
difficult to fit into the place he had made for it. Exasperated, he
refolded it and jammed it in place. Smaller rolls of underclothing were
then fitted in. When he was satisfied with the layer, he tossed in a
small handful of crystals and began to fill the next layer. After the
carton was completely filled, he ignited the sealing strip and watched
as the plastic melted into a single, seamless whole. It was ready for
irradiation. Probably in another ten years his son-to-be would put it
on and play spaceman. But Craig swore he'd make sure that the kid knew
what a stinking life it was.
At 1300 hours, the ferry bumped heavily alongside the starboard lock.
It was the signal for relief in the passengers' quarters; many were
beginning to feel a reaction to the short free-fall flight from the
headquarters satellite.
The audio called out: "Flight Officer Robert Craig. Flight Officer
Robert Craig. Report to Orderly 12. Report to Orderly 12 through the
aft door."
With pangs of anxiety he could not completely suppress, Craig obeyed.
Orderly 12 handed him a message container.
"Who's it from? Somebody on Terra?"
"From a private spaceman named Morgan Brockman."
"
Brockman?
"
"He was with you in the grav tank."
"The old man!"
The message container produced a battered punch card. Craig
straightened it and was about to reach into his pocket for a hand
transcriber. But then he noticed the card bore only a few irregular
punches and was covered with rough hand printing.
Son, when the flunkies get around to giving you this, they'll have
shot me out the tube. How do I know? Same way you know when your
turbos are going to throw a blade. It's good this way.
There's something you can do for me if you want to. Way back, some
fifty years ago, there was a woman. She was my wife. It's a long story
I won't bother you with. Anyway, I left her. Wanted to take her along
with me, but she wouldn't go.
Earth was a lot different then than it is now. They don't have to tell
me; I know. I saw it coming and so did Ethel. We talked about it and I
knew I had to go. She wouldn't or couldn't go. Wanted me to stay, but
I couldn't.
I tried to send her some units once in a while. Don't know if she ever
got them. Sometimes I forgot to send them at all. You know, you're way
out across the Galaxy, while she's home.
Go see her if you can, son. Will you? Make sure she gets the unit
transfer I made out. It isn't much out of seventy years of living,
but she may need it. And maybe you can tell her a little bit about
what it means to be out there. Tell her it's open and free and when
you got hold of those levers and you're trying for an orbit on
something big and new and green.... Hell, you remember. You know how
to tell her.
Her name is Ethel Brockman. I know she'll still use my name. Her
address is or was East 71, North 101, Number 4. You can trace her
easy if she moved. Women don't generally shove off and not leave a
forwarding address. Not Ethel, at least.
Craig put the battered card in his pocket and walked back through the
door to the passenger room. How did you explain to an old woman why her
husband deserted her fifty years before? Some kind of story about one's
duty to the Universe? No, the old man had not been in Intergalactic. He
had been a tramp spaceman. Well, why
had
he left?
Fifty years in space.
Fifty
years! Zone V had been beyond anybody's
imagination that long ago. He must have been in on the first Cetusian
flights and shot the early landings in Cetus II. God only knew how many
times he had battled Zone 111b pirates....
Damn the old man! How did one explain?
Craig descended the ramp from the huge jet and concentrated on his
impressions. One day he would recall this moment, his first on the
planet Terra. He tried to recall his first thrill at seeing Los
Angeles, 1500 square miles of it, from the ship as it entered the
atmosphere.
He was about to step off the last step when a man appeared hurriedly. A
rather plump man, he displayed a toothy smile on his puffy red face.
"A moment, sir. Just a little greeting from the Terra. You understand,
of course. Purely routine."
Craig remained on the final step of the ramp, puzzled. The man turned
to a companion at his right.
"We can see that this gentleman has come from a long, long way off,
can't we?"
The other man did not look up. He was peering into what seemed to Craig
to be a kind of camera.
"We can allow the gentlemen to continue now, can't we? It wasn't that
we believed for a minute, you understand ... purely routine."
Both men were gone in an instant, leaving Craig completely bewildered.
"You goin' to move on, buddy, or you want to go back?"
Craig turned to face a line of his fellow passengers up the ramp behind
him.
"Who was that?" Craig asked.
"Customs. Bet you never got such a smooth screening before, eh?"
"You mean he
screened
me? What for?"
"Hard to say," the other passenger said. "You'll get used to this. They
get it over with quick."
Craig made his way toward the spaceport administration building. His
first physical contact with Terra had passed unnoticed.
"Sir! Sir!" cried a voice behind him.
He wheeled to see a man walking briskly toward him.
"You dropped this, sir. Quite by accident, of course."
Craig examined the small object the man had given him before rushing
off toward an exit.
It was an empty PON tube he had just discarded. He couldn't
understand why the man had bothered until he realized that the
plastaloid floor of the lobby displayed not the faintest scrap of paper
nor trace of dirt.
The Import personnel man was toying with a small chip of gleaming
metal. He did not look directly at Craig for more than an instant at a
time, and commented on Craig's description of his trip through the city
only very briefly between questions.
"It's a good deal bigger than I imagined," Craig was saying. "Haven't
seen much of it, of course. Thought I'd check in here with you first."
"Yes, naturally."
"Thought you could give me some idea of conditions...."
"Conditions?"
"For instance, what part of the city I should live in. That is, what
part is closest to where I'll work."
"I see," said the man noncommittally. It seemed to Craig that he was
about to add something. He did not, however, but instead rose from his
chair and walked to the large window overlooking an enormous section of
the city far below. He stared out the window for a time, leaving Craig
seated uncomfortably in the silent room. There was a distracted quality
about him, Craig thought.
"You are the first man we have had from the Intergalactic Service," the
personnel man said finally.
"That so?"
"Yes." He turned to face Craig briefly before continuing. "You must
find it very strange here."
"Well, I've never seen a city so big."
"Yes, so big. And also...." He seemed to consider many words before
completing the sentence. "And also different."
"I haven't been here very long," said Craig. "Matter of fact, I haven't
been anywhere very long. This is my first real experience with life on
a planet. As an adult, anyway."
The personnel man seated himself once more and pressed a button on a
small instrument. A secretary entered the office from a door to Craig's
left.
"Miss Wendel, this is Mr. Craig. Mr. Craig, my secretary. Mr. Craig
will enter Minerals and Metals, Zone V."
They exchanged formal greetings. She was a moderately pretty girl of
medium height and, to Craig, a pleasantly rounded figure. He would have
attempted to catch her eye had she not immediately occupied herself
with unfolding the legs of a small instrument she was carrying.
"This is Mr. Craig's first landing on Terra, Miss Wendel," the
personnel man continued. "Actually, we shall have to consider him in
much the same way we would an extraterrestrial."
The girl glanced at Craig, casting him a cool, impersonal smile.
"He was formerly a flight officer in the Intergalactic Space Service."
The statement was delivered in an almost exaggeratedly casual tone.
The girl glanced at him once more, this time with a definite quizzical
look in her brown eyes.
"Three complete tours of duty, I believe."
"Four," corrected Craig. "Four tours of three years each, minus a
year's terminal leave."
"I take it you have no identification card?" the man asked.
"The one I held in the service. It's pretty comprehensive."
The other turned to the secretary. "You'll see that he is assisted in
filing his application, won't you? A provisional Code II. That will
enable you to enter all Import offices freely, Mr. Craig."
"Will he need a food and—clothing ration also?" asked the girl,
without looking at Craig.
"Yes." The man laughed. "You'll excuse us, Mr. Craig. We realize that
you couldn't be expected to be familiar with Terra's fashions. In your
present outfit you would certainly be typed as a ... well, you'd be
made uncomfortable."
Craig reddened in spite of himself. He had bought the suit on Ghandii.
"A hick," he supplied.
"I wouldn't go that far, but some people might."
Craig noted the pleasant way the girl filled her trim, rather severe
business suit. He amused himself by calculating stress patterns in its
plain woven material as she assembled the forms for him.
"Here, Mr. Craig. I believe these are complete."
"They look pretty complicated."
"Not at all. The questions are quite explicit."
Craig looked them over quickly.
"I guess so. Say, Miss Wendel, I was wondering—I don't know the city
at all. Maybe you could go with me to have dinner. It must be almost
dinnertime now. You could sort of check me out on some...."
"I'm afraid that would be quite impossible. You couldn't gain
admittance to any office you need to visit tonight. Therefore, it is
impossible for me to be of any assistance to you."
"Oh, come now, Miss Wendel. There are women aboard spaceships. I'm not
a starved wolf."
"Certainly you are not, Mr. Craig. But it is not possible for me...."
"You said that already, but you can have dinner with me. Just company."
"I'm afraid I don't understand."
The Galactic hotel strove to preserve an archaic tone of hospitality.
It advertised "a night's lodgings" and it possessed a bellboy. The
bellboy actually carried Craig's plasticarton and large file of punch
cards and forms to his room. Tired from the long, confusing day, Craig
was not impressed. He vaguely wondered if the little drama of the
hotel carried so far as a small fee to be paid the bellboy, and he
hoped he would have the right size of Terran units in his wallet.
Outside the door to the room, the bellboy stopped and turned to Craig.
"For five I'll tell you where it is," he said in a subdued tone.
"Tell me where what is?"
"You know, the mike."
"Mike?"
"All right, mister, three units, then. I wasn't trying to hold you up."
"You mean a microphone?" asked Craig, mechanically fishing for his
wallet.
"Sure, they don't put in screens here. Wanted to, but the boss
convinced 'em there aren't any Freedomites ever stay here."
"Where is the microphone?" Craig asked as he found a ten unit note.
He was too puzzled to wonder what he was expected to do with the
information.
"It's in the bed illuminator. You can short it out with a razor blade.
Or I'll do it for another two."
"Never mind," Craig said wearily. He waited while the bellboy inserted
a key into the door and opened it for him.
"I can get you a sensatia-tape," whispered the boy when they had
entered. He nudged Craig wickedly. "You know what they're like?"
"Yeah," Craig said disgustedly. Traffic in the illicit mental-image
tapes was known as far into space as lonely men had penetrated.
Intergalactic considered them as great a menace to mental and moral
stability as the hectopiates. Craig wearily got the man out of the
room, took a PON pill, and eased himself into the bed.
It had been a weird day and he had not liked it. There was no telling
how long it would take him to shake his—sea legs, the psychologist
had called it. One thing was sure: Terra aggressively went after its
strangers. | [
"He died on the way to Terra",
"His ex-wife Ethel had him assassinated",
"He refused to leave his cot after conditioning",
"He was arrested for being a Freedomite"
] | 0 |
51407_3ARTW1HP_5 | Why is it important to watch the ones who don't become physically ill during the conditioning process? | SEA LEGS
By FRANK QUATTROCCHI
Illustrated by EMSH
Rootless and footloose, a man in space can't help
but dream of coming home. But something nobody should
do is bet on the validity of a homesick dream!
Flight Officer Robert Craig surrendered the tube containing his service
record tapes and stood waiting while the bored process clerk examined
the seal.
"Your clearance," said the clerk.
Craig handed him a battered punch card and watched the man insert it in
the reproducer. He felt anxiety as the much-handled card refused for a
time to match the instrument's metal contact points. The line of men
behind Craig fidgeted.
"You got to get this punched by Territorial," said the clerk. "Take it
back to your unit's clearance office."
"Look again, Sergeant," Craig said, repressing his irritation.
"It ain't notched."
"The hell it isn't."
The man examined the card with squinting care and nodded finally. "It's
so damn notched," he complained. "You ought to take care of that card;
can't get on without one."
Craig hesitated before moving.
"Next," said the clerk, "What you waiting for?"
"Don't I take my 201 file?"
"We send it on ahead. Go to Grav 1 desk."
A murmur greeted the order. Craig experienced the thrill of knowing
the envy of the others. Grav 1—that meant Terra. He crossed the long,
dreary room, knowing the eyes of the other men were upon him.
"Your service tapes," the next noncom said. "Where you going?"
"Grav 1—Terra," fumbled Craig. "Los Angeles."
"Los Angeles, eh? Where in Los Angeles?"
"I—I—" Craig muttered, fumbling in his pockets.
"No specific destination," supplied the man as he punched a key on a
small instrument, "Air-lock ahead and to your right. Strip and follow
the robot's orders. Any metal?"
"Metal?" asked Craig.
"You know,
metal
."
"Well, my identification key."
"Here," commanded the clerk, extending a plastic envelope.
Craig moved in the direction indicated. He fought the irrational fear
that he had missed an important step in the complicated clerical
process. He cursed the grudging attitude of the headquarters satellite
personnel and felt the impotence of a spaceman who had long forgotten
the bureaucracy of a rear area base. The knowledge that much of it was
motivated by envy soothed him as he clumsily let himself into the lock.
"Place your clothing in the receptacle provided and assume a stationary
position on the raised podium in the center of the lock."
Craig obeyed the robot voice and began reluctantly to remove his flight
jacket. Its incredibly fine-grained leather would carry none of the
strange, foreign associations for the base station clerk who would
appropriate it. He would never know the beautiful, gentle beast that
supplied this skin.
"You are retarding the progress of others. Please respond more quickly
to your orders."
Craig quickly removed the last of his clothing. It was impossible
to hate a robot, but one could certainly hate those who set it into
operation.
"You will find a red button at your feet. Lower your head and depress
that button."
Stepping on the button with his bare foot produced an instant of
brilliant blue illumination. A small scratch on his arm stung briefly
and he was somewhat blinded by the flash even through his eyelids, but
that was all there was to the sterilizing process.
"Your clothing and effects will be in the dressing room immediately
beyond the locked door."
He found his clothing cleanly and neatly hung on plastic hangers just
inside the door to the dressing room. The few personal items he carried
in his pockets were still there. The Schtann flight jacket was actually
there, looking like new, its space-blue unfaded and as wonderfully
pliant as before.
"Insert your right arm into the instrument on the central table,"
commanded the same voice he had heard before. "Turn your arm until the
scratch is in contact with the metal plate. There will be a slight
pain, but it is necessary to treat the small injury you have been
disregarding."
Craig obeyed and clenched his teeth against a sharp stinging. His
respect for the robot-controlled equipment of bases had risen. When
he withdrew his arm, the scratch was neatly coated with a layer of
flesh-colored plastic material.
He dressed quickly and was on the verge of asking the robot for
instructions, when a man appeared in the open doorway.
"I am Captain Wyandotte," said the man in a pleasant voice.
"Well, what's next?" asked Craig somewhat more belligerently than he
had intended.
The man smiled. "Your reaction is quite natural. You are somewhat
aggressive after Clerical, eh?"
"I'm a little anxious to get home, I suppose," said Craig defensively.
"By 'home' you mean Terra. But you've never been there, have you?"
"No, but my father—"
"Your parents left Terra during the Second Colonization of Cassiopeia
II, didn't they?"
"Yes," Craig said. He was uncomfortable; Wyandotte seemed to know all
about him.
"We might say you've been away quite a while, eh?"
"I was entered as a spaceman when I was 16," Craig said. "I've never
been down for any period as yet."
"You mean you haven't been in a gravity system?"
"Oh, I've landed a few times, even walked around for a while...."
"With the help of paraoxylnebutal," supplied the captain.
"Well, sure."
"Mr. Craig, I suppose you've guessed that the next step in our little
torture system here is psych."
"So I gathered."
The captain laughed reassuringly. "No, don't put up your guard again.
The worst is over. Short of Gravitational conditioning, there is
nothing to stop you from going to Terra."
"Sorry, I guess I'm a little touchy. This is my first time...."
"Quite natural. But it being your first time—in quite a number of
ways, I might add—it will be necessary for you to undergo some
conditioning."
"Conditioning?" asked Craig.
"Yes. You have spent eleven years in space. Your body is conditioned to
a normal state of free fall, or at best to a state of acceleration."
"Yeah, I know. Once on Gerymeade...."
"You were ill, couldn't keep your balance, felt dizzy. That is why
all spacemen carry PON, paraoxylnebutal, with them. It helps
suppress certain physiological reactions to an entirely new set of
conditions. Channels of the ear, for example. They play an important
part in our awareness of balance. They operate on a simple gravity
principle. Without gravity they act up for a time, then gradually lose
function. Returning to gravity is rather frightening at first."
"I know all about this, Captain."
"You've undoubtedly read popularizations in tapezines. But you have
experienced it briefly."
"I expect to have some trouble at first." Craig was disturbed by the
wordy psychologist. What was the man actually saying?
"Do you know what sailors of ancient times meant by 'sea legs?'" asked
Wyandotte. "Men on a rolling ocean acclimated themselves to a rolling
horizontal. They had trouble when they went ashore and the horizontal
didn't roll any more.
"It meant more than that. There were excellent psychological reasons
for the old stereotype, the 'drunken sailor.' A port city was a
frightening thing to an old sailor—but let's begin our little job at
the beginning. I'll turn you over to psychometry for the usual tests
and pick you up tomorrow morning at, say, 0900."
During the days that followed, the psychologist seemed to Craig to
become progressively more didactic. He would deliver long speeches
about the "freedom of open space." He spoke repetitiously of the
"growing complexity of Terran society." And yet the man could not
be pinned down to any specific condition the spaceman would find
intolerable.
Craig began to hate the delay that kept him from Terra. Through the
ports of the headquarters base satellite, he scanned the constellations
for the scores of worlds he had visited during his eleven years in
space. They were incredibly varied, even those that supported life. He
had weathered difficult landings on worlds with rip-tide gravities, had
felt the pull of the incredible star-tides imparted by twin and even
triple star systems. He had been on Einstein IV, the planet of eight
moons, and had felt the pulse of all eight of the satellites at once
that no PON could completely nullify.
But even if he could accept the psychologist's authority for the
cumulative effect of a gravity system, he could not understand the
unspoken warning he felt underlying all that the man said.
"Of course it has changed," Craig was protesting. "Anyway, I never
really knew very much about Terra. So what? I know it won't be as it
was in tapezines either."
"Yet you are so completely sure you will want to live out your life
there, that you are willing to give up space service for it."
"We've gone through this time and time again," Craig said wearily. "I
gave you my reasons for quitting space. We analyzed them. You agreed
that you could not decide that for me and that my decision is logical.
You tell me spacemen don't settle down on Terra. Yet you won't—or
can't—tell me why. I've got a damned good job there—"
"You may find that 'damned good jobs' become boring."
"So I'll transfer. I don't know what you're trying to get at, Captain,
but you're not talking me out of going back. If the service needs men
so badly, let them get somebody else. I've put in
my
time."
"Do you really think that's my reason?"
"Sure. What else can it be?"
"Mr. Craig," the psychologist said slowly, "you have my authorization
for you to return to Terra as a private citizen of that planet. You
will be given a very liberal supply of PON—which you will
definitely need. Good luck. You'll need that too."
On the eighth day, two attendants, who showed the effects of massive
doses of PON to protect themselves from the centrifugal force,
had to carry a man out of the tank. Many others asked to be removed,
begged to be allowed to withdraw their resignations.
"The twelfth day is the worst," a grizzled spaceman told Craig. "That's
when the best of 'em want out."
Craig clenched the iron rung of his bed and struggled to bring the old
man's face into focus.
"How ... how do they know when you ought ... to come out?" he asked
between waves of nausea.
"Blood pressure. They get you just before you go into shock."
"How can they tell?" Craig fought down his growing panic. "I can't."
"That strap around your belly. You mean you ain't noticed it?"
"Haven't noticed much of anything."
"Well, it's keyed to give them some kind of signal."
The old man lapsed into silence. Craig wished him to continue. He
desperately wanted something to distract his mind from the ghastly
conditioning process.
Slowly at first, the lines formed by seams in the metal ceiling began
to bend. Here it came again!
"Old man!" shouted Craig.
"Yeah, son. They've dropped it down a notch."
"Dropped ... it ... down?"
"Maybe that ain't scientific, but it's the way I always think of it."
"Can't they ... drop it down continuously?"
"They tried that a few times—once when I was aboard. You wouldn't like
it, kid. You wouldn't like it at all."
"How ... many times ... do they drop it?"
"Four times during the day, three at night. Twenty days."
A nightmare of visual sensations ebbed into Craig's mind. He was
vaguely aware of the moans of other men in the vaultlike room. Wave
upon wave of nausea swept him as he watched the seam lines bend and
warp fantastically. He snapped his eyelids shut, only to begin feeling
the nightmarish bodily sensations once more. He felt the cot slowly
rise longitudinally, felt himself upside down, then the snap of turning
right side up once more—and he knew that neither he nor the cot had
moved so much as an inch.
Craig heard the voices around him, muffled, as though talking through
wadding.
"... got it bad."
"We better take him out."
"... pretty bad."
"He'll go into shock."
"... never make it the twelfth."
"We better yank him."
"I'm ... all right," Craig mumbled at the voices. He struggled with the
bonds of his cot. With terrible effort he forced his eyes open. Two
white-clad figures, ridiculously out of proportion, hovered wraithlike
over him. Four elongated eyes peered at him.
Attendants coming for to take me home....
"Touch me and I'll kick your teeth in!" he yelled. "I'm going to Terra.
Wish you were going to Terra?"
Then it was better. Oddly, he passed the twelfth day easily. By the
fourteenth day, Craig knew he could stand Grav 1. The whine of the
centrifuge's motors had diminished to a low hum. Either that or they
had begun to produce ultra-sonic waves. Craig was not sure.
Most of the men had passed through the torments of gravitational
conditioning. The huge headquarters base centrifuge aboard the man-made
satellite had gradually caused their bodies to respond once more to a
single source of pull. They were now ready to become inhabitants of
planets again, instead of free-falling ships.
On the eighteenth day, automatic machinery freed them from their
imprisoning cots. Clumsily and awkwardly at first, the men began to
walk, to hold their heads and arms in proper attitudes. They laughed
and joked about it and kidded those who were slow at adjusting.
Then they again began taking paraoxylnebutal in preparation for the
free-fall flight to Terra.
Only one of the score of men in the centrifuge tank remained
voluntarily in his cot.
"Space article violator," the old man informed Craig. "Psycho, I think.
Went amuck with some extraterritorials. Killed a dozen."
"What will they do, exile him?"
"Not to Chociante, if that's what you mean. They just jerked his space
card and gave him a one-way ticket to Terra."
"For twelve murders?" asked Craig incredulously.
"That's enough, son." The old man eyed Craig for an instant before
looking away. "Pick something to talk about. What do you figure on
doing when you get to Terra, for instance?"
"I'm going into Import. My father was in it for twenty years."
"Sure," said the old spaceman, watching a group of young crewmen
engaged in an animated conversation.
"It's a good job. There's a future to it."
"Yeah."
Why did he have to explain anything at all to the old space tramp?
"Once I get set up, I'll probably try to open my own business."
"And spend your weekends on Luna."
Craig half rose from his cot, jarred into anger.
But the old spaceman turned, smiling wryly. "Don't get hot, kid. I
guess I spent too long in Zone V." He paused to examine his wrinkled
hands. They were indelibly marked with lever callouses. "You get to
thinking anyone who stays closer'n eighty light years from Terra is a
land-lubber."
Craig relaxed, realizing he had acted childishly. "Used to think the
same. Then I took the exam and got this job."
"Whereabouts?"
"Los Angeles."
The old man looked up at Craig. "You don't know much about Terra, do
you, son?"
"Not much."
"Yeah. Well, I hope you ain't disappointed."
"My father was born there, but I never saw it. Never hit the Solar
System, matter of fact. Never saw much of anything close up. I stood it
a long time, old man, this hitting atmospheres all over the Universe."
But the spaceman seemed to have lost interest. He was unpacking some
personal belongings from a kit.
"What are you doing in Grav 1?" Craig asked.
The old man's face clouded for an instant. "In the old days, they used
to say us old-timers acted like clocks. They used to say we just ran
down. Now they got some fancy psychology name for it."
Craig regretted his question. He would have muttered some word of
apology, but the old man continued.
"Maybe you've read some of the old sea stories, or more'n likely had
'em read to you. Sailors could go to sea until they just sort of dried
up. The sea tanned their skins and stiffened their bones, but it never
stiffened their hearts. When they got old, it just pulled them in.
"But space is different. Space is raw and new. It tugs at your guts. It
sends the blood rushing through your veins. It's like loving. You don't
become a part of space the way you do the old sea, though. It leaves
you strictly alone. Except that it sucks you dry, takes all the soup
out of you, leaves you brittle and old—old as a dehydrated piece of
split leather.
"Then one day it shoots a spurt of blood around in one of your old
veins. Something gives. Space is through with you then. And if you can
stand this whirligig conditioning, you're through with space."
"
You can't figure it. Some of 'em urp all over and turn six shades of
green.
"
"
You got to watch the ones that don't.
"
"
Yeah, you got to watch the ones that don't. Especially the old ones.
"
"
He's old. You think it was his heart?
"
"
Who knows?
"
"
They'll dump him, won't they?
"
"
After a tracer is sent through. But it won't do any good.
"
"
He probably outlived everybody that ever knew him.
"
"
Wouldn't be surprised. Here, grab his leg.
"
Robert Craig folded the flight jacket tightly and stuffed it into the
cylindrical carton. A sleeve unwound just as he did so, making it
difficult to fit into the place he had made for it. Exasperated, he
refolded it and jammed it in place. Smaller rolls of underclothing were
then fitted in. When he was satisfied with the layer, he tossed in a
small handful of crystals and began to fill the next layer. After the
carton was completely filled, he ignited the sealing strip and watched
as the plastic melted into a single, seamless whole. It was ready for
irradiation. Probably in another ten years his son-to-be would put it
on and play spaceman. But Craig swore he'd make sure that the kid knew
what a stinking life it was.
At 1300 hours, the ferry bumped heavily alongside the starboard lock.
It was the signal for relief in the passengers' quarters; many were
beginning to feel a reaction to the short free-fall flight from the
headquarters satellite.
The audio called out: "Flight Officer Robert Craig. Flight Officer
Robert Craig. Report to Orderly 12. Report to Orderly 12 through the
aft door."
With pangs of anxiety he could not completely suppress, Craig obeyed.
Orderly 12 handed him a message container.
"Who's it from? Somebody on Terra?"
"From a private spaceman named Morgan Brockman."
"
Brockman?
"
"He was with you in the grav tank."
"The old man!"
The message container produced a battered punch card. Craig
straightened it and was about to reach into his pocket for a hand
transcriber. But then he noticed the card bore only a few irregular
punches and was covered with rough hand printing.
Son, when the flunkies get around to giving you this, they'll have
shot me out the tube. How do I know? Same way you know when your
turbos are going to throw a blade. It's good this way.
There's something you can do for me if you want to. Way back, some
fifty years ago, there was a woman. She was my wife. It's a long story
I won't bother you with. Anyway, I left her. Wanted to take her along
with me, but she wouldn't go.
Earth was a lot different then than it is now. They don't have to tell
me; I know. I saw it coming and so did Ethel. We talked about it and I
knew I had to go. She wouldn't or couldn't go. Wanted me to stay, but
I couldn't.
I tried to send her some units once in a while. Don't know if she ever
got them. Sometimes I forgot to send them at all. You know, you're way
out across the Galaxy, while she's home.
Go see her if you can, son. Will you? Make sure she gets the unit
transfer I made out. It isn't much out of seventy years of living,
but she may need it. And maybe you can tell her a little bit about
what it means to be out there. Tell her it's open and free and when
you got hold of those levers and you're trying for an orbit on
something big and new and green.... Hell, you remember. You know how
to tell her.
Her name is Ethel Brockman. I know she'll still use my name. Her
address is or was East 71, North 101, Number 4. You can trace her
easy if she moved. Women don't generally shove off and not leave a
forwarding address. Not Ethel, at least.
Craig put the battered card in his pocket and walked back through the
door to the passenger room. How did you explain to an old woman why her
husband deserted her fifty years before? Some kind of story about one's
duty to the Universe? No, the old man had not been in Intergalactic. He
had been a tramp spaceman. Well, why
had
he left?
Fifty years in space.
Fifty
years! Zone V had been beyond anybody's
imagination that long ago. He must have been in on the first Cetusian
flights and shot the early landings in Cetus II. God only knew how many
times he had battled Zone 111b pirates....
Damn the old man! How did one explain?
Craig descended the ramp from the huge jet and concentrated on his
impressions. One day he would recall this moment, his first on the
planet Terra. He tried to recall his first thrill at seeing Los
Angeles, 1500 square miles of it, from the ship as it entered the
atmosphere.
He was about to step off the last step when a man appeared hurriedly. A
rather plump man, he displayed a toothy smile on his puffy red face.
"A moment, sir. Just a little greeting from the Terra. You understand,
of course. Purely routine."
Craig remained on the final step of the ramp, puzzled. The man turned
to a companion at his right.
"We can see that this gentleman has come from a long, long way off,
can't we?"
The other man did not look up. He was peering into what seemed to Craig
to be a kind of camera.
"We can allow the gentlemen to continue now, can't we? It wasn't that
we believed for a minute, you understand ... purely routine."
Both men were gone in an instant, leaving Craig completely bewildered.
"You goin' to move on, buddy, or you want to go back?"
Craig turned to face a line of his fellow passengers up the ramp behind
him.
"Who was that?" Craig asked.
"Customs. Bet you never got such a smooth screening before, eh?"
"You mean he
screened
me? What for?"
"Hard to say," the other passenger said. "You'll get used to this. They
get it over with quick."
Craig made his way toward the spaceport administration building. His
first physical contact with Terra had passed unnoticed.
"Sir! Sir!" cried a voice behind him.
He wheeled to see a man walking briskly toward him.
"You dropped this, sir. Quite by accident, of course."
Craig examined the small object the man had given him before rushing
off toward an exit.
It was an empty PON tube he had just discarded. He couldn't
understand why the man had bothered until he realized that the
plastaloid floor of the lobby displayed not the faintest scrap of paper
nor trace of dirt.
The Import personnel man was toying with a small chip of gleaming
metal. He did not look directly at Craig for more than an instant at a
time, and commented on Craig's description of his trip through the city
only very briefly between questions.
"It's a good deal bigger than I imagined," Craig was saying. "Haven't
seen much of it, of course. Thought I'd check in here with you first."
"Yes, naturally."
"Thought you could give me some idea of conditions...."
"Conditions?"
"For instance, what part of the city I should live in. That is, what
part is closest to where I'll work."
"I see," said the man noncommittally. It seemed to Craig that he was
about to add something. He did not, however, but instead rose from his
chair and walked to the large window overlooking an enormous section of
the city far below. He stared out the window for a time, leaving Craig
seated uncomfortably in the silent room. There was a distracted quality
about him, Craig thought.
"You are the first man we have had from the Intergalactic Service," the
personnel man said finally.
"That so?"
"Yes." He turned to face Craig briefly before continuing. "You must
find it very strange here."
"Well, I've never seen a city so big."
"Yes, so big. And also...." He seemed to consider many words before
completing the sentence. "And also different."
"I haven't been here very long," said Craig. "Matter of fact, I haven't
been anywhere very long. This is my first real experience with life on
a planet. As an adult, anyway."
The personnel man seated himself once more and pressed a button on a
small instrument. A secretary entered the office from a door to Craig's
left.
"Miss Wendel, this is Mr. Craig. Mr. Craig, my secretary. Mr. Craig
will enter Minerals and Metals, Zone V."
They exchanged formal greetings. She was a moderately pretty girl of
medium height and, to Craig, a pleasantly rounded figure. He would have
attempted to catch her eye had she not immediately occupied herself
with unfolding the legs of a small instrument she was carrying.
"This is Mr. Craig's first landing on Terra, Miss Wendel," the
personnel man continued. "Actually, we shall have to consider him in
much the same way we would an extraterrestrial."
The girl glanced at Craig, casting him a cool, impersonal smile.
"He was formerly a flight officer in the Intergalactic Space Service."
The statement was delivered in an almost exaggeratedly casual tone.
The girl glanced at him once more, this time with a definite quizzical
look in her brown eyes.
"Three complete tours of duty, I believe."
"Four," corrected Craig. "Four tours of three years each, minus a
year's terminal leave."
"I take it you have no identification card?" the man asked.
"The one I held in the service. It's pretty comprehensive."
The other turned to the secretary. "You'll see that he is assisted in
filing his application, won't you? A provisional Code II. That will
enable you to enter all Import offices freely, Mr. Craig."
"Will he need a food and—clothing ration also?" asked the girl,
without looking at Craig.
"Yes." The man laughed. "You'll excuse us, Mr. Craig. We realize that
you couldn't be expected to be familiar with Terra's fashions. In your
present outfit you would certainly be typed as a ... well, you'd be
made uncomfortable."
Craig reddened in spite of himself. He had bought the suit on Ghandii.
"A hick," he supplied.
"I wouldn't go that far, but some people might."
Craig noted the pleasant way the girl filled her trim, rather severe
business suit. He amused himself by calculating stress patterns in its
plain woven material as she assembled the forms for him.
"Here, Mr. Craig. I believe these are complete."
"They look pretty complicated."
"Not at all. The questions are quite explicit."
Craig looked them over quickly.
"I guess so. Say, Miss Wendel, I was wondering—I don't know the city
at all. Maybe you could go with me to have dinner. It must be almost
dinnertime now. You could sort of check me out on some...."
"I'm afraid that would be quite impossible. You couldn't gain
admittance to any office you need to visit tonight. Therefore, it is
impossible for me to be of any assistance to you."
"Oh, come now, Miss Wendel. There are women aboard spaceships. I'm not
a starved wolf."
"Certainly you are not, Mr. Craig. But it is not possible for me...."
"You said that already, but you can have dinner with me. Just company."
"I'm afraid I don't understand."
The Galactic hotel strove to preserve an archaic tone of hospitality.
It advertised "a night's lodgings" and it possessed a bellboy. The
bellboy actually carried Craig's plasticarton and large file of punch
cards and forms to his room. Tired from the long, confusing day, Craig
was not impressed. He vaguely wondered if the little drama of the
hotel carried so far as a small fee to be paid the bellboy, and he
hoped he would have the right size of Terran units in his wallet.
Outside the door to the room, the bellboy stopped and turned to Craig.
"For five I'll tell you where it is," he said in a subdued tone.
"Tell me where what is?"
"You know, the mike."
"Mike?"
"All right, mister, three units, then. I wasn't trying to hold you up."
"You mean a microphone?" asked Craig, mechanically fishing for his
wallet.
"Sure, they don't put in screens here. Wanted to, but the boss
convinced 'em there aren't any Freedomites ever stay here."
"Where is the microphone?" Craig asked as he found a ten unit note.
He was too puzzled to wonder what he was expected to do with the
information.
"It's in the bed illuminator. You can short it out with a razor blade.
Or I'll do it for another two."
"Never mind," Craig said wearily. He waited while the bellboy inserted
a key into the door and opened it for him.
"I can get you a sensatia-tape," whispered the boy when they had
entered. He nudged Craig wickedly. "You know what they're like?"
"Yeah," Craig said disgustedly. Traffic in the illicit mental-image
tapes was known as far into space as lonely men had penetrated.
Intergalactic considered them as great a menace to mental and moral
stability as the hectopiates. Craig wearily got the man out of the
room, took a PON pill, and eased himself into the bed.
It had been a weird day and he had not liked it. There was no telling
how long it would take him to shake his—sea legs, the psychologist
had called it. One thing was sure: Terra aggressively went after its
strangers. | [
"They could be tapped as leaders for Freedomite missions",
"It is a sign that they are deviant extraterrestrials",
"Their bodies' familiarity with gravity naturally makes them suspicious",
"Their bodies may naturally produce paraoxynebutal"
] | 2 |
51407_3ARTW1HP_6 | Upon landing, Craig is greeted by whom? | SEA LEGS
By FRANK QUATTROCCHI
Illustrated by EMSH
Rootless and footloose, a man in space can't help
but dream of coming home. But something nobody should
do is bet on the validity of a homesick dream!
Flight Officer Robert Craig surrendered the tube containing his service
record tapes and stood waiting while the bored process clerk examined
the seal.
"Your clearance," said the clerk.
Craig handed him a battered punch card and watched the man insert it in
the reproducer. He felt anxiety as the much-handled card refused for a
time to match the instrument's metal contact points. The line of men
behind Craig fidgeted.
"You got to get this punched by Territorial," said the clerk. "Take it
back to your unit's clearance office."
"Look again, Sergeant," Craig said, repressing his irritation.
"It ain't notched."
"The hell it isn't."
The man examined the card with squinting care and nodded finally. "It's
so damn notched," he complained. "You ought to take care of that card;
can't get on without one."
Craig hesitated before moving.
"Next," said the clerk, "What you waiting for?"
"Don't I take my 201 file?"
"We send it on ahead. Go to Grav 1 desk."
A murmur greeted the order. Craig experienced the thrill of knowing
the envy of the others. Grav 1—that meant Terra. He crossed the long,
dreary room, knowing the eyes of the other men were upon him.
"Your service tapes," the next noncom said. "Where you going?"
"Grav 1—Terra," fumbled Craig. "Los Angeles."
"Los Angeles, eh? Where in Los Angeles?"
"I—I—" Craig muttered, fumbling in his pockets.
"No specific destination," supplied the man as he punched a key on a
small instrument, "Air-lock ahead and to your right. Strip and follow
the robot's orders. Any metal?"
"Metal?" asked Craig.
"You know,
metal
."
"Well, my identification key."
"Here," commanded the clerk, extending a plastic envelope.
Craig moved in the direction indicated. He fought the irrational fear
that he had missed an important step in the complicated clerical
process. He cursed the grudging attitude of the headquarters satellite
personnel and felt the impotence of a spaceman who had long forgotten
the bureaucracy of a rear area base. The knowledge that much of it was
motivated by envy soothed him as he clumsily let himself into the lock.
"Place your clothing in the receptacle provided and assume a stationary
position on the raised podium in the center of the lock."
Craig obeyed the robot voice and began reluctantly to remove his flight
jacket. Its incredibly fine-grained leather would carry none of the
strange, foreign associations for the base station clerk who would
appropriate it. He would never know the beautiful, gentle beast that
supplied this skin.
"You are retarding the progress of others. Please respond more quickly
to your orders."
Craig quickly removed the last of his clothing. It was impossible
to hate a robot, but one could certainly hate those who set it into
operation.
"You will find a red button at your feet. Lower your head and depress
that button."
Stepping on the button with his bare foot produced an instant of
brilliant blue illumination. A small scratch on his arm stung briefly
and he was somewhat blinded by the flash even through his eyelids, but
that was all there was to the sterilizing process.
"Your clothing and effects will be in the dressing room immediately
beyond the locked door."
He found his clothing cleanly and neatly hung on plastic hangers just
inside the door to the dressing room. The few personal items he carried
in his pockets were still there. The Schtann flight jacket was actually
there, looking like new, its space-blue unfaded and as wonderfully
pliant as before.
"Insert your right arm into the instrument on the central table,"
commanded the same voice he had heard before. "Turn your arm until the
scratch is in contact with the metal plate. There will be a slight
pain, but it is necessary to treat the small injury you have been
disregarding."
Craig obeyed and clenched his teeth against a sharp stinging. His
respect for the robot-controlled equipment of bases had risen. When
he withdrew his arm, the scratch was neatly coated with a layer of
flesh-colored plastic material.
He dressed quickly and was on the verge of asking the robot for
instructions, when a man appeared in the open doorway.
"I am Captain Wyandotte," said the man in a pleasant voice.
"Well, what's next?" asked Craig somewhat more belligerently than he
had intended.
The man smiled. "Your reaction is quite natural. You are somewhat
aggressive after Clerical, eh?"
"I'm a little anxious to get home, I suppose," said Craig defensively.
"By 'home' you mean Terra. But you've never been there, have you?"
"No, but my father—"
"Your parents left Terra during the Second Colonization of Cassiopeia
II, didn't they?"
"Yes," Craig said. He was uncomfortable; Wyandotte seemed to know all
about him.
"We might say you've been away quite a while, eh?"
"I was entered as a spaceman when I was 16," Craig said. "I've never
been down for any period as yet."
"You mean you haven't been in a gravity system?"
"Oh, I've landed a few times, even walked around for a while...."
"With the help of paraoxylnebutal," supplied the captain.
"Well, sure."
"Mr. Craig, I suppose you've guessed that the next step in our little
torture system here is psych."
"So I gathered."
The captain laughed reassuringly. "No, don't put up your guard again.
The worst is over. Short of Gravitational conditioning, there is
nothing to stop you from going to Terra."
"Sorry, I guess I'm a little touchy. This is my first time...."
"Quite natural. But it being your first time—in quite a number of
ways, I might add—it will be necessary for you to undergo some
conditioning."
"Conditioning?" asked Craig.
"Yes. You have spent eleven years in space. Your body is conditioned to
a normal state of free fall, or at best to a state of acceleration."
"Yeah, I know. Once on Gerymeade...."
"You were ill, couldn't keep your balance, felt dizzy. That is why
all spacemen carry PON, paraoxylnebutal, with them. It helps
suppress certain physiological reactions to an entirely new set of
conditions. Channels of the ear, for example. They play an important
part in our awareness of balance. They operate on a simple gravity
principle. Without gravity they act up for a time, then gradually lose
function. Returning to gravity is rather frightening at first."
"I know all about this, Captain."
"You've undoubtedly read popularizations in tapezines. But you have
experienced it briefly."
"I expect to have some trouble at first." Craig was disturbed by the
wordy psychologist. What was the man actually saying?
"Do you know what sailors of ancient times meant by 'sea legs?'" asked
Wyandotte. "Men on a rolling ocean acclimated themselves to a rolling
horizontal. They had trouble when they went ashore and the horizontal
didn't roll any more.
"It meant more than that. There were excellent psychological reasons
for the old stereotype, the 'drunken sailor.' A port city was a
frightening thing to an old sailor—but let's begin our little job at
the beginning. I'll turn you over to psychometry for the usual tests
and pick you up tomorrow morning at, say, 0900."
During the days that followed, the psychologist seemed to Craig to
become progressively more didactic. He would deliver long speeches
about the "freedom of open space." He spoke repetitiously of the
"growing complexity of Terran society." And yet the man could not
be pinned down to any specific condition the spaceman would find
intolerable.
Craig began to hate the delay that kept him from Terra. Through the
ports of the headquarters base satellite, he scanned the constellations
for the scores of worlds he had visited during his eleven years in
space. They were incredibly varied, even those that supported life. He
had weathered difficult landings on worlds with rip-tide gravities, had
felt the pull of the incredible star-tides imparted by twin and even
triple star systems. He had been on Einstein IV, the planet of eight
moons, and had felt the pulse of all eight of the satellites at once
that no PON could completely nullify.
But even if he could accept the psychologist's authority for the
cumulative effect of a gravity system, he could not understand the
unspoken warning he felt underlying all that the man said.
"Of course it has changed," Craig was protesting. "Anyway, I never
really knew very much about Terra. So what? I know it won't be as it
was in tapezines either."
"Yet you are so completely sure you will want to live out your life
there, that you are willing to give up space service for it."
"We've gone through this time and time again," Craig said wearily. "I
gave you my reasons for quitting space. We analyzed them. You agreed
that you could not decide that for me and that my decision is logical.
You tell me spacemen don't settle down on Terra. Yet you won't—or
can't—tell me why. I've got a damned good job there—"
"You may find that 'damned good jobs' become boring."
"So I'll transfer. I don't know what you're trying to get at, Captain,
but you're not talking me out of going back. If the service needs men
so badly, let them get somebody else. I've put in
my
time."
"Do you really think that's my reason?"
"Sure. What else can it be?"
"Mr. Craig," the psychologist said slowly, "you have my authorization
for you to return to Terra as a private citizen of that planet. You
will be given a very liberal supply of PON—which you will
definitely need. Good luck. You'll need that too."
On the eighth day, two attendants, who showed the effects of massive
doses of PON to protect themselves from the centrifugal force,
had to carry a man out of the tank. Many others asked to be removed,
begged to be allowed to withdraw their resignations.
"The twelfth day is the worst," a grizzled spaceman told Craig. "That's
when the best of 'em want out."
Craig clenched the iron rung of his bed and struggled to bring the old
man's face into focus.
"How ... how do they know when you ought ... to come out?" he asked
between waves of nausea.
"Blood pressure. They get you just before you go into shock."
"How can they tell?" Craig fought down his growing panic. "I can't."
"That strap around your belly. You mean you ain't noticed it?"
"Haven't noticed much of anything."
"Well, it's keyed to give them some kind of signal."
The old man lapsed into silence. Craig wished him to continue. He
desperately wanted something to distract his mind from the ghastly
conditioning process.
Slowly at first, the lines formed by seams in the metal ceiling began
to bend. Here it came again!
"Old man!" shouted Craig.
"Yeah, son. They've dropped it down a notch."
"Dropped ... it ... down?"
"Maybe that ain't scientific, but it's the way I always think of it."
"Can't they ... drop it down continuously?"
"They tried that a few times—once when I was aboard. You wouldn't like
it, kid. You wouldn't like it at all."
"How ... many times ... do they drop it?"
"Four times during the day, three at night. Twenty days."
A nightmare of visual sensations ebbed into Craig's mind. He was
vaguely aware of the moans of other men in the vaultlike room. Wave
upon wave of nausea swept him as he watched the seam lines bend and
warp fantastically. He snapped his eyelids shut, only to begin feeling
the nightmarish bodily sensations once more. He felt the cot slowly
rise longitudinally, felt himself upside down, then the snap of turning
right side up once more—and he knew that neither he nor the cot had
moved so much as an inch.
Craig heard the voices around him, muffled, as though talking through
wadding.
"... got it bad."
"We better take him out."
"... pretty bad."
"He'll go into shock."
"... never make it the twelfth."
"We better yank him."
"I'm ... all right," Craig mumbled at the voices. He struggled with the
bonds of his cot. With terrible effort he forced his eyes open. Two
white-clad figures, ridiculously out of proportion, hovered wraithlike
over him. Four elongated eyes peered at him.
Attendants coming for to take me home....
"Touch me and I'll kick your teeth in!" he yelled. "I'm going to Terra.
Wish you were going to Terra?"
Then it was better. Oddly, he passed the twelfth day easily. By the
fourteenth day, Craig knew he could stand Grav 1. The whine of the
centrifuge's motors had diminished to a low hum. Either that or they
had begun to produce ultra-sonic waves. Craig was not sure.
Most of the men had passed through the torments of gravitational
conditioning. The huge headquarters base centrifuge aboard the man-made
satellite had gradually caused their bodies to respond once more to a
single source of pull. They were now ready to become inhabitants of
planets again, instead of free-falling ships.
On the eighteenth day, automatic machinery freed them from their
imprisoning cots. Clumsily and awkwardly at first, the men began to
walk, to hold their heads and arms in proper attitudes. They laughed
and joked about it and kidded those who were slow at adjusting.
Then they again began taking paraoxylnebutal in preparation for the
free-fall flight to Terra.
Only one of the score of men in the centrifuge tank remained
voluntarily in his cot.
"Space article violator," the old man informed Craig. "Psycho, I think.
Went amuck with some extraterritorials. Killed a dozen."
"What will they do, exile him?"
"Not to Chociante, if that's what you mean. They just jerked his space
card and gave him a one-way ticket to Terra."
"For twelve murders?" asked Craig incredulously.
"That's enough, son." The old man eyed Craig for an instant before
looking away. "Pick something to talk about. What do you figure on
doing when you get to Terra, for instance?"
"I'm going into Import. My father was in it for twenty years."
"Sure," said the old spaceman, watching a group of young crewmen
engaged in an animated conversation.
"It's a good job. There's a future to it."
"Yeah."
Why did he have to explain anything at all to the old space tramp?
"Once I get set up, I'll probably try to open my own business."
"And spend your weekends on Luna."
Craig half rose from his cot, jarred into anger.
But the old spaceman turned, smiling wryly. "Don't get hot, kid. I
guess I spent too long in Zone V." He paused to examine his wrinkled
hands. They were indelibly marked with lever callouses. "You get to
thinking anyone who stays closer'n eighty light years from Terra is a
land-lubber."
Craig relaxed, realizing he had acted childishly. "Used to think the
same. Then I took the exam and got this job."
"Whereabouts?"
"Los Angeles."
The old man looked up at Craig. "You don't know much about Terra, do
you, son?"
"Not much."
"Yeah. Well, I hope you ain't disappointed."
"My father was born there, but I never saw it. Never hit the Solar
System, matter of fact. Never saw much of anything close up. I stood it
a long time, old man, this hitting atmospheres all over the Universe."
But the spaceman seemed to have lost interest. He was unpacking some
personal belongings from a kit.
"What are you doing in Grav 1?" Craig asked.
The old man's face clouded for an instant. "In the old days, they used
to say us old-timers acted like clocks. They used to say we just ran
down. Now they got some fancy psychology name for it."
Craig regretted his question. He would have muttered some word of
apology, but the old man continued.
"Maybe you've read some of the old sea stories, or more'n likely had
'em read to you. Sailors could go to sea until they just sort of dried
up. The sea tanned their skins and stiffened their bones, but it never
stiffened their hearts. When they got old, it just pulled them in.
"But space is different. Space is raw and new. It tugs at your guts. It
sends the blood rushing through your veins. It's like loving. You don't
become a part of space the way you do the old sea, though. It leaves
you strictly alone. Except that it sucks you dry, takes all the soup
out of you, leaves you brittle and old—old as a dehydrated piece of
split leather.
"Then one day it shoots a spurt of blood around in one of your old
veins. Something gives. Space is through with you then. And if you can
stand this whirligig conditioning, you're through with space."
"
You can't figure it. Some of 'em urp all over and turn six shades of
green.
"
"
You got to watch the ones that don't.
"
"
Yeah, you got to watch the ones that don't. Especially the old ones.
"
"
He's old. You think it was his heart?
"
"
Who knows?
"
"
They'll dump him, won't they?
"
"
After a tracer is sent through. But it won't do any good.
"
"
He probably outlived everybody that ever knew him.
"
"
Wouldn't be surprised. Here, grab his leg.
"
Robert Craig folded the flight jacket tightly and stuffed it into the
cylindrical carton. A sleeve unwound just as he did so, making it
difficult to fit into the place he had made for it. Exasperated, he
refolded it and jammed it in place. Smaller rolls of underclothing were
then fitted in. When he was satisfied with the layer, he tossed in a
small handful of crystals and began to fill the next layer. After the
carton was completely filled, he ignited the sealing strip and watched
as the plastic melted into a single, seamless whole. It was ready for
irradiation. Probably in another ten years his son-to-be would put it
on and play spaceman. But Craig swore he'd make sure that the kid knew
what a stinking life it was.
At 1300 hours, the ferry bumped heavily alongside the starboard lock.
It was the signal for relief in the passengers' quarters; many were
beginning to feel a reaction to the short free-fall flight from the
headquarters satellite.
The audio called out: "Flight Officer Robert Craig. Flight Officer
Robert Craig. Report to Orderly 12. Report to Orderly 12 through the
aft door."
With pangs of anxiety he could not completely suppress, Craig obeyed.
Orderly 12 handed him a message container.
"Who's it from? Somebody on Terra?"
"From a private spaceman named Morgan Brockman."
"
Brockman?
"
"He was with you in the grav tank."
"The old man!"
The message container produced a battered punch card. Craig
straightened it and was about to reach into his pocket for a hand
transcriber. But then he noticed the card bore only a few irregular
punches and was covered with rough hand printing.
Son, when the flunkies get around to giving you this, they'll have
shot me out the tube. How do I know? Same way you know when your
turbos are going to throw a blade. It's good this way.
There's something you can do for me if you want to. Way back, some
fifty years ago, there was a woman. She was my wife. It's a long story
I won't bother you with. Anyway, I left her. Wanted to take her along
with me, but she wouldn't go.
Earth was a lot different then than it is now. They don't have to tell
me; I know. I saw it coming and so did Ethel. We talked about it and I
knew I had to go. She wouldn't or couldn't go. Wanted me to stay, but
I couldn't.
I tried to send her some units once in a while. Don't know if she ever
got them. Sometimes I forgot to send them at all. You know, you're way
out across the Galaxy, while she's home.
Go see her if you can, son. Will you? Make sure she gets the unit
transfer I made out. It isn't much out of seventy years of living,
but she may need it. And maybe you can tell her a little bit about
what it means to be out there. Tell her it's open and free and when
you got hold of those levers and you're trying for an orbit on
something big and new and green.... Hell, you remember. You know how
to tell her.
Her name is Ethel Brockman. I know she'll still use my name. Her
address is or was East 71, North 101, Number 4. You can trace her
easy if she moved. Women don't generally shove off and not leave a
forwarding address. Not Ethel, at least.
Craig put the battered card in his pocket and walked back through the
door to the passenger room. How did you explain to an old woman why her
husband deserted her fifty years before? Some kind of story about one's
duty to the Universe? No, the old man had not been in Intergalactic. He
had been a tramp spaceman. Well, why
had
he left?
Fifty years in space.
Fifty
years! Zone V had been beyond anybody's
imagination that long ago. He must have been in on the first Cetusian
flights and shot the early landings in Cetus II. God only knew how many
times he had battled Zone 111b pirates....
Damn the old man! How did one explain?
Craig descended the ramp from the huge jet and concentrated on his
impressions. One day he would recall this moment, his first on the
planet Terra. He tried to recall his first thrill at seeing Los
Angeles, 1500 square miles of it, from the ship as it entered the
atmosphere.
He was about to step off the last step when a man appeared hurriedly. A
rather plump man, he displayed a toothy smile on his puffy red face.
"A moment, sir. Just a little greeting from the Terra. You understand,
of course. Purely routine."
Craig remained on the final step of the ramp, puzzled. The man turned
to a companion at his right.
"We can see that this gentleman has come from a long, long way off,
can't we?"
The other man did not look up. He was peering into what seemed to Craig
to be a kind of camera.
"We can allow the gentlemen to continue now, can't we? It wasn't that
we believed for a minute, you understand ... purely routine."
Both men were gone in an instant, leaving Craig completely bewildered.
"You goin' to move on, buddy, or you want to go back?"
Craig turned to face a line of his fellow passengers up the ramp behind
him.
"Who was that?" Craig asked.
"Customs. Bet you never got such a smooth screening before, eh?"
"You mean he
screened
me? What for?"
"Hard to say," the other passenger said. "You'll get used to this. They
get it over with quick."
Craig made his way toward the spaceport administration building. His
first physical contact with Terra had passed unnoticed.
"Sir! Sir!" cried a voice behind him.
He wheeled to see a man walking briskly toward him.
"You dropped this, sir. Quite by accident, of course."
Craig examined the small object the man had given him before rushing
off toward an exit.
It was an empty PON tube he had just discarded. He couldn't
understand why the man had bothered until he realized that the
plastaloid floor of the lobby displayed not the faintest scrap of paper
nor trace of dirt.
The Import personnel man was toying with a small chip of gleaming
metal. He did not look directly at Craig for more than an instant at a
time, and commented on Craig's description of his trip through the city
only very briefly between questions.
"It's a good deal bigger than I imagined," Craig was saying. "Haven't
seen much of it, of course. Thought I'd check in here with you first."
"Yes, naturally."
"Thought you could give me some idea of conditions...."
"Conditions?"
"For instance, what part of the city I should live in. That is, what
part is closest to where I'll work."
"I see," said the man noncommittally. It seemed to Craig that he was
about to add something. He did not, however, but instead rose from his
chair and walked to the large window overlooking an enormous section of
the city far below. He stared out the window for a time, leaving Craig
seated uncomfortably in the silent room. There was a distracted quality
about him, Craig thought.
"You are the first man we have had from the Intergalactic Service," the
personnel man said finally.
"That so?"
"Yes." He turned to face Craig briefly before continuing. "You must
find it very strange here."
"Well, I've never seen a city so big."
"Yes, so big. And also...." He seemed to consider many words before
completing the sentence. "And also different."
"I haven't been here very long," said Craig. "Matter of fact, I haven't
been anywhere very long. This is my first real experience with life on
a planet. As an adult, anyway."
The personnel man seated himself once more and pressed a button on a
small instrument. A secretary entered the office from a door to Craig's
left.
"Miss Wendel, this is Mr. Craig. Mr. Craig, my secretary. Mr. Craig
will enter Minerals and Metals, Zone V."
They exchanged formal greetings. She was a moderately pretty girl of
medium height and, to Craig, a pleasantly rounded figure. He would have
attempted to catch her eye had she not immediately occupied herself
with unfolding the legs of a small instrument she was carrying.
"This is Mr. Craig's first landing on Terra, Miss Wendel," the
personnel man continued. "Actually, we shall have to consider him in
much the same way we would an extraterrestrial."
The girl glanced at Craig, casting him a cool, impersonal smile.
"He was formerly a flight officer in the Intergalactic Space Service."
The statement was delivered in an almost exaggeratedly casual tone.
The girl glanced at him once more, this time with a definite quizzical
look in her brown eyes.
"Three complete tours of duty, I believe."
"Four," corrected Craig. "Four tours of three years each, minus a
year's terminal leave."
"I take it you have no identification card?" the man asked.
"The one I held in the service. It's pretty comprehensive."
The other turned to the secretary. "You'll see that he is assisted in
filing his application, won't you? A provisional Code II. That will
enable you to enter all Import offices freely, Mr. Craig."
"Will he need a food and—clothing ration also?" asked the girl,
without looking at Craig.
"Yes." The man laughed. "You'll excuse us, Mr. Craig. We realize that
you couldn't be expected to be familiar with Terra's fashions. In your
present outfit you would certainly be typed as a ... well, you'd be
made uncomfortable."
Craig reddened in spite of himself. He had bought the suit on Ghandii.
"A hick," he supplied.
"I wouldn't go that far, but some people might."
Craig noted the pleasant way the girl filled her trim, rather severe
business suit. He amused himself by calculating stress patterns in its
plain woven material as she assembled the forms for him.
"Here, Mr. Craig. I believe these are complete."
"They look pretty complicated."
"Not at all. The questions are quite explicit."
Craig looked them over quickly.
"I guess so. Say, Miss Wendel, I was wondering—I don't know the city
at all. Maybe you could go with me to have dinner. It must be almost
dinnertime now. You could sort of check me out on some...."
"I'm afraid that would be quite impossible. You couldn't gain
admittance to any office you need to visit tonight. Therefore, it is
impossible for me to be of any assistance to you."
"Oh, come now, Miss Wendel. There are women aboard spaceships. I'm not
a starved wolf."
"Certainly you are not, Mr. Craig. But it is not possible for me...."
"You said that already, but you can have dinner with me. Just company."
"I'm afraid I don't understand."
The Galactic hotel strove to preserve an archaic tone of hospitality.
It advertised "a night's lodgings" and it possessed a bellboy. The
bellboy actually carried Craig's plasticarton and large file of punch
cards and forms to his room. Tired from the long, confusing day, Craig
was not impressed. He vaguely wondered if the little drama of the
hotel carried so far as a small fee to be paid the bellboy, and he
hoped he would have the right size of Terran units in his wallet.
Outside the door to the room, the bellboy stopped and turned to Craig.
"For five I'll tell you where it is," he said in a subdued tone.
"Tell me where what is?"
"You know, the mike."
"Mike?"
"All right, mister, three units, then. I wasn't trying to hold you up."
"You mean a microphone?" asked Craig, mechanically fishing for his
wallet.
"Sure, they don't put in screens here. Wanted to, but the boss
convinced 'em there aren't any Freedomites ever stay here."
"Where is the microphone?" Craig asked as he found a ten unit note.
He was too puzzled to wonder what he was expected to do with the
information.
"It's in the bed illuminator. You can short it out with a razor blade.
Or I'll do it for another two."
"Never mind," Craig said wearily. He waited while the bellboy inserted
a key into the door and opened it for him.
"I can get you a sensatia-tape," whispered the boy when they had
entered. He nudged Craig wickedly. "You know what they're like?"
"Yeah," Craig said disgustedly. Traffic in the illicit mental-image
tapes was known as far into space as lonely men had penetrated.
Intergalactic considered them as great a menace to mental and moral
stability as the hectopiates. Craig wearily got the man out of the
room, took a PON pill, and eased himself into the bed.
It had been a weird day and he had not liked it. There was no telling
how long it would take him to shake his—sea legs, the psychologist
had called it. One thing was sure: Terra aggressively went after its
strangers. | [
"A reporter and his cameraman",
"Two members of Terra's welcoming committee",
"Two screening technicians",
"A psychologist and his assistant"
] | 2 |
51407_3ARTW1HP_7 | The denizens of Terra would most likely make fun of Craig for his ______. | SEA LEGS
By FRANK QUATTROCCHI
Illustrated by EMSH
Rootless and footloose, a man in space can't help
but dream of coming home. But something nobody should
do is bet on the validity of a homesick dream!
Flight Officer Robert Craig surrendered the tube containing his service
record tapes and stood waiting while the bored process clerk examined
the seal.
"Your clearance," said the clerk.
Craig handed him a battered punch card and watched the man insert it in
the reproducer. He felt anxiety as the much-handled card refused for a
time to match the instrument's metal contact points. The line of men
behind Craig fidgeted.
"You got to get this punched by Territorial," said the clerk. "Take it
back to your unit's clearance office."
"Look again, Sergeant," Craig said, repressing his irritation.
"It ain't notched."
"The hell it isn't."
The man examined the card with squinting care and nodded finally. "It's
so damn notched," he complained. "You ought to take care of that card;
can't get on without one."
Craig hesitated before moving.
"Next," said the clerk, "What you waiting for?"
"Don't I take my 201 file?"
"We send it on ahead. Go to Grav 1 desk."
A murmur greeted the order. Craig experienced the thrill of knowing
the envy of the others. Grav 1—that meant Terra. He crossed the long,
dreary room, knowing the eyes of the other men were upon him.
"Your service tapes," the next noncom said. "Where you going?"
"Grav 1—Terra," fumbled Craig. "Los Angeles."
"Los Angeles, eh? Where in Los Angeles?"
"I—I—" Craig muttered, fumbling in his pockets.
"No specific destination," supplied the man as he punched a key on a
small instrument, "Air-lock ahead and to your right. Strip and follow
the robot's orders. Any metal?"
"Metal?" asked Craig.
"You know,
metal
."
"Well, my identification key."
"Here," commanded the clerk, extending a plastic envelope.
Craig moved in the direction indicated. He fought the irrational fear
that he had missed an important step in the complicated clerical
process. He cursed the grudging attitude of the headquarters satellite
personnel and felt the impotence of a spaceman who had long forgotten
the bureaucracy of a rear area base. The knowledge that much of it was
motivated by envy soothed him as he clumsily let himself into the lock.
"Place your clothing in the receptacle provided and assume a stationary
position on the raised podium in the center of the lock."
Craig obeyed the robot voice and began reluctantly to remove his flight
jacket. Its incredibly fine-grained leather would carry none of the
strange, foreign associations for the base station clerk who would
appropriate it. He would never know the beautiful, gentle beast that
supplied this skin.
"You are retarding the progress of others. Please respond more quickly
to your orders."
Craig quickly removed the last of his clothing. It was impossible
to hate a robot, but one could certainly hate those who set it into
operation.
"You will find a red button at your feet. Lower your head and depress
that button."
Stepping on the button with his bare foot produced an instant of
brilliant blue illumination. A small scratch on his arm stung briefly
and he was somewhat blinded by the flash even through his eyelids, but
that was all there was to the sterilizing process.
"Your clothing and effects will be in the dressing room immediately
beyond the locked door."
He found his clothing cleanly and neatly hung on plastic hangers just
inside the door to the dressing room. The few personal items he carried
in his pockets were still there. The Schtann flight jacket was actually
there, looking like new, its space-blue unfaded and as wonderfully
pliant as before.
"Insert your right arm into the instrument on the central table,"
commanded the same voice he had heard before. "Turn your arm until the
scratch is in contact with the metal plate. There will be a slight
pain, but it is necessary to treat the small injury you have been
disregarding."
Craig obeyed and clenched his teeth against a sharp stinging. His
respect for the robot-controlled equipment of bases had risen. When
he withdrew his arm, the scratch was neatly coated with a layer of
flesh-colored plastic material.
He dressed quickly and was on the verge of asking the robot for
instructions, when a man appeared in the open doorway.
"I am Captain Wyandotte," said the man in a pleasant voice.
"Well, what's next?" asked Craig somewhat more belligerently than he
had intended.
The man smiled. "Your reaction is quite natural. You are somewhat
aggressive after Clerical, eh?"
"I'm a little anxious to get home, I suppose," said Craig defensively.
"By 'home' you mean Terra. But you've never been there, have you?"
"No, but my father—"
"Your parents left Terra during the Second Colonization of Cassiopeia
II, didn't they?"
"Yes," Craig said. He was uncomfortable; Wyandotte seemed to know all
about him.
"We might say you've been away quite a while, eh?"
"I was entered as a spaceman when I was 16," Craig said. "I've never
been down for any period as yet."
"You mean you haven't been in a gravity system?"
"Oh, I've landed a few times, even walked around for a while...."
"With the help of paraoxylnebutal," supplied the captain.
"Well, sure."
"Mr. Craig, I suppose you've guessed that the next step in our little
torture system here is psych."
"So I gathered."
The captain laughed reassuringly. "No, don't put up your guard again.
The worst is over. Short of Gravitational conditioning, there is
nothing to stop you from going to Terra."
"Sorry, I guess I'm a little touchy. This is my first time...."
"Quite natural. But it being your first time—in quite a number of
ways, I might add—it will be necessary for you to undergo some
conditioning."
"Conditioning?" asked Craig.
"Yes. You have spent eleven years in space. Your body is conditioned to
a normal state of free fall, or at best to a state of acceleration."
"Yeah, I know. Once on Gerymeade...."
"You were ill, couldn't keep your balance, felt dizzy. That is why
all spacemen carry PON, paraoxylnebutal, with them. It helps
suppress certain physiological reactions to an entirely new set of
conditions. Channels of the ear, for example. They play an important
part in our awareness of balance. They operate on a simple gravity
principle. Without gravity they act up for a time, then gradually lose
function. Returning to gravity is rather frightening at first."
"I know all about this, Captain."
"You've undoubtedly read popularizations in tapezines. But you have
experienced it briefly."
"I expect to have some trouble at first." Craig was disturbed by the
wordy psychologist. What was the man actually saying?
"Do you know what sailors of ancient times meant by 'sea legs?'" asked
Wyandotte. "Men on a rolling ocean acclimated themselves to a rolling
horizontal. They had trouble when they went ashore and the horizontal
didn't roll any more.
"It meant more than that. There were excellent psychological reasons
for the old stereotype, the 'drunken sailor.' A port city was a
frightening thing to an old sailor—but let's begin our little job at
the beginning. I'll turn you over to psychometry for the usual tests
and pick you up tomorrow morning at, say, 0900."
During the days that followed, the psychologist seemed to Craig to
become progressively more didactic. He would deliver long speeches
about the "freedom of open space." He spoke repetitiously of the
"growing complexity of Terran society." And yet the man could not
be pinned down to any specific condition the spaceman would find
intolerable.
Craig began to hate the delay that kept him from Terra. Through the
ports of the headquarters base satellite, he scanned the constellations
for the scores of worlds he had visited during his eleven years in
space. They were incredibly varied, even those that supported life. He
had weathered difficult landings on worlds with rip-tide gravities, had
felt the pull of the incredible star-tides imparted by twin and even
triple star systems. He had been on Einstein IV, the planet of eight
moons, and had felt the pulse of all eight of the satellites at once
that no PON could completely nullify.
But even if he could accept the psychologist's authority for the
cumulative effect of a gravity system, he could not understand the
unspoken warning he felt underlying all that the man said.
"Of course it has changed," Craig was protesting. "Anyway, I never
really knew very much about Terra. So what? I know it won't be as it
was in tapezines either."
"Yet you are so completely sure you will want to live out your life
there, that you are willing to give up space service for it."
"We've gone through this time and time again," Craig said wearily. "I
gave you my reasons for quitting space. We analyzed them. You agreed
that you could not decide that for me and that my decision is logical.
You tell me spacemen don't settle down on Terra. Yet you won't—or
can't—tell me why. I've got a damned good job there—"
"You may find that 'damned good jobs' become boring."
"So I'll transfer. I don't know what you're trying to get at, Captain,
but you're not talking me out of going back. If the service needs men
so badly, let them get somebody else. I've put in
my
time."
"Do you really think that's my reason?"
"Sure. What else can it be?"
"Mr. Craig," the psychologist said slowly, "you have my authorization
for you to return to Terra as a private citizen of that planet. You
will be given a very liberal supply of PON—which you will
definitely need. Good luck. You'll need that too."
On the eighth day, two attendants, who showed the effects of massive
doses of PON to protect themselves from the centrifugal force,
had to carry a man out of the tank. Many others asked to be removed,
begged to be allowed to withdraw their resignations.
"The twelfth day is the worst," a grizzled spaceman told Craig. "That's
when the best of 'em want out."
Craig clenched the iron rung of his bed and struggled to bring the old
man's face into focus.
"How ... how do they know when you ought ... to come out?" he asked
between waves of nausea.
"Blood pressure. They get you just before you go into shock."
"How can they tell?" Craig fought down his growing panic. "I can't."
"That strap around your belly. You mean you ain't noticed it?"
"Haven't noticed much of anything."
"Well, it's keyed to give them some kind of signal."
The old man lapsed into silence. Craig wished him to continue. He
desperately wanted something to distract his mind from the ghastly
conditioning process.
Slowly at first, the lines formed by seams in the metal ceiling began
to bend. Here it came again!
"Old man!" shouted Craig.
"Yeah, son. They've dropped it down a notch."
"Dropped ... it ... down?"
"Maybe that ain't scientific, but it's the way I always think of it."
"Can't they ... drop it down continuously?"
"They tried that a few times—once when I was aboard. You wouldn't like
it, kid. You wouldn't like it at all."
"How ... many times ... do they drop it?"
"Four times during the day, three at night. Twenty days."
A nightmare of visual sensations ebbed into Craig's mind. He was
vaguely aware of the moans of other men in the vaultlike room. Wave
upon wave of nausea swept him as he watched the seam lines bend and
warp fantastically. He snapped his eyelids shut, only to begin feeling
the nightmarish bodily sensations once more. He felt the cot slowly
rise longitudinally, felt himself upside down, then the snap of turning
right side up once more—and he knew that neither he nor the cot had
moved so much as an inch.
Craig heard the voices around him, muffled, as though talking through
wadding.
"... got it bad."
"We better take him out."
"... pretty bad."
"He'll go into shock."
"... never make it the twelfth."
"We better yank him."
"I'm ... all right," Craig mumbled at the voices. He struggled with the
bonds of his cot. With terrible effort he forced his eyes open. Two
white-clad figures, ridiculously out of proportion, hovered wraithlike
over him. Four elongated eyes peered at him.
Attendants coming for to take me home....
"Touch me and I'll kick your teeth in!" he yelled. "I'm going to Terra.
Wish you were going to Terra?"
Then it was better. Oddly, he passed the twelfth day easily. By the
fourteenth day, Craig knew he could stand Grav 1. The whine of the
centrifuge's motors had diminished to a low hum. Either that or they
had begun to produce ultra-sonic waves. Craig was not sure.
Most of the men had passed through the torments of gravitational
conditioning. The huge headquarters base centrifuge aboard the man-made
satellite had gradually caused their bodies to respond once more to a
single source of pull. They were now ready to become inhabitants of
planets again, instead of free-falling ships.
On the eighteenth day, automatic machinery freed them from their
imprisoning cots. Clumsily and awkwardly at first, the men began to
walk, to hold their heads and arms in proper attitudes. They laughed
and joked about it and kidded those who were slow at adjusting.
Then they again began taking paraoxylnebutal in preparation for the
free-fall flight to Terra.
Only one of the score of men in the centrifuge tank remained
voluntarily in his cot.
"Space article violator," the old man informed Craig. "Psycho, I think.
Went amuck with some extraterritorials. Killed a dozen."
"What will they do, exile him?"
"Not to Chociante, if that's what you mean. They just jerked his space
card and gave him a one-way ticket to Terra."
"For twelve murders?" asked Craig incredulously.
"That's enough, son." The old man eyed Craig for an instant before
looking away. "Pick something to talk about. What do you figure on
doing when you get to Terra, for instance?"
"I'm going into Import. My father was in it for twenty years."
"Sure," said the old spaceman, watching a group of young crewmen
engaged in an animated conversation.
"It's a good job. There's a future to it."
"Yeah."
Why did he have to explain anything at all to the old space tramp?
"Once I get set up, I'll probably try to open my own business."
"And spend your weekends on Luna."
Craig half rose from his cot, jarred into anger.
But the old spaceman turned, smiling wryly. "Don't get hot, kid. I
guess I spent too long in Zone V." He paused to examine his wrinkled
hands. They were indelibly marked with lever callouses. "You get to
thinking anyone who stays closer'n eighty light years from Terra is a
land-lubber."
Craig relaxed, realizing he had acted childishly. "Used to think the
same. Then I took the exam and got this job."
"Whereabouts?"
"Los Angeles."
The old man looked up at Craig. "You don't know much about Terra, do
you, son?"
"Not much."
"Yeah. Well, I hope you ain't disappointed."
"My father was born there, but I never saw it. Never hit the Solar
System, matter of fact. Never saw much of anything close up. I stood it
a long time, old man, this hitting atmospheres all over the Universe."
But the spaceman seemed to have lost interest. He was unpacking some
personal belongings from a kit.
"What are you doing in Grav 1?" Craig asked.
The old man's face clouded for an instant. "In the old days, they used
to say us old-timers acted like clocks. They used to say we just ran
down. Now they got some fancy psychology name for it."
Craig regretted his question. He would have muttered some word of
apology, but the old man continued.
"Maybe you've read some of the old sea stories, or more'n likely had
'em read to you. Sailors could go to sea until they just sort of dried
up. The sea tanned their skins and stiffened their bones, but it never
stiffened their hearts. When they got old, it just pulled them in.
"But space is different. Space is raw and new. It tugs at your guts. It
sends the blood rushing through your veins. It's like loving. You don't
become a part of space the way you do the old sea, though. It leaves
you strictly alone. Except that it sucks you dry, takes all the soup
out of you, leaves you brittle and old—old as a dehydrated piece of
split leather.
"Then one day it shoots a spurt of blood around in one of your old
veins. Something gives. Space is through with you then. And if you can
stand this whirligig conditioning, you're through with space."
"
You can't figure it. Some of 'em urp all over and turn six shades of
green.
"
"
You got to watch the ones that don't.
"
"
Yeah, you got to watch the ones that don't. Especially the old ones.
"
"
He's old. You think it was his heart?
"
"
Who knows?
"
"
They'll dump him, won't they?
"
"
After a tracer is sent through. But it won't do any good.
"
"
He probably outlived everybody that ever knew him.
"
"
Wouldn't be surprised. Here, grab his leg.
"
Robert Craig folded the flight jacket tightly and stuffed it into the
cylindrical carton. A sleeve unwound just as he did so, making it
difficult to fit into the place he had made for it. Exasperated, he
refolded it and jammed it in place. Smaller rolls of underclothing were
then fitted in. When he was satisfied with the layer, he tossed in a
small handful of crystals and began to fill the next layer. After the
carton was completely filled, he ignited the sealing strip and watched
as the plastic melted into a single, seamless whole. It was ready for
irradiation. Probably in another ten years his son-to-be would put it
on and play spaceman. But Craig swore he'd make sure that the kid knew
what a stinking life it was.
At 1300 hours, the ferry bumped heavily alongside the starboard lock.
It was the signal for relief in the passengers' quarters; many were
beginning to feel a reaction to the short free-fall flight from the
headquarters satellite.
The audio called out: "Flight Officer Robert Craig. Flight Officer
Robert Craig. Report to Orderly 12. Report to Orderly 12 through the
aft door."
With pangs of anxiety he could not completely suppress, Craig obeyed.
Orderly 12 handed him a message container.
"Who's it from? Somebody on Terra?"
"From a private spaceman named Morgan Brockman."
"
Brockman?
"
"He was with you in the grav tank."
"The old man!"
The message container produced a battered punch card. Craig
straightened it and was about to reach into his pocket for a hand
transcriber. But then he noticed the card bore only a few irregular
punches and was covered with rough hand printing.
Son, when the flunkies get around to giving you this, they'll have
shot me out the tube. How do I know? Same way you know when your
turbos are going to throw a blade. It's good this way.
There's something you can do for me if you want to. Way back, some
fifty years ago, there was a woman. She was my wife. It's a long story
I won't bother you with. Anyway, I left her. Wanted to take her along
with me, but she wouldn't go.
Earth was a lot different then than it is now. They don't have to tell
me; I know. I saw it coming and so did Ethel. We talked about it and I
knew I had to go. She wouldn't or couldn't go. Wanted me to stay, but
I couldn't.
I tried to send her some units once in a while. Don't know if she ever
got them. Sometimes I forgot to send them at all. You know, you're way
out across the Galaxy, while she's home.
Go see her if you can, son. Will you? Make sure she gets the unit
transfer I made out. It isn't much out of seventy years of living,
but she may need it. And maybe you can tell her a little bit about
what it means to be out there. Tell her it's open and free and when
you got hold of those levers and you're trying for an orbit on
something big and new and green.... Hell, you remember. You know how
to tell her.
Her name is Ethel Brockman. I know she'll still use my name. Her
address is or was East 71, North 101, Number 4. You can trace her
easy if she moved. Women don't generally shove off and not leave a
forwarding address. Not Ethel, at least.
Craig put the battered card in his pocket and walked back through the
door to the passenger room. How did you explain to an old woman why her
husband deserted her fifty years before? Some kind of story about one's
duty to the Universe? No, the old man had not been in Intergalactic. He
had been a tramp spaceman. Well, why
had
he left?
Fifty years in space.
Fifty
years! Zone V had been beyond anybody's
imagination that long ago. He must have been in on the first Cetusian
flights and shot the early landings in Cetus II. God only knew how many
times he had battled Zone 111b pirates....
Damn the old man! How did one explain?
Craig descended the ramp from the huge jet and concentrated on his
impressions. One day he would recall this moment, his first on the
planet Terra. He tried to recall his first thrill at seeing Los
Angeles, 1500 square miles of it, from the ship as it entered the
atmosphere.
He was about to step off the last step when a man appeared hurriedly. A
rather plump man, he displayed a toothy smile on his puffy red face.
"A moment, sir. Just a little greeting from the Terra. You understand,
of course. Purely routine."
Craig remained on the final step of the ramp, puzzled. The man turned
to a companion at his right.
"We can see that this gentleman has come from a long, long way off,
can't we?"
The other man did not look up. He was peering into what seemed to Craig
to be a kind of camera.
"We can allow the gentlemen to continue now, can't we? It wasn't that
we believed for a minute, you understand ... purely routine."
Both men were gone in an instant, leaving Craig completely bewildered.
"You goin' to move on, buddy, or you want to go back?"
Craig turned to face a line of his fellow passengers up the ramp behind
him.
"Who was that?" Craig asked.
"Customs. Bet you never got such a smooth screening before, eh?"
"You mean he
screened
me? What for?"
"Hard to say," the other passenger said. "You'll get used to this. They
get it over with quick."
Craig made his way toward the spaceport administration building. His
first physical contact with Terra had passed unnoticed.
"Sir! Sir!" cried a voice behind him.
He wheeled to see a man walking briskly toward him.
"You dropped this, sir. Quite by accident, of course."
Craig examined the small object the man had given him before rushing
off toward an exit.
It was an empty PON tube he had just discarded. He couldn't
understand why the man had bothered until he realized that the
plastaloid floor of the lobby displayed not the faintest scrap of paper
nor trace of dirt.
The Import personnel man was toying with a small chip of gleaming
metal. He did not look directly at Craig for more than an instant at a
time, and commented on Craig's description of his trip through the city
only very briefly between questions.
"It's a good deal bigger than I imagined," Craig was saying. "Haven't
seen much of it, of course. Thought I'd check in here with you first."
"Yes, naturally."
"Thought you could give me some idea of conditions...."
"Conditions?"
"For instance, what part of the city I should live in. That is, what
part is closest to where I'll work."
"I see," said the man noncommittally. It seemed to Craig that he was
about to add something. He did not, however, but instead rose from his
chair and walked to the large window overlooking an enormous section of
the city far below. He stared out the window for a time, leaving Craig
seated uncomfortably in the silent room. There was a distracted quality
about him, Craig thought.
"You are the first man we have had from the Intergalactic Service," the
personnel man said finally.
"That so?"
"Yes." He turned to face Craig briefly before continuing. "You must
find it very strange here."
"Well, I've never seen a city so big."
"Yes, so big. And also...." He seemed to consider many words before
completing the sentence. "And also different."
"I haven't been here very long," said Craig. "Matter of fact, I haven't
been anywhere very long. This is my first real experience with life on
a planet. As an adult, anyway."
The personnel man seated himself once more and pressed a button on a
small instrument. A secretary entered the office from a door to Craig's
left.
"Miss Wendel, this is Mr. Craig. Mr. Craig, my secretary. Mr. Craig
will enter Minerals and Metals, Zone V."
They exchanged formal greetings. She was a moderately pretty girl of
medium height and, to Craig, a pleasantly rounded figure. He would have
attempted to catch her eye had she not immediately occupied herself
with unfolding the legs of a small instrument she was carrying.
"This is Mr. Craig's first landing on Terra, Miss Wendel," the
personnel man continued. "Actually, we shall have to consider him in
much the same way we would an extraterrestrial."
The girl glanced at Craig, casting him a cool, impersonal smile.
"He was formerly a flight officer in the Intergalactic Space Service."
The statement was delivered in an almost exaggeratedly casual tone.
The girl glanced at him once more, this time with a definite quizzical
look in her brown eyes.
"Three complete tours of duty, I believe."
"Four," corrected Craig. "Four tours of three years each, minus a
year's terminal leave."
"I take it you have no identification card?" the man asked.
"The one I held in the service. It's pretty comprehensive."
The other turned to the secretary. "You'll see that he is assisted in
filing his application, won't you? A provisional Code II. That will
enable you to enter all Import offices freely, Mr. Craig."
"Will he need a food and—clothing ration also?" asked the girl,
without looking at Craig.
"Yes." The man laughed. "You'll excuse us, Mr. Craig. We realize that
you couldn't be expected to be familiar with Terra's fashions. In your
present outfit you would certainly be typed as a ... well, you'd be
made uncomfortable."
Craig reddened in spite of himself. He had bought the suit on Ghandii.
"A hick," he supplied.
"I wouldn't go that far, but some people might."
Craig noted the pleasant way the girl filled her trim, rather severe
business suit. He amused himself by calculating stress patterns in its
plain woven material as she assembled the forms for him.
"Here, Mr. Craig. I believe these are complete."
"They look pretty complicated."
"Not at all. The questions are quite explicit."
Craig looked them over quickly.
"I guess so. Say, Miss Wendel, I was wondering—I don't know the city
at all. Maybe you could go with me to have dinner. It must be almost
dinnertime now. You could sort of check me out on some...."
"I'm afraid that would be quite impossible. You couldn't gain
admittance to any office you need to visit tonight. Therefore, it is
impossible for me to be of any assistance to you."
"Oh, come now, Miss Wendel. There are women aboard spaceships. I'm not
a starved wolf."
"Certainly you are not, Mr. Craig. But it is not possible for me...."
"You said that already, but you can have dinner with me. Just company."
"I'm afraid I don't understand."
The Galactic hotel strove to preserve an archaic tone of hospitality.
It advertised "a night's lodgings" and it possessed a bellboy. The
bellboy actually carried Craig's plasticarton and large file of punch
cards and forms to his room. Tired from the long, confusing day, Craig
was not impressed. He vaguely wondered if the little drama of the
hotel carried so far as a small fee to be paid the bellboy, and he
hoped he would have the right size of Terran units in his wallet.
Outside the door to the room, the bellboy stopped and turned to Craig.
"For five I'll tell you where it is," he said in a subdued tone.
"Tell me where what is?"
"You know, the mike."
"Mike?"
"All right, mister, three units, then. I wasn't trying to hold you up."
"You mean a microphone?" asked Craig, mechanically fishing for his
wallet.
"Sure, they don't put in screens here. Wanted to, but the boss
convinced 'em there aren't any Freedomites ever stay here."
"Where is the microphone?" Craig asked as he found a ten unit note.
He was too puzzled to wonder what he was expected to do with the
information.
"It's in the bed illuminator. You can short it out with a razor blade.
Or I'll do it for another two."
"Never mind," Craig said wearily. He waited while the bellboy inserted
a key into the door and opened it for him.
"I can get you a sensatia-tape," whispered the boy when they had
entered. He nudged Craig wickedly. "You know what they're like?"
"Yeah," Craig said disgustedly. Traffic in the illicit mental-image
tapes was known as far into space as lonely men had penetrated.
Intergalactic considered them as great a menace to mental and moral
stability as the hectopiates. Craig wearily got the man out of the
room, took a PON pill, and eased himself into the bed.
It had been a weird day and he had not liked it. There was no telling
how long it would take him to shake his—sea legs, the psychologist
had called it. One thing was sure: Terra aggressively went after its
strangers. | [
"clothing",
"accent",
"posture",
"walking"
] | 0 |
51407_3ARTW1HP_8 | Sensatia most likely refers to ________. | SEA LEGS
By FRANK QUATTROCCHI
Illustrated by EMSH
Rootless and footloose, a man in space can't help
but dream of coming home. But something nobody should
do is bet on the validity of a homesick dream!
Flight Officer Robert Craig surrendered the tube containing his service
record tapes and stood waiting while the bored process clerk examined
the seal.
"Your clearance," said the clerk.
Craig handed him a battered punch card and watched the man insert it in
the reproducer. He felt anxiety as the much-handled card refused for a
time to match the instrument's metal contact points. The line of men
behind Craig fidgeted.
"You got to get this punched by Territorial," said the clerk. "Take it
back to your unit's clearance office."
"Look again, Sergeant," Craig said, repressing his irritation.
"It ain't notched."
"The hell it isn't."
The man examined the card with squinting care and nodded finally. "It's
so damn notched," he complained. "You ought to take care of that card;
can't get on without one."
Craig hesitated before moving.
"Next," said the clerk, "What you waiting for?"
"Don't I take my 201 file?"
"We send it on ahead. Go to Grav 1 desk."
A murmur greeted the order. Craig experienced the thrill of knowing
the envy of the others. Grav 1—that meant Terra. He crossed the long,
dreary room, knowing the eyes of the other men were upon him.
"Your service tapes," the next noncom said. "Where you going?"
"Grav 1—Terra," fumbled Craig. "Los Angeles."
"Los Angeles, eh? Where in Los Angeles?"
"I—I—" Craig muttered, fumbling in his pockets.
"No specific destination," supplied the man as he punched a key on a
small instrument, "Air-lock ahead and to your right. Strip and follow
the robot's orders. Any metal?"
"Metal?" asked Craig.
"You know,
metal
."
"Well, my identification key."
"Here," commanded the clerk, extending a plastic envelope.
Craig moved in the direction indicated. He fought the irrational fear
that he had missed an important step in the complicated clerical
process. He cursed the grudging attitude of the headquarters satellite
personnel and felt the impotence of a spaceman who had long forgotten
the bureaucracy of a rear area base. The knowledge that much of it was
motivated by envy soothed him as he clumsily let himself into the lock.
"Place your clothing in the receptacle provided and assume a stationary
position on the raised podium in the center of the lock."
Craig obeyed the robot voice and began reluctantly to remove his flight
jacket. Its incredibly fine-grained leather would carry none of the
strange, foreign associations for the base station clerk who would
appropriate it. He would never know the beautiful, gentle beast that
supplied this skin.
"You are retarding the progress of others. Please respond more quickly
to your orders."
Craig quickly removed the last of his clothing. It was impossible
to hate a robot, but one could certainly hate those who set it into
operation.
"You will find a red button at your feet. Lower your head and depress
that button."
Stepping on the button with his bare foot produced an instant of
brilliant blue illumination. A small scratch on his arm stung briefly
and he was somewhat blinded by the flash even through his eyelids, but
that was all there was to the sterilizing process.
"Your clothing and effects will be in the dressing room immediately
beyond the locked door."
He found his clothing cleanly and neatly hung on plastic hangers just
inside the door to the dressing room. The few personal items he carried
in his pockets were still there. The Schtann flight jacket was actually
there, looking like new, its space-blue unfaded and as wonderfully
pliant as before.
"Insert your right arm into the instrument on the central table,"
commanded the same voice he had heard before. "Turn your arm until the
scratch is in contact with the metal plate. There will be a slight
pain, but it is necessary to treat the small injury you have been
disregarding."
Craig obeyed and clenched his teeth against a sharp stinging. His
respect for the robot-controlled equipment of bases had risen. When
he withdrew his arm, the scratch was neatly coated with a layer of
flesh-colored plastic material.
He dressed quickly and was on the verge of asking the robot for
instructions, when a man appeared in the open doorway.
"I am Captain Wyandotte," said the man in a pleasant voice.
"Well, what's next?" asked Craig somewhat more belligerently than he
had intended.
The man smiled. "Your reaction is quite natural. You are somewhat
aggressive after Clerical, eh?"
"I'm a little anxious to get home, I suppose," said Craig defensively.
"By 'home' you mean Terra. But you've never been there, have you?"
"No, but my father—"
"Your parents left Terra during the Second Colonization of Cassiopeia
II, didn't they?"
"Yes," Craig said. He was uncomfortable; Wyandotte seemed to know all
about him.
"We might say you've been away quite a while, eh?"
"I was entered as a spaceman when I was 16," Craig said. "I've never
been down for any period as yet."
"You mean you haven't been in a gravity system?"
"Oh, I've landed a few times, even walked around for a while...."
"With the help of paraoxylnebutal," supplied the captain.
"Well, sure."
"Mr. Craig, I suppose you've guessed that the next step in our little
torture system here is psych."
"So I gathered."
The captain laughed reassuringly. "No, don't put up your guard again.
The worst is over. Short of Gravitational conditioning, there is
nothing to stop you from going to Terra."
"Sorry, I guess I'm a little touchy. This is my first time...."
"Quite natural. But it being your first time—in quite a number of
ways, I might add—it will be necessary for you to undergo some
conditioning."
"Conditioning?" asked Craig.
"Yes. You have spent eleven years in space. Your body is conditioned to
a normal state of free fall, or at best to a state of acceleration."
"Yeah, I know. Once on Gerymeade...."
"You were ill, couldn't keep your balance, felt dizzy. That is why
all spacemen carry PON, paraoxylnebutal, with them. It helps
suppress certain physiological reactions to an entirely new set of
conditions. Channels of the ear, for example. They play an important
part in our awareness of balance. They operate on a simple gravity
principle. Without gravity they act up for a time, then gradually lose
function. Returning to gravity is rather frightening at first."
"I know all about this, Captain."
"You've undoubtedly read popularizations in tapezines. But you have
experienced it briefly."
"I expect to have some trouble at first." Craig was disturbed by the
wordy psychologist. What was the man actually saying?
"Do you know what sailors of ancient times meant by 'sea legs?'" asked
Wyandotte. "Men on a rolling ocean acclimated themselves to a rolling
horizontal. They had trouble when they went ashore and the horizontal
didn't roll any more.
"It meant more than that. There were excellent psychological reasons
for the old stereotype, the 'drunken sailor.' A port city was a
frightening thing to an old sailor—but let's begin our little job at
the beginning. I'll turn you over to psychometry for the usual tests
and pick you up tomorrow morning at, say, 0900."
During the days that followed, the psychologist seemed to Craig to
become progressively more didactic. He would deliver long speeches
about the "freedom of open space." He spoke repetitiously of the
"growing complexity of Terran society." And yet the man could not
be pinned down to any specific condition the spaceman would find
intolerable.
Craig began to hate the delay that kept him from Terra. Through the
ports of the headquarters base satellite, he scanned the constellations
for the scores of worlds he had visited during his eleven years in
space. They were incredibly varied, even those that supported life. He
had weathered difficult landings on worlds with rip-tide gravities, had
felt the pull of the incredible star-tides imparted by twin and even
triple star systems. He had been on Einstein IV, the planet of eight
moons, and had felt the pulse of all eight of the satellites at once
that no PON could completely nullify.
But even if he could accept the psychologist's authority for the
cumulative effect of a gravity system, he could not understand the
unspoken warning he felt underlying all that the man said.
"Of course it has changed," Craig was protesting. "Anyway, I never
really knew very much about Terra. So what? I know it won't be as it
was in tapezines either."
"Yet you are so completely sure you will want to live out your life
there, that you are willing to give up space service for it."
"We've gone through this time and time again," Craig said wearily. "I
gave you my reasons for quitting space. We analyzed them. You agreed
that you could not decide that for me and that my decision is logical.
You tell me spacemen don't settle down on Terra. Yet you won't—or
can't—tell me why. I've got a damned good job there—"
"You may find that 'damned good jobs' become boring."
"So I'll transfer. I don't know what you're trying to get at, Captain,
but you're not talking me out of going back. If the service needs men
so badly, let them get somebody else. I've put in
my
time."
"Do you really think that's my reason?"
"Sure. What else can it be?"
"Mr. Craig," the psychologist said slowly, "you have my authorization
for you to return to Terra as a private citizen of that planet. You
will be given a very liberal supply of PON—which you will
definitely need. Good luck. You'll need that too."
On the eighth day, two attendants, who showed the effects of massive
doses of PON to protect themselves from the centrifugal force,
had to carry a man out of the tank. Many others asked to be removed,
begged to be allowed to withdraw their resignations.
"The twelfth day is the worst," a grizzled spaceman told Craig. "That's
when the best of 'em want out."
Craig clenched the iron rung of his bed and struggled to bring the old
man's face into focus.
"How ... how do they know when you ought ... to come out?" he asked
between waves of nausea.
"Blood pressure. They get you just before you go into shock."
"How can they tell?" Craig fought down his growing panic. "I can't."
"That strap around your belly. You mean you ain't noticed it?"
"Haven't noticed much of anything."
"Well, it's keyed to give them some kind of signal."
The old man lapsed into silence. Craig wished him to continue. He
desperately wanted something to distract his mind from the ghastly
conditioning process.
Slowly at first, the lines formed by seams in the metal ceiling began
to bend. Here it came again!
"Old man!" shouted Craig.
"Yeah, son. They've dropped it down a notch."
"Dropped ... it ... down?"
"Maybe that ain't scientific, but it's the way I always think of it."
"Can't they ... drop it down continuously?"
"They tried that a few times—once when I was aboard. You wouldn't like
it, kid. You wouldn't like it at all."
"How ... many times ... do they drop it?"
"Four times during the day, three at night. Twenty days."
A nightmare of visual sensations ebbed into Craig's mind. He was
vaguely aware of the moans of other men in the vaultlike room. Wave
upon wave of nausea swept him as he watched the seam lines bend and
warp fantastically. He snapped his eyelids shut, only to begin feeling
the nightmarish bodily sensations once more. He felt the cot slowly
rise longitudinally, felt himself upside down, then the snap of turning
right side up once more—and he knew that neither he nor the cot had
moved so much as an inch.
Craig heard the voices around him, muffled, as though talking through
wadding.
"... got it bad."
"We better take him out."
"... pretty bad."
"He'll go into shock."
"... never make it the twelfth."
"We better yank him."
"I'm ... all right," Craig mumbled at the voices. He struggled with the
bonds of his cot. With terrible effort he forced his eyes open. Two
white-clad figures, ridiculously out of proportion, hovered wraithlike
over him. Four elongated eyes peered at him.
Attendants coming for to take me home....
"Touch me and I'll kick your teeth in!" he yelled. "I'm going to Terra.
Wish you were going to Terra?"
Then it was better. Oddly, he passed the twelfth day easily. By the
fourteenth day, Craig knew he could stand Grav 1. The whine of the
centrifuge's motors had diminished to a low hum. Either that or they
had begun to produce ultra-sonic waves. Craig was not sure.
Most of the men had passed through the torments of gravitational
conditioning. The huge headquarters base centrifuge aboard the man-made
satellite had gradually caused their bodies to respond once more to a
single source of pull. They were now ready to become inhabitants of
planets again, instead of free-falling ships.
On the eighteenth day, automatic machinery freed them from their
imprisoning cots. Clumsily and awkwardly at first, the men began to
walk, to hold their heads and arms in proper attitudes. They laughed
and joked about it and kidded those who were slow at adjusting.
Then they again began taking paraoxylnebutal in preparation for the
free-fall flight to Terra.
Only one of the score of men in the centrifuge tank remained
voluntarily in his cot.
"Space article violator," the old man informed Craig. "Psycho, I think.
Went amuck with some extraterritorials. Killed a dozen."
"What will they do, exile him?"
"Not to Chociante, if that's what you mean. They just jerked his space
card and gave him a one-way ticket to Terra."
"For twelve murders?" asked Craig incredulously.
"That's enough, son." The old man eyed Craig for an instant before
looking away. "Pick something to talk about. What do you figure on
doing when you get to Terra, for instance?"
"I'm going into Import. My father was in it for twenty years."
"Sure," said the old spaceman, watching a group of young crewmen
engaged in an animated conversation.
"It's a good job. There's a future to it."
"Yeah."
Why did he have to explain anything at all to the old space tramp?
"Once I get set up, I'll probably try to open my own business."
"And spend your weekends on Luna."
Craig half rose from his cot, jarred into anger.
But the old spaceman turned, smiling wryly. "Don't get hot, kid. I
guess I spent too long in Zone V." He paused to examine his wrinkled
hands. They were indelibly marked with lever callouses. "You get to
thinking anyone who stays closer'n eighty light years from Terra is a
land-lubber."
Craig relaxed, realizing he had acted childishly. "Used to think the
same. Then I took the exam and got this job."
"Whereabouts?"
"Los Angeles."
The old man looked up at Craig. "You don't know much about Terra, do
you, son?"
"Not much."
"Yeah. Well, I hope you ain't disappointed."
"My father was born there, but I never saw it. Never hit the Solar
System, matter of fact. Never saw much of anything close up. I stood it
a long time, old man, this hitting atmospheres all over the Universe."
But the spaceman seemed to have lost interest. He was unpacking some
personal belongings from a kit.
"What are you doing in Grav 1?" Craig asked.
The old man's face clouded for an instant. "In the old days, they used
to say us old-timers acted like clocks. They used to say we just ran
down. Now they got some fancy psychology name for it."
Craig regretted his question. He would have muttered some word of
apology, but the old man continued.
"Maybe you've read some of the old sea stories, or more'n likely had
'em read to you. Sailors could go to sea until they just sort of dried
up. The sea tanned their skins and stiffened their bones, but it never
stiffened their hearts. When they got old, it just pulled them in.
"But space is different. Space is raw and new. It tugs at your guts. It
sends the blood rushing through your veins. It's like loving. You don't
become a part of space the way you do the old sea, though. It leaves
you strictly alone. Except that it sucks you dry, takes all the soup
out of you, leaves you brittle and old—old as a dehydrated piece of
split leather.
"Then one day it shoots a spurt of blood around in one of your old
veins. Something gives. Space is through with you then. And if you can
stand this whirligig conditioning, you're through with space."
"
You can't figure it. Some of 'em urp all over and turn six shades of
green.
"
"
You got to watch the ones that don't.
"
"
Yeah, you got to watch the ones that don't. Especially the old ones.
"
"
He's old. You think it was his heart?
"
"
Who knows?
"
"
They'll dump him, won't they?
"
"
After a tracer is sent through. But it won't do any good.
"
"
He probably outlived everybody that ever knew him.
"
"
Wouldn't be surprised. Here, grab his leg.
"
Robert Craig folded the flight jacket tightly and stuffed it into the
cylindrical carton. A sleeve unwound just as he did so, making it
difficult to fit into the place he had made for it. Exasperated, he
refolded it and jammed it in place. Smaller rolls of underclothing were
then fitted in. When he was satisfied with the layer, he tossed in a
small handful of crystals and began to fill the next layer. After the
carton was completely filled, he ignited the sealing strip and watched
as the plastic melted into a single, seamless whole. It was ready for
irradiation. Probably in another ten years his son-to-be would put it
on and play spaceman. But Craig swore he'd make sure that the kid knew
what a stinking life it was.
At 1300 hours, the ferry bumped heavily alongside the starboard lock.
It was the signal for relief in the passengers' quarters; many were
beginning to feel a reaction to the short free-fall flight from the
headquarters satellite.
The audio called out: "Flight Officer Robert Craig. Flight Officer
Robert Craig. Report to Orderly 12. Report to Orderly 12 through the
aft door."
With pangs of anxiety he could not completely suppress, Craig obeyed.
Orderly 12 handed him a message container.
"Who's it from? Somebody on Terra?"
"From a private spaceman named Morgan Brockman."
"
Brockman?
"
"He was with you in the grav tank."
"The old man!"
The message container produced a battered punch card. Craig
straightened it and was about to reach into his pocket for a hand
transcriber. But then he noticed the card bore only a few irregular
punches and was covered with rough hand printing.
Son, when the flunkies get around to giving you this, they'll have
shot me out the tube. How do I know? Same way you know when your
turbos are going to throw a blade. It's good this way.
There's something you can do for me if you want to. Way back, some
fifty years ago, there was a woman. She was my wife. It's a long story
I won't bother you with. Anyway, I left her. Wanted to take her along
with me, but she wouldn't go.
Earth was a lot different then than it is now. They don't have to tell
me; I know. I saw it coming and so did Ethel. We talked about it and I
knew I had to go. She wouldn't or couldn't go. Wanted me to stay, but
I couldn't.
I tried to send her some units once in a while. Don't know if she ever
got them. Sometimes I forgot to send them at all. You know, you're way
out across the Galaxy, while she's home.
Go see her if you can, son. Will you? Make sure she gets the unit
transfer I made out. It isn't much out of seventy years of living,
but she may need it. And maybe you can tell her a little bit about
what it means to be out there. Tell her it's open and free and when
you got hold of those levers and you're trying for an orbit on
something big and new and green.... Hell, you remember. You know how
to tell her.
Her name is Ethel Brockman. I know she'll still use my name. Her
address is or was East 71, North 101, Number 4. You can trace her
easy if she moved. Women don't generally shove off and not leave a
forwarding address. Not Ethel, at least.
Craig put the battered card in his pocket and walked back through the
door to the passenger room. How did you explain to an old woman why her
husband deserted her fifty years before? Some kind of story about one's
duty to the Universe? No, the old man had not been in Intergalactic. He
had been a tramp spaceman. Well, why
had
he left?
Fifty years in space.
Fifty
years! Zone V had been beyond anybody's
imagination that long ago. He must have been in on the first Cetusian
flights and shot the early landings in Cetus II. God only knew how many
times he had battled Zone 111b pirates....
Damn the old man! How did one explain?
Craig descended the ramp from the huge jet and concentrated on his
impressions. One day he would recall this moment, his first on the
planet Terra. He tried to recall his first thrill at seeing Los
Angeles, 1500 square miles of it, from the ship as it entered the
atmosphere.
He was about to step off the last step when a man appeared hurriedly. A
rather plump man, he displayed a toothy smile on his puffy red face.
"A moment, sir. Just a little greeting from the Terra. You understand,
of course. Purely routine."
Craig remained on the final step of the ramp, puzzled. The man turned
to a companion at his right.
"We can see that this gentleman has come from a long, long way off,
can't we?"
The other man did not look up. He was peering into what seemed to Craig
to be a kind of camera.
"We can allow the gentlemen to continue now, can't we? It wasn't that
we believed for a minute, you understand ... purely routine."
Both men were gone in an instant, leaving Craig completely bewildered.
"You goin' to move on, buddy, or you want to go back?"
Craig turned to face a line of his fellow passengers up the ramp behind
him.
"Who was that?" Craig asked.
"Customs. Bet you never got such a smooth screening before, eh?"
"You mean he
screened
me? What for?"
"Hard to say," the other passenger said. "You'll get used to this. They
get it over with quick."
Craig made his way toward the spaceport administration building. His
first physical contact with Terra had passed unnoticed.
"Sir! Sir!" cried a voice behind him.
He wheeled to see a man walking briskly toward him.
"You dropped this, sir. Quite by accident, of course."
Craig examined the small object the man had given him before rushing
off toward an exit.
It was an empty PON tube he had just discarded. He couldn't
understand why the man had bothered until he realized that the
plastaloid floor of the lobby displayed not the faintest scrap of paper
nor trace of dirt.
The Import personnel man was toying with a small chip of gleaming
metal. He did not look directly at Craig for more than an instant at a
time, and commented on Craig's description of his trip through the city
only very briefly between questions.
"It's a good deal bigger than I imagined," Craig was saying. "Haven't
seen much of it, of course. Thought I'd check in here with you first."
"Yes, naturally."
"Thought you could give me some idea of conditions...."
"Conditions?"
"For instance, what part of the city I should live in. That is, what
part is closest to where I'll work."
"I see," said the man noncommittally. It seemed to Craig that he was
about to add something. He did not, however, but instead rose from his
chair and walked to the large window overlooking an enormous section of
the city far below. He stared out the window for a time, leaving Craig
seated uncomfortably in the silent room. There was a distracted quality
about him, Craig thought.
"You are the first man we have had from the Intergalactic Service," the
personnel man said finally.
"That so?"
"Yes." He turned to face Craig briefly before continuing. "You must
find it very strange here."
"Well, I've never seen a city so big."
"Yes, so big. And also...." He seemed to consider many words before
completing the sentence. "And also different."
"I haven't been here very long," said Craig. "Matter of fact, I haven't
been anywhere very long. This is my first real experience with life on
a planet. As an adult, anyway."
The personnel man seated himself once more and pressed a button on a
small instrument. A secretary entered the office from a door to Craig's
left.
"Miss Wendel, this is Mr. Craig. Mr. Craig, my secretary. Mr. Craig
will enter Minerals and Metals, Zone V."
They exchanged formal greetings. She was a moderately pretty girl of
medium height and, to Craig, a pleasantly rounded figure. He would have
attempted to catch her eye had she not immediately occupied herself
with unfolding the legs of a small instrument she was carrying.
"This is Mr. Craig's first landing on Terra, Miss Wendel," the
personnel man continued. "Actually, we shall have to consider him in
much the same way we would an extraterrestrial."
The girl glanced at Craig, casting him a cool, impersonal smile.
"He was formerly a flight officer in the Intergalactic Space Service."
The statement was delivered in an almost exaggeratedly casual tone.
The girl glanced at him once more, this time with a definite quizzical
look in her brown eyes.
"Three complete tours of duty, I believe."
"Four," corrected Craig. "Four tours of three years each, minus a
year's terminal leave."
"I take it you have no identification card?" the man asked.
"The one I held in the service. It's pretty comprehensive."
The other turned to the secretary. "You'll see that he is assisted in
filing his application, won't you? A provisional Code II. That will
enable you to enter all Import offices freely, Mr. Craig."
"Will he need a food and—clothing ration also?" asked the girl,
without looking at Craig.
"Yes." The man laughed. "You'll excuse us, Mr. Craig. We realize that
you couldn't be expected to be familiar with Terra's fashions. In your
present outfit you would certainly be typed as a ... well, you'd be
made uncomfortable."
Craig reddened in spite of himself. He had bought the suit on Ghandii.
"A hick," he supplied.
"I wouldn't go that far, but some people might."
Craig noted the pleasant way the girl filled her trim, rather severe
business suit. He amused himself by calculating stress patterns in its
plain woven material as she assembled the forms for him.
"Here, Mr. Craig. I believe these are complete."
"They look pretty complicated."
"Not at all. The questions are quite explicit."
Craig looked them over quickly.
"I guess so. Say, Miss Wendel, I was wondering—I don't know the city
at all. Maybe you could go with me to have dinner. It must be almost
dinnertime now. You could sort of check me out on some...."
"I'm afraid that would be quite impossible. You couldn't gain
admittance to any office you need to visit tonight. Therefore, it is
impossible for me to be of any assistance to you."
"Oh, come now, Miss Wendel. There are women aboard spaceships. I'm not
a starved wolf."
"Certainly you are not, Mr. Craig. But it is not possible for me...."
"You said that already, but you can have dinner with me. Just company."
"I'm afraid I don't understand."
The Galactic hotel strove to preserve an archaic tone of hospitality.
It advertised "a night's lodgings" and it possessed a bellboy. The
bellboy actually carried Craig's plasticarton and large file of punch
cards and forms to his room. Tired from the long, confusing day, Craig
was not impressed. He vaguely wondered if the little drama of the
hotel carried so far as a small fee to be paid the bellboy, and he
hoped he would have the right size of Terran units in his wallet.
Outside the door to the room, the bellboy stopped and turned to Craig.
"For five I'll tell you where it is," he said in a subdued tone.
"Tell me where what is?"
"You know, the mike."
"Mike?"
"All right, mister, three units, then. I wasn't trying to hold you up."
"You mean a microphone?" asked Craig, mechanically fishing for his
wallet.
"Sure, they don't put in screens here. Wanted to, but the boss
convinced 'em there aren't any Freedomites ever stay here."
"Where is the microphone?" Craig asked as he found a ten unit note.
He was too puzzled to wonder what he was expected to do with the
information.
"It's in the bed illuminator. You can short it out with a razor blade.
Or I'll do it for another two."
"Never mind," Craig said wearily. He waited while the bellboy inserted
a key into the door and opened it for him.
"I can get you a sensatia-tape," whispered the boy when they had
entered. He nudged Craig wickedly. "You know what they're like?"
"Yeah," Craig said disgustedly. Traffic in the illicit mental-image
tapes was known as far into space as lonely men had penetrated.
Intergalactic considered them as great a menace to mental and moral
stability as the hectopiates. Craig wearily got the man out of the
room, took a PON pill, and eased himself into the bed.
It had been a weird day and he had not liked it. There was no telling
how long it would take him to shake his—sea legs, the psychologist
had called it. One thing was sure: Terra aggressively went after its
strangers. | [
"illicit drugs",
"microphone shorters",
"pornography",
"virtual reality equipment"
] | 2 |
43046_Q9R0IJB9_1 | What crime did Moran commit? | <!-- $Id: header.txt 236 2009-12-07 18:57:00Z vlsimpson $ -->
PLANET of DREAD
By MURRAY LEINSTER
Illustrator ADKINS
I.
Moran cut apart the yard-long monstrosity with a slash of flame.
The thing presumably died, but it continued to writhe senselessly.
He turned to see other horrors crawling toward him. Then he knew he
was being marooned on a planet of endless terrors.
Moran, naturally, did not mean to help in the carrying out of the plans
which would mean his destruction one way or another. The plans were
thrashed out very painstakingly, in formal conference on the space-yacht
Nadine
, with Moran present and allowed to take part in the discussion.
From the viewpoint of the
Nadine's
ship's company, it was simply
necessary to get rid of Moran. In their predicament he might have come
to the same conclusion; but he was not at all enthusiastic about their
decision. He would die of it.
The
Nadine
was out of overdrive and all the uncountable suns of the
galaxy shone steadily, remotely, as infinitesimal specks of light of
every color of the rainbow. Two hours since, the sun of this solar
system had been a vast glaring disk off to port, with streamers and
prominences erupting about its edges. Now it lay astern, and Moran
could see the planet that had been chosen for his marooning. It was a
cloudy world. There were some dim markings near one lighted limb, but
nowhere else. There was an ice-cap in view. The rest was—clouds.
The ice-cap, by its existence and circular shape, proved that the planet
rotated at a not unreasonable rate. The fact that it was water-ice told
much. A water-ice ice-cap said that there were no poisonous gases in the
planet's atmosphere. Sulfur dioxide or chlorine, for example, would not
allow the formation of water-ice. It would have to be sulphuric-acid or
hydrochloric-acid ice. But the ice-cap was simple snow. Its size, too,
told about temperature-distribution on the planet. A large cap would
have meant a large area with arctic and sub-arctic temperatures, with
small temperate and tropical climate-belts. A small one like this meant
wide tropical and sub-tropical zones. The fact was verified by the
thick, dense cloud-masses which covered most of the surface,—all the
surface, in fact, outside the ice-cap. But since there were ice-caps
there would be temperate regions. In short, the ice-cap proved that a
man could endure the air and temperature conditions he would find.
Moran observed these things from the control-room of the
Nadine
, then
approaching the world on planetary drive. He was to be left here, with
no reason ever to expect rescue. Two of the
Nadine's
four-man crew
watched out the same ports as the planet seemed to approach. Burleigh
said encouragingly;
"It doesn't look too bad, Moran!"
Moran disagreed, but he did not answer. He cocked an ear instead. He
heard something. It was a thin, wabbling, keening whine. No natural
radiation sounds like that. Moran nodded toward the all-band speaker.
"Do you hear what I do?" he asked sardonically.
Burleigh listened. A distinctly artificial signal came out of the
speaker. It wasn't a voice-signal. It wasn't an identification beacon,
such as are placed on certain worlds for the convenience of interstellar
skippers who need to check their courses on extremely long runs. This
was something else.
Burleigh said:
"Hm ... Call the others, Harper."
Harper, prudently with him in the control-room, put his head into the
passage leading away. He called. But Moran observed with grudging
respect that he didn't give him a chance to do anything drastic. These
people on the
Nadine
were capable. They'd managed to recapture the
Nadine
from him, but they were matter-of-fact about it. They didn't
seem to resent what he'd tried to do, or that he'd brought them an
indefinite distance in an indefinite direction from their last
landing-point, and they had still to re-locate themselves.
They'd been on Coryus Three and they'd gotten departure clearance from
its space-port. With clearance-papers in order, they could land
unquestioned at any other space-port and take off again—provided the
other space-port was one they had clearance for. Without rigid control
of space-travel, any criminal anywhere could escape the consequences of
any crime simply by buying a ticket to another world. Moran couldn't
have bought a ticket, but he'd tried to get off the planet Coryus on the
Nadine
. The trouble was that the
Nadine
had clearance papers
covering five persons aboard—four men and a girl Carol. Moran made six.
Wherever the yacht landed, such a disparity between its documents and
its crew would spark an investigation. A lengthy, incredibly minute
investigation. Moran, at least, would be picked out as a fugitive from
Coryus Three. The others were fugitives too, from some unnamed world
Moran did not know. They might be sent back where they came from. In
effect, with six people on board instead of five, the
Nadine
could not
land anywhere for supplies. With five on board, as her papers declared,
she could. And Moran was the extra man whose presence would rouse
space-port officials' suspicion of the rest. So he had to be dumped.
He couldn't blame them. He'd made another difficulty, too. Blaster in
hand, he'd made the
Nadine
take off from Coryus III with a trip-tape
picked at random for guidance. But the trip-tape had been computed for
another starting-point, and when the yacht came out of overdrive it was
because the drive had been dismantled in the engine-room. So the ship's
location was in doubt. It could have travelled at almost any speed in
practically any direction for a length of time that was at least
indefinite. A liner could re-locate itself without trouble. It had
elaborate observational equipment and tri-di star-charts. But smaller
craft had to depend on the Galactic Directory. The process would be to
find a planet and check its climate and relationship to other planets,
and its flora and fauna against descriptions in the Directory. That was
the way to find out where one was, when one's position became doubtful.
The
Nadine
needed to make a planet-fall for this.
The rest of the ship's company came into the control-room. Burleigh
waved his hand at the speaker.
"Listen!"
They heard it. All of them. It was a trilling, whining sound among the
innumerable random noises to be heard in supposedly empty space.
"That's a marker," Carol announced. "I saw a costume-story tape once
that had that sound in it. It marked a first-landing spot on some planet
or other, so the people could find that spot again. It was supposed to
be a long time ago, though."
"It's weak," observed Burleigh. "We'll try answering it."
Moran stirred, and he knew that every one of the others was conscious of
the movement. But they didn't watch him suspiciously. They were alert by
long habit. Burleigh said they'd been Underground people, fighting the
government of their native world, and they'd gotten away to make it seem
the revolt had collapsed. They'd go back later when they weren't
expected, and start it up again. Moran considered the story probable.
Only people accustomed to desperate actions would have remained so calm
when Moran had used desperate measures against them.
Burleigh picked up the transmitter-microphone.
"Calling ground," he said briskly. "Calling ground! We pick up your
signal. Please reply."
He repeated the call, over and over and over. There was no answer.
Cracklings and hissings came out of the speaker as before, and the thin
and reedy wabbling whine continued. The
Nadine
went on toward the
enlarging cloudy mass ahead.
Burleigh said;
"Well?"
"I think," said Carol, "that we should land. People have been here. If
they left a beacon, they may have left an identification of the planet.
Then we'd know where we are and how to get to Loris."
Burleigh nodded. The
Nadine
had cleared for Loris. That was where it
should make its next landing. The little yacht went on. All five of its
proper company watched as the planet's surface enlarged. The ice-cap
went out of sight around the bulge of the globe, but no markings
appeared. There were cloud-banks everywhere, probably low down in the
atmosphere. The darker vague areas previously seen might have been
highlands.
"I think," said Carol, to Moran, "that if it's too tropical where this
signal's coming from, we'll take you somewhere near enough to the
ice-cap to have an endurable climate. I've been figuring on food, too.
That will depend on where we are from Loris because we have to keep
enough for ourselves. But we can spare some. We'll give you the
emergency-kit, anyhow."
The emergency-kit contained antiseptics, seeds, and a weapon or two,
with elaborate advice to castaways. If somebody were wrecked on an even
possibly habitable planet, the especially developed seed-strains would
provide food in a minimum of time. It was not an encouraging thought,
though, and Moran grimaced.
She hadn't said anything about being sorry that he had to be marooned.
Maybe she was, but rebels learn to be practical or they don't live long.
Moran wondered, momentarily, what sort of world they came from and why
they had revolted, and what sort of set-back to the revolt had sent the
five off in what they considered a strategic retreat but their
government would think defeat. Moran's own situation was perfectly
clear.
He'd killed a man on Coryus III. His victim would not be mourned by
anybody, and somebody formerly in very great danger would now be safe,
which was the reason for what Moran had done. But the dead man had been
very important, and the fact that Moran had forced him to fight and
killed him in fair combat made no difference. Moran had needed to get
off-planet, and fast. But space-travel regulations are especially
designed to prevent such escapes.
He'd made a pretty good try, at that. One of the controls on
space-traffic required a ship on landing to deposit its fuel-block in
the space-port's vaults. The fuel-block was not returned until clearance
for departure had been granted. But Moran had waylaid the messenger
carrying the
Nadine's
fuel-block back to that space-yacht. He'd
knocked the messenger cold and presented himself at the yacht with the
fuel. He was admitted. He put the block in the engine's gate. He duly
took the plastic receipt-token the engine only then released, and he
drew a blaster. He'd locked two of the
Nadine's
crew in the
engine-room, rushed to the control-room without encountering the others,
dogged the door shut, and threaded in the first trip-tape to come to
hand. He punched the take-off button and only seconds later the
overdrive. Then the yacht—and Moran—was away. But his present
companions got the drive dismantled two days later and once the yacht
was out of overdrive they efficiently gave him his choice of
surrendering or else. He surrendered, stipulating that he wouldn't be
landed back on Coryus; he still clung to hope of avoiding return—which
was almost certain anyhow. Because nobody would want to go back to a
planet from which they'd carried away a criminal, even though they'd
done it unwillingly. Investigation of such a matter might last for
months.
Now the space-yacht moved toward a vast mass of fleecy whiteness without
any visible features. Harper stayed with the direction-finder. From time
to time he gave readings requiring minute changes of course. The
wabbling, whining signal was louder now. It became louder than all the
rest of the space-noises together.
The yacht touched atmosphere and Burleigh said;
"Watch our height, Carol."
She stood by the echometer. Sixty miles. Fifty. Thirty. A correction of
course. Fifteen miles to surface below. Ten. Five. At twenty-five
thousand feet there were clouds, which would be particles of ice so
small that they floated even so high. Then clear air, then lower clouds,
and lower ones still. It was not until six thousand feet above the
surface that the planet-wide cloud-level seemed to begin. From there on
down it was pure opacity. Anything could exist in that dense, almost
palpable grayness. There could be jagged peaks.
The
Nadine
went down and down. At fifteen hundred feet above the
unseen surface, the clouds ended. Below, there was only haze. One could
see the ground, at least, but there was no horizon. There was only an
end to visibility. The yacht descended as if in the center of a sphere
in which one could see clearly nearby, less clearly at a little
distance, and not at all beyond a quarter-mile or so.
There was a shaded, shadowless twilight under the cloud-bank. The ground
looked like no ground ever seen before by anyone. Off to the right a
rivulet ran between improbable-seeming banks. There were a few very
small hills of most unlikely appearance. It was the ground, the matter
on which one would walk, which was strangest. It had color, but the
color was not green. Much of it was a pallid, dirty-yellowish white. But
there were patches of blue, and curious veinings of black, and here and
there were other colors, all of them unlike the normal color of
vegetation on a planet with a sol-type sun.
Harper spoke from the direction-finder;
"The signal's coming from that mound, yonder."
There was a hillock of elongated shape directly in line with the
Nadine's
course in descent. Except for the patches of color, it was
the only considerable landmark within the half-mile circle in which
anything could be seen at all.
The
Nadine
checked her downward motion. Interplanetary drive is rugged
and sure, but it does not respond to fine adjustment. Burleigh used
rockets, issuing great bellowings of flame, to make actual contact. The
yacht hovered, and as the rocket-flames diminished slowly she sat down
with practically no impact at all. But around her there was a monstrous
tumult of smoke and steam. When the rockets went off, she lay in a
burned-out hollow some three or four feet deep with a bottom of solid
stone. The walls of the hollow were black and scorched. It seemed that
at some places they quivered persistently.
There was silence in the control-room save for the whining noise which
now was almost deafening. Harper snapped off the switch. Then there was
true silence. The space-yacht had come to rest possibly a hundred yards
from the mound which was the source of the space-signal. That mound
shared the peculiarity of the ground as far as they could see through
the haze. It was not vegetation in any ordinary sense. Certainly it was
no mineral surface! The landing-pockets had burned away three or four
feet of it, and the edge of the burned area smoked noisesomely, and
somehow it looked as if it would reek. And there were places where it
stirred.
Burleigh blinked and stared. Then he reached up and flicked on the
outside microphones. Instantly there was bedlam. If the landscape was
strange, here, the sounds that came from it were unbelievable.
There were grunting noises. There were clickings, uncountable clickings
that made a background for all the rest. There were discordant howls and
honkings. From time to time some thing unknown made a cry that sounded
very much like a small boy trailing a stick against a picket fence, only
much louder. Something hooted, maintaining the noise for an impossibly
long time. And persistently, sounding as if they came from far away,
there were booming noises, unspeakably deep-bass, made by something
alive. And something shrieked in lunatic fashion and something else
still moaned from time to time with the volume of a steam-whistle....
"This sounds and looks like a nice place to live," said Moran with fine
irony.
Burleigh did not answer. He turned down the outside sound.
"What's that stuff there, the ground?" he demanded. "We burned it away
in landing. I've seen something like it somewhere, but never taking the
place of grass!"
"That," said Moran as if brightly, "that's what I'm to make a garden in.
Of evenings I'll stroll among my thrifty plantings and listen to the
delightful sounds of nature."
Burleigh scowled. Harper flicked off the direction-finder.
"The signal still comes from that hillock yonder," he said with
finality.
Moran said bitingly;
"That ain't no hillock, that's my home!"
Then, instantly he'd said it, he recognized that it could be true. The
mound was not a fold in the ground. It was not an up-cropping of the
ash-covered stone on which the
Nadine
rested. The enigmatic,
dirty-yellow-dirty-red-dirty-blue-and-dirty-black ground-cover hid
something. It blurred the shape it covered, very much as enormous
cobwebs made solid and opaque would have done. But when one looked
carefully at the mound, there was a landing-fin sticking up toward the
leaden skies. It was attached to a large cylindrical object of which the
fore part was crushed in. The other landing-fins could be traced.
"It's a ship," said Moran curtly. "It crash-landed and its crew set up a
signal to call for help. None came, or they'd have turned the beacon
off. Maybe they got the lifeboats to work and got away. Maybe they lived
as I'm expected to live until they died as I'm expected to die."
Burleigh said angrily;
"You'd do what we are doing if you were in our shoes!"
"Sure," said Moran, "but a man can gripe, can't he?"
"You won't have to live here," said Burleigh. "We'll take you somewhere
up by the ice-cap. As Carol said, we'll give you everything we can
spare. And meanwhile we'll take a look at that wreck yonder. There might
be an indication in it of what solar system this is. There could be
something in it of use to you, too. You'd better come along when we
explore."
"Aye, aye, sir," said Moran with irony. "Very kind of you, sir. You'll
go armed, sir?"
Burleigh growled;
"Naturally!"
"Then since I can't be trusted with a weapon," said Moran, "I suggest
that I take a torch. We may have to burn through that loathesome stuff
to get in the ship."
"Right," growled Burleigh again. "Brawn and Carol, you'll keep ship. The
rest of us wear suits. We don't know what that stuff is outside."
Moran silently went to the space-suit rack and began to get into a
suit. Modern space-suits weren't like the ancient crudities with bulging
metal casings and enormous globular helmets. Non-stretch fabrics took
the place of metal, and constant-volume joints were really practical
nowadays. A man could move about in a late-model space-suit almost as
easily as in ship-clothing. The others of the landing-party donned their
special garments with the brisk absence of fumbling that these people
displayed in every action.
"If there's a lifeboat left," said Carol suddenly, "Moran might be able
to do something with it."
"Ah, yes!" said Moran. "It's very likely that the ship hit hard enough
to kill everybody aboard, but not smash the boats!"
"Somebody survived the crash," said Burleigh, "because they set up a
beacon. I wouldn't count on a boat, Moran."
"I don't!" snapped Moran.
He flipped the fastener of his suit. He felt all the openings catch. He
saw the others complete their equipment. They took arms. So far they had
seen no moving thing outside, but arms were simple sanity on an unknown
world. Moran, though, would not be permitted a weapon. He picked up a
torch. They filed into the airlock. The inner door closed. The outer
door opened. It was not necessary to check the air specifically. The
suits would take care of that. Anyhow the ice-cap said there were no
water-soluble gases in the atmosphere, and a gas can't be an active
poison if it can't dissolve.
They filed out of the airlock. They stood on ash-covered stone, only
slightly eroded by the processes which made life possible on this
planet. They looked dubiously at the scorched, indefinite substance
which had been ground before the
Nadine
landed. Moran moved scornfully
forward. He kicked at the burnt stuff. His foot went through the char.
The hole exposed a cheesy mass of soft matter which seemed riddled with
small holes.
Something black came squirming frantically out of one of the openings.
It was eight or ten inches long. It had a head, a thorax, and an
abdomen. It had wing-cases. It had six legs. It toppled down to the
stone on which the
Nadine
rested. Agitatedly, it spread its
wing-covers and flew away, droning loudly. The four men heard the sound
above even the monstrous cacophony of cries and boomings and grunts and
squeaks which seemed to fill the air.
"What the devil—."
Moran kicked again. More holes. More openings. More small tunnels in the
cheese-like, curd-like stuff. More black things squirming to view in
obvious panic. They popped out everywhere. It was suddenly apparent
that the top of the soil, here, was a thick and blanket-like sheet over
the whitish stuff. The black creatures lived and thrived in tunnels
under it.
Carol's voice came over the helmet-phones.
"
They're—bugs!
" she said incredulously. "
They're beetles! They're
twenty times the size of the beetles we humans have been carrying around
the galaxy, but that's what they are!
"
Moran grunted. Distastefully, he saw his predicament made worse. He knew
what had happened here. He could begin to guess at other things to be
discovered. It had not been practical for men to move onto new planets
and subsist upon the flora and fauna they found there. On some new
planets life had never gotten started. On such worlds a highly complex
operation was necessary before humanity could move in. A complete
ecological complex had to be built up; microbes to break down the rock
for soil, bacteria to fix nitrogen to make the soil fertile; plants to
grow in the new-made dirt and insects to fertilize the plants so they
would multiply, and animals and birds to carry the seeds planet-wide. On
most planets, to be sure, there were local, aboriginal plants and
animals. But still terrestrial creatures had to be introduced if a
colony was to feed itself. Alien plants did not supply satisfactory
food. So an elaborate adaptation job had to be done on every planet
before native and terrestrial living things settled down together. It
wasn't impossible that the scuttling things were truly beetles, grown
large and monstrous under the conditions of a new planet. And the
ground....
"This ground stuff," said Moran distastefully, "is yeast or some sort of
toadstool growth. This is a seedling world. It didn't have any life on
it, so somebody dumped germs and spores and bugs to make it ready for
plants and animals eventually. But nobody's come back to finish up the
job."
Burleigh grunted a somehow surprised assent. But it wasn't surprising;
not wholly so. Once one mentioned yeasts and toadstools and fungi
generally, the weird landscape became less than incredible. But it
remained actively unpleasant to think of being marooned on it.
"Suppose we go look at the ship?" said Moran unpleasantly. "Maybe you
can find out where you are, and I can find out what's ahead of me."
He climbed up on the unscorched surface. It was elastic. The
parchment-like top skin yielded. It was like walking on a mass of
springs.
"We'd better spread out," added Moran, "or else we'll break through that
skin and be floundering in this mess."
"I'm giving the orders, Moran!" said Burleigh shortly. "But what you say
does make sense."
He and the others joined Moran on the yielding surface. Their footing
was uncertain, as on a trampoline. They staggered. They moved toward the
hillock which was a covered-over wrecked ship.
The ground was not as level as it appeared from the
Nadine's
control-room. There were undulations. But they could not see more than a
quarter-mile in any direction. Beyond that was mist. But Burleigh, at
one end of the uneven line of advancing men, suddenly halted and stood
staring down at something he had not seen before. The others halted.
Something moved. It came out from behind a very minor spire of whitish
stuff that looked like a dirty sheet stretched over a tall stone. The
thing that appeared was very peculiar indeed. It was a—worm. But it was
a foot thick and ten feet long, and it had a group of stumpy legs at its
fore end—where there were eyes hidden behind bristling hair-like
growths—and another set of feet at its tail end. It progressed sedately
by reaching forward with its fore-part, securing a foothold, and then
arching its middle portion like a cat arching its back, to bring its
hind part forward. Then it reached forward again. It was of a dark olive
color from one end to the other. Its manner of walking was insane but
somehow sedate.
Moran heard muffled noises in his helmet-phone as the others tried to
speak. Carol's voice came anxiously;
"
What's the matter? What do you see?
"
Moran said with savage precision;
"We're looking at an inch-worm, grown up like the beetles only more so.
It's not an inch-worm any longer. It's a yard-worm." Then he said
harshly to the men with him; "It's not a hunting creature on worlds
where it's smaller. It's not likely to have turned deadly here. Come
on!"
He went forward over the singularly bouncy ground. The others followed.
It was to be noted that Hallet the engineer, avoided the huge harmless
creature more widely than most.
They reached the mound which was the ship. Moran unlimbered his torch.
He said sardonically;
"This ship won't do anybody any good. It's old-style. That thick belt
around its middle was dropped a hundred years ago, and more." There was
an abrupt thickening of the cylindrical hull at the middle. There was an
equally abrupt thinning, again, toward the landing-fins. The sharpness
of the change was blurred over by the revolting ground-stuff growing
everywhere. "We're going to find that this wreck has been here a century
at least!"
Without orders, he turned on the torch. A four-foot flame of pure
blue-white leaped out. He touched its tip to the fungoid soil. Steam
leaped up. He used the flame like a gigantic scalpel, cutting a square a
yard deep in the whitish stuff, and then cutting it across and across to
destroy it. Thick fumes arose, and quiverings and shakings began. Black
creatures in their labyrinths of tunnels began to panic. Off to the
right the blanket-like surface ripped and they poured out. They scuttled
crazily here and there. Some took to wing. By instinct the other
men—the armed ones—moved back from the smoke. They wore space-helmets
but they felt that there should be an intolerable smell.
Moran slashed and slashed angrily with the big flame, cutting a way to
the metal hull that had fallen here before his grandfather was born.
Sometimes the flame cut across things that writhed, and he was sickened.
But above all he raged because he was to be marooned here. He could not
altogether blame the others. They couldn't land at any colonized world
with him on board without his being detected as an extra member of the
crew. His fate would then be sealed. But they also would be
investigated. Official queries would go across this whole sector of the
galaxy, naming five persons of such-and-such description and
such-and-such fingerprints, voyaging in a space-yacht of such-and-such
size and registration. The world they came from would claim them as
fugitives. They would be returned to it. They'd be executed.
Then Carol's voice came in his helmet-phone. She cried out;
"
Look out! It's coming! Kill it! Kill it—.
"
He heard blast-rifles firing. He heard Burleigh pant commands. He was on
his way out of the hollow he'd carved when he heard Harper cry out
horribly.
He got clear of the newly burned-away stuff. There was still much smoke
and stream. But he saw Harper. More, he saw the thing that had Harper.
It occurred to him instantly that if Harper died, there would not be too
many people on the
Nadine
. They need not maroon him. In fact, they
wouldn't dare.
A ship that came in to port with two few on board would be investigated
as thoroughly as one that had too many. Perhaps more thoroughly. So if
Harper were killed, Moran would be needed to take his place. He'd go on
from here in the
Nadine
, necessarily accepted as a member of her crew.
Then he rushed, the flame-torch making a roaring sound.
II.
They went back to the
Nadine
for weapons more adequate for
encountering the local fauna when it was over. Blast-rifles were not
effective against such creatures as these. Torches were contact weapons
but they killed. Blast-rifles did not. And Harper needed to pull himself
together again, too. Also, neither Moran nor any of the others wanted to
go back to the still un-entered wreck while the skinny, somehow
disgusting legs of the thing still kicked spasmodically—quite
separate—on the whitish ground-stuff. Moran had disliked such creatures
in miniature form on other worlds. Enlarged like this.
It seemed insane that such creatures, even in miniature, should
painstakingly be brought across light-years of space to the new worlds
men settled on. But it had been found to be necessary. The ecological
system in which human beings belonged had turned out to be infinitely
complicated. It had turned out, in fact, to be the ecological system of
Earth, and unless all parts of the complex were present, the total was
subtly or glaringly wrong. So mankind distastefully ferried pests as
well as useful creatures to its new worlds as they were made ready for
settlement. Mosquitos throve on the inhabited globes of the Rim Stars.
Roaches twitched nervous antennae on the settled planets of the
Coal-sack. Dogs on Antares had fleas, and scratched their bites, and
humanity spread through the galaxy with an attendant train of insects
and annoyances. If they left their pests behind, the total system of
checks and balances which make life practical would get lopsided. It
would not maintain itself. The vagaries that could result were admirably
illustrated in and on the landscape outside the
Nadine
. Something had
been left out of the seeding of this planet. The element—which might be
a bacterium or a virus or almost anything at all—the element that kept
creatures at the size called "normal" was either missing or inoperable
here. The results were not desirable. | [
"theft",
"fraud",
"murder",
"treason"
] | 2 |
43046_Q9R0IJB9_2 | Which of the follow characteristics does NOT give Moran the impression that the planet that the Nadine is approaching may be habitable? | <!-- $Id: header.txt 236 2009-12-07 18:57:00Z vlsimpson $ -->
PLANET of DREAD
By MURRAY LEINSTER
Illustrator ADKINS
I.
Moran cut apart the yard-long monstrosity with a slash of flame.
The thing presumably died, but it continued to writhe senselessly.
He turned to see other horrors crawling toward him. Then he knew he
was being marooned on a planet of endless terrors.
Moran, naturally, did not mean to help in the carrying out of the plans
which would mean his destruction one way or another. The plans were
thrashed out very painstakingly, in formal conference on the space-yacht
Nadine
, with Moran present and allowed to take part in the discussion.
From the viewpoint of the
Nadine's
ship's company, it was simply
necessary to get rid of Moran. In their predicament he might have come
to the same conclusion; but he was not at all enthusiastic about their
decision. He would die of it.
The
Nadine
was out of overdrive and all the uncountable suns of the
galaxy shone steadily, remotely, as infinitesimal specks of light of
every color of the rainbow. Two hours since, the sun of this solar
system had been a vast glaring disk off to port, with streamers and
prominences erupting about its edges. Now it lay astern, and Moran
could see the planet that had been chosen for his marooning. It was a
cloudy world. There were some dim markings near one lighted limb, but
nowhere else. There was an ice-cap in view. The rest was—clouds.
The ice-cap, by its existence and circular shape, proved that the planet
rotated at a not unreasonable rate. The fact that it was water-ice told
much. A water-ice ice-cap said that there were no poisonous gases in the
planet's atmosphere. Sulfur dioxide or chlorine, for example, would not
allow the formation of water-ice. It would have to be sulphuric-acid or
hydrochloric-acid ice. But the ice-cap was simple snow. Its size, too,
told about temperature-distribution on the planet. A large cap would
have meant a large area with arctic and sub-arctic temperatures, with
small temperate and tropical climate-belts. A small one like this meant
wide tropical and sub-tropical zones. The fact was verified by the
thick, dense cloud-masses which covered most of the surface,—all the
surface, in fact, outside the ice-cap. But since there were ice-caps
there would be temperate regions. In short, the ice-cap proved that a
man could endure the air and temperature conditions he would find.
Moran observed these things from the control-room of the
Nadine
, then
approaching the world on planetary drive. He was to be left here, with
no reason ever to expect rescue. Two of the
Nadine's
four-man crew
watched out the same ports as the planet seemed to approach. Burleigh
said encouragingly;
"It doesn't look too bad, Moran!"
Moran disagreed, but he did not answer. He cocked an ear instead. He
heard something. It was a thin, wabbling, keening whine. No natural
radiation sounds like that. Moran nodded toward the all-band speaker.
"Do you hear what I do?" he asked sardonically.
Burleigh listened. A distinctly artificial signal came out of the
speaker. It wasn't a voice-signal. It wasn't an identification beacon,
such as are placed on certain worlds for the convenience of interstellar
skippers who need to check their courses on extremely long runs. This
was something else.
Burleigh said:
"Hm ... Call the others, Harper."
Harper, prudently with him in the control-room, put his head into the
passage leading away. He called. But Moran observed with grudging
respect that he didn't give him a chance to do anything drastic. These
people on the
Nadine
were capable. They'd managed to recapture the
Nadine
from him, but they were matter-of-fact about it. They didn't
seem to resent what he'd tried to do, or that he'd brought them an
indefinite distance in an indefinite direction from their last
landing-point, and they had still to re-locate themselves.
They'd been on Coryus Three and they'd gotten departure clearance from
its space-port. With clearance-papers in order, they could land
unquestioned at any other space-port and take off again—provided the
other space-port was one they had clearance for. Without rigid control
of space-travel, any criminal anywhere could escape the consequences of
any crime simply by buying a ticket to another world. Moran couldn't
have bought a ticket, but he'd tried to get off the planet Coryus on the
Nadine
. The trouble was that the
Nadine
had clearance papers
covering five persons aboard—four men and a girl Carol. Moran made six.
Wherever the yacht landed, such a disparity between its documents and
its crew would spark an investigation. A lengthy, incredibly minute
investigation. Moran, at least, would be picked out as a fugitive from
Coryus Three. The others were fugitives too, from some unnamed world
Moran did not know. They might be sent back where they came from. In
effect, with six people on board instead of five, the
Nadine
could not
land anywhere for supplies. With five on board, as her papers declared,
she could. And Moran was the extra man whose presence would rouse
space-port officials' suspicion of the rest. So he had to be dumped.
He couldn't blame them. He'd made another difficulty, too. Blaster in
hand, he'd made the
Nadine
take off from Coryus III with a trip-tape
picked at random for guidance. But the trip-tape had been computed for
another starting-point, and when the yacht came out of overdrive it was
because the drive had been dismantled in the engine-room. So the ship's
location was in doubt. It could have travelled at almost any speed in
practically any direction for a length of time that was at least
indefinite. A liner could re-locate itself without trouble. It had
elaborate observational equipment and tri-di star-charts. But smaller
craft had to depend on the Galactic Directory. The process would be to
find a planet and check its climate and relationship to other planets,
and its flora and fauna against descriptions in the Directory. That was
the way to find out where one was, when one's position became doubtful.
The
Nadine
needed to make a planet-fall for this.
The rest of the ship's company came into the control-room. Burleigh
waved his hand at the speaker.
"Listen!"
They heard it. All of them. It was a trilling, whining sound among the
innumerable random noises to be heard in supposedly empty space.
"That's a marker," Carol announced. "I saw a costume-story tape once
that had that sound in it. It marked a first-landing spot on some planet
or other, so the people could find that spot again. It was supposed to
be a long time ago, though."
"It's weak," observed Burleigh. "We'll try answering it."
Moran stirred, and he knew that every one of the others was conscious of
the movement. But they didn't watch him suspiciously. They were alert by
long habit. Burleigh said they'd been Underground people, fighting the
government of their native world, and they'd gotten away to make it seem
the revolt had collapsed. They'd go back later when they weren't
expected, and start it up again. Moran considered the story probable.
Only people accustomed to desperate actions would have remained so calm
when Moran had used desperate measures against them.
Burleigh picked up the transmitter-microphone.
"Calling ground," he said briskly. "Calling ground! We pick up your
signal. Please reply."
He repeated the call, over and over and over. There was no answer.
Cracklings and hissings came out of the speaker as before, and the thin
and reedy wabbling whine continued. The
Nadine
went on toward the
enlarging cloudy mass ahead.
Burleigh said;
"Well?"
"I think," said Carol, "that we should land. People have been here. If
they left a beacon, they may have left an identification of the planet.
Then we'd know where we are and how to get to Loris."
Burleigh nodded. The
Nadine
had cleared for Loris. That was where it
should make its next landing. The little yacht went on. All five of its
proper company watched as the planet's surface enlarged. The ice-cap
went out of sight around the bulge of the globe, but no markings
appeared. There were cloud-banks everywhere, probably low down in the
atmosphere. The darker vague areas previously seen might have been
highlands.
"I think," said Carol, to Moran, "that if it's too tropical where this
signal's coming from, we'll take you somewhere near enough to the
ice-cap to have an endurable climate. I've been figuring on food, too.
That will depend on where we are from Loris because we have to keep
enough for ourselves. But we can spare some. We'll give you the
emergency-kit, anyhow."
The emergency-kit contained antiseptics, seeds, and a weapon or two,
with elaborate advice to castaways. If somebody were wrecked on an even
possibly habitable planet, the especially developed seed-strains would
provide food in a minimum of time. It was not an encouraging thought,
though, and Moran grimaced.
She hadn't said anything about being sorry that he had to be marooned.
Maybe she was, but rebels learn to be practical or they don't live long.
Moran wondered, momentarily, what sort of world they came from and why
they had revolted, and what sort of set-back to the revolt had sent the
five off in what they considered a strategic retreat but their
government would think defeat. Moran's own situation was perfectly
clear.
He'd killed a man on Coryus III. His victim would not be mourned by
anybody, and somebody formerly in very great danger would now be safe,
which was the reason for what Moran had done. But the dead man had been
very important, and the fact that Moran had forced him to fight and
killed him in fair combat made no difference. Moran had needed to get
off-planet, and fast. But space-travel regulations are especially
designed to prevent such escapes.
He'd made a pretty good try, at that. One of the controls on
space-traffic required a ship on landing to deposit its fuel-block in
the space-port's vaults. The fuel-block was not returned until clearance
for departure had been granted. But Moran had waylaid the messenger
carrying the
Nadine's
fuel-block back to that space-yacht. He'd
knocked the messenger cold and presented himself at the yacht with the
fuel. He was admitted. He put the block in the engine's gate. He duly
took the plastic receipt-token the engine only then released, and he
drew a blaster. He'd locked two of the
Nadine's
crew in the
engine-room, rushed to the control-room without encountering the others,
dogged the door shut, and threaded in the first trip-tape to come to
hand. He punched the take-off button and only seconds later the
overdrive. Then the yacht—and Moran—was away. But his present
companions got the drive dismantled two days later and once the yacht
was out of overdrive they efficiently gave him his choice of
surrendering or else. He surrendered, stipulating that he wouldn't be
landed back on Coryus; he still clung to hope of avoiding return—which
was almost certain anyhow. Because nobody would want to go back to a
planet from which they'd carried away a criminal, even though they'd
done it unwillingly. Investigation of such a matter might last for
months.
Now the space-yacht moved toward a vast mass of fleecy whiteness without
any visible features. Harper stayed with the direction-finder. From time
to time he gave readings requiring minute changes of course. The
wabbling, whining signal was louder now. It became louder than all the
rest of the space-noises together.
The yacht touched atmosphere and Burleigh said;
"Watch our height, Carol."
She stood by the echometer. Sixty miles. Fifty. Thirty. A correction of
course. Fifteen miles to surface below. Ten. Five. At twenty-five
thousand feet there were clouds, which would be particles of ice so
small that they floated even so high. Then clear air, then lower clouds,
and lower ones still. It was not until six thousand feet above the
surface that the planet-wide cloud-level seemed to begin. From there on
down it was pure opacity. Anything could exist in that dense, almost
palpable grayness. There could be jagged peaks.
The
Nadine
went down and down. At fifteen hundred feet above the
unseen surface, the clouds ended. Below, there was only haze. One could
see the ground, at least, but there was no horizon. There was only an
end to visibility. The yacht descended as if in the center of a sphere
in which one could see clearly nearby, less clearly at a little
distance, and not at all beyond a quarter-mile or so.
There was a shaded, shadowless twilight under the cloud-bank. The ground
looked like no ground ever seen before by anyone. Off to the right a
rivulet ran between improbable-seeming banks. There were a few very
small hills of most unlikely appearance. It was the ground, the matter
on which one would walk, which was strangest. It had color, but the
color was not green. Much of it was a pallid, dirty-yellowish white. But
there were patches of blue, and curious veinings of black, and here and
there were other colors, all of them unlike the normal color of
vegetation on a planet with a sol-type sun.
Harper spoke from the direction-finder;
"The signal's coming from that mound, yonder."
There was a hillock of elongated shape directly in line with the
Nadine's
course in descent. Except for the patches of color, it was
the only considerable landmark within the half-mile circle in which
anything could be seen at all.
The
Nadine
checked her downward motion. Interplanetary drive is rugged
and sure, but it does not respond to fine adjustment. Burleigh used
rockets, issuing great bellowings of flame, to make actual contact. The
yacht hovered, and as the rocket-flames diminished slowly she sat down
with practically no impact at all. But around her there was a monstrous
tumult of smoke and steam. When the rockets went off, she lay in a
burned-out hollow some three or four feet deep with a bottom of solid
stone. The walls of the hollow were black and scorched. It seemed that
at some places they quivered persistently.
There was silence in the control-room save for the whining noise which
now was almost deafening. Harper snapped off the switch. Then there was
true silence. The space-yacht had come to rest possibly a hundred yards
from the mound which was the source of the space-signal. That mound
shared the peculiarity of the ground as far as they could see through
the haze. It was not vegetation in any ordinary sense. Certainly it was
no mineral surface! The landing-pockets had burned away three or four
feet of it, and the edge of the burned area smoked noisesomely, and
somehow it looked as if it would reek. And there were places where it
stirred.
Burleigh blinked and stared. Then he reached up and flicked on the
outside microphones. Instantly there was bedlam. If the landscape was
strange, here, the sounds that came from it were unbelievable.
There were grunting noises. There were clickings, uncountable clickings
that made a background for all the rest. There were discordant howls and
honkings. From time to time some thing unknown made a cry that sounded
very much like a small boy trailing a stick against a picket fence, only
much louder. Something hooted, maintaining the noise for an impossibly
long time. And persistently, sounding as if they came from far away,
there were booming noises, unspeakably deep-bass, made by something
alive. And something shrieked in lunatic fashion and something else
still moaned from time to time with the volume of a steam-whistle....
"This sounds and looks like a nice place to live," said Moran with fine
irony.
Burleigh did not answer. He turned down the outside sound.
"What's that stuff there, the ground?" he demanded. "We burned it away
in landing. I've seen something like it somewhere, but never taking the
place of grass!"
"That," said Moran as if brightly, "that's what I'm to make a garden in.
Of evenings I'll stroll among my thrifty plantings and listen to the
delightful sounds of nature."
Burleigh scowled. Harper flicked off the direction-finder.
"The signal still comes from that hillock yonder," he said with
finality.
Moran said bitingly;
"That ain't no hillock, that's my home!"
Then, instantly he'd said it, he recognized that it could be true. The
mound was not a fold in the ground. It was not an up-cropping of the
ash-covered stone on which the
Nadine
rested. The enigmatic,
dirty-yellow-dirty-red-dirty-blue-and-dirty-black ground-cover hid
something. It blurred the shape it covered, very much as enormous
cobwebs made solid and opaque would have done. But when one looked
carefully at the mound, there was a landing-fin sticking up toward the
leaden skies. It was attached to a large cylindrical object of which the
fore part was crushed in. The other landing-fins could be traced.
"It's a ship," said Moran curtly. "It crash-landed and its crew set up a
signal to call for help. None came, or they'd have turned the beacon
off. Maybe they got the lifeboats to work and got away. Maybe they lived
as I'm expected to live until they died as I'm expected to die."
Burleigh said angrily;
"You'd do what we are doing if you were in our shoes!"
"Sure," said Moran, "but a man can gripe, can't he?"
"You won't have to live here," said Burleigh. "We'll take you somewhere
up by the ice-cap. As Carol said, we'll give you everything we can
spare. And meanwhile we'll take a look at that wreck yonder. There might
be an indication in it of what solar system this is. There could be
something in it of use to you, too. You'd better come along when we
explore."
"Aye, aye, sir," said Moran with irony. "Very kind of you, sir. You'll
go armed, sir?"
Burleigh growled;
"Naturally!"
"Then since I can't be trusted with a weapon," said Moran, "I suggest
that I take a torch. We may have to burn through that loathesome stuff
to get in the ship."
"Right," growled Burleigh again. "Brawn and Carol, you'll keep ship. The
rest of us wear suits. We don't know what that stuff is outside."
Moran silently went to the space-suit rack and began to get into a
suit. Modern space-suits weren't like the ancient crudities with bulging
metal casings and enormous globular helmets. Non-stretch fabrics took
the place of metal, and constant-volume joints were really practical
nowadays. A man could move about in a late-model space-suit almost as
easily as in ship-clothing. The others of the landing-party donned their
special garments with the brisk absence of fumbling that these people
displayed in every action.
"If there's a lifeboat left," said Carol suddenly, "Moran might be able
to do something with it."
"Ah, yes!" said Moran. "It's very likely that the ship hit hard enough
to kill everybody aboard, but not smash the boats!"
"Somebody survived the crash," said Burleigh, "because they set up a
beacon. I wouldn't count on a boat, Moran."
"I don't!" snapped Moran.
He flipped the fastener of his suit. He felt all the openings catch. He
saw the others complete their equipment. They took arms. So far they had
seen no moving thing outside, but arms were simple sanity on an unknown
world. Moran, though, would not be permitted a weapon. He picked up a
torch. They filed into the airlock. The inner door closed. The outer
door opened. It was not necessary to check the air specifically. The
suits would take care of that. Anyhow the ice-cap said there were no
water-soluble gases in the atmosphere, and a gas can't be an active
poison if it can't dissolve.
They filed out of the airlock. They stood on ash-covered stone, only
slightly eroded by the processes which made life possible on this
planet. They looked dubiously at the scorched, indefinite substance
which had been ground before the
Nadine
landed. Moran moved scornfully
forward. He kicked at the burnt stuff. His foot went through the char.
The hole exposed a cheesy mass of soft matter which seemed riddled with
small holes.
Something black came squirming frantically out of one of the openings.
It was eight or ten inches long. It had a head, a thorax, and an
abdomen. It had wing-cases. It had six legs. It toppled down to the
stone on which the
Nadine
rested. Agitatedly, it spread its
wing-covers and flew away, droning loudly. The four men heard the sound
above even the monstrous cacophony of cries and boomings and grunts and
squeaks which seemed to fill the air.
"What the devil—."
Moran kicked again. More holes. More openings. More small tunnels in the
cheese-like, curd-like stuff. More black things squirming to view in
obvious panic. They popped out everywhere. It was suddenly apparent
that the top of the soil, here, was a thick and blanket-like sheet over
the whitish stuff. The black creatures lived and thrived in tunnels
under it.
Carol's voice came over the helmet-phones.
"
They're—bugs!
" she said incredulously. "
They're beetles! They're
twenty times the size of the beetles we humans have been carrying around
the galaxy, but that's what they are!
"
Moran grunted. Distastefully, he saw his predicament made worse. He knew
what had happened here. He could begin to guess at other things to be
discovered. It had not been practical for men to move onto new planets
and subsist upon the flora and fauna they found there. On some new
planets life had never gotten started. On such worlds a highly complex
operation was necessary before humanity could move in. A complete
ecological complex had to be built up; microbes to break down the rock
for soil, bacteria to fix nitrogen to make the soil fertile; plants to
grow in the new-made dirt and insects to fertilize the plants so they
would multiply, and animals and birds to carry the seeds planet-wide. On
most planets, to be sure, there were local, aboriginal plants and
animals. But still terrestrial creatures had to be introduced if a
colony was to feed itself. Alien plants did not supply satisfactory
food. So an elaborate adaptation job had to be done on every planet
before native and terrestrial living things settled down together. It
wasn't impossible that the scuttling things were truly beetles, grown
large and monstrous under the conditions of a new planet. And the
ground....
"This ground stuff," said Moran distastefully, "is yeast or some sort of
toadstool growth. This is a seedling world. It didn't have any life on
it, so somebody dumped germs and spores and bugs to make it ready for
plants and animals eventually. But nobody's come back to finish up the
job."
Burleigh grunted a somehow surprised assent. But it wasn't surprising;
not wholly so. Once one mentioned yeasts and toadstools and fungi
generally, the weird landscape became less than incredible. But it
remained actively unpleasant to think of being marooned on it.
"Suppose we go look at the ship?" said Moran unpleasantly. "Maybe you
can find out where you are, and I can find out what's ahead of me."
He climbed up on the unscorched surface. It was elastic. The
parchment-like top skin yielded. It was like walking on a mass of
springs.
"We'd better spread out," added Moran, "or else we'll break through that
skin and be floundering in this mess."
"I'm giving the orders, Moran!" said Burleigh shortly. "But what you say
does make sense."
He and the others joined Moran on the yielding surface. Their footing
was uncertain, as on a trampoline. They staggered. They moved toward the
hillock which was a covered-over wrecked ship.
The ground was not as level as it appeared from the
Nadine's
control-room. There were undulations. But they could not see more than a
quarter-mile in any direction. Beyond that was mist. But Burleigh, at
one end of the uneven line of advancing men, suddenly halted and stood
staring down at something he had not seen before. The others halted.
Something moved. It came out from behind a very minor spire of whitish
stuff that looked like a dirty sheet stretched over a tall stone. The
thing that appeared was very peculiar indeed. It was a—worm. But it was
a foot thick and ten feet long, and it had a group of stumpy legs at its
fore end—where there were eyes hidden behind bristling hair-like
growths—and another set of feet at its tail end. It progressed sedately
by reaching forward with its fore-part, securing a foothold, and then
arching its middle portion like a cat arching its back, to bring its
hind part forward. Then it reached forward again. It was of a dark olive
color from one end to the other. Its manner of walking was insane but
somehow sedate.
Moran heard muffled noises in his helmet-phone as the others tried to
speak. Carol's voice came anxiously;
"
What's the matter? What do you see?
"
Moran said with savage precision;
"We're looking at an inch-worm, grown up like the beetles only more so.
It's not an inch-worm any longer. It's a yard-worm." Then he said
harshly to the men with him; "It's not a hunting creature on worlds
where it's smaller. It's not likely to have turned deadly here. Come
on!"
He went forward over the singularly bouncy ground. The others followed.
It was to be noted that Hallet the engineer, avoided the huge harmless
creature more widely than most.
They reached the mound which was the ship. Moran unlimbered his torch.
He said sardonically;
"This ship won't do anybody any good. It's old-style. That thick belt
around its middle was dropped a hundred years ago, and more." There was
an abrupt thickening of the cylindrical hull at the middle. There was an
equally abrupt thinning, again, toward the landing-fins. The sharpness
of the change was blurred over by the revolting ground-stuff growing
everywhere. "We're going to find that this wreck has been here a century
at least!"
Without orders, he turned on the torch. A four-foot flame of pure
blue-white leaped out. He touched its tip to the fungoid soil. Steam
leaped up. He used the flame like a gigantic scalpel, cutting a square a
yard deep in the whitish stuff, and then cutting it across and across to
destroy it. Thick fumes arose, and quiverings and shakings began. Black
creatures in their labyrinths of tunnels began to panic. Off to the
right the blanket-like surface ripped and they poured out. They scuttled
crazily here and there. Some took to wing. By instinct the other
men—the armed ones—moved back from the smoke. They wore space-helmets
but they felt that there should be an intolerable smell.
Moran slashed and slashed angrily with the big flame, cutting a way to
the metal hull that had fallen here before his grandfather was born.
Sometimes the flame cut across things that writhed, and he was sickened.
But above all he raged because he was to be marooned here. He could not
altogether blame the others. They couldn't land at any colonized world
with him on board without his being detected as an extra member of the
crew. His fate would then be sealed. But they also would be
investigated. Official queries would go across this whole sector of the
galaxy, naming five persons of such-and-such description and
such-and-such fingerprints, voyaging in a space-yacht of such-and-such
size and registration. The world they came from would claim them as
fugitives. They would be returned to it. They'd be executed.
Then Carol's voice came in his helmet-phone. She cried out;
"
Look out! It's coming! Kill it! Kill it—.
"
He heard blast-rifles firing. He heard Burleigh pant commands. He was on
his way out of the hollow he'd carved when he heard Harper cry out
horribly.
He got clear of the newly burned-away stuff. There was still much smoke
and stream. But he saw Harper. More, he saw the thing that had Harper.
It occurred to him instantly that if Harper died, there would not be too
many people on the
Nadine
. They need not maroon him. In fact, they
wouldn't dare.
A ship that came in to port with two few on board would be investigated
as thoroughly as one that had too many. Perhaps more thoroughly. So if
Harper were killed, Moran would be needed to take his place. He'd go on
from here in the
Nadine
, necessarily accepted as a member of her crew.
Then he rushed, the flame-torch making a roaring sound.
II.
They went back to the
Nadine
for weapons more adequate for
encountering the local fauna when it was over. Blast-rifles were not
effective against such creatures as these. Torches were contact weapons
but they killed. Blast-rifles did not. And Harper needed to pull himself
together again, too. Also, neither Moran nor any of the others wanted to
go back to the still un-entered wreck while the skinny, somehow
disgusting legs of the thing still kicked spasmodically—quite
separate—on the whitish ground-stuff. Moran had disliked such creatures
in miniature form on other worlds. Enlarged like this.
It seemed insane that such creatures, even in miniature, should
painstakingly be brought across light-years of space to the new worlds
men settled on. But it had been found to be necessary. The ecological
system in which human beings belonged had turned out to be infinitely
complicated. It had turned out, in fact, to be the ecological system of
Earth, and unless all parts of the complex were present, the total was
subtly or glaringly wrong. So mankind distastefully ferried pests as
well as useful creatures to its new worlds as they were made ready for
settlement. Mosquitos throve on the inhabited globes of the Rim Stars.
Roaches twitched nervous antennae on the settled planets of the
Coal-sack. Dogs on Antares had fleas, and scratched their bites, and
humanity spread through the galaxy with an attendant train of insects
and annoyances. If they left their pests behind, the total system of
checks and balances which make life practical would get lopsided. It
would not maintain itself. The vagaries that could result were admirably
illustrated in and on the landscape outside the
Nadine
. Something had
been left out of the seeding of this planet. The element—which might be
a bacterium or a virus or almost anything at all—the element that kept
creatures at the size called "normal" was either missing or inoperable
here. The results were not desirable. | [
"shape of the ice cap",
"composition of the ice cap",
"location of the ice cap",
"size of the ice cap"
] | 2 |
43046_Q9R0IJB9_3 | Which term best describes the ease of space travel within the context of the passage? | <!-- $Id: header.txt 236 2009-12-07 18:57:00Z vlsimpson $ -->
PLANET of DREAD
By MURRAY LEINSTER
Illustrator ADKINS
I.
Moran cut apart the yard-long monstrosity with a slash of flame.
The thing presumably died, but it continued to writhe senselessly.
He turned to see other horrors crawling toward him. Then he knew he
was being marooned on a planet of endless terrors.
Moran, naturally, did not mean to help in the carrying out of the plans
which would mean his destruction one way or another. The plans were
thrashed out very painstakingly, in formal conference on the space-yacht
Nadine
, with Moran present and allowed to take part in the discussion.
From the viewpoint of the
Nadine's
ship's company, it was simply
necessary to get rid of Moran. In their predicament he might have come
to the same conclusion; but he was not at all enthusiastic about their
decision. He would die of it.
The
Nadine
was out of overdrive and all the uncountable suns of the
galaxy shone steadily, remotely, as infinitesimal specks of light of
every color of the rainbow. Two hours since, the sun of this solar
system had been a vast glaring disk off to port, with streamers and
prominences erupting about its edges. Now it lay astern, and Moran
could see the planet that had been chosen for his marooning. It was a
cloudy world. There were some dim markings near one lighted limb, but
nowhere else. There was an ice-cap in view. The rest was—clouds.
The ice-cap, by its existence and circular shape, proved that the planet
rotated at a not unreasonable rate. The fact that it was water-ice told
much. A water-ice ice-cap said that there were no poisonous gases in the
planet's atmosphere. Sulfur dioxide or chlorine, for example, would not
allow the formation of water-ice. It would have to be sulphuric-acid or
hydrochloric-acid ice. But the ice-cap was simple snow. Its size, too,
told about temperature-distribution on the planet. A large cap would
have meant a large area with arctic and sub-arctic temperatures, with
small temperate and tropical climate-belts. A small one like this meant
wide tropical and sub-tropical zones. The fact was verified by the
thick, dense cloud-masses which covered most of the surface,—all the
surface, in fact, outside the ice-cap. But since there were ice-caps
there would be temperate regions. In short, the ice-cap proved that a
man could endure the air and temperature conditions he would find.
Moran observed these things from the control-room of the
Nadine
, then
approaching the world on planetary drive. He was to be left here, with
no reason ever to expect rescue. Two of the
Nadine's
four-man crew
watched out the same ports as the planet seemed to approach. Burleigh
said encouragingly;
"It doesn't look too bad, Moran!"
Moran disagreed, but he did not answer. He cocked an ear instead. He
heard something. It was a thin, wabbling, keening whine. No natural
radiation sounds like that. Moran nodded toward the all-band speaker.
"Do you hear what I do?" he asked sardonically.
Burleigh listened. A distinctly artificial signal came out of the
speaker. It wasn't a voice-signal. It wasn't an identification beacon,
such as are placed on certain worlds for the convenience of interstellar
skippers who need to check their courses on extremely long runs. This
was something else.
Burleigh said:
"Hm ... Call the others, Harper."
Harper, prudently with him in the control-room, put his head into the
passage leading away. He called. But Moran observed with grudging
respect that he didn't give him a chance to do anything drastic. These
people on the
Nadine
were capable. They'd managed to recapture the
Nadine
from him, but they were matter-of-fact about it. They didn't
seem to resent what he'd tried to do, or that he'd brought them an
indefinite distance in an indefinite direction from their last
landing-point, and they had still to re-locate themselves.
They'd been on Coryus Three and they'd gotten departure clearance from
its space-port. With clearance-papers in order, they could land
unquestioned at any other space-port and take off again—provided the
other space-port was one they had clearance for. Without rigid control
of space-travel, any criminal anywhere could escape the consequences of
any crime simply by buying a ticket to another world. Moran couldn't
have bought a ticket, but he'd tried to get off the planet Coryus on the
Nadine
. The trouble was that the
Nadine
had clearance papers
covering five persons aboard—four men and a girl Carol. Moran made six.
Wherever the yacht landed, such a disparity between its documents and
its crew would spark an investigation. A lengthy, incredibly minute
investigation. Moran, at least, would be picked out as a fugitive from
Coryus Three. The others were fugitives too, from some unnamed world
Moran did not know. They might be sent back where they came from. In
effect, with six people on board instead of five, the
Nadine
could not
land anywhere for supplies. With five on board, as her papers declared,
she could. And Moran was the extra man whose presence would rouse
space-port officials' suspicion of the rest. So he had to be dumped.
He couldn't blame them. He'd made another difficulty, too. Blaster in
hand, he'd made the
Nadine
take off from Coryus III with a trip-tape
picked at random for guidance. But the trip-tape had been computed for
another starting-point, and when the yacht came out of overdrive it was
because the drive had been dismantled in the engine-room. So the ship's
location was in doubt. It could have travelled at almost any speed in
practically any direction for a length of time that was at least
indefinite. A liner could re-locate itself without trouble. It had
elaborate observational equipment and tri-di star-charts. But smaller
craft had to depend on the Galactic Directory. The process would be to
find a planet and check its climate and relationship to other planets,
and its flora and fauna against descriptions in the Directory. That was
the way to find out where one was, when one's position became doubtful.
The
Nadine
needed to make a planet-fall for this.
The rest of the ship's company came into the control-room. Burleigh
waved his hand at the speaker.
"Listen!"
They heard it. All of them. It was a trilling, whining sound among the
innumerable random noises to be heard in supposedly empty space.
"That's a marker," Carol announced. "I saw a costume-story tape once
that had that sound in it. It marked a first-landing spot on some planet
or other, so the people could find that spot again. It was supposed to
be a long time ago, though."
"It's weak," observed Burleigh. "We'll try answering it."
Moran stirred, and he knew that every one of the others was conscious of
the movement. But they didn't watch him suspiciously. They were alert by
long habit. Burleigh said they'd been Underground people, fighting the
government of their native world, and they'd gotten away to make it seem
the revolt had collapsed. They'd go back later when they weren't
expected, and start it up again. Moran considered the story probable.
Only people accustomed to desperate actions would have remained so calm
when Moran had used desperate measures against them.
Burleigh picked up the transmitter-microphone.
"Calling ground," he said briskly. "Calling ground! We pick up your
signal. Please reply."
He repeated the call, over and over and over. There was no answer.
Cracklings and hissings came out of the speaker as before, and the thin
and reedy wabbling whine continued. The
Nadine
went on toward the
enlarging cloudy mass ahead.
Burleigh said;
"Well?"
"I think," said Carol, "that we should land. People have been here. If
they left a beacon, they may have left an identification of the planet.
Then we'd know where we are and how to get to Loris."
Burleigh nodded. The
Nadine
had cleared for Loris. That was where it
should make its next landing. The little yacht went on. All five of its
proper company watched as the planet's surface enlarged. The ice-cap
went out of sight around the bulge of the globe, but no markings
appeared. There were cloud-banks everywhere, probably low down in the
atmosphere. The darker vague areas previously seen might have been
highlands.
"I think," said Carol, to Moran, "that if it's too tropical where this
signal's coming from, we'll take you somewhere near enough to the
ice-cap to have an endurable climate. I've been figuring on food, too.
That will depend on where we are from Loris because we have to keep
enough for ourselves. But we can spare some. We'll give you the
emergency-kit, anyhow."
The emergency-kit contained antiseptics, seeds, and a weapon or two,
with elaborate advice to castaways. If somebody were wrecked on an even
possibly habitable planet, the especially developed seed-strains would
provide food in a minimum of time. It was not an encouraging thought,
though, and Moran grimaced.
She hadn't said anything about being sorry that he had to be marooned.
Maybe she was, but rebels learn to be practical or they don't live long.
Moran wondered, momentarily, what sort of world they came from and why
they had revolted, and what sort of set-back to the revolt had sent the
five off in what they considered a strategic retreat but their
government would think defeat. Moran's own situation was perfectly
clear.
He'd killed a man on Coryus III. His victim would not be mourned by
anybody, and somebody formerly in very great danger would now be safe,
which was the reason for what Moran had done. But the dead man had been
very important, and the fact that Moran had forced him to fight and
killed him in fair combat made no difference. Moran had needed to get
off-planet, and fast. But space-travel regulations are especially
designed to prevent such escapes.
He'd made a pretty good try, at that. One of the controls on
space-traffic required a ship on landing to deposit its fuel-block in
the space-port's vaults. The fuel-block was not returned until clearance
for departure had been granted. But Moran had waylaid the messenger
carrying the
Nadine's
fuel-block back to that space-yacht. He'd
knocked the messenger cold and presented himself at the yacht with the
fuel. He was admitted. He put the block in the engine's gate. He duly
took the plastic receipt-token the engine only then released, and he
drew a blaster. He'd locked two of the
Nadine's
crew in the
engine-room, rushed to the control-room without encountering the others,
dogged the door shut, and threaded in the first trip-tape to come to
hand. He punched the take-off button and only seconds later the
overdrive. Then the yacht—and Moran—was away. But his present
companions got the drive dismantled two days later and once the yacht
was out of overdrive they efficiently gave him his choice of
surrendering or else. He surrendered, stipulating that he wouldn't be
landed back on Coryus; he still clung to hope of avoiding return—which
was almost certain anyhow. Because nobody would want to go back to a
planet from which they'd carried away a criminal, even though they'd
done it unwillingly. Investigation of such a matter might last for
months.
Now the space-yacht moved toward a vast mass of fleecy whiteness without
any visible features. Harper stayed with the direction-finder. From time
to time he gave readings requiring minute changes of course. The
wabbling, whining signal was louder now. It became louder than all the
rest of the space-noises together.
The yacht touched atmosphere and Burleigh said;
"Watch our height, Carol."
She stood by the echometer. Sixty miles. Fifty. Thirty. A correction of
course. Fifteen miles to surface below. Ten. Five. At twenty-five
thousand feet there were clouds, which would be particles of ice so
small that they floated even so high. Then clear air, then lower clouds,
and lower ones still. It was not until six thousand feet above the
surface that the planet-wide cloud-level seemed to begin. From there on
down it was pure opacity. Anything could exist in that dense, almost
palpable grayness. There could be jagged peaks.
The
Nadine
went down and down. At fifteen hundred feet above the
unseen surface, the clouds ended. Below, there was only haze. One could
see the ground, at least, but there was no horizon. There was only an
end to visibility. The yacht descended as if in the center of a sphere
in which one could see clearly nearby, less clearly at a little
distance, and not at all beyond a quarter-mile or so.
There was a shaded, shadowless twilight under the cloud-bank. The ground
looked like no ground ever seen before by anyone. Off to the right a
rivulet ran between improbable-seeming banks. There were a few very
small hills of most unlikely appearance. It was the ground, the matter
on which one would walk, which was strangest. It had color, but the
color was not green. Much of it was a pallid, dirty-yellowish white. But
there were patches of blue, and curious veinings of black, and here and
there were other colors, all of them unlike the normal color of
vegetation on a planet with a sol-type sun.
Harper spoke from the direction-finder;
"The signal's coming from that mound, yonder."
There was a hillock of elongated shape directly in line with the
Nadine's
course in descent. Except for the patches of color, it was
the only considerable landmark within the half-mile circle in which
anything could be seen at all.
The
Nadine
checked her downward motion. Interplanetary drive is rugged
and sure, but it does not respond to fine adjustment. Burleigh used
rockets, issuing great bellowings of flame, to make actual contact. The
yacht hovered, and as the rocket-flames diminished slowly she sat down
with practically no impact at all. But around her there was a monstrous
tumult of smoke and steam. When the rockets went off, she lay in a
burned-out hollow some three or four feet deep with a bottom of solid
stone. The walls of the hollow were black and scorched. It seemed that
at some places they quivered persistently.
There was silence in the control-room save for the whining noise which
now was almost deafening. Harper snapped off the switch. Then there was
true silence. The space-yacht had come to rest possibly a hundred yards
from the mound which was the source of the space-signal. That mound
shared the peculiarity of the ground as far as they could see through
the haze. It was not vegetation in any ordinary sense. Certainly it was
no mineral surface! The landing-pockets had burned away three or four
feet of it, and the edge of the burned area smoked noisesomely, and
somehow it looked as if it would reek. And there were places where it
stirred.
Burleigh blinked and stared. Then he reached up and flicked on the
outside microphones. Instantly there was bedlam. If the landscape was
strange, here, the sounds that came from it were unbelievable.
There were grunting noises. There were clickings, uncountable clickings
that made a background for all the rest. There were discordant howls and
honkings. From time to time some thing unknown made a cry that sounded
very much like a small boy trailing a stick against a picket fence, only
much louder. Something hooted, maintaining the noise for an impossibly
long time. And persistently, sounding as if they came from far away,
there were booming noises, unspeakably deep-bass, made by something
alive. And something shrieked in lunatic fashion and something else
still moaned from time to time with the volume of a steam-whistle....
"This sounds and looks like a nice place to live," said Moran with fine
irony.
Burleigh did not answer. He turned down the outside sound.
"What's that stuff there, the ground?" he demanded. "We burned it away
in landing. I've seen something like it somewhere, but never taking the
place of grass!"
"That," said Moran as if brightly, "that's what I'm to make a garden in.
Of evenings I'll stroll among my thrifty plantings and listen to the
delightful sounds of nature."
Burleigh scowled. Harper flicked off the direction-finder.
"The signal still comes from that hillock yonder," he said with
finality.
Moran said bitingly;
"That ain't no hillock, that's my home!"
Then, instantly he'd said it, he recognized that it could be true. The
mound was not a fold in the ground. It was not an up-cropping of the
ash-covered stone on which the
Nadine
rested. The enigmatic,
dirty-yellow-dirty-red-dirty-blue-and-dirty-black ground-cover hid
something. It blurred the shape it covered, very much as enormous
cobwebs made solid and opaque would have done. But when one looked
carefully at the mound, there was a landing-fin sticking up toward the
leaden skies. It was attached to a large cylindrical object of which the
fore part was crushed in. The other landing-fins could be traced.
"It's a ship," said Moran curtly. "It crash-landed and its crew set up a
signal to call for help. None came, or they'd have turned the beacon
off. Maybe they got the lifeboats to work and got away. Maybe they lived
as I'm expected to live until they died as I'm expected to die."
Burleigh said angrily;
"You'd do what we are doing if you were in our shoes!"
"Sure," said Moran, "but a man can gripe, can't he?"
"You won't have to live here," said Burleigh. "We'll take you somewhere
up by the ice-cap. As Carol said, we'll give you everything we can
spare. And meanwhile we'll take a look at that wreck yonder. There might
be an indication in it of what solar system this is. There could be
something in it of use to you, too. You'd better come along when we
explore."
"Aye, aye, sir," said Moran with irony. "Very kind of you, sir. You'll
go armed, sir?"
Burleigh growled;
"Naturally!"
"Then since I can't be trusted with a weapon," said Moran, "I suggest
that I take a torch. We may have to burn through that loathesome stuff
to get in the ship."
"Right," growled Burleigh again. "Brawn and Carol, you'll keep ship. The
rest of us wear suits. We don't know what that stuff is outside."
Moran silently went to the space-suit rack and began to get into a
suit. Modern space-suits weren't like the ancient crudities with bulging
metal casings and enormous globular helmets. Non-stretch fabrics took
the place of metal, and constant-volume joints were really practical
nowadays. A man could move about in a late-model space-suit almost as
easily as in ship-clothing. The others of the landing-party donned their
special garments with the brisk absence of fumbling that these people
displayed in every action.
"If there's a lifeboat left," said Carol suddenly, "Moran might be able
to do something with it."
"Ah, yes!" said Moran. "It's very likely that the ship hit hard enough
to kill everybody aboard, but not smash the boats!"
"Somebody survived the crash," said Burleigh, "because they set up a
beacon. I wouldn't count on a boat, Moran."
"I don't!" snapped Moran.
He flipped the fastener of his suit. He felt all the openings catch. He
saw the others complete their equipment. They took arms. So far they had
seen no moving thing outside, but arms were simple sanity on an unknown
world. Moran, though, would not be permitted a weapon. He picked up a
torch. They filed into the airlock. The inner door closed. The outer
door opened. It was not necessary to check the air specifically. The
suits would take care of that. Anyhow the ice-cap said there were no
water-soluble gases in the atmosphere, and a gas can't be an active
poison if it can't dissolve.
They filed out of the airlock. They stood on ash-covered stone, only
slightly eroded by the processes which made life possible on this
planet. They looked dubiously at the scorched, indefinite substance
which had been ground before the
Nadine
landed. Moran moved scornfully
forward. He kicked at the burnt stuff. His foot went through the char.
The hole exposed a cheesy mass of soft matter which seemed riddled with
small holes.
Something black came squirming frantically out of one of the openings.
It was eight or ten inches long. It had a head, a thorax, and an
abdomen. It had wing-cases. It had six legs. It toppled down to the
stone on which the
Nadine
rested. Agitatedly, it spread its
wing-covers and flew away, droning loudly. The four men heard the sound
above even the monstrous cacophony of cries and boomings and grunts and
squeaks which seemed to fill the air.
"What the devil—."
Moran kicked again. More holes. More openings. More small tunnels in the
cheese-like, curd-like stuff. More black things squirming to view in
obvious panic. They popped out everywhere. It was suddenly apparent
that the top of the soil, here, was a thick and blanket-like sheet over
the whitish stuff. The black creatures lived and thrived in tunnels
under it.
Carol's voice came over the helmet-phones.
"
They're—bugs!
" she said incredulously. "
They're beetles! They're
twenty times the size of the beetles we humans have been carrying around
the galaxy, but that's what they are!
"
Moran grunted. Distastefully, he saw his predicament made worse. He knew
what had happened here. He could begin to guess at other things to be
discovered. It had not been practical for men to move onto new planets
and subsist upon the flora and fauna they found there. On some new
planets life had never gotten started. On such worlds a highly complex
operation was necessary before humanity could move in. A complete
ecological complex had to be built up; microbes to break down the rock
for soil, bacteria to fix nitrogen to make the soil fertile; plants to
grow in the new-made dirt and insects to fertilize the plants so they
would multiply, and animals and birds to carry the seeds planet-wide. On
most planets, to be sure, there were local, aboriginal plants and
animals. But still terrestrial creatures had to be introduced if a
colony was to feed itself. Alien plants did not supply satisfactory
food. So an elaborate adaptation job had to be done on every planet
before native and terrestrial living things settled down together. It
wasn't impossible that the scuttling things were truly beetles, grown
large and monstrous under the conditions of a new planet. And the
ground....
"This ground stuff," said Moran distastefully, "is yeast or some sort of
toadstool growth. This is a seedling world. It didn't have any life on
it, so somebody dumped germs and spores and bugs to make it ready for
plants and animals eventually. But nobody's come back to finish up the
job."
Burleigh grunted a somehow surprised assent. But it wasn't surprising;
not wholly so. Once one mentioned yeasts and toadstools and fungi
generally, the weird landscape became less than incredible. But it
remained actively unpleasant to think of being marooned on it.
"Suppose we go look at the ship?" said Moran unpleasantly. "Maybe you
can find out where you are, and I can find out what's ahead of me."
He climbed up on the unscorched surface. It was elastic. The
parchment-like top skin yielded. It was like walking on a mass of
springs.
"We'd better spread out," added Moran, "or else we'll break through that
skin and be floundering in this mess."
"I'm giving the orders, Moran!" said Burleigh shortly. "But what you say
does make sense."
He and the others joined Moran on the yielding surface. Their footing
was uncertain, as on a trampoline. They staggered. They moved toward the
hillock which was a covered-over wrecked ship.
The ground was not as level as it appeared from the
Nadine's
control-room. There were undulations. But they could not see more than a
quarter-mile in any direction. Beyond that was mist. But Burleigh, at
one end of the uneven line of advancing men, suddenly halted and stood
staring down at something he had not seen before. The others halted.
Something moved. It came out from behind a very minor spire of whitish
stuff that looked like a dirty sheet stretched over a tall stone. The
thing that appeared was very peculiar indeed. It was a—worm. But it was
a foot thick and ten feet long, and it had a group of stumpy legs at its
fore end—where there were eyes hidden behind bristling hair-like
growths—and another set of feet at its tail end. It progressed sedately
by reaching forward with its fore-part, securing a foothold, and then
arching its middle portion like a cat arching its back, to bring its
hind part forward. Then it reached forward again. It was of a dark olive
color from one end to the other. Its manner of walking was insane but
somehow sedate.
Moran heard muffled noises in his helmet-phone as the others tried to
speak. Carol's voice came anxiously;
"
What's the matter? What do you see?
"
Moran said with savage precision;
"We're looking at an inch-worm, grown up like the beetles only more so.
It's not an inch-worm any longer. It's a yard-worm." Then he said
harshly to the men with him; "It's not a hunting creature on worlds
where it's smaller. It's not likely to have turned deadly here. Come
on!"
He went forward over the singularly bouncy ground. The others followed.
It was to be noted that Hallet the engineer, avoided the huge harmless
creature more widely than most.
They reached the mound which was the ship. Moran unlimbered his torch.
He said sardonically;
"This ship won't do anybody any good. It's old-style. That thick belt
around its middle was dropped a hundred years ago, and more." There was
an abrupt thickening of the cylindrical hull at the middle. There was an
equally abrupt thinning, again, toward the landing-fins. The sharpness
of the change was blurred over by the revolting ground-stuff growing
everywhere. "We're going to find that this wreck has been here a century
at least!"
Without orders, he turned on the torch. A four-foot flame of pure
blue-white leaped out. He touched its tip to the fungoid soil. Steam
leaped up. He used the flame like a gigantic scalpel, cutting a square a
yard deep in the whitish stuff, and then cutting it across and across to
destroy it. Thick fumes arose, and quiverings and shakings began. Black
creatures in their labyrinths of tunnels began to panic. Off to the
right the blanket-like surface ripped and they poured out. They scuttled
crazily here and there. Some took to wing. By instinct the other
men—the armed ones—moved back from the smoke. They wore space-helmets
but they felt that there should be an intolerable smell.
Moran slashed and slashed angrily with the big flame, cutting a way to
the metal hull that had fallen here before his grandfather was born.
Sometimes the flame cut across things that writhed, and he was sickened.
But above all he raged because he was to be marooned here. He could not
altogether blame the others. They couldn't land at any colonized world
with him on board without his being detected as an extra member of the
crew. His fate would then be sealed. But they also would be
investigated. Official queries would go across this whole sector of the
galaxy, naming five persons of such-and-such description and
such-and-such fingerprints, voyaging in a space-yacht of such-and-such
size and registration. The world they came from would claim them as
fugitives. They would be returned to it. They'd be executed.
Then Carol's voice came in his helmet-phone. She cried out;
"
Look out! It's coming! Kill it! Kill it—.
"
He heard blast-rifles firing. He heard Burleigh pant commands. He was on
his way out of the hollow he'd carved when he heard Harper cry out
horribly.
He got clear of the newly burned-away stuff. There was still much smoke
and stream. But he saw Harper. More, he saw the thing that had Harper.
It occurred to him instantly that if Harper died, there would not be too
many people on the
Nadine
. They need not maroon him. In fact, they
wouldn't dare.
A ship that came in to port with two few on board would be investigated
as thoroughly as one that had too many. Perhaps more thoroughly. So if
Harper were killed, Moran would be needed to take his place. He'd go on
from here in the
Nadine
, necessarily accepted as a member of her crew.
Then he rushed, the flame-torch making a roaring sound.
II.
They went back to the
Nadine
for weapons more adequate for
encountering the local fauna when it was over. Blast-rifles were not
effective against such creatures as these. Torches were contact weapons
but they killed. Blast-rifles did not. And Harper needed to pull himself
together again, too. Also, neither Moran nor any of the others wanted to
go back to the still un-entered wreck while the skinny, somehow
disgusting legs of the thing still kicked spasmodically—quite
separate—on the whitish ground-stuff. Moran had disliked such creatures
in miniature form on other worlds. Enlarged like this.
It seemed insane that such creatures, even in miniature, should
painstakingly be brought across light-years of space to the new worlds
men settled on. But it had been found to be necessary. The ecological
system in which human beings belonged had turned out to be infinitely
complicated. It had turned out, in fact, to be the ecological system of
Earth, and unless all parts of the complex were present, the total was
subtly or glaringly wrong. So mankind distastefully ferried pests as
well as useful creatures to its new worlds as they were made ready for
settlement. Mosquitos throve on the inhabited globes of the Rim Stars.
Roaches twitched nervous antennae on the settled planets of the
Coal-sack. Dogs on Antares had fleas, and scratched their bites, and
humanity spread through the galaxy with an attendant train of insects
and annoyances. If they left their pests behind, the total system of
checks and balances which make life practical would get lopsided. It
would not maintain itself. The vagaries that could result were admirably
illustrated in and on the landscape outside the
Nadine
. Something had
been left out of the seeding of this planet. The element—which might be
a bacterium or a virus or almost anything at all—the element that kept
creatures at the size called "normal" was either missing or inoperable
here. The results were not desirable. | [
"complex",
"evolving",
"strict",
"flexible"
] | 2 |
43046_Q9R0IJB9_4 | Why is the crew of the Nadine not more upset that Moran stole their spacecraft? | <!-- $Id: header.txt 236 2009-12-07 18:57:00Z vlsimpson $ -->
PLANET of DREAD
By MURRAY LEINSTER
Illustrator ADKINS
I.
Moran cut apart the yard-long monstrosity with a slash of flame.
The thing presumably died, but it continued to writhe senselessly.
He turned to see other horrors crawling toward him. Then he knew he
was being marooned on a planet of endless terrors.
Moran, naturally, did not mean to help in the carrying out of the plans
which would mean his destruction one way or another. The plans were
thrashed out very painstakingly, in formal conference on the space-yacht
Nadine
, with Moran present and allowed to take part in the discussion.
From the viewpoint of the
Nadine's
ship's company, it was simply
necessary to get rid of Moran. In their predicament he might have come
to the same conclusion; but he was not at all enthusiastic about their
decision. He would die of it.
The
Nadine
was out of overdrive and all the uncountable suns of the
galaxy shone steadily, remotely, as infinitesimal specks of light of
every color of the rainbow. Two hours since, the sun of this solar
system had been a vast glaring disk off to port, with streamers and
prominences erupting about its edges. Now it lay astern, and Moran
could see the planet that had been chosen for his marooning. It was a
cloudy world. There were some dim markings near one lighted limb, but
nowhere else. There was an ice-cap in view. The rest was—clouds.
The ice-cap, by its existence and circular shape, proved that the planet
rotated at a not unreasonable rate. The fact that it was water-ice told
much. A water-ice ice-cap said that there were no poisonous gases in the
planet's atmosphere. Sulfur dioxide or chlorine, for example, would not
allow the formation of water-ice. It would have to be sulphuric-acid or
hydrochloric-acid ice. But the ice-cap was simple snow. Its size, too,
told about temperature-distribution on the planet. A large cap would
have meant a large area with arctic and sub-arctic temperatures, with
small temperate and tropical climate-belts. A small one like this meant
wide tropical and sub-tropical zones. The fact was verified by the
thick, dense cloud-masses which covered most of the surface,—all the
surface, in fact, outside the ice-cap. But since there were ice-caps
there would be temperate regions. In short, the ice-cap proved that a
man could endure the air and temperature conditions he would find.
Moran observed these things from the control-room of the
Nadine
, then
approaching the world on planetary drive. He was to be left here, with
no reason ever to expect rescue. Two of the
Nadine's
four-man crew
watched out the same ports as the planet seemed to approach. Burleigh
said encouragingly;
"It doesn't look too bad, Moran!"
Moran disagreed, but he did not answer. He cocked an ear instead. He
heard something. It was a thin, wabbling, keening whine. No natural
radiation sounds like that. Moran nodded toward the all-band speaker.
"Do you hear what I do?" he asked sardonically.
Burleigh listened. A distinctly artificial signal came out of the
speaker. It wasn't a voice-signal. It wasn't an identification beacon,
such as are placed on certain worlds for the convenience of interstellar
skippers who need to check their courses on extremely long runs. This
was something else.
Burleigh said:
"Hm ... Call the others, Harper."
Harper, prudently with him in the control-room, put his head into the
passage leading away. He called. But Moran observed with grudging
respect that he didn't give him a chance to do anything drastic. These
people on the
Nadine
were capable. They'd managed to recapture the
Nadine
from him, but they were matter-of-fact about it. They didn't
seem to resent what he'd tried to do, or that he'd brought them an
indefinite distance in an indefinite direction from their last
landing-point, and they had still to re-locate themselves.
They'd been on Coryus Three and they'd gotten departure clearance from
its space-port. With clearance-papers in order, they could land
unquestioned at any other space-port and take off again—provided the
other space-port was one they had clearance for. Without rigid control
of space-travel, any criminal anywhere could escape the consequences of
any crime simply by buying a ticket to another world. Moran couldn't
have bought a ticket, but he'd tried to get off the planet Coryus on the
Nadine
. The trouble was that the
Nadine
had clearance papers
covering five persons aboard—four men and a girl Carol. Moran made six.
Wherever the yacht landed, such a disparity between its documents and
its crew would spark an investigation. A lengthy, incredibly minute
investigation. Moran, at least, would be picked out as a fugitive from
Coryus Three. The others were fugitives too, from some unnamed world
Moran did not know. They might be sent back where they came from. In
effect, with six people on board instead of five, the
Nadine
could not
land anywhere for supplies. With five on board, as her papers declared,
she could. And Moran was the extra man whose presence would rouse
space-port officials' suspicion of the rest. So he had to be dumped.
He couldn't blame them. He'd made another difficulty, too. Blaster in
hand, he'd made the
Nadine
take off from Coryus III with a trip-tape
picked at random for guidance. But the trip-tape had been computed for
another starting-point, and when the yacht came out of overdrive it was
because the drive had been dismantled in the engine-room. So the ship's
location was in doubt. It could have travelled at almost any speed in
practically any direction for a length of time that was at least
indefinite. A liner could re-locate itself without trouble. It had
elaborate observational equipment and tri-di star-charts. But smaller
craft had to depend on the Galactic Directory. The process would be to
find a planet and check its climate and relationship to other planets,
and its flora and fauna against descriptions in the Directory. That was
the way to find out where one was, when one's position became doubtful.
The
Nadine
needed to make a planet-fall for this.
The rest of the ship's company came into the control-room. Burleigh
waved his hand at the speaker.
"Listen!"
They heard it. All of them. It was a trilling, whining sound among the
innumerable random noises to be heard in supposedly empty space.
"That's a marker," Carol announced. "I saw a costume-story tape once
that had that sound in it. It marked a first-landing spot on some planet
or other, so the people could find that spot again. It was supposed to
be a long time ago, though."
"It's weak," observed Burleigh. "We'll try answering it."
Moran stirred, and he knew that every one of the others was conscious of
the movement. But they didn't watch him suspiciously. They were alert by
long habit. Burleigh said they'd been Underground people, fighting the
government of their native world, and they'd gotten away to make it seem
the revolt had collapsed. They'd go back later when they weren't
expected, and start it up again. Moran considered the story probable.
Only people accustomed to desperate actions would have remained so calm
when Moran had used desperate measures against them.
Burleigh picked up the transmitter-microphone.
"Calling ground," he said briskly. "Calling ground! We pick up your
signal. Please reply."
He repeated the call, over and over and over. There was no answer.
Cracklings and hissings came out of the speaker as before, and the thin
and reedy wabbling whine continued. The
Nadine
went on toward the
enlarging cloudy mass ahead.
Burleigh said;
"Well?"
"I think," said Carol, "that we should land. People have been here. If
they left a beacon, they may have left an identification of the planet.
Then we'd know where we are and how to get to Loris."
Burleigh nodded. The
Nadine
had cleared for Loris. That was where it
should make its next landing. The little yacht went on. All five of its
proper company watched as the planet's surface enlarged. The ice-cap
went out of sight around the bulge of the globe, but no markings
appeared. There were cloud-banks everywhere, probably low down in the
atmosphere. The darker vague areas previously seen might have been
highlands.
"I think," said Carol, to Moran, "that if it's too tropical where this
signal's coming from, we'll take you somewhere near enough to the
ice-cap to have an endurable climate. I've been figuring on food, too.
That will depend on where we are from Loris because we have to keep
enough for ourselves. But we can spare some. We'll give you the
emergency-kit, anyhow."
The emergency-kit contained antiseptics, seeds, and a weapon or two,
with elaborate advice to castaways. If somebody were wrecked on an even
possibly habitable planet, the especially developed seed-strains would
provide food in a minimum of time. It was not an encouraging thought,
though, and Moran grimaced.
She hadn't said anything about being sorry that he had to be marooned.
Maybe she was, but rebels learn to be practical or they don't live long.
Moran wondered, momentarily, what sort of world they came from and why
they had revolted, and what sort of set-back to the revolt had sent the
five off in what they considered a strategic retreat but their
government would think defeat. Moran's own situation was perfectly
clear.
He'd killed a man on Coryus III. His victim would not be mourned by
anybody, and somebody formerly in very great danger would now be safe,
which was the reason for what Moran had done. But the dead man had been
very important, and the fact that Moran had forced him to fight and
killed him in fair combat made no difference. Moran had needed to get
off-planet, and fast. But space-travel regulations are especially
designed to prevent such escapes.
He'd made a pretty good try, at that. One of the controls on
space-traffic required a ship on landing to deposit its fuel-block in
the space-port's vaults. The fuel-block was not returned until clearance
for departure had been granted. But Moran had waylaid the messenger
carrying the
Nadine's
fuel-block back to that space-yacht. He'd
knocked the messenger cold and presented himself at the yacht with the
fuel. He was admitted. He put the block in the engine's gate. He duly
took the plastic receipt-token the engine only then released, and he
drew a blaster. He'd locked two of the
Nadine's
crew in the
engine-room, rushed to the control-room without encountering the others,
dogged the door shut, and threaded in the first trip-tape to come to
hand. He punched the take-off button and only seconds later the
overdrive. Then the yacht—and Moran—was away. But his present
companions got the drive dismantled two days later and once the yacht
was out of overdrive they efficiently gave him his choice of
surrendering or else. He surrendered, stipulating that he wouldn't be
landed back on Coryus; he still clung to hope of avoiding return—which
was almost certain anyhow. Because nobody would want to go back to a
planet from which they'd carried away a criminal, even though they'd
done it unwillingly. Investigation of such a matter might last for
months.
Now the space-yacht moved toward a vast mass of fleecy whiteness without
any visible features. Harper stayed with the direction-finder. From time
to time he gave readings requiring minute changes of course. The
wabbling, whining signal was louder now. It became louder than all the
rest of the space-noises together.
The yacht touched atmosphere and Burleigh said;
"Watch our height, Carol."
She stood by the echometer. Sixty miles. Fifty. Thirty. A correction of
course. Fifteen miles to surface below. Ten. Five. At twenty-five
thousand feet there were clouds, which would be particles of ice so
small that they floated even so high. Then clear air, then lower clouds,
and lower ones still. It was not until six thousand feet above the
surface that the planet-wide cloud-level seemed to begin. From there on
down it was pure opacity. Anything could exist in that dense, almost
palpable grayness. There could be jagged peaks.
The
Nadine
went down and down. At fifteen hundred feet above the
unseen surface, the clouds ended. Below, there was only haze. One could
see the ground, at least, but there was no horizon. There was only an
end to visibility. The yacht descended as if in the center of a sphere
in which one could see clearly nearby, less clearly at a little
distance, and not at all beyond a quarter-mile or so.
There was a shaded, shadowless twilight under the cloud-bank. The ground
looked like no ground ever seen before by anyone. Off to the right a
rivulet ran between improbable-seeming banks. There were a few very
small hills of most unlikely appearance. It was the ground, the matter
on which one would walk, which was strangest. It had color, but the
color was not green. Much of it was a pallid, dirty-yellowish white. But
there were patches of blue, and curious veinings of black, and here and
there were other colors, all of them unlike the normal color of
vegetation on a planet with a sol-type sun.
Harper spoke from the direction-finder;
"The signal's coming from that mound, yonder."
There was a hillock of elongated shape directly in line with the
Nadine's
course in descent. Except for the patches of color, it was
the only considerable landmark within the half-mile circle in which
anything could be seen at all.
The
Nadine
checked her downward motion. Interplanetary drive is rugged
and sure, but it does not respond to fine adjustment. Burleigh used
rockets, issuing great bellowings of flame, to make actual contact. The
yacht hovered, and as the rocket-flames diminished slowly she sat down
with practically no impact at all. But around her there was a monstrous
tumult of smoke and steam. When the rockets went off, she lay in a
burned-out hollow some three or four feet deep with a bottom of solid
stone. The walls of the hollow were black and scorched. It seemed that
at some places they quivered persistently.
There was silence in the control-room save for the whining noise which
now was almost deafening. Harper snapped off the switch. Then there was
true silence. The space-yacht had come to rest possibly a hundred yards
from the mound which was the source of the space-signal. That mound
shared the peculiarity of the ground as far as they could see through
the haze. It was not vegetation in any ordinary sense. Certainly it was
no mineral surface! The landing-pockets had burned away three or four
feet of it, and the edge of the burned area smoked noisesomely, and
somehow it looked as if it would reek. And there were places where it
stirred.
Burleigh blinked and stared. Then he reached up and flicked on the
outside microphones. Instantly there was bedlam. If the landscape was
strange, here, the sounds that came from it were unbelievable.
There were grunting noises. There were clickings, uncountable clickings
that made a background for all the rest. There were discordant howls and
honkings. From time to time some thing unknown made a cry that sounded
very much like a small boy trailing a stick against a picket fence, only
much louder. Something hooted, maintaining the noise for an impossibly
long time. And persistently, sounding as if they came from far away,
there were booming noises, unspeakably deep-bass, made by something
alive. And something shrieked in lunatic fashion and something else
still moaned from time to time with the volume of a steam-whistle....
"This sounds and looks like a nice place to live," said Moran with fine
irony.
Burleigh did not answer. He turned down the outside sound.
"What's that stuff there, the ground?" he demanded. "We burned it away
in landing. I've seen something like it somewhere, but never taking the
place of grass!"
"That," said Moran as if brightly, "that's what I'm to make a garden in.
Of evenings I'll stroll among my thrifty plantings and listen to the
delightful sounds of nature."
Burleigh scowled. Harper flicked off the direction-finder.
"The signal still comes from that hillock yonder," he said with
finality.
Moran said bitingly;
"That ain't no hillock, that's my home!"
Then, instantly he'd said it, he recognized that it could be true. The
mound was not a fold in the ground. It was not an up-cropping of the
ash-covered stone on which the
Nadine
rested. The enigmatic,
dirty-yellow-dirty-red-dirty-blue-and-dirty-black ground-cover hid
something. It blurred the shape it covered, very much as enormous
cobwebs made solid and opaque would have done. But when one looked
carefully at the mound, there was a landing-fin sticking up toward the
leaden skies. It was attached to a large cylindrical object of which the
fore part was crushed in. The other landing-fins could be traced.
"It's a ship," said Moran curtly. "It crash-landed and its crew set up a
signal to call for help. None came, or they'd have turned the beacon
off. Maybe they got the lifeboats to work and got away. Maybe they lived
as I'm expected to live until they died as I'm expected to die."
Burleigh said angrily;
"You'd do what we are doing if you were in our shoes!"
"Sure," said Moran, "but a man can gripe, can't he?"
"You won't have to live here," said Burleigh. "We'll take you somewhere
up by the ice-cap. As Carol said, we'll give you everything we can
spare. And meanwhile we'll take a look at that wreck yonder. There might
be an indication in it of what solar system this is. There could be
something in it of use to you, too. You'd better come along when we
explore."
"Aye, aye, sir," said Moran with irony. "Very kind of you, sir. You'll
go armed, sir?"
Burleigh growled;
"Naturally!"
"Then since I can't be trusted with a weapon," said Moran, "I suggest
that I take a torch. We may have to burn through that loathesome stuff
to get in the ship."
"Right," growled Burleigh again. "Brawn and Carol, you'll keep ship. The
rest of us wear suits. We don't know what that stuff is outside."
Moran silently went to the space-suit rack and began to get into a
suit. Modern space-suits weren't like the ancient crudities with bulging
metal casings and enormous globular helmets. Non-stretch fabrics took
the place of metal, and constant-volume joints were really practical
nowadays. A man could move about in a late-model space-suit almost as
easily as in ship-clothing. The others of the landing-party donned their
special garments with the brisk absence of fumbling that these people
displayed in every action.
"If there's a lifeboat left," said Carol suddenly, "Moran might be able
to do something with it."
"Ah, yes!" said Moran. "It's very likely that the ship hit hard enough
to kill everybody aboard, but not smash the boats!"
"Somebody survived the crash," said Burleigh, "because they set up a
beacon. I wouldn't count on a boat, Moran."
"I don't!" snapped Moran.
He flipped the fastener of his suit. He felt all the openings catch. He
saw the others complete their equipment. They took arms. So far they had
seen no moving thing outside, but arms were simple sanity on an unknown
world. Moran, though, would not be permitted a weapon. He picked up a
torch. They filed into the airlock. The inner door closed. The outer
door opened. It was not necessary to check the air specifically. The
suits would take care of that. Anyhow the ice-cap said there were no
water-soluble gases in the atmosphere, and a gas can't be an active
poison if it can't dissolve.
They filed out of the airlock. They stood on ash-covered stone, only
slightly eroded by the processes which made life possible on this
planet. They looked dubiously at the scorched, indefinite substance
which had been ground before the
Nadine
landed. Moran moved scornfully
forward. He kicked at the burnt stuff. His foot went through the char.
The hole exposed a cheesy mass of soft matter which seemed riddled with
small holes.
Something black came squirming frantically out of one of the openings.
It was eight or ten inches long. It had a head, a thorax, and an
abdomen. It had wing-cases. It had six legs. It toppled down to the
stone on which the
Nadine
rested. Agitatedly, it spread its
wing-covers and flew away, droning loudly. The four men heard the sound
above even the monstrous cacophony of cries and boomings and grunts and
squeaks which seemed to fill the air.
"What the devil—."
Moran kicked again. More holes. More openings. More small tunnels in the
cheese-like, curd-like stuff. More black things squirming to view in
obvious panic. They popped out everywhere. It was suddenly apparent
that the top of the soil, here, was a thick and blanket-like sheet over
the whitish stuff. The black creatures lived and thrived in tunnels
under it.
Carol's voice came over the helmet-phones.
"
They're—bugs!
" she said incredulously. "
They're beetles! They're
twenty times the size of the beetles we humans have been carrying around
the galaxy, but that's what they are!
"
Moran grunted. Distastefully, he saw his predicament made worse. He knew
what had happened here. He could begin to guess at other things to be
discovered. It had not been practical for men to move onto new planets
and subsist upon the flora and fauna they found there. On some new
planets life had never gotten started. On such worlds a highly complex
operation was necessary before humanity could move in. A complete
ecological complex had to be built up; microbes to break down the rock
for soil, bacteria to fix nitrogen to make the soil fertile; plants to
grow in the new-made dirt and insects to fertilize the plants so they
would multiply, and animals and birds to carry the seeds planet-wide. On
most planets, to be sure, there were local, aboriginal plants and
animals. But still terrestrial creatures had to be introduced if a
colony was to feed itself. Alien plants did not supply satisfactory
food. So an elaborate adaptation job had to be done on every planet
before native and terrestrial living things settled down together. It
wasn't impossible that the scuttling things were truly beetles, grown
large and monstrous under the conditions of a new planet. And the
ground....
"This ground stuff," said Moran distastefully, "is yeast or some sort of
toadstool growth. This is a seedling world. It didn't have any life on
it, so somebody dumped germs and spores and bugs to make it ready for
plants and animals eventually. But nobody's come back to finish up the
job."
Burleigh grunted a somehow surprised assent. But it wasn't surprising;
not wholly so. Once one mentioned yeasts and toadstools and fungi
generally, the weird landscape became less than incredible. But it
remained actively unpleasant to think of being marooned on it.
"Suppose we go look at the ship?" said Moran unpleasantly. "Maybe you
can find out where you are, and I can find out what's ahead of me."
He climbed up on the unscorched surface. It was elastic. The
parchment-like top skin yielded. It was like walking on a mass of
springs.
"We'd better spread out," added Moran, "or else we'll break through that
skin and be floundering in this mess."
"I'm giving the orders, Moran!" said Burleigh shortly. "But what you say
does make sense."
He and the others joined Moran on the yielding surface. Their footing
was uncertain, as on a trampoline. They staggered. They moved toward the
hillock which was a covered-over wrecked ship.
The ground was not as level as it appeared from the
Nadine's
control-room. There were undulations. But they could not see more than a
quarter-mile in any direction. Beyond that was mist. But Burleigh, at
one end of the uneven line of advancing men, suddenly halted and stood
staring down at something he had not seen before. The others halted.
Something moved. It came out from behind a very minor spire of whitish
stuff that looked like a dirty sheet stretched over a tall stone. The
thing that appeared was very peculiar indeed. It was a—worm. But it was
a foot thick and ten feet long, and it had a group of stumpy legs at its
fore end—where there were eyes hidden behind bristling hair-like
growths—and another set of feet at its tail end. It progressed sedately
by reaching forward with its fore-part, securing a foothold, and then
arching its middle portion like a cat arching its back, to bring its
hind part forward. Then it reached forward again. It was of a dark olive
color from one end to the other. Its manner of walking was insane but
somehow sedate.
Moran heard muffled noises in his helmet-phone as the others tried to
speak. Carol's voice came anxiously;
"
What's the matter? What do you see?
"
Moran said with savage precision;
"We're looking at an inch-worm, grown up like the beetles only more so.
It's not an inch-worm any longer. It's a yard-worm." Then he said
harshly to the men with him; "It's not a hunting creature on worlds
where it's smaller. It's not likely to have turned deadly here. Come
on!"
He went forward over the singularly bouncy ground. The others followed.
It was to be noted that Hallet the engineer, avoided the huge harmless
creature more widely than most.
They reached the mound which was the ship. Moran unlimbered his torch.
He said sardonically;
"This ship won't do anybody any good. It's old-style. That thick belt
around its middle was dropped a hundred years ago, and more." There was
an abrupt thickening of the cylindrical hull at the middle. There was an
equally abrupt thinning, again, toward the landing-fins. The sharpness
of the change was blurred over by the revolting ground-stuff growing
everywhere. "We're going to find that this wreck has been here a century
at least!"
Without orders, he turned on the torch. A four-foot flame of pure
blue-white leaped out. He touched its tip to the fungoid soil. Steam
leaped up. He used the flame like a gigantic scalpel, cutting a square a
yard deep in the whitish stuff, and then cutting it across and across to
destroy it. Thick fumes arose, and quiverings and shakings began. Black
creatures in their labyrinths of tunnels began to panic. Off to the
right the blanket-like surface ripped and they poured out. They scuttled
crazily here and there. Some took to wing. By instinct the other
men—the armed ones—moved back from the smoke. They wore space-helmets
but they felt that there should be an intolerable smell.
Moran slashed and slashed angrily with the big flame, cutting a way to
the metal hull that had fallen here before his grandfather was born.
Sometimes the flame cut across things that writhed, and he was sickened.
But above all he raged because he was to be marooned here. He could not
altogether blame the others. They couldn't land at any colonized world
with him on board without his being detected as an extra member of the
crew. His fate would then be sealed. But they also would be
investigated. Official queries would go across this whole sector of the
galaxy, naming five persons of such-and-such description and
such-and-such fingerprints, voyaging in a space-yacht of such-and-such
size and registration. The world they came from would claim them as
fugitives. They would be returned to it. They'd be executed.
Then Carol's voice came in his helmet-phone. She cried out;
"
Look out! It's coming! Kill it! Kill it—.
"
He heard blast-rifles firing. He heard Burleigh pant commands. He was on
his way out of the hollow he'd carved when he heard Harper cry out
horribly.
He got clear of the newly burned-away stuff. There was still much smoke
and stream. But he saw Harper. More, he saw the thing that had Harper.
It occurred to him instantly that if Harper died, there would not be too
many people on the
Nadine
. They need not maroon him. In fact, they
wouldn't dare.
A ship that came in to port with two few on board would be investigated
as thoroughly as one that had too many. Perhaps more thoroughly. So if
Harper were killed, Moran would be needed to take his place. He'd go on
from here in the
Nadine
, necessarily accepted as a member of her crew.
Then he rushed, the flame-torch making a roaring sound.
II.
They went back to the
Nadine
for weapons more adequate for
encountering the local fauna when it was over. Blast-rifles were not
effective against such creatures as these. Torches were contact weapons
but they killed. Blast-rifles did not. And Harper needed to pull himself
together again, too. Also, neither Moran nor any of the others wanted to
go back to the still un-entered wreck while the skinny, somehow
disgusting legs of the thing still kicked spasmodically—quite
separate—on the whitish ground-stuff. Moran had disliked such creatures
in miniature form on other worlds. Enlarged like this.
It seemed insane that such creatures, even in miniature, should
painstakingly be brought across light-years of space to the new worlds
men settled on. But it had been found to be necessary. The ecological
system in which human beings belonged had turned out to be infinitely
complicated. It had turned out, in fact, to be the ecological system of
Earth, and unless all parts of the complex were present, the total was
subtly or glaringly wrong. So mankind distastefully ferried pests as
well as useful creatures to its new worlds as they were made ready for
settlement. Mosquitos throve on the inhabited globes of the Rim Stars.
Roaches twitched nervous antennae on the settled planets of the
Coal-sack. Dogs on Antares had fleas, and scratched their bites, and
humanity spread through the galaxy with an attendant train of insects
and annoyances. If they left their pests behind, the total system of
checks and balances which make life practical would get lopsided. It
would not maintain itself. The vagaries that could result were admirably
illustrated in and on the landscape outside the
Nadine
. Something had
been left out of the seeding of this planet. The element—which might be
a bacterium or a virus or almost anything at all—the element that kept
creatures at the size called "normal" was either missing or inoperable
here. The results were not desirable. | [
"They view Moran as a potential sacrifice to any predators or officials they may discover upon the alien planet.",
"They are fugitives just like Moran, and don't believe he has a motive to thwart their mission.",
"They have no space navigation experience, while Moran does, and view him as potentially useful.",
"They are not threatened by Moran because he does not have any weapons on his person."
] | 1 |
43046_Q9R0IJB9_5 | What, within the context of the passage, is a 'marker'? | <!-- $Id: header.txt 236 2009-12-07 18:57:00Z vlsimpson $ -->
PLANET of DREAD
By MURRAY LEINSTER
Illustrator ADKINS
I.
Moran cut apart the yard-long monstrosity with a slash of flame.
The thing presumably died, but it continued to writhe senselessly.
He turned to see other horrors crawling toward him. Then he knew he
was being marooned on a planet of endless terrors.
Moran, naturally, did not mean to help in the carrying out of the plans
which would mean his destruction one way or another. The plans were
thrashed out very painstakingly, in formal conference on the space-yacht
Nadine
, with Moran present and allowed to take part in the discussion.
From the viewpoint of the
Nadine's
ship's company, it was simply
necessary to get rid of Moran. In their predicament he might have come
to the same conclusion; but he was not at all enthusiastic about their
decision. He would die of it.
The
Nadine
was out of overdrive and all the uncountable suns of the
galaxy shone steadily, remotely, as infinitesimal specks of light of
every color of the rainbow. Two hours since, the sun of this solar
system had been a vast glaring disk off to port, with streamers and
prominences erupting about its edges. Now it lay astern, and Moran
could see the planet that had been chosen for his marooning. It was a
cloudy world. There were some dim markings near one lighted limb, but
nowhere else. There was an ice-cap in view. The rest was—clouds.
The ice-cap, by its existence and circular shape, proved that the planet
rotated at a not unreasonable rate. The fact that it was water-ice told
much. A water-ice ice-cap said that there were no poisonous gases in the
planet's atmosphere. Sulfur dioxide or chlorine, for example, would not
allow the formation of water-ice. It would have to be sulphuric-acid or
hydrochloric-acid ice. But the ice-cap was simple snow. Its size, too,
told about temperature-distribution on the planet. A large cap would
have meant a large area with arctic and sub-arctic temperatures, with
small temperate and tropical climate-belts. A small one like this meant
wide tropical and sub-tropical zones. The fact was verified by the
thick, dense cloud-masses which covered most of the surface,—all the
surface, in fact, outside the ice-cap. But since there were ice-caps
there would be temperate regions. In short, the ice-cap proved that a
man could endure the air and temperature conditions he would find.
Moran observed these things from the control-room of the
Nadine
, then
approaching the world on planetary drive. He was to be left here, with
no reason ever to expect rescue. Two of the
Nadine's
four-man crew
watched out the same ports as the planet seemed to approach. Burleigh
said encouragingly;
"It doesn't look too bad, Moran!"
Moran disagreed, but he did not answer. He cocked an ear instead. He
heard something. It was a thin, wabbling, keening whine. No natural
radiation sounds like that. Moran nodded toward the all-band speaker.
"Do you hear what I do?" he asked sardonically.
Burleigh listened. A distinctly artificial signal came out of the
speaker. It wasn't a voice-signal. It wasn't an identification beacon,
such as are placed on certain worlds for the convenience of interstellar
skippers who need to check their courses on extremely long runs. This
was something else.
Burleigh said:
"Hm ... Call the others, Harper."
Harper, prudently with him in the control-room, put his head into the
passage leading away. He called. But Moran observed with grudging
respect that he didn't give him a chance to do anything drastic. These
people on the
Nadine
were capable. They'd managed to recapture the
Nadine
from him, but they were matter-of-fact about it. They didn't
seem to resent what he'd tried to do, or that he'd brought them an
indefinite distance in an indefinite direction from their last
landing-point, and they had still to re-locate themselves.
They'd been on Coryus Three and they'd gotten departure clearance from
its space-port. With clearance-papers in order, they could land
unquestioned at any other space-port and take off again—provided the
other space-port was one they had clearance for. Without rigid control
of space-travel, any criminal anywhere could escape the consequences of
any crime simply by buying a ticket to another world. Moran couldn't
have bought a ticket, but he'd tried to get off the planet Coryus on the
Nadine
. The trouble was that the
Nadine
had clearance papers
covering five persons aboard—four men and a girl Carol. Moran made six.
Wherever the yacht landed, such a disparity between its documents and
its crew would spark an investigation. A lengthy, incredibly minute
investigation. Moran, at least, would be picked out as a fugitive from
Coryus Three. The others were fugitives too, from some unnamed world
Moran did not know. They might be sent back where they came from. In
effect, with six people on board instead of five, the
Nadine
could not
land anywhere for supplies. With five on board, as her papers declared,
she could. And Moran was the extra man whose presence would rouse
space-port officials' suspicion of the rest. So he had to be dumped.
He couldn't blame them. He'd made another difficulty, too. Blaster in
hand, he'd made the
Nadine
take off from Coryus III with a trip-tape
picked at random for guidance. But the trip-tape had been computed for
another starting-point, and when the yacht came out of overdrive it was
because the drive had been dismantled in the engine-room. So the ship's
location was in doubt. It could have travelled at almost any speed in
practically any direction for a length of time that was at least
indefinite. A liner could re-locate itself without trouble. It had
elaborate observational equipment and tri-di star-charts. But smaller
craft had to depend on the Galactic Directory. The process would be to
find a planet and check its climate and relationship to other planets,
and its flora and fauna against descriptions in the Directory. That was
the way to find out where one was, when one's position became doubtful.
The
Nadine
needed to make a planet-fall for this.
The rest of the ship's company came into the control-room. Burleigh
waved his hand at the speaker.
"Listen!"
They heard it. All of them. It was a trilling, whining sound among the
innumerable random noises to be heard in supposedly empty space.
"That's a marker," Carol announced. "I saw a costume-story tape once
that had that sound in it. It marked a first-landing spot on some planet
or other, so the people could find that spot again. It was supposed to
be a long time ago, though."
"It's weak," observed Burleigh. "We'll try answering it."
Moran stirred, and he knew that every one of the others was conscious of
the movement. But they didn't watch him suspiciously. They were alert by
long habit. Burleigh said they'd been Underground people, fighting the
government of their native world, and they'd gotten away to make it seem
the revolt had collapsed. They'd go back later when they weren't
expected, and start it up again. Moran considered the story probable.
Only people accustomed to desperate actions would have remained so calm
when Moran had used desperate measures against them.
Burleigh picked up the transmitter-microphone.
"Calling ground," he said briskly. "Calling ground! We pick up your
signal. Please reply."
He repeated the call, over and over and over. There was no answer.
Cracklings and hissings came out of the speaker as before, and the thin
and reedy wabbling whine continued. The
Nadine
went on toward the
enlarging cloudy mass ahead.
Burleigh said;
"Well?"
"I think," said Carol, "that we should land. People have been here. If
they left a beacon, they may have left an identification of the planet.
Then we'd know where we are and how to get to Loris."
Burleigh nodded. The
Nadine
had cleared for Loris. That was where it
should make its next landing. The little yacht went on. All five of its
proper company watched as the planet's surface enlarged. The ice-cap
went out of sight around the bulge of the globe, but no markings
appeared. There were cloud-banks everywhere, probably low down in the
atmosphere. The darker vague areas previously seen might have been
highlands.
"I think," said Carol, to Moran, "that if it's too tropical where this
signal's coming from, we'll take you somewhere near enough to the
ice-cap to have an endurable climate. I've been figuring on food, too.
That will depend on where we are from Loris because we have to keep
enough for ourselves. But we can spare some. We'll give you the
emergency-kit, anyhow."
The emergency-kit contained antiseptics, seeds, and a weapon or two,
with elaborate advice to castaways. If somebody were wrecked on an even
possibly habitable planet, the especially developed seed-strains would
provide food in a minimum of time. It was not an encouraging thought,
though, and Moran grimaced.
She hadn't said anything about being sorry that he had to be marooned.
Maybe she was, but rebels learn to be practical or they don't live long.
Moran wondered, momentarily, what sort of world they came from and why
they had revolted, and what sort of set-back to the revolt had sent the
five off in what they considered a strategic retreat but their
government would think defeat. Moran's own situation was perfectly
clear.
He'd killed a man on Coryus III. His victim would not be mourned by
anybody, and somebody formerly in very great danger would now be safe,
which was the reason for what Moran had done. But the dead man had been
very important, and the fact that Moran had forced him to fight and
killed him in fair combat made no difference. Moran had needed to get
off-planet, and fast. But space-travel regulations are especially
designed to prevent such escapes.
He'd made a pretty good try, at that. One of the controls on
space-traffic required a ship on landing to deposit its fuel-block in
the space-port's vaults. The fuel-block was not returned until clearance
for departure had been granted. But Moran had waylaid the messenger
carrying the
Nadine's
fuel-block back to that space-yacht. He'd
knocked the messenger cold and presented himself at the yacht with the
fuel. He was admitted. He put the block in the engine's gate. He duly
took the plastic receipt-token the engine only then released, and he
drew a blaster. He'd locked two of the
Nadine's
crew in the
engine-room, rushed to the control-room without encountering the others,
dogged the door shut, and threaded in the first trip-tape to come to
hand. He punched the take-off button and only seconds later the
overdrive. Then the yacht—and Moran—was away. But his present
companions got the drive dismantled two days later and once the yacht
was out of overdrive they efficiently gave him his choice of
surrendering or else. He surrendered, stipulating that he wouldn't be
landed back on Coryus; he still clung to hope of avoiding return—which
was almost certain anyhow. Because nobody would want to go back to a
planet from which they'd carried away a criminal, even though they'd
done it unwillingly. Investigation of such a matter might last for
months.
Now the space-yacht moved toward a vast mass of fleecy whiteness without
any visible features. Harper stayed with the direction-finder. From time
to time he gave readings requiring minute changes of course. The
wabbling, whining signal was louder now. It became louder than all the
rest of the space-noises together.
The yacht touched atmosphere and Burleigh said;
"Watch our height, Carol."
She stood by the echometer. Sixty miles. Fifty. Thirty. A correction of
course. Fifteen miles to surface below. Ten. Five. At twenty-five
thousand feet there were clouds, which would be particles of ice so
small that they floated even so high. Then clear air, then lower clouds,
and lower ones still. It was not until six thousand feet above the
surface that the planet-wide cloud-level seemed to begin. From there on
down it was pure opacity. Anything could exist in that dense, almost
palpable grayness. There could be jagged peaks.
The
Nadine
went down and down. At fifteen hundred feet above the
unseen surface, the clouds ended. Below, there was only haze. One could
see the ground, at least, but there was no horizon. There was only an
end to visibility. The yacht descended as if in the center of a sphere
in which one could see clearly nearby, less clearly at a little
distance, and not at all beyond a quarter-mile or so.
There was a shaded, shadowless twilight under the cloud-bank. The ground
looked like no ground ever seen before by anyone. Off to the right a
rivulet ran between improbable-seeming banks. There were a few very
small hills of most unlikely appearance. It was the ground, the matter
on which one would walk, which was strangest. It had color, but the
color was not green. Much of it was a pallid, dirty-yellowish white. But
there were patches of blue, and curious veinings of black, and here and
there were other colors, all of them unlike the normal color of
vegetation on a planet with a sol-type sun.
Harper spoke from the direction-finder;
"The signal's coming from that mound, yonder."
There was a hillock of elongated shape directly in line with the
Nadine's
course in descent. Except for the patches of color, it was
the only considerable landmark within the half-mile circle in which
anything could be seen at all.
The
Nadine
checked her downward motion. Interplanetary drive is rugged
and sure, but it does not respond to fine adjustment. Burleigh used
rockets, issuing great bellowings of flame, to make actual contact. The
yacht hovered, and as the rocket-flames diminished slowly she sat down
with practically no impact at all. But around her there was a monstrous
tumult of smoke and steam. When the rockets went off, she lay in a
burned-out hollow some three or four feet deep with a bottom of solid
stone. The walls of the hollow were black and scorched. It seemed that
at some places they quivered persistently.
There was silence in the control-room save for the whining noise which
now was almost deafening. Harper snapped off the switch. Then there was
true silence. The space-yacht had come to rest possibly a hundred yards
from the mound which was the source of the space-signal. That mound
shared the peculiarity of the ground as far as they could see through
the haze. It was not vegetation in any ordinary sense. Certainly it was
no mineral surface! The landing-pockets had burned away three or four
feet of it, and the edge of the burned area smoked noisesomely, and
somehow it looked as if it would reek. And there were places where it
stirred.
Burleigh blinked and stared. Then he reached up and flicked on the
outside microphones. Instantly there was bedlam. If the landscape was
strange, here, the sounds that came from it were unbelievable.
There were grunting noises. There were clickings, uncountable clickings
that made a background for all the rest. There were discordant howls and
honkings. From time to time some thing unknown made a cry that sounded
very much like a small boy trailing a stick against a picket fence, only
much louder. Something hooted, maintaining the noise for an impossibly
long time. And persistently, sounding as if they came from far away,
there were booming noises, unspeakably deep-bass, made by something
alive. And something shrieked in lunatic fashion and something else
still moaned from time to time with the volume of a steam-whistle....
"This sounds and looks like a nice place to live," said Moran with fine
irony.
Burleigh did not answer. He turned down the outside sound.
"What's that stuff there, the ground?" he demanded. "We burned it away
in landing. I've seen something like it somewhere, but never taking the
place of grass!"
"That," said Moran as if brightly, "that's what I'm to make a garden in.
Of evenings I'll stroll among my thrifty plantings and listen to the
delightful sounds of nature."
Burleigh scowled. Harper flicked off the direction-finder.
"The signal still comes from that hillock yonder," he said with
finality.
Moran said bitingly;
"That ain't no hillock, that's my home!"
Then, instantly he'd said it, he recognized that it could be true. The
mound was not a fold in the ground. It was not an up-cropping of the
ash-covered stone on which the
Nadine
rested. The enigmatic,
dirty-yellow-dirty-red-dirty-blue-and-dirty-black ground-cover hid
something. It blurred the shape it covered, very much as enormous
cobwebs made solid and opaque would have done. But when one looked
carefully at the mound, there was a landing-fin sticking up toward the
leaden skies. It was attached to a large cylindrical object of which the
fore part was crushed in. The other landing-fins could be traced.
"It's a ship," said Moran curtly. "It crash-landed and its crew set up a
signal to call for help. None came, or they'd have turned the beacon
off. Maybe they got the lifeboats to work and got away. Maybe they lived
as I'm expected to live until they died as I'm expected to die."
Burleigh said angrily;
"You'd do what we are doing if you were in our shoes!"
"Sure," said Moran, "but a man can gripe, can't he?"
"You won't have to live here," said Burleigh. "We'll take you somewhere
up by the ice-cap. As Carol said, we'll give you everything we can
spare. And meanwhile we'll take a look at that wreck yonder. There might
be an indication in it of what solar system this is. There could be
something in it of use to you, too. You'd better come along when we
explore."
"Aye, aye, sir," said Moran with irony. "Very kind of you, sir. You'll
go armed, sir?"
Burleigh growled;
"Naturally!"
"Then since I can't be trusted with a weapon," said Moran, "I suggest
that I take a torch. We may have to burn through that loathesome stuff
to get in the ship."
"Right," growled Burleigh again. "Brawn and Carol, you'll keep ship. The
rest of us wear suits. We don't know what that stuff is outside."
Moran silently went to the space-suit rack and began to get into a
suit. Modern space-suits weren't like the ancient crudities with bulging
metal casings and enormous globular helmets. Non-stretch fabrics took
the place of metal, and constant-volume joints were really practical
nowadays. A man could move about in a late-model space-suit almost as
easily as in ship-clothing. The others of the landing-party donned their
special garments with the brisk absence of fumbling that these people
displayed in every action.
"If there's a lifeboat left," said Carol suddenly, "Moran might be able
to do something with it."
"Ah, yes!" said Moran. "It's very likely that the ship hit hard enough
to kill everybody aboard, but not smash the boats!"
"Somebody survived the crash," said Burleigh, "because they set up a
beacon. I wouldn't count on a boat, Moran."
"I don't!" snapped Moran.
He flipped the fastener of his suit. He felt all the openings catch. He
saw the others complete their equipment. They took arms. So far they had
seen no moving thing outside, but arms were simple sanity on an unknown
world. Moran, though, would not be permitted a weapon. He picked up a
torch. They filed into the airlock. The inner door closed. The outer
door opened. It was not necessary to check the air specifically. The
suits would take care of that. Anyhow the ice-cap said there were no
water-soluble gases in the atmosphere, and a gas can't be an active
poison if it can't dissolve.
They filed out of the airlock. They stood on ash-covered stone, only
slightly eroded by the processes which made life possible on this
planet. They looked dubiously at the scorched, indefinite substance
which had been ground before the
Nadine
landed. Moran moved scornfully
forward. He kicked at the burnt stuff. His foot went through the char.
The hole exposed a cheesy mass of soft matter which seemed riddled with
small holes.
Something black came squirming frantically out of one of the openings.
It was eight or ten inches long. It had a head, a thorax, and an
abdomen. It had wing-cases. It had six legs. It toppled down to the
stone on which the
Nadine
rested. Agitatedly, it spread its
wing-covers and flew away, droning loudly. The four men heard the sound
above even the monstrous cacophony of cries and boomings and grunts and
squeaks which seemed to fill the air.
"What the devil—."
Moran kicked again. More holes. More openings. More small tunnels in the
cheese-like, curd-like stuff. More black things squirming to view in
obvious panic. They popped out everywhere. It was suddenly apparent
that the top of the soil, here, was a thick and blanket-like sheet over
the whitish stuff. The black creatures lived and thrived in tunnels
under it.
Carol's voice came over the helmet-phones.
"
They're—bugs!
" she said incredulously. "
They're beetles! They're
twenty times the size of the beetles we humans have been carrying around
the galaxy, but that's what they are!
"
Moran grunted. Distastefully, he saw his predicament made worse. He knew
what had happened here. He could begin to guess at other things to be
discovered. It had not been practical for men to move onto new planets
and subsist upon the flora and fauna they found there. On some new
planets life had never gotten started. On such worlds a highly complex
operation was necessary before humanity could move in. A complete
ecological complex had to be built up; microbes to break down the rock
for soil, bacteria to fix nitrogen to make the soil fertile; plants to
grow in the new-made dirt and insects to fertilize the plants so they
would multiply, and animals and birds to carry the seeds planet-wide. On
most planets, to be sure, there were local, aboriginal plants and
animals. But still terrestrial creatures had to be introduced if a
colony was to feed itself. Alien plants did not supply satisfactory
food. So an elaborate adaptation job had to be done on every planet
before native and terrestrial living things settled down together. It
wasn't impossible that the scuttling things were truly beetles, grown
large and monstrous under the conditions of a new planet. And the
ground....
"This ground stuff," said Moran distastefully, "is yeast or some sort of
toadstool growth. This is a seedling world. It didn't have any life on
it, so somebody dumped germs and spores and bugs to make it ready for
plants and animals eventually. But nobody's come back to finish up the
job."
Burleigh grunted a somehow surprised assent. But it wasn't surprising;
not wholly so. Once one mentioned yeasts and toadstools and fungi
generally, the weird landscape became less than incredible. But it
remained actively unpleasant to think of being marooned on it.
"Suppose we go look at the ship?" said Moran unpleasantly. "Maybe you
can find out where you are, and I can find out what's ahead of me."
He climbed up on the unscorched surface. It was elastic. The
parchment-like top skin yielded. It was like walking on a mass of
springs.
"We'd better spread out," added Moran, "or else we'll break through that
skin and be floundering in this mess."
"I'm giving the orders, Moran!" said Burleigh shortly. "But what you say
does make sense."
He and the others joined Moran on the yielding surface. Their footing
was uncertain, as on a trampoline. They staggered. They moved toward the
hillock which was a covered-over wrecked ship.
The ground was not as level as it appeared from the
Nadine's
control-room. There were undulations. But they could not see more than a
quarter-mile in any direction. Beyond that was mist. But Burleigh, at
one end of the uneven line of advancing men, suddenly halted and stood
staring down at something he had not seen before. The others halted.
Something moved. It came out from behind a very minor spire of whitish
stuff that looked like a dirty sheet stretched over a tall stone. The
thing that appeared was very peculiar indeed. It was a—worm. But it was
a foot thick and ten feet long, and it had a group of stumpy legs at its
fore end—where there were eyes hidden behind bristling hair-like
growths—and another set of feet at its tail end. It progressed sedately
by reaching forward with its fore-part, securing a foothold, and then
arching its middle portion like a cat arching its back, to bring its
hind part forward. Then it reached forward again. It was of a dark olive
color from one end to the other. Its manner of walking was insane but
somehow sedate.
Moran heard muffled noises in his helmet-phone as the others tried to
speak. Carol's voice came anxiously;
"
What's the matter? What do you see?
"
Moran said with savage precision;
"We're looking at an inch-worm, grown up like the beetles only more so.
It's not an inch-worm any longer. It's a yard-worm." Then he said
harshly to the men with him; "It's not a hunting creature on worlds
where it's smaller. It's not likely to have turned deadly here. Come
on!"
He went forward over the singularly bouncy ground. The others followed.
It was to be noted that Hallet the engineer, avoided the huge harmless
creature more widely than most.
They reached the mound which was the ship. Moran unlimbered his torch.
He said sardonically;
"This ship won't do anybody any good. It's old-style. That thick belt
around its middle was dropped a hundred years ago, and more." There was
an abrupt thickening of the cylindrical hull at the middle. There was an
equally abrupt thinning, again, toward the landing-fins. The sharpness
of the change was blurred over by the revolting ground-stuff growing
everywhere. "We're going to find that this wreck has been here a century
at least!"
Without orders, he turned on the torch. A four-foot flame of pure
blue-white leaped out. He touched its tip to the fungoid soil. Steam
leaped up. He used the flame like a gigantic scalpel, cutting a square a
yard deep in the whitish stuff, and then cutting it across and across to
destroy it. Thick fumes arose, and quiverings and shakings began. Black
creatures in their labyrinths of tunnels began to panic. Off to the
right the blanket-like surface ripped and they poured out. They scuttled
crazily here and there. Some took to wing. By instinct the other
men—the armed ones—moved back from the smoke. They wore space-helmets
but they felt that there should be an intolerable smell.
Moran slashed and slashed angrily with the big flame, cutting a way to
the metal hull that had fallen here before his grandfather was born.
Sometimes the flame cut across things that writhed, and he was sickened.
But above all he raged because he was to be marooned here. He could not
altogether blame the others. They couldn't land at any colonized world
with him on board without his being detected as an extra member of the
crew. His fate would then be sealed. But they also would be
investigated. Official queries would go across this whole sector of the
galaxy, naming five persons of such-and-such description and
such-and-such fingerprints, voyaging in a space-yacht of such-and-such
size and registration. The world they came from would claim them as
fugitives. They would be returned to it. They'd be executed.
Then Carol's voice came in his helmet-phone. She cried out;
"
Look out! It's coming! Kill it! Kill it—.
"
He heard blast-rifles firing. He heard Burleigh pant commands. He was on
his way out of the hollow he'd carved when he heard Harper cry out
horribly.
He got clear of the newly burned-away stuff. There was still much smoke
and stream. But he saw Harper. More, he saw the thing that had Harper.
It occurred to him instantly that if Harper died, there would not be too
many people on the
Nadine
. They need not maroon him. In fact, they
wouldn't dare.
A ship that came in to port with two few on board would be investigated
as thoroughly as one that had too many. Perhaps more thoroughly. So if
Harper were killed, Moran would be needed to take his place. He'd go on
from here in the
Nadine
, necessarily accepted as a member of her crew.
Then he rushed, the flame-torch making a roaring sound.
II.
They went back to the
Nadine
for weapons more adequate for
encountering the local fauna when it was over. Blast-rifles were not
effective against such creatures as these. Torches were contact weapons
but they killed. Blast-rifles did not. And Harper needed to pull himself
together again, too. Also, neither Moran nor any of the others wanted to
go back to the still un-entered wreck while the skinny, somehow
disgusting legs of the thing still kicked spasmodically—quite
separate—on the whitish ground-stuff. Moran had disliked such creatures
in miniature form on other worlds. Enlarged like this.
It seemed insane that such creatures, even in miniature, should
painstakingly be brought across light-years of space to the new worlds
men settled on. But it had been found to be necessary. The ecological
system in which human beings belonged had turned out to be infinitely
complicated. It had turned out, in fact, to be the ecological system of
Earth, and unless all parts of the complex were present, the total was
subtly or glaringly wrong. So mankind distastefully ferried pests as
well as useful creatures to its new worlds as they were made ready for
settlement. Mosquitos throve on the inhabited globes of the Rim Stars.
Roaches twitched nervous antennae on the settled planets of the
Coal-sack. Dogs on Antares had fleas, and scratched their bites, and
humanity spread through the galaxy with an attendant train of insects
and annoyances. If they left their pests behind, the total system of
checks and balances which make life practical would get lopsided. It
would not maintain itself. The vagaries that could result were admirably
illustrated in and on the landscape outside the
Nadine
. Something had
been left out of the seeding of this planet. The element—which might be
a bacterium or a virus or almost anything at all—the element that kept
creatures at the size called "normal" was either missing or inoperable
here. The results were not desirable. | [
"A microchip inserted into a person, designating them as a fugitive",
"A safe space for a spacecraft to land on an alien planet",
"A sound picked up on a radar that reveals the closest habitable planet",
"A location on the alien planet that indicates high predatory activity"
] | 1 |
43046_Q9R0IJB9_6 | If, after being marooned on the alien planet, Moran does not discover any edible vegetation, how would he be expected to survive? | <!-- $Id: header.txt 236 2009-12-07 18:57:00Z vlsimpson $ -->
PLANET of DREAD
By MURRAY LEINSTER
Illustrator ADKINS
I.
Moran cut apart the yard-long monstrosity with a slash of flame.
The thing presumably died, but it continued to writhe senselessly.
He turned to see other horrors crawling toward him. Then he knew he
was being marooned on a planet of endless terrors.
Moran, naturally, did not mean to help in the carrying out of the plans
which would mean his destruction one way or another. The plans were
thrashed out very painstakingly, in formal conference on the space-yacht
Nadine
, with Moran present and allowed to take part in the discussion.
From the viewpoint of the
Nadine's
ship's company, it was simply
necessary to get rid of Moran. In their predicament he might have come
to the same conclusion; but he was not at all enthusiastic about their
decision. He would die of it.
The
Nadine
was out of overdrive and all the uncountable suns of the
galaxy shone steadily, remotely, as infinitesimal specks of light of
every color of the rainbow. Two hours since, the sun of this solar
system had been a vast glaring disk off to port, with streamers and
prominences erupting about its edges. Now it lay astern, and Moran
could see the planet that had been chosen for his marooning. It was a
cloudy world. There were some dim markings near one lighted limb, but
nowhere else. There was an ice-cap in view. The rest was—clouds.
The ice-cap, by its existence and circular shape, proved that the planet
rotated at a not unreasonable rate. The fact that it was water-ice told
much. A water-ice ice-cap said that there were no poisonous gases in the
planet's atmosphere. Sulfur dioxide or chlorine, for example, would not
allow the formation of water-ice. It would have to be sulphuric-acid or
hydrochloric-acid ice. But the ice-cap was simple snow. Its size, too,
told about temperature-distribution on the planet. A large cap would
have meant a large area with arctic and sub-arctic temperatures, with
small temperate and tropical climate-belts. A small one like this meant
wide tropical and sub-tropical zones. The fact was verified by the
thick, dense cloud-masses which covered most of the surface,—all the
surface, in fact, outside the ice-cap. But since there were ice-caps
there would be temperate regions. In short, the ice-cap proved that a
man could endure the air and temperature conditions he would find.
Moran observed these things from the control-room of the
Nadine
, then
approaching the world on planetary drive. He was to be left here, with
no reason ever to expect rescue. Two of the
Nadine's
four-man crew
watched out the same ports as the planet seemed to approach. Burleigh
said encouragingly;
"It doesn't look too bad, Moran!"
Moran disagreed, but he did not answer. He cocked an ear instead. He
heard something. It was a thin, wabbling, keening whine. No natural
radiation sounds like that. Moran nodded toward the all-band speaker.
"Do you hear what I do?" he asked sardonically.
Burleigh listened. A distinctly artificial signal came out of the
speaker. It wasn't a voice-signal. It wasn't an identification beacon,
such as are placed on certain worlds for the convenience of interstellar
skippers who need to check their courses on extremely long runs. This
was something else.
Burleigh said:
"Hm ... Call the others, Harper."
Harper, prudently with him in the control-room, put his head into the
passage leading away. He called. But Moran observed with grudging
respect that he didn't give him a chance to do anything drastic. These
people on the
Nadine
were capable. They'd managed to recapture the
Nadine
from him, but they were matter-of-fact about it. They didn't
seem to resent what he'd tried to do, or that he'd brought them an
indefinite distance in an indefinite direction from their last
landing-point, and they had still to re-locate themselves.
They'd been on Coryus Three and they'd gotten departure clearance from
its space-port. With clearance-papers in order, they could land
unquestioned at any other space-port and take off again—provided the
other space-port was one they had clearance for. Without rigid control
of space-travel, any criminal anywhere could escape the consequences of
any crime simply by buying a ticket to another world. Moran couldn't
have bought a ticket, but he'd tried to get off the planet Coryus on the
Nadine
. The trouble was that the
Nadine
had clearance papers
covering five persons aboard—four men and a girl Carol. Moran made six.
Wherever the yacht landed, such a disparity between its documents and
its crew would spark an investigation. A lengthy, incredibly minute
investigation. Moran, at least, would be picked out as a fugitive from
Coryus Three. The others were fugitives too, from some unnamed world
Moran did not know. They might be sent back where they came from. In
effect, with six people on board instead of five, the
Nadine
could not
land anywhere for supplies. With five on board, as her papers declared,
she could. And Moran was the extra man whose presence would rouse
space-port officials' suspicion of the rest. So he had to be dumped.
He couldn't blame them. He'd made another difficulty, too. Blaster in
hand, he'd made the
Nadine
take off from Coryus III with a trip-tape
picked at random for guidance. But the trip-tape had been computed for
another starting-point, and when the yacht came out of overdrive it was
because the drive had been dismantled in the engine-room. So the ship's
location was in doubt. It could have travelled at almost any speed in
practically any direction for a length of time that was at least
indefinite. A liner could re-locate itself without trouble. It had
elaborate observational equipment and tri-di star-charts. But smaller
craft had to depend on the Galactic Directory. The process would be to
find a planet and check its climate and relationship to other planets,
and its flora and fauna against descriptions in the Directory. That was
the way to find out where one was, when one's position became doubtful.
The
Nadine
needed to make a planet-fall for this.
The rest of the ship's company came into the control-room. Burleigh
waved his hand at the speaker.
"Listen!"
They heard it. All of them. It was a trilling, whining sound among the
innumerable random noises to be heard in supposedly empty space.
"That's a marker," Carol announced. "I saw a costume-story tape once
that had that sound in it. It marked a first-landing spot on some planet
or other, so the people could find that spot again. It was supposed to
be a long time ago, though."
"It's weak," observed Burleigh. "We'll try answering it."
Moran stirred, and he knew that every one of the others was conscious of
the movement. But they didn't watch him suspiciously. They were alert by
long habit. Burleigh said they'd been Underground people, fighting the
government of their native world, and they'd gotten away to make it seem
the revolt had collapsed. They'd go back later when they weren't
expected, and start it up again. Moran considered the story probable.
Only people accustomed to desperate actions would have remained so calm
when Moran had used desperate measures against them.
Burleigh picked up the transmitter-microphone.
"Calling ground," he said briskly. "Calling ground! We pick up your
signal. Please reply."
He repeated the call, over and over and over. There was no answer.
Cracklings and hissings came out of the speaker as before, and the thin
and reedy wabbling whine continued. The
Nadine
went on toward the
enlarging cloudy mass ahead.
Burleigh said;
"Well?"
"I think," said Carol, "that we should land. People have been here. If
they left a beacon, they may have left an identification of the planet.
Then we'd know where we are and how to get to Loris."
Burleigh nodded. The
Nadine
had cleared for Loris. That was where it
should make its next landing. The little yacht went on. All five of its
proper company watched as the planet's surface enlarged. The ice-cap
went out of sight around the bulge of the globe, but no markings
appeared. There were cloud-banks everywhere, probably low down in the
atmosphere. The darker vague areas previously seen might have been
highlands.
"I think," said Carol, to Moran, "that if it's too tropical where this
signal's coming from, we'll take you somewhere near enough to the
ice-cap to have an endurable climate. I've been figuring on food, too.
That will depend on where we are from Loris because we have to keep
enough for ourselves. But we can spare some. We'll give you the
emergency-kit, anyhow."
The emergency-kit contained antiseptics, seeds, and a weapon or two,
with elaborate advice to castaways. If somebody were wrecked on an even
possibly habitable planet, the especially developed seed-strains would
provide food in a minimum of time. It was not an encouraging thought,
though, and Moran grimaced.
She hadn't said anything about being sorry that he had to be marooned.
Maybe she was, but rebels learn to be practical or they don't live long.
Moran wondered, momentarily, what sort of world they came from and why
they had revolted, and what sort of set-back to the revolt had sent the
five off in what they considered a strategic retreat but their
government would think defeat. Moran's own situation was perfectly
clear.
He'd killed a man on Coryus III. His victim would not be mourned by
anybody, and somebody formerly in very great danger would now be safe,
which was the reason for what Moran had done. But the dead man had been
very important, and the fact that Moran had forced him to fight and
killed him in fair combat made no difference. Moran had needed to get
off-planet, and fast. But space-travel regulations are especially
designed to prevent such escapes.
He'd made a pretty good try, at that. One of the controls on
space-traffic required a ship on landing to deposit its fuel-block in
the space-port's vaults. The fuel-block was not returned until clearance
for departure had been granted. But Moran had waylaid the messenger
carrying the
Nadine's
fuel-block back to that space-yacht. He'd
knocked the messenger cold and presented himself at the yacht with the
fuel. He was admitted. He put the block in the engine's gate. He duly
took the plastic receipt-token the engine only then released, and he
drew a blaster. He'd locked two of the
Nadine's
crew in the
engine-room, rushed to the control-room without encountering the others,
dogged the door shut, and threaded in the first trip-tape to come to
hand. He punched the take-off button and only seconds later the
overdrive. Then the yacht—and Moran—was away. But his present
companions got the drive dismantled two days later and once the yacht
was out of overdrive they efficiently gave him his choice of
surrendering or else. He surrendered, stipulating that he wouldn't be
landed back on Coryus; he still clung to hope of avoiding return—which
was almost certain anyhow. Because nobody would want to go back to a
planet from which they'd carried away a criminal, even though they'd
done it unwillingly. Investigation of such a matter might last for
months.
Now the space-yacht moved toward a vast mass of fleecy whiteness without
any visible features. Harper stayed with the direction-finder. From time
to time he gave readings requiring minute changes of course. The
wabbling, whining signal was louder now. It became louder than all the
rest of the space-noises together.
The yacht touched atmosphere and Burleigh said;
"Watch our height, Carol."
She stood by the echometer. Sixty miles. Fifty. Thirty. A correction of
course. Fifteen miles to surface below. Ten. Five. At twenty-five
thousand feet there were clouds, which would be particles of ice so
small that they floated even so high. Then clear air, then lower clouds,
and lower ones still. It was not until six thousand feet above the
surface that the planet-wide cloud-level seemed to begin. From there on
down it was pure opacity. Anything could exist in that dense, almost
palpable grayness. There could be jagged peaks.
The
Nadine
went down and down. At fifteen hundred feet above the
unseen surface, the clouds ended. Below, there was only haze. One could
see the ground, at least, but there was no horizon. There was only an
end to visibility. The yacht descended as if in the center of a sphere
in which one could see clearly nearby, less clearly at a little
distance, and not at all beyond a quarter-mile or so.
There was a shaded, shadowless twilight under the cloud-bank. The ground
looked like no ground ever seen before by anyone. Off to the right a
rivulet ran between improbable-seeming banks. There were a few very
small hills of most unlikely appearance. It was the ground, the matter
on which one would walk, which was strangest. It had color, but the
color was not green. Much of it was a pallid, dirty-yellowish white. But
there were patches of blue, and curious veinings of black, and here and
there were other colors, all of them unlike the normal color of
vegetation on a planet with a sol-type sun.
Harper spoke from the direction-finder;
"The signal's coming from that mound, yonder."
There was a hillock of elongated shape directly in line with the
Nadine's
course in descent. Except for the patches of color, it was
the only considerable landmark within the half-mile circle in which
anything could be seen at all.
The
Nadine
checked her downward motion. Interplanetary drive is rugged
and sure, but it does not respond to fine adjustment. Burleigh used
rockets, issuing great bellowings of flame, to make actual contact. The
yacht hovered, and as the rocket-flames diminished slowly she sat down
with practically no impact at all. But around her there was a monstrous
tumult of smoke and steam. When the rockets went off, she lay in a
burned-out hollow some three or four feet deep with a bottom of solid
stone. The walls of the hollow were black and scorched. It seemed that
at some places they quivered persistently.
There was silence in the control-room save for the whining noise which
now was almost deafening. Harper snapped off the switch. Then there was
true silence. The space-yacht had come to rest possibly a hundred yards
from the mound which was the source of the space-signal. That mound
shared the peculiarity of the ground as far as they could see through
the haze. It was not vegetation in any ordinary sense. Certainly it was
no mineral surface! The landing-pockets had burned away three or four
feet of it, and the edge of the burned area smoked noisesomely, and
somehow it looked as if it would reek. And there were places where it
stirred.
Burleigh blinked and stared. Then he reached up and flicked on the
outside microphones. Instantly there was bedlam. If the landscape was
strange, here, the sounds that came from it were unbelievable.
There were grunting noises. There were clickings, uncountable clickings
that made a background for all the rest. There were discordant howls and
honkings. From time to time some thing unknown made a cry that sounded
very much like a small boy trailing a stick against a picket fence, only
much louder. Something hooted, maintaining the noise for an impossibly
long time. And persistently, sounding as if they came from far away,
there were booming noises, unspeakably deep-bass, made by something
alive. And something shrieked in lunatic fashion and something else
still moaned from time to time with the volume of a steam-whistle....
"This sounds and looks like a nice place to live," said Moran with fine
irony.
Burleigh did not answer. He turned down the outside sound.
"What's that stuff there, the ground?" he demanded. "We burned it away
in landing. I've seen something like it somewhere, but never taking the
place of grass!"
"That," said Moran as if brightly, "that's what I'm to make a garden in.
Of evenings I'll stroll among my thrifty plantings and listen to the
delightful sounds of nature."
Burleigh scowled. Harper flicked off the direction-finder.
"The signal still comes from that hillock yonder," he said with
finality.
Moran said bitingly;
"That ain't no hillock, that's my home!"
Then, instantly he'd said it, he recognized that it could be true. The
mound was not a fold in the ground. It was not an up-cropping of the
ash-covered stone on which the
Nadine
rested. The enigmatic,
dirty-yellow-dirty-red-dirty-blue-and-dirty-black ground-cover hid
something. It blurred the shape it covered, very much as enormous
cobwebs made solid and opaque would have done. But when one looked
carefully at the mound, there was a landing-fin sticking up toward the
leaden skies. It was attached to a large cylindrical object of which the
fore part was crushed in. The other landing-fins could be traced.
"It's a ship," said Moran curtly. "It crash-landed and its crew set up a
signal to call for help. None came, or they'd have turned the beacon
off. Maybe they got the lifeboats to work and got away. Maybe they lived
as I'm expected to live until they died as I'm expected to die."
Burleigh said angrily;
"You'd do what we are doing if you were in our shoes!"
"Sure," said Moran, "but a man can gripe, can't he?"
"You won't have to live here," said Burleigh. "We'll take you somewhere
up by the ice-cap. As Carol said, we'll give you everything we can
spare. And meanwhile we'll take a look at that wreck yonder. There might
be an indication in it of what solar system this is. There could be
something in it of use to you, too. You'd better come along when we
explore."
"Aye, aye, sir," said Moran with irony. "Very kind of you, sir. You'll
go armed, sir?"
Burleigh growled;
"Naturally!"
"Then since I can't be trusted with a weapon," said Moran, "I suggest
that I take a torch. We may have to burn through that loathesome stuff
to get in the ship."
"Right," growled Burleigh again. "Brawn and Carol, you'll keep ship. The
rest of us wear suits. We don't know what that stuff is outside."
Moran silently went to the space-suit rack and began to get into a
suit. Modern space-suits weren't like the ancient crudities with bulging
metal casings and enormous globular helmets. Non-stretch fabrics took
the place of metal, and constant-volume joints were really practical
nowadays. A man could move about in a late-model space-suit almost as
easily as in ship-clothing. The others of the landing-party donned their
special garments with the brisk absence of fumbling that these people
displayed in every action.
"If there's a lifeboat left," said Carol suddenly, "Moran might be able
to do something with it."
"Ah, yes!" said Moran. "It's very likely that the ship hit hard enough
to kill everybody aboard, but not smash the boats!"
"Somebody survived the crash," said Burleigh, "because they set up a
beacon. I wouldn't count on a boat, Moran."
"I don't!" snapped Moran.
He flipped the fastener of his suit. He felt all the openings catch. He
saw the others complete their equipment. They took arms. So far they had
seen no moving thing outside, but arms were simple sanity on an unknown
world. Moran, though, would not be permitted a weapon. He picked up a
torch. They filed into the airlock. The inner door closed. The outer
door opened. It was not necessary to check the air specifically. The
suits would take care of that. Anyhow the ice-cap said there were no
water-soluble gases in the atmosphere, and a gas can't be an active
poison if it can't dissolve.
They filed out of the airlock. They stood on ash-covered stone, only
slightly eroded by the processes which made life possible on this
planet. They looked dubiously at the scorched, indefinite substance
which had been ground before the
Nadine
landed. Moran moved scornfully
forward. He kicked at the burnt stuff. His foot went through the char.
The hole exposed a cheesy mass of soft matter which seemed riddled with
small holes.
Something black came squirming frantically out of one of the openings.
It was eight or ten inches long. It had a head, a thorax, and an
abdomen. It had wing-cases. It had six legs. It toppled down to the
stone on which the
Nadine
rested. Agitatedly, it spread its
wing-covers and flew away, droning loudly. The four men heard the sound
above even the monstrous cacophony of cries and boomings and grunts and
squeaks which seemed to fill the air.
"What the devil—."
Moran kicked again. More holes. More openings. More small tunnels in the
cheese-like, curd-like stuff. More black things squirming to view in
obvious panic. They popped out everywhere. It was suddenly apparent
that the top of the soil, here, was a thick and blanket-like sheet over
the whitish stuff. The black creatures lived and thrived in tunnels
under it.
Carol's voice came over the helmet-phones.
"
They're—bugs!
" she said incredulously. "
They're beetles! They're
twenty times the size of the beetles we humans have been carrying around
the galaxy, but that's what they are!
"
Moran grunted. Distastefully, he saw his predicament made worse. He knew
what had happened here. He could begin to guess at other things to be
discovered. It had not been practical for men to move onto new planets
and subsist upon the flora and fauna they found there. On some new
planets life had never gotten started. On such worlds a highly complex
operation was necessary before humanity could move in. A complete
ecological complex had to be built up; microbes to break down the rock
for soil, bacteria to fix nitrogen to make the soil fertile; plants to
grow in the new-made dirt and insects to fertilize the plants so they
would multiply, and animals and birds to carry the seeds planet-wide. On
most planets, to be sure, there were local, aboriginal plants and
animals. But still terrestrial creatures had to be introduced if a
colony was to feed itself. Alien plants did not supply satisfactory
food. So an elaborate adaptation job had to be done on every planet
before native and terrestrial living things settled down together. It
wasn't impossible that the scuttling things were truly beetles, grown
large and monstrous under the conditions of a new planet. And the
ground....
"This ground stuff," said Moran distastefully, "is yeast or some sort of
toadstool growth. This is a seedling world. It didn't have any life on
it, so somebody dumped germs and spores and bugs to make it ready for
plants and animals eventually. But nobody's come back to finish up the
job."
Burleigh grunted a somehow surprised assent. But it wasn't surprising;
not wholly so. Once one mentioned yeasts and toadstools and fungi
generally, the weird landscape became less than incredible. But it
remained actively unpleasant to think of being marooned on it.
"Suppose we go look at the ship?" said Moran unpleasantly. "Maybe you
can find out where you are, and I can find out what's ahead of me."
He climbed up on the unscorched surface. It was elastic. The
parchment-like top skin yielded. It was like walking on a mass of
springs.
"We'd better spread out," added Moran, "or else we'll break through that
skin and be floundering in this mess."
"I'm giving the orders, Moran!" said Burleigh shortly. "But what you say
does make sense."
He and the others joined Moran on the yielding surface. Their footing
was uncertain, as on a trampoline. They staggered. They moved toward the
hillock which was a covered-over wrecked ship.
The ground was not as level as it appeared from the
Nadine's
control-room. There were undulations. But they could not see more than a
quarter-mile in any direction. Beyond that was mist. But Burleigh, at
one end of the uneven line of advancing men, suddenly halted and stood
staring down at something he had not seen before. The others halted.
Something moved. It came out from behind a very minor spire of whitish
stuff that looked like a dirty sheet stretched over a tall stone. The
thing that appeared was very peculiar indeed. It was a—worm. But it was
a foot thick and ten feet long, and it had a group of stumpy legs at its
fore end—where there were eyes hidden behind bristling hair-like
growths—and another set of feet at its tail end. It progressed sedately
by reaching forward with its fore-part, securing a foothold, and then
arching its middle portion like a cat arching its back, to bring its
hind part forward. Then it reached forward again. It was of a dark olive
color from one end to the other. Its manner of walking was insane but
somehow sedate.
Moran heard muffled noises in his helmet-phone as the others tried to
speak. Carol's voice came anxiously;
"
What's the matter? What do you see?
"
Moran said with savage precision;
"We're looking at an inch-worm, grown up like the beetles only more so.
It's not an inch-worm any longer. It's a yard-worm." Then he said
harshly to the men with him; "It's not a hunting creature on worlds
where it's smaller. It's not likely to have turned deadly here. Come
on!"
He went forward over the singularly bouncy ground. The others followed.
It was to be noted that Hallet the engineer, avoided the huge harmless
creature more widely than most.
They reached the mound which was the ship. Moran unlimbered his torch.
He said sardonically;
"This ship won't do anybody any good. It's old-style. That thick belt
around its middle was dropped a hundred years ago, and more." There was
an abrupt thickening of the cylindrical hull at the middle. There was an
equally abrupt thinning, again, toward the landing-fins. The sharpness
of the change was blurred over by the revolting ground-stuff growing
everywhere. "We're going to find that this wreck has been here a century
at least!"
Without orders, he turned on the torch. A four-foot flame of pure
blue-white leaped out. He touched its tip to the fungoid soil. Steam
leaped up. He used the flame like a gigantic scalpel, cutting a square a
yard deep in the whitish stuff, and then cutting it across and across to
destroy it. Thick fumes arose, and quiverings and shakings began. Black
creatures in their labyrinths of tunnels began to panic. Off to the
right the blanket-like surface ripped and they poured out. They scuttled
crazily here and there. Some took to wing. By instinct the other
men—the armed ones—moved back from the smoke. They wore space-helmets
but they felt that there should be an intolerable smell.
Moran slashed and slashed angrily with the big flame, cutting a way to
the metal hull that had fallen here before his grandfather was born.
Sometimes the flame cut across things that writhed, and he was sickened.
But above all he raged because he was to be marooned here. He could not
altogether blame the others. They couldn't land at any colonized world
with him on board without his being detected as an extra member of the
crew. His fate would then be sealed. But they also would be
investigated. Official queries would go across this whole sector of the
galaxy, naming five persons of such-and-such description and
such-and-such fingerprints, voyaging in a space-yacht of such-and-such
size and registration. The world they came from would claim them as
fugitives. They would be returned to it. They'd be executed.
Then Carol's voice came in his helmet-phone. She cried out;
"
Look out! It's coming! Kill it! Kill it—.
"
He heard blast-rifles firing. He heard Burleigh pant commands. He was on
his way out of the hollow he'd carved when he heard Harper cry out
horribly.
He got clear of the newly burned-away stuff. There was still much smoke
and stream. But he saw Harper. More, he saw the thing that had Harper.
It occurred to him instantly that if Harper died, there would not be too
many people on the
Nadine
. They need not maroon him. In fact, they
wouldn't dare.
A ship that came in to port with two few on board would be investigated
as thoroughly as one that had too many. Perhaps more thoroughly. So if
Harper were killed, Moran would be needed to take his place. He'd go on
from here in the
Nadine
, necessarily accepted as a member of her crew.
Then he rushed, the flame-torch making a roaring sound.
II.
They went back to the
Nadine
for weapons more adequate for
encountering the local fauna when it was over. Blast-rifles were not
effective against such creatures as these. Torches were contact weapons
but they killed. Blast-rifles did not. And Harper needed to pull himself
together again, too. Also, neither Moran nor any of the others wanted to
go back to the still un-entered wreck while the skinny, somehow
disgusting legs of the thing still kicked spasmodically—quite
separate—on the whitish ground-stuff. Moran had disliked such creatures
in miniature form on other worlds. Enlarged like this.
It seemed insane that such creatures, even in miniature, should
painstakingly be brought across light-years of space to the new worlds
men settled on. But it had been found to be necessary. The ecological
system in which human beings belonged had turned out to be infinitely
complicated. It had turned out, in fact, to be the ecological system of
Earth, and unless all parts of the complex were present, the total was
subtly or glaringly wrong. So mankind distastefully ferried pests as
well as useful creatures to its new worlds as they were made ready for
settlement. Mosquitos throve on the inhabited globes of the Rim Stars.
Roaches twitched nervous antennae on the settled planets of the
Coal-sack. Dogs on Antares had fleas, and scratched their bites, and
humanity spread through the galaxy with an attendant train of insects
and annoyances. If they left their pests behind, the total system of
checks and balances which make life practical would get lopsided. It
would not maintain itself. The vagaries that could result were admirably
illustrated in and on the landscape outside the
Nadine
. Something had
been left out of the seeding of this planet. The element—which might be
a bacterium or a virus or almost anything at all—the element that kept
creatures at the size called "normal" was either missing or inoperable
here. The results were not desirable. | [
"His space-suit is equipped with a nozzle through which he can absorb nutrients in gas form.",
"His only option would be to prey on animals, bacteria, fungi, or other living creatures.",
"He could use limited, fast-growing seed packets provided by the crew members of the Nadine.",
"He would not have any viable chance of survival without non-toxic vegetation."
] | 2 |
43046_Q9R0IJB9_7 | Which term does NOT describe Moran's tone toward the other five crew members? | <!-- $Id: header.txt 236 2009-12-07 18:57:00Z vlsimpson $ -->
PLANET of DREAD
By MURRAY LEINSTER
Illustrator ADKINS
I.
Moran cut apart the yard-long monstrosity with a slash of flame.
The thing presumably died, but it continued to writhe senselessly.
He turned to see other horrors crawling toward him. Then he knew he
was being marooned on a planet of endless terrors.
Moran, naturally, did not mean to help in the carrying out of the plans
which would mean his destruction one way or another. The plans were
thrashed out very painstakingly, in formal conference on the space-yacht
Nadine
, with Moran present and allowed to take part in the discussion.
From the viewpoint of the
Nadine's
ship's company, it was simply
necessary to get rid of Moran. In their predicament he might have come
to the same conclusion; but he was not at all enthusiastic about their
decision. He would die of it.
The
Nadine
was out of overdrive and all the uncountable suns of the
galaxy shone steadily, remotely, as infinitesimal specks of light of
every color of the rainbow. Two hours since, the sun of this solar
system had been a vast glaring disk off to port, with streamers and
prominences erupting about its edges. Now it lay astern, and Moran
could see the planet that had been chosen for his marooning. It was a
cloudy world. There were some dim markings near one lighted limb, but
nowhere else. There was an ice-cap in view. The rest was—clouds.
The ice-cap, by its existence and circular shape, proved that the planet
rotated at a not unreasonable rate. The fact that it was water-ice told
much. A water-ice ice-cap said that there were no poisonous gases in the
planet's atmosphere. Sulfur dioxide or chlorine, for example, would not
allow the formation of water-ice. It would have to be sulphuric-acid or
hydrochloric-acid ice. But the ice-cap was simple snow. Its size, too,
told about temperature-distribution on the planet. A large cap would
have meant a large area with arctic and sub-arctic temperatures, with
small temperate and tropical climate-belts. A small one like this meant
wide tropical and sub-tropical zones. The fact was verified by the
thick, dense cloud-masses which covered most of the surface,—all the
surface, in fact, outside the ice-cap. But since there were ice-caps
there would be temperate regions. In short, the ice-cap proved that a
man could endure the air and temperature conditions he would find.
Moran observed these things from the control-room of the
Nadine
, then
approaching the world on planetary drive. He was to be left here, with
no reason ever to expect rescue. Two of the
Nadine's
four-man crew
watched out the same ports as the planet seemed to approach. Burleigh
said encouragingly;
"It doesn't look too bad, Moran!"
Moran disagreed, but he did not answer. He cocked an ear instead. He
heard something. It was a thin, wabbling, keening whine. No natural
radiation sounds like that. Moran nodded toward the all-band speaker.
"Do you hear what I do?" he asked sardonically.
Burleigh listened. A distinctly artificial signal came out of the
speaker. It wasn't a voice-signal. It wasn't an identification beacon,
such as are placed on certain worlds for the convenience of interstellar
skippers who need to check their courses on extremely long runs. This
was something else.
Burleigh said:
"Hm ... Call the others, Harper."
Harper, prudently with him in the control-room, put his head into the
passage leading away. He called. But Moran observed with grudging
respect that he didn't give him a chance to do anything drastic. These
people on the
Nadine
were capable. They'd managed to recapture the
Nadine
from him, but they were matter-of-fact about it. They didn't
seem to resent what he'd tried to do, or that he'd brought them an
indefinite distance in an indefinite direction from their last
landing-point, and they had still to re-locate themselves.
They'd been on Coryus Three and they'd gotten departure clearance from
its space-port. With clearance-papers in order, they could land
unquestioned at any other space-port and take off again—provided the
other space-port was one they had clearance for. Without rigid control
of space-travel, any criminal anywhere could escape the consequences of
any crime simply by buying a ticket to another world. Moran couldn't
have bought a ticket, but he'd tried to get off the planet Coryus on the
Nadine
. The trouble was that the
Nadine
had clearance papers
covering five persons aboard—four men and a girl Carol. Moran made six.
Wherever the yacht landed, such a disparity between its documents and
its crew would spark an investigation. A lengthy, incredibly minute
investigation. Moran, at least, would be picked out as a fugitive from
Coryus Three. The others were fugitives too, from some unnamed world
Moran did not know. They might be sent back where they came from. In
effect, with six people on board instead of five, the
Nadine
could not
land anywhere for supplies. With five on board, as her papers declared,
she could. And Moran was the extra man whose presence would rouse
space-port officials' suspicion of the rest. So he had to be dumped.
He couldn't blame them. He'd made another difficulty, too. Blaster in
hand, he'd made the
Nadine
take off from Coryus III with a trip-tape
picked at random for guidance. But the trip-tape had been computed for
another starting-point, and when the yacht came out of overdrive it was
because the drive had been dismantled in the engine-room. So the ship's
location was in doubt. It could have travelled at almost any speed in
practically any direction for a length of time that was at least
indefinite. A liner could re-locate itself without trouble. It had
elaborate observational equipment and tri-di star-charts. But smaller
craft had to depend on the Galactic Directory. The process would be to
find a planet and check its climate and relationship to other planets,
and its flora and fauna against descriptions in the Directory. That was
the way to find out where one was, when one's position became doubtful.
The
Nadine
needed to make a planet-fall for this.
The rest of the ship's company came into the control-room. Burleigh
waved his hand at the speaker.
"Listen!"
They heard it. All of them. It was a trilling, whining sound among the
innumerable random noises to be heard in supposedly empty space.
"That's a marker," Carol announced. "I saw a costume-story tape once
that had that sound in it. It marked a first-landing spot on some planet
or other, so the people could find that spot again. It was supposed to
be a long time ago, though."
"It's weak," observed Burleigh. "We'll try answering it."
Moran stirred, and he knew that every one of the others was conscious of
the movement. But they didn't watch him suspiciously. They were alert by
long habit. Burleigh said they'd been Underground people, fighting the
government of their native world, and they'd gotten away to make it seem
the revolt had collapsed. They'd go back later when they weren't
expected, and start it up again. Moran considered the story probable.
Only people accustomed to desperate actions would have remained so calm
when Moran had used desperate measures against them.
Burleigh picked up the transmitter-microphone.
"Calling ground," he said briskly. "Calling ground! We pick up your
signal. Please reply."
He repeated the call, over and over and over. There was no answer.
Cracklings and hissings came out of the speaker as before, and the thin
and reedy wabbling whine continued. The
Nadine
went on toward the
enlarging cloudy mass ahead.
Burleigh said;
"Well?"
"I think," said Carol, "that we should land. People have been here. If
they left a beacon, they may have left an identification of the planet.
Then we'd know where we are and how to get to Loris."
Burleigh nodded. The
Nadine
had cleared for Loris. That was where it
should make its next landing. The little yacht went on. All five of its
proper company watched as the planet's surface enlarged. The ice-cap
went out of sight around the bulge of the globe, but no markings
appeared. There were cloud-banks everywhere, probably low down in the
atmosphere. The darker vague areas previously seen might have been
highlands.
"I think," said Carol, to Moran, "that if it's too tropical where this
signal's coming from, we'll take you somewhere near enough to the
ice-cap to have an endurable climate. I've been figuring on food, too.
That will depend on where we are from Loris because we have to keep
enough for ourselves. But we can spare some. We'll give you the
emergency-kit, anyhow."
The emergency-kit contained antiseptics, seeds, and a weapon or two,
with elaborate advice to castaways. If somebody were wrecked on an even
possibly habitable planet, the especially developed seed-strains would
provide food in a minimum of time. It was not an encouraging thought,
though, and Moran grimaced.
She hadn't said anything about being sorry that he had to be marooned.
Maybe she was, but rebels learn to be practical or they don't live long.
Moran wondered, momentarily, what sort of world they came from and why
they had revolted, and what sort of set-back to the revolt had sent the
five off in what they considered a strategic retreat but their
government would think defeat. Moran's own situation was perfectly
clear.
He'd killed a man on Coryus III. His victim would not be mourned by
anybody, and somebody formerly in very great danger would now be safe,
which was the reason for what Moran had done. But the dead man had been
very important, and the fact that Moran had forced him to fight and
killed him in fair combat made no difference. Moran had needed to get
off-planet, and fast. But space-travel regulations are especially
designed to prevent such escapes.
He'd made a pretty good try, at that. One of the controls on
space-traffic required a ship on landing to deposit its fuel-block in
the space-port's vaults. The fuel-block was not returned until clearance
for departure had been granted. But Moran had waylaid the messenger
carrying the
Nadine's
fuel-block back to that space-yacht. He'd
knocked the messenger cold and presented himself at the yacht with the
fuel. He was admitted. He put the block in the engine's gate. He duly
took the plastic receipt-token the engine only then released, and he
drew a blaster. He'd locked two of the
Nadine's
crew in the
engine-room, rushed to the control-room without encountering the others,
dogged the door shut, and threaded in the first trip-tape to come to
hand. He punched the take-off button and only seconds later the
overdrive. Then the yacht—and Moran—was away. But his present
companions got the drive dismantled two days later and once the yacht
was out of overdrive they efficiently gave him his choice of
surrendering or else. He surrendered, stipulating that he wouldn't be
landed back on Coryus; he still clung to hope of avoiding return—which
was almost certain anyhow. Because nobody would want to go back to a
planet from which they'd carried away a criminal, even though they'd
done it unwillingly. Investigation of such a matter might last for
months.
Now the space-yacht moved toward a vast mass of fleecy whiteness without
any visible features. Harper stayed with the direction-finder. From time
to time he gave readings requiring minute changes of course. The
wabbling, whining signal was louder now. It became louder than all the
rest of the space-noises together.
The yacht touched atmosphere and Burleigh said;
"Watch our height, Carol."
She stood by the echometer. Sixty miles. Fifty. Thirty. A correction of
course. Fifteen miles to surface below. Ten. Five. At twenty-five
thousand feet there were clouds, which would be particles of ice so
small that they floated even so high. Then clear air, then lower clouds,
and lower ones still. It was not until six thousand feet above the
surface that the planet-wide cloud-level seemed to begin. From there on
down it was pure opacity. Anything could exist in that dense, almost
palpable grayness. There could be jagged peaks.
The
Nadine
went down and down. At fifteen hundred feet above the
unseen surface, the clouds ended. Below, there was only haze. One could
see the ground, at least, but there was no horizon. There was only an
end to visibility. The yacht descended as if in the center of a sphere
in which one could see clearly nearby, less clearly at a little
distance, and not at all beyond a quarter-mile or so.
There was a shaded, shadowless twilight under the cloud-bank. The ground
looked like no ground ever seen before by anyone. Off to the right a
rivulet ran between improbable-seeming banks. There were a few very
small hills of most unlikely appearance. It was the ground, the matter
on which one would walk, which was strangest. It had color, but the
color was not green. Much of it was a pallid, dirty-yellowish white. But
there were patches of blue, and curious veinings of black, and here and
there were other colors, all of them unlike the normal color of
vegetation on a planet with a sol-type sun.
Harper spoke from the direction-finder;
"The signal's coming from that mound, yonder."
There was a hillock of elongated shape directly in line with the
Nadine's
course in descent. Except for the patches of color, it was
the only considerable landmark within the half-mile circle in which
anything could be seen at all.
The
Nadine
checked her downward motion. Interplanetary drive is rugged
and sure, but it does not respond to fine adjustment. Burleigh used
rockets, issuing great bellowings of flame, to make actual contact. The
yacht hovered, and as the rocket-flames diminished slowly she sat down
with practically no impact at all. But around her there was a monstrous
tumult of smoke and steam. When the rockets went off, she lay in a
burned-out hollow some three or four feet deep with a bottom of solid
stone. The walls of the hollow were black and scorched. It seemed that
at some places they quivered persistently.
There was silence in the control-room save for the whining noise which
now was almost deafening. Harper snapped off the switch. Then there was
true silence. The space-yacht had come to rest possibly a hundred yards
from the mound which was the source of the space-signal. That mound
shared the peculiarity of the ground as far as they could see through
the haze. It was not vegetation in any ordinary sense. Certainly it was
no mineral surface! The landing-pockets had burned away three or four
feet of it, and the edge of the burned area smoked noisesomely, and
somehow it looked as if it would reek. And there were places where it
stirred.
Burleigh blinked and stared. Then he reached up and flicked on the
outside microphones. Instantly there was bedlam. If the landscape was
strange, here, the sounds that came from it were unbelievable.
There were grunting noises. There were clickings, uncountable clickings
that made a background for all the rest. There were discordant howls and
honkings. From time to time some thing unknown made a cry that sounded
very much like a small boy trailing a stick against a picket fence, only
much louder. Something hooted, maintaining the noise for an impossibly
long time. And persistently, sounding as if they came from far away,
there were booming noises, unspeakably deep-bass, made by something
alive. And something shrieked in lunatic fashion and something else
still moaned from time to time with the volume of a steam-whistle....
"This sounds and looks like a nice place to live," said Moran with fine
irony.
Burleigh did not answer. He turned down the outside sound.
"What's that stuff there, the ground?" he demanded. "We burned it away
in landing. I've seen something like it somewhere, but never taking the
place of grass!"
"That," said Moran as if brightly, "that's what I'm to make a garden in.
Of evenings I'll stroll among my thrifty plantings and listen to the
delightful sounds of nature."
Burleigh scowled. Harper flicked off the direction-finder.
"The signal still comes from that hillock yonder," he said with
finality.
Moran said bitingly;
"That ain't no hillock, that's my home!"
Then, instantly he'd said it, he recognized that it could be true. The
mound was not a fold in the ground. It was not an up-cropping of the
ash-covered stone on which the
Nadine
rested. The enigmatic,
dirty-yellow-dirty-red-dirty-blue-and-dirty-black ground-cover hid
something. It blurred the shape it covered, very much as enormous
cobwebs made solid and opaque would have done. But when one looked
carefully at the mound, there was a landing-fin sticking up toward the
leaden skies. It was attached to a large cylindrical object of which the
fore part was crushed in. The other landing-fins could be traced.
"It's a ship," said Moran curtly. "It crash-landed and its crew set up a
signal to call for help. None came, or they'd have turned the beacon
off. Maybe they got the lifeboats to work and got away. Maybe they lived
as I'm expected to live until they died as I'm expected to die."
Burleigh said angrily;
"You'd do what we are doing if you were in our shoes!"
"Sure," said Moran, "but a man can gripe, can't he?"
"You won't have to live here," said Burleigh. "We'll take you somewhere
up by the ice-cap. As Carol said, we'll give you everything we can
spare. And meanwhile we'll take a look at that wreck yonder. There might
be an indication in it of what solar system this is. There could be
something in it of use to you, too. You'd better come along when we
explore."
"Aye, aye, sir," said Moran with irony. "Very kind of you, sir. You'll
go armed, sir?"
Burleigh growled;
"Naturally!"
"Then since I can't be trusted with a weapon," said Moran, "I suggest
that I take a torch. We may have to burn through that loathesome stuff
to get in the ship."
"Right," growled Burleigh again. "Brawn and Carol, you'll keep ship. The
rest of us wear suits. We don't know what that stuff is outside."
Moran silently went to the space-suit rack and began to get into a
suit. Modern space-suits weren't like the ancient crudities with bulging
metal casings and enormous globular helmets. Non-stretch fabrics took
the place of metal, and constant-volume joints were really practical
nowadays. A man could move about in a late-model space-suit almost as
easily as in ship-clothing. The others of the landing-party donned their
special garments with the brisk absence of fumbling that these people
displayed in every action.
"If there's a lifeboat left," said Carol suddenly, "Moran might be able
to do something with it."
"Ah, yes!" said Moran. "It's very likely that the ship hit hard enough
to kill everybody aboard, but not smash the boats!"
"Somebody survived the crash," said Burleigh, "because they set up a
beacon. I wouldn't count on a boat, Moran."
"I don't!" snapped Moran.
He flipped the fastener of his suit. He felt all the openings catch. He
saw the others complete their equipment. They took arms. So far they had
seen no moving thing outside, but arms were simple sanity on an unknown
world. Moran, though, would not be permitted a weapon. He picked up a
torch. They filed into the airlock. The inner door closed. The outer
door opened. It was not necessary to check the air specifically. The
suits would take care of that. Anyhow the ice-cap said there were no
water-soluble gases in the atmosphere, and a gas can't be an active
poison if it can't dissolve.
They filed out of the airlock. They stood on ash-covered stone, only
slightly eroded by the processes which made life possible on this
planet. They looked dubiously at the scorched, indefinite substance
which had been ground before the
Nadine
landed. Moran moved scornfully
forward. He kicked at the burnt stuff. His foot went through the char.
The hole exposed a cheesy mass of soft matter which seemed riddled with
small holes.
Something black came squirming frantically out of one of the openings.
It was eight or ten inches long. It had a head, a thorax, and an
abdomen. It had wing-cases. It had six legs. It toppled down to the
stone on which the
Nadine
rested. Agitatedly, it spread its
wing-covers and flew away, droning loudly. The four men heard the sound
above even the monstrous cacophony of cries and boomings and grunts and
squeaks which seemed to fill the air.
"What the devil—."
Moran kicked again. More holes. More openings. More small tunnels in the
cheese-like, curd-like stuff. More black things squirming to view in
obvious panic. They popped out everywhere. It was suddenly apparent
that the top of the soil, here, was a thick and blanket-like sheet over
the whitish stuff. The black creatures lived and thrived in tunnels
under it.
Carol's voice came over the helmet-phones.
"
They're—bugs!
" she said incredulously. "
They're beetles! They're
twenty times the size of the beetles we humans have been carrying around
the galaxy, but that's what they are!
"
Moran grunted. Distastefully, he saw his predicament made worse. He knew
what had happened here. He could begin to guess at other things to be
discovered. It had not been practical for men to move onto new planets
and subsist upon the flora and fauna they found there. On some new
planets life had never gotten started. On such worlds a highly complex
operation was necessary before humanity could move in. A complete
ecological complex had to be built up; microbes to break down the rock
for soil, bacteria to fix nitrogen to make the soil fertile; plants to
grow in the new-made dirt and insects to fertilize the plants so they
would multiply, and animals and birds to carry the seeds planet-wide. On
most planets, to be sure, there were local, aboriginal plants and
animals. But still terrestrial creatures had to be introduced if a
colony was to feed itself. Alien plants did not supply satisfactory
food. So an elaborate adaptation job had to be done on every planet
before native and terrestrial living things settled down together. It
wasn't impossible that the scuttling things were truly beetles, grown
large and monstrous under the conditions of a new planet. And the
ground....
"This ground stuff," said Moran distastefully, "is yeast or some sort of
toadstool growth. This is a seedling world. It didn't have any life on
it, so somebody dumped germs and spores and bugs to make it ready for
plants and animals eventually. But nobody's come back to finish up the
job."
Burleigh grunted a somehow surprised assent. But it wasn't surprising;
not wholly so. Once one mentioned yeasts and toadstools and fungi
generally, the weird landscape became less than incredible. But it
remained actively unpleasant to think of being marooned on it.
"Suppose we go look at the ship?" said Moran unpleasantly. "Maybe you
can find out where you are, and I can find out what's ahead of me."
He climbed up on the unscorched surface. It was elastic. The
parchment-like top skin yielded. It was like walking on a mass of
springs.
"We'd better spread out," added Moran, "or else we'll break through that
skin and be floundering in this mess."
"I'm giving the orders, Moran!" said Burleigh shortly. "But what you say
does make sense."
He and the others joined Moran on the yielding surface. Their footing
was uncertain, as on a trampoline. They staggered. They moved toward the
hillock which was a covered-over wrecked ship.
The ground was not as level as it appeared from the
Nadine's
control-room. There were undulations. But they could not see more than a
quarter-mile in any direction. Beyond that was mist. But Burleigh, at
one end of the uneven line of advancing men, suddenly halted and stood
staring down at something he had not seen before. The others halted.
Something moved. It came out from behind a very minor spire of whitish
stuff that looked like a dirty sheet stretched over a tall stone. The
thing that appeared was very peculiar indeed. It was a—worm. But it was
a foot thick and ten feet long, and it had a group of stumpy legs at its
fore end—where there were eyes hidden behind bristling hair-like
growths—and another set of feet at its tail end. It progressed sedately
by reaching forward with its fore-part, securing a foothold, and then
arching its middle portion like a cat arching its back, to bring its
hind part forward. Then it reached forward again. It was of a dark olive
color from one end to the other. Its manner of walking was insane but
somehow sedate.
Moran heard muffled noises in his helmet-phone as the others tried to
speak. Carol's voice came anxiously;
"
What's the matter? What do you see?
"
Moran said with savage precision;
"We're looking at an inch-worm, grown up like the beetles only more so.
It's not an inch-worm any longer. It's a yard-worm." Then he said
harshly to the men with him; "It's not a hunting creature on worlds
where it's smaller. It's not likely to have turned deadly here. Come
on!"
He went forward over the singularly bouncy ground. The others followed.
It was to be noted that Hallet the engineer, avoided the huge harmless
creature more widely than most.
They reached the mound which was the ship. Moran unlimbered his torch.
He said sardonically;
"This ship won't do anybody any good. It's old-style. That thick belt
around its middle was dropped a hundred years ago, and more." There was
an abrupt thickening of the cylindrical hull at the middle. There was an
equally abrupt thinning, again, toward the landing-fins. The sharpness
of the change was blurred over by the revolting ground-stuff growing
everywhere. "We're going to find that this wreck has been here a century
at least!"
Without orders, he turned on the torch. A four-foot flame of pure
blue-white leaped out. He touched its tip to the fungoid soil. Steam
leaped up. He used the flame like a gigantic scalpel, cutting a square a
yard deep in the whitish stuff, and then cutting it across and across to
destroy it. Thick fumes arose, and quiverings and shakings began. Black
creatures in their labyrinths of tunnels began to panic. Off to the
right the blanket-like surface ripped and they poured out. They scuttled
crazily here and there. Some took to wing. By instinct the other
men—the armed ones—moved back from the smoke. They wore space-helmets
but they felt that there should be an intolerable smell.
Moran slashed and slashed angrily with the big flame, cutting a way to
the metal hull that had fallen here before his grandfather was born.
Sometimes the flame cut across things that writhed, and he was sickened.
But above all he raged because he was to be marooned here. He could not
altogether blame the others. They couldn't land at any colonized world
with him on board without his being detected as an extra member of the
crew. His fate would then be sealed. But they also would be
investigated. Official queries would go across this whole sector of the
galaxy, naming five persons of such-and-such description and
such-and-such fingerprints, voyaging in a space-yacht of such-and-such
size and registration. The world they came from would claim them as
fugitives. They would be returned to it. They'd be executed.
Then Carol's voice came in his helmet-phone. She cried out;
"
Look out! It's coming! Kill it! Kill it—.
"
He heard blast-rifles firing. He heard Burleigh pant commands. He was on
his way out of the hollow he'd carved when he heard Harper cry out
horribly.
He got clear of the newly burned-away stuff. There was still much smoke
and stream. But he saw Harper. More, he saw the thing that had Harper.
It occurred to him instantly that if Harper died, there would not be too
many people on the
Nadine
. They need not maroon him. In fact, they
wouldn't dare.
A ship that came in to port with two few on board would be investigated
as thoroughly as one that had too many. Perhaps more thoroughly. So if
Harper were killed, Moran would be needed to take his place. He'd go on
from here in the
Nadine
, necessarily accepted as a member of her crew.
Then he rushed, the flame-torch making a roaring sound.
II.
They went back to the
Nadine
for weapons more adequate for
encountering the local fauna when it was over. Blast-rifles were not
effective against such creatures as these. Torches were contact weapons
but they killed. Blast-rifles did not. And Harper needed to pull himself
together again, too. Also, neither Moran nor any of the others wanted to
go back to the still un-entered wreck while the skinny, somehow
disgusting legs of the thing still kicked spasmodically—quite
separate—on the whitish ground-stuff. Moran had disliked such creatures
in miniature form on other worlds. Enlarged like this.
It seemed insane that such creatures, even in miniature, should
painstakingly be brought across light-years of space to the new worlds
men settled on. But it had been found to be necessary. The ecological
system in which human beings belonged had turned out to be infinitely
complicated. It had turned out, in fact, to be the ecological system of
Earth, and unless all parts of the complex were present, the total was
subtly or glaringly wrong. So mankind distastefully ferried pests as
well as useful creatures to its new worlds as they were made ready for
settlement. Mosquitos throve on the inhabited globes of the Rim Stars.
Roaches twitched nervous antennae on the settled planets of the
Coal-sack. Dogs on Antares had fleas, and scratched their bites, and
humanity spread through the galaxy with an attendant train of insects
and annoyances. If they left their pests behind, the total system of
checks and balances which make life practical would get lopsided. It
would not maintain itself. The vagaries that could result were admirably
illustrated in and on the landscape outside the
Nadine
. Something had
been left out of the seeding of this planet. The element—which might be
a bacterium or a virus or almost anything at all—the element that kept
creatures at the size called "normal" was either missing or inoperable
here. The results were not desirable. | [
"resigned",
"bitter",
"vindictive",
"sarcastic"
] | 2 |
43046_Q9R0IJB9_8 | Why does Moran think it could be beneficial if one of the crew members was killed on the alien planet? | <!-- $Id: header.txt 236 2009-12-07 18:57:00Z vlsimpson $ -->
PLANET of DREAD
By MURRAY LEINSTER
Illustrator ADKINS
I.
Moran cut apart the yard-long monstrosity with a slash of flame.
The thing presumably died, but it continued to writhe senselessly.
He turned to see other horrors crawling toward him. Then he knew he
was being marooned on a planet of endless terrors.
Moran, naturally, did not mean to help in the carrying out of the plans
which would mean his destruction one way or another. The plans were
thrashed out very painstakingly, in formal conference on the space-yacht
Nadine
, with Moran present and allowed to take part in the discussion.
From the viewpoint of the
Nadine's
ship's company, it was simply
necessary to get rid of Moran. In their predicament he might have come
to the same conclusion; but he was not at all enthusiastic about their
decision. He would die of it.
The
Nadine
was out of overdrive and all the uncountable suns of the
galaxy shone steadily, remotely, as infinitesimal specks of light of
every color of the rainbow. Two hours since, the sun of this solar
system had been a vast glaring disk off to port, with streamers and
prominences erupting about its edges. Now it lay astern, and Moran
could see the planet that had been chosen for his marooning. It was a
cloudy world. There were some dim markings near one lighted limb, but
nowhere else. There was an ice-cap in view. The rest was—clouds.
The ice-cap, by its existence and circular shape, proved that the planet
rotated at a not unreasonable rate. The fact that it was water-ice told
much. A water-ice ice-cap said that there were no poisonous gases in the
planet's atmosphere. Sulfur dioxide or chlorine, for example, would not
allow the formation of water-ice. It would have to be sulphuric-acid or
hydrochloric-acid ice. But the ice-cap was simple snow. Its size, too,
told about temperature-distribution on the planet. A large cap would
have meant a large area with arctic and sub-arctic temperatures, with
small temperate and tropical climate-belts. A small one like this meant
wide tropical and sub-tropical zones. The fact was verified by the
thick, dense cloud-masses which covered most of the surface,—all the
surface, in fact, outside the ice-cap. But since there were ice-caps
there would be temperate regions. In short, the ice-cap proved that a
man could endure the air and temperature conditions he would find.
Moran observed these things from the control-room of the
Nadine
, then
approaching the world on planetary drive. He was to be left here, with
no reason ever to expect rescue. Two of the
Nadine's
four-man crew
watched out the same ports as the planet seemed to approach. Burleigh
said encouragingly;
"It doesn't look too bad, Moran!"
Moran disagreed, but he did not answer. He cocked an ear instead. He
heard something. It was a thin, wabbling, keening whine. No natural
radiation sounds like that. Moran nodded toward the all-band speaker.
"Do you hear what I do?" he asked sardonically.
Burleigh listened. A distinctly artificial signal came out of the
speaker. It wasn't a voice-signal. It wasn't an identification beacon,
such as are placed on certain worlds for the convenience of interstellar
skippers who need to check their courses on extremely long runs. This
was something else.
Burleigh said:
"Hm ... Call the others, Harper."
Harper, prudently with him in the control-room, put his head into the
passage leading away. He called. But Moran observed with grudging
respect that he didn't give him a chance to do anything drastic. These
people on the
Nadine
were capable. They'd managed to recapture the
Nadine
from him, but they were matter-of-fact about it. They didn't
seem to resent what he'd tried to do, or that he'd brought them an
indefinite distance in an indefinite direction from their last
landing-point, and they had still to re-locate themselves.
They'd been on Coryus Three and they'd gotten departure clearance from
its space-port. With clearance-papers in order, they could land
unquestioned at any other space-port and take off again—provided the
other space-port was one they had clearance for. Without rigid control
of space-travel, any criminal anywhere could escape the consequences of
any crime simply by buying a ticket to another world. Moran couldn't
have bought a ticket, but he'd tried to get off the planet Coryus on the
Nadine
. The trouble was that the
Nadine
had clearance papers
covering five persons aboard—four men and a girl Carol. Moran made six.
Wherever the yacht landed, such a disparity between its documents and
its crew would spark an investigation. A lengthy, incredibly minute
investigation. Moran, at least, would be picked out as a fugitive from
Coryus Three. The others were fugitives too, from some unnamed world
Moran did not know. They might be sent back where they came from. In
effect, with six people on board instead of five, the
Nadine
could not
land anywhere for supplies. With five on board, as her papers declared,
she could. And Moran was the extra man whose presence would rouse
space-port officials' suspicion of the rest. So he had to be dumped.
He couldn't blame them. He'd made another difficulty, too. Blaster in
hand, he'd made the
Nadine
take off from Coryus III with a trip-tape
picked at random for guidance. But the trip-tape had been computed for
another starting-point, and when the yacht came out of overdrive it was
because the drive had been dismantled in the engine-room. So the ship's
location was in doubt. It could have travelled at almost any speed in
practically any direction for a length of time that was at least
indefinite. A liner could re-locate itself without trouble. It had
elaborate observational equipment and tri-di star-charts. But smaller
craft had to depend on the Galactic Directory. The process would be to
find a planet and check its climate and relationship to other planets,
and its flora and fauna against descriptions in the Directory. That was
the way to find out where one was, when one's position became doubtful.
The
Nadine
needed to make a planet-fall for this.
The rest of the ship's company came into the control-room. Burleigh
waved his hand at the speaker.
"Listen!"
They heard it. All of them. It was a trilling, whining sound among the
innumerable random noises to be heard in supposedly empty space.
"That's a marker," Carol announced. "I saw a costume-story tape once
that had that sound in it. It marked a first-landing spot on some planet
or other, so the people could find that spot again. It was supposed to
be a long time ago, though."
"It's weak," observed Burleigh. "We'll try answering it."
Moran stirred, and he knew that every one of the others was conscious of
the movement. But they didn't watch him suspiciously. They were alert by
long habit. Burleigh said they'd been Underground people, fighting the
government of their native world, and they'd gotten away to make it seem
the revolt had collapsed. They'd go back later when they weren't
expected, and start it up again. Moran considered the story probable.
Only people accustomed to desperate actions would have remained so calm
when Moran had used desperate measures against them.
Burleigh picked up the transmitter-microphone.
"Calling ground," he said briskly. "Calling ground! We pick up your
signal. Please reply."
He repeated the call, over and over and over. There was no answer.
Cracklings and hissings came out of the speaker as before, and the thin
and reedy wabbling whine continued. The
Nadine
went on toward the
enlarging cloudy mass ahead.
Burleigh said;
"Well?"
"I think," said Carol, "that we should land. People have been here. If
they left a beacon, they may have left an identification of the planet.
Then we'd know where we are and how to get to Loris."
Burleigh nodded. The
Nadine
had cleared for Loris. That was where it
should make its next landing. The little yacht went on. All five of its
proper company watched as the planet's surface enlarged. The ice-cap
went out of sight around the bulge of the globe, but no markings
appeared. There were cloud-banks everywhere, probably low down in the
atmosphere. The darker vague areas previously seen might have been
highlands.
"I think," said Carol, to Moran, "that if it's too tropical where this
signal's coming from, we'll take you somewhere near enough to the
ice-cap to have an endurable climate. I've been figuring on food, too.
That will depend on where we are from Loris because we have to keep
enough for ourselves. But we can spare some. We'll give you the
emergency-kit, anyhow."
The emergency-kit contained antiseptics, seeds, and a weapon or two,
with elaborate advice to castaways. If somebody were wrecked on an even
possibly habitable planet, the especially developed seed-strains would
provide food in a minimum of time. It was not an encouraging thought,
though, and Moran grimaced.
She hadn't said anything about being sorry that he had to be marooned.
Maybe she was, but rebels learn to be practical or they don't live long.
Moran wondered, momentarily, what sort of world they came from and why
they had revolted, and what sort of set-back to the revolt had sent the
five off in what they considered a strategic retreat but their
government would think defeat. Moran's own situation was perfectly
clear.
He'd killed a man on Coryus III. His victim would not be mourned by
anybody, and somebody formerly in very great danger would now be safe,
which was the reason for what Moran had done. But the dead man had been
very important, and the fact that Moran had forced him to fight and
killed him in fair combat made no difference. Moran had needed to get
off-planet, and fast. But space-travel regulations are especially
designed to prevent such escapes.
He'd made a pretty good try, at that. One of the controls on
space-traffic required a ship on landing to deposit its fuel-block in
the space-port's vaults. The fuel-block was not returned until clearance
for departure had been granted. But Moran had waylaid the messenger
carrying the
Nadine's
fuel-block back to that space-yacht. He'd
knocked the messenger cold and presented himself at the yacht with the
fuel. He was admitted. He put the block in the engine's gate. He duly
took the plastic receipt-token the engine only then released, and he
drew a blaster. He'd locked two of the
Nadine's
crew in the
engine-room, rushed to the control-room without encountering the others,
dogged the door shut, and threaded in the first trip-tape to come to
hand. He punched the take-off button and only seconds later the
overdrive. Then the yacht—and Moran—was away. But his present
companions got the drive dismantled two days later and once the yacht
was out of overdrive they efficiently gave him his choice of
surrendering or else. He surrendered, stipulating that he wouldn't be
landed back on Coryus; he still clung to hope of avoiding return—which
was almost certain anyhow. Because nobody would want to go back to a
planet from which they'd carried away a criminal, even though they'd
done it unwillingly. Investigation of such a matter might last for
months.
Now the space-yacht moved toward a vast mass of fleecy whiteness without
any visible features. Harper stayed with the direction-finder. From time
to time he gave readings requiring minute changes of course. The
wabbling, whining signal was louder now. It became louder than all the
rest of the space-noises together.
The yacht touched atmosphere and Burleigh said;
"Watch our height, Carol."
She stood by the echometer. Sixty miles. Fifty. Thirty. A correction of
course. Fifteen miles to surface below. Ten. Five. At twenty-five
thousand feet there were clouds, which would be particles of ice so
small that they floated even so high. Then clear air, then lower clouds,
and lower ones still. It was not until six thousand feet above the
surface that the planet-wide cloud-level seemed to begin. From there on
down it was pure opacity. Anything could exist in that dense, almost
palpable grayness. There could be jagged peaks.
The
Nadine
went down and down. At fifteen hundred feet above the
unseen surface, the clouds ended. Below, there was only haze. One could
see the ground, at least, but there was no horizon. There was only an
end to visibility. The yacht descended as if in the center of a sphere
in which one could see clearly nearby, less clearly at a little
distance, and not at all beyond a quarter-mile or so.
There was a shaded, shadowless twilight under the cloud-bank. The ground
looked like no ground ever seen before by anyone. Off to the right a
rivulet ran between improbable-seeming banks. There were a few very
small hills of most unlikely appearance. It was the ground, the matter
on which one would walk, which was strangest. It had color, but the
color was not green. Much of it was a pallid, dirty-yellowish white. But
there were patches of blue, and curious veinings of black, and here and
there were other colors, all of them unlike the normal color of
vegetation on a planet with a sol-type sun.
Harper spoke from the direction-finder;
"The signal's coming from that mound, yonder."
There was a hillock of elongated shape directly in line with the
Nadine's
course in descent. Except for the patches of color, it was
the only considerable landmark within the half-mile circle in which
anything could be seen at all.
The
Nadine
checked her downward motion. Interplanetary drive is rugged
and sure, but it does not respond to fine adjustment. Burleigh used
rockets, issuing great bellowings of flame, to make actual contact. The
yacht hovered, and as the rocket-flames diminished slowly she sat down
with practically no impact at all. But around her there was a monstrous
tumult of smoke and steam. When the rockets went off, she lay in a
burned-out hollow some three or four feet deep with a bottom of solid
stone. The walls of the hollow were black and scorched. It seemed that
at some places they quivered persistently.
There was silence in the control-room save for the whining noise which
now was almost deafening. Harper snapped off the switch. Then there was
true silence. The space-yacht had come to rest possibly a hundred yards
from the mound which was the source of the space-signal. That mound
shared the peculiarity of the ground as far as they could see through
the haze. It was not vegetation in any ordinary sense. Certainly it was
no mineral surface! The landing-pockets had burned away three or four
feet of it, and the edge of the burned area smoked noisesomely, and
somehow it looked as if it would reek. And there were places where it
stirred.
Burleigh blinked and stared. Then he reached up and flicked on the
outside microphones. Instantly there was bedlam. If the landscape was
strange, here, the sounds that came from it were unbelievable.
There were grunting noises. There were clickings, uncountable clickings
that made a background for all the rest. There were discordant howls and
honkings. From time to time some thing unknown made a cry that sounded
very much like a small boy trailing a stick against a picket fence, only
much louder. Something hooted, maintaining the noise for an impossibly
long time. And persistently, sounding as if they came from far away,
there were booming noises, unspeakably deep-bass, made by something
alive. And something shrieked in lunatic fashion and something else
still moaned from time to time with the volume of a steam-whistle....
"This sounds and looks like a nice place to live," said Moran with fine
irony.
Burleigh did not answer. He turned down the outside sound.
"What's that stuff there, the ground?" he demanded. "We burned it away
in landing. I've seen something like it somewhere, but never taking the
place of grass!"
"That," said Moran as if brightly, "that's what I'm to make a garden in.
Of evenings I'll stroll among my thrifty plantings and listen to the
delightful sounds of nature."
Burleigh scowled. Harper flicked off the direction-finder.
"The signal still comes from that hillock yonder," he said with
finality.
Moran said bitingly;
"That ain't no hillock, that's my home!"
Then, instantly he'd said it, he recognized that it could be true. The
mound was not a fold in the ground. It was not an up-cropping of the
ash-covered stone on which the
Nadine
rested. The enigmatic,
dirty-yellow-dirty-red-dirty-blue-and-dirty-black ground-cover hid
something. It blurred the shape it covered, very much as enormous
cobwebs made solid and opaque would have done. But when one looked
carefully at the mound, there was a landing-fin sticking up toward the
leaden skies. It was attached to a large cylindrical object of which the
fore part was crushed in. The other landing-fins could be traced.
"It's a ship," said Moran curtly. "It crash-landed and its crew set up a
signal to call for help. None came, or they'd have turned the beacon
off. Maybe they got the lifeboats to work and got away. Maybe they lived
as I'm expected to live until they died as I'm expected to die."
Burleigh said angrily;
"You'd do what we are doing if you were in our shoes!"
"Sure," said Moran, "but a man can gripe, can't he?"
"You won't have to live here," said Burleigh. "We'll take you somewhere
up by the ice-cap. As Carol said, we'll give you everything we can
spare. And meanwhile we'll take a look at that wreck yonder. There might
be an indication in it of what solar system this is. There could be
something in it of use to you, too. You'd better come along when we
explore."
"Aye, aye, sir," said Moran with irony. "Very kind of you, sir. You'll
go armed, sir?"
Burleigh growled;
"Naturally!"
"Then since I can't be trusted with a weapon," said Moran, "I suggest
that I take a torch. We may have to burn through that loathesome stuff
to get in the ship."
"Right," growled Burleigh again. "Brawn and Carol, you'll keep ship. The
rest of us wear suits. We don't know what that stuff is outside."
Moran silently went to the space-suit rack and began to get into a
suit. Modern space-suits weren't like the ancient crudities with bulging
metal casings and enormous globular helmets. Non-stretch fabrics took
the place of metal, and constant-volume joints were really practical
nowadays. A man could move about in a late-model space-suit almost as
easily as in ship-clothing. The others of the landing-party donned their
special garments with the brisk absence of fumbling that these people
displayed in every action.
"If there's a lifeboat left," said Carol suddenly, "Moran might be able
to do something with it."
"Ah, yes!" said Moran. "It's very likely that the ship hit hard enough
to kill everybody aboard, but not smash the boats!"
"Somebody survived the crash," said Burleigh, "because they set up a
beacon. I wouldn't count on a boat, Moran."
"I don't!" snapped Moran.
He flipped the fastener of his suit. He felt all the openings catch. He
saw the others complete their equipment. They took arms. So far they had
seen no moving thing outside, but arms were simple sanity on an unknown
world. Moran, though, would not be permitted a weapon. He picked up a
torch. They filed into the airlock. The inner door closed. The outer
door opened. It was not necessary to check the air specifically. The
suits would take care of that. Anyhow the ice-cap said there were no
water-soluble gases in the atmosphere, and a gas can't be an active
poison if it can't dissolve.
They filed out of the airlock. They stood on ash-covered stone, only
slightly eroded by the processes which made life possible on this
planet. They looked dubiously at the scorched, indefinite substance
which had been ground before the
Nadine
landed. Moran moved scornfully
forward. He kicked at the burnt stuff. His foot went through the char.
The hole exposed a cheesy mass of soft matter which seemed riddled with
small holes.
Something black came squirming frantically out of one of the openings.
It was eight or ten inches long. It had a head, a thorax, and an
abdomen. It had wing-cases. It had six legs. It toppled down to the
stone on which the
Nadine
rested. Agitatedly, it spread its
wing-covers and flew away, droning loudly. The four men heard the sound
above even the monstrous cacophony of cries and boomings and grunts and
squeaks which seemed to fill the air.
"What the devil—."
Moran kicked again. More holes. More openings. More small tunnels in the
cheese-like, curd-like stuff. More black things squirming to view in
obvious panic. They popped out everywhere. It was suddenly apparent
that the top of the soil, here, was a thick and blanket-like sheet over
the whitish stuff. The black creatures lived and thrived in tunnels
under it.
Carol's voice came over the helmet-phones.
"
They're—bugs!
" she said incredulously. "
They're beetles! They're
twenty times the size of the beetles we humans have been carrying around
the galaxy, but that's what they are!
"
Moran grunted. Distastefully, he saw his predicament made worse. He knew
what had happened here. He could begin to guess at other things to be
discovered. It had not been practical for men to move onto new planets
and subsist upon the flora and fauna they found there. On some new
planets life had never gotten started. On such worlds a highly complex
operation was necessary before humanity could move in. A complete
ecological complex had to be built up; microbes to break down the rock
for soil, bacteria to fix nitrogen to make the soil fertile; plants to
grow in the new-made dirt and insects to fertilize the plants so they
would multiply, and animals and birds to carry the seeds planet-wide. On
most planets, to be sure, there were local, aboriginal plants and
animals. But still terrestrial creatures had to be introduced if a
colony was to feed itself. Alien plants did not supply satisfactory
food. So an elaborate adaptation job had to be done on every planet
before native and terrestrial living things settled down together. It
wasn't impossible that the scuttling things were truly beetles, grown
large and monstrous under the conditions of a new planet. And the
ground....
"This ground stuff," said Moran distastefully, "is yeast or some sort of
toadstool growth. This is a seedling world. It didn't have any life on
it, so somebody dumped germs and spores and bugs to make it ready for
plants and animals eventually. But nobody's come back to finish up the
job."
Burleigh grunted a somehow surprised assent. But it wasn't surprising;
not wholly so. Once one mentioned yeasts and toadstools and fungi
generally, the weird landscape became less than incredible. But it
remained actively unpleasant to think of being marooned on it.
"Suppose we go look at the ship?" said Moran unpleasantly. "Maybe you
can find out where you are, and I can find out what's ahead of me."
He climbed up on the unscorched surface. It was elastic. The
parchment-like top skin yielded. It was like walking on a mass of
springs.
"We'd better spread out," added Moran, "or else we'll break through that
skin and be floundering in this mess."
"I'm giving the orders, Moran!" said Burleigh shortly. "But what you say
does make sense."
He and the others joined Moran on the yielding surface. Their footing
was uncertain, as on a trampoline. They staggered. They moved toward the
hillock which was a covered-over wrecked ship.
The ground was not as level as it appeared from the
Nadine's
control-room. There were undulations. But they could not see more than a
quarter-mile in any direction. Beyond that was mist. But Burleigh, at
one end of the uneven line of advancing men, suddenly halted and stood
staring down at something he had not seen before. The others halted.
Something moved. It came out from behind a very minor spire of whitish
stuff that looked like a dirty sheet stretched over a tall stone. The
thing that appeared was very peculiar indeed. It was a—worm. But it was
a foot thick and ten feet long, and it had a group of stumpy legs at its
fore end—where there were eyes hidden behind bristling hair-like
growths—and another set of feet at its tail end. It progressed sedately
by reaching forward with its fore-part, securing a foothold, and then
arching its middle portion like a cat arching its back, to bring its
hind part forward. Then it reached forward again. It was of a dark olive
color from one end to the other. Its manner of walking was insane but
somehow sedate.
Moran heard muffled noises in his helmet-phone as the others tried to
speak. Carol's voice came anxiously;
"
What's the matter? What do you see?
"
Moran said with savage precision;
"We're looking at an inch-worm, grown up like the beetles only more so.
It's not an inch-worm any longer. It's a yard-worm." Then he said
harshly to the men with him; "It's not a hunting creature on worlds
where it's smaller. It's not likely to have turned deadly here. Come
on!"
He went forward over the singularly bouncy ground. The others followed.
It was to be noted that Hallet the engineer, avoided the huge harmless
creature more widely than most.
They reached the mound which was the ship. Moran unlimbered his torch.
He said sardonically;
"This ship won't do anybody any good. It's old-style. That thick belt
around its middle was dropped a hundred years ago, and more." There was
an abrupt thickening of the cylindrical hull at the middle. There was an
equally abrupt thinning, again, toward the landing-fins. The sharpness
of the change was blurred over by the revolting ground-stuff growing
everywhere. "We're going to find that this wreck has been here a century
at least!"
Without orders, he turned on the torch. A four-foot flame of pure
blue-white leaped out. He touched its tip to the fungoid soil. Steam
leaped up. He used the flame like a gigantic scalpel, cutting a square a
yard deep in the whitish stuff, and then cutting it across and across to
destroy it. Thick fumes arose, and quiverings and shakings began. Black
creatures in their labyrinths of tunnels began to panic. Off to the
right the blanket-like surface ripped and they poured out. They scuttled
crazily here and there. Some took to wing. By instinct the other
men—the armed ones—moved back from the smoke. They wore space-helmets
but they felt that there should be an intolerable smell.
Moran slashed and slashed angrily with the big flame, cutting a way to
the metal hull that had fallen here before his grandfather was born.
Sometimes the flame cut across things that writhed, and he was sickened.
But above all he raged because he was to be marooned here. He could not
altogether blame the others. They couldn't land at any colonized world
with him on board without his being detected as an extra member of the
crew. His fate would then be sealed. But they also would be
investigated. Official queries would go across this whole sector of the
galaxy, naming five persons of such-and-such description and
such-and-such fingerprints, voyaging in a space-yacht of such-and-such
size and registration. The world they came from would claim them as
fugitives. They would be returned to it. They'd be executed.
Then Carol's voice came in his helmet-phone. She cried out;
"
Look out! It's coming! Kill it! Kill it—.
"
He heard blast-rifles firing. He heard Burleigh pant commands. He was on
his way out of the hollow he'd carved when he heard Harper cry out
horribly.
He got clear of the newly burned-away stuff. There was still much smoke
and stream. But he saw Harper. More, he saw the thing that had Harper.
It occurred to him instantly that if Harper died, there would not be too
many people on the
Nadine
. They need not maroon him. In fact, they
wouldn't dare.
A ship that came in to port with two few on board would be investigated
as thoroughly as one that had too many. Perhaps more thoroughly. So if
Harper were killed, Moran would be needed to take his place. He'd go on
from here in the
Nadine
, necessarily accepted as a member of her crew.
Then he rushed, the flame-torch making a roaring sound.
II.
They went back to the
Nadine
for weapons more adequate for
encountering the local fauna when it was over. Blast-rifles were not
effective against such creatures as these. Torches were contact weapons
but they killed. Blast-rifles did not. And Harper needed to pull himself
together again, too. Also, neither Moran nor any of the others wanted to
go back to the still un-entered wreck while the skinny, somehow
disgusting legs of the thing still kicked spasmodically—quite
separate—on the whitish ground-stuff. Moran had disliked such creatures
in miniature form on other worlds. Enlarged like this.
It seemed insane that such creatures, even in miniature, should
painstakingly be brought across light-years of space to the new worlds
men settled on. But it had been found to be necessary. The ecological
system in which human beings belonged had turned out to be infinitely
complicated. It had turned out, in fact, to be the ecological system of
Earth, and unless all parts of the complex were present, the total was
subtly or glaringly wrong. So mankind distastefully ferried pests as
well as useful creatures to its new worlds as they were made ready for
settlement. Mosquitos throve on the inhabited globes of the Rim Stars.
Roaches twitched nervous antennae on the settled planets of the
Coal-sack. Dogs on Antares had fleas, and scratched their bites, and
humanity spread through the galaxy with an attendant train of insects
and annoyances. If they left their pests behind, the total system of
checks and balances which make life practical would get lopsided. It
would not maintain itself. The vagaries that could result were admirably
illustrated in and on the landscape outside the
Nadine
. Something had
been left out of the seeding of this planet. The element—which might be
a bacterium or a virus or almost anything at all—the element that kept
creatures at the size called "normal" was either missing or inoperable
here. The results were not desirable. | [
"He would be more likely to survive an attack from the Nadine crew if they ambushed him.",
"He could convert their body to nutrients, which he could use to survive longer on the alien planet.",
"He and the remaining crew members could pass security clearance with only five members on board.",
"He could steal the deceased crew member's identity and use it to start a new life on a new planet."
] | 2 |
43046_Q9R0IJB9_9 | What is hiding underneath the gigantic mound on the alien planet? | <!-- $Id: header.txt 236 2009-12-07 18:57:00Z vlsimpson $ -->
PLANET of DREAD
By MURRAY LEINSTER
Illustrator ADKINS
I.
Moran cut apart the yard-long monstrosity with a slash of flame.
The thing presumably died, but it continued to writhe senselessly.
He turned to see other horrors crawling toward him. Then he knew he
was being marooned on a planet of endless terrors.
Moran, naturally, did not mean to help in the carrying out of the plans
which would mean his destruction one way or another. The plans were
thrashed out very painstakingly, in formal conference on the space-yacht
Nadine
, with Moran present and allowed to take part in the discussion.
From the viewpoint of the
Nadine's
ship's company, it was simply
necessary to get rid of Moran. In their predicament he might have come
to the same conclusion; but he was not at all enthusiastic about their
decision. He would die of it.
The
Nadine
was out of overdrive and all the uncountable suns of the
galaxy shone steadily, remotely, as infinitesimal specks of light of
every color of the rainbow. Two hours since, the sun of this solar
system had been a vast glaring disk off to port, with streamers and
prominences erupting about its edges. Now it lay astern, and Moran
could see the planet that had been chosen for his marooning. It was a
cloudy world. There were some dim markings near one lighted limb, but
nowhere else. There was an ice-cap in view. The rest was—clouds.
The ice-cap, by its existence and circular shape, proved that the planet
rotated at a not unreasonable rate. The fact that it was water-ice told
much. A water-ice ice-cap said that there were no poisonous gases in the
planet's atmosphere. Sulfur dioxide or chlorine, for example, would not
allow the formation of water-ice. It would have to be sulphuric-acid or
hydrochloric-acid ice. But the ice-cap was simple snow. Its size, too,
told about temperature-distribution on the planet. A large cap would
have meant a large area with arctic and sub-arctic temperatures, with
small temperate and tropical climate-belts. A small one like this meant
wide tropical and sub-tropical zones. The fact was verified by the
thick, dense cloud-masses which covered most of the surface,—all the
surface, in fact, outside the ice-cap. But since there were ice-caps
there would be temperate regions. In short, the ice-cap proved that a
man could endure the air and temperature conditions he would find.
Moran observed these things from the control-room of the
Nadine
, then
approaching the world on planetary drive. He was to be left here, with
no reason ever to expect rescue. Two of the
Nadine's
four-man crew
watched out the same ports as the planet seemed to approach. Burleigh
said encouragingly;
"It doesn't look too bad, Moran!"
Moran disagreed, but he did not answer. He cocked an ear instead. He
heard something. It was a thin, wabbling, keening whine. No natural
radiation sounds like that. Moran nodded toward the all-band speaker.
"Do you hear what I do?" he asked sardonically.
Burleigh listened. A distinctly artificial signal came out of the
speaker. It wasn't a voice-signal. It wasn't an identification beacon,
such as are placed on certain worlds for the convenience of interstellar
skippers who need to check their courses on extremely long runs. This
was something else.
Burleigh said:
"Hm ... Call the others, Harper."
Harper, prudently with him in the control-room, put his head into the
passage leading away. He called. But Moran observed with grudging
respect that he didn't give him a chance to do anything drastic. These
people on the
Nadine
were capable. They'd managed to recapture the
Nadine
from him, but they were matter-of-fact about it. They didn't
seem to resent what he'd tried to do, or that he'd brought them an
indefinite distance in an indefinite direction from their last
landing-point, and they had still to re-locate themselves.
They'd been on Coryus Three and they'd gotten departure clearance from
its space-port. With clearance-papers in order, they could land
unquestioned at any other space-port and take off again—provided the
other space-port was one they had clearance for. Without rigid control
of space-travel, any criminal anywhere could escape the consequences of
any crime simply by buying a ticket to another world. Moran couldn't
have bought a ticket, but he'd tried to get off the planet Coryus on the
Nadine
. The trouble was that the
Nadine
had clearance papers
covering five persons aboard—four men and a girl Carol. Moran made six.
Wherever the yacht landed, such a disparity between its documents and
its crew would spark an investigation. A lengthy, incredibly minute
investigation. Moran, at least, would be picked out as a fugitive from
Coryus Three. The others were fugitives too, from some unnamed world
Moran did not know. They might be sent back where they came from. In
effect, with six people on board instead of five, the
Nadine
could not
land anywhere for supplies. With five on board, as her papers declared,
she could. And Moran was the extra man whose presence would rouse
space-port officials' suspicion of the rest. So he had to be dumped.
He couldn't blame them. He'd made another difficulty, too. Blaster in
hand, he'd made the
Nadine
take off from Coryus III with a trip-tape
picked at random for guidance. But the trip-tape had been computed for
another starting-point, and when the yacht came out of overdrive it was
because the drive had been dismantled in the engine-room. So the ship's
location was in doubt. It could have travelled at almost any speed in
practically any direction for a length of time that was at least
indefinite. A liner could re-locate itself without trouble. It had
elaborate observational equipment and tri-di star-charts. But smaller
craft had to depend on the Galactic Directory. The process would be to
find a planet and check its climate and relationship to other planets,
and its flora and fauna against descriptions in the Directory. That was
the way to find out where one was, when one's position became doubtful.
The
Nadine
needed to make a planet-fall for this.
The rest of the ship's company came into the control-room. Burleigh
waved his hand at the speaker.
"Listen!"
They heard it. All of them. It was a trilling, whining sound among the
innumerable random noises to be heard in supposedly empty space.
"That's a marker," Carol announced. "I saw a costume-story tape once
that had that sound in it. It marked a first-landing spot on some planet
or other, so the people could find that spot again. It was supposed to
be a long time ago, though."
"It's weak," observed Burleigh. "We'll try answering it."
Moran stirred, and he knew that every one of the others was conscious of
the movement. But they didn't watch him suspiciously. They were alert by
long habit. Burleigh said they'd been Underground people, fighting the
government of their native world, and they'd gotten away to make it seem
the revolt had collapsed. They'd go back later when they weren't
expected, and start it up again. Moran considered the story probable.
Only people accustomed to desperate actions would have remained so calm
when Moran had used desperate measures against them.
Burleigh picked up the transmitter-microphone.
"Calling ground," he said briskly. "Calling ground! We pick up your
signal. Please reply."
He repeated the call, over and over and over. There was no answer.
Cracklings and hissings came out of the speaker as before, and the thin
and reedy wabbling whine continued. The
Nadine
went on toward the
enlarging cloudy mass ahead.
Burleigh said;
"Well?"
"I think," said Carol, "that we should land. People have been here. If
they left a beacon, they may have left an identification of the planet.
Then we'd know where we are and how to get to Loris."
Burleigh nodded. The
Nadine
had cleared for Loris. That was where it
should make its next landing. The little yacht went on. All five of its
proper company watched as the planet's surface enlarged. The ice-cap
went out of sight around the bulge of the globe, but no markings
appeared. There were cloud-banks everywhere, probably low down in the
atmosphere. The darker vague areas previously seen might have been
highlands.
"I think," said Carol, to Moran, "that if it's too tropical where this
signal's coming from, we'll take you somewhere near enough to the
ice-cap to have an endurable climate. I've been figuring on food, too.
That will depend on where we are from Loris because we have to keep
enough for ourselves. But we can spare some. We'll give you the
emergency-kit, anyhow."
The emergency-kit contained antiseptics, seeds, and a weapon or two,
with elaborate advice to castaways. If somebody were wrecked on an even
possibly habitable planet, the especially developed seed-strains would
provide food in a minimum of time. It was not an encouraging thought,
though, and Moran grimaced.
She hadn't said anything about being sorry that he had to be marooned.
Maybe she was, but rebels learn to be practical or they don't live long.
Moran wondered, momentarily, what sort of world they came from and why
they had revolted, and what sort of set-back to the revolt had sent the
five off in what they considered a strategic retreat but their
government would think defeat. Moran's own situation was perfectly
clear.
He'd killed a man on Coryus III. His victim would not be mourned by
anybody, and somebody formerly in very great danger would now be safe,
which was the reason for what Moran had done. But the dead man had been
very important, and the fact that Moran had forced him to fight and
killed him in fair combat made no difference. Moran had needed to get
off-planet, and fast. But space-travel regulations are especially
designed to prevent such escapes.
He'd made a pretty good try, at that. One of the controls on
space-traffic required a ship on landing to deposit its fuel-block in
the space-port's vaults. The fuel-block was not returned until clearance
for departure had been granted. But Moran had waylaid the messenger
carrying the
Nadine's
fuel-block back to that space-yacht. He'd
knocked the messenger cold and presented himself at the yacht with the
fuel. He was admitted. He put the block in the engine's gate. He duly
took the plastic receipt-token the engine only then released, and he
drew a blaster. He'd locked two of the
Nadine's
crew in the
engine-room, rushed to the control-room without encountering the others,
dogged the door shut, and threaded in the first trip-tape to come to
hand. He punched the take-off button and only seconds later the
overdrive. Then the yacht—and Moran—was away. But his present
companions got the drive dismantled two days later and once the yacht
was out of overdrive they efficiently gave him his choice of
surrendering or else. He surrendered, stipulating that he wouldn't be
landed back on Coryus; he still clung to hope of avoiding return—which
was almost certain anyhow. Because nobody would want to go back to a
planet from which they'd carried away a criminal, even though they'd
done it unwillingly. Investigation of such a matter might last for
months.
Now the space-yacht moved toward a vast mass of fleecy whiteness without
any visible features. Harper stayed with the direction-finder. From time
to time he gave readings requiring minute changes of course. The
wabbling, whining signal was louder now. It became louder than all the
rest of the space-noises together.
The yacht touched atmosphere and Burleigh said;
"Watch our height, Carol."
She stood by the echometer. Sixty miles. Fifty. Thirty. A correction of
course. Fifteen miles to surface below. Ten. Five. At twenty-five
thousand feet there were clouds, which would be particles of ice so
small that they floated even so high. Then clear air, then lower clouds,
and lower ones still. It was not until six thousand feet above the
surface that the planet-wide cloud-level seemed to begin. From there on
down it was pure opacity. Anything could exist in that dense, almost
palpable grayness. There could be jagged peaks.
The
Nadine
went down and down. At fifteen hundred feet above the
unseen surface, the clouds ended. Below, there was only haze. One could
see the ground, at least, but there was no horizon. There was only an
end to visibility. The yacht descended as if in the center of a sphere
in which one could see clearly nearby, less clearly at a little
distance, and not at all beyond a quarter-mile or so.
There was a shaded, shadowless twilight under the cloud-bank. The ground
looked like no ground ever seen before by anyone. Off to the right a
rivulet ran between improbable-seeming banks. There were a few very
small hills of most unlikely appearance. It was the ground, the matter
on which one would walk, which was strangest. It had color, but the
color was not green. Much of it was a pallid, dirty-yellowish white. But
there were patches of blue, and curious veinings of black, and here and
there were other colors, all of them unlike the normal color of
vegetation on a planet with a sol-type sun.
Harper spoke from the direction-finder;
"The signal's coming from that mound, yonder."
There was a hillock of elongated shape directly in line with the
Nadine's
course in descent. Except for the patches of color, it was
the only considerable landmark within the half-mile circle in which
anything could be seen at all.
The
Nadine
checked her downward motion. Interplanetary drive is rugged
and sure, but it does not respond to fine adjustment. Burleigh used
rockets, issuing great bellowings of flame, to make actual contact. The
yacht hovered, and as the rocket-flames diminished slowly she sat down
with practically no impact at all. But around her there was a monstrous
tumult of smoke and steam. When the rockets went off, she lay in a
burned-out hollow some three or four feet deep with a bottom of solid
stone. The walls of the hollow were black and scorched. It seemed that
at some places they quivered persistently.
There was silence in the control-room save for the whining noise which
now was almost deafening. Harper snapped off the switch. Then there was
true silence. The space-yacht had come to rest possibly a hundred yards
from the mound which was the source of the space-signal. That mound
shared the peculiarity of the ground as far as they could see through
the haze. It was not vegetation in any ordinary sense. Certainly it was
no mineral surface! The landing-pockets had burned away three or four
feet of it, and the edge of the burned area smoked noisesomely, and
somehow it looked as if it would reek. And there were places where it
stirred.
Burleigh blinked and stared. Then he reached up and flicked on the
outside microphones. Instantly there was bedlam. If the landscape was
strange, here, the sounds that came from it were unbelievable.
There were grunting noises. There were clickings, uncountable clickings
that made a background for all the rest. There were discordant howls and
honkings. From time to time some thing unknown made a cry that sounded
very much like a small boy trailing a stick against a picket fence, only
much louder. Something hooted, maintaining the noise for an impossibly
long time. And persistently, sounding as if they came from far away,
there were booming noises, unspeakably deep-bass, made by something
alive. And something shrieked in lunatic fashion and something else
still moaned from time to time with the volume of a steam-whistle....
"This sounds and looks like a nice place to live," said Moran with fine
irony.
Burleigh did not answer. He turned down the outside sound.
"What's that stuff there, the ground?" he demanded. "We burned it away
in landing. I've seen something like it somewhere, but never taking the
place of grass!"
"That," said Moran as if brightly, "that's what I'm to make a garden in.
Of evenings I'll stroll among my thrifty plantings and listen to the
delightful sounds of nature."
Burleigh scowled. Harper flicked off the direction-finder.
"The signal still comes from that hillock yonder," he said with
finality.
Moran said bitingly;
"That ain't no hillock, that's my home!"
Then, instantly he'd said it, he recognized that it could be true. The
mound was not a fold in the ground. It was not an up-cropping of the
ash-covered stone on which the
Nadine
rested. The enigmatic,
dirty-yellow-dirty-red-dirty-blue-and-dirty-black ground-cover hid
something. It blurred the shape it covered, very much as enormous
cobwebs made solid and opaque would have done. But when one looked
carefully at the mound, there was a landing-fin sticking up toward the
leaden skies. It was attached to a large cylindrical object of which the
fore part was crushed in. The other landing-fins could be traced.
"It's a ship," said Moran curtly. "It crash-landed and its crew set up a
signal to call for help. None came, or they'd have turned the beacon
off. Maybe they got the lifeboats to work and got away. Maybe they lived
as I'm expected to live until they died as I'm expected to die."
Burleigh said angrily;
"You'd do what we are doing if you were in our shoes!"
"Sure," said Moran, "but a man can gripe, can't he?"
"You won't have to live here," said Burleigh. "We'll take you somewhere
up by the ice-cap. As Carol said, we'll give you everything we can
spare. And meanwhile we'll take a look at that wreck yonder. There might
be an indication in it of what solar system this is. There could be
something in it of use to you, too. You'd better come along when we
explore."
"Aye, aye, sir," said Moran with irony. "Very kind of you, sir. You'll
go armed, sir?"
Burleigh growled;
"Naturally!"
"Then since I can't be trusted with a weapon," said Moran, "I suggest
that I take a torch. We may have to burn through that loathesome stuff
to get in the ship."
"Right," growled Burleigh again. "Brawn and Carol, you'll keep ship. The
rest of us wear suits. We don't know what that stuff is outside."
Moran silently went to the space-suit rack and began to get into a
suit. Modern space-suits weren't like the ancient crudities with bulging
metal casings and enormous globular helmets. Non-stretch fabrics took
the place of metal, and constant-volume joints were really practical
nowadays. A man could move about in a late-model space-suit almost as
easily as in ship-clothing. The others of the landing-party donned their
special garments with the brisk absence of fumbling that these people
displayed in every action.
"If there's a lifeboat left," said Carol suddenly, "Moran might be able
to do something with it."
"Ah, yes!" said Moran. "It's very likely that the ship hit hard enough
to kill everybody aboard, but not smash the boats!"
"Somebody survived the crash," said Burleigh, "because they set up a
beacon. I wouldn't count on a boat, Moran."
"I don't!" snapped Moran.
He flipped the fastener of his suit. He felt all the openings catch. He
saw the others complete their equipment. They took arms. So far they had
seen no moving thing outside, but arms were simple sanity on an unknown
world. Moran, though, would not be permitted a weapon. He picked up a
torch. They filed into the airlock. The inner door closed. The outer
door opened. It was not necessary to check the air specifically. The
suits would take care of that. Anyhow the ice-cap said there were no
water-soluble gases in the atmosphere, and a gas can't be an active
poison if it can't dissolve.
They filed out of the airlock. They stood on ash-covered stone, only
slightly eroded by the processes which made life possible on this
planet. They looked dubiously at the scorched, indefinite substance
which had been ground before the
Nadine
landed. Moran moved scornfully
forward. He kicked at the burnt stuff. His foot went through the char.
The hole exposed a cheesy mass of soft matter which seemed riddled with
small holes.
Something black came squirming frantically out of one of the openings.
It was eight or ten inches long. It had a head, a thorax, and an
abdomen. It had wing-cases. It had six legs. It toppled down to the
stone on which the
Nadine
rested. Agitatedly, it spread its
wing-covers and flew away, droning loudly. The four men heard the sound
above even the monstrous cacophony of cries and boomings and grunts and
squeaks which seemed to fill the air.
"What the devil—."
Moran kicked again. More holes. More openings. More small tunnels in the
cheese-like, curd-like stuff. More black things squirming to view in
obvious panic. They popped out everywhere. It was suddenly apparent
that the top of the soil, here, was a thick and blanket-like sheet over
the whitish stuff. The black creatures lived and thrived in tunnels
under it.
Carol's voice came over the helmet-phones.
"
They're—bugs!
" she said incredulously. "
They're beetles! They're
twenty times the size of the beetles we humans have been carrying around
the galaxy, but that's what they are!
"
Moran grunted. Distastefully, he saw his predicament made worse. He knew
what had happened here. He could begin to guess at other things to be
discovered. It had not been practical for men to move onto new planets
and subsist upon the flora and fauna they found there. On some new
planets life had never gotten started. On such worlds a highly complex
operation was necessary before humanity could move in. A complete
ecological complex had to be built up; microbes to break down the rock
for soil, bacteria to fix nitrogen to make the soil fertile; plants to
grow in the new-made dirt and insects to fertilize the plants so they
would multiply, and animals and birds to carry the seeds planet-wide. On
most planets, to be sure, there were local, aboriginal plants and
animals. But still terrestrial creatures had to be introduced if a
colony was to feed itself. Alien plants did not supply satisfactory
food. So an elaborate adaptation job had to be done on every planet
before native and terrestrial living things settled down together. It
wasn't impossible that the scuttling things were truly beetles, grown
large and monstrous under the conditions of a new planet. And the
ground....
"This ground stuff," said Moran distastefully, "is yeast or some sort of
toadstool growth. This is a seedling world. It didn't have any life on
it, so somebody dumped germs and spores and bugs to make it ready for
plants and animals eventually. But nobody's come back to finish up the
job."
Burleigh grunted a somehow surprised assent. But it wasn't surprising;
not wholly so. Once one mentioned yeasts and toadstools and fungi
generally, the weird landscape became less than incredible. But it
remained actively unpleasant to think of being marooned on it.
"Suppose we go look at the ship?" said Moran unpleasantly. "Maybe you
can find out where you are, and I can find out what's ahead of me."
He climbed up on the unscorched surface. It was elastic. The
parchment-like top skin yielded. It was like walking on a mass of
springs.
"We'd better spread out," added Moran, "or else we'll break through that
skin and be floundering in this mess."
"I'm giving the orders, Moran!" said Burleigh shortly. "But what you say
does make sense."
He and the others joined Moran on the yielding surface. Their footing
was uncertain, as on a trampoline. They staggered. They moved toward the
hillock which was a covered-over wrecked ship.
The ground was not as level as it appeared from the
Nadine's
control-room. There were undulations. But they could not see more than a
quarter-mile in any direction. Beyond that was mist. But Burleigh, at
one end of the uneven line of advancing men, suddenly halted and stood
staring down at something he had not seen before. The others halted.
Something moved. It came out from behind a very minor spire of whitish
stuff that looked like a dirty sheet stretched over a tall stone. The
thing that appeared was very peculiar indeed. It was a—worm. But it was
a foot thick and ten feet long, and it had a group of stumpy legs at its
fore end—where there were eyes hidden behind bristling hair-like
growths—and another set of feet at its tail end. It progressed sedately
by reaching forward with its fore-part, securing a foothold, and then
arching its middle portion like a cat arching its back, to bring its
hind part forward. Then it reached forward again. It was of a dark olive
color from one end to the other. Its manner of walking was insane but
somehow sedate.
Moran heard muffled noises in his helmet-phone as the others tried to
speak. Carol's voice came anxiously;
"
What's the matter? What do you see?
"
Moran said with savage precision;
"We're looking at an inch-worm, grown up like the beetles only more so.
It's not an inch-worm any longer. It's a yard-worm." Then he said
harshly to the men with him; "It's not a hunting creature on worlds
where it's smaller. It's not likely to have turned deadly here. Come
on!"
He went forward over the singularly bouncy ground. The others followed.
It was to be noted that Hallet the engineer, avoided the huge harmless
creature more widely than most.
They reached the mound which was the ship. Moran unlimbered his torch.
He said sardonically;
"This ship won't do anybody any good. It's old-style. That thick belt
around its middle was dropped a hundred years ago, and more." There was
an abrupt thickening of the cylindrical hull at the middle. There was an
equally abrupt thinning, again, toward the landing-fins. The sharpness
of the change was blurred over by the revolting ground-stuff growing
everywhere. "We're going to find that this wreck has been here a century
at least!"
Without orders, he turned on the torch. A four-foot flame of pure
blue-white leaped out. He touched its tip to the fungoid soil. Steam
leaped up. He used the flame like a gigantic scalpel, cutting a square a
yard deep in the whitish stuff, and then cutting it across and across to
destroy it. Thick fumes arose, and quiverings and shakings began. Black
creatures in their labyrinths of tunnels began to panic. Off to the
right the blanket-like surface ripped and they poured out. They scuttled
crazily here and there. Some took to wing. By instinct the other
men—the armed ones—moved back from the smoke. They wore space-helmets
but they felt that there should be an intolerable smell.
Moran slashed and slashed angrily with the big flame, cutting a way to
the metal hull that had fallen here before his grandfather was born.
Sometimes the flame cut across things that writhed, and he was sickened.
But above all he raged because he was to be marooned here. He could not
altogether blame the others. They couldn't land at any colonized world
with him on board without his being detected as an extra member of the
crew. His fate would then be sealed. But they also would be
investigated. Official queries would go across this whole sector of the
galaxy, naming five persons of such-and-such description and
such-and-such fingerprints, voyaging in a space-yacht of such-and-such
size and registration. The world they came from would claim them as
fugitives. They would be returned to it. They'd be executed.
Then Carol's voice came in his helmet-phone. She cried out;
"
Look out! It's coming! Kill it! Kill it—.
"
He heard blast-rifles firing. He heard Burleigh pant commands. He was on
his way out of the hollow he'd carved when he heard Harper cry out
horribly.
He got clear of the newly burned-away stuff. There was still much smoke
and stream. But he saw Harper. More, he saw the thing that had Harper.
It occurred to him instantly that if Harper died, there would not be too
many people on the
Nadine
. They need not maroon him. In fact, they
wouldn't dare.
A ship that came in to port with two few on board would be investigated
as thoroughly as one that had too many. Perhaps more thoroughly. So if
Harper were killed, Moran would be needed to take his place. He'd go on
from here in the
Nadine
, necessarily accepted as a member of her crew.
Then he rushed, the flame-torch making a roaring sound.
II.
They went back to the
Nadine
for weapons more adequate for
encountering the local fauna when it was over. Blast-rifles were not
effective against such creatures as these. Torches were contact weapons
but they killed. Blast-rifles did not. And Harper needed to pull himself
together again, too. Also, neither Moran nor any of the others wanted to
go back to the still un-entered wreck while the skinny, somehow
disgusting legs of the thing still kicked spasmodically—quite
separate—on the whitish ground-stuff. Moran had disliked such creatures
in miniature form on other worlds. Enlarged like this.
It seemed insane that such creatures, even in miniature, should
painstakingly be brought across light-years of space to the new worlds
men settled on. But it had been found to be necessary. The ecological
system in which human beings belonged had turned out to be infinitely
complicated. It had turned out, in fact, to be the ecological system of
Earth, and unless all parts of the complex were present, the total was
subtly or glaringly wrong. So mankind distastefully ferried pests as
well as useful creatures to its new worlds as they were made ready for
settlement. Mosquitos throve on the inhabited globes of the Rim Stars.
Roaches twitched nervous antennae on the settled planets of the
Coal-sack. Dogs on Antares had fleas, and scratched their bites, and
humanity spread through the galaxy with an attendant train of insects
and annoyances. If they left their pests behind, the total system of
checks and balances which make life practical would get lopsided. It
would not maintain itself. The vagaries that could result were admirably
illustrated in and on the landscape outside the
Nadine
. Something had
been left out of the seeding of this planet. The element—which might be
a bacterium or a virus or almost anything at all—the element that kept
creatures at the size called "normal" was either missing or inoperable
here. The results were not desirable. | [
"A pulsing, reeking object egg casing that contains countless unhatched beetle eggs",
"An empty spacecraft where a crew member had survived long enough to set up a marker",
"A 'yard-worm,' which is an uncontrolled type of an 'inch-worm'",
"The remains of a crew that had landed on the alien planet a century earlier"
] | 1 |
43046_Q9R0IJB9_10 | What is the most likely reason that creatures on the alien planet have grown to such a large size? | <!-- $Id: header.txt 236 2009-12-07 18:57:00Z vlsimpson $ -->
PLANET of DREAD
By MURRAY LEINSTER
Illustrator ADKINS
I.
Moran cut apart the yard-long monstrosity with a slash of flame.
The thing presumably died, but it continued to writhe senselessly.
He turned to see other horrors crawling toward him. Then he knew he
was being marooned on a planet of endless terrors.
Moran, naturally, did not mean to help in the carrying out of the plans
which would mean his destruction one way or another. The plans were
thrashed out very painstakingly, in formal conference on the space-yacht
Nadine
, with Moran present and allowed to take part in the discussion.
From the viewpoint of the
Nadine's
ship's company, it was simply
necessary to get rid of Moran. In their predicament he might have come
to the same conclusion; but he was not at all enthusiastic about their
decision. He would die of it.
The
Nadine
was out of overdrive and all the uncountable suns of the
galaxy shone steadily, remotely, as infinitesimal specks of light of
every color of the rainbow. Two hours since, the sun of this solar
system had been a vast glaring disk off to port, with streamers and
prominences erupting about its edges. Now it lay astern, and Moran
could see the planet that had been chosen for his marooning. It was a
cloudy world. There were some dim markings near one lighted limb, but
nowhere else. There was an ice-cap in view. The rest was—clouds.
The ice-cap, by its existence and circular shape, proved that the planet
rotated at a not unreasonable rate. The fact that it was water-ice told
much. A water-ice ice-cap said that there were no poisonous gases in the
planet's atmosphere. Sulfur dioxide or chlorine, for example, would not
allow the formation of water-ice. It would have to be sulphuric-acid or
hydrochloric-acid ice. But the ice-cap was simple snow. Its size, too,
told about temperature-distribution on the planet. A large cap would
have meant a large area with arctic and sub-arctic temperatures, with
small temperate and tropical climate-belts. A small one like this meant
wide tropical and sub-tropical zones. The fact was verified by the
thick, dense cloud-masses which covered most of the surface,—all the
surface, in fact, outside the ice-cap. But since there were ice-caps
there would be temperate regions. In short, the ice-cap proved that a
man could endure the air and temperature conditions he would find.
Moran observed these things from the control-room of the
Nadine
, then
approaching the world on planetary drive. He was to be left here, with
no reason ever to expect rescue. Two of the
Nadine's
four-man crew
watched out the same ports as the planet seemed to approach. Burleigh
said encouragingly;
"It doesn't look too bad, Moran!"
Moran disagreed, but he did not answer. He cocked an ear instead. He
heard something. It was a thin, wabbling, keening whine. No natural
radiation sounds like that. Moran nodded toward the all-band speaker.
"Do you hear what I do?" he asked sardonically.
Burleigh listened. A distinctly artificial signal came out of the
speaker. It wasn't a voice-signal. It wasn't an identification beacon,
such as are placed on certain worlds for the convenience of interstellar
skippers who need to check their courses on extremely long runs. This
was something else.
Burleigh said:
"Hm ... Call the others, Harper."
Harper, prudently with him in the control-room, put his head into the
passage leading away. He called. But Moran observed with grudging
respect that he didn't give him a chance to do anything drastic. These
people on the
Nadine
were capable. They'd managed to recapture the
Nadine
from him, but they were matter-of-fact about it. They didn't
seem to resent what he'd tried to do, or that he'd brought them an
indefinite distance in an indefinite direction from their last
landing-point, and they had still to re-locate themselves.
They'd been on Coryus Three and they'd gotten departure clearance from
its space-port. With clearance-papers in order, they could land
unquestioned at any other space-port and take off again—provided the
other space-port was one they had clearance for. Without rigid control
of space-travel, any criminal anywhere could escape the consequences of
any crime simply by buying a ticket to another world. Moran couldn't
have bought a ticket, but he'd tried to get off the planet Coryus on the
Nadine
. The trouble was that the
Nadine
had clearance papers
covering five persons aboard—four men and a girl Carol. Moran made six.
Wherever the yacht landed, such a disparity between its documents and
its crew would spark an investigation. A lengthy, incredibly minute
investigation. Moran, at least, would be picked out as a fugitive from
Coryus Three. The others were fugitives too, from some unnamed world
Moran did not know. They might be sent back where they came from. In
effect, with six people on board instead of five, the
Nadine
could not
land anywhere for supplies. With five on board, as her papers declared,
she could. And Moran was the extra man whose presence would rouse
space-port officials' suspicion of the rest. So he had to be dumped.
He couldn't blame them. He'd made another difficulty, too. Blaster in
hand, he'd made the
Nadine
take off from Coryus III with a trip-tape
picked at random for guidance. But the trip-tape had been computed for
another starting-point, and when the yacht came out of overdrive it was
because the drive had been dismantled in the engine-room. So the ship's
location was in doubt. It could have travelled at almost any speed in
practically any direction for a length of time that was at least
indefinite. A liner could re-locate itself without trouble. It had
elaborate observational equipment and tri-di star-charts. But smaller
craft had to depend on the Galactic Directory. The process would be to
find a planet and check its climate and relationship to other planets,
and its flora and fauna against descriptions in the Directory. That was
the way to find out where one was, when one's position became doubtful.
The
Nadine
needed to make a planet-fall for this.
The rest of the ship's company came into the control-room. Burleigh
waved his hand at the speaker.
"Listen!"
They heard it. All of them. It was a trilling, whining sound among the
innumerable random noises to be heard in supposedly empty space.
"That's a marker," Carol announced. "I saw a costume-story tape once
that had that sound in it. It marked a first-landing spot on some planet
or other, so the people could find that spot again. It was supposed to
be a long time ago, though."
"It's weak," observed Burleigh. "We'll try answering it."
Moran stirred, and he knew that every one of the others was conscious of
the movement. But they didn't watch him suspiciously. They were alert by
long habit. Burleigh said they'd been Underground people, fighting the
government of their native world, and they'd gotten away to make it seem
the revolt had collapsed. They'd go back later when they weren't
expected, and start it up again. Moran considered the story probable.
Only people accustomed to desperate actions would have remained so calm
when Moran had used desperate measures against them.
Burleigh picked up the transmitter-microphone.
"Calling ground," he said briskly. "Calling ground! We pick up your
signal. Please reply."
He repeated the call, over and over and over. There was no answer.
Cracklings and hissings came out of the speaker as before, and the thin
and reedy wabbling whine continued. The
Nadine
went on toward the
enlarging cloudy mass ahead.
Burleigh said;
"Well?"
"I think," said Carol, "that we should land. People have been here. If
they left a beacon, they may have left an identification of the planet.
Then we'd know where we are and how to get to Loris."
Burleigh nodded. The
Nadine
had cleared for Loris. That was where it
should make its next landing. The little yacht went on. All five of its
proper company watched as the planet's surface enlarged. The ice-cap
went out of sight around the bulge of the globe, but no markings
appeared. There were cloud-banks everywhere, probably low down in the
atmosphere. The darker vague areas previously seen might have been
highlands.
"I think," said Carol, to Moran, "that if it's too tropical where this
signal's coming from, we'll take you somewhere near enough to the
ice-cap to have an endurable climate. I've been figuring on food, too.
That will depend on where we are from Loris because we have to keep
enough for ourselves. But we can spare some. We'll give you the
emergency-kit, anyhow."
The emergency-kit contained antiseptics, seeds, and a weapon or two,
with elaborate advice to castaways. If somebody were wrecked on an even
possibly habitable planet, the especially developed seed-strains would
provide food in a minimum of time. It was not an encouraging thought,
though, and Moran grimaced.
She hadn't said anything about being sorry that he had to be marooned.
Maybe she was, but rebels learn to be practical or they don't live long.
Moran wondered, momentarily, what sort of world they came from and why
they had revolted, and what sort of set-back to the revolt had sent the
five off in what they considered a strategic retreat but their
government would think defeat. Moran's own situation was perfectly
clear.
He'd killed a man on Coryus III. His victim would not be mourned by
anybody, and somebody formerly in very great danger would now be safe,
which was the reason for what Moran had done. But the dead man had been
very important, and the fact that Moran had forced him to fight and
killed him in fair combat made no difference. Moran had needed to get
off-planet, and fast. But space-travel regulations are especially
designed to prevent such escapes.
He'd made a pretty good try, at that. One of the controls on
space-traffic required a ship on landing to deposit its fuel-block in
the space-port's vaults. The fuel-block was not returned until clearance
for departure had been granted. But Moran had waylaid the messenger
carrying the
Nadine's
fuel-block back to that space-yacht. He'd
knocked the messenger cold and presented himself at the yacht with the
fuel. He was admitted. He put the block in the engine's gate. He duly
took the plastic receipt-token the engine only then released, and he
drew a blaster. He'd locked two of the
Nadine's
crew in the
engine-room, rushed to the control-room without encountering the others,
dogged the door shut, and threaded in the first trip-tape to come to
hand. He punched the take-off button and only seconds later the
overdrive. Then the yacht—and Moran—was away. But his present
companions got the drive dismantled two days later and once the yacht
was out of overdrive they efficiently gave him his choice of
surrendering or else. He surrendered, stipulating that he wouldn't be
landed back on Coryus; he still clung to hope of avoiding return—which
was almost certain anyhow. Because nobody would want to go back to a
planet from which they'd carried away a criminal, even though they'd
done it unwillingly. Investigation of such a matter might last for
months.
Now the space-yacht moved toward a vast mass of fleecy whiteness without
any visible features. Harper stayed with the direction-finder. From time
to time he gave readings requiring minute changes of course. The
wabbling, whining signal was louder now. It became louder than all the
rest of the space-noises together.
The yacht touched atmosphere and Burleigh said;
"Watch our height, Carol."
She stood by the echometer. Sixty miles. Fifty. Thirty. A correction of
course. Fifteen miles to surface below. Ten. Five. At twenty-five
thousand feet there were clouds, which would be particles of ice so
small that they floated even so high. Then clear air, then lower clouds,
and lower ones still. It was not until six thousand feet above the
surface that the planet-wide cloud-level seemed to begin. From there on
down it was pure opacity. Anything could exist in that dense, almost
palpable grayness. There could be jagged peaks.
The
Nadine
went down and down. At fifteen hundred feet above the
unseen surface, the clouds ended. Below, there was only haze. One could
see the ground, at least, but there was no horizon. There was only an
end to visibility. The yacht descended as if in the center of a sphere
in which one could see clearly nearby, less clearly at a little
distance, and not at all beyond a quarter-mile or so.
There was a shaded, shadowless twilight under the cloud-bank. The ground
looked like no ground ever seen before by anyone. Off to the right a
rivulet ran between improbable-seeming banks. There were a few very
small hills of most unlikely appearance. It was the ground, the matter
on which one would walk, which was strangest. It had color, but the
color was not green. Much of it was a pallid, dirty-yellowish white. But
there were patches of blue, and curious veinings of black, and here and
there were other colors, all of them unlike the normal color of
vegetation on a planet with a sol-type sun.
Harper spoke from the direction-finder;
"The signal's coming from that mound, yonder."
There was a hillock of elongated shape directly in line with the
Nadine's
course in descent. Except for the patches of color, it was
the only considerable landmark within the half-mile circle in which
anything could be seen at all.
The
Nadine
checked her downward motion. Interplanetary drive is rugged
and sure, but it does not respond to fine adjustment. Burleigh used
rockets, issuing great bellowings of flame, to make actual contact. The
yacht hovered, and as the rocket-flames diminished slowly she sat down
with practically no impact at all. But around her there was a monstrous
tumult of smoke and steam. When the rockets went off, she lay in a
burned-out hollow some three or four feet deep with a bottom of solid
stone. The walls of the hollow were black and scorched. It seemed that
at some places they quivered persistently.
There was silence in the control-room save for the whining noise which
now was almost deafening. Harper snapped off the switch. Then there was
true silence. The space-yacht had come to rest possibly a hundred yards
from the mound which was the source of the space-signal. That mound
shared the peculiarity of the ground as far as they could see through
the haze. It was not vegetation in any ordinary sense. Certainly it was
no mineral surface! The landing-pockets had burned away three or four
feet of it, and the edge of the burned area smoked noisesomely, and
somehow it looked as if it would reek. And there were places where it
stirred.
Burleigh blinked and stared. Then he reached up and flicked on the
outside microphones. Instantly there was bedlam. If the landscape was
strange, here, the sounds that came from it were unbelievable.
There were grunting noises. There were clickings, uncountable clickings
that made a background for all the rest. There were discordant howls and
honkings. From time to time some thing unknown made a cry that sounded
very much like a small boy trailing a stick against a picket fence, only
much louder. Something hooted, maintaining the noise for an impossibly
long time. And persistently, sounding as if they came from far away,
there were booming noises, unspeakably deep-bass, made by something
alive. And something shrieked in lunatic fashion and something else
still moaned from time to time with the volume of a steam-whistle....
"This sounds and looks like a nice place to live," said Moran with fine
irony.
Burleigh did not answer. He turned down the outside sound.
"What's that stuff there, the ground?" he demanded. "We burned it away
in landing. I've seen something like it somewhere, but never taking the
place of grass!"
"That," said Moran as if brightly, "that's what I'm to make a garden in.
Of evenings I'll stroll among my thrifty plantings and listen to the
delightful sounds of nature."
Burleigh scowled. Harper flicked off the direction-finder.
"The signal still comes from that hillock yonder," he said with
finality.
Moran said bitingly;
"That ain't no hillock, that's my home!"
Then, instantly he'd said it, he recognized that it could be true. The
mound was not a fold in the ground. It was not an up-cropping of the
ash-covered stone on which the
Nadine
rested. The enigmatic,
dirty-yellow-dirty-red-dirty-blue-and-dirty-black ground-cover hid
something. It blurred the shape it covered, very much as enormous
cobwebs made solid and opaque would have done. But when one looked
carefully at the mound, there was a landing-fin sticking up toward the
leaden skies. It was attached to a large cylindrical object of which the
fore part was crushed in. The other landing-fins could be traced.
"It's a ship," said Moran curtly. "It crash-landed and its crew set up a
signal to call for help. None came, or they'd have turned the beacon
off. Maybe they got the lifeboats to work and got away. Maybe they lived
as I'm expected to live until they died as I'm expected to die."
Burleigh said angrily;
"You'd do what we are doing if you were in our shoes!"
"Sure," said Moran, "but a man can gripe, can't he?"
"You won't have to live here," said Burleigh. "We'll take you somewhere
up by the ice-cap. As Carol said, we'll give you everything we can
spare. And meanwhile we'll take a look at that wreck yonder. There might
be an indication in it of what solar system this is. There could be
something in it of use to you, too. You'd better come along when we
explore."
"Aye, aye, sir," said Moran with irony. "Very kind of you, sir. You'll
go armed, sir?"
Burleigh growled;
"Naturally!"
"Then since I can't be trusted with a weapon," said Moran, "I suggest
that I take a torch. We may have to burn through that loathesome stuff
to get in the ship."
"Right," growled Burleigh again. "Brawn and Carol, you'll keep ship. The
rest of us wear suits. We don't know what that stuff is outside."
Moran silently went to the space-suit rack and began to get into a
suit. Modern space-suits weren't like the ancient crudities with bulging
metal casings and enormous globular helmets. Non-stretch fabrics took
the place of metal, and constant-volume joints were really practical
nowadays. A man could move about in a late-model space-suit almost as
easily as in ship-clothing. The others of the landing-party donned their
special garments with the brisk absence of fumbling that these people
displayed in every action.
"If there's a lifeboat left," said Carol suddenly, "Moran might be able
to do something with it."
"Ah, yes!" said Moran. "It's very likely that the ship hit hard enough
to kill everybody aboard, but not smash the boats!"
"Somebody survived the crash," said Burleigh, "because they set up a
beacon. I wouldn't count on a boat, Moran."
"I don't!" snapped Moran.
He flipped the fastener of his suit. He felt all the openings catch. He
saw the others complete their equipment. They took arms. So far they had
seen no moving thing outside, but arms were simple sanity on an unknown
world. Moran, though, would not be permitted a weapon. He picked up a
torch. They filed into the airlock. The inner door closed. The outer
door opened. It was not necessary to check the air specifically. The
suits would take care of that. Anyhow the ice-cap said there were no
water-soluble gases in the atmosphere, and a gas can't be an active
poison if it can't dissolve.
They filed out of the airlock. They stood on ash-covered stone, only
slightly eroded by the processes which made life possible on this
planet. They looked dubiously at the scorched, indefinite substance
which had been ground before the
Nadine
landed. Moran moved scornfully
forward. He kicked at the burnt stuff. His foot went through the char.
The hole exposed a cheesy mass of soft matter which seemed riddled with
small holes.
Something black came squirming frantically out of one of the openings.
It was eight or ten inches long. It had a head, a thorax, and an
abdomen. It had wing-cases. It had six legs. It toppled down to the
stone on which the
Nadine
rested. Agitatedly, it spread its
wing-covers and flew away, droning loudly. The four men heard the sound
above even the monstrous cacophony of cries and boomings and grunts and
squeaks which seemed to fill the air.
"What the devil—."
Moran kicked again. More holes. More openings. More small tunnels in the
cheese-like, curd-like stuff. More black things squirming to view in
obvious panic. They popped out everywhere. It was suddenly apparent
that the top of the soil, here, was a thick and blanket-like sheet over
the whitish stuff. The black creatures lived and thrived in tunnels
under it.
Carol's voice came over the helmet-phones.
"
They're—bugs!
" she said incredulously. "
They're beetles! They're
twenty times the size of the beetles we humans have been carrying around
the galaxy, but that's what they are!
"
Moran grunted. Distastefully, he saw his predicament made worse. He knew
what had happened here. He could begin to guess at other things to be
discovered. It had not been practical for men to move onto new planets
and subsist upon the flora and fauna they found there. On some new
planets life had never gotten started. On such worlds a highly complex
operation was necessary before humanity could move in. A complete
ecological complex had to be built up; microbes to break down the rock
for soil, bacteria to fix nitrogen to make the soil fertile; plants to
grow in the new-made dirt and insects to fertilize the plants so they
would multiply, and animals and birds to carry the seeds planet-wide. On
most planets, to be sure, there were local, aboriginal plants and
animals. But still terrestrial creatures had to be introduced if a
colony was to feed itself. Alien plants did not supply satisfactory
food. So an elaborate adaptation job had to be done on every planet
before native and terrestrial living things settled down together. It
wasn't impossible that the scuttling things were truly beetles, grown
large and monstrous under the conditions of a new planet. And the
ground....
"This ground stuff," said Moran distastefully, "is yeast or some sort of
toadstool growth. This is a seedling world. It didn't have any life on
it, so somebody dumped germs and spores and bugs to make it ready for
plants and animals eventually. But nobody's come back to finish up the
job."
Burleigh grunted a somehow surprised assent. But it wasn't surprising;
not wholly so. Once one mentioned yeasts and toadstools and fungi
generally, the weird landscape became less than incredible. But it
remained actively unpleasant to think of being marooned on it.
"Suppose we go look at the ship?" said Moran unpleasantly. "Maybe you
can find out where you are, and I can find out what's ahead of me."
He climbed up on the unscorched surface. It was elastic. The
parchment-like top skin yielded. It was like walking on a mass of
springs.
"We'd better spread out," added Moran, "or else we'll break through that
skin and be floundering in this mess."
"I'm giving the orders, Moran!" said Burleigh shortly. "But what you say
does make sense."
He and the others joined Moran on the yielding surface. Their footing
was uncertain, as on a trampoline. They staggered. They moved toward the
hillock which was a covered-over wrecked ship.
The ground was not as level as it appeared from the
Nadine's
control-room. There were undulations. But they could not see more than a
quarter-mile in any direction. Beyond that was mist. But Burleigh, at
one end of the uneven line of advancing men, suddenly halted and stood
staring down at something he had not seen before. The others halted.
Something moved. It came out from behind a very minor spire of whitish
stuff that looked like a dirty sheet stretched over a tall stone. The
thing that appeared was very peculiar indeed. It was a—worm. But it was
a foot thick and ten feet long, and it had a group of stumpy legs at its
fore end—where there were eyes hidden behind bristling hair-like
growths—and another set of feet at its tail end. It progressed sedately
by reaching forward with its fore-part, securing a foothold, and then
arching its middle portion like a cat arching its back, to bring its
hind part forward. Then it reached forward again. It was of a dark olive
color from one end to the other. Its manner of walking was insane but
somehow sedate.
Moran heard muffled noises in his helmet-phone as the others tried to
speak. Carol's voice came anxiously;
"
What's the matter? What do you see?
"
Moran said with savage precision;
"We're looking at an inch-worm, grown up like the beetles only more so.
It's not an inch-worm any longer. It's a yard-worm." Then he said
harshly to the men with him; "It's not a hunting creature on worlds
where it's smaller. It's not likely to have turned deadly here. Come
on!"
He went forward over the singularly bouncy ground. The others followed.
It was to be noted that Hallet the engineer, avoided the huge harmless
creature more widely than most.
They reached the mound which was the ship. Moran unlimbered his torch.
He said sardonically;
"This ship won't do anybody any good. It's old-style. That thick belt
around its middle was dropped a hundred years ago, and more." There was
an abrupt thickening of the cylindrical hull at the middle. There was an
equally abrupt thinning, again, toward the landing-fins. The sharpness
of the change was blurred over by the revolting ground-stuff growing
everywhere. "We're going to find that this wreck has been here a century
at least!"
Without orders, he turned on the torch. A four-foot flame of pure
blue-white leaped out. He touched its tip to the fungoid soil. Steam
leaped up. He used the flame like a gigantic scalpel, cutting a square a
yard deep in the whitish stuff, and then cutting it across and across to
destroy it. Thick fumes arose, and quiverings and shakings began. Black
creatures in their labyrinths of tunnels began to panic. Off to the
right the blanket-like surface ripped and they poured out. They scuttled
crazily here and there. Some took to wing. By instinct the other
men—the armed ones—moved back from the smoke. They wore space-helmets
but they felt that there should be an intolerable smell.
Moran slashed and slashed angrily with the big flame, cutting a way to
the metal hull that had fallen here before his grandfather was born.
Sometimes the flame cut across things that writhed, and he was sickened.
But above all he raged because he was to be marooned here. He could not
altogether blame the others. They couldn't land at any colonized world
with him on board without his being detected as an extra member of the
crew. His fate would then be sealed. But they also would be
investigated. Official queries would go across this whole sector of the
galaxy, naming five persons of such-and-such description and
such-and-such fingerprints, voyaging in a space-yacht of such-and-such
size and registration. The world they came from would claim them as
fugitives. They would be returned to it. They'd be executed.
Then Carol's voice came in his helmet-phone. She cried out;
"
Look out! It's coming! Kill it! Kill it—.
"
He heard blast-rifles firing. He heard Burleigh pant commands. He was on
his way out of the hollow he'd carved when he heard Harper cry out
horribly.
He got clear of the newly burned-away stuff. There was still much smoke
and stream. But he saw Harper. More, he saw the thing that had Harper.
It occurred to him instantly that if Harper died, there would not be too
many people on the
Nadine
. They need not maroon him. In fact, they
wouldn't dare.
A ship that came in to port with two few on board would be investigated
as thoroughly as one that had too many. Perhaps more thoroughly. So if
Harper were killed, Moran would be needed to take his place. He'd go on
from here in the
Nadine
, necessarily accepted as a member of her crew.
Then he rushed, the flame-torch making a roaring sound.
II.
They went back to the
Nadine
for weapons more adequate for
encountering the local fauna when it was over. Blast-rifles were not
effective against such creatures as these. Torches were contact weapons
but they killed. Blast-rifles did not. And Harper needed to pull himself
together again, too. Also, neither Moran nor any of the others wanted to
go back to the still un-entered wreck while the skinny, somehow
disgusting legs of the thing still kicked spasmodically—quite
separate—on the whitish ground-stuff. Moran had disliked such creatures
in miniature form on other worlds. Enlarged like this.
It seemed insane that such creatures, even in miniature, should
painstakingly be brought across light-years of space to the new worlds
men settled on. But it had been found to be necessary. The ecological
system in which human beings belonged had turned out to be infinitely
complicated. It had turned out, in fact, to be the ecological system of
Earth, and unless all parts of the complex were present, the total was
subtly or glaringly wrong. So mankind distastefully ferried pests as
well as useful creatures to its new worlds as they were made ready for
settlement. Mosquitos throve on the inhabited globes of the Rim Stars.
Roaches twitched nervous antennae on the settled planets of the
Coal-sack. Dogs on Antares had fleas, and scratched their bites, and
humanity spread through the galaxy with an attendant train of insects
and annoyances. If they left their pests behind, the total system of
checks and balances which make life practical would get lopsided. It
would not maintain itself. The vagaries that could result were admirably
illustrated in and on the landscape outside the
Nadine
. Something had
been left out of the seeding of this planet. The element—which might be
a bacterium or a virus or almost anything at all—the element that kept
creatures at the size called "normal" was either missing or inoperable
here. The results were not desirable. | [
"The planet is being used by the government as a site to breed creatures that could keep the population in check.",
"The planet's atmosphere comprises gases that target the DNA of living creatures, causing them to grow in size.",
"The planet, like many others, is being used as a site to copy a habitable eco-system, but has been left unchecked.",
"The planet's cheesy, perforated ground is made up of a substance that causes living creatures to mutate."
] | 2 |
20069_M2O7ZO3N_1 | According to the reviewer of "American Beauty," the protagonist Lester has mostly lost _____. | A Good Year for the Roses?
Early in American
Beauty , Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey), a weary reporter for a media
magazine, masturbates in the shower while informing us in voice-over that we're
witnessing the highlight of his day. He peers through tired eyes out the window
at his manicured suburban tract-house lawn, where his wife, Carolyn (Annette
Bening)--whose gardening clogs, he points out, are color-coordinated with the
handles of her shears--snips roses (American beauties) and twitters about
Miracle-Gro to a gay yuppie (Scott Bakula) on the other side of a white picket
fence. "I have lost something," says Lester. "I'm not exactly sure what it is
but I know I didn't always feel this ... sedated." Apparently, Lester doesn't
realize that snipped roses are garden-variety symbols of castration, or he'd
know what he has lost. But the makers of American Beauty are about to
give Lester his roses back. At a high-school basketball game, Lester is
transfixed by a blonde cheerleader named Angela (Mena Suvari), who is twirling
alongside his daughter, Jane (Thora Burch). Ambient noise falls away, the crowd
disappears, and there she is, Lester's angel, writhing in slow motion--just for
him. She opens her jacket (she's naked underneath) and red rose petals drift
out. Later, Lester envisions her on a bed of red petals, then immersed in a
bath of red petals. Back in the roses for the first time in years, he's soon
pumping iron, smoking pot, and telling off his frigid wife and faceless bosses,
convinced that whatever he has lost he's getting back, baby.
The movie is convinced,
too--which is odd, since the fantasy of an underage cheerleader making a
middle-aged man's wilted roses bloom is a tad ... primitive. But American
Beauty doesn't feel primitive. It feels lustrously hip and aware,
and a lot of critics are making big claims for it. The script, by Alan Ball, a
playwright and former sitcom writer, carries an invigorating blast of
counterculture righteousness, along with the kind of pithily vicious marital
bickering that makes some viewers (especially male) say, "Yeah! Tell that bitch
off!" More important, it has a vein of metaphysical yearning, which the
director, Sam Mendes, mines brilliantly. A hotshot English theater director
(his Cabaret revival is still on the boards in New York), Mendes gives
the film a patina of New Age lyricism and layer upon layer of visual irony. The
movie's surface is velvety and immaculate--until the action is abruptly viewed
through the video camera of the teen-age voyeur next door (Wes Bentley), and
the graininess of the video image (along with the plangent music) suggests how
unstable the molecules that constitute our "reality" really are. Mendes can
distend the real into the surreal with imperceptible puffs. Aided by his
cinematographer, Conrad Hall, and editors, Tariq Anwar and Chris Greenbury, he
creates an entrancing vision of the American nuclear family on the verge of a
meltdown.
A merican
Beauty is so wittily written and
gorgeously directed that you might think you're seeing something
archetypal--maybe even the Great American Movie. But when you stop and smell
the roses ... Well, that scent isn't Miracle-Gro. The hairpin turns from farce
to melodrama, from satire to bathos, are fresh and deftly navigated, but almost
every one of the underlying attitudes is smug and easy: from the corporate
flunky named "Brad" to the interchangeable gay neighbors (they're both called
"Jim") to the brutally homophobic patriarch next door, an ex-Marine colonel
(Chris Cooper) who has reduced his wife (the normally exuberant Allison Janney)
to a catatonic mummy and his son, Ricky (Bentley), to a life of subterranean
deception. (The colonel's idea of bliss is watching an old Ronald Reagan
military picture on television: How's that for subtle?) Lester's wife, Carolyn,
is even more stridently caricatured. A real-estate broker who fails to sell a
big house (her only potential customers are blank-faced African-Americans,
Indian-Americans, and surly lesbians), she wears a mask of perky efficiency and
insists on listening to Muzak while she and her husband and daughter eat her
"nutritious yet savory" dinners. It's amazing that Mendes and Ball get away
with recycling so many stale and reactionary ideas under the all-purpose rubric
of "black comedy."
But it's also possible
that those ideas have rarely been presented so seductively. Several months ago,
Daniel Menaker in
Slate
in contemporary film in which the
protagonist attempts to break through our cultural and technological
anesthetization into "the real." That's the theme here, too, and it's
extraordinarily potent, at times even heartbreaking. The symbols, however, have
been cunningly reversed. In movies like sex, lies, and videotape (1989),
the protagonist has to put away the video camera to "get real"; in American
Beauty , it's Ricky Fitts, the damaged stoner videomaker next door, who sees
beauty where nonartists see only horror or nothingness. In the film's most
self-consciously poetic set piece, Ricky shows Lester's dour daughter Jane--in
whom he recognizes a kindred spirit--a video of a plastic bag fluttering up,
down, and around on invisible currents of wind. Ricky speaks of glimpsing in
the bag's trajectory an "entire life behind things"--a "benevolent force" that
holds the universe together. The teen-ager, who likes to train his lenses on
dead bodies of animals and people, sells wildly expensive marijuana to Lester
and somehow passes on this notion of "beauty." By the end, Lester is mouthing
the same sentiments and has acquired the same deadpan radiance. That must be
some really good shit they're smoking.
It's not the druggy philosophizing, however, that makes
American Beauty an emotional workout. It's that the caricatures are
grounded in sympathy instead of derision. Everyone on screen is in serious
pain. The manipulative sexpot Angela, who taunts her friend Jane with the idea
of seducing her dad, acts chiefly out of a terror of appearing ordinary. As the
military martinet, Cooper goes against the grain, turning Col. Fitts into a
sour bulldog whose capaciously baggy eyes are moist with sadness over his
inability to reach out. (When he stands helplessly in the rain at the end, the
deluge completes him.) The character of Carolyn is so shrill as to constitute a
libel on the female sex, but there isn't a second when Bening sends the woman
up. She doesn't transcend the part, she fills it to the brim, anatomizes it.
You can't hate Carolyn because the woman is trying so hard--to appear
confident, composed, in control. When she fails to sell that house, she closes
the shades and lets go with a naked wail--it's the sound of a vacuum crying to
be filled--then furiously slaps herself while sputtering, "Shut up--you're
weak--shut up. " Then she breathes, regains her go-get-'em poise, replaces
her mask. Carolyn isn't a complicated dramatic construction, but Bening gives
her a primal force. An actress who packs more psychological detail into a
single gesture than others get into whole scenes, Bening was barreling down the
road to greatness before she hit a speed bump called Warren. It's a joy to
observe her--both here and in Neil Jordan's In Dreams (1999)--back at
full throttle.
American Beauty is Spacey's movie, though.
He gives it--how weird to write this about Spacey, who made his name playing
flamboyantly self-involved psychopaths--a heart. Early on, he lets his face and
posture go slack and his eyes blurry. He mugs like crazy, telegraphing Lester's
"loserness." But Spacey's genius is for mugging in character. He makes us
believe that it's Lester who's caricaturing himself , and that bitter
edge paves the way for the character's later, more comfortably Spacey-like
scenes of insult and mockery. He even makes us take Lester's final, improbably
rhapsodic moments straight.
But do the filmmakers
take them straight? If I read it correctly, the movie is saying that American
society is unjust and absurd and loveless--full of people so afraid of seeming
ordinary that they lose their capacity to see. It's saying that our only hope
is to cultivate a kind of stoned aesthetic detachment whereby even a man with
his brains blown out becomes an object of beauty and a signpost to a Higher
Power. But to scrutinize a freshly dead body and not ask how it got that
way--or if there's anyone nearby with a gun who might want to add to the body
count--strikes me as either moronic or insane or both. The kind of detachment
the movie is peddling isn't artistic, it isn't life--it's nihilism at its most
fatuous. In the end, American Beauty is New Age Nihilism.
Kevin Costner is 11 years older than he was as Crash Davis,
the over-the-hill minor-league catcher in Bull Durham (1988), but he can
still get away with playing a professional ballplayer. He moves and acts like a
celebrity jock, and he can make his narcissistic self-containment look as if
he's keeping something in reserve--to protect his "instrument," as it were. In
For Love of the Game , he's a 40ish Detroit Tigers pitcher having his
last hurrah: The team has been sold and the new owners don't necessarily want
him back. For about half an hour, it's a great sports movie. Costner stands on
the mound shaking off the signals of his longtime catcher (John C. Reilly); he
forces himself to tune out the huge Yankee Stadium crowd (the background blurs
before our eyes and the sound drops out); and he mutters darkly at a succession
of batters, some old nemeses, some old buddies.
He also thinks about his Manhattan-based
ex-girlfriend (Kelly Preston), who tearfully told him that morning that things
were absolutely over and she was moving to London. There's an appealing
flashback to how they met (he stopped to fix her car while on the way to Yankee
Stadium), then it's back to the game for more nail-biting at bats. But pretty
soon the relationship flashbacks start coming thick and fast, and the balance
of the movie shifts to whether Kevin can commit to Kelly and Kelly can commit
to Kevin or whether his only commitment could ever be to the ball and the
diamond and the game.
Maybe it's because I'm a baseball nut that I hated
to leave the mound. But maybe it's also because the relationships scenes are
soft-focus, generic, and woozily drawn-out, whereas the stuff in the stadium is
sharply edited and full of texture. The rhythms of the game feel right; the
rhythms of the romance feel embarrassingly Harlequin, and the picture drags on
for over two hours. I can't believe that the director, Sam Raimi ( The Evil
Dead , 1983; last year's A Simple Plan ) thought that all those scenes
of Costner and Preston staring into space while the piano plinks would end up
in the final cut, but Raimi apparently gave up control of the final cut for the
sake of making his first, real mainstream picture. He might as well have stuck
his head over the plate and said, "Bean me." | [
"His manhood",
"His sex drive",
"His family",
"His sanity"
] | 0 |
20069_M2O7ZO3N_2 | Based on the reviewer's description of Lester and his family, what is their likely socioeconomic status? | A Good Year for the Roses?
Early in American
Beauty , Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey), a weary reporter for a media
magazine, masturbates in the shower while informing us in voice-over that we're
witnessing the highlight of his day. He peers through tired eyes out the window
at his manicured suburban tract-house lawn, where his wife, Carolyn (Annette
Bening)--whose gardening clogs, he points out, are color-coordinated with the
handles of her shears--snips roses (American beauties) and twitters about
Miracle-Gro to a gay yuppie (Scott Bakula) on the other side of a white picket
fence. "I have lost something," says Lester. "I'm not exactly sure what it is
but I know I didn't always feel this ... sedated." Apparently, Lester doesn't
realize that snipped roses are garden-variety symbols of castration, or he'd
know what he has lost. But the makers of American Beauty are about to
give Lester his roses back. At a high-school basketball game, Lester is
transfixed by a blonde cheerleader named Angela (Mena Suvari), who is twirling
alongside his daughter, Jane (Thora Burch). Ambient noise falls away, the crowd
disappears, and there she is, Lester's angel, writhing in slow motion--just for
him. She opens her jacket (she's naked underneath) and red rose petals drift
out. Later, Lester envisions her on a bed of red petals, then immersed in a
bath of red petals. Back in the roses for the first time in years, he's soon
pumping iron, smoking pot, and telling off his frigid wife and faceless bosses,
convinced that whatever he has lost he's getting back, baby.
The movie is convinced,
too--which is odd, since the fantasy of an underage cheerleader making a
middle-aged man's wilted roses bloom is a tad ... primitive. But American
Beauty doesn't feel primitive. It feels lustrously hip and aware,
and a lot of critics are making big claims for it. The script, by Alan Ball, a
playwright and former sitcom writer, carries an invigorating blast of
counterculture righteousness, along with the kind of pithily vicious marital
bickering that makes some viewers (especially male) say, "Yeah! Tell that bitch
off!" More important, it has a vein of metaphysical yearning, which the
director, Sam Mendes, mines brilliantly. A hotshot English theater director
(his Cabaret revival is still on the boards in New York), Mendes gives
the film a patina of New Age lyricism and layer upon layer of visual irony. The
movie's surface is velvety and immaculate--until the action is abruptly viewed
through the video camera of the teen-age voyeur next door (Wes Bentley), and
the graininess of the video image (along with the plangent music) suggests how
unstable the molecules that constitute our "reality" really are. Mendes can
distend the real into the surreal with imperceptible puffs. Aided by his
cinematographer, Conrad Hall, and editors, Tariq Anwar and Chris Greenbury, he
creates an entrancing vision of the American nuclear family on the verge of a
meltdown.
A merican
Beauty is so wittily written and
gorgeously directed that you might think you're seeing something
archetypal--maybe even the Great American Movie. But when you stop and smell
the roses ... Well, that scent isn't Miracle-Gro. The hairpin turns from farce
to melodrama, from satire to bathos, are fresh and deftly navigated, but almost
every one of the underlying attitudes is smug and easy: from the corporate
flunky named "Brad" to the interchangeable gay neighbors (they're both called
"Jim") to the brutally homophobic patriarch next door, an ex-Marine colonel
(Chris Cooper) who has reduced his wife (the normally exuberant Allison Janney)
to a catatonic mummy and his son, Ricky (Bentley), to a life of subterranean
deception. (The colonel's idea of bliss is watching an old Ronald Reagan
military picture on television: How's that for subtle?) Lester's wife, Carolyn,
is even more stridently caricatured. A real-estate broker who fails to sell a
big house (her only potential customers are blank-faced African-Americans,
Indian-Americans, and surly lesbians), she wears a mask of perky efficiency and
insists on listening to Muzak while she and her husband and daughter eat her
"nutritious yet savory" dinners. It's amazing that Mendes and Ball get away
with recycling so many stale and reactionary ideas under the all-purpose rubric
of "black comedy."
But it's also possible
that those ideas have rarely been presented so seductively. Several months ago,
Daniel Menaker in
Slate
in contemporary film in which the
protagonist attempts to break through our cultural and technological
anesthetization into "the real." That's the theme here, too, and it's
extraordinarily potent, at times even heartbreaking. The symbols, however, have
been cunningly reversed. In movies like sex, lies, and videotape (1989),
the protagonist has to put away the video camera to "get real"; in American
Beauty , it's Ricky Fitts, the damaged stoner videomaker next door, who sees
beauty where nonartists see only horror or nothingness. In the film's most
self-consciously poetic set piece, Ricky shows Lester's dour daughter Jane--in
whom he recognizes a kindred spirit--a video of a plastic bag fluttering up,
down, and around on invisible currents of wind. Ricky speaks of glimpsing in
the bag's trajectory an "entire life behind things"--a "benevolent force" that
holds the universe together. The teen-ager, who likes to train his lenses on
dead bodies of animals and people, sells wildly expensive marijuana to Lester
and somehow passes on this notion of "beauty." By the end, Lester is mouthing
the same sentiments and has acquired the same deadpan radiance. That must be
some really good shit they're smoking.
It's not the druggy philosophizing, however, that makes
American Beauty an emotional workout. It's that the caricatures are
grounded in sympathy instead of derision. Everyone on screen is in serious
pain. The manipulative sexpot Angela, who taunts her friend Jane with the idea
of seducing her dad, acts chiefly out of a terror of appearing ordinary. As the
military martinet, Cooper goes against the grain, turning Col. Fitts into a
sour bulldog whose capaciously baggy eyes are moist with sadness over his
inability to reach out. (When he stands helplessly in the rain at the end, the
deluge completes him.) The character of Carolyn is so shrill as to constitute a
libel on the female sex, but there isn't a second when Bening sends the woman
up. She doesn't transcend the part, she fills it to the brim, anatomizes it.
You can't hate Carolyn because the woman is trying so hard--to appear
confident, composed, in control. When she fails to sell that house, she closes
the shades and lets go with a naked wail--it's the sound of a vacuum crying to
be filled--then furiously slaps herself while sputtering, "Shut up--you're
weak--shut up. " Then she breathes, regains her go-get-'em poise, replaces
her mask. Carolyn isn't a complicated dramatic construction, but Bening gives
her a primal force. An actress who packs more psychological detail into a
single gesture than others get into whole scenes, Bening was barreling down the
road to greatness before she hit a speed bump called Warren. It's a joy to
observe her--both here and in Neil Jordan's In Dreams (1999)--back at
full throttle.
American Beauty is Spacey's movie, though.
He gives it--how weird to write this about Spacey, who made his name playing
flamboyantly self-involved psychopaths--a heart. Early on, he lets his face and
posture go slack and his eyes blurry. He mugs like crazy, telegraphing Lester's
"loserness." But Spacey's genius is for mugging in character. He makes us
believe that it's Lester who's caricaturing himself , and that bitter
edge paves the way for the character's later, more comfortably Spacey-like
scenes of insult and mockery. He even makes us take Lester's final, improbably
rhapsodic moments straight.
But do the filmmakers
take them straight? If I read it correctly, the movie is saying that American
society is unjust and absurd and loveless--full of people so afraid of seeming
ordinary that they lose their capacity to see. It's saying that our only hope
is to cultivate a kind of stoned aesthetic detachment whereby even a man with
his brains blown out becomes an object of beauty and a signpost to a Higher
Power. But to scrutinize a freshly dead body and not ask how it got that
way--or if there's anyone nearby with a gun who might want to add to the body
count--strikes me as either moronic or insane or both. The kind of detachment
the movie is peddling isn't artistic, it isn't life--it's nihilism at its most
fatuous. In the end, American Beauty is New Age Nihilism.
Kevin Costner is 11 years older than he was as Crash Davis,
the over-the-hill minor-league catcher in Bull Durham (1988), but he can
still get away with playing a professional ballplayer. He moves and acts like a
celebrity jock, and he can make his narcissistic self-containment look as if
he's keeping something in reserve--to protect his "instrument," as it were. In
For Love of the Game , he's a 40ish Detroit Tigers pitcher having his
last hurrah: The team has been sold and the new owners don't necessarily want
him back. For about half an hour, it's a great sports movie. Costner stands on
the mound shaking off the signals of his longtime catcher (John C. Reilly); he
forces himself to tune out the huge Yankee Stadium crowd (the background blurs
before our eyes and the sound drops out); and he mutters darkly at a succession
of batters, some old nemeses, some old buddies.
He also thinks about his Manhattan-based
ex-girlfriend (Kelly Preston), who tearfully told him that morning that things
were absolutely over and she was moving to London. There's an appealing
flashback to how they met (he stopped to fix her car while on the way to Yankee
Stadium), then it's back to the game for more nail-biting at bats. But pretty
soon the relationship flashbacks start coming thick and fast, and the balance
of the movie shifts to whether Kevin can commit to Kelly and Kelly can commit
to Kevin or whether his only commitment could ever be to the ball and the
diamond and the game.
Maybe it's because I'm a baseball nut that I hated
to leave the mound. But maybe it's also because the relationships scenes are
soft-focus, generic, and woozily drawn-out, whereas the stuff in the stadium is
sharply edited and full of texture. The rhythms of the game feel right; the
rhythms of the romance feel embarrassingly Harlequin, and the picture drags on
for over two hours. I can't believe that the director, Sam Raimi ( The Evil
Dead , 1983; last year's A Simple Plan ) thought that all those scenes
of Costner and Preston staring into space while the piano plinks would end up
in the final cut, but Raimi apparently gave up control of the final cut for the
sake of making his first, real mainstream picture. He might as well have stuck
his head over the plate and said, "Bean me." | [
"Below poverty level",
"Blue collar",
"White collar",
"Middle class"
] | 3 |
20069_M2O7ZO3N_3 | The reviewer implies that the following demographic might relate most strongly to the film, "American Beauty": | A Good Year for the Roses?
Early in American
Beauty , Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey), a weary reporter for a media
magazine, masturbates in the shower while informing us in voice-over that we're
witnessing the highlight of his day. He peers through tired eyes out the window
at his manicured suburban tract-house lawn, where his wife, Carolyn (Annette
Bening)--whose gardening clogs, he points out, are color-coordinated with the
handles of her shears--snips roses (American beauties) and twitters about
Miracle-Gro to a gay yuppie (Scott Bakula) on the other side of a white picket
fence. "I have lost something," says Lester. "I'm not exactly sure what it is
but I know I didn't always feel this ... sedated." Apparently, Lester doesn't
realize that snipped roses are garden-variety symbols of castration, or he'd
know what he has lost. But the makers of American Beauty are about to
give Lester his roses back. At a high-school basketball game, Lester is
transfixed by a blonde cheerleader named Angela (Mena Suvari), who is twirling
alongside his daughter, Jane (Thora Burch). Ambient noise falls away, the crowd
disappears, and there she is, Lester's angel, writhing in slow motion--just for
him. She opens her jacket (she's naked underneath) and red rose petals drift
out. Later, Lester envisions her on a bed of red petals, then immersed in a
bath of red petals. Back in the roses for the first time in years, he's soon
pumping iron, smoking pot, and telling off his frigid wife and faceless bosses,
convinced that whatever he has lost he's getting back, baby.
The movie is convinced,
too--which is odd, since the fantasy of an underage cheerleader making a
middle-aged man's wilted roses bloom is a tad ... primitive. But American
Beauty doesn't feel primitive. It feels lustrously hip and aware,
and a lot of critics are making big claims for it. The script, by Alan Ball, a
playwright and former sitcom writer, carries an invigorating blast of
counterculture righteousness, along with the kind of pithily vicious marital
bickering that makes some viewers (especially male) say, "Yeah! Tell that bitch
off!" More important, it has a vein of metaphysical yearning, which the
director, Sam Mendes, mines brilliantly. A hotshot English theater director
(his Cabaret revival is still on the boards in New York), Mendes gives
the film a patina of New Age lyricism and layer upon layer of visual irony. The
movie's surface is velvety and immaculate--until the action is abruptly viewed
through the video camera of the teen-age voyeur next door (Wes Bentley), and
the graininess of the video image (along with the plangent music) suggests how
unstable the molecules that constitute our "reality" really are. Mendes can
distend the real into the surreal with imperceptible puffs. Aided by his
cinematographer, Conrad Hall, and editors, Tariq Anwar and Chris Greenbury, he
creates an entrancing vision of the American nuclear family on the verge of a
meltdown.
A merican
Beauty is so wittily written and
gorgeously directed that you might think you're seeing something
archetypal--maybe even the Great American Movie. But when you stop and smell
the roses ... Well, that scent isn't Miracle-Gro. The hairpin turns from farce
to melodrama, from satire to bathos, are fresh and deftly navigated, but almost
every one of the underlying attitudes is smug and easy: from the corporate
flunky named "Brad" to the interchangeable gay neighbors (they're both called
"Jim") to the brutally homophobic patriarch next door, an ex-Marine colonel
(Chris Cooper) who has reduced his wife (the normally exuberant Allison Janney)
to a catatonic mummy and his son, Ricky (Bentley), to a life of subterranean
deception. (The colonel's idea of bliss is watching an old Ronald Reagan
military picture on television: How's that for subtle?) Lester's wife, Carolyn,
is even more stridently caricatured. A real-estate broker who fails to sell a
big house (her only potential customers are blank-faced African-Americans,
Indian-Americans, and surly lesbians), she wears a mask of perky efficiency and
insists on listening to Muzak while she and her husband and daughter eat her
"nutritious yet savory" dinners. It's amazing that Mendes and Ball get away
with recycling so many stale and reactionary ideas under the all-purpose rubric
of "black comedy."
But it's also possible
that those ideas have rarely been presented so seductively. Several months ago,
Daniel Menaker in
Slate
in contemporary film in which the
protagonist attempts to break through our cultural and technological
anesthetization into "the real." That's the theme here, too, and it's
extraordinarily potent, at times even heartbreaking. The symbols, however, have
been cunningly reversed. In movies like sex, lies, and videotape (1989),
the protagonist has to put away the video camera to "get real"; in American
Beauty , it's Ricky Fitts, the damaged stoner videomaker next door, who sees
beauty where nonartists see only horror or nothingness. In the film's most
self-consciously poetic set piece, Ricky shows Lester's dour daughter Jane--in
whom he recognizes a kindred spirit--a video of a plastic bag fluttering up,
down, and around on invisible currents of wind. Ricky speaks of glimpsing in
the bag's trajectory an "entire life behind things"--a "benevolent force" that
holds the universe together. The teen-ager, who likes to train his lenses on
dead bodies of animals and people, sells wildly expensive marijuana to Lester
and somehow passes on this notion of "beauty." By the end, Lester is mouthing
the same sentiments and has acquired the same deadpan radiance. That must be
some really good shit they're smoking.
It's not the druggy philosophizing, however, that makes
American Beauty an emotional workout. It's that the caricatures are
grounded in sympathy instead of derision. Everyone on screen is in serious
pain. The manipulative sexpot Angela, who taunts her friend Jane with the idea
of seducing her dad, acts chiefly out of a terror of appearing ordinary. As the
military martinet, Cooper goes against the grain, turning Col. Fitts into a
sour bulldog whose capaciously baggy eyes are moist with sadness over his
inability to reach out. (When he stands helplessly in the rain at the end, the
deluge completes him.) The character of Carolyn is so shrill as to constitute a
libel on the female sex, but there isn't a second when Bening sends the woman
up. She doesn't transcend the part, she fills it to the brim, anatomizes it.
You can't hate Carolyn because the woman is trying so hard--to appear
confident, composed, in control. When she fails to sell that house, she closes
the shades and lets go with a naked wail--it's the sound of a vacuum crying to
be filled--then furiously slaps herself while sputtering, "Shut up--you're
weak--shut up. " Then she breathes, regains her go-get-'em poise, replaces
her mask. Carolyn isn't a complicated dramatic construction, but Bening gives
her a primal force. An actress who packs more psychological detail into a
single gesture than others get into whole scenes, Bening was barreling down the
road to greatness before she hit a speed bump called Warren. It's a joy to
observe her--both here and in Neil Jordan's In Dreams (1999)--back at
full throttle.
American Beauty is Spacey's movie, though.
He gives it--how weird to write this about Spacey, who made his name playing
flamboyantly self-involved psychopaths--a heart. Early on, he lets his face and
posture go slack and his eyes blurry. He mugs like crazy, telegraphing Lester's
"loserness." But Spacey's genius is for mugging in character. He makes us
believe that it's Lester who's caricaturing himself , and that bitter
edge paves the way for the character's later, more comfortably Spacey-like
scenes of insult and mockery. He even makes us take Lester's final, improbably
rhapsodic moments straight.
But do the filmmakers
take them straight? If I read it correctly, the movie is saying that American
society is unjust and absurd and loveless--full of people so afraid of seeming
ordinary that they lose their capacity to see. It's saying that our only hope
is to cultivate a kind of stoned aesthetic detachment whereby even a man with
his brains blown out becomes an object of beauty and a signpost to a Higher
Power. But to scrutinize a freshly dead body and not ask how it got that
way--or if there's anyone nearby with a gun who might want to add to the body
count--strikes me as either moronic or insane or both. The kind of detachment
the movie is peddling isn't artistic, it isn't life--it's nihilism at its most
fatuous. In the end, American Beauty is New Age Nihilism.
Kevin Costner is 11 years older than he was as Crash Davis,
the over-the-hill minor-league catcher in Bull Durham (1988), but he can
still get away with playing a professional ballplayer. He moves and acts like a
celebrity jock, and he can make his narcissistic self-containment look as if
he's keeping something in reserve--to protect his "instrument," as it were. In
For Love of the Game , he's a 40ish Detroit Tigers pitcher having his
last hurrah: The team has been sold and the new owners don't necessarily want
him back. For about half an hour, it's a great sports movie. Costner stands on
the mound shaking off the signals of his longtime catcher (John C. Reilly); he
forces himself to tune out the huge Yankee Stadium crowd (the background blurs
before our eyes and the sound drops out); and he mutters darkly at a succession
of batters, some old nemeses, some old buddies.
He also thinks about his Manhattan-based
ex-girlfriend (Kelly Preston), who tearfully told him that morning that things
were absolutely over and she was moving to London. There's an appealing
flashback to how they met (he stopped to fix her car while on the way to Yankee
Stadium), then it's back to the game for more nail-biting at bats. But pretty
soon the relationship flashbacks start coming thick and fast, and the balance
of the movie shifts to whether Kevin can commit to Kelly and Kelly can commit
to Kevin or whether his only commitment could ever be to the ball and the
diamond and the game.
Maybe it's because I'm a baseball nut that I hated
to leave the mound. But maybe it's also because the relationships scenes are
soft-focus, generic, and woozily drawn-out, whereas the stuff in the stadium is
sharply edited and full of texture. The rhythms of the game feel right; the
rhythms of the romance feel embarrassingly Harlequin, and the picture drags on
for over two hours. I can't believe that the director, Sam Raimi ( The Evil
Dead , 1983; last year's A Simple Plan ) thought that all those scenes
of Costner and Preston staring into space while the piano plinks would end up
in the final cut, but Raimi apparently gave up control of the final cut for the
sake of making his first, real mainstream picture. He might as well have stuck
his head over the plate and said, "Bean me." | [
"Emasculated men",
"Dysfunctional \"family men\"",
"Sex-addicted men",
"High-powered businessmen"
] | 0 |
20069_M2O7ZO3N_4 | According to the reviewer, which motif seems to represent the precariousness of reality? | A Good Year for the Roses?
Early in American
Beauty , Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey), a weary reporter for a media
magazine, masturbates in the shower while informing us in voice-over that we're
witnessing the highlight of his day. He peers through tired eyes out the window
at his manicured suburban tract-house lawn, where his wife, Carolyn (Annette
Bening)--whose gardening clogs, he points out, are color-coordinated with the
handles of her shears--snips roses (American beauties) and twitters about
Miracle-Gro to a gay yuppie (Scott Bakula) on the other side of a white picket
fence. "I have lost something," says Lester. "I'm not exactly sure what it is
but I know I didn't always feel this ... sedated." Apparently, Lester doesn't
realize that snipped roses are garden-variety symbols of castration, or he'd
know what he has lost. But the makers of American Beauty are about to
give Lester his roses back. At a high-school basketball game, Lester is
transfixed by a blonde cheerleader named Angela (Mena Suvari), who is twirling
alongside his daughter, Jane (Thora Burch). Ambient noise falls away, the crowd
disappears, and there she is, Lester's angel, writhing in slow motion--just for
him. She opens her jacket (she's naked underneath) and red rose petals drift
out. Later, Lester envisions her on a bed of red petals, then immersed in a
bath of red petals. Back in the roses for the first time in years, he's soon
pumping iron, smoking pot, and telling off his frigid wife and faceless bosses,
convinced that whatever he has lost he's getting back, baby.
The movie is convinced,
too--which is odd, since the fantasy of an underage cheerleader making a
middle-aged man's wilted roses bloom is a tad ... primitive. But American
Beauty doesn't feel primitive. It feels lustrously hip and aware,
and a lot of critics are making big claims for it. The script, by Alan Ball, a
playwright and former sitcom writer, carries an invigorating blast of
counterculture righteousness, along with the kind of pithily vicious marital
bickering that makes some viewers (especially male) say, "Yeah! Tell that bitch
off!" More important, it has a vein of metaphysical yearning, which the
director, Sam Mendes, mines brilliantly. A hotshot English theater director
(his Cabaret revival is still on the boards in New York), Mendes gives
the film a patina of New Age lyricism and layer upon layer of visual irony. The
movie's surface is velvety and immaculate--until the action is abruptly viewed
through the video camera of the teen-age voyeur next door (Wes Bentley), and
the graininess of the video image (along with the plangent music) suggests how
unstable the molecules that constitute our "reality" really are. Mendes can
distend the real into the surreal with imperceptible puffs. Aided by his
cinematographer, Conrad Hall, and editors, Tariq Anwar and Chris Greenbury, he
creates an entrancing vision of the American nuclear family on the verge of a
meltdown.
A merican
Beauty is so wittily written and
gorgeously directed that you might think you're seeing something
archetypal--maybe even the Great American Movie. But when you stop and smell
the roses ... Well, that scent isn't Miracle-Gro. The hairpin turns from farce
to melodrama, from satire to bathos, are fresh and deftly navigated, but almost
every one of the underlying attitudes is smug and easy: from the corporate
flunky named "Brad" to the interchangeable gay neighbors (they're both called
"Jim") to the brutally homophobic patriarch next door, an ex-Marine colonel
(Chris Cooper) who has reduced his wife (the normally exuberant Allison Janney)
to a catatonic mummy and his son, Ricky (Bentley), to a life of subterranean
deception. (The colonel's idea of bliss is watching an old Ronald Reagan
military picture on television: How's that for subtle?) Lester's wife, Carolyn,
is even more stridently caricatured. A real-estate broker who fails to sell a
big house (her only potential customers are blank-faced African-Americans,
Indian-Americans, and surly lesbians), she wears a mask of perky efficiency and
insists on listening to Muzak while she and her husband and daughter eat her
"nutritious yet savory" dinners. It's amazing that Mendes and Ball get away
with recycling so many stale and reactionary ideas under the all-purpose rubric
of "black comedy."
But it's also possible
that those ideas have rarely been presented so seductively. Several months ago,
Daniel Menaker in
Slate
in contemporary film in which the
protagonist attempts to break through our cultural and technological
anesthetization into "the real." That's the theme here, too, and it's
extraordinarily potent, at times even heartbreaking. The symbols, however, have
been cunningly reversed. In movies like sex, lies, and videotape (1989),
the protagonist has to put away the video camera to "get real"; in American
Beauty , it's Ricky Fitts, the damaged stoner videomaker next door, who sees
beauty where nonartists see only horror or nothingness. In the film's most
self-consciously poetic set piece, Ricky shows Lester's dour daughter Jane--in
whom he recognizes a kindred spirit--a video of a plastic bag fluttering up,
down, and around on invisible currents of wind. Ricky speaks of glimpsing in
the bag's trajectory an "entire life behind things"--a "benevolent force" that
holds the universe together. The teen-ager, who likes to train his lenses on
dead bodies of animals and people, sells wildly expensive marijuana to Lester
and somehow passes on this notion of "beauty." By the end, Lester is mouthing
the same sentiments and has acquired the same deadpan radiance. That must be
some really good shit they're smoking.
It's not the druggy philosophizing, however, that makes
American Beauty an emotional workout. It's that the caricatures are
grounded in sympathy instead of derision. Everyone on screen is in serious
pain. The manipulative sexpot Angela, who taunts her friend Jane with the idea
of seducing her dad, acts chiefly out of a terror of appearing ordinary. As the
military martinet, Cooper goes against the grain, turning Col. Fitts into a
sour bulldog whose capaciously baggy eyes are moist with sadness over his
inability to reach out. (When he stands helplessly in the rain at the end, the
deluge completes him.) The character of Carolyn is so shrill as to constitute a
libel on the female sex, but there isn't a second when Bening sends the woman
up. She doesn't transcend the part, she fills it to the brim, anatomizes it.
You can't hate Carolyn because the woman is trying so hard--to appear
confident, composed, in control. When she fails to sell that house, she closes
the shades and lets go with a naked wail--it's the sound of a vacuum crying to
be filled--then furiously slaps herself while sputtering, "Shut up--you're
weak--shut up. " Then she breathes, regains her go-get-'em poise, replaces
her mask. Carolyn isn't a complicated dramatic construction, but Bening gives
her a primal force. An actress who packs more psychological detail into a
single gesture than others get into whole scenes, Bening was barreling down the
road to greatness before she hit a speed bump called Warren. It's a joy to
observe her--both here and in Neil Jordan's In Dreams (1999)--back at
full throttle.
American Beauty is Spacey's movie, though.
He gives it--how weird to write this about Spacey, who made his name playing
flamboyantly self-involved psychopaths--a heart. Early on, he lets his face and
posture go slack and his eyes blurry. He mugs like crazy, telegraphing Lester's
"loserness." But Spacey's genius is for mugging in character. He makes us
believe that it's Lester who's caricaturing himself , and that bitter
edge paves the way for the character's later, more comfortably Spacey-like
scenes of insult and mockery. He even makes us take Lester's final, improbably
rhapsodic moments straight.
But do the filmmakers
take them straight? If I read it correctly, the movie is saying that American
society is unjust and absurd and loveless--full of people so afraid of seeming
ordinary that they lose their capacity to see. It's saying that our only hope
is to cultivate a kind of stoned aesthetic detachment whereby even a man with
his brains blown out becomes an object of beauty and a signpost to a Higher
Power. But to scrutinize a freshly dead body and not ask how it got that
way--or if there's anyone nearby with a gun who might want to add to the body
count--strikes me as either moronic or insane or both. The kind of detachment
the movie is peddling isn't artistic, it isn't life--it's nihilism at its most
fatuous. In the end, American Beauty is New Age Nihilism.
Kevin Costner is 11 years older than he was as Crash Davis,
the over-the-hill minor-league catcher in Bull Durham (1988), but he can
still get away with playing a professional ballplayer. He moves and acts like a
celebrity jock, and he can make his narcissistic self-containment look as if
he's keeping something in reserve--to protect his "instrument," as it were. In
For Love of the Game , he's a 40ish Detroit Tigers pitcher having his
last hurrah: The team has been sold and the new owners don't necessarily want
him back. For about half an hour, it's a great sports movie. Costner stands on
the mound shaking off the signals of his longtime catcher (John C. Reilly); he
forces himself to tune out the huge Yankee Stadium crowd (the background blurs
before our eyes and the sound drops out); and he mutters darkly at a succession
of batters, some old nemeses, some old buddies.
He also thinks about his Manhattan-based
ex-girlfriend (Kelly Preston), who tearfully told him that morning that things
were absolutely over and she was moving to London. There's an appealing
flashback to how they met (he stopped to fix her car while on the way to Yankee
Stadium), then it's back to the game for more nail-biting at bats. But pretty
soon the relationship flashbacks start coming thick and fast, and the balance
of the movie shifts to whether Kevin can commit to Kelly and Kelly can commit
to Kevin or whether his only commitment could ever be to the ball and the
diamond and the game.
Maybe it's because I'm a baseball nut that I hated
to leave the mound. But maybe it's also because the relationships scenes are
soft-focus, generic, and woozily drawn-out, whereas the stuff in the stadium is
sharply edited and full of texture. The rhythms of the game feel right; the
rhythms of the romance feel embarrassingly Harlequin, and the picture drags on
for over two hours. I can't believe that the director, Sam Raimi ( The Evil
Dead , 1983; last year's A Simple Plan ) thought that all those scenes
of Costner and Preston staring into space while the piano plinks would end up
in the final cut, but Raimi apparently gave up control of the final cut for the
sake of making his first, real mainstream picture. He might as well have stuck
his head over the plate and said, "Bean me." | [
"The rose petals in Angela's bathtub",
"The undulating plastic bag",
"The grainy texture of Ricky's camera film",
"The raindrops falling on top of the Colonel"
] | 2 |
20069_M2O7ZO3N_5 | Based on the reviewer's description of Carolyn, a viewer might assume that she values all of the following EXCEPT: | A Good Year for the Roses?
Early in American
Beauty , Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey), a weary reporter for a media
magazine, masturbates in the shower while informing us in voice-over that we're
witnessing the highlight of his day. He peers through tired eyes out the window
at his manicured suburban tract-house lawn, where his wife, Carolyn (Annette
Bening)--whose gardening clogs, he points out, are color-coordinated with the
handles of her shears--snips roses (American beauties) and twitters about
Miracle-Gro to a gay yuppie (Scott Bakula) on the other side of a white picket
fence. "I have lost something," says Lester. "I'm not exactly sure what it is
but I know I didn't always feel this ... sedated." Apparently, Lester doesn't
realize that snipped roses are garden-variety symbols of castration, or he'd
know what he has lost. But the makers of American Beauty are about to
give Lester his roses back. At a high-school basketball game, Lester is
transfixed by a blonde cheerleader named Angela (Mena Suvari), who is twirling
alongside his daughter, Jane (Thora Burch). Ambient noise falls away, the crowd
disappears, and there she is, Lester's angel, writhing in slow motion--just for
him. She opens her jacket (she's naked underneath) and red rose petals drift
out. Later, Lester envisions her on a bed of red petals, then immersed in a
bath of red petals. Back in the roses for the first time in years, he's soon
pumping iron, smoking pot, and telling off his frigid wife and faceless bosses,
convinced that whatever he has lost he's getting back, baby.
The movie is convinced,
too--which is odd, since the fantasy of an underage cheerleader making a
middle-aged man's wilted roses bloom is a tad ... primitive. But American
Beauty doesn't feel primitive. It feels lustrously hip and aware,
and a lot of critics are making big claims for it. The script, by Alan Ball, a
playwright and former sitcom writer, carries an invigorating blast of
counterculture righteousness, along with the kind of pithily vicious marital
bickering that makes some viewers (especially male) say, "Yeah! Tell that bitch
off!" More important, it has a vein of metaphysical yearning, which the
director, Sam Mendes, mines brilliantly. A hotshot English theater director
(his Cabaret revival is still on the boards in New York), Mendes gives
the film a patina of New Age lyricism and layer upon layer of visual irony. The
movie's surface is velvety and immaculate--until the action is abruptly viewed
through the video camera of the teen-age voyeur next door (Wes Bentley), and
the graininess of the video image (along with the plangent music) suggests how
unstable the molecules that constitute our "reality" really are. Mendes can
distend the real into the surreal with imperceptible puffs. Aided by his
cinematographer, Conrad Hall, and editors, Tariq Anwar and Chris Greenbury, he
creates an entrancing vision of the American nuclear family on the verge of a
meltdown.
A merican
Beauty is so wittily written and
gorgeously directed that you might think you're seeing something
archetypal--maybe even the Great American Movie. But when you stop and smell
the roses ... Well, that scent isn't Miracle-Gro. The hairpin turns from farce
to melodrama, from satire to bathos, are fresh and deftly navigated, but almost
every one of the underlying attitudes is smug and easy: from the corporate
flunky named "Brad" to the interchangeable gay neighbors (they're both called
"Jim") to the brutally homophobic patriarch next door, an ex-Marine colonel
(Chris Cooper) who has reduced his wife (the normally exuberant Allison Janney)
to a catatonic mummy and his son, Ricky (Bentley), to a life of subterranean
deception. (The colonel's idea of bliss is watching an old Ronald Reagan
military picture on television: How's that for subtle?) Lester's wife, Carolyn,
is even more stridently caricatured. A real-estate broker who fails to sell a
big house (her only potential customers are blank-faced African-Americans,
Indian-Americans, and surly lesbians), she wears a mask of perky efficiency and
insists on listening to Muzak while she and her husband and daughter eat her
"nutritious yet savory" dinners. It's amazing that Mendes and Ball get away
with recycling so many stale and reactionary ideas under the all-purpose rubric
of "black comedy."
But it's also possible
that those ideas have rarely been presented so seductively. Several months ago,
Daniel Menaker in
Slate
in contemporary film in which the
protagonist attempts to break through our cultural and technological
anesthetization into "the real." That's the theme here, too, and it's
extraordinarily potent, at times even heartbreaking. The symbols, however, have
been cunningly reversed. In movies like sex, lies, and videotape (1989),
the protagonist has to put away the video camera to "get real"; in American
Beauty , it's Ricky Fitts, the damaged stoner videomaker next door, who sees
beauty where nonartists see only horror or nothingness. In the film's most
self-consciously poetic set piece, Ricky shows Lester's dour daughter Jane--in
whom he recognizes a kindred spirit--a video of a plastic bag fluttering up,
down, and around on invisible currents of wind. Ricky speaks of glimpsing in
the bag's trajectory an "entire life behind things"--a "benevolent force" that
holds the universe together. The teen-ager, who likes to train his lenses on
dead bodies of animals and people, sells wildly expensive marijuana to Lester
and somehow passes on this notion of "beauty." By the end, Lester is mouthing
the same sentiments and has acquired the same deadpan radiance. That must be
some really good shit they're smoking.
It's not the druggy philosophizing, however, that makes
American Beauty an emotional workout. It's that the caricatures are
grounded in sympathy instead of derision. Everyone on screen is in serious
pain. The manipulative sexpot Angela, who taunts her friend Jane with the idea
of seducing her dad, acts chiefly out of a terror of appearing ordinary. As the
military martinet, Cooper goes against the grain, turning Col. Fitts into a
sour bulldog whose capaciously baggy eyes are moist with sadness over his
inability to reach out. (When he stands helplessly in the rain at the end, the
deluge completes him.) The character of Carolyn is so shrill as to constitute a
libel on the female sex, but there isn't a second when Bening sends the woman
up. She doesn't transcend the part, she fills it to the brim, anatomizes it.
You can't hate Carolyn because the woman is trying so hard--to appear
confident, composed, in control. When she fails to sell that house, she closes
the shades and lets go with a naked wail--it's the sound of a vacuum crying to
be filled--then furiously slaps herself while sputtering, "Shut up--you're
weak--shut up. " Then she breathes, regains her go-get-'em poise, replaces
her mask. Carolyn isn't a complicated dramatic construction, but Bening gives
her a primal force. An actress who packs more psychological detail into a
single gesture than others get into whole scenes, Bening was barreling down the
road to greatness before she hit a speed bump called Warren. It's a joy to
observe her--both here and in Neil Jordan's In Dreams (1999)--back at
full throttle.
American Beauty is Spacey's movie, though.
He gives it--how weird to write this about Spacey, who made his name playing
flamboyantly self-involved psychopaths--a heart. Early on, he lets his face and
posture go slack and his eyes blurry. He mugs like crazy, telegraphing Lester's
"loserness." But Spacey's genius is for mugging in character. He makes us
believe that it's Lester who's caricaturing himself , and that bitter
edge paves the way for the character's later, more comfortably Spacey-like
scenes of insult and mockery. He even makes us take Lester's final, improbably
rhapsodic moments straight.
But do the filmmakers
take them straight? If I read it correctly, the movie is saying that American
society is unjust and absurd and loveless--full of people so afraid of seeming
ordinary that they lose their capacity to see. It's saying that our only hope
is to cultivate a kind of stoned aesthetic detachment whereby even a man with
his brains blown out becomes an object of beauty and a signpost to a Higher
Power. But to scrutinize a freshly dead body and not ask how it got that
way--or if there's anyone nearby with a gun who might want to add to the body
count--strikes me as either moronic or insane or both. The kind of detachment
the movie is peddling isn't artistic, it isn't life--it's nihilism at its most
fatuous. In the end, American Beauty is New Age Nihilism.
Kevin Costner is 11 years older than he was as Crash Davis,
the over-the-hill minor-league catcher in Bull Durham (1988), but he can
still get away with playing a professional ballplayer. He moves and acts like a
celebrity jock, and he can make his narcissistic self-containment look as if
he's keeping something in reserve--to protect his "instrument," as it were. In
For Love of the Game , he's a 40ish Detroit Tigers pitcher having his
last hurrah: The team has been sold and the new owners don't necessarily want
him back. For about half an hour, it's a great sports movie. Costner stands on
the mound shaking off the signals of his longtime catcher (John C. Reilly); he
forces himself to tune out the huge Yankee Stadium crowd (the background blurs
before our eyes and the sound drops out); and he mutters darkly at a succession
of batters, some old nemeses, some old buddies.
He also thinks about his Manhattan-based
ex-girlfriend (Kelly Preston), who tearfully told him that morning that things
were absolutely over and she was moving to London. There's an appealing
flashback to how they met (he stopped to fix her car while on the way to Yankee
Stadium), then it's back to the game for more nail-biting at bats. But pretty
soon the relationship flashbacks start coming thick and fast, and the balance
of the movie shifts to whether Kevin can commit to Kelly and Kelly can commit
to Kevin or whether his only commitment could ever be to the ball and the
diamond and the game.
Maybe it's because I'm a baseball nut that I hated
to leave the mound. But maybe it's also because the relationships scenes are
soft-focus, generic, and woozily drawn-out, whereas the stuff in the stadium is
sharply edited and full of texture. The rhythms of the game feel right; the
rhythms of the romance feel embarrassingly Harlequin, and the picture drags on
for over two hours. I can't believe that the director, Sam Raimi ( The Evil
Dead , 1983; last year's A Simple Plan ) thought that all those scenes
of Costner and Preston staring into space while the piano plinks would end up
in the final cut, but Raimi apparently gave up control of the final cut for the
sake of making his first, real mainstream picture. He might as well have stuck
his head over the plate and said, "Bean me." | [
"social awareness",
"career success",
"whiteness",
"heterosexuality"
] | 0 |
20069_M2O7ZO3N_6 | According to the reviewer, Carolyn's preference for "Muzak" and "nutritious yet savory" food most likely symbolize: | A Good Year for the Roses?
Early in American
Beauty , Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey), a weary reporter for a media
magazine, masturbates in the shower while informing us in voice-over that we're
witnessing the highlight of his day. He peers through tired eyes out the window
at his manicured suburban tract-house lawn, where his wife, Carolyn (Annette
Bening)--whose gardening clogs, he points out, are color-coordinated with the
handles of her shears--snips roses (American beauties) and twitters about
Miracle-Gro to a gay yuppie (Scott Bakula) on the other side of a white picket
fence. "I have lost something," says Lester. "I'm not exactly sure what it is
but I know I didn't always feel this ... sedated." Apparently, Lester doesn't
realize that snipped roses are garden-variety symbols of castration, or he'd
know what he has lost. But the makers of American Beauty are about to
give Lester his roses back. At a high-school basketball game, Lester is
transfixed by a blonde cheerleader named Angela (Mena Suvari), who is twirling
alongside his daughter, Jane (Thora Burch). Ambient noise falls away, the crowd
disappears, and there she is, Lester's angel, writhing in slow motion--just for
him. She opens her jacket (she's naked underneath) and red rose petals drift
out. Later, Lester envisions her on a bed of red petals, then immersed in a
bath of red petals. Back in the roses for the first time in years, he's soon
pumping iron, smoking pot, and telling off his frigid wife and faceless bosses,
convinced that whatever he has lost he's getting back, baby.
The movie is convinced,
too--which is odd, since the fantasy of an underage cheerleader making a
middle-aged man's wilted roses bloom is a tad ... primitive. But American
Beauty doesn't feel primitive. It feels lustrously hip and aware,
and a lot of critics are making big claims for it. The script, by Alan Ball, a
playwright and former sitcom writer, carries an invigorating blast of
counterculture righteousness, along with the kind of pithily vicious marital
bickering that makes some viewers (especially male) say, "Yeah! Tell that bitch
off!" More important, it has a vein of metaphysical yearning, which the
director, Sam Mendes, mines brilliantly. A hotshot English theater director
(his Cabaret revival is still on the boards in New York), Mendes gives
the film a patina of New Age lyricism and layer upon layer of visual irony. The
movie's surface is velvety and immaculate--until the action is abruptly viewed
through the video camera of the teen-age voyeur next door (Wes Bentley), and
the graininess of the video image (along with the plangent music) suggests how
unstable the molecules that constitute our "reality" really are. Mendes can
distend the real into the surreal with imperceptible puffs. Aided by his
cinematographer, Conrad Hall, and editors, Tariq Anwar and Chris Greenbury, he
creates an entrancing vision of the American nuclear family on the verge of a
meltdown.
A merican
Beauty is so wittily written and
gorgeously directed that you might think you're seeing something
archetypal--maybe even the Great American Movie. But when you stop and smell
the roses ... Well, that scent isn't Miracle-Gro. The hairpin turns from farce
to melodrama, from satire to bathos, are fresh and deftly navigated, but almost
every one of the underlying attitudes is smug and easy: from the corporate
flunky named "Brad" to the interchangeable gay neighbors (they're both called
"Jim") to the brutally homophobic patriarch next door, an ex-Marine colonel
(Chris Cooper) who has reduced his wife (the normally exuberant Allison Janney)
to a catatonic mummy and his son, Ricky (Bentley), to a life of subterranean
deception. (The colonel's idea of bliss is watching an old Ronald Reagan
military picture on television: How's that for subtle?) Lester's wife, Carolyn,
is even more stridently caricatured. A real-estate broker who fails to sell a
big house (her only potential customers are blank-faced African-Americans,
Indian-Americans, and surly lesbians), she wears a mask of perky efficiency and
insists on listening to Muzak while she and her husband and daughter eat her
"nutritious yet savory" dinners. It's amazing that Mendes and Ball get away
with recycling so many stale and reactionary ideas under the all-purpose rubric
of "black comedy."
But it's also possible
that those ideas have rarely been presented so seductively. Several months ago,
Daniel Menaker in
Slate
in contemporary film in which the
protagonist attempts to break through our cultural and technological
anesthetization into "the real." That's the theme here, too, and it's
extraordinarily potent, at times even heartbreaking. The symbols, however, have
been cunningly reversed. In movies like sex, lies, and videotape (1989),
the protagonist has to put away the video camera to "get real"; in American
Beauty , it's Ricky Fitts, the damaged stoner videomaker next door, who sees
beauty where nonartists see only horror or nothingness. In the film's most
self-consciously poetic set piece, Ricky shows Lester's dour daughter Jane--in
whom he recognizes a kindred spirit--a video of a plastic bag fluttering up,
down, and around on invisible currents of wind. Ricky speaks of glimpsing in
the bag's trajectory an "entire life behind things"--a "benevolent force" that
holds the universe together. The teen-ager, who likes to train his lenses on
dead bodies of animals and people, sells wildly expensive marijuana to Lester
and somehow passes on this notion of "beauty." By the end, Lester is mouthing
the same sentiments and has acquired the same deadpan radiance. That must be
some really good shit they're smoking.
It's not the druggy philosophizing, however, that makes
American Beauty an emotional workout. It's that the caricatures are
grounded in sympathy instead of derision. Everyone on screen is in serious
pain. The manipulative sexpot Angela, who taunts her friend Jane with the idea
of seducing her dad, acts chiefly out of a terror of appearing ordinary. As the
military martinet, Cooper goes against the grain, turning Col. Fitts into a
sour bulldog whose capaciously baggy eyes are moist with sadness over his
inability to reach out. (When he stands helplessly in the rain at the end, the
deluge completes him.) The character of Carolyn is so shrill as to constitute a
libel on the female sex, but there isn't a second when Bening sends the woman
up. She doesn't transcend the part, she fills it to the brim, anatomizes it.
You can't hate Carolyn because the woman is trying so hard--to appear
confident, composed, in control. When she fails to sell that house, she closes
the shades and lets go with a naked wail--it's the sound of a vacuum crying to
be filled--then furiously slaps herself while sputtering, "Shut up--you're
weak--shut up. " Then she breathes, regains her go-get-'em poise, replaces
her mask. Carolyn isn't a complicated dramatic construction, but Bening gives
her a primal force. An actress who packs more psychological detail into a
single gesture than others get into whole scenes, Bening was barreling down the
road to greatness before she hit a speed bump called Warren. It's a joy to
observe her--both here and in Neil Jordan's In Dreams (1999)--back at
full throttle.
American Beauty is Spacey's movie, though.
He gives it--how weird to write this about Spacey, who made his name playing
flamboyantly self-involved psychopaths--a heart. Early on, he lets his face and
posture go slack and his eyes blurry. He mugs like crazy, telegraphing Lester's
"loserness." But Spacey's genius is for mugging in character. He makes us
believe that it's Lester who's caricaturing himself , and that bitter
edge paves the way for the character's later, more comfortably Spacey-like
scenes of insult and mockery. He even makes us take Lester's final, improbably
rhapsodic moments straight.
But do the filmmakers
take them straight? If I read it correctly, the movie is saying that American
society is unjust and absurd and loveless--full of people so afraid of seeming
ordinary that they lose their capacity to see. It's saying that our only hope
is to cultivate a kind of stoned aesthetic detachment whereby even a man with
his brains blown out becomes an object of beauty and a signpost to a Higher
Power. But to scrutinize a freshly dead body and not ask how it got that
way--or if there's anyone nearby with a gun who might want to add to the body
count--strikes me as either moronic or insane or both. The kind of detachment
the movie is peddling isn't artistic, it isn't life--it's nihilism at its most
fatuous. In the end, American Beauty is New Age Nihilism.
Kevin Costner is 11 years older than he was as Crash Davis,
the over-the-hill minor-league catcher in Bull Durham (1988), but he can
still get away with playing a professional ballplayer. He moves and acts like a
celebrity jock, and he can make his narcissistic self-containment look as if
he's keeping something in reserve--to protect his "instrument," as it were. In
For Love of the Game , he's a 40ish Detroit Tigers pitcher having his
last hurrah: The team has been sold and the new owners don't necessarily want
him back. For about half an hour, it's a great sports movie. Costner stands on
the mound shaking off the signals of his longtime catcher (John C. Reilly); he
forces himself to tune out the huge Yankee Stadium crowd (the background blurs
before our eyes and the sound drops out); and he mutters darkly at a succession
of batters, some old nemeses, some old buddies.
He also thinks about his Manhattan-based
ex-girlfriend (Kelly Preston), who tearfully told him that morning that things
were absolutely over and she was moving to London. There's an appealing
flashback to how they met (he stopped to fix her car while on the way to Yankee
Stadium), then it's back to the game for more nail-biting at bats. But pretty
soon the relationship flashbacks start coming thick and fast, and the balance
of the movie shifts to whether Kevin can commit to Kelly and Kelly can commit
to Kevin or whether his only commitment could ever be to the ball and the
diamond and the game.
Maybe it's because I'm a baseball nut that I hated
to leave the mound. But maybe it's also because the relationships scenes are
soft-focus, generic, and woozily drawn-out, whereas the stuff in the stadium is
sharply edited and full of texture. The rhythms of the game feel right; the
rhythms of the romance feel embarrassingly Harlequin, and the picture drags on
for over two hours. I can't believe that the director, Sam Raimi ( The Evil
Dead , 1983; last year's A Simple Plan ) thought that all those scenes
of Costner and Preston staring into space while the piano plinks would end up
in the final cut, but Raimi apparently gave up control of the final cut for the
sake of making his first, real mainstream picture. He might as well have stuck
his head over the plate and said, "Bean me." | [
"The characters' desperate desire to be perceived as ordinary",
"The deterioration of the American nuclear family",
"The tendency for people to be consumed by what their values",
"The dangers of standing out in a society that demands conformity"
] | 0 |
20069_M2O7ZO3N_7 | Which of the following terms best describes the reviewer's opinion of Bening's acting performance in "American Beauty," compared to her previous acting roles: | A Good Year for the Roses?
Early in American
Beauty , Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey), a weary reporter for a media
magazine, masturbates in the shower while informing us in voice-over that we're
witnessing the highlight of his day. He peers through tired eyes out the window
at his manicured suburban tract-house lawn, where his wife, Carolyn (Annette
Bening)--whose gardening clogs, he points out, are color-coordinated with the
handles of her shears--snips roses (American beauties) and twitters about
Miracle-Gro to a gay yuppie (Scott Bakula) on the other side of a white picket
fence. "I have lost something," says Lester. "I'm not exactly sure what it is
but I know I didn't always feel this ... sedated." Apparently, Lester doesn't
realize that snipped roses are garden-variety symbols of castration, or he'd
know what he has lost. But the makers of American Beauty are about to
give Lester his roses back. At a high-school basketball game, Lester is
transfixed by a blonde cheerleader named Angela (Mena Suvari), who is twirling
alongside his daughter, Jane (Thora Burch). Ambient noise falls away, the crowd
disappears, and there she is, Lester's angel, writhing in slow motion--just for
him. She opens her jacket (she's naked underneath) and red rose petals drift
out. Later, Lester envisions her on a bed of red petals, then immersed in a
bath of red petals. Back in the roses for the first time in years, he's soon
pumping iron, smoking pot, and telling off his frigid wife and faceless bosses,
convinced that whatever he has lost he's getting back, baby.
The movie is convinced,
too--which is odd, since the fantasy of an underage cheerleader making a
middle-aged man's wilted roses bloom is a tad ... primitive. But American
Beauty doesn't feel primitive. It feels lustrously hip and aware,
and a lot of critics are making big claims for it. The script, by Alan Ball, a
playwright and former sitcom writer, carries an invigorating blast of
counterculture righteousness, along with the kind of pithily vicious marital
bickering that makes some viewers (especially male) say, "Yeah! Tell that bitch
off!" More important, it has a vein of metaphysical yearning, which the
director, Sam Mendes, mines brilliantly. A hotshot English theater director
(his Cabaret revival is still on the boards in New York), Mendes gives
the film a patina of New Age lyricism and layer upon layer of visual irony. The
movie's surface is velvety and immaculate--until the action is abruptly viewed
through the video camera of the teen-age voyeur next door (Wes Bentley), and
the graininess of the video image (along with the plangent music) suggests how
unstable the molecules that constitute our "reality" really are. Mendes can
distend the real into the surreal with imperceptible puffs. Aided by his
cinematographer, Conrad Hall, and editors, Tariq Anwar and Chris Greenbury, he
creates an entrancing vision of the American nuclear family on the verge of a
meltdown.
A merican
Beauty is so wittily written and
gorgeously directed that you might think you're seeing something
archetypal--maybe even the Great American Movie. But when you stop and smell
the roses ... Well, that scent isn't Miracle-Gro. The hairpin turns from farce
to melodrama, from satire to bathos, are fresh and deftly navigated, but almost
every one of the underlying attitudes is smug and easy: from the corporate
flunky named "Brad" to the interchangeable gay neighbors (they're both called
"Jim") to the brutally homophobic patriarch next door, an ex-Marine colonel
(Chris Cooper) who has reduced his wife (the normally exuberant Allison Janney)
to a catatonic mummy and his son, Ricky (Bentley), to a life of subterranean
deception. (The colonel's idea of bliss is watching an old Ronald Reagan
military picture on television: How's that for subtle?) Lester's wife, Carolyn,
is even more stridently caricatured. A real-estate broker who fails to sell a
big house (her only potential customers are blank-faced African-Americans,
Indian-Americans, and surly lesbians), she wears a mask of perky efficiency and
insists on listening to Muzak while she and her husband and daughter eat her
"nutritious yet savory" dinners. It's amazing that Mendes and Ball get away
with recycling so many stale and reactionary ideas under the all-purpose rubric
of "black comedy."
But it's also possible
that those ideas have rarely been presented so seductively. Several months ago,
Daniel Menaker in
Slate
in contemporary film in which the
protagonist attempts to break through our cultural and technological
anesthetization into "the real." That's the theme here, too, and it's
extraordinarily potent, at times even heartbreaking. The symbols, however, have
been cunningly reversed. In movies like sex, lies, and videotape (1989),
the protagonist has to put away the video camera to "get real"; in American
Beauty , it's Ricky Fitts, the damaged stoner videomaker next door, who sees
beauty where nonartists see only horror or nothingness. In the film's most
self-consciously poetic set piece, Ricky shows Lester's dour daughter Jane--in
whom he recognizes a kindred spirit--a video of a plastic bag fluttering up,
down, and around on invisible currents of wind. Ricky speaks of glimpsing in
the bag's trajectory an "entire life behind things"--a "benevolent force" that
holds the universe together. The teen-ager, who likes to train his lenses on
dead bodies of animals and people, sells wildly expensive marijuana to Lester
and somehow passes on this notion of "beauty." By the end, Lester is mouthing
the same sentiments and has acquired the same deadpan radiance. That must be
some really good shit they're smoking.
It's not the druggy philosophizing, however, that makes
American Beauty an emotional workout. It's that the caricatures are
grounded in sympathy instead of derision. Everyone on screen is in serious
pain. The manipulative sexpot Angela, who taunts her friend Jane with the idea
of seducing her dad, acts chiefly out of a terror of appearing ordinary. As the
military martinet, Cooper goes against the grain, turning Col. Fitts into a
sour bulldog whose capaciously baggy eyes are moist with sadness over his
inability to reach out. (When he stands helplessly in the rain at the end, the
deluge completes him.) The character of Carolyn is so shrill as to constitute a
libel on the female sex, but there isn't a second when Bening sends the woman
up. She doesn't transcend the part, she fills it to the brim, anatomizes it.
You can't hate Carolyn because the woman is trying so hard--to appear
confident, composed, in control. When she fails to sell that house, she closes
the shades and lets go with a naked wail--it's the sound of a vacuum crying to
be filled--then furiously slaps herself while sputtering, "Shut up--you're
weak--shut up. " Then she breathes, regains her go-get-'em poise, replaces
her mask. Carolyn isn't a complicated dramatic construction, but Bening gives
her a primal force. An actress who packs more psychological detail into a
single gesture than others get into whole scenes, Bening was barreling down the
road to greatness before she hit a speed bump called Warren. It's a joy to
observe her--both here and in Neil Jordan's In Dreams (1999)--back at
full throttle.
American Beauty is Spacey's movie, though.
He gives it--how weird to write this about Spacey, who made his name playing
flamboyantly self-involved psychopaths--a heart. Early on, he lets his face and
posture go slack and his eyes blurry. He mugs like crazy, telegraphing Lester's
"loserness." But Spacey's genius is for mugging in character. He makes us
believe that it's Lester who's caricaturing himself , and that bitter
edge paves the way for the character's later, more comfortably Spacey-like
scenes of insult and mockery. He even makes us take Lester's final, improbably
rhapsodic moments straight.
But do the filmmakers
take them straight? If I read it correctly, the movie is saying that American
society is unjust and absurd and loveless--full of people so afraid of seeming
ordinary that they lose their capacity to see. It's saying that our only hope
is to cultivate a kind of stoned aesthetic detachment whereby even a man with
his brains blown out becomes an object of beauty and a signpost to a Higher
Power. But to scrutinize a freshly dead body and not ask how it got that
way--or if there's anyone nearby with a gun who might want to add to the body
count--strikes me as either moronic or insane or both. The kind of detachment
the movie is peddling isn't artistic, it isn't life--it's nihilism at its most
fatuous. In the end, American Beauty is New Age Nihilism.
Kevin Costner is 11 years older than he was as Crash Davis,
the over-the-hill minor-league catcher in Bull Durham (1988), but he can
still get away with playing a professional ballplayer. He moves and acts like a
celebrity jock, and he can make his narcissistic self-containment look as if
he's keeping something in reserve--to protect his "instrument," as it were. In
For Love of the Game , he's a 40ish Detroit Tigers pitcher having his
last hurrah: The team has been sold and the new owners don't necessarily want
him back. For about half an hour, it's a great sports movie. Costner stands on
the mound shaking off the signals of his longtime catcher (John C. Reilly); he
forces himself to tune out the huge Yankee Stadium crowd (the background blurs
before our eyes and the sound drops out); and he mutters darkly at a succession
of batters, some old nemeses, some old buddies.
He also thinks about his Manhattan-based
ex-girlfriend (Kelly Preston), who tearfully told him that morning that things
were absolutely over and she was moving to London. There's an appealing
flashback to how they met (he stopped to fix her car while on the way to Yankee
Stadium), then it's back to the game for more nail-biting at bats. But pretty
soon the relationship flashbacks start coming thick and fast, and the balance
of the movie shifts to whether Kevin can commit to Kelly and Kelly can commit
to Kevin or whether his only commitment could ever be to the ball and the
diamond and the game.
Maybe it's because I'm a baseball nut that I hated
to leave the mound. But maybe it's also because the relationships scenes are
soft-focus, generic, and woozily drawn-out, whereas the stuff in the stadium is
sharply edited and full of texture. The rhythms of the game feel right; the
rhythms of the romance feel embarrassingly Harlequin, and the picture drags on
for over two hours. I can't believe that the director, Sam Raimi ( The Evil
Dead , 1983; last year's A Simple Plan ) thought that all those scenes
of Costner and Preston staring into space while the piano plinks would end up
in the final cut, but Raimi apparently gave up control of the final cut for the
sake of making his first, real mainstream picture. He might as well have stuck
his head over the plate and said, "Bean me." | [
"empowering",
"muddled",
"redemptive",
"distasteful"
] | 2 |
20069_M2O7ZO3N_8 | According to the reviewer, the films "American Beauty" and "For the Love of the Game" share all of the following in common EXCEPT: | A Good Year for the Roses?
Early in American
Beauty , Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey), a weary reporter for a media
magazine, masturbates in the shower while informing us in voice-over that we're
witnessing the highlight of his day. He peers through tired eyes out the window
at his manicured suburban tract-house lawn, where his wife, Carolyn (Annette
Bening)--whose gardening clogs, he points out, are color-coordinated with the
handles of her shears--snips roses (American beauties) and twitters about
Miracle-Gro to a gay yuppie (Scott Bakula) on the other side of a white picket
fence. "I have lost something," says Lester. "I'm not exactly sure what it is
but I know I didn't always feel this ... sedated." Apparently, Lester doesn't
realize that snipped roses are garden-variety symbols of castration, or he'd
know what he has lost. But the makers of American Beauty are about to
give Lester his roses back. At a high-school basketball game, Lester is
transfixed by a blonde cheerleader named Angela (Mena Suvari), who is twirling
alongside his daughter, Jane (Thora Burch). Ambient noise falls away, the crowd
disappears, and there she is, Lester's angel, writhing in slow motion--just for
him. She opens her jacket (she's naked underneath) and red rose petals drift
out. Later, Lester envisions her on a bed of red petals, then immersed in a
bath of red petals. Back in the roses for the first time in years, he's soon
pumping iron, smoking pot, and telling off his frigid wife and faceless bosses,
convinced that whatever he has lost he's getting back, baby.
The movie is convinced,
too--which is odd, since the fantasy of an underage cheerleader making a
middle-aged man's wilted roses bloom is a tad ... primitive. But American
Beauty doesn't feel primitive. It feels lustrously hip and aware,
and a lot of critics are making big claims for it. The script, by Alan Ball, a
playwright and former sitcom writer, carries an invigorating blast of
counterculture righteousness, along with the kind of pithily vicious marital
bickering that makes some viewers (especially male) say, "Yeah! Tell that bitch
off!" More important, it has a vein of metaphysical yearning, which the
director, Sam Mendes, mines brilliantly. A hotshot English theater director
(his Cabaret revival is still on the boards in New York), Mendes gives
the film a patina of New Age lyricism and layer upon layer of visual irony. The
movie's surface is velvety and immaculate--until the action is abruptly viewed
through the video camera of the teen-age voyeur next door (Wes Bentley), and
the graininess of the video image (along with the plangent music) suggests how
unstable the molecules that constitute our "reality" really are. Mendes can
distend the real into the surreal with imperceptible puffs. Aided by his
cinematographer, Conrad Hall, and editors, Tariq Anwar and Chris Greenbury, he
creates an entrancing vision of the American nuclear family on the verge of a
meltdown.
A merican
Beauty is so wittily written and
gorgeously directed that you might think you're seeing something
archetypal--maybe even the Great American Movie. But when you stop and smell
the roses ... Well, that scent isn't Miracle-Gro. The hairpin turns from farce
to melodrama, from satire to bathos, are fresh and deftly navigated, but almost
every one of the underlying attitudes is smug and easy: from the corporate
flunky named "Brad" to the interchangeable gay neighbors (they're both called
"Jim") to the brutally homophobic patriarch next door, an ex-Marine colonel
(Chris Cooper) who has reduced his wife (the normally exuberant Allison Janney)
to a catatonic mummy and his son, Ricky (Bentley), to a life of subterranean
deception. (The colonel's idea of bliss is watching an old Ronald Reagan
military picture on television: How's that for subtle?) Lester's wife, Carolyn,
is even more stridently caricatured. A real-estate broker who fails to sell a
big house (her only potential customers are blank-faced African-Americans,
Indian-Americans, and surly lesbians), she wears a mask of perky efficiency and
insists on listening to Muzak while she and her husband and daughter eat her
"nutritious yet savory" dinners. It's amazing that Mendes and Ball get away
with recycling so many stale and reactionary ideas under the all-purpose rubric
of "black comedy."
But it's also possible
that those ideas have rarely been presented so seductively. Several months ago,
Daniel Menaker in
Slate
in contemporary film in which the
protagonist attempts to break through our cultural and technological
anesthetization into "the real." That's the theme here, too, and it's
extraordinarily potent, at times even heartbreaking. The symbols, however, have
been cunningly reversed. In movies like sex, lies, and videotape (1989),
the protagonist has to put away the video camera to "get real"; in American
Beauty , it's Ricky Fitts, the damaged stoner videomaker next door, who sees
beauty where nonartists see only horror or nothingness. In the film's most
self-consciously poetic set piece, Ricky shows Lester's dour daughter Jane--in
whom he recognizes a kindred spirit--a video of a plastic bag fluttering up,
down, and around on invisible currents of wind. Ricky speaks of glimpsing in
the bag's trajectory an "entire life behind things"--a "benevolent force" that
holds the universe together. The teen-ager, who likes to train his lenses on
dead bodies of animals and people, sells wildly expensive marijuana to Lester
and somehow passes on this notion of "beauty." By the end, Lester is mouthing
the same sentiments and has acquired the same deadpan radiance. That must be
some really good shit they're smoking.
It's not the druggy philosophizing, however, that makes
American Beauty an emotional workout. It's that the caricatures are
grounded in sympathy instead of derision. Everyone on screen is in serious
pain. The manipulative sexpot Angela, who taunts her friend Jane with the idea
of seducing her dad, acts chiefly out of a terror of appearing ordinary. As the
military martinet, Cooper goes against the grain, turning Col. Fitts into a
sour bulldog whose capaciously baggy eyes are moist with sadness over his
inability to reach out. (When he stands helplessly in the rain at the end, the
deluge completes him.) The character of Carolyn is so shrill as to constitute a
libel on the female sex, but there isn't a second when Bening sends the woman
up. She doesn't transcend the part, she fills it to the brim, anatomizes it.
You can't hate Carolyn because the woman is trying so hard--to appear
confident, composed, in control. When she fails to sell that house, she closes
the shades and lets go with a naked wail--it's the sound of a vacuum crying to
be filled--then furiously slaps herself while sputtering, "Shut up--you're
weak--shut up. " Then she breathes, regains her go-get-'em poise, replaces
her mask. Carolyn isn't a complicated dramatic construction, but Bening gives
her a primal force. An actress who packs more psychological detail into a
single gesture than others get into whole scenes, Bening was barreling down the
road to greatness before she hit a speed bump called Warren. It's a joy to
observe her--both here and in Neil Jordan's In Dreams (1999)--back at
full throttle.
American Beauty is Spacey's movie, though.
He gives it--how weird to write this about Spacey, who made his name playing
flamboyantly self-involved psychopaths--a heart. Early on, he lets his face and
posture go slack and his eyes blurry. He mugs like crazy, telegraphing Lester's
"loserness." But Spacey's genius is for mugging in character. He makes us
believe that it's Lester who's caricaturing himself , and that bitter
edge paves the way for the character's later, more comfortably Spacey-like
scenes of insult and mockery. He even makes us take Lester's final, improbably
rhapsodic moments straight.
But do the filmmakers
take them straight? If I read it correctly, the movie is saying that American
society is unjust and absurd and loveless--full of people so afraid of seeming
ordinary that they lose their capacity to see. It's saying that our only hope
is to cultivate a kind of stoned aesthetic detachment whereby even a man with
his brains blown out becomes an object of beauty and a signpost to a Higher
Power. But to scrutinize a freshly dead body and not ask how it got that
way--or if there's anyone nearby with a gun who might want to add to the body
count--strikes me as either moronic or insane or both. The kind of detachment
the movie is peddling isn't artistic, it isn't life--it's nihilism at its most
fatuous. In the end, American Beauty is New Age Nihilism.
Kevin Costner is 11 years older than he was as Crash Davis,
the over-the-hill minor-league catcher in Bull Durham (1988), but he can
still get away with playing a professional ballplayer. He moves and acts like a
celebrity jock, and he can make his narcissistic self-containment look as if
he's keeping something in reserve--to protect his "instrument," as it were. In
For Love of the Game , he's a 40ish Detroit Tigers pitcher having his
last hurrah: The team has been sold and the new owners don't necessarily want
him back. For about half an hour, it's a great sports movie. Costner stands on
the mound shaking off the signals of his longtime catcher (John C. Reilly); he
forces himself to tune out the huge Yankee Stadium crowd (the background blurs
before our eyes and the sound drops out); and he mutters darkly at a succession
of batters, some old nemeses, some old buddies.
He also thinks about his Manhattan-based
ex-girlfriend (Kelly Preston), who tearfully told him that morning that things
were absolutely over and she was moving to London. There's an appealing
flashback to how they met (he stopped to fix her car while on the way to Yankee
Stadium), then it's back to the game for more nail-biting at bats. But pretty
soon the relationship flashbacks start coming thick and fast, and the balance
of the movie shifts to whether Kevin can commit to Kelly and Kelly can commit
to Kevin or whether his only commitment could ever be to the ball and the
diamond and the game.
Maybe it's because I'm a baseball nut that I hated
to leave the mound. But maybe it's also because the relationships scenes are
soft-focus, generic, and woozily drawn-out, whereas the stuff in the stadium is
sharply edited and full of texture. The rhythms of the game feel right; the
rhythms of the romance feel embarrassingly Harlequin, and the picture drags on
for over two hours. I can't believe that the director, Sam Raimi ( The Evil
Dead , 1983; last year's A Simple Plan ) thought that all those scenes
of Costner and Preston staring into space while the piano plinks would end up
in the final cut, but Raimi apparently gave up control of the final cut for the
sake of making his first, real mainstream picture. He might as well have stuck
his head over the plate and said, "Bean me." | [
"The first names of the protagonists",
"Protagonists who glorify masculinity",
"A successful portrayal of New Age Nihilism",
"The first names of the directors"
] | 2 |
20072_XP4G9Y26_1 | To which director does the film reviewer offer the most praise? | Machines in the Garden
In the animated ecological
epic
Princess Mononoke
, the camera travels over landscapes with a
clear, steady gaze, like a Zen hang glider. The images have none of the
comin'-at-ya pop-surrealism of American cartoons, many of which have characters
that spring out of the frame like jack-in-the-boxes. The Japanese director,
Hayao Miyazaki, who spent three years on Princess Mononoke and is
reported to have done 70 percent of its paintings himself, seems to work from
the outside in: to begin with the curve of the earth, then the mossy hills, the
watercolor foliage, the nubby stones, the whorls on the wood, the meticulous
carvings on a teacup. He captures the texture of light and the currents of air.
You could almost settle down in this landscape. A view of nature that some
would call "tree-hugging" doesn't feel softheaded when the trees are rendered
in such brilliant and robust detail.
But then, "soft" is not
a word you can apply to Princess Mononoke , however pantheistic its
worldview. The film, which is rated PG-13, is full of splattery carnage. If
Miyazaki in long shot is contemplative, in close-up he's ferocious. He's both
inside and outside the action: He knows when to rock your world and when to
induce a state of sorrowful detachment. According to the New
York
Times , Toy Story animators screened reels of his work when their
imaginations flagged, and writers for Star Trek named an alien species
after one of his features. Watching Princess
Mononoke --which has
been dubbed to Disney/Miramax specifications by American and English stars but
retains its two-hour-plus length, its gory beheadings, and its grim,
near-apocalyptic finale--you can understand their worship. It isn't that
Miyazaki's work is technically so dazzling in this age of digitized miracles;
it's that everything is sublimely in proportion.
The movie has a scope that makes Hollywood's homiletic,
follow-your-dream fables look even more solipsistic. Miyazaki is after nothing
less than the moment in our history (the film is set in the 14 th and
15 th centuries) when the power shifted from a "natural" world to one
shaped by human technology. It's the beginning of what Bill McKibben called
"the end of nature"--that is, when nature became no longer an autonomous,
self-regulating force but one touched (and, in Miyazaki's view, poisoned) by
human industry.
The hero, Ashitaka, a
warrior from the isolationist Emishi clan, is forced in the first scene to kill
a marauding boar--a god turned into a demon (covered in roiling, corrosive
worms) by an iron ball lodged in its body. Infected, destined to be consumed
by--and to die of--rage, Ashitaka leaves his village in search of the iron
ball's source. He discovers a fortress-cum-arms-manufacturing plant called
Irontown, presided over by one of the most complex villains in modern film: the
regal Lady Eboshi. On one hand, she's a benevolent industrialist who presides
over a warmly matriarchal society; on the other, she wants to destroy the
forest, harness its resources, and exterminate its animal deities--chiefly the
Spirit of the Forest, a magnificent deer god whose touch brings instant life or
death, and who transforms at dusk into the towering Night Walker.
P rincess Mononoke builds to a full-scale war between
humans and the animal kingdom--which does not, by the way, consist of your
father's cartoon critters. In fact, the boars and apes have little patience
with Ashitaka's call for nature and mankind to live together in harmony; they'd
like to eat him. The wolf god, Moro, is slightly more sympathetic, but that's
because her adopted "daughter," San (a k a Princess Mononoke), is human. San is
first seen sucking a wound of her huge wolf mother, then, as the gore drips
from her mouth, training her dark eyes on Ashitaka with feral hatred. Her
second appearance--a lone attack on Irontown to assassinate Lady Eboshi--is one
of the movie's high points. It's Miyazaki's use of sound--and silence--that
takes your breath away: the determined tap of the wolf princess's shoes as she
scuttles over the fortress's rooftops; the silence of Eboshi and her army as
they stare at this tiny yet formidable tomboy against the black sky. Their
battle is so furious that the blades streak and lose definition--it's almost
subliminal.
It's a shame that the
wolf princess warms up to Ashitaka and spends the rest of the film either
saving him or being saved by him. She loses that punk-bitch allure. The voice
of Claire Danes doesn't help. When Danes says, "I'd do anything to get you
humans out of my forest," she sounds like a Valley Girl peeved over lack of
parking spaces at the mall. (San needs a more ragged voice--I'd be interested
to hear the original Japanese actress.) Billy Crudup is just as Disneyfied
(Miramaxed?), but that doesn't hurt as much because Ashitaka is conceived from
the start as a rather bland ingénu. Gillian Anderson's growling Moro sounds
silly (she doesn't have the breath control), and the fey-hick tones of Billy
Bob Thornton are too recognizable as the Akim Tamiroff-like mercenary, Jigo.
But Minnie Driver--coming off a triumphantly dizzy Jane in Tarzan --once
again provides a voice that the animators deserve. "Bring the strange-ah to me
late-ah," she commands in sexy Martian Queen cadences that will stir the loins
of Flash Gordon fans everywhere. "I would like to thank him
puh-sonally."
The overfamiliar voices nudge Princess Mononoke
closer to its American counterparts--but not by a lot. There's always something
wondrously strange. The "kodamas" are little tree spirits on doughboy bodies.
They cock their trapezoidal dice heads and emit a series of clicks; then their
heads pop back with a conclusive rattle. Something about them seems just right;
I could watch them for hours. (Miyazaki limits their appearances to seconds--he
doesn't wear out their mystery the way that, say, George Lucas would.) And no
Hollywood animated feature would end with such a powerful vision of apocalypse,
as the land is bestridden by a colossus dropping a thick, caustic, tarlike gel
that recalls the post-Hiroshima "black rain." Can you take the kids? I think
so. As Miyazaki said at a New York Film Festival press conference, "Children
understand intuitively that the world they have been born into is not a blessed
world." Princess Mononoke , at least, can tell them why.
"A special smile ... a
certain touch ..." So begins the elevator-music theme song of
Music of
the Heart
... "I never had a lot that I loved so much." The credits had
just started and I was already looking for a barf bag. Did Miramax and director
Wes Craven have to work so hard to schlockify the story of Roberta Guaspari
(played here by Meryl Streep), whose violin courses in East Harlem elementary
schools have become a beacon for such programs nationwide? A fabled taskmaster
(her story was told in the 1996 documentary Small Wonders ), Guaspari
used music as a way to teach self-discipline--along with the healthy
self-respect that follows in its wake. When the New York school board cut the
funding for her program, she proved a marvel of self-promotion, attracting
features in all the major dailies and ending up along with her best students at
Carnegie Hall for a benefit "Fiddlefest"--along with Itzhak Perlman, Isaac
Stern, and other legendary "fiddlers."
Streep has said that she spent so much of the time on the
set learning the violin (she doesn't play any instruments) that she didn't
bring the full force of her acting technique to bear on Roberta. Maybe that's
why the performance seems so natural. Let her always learn an instrument on the
set! Still, she doesn't make much sense of Guaspari. The script, by Pamela Gray
( A Walk on the Moon ), has her students complain of her nastiness and
perfectionism, but Streep--who has made herself look dumpy, thick-waisted, and
bedraggled--is so busy telegraphing her vulnerability that all we get is dippy
niceness. Instead of a monument to an individual's iron will, Music of the
Heart becomes the story of a woman so helpless that she arouses the
kindness of strangers.
Directors of violent
genre pieces like Craven (who got this mainstream gig in return for doing the
Scream sequels) or Carl Franklin or Sam Raimi sometimes want so badly to
belong to Establishment Hollywood--to go to the Academy Awards--that they
neuter themselves. Bending over backward to show how sensitive they can be,
they forget that violence--even if it's just emotional violence--belongs in
"ordinary" dramas, too. Craven does good work with the young actors in the
classroom scenes, but the film has a reticence common to most biopics and a
mushy, TV-movie humanism that blands out its texture. OK, I was a puddle after
some scenes, like the one where Guaspari pushes a student to get her to improve
her posture and discovers that the girl is wearing a leg brace. But how much
more emotional the Carnegie Hall climax would have been if instead of suddenly
seeing these East Harlem kids on stage with Perlman, Stern, Joshua Bell, etc.,
we'd seen them rehearsing first and struggling to keep up. There's too
much music of the heart and not enough music of the callused fingers.
In outline,
The Limey
is a lean little
B-movie revenge melodrama about a felonious Brit (Terence Stamp) who's newly
sprung from prison and flies to Southern California to get to the bottom of his
beautiful daughter's death: "My name's Wilson ... Who dunnit?" The film,
directed by Steven Soderbergh, would be worth seeing just for Stamp's
performance, at once rock-hard and goofily blinkered, and for Peter Fonda's
wittily self-parodic turn as the suspected killer, a music producer who coasts
on '60s counterculture easiness while his lackeys do the dirty work. ("Oh,
man," he says, the fear finally seeping through the ether. "This is getting all
too close to me.")
But the picture's glory is its layered and intricate
syntax. The dialogue moves ahead--there are great gobs of exposition--but the
images continually double back: to Stamp and Lesley Ann Warren, as his
daughter's acting teacher, simply gazing at each other; or to Stamp sitting on
a plane, remembering his daughter as a girl on the beach, the lens of his home
movie camera creating an eerily bright--almost supernatural--spot that dances
over her face. The film's most violent act happens well off screen. (You hear
the distant "pop-pop-pop-pop-pop" of the hero's gun.) The rest is only
half-glimpsed, fantasized, or saturated by memory--or is the present the
memory? Is all of The Limey a temporal hiccup?
Some, including the critic at Time , have
questioned Soderbergh's sanity. (But of course--Soderbergh flouts time!) I see
a method to his madness. Less grandiosely than Harmony Korine in Julien
Donkey-Boy , Soderbergh pores over every scene in search of its essential
dramatic gesture. He's saying: This --not all that other stuff--is what's
important. He telegraphs the ending--you know the Limey will somehow be at the
root of his daughter's death--but it's still an emotional wow. The climax
justifies the technique. It says the point of this odyssey isn't revenge but
regret--for irredeemably blown chances and a tragic waste of love.
Soderbergh is one of those rare filmmakers who learn
on the job. Working within a tight genre structure, he's discovering hundreds
of ways of editing a given scene that can give it the richness of a novel. Is
he totally successful? No; he misses now and then, which is why the technique
sticks out. But what a fantastic effort. See it and weep for what's missing in
most other movies. | [
"Sam Raimi",
"Steven Soderbergh",
"Wes Craven",
"Hayao Miyazaki"
] | 3 |
20072_XP4G9Y26_2 | In reviewing "Princess Mononoke," which of Miyazaki's techniques does the reviewer appreciate the least? | Machines in the Garden
In the animated ecological
epic
Princess Mononoke
, the camera travels over landscapes with a
clear, steady gaze, like a Zen hang glider. The images have none of the
comin'-at-ya pop-surrealism of American cartoons, many of which have characters
that spring out of the frame like jack-in-the-boxes. The Japanese director,
Hayao Miyazaki, who spent three years on Princess Mononoke and is
reported to have done 70 percent of its paintings himself, seems to work from
the outside in: to begin with the curve of the earth, then the mossy hills, the
watercolor foliage, the nubby stones, the whorls on the wood, the meticulous
carvings on a teacup. He captures the texture of light and the currents of air.
You could almost settle down in this landscape. A view of nature that some
would call "tree-hugging" doesn't feel softheaded when the trees are rendered
in such brilliant and robust detail.
But then, "soft" is not
a word you can apply to Princess Mononoke , however pantheistic its
worldview. The film, which is rated PG-13, is full of splattery carnage. If
Miyazaki in long shot is contemplative, in close-up he's ferocious. He's both
inside and outside the action: He knows when to rock your world and when to
induce a state of sorrowful detachment. According to the New
York
Times , Toy Story animators screened reels of his work when their
imaginations flagged, and writers for Star Trek named an alien species
after one of his features. Watching Princess
Mononoke --which has
been dubbed to Disney/Miramax specifications by American and English stars but
retains its two-hour-plus length, its gory beheadings, and its grim,
near-apocalyptic finale--you can understand their worship. It isn't that
Miyazaki's work is technically so dazzling in this age of digitized miracles;
it's that everything is sublimely in proportion.
The movie has a scope that makes Hollywood's homiletic,
follow-your-dream fables look even more solipsistic. Miyazaki is after nothing
less than the moment in our history (the film is set in the 14 th and
15 th centuries) when the power shifted from a "natural" world to one
shaped by human technology. It's the beginning of what Bill McKibben called
"the end of nature"--that is, when nature became no longer an autonomous,
self-regulating force but one touched (and, in Miyazaki's view, poisoned) by
human industry.
The hero, Ashitaka, a
warrior from the isolationist Emishi clan, is forced in the first scene to kill
a marauding boar--a god turned into a demon (covered in roiling, corrosive
worms) by an iron ball lodged in its body. Infected, destined to be consumed
by--and to die of--rage, Ashitaka leaves his village in search of the iron
ball's source. He discovers a fortress-cum-arms-manufacturing plant called
Irontown, presided over by one of the most complex villains in modern film: the
regal Lady Eboshi. On one hand, she's a benevolent industrialist who presides
over a warmly matriarchal society; on the other, she wants to destroy the
forest, harness its resources, and exterminate its animal deities--chiefly the
Spirit of the Forest, a magnificent deer god whose touch brings instant life or
death, and who transforms at dusk into the towering Night Walker.
P rincess Mononoke builds to a full-scale war between
humans and the animal kingdom--which does not, by the way, consist of your
father's cartoon critters. In fact, the boars and apes have little patience
with Ashitaka's call for nature and mankind to live together in harmony; they'd
like to eat him. The wolf god, Moro, is slightly more sympathetic, but that's
because her adopted "daughter," San (a k a Princess Mononoke), is human. San is
first seen sucking a wound of her huge wolf mother, then, as the gore drips
from her mouth, training her dark eyes on Ashitaka with feral hatred. Her
second appearance--a lone attack on Irontown to assassinate Lady Eboshi--is one
of the movie's high points. It's Miyazaki's use of sound--and silence--that
takes your breath away: the determined tap of the wolf princess's shoes as she
scuttles over the fortress's rooftops; the silence of Eboshi and her army as
they stare at this tiny yet formidable tomboy against the black sky. Their
battle is so furious that the blades streak and lose definition--it's almost
subliminal.
It's a shame that the
wolf princess warms up to Ashitaka and spends the rest of the film either
saving him or being saved by him. She loses that punk-bitch allure. The voice
of Claire Danes doesn't help. When Danes says, "I'd do anything to get you
humans out of my forest," she sounds like a Valley Girl peeved over lack of
parking spaces at the mall. (San needs a more ragged voice--I'd be interested
to hear the original Japanese actress.) Billy Crudup is just as Disneyfied
(Miramaxed?), but that doesn't hurt as much because Ashitaka is conceived from
the start as a rather bland ingénu. Gillian Anderson's growling Moro sounds
silly (she doesn't have the breath control), and the fey-hick tones of Billy
Bob Thornton are too recognizable as the Akim Tamiroff-like mercenary, Jigo.
But Minnie Driver--coming off a triumphantly dizzy Jane in Tarzan --once
again provides a voice that the animators deserve. "Bring the strange-ah to me
late-ah," she commands in sexy Martian Queen cadences that will stir the loins
of Flash Gordon fans everywhere. "I would like to thank him
puh-sonally."
The overfamiliar voices nudge Princess Mononoke
closer to its American counterparts--but not by a lot. There's always something
wondrously strange. The "kodamas" are little tree spirits on doughboy bodies.
They cock their trapezoidal dice heads and emit a series of clicks; then their
heads pop back with a conclusive rattle. Something about them seems just right;
I could watch them for hours. (Miyazaki limits their appearances to seconds--he
doesn't wear out their mystery the way that, say, George Lucas would.) And no
Hollywood animated feature would end with such a powerful vision of apocalypse,
as the land is bestridden by a colossus dropping a thick, caustic, tarlike gel
that recalls the post-Hiroshima "black rain." Can you take the kids? I think
so. As Miyazaki said at a New York Film Festival press conference, "Children
understand intuitively that the world they have been born into is not a blessed
world." Princess Mononoke , at least, can tell them why.
"A special smile ... a
certain touch ..." So begins the elevator-music theme song of
Music of
the Heart
... "I never had a lot that I loved so much." The credits had
just started and I was already looking for a barf bag. Did Miramax and director
Wes Craven have to work so hard to schlockify the story of Roberta Guaspari
(played here by Meryl Streep), whose violin courses in East Harlem elementary
schools have become a beacon for such programs nationwide? A fabled taskmaster
(her story was told in the 1996 documentary Small Wonders ), Guaspari
used music as a way to teach self-discipline--along with the healthy
self-respect that follows in its wake. When the New York school board cut the
funding for her program, she proved a marvel of self-promotion, attracting
features in all the major dailies and ending up along with her best students at
Carnegie Hall for a benefit "Fiddlefest"--along with Itzhak Perlman, Isaac
Stern, and other legendary "fiddlers."
Streep has said that she spent so much of the time on the
set learning the violin (she doesn't play any instruments) that she didn't
bring the full force of her acting technique to bear on Roberta. Maybe that's
why the performance seems so natural. Let her always learn an instrument on the
set! Still, she doesn't make much sense of Guaspari. The script, by Pamela Gray
( A Walk on the Moon ), has her students complain of her nastiness and
perfectionism, but Streep--who has made herself look dumpy, thick-waisted, and
bedraggled--is so busy telegraphing her vulnerability that all we get is dippy
niceness. Instead of a monument to an individual's iron will, Music of the
Heart becomes the story of a woman so helpless that she arouses the
kindness of strangers.
Directors of violent
genre pieces like Craven (who got this mainstream gig in return for doing the
Scream sequels) or Carl Franklin or Sam Raimi sometimes want so badly to
belong to Establishment Hollywood--to go to the Academy Awards--that they
neuter themselves. Bending over backward to show how sensitive they can be,
they forget that violence--even if it's just emotional violence--belongs in
"ordinary" dramas, too. Craven does good work with the young actors in the
classroom scenes, but the film has a reticence common to most biopics and a
mushy, TV-movie humanism that blands out its texture. OK, I was a puddle after
some scenes, like the one where Guaspari pushes a student to get her to improve
her posture and discovers that the girl is wearing a leg brace. But how much
more emotional the Carnegie Hall climax would have been if instead of suddenly
seeing these East Harlem kids on stage with Perlman, Stern, Joshua Bell, etc.,
we'd seen them rehearsing first and struggling to keep up. There's too
much music of the heart and not enough music of the callused fingers.
In outline,
The Limey
is a lean little
B-movie revenge melodrama about a felonious Brit (Terence Stamp) who's newly
sprung from prison and flies to Southern California to get to the bottom of his
beautiful daughter's death: "My name's Wilson ... Who dunnit?" The film,
directed by Steven Soderbergh, would be worth seeing just for Stamp's
performance, at once rock-hard and goofily blinkered, and for Peter Fonda's
wittily self-parodic turn as the suspected killer, a music producer who coasts
on '60s counterculture easiness while his lackeys do the dirty work. ("Oh,
man," he says, the fear finally seeping through the ether. "This is getting all
too close to me.")
But the picture's glory is its layered and intricate
syntax. The dialogue moves ahead--there are great gobs of exposition--but the
images continually double back: to Stamp and Lesley Ann Warren, as his
daughter's acting teacher, simply gazing at each other; or to Stamp sitting on
a plane, remembering his daughter as a girl on the beach, the lens of his home
movie camera creating an eerily bright--almost supernatural--spot that dances
over her face. The film's most violent act happens well off screen. (You hear
the distant "pop-pop-pop-pop-pop" of the hero's gun.) The rest is only
half-glimpsed, fantasized, or saturated by memory--or is the present the
memory? Is all of The Limey a temporal hiccup?
Some, including the critic at Time , have
questioned Soderbergh's sanity. (But of course--Soderbergh flouts time!) I see
a method to his madness. Less grandiosely than Harmony Korine in Julien
Donkey-Boy , Soderbergh pores over every scene in search of its essential
dramatic gesture. He's saying: This --not all that other stuff--is what's
important. He telegraphs the ending--you know the Limey will somehow be at the
root of his daughter's death--but it's still an emotional wow. The climax
justifies the technique. It says the point of this odyssey isn't revenge but
regret--for irredeemably blown chances and a tragic waste of love.
Soderbergh is one of those rare filmmakers who learn
on the job. Working within a tight genre structure, he's discovering hundreds
of ways of editing a given scene that can give it the richness of a novel. Is
he totally successful? No; he misses now and then, which is why the technique
sticks out. But what a fantastic effort. See it and weep for what's missing in
most other movies. | [
"His awareness of his audience",
"His digitally dazzling cinematography",
"His attention to detail",
"His sublime proportionality"
] | 1 |
20072_XP4G9Y26_3 | According to the reviewer, Miyazaki believes that technological and industrial advancement has had a/an ______ effect on the force of nature: | Machines in the Garden
In the animated ecological
epic
Princess Mononoke
, the camera travels over landscapes with a
clear, steady gaze, like a Zen hang glider. The images have none of the
comin'-at-ya pop-surrealism of American cartoons, many of which have characters
that spring out of the frame like jack-in-the-boxes. The Japanese director,
Hayao Miyazaki, who spent three years on Princess Mononoke and is
reported to have done 70 percent of its paintings himself, seems to work from
the outside in: to begin with the curve of the earth, then the mossy hills, the
watercolor foliage, the nubby stones, the whorls on the wood, the meticulous
carvings on a teacup. He captures the texture of light and the currents of air.
You could almost settle down in this landscape. A view of nature that some
would call "tree-hugging" doesn't feel softheaded when the trees are rendered
in such brilliant and robust detail.
But then, "soft" is not
a word you can apply to Princess Mononoke , however pantheistic its
worldview. The film, which is rated PG-13, is full of splattery carnage. If
Miyazaki in long shot is contemplative, in close-up he's ferocious. He's both
inside and outside the action: He knows when to rock your world and when to
induce a state of sorrowful detachment. According to the New
York
Times , Toy Story animators screened reels of his work when their
imaginations flagged, and writers for Star Trek named an alien species
after one of his features. Watching Princess
Mononoke --which has
been dubbed to Disney/Miramax specifications by American and English stars but
retains its two-hour-plus length, its gory beheadings, and its grim,
near-apocalyptic finale--you can understand their worship. It isn't that
Miyazaki's work is technically so dazzling in this age of digitized miracles;
it's that everything is sublimely in proportion.
The movie has a scope that makes Hollywood's homiletic,
follow-your-dream fables look even more solipsistic. Miyazaki is after nothing
less than the moment in our history (the film is set in the 14 th and
15 th centuries) when the power shifted from a "natural" world to one
shaped by human technology. It's the beginning of what Bill McKibben called
"the end of nature"--that is, when nature became no longer an autonomous,
self-regulating force but one touched (and, in Miyazaki's view, poisoned) by
human industry.
The hero, Ashitaka, a
warrior from the isolationist Emishi clan, is forced in the first scene to kill
a marauding boar--a god turned into a demon (covered in roiling, corrosive
worms) by an iron ball lodged in its body. Infected, destined to be consumed
by--and to die of--rage, Ashitaka leaves his village in search of the iron
ball's source. He discovers a fortress-cum-arms-manufacturing plant called
Irontown, presided over by one of the most complex villains in modern film: the
regal Lady Eboshi. On one hand, she's a benevolent industrialist who presides
over a warmly matriarchal society; on the other, she wants to destroy the
forest, harness its resources, and exterminate its animal deities--chiefly the
Spirit of the Forest, a magnificent deer god whose touch brings instant life or
death, and who transforms at dusk into the towering Night Walker.
P rincess Mononoke builds to a full-scale war between
humans and the animal kingdom--which does not, by the way, consist of your
father's cartoon critters. In fact, the boars and apes have little patience
with Ashitaka's call for nature and mankind to live together in harmony; they'd
like to eat him. The wolf god, Moro, is slightly more sympathetic, but that's
because her adopted "daughter," San (a k a Princess Mononoke), is human. San is
first seen sucking a wound of her huge wolf mother, then, as the gore drips
from her mouth, training her dark eyes on Ashitaka with feral hatred. Her
second appearance--a lone attack on Irontown to assassinate Lady Eboshi--is one
of the movie's high points. It's Miyazaki's use of sound--and silence--that
takes your breath away: the determined tap of the wolf princess's shoes as she
scuttles over the fortress's rooftops; the silence of Eboshi and her army as
they stare at this tiny yet formidable tomboy against the black sky. Their
battle is so furious that the blades streak and lose definition--it's almost
subliminal.
It's a shame that the
wolf princess warms up to Ashitaka and spends the rest of the film either
saving him or being saved by him. She loses that punk-bitch allure. The voice
of Claire Danes doesn't help. When Danes says, "I'd do anything to get you
humans out of my forest," she sounds like a Valley Girl peeved over lack of
parking spaces at the mall. (San needs a more ragged voice--I'd be interested
to hear the original Japanese actress.) Billy Crudup is just as Disneyfied
(Miramaxed?), but that doesn't hurt as much because Ashitaka is conceived from
the start as a rather bland ingénu. Gillian Anderson's growling Moro sounds
silly (she doesn't have the breath control), and the fey-hick tones of Billy
Bob Thornton are too recognizable as the Akim Tamiroff-like mercenary, Jigo.
But Minnie Driver--coming off a triumphantly dizzy Jane in Tarzan --once
again provides a voice that the animators deserve. "Bring the strange-ah to me
late-ah," she commands in sexy Martian Queen cadences that will stir the loins
of Flash Gordon fans everywhere. "I would like to thank him
puh-sonally."
The overfamiliar voices nudge Princess Mononoke
closer to its American counterparts--but not by a lot. There's always something
wondrously strange. The "kodamas" are little tree spirits on doughboy bodies.
They cock their trapezoidal dice heads and emit a series of clicks; then their
heads pop back with a conclusive rattle. Something about them seems just right;
I could watch them for hours. (Miyazaki limits their appearances to seconds--he
doesn't wear out their mystery the way that, say, George Lucas would.) And no
Hollywood animated feature would end with such a powerful vision of apocalypse,
as the land is bestridden by a colossus dropping a thick, caustic, tarlike gel
that recalls the post-Hiroshima "black rain." Can you take the kids? I think
so. As Miyazaki said at a New York Film Festival press conference, "Children
understand intuitively that the world they have been born into is not a blessed
world." Princess Mononoke , at least, can tell them why.
"A special smile ... a
certain touch ..." So begins the elevator-music theme song of
Music of
the Heart
... "I never had a lot that I loved so much." The credits had
just started and I was already looking for a barf bag. Did Miramax and director
Wes Craven have to work so hard to schlockify the story of Roberta Guaspari
(played here by Meryl Streep), whose violin courses in East Harlem elementary
schools have become a beacon for such programs nationwide? A fabled taskmaster
(her story was told in the 1996 documentary Small Wonders ), Guaspari
used music as a way to teach self-discipline--along with the healthy
self-respect that follows in its wake. When the New York school board cut the
funding for her program, she proved a marvel of self-promotion, attracting
features in all the major dailies and ending up along with her best students at
Carnegie Hall for a benefit "Fiddlefest"--along with Itzhak Perlman, Isaac
Stern, and other legendary "fiddlers."
Streep has said that she spent so much of the time on the
set learning the violin (she doesn't play any instruments) that she didn't
bring the full force of her acting technique to bear on Roberta. Maybe that's
why the performance seems so natural. Let her always learn an instrument on the
set! Still, she doesn't make much sense of Guaspari. The script, by Pamela Gray
( A Walk on the Moon ), has her students complain of her nastiness and
perfectionism, but Streep--who has made herself look dumpy, thick-waisted, and
bedraggled--is so busy telegraphing her vulnerability that all we get is dippy
niceness. Instead of a monument to an individual's iron will, Music of the
Heart becomes the story of a woman so helpless that she arouses the
kindness of strangers.
Directors of violent
genre pieces like Craven (who got this mainstream gig in return for doing the
Scream sequels) or Carl Franklin or Sam Raimi sometimes want so badly to
belong to Establishment Hollywood--to go to the Academy Awards--that they
neuter themselves. Bending over backward to show how sensitive they can be,
they forget that violence--even if it's just emotional violence--belongs in
"ordinary" dramas, too. Craven does good work with the young actors in the
classroom scenes, but the film has a reticence common to most biopics and a
mushy, TV-movie humanism that blands out its texture. OK, I was a puddle after
some scenes, like the one where Guaspari pushes a student to get her to improve
her posture and discovers that the girl is wearing a leg brace. But how much
more emotional the Carnegie Hall climax would have been if instead of suddenly
seeing these East Harlem kids on stage with Perlman, Stern, Joshua Bell, etc.,
we'd seen them rehearsing first and struggling to keep up. There's too
much music of the heart and not enough music of the callused fingers.
In outline,
The Limey
is a lean little
B-movie revenge melodrama about a felonious Brit (Terence Stamp) who's newly
sprung from prison and flies to Southern California to get to the bottom of his
beautiful daughter's death: "My name's Wilson ... Who dunnit?" The film,
directed by Steven Soderbergh, would be worth seeing just for Stamp's
performance, at once rock-hard and goofily blinkered, and for Peter Fonda's
wittily self-parodic turn as the suspected killer, a music producer who coasts
on '60s counterculture easiness while his lackeys do the dirty work. ("Oh,
man," he says, the fear finally seeping through the ether. "This is getting all
too close to me.")
But the picture's glory is its layered and intricate
syntax. The dialogue moves ahead--there are great gobs of exposition--but the
images continually double back: to Stamp and Lesley Ann Warren, as his
daughter's acting teacher, simply gazing at each other; or to Stamp sitting on
a plane, remembering his daughter as a girl on the beach, the lens of his home
movie camera creating an eerily bright--almost supernatural--spot that dances
over her face. The film's most violent act happens well off screen. (You hear
the distant "pop-pop-pop-pop-pop" of the hero's gun.) The rest is only
half-glimpsed, fantasized, or saturated by memory--or is the present the
memory? Is all of The Limey a temporal hiccup?
Some, including the critic at Time , have
questioned Soderbergh's sanity. (But of course--Soderbergh flouts time!) I see
a method to his madness. Less grandiosely than Harmony Korine in Julien
Donkey-Boy , Soderbergh pores over every scene in search of its essential
dramatic gesture. He's saying: This --not all that other stuff--is what's
important. He telegraphs the ending--you know the Limey will somehow be at the
root of his daughter's death--but it's still an emotional wow. The climax
justifies the technique. It says the point of this odyssey isn't revenge but
regret--for irredeemably blown chances and a tragic waste of love.
Soderbergh is one of those rare filmmakers who learn
on the job. Working within a tight genre structure, he's discovering hundreds
of ways of editing a given scene that can give it the richness of a novel. Is
he totally successful? No; he misses now and then, which is why the technique
sticks out. But what a fantastic effort. See it and weep for what's missing in
most other movies. | [
"Cannabilistic",
"Befuddling",
"Lethal",
"Solipsistic"
] | 2 |
20072_XP4G9Y26_4 | According to the reviewer, what is one of the greatest moments of the film "Princess Mononoke"? | Machines in the Garden
In the animated ecological
epic
Princess Mononoke
, the camera travels over landscapes with a
clear, steady gaze, like a Zen hang glider. The images have none of the
comin'-at-ya pop-surrealism of American cartoons, many of which have characters
that spring out of the frame like jack-in-the-boxes. The Japanese director,
Hayao Miyazaki, who spent three years on Princess Mononoke and is
reported to have done 70 percent of its paintings himself, seems to work from
the outside in: to begin with the curve of the earth, then the mossy hills, the
watercolor foliage, the nubby stones, the whorls on the wood, the meticulous
carvings on a teacup. He captures the texture of light and the currents of air.
You could almost settle down in this landscape. A view of nature that some
would call "tree-hugging" doesn't feel softheaded when the trees are rendered
in such brilliant and robust detail.
But then, "soft" is not
a word you can apply to Princess Mononoke , however pantheistic its
worldview. The film, which is rated PG-13, is full of splattery carnage. If
Miyazaki in long shot is contemplative, in close-up he's ferocious. He's both
inside and outside the action: He knows when to rock your world and when to
induce a state of sorrowful detachment. According to the New
York
Times , Toy Story animators screened reels of his work when their
imaginations flagged, and writers for Star Trek named an alien species
after one of his features. Watching Princess
Mononoke --which has
been dubbed to Disney/Miramax specifications by American and English stars but
retains its two-hour-plus length, its gory beheadings, and its grim,
near-apocalyptic finale--you can understand their worship. It isn't that
Miyazaki's work is technically so dazzling in this age of digitized miracles;
it's that everything is sublimely in proportion.
The movie has a scope that makes Hollywood's homiletic,
follow-your-dream fables look even more solipsistic. Miyazaki is after nothing
less than the moment in our history (the film is set in the 14 th and
15 th centuries) when the power shifted from a "natural" world to one
shaped by human technology. It's the beginning of what Bill McKibben called
"the end of nature"--that is, when nature became no longer an autonomous,
self-regulating force but one touched (and, in Miyazaki's view, poisoned) by
human industry.
The hero, Ashitaka, a
warrior from the isolationist Emishi clan, is forced in the first scene to kill
a marauding boar--a god turned into a demon (covered in roiling, corrosive
worms) by an iron ball lodged in its body. Infected, destined to be consumed
by--and to die of--rage, Ashitaka leaves his village in search of the iron
ball's source. He discovers a fortress-cum-arms-manufacturing plant called
Irontown, presided over by one of the most complex villains in modern film: the
regal Lady Eboshi. On one hand, she's a benevolent industrialist who presides
over a warmly matriarchal society; on the other, she wants to destroy the
forest, harness its resources, and exterminate its animal deities--chiefly the
Spirit of the Forest, a magnificent deer god whose touch brings instant life or
death, and who transforms at dusk into the towering Night Walker.
P rincess Mononoke builds to a full-scale war between
humans and the animal kingdom--which does not, by the way, consist of your
father's cartoon critters. In fact, the boars and apes have little patience
with Ashitaka's call for nature and mankind to live together in harmony; they'd
like to eat him. The wolf god, Moro, is slightly more sympathetic, but that's
because her adopted "daughter," San (a k a Princess Mononoke), is human. San is
first seen sucking a wound of her huge wolf mother, then, as the gore drips
from her mouth, training her dark eyes on Ashitaka with feral hatred. Her
second appearance--a lone attack on Irontown to assassinate Lady Eboshi--is one
of the movie's high points. It's Miyazaki's use of sound--and silence--that
takes your breath away: the determined tap of the wolf princess's shoes as she
scuttles over the fortress's rooftops; the silence of Eboshi and her army as
they stare at this tiny yet formidable tomboy against the black sky. Their
battle is so furious that the blades streak and lose definition--it's almost
subliminal.
It's a shame that the
wolf princess warms up to Ashitaka and spends the rest of the film either
saving him or being saved by him. She loses that punk-bitch allure. The voice
of Claire Danes doesn't help. When Danes says, "I'd do anything to get you
humans out of my forest," she sounds like a Valley Girl peeved over lack of
parking spaces at the mall. (San needs a more ragged voice--I'd be interested
to hear the original Japanese actress.) Billy Crudup is just as Disneyfied
(Miramaxed?), but that doesn't hurt as much because Ashitaka is conceived from
the start as a rather bland ingénu. Gillian Anderson's growling Moro sounds
silly (she doesn't have the breath control), and the fey-hick tones of Billy
Bob Thornton are too recognizable as the Akim Tamiroff-like mercenary, Jigo.
But Minnie Driver--coming off a triumphantly dizzy Jane in Tarzan --once
again provides a voice that the animators deserve. "Bring the strange-ah to me
late-ah," she commands in sexy Martian Queen cadences that will stir the loins
of Flash Gordon fans everywhere. "I would like to thank him
puh-sonally."
The overfamiliar voices nudge Princess Mononoke
closer to its American counterparts--but not by a lot. There's always something
wondrously strange. The "kodamas" are little tree spirits on doughboy bodies.
They cock their trapezoidal dice heads and emit a series of clicks; then their
heads pop back with a conclusive rattle. Something about them seems just right;
I could watch them for hours. (Miyazaki limits their appearances to seconds--he
doesn't wear out their mystery the way that, say, George Lucas would.) And no
Hollywood animated feature would end with such a powerful vision of apocalypse,
as the land is bestridden by a colossus dropping a thick, caustic, tarlike gel
that recalls the post-Hiroshima "black rain." Can you take the kids? I think
so. As Miyazaki said at a New York Film Festival press conference, "Children
understand intuitively that the world they have been born into is not a blessed
world." Princess Mononoke , at least, can tell them why.
"A special smile ... a
certain touch ..." So begins the elevator-music theme song of
Music of
the Heart
... "I never had a lot that I loved so much." The credits had
just started and I was already looking for a barf bag. Did Miramax and director
Wes Craven have to work so hard to schlockify the story of Roberta Guaspari
(played here by Meryl Streep), whose violin courses in East Harlem elementary
schools have become a beacon for such programs nationwide? A fabled taskmaster
(her story was told in the 1996 documentary Small Wonders ), Guaspari
used music as a way to teach self-discipline--along with the healthy
self-respect that follows in its wake. When the New York school board cut the
funding for her program, she proved a marvel of self-promotion, attracting
features in all the major dailies and ending up along with her best students at
Carnegie Hall for a benefit "Fiddlefest"--along with Itzhak Perlman, Isaac
Stern, and other legendary "fiddlers."
Streep has said that she spent so much of the time on the
set learning the violin (she doesn't play any instruments) that she didn't
bring the full force of her acting technique to bear on Roberta. Maybe that's
why the performance seems so natural. Let her always learn an instrument on the
set! Still, she doesn't make much sense of Guaspari. The script, by Pamela Gray
( A Walk on the Moon ), has her students complain of her nastiness and
perfectionism, but Streep--who has made herself look dumpy, thick-waisted, and
bedraggled--is so busy telegraphing her vulnerability that all we get is dippy
niceness. Instead of a monument to an individual's iron will, Music of the
Heart becomes the story of a woman so helpless that she arouses the
kindness of strangers.
Directors of violent
genre pieces like Craven (who got this mainstream gig in return for doing the
Scream sequels) or Carl Franklin or Sam Raimi sometimes want so badly to
belong to Establishment Hollywood--to go to the Academy Awards--that they
neuter themselves. Bending over backward to show how sensitive they can be,
they forget that violence--even if it's just emotional violence--belongs in
"ordinary" dramas, too. Craven does good work with the young actors in the
classroom scenes, but the film has a reticence common to most biopics and a
mushy, TV-movie humanism that blands out its texture. OK, I was a puddle after
some scenes, like the one where Guaspari pushes a student to get her to improve
her posture and discovers that the girl is wearing a leg brace. But how much
more emotional the Carnegie Hall climax would have been if instead of suddenly
seeing these East Harlem kids on stage with Perlman, Stern, Joshua Bell, etc.,
we'd seen them rehearsing first and struggling to keep up. There's too
much music of the heart and not enough music of the callused fingers.
In outline,
The Limey
is a lean little
B-movie revenge melodrama about a felonious Brit (Terence Stamp) who's newly
sprung from prison and flies to Southern California to get to the bottom of his
beautiful daughter's death: "My name's Wilson ... Who dunnit?" The film,
directed by Steven Soderbergh, would be worth seeing just for Stamp's
performance, at once rock-hard and goofily blinkered, and for Peter Fonda's
wittily self-parodic turn as the suspected killer, a music producer who coasts
on '60s counterculture easiness while his lackeys do the dirty work. ("Oh,
man," he says, the fear finally seeping through the ether. "This is getting all
too close to me.")
But the picture's glory is its layered and intricate
syntax. The dialogue moves ahead--there are great gobs of exposition--but the
images continually double back: to Stamp and Lesley Ann Warren, as his
daughter's acting teacher, simply gazing at each other; or to Stamp sitting on
a plane, remembering his daughter as a girl on the beach, the lens of his home
movie camera creating an eerily bright--almost supernatural--spot that dances
over her face. The film's most violent act happens well off screen. (You hear
the distant "pop-pop-pop-pop-pop" of the hero's gun.) The rest is only
half-glimpsed, fantasized, or saturated by memory--or is the present the
memory? Is all of The Limey a temporal hiccup?
Some, including the critic at Time , have
questioned Soderbergh's sanity. (But of course--Soderbergh flouts time!) I see
a method to his madness. Less grandiosely than Harmony Korine in Julien
Donkey-Boy , Soderbergh pores over every scene in search of its essential
dramatic gesture. He's saying: This --not all that other stuff--is what's
important. He telegraphs the ending--you know the Limey will somehow be at the
root of his daughter's death--but it's still an emotional wow. The climax
justifies the technique. It says the point of this odyssey isn't revenge but
regret--for irredeemably blown chances and a tragic waste of love.
Soderbergh is one of those rare filmmakers who learn
on the job. Working within a tight genre structure, he's discovering hundreds
of ways of editing a given scene that can give it the richness of a novel. Is
he totally successful? No; he misses now and then, which is why the technique
sticks out. But what a fantastic effort. See it and weep for what's missing in
most other movies. | [
"The moment when Princess Mononoke sets off to kill the leader of Irontown",
"The moment when Princess Mononoke rescues the Ashitaka",
"The moment when Ashitaka unlodges the iron ball from his body",
"The moment when the kodamas make a brief appearance"
] | 0 |
20072_XP4G9Y26_5 | According to the reviewer, what is one of the disappointing aspects of the film "Princess Mononoke"? | Machines in the Garden
In the animated ecological
epic
Princess Mononoke
, the camera travels over landscapes with a
clear, steady gaze, like a Zen hang glider. The images have none of the
comin'-at-ya pop-surrealism of American cartoons, many of which have characters
that spring out of the frame like jack-in-the-boxes. The Japanese director,
Hayao Miyazaki, who spent three years on Princess Mononoke and is
reported to have done 70 percent of its paintings himself, seems to work from
the outside in: to begin with the curve of the earth, then the mossy hills, the
watercolor foliage, the nubby stones, the whorls on the wood, the meticulous
carvings on a teacup. He captures the texture of light and the currents of air.
You could almost settle down in this landscape. A view of nature that some
would call "tree-hugging" doesn't feel softheaded when the trees are rendered
in such brilliant and robust detail.
But then, "soft" is not
a word you can apply to Princess Mononoke , however pantheistic its
worldview. The film, which is rated PG-13, is full of splattery carnage. If
Miyazaki in long shot is contemplative, in close-up he's ferocious. He's both
inside and outside the action: He knows when to rock your world and when to
induce a state of sorrowful detachment. According to the New
York
Times , Toy Story animators screened reels of his work when their
imaginations flagged, and writers for Star Trek named an alien species
after one of his features. Watching Princess
Mononoke --which has
been dubbed to Disney/Miramax specifications by American and English stars but
retains its two-hour-plus length, its gory beheadings, and its grim,
near-apocalyptic finale--you can understand their worship. It isn't that
Miyazaki's work is technically so dazzling in this age of digitized miracles;
it's that everything is sublimely in proportion.
The movie has a scope that makes Hollywood's homiletic,
follow-your-dream fables look even more solipsistic. Miyazaki is after nothing
less than the moment in our history (the film is set in the 14 th and
15 th centuries) when the power shifted from a "natural" world to one
shaped by human technology. It's the beginning of what Bill McKibben called
"the end of nature"--that is, when nature became no longer an autonomous,
self-regulating force but one touched (and, in Miyazaki's view, poisoned) by
human industry.
The hero, Ashitaka, a
warrior from the isolationist Emishi clan, is forced in the first scene to kill
a marauding boar--a god turned into a demon (covered in roiling, corrosive
worms) by an iron ball lodged in its body. Infected, destined to be consumed
by--and to die of--rage, Ashitaka leaves his village in search of the iron
ball's source. He discovers a fortress-cum-arms-manufacturing plant called
Irontown, presided over by one of the most complex villains in modern film: the
regal Lady Eboshi. On one hand, she's a benevolent industrialist who presides
over a warmly matriarchal society; on the other, she wants to destroy the
forest, harness its resources, and exterminate its animal deities--chiefly the
Spirit of the Forest, a magnificent deer god whose touch brings instant life or
death, and who transforms at dusk into the towering Night Walker.
P rincess Mononoke builds to a full-scale war between
humans and the animal kingdom--which does not, by the way, consist of your
father's cartoon critters. In fact, the boars and apes have little patience
with Ashitaka's call for nature and mankind to live together in harmony; they'd
like to eat him. The wolf god, Moro, is slightly more sympathetic, but that's
because her adopted "daughter," San (a k a Princess Mononoke), is human. San is
first seen sucking a wound of her huge wolf mother, then, as the gore drips
from her mouth, training her dark eyes on Ashitaka with feral hatred. Her
second appearance--a lone attack on Irontown to assassinate Lady Eboshi--is one
of the movie's high points. It's Miyazaki's use of sound--and silence--that
takes your breath away: the determined tap of the wolf princess's shoes as she
scuttles over the fortress's rooftops; the silence of Eboshi and her army as
they stare at this tiny yet formidable tomboy against the black sky. Their
battle is so furious that the blades streak and lose definition--it's almost
subliminal.
It's a shame that the
wolf princess warms up to Ashitaka and spends the rest of the film either
saving him or being saved by him. She loses that punk-bitch allure. The voice
of Claire Danes doesn't help. When Danes says, "I'd do anything to get you
humans out of my forest," she sounds like a Valley Girl peeved over lack of
parking spaces at the mall. (San needs a more ragged voice--I'd be interested
to hear the original Japanese actress.) Billy Crudup is just as Disneyfied
(Miramaxed?), but that doesn't hurt as much because Ashitaka is conceived from
the start as a rather bland ingénu. Gillian Anderson's growling Moro sounds
silly (she doesn't have the breath control), and the fey-hick tones of Billy
Bob Thornton are too recognizable as the Akim Tamiroff-like mercenary, Jigo.
But Minnie Driver--coming off a triumphantly dizzy Jane in Tarzan --once
again provides a voice that the animators deserve. "Bring the strange-ah to me
late-ah," she commands in sexy Martian Queen cadences that will stir the loins
of Flash Gordon fans everywhere. "I would like to thank him
puh-sonally."
The overfamiliar voices nudge Princess Mononoke
closer to its American counterparts--but not by a lot. There's always something
wondrously strange. The "kodamas" are little tree spirits on doughboy bodies.
They cock their trapezoidal dice heads and emit a series of clicks; then their
heads pop back with a conclusive rattle. Something about them seems just right;
I could watch them for hours. (Miyazaki limits their appearances to seconds--he
doesn't wear out their mystery the way that, say, George Lucas would.) And no
Hollywood animated feature would end with such a powerful vision of apocalypse,
as the land is bestridden by a colossus dropping a thick, caustic, tarlike gel
that recalls the post-Hiroshima "black rain." Can you take the kids? I think
so. As Miyazaki said at a New York Film Festival press conference, "Children
understand intuitively that the world they have been born into is not a blessed
world." Princess Mononoke , at least, can tell them why.
"A special smile ... a
certain touch ..." So begins the elevator-music theme song of
Music of
the Heart
... "I never had a lot that I loved so much." The credits had
just started and I was already looking for a barf bag. Did Miramax and director
Wes Craven have to work so hard to schlockify the story of Roberta Guaspari
(played here by Meryl Streep), whose violin courses in East Harlem elementary
schools have become a beacon for such programs nationwide? A fabled taskmaster
(her story was told in the 1996 documentary Small Wonders ), Guaspari
used music as a way to teach self-discipline--along with the healthy
self-respect that follows in its wake. When the New York school board cut the
funding for her program, she proved a marvel of self-promotion, attracting
features in all the major dailies and ending up along with her best students at
Carnegie Hall for a benefit "Fiddlefest"--along with Itzhak Perlman, Isaac
Stern, and other legendary "fiddlers."
Streep has said that she spent so much of the time on the
set learning the violin (she doesn't play any instruments) that she didn't
bring the full force of her acting technique to bear on Roberta. Maybe that's
why the performance seems so natural. Let her always learn an instrument on the
set! Still, she doesn't make much sense of Guaspari. The script, by Pamela Gray
( A Walk on the Moon ), has her students complain of her nastiness and
perfectionism, but Streep--who has made herself look dumpy, thick-waisted, and
bedraggled--is so busy telegraphing her vulnerability that all we get is dippy
niceness. Instead of a monument to an individual's iron will, Music of the
Heart becomes the story of a woman so helpless that she arouses the
kindness of strangers.
Directors of violent
genre pieces like Craven (who got this mainstream gig in return for doing the
Scream sequels) or Carl Franklin or Sam Raimi sometimes want so badly to
belong to Establishment Hollywood--to go to the Academy Awards--that they
neuter themselves. Bending over backward to show how sensitive they can be,
they forget that violence--even if it's just emotional violence--belongs in
"ordinary" dramas, too. Craven does good work with the young actors in the
classroom scenes, but the film has a reticence common to most biopics and a
mushy, TV-movie humanism that blands out its texture. OK, I was a puddle after
some scenes, like the one where Guaspari pushes a student to get her to improve
her posture and discovers that the girl is wearing a leg brace. But how much
more emotional the Carnegie Hall climax would have been if instead of suddenly
seeing these East Harlem kids on stage with Perlman, Stern, Joshua Bell, etc.,
we'd seen them rehearsing first and struggling to keep up. There's too
much music of the heart and not enough music of the callused fingers.
In outline,
The Limey
is a lean little
B-movie revenge melodrama about a felonious Brit (Terence Stamp) who's newly
sprung from prison and flies to Southern California to get to the bottom of his
beautiful daughter's death: "My name's Wilson ... Who dunnit?" The film,
directed by Steven Soderbergh, would be worth seeing just for Stamp's
performance, at once rock-hard and goofily blinkered, and for Peter Fonda's
wittily self-parodic turn as the suspected killer, a music producer who coasts
on '60s counterculture easiness while his lackeys do the dirty work. ("Oh,
man," he says, the fear finally seeping through the ether. "This is getting all
too close to me.")
But the picture's glory is its layered and intricate
syntax. The dialogue moves ahead--there are great gobs of exposition--but the
images continually double back: to Stamp and Lesley Ann Warren, as his
daughter's acting teacher, simply gazing at each other; or to Stamp sitting on
a plane, remembering his daughter as a girl on the beach, the lens of his home
movie camera creating an eerily bright--almost supernatural--spot that dances
over her face. The film's most violent act happens well off screen. (You hear
the distant "pop-pop-pop-pop-pop" of the hero's gun.) The rest is only
half-glimpsed, fantasized, or saturated by memory--or is the present the
memory? Is all of The Limey a temporal hiccup?
Some, including the critic at Time , have
questioned Soderbergh's sanity. (But of course--Soderbergh flouts time!) I see
a method to his madness. Less grandiosely than Harmony Korine in Julien
Donkey-Boy , Soderbergh pores over every scene in search of its essential
dramatic gesture. He's saying: This --not all that other stuff--is what's
important. He telegraphs the ending--you know the Limey will somehow be at the
root of his daughter's death--but it's still an emotional wow. The climax
justifies the technique. It says the point of this odyssey isn't revenge but
regret--for irredeemably blown chances and a tragic waste of love.
Soderbergh is one of those rare filmmakers who learn
on the job. Working within a tight genre structure, he's discovering hundreds
of ways of editing a given scene that can give it the richness of a novel. Is
he totally successful? No; he misses now and then, which is why the technique
sticks out. But what a fantastic effort. See it and weep for what's missing in
most other movies. | [
"Industry ultimately triumphs over nature",
"Princess Mononoke is too fixated on Ashitaka",
"The director Miyazaki gets too lost in unimportant details",
"The actors' overfamiliar voices distract from the seriousness of the plot"
] | 3 |
20072_XP4G9Y26_6 | According to the reviewer, how would Miyazaki feel about youth viewing "Princess Mononoke"? | Machines in the Garden
In the animated ecological
epic
Princess Mononoke
, the camera travels over landscapes with a
clear, steady gaze, like a Zen hang glider. The images have none of the
comin'-at-ya pop-surrealism of American cartoons, many of which have characters
that spring out of the frame like jack-in-the-boxes. The Japanese director,
Hayao Miyazaki, who spent three years on Princess Mononoke and is
reported to have done 70 percent of its paintings himself, seems to work from
the outside in: to begin with the curve of the earth, then the mossy hills, the
watercolor foliage, the nubby stones, the whorls on the wood, the meticulous
carvings on a teacup. He captures the texture of light and the currents of air.
You could almost settle down in this landscape. A view of nature that some
would call "tree-hugging" doesn't feel softheaded when the trees are rendered
in such brilliant and robust detail.
But then, "soft" is not
a word you can apply to Princess Mononoke , however pantheistic its
worldview. The film, which is rated PG-13, is full of splattery carnage. If
Miyazaki in long shot is contemplative, in close-up he's ferocious. He's both
inside and outside the action: He knows when to rock your world and when to
induce a state of sorrowful detachment. According to the New
York
Times , Toy Story animators screened reels of his work when their
imaginations flagged, and writers for Star Trek named an alien species
after one of his features. Watching Princess
Mononoke --which has
been dubbed to Disney/Miramax specifications by American and English stars but
retains its two-hour-plus length, its gory beheadings, and its grim,
near-apocalyptic finale--you can understand their worship. It isn't that
Miyazaki's work is technically so dazzling in this age of digitized miracles;
it's that everything is sublimely in proportion.
The movie has a scope that makes Hollywood's homiletic,
follow-your-dream fables look even more solipsistic. Miyazaki is after nothing
less than the moment in our history (the film is set in the 14 th and
15 th centuries) when the power shifted from a "natural" world to one
shaped by human technology. It's the beginning of what Bill McKibben called
"the end of nature"--that is, when nature became no longer an autonomous,
self-regulating force but one touched (and, in Miyazaki's view, poisoned) by
human industry.
The hero, Ashitaka, a
warrior from the isolationist Emishi clan, is forced in the first scene to kill
a marauding boar--a god turned into a demon (covered in roiling, corrosive
worms) by an iron ball lodged in its body. Infected, destined to be consumed
by--and to die of--rage, Ashitaka leaves his village in search of the iron
ball's source. He discovers a fortress-cum-arms-manufacturing plant called
Irontown, presided over by one of the most complex villains in modern film: the
regal Lady Eboshi. On one hand, she's a benevolent industrialist who presides
over a warmly matriarchal society; on the other, she wants to destroy the
forest, harness its resources, and exterminate its animal deities--chiefly the
Spirit of the Forest, a magnificent deer god whose touch brings instant life or
death, and who transforms at dusk into the towering Night Walker.
P rincess Mononoke builds to a full-scale war between
humans and the animal kingdom--which does not, by the way, consist of your
father's cartoon critters. In fact, the boars and apes have little patience
with Ashitaka's call for nature and mankind to live together in harmony; they'd
like to eat him. The wolf god, Moro, is slightly more sympathetic, but that's
because her adopted "daughter," San (a k a Princess Mononoke), is human. San is
first seen sucking a wound of her huge wolf mother, then, as the gore drips
from her mouth, training her dark eyes on Ashitaka with feral hatred. Her
second appearance--a lone attack on Irontown to assassinate Lady Eboshi--is one
of the movie's high points. It's Miyazaki's use of sound--and silence--that
takes your breath away: the determined tap of the wolf princess's shoes as she
scuttles over the fortress's rooftops; the silence of Eboshi and her army as
they stare at this tiny yet formidable tomboy against the black sky. Their
battle is so furious that the blades streak and lose definition--it's almost
subliminal.
It's a shame that the
wolf princess warms up to Ashitaka and spends the rest of the film either
saving him or being saved by him. She loses that punk-bitch allure. The voice
of Claire Danes doesn't help. When Danes says, "I'd do anything to get you
humans out of my forest," she sounds like a Valley Girl peeved over lack of
parking spaces at the mall. (San needs a more ragged voice--I'd be interested
to hear the original Japanese actress.) Billy Crudup is just as Disneyfied
(Miramaxed?), but that doesn't hurt as much because Ashitaka is conceived from
the start as a rather bland ingénu. Gillian Anderson's growling Moro sounds
silly (she doesn't have the breath control), and the fey-hick tones of Billy
Bob Thornton are too recognizable as the Akim Tamiroff-like mercenary, Jigo.
But Minnie Driver--coming off a triumphantly dizzy Jane in Tarzan --once
again provides a voice that the animators deserve. "Bring the strange-ah to me
late-ah," she commands in sexy Martian Queen cadences that will stir the loins
of Flash Gordon fans everywhere. "I would like to thank him
puh-sonally."
The overfamiliar voices nudge Princess Mononoke
closer to its American counterparts--but not by a lot. There's always something
wondrously strange. The "kodamas" are little tree spirits on doughboy bodies.
They cock their trapezoidal dice heads and emit a series of clicks; then their
heads pop back with a conclusive rattle. Something about them seems just right;
I could watch them for hours. (Miyazaki limits their appearances to seconds--he
doesn't wear out their mystery the way that, say, George Lucas would.) And no
Hollywood animated feature would end with such a powerful vision of apocalypse,
as the land is bestridden by a colossus dropping a thick, caustic, tarlike gel
that recalls the post-Hiroshima "black rain." Can you take the kids? I think
so. As Miyazaki said at a New York Film Festival press conference, "Children
understand intuitively that the world they have been born into is not a blessed
world." Princess Mononoke , at least, can tell them why.
"A special smile ... a
certain touch ..." So begins the elevator-music theme song of
Music of
the Heart
... "I never had a lot that I loved so much." The credits had
just started and I was already looking for a barf bag. Did Miramax and director
Wes Craven have to work so hard to schlockify the story of Roberta Guaspari
(played here by Meryl Streep), whose violin courses in East Harlem elementary
schools have become a beacon for such programs nationwide? A fabled taskmaster
(her story was told in the 1996 documentary Small Wonders ), Guaspari
used music as a way to teach self-discipline--along with the healthy
self-respect that follows in its wake. When the New York school board cut the
funding for her program, she proved a marvel of self-promotion, attracting
features in all the major dailies and ending up along with her best students at
Carnegie Hall for a benefit "Fiddlefest"--along with Itzhak Perlman, Isaac
Stern, and other legendary "fiddlers."
Streep has said that she spent so much of the time on the
set learning the violin (she doesn't play any instruments) that she didn't
bring the full force of her acting technique to bear on Roberta. Maybe that's
why the performance seems so natural. Let her always learn an instrument on the
set! Still, she doesn't make much sense of Guaspari. The script, by Pamela Gray
( A Walk on the Moon ), has her students complain of her nastiness and
perfectionism, but Streep--who has made herself look dumpy, thick-waisted, and
bedraggled--is so busy telegraphing her vulnerability that all we get is dippy
niceness. Instead of a monument to an individual's iron will, Music of the
Heart becomes the story of a woman so helpless that she arouses the
kindness of strangers.
Directors of violent
genre pieces like Craven (who got this mainstream gig in return for doing the
Scream sequels) or Carl Franklin or Sam Raimi sometimes want so badly to
belong to Establishment Hollywood--to go to the Academy Awards--that they
neuter themselves. Bending over backward to show how sensitive they can be,
they forget that violence--even if it's just emotional violence--belongs in
"ordinary" dramas, too. Craven does good work with the young actors in the
classroom scenes, but the film has a reticence common to most biopics and a
mushy, TV-movie humanism that blands out its texture. OK, I was a puddle after
some scenes, like the one where Guaspari pushes a student to get her to improve
her posture and discovers that the girl is wearing a leg brace. But how much
more emotional the Carnegie Hall climax would have been if instead of suddenly
seeing these East Harlem kids on stage with Perlman, Stern, Joshua Bell, etc.,
we'd seen them rehearsing first and struggling to keep up. There's too
much music of the heart and not enough music of the callused fingers.
In outline,
The Limey
is a lean little
B-movie revenge melodrama about a felonious Brit (Terence Stamp) who's newly
sprung from prison and flies to Southern California to get to the bottom of his
beautiful daughter's death: "My name's Wilson ... Who dunnit?" The film,
directed by Steven Soderbergh, would be worth seeing just for Stamp's
performance, at once rock-hard and goofily blinkered, and for Peter Fonda's
wittily self-parodic turn as the suspected killer, a music producer who coasts
on '60s counterculture easiness while his lackeys do the dirty work. ("Oh,
man," he says, the fear finally seeping through the ether. "This is getting all
too close to me.")
But the picture's glory is its layered and intricate
syntax. The dialogue moves ahead--there are great gobs of exposition--but the
images continually double back: to Stamp and Lesley Ann Warren, as his
daughter's acting teacher, simply gazing at each other; or to Stamp sitting on
a plane, remembering his daughter as a girl on the beach, the lens of his home
movie camera creating an eerily bright--almost supernatural--spot that dances
over her face. The film's most violent act happens well off screen. (You hear
the distant "pop-pop-pop-pop-pop" of the hero's gun.) The rest is only
half-glimpsed, fantasized, or saturated by memory--or is the present the
memory? Is all of The Limey a temporal hiccup?
Some, including the critic at Time , have
questioned Soderbergh's sanity. (But of course--Soderbergh flouts time!) I see
a method to his madness. Less grandiosely than Harmony Korine in Julien
Donkey-Boy , Soderbergh pores over every scene in search of its essential
dramatic gesture. He's saying: This --not all that other stuff--is what's
important. He telegraphs the ending--you know the Limey will somehow be at the
root of his daughter's death--but it's still an emotional wow. The climax
justifies the technique. It says the point of this odyssey isn't revenge but
regret--for irredeemably blown chances and a tragic waste of love.
Soderbergh is one of those rare filmmakers who learn
on the job. Working within a tight genre structure, he's discovering hundreds
of ways of editing a given scene that can give it the richness of a novel. Is
he totally successful? No; he misses now and then, which is why the technique
sticks out. But what a fantastic effort. See it and weep for what's missing in
most other movies. | [
"Zealous",
"Apprehensive",
"Supportive",
"Ambivalent"
] | 2 |
20072_XP4G9Y26_7 | In reviewing "Music of the Heart," the reviewer believes that the director's greatest flaw is: | Machines in the Garden
In the animated ecological
epic
Princess Mononoke
, the camera travels over landscapes with a
clear, steady gaze, like a Zen hang glider. The images have none of the
comin'-at-ya pop-surrealism of American cartoons, many of which have characters
that spring out of the frame like jack-in-the-boxes. The Japanese director,
Hayao Miyazaki, who spent three years on Princess Mononoke and is
reported to have done 70 percent of its paintings himself, seems to work from
the outside in: to begin with the curve of the earth, then the mossy hills, the
watercolor foliage, the nubby stones, the whorls on the wood, the meticulous
carvings on a teacup. He captures the texture of light and the currents of air.
You could almost settle down in this landscape. A view of nature that some
would call "tree-hugging" doesn't feel softheaded when the trees are rendered
in such brilliant and robust detail.
But then, "soft" is not
a word you can apply to Princess Mononoke , however pantheistic its
worldview. The film, which is rated PG-13, is full of splattery carnage. If
Miyazaki in long shot is contemplative, in close-up he's ferocious. He's both
inside and outside the action: He knows when to rock your world and when to
induce a state of sorrowful detachment. According to the New
York
Times , Toy Story animators screened reels of his work when their
imaginations flagged, and writers for Star Trek named an alien species
after one of his features. Watching Princess
Mononoke --which has
been dubbed to Disney/Miramax specifications by American and English stars but
retains its two-hour-plus length, its gory beheadings, and its grim,
near-apocalyptic finale--you can understand their worship. It isn't that
Miyazaki's work is technically so dazzling in this age of digitized miracles;
it's that everything is sublimely in proportion.
The movie has a scope that makes Hollywood's homiletic,
follow-your-dream fables look even more solipsistic. Miyazaki is after nothing
less than the moment in our history (the film is set in the 14 th and
15 th centuries) when the power shifted from a "natural" world to one
shaped by human technology. It's the beginning of what Bill McKibben called
"the end of nature"--that is, when nature became no longer an autonomous,
self-regulating force but one touched (and, in Miyazaki's view, poisoned) by
human industry.
The hero, Ashitaka, a
warrior from the isolationist Emishi clan, is forced in the first scene to kill
a marauding boar--a god turned into a demon (covered in roiling, corrosive
worms) by an iron ball lodged in its body. Infected, destined to be consumed
by--and to die of--rage, Ashitaka leaves his village in search of the iron
ball's source. He discovers a fortress-cum-arms-manufacturing plant called
Irontown, presided over by one of the most complex villains in modern film: the
regal Lady Eboshi. On one hand, she's a benevolent industrialist who presides
over a warmly matriarchal society; on the other, she wants to destroy the
forest, harness its resources, and exterminate its animal deities--chiefly the
Spirit of the Forest, a magnificent deer god whose touch brings instant life or
death, and who transforms at dusk into the towering Night Walker.
P rincess Mononoke builds to a full-scale war between
humans and the animal kingdom--which does not, by the way, consist of your
father's cartoon critters. In fact, the boars and apes have little patience
with Ashitaka's call for nature and mankind to live together in harmony; they'd
like to eat him. The wolf god, Moro, is slightly more sympathetic, but that's
because her adopted "daughter," San (a k a Princess Mononoke), is human. San is
first seen sucking a wound of her huge wolf mother, then, as the gore drips
from her mouth, training her dark eyes on Ashitaka with feral hatred. Her
second appearance--a lone attack on Irontown to assassinate Lady Eboshi--is one
of the movie's high points. It's Miyazaki's use of sound--and silence--that
takes your breath away: the determined tap of the wolf princess's shoes as she
scuttles over the fortress's rooftops; the silence of Eboshi and her army as
they stare at this tiny yet formidable tomboy against the black sky. Their
battle is so furious that the blades streak and lose definition--it's almost
subliminal.
It's a shame that the
wolf princess warms up to Ashitaka and spends the rest of the film either
saving him or being saved by him. She loses that punk-bitch allure. The voice
of Claire Danes doesn't help. When Danes says, "I'd do anything to get you
humans out of my forest," she sounds like a Valley Girl peeved over lack of
parking spaces at the mall. (San needs a more ragged voice--I'd be interested
to hear the original Japanese actress.) Billy Crudup is just as Disneyfied
(Miramaxed?), but that doesn't hurt as much because Ashitaka is conceived from
the start as a rather bland ingénu. Gillian Anderson's growling Moro sounds
silly (she doesn't have the breath control), and the fey-hick tones of Billy
Bob Thornton are too recognizable as the Akim Tamiroff-like mercenary, Jigo.
But Minnie Driver--coming off a triumphantly dizzy Jane in Tarzan --once
again provides a voice that the animators deserve. "Bring the strange-ah to me
late-ah," she commands in sexy Martian Queen cadences that will stir the loins
of Flash Gordon fans everywhere. "I would like to thank him
puh-sonally."
The overfamiliar voices nudge Princess Mononoke
closer to its American counterparts--but not by a lot. There's always something
wondrously strange. The "kodamas" are little tree spirits on doughboy bodies.
They cock their trapezoidal dice heads and emit a series of clicks; then their
heads pop back with a conclusive rattle. Something about them seems just right;
I could watch them for hours. (Miyazaki limits their appearances to seconds--he
doesn't wear out their mystery the way that, say, George Lucas would.) And no
Hollywood animated feature would end with such a powerful vision of apocalypse,
as the land is bestridden by a colossus dropping a thick, caustic, tarlike gel
that recalls the post-Hiroshima "black rain." Can you take the kids? I think
so. As Miyazaki said at a New York Film Festival press conference, "Children
understand intuitively that the world they have been born into is not a blessed
world." Princess Mononoke , at least, can tell them why.
"A special smile ... a
certain touch ..." So begins the elevator-music theme song of
Music of
the Heart
... "I never had a lot that I loved so much." The credits had
just started and I was already looking for a barf bag. Did Miramax and director
Wes Craven have to work so hard to schlockify the story of Roberta Guaspari
(played here by Meryl Streep), whose violin courses in East Harlem elementary
schools have become a beacon for such programs nationwide? A fabled taskmaster
(her story was told in the 1996 documentary Small Wonders ), Guaspari
used music as a way to teach self-discipline--along with the healthy
self-respect that follows in its wake. When the New York school board cut the
funding for her program, she proved a marvel of self-promotion, attracting
features in all the major dailies and ending up along with her best students at
Carnegie Hall for a benefit "Fiddlefest"--along with Itzhak Perlman, Isaac
Stern, and other legendary "fiddlers."
Streep has said that she spent so much of the time on the
set learning the violin (she doesn't play any instruments) that she didn't
bring the full force of her acting technique to bear on Roberta. Maybe that's
why the performance seems so natural. Let her always learn an instrument on the
set! Still, she doesn't make much sense of Guaspari. The script, by Pamela Gray
( A Walk on the Moon ), has her students complain of her nastiness and
perfectionism, but Streep--who has made herself look dumpy, thick-waisted, and
bedraggled--is so busy telegraphing her vulnerability that all we get is dippy
niceness. Instead of a monument to an individual's iron will, Music of the
Heart becomes the story of a woman so helpless that she arouses the
kindness of strangers.
Directors of violent
genre pieces like Craven (who got this mainstream gig in return for doing the
Scream sequels) or Carl Franklin or Sam Raimi sometimes want so badly to
belong to Establishment Hollywood--to go to the Academy Awards--that they
neuter themselves. Bending over backward to show how sensitive they can be,
they forget that violence--even if it's just emotional violence--belongs in
"ordinary" dramas, too. Craven does good work with the young actors in the
classroom scenes, but the film has a reticence common to most biopics and a
mushy, TV-movie humanism that blands out its texture. OK, I was a puddle after
some scenes, like the one where Guaspari pushes a student to get her to improve
her posture and discovers that the girl is wearing a leg brace. But how much
more emotional the Carnegie Hall climax would have been if instead of suddenly
seeing these East Harlem kids on stage with Perlman, Stern, Joshua Bell, etc.,
we'd seen them rehearsing first and struggling to keep up. There's too
much music of the heart and not enough music of the callused fingers.
In outline,
The Limey
is a lean little
B-movie revenge melodrama about a felonious Brit (Terence Stamp) who's newly
sprung from prison and flies to Southern California to get to the bottom of his
beautiful daughter's death: "My name's Wilson ... Who dunnit?" The film,
directed by Steven Soderbergh, would be worth seeing just for Stamp's
performance, at once rock-hard and goofily blinkered, and for Peter Fonda's
wittily self-parodic turn as the suspected killer, a music producer who coasts
on '60s counterculture easiness while his lackeys do the dirty work. ("Oh,
man," he says, the fear finally seeping through the ether. "This is getting all
too close to me.")
But the picture's glory is its layered and intricate
syntax. The dialogue moves ahead--there are great gobs of exposition--but the
images continually double back: to Stamp and Lesley Ann Warren, as his
daughter's acting teacher, simply gazing at each other; or to Stamp sitting on
a plane, remembering his daughter as a girl on the beach, the lens of his home
movie camera creating an eerily bright--almost supernatural--spot that dances
over her face. The film's most violent act happens well off screen. (You hear
the distant "pop-pop-pop-pop-pop" of the hero's gun.) The rest is only
half-glimpsed, fantasized, or saturated by memory--or is the present the
memory? Is all of The Limey a temporal hiccup?
Some, including the critic at Time , have
questioned Soderbergh's sanity. (But of course--Soderbergh flouts time!) I see
a method to his madness. Less grandiosely than Harmony Korine in Julien
Donkey-Boy , Soderbergh pores over every scene in search of its essential
dramatic gesture. He's saying: This --not all that other stuff--is what's
important. He telegraphs the ending--you know the Limey will somehow be at the
root of his daughter's death--but it's still an emotional wow. The climax
justifies the technique. It says the point of this odyssey isn't revenge but
regret--for irredeemably blown chances and a tragic waste of love.
Soderbergh is one of those rare filmmakers who learn
on the job. Working within a tight genre structure, he's discovering hundreds
of ways of editing a given scene that can give it the richness of a novel. Is
he totally successful? No; he misses now and then, which is why the technique
sticks out. But what a fantastic effort. See it and weep for what's missing in
most other movies. | [
"Not focusing enough on the violin music",
"Trying too hard to appeal to the film industry's elite",
"Ignoring the perspectives of the children in the film",
"Mischaracterizing Roberta Guaspari"
] | 3 |
20072_XP4G9Y26_8 | The reviewer shares the following similar criticism of Princess Mononoke and Roberta Guaspari: | Machines in the Garden
In the animated ecological
epic
Princess Mononoke
, the camera travels over landscapes with a
clear, steady gaze, like a Zen hang glider. The images have none of the
comin'-at-ya pop-surrealism of American cartoons, many of which have characters
that spring out of the frame like jack-in-the-boxes. The Japanese director,
Hayao Miyazaki, who spent three years on Princess Mononoke and is
reported to have done 70 percent of its paintings himself, seems to work from
the outside in: to begin with the curve of the earth, then the mossy hills, the
watercolor foliage, the nubby stones, the whorls on the wood, the meticulous
carvings on a teacup. He captures the texture of light and the currents of air.
You could almost settle down in this landscape. A view of nature that some
would call "tree-hugging" doesn't feel softheaded when the trees are rendered
in such brilliant and robust detail.
But then, "soft" is not
a word you can apply to Princess Mononoke , however pantheistic its
worldview. The film, which is rated PG-13, is full of splattery carnage. If
Miyazaki in long shot is contemplative, in close-up he's ferocious. He's both
inside and outside the action: He knows when to rock your world and when to
induce a state of sorrowful detachment. According to the New
York
Times , Toy Story animators screened reels of his work when their
imaginations flagged, and writers for Star Trek named an alien species
after one of his features. Watching Princess
Mononoke --which has
been dubbed to Disney/Miramax specifications by American and English stars but
retains its two-hour-plus length, its gory beheadings, and its grim,
near-apocalyptic finale--you can understand their worship. It isn't that
Miyazaki's work is technically so dazzling in this age of digitized miracles;
it's that everything is sublimely in proportion.
The movie has a scope that makes Hollywood's homiletic,
follow-your-dream fables look even more solipsistic. Miyazaki is after nothing
less than the moment in our history (the film is set in the 14 th and
15 th centuries) when the power shifted from a "natural" world to one
shaped by human technology. It's the beginning of what Bill McKibben called
"the end of nature"--that is, when nature became no longer an autonomous,
self-regulating force but one touched (and, in Miyazaki's view, poisoned) by
human industry.
The hero, Ashitaka, a
warrior from the isolationist Emishi clan, is forced in the first scene to kill
a marauding boar--a god turned into a demon (covered in roiling, corrosive
worms) by an iron ball lodged in its body. Infected, destined to be consumed
by--and to die of--rage, Ashitaka leaves his village in search of the iron
ball's source. He discovers a fortress-cum-arms-manufacturing plant called
Irontown, presided over by one of the most complex villains in modern film: the
regal Lady Eboshi. On one hand, she's a benevolent industrialist who presides
over a warmly matriarchal society; on the other, she wants to destroy the
forest, harness its resources, and exterminate its animal deities--chiefly the
Spirit of the Forest, a magnificent deer god whose touch brings instant life or
death, and who transforms at dusk into the towering Night Walker.
P rincess Mononoke builds to a full-scale war between
humans and the animal kingdom--which does not, by the way, consist of your
father's cartoon critters. In fact, the boars and apes have little patience
with Ashitaka's call for nature and mankind to live together in harmony; they'd
like to eat him. The wolf god, Moro, is slightly more sympathetic, but that's
because her adopted "daughter," San (a k a Princess Mononoke), is human. San is
first seen sucking a wound of her huge wolf mother, then, as the gore drips
from her mouth, training her dark eyes on Ashitaka with feral hatred. Her
second appearance--a lone attack on Irontown to assassinate Lady Eboshi--is one
of the movie's high points. It's Miyazaki's use of sound--and silence--that
takes your breath away: the determined tap of the wolf princess's shoes as she
scuttles over the fortress's rooftops; the silence of Eboshi and her army as
they stare at this tiny yet formidable tomboy against the black sky. Their
battle is so furious that the blades streak and lose definition--it's almost
subliminal.
It's a shame that the
wolf princess warms up to Ashitaka and spends the rest of the film either
saving him or being saved by him. She loses that punk-bitch allure. The voice
of Claire Danes doesn't help. When Danes says, "I'd do anything to get you
humans out of my forest," she sounds like a Valley Girl peeved over lack of
parking spaces at the mall. (San needs a more ragged voice--I'd be interested
to hear the original Japanese actress.) Billy Crudup is just as Disneyfied
(Miramaxed?), but that doesn't hurt as much because Ashitaka is conceived from
the start as a rather bland ingénu. Gillian Anderson's growling Moro sounds
silly (she doesn't have the breath control), and the fey-hick tones of Billy
Bob Thornton are too recognizable as the Akim Tamiroff-like mercenary, Jigo.
But Minnie Driver--coming off a triumphantly dizzy Jane in Tarzan --once
again provides a voice that the animators deserve. "Bring the strange-ah to me
late-ah," she commands in sexy Martian Queen cadences that will stir the loins
of Flash Gordon fans everywhere. "I would like to thank him
puh-sonally."
The overfamiliar voices nudge Princess Mononoke
closer to its American counterparts--but not by a lot. There's always something
wondrously strange. The "kodamas" are little tree spirits on doughboy bodies.
They cock their trapezoidal dice heads and emit a series of clicks; then their
heads pop back with a conclusive rattle. Something about them seems just right;
I could watch them for hours. (Miyazaki limits their appearances to seconds--he
doesn't wear out their mystery the way that, say, George Lucas would.) And no
Hollywood animated feature would end with such a powerful vision of apocalypse,
as the land is bestridden by a colossus dropping a thick, caustic, tarlike gel
that recalls the post-Hiroshima "black rain." Can you take the kids? I think
so. As Miyazaki said at a New York Film Festival press conference, "Children
understand intuitively that the world they have been born into is not a blessed
world." Princess Mononoke , at least, can tell them why.
"A special smile ... a
certain touch ..." So begins the elevator-music theme song of
Music of
the Heart
... "I never had a lot that I loved so much." The credits had
just started and I was already looking for a barf bag. Did Miramax and director
Wes Craven have to work so hard to schlockify the story of Roberta Guaspari
(played here by Meryl Streep), whose violin courses in East Harlem elementary
schools have become a beacon for such programs nationwide? A fabled taskmaster
(her story was told in the 1996 documentary Small Wonders ), Guaspari
used music as a way to teach self-discipline--along with the healthy
self-respect that follows in its wake. When the New York school board cut the
funding for her program, she proved a marvel of self-promotion, attracting
features in all the major dailies and ending up along with her best students at
Carnegie Hall for a benefit "Fiddlefest"--along with Itzhak Perlman, Isaac
Stern, and other legendary "fiddlers."
Streep has said that she spent so much of the time on the
set learning the violin (she doesn't play any instruments) that she didn't
bring the full force of her acting technique to bear on Roberta. Maybe that's
why the performance seems so natural. Let her always learn an instrument on the
set! Still, she doesn't make much sense of Guaspari. The script, by Pamela Gray
( A Walk on the Moon ), has her students complain of her nastiness and
perfectionism, but Streep--who has made herself look dumpy, thick-waisted, and
bedraggled--is so busy telegraphing her vulnerability that all we get is dippy
niceness. Instead of a monument to an individual's iron will, Music of the
Heart becomes the story of a woman so helpless that she arouses the
kindness of strangers.
Directors of violent
genre pieces like Craven (who got this mainstream gig in return for doing the
Scream sequels) or Carl Franklin or Sam Raimi sometimes want so badly to
belong to Establishment Hollywood--to go to the Academy Awards--that they
neuter themselves. Bending over backward to show how sensitive they can be,
they forget that violence--even if it's just emotional violence--belongs in
"ordinary" dramas, too. Craven does good work with the young actors in the
classroom scenes, but the film has a reticence common to most biopics and a
mushy, TV-movie humanism that blands out its texture. OK, I was a puddle after
some scenes, like the one where Guaspari pushes a student to get her to improve
her posture and discovers that the girl is wearing a leg brace. But how much
more emotional the Carnegie Hall climax would have been if instead of suddenly
seeing these East Harlem kids on stage with Perlman, Stern, Joshua Bell, etc.,
we'd seen them rehearsing first and struggling to keep up. There's too
much music of the heart and not enough music of the callused fingers.
In outline,
The Limey
is a lean little
B-movie revenge melodrama about a felonious Brit (Terence Stamp) who's newly
sprung from prison and flies to Southern California to get to the bottom of his
beautiful daughter's death: "My name's Wilson ... Who dunnit?" The film,
directed by Steven Soderbergh, would be worth seeing just for Stamp's
performance, at once rock-hard and goofily blinkered, and for Peter Fonda's
wittily self-parodic turn as the suspected killer, a music producer who coasts
on '60s counterculture easiness while his lackeys do the dirty work. ("Oh,
man," he says, the fear finally seeping through the ether. "This is getting all
too close to me.")
But the picture's glory is its layered and intricate
syntax. The dialogue moves ahead--there are great gobs of exposition--but the
images continually double back: to Stamp and Lesley Ann Warren, as his
daughter's acting teacher, simply gazing at each other; or to Stamp sitting on
a plane, remembering his daughter as a girl on the beach, the lens of his home
movie camera creating an eerily bright--almost supernatural--spot that dances
over her face. The film's most violent act happens well off screen. (You hear
the distant "pop-pop-pop-pop-pop" of the hero's gun.) The rest is only
half-glimpsed, fantasized, or saturated by memory--or is the present the
memory? Is all of The Limey a temporal hiccup?
Some, including the critic at Time , have
questioned Soderbergh's sanity. (But of course--Soderbergh flouts time!) I see
a method to his madness. Less grandiosely than Harmony Korine in Julien
Donkey-Boy , Soderbergh pores over every scene in search of its essential
dramatic gesture. He's saying: This --not all that other stuff--is what's
important. He telegraphs the ending--you know the Limey will somehow be at the
root of his daughter's death--but it's still an emotional wow. The climax
justifies the technique. It says the point of this odyssey isn't revenge but
regret--for irredeemably blown chances and a tragic waste of love.
Soderbergh is one of those rare filmmakers who learn
on the job. Working within a tight genre structure, he's discovering hundreds
of ways of editing a given scene that can give it the richness of a novel. Is
he totally successful? No; he misses now and then, which is why the technique
sticks out. But what a fantastic effort. See it and weep for what's missing in
most other movies. | [
"They are unoriginal and sexist caricatures of stereotypical female archetypes",
"They are not developed to the fullest extent they could be, and the audience loses interest in their storyline",
"They lose their appeal when the director reduces their rough edges",
"They should have been cast as the protagonists of their respective stories, instead of secondary characters"
] | 2 |
20072_XP4G9Y26_9 | The film reviewer is generally _____ the actors in "Princess Mononoke," and ______ the actors in "The Limey," respectively: | Machines in the Garden
In the animated ecological
epic
Princess Mononoke
, the camera travels over landscapes with a
clear, steady gaze, like a Zen hang glider. The images have none of the
comin'-at-ya pop-surrealism of American cartoons, many of which have characters
that spring out of the frame like jack-in-the-boxes. The Japanese director,
Hayao Miyazaki, who spent three years on Princess Mononoke and is
reported to have done 70 percent of its paintings himself, seems to work from
the outside in: to begin with the curve of the earth, then the mossy hills, the
watercolor foliage, the nubby stones, the whorls on the wood, the meticulous
carvings on a teacup. He captures the texture of light and the currents of air.
You could almost settle down in this landscape. A view of nature that some
would call "tree-hugging" doesn't feel softheaded when the trees are rendered
in such brilliant and robust detail.
But then, "soft" is not
a word you can apply to Princess Mononoke , however pantheistic its
worldview. The film, which is rated PG-13, is full of splattery carnage. If
Miyazaki in long shot is contemplative, in close-up he's ferocious. He's both
inside and outside the action: He knows when to rock your world and when to
induce a state of sorrowful detachment. According to the New
York
Times , Toy Story animators screened reels of his work when their
imaginations flagged, and writers for Star Trek named an alien species
after one of his features. Watching Princess
Mononoke --which has
been dubbed to Disney/Miramax specifications by American and English stars but
retains its two-hour-plus length, its gory beheadings, and its grim,
near-apocalyptic finale--you can understand their worship. It isn't that
Miyazaki's work is technically so dazzling in this age of digitized miracles;
it's that everything is sublimely in proportion.
The movie has a scope that makes Hollywood's homiletic,
follow-your-dream fables look even more solipsistic. Miyazaki is after nothing
less than the moment in our history (the film is set in the 14 th and
15 th centuries) when the power shifted from a "natural" world to one
shaped by human technology. It's the beginning of what Bill McKibben called
"the end of nature"--that is, when nature became no longer an autonomous,
self-regulating force but one touched (and, in Miyazaki's view, poisoned) by
human industry.
The hero, Ashitaka, a
warrior from the isolationist Emishi clan, is forced in the first scene to kill
a marauding boar--a god turned into a demon (covered in roiling, corrosive
worms) by an iron ball lodged in its body. Infected, destined to be consumed
by--and to die of--rage, Ashitaka leaves his village in search of the iron
ball's source. He discovers a fortress-cum-arms-manufacturing plant called
Irontown, presided over by one of the most complex villains in modern film: the
regal Lady Eboshi. On one hand, she's a benevolent industrialist who presides
over a warmly matriarchal society; on the other, she wants to destroy the
forest, harness its resources, and exterminate its animal deities--chiefly the
Spirit of the Forest, a magnificent deer god whose touch brings instant life or
death, and who transforms at dusk into the towering Night Walker.
P rincess Mononoke builds to a full-scale war between
humans and the animal kingdom--which does not, by the way, consist of your
father's cartoon critters. In fact, the boars and apes have little patience
with Ashitaka's call for nature and mankind to live together in harmony; they'd
like to eat him. The wolf god, Moro, is slightly more sympathetic, but that's
because her adopted "daughter," San (a k a Princess Mononoke), is human. San is
first seen sucking a wound of her huge wolf mother, then, as the gore drips
from her mouth, training her dark eyes on Ashitaka with feral hatred. Her
second appearance--a lone attack on Irontown to assassinate Lady Eboshi--is one
of the movie's high points. It's Miyazaki's use of sound--and silence--that
takes your breath away: the determined tap of the wolf princess's shoes as she
scuttles over the fortress's rooftops; the silence of Eboshi and her army as
they stare at this tiny yet formidable tomboy against the black sky. Their
battle is so furious that the blades streak and lose definition--it's almost
subliminal.
It's a shame that the
wolf princess warms up to Ashitaka and spends the rest of the film either
saving him or being saved by him. She loses that punk-bitch allure. The voice
of Claire Danes doesn't help. When Danes says, "I'd do anything to get you
humans out of my forest," she sounds like a Valley Girl peeved over lack of
parking spaces at the mall. (San needs a more ragged voice--I'd be interested
to hear the original Japanese actress.) Billy Crudup is just as Disneyfied
(Miramaxed?), but that doesn't hurt as much because Ashitaka is conceived from
the start as a rather bland ingénu. Gillian Anderson's growling Moro sounds
silly (she doesn't have the breath control), and the fey-hick tones of Billy
Bob Thornton are too recognizable as the Akim Tamiroff-like mercenary, Jigo.
But Minnie Driver--coming off a triumphantly dizzy Jane in Tarzan --once
again provides a voice that the animators deserve. "Bring the strange-ah to me
late-ah," she commands in sexy Martian Queen cadences that will stir the loins
of Flash Gordon fans everywhere. "I would like to thank him
puh-sonally."
The overfamiliar voices nudge Princess Mononoke
closer to its American counterparts--but not by a lot. There's always something
wondrously strange. The "kodamas" are little tree spirits on doughboy bodies.
They cock their trapezoidal dice heads and emit a series of clicks; then their
heads pop back with a conclusive rattle. Something about them seems just right;
I could watch them for hours. (Miyazaki limits their appearances to seconds--he
doesn't wear out their mystery the way that, say, George Lucas would.) And no
Hollywood animated feature would end with such a powerful vision of apocalypse,
as the land is bestridden by a colossus dropping a thick, caustic, tarlike gel
that recalls the post-Hiroshima "black rain." Can you take the kids? I think
so. As Miyazaki said at a New York Film Festival press conference, "Children
understand intuitively that the world they have been born into is not a blessed
world." Princess Mononoke , at least, can tell them why.
"A special smile ... a
certain touch ..." So begins the elevator-music theme song of
Music of
the Heart
... "I never had a lot that I loved so much." The credits had
just started and I was already looking for a barf bag. Did Miramax and director
Wes Craven have to work so hard to schlockify the story of Roberta Guaspari
(played here by Meryl Streep), whose violin courses in East Harlem elementary
schools have become a beacon for such programs nationwide? A fabled taskmaster
(her story was told in the 1996 documentary Small Wonders ), Guaspari
used music as a way to teach self-discipline--along with the healthy
self-respect that follows in its wake. When the New York school board cut the
funding for her program, she proved a marvel of self-promotion, attracting
features in all the major dailies and ending up along with her best students at
Carnegie Hall for a benefit "Fiddlefest"--along with Itzhak Perlman, Isaac
Stern, and other legendary "fiddlers."
Streep has said that she spent so much of the time on the
set learning the violin (she doesn't play any instruments) that she didn't
bring the full force of her acting technique to bear on Roberta. Maybe that's
why the performance seems so natural. Let her always learn an instrument on the
set! Still, she doesn't make much sense of Guaspari. The script, by Pamela Gray
( A Walk on the Moon ), has her students complain of her nastiness and
perfectionism, but Streep--who has made herself look dumpy, thick-waisted, and
bedraggled--is so busy telegraphing her vulnerability that all we get is dippy
niceness. Instead of a monument to an individual's iron will, Music of the
Heart becomes the story of a woman so helpless that she arouses the
kindness of strangers.
Directors of violent
genre pieces like Craven (who got this mainstream gig in return for doing the
Scream sequels) or Carl Franklin or Sam Raimi sometimes want so badly to
belong to Establishment Hollywood--to go to the Academy Awards--that they
neuter themselves. Bending over backward to show how sensitive they can be,
they forget that violence--even if it's just emotional violence--belongs in
"ordinary" dramas, too. Craven does good work with the young actors in the
classroom scenes, but the film has a reticence common to most biopics and a
mushy, TV-movie humanism that blands out its texture. OK, I was a puddle after
some scenes, like the one where Guaspari pushes a student to get her to improve
her posture and discovers that the girl is wearing a leg brace. But how much
more emotional the Carnegie Hall climax would have been if instead of suddenly
seeing these East Harlem kids on stage with Perlman, Stern, Joshua Bell, etc.,
we'd seen them rehearsing first and struggling to keep up. There's too
much music of the heart and not enough music of the callused fingers.
In outline,
The Limey
is a lean little
B-movie revenge melodrama about a felonious Brit (Terence Stamp) who's newly
sprung from prison and flies to Southern California to get to the bottom of his
beautiful daughter's death: "My name's Wilson ... Who dunnit?" The film,
directed by Steven Soderbergh, would be worth seeing just for Stamp's
performance, at once rock-hard and goofily blinkered, and for Peter Fonda's
wittily self-parodic turn as the suspected killer, a music producer who coasts
on '60s counterculture easiness while his lackeys do the dirty work. ("Oh,
man," he says, the fear finally seeping through the ether. "This is getting all
too close to me.")
But the picture's glory is its layered and intricate
syntax. The dialogue moves ahead--there are great gobs of exposition--but the
images continually double back: to Stamp and Lesley Ann Warren, as his
daughter's acting teacher, simply gazing at each other; or to Stamp sitting on
a plane, remembering his daughter as a girl on the beach, the lens of his home
movie camera creating an eerily bright--almost supernatural--spot that dances
over her face. The film's most violent act happens well off screen. (You hear
the distant "pop-pop-pop-pop-pop" of the hero's gun.) The rest is only
half-glimpsed, fantasized, or saturated by memory--or is the present the
memory? Is all of The Limey a temporal hiccup?
Some, including the critic at Time , have
questioned Soderbergh's sanity. (But of course--Soderbergh flouts time!) I see
a method to his madness. Less grandiosely than Harmony Korine in Julien
Donkey-Boy , Soderbergh pores over every scene in search of its essential
dramatic gesture. He's saying: This --not all that other stuff--is what's
important. He telegraphs the ending--you know the Limey will somehow be at the
root of his daughter's death--but it's still an emotional wow. The climax
justifies the technique. It says the point of this odyssey isn't revenge but
regret--for irredeemably blown chances and a tragic waste of love.
Soderbergh is one of those rare filmmakers who learn
on the job. Working within a tight genre structure, he's discovering hundreds
of ways of editing a given scene that can give it the richness of a novel. Is
he totally successful? No; he misses now and then, which is why the technique
sticks out. But what a fantastic effort. See it and weep for what's missing in
most other movies. | [
"irritated by // impressed by",
"skeptical of // convinced by",
"bored of // enraptured by",
"critical of // overpraising of"
] | 0 |
20072_XP4G9Y26_10 | What does the film reviewer respect the most about the director of "The Limey"? | Machines in the Garden
In the animated ecological
epic
Princess Mononoke
, the camera travels over landscapes with a
clear, steady gaze, like a Zen hang glider. The images have none of the
comin'-at-ya pop-surrealism of American cartoons, many of which have characters
that spring out of the frame like jack-in-the-boxes. The Japanese director,
Hayao Miyazaki, who spent three years on Princess Mononoke and is
reported to have done 70 percent of its paintings himself, seems to work from
the outside in: to begin with the curve of the earth, then the mossy hills, the
watercolor foliage, the nubby stones, the whorls on the wood, the meticulous
carvings on a teacup. He captures the texture of light and the currents of air.
You could almost settle down in this landscape. A view of nature that some
would call "tree-hugging" doesn't feel softheaded when the trees are rendered
in such brilliant and robust detail.
But then, "soft" is not
a word you can apply to Princess Mononoke , however pantheistic its
worldview. The film, which is rated PG-13, is full of splattery carnage. If
Miyazaki in long shot is contemplative, in close-up he's ferocious. He's both
inside and outside the action: He knows when to rock your world and when to
induce a state of sorrowful detachment. According to the New
York
Times , Toy Story animators screened reels of his work when their
imaginations flagged, and writers for Star Trek named an alien species
after one of his features. Watching Princess
Mononoke --which has
been dubbed to Disney/Miramax specifications by American and English stars but
retains its two-hour-plus length, its gory beheadings, and its grim,
near-apocalyptic finale--you can understand their worship. It isn't that
Miyazaki's work is technically so dazzling in this age of digitized miracles;
it's that everything is sublimely in proportion.
The movie has a scope that makes Hollywood's homiletic,
follow-your-dream fables look even more solipsistic. Miyazaki is after nothing
less than the moment in our history (the film is set in the 14 th and
15 th centuries) when the power shifted from a "natural" world to one
shaped by human technology. It's the beginning of what Bill McKibben called
"the end of nature"--that is, when nature became no longer an autonomous,
self-regulating force but one touched (and, in Miyazaki's view, poisoned) by
human industry.
The hero, Ashitaka, a
warrior from the isolationist Emishi clan, is forced in the first scene to kill
a marauding boar--a god turned into a demon (covered in roiling, corrosive
worms) by an iron ball lodged in its body. Infected, destined to be consumed
by--and to die of--rage, Ashitaka leaves his village in search of the iron
ball's source. He discovers a fortress-cum-arms-manufacturing plant called
Irontown, presided over by one of the most complex villains in modern film: the
regal Lady Eboshi. On one hand, she's a benevolent industrialist who presides
over a warmly matriarchal society; on the other, she wants to destroy the
forest, harness its resources, and exterminate its animal deities--chiefly the
Spirit of the Forest, a magnificent deer god whose touch brings instant life or
death, and who transforms at dusk into the towering Night Walker.
P rincess Mononoke builds to a full-scale war between
humans and the animal kingdom--which does not, by the way, consist of your
father's cartoon critters. In fact, the boars and apes have little patience
with Ashitaka's call for nature and mankind to live together in harmony; they'd
like to eat him. The wolf god, Moro, is slightly more sympathetic, but that's
because her adopted "daughter," San (a k a Princess Mononoke), is human. San is
first seen sucking a wound of her huge wolf mother, then, as the gore drips
from her mouth, training her dark eyes on Ashitaka with feral hatred. Her
second appearance--a lone attack on Irontown to assassinate Lady Eboshi--is one
of the movie's high points. It's Miyazaki's use of sound--and silence--that
takes your breath away: the determined tap of the wolf princess's shoes as she
scuttles over the fortress's rooftops; the silence of Eboshi and her army as
they stare at this tiny yet formidable tomboy against the black sky. Their
battle is so furious that the blades streak and lose definition--it's almost
subliminal.
It's a shame that the
wolf princess warms up to Ashitaka and spends the rest of the film either
saving him or being saved by him. She loses that punk-bitch allure. The voice
of Claire Danes doesn't help. When Danes says, "I'd do anything to get you
humans out of my forest," she sounds like a Valley Girl peeved over lack of
parking spaces at the mall. (San needs a more ragged voice--I'd be interested
to hear the original Japanese actress.) Billy Crudup is just as Disneyfied
(Miramaxed?), but that doesn't hurt as much because Ashitaka is conceived from
the start as a rather bland ingénu. Gillian Anderson's growling Moro sounds
silly (she doesn't have the breath control), and the fey-hick tones of Billy
Bob Thornton are too recognizable as the Akim Tamiroff-like mercenary, Jigo.
But Minnie Driver--coming off a triumphantly dizzy Jane in Tarzan --once
again provides a voice that the animators deserve. "Bring the strange-ah to me
late-ah," she commands in sexy Martian Queen cadences that will stir the loins
of Flash Gordon fans everywhere. "I would like to thank him
puh-sonally."
The overfamiliar voices nudge Princess Mononoke
closer to its American counterparts--but not by a lot. There's always something
wondrously strange. The "kodamas" are little tree spirits on doughboy bodies.
They cock their trapezoidal dice heads and emit a series of clicks; then their
heads pop back with a conclusive rattle. Something about them seems just right;
I could watch them for hours. (Miyazaki limits their appearances to seconds--he
doesn't wear out their mystery the way that, say, George Lucas would.) And no
Hollywood animated feature would end with such a powerful vision of apocalypse,
as the land is bestridden by a colossus dropping a thick, caustic, tarlike gel
that recalls the post-Hiroshima "black rain." Can you take the kids? I think
so. As Miyazaki said at a New York Film Festival press conference, "Children
understand intuitively that the world they have been born into is not a blessed
world." Princess Mononoke , at least, can tell them why.
"A special smile ... a
certain touch ..." So begins the elevator-music theme song of
Music of
the Heart
... "I never had a lot that I loved so much." The credits had
just started and I was already looking for a barf bag. Did Miramax and director
Wes Craven have to work so hard to schlockify the story of Roberta Guaspari
(played here by Meryl Streep), whose violin courses in East Harlem elementary
schools have become a beacon for such programs nationwide? A fabled taskmaster
(her story was told in the 1996 documentary Small Wonders ), Guaspari
used music as a way to teach self-discipline--along with the healthy
self-respect that follows in its wake. When the New York school board cut the
funding for her program, she proved a marvel of self-promotion, attracting
features in all the major dailies and ending up along with her best students at
Carnegie Hall for a benefit "Fiddlefest"--along with Itzhak Perlman, Isaac
Stern, and other legendary "fiddlers."
Streep has said that she spent so much of the time on the
set learning the violin (she doesn't play any instruments) that she didn't
bring the full force of her acting technique to bear on Roberta. Maybe that's
why the performance seems so natural. Let her always learn an instrument on the
set! Still, she doesn't make much sense of Guaspari. The script, by Pamela Gray
( A Walk on the Moon ), has her students complain of her nastiness and
perfectionism, but Streep--who has made herself look dumpy, thick-waisted, and
bedraggled--is so busy telegraphing her vulnerability that all we get is dippy
niceness. Instead of a monument to an individual's iron will, Music of the
Heart becomes the story of a woman so helpless that she arouses the
kindness of strangers.
Directors of violent
genre pieces like Craven (who got this mainstream gig in return for doing the
Scream sequels) or Carl Franklin or Sam Raimi sometimes want so badly to
belong to Establishment Hollywood--to go to the Academy Awards--that they
neuter themselves. Bending over backward to show how sensitive they can be,
they forget that violence--even if it's just emotional violence--belongs in
"ordinary" dramas, too. Craven does good work with the young actors in the
classroom scenes, but the film has a reticence common to most biopics and a
mushy, TV-movie humanism that blands out its texture. OK, I was a puddle after
some scenes, like the one where Guaspari pushes a student to get her to improve
her posture and discovers that the girl is wearing a leg brace. But how much
more emotional the Carnegie Hall climax would have been if instead of suddenly
seeing these East Harlem kids on stage with Perlman, Stern, Joshua Bell, etc.,
we'd seen them rehearsing first and struggling to keep up. There's too
much music of the heart and not enough music of the callused fingers.
In outline,
The Limey
is a lean little
B-movie revenge melodrama about a felonious Brit (Terence Stamp) who's newly
sprung from prison and flies to Southern California to get to the bottom of his
beautiful daughter's death: "My name's Wilson ... Who dunnit?" The film,
directed by Steven Soderbergh, would be worth seeing just for Stamp's
performance, at once rock-hard and goofily blinkered, and for Peter Fonda's
wittily self-parodic turn as the suspected killer, a music producer who coasts
on '60s counterculture easiness while his lackeys do the dirty work. ("Oh,
man," he says, the fear finally seeping through the ether. "This is getting all
too close to me.")
But the picture's glory is its layered and intricate
syntax. The dialogue moves ahead--there are great gobs of exposition--but the
images continually double back: to Stamp and Lesley Ann Warren, as his
daughter's acting teacher, simply gazing at each other; or to Stamp sitting on
a plane, remembering his daughter as a girl on the beach, the lens of his home
movie camera creating an eerily bright--almost supernatural--spot that dances
over her face. The film's most violent act happens well off screen. (You hear
the distant "pop-pop-pop-pop-pop" of the hero's gun.) The rest is only
half-glimpsed, fantasized, or saturated by memory--or is the present the
memory? Is all of The Limey a temporal hiccup?
Some, including the critic at Time , have
questioned Soderbergh's sanity. (But of course--Soderbergh flouts time!) I see
a method to his madness. Less grandiosely than Harmony Korine in Julien
Donkey-Boy , Soderbergh pores over every scene in search of its essential
dramatic gesture. He's saying: This --not all that other stuff--is what's
important. He telegraphs the ending--you know the Limey will somehow be at the
root of his daughter's death--but it's still an emotional wow. The climax
justifies the technique. It says the point of this odyssey isn't revenge but
regret--for irredeemably blown chances and a tragic waste of love.
Soderbergh is one of those rare filmmakers who learn
on the job. Working within a tight genre structure, he's discovering hundreds
of ways of editing a given scene that can give it the richness of a novel. Is
he totally successful? No; he misses now and then, which is why the technique
sticks out. But what a fantastic effort. See it and weep for what's missing in
most other movies. | [
"His use of flashback and dialogue",
"His simultaneous implication and omission of violence",
"His ability to pack a lot of action into a short film",
"His ability to evolve as a filmmaker"
] | 3 |
20071_BB3BFSMM_1 | Of the four films reviewed in the passage, which one has received the MOST positive review? | Boys Do Bleed
Fight Club is silly
stuff, sensationalism that mistakes itself for satire, but it's also a brash
and transporting piece of moviemaking, like Raging Bull on acid. The
film opens with--literally--a surge of adrenalin, which travels through the
bloodstream and into the brain of its protagonist, Jack (Edward Norton), who's
viewed, as the camera pulls out of his insides, with a gun stuck in his mouth.
How'd he get into this pickle? He's going to tell you, breezily, and the
director, David Fincher, is going to illustrate his narrative--violently.
Fincher ( Seven , 1995; The Game , 1997) is out to bombard you with
so much feverish imagery that you have no choice but to succumb to the movie's
reeling, punch-drunk worldview. By the end, you might feel as if you, too, have
a mouthful of blood.
Not to mention a hole in your head. Fight
Club careers from one resonant satirical idea to the next without quite
deciding whether its characters are full of crap or are Gen X prophets. It
always gives you a rush, though. At first, it goofs on the absurd feminization
of an absurdly macho culture. An increasingly desperate insomniac, Jack finds
relief (and release) only at meetings for the terminally ill. At a testicular
cancer group, he's enfolded in the ample arms of Bob (the singer Meat Loaf
Aday), a former bodybuilder who ruined his health with steroids and now has
"bitch tits." Jack and Bob subscribe to a new form of male bonding: They cling
to each other and sob. But Jack's idyll is rudely disrupted by--wouldn't you
know it?--a woman. A dark-eyed, sepulchral head case named Marla Singer (Helena
Bonham Carter) begins showing up at all the same disparate meetings for
essentially the same voyeuristic ends, and the presence of this "tourist" makes
it impossible for Jack to emote.
Jack finds another
outlet, though. On a plane, he meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a cryptic
hipster with a penchant for subversive acts both large (he makes high-priced
soaps from liposuctioned human fat) and small (he splices frames from porn
flicks into kiddie movies). When Jack's apartment mysteriously explodes--along
with his carefully chosen IKEA furniture--he moves into Tyler's squalid
warehouse and helps to found a new religion: Fight Club, in which young males
gather after hours in the basement of a nightclub to pound one another (and be
pounded) to a bloody pulp. That last parenthesis isn't so parenthetical. In
some ways, it's the longing to be beaten into oblivion that's the strongest.
"Self-improvement," explains Tyler, "is masturbation"; self-destruction is the
new way. Tyler's manifesto calls for an end to consumerism ("Things you own end
up owning you"), and since society is going down ("Martha Stewart is polishing
brass on the Titanic "), the only creative outlet left is annihilation.
"It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything," he
says.
Fincher and his screenwriter, Jim Uhls, seem to think
they've broken new ground in Fight
Club , that their metaphor for
our discontents hits harder than anyone else's. Certainly it produces more
bloody splatter. But 20 years ago, the same impulse was called punk and, as
Greil Marcus documents in Lipstick Traces , it was other things before
that. Yes, the mixture of Johnny Rotten, Jake La Motta, and Jesus is unique;
and the Faludi-esque emasculation themes are more explicit. But there's
something deeply movie-ish about the whole conceit, as if the novelist and
director were weaned on Martin Scorsese pictures and never stopped dreaming of
recapturing that first masochistic rush.
The novel, the first by
Chuck Palahniuk (the surname sounds like Eskimo for "palooka"--which somehow
fits), walks a line between the straight and ironic--it isn't always clear if
its glib sociological pronouncements are meant to be taken straight or as the
ravings of a delusional mama's boy. But onscreen, when Pitt announces to the
assembled fighters that they are the "middle children of history" with "no
purpose and no place"--emasculated on one hand by the lack of a unifying crisis
(a world war or depression) and on the other by lack of material wealth as
promised by television--he seems meant to be intoning gospel. "We are a
generation of men raised by women," Tyler announces, and adds, "If our fathers
bail, what does that tell you about God?" (I give up: What?)
F ight
Club could use a few different
perspectives: a woman's, obviously, but also an African-American's--someone
who'd have a different take on the "healing" properties of violence. It's also
unclear just what has emasculated Jack: Is it that he's a materialist or that
the materials themselves (i.e., IKEA's lacquered particle boards) don't measure
up to his fantasies of opulence? Is he motivated by spiritual hunger or envy?
Tyler's subsequent idea of confining his group's mayhem to franchise coffee
bars and corporate-subsidized art is a witty one--it's like a parody of
neo-Nazism as re-enacted by yuppies. It might have been a howl if performed by,
say, the troupe of artsy German nihilists in Joel and Ethan Coen's The Big
Lebowski (1998). Somehow Brad Pitt doesn't have the same piquancy.
Actually, Pitt isn't as terrible as usual: He's
playing not a character but a conceit, and he can bask in his movie-idol
arrogance, which seems to be the most authentic emotion he has. But the film
belongs to Norton. As a ferocious skinhead in last year's American History
X , Norton was taut and ropy, his long torso curled into a sneer; here, he's
skinny and wilting, a quivering pansy. Even when he fights he doesn't
transform--he's a raging wimp. The performance is marvelous, and it makes
poetic sense in light of the movie's climactic twist. But that twist will annoy
more people than it will delight, if only because it shifts the drama from the
realm of the sociological to that of the psychoanalytic. The finale, scored
with the Pixies' great "Where Is My Mind?" comes off facetiously--as if Fincher
is throwing the movie away.
Until then, however, he
has done a fabulous job of keeping it spinning. The most thrilling thing about
Fight Club isn't what it says but how Uhls and Fincher pull you into its
narrator's head and simulate his adrenalin rushes. A veteran of rock videos,
Fincher is one of those filmmakers who helps make the case that MTV--along with
digital editing--has transformed cinema for better as well as worse. The syntax
has become more intricate. Voice-over narration, once considered uncinematic,
is back in style, along with novelistic asides, digressions, fantasies, and
flashbacks. To make a point, you can jazzily interject anything--even, as in
Three Kings , a shot of a bullet slicing through internal organs. Films
like Fight Club might not gel, but they have a breathless,
free-associational quality that points to new possibilities in storytelling. Or
maybe old possibilities: The language of movies hasn't seemed this unfettered
since the pre-sound days of Sergei Eisenstein and Abel Gance.
An actress named Hilary Swank gives one of the most
rapturous performances I've ever seen as the cross-dressing Brandon Teena (a k
a Teena Brandon) in Kimberly Peirce's stark and astonishingly beautiful debut
feature,
Boys Don't Cry
. The movie opens with Teena
being shorn of her hated female tresses and becoming "Brandon," who swaggers
around in tight jeans and leather jackets. The joy is in watching the actor
transform, and I don't just mean Swank: I mean Teena Brandon playing Brandon
Teena--the role she has been longing for her whole life. In a redneck Nebraska
bar, Brandon throws back a shot of whiskey and the gesture--a macho
cliché--becomes an act of self-discovery. Every gesture does. "You're gonna
have a shiner in the morning," someone tells Brandon after a barroom brawl, and
he takes the news with a glee that's almost mystical: "I am????? Oh, shit!!!"
he cries, grinning. That might be my favorite moment in the picture, because
Swank's ecstatic expression carries us through the next hour, as Brandon acts
out his urban-cowboy fantasies--"surfing" from the bumper of a pickup truck,
rolling in the mud, and straddling a barstool with one hand on a brewski and
the other on the shoulder of a gorgeous babe.
That the people with whom Brandon feels most at home
would kill him if they knew his true gender is the movie's most tragic
irony--and the one that lifts it out of the realm of gay-martyr hagiography and
into something more complex and irreducible: a meditation on the irrelevance of
gender. Peirce's triumph is to make these scenes at once exuberant
(occasionally hilarious) and foreboding, so that all the seeds of Brandon's
killing are right there on the screen. John (Peter Sarsgaard), one of his
future rapists and murderers, calls him "little buddy" and seems almost
attracted to him; Sarsgaard's performance is a finely chiseled study of how
unresolved emotion can suddenly resolve itself into violence.
Though harrowing, the
second half of Boys Don't Cry isn't as great as the first. The early
scenes evoke elation and dread simultaneously, the later ones just dread; and
the last half-hour is unrelieved torture. What keeps the movie tantalizing is
Chloë Sevigny's Lana, who might or might not know that Brandon is a girl but
who's entranced by him anyway. With her lank hair, hooded eyes, and air of
sleepy sensuality, Sevigny--maybe even more than Swank--embodies the mystery of
sex that's at the core of Boys Don't Cry . Everything she does is
deliberate, ironic, slightly unreadable--and unyielding. She's could be saying,
"I'm in this world but not of it. ... You'd never dream what's
underneath."
I n
brief: If a friend tells you
you'll love
Happy Texas
, rethink the friendship. This
clunky mistaken-identity comedy about escaped cons who impersonate gay pageant
directors doesn't even make sense on its own low farcical terms; it's mostly
one lame homo joke after another. The only bright spot is Steve Zahn, who could
be the offspring of Michael J. Fox and Crispin Glover if they'd mated on the
set of Back to the Future (1985).
It's hard to make a serious case for Lawrence
Kasdan's
Mumford
, which has apparently flopped but
which you can still catch at second- and third-tier theaters. It looks
peculiar--a Norman Rockwell painting with noir shadows. And its tale of a small
town healed by a depressive (Loren Dean) posing as a psychologist is full of
doddering misconceptions about psychotherapy. I almost don't know why I loved
it, but the relaxed pacing and the witty turns by Martin Short, Ted Danson,
David Paymer, and Mary McDonnell surely helped. I can't decide if the weirdly
affectless Dean is inspired or inept, but my indecision suggests why he works
in the role. There's no doubt, however, about his even more depressive love
object, Hope Davis, who posseses the cinema's most expressive honking-nasal
voice and who slumps through the movie like the world's most lyrical
anti-ballerina. Even her puffy cheeks are eloquent: They made me think of
Mumford as the home of the psychological mumps. | [
"Fight Club",
"Happy Texas",
"Boys Don't Cry",
"Mumford"
] | 2 |
20071_BB3BFSMM_2 | All four of the films reviewed share the following theme: | Boys Do Bleed
Fight Club is silly
stuff, sensationalism that mistakes itself for satire, but it's also a brash
and transporting piece of moviemaking, like Raging Bull on acid. The
film opens with--literally--a surge of adrenalin, which travels through the
bloodstream and into the brain of its protagonist, Jack (Edward Norton), who's
viewed, as the camera pulls out of his insides, with a gun stuck in his mouth.
How'd he get into this pickle? He's going to tell you, breezily, and the
director, David Fincher, is going to illustrate his narrative--violently.
Fincher ( Seven , 1995; The Game , 1997) is out to bombard you with
so much feverish imagery that you have no choice but to succumb to the movie's
reeling, punch-drunk worldview. By the end, you might feel as if you, too, have
a mouthful of blood.
Not to mention a hole in your head. Fight
Club careers from one resonant satirical idea to the next without quite
deciding whether its characters are full of crap or are Gen X prophets. It
always gives you a rush, though. At first, it goofs on the absurd feminization
of an absurdly macho culture. An increasingly desperate insomniac, Jack finds
relief (and release) only at meetings for the terminally ill. At a testicular
cancer group, he's enfolded in the ample arms of Bob (the singer Meat Loaf
Aday), a former bodybuilder who ruined his health with steroids and now has
"bitch tits." Jack and Bob subscribe to a new form of male bonding: They cling
to each other and sob. But Jack's idyll is rudely disrupted by--wouldn't you
know it?--a woman. A dark-eyed, sepulchral head case named Marla Singer (Helena
Bonham Carter) begins showing up at all the same disparate meetings for
essentially the same voyeuristic ends, and the presence of this "tourist" makes
it impossible for Jack to emote.
Jack finds another
outlet, though. On a plane, he meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a cryptic
hipster with a penchant for subversive acts both large (he makes high-priced
soaps from liposuctioned human fat) and small (he splices frames from porn
flicks into kiddie movies). When Jack's apartment mysteriously explodes--along
with his carefully chosen IKEA furniture--he moves into Tyler's squalid
warehouse and helps to found a new religion: Fight Club, in which young males
gather after hours in the basement of a nightclub to pound one another (and be
pounded) to a bloody pulp. That last parenthesis isn't so parenthetical. In
some ways, it's the longing to be beaten into oblivion that's the strongest.
"Self-improvement," explains Tyler, "is masturbation"; self-destruction is the
new way. Tyler's manifesto calls for an end to consumerism ("Things you own end
up owning you"), and since society is going down ("Martha Stewart is polishing
brass on the Titanic "), the only creative outlet left is annihilation.
"It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything," he
says.
Fincher and his screenwriter, Jim Uhls, seem to think
they've broken new ground in Fight
Club , that their metaphor for
our discontents hits harder than anyone else's. Certainly it produces more
bloody splatter. But 20 years ago, the same impulse was called punk and, as
Greil Marcus documents in Lipstick Traces , it was other things before
that. Yes, the mixture of Johnny Rotten, Jake La Motta, and Jesus is unique;
and the Faludi-esque emasculation themes are more explicit. But there's
something deeply movie-ish about the whole conceit, as if the novelist and
director were weaned on Martin Scorsese pictures and never stopped dreaming of
recapturing that first masochistic rush.
The novel, the first by
Chuck Palahniuk (the surname sounds like Eskimo for "palooka"--which somehow
fits), walks a line between the straight and ironic--it isn't always clear if
its glib sociological pronouncements are meant to be taken straight or as the
ravings of a delusional mama's boy. But onscreen, when Pitt announces to the
assembled fighters that they are the "middle children of history" with "no
purpose and no place"--emasculated on one hand by the lack of a unifying crisis
(a world war or depression) and on the other by lack of material wealth as
promised by television--he seems meant to be intoning gospel. "We are a
generation of men raised by women," Tyler announces, and adds, "If our fathers
bail, what does that tell you about God?" (I give up: What?)
F ight
Club could use a few different
perspectives: a woman's, obviously, but also an African-American's--someone
who'd have a different take on the "healing" properties of violence. It's also
unclear just what has emasculated Jack: Is it that he's a materialist or that
the materials themselves (i.e., IKEA's lacquered particle boards) don't measure
up to his fantasies of opulence? Is he motivated by spiritual hunger or envy?
Tyler's subsequent idea of confining his group's mayhem to franchise coffee
bars and corporate-subsidized art is a witty one--it's like a parody of
neo-Nazism as re-enacted by yuppies. It might have been a howl if performed by,
say, the troupe of artsy German nihilists in Joel and Ethan Coen's The Big
Lebowski (1998). Somehow Brad Pitt doesn't have the same piquancy.
Actually, Pitt isn't as terrible as usual: He's
playing not a character but a conceit, and he can bask in his movie-idol
arrogance, which seems to be the most authentic emotion he has. But the film
belongs to Norton. As a ferocious skinhead in last year's American History
X , Norton was taut and ropy, his long torso curled into a sneer; here, he's
skinny and wilting, a quivering pansy. Even when he fights he doesn't
transform--he's a raging wimp. The performance is marvelous, and it makes
poetic sense in light of the movie's climactic twist. But that twist will annoy
more people than it will delight, if only because it shifts the drama from the
realm of the sociological to that of the psychoanalytic. The finale, scored
with the Pixies' great "Where Is My Mind?" comes off facetiously--as if Fincher
is throwing the movie away.
Until then, however, he
has done a fabulous job of keeping it spinning. The most thrilling thing about
Fight Club isn't what it says but how Uhls and Fincher pull you into its
narrator's head and simulate his adrenalin rushes. A veteran of rock videos,
Fincher is one of those filmmakers who helps make the case that MTV--along with
digital editing--has transformed cinema for better as well as worse. The syntax
has become more intricate. Voice-over narration, once considered uncinematic,
is back in style, along with novelistic asides, digressions, fantasies, and
flashbacks. To make a point, you can jazzily interject anything--even, as in
Three Kings , a shot of a bullet slicing through internal organs. Films
like Fight Club might not gel, but they have a breathless,
free-associational quality that points to new possibilities in storytelling. Or
maybe old possibilities: The language of movies hasn't seemed this unfettered
since the pre-sound days of Sergei Eisenstein and Abel Gance.
An actress named Hilary Swank gives one of the most
rapturous performances I've ever seen as the cross-dressing Brandon Teena (a k
a Teena Brandon) in Kimberly Peirce's stark and astonishingly beautiful debut
feature,
Boys Don't Cry
. The movie opens with Teena
being shorn of her hated female tresses and becoming "Brandon," who swaggers
around in tight jeans and leather jackets. The joy is in watching the actor
transform, and I don't just mean Swank: I mean Teena Brandon playing Brandon
Teena--the role she has been longing for her whole life. In a redneck Nebraska
bar, Brandon throws back a shot of whiskey and the gesture--a macho
cliché--becomes an act of self-discovery. Every gesture does. "You're gonna
have a shiner in the morning," someone tells Brandon after a barroom brawl, and
he takes the news with a glee that's almost mystical: "I am????? Oh, shit!!!"
he cries, grinning. That might be my favorite moment in the picture, because
Swank's ecstatic expression carries us through the next hour, as Brandon acts
out his urban-cowboy fantasies--"surfing" from the bumper of a pickup truck,
rolling in the mud, and straddling a barstool with one hand on a brewski and
the other on the shoulder of a gorgeous babe.
That the people with whom Brandon feels most at home
would kill him if they knew his true gender is the movie's most tragic
irony--and the one that lifts it out of the realm of gay-martyr hagiography and
into something more complex and irreducible: a meditation on the irrelevance of
gender. Peirce's triumph is to make these scenes at once exuberant
(occasionally hilarious) and foreboding, so that all the seeds of Brandon's
killing are right there on the screen. John (Peter Sarsgaard), one of his
future rapists and murderers, calls him "little buddy" and seems almost
attracted to him; Sarsgaard's performance is a finely chiseled study of how
unresolved emotion can suddenly resolve itself into violence.
Though harrowing, the
second half of Boys Don't Cry isn't as great as the first. The early
scenes evoke elation and dread simultaneously, the later ones just dread; and
the last half-hour is unrelieved torture. What keeps the movie tantalizing is
Chloë Sevigny's Lana, who might or might not know that Brandon is a girl but
who's entranced by him anyway. With her lank hair, hooded eyes, and air of
sleepy sensuality, Sevigny--maybe even more than Swank--embodies the mystery of
sex that's at the core of Boys Don't Cry . Everything she does is
deliberate, ironic, slightly unreadable--and unyielding. She's could be saying,
"I'm in this world but not of it. ... You'd never dream what's
underneath."
I n
brief: If a friend tells you
you'll love
Happy Texas
, rethink the friendship. This
clunky mistaken-identity comedy about escaped cons who impersonate gay pageant
directors doesn't even make sense on its own low farcical terms; it's mostly
one lame homo joke after another. The only bright spot is Steve Zahn, who could
be the offspring of Michael J. Fox and Crispin Glover if they'd mated on the
set of Back to the Future (1985).
It's hard to make a serious case for Lawrence
Kasdan's
Mumford
, which has apparently flopped but
which you can still catch at second- and third-tier theaters. It looks
peculiar--a Norman Rockwell painting with noir shadows. And its tale of a small
town healed by a depressive (Loren Dean) posing as a psychologist is full of
doddering misconceptions about psychotherapy. I almost don't know why I loved
it, but the relaxed pacing and the witty turns by Martin Short, Ted Danson,
David Paymer, and Mary McDonnell surely helped. I can't decide if the weirdly
affectless Dean is inspired or inept, but my indecision suggests why he works
in the role. There's no doubt, however, about his even more depressive love
object, Hope Davis, who posseses the cinema's most expressive honking-nasal
voice and who slumps through the movie like the world's most lyrical
anti-ballerina. Even her puffy cheeks are eloquent: They made me think of
Mumford as the home of the psychological mumps. | [
"gender",
"sexuality",
"consumerism",
"identity"
] | 3 |
20071_BB3BFSMM_3 | In the review of "Fight Club," lines from Tyler Durden cited by the reviewer illustrate the following literary device: | Boys Do Bleed
Fight Club is silly
stuff, sensationalism that mistakes itself for satire, but it's also a brash
and transporting piece of moviemaking, like Raging Bull on acid. The
film opens with--literally--a surge of adrenalin, which travels through the
bloodstream and into the brain of its protagonist, Jack (Edward Norton), who's
viewed, as the camera pulls out of his insides, with a gun stuck in his mouth.
How'd he get into this pickle? He's going to tell you, breezily, and the
director, David Fincher, is going to illustrate his narrative--violently.
Fincher ( Seven , 1995; The Game , 1997) is out to bombard you with
so much feverish imagery that you have no choice but to succumb to the movie's
reeling, punch-drunk worldview. By the end, you might feel as if you, too, have
a mouthful of blood.
Not to mention a hole in your head. Fight
Club careers from one resonant satirical idea to the next without quite
deciding whether its characters are full of crap or are Gen X prophets. It
always gives you a rush, though. At first, it goofs on the absurd feminization
of an absurdly macho culture. An increasingly desperate insomniac, Jack finds
relief (and release) only at meetings for the terminally ill. At a testicular
cancer group, he's enfolded in the ample arms of Bob (the singer Meat Loaf
Aday), a former bodybuilder who ruined his health with steroids and now has
"bitch tits." Jack and Bob subscribe to a new form of male bonding: They cling
to each other and sob. But Jack's idyll is rudely disrupted by--wouldn't you
know it?--a woman. A dark-eyed, sepulchral head case named Marla Singer (Helena
Bonham Carter) begins showing up at all the same disparate meetings for
essentially the same voyeuristic ends, and the presence of this "tourist" makes
it impossible for Jack to emote.
Jack finds another
outlet, though. On a plane, he meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a cryptic
hipster with a penchant for subversive acts both large (he makes high-priced
soaps from liposuctioned human fat) and small (he splices frames from porn
flicks into kiddie movies). When Jack's apartment mysteriously explodes--along
with his carefully chosen IKEA furniture--he moves into Tyler's squalid
warehouse and helps to found a new religion: Fight Club, in which young males
gather after hours in the basement of a nightclub to pound one another (and be
pounded) to a bloody pulp. That last parenthesis isn't so parenthetical. In
some ways, it's the longing to be beaten into oblivion that's the strongest.
"Self-improvement," explains Tyler, "is masturbation"; self-destruction is the
new way. Tyler's manifesto calls for an end to consumerism ("Things you own end
up owning you"), and since society is going down ("Martha Stewart is polishing
brass on the Titanic "), the only creative outlet left is annihilation.
"It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything," he
says.
Fincher and his screenwriter, Jim Uhls, seem to think
they've broken new ground in Fight
Club , that their metaphor for
our discontents hits harder than anyone else's. Certainly it produces more
bloody splatter. But 20 years ago, the same impulse was called punk and, as
Greil Marcus documents in Lipstick Traces , it was other things before
that. Yes, the mixture of Johnny Rotten, Jake La Motta, and Jesus is unique;
and the Faludi-esque emasculation themes are more explicit. But there's
something deeply movie-ish about the whole conceit, as if the novelist and
director were weaned on Martin Scorsese pictures and never stopped dreaming of
recapturing that first masochistic rush.
The novel, the first by
Chuck Palahniuk (the surname sounds like Eskimo for "palooka"--which somehow
fits), walks a line between the straight and ironic--it isn't always clear if
its glib sociological pronouncements are meant to be taken straight or as the
ravings of a delusional mama's boy. But onscreen, when Pitt announces to the
assembled fighters that they are the "middle children of history" with "no
purpose and no place"--emasculated on one hand by the lack of a unifying crisis
(a world war or depression) and on the other by lack of material wealth as
promised by television--he seems meant to be intoning gospel. "We are a
generation of men raised by women," Tyler announces, and adds, "If our fathers
bail, what does that tell you about God?" (I give up: What?)
F ight
Club could use a few different
perspectives: a woman's, obviously, but also an African-American's--someone
who'd have a different take on the "healing" properties of violence. It's also
unclear just what has emasculated Jack: Is it that he's a materialist or that
the materials themselves (i.e., IKEA's lacquered particle boards) don't measure
up to his fantasies of opulence? Is he motivated by spiritual hunger or envy?
Tyler's subsequent idea of confining his group's mayhem to franchise coffee
bars and corporate-subsidized art is a witty one--it's like a parody of
neo-Nazism as re-enacted by yuppies. It might have been a howl if performed by,
say, the troupe of artsy German nihilists in Joel and Ethan Coen's The Big
Lebowski (1998). Somehow Brad Pitt doesn't have the same piquancy.
Actually, Pitt isn't as terrible as usual: He's
playing not a character but a conceit, and he can bask in his movie-idol
arrogance, which seems to be the most authentic emotion he has. But the film
belongs to Norton. As a ferocious skinhead in last year's American History
X , Norton was taut and ropy, his long torso curled into a sneer; here, he's
skinny and wilting, a quivering pansy. Even when he fights he doesn't
transform--he's a raging wimp. The performance is marvelous, and it makes
poetic sense in light of the movie's climactic twist. But that twist will annoy
more people than it will delight, if only because it shifts the drama from the
realm of the sociological to that of the psychoanalytic. The finale, scored
with the Pixies' great "Where Is My Mind?" comes off facetiously--as if Fincher
is throwing the movie away.
Until then, however, he
has done a fabulous job of keeping it spinning. The most thrilling thing about
Fight Club isn't what it says but how Uhls and Fincher pull you into its
narrator's head and simulate his adrenalin rushes. A veteran of rock videos,
Fincher is one of those filmmakers who helps make the case that MTV--along with
digital editing--has transformed cinema for better as well as worse. The syntax
has become more intricate. Voice-over narration, once considered uncinematic,
is back in style, along with novelistic asides, digressions, fantasies, and
flashbacks. To make a point, you can jazzily interject anything--even, as in
Three Kings , a shot of a bullet slicing through internal organs. Films
like Fight Club might not gel, but they have a breathless,
free-associational quality that points to new possibilities in storytelling. Or
maybe old possibilities: The language of movies hasn't seemed this unfettered
since the pre-sound days of Sergei Eisenstein and Abel Gance.
An actress named Hilary Swank gives one of the most
rapturous performances I've ever seen as the cross-dressing Brandon Teena (a k
a Teena Brandon) in Kimberly Peirce's stark and astonishingly beautiful debut
feature,
Boys Don't Cry
. The movie opens with Teena
being shorn of her hated female tresses and becoming "Brandon," who swaggers
around in tight jeans and leather jackets. The joy is in watching the actor
transform, and I don't just mean Swank: I mean Teena Brandon playing Brandon
Teena--the role she has been longing for her whole life. In a redneck Nebraska
bar, Brandon throws back a shot of whiskey and the gesture--a macho
cliché--becomes an act of self-discovery. Every gesture does. "You're gonna
have a shiner in the morning," someone tells Brandon after a barroom brawl, and
he takes the news with a glee that's almost mystical: "I am????? Oh, shit!!!"
he cries, grinning. That might be my favorite moment in the picture, because
Swank's ecstatic expression carries us through the next hour, as Brandon acts
out his urban-cowboy fantasies--"surfing" from the bumper of a pickup truck,
rolling in the mud, and straddling a barstool with one hand on a brewski and
the other on the shoulder of a gorgeous babe.
That the people with whom Brandon feels most at home
would kill him if they knew his true gender is the movie's most tragic
irony--and the one that lifts it out of the realm of gay-martyr hagiography and
into something more complex and irreducible: a meditation on the irrelevance of
gender. Peirce's triumph is to make these scenes at once exuberant
(occasionally hilarious) and foreboding, so that all the seeds of Brandon's
killing are right there on the screen. John (Peter Sarsgaard), one of his
future rapists and murderers, calls him "little buddy" and seems almost
attracted to him; Sarsgaard's performance is a finely chiseled study of how
unresolved emotion can suddenly resolve itself into violence.
Though harrowing, the
second half of Boys Don't Cry isn't as great as the first. The early
scenes evoke elation and dread simultaneously, the later ones just dread; and
the last half-hour is unrelieved torture. What keeps the movie tantalizing is
Chloë Sevigny's Lana, who might or might not know that Brandon is a girl but
who's entranced by him anyway. With her lank hair, hooded eyes, and air of
sleepy sensuality, Sevigny--maybe even more than Swank--embodies the mystery of
sex that's at the core of Boys Don't Cry . Everything she does is
deliberate, ironic, slightly unreadable--and unyielding. She's could be saying,
"I'm in this world but not of it. ... You'd never dream what's
underneath."
I n
brief: If a friend tells you
you'll love
Happy Texas
, rethink the friendship. This
clunky mistaken-identity comedy about escaped cons who impersonate gay pageant
directors doesn't even make sense on its own low farcical terms; it's mostly
one lame homo joke after another. The only bright spot is Steve Zahn, who could
be the offspring of Michael J. Fox and Crispin Glover if they'd mated on the
set of Back to the Future (1985).
It's hard to make a serious case for Lawrence
Kasdan's
Mumford
, which has apparently flopped but
which you can still catch at second- and third-tier theaters. It looks
peculiar--a Norman Rockwell painting with noir shadows. And its tale of a small
town healed by a depressive (Loren Dean) posing as a psychologist is full of
doddering misconceptions about psychotherapy. I almost don't know why I loved
it, but the relaxed pacing and the witty turns by Martin Short, Ted Danson,
David Paymer, and Mary McDonnell surely helped. I can't decide if the weirdly
affectless Dean is inspired or inept, but my indecision suggests why he works
in the role. There's no doubt, however, about his even more depressive love
object, Hope Davis, who posseses the cinema's most expressive honking-nasal
voice and who slumps through the movie like the world's most lyrical
anti-ballerina. Even her puffy cheeks are eloquent: They made me think of
Mumford as the home of the psychological mumps. | [
"allusion",
"personification",
"metaphor",
"irony"
] | 2 |
20071_BB3BFSMM_4 | Which of the following terms DOES NOT describe the reviewer's tone toward the director and screenwriter of "Fight Club"? | Boys Do Bleed
Fight Club is silly
stuff, sensationalism that mistakes itself for satire, but it's also a brash
and transporting piece of moviemaking, like Raging Bull on acid. The
film opens with--literally--a surge of adrenalin, which travels through the
bloodstream and into the brain of its protagonist, Jack (Edward Norton), who's
viewed, as the camera pulls out of his insides, with a gun stuck in his mouth.
How'd he get into this pickle? He's going to tell you, breezily, and the
director, David Fincher, is going to illustrate his narrative--violently.
Fincher ( Seven , 1995; The Game , 1997) is out to bombard you with
so much feverish imagery that you have no choice but to succumb to the movie's
reeling, punch-drunk worldview. By the end, you might feel as if you, too, have
a mouthful of blood.
Not to mention a hole in your head. Fight
Club careers from one resonant satirical idea to the next without quite
deciding whether its characters are full of crap or are Gen X prophets. It
always gives you a rush, though. At first, it goofs on the absurd feminization
of an absurdly macho culture. An increasingly desperate insomniac, Jack finds
relief (and release) only at meetings for the terminally ill. At a testicular
cancer group, he's enfolded in the ample arms of Bob (the singer Meat Loaf
Aday), a former bodybuilder who ruined his health with steroids and now has
"bitch tits." Jack and Bob subscribe to a new form of male bonding: They cling
to each other and sob. But Jack's idyll is rudely disrupted by--wouldn't you
know it?--a woman. A dark-eyed, sepulchral head case named Marla Singer (Helena
Bonham Carter) begins showing up at all the same disparate meetings for
essentially the same voyeuristic ends, and the presence of this "tourist" makes
it impossible for Jack to emote.
Jack finds another
outlet, though. On a plane, he meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a cryptic
hipster with a penchant for subversive acts both large (he makes high-priced
soaps from liposuctioned human fat) and small (he splices frames from porn
flicks into kiddie movies). When Jack's apartment mysteriously explodes--along
with his carefully chosen IKEA furniture--he moves into Tyler's squalid
warehouse and helps to found a new religion: Fight Club, in which young males
gather after hours in the basement of a nightclub to pound one another (and be
pounded) to a bloody pulp. That last parenthesis isn't so parenthetical. In
some ways, it's the longing to be beaten into oblivion that's the strongest.
"Self-improvement," explains Tyler, "is masturbation"; self-destruction is the
new way. Tyler's manifesto calls for an end to consumerism ("Things you own end
up owning you"), and since society is going down ("Martha Stewart is polishing
brass on the Titanic "), the only creative outlet left is annihilation.
"It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything," he
says.
Fincher and his screenwriter, Jim Uhls, seem to think
they've broken new ground in Fight
Club , that their metaphor for
our discontents hits harder than anyone else's. Certainly it produces more
bloody splatter. But 20 years ago, the same impulse was called punk and, as
Greil Marcus documents in Lipstick Traces , it was other things before
that. Yes, the mixture of Johnny Rotten, Jake La Motta, and Jesus is unique;
and the Faludi-esque emasculation themes are more explicit. But there's
something deeply movie-ish about the whole conceit, as if the novelist and
director were weaned on Martin Scorsese pictures and never stopped dreaming of
recapturing that first masochistic rush.
The novel, the first by
Chuck Palahniuk (the surname sounds like Eskimo for "palooka"--which somehow
fits), walks a line between the straight and ironic--it isn't always clear if
its glib sociological pronouncements are meant to be taken straight or as the
ravings of a delusional mama's boy. But onscreen, when Pitt announces to the
assembled fighters that they are the "middle children of history" with "no
purpose and no place"--emasculated on one hand by the lack of a unifying crisis
(a world war or depression) and on the other by lack of material wealth as
promised by television--he seems meant to be intoning gospel. "We are a
generation of men raised by women," Tyler announces, and adds, "If our fathers
bail, what does that tell you about God?" (I give up: What?)
F ight
Club could use a few different
perspectives: a woman's, obviously, but also an African-American's--someone
who'd have a different take on the "healing" properties of violence. It's also
unclear just what has emasculated Jack: Is it that he's a materialist or that
the materials themselves (i.e., IKEA's lacquered particle boards) don't measure
up to his fantasies of opulence? Is he motivated by spiritual hunger or envy?
Tyler's subsequent idea of confining his group's mayhem to franchise coffee
bars and corporate-subsidized art is a witty one--it's like a parody of
neo-Nazism as re-enacted by yuppies. It might have been a howl if performed by,
say, the troupe of artsy German nihilists in Joel and Ethan Coen's The Big
Lebowski (1998). Somehow Brad Pitt doesn't have the same piquancy.
Actually, Pitt isn't as terrible as usual: He's
playing not a character but a conceit, and he can bask in his movie-idol
arrogance, which seems to be the most authentic emotion he has. But the film
belongs to Norton. As a ferocious skinhead in last year's American History
X , Norton was taut and ropy, his long torso curled into a sneer; here, he's
skinny and wilting, a quivering pansy. Even when he fights he doesn't
transform--he's a raging wimp. The performance is marvelous, and it makes
poetic sense in light of the movie's climactic twist. But that twist will annoy
more people than it will delight, if only because it shifts the drama from the
realm of the sociological to that of the psychoanalytic. The finale, scored
with the Pixies' great "Where Is My Mind?" comes off facetiously--as if Fincher
is throwing the movie away.
Until then, however, he
has done a fabulous job of keeping it spinning. The most thrilling thing about
Fight Club isn't what it says but how Uhls and Fincher pull you into its
narrator's head and simulate his adrenalin rushes. A veteran of rock videos,
Fincher is one of those filmmakers who helps make the case that MTV--along with
digital editing--has transformed cinema for better as well as worse. The syntax
has become more intricate. Voice-over narration, once considered uncinematic,
is back in style, along with novelistic asides, digressions, fantasies, and
flashbacks. To make a point, you can jazzily interject anything--even, as in
Three Kings , a shot of a bullet slicing through internal organs. Films
like Fight Club might not gel, but they have a breathless,
free-associational quality that points to new possibilities in storytelling. Or
maybe old possibilities: The language of movies hasn't seemed this unfettered
since the pre-sound days of Sergei Eisenstein and Abel Gance.
An actress named Hilary Swank gives one of the most
rapturous performances I've ever seen as the cross-dressing Brandon Teena (a k
a Teena Brandon) in Kimberly Peirce's stark and astonishingly beautiful debut
feature,
Boys Don't Cry
. The movie opens with Teena
being shorn of her hated female tresses and becoming "Brandon," who swaggers
around in tight jeans and leather jackets. The joy is in watching the actor
transform, and I don't just mean Swank: I mean Teena Brandon playing Brandon
Teena--the role she has been longing for her whole life. In a redneck Nebraska
bar, Brandon throws back a shot of whiskey and the gesture--a macho
cliché--becomes an act of self-discovery. Every gesture does. "You're gonna
have a shiner in the morning," someone tells Brandon after a barroom brawl, and
he takes the news with a glee that's almost mystical: "I am????? Oh, shit!!!"
he cries, grinning. That might be my favorite moment in the picture, because
Swank's ecstatic expression carries us through the next hour, as Brandon acts
out his urban-cowboy fantasies--"surfing" from the bumper of a pickup truck,
rolling in the mud, and straddling a barstool with one hand on a brewski and
the other on the shoulder of a gorgeous babe.
That the people with whom Brandon feels most at home
would kill him if they knew his true gender is the movie's most tragic
irony--and the one that lifts it out of the realm of gay-martyr hagiography and
into something more complex and irreducible: a meditation on the irrelevance of
gender. Peirce's triumph is to make these scenes at once exuberant
(occasionally hilarious) and foreboding, so that all the seeds of Brandon's
killing are right there on the screen. John (Peter Sarsgaard), one of his
future rapists and murderers, calls him "little buddy" and seems almost
attracted to him; Sarsgaard's performance is a finely chiseled study of how
unresolved emotion can suddenly resolve itself into violence.
Though harrowing, the
second half of Boys Don't Cry isn't as great as the first. The early
scenes evoke elation and dread simultaneously, the later ones just dread; and
the last half-hour is unrelieved torture. What keeps the movie tantalizing is
Chloë Sevigny's Lana, who might or might not know that Brandon is a girl but
who's entranced by him anyway. With her lank hair, hooded eyes, and air of
sleepy sensuality, Sevigny--maybe even more than Swank--embodies the mystery of
sex that's at the core of Boys Don't Cry . Everything she does is
deliberate, ironic, slightly unreadable--and unyielding. She's could be saying,
"I'm in this world but not of it. ... You'd never dream what's
underneath."
I n
brief: If a friend tells you
you'll love
Happy Texas
, rethink the friendship. This
clunky mistaken-identity comedy about escaped cons who impersonate gay pageant
directors doesn't even make sense on its own low farcical terms; it's mostly
one lame homo joke after another. The only bright spot is Steve Zahn, who could
be the offspring of Michael J. Fox and Crispin Glover if they'd mated on the
set of Back to the Future (1985).
It's hard to make a serious case for Lawrence
Kasdan's
Mumford
, which has apparently flopped but
which you can still catch at second- and third-tier theaters. It looks
peculiar--a Norman Rockwell painting with noir shadows. And its tale of a small
town healed by a depressive (Loren Dean) posing as a psychologist is full of
doddering misconceptions about psychotherapy. I almost don't know why I loved
it, but the relaxed pacing and the witty turns by Martin Short, Ted Danson,
David Paymer, and Mary McDonnell surely helped. I can't decide if the weirdly
affectless Dean is inspired or inept, but my indecision suggests why he works
in the role. There's no doubt, however, about his even more depressive love
object, Hope Davis, who posseses the cinema's most expressive honking-nasal
voice and who slumps through the movie like the world's most lyrical
anti-ballerina. Even her puffy cheeks are eloquent: They made me think of
Mumford as the home of the psychological mumps. | [
"confused",
"critical",
"unimpressed",
"condescending"
] | 0 |
20071_BB3BFSMM_5 | The reviewer of "Fight Club" believes that the film could have benefitted from: | Boys Do Bleed
Fight Club is silly
stuff, sensationalism that mistakes itself for satire, but it's also a brash
and transporting piece of moviemaking, like Raging Bull on acid. The
film opens with--literally--a surge of adrenalin, which travels through the
bloodstream and into the brain of its protagonist, Jack (Edward Norton), who's
viewed, as the camera pulls out of his insides, with a gun stuck in his mouth.
How'd he get into this pickle? He's going to tell you, breezily, and the
director, David Fincher, is going to illustrate his narrative--violently.
Fincher ( Seven , 1995; The Game , 1997) is out to bombard you with
so much feverish imagery that you have no choice but to succumb to the movie's
reeling, punch-drunk worldview. By the end, you might feel as if you, too, have
a mouthful of blood.
Not to mention a hole in your head. Fight
Club careers from one resonant satirical idea to the next without quite
deciding whether its characters are full of crap or are Gen X prophets. It
always gives you a rush, though. At first, it goofs on the absurd feminization
of an absurdly macho culture. An increasingly desperate insomniac, Jack finds
relief (and release) only at meetings for the terminally ill. At a testicular
cancer group, he's enfolded in the ample arms of Bob (the singer Meat Loaf
Aday), a former bodybuilder who ruined his health with steroids and now has
"bitch tits." Jack and Bob subscribe to a new form of male bonding: They cling
to each other and sob. But Jack's idyll is rudely disrupted by--wouldn't you
know it?--a woman. A dark-eyed, sepulchral head case named Marla Singer (Helena
Bonham Carter) begins showing up at all the same disparate meetings for
essentially the same voyeuristic ends, and the presence of this "tourist" makes
it impossible for Jack to emote.
Jack finds another
outlet, though. On a plane, he meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a cryptic
hipster with a penchant for subversive acts both large (he makes high-priced
soaps from liposuctioned human fat) and small (he splices frames from porn
flicks into kiddie movies). When Jack's apartment mysteriously explodes--along
with his carefully chosen IKEA furniture--he moves into Tyler's squalid
warehouse and helps to found a new religion: Fight Club, in which young males
gather after hours in the basement of a nightclub to pound one another (and be
pounded) to a bloody pulp. That last parenthesis isn't so parenthetical. In
some ways, it's the longing to be beaten into oblivion that's the strongest.
"Self-improvement," explains Tyler, "is masturbation"; self-destruction is the
new way. Tyler's manifesto calls for an end to consumerism ("Things you own end
up owning you"), and since society is going down ("Martha Stewart is polishing
brass on the Titanic "), the only creative outlet left is annihilation.
"It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything," he
says.
Fincher and his screenwriter, Jim Uhls, seem to think
they've broken new ground in Fight
Club , that their metaphor for
our discontents hits harder than anyone else's. Certainly it produces more
bloody splatter. But 20 years ago, the same impulse was called punk and, as
Greil Marcus documents in Lipstick Traces , it was other things before
that. Yes, the mixture of Johnny Rotten, Jake La Motta, and Jesus is unique;
and the Faludi-esque emasculation themes are more explicit. But there's
something deeply movie-ish about the whole conceit, as if the novelist and
director were weaned on Martin Scorsese pictures and never stopped dreaming of
recapturing that first masochistic rush.
The novel, the first by
Chuck Palahniuk (the surname sounds like Eskimo for "palooka"--which somehow
fits), walks a line between the straight and ironic--it isn't always clear if
its glib sociological pronouncements are meant to be taken straight or as the
ravings of a delusional mama's boy. But onscreen, when Pitt announces to the
assembled fighters that they are the "middle children of history" with "no
purpose and no place"--emasculated on one hand by the lack of a unifying crisis
(a world war or depression) and on the other by lack of material wealth as
promised by television--he seems meant to be intoning gospel. "We are a
generation of men raised by women," Tyler announces, and adds, "If our fathers
bail, what does that tell you about God?" (I give up: What?)
F ight
Club could use a few different
perspectives: a woman's, obviously, but also an African-American's--someone
who'd have a different take on the "healing" properties of violence. It's also
unclear just what has emasculated Jack: Is it that he's a materialist or that
the materials themselves (i.e., IKEA's lacquered particle boards) don't measure
up to his fantasies of opulence? Is he motivated by spiritual hunger or envy?
Tyler's subsequent idea of confining his group's mayhem to franchise coffee
bars and corporate-subsidized art is a witty one--it's like a parody of
neo-Nazism as re-enacted by yuppies. It might have been a howl if performed by,
say, the troupe of artsy German nihilists in Joel and Ethan Coen's The Big
Lebowski (1998). Somehow Brad Pitt doesn't have the same piquancy.
Actually, Pitt isn't as terrible as usual: He's
playing not a character but a conceit, and he can bask in his movie-idol
arrogance, which seems to be the most authentic emotion he has. But the film
belongs to Norton. As a ferocious skinhead in last year's American History
X , Norton was taut and ropy, his long torso curled into a sneer; here, he's
skinny and wilting, a quivering pansy. Even when he fights he doesn't
transform--he's a raging wimp. The performance is marvelous, and it makes
poetic sense in light of the movie's climactic twist. But that twist will annoy
more people than it will delight, if only because it shifts the drama from the
realm of the sociological to that of the psychoanalytic. The finale, scored
with the Pixies' great "Where Is My Mind?" comes off facetiously--as if Fincher
is throwing the movie away.
Until then, however, he
has done a fabulous job of keeping it spinning. The most thrilling thing about
Fight Club isn't what it says but how Uhls and Fincher pull you into its
narrator's head and simulate his adrenalin rushes. A veteran of rock videos,
Fincher is one of those filmmakers who helps make the case that MTV--along with
digital editing--has transformed cinema for better as well as worse. The syntax
has become more intricate. Voice-over narration, once considered uncinematic,
is back in style, along with novelistic asides, digressions, fantasies, and
flashbacks. To make a point, you can jazzily interject anything--even, as in
Three Kings , a shot of a bullet slicing through internal organs. Films
like Fight Club might not gel, but they have a breathless,
free-associational quality that points to new possibilities in storytelling. Or
maybe old possibilities: The language of movies hasn't seemed this unfettered
since the pre-sound days of Sergei Eisenstein and Abel Gance.
An actress named Hilary Swank gives one of the most
rapturous performances I've ever seen as the cross-dressing Brandon Teena (a k
a Teena Brandon) in Kimberly Peirce's stark and astonishingly beautiful debut
feature,
Boys Don't Cry
. The movie opens with Teena
being shorn of her hated female tresses and becoming "Brandon," who swaggers
around in tight jeans and leather jackets. The joy is in watching the actor
transform, and I don't just mean Swank: I mean Teena Brandon playing Brandon
Teena--the role she has been longing for her whole life. In a redneck Nebraska
bar, Brandon throws back a shot of whiskey and the gesture--a macho
cliché--becomes an act of self-discovery. Every gesture does. "You're gonna
have a shiner in the morning," someone tells Brandon after a barroom brawl, and
he takes the news with a glee that's almost mystical: "I am????? Oh, shit!!!"
he cries, grinning. That might be my favorite moment in the picture, because
Swank's ecstatic expression carries us through the next hour, as Brandon acts
out his urban-cowboy fantasies--"surfing" from the bumper of a pickup truck,
rolling in the mud, and straddling a barstool with one hand on a brewski and
the other on the shoulder of a gorgeous babe.
That the people with whom Brandon feels most at home
would kill him if they knew his true gender is the movie's most tragic
irony--and the one that lifts it out of the realm of gay-martyr hagiography and
into something more complex and irreducible: a meditation on the irrelevance of
gender. Peirce's triumph is to make these scenes at once exuberant
(occasionally hilarious) and foreboding, so that all the seeds of Brandon's
killing are right there on the screen. John (Peter Sarsgaard), one of his
future rapists and murderers, calls him "little buddy" and seems almost
attracted to him; Sarsgaard's performance is a finely chiseled study of how
unresolved emotion can suddenly resolve itself into violence.
Though harrowing, the
second half of Boys Don't Cry isn't as great as the first. The early
scenes evoke elation and dread simultaneously, the later ones just dread; and
the last half-hour is unrelieved torture. What keeps the movie tantalizing is
Chloë Sevigny's Lana, who might or might not know that Brandon is a girl but
who's entranced by him anyway. With her lank hair, hooded eyes, and air of
sleepy sensuality, Sevigny--maybe even more than Swank--embodies the mystery of
sex that's at the core of Boys Don't Cry . Everything she does is
deliberate, ironic, slightly unreadable--and unyielding. She's could be saying,
"I'm in this world but not of it. ... You'd never dream what's
underneath."
I n
brief: If a friend tells you
you'll love
Happy Texas
, rethink the friendship. This
clunky mistaken-identity comedy about escaped cons who impersonate gay pageant
directors doesn't even make sense on its own low farcical terms; it's mostly
one lame homo joke after another. The only bright spot is Steve Zahn, who could
be the offspring of Michael J. Fox and Crispin Glover if they'd mated on the
set of Back to the Future (1985).
It's hard to make a serious case for Lawrence
Kasdan's
Mumford
, which has apparently flopped but
which you can still catch at second- and third-tier theaters. It looks
peculiar--a Norman Rockwell painting with noir shadows. And its tale of a small
town healed by a depressive (Loren Dean) posing as a psychologist is full of
doddering misconceptions about psychotherapy. I almost don't know why I loved
it, but the relaxed pacing and the witty turns by Martin Short, Ted Danson,
David Paymer, and Mary McDonnell surely helped. I can't decide if the weirdly
affectless Dean is inspired or inept, but my indecision suggests why he works
in the role. There's no doubt, however, about his even more depressive love
object, Hope Davis, who posseses the cinema's most expressive honking-nasal
voice and who slumps through the movie like the world's most lyrical
anti-ballerina. Even her puffy cheeks are eloquent: They made me think of
Mumford as the home of the psychological mumps. | [
"More diverse points-of-view",
"More explicit commentary on the dangers of consumerism",
"A less predictable and facetious ending",
"Less obvious situational irony"
] | 0 |
20071_BB3BFSMM_6 | Which terms describe how the reviewers compare Brad Pitt's performance to Hilary Swank's, respectively? | Boys Do Bleed
Fight Club is silly
stuff, sensationalism that mistakes itself for satire, but it's also a brash
and transporting piece of moviemaking, like Raging Bull on acid. The
film opens with--literally--a surge of adrenalin, which travels through the
bloodstream and into the brain of its protagonist, Jack (Edward Norton), who's
viewed, as the camera pulls out of his insides, with a gun stuck in his mouth.
How'd he get into this pickle? He's going to tell you, breezily, and the
director, David Fincher, is going to illustrate his narrative--violently.
Fincher ( Seven , 1995; The Game , 1997) is out to bombard you with
so much feverish imagery that you have no choice but to succumb to the movie's
reeling, punch-drunk worldview. By the end, you might feel as if you, too, have
a mouthful of blood.
Not to mention a hole in your head. Fight
Club careers from one resonant satirical idea to the next without quite
deciding whether its characters are full of crap or are Gen X prophets. It
always gives you a rush, though. At first, it goofs on the absurd feminization
of an absurdly macho culture. An increasingly desperate insomniac, Jack finds
relief (and release) only at meetings for the terminally ill. At a testicular
cancer group, he's enfolded in the ample arms of Bob (the singer Meat Loaf
Aday), a former bodybuilder who ruined his health with steroids and now has
"bitch tits." Jack and Bob subscribe to a new form of male bonding: They cling
to each other and sob. But Jack's idyll is rudely disrupted by--wouldn't you
know it?--a woman. A dark-eyed, sepulchral head case named Marla Singer (Helena
Bonham Carter) begins showing up at all the same disparate meetings for
essentially the same voyeuristic ends, and the presence of this "tourist" makes
it impossible for Jack to emote.
Jack finds another
outlet, though. On a plane, he meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a cryptic
hipster with a penchant for subversive acts both large (he makes high-priced
soaps from liposuctioned human fat) and small (he splices frames from porn
flicks into kiddie movies). When Jack's apartment mysteriously explodes--along
with his carefully chosen IKEA furniture--he moves into Tyler's squalid
warehouse and helps to found a new religion: Fight Club, in which young males
gather after hours in the basement of a nightclub to pound one another (and be
pounded) to a bloody pulp. That last parenthesis isn't so parenthetical. In
some ways, it's the longing to be beaten into oblivion that's the strongest.
"Self-improvement," explains Tyler, "is masturbation"; self-destruction is the
new way. Tyler's manifesto calls for an end to consumerism ("Things you own end
up owning you"), and since society is going down ("Martha Stewart is polishing
brass on the Titanic "), the only creative outlet left is annihilation.
"It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything," he
says.
Fincher and his screenwriter, Jim Uhls, seem to think
they've broken new ground in Fight
Club , that their metaphor for
our discontents hits harder than anyone else's. Certainly it produces more
bloody splatter. But 20 years ago, the same impulse was called punk and, as
Greil Marcus documents in Lipstick Traces , it was other things before
that. Yes, the mixture of Johnny Rotten, Jake La Motta, and Jesus is unique;
and the Faludi-esque emasculation themes are more explicit. But there's
something deeply movie-ish about the whole conceit, as if the novelist and
director were weaned on Martin Scorsese pictures and never stopped dreaming of
recapturing that first masochistic rush.
The novel, the first by
Chuck Palahniuk (the surname sounds like Eskimo for "palooka"--which somehow
fits), walks a line between the straight and ironic--it isn't always clear if
its glib sociological pronouncements are meant to be taken straight or as the
ravings of a delusional mama's boy. But onscreen, when Pitt announces to the
assembled fighters that they are the "middle children of history" with "no
purpose and no place"--emasculated on one hand by the lack of a unifying crisis
(a world war or depression) and on the other by lack of material wealth as
promised by television--he seems meant to be intoning gospel. "We are a
generation of men raised by women," Tyler announces, and adds, "If our fathers
bail, what does that tell you about God?" (I give up: What?)
F ight
Club could use a few different
perspectives: a woman's, obviously, but also an African-American's--someone
who'd have a different take on the "healing" properties of violence. It's also
unclear just what has emasculated Jack: Is it that he's a materialist or that
the materials themselves (i.e., IKEA's lacquered particle boards) don't measure
up to his fantasies of opulence? Is he motivated by spiritual hunger or envy?
Tyler's subsequent idea of confining his group's mayhem to franchise coffee
bars and corporate-subsidized art is a witty one--it's like a parody of
neo-Nazism as re-enacted by yuppies. It might have been a howl if performed by,
say, the troupe of artsy German nihilists in Joel and Ethan Coen's The Big
Lebowski (1998). Somehow Brad Pitt doesn't have the same piquancy.
Actually, Pitt isn't as terrible as usual: He's
playing not a character but a conceit, and he can bask in his movie-idol
arrogance, which seems to be the most authentic emotion he has. But the film
belongs to Norton. As a ferocious skinhead in last year's American History
X , Norton was taut and ropy, his long torso curled into a sneer; here, he's
skinny and wilting, a quivering pansy. Even when he fights he doesn't
transform--he's a raging wimp. The performance is marvelous, and it makes
poetic sense in light of the movie's climactic twist. But that twist will annoy
more people than it will delight, if only because it shifts the drama from the
realm of the sociological to that of the psychoanalytic. The finale, scored
with the Pixies' great "Where Is My Mind?" comes off facetiously--as if Fincher
is throwing the movie away.
Until then, however, he
has done a fabulous job of keeping it spinning. The most thrilling thing about
Fight Club isn't what it says but how Uhls and Fincher pull you into its
narrator's head and simulate his adrenalin rushes. A veteran of rock videos,
Fincher is one of those filmmakers who helps make the case that MTV--along with
digital editing--has transformed cinema for better as well as worse. The syntax
has become more intricate. Voice-over narration, once considered uncinematic,
is back in style, along with novelistic asides, digressions, fantasies, and
flashbacks. To make a point, you can jazzily interject anything--even, as in
Three Kings , a shot of a bullet slicing through internal organs. Films
like Fight Club might not gel, but they have a breathless,
free-associational quality that points to new possibilities in storytelling. Or
maybe old possibilities: The language of movies hasn't seemed this unfettered
since the pre-sound days of Sergei Eisenstein and Abel Gance.
An actress named Hilary Swank gives one of the most
rapturous performances I've ever seen as the cross-dressing Brandon Teena (a k
a Teena Brandon) in Kimberly Peirce's stark and astonishingly beautiful debut
feature,
Boys Don't Cry
. The movie opens with Teena
being shorn of her hated female tresses and becoming "Brandon," who swaggers
around in tight jeans and leather jackets. The joy is in watching the actor
transform, and I don't just mean Swank: I mean Teena Brandon playing Brandon
Teena--the role she has been longing for her whole life. In a redneck Nebraska
bar, Brandon throws back a shot of whiskey and the gesture--a macho
cliché--becomes an act of self-discovery. Every gesture does. "You're gonna
have a shiner in the morning," someone tells Brandon after a barroom brawl, and
he takes the news with a glee that's almost mystical: "I am????? Oh, shit!!!"
he cries, grinning. That might be my favorite moment in the picture, because
Swank's ecstatic expression carries us through the next hour, as Brandon acts
out his urban-cowboy fantasies--"surfing" from the bumper of a pickup truck,
rolling in the mud, and straddling a barstool with one hand on a brewski and
the other on the shoulder of a gorgeous babe.
That the people with whom Brandon feels most at home
would kill him if they knew his true gender is the movie's most tragic
irony--and the one that lifts it out of the realm of gay-martyr hagiography and
into something more complex and irreducible: a meditation on the irrelevance of
gender. Peirce's triumph is to make these scenes at once exuberant
(occasionally hilarious) and foreboding, so that all the seeds of Brandon's
killing are right there on the screen. John (Peter Sarsgaard), one of his
future rapists and murderers, calls him "little buddy" and seems almost
attracted to him; Sarsgaard's performance is a finely chiseled study of how
unresolved emotion can suddenly resolve itself into violence.
Though harrowing, the
second half of Boys Don't Cry isn't as great as the first. The early
scenes evoke elation and dread simultaneously, the later ones just dread; and
the last half-hour is unrelieved torture. What keeps the movie tantalizing is
Chloë Sevigny's Lana, who might or might not know that Brandon is a girl but
who's entranced by him anyway. With her lank hair, hooded eyes, and air of
sleepy sensuality, Sevigny--maybe even more than Swank--embodies the mystery of
sex that's at the core of Boys Don't Cry . Everything she does is
deliberate, ironic, slightly unreadable--and unyielding. She's could be saying,
"I'm in this world but not of it. ... You'd never dream what's
underneath."
I n
brief: If a friend tells you
you'll love
Happy Texas
, rethink the friendship. This
clunky mistaken-identity comedy about escaped cons who impersonate gay pageant
directors doesn't even make sense on its own low farcical terms; it's mostly
one lame homo joke after another. The only bright spot is Steve Zahn, who could
be the offspring of Michael J. Fox and Crispin Glover if they'd mated on the
set of Back to the Future (1985).
It's hard to make a serious case for Lawrence
Kasdan's
Mumford
, which has apparently flopped but
which you can still catch at second- and third-tier theaters. It looks
peculiar--a Norman Rockwell painting with noir shadows. And its tale of a small
town healed by a depressive (Loren Dean) posing as a psychologist is full of
doddering misconceptions about psychotherapy. I almost don't know why I loved
it, but the relaxed pacing and the witty turns by Martin Short, Ted Danson,
David Paymer, and Mary McDonnell surely helped. I can't decide if the weirdly
affectless Dean is inspired or inept, but my indecision suggests why he works
in the role. There's no doubt, however, about his even more depressive love
object, Hope Davis, who posseses the cinema's most expressive honking-nasal
voice and who slumps through the movie like the world's most lyrical
anti-ballerina. Even her puffy cheeks are eloquent: They made me think of
Mumford as the home of the psychological mumps. | [
"Irritating / Courageous",
"Facetious / Naive",
"Disjointed / Measured",
"Conceited / Captivating"
] | 3 |
20071_BB3BFSMM_7 | According to the reviewers, Jack from "Fight Club" and Brandon Teena from "Boys Don't Cry" share the following: | Boys Do Bleed
Fight Club is silly
stuff, sensationalism that mistakes itself for satire, but it's also a brash
and transporting piece of moviemaking, like Raging Bull on acid. The
film opens with--literally--a surge of adrenalin, which travels through the
bloodstream and into the brain of its protagonist, Jack (Edward Norton), who's
viewed, as the camera pulls out of his insides, with a gun stuck in his mouth.
How'd he get into this pickle? He's going to tell you, breezily, and the
director, David Fincher, is going to illustrate his narrative--violently.
Fincher ( Seven , 1995; The Game , 1997) is out to bombard you with
so much feverish imagery that you have no choice but to succumb to the movie's
reeling, punch-drunk worldview. By the end, you might feel as if you, too, have
a mouthful of blood.
Not to mention a hole in your head. Fight
Club careers from one resonant satirical idea to the next without quite
deciding whether its characters are full of crap or are Gen X prophets. It
always gives you a rush, though. At first, it goofs on the absurd feminization
of an absurdly macho culture. An increasingly desperate insomniac, Jack finds
relief (and release) only at meetings for the terminally ill. At a testicular
cancer group, he's enfolded in the ample arms of Bob (the singer Meat Loaf
Aday), a former bodybuilder who ruined his health with steroids and now has
"bitch tits." Jack and Bob subscribe to a new form of male bonding: They cling
to each other and sob. But Jack's idyll is rudely disrupted by--wouldn't you
know it?--a woman. A dark-eyed, sepulchral head case named Marla Singer (Helena
Bonham Carter) begins showing up at all the same disparate meetings for
essentially the same voyeuristic ends, and the presence of this "tourist" makes
it impossible for Jack to emote.
Jack finds another
outlet, though. On a plane, he meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a cryptic
hipster with a penchant for subversive acts both large (he makes high-priced
soaps from liposuctioned human fat) and small (he splices frames from porn
flicks into kiddie movies). When Jack's apartment mysteriously explodes--along
with his carefully chosen IKEA furniture--he moves into Tyler's squalid
warehouse and helps to found a new religion: Fight Club, in which young males
gather after hours in the basement of a nightclub to pound one another (and be
pounded) to a bloody pulp. That last parenthesis isn't so parenthetical. In
some ways, it's the longing to be beaten into oblivion that's the strongest.
"Self-improvement," explains Tyler, "is masturbation"; self-destruction is the
new way. Tyler's manifesto calls for an end to consumerism ("Things you own end
up owning you"), and since society is going down ("Martha Stewart is polishing
brass on the Titanic "), the only creative outlet left is annihilation.
"It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything," he
says.
Fincher and his screenwriter, Jim Uhls, seem to think
they've broken new ground in Fight
Club , that their metaphor for
our discontents hits harder than anyone else's. Certainly it produces more
bloody splatter. But 20 years ago, the same impulse was called punk and, as
Greil Marcus documents in Lipstick Traces , it was other things before
that. Yes, the mixture of Johnny Rotten, Jake La Motta, and Jesus is unique;
and the Faludi-esque emasculation themes are more explicit. But there's
something deeply movie-ish about the whole conceit, as if the novelist and
director were weaned on Martin Scorsese pictures and never stopped dreaming of
recapturing that first masochistic rush.
The novel, the first by
Chuck Palahniuk (the surname sounds like Eskimo for "palooka"--which somehow
fits), walks a line between the straight and ironic--it isn't always clear if
its glib sociological pronouncements are meant to be taken straight or as the
ravings of a delusional mama's boy. But onscreen, when Pitt announces to the
assembled fighters that they are the "middle children of history" with "no
purpose and no place"--emasculated on one hand by the lack of a unifying crisis
(a world war or depression) and on the other by lack of material wealth as
promised by television--he seems meant to be intoning gospel. "We are a
generation of men raised by women," Tyler announces, and adds, "If our fathers
bail, what does that tell you about God?" (I give up: What?)
F ight
Club could use a few different
perspectives: a woman's, obviously, but also an African-American's--someone
who'd have a different take on the "healing" properties of violence. It's also
unclear just what has emasculated Jack: Is it that he's a materialist or that
the materials themselves (i.e., IKEA's lacquered particle boards) don't measure
up to his fantasies of opulence? Is he motivated by spiritual hunger or envy?
Tyler's subsequent idea of confining his group's mayhem to franchise coffee
bars and corporate-subsidized art is a witty one--it's like a parody of
neo-Nazism as re-enacted by yuppies. It might have been a howl if performed by,
say, the troupe of artsy German nihilists in Joel and Ethan Coen's The Big
Lebowski (1998). Somehow Brad Pitt doesn't have the same piquancy.
Actually, Pitt isn't as terrible as usual: He's
playing not a character but a conceit, and he can bask in his movie-idol
arrogance, which seems to be the most authentic emotion he has. But the film
belongs to Norton. As a ferocious skinhead in last year's American History
X , Norton was taut and ropy, his long torso curled into a sneer; here, he's
skinny and wilting, a quivering pansy. Even when he fights he doesn't
transform--he's a raging wimp. The performance is marvelous, and it makes
poetic sense in light of the movie's climactic twist. But that twist will annoy
more people than it will delight, if only because it shifts the drama from the
realm of the sociological to that of the psychoanalytic. The finale, scored
with the Pixies' great "Where Is My Mind?" comes off facetiously--as if Fincher
is throwing the movie away.
Until then, however, he
has done a fabulous job of keeping it spinning. The most thrilling thing about
Fight Club isn't what it says but how Uhls and Fincher pull you into its
narrator's head and simulate his adrenalin rushes. A veteran of rock videos,
Fincher is one of those filmmakers who helps make the case that MTV--along with
digital editing--has transformed cinema for better as well as worse. The syntax
has become more intricate. Voice-over narration, once considered uncinematic,
is back in style, along with novelistic asides, digressions, fantasies, and
flashbacks. To make a point, you can jazzily interject anything--even, as in
Three Kings , a shot of a bullet slicing through internal organs. Films
like Fight Club might not gel, but they have a breathless,
free-associational quality that points to new possibilities in storytelling. Or
maybe old possibilities: The language of movies hasn't seemed this unfettered
since the pre-sound days of Sergei Eisenstein and Abel Gance.
An actress named Hilary Swank gives one of the most
rapturous performances I've ever seen as the cross-dressing Brandon Teena (a k
a Teena Brandon) in Kimberly Peirce's stark and astonishingly beautiful debut
feature,
Boys Don't Cry
. The movie opens with Teena
being shorn of her hated female tresses and becoming "Brandon," who swaggers
around in tight jeans and leather jackets. The joy is in watching the actor
transform, and I don't just mean Swank: I mean Teena Brandon playing Brandon
Teena--the role she has been longing for her whole life. In a redneck Nebraska
bar, Brandon throws back a shot of whiskey and the gesture--a macho
cliché--becomes an act of self-discovery. Every gesture does. "You're gonna
have a shiner in the morning," someone tells Brandon after a barroom brawl, and
he takes the news with a glee that's almost mystical: "I am????? Oh, shit!!!"
he cries, grinning. That might be my favorite moment in the picture, because
Swank's ecstatic expression carries us through the next hour, as Brandon acts
out his urban-cowboy fantasies--"surfing" from the bumper of a pickup truck,
rolling in the mud, and straddling a barstool with one hand on a brewski and
the other on the shoulder of a gorgeous babe.
That the people with whom Brandon feels most at home
would kill him if they knew his true gender is the movie's most tragic
irony--and the one that lifts it out of the realm of gay-martyr hagiography and
into something more complex and irreducible: a meditation on the irrelevance of
gender. Peirce's triumph is to make these scenes at once exuberant
(occasionally hilarious) and foreboding, so that all the seeds of Brandon's
killing are right there on the screen. John (Peter Sarsgaard), one of his
future rapists and murderers, calls him "little buddy" and seems almost
attracted to him; Sarsgaard's performance is a finely chiseled study of how
unresolved emotion can suddenly resolve itself into violence.
Though harrowing, the
second half of Boys Don't Cry isn't as great as the first. The early
scenes evoke elation and dread simultaneously, the later ones just dread; and
the last half-hour is unrelieved torture. What keeps the movie tantalizing is
Chloë Sevigny's Lana, who might or might not know that Brandon is a girl but
who's entranced by him anyway. With her lank hair, hooded eyes, and air of
sleepy sensuality, Sevigny--maybe even more than Swank--embodies the mystery of
sex that's at the core of Boys Don't Cry . Everything she does is
deliberate, ironic, slightly unreadable--and unyielding. She's could be saying,
"I'm in this world but not of it. ... You'd never dream what's
underneath."
I n
brief: If a friend tells you
you'll love
Happy Texas
, rethink the friendship. This
clunky mistaken-identity comedy about escaped cons who impersonate gay pageant
directors doesn't even make sense on its own low farcical terms; it's mostly
one lame homo joke after another. The only bright spot is Steve Zahn, who could
be the offspring of Michael J. Fox and Crispin Glover if they'd mated on the
set of Back to the Future (1985).
It's hard to make a serious case for Lawrence
Kasdan's
Mumford
, which has apparently flopped but
which you can still catch at second- and third-tier theaters. It looks
peculiar--a Norman Rockwell painting with noir shadows. And its tale of a small
town healed by a depressive (Loren Dean) posing as a psychologist is full of
doddering misconceptions about psychotherapy. I almost don't know why I loved
it, but the relaxed pacing and the witty turns by Martin Short, Ted Danson,
David Paymer, and Mary McDonnell surely helped. I can't decide if the weirdly
affectless Dean is inspired or inept, but my indecision suggests why he works
in the role. There's no doubt, however, about his even more depressive love
object, Hope Davis, who posseses the cinema's most expressive honking-nasal
voice and who slumps through the movie like the world's most lyrical
anti-ballerina. Even her puffy cheeks are eloquent: They made me think of
Mumford as the home of the psychological mumps. | [
"An unsupportive family",
"An addictive personality",
"A fascination with masculinity",
"A sleep disorder"
] | 2 |
20071_BB3BFSMM_8 | According to the reviewer of "Boys Don't Cry," Brandon Teena feels more connected to their true identity by engaging in all of the following acts EXCEPT: | Boys Do Bleed
Fight Club is silly
stuff, sensationalism that mistakes itself for satire, but it's also a brash
and transporting piece of moviemaking, like Raging Bull on acid. The
film opens with--literally--a surge of adrenalin, which travels through the
bloodstream and into the brain of its protagonist, Jack (Edward Norton), who's
viewed, as the camera pulls out of his insides, with a gun stuck in his mouth.
How'd he get into this pickle? He's going to tell you, breezily, and the
director, David Fincher, is going to illustrate his narrative--violently.
Fincher ( Seven , 1995; The Game , 1997) is out to bombard you with
so much feverish imagery that you have no choice but to succumb to the movie's
reeling, punch-drunk worldview. By the end, you might feel as if you, too, have
a mouthful of blood.
Not to mention a hole in your head. Fight
Club careers from one resonant satirical idea to the next without quite
deciding whether its characters are full of crap or are Gen X prophets. It
always gives you a rush, though. At first, it goofs on the absurd feminization
of an absurdly macho culture. An increasingly desperate insomniac, Jack finds
relief (and release) only at meetings for the terminally ill. At a testicular
cancer group, he's enfolded in the ample arms of Bob (the singer Meat Loaf
Aday), a former bodybuilder who ruined his health with steroids and now has
"bitch tits." Jack and Bob subscribe to a new form of male bonding: They cling
to each other and sob. But Jack's idyll is rudely disrupted by--wouldn't you
know it?--a woman. A dark-eyed, sepulchral head case named Marla Singer (Helena
Bonham Carter) begins showing up at all the same disparate meetings for
essentially the same voyeuristic ends, and the presence of this "tourist" makes
it impossible for Jack to emote.
Jack finds another
outlet, though. On a plane, he meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a cryptic
hipster with a penchant for subversive acts both large (he makes high-priced
soaps from liposuctioned human fat) and small (he splices frames from porn
flicks into kiddie movies). When Jack's apartment mysteriously explodes--along
with his carefully chosen IKEA furniture--he moves into Tyler's squalid
warehouse and helps to found a new religion: Fight Club, in which young males
gather after hours in the basement of a nightclub to pound one another (and be
pounded) to a bloody pulp. That last parenthesis isn't so parenthetical. In
some ways, it's the longing to be beaten into oblivion that's the strongest.
"Self-improvement," explains Tyler, "is masturbation"; self-destruction is the
new way. Tyler's manifesto calls for an end to consumerism ("Things you own end
up owning you"), and since society is going down ("Martha Stewart is polishing
brass on the Titanic "), the only creative outlet left is annihilation.
"It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything," he
says.
Fincher and his screenwriter, Jim Uhls, seem to think
they've broken new ground in Fight
Club , that their metaphor for
our discontents hits harder than anyone else's. Certainly it produces more
bloody splatter. But 20 years ago, the same impulse was called punk and, as
Greil Marcus documents in Lipstick Traces , it was other things before
that. Yes, the mixture of Johnny Rotten, Jake La Motta, and Jesus is unique;
and the Faludi-esque emasculation themes are more explicit. But there's
something deeply movie-ish about the whole conceit, as if the novelist and
director were weaned on Martin Scorsese pictures and never stopped dreaming of
recapturing that first masochistic rush.
The novel, the first by
Chuck Palahniuk (the surname sounds like Eskimo for "palooka"--which somehow
fits), walks a line between the straight and ironic--it isn't always clear if
its glib sociological pronouncements are meant to be taken straight or as the
ravings of a delusional mama's boy. But onscreen, when Pitt announces to the
assembled fighters that they are the "middle children of history" with "no
purpose and no place"--emasculated on one hand by the lack of a unifying crisis
(a world war or depression) and on the other by lack of material wealth as
promised by television--he seems meant to be intoning gospel. "We are a
generation of men raised by women," Tyler announces, and adds, "If our fathers
bail, what does that tell you about God?" (I give up: What?)
F ight
Club could use a few different
perspectives: a woman's, obviously, but also an African-American's--someone
who'd have a different take on the "healing" properties of violence. It's also
unclear just what has emasculated Jack: Is it that he's a materialist or that
the materials themselves (i.e., IKEA's lacquered particle boards) don't measure
up to his fantasies of opulence? Is he motivated by spiritual hunger or envy?
Tyler's subsequent idea of confining his group's mayhem to franchise coffee
bars and corporate-subsidized art is a witty one--it's like a parody of
neo-Nazism as re-enacted by yuppies. It might have been a howl if performed by,
say, the troupe of artsy German nihilists in Joel and Ethan Coen's The Big
Lebowski (1998). Somehow Brad Pitt doesn't have the same piquancy.
Actually, Pitt isn't as terrible as usual: He's
playing not a character but a conceit, and he can bask in his movie-idol
arrogance, which seems to be the most authentic emotion he has. But the film
belongs to Norton. As a ferocious skinhead in last year's American History
X , Norton was taut and ropy, his long torso curled into a sneer; here, he's
skinny and wilting, a quivering pansy. Even when he fights he doesn't
transform--he's a raging wimp. The performance is marvelous, and it makes
poetic sense in light of the movie's climactic twist. But that twist will annoy
more people than it will delight, if only because it shifts the drama from the
realm of the sociological to that of the psychoanalytic. The finale, scored
with the Pixies' great "Where Is My Mind?" comes off facetiously--as if Fincher
is throwing the movie away.
Until then, however, he
has done a fabulous job of keeping it spinning. The most thrilling thing about
Fight Club isn't what it says but how Uhls and Fincher pull you into its
narrator's head and simulate his adrenalin rushes. A veteran of rock videos,
Fincher is one of those filmmakers who helps make the case that MTV--along with
digital editing--has transformed cinema for better as well as worse. The syntax
has become more intricate. Voice-over narration, once considered uncinematic,
is back in style, along with novelistic asides, digressions, fantasies, and
flashbacks. To make a point, you can jazzily interject anything--even, as in
Three Kings , a shot of a bullet slicing through internal organs. Films
like Fight Club might not gel, but they have a breathless,
free-associational quality that points to new possibilities in storytelling. Or
maybe old possibilities: The language of movies hasn't seemed this unfettered
since the pre-sound days of Sergei Eisenstein and Abel Gance.
An actress named Hilary Swank gives one of the most
rapturous performances I've ever seen as the cross-dressing Brandon Teena (a k
a Teena Brandon) in Kimberly Peirce's stark and astonishingly beautiful debut
feature,
Boys Don't Cry
. The movie opens with Teena
being shorn of her hated female tresses and becoming "Brandon," who swaggers
around in tight jeans and leather jackets. The joy is in watching the actor
transform, and I don't just mean Swank: I mean Teena Brandon playing Brandon
Teena--the role she has been longing for her whole life. In a redneck Nebraska
bar, Brandon throws back a shot of whiskey and the gesture--a macho
cliché--becomes an act of self-discovery. Every gesture does. "You're gonna
have a shiner in the morning," someone tells Brandon after a barroom brawl, and
he takes the news with a glee that's almost mystical: "I am????? Oh, shit!!!"
he cries, grinning. That might be my favorite moment in the picture, because
Swank's ecstatic expression carries us through the next hour, as Brandon acts
out his urban-cowboy fantasies--"surfing" from the bumper of a pickup truck,
rolling in the mud, and straddling a barstool with one hand on a brewski and
the other on the shoulder of a gorgeous babe.
That the people with whom Brandon feels most at home
would kill him if they knew his true gender is the movie's most tragic
irony--and the one that lifts it out of the realm of gay-martyr hagiography and
into something more complex and irreducible: a meditation on the irrelevance of
gender. Peirce's triumph is to make these scenes at once exuberant
(occasionally hilarious) and foreboding, so that all the seeds of Brandon's
killing are right there on the screen. John (Peter Sarsgaard), one of his
future rapists and murderers, calls him "little buddy" and seems almost
attracted to him; Sarsgaard's performance is a finely chiseled study of how
unresolved emotion can suddenly resolve itself into violence.
Though harrowing, the
second half of Boys Don't Cry isn't as great as the first. The early
scenes evoke elation and dread simultaneously, the later ones just dread; and
the last half-hour is unrelieved torture. What keeps the movie tantalizing is
Chloë Sevigny's Lana, who might or might not know that Brandon is a girl but
who's entranced by him anyway. With her lank hair, hooded eyes, and air of
sleepy sensuality, Sevigny--maybe even more than Swank--embodies the mystery of
sex that's at the core of Boys Don't Cry . Everything she does is
deliberate, ironic, slightly unreadable--and unyielding. She's could be saying,
"I'm in this world but not of it. ... You'd never dream what's
underneath."
I n
brief: If a friend tells you
you'll love
Happy Texas
, rethink the friendship. This
clunky mistaken-identity comedy about escaped cons who impersonate gay pageant
directors doesn't even make sense on its own low farcical terms; it's mostly
one lame homo joke after another. The only bright spot is Steve Zahn, who could
be the offspring of Michael J. Fox and Crispin Glover if they'd mated on the
set of Back to the Future (1985).
It's hard to make a serious case for Lawrence
Kasdan's
Mumford
, which has apparently flopped but
which you can still catch at second- and third-tier theaters. It looks
peculiar--a Norman Rockwell painting with noir shadows. And its tale of a small
town healed by a depressive (Loren Dean) posing as a psychologist is full of
doddering misconceptions about psychotherapy. I almost don't know why I loved
it, but the relaxed pacing and the witty turns by Martin Short, Ted Danson,
David Paymer, and Mary McDonnell surely helped. I can't decide if the weirdly
affectless Dean is inspired or inept, but my indecision suggests why he works
in the role. There's no doubt, however, about his even more depressive love
object, Hope Davis, who posseses the cinema's most expressive honking-nasal
voice and who slumps through the movie like the world's most lyrical
anti-ballerina. Even her puffy cheeks are eloquent: They made me think of
Mumford as the home of the psychological mumps. | [
"Confiding in their family",
"Getting dirty",
"Flirting with women",
"Drinking in a bar"
] | 0 |
20071_BB3BFSMM_9 | Of the four films reviewed in the passage, which one has received the LEAST positive review? | Boys Do Bleed
Fight Club is silly
stuff, sensationalism that mistakes itself for satire, but it's also a brash
and transporting piece of moviemaking, like Raging Bull on acid. The
film opens with--literally--a surge of adrenalin, which travels through the
bloodstream and into the brain of its protagonist, Jack (Edward Norton), who's
viewed, as the camera pulls out of his insides, with a gun stuck in his mouth.
How'd he get into this pickle? He's going to tell you, breezily, and the
director, David Fincher, is going to illustrate his narrative--violently.
Fincher ( Seven , 1995; The Game , 1997) is out to bombard you with
so much feverish imagery that you have no choice but to succumb to the movie's
reeling, punch-drunk worldview. By the end, you might feel as if you, too, have
a mouthful of blood.
Not to mention a hole in your head. Fight
Club careers from one resonant satirical idea to the next without quite
deciding whether its characters are full of crap or are Gen X prophets. It
always gives you a rush, though. At first, it goofs on the absurd feminization
of an absurdly macho culture. An increasingly desperate insomniac, Jack finds
relief (and release) only at meetings for the terminally ill. At a testicular
cancer group, he's enfolded in the ample arms of Bob (the singer Meat Loaf
Aday), a former bodybuilder who ruined his health with steroids and now has
"bitch tits." Jack and Bob subscribe to a new form of male bonding: They cling
to each other and sob. But Jack's idyll is rudely disrupted by--wouldn't you
know it?--a woman. A dark-eyed, sepulchral head case named Marla Singer (Helena
Bonham Carter) begins showing up at all the same disparate meetings for
essentially the same voyeuristic ends, and the presence of this "tourist" makes
it impossible for Jack to emote.
Jack finds another
outlet, though. On a plane, he meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a cryptic
hipster with a penchant for subversive acts both large (he makes high-priced
soaps from liposuctioned human fat) and small (he splices frames from porn
flicks into kiddie movies). When Jack's apartment mysteriously explodes--along
with his carefully chosen IKEA furniture--he moves into Tyler's squalid
warehouse and helps to found a new religion: Fight Club, in which young males
gather after hours in the basement of a nightclub to pound one another (and be
pounded) to a bloody pulp. That last parenthesis isn't so parenthetical. In
some ways, it's the longing to be beaten into oblivion that's the strongest.
"Self-improvement," explains Tyler, "is masturbation"; self-destruction is the
new way. Tyler's manifesto calls for an end to consumerism ("Things you own end
up owning you"), and since society is going down ("Martha Stewart is polishing
brass on the Titanic "), the only creative outlet left is annihilation.
"It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything," he
says.
Fincher and his screenwriter, Jim Uhls, seem to think
they've broken new ground in Fight
Club , that their metaphor for
our discontents hits harder than anyone else's. Certainly it produces more
bloody splatter. But 20 years ago, the same impulse was called punk and, as
Greil Marcus documents in Lipstick Traces , it was other things before
that. Yes, the mixture of Johnny Rotten, Jake La Motta, and Jesus is unique;
and the Faludi-esque emasculation themes are more explicit. But there's
something deeply movie-ish about the whole conceit, as if the novelist and
director were weaned on Martin Scorsese pictures and never stopped dreaming of
recapturing that first masochistic rush.
The novel, the first by
Chuck Palahniuk (the surname sounds like Eskimo for "palooka"--which somehow
fits), walks a line between the straight and ironic--it isn't always clear if
its glib sociological pronouncements are meant to be taken straight or as the
ravings of a delusional mama's boy. But onscreen, when Pitt announces to the
assembled fighters that they are the "middle children of history" with "no
purpose and no place"--emasculated on one hand by the lack of a unifying crisis
(a world war or depression) and on the other by lack of material wealth as
promised by television--he seems meant to be intoning gospel. "We are a
generation of men raised by women," Tyler announces, and adds, "If our fathers
bail, what does that tell you about God?" (I give up: What?)
F ight
Club could use a few different
perspectives: a woman's, obviously, but also an African-American's--someone
who'd have a different take on the "healing" properties of violence. It's also
unclear just what has emasculated Jack: Is it that he's a materialist or that
the materials themselves (i.e., IKEA's lacquered particle boards) don't measure
up to his fantasies of opulence? Is he motivated by spiritual hunger or envy?
Tyler's subsequent idea of confining his group's mayhem to franchise coffee
bars and corporate-subsidized art is a witty one--it's like a parody of
neo-Nazism as re-enacted by yuppies. It might have been a howl if performed by,
say, the troupe of artsy German nihilists in Joel and Ethan Coen's The Big
Lebowski (1998). Somehow Brad Pitt doesn't have the same piquancy.
Actually, Pitt isn't as terrible as usual: He's
playing not a character but a conceit, and he can bask in his movie-idol
arrogance, which seems to be the most authentic emotion he has. But the film
belongs to Norton. As a ferocious skinhead in last year's American History
X , Norton was taut and ropy, his long torso curled into a sneer; here, he's
skinny and wilting, a quivering pansy. Even when he fights he doesn't
transform--he's a raging wimp. The performance is marvelous, and it makes
poetic sense in light of the movie's climactic twist. But that twist will annoy
more people than it will delight, if only because it shifts the drama from the
realm of the sociological to that of the psychoanalytic. The finale, scored
with the Pixies' great "Where Is My Mind?" comes off facetiously--as if Fincher
is throwing the movie away.
Until then, however, he
has done a fabulous job of keeping it spinning. The most thrilling thing about
Fight Club isn't what it says but how Uhls and Fincher pull you into its
narrator's head and simulate his adrenalin rushes. A veteran of rock videos,
Fincher is one of those filmmakers who helps make the case that MTV--along with
digital editing--has transformed cinema for better as well as worse. The syntax
has become more intricate. Voice-over narration, once considered uncinematic,
is back in style, along with novelistic asides, digressions, fantasies, and
flashbacks. To make a point, you can jazzily interject anything--even, as in
Three Kings , a shot of a bullet slicing through internal organs. Films
like Fight Club might not gel, but they have a breathless,
free-associational quality that points to new possibilities in storytelling. Or
maybe old possibilities: The language of movies hasn't seemed this unfettered
since the pre-sound days of Sergei Eisenstein and Abel Gance.
An actress named Hilary Swank gives one of the most
rapturous performances I've ever seen as the cross-dressing Brandon Teena (a k
a Teena Brandon) in Kimberly Peirce's stark and astonishingly beautiful debut
feature,
Boys Don't Cry
. The movie opens with Teena
being shorn of her hated female tresses and becoming "Brandon," who swaggers
around in tight jeans and leather jackets. The joy is in watching the actor
transform, and I don't just mean Swank: I mean Teena Brandon playing Brandon
Teena--the role she has been longing for her whole life. In a redneck Nebraska
bar, Brandon throws back a shot of whiskey and the gesture--a macho
cliché--becomes an act of self-discovery. Every gesture does. "You're gonna
have a shiner in the morning," someone tells Brandon after a barroom brawl, and
he takes the news with a glee that's almost mystical: "I am????? Oh, shit!!!"
he cries, grinning. That might be my favorite moment in the picture, because
Swank's ecstatic expression carries us through the next hour, as Brandon acts
out his urban-cowboy fantasies--"surfing" from the bumper of a pickup truck,
rolling in the mud, and straddling a barstool with one hand on a brewski and
the other on the shoulder of a gorgeous babe.
That the people with whom Brandon feels most at home
would kill him if they knew his true gender is the movie's most tragic
irony--and the one that lifts it out of the realm of gay-martyr hagiography and
into something more complex and irreducible: a meditation on the irrelevance of
gender. Peirce's triumph is to make these scenes at once exuberant
(occasionally hilarious) and foreboding, so that all the seeds of Brandon's
killing are right there on the screen. John (Peter Sarsgaard), one of his
future rapists and murderers, calls him "little buddy" and seems almost
attracted to him; Sarsgaard's performance is a finely chiseled study of how
unresolved emotion can suddenly resolve itself into violence.
Though harrowing, the
second half of Boys Don't Cry isn't as great as the first. The early
scenes evoke elation and dread simultaneously, the later ones just dread; and
the last half-hour is unrelieved torture. What keeps the movie tantalizing is
Chloë Sevigny's Lana, who might or might not know that Brandon is a girl but
who's entranced by him anyway. With her lank hair, hooded eyes, and air of
sleepy sensuality, Sevigny--maybe even more than Swank--embodies the mystery of
sex that's at the core of Boys Don't Cry . Everything she does is
deliberate, ironic, slightly unreadable--and unyielding. She's could be saying,
"I'm in this world but not of it. ... You'd never dream what's
underneath."
I n
brief: If a friend tells you
you'll love
Happy Texas
, rethink the friendship. This
clunky mistaken-identity comedy about escaped cons who impersonate gay pageant
directors doesn't even make sense on its own low farcical terms; it's mostly
one lame homo joke after another. The only bright spot is Steve Zahn, who could
be the offspring of Michael J. Fox and Crispin Glover if they'd mated on the
set of Back to the Future (1985).
It's hard to make a serious case for Lawrence
Kasdan's
Mumford
, which has apparently flopped but
which you can still catch at second- and third-tier theaters. It looks
peculiar--a Norman Rockwell painting with noir shadows. And its tale of a small
town healed by a depressive (Loren Dean) posing as a psychologist is full of
doddering misconceptions about psychotherapy. I almost don't know why I loved
it, but the relaxed pacing and the witty turns by Martin Short, Ted Danson,
David Paymer, and Mary McDonnell surely helped. I can't decide if the weirdly
affectless Dean is inspired or inept, but my indecision suggests why he works
in the role. There's no doubt, however, about his even more depressive love
object, Hope Davis, who posseses the cinema's most expressive honking-nasal
voice and who slumps through the movie like the world's most lyrical
anti-ballerina. Even her puffy cheeks are eloquent: They made me think of
Mumford as the home of the psychological mumps. | [
"Fight Club",
"Mumford",
"Boys Don't Cry",
"Happy Texas"
] | 3 |
23588_CJYHQDJP_1 | Why is everyone surprised that Thaddeus was able to make a bomb? | Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science Fiction November 1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
A FILBERT IS A NUT
BY RICK RAPHAEL
That the gentleman in question was a nut was beyond question. He was an institutionalized
psychotic. He was nutty enough to think he could make an atom bomb out of modeling clay!
Illustrated by Freas
Miss Abercrombie, the manual therapist patted the old man on the
shoulder. "You're doing just fine, Mr. Lieberman. Show it to me when you
have finished."
The oldster in the stained convalescent suit gave her a quick, shy smile
and went back to his aimless smearing in the finger paints.
Miss Abercrombie smoothed her smock down over trim hips and surveyed the
other patients working at the long tables in the hospital's arts and
crafts shop. Two muscular and bored attendants in spotless whites,
lounged beside the locked door and chatted idly about the Dodgers'
prospects for the pennant.
Through the barred windows of the workshop, rolling green hills were
seen, their tree-studded flanks making a pleasant setting for the mental
institution. The crafts building was a good mile away from the main
buildings of the hospital and the hills blocked the view of the austere
complex of buildings that housed the main wards.
The therapist strolled down the line of tables, pausing to give a word
of advice here, and a suggestion there.
She stopped behind a frowning, intense patient, rapidly shaping blobs of
clay into odd-sized strips and forms. As he finished each piece, he
carefully placed it into a hollow shell hemisphere of clay.
"And what are we making today, Mr. Funston?" Miss Abercrombie asked.
The flying fingers continued to whip out the bits of shaped clay as the
patient ignored the question. He hunched closer to his table as if to
draw away from the woman.
"We mustn't be antisocial, Mr. Funston," Miss Abercrombie said lightly,
but firmly. "You've been coming along famously and you must remember to
answer when someone talks to you. Now what are you making? It looks very
complicated." She stared professionally at the maze of clay parts.
Thaddeus Funston continued to mold the clay bits and put them in place.
Without looking up from his bench he muttered a reply.
"Atom bomb."
A puzzled look crossed the therapist's face. "Pardon me, Mr. Funston. I
thought you said an 'atom bomb.'"
"Did," Funston murmured.
Safely behind the patient's back, Miss Abercrombie smiled ever so
slightly. "Why that's very good, Mr. Funston. That shows real creative
thought. I'm very pleased."
She patted him on the shoulder and moved down the line of patients.
A few minutes later, one of the attendants glanced at his watch, stood
up and stretched.
"All right, fellows," he called out, "time to go back. Put up your
things."
There was a rustle of paint boxes and papers being shuffled and chairs
being moved back. A tall, blond patient with a flowing mustache, put one
more dab of paint on his canvas and stood back to survey the meaningless
smears. He sighed happily and laid down his palette.
At the clay table, Funston feverishly fabricated the last odd-shaped bit
of clay and slapped it into place. With a furtive glance around him, he
clapped the other half of the clay sphere over the filled hemisphere and
then stood up. The patients lined up at the door, waiting for the walk
back across the green hills to the main hospital. The attendants made a
quick count and then unlocked the door. The group shuffled out into the
warm, afternoon sunlight and the door closed behind them.
Miss Abercrombie gazed around the cluttered room and picked up her chart
book of patient progress. Moving slowly down the line of benches, she
made short, precise notes on the day's work accomplished by each
patient.
At the clay table, she carefully lifted the top half of the clay ball
and stared thoughtfully at the jumbled maze of clay strips laced through
the lower hemisphere. She placed the lid back in place and jotted
lengthily in her chart book.
When she had completed her rounds, she slipped out of the smock, tucked
the chart book under her arm and left the crafts building for the day.
The late afternoon sun felt warm and comfortable as she walked the mile
to the main administration building where her car was parked.
As she drove out of the hospital grounds, Thaddeus Funston stood at the
barred window of his locked ward and stared vacantly over the hills
towards the craft shop. He stood there unmoving until a ward attendant
came and took his arm an hour later to lead him off to the patients'
mess hall.
The sun set, darkness fell over the stilled hospital grounds and the
ward lights winked out at nine o'clock, leaving just a single light
burning in each ward office. A quiet wind sighed over the still-warm
hills.
At 3:01 a.m., Thaddeus Funston stirred in his sleep and awakened. He sat
up in bed and looked around the dark ward. The quiet breathing and
occasional snores of thirty other sleeping patients filled the room.
Funston turned to the window and stared out across the black hills that
sheltered the deserted crafts building.
He gave a quick cry, shut his eyes and clapped his hands over his face.
The brilliance of a hundred suns glared in the night and threw stark
shadows on the walls of the suddenly-illuminated ward.
An instant later, the shattering roar and blast of the explosion struck
the hospital buildings in a wave of force and the bursting crash of a
thousand windows was lost in the fury of the explosion and the wild
screams of the frightened and demented patients.
It was over in an instant, and a stunned moment later, recessed ceiling
lights began flashing on throughout the big institution.
Beyond the again-silent hills, a great pillar of smoke, topped by a
small mushroom-shaped cloud, rose above the gaping hole that had been
the arts and crafts building.
Thaddeus Funston took his hands from his face and lay back in his bed
with a small, secret smile on his lips. Attendants and nurses scurried
through the hospital, seeing how many had been injured in the
explosion.
None had. The hills had absorbed most of the shock and apart from a
welter of broken glass, the damage had been surprisingly slight.
The roar and flash of the explosion had lighted and rocked the
surrounding countryside. Soon firemen and civil defense disaster units
from a half-dozen neighboring communities had gathered at the
still-smoking hole that marked the site of the vanished crafts building.
Within fifteen minutes, the disaster-trained crews had detected heavy
radiation emanating from the crater and there was a scurry of men and
equipment back to a safe distance, a few hundred yards away.
At 5:30 a.m., a plane landed at a nearby airfield and a platoon of
Atomic Energy Commission experts, military intelligence men, four FBI
agents and an Army full colonel disembarked.
At 5:45 a.m. a cordon was thrown around both the hospital and the blast
crater.
In Ward 4-C, Thaddeus Funston slept peacefully and happily.
"It's impossible and unbelievable," Colonel Thomas Thurgood said for the
fifteenth time, later that morning, as he looked around the group of
experts gathered in the tent erected on the hill overlooking the crater.
"How can an atom bomb go off in a nut house?"
"It apparently was a very small bomb, colonel," one of the haggard AEC
men offered timidly. "Not over three kilotons."
"I don't care if it was the size of a peanut," Thurgood screamed. "How
did it get here?"
A military intelligence agent spoke up. "If we knew, sir, we wouldn't be
standing around here. We don't know, but the fact remains that it WAS an
atomic explosion."
Thurgood turned wearily to the small, white-haired man at his side.
"Let's go over it once more, Dr. Crane. Are you sure you knew everything
that was in that building?" Thurgood swept his hand in the general
direction of the blast crater.
"Colonel, I've told you a dozen times," the hospital administrator said
with exasperation, "this was our manual therapy room. We gave our
patients art work. It was a means of getting out of their systems,
through the use of their hands, some of the frustrations and problems
that led them to this hospital. They worked with oil and water paints
and clay. If you can make an atomic bomb from vermillion pigments, then
Madame Curie was a misguided scrubwoman."
"All I know is that you say this was a crafts building. O.K. So it was,"
Thurgood sighed. "I also know that an atomic explosion at 3:02 this
morning blew it to hell and gone.
"And I've got to find out how it happened."
Thurgood slumped into a field chair and gazed tiredly up at the little
doctor.
"Where's that girl you said was in charge of this place?"
"We've already called for Miss Abercrombie and she's on her way here
now," the doctor snapped.
Outside the tent, a small army of military men and AEC technicians moved
around the perimeter of the crater, scintillators in hand, examining
every tiny scrap that might have been a part of the building at one
time.
A jeep raced down the road from the hospital and drew up in front of the
tent. An armed MP helped Miss Abercrombie from the vehicle.
She walked to the edge of the hill and looked down with a stunned
expression.
"He did make an atom bomb," she cried.
Colonel Thurgood, who had snapped from his chair at her words, leaped
forward to catch her as she collapsed in a faint.
At 4:00 p.m., the argument was still raging in the long, narrow staff
room of the hospital administration building.
Colonel Thurgood, looking more like a patient every minute, sat on the
edge of his chair at the head of a long table and pounded with his fist
on the wooden surface, making Miss Abercrombie's chart book bounce with
every beat.
"It's ridiculous," Thurgood roared. "We'll all be the laughingstocks of
the world if this ever gets out. An atomic bomb made out of clay. You
are all nuts. You're in the right place, but count me out."
At his left, Miss Abercrombie cringed deeper into her chair at the
broadside. Down both sides of the long table, psychiatrists, physicists,
strategists and radiologists sat in various stages of nerve-shattered
weariness.
"Miss Abercrombie," one of the physicists spoke up gently, "you say that
after the patients had departed the building, you looked again at
Funston's work?"
The therapist nodded unhappily.
"And you say that, to the best of your knowledge," the physicist
continued, "there was nothing inside the ball but other pieces of clay."
"I'm positive that's all there was in it," Miss Abercrombie cried.
There was a renewed buzz of conversation at the table and the senior AEC
man present got heads together with the senior intelligence man. They
conferred briefly and then the intelligence officer spoke.
"That seems to settle it, colonel. We've got to give this Funston
another chance to repeat his bomb. But this time under our supervision."
Thurgood leaped to his feet, his face purpling.
"Are you crazy?" he screamed. "You want to get us all thrown into this
filbert factory? Do you know what the newspapers would do to us if they
ever got wind of the fact, that for one, tiny fraction of a second,
anyone of us here entertained the notion that a paranoidal idiot with
the IQ of an ape could make an atomic bomb out of kid's modeling clay?
"They'd crucify us, that's what they'd do!"
At 8:30 that night, Thaddeus Funston, swathed in an Army officer's
greatcoat that concealed the strait jacket binding him and with an
officer's cap jammed far down over his face, was hustled out of a small
side door of the hospital and into a waiting staff car. A few minutes
later, the car pulled into the flying field at the nearby community and
drove directly to the military transport plane that stood at the end of
the runway with propellers turning.
Two military policemen and a brace of staff psychiatrists sworn to
secrecy under the National Atomic Secrets Act, bundled Thaddeus aboard
the plane. They plopped him into a seat directly in front of Miss
Abercrombie and with a roar, the plane raced down the runway and into
the night skies.
The plane landed the next morning at the AEC's atomic testing grounds in
the Nevada desert and two hours later, in a small hot, wooden shack
miles up the barren desert wastelands, a cluster of scientists and
military men huddled around a small wooden table.
There was nothing on the table but a bowl of water and a great lump of
modeling clay. While the psychiatrists were taking the strait jacket off
Thaddeus in the staff car outside, Colonel Thurgood spoke to the weary
Miss Abercrombie.
"Now you're positive this is just about the same amount and the same
kind of clay he used before?"
"I brought it along from the same batch we had in the store room at the
hospital," she replied, "and it's the same amount."
Thurgood signaled to the doctors and they entered the shack with
Thaddeus Funston between them. The colonel nudged Miss Abercrombie.
She smiled at Funston.
"Now isn't this nice, Mr. Funston," she said. "These nice men have
brought us way out here just to see you make another atom bomb like the
one you made for me yesterday."
A flicker of interest lightened Thaddeus' face. He looked around the
shack and then spotted the clay on the table. Without hesitation, he
walked to the table and sat down. His fingers began working the damp
clay, making first the hollow, half-round shell while the nation's top
atomic scientists watched in fascination.
His busy fingers flew through the clay, shaping odd, flat bits and clay
parts that were dropped almost aimlessly into the open hemisphere in
front of him.
Miss Abercrombie stood at his shoulder as Thaddeus hunched over the
table just as he had done the previous day. From time to time she
glanced at her watch. The maze of clay strips grew and as Funston
finished shaping the other half hemisphere of clay, she broke the tense
silence.
"Time to go back now, Mr. Funston. You can work some more tomorrow." She
looked at the men and nodded her head.
The two psychiatrists went to Thaddeus' side as he put the upper lid of
clay carefully in place. Funston stood up and the doctors escorted him
from the shack.
There was a moment of hushed silence and then pandemonium burst. The
experts converged on the clay ball, instruments blossoming from nowhere
and cameras clicking.
For two hours they studied and gently probed the mass of child's clay
and photographed it from every angle.
Then they left for the concrete observatory bunker, several miles down
range where Thaddeus and the psychiatrists waited inside a ring of
stony-faced military policemen.
"I told you this whole thing was asinine," Thurgood snarled as the
scientific teams trooped into the bunker.
Thaddeus Funston stared out over the heads of the MPs through the open
door, looking uprange over the heat-shimmering desert. He gave a sudden
cry, shut his eyes and clapped his hands over his face.
A brilliance a hundred times brighter than the glaring Nevada sun lit
the dim interior of the bunker and the pneumatically-operated door
slammed shut just before the wave of the blast hit the structure.
Six hours and a jet plane trip later, Thaddeus, once again in his strait
jacket, sat between his armed escorts in a small room in the Pentagon.
Through the window he could see the hurried bustle of traffic over the
Potomac and beyond, the domed roof of the Capitol.
In the conference room next door, the joint chiefs of staff were
closeted with a gray-faced and bone-weary Colonel Thurgood and his
baker's dozen of AEC brains. Scraps of the hot and scornful talk drifted
across a half-opened transom into the room where Thaddeus Funston sat in
a neatly-tied bundle.
In the conference room, a red-faced, four-star general cast a chilling
glance at the rumpled figure of Colonel Thurgood.
"I've listened to some silly stories in my life, colonel," the general
said coldly, "but this takes the cake. You come in here with an insane
asylum inmate in a strait jacket and you have the colossal gall to sit
there and tell me that this poor soul has made not one, but two atomic
devices out of modeling clay and then has detonated them."
The general paused.
"Why don't you just tell me, colonel, that he can also make spaceships
out of sponge rubber?" the general added bitingly.
In the next room, Thaddeus Funston stared out over the sweeping panorama
of the Washington landscape. He stared hard.
In the distance, a white cloud began billowing up from the base of the
Washington Monument, and with an ear-shattering, glass-splintering roar,
the great shaft rose majestically from its base and vanished into space
on a tail of flame.
THE END | [
"He needed the finger paints but Mr. Lieberman had taken those",
"Miss Abercrombie had taken away the other parts that would have made it work",
"It was only made of clay and nothing else",
"It was the wrong kind of clay to build an explosive device from"
] | 2 |
23588_CJYHQDJP_2 | What likely happens to Thaddeus after the story ends? | Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science Fiction November 1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
A FILBERT IS A NUT
BY RICK RAPHAEL
That the gentleman in question was a nut was beyond question. He was an institutionalized
psychotic. He was nutty enough to think he could make an atom bomb out of modeling clay!
Illustrated by Freas
Miss Abercrombie, the manual therapist patted the old man on the
shoulder. "You're doing just fine, Mr. Lieberman. Show it to me when you
have finished."
The oldster in the stained convalescent suit gave her a quick, shy smile
and went back to his aimless smearing in the finger paints.
Miss Abercrombie smoothed her smock down over trim hips and surveyed the
other patients working at the long tables in the hospital's arts and
crafts shop. Two muscular and bored attendants in spotless whites,
lounged beside the locked door and chatted idly about the Dodgers'
prospects for the pennant.
Through the barred windows of the workshop, rolling green hills were
seen, their tree-studded flanks making a pleasant setting for the mental
institution. The crafts building was a good mile away from the main
buildings of the hospital and the hills blocked the view of the austere
complex of buildings that housed the main wards.
The therapist strolled down the line of tables, pausing to give a word
of advice here, and a suggestion there.
She stopped behind a frowning, intense patient, rapidly shaping blobs of
clay into odd-sized strips and forms. As he finished each piece, he
carefully placed it into a hollow shell hemisphere of clay.
"And what are we making today, Mr. Funston?" Miss Abercrombie asked.
The flying fingers continued to whip out the bits of shaped clay as the
patient ignored the question. He hunched closer to his table as if to
draw away from the woman.
"We mustn't be antisocial, Mr. Funston," Miss Abercrombie said lightly,
but firmly. "You've been coming along famously and you must remember to
answer when someone talks to you. Now what are you making? It looks very
complicated." She stared professionally at the maze of clay parts.
Thaddeus Funston continued to mold the clay bits and put them in place.
Without looking up from his bench he muttered a reply.
"Atom bomb."
A puzzled look crossed the therapist's face. "Pardon me, Mr. Funston. I
thought you said an 'atom bomb.'"
"Did," Funston murmured.
Safely behind the patient's back, Miss Abercrombie smiled ever so
slightly. "Why that's very good, Mr. Funston. That shows real creative
thought. I'm very pleased."
She patted him on the shoulder and moved down the line of patients.
A few minutes later, one of the attendants glanced at his watch, stood
up and stretched.
"All right, fellows," he called out, "time to go back. Put up your
things."
There was a rustle of paint boxes and papers being shuffled and chairs
being moved back. A tall, blond patient with a flowing mustache, put one
more dab of paint on his canvas and stood back to survey the meaningless
smears. He sighed happily and laid down his palette.
At the clay table, Funston feverishly fabricated the last odd-shaped bit
of clay and slapped it into place. With a furtive glance around him, he
clapped the other half of the clay sphere over the filled hemisphere and
then stood up. The patients lined up at the door, waiting for the walk
back across the green hills to the main hospital. The attendants made a
quick count and then unlocked the door. The group shuffled out into the
warm, afternoon sunlight and the door closed behind them.
Miss Abercrombie gazed around the cluttered room and picked up her chart
book of patient progress. Moving slowly down the line of benches, she
made short, precise notes on the day's work accomplished by each
patient.
At the clay table, she carefully lifted the top half of the clay ball
and stared thoughtfully at the jumbled maze of clay strips laced through
the lower hemisphere. She placed the lid back in place and jotted
lengthily in her chart book.
When she had completed her rounds, she slipped out of the smock, tucked
the chart book under her arm and left the crafts building for the day.
The late afternoon sun felt warm and comfortable as she walked the mile
to the main administration building where her car was parked.
As she drove out of the hospital grounds, Thaddeus Funston stood at the
barred window of his locked ward and stared vacantly over the hills
towards the craft shop. He stood there unmoving until a ward attendant
came and took his arm an hour later to lead him off to the patients'
mess hall.
The sun set, darkness fell over the stilled hospital grounds and the
ward lights winked out at nine o'clock, leaving just a single light
burning in each ward office. A quiet wind sighed over the still-warm
hills.
At 3:01 a.m., Thaddeus Funston stirred in his sleep and awakened. He sat
up in bed and looked around the dark ward. The quiet breathing and
occasional snores of thirty other sleeping patients filled the room.
Funston turned to the window and stared out across the black hills that
sheltered the deserted crafts building.
He gave a quick cry, shut his eyes and clapped his hands over his face.
The brilliance of a hundred suns glared in the night and threw stark
shadows on the walls of the suddenly-illuminated ward.
An instant later, the shattering roar and blast of the explosion struck
the hospital buildings in a wave of force and the bursting crash of a
thousand windows was lost in the fury of the explosion and the wild
screams of the frightened and demented patients.
It was over in an instant, and a stunned moment later, recessed ceiling
lights began flashing on throughout the big institution.
Beyond the again-silent hills, a great pillar of smoke, topped by a
small mushroom-shaped cloud, rose above the gaping hole that had been
the arts and crafts building.
Thaddeus Funston took his hands from his face and lay back in his bed
with a small, secret smile on his lips. Attendants and nurses scurried
through the hospital, seeing how many had been injured in the
explosion.
None had. The hills had absorbed most of the shock and apart from a
welter of broken glass, the damage had been surprisingly slight.
The roar and flash of the explosion had lighted and rocked the
surrounding countryside. Soon firemen and civil defense disaster units
from a half-dozen neighboring communities had gathered at the
still-smoking hole that marked the site of the vanished crafts building.
Within fifteen minutes, the disaster-trained crews had detected heavy
radiation emanating from the crater and there was a scurry of men and
equipment back to a safe distance, a few hundred yards away.
At 5:30 a.m., a plane landed at a nearby airfield and a platoon of
Atomic Energy Commission experts, military intelligence men, four FBI
agents and an Army full colonel disembarked.
At 5:45 a.m. a cordon was thrown around both the hospital and the blast
crater.
In Ward 4-C, Thaddeus Funston slept peacefully and happily.
"It's impossible and unbelievable," Colonel Thomas Thurgood said for the
fifteenth time, later that morning, as he looked around the group of
experts gathered in the tent erected on the hill overlooking the crater.
"How can an atom bomb go off in a nut house?"
"It apparently was a very small bomb, colonel," one of the haggard AEC
men offered timidly. "Not over three kilotons."
"I don't care if it was the size of a peanut," Thurgood screamed. "How
did it get here?"
A military intelligence agent spoke up. "If we knew, sir, we wouldn't be
standing around here. We don't know, but the fact remains that it WAS an
atomic explosion."
Thurgood turned wearily to the small, white-haired man at his side.
"Let's go over it once more, Dr. Crane. Are you sure you knew everything
that was in that building?" Thurgood swept his hand in the general
direction of the blast crater.
"Colonel, I've told you a dozen times," the hospital administrator said
with exasperation, "this was our manual therapy room. We gave our
patients art work. It was a means of getting out of their systems,
through the use of their hands, some of the frustrations and problems
that led them to this hospital. They worked with oil and water paints
and clay. If you can make an atomic bomb from vermillion pigments, then
Madame Curie was a misguided scrubwoman."
"All I know is that you say this was a crafts building. O.K. So it was,"
Thurgood sighed. "I also know that an atomic explosion at 3:02 this
morning blew it to hell and gone.
"And I've got to find out how it happened."
Thurgood slumped into a field chair and gazed tiredly up at the little
doctor.
"Where's that girl you said was in charge of this place?"
"We've already called for Miss Abercrombie and she's on her way here
now," the doctor snapped.
Outside the tent, a small army of military men and AEC technicians moved
around the perimeter of the crater, scintillators in hand, examining
every tiny scrap that might have been a part of the building at one
time.
A jeep raced down the road from the hospital and drew up in front of the
tent. An armed MP helped Miss Abercrombie from the vehicle.
She walked to the edge of the hill and looked down with a stunned
expression.
"He did make an atom bomb," she cried.
Colonel Thurgood, who had snapped from his chair at her words, leaped
forward to catch her as she collapsed in a faint.
At 4:00 p.m., the argument was still raging in the long, narrow staff
room of the hospital administration building.
Colonel Thurgood, looking more like a patient every minute, sat on the
edge of his chair at the head of a long table and pounded with his fist
on the wooden surface, making Miss Abercrombie's chart book bounce with
every beat.
"It's ridiculous," Thurgood roared. "We'll all be the laughingstocks of
the world if this ever gets out. An atomic bomb made out of clay. You
are all nuts. You're in the right place, but count me out."
At his left, Miss Abercrombie cringed deeper into her chair at the
broadside. Down both sides of the long table, psychiatrists, physicists,
strategists and radiologists sat in various stages of nerve-shattered
weariness.
"Miss Abercrombie," one of the physicists spoke up gently, "you say that
after the patients had departed the building, you looked again at
Funston's work?"
The therapist nodded unhappily.
"And you say that, to the best of your knowledge," the physicist
continued, "there was nothing inside the ball but other pieces of clay."
"I'm positive that's all there was in it," Miss Abercrombie cried.
There was a renewed buzz of conversation at the table and the senior AEC
man present got heads together with the senior intelligence man. They
conferred briefly and then the intelligence officer spoke.
"That seems to settle it, colonel. We've got to give this Funston
another chance to repeat his bomb. But this time under our supervision."
Thurgood leaped to his feet, his face purpling.
"Are you crazy?" he screamed. "You want to get us all thrown into this
filbert factory? Do you know what the newspapers would do to us if they
ever got wind of the fact, that for one, tiny fraction of a second,
anyone of us here entertained the notion that a paranoidal idiot with
the IQ of an ape could make an atomic bomb out of kid's modeling clay?
"They'd crucify us, that's what they'd do!"
At 8:30 that night, Thaddeus Funston, swathed in an Army officer's
greatcoat that concealed the strait jacket binding him and with an
officer's cap jammed far down over his face, was hustled out of a small
side door of the hospital and into a waiting staff car. A few minutes
later, the car pulled into the flying field at the nearby community and
drove directly to the military transport plane that stood at the end of
the runway with propellers turning.
Two military policemen and a brace of staff psychiatrists sworn to
secrecy under the National Atomic Secrets Act, bundled Thaddeus aboard
the plane. They plopped him into a seat directly in front of Miss
Abercrombie and with a roar, the plane raced down the runway and into
the night skies.
The plane landed the next morning at the AEC's atomic testing grounds in
the Nevada desert and two hours later, in a small hot, wooden shack
miles up the barren desert wastelands, a cluster of scientists and
military men huddled around a small wooden table.
There was nothing on the table but a bowl of water and a great lump of
modeling clay. While the psychiatrists were taking the strait jacket off
Thaddeus in the staff car outside, Colonel Thurgood spoke to the weary
Miss Abercrombie.
"Now you're positive this is just about the same amount and the same
kind of clay he used before?"
"I brought it along from the same batch we had in the store room at the
hospital," she replied, "and it's the same amount."
Thurgood signaled to the doctors and they entered the shack with
Thaddeus Funston between them. The colonel nudged Miss Abercrombie.
She smiled at Funston.
"Now isn't this nice, Mr. Funston," she said. "These nice men have
brought us way out here just to see you make another atom bomb like the
one you made for me yesterday."
A flicker of interest lightened Thaddeus' face. He looked around the
shack and then spotted the clay on the table. Without hesitation, he
walked to the table and sat down. His fingers began working the damp
clay, making first the hollow, half-round shell while the nation's top
atomic scientists watched in fascination.
His busy fingers flew through the clay, shaping odd, flat bits and clay
parts that were dropped almost aimlessly into the open hemisphere in
front of him.
Miss Abercrombie stood at his shoulder as Thaddeus hunched over the
table just as he had done the previous day. From time to time she
glanced at her watch. The maze of clay strips grew and as Funston
finished shaping the other half hemisphere of clay, she broke the tense
silence.
"Time to go back now, Mr. Funston. You can work some more tomorrow." She
looked at the men and nodded her head.
The two psychiatrists went to Thaddeus' side as he put the upper lid of
clay carefully in place. Funston stood up and the doctors escorted him
from the shack.
There was a moment of hushed silence and then pandemonium burst. The
experts converged on the clay ball, instruments blossoming from nowhere
and cameras clicking.
For two hours they studied and gently probed the mass of child's clay
and photographed it from every angle.
Then they left for the concrete observatory bunker, several miles down
range where Thaddeus and the psychiatrists waited inside a ring of
stony-faced military policemen.
"I told you this whole thing was asinine," Thurgood snarled as the
scientific teams trooped into the bunker.
Thaddeus Funston stared out over the heads of the MPs through the open
door, looking uprange over the heat-shimmering desert. He gave a sudden
cry, shut his eyes and clapped his hands over his face.
A brilliance a hundred times brighter than the glaring Nevada sun lit
the dim interior of the bunker and the pneumatically-operated door
slammed shut just before the wave of the blast hit the structure.
Six hours and a jet plane trip later, Thaddeus, once again in his strait
jacket, sat between his armed escorts in a small room in the Pentagon.
Through the window he could see the hurried bustle of traffic over the
Potomac and beyond, the domed roof of the Capitol.
In the conference room next door, the joint chiefs of staff were
closeted with a gray-faced and bone-weary Colonel Thurgood and his
baker's dozen of AEC brains. Scraps of the hot and scornful talk drifted
across a half-opened transom into the room where Thaddeus Funston sat in
a neatly-tied bundle.
In the conference room, a red-faced, four-star general cast a chilling
glance at the rumpled figure of Colonel Thurgood.
"I've listened to some silly stories in my life, colonel," the general
said coldly, "but this takes the cake. You come in here with an insane
asylum inmate in a strait jacket and you have the colossal gall to sit
there and tell me that this poor soul has made not one, but two atomic
devices out of modeling clay and then has detonated them."
The general paused.
"Why don't you just tell me, colonel, that he can also make spaceships
out of sponge rubber?" the general added bitingly.
In the next room, Thaddeus Funston stared out over the sweeping panorama
of the Washington landscape. He stared hard.
In the distance, a white cloud began billowing up from the base of the
Washington Monument, and with an ear-shattering, glass-splintering roar,
the great shaft rose majestically from its base and vanished into space
on a tail of flame.
THE END | [
"He uses the Washington Monument to travel to space",
"Various government agencies continue to study him to find out his secrets",
"He is locked in the Pentagon forever so he cannot create any more devices",
"He is sent back to the mental institution to continue his care"
] | 1 |
23588_CJYHQDJP_3 | What is the significance of the Washington Monument flying into space at the end of the story? | Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science Fiction November 1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
A FILBERT IS A NUT
BY RICK RAPHAEL
That the gentleman in question was a nut was beyond question. He was an institutionalized
psychotic. He was nutty enough to think he could make an atom bomb out of modeling clay!
Illustrated by Freas
Miss Abercrombie, the manual therapist patted the old man on the
shoulder. "You're doing just fine, Mr. Lieberman. Show it to me when you
have finished."
The oldster in the stained convalescent suit gave her a quick, shy smile
and went back to his aimless smearing in the finger paints.
Miss Abercrombie smoothed her smock down over trim hips and surveyed the
other patients working at the long tables in the hospital's arts and
crafts shop. Two muscular and bored attendants in spotless whites,
lounged beside the locked door and chatted idly about the Dodgers'
prospects for the pennant.
Through the barred windows of the workshop, rolling green hills were
seen, their tree-studded flanks making a pleasant setting for the mental
institution. The crafts building was a good mile away from the main
buildings of the hospital and the hills blocked the view of the austere
complex of buildings that housed the main wards.
The therapist strolled down the line of tables, pausing to give a word
of advice here, and a suggestion there.
She stopped behind a frowning, intense patient, rapidly shaping blobs of
clay into odd-sized strips and forms. As he finished each piece, he
carefully placed it into a hollow shell hemisphere of clay.
"And what are we making today, Mr. Funston?" Miss Abercrombie asked.
The flying fingers continued to whip out the bits of shaped clay as the
patient ignored the question. He hunched closer to his table as if to
draw away from the woman.
"We mustn't be antisocial, Mr. Funston," Miss Abercrombie said lightly,
but firmly. "You've been coming along famously and you must remember to
answer when someone talks to you. Now what are you making? It looks very
complicated." She stared professionally at the maze of clay parts.
Thaddeus Funston continued to mold the clay bits and put them in place.
Without looking up from his bench he muttered a reply.
"Atom bomb."
A puzzled look crossed the therapist's face. "Pardon me, Mr. Funston. I
thought you said an 'atom bomb.'"
"Did," Funston murmured.
Safely behind the patient's back, Miss Abercrombie smiled ever so
slightly. "Why that's very good, Mr. Funston. That shows real creative
thought. I'm very pleased."
She patted him on the shoulder and moved down the line of patients.
A few minutes later, one of the attendants glanced at his watch, stood
up and stretched.
"All right, fellows," he called out, "time to go back. Put up your
things."
There was a rustle of paint boxes and papers being shuffled and chairs
being moved back. A tall, blond patient with a flowing mustache, put one
more dab of paint on his canvas and stood back to survey the meaningless
smears. He sighed happily and laid down his palette.
At the clay table, Funston feverishly fabricated the last odd-shaped bit
of clay and slapped it into place. With a furtive glance around him, he
clapped the other half of the clay sphere over the filled hemisphere and
then stood up. The patients lined up at the door, waiting for the walk
back across the green hills to the main hospital. The attendants made a
quick count and then unlocked the door. The group shuffled out into the
warm, afternoon sunlight and the door closed behind them.
Miss Abercrombie gazed around the cluttered room and picked up her chart
book of patient progress. Moving slowly down the line of benches, she
made short, precise notes on the day's work accomplished by each
patient.
At the clay table, she carefully lifted the top half of the clay ball
and stared thoughtfully at the jumbled maze of clay strips laced through
the lower hemisphere. She placed the lid back in place and jotted
lengthily in her chart book.
When she had completed her rounds, she slipped out of the smock, tucked
the chart book under her arm and left the crafts building for the day.
The late afternoon sun felt warm and comfortable as she walked the mile
to the main administration building where her car was parked.
As she drove out of the hospital grounds, Thaddeus Funston stood at the
barred window of his locked ward and stared vacantly over the hills
towards the craft shop. He stood there unmoving until a ward attendant
came and took his arm an hour later to lead him off to the patients'
mess hall.
The sun set, darkness fell over the stilled hospital grounds and the
ward lights winked out at nine o'clock, leaving just a single light
burning in each ward office. A quiet wind sighed over the still-warm
hills.
At 3:01 a.m., Thaddeus Funston stirred in his sleep and awakened. He sat
up in bed and looked around the dark ward. The quiet breathing and
occasional snores of thirty other sleeping patients filled the room.
Funston turned to the window and stared out across the black hills that
sheltered the deserted crafts building.
He gave a quick cry, shut his eyes and clapped his hands over his face.
The brilliance of a hundred suns glared in the night and threw stark
shadows on the walls of the suddenly-illuminated ward.
An instant later, the shattering roar and blast of the explosion struck
the hospital buildings in a wave of force and the bursting crash of a
thousand windows was lost in the fury of the explosion and the wild
screams of the frightened and demented patients.
It was over in an instant, and a stunned moment later, recessed ceiling
lights began flashing on throughout the big institution.
Beyond the again-silent hills, a great pillar of smoke, topped by a
small mushroom-shaped cloud, rose above the gaping hole that had been
the arts and crafts building.
Thaddeus Funston took his hands from his face and lay back in his bed
with a small, secret smile on his lips. Attendants and nurses scurried
through the hospital, seeing how many had been injured in the
explosion.
None had. The hills had absorbed most of the shock and apart from a
welter of broken glass, the damage had been surprisingly slight.
The roar and flash of the explosion had lighted and rocked the
surrounding countryside. Soon firemen and civil defense disaster units
from a half-dozen neighboring communities had gathered at the
still-smoking hole that marked the site of the vanished crafts building.
Within fifteen minutes, the disaster-trained crews had detected heavy
radiation emanating from the crater and there was a scurry of men and
equipment back to a safe distance, a few hundred yards away.
At 5:30 a.m., a plane landed at a nearby airfield and a platoon of
Atomic Energy Commission experts, military intelligence men, four FBI
agents and an Army full colonel disembarked.
At 5:45 a.m. a cordon was thrown around both the hospital and the blast
crater.
In Ward 4-C, Thaddeus Funston slept peacefully and happily.
"It's impossible and unbelievable," Colonel Thomas Thurgood said for the
fifteenth time, later that morning, as he looked around the group of
experts gathered in the tent erected on the hill overlooking the crater.
"How can an atom bomb go off in a nut house?"
"It apparently was a very small bomb, colonel," one of the haggard AEC
men offered timidly. "Not over three kilotons."
"I don't care if it was the size of a peanut," Thurgood screamed. "How
did it get here?"
A military intelligence agent spoke up. "If we knew, sir, we wouldn't be
standing around here. We don't know, but the fact remains that it WAS an
atomic explosion."
Thurgood turned wearily to the small, white-haired man at his side.
"Let's go over it once more, Dr. Crane. Are you sure you knew everything
that was in that building?" Thurgood swept his hand in the general
direction of the blast crater.
"Colonel, I've told you a dozen times," the hospital administrator said
with exasperation, "this was our manual therapy room. We gave our
patients art work. It was a means of getting out of their systems,
through the use of their hands, some of the frustrations and problems
that led them to this hospital. They worked with oil and water paints
and clay. If you can make an atomic bomb from vermillion pigments, then
Madame Curie was a misguided scrubwoman."
"All I know is that you say this was a crafts building. O.K. So it was,"
Thurgood sighed. "I also know that an atomic explosion at 3:02 this
morning blew it to hell and gone.
"And I've got to find out how it happened."
Thurgood slumped into a field chair and gazed tiredly up at the little
doctor.
"Where's that girl you said was in charge of this place?"
"We've already called for Miss Abercrombie and she's on her way here
now," the doctor snapped.
Outside the tent, a small army of military men and AEC technicians moved
around the perimeter of the crater, scintillators in hand, examining
every tiny scrap that might have been a part of the building at one
time.
A jeep raced down the road from the hospital and drew up in front of the
tent. An armed MP helped Miss Abercrombie from the vehicle.
She walked to the edge of the hill and looked down with a stunned
expression.
"He did make an atom bomb," she cried.
Colonel Thurgood, who had snapped from his chair at her words, leaped
forward to catch her as she collapsed in a faint.
At 4:00 p.m., the argument was still raging in the long, narrow staff
room of the hospital administration building.
Colonel Thurgood, looking more like a patient every minute, sat on the
edge of his chair at the head of a long table and pounded with his fist
on the wooden surface, making Miss Abercrombie's chart book bounce with
every beat.
"It's ridiculous," Thurgood roared. "We'll all be the laughingstocks of
the world if this ever gets out. An atomic bomb made out of clay. You
are all nuts. You're in the right place, but count me out."
At his left, Miss Abercrombie cringed deeper into her chair at the
broadside. Down both sides of the long table, psychiatrists, physicists,
strategists and radiologists sat in various stages of nerve-shattered
weariness.
"Miss Abercrombie," one of the physicists spoke up gently, "you say that
after the patients had departed the building, you looked again at
Funston's work?"
The therapist nodded unhappily.
"And you say that, to the best of your knowledge," the physicist
continued, "there was nothing inside the ball but other pieces of clay."
"I'm positive that's all there was in it," Miss Abercrombie cried.
There was a renewed buzz of conversation at the table and the senior AEC
man present got heads together with the senior intelligence man. They
conferred briefly and then the intelligence officer spoke.
"That seems to settle it, colonel. We've got to give this Funston
another chance to repeat his bomb. But this time under our supervision."
Thurgood leaped to his feet, his face purpling.
"Are you crazy?" he screamed. "You want to get us all thrown into this
filbert factory? Do you know what the newspapers would do to us if they
ever got wind of the fact, that for one, tiny fraction of a second,
anyone of us here entertained the notion that a paranoidal idiot with
the IQ of an ape could make an atomic bomb out of kid's modeling clay?
"They'd crucify us, that's what they'd do!"
At 8:30 that night, Thaddeus Funston, swathed in an Army officer's
greatcoat that concealed the strait jacket binding him and with an
officer's cap jammed far down over his face, was hustled out of a small
side door of the hospital and into a waiting staff car. A few minutes
later, the car pulled into the flying field at the nearby community and
drove directly to the military transport plane that stood at the end of
the runway with propellers turning.
Two military policemen and a brace of staff psychiatrists sworn to
secrecy under the National Atomic Secrets Act, bundled Thaddeus aboard
the plane. They plopped him into a seat directly in front of Miss
Abercrombie and with a roar, the plane raced down the runway and into
the night skies.
The plane landed the next morning at the AEC's atomic testing grounds in
the Nevada desert and two hours later, in a small hot, wooden shack
miles up the barren desert wastelands, a cluster of scientists and
military men huddled around a small wooden table.
There was nothing on the table but a bowl of water and a great lump of
modeling clay. While the psychiatrists were taking the strait jacket off
Thaddeus in the staff car outside, Colonel Thurgood spoke to the weary
Miss Abercrombie.
"Now you're positive this is just about the same amount and the same
kind of clay he used before?"
"I brought it along from the same batch we had in the store room at the
hospital," she replied, "and it's the same amount."
Thurgood signaled to the doctors and they entered the shack with
Thaddeus Funston between them. The colonel nudged Miss Abercrombie.
She smiled at Funston.
"Now isn't this nice, Mr. Funston," she said. "These nice men have
brought us way out here just to see you make another atom bomb like the
one you made for me yesterday."
A flicker of interest lightened Thaddeus' face. He looked around the
shack and then spotted the clay on the table. Without hesitation, he
walked to the table and sat down. His fingers began working the damp
clay, making first the hollow, half-round shell while the nation's top
atomic scientists watched in fascination.
His busy fingers flew through the clay, shaping odd, flat bits and clay
parts that were dropped almost aimlessly into the open hemisphere in
front of him.
Miss Abercrombie stood at his shoulder as Thaddeus hunched over the
table just as he had done the previous day. From time to time she
glanced at her watch. The maze of clay strips grew and as Funston
finished shaping the other half hemisphere of clay, she broke the tense
silence.
"Time to go back now, Mr. Funston. You can work some more tomorrow." She
looked at the men and nodded her head.
The two psychiatrists went to Thaddeus' side as he put the upper lid of
clay carefully in place. Funston stood up and the doctors escorted him
from the shack.
There was a moment of hushed silence and then pandemonium burst. The
experts converged on the clay ball, instruments blossoming from nowhere
and cameras clicking.
For two hours they studied and gently probed the mass of child's clay
and photographed it from every angle.
Then they left for the concrete observatory bunker, several miles down
range where Thaddeus and the psychiatrists waited inside a ring of
stony-faced military policemen.
"I told you this whole thing was asinine," Thurgood snarled as the
scientific teams trooped into the bunker.
Thaddeus Funston stared out over the heads of the MPs through the open
door, looking uprange over the heat-shimmering desert. He gave a sudden
cry, shut his eyes and clapped his hands over his face.
A brilliance a hundred times brighter than the glaring Nevada sun lit
the dim interior of the bunker and the pneumatically-operated door
slammed shut just before the wave of the blast hit the structure.
Six hours and a jet plane trip later, Thaddeus, once again in his strait
jacket, sat between his armed escorts in a small room in the Pentagon.
Through the window he could see the hurried bustle of traffic over the
Potomac and beyond, the domed roof of the Capitol.
In the conference room next door, the joint chiefs of staff were
closeted with a gray-faced and bone-weary Colonel Thurgood and his
baker's dozen of AEC brains. Scraps of the hot and scornful talk drifted
across a half-opened transom into the room where Thaddeus Funston sat in
a neatly-tied bundle.
In the conference room, a red-faced, four-star general cast a chilling
glance at the rumpled figure of Colonel Thurgood.
"I've listened to some silly stories in my life, colonel," the general
said coldly, "but this takes the cake. You come in here with an insane
asylum inmate in a strait jacket and you have the colossal gall to sit
there and tell me that this poor soul has made not one, but two atomic
devices out of modeling clay and then has detonated them."
The general paused.
"Why don't you just tell me, colonel, that he can also make spaceships
out of sponge rubber?" the general added bitingly.
In the next room, Thaddeus Funston stared out over the sweeping panorama
of the Washington landscape. He stared hard.
In the distance, a white cloud began billowing up from the base of the
Washington Monument, and with an ear-shattering, glass-splintering roar,
the great shaft rose majestically from its base and vanished into space
on a tail of flame.
THE END | [
"It shows that someone else has powers similar to Thaddeus",
"It shows the reader that it is certainly something about his gaze that causes these events",
"The government is able to confirm their suspicions that he is able to create different types of powerful reactions, not just bombs",
"It is a politically charged building which makes it a more severe issue to the men studying him"
] | 1 |
23588_CJYHQDJP_4 | What does the colonel seem to think about the bomb situation at the mental institution? | Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science Fiction November 1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
A FILBERT IS A NUT
BY RICK RAPHAEL
That the gentleman in question was a nut was beyond question. He was an institutionalized
psychotic. He was nutty enough to think he could make an atom bomb out of modeling clay!
Illustrated by Freas
Miss Abercrombie, the manual therapist patted the old man on the
shoulder. "You're doing just fine, Mr. Lieberman. Show it to me when you
have finished."
The oldster in the stained convalescent suit gave her a quick, shy smile
and went back to his aimless smearing in the finger paints.
Miss Abercrombie smoothed her smock down over trim hips and surveyed the
other patients working at the long tables in the hospital's arts and
crafts shop. Two muscular and bored attendants in spotless whites,
lounged beside the locked door and chatted idly about the Dodgers'
prospects for the pennant.
Through the barred windows of the workshop, rolling green hills were
seen, their tree-studded flanks making a pleasant setting for the mental
institution. The crafts building was a good mile away from the main
buildings of the hospital and the hills blocked the view of the austere
complex of buildings that housed the main wards.
The therapist strolled down the line of tables, pausing to give a word
of advice here, and a suggestion there.
She stopped behind a frowning, intense patient, rapidly shaping blobs of
clay into odd-sized strips and forms. As he finished each piece, he
carefully placed it into a hollow shell hemisphere of clay.
"And what are we making today, Mr. Funston?" Miss Abercrombie asked.
The flying fingers continued to whip out the bits of shaped clay as the
patient ignored the question. He hunched closer to his table as if to
draw away from the woman.
"We mustn't be antisocial, Mr. Funston," Miss Abercrombie said lightly,
but firmly. "You've been coming along famously and you must remember to
answer when someone talks to you. Now what are you making? It looks very
complicated." She stared professionally at the maze of clay parts.
Thaddeus Funston continued to mold the clay bits and put them in place.
Without looking up from his bench he muttered a reply.
"Atom bomb."
A puzzled look crossed the therapist's face. "Pardon me, Mr. Funston. I
thought you said an 'atom bomb.'"
"Did," Funston murmured.
Safely behind the patient's back, Miss Abercrombie smiled ever so
slightly. "Why that's very good, Mr. Funston. That shows real creative
thought. I'm very pleased."
She patted him on the shoulder and moved down the line of patients.
A few minutes later, one of the attendants glanced at his watch, stood
up and stretched.
"All right, fellows," he called out, "time to go back. Put up your
things."
There was a rustle of paint boxes and papers being shuffled and chairs
being moved back. A tall, blond patient with a flowing mustache, put one
more dab of paint on his canvas and stood back to survey the meaningless
smears. He sighed happily and laid down his palette.
At the clay table, Funston feverishly fabricated the last odd-shaped bit
of clay and slapped it into place. With a furtive glance around him, he
clapped the other half of the clay sphere over the filled hemisphere and
then stood up. The patients lined up at the door, waiting for the walk
back across the green hills to the main hospital. The attendants made a
quick count and then unlocked the door. The group shuffled out into the
warm, afternoon sunlight and the door closed behind them.
Miss Abercrombie gazed around the cluttered room and picked up her chart
book of patient progress. Moving slowly down the line of benches, she
made short, precise notes on the day's work accomplished by each
patient.
At the clay table, she carefully lifted the top half of the clay ball
and stared thoughtfully at the jumbled maze of clay strips laced through
the lower hemisphere. She placed the lid back in place and jotted
lengthily in her chart book.
When she had completed her rounds, she slipped out of the smock, tucked
the chart book under her arm and left the crafts building for the day.
The late afternoon sun felt warm and comfortable as she walked the mile
to the main administration building where her car was parked.
As she drove out of the hospital grounds, Thaddeus Funston stood at the
barred window of his locked ward and stared vacantly over the hills
towards the craft shop. He stood there unmoving until a ward attendant
came and took his arm an hour later to lead him off to the patients'
mess hall.
The sun set, darkness fell over the stilled hospital grounds and the
ward lights winked out at nine o'clock, leaving just a single light
burning in each ward office. A quiet wind sighed over the still-warm
hills.
At 3:01 a.m., Thaddeus Funston stirred in his sleep and awakened. He sat
up in bed and looked around the dark ward. The quiet breathing and
occasional snores of thirty other sleeping patients filled the room.
Funston turned to the window and stared out across the black hills that
sheltered the deserted crafts building.
He gave a quick cry, shut his eyes and clapped his hands over his face.
The brilliance of a hundred suns glared in the night and threw stark
shadows on the walls of the suddenly-illuminated ward.
An instant later, the shattering roar and blast of the explosion struck
the hospital buildings in a wave of force and the bursting crash of a
thousand windows was lost in the fury of the explosion and the wild
screams of the frightened and demented patients.
It was over in an instant, and a stunned moment later, recessed ceiling
lights began flashing on throughout the big institution.
Beyond the again-silent hills, a great pillar of smoke, topped by a
small mushroom-shaped cloud, rose above the gaping hole that had been
the arts and crafts building.
Thaddeus Funston took his hands from his face and lay back in his bed
with a small, secret smile on his lips. Attendants and nurses scurried
through the hospital, seeing how many had been injured in the
explosion.
None had. The hills had absorbed most of the shock and apart from a
welter of broken glass, the damage had been surprisingly slight.
The roar and flash of the explosion had lighted and rocked the
surrounding countryside. Soon firemen and civil defense disaster units
from a half-dozen neighboring communities had gathered at the
still-smoking hole that marked the site of the vanished crafts building.
Within fifteen minutes, the disaster-trained crews had detected heavy
radiation emanating from the crater and there was a scurry of men and
equipment back to a safe distance, a few hundred yards away.
At 5:30 a.m., a plane landed at a nearby airfield and a platoon of
Atomic Energy Commission experts, military intelligence men, four FBI
agents and an Army full colonel disembarked.
At 5:45 a.m. a cordon was thrown around both the hospital and the blast
crater.
In Ward 4-C, Thaddeus Funston slept peacefully and happily.
"It's impossible and unbelievable," Colonel Thomas Thurgood said for the
fifteenth time, later that morning, as he looked around the group of
experts gathered in the tent erected on the hill overlooking the crater.
"How can an atom bomb go off in a nut house?"
"It apparently was a very small bomb, colonel," one of the haggard AEC
men offered timidly. "Not over three kilotons."
"I don't care if it was the size of a peanut," Thurgood screamed. "How
did it get here?"
A military intelligence agent spoke up. "If we knew, sir, we wouldn't be
standing around here. We don't know, but the fact remains that it WAS an
atomic explosion."
Thurgood turned wearily to the small, white-haired man at his side.
"Let's go over it once more, Dr. Crane. Are you sure you knew everything
that was in that building?" Thurgood swept his hand in the general
direction of the blast crater.
"Colonel, I've told you a dozen times," the hospital administrator said
with exasperation, "this was our manual therapy room. We gave our
patients art work. It was a means of getting out of their systems,
through the use of their hands, some of the frustrations and problems
that led them to this hospital. They worked with oil and water paints
and clay. If you can make an atomic bomb from vermillion pigments, then
Madame Curie was a misguided scrubwoman."
"All I know is that you say this was a crafts building. O.K. So it was,"
Thurgood sighed. "I also know that an atomic explosion at 3:02 this
morning blew it to hell and gone.
"And I've got to find out how it happened."
Thurgood slumped into a field chair and gazed tiredly up at the little
doctor.
"Where's that girl you said was in charge of this place?"
"We've already called for Miss Abercrombie and she's on her way here
now," the doctor snapped.
Outside the tent, a small army of military men and AEC technicians moved
around the perimeter of the crater, scintillators in hand, examining
every tiny scrap that might have been a part of the building at one
time.
A jeep raced down the road from the hospital and drew up in front of the
tent. An armed MP helped Miss Abercrombie from the vehicle.
She walked to the edge of the hill and looked down with a stunned
expression.
"He did make an atom bomb," she cried.
Colonel Thurgood, who had snapped from his chair at her words, leaped
forward to catch her as she collapsed in a faint.
At 4:00 p.m., the argument was still raging in the long, narrow staff
room of the hospital administration building.
Colonel Thurgood, looking more like a patient every minute, sat on the
edge of his chair at the head of a long table and pounded with his fist
on the wooden surface, making Miss Abercrombie's chart book bounce with
every beat.
"It's ridiculous," Thurgood roared. "We'll all be the laughingstocks of
the world if this ever gets out. An atomic bomb made out of clay. You
are all nuts. You're in the right place, but count me out."
At his left, Miss Abercrombie cringed deeper into her chair at the
broadside. Down both sides of the long table, psychiatrists, physicists,
strategists and radiologists sat in various stages of nerve-shattered
weariness.
"Miss Abercrombie," one of the physicists spoke up gently, "you say that
after the patients had departed the building, you looked again at
Funston's work?"
The therapist nodded unhappily.
"And you say that, to the best of your knowledge," the physicist
continued, "there was nothing inside the ball but other pieces of clay."
"I'm positive that's all there was in it," Miss Abercrombie cried.
There was a renewed buzz of conversation at the table and the senior AEC
man present got heads together with the senior intelligence man. They
conferred briefly and then the intelligence officer spoke.
"That seems to settle it, colonel. We've got to give this Funston
another chance to repeat his bomb. But this time under our supervision."
Thurgood leaped to his feet, his face purpling.
"Are you crazy?" he screamed. "You want to get us all thrown into this
filbert factory? Do you know what the newspapers would do to us if they
ever got wind of the fact, that for one, tiny fraction of a second,
anyone of us here entertained the notion that a paranoidal idiot with
the IQ of an ape could make an atomic bomb out of kid's modeling clay?
"They'd crucify us, that's what they'd do!"
At 8:30 that night, Thaddeus Funston, swathed in an Army officer's
greatcoat that concealed the strait jacket binding him and with an
officer's cap jammed far down over his face, was hustled out of a small
side door of the hospital and into a waiting staff car. A few minutes
later, the car pulled into the flying field at the nearby community and
drove directly to the military transport plane that stood at the end of
the runway with propellers turning.
Two military policemen and a brace of staff psychiatrists sworn to
secrecy under the National Atomic Secrets Act, bundled Thaddeus aboard
the plane. They plopped him into a seat directly in front of Miss
Abercrombie and with a roar, the plane raced down the runway and into
the night skies.
The plane landed the next morning at the AEC's atomic testing grounds in
the Nevada desert and two hours later, in a small hot, wooden shack
miles up the barren desert wastelands, a cluster of scientists and
military men huddled around a small wooden table.
There was nothing on the table but a bowl of water and a great lump of
modeling clay. While the psychiatrists were taking the strait jacket off
Thaddeus in the staff car outside, Colonel Thurgood spoke to the weary
Miss Abercrombie.
"Now you're positive this is just about the same amount and the same
kind of clay he used before?"
"I brought it along from the same batch we had in the store room at the
hospital," she replied, "and it's the same amount."
Thurgood signaled to the doctors and they entered the shack with
Thaddeus Funston between them. The colonel nudged Miss Abercrombie.
She smiled at Funston.
"Now isn't this nice, Mr. Funston," she said. "These nice men have
brought us way out here just to see you make another atom bomb like the
one you made for me yesterday."
A flicker of interest lightened Thaddeus' face. He looked around the
shack and then spotted the clay on the table. Without hesitation, he
walked to the table and sat down. His fingers began working the damp
clay, making first the hollow, half-round shell while the nation's top
atomic scientists watched in fascination.
His busy fingers flew through the clay, shaping odd, flat bits and clay
parts that were dropped almost aimlessly into the open hemisphere in
front of him.
Miss Abercrombie stood at his shoulder as Thaddeus hunched over the
table just as he had done the previous day. From time to time she
glanced at her watch. The maze of clay strips grew and as Funston
finished shaping the other half hemisphere of clay, she broke the tense
silence.
"Time to go back now, Mr. Funston. You can work some more tomorrow." She
looked at the men and nodded her head.
The two psychiatrists went to Thaddeus' side as he put the upper lid of
clay carefully in place. Funston stood up and the doctors escorted him
from the shack.
There was a moment of hushed silence and then pandemonium burst. The
experts converged on the clay ball, instruments blossoming from nowhere
and cameras clicking.
For two hours they studied and gently probed the mass of child's clay
and photographed it from every angle.
Then they left for the concrete observatory bunker, several miles down
range where Thaddeus and the psychiatrists waited inside a ring of
stony-faced military policemen.
"I told you this whole thing was asinine," Thurgood snarled as the
scientific teams trooped into the bunker.
Thaddeus Funston stared out over the heads of the MPs through the open
door, looking uprange over the heat-shimmering desert. He gave a sudden
cry, shut his eyes and clapped his hands over his face.
A brilliance a hundred times brighter than the glaring Nevada sun lit
the dim interior of the bunker and the pneumatically-operated door
slammed shut just before the wave of the blast hit the structure.
Six hours and a jet plane trip later, Thaddeus, once again in his strait
jacket, sat between his armed escorts in a small room in the Pentagon.
Through the window he could see the hurried bustle of traffic over the
Potomac and beyond, the domed roof of the Capitol.
In the conference room next door, the joint chiefs of staff were
closeted with a gray-faced and bone-weary Colonel Thurgood and his
baker's dozen of AEC brains. Scraps of the hot and scornful talk drifted
across a half-opened transom into the room where Thaddeus Funston sat in
a neatly-tied bundle.
In the conference room, a red-faced, four-star general cast a chilling
glance at the rumpled figure of Colonel Thurgood.
"I've listened to some silly stories in my life, colonel," the general
said coldly, "but this takes the cake. You come in here with an insane
asylum inmate in a strait jacket and you have the colossal gall to sit
there and tell me that this poor soul has made not one, but two atomic
devices out of modeling clay and then has detonated them."
The general paused.
"Why don't you just tell me, colonel, that he can also make spaceships
out of sponge rubber?" the general added bitingly.
In the next room, Thaddeus Funston stared out over the sweeping panorama
of the Washington landscape. He stared hard.
In the distance, a white cloud began billowing up from the base of the
Washington Monument, and with an ear-shattering, glass-splintering roar,
the great shaft rose majestically from its base and vanished into space
on a tail of flame.
THE END | [
"He wants to let Thaddeus create more things to study them",
"He is worried about the perception if others hear about what's happening",
"He wants to keep the story away from the newspapers so that others cannot learn Thaddeus' secrets",
"It figures that this is where this is happening, so he's frustrated for yet another bomb case"
] | 1 |
23588_CJYHQDJP_5 | Which statement about the relationship between Thaddeus Funston and Miss Abercrombie is most true, based on the facts in the story? | Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science Fiction November 1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
A FILBERT IS A NUT
BY RICK RAPHAEL
That the gentleman in question was a nut was beyond question. He was an institutionalized
psychotic. He was nutty enough to think he could make an atom bomb out of modeling clay!
Illustrated by Freas
Miss Abercrombie, the manual therapist patted the old man on the
shoulder. "You're doing just fine, Mr. Lieberman. Show it to me when you
have finished."
The oldster in the stained convalescent suit gave her a quick, shy smile
and went back to his aimless smearing in the finger paints.
Miss Abercrombie smoothed her smock down over trim hips and surveyed the
other patients working at the long tables in the hospital's arts and
crafts shop. Two muscular and bored attendants in spotless whites,
lounged beside the locked door and chatted idly about the Dodgers'
prospects for the pennant.
Through the barred windows of the workshop, rolling green hills were
seen, their tree-studded flanks making a pleasant setting for the mental
institution. The crafts building was a good mile away from the main
buildings of the hospital and the hills blocked the view of the austere
complex of buildings that housed the main wards.
The therapist strolled down the line of tables, pausing to give a word
of advice here, and a suggestion there.
She stopped behind a frowning, intense patient, rapidly shaping blobs of
clay into odd-sized strips and forms. As he finished each piece, he
carefully placed it into a hollow shell hemisphere of clay.
"And what are we making today, Mr. Funston?" Miss Abercrombie asked.
The flying fingers continued to whip out the bits of shaped clay as the
patient ignored the question. He hunched closer to his table as if to
draw away from the woman.
"We mustn't be antisocial, Mr. Funston," Miss Abercrombie said lightly,
but firmly. "You've been coming along famously and you must remember to
answer when someone talks to you. Now what are you making? It looks very
complicated." She stared professionally at the maze of clay parts.
Thaddeus Funston continued to mold the clay bits and put them in place.
Without looking up from his bench he muttered a reply.
"Atom bomb."
A puzzled look crossed the therapist's face. "Pardon me, Mr. Funston. I
thought you said an 'atom bomb.'"
"Did," Funston murmured.
Safely behind the patient's back, Miss Abercrombie smiled ever so
slightly. "Why that's very good, Mr. Funston. That shows real creative
thought. I'm very pleased."
She patted him on the shoulder and moved down the line of patients.
A few minutes later, one of the attendants glanced at his watch, stood
up and stretched.
"All right, fellows," he called out, "time to go back. Put up your
things."
There was a rustle of paint boxes and papers being shuffled and chairs
being moved back. A tall, blond patient with a flowing mustache, put one
more dab of paint on his canvas and stood back to survey the meaningless
smears. He sighed happily and laid down his palette.
At the clay table, Funston feverishly fabricated the last odd-shaped bit
of clay and slapped it into place. With a furtive glance around him, he
clapped the other half of the clay sphere over the filled hemisphere and
then stood up. The patients lined up at the door, waiting for the walk
back across the green hills to the main hospital. The attendants made a
quick count and then unlocked the door. The group shuffled out into the
warm, afternoon sunlight and the door closed behind them.
Miss Abercrombie gazed around the cluttered room and picked up her chart
book of patient progress. Moving slowly down the line of benches, she
made short, precise notes on the day's work accomplished by each
patient.
At the clay table, she carefully lifted the top half of the clay ball
and stared thoughtfully at the jumbled maze of clay strips laced through
the lower hemisphere. She placed the lid back in place and jotted
lengthily in her chart book.
When she had completed her rounds, she slipped out of the smock, tucked
the chart book under her arm and left the crafts building for the day.
The late afternoon sun felt warm and comfortable as she walked the mile
to the main administration building where her car was parked.
As she drove out of the hospital grounds, Thaddeus Funston stood at the
barred window of his locked ward and stared vacantly over the hills
towards the craft shop. He stood there unmoving until a ward attendant
came and took his arm an hour later to lead him off to the patients'
mess hall.
The sun set, darkness fell over the stilled hospital grounds and the
ward lights winked out at nine o'clock, leaving just a single light
burning in each ward office. A quiet wind sighed over the still-warm
hills.
At 3:01 a.m., Thaddeus Funston stirred in his sleep and awakened. He sat
up in bed and looked around the dark ward. The quiet breathing and
occasional snores of thirty other sleeping patients filled the room.
Funston turned to the window and stared out across the black hills that
sheltered the deserted crafts building.
He gave a quick cry, shut his eyes and clapped his hands over his face.
The brilliance of a hundred suns glared in the night and threw stark
shadows on the walls of the suddenly-illuminated ward.
An instant later, the shattering roar and blast of the explosion struck
the hospital buildings in a wave of force and the bursting crash of a
thousand windows was lost in the fury of the explosion and the wild
screams of the frightened and demented patients.
It was over in an instant, and a stunned moment later, recessed ceiling
lights began flashing on throughout the big institution.
Beyond the again-silent hills, a great pillar of smoke, topped by a
small mushroom-shaped cloud, rose above the gaping hole that had been
the arts and crafts building.
Thaddeus Funston took his hands from his face and lay back in his bed
with a small, secret smile on his lips. Attendants and nurses scurried
through the hospital, seeing how many had been injured in the
explosion.
None had. The hills had absorbed most of the shock and apart from a
welter of broken glass, the damage had been surprisingly slight.
The roar and flash of the explosion had lighted and rocked the
surrounding countryside. Soon firemen and civil defense disaster units
from a half-dozen neighboring communities had gathered at the
still-smoking hole that marked the site of the vanished crafts building.
Within fifteen minutes, the disaster-trained crews had detected heavy
radiation emanating from the crater and there was a scurry of men and
equipment back to a safe distance, a few hundred yards away.
At 5:30 a.m., a plane landed at a nearby airfield and a platoon of
Atomic Energy Commission experts, military intelligence men, four FBI
agents and an Army full colonel disembarked.
At 5:45 a.m. a cordon was thrown around both the hospital and the blast
crater.
In Ward 4-C, Thaddeus Funston slept peacefully and happily.
"It's impossible and unbelievable," Colonel Thomas Thurgood said for the
fifteenth time, later that morning, as he looked around the group of
experts gathered in the tent erected on the hill overlooking the crater.
"How can an atom bomb go off in a nut house?"
"It apparently was a very small bomb, colonel," one of the haggard AEC
men offered timidly. "Not over three kilotons."
"I don't care if it was the size of a peanut," Thurgood screamed. "How
did it get here?"
A military intelligence agent spoke up. "If we knew, sir, we wouldn't be
standing around here. We don't know, but the fact remains that it WAS an
atomic explosion."
Thurgood turned wearily to the small, white-haired man at his side.
"Let's go over it once more, Dr. Crane. Are you sure you knew everything
that was in that building?" Thurgood swept his hand in the general
direction of the blast crater.
"Colonel, I've told you a dozen times," the hospital administrator said
with exasperation, "this was our manual therapy room. We gave our
patients art work. It was a means of getting out of their systems,
through the use of their hands, some of the frustrations and problems
that led them to this hospital. They worked with oil and water paints
and clay. If you can make an atomic bomb from vermillion pigments, then
Madame Curie was a misguided scrubwoman."
"All I know is that you say this was a crafts building. O.K. So it was,"
Thurgood sighed. "I also know that an atomic explosion at 3:02 this
morning blew it to hell and gone.
"And I've got to find out how it happened."
Thurgood slumped into a field chair and gazed tiredly up at the little
doctor.
"Where's that girl you said was in charge of this place?"
"We've already called for Miss Abercrombie and she's on her way here
now," the doctor snapped.
Outside the tent, a small army of military men and AEC technicians moved
around the perimeter of the crater, scintillators in hand, examining
every tiny scrap that might have been a part of the building at one
time.
A jeep raced down the road from the hospital and drew up in front of the
tent. An armed MP helped Miss Abercrombie from the vehicle.
She walked to the edge of the hill and looked down with a stunned
expression.
"He did make an atom bomb," she cried.
Colonel Thurgood, who had snapped from his chair at her words, leaped
forward to catch her as she collapsed in a faint.
At 4:00 p.m., the argument was still raging in the long, narrow staff
room of the hospital administration building.
Colonel Thurgood, looking more like a patient every minute, sat on the
edge of his chair at the head of a long table and pounded with his fist
on the wooden surface, making Miss Abercrombie's chart book bounce with
every beat.
"It's ridiculous," Thurgood roared. "We'll all be the laughingstocks of
the world if this ever gets out. An atomic bomb made out of clay. You
are all nuts. You're in the right place, but count me out."
At his left, Miss Abercrombie cringed deeper into her chair at the
broadside. Down both sides of the long table, psychiatrists, physicists,
strategists and radiologists sat in various stages of nerve-shattered
weariness.
"Miss Abercrombie," one of the physicists spoke up gently, "you say that
after the patients had departed the building, you looked again at
Funston's work?"
The therapist nodded unhappily.
"And you say that, to the best of your knowledge," the physicist
continued, "there was nothing inside the ball but other pieces of clay."
"I'm positive that's all there was in it," Miss Abercrombie cried.
There was a renewed buzz of conversation at the table and the senior AEC
man present got heads together with the senior intelligence man. They
conferred briefly and then the intelligence officer spoke.
"That seems to settle it, colonel. We've got to give this Funston
another chance to repeat his bomb. But this time under our supervision."
Thurgood leaped to his feet, his face purpling.
"Are you crazy?" he screamed. "You want to get us all thrown into this
filbert factory? Do you know what the newspapers would do to us if they
ever got wind of the fact, that for one, tiny fraction of a second,
anyone of us here entertained the notion that a paranoidal idiot with
the IQ of an ape could make an atomic bomb out of kid's modeling clay?
"They'd crucify us, that's what they'd do!"
At 8:30 that night, Thaddeus Funston, swathed in an Army officer's
greatcoat that concealed the strait jacket binding him and with an
officer's cap jammed far down over his face, was hustled out of a small
side door of the hospital and into a waiting staff car. A few minutes
later, the car pulled into the flying field at the nearby community and
drove directly to the military transport plane that stood at the end of
the runway with propellers turning.
Two military policemen and a brace of staff psychiatrists sworn to
secrecy under the National Atomic Secrets Act, bundled Thaddeus aboard
the plane. They plopped him into a seat directly in front of Miss
Abercrombie and with a roar, the plane raced down the runway and into
the night skies.
The plane landed the next morning at the AEC's atomic testing grounds in
the Nevada desert and two hours later, in a small hot, wooden shack
miles up the barren desert wastelands, a cluster of scientists and
military men huddled around a small wooden table.
There was nothing on the table but a bowl of water and a great lump of
modeling clay. While the psychiatrists were taking the strait jacket off
Thaddeus in the staff car outside, Colonel Thurgood spoke to the weary
Miss Abercrombie.
"Now you're positive this is just about the same amount and the same
kind of clay he used before?"
"I brought it along from the same batch we had in the store room at the
hospital," she replied, "and it's the same amount."
Thurgood signaled to the doctors and they entered the shack with
Thaddeus Funston between them. The colonel nudged Miss Abercrombie.
She smiled at Funston.
"Now isn't this nice, Mr. Funston," she said. "These nice men have
brought us way out here just to see you make another atom bomb like the
one you made for me yesterday."
A flicker of interest lightened Thaddeus' face. He looked around the
shack and then spotted the clay on the table. Without hesitation, he
walked to the table and sat down. His fingers began working the damp
clay, making first the hollow, half-round shell while the nation's top
atomic scientists watched in fascination.
His busy fingers flew through the clay, shaping odd, flat bits and clay
parts that were dropped almost aimlessly into the open hemisphere in
front of him.
Miss Abercrombie stood at his shoulder as Thaddeus hunched over the
table just as he had done the previous day. From time to time she
glanced at her watch. The maze of clay strips grew and as Funston
finished shaping the other half hemisphere of clay, she broke the tense
silence.
"Time to go back now, Mr. Funston. You can work some more tomorrow." She
looked at the men and nodded her head.
The two psychiatrists went to Thaddeus' side as he put the upper lid of
clay carefully in place. Funston stood up and the doctors escorted him
from the shack.
There was a moment of hushed silence and then pandemonium burst. The
experts converged on the clay ball, instruments blossoming from nowhere
and cameras clicking.
For two hours they studied and gently probed the mass of child's clay
and photographed it from every angle.
Then they left for the concrete observatory bunker, several miles down
range where Thaddeus and the psychiatrists waited inside a ring of
stony-faced military policemen.
"I told you this whole thing was asinine," Thurgood snarled as the
scientific teams trooped into the bunker.
Thaddeus Funston stared out over the heads of the MPs through the open
door, looking uprange over the heat-shimmering desert. He gave a sudden
cry, shut his eyes and clapped his hands over his face.
A brilliance a hundred times brighter than the glaring Nevada sun lit
the dim interior of the bunker and the pneumatically-operated door
slammed shut just before the wave of the blast hit the structure.
Six hours and a jet plane trip later, Thaddeus, once again in his strait
jacket, sat between his armed escorts in a small room in the Pentagon.
Through the window he could see the hurried bustle of traffic over the
Potomac and beyond, the domed roof of the Capitol.
In the conference room next door, the joint chiefs of staff were
closeted with a gray-faced and bone-weary Colonel Thurgood and his
baker's dozen of AEC brains. Scraps of the hot and scornful talk drifted
across a half-opened transom into the room where Thaddeus Funston sat in
a neatly-tied bundle.
In the conference room, a red-faced, four-star general cast a chilling
glance at the rumpled figure of Colonel Thurgood.
"I've listened to some silly stories in my life, colonel," the general
said coldly, "but this takes the cake. You come in here with an insane
asylum inmate in a strait jacket and you have the colossal gall to sit
there and tell me that this poor soul has made not one, but two atomic
devices out of modeling clay and then has detonated them."
The general paused.
"Why don't you just tell me, colonel, that he can also make spaceships
out of sponge rubber?" the general added bitingly.
In the next room, Thaddeus Funston stared out over the sweeping panorama
of the Washington landscape. He stared hard.
In the distance, a white cloud began billowing up from the base of the
Washington Monument, and with an ear-shattering, glass-splintering roar,
the great shaft rose majestically from its base and vanished into space
on a tail of flame.
THE END | [
"She encourages him to keep making progress over time as she supervises him in one area of his treatment",
"Thaddeus has long confided in Miss Abercrombie as his therapist and she is shocked that someone she trusted closely would cause so much damage",
"Miss Abercrombie has long considered Thaddeus a problem student of hers and is frustrated by his behavior",
"She tries to stifle his creative instincts and doesn't let him express himself the way he wants"
] | 0 |
23588_CJYHQDJP_6 | What kind of person is Miss Abercrombie? Choose the best option | Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science Fiction November 1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
A FILBERT IS A NUT
BY RICK RAPHAEL
That the gentleman in question was a nut was beyond question. He was an institutionalized
psychotic. He was nutty enough to think he could make an atom bomb out of modeling clay!
Illustrated by Freas
Miss Abercrombie, the manual therapist patted the old man on the
shoulder. "You're doing just fine, Mr. Lieberman. Show it to me when you
have finished."
The oldster in the stained convalescent suit gave her a quick, shy smile
and went back to his aimless smearing in the finger paints.
Miss Abercrombie smoothed her smock down over trim hips and surveyed the
other patients working at the long tables in the hospital's arts and
crafts shop. Two muscular and bored attendants in spotless whites,
lounged beside the locked door and chatted idly about the Dodgers'
prospects for the pennant.
Through the barred windows of the workshop, rolling green hills were
seen, their tree-studded flanks making a pleasant setting for the mental
institution. The crafts building was a good mile away from the main
buildings of the hospital and the hills blocked the view of the austere
complex of buildings that housed the main wards.
The therapist strolled down the line of tables, pausing to give a word
of advice here, and a suggestion there.
She stopped behind a frowning, intense patient, rapidly shaping blobs of
clay into odd-sized strips and forms. As he finished each piece, he
carefully placed it into a hollow shell hemisphere of clay.
"And what are we making today, Mr. Funston?" Miss Abercrombie asked.
The flying fingers continued to whip out the bits of shaped clay as the
patient ignored the question. He hunched closer to his table as if to
draw away from the woman.
"We mustn't be antisocial, Mr. Funston," Miss Abercrombie said lightly,
but firmly. "You've been coming along famously and you must remember to
answer when someone talks to you. Now what are you making? It looks very
complicated." She stared professionally at the maze of clay parts.
Thaddeus Funston continued to mold the clay bits and put them in place.
Without looking up from his bench he muttered a reply.
"Atom bomb."
A puzzled look crossed the therapist's face. "Pardon me, Mr. Funston. I
thought you said an 'atom bomb.'"
"Did," Funston murmured.
Safely behind the patient's back, Miss Abercrombie smiled ever so
slightly. "Why that's very good, Mr. Funston. That shows real creative
thought. I'm very pleased."
She patted him on the shoulder and moved down the line of patients.
A few minutes later, one of the attendants glanced at his watch, stood
up and stretched.
"All right, fellows," he called out, "time to go back. Put up your
things."
There was a rustle of paint boxes and papers being shuffled and chairs
being moved back. A tall, blond patient with a flowing mustache, put one
more dab of paint on his canvas and stood back to survey the meaningless
smears. He sighed happily and laid down his palette.
At the clay table, Funston feverishly fabricated the last odd-shaped bit
of clay and slapped it into place. With a furtive glance around him, he
clapped the other half of the clay sphere over the filled hemisphere and
then stood up. The patients lined up at the door, waiting for the walk
back across the green hills to the main hospital. The attendants made a
quick count and then unlocked the door. The group shuffled out into the
warm, afternoon sunlight and the door closed behind them.
Miss Abercrombie gazed around the cluttered room and picked up her chart
book of patient progress. Moving slowly down the line of benches, she
made short, precise notes on the day's work accomplished by each
patient.
At the clay table, she carefully lifted the top half of the clay ball
and stared thoughtfully at the jumbled maze of clay strips laced through
the lower hemisphere. She placed the lid back in place and jotted
lengthily in her chart book.
When she had completed her rounds, she slipped out of the smock, tucked
the chart book under her arm and left the crafts building for the day.
The late afternoon sun felt warm and comfortable as she walked the mile
to the main administration building where her car was parked.
As she drove out of the hospital grounds, Thaddeus Funston stood at the
barred window of his locked ward and stared vacantly over the hills
towards the craft shop. He stood there unmoving until a ward attendant
came and took his arm an hour later to lead him off to the patients'
mess hall.
The sun set, darkness fell over the stilled hospital grounds and the
ward lights winked out at nine o'clock, leaving just a single light
burning in each ward office. A quiet wind sighed over the still-warm
hills.
At 3:01 a.m., Thaddeus Funston stirred in his sleep and awakened. He sat
up in bed and looked around the dark ward. The quiet breathing and
occasional snores of thirty other sleeping patients filled the room.
Funston turned to the window and stared out across the black hills that
sheltered the deserted crafts building.
He gave a quick cry, shut his eyes and clapped his hands over his face.
The brilliance of a hundred suns glared in the night and threw stark
shadows on the walls of the suddenly-illuminated ward.
An instant later, the shattering roar and blast of the explosion struck
the hospital buildings in a wave of force and the bursting crash of a
thousand windows was lost in the fury of the explosion and the wild
screams of the frightened and demented patients.
It was over in an instant, and a stunned moment later, recessed ceiling
lights began flashing on throughout the big institution.
Beyond the again-silent hills, a great pillar of smoke, topped by a
small mushroom-shaped cloud, rose above the gaping hole that had been
the arts and crafts building.
Thaddeus Funston took his hands from his face and lay back in his bed
with a small, secret smile on his lips. Attendants and nurses scurried
through the hospital, seeing how many had been injured in the
explosion.
None had. The hills had absorbed most of the shock and apart from a
welter of broken glass, the damage had been surprisingly slight.
The roar and flash of the explosion had lighted and rocked the
surrounding countryside. Soon firemen and civil defense disaster units
from a half-dozen neighboring communities had gathered at the
still-smoking hole that marked the site of the vanished crafts building.
Within fifteen minutes, the disaster-trained crews had detected heavy
radiation emanating from the crater and there was a scurry of men and
equipment back to a safe distance, a few hundred yards away.
At 5:30 a.m., a plane landed at a nearby airfield and a platoon of
Atomic Energy Commission experts, military intelligence men, four FBI
agents and an Army full colonel disembarked.
At 5:45 a.m. a cordon was thrown around both the hospital and the blast
crater.
In Ward 4-C, Thaddeus Funston slept peacefully and happily.
"It's impossible and unbelievable," Colonel Thomas Thurgood said for the
fifteenth time, later that morning, as he looked around the group of
experts gathered in the tent erected on the hill overlooking the crater.
"How can an atom bomb go off in a nut house?"
"It apparently was a very small bomb, colonel," one of the haggard AEC
men offered timidly. "Not over three kilotons."
"I don't care if it was the size of a peanut," Thurgood screamed. "How
did it get here?"
A military intelligence agent spoke up. "If we knew, sir, we wouldn't be
standing around here. We don't know, but the fact remains that it WAS an
atomic explosion."
Thurgood turned wearily to the small, white-haired man at his side.
"Let's go over it once more, Dr. Crane. Are you sure you knew everything
that was in that building?" Thurgood swept his hand in the general
direction of the blast crater.
"Colonel, I've told you a dozen times," the hospital administrator said
with exasperation, "this was our manual therapy room. We gave our
patients art work. It was a means of getting out of their systems,
through the use of their hands, some of the frustrations and problems
that led them to this hospital. They worked with oil and water paints
and clay. If you can make an atomic bomb from vermillion pigments, then
Madame Curie was a misguided scrubwoman."
"All I know is that you say this was a crafts building. O.K. So it was,"
Thurgood sighed. "I also know that an atomic explosion at 3:02 this
morning blew it to hell and gone.
"And I've got to find out how it happened."
Thurgood slumped into a field chair and gazed tiredly up at the little
doctor.
"Where's that girl you said was in charge of this place?"
"We've already called for Miss Abercrombie and she's on her way here
now," the doctor snapped.
Outside the tent, a small army of military men and AEC technicians moved
around the perimeter of the crater, scintillators in hand, examining
every tiny scrap that might have been a part of the building at one
time.
A jeep raced down the road from the hospital and drew up in front of the
tent. An armed MP helped Miss Abercrombie from the vehicle.
She walked to the edge of the hill and looked down with a stunned
expression.
"He did make an atom bomb," she cried.
Colonel Thurgood, who had snapped from his chair at her words, leaped
forward to catch her as she collapsed in a faint.
At 4:00 p.m., the argument was still raging in the long, narrow staff
room of the hospital administration building.
Colonel Thurgood, looking more like a patient every minute, sat on the
edge of his chair at the head of a long table and pounded with his fist
on the wooden surface, making Miss Abercrombie's chart book bounce with
every beat.
"It's ridiculous," Thurgood roared. "We'll all be the laughingstocks of
the world if this ever gets out. An atomic bomb made out of clay. You
are all nuts. You're in the right place, but count me out."
At his left, Miss Abercrombie cringed deeper into her chair at the
broadside. Down both sides of the long table, psychiatrists, physicists,
strategists and radiologists sat in various stages of nerve-shattered
weariness.
"Miss Abercrombie," one of the physicists spoke up gently, "you say that
after the patients had departed the building, you looked again at
Funston's work?"
The therapist nodded unhappily.
"And you say that, to the best of your knowledge," the physicist
continued, "there was nothing inside the ball but other pieces of clay."
"I'm positive that's all there was in it," Miss Abercrombie cried.
There was a renewed buzz of conversation at the table and the senior AEC
man present got heads together with the senior intelligence man. They
conferred briefly and then the intelligence officer spoke.
"That seems to settle it, colonel. We've got to give this Funston
another chance to repeat his bomb. But this time under our supervision."
Thurgood leaped to his feet, his face purpling.
"Are you crazy?" he screamed. "You want to get us all thrown into this
filbert factory? Do you know what the newspapers would do to us if they
ever got wind of the fact, that for one, tiny fraction of a second,
anyone of us here entertained the notion that a paranoidal idiot with
the IQ of an ape could make an atomic bomb out of kid's modeling clay?
"They'd crucify us, that's what they'd do!"
At 8:30 that night, Thaddeus Funston, swathed in an Army officer's
greatcoat that concealed the strait jacket binding him and with an
officer's cap jammed far down over his face, was hustled out of a small
side door of the hospital and into a waiting staff car. A few minutes
later, the car pulled into the flying field at the nearby community and
drove directly to the military transport plane that stood at the end of
the runway with propellers turning.
Two military policemen and a brace of staff psychiatrists sworn to
secrecy under the National Atomic Secrets Act, bundled Thaddeus aboard
the plane. They plopped him into a seat directly in front of Miss
Abercrombie and with a roar, the plane raced down the runway and into
the night skies.
The plane landed the next morning at the AEC's atomic testing grounds in
the Nevada desert and two hours later, in a small hot, wooden shack
miles up the barren desert wastelands, a cluster of scientists and
military men huddled around a small wooden table.
There was nothing on the table but a bowl of water and a great lump of
modeling clay. While the psychiatrists were taking the strait jacket off
Thaddeus in the staff car outside, Colonel Thurgood spoke to the weary
Miss Abercrombie.
"Now you're positive this is just about the same amount and the same
kind of clay he used before?"
"I brought it along from the same batch we had in the store room at the
hospital," she replied, "and it's the same amount."
Thurgood signaled to the doctors and they entered the shack with
Thaddeus Funston between them. The colonel nudged Miss Abercrombie.
She smiled at Funston.
"Now isn't this nice, Mr. Funston," she said. "These nice men have
brought us way out here just to see you make another atom bomb like the
one you made for me yesterday."
A flicker of interest lightened Thaddeus' face. He looked around the
shack and then spotted the clay on the table. Without hesitation, he
walked to the table and sat down. His fingers began working the damp
clay, making first the hollow, half-round shell while the nation's top
atomic scientists watched in fascination.
His busy fingers flew through the clay, shaping odd, flat bits and clay
parts that were dropped almost aimlessly into the open hemisphere in
front of him.
Miss Abercrombie stood at his shoulder as Thaddeus hunched over the
table just as he had done the previous day. From time to time she
glanced at her watch. The maze of clay strips grew and as Funston
finished shaping the other half hemisphere of clay, she broke the tense
silence.
"Time to go back now, Mr. Funston. You can work some more tomorrow." She
looked at the men and nodded her head.
The two psychiatrists went to Thaddeus' side as he put the upper lid of
clay carefully in place. Funston stood up and the doctors escorted him
from the shack.
There was a moment of hushed silence and then pandemonium burst. The
experts converged on the clay ball, instruments blossoming from nowhere
and cameras clicking.
For two hours they studied and gently probed the mass of child's clay
and photographed it from every angle.
Then they left for the concrete observatory bunker, several miles down
range where Thaddeus and the psychiatrists waited inside a ring of
stony-faced military policemen.
"I told you this whole thing was asinine," Thurgood snarled as the
scientific teams trooped into the bunker.
Thaddeus Funston stared out over the heads of the MPs through the open
door, looking uprange over the heat-shimmering desert. He gave a sudden
cry, shut his eyes and clapped his hands over his face.
A brilliance a hundred times brighter than the glaring Nevada sun lit
the dim interior of the bunker and the pneumatically-operated door
slammed shut just before the wave of the blast hit the structure.
Six hours and a jet plane trip later, Thaddeus, once again in his strait
jacket, sat between his armed escorts in a small room in the Pentagon.
Through the window he could see the hurried bustle of traffic over the
Potomac and beyond, the domed roof of the Capitol.
In the conference room next door, the joint chiefs of staff were
closeted with a gray-faced and bone-weary Colonel Thurgood and his
baker's dozen of AEC brains. Scraps of the hot and scornful talk drifted
across a half-opened transom into the room where Thaddeus Funston sat in
a neatly-tied bundle.
In the conference room, a red-faced, four-star general cast a chilling
glance at the rumpled figure of Colonel Thurgood.
"I've listened to some silly stories in my life, colonel," the general
said coldly, "but this takes the cake. You come in here with an insane
asylum inmate in a strait jacket and you have the colossal gall to sit
there and tell me that this poor soul has made not one, but two atomic
devices out of modeling clay and then has detonated them."
The general paused.
"Why don't you just tell me, colonel, that he can also make spaceships
out of sponge rubber?" the general added bitingly.
In the next room, Thaddeus Funston stared out over the sweeping panorama
of the Washington landscape. He stared hard.
In the distance, a white cloud began billowing up from the base of the
Washington Monument, and with an ear-shattering, glass-splintering roar,
the great shaft rose majestically from its base and vanished into space
on a tail of flame.
THE END | [
"Cautious and discouraging",
"Impatient but well-meaning",
"Encouraging and strict",
"Patient but sometimes easily shaken"
] | 3 |
23588_CJYHQDJP_7 | What do the jumbled clay strips represent? | Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science Fiction November 1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
A FILBERT IS A NUT
BY RICK RAPHAEL
That the gentleman in question was a nut was beyond question. He was an institutionalized
psychotic. He was nutty enough to think he could make an atom bomb out of modeling clay!
Illustrated by Freas
Miss Abercrombie, the manual therapist patted the old man on the
shoulder. "You're doing just fine, Mr. Lieberman. Show it to me when you
have finished."
The oldster in the stained convalescent suit gave her a quick, shy smile
and went back to his aimless smearing in the finger paints.
Miss Abercrombie smoothed her smock down over trim hips and surveyed the
other patients working at the long tables in the hospital's arts and
crafts shop. Two muscular and bored attendants in spotless whites,
lounged beside the locked door and chatted idly about the Dodgers'
prospects for the pennant.
Through the barred windows of the workshop, rolling green hills were
seen, their tree-studded flanks making a pleasant setting for the mental
institution. The crafts building was a good mile away from the main
buildings of the hospital and the hills blocked the view of the austere
complex of buildings that housed the main wards.
The therapist strolled down the line of tables, pausing to give a word
of advice here, and a suggestion there.
She stopped behind a frowning, intense patient, rapidly shaping blobs of
clay into odd-sized strips and forms. As he finished each piece, he
carefully placed it into a hollow shell hemisphere of clay.
"And what are we making today, Mr. Funston?" Miss Abercrombie asked.
The flying fingers continued to whip out the bits of shaped clay as the
patient ignored the question. He hunched closer to his table as if to
draw away from the woman.
"We mustn't be antisocial, Mr. Funston," Miss Abercrombie said lightly,
but firmly. "You've been coming along famously and you must remember to
answer when someone talks to you. Now what are you making? It looks very
complicated." She stared professionally at the maze of clay parts.
Thaddeus Funston continued to mold the clay bits and put them in place.
Without looking up from his bench he muttered a reply.
"Atom bomb."
A puzzled look crossed the therapist's face. "Pardon me, Mr. Funston. I
thought you said an 'atom bomb.'"
"Did," Funston murmured.
Safely behind the patient's back, Miss Abercrombie smiled ever so
slightly. "Why that's very good, Mr. Funston. That shows real creative
thought. I'm very pleased."
She patted him on the shoulder and moved down the line of patients.
A few minutes later, one of the attendants glanced at his watch, stood
up and stretched.
"All right, fellows," he called out, "time to go back. Put up your
things."
There was a rustle of paint boxes and papers being shuffled and chairs
being moved back. A tall, blond patient with a flowing mustache, put one
more dab of paint on his canvas and stood back to survey the meaningless
smears. He sighed happily and laid down his palette.
At the clay table, Funston feverishly fabricated the last odd-shaped bit
of clay and slapped it into place. With a furtive glance around him, he
clapped the other half of the clay sphere over the filled hemisphere and
then stood up. The patients lined up at the door, waiting for the walk
back across the green hills to the main hospital. The attendants made a
quick count and then unlocked the door. The group shuffled out into the
warm, afternoon sunlight and the door closed behind them.
Miss Abercrombie gazed around the cluttered room and picked up her chart
book of patient progress. Moving slowly down the line of benches, she
made short, precise notes on the day's work accomplished by each
patient.
At the clay table, she carefully lifted the top half of the clay ball
and stared thoughtfully at the jumbled maze of clay strips laced through
the lower hemisphere. She placed the lid back in place and jotted
lengthily in her chart book.
When she had completed her rounds, she slipped out of the smock, tucked
the chart book under her arm and left the crafts building for the day.
The late afternoon sun felt warm and comfortable as she walked the mile
to the main administration building where her car was parked.
As she drove out of the hospital grounds, Thaddeus Funston stood at the
barred window of his locked ward and stared vacantly over the hills
towards the craft shop. He stood there unmoving until a ward attendant
came and took his arm an hour later to lead him off to the patients'
mess hall.
The sun set, darkness fell over the stilled hospital grounds and the
ward lights winked out at nine o'clock, leaving just a single light
burning in each ward office. A quiet wind sighed over the still-warm
hills.
At 3:01 a.m., Thaddeus Funston stirred in his sleep and awakened. He sat
up in bed and looked around the dark ward. The quiet breathing and
occasional snores of thirty other sleeping patients filled the room.
Funston turned to the window and stared out across the black hills that
sheltered the deserted crafts building.
He gave a quick cry, shut his eyes and clapped his hands over his face.
The brilliance of a hundred suns glared in the night and threw stark
shadows on the walls of the suddenly-illuminated ward.
An instant later, the shattering roar and blast of the explosion struck
the hospital buildings in a wave of force and the bursting crash of a
thousand windows was lost in the fury of the explosion and the wild
screams of the frightened and demented patients.
It was over in an instant, and a stunned moment later, recessed ceiling
lights began flashing on throughout the big institution.
Beyond the again-silent hills, a great pillar of smoke, topped by a
small mushroom-shaped cloud, rose above the gaping hole that had been
the arts and crafts building.
Thaddeus Funston took his hands from his face and lay back in his bed
with a small, secret smile on his lips. Attendants and nurses scurried
through the hospital, seeing how many had been injured in the
explosion.
None had. The hills had absorbed most of the shock and apart from a
welter of broken glass, the damage had been surprisingly slight.
The roar and flash of the explosion had lighted and rocked the
surrounding countryside. Soon firemen and civil defense disaster units
from a half-dozen neighboring communities had gathered at the
still-smoking hole that marked the site of the vanished crafts building.
Within fifteen minutes, the disaster-trained crews had detected heavy
radiation emanating from the crater and there was a scurry of men and
equipment back to a safe distance, a few hundred yards away.
At 5:30 a.m., a plane landed at a nearby airfield and a platoon of
Atomic Energy Commission experts, military intelligence men, four FBI
agents and an Army full colonel disembarked.
At 5:45 a.m. a cordon was thrown around both the hospital and the blast
crater.
In Ward 4-C, Thaddeus Funston slept peacefully and happily.
"It's impossible and unbelievable," Colonel Thomas Thurgood said for the
fifteenth time, later that morning, as he looked around the group of
experts gathered in the tent erected on the hill overlooking the crater.
"How can an atom bomb go off in a nut house?"
"It apparently was a very small bomb, colonel," one of the haggard AEC
men offered timidly. "Not over three kilotons."
"I don't care if it was the size of a peanut," Thurgood screamed. "How
did it get here?"
A military intelligence agent spoke up. "If we knew, sir, we wouldn't be
standing around here. We don't know, but the fact remains that it WAS an
atomic explosion."
Thurgood turned wearily to the small, white-haired man at his side.
"Let's go over it once more, Dr. Crane. Are you sure you knew everything
that was in that building?" Thurgood swept his hand in the general
direction of the blast crater.
"Colonel, I've told you a dozen times," the hospital administrator said
with exasperation, "this was our manual therapy room. We gave our
patients art work. It was a means of getting out of their systems,
through the use of their hands, some of the frustrations and problems
that led them to this hospital. They worked with oil and water paints
and clay. If you can make an atomic bomb from vermillion pigments, then
Madame Curie was a misguided scrubwoman."
"All I know is that you say this was a crafts building. O.K. So it was,"
Thurgood sighed. "I also know that an atomic explosion at 3:02 this
morning blew it to hell and gone.
"And I've got to find out how it happened."
Thurgood slumped into a field chair and gazed tiredly up at the little
doctor.
"Where's that girl you said was in charge of this place?"
"We've already called for Miss Abercrombie and she's on her way here
now," the doctor snapped.
Outside the tent, a small army of military men and AEC technicians moved
around the perimeter of the crater, scintillators in hand, examining
every tiny scrap that might have been a part of the building at one
time.
A jeep raced down the road from the hospital and drew up in front of the
tent. An armed MP helped Miss Abercrombie from the vehicle.
She walked to the edge of the hill and looked down with a stunned
expression.
"He did make an atom bomb," she cried.
Colonel Thurgood, who had snapped from his chair at her words, leaped
forward to catch her as she collapsed in a faint.
At 4:00 p.m., the argument was still raging in the long, narrow staff
room of the hospital administration building.
Colonel Thurgood, looking more like a patient every minute, sat on the
edge of his chair at the head of a long table and pounded with his fist
on the wooden surface, making Miss Abercrombie's chart book bounce with
every beat.
"It's ridiculous," Thurgood roared. "We'll all be the laughingstocks of
the world if this ever gets out. An atomic bomb made out of clay. You
are all nuts. You're in the right place, but count me out."
At his left, Miss Abercrombie cringed deeper into her chair at the
broadside. Down both sides of the long table, psychiatrists, physicists,
strategists and radiologists sat in various stages of nerve-shattered
weariness.
"Miss Abercrombie," one of the physicists spoke up gently, "you say that
after the patients had departed the building, you looked again at
Funston's work?"
The therapist nodded unhappily.
"And you say that, to the best of your knowledge," the physicist
continued, "there was nothing inside the ball but other pieces of clay."
"I'm positive that's all there was in it," Miss Abercrombie cried.
There was a renewed buzz of conversation at the table and the senior AEC
man present got heads together with the senior intelligence man. They
conferred briefly and then the intelligence officer spoke.
"That seems to settle it, colonel. We've got to give this Funston
another chance to repeat his bomb. But this time under our supervision."
Thurgood leaped to his feet, his face purpling.
"Are you crazy?" he screamed. "You want to get us all thrown into this
filbert factory? Do you know what the newspapers would do to us if they
ever got wind of the fact, that for one, tiny fraction of a second,
anyone of us here entertained the notion that a paranoidal idiot with
the IQ of an ape could make an atomic bomb out of kid's modeling clay?
"They'd crucify us, that's what they'd do!"
At 8:30 that night, Thaddeus Funston, swathed in an Army officer's
greatcoat that concealed the strait jacket binding him and with an
officer's cap jammed far down over his face, was hustled out of a small
side door of the hospital and into a waiting staff car. A few minutes
later, the car pulled into the flying field at the nearby community and
drove directly to the military transport plane that stood at the end of
the runway with propellers turning.
Two military policemen and a brace of staff psychiatrists sworn to
secrecy under the National Atomic Secrets Act, bundled Thaddeus aboard
the plane. They plopped him into a seat directly in front of Miss
Abercrombie and with a roar, the plane raced down the runway and into
the night skies.
The plane landed the next morning at the AEC's atomic testing grounds in
the Nevada desert and two hours later, in a small hot, wooden shack
miles up the barren desert wastelands, a cluster of scientists and
military men huddled around a small wooden table.
There was nothing on the table but a bowl of water and a great lump of
modeling clay. While the psychiatrists were taking the strait jacket off
Thaddeus in the staff car outside, Colonel Thurgood spoke to the weary
Miss Abercrombie.
"Now you're positive this is just about the same amount and the same
kind of clay he used before?"
"I brought it along from the same batch we had in the store room at the
hospital," she replied, "and it's the same amount."
Thurgood signaled to the doctors and they entered the shack with
Thaddeus Funston between them. The colonel nudged Miss Abercrombie.
She smiled at Funston.
"Now isn't this nice, Mr. Funston," she said. "These nice men have
brought us way out here just to see you make another atom bomb like the
one you made for me yesterday."
A flicker of interest lightened Thaddeus' face. He looked around the
shack and then spotted the clay on the table. Without hesitation, he
walked to the table and sat down. His fingers began working the damp
clay, making first the hollow, half-round shell while the nation's top
atomic scientists watched in fascination.
His busy fingers flew through the clay, shaping odd, flat bits and clay
parts that were dropped almost aimlessly into the open hemisphere in
front of him.
Miss Abercrombie stood at his shoulder as Thaddeus hunched over the
table just as he had done the previous day. From time to time she
glanced at her watch. The maze of clay strips grew and as Funston
finished shaping the other half hemisphere of clay, she broke the tense
silence.
"Time to go back now, Mr. Funston. You can work some more tomorrow." She
looked at the men and nodded her head.
The two psychiatrists went to Thaddeus' side as he put the upper lid of
clay carefully in place. Funston stood up and the doctors escorted him
from the shack.
There was a moment of hushed silence and then pandemonium burst. The
experts converged on the clay ball, instruments blossoming from nowhere
and cameras clicking.
For two hours they studied and gently probed the mass of child's clay
and photographed it from every angle.
Then they left for the concrete observatory bunker, several miles down
range where Thaddeus and the psychiatrists waited inside a ring of
stony-faced military policemen.
"I told you this whole thing was asinine," Thurgood snarled as the
scientific teams trooped into the bunker.
Thaddeus Funston stared out over the heads of the MPs through the open
door, looking uprange over the heat-shimmering desert. He gave a sudden
cry, shut his eyes and clapped his hands over his face.
A brilliance a hundred times brighter than the glaring Nevada sun lit
the dim interior of the bunker and the pneumatically-operated door
slammed shut just before the wave of the blast hit the structure.
Six hours and a jet plane trip later, Thaddeus, once again in his strait
jacket, sat between his armed escorts in a small room in the Pentagon.
Through the window he could see the hurried bustle of traffic over the
Potomac and beyond, the domed roof of the Capitol.
In the conference room next door, the joint chiefs of staff were
closeted with a gray-faced and bone-weary Colonel Thurgood and his
baker's dozen of AEC brains. Scraps of the hot and scornful talk drifted
across a half-opened transom into the room where Thaddeus Funston sat in
a neatly-tied bundle.
In the conference room, a red-faced, four-star general cast a chilling
glance at the rumpled figure of Colonel Thurgood.
"I've listened to some silly stories in my life, colonel," the general
said coldly, "but this takes the cake. You come in here with an insane
asylum inmate in a strait jacket and you have the colossal gall to sit
there and tell me that this poor soul has made not one, but two atomic
devices out of modeling clay and then has detonated them."
The general paused.
"Why don't you just tell me, colonel, that he can also make spaceships
out of sponge rubber?" the general added bitingly.
In the next room, Thaddeus Funston stared out over the sweeping panorama
of the Washington landscape. He stared hard.
In the distance, a white cloud began billowing up from the base of the
Washington Monument, and with an ear-shattering, glass-splintering roar,
the great shaft rose majestically from its base and vanished into space
on a tail of flame.
THE END | [
"Thaddeus' way of labeling his creation",
"Wires and circuitry from a bomb",
"The discarded clay from his process",
"Rivers on a globe of the Earth"
] | 1 |
23588_CJYHQDJP_8 | Who is Miss Abercrombie | Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science Fiction November 1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
A FILBERT IS A NUT
BY RICK RAPHAEL
That the gentleman in question was a nut was beyond question. He was an institutionalized
psychotic. He was nutty enough to think he could make an atom bomb out of modeling clay!
Illustrated by Freas
Miss Abercrombie, the manual therapist patted the old man on the
shoulder. "You're doing just fine, Mr. Lieberman. Show it to me when you
have finished."
The oldster in the stained convalescent suit gave her a quick, shy smile
and went back to his aimless smearing in the finger paints.
Miss Abercrombie smoothed her smock down over trim hips and surveyed the
other patients working at the long tables in the hospital's arts and
crafts shop. Two muscular and bored attendants in spotless whites,
lounged beside the locked door and chatted idly about the Dodgers'
prospects for the pennant.
Through the barred windows of the workshop, rolling green hills were
seen, their tree-studded flanks making a pleasant setting for the mental
institution. The crafts building was a good mile away from the main
buildings of the hospital and the hills blocked the view of the austere
complex of buildings that housed the main wards.
The therapist strolled down the line of tables, pausing to give a word
of advice here, and a suggestion there.
She stopped behind a frowning, intense patient, rapidly shaping blobs of
clay into odd-sized strips and forms. As he finished each piece, he
carefully placed it into a hollow shell hemisphere of clay.
"And what are we making today, Mr. Funston?" Miss Abercrombie asked.
The flying fingers continued to whip out the bits of shaped clay as the
patient ignored the question. He hunched closer to his table as if to
draw away from the woman.
"We mustn't be antisocial, Mr. Funston," Miss Abercrombie said lightly,
but firmly. "You've been coming along famously and you must remember to
answer when someone talks to you. Now what are you making? It looks very
complicated." She stared professionally at the maze of clay parts.
Thaddeus Funston continued to mold the clay bits and put them in place.
Without looking up from his bench he muttered a reply.
"Atom bomb."
A puzzled look crossed the therapist's face. "Pardon me, Mr. Funston. I
thought you said an 'atom bomb.'"
"Did," Funston murmured.
Safely behind the patient's back, Miss Abercrombie smiled ever so
slightly. "Why that's very good, Mr. Funston. That shows real creative
thought. I'm very pleased."
She patted him on the shoulder and moved down the line of patients.
A few minutes later, one of the attendants glanced at his watch, stood
up and stretched.
"All right, fellows," he called out, "time to go back. Put up your
things."
There was a rustle of paint boxes and papers being shuffled and chairs
being moved back. A tall, blond patient with a flowing mustache, put one
more dab of paint on his canvas and stood back to survey the meaningless
smears. He sighed happily and laid down his palette.
At the clay table, Funston feverishly fabricated the last odd-shaped bit
of clay and slapped it into place. With a furtive glance around him, he
clapped the other half of the clay sphere over the filled hemisphere and
then stood up. The patients lined up at the door, waiting for the walk
back across the green hills to the main hospital. The attendants made a
quick count and then unlocked the door. The group shuffled out into the
warm, afternoon sunlight and the door closed behind them.
Miss Abercrombie gazed around the cluttered room and picked up her chart
book of patient progress. Moving slowly down the line of benches, she
made short, precise notes on the day's work accomplished by each
patient.
At the clay table, she carefully lifted the top half of the clay ball
and stared thoughtfully at the jumbled maze of clay strips laced through
the lower hemisphere. She placed the lid back in place and jotted
lengthily in her chart book.
When she had completed her rounds, she slipped out of the smock, tucked
the chart book under her arm and left the crafts building for the day.
The late afternoon sun felt warm and comfortable as she walked the mile
to the main administration building where her car was parked.
As she drove out of the hospital grounds, Thaddeus Funston stood at the
barred window of his locked ward and stared vacantly over the hills
towards the craft shop. He stood there unmoving until a ward attendant
came and took his arm an hour later to lead him off to the patients'
mess hall.
The sun set, darkness fell over the stilled hospital grounds and the
ward lights winked out at nine o'clock, leaving just a single light
burning in each ward office. A quiet wind sighed over the still-warm
hills.
At 3:01 a.m., Thaddeus Funston stirred in his sleep and awakened. He sat
up in bed and looked around the dark ward. The quiet breathing and
occasional snores of thirty other sleeping patients filled the room.
Funston turned to the window and stared out across the black hills that
sheltered the deserted crafts building.
He gave a quick cry, shut his eyes and clapped his hands over his face.
The brilliance of a hundred suns glared in the night and threw stark
shadows on the walls of the suddenly-illuminated ward.
An instant later, the shattering roar and blast of the explosion struck
the hospital buildings in a wave of force and the bursting crash of a
thousand windows was lost in the fury of the explosion and the wild
screams of the frightened and demented patients.
It was over in an instant, and a stunned moment later, recessed ceiling
lights began flashing on throughout the big institution.
Beyond the again-silent hills, a great pillar of smoke, topped by a
small mushroom-shaped cloud, rose above the gaping hole that had been
the arts and crafts building.
Thaddeus Funston took his hands from his face and lay back in his bed
with a small, secret smile on his lips. Attendants and nurses scurried
through the hospital, seeing how many had been injured in the
explosion.
None had. The hills had absorbed most of the shock and apart from a
welter of broken glass, the damage had been surprisingly slight.
The roar and flash of the explosion had lighted and rocked the
surrounding countryside. Soon firemen and civil defense disaster units
from a half-dozen neighboring communities had gathered at the
still-smoking hole that marked the site of the vanished crafts building.
Within fifteen minutes, the disaster-trained crews had detected heavy
radiation emanating from the crater and there was a scurry of men and
equipment back to a safe distance, a few hundred yards away.
At 5:30 a.m., a plane landed at a nearby airfield and a platoon of
Atomic Energy Commission experts, military intelligence men, four FBI
agents and an Army full colonel disembarked.
At 5:45 a.m. a cordon was thrown around both the hospital and the blast
crater.
In Ward 4-C, Thaddeus Funston slept peacefully and happily.
"It's impossible and unbelievable," Colonel Thomas Thurgood said for the
fifteenth time, later that morning, as he looked around the group of
experts gathered in the tent erected on the hill overlooking the crater.
"How can an atom bomb go off in a nut house?"
"It apparently was a very small bomb, colonel," one of the haggard AEC
men offered timidly. "Not over three kilotons."
"I don't care if it was the size of a peanut," Thurgood screamed. "How
did it get here?"
A military intelligence agent spoke up. "If we knew, sir, we wouldn't be
standing around here. We don't know, but the fact remains that it WAS an
atomic explosion."
Thurgood turned wearily to the small, white-haired man at his side.
"Let's go over it once more, Dr. Crane. Are you sure you knew everything
that was in that building?" Thurgood swept his hand in the general
direction of the blast crater.
"Colonel, I've told you a dozen times," the hospital administrator said
with exasperation, "this was our manual therapy room. We gave our
patients art work. It was a means of getting out of their systems,
through the use of their hands, some of the frustrations and problems
that led them to this hospital. They worked with oil and water paints
and clay. If you can make an atomic bomb from vermillion pigments, then
Madame Curie was a misguided scrubwoman."
"All I know is that you say this was a crafts building. O.K. So it was,"
Thurgood sighed. "I also know that an atomic explosion at 3:02 this
morning blew it to hell and gone.
"And I've got to find out how it happened."
Thurgood slumped into a field chair and gazed tiredly up at the little
doctor.
"Where's that girl you said was in charge of this place?"
"We've already called for Miss Abercrombie and she's on her way here
now," the doctor snapped.
Outside the tent, a small army of military men and AEC technicians moved
around the perimeter of the crater, scintillators in hand, examining
every tiny scrap that might have been a part of the building at one
time.
A jeep raced down the road from the hospital and drew up in front of the
tent. An armed MP helped Miss Abercrombie from the vehicle.
She walked to the edge of the hill and looked down with a stunned
expression.
"He did make an atom bomb," she cried.
Colonel Thurgood, who had snapped from his chair at her words, leaped
forward to catch her as she collapsed in a faint.
At 4:00 p.m., the argument was still raging in the long, narrow staff
room of the hospital administration building.
Colonel Thurgood, looking more like a patient every minute, sat on the
edge of his chair at the head of a long table and pounded with his fist
on the wooden surface, making Miss Abercrombie's chart book bounce with
every beat.
"It's ridiculous," Thurgood roared. "We'll all be the laughingstocks of
the world if this ever gets out. An atomic bomb made out of clay. You
are all nuts. You're in the right place, but count me out."
At his left, Miss Abercrombie cringed deeper into her chair at the
broadside. Down both sides of the long table, psychiatrists, physicists,
strategists and radiologists sat in various stages of nerve-shattered
weariness.
"Miss Abercrombie," one of the physicists spoke up gently, "you say that
after the patients had departed the building, you looked again at
Funston's work?"
The therapist nodded unhappily.
"And you say that, to the best of your knowledge," the physicist
continued, "there was nothing inside the ball but other pieces of clay."
"I'm positive that's all there was in it," Miss Abercrombie cried.
There was a renewed buzz of conversation at the table and the senior AEC
man present got heads together with the senior intelligence man. They
conferred briefly and then the intelligence officer spoke.
"That seems to settle it, colonel. We've got to give this Funston
another chance to repeat his bomb. But this time under our supervision."
Thurgood leaped to his feet, his face purpling.
"Are you crazy?" he screamed. "You want to get us all thrown into this
filbert factory? Do you know what the newspapers would do to us if they
ever got wind of the fact, that for one, tiny fraction of a second,
anyone of us here entertained the notion that a paranoidal idiot with
the IQ of an ape could make an atomic bomb out of kid's modeling clay?
"They'd crucify us, that's what they'd do!"
At 8:30 that night, Thaddeus Funston, swathed in an Army officer's
greatcoat that concealed the strait jacket binding him and with an
officer's cap jammed far down over his face, was hustled out of a small
side door of the hospital and into a waiting staff car. A few minutes
later, the car pulled into the flying field at the nearby community and
drove directly to the military transport plane that stood at the end of
the runway with propellers turning.
Two military policemen and a brace of staff psychiatrists sworn to
secrecy under the National Atomic Secrets Act, bundled Thaddeus aboard
the plane. They plopped him into a seat directly in front of Miss
Abercrombie and with a roar, the plane raced down the runway and into
the night skies.
The plane landed the next morning at the AEC's atomic testing grounds in
the Nevada desert and two hours later, in a small hot, wooden shack
miles up the barren desert wastelands, a cluster of scientists and
military men huddled around a small wooden table.
There was nothing on the table but a bowl of water and a great lump of
modeling clay. While the psychiatrists were taking the strait jacket off
Thaddeus in the staff car outside, Colonel Thurgood spoke to the weary
Miss Abercrombie.
"Now you're positive this is just about the same amount and the same
kind of clay he used before?"
"I brought it along from the same batch we had in the store room at the
hospital," she replied, "and it's the same amount."
Thurgood signaled to the doctors and they entered the shack with
Thaddeus Funston between them. The colonel nudged Miss Abercrombie.
She smiled at Funston.
"Now isn't this nice, Mr. Funston," she said. "These nice men have
brought us way out here just to see you make another atom bomb like the
one you made for me yesterday."
A flicker of interest lightened Thaddeus' face. He looked around the
shack and then spotted the clay on the table. Without hesitation, he
walked to the table and sat down. His fingers began working the damp
clay, making first the hollow, half-round shell while the nation's top
atomic scientists watched in fascination.
His busy fingers flew through the clay, shaping odd, flat bits and clay
parts that were dropped almost aimlessly into the open hemisphere in
front of him.
Miss Abercrombie stood at his shoulder as Thaddeus hunched over the
table just as he had done the previous day. From time to time she
glanced at her watch. The maze of clay strips grew and as Funston
finished shaping the other half hemisphere of clay, she broke the tense
silence.
"Time to go back now, Mr. Funston. You can work some more tomorrow." She
looked at the men and nodded her head.
The two psychiatrists went to Thaddeus' side as he put the upper lid of
clay carefully in place. Funston stood up and the doctors escorted him
from the shack.
There was a moment of hushed silence and then pandemonium burst. The
experts converged on the clay ball, instruments blossoming from nowhere
and cameras clicking.
For two hours they studied and gently probed the mass of child's clay
and photographed it from every angle.
Then they left for the concrete observatory bunker, several miles down
range where Thaddeus and the psychiatrists waited inside a ring of
stony-faced military policemen.
"I told you this whole thing was asinine," Thurgood snarled as the
scientific teams trooped into the bunker.
Thaddeus Funston stared out over the heads of the MPs through the open
door, looking uprange over the heat-shimmering desert. He gave a sudden
cry, shut his eyes and clapped his hands over his face.
A brilliance a hundred times brighter than the glaring Nevada sun lit
the dim interior of the bunker and the pneumatically-operated door
slammed shut just before the wave of the blast hit the structure.
Six hours and a jet plane trip later, Thaddeus, once again in his strait
jacket, sat between his armed escorts in a small room in the Pentagon.
Through the window he could see the hurried bustle of traffic over the
Potomac and beyond, the domed roof of the Capitol.
In the conference room next door, the joint chiefs of staff were
closeted with a gray-faced and bone-weary Colonel Thurgood and his
baker's dozen of AEC brains. Scraps of the hot and scornful talk drifted
across a half-opened transom into the room where Thaddeus Funston sat in
a neatly-tied bundle.
In the conference room, a red-faced, four-star general cast a chilling
glance at the rumpled figure of Colonel Thurgood.
"I've listened to some silly stories in my life, colonel," the general
said coldly, "but this takes the cake. You come in here with an insane
asylum inmate in a strait jacket and you have the colossal gall to sit
there and tell me that this poor soul has made not one, but two atomic
devices out of modeling clay and then has detonated them."
The general paused.
"Why don't you just tell me, colonel, that he can also make spaceships
out of sponge rubber?" the general added bitingly.
In the next room, Thaddeus Funston stared out over the sweeping panorama
of the Washington landscape. He stared hard.
In the distance, a white cloud began billowing up from the base of the
Washington Monument, and with an ear-shattering, glass-splintering roar,
the great shaft rose majestically from its base and vanished into space
on a tail of flame.
THE END | [
"An art teacher brought in to supervise activity time at the institution",
"A government agent keeping tabs on the people at the mental institution under the guise of a therapist",
"A therapist who specializes in hand- and joint-related activities",
"One of the therapists personally appointed to keep an eye on Thaddeus"
] | 2 |
23588_CJYHQDJP_9 | What are the necessary components for Thaddeus to cause an "event"? | Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science Fiction November 1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
A FILBERT IS A NUT
BY RICK RAPHAEL
That the gentleman in question was a nut was beyond question. He was an institutionalized
psychotic. He was nutty enough to think he could make an atom bomb out of modeling clay!
Illustrated by Freas
Miss Abercrombie, the manual therapist patted the old man on the
shoulder. "You're doing just fine, Mr. Lieberman. Show it to me when you
have finished."
The oldster in the stained convalescent suit gave her a quick, shy smile
and went back to his aimless smearing in the finger paints.
Miss Abercrombie smoothed her smock down over trim hips and surveyed the
other patients working at the long tables in the hospital's arts and
crafts shop. Two muscular and bored attendants in spotless whites,
lounged beside the locked door and chatted idly about the Dodgers'
prospects for the pennant.
Through the barred windows of the workshop, rolling green hills were
seen, their tree-studded flanks making a pleasant setting for the mental
institution. The crafts building was a good mile away from the main
buildings of the hospital and the hills blocked the view of the austere
complex of buildings that housed the main wards.
The therapist strolled down the line of tables, pausing to give a word
of advice here, and a suggestion there.
She stopped behind a frowning, intense patient, rapidly shaping blobs of
clay into odd-sized strips and forms. As he finished each piece, he
carefully placed it into a hollow shell hemisphere of clay.
"And what are we making today, Mr. Funston?" Miss Abercrombie asked.
The flying fingers continued to whip out the bits of shaped clay as the
patient ignored the question. He hunched closer to his table as if to
draw away from the woman.
"We mustn't be antisocial, Mr. Funston," Miss Abercrombie said lightly,
but firmly. "You've been coming along famously and you must remember to
answer when someone talks to you. Now what are you making? It looks very
complicated." She stared professionally at the maze of clay parts.
Thaddeus Funston continued to mold the clay bits and put them in place.
Without looking up from his bench he muttered a reply.
"Atom bomb."
A puzzled look crossed the therapist's face. "Pardon me, Mr. Funston. I
thought you said an 'atom bomb.'"
"Did," Funston murmured.
Safely behind the patient's back, Miss Abercrombie smiled ever so
slightly. "Why that's very good, Mr. Funston. That shows real creative
thought. I'm very pleased."
She patted him on the shoulder and moved down the line of patients.
A few minutes later, one of the attendants glanced at his watch, stood
up and stretched.
"All right, fellows," he called out, "time to go back. Put up your
things."
There was a rustle of paint boxes and papers being shuffled and chairs
being moved back. A tall, blond patient with a flowing mustache, put one
more dab of paint on his canvas and stood back to survey the meaningless
smears. He sighed happily and laid down his palette.
At the clay table, Funston feverishly fabricated the last odd-shaped bit
of clay and slapped it into place. With a furtive glance around him, he
clapped the other half of the clay sphere over the filled hemisphere and
then stood up. The patients lined up at the door, waiting for the walk
back across the green hills to the main hospital. The attendants made a
quick count and then unlocked the door. The group shuffled out into the
warm, afternoon sunlight and the door closed behind them.
Miss Abercrombie gazed around the cluttered room and picked up her chart
book of patient progress. Moving slowly down the line of benches, she
made short, precise notes on the day's work accomplished by each
patient.
At the clay table, she carefully lifted the top half of the clay ball
and stared thoughtfully at the jumbled maze of clay strips laced through
the lower hemisphere. She placed the lid back in place and jotted
lengthily in her chart book.
When she had completed her rounds, she slipped out of the smock, tucked
the chart book under her arm and left the crafts building for the day.
The late afternoon sun felt warm and comfortable as she walked the mile
to the main administration building where her car was parked.
As she drove out of the hospital grounds, Thaddeus Funston stood at the
barred window of his locked ward and stared vacantly over the hills
towards the craft shop. He stood there unmoving until a ward attendant
came and took his arm an hour later to lead him off to the patients'
mess hall.
The sun set, darkness fell over the stilled hospital grounds and the
ward lights winked out at nine o'clock, leaving just a single light
burning in each ward office. A quiet wind sighed over the still-warm
hills.
At 3:01 a.m., Thaddeus Funston stirred in his sleep and awakened. He sat
up in bed and looked around the dark ward. The quiet breathing and
occasional snores of thirty other sleeping patients filled the room.
Funston turned to the window and stared out across the black hills that
sheltered the deserted crafts building.
He gave a quick cry, shut his eyes and clapped his hands over his face.
The brilliance of a hundred suns glared in the night and threw stark
shadows on the walls of the suddenly-illuminated ward.
An instant later, the shattering roar and blast of the explosion struck
the hospital buildings in a wave of force and the bursting crash of a
thousand windows was lost in the fury of the explosion and the wild
screams of the frightened and demented patients.
It was over in an instant, and a stunned moment later, recessed ceiling
lights began flashing on throughout the big institution.
Beyond the again-silent hills, a great pillar of smoke, topped by a
small mushroom-shaped cloud, rose above the gaping hole that had been
the arts and crafts building.
Thaddeus Funston took his hands from his face and lay back in his bed
with a small, secret smile on his lips. Attendants and nurses scurried
through the hospital, seeing how many had been injured in the
explosion.
None had. The hills had absorbed most of the shock and apart from a
welter of broken glass, the damage had been surprisingly slight.
The roar and flash of the explosion had lighted and rocked the
surrounding countryside. Soon firemen and civil defense disaster units
from a half-dozen neighboring communities had gathered at the
still-smoking hole that marked the site of the vanished crafts building.
Within fifteen minutes, the disaster-trained crews had detected heavy
radiation emanating from the crater and there was a scurry of men and
equipment back to a safe distance, a few hundred yards away.
At 5:30 a.m., a plane landed at a nearby airfield and a platoon of
Atomic Energy Commission experts, military intelligence men, four FBI
agents and an Army full colonel disembarked.
At 5:45 a.m. a cordon was thrown around both the hospital and the blast
crater.
In Ward 4-C, Thaddeus Funston slept peacefully and happily.
"It's impossible and unbelievable," Colonel Thomas Thurgood said for the
fifteenth time, later that morning, as he looked around the group of
experts gathered in the tent erected on the hill overlooking the crater.
"How can an atom bomb go off in a nut house?"
"It apparently was a very small bomb, colonel," one of the haggard AEC
men offered timidly. "Not over three kilotons."
"I don't care if it was the size of a peanut," Thurgood screamed. "How
did it get here?"
A military intelligence agent spoke up. "If we knew, sir, we wouldn't be
standing around here. We don't know, but the fact remains that it WAS an
atomic explosion."
Thurgood turned wearily to the small, white-haired man at his side.
"Let's go over it once more, Dr. Crane. Are you sure you knew everything
that was in that building?" Thurgood swept his hand in the general
direction of the blast crater.
"Colonel, I've told you a dozen times," the hospital administrator said
with exasperation, "this was our manual therapy room. We gave our
patients art work. It was a means of getting out of their systems,
through the use of their hands, some of the frustrations and problems
that led them to this hospital. They worked with oil and water paints
and clay. If you can make an atomic bomb from vermillion pigments, then
Madame Curie was a misguided scrubwoman."
"All I know is that you say this was a crafts building. O.K. So it was,"
Thurgood sighed. "I also know that an atomic explosion at 3:02 this
morning blew it to hell and gone.
"And I've got to find out how it happened."
Thurgood slumped into a field chair and gazed tiredly up at the little
doctor.
"Where's that girl you said was in charge of this place?"
"We've already called for Miss Abercrombie and she's on her way here
now," the doctor snapped.
Outside the tent, a small army of military men and AEC technicians moved
around the perimeter of the crater, scintillators in hand, examining
every tiny scrap that might have been a part of the building at one
time.
A jeep raced down the road from the hospital and drew up in front of the
tent. An armed MP helped Miss Abercrombie from the vehicle.
She walked to the edge of the hill and looked down with a stunned
expression.
"He did make an atom bomb," she cried.
Colonel Thurgood, who had snapped from his chair at her words, leaped
forward to catch her as she collapsed in a faint.
At 4:00 p.m., the argument was still raging in the long, narrow staff
room of the hospital administration building.
Colonel Thurgood, looking more like a patient every minute, sat on the
edge of his chair at the head of a long table and pounded with his fist
on the wooden surface, making Miss Abercrombie's chart book bounce with
every beat.
"It's ridiculous," Thurgood roared. "We'll all be the laughingstocks of
the world if this ever gets out. An atomic bomb made out of clay. You
are all nuts. You're in the right place, but count me out."
At his left, Miss Abercrombie cringed deeper into her chair at the
broadside. Down both sides of the long table, psychiatrists, physicists,
strategists and radiologists sat in various stages of nerve-shattered
weariness.
"Miss Abercrombie," one of the physicists spoke up gently, "you say that
after the patients had departed the building, you looked again at
Funston's work?"
The therapist nodded unhappily.
"And you say that, to the best of your knowledge," the physicist
continued, "there was nothing inside the ball but other pieces of clay."
"I'm positive that's all there was in it," Miss Abercrombie cried.
There was a renewed buzz of conversation at the table and the senior AEC
man present got heads together with the senior intelligence man. They
conferred briefly and then the intelligence officer spoke.
"That seems to settle it, colonel. We've got to give this Funston
another chance to repeat his bomb. But this time under our supervision."
Thurgood leaped to his feet, his face purpling.
"Are you crazy?" he screamed. "You want to get us all thrown into this
filbert factory? Do you know what the newspapers would do to us if they
ever got wind of the fact, that for one, tiny fraction of a second,
anyone of us here entertained the notion that a paranoidal idiot with
the IQ of an ape could make an atomic bomb out of kid's modeling clay?
"They'd crucify us, that's what they'd do!"
At 8:30 that night, Thaddeus Funston, swathed in an Army officer's
greatcoat that concealed the strait jacket binding him and with an
officer's cap jammed far down over his face, was hustled out of a small
side door of the hospital and into a waiting staff car. A few minutes
later, the car pulled into the flying field at the nearby community and
drove directly to the military transport plane that stood at the end of
the runway with propellers turning.
Two military policemen and a brace of staff psychiatrists sworn to
secrecy under the National Atomic Secrets Act, bundled Thaddeus aboard
the plane. They plopped him into a seat directly in front of Miss
Abercrombie and with a roar, the plane raced down the runway and into
the night skies.
The plane landed the next morning at the AEC's atomic testing grounds in
the Nevada desert and two hours later, in a small hot, wooden shack
miles up the barren desert wastelands, a cluster of scientists and
military men huddled around a small wooden table.
There was nothing on the table but a bowl of water and a great lump of
modeling clay. While the psychiatrists were taking the strait jacket off
Thaddeus in the staff car outside, Colonel Thurgood spoke to the weary
Miss Abercrombie.
"Now you're positive this is just about the same amount and the same
kind of clay he used before?"
"I brought it along from the same batch we had in the store room at the
hospital," she replied, "and it's the same amount."
Thurgood signaled to the doctors and they entered the shack with
Thaddeus Funston between them. The colonel nudged Miss Abercrombie.
She smiled at Funston.
"Now isn't this nice, Mr. Funston," she said. "These nice men have
brought us way out here just to see you make another atom bomb like the
one you made for me yesterday."
A flicker of interest lightened Thaddeus' face. He looked around the
shack and then spotted the clay on the table. Without hesitation, he
walked to the table and sat down. His fingers began working the damp
clay, making first the hollow, half-round shell while the nation's top
atomic scientists watched in fascination.
His busy fingers flew through the clay, shaping odd, flat bits and clay
parts that were dropped almost aimlessly into the open hemisphere in
front of him.
Miss Abercrombie stood at his shoulder as Thaddeus hunched over the
table just as he had done the previous day. From time to time she
glanced at her watch. The maze of clay strips grew and as Funston
finished shaping the other half hemisphere of clay, she broke the tense
silence.
"Time to go back now, Mr. Funston. You can work some more tomorrow." She
looked at the men and nodded her head.
The two psychiatrists went to Thaddeus' side as he put the upper lid of
clay carefully in place. Funston stood up and the doctors escorted him
from the shack.
There was a moment of hushed silence and then pandemonium burst. The
experts converged on the clay ball, instruments blossoming from nowhere
and cameras clicking.
For two hours they studied and gently probed the mass of child's clay
and photographed it from every angle.
Then they left for the concrete observatory bunker, several miles down
range where Thaddeus and the psychiatrists waited inside a ring of
stony-faced military policemen.
"I told you this whole thing was asinine," Thurgood snarled as the
scientific teams trooped into the bunker.
Thaddeus Funston stared out over the heads of the MPs through the open
door, looking uprange over the heat-shimmering desert. He gave a sudden
cry, shut his eyes and clapped his hands over his face.
A brilliance a hundred times brighter than the glaring Nevada sun lit
the dim interior of the bunker and the pneumatically-operated door
slammed shut just before the wave of the blast hit the structure.
Six hours and a jet plane trip later, Thaddeus, once again in his strait
jacket, sat between his armed escorts in a small room in the Pentagon.
Through the window he could see the hurried bustle of traffic over the
Potomac and beyond, the domed roof of the Capitol.
In the conference room next door, the joint chiefs of staff were
closeted with a gray-faced and bone-weary Colonel Thurgood and his
baker's dozen of AEC brains. Scraps of the hot and scornful talk drifted
across a half-opened transom into the room where Thaddeus Funston sat in
a neatly-tied bundle.
In the conference room, a red-faced, four-star general cast a chilling
glance at the rumpled figure of Colonel Thurgood.
"I've listened to some silly stories in my life, colonel," the general
said coldly, "but this takes the cake. You come in here with an insane
asylum inmate in a strait jacket and you have the colossal gall to sit
there and tell me that this poor soul has made not one, but two atomic
devices out of modeling clay and then has detonated them."
The general paused.
"Why don't you just tell me, colonel, that he can also make spaceships
out of sponge rubber?" the general added bitingly.
In the next room, Thaddeus Funston stared out over the sweeping panorama
of the Washington landscape. He stared hard.
In the distance, a white cloud began billowing up from the base of the
Washington Monument, and with an ear-shattering, glass-splintering roar,
the great shaft rose majestically from its base and vanished into space
on a tail of flame.
THE END | [
"An object and his stare",
"Clay and his stare",
"A physical object",
"His stare, at a particular time of day"
] | 0 |
23592_UIJQGZDK_1 | How is Mary feeling at the beginning of the story? | Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science
Fiction December 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence
that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
BREAKAWAY
BY STANLEY GIMBLE
Illustrated by Freas
She surely got her wish ... but there was some question about getting
what she wanted.
Phil Conover pulled the zipper of his flight suit up the front of his
long, thin body and came into the living room. His face, usually serious
and quietly handsome, had an alive, excited look. And the faint lines
around his dark, deep-set eyes were accentuated when he smiled at his
wife.
"All set, honey. How do I look in my monkey suit?"
His wife was sitting stiffly on the flowered couch that was still not
theirs completely. In her fingers she held a cigarette burned down too
far. She said, "You look fine, Phil. You look just right." She managed a
smile. Then she leaned forward and crushed the cigarette in the ash
tray on the maple coffee table and took another from the pack.
He came to her and touched his hands to her soft blond hair, raising her
face until she was looking into his eyes. "You're the most beautiful
girl I know. Did I ever tell you that?"
"Yes, I think so. Yes, I'm sure you did," she said, finishing the
ritual; but her voice broke, and she turned her head away. Phil sat
beside her and put his arm around her small shoulders. He had stopped
smiling.
"Honey, look at me," he said. "It isn't going to be bad. Honestly it
isn't. We know exactly how it will be. If anything could go wrong, they
wouldn't be sending me; you know that. I told you that we've sent five
un-manned ships up and everyone came back without a hitch."
She turned, facing him. There were tears starting in the corners of her
wide, brown eyes, and she brushed them away with her hand.
"Phil, don't go. Please don't. They can send Sammy. Sammy doesn't have a
wife. Can't he go? They'd understand, Phil. Please!" She was holding his
arms tightly with her hands, and the color had drained from her cheeks.
"Mary, you know I can't back out now. How could I? It's been three
years. You know how much I've wanted to be the first man to go. Nothing
would ever be right with me again if I didn't go. Please don't make it
hard." He stopped talking and held her to him and stroked the back of
her head. He could feel her shoulders shaking with quiet sobs. He
released her and stood up.
"I've got to get started, Mary. Will you come to the field with me?"
"Yes, I'll come to say good-by." She paused and dropped her eyes. "Phil,
if you go, I won't be here when you get back—if you get back. I won't
be here because I won't be the wife of a space pilot for the rest of my
life. It isn't the kind of life I bargained for. No matter how much I
love you, I just couldn't take that, Phil. I'm sorry. I guess I'm not
the noble sort of wife."
She finished and took another cigarette from the pack on the coffee
table and put it to her lips. Her hand was trembling as she touched the
lighter to the end of the cigarette and drew deeply. Phil stood watching
her, the excitement completely gone from his eyes.
"I wish you had told me this a long time ago, Mary," Phil said. His
voice was dry and low. "I didn't know you felt this way about it."
"Yes, you did. I told you how I felt. I told you I could never be the
wife of a space pilot. But I don't think I ever really believed it was
possible—not until this morning when you said tonight was the take-off.
It's so stupid to jeopardize everything we've got for a ridiculous
dream!"
He sat down on the edge of the couch and took her hands between his.
"Mary, listen to me," he said. "It isn't a dream. It's real. There's
nothing means anything more to me than you do—you know that. But no
man ever had the chance to do what I'm going to do tonight—no man ever.
If I backed out now for any reason, I'd never be able to look at the sky
again. I'd be through."
She looked at him without seeing him, and there was nothing at all in
her eyes.
"Let's go, if you're still going," she finally said.
They drove through the streets of the small town with its small
bungalows, each alike. There were no trees and very little grass. It was
a new town, a government built town, and it had no personality yet. It
existed only because of the huge ship standing poised in the take-off
zone five miles away in the desert. Its future as a town rested with the
ship, and the town seemed to feel the uncertainty of its future, seemed
ready to stop existing as a town and to give itself back to the desert,
if such was its destiny.
Phil turned the car off the highway onto the rutted dirt road that led
across the sand to the field where the ship waited. In the distance they
could see the beams of the searchlights as they played across the
take-off zone and swept along the top of the high wire fence stretching
out of sight to right and left. At the gate they were stopped by the
guard. He read Phil's pass, shined his flashlight in their faces, and
then saluted. "Good luck, colonel," he said, and shook Phil's hand.
"Thanks, sergeant. I'll be seeing you next week," Phil said, and smiled.
They drove between the rows of wooden buildings that lined the field,
and he parked near the low barbed fence ringing the take-off zone. He
turned off the ignition, and sat quietly for a moment before lighting a
cigarette. Then he looked at his wife. She was staring through the
windshield at the rocket two hundred yards away. Its smooth polished
surface gleamed in the spotlight glare, and it sloped up and up until
the eye lost the tip against the stars.
"She's beautiful, Mary. You've never seen her before, have you?"
"No, I've never seen her before," she said. "Hadn't you better go?" Her
voice was strained and she held her hands closed tightly in her lap.
"Please go now, Phil," she said.
He leaned toward her and touched her cheek. Then she was in his arms,
her head buried against his shoulder.
"Good-by, darling," she said.
"Wish me luck, Mary?" he asked.
"Yes, good luck, Phil," she said. He opened the car door and got out.
The noise of men and machines scurrying around the ship broke the spell
of the rocket waiting silently for flight.
"Mary, I—" he began, and then turned and strode toward the
administration building without looking back.
Inside the building it was like a locker room before the big game. The
tension stood alone, and each man had the same happy, excited look that
Phil had worn earlier. When he came into the room, the noise and bustle
stopped. They turned as one man toward him, and General Small came up to
him and took his hand.
"Hello, Phil. We were beginning to think you weren't coming. You all
set, son?"
"Yes, sir, I'm all set, I guess," Phil said.
"I'd like you to meet the Secretary of Defense, Phil. He's over here by
the radar."
As they crossed the room, familiar faces smiled, and each man shook his
hand or touched his arm. He saw Sammy, alone, by the coffee urn. Sammy
waved to him, but he didn't smile. Phil wanted to talk to him, to say
something; but there was nothing to be said now. Sammy's turn would come
later.
"Mr. Secretary," the general said, "this is Colonel Conover. He'll be
the first man in history to see the other side of the Moon. Colonel—the
Secretary of Defense."
"How do you do, sir. I'm very proud to meet you," Phil said.
"On the contrary, colonel. I'm very proud to meet you. I've been looking
at that ship out there and wondering. I almost wish I were a young man
again. I'd like to be going. It's a thrilling thought—man's first
adventure into the universe. You're lighting a new dawn of history,
colonel. It's a privilege few men have ever had; and those who have had
it didn't realize it at the time. Good luck, and God be with you."
"Thank you, sir. I'm aware of all you say. It frightens me a little."
The general took Phil's arm and they walked to the briefing room. There
were chairs set up for the scientists and Air Force officers directly
connected with the take-off. They were seated now in a semicircle in
front of a huge chart of the solar system. Phil took his seat, and the
last minute briefing began. It was a routine he knew by heart. He had
gone over and over it a thousand times, and he only half listened now.
He kept thinking of Mary outside, alone by the fence.
The voice of the briefing officer was a dull hum in his ears.
"... And orbit at 18,000-mph. You will then accelerate for the breakaway
to 24,900-mph for five minutes and then free-coast for 116 hours
until—"
Phil asked a few questions about weather and solar conditions. And then
the session was done. They rose and looked at each other, the same
unanswered questions on each man's face. There were forced smiles and
handshakes. They were ready now.
"Phil," the general said, and took him aside.
"Sir?"
"Phil, you're ... you feel all right, don't you, son?"
"Yes, sir. I feel fine. Why?"
"Phil, I've spent nearly every day with you for three years. I know you
better than I know myself in many ways. And I've studied the
psychologist's reports on you carefully. Maybe it's just nervousness,
Phil, but I think there's something wrong. Is there?"
"No, sir. There's nothing wrong," Phil said, but his voice didn't carry
conviction. He reached for a cigarette.
"Phil, if there is anything—anything at all—you know what it might
mean. You've got to be in the best mental and physical condition of your
life tonight. You know better than any man here what that means to our
success. I think there is something more than just natural apprehension
wrong with you. Want to tell me?"
Outside, the take-off zone crawled with men and machines at the base of
the rocket. For ten hours, the final check-outs had been in progress;
and now the men were checking again, on their own time. The thing they
had worked toward for six years was ready to happen, and each one felt
that he was sending just a little bit of himself into the sky. Beyond
the ring of lights and moving men, on the edge of the field, Mary stood.
Her hands moved slowly over the top of the fence, twisting the barbs of
wire. But her eyes were on the ship.
And then they were ready. A small group of excited men came out from the
administration building and moved forward. The check-out crews climbed
into their machines and drove back outside the take-off zone. And,
alone, one man climbed the steel ladder up the side of the
rocket—ninety feet into the air. At the top he waved to the men on the
ground and then disappeared through a small port.
Mary waved to him. "Good-by," she said to herself, but the words stuck
tight in her throat.
The small group at the base of the ship turned and walked back to the
fence. And for an eternity the great ship stood alone, waiting. Then,
from deep inside, a rumble came, increasing in volume to a gigantic roar
that shook the earth and tore at the ears. Slowly, the first manned
rocket to the Moon lifted up and up to the sky.
For a long time after the rocket had become a tiny speck of light in the
heavens, she stood holding her face in her hands and crying softly to
herself. And then she felt the touch of a hand on her arm. She turned.
"Phil! Oh, Phil." She held tightly to him and repeated his name over and
over.
"They wouldn't let me go, Mary," he said finally. "The general would not
let me go."
She looked at him. His face was drawn tight, and there were tears on his
cheeks. "Thank, God," she said. "It doesn't matter, darling. The only
thing that matters is you didn't go."
"You're right, Mary," he said. His voice was low—so low she could
hardly hear him. "It doesn't matter. Nothing matters now." He stood with
his hands at his sides, watching her. And then turned away and walked
toward the car.
THE END | [
"She is desperate for Phil not to leave.",
"She is angry at Phil for not taking her seriously.",
"She is frustrated with Phil for not letting Sammy replace him.",
"She is depressed because she thinks she is going to lose Phil forever."
] | 0 |
23592_UIJQGZDK_2 | How is Phil feeling at the beginning of the story? | Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science
Fiction December 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence
that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
BREAKAWAY
BY STANLEY GIMBLE
Illustrated by Freas
She surely got her wish ... but there was some question about getting
what she wanted.
Phil Conover pulled the zipper of his flight suit up the front of his
long, thin body and came into the living room. His face, usually serious
and quietly handsome, had an alive, excited look. And the faint lines
around his dark, deep-set eyes were accentuated when he smiled at his
wife.
"All set, honey. How do I look in my monkey suit?"
His wife was sitting stiffly on the flowered couch that was still not
theirs completely. In her fingers she held a cigarette burned down too
far. She said, "You look fine, Phil. You look just right." She managed a
smile. Then she leaned forward and crushed the cigarette in the ash
tray on the maple coffee table and took another from the pack.
He came to her and touched his hands to her soft blond hair, raising her
face until she was looking into his eyes. "You're the most beautiful
girl I know. Did I ever tell you that?"
"Yes, I think so. Yes, I'm sure you did," she said, finishing the
ritual; but her voice broke, and she turned her head away. Phil sat
beside her and put his arm around her small shoulders. He had stopped
smiling.
"Honey, look at me," he said. "It isn't going to be bad. Honestly it
isn't. We know exactly how it will be. If anything could go wrong, they
wouldn't be sending me; you know that. I told you that we've sent five
un-manned ships up and everyone came back without a hitch."
She turned, facing him. There were tears starting in the corners of her
wide, brown eyes, and she brushed them away with her hand.
"Phil, don't go. Please don't. They can send Sammy. Sammy doesn't have a
wife. Can't he go? They'd understand, Phil. Please!" She was holding his
arms tightly with her hands, and the color had drained from her cheeks.
"Mary, you know I can't back out now. How could I? It's been three
years. You know how much I've wanted to be the first man to go. Nothing
would ever be right with me again if I didn't go. Please don't make it
hard." He stopped talking and held her to him and stroked the back of
her head. He could feel her shoulders shaking with quiet sobs. He
released her and stood up.
"I've got to get started, Mary. Will you come to the field with me?"
"Yes, I'll come to say good-by." She paused and dropped her eyes. "Phil,
if you go, I won't be here when you get back—if you get back. I won't
be here because I won't be the wife of a space pilot for the rest of my
life. It isn't the kind of life I bargained for. No matter how much I
love you, I just couldn't take that, Phil. I'm sorry. I guess I'm not
the noble sort of wife."
She finished and took another cigarette from the pack on the coffee
table and put it to her lips. Her hand was trembling as she touched the
lighter to the end of the cigarette and drew deeply. Phil stood watching
her, the excitement completely gone from his eyes.
"I wish you had told me this a long time ago, Mary," Phil said. His
voice was dry and low. "I didn't know you felt this way about it."
"Yes, you did. I told you how I felt. I told you I could never be the
wife of a space pilot. But I don't think I ever really believed it was
possible—not until this morning when you said tonight was the take-off.
It's so stupid to jeopardize everything we've got for a ridiculous
dream!"
He sat down on the edge of the couch and took her hands between his.
"Mary, listen to me," he said. "It isn't a dream. It's real. There's
nothing means anything more to me than you do—you know that. But no
man ever had the chance to do what I'm going to do tonight—no man ever.
If I backed out now for any reason, I'd never be able to look at the sky
again. I'd be through."
She looked at him without seeing him, and there was nothing at all in
her eyes.
"Let's go, if you're still going," she finally said.
They drove through the streets of the small town with its small
bungalows, each alike. There were no trees and very little grass. It was
a new town, a government built town, and it had no personality yet. It
existed only because of the huge ship standing poised in the take-off
zone five miles away in the desert. Its future as a town rested with the
ship, and the town seemed to feel the uncertainty of its future, seemed
ready to stop existing as a town and to give itself back to the desert,
if such was its destiny.
Phil turned the car off the highway onto the rutted dirt road that led
across the sand to the field where the ship waited. In the distance they
could see the beams of the searchlights as they played across the
take-off zone and swept along the top of the high wire fence stretching
out of sight to right and left. At the gate they were stopped by the
guard. He read Phil's pass, shined his flashlight in their faces, and
then saluted. "Good luck, colonel," he said, and shook Phil's hand.
"Thanks, sergeant. I'll be seeing you next week," Phil said, and smiled.
They drove between the rows of wooden buildings that lined the field,
and he parked near the low barbed fence ringing the take-off zone. He
turned off the ignition, and sat quietly for a moment before lighting a
cigarette. Then he looked at his wife. She was staring through the
windshield at the rocket two hundred yards away. Its smooth polished
surface gleamed in the spotlight glare, and it sloped up and up until
the eye lost the tip against the stars.
"She's beautiful, Mary. You've never seen her before, have you?"
"No, I've never seen her before," she said. "Hadn't you better go?" Her
voice was strained and she held her hands closed tightly in her lap.
"Please go now, Phil," she said.
He leaned toward her and touched her cheek. Then she was in his arms,
her head buried against his shoulder.
"Good-by, darling," she said.
"Wish me luck, Mary?" he asked.
"Yes, good luck, Phil," she said. He opened the car door and got out.
The noise of men and machines scurrying around the ship broke the spell
of the rocket waiting silently for flight.
"Mary, I—" he began, and then turned and strode toward the
administration building without looking back.
Inside the building it was like a locker room before the big game. The
tension stood alone, and each man had the same happy, excited look that
Phil had worn earlier. When he came into the room, the noise and bustle
stopped. They turned as one man toward him, and General Small came up to
him and took his hand.
"Hello, Phil. We were beginning to think you weren't coming. You all
set, son?"
"Yes, sir, I'm all set, I guess," Phil said.
"I'd like you to meet the Secretary of Defense, Phil. He's over here by
the radar."
As they crossed the room, familiar faces smiled, and each man shook his
hand or touched his arm. He saw Sammy, alone, by the coffee urn. Sammy
waved to him, but he didn't smile. Phil wanted to talk to him, to say
something; but there was nothing to be said now. Sammy's turn would come
later.
"Mr. Secretary," the general said, "this is Colonel Conover. He'll be
the first man in history to see the other side of the Moon. Colonel—the
Secretary of Defense."
"How do you do, sir. I'm very proud to meet you," Phil said.
"On the contrary, colonel. I'm very proud to meet you. I've been looking
at that ship out there and wondering. I almost wish I were a young man
again. I'd like to be going. It's a thrilling thought—man's first
adventure into the universe. You're lighting a new dawn of history,
colonel. It's a privilege few men have ever had; and those who have had
it didn't realize it at the time. Good luck, and God be with you."
"Thank you, sir. I'm aware of all you say. It frightens me a little."
The general took Phil's arm and they walked to the briefing room. There
were chairs set up for the scientists and Air Force officers directly
connected with the take-off. They were seated now in a semicircle in
front of a huge chart of the solar system. Phil took his seat, and the
last minute briefing began. It was a routine he knew by heart. He had
gone over and over it a thousand times, and he only half listened now.
He kept thinking of Mary outside, alone by the fence.
The voice of the briefing officer was a dull hum in his ears.
"... And orbit at 18,000-mph. You will then accelerate for the breakaway
to 24,900-mph for five minutes and then free-coast for 116 hours
until—"
Phil asked a few questions about weather and solar conditions. And then
the session was done. They rose and looked at each other, the same
unanswered questions on each man's face. There were forced smiles and
handshakes. They were ready now.
"Phil," the general said, and took him aside.
"Sir?"
"Phil, you're ... you feel all right, don't you, son?"
"Yes, sir. I feel fine. Why?"
"Phil, I've spent nearly every day with you for three years. I know you
better than I know myself in many ways. And I've studied the
psychologist's reports on you carefully. Maybe it's just nervousness,
Phil, but I think there's something wrong. Is there?"
"No, sir. There's nothing wrong," Phil said, but his voice didn't carry
conviction. He reached for a cigarette.
"Phil, if there is anything—anything at all—you know what it might
mean. You've got to be in the best mental and physical condition of your
life tonight. You know better than any man here what that means to our
success. I think there is something more than just natural apprehension
wrong with you. Want to tell me?"
Outside, the take-off zone crawled with men and machines at the base of
the rocket. For ten hours, the final check-outs had been in progress;
and now the men were checking again, on their own time. The thing they
had worked toward for six years was ready to happen, and each one felt
that he was sending just a little bit of himself into the sky. Beyond
the ring of lights and moving men, on the edge of the field, Mary stood.
Her hands moved slowly over the top of the fence, twisting the barbs of
wire. But her eyes were on the ship.
And then they were ready. A small group of excited men came out from the
administration building and moved forward. The check-out crews climbed
into their machines and drove back outside the take-off zone. And,
alone, one man climbed the steel ladder up the side of the
rocket—ninety feet into the air. At the top he waved to the men on the
ground and then disappeared through a small port.
Mary waved to him. "Good-by," she said to herself, but the words stuck
tight in her throat.
The small group at the base of the ship turned and walked back to the
fence. And for an eternity the great ship stood alone, waiting. Then,
from deep inside, a rumble came, increasing in volume to a gigantic roar
that shook the earth and tore at the ears. Slowly, the first manned
rocket to the Moon lifted up and up to the sky.
For a long time after the rocket had become a tiny speck of light in the
heavens, she stood holding her face in her hands and crying softly to
herself. And then she felt the touch of a hand on her arm. She turned.
"Phil! Oh, Phil." She held tightly to him and repeated his name over and
over.
"They wouldn't let me go, Mary," he said finally. "The general would not
let me go."
She looked at him. His face was drawn tight, and there were tears on his
cheeks. "Thank, God," she said. "It doesn't matter, darling. The only
thing that matters is you didn't go."
"You're right, Mary," he said. His voice was low—so low she could
hardly hear him. "It doesn't matter. Nothing matters now." He stood with
his hands at his sides, watching her. And then turned away and walked
toward the car.
THE END | [
"He is nervous about the mission but hopeful that it will be a success and he could return home.",
"He is uncertain if he is the right person to go on this mission.",
"He is upset by the way Mary stifles his hopes.",
"He is too excited about fulfilling his dream that he ignores everything else going on around him."
] | 2 |
23592_UIJQGZDK_3 | Why does Mary ask Phil to go to the rocket as soon as they can see it? | Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science
Fiction December 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence
that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
BREAKAWAY
BY STANLEY GIMBLE
Illustrated by Freas
She surely got her wish ... but there was some question about getting
what she wanted.
Phil Conover pulled the zipper of his flight suit up the front of his
long, thin body and came into the living room. His face, usually serious
and quietly handsome, had an alive, excited look. And the faint lines
around his dark, deep-set eyes were accentuated when he smiled at his
wife.
"All set, honey. How do I look in my monkey suit?"
His wife was sitting stiffly on the flowered couch that was still not
theirs completely. In her fingers she held a cigarette burned down too
far. She said, "You look fine, Phil. You look just right." She managed a
smile. Then she leaned forward and crushed the cigarette in the ash
tray on the maple coffee table and took another from the pack.
He came to her and touched his hands to her soft blond hair, raising her
face until she was looking into his eyes. "You're the most beautiful
girl I know. Did I ever tell you that?"
"Yes, I think so. Yes, I'm sure you did," she said, finishing the
ritual; but her voice broke, and she turned her head away. Phil sat
beside her and put his arm around her small shoulders. He had stopped
smiling.
"Honey, look at me," he said. "It isn't going to be bad. Honestly it
isn't. We know exactly how it will be. If anything could go wrong, they
wouldn't be sending me; you know that. I told you that we've sent five
un-manned ships up and everyone came back without a hitch."
She turned, facing him. There were tears starting in the corners of her
wide, brown eyes, and she brushed them away with her hand.
"Phil, don't go. Please don't. They can send Sammy. Sammy doesn't have a
wife. Can't he go? They'd understand, Phil. Please!" She was holding his
arms tightly with her hands, and the color had drained from her cheeks.
"Mary, you know I can't back out now. How could I? It's been three
years. You know how much I've wanted to be the first man to go. Nothing
would ever be right with me again if I didn't go. Please don't make it
hard." He stopped talking and held her to him and stroked the back of
her head. He could feel her shoulders shaking with quiet sobs. He
released her and stood up.
"I've got to get started, Mary. Will you come to the field with me?"
"Yes, I'll come to say good-by." She paused and dropped her eyes. "Phil,
if you go, I won't be here when you get back—if you get back. I won't
be here because I won't be the wife of a space pilot for the rest of my
life. It isn't the kind of life I bargained for. No matter how much I
love you, I just couldn't take that, Phil. I'm sorry. I guess I'm not
the noble sort of wife."
She finished and took another cigarette from the pack on the coffee
table and put it to her lips. Her hand was trembling as she touched the
lighter to the end of the cigarette and drew deeply. Phil stood watching
her, the excitement completely gone from his eyes.
"I wish you had told me this a long time ago, Mary," Phil said. His
voice was dry and low. "I didn't know you felt this way about it."
"Yes, you did. I told you how I felt. I told you I could never be the
wife of a space pilot. But I don't think I ever really believed it was
possible—not until this morning when you said tonight was the take-off.
It's so stupid to jeopardize everything we've got for a ridiculous
dream!"
He sat down on the edge of the couch and took her hands between his.
"Mary, listen to me," he said. "It isn't a dream. It's real. There's
nothing means anything more to me than you do—you know that. But no
man ever had the chance to do what I'm going to do tonight—no man ever.
If I backed out now for any reason, I'd never be able to look at the sky
again. I'd be through."
She looked at him without seeing him, and there was nothing at all in
her eyes.
"Let's go, if you're still going," she finally said.
They drove through the streets of the small town with its small
bungalows, each alike. There were no trees and very little grass. It was
a new town, a government built town, and it had no personality yet. It
existed only because of the huge ship standing poised in the take-off
zone five miles away in the desert. Its future as a town rested with the
ship, and the town seemed to feel the uncertainty of its future, seemed
ready to stop existing as a town and to give itself back to the desert,
if such was its destiny.
Phil turned the car off the highway onto the rutted dirt road that led
across the sand to the field where the ship waited. In the distance they
could see the beams of the searchlights as they played across the
take-off zone and swept along the top of the high wire fence stretching
out of sight to right and left. At the gate they were stopped by the
guard. He read Phil's pass, shined his flashlight in their faces, and
then saluted. "Good luck, colonel," he said, and shook Phil's hand.
"Thanks, sergeant. I'll be seeing you next week," Phil said, and smiled.
They drove between the rows of wooden buildings that lined the field,
and he parked near the low barbed fence ringing the take-off zone. He
turned off the ignition, and sat quietly for a moment before lighting a
cigarette. Then he looked at his wife. She was staring through the
windshield at the rocket two hundred yards away. Its smooth polished
surface gleamed in the spotlight glare, and it sloped up and up until
the eye lost the tip against the stars.
"She's beautiful, Mary. You've never seen her before, have you?"
"No, I've never seen her before," she said. "Hadn't you better go?" Her
voice was strained and she held her hands closed tightly in her lap.
"Please go now, Phil," she said.
He leaned toward her and touched her cheek. Then she was in his arms,
her head buried against his shoulder.
"Good-by, darling," she said.
"Wish me luck, Mary?" he asked.
"Yes, good luck, Phil," she said. He opened the car door and got out.
The noise of men and machines scurrying around the ship broke the spell
of the rocket waiting silently for flight.
"Mary, I—" he began, and then turned and strode toward the
administration building without looking back.
Inside the building it was like a locker room before the big game. The
tension stood alone, and each man had the same happy, excited look that
Phil had worn earlier. When he came into the room, the noise and bustle
stopped. They turned as one man toward him, and General Small came up to
him and took his hand.
"Hello, Phil. We were beginning to think you weren't coming. You all
set, son?"
"Yes, sir, I'm all set, I guess," Phil said.
"I'd like you to meet the Secretary of Defense, Phil. He's over here by
the radar."
As they crossed the room, familiar faces smiled, and each man shook his
hand or touched his arm. He saw Sammy, alone, by the coffee urn. Sammy
waved to him, but he didn't smile. Phil wanted to talk to him, to say
something; but there was nothing to be said now. Sammy's turn would come
later.
"Mr. Secretary," the general said, "this is Colonel Conover. He'll be
the first man in history to see the other side of the Moon. Colonel—the
Secretary of Defense."
"How do you do, sir. I'm very proud to meet you," Phil said.
"On the contrary, colonel. I'm very proud to meet you. I've been looking
at that ship out there and wondering. I almost wish I were a young man
again. I'd like to be going. It's a thrilling thought—man's first
adventure into the universe. You're lighting a new dawn of history,
colonel. It's a privilege few men have ever had; and those who have had
it didn't realize it at the time. Good luck, and God be with you."
"Thank you, sir. I'm aware of all you say. It frightens me a little."
The general took Phil's arm and they walked to the briefing room. There
were chairs set up for the scientists and Air Force officers directly
connected with the take-off. They were seated now in a semicircle in
front of a huge chart of the solar system. Phil took his seat, and the
last minute briefing began. It was a routine he knew by heart. He had
gone over and over it a thousand times, and he only half listened now.
He kept thinking of Mary outside, alone by the fence.
The voice of the briefing officer was a dull hum in his ears.
"... And orbit at 18,000-mph. You will then accelerate for the breakaway
to 24,900-mph for five minutes and then free-coast for 116 hours
until—"
Phil asked a few questions about weather and solar conditions. And then
the session was done. They rose and looked at each other, the same
unanswered questions on each man's face. There were forced smiles and
handshakes. They were ready now.
"Phil," the general said, and took him aside.
"Sir?"
"Phil, you're ... you feel all right, don't you, son?"
"Yes, sir. I feel fine. Why?"
"Phil, I've spent nearly every day with you for three years. I know you
better than I know myself in many ways. And I've studied the
psychologist's reports on you carefully. Maybe it's just nervousness,
Phil, but I think there's something wrong. Is there?"
"No, sir. There's nothing wrong," Phil said, but his voice didn't carry
conviction. He reached for a cigarette.
"Phil, if there is anything—anything at all—you know what it might
mean. You've got to be in the best mental and physical condition of your
life tonight. You know better than any man here what that means to our
success. I think there is something more than just natural apprehension
wrong with you. Want to tell me?"
Outside, the take-off zone crawled with men and machines at the base of
the rocket. For ten hours, the final check-outs had been in progress;
and now the men were checking again, on their own time. The thing they
had worked toward for six years was ready to happen, and each one felt
that he was sending just a little bit of himself into the sky. Beyond
the ring of lights and moving men, on the edge of the field, Mary stood.
Her hands moved slowly over the top of the fence, twisting the barbs of
wire. But her eyes were on the ship.
And then they were ready. A small group of excited men came out from the
administration building and moved forward. The check-out crews climbed
into their machines and drove back outside the take-off zone. And,
alone, one man climbed the steel ladder up the side of the
rocket—ninety feet into the air. At the top he waved to the men on the
ground and then disappeared through a small port.
Mary waved to him. "Good-by," she said to herself, but the words stuck
tight in her throat.
The small group at the base of the ship turned and walked back to the
fence. And for an eternity the great ship stood alone, waiting. Then,
from deep inside, a rumble came, increasing in volume to a gigantic roar
that shook the earth and tore at the ears. Slowly, the first manned
rocket to the Moon lifted up and up to the sky.
For a long time after the rocket had become a tiny speck of light in the
heavens, she stood holding her face in her hands and crying softly to
herself. And then she felt the touch of a hand on her arm. She turned.
"Phil! Oh, Phil." She held tightly to him and repeated his name over and
over.
"They wouldn't let me go, Mary," he said finally. "The general would not
let me go."
She looked at him. His face was drawn tight, and there were tears on his
cheeks. "Thank, God," she said. "It doesn't matter, darling. The only
thing that matters is you didn't go."
"You're right, Mary," he said. His voice was low—so low she could
hardly hear him. "It doesn't matter. Nothing matters now." He stood with
his hands at his sides, watching her. And then turned away and walked
toward the car.
THE END | [
"She was not allowed to stay there, as a civilian, so she had to leave.",
"She did not want him to be late for his very important mission.",
"She needed to drop them off so she could leave.",
"She did not want to prolong the painful goodbye."
] | 3 |
23592_UIJQGZDK_4 | What do you think life is like for Mary and Phil after the events of the story? | Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science
Fiction December 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence
that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
BREAKAWAY
BY STANLEY GIMBLE
Illustrated by Freas
She surely got her wish ... but there was some question about getting
what she wanted.
Phil Conover pulled the zipper of his flight suit up the front of his
long, thin body and came into the living room. His face, usually serious
and quietly handsome, had an alive, excited look. And the faint lines
around his dark, deep-set eyes were accentuated when he smiled at his
wife.
"All set, honey. How do I look in my monkey suit?"
His wife was sitting stiffly on the flowered couch that was still not
theirs completely. In her fingers she held a cigarette burned down too
far. She said, "You look fine, Phil. You look just right." She managed a
smile. Then she leaned forward and crushed the cigarette in the ash
tray on the maple coffee table and took another from the pack.
He came to her and touched his hands to her soft blond hair, raising her
face until she was looking into his eyes. "You're the most beautiful
girl I know. Did I ever tell you that?"
"Yes, I think so. Yes, I'm sure you did," she said, finishing the
ritual; but her voice broke, and she turned her head away. Phil sat
beside her and put his arm around her small shoulders. He had stopped
smiling.
"Honey, look at me," he said. "It isn't going to be bad. Honestly it
isn't. We know exactly how it will be. If anything could go wrong, they
wouldn't be sending me; you know that. I told you that we've sent five
un-manned ships up and everyone came back without a hitch."
She turned, facing him. There were tears starting in the corners of her
wide, brown eyes, and she brushed them away with her hand.
"Phil, don't go. Please don't. They can send Sammy. Sammy doesn't have a
wife. Can't he go? They'd understand, Phil. Please!" She was holding his
arms tightly with her hands, and the color had drained from her cheeks.
"Mary, you know I can't back out now. How could I? It's been three
years. You know how much I've wanted to be the first man to go. Nothing
would ever be right with me again if I didn't go. Please don't make it
hard." He stopped talking and held her to him and stroked the back of
her head. He could feel her shoulders shaking with quiet sobs. He
released her and stood up.
"I've got to get started, Mary. Will you come to the field with me?"
"Yes, I'll come to say good-by." She paused and dropped her eyes. "Phil,
if you go, I won't be here when you get back—if you get back. I won't
be here because I won't be the wife of a space pilot for the rest of my
life. It isn't the kind of life I bargained for. No matter how much I
love you, I just couldn't take that, Phil. I'm sorry. I guess I'm not
the noble sort of wife."
She finished and took another cigarette from the pack on the coffee
table and put it to her lips. Her hand was trembling as she touched the
lighter to the end of the cigarette and drew deeply. Phil stood watching
her, the excitement completely gone from his eyes.
"I wish you had told me this a long time ago, Mary," Phil said. His
voice was dry and low. "I didn't know you felt this way about it."
"Yes, you did. I told you how I felt. I told you I could never be the
wife of a space pilot. But I don't think I ever really believed it was
possible—not until this morning when you said tonight was the take-off.
It's so stupid to jeopardize everything we've got for a ridiculous
dream!"
He sat down on the edge of the couch and took her hands between his.
"Mary, listen to me," he said. "It isn't a dream. It's real. There's
nothing means anything more to me than you do—you know that. But no
man ever had the chance to do what I'm going to do tonight—no man ever.
If I backed out now for any reason, I'd never be able to look at the sky
again. I'd be through."
She looked at him without seeing him, and there was nothing at all in
her eyes.
"Let's go, if you're still going," she finally said.
They drove through the streets of the small town with its small
bungalows, each alike. There were no trees and very little grass. It was
a new town, a government built town, and it had no personality yet. It
existed only because of the huge ship standing poised in the take-off
zone five miles away in the desert. Its future as a town rested with the
ship, and the town seemed to feel the uncertainty of its future, seemed
ready to stop existing as a town and to give itself back to the desert,
if such was its destiny.
Phil turned the car off the highway onto the rutted dirt road that led
across the sand to the field where the ship waited. In the distance they
could see the beams of the searchlights as they played across the
take-off zone and swept along the top of the high wire fence stretching
out of sight to right and left. At the gate they were stopped by the
guard. He read Phil's pass, shined his flashlight in their faces, and
then saluted. "Good luck, colonel," he said, and shook Phil's hand.
"Thanks, sergeant. I'll be seeing you next week," Phil said, and smiled.
They drove between the rows of wooden buildings that lined the field,
and he parked near the low barbed fence ringing the take-off zone. He
turned off the ignition, and sat quietly for a moment before lighting a
cigarette. Then he looked at his wife. She was staring through the
windshield at the rocket two hundred yards away. Its smooth polished
surface gleamed in the spotlight glare, and it sloped up and up until
the eye lost the tip against the stars.
"She's beautiful, Mary. You've never seen her before, have you?"
"No, I've never seen her before," she said. "Hadn't you better go?" Her
voice was strained and she held her hands closed tightly in her lap.
"Please go now, Phil," she said.
He leaned toward her and touched her cheek. Then she was in his arms,
her head buried against his shoulder.
"Good-by, darling," she said.
"Wish me luck, Mary?" he asked.
"Yes, good luck, Phil," she said. He opened the car door and got out.
The noise of men and machines scurrying around the ship broke the spell
of the rocket waiting silently for flight.
"Mary, I—" he began, and then turned and strode toward the
administration building without looking back.
Inside the building it was like a locker room before the big game. The
tension stood alone, and each man had the same happy, excited look that
Phil had worn earlier. When he came into the room, the noise and bustle
stopped. They turned as one man toward him, and General Small came up to
him and took his hand.
"Hello, Phil. We were beginning to think you weren't coming. You all
set, son?"
"Yes, sir, I'm all set, I guess," Phil said.
"I'd like you to meet the Secretary of Defense, Phil. He's over here by
the radar."
As they crossed the room, familiar faces smiled, and each man shook his
hand or touched his arm. He saw Sammy, alone, by the coffee urn. Sammy
waved to him, but he didn't smile. Phil wanted to talk to him, to say
something; but there was nothing to be said now. Sammy's turn would come
later.
"Mr. Secretary," the general said, "this is Colonel Conover. He'll be
the first man in history to see the other side of the Moon. Colonel—the
Secretary of Defense."
"How do you do, sir. I'm very proud to meet you," Phil said.
"On the contrary, colonel. I'm very proud to meet you. I've been looking
at that ship out there and wondering. I almost wish I were a young man
again. I'd like to be going. It's a thrilling thought—man's first
adventure into the universe. You're lighting a new dawn of history,
colonel. It's a privilege few men have ever had; and those who have had
it didn't realize it at the time. Good luck, and God be with you."
"Thank you, sir. I'm aware of all you say. It frightens me a little."
The general took Phil's arm and they walked to the briefing room. There
were chairs set up for the scientists and Air Force officers directly
connected with the take-off. They were seated now in a semicircle in
front of a huge chart of the solar system. Phil took his seat, and the
last minute briefing began. It was a routine he knew by heart. He had
gone over and over it a thousand times, and he only half listened now.
He kept thinking of Mary outside, alone by the fence.
The voice of the briefing officer was a dull hum in his ears.
"... And orbit at 18,000-mph. You will then accelerate for the breakaway
to 24,900-mph for five minutes and then free-coast for 116 hours
until—"
Phil asked a few questions about weather and solar conditions. And then
the session was done. They rose and looked at each other, the same
unanswered questions on each man's face. There were forced smiles and
handshakes. They were ready now.
"Phil," the general said, and took him aside.
"Sir?"
"Phil, you're ... you feel all right, don't you, son?"
"Yes, sir. I feel fine. Why?"
"Phil, I've spent nearly every day with you for three years. I know you
better than I know myself in many ways. And I've studied the
psychologist's reports on you carefully. Maybe it's just nervousness,
Phil, but I think there's something wrong. Is there?"
"No, sir. There's nothing wrong," Phil said, but his voice didn't carry
conviction. He reached for a cigarette.
"Phil, if there is anything—anything at all—you know what it might
mean. You've got to be in the best mental and physical condition of your
life tonight. You know better than any man here what that means to our
success. I think there is something more than just natural apprehension
wrong with you. Want to tell me?"
Outside, the take-off zone crawled with men and machines at the base of
the rocket. For ten hours, the final check-outs had been in progress;
and now the men were checking again, on their own time. The thing they
had worked toward for six years was ready to happen, and each one felt
that he was sending just a little bit of himself into the sky. Beyond
the ring of lights and moving men, on the edge of the field, Mary stood.
Her hands moved slowly over the top of the fence, twisting the barbs of
wire. But her eyes were on the ship.
And then they were ready. A small group of excited men came out from the
administration building and moved forward. The check-out crews climbed
into their machines and drove back outside the take-off zone. And,
alone, one man climbed the steel ladder up the side of the
rocket—ninety feet into the air. At the top he waved to the men on the
ground and then disappeared through a small port.
Mary waved to him. "Good-by," she said to herself, but the words stuck
tight in her throat.
The small group at the base of the ship turned and walked back to the
fence. And for an eternity the great ship stood alone, waiting. Then,
from deep inside, a rumble came, increasing in volume to a gigantic roar
that shook the earth and tore at the ears. Slowly, the first manned
rocket to the Moon lifted up and up to the sky.
For a long time after the rocket had become a tiny speck of light in the
heavens, she stood holding her face in her hands and crying softly to
herself. And then she felt the touch of a hand on her arm. She turned.
"Phil! Oh, Phil." She held tightly to him and repeated his name over and
over.
"They wouldn't let me go, Mary," he said finally. "The general would not
let me go."
She looked at him. His face was drawn tight, and there were tears on his
cheeks. "Thank, God," she said. "It doesn't matter, darling. The only
thing that matters is you didn't go."
"You're right, Mary," he said. His voice was low—so low she could
hardly hear him. "It doesn't matter. Nothing matters now." He stood with
his hands at his sides, watching her. And then turned away and walked
toward the car.
THE END | [
"Mary is thankful that Phil did not leave, and their lives continue as normal.",
"They become closer friends with Sammy who is thankful to have gone on the mission.",
"Phil closes himself off, resenting Mary for forcing his hand.",
"Mary helps Phil find another mission closer to home."
] | 2 |
23592_UIJQGZDK_5 | What prompted the general to take Phil off of the mission? | Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science
Fiction December 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence
that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
BREAKAWAY
BY STANLEY GIMBLE
Illustrated by Freas
She surely got her wish ... but there was some question about getting
what she wanted.
Phil Conover pulled the zipper of his flight suit up the front of his
long, thin body and came into the living room. His face, usually serious
and quietly handsome, had an alive, excited look. And the faint lines
around his dark, deep-set eyes were accentuated when he smiled at his
wife.
"All set, honey. How do I look in my monkey suit?"
His wife was sitting stiffly on the flowered couch that was still not
theirs completely. In her fingers she held a cigarette burned down too
far. She said, "You look fine, Phil. You look just right." She managed a
smile. Then she leaned forward and crushed the cigarette in the ash
tray on the maple coffee table and took another from the pack.
He came to her and touched his hands to her soft blond hair, raising her
face until she was looking into his eyes. "You're the most beautiful
girl I know. Did I ever tell you that?"
"Yes, I think so. Yes, I'm sure you did," she said, finishing the
ritual; but her voice broke, and she turned her head away. Phil sat
beside her and put his arm around her small shoulders. He had stopped
smiling.
"Honey, look at me," he said. "It isn't going to be bad. Honestly it
isn't. We know exactly how it will be. If anything could go wrong, they
wouldn't be sending me; you know that. I told you that we've sent five
un-manned ships up and everyone came back without a hitch."
She turned, facing him. There were tears starting in the corners of her
wide, brown eyes, and she brushed them away with her hand.
"Phil, don't go. Please don't. They can send Sammy. Sammy doesn't have a
wife. Can't he go? They'd understand, Phil. Please!" She was holding his
arms tightly with her hands, and the color had drained from her cheeks.
"Mary, you know I can't back out now. How could I? It's been three
years. You know how much I've wanted to be the first man to go. Nothing
would ever be right with me again if I didn't go. Please don't make it
hard." He stopped talking and held her to him and stroked the back of
her head. He could feel her shoulders shaking with quiet sobs. He
released her and stood up.
"I've got to get started, Mary. Will you come to the field with me?"
"Yes, I'll come to say good-by." She paused and dropped her eyes. "Phil,
if you go, I won't be here when you get back—if you get back. I won't
be here because I won't be the wife of a space pilot for the rest of my
life. It isn't the kind of life I bargained for. No matter how much I
love you, I just couldn't take that, Phil. I'm sorry. I guess I'm not
the noble sort of wife."
She finished and took another cigarette from the pack on the coffee
table and put it to her lips. Her hand was trembling as she touched the
lighter to the end of the cigarette and drew deeply. Phil stood watching
her, the excitement completely gone from his eyes.
"I wish you had told me this a long time ago, Mary," Phil said. His
voice was dry and low. "I didn't know you felt this way about it."
"Yes, you did. I told you how I felt. I told you I could never be the
wife of a space pilot. But I don't think I ever really believed it was
possible—not until this morning when you said tonight was the take-off.
It's so stupid to jeopardize everything we've got for a ridiculous
dream!"
He sat down on the edge of the couch and took her hands between his.
"Mary, listen to me," he said. "It isn't a dream. It's real. There's
nothing means anything more to me than you do—you know that. But no
man ever had the chance to do what I'm going to do tonight—no man ever.
If I backed out now for any reason, I'd never be able to look at the sky
again. I'd be through."
She looked at him without seeing him, and there was nothing at all in
her eyes.
"Let's go, if you're still going," she finally said.
They drove through the streets of the small town with its small
bungalows, each alike. There were no trees and very little grass. It was
a new town, a government built town, and it had no personality yet. It
existed only because of the huge ship standing poised in the take-off
zone five miles away in the desert. Its future as a town rested with the
ship, and the town seemed to feel the uncertainty of its future, seemed
ready to stop existing as a town and to give itself back to the desert,
if such was its destiny.
Phil turned the car off the highway onto the rutted dirt road that led
across the sand to the field where the ship waited. In the distance they
could see the beams of the searchlights as they played across the
take-off zone and swept along the top of the high wire fence stretching
out of sight to right and left. At the gate they were stopped by the
guard. He read Phil's pass, shined his flashlight in their faces, and
then saluted. "Good luck, colonel," he said, and shook Phil's hand.
"Thanks, sergeant. I'll be seeing you next week," Phil said, and smiled.
They drove between the rows of wooden buildings that lined the field,
and he parked near the low barbed fence ringing the take-off zone. He
turned off the ignition, and sat quietly for a moment before lighting a
cigarette. Then he looked at his wife. She was staring through the
windshield at the rocket two hundred yards away. Its smooth polished
surface gleamed in the spotlight glare, and it sloped up and up until
the eye lost the tip against the stars.
"She's beautiful, Mary. You've never seen her before, have you?"
"No, I've never seen her before," she said. "Hadn't you better go?" Her
voice was strained and she held her hands closed tightly in her lap.
"Please go now, Phil," she said.
He leaned toward her and touched her cheek. Then she was in his arms,
her head buried against his shoulder.
"Good-by, darling," she said.
"Wish me luck, Mary?" he asked.
"Yes, good luck, Phil," she said. He opened the car door and got out.
The noise of men and machines scurrying around the ship broke the spell
of the rocket waiting silently for flight.
"Mary, I—" he began, and then turned and strode toward the
administration building without looking back.
Inside the building it was like a locker room before the big game. The
tension stood alone, and each man had the same happy, excited look that
Phil had worn earlier. When he came into the room, the noise and bustle
stopped. They turned as one man toward him, and General Small came up to
him and took his hand.
"Hello, Phil. We were beginning to think you weren't coming. You all
set, son?"
"Yes, sir, I'm all set, I guess," Phil said.
"I'd like you to meet the Secretary of Defense, Phil. He's over here by
the radar."
As they crossed the room, familiar faces smiled, and each man shook his
hand or touched his arm. He saw Sammy, alone, by the coffee urn. Sammy
waved to him, but he didn't smile. Phil wanted to talk to him, to say
something; but there was nothing to be said now. Sammy's turn would come
later.
"Mr. Secretary," the general said, "this is Colonel Conover. He'll be
the first man in history to see the other side of the Moon. Colonel—the
Secretary of Defense."
"How do you do, sir. I'm very proud to meet you," Phil said.
"On the contrary, colonel. I'm very proud to meet you. I've been looking
at that ship out there and wondering. I almost wish I were a young man
again. I'd like to be going. It's a thrilling thought—man's first
adventure into the universe. You're lighting a new dawn of history,
colonel. It's a privilege few men have ever had; and those who have had
it didn't realize it at the time. Good luck, and God be with you."
"Thank you, sir. I'm aware of all you say. It frightens me a little."
The general took Phil's arm and they walked to the briefing room. There
were chairs set up for the scientists and Air Force officers directly
connected with the take-off. They were seated now in a semicircle in
front of a huge chart of the solar system. Phil took his seat, and the
last minute briefing began. It was a routine he knew by heart. He had
gone over and over it a thousand times, and he only half listened now.
He kept thinking of Mary outside, alone by the fence.
The voice of the briefing officer was a dull hum in his ears.
"... And orbit at 18,000-mph. You will then accelerate for the breakaway
to 24,900-mph for five minutes and then free-coast for 116 hours
until—"
Phil asked a few questions about weather and solar conditions. And then
the session was done. They rose and looked at each other, the same
unanswered questions on each man's face. There were forced smiles and
handshakes. They were ready now.
"Phil," the general said, and took him aside.
"Sir?"
"Phil, you're ... you feel all right, don't you, son?"
"Yes, sir. I feel fine. Why?"
"Phil, I've spent nearly every day with you for three years. I know you
better than I know myself in many ways. And I've studied the
psychologist's reports on you carefully. Maybe it's just nervousness,
Phil, but I think there's something wrong. Is there?"
"No, sir. There's nothing wrong," Phil said, but his voice didn't carry
conviction. He reached for a cigarette.
"Phil, if there is anything—anything at all—you know what it might
mean. You've got to be in the best mental and physical condition of your
life tonight. You know better than any man here what that means to our
success. I think there is something more than just natural apprehension
wrong with you. Want to tell me?"
Outside, the take-off zone crawled with men and machines at the base of
the rocket. For ten hours, the final check-outs had been in progress;
and now the men were checking again, on their own time. The thing they
had worked toward for six years was ready to happen, and each one felt
that he was sending just a little bit of himself into the sky. Beyond
the ring of lights and moving men, on the edge of the field, Mary stood.
Her hands moved slowly over the top of the fence, twisting the barbs of
wire. But her eyes were on the ship.
And then they were ready. A small group of excited men came out from the
administration building and moved forward. The check-out crews climbed
into their machines and drove back outside the take-off zone. And,
alone, one man climbed the steel ladder up the side of the
rocket—ninety feet into the air. At the top he waved to the men on the
ground and then disappeared through a small port.
Mary waved to him. "Good-by," she said to herself, but the words stuck
tight in her throat.
The small group at the base of the ship turned and walked back to the
fence. And for an eternity the great ship stood alone, waiting. Then,
from deep inside, a rumble came, increasing in volume to a gigantic roar
that shook the earth and tore at the ears. Slowly, the first manned
rocket to the Moon lifted up and up to the sky.
For a long time after the rocket had become a tiny speck of light in the
heavens, she stood holding her face in her hands and crying softly to
herself. And then she felt the touch of a hand on her arm. She turned.
"Phil! Oh, Phil." She held tightly to him and repeated his name over and
over.
"They wouldn't let me go, Mary," he said finally. "The general would not
let me go."
She looked at him. His face was drawn tight, and there were tears on his
cheeks. "Thank, God," she said. "It doesn't matter, darling. The only
thing that matters is you didn't go."
"You're right, Mary," he said. His voice was low—so low she could
hardly hear him. "It doesn't matter. Nothing matters now." He stood with
his hands at his sides, watching her. And then turned away and walked
toward the car.
THE END | [
"Phil was too torn about his disagreement with his wife to be in the right headspace.",
"Phil had expressed concerns about the safety of the mission compared to the unmanned missions.",
"Phil's hands were shaking, so he could not safely operate the controls.",
"Phil was too nervous and was not thinking straight."
] | 0 |
23592_UIJQGZDK_6 | Which of these is a reason that Mary would have wanted Sammy to replace Phil? | Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science
Fiction December 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence
that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
BREAKAWAY
BY STANLEY GIMBLE
Illustrated by Freas
She surely got her wish ... but there was some question about getting
what she wanted.
Phil Conover pulled the zipper of his flight suit up the front of his
long, thin body and came into the living room. His face, usually serious
and quietly handsome, had an alive, excited look. And the faint lines
around his dark, deep-set eyes were accentuated when he smiled at his
wife.
"All set, honey. How do I look in my monkey suit?"
His wife was sitting stiffly on the flowered couch that was still not
theirs completely. In her fingers she held a cigarette burned down too
far. She said, "You look fine, Phil. You look just right." She managed a
smile. Then she leaned forward and crushed the cigarette in the ash
tray on the maple coffee table and took another from the pack.
He came to her and touched his hands to her soft blond hair, raising her
face until she was looking into his eyes. "You're the most beautiful
girl I know. Did I ever tell you that?"
"Yes, I think so. Yes, I'm sure you did," she said, finishing the
ritual; but her voice broke, and she turned her head away. Phil sat
beside her and put his arm around her small shoulders. He had stopped
smiling.
"Honey, look at me," he said. "It isn't going to be bad. Honestly it
isn't. We know exactly how it will be. If anything could go wrong, they
wouldn't be sending me; you know that. I told you that we've sent five
un-manned ships up and everyone came back without a hitch."
She turned, facing him. There were tears starting in the corners of her
wide, brown eyes, and she brushed them away with her hand.
"Phil, don't go. Please don't. They can send Sammy. Sammy doesn't have a
wife. Can't he go? They'd understand, Phil. Please!" She was holding his
arms tightly with her hands, and the color had drained from her cheeks.
"Mary, you know I can't back out now. How could I? It's been three
years. You know how much I've wanted to be the first man to go. Nothing
would ever be right with me again if I didn't go. Please don't make it
hard." He stopped talking and held her to him and stroked the back of
her head. He could feel her shoulders shaking with quiet sobs. He
released her and stood up.
"I've got to get started, Mary. Will you come to the field with me?"
"Yes, I'll come to say good-by." She paused and dropped her eyes. "Phil,
if you go, I won't be here when you get back—if you get back. I won't
be here because I won't be the wife of a space pilot for the rest of my
life. It isn't the kind of life I bargained for. No matter how much I
love you, I just couldn't take that, Phil. I'm sorry. I guess I'm not
the noble sort of wife."
She finished and took another cigarette from the pack on the coffee
table and put it to her lips. Her hand was trembling as she touched the
lighter to the end of the cigarette and drew deeply. Phil stood watching
her, the excitement completely gone from his eyes.
"I wish you had told me this a long time ago, Mary," Phil said. His
voice was dry and low. "I didn't know you felt this way about it."
"Yes, you did. I told you how I felt. I told you I could never be the
wife of a space pilot. But I don't think I ever really believed it was
possible—not until this morning when you said tonight was the take-off.
It's so stupid to jeopardize everything we've got for a ridiculous
dream!"
He sat down on the edge of the couch and took her hands between his.
"Mary, listen to me," he said. "It isn't a dream. It's real. There's
nothing means anything more to me than you do—you know that. But no
man ever had the chance to do what I'm going to do tonight—no man ever.
If I backed out now for any reason, I'd never be able to look at the sky
again. I'd be through."
She looked at him without seeing him, and there was nothing at all in
her eyes.
"Let's go, if you're still going," she finally said.
They drove through the streets of the small town with its small
bungalows, each alike. There were no trees and very little grass. It was
a new town, a government built town, and it had no personality yet. It
existed only because of the huge ship standing poised in the take-off
zone five miles away in the desert. Its future as a town rested with the
ship, and the town seemed to feel the uncertainty of its future, seemed
ready to stop existing as a town and to give itself back to the desert,
if such was its destiny.
Phil turned the car off the highway onto the rutted dirt road that led
across the sand to the field where the ship waited. In the distance they
could see the beams of the searchlights as they played across the
take-off zone and swept along the top of the high wire fence stretching
out of sight to right and left. At the gate they were stopped by the
guard. He read Phil's pass, shined his flashlight in their faces, and
then saluted. "Good luck, colonel," he said, and shook Phil's hand.
"Thanks, sergeant. I'll be seeing you next week," Phil said, and smiled.
They drove between the rows of wooden buildings that lined the field,
and he parked near the low barbed fence ringing the take-off zone. He
turned off the ignition, and sat quietly for a moment before lighting a
cigarette. Then he looked at his wife. She was staring through the
windshield at the rocket two hundred yards away. Its smooth polished
surface gleamed in the spotlight glare, and it sloped up and up until
the eye lost the tip against the stars.
"She's beautiful, Mary. You've never seen her before, have you?"
"No, I've never seen her before," she said. "Hadn't you better go?" Her
voice was strained and she held her hands closed tightly in her lap.
"Please go now, Phil," she said.
He leaned toward her and touched her cheek. Then she was in his arms,
her head buried against his shoulder.
"Good-by, darling," she said.
"Wish me luck, Mary?" he asked.
"Yes, good luck, Phil," she said. He opened the car door and got out.
The noise of men and machines scurrying around the ship broke the spell
of the rocket waiting silently for flight.
"Mary, I—" he began, and then turned and strode toward the
administration building without looking back.
Inside the building it was like a locker room before the big game. The
tension stood alone, and each man had the same happy, excited look that
Phil had worn earlier. When he came into the room, the noise and bustle
stopped. They turned as one man toward him, and General Small came up to
him and took his hand.
"Hello, Phil. We were beginning to think you weren't coming. You all
set, son?"
"Yes, sir, I'm all set, I guess," Phil said.
"I'd like you to meet the Secretary of Defense, Phil. He's over here by
the radar."
As they crossed the room, familiar faces smiled, and each man shook his
hand or touched his arm. He saw Sammy, alone, by the coffee urn. Sammy
waved to him, but he didn't smile. Phil wanted to talk to him, to say
something; but there was nothing to be said now. Sammy's turn would come
later.
"Mr. Secretary," the general said, "this is Colonel Conover. He'll be
the first man in history to see the other side of the Moon. Colonel—the
Secretary of Defense."
"How do you do, sir. I'm very proud to meet you," Phil said.
"On the contrary, colonel. I'm very proud to meet you. I've been looking
at that ship out there and wondering. I almost wish I were a young man
again. I'd like to be going. It's a thrilling thought—man's first
adventure into the universe. You're lighting a new dawn of history,
colonel. It's a privilege few men have ever had; and those who have had
it didn't realize it at the time. Good luck, and God be with you."
"Thank you, sir. I'm aware of all you say. It frightens me a little."
The general took Phil's arm and they walked to the briefing room. There
were chairs set up for the scientists and Air Force officers directly
connected with the take-off. They were seated now in a semicircle in
front of a huge chart of the solar system. Phil took his seat, and the
last minute briefing began. It was a routine he knew by heart. He had
gone over and over it a thousand times, and he only half listened now.
He kept thinking of Mary outside, alone by the fence.
The voice of the briefing officer was a dull hum in his ears.
"... And orbit at 18,000-mph. You will then accelerate for the breakaway
to 24,900-mph for five minutes and then free-coast for 116 hours
until—"
Phil asked a few questions about weather and solar conditions. And then
the session was done. They rose and looked at each other, the same
unanswered questions on each man's face. There were forced smiles and
handshakes. They were ready now.
"Phil," the general said, and took him aside.
"Sir?"
"Phil, you're ... you feel all right, don't you, son?"
"Yes, sir. I feel fine. Why?"
"Phil, I've spent nearly every day with you for three years. I know you
better than I know myself in many ways. And I've studied the
psychologist's reports on you carefully. Maybe it's just nervousness,
Phil, but I think there's something wrong. Is there?"
"No, sir. There's nothing wrong," Phil said, but his voice didn't carry
conviction. He reached for a cigarette.
"Phil, if there is anything—anything at all—you know what it might
mean. You've got to be in the best mental and physical condition of your
life tonight. You know better than any man here what that means to our
success. I think there is something more than just natural apprehension
wrong with you. Want to tell me?"
Outside, the take-off zone crawled with men and machines at the base of
the rocket. For ten hours, the final check-outs had been in progress;
and now the men were checking again, on their own time. The thing they
had worked toward for six years was ready to happen, and each one felt
that he was sending just a little bit of himself into the sky. Beyond
the ring of lights and moving men, on the edge of the field, Mary stood.
Her hands moved slowly over the top of the fence, twisting the barbs of
wire. But her eyes were on the ship.
And then they were ready. A small group of excited men came out from the
administration building and moved forward. The check-out crews climbed
into their machines and drove back outside the take-off zone. And,
alone, one man climbed the steel ladder up the side of the
rocket—ninety feet into the air. At the top he waved to the men on the
ground and then disappeared through a small port.
Mary waved to him. "Good-by," she said to herself, but the words stuck
tight in her throat.
The small group at the base of the ship turned and walked back to the
fence. And for an eternity the great ship stood alone, waiting. Then,
from deep inside, a rumble came, increasing in volume to a gigantic roar
that shook the earth and tore at the ears. Slowly, the first manned
rocket to the Moon lifted up and up to the sky.
For a long time after the rocket had become a tiny speck of light in the
heavens, she stood holding her face in her hands and crying softly to
herself. And then she felt the touch of a hand on her arm. She turned.
"Phil! Oh, Phil." She held tightly to him and repeated his name over and
over.
"They wouldn't let me go, Mary," he said finally. "The general would not
let me go."
She looked at him. His face was drawn tight, and there were tears on his
cheeks. "Thank, God," she said. "It doesn't matter, darling. The only
thing that matters is you didn't go."
"You're right, Mary," he said. His voice was low—so low she could
hardly hear him. "It doesn't matter. Nothing matters now." He stood with
his hands at his sides, watching her. And then turned away and walked
toward the car.
THE END | [
"She knows that Sammy is more careful, and would have a greater chance at mission success.",
"She thought she could protect herself if someone else went.",
"She thought that Sammy was more qualified.",
"She thought but his lack of family showed his dedication to his job."
] | 1 |
23592_UIJQGZDK_7 | What were the unanswered questions that the men had after the weather briefing? | Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science
Fiction December 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence
that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
BREAKAWAY
BY STANLEY GIMBLE
Illustrated by Freas
She surely got her wish ... but there was some question about getting
what she wanted.
Phil Conover pulled the zipper of his flight suit up the front of his
long, thin body and came into the living room. His face, usually serious
and quietly handsome, had an alive, excited look. And the faint lines
around his dark, deep-set eyes were accentuated when he smiled at his
wife.
"All set, honey. How do I look in my monkey suit?"
His wife was sitting stiffly on the flowered couch that was still not
theirs completely. In her fingers she held a cigarette burned down too
far. She said, "You look fine, Phil. You look just right." She managed a
smile. Then she leaned forward and crushed the cigarette in the ash
tray on the maple coffee table and took another from the pack.
He came to her and touched his hands to her soft blond hair, raising her
face until she was looking into his eyes. "You're the most beautiful
girl I know. Did I ever tell you that?"
"Yes, I think so. Yes, I'm sure you did," she said, finishing the
ritual; but her voice broke, and she turned her head away. Phil sat
beside her and put his arm around her small shoulders. He had stopped
smiling.
"Honey, look at me," he said. "It isn't going to be bad. Honestly it
isn't. We know exactly how it will be. If anything could go wrong, they
wouldn't be sending me; you know that. I told you that we've sent five
un-manned ships up and everyone came back without a hitch."
She turned, facing him. There were tears starting in the corners of her
wide, brown eyes, and she brushed them away with her hand.
"Phil, don't go. Please don't. They can send Sammy. Sammy doesn't have a
wife. Can't he go? They'd understand, Phil. Please!" She was holding his
arms tightly with her hands, and the color had drained from her cheeks.
"Mary, you know I can't back out now. How could I? It's been three
years. You know how much I've wanted to be the first man to go. Nothing
would ever be right with me again if I didn't go. Please don't make it
hard." He stopped talking and held her to him and stroked the back of
her head. He could feel her shoulders shaking with quiet sobs. He
released her and stood up.
"I've got to get started, Mary. Will you come to the field with me?"
"Yes, I'll come to say good-by." She paused and dropped her eyes. "Phil,
if you go, I won't be here when you get back—if you get back. I won't
be here because I won't be the wife of a space pilot for the rest of my
life. It isn't the kind of life I bargained for. No matter how much I
love you, I just couldn't take that, Phil. I'm sorry. I guess I'm not
the noble sort of wife."
She finished and took another cigarette from the pack on the coffee
table and put it to her lips. Her hand was trembling as she touched the
lighter to the end of the cigarette and drew deeply. Phil stood watching
her, the excitement completely gone from his eyes.
"I wish you had told me this a long time ago, Mary," Phil said. His
voice was dry and low. "I didn't know you felt this way about it."
"Yes, you did. I told you how I felt. I told you I could never be the
wife of a space pilot. But I don't think I ever really believed it was
possible—not until this morning when you said tonight was the take-off.
It's so stupid to jeopardize everything we've got for a ridiculous
dream!"
He sat down on the edge of the couch and took her hands between his.
"Mary, listen to me," he said. "It isn't a dream. It's real. There's
nothing means anything more to me than you do—you know that. But no
man ever had the chance to do what I'm going to do tonight—no man ever.
If I backed out now for any reason, I'd never be able to look at the sky
again. I'd be through."
She looked at him without seeing him, and there was nothing at all in
her eyes.
"Let's go, if you're still going," she finally said.
They drove through the streets of the small town with its small
bungalows, each alike. There were no trees and very little grass. It was
a new town, a government built town, and it had no personality yet. It
existed only because of the huge ship standing poised in the take-off
zone five miles away in the desert. Its future as a town rested with the
ship, and the town seemed to feel the uncertainty of its future, seemed
ready to stop existing as a town and to give itself back to the desert,
if such was its destiny.
Phil turned the car off the highway onto the rutted dirt road that led
across the sand to the field where the ship waited. In the distance they
could see the beams of the searchlights as they played across the
take-off zone and swept along the top of the high wire fence stretching
out of sight to right and left. At the gate they were stopped by the
guard. He read Phil's pass, shined his flashlight in their faces, and
then saluted. "Good luck, colonel," he said, and shook Phil's hand.
"Thanks, sergeant. I'll be seeing you next week," Phil said, and smiled.
They drove between the rows of wooden buildings that lined the field,
and he parked near the low barbed fence ringing the take-off zone. He
turned off the ignition, and sat quietly for a moment before lighting a
cigarette. Then he looked at his wife. She was staring through the
windshield at the rocket two hundred yards away. Its smooth polished
surface gleamed in the spotlight glare, and it sloped up and up until
the eye lost the tip against the stars.
"She's beautiful, Mary. You've never seen her before, have you?"
"No, I've never seen her before," she said. "Hadn't you better go?" Her
voice was strained and she held her hands closed tightly in her lap.
"Please go now, Phil," she said.
He leaned toward her and touched her cheek. Then she was in his arms,
her head buried against his shoulder.
"Good-by, darling," she said.
"Wish me luck, Mary?" he asked.
"Yes, good luck, Phil," she said. He opened the car door and got out.
The noise of men and machines scurrying around the ship broke the spell
of the rocket waiting silently for flight.
"Mary, I—" he began, and then turned and strode toward the
administration building without looking back.
Inside the building it was like a locker room before the big game. The
tension stood alone, and each man had the same happy, excited look that
Phil had worn earlier. When he came into the room, the noise and bustle
stopped. They turned as one man toward him, and General Small came up to
him and took his hand.
"Hello, Phil. We were beginning to think you weren't coming. You all
set, son?"
"Yes, sir, I'm all set, I guess," Phil said.
"I'd like you to meet the Secretary of Defense, Phil. He's over here by
the radar."
As they crossed the room, familiar faces smiled, and each man shook his
hand or touched his arm. He saw Sammy, alone, by the coffee urn. Sammy
waved to him, but he didn't smile. Phil wanted to talk to him, to say
something; but there was nothing to be said now. Sammy's turn would come
later.
"Mr. Secretary," the general said, "this is Colonel Conover. He'll be
the first man in history to see the other side of the Moon. Colonel—the
Secretary of Defense."
"How do you do, sir. I'm very proud to meet you," Phil said.
"On the contrary, colonel. I'm very proud to meet you. I've been looking
at that ship out there and wondering. I almost wish I were a young man
again. I'd like to be going. It's a thrilling thought—man's first
adventure into the universe. You're lighting a new dawn of history,
colonel. It's a privilege few men have ever had; and those who have had
it didn't realize it at the time. Good luck, and God be with you."
"Thank you, sir. I'm aware of all you say. It frightens me a little."
The general took Phil's arm and they walked to the briefing room. There
were chairs set up for the scientists and Air Force officers directly
connected with the take-off. They were seated now in a semicircle in
front of a huge chart of the solar system. Phil took his seat, and the
last minute briefing began. It was a routine he knew by heart. He had
gone over and over it a thousand times, and he only half listened now.
He kept thinking of Mary outside, alone by the fence.
The voice of the briefing officer was a dull hum in his ears.
"... And orbit at 18,000-mph. You will then accelerate for the breakaway
to 24,900-mph for five minutes and then free-coast for 116 hours
until—"
Phil asked a few questions about weather and solar conditions. And then
the session was done. They rose and looked at each other, the same
unanswered questions on each man's face. There were forced smiles and
handshakes. They were ready now.
"Phil," the general said, and took him aside.
"Sir?"
"Phil, you're ... you feel all right, don't you, son?"
"Yes, sir. I feel fine. Why?"
"Phil, I've spent nearly every day with you for three years. I know you
better than I know myself in many ways. And I've studied the
psychologist's reports on you carefully. Maybe it's just nervousness,
Phil, but I think there's something wrong. Is there?"
"No, sir. There's nothing wrong," Phil said, but his voice didn't carry
conviction. He reached for a cigarette.
"Phil, if there is anything—anything at all—you know what it might
mean. You've got to be in the best mental and physical condition of your
life tonight. You know better than any man here what that means to our
success. I think there is something more than just natural apprehension
wrong with you. Want to tell me?"
Outside, the take-off zone crawled with men and machines at the base of
the rocket. For ten hours, the final check-outs had been in progress;
and now the men were checking again, on their own time. The thing they
had worked toward for six years was ready to happen, and each one felt
that he was sending just a little bit of himself into the sky. Beyond
the ring of lights and moving men, on the edge of the field, Mary stood.
Her hands moved slowly over the top of the fence, twisting the barbs of
wire. But her eyes were on the ship.
And then they were ready. A small group of excited men came out from the
administration building and moved forward. The check-out crews climbed
into their machines and drove back outside the take-off zone. And,
alone, one man climbed the steel ladder up the side of the
rocket—ninety feet into the air. At the top he waved to the men on the
ground and then disappeared through a small port.
Mary waved to him. "Good-by," she said to herself, but the words stuck
tight in her throat.
The small group at the base of the ship turned and walked back to the
fence. And for an eternity the great ship stood alone, waiting. Then,
from deep inside, a rumble came, increasing in volume to a gigantic roar
that shook the earth and tore at the ears. Slowly, the first manned
rocket to the Moon lifted up and up to the sky.
For a long time after the rocket had become a tiny speck of light in the
heavens, she stood holding her face in her hands and crying softly to
herself. And then she felt the touch of a hand on her arm. She turned.
"Phil! Oh, Phil." She held tightly to him and repeated his name over and
over.
"They wouldn't let me go, Mary," he said finally. "The general would not
let me go."
She looked at him. His face was drawn tight, and there were tears on his
cheeks. "Thank, God," she said. "It doesn't matter, darling. The only
thing that matters is you didn't go."
"You're right, Mary," he said. His voice was low—so low she could
hardly hear him. "It doesn't matter. Nothing matters now." He stood with
his hands at his sides, watching her. And then turned away and walked
toward the car.
THE END | [
"They did not know how the public would react to the event.",
"They did not know how well they could predict weather so far away.",
"They were not sure if Phil could go on the mission.",
"There is still level uncertainty in the success of the mission."
] | 3 |
23592_UIJQGZDK_8 | How long was Mary standing outside? | Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science
Fiction December 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence
that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
BREAKAWAY
BY STANLEY GIMBLE
Illustrated by Freas
She surely got her wish ... but there was some question about getting
what she wanted.
Phil Conover pulled the zipper of his flight suit up the front of his
long, thin body and came into the living room. His face, usually serious
and quietly handsome, had an alive, excited look. And the faint lines
around his dark, deep-set eyes were accentuated when he smiled at his
wife.
"All set, honey. How do I look in my monkey suit?"
His wife was sitting stiffly on the flowered couch that was still not
theirs completely. In her fingers she held a cigarette burned down too
far. She said, "You look fine, Phil. You look just right." She managed a
smile. Then she leaned forward and crushed the cigarette in the ash
tray on the maple coffee table and took another from the pack.
He came to her and touched his hands to her soft blond hair, raising her
face until she was looking into his eyes. "You're the most beautiful
girl I know. Did I ever tell you that?"
"Yes, I think so. Yes, I'm sure you did," she said, finishing the
ritual; but her voice broke, and she turned her head away. Phil sat
beside her and put his arm around her small shoulders. He had stopped
smiling.
"Honey, look at me," he said. "It isn't going to be bad. Honestly it
isn't. We know exactly how it will be. If anything could go wrong, they
wouldn't be sending me; you know that. I told you that we've sent five
un-manned ships up and everyone came back without a hitch."
She turned, facing him. There were tears starting in the corners of her
wide, brown eyes, and she brushed them away with her hand.
"Phil, don't go. Please don't. They can send Sammy. Sammy doesn't have a
wife. Can't he go? They'd understand, Phil. Please!" She was holding his
arms tightly with her hands, and the color had drained from her cheeks.
"Mary, you know I can't back out now. How could I? It's been three
years. You know how much I've wanted to be the first man to go. Nothing
would ever be right with me again if I didn't go. Please don't make it
hard." He stopped talking and held her to him and stroked the back of
her head. He could feel her shoulders shaking with quiet sobs. He
released her and stood up.
"I've got to get started, Mary. Will you come to the field with me?"
"Yes, I'll come to say good-by." She paused and dropped her eyes. "Phil,
if you go, I won't be here when you get back—if you get back. I won't
be here because I won't be the wife of a space pilot for the rest of my
life. It isn't the kind of life I bargained for. No matter how much I
love you, I just couldn't take that, Phil. I'm sorry. I guess I'm not
the noble sort of wife."
She finished and took another cigarette from the pack on the coffee
table and put it to her lips. Her hand was trembling as she touched the
lighter to the end of the cigarette and drew deeply. Phil stood watching
her, the excitement completely gone from his eyes.
"I wish you had told me this a long time ago, Mary," Phil said. His
voice was dry and low. "I didn't know you felt this way about it."
"Yes, you did. I told you how I felt. I told you I could never be the
wife of a space pilot. But I don't think I ever really believed it was
possible—not until this morning when you said tonight was the take-off.
It's so stupid to jeopardize everything we've got for a ridiculous
dream!"
He sat down on the edge of the couch and took her hands between his.
"Mary, listen to me," he said. "It isn't a dream. It's real. There's
nothing means anything more to me than you do—you know that. But no
man ever had the chance to do what I'm going to do tonight—no man ever.
If I backed out now for any reason, I'd never be able to look at the sky
again. I'd be through."
She looked at him without seeing him, and there was nothing at all in
her eyes.
"Let's go, if you're still going," she finally said.
They drove through the streets of the small town with its small
bungalows, each alike. There were no trees and very little grass. It was
a new town, a government built town, and it had no personality yet. It
existed only because of the huge ship standing poised in the take-off
zone five miles away in the desert. Its future as a town rested with the
ship, and the town seemed to feel the uncertainty of its future, seemed
ready to stop existing as a town and to give itself back to the desert,
if such was its destiny.
Phil turned the car off the highway onto the rutted dirt road that led
across the sand to the field where the ship waited. In the distance they
could see the beams of the searchlights as they played across the
take-off zone and swept along the top of the high wire fence stretching
out of sight to right and left. At the gate they were stopped by the
guard. He read Phil's pass, shined his flashlight in their faces, and
then saluted. "Good luck, colonel," he said, and shook Phil's hand.
"Thanks, sergeant. I'll be seeing you next week," Phil said, and smiled.
They drove between the rows of wooden buildings that lined the field,
and he parked near the low barbed fence ringing the take-off zone. He
turned off the ignition, and sat quietly for a moment before lighting a
cigarette. Then he looked at his wife. She was staring through the
windshield at the rocket two hundred yards away. Its smooth polished
surface gleamed in the spotlight glare, and it sloped up and up until
the eye lost the tip against the stars.
"She's beautiful, Mary. You've never seen her before, have you?"
"No, I've never seen her before," she said. "Hadn't you better go?" Her
voice was strained and she held her hands closed tightly in her lap.
"Please go now, Phil," she said.
He leaned toward her and touched her cheek. Then she was in his arms,
her head buried against his shoulder.
"Good-by, darling," she said.
"Wish me luck, Mary?" he asked.
"Yes, good luck, Phil," she said. He opened the car door and got out.
The noise of men and machines scurrying around the ship broke the spell
of the rocket waiting silently for flight.
"Mary, I—" he began, and then turned and strode toward the
administration building without looking back.
Inside the building it was like a locker room before the big game. The
tension stood alone, and each man had the same happy, excited look that
Phil had worn earlier. When he came into the room, the noise and bustle
stopped. They turned as one man toward him, and General Small came up to
him and took his hand.
"Hello, Phil. We were beginning to think you weren't coming. You all
set, son?"
"Yes, sir, I'm all set, I guess," Phil said.
"I'd like you to meet the Secretary of Defense, Phil. He's over here by
the radar."
As they crossed the room, familiar faces smiled, and each man shook his
hand or touched his arm. He saw Sammy, alone, by the coffee urn. Sammy
waved to him, but he didn't smile. Phil wanted to talk to him, to say
something; but there was nothing to be said now. Sammy's turn would come
later.
"Mr. Secretary," the general said, "this is Colonel Conover. He'll be
the first man in history to see the other side of the Moon. Colonel—the
Secretary of Defense."
"How do you do, sir. I'm very proud to meet you," Phil said.
"On the contrary, colonel. I'm very proud to meet you. I've been looking
at that ship out there and wondering. I almost wish I were a young man
again. I'd like to be going. It's a thrilling thought—man's first
adventure into the universe. You're lighting a new dawn of history,
colonel. It's a privilege few men have ever had; and those who have had
it didn't realize it at the time. Good luck, and God be with you."
"Thank you, sir. I'm aware of all you say. It frightens me a little."
The general took Phil's arm and they walked to the briefing room. There
were chairs set up for the scientists and Air Force officers directly
connected with the take-off. They were seated now in a semicircle in
front of a huge chart of the solar system. Phil took his seat, and the
last minute briefing began. It was a routine he knew by heart. He had
gone over and over it a thousand times, and he only half listened now.
He kept thinking of Mary outside, alone by the fence.
The voice of the briefing officer was a dull hum in his ears.
"... And orbit at 18,000-mph. You will then accelerate for the breakaway
to 24,900-mph for five minutes and then free-coast for 116 hours
until—"
Phil asked a few questions about weather and solar conditions. And then
the session was done. They rose and looked at each other, the same
unanswered questions on each man's face. There were forced smiles and
handshakes. They were ready now.
"Phil," the general said, and took him aside.
"Sir?"
"Phil, you're ... you feel all right, don't you, son?"
"Yes, sir. I feel fine. Why?"
"Phil, I've spent nearly every day with you for three years. I know you
better than I know myself in many ways. And I've studied the
psychologist's reports on you carefully. Maybe it's just nervousness,
Phil, but I think there's something wrong. Is there?"
"No, sir. There's nothing wrong," Phil said, but his voice didn't carry
conviction. He reached for a cigarette.
"Phil, if there is anything—anything at all—you know what it might
mean. You've got to be in the best mental and physical condition of your
life tonight. You know better than any man here what that means to our
success. I think there is something more than just natural apprehension
wrong with you. Want to tell me?"
Outside, the take-off zone crawled with men and machines at the base of
the rocket. For ten hours, the final check-outs had been in progress;
and now the men were checking again, on their own time. The thing they
had worked toward for six years was ready to happen, and each one felt
that he was sending just a little bit of himself into the sky. Beyond
the ring of lights and moving men, on the edge of the field, Mary stood.
Her hands moved slowly over the top of the fence, twisting the barbs of
wire. But her eyes were on the ship.
And then they were ready. A small group of excited men came out from the
administration building and moved forward. The check-out crews climbed
into their machines and drove back outside the take-off zone. And,
alone, one man climbed the steel ladder up the side of the
rocket—ninety feet into the air. At the top he waved to the men on the
ground and then disappeared through a small port.
Mary waved to him. "Good-by," she said to herself, but the words stuck
tight in her throat.
The small group at the base of the ship turned and walked back to the
fence. And for an eternity the great ship stood alone, waiting. Then,
from deep inside, a rumble came, increasing in volume to a gigantic roar
that shook the earth and tore at the ears. Slowly, the first manned
rocket to the Moon lifted up and up to the sky.
For a long time after the rocket had become a tiny speck of light in the
heavens, she stood holding her face in her hands and crying softly to
herself. And then she felt the touch of a hand on her arm. She turned.
"Phil! Oh, Phil." She held tightly to him and repeated his name over and
over.
"They wouldn't let me go, Mary," he said finally. "The general would not
let me go."
She looked at him. His face was drawn tight, and there were tears on his
cheeks. "Thank, God," she said. "It doesn't matter, darling. The only
thing that matters is you didn't go."
"You're right, Mary," he said. His voice was low—so low she could
hardly hear him. "It doesn't matter. Nothing matters now." He stood with
his hands at his sides, watching her. And then turned away and walked
toward the car.
THE END | [
"She had gone home but came back for the launch.",
"For almost half a day.",
"For a couple hours as Phil went through pre-boarding procedure.",
"A full 24 hours."
] | 1 |
23592_UIJQGZDK_9 | What is the most salient part of the final scene the reflects on the initial conversation? | Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science
Fiction December 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence
that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
BREAKAWAY
BY STANLEY GIMBLE
Illustrated by Freas
She surely got her wish ... but there was some question about getting
what she wanted.
Phil Conover pulled the zipper of his flight suit up the front of his
long, thin body and came into the living room. His face, usually serious
and quietly handsome, had an alive, excited look. And the faint lines
around his dark, deep-set eyes were accentuated when he smiled at his
wife.
"All set, honey. How do I look in my monkey suit?"
His wife was sitting stiffly on the flowered couch that was still not
theirs completely. In her fingers she held a cigarette burned down too
far. She said, "You look fine, Phil. You look just right." She managed a
smile. Then she leaned forward and crushed the cigarette in the ash
tray on the maple coffee table and took another from the pack.
He came to her and touched his hands to her soft blond hair, raising her
face until she was looking into his eyes. "You're the most beautiful
girl I know. Did I ever tell you that?"
"Yes, I think so. Yes, I'm sure you did," she said, finishing the
ritual; but her voice broke, and she turned her head away. Phil sat
beside her and put his arm around her small shoulders. He had stopped
smiling.
"Honey, look at me," he said. "It isn't going to be bad. Honestly it
isn't. We know exactly how it will be. If anything could go wrong, they
wouldn't be sending me; you know that. I told you that we've sent five
un-manned ships up and everyone came back without a hitch."
She turned, facing him. There were tears starting in the corners of her
wide, brown eyes, and she brushed them away with her hand.
"Phil, don't go. Please don't. They can send Sammy. Sammy doesn't have a
wife. Can't he go? They'd understand, Phil. Please!" She was holding his
arms tightly with her hands, and the color had drained from her cheeks.
"Mary, you know I can't back out now. How could I? It's been three
years. You know how much I've wanted to be the first man to go. Nothing
would ever be right with me again if I didn't go. Please don't make it
hard." He stopped talking and held her to him and stroked the back of
her head. He could feel her shoulders shaking with quiet sobs. He
released her and stood up.
"I've got to get started, Mary. Will you come to the field with me?"
"Yes, I'll come to say good-by." She paused and dropped her eyes. "Phil,
if you go, I won't be here when you get back—if you get back. I won't
be here because I won't be the wife of a space pilot for the rest of my
life. It isn't the kind of life I bargained for. No matter how much I
love you, I just couldn't take that, Phil. I'm sorry. I guess I'm not
the noble sort of wife."
She finished and took another cigarette from the pack on the coffee
table and put it to her lips. Her hand was trembling as she touched the
lighter to the end of the cigarette and drew deeply. Phil stood watching
her, the excitement completely gone from his eyes.
"I wish you had told me this a long time ago, Mary," Phil said. His
voice was dry and low. "I didn't know you felt this way about it."
"Yes, you did. I told you how I felt. I told you I could never be the
wife of a space pilot. But I don't think I ever really believed it was
possible—not until this morning when you said tonight was the take-off.
It's so stupid to jeopardize everything we've got for a ridiculous
dream!"
He sat down on the edge of the couch and took her hands between his.
"Mary, listen to me," he said. "It isn't a dream. It's real. There's
nothing means anything more to me than you do—you know that. But no
man ever had the chance to do what I'm going to do tonight—no man ever.
If I backed out now for any reason, I'd never be able to look at the sky
again. I'd be through."
She looked at him without seeing him, and there was nothing at all in
her eyes.
"Let's go, if you're still going," she finally said.
They drove through the streets of the small town with its small
bungalows, each alike. There were no trees and very little grass. It was
a new town, a government built town, and it had no personality yet. It
existed only because of the huge ship standing poised in the take-off
zone five miles away in the desert. Its future as a town rested with the
ship, and the town seemed to feel the uncertainty of its future, seemed
ready to stop existing as a town and to give itself back to the desert,
if such was its destiny.
Phil turned the car off the highway onto the rutted dirt road that led
across the sand to the field where the ship waited. In the distance they
could see the beams of the searchlights as they played across the
take-off zone and swept along the top of the high wire fence stretching
out of sight to right and left. At the gate they were stopped by the
guard. He read Phil's pass, shined his flashlight in their faces, and
then saluted. "Good luck, colonel," he said, and shook Phil's hand.
"Thanks, sergeant. I'll be seeing you next week," Phil said, and smiled.
They drove between the rows of wooden buildings that lined the field,
and he parked near the low barbed fence ringing the take-off zone. He
turned off the ignition, and sat quietly for a moment before lighting a
cigarette. Then he looked at his wife. She was staring through the
windshield at the rocket two hundred yards away. Its smooth polished
surface gleamed in the spotlight glare, and it sloped up and up until
the eye lost the tip against the stars.
"She's beautiful, Mary. You've never seen her before, have you?"
"No, I've never seen her before," she said. "Hadn't you better go?" Her
voice was strained and she held her hands closed tightly in her lap.
"Please go now, Phil," she said.
He leaned toward her and touched her cheek. Then she was in his arms,
her head buried against his shoulder.
"Good-by, darling," she said.
"Wish me luck, Mary?" he asked.
"Yes, good luck, Phil," she said. He opened the car door and got out.
The noise of men and machines scurrying around the ship broke the spell
of the rocket waiting silently for flight.
"Mary, I—" he began, and then turned and strode toward the
administration building without looking back.
Inside the building it was like a locker room before the big game. The
tension stood alone, and each man had the same happy, excited look that
Phil had worn earlier. When he came into the room, the noise and bustle
stopped. They turned as one man toward him, and General Small came up to
him and took his hand.
"Hello, Phil. We were beginning to think you weren't coming. You all
set, son?"
"Yes, sir, I'm all set, I guess," Phil said.
"I'd like you to meet the Secretary of Defense, Phil. He's over here by
the radar."
As they crossed the room, familiar faces smiled, and each man shook his
hand or touched his arm. He saw Sammy, alone, by the coffee urn. Sammy
waved to him, but he didn't smile. Phil wanted to talk to him, to say
something; but there was nothing to be said now. Sammy's turn would come
later.
"Mr. Secretary," the general said, "this is Colonel Conover. He'll be
the first man in history to see the other side of the Moon. Colonel—the
Secretary of Defense."
"How do you do, sir. I'm very proud to meet you," Phil said.
"On the contrary, colonel. I'm very proud to meet you. I've been looking
at that ship out there and wondering. I almost wish I were a young man
again. I'd like to be going. It's a thrilling thought—man's first
adventure into the universe. You're lighting a new dawn of history,
colonel. It's a privilege few men have ever had; and those who have had
it didn't realize it at the time. Good luck, and God be with you."
"Thank you, sir. I'm aware of all you say. It frightens me a little."
The general took Phil's arm and they walked to the briefing room. There
were chairs set up for the scientists and Air Force officers directly
connected with the take-off. They were seated now in a semicircle in
front of a huge chart of the solar system. Phil took his seat, and the
last minute briefing began. It was a routine he knew by heart. He had
gone over and over it a thousand times, and he only half listened now.
He kept thinking of Mary outside, alone by the fence.
The voice of the briefing officer was a dull hum in his ears.
"... And orbit at 18,000-mph. You will then accelerate for the breakaway
to 24,900-mph for five minutes and then free-coast for 116 hours
until—"
Phil asked a few questions about weather and solar conditions. And then
the session was done. They rose and looked at each other, the same
unanswered questions on each man's face. There were forced smiles and
handshakes. They were ready now.
"Phil," the general said, and took him aside.
"Sir?"
"Phil, you're ... you feel all right, don't you, son?"
"Yes, sir. I feel fine. Why?"
"Phil, I've spent nearly every day with you for three years. I know you
better than I know myself in many ways. And I've studied the
psychologist's reports on you carefully. Maybe it's just nervousness,
Phil, but I think there's something wrong. Is there?"
"No, sir. There's nothing wrong," Phil said, but his voice didn't carry
conviction. He reached for a cigarette.
"Phil, if there is anything—anything at all—you know what it might
mean. You've got to be in the best mental and physical condition of your
life tonight. You know better than any man here what that means to our
success. I think there is something more than just natural apprehension
wrong with you. Want to tell me?"
Outside, the take-off zone crawled with men and machines at the base of
the rocket. For ten hours, the final check-outs had been in progress;
and now the men were checking again, on their own time. The thing they
had worked toward for six years was ready to happen, and each one felt
that he was sending just a little bit of himself into the sky. Beyond
the ring of lights and moving men, on the edge of the field, Mary stood.
Her hands moved slowly over the top of the fence, twisting the barbs of
wire. But her eyes were on the ship.
And then they were ready. A small group of excited men came out from the
administration building and moved forward. The check-out crews climbed
into their machines and drove back outside the take-off zone. And,
alone, one man climbed the steel ladder up the side of the
rocket—ninety feet into the air. At the top he waved to the men on the
ground and then disappeared through a small port.
Mary waved to him. "Good-by," she said to herself, but the words stuck
tight in her throat.
The small group at the base of the ship turned and walked back to the
fence. And for an eternity the great ship stood alone, waiting. Then,
from deep inside, a rumble came, increasing in volume to a gigantic roar
that shook the earth and tore at the ears. Slowly, the first manned
rocket to the Moon lifted up and up to the sky.
For a long time after the rocket had become a tiny speck of light in the
heavens, she stood holding her face in her hands and crying softly to
herself. And then she felt the touch of a hand on her arm. She turned.
"Phil! Oh, Phil." She held tightly to him and repeated his name over and
over.
"They wouldn't let me go, Mary," he said finally. "The general would not
let me go."
She looked at him. His face was drawn tight, and there were tears on his
cheeks. "Thank, God," she said. "It doesn't matter, darling. The only
thing that matters is you didn't go."
"You're right, Mary," he said. His voice was low—so low she could
hardly hear him. "It doesn't matter. Nothing matters now." He stood with
his hands at his sides, watching her. And then turned away and walked
toward the car.
THE END | [
"Mary promising she would only stay with him if he did not go",
"Phil knowing he wouldn't be the same if he did not go on the mission",
"The fact that their love was stronger than Phil's independent goals",
"Phil decided not to go on the mission in the end"
] | 1 |
23592_UIJQGZDK_10 | What would have happened if Phil had gone on the mission? | Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science
Fiction December 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence
that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
BREAKAWAY
BY STANLEY GIMBLE
Illustrated by Freas
She surely got her wish ... but there was some question about getting
what she wanted.
Phil Conover pulled the zipper of his flight suit up the front of his
long, thin body and came into the living room. His face, usually serious
and quietly handsome, had an alive, excited look. And the faint lines
around his dark, deep-set eyes were accentuated when he smiled at his
wife.
"All set, honey. How do I look in my monkey suit?"
His wife was sitting stiffly on the flowered couch that was still not
theirs completely. In her fingers she held a cigarette burned down too
far. She said, "You look fine, Phil. You look just right." She managed a
smile. Then she leaned forward and crushed the cigarette in the ash
tray on the maple coffee table and took another from the pack.
He came to her and touched his hands to her soft blond hair, raising her
face until she was looking into his eyes. "You're the most beautiful
girl I know. Did I ever tell you that?"
"Yes, I think so. Yes, I'm sure you did," she said, finishing the
ritual; but her voice broke, and she turned her head away. Phil sat
beside her and put his arm around her small shoulders. He had stopped
smiling.
"Honey, look at me," he said. "It isn't going to be bad. Honestly it
isn't. We know exactly how it will be. If anything could go wrong, they
wouldn't be sending me; you know that. I told you that we've sent five
un-manned ships up and everyone came back without a hitch."
She turned, facing him. There were tears starting in the corners of her
wide, brown eyes, and she brushed them away with her hand.
"Phil, don't go. Please don't. They can send Sammy. Sammy doesn't have a
wife. Can't he go? They'd understand, Phil. Please!" She was holding his
arms tightly with her hands, and the color had drained from her cheeks.
"Mary, you know I can't back out now. How could I? It's been three
years. You know how much I've wanted to be the first man to go. Nothing
would ever be right with me again if I didn't go. Please don't make it
hard." He stopped talking and held her to him and stroked the back of
her head. He could feel her shoulders shaking with quiet sobs. He
released her and stood up.
"I've got to get started, Mary. Will you come to the field with me?"
"Yes, I'll come to say good-by." She paused and dropped her eyes. "Phil,
if you go, I won't be here when you get back—if you get back. I won't
be here because I won't be the wife of a space pilot for the rest of my
life. It isn't the kind of life I bargained for. No matter how much I
love you, I just couldn't take that, Phil. I'm sorry. I guess I'm not
the noble sort of wife."
She finished and took another cigarette from the pack on the coffee
table and put it to her lips. Her hand was trembling as she touched the
lighter to the end of the cigarette and drew deeply. Phil stood watching
her, the excitement completely gone from his eyes.
"I wish you had told me this a long time ago, Mary," Phil said. His
voice was dry and low. "I didn't know you felt this way about it."
"Yes, you did. I told you how I felt. I told you I could never be the
wife of a space pilot. But I don't think I ever really believed it was
possible—not until this morning when you said tonight was the take-off.
It's so stupid to jeopardize everything we've got for a ridiculous
dream!"
He sat down on the edge of the couch and took her hands between his.
"Mary, listen to me," he said. "It isn't a dream. It's real. There's
nothing means anything more to me than you do—you know that. But no
man ever had the chance to do what I'm going to do tonight—no man ever.
If I backed out now for any reason, I'd never be able to look at the sky
again. I'd be through."
She looked at him without seeing him, and there was nothing at all in
her eyes.
"Let's go, if you're still going," she finally said.
They drove through the streets of the small town with its small
bungalows, each alike. There were no trees and very little grass. It was
a new town, a government built town, and it had no personality yet. It
existed only because of the huge ship standing poised in the take-off
zone five miles away in the desert. Its future as a town rested with the
ship, and the town seemed to feel the uncertainty of its future, seemed
ready to stop existing as a town and to give itself back to the desert,
if such was its destiny.
Phil turned the car off the highway onto the rutted dirt road that led
across the sand to the field where the ship waited. In the distance they
could see the beams of the searchlights as they played across the
take-off zone and swept along the top of the high wire fence stretching
out of sight to right and left. At the gate they were stopped by the
guard. He read Phil's pass, shined his flashlight in their faces, and
then saluted. "Good luck, colonel," he said, and shook Phil's hand.
"Thanks, sergeant. I'll be seeing you next week," Phil said, and smiled.
They drove between the rows of wooden buildings that lined the field,
and he parked near the low barbed fence ringing the take-off zone. He
turned off the ignition, and sat quietly for a moment before lighting a
cigarette. Then he looked at his wife. She was staring through the
windshield at the rocket two hundred yards away. Its smooth polished
surface gleamed in the spotlight glare, and it sloped up and up until
the eye lost the tip against the stars.
"She's beautiful, Mary. You've never seen her before, have you?"
"No, I've never seen her before," she said. "Hadn't you better go?" Her
voice was strained and she held her hands closed tightly in her lap.
"Please go now, Phil," she said.
He leaned toward her and touched her cheek. Then she was in his arms,
her head buried against his shoulder.
"Good-by, darling," she said.
"Wish me luck, Mary?" he asked.
"Yes, good luck, Phil," she said. He opened the car door and got out.
The noise of men and machines scurrying around the ship broke the spell
of the rocket waiting silently for flight.
"Mary, I—" he began, and then turned and strode toward the
administration building without looking back.
Inside the building it was like a locker room before the big game. The
tension stood alone, and each man had the same happy, excited look that
Phil had worn earlier. When he came into the room, the noise and bustle
stopped. They turned as one man toward him, and General Small came up to
him and took his hand.
"Hello, Phil. We were beginning to think you weren't coming. You all
set, son?"
"Yes, sir, I'm all set, I guess," Phil said.
"I'd like you to meet the Secretary of Defense, Phil. He's over here by
the radar."
As they crossed the room, familiar faces smiled, and each man shook his
hand or touched his arm. He saw Sammy, alone, by the coffee urn. Sammy
waved to him, but he didn't smile. Phil wanted to talk to him, to say
something; but there was nothing to be said now. Sammy's turn would come
later.
"Mr. Secretary," the general said, "this is Colonel Conover. He'll be
the first man in history to see the other side of the Moon. Colonel—the
Secretary of Defense."
"How do you do, sir. I'm very proud to meet you," Phil said.
"On the contrary, colonel. I'm very proud to meet you. I've been looking
at that ship out there and wondering. I almost wish I were a young man
again. I'd like to be going. It's a thrilling thought—man's first
adventure into the universe. You're lighting a new dawn of history,
colonel. It's a privilege few men have ever had; and those who have had
it didn't realize it at the time. Good luck, and God be with you."
"Thank you, sir. I'm aware of all you say. It frightens me a little."
The general took Phil's arm and they walked to the briefing room. There
were chairs set up for the scientists and Air Force officers directly
connected with the take-off. They were seated now in a semicircle in
front of a huge chart of the solar system. Phil took his seat, and the
last minute briefing began. It was a routine he knew by heart. He had
gone over and over it a thousand times, and he only half listened now.
He kept thinking of Mary outside, alone by the fence.
The voice of the briefing officer was a dull hum in his ears.
"... And orbit at 18,000-mph. You will then accelerate for the breakaway
to 24,900-mph for five minutes and then free-coast for 116 hours
until—"
Phil asked a few questions about weather and solar conditions. And then
the session was done. They rose and looked at each other, the same
unanswered questions on each man's face. There were forced smiles and
handshakes. They were ready now.
"Phil," the general said, and took him aside.
"Sir?"
"Phil, you're ... you feel all right, don't you, son?"
"Yes, sir. I feel fine. Why?"
"Phil, I've spent nearly every day with you for three years. I know you
better than I know myself in many ways. And I've studied the
psychologist's reports on you carefully. Maybe it's just nervousness,
Phil, but I think there's something wrong. Is there?"
"No, sir. There's nothing wrong," Phil said, but his voice didn't carry
conviction. He reached for a cigarette.
"Phil, if there is anything—anything at all—you know what it might
mean. You've got to be in the best mental and physical condition of your
life tonight. You know better than any man here what that means to our
success. I think there is something more than just natural apprehension
wrong with you. Want to tell me?"
Outside, the take-off zone crawled with men and machines at the base of
the rocket. For ten hours, the final check-outs had been in progress;
and now the men were checking again, on their own time. The thing they
had worked toward for six years was ready to happen, and each one felt
that he was sending just a little bit of himself into the sky. Beyond
the ring of lights and moving men, on the edge of the field, Mary stood.
Her hands moved slowly over the top of the fence, twisting the barbs of
wire. But her eyes were on the ship.
And then they were ready. A small group of excited men came out from the
administration building and moved forward. The check-out crews climbed
into their machines and drove back outside the take-off zone. And,
alone, one man climbed the steel ladder up the side of the
rocket—ninety feet into the air. At the top he waved to the men on the
ground and then disappeared through a small port.
Mary waved to him. "Good-by," she said to herself, but the words stuck
tight in her throat.
The small group at the base of the ship turned and walked back to the
fence. And for an eternity the great ship stood alone, waiting. Then,
from deep inside, a rumble came, increasing in volume to a gigantic roar
that shook the earth and tore at the ears. Slowly, the first manned
rocket to the Moon lifted up and up to the sky.
For a long time after the rocket had become a tiny speck of light in the
heavens, she stood holding her face in her hands and crying softly to
herself. And then she felt the touch of a hand on her arm. She turned.
"Phil! Oh, Phil." She held tightly to him and repeated his name over and
over.
"They wouldn't let me go, Mary," he said finally. "The general would not
let me go."
She looked at him. His face was drawn tight, and there were tears on his
cheeks. "Thank, God," she said. "It doesn't matter, darling. The only
thing that matters is you didn't go."
"You're right, Mary," he said. His voice was low—so low she could
hardly hear him. "It doesn't matter. Nothing matters now." He stood with
his hands at his sides, watching her. And then turned away and walked
toward the car.
THE END | [
"Mary would have forgiven him for following his dreams and they would work together to continue their relationship.",
"His anger would've caused him to make a mistake that would have ended in his death.",
"He would have been ecstatic to finally have lived his dream, and gone on to live his life.",
"He would still have been disappointed after fulfilling his dream because of how things ended with Mary."
] | 3 |
23767_EDRV7U74_1 | Why is Peter on the surface of this planet? | By H. B. Fyfe
THE TALKATIVE
TREE
Dang vines! Beats all how some plants
have no manners—but what do you expect,
when they used to be men!
All
things considered—the
obscure star, the undetermined
damage to the
stellar drive and the way the
small planet's murky atmosphere
defied precision scanners—the
pilot made a reasonably
good landing. Despite
sour feelings for the space
service of Haurtoz, steward
Peter Kolin had to admit that
casualties might have been
far worse.
Chief Steward Slichow led
his little command, less two
third-class ration keepers
thought to have been trapped
in the lower hold, to a point
two hundred meters from the
steaming hull of the
Peace
State
. He lined them up as if
on parade. Kolin made himself
inconspicuous.
"Since the crew will be on
emergency watches repairing
the damage," announced the
Chief in clipped, aggressive
tones, "I have volunteered my
section for preliminary scouting,
as is suitable. It may be
useful to discover temporary
sources in this area of natural
foods."
Volunteered HIS section!
thought Kolin rebelliously.
Like the Supreme Director
of Haurtoz! Being conscripted
into this idiotic space fleet
that never fights is bad
enough without a tin god on
jets like Slichow!
Prudently, he did not express
this resentment overtly.
His well-schooled features
revealed no trace of the idea—or
of any other idea. The
Planetary State of Haurtoz
had been organized some fifteen
light-years from old
Earth, but many of the home
world's less kindly techniques
had been employed. Lack of
complete loyalty to the state
was likely to result in a siege
of treatment that left the subject
suitably "re-personalized."
Kolin had heard of instances
wherein mere unenthusiastic
posture had betrayed
intentions to harbor
treasonable thoughts.
"You will scout in five details
of three persons each,"
Chief Slichow said. "Every
hour, each detail will send
one person in to report, and
he will be replaced by one of
the five I shall keep here to
issue rations."
Kolin permitted himself to
wonder when anyone might
get some rest, but assumed a
mildly willing look. (Too eager
an attitude could arouse
suspicion of disguising an improper
viewpoint.) The maintenance
of a proper viewpoint
was a necessity if the Planetary
State were to survive
the hostile plots of Earth and
the latter's decadent colonies.
That, at least, was the official
line.
Kolin found himself in a
group with Jak Ammet, a
third cook, and Eva Yrtok,
powdered foods storekeeper.
Since the crew would be eating
packaged rations during
repairs, Yrtok could be spared
to command a scout detail.
Each scout was issued a
rocket pistol and a plastic water
tube. Chief Slichow emphasized
that the keepers of
rations could hardly, in an
emergency, give even the appearance
of favoring themselves
in regard to food. They
would go without. Kolin
maintained a standard expression
as the Chief's sharp
stare measured them.
Yrtok, a dark, lean-faced
girl, led the way with a quiet
monosyllable. She carried the
small radio they would be
permitted to use for messages
of utmost urgency. Ammet
followed, and Kolin brought
up the rear.
To
reach their assigned
sector, they had to climb
a forbidding ridge of rock
within half a kilometer. Only
a sparse creeper grew along
their way, its elongated leaves
shimmering with bronze-green
reflections against a
stony surface; but when they
topped the ridge a thick forest
was in sight.
Yrtok and Ammet paused
momentarily before descending.
Kolin shared their sense of
isolation. They would be out
of sight of authority and responsible
for their own actions.
It was a strange sensation.
They marched down into
the valley at a brisk pace, becoming
more aware of the
clouds and atmospheric haze.
Distant objects seemed
blurred by the mist, taking on
a somber, brooding grayness.
For all Kolin could tell, he
and the others were isolated
in a world bounded by the
rocky ridge behind them and
a semi-circle of damp trees
and bushes several hundred
meters away. He suspected
that the hills rising mistily
ahead were part of a continuous
slope, but could not be
sure.
Yrtok led the way along
the most nearly level ground.
Low creepers became more
plentiful, interspersed with
scrubby thickets of tangled,
spike-armored bushes. Occasionally,
small flying things
flickered among the foliage.
Once, a shrub puffed out an
enormous cloud of tiny
spores.
"Be a job to find anything
edible here," grunted Ammet,
and Kolin agreed.
Finally, after a longer hike
than he had anticipated, they
approached the edge of the
deceptively distant forest.
Yrtok paused to examine some
purple berries glistening dangerously
on a low shrub. Kolin
regarded the trees with
misgiving.
"Looks as tough to get
through as a tropical jungle,"
he remarked.
"I think the stuff puts out
shoots that grow back into
the ground to root as they
spread," said the woman.
"Maybe we can find a way
through."
In two or three minutes,
they reached the abrupt border
of the odd-looking trees.
Except for one thick
trunked giant, all of them
were about the same height.
They craned their necks to estimate
the altitude of the
monster, but the top was hidden
by the wide spread of
branches. The depths behind
it looked dark and impenetrable.
"We'd better explore along
the edge," decided Yrtok.
"Ammet, now is the time to
go back and tell the Chief
which way we're—
Ammet!
"
Kolin looked over his shoulder.
Fifty meters away, Ammet
sat beside the bush with
the purple berries, utterly
relaxed.
"He must have tasted
some!" exclaimed Kolin. "I'll
see how he is."
He ran back to the cook and
shook him by the shoulder.
Ammet's head lolled loosely
to one side. His rather heavy
features were vacant, lending
him a doped appearance. Kolin
straightened up and beckoned
to Yrtok.
For some reason, he had
trouble attracting her attention.
Then he noticed that she
was kneeling.
"Hope she didn't eat some
stupid thing too!" he grumbled,
trotting back.
As he reached her, whatever
Yrtok was examining
came to life and scooted into
the underbrush with a flash
of greenish fur. All Kolin
saw was that it had several
legs too many.
He pulled Yrtok to her
feet. She pawed at him weakly,
eyes as vacant as Ammet's.
When he let go in sudden
horror, she folded gently to
the ground. She lay comfortably
on her side, twitching
one hand as if to brush something
away.
When she began to smile
dreamily, Kolin backed away.
The
corners of his mouth
felt oddly stiff; they had
involuntarily drawn back to
expose his clenched teeth. He
glanced warily about, but
nothing appeared to threaten
him.
"It's time to end this scout,"
he told himself. "It's dangerous.
One good look and I'm
jetting off! What I need is
an easy tree to climb."
He considered the massive
giant. Soaring thirty or forty
meters into the thin fog and
dwarfing other growth, it
seemed the most promising
choice.
At first, Kolin saw no way,
but then the network of vines
clinging to the rugged trunk
suggested a route. He tried
his weight gingerly, then began
to climb.
"I should have brought
Yrtok's radio," he muttered.
"Oh, well, I can take it when
I come down, if she hasn't
snapped out of her spell by
then. Funny … I wonder if
that green thing bit her."
Footholds were plentiful
among the interlaced lianas.
Kolin progressed rapidly.
When he reached the first
thick limbs, twice head
height, he felt safer.
Later, at what he hoped was
the halfway mark, he hooked
one knee over a branch and
paused to wipe sweat from his
eyes. Peering down, he discovered
the ground to be obscured
by foliage.
"I should have checked
from down there to see how
open the top is," he mused.
"I wonder how the view will
be from up there?"
"Depends on what you're
looking for, Sonny!" something
remarked in a soughing wheeze.
Kolin, slipping, grabbed
desperately for the branch.
His fingers clutched a handful
of twigs and leaves, which
just barely supported him until
he regained a grip with
the other hand.
The branch quivered resentfully
under him.
"Careful, there!" whooshed
the eerie voice. "It took me
all summer to grow those!"
Kolin could feel the skin
crawling along his backbone.
"Who
are
you?" he gasped.
The answering sigh of
laughter gave him a distinct
chill despite its suggestion of
amiability.
"Name's Johnny Ashlew.
Kinda thought you'd start
with
what
I am. Didn't figure
you'd ever seen a man grown
into a tree before."
Kolin looked about, seeing
little but leaves and fog.
"I have to climb down," he
told himself in a reasonable
tone. "It's bad enough that the
other two passed out without
me going space happy too."
"What's your hurry?" demanded
the voice. "I can talk
to you just as easy all the way
down, you know. Airholes in
my bark—I'm not like an
Earth tree."
Kolin examined the bark of
the crotch in which he sat. It
did seem to have assorted
holes and hollows in its rough
surface.
"I never saw an Earth tree,"
he admitted. "We came from
Haurtoz."
"Where's that? Oh, never
mind—some little planet. I
don't bother with them all,
since I came here and found
out I could be anything I
wanted."
"What do you mean, anything
you wanted?" asked
Kolin, testing the firmness of
a vertical vine.
"Just
what I said," continued
the voice, sounding
closer in his ear as his
cheek brushed the ridged bark
of the tree trunk. "And, if
I do have to remind you, it
would be nicer if you said
'Mr. Ashlew,' considering my
age."
"Your age? How old—?"
"Can't really count it in
Earth years any more. Lost
track. I always figured bein'
a tree was a nice, peaceful
life; and when I remembered
how long some of them live,
that settled it. Sonny, this
world ain't all it looks like."
"It isn't, Mr. Ashlew?"
asked Kolin, twisting about
in an effort to see what the
higher branches might hide.
"Nope. Most everything
here is run by the Life—that
is, by the thing that first
grew big enough to do some
thinking, and set its roots
down all over until it had
control. That's the outskirts
of it down below."
"The other trees? That jungle?"
"It's more'n a jungle, Sonny.
When I landed here, along
with the others from the
Arcturan Spark
, the planet
looked pretty empty to me,
just like it must have to—Watch
it, there, Boy! If I
didn't twist that branch over
in time, you'd be bouncing off
my roots right now!"
"Th-thanks!" grunted Kolin,
hanging on grimly.
"Doggone vine!" commented
the windy whisper. "
He
ain't one of my crowd. Landed
years later in a ship from
some star towards the center
of the galaxy. You should
have seen his looks before
the Life got in touch with his
mind and set up a mental field
to help him change form. He
looks twice as good as a
vine!"
"He's very handy," agreed
Kolin politely. He groped for
a foothold.
"Well … matter of fact, I
can't get through to him
much, even with the Life's
mental field helping. Guess
he started living with a different
way of thinking. It
burns me. I thought of being
a tree, and then he came along
to take advantage of it!"
Kolin braced himself securely
to stretch tiring muscles.
"Maybe I'd better stay a
while," he muttered. "I don't
know where I am."
"You're about fifty feet
up," the sighing voice informed
him. "You ought to
let me tell you how the Life
helps you change form. You
don't
have
to be a tree."
"No?"
"
Uh
-uh! Some of the boys
that landed with me wanted
to get around and see things.
Lots changed to animals or
birds. One even stayed a man—on
the outside anyway.
Most of them have to change
as the bodies wear out, which
I don't, and some made bad
mistakes tryin' to be things
they saw on other planets."
"I wouldn't want to do
that, Mr. Ashlew."
"There's just one thing.
The Life don't like taking
chances on word about this
place gettin' around. It sorta
believes in peace and quiet.
You might not get back to
your ship in any form that
could tell tales."
"Listen!" Kolin blurted
out. "I wasn't so much enjoying
being what I was that
getting back matters to me!"
"Don't like your home planet,
whatever the name was?"
"Haurtoz. It's a rotten
place. A Planetary State! You
have to think and even look
the way that's standard thirty
hours a day, asleep or
awake. You get scared to
sleep for fear you might
dream
treason and they'd find
out somehow."
"Whooeee! Heard about
them places. Must be tough
just to live."
Suddenly, Kolin found himself
telling the tree about life
on Haurtoz, and of the officially
announced threats to
the Planetary State's planned
expansion. He dwelt upon the
desperation of having no
place to hide in case of trouble
with the authorities. A
multiple system of such
worlds was agonizing to
imagine.
Somehow,
the oddity of
talking to a tree wore off.
Kolin heard opinions spouting
out which he had prudently
kept bottled up for
years.
The more he talked and
stormed and complained, the
more relaxed he felt.
"If there was ever a fellow
ready for this planet," decided
the tree named Ashlew,
"you're it, Sonny! Hang on
there while I signal the Life
by root!"
Kolin sensed a lack of direct
attention. The rustle
about him was natural, caused
by an ordinary breeze. He
noticed his hands shaking.
"Don't know what got into
me, talking that way to a
tree," he muttered. "If Yrtok
snapped out of it and heard,
I'm as good as re-personalized
right now."
As he brooded upon the
sorry choice of arousing a
search by hiding where he
was or going back to bluff
things out, the tree spoke.
"Maybe you're all set, Sonny.
The Life has been thinkin'
of learning about other
worlds. If you can think of a
safe form to jet off in, you
might make yourself a deal.
How'd you like to stay here?"
"I don't know," said Kolin.
"The penalty for desertion—"
"Whoosh! Who'd find you?
You could be a bird, a tree,
even a cloud."
Silenced but doubting, Kolin
permitted himself to try
the dream on for size.
He considered what form
might most easily escape the
notice of search parties and
still be tough enough to live
a long time without renewal.
Another factor slipped into
his musings: mere hope of escape
was unsatisfying after
the outburst that had defined
his fuming hatred for Haurtoz.
I'd better watch myself!
he
thought.
Don't drop diamonds
to grab at stars!
"What I wish I could do is
not just get away but get even
for the way they make us
live … the whole damn set-up.
They could just as easy make
peace with the Earth colonies.
You know why they
don't?"
"Why?" wheezed Ashlew.
"They're scared that without
talk of war, and scouting
for Earth fleets that never
come, people would have time
to think about the way they
have to live and who's running
things in the Planetary
State. Then the gravy train
would get blown up—and I
mean blown up!"
The tree was silent for a
moment. Kolin felt the
branches stir meditatively.
Then Ashlew offered a suggestion.
"I could tell the Life your
side of it," he hissed. "Once
in with us, you can always
make thinking connections,
no matter how far away.
Maybe you could make a deal
to kill two birds with one
stone, as they used to say on
Earth…."
Chief
Steward Slichow
paced up and down beside
the ration crate turned up to
serve him as a field desk. He
scowled in turn, impartially,
at his watch and at the weary
stewards of his headquarters
detail. The latter stumbled
about, stacking and distributing
small packets of emergency
rations.
The line of crewmen released
temporarily from repair
work was transient as to
individuals but immutable as
to length. Slichow muttered
something profane about disregard
of orders as he glared
at the rocky ridges surrounding
the landing place.
He was so intent upon planning
greetings with which to
favor the tardy scouting parties
that he failed to notice
the loose cloud drifting over
the ridge.
It was tenuous, almost a
haze. Close examination
would have revealed it to be
made up of myriads of tiny
spores. They resembled those
cast forth by one of the
bushes Kolin's party had
passed. Along the edges, the
haze faded raggedly into thin
air, but the units evidently
formed a cohesive body. They
drifted together, approaching
the men as if taking intelligent
advantage of the breeze.
One of Chief Slichow's
staggering flunkies, stealing
a few seconds of relaxation
on the pretext of dumping an
armful of light plastic packing,
wandered into the haze.
He froze.
After a few heartbeats, he
dropped the trash and stared
at ship and men as if he had
never seen either. A hail from
his master moved him.
"Coming, Chief!" he called
but, returning at a moderate
pace, he murmured, "My
name is Frazer. I'm a second
assistant steward. I'll think as
Unit One."
Throughout the cloud of
spores, the mind formerly
known as Peter Kolin congratulated
itself upon its
choice of form.
Nearer to the original
shape of the Life than Ashlew
got
, he thought.
He paused to consider the
state of the tree named Ashlew,
half immortal but rooted
to one spot, unable to float on
a breeze or through space itself
on the pressure of light.
Especially, it was unable to
insinuate any part of itself
into the control center of another
form of life, as a second
spore was taking charge of
the body of Chief Slichow at
that very instant.
There are not enough men
,
thought Kolin.
Some of me
must drift through the airlock.
In space, I can spread
through the air system to the
command group.
Repairs to the
Peace State
and the return to Haurtoz
passed like weeks to some of
the crew but like brief moments
in infinity to other
units. At last, the ship parted
the air above Headquarters
City and landed.
The unit known as Captain
Theodor Kessel hesitated before
descending the ramp. He
surveyed the field, the city
and the waiting team of inspecting
officers.
"Could hardly be better,
could it?" he chuckled to the
companion unit called Security
Officer Tarth.
"Hardly, sir. All ready for
the liberation of Haurtoz."
"Reformation of the Planetary
State," mused the captain,
smiling dreamily as he
grasped the handrail. "And
then—formation of the Planetary
Mind!"
END
Transcriber's Note:
This e-text was produced from
Worlds of If January 1962
.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this
publication was renewed. | [
"His ship took a long turn and is waiting for supplies.",
"He ended up there because of an accident.",
"His ship is there to pass rations to the locals who are low on food.",
"He is part of an exploratory crew sent to investigate."
] | 1 |
23767_EDRV7U74_2 | What would have happened if the Peace State had not crash landed? | By H. B. Fyfe
THE TALKATIVE
TREE
Dang vines! Beats all how some plants
have no manners—but what do you expect,
when they used to be men!
All
things considered—the
obscure star, the undetermined
damage to the
stellar drive and the way the
small planet's murky atmosphere
defied precision scanners—the
pilot made a reasonably
good landing. Despite
sour feelings for the space
service of Haurtoz, steward
Peter Kolin had to admit that
casualties might have been
far worse.
Chief Steward Slichow led
his little command, less two
third-class ration keepers
thought to have been trapped
in the lower hold, to a point
two hundred meters from the
steaming hull of the
Peace
State
. He lined them up as if
on parade. Kolin made himself
inconspicuous.
"Since the crew will be on
emergency watches repairing
the damage," announced the
Chief in clipped, aggressive
tones, "I have volunteered my
section for preliminary scouting,
as is suitable. It may be
useful to discover temporary
sources in this area of natural
foods."
Volunteered HIS section!
thought Kolin rebelliously.
Like the Supreme Director
of Haurtoz! Being conscripted
into this idiotic space fleet
that never fights is bad
enough without a tin god on
jets like Slichow!
Prudently, he did not express
this resentment overtly.
His well-schooled features
revealed no trace of the idea—or
of any other idea. The
Planetary State of Haurtoz
had been organized some fifteen
light-years from old
Earth, but many of the home
world's less kindly techniques
had been employed. Lack of
complete loyalty to the state
was likely to result in a siege
of treatment that left the subject
suitably "re-personalized."
Kolin had heard of instances
wherein mere unenthusiastic
posture had betrayed
intentions to harbor
treasonable thoughts.
"You will scout in five details
of three persons each,"
Chief Slichow said. "Every
hour, each detail will send
one person in to report, and
he will be replaced by one of
the five I shall keep here to
issue rations."
Kolin permitted himself to
wonder when anyone might
get some rest, but assumed a
mildly willing look. (Too eager
an attitude could arouse
suspicion of disguising an improper
viewpoint.) The maintenance
of a proper viewpoint
was a necessity if the Planetary
State were to survive
the hostile plots of Earth and
the latter's decadent colonies.
That, at least, was the official
line.
Kolin found himself in a
group with Jak Ammet, a
third cook, and Eva Yrtok,
powdered foods storekeeper.
Since the crew would be eating
packaged rations during
repairs, Yrtok could be spared
to command a scout detail.
Each scout was issued a
rocket pistol and a plastic water
tube. Chief Slichow emphasized
that the keepers of
rations could hardly, in an
emergency, give even the appearance
of favoring themselves
in regard to food. They
would go without. Kolin
maintained a standard expression
as the Chief's sharp
stare measured them.
Yrtok, a dark, lean-faced
girl, led the way with a quiet
monosyllable. She carried the
small radio they would be
permitted to use for messages
of utmost urgency. Ammet
followed, and Kolin brought
up the rear.
To
reach their assigned
sector, they had to climb
a forbidding ridge of rock
within half a kilometer. Only
a sparse creeper grew along
their way, its elongated leaves
shimmering with bronze-green
reflections against a
stony surface; but when they
topped the ridge a thick forest
was in sight.
Yrtok and Ammet paused
momentarily before descending.
Kolin shared their sense of
isolation. They would be out
of sight of authority and responsible
for their own actions.
It was a strange sensation.
They marched down into
the valley at a brisk pace, becoming
more aware of the
clouds and atmospheric haze.
Distant objects seemed
blurred by the mist, taking on
a somber, brooding grayness.
For all Kolin could tell, he
and the others were isolated
in a world bounded by the
rocky ridge behind them and
a semi-circle of damp trees
and bushes several hundred
meters away. He suspected
that the hills rising mistily
ahead were part of a continuous
slope, but could not be
sure.
Yrtok led the way along
the most nearly level ground.
Low creepers became more
plentiful, interspersed with
scrubby thickets of tangled,
spike-armored bushes. Occasionally,
small flying things
flickered among the foliage.
Once, a shrub puffed out an
enormous cloud of tiny
spores.
"Be a job to find anything
edible here," grunted Ammet,
and Kolin agreed.
Finally, after a longer hike
than he had anticipated, they
approached the edge of the
deceptively distant forest.
Yrtok paused to examine some
purple berries glistening dangerously
on a low shrub. Kolin
regarded the trees with
misgiving.
"Looks as tough to get
through as a tropical jungle,"
he remarked.
"I think the stuff puts out
shoots that grow back into
the ground to root as they
spread," said the woman.
"Maybe we can find a way
through."
In two or three minutes,
they reached the abrupt border
of the odd-looking trees.
Except for one thick
trunked giant, all of them
were about the same height.
They craned their necks to estimate
the altitude of the
monster, but the top was hidden
by the wide spread of
branches. The depths behind
it looked dark and impenetrable.
"We'd better explore along
the edge," decided Yrtok.
"Ammet, now is the time to
go back and tell the Chief
which way we're—
Ammet!
"
Kolin looked over his shoulder.
Fifty meters away, Ammet
sat beside the bush with
the purple berries, utterly
relaxed.
"He must have tasted
some!" exclaimed Kolin. "I'll
see how he is."
He ran back to the cook and
shook him by the shoulder.
Ammet's head lolled loosely
to one side. His rather heavy
features were vacant, lending
him a doped appearance. Kolin
straightened up and beckoned
to Yrtok.
For some reason, he had
trouble attracting her attention.
Then he noticed that she
was kneeling.
"Hope she didn't eat some
stupid thing too!" he grumbled,
trotting back.
As he reached her, whatever
Yrtok was examining
came to life and scooted into
the underbrush with a flash
of greenish fur. All Kolin
saw was that it had several
legs too many.
He pulled Yrtok to her
feet. She pawed at him weakly,
eyes as vacant as Ammet's.
When he let go in sudden
horror, she folded gently to
the ground. She lay comfortably
on her side, twitching
one hand as if to brush something
away.
When she began to smile
dreamily, Kolin backed away.
The
corners of his mouth
felt oddly stiff; they had
involuntarily drawn back to
expose his clenched teeth. He
glanced warily about, but
nothing appeared to threaten
him.
"It's time to end this scout,"
he told himself. "It's dangerous.
One good look and I'm
jetting off! What I need is
an easy tree to climb."
He considered the massive
giant. Soaring thirty or forty
meters into the thin fog and
dwarfing other growth, it
seemed the most promising
choice.
At first, Kolin saw no way,
but then the network of vines
clinging to the rugged trunk
suggested a route. He tried
his weight gingerly, then began
to climb.
"I should have brought
Yrtok's radio," he muttered.
"Oh, well, I can take it when
I come down, if she hasn't
snapped out of her spell by
then. Funny … I wonder if
that green thing bit her."
Footholds were plentiful
among the interlaced lianas.
Kolin progressed rapidly.
When he reached the first
thick limbs, twice head
height, he felt safer.
Later, at what he hoped was
the halfway mark, he hooked
one knee over a branch and
paused to wipe sweat from his
eyes. Peering down, he discovered
the ground to be obscured
by foliage.
"I should have checked
from down there to see how
open the top is," he mused.
"I wonder how the view will
be from up there?"
"Depends on what you're
looking for, Sonny!" something
remarked in a soughing wheeze.
Kolin, slipping, grabbed
desperately for the branch.
His fingers clutched a handful
of twigs and leaves, which
just barely supported him until
he regained a grip with
the other hand.
The branch quivered resentfully
under him.
"Careful, there!" whooshed
the eerie voice. "It took me
all summer to grow those!"
Kolin could feel the skin
crawling along his backbone.
"Who
are
you?" he gasped.
The answering sigh of
laughter gave him a distinct
chill despite its suggestion of
amiability.
"Name's Johnny Ashlew.
Kinda thought you'd start
with
what
I am. Didn't figure
you'd ever seen a man grown
into a tree before."
Kolin looked about, seeing
little but leaves and fog.
"I have to climb down," he
told himself in a reasonable
tone. "It's bad enough that the
other two passed out without
me going space happy too."
"What's your hurry?" demanded
the voice. "I can talk
to you just as easy all the way
down, you know. Airholes in
my bark—I'm not like an
Earth tree."
Kolin examined the bark of
the crotch in which he sat. It
did seem to have assorted
holes and hollows in its rough
surface.
"I never saw an Earth tree,"
he admitted. "We came from
Haurtoz."
"Where's that? Oh, never
mind—some little planet. I
don't bother with them all,
since I came here and found
out I could be anything I
wanted."
"What do you mean, anything
you wanted?" asked
Kolin, testing the firmness of
a vertical vine.
"Just
what I said," continued
the voice, sounding
closer in his ear as his
cheek brushed the ridged bark
of the tree trunk. "And, if
I do have to remind you, it
would be nicer if you said
'Mr. Ashlew,' considering my
age."
"Your age? How old—?"
"Can't really count it in
Earth years any more. Lost
track. I always figured bein'
a tree was a nice, peaceful
life; and when I remembered
how long some of them live,
that settled it. Sonny, this
world ain't all it looks like."
"It isn't, Mr. Ashlew?"
asked Kolin, twisting about
in an effort to see what the
higher branches might hide.
"Nope. Most everything
here is run by the Life—that
is, by the thing that first
grew big enough to do some
thinking, and set its roots
down all over until it had
control. That's the outskirts
of it down below."
"The other trees? That jungle?"
"It's more'n a jungle, Sonny.
When I landed here, along
with the others from the
Arcturan Spark
, the planet
looked pretty empty to me,
just like it must have to—Watch
it, there, Boy! If I
didn't twist that branch over
in time, you'd be bouncing off
my roots right now!"
"Th-thanks!" grunted Kolin,
hanging on grimly.
"Doggone vine!" commented
the windy whisper. "
He
ain't one of my crowd. Landed
years later in a ship from
some star towards the center
of the galaxy. You should
have seen his looks before
the Life got in touch with his
mind and set up a mental field
to help him change form. He
looks twice as good as a
vine!"
"He's very handy," agreed
Kolin politely. He groped for
a foothold.
"Well … matter of fact, I
can't get through to him
much, even with the Life's
mental field helping. Guess
he started living with a different
way of thinking. It
burns me. I thought of being
a tree, and then he came along
to take advantage of it!"
Kolin braced himself securely
to stretch tiring muscles.
"Maybe I'd better stay a
while," he muttered. "I don't
know where I am."
"You're about fifty feet
up," the sighing voice informed
him. "You ought to
let me tell you how the Life
helps you change form. You
don't
have
to be a tree."
"No?"
"
Uh
-uh! Some of the boys
that landed with me wanted
to get around and see things.
Lots changed to animals or
birds. One even stayed a man—on
the outside anyway.
Most of them have to change
as the bodies wear out, which
I don't, and some made bad
mistakes tryin' to be things
they saw on other planets."
"I wouldn't want to do
that, Mr. Ashlew."
"There's just one thing.
The Life don't like taking
chances on word about this
place gettin' around. It sorta
believes in peace and quiet.
You might not get back to
your ship in any form that
could tell tales."
"Listen!" Kolin blurted
out. "I wasn't so much enjoying
being what I was that
getting back matters to me!"
"Don't like your home planet,
whatever the name was?"
"Haurtoz. It's a rotten
place. A Planetary State! You
have to think and even look
the way that's standard thirty
hours a day, asleep or
awake. You get scared to
sleep for fear you might
dream
treason and they'd find
out somehow."
"Whooeee! Heard about
them places. Must be tough
just to live."
Suddenly, Kolin found himself
telling the tree about life
on Haurtoz, and of the officially
announced threats to
the Planetary State's planned
expansion. He dwelt upon the
desperation of having no
place to hide in case of trouble
with the authorities. A
multiple system of such
worlds was agonizing to
imagine.
Somehow,
the oddity of
talking to a tree wore off.
Kolin heard opinions spouting
out which he had prudently
kept bottled up for
years.
The more he talked and
stormed and complained, the
more relaxed he felt.
"If there was ever a fellow
ready for this planet," decided
the tree named Ashlew,
"you're it, Sonny! Hang on
there while I signal the Life
by root!"
Kolin sensed a lack of direct
attention. The rustle
about him was natural, caused
by an ordinary breeze. He
noticed his hands shaking.
"Don't know what got into
me, talking that way to a
tree," he muttered. "If Yrtok
snapped out of it and heard,
I'm as good as re-personalized
right now."
As he brooded upon the
sorry choice of arousing a
search by hiding where he
was or going back to bluff
things out, the tree spoke.
"Maybe you're all set, Sonny.
The Life has been thinkin'
of learning about other
worlds. If you can think of a
safe form to jet off in, you
might make yourself a deal.
How'd you like to stay here?"
"I don't know," said Kolin.
"The penalty for desertion—"
"Whoosh! Who'd find you?
You could be a bird, a tree,
even a cloud."
Silenced but doubting, Kolin
permitted himself to try
the dream on for size.
He considered what form
might most easily escape the
notice of search parties and
still be tough enough to live
a long time without renewal.
Another factor slipped into
his musings: mere hope of escape
was unsatisfying after
the outburst that had defined
his fuming hatred for Haurtoz.
I'd better watch myself!
he
thought.
Don't drop diamonds
to grab at stars!
"What I wish I could do is
not just get away but get even
for the way they make us
live … the whole damn set-up.
They could just as easy make
peace with the Earth colonies.
You know why they
don't?"
"Why?" wheezed Ashlew.
"They're scared that without
talk of war, and scouting
for Earth fleets that never
come, people would have time
to think about the way they
have to live and who's running
things in the Planetary
State. Then the gravy train
would get blown up—and I
mean blown up!"
The tree was silent for a
moment. Kolin felt the
branches stir meditatively.
Then Ashlew offered a suggestion.
"I could tell the Life your
side of it," he hissed. "Once
in with us, you can always
make thinking connections,
no matter how far away.
Maybe you could make a deal
to kill two birds with one
stone, as they used to say on
Earth…."
Chief
Steward Slichow
paced up and down beside
the ration crate turned up to
serve him as a field desk. He
scowled in turn, impartially,
at his watch and at the weary
stewards of his headquarters
detail. The latter stumbled
about, stacking and distributing
small packets of emergency
rations.
The line of crewmen released
temporarily from repair
work was transient as to
individuals but immutable as
to length. Slichow muttered
something profane about disregard
of orders as he glared
at the rocky ridges surrounding
the landing place.
He was so intent upon planning
greetings with which to
favor the tardy scouting parties
that he failed to notice
the loose cloud drifting over
the ridge.
It was tenuous, almost a
haze. Close examination
would have revealed it to be
made up of myriads of tiny
spores. They resembled those
cast forth by one of the
bushes Kolin's party had
passed. Along the edges, the
haze faded raggedly into thin
air, but the units evidently
formed a cohesive body. They
drifted together, approaching
the men as if taking intelligent
advantage of the breeze.
One of Chief Slichow's
staggering flunkies, stealing
a few seconds of relaxation
on the pretext of dumping an
armful of light plastic packing,
wandered into the haze.
He froze.
After a few heartbeats, he
dropped the trash and stared
at ship and men as if he had
never seen either. A hail from
his master moved him.
"Coming, Chief!" he called
but, returning at a moderate
pace, he murmured, "My
name is Frazer. I'm a second
assistant steward. I'll think as
Unit One."
Throughout the cloud of
spores, the mind formerly
known as Peter Kolin congratulated
itself upon its
choice of form.
Nearer to the original
shape of the Life than Ashlew
got
, he thought.
He paused to consider the
state of the tree named Ashlew,
half immortal but rooted
to one spot, unable to float on
a breeze or through space itself
on the pressure of light.
Especially, it was unable to
insinuate any part of itself
into the control center of another
form of life, as a second
spore was taking charge of
the body of Chief Slichow at
that very instant.
There are not enough men
,
thought Kolin.
Some of me
must drift through the airlock.
In space, I can spread
through the air system to the
command group.
Repairs to the
Peace State
and the return to Haurtoz
passed like weeks to some of
the crew but like brief moments
in infinity to other
units. At last, the ship parted
the air above Headquarters
City and landed.
The unit known as Captain
Theodor Kessel hesitated before
descending the ramp. He
surveyed the field, the city
and the waiting team of inspecting
officers.
"Could hardly be better,
could it?" he chuckled to the
companion unit called Security
Officer Tarth.
"Hardly, sir. All ready for
the liberation of Haurtoz."
"Reformation of the Planetary
State," mused the captain,
smiling dreamily as he
grasped the handrail. "And
then—formation of the Planetary
Mind!"
END
Transcriber's Note:
This e-text was produced from
Worlds of If January 1962
.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this
publication was renewed. | [
"A different crew would eventually follow a similar path.",
"The locals would not have gotten the rations they needed.",
"A revolution on Haurtoz would never have happened.",
"Yrtok would have remained lonely for the rest of his life."
] | 2 |
23767_EDRV7U74_3 | What is the most likely explanation for why Kolin's anger is so extreme? | By H. B. Fyfe
THE TALKATIVE
TREE
Dang vines! Beats all how some plants
have no manners—but what do you expect,
when they used to be men!
All
things considered—the
obscure star, the undetermined
damage to the
stellar drive and the way the
small planet's murky atmosphere
defied precision scanners—the
pilot made a reasonably
good landing. Despite
sour feelings for the space
service of Haurtoz, steward
Peter Kolin had to admit that
casualties might have been
far worse.
Chief Steward Slichow led
his little command, less two
third-class ration keepers
thought to have been trapped
in the lower hold, to a point
two hundred meters from the
steaming hull of the
Peace
State
. He lined them up as if
on parade. Kolin made himself
inconspicuous.
"Since the crew will be on
emergency watches repairing
the damage," announced the
Chief in clipped, aggressive
tones, "I have volunteered my
section for preliminary scouting,
as is suitable. It may be
useful to discover temporary
sources in this area of natural
foods."
Volunteered HIS section!
thought Kolin rebelliously.
Like the Supreme Director
of Haurtoz! Being conscripted
into this idiotic space fleet
that never fights is bad
enough without a tin god on
jets like Slichow!
Prudently, he did not express
this resentment overtly.
His well-schooled features
revealed no trace of the idea—or
of any other idea. The
Planetary State of Haurtoz
had been organized some fifteen
light-years from old
Earth, but many of the home
world's less kindly techniques
had been employed. Lack of
complete loyalty to the state
was likely to result in a siege
of treatment that left the subject
suitably "re-personalized."
Kolin had heard of instances
wherein mere unenthusiastic
posture had betrayed
intentions to harbor
treasonable thoughts.
"You will scout in five details
of three persons each,"
Chief Slichow said. "Every
hour, each detail will send
one person in to report, and
he will be replaced by one of
the five I shall keep here to
issue rations."
Kolin permitted himself to
wonder when anyone might
get some rest, but assumed a
mildly willing look. (Too eager
an attitude could arouse
suspicion of disguising an improper
viewpoint.) The maintenance
of a proper viewpoint
was a necessity if the Planetary
State were to survive
the hostile plots of Earth and
the latter's decadent colonies.
That, at least, was the official
line.
Kolin found himself in a
group with Jak Ammet, a
third cook, and Eva Yrtok,
powdered foods storekeeper.
Since the crew would be eating
packaged rations during
repairs, Yrtok could be spared
to command a scout detail.
Each scout was issued a
rocket pistol and a plastic water
tube. Chief Slichow emphasized
that the keepers of
rations could hardly, in an
emergency, give even the appearance
of favoring themselves
in regard to food. They
would go without. Kolin
maintained a standard expression
as the Chief's sharp
stare measured them.
Yrtok, a dark, lean-faced
girl, led the way with a quiet
monosyllable. She carried the
small radio they would be
permitted to use for messages
of utmost urgency. Ammet
followed, and Kolin brought
up the rear.
To
reach their assigned
sector, they had to climb
a forbidding ridge of rock
within half a kilometer. Only
a sparse creeper grew along
their way, its elongated leaves
shimmering with bronze-green
reflections against a
stony surface; but when they
topped the ridge a thick forest
was in sight.
Yrtok and Ammet paused
momentarily before descending.
Kolin shared their sense of
isolation. They would be out
of sight of authority and responsible
for their own actions.
It was a strange sensation.
They marched down into
the valley at a brisk pace, becoming
more aware of the
clouds and atmospheric haze.
Distant objects seemed
blurred by the mist, taking on
a somber, brooding grayness.
For all Kolin could tell, he
and the others were isolated
in a world bounded by the
rocky ridge behind them and
a semi-circle of damp trees
and bushes several hundred
meters away. He suspected
that the hills rising mistily
ahead were part of a continuous
slope, but could not be
sure.
Yrtok led the way along
the most nearly level ground.
Low creepers became more
plentiful, interspersed with
scrubby thickets of tangled,
spike-armored bushes. Occasionally,
small flying things
flickered among the foliage.
Once, a shrub puffed out an
enormous cloud of tiny
spores.
"Be a job to find anything
edible here," grunted Ammet,
and Kolin agreed.
Finally, after a longer hike
than he had anticipated, they
approached the edge of the
deceptively distant forest.
Yrtok paused to examine some
purple berries glistening dangerously
on a low shrub. Kolin
regarded the trees with
misgiving.
"Looks as tough to get
through as a tropical jungle,"
he remarked.
"I think the stuff puts out
shoots that grow back into
the ground to root as they
spread," said the woman.
"Maybe we can find a way
through."
In two or three minutes,
they reached the abrupt border
of the odd-looking trees.
Except for one thick
trunked giant, all of them
were about the same height.
They craned their necks to estimate
the altitude of the
monster, but the top was hidden
by the wide spread of
branches. The depths behind
it looked dark and impenetrable.
"We'd better explore along
the edge," decided Yrtok.
"Ammet, now is the time to
go back and tell the Chief
which way we're—
Ammet!
"
Kolin looked over his shoulder.
Fifty meters away, Ammet
sat beside the bush with
the purple berries, utterly
relaxed.
"He must have tasted
some!" exclaimed Kolin. "I'll
see how he is."
He ran back to the cook and
shook him by the shoulder.
Ammet's head lolled loosely
to one side. His rather heavy
features were vacant, lending
him a doped appearance. Kolin
straightened up and beckoned
to Yrtok.
For some reason, he had
trouble attracting her attention.
Then he noticed that she
was kneeling.
"Hope she didn't eat some
stupid thing too!" he grumbled,
trotting back.
As he reached her, whatever
Yrtok was examining
came to life and scooted into
the underbrush with a flash
of greenish fur. All Kolin
saw was that it had several
legs too many.
He pulled Yrtok to her
feet. She pawed at him weakly,
eyes as vacant as Ammet's.
When he let go in sudden
horror, she folded gently to
the ground. She lay comfortably
on her side, twitching
one hand as if to brush something
away.
When she began to smile
dreamily, Kolin backed away.
The
corners of his mouth
felt oddly stiff; they had
involuntarily drawn back to
expose his clenched teeth. He
glanced warily about, but
nothing appeared to threaten
him.
"It's time to end this scout,"
he told himself. "It's dangerous.
One good look and I'm
jetting off! What I need is
an easy tree to climb."
He considered the massive
giant. Soaring thirty or forty
meters into the thin fog and
dwarfing other growth, it
seemed the most promising
choice.
At first, Kolin saw no way,
but then the network of vines
clinging to the rugged trunk
suggested a route. He tried
his weight gingerly, then began
to climb.
"I should have brought
Yrtok's radio," he muttered.
"Oh, well, I can take it when
I come down, if she hasn't
snapped out of her spell by
then. Funny … I wonder if
that green thing bit her."
Footholds were plentiful
among the interlaced lianas.
Kolin progressed rapidly.
When he reached the first
thick limbs, twice head
height, he felt safer.
Later, at what he hoped was
the halfway mark, he hooked
one knee over a branch and
paused to wipe sweat from his
eyes. Peering down, he discovered
the ground to be obscured
by foliage.
"I should have checked
from down there to see how
open the top is," he mused.
"I wonder how the view will
be from up there?"
"Depends on what you're
looking for, Sonny!" something
remarked in a soughing wheeze.
Kolin, slipping, grabbed
desperately for the branch.
His fingers clutched a handful
of twigs and leaves, which
just barely supported him until
he regained a grip with
the other hand.
The branch quivered resentfully
under him.
"Careful, there!" whooshed
the eerie voice. "It took me
all summer to grow those!"
Kolin could feel the skin
crawling along his backbone.
"Who
are
you?" he gasped.
The answering sigh of
laughter gave him a distinct
chill despite its suggestion of
amiability.
"Name's Johnny Ashlew.
Kinda thought you'd start
with
what
I am. Didn't figure
you'd ever seen a man grown
into a tree before."
Kolin looked about, seeing
little but leaves and fog.
"I have to climb down," he
told himself in a reasonable
tone. "It's bad enough that the
other two passed out without
me going space happy too."
"What's your hurry?" demanded
the voice. "I can talk
to you just as easy all the way
down, you know. Airholes in
my bark—I'm not like an
Earth tree."
Kolin examined the bark of
the crotch in which he sat. It
did seem to have assorted
holes and hollows in its rough
surface.
"I never saw an Earth tree,"
he admitted. "We came from
Haurtoz."
"Where's that? Oh, never
mind—some little planet. I
don't bother with them all,
since I came here and found
out I could be anything I
wanted."
"What do you mean, anything
you wanted?" asked
Kolin, testing the firmness of
a vertical vine.
"Just
what I said," continued
the voice, sounding
closer in his ear as his
cheek brushed the ridged bark
of the tree trunk. "And, if
I do have to remind you, it
would be nicer if you said
'Mr. Ashlew,' considering my
age."
"Your age? How old—?"
"Can't really count it in
Earth years any more. Lost
track. I always figured bein'
a tree was a nice, peaceful
life; and when I remembered
how long some of them live,
that settled it. Sonny, this
world ain't all it looks like."
"It isn't, Mr. Ashlew?"
asked Kolin, twisting about
in an effort to see what the
higher branches might hide.
"Nope. Most everything
here is run by the Life—that
is, by the thing that first
grew big enough to do some
thinking, and set its roots
down all over until it had
control. That's the outskirts
of it down below."
"The other trees? That jungle?"
"It's more'n a jungle, Sonny.
When I landed here, along
with the others from the
Arcturan Spark
, the planet
looked pretty empty to me,
just like it must have to—Watch
it, there, Boy! If I
didn't twist that branch over
in time, you'd be bouncing off
my roots right now!"
"Th-thanks!" grunted Kolin,
hanging on grimly.
"Doggone vine!" commented
the windy whisper. "
He
ain't one of my crowd. Landed
years later in a ship from
some star towards the center
of the galaxy. You should
have seen his looks before
the Life got in touch with his
mind and set up a mental field
to help him change form. He
looks twice as good as a
vine!"
"He's very handy," agreed
Kolin politely. He groped for
a foothold.
"Well … matter of fact, I
can't get through to him
much, even with the Life's
mental field helping. Guess
he started living with a different
way of thinking. It
burns me. I thought of being
a tree, and then he came along
to take advantage of it!"
Kolin braced himself securely
to stretch tiring muscles.
"Maybe I'd better stay a
while," he muttered. "I don't
know where I am."
"You're about fifty feet
up," the sighing voice informed
him. "You ought to
let me tell you how the Life
helps you change form. You
don't
have
to be a tree."
"No?"
"
Uh
-uh! Some of the boys
that landed with me wanted
to get around and see things.
Lots changed to animals or
birds. One even stayed a man—on
the outside anyway.
Most of them have to change
as the bodies wear out, which
I don't, and some made bad
mistakes tryin' to be things
they saw on other planets."
"I wouldn't want to do
that, Mr. Ashlew."
"There's just one thing.
The Life don't like taking
chances on word about this
place gettin' around. It sorta
believes in peace and quiet.
You might not get back to
your ship in any form that
could tell tales."
"Listen!" Kolin blurted
out. "I wasn't so much enjoying
being what I was that
getting back matters to me!"
"Don't like your home planet,
whatever the name was?"
"Haurtoz. It's a rotten
place. A Planetary State! You
have to think and even look
the way that's standard thirty
hours a day, asleep or
awake. You get scared to
sleep for fear you might
dream
treason and they'd find
out somehow."
"Whooeee! Heard about
them places. Must be tough
just to live."
Suddenly, Kolin found himself
telling the tree about life
on Haurtoz, and of the officially
announced threats to
the Planetary State's planned
expansion. He dwelt upon the
desperation of having no
place to hide in case of trouble
with the authorities. A
multiple system of such
worlds was agonizing to
imagine.
Somehow,
the oddity of
talking to a tree wore off.
Kolin heard opinions spouting
out which he had prudently
kept bottled up for
years.
The more he talked and
stormed and complained, the
more relaxed he felt.
"If there was ever a fellow
ready for this planet," decided
the tree named Ashlew,
"you're it, Sonny! Hang on
there while I signal the Life
by root!"
Kolin sensed a lack of direct
attention. The rustle
about him was natural, caused
by an ordinary breeze. He
noticed his hands shaking.
"Don't know what got into
me, talking that way to a
tree," he muttered. "If Yrtok
snapped out of it and heard,
I'm as good as re-personalized
right now."
As he brooded upon the
sorry choice of arousing a
search by hiding where he
was or going back to bluff
things out, the tree spoke.
"Maybe you're all set, Sonny.
The Life has been thinkin'
of learning about other
worlds. If you can think of a
safe form to jet off in, you
might make yourself a deal.
How'd you like to stay here?"
"I don't know," said Kolin.
"The penalty for desertion—"
"Whoosh! Who'd find you?
You could be a bird, a tree,
even a cloud."
Silenced but doubting, Kolin
permitted himself to try
the dream on for size.
He considered what form
might most easily escape the
notice of search parties and
still be tough enough to live
a long time without renewal.
Another factor slipped into
his musings: mere hope of escape
was unsatisfying after
the outburst that had defined
his fuming hatred for Haurtoz.
I'd better watch myself!
he
thought.
Don't drop diamonds
to grab at stars!
"What I wish I could do is
not just get away but get even
for the way they make us
live … the whole damn set-up.
They could just as easy make
peace with the Earth colonies.
You know why they
don't?"
"Why?" wheezed Ashlew.
"They're scared that without
talk of war, and scouting
for Earth fleets that never
come, people would have time
to think about the way they
have to live and who's running
things in the Planetary
State. Then the gravy train
would get blown up—and I
mean blown up!"
The tree was silent for a
moment. Kolin felt the
branches stir meditatively.
Then Ashlew offered a suggestion.
"I could tell the Life your
side of it," he hissed. "Once
in with us, you can always
make thinking connections,
no matter how far away.
Maybe you could make a deal
to kill two birds with one
stone, as they used to say on
Earth…."
Chief
Steward Slichow
paced up and down beside
the ration crate turned up to
serve him as a field desk. He
scowled in turn, impartially,
at his watch and at the weary
stewards of his headquarters
detail. The latter stumbled
about, stacking and distributing
small packets of emergency
rations.
The line of crewmen released
temporarily from repair
work was transient as to
individuals but immutable as
to length. Slichow muttered
something profane about disregard
of orders as he glared
at the rocky ridges surrounding
the landing place.
He was so intent upon planning
greetings with which to
favor the tardy scouting parties
that he failed to notice
the loose cloud drifting over
the ridge.
It was tenuous, almost a
haze. Close examination
would have revealed it to be
made up of myriads of tiny
spores. They resembled those
cast forth by one of the
bushes Kolin's party had
passed. Along the edges, the
haze faded raggedly into thin
air, but the units evidently
formed a cohesive body. They
drifted together, approaching
the men as if taking intelligent
advantage of the breeze.
One of Chief Slichow's
staggering flunkies, stealing
a few seconds of relaxation
on the pretext of dumping an
armful of light plastic packing,
wandered into the haze.
He froze.
After a few heartbeats, he
dropped the trash and stared
at ship and men as if he had
never seen either. A hail from
his master moved him.
"Coming, Chief!" he called
but, returning at a moderate
pace, he murmured, "My
name is Frazer. I'm a second
assistant steward. I'll think as
Unit One."
Throughout the cloud of
spores, the mind formerly
known as Peter Kolin congratulated
itself upon its
choice of form.
Nearer to the original
shape of the Life than Ashlew
got
, he thought.
He paused to consider the
state of the tree named Ashlew,
half immortal but rooted
to one spot, unable to float on
a breeze or through space itself
on the pressure of light.
Especially, it was unable to
insinuate any part of itself
into the control center of another
form of life, as a second
spore was taking charge of
the body of Chief Slichow at
that very instant.
There are not enough men
,
thought Kolin.
Some of me
must drift through the airlock.
In space, I can spread
through the air system to the
command group.
Repairs to the
Peace State
and the return to Haurtoz
passed like weeks to some of
the crew but like brief moments
in infinity to other
units. At last, the ship parted
the air above Headquarters
City and landed.
The unit known as Captain
Theodor Kessel hesitated before
descending the ramp. He
surveyed the field, the city
and the waiting team of inspecting
officers.
"Could hardly be better,
could it?" he chuckled to the
companion unit called Security
Officer Tarth.
"Hardly, sir. All ready for
the liberation of Haurtoz."
"Reformation of the Planetary
State," mused the captain,
smiling dreamily as he
grasped the handrail. "And
then—formation of the Planetary
Mind!"
END
Transcriber's Note:
This e-text was produced from
Worlds of If January 1962
.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this
publication was renewed. | [
"He is known to be irritable and have mood swings.",
"He had been holding in anger and his captain's reaction was the last straw.",
"He was under the effects of the purple berries.",
"His mind is being controlled by Ashlew."
] | 1 |
23767_EDRV7U74_4 | Which description is the best representation of Yrtok's role in the story? | By H. B. Fyfe
THE TALKATIVE
TREE
Dang vines! Beats all how some plants
have no manners—but what do you expect,
when they used to be men!
All
things considered—the
obscure star, the undetermined
damage to the
stellar drive and the way the
small planet's murky atmosphere
defied precision scanners—the
pilot made a reasonably
good landing. Despite
sour feelings for the space
service of Haurtoz, steward
Peter Kolin had to admit that
casualties might have been
far worse.
Chief Steward Slichow led
his little command, less two
third-class ration keepers
thought to have been trapped
in the lower hold, to a point
two hundred meters from the
steaming hull of the
Peace
State
. He lined them up as if
on parade. Kolin made himself
inconspicuous.
"Since the crew will be on
emergency watches repairing
the damage," announced the
Chief in clipped, aggressive
tones, "I have volunteered my
section for preliminary scouting,
as is suitable. It may be
useful to discover temporary
sources in this area of natural
foods."
Volunteered HIS section!
thought Kolin rebelliously.
Like the Supreme Director
of Haurtoz! Being conscripted
into this idiotic space fleet
that never fights is bad
enough without a tin god on
jets like Slichow!
Prudently, he did not express
this resentment overtly.
His well-schooled features
revealed no trace of the idea—or
of any other idea. The
Planetary State of Haurtoz
had been organized some fifteen
light-years from old
Earth, but many of the home
world's less kindly techniques
had been employed. Lack of
complete loyalty to the state
was likely to result in a siege
of treatment that left the subject
suitably "re-personalized."
Kolin had heard of instances
wherein mere unenthusiastic
posture had betrayed
intentions to harbor
treasonable thoughts.
"You will scout in five details
of three persons each,"
Chief Slichow said. "Every
hour, each detail will send
one person in to report, and
he will be replaced by one of
the five I shall keep here to
issue rations."
Kolin permitted himself to
wonder when anyone might
get some rest, but assumed a
mildly willing look. (Too eager
an attitude could arouse
suspicion of disguising an improper
viewpoint.) The maintenance
of a proper viewpoint
was a necessity if the Planetary
State were to survive
the hostile plots of Earth and
the latter's decadent colonies.
That, at least, was the official
line.
Kolin found himself in a
group with Jak Ammet, a
third cook, and Eva Yrtok,
powdered foods storekeeper.
Since the crew would be eating
packaged rations during
repairs, Yrtok could be spared
to command a scout detail.
Each scout was issued a
rocket pistol and a plastic water
tube. Chief Slichow emphasized
that the keepers of
rations could hardly, in an
emergency, give even the appearance
of favoring themselves
in regard to food. They
would go without. Kolin
maintained a standard expression
as the Chief's sharp
stare measured them.
Yrtok, a dark, lean-faced
girl, led the way with a quiet
monosyllable. She carried the
small radio they would be
permitted to use for messages
of utmost urgency. Ammet
followed, and Kolin brought
up the rear.
To
reach their assigned
sector, they had to climb
a forbidding ridge of rock
within half a kilometer. Only
a sparse creeper grew along
their way, its elongated leaves
shimmering with bronze-green
reflections against a
stony surface; but when they
topped the ridge a thick forest
was in sight.
Yrtok and Ammet paused
momentarily before descending.
Kolin shared their sense of
isolation. They would be out
of sight of authority and responsible
for their own actions.
It was a strange sensation.
They marched down into
the valley at a brisk pace, becoming
more aware of the
clouds and atmospheric haze.
Distant objects seemed
blurred by the mist, taking on
a somber, brooding grayness.
For all Kolin could tell, he
and the others were isolated
in a world bounded by the
rocky ridge behind them and
a semi-circle of damp trees
and bushes several hundred
meters away. He suspected
that the hills rising mistily
ahead were part of a continuous
slope, but could not be
sure.
Yrtok led the way along
the most nearly level ground.
Low creepers became more
plentiful, interspersed with
scrubby thickets of tangled,
spike-armored bushes. Occasionally,
small flying things
flickered among the foliage.
Once, a shrub puffed out an
enormous cloud of tiny
spores.
"Be a job to find anything
edible here," grunted Ammet,
and Kolin agreed.
Finally, after a longer hike
than he had anticipated, they
approached the edge of the
deceptively distant forest.
Yrtok paused to examine some
purple berries glistening dangerously
on a low shrub. Kolin
regarded the trees with
misgiving.
"Looks as tough to get
through as a tropical jungle,"
he remarked.
"I think the stuff puts out
shoots that grow back into
the ground to root as they
spread," said the woman.
"Maybe we can find a way
through."
In two or three minutes,
they reached the abrupt border
of the odd-looking trees.
Except for one thick
trunked giant, all of them
were about the same height.
They craned their necks to estimate
the altitude of the
monster, but the top was hidden
by the wide spread of
branches. The depths behind
it looked dark and impenetrable.
"We'd better explore along
the edge," decided Yrtok.
"Ammet, now is the time to
go back and tell the Chief
which way we're—
Ammet!
"
Kolin looked over his shoulder.
Fifty meters away, Ammet
sat beside the bush with
the purple berries, utterly
relaxed.
"He must have tasted
some!" exclaimed Kolin. "I'll
see how he is."
He ran back to the cook and
shook him by the shoulder.
Ammet's head lolled loosely
to one side. His rather heavy
features were vacant, lending
him a doped appearance. Kolin
straightened up and beckoned
to Yrtok.
For some reason, he had
trouble attracting her attention.
Then he noticed that she
was kneeling.
"Hope she didn't eat some
stupid thing too!" he grumbled,
trotting back.
As he reached her, whatever
Yrtok was examining
came to life and scooted into
the underbrush with a flash
of greenish fur. All Kolin
saw was that it had several
legs too many.
He pulled Yrtok to her
feet. She pawed at him weakly,
eyes as vacant as Ammet's.
When he let go in sudden
horror, she folded gently to
the ground. She lay comfortably
on her side, twitching
one hand as if to brush something
away.
When she began to smile
dreamily, Kolin backed away.
The
corners of his mouth
felt oddly stiff; they had
involuntarily drawn back to
expose his clenched teeth. He
glanced warily about, but
nothing appeared to threaten
him.
"It's time to end this scout,"
he told himself. "It's dangerous.
One good look and I'm
jetting off! What I need is
an easy tree to climb."
He considered the massive
giant. Soaring thirty or forty
meters into the thin fog and
dwarfing other growth, it
seemed the most promising
choice.
At first, Kolin saw no way,
but then the network of vines
clinging to the rugged trunk
suggested a route. He tried
his weight gingerly, then began
to climb.
"I should have brought
Yrtok's radio," he muttered.
"Oh, well, I can take it when
I come down, if she hasn't
snapped out of her spell by
then. Funny … I wonder if
that green thing bit her."
Footholds were plentiful
among the interlaced lianas.
Kolin progressed rapidly.
When he reached the first
thick limbs, twice head
height, he felt safer.
Later, at what he hoped was
the halfway mark, he hooked
one knee over a branch and
paused to wipe sweat from his
eyes. Peering down, he discovered
the ground to be obscured
by foliage.
"I should have checked
from down there to see how
open the top is," he mused.
"I wonder how the view will
be from up there?"
"Depends on what you're
looking for, Sonny!" something
remarked in a soughing wheeze.
Kolin, slipping, grabbed
desperately for the branch.
His fingers clutched a handful
of twigs and leaves, which
just barely supported him until
he regained a grip with
the other hand.
The branch quivered resentfully
under him.
"Careful, there!" whooshed
the eerie voice. "It took me
all summer to grow those!"
Kolin could feel the skin
crawling along his backbone.
"Who
are
you?" he gasped.
The answering sigh of
laughter gave him a distinct
chill despite its suggestion of
amiability.
"Name's Johnny Ashlew.
Kinda thought you'd start
with
what
I am. Didn't figure
you'd ever seen a man grown
into a tree before."
Kolin looked about, seeing
little but leaves and fog.
"I have to climb down," he
told himself in a reasonable
tone. "It's bad enough that the
other two passed out without
me going space happy too."
"What's your hurry?" demanded
the voice. "I can talk
to you just as easy all the way
down, you know. Airholes in
my bark—I'm not like an
Earth tree."
Kolin examined the bark of
the crotch in which he sat. It
did seem to have assorted
holes and hollows in its rough
surface.
"I never saw an Earth tree,"
he admitted. "We came from
Haurtoz."
"Where's that? Oh, never
mind—some little planet. I
don't bother with them all,
since I came here and found
out I could be anything I
wanted."
"What do you mean, anything
you wanted?" asked
Kolin, testing the firmness of
a vertical vine.
"Just
what I said," continued
the voice, sounding
closer in his ear as his
cheek brushed the ridged bark
of the tree trunk. "And, if
I do have to remind you, it
would be nicer if you said
'Mr. Ashlew,' considering my
age."
"Your age? How old—?"
"Can't really count it in
Earth years any more. Lost
track. I always figured bein'
a tree was a nice, peaceful
life; and when I remembered
how long some of them live,
that settled it. Sonny, this
world ain't all it looks like."
"It isn't, Mr. Ashlew?"
asked Kolin, twisting about
in an effort to see what the
higher branches might hide.
"Nope. Most everything
here is run by the Life—that
is, by the thing that first
grew big enough to do some
thinking, and set its roots
down all over until it had
control. That's the outskirts
of it down below."
"The other trees? That jungle?"
"It's more'n a jungle, Sonny.
When I landed here, along
with the others from the
Arcturan Spark
, the planet
looked pretty empty to me,
just like it must have to—Watch
it, there, Boy! If I
didn't twist that branch over
in time, you'd be bouncing off
my roots right now!"
"Th-thanks!" grunted Kolin,
hanging on grimly.
"Doggone vine!" commented
the windy whisper. "
He
ain't one of my crowd. Landed
years later in a ship from
some star towards the center
of the galaxy. You should
have seen his looks before
the Life got in touch with his
mind and set up a mental field
to help him change form. He
looks twice as good as a
vine!"
"He's very handy," agreed
Kolin politely. He groped for
a foothold.
"Well … matter of fact, I
can't get through to him
much, even with the Life's
mental field helping. Guess
he started living with a different
way of thinking. It
burns me. I thought of being
a tree, and then he came along
to take advantage of it!"
Kolin braced himself securely
to stretch tiring muscles.
"Maybe I'd better stay a
while," he muttered. "I don't
know where I am."
"You're about fifty feet
up," the sighing voice informed
him. "You ought to
let me tell you how the Life
helps you change form. You
don't
have
to be a tree."
"No?"
"
Uh
-uh! Some of the boys
that landed with me wanted
to get around and see things.
Lots changed to animals or
birds. One even stayed a man—on
the outside anyway.
Most of them have to change
as the bodies wear out, which
I don't, and some made bad
mistakes tryin' to be things
they saw on other planets."
"I wouldn't want to do
that, Mr. Ashlew."
"There's just one thing.
The Life don't like taking
chances on word about this
place gettin' around. It sorta
believes in peace and quiet.
You might not get back to
your ship in any form that
could tell tales."
"Listen!" Kolin blurted
out. "I wasn't so much enjoying
being what I was that
getting back matters to me!"
"Don't like your home planet,
whatever the name was?"
"Haurtoz. It's a rotten
place. A Planetary State! You
have to think and even look
the way that's standard thirty
hours a day, asleep or
awake. You get scared to
sleep for fear you might
dream
treason and they'd find
out somehow."
"Whooeee! Heard about
them places. Must be tough
just to live."
Suddenly, Kolin found himself
telling the tree about life
on Haurtoz, and of the officially
announced threats to
the Planetary State's planned
expansion. He dwelt upon the
desperation of having no
place to hide in case of trouble
with the authorities. A
multiple system of such
worlds was agonizing to
imagine.
Somehow,
the oddity of
talking to a tree wore off.
Kolin heard opinions spouting
out which he had prudently
kept bottled up for
years.
The more he talked and
stormed and complained, the
more relaxed he felt.
"If there was ever a fellow
ready for this planet," decided
the tree named Ashlew,
"you're it, Sonny! Hang on
there while I signal the Life
by root!"
Kolin sensed a lack of direct
attention. The rustle
about him was natural, caused
by an ordinary breeze. He
noticed his hands shaking.
"Don't know what got into
me, talking that way to a
tree," he muttered. "If Yrtok
snapped out of it and heard,
I'm as good as re-personalized
right now."
As he brooded upon the
sorry choice of arousing a
search by hiding where he
was or going back to bluff
things out, the tree spoke.
"Maybe you're all set, Sonny.
The Life has been thinkin'
of learning about other
worlds. If you can think of a
safe form to jet off in, you
might make yourself a deal.
How'd you like to stay here?"
"I don't know," said Kolin.
"The penalty for desertion—"
"Whoosh! Who'd find you?
You could be a bird, a tree,
even a cloud."
Silenced but doubting, Kolin
permitted himself to try
the dream on for size.
He considered what form
might most easily escape the
notice of search parties and
still be tough enough to live
a long time without renewal.
Another factor slipped into
his musings: mere hope of escape
was unsatisfying after
the outburst that had defined
his fuming hatred for Haurtoz.
I'd better watch myself!
he
thought.
Don't drop diamonds
to grab at stars!
"What I wish I could do is
not just get away but get even
for the way they make us
live … the whole damn set-up.
They could just as easy make
peace with the Earth colonies.
You know why they
don't?"
"Why?" wheezed Ashlew.
"They're scared that without
talk of war, and scouting
for Earth fleets that never
come, people would have time
to think about the way they
have to live and who's running
things in the Planetary
State. Then the gravy train
would get blown up—and I
mean blown up!"
The tree was silent for a
moment. Kolin felt the
branches stir meditatively.
Then Ashlew offered a suggestion.
"I could tell the Life your
side of it," he hissed. "Once
in with us, you can always
make thinking connections,
no matter how far away.
Maybe you could make a deal
to kill two birds with one
stone, as they used to say on
Earth…."
Chief
Steward Slichow
paced up and down beside
the ration crate turned up to
serve him as a field desk. He
scowled in turn, impartially,
at his watch and at the weary
stewards of his headquarters
detail. The latter stumbled
about, stacking and distributing
small packets of emergency
rations.
The line of crewmen released
temporarily from repair
work was transient as to
individuals but immutable as
to length. Slichow muttered
something profane about disregard
of orders as he glared
at the rocky ridges surrounding
the landing place.
He was so intent upon planning
greetings with which to
favor the tardy scouting parties
that he failed to notice
the loose cloud drifting over
the ridge.
It was tenuous, almost a
haze. Close examination
would have revealed it to be
made up of myriads of tiny
spores. They resembled those
cast forth by one of the
bushes Kolin's party had
passed. Along the edges, the
haze faded raggedly into thin
air, but the units evidently
formed a cohesive body. They
drifted together, approaching
the men as if taking intelligent
advantage of the breeze.
One of Chief Slichow's
staggering flunkies, stealing
a few seconds of relaxation
on the pretext of dumping an
armful of light plastic packing,
wandered into the haze.
He froze.
After a few heartbeats, he
dropped the trash and stared
at ship and men as if he had
never seen either. A hail from
his master moved him.
"Coming, Chief!" he called
but, returning at a moderate
pace, he murmured, "My
name is Frazer. I'm a second
assistant steward. I'll think as
Unit One."
Throughout the cloud of
spores, the mind formerly
known as Peter Kolin congratulated
itself upon its
choice of form.
Nearer to the original
shape of the Life than Ashlew
got
, he thought.
He paused to consider the
state of the tree named Ashlew,
half immortal but rooted
to one spot, unable to float on
a breeze or through space itself
on the pressure of light.
Especially, it was unable to
insinuate any part of itself
into the control center of another
form of life, as a second
spore was taking charge of
the body of Chief Slichow at
that very instant.
There are not enough men
,
thought Kolin.
Some of me
must drift through the airlock.
In space, I can spread
through the air system to the
command group.
Repairs to the
Peace State
and the return to Haurtoz
passed like weeks to some of
the crew but like brief moments
in infinity to other
units. At last, the ship parted
the air above Headquarters
City and landed.
The unit known as Captain
Theodor Kessel hesitated before
descending the ramp. He
surveyed the field, the city
and the waiting team of inspecting
officers.
"Could hardly be better,
could it?" he chuckled to the
companion unit called Security
Officer Tarth.
"Hardly, sir. All ready for
the liberation of Haurtoz."
"Reformation of the Planetary
State," mused the captain,
smiling dreamily as he
grasped the handrail. "And
then—formation of the Planetary
Mind!"
END
Transcriber's Note:
This e-text was produced from
Worlds of If January 1962
.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this
publication was renewed. | [
"She figured out what was wrong with Ammet when he fell.",
"She was the reason they had a quality water supply.",
"She found the purple berries, an important source of food for the stranded crew.",
"Her fall leads Kolin to find Ashlew"
] | 3 |
23767_EDRV7U74_5 | Why is Kolin so worried about the purple berries? | By H. B. Fyfe
THE TALKATIVE
TREE
Dang vines! Beats all how some plants
have no manners—but what do you expect,
when they used to be men!
All
things considered—the
obscure star, the undetermined
damage to the
stellar drive and the way the
small planet's murky atmosphere
defied precision scanners—the
pilot made a reasonably
good landing. Despite
sour feelings for the space
service of Haurtoz, steward
Peter Kolin had to admit that
casualties might have been
far worse.
Chief Steward Slichow led
his little command, less two
third-class ration keepers
thought to have been trapped
in the lower hold, to a point
two hundred meters from the
steaming hull of the
Peace
State
. He lined them up as if
on parade. Kolin made himself
inconspicuous.
"Since the crew will be on
emergency watches repairing
the damage," announced the
Chief in clipped, aggressive
tones, "I have volunteered my
section for preliminary scouting,
as is suitable. It may be
useful to discover temporary
sources in this area of natural
foods."
Volunteered HIS section!
thought Kolin rebelliously.
Like the Supreme Director
of Haurtoz! Being conscripted
into this idiotic space fleet
that never fights is bad
enough without a tin god on
jets like Slichow!
Prudently, he did not express
this resentment overtly.
His well-schooled features
revealed no trace of the idea—or
of any other idea. The
Planetary State of Haurtoz
had been organized some fifteen
light-years from old
Earth, but many of the home
world's less kindly techniques
had been employed. Lack of
complete loyalty to the state
was likely to result in a siege
of treatment that left the subject
suitably "re-personalized."
Kolin had heard of instances
wherein mere unenthusiastic
posture had betrayed
intentions to harbor
treasonable thoughts.
"You will scout in five details
of three persons each,"
Chief Slichow said. "Every
hour, each detail will send
one person in to report, and
he will be replaced by one of
the five I shall keep here to
issue rations."
Kolin permitted himself to
wonder when anyone might
get some rest, but assumed a
mildly willing look. (Too eager
an attitude could arouse
suspicion of disguising an improper
viewpoint.) The maintenance
of a proper viewpoint
was a necessity if the Planetary
State were to survive
the hostile plots of Earth and
the latter's decadent colonies.
That, at least, was the official
line.
Kolin found himself in a
group with Jak Ammet, a
third cook, and Eva Yrtok,
powdered foods storekeeper.
Since the crew would be eating
packaged rations during
repairs, Yrtok could be spared
to command a scout detail.
Each scout was issued a
rocket pistol and a plastic water
tube. Chief Slichow emphasized
that the keepers of
rations could hardly, in an
emergency, give even the appearance
of favoring themselves
in regard to food. They
would go without. Kolin
maintained a standard expression
as the Chief's sharp
stare measured them.
Yrtok, a dark, lean-faced
girl, led the way with a quiet
monosyllable. She carried the
small radio they would be
permitted to use for messages
of utmost urgency. Ammet
followed, and Kolin brought
up the rear.
To
reach their assigned
sector, they had to climb
a forbidding ridge of rock
within half a kilometer. Only
a sparse creeper grew along
their way, its elongated leaves
shimmering with bronze-green
reflections against a
stony surface; but when they
topped the ridge a thick forest
was in sight.
Yrtok and Ammet paused
momentarily before descending.
Kolin shared their sense of
isolation. They would be out
of sight of authority and responsible
for their own actions.
It was a strange sensation.
They marched down into
the valley at a brisk pace, becoming
more aware of the
clouds and atmospheric haze.
Distant objects seemed
blurred by the mist, taking on
a somber, brooding grayness.
For all Kolin could tell, he
and the others were isolated
in a world bounded by the
rocky ridge behind them and
a semi-circle of damp trees
and bushes several hundred
meters away. He suspected
that the hills rising mistily
ahead were part of a continuous
slope, but could not be
sure.
Yrtok led the way along
the most nearly level ground.
Low creepers became more
plentiful, interspersed with
scrubby thickets of tangled,
spike-armored bushes. Occasionally,
small flying things
flickered among the foliage.
Once, a shrub puffed out an
enormous cloud of tiny
spores.
"Be a job to find anything
edible here," grunted Ammet,
and Kolin agreed.
Finally, after a longer hike
than he had anticipated, they
approached the edge of the
deceptively distant forest.
Yrtok paused to examine some
purple berries glistening dangerously
on a low shrub. Kolin
regarded the trees with
misgiving.
"Looks as tough to get
through as a tropical jungle,"
he remarked.
"I think the stuff puts out
shoots that grow back into
the ground to root as they
spread," said the woman.
"Maybe we can find a way
through."
In two or three minutes,
they reached the abrupt border
of the odd-looking trees.
Except for one thick
trunked giant, all of them
were about the same height.
They craned their necks to estimate
the altitude of the
monster, but the top was hidden
by the wide spread of
branches. The depths behind
it looked dark and impenetrable.
"We'd better explore along
the edge," decided Yrtok.
"Ammet, now is the time to
go back and tell the Chief
which way we're—
Ammet!
"
Kolin looked over his shoulder.
Fifty meters away, Ammet
sat beside the bush with
the purple berries, utterly
relaxed.
"He must have tasted
some!" exclaimed Kolin. "I'll
see how he is."
He ran back to the cook and
shook him by the shoulder.
Ammet's head lolled loosely
to one side. His rather heavy
features were vacant, lending
him a doped appearance. Kolin
straightened up and beckoned
to Yrtok.
For some reason, he had
trouble attracting her attention.
Then he noticed that she
was kneeling.
"Hope she didn't eat some
stupid thing too!" he grumbled,
trotting back.
As he reached her, whatever
Yrtok was examining
came to life and scooted into
the underbrush with a flash
of greenish fur. All Kolin
saw was that it had several
legs too many.
He pulled Yrtok to her
feet. She pawed at him weakly,
eyes as vacant as Ammet's.
When he let go in sudden
horror, she folded gently to
the ground. She lay comfortably
on her side, twitching
one hand as if to brush something
away.
When she began to smile
dreamily, Kolin backed away.
The
corners of his mouth
felt oddly stiff; they had
involuntarily drawn back to
expose his clenched teeth. He
glanced warily about, but
nothing appeared to threaten
him.
"It's time to end this scout,"
he told himself. "It's dangerous.
One good look and I'm
jetting off! What I need is
an easy tree to climb."
He considered the massive
giant. Soaring thirty or forty
meters into the thin fog and
dwarfing other growth, it
seemed the most promising
choice.
At first, Kolin saw no way,
but then the network of vines
clinging to the rugged trunk
suggested a route. He tried
his weight gingerly, then began
to climb.
"I should have brought
Yrtok's radio," he muttered.
"Oh, well, I can take it when
I come down, if she hasn't
snapped out of her spell by
then. Funny … I wonder if
that green thing bit her."
Footholds were plentiful
among the interlaced lianas.
Kolin progressed rapidly.
When he reached the first
thick limbs, twice head
height, he felt safer.
Later, at what he hoped was
the halfway mark, he hooked
one knee over a branch and
paused to wipe sweat from his
eyes. Peering down, he discovered
the ground to be obscured
by foliage.
"I should have checked
from down there to see how
open the top is," he mused.
"I wonder how the view will
be from up there?"
"Depends on what you're
looking for, Sonny!" something
remarked in a soughing wheeze.
Kolin, slipping, grabbed
desperately for the branch.
His fingers clutched a handful
of twigs and leaves, which
just barely supported him until
he regained a grip with
the other hand.
The branch quivered resentfully
under him.
"Careful, there!" whooshed
the eerie voice. "It took me
all summer to grow those!"
Kolin could feel the skin
crawling along his backbone.
"Who
are
you?" he gasped.
The answering sigh of
laughter gave him a distinct
chill despite its suggestion of
amiability.
"Name's Johnny Ashlew.
Kinda thought you'd start
with
what
I am. Didn't figure
you'd ever seen a man grown
into a tree before."
Kolin looked about, seeing
little but leaves and fog.
"I have to climb down," he
told himself in a reasonable
tone. "It's bad enough that the
other two passed out without
me going space happy too."
"What's your hurry?" demanded
the voice. "I can talk
to you just as easy all the way
down, you know. Airholes in
my bark—I'm not like an
Earth tree."
Kolin examined the bark of
the crotch in which he sat. It
did seem to have assorted
holes and hollows in its rough
surface.
"I never saw an Earth tree,"
he admitted. "We came from
Haurtoz."
"Where's that? Oh, never
mind—some little planet. I
don't bother with them all,
since I came here and found
out I could be anything I
wanted."
"What do you mean, anything
you wanted?" asked
Kolin, testing the firmness of
a vertical vine.
"Just
what I said," continued
the voice, sounding
closer in his ear as his
cheek brushed the ridged bark
of the tree trunk. "And, if
I do have to remind you, it
would be nicer if you said
'Mr. Ashlew,' considering my
age."
"Your age? How old—?"
"Can't really count it in
Earth years any more. Lost
track. I always figured bein'
a tree was a nice, peaceful
life; and when I remembered
how long some of them live,
that settled it. Sonny, this
world ain't all it looks like."
"It isn't, Mr. Ashlew?"
asked Kolin, twisting about
in an effort to see what the
higher branches might hide.
"Nope. Most everything
here is run by the Life—that
is, by the thing that first
grew big enough to do some
thinking, and set its roots
down all over until it had
control. That's the outskirts
of it down below."
"The other trees? That jungle?"
"It's more'n a jungle, Sonny.
When I landed here, along
with the others from the
Arcturan Spark
, the planet
looked pretty empty to me,
just like it must have to—Watch
it, there, Boy! If I
didn't twist that branch over
in time, you'd be bouncing off
my roots right now!"
"Th-thanks!" grunted Kolin,
hanging on grimly.
"Doggone vine!" commented
the windy whisper. "
He
ain't one of my crowd. Landed
years later in a ship from
some star towards the center
of the galaxy. You should
have seen his looks before
the Life got in touch with his
mind and set up a mental field
to help him change form. He
looks twice as good as a
vine!"
"He's very handy," agreed
Kolin politely. He groped for
a foothold.
"Well … matter of fact, I
can't get through to him
much, even with the Life's
mental field helping. Guess
he started living with a different
way of thinking. It
burns me. I thought of being
a tree, and then he came along
to take advantage of it!"
Kolin braced himself securely
to stretch tiring muscles.
"Maybe I'd better stay a
while," he muttered. "I don't
know where I am."
"You're about fifty feet
up," the sighing voice informed
him. "You ought to
let me tell you how the Life
helps you change form. You
don't
have
to be a tree."
"No?"
"
Uh
-uh! Some of the boys
that landed with me wanted
to get around and see things.
Lots changed to animals or
birds. One even stayed a man—on
the outside anyway.
Most of them have to change
as the bodies wear out, which
I don't, and some made bad
mistakes tryin' to be things
they saw on other planets."
"I wouldn't want to do
that, Mr. Ashlew."
"There's just one thing.
The Life don't like taking
chances on word about this
place gettin' around. It sorta
believes in peace and quiet.
You might not get back to
your ship in any form that
could tell tales."
"Listen!" Kolin blurted
out. "I wasn't so much enjoying
being what I was that
getting back matters to me!"
"Don't like your home planet,
whatever the name was?"
"Haurtoz. It's a rotten
place. A Planetary State! You
have to think and even look
the way that's standard thirty
hours a day, asleep or
awake. You get scared to
sleep for fear you might
dream
treason and they'd find
out somehow."
"Whooeee! Heard about
them places. Must be tough
just to live."
Suddenly, Kolin found himself
telling the tree about life
on Haurtoz, and of the officially
announced threats to
the Planetary State's planned
expansion. He dwelt upon the
desperation of having no
place to hide in case of trouble
with the authorities. A
multiple system of such
worlds was agonizing to
imagine.
Somehow,
the oddity of
talking to a tree wore off.
Kolin heard opinions spouting
out which he had prudently
kept bottled up for
years.
The more he talked and
stormed and complained, the
more relaxed he felt.
"If there was ever a fellow
ready for this planet," decided
the tree named Ashlew,
"you're it, Sonny! Hang on
there while I signal the Life
by root!"
Kolin sensed a lack of direct
attention. The rustle
about him was natural, caused
by an ordinary breeze. He
noticed his hands shaking.
"Don't know what got into
me, talking that way to a
tree," he muttered. "If Yrtok
snapped out of it and heard,
I'm as good as re-personalized
right now."
As he brooded upon the
sorry choice of arousing a
search by hiding where he
was or going back to bluff
things out, the tree spoke.
"Maybe you're all set, Sonny.
The Life has been thinkin'
of learning about other
worlds. If you can think of a
safe form to jet off in, you
might make yourself a deal.
How'd you like to stay here?"
"I don't know," said Kolin.
"The penalty for desertion—"
"Whoosh! Who'd find you?
You could be a bird, a tree,
even a cloud."
Silenced but doubting, Kolin
permitted himself to try
the dream on for size.
He considered what form
might most easily escape the
notice of search parties and
still be tough enough to live
a long time without renewal.
Another factor slipped into
his musings: mere hope of escape
was unsatisfying after
the outburst that had defined
his fuming hatred for Haurtoz.
I'd better watch myself!
he
thought.
Don't drop diamonds
to grab at stars!
"What I wish I could do is
not just get away but get even
for the way they make us
live … the whole damn set-up.
They could just as easy make
peace with the Earth colonies.
You know why they
don't?"
"Why?" wheezed Ashlew.
"They're scared that without
talk of war, and scouting
for Earth fleets that never
come, people would have time
to think about the way they
have to live and who's running
things in the Planetary
State. Then the gravy train
would get blown up—and I
mean blown up!"
The tree was silent for a
moment. Kolin felt the
branches stir meditatively.
Then Ashlew offered a suggestion.
"I could tell the Life your
side of it," he hissed. "Once
in with us, you can always
make thinking connections,
no matter how far away.
Maybe you could make a deal
to kill two birds with one
stone, as they used to say on
Earth…."
Chief
Steward Slichow
paced up and down beside
the ration crate turned up to
serve him as a field desk. He
scowled in turn, impartially,
at his watch and at the weary
stewards of his headquarters
detail. The latter stumbled
about, stacking and distributing
small packets of emergency
rations.
The line of crewmen released
temporarily from repair
work was transient as to
individuals but immutable as
to length. Slichow muttered
something profane about disregard
of orders as he glared
at the rocky ridges surrounding
the landing place.
He was so intent upon planning
greetings with which to
favor the tardy scouting parties
that he failed to notice
the loose cloud drifting over
the ridge.
It was tenuous, almost a
haze. Close examination
would have revealed it to be
made up of myriads of tiny
spores. They resembled those
cast forth by one of the
bushes Kolin's party had
passed. Along the edges, the
haze faded raggedly into thin
air, but the units evidently
formed a cohesive body. They
drifted together, approaching
the men as if taking intelligent
advantage of the breeze.
One of Chief Slichow's
staggering flunkies, stealing
a few seconds of relaxation
on the pretext of dumping an
armful of light plastic packing,
wandered into the haze.
He froze.
After a few heartbeats, he
dropped the trash and stared
at ship and men as if he had
never seen either. A hail from
his master moved him.
"Coming, Chief!" he called
but, returning at a moderate
pace, he murmured, "My
name is Frazer. I'm a second
assistant steward. I'll think as
Unit One."
Throughout the cloud of
spores, the mind formerly
known as Peter Kolin congratulated
itself upon its
choice of form.
Nearer to the original
shape of the Life than Ashlew
got
, he thought.
He paused to consider the
state of the tree named Ashlew,
half immortal but rooted
to one spot, unable to float on
a breeze or through space itself
on the pressure of light.
Especially, it was unable to
insinuate any part of itself
into the control center of another
form of life, as a second
spore was taking charge of
the body of Chief Slichow at
that very instant.
There are not enough men
,
thought Kolin.
Some of me
must drift through the airlock.
In space, I can spread
through the air system to the
command group.
Repairs to the
Peace State
and the return to Haurtoz
passed like weeks to some of
the crew but like brief moments
in infinity to other
units. At last, the ship parted
the air above Headquarters
City and landed.
The unit known as Captain
Theodor Kessel hesitated before
descending the ramp. He
surveyed the field, the city
and the waiting team of inspecting
officers.
"Could hardly be better,
could it?" he chuckled to the
companion unit called Security
Officer Tarth.
"Hardly, sir. All ready for
the liberation of Haurtoz."
"Reformation of the Planetary
State," mused the captain,
smiling dreamily as he
grasped the handrail. "And
then—formation of the Planetary
Mind!"
END
Transcriber's Note:
This e-text was produced from
Worlds of If January 1962
.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this
publication was renewed. | [
"He expected them to be a different color.",
"They may have had adverse effects on his crewmates' mental state.",
"The cook thinks that they are dangerous to eat.",
"If they are not edible, they will not have any food to bring back with their report."
] | 1 |
23767_EDRV7U74_6 | What might lead the reader to think that Ashlew is trying to draw Kolin into a trap? | By H. B. Fyfe
THE TALKATIVE
TREE
Dang vines! Beats all how some plants
have no manners—but what do you expect,
when they used to be men!
All
things considered—the
obscure star, the undetermined
damage to the
stellar drive and the way the
small planet's murky atmosphere
defied precision scanners—the
pilot made a reasonably
good landing. Despite
sour feelings for the space
service of Haurtoz, steward
Peter Kolin had to admit that
casualties might have been
far worse.
Chief Steward Slichow led
his little command, less two
third-class ration keepers
thought to have been trapped
in the lower hold, to a point
two hundred meters from the
steaming hull of the
Peace
State
. He lined them up as if
on parade. Kolin made himself
inconspicuous.
"Since the crew will be on
emergency watches repairing
the damage," announced the
Chief in clipped, aggressive
tones, "I have volunteered my
section for preliminary scouting,
as is suitable. It may be
useful to discover temporary
sources in this area of natural
foods."
Volunteered HIS section!
thought Kolin rebelliously.
Like the Supreme Director
of Haurtoz! Being conscripted
into this idiotic space fleet
that never fights is bad
enough without a tin god on
jets like Slichow!
Prudently, he did not express
this resentment overtly.
His well-schooled features
revealed no trace of the idea—or
of any other idea. The
Planetary State of Haurtoz
had been organized some fifteen
light-years from old
Earth, but many of the home
world's less kindly techniques
had been employed. Lack of
complete loyalty to the state
was likely to result in a siege
of treatment that left the subject
suitably "re-personalized."
Kolin had heard of instances
wherein mere unenthusiastic
posture had betrayed
intentions to harbor
treasonable thoughts.
"You will scout in five details
of three persons each,"
Chief Slichow said. "Every
hour, each detail will send
one person in to report, and
he will be replaced by one of
the five I shall keep here to
issue rations."
Kolin permitted himself to
wonder when anyone might
get some rest, but assumed a
mildly willing look. (Too eager
an attitude could arouse
suspicion of disguising an improper
viewpoint.) The maintenance
of a proper viewpoint
was a necessity if the Planetary
State were to survive
the hostile plots of Earth and
the latter's decadent colonies.
That, at least, was the official
line.
Kolin found himself in a
group with Jak Ammet, a
third cook, and Eva Yrtok,
powdered foods storekeeper.
Since the crew would be eating
packaged rations during
repairs, Yrtok could be spared
to command a scout detail.
Each scout was issued a
rocket pistol and a plastic water
tube. Chief Slichow emphasized
that the keepers of
rations could hardly, in an
emergency, give even the appearance
of favoring themselves
in regard to food. They
would go without. Kolin
maintained a standard expression
as the Chief's sharp
stare measured them.
Yrtok, a dark, lean-faced
girl, led the way with a quiet
monosyllable. She carried the
small radio they would be
permitted to use for messages
of utmost urgency. Ammet
followed, and Kolin brought
up the rear.
To
reach their assigned
sector, they had to climb
a forbidding ridge of rock
within half a kilometer. Only
a sparse creeper grew along
their way, its elongated leaves
shimmering with bronze-green
reflections against a
stony surface; but when they
topped the ridge a thick forest
was in sight.
Yrtok and Ammet paused
momentarily before descending.
Kolin shared their sense of
isolation. They would be out
of sight of authority and responsible
for their own actions.
It was a strange sensation.
They marched down into
the valley at a brisk pace, becoming
more aware of the
clouds and atmospheric haze.
Distant objects seemed
blurred by the mist, taking on
a somber, brooding grayness.
For all Kolin could tell, he
and the others were isolated
in a world bounded by the
rocky ridge behind them and
a semi-circle of damp trees
and bushes several hundred
meters away. He suspected
that the hills rising mistily
ahead were part of a continuous
slope, but could not be
sure.
Yrtok led the way along
the most nearly level ground.
Low creepers became more
plentiful, interspersed with
scrubby thickets of tangled,
spike-armored bushes. Occasionally,
small flying things
flickered among the foliage.
Once, a shrub puffed out an
enormous cloud of tiny
spores.
"Be a job to find anything
edible here," grunted Ammet,
and Kolin agreed.
Finally, after a longer hike
than he had anticipated, they
approached the edge of the
deceptively distant forest.
Yrtok paused to examine some
purple berries glistening dangerously
on a low shrub. Kolin
regarded the trees with
misgiving.
"Looks as tough to get
through as a tropical jungle,"
he remarked.
"I think the stuff puts out
shoots that grow back into
the ground to root as they
spread," said the woman.
"Maybe we can find a way
through."
In two or three minutes,
they reached the abrupt border
of the odd-looking trees.
Except for one thick
trunked giant, all of them
were about the same height.
They craned their necks to estimate
the altitude of the
monster, but the top was hidden
by the wide spread of
branches. The depths behind
it looked dark and impenetrable.
"We'd better explore along
the edge," decided Yrtok.
"Ammet, now is the time to
go back and tell the Chief
which way we're—
Ammet!
"
Kolin looked over his shoulder.
Fifty meters away, Ammet
sat beside the bush with
the purple berries, utterly
relaxed.
"He must have tasted
some!" exclaimed Kolin. "I'll
see how he is."
He ran back to the cook and
shook him by the shoulder.
Ammet's head lolled loosely
to one side. His rather heavy
features were vacant, lending
him a doped appearance. Kolin
straightened up and beckoned
to Yrtok.
For some reason, he had
trouble attracting her attention.
Then he noticed that she
was kneeling.
"Hope she didn't eat some
stupid thing too!" he grumbled,
trotting back.
As he reached her, whatever
Yrtok was examining
came to life and scooted into
the underbrush with a flash
of greenish fur. All Kolin
saw was that it had several
legs too many.
He pulled Yrtok to her
feet. She pawed at him weakly,
eyes as vacant as Ammet's.
When he let go in sudden
horror, she folded gently to
the ground. She lay comfortably
on her side, twitching
one hand as if to brush something
away.
When she began to smile
dreamily, Kolin backed away.
The
corners of his mouth
felt oddly stiff; they had
involuntarily drawn back to
expose his clenched teeth. He
glanced warily about, but
nothing appeared to threaten
him.
"It's time to end this scout,"
he told himself. "It's dangerous.
One good look and I'm
jetting off! What I need is
an easy tree to climb."
He considered the massive
giant. Soaring thirty or forty
meters into the thin fog and
dwarfing other growth, it
seemed the most promising
choice.
At first, Kolin saw no way,
but then the network of vines
clinging to the rugged trunk
suggested a route. He tried
his weight gingerly, then began
to climb.
"I should have brought
Yrtok's radio," he muttered.
"Oh, well, I can take it when
I come down, if she hasn't
snapped out of her spell by
then. Funny … I wonder if
that green thing bit her."
Footholds were plentiful
among the interlaced lianas.
Kolin progressed rapidly.
When he reached the first
thick limbs, twice head
height, he felt safer.
Later, at what he hoped was
the halfway mark, he hooked
one knee over a branch and
paused to wipe sweat from his
eyes. Peering down, he discovered
the ground to be obscured
by foliage.
"I should have checked
from down there to see how
open the top is," he mused.
"I wonder how the view will
be from up there?"
"Depends on what you're
looking for, Sonny!" something
remarked in a soughing wheeze.
Kolin, slipping, grabbed
desperately for the branch.
His fingers clutched a handful
of twigs and leaves, which
just barely supported him until
he regained a grip with
the other hand.
The branch quivered resentfully
under him.
"Careful, there!" whooshed
the eerie voice. "It took me
all summer to grow those!"
Kolin could feel the skin
crawling along his backbone.
"Who
are
you?" he gasped.
The answering sigh of
laughter gave him a distinct
chill despite its suggestion of
amiability.
"Name's Johnny Ashlew.
Kinda thought you'd start
with
what
I am. Didn't figure
you'd ever seen a man grown
into a tree before."
Kolin looked about, seeing
little but leaves and fog.
"I have to climb down," he
told himself in a reasonable
tone. "It's bad enough that the
other two passed out without
me going space happy too."
"What's your hurry?" demanded
the voice. "I can talk
to you just as easy all the way
down, you know. Airholes in
my bark—I'm not like an
Earth tree."
Kolin examined the bark of
the crotch in which he sat. It
did seem to have assorted
holes and hollows in its rough
surface.
"I never saw an Earth tree,"
he admitted. "We came from
Haurtoz."
"Where's that? Oh, never
mind—some little planet. I
don't bother with them all,
since I came here and found
out I could be anything I
wanted."
"What do you mean, anything
you wanted?" asked
Kolin, testing the firmness of
a vertical vine.
"Just
what I said," continued
the voice, sounding
closer in his ear as his
cheek brushed the ridged bark
of the tree trunk. "And, if
I do have to remind you, it
would be nicer if you said
'Mr. Ashlew,' considering my
age."
"Your age? How old—?"
"Can't really count it in
Earth years any more. Lost
track. I always figured bein'
a tree was a nice, peaceful
life; and when I remembered
how long some of them live,
that settled it. Sonny, this
world ain't all it looks like."
"It isn't, Mr. Ashlew?"
asked Kolin, twisting about
in an effort to see what the
higher branches might hide.
"Nope. Most everything
here is run by the Life—that
is, by the thing that first
grew big enough to do some
thinking, and set its roots
down all over until it had
control. That's the outskirts
of it down below."
"The other trees? That jungle?"
"It's more'n a jungle, Sonny.
When I landed here, along
with the others from the
Arcturan Spark
, the planet
looked pretty empty to me,
just like it must have to—Watch
it, there, Boy! If I
didn't twist that branch over
in time, you'd be bouncing off
my roots right now!"
"Th-thanks!" grunted Kolin,
hanging on grimly.
"Doggone vine!" commented
the windy whisper. "
He
ain't one of my crowd. Landed
years later in a ship from
some star towards the center
of the galaxy. You should
have seen his looks before
the Life got in touch with his
mind and set up a mental field
to help him change form. He
looks twice as good as a
vine!"
"He's very handy," agreed
Kolin politely. He groped for
a foothold.
"Well … matter of fact, I
can't get through to him
much, even with the Life's
mental field helping. Guess
he started living with a different
way of thinking. It
burns me. I thought of being
a tree, and then he came along
to take advantage of it!"
Kolin braced himself securely
to stretch tiring muscles.
"Maybe I'd better stay a
while," he muttered. "I don't
know where I am."
"You're about fifty feet
up," the sighing voice informed
him. "You ought to
let me tell you how the Life
helps you change form. You
don't
have
to be a tree."
"No?"
"
Uh
-uh! Some of the boys
that landed with me wanted
to get around and see things.
Lots changed to animals or
birds. One even stayed a man—on
the outside anyway.
Most of them have to change
as the bodies wear out, which
I don't, and some made bad
mistakes tryin' to be things
they saw on other planets."
"I wouldn't want to do
that, Mr. Ashlew."
"There's just one thing.
The Life don't like taking
chances on word about this
place gettin' around. It sorta
believes in peace and quiet.
You might not get back to
your ship in any form that
could tell tales."
"Listen!" Kolin blurted
out. "I wasn't so much enjoying
being what I was that
getting back matters to me!"
"Don't like your home planet,
whatever the name was?"
"Haurtoz. It's a rotten
place. A Planetary State! You
have to think and even look
the way that's standard thirty
hours a day, asleep or
awake. You get scared to
sleep for fear you might
dream
treason and they'd find
out somehow."
"Whooeee! Heard about
them places. Must be tough
just to live."
Suddenly, Kolin found himself
telling the tree about life
on Haurtoz, and of the officially
announced threats to
the Planetary State's planned
expansion. He dwelt upon the
desperation of having no
place to hide in case of trouble
with the authorities. A
multiple system of such
worlds was agonizing to
imagine.
Somehow,
the oddity of
talking to a tree wore off.
Kolin heard opinions spouting
out which he had prudently
kept bottled up for
years.
The more he talked and
stormed and complained, the
more relaxed he felt.
"If there was ever a fellow
ready for this planet," decided
the tree named Ashlew,
"you're it, Sonny! Hang on
there while I signal the Life
by root!"
Kolin sensed a lack of direct
attention. The rustle
about him was natural, caused
by an ordinary breeze. He
noticed his hands shaking.
"Don't know what got into
me, talking that way to a
tree," he muttered. "If Yrtok
snapped out of it and heard,
I'm as good as re-personalized
right now."
As he brooded upon the
sorry choice of arousing a
search by hiding where he
was or going back to bluff
things out, the tree spoke.
"Maybe you're all set, Sonny.
The Life has been thinkin'
of learning about other
worlds. If you can think of a
safe form to jet off in, you
might make yourself a deal.
How'd you like to stay here?"
"I don't know," said Kolin.
"The penalty for desertion—"
"Whoosh! Who'd find you?
You could be a bird, a tree,
even a cloud."
Silenced but doubting, Kolin
permitted himself to try
the dream on for size.
He considered what form
might most easily escape the
notice of search parties and
still be tough enough to live
a long time without renewal.
Another factor slipped into
his musings: mere hope of escape
was unsatisfying after
the outburst that had defined
his fuming hatred for Haurtoz.
I'd better watch myself!
he
thought.
Don't drop diamonds
to grab at stars!
"What I wish I could do is
not just get away but get even
for the way they make us
live … the whole damn set-up.
They could just as easy make
peace with the Earth colonies.
You know why they
don't?"
"Why?" wheezed Ashlew.
"They're scared that without
talk of war, and scouting
for Earth fleets that never
come, people would have time
to think about the way they
have to live and who's running
things in the Planetary
State. Then the gravy train
would get blown up—and I
mean blown up!"
The tree was silent for a
moment. Kolin felt the
branches stir meditatively.
Then Ashlew offered a suggestion.
"I could tell the Life your
side of it," he hissed. "Once
in with us, you can always
make thinking connections,
no matter how far away.
Maybe you could make a deal
to kill two birds with one
stone, as they used to say on
Earth…."
Chief
Steward Slichow
paced up and down beside
the ration crate turned up to
serve him as a field desk. He
scowled in turn, impartially,
at his watch and at the weary
stewards of his headquarters
detail. The latter stumbled
about, stacking and distributing
small packets of emergency
rations.
The line of crewmen released
temporarily from repair
work was transient as to
individuals but immutable as
to length. Slichow muttered
something profane about disregard
of orders as he glared
at the rocky ridges surrounding
the landing place.
He was so intent upon planning
greetings with which to
favor the tardy scouting parties
that he failed to notice
the loose cloud drifting over
the ridge.
It was tenuous, almost a
haze. Close examination
would have revealed it to be
made up of myriads of tiny
spores. They resembled those
cast forth by one of the
bushes Kolin's party had
passed. Along the edges, the
haze faded raggedly into thin
air, but the units evidently
formed a cohesive body. They
drifted together, approaching
the men as if taking intelligent
advantage of the breeze.
One of Chief Slichow's
staggering flunkies, stealing
a few seconds of relaxation
on the pretext of dumping an
armful of light plastic packing,
wandered into the haze.
He froze.
After a few heartbeats, he
dropped the trash and stared
at ship and men as if he had
never seen either. A hail from
his master moved him.
"Coming, Chief!" he called
but, returning at a moderate
pace, he murmured, "My
name is Frazer. I'm a second
assistant steward. I'll think as
Unit One."
Throughout the cloud of
spores, the mind formerly
known as Peter Kolin congratulated
itself upon its
choice of form.
Nearer to the original
shape of the Life than Ashlew
got
, he thought.
He paused to consider the
state of the tree named Ashlew,
half immortal but rooted
to one spot, unable to float on
a breeze or through space itself
on the pressure of light.
Especially, it was unable to
insinuate any part of itself
into the control center of another
form of life, as a second
spore was taking charge of
the body of Chief Slichow at
that very instant.
There are not enough men
,
thought Kolin.
Some of me
must drift through the airlock.
In space, I can spread
through the air system to the
command group.
Repairs to the
Peace State
and the return to Haurtoz
passed like weeks to some of
the crew but like brief moments
in infinity to other
units. At last, the ship parted
the air above Headquarters
City and landed.
The unit known as Captain
Theodor Kessel hesitated before
descending the ramp. He
surveyed the field, the city
and the waiting team of inspecting
officers.
"Could hardly be better,
could it?" he chuckled to the
companion unit called Security
Officer Tarth.
"Hardly, sir. All ready for
the liberation of Haurtoz."
"Reformation of the Planetary
State," mused the captain,
smiling dreamily as he
grasped the handrail. "And
then—formation of the Planetary
Mind!"
END
Transcriber's Note:
This e-text was produced from
Worlds of If January 1962
.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this
publication was renewed. | [
"The way in which he offers to talk to the powerful force about Kolin's history",
"The holes strewn across Ashlew's back.",
"The fact that Ashlew assumed Kolin had been to Earth.",
"The fact that anyone would think a tree would be a good being to change into."
] | 0 |
23767_EDRV7U74_7 | What did Kolin think about becoming a tree himself? | By H. B. Fyfe
THE TALKATIVE
TREE
Dang vines! Beats all how some plants
have no manners—but what do you expect,
when they used to be men!
All
things considered—the
obscure star, the undetermined
damage to the
stellar drive and the way the
small planet's murky atmosphere
defied precision scanners—the
pilot made a reasonably
good landing. Despite
sour feelings for the space
service of Haurtoz, steward
Peter Kolin had to admit that
casualties might have been
far worse.
Chief Steward Slichow led
his little command, less two
third-class ration keepers
thought to have been trapped
in the lower hold, to a point
two hundred meters from the
steaming hull of the
Peace
State
. He lined them up as if
on parade. Kolin made himself
inconspicuous.
"Since the crew will be on
emergency watches repairing
the damage," announced the
Chief in clipped, aggressive
tones, "I have volunteered my
section for preliminary scouting,
as is suitable. It may be
useful to discover temporary
sources in this area of natural
foods."
Volunteered HIS section!
thought Kolin rebelliously.
Like the Supreme Director
of Haurtoz! Being conscripted
into this idiotic space fleet
that never fights is bad
enough without a tin god on
jets like Slichow!
Prudently, he did not express
this resentment overtly.
His well-schooled features
revealed no trace of the idea—or
of any other idea. The
Planetary State of Haurtoz
had been organized some fifteen
light-years from old
Earth, but many of the home
world's less kindly techniques
had been employed. Lack of
complete loyalty to the state
was likely to result in a siege
of treatment that left the subject
suitably "re-personalized."
Kolin had heard of instances
wherein mere unenthusiastic
posture had betrayed
intentions to harbor
treasonable thoughts.
"You will scout in five details
of three persons each,"
Chief Slichow said. "Every
hour, each detail will send
one person in to report, and
he will be replaced by one of
the five I shall keep here to
issue rations."
Kolin permitted himself to
wonder when anyone might
get some rest, but assumed a
mildly willing look. (Too eager
an attitude could arouse
suspicion of disguising an improper
viewpoint.) The maintenance
of a proper viewpoint
was a necessity if the Planetary
State were to survive
the hostile plots of Earth and
the latter's decadent colonies.
That, at least, was the official
line.
Kolin found himself in a
group with Jak Ammet, a
third cook, and Eva Yrtok,
powdered foods storekeeper.
Since the crew would be eating
packaged rations during
repairs, Yrtok could be spared
to command a scout detail.
Each scout was issued a
rocket pistol and a plastic water
tube. Chief Slichow emphasized
that the keepers of
rations could hardly, in an
emergency, give even the appearance
of favoring themselves
in regard to food. They
would go without. Kolin
maintained a standard expression
as the Chief's sharp
stare measured them.
Yrtok, a dark, lean-faced
girl, led the way with a quiet
monosyllable. She carried the
small radio they would be
permitted to use for messages
of utmost urgency. Ammet
followed, and Kolin brought
up the rear.
To
reach their assigned
sector, they had to climb
a forbidding ridge of rock
within half a kilometer. Only
a sparse creeper grew along
their way, its elongated leaves
shimmering with bronze-green
reflections against a
stony surface; but when they
topped the ridge a thick forest
was in sight.
Yrtok and Ammet paused
momentarily before descending.
Kolin shared their sense of
isolation. They would be out
of sight of authority and responsible
for their own actions.
It was a strange sensation.
They marched down into
the valley at a brisk pace, becoming
more aware of the
clouds and atmospheric haze.
Distant objects seemed
blurred by the mist, taking on
a somber, brooding grayness.
For all Kolin could tell, he
and the others were isolated
in a world bounded by the
rocky ridge behind them and
a semi-circle of damp trees
and bushes several hundred
meters away. He suspected
that the hills rising mistily
ahead were part of a continuous
slope, but could not be
sure.
Yrtok led the way along
the most nearly level ground.
Low creepers became more
plentiful, interspersed with
scrubby thickets of tangled,
spike-armored bushes. Occasionally,
small flying things
flickered among the foliage.
Once, a shrub puffed out an
enormous cloud of tiny
spores.
"Be a job to find anything
edible here," grunted Ammet,
and Kolin agreed.
Finally, after a longer hike
than he had anticipated, they
approached the edge of the
deceptively distant forest.
Yrtok paused to examine some
purple berries glistening dangerously
on a low shrub. Kolin
regarded the trees with
misgiving.
"Looks as tough to get
through as a tropical jungle,"
he remarked.
"I think the stuff puts out
shoots that grow back into
the ground to root as they
spread," said the woman.
"Maybe we can find a way
through."
In two or three minutes,
they reached the abrupt border
of the odd-looking trees.
Except for one thick
trunked giant, all of them
were about the same height.
They craned their necks to estimate
the altitude of the
monster, but the top was hidden
by the wide spread of
branches. The depths behind
it looked dark and impenetrable.
"We'd better explore along
the edge," decided Yrtok.
"Ammet, now is the time to
go back and tell the Chief
which way we're—
Ammet!
"
Kolin looked over his shoulder.
Fifty meters away, Ammet
sat beside the bush with
the purple berries, utterly
relaxed.
"He must have tasted
some!" exclaimed Kolin. "I'll
see how he is."
He ran back to the cook and
shook him by the shoulder.
Ammet's head lolled loosely
to one side. His rather heavy
features were vacant, lending
him a doped appearance. Kolin
straightened up and beckoned
to Yrtok.
For some reason, he had
trouble attracting her attention.
Then he noticed that she
was kneeling.
"Hope she didn't eat some
stupid thing too!" he grumbled,
trotting back.
As he reached her, whatever
Yrtok was examining
came to life and scooted into
the underbrush with a flash
of greenish fur. All Kolin
saw was that it had several
legs too many.
He pulled Yrtok to her
feet. She pawed at him weakly,
eyes as vacant as Ammet's.
When he let go in sudden
horror, she folded gently to
the ground. She lay comfortably
on her side, twitching
one hand as if to brush something
away.
When she began to smile
dreamily, Kolin backed away.
The
corners of his mouth
felt oddly stiff; they had
involuntarily drawn back to
expose his clenched teeth. He
glanced warily about, but
nothing appeared to threaten
him.
"It's time to end this scout,"
he told himself. "It's dangerous.
One good look and I'm
jetting off! What I need is
an easy tree to climb."
He considered the massive
giant. Soaring thirty or forty
meters into the thin fog and
dwarfing other growth, it
seemed the most promising
choice.
At first, Kolin saw no way,
but then the network of vines
clinging to the rugged trunk
suggested a route. He tried
his weight gingerly, then began
to climb.
"I should have brought
Yrtok's radio," he muttered.
"Oh, well, I can take it when
I come down, if she hasn't
snapped out of her spell by
then. Funny … I wonder if
that green thing bit her."
Footholds were plentiful
among the interlaced lianas.
Kolin progressed rapidly.
When he reached the first
thick limbs, twice head
height, he felt safer.
Later, at what he hoped was
the halfway mark, he hooked
one knee over a branch and
paused to wipe sweat from his
eyes. Peering down, he discovered
the ground to be obscured
by foliage.
"I should have checked
from down there to see how
open the top is," he mused.
"I wonder how the view will
be from up there?"
"Depends on what you're
looking for, Sonny!" something
remarked in a soughing wheeze.
Kolin, slipping, grabbed
desperately for the branch.
His fingers clutched a handful
of twigs and leaves, which
just barely supported him until
he regained a grip with
the other hand.
The branch quivered resentfully
under him.
"Careful, there!" whooshed
the eerie voice. "It took me
all summer to grow those!"
Kolin could feel the skin
crawling along his backbone.
"Who
are
you?" he gasped.
The answering sigh of
laughter gave him a distinct
chill despite its suggestion of
amiability.
"Name's Johnny Ashlew.
Kinda thought you'd start
with
what
I am. Didn't figure
you'd ever seen a man grown
into a tree before."
Kolin looked about, seeing
little but leaves and fog.
"I have to climb down," he
told himself in a reasonable
tone. "It's bad enough that the
other two passed out without
me going space happy too."
"What's your hurry?" demanded
the voice. "I can talk
to you just as easy all the way
down, you know. Airholes in
my bark—I'm not like an
Earth tree."
Kolin examined the bark of
the crotch in which he sat. It
did seem to have assorted
holes and hollows in its rough
surface.
"I never saw an Earth tree,"
he admitted. "We came from
Haurtoz."
"Where's that? Oh, never
mind—some little planet. I
don't bother with them all,
since I came here and found
out I could be anything I
wanted."
"What do you mean, anything
you wanted?" asked
Kolin, testing the firmness of
a vertical vine.
"Just
what I said," continued
the voice, sounding
closer in his ear as his
cheek brushed the ridged bark
of the tree trunk. "And, if
I do have to remind you, it
would be nicer if you said
'Mr. Ashlew,' considering my
age."
"Your age? How old—?"
"Can't really count it in
Earth years any more. Lost
track. I always figured bein'
a tree was a nice, peaceful
life; and when I remembered
how long some of them live,
that settled it. Sonny, this
world ain't all it looks like."
"It isn't, Mr. Ashlew?"
asked Kolin, twisting about
in an effort to see what the
higher branches might hide.
"Nope. Most everything
here is run by the Life—that
is, by the thing that first
grew big enough to do some
thinking, and set its roots
down all over until it had
control. That's the outskirts
of it down below."
"The other trees? That jungle?"
"It's more'n a jungle, Sonny.
When I landed here, along
with the others from the
Arcturan Spark
, the planet
looked pretty empty to me,
just like it must have to—Watch
it, there, Boy! If I
didn't twist that branch over
in time, you'd be bouncing off
my roots right now!"
"Th-thanks!" grunted Kolin,
hanging on grimly.
"Doggone vine!" commented
the windy whisper. "
He
ain't one of my crowd. Landed
years later in a ship from
some star towards the center
of the galaxy. You should
have seen his looks before
the Life got in touch with his
mind and set up a mental field
to help him change form. He
looks twice as good as a
vine!"
"He's very handy," agreed
Kolin politely. He groped for
a foothold.
"Well … matter of fact, I
can't get through to him
much, even with the Life's
mental field helping. Guess
he started living with a different
way of thinking. It
burns me. I thought of being
a tree, and then he came along
to take advantage of it!"
Kolin braced himself securely
to stretch tiring muscles.
"Maybe I'd better stay a
while," he muttered. "I don't
know where I am."
"You're about fifty feet
up," the sighing voice informed
him. "You ought to
let me tell you how the Life
helps you change form. You
don't
have
to be a tree."
"No?"
"
Uh
-uh! Some of the boys
that landed with me wanted
to get around and see things.
Lots changed to animals or
birds. One even stayed a man—on
the outside anyway.
Most of them have to change
as the bodies wear out, which
I don't, and some made bad
mistakes tryin' to be things
they saw on other planets."
"I wouldn't want to do
that, Mr. Ashlew."
"There's just one thing.
The Life don't like taking
chances on word about this
place gettin' around. It sorta
believes in peace and quiet.
You might not get back to
your ship in any form that
could tell tales."
"Listen!" Kolin blurted
out. "I wasn't so much enjoying
being what I was that
getting back matters to me!"
"Don't like your home planet,
whatever the name was?"
"Haurtoz. It's a rotten
place. A Planetary State! You
have to think and even look
the way that's standard thirty
hours a day, asleep or
awake. You get scared to
sleep for fear you might
dream
treason and they'd find
out somehow."
"Whooeee! Heard about
them places. Must be tough
just to live."
Suddenly, Kolin found himself
telling the tree about life
on Haurtoz, and of the officially
announced threats to
the Planetary State's planned
expansion. He dwelt upon the
desperation of having no
place to hide in case of trouble
with the authorities. A
multiple system of such
worlds was agonizing to
imagine.
Somehow,
the oddity of
talking to a tree wore off.
Kolin heard opinions spouting
out which he had prudently
kept bottled up for
years.
The more he talked and
stormed and complained, the
more relaxed he felt.
"If there was ever a fellow
ready for this planet," decided
the tree named Ashlew,
"you're it, Sonny! Hang on
there while I signal the Life
by root!"
Kolin sensed a lack of direct
attention. The rustle
about him was natural, caused
by an ordinary breeze. He
noticed his hands shaking.
"Don't know what got into
me, talking that way to a
tree," he muttered. "If Yrtok
snapped out of it and heard,
I'm as good as re-personalized
right now."
As he brooded upon the
sorry choice of arousing a
search by hiding where he
was or going back to bluff
things out, the tree spoke.
"Maybe you're all set, Sonny.
The Life has been thinkin'
of learning about other
worlds. If you can think of a
safe form to jet off in, you
might make yourself a deal.
How'd you like to stay here?"
"I don't know," said Kolin.
"The penalty for desertion—"
"Whoosh! Who'd find you?
You could be a bird, a tree,
even a cloud."
Silenced but doubting, Kolin
permitted himself to try
the dream on for size.
He considered what form
might most easily escape the
notice of search parties and
still be tough enough to live
a long time without renewal.
Another factor slipped into
his musings: mere hope of escape
was unsatisfying after
the outburst that had defined
his fuming hatred for Haurtoz.
I'd better watch myself!
he
thought.
Don't drop diamonds
to grab at stars!
"What I wish I could do is
not just get away but get even
for the way they make us
live … the whole damn set-up.
They could just as easy make
peace with the Earth colonies.
You know why they
don't?"
"Why?" wheezed Ashlew.
"They're scared that without
talk of war, and scouting
for Earth fleets that never
come, people would have time
to think about the way they
have to live and who's running
things in the Planetary
State. Then the gravy train
would get blown up—and I
mean blown up!"
The tree was silent for a
moment. Kolin felt the
branches stir meditatively.
Then Ashlew offered a suggestion.
"I could tell the Life your
side of it," he hissed. "Once
in with us, you can always
make thinking connections,
no matter how far away.
Maybe you could make a deal
to kill two birds with one
stone, as they used to say on
Earth…."
Chief
Steward Slichow
paced up and down beside
the ration crate turned up to
serve him as a field desk. He
scowled in turn, impartially,
at his watch and at the weary
stewards of his headquarters
detail. The latter stumbled
about, stacking and distributing
small packets of emergency
rations.
The line of crewmen released
temporarily from repair
work was transient as to
individuals but immutable as
to length. Slichow muttered
something profane about disregard
of orders as he glared
at the rocky ridges surrounding
the landing place.
He was so intent upon planning
greetings with which to
favor the tardy scouting parties
that he failed to notice
the loose cloud drifting over
the ridge.
It was tenuous, almost a
haze. Close examination
would have revealed it to be
made up of myriads of tiny
spores. They resembled those
cast forth by one of the
bushes Kolin's party had
passed. Along the edges, the
haze faded raggedly into thin
air, but the units evidently
formed a cohesive body. They
drifted together, approaching
the men as if taking intelligent
advantage of the breeze.
One of Chief Slichow's
staggering flunkies, stealing
a few seconds of relaxation
on the pretext of dumping an
armful of light plastic packing,
wandered into the haze.
He froze.
After a few heartbeats, he
dropped the trash and stared
at ship and men as if he had
never seen either. A hail from
his master moved him.
"Coming, Chief!" he called
but, returning at a moderate
pace, he murmured, "My
name is Frazer. I'm a second
assistant steward. I'll think as
Unit One."
Throughout the cloud of
spores, the mind formerly
known as Peter Kolin congratulated
itself upon its
choice of form.
Nearer to the original
shape of the Life than Ashlew
got
, he thought.
He paused to consider the
state of the tree named Ashlew,
half immortal but rooted
to one spot, unable to float on
a breeze or through space itself
on the pressure of light.
Especially, it was unable to
insinuate any part of itself
into the control center of another
form of life, as a second
spore was taking charge of
the body of Chief Slichow at
that very instant.
There are not enough men
,
thought Kolin.
Some of me
must drift through the airlock.
In space, I can spread
through the air system to the
command group.
Repairs to the
Peace State
and the return to Haurtoz
passed like weeks to some of
the crew but like brief moments
in infinity to other
units. At last, the ship parted
the air above Headquarters
City and landed.
The unit known as Captain
Theodor Kessel hesitated before
descending the ramp. He
surveyed the field, the city
and the waiting team of inspecting
officers.
"Could hardly be better,
could it?" he chuckled to the
companion unit called Security
Officer Tarth.
"Hardly, sir. All ready for
the liberation of Haurtoz."
"Reformation of the Planetary
State," mused the captain,
smiling dreamily as he
grasped the handrail. "And
then—formation of the Planetary
Mind!"
END
Transcriber's Note:
This e-text was produced from
Worlds of If January 1962
.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this
publication was renewed. | [
"He wanted to be an animal, not a plant.",
"He was intrigued but wanted to try something slightly different.",
"He figured it was an effective way to escape his crew.",
"He refused to give up his own body."
] | 1 |
23767_EDRV7U74_8 | How does Kolin feel about Ashlew? | By H. B. Fyfe
THE TALKATIVE
TREE
Dang vines! Beats all how some plants
have no manners—but what do you expect,
when they used to be men!
All
things considered—the
obscure star, the undetermined
damage to the
stellar drive and the way the
small planet's murky atmosphere
defied precision scanners—the
pilot made a reasonably
good landing. Despite
sour feelings for the space
service of Haurtoz, steward
Peter Kolin had to admit that
casualties might have been
far worse.
Chief Steward Slichow led
his little command, less two
third-class ration keepers
thought to have been trapped
in the lower hold, to a point
two hundred meters from the
steaming hull of the
Peace
State
. He lined them up as if
on parade. Kolin made himself
inconspicuous.
"Since the crew will be on
emergency watches repairing
the damage," announced the
Chief in clipped, aggressive
tones, "I have volunteered my
section for preliminary scouting,
as is suitable. It may be
useful to discover temporary
sources in this area of natural
foods."
Volunteered HIS section!
thought Kolin rebelliously.
Like the Supreme Director
of Haurtoz! Being conscripted
into this idiotic space fleet
that never fights is bad
enough without a tin god on
jets like Slichow!
Prudently, he did not express
this resentment overtly.
His well-schooled features
revealed no trace of the idea—or
of any other idea. The
Planetary State of Haurtoz
had been organized some fifteen
light-years from old
Earth, but many of the home
world's less kindly techniques
had been employed. Lack of
complete loyalty to the state
was likely to result in a siege
of treatment that left the subject
suitably "re-personalized."
Kolin had heard of instances
wherein mere unenthusiastic
posture had betrayed
intentions to harbor
treasonable thoughts.
"You will scout in five details
of three persons each,"
Chief Slichow said. "Every
hour, each detail will send
one person in to report, and
he will be replaced by one of
the five I shall keep here to
issue rations."
Kolin permitted himself to
wonder when anyone might
get some rest, but assumed a
mildly willing look. (Too eager
an attitude could arouse
suspicion of disguising an improper
viewpoint.) The maintenance
of a proper viewpoint
was a necessity if the Planetary
State were to survive
the hostile plots of Earth and
the latter's decadent colonies.
That, at least, was the official
line.
Kolin found himself in a
group with Jak Ammet, a
third cook, and Eva Yrtok,
powdered foods storekeeper.
Since the crew would be eating
packaged rations during
repairs, Yrtok could be spared
to command a scout detail.
Each scout was issued a
rocket pistol and a plastic water
tube. Chief Slichow emphasized
that the keepers of
rations could hardly, in an
emergency, give even the appearance
of favoring themselves
in regard to food. They
would go without. Kolin
maintained a standard expression
as the Chief's sharp
stare measured them.
Yrtok, a dark, lean-faced
girl, led the way with a quiet
monosyllable. She carried the
small radio they would be
permitted to use for messages
of utmost urgency. Ammet
followed, and Kolin brought
up the rear.
To
reach their assigned
sector, they had to climb
a forbidding ridge of rock
within half a kilometer. Only
a sparse creeper grew along
their way, its elongated leaves
shimmering with bronze-green
reflections against a
stony surface; but when they
topped the ridge a thick forest
was in sight.
Yrtok and Ammet paused
momentarily before descending.
Kolin shared their sense of
isolation. They would be out
of sight of authority and responsible
for their own actions.
It was a strange sensation.
They marched down into
the valley at a brisk pace, becoming
more aware of the
clouds and atmospheric haze.
Distant objects seemed
blurred by the mist, taking on
a somber, brooding grayness.
For all Kolin could tell, he
and the others were isolated
in a world bounded by the
rocky ridge behind them and
a semi-circle of damp trees
and bushes several hundred
meters away. He suspected
that the hills rising mistily
ahead were part of a continuous
slope, but could not be
sure.
Yrtok led the way along
the most nearly level ground.
Low creepers became more
plentiful, interspersed with
scrubby thickets of tangled,
spike-armored bushes. Occasionally,
small flying things
flickered among the foliage.
Once, a shrub puffed out an
enormous cloud of tiny
spores.
"Be a job to find anything
edible here," grunted Ammet,
and Kolin agreed.
Finally, after a longer hike
than he had anticipated, they
approached the edge of the
deceptively distant forest.
Yrtok paused to examine some
purple berries glistening dangerously
on a low shrub. Kolin
regarded the trees with
misgiving.
"Looks as tough to get
through as a tropical jungle,"
he remarked.
"I think the stuff puts out
shoots that grow back into
the ground to root as they
spread," said the woman.
"Maybe we can find a way
through."
In two or three minutes,
they reached the abrupt border
of the odd-looking trees.
Except for one thick
trunked giant, all of them
were about the same height.
They craned their necks to estimate
the altitude of the
monster, but the top was hidden
by the wide spread of
branches. The depths behind
it looked dark and impenetrable.
"We'd better explore along
the edge," decided Yrtok.
"Ammet, now is the time to
go back and tell the Chief
which way we're—
Ammet!
"
Kolin looked over his shoulder.
Fifty meters away, Ammet
sat beside the bush with
the purple berries, utterly
relaxed.
"He must have tasted
some!" exclaimed Kolin. "I'll
see how he is."
He ran back to the cook and
shook him by the shoulder.
Ammet's head lolled loosely
to one side. His rather heavy
features were vacant, lending
him a doped appearance. Kolin
straightened up and beckoned
to Yrtok.
For some reason, he had
trouble attracting her attention.
Then he noticed that she
was kneeling.
"Hope she didn't eat some
stupid thing too!" he grumbled,
trotting back.
As he reached her, whatever
Yrtok was examining
came to life and scooted into
the underbrush with a flash
of greenish fur. All Kolin
saw was that it had several
legs too many.
He pulled Yrtok to her
feet. She pawed at him weakly,
eyes as vacant as Ammet's.
When he let go in sudden
horror, she folded gently to
the ground. She lay comfortably
on her side, twitching
one hand as if to brush something
away.
When she began to smile
dreamily, Kolin backed away.
The
corners of his mouth
felt oddly stiff; they had
involuntarily drawn back to
expose his clenched teeth. He
glanced warily about, but
nothing appeared to threaten
him.
"It's time to end this scout,"
he told himself. "It's dangerous.
One good look and I'm
jetting off! What I need is
an easy tree to climb."
He considered the massive
giant. Soaring thirty or forty
meters into the thin fog and
dwarfing other growth, it
seemed the most promising
choice.
At first, Kolin saw no way,
but then the network of vines
clinging to the rugged trunk
suggested a route. He tried
his weight gingerly, then began
to climb.
"I should have brought
Yrtok's radio," he muttered.
"Oh, well, I can take it when
I come down, if she hasn't
snapped out of her spell by
then. Funny … I wonder if
that green thing bit her."
Footholds were plentiful
among the interlaced lianas.
Kolin progressed rapidly.
When he reached the first
thick limbs, twice head
height, he felt safer.
Later, at what he hoped was
the halfway mark, he hooked
one knee over a branch and
paused to wipe sweat from his
eyes. Peering down, he discovered
the ground to be obscured
by foliage.
"I should have checked
from down there to see how
open the top is," he mused.
"I wonder how the view will
be from up there?"
"Depends on what you're
looking for, Sonny!" something
remarked in a soughing wheeze.
Kolin, slipping, grabbed
desperately for the branch.
His fingers clutched a handful
of twigs and leaves, which
just barely supported him until
he regained a grip with
the other hand.
The branch quivered resentfully
under him.
"Careful, there!" whooshed
the eerie voice. "It took me
all summer to grow those!"
Kolin could feel the skin
crawling along his backbone.
"Who
are
you?" he gasped.
The answering sigh of
laughter gave him a distinct
chill despite its suggestion of
amiability.
"Name's Johnny Ashlew.
Kinda thought you'd start
with
what
I am. Didn't figure
you'd ever seen a man grown
into a tree before."
Kolin looked about, seeing
little but leaves and fog.
"I have to climb down," he
told himself in a reasonable
tone. "It's bad enough that the
other two passed out without
me going space happy too."
"What's your hurry?" demanded
the voice. "I can talk
to you just as easy all the way
down, you know. Airholes in
my bark—I'm not like an
Earth tree."
Kolin examined the bark of
the crotch in which he sat. It
did seem to have assorted
holes and hollows in its rough
surface.
"I never saw an Earth tree,"
he admitted. "We came from
Haurtoz."
"Where's that? Oh, never
mind—some little planet. I
don't bother with them all,
since I came here and found
out I could be anything I
wanted."
"What do you mean, anything
you wanted?" asked
Kolin, testing the firmness of
a vertical vine.
"Just
what I said," continued
the voice, sounding
closer in his ear as his
cheek brushed the ridged bark
of the tree trunk. "And, if
I do have to remind you, it
would be nicer if you said
'Mr. Ashlew,' considering my
age."
"Your age? How old—?"
"Can't really count it in
Earth years any more. Lost
track. I always figured bein'
a tree was a nice, peaceful
life; and when I remembered
how long some of them live,
that settled it. Sonny, this
world ain't all it looks like."
"It isn't, Mr. Ashlew?"
asked Kolin, twisting about
in an effort to see what the
higher branches might hide.
"Nope. Most everything
here is run by the Life—that
is, by the thing that first
grew big enough to do some
thinking, and set its roots
down all over until it had
control. That's the outskirts
of it down below."
"The other trees? That jungle?"
"It's more'n a jungle, Sonny.
When I landed here, along
with the others from the
Arcturan Spark
, the planet
looked pretty empty to me,
just like it must have to—Watch
it, there, Boy! If I
didn't twist that branch over
in time, you'd be bouncing off
my roots right now!"
"Th-thanks!" grunted Kolin,
hanging on grimly.
"Doggone vine!" commented
the windy whisper. "
He
ain't one of my crowd. Landed
years later in a ship from
some star towards the center
of the galaxy. You should
have seen his looks before
the Life got in touch with his
mind and set up a mental field
to help him change form. He
looks twice as good as a
vine!"
"He's very handy," agreed
Kolin politely. He groped for
a foothold.
"Well … matter of fact, I
can't get through to him
much, even with the Life's
mental field helping. Guess
he started living with a different
way of thinking. It
burns me. I thought of being
a tree, and then he came along
to take advantage of it!"
Kolin braced himself securely
to stretch tiring muscles.
"Maybe I'd better stay a
while," he muttered. "I don't
know where I am."
"You're about fifty feet
up," the sighing voice informed
him. "You ought to
let me tell you how the Life
helps you change form. You
don't
have
to be a tree."
"No?"
"
Uh
-uh! Some of the boys
that landed with me wanted
to get around and see things.
Lots changed to animals or
birds. One even stayed a man—on
the outside anyway.
Most of them have to change
as the bodies wear out, which
I don't, and some made bad
mistakes tryin' to be things
they saw on other planets."
"I wouldn't want to do
that, Mr. Ashlew."
"There's just one thing.
The Life don't like taking
chances on word about this
place gettin' around. It sorta
believes in peace and quiet.
You might not get back to
your ship in any form that
could tell tales."
"Listen!" Kolin blurted
out. "I wasn't so much enjoying
being what I was that
getting back matters to me!"
"Don't like your home planet,
whatever the name was?"
"Haurtoz. It's a rotten
place. A Planetary State! You
have to think and even look
the way that's standard thirty
hours a day, asleep or
awake. You get scared to
sleep for fear you might
dream
treason and they'd find
out somehow."
"Whooeee! Heard about
them places. Must be tough
just to live."
Suddenly, Kolin found himself
telling the tree about life
on Haurtoz, and of the officially
announced threats to
the Planetary State's planned
expansion. He dwelt upon the
desperation of having no
place to hide in case of trouble
with the authorities. A
multiple system of such
worlds was agonizing to
imagine.
Somehow,
the oddity of
talking to a tree wore off.
Kolin heard opinions spouting
out which he had prudently
kept bottled up for
years.
The more he talked and
stormed and complained, the
more relaxed he felt.
"If there was ever a fellow
ready for this planet," decided
the tree named Ashlew,
"you're it, Sonny! Hang on
there while I signal the Life
by root!"
Kolin sensed a lack of direct
attention. The rustle
about him was natural, caused
by an ordinary breeze. He
noticed his hands shaking.
"Don't know what got into
me, talking that way to a
tree," he muttered. "If Yrtok
snapped out of it and heard,
I'm as good as re-personalized
right now."
As he brooded upon the
sorry choice of arousing a
search by hiding where he
was or going back to bluff
things out, the tree spoke.
"Maybe you're all set, Sonny.
The Life has been thinkin'
of learning about other
worlds. If you can think of a
safe form to jet off in, you
might make yourself a deal.
How'd you like to stay here?"
"I don't know," said Kolin.
"The penalty for desertion—"
"Whoosh! Who'd find you?
You could be a bird, a tree,
even a cloud."
Silenced but doubting, Kolin
permitted himself to try
the dream on for size.
He considered what form
might most easily escape the
notice of search parties and
still be tough enough to live
a long time without renewal.
Another factor slipped into
his musings: mere hope of escape
was unsatisfying after
the outburst that had defined
his fuming hatred for Haurtoz.
I'd better watch myself!
he
thought.
Don't drop diamonds
to grab at stars!
"What I wish I could do is
not just get away but get even
for the way they make us
live … the whole damn set-up.
They could just as easy make
peace with the Earth colonies.
You know why they
don't?"
"Why?" wheezed Ashlew.
"They're scared that without
talk of war, and scouting
for Earth fleets that never
come, people would have time
to think about the way they
have to live and who's running
things in the Planetary
State. Then the gravy train
would get blown up—and I
mean blown up!"
The tree was silent for a
moment. Kolin felt the
branches stir meditatively.
Then Ashlew offered a suggestion.
"I could tell the Life your
side of it," he hissed. "Once
in with us, you can always
make thinking connections,
no matter how far away.
Maybe you could make a deal
to kill two birds with one
stone, as they used to say on
Earth…."
Chief
Steward Slichow
paced up and down beside
the ration crate turned up to
serve him as a field desk. He
scowled in turn, impartially,
at his watch and at the weary
stewards of his headquarters
detail. The latter stumbled
about, stacking and distributing
small packets of emergency
rations.
The line of crewmen released
temporarily from repair
work was transient as to
individuals but immutable as
to length. Slichow muttered
something profane about disregard
of orders as he glared
at the rocky ridges surrounding
the landing place.
He was so intent upon planning
greetings with which to
favor the tardy scouting parties
that he failed to notice
the loose cloud drifting over
the ridge.
It was tenuous, almost a
haze. Close examination
would have revealed it to be
made up of myriads of tiny
spores. They resembled those
cast forth by one of the
bushes Kolin's party had
passed. Along the edges, the
haze faded raggedly into thin
air, but the units evidently
formed a cohesive body. They
drifted together, approaching
the men as if taking intelligent
advantage of the breeze.
One of Chief Slichow's
staggering flunkies, stealing
a few seconds of relaxation
on the pretext of dumping an
armful of light plastic packing,
wandered into the haze.
He froze.
After a few heartbeats, he
dropped the trash and stared
at ship and men as if he had
never seen either. A hail from
his master moved him.
"Coming, Chief!" he called
but, returning at a moderate
pace, he murmured, "My
name is Frazer. I'm a second
assistant steward. I'll think as
Unit One."
Throughout the cloud of
spores, the mind formerly
known as Peter Kolin congratulated
itself upon its
choice of form.
Nearer to the original
shape of the Life than Ashlew
got
, he thought.
He paused to consider the
state of the tree named Ashlew,
half immortal but rooted
to one spot, unable to float on
a breeze or through space itself
on the pressure of light.
Especially, it was unable to
insinuate any part of itself
into the control center of another
form of life, as a second
spore was taking charge of
the body of Chief Slichow at
that very instant.
There are not enough men
,
thought Kolin.
Some of me
must drift through the airlock.
In space, I can spread
through the air system to the
command group.
Repairs to the
Peace State
and the return to Haurtoz
passed like weeks to some of
the crew but like brief moments
in infinity to other
units. At last, the ship parted
the air above Headquarters
City and landed.
The unit known as Captain
Theodor Kessel hesitated before
descending the ramp. He
surveyed the field, the city
and the waiting team of inspecting
officers.
"Could hardly be better,
could it?" he chuckled to the
companion unit called Security
Officer Tarth.
"Hardly, sir. All ready for
the liberation of Haurtoz."
"Reformation of the Planetary
State," mused the captain,
smiling dreamily as he
grasped the handrail. "And
then—formation of the Planetary
Mind!"
END
Transcriber's Note:
This e-text was produced from
Worlds of If January 1962
.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this
publication was renewed. | [
"He does not trust him because he has many features not standard for trees.",
"He is hesitant but drawn to him all the same.",
"He is certain that Ashlew is trying to trick him.",
"He trusts them, as the highest ranking person in this new planet he has met so far."
] | 1 |
23942_IGIFD97I_1 | Why is the lack of hotel space important for Simon's story? | UNBORN
TOMORROW
BY MACK REYNOLDS
Unfortunately
, there was only
one thing he could bring back
from the wonderful future ...
and though he didn't want to
... nevertheless he did....
Illustrated by Freas
Betty
looked up from
her magazine. She said
mildly, "You're late."
"Don't yell at me, I
feel awful," Simon told
her. He sat down at his desk, passed
his tongue over his teeth in distaste,
groaned, fumbled in a drawer for the
aspirin bottle.
He looked over at Betty and said,
almost as though reciting, "What I
need is a vacation."
"What," Betty said, "are you going
to use for money?"
"Providence," Simon told her
whilst fiddling with the aspirin bottle,
"will provide."
"Hm-m-m. But before providing
vacations it'd be nice if Providence
turned up a missing jewel deal, say.
Something where you could deduce
that actually the ruby ring had gone
down the drain and was caught in the
elbow. Something that would net
about fifty dollars."
Simon said, mournful of tone,
"Fifty dollars? Why not make it five
hundred?"
"I'm not selfish," Betty said. "All
I want is enough to pay me this
week's salary."
"Money," Simon said. "When you
took this job you said it was the romance
that appealed to you."
"Hm-m-m. I didn't know most
sleuthing amounted to snooping
around department stores to check on
the clerks knocking down."
Simon said, enigmatically, "Now
it comes."
There was a knock.
Betty bounced up with Olympic
agility and had the door swinging
wide before the knocking was quite
completed.
He was old, little and had bug
eyes behind pince-nez glasses. His
suit was cut in the style of yesteryear
but when a suit costs two or
three hundred dollars you still retain
caste whatever the styling.
Simon said unenthusiastically,
"Good morning, Mr. Oyster." He indicated
the client's chair. "Sit down,
sir."
The client fussed himself with
Betty's assistance into the seat, bug-eyed
Simon, said finally, "You know
my name, that's pretty good. Never
saw you before in my life. Stop fussing
with me, young lady. Your ad
in the phone book says you'll investigate
anything."
"Anything," Simon said. "Only
one exception."
"Excellent. Do you believe in time
travel?"
Simon said nothing. Across the
room, where she had resumed her
seat, Betty cleared her throat. When
Simon continued to say nothing she
ventured, "Time travel is impossible."
"Why?"
"Why?"
"Yes, why?"
Betty looked to her boss for assistance.
None was forthcoming. There
ought to be some very quick, positive,
definite answer. She said, "Well,
for one thing, paradox. Suppose you
had a time machine and traveled back
a hundred years or so and killed your
own great-grandfather. Then how
could you ever be born?"
"Confound it if I know," the little
fellow growled. "How?"
Simon said, "Let's get to the point,
what you wanted to see me about."
"I want to hire you to hunt me up
some time travelers," the old boy
said.
Betty was too far in now to maintain
her proper role of silent secretary.
"Time travelers," she said, not
very intelligently.
The potential client sat more erect,
obviously with intent to hold the
floor for a time. He removed the
pince-nez glasses and pointed them
at Betty. He said, "Have you read
much science fiction, Miss?"
"Some," Betty admitted.
"Then you'll realize that there are
a dozen explanations of the paradoxes
of time travel. Every writer in
the field worth his salt has explained
them away. But to get on. It's my
contention that within a century or
so man will have solved the problems
of immortality and eternal youth, and
it's also my suspicion that he will
eventually be able to travel in time.
So convinced am I of these possibilities
that I am willing to gamble a
portion of my fortune to investigate
the presence in our era of such time
travelers."
Simon seemed incapable of carrying
the ball this morning, so Betty
said, "But ... Mr. Oyster, if the
future has developed time travel why
don't we ever meet such travelers?"
Simon put in a word. "The usual
explanation, Betty, is that they can't
afford to allow the space-time continuum
track to be altered. If, say, a
time traveler returned to a period of
twenty-five years ago and shot Hitler,
then all subsequent history would be
changed. In that case, the time traveler
himself might never be born. They
have to tread mighty carefully."
Mr. Oyster was pleased. "I didn't
expect you to be so well informed
on the subject, young man."
Simon shrugged and fumbled
again with the aspirin bottle.
Mr. Oyster went on. "I've been
considering the matter for some time
and—"
Simon held up a hand. "There's
no use prolonging this. As I understand
it, you're an elderly gentleman
with a considerable fortune and you
realize that thus far nobody has succeeded
in taking it with him."
Mr. Oyster returned his glasses to
their perch, bug-eyed Simon, but then
nodded.
Simon said, "You want to hire me
to find a time traveler and in some
manner or other—any manner will
do—exhort from him the secret of
eternal life and youth, which you figure
the future will have discovered.
You're willing to pony up a part of
this fortune of yours, if I can deliver
a bona fide time traveler."
"Right!"
Betty had been looking from one
to the other. Now she said, plaintively,
"But where are you going to find
one of these characters—especially if
they're interested in keeping hid?"
The old boy was the center again.
"I told you I'd been considering it
for some time. The
Oktoberfest
,
that's where they'd be!" He seemed
elated.
Betty and Simon waited.
"The
Oktoberfest
," he repeated.
"The greatest festival the world has
ever seen, the carnival,
feria
,
fiesta
to beat them all. Every year it's held
in Munich. Makes the New Orleans
Mardi gras look like a quilting
party." He began to swing into the
spirit of his description. "It originally
started in celebration of the wedding
of some local prince a century
and a half ago and the Bavarians had
such a bang-up time they've been
holding it every year since. The
Munich breweries do up a special
beer,
Marzenbräu
they call it, and
each brewery opens a tremendous tent
on the fair grounds which will hold
five thousand customers apiece. Millions
of liters of beer are put away,
hundreds of thousands of barbecued
chickens, a small herd of oxen are
roasted whole over spits, millions of
pair of
weisswurst
, a very special
sausage, millions upon millions of
pretzels—"
"All right," Simon said. "We'll accept
it. The
Oktoberfest
is one whale
of a wingding."
"Well," the old boy pursued, into
his subject now, "that's where they'd
be, places like the
Oktoberfest
. For
one thing, a time traveler wouldn't
be conspicuous. At a festival like this
somebody with a strange accent, or
who didn't know exactly how to wear
his clothes correctly, or was off the
ordinary in any of a dozen other
ways, wouldn't be noticed. You could
be a four-armed space traveler from
Mars, and you still wouldn't be conspicuous
at the
Oktoberfest
. People
would figure they had D.T.'s."
"But why would a time traveler
want to go to a—" Betty began.
"Why not! What better opportunity
to study a people than when they
are in their cups? If
you
could go
back a few thousand years, the things
you would wish to see would be a
Roman Triumph, perhaps the Rites
of Dionysus, or one of Alexander's
orgies. You wouldn't want to wander
up and down the streets of, say,
Athens while nothing was going on,
particularly when you might be revealed
as a suspicious character not
being able to speak the language, not
knowing how to wear the clothes and
not familiar with the city's layout."
He took a deep breath. "No ma'am,
you'd have to stick to some great
event, both for the sake of actual
interest and for protection against being
unmasked."
The old boy wound it up. "Well,
that's the story. What are your rates?
The
Oktoberfest
starts on Friday and
continues for sixteen days. You can
take the plane to Munich, spend a
week there and—"
Simon was shaking his head. "Not
interested."
As soon as Betty had got her jaw
back into place, she glared unbelievingly
at him.
Mr. Oyster was taken aback himself.
"See here, young man, I realize
this isn't an ordinary assignment,
however, as I said, I am willing to
risk a considerable portion of my
fortune—"
"Sorry," Simon said. "Can't be
done."
"A hundred dollars a day plus expenses,"
Mr. Oyster said quietly. "I
like the fact that you already seem
to have some interest and knowledge
of the matter. I liked the way you
knew my name when I walked in the
door; my picture doesn't appear often
in the papers."
"No go," Simon said, a sad quality
in his voice.
"A fifty thousand dollar bonus if
you bring me a time traveler."
"Out of the question," Simon
said.
"But
why
?" Betty wailed.
"Just for laughs," Simon told the
two of them sourly, "suppose I tell
you a funny story. It goes like
this:"
I got a thousand dollars from Mr.
Oyster (Simon began) in the way
of an advance, and leaving him with
Betty who was making out a receipt,
I hustled back to the apartment and
packed a bag. Hell, I'd wanted a vacation
anyway, this was a natural. On
the way to Idlewild I stopped off at
the Germany Information Offices for
some tourist literature.
It takes roughly three and a half
hours to get to Gander from Idlewild.
I spent the time planning the
fun I was going to have.
It takes roughly seven and a half
hours from Gander to Shannon and
I spent that time dreaming up material
I could put into my reports to
Mr. Oyster. I was going to have to
give him some kind of report for his
money. Time travel yet! What a
laugh!
Between Shannon and Munich a
faint suspicion began to simmer in
my mind. These statistics I read on
the
Oktoberfest
in the Munich tourist
pamphlets. Five million people
attended annually.
Where did five million people
come from to attend an overgrown
festival in comparatively remote
Southern Germany? The tourist season
is over before September 21st,
first day of the gigantic beer bust.
Nor could the Germans account for
any such number. Munich itself has
a population of less than a million,
counting children.
And those millions of gallons of
beer, the hundreds of thousands of
chickens, the herds of oxen. Who
ponied up all the money for such expenditures?
How could the average
German, with his twenty-five dollars
a week salary?
In Munich there was no hotel
space available. I went to the Bahnhof
where they have a hotel service
and applied. They put my name
down, pocketed the husky bribe,
showed me where I could check my
bag, told me they'd do what they
could, and to report back in a few
hours.
I had another suspicious twinge.
If five million people attended this
beer bout, how were they accommodated?
The
Theresienwiese
, the fair
ground, was only a few blocks
away. I was stiff from the plane ride
so I walked.
There are seven major brewers in
the Munich area, each of them represented
by one of the circuslike tents
that Mr. Oyster mentioned. Each tent
contained benches and tables for
about five thousand persons and from
six to ten thousands pack themselves
in, competing for room. In the center
is a tremendous bandstand, the
musicians all
lederhosen
clad, the
music as Bavarian as any to be found
in a Bavarian beer hall. Hundreds of
peasant garbed
fräuleins
darted about
the tables with quart sized earthenware
mugs, platters of chicken, sausage,
kraut and pretzels.
I found a place finally at a table
which had space for twenty-odd beer
bibbers. Odd is right. As weird an
assortment of Germans and foreign
tourists as could have been dreamed
up, ranging from a seventy- or
eighty-year-old couple in Bavarian
costume, to the bald-headed drunk
across the table from me.
A desperate waitress bearing six
mugs of beer in each hand scurried
past. They call them
masses
, by the
way, not mugs. The bald-headed
character and I both held up a finger
and she slid two of the
masses
over
to us and then hustled on.
"Down the hatch," the other said,
holding up his
mass
in toast.
"To the ladies," I told him. Before
sipping, I said, "You know, the
tourist pamphlets say this stuff is
eighteen per cent. That's nonsense.
No beer is that strong." I took a long
pull.
He looked at me, waiting.
I came up. "Mistaken," I admitted.
A
mass
or two apiece later he looked
carefully at the name engraved on
his earthenware mug. "Löwenbräu,"
he said. He took a small notebook
from his pocket and a pencil, noted
down the word and returned the
things.
"That's a queer looking pencil you
have there," I told him. "German?"
"Venusian," he said. "Oops, sorry.
Shouldn't have said that."
I had never heard of the brand so
I skipped it.
"Next is the Hofbräu," he said.
"Next what?" Baldy's conversation
didn't seem to hang together very
well.
"My pilgrimage," he told me. "All
my life I've been wanting to go back
to an
Oktoberfest
and sample every
one of the seven brands of the best
beer the world has ever known. I'm
only as far as Löwenbräu. I'm afraid
I'll never make it."
I finished my
mass
. "I'll help
you," I told him. "Very noble endeavor.
Name is Simon."
"Arth," he said. "How could you
help?"
"I'm still fresh—comparatively.
I'll navigate you around. There are
seven beer tents. How many have you
got through, so far?"
"Two, counting this one," Arth
said.
I looked at him. "It's going to be
a chore," I said. "You've already got
a nice edge on."
Outside, as we made our way to
the next tent, the fair looked like
every big State-Fair ever seen, except
it was bigger. Games, souvenir
stands, sausage stands, rides, side
shows, and people, people, people.
The Hofbräu tent was as overflowing
as the last but we managed to
find two seats.
The band was blaring, and five
thousand half-swacked voices were
roaring accompaniment.
In Muenchen steht ein Hofbräuhaus!
Eins, Zwei, G'sufa!
At the
G'sufa
everybody upped
with the mugs and drank each other's
health.
"This is what I call a real beer
bust," I said approvingly.
Arth was waving to a waitress. As
in the Löwenbräu tent, a full quart
was the smallest amount obtainable.
A beer later I said, "I don't know
if you'll make it or not, Arth."
"Make what?"
"All seven tents."
"Oh."
A waitress was on her way by,
mugs foaming over their rims. I gestured
to her for refills.
"Where are you from, Arth?" I
asked him, in the way of making
conversation.
"2183."
"2183 where?"
He looked at me, closing one eye
to focus better. "Oh," he said. "Well,
2183 South Street, ah, New Albuquerque."
"New Albuquerque? Where's
that?"
Arth thought about it. Took another
long pull at the beer. "Right
across the way from old Albuquerque,"
he said finally. "Maybe we
ought to be getting on to the
Pschorrbräu tent."
"Maybe we ought to eat something
first," I said. "I'm beginning to feel
this. We could get some of that barbecued
ox."
Arth closed his eyes in pain.
"Vegetarian," he said. "Couldn't possibly
eat meat. Barbarous. Ugh."
"Well, we need some nourishment,"
I said.
"There's supposed to be considerable
nourishment in beer."
That made sense. I yelled, "
Fräulein!
Zwei neu bier!
"
Somewhere along in here the fog
rolled in. When it rolled out again,
I found myself closing one eye the
better to read the lettering on my
earthenware mug. It read Augustinerbräu.
Somehow we'd evidently
navigated from one tent to another.
Arth was saying, "Where's your
hotel?"
That seemed like a good question.
I thought about it for a while. Finally
I said, "Haven't got one. Town's
jam packed. Left my bag at the Bahnhof.
I don't think we'll ever make
it, Arth. How many we got to
go?"
"Lost track," Arth said. "You can
come home with me."
We drank to that and the fog rolled
in again.
When the fog rolled out, it was
daylight. Bright, glaring, awful daylight.
I was sprawled, complete with
clothes, on one of twin beds. On the
other bed, also completely clothed,
was Arth.
That sun was too much. I stumbled
up from the bed, staggered to
the window and fumbled around for
a blind or curtain. There was none.
Behind me a voice said in horror,
"Who ... how ... oh,
Wodo
,
where'd you come from?"
I got a quick impression, looking
out the window, that the Germans
were certainly the most modern, futuristic
people in the world. But I
couldn't stand the light. "Where's
the shade," I moaned.
Arth did something and the window
went opaque.
"That's quite a gadget," I groaned.
"If I didn't feel so lousy, I'd
appreciate it."
Arth was sitting on the edge of
the bed holding his bald head in his
hands. "I remember now," he sorrowed.
"You didn't have a hotel.
What a stupidity. I'll be phased.
Phased all the way down."
"You haven't got a handful of
aspirin, have you?" I asked him.
"Just a minute," Arth said, staggering
erect and heading for what
undoubtedly was a bathroom. "Stay
where you are. Don't move. Don't
touch anything."
"All right," I told him plaintively.
"I'm clean. I won't mess up the
place. All I've got is a hangover, not
lice."
Arth was gone. He came back in
two or three minutes, box of pills in
hand. "Here, take one of these."
I took the pill, followed it with a
glass of water.
And went out like a light.
Arth was shaking my arm. "Want
another
mass
?"
The band was blaring, and five
thousand half-swacked voices were
roaring accompaniment.
In Muenchen steht ein Hofbräuhaus!
Eins, Zwei, G'sufa!
At the
G'sufa
everybody upped
with their king-size mugs and drank
each other's health.
My head was killing me. "This is
where I came in, or something," I
groaned.
Arth said, "That was last night."
He looked at me over the rim of his
beer mug.
Something, somewhere, was
wrong. But I didn't care. I finished
my
mass
and then remembered. "I've
got to get my bag. Oh, my head.
Where did we spend last night?"
Arth said, and his voice sounded
cautious, "At my hotel, don't you remember?"
"Not very well," I admitted. "I
feel lousy. I must have dimmed out.
I've got to go to the Bahnhof and
get my luggage."
Arth didn't put up an argument
on that. We said good-by and I could
feel him watching after me as I pushed
through the tables on the way
out.
At the Bahnhof they could do me
no good. There were no hotel rooms
available in Munich. The head was
getting worse by the minute. The
fact that they'd somehow managed
to lose my bag didn't help. I worked
on that project for at least a couple
of hours. Not only wasn't the bag
at the luggage checking station, but
the attendant there evidently couldn't
make heads nor tails of the check
receipt. He didn't speak English and
my high school German was inadequate,
especially accompanied by a
blockbusting hangover.
I didn't get anywhere tearing my
hair and complaining from one end
of the Bahnhof to the other. I drew
a blank on the bag.
And the head was getting worse
by the minute. I was bleeding to
death through the eyes and instead
of butterflies I had bats in my stomach.
Believe me,
nobody
should drink
a gallon or more of Marzenbräu.
I decided the hell with it. I took
a cab to the airport, presented my return
ticket, told them I wanted to
leave on the first obtainable plane to
New York. I'd spent two days at the
Oktoberfest
, and I'd had it.
I got more guff there. Something
was wrong with the ticket, wrong
date or some such. But they fixed
that up. I never was clear on what
was fouled up, some clerk's error,
evidently.
The trip back was as uninteresting
as the one over. As the hangover began
to wear off—a little—I was almost
sorry I hadn't been able to stay.
If I'd only been able to get a room I
would
have stayed, I told myself.
From Idlewild, I came directly to
the office rather than going to my
apartment. I figured I might as well
check in with Betty.
I opened the door and there I
found Mr. Oyster sitting in the chair
he had been occupying four—or was
it five—days before when I'd left.
I'd lost track of the time.
I said to him, "Glad you're here,
sir. I can report. Ah, what was it
you came for? Impatient to hear if
I'd had any results?" My mind was
spinning like a whirling dervish in
a revolving door. I'd spent a wad of
his money and had nothing I could
think of to show for it; nothing but
the last stages of a grand-daddy
hangover.
"Came for?" Mr. Oyster snorted.
"I'm merely waiting for your girl to
make out my receipt. I thought you
had already left."
"You'll miss your plane," Betty
said.
There was suddenly a double dip
of ice cream in my stomach. I walked
over to my desk and looked down at
the calendar.
Mr. Oyster was saying something
to the effect that if I didn't leave today,
it would have to be tomorrow,
that he hadn't ponied up that thousand
dollars advance for anything
less than immediate service. Stuffing
his receipt in his wallet, he fussed
his way out the door.
I said to Betty hopefully, "I suppose
you haven't changed this calendar
since I left."
Betty said, "What's the matter
with you? You look funny. How did
your clothes get so mussed? You tore
the top sheet off that calendar yourself,
not half an hour ago, just before
this marble-missing client came
in." She added, irrelevantly, "Time
travelers yet."
I tried just once more. "Uh, when
did you first see this Mr. Oyster?"
"Never saw him before in my
life," she said. "Not until he came
in this morning."
"This morning," I said weakly.
While Betty stared at me as though
it was
me
that needed candling by a
head shrinker preparatory to being
sent off to a pressure cooker, I fished
in my pocket for my wallet, counted
the contents and winced at the
pathetic remains of the thousand.
I said pleadingly, "Betty, listen,
how long ago did I go out that door—on
the way to the airport?"
"You've been acting sick all morning.
You went out that door about
ten minutes ago, were gone about
three minutes, and then came back."
"See here," Mr. Oyster said (interrupting
Simon's story), "did you
say this was supposed to be amusing,
young man? I don't find it so. In
fact, I believe I am being ridiculed."
Simon shrugged, put one hand to
his forehead and said, "That's only
the first chapter. There are two
more."
"I'm not interested in more," Mr.
Oyster said. "I suppose your point
was to show me how ridiculous the
whole idea actually is. Very well,
you've done it. Confound it. However,
I suppose your time, even when
spent in this manner, has some value.
Here is fifty dollars. And good day,
sir!"
He slammed the door after him
as he left.
Simon winced at the noise, took
the aspirin bottle from its drawer,
took two, washed them down with
water from the desk carafe.
Betty looked at him admiringly.
Came to her feet, crossed over and
took up the fifty dollars. "Week's
wages," she said. "I suppose that's
one way of taking care of a crackpot.
But I'm surprised you didn't
take his money and enjoy that vacation
you've been yearning about."
"I did," Simon groaned. "Three
times."
Betty stared at him. "You mean—"
Simon nodded, miserably.
She said, "But
Simon
. Fifty thousand
dollars bonus. If that story was
true, you should have gone back
again to Munich. If there was one
time traveler, there might have
been—"
"I keep telling you," Simon said
bitterly, "I went back there three
times. There were hundreds of them.
Probably thousands." He took a deep
breath. "Listen, we're just going to
have to forget about it. They're not
going to stand for the space-time
continuum track being altered. If
something comes up that looks like
it might result in the track being
changed, they set you right back at
the beginning and let things start—for
you—all over again. They just
can't allow anything to come back
from the future and change the
past."
"You mean," Betty was suddenly
furious at him, "you've given up!
Why this is the biggest thing— Why
the fifty thousand dollars is nothing.
The future! Just think!"
Simon said wearily, "There's just
one thing you can bring back with
you from the future, a hangover compounded
of a gallon or so of Marzenbräu.
What's more you can pile
one on top of the other, and another
on top of that!"
He shuddered. "If you think I'm
going to take another crack at this
merry-go-round and pile a fourth
hangover on the three I'm already
nursing, all at once, you can think
again."
THE END
Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from
Astounding Science Fiction
June
1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and
typographical errors have been corrected without note. | [
"It made him cut his trip short without finding any time travelers.",
"Simon would have to learn how to time travel in order to keep his bag from being stolen.",
"It set the stage for him to encounter an alien's home for himself.",
"It meant he would find a number of unsavory characters as he tried to find somewhere to sleep."
] | 2 |
23942_IGIFD97I_2 | What is the goal of the story that Simon tells Mr. Oyster? | UNBORN
TOMORROW
BY MACK REYNOLDS
Unfortunately
, there was only
one thing he could bring back
from the wonderful future ...
and though he didn't want to
... nevertheless he did....
Illustrated by Freas
Betty
looked up from
her magazine. She said
mildly, "You're late."
"Don't yell at me, I
feel awful," Simon told
her. He sat down at his desk, passed
his tongue over his teeth in distaste,
groaned, fumbled in a drawer for the
aspirin bottle.
He looked over at Betty and said,
almost as though reciting, "What I
need is a vacation."
"What," Betty said, "are you going
to use for money?"
"Providence," Simon told her
whilst fiddling with the aspirin bottle,
"will provide."
"Hm-m-m. But before providing
vacations it'd be nice if Providence
turned up a missing jewel deal, say.
Something where you could deduce
that actually the ruby ring had gone
down the drain and was caught in the
elbow. Something that would net
about fifty dollars."
Simon said, mournful of tone,
"Fifty dollars? Why not make it five
hundred?"
"I'm not selfish," Betty said. "All
I want is enough to pay me this
week's salary."
"Money," Simon said. "When you
took this job you said it was the romance
that appealed to you."
"Hm-m-m. I didn't know most
sleuthing amounted to snooping
around department stores to check on
the clerks knocking down."
Simon said, enigmatically, "Now
it comes."
There was a knock.
Betty bounced up with Olympic
agility and had the door swinging
wide before the knocking was quite
completed.
He was old, little and had bug
eyes behind pince-nez glasses. His
suit was cut in the style of yesteryear
but when a suit costs two or
three hundred dollars you still retain
caste whatever the styling.
Simon said unenthusiastically,
"Good morning, Mr. Oyster." He indicated
the client's chair. "Sit down,
sir."
The client fussed himself with
Betty's assistance into the seat, bug-eyed
Simon, said finally, "You know
my name, that's pretty good. Never
saw you before in my life. Stop fussing
with me, young lady. Your ad
in the phone book says you'll investigate
anything."
"Anything," Simon said. "Only
one exception."
"Excellent. Do you believe in time
travel?"
Simon said nothing. Across the
room, where she had resumed her
seat, Betty cleared her throat. When
Simon continued to say nothing she
ventured, "Time travel is impossible."
"Why?"
"Why?"
"Yes, why?"
Betty looked to her boss for assistance.
None was forthcoming. There
ought to be some very quick, positive,
definite answer. She said, "Well,
for one thing, paradox. Suppose you
had a time machine and traveled back
a hundred years or so and killed your
own great-grandfather. Then how
could you ever be born?"
"Confound it if I know," the little
fellow growled. "How?"
Simon said, "Let's get to the point,
what you wanted to see me about."
"I want to hire you to hunt me up
some time travelers," the old boy
said.
Betty was too far in now to maintain
her proper role of silent secretary.
"Time travelers," she said, not
very intelligently.
The potential client sat more erect,
obviously with intent to hold the
floor for a time. He removed the
pince-nez glasses and pointed them
at Betty. He said, "Have you read
much science fiction, Miss?"
"Some," Betty admitted.
"Then you'll realize that there are
a dozen explanations of the paradoxes
of time travel. Every writer in
the field worth his salt has explained
them away. But to get on. It's my
contention that within a century or
so man will have solved the problems
of immortality and eternal youth, and
it's also my suspicion that he will
eventually be able to travel in time.
So convinced am I of these possibilities
that I am willing to gamble a
portion of my fortune to investigate
the presence in our era of such time
travelers."
Simon seemed incapable of carrying
the ball this morning, so Betty
said, "But ... Mr. Oyster, if the
future has developed time travel why
don't we ever meet such travelers?"
Simon put in a word. "The usual
explanation, Betty, is that they can't
afford to allow the space-time continuum
track to be altered. If, say, a
time traveler returned to a period of
twenty-five years ago and shot Hitler,
then all subsequent history would be
changed. In that case, the time traveler
himself might never be born. They
have to tread mighty carefully."
Mr. Oyster was pleased. "I didn't
expect you to be so well informed
on the subject, young man."
Simon shrugged and fumbled
again with the aspirin bottle.
Mr. Oyster went on. "I've been
considering the matter for some time
and—"
Simon held up a hand. "There's
no use prolonging this. As I understand
it, you're an elderly gentleman
with a considerable fortune and you
realize that thus far nobody has succeeded
in taking it with him."
Mr. Oyster returned his glasses to
their perch, bug-eyed Simon, but then
nodded.
Simon said, "You want to hire me
to find a time traveler and in some
manner or other—any manner will
do—exhort from him the secret of
eternal life and youth, which you figure
the future will have discovered.
You're willing to pony up a part of
this fortune of yours, if I can deliver
a bona fide time traveler."
"Right!"
Betty had been looking from one
to the other. Now she said, plaintively,
"But where are you going to find
one of these characters—especially if
they're interested in keeping hid?"
The old boy was the center again.
"I told you I'd been considering it
for some time. The
Oktoberfest
,
that's where they'd be!" He seemed
elated.
Betty and Simon waited.
"The
Oktoberfest
," he repeated.
"The greatest festival the world has
ever seen, the carnival,
feria
,
fiesta
to beat them all. Every year it's held
in Munich. Makes the New Orleans
Mardi gras look like a quilting
party." He began to swing into the
spirit of his description. "It originally
started in celebration of the wedding
of some local prince a century
and a half ago and the Bavarians had
such a bang-up time they've been
holding it every year since. The
Munich breweries do up a special
beer,
Marzenbräu
they call it, and
each brewery opens a tremendous tent
on the fair grounds which will hold
five thousand customers apiece. Millions
of liters of beer are put away,
hundreds of thousands of barbecued
chickens, a small herd of oxen are
roasted whole over spits, millions of
pair of
weisswurst
, a very special
sausage, millions upon millions of
pretzels—"
"All right," Simon said. "We'll accept
it. The
Oktoberfest
is one whale
of a wingding."
"Well," the old boy pursued, into
his subject now, "that's where they'd
be, places like the
Oktoberfest
. For
one thing, a time traveler wouldn't
be conspicuous. At a festival like this
somebody with a strange accent, or
who didn't know exactly how to wear
his clothes correctly, or was off the
ordinary in any of a dozen other
ways, wouldn't be noticed. You could
be a four-armed space traveler from
Mars, and you still wouldn't be conspicuous
at the
Oktoberfest
. People
would figure they had D.T.'s."
"But why would a time traveler
want to go to a—" Betty began.
"Why not! What better opportunity
to study a people than when they
are in their cups? If
you
could go
back a few thousand years, the things
you would wish to see would be a
Roman Triumph, perhaps the Rites
of Dionysus, or one of Alexander's
orgies. You wouldn't want to wander
up and down the streets of, say,
Athens while nothing was going on,
particularly when you might be revealed
as a suspicious character not
being able to speak the language, not
knowing how to wear the clothes and
not familiar with the city's layout."
He took a deep breath. "No ma'am,
you'd have to stick to some great
event, both for the sake of actual
interest and for protection against being
unmasked."
The old boy wound it up. "Well,
that's the story. What are your rates?
The
Oktoberfest
starts on Friday and
continues for sixteen days. You can
take the plane to Munich, spend a
week there and—"
Simon was shaking his head. "Not
interested."
As soon as Betty had got her jaw
back into place, she glared unbelievingly
at him.
Mr. Oyster was taken aback himself.
"See here, young man, I realize
this isn't an ordinary assignment,
however, as I said, I am willing to
risk a considerable portion of my
fortune—"
"Sorry," Simon said. "Can't be
done."
"A hundred dollars a day plus expenses,"
Mr. Oyster said quietly. "I
like the fact that you already seem
to have some interest and knowledge
of the matter. I liked the way you
knew my name when I walked in the
door; my picture doesn't appear often
in the papers."
"No go," Simon said, a sad quality
in his voice.
"A fifty thousand dollar bonus if
you bring me a time traveler."
"Out of the question," Simon
said.
"But
why
?" Betty wailed.
"Just for laughs," Simon told the
two of them sourly, "suppose I tell
you a funny story. It goes like
this:"
I got a thousand dollars from Mr.
Oyster (Simon began) in the way
of an advance, and leaving him with
Betty who was making out a receipt,
I hustled back to the apartment and
packed a bag. Hell, I'd wanted a vacation
anyway, this was a natural. On
the way to Idlewild I stopped off at
the Germany Information Offices for
some tourist literature.
It takes roughly three and a half
hours to get to Gander from Idlewild.
I spent the time planning the
fun I was going to have.
It takes roughly seven and a half
hours from Gander to Shannon and
I spent that time dreaming up material
I could put into my reports to
Mr. Oyster. I was going to have to
give him some kind of report for his
money. Time travel yet! What a
laugh!
Between Shannon and Munich a
faint suspicion began to simmer in
my mind. These statistics I read on
the
Oktoberfest
in the Munich tourist
pamphlets. Five million people
attended annually.
Where did five million people
come from to attend an overgrown
festival in comparatively remote
Southern Germany? The tourist season
is over before September 21st,
first day of the gigantic beer bust.
Nor could the Germans account for
any such number. Munich itself has
a population of less than a million,
counting children.
And those millions of gallons of
beer, the hundreds of thousands of
chickens, the herds of oxen. Who
ponied up all the money for such expenditures?
How could the average
German, with his twenty-five dollars
a week salary?
In Munich there was no hotel
space available. I went to the Bahnhof
where they have a hotel service
and applied. They put my name
down, pocketed the husky bribe,
showed me where I could check my
bag, told me they'd do what they
could, and to report back in a few
hours.
I had another suspicious twinge.
If five million people attended this
beer bout, how were they accommodated?
The
Theresienwiese
, the fair
ground, was only a few blocks
away. I was stiff from the plane ride
so I walked.
There are seven major brewers in
the Munich area, each of them represented
by one of the circuslike tents
that Mr. Oyster mentioned. Each tent
contained benches and tables for
about five thousand persons and from
six to ten thousands pack themselves
in, competing for room. In the center
is a tremendous bandstand, the
musicians all
lederhosen
clad, the
music as Bavarian as any to be found
in a Bavarian beer hall. Hundreds of
peasant garbed
fräuleins
darted about
the tables with quart sized earthenware
mugs, platters of chicken, sausage,
kraut and pretzels.
I found a place finally at a table
which had space for twenty-odd beer
bibbers. Odd is right. As weird an
assortment of Germans and foreign
tourists as could have been dreamed
up, ranging from a seventy- or
eighty-year-old couple in Bavarian
costume, to the bald-headed drunk
across the table from me.
A desperate waitress bearing six
mugs of beer in each hand scurried
past. They call them
masses
, by the
way, not mugs. The bald-headed
character and I both held up a finger
and she slid two of the
masses
over
to us and then hustled on.
"Down the hatch," the other said,
holding up his
mass
in toast.
"To the ladies," I told him. Before
sipping, I said, "You know, the
tourist pamphlets say this stuff is
eighteen per cent. That's nonsense.
No beer is that strong." I took a long
pull.
He looked at me, waiting.
I came up. "Mistaken," I admitted.
A
mass
or two apiece later he looked
carefully at the name engraved on
his earthenware mug. "Löwenbräu,"
he said. He took a small notebook
from his pocket and a pencil, noted
down the word and returned the
things.
"That's a queer looking pencil you
have there," I told him. "German?"
"Venusian," he said. "Oops, sorry.
Shouldn't have said that."
I had never heard of the brand so
I skipped it.
"Next is the Hofbräu," he said.
"Next what?" Baldy's conversation
didn't seem to hang together very
well.
"My pilgrimage," he told me. "All
my life I've been wanting to go back
to an
Oktoberfest
and sample every
one of the seven brands of the best
beer the world has ever known. I'm
only as far as Löwenbräu. I'm afraid
I'll never make it."
I finished my
mass
. "I'll help
you," I told him. "Very noble endeavor.
Name is Simon."
"Arth," he said. "How could you
help?"
"I'm still fresh—comparatively.
I'll navigate you around. There are
seven beer tents. How many have you
got through, so far?"
"Two, counting this one," Arth
said.
I looked at him. "It's going to be
a chore," I said. "You've already got
a nice edge on."
Outside, as we made our way to
the next tent, the fair looked like
every big State-Fair ever seen, except
it was bigger. Games, souvenir
stands, sausage stands, rides, side
shows, and people, people, people.
The Hofbräu tent was as overflowing
as the last but we managed to
find two seats.
The band was blaring, and five
thousand half-swacked voices were
roaring accompaniment.
In Muenchen steht ein Hofbräuhaus!
Eins, Zwei, G'sufa!
At the
G'sufa
everybody upped
with the mugs and drank each other's
health.
"This is what I call a real beer
bust," I said approvingly.
Arth was waving to a waitress. As
in the Löwenbräu tent, a full quart
was the smallest amount obtainable.
A beer later I said, "I don't know
if you'll make it or not, Arth."
"Make what?"
"All seven tents."
"Oh."
A waitress was on her way by,
mugs foaming over their rims. I gestured
to her for refills.
"Where are you from, Arth?" I
asked him, in the way of making
conversation.
"2183."
"2183 where?"
He looked at me, closing one eye
to focus better. "Oh," he said. "Well,
2183 South Street, ah, New Albuquerque."
"New Albuquerque? Where's
that?"
Arth thought about it. Took another
long pull at the beer. "Right
across the way from old Albuquerque,"
he said finally. "Maybe we
ought to be getting on to the
Pschorrbräu tent."
"Maybe we ought to eat something
first," I said. "I'm beginning to feel
this. We could get some of that barbecued
ox."
Arth closed his eyes in pain.
"Vegetarian," he said. "Couldn't possibly
eat meat. Barbarous. Ugh."
"Well, we need some nourishment,"
I said.
"There's supposed to be considerable
nourishment in beer."
That made sense. I yelled, "
Fräulein!
Zwei neu bier!
"
Somewhere along in here the fog
rolled in. When it rolled out again,
I found myself closing one eye the
better to read the lettering on my
earthenware mug. It read Augustinerbräu.
Somehow we'd evidently
navigated from one tent to another.
Arth was saying, "Where's your
hotel?"
That seemed like a good question.
I thought about it for a while. Finally
I said, "Haven't got one. Town's
jam packed. Left my bag at the Bahnhof.
I don't think we'll ever make
it, Arth. How many we got to
go?"
"Lost track," Arth said. "You can
come home with me."
We drank to that and the fog rolled
in again.
When the fog rolled out, it was
daylight. Bright, glaring, awful daylight.
I was sprawled, complete with
clothes, on one of twin beds. On the
other bed, also completely clothed,
was Arth.
That sun was too much. I stumbled
up from the bed, staggered to
the window and fumbled around for
a blind or curtain. There was none.
Behind me a voice said in horror,
"Who ... how ... oh,
Wodo
,
where'd you come from?"
I got a quick impression, looking
out the window, that the Germans
were certainly the most modern, futuristic
people in the world. But I
couldn't stand the light. "Where's
the shade," I moaned.
Arth did something and the window
went opaque.
"That's quite a gadget," I groaned.
"If I didn't feel so lousy, I'd
appreciate it."
Arth was sitting on the edge of
the bed holding his bald head in his
hands. "I remember now," he sorrowed.
"You didn't have a hotel.
What a stupidity. I'll be phased.
Phased all the way down."
"You haven't got a handful of
aspirin, have you?" I asked him.
"Just a minute," Arth said, staggering
erect and heading for what
undoubtedly was a bathroom. "Stay
where you are. Don't move. Don't
touch anything."
"All right," I told him plaintively.
"I'm clean. I won't mess up the
place. All I've got is a hangover, not
lice."
Arth was gone. He came back in
two or three minutes, box of pills in
hand. "Here, take one of these."
I took the pill, followed it with a
glass of water.
And went out like a light.
Arth was shaking my arm. "Want
another
mass
?"
The band was blaring, and five
thousand half-swacked voices were
roaring accompaniment.
In Muenchen steht ein Hofbräuhaus!
Eins, Zwei, G'sufa!
At the
G'sufa
everybody upped
with their king-size mugs and drank
each other's health.
My head was killing me. "This is
where I came in, or something," I
groaned.
Arth said, "That was last night."
He looked at me over the rim of his
beer mug.
Something, somewhere, was
wrong. But I didn't care. I finished
my
mass
and then remembered. "I've
got to get my bag. Oh, my head.
Where did we spend last night?"
Arth said, and his voice sounded
cautious, "At my hotel, don't you remember?"
"Not very well," I admitted. "I
feel lousy. I must have dimmed out.
I've got to go to the Bahnhof and
get my luggage."
Arth didn't put up an argument
on that. We said good-by and I could
feel him watching after me as I pushed
through the tables on the way
out.
At the Bahnhof they could do me
no good. There were no hotel rooms
available in Munich. The head was
getting worse by the minute. The
fact that they'd somehow managed
to lose my bag didn't help. I worked
on that project for at least a couple
of hours. Not only wasn't the bag
at the luggage checking station, but
the attendant there evidently couldn't
make heads nor tails of the check
receipt. He didn't speak English and
my high school German was inadequate,
especially accompanied by a
blockbusting hangover.
I didn't get anywhere tearing my
hair and complaining from one end
of the Bahnhof to the other. I drew
a blank on the bag.
And the head was getting worse
by the minute. I was bleeding to
death through the eyes and instead
of butterflies I had bats in my stomach.
Believe me,
nobody
should drink
a gallon or more of Marzenbräu.
I decided the hell with it. I took
a cab to the airport, presented my return
ticket, told them I wanted to
leave on the first obtainable plane to
New York. I'd spent two days at the
Oktoberfest
, and I'd had it.
I got more guff there. Something
was wrong with the ticket, wrong
date or some such. But they fixed
that up. I never was clear on what
was fouled up, some clerk's error,
evidently.
The trip back was as uninteresting
as the one over. As the hangover began
to wear off—a little—I was almost
sorry I hadn't been able to stay.
If I'd only been able to get a room I
would
have stayed, I told myself.
From Idlewild, I came directly to
the office rather than going to my
apartment. I figured I might as well
check in with Betty.
I opened the door and there I
found Mr. Oyster sitting in the chair
he had been occupying four—or was
it five—days before when I'd left.
I'd lost track of the time.
I said to him, "Glad you're here,
sir. I can report. Ah, what was it
you came for? Impatient to hear if
I'd had any results?" My mind was
spinning like a whirling dervish in
a revolving door. I'd spent a wad of
his money and had nothing I could
think of to show for it; nothing but
the last stages of a grand-daddy
hangover.
"Came for?" Mr. Oyster snorted.
"I'm merely waiting for your girl to
make out my receipt. I thought you
had already left."
"You'll miss your plane," Betty
said.
There was suddenly a double dip
of ice cream in my stomach. I walked
over to my desk and looked down at
the calendar.
Mr. Oyster was saying something
to the effect that if I didn't leave today,
it would have to be tomorrow,
that he hadn't ponied up that thousand
dollars advance for anything
less than immediate service. Stuffing
his receipt in his wallet, he fussed
his way out the door.
I said to Betty hopefully, "I suppose
you haven't changed this calendar
since I left."
Betty said, "What's the matter
with you? You look funny. How did
your clothes get so mussed? You tore
the top sheet off that calendar yourself,
not half an hour ago, just before
this marble-missing client came
in." She added, irrelevantly, "Time
travelers yet."
I tried just once more. "Uh, when
did you first see this Mr. Oyster?"
"Never saw him before in my
life," she said. "Not until he came
in this morning."
"This morning," I said weakly.
While Betty stared at me as though
it was
me
that needed candling by a
head shrinker preparatory to being
sent off to a pressure cooker, I fished
in my pocket for my wallet, counted
the contents and winced at the
pathetic remains of the thousand.
I said pleadingly, "Betty, listen,
how long ago did I go out that door—on
the way to the airport?"
"You've been acting sick all morning.
You went out that door about
ten minutes ago, were gone about
three minutes, and then came back."
"See here," Mr. Oyster said (interrupting
Simon's story), "did you
say this was supposed to be amusing,
young man? I don't find it so. In
fact, I believe I am being ridiculed."
Simon shrugged, put one hand to
his forehead and said, "That's only
the first chapter. There are two
more."
"I'm not interested in more," Mr.
Oyster said. "I suppose your point
was to show me how ridiculous the
whole idea actually is. Very well,
you've done it. Confound it. However,
I suppose your time, even when
spent in this manner, has some value.
Here is fifty dollars. And good day,
sir!"
He slammed the door after him
as he left.
Simon winced at the noise, took
the aspirin bottle from its drawer,
took two, washed them down with
water from the desk carafe.
Betty looked at him admiringly.
Came to her feet, crossed over and
took up the fifty dollars. "Week's
wages," she said. "I suppose that's
one way of taking care of a crackpot.
But I'm surprised you didn't
take his money and enjoy that vacation
you've been yearning about."
"I did," Simon groaned. "Three
times."
Betty stared at him. "You mean—"
Simon nodded, miserably.
She said, "But
Simon
. Fifty thousand
dollars bonus. If that story was
true, you should have gone back
again to Munich. If there was one
time traveler, there might have
been—"
"I keep telling you," Simon said
bitterly, "I went back there three
times. There were hundreds of them.
Probably thousands." He took a deep
breath. "Listen, we're just going to
have to forget about it. They're not
going to stand for the space-time
continuum track being altered. If
something comes up that looks like
it might result in the track being
changed, they set you right back at
the beginning and let things start—for
you—all over again. They just
can't allow anything to come back
from the future and change the
past."
"You mean," Betty was suddenly
furious at him, "you've given up!
Why this is the biggest thing— Why
the fifty thousand dollars is nothing.
The future! Just think!"
Simon said wearily, "There's just
one thing you can bring back with
you from the future, a hangover compounded
of a gallon or so of Marzenbräu.
What's more you can pile
one on top of the other, and another
on top of that!"
He shuddered. "If you think I'm
going to take another crack at this
merry-go-round and pile a fourth
hangover on the three I'm already
nursing, all at once, you can think
again."
THE END
Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from
Astounding Science Fiction
June
1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and
typographical errors have been corrected without note. | [
"Simon wanted to show that he had spent a lot of time thinking about encounters with time travelers.",
"He wanted to explain why the trip would not be successful if he went to Germany.",
"He wanted to mock his prospective client for his ideas about time travel.",
"He wanted to prove that Oktoberfest was the wrong place to look for time travelers."
] | 1 |
23942_IGIFD97I_3 | What does Simon think about the possibility of time travel? | UNBORN
TOMORROW
BY MACK REYNOLDS
Unfortunately
, there was only
one thing he could bring back
from the wonderful future ...
and though he didn't want to
... nevertheless he did....
Illustrated by Freas
Betty
looked up from
her magazine. She said
mildly, "You're late."
"Don't yell at me, I
feel awful," Simon told
her. He sat down at his desk, passed
his tongue over his teeth in distaste,
groaned, fumbled in a drawer for the
aspirin bottle.
He looked over at Betty and said,
almost as though reciting, "What I
need is a vacation."
"What," Betty said, "are you going
to use for money?"
"Providence," Simon told her
whilst fiddling with the aspirin bottle,
"will provide."
"Hm-m-m. But before providing
vacations it'd be nice if Providence
turned up a missing jewel deal, say.
Something where you could deduce
that actually the ruby ring had gone
down the drain and was caught in the
elbow. Something that would net
about fifty dollars."
Simon said, mournful of tone,
"Fifty dollars? Why not make it five
hundred?"
"I'm not selfish," Betty said. "All
I want is enough to pay me this
week's salary."
"Money," Simon said. "When you
took this job you said it was the romance
that appealed to you."
"Hm-m-m. I didn't know most
sleuthing amounted to snooping
around department stores to check on
the clerks knocking down."
Simon said, enigmatically, "Now
it comes."
There was a knock.
Betty bounced up with Olympic
agility and had the door swinging
wide before the knocking was quite
completed.
He was old, little and had bug
eyes behind pince-nez glasses. His
suit was cut in the style of yesteryear
but when a suit costs two or
three hundred dollars you still retain
caste whatever the styling.
Simon said unenthusiastically,
"Good morning, Mr. Oyster." He indicated
the client's chair. "Sit down,
sir."
The client fussed himself with
Betty's assistance into the seat, bug-eyed
Simon, said finally, "You know
my name, that's pretty good. Never
saw you before in my life. Stop fussing
with me, young lady. Your ad
in the phone book says you'll investigate
anything."
"Anything," Simon said. "Only
one exception."
"Excellent. Do you believe in time
travel?"
Simon said nothing. Across the
room, where she had resumed her
seat, Betty cleared her throat. When
Simon continued to say nothing she
ventured, "Time travel is impossible."
"Why?"
"Why?"
"Yes, why?"
Betty looked to her boss for assistance.
None was forthcoming. There
ought to be some very quick, positive,
definite answer. She said, "Well,
for one thing, paradox. Suppose you
had a time machine and traveled back
a hundred years or so and killed your
own great-grandfather. Then how
could you ever be born?"
"Confound it if I know," the little
fellow growled. "How?"
Simon said, "Let's get to the point,
what you wanted to see me about."
"I want to hire you to hunt me up
some time travelers," the old boy
said.
Betty was too far in now to maintain
her proper role of silent secretary.
"Time travelers," she said, not
very intelligently.
The potential client sat more erect,
obviously with intent to hold the
floor for a time. He removed the
pince-nez glasses and pointed them
at Betty. He said, "Have you read
much science fiction, Miss?"
"Some," Betty admitted.
"Then you'll realize that there are
a dozen explanations of the paradoxes
of time travel. Every writer in
the field worth his salt has explained
them away. But to get on. It's my
contention that within a century or
so man will have solved the problems
of immortality and eternal youth, and
it's also my suspicion that he will
eventually be able to travel in time.
So convinced am I of these possibilities
that I am willing to gamble a
portion of my fortune to investigate
the presence in our era of such time
travelers."
Simon seemed incapable of carrying
the ball this morning, so Betty
said, "But ... Mr. Oyster, if the
future has developed time travel why
don't we ever meet such travelers?"
Simon put in a word. "The usual
explanation, Betty, is that they can't
afford to allow the space-time continuum
track to be altered. If, say, a
time traveler returned to a period of
twenty-five years ago and shot Hitler,
then all subsequent history would be
changed. In that case, the time traveler
himself might never be born. They
have to tread mighty carefully."
Mr. Oyster was pleased. "I didn't
expect you to be so well informed
on the subject, young man."
Simon shrugged and fumbled
again with the aspirin bottle.
Mr. Oyster went on. "I've been
considering the matter for some time
and—"
Simon held up a hand. "There's
no use prolonging this. As I understand
it, you're an elderly gentleman
with a considerable fortune and you
realize that thus far nobody has succeeded
in taking it with him."
Mr. Oyster returned his glasses to
their perch, bug-eyed Simon, but then
nodded.
Simon said, "You want to hire me
to find a time traveler and in some
manner or other—any manner will
do—exhort from him the secret of
eternal life and youth, which you figure
the future will have discovered.
You're willing to pony up a part of
this fortune of yours, if I can deliver
a bona fide time traveler."
"Right!"
Betty had been looking from one
to the other. Now she said, plaintively,
"But where are you going to find
one of these characters—especially if
they're interested in keeping hid?"
The old boy was the center again.
"I told you I'd been considering it
for some time. The
Oktoberfest
,
that's where they'd be!" He seemed
elated.
Betty and Simon waited.
"The
Oktoberfest
," he repeated.
"The greatest festival the world has
ever seen, the carnival,
feria
,
fiesta
to beat them all. Every year it's held
in Munich. Makes the New Orleans
Mardi gras look like a quilting
party." He began to swing into the
spirit of his description. "It originally
started in celebration of the wedding
of some local prince a century
and a half ago and the Bavarians had
such a bang-up time they've been
holding it every year since. The
Munich breweries do up a special
beer,
Marzenbräu
they call it, and
each brewery opens a tremendous tent
on the fair grounds which will hold
five thousand customers apiece. Millions
of liters of beer are put away,
hundreds of thousands of barbecued
chickens, a small herd of oxen are
roasted whole over spits, millions of
pair of
weisswurst
, a very special
sausage, millions upon millions of
pretzels—"
"All right," Simon said. "We'll accept
it. The
Oktoberfest
is one whale
of a wingding."
"Well," the old boy pursued, into
his subject now, "that's where they'd
be, places like the
Oktoberfest
. For
one thing, a time traveler wouldn't
be conspicuous. At a festival like this
somebody with a strange accent, or
who didn't know exactly how to wear
his clothes correctly, or was off the
ordinary in any of a dozen other
ways, wouldn't be noticed. You could
be a four-armed space traveler from
Mars, and you still wouldn't be conspicuous
at the
Oktoberfest
. People
would figure they had D.T.'s."
"But why would a time traveler
want to go to a—" Betty began.
"Why not! What better opportunity
to study a people than when they
are in their cups? If
you
could go
back a few thousand years, the things
you would wish to see would be a
Roman Triumph, perhaps the Rites
of Dionysus, or one of Alexander's
orgies. You wouldn't want to wander
up and down the streets of, say,
Athens while nothing was going on,
particularly when you might be revealed
as a suspicious character not
being able to speak the language, not
knowing how to wear the clothes and
not familiar with the city's layout."
He took a deep breath. "No ma'am,
you'd have to stick to some great
event, both for the sake of actual
interest and for protection against being
unmasked."
The old boy wound it up. "Well,
that's the story. What are your rates?
The
Oktoberfest
starts on Friday and
continues for sixteen days. You can
take the plane to Munich, spend a
week there and—"
Simon was shaking his head. "Not
interested."
As soon as Betty had got her jaw
back into place, she glared unbelievingly
at him.
Mr. Oyster was taken aback himself.
"See here, young man, I realize
this isn't an ordinary assignment,
however, as I said, I am willing to
risk a considerable portion of my
fortune—"
"Sorry," Simon said. "Can't be
done."
"A hundred dollars a day plus expenses,"
Mr. Oyster said quietly. "I
like the fact that you already seem
to have some interest and knowledge
of the matter. I liked the way you
knew my name when I walked in the
door; my picture doesn't appear often
in the papers."
"No go," Simon said, a sad quality
in his voice.
"A fifty thousand dollar bonus if
you bring me a time traveler."
"Out of the question," Simon
said.
"But
why
?" Betty wailed.
"Just for laughs," Simon told the
two of them sourly, "suppose I tell
you a funny story. It goes like
this:"
I got a thousand dollars from Mr.
Oyster (Simon began) in the way
of an advance, and leaving him with
Betty who was making out a receipt,
I hustled back to the apartment and
packed a bag. Hell, I'd wanted a vacation
anyway, this was a natural. On
the way to Idlewild I stopped off at
the Germany Information Offices for
some tourist literature.
It takes roughly three and a half
hours to get to Gander from Idlewild.
I spent the time planning the
fun I was going to have.
It takes roughly seven and a half
hours from Gander to Shannon and
I spent that time dreaming up material
I could put into my reports to
Mr. Oyster. I was going to have to
give him some kind of report for his
money. Time travel yet! What a
laugh!
Between Shannon and Munich a
faint suspicion began to simmer in
my mind. These statistics I read on
the
Oktoberfest
in the Munich tourist
pamphlets. Five million people
attended annually.
Where did five million people
come from to attend an overgrown
festival in comparatively remote
Southern Germany? The tourist season
is over before September 21st,
first day of the gigantic beer bust.
Nor could the Germans account for
any such number. Munich itself has
a population of less than a million,
counting children.
And those millions of gallons of
beer, the hundreds of thousands of
chickens, the herds of oxen. Who
ponied up all the money for such expenditures?
How could the average
German, with his twenty-five dollars
a week salary?
In Munich there was no hotel
space available. I went to the Bahnhof
where they have a hotel service
and applied. They put my name
down, pocketed the husky bribe,
showed me where I could check my
bag, told me they'd do what they
could, and to report back in a few
hours.
I had another suspicious twinge.
If five million people attended this
beer bout, how were they accommodated?
The
Theresienwiese
, the fair
ground, was only a few blocks
away. I was stiff from the plane ride
so I walked.
There are seven major brewers in
the Munich area, each of them represented
by one of the circuslike tents
that Mr. Oyster mentioned. Each tent
contained benches and tables for
about five thousand persons and from
six to ten thousands pack themselves
in, competing for room. In the center
is a tremendous bandstand, the
musicians all
lederhosen
clad, the
music as Bavarian as any to be found
in a Bavarian beer hall. Hundreds of
peasant garbed
fräuleins
darted about
the tables with quart sized earthenware
mugs, platters of chicken, sausage,
kraut and pretzels.
I found a place finally at a table
which had space for twenty-odd beer
bibbers. Odd is right. As weird an
assortment of Germans and foreign
tourists as could have been dreamed
up, ranging from a seventy- or
eighty-year-old couple in Bavarian
costume, to the bald-headed drunk
across the table from me.
A desperate waitress bearing six
mugs of beer in each hand scurried
past. They call them
masses
, by the
way, not mugs. The bald-headed
character and I both held up a finger
and she slid two of the
masses
over
to us and then hustled on.
"Down the hatch," the other said,
holding up his
mass
in toast.
"To the ladies," I told him. Before
sipping, I said, "You know, the
tourist pamphlets say this stuff is
eighteen per cent. That's nonsense.
No beer is that strong." I took a long
pull.
He looked at me, waiting.
I came up. "Mistaken," I admitted.
A
mass
or two apiece later he looked
carefully at the name engraved on
his earthenware mug. "Löwenbräu,"
he said. He took a small notebook
from his pocket and a pencil, noted
down the word and returned the
things.
"That's a queer looking pencil you
have there," I told him. "German?"
"Venusian," he said. "Oops, sorry.
Shouldn't have said that."
I had never heard of the brand so
I skipped it.
"Next is the Hofbräu," he said.
"Next what?" Baldy's conversation
didn't seem to hang together very
well.
"My pilgrimage," he told me. "All
my life I've been wanting to go back
to an
Oktoberfest
and sample every
one of the seven brands of the best
beer the world has ever known. I'm
only as far as Löwenbräu. I'm afraid
I'll never make it."
I finished my
mass
. "I'll help
you," I told him. "Very noble endeavor.
Name is Simon."
"Arth," he said. "How could you
help?"
"I'm still fresh—comparatively.
I'll navigate you around. There are
seven beer tents. How many have you
got through, so far?"
"Two, counting this one," Arth
said.
I looked at him. "It's going to be
a chore," I said. "You've already got
a nice edge on."
Outside, as we made our way to
the next tent, the fair looked like
every big State-Fair ever seen, except
it was bigger. Games, souvenir
stands, sausage stands, rides, side
shows, and people, people, people.
The Hofbräu tent was as overflowing
as the last but we managed to
find two seats.
The band was blaring, and five
thousand half-swacked voices were
roaring accompaniment.
In Muenchen steht ein Hofbräuhaus!
Eins, Zwei, G'sufa!
At the
G'sufa
everybody upped
with the mugs and drank each other's
health.
"This is what I call a real beer
bust," I said approvingly.
Arth was waving to a waitress. As
in the Löwenbräu tent, a full quart
was the smallest amount obtainable.
A beer later I said, "I don't know
if you'll make it or not, Arth."
"Make what?"
"All seven tents."
"Oh."
A waitress was on her way by,
mugs foaming over their rims. I gestured
to her for refills.
"Where are you from, Arth?" I
asked him, in the way of making
conversation.
"2183."
"2183 where?"
He looked at me, closing one eye
to focus better. "Oh," he said. "Well,
2183 South Street, ah, New Albuquerque."
"New Albuquerque? Where's
that?"
Arth thought about it. Took another
long pull at the beer. "Right
across the way from old Albuquerque,"
he said finally. "Maybe we
ought to be getting on to the
Pschorrbräu tent."
"Maybe we ought to eat something
first," I said. "I'm beginning to feel
this. We could get some of that barbecued
ox."
Arth closed his eyes in pain.
"Vegetarian," he said. "Couldn't possibly
eat meat. Barbarous. Ugh."
"Well, we need some nourishment,"
I said.
"There's supposed to be considerable
nourishment in beer."
That made sense. I yelled, "
Fräulein!
Zwei neu bier!
"
Somewhere along in here the fog
rolled in. When it rolled out again,
I found myself closing one eye the
better to read the lettering on my
earthenware mug. It read Augustinerbräu.
Somehow we'd evidently
navigated from one tent to another.
Arth was saying, "Where's your
hotel?"
That seemed like a good question.
I thought about it for a while. Finally
I said, "Haven't got one. Town's
jam packed. Left my bag at the Bahnhof.
I don't think we'll ever make
it, Arth. How many we got to
go?"
"Lost track," Arth said. "You can
come home with me."
We drank to that and the fog rolled
in again.
When the fog rolled out, it was
daylight. Bright, glaring, awful daylight.
I was sprawled, complete with
clothes, on one of twin beds. On the
other bed, also completely clothed,
was Arth.
That sun was too much. I stumbled
up from the bed, staggered to
the window and fumbled around for
a blind or curtain. There was none.
Behind me a voice said in horror,
"Who ... how ... oh,
Wodo
,
where'd you come from?"
I got a quick impression, looking
out the window, that the Germans
were certainly the most modern, futuristic
people in the world. But I
couldn't stand the light. "Where's
the shade," I moaned.
Arth did something and the window
went opaque.
"That's quite a gadget," I groaned.
"If I didn't feel so lousy, I'd
appreciate it."
Arth was sitting on the edge of
the bed holding his bald head in his
hands. "I remember now," he sorrowed.
"You didn't have a hotel.
What a stupidity. I'll be phased.
Phased all the way down."
"You haven't got a handful of
aspirin, have you?" I asked him.
"Just a minute," Arth said, staggering
erect and heading for what
undoubtedly was a bathroom. "Stay
where you are. Don't move. Don't
touch anything."
"All right," I told him plaintively.
"I'm clean. I won't mess up the
place. All I've got is a hangover, not
lice."
Arth was gone. He came back in
two or three minutes, box of pills in
hand. "Here, take one of these."
I took the pill, followed it with a
glass of water.
And went out like a light.
Arth was shaking my arm. "Want
another
mass
?"
The band was blaring, and five
thousand half-swacked voices were
roaring accompaniment.
In Muenchen steht ein Hofbräuhaus!
Eins, Zwei, G'sufa!
At the
G'sufa
everybody upped
with their king-size mugs and drank
each other's health.
My head was killing me. "This is
where I came in, or something," I
groaned.
Arth said, "That was last night."
He looked at me over the rim of his
beer mug.
Something, somewhere, was
wrong. But I didn't care. I finished
my
mass
and then remembered. "I've
got to get my bag. Oh, my head.
Where did we spend last night?"
Arth said, and his voice sounded
cautious, "At my hotel, don't you remember?"
"Not very well," I admitted. "I
feel lousy. I must have dimmed out.
I've got to go to the Bahnhof and
get my luggage."
Arth didn't put up an argument
on that. We said good-by and I could
feel him watching after me as I pushed
through the tables on the way
out.
At the Bahnhof they could do me
no good. There were no hotel rooms
available in Munich. The head was
getting worse by the minute. The
fact that they'd somehow managed
to lose my bag didn't help. I worked
on that project for at least a couple
of hours. Not only wasn't the bag
at the luggage checking station, but
the attendant there evidently couldn't
make heads nor tails of the check
receipt. He didn't speak English and
my high school German was inadequate,
especially accompanied by a
blockbusting hangover.
I didn't get anywhere tearing my
hair and complaining from one end
of the Bahnhof to the other. I drew
a blank on the bag.
And the head was getting worse
by the minute. I was bleeding to
death through the eyes and instead
of butterflies I had bats in my stomach.
Believe me,
nobody
should drink
a gallon or more of Marzenbräu.
I decided the hell with it. I took
a cab to the airport, presented my return
ticket, told them I wanted to
leave on the first obtainable plane to
New York. I'd spent two days at the
Oktoberfest
, and I'd had it.
I got more guff there. Something
was wrong with the ticket, wrong
date or some such. But they fixed
that up. I never was clear on what
was fouled up, some clerk's error,
evidently.
The trip back was as uninteresting
as the one over. As the hangover began
to wear off—a little—I was almost
sorry I hadn't been able to stay.
If I'd only been able to get a room I
would
have stayed, I told myself.
From Idlewild, I came directly to
the office rather than going to my
apartment. I figured I might as well
check in with Betty.
I opened the door and there I
found Mr. Oyster sitting in the chair
he had been occupying four—or was
it five—days before when I'd left.
I'd lost track of the time.
I said to him, "Glad you're here,
sir. I can report. Ah, what was it
you came for? Impatient to hear if
I'd had any results?" My mind was
spinning like a whirling dervish in
a revolving door. I'd spent a wad of
his money and had nothing I could
think of to show for it; nothing but
the last stages of a grand-daddy
hangover.
"Came for?" Mr. Oyster snorted.
"I'm merely waiting for your girl to
make out my receipt. I thought you
had already left."
"You'll miss your plane," Betty
said.
There was suddenly a double dip
of ice cream in my stomach. I walked
over to my desk and looked down at
the calendar.
Mr. Oyster was saying something
to the effect that if I didn't leave today,
it would have to be tomorrow,
that he hadn't ponied up that thousand
dollars advance for anything
less than immediate service. Stuffing
his receipt in his wallet, he fussed
his way out the door.
I said to Betty hopefully, "I suppose
you haven't changed this calendar
since I left."
Betty said, "What's the matter
with you? You look funny. How did
your clothes get so mussed? You tore
the top sheet off that calendar yourself,
not half an hour ago, just before
this marble-missing client came
in." She added, irrelevantly, "Time
travelers yet."
I tried just once more. "Uh, when
did you first see this Mr. Oyster?"
"Never saw him before in my
life," she said. "Not until he came
in this morning."
"This morning," I said weakly.
While Betty stared at me as though
it was
me
that needed candling by a
head shrinker preparatory to being
sent off to a pressure cooker, I fished
in my pocket for my wallet, counted
the contents and winced at the
pathetic remains of the thousand.
I said pleadingly, "Betty, listen,
how long ago did I go out that door—on
the way to the airport?"
"You've been acting sick all morning.
You went out that door about
ten minutes ago, were gone about
three minutes, and then came back."
"See here," Mr. Oyster said (interrupting
Simon's story), "did you
say this was supposed to be amusing,
young man? I don't find it so. In
fact, I believe I am being ridiculed."
Simon shrugged, put one hand to
his forehead and said, "That's only
the first chapter. There are two
more."
"I'm not interested in more," Mr.
Oyster said. "I suppose your point
was to show me how ridiculous the
whole idea actually is. Very well,
you've done it. Confound it. However,
I suppose your time, even when
spent in this manner, has some value.
Here is fifty dollars. And good day,
sir!"
He slammed the door after him
as he left.
Simon winced at the noise, took
the aspirin bottle from its drawer,
took two, washed them down with
water from the desk carafe.
Betty looked at him admiringly.
Came to her feet, crossed over and
took up the fifty dollars. "Week's
wages," she said. "I suppose that's
one way of taking care of a crackpot.
But I'm surprised you didn't
take his money and enjoy that vacation
you've been yearning about."
"I did," Simon groaned. "Three
times."
Betty stared at him. "You mean—"
Simon nodded, miserably.
She said, "But
Simon
. Fifty thousand
dollars bonus. If that story was
true, you should have gone back
again to Munich. If there was one
time traveler, there might have
been—"
"I keep telling you," Simon said
bitterly, "I went back there three
times. There were hundreds of them.
Probably thousands." He took a deep
breath. "Listen, we're just going to
have to forget about it. They're not
going to stand for the space-time
continuum track being altered. If
something comes up that looks like
it might result in the track being
changed, they set you right back at
the beginning and let things start—for
you—all over again. They just
can't allow anything to come back
from the future and change the
past."
"You mean," Betty was suddenly
furious at him, "you've given up!
Why this is the biggest thing— Why
the fifty thousand dollars is nothing.
The future! Just think!"
Simon said wearily, "There's just
one thing you can bring back with
you from the future, a hangover compounded
of a gallon or so of Marzenbräu.
What's more you can pile
one on top of the other, and another
on top of that!"
He shuddered. "If you think I'm
going to take another crack at this
merry-go-round and pile a fourth
hangover on the three I'm already
nursing, all at once, you can think
again."
THE END
Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from
Astounding Science Fiction
June
1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and
typographical errors have been corrected without note. | [
"He thinks it's possible, but finds it ridiculous that Oktoberfest would be the place to find it.",
"He hopes that it's real, and spends a lot of time thinking about how to avoid a paradox.",
"He knows that it's real, but thinks that its secret will be kept in the future.",
"He thinks it's incredibly stupid and not worth considering."
] | 2 |
23942_IGIFD97I_4 | Why does Mr. Oyster want to hire Simon and Betty? | UNBORN
TOMORROW
BY MACK REYNOLDS
Unfortunately
, there was only
one thing he could bring back
from the wonderful future ...
and though he didn't want to
... nevertheless he did....
Illustrated by Freas
Betty
looked up from
her magazine. She said
mildly, "You're late."
"Don't yell at me, I
feel awful," Simon told
her. He sat down at his desk, passed
his tongue over his teeth in distaste,
groaned, fumbled in a drawer for the
aspirin bottle.
He looked over at Betty and said,
almost as though reciting, "What I
need is a vacation."
"What," Betty said, "are you going
to use for money?"
"Providence," Simon told her
whilst fiddling with the aspirin bottle,
"will provide."
"Hm-m-m. But before providing
vacations it'd be nice if Providence
turned up a missing jewel deal, say.
Something where you could deduce
that actually the ruby ring had gone
down the drain and was caught in the
elbow. Something that would net
about fifty dollars."
Simon said, mournful of tone,
"Fifty dollars? Why not make it five
hundred?"
"I'm not selfish," Betty said. "All
I want is enough to pay me this
week's salary."
"Money," Simon said. "When you
took this job you said it was the romance
that appealed to you."
"Hm-m-m. I didn't know most
sleuthing amounted to snooping
around department stores to check on
the clerks knocking down."
Simon said, enigmatically, "Now
it comes."
There was a knock.
Betty bounced up with Olympic
agility and had the door swinging
wide before the knocking was quite
completed.
He was old, little and had bug
eyes behind pince-nez glasses. His
suit was cut in the style of yesteryear
but when a suit costs two or
three hundred dollars you still retain
caste whatever the styling.
Simon said unenthusiastically,
"Good morning, Mr. Oyster." He indicated
the client's chair. "Sit down,
sir."
The client fussed himself with
Betty's assistance into the seat, bug-eyed
Simon, said finally, "You know
my name, that's pretty good. Never
saw you before in my life. Stop fussing
with me, young lady. Your ad
in the phone book says you'll investigate
anything."
"Anything," Simon said. "Only
one exception."
"Excellent. Do you believe in time
travel?"
Simon said nothing. Across the
room, where she had resumed her
seat, Betty cleared her throat. When
Simon continued to say nothing she
ventured, "Time travel is impossible."
"Why?"
"Why?"
"Yes, why?"
Betty looked to her boss for assistance.
None was forthcoming. There
ought to be some very quick, positive,
definite answer. She said, "Well,
for one thing, paradox. Suppose you
had a time machine and traveled back
a hundred years or so and killed your
own great-grandfather. Then how
could you ever be born?"
"Confound it if I know," the little
fellow growled. "How?"
Simon said, "Let's get to the point,
what you wanted to see me about."
"I want to hire you to hunt me up
some time travelers," the old boy
said.
Betty was too far in now to maintain
her proper role of silent secretary.
"Time travelers," she said, not
very intelligently.
The potential client sat more erect,
obviously with intent to hold the
floor for a time. He removed the
pince-nez glasses and pointed them
at Betty. He said, "Have you read
much science fiction, Miss?"
"Some," Betty admitted.
"Then you'll realize that there are
a dozen explanations of the paradoxes
of time travel. Every writer in
the field worth his salt has explained
them away. But to get on. It's my
contention that within a century or
so man will have solved the problems
of immortality and eternal youth, and
it's also my suspicion that he will
eventually be able to travel in time.
So convinced am I of these possibilities
that I am willing to gamble a
portion of my fortune to investigate
the presence in our era of such time
travelers."
Simon seemed incapable of carrying
the ball this morning, so Betty
said, "But ... Mr. Oyster, if the
future has developed time travel why
don't we ever meet such travelers?"
Simon put in a word. "The usual
explanation, Betty, is that they can't
afford to allow the space-time continuum
track to be altered. If, say, a
time traveler returned to a period of
twenty-five years ago and shot Hitler,
then all subsequent history would be
changed. In that case, the time traveler
himself might never be born. They
have to tread mighty carefully."
Mr. Oyster was pleased. "I didn't
expect you to be so well informed
on the subject, young man."
Simon shrugged and fumbled
again with the aspirin bottle.
Mr. Oyster went on. "I've been
considering the matter for some time
and—"
Simon held up a hand. "There's
no use prolonging this. As I understand
it, you're an elderly gentleman
with a considerable fortune and you
realize that thus far nobody has succeeded
in taking it with him."
Mr. Oyster returned his glasses to
their perch, bug-eyed Simon, but then
nodded.
Simon said, "You want to hire me
to find a time traveler and in some
manner or other—any manner will
do—exhort from him the secret of
eternal life and youth, which you figure
the future will have discovered.
You're willing to pony up a part of
this fortune of yours, if I can deliver
a bona fide time traveler."
"Right!"
Betty had been looking from one
to the other. Now she said, plaintively,
"But where are you going to find
one of these characters—especially if
they're interested in keeping hid?"
The old boy was the center again.
"I told you I'd been considering it
for some time. The
Oktoberfest
,
that's where they'd be!" He seemed
elated.
Betty and Simon waited.
"The
Oktoberfest
," he repeated.
"The greatest festival the world has
ever seen, the carnival,
feria
,
fiesta
to beat them all. Every year it's held
in Munich. Makes the New Orleans
Mardi gras look like a quilting
party." He began to swing into the
spirit of his description. "It originally
started in celebration of the wedding
of some local prince a century
and a half ago and the Bavarians had
such a bang-up time they've been
holding it every year since. The
Munich breweries do up a special
beer,
Marzenbräu
they call it, and
each brewery opens a tremendous tent
on the fair grounds which will hold
five thousand customers apiece. Millions
of liters of beer are put away,
hundreds of thousands of barbecued
chickens, a small herd of oxen are
roasted whole over spits, millions of
pair of
weisswurst
, a very special
sausage, millions upon millions of
pretzels—"
"All right," Simon said. "We'll accept
it. The
Oktoberfest
is one whale
of a wingding."
"Well," the old boy pursued, into
his subject now, "that's where they'd
be, places like the
Oktoberfest
. For
one thing, a time traveler wouldn't
be conspicuous. At a festival like this
somebody with a strange accent, or
who didn't know exactly how to wear
his clothes correctly, or was off the
ordinary in any of a dozen other
ways, wouldn't be noticed. You could
be a four-armed space traveler from
Mars, and you still wouldn't be conspicuous
at the
Oktoberfest
. People
would figure they had D.T.'s."
"But why would a time traveler
want to go to a—" Betty began.
"Why not! What better opportunity
to study a people than when they
are in their cups? If
you
could go
back a few thousand years, the things
you would wish to see would be a
Roman Triumph, perhaps the Rites
of Dionysus, or one of Alexander's
orgies. You wouldn't want to wander
up and down the streets of, say,
Athens while nothing was going on,
particularly when you might be revealed
as a suspicious character not
being able to speak the language, not
knowing how to wear the clothes and
not familiar with the city's layout."
He took a deep breath. "No ma'am,
you'd have to stick to some great
event, both for the sake of actual
interest and for protection against being
unmasked."
The old boy wound it up. "Well,
that's the story. What are your rates?
The
Oktoberfest
starts on Friday and
continues for sixteen days. You can
take the plane to Munich, spend a
week there and—"
Simon was shaking his head. "Not
interested."
As soon as Betty had got her jaw
back into place, she glared unbelievingly
at him.
Mr. Oyster was taken aback himself.
"See here, young man, I realize
this isn't an ordinary assignment,
however, as I said, I am willing to
risk a considerable portion of my
fortune—"
"Sorry," Simon said. "Can't be
done."
"A hundred dollars a day plus expenses,"
Mr. Oyster said quietly. "I
like the fact that you already seem
to have some interest and knowledge
of the matter. I liked the way you
knew my name when I walked in the
door; my picture doesn't appear often
in the papers."
"No go," Simon said, a sad quality
in his voice.
"A fifty thousand dollar bonus if
you bring me a time traveler."
"Out of the question," Simon
said.
"But
why
?" Betty wailed.
"Just for laughs," Simon told the
two of them sourly, "suppose I tell
you a funny story. It goes like
this:"
I got a thousand dollars from Mr.
Oyster (Simon began) in the way
of an advance, and leaving him with
Betty who was making out a receipt,
I hustled back to the apartment and
packed a bag. Hell, I'd wanted a vacation
anyway, this was a natural. On
the way to Idlewild I stopped off at
the Germany Information Offices for
some tourist literature.
It takes roughly three and a half
hours to get to Gander from Idlewild.
I spent the time planning the
fun I was going to have.
It takes roughly seven and a half
hours from Gander to Shannon and
I spent that time dreaming up material
I could put into my reports to
Mr. Oyster. I was going to have to
give him some kind of report for his
money. Time travel yet! What a
laugh!
Between Shannon and Munich a
faint suspicion began to simmer in
my mind. These statistics I read on
the
Oktoberfest
in the Munich tourist
pamphlets. Five million people
attended annually.
Where did five million people
come from to attend an overgrown
festival in comparatively remote
Southern Germany? The tourist season
is over before September 21st,
first day of the gigantic beer bust.
Nor could the Germans account for
any such number. Munich itself has
a population of less than a million,
counting children.
And those millions of gallons of
beer, the hundreds of thousands of
chickens, the herds of oxen. Who
ponied up all the money for such expenditures?
How could the average
German, with his twenty-five dollars
a week salary?
In Munich there was no hotel
space available. I went to the Bahnhof
where they have a hotel service
and applied. They put my name
down, pocketed the husky bribe,
showed me where I could check my
bag, told me they'd do what they
could, and to report back in a few
hours.
I had another suspicious twinge.
If five million people attended this
beer bout, how were they accommodated?
The
Theresienwiese
, the fair
ground, was only a few blocks
away. I was stiff from the plane ride
so I walked.
There are seven major brewers in
the Munich area, each of them represented
by one of the circuslike tents
that Mr. Oyster mentioned. Each tent
contained benches and tables for
about five thousand persons and from
six to ten thousands pack themselves
in, competing for room. In the center
is a tremendous bandstand, the
musicians all
lederhosen
clad, the
music as Bavarian as any to be found
in a Bavarian beer hall. Hundreds of
peasant garbed
fräuleins
darted about
the tables with quart sized earthenware
mugs, platters of chicken, sausage,
kraut and pretzels.
I found a place finally at a table
which had space for twenty-odd beer
bibbers. Odd is right. As weird an
assortment of Germans and foreign
tourists as could have been dreamed
up, ranging from a seventy- or
eighty-year-old couple in Bavarian
costume, to the bald-headed drunk
across the table from me.
A desperate waitress bearing six
mugs of beer in each hand scurried
past. They call them
masses
, by the
way, not mugs. The bald-headed
character and I both held up a finger
and she slid two of the
masses
over
to us and then hustled on.
"Down the hatch," the other said,
holding up his
mass
in toast.
"To the ladies," I told him. Before
sipping, I said, "You know, the
tourist pamphlets say this stuff is
eighteen per cent. That's nonsense.
No beer is that strong." I took a long
pull.
He looked at me, waiting.
I came up. "Mistaken," I admitted.
A
mass
or two apiece later he looked
carefully at the name engraved on
his earthenware mug. "Löwenbräu,"
he said. He took a small notebook
from his pocket and a pencil, noted
down the word and returned the
things.
"That's a queer looking pencil you
have there," I told him. "German?"
"Venusian," he said. "Oops, sorry.
Shouldn't have said that."
I had never heard of the brand so
I skipped it.
"Next is the Hofbräu," he said.
"Next what?" Baldy's conversation
didn't seem to hang together very
well.
"My pilgrimage," he told me. "All
my life I've been wanting to go back
to an
Oktoberfest
and sample every
one of the seven brands of the best
beer the world has ever known. I'm
only as far as Löwenbräu. I'm afraid
I'll never make it."
I finished my
mass
. "I'll help
you," I told him. "Very noble endeavor.
Name is Simon."
"Arth," he said. "How could you
help?"
"I'm still fresh—comparatively.
I'll navigate you around. There are
seven beer tents. How many have you
got through, so far?"
"Two, counting this one," Arth
said.
I looked at him. "It's going to be
a chore," I said. "You've already got
a nice edge on."
Outside, as we made our way to
the next tent, the fair looked like
every big State-Fair ever seen, except
it was bigger. Games, souvenir
stands, sausage stands, rides, side
shows, and people, people, people.
The Hofbräu tent was as overflowing
as the last but we managed to
find two seats.
The band was blaring, and five
thousand half-swacked voices were
roaring accompaniment.
In Muenchen steht ein Hofbräuhaus!
Eins, Zwei, G'sufa!
At the
G'sufa
everybody upped
with the mugs and drank each other's
health.
"This is what I call a real beer
bust," I said approvingly.
Arth was waving to a waitress. As
in the Löwenbräu tent, a full quart
was the smallest amount obtainable.
A beer later I said, "I don't know
if you'll make it or not, Arth."
"Make what?"
"All seven tents."
"Oh."
A waitress was on her way by,
mugs foaming over their rims. I gestured
to her for refills.
"Where are you from, Arth?" I
asked him, in the way of making
conversation.
"2183."
"2183 where?"
He looked at me, closing one eye
to focus better. "Oh," he said. "Well,
2183 South Street, ah, New Albuquerque."
"New Albuquerque? Where's
that?"
Arth thought about it. Took another
long pull at the beer. "Right
across the way from old Albuquerque,"
he said finally. "Maybe we
ought to be getting on to the
Pschorrbräu tent."
"Maybe we ought to eat something
first," I said. "I'm beginning to feel
this. We could get some of that barbecued
ox."
Arth closed his eyes in pain.
"Vegetarian," he said. "Couldn't possibly
eat meat. Barbarous. Ugh."
"Well, we need some nourishment,"
I said.
"There's supposed to be considerable
nourishment in beer."
That made sense. I yelled, "
Fräulein!
Zwei neu bier!
"
Somewhere along in here the fog
rolled in. When it rolled out again,
I found myself closing one eye the
better to read the lettering on my
earthenware mug. It read Augustinerbräu.
Somehow we'd evidently
navigated from one tent to another.
Arth was saying, "Where's your
hotel?"
That seemed like a good question.
I thought about it for a while. Finally
I said, "Haven't got one. Town's
jam packed. Left my bag at the Bahnhof.
I don't think we'll ever make
it, Arth. How many we got to
go?"
"Lost track," Arth said. "You can
come home with me."
We drank to that and the fog rolled
in again.
When the fog rolled out, it was
daylight. Bright, glaring, awful daylight.
I was sprawled, complete with
clothes, on one of twin beds. On the
other bed, also completely clothed,
was Arth.
That sun was too much. I stumbled
up from the bed, staggered to
the window and fumbled around for
a blind or curtain. There was none.
Behind me a voice said in horror,
"Who ... how ... oh,
Wodo
,
where'd you come from?"
I got a quick impression, looking
out the window, that the Germans
were certainly the most modern, futuristic
people in the world. But I
couldn't stand the light. "Where's
the shade," I moaned.
Arth did something and the window
went opaque.
"That's quite a gadget," I groaned.
"If I didn't feel so lousy, I'd
appreciate it."
Arth was sitting on the edge of
the bed holding his bald head in his
hands. "I remember now," he sorrowed.
"You didn't have a hotel.
What a stupidity. I'll be phased.
Phased all the way down."
"You haven't got a handful of
aspirin, have you?" I asked him.
"Just a minute," Arth said, staggering
erect and heading for what
undoubtedly was a bathroom. "Stay
where you are. Don't move. Don't
touch anything."
"All right," I told him plaintively.
"I'm clean. I won't mess up the
place. All I've got is a hangover, not
lice."
Arth was gone. He came back in
two or three minutes, box of pills in
hand. "Here, take one of these."
I took the pill, followed it with a
glass of water.
And went out like a light.
Arth was shaking my arm. "Want
another
mass
?"
The band was blaring, and five
thousand half-swacked voices were
roaring accompaniment.
In Muenchen steht ein Hofbräuhaus!
Eins, Zwei, G'sufa!
At the
G'sufa
everybody upped
with their king-size mugs and drank
each other's health.
My head was killing me. "This is
where I came in, or something," I
groaned.
Arth said, "That was last night."
He looked at me over the rim of his
beer mug.
Something, somewhere, was
wrong. But I didn't care. I finished
my
mass
and then remembered. "I've
got to get my bag. Oh, my head.
Where did we spend last night?"
Arth said, and his voice sounded
cautious, "At my hotel, don't you remember?"
"Not very well," I admitted. "I
feel lousy. I must have dimmed out.
I've got to go to the Bahnhof and
get my luggage."
Arth didn't put up an argument
on that. We said good-by and I could
feel him watching after me as I pushed
through the tables on the way
out.
At the Bahnhof they could do me
no good. There were no hotel rooms
available in Munich. The head was
getting worse by the minute. The
fact that they'd somehow managed
to lose my bag didn't help. I worked
on that project for at least a couple
of hours. Not only wasn't the bag
at the luggage checking station, but
the attendant there evidently couldn't
make heads nor tails of the check
receipt. He didn't speak English and
my high school German was inadequate,
especially accompanied by a
blockbusting hangover.
I didn't get anywhere tearing my
hair and complaining from one end
of the Bahnhof to the other. I drew
a blank on the bag.
And the head was getting worse
by the minute. I was bleeding to
death through the eyes and instead
of butterflies I had bats in my stomach.
Believe me,
nobody
should drink
a gallon or more of Marzenbräu.
I decided the hell with it. I took
a cab to the airport, presented my return
ticket, told them I wanted to
leave on the first obtainable plane to
New York. I'd spent two days at the
Oktoberfest
, and I'd had it.
I got more guff there. Something
was wrong with the ticket, wrong
date or some such. But they fixed
that up. I never was clear on what
was fouled up, some clerk's error,
evidently.
The trip back was as uninteresting
as the one over. As the hangover began
to wear off—a little—I was almost
sorry I hadn't been able to stay.
If I'd only been able to get a room I
would
have stayed, I told myself.
From Idlewild, I came directly to
the office rather than going to my
apartment. I figured I might as well
check in with Betty.
I opened the door and there I
found Mr. Oyster sitting in the chair
he had been occupying four—or was
it five—days before when I'd left.
I'd lost track of the time.
I said to him, "Glad you're here,
sir. I can report. Ah, what was it
you came for? Impatient to hear if
I'd had any results?" My mind was
spinning like a whirling dervish in
a revolving door. I'd spent a wad of
his money and had nothing I could
think of to show for it; nothing but
the last stages of a grand-daddy
hangover.
"Came for?" Mr. Oyster snorted.
"I'm merely waiting for your girl to
make out my receipt. I thought you
had already left."
"You'll miss your plane," Betty
said.
There was suddenly a double dip
of ice cream in my stomach. I walked
over to my desk and looked down at
the calendar.
Mr. Oyster was saying something
to the effect that if I didn't leave today,
it would have to be tomorrow,
that he hadn't ponied up that thousand
dollars advance for anything
less than immediate service. Stuffing
his receipt in his wallet, he fussed
his way out the door.
I said to Betty hopefully, "I suppose
you haven't changed this calendar
since I left."
Betty said, "What's the matter
with you? You look funny. How did
your clothes get so mussed? You tore
the top sheet off that calendar yourself,
not half an hour ago, just before
this marble-missing client came
in." She added, irrelevantly, "Time
travelers yet."
I tried just once more. "Uh, when
did you first see this Mr. Oyster?"
"Never saw him before in my
life," she said. "Not until he came
in this morning."
"This morning," I said weakly.
While Betty stared at me as though
it was
me
that needed candling by a
head shrinker preparatory to being
sent off to a pressure cooker, I fished
in my pocket for my wallet, counted
the contents and winced at the
pathetic remains of the thousand.
I said pleadingly, "Betty, listen,
how long ago did I go out that door—on
the way to the airport?"
"You've been acting sick all morning.
You went out that door about
ten minutes ago, were gone about
three minutes, and then came back."
"See here," Mr. Oyster said (interrupting
Simon's story), "did you
say this was supposed to be amusing,
young man? I don't find it so. In
fact, I believe I am being ridiculed."
Simon shrugged, put one hand to
his forehead and said, "That's only
the first chapter. There are two
more."
"I'm not interested in more," Mr.
Oyster said. "I suppose your point
was to show me how ridiculous the
whole idea actually is. Very well,
you've done it. Confound it. However,
I suppose your time, even when
spent in this manner, has some value.
Here is fifty dollars. And good day,
sir!"
He slammed the door after him
as he left.
Simon winced at the noise, took
the aspirin bottle from its drawer,
took two, washed them down with
water from the desk carafe.
Betty looked at him admiringly.
Came to her feet, crossed over and
took up the fifty dollars. "Week's
wages," she said. "I suppose that's
one way of taking care of a crackpot.
But I'm surprised you didn't
take his money and enjoy that vacation
you've been yearning about."
"I did," Simon groaned. "Three
times."
Betty stared at him. "You mean—"
Simon nodded, miserably.
She said, "But
Simon
. Fifty thousand
dollars bonus. If that story was
true, you should have gone back
again to Munich. If there was one
time traveler, there might have
been—"
"I keep telling you," Simon said
bitterly, "I went back there three
times. There were hundreds of them.
Probably thousands." He took a deep
breath. "Listen, we're just going to
have to forget about it. They're not
going to stand for the space-time
continuum track being altered. If
something comes up that looks like
it might result in the track being
changed, they set you right back at
the beginning and let things start—for
you—all over again. They just
can't allow anything to come back
from the future and change the
past."
"You mean," Betty was suddenly
furious at him, "you've given up!
Why this is the biggest thing— Why
the fifty thousand dollars is nothing.
The future! Just think!"
Simon said wearily, "There's just
one thing you can bring back with
you from the future, a hangover compounded
of a gallon or so of Marzenbräu.
What's more you can pile
one on top of the other, and another
on top of that!"
He shuddered. "If you think I'm
going to take another crack at this
merry-go-round and pile a fourth
hangover on the three I'm already
nursing, all at once, you can think
again."
THE END
Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from
Astounding Science Fiction
June
1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and
typographical errors have been corrected without note. | [
"He thinks the time traveler will have the secret to never-ending youth.",
"He wants to know the secret of time travel and they are the best investigators around.",
"He wants to make sure his family's wealth continues in the future.",
"He wants to find out a secret for political reasons."
] | 0 |
23942_IGIFD97I_5 | Why is Simon so unenthusiastic when the client shows up at the beginning of the story? | UNBORN
TOMORROW
BY MACK REYNOLDS
Unfortunately
, there was only
one thing he could bring back
from the wonderful future ...
and though he didn't want to
... nevertheless he did....
Illustrated by Freas
Betty
looked up from
her magazine. She said
mildly, "You're late."
"Don't yell at me, I
feel awful," Simon told
her. He sat down at his desk, passed
his tongue over his teeth in distaste,
groaned, fumbled in a drawer for the
aspirin bottle.
He looked over at Betty and said,
almost as though reciting, "What I
need is a vacation."
"What," Betty said, "are you going
to use for money?"
"Providence," Simon told her
whilst fiddling with the aspirin bottle,
"will provide."
"Hm-m-m. But before providing
vacations it'd be nice if Providence
turned up a missing jewel deal, say.
Something where you could deduce
that actually the ruby ring had gone
down the drain and was caught in the
elbow. Something that would net
about fifty dollars."
Simon said, mournful of tone,
"Fifty dollars? Why not make it five
hundred?"
"I'm not selfish," Betty said. "All
I want is enough to pay me this
week's salary."
"Money," Simon said. "When you
took this job you said it was the romance
that appealed to you."
"Hm-m-m. I didn't know most
sleuthing amounted to snooping
around department stores to check on
the clerks knocking down."
Simon said, enigmatically, "Now
it comes."
There was a knock.
Betty bounced up with Olympic
agility and had the door swinging
wide before the knocking was quite
completed.
He was old, little and had bug
eyes behind pince-nez glasses. His
suit was cut in the style of yesteryear
but when a suit costs two or
three hundred dollars you still retain
caste whatever the styling.
Simon said unenthusiastically,
"Good morning, Mr. Oyster." He indicated
the client's chair. "Sit down,
sir."
The client fussed himself with
Betty's assistance into the seat, bug-eyed
Simon, said finally, "You know
my name, that's pretty good. Never
saw you before in my life. Stop fussing
with me, young lady. Your ad
in the phone book says you'll investigate
anything."
"Anything," Simon said. "Only
one exception."
"Excellent. Do you believe in time
travel?"
Simon said nothing. Across the
room, where she had resumed her
seat, Betty cleared her throat. When
Simon continued to say nothing she
ventured, "Time travel is impossible."
"Why?"
"Why?"
"Yes, why?"
Betty looked to her boss for assistance.
None was forthcoming. There
ought to be some very quick, positive,
definite answer. She said, "Well,
for one thing, paradox. Suppose you
had a time machine and traveled back
a hundred years or so and killed your
own great-grandfather. Then how
could you ever be born?"
"Confound it if I know," the little
fellow growled. "How?"
Simon said, "Let's get to the point,
what you wanted to see me about."
"I want to hire you to hunt me up
some time travelers," the old boy
said.
Betty was too far in now to maintain
her proper role of silent secretary.
"Time travelers," she said, not
very intelligently.
The potential client sat more erect,
obviously with intent to hold the
floor for a time. He removed the
pince-nez glasses and pointed them
at Betty. He said, "Have you read
much science fiction, Miss?"
"Some," Betty admitted.
"Then you'll realize that there are
a dozen explanations of the paradoxes
of time travel. Every writer in
the field worth his salt has explained
them away. But to get on. It's my
contention that within a century or
so man will have solved the problems
of immortality and eternal youth, and
it's also my suspicion that he will
eventually be able to travel in time.
So convinced am I of these possibilities
that I am willing to gamble a
portion of my fortune to investigate
the presence in our era of such time
travelers."
Simon seemed incapable of carrying
the ball this morning, so Betty
said, "But ... Mr. Oyster, if the
future has developed time travel why
don't we ever meet such travelers?"
Simon put in a word. "The usual
explanation, Betty, is that they can't
afford to allow the space-time continuum
track to be altered. If, say, a
time traveler returned to a period of
twenty-five years ago and shot Hitler,
then all subsequent history would be
changed. In that case, the time traveler
himself might never be born. They
have to tread mighty carefully."
Mr. Oyster was pleased. "I didn't
expect you to be so well informed
on the subject, young man."
Simon shrugged and fumbled
again with the aspirin bottle.
Mr. Oyster went on. "I've been
considering the matter for some time
and—"
Simon held up a hand. "There's
no use prolonging this. As I understand
it, you're an elderly gentleman
with a considerable fortune and you
realize that thus far nobody has succeeded
in taking it with him."
Mr. Oyster returned his glasses to
their perch, bug-eyed Simon, but then
nodded.
Simon said, "You want to hire me
to find a time traveler and in some
manner or other—any manner will
do—exhort from him the secret of
eternal life and youth, which you figure
the future will have discovered.
You're willing to pony up a part of
this fortune of yours, if I can deliver
a bona fide time traveler."
"Right!"
Betty had been looking from one
to the other. Now she said, plaintively,
"But where are you going to find
one of these characters—especially if
they're interested in keeping hid?"
The old boy was the center again.
"I told you I'd been considering it
for some time. The
Oktoberfest
,
that's where they'd be!" He seemed
elated.
Betty and Simon waited.
"The
Oktoberfest
," he repeated.
"The greatest festival the world has
ever seen, the carnival,
feria
,
fiesta
to beat them all. Every year it's held
in Munich. Makes the New Orleans
Mardi gras look like a quilting
party." He began to swing into the
spirit of his description. "It originally
started in celebration of the wedding
of some local prince a century
and a half ago and the Bavarians had
such a bang-up time they've been
holding it every year since. The
Munich breweries do up a special
beer,
Marzenbräu
they call it, and
each brewery opens a tremendous tent
on the fair grounds which will hold
five thousand customers apiece. Millions
of liters of beer are put away,
hundreds of thousands of barbecued
chickens, a small herd of oxen are
roasted whole over spits, millions of
pair of
weisswurst
, a very special
sausage, millions upon millions of
pretzels—"
"All right," Simon said. "We'll accept
it. The
Oktoberfest
is one whale
of a wingding."
"Well," the old boy pursued, into
his subject now, "that's where they'd
be, places like the
Oktoberfest
. For
one thing, a time traveler wouldn't
be conspicuous. At a festival like this
somebody with a strange accent, or
who didn't know exactly how to wear
his clothes correctly, or was off the
ordinary in any of a dozen other
ways, wouldn't be noticed. You could
be a four-armed space traveler from
Mars, and you still wouldn't be conspicuous
at the
Oktoberfest
. People
would figure they had D.T.'s."
"But why would a time traveler
want to go to a—" Betty began.
"Why not! What better opportunity
to study a people than when they
are in their cups? If
you
could go
back a few thousand years, the things
you would wish to see would be a
Roman Triumph, perhaps the Rites
of Dionysus, or one of Alexander's
orgies. You wouldn't want to wander
up and down the streets of, say,
Athens while nothing was going on,
particularly when you might be revealed
as a suspicious character not
being able to speak the language, not
knowing how to wear the clothes and
not familiar with the city's layout."
He took a deep breath. "No ma'am,
you'd have to stick to some great
event, both for the sake of actual
interest and for protection against being
unmasked."
The old boy wound it up. "Well,
that's the story. What are your rates?
The
Oktoberfest
starts on Friday and
continues for sixteen days. You can
take the plane to Munich, spend a
week there and—"
Simon was shaking his head. "Not
interested."
As soon as Betty had got her jaw
back into place, she glared unbelievingly
at him.
Mr. Oyster was taken aback himself.
"See here, young man, I realize
this isn't an ordinary assignment,
however, as I said, I am willing to
risk a considerable portion of my
fortune—"
"Sorry," Simon said. "Can't be
done."
"A hundred dollars a day plus expenses,"
Mr. Oyster said quietly. "I
like the fact that you already seem
to have some interest and knowledge
of the matter. I liked the way you
knew my name when I walked in the
door; my picture doesn't appear often
in the papers."
"No go," Simon said, a sad quality
in his voice.
"A fifty thousand dollar bonus if
you bring me a time traveler."
"Out of the question," Simon
said.
"But
why
?" Betty wailed.
"Just for laughs," Simon told the
two of them sourly, "suppose I tell
you a funny story. It goes like
this:"
I got a thousand dollars from Mr.
Oyster (Simon began) in the way
of an advance, and leaving him with
Betty who was making out a receipt,
I hustled back to the apartment and
packed a bag. Hell, I'd wanted a vacation
anyway, this was a natural. On
the way to Idlewild I stopped off at
the Germany Information Offices for
some tourist literature.
It takes roughly three and a half
hours to get to Gander from Idlewild.
I spent the time planning the
fun I was going to have.
It takes roughly seven and a half
hours from Gander to Shannon and
I spent that time dreaming up material
I could put into my reports to
Mr. Oyster. I was going to have to
give him some kind of report for his
money. Time travel yet! What a
laugh!
Between Shannon and Munich a
faint suspicion began to simmer in
my mind. These statistics I read on
the
Oktoberfest
in the Munich tourist
pamphlets. Five million people
attended annually.
Where did five million people
come from to attend an overgrown
festival in comparatively remote
Southern Germany? The tourist season
is over before September 21st,
first day of the gigantic beer bust.
Nor could the Germans account for
any such number. Munich itself has
a population of less than a million,
counting children.
And those millions of gallons of
beer, the hundreds of thousands of
chickens, the herds of oxen. Who
ponied up all the money for such expenditures?
How could the average
German, with his twenty-five dollars
a week salary?
In Munich there was no hotel
space available. I went to the Bahnhof
where they have a hotel service
and applied. They put my name
down, pocketed the husky bribe,
showed me where I could check my
bag, told me they'd do what they
could, and to report back in a few
hours.
I had another suspicious twinge.
If five million people attended this
beer bout, how were they accommodated?
The
Theresienwiese
, the fair
ground, was only a few blocks
away. I was stiff from the plane ride
so I walked.
There are seven major brewers in
the Munich area, each of them represented
by one of the circuslike tents
that Mr. Oyster mentioned. Each tent
contained benches and tables for
about five thousand persons and from
six to ten thousands pack themselves
in, competing for room. In the center
is a tremendous bandstand, the
musicians all
lederhosen
clad, the
music as Bavarian as any to be found
in a Bavarian beer hall. Hundreds of
peasant garbed
fräuleins
darted about
the tables with quart sized earthenware
mugs, platters of chicken, sausage,
kraut and pretzels.
I found a place finally at a table
which had space for twenty-odd beer
bibbers. Odd is right. As weird an
assortment of Germans and foreign
tourists as could have been dreamed
up, ranging from a seventy- or
eighty-year-old couple in Bavarian
costume, to the bald-headed drunk
across the table from me.
A desperate waitress bearing six
mugs of beer in each hand scurried
past. They call them
masses
, by the
way, not mugs. The bald-headed
character and I both held up a finger
and she slid two of the
masses
over
to us and then hustled on.
"Down the hatch," the other said,
holding up his
mass
in toast.
"To the ladies," I told him. Before
sipping, I said, "You know, the
tourist pamphlets say this stuff is
eighteen per cent. That's nonsense.
No beer is that strong." I took a long
pull.
He looked at me, waiting.
I came up. "Mistaken," I admitted.
A
mass
or two apiece later he looked
carefully at the name engraved on
his earthenware mug. "Löwenbräu,"
he said. He took a small notebook
from his pocket and a pencil, noted
down the word and returned the
things.
"That's a queer looking pencil you
have there," I told him. "German?"
"Venusian," he said. "Oops, sorry.
Shouldn't have said that."
I had never heard of the brand so
I skipped it.
"Next is the Hofbräu," he said.
"Next what?" Baldy's conversation
didn't seem to hang together very
well.
"My pilgrimage," he told me. "All
my life I've been wanting to go back
to an
Oktoberfest
and sample every
one of the seven brands of the best
beer the world has ever known. I'm
only as far as Löwenbräu. I'm afraid
I'll never make it."
I finished my
mass
. "I'll help
you," I told him. "Very noble endeavor.
Name is Simon."
"Arth," he said. "How could you
help?"
"I'm still fresh—comparatively.
I'll navigate you around. There are
seven beer tents. How many have you
got through, so far?"
"Two, counting this one," Arth
said.
I looked at him. "It's going to be
a chore," I said. "You've already got
a nice edge on."
Outside, as we made our way to
the next tent, the fair looked like
every big State-Fair ever seen, except
it was bigger. Games, souvenir
stands, sausage stands, rides, side
shows, and people, people, people.
The Hofbräu tent was as overflowing
as the last but we managed to
find two seats.
The band was blaring, and five
thousand half-swacked voices were
roaring accompaniment.
In Muenchen steht ein Hofbräuhaus!
Eins, Zwei, G'sufa!
At the
G'sufa
everybody upped
with the mugs and drank each other's
health.
"This is what I call a real beer
bust," I said approvingly.
Arth was waving to a waitress. As
in the Löwenbräu tent, a full quart
was the smallest amount obtainable.
A beer later I said, "I don't know
if you'll make it or not, Arth."
"Make what?"
"All seven tents."
"Oh."
A waitress was on her way by,
mugs foaming over their rims. I gestured
to her for refills.
"Where are you from, Arth?" I
asked him, in the way of making
conversation.
"2183."
"2183 where?"
He looked at me, closing one eye
to focus better. "Oh," he said. "Well,
2183 South Street, ah, New Albuquerque."
"New Albuquerque? Where's
that?"
Arth thought about it. Took another
long pull at the beer. "Right
across the way from old Albuquerque,"
he said finally. "Maybe we
ought to be getting on to the
Pschorrbräu tent."
"Maybe we ought to eat something
first," I said. "I'm beginning to feel
this. We could get some of that barbecued
ox."
Arth closed his eyes in pain.
"Vegetarian," he said. "Couldn't possibly
eat meat. Barbarous. Ugh."
"Well, we need some nourishment,"
I said.
"There's supposed to be considerable
nourishment in beer."
That made sense. I yelled, "
Fräulein!
Zwei neu bier!
"
Somewhere along in here the fog
rolled in. When it rolled out again,
I found myself closing one eye the
better to read the lettering on my
earthenware mug. It read Augustinerbräu.
Somehow we'd evidently
navigated from one tent to another.
Arth was saying, "Where's your
hotel?"
That seemed like a good question.
I thought about it for a while. Finally
I said, "Haven't got one. Town's
jam packed. Left my bag at the Bahnhof.
I don't think we'll ever make
it, Arth. How many we got to
go?"
"Lost track," Arth said. "You can
come home with me."
We drank to that and the fog rolled
in again.
When the fog rolled out, it was
daylight. Bright, glaring, awful daylight.
I was sprawled, complete with
clothes, on one of twin beds. On the
other bed, also completely clothed,
was Arth.
That sun was too much. I stumbled
up from the bed, staggered to
the window and fumbled around for
a blind or curtain. There was none.
Behind me a voice said in horror,
"Who ... how ... oh,
Wodo
,
where'd you come from?"
I got a quick impression, looking
out the window, that the Germans
were certainly the most modern, futuristic
people in the world. But I
couldn't stand the light. "Where's
the shade," I moaned.
Arth did something and the window
went opaque.
"That's quite a gadget," I groaned.
"If I didn't feel so lousy, I'd
appreciate it."
Arth was sitting on the edge of
the bed holding his bald head in his
hands. "I remember now," he sorrowed.
"You didn't have a hotel.
What a stupidity. I'll be phased.
Phased all the way down."
"You haven't got a handful of
aspirin, have you?" I asked him.
"Just a minute," Arth said, staggering
erect and heading for what
undoubtedly was a bathroom. "Stay
where you are. Don't move. Don't
touch anything."
"All right," I told him plaintively.
"I'm clean. I won't mess up the
place. All I've got is a hangover, not
lice."
Arth was gone. He came back in
two or three minutes, box of pills in
hand. "Here, take one of these."
I took the pill, followed it with a
glass of water.
And went out like a light.
Arth was shaking my arm. "Want
another
mass
?"
The band was blaring, and five
thousand half-swacked voices were
roaring accompaniment.
In Muenchen steht ein Hofbräuhaus!
Eins, Zwei, G'sufa!
At the
G'sufa
everybody upped
with their king-size mugs and drank
each other's health.
My head was killing me. "This is
where I came in, or something," I
groaned.
Arth said, "That was last night."
He looked at me over the rim of his
beer mug.
Something, somewhere, was
wrong. But I didn't care. I finished
my
mass
and then remembered. "I've
got to get my bag. Oh, my head.
Where did we spend last night?"
Arth said, and his voice sounded
cautious, "At my hotel, don't you remember?"
"Not very well," I admitted. "I
feel lousy. I must have dimmed out.
I've got to go to the Bahnhof and
get my luggage."
Arth didn't put up an argument
on that. We said good-by and I could
feel him watching after me as I pushed
through the tables on the way
out.
At the Bahnhof they could do me
no good. There were no hotel rooms
available in Munich. The head was
getting worse by the minute. The
fact that they'd somehow managed
to lose my bag didn't help. I worked
on that project for at least a couple
of hours. Not only wasn't the bag
at the luggage checking station, but
the attendant there evidently couldn't
make heads nor tails of the check
receipt. He didn't speak English and
my high school German was inadequate,
especially accompanied by a
blockbusting hangover.
I didn't get anywhere tearing my
hair and complaining from one end
of the Bahnhof to the other. I drew
a blank on the bag.
And the head was getting worse
by the minute. I was bleeding to
death through the eyes and instead
of butterflies I had bats in my stomach.
Believe me,
nobody
should drink
a gallon or more of Marzenbräu.
I decided the hell with it. I took
a cab to the airport, presented my return
ticket, told them I wanted to
leave on the first obtainable plane to
New York. I'd spent two days at the
Oktoberfest
, and I'd had it.
I got more guff there. Something
was wrong with the ticket, wrong
date or some such. But they fixed
that up. I never was clear on what
was fouled up, some clerk's error,
evidently.
The trip back was as uninteresting
as the one over. As the hangover began
to wear off—a little—I was almost
sorry I hadn't been able to stay.
If I'd only been able to get a room I
would
have stayed, I told myself.
From Idlewild, I came directly to
the office rather than going to my
apartment. I figured I might as well
check in with Betty.
I opened the door and there I
found Mr. Oyster sitting in the chair
he had been occupying four—or was
it five—days before when I'd left.
I'd lost track of the time.
I said to him, "Glad you're here,
sir. I can report. Ah, what was it
you came for? Impatient to hear if
I'd had any results?" My mind was
spinning like a whirling dervish in
a revolving door. I'd spent a wad of
his money and had nothing I could
think of to show for it; nothing but
the last stages of a grand-daddy
hangover.
"Came for?" Mr. Oyster snorted.
"I'm merely waiting for your girl to
make out my receipt. I thought you
had already left."
"You'll miss your plane," Betty
said.
There was suddenly a double dip
of ice cream in my stomach. I walked
over to my desk and looked down at
the calendar.
Mr. Oyster was saying something
to the effect that if I didn't leave today,
it would have to be tomorrow,
that he hadn't ponied up that thousand
dollars advance for anything
less than immediate service. Stuffing
his receipt in his wallet, he fussed
his way out the door.
I said to Betty hopefully, "I suppose
you haven't changed this calendar
since I left."
Betty said, "What's the matter
with you? You look funny. How did
your clothes get so mussed? You tore
the top sheet off that calendar yourself,
not half an hour ago, just before
this marble-missing client came
in." She added, irrelevantly, "Time
travelers yet."
I tried just once more. "Uh, when
did you first see this Mr. Oyster?"
"Never saw him before in my
life," she said. "Not until he came
in this morning."
"This morning," I said weakly.
While Betty stared at me as though
it was
me
that needed candling by a
head shrinker preparatory to being
sent off to a pressure cooker, I fished
in my pocket for my wallet, counted
the contents and winced at the
pathetic remains of the thousand.
I said pleadingly, "Betty, listen,
how long ago did I go out that door—on
the way to the airport?"
"You've been acting sick all morning.
You went out that door about
ten minutes ago, were gone about
three minutes, and then came back."
"See here," Mr. Oyster said (interrupting
Simon's story), "did you
say this was supposed to be amusing,
young man? I don't find it so. In
fact, I believe I am being ridiculed."
Simon shrugged, put one hand to
his forehead and said, "That's only
the first chapter. There are two
more."
"I'm not interested in more," Mr.
Oyster said. "I suppose your point
was to show me how ridiculous the
whole idea actually is. Very well,
you've done it. Confound it. However,
I suppose your time, even when
spent in this manner, has some value.
Here is fifty dollars. And good day,
sir!"
He slammed the door after him
as he left.
Simon winced at the noise, took
the aspirin bottle from its drawer,
took two, washed them down with
water from the desk carafe.
Betty looked at him admiringly.
Came to her feet, crossed over and
took up the fifty dollars. "Week's
wages," she said. "I suppose that's
one way of taking care of a crackpot.
But I'm surprised you didn't
take his money and enjoy that vacation
you've been yearning about."
"I did," Simon groaned. "Three
times."
Betty stared at him. "You mean—"
Simon nodded, miserably.
She said, "But
Simon
. Fifty thousand
dollars bonus. If that story was
true, you should have gone back
again to Munich. If there was one
time traveler, there might have
been—"
"I keep telling you," Simon said
bitterly, "I went back there three
times. There were hundreds of them.
Probably thousands." He took a deep
breath. "Listen, we're just going to
have to forget about it. They're not
going to stand for the space-time
continuum track being altered. If
something comes up that looks like
it might result in the track being
changed, they set you right back at
the beginning and let things start—for
you—all over again. They just
can't allow anything to come back
from the future and change the
past."
"You mean," Betty was suddenly
furious at him, "you've given up!
Why this is the biggest thing— Why
the fifty thousand dollars is nothing.
The future! Just think!"
Simon said wearily, "There's just
one thing you can bring back with
you from the future, a hangover compounded
of a gallon or so of Marzenbräu.
What's more you can pile
one on top of the other, and another
on top of that!"
He shuddered. "If you think I'm
going to take another crack at this
merry-go-round and pile a fourth
hangover on the three I'm already
nursing, all at once, you can think
again."
THE END
Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from
Astounding Science Fiction
June
1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and
typographical errors have been corrected without note. | [
"He knows Mr. Oyster's reputation, and does not want to get involved in his affairs.",
"He knows he cannot accomplish what Mr. Oyster is asking, and knows he will have to turn him away.",
"He only takes on easy cases that he knows will pay the bills.",
"He has too much of a headache to deal with the new client."
] | 1 |
23942_IGIFD97I_6 | What is Simon referring to when he says "now it comes" to Betty during their discussion at the beginning of the story? | UNBORN
TOMORROW
BY MACK REYNOLDS
Unfortunately
, there was only
one thing he could bring back
from the wonderful future ...
and though he didn't want to
... nevertheless he did....
Illustrated by Freas
Betty
looked up from
her magazine. She said
mildly, "You're late."
"Don't yell at me, I
feel awful," Simon told
her. He sat down at his desk, passed
his tongue over his teeth in distaste,
groaned, fumbled in a drawer for the
aspirin bottle.
He looked over at Betty and said,
almost as though reciting, "What I
need is a vacation."
"What," Betty said, "are you going
to use for money?"
"Providence," Simon told her
whilst fiddling with the aspirin bottle,
"will provide."
"Hm-m-m. But before providing
vacations it'd be nice if Providence
turned up a missing jewel deal, say.
Something where you could deduce
that actually the ruby ring had gone
down the drain and was caught in the
elbow. Something that would net
about fifty dollars."
Simon said, mournful of tone,
"Fifty dollars? Why not make it five
hundred?"
"I'm not selfish," Betty said. "All
I want is enough to pay me this
week's salary."
"Money," Simon said. "When you
took this job you said it was the romance
that appealed to you."
"Hm-m-m. I didn't know most
sleuthing amounted to snooping
around department stores to check on
the clerks knocking down."
Simon said, enigmatically, "Now
it comes."
There was a knock.
Betty bounced up with Olympic
agility and had the door swinging
wide before the knocking was quite
completed.
He was old, little and had bug
eyes behind pince-nez glasses. His
suit was cut in the style of yesteryear
but when a suit costs two or
three hundred dollars you still retain
caste whatever the styling.
Simon said unenthusiastically,
"Good morning, Mr. Oyster." He indicated
the client's chair. "Sit down,
sir."
The client fussed himself with
Betty's assistance into the seat, bug-eyed
Simon, said finally, "You know
my name, that's pretty good. Never
saw you before in my life. Stop fussing
with me, young lady. Your ad
in the phone book says you'll investigate
anything."
"Anything," Simon said. "Only
one exception."
"Excellent. Do you believe in time
travel?"
Simon said nothing. Across the
room, where she had resumed her
seat, Betty cleared her throat. When
Simon continued to say nothing she
ventured, "Time travel is impossible."
"Why?"
"Why?"
"Yes, why?"
Betty looked to her boss for assistance.
None was forthcoming. There
ought to be some very quick, positive,
definite answer. She said, "Well,
for one thing, paradox. Suppose you
had a time machine and traveled back
a hundred years or so and killed your
own great-grandfather. Then how
could you ever be born?"
"Confound it if I know," the little
fellow growled. "How?"
Simon said, "Let's get to the point,
what you wanted to see me about."
"I want to hire you to hunt me up
some time travelers," the old boy
said.
Betty was too far in now to maintain
her proper role of silent secretary.
"Time travelers," she said, not
very intelligently.
The potential client sat more erect,
obviously with intent to hold the
floor for a time. He removed the
pince-nez glasses and pointed them
at Betty. He said, "Have you read
much science fiction, Miss?"
"Some," Betty admitted.
"Then you'll realize that there are
a dozen explanations of the paradoxes
of time travel. Every writer in
the field worth his salt has explained
them away. But to get on. It's my
contention that within a century or
so man will have solved the problems
of immortality and eternal youth, and
it's also my suspicion that he will
eventually be able to travel in time.
So convinced am I of these possibilities
that I am willing to gamble a
portion of my fortune to investigate
the presence in our era of such time
travelers."
Simon seemed incapable of carrying
the ball this morning, so Betty
said, "But ... Mr. Oyster, if the
future has developed time travel why
don't we ever meet such travelers?"
Simon put in a word. "The usual
explanation, Betty, is that they can't
afford to allow the space-time continuum
track to be altered. If, say, a
time traveler returned to a period of
twenty-five years ago and shot Hitler,
then all subsequent history would be
changed. In that case, the time traveler
himself might never be born. They
have to tread mighty carefully."
Mr. Oyster was pleased. "I didn't
expect you to be so well informed
on the subject, young man."
Simon shrugged and fumbled
again with the aspirin bottle.
Mr. Oyster went on. "I've been
considering the matter for some time
and—"
Simon held up a hand. "There's
no use prolonging this. As I understand
it, you're an elderly gentleman
with a considerable fortune and you
realize that thus far nobody has succeeded
in taking it with him."
Mr. Oyster returned his glasses to
their perch, bug-eyed Simon, but then
nodded.
Simon said, "You want to hire me
to find a time traveler and in some
manner or other—any manner will
do—exhort from him the secret of
eternal life and youth, which you figure
the future will have discovered.
You're willing to pony up a part of
this fortune of yours, if I can deliver
a bona fide time traveler."
"Right!"
Betty had been looking from one
to the other. Now she said, plaintively,
"But where are you going to find
one of these characters—especially if
they're interested in keeping hid?"
The old boy was the center again.
"I told you I'd been considering it
for some time. The
Oktoberfest
,
that's where they'd be!" He seemed
elated.
Betty and Simon waited.
"The
Oktoberfest
," he repeated.
"The greatest festival the world has
ever seen, the carnival,
feria
,
fiesta
to beat them all. Every year it's held
in Munich. Makes the New Orleans
Mardi gras look like a quilting
party." He began to swing into the
spirit of his description. "It originally
started in celebration of the wedding
of some local prince a century
and a half ago and the Bavarians had
such a bang-up time they've been
holding it every year since. The
Munich breweries do up a special
beer,
Marzenbräu
they call it, and
each brewery opens a tremendous tent
on the fair grounds which will hold
five thousand customers apiece. Millions
of liters of beer are put away,
hundreds of thousands of barbecued
chickens, a small herd of oxen are
roasted whole over spits, millions of
pair of
weisswurst
, a very special
sausage, millions upon millions of
pretzels—"
"All right," Simon said. "We'll accept
it. The
Oktoberfest
is one whale
of a wingding."
"Well," the old boy pursued, into
his subject now, "that's where they'd
be, places like the
Oktoberfest
. For
one thing, a time traveler wouldn't
be conspicuous. At a festival like this
somebody with a strange accent, or
who didn't know exactly how to wear
his clothes correctly, or was off the
ordinary in any of a dozen other
ways, wouldn't be noticed. You could
be a four-armed space traveler from
Mars, and you still wouldn't be conspicuous
at the
Oktoberfest
. People
would figure they had D.T.'s."
"But why would a time traveler
want to go to a—" Betty began.
"Why not! What better opportunity
to study a people than when they
are in their cups? If
you
could go
back a few thousand years, the things
you would wish to see would be a
Roman Triumph, perhaps the Rites
of Dionysus, or one of Alexander's
orgies. You wouldn't want to wander
up and down the streets of, say,
Athens while nothing was going on,
particularly when you might be revealed
as a suspicious character not
being able to speak the language, not
knowing how to wear the clothes and
not familiar with the city's layout."
He took a deep breath. "No ma'am,
you'd have to stick to some great
event, both for the sake of actual
interest and for protection against being
unmasked."
The old boy wound it up. "Well,
that's the story. What are your rates?
The
Oktoberfest
starts on Friday and
continues for sixteen days. You can
take the plane to Munich, spend a
week there and—"
Simon was shaking his head. "Not
interested."
As soon as Betty had got her jaw
back into place, she glared unbelievingly
at him.
Mr. Oyster was taken aback himself.
"See here, young man, I realize
this isn't an ordinary assignment,
however, as I said, I am willing to
risk a considerable portion of my
fortune—"
"Sorry," Simon said. "Can't be
done."
"A hundred dollars a day plus expenses,"
Mr. Oyster said quietly. "I
like the fact that you already seem
to have some interest and knowledge
of the matter. I liked the way you
knew my name when I walked in the
door; my picture doesn't appear often
in the papers."
"No go," Simon said, a sad quality
in his voice.
"A fifty thousand dollar bonus if
you bring me a time traveler."
"Out of the question," Simon
said.
"But
why
?" Betty wailed.
"Just for laughs," Simon told the
two of them sourly, "suppose I tell
you a funny story. It goes like
this:"
I got a thousand dollars from Mr.
Oyster (Simon began) in the way
of an advance, and leaving him with
Betty who was making out a receipt,
I hustled back to the apartment and
packed a bag. Hell, I'd wanted a vacation
anyway, this was a natural. On
the way to Idlewild I stopped off at
the Germany Information Offices for
some tourist literature.
It takes roughly three and a half
hours to get to Gander from Idlewild.
I spent the time planning the
fun I was going to have.
It takes roughly seven and a half
hours from Gander to Shannon and
I spent that time dreaming up material
I could put into my reports to
Mr. Oyster. I was going to have to
give him some kind of report for his
money. Time travel yet! What a
laugh!
Between Shannon and Munich a
faint suspicion began to simmer in
my mind. These statistics I read on
the
Oktoberfest
in the Munich tourist
pamphlets. Five million people
attended annually.
Where did five million people
come from to attend an overgrown
festival in comparatively remote
Southern Germany? The tourist season
is over before September 21st,
first day of the gigantic beer bust.
Nor could the Germans account for
any such number. Munich itself has
a population of less than a million,
counting children.
And those millions of gallons of
beer, the hundreds of thousands of
chickens, the herds of oxen. Who
ponied up all the money for such expenditures?
How could the average
German, with his twenty-five dollars
a week salary?
In Munich there was no hotel
space available. I went to the Bahnhof
where they have a hotel service
and applied. They put my name
down, pocketed the husky bribe,
showed me where I could check my
bag, told me they'd do what they
could, and to report back in a few
hours.
I had another suspicious twinge.
If five million people attended this
beer bout, how were they accommodated?
The
Theresienwiese
, the fair
ground, was only a few blocks
away. I was stiff from the plane ride
so I walked.
There are seven major brewers in
the Munich area, each of them represented
by one of the circuslike tents
that Mr. Oyster mentioned. Each tent
contained benches and tables for
about five thousand persons and from
six to ten thousands pack themselves
in, competing for room. In the center
is a tremendous bandstand, the
musicians all
lederhosen
clad, the
music as Bavarian as any to be found
in a Bavarian beer hall. Hundreds of
peasant garbed
fräuleins
darted about
the tables with quart sized earthenware
mugs, platters of chicken, sausage,
kraut and pretzels.
I found a place finally at a table
which had space for twenty-odd beer
bibbers. Odd is right. As weird an
assortment of Germans and foreign
tourists as could have been dreamed
up, ranging from a seventy- or
eighty-year-old couple in Bavarian
costume, to the bald-headed drunk
across the table from me.
A desperate waitress bearing six
mugs of beer in each hand scurried
past. They call them
masses
, by the
way, not mugs. The bald-headed
character and I both held up a finger
and she slid two of the
masses
over
to us and then hustled on.
"Down the hatch," the other said,
holding up his
mass
in toast.
"To the ladies," I told him. Before
sipping, I said, "You know, the
tourist pamphlets say this stuff is
eighteen per cent. That's nonsense.
No beer is that strong." I took a long
pull.
He looked at me, waiting.
I came up. "Mistaken," I admitted.
A
mass
or two apiece later he looked
carefully at the name engraved on
his earthenware mug. "Löwenbräu,"
he said. He took a small notebook
from his pocket and a pencil, noted
down the word and returned the
things.
"That's a queer looking pencil you
have there," I told him. "German?"
"Venusian," he said. "Oops, sorry.
Shouldn't have said that."
I had never heard of the brand so
I skipped it.
"Next is the Hofbräu," he said.
"Next what?" Baldy's conversation
didn't seem to hang together very
well.
"My pilgrimage," he told me. "All
my life I've been wanting to go back
to an
Oktoberfest
and sample every
one of the seven brands of the best
beer the world has ever known. I'm
only as far as Löwenbräu. I'm afraid
I'll never make it."
I finished my
mass
. "I'll help
you," I told him. "Very noble endeavor.
Name is Simon."
"Arth," he said. "How could you
help?"
"I'm still fresh—comparatively.
I'll navigate you around. There are
seven beer tents. How many have you
got through, so far?"
"Two, counting this one," Arth
said.
I looked at him. "It's going to be
a chore," I said. "You've already got
a nice edge on."
Outside, as we made our way to
the next tent, the fair looked like
every big State-Fair ever seen, except
it was bigger. Games, souvenir
stands, sausage stands, rides, side
shows, and people, people, people.
The Hofbräu tent was as overflowing
as the last but we managed to
find two seats.
The band was blaring, and five
thousand half-swacked voices were
roaring accompaniment.
In Muenchen steht ein Hofbräuhaus!
Eins, Zwei, G'sufa!
At the
G'sufa
everybody upped
with the mugs and drank each other's
health.
"This is what I call a real beer
bust," I said approvingly.
Arth was waving to a waitress. As
in the Löwenbräu tent, a full quart
was the smallest amount obtainable.
A beer later I said, "I don't know
if you'll make it or not, Arth."
"Make what?"
"All seven tents."
"Oh."
A waitress was on her way by,
mugs foaming over their rims. I gestured
to her for refills.
"Where are you from, Arth?" I
asked him, in the way of making
conversation.
"2183."
"2183 where?"
He looked at me, closing one eye
to focus better. "Oh," he said. "Well,
2183 South Street, ah, New Albuquerque."
"New Albuquerque? Where's
that?"
Arth thought about it. Took another
long pull at the beer. "Right
across the way from old Albuquerque,"
he said finally. "Maybe we
ought to be getting on to the
Pschorrbräu tent."
"Maybe we ought to eat something
first," I said. "I'm beginning to feel
this. We could get some of that barbecued
ox."
Arth closed his eyes in pain.
"Vegetarian," he said. "Couldn't possibly
eat meat. Barbarous. Ugh."
"Well, we need some nourishment,"
I said.
"There's supposed to be considerable
nourishment in beer."
That made sense. I yelled, "
Fräulein!
Zwei neu bier!
"
Somewhere along in here the fog
rolled in. When it rolled out again,
I found myself closing one eye the
better to read the lettering on my
earthenware mug. It read Augustinerbräu.
Somehow we'd evidently
navigated from one tent to another.
Arth was saying, "Where's your
hotel?"
That seemed like a good question.
I thought about it for a while. Finally
I said, "Haven't got one. Town's
jam packed. Left my bag at the Bahnhof.
I don't think we'll ever make
it, Arth. How many we got to
go?"
"Lost track," Arth said. "You can
come home with me."
We drank to that and the fog rolled
in again.
When the fog rolled out, it was
daylight. Bright, glaring, awful daylight.
I was sprawled, complete with
clothes, on one of twin beds. On the
other bed, also completely clothed,
was Arth.
That sun was too much. I stumbled
up from the bed, staggered to
the window and fumbled around for
a blind or curtain. There was none.
Behind me a voice said in horror,
"Who ... how ... oh,
Wodo
,
where'd you come from?"
I got a quick impression, looking
out the window, that the Germans
were certainly the most modern, futuristic
people in the world. But I
couldn't stand the light. "Where's
the shade," I moaned.
Arth did something and the window
went opaque.
"That's quite a gadget," I groaned.
"If I didn't feel so lousy, I'd
appreciate it."
Arth was sitting on the edge of
the bed holding his bald head in his
hands. "I remember now," he sorrowed.
"You didn't have a hotel.
What a stupidity. I'll be phased.
Phased all the way down."
"You haven't got a handful of
aspirin, have you?" I asked him.
"Just a minute," Arth said, staggering
erect and heading for what
undoubtedly was a bathroom. "Stay
where you are. Don't move. Don't
touch anything."
"All right," I told him plaintively.
"I'm clean. I won't mess up the
place. All I've got is a hangover, not
lice."
Arth was gone. He came back in
two or three minutes, box of pills in
hand. "Here, take one of these."
I took the pill, followed it with a
glass of water.
And went out like a light.
Arth was shaking my arm. "Want
another
mass
?"
The band was blaring, and five
thousand half-swacked voices were
roaring accompaniment.
In Muenchen steht ein Hofbräuhaus!
Eins, Zwei, G'sufa!
At the
G'sufa
everybody upped
with their king-size mugs and drank
each other's health.
My head was killing me. "This is
where I came in, or something," I
groaned.
Arth said, "That was last night."
He looked at me over the rim of his
beer mug.
Something, somewhere, was
wrong. But I didn't care. I finished
my
mass
and then remembered. "I've
got to get my bag. Oh, my head.
Where did we spend last night?"
Arth said, and his voice sounded
cautious, "At my hotel, don't you remember?"
"Not very well," I admitted. "I
feel lousy. I must have dimmed out.
I've got to go to the Bahnhof and
get my luggage."
Arth didn't put up an argument
on that. We said good-by and I could
feel him watching after me as I pushed
through the tables on the way
out.
At the Bahnhof they could do me
no good. There were no hotel rooms
available in Munich. The head was
getting worse by the minute. The
fact that they'd somehow managed
to lose my bag didn't help. I worked
on that project for at least a couple
of hours. Not only wasn't the bag
at the luggage checking station, but
the attendant there evidently couldn't
make heads nor tails of the check
receipt. He didn't speak English and
my high school German was inadequate,
especially accompanied by a
blockbusting hangover.
I didn't get anywhere tearing my
hair and complaining from one end
of the Bahnhof to the other. I drew
a blank on the bag.
And the head was getting worse
by the minute. I was bleeding to
death through the eyes and instead
of butterflies I had bats in my stomach.
Believe me,
nobody
should drink
a gallon or more of Marzenbräu.
I decided the hell with it. I took
a cab to the airport, presented my return
ticket, told them I wanted to
leave on the first obtainable plane to
New York. I'd spent two days at the
Oktoberfest
, and I'd had it.
I got more guff there. Something
was wrong with the ticket, wrong
date or some such. But they fixed
that up. I never was clear on what
was fouled up, some clerk's error,
evidently.
The trip back was as uninteresting
as the one over. As the hangover began
to wear off—a little—I was almost
sorry I hadn't been able to stay.
If I'd only been able to get a room I
would
have stayed, I told myself.
From Idlewild, I came directly to
the office rather than going to my
apartment. I figured I might as well
check in with Betty.
I opened the door and there I
found Mr. Oyster sitting in the chair
he had been occupying four—or was
it five—days before when I'd left.
I'd lost track of the time.
I said to him, "Glad you're here,
sir. I can report. Ah, what was it
you came for? Impatient to hear if
I'd had any results?" My mind was
spinning like a whirling dervish in
a revolving door. I'd spent a wad of
his money and had nothing I could
think of to show for it; nothing but
the last stages of a grand-daddy
hangover.
"Came for?" Mr. Oyster snorted.
"I'm merely waiting for your girl to
make out my receipt. I thought you
had already left."
"You'll miss your plane," Betty
said.
There was suddenly a double dip
of ice cream in my stomach. I walked
over to my desk and looked down at
the calendar.
Mr. Oyster was saying something
to the effect that if I didn't leave today,
it would have to be tomorrow,
that he hadn't ponied up that thousand
dollars advance for anything
less than immediate service. Stuffing
his receipt in his wallet, he fussed
his way out the door.
I said to Betty hopefully, "I suppose
you haven't changed this calendar
since I left."
Betty said, "What's the matter
with you? You look funny. How did
your clothes get so mussed? You tore
the top sheet off that calendar yourself,
not half an hour ago, just before
this marble-missing client came
in." She added, irrelevantly, "Time
travelers yet."
I tried just once more. "Uh, when
did you first see this Mr. Oyster?"
"Never saw him before in my
life," she said. "Not until he came
in this morning."
"This morning," I said weakly.
While Betty stared at me as though
it was
me
that needed candling by a
head shrinker preparatory to being
sent off to a pressure cooker, I fished
in my pocket for my wallet, counted
the contents and winced at the
pathetic remains of the thousand.
I said pleadingly, "Betty, listen,
how long ago did I go out that door—on
the way to the airport?"
"You've been acting sick all morning.
You went out that door about
ten minutes ago, were gone about
three minutes, and then came back."
"See here," Mr. Oyster said (interrupting
Simon's story), "did you
say this was supposed to be amusing,
young man? I don't find it so. In
fact, I believe I am being ridiculed."
Simon shrugged, put one hand to
his forehead and said, "That's only
the first chapter. There are two
more."
"I'm not interested in more," Mr.
Oyster said. "I suppose your point
was to show me how ridiculous the
whole idea actually is. Very well,
you've done it. Confound it. However,
I suppose your time, even when
spent in this manner, has some value.
Here is fifty dollars. And good day,
sir!"
He slammed the door after him
as he left.
Simon winced at the noise, took
the aspirin bottle from its drawer,
took two, washed them down with
water from the desk carafe.
Betty looked at him admiringly.
Came to her feet, crossed over and
took up the fifty dollars. "Week's
wages," she said. "I suppose that's
one way of taking care of a crackpot.
But I'm surprised you didn't
take his money and enjoy that vacation
you've been yearning about."
"I did," Simon groaned. "Three
times."
Betty stared at him. "You mean—"
Simon nodded, miserably.
She said, "But
Simon
. Fifty thousand
dollars bonus. If that story was
true, you should have gone back
again to Munich. If there was one
time traveler, there might have
been—"
"I keep telling you," Simon said
bitterly, "I went back there three
times. There were hundreds of them.
Probably thousands." He took a deep
breath. "Listen, we're just going to
have to forget about it. They're not
going to stand for the space-time
continuum track being altered. If
something comes up that looks like
it might result in the track being
changed, they set you right back at
the beginning and let things start—for
you—all over again. They just
can't allow anything to come back
from the future and change the
past."
"You mean," Betty was suddenly
furious at him, "you've given up!
Why this is the biggest thing— Why
the fifty thousand dollars is nothing.
The future! Just think!"
Simon said wearily, "There's just
one thing you can bring back with
you from the future, a hangover compounded
of a gallon or so of Marzenbräu.
What's more you can pile
one on top of the other, and another
on top of that!"
He shuddered. "If you think I'm
going to take another crack at this
merry-go-round and pile a fourth
hangover on the three I'm already
nursing, all at once, you can think
again."
THE END
Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from
Astounding Science Fiction
June
1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and
typographical errors have been corrected without note. | [
"He knows his headache is about to get worse.",
"The client he is expecting is about to show up.",
"He is used to complaints about Betty's salary.",
"He is expecting the usual argument with Betty about her job."
] | 1 |
23942_IGIFD97I_7 | Why does Simon look for aspirin as soon as he gets to his office? | UNBORN
TOMORROW
BY MACK REYNOLDS
Unfortunately
, there was only
one thing he could bring back
from the wonderful future ...
and though he didn't want to
... nevertheless he did....
Illustrated by Freas
Betty
looked up from
her magazine. She said
mildly, "You're late."
"Don't yell at me, I
feel awful," Simon told
her. He sat down at his desk, passed
his tongue over his teeth in distaste,
groaned, fumbled in a drawer for the
aspirin bottle.
He looked over at Betty and said,
almost as though reciting, "What I
need is a vacation."
"What," Betty said, "are you going
to use for money?"
"Providence," Simon told her
whilst fiddling with the aspirin bottle,
"will provide."
"Hm-m-m. But before providing
vacations it'd be nice if Providence
turned up a missing jewel deal, say.
Something where you could deduce
that actually the ruby ring had gone
down the drain and was caught in the
elbow. Something that would net
about fifty dollars."
Simon said, mournful of tone,
"Fifty dollars? Why not make it five
hundred?"
"I'm not selfish," Betty said. "All
I want is enough to pay me this
week's salary."
"Money," Simon said. "When you
took this job you said it was the romance
that appealed to you."
"Hm-m-m. I didn't know most
sleuthing amounted to snooping
around department stores to check on
the clerks knocking down."
Simon said, enigmatically, "Now
it comes."
There was a knock.
Betty bounced up with Olympic
agility and had the door swinging
wide before the knocking was quite
completed.
He was old, little and had bug
eyes behind pince-nez glasses. His
suit was cut in the style of yesteryear
but when a suit costs two or
three hundred dollars you still retain
caste whatever the styling.
Simon said unenthusiastically,
"Good morning, Mr. Oyster." He indicated
the client's chair. "Sit down,
sir."
The client fussed himself with
Betty's assistance into the seat, bug-eyed
Simon, said finally, "You know
my name, that's pretty good. Never
saw you before in my life. Stop fussing
with me, young lady. Your ad
in the phone book says you'll investigate
anything."
"Anything," Simon said. "Only
one exception."
"Excellent. Do you believe in time
travel?"
Simon said nothing. Across the
room, where she had resumed her
seat, Betty cleared her throat. When
Simon continued to say nothing she
ventured, "Time travel is impossible."
"Why?"
"Why?"
"Yes, why?"
Betty looked to her boss for assistance.
None was forthcoming. There
ought to be some very quick, positive,
definite answer. She said, "Well,
for one thing, paradox. Suppose you
had a time machine and traveled back
a hundred years or so and killed your
own great-grandfather. Then how
could you ever be born?"
"Confound it if I know," the little
fellow growled. "How?"
Simon said, "Let's get to the point,
what you wanted to see me about."
"I want to hire you to hunt me up
some time travelers," the old boy
said.
Betty was too far in now to maintain
her proper role of silent secretary.
"Time travelers," she said, not
very intelligently.
The potential client sat more erect,
obviously with intent to hold the
floor for a time. He removed the
pince-nez glasses and pointed them
at Betty. He said, "Have you read
much science fiction, Miss?"
"Some," Betty admitted.
"Then you'll realize that there are
a dozen explanations of the paradoxes
of time travel. Every writer in
the field worth his salt has explained
them away. But to get on. It's my
contention that within a century or
so man will have solved the problems
of immortality and eternal youth, and
it's also my suspicion that he will
eventually be able to travel in time.
So convinced am I of these possibilities
that I am willing to gamble a
portion of my fortune to investigate
the presence in our era of such time
travelers."
Simon seemed incapable of carrying
the ball this morning, so Betty
said, "But ... Mr. Oyster, if the
future has developed time travel why
don't we ever meet such travelers?"
Simon put in a word. "The usual
explanation, Betty, is that they can't
afford to allow the space-time continuum
track to be altered. If, say, a
time traveler returned to a period of
twenty-five years ago and shot Hitler,
then all subsequent history would be
changed. In that case, the time traveler
himself might never be born. They
have to tread mighty carefully."
Mr. Oyster was pleased. "I didn't
expect you to be so well informed
on the subject, young man."
Simon shrugged and fumbled
again with the aspirin bottle.
Mr. Oyster went on. "I've been
considering the matter for some time
and—"
Simon held up a hand. "There's
no use prolonging this. As I understand
it, you're an elderly gentleman
with a considerable fortune and you
realize that thus far nobody has succeeded
in taking it with him."
Mr. Oyster returned his glasses to
their perch, bug-eyed Simon, but then
nodded.
Simon said, "You want to hire me
to find a time traveler and in some
manner or other—any manner will
do—exhort from him the secret of
eternal life and youth, which you figure
the future will have discovered.
You're willing to pony up a part of
this fortune of yours, if I can deliver
a bona fide time traveler."
"Right!"
Betty had been looking from one
to the other. Now she said, plaintively,
"But where are you going to find
one of these characters—especially if
they're interested in keeping hid?"
The old boy was the center again.
"I told you I'd been considering it
for some time. The
Oktoberfest
,
that's where they'd be!" He seemed
elated.
Betty and Simon waited.
"The
Oktoberfest
," he repeated.
"The greatest festival the world has
ever seen, the carnival,
feria
,
fiesta
to beat them all. Every year it's held
in Munich. Makes the New Orleans
Mardi gras look like a quilting
party." He began to swing into the
spirit of his description. "It originally
started in celebration of the wedding
of some local prince a century
and a half ago and the Bavarians had
such a bang-up time they've been
holding it every year since. The
Munich breweries do up a special
beer,
Marzenbräu
they call it, and
each brewery opens a tremendous tent
on the fair grounds which will hold
five thousand customers apiece. Millions
of liters of beer are put away,
hundreds of thousands of barbecued
chickens, a small herd of oxen are
roasted whole over spits, millions of
pair of
weisswurst
, a very special
sausage, millions upon millions of
pretzels—"
"All right," Simon said. "We'll accept
it. The
Oktoberfest
is one whale
of a wingding."
"Well," the old boy pursued, into
his subject now, "that's where they'd
be, places like the
Oktoberfest
. For
one thing, a time traveler wouldn't
be conspicuous. At a festival like this
somebody with a strange accent, or
who didn't know exactly how to wear
his clothes correctly, or was off the
ordinary in any of a dozen other
ways, wouldn't be noticed. You could
be a four-armed space traveler from
Mars, and you still wouldn't be conspicuous
at the
Oktoberfest
. People
would figure they had D.T.'s."
"But why would a time traveler
want to go to a—" Betty began.
"Why not! What better opportunity
to study a people than when they
are in their cups? If
you
could go
back a few thousand years, the things
you would wish to see would be a
Roman Triumph, perhaps the Rites
of Dionysus, or one of Alexander's
orgies. You wouldn't want to wander
up and down the streets of, say,
Athens while nothing was going on,
particularly when you might be revealed
as a suspicious character not
being able to speak the language, not
knowing how to wear the clothes and
not familiar with the city's layout."
He took a deep breath. "No ma'am,
you'd have to stick to some great
event, both for the sake of actual
interest and for protection against being
unmasked."
The old boy wound it up. "Well,
that's the story. What are your rates?
The
Oktoberfest
starts on Friday and
continues for sixteen days. You can
take the plane to Munich, spend a
week there and—"
Simon was shaking his head. "Not
interested."
As soon as Betty had got her jaw
back into place, she glared unbelievingly
at him.
Mr. Oyster was taken aback himself.
"See here, young man, I realize
this isn't an ordinary assignment,
however, as I said, I am willing to
risk a considerable portion of my
fortune—"
"Sorry," Simon said. "Can't be
done."
"A hundred dollars a day plus expenses,"
Mr. Oyster said quietly. "I
like the fact that you already seem
to have some interest and knowledge
of the matter. I liked the way you
knew my name when I walked in the
door; my picture doesn't appear often
in the papers."
"No go," Simon said, a sad quality
in his voice.
"A fifty thousand dollar bonus if
you bring me a time traveler."
"Out of the question," Simon
said.
"But
why
?" Betty wailed.
"Just for laughs," Simon told the
two of them sourly, "suppose I tell
you a funny story. It goes like
this:"
I got a thousand dollars from Mr.
Oyster (Simon began) in the way
of an advance, and leaving him with
Betty who was making out a receipt,
I hustled back to the apartment and
packed a bag. Hell, I'd wanted a vacation
anyway, this was a natural. On
the way to Idlewild I stopped off at
the Germany Information Offices for
some tourist literature.
It takes roughly three and a half
hours to get to Gander from Idlewild.
I spent the time planning the
fun I was going to have.
It takes roughly seven and a half
hours from Gander to Shannon and
I spent that time dreaming up material
I could put into my reports to
Mr. Oyster. I was going to have to
give him some kind of report for his
money. Time travel yet! What a
laugh!
Between Shannon and Munich a
faint suspicion began to simmer in
my mind. These statistics I read on
the
Oktoberfest
in the Munich tourist
pamphlets. Five million people
attended annually.
Where did five million people
come from to attend an overgrown
festival in comparatively remote
Southern Germany? The tourist season
is over before September 21st,
first day of the gigantic beer bust.
Nor could the Germans account for
any such number. Munich itself has
a population of less than a million,
counting children.
And those millions of gallons of
beer, the hundreds of thousands of
chickens, the herds of oxen. Who
ponied up all the money for such expenditures?
How could the average
German, with his twenty-five dollars
a week salary?
In Munich there was no hotel
space available. I went to the Bahnhof
where they have a hotel service
and applied. They put my name
down, pocketed the husky bribe,
showed me where I could check my
bag, told me they'd do what they
could, and to report back in a few
hours.
I had another suspicious twinge.
If five million people attended this
beer bout, how were they accommodated?
The
Theresienwiese
, the fair
ground, was only a few blocks
away. I was stiff from the plane ride
so I walked.
There are seven major brewers in
the Munich area, each of them represented
by one of the circuslike tents
that Mr. Oyster mentioned. Each tent
contained benches and tables for
about five thousand persons and from
six to ten thousands pack themselves
in, competing for room. In the center
is a tremendous bandstand, the
musicians all
lederhosen
clad, the
music as Bavarian as any to be found
in a Bavarian beer hall. Hundreds of
peasant garbed
fräuleins
darted about
the tables with quart sized earthenware
mugs, platters of chicken, sausage,
kraut and pretzels.
I found a place finally at a table
which had space for twenty-odd beer
bibbers. Odd is right. As weird an
assortment of Germans and foreign
tourists as could have been dreamed
up, ranging from a seventy- or
eighty-year-old couple in Bavarian
costume, to the bald-headed drunk
across the table from me.
A desperate waitress bearing six
mugs of beer in each hand scurried
past. They call them
masses
, by the
way, not mugs. The bald-headed
character and I both held up a finger
and she slid two of the
masses
over
to us and then hustled on.
"Down the hatch," the other said,
holding up his
mass
in toast.
"To the ladies," I told him. Before
sipping, I said, "You know, the
tourist pamphlets say this stuff is
eighteen per cent. That's nonsense.
No beer is that strong." I took a long
pull.
He looked at me, waiting.
I came up. "Mistaken," I admitted.
A
mass
or two apiece later he looked
carefully at the name engraved on
his earthenware mug. "Löwenbräu,"
he said. He took a small notebook
from his pocket and a pencil, noted
down the word and returned the
things.
"That's a queer looking pencil you
have there," I told him. "German?"
"Venusian," he said. "Oops, sorry.
Shouldn't have said that."
I had never heard of the brand so
I skipped it.
"Next is the Hofbräu," he said.
"Next what?" Baldy's conversation
didn't seem to hang together very
well.
"My pilgrimage," he told me. "All
my life I've been wanting to go back
to an
Oktoberfest
and sample every
one of the seven brands of the best
beer the world has ever known. I'm
only as far as Löwenbräu. I'm afraid
I'll never make it."
I finished my
mass
. "I'll help
you," I told him. "Very noble endeavor.
Name is Simon."
"Arth," he said. "How could you
help?"
"I'm still fresh—comparatively.
I'll navigate you around. There are
seven beer tents. How many have you
got through, so far?"
"Two, counting this one," Arth
said.
I looked at him. "It's going to be
a chore," I said. "You've already got
a nice edge on."
Outside, as we made our way to
the next tent, the fair looked like
every big State-Fair ever seen, except
it was bigger. Games, souvenir
stands, sausage stands, rides, side
shows, and people, people, people.
The Hofbräu tent was as overflowing
as the last but we managed to
find two seats.
The band was blaring, and five
thousand half-swacked voices were
roaring accompaniment.
In Muenchen steht ein Hofbräuhaus!
Eins, Zwei, G'sufa!
At the
G'sufa
everybody upped
with the mugs and drank each other's
health.
"This is what I call a real beer
bust," I said approvingly.
Arth was waving to a waitress. As
in the Löwenbräu tent, a full quart
was the smallest amount obtainable.
A beer later I said, "I don't know
if you'll make it or not, Arth."
"Make what?"
"All seven tents."
"Oh."
A waitress was on her way by,
mugs foaming over their rims. I gestured
to her for refills.
"Where are you from, Arth?" I
asked him, in the way of making
conversation.
"2183."
"2183 where?"
He looked at me, closing one eye
to focus better. "Oh," he said. "Well,
2183 South Street, ah, New Albuquerque."
"New Albuquerque? Where's
that?"
Arth thought about it. Took another
long pull at the beer. "Right
across the way from old Albuquerque,"
he said finally. "Maybe we
ought to be getting on to the
Pschorrbräu tent."
"Maybe we ought to eat something
first," I said. "I'm beginning to feel
this. We could get some of that barbecued
ox."
Arth closed his eyes in pain.
"Vegetarian," he said. "Couldn't possibly
eat meat. Barbarous. Ugh."
"Well, we need some nourishment,"
I said.
"There's supposed to be considerable
nourishment in beer."
That made sense. I yelled, "
Fräulein!
Zwei neu bier!
"
Somewhere along in here the fog
rolled in. When it rolled out again,
I found myself closing one eye the
better to read the lettering on my
earthenware mug. It read Augustinerbräu.
Somehow we'd evidently
navigated from one tent to another.
Arth was saying, "Where's your
hotel?"
That seemed like a good question.
I thought about it for a while. Finally
I said, "Haven't got one. Town's
jam packed. Left my bag at the Bahnhof.
I don't think we'll ever make
it, Arth. How many we got to
go?"
"Lost track," Arth said. "You can
come home with me."
We drank to that and the fog rolled
in again.
When the fog rolled out, it was
daylight. Bright, glaring, awful daylight.
I was sprawled, complete with
clothes, on one of twin beds. On the
other bed, also completely clothed,
was Arth.
That sun was too much. I stumbled
up from the bed, staggered to
the window and fumbled around for
a blind or curtain. There was none.
Behind me a voice said in horror,
"Who ... how ... oh,
Wodo
,
where'd you come from?"
I got a quick impression, looking
out the window, that the Germans
were certainly the most modern, futuristic
people in the world. But I
couldn't stand the light. "Where's
the shade," I moaned.
Arth did something and the window
went opaque.
"That's quite a gadget," I groaned.
"If I didn't feel so lousy, I'd
appreciate it."
Arth was sitting on the edge of
the bed holding his bald head in his
hands. "I remember now," he sorrowed.
"You didn't have a hotel.
What a stupidity. I'll be phased.
Phased all the way down."
"You haven't got a handful of
aspirin, have you?" I asked him.
"Just a minute," Arth said, staggering
erect and heading for what
undoubtedly was a bathroom. "Stay
where you are. Don't move. Don't
touch anything."
"All right," I told him plaintively.
"I'm clean. I won't mess up the
place. All I've got is a hangover, not
lice."
Arth was gone. He came back in
two or three minutes, box of pills in
hand. "Here, take one of these."
I took the pill, followed it with a
glass of water.
And went out like a light.
Arth was shaking my arm. "Want
another
mass
?"
The band was blaring, and five
thousand half-swacked voices were
roaring accompaniment.
In Muenchen steht ein Hofbräuhaus!
Eins, Zwei, G'sufa!
At the
G'sufa
everybody upped
with their king-size mugs and drank
each other's health.
My head was killing me. "This is
where I came in, or something," I
groaned.
Arth said, "That was last night."
He looked at me over the rim of his
beer mug.
Something, somewhere, was
wrong. But I didn't care. I finished
my
mass
and then remembered. "I've
got to get my bag. Oh, my head.
Where did we spend last night?"
Arth said, and his voice sounded
cautious, "At my hotel, don't you remember?"
"Not very well," I admitted. "I
feel lousy. I must have dimmed out.
I've got to go to the Bahnhof and
get my luggage."
Arth didn't put up an argument
on that. We said good-by and I could
feel him watching after me as I pushed
through the tables on the way
out.
At the Bahnhof they could do me
no good. There were no hotel rooms
available in Munich. The head was
getting worse by the minute. The
fact that they'd somehow managed
to lose my bag didn't help. I worked
on that project for at least a couple
of hours. Not only wasn't the bag
at the luggage checking station, but
the attendant there evidently couldn't
make heads nor tails of the check
receipt. He didn't speak English and
my high school German was inadequate,
especially accompanied by a
blockbusting hangover.
I didn't get anywhere tearing my
hair and complaining from one end
of the Bahnhof to the other. I drew
a blank on the bag.
And the head was getting worse
by the minute. I was bleeding to
death through the eyes and instead
of butterflies I had bats in my stomach.
Believe me,
nobody
should drink
a gallon or more of Marzenbräu.
I decided the hell with it. I took
a cab to the airport, presented my return
ticket, told them I wanted to
leave on the first obtainable plane to
New York. I'd spent two days at the
Oktoberfest
, and I'd had it.
I got more guff there. Something
was wrong with the ticket, wrong
date or some such. But they fixed
that up. I never was clear on what
was fouled up, some clerk's error,
evidently.
The trip back was as uninteresting
as the one over. As the hangover began
to wear off—a little—I was almost
sorry I hadn't been able to stay.
If I'd only been able to get a room I
would
have stayed, I told myself.
From Idlewild, I came directly to
the office rather than going to my
apartment. I figured I might as well
check in with Betty.
I opened the door and there I
found Mr. Oyster sitting in the chair
he had been occupying four—or was
it five—days before when I'd left.
I'd lost track of the time.
I said to him, "Glad you're here,
sir. I can report. Ah, what was it
you came for? Impatient to hear if
I'd had any results?" My mind was
spinning like a whirling dervish in
a revolving door. I'd spent a wad of
his money and had nothing I could
think of to show for it; nothing but
the last stages of a grand-daddy
hangover.
"Came for?" Mr. Oyster snorted.
"I'm merely waiting for your girl to
make out my receipt. I thought you
had already left."
"You'll miss your plane," Betty
said.
There was suddenly a double dip
of ice cream in my stomach. I walked
over to my desk and looked down at
the calendar.
Mr. Oyster was saying something
to the effect that if I didn't leave today,
it would have to be tomorrow,
that he hadn't ponied up that thousand
dollars advance for anything
less than immediate service. Stuffing
his receipt in his wallet, he fussed
his way out the door.
I said to Betty hopefully, "I suppose
you haven't changed this calendar
since I left."
Betty said, "What's the matter
with you? You look funny. How did
your clothes get so mussed? You tore
the top sheet off that calendar yourself,
not half an hour ago, just before
this marble-missing client came
in." She added, irrelevantly, "Time
travelers yet."
I tried just once more. "Uh, when
did you first see this Mr. Oyster?"
"Never saw him before in my
life," she said. "Not until he came
in this morning."
"This morning," I said weakly.
While Betty stared at me as though
it was
me
that needed candling by a
head shrinker preparatory to being
sent off to a pressure cooker, I fished
in my pocket for my wallet, counted
the contents and winced at the
pathetic remains of the thousand.
I said pleadingly, "Betty, listen,
how long ago did I go out that door—on
the way to the airport?"
"You've been acting sick all morning.
You went out that door about
ten minutes ago, were gone about
three minutes, and then came back."
"See here," Mr. Oyster said (interrupting
Simon's story), "did you
say this was supposed to be amusing,
young man? I don't find it so. In
fact, I believe I am being ridiculed."
Simon shrugged, put one hand to
his forehead and said, "That's only
the first chapter. There are two
more."
"I'm not interested in more," Mr.
Oyster said. "I suppose your point
was to show me how ridiculous the
whole idea actually is. Very well,
you've done it. Confound it. However,
I suppose your time, even when
spent in this manner, has some value.
Here is fifty dollars. And good day,
sir!"
He slammed the door after him
as he left.
Simon winced at the noise, took
the aspirin bottle from its drawer,
took two, washed them down with
water from the desk carafe.
Betty looked at him admiringly.
Came to her feet, crossed over and
took up the fifty dollars. "Week's
wages," she said. "I suppose that's
one way of taking care of a crackpot.
But I'm surprised you didn't
take his money and enjoy that vacation
you've been yearning about."
"I did," Simon groaned. "Three
times."
Betty stared at him. "You mean—"
Simon nodded, miserably.
She said, "But
Simon
. Fifty thousand
dollars bonus. If that story was
true, you should have gone back
again to Munich. If there was one
time traveler, there might have
been—"
"I keep telling you," Simon said
bitterly, "I went back there three
times. There were hundreds of them.
Probably thousands." He took a deep
breath. "Listen, we're just going to
have to forget about it. They're not
going to stand for the space-time
continuum track being altered. If
something comes up that looks like
it might result in the track being
changed, they set you right back at
the beginning and let things start—for
you—all over again. They just
can't allow anything to come back
from the future and change the
past."
"You mean," Betty was suddenly
furious at him, "you've given up!
Why this is the biggest thing— Why
the fifty thousand dollars is nothing.
The future! Just think!"
Simon said wearily, "There's just
one thing you can bring back with
you from the future, a hangover compounded
of a gallon or so of Marzenbräu.
What's more you can pile
one on top of the other, and another
on top of that!"
He shuddered. "If you think I'm
going to take another crack at this
merry-go-round and pile a fourth
hangover on the three I'm already
nursing, all at once, you can think
again."
THE END
Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from
Astounding Science Fiction
June
1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and
typographical errors have been corrected without note. | [
"He is experiencing caffeine withdrawal and did not have time to stop for coffee.",
"We never learn the cause of the headache, we only know that it is severe.",
"He has a hangover from attending a festival.",
"He was out drinking with some friends the night before, and has a hangover."
] | 2 |
23942_IGIFD97I_8 | What would've happened if Simon had said yes to the job at the end of the story? | UNBORN
TOMORROW
BY MACK REYNOLDS
Unfortunately
, there was only
one thing he could bring back
from the wonderful future ...
and though he didn't want to
... nevertheless he did....
Illustrated by Freas
Betty
looked up from
her magazine. She said
mildly, "You're late."
"Don't yell at me, I
feel awful," Simon told
her. He sat down at his desk, passed
his tongue over his teeth in distaste,
groaned, fumbled in a drawer for the
aspirin bottle.
He looked over at Betty and said,
almost as though reciting, "What I
need is a vacation."
"What," Betty said, "are you going
to use for money?"
"Providence," Simon told her
whilst fiddling with the aspirin bottle,
"will provide."
"Hm-m-m. But before providing
vacations it'd be nice if Providence
turned up a missing jewel deal, say.
Something where you could deduce
that actually the ruby ring had gone
down the drain and was caught in the
elbow. Something that would net
about fifty dollars."
Simon said, mournful of tone,
"Fifty dollars? Why not make it five
hundred?"
"I'm not selfish," Betty said. "All
I want is enough to pay me this
week's salary."
"Money," Simon said. "When you
took this job you said it was the romance
that appealed to you."
"Hm-m-m. I didn't know most
sleuthing amounted to snooping
around department stores to check on
the clerks knocking down."
Simon said, enigmatically, "Now
it comes."
There was a knock.
Betty bounced up with Olympic
agility and had the door swinging
wide before the knocking was quite
completed.
He was old, little and had bug
eyes behind pince-nez glasses. His
suit was cut in the style of yesteryear
but when a suit costs two or
three hundred dollars you still retain
caste whatever the styling.
Simon said unenthusiastically,
"Good morning, Mr. Oyster." He indicated
the client's chair. "Sit down,
sir."
The client fussed himself with
Betty's assistance into the seat, bug-eyed
Simon, said finally, "You know
my name, that's pretty good. Never
saw you before in my life. Stop fussing
with me, young lady. Your ad
in the phone book says you'll investigate
anything."
"Anything," Simon said. "Only
one exception."
"Excellent. Do you believe in time
travel?"
Simon said nothing. Across the
room, where she had resumed her
seat, Betty cleared her throat. When
Simon continued to say nothing she
ventured, "Time travel is impossible."
"Why?"
"Why?"
"Yes, why?"
Betty looked to her boss for assistance.
None was forthcoming. There
ought to be some very quick, positive,
definite answer. She said, "Well,
for one thing, paradox. Suppose you
had a time machine and traveled back
a hundred years or so and killed your
own great-grandfather. Then how
could you ever be born?"
"Confound it if I know," the little
fellow growled. "How?"
Simon said, "Let's get to the point,
what you wanted to see me about."
"I want to hire you to hunt me up
some time travelers," the old boy
said.
Betty was too far in now to maintain
her proper role of silent secretary.
"Time travelers," she said, not
very intelligently.
The potential client sat more erect,
obviously with intent to hold the
floor for a time. He removed the
pince-nez glasses and pointed them
at Betty. He said, "Have you read
much science fiction, Miss?"
"Some," Betty admitted.
"Then you'll realize that there are
a dozen explanations of the paradoxes
of time travel. Every writer in
the field worth his salt has explained
them away. But to get on. It's my
contention that within a century or
so man will have solved the problems
of immortality and eternal youth, and
it's also my suspicion that he will
eventually be able to travel in time.
So convinced am I of these possibilities
that I am willing to gamble a
portion of my fortune to investigate
the presence in our era of such time
travelers."
Simon seemed incapable of carrying
the ball this morning, so Betty
said, "But ... Mr. Oyster, if the
future has developed time travel why
don't we ever meet such travelers?"
Simon put in a word. "The usual
explanation, Betty, is that they can't
afford to allow the space-time continuum
track to be altered. If, say, a
time traveler returned to a period of
twenty-five years ago and shot Hitler,
then all subsequent history would be
changed. In that case, the time traveler
himself might never be born. They
have to tread mighty carefully."
Mr. Oyster was pleased. "I didn't
expect you to be so well informed
on the subject, young man."
Simon shrugged and fumbled
again with the aspirin bottle.
Mr. Oyster went on. "I've been
considering the matter for some time
and—"
Simon held up a hand. "There's
no use prolonging this. As I understand
it, you're an elderly gentleman
with a considerable fortune and you
realize that thus far nobody has succeeded
in taking it with him."
Mr. Oyster returned his glasses to
their perch, bug-eyed Simon, but then
nodded.
Simon said, "You want to hire me
to find a time traveler and in some
manner or other—any manner will
do—exhort from him the secret of
eternal life and youth, which you figure
the future will have discovered.
You're willing to pony up a part of
this fortune of yours, if I can deliver
a bona fide time traveler."
"Right!"
Betty had been looking from one
to the other. Now she said, plaintively,
"But where are you going to find
one of these characters—especially if
they're interested in keeping hid?"
The old boy was the center again.
"I told you I'd been considering it
for some time. The
Oktoberfest
,
that's where they'd be!" He seemed
elated.
Betty and Simon waited.
"The
Oktoberfest
," he repeated.
"The greatest festival the world has
ever seen, the carnival,
feria
,
fiesta
to beat them all. Every year it's held
in Munich. Makes the New Orleans
Mardi gras look like a quilting
party." He began to swing into the
spirit of his description. "It originally
started in celebration of the wedding
of some local prince a century
and a half ago and the Bavarians had
such a bang-up time they've been
holding it every year since. The
Munich breweries do up a special
beer,
Marzenbräu
they call it, and
each brewery opens a tremendous tent
on the fair grounds which will hold
five thousand customers apiece. Millions
of liters of beer are put away,
hundreds of thousands of barbecued
chickens, a small herd of oxen are
roasted whole over spits, millions of
pair of
weisswurst
, a very special
sausage, millions upon millions of
pretzels—"
"All right," Simon said. "We'll accept
it. The
Oktoberfest
is one whale
of a wingding."
"Well," the old boy pursued, into
his subject now, "that's where they'd
be, places like the
Oktoberfest
. For
one thing, a time traveler wouldn't
be conspicuous. At a festival like this
somebody with a strange accent, or
who didn't know exactly how to wear
his clothes correctly, or was off the
ordinary in any of a dozen other
ways, wouldn't be noticed. You could
be a four-armed space traveler from
Mars, and you still wouldn't be conspicuous
at the
Oktoberfest
. People
would figure they had D.T.'s."
"But why would a time traveler
want to go to a—" Betty began.
"Why not! What better opportunity
to study a people than when they
are in their cups? If
you
could go
back a few thousand years, the things
you would wish to see would be a
Roman Triumph, perhaps the Rites
of Dionysus, or one of Alexander's
orgies. You wouldn't want to wander
up and down the streets of, say,
Athens while nothing was going on,
particularly when you might be revealed
as a suspicious character not
being able to speak the language, not
knowing how to wear the clothes and
not familiar with the city's layout."
He took a deep breath. "No ma'am,
you'd have to stick to some great
event, both for the sake of actual
interest and for protection against being
unmasked."
The old boy wound it up. "Well,
that's the story. What are your rates?
The
Oktoberfest
starts on Friday and
continues for sixteen days. You can
take the plane to Munich, spend a
week there and—"
Simon was shaking his head. "Not
interested."
As soon as Betty had got her jaw
back into place, she glared unbelievingly
at him.
Mr. Oyster was taken aback himself.
"See here, young man, I realize
this isn't an ordinary assignment,
however, as I said, I am willing to
risk a considerable portion of my
fortune—"
"Sorry," Simon said. "Can't be
done."
"A hundred dollars a day plus expenses,"
Mr. Oyster said quietly. "I
like the fact that you already seem
to have some interest and knowledge
of the matter. I liked the way you
knew my name when I walked in the
door; my picture doesn't appear often
in the papers."
"No go," Simon said, a sad quality
in his voice.
"A fifty thousand dollar bonus if
you bring me a time traveler."
"Out of the question," Simon
said.
"But
why
?" Betty wailed.
"Just for laughs," Simon told the
two of them sourly, "suppose I tell
you a funny story. It goes like
this:"
I got a thousand dollars from Mr.
Oyster (Simon began) in the way
of an advance, and leaving him with
Betty who was making out a receipt,
I hustled back to the apartment and
packed a bag. Hell, I'd wanted a vacation
anyway, this was a natural. On
the way to Idlewild I stopped off at
the Germany Information Offices for
some tourist literature.
It takes roughly three and a half
hours to get to Gander from Idlewild.
I spent the time planning the
fun I was going to have.
It takes roughly seven and a half
hours from Gander to Shannon and
I spent that time dreaming up material
I could put into my reports to
Mr. Oyster. I was going to have to
give him some kind of report for his
money. Time travel yet! What a
laugh!
Between Shannon and Munich a
faint suspicion began to simmer in
my mind. These statistics I read on
the
Oktoberfest
in the Munich tourist
pamphlets. Five million people
attended annually.
Where did five million people
come from to attend an overgrown
festival in comparatively remote
Southern Germany? The tourist season
is over before September 21st,
first day of the gigantic beer bust.
Nor could the Germans account for
any such number. Munich itself has
a population of less than a million,
counting children.
And those millions of gallons of
beer, the hundreds of thousands of
chickens, the herds of oxen. Who
ponied up all the money for such expenditures?
How could the average
German, with his twenty-five dollars
a week salary?
In Munich there was no hotel
space available. I went to the Bahnhof
where they have a hotel service
and applied. They put my name
down, pocketed the husky bribe,
showed me where I could check my
bag, told me they'd do what they
could, and to report back in a few
hours.
I had another suspicious twinge.
If five million people attended this
beer bout, how were they accommodated?
The
Theresienwiese
, the fair
ground, was only a few blocks
away. I was stiff from the plane ride
so I walked.
There are seven major brewers in
the Munich area, each of them represented
by one of the circuslike tents
that Mr. Oyster mentioned. Each tent
contained benches and tables for
about five thousand persons and from
six to ten thousands pack themselves
in, competing for room. In the center
is a tremendous bandstand, the
musicians all
lederhosen
clad, the
music as Bavarian as any to be found
in a Bavarian beer hall. Hundreds of
peasant garbed
fräuleins
darted about
the tables with quart sized earthenware
mugs, platters of chicken, sausage,
kraut and pretzels.
I found a place finally at a table
which had space for twenty-odd beer
bibbers. Odd is right. As weird an
assortment of Germans and foreign
tourists as could have been dreamed
up, ranging from a seventy- or
eighty-year-old couple in Bavarian
costume, to the bald-headed drunk
across the table from me.
A desperate waitress bearing six
mugs of beer in each hand scurried
past. They call them
masses
, by the
way, not mugs. The bald-headed
character and I both held up a finger
and she slid two of the
masses
over
to us and then hustled on.
"Down the hatch," the other said,
holding up his
mass
in toast.
"To the ladies," I told him. Before
sipping, I said, "You know, the
tourist pamphlets say this stuff is
eighteen per cent. That's nonsense.
No beer is that strong." I took a long
pull.
He looked at me, waiting.
I came up. "Mistaken," I admitted.
A
mass
or two apiece later he looked
carefully at the name engraved on
his earthenware mug. "Löwenbräu,"
he said. He took a small notebook
from his pocket and a pencil, noted
down the word and returned the
things.
"That's a queer looking pencil you
have there," I told him. "German?"
"Venusian," he said. "Oops, sorry.
Shouldn't have said that."
I had never heard of the brand so
I skipped it.
"Next is the Hofbräu," he said.
"Next what?" Baldy's conversation
didn't seem to hang together very
well.
"My pilgrimage," he told me. "All
my life I've been wanting to go back
to an
Oktoberfest
and sample every
one of the seven brands of the best
beer the world has ever known. I'm
only as far as Löwenbräu. I'm afraid
I'll never make it."
I finished my
mass
. "I'll help
you," I told him. "Very noble endeavor.
Name is Simon."
"Arth," he said. "How could you
help?"
"I'm still fresh—comparatively.
I'll navigate you around. There are
seven beer tents. How many have you
got through, so far?"
"Two, counting this one," Arth
said.
I looked at him. "It's going to be
a chore," I said. "You've already got
a nice edge on."
Outside, as we made our way to
the next tent, the fair looked like
every big State-Fair ever seen, except
it was bigger. Games, souvenir
stands, sausage stands, rides, side
shows, and people, people, people.
The Hofbräu tent was as overflowing
as the last but we managed to
find two seats.
The band was blaring, and five
thousand half-swacked voices were
roaring accompaniment.
In Muenchen steht ein Hofbräuhaus!
Eins, Zwei, G'sufa!
At the
G'sufa
everybody upped
with the mugs and drank each other's
health.
"This is what I call a real beer
bust," I said approvingly.
Arth was waving to a waitress. As
in the Löwenbräu tent, a full quart
was the smallest amount obtainable.
A beer later I said, "I don't know
if you'll make it or not, Arth."
"Make what?"
"All seven tents."
"Oh."
A waitress was on her way by,
mugs foaming over their rims. I gestured
to her for refills.
"Where are you from, Arth?" I
asked him, in the way of making
conversation.
"2183."
"2183 where?"
He looked at me, closing one eye
to focus better. "Oh," he said. "Well,
2183 South Street, ah, New Albuquerque."
"New Albuquerque? Where's
that?"
Arth thought about it. Took another
long pull at the beer. "Right
across the way from old Albuquerque,"
he said finally. "Maybe we
ought to be getting on to the
Pschorrbräu tent."
"Maybe we ought to eat something
first," I said. "I'm beginning to feel
this. We could get some of that barbecued
ox."
Arth closed his eyes in pain.
"Vegetarian," he said. "Couldn't possibly
eat meat. Barbarous. Ugh."
"Well, we need some nourishment,"
I said.
"There's supposed to be considerable
nourishment in beer."
That made sense. I yelled, "
Fräulein!
Zwei neu bier!
"
Somewhere along in here the fog
rolled in. When it rolled out again,
I found myself closing one eye the
better to read the lettering on my
earthenware mug. It read Augustinerbräu.
Somehow we'd evidently
navigated from one tent to another.
Arth was saying, "Where's your
hotel?"
That seemed like a good question.
I thought about it for a while. Finally
I said, "Haven't got one. Town's
jam packed. Left my bag at the Bahnhof.
I don't think we'll ever make
it, Arth. How many we got to
go?"
"Lost track," Arth said. "You can
come home with me."
We drank to that and the fog rolled
in again.
When the fog rolled out, it was
daylight. Bright, glaring, awful daylight.
I was sprawled, complete with
clothes, on one of twin beds. On the
other bed, also completely clothed,
was Arth.
That sun was too much. I stumbled
up from the bed, staggered to
the window and fumbled around for
a blind or curtain. There was none.
Behind me a voice said in horror,
"Who ... how ... oh,
Wodo
,
where'd you come from?"
I got a quick impression, looking
out the window, that the Germans
were certainly the most modern, futuristic
people in the world. But I
couldn't stand the light. "Where's
the shade," I moaned.
Arth did something and the window
went opaque.
"That's quite a gadget," I groaned.
"If I didn't feel so lousy, I'd
appreciate it."
Arth was sitting on the edge of
the bed holding his bald head in his
hands. "I remember now," he sorrowed.
"You didn't have a hotel.
What a stupidity. I'll be phased.
Phased all the way down."
"You haven't got a handful of
aspirin, have you?" I asked him.
"Just a minute," Arth said, staggering
erect and heading for what
undoubtedly was a bathroom. "Stay
where you are. Don't move. Don't
touch anything."
"All right," I told him plaintively.
"I'm clean. I won't mess up the
place. All I've got is a hangover, not
lice."
Arth was gone. He came back in
two or three minutes, box of pills in
hand. "Here, take one of these."
I took the pill, followed it with a
glass of water.
And went out like a light.
Arth was shaking my arm. "Want
another
mass
?"
The band was blaring, and five
thousand half-swacked voices were
roaring accompaniment.
In Muenchen steht ein Hofbräuhaus!
Eins, Zwei, G'sufa!
At the
G'sufa
everybody upped
with their king-size mugs and drank
each other's health.
My head was killing me. "This is
where I came in, or something," I
groaned.
Arth said, "That was last night."
He looked at me over the rim of his
beer mug.
Something, somewhere, was
wrong. But I didn't care. I finished
my
mass
and then remembered. "I've
got to get my bag. Oh, my head.
Where did we spend last night?"
Arth said, and his voice sounded
cautious, "At my hotel, don't you remember?"
"Not very well," I admitted. "I
feel lousy. I must have dimmed out.
I've got to go to the Bahnhof and
get my luggage."
Arth didn't put up an argument
on that. We said good-by and I could
feel him watching after me as I pushed
through the tables on the way
out.
At the Bahnhof they could do me
no good. There were no hotel rooms
available in Munich. The head was
getting worse by the minute. The
fact that they'd somehow managed
to lose my bag didn't help. I worked
on that project for at least a couple
of hours. Not only wasn't the bag
at the luggage checking station, but
the attendant there evidently couldn't
make heads nor tails of the check
receipt. He didn't speak English and
my high school German was inadequate,
especially accompanied by a
blockbusting hangover.
I didn't get anywhere tearing my
hair and complaining from one end
of the Bahnhof to the other. I drew
a blank on the bag.
And the head was getting worse
by the minute. I was bleeding to
death through the eyes and instead
of butterflies I had bats in my stomach.
Believe me,
nobody
should drink
a gallon or more of Marzenbräu.
I decided the hell with it. I took
a cab to the airport, presented my return
ticket, told them I wanted to
leave on the first obtainable plane to
New York. I'd spent two days at the
Oktoberfest
, and I'd had it.
I got more guff there. Something
was wrong with the ticket, wrong
date or some such. But they fixed
that up. I never was clear on what
was fouled up, some clerk's error,
evidently.
The trip back was as uninteresting
as the one over. As the hangover began
to wear off—a little—I was almost
sorry I hadn't been able to stay.
If I'd only been able to get a room I
would
have stayed, I told myself.
From Idlewild, I came directly to
the office rather than going to my
apartment. I figured I might as well
check in with Betty.
I opened the door and there I
found Mr. Oyster sitting in the chair
he had been occupying four—or was
it five—days before when I'd left.
I'd lost track of the time.
I said to him, "Glad you're here,
sir. I can report. Ah, what was it
you came for? Impatient to hear if
I'd had any results?" My mind was
spinning like a whirling dervish in
a revolving door. I'd spent a wad of
his money and had nothing I could
think of to show for it; nothing but
the last stages of a grand-daddy
hangover.
"Came for?" Mr. Oyster snorted.
"I'm merely waiting for your girl to
make out my receipt. I thought you
had already left."
"You'll miss your plane," Betty
said.
There was suddenly a double dip
of ice cream in my stomach. I walked
over to my desk and looked down at
the calendar.
Mr. Oyster was saying something
to the effect that if I didn't leave today,
it would have to be tomorrow,
that he hadn't ponied up that thousand
dollars advance for anything
less than immediate service. Stuffing
his receipt in his wallet, he fussed
his way out the door.
I said to Betty hopefully, "I suppose
you haven't changed this calendar
since I left."
Betty said, "What's the matter
with you? You look funny. How did
your clothes get so mussed? You tore
the top sheet off that calendar yourself,
not half an hour ago, just before
this marble-missing client came
in." She added, irrelevantly, "Time
travelers yet."
I tried just once more. "Uh, when
did you first see this Mr. Oyster?"
"Never saw him before in my
life," she said. "Not until he came
in this morning."
"This morning," I said weakly.
While Betty stared at me as though
it was
me
that needed candling by a
head shrinker preparatory to being
sent off to a pressure cooker, I fished
in my pocket for my wallet, counted
the contents and winced at the
pathetic remains of the thousand.
I said pleadingly, "Betty, listen,
how long ago did I go out that door—on
the way to the airport?"
"You've been acting sick all morning.
You went out that door about
ten minutes ago, were gone about
three minutes, and then came back."
"See here," Mr. Oyster said (interrupting
Simon's story), "did you
say this was supposed to be amusing,
young man? I don't find it so. In
fact, I believe I am being ridiculed."
Simon shrugged, put one hand to
his forehead and said, "That's only
the first chapter. There are two
more."
"I'm not interested in more," Mr.
Oyster said. "I suppose your point
was to show me how ridiculous the
whole idea actually is. Very well,
you've done it. Confound it. However,
I suppose your time, even when
spent in this manner, has some value.
Here is fifty dollars. And good day,
sir!"
He slammed the door after him
as he left.
Simon winced at the noise, took
the aspirin bottle from its drawer,
took two, washed them down with
water from the desk carafe.
Betty looked at him admiringly.
Came to her feet, crossed over and
took up the fifty dollars. "Week's
wages," she said. "I suppose that's
one way of taking care of a crackpot.
But I'm surprised you didn't
take his money and enjoy that vacation
you've been yearning about."
"I did," Simon groaned. "Three
times."
Betty stared at him. "You mean—"
Simon nodded, miserably.
She said, "But
Simon
. Fifty thousand
dollars bonus. If that story was
true, you should have gone back
again to Munich. If there was one
time traveler, there might have
been—"
"I keep telling you," Simon said
bitterly, "I went back there three
times. There were hundreds of them.
Probably thousands." He took a deep
breath. "Listen, we're just going to
have to forget about it. They're not
going to stand for the space-time
continuum track being altered. If
something comes up that looks like
it might result in the track being
changed, they set you right back at
the beginning and let things start—for
you—all over again. They just
can't allow anything to come back
from the future and change the
past."
"You mean," Betty was suddenly
furious at him, "you've given up!
Why this is the biggest thing— Why
the fifty thousand dollars is nothing.
The future! Just think!"
Simon said wearily, "There's just
one thing you can bring back with
you from the future, a hangover compounded
of a gallon or so of Marzenbräu.
What's more you can pile
one on top of the other, and another
on top of that!"
He shuddered. "If you think I'm
going to take another crack at this
merry-go-round and pile a fourth
hangover on the three I'm already
nursing, all at once, you can think
again."
THE END
Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from
Astounding Science Fiction
June
1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and
typographical errors have been corrected without note. | [
"He would have returned right back to the office soon after he left for the airport, but with a worse hangover.",
"He would have stayed at home and pretended to travel to Germany for the sake of his client.",
"He would have gone to Germany for the 16-day festival and looked for time travelers.",
"He would have brought Betty with him to Germany to help him find time travelers."
] | 0 |
23942_IGIFD97I_9 | Why did Simon's new friend not give him an aspirin when Simon asked for one? | UNBORN
TOMORROW
BY MACK REYNOLDS
Unfortunately
, there was only
one thing he could bring back
from the wonderful future ...
and though he didn't want to
... nevertheless he did....
Illustrated by Freas
Betty
looked up from
her magazine. She said
mildly, "You're late."
"Don't yell at me, I
feel awful," Simon told
her. He sat down at his desk, passed
his tongue over his teeth in distaste,
groaned, fumbled in a drawer for the
aspirin bottle.
He looked over at Betty and said,
almost as though reciting, "What I
need is a vacation."
"What," Betty said, "are you going
to use for money?"
"Providence," Simon told her
whilst fiddling with the aspirin bottle,
"will provide."
"Hm-m-m. But before providing
vacations it'd be nice if Providence
turned up a missing jewel deal, say.
Something where you could deduce
that actually the ruby ring had gone
down the drain and was caught in the
elbow. Something that would net
about fifty dollars."
Simon said, mournful of tone,
"Fifty dollars? Why not make it five
hundred?"
"I'm not selfish," Betty said. "All
I want is enough to pay me this
week's salary."
"Money," Simon said. "When you
took this job you said it was the romance
that appealed to you."
"Hm-m-m. I didn't know most
sleuthing amounted to snooping
around department stores to check on
the clerks knocking down."
Simon said, enigmatically, "Now
it comes."
There was a knock.
Betty bounced up with Olympic
agility and had the door swinging
wide before the knocking was quite
completed.
He was old, little and had bug
eyes behind pince-nez glasses. His
suit was cut in the style of yesteryear
but when a suit costs two or
three hundred dollars you still retain
caste whatever the styling.
Simon said unenthusiastically,
"Good morning, Mr. Oyster." He indicated
the client's chair. "Sit down,
sir."
The client fussed himself with
Betty's assistance into the seat, bug-eyed
Simon, said finally, "You know
my name, that's pretty good. Never
saw you before in my life. Stop fussing
with me, young lady. Your ad
in the phone book says you'll investigate
anything."
"Anything," Simon said. "Only
one exception."
"Excellent. Do you believe in time
travel?"
Simon said nothing. Across the
room, where she had resumed her
seat, Betty cleared her throat. When
Simon continued to say nothing she
ventured, "Time travel is impossible."
"Why?"
"Why?"
"Yes, why?"
Betty looked to her boss for assistance.
None was forthcoming. There
ought to be some very quick, positive,
definite answer. She said, "Well,
for one thing, paradox. Suppose you
had a time machine and traveled back
a hundred years or so and killed your
own great-grandfather. Then how
could you ever be born?"
"Confound it if I know," the little
fellow growled. "How?"
Simon said, "Let's get to the point,
what you wanted to see me about."
"I want to hire you to hunt me up
some time travelers," the old boy
said.
Betty was too far in now to maintain
her proper role of silent secretary.
"Time travelers," she said, not
very intelligently.
The potential client sat more erect,
obviously with intent to hold the
floor for a time. He removed the
pince-nez glasses and pointed them
at Betty. He said, "Have you read
much science fiction, Miss?"
"Some," Betty admitted.
"Then you'll realize that there are
a dozen explanations of the paradoxes
of time travel. Every writer in
the field worth his salt has explained
them away. But to get on. It's my
contention that within a century or
so man will have solved the problems
of immortality and eternal youth, and
it's also my suspicion that he will
eventually be able to travel in time.
So convinced am I of these possibilities
that I am willing to gamble a
portion of my fortune to investigate
the presence in our era of such time
travelers."
Simon seemed incapable of carrying
the ball this morning, so Betty
said, "But ... Mr. Oyster, if the
future has developed time travel why
don't we ever meet such travelers?"
Simon put in a word. "The usual
explanation, Betty, is that they can't
afford to allow the space-time continuum
track to be altered. If, say, a
time traveler returned to a period of
twenty-five years ago and shot Hitler,
then all subsequent history would be
changed. In that case, the time traveler
himself might never be born. They
have to tread mighty carefully."
Mr. Oyster was pleased. "I didn't
expect you to be so well informed
on the subject, young man."
Simon shrugged and fumbled
again with the aspirin bottle.
Mr. Oyster went on. "I've been
considering the matter for some time
and—"
Simon held up a hand. "There's
no use prolonging this. As I understand
it, you're an elderly gentleman
with a considerable fortune and you
realize that thus far nobody has succeeded
in taking it with him."
Mr. Oyster returned his glasses to
their perch, bug-eyed Simon, but then
nodded.
Simon said, "You want to hire me
to find a time traveler and in some
manner or other—any manner will
do—exhort from him the secret of
eternal life and youth, which you figure
the future will have discovered.
You're willing to pony up a part of
this fortune of yours, if I can deliver
a bona fide time traveler."
"Right!"
Betty had been looking from one
to the other. Now she said, plaintively,
"But where are you going to find
one of these characters—especially if
they're interested in keeping hid?"
The old boy was the center again.
"I told you I'd been considering it
for some time. The
Oktoberfest
,
that's where they'd be!" He seemed
elated.
Betty and Simon waited.
"The
Oktoberfest
," he repeated.
"The greatest festival the world has
ever seen, the carnival,
feria
,
fiesta
to beat them all. Every year it's held
in Munich. Makes the New Orleans
Mardi gras look like a quilting
party." He began to swing into the
spirit of his description. "It originally
started in celebration of the wedding
of some local prince a century
and a half ago and the Bavarians had
such a bang-up time they've been
holding it every year since. The
Munich breweries do up a special
beer,
Marzenbräu
they call it, and
each brewery opens a tremendous tent
on the fair grounds which will hold
five thousand customers apiece. Millions
of liters of beer are put away,
hundreds of thousands of barbecued
chickens, a small herd of oxen are
roasted whole over spits, millions of
pair of
weisswurst
, a very special
sausage, millions upon millions of
pretzels—"
"All right," Simon said. "We'll accept
it. The
Oktoberfest
is one whale
of a wingding."
"Well," the old boy pursued, into
his subject now, "that's where they'd
be, places like the
Oktoberfest
. For
one thing, a time traveler wouldn't
be conspicuous. At a festival like this
somebody with a strange accent, or
who didn't know exactly how to wear
his clothes correctly, or was off the
ordinary in any of a dozen other
ways, wouldn't be noticed. You could
be a four-armed space traveler from
Mars, and you still wouldn't be conspicuous
at the
Oktoberfest
. People
would figure they had D.T.'s."
"But why would a time traveler
want to go to a—" Betty began.
"Why not! What better opportunity
to study a people than when they
are in their cups? If
you
could go
back a few thousand years, the things
you would wish to see would be a
Roman Triumph, perhaps the Rites
of Dionysus, or one of Alexander's
orgies. You wouldn't want to wander
up and down the streets of, say,
Athens while nothing was going on,
particularly when you might be revealed
as a suspicious character not
being able to speak the language, not
knowing how to wear the clothes and
not familiar with the city's layout."
He took a deep breath. "No ma'am,
you'd have to stick to some great
event, both for the sake of actual
interest and for protection against being
unmasked."
The old boy wound it up. "Well,
that's the story. What are your rates?
The
Oktoberfest
starts on Friday and
continues for sixteen days. You can
take the plane to Munich, spend a
week there and—"
Simon was shaking his head. "Not
interested."
As soon as Betty had got her jaw
back into place, she glared unbelievingly
at him.
Mr. Oyster was taken aback himself.
"See here, young man, I realize
this isn't an ordinary assignment,
however, as I said, I am willing to
risk a considerable portion of my
fortune—"
"Sorry," Simon said. "Can't be
done."
"A hundred dollars a day plus expenses,"
Mr. Oyster said quietly. "I
like the fact that you already seem
to have some interest and knowledge
of the matter. I liked the way you
knew my name when I walked in the
door; my picture doesn't appear often
in the papers."
"No go," Simon said, a sad quality
in his voice.
"A fifty thousand dollar bonus if
you bring me a time traveler."
"Out of the question," Simon
said.
"But
why
?" Betty wailed.
"Just for laughs," Simon told the
two of them sourly, "suppose I tell
you a funny story. It goes like
this:"
I got a thousand dollars from Mr.
Oyster (Simon began) in the way
of an advance, and leaving him with
Betty who was making out a receipt,
I hustled back to the apartment and
packed a bag. Hell, I'd wanted a vacation
anyway, this was a natural. On
the way to Idlewild I stopped off at
the Germany Information Offices for
some tourist literature.
It takes roughly three and a half
hours to get to Gander from Idlewild.
I spent the time planning the
fun I was going to have.
It takes roughly seven and a half
hours from Gander to Shannon and
I spent that time dreaming up material
I could put into my reports to
Mr. Oyster. I was going to have to
give him some kind of report for his
money. Time travel yet! What a
laugh!
Between Shannon and Munich a
faint suspicion began to simmer in
my mind. These statistics I read on
the
Oktoberfest
in the Munich tourist
pamphlets. Five million people
attended annually.
Where did five million people
come from to attend an overgrown
festival in comparatively remote
Southern Germany? The tourist season
is over before September 21st,
first day of the gigantic beer bust.
Nor could the Germans account for
any such number. Munich itself has
a population of less than a million,
counting children.
And those millions of gallons of
beer, the hundreds of thousands of
chickens, the herds of oxen. Who
ponied up all the money for such expenditures?
How could the average
German, with his twenty-five dollars
a week salary?
In Munich there was no hotel
space available. I went to the Bahnhof
where they have a hotel service
and applied. They put my name
down, pocketed the husky bribe,
showed me where I could check my
bag, told me they'd do what they
could, and to report back in a few
hours.
I had another suspicious twinge.
If five million people attended this
beer bout, how were they accommodated?
The
Theresienwiese
, the fair
ground, was only a few blocks
away. I was stiff from the plane ride
so I walked.
There are seven major brewers in
the Munich area, each of them represented
by one of the circuslike tents
that Mr. Oyster mentioned. Each tent
contained benches and tables for
about five thousand persons and from
six to ten thousands pack themselves
in, competing for room. In the center
is a tremendous bandstand, the
musicians all
lederhosen
clad, the
music as Bavarian as any to be found
in a Bavarian beer hall. Hundreds of
peasant garbed
fräuleins
darted about
the tables with quart sized earthenware
mugs, platters of chicken, sausage,
kraut and pretzels.
I found a place finally at a table
which had space for twenty-odd beer
bibbers. Odd is right. As weird an
assortment of Germans and foreign
tourists as could have been dreamed
up, ranging from a seventy- or
eighty-year-old couple in Bavarian
costume, to the bald-headed drunk
across the table from me.
A desperate waitress bearing six
mugs of beer in each hand scurried
past. They call them
masses
, by the
way, not mugs. The bald-headed
character and I both held up a finger
and she slid two of the
masses
over
to us and then hustled on.
"Down the hatch," the other said,
holding up his
mass
in toast.
"To the ladies," I told him. Before
sipping, I said, "You know, the
tourist pamphlets say this stuff is
eighteen per cent. That's nonsense.
No beer is that strong." I took a long
pull.
He looked at me, waiting.
I came up. "Mistaken," I admitted.
A
mass
or two apiece later he looked
carefully at the name engraved on
his earthenware mug. "Löwenbräu,"
he said. He took a small notebook
from his pocket and a pencil, noted
down the word and returned the
things.
"That's a queer looking pencil you
have there," I told him. "German?"
"Venusian," he said. "Oops, sorry.
Shouldn't have said that."
I had never heard of the brand so
I skipped it.
"Next is the Hofbräu," he said.
"Next what?" Baldy's conversation
didn't seem to hang together very
well.
"My pilgrimage," he told me. "All
my life I've been wanting to go back
to an
Oktoberfest
and sample every
one of the seven brands of the best
beer the world has ever known. I'm
only as far as Löwenbräu. I'm afraid
I'll never make it."
I finished my
mass
. "I'll help
you," I told him. "Very noble endeavor.
Name is Simon."
"Arth," he said. "How could you
help?"
"I'm still fresh—comparatively.
I'll navigate you around. There are
seven beer tents. How many have you
got through, so far?"
"Two, counting this one," Arth
said.
I looked at him. "It's going to be
a chore," I said. "You've already got
a nice edge on."
Outside, as we made our way to
the next tent, the fair looked like
every big State-Fair ever seen, except
it was bigger. Games, souvenir
stands, sausage stands, rides, side
shows, and people, people, people.
The Hofbräu tent was as overflowing
as the last but we managed to
find two seats.
The band was blaring, and five
thousand half-swacked voices were
roaring accompaniment.
In Muenchen steht ein Hofbräuhaus!
Eins, Zwei, G'sufa!
At the
G'sufa
everybody upped
with the mugs and drank each other's
health.
"This is what I call a real beer
bust," I said approvingly.
Arth was waving to a waitress. As
in the Löwenbräu tent, a full quart
was the smallest amount obtainable.
A beer later I said, "I don't know
if you'll make it or not, Arth."
"Make what?"
"All seven tents."
"Oh."
A waitress was on her way by,
mugs foaming over their rims. I gestured
to her for refills.
"Where are you from, Arth?" I
asked him, in the way of making
conversation.
"2183."
"2183 where?"
He looked at me, closing one eye
to focus better. "Oh," he said. "Well,
2183 South Street, ah, New Albuquerque."
"New Albuquerque? Where's
that?"
Arth thought about it. Took another
long pull at the beer. "Right
across the way from old Albuquerque,"
he said finally. "Maybe we
ought to be getting on to the
Pschorrbräu tent."
"Maybe we ought to eat something
first," I said. "I'm beginning to feel
this. We could get some of that barbecued
ox."
Arth closed his eyes in pain.
"Vegetarian," he said. "Couldn't possibly
eat meat. Barbarous. Ugh."
"Well, we need some nourishment,"
I said.
"There's supposed to be considerable
nourishment in beer."
That made sense. I yelled, "
Fräulein!
Zwei neu bier!
"
Somewhere along in here the fog
rolled in. When it rolled out again,
I found myself closing one eye the
better to read the lettering on my
earthenware mug. It read Augustinerbräu.
Somehow we'd evidently
navigated from one tent to another.
Arth was saying, "Where's your
hotel?"
That seemed like a good question.
I thought about it for a while. Finally
I said, "Haven't got one. Town's
jam packed. Left my bag at the Bahnhof.
I don't think we'll ever make
it, Arth. How many we got to
go?"
"Lost track," Arth said. "You can
come home with me."
We drank to that and the fog rolled
in again.
When the fog rolled out, it was
daylight. Bright, glaring, awful daylight.
I was sprawled, complete with
clothes, on one of twin beds. On the
other bed, also completely clothed,
was Arth.
That sun was too much. I stumbled
up from the bed, staggered to
the window and fumbled around for
a blind or curtain. There was none.
Behind me a voice said in horror,
"Who ... how ... oh,
Wodo
,
where'd you come from?"
I got a quick impression, looking
out the window, that the Germans
were certainly the most modern, futuristic
people in the world. But I
couldn't stand the light. "Where's
the shade," I moaned.
Arth did something and the window
went opaque.
"That's quite a gadget," I groaned.
"If I didn't feel so lousy, I'd
appreciate it."
Arth was sitting on the edge of
the bed holding his bald head in his
hands. "I remember now," he sorrowed.
"You didn't have a hotel.
What a stupidity. I'll be phased.
Phased all the way down."
"You haven't got a handful of
aspirin, have you?" I asked him.
"Just a minute," Arth said, staggering
erect and heading for what
undoubtedly was a bathroom. "Stay
where you are. Don't move. Don't
touch anything."
"All right," I told him plaintively.
"I'm clean. I won't mess up the
place. All I've got is a hangover, not
lice."
Arth was gone. He came back in
two or three minutes, box of pills in
hand. "Here, take one of these."
I took the pill, followed it with a
glass of water.
And went out like a light.
Arth was shaking my arm. "Want
another
mass
?"
The band was blaring, and five
thousand half-swacked voices were
roaring accompaniment.
In Muenchen steht ein Hofbräuhaus!
Eins, Zwei, G'sufa!
At the
G'sufa
everybody upped
with their king-size mugs and drank
each other's health.
My head was killing me. "This is
where I came in, or something," I
groaned.
Arth said, "That was last night."
He looked at me over the rim of his
beer mug.
Something, somewhere, was
wrong. But I didn't care. I finished
my
mass
and then remembered. "I've
got to get my bag. Oh, my head.
Where did we spend last night?"
Arth said, and his voice sounded
cautious, "At my hotel, don't you remember?"
"Not very well," I admitted. "I
feel lousy. I must have dimmed out.
I've got to go to the Bahnhof and
get my luggage."
Arth didn't put up an argument
on that. We said good-by and I could
feel him watching after me as I pushed
through the tables on the way
out.
At the Bahnhof they could do me
no good. There were no hotel rooms
available in Munich. The head was
getting worse by the minute. The
fact that they'd somehow managed
to lose my bag didn't help. I worked
on that project for at least a couple
of hours. Not only wasn't the bag
at the luggage checking station, but
the attendant there evidently couldn't
make heads nor tails of the check
receipt. He didn't speak English and
my high school German was inadequate,
especially accompanied by a
blockbusting hangover.
I didn't get anywhere tearing my
hair and complaining from one end
of the Bahnhof to the other. I drew
a blank on the bag.
And the head was getting worse
by the minute. I was bleeding to
death through the eyes and instead
of butterflies I had bats in my stomach.
Believe me,
nobody
should drink
a gallon or more of Marzenbräu.
I decided the hell with it. I took
a cab to the airport, presented my return
ticket, told them I wanted to
leave on the first obtainable plane to
New York. I'd spent two days at the
Oktoberfest
, and I'd had it.
I got more guff there. Something
was wrong with the ticket, wrong
date or some such. But they fixed
that up. I never was clear on what
was fouled up, some clerk's error,
evidently.
The trip back was as uninteresting
as the one over. As the hangover began
to wear off—a little—I was almost
sorry I hadn't been able to stay.
If I'd only been able to get a room I
would
have stayed, I told myself.
From Idlewild, I came directly to
the office rather than going to my
apartment. I figured I might as well
check in with Betty.
I opened the door and there I
found Mr. Oyster sitting in the chair
he had been occupying four—or was
it five—days before when I'd left.
I'd lost track of the time.
I said to him, "Glad you're here,
sir. I can report. Ah, what was it
you came for? Impatient to hear if
I'd had any results?" My mind was
spinning like a whirling dervish in
a revolving door. I'd spent a wad of
his money and had nothing I could
think of to show for it; nothing but
the last stages of a grand-daddy
hangover.
"Came for?" Mr. Oyster snorted.
"I'm merely waiting for your girl to
make out my receipt. I thought you
had already left."
"You'll miss your plane," Betty
said.
There was suddenly a double dip
of ice cream in my stomach. I walked
over to my desk and looked down at
the calendar.
Mr. Oyster was saying something
to the effect that if I didn't leave today,
it would have to be tomorrow,
that he hadn't ponied up that thousand
dollars advance for anything
less than immediate service. Stuffing
his receipt in his wallet, he fussed
his way out the door.
I said to Betty hopefully, "I suppose
you haven't changed this calendar
since I left."
Betty said, "What's the matter
with you? You look funny. How did
your clothes get so mussed? You tore
the top sheet off that calendar yourself,
not half an hour ago, just before
this marble-missing client came
in." She added, irrelevantly, "Time
travelers yet."
I tried just once more. "Uh, when
did you first see this Mr. Oyster?"
"Never saw him before in my
life," she said. "Not until he came
in this morning."
"This morning," I said weakly.
While Betty stared at me as though
it was
me
that needed candling by a
head shrinker preparatory to being
sent off to a pressure cooker, I fished
in my pocket for my wallet, counted
the contents and winced at the
pathetic remains of the thousand.
I said pleadingly, "Betty, listen,
how long ago did I go out that door—on
the way to the airport?"
"You've been acting sick all morning.
You went out that door about
ten minutes ago, were gone about
three minutes, and then came back."
"See here," Mr. Oyster said (interrupting
Simon's story), "did you
say this was supposed to be amusing,
young man? I don't find it so. In
fact, I believe I am being ridiculed."
Simon shrugged, put one hand to
his forehead and said, "That's only
the first chapter. There are two
more."
"I'm not interested in more," Mr.
Oyster said. "I suppose your point
was to show me how ridiculous the
whole idea actually is. Very well,
you've done it. Confound it. However,
I suppose your time, even when
spent in this manner, has some value.
Here is fifty dollars. And good day,
sir!"
He slammed the door after him
as he left.
Simon winced at the noise, took
the aspirin bottle from its drawer,
took two, washed them down with
water from the desk carafe.
Betty looked at him admiringly.
Came to her feet, crossed over and
took up the fifty dollars. "Week's
wages," she said. "I suppose that's
one way of taking care of a crackpot.
But I'm surprised you didn't
take his money and enjoy that vacation
you've been yearning about."
"I did," Simon groaned. "Three
times."
Betty stared at him. "You mean—"
Simon nodded, miserably.
She said, "But
Simon
. Fifty thousand
dollars bonus. If that story was
true, you should have gone back
again to Munich. If there was one
time traveler, there might have
been—"
"I keep telling you," Simon said
bitterly, "I went back there three
times. There were hundreds of them.
Probably thousands." He took a deep
breath. "Listen, we're just going to
have to forget about it. They're not
going to stand for the space-time
continuum track being altered. If
something comes up that looks like
it might result in the track being
changed, they set you right back at
the beginning and let things start—for
you—all over again. They just
can't allow anything to come back
from the future and change the
past."
"You mean," Betty was suddenly
furious at him, "you've given up!
Why this is the biggest thing— Why
the fifty thousand dollars is nothing.
The future! Just think!"
Simon said wearily, "There's just
one thing you can bring back with
you from the future, a hangover compounded
of a gallon or so of Marzenbräu.
What's more you can pile
one on top of the other, and another
on top of that!"
He shuddered. "If you think I'm
going to take another crack at this
merry-go-round and pile a fourth
hangover on the three I'm already
nursing, all at once, you can think
again."
THE END
Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from
Astounding Science Fiction
June
1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and
typographical errors have been corrected without note. | [
"He had run out of aspirin and did not know how to help.",
"The friend thought Simon needed to deal with his headache like a man.",
"He needed to knock him out to go back to the festival so that Simon would not know what had happened.",
"He gave him a different medicine instead that he thought would work better."
] | 2 |
23960_9R8L8U1B_1 | What is the significance of the story's title? | ... After a Few Words ...
by Seaton McKettrig
Illustrated by Summer
This is a science-fiction story. History is a science; the other
part is, as all Americans know, the most fictional field we have
today.
He settled himself comfortably in his seat, and carefully put the helmet
on, pulling it down firmly until it was properly seated. For a moment,
he could see nothing.
Then his hand moved up and, with a flick of the wrist, lifted the visor.
Ahead of him, in serried array, with lances erect and pennons flying,
was the forward part of the column. Far ahead, he knew, were the Knights
Templars, who had taken the advance. Behind the Templars rode the mailed
knights of Brittany and Anjou. These were followed by King Guy of
Jerusalem and the host of Poitou.
He himself, Sir Robert de Bouain, was riding with the Norman and English
troops, just behind the men of Poitou. Sir Robert turned slightly in his
saddle. To his right, he could see the brilliant red-and-gold banner of
the lion-hearted Richard of England—
gules, in pale three lions passant
guardant or
. Behind the standard-bearer, his great war horse moving
with a steady, measured pace, his coronet of gold on his steel helm
gleaming in the glaring desert sun, the lions of England on his
firm-held shield, was the King himself.
Further behind, the Knights Hospitallers protected the rear, guarding
the column of the hosts of Christendom from harassment by the Bedouins.
"By our Lady!" came a voice from his left. "Three days out from Acre,
and the accursed Saracens still elude us."
Sir Robert de Bouain twisted again in his saddle to look at the knight
riding alongside him. Sir Gaeton de l'Arc-Tombé sat tall and straight in
his saddle, his visor up, his blue eyes narrowed against the glare of
the sun.
Sir Robert's lips formed a smile. "They are not far off, Sir Gaeton.
They have been following us. As we march parallel to the seacoast, so
they have been marching with us in those hills to the east."
"Like the jackals they are," said Sir Gaeton. "They assail us from the
rear, and they set up traps in our path ahead. Our spies tell us that
the Turks lie ahead of us in countless numbers. And yet, they fear to
face us in open battle."
"Is it fear, or are they merely gathering their forces?"
"Both," said Sir Gaeton flatly. "They fear us, else they would not dally
to amass so fearsome a force. If, as our informers tell us, there are
uncounted Turks to the fore, and if, as we are aware, our rear is being
dogged by the Bedouin and the black horsemen of Egypt, it would seem
that Saladin has at hand more than enough to overcome us, were they all
truly Christian knights."
"Give them time. We must wait for their attack, sir knight. It were
foolhardy to attempt to seek them in their own hills, and yet they must
stop us. They will attack before we reach Jerusalem, fear not."
"We of Gascony fear no heathen Musselman," Sir Gaeton growled. "It's
this Hellish heat that is driving me mad." He pointed toward the eastern
hills. "The sun is yet low, and already the heat is unbearable."
Sir Robert heard his own laugh echo hollowly within his helmet. "Perhaps
'twere better to be mad when the assault comes. Madmen fight better than
men of cooler blood." He knew that the others were baking inside their
heavy armor, although he himself was not too uncomfortable.
Sir Gaeton looked at him with a smile that held both irony and respect.
"In truth, sir knight, it is apparent that you fear neither men nor
heat. Nor is your own blood too cool. True, I ride with your Normans and
your English and your King Richard of the Lion's Heart, but I am a
Gascon, and have sworn no fealty to him. But to side with the Duke of
Burgundy against King Richard—" He gave a short, barking laugh. "I
fear no man," he went on, "but if I had to fear one, it would be Richard
of England."
Sir Robert's voice came like a sword: steely, flat, cold, and sharp. "My
lord the King spoke in haste. He has reason to be bitter against Philip
of France, as do we all. Philip has deserted the field. He has returned
to France in haste, leaving the rest of us to fight the Saracen for the
Holy Land leaving only the contingent of his vassal the Duke of Burgundy
to remain with us."
"Richard of England has never been on the best of terms with Philip
Augustus," said Sir Gaeton.
"No, and with good cause. But he allowed his anger against Philip to
color his judgment when he spoke harshly against the Duke of Burgundy.
The Duke is no coward, and Richard Plantagenet well knows it. As I said,
he spoke in haste."
"And you intervened," said Sir Gaeton.
"It was my duty." Sir Robert's voice was stubborn. "Could we have
permitted a quarrel to develop between the two finest knights and
warleaders in Christendom at this crucial point? The desertion of Philip
of France has cost us dearly. Could we permit the desertion of Burgundy,
too?"
"You did what must be done in honor," the Gascon conceded, "but you have
not gained the love of Richard by doing so."
Sir Robert felt his jaw set firmly. "My king knows I am loyal."
Sir Gaeton said nothing more, but there was a look in his eyes that
showed that he felt that Richard of England might even doubt the loyalty
of Sir Robert de Bouain.
Sir Robert rode on in silence, feeling the movement of the horse beneath
him.
There was a sudden sound to the rear. Like a wash of the tide from the
sea came the sound of Saracen war cries and the clash of steel on steel
mingled with the sounds of horses in agony and anger.
Sir Robert turned his horse to look.
The Negro troops of Saladin's Egyptian contingent were thundering down
upon the rear! They clashed with the Hospitallers, slamming in like a
rain of heavy stones, too close in for the use of bows. There was only
the sword against armor, like the sound of a thousand hammers against a
thousand anvils.
"Stand fast! Stand fast! Hold them off!" It was the voice of King
Richard, sounding like a clarion over the din of battle.
Sir Robert felt his horse move, as though it were urging him on toward
the battle, but his hand held to the reins, keeping the great charger in
check. The King had said "Stand fast!" and this was no time to disobey
the orders of Richard.
The Saracen troops were coming in from the rear, and the Hospitallers
were taking the brunt of the charge. They fought like madmen, but they
were slowly being forced back.
The Master of the Hospitallers rode to the rear, to the King's standard,
which hardly moved in the still desert air, now that the column had
stopped moving.
The voice of the Duke of Burgundy came to Sir Robert's ears.
"Stand fast. The King bids you all to stand fast," said the duke, his
voice fading as he rode on up the column toward the knights of Poitou
and the Knights Templars.
The Master of the Hospitallers was speaking in a low, urgent voice to
the King: "My lord, we are pressed on by the enemy and in danger of
eternal infamy. We are losing our horses, one after the other!"
"Good Master," said Richard, "it is you who must sustain their attack.
No one can be everywhere at once."
The Master of the Hospitallers nodded curtly and charged back into the
fray.
The King turned to Sir Baldwin de Carreo, who sat ahorse nearby, and
pointed toward the eastern hills. "They will come from there, hitting us
in the flank; we cannot afford to amass a rearward charge. To do so
would be to fall directly into the hands of the Saracen."
A voice very close to Sir Robert said: "Richard is right. If we go to
the aid of the Hospitallers, we will expose the column to a flank
attack." It was Sir Gaeton.
"My lord the King," Sir Robert heard his voice say, "is right in all but
one thing. If we allow the Egyptians to take us from the rear, there
will be no need for Saladin and his Turks to come down on our flank. And
the Hospitallers cannot hold for long at this rate. A charge at full
gallop would break the Egyptian line and give the Hospitallers breathing
time. Are you with me?"
"Against the orders of the King?"
"The King cannot see everything! There are times when a man must use his
own judgment! You said you were afraid of no man. Are you with me?"
After a moment's hesitation, Sir Gaeton couched his lance. "I'm with
you, sir knight! Live or die, I follow! Strike and strike hard!"
"Forward then!" Sir Robert heard himself shouting. "Forward for St.
George and for England!"
"St. George and England!" the Gascon echoed.
Two great war horses began to move ponderously forward toward the battle
lines, gaining momentum as they went. Moving in unison, the two knights,
their horses now at a fast trot, lowered their lances, picking their
Saracen targets with care. Larger and larger loomed the Egyptian
cavalrymen as the horses changed pace to a thundering gallop.
The Egyptians tried to dodge, as they saw, too late, the approach of the
Christian knights.
Sir Robert felt the shock against himself and his horse as the steel tip
of the long ash lance struck the Saracen horseman in the chest. Out of
the corner of his eye, he saw that Sir Gaeton, too, had scored.
The Saracen, impaled on Sir Robert's lance, shot from the saddle as he
died. His lighter armor had hardly impeded the incoming spear-point, and
now his body dragged it down as he dropped toward the desert sand.
Another Moslem cavalryman was charging in now, swinging his curved
saber, taking advantage of Sir Robert's sagging lance.
There was nothing else to do but drop the lance and draw his heavy
broadsword. His hand grasped it, and it came singing from its scabbard.
The Egyptian's curved sword clanged against Sir Robert's helm, setting
his head ringing. In return, the knight's broadsword came about in a
sweeping arc, and the Egyptian's horse rode on with the rider's headless
body.
Behind him, Sir Robert heard further cries of "St. George and England!"
The Hospitallers, taking heart at the charge, were going in! Behind them
came the Count of Champagne, the Earl of Leister, and the Bishop of
Beauvais, who carried a great warhammer in order that he might not break
Church Law by shedding blood.
Sir Robert's own sword rose and fell, cutting and hacking at the enemy.
He himself felt a dreamlike detachment, as though he were watching the
battle rather than participating in it.
But he could see that the Moslems were falling back before the Christian
onslaught.
And then, quite suddenly, there seemed to be no foeman to swing at.
Breathing heavily, Sir Robert sheathed his broadsword.
Beside him, Sir Gaeton did the same, saying: "It will be a few minutes
before they can regroup, sir knight. We may have routed them
completely."
"Aye. But King Richard will not approve of my breaking ranks and
disobeying orders. I may win the battle and lose my head in the end."
"This is no time to worry about the future," said the Gascon. "Rest for
a moment and relax, that you may be the stronger later. Here—have an
Old Kings
."
He had a pack of cigarettes in his gauntleted hand, which he profferred
to Sir Robert. There were three cigarettes protruding from it, one
slightly farther than the others. Sir Robert's hand reached out and took
that one.
"Thanks. When the going gets rough, I really enjoy an
Old Kings
."
He put one end of the cigarette in his mouth and lit the other from the
lighter in Sir Gaeton's hand.
"Yes, sir," said Sir Gaeton, after lighting his own cigarette, "
Old
Kings
are the greatest. They give a man real, deep-down smoking
pleasure."
"There's no doubt about it,
Old Kings
are a
man's
cigarette." Sir
Robert could feel the soothing smoke in his lungs as he inhaled deeply.
"That's great. When I want a cigarette, I don't want just
any
cigarette."
"Nor I," agreed the Gascon. "
Old Kings
is the only real cigarette when
you're doing a real
man's
work."
"That's for sure." Sir Robert watched a smoke ring expand in the air.
There was a sudden clash of arms off to their left. Sir Robert dropped
his cigarette to the ground. "The trouble is that doing a real he-man's
work doesn't always allow you to enjoy the fine, rich tobaccos of
Old
Kings
right down to the very end."
"No, but you can always light another later," said the Gascon knight.
King Richard, on seeing his army moving suddenly toward the harassed
rear, had realized the danger and had charged through the Hospitallers
to get into the thick of the fray. Now the Turks were charging down from
the hills, hitting—not the flank as he had expected, but the rear!
Saladin had expected him to hold fast!
Sir Robert and Sir Gaeton spurred their chargers toward the flapping
banner of England.
The fierce warrior-king of England, his mighty sword in hand, was
cutting down Turks as though they were grain-stalks, but still the
Saracen horde pressed on. More and more of the terrible Turks came
boiling down out of the hills, their glittering scimitars swinging.
Sir Robert lost all track of time. There was nothing to do but keep his
own great broadsword moving, swinging like some gigantic metronome as he
hacked down the Moslem foes.
And then, suddenly, he found himself surrounded by the Saracens! He was
isolated and alone, cut off from the rest of the Christian forces! He
glanced quickly around as he slashed another Saracen from pate to
breastbone. Where was Sir Gaeton? Where were the others? Where was the
red-and-gold banner of Richard?
He caught a glimpse of the fluttering banner far to the rear and started
to fall back.
And then he saw another knight nearby, a huge man who swung his
sparkling blade with power and force. On his steel helm gleamed a golden
coronet! Richard!
And the great king, in spite of his prowess was outnumbered heavily and
would, within seconds, be cut down by the Saracen horde!
Without hesitation, Sir Robert plunged his horse toward the surrounded
monarch, his great blade cutting a path before him.
He saw Richard go down, falling from the saddle of his charger, but by
that time his own sword was cutting into the screaming Saracens and
they had no time to attempt any further mischief to the King. They had
their hands full with Sir Robert de Bouain.
He did not know how long he fought there, holding his charger motionless
over the inert body of the fallen king, hewing down the screaming enemy,
but presently he heard the familiar cry of "For St. George and for
England" behind him. The Norman and English troops were charging in,
bringing with them the banner of England!
And then Richard was on his feet, cleaving the air about him with his
own broadsword. Its bright edge, besmeared with Saracen blood, was
biting viciously into the foe.
The Turks began to fall back. Within seconds, the Christian knights were
boiling around the embattled pair, forcing the Turks into retreat. And
for the second time, Sir Robert found himself with no one to fight.
And then a voice was saying: "You have done well this day, sir knight.
Richard Plantagenet will not forget."
Sir Robert turned in his saddle to face the smiling king.
"My lord king, be assured that I would never forget my loyalty to my
sovereign and liege lord. My sword and my life are yours whenever you
call."
King Richard's gauntleted hand grasped his own. "If it please God, I
shall never ask your life. An earldom awaits you when we return to
England, sir knight."
And then the king mounted his horse and was running full gallop after
the retreating Saracens.
Robert took off his helmet.
He blinked for a second to adjust his eyes to the relative dimness of
the studio. After the brightness of the desert that the televicarion
helmet had projected into his eyes, the studio seemed strangely
cavelike.
"How'd you like it, Bob?" asked one of the two producers of the show.
Robert Bowen nodded briskly and patted the televike helmet. "It was
O.K.," he said. "Good show. A little talky at the beginning, and it
needs a better fade-out, but the action scenes were fine. The sponsor
ought to like it—for a while, at least."
"What do you mean, 'for a while'?"
Robert Bowen sighed. "If this thing goes on the air the way it is, he'll
lose sales."
"Why? Commercial not good enough?"
"
Too
good! Man, I've smoked
Old Kings
, and, believe me, the real
thing never tasted as good as that cigarette did in the commercial!" | [
"It points to the high ratio of battle over diplomacy in the story",
"It shows that the king is a man of few words",
"We shows that this is part of a newscast recording",
"It hints at sponsorship being relevant"
] | 3 |
23960_9R8L8U1B_2 | Which of these statements about the cigarettes has an irony that is represented elsewhere in the story? | ... After a Few Words ...
by Seaton McKettrig
Illustrated by Summer
This is a science-fiction story. History is a science; the other
part is, as all Americans know, the most fictional field we have
today.
He settled himself comfortably in his seat, and carefully put the helmet
on, pulling it down firmly until it was properly seated. For a moment,
he could see nothing.
Then his hand moved up and, with a flick of the wrist, lifted the visor.
Ahead of him, in serried array, with lances erect and pennons flying,
was the forward part of the column. Far ahead, he knew, were the Knights
Templars, who had taken the advance. Behind the Templars rode the mailed
knights of Brittany and Anjou. These were followed by King Guy of
Jerusalem and the host of Poitou.
He himself, Sir Robert de Bouain, was riding with the Norman and English
troops, just behind the men of Poitou. Sir Robert turned slightly in his
saddle. To his right, he could see the brilliant red-and-gold banner of
the lion-hearted Richard of England—
gules, in pale three lions passant
guardant or
. Behind the standard-bearer, his great war horse moving
with a steady, measured pace, his coronet of gold on his steel helm
gleaming in the glaring desert sun, the lions of England on his
firm-held shield, was the King himself.
Further behind, the Knights Hospitallers protected the rear, guarding
the column of the hosts of Christendom from harassment by the Bedouins.
"By our Lady!" came a voice from his left. "Three days out from Acre,
and the accursed Saracens still elude us."
Sir Robert de Bouain twisted again in his saddle to look at the knight
riding alongside him. Sir Gaeton de l'Arc-Tombé sat tall and straight in
his saddle, his visor up, his blue eyes narrowed against the glare of
the sun.
Sir Robert's lips formed a smile. "They are not far off, Sir Gaeton.
They have been following us. As we march parallel to the seacoast, so
they have been marching with us in those hills to the east."
"Like the jackals they are," said Sir Gaeton. "They assail us from the
rear, and they set up traps in our path ahead. Our spies tell us that
the Turks lie ahead of us in countless numbers. And yet, they fear to
face us in open battle."
"Is it fear, or are they merely gathering their forces?"
"Both," said Sir Gaeton flatly. "They fear us, else they would not dally
to amass so fearsome a force. If, as our informers tell us, there are
uncounted Turks to the fore, and if, as we are aware, our rear is being
dogged by the Bedouin and the black horsemen of Egypt, it would seem
that Saladin has at hand more than enough to overcome us, were they all
truly Christian knights."
"Give them time. We must wait for their attack, sir knight. It were
foolhardy to attempt to seek them in their own hills, and yet they must
stop us. They will attack before we reach Jerusalem, fear not."
"We of Gascony fear no heathen Musselman," Sir Gaeton growled. "It's
this Hellish heat that is driving me mad." He pointed toward the eastern
hills. "The sun is yet low, and already the heat is unbearable."
Sir Robert heard his own laugh echo hollowly within his helmet. "Perhaps
'twere better to be mad when the assault comes. Madmen fight better than
men of cooler blood." He knew that the others were baking inside their
heavy armor, although he himself was not too uncomfortable.
Sir Gaeton looked at him with a smile that held both irony and respect.
"In truth, sir knight, it is apparent that you fear neither men nor
heat. Nor is your own blood too cool. True, I ride with your Normans and
your English and your King Richard of the Lion's Heart, but I am a
Gascon, and have sworn no fealty to him. But to side with the Duke of
Burgundy against King Richard—" He gave a short, barking laugh. "I
fear no man," he went on, "but if I had to fear one, it would be Richard
of England."
Sir Robert's voice came like a sword: steely, flat, cold, and sharp. "My
lord the King spoke in haste. He has reason to be bitter against Philip
of France, as do we all. Philip has deserted the field. He has returned
to France in haste, leaving the rest of us to fight the Saracen for the
Holy Land leaving only the contingent of his vassal the Duke of Burgundy
to remain with us."
"Richard of England has never been on the best of terms with Philip
Augustus," said Sir Gaeton.
"No, and with good cause. But he allowed his anger against Philip to
color his judgment when he spoke harshly against the Duke of Burgundy.
The Duke is no coward, and Richard Plantagenet well knows it. As I said,
he spoke in haste."
"And you intervened," said Sir Gaeton.
"It was my duty." Sir Robert's voice was stubborn. "Could we have
permitted a quarrel to develop between the two finest knights and
warleaders in Christendom at this crucial point? The desertion of Philip
of France has cost us dearly. Could we permit the desertion of Burgundy,
too?"
"You did what must be done in honor," the Gascon conceded, "but you have
not gained the love of Richard by doing so."
Sir Robert felt his jaw set firmly. "My king knows I am loyal."
Sir Gaeton said nothing more, but there was a look in his eyes that
showed that he felt that Richard of England might even doubt the loyalty
of Sir Robert de Bouain.
Sir Robert rode on in silence, feeling the movement of the horse beneath
him.
There was a sudden sound to the rear. Like a wash of the tide from the
sea came the sound of Saracen war cries and the clash of steel on steel
mingled with the sounds of horses in agony and anger.
Sir Robert turned his horse to look.
The Negro troops of Saladin's Egyptian contingent were thundering down
upon the rear! They clashed with the Hospitallers, slamming in like a
rain of heavy stones, too close in for the use of bows. There was only
the sword against armor, like the sound of a thousand hammers against a
thousand anvils.
"Stand fast! Stand fast! Hold them off!" It was the voice of King
Richard, sounding like a clarion over the din of battle.
Sir Robert felt his horse move, as though it were urging him on toward
the battle, but his hand held to the reins, keeping the great charger in
check. The King had said "Stand fast!" and this was no time to disobey
the orders of Richard.
The Saracen troops were coming in from the rear, and the Hospitallers
were taking the brunt of the charge. They fought like madmen, but they
were slowly being forced back.
The Master of the Hospitallers rode to the rear, to the King's standard,
which hardly moved in the still desert air, now that the column had
stopped moving.
The voice of the Duke of Burgundy came to Sir Robert's ears.
"Stand fast. The King bids you all to stand fast," said the duke, his
voice fading as he rode on up the column toward the knights of Poitou
and the Knights Templars.
The Master of the Hospitallers was speaking in a low, urgent voice to
the King: "My lord, we are pressed on by the enemy and in danger of
eternal infamy. We are losing our horses, one after the other!"
"Good Master," said Richard, "it is you who must sustain their attack.
No one can be everywhere at once."
The Master of the Hospitallers nodded curtly and charged back into the
fray.
The King turned to Sir Baldwin de Carreo, who sat ahorse nearby, and
pointed toward the eastern hills. "They will come from there, hitting us
in the flank; we cannot afford to amass a rearward charge. To do so
would be to fall directly into the hands of the Saracen."
A voice very close to Sir Robert said: "Richard is right. If we go to
the aid of the Hospitallers, we will expose the column to a flank
attack." It was Sir Gaeton.
"My lord the King," Sir Robert heard his voice say, "is right in all but
one thing. If we allow the Egyptians to take us from the rear, there
will be no need for Saladin and his Turks to come down on our flank. And
the Hospitallers cannot hold for long at this rate. A charge at full
gallop would break the Egyptian line and give the Hospitallers breathing
time. Are you with me?"
"Against the orders of the King?"
"The King cannot see everything! There are times when a man must use his
own judgment! You said you were afraid of no man. Are you with me?"
After a moment's hesitation, Sir Gaeton couched his lance. "I'm with
you, sir knight! Live or die, I follow! Strike and strike hard!"
"Forward then!" Sir Robert heard himself shouting. "Forward for St.
George and for England!"
"St. George and England!" the Gascon echoed.
Two great war horses began to move ponderously forward toward the battle
lines, gaining momentum as they went. Moving in unison, the two knights,
their horses now at a fast trot, lowered their lances, picking their
Saracen targets with care. Larger and larger loomed the Egyptian
cavalrymen as the horses changed pace to a thundering gallop.
The Egyptians tried to dodge, as they saw, too late, the approach of the
Christian knights.
Sir Robert felt the shock against himself and his horse as the steel tip
of the long ash lance struck the Saracen horseman in the chest. Out of
the corner of his eye, he saw that Sir Gaeton, too, had scored.
The Saracen, impaled on Sir Robert's lance, shot from the saddle as he
died. His lighter armor had hardly impeded the incoming spear-point, and
now his body dragged it down as he dropped toward the desert sand.
Another Moslem cavalryman was charging in now, swinging his curved
saber, taking advantage of Sir Robert's sagging lance.
There was nothing else to do but drop the lance and draw his heavy
broadsword. His hand grasped it, and it came singing from its scabbard.
The Egyptian's curved sword clanged against Sir Robert's helm, setting
his head ringing. In return, the knight's broadsword came about in a
sweeping arc, and the Egyptian's horse rode on with the rider's headless
body.
Behind him, Sir Robert heard further cries of "St. George and England!"
The Hospitallers, taking heart at the charge, were going in! Behind them
came the Count of Champagne, the Earl of Leister, and the Bishop of
Beauvais, who carried a great warhammer in order that he might not break
Church Law by shedding blood.
Sir Robert's own sword rose and fell, cutting and hacking at the enemy.
He himself felt a dreamlike detachment, as though he were watching the
battle rather than participating in it.
But he could see that the Moslems were falling back before the Christian
onslaught.
And then, quite suddenly, there seemed to be no foeman to swing at.
Breathing heavily, Sir Robert sheathed his broadsword.
Beside him, Sir Gaeton did the same, saying: "It will be a few minutes
before they can regroup, sir knight. We may have routed them
completely."
"Aye. But King Richard will not approve of my breaking ranks and
disobeying orders. I may win the battle and lose my head in the end."
"This is no time to worry about the future," said the Gascon. "Rest for
a moment and relax, that you may be the stronger later. Here—have an
Old Kings
."
He had a pack of cigarettes in his gauntleted hand, which he profferred
to Sir Robert. There were three cigarettes protruding from it, one
slightly farther than the others. Sir Robert's hand reached out and took
that one.
"Thanks. When the going gets rough, I really enjoy an
Old Kings
."
He put one end of the cigarette in his mouth and lit the other from the
lighter in Sir Gaeton's hand.
"Yes, sir," said Sir Gaeton, after lighting his own cigarette, "
Old
Kings
are the greatest. They give a man real, deep-down smoking
pleasure."
"There's no doubt about it,
Old Kings
are a
man's
cigarette." Sir
Robert could feel the soothing smoke in his lungs as he inhaled deeply.
"That's great. When I want a cigarette, I don't want just
any
cigarette."
"Nor I," agreed the Gascon. "
Old Kings
is the only real cigarette when
you're doing a real
man's
work."
"That's for sure." Sir Robert watched a smoke ring expand in the air.
There was a sudden clash of arms off to their left. Sir Robert dropped
his cigarette to the ground. "The trouble is that doing a real he-man's
work doesn't always allow you to enjoy the fine, rich tobaccos of
Old
Kings
right down to the very end."
"No, but you can always light another later," said the Gascon knight.
King Richard, on seeing his army moving suddenly toward the harassed
rear, had realized the danger and had charged through the Hospitallers
to get into the thick of the fray. Now the Turks were charging down from
the hills, hitting—not the flank as he had expected, but the rear!
Saladin had expected him to hold fast!
Sir Robert and Sir Gaeton spurred their chargers toward the flapping
banner of England.
The fierce warrior-king of England, his mighty sword in hand, was
cutting down Turks as though they were grain-stalks, but still the
Saracen horde pressed on. More and more of the terrible Turks came
boiling down out of the hills, their glittering scimitars swinging.
Sir Robert lost all track of time. There was nothing to do but keep his
own great broadsword moving, swinging like some gigantic metronome as he
hacked down the Moslem foes.
And then, suddenly, he found himself surrounded by the Saracens! He was
isolated and alone, cut off from the rest of the Christian forces! He
glanced quickly around as he slashed another Saracen from pate to
breastbone. Where was Sir Gaeton? Where were the others? Where was the
red-and-gold banner of Richard?
He caught a glimpse of the fluttering banner far to the rear and started
to fall back.
And then he saw another knight nearby, a huge man who swung his
sparkling blade with power and force. On his steel helm gleamed a golden
coronet! Richard!
And the great king, in spite of his prowess was outnumbered heavily and
would, within seconds, be cut down by the Saracen horde!
Without hesitation, Sir Robert plunged his horse toward the surrounded
monarch, his great blade cutting a path before him.
He saw Richard go down, falling from the saddle of his charger, but by
that time his own sword was cutting into the screaming Saracens and
they had no time to attempt any further mischief to the King. They had
their hands full with Sir Robert de Bouain.
He did not know how long he fought there, holding his charger motionless
over the inert body of the fallen king, hewing down the screaming enemy,
but presently he heard the familiar cry of "For St. George and for
England" behind him. The Norman and English troops were charging in,
bringing with them the banner of England!
And then Richard was on his feet, cleaving the air about him with his
own broadsword. Its bright edge, besmeared with Saracen blood, was
biting viciously into the foe.
The Turks began to fall back. Within seconds, the Christian knights were
boiling around the embattled pair, forcing the Turks into retreat. And
for the second time, Sir Robert found himself with no one to fight.
And then a voice was saying: "You have done well this day, sir knight.
Richard Plantagenet will not forget."
Sir Robert turned in his saddle to face the smiling king.
"My lord king, be assured that I would never forget my loyalty to my
sovereign and liege lord. My sword and my life are yours whenever you
call."
King Richard's gauntleted hand grasped his own. "If it please God, I
shall never ask your life. An earldom awaits you when we return to
England, sir knight."
And then the king mounted his horse and was running full gallop after
the retreating Saracens.
Robert took off his helmet.
He blinked for a second to adjust his eyes to the relative dimness of
the studio. After the brightness of the desert that the televicarion
helmet had projected into his eyes, the studio seemed strangely
cavelike.
"How'd you like it, Bob?" asked one of the two producers of the show.
Robert Bowen nodded briskly and patted the televike helmet. "It was
O.K.," he said. "Good show. A little talky at the beginning, and it
needs a better fade-out, but the action scenes were fine. The sponsor
ought to like it—for a while, at least."
"What do you mean, 'for a while'?"
Robert Bowen sighed. "If this thing goes on the air the way it is, he'll
lose sales."
"Why? Commercial not good enough?"
"
Too
good! Man, I've smoked
Old Kings
, and, believe me, the real
thing never tasted as good as that cigarette did in the commercial!" | [
"The fact that the producers know different media would have been a better platform",
"The fact that Sir Robert only held one for a short time before dropping it, after saying how good it was",
"The fact that the cigarettes themselves are anachronistic",
"The fact that the producer actually works for a rival cigarette company"
] | 2 |
23960_9R8L8U1B_3 | Which is definitely true about why Sir Robert could not finish smoking the cigarette? | ... After a Few Words ...
by Seaton McKettrig
Illustrated by Summer
This is a science-fiction story. History is a science; the other
part is, as all Americans know, the most fictional field we have
today.
He settled himself comfortably in his seat, and carefully put the helmet
on, pulling it down firmly until it was properly seated. For a moment,
he could see nothing.
Then his hand moved up and, with a flick of the wrist, lifted the visor.
Ahead of him, in serried array, with lances erect and pennons flying,
was the forward part of the column. Far ahead, he knew, were the Knights
Templars, who had taken the advance. Behind the Templars rode the mailed
knights of Brittany and Anjou. These were followed by King Guy of
Jerusalem and the host of Poitou.
He himself, Sir Robert de Bouain, was riding with the Norman and English
troops, just behind the men of Poitou. Sir Robert turned slightly in his
saddle. To his right, he could see the brilliant red-and-gold banner of
the lion-hearted Richard of England—
gules, in pale three lions passant
guardant or
. Behind the standard-bearer, his great war horse moving
with a steady, measured pace, his coronet of gold on his steel helm
gleaming in the glaring desert sun, the lions of England on his
firm-held shield, was the King himself.
Further behind, the Knights Hospitallers protected the rear, guarding
the column of the hosts of Christendom from harassment by the Bedouins.
"By our Lady!" came a voice from his left. "Three days out from Acre,
and the accursed Saracens still elude us."
Sir Robert de Bouain twisted again in his saddle to look at the knight
riding alongside him. Sir Gaeton de l'Arc-Tombé sat tall and straight in
his saddle, his visor up, his blue eyes narrowed against the glare of
the sun.
Sir Robert's lips formed a smile. "They are not far off, Sir Gaeton.
They have been following us. As we march parallel to the seacoast, so
they have been marching with us in those hills to the east."
"Like the jackals they are," said Sir Gaeton. "They assail us from the
rear, and they set up traps in our path ahead. Our spies tell us that
the Turks lie ahead of us in countless numbers. And yet, they fear to
face us in open battle."
"Is it fear, or are they merely gathering their forces?"
"Both," said Sir Gaeton flatly. "They fear us, else they would not dally
to amass so fearsome a force. If, as our informers tell us, there are
uncounted Turks to the fore, and if, as we are aware, our rear is being
dogged by the Bedouin and the black horsemen of Egypt, it would seem
that Saladin has at hand more than enough to overcome us, were they all
truly Christian knights."
"Give them time. We must wait for their attack, sir knight. It were
foolhardy to attempt to seek them in their own hills, and yet they must
stop us. They will attack before we reach Jerusalem, fear not."
"We of Gascony fear no heathen Musselman," Sir Gaeton growled. "It's
this Hellish heat that is driving me mad." He pointed toward the eastern
hills. "The sun is yet low, and already the heat is unbearable."
Sir Robert heard his own laugh echo hollowly within his helmet. "Perhaps
'twere better to be mad when the assault comes. Madmen fight better than
men of cooler blood." He knew that the others were baking inside their
heavy armor, although he himself was not too uncomfortable.
Sir Gaeton looked at him with a smile that held both irony and respect.
"In truth, sir knight, it is apparent that you fear neither men nor
heat. Nor is your own blood too cool. True, I ride with your Normans and
your English and your King Richard of the Lion's Heart, but I am a
Gascon, and have sworn no fealty to him. But to side with the Duke of
Burgundy against King Richard—" He gave a short, barking laugh. "I
fear no man," he went on, "but if I had to fear one, it would be Richard
of England."
Sir Robert's voice came like a sword: steely, flat, cold, and sharp. "My
lord the King spoke in haste. He has reason to be bitter against Philip
of France, as do we all. Philip has deserted the field. He has returned
to France in haste, leaving the rest of us to fight the Saracen for the
Holy Land leaving only the contingent of his vassal the Duke of Burgundy
to remain with us."
"Richard of England has never been on the best of terms with Philip
Augustus," said Sir Gaeton.
"No, and with good cause. But he allowed his anger against Philip to
color his judgment when he spoke harshly against the Duke of Burgundy.
The Duke is no coward, and Richard Plantagenet well knows it. As I said,
he spoke in haste."
"And you intervened," said Sir Gaeton.
"It was my duty." Sir Robert's voice was stubborn. "Could we have
permitted a quarrel to develop between the two finest knights and
warleaders in Christendom at this crucial point? The desertion of Philip
of France has cost us dearly. Could we permit the desertion of Burgundy,
too?"
"You did what must be done in honor," the Gascon conceded, "but you have
not gained the love of Richard by doing so."
Sir Robert felt his jaw set firmly. "My king knows I am loyal."
Sir Gaeton said nothing more, but there was a look in his eyes that
showed that he felt that Richard of England might even doubt the loyalty
of Sir Robert de Bouain.
Sir Robert rode on in silence, feeling the movement of the horse beneath
him.
There was a sudden sound to the rear. Like a wash of the tide from the
sea came the sound of Saracen war cries and the clash of steel on steel
mingled with the sounds of horses in agony and anger.
Sir Robert turned his horse to look.
The Negro troops of Saladin's Egyptian contingent were thundering down
upon the rear! They clashed with the Hospitallers, slamming in like a
rain of heavy stones, too close in for the use of bows. There was only
the sword against armor, like the sound of a thousand hammers against a
thousand anvils.
"Stand fast! Stand fast! Hold them off!" It was the voice of King
Richard, sounding like a clarion over the din of battle.
Sir Robert felt his horse move, as though it were urging him on toward
the battle, but his hand held to the reins, keeping the great charger in
check. The King had said "Stand fast!" and this was no time to disobey
the orders of Richard.
The Saracen troops were coming in from the rear, and the Hospitallers
were taking the brunt of the charge. They fought like madmen, but they
were slowly being forced back.
The Master of the Hospitallers rode to the rear, to the King's standard,
which hardly moved in the still desert air, now that the column had
stopped moving.
The voice of the Duke of Burgundy came to Sir Robert's ears.
"Stand fast. The King bids you all to stand fast," said the duke, his
voice fading as he rode on up the column toward the knights of Poitou
and the Knights Templars.
The Master of the Hospitallers was speaking in a low, urgent voice to
the King: "My lord, we are pressed on by the enemy and in danger of
eternal infamy. We are losing our horses, one after the other!"
"Good Master," said Richard, "it is you who must sustain their attack.
No one can be everywhere at once."
The Master of the Hospitallers nodded curtly and charged back into the
fray.
The King turned to Sir Baldwin de Carreo, who sat ahorse nearby, and
pointed toward the eastern hills. "They will come from there, hitting us
in the flank; we cannot afford to amass a rearward charge. To do so
would be to fall directly into the hands of the Saracen."
A voice very close to Sir Robert said: "Richard is right. If we go to
the aid of the Hospitallers, we will expose the column to a flank
attack." It was Sir Gaeton.
"My lord the King," Sir Robert heard his voice say, "is right in all but
one thing. If we allow the Egyptians to take us from the rear, there
will be no need for Saladin and his Turks to come down on our flank. And
the Hospitallers cannot hold for long at this rate. A charge at full
gallop would break the Egyptian line and give the Hospitallers breathing
time. Are you with me?"
"Against the orders of the King?"
"The King cannot see everything! There are times when a man must use his
own judgment! You said you were afraid of no man. Are you with me?"
After a moment's hesitation, Sir Gaeton couched his lance. "I'm with
you, sir knight! Live or die, I follow! Strike and strike hard!"
"Forward then!" Sir Robert heard himself shouting. "Forward for St.
George and for England!"
"St. George and England!" the Gascon echoed.
Two great war horses began to move ponderously forward toward the battle
lines, gaining momentum as they went. Moving in unison, the two knights,
their horses now at a fast trot, lowered their lances, picking their
Saracen targets with care. Larger and larger loomed the Egyptian
cavalrymen as the horses changed pace to a thundering gallop.
The Egyptians tried to dodge, as they saw, too late, the approach of the
Christian knights.
Sir Robert felt the shock against himself and his horse as the steel tip
of the long ash lance struck the Saracen horseman in the chest. Out of
the corner of his eye, he saw that Sir Gaeton, too, had scored.
The Saracen, impaled on Sir Robert's lance, shot from the saddle as he
died. His lighter armor had hardly impeded the incoming spear-point, and
now his body dragged it down as he dropped toward the desert sand.
Another Moslem cavalryman was charging in now, swinging his curved
saber, taking advantage of Sir Robert's sagging lance.
There was nothing else to do but drop the lance and draw his heavy
broadsword. His hand grasped it, and it came singing from its scabbard.
The Egyptian's curved sword clanged against Sir Robert's helm, setting
his head ringing. In return, the knight's broadsword came about in a
sweeping arc, and the Egyptian's horse rode on with the rider's headless
body.
Behind him, Sir Robert heard further cries of "St. George and England!"
The Hospitallers, taking heart at the charge, were going in! Behind them
came the Count of Champagne, the Earl of Leister, and the Bishop of
Beauvais, who carried a great warhammer in order that he might not break
Church Law by shedding blood.
Sir Robert's own sword rose and fell, cutting and hacking at the enemy.
He himself felt a dreamlike detachment, as though he were watching the
battle rather than participating in it.
But he could see that the Moslems were falling back before the Christian
onslaught.
And then, quite suddenly, there seemed to be no foeman to swing at.
Breathing heavily, Sir Robert sheathed his broadsword.
Beside him, Sir Gaeton did the same, saying: "It will be a few minutes
before they can regroup, sir knight. We may have routed them
completely."
"Aye. But King Richard will not approve of my breaking ranks and
disobeying orders. I may win the battle and lose my head in the end."
"This is no time to worry about the future," said the Gascon. "Rest for
a moment and relax, that you may be the stronger later. Here—have an
Old Kings
."
He had a pack of cigarettes in his gauntleted hand, which he profferred
to Sir Robert. There were three cigarettes protruding from it, one
slightly farther than the others. Sir Robert's hand reached out and took
that one.
"Thanks. When the going gets rough, I really enjoy an
Old Kings
."
He put one end of the cigarette in his mouth and lit the other from the
lighter in Sir Gaeton's hand.
"Yes, sir," said Sir Gaeton, after lighting his own cigarette, "
Old
Kings
are the greatest. They give a man real, deep-down smoking
pleasure."
"There's no doubt about it,
Old Kings
are a
man's
cigarette." Sir
Robert could feel the soothing smoke in his lungs as he inhaled deeply.
"That's great. When I want a cigarette, I don't want just
any
cigarette."
"Nor I," agreed the Gascon. "
Old Kings
is the only real cigarette when
you're doing a real
man's
work."
"That's for sure." Sir Robert watched a smoke ring expand in the air.
There was a sudden clash of arms off to their left. Sir Robert dropped
his cigarette to the ground. "The trouble is that doing a real he-man's
work doesn't always allow you to enjoy the fine, rich tobaccos of
Old
Kings
right down to the very end."
"No, but you can always light another later," said the Gascon knight.
King Richard, on seeing his army moving suddenly toward the harassed
rear, had realized the danger and had charged through the Hospitallers
to get into the thick of the fray. Now the Turks were charging down from
the hills, hitting—not the flank as he had expected, but the rear!
Saladin had expected him to hold fast!
Sir Robert and Sir Gaeton spurred their chargers toward the flapping
banner of England.
The fierce warrior-king of England, his mighty sword in hand, was
cutting down Turks as though they were grain-stalks, but still the
Saracen horde pressed on. More and more of the terrible Turks came
boiling down out of the hills, their glittering scimitars swinging.
Sir Robert lost all track of time. There was nothing to do but keep his
own great broadsword moving, swinging like some gigantic metronome as he
hacked down the Moslem foes.
And then, suddenly, he found himself surrounded by the Saracens! He was
isolated and alone, cut off from the rest of the Christian forces! He
glanced quickly around as he slashed another Saracen from pate to
breastbone. Where was Sir Gaeton? Where were the others? Where was the
red-and-gold banner of Richard?
He caught a glimpse of the fluttering banner far to the rear and started
to fall back.
And then he saw another knight nearby, a huge man who swung his
sparkling blade with power and force. On his steel helm gleamed a golden
coronet! Richard!
And the great king, in spite of his prowess was outnumbered heavily and
would, within seconds, be cut down by the Saracen horde!
Without hesitation, Sir Robert plunged his horse toward the surrounded
monarch, his great blade cutting a path before him.
He saw Richard go down, falling from the saddle of his charger, but by
that time his own sword was cutting into the screaming Saracens and
they had no time to attempt any further mischief to the King. They had
their hands full with Sir Robert de Bouain.
He did not know how long he fought there, holding his charger motionless
over the inert body of the fallen king, hewing down the screaming enemy,
but presently he heard the familiar cry of "For St. George and for
England" behind him. The Norman and English troops were charging in,
bringing with them the banner of England!
And then Richard was on his feet, cleaving the air about him with his
own broadsword. Its bright edge, besmeared with Saracen blood, was
biting viciously into the foe.
The Turks began to fall back. Within seconds, the Christian knights were
boiling around the embattled pair, forcing the Turks into retreat. And
for the second time, Sir Robert found himself with no one to fight.
And then a voice was saying: "You have done well this day, sir knight.
Richard Plantagenet will not forget."
Sir Robert turned in his saddle to face the smiling king.
"My lord king, be assured that I would never forget my loyalty to my
sovereign and liege lord. My sword and my life are yours whenever you
call."
King Richard's gauntleted hand grasped his own. "If it please God, I
shall never ask your life. An earldom awaits you when we return to
England, sir knight."
And then the king mounted his horse and was running full gallop after
the retreating Saracens.
Robert took off his helmet.
He blinked for a second to adjust his eyes to the relative dimness of
the studio. After the brightness of the desert that the televicarion
helmet had projected into his eyes, the studio seemed strangely
cavelike.
"How'd you like it, Bob?" asked one of the two producers of the show.
Robert Bowen nodded briskly and patted the televike helmet. "It was
O.K.," he said. "Good show. A little talky at the beginning, and it
needs a better fade-out, but the action scenes were fine. The sponsor
ought to like it—for a while, at least."
"What do you mean, 'for a while'?"
Robert Bowen sighed. "If this thing goes on the air the way it is, he'll
lose sales."
"Why? Commercial not good enough?"
"
Too
good! Man, I've smoked
Old Kings
, and, believe me, the real
thing never tasted as good as that cigarette did in the commercial!" | [
"The company only paid for a short amount of airtime",
"He had to return to battle",
"It tasted disgusting and he did not want to finish it",
"They were prop cigarettes that hurt to use"
] | 1 |
23960_9R8L8U1B_4 | Why did Sir Robert decide to disobey the king's orders? | ... After a Few Words ...
by Seaton McKettrig
Illustrated by Summer
This is a science-fiction story. History is a science; the other
part is, as all Americans know, the most fictional field we have
today.
He settled himself comfortably in his seat, and carefully put the helmet
on, pulling it down firmly until it was properly seated. For a moment,
he could see nothing.
Then his hand moved up and, with a flick of the wrist, lifted the visor.
Ahead of him, in serried array, with lances erect and pennons flying,
was the forward part of the column. Far ahead, he knew, were the Knights
Templars, who had taken the advance. Behind the Templars rode the mailed
knights of Brittany and Anjou. These were followed by King Guy of
Jerusalem and the host of Poitou.
He himself, Sir Robert de Bouain, was riding with the Norman and English
troops, just behind the men of Poitou. Sir Robert turned slightly in his
saddle. To his right, he could see the brilliant red-and-gold banner of
the lion-hearted Richard of England—
gules, in pale three lions passant
guardant or
. Behind the standard-bearer, his great war horse moving
with a steady, measured pace, his coronet of gold on his steel helm
gleaming in the glaring desert sun, the lions of England on his
firm-held shield, was the King himself.
Further behind, the Knights Hospitallers protected the rear, guarding
the column of the hosts of Christendom from harassment by the Bedouins.
"By our Lady!" came a voice from his left. "Three days out from Acre,
and the accursed Saracens still elude us."
Sir Robert de Bouain twisted again in his saddle to look at the knight
riding alongside him. Sir Gaeton de l'Arc-Tombé sat tall and straight in
his saddle, his visor up, his blue eyes narrowed against the glare of
the sun.
Sir Robert's lips formed a smile. "They are not far off, Sir Gaeton.
They have been following us. As we march parallel to the seacoast, so
they have been marching with us in those hills to the east."
"Like the jackals they are," said Sir Gaeton. "They assail us from the
rear, and they set up traps in our path ahead. Our spies tell us that
the Turks lie ahead of us in countless numbers. And yet, they fear to
face us in open battle."
"Is it fear, or are they merely gathering their forces?"
"Both," said Sir Gaeton flatly. "They fear us, else they would not dally
to amass so fearsome a force. If, as our informers tell us, there are
uncounted Turks to the fore, and if, as we are aware, our rear is being
dogged by the Bedouin and the black horsemen of Egypt, it would seem
that Saladin has at hand more than enough to overcome us, were they all
truly Christian knights."
"Give them time. We must wait for their attack, sir knight. It were
foolhardy to attempt to seek them in their own hills, and yet they must
stop us. They will attack before we reach Jerusalem, fear not."
"We of Gascony fear no heathen Musselman," Sir Gaeton growled. "It's
this Hellish heat that is driving me mad." He pointed toward the eastern
hills. "The sun is yet low, and already the heat is unbearable."
Sir Robert heard his own laugh echo hollowly within his helmet. "Perhaps
'twere better to be mad when the assault comes. Madmen fight better than
men of cooler blood." He knew that the others were baking inside their
heavy armor, although he himself was not too uncomfortable.
Sir Gaeton looked at him with a smile that held both irony and respect.
"In truth, sir knight, it is apparent that you fear neither men nor
heat. Nor is your own blood too cool. True, I ride with your Normans and
your English and your King Richard of the Lion's Heart, but I am a
Gascon, and have sworn no fealty to him. But to side with the Duke of
Burgundy against King Richard—" He gave a short, barking laugh. "I
fear no man," he went on, "but if I had to fear one, it would be Richard
of England."
Sir Robert's voice came like a sword: steely, flat, cold, and sharp. "My
lord the King spoke in haste. He has reason to be bitter against Philip
of France, as do we all. Philip has deserted the field. He has returned
to France in haste, leaving the rest of us to fight the Saracen for the
Holy Land leaving only the contingent of his vassal the Duke of Burgundy
to remain with us."
"Richard of England has never been on the best of terms with Philip
Augustus," said Sir Gaeton.
"No, and with good cause. But he allowed his anger against Philip to
color his judgment when he spoke harshly against the Duke of Burgundy.
The Duke is no coward, and Richard Plantagenet well knows it. As I said,
he spoke in haste."
"And you intervened," said Sir Gaeton.
"It was my duty." Sir Robert's voice was stubborn. "Could we have
permitted a quarrel to develop between the two finest knights and
warleaders in Christendom at this crucial point? The desertion of Philip
of France has cost us dearly. Could we permit the desertion of Burgundy,
too?"
"You did what must be done in honor," the Gascon conceded, "but you have
not gained the love of Richard by doing so."
Sir Robert felt his jaw set firmly. "My king knows I am loyal."
Sir Gaeton said nothing more, but there was a look in his eyes that
showed that he felt that Richard of England might even doubt the loyalty
of Sir Robert de Bouain.
Sir Robert rode on in silence, feeling the movement of the horse beneath
him.
There was a sudden sound to the rear. Like a wash of the tide from the
sea came the sound of Saracen war cries and the clash of steel on steel
mingled with the sounds of horses in agony and anger.
Sir Robert turned his horse to look.
The Negro troops of Saladin's Egyptian contingent were thundering down
upon the rear! They clashed with the Hospitallers, slamming in like a
rain of heavy stones, too close in for the use of bows. There was only
the sword against armor, like the sound of a thousand hammers against a
thousand anvils.
"Stand fast! Stand fast! Hold them off!" It was the voice of King
Richard, sounding like a clarion over the din of battle.
Sir Robert felt his horse move, as though it were urging him on toward
the battle, but his hand held to the reins, keeping the great charger in
check. The King had said "Stand fast!" and this was no time to disobey
the orders of Richard.
The Saracen troops were coming in from the rear, and the Hospitallers
were taking the brunt of the charge. They fought like madmen, but they
were slowly being forced back.
The Master of the Hospitallers rode to the rear, to the King's standard,
which hardly moved in the still desert air, now that the column had
stopped moving.
The voice of the Duke of Burgundy came to Sir Robert's ears.
"Stand fast. The King bids you all to stand fast," said the duke, his
voice fading as he rode on up the column toward the knights of Poitou
and the Knights Templars.
The Master of the Hospitallers was speaking in a low, urgent voice to
the King: "My lord, we are pressed on by the enemy and in danger of
eternal infamy. We are losing our horses, one after the other!"
"Good Master," said Richard, "it is you who must sustain their attack.
No one can be everywhere at once."
The Master of the Hospitallers nodded curtly and charged back into the
fray.
The King turned to Sir Baldwin de Carreo, who sat ahorse nearby, and
pointed toward the eastern hills. "They will come from there, hitting us
in the flank; we cannot afford to amass a rearward charge. To do so
would be to fall directly into the hands of the Saracen."
A voice very close to Sir Robert said: "Richard is right. If we go to
the aid of the Hospitallers, we will expose the column to a flank
attack." It was Sir Gaeton.
"My lord the King," Sir Robert heard his voice say, "is right in all but
one thing. If we allow the Egyptians to take us from the rear, there
will be no need for Saladin and his Turks to come down on our flank. And
the Hospitallers cannot hold for long at this rate. A charge at full
gallop would break the Egyptian line and give the Hospitallers breathing
time. Are you with me?"
"Against the orders of the King?"
"The King cannot see everything! There are times when a man must use his
own judgment! You said you were afraid of no man. Are you with me?"
After a moment's hesitation, Sir Gaeton couched his lance. "I'm with
you, sir knight! Live or die, I follow! Strike and strike hard!"
"Forward then!" Sir Robert heard himself shouting. "Forward for St.
George and for England!"
"St. George and England!" the Gascon echoed.
Two great war horses began to move ponderously forward toward the battle
lines, gaining momentum as they went. Moving in unison, the two knights,
their horses now at a fast trot, lowered their lances, picking their
Saracen targets with care. Larger and larger loomed the Egyptian
cavalrymen as the horses changed pace to a thundering gallop.
The Egyptians tried to dodge, as they saw, too late, the approach of the
Christian knights.
Sir Robert felt the shock against himself and his horse as the steel tip
of the long ash lance struck the Saracen horseman in the chest. Out of
the corner of his eye, he saw that Sir Gaeton, too, had scored.
The Saracen, impaled on Sir Robert's lance, shot from the saddle as he
died. His lighter armor had hardly impeded the incoming spear-point, and
now his body dragged it down as he dropped toward the desert sand.
Another Moslem cavalryman was charging in now, swinging his curved
saber, taking advantage of Sir Robert's sagging lance.
There was nothing else to do but drop the lance and draw his heavy
broadsword. His hand grasped it, and it came singing from its scabbard.
The Egyptian's curved sword clanged against Sir Robert's helm, setting
his head ringing. In return, the knight's broadsword came about in a
sweeping arc, and the Egyptian's horse rode on with the rider's headless
body.
Behind him, Sir Robert heard further cries of "St. George and England!"
The Hospitallers, taking heart at the charge, were going in! Behind them
came the Count of Champagne, the Earl of Leister, and the Bishop of
Beauvais, who carried a great warhammer in order that he might not break
Church Law by shedding blood.
Sir Robert's own sword rose and fell, cutting and hacking at the enemy.
He himself felt a dreamlike detachment, as though he were watching the
battle rather than participating in it.
But he could see that the Moslems were falling back before the Christian
onslaught.
And then, quite suddenly, there seemed to be no foeman to swing at.
Breathing heavily, Sir Robert sheathed his broadsword.
Beside him, Sir Gaeton did the same, saying: "It will be a few minutes
before they can regroup, sir knight. We may have routed them
completely."
"Aye. But King Richard will not approve of my breaking ranks and
disobeying orders. I may win the battle and lose my head in the end."
"This is no time to worry about the future," said the Gascon. "Rest for
a moment and relax, that you may be the stronger later. Here—have an
Old Kings
."
He had a pack of cigarettes in his gauntleted hand, which he profferred
to Sir Robert. There were three cigarettes protruding from it, one
slightly farther than the others. Sir Robert's hand reached out and took
that one.
"Thanks. When the going gets rough, I really enjoy an
Old Kings
."
He put one end of the cigarette in his mouth and lit the other from the
lighter in Sir Gaeton's hand.
"Yes, sir," said Sir Gaeton, after lighting his own cigarette, "
Old
Kings
are the greatest. They give a man real, deep-down smoking
pleasure."
"There's no doubt about it,
Old Kings
are a
man's
cigarette." Sir
Robert could feel the soothing smoke in his lungs as he inhaled deeply.
"That's great. When I want a cigarette, I don't want just
any
cigarette."
"Nor I," agreed the Gascon. "
Old Kings
is the only real cigarette when
you're doing a real
man's
work."
"That's for sure." Sir Robert watched a smoke ring expand in the air.
There was a sudden clash of arms off to their left. Sir Robert dropped
his cigarette to the ground. "The trouble is that doing a real he-man's
work doesn't always allow you to enjoy the fine, rich tobaccos of
Old
Kings
right down to the very end."
"No, but you can always light another later," said the Gascon knight.
King Richard, on seeing his army moving suddenly toward the harassed
rear, had realized the danger and had charged through the Hospitallers
to get into the thick of the fray. Now the Turks were charging down from
the hills, hitting—not the flank as he had expected, but the rear!
Saladin had expected him to hold fast!
Sir Robert and Sir Gaeton spurred their chargers toward the flapping
banner of England.
The fierce warrior-king of England, his mighty sword in hand, was
cutting down Turks as though they were grain-stalks, but still the
Saracen horde pressed on. More and more of the terrible Turks came
boiling down out of the hills, their glittering scimitars swinging.
Sir Robert lost all track of time. There was nothing to do but keep his
own great broadsword moving, swinging like some gigantic metronome as he
hacked down the Moslem foes.
And then, suddenly, he found himself surrounded by the Saracens! He was
isolated and alone, cut off from the rest of the Christian forces! He
glanced quickly around as he slashed another Saracen from pate to
breastbone. Where was Sir Gaeton? Where were the others? Where was the
red-and-gold banner of Richard?
He caught a glimpse of the fluttering banner far to the rear and started
to fall back.
And then he saw another knight nearby, a huge man who swung his
sparkling blade with power and force. On his steel helm gleamed a golden
coronet! Richard!
And the great king, in spite of his prowess was outnumbered heavily and
would, within seconds, be cut down by the Saracen horde!
Without hesitation, Sir Robert plunged his horse toward the surrounded
monarch, his great blade cutting a path before him.
He saw Richard go down, falling from the saddle of his charger, but by
that time his own sword was cutting into the screaming Saracens and
they had no time to attempt any further mischief to the King. They had
their hands full with Sir Robert de Bouain.
He did not know how long he fought there, holding his charger motionless
over the inert body of the fallen king, hewing down the screaming enemy,
but presently he heard the familiar cry of "For St. George and for
England" behind him. The Norman and English troops were charging in,
bringing with them the banner of England!
And then Richard was on his feet, cleaving the air about him with his
own broadsword. Its bright edge, besmeared with Saracen blood, was
biting viciously into the foe.
The Turks began to fall back. Within seconds, the Christian knights were
boiling around the embattled pair, forcing the Turks into retreat. And
for the second time, Sir Robert found himself with no one to fight.
And then a voice was saying: "You have done well this day, sir knight.
Richard Plantagenet will not forget."
Sir Robert turned in his saddle to face the smiling king.
"My lord king, be assured that I would never forget my loyalty to my
sovereign and liege lord. My sword and my life are yours whenever you
call."
King Richard's gauntleted hand grasped his own. "If it please God, I
shall never ask your life. An earldom awaits you when we return to
England, sir knight."
And then the king mounted his horse and was running full gallop after
the retreating Saracens.
Robert took off his helmet.
He blinked for a second to adjust his eyes to the relative dimness of
the studio. After the brightness of the desert that the televicarion
helmet had projected into his eyes, the studio seemed strangely
cavelike.
"How'd you like it, Bob?" asked one of the two producers of the show.
Robert Bowen nodded briskly and patted the televike helmet. "It was
O.K.," he said. "Good show. A little talky at the beginning, and it
needs a better fade-out, but the action scenes were fine. The sponsor
ought to like it—for a while, at least."
"What do you mean, 'for a while'?"
Robert Bowen sighed. "If this thing goes on the air the way it is, he'll
lose sales."
"Why? Commercial not good enough?"
"
Too
good! Man, I've smoked
Old Kings
, and, believe me, the real
thing never tasted as good as that cigarette did in the commercial!" | [
"It is the only way to get back at France",
"He is going to get chased out",
"He is trying to protect his fellow knights",
"He realizes following orders will mean his death"
] | 2 |
23960_9R8L8U1B_5 | What is Robert's relationship with loyalty? | ... After a Few Words ...
by Seaton McKettrig
Illustrated by Summer
This is a science-fiction story. History is a science; the other
part is, as all Americans know, the most fictional field we have
today.
He settled himself comfortably in his seat, and carefully put the helmet
on, pulling it down firmly until it was properly seated. For a moment,
he could see nothing.
Then his hand moved up and, with a flick of the wrist, lifted the visor.
Ahead of him, in serried array, with lances erect and pennons flying,
was the forward part of the column. Far ahead, he knew, were the Knights
Templars, who had taken the advance. Behind the Templars rode the mailed
knights of Brittany and Anjou. These were followed by King Guy of
Jerusalem and the host of Poitou.
He himself, Sir Robert de Bouain, was riding with the Norman and English
troops, just behind the men of Poitou. Sir Robert turned slightly in his
saddle. To his right, he could see the brilliant red-and-gold banner of
the lion-hearted Richard of England—
gules, in pale three lions passant
guardant or
. Behind the standard-bearer, his great war horse moving
with a steady, measured pace, his coronet of gold on his steel helm
gleaming in the glaring desert sun, the lions of England on his
firm-held shield, was the King himself.
Further behind, the Knights Hospitallers protected the rear, guarding
the column of the hosts of Christendom from harassment by the Bedouins.
"By our Lady!" came a voice from his left. "Three days out from Acre,
and the accursed Saracens still elude us."
Sir Robert de Bouain twisted again in his saddle to look at the knight
riding alongside him. Sir Gaeton de l'Arc-Tombé sat tall and straight in
his saddle, his visor up, his blue eyes narrowed against the glare of
the sun.
Sir Robert's lips formed a smile. "They are not far off, Sir Gaeton.
They have been following us. As we march parallel to the seacoast, so
they have been marching with us in those hills to the east."
"Like the jackals they are," said Sir Gaeton. "They assail us from the
rear, and they set up traps in our path ahead. Our spies tell us that
the Turks lie ahead of us in countless numbers. And yet, they fear to
face us in open battle."
"Is it fear, or are they merely gathering their forces?"
"Both," said Sir Gaeton flatly. "They fear us, else they would not dally
to amass so fearsome a force. If, as our informers tell us, there are
uncounted Turks to the fore, and if, as we are aware, our rear is being
dogged by the Bedouin and the black horsemen of Egypt, it would seem
that Saladin has at hand more than enough to overcome us, were they all
truly Christian knights."
"Give them time. We must wait for their attack, sir knight. It were
foolhardy to attempt to seek them in their own hills, and yet they must
stop us. They will attack before we reach Jerusalem, fear not."
"We of Gascony fear no heathen Musselman," Sir Gaeton growled. "It's
this Hellish heat that is driving me mad." He pointed toward the eastern
hills. "The sun is yet low, and already the heat is unbearable."
Sir Robert heard his own laugh echo hollowly within his helmet. "Perhaps
'twere better to be mad when the assault comes. Madmen fight better than
men of cooler blood." He knew that the others were baking inside their
heavy armor, although he himself was not too uncomfortable.
Sir Gaeton looked at him with a smile that held both irony and respect.
"In truth, sir knight, it is apparent that you fear neither men nor
heat. Nor is your own blood too cool. True, I ride with your Normans and
your English and your King Richard of the Lion's Heart, but I am a
Gascon, and have sworn no fealty to him. But to side with the Duke of
Burgundy against King Richard—" He gave a short, barking laugh. "I
fear no man," he went on, "but if I had to fear one, it would be Richard
of England."
Sir Robert's voice came like a sword: steely, flat, cold, and sharp. "My
lord the King spoke in haste. He has reason to be bitter against Philip
of France, as do we all. Philip has deserted the field. He has returned
to France in haste, leaving the rest of us to fight the Saracen for the
Holy Land leaving only the contingent of his vassal the Duke of Burgundy
to remain with us."
"Richard of England has never been on the best of terms with Philip
Augustus," said Sir Gaeton.
"No, and with good cause. But he allowed his anger against Philip to
color his judgment when he spoke harshly against the Duke of Burgundy.
The Duke is no coward, and Richard Plantagenet well knows it. As I said,
he spoke in haste."
"And you intervened," said Sir Gaeton.
"It was my duty." Sir Robert's voice was stubborn. "Could we have
permitted a quarrel to develop between the two finest knights and
warleaders in Christendom at this crucial point? The desertion of Philip
of France has cost us dearly. Could we permit the desertion of Burgundy,
too?"
"You did what must be done in honor," the Gascon conceded, "but you have
not gained the love of Richard by doing so."
Sir Robert felt his jaw set firmly. "My king knows I am loyal."
Sir Gaeton said nothing more, but there was a look in his eyes that
showed that he felt that Richard of England might even doubt the loyalty
of Sir Robert de Bouain.
Sir Robert rode on in silence, feeling the movement of the horse beneath
him.
There was a sudden sound to the rear. Like a wash of the tide from the
sea came the sound of Saracen war cries and the clash of steel on steel
mingled with the sounds of horses in agony and anger.
Sir Robert turned his horse to look.
The Negro troops of Saladin's Egyptian contingent were thundering down
upon the rear! They clashed with the Hospitallers, slamming in like a
rain of heavy stones, too close in for the use of bows. There was only
the sword against armor, like the sound of a thousand hammers against a
thousand anvils.
"Stand fast! Stand fast! Hold them off!" It was the voice of King
Richard, sounding like a clarion over the din of battle.
Sir Robert felt his horse move, as though it were urging him on toward
the battle, but his hand held to the reins, keeping the great charger in
check. The King had said "Stand fast!" and this was no time to disobey
the orders of Richard.
The Saracen troops were coming in from the rear, and the Hospitallers
were taking the brunt of the charge. They fought like madmen, but they
were slowly being forced back.
The Master of the Hospitallers rode to the rear, to the King's standard,
which hardly moved in the still desert air, now that the column had
stopped moving.
The voice of the Duke of Burgundy came to Sir Robert's ears.
"Stand fast. The King bids you all to stand fast," said the duke, his
voice fading as he rode on up the column toward the knights of Poitou
and the Knights Templars.
The Master of the Hospitallers was speaking in a low, urgent voice to
the King: "My lord, we are pressed on by the enemy and in danger of
eternal infamy. We are losing our horses, one after the other!"
"Good Master," said Richard, "it is you who must sustain their attack.
No one can be everywhere at once."
The Master of the Hospitallers nodded curtly and charged back into the
fray.
The King turned to Sir Baldwin de Carreo, who sat ahorse nearby, and
pointed toward the eastern hills. "They will come from there, hitting us
in the flank; we cannot afford to amass a rearward charge. To do so
would be to fall directly into the hands of the Saracen."
A voice very close to Sir Robert said: "Richard is right. If we go to
the aid of the Hospitallers, we will expose the column to a flank
attack." It was Sir Gaeton.
"My lord the King," Sir Robert heard his voice say, "is right in all but
one thing. If we allow the Egyptians to take us from the rear, there
will be no need for Saladin and his Turks to come down on our flank. And
the Hospitallers cannot hold for long at this rate. A charge at full
gallop would break the Egyptian line and give the Hospitallers breathing
time. Are you with me?"
"Against the orders of the King?"
"The King cannot see everything! There are times when a man must use his
own judgment! You said you were afraid of no man. Are you with me?"
After a moment's hesitation, Sir Gaeton couched his lance. "I'm with
you, sir knight! Live or die, I follow! Strike and strike hard!"
"Forward then!" Sir Robert heard himself shouting. "Forward for St.
George and for England!"
"St. George and England!" the Gascon echoed.
Two great war horses began to move ponderously forward toward the battle
lines, gaining momentum as they went. Moving in unison, the two knights,
their horses now at a fast trot, lowered their lances, picking their
Saracen targets with care. Larger and larger loomed the Egyptian
cavalrymen as the horses changed pace to a thundering gallop.
The Egyptians tried to dodge, as they saw, too late, the approach of the
Christian knights.
Sir Robert felt the shock against himself and his horse as the steel tip
of the long ash lance struck the Saracen horseman in the chest. Out of
the corner of his eye, he saw that Sir Gaeton, too, had scored.
The Saracen, impaled on Sir Robert's lance, shot from the saddle as he
died. His lighter armor had hardly impeded the incoming spear-point, and
now his body dragged it down as he dropped toward the desert sand.
Another Moslem cavalryman was charging in now, swinging his curved
saber, taking advantage of Sir Robert's sagging lance.
There was nothing else to do but drop the lance and draw his heavy
broadsword. His hand grasped it, and it came singing from its scabbard.
The Egyptian's curved sword clanged against Sir Robert's helm, setting
his head ringing. In return, the knight's broadsword came about in a
sweeping arc, and the Egyptian's horse rode on with the rider's headless
body.
Behind him, Sir Robert heard further cries of "St. George and England!"
The Hospitallers, taking heart at the charge, were going in! Behind them
came the Count of Champagne, the Earl of Leister, and the Bishop of
Beauvais, who carried a great warhammer in order that he might not break
Church Law by shedding blood.
Sir Robert's own sword rose and fell, cutting and hacking at the enemy.
He himself felt a dreamlike detachment, as though he were watching the
battle rather than participating in it.
But he could see that the Moslems were falling back before the Christian
onslaught.
And then, quite suddenly, there seemed to be no foeman to swing at.
Breathing heavily, Sir Robert sheathed his broadsword.
Beside him, Sir Gaeton did the same, saying: "It will be a few minutes
before they can regroup, sir knight. We may have routed them
completely."
"Aye. But King Richard will not approve of my breaking ranks and
disobeying orders. I may win the battle and lose my head in the end."
"This is no time to worry about the future," said the Gascon. "Rest for
a moment and relax, that you may be the stronger later. Here—have an
Old Kings
."
He had a pack of cigarettes in his gauntleted hand, which he profferred
to Sir Robert. There were three cigarettes protruding from it, one
slightly farther than the others. Sir Robert's hand reached out and took
that one.
"Thanks. When the going gets rough, I really enjoy an
Old Kings
."
He put one end of the cigarette in his mouth and lit the other from the
lighter in Sir Gaeton's hand.
"Yes, sir," said Sir Gaeton, after lighting his own cigarette, "
Old
Kings
are the greatest. They give a man real, deep-down smoking
pleasure."
"There's no doubt about it,
Old Kings
are a
man's
cigarette." Sir
Robert could feel the soothing smoke in his lungs as he inhaled deeply.
"That's great. When I want a cigarette, I don't want just
any
cigarette."
"Nor I," agreed the Gascon. "
Old Kings
is the only real cigarette when
you're doing a real
man's
work."
"That's for sure." Sir Robert watched a smoke ring expand in the air.
There was a sudden clash of arms off to their left. Sir Robert dropped
his cigarette to the ground. "The trouble is that doing a real he-man's
work doesn't always allow you to enjoy the fine, rich tobaccos of
Old
Kings
right down to the very end."
"No, but you can always light another later," said the Gascon knight.
King Richard, on seeing his army moving suddenly toward the harassed
rear, had realized the danger and had charged through the Hospitallers
to get into the thick of the fray. Now the Turks were charging down from
the hills, hitting—not the flank as he had expected, but the rear!
Saladin had expected him to hold fast!
Sir Robert and Sir Gaeton spurred their chargers toward the flapping
banner of England.
The fierce warrior-king of England, his mighty sword in hand, was
cutting down Turks as though they were grain-stalks, but still the
Saracen horde pressed on. More and more of the terrible Turks came
boiling down out of the hills, their glittering scimitars swinging.
Sir Robert lost all track of time. There was nothing to do but keep his
own great broadsword moving, swinging like some gigantic metronome as he
hacked down the Moslem foes.
And then, suddenly, he found himself surrounded by the Saracens! He was
isolated and alone, cut off from the rest of the Christian forces! He
glanced quickly around as he slashed another Saracen from pate to
breastbone. Where was Sir Gaeton? Where were the others? Where was the
red-and-gold banner of Richard?
He caught a glimpse of the fluttering banner far to the rear and started
to fall back.
And then he saw another knight nearby, a huge man who swung his
sparkling blade with power and force. On his steel helm gleamed a golden
coronet! Richard!
And the great king, in spite of his prowess was outnumbered heavily and
would, within seconds, be cut down by the Saracen horde!
Without hesitation, Sir Robert plunged his horse toward the surrounded
monarch, his great blade cutting a path before him.
He saw Richard go down, falling from the saddle of his charger, but by
that time his own sword was cutting into the screaming Saracens and
they had no time to attempt any further mischief to the King. They had
their hands full with Sir Robert de Bouain.
He did not know how long he fought there, holding his charger motionless
over the inert body of the fallen king, hewing down the screaming enemy,
but presently he heard the familiar cry of "For St. George and for
England" behind him. The Norman and English troops were charging in,
bringing with them the banner of England!
And then Richard was on his feet, cleaving the air about him with his
own broadsword. Its bright edge, besmeared with Saracen blood, was
biting viciously into the foe.
The Turks began to fall back. Within seconds, the Christian knights were
boiling around the embattled pair, forcing the Turks into retreat. And
for the second time, Sir Robert found himself with no one to fight.
And then a voice was saying: "You have done well this day, sir knight.
Richard Plantagenet will not forget."
Sir Robert turned in his saddle to face the smiling king.
"My lord king, be assured that I would never forget my loyalty to my
sovereign and liege lord. My sword and my life are yours whenever you
call."
King Richard's gauntleted hand grasped his own. "If it please God, I
shall never ask your life. An earldom awaits you when we return to
England, sir knight."
And then the king mounted his horse and was running full gallop after
the retreating Saracens.
Robert took off his helmet.
He blinked for a second to adjust his eyes to the relative dimness of
the studio. After the brightness of the desert that the televicarion
helmet had projected into his eyes, the studio seemed strangely
cavelike.
"How'd you like it, Bob?" asked one of the two producers of the show.
Robert Bowen nodded briskly and patted the televike helmet. "It was
O.K.," he said. "Good show. A little talky at the beginning, and it
needs a better fade-out, but the action scenes were fine. The sponsor
ought to like it—for a while, at least."
"What do you mean, 'for a while'?"
Robert Bowen sighed. "If this thing goes on the air the way it is, he'll
lose sales."
"Why? Commercial not good enough?"
"
Too
good! Man, I've smoked
Old Kings
, and, believe me, the real
thing never tasted as good as that cigarette did in the commercial!" | [
"He is loyal to his crown but makes his own decisions",
"He is loyal to a small group but not to his country",
"He tries to hide his disloyalty to the crown",
"He is staunchly loyal and always obeys orders"
] | 0 |
23960_9R8L8U1B_6 | Gascon ___ Sir Robert | ... After a Few Words ...
by Seaton McKettrig
Illustrated by Summer
This is a science-fiction story. History is a science; the other
part is, as all Americans know, the most fictional field we have
today.
He settled himself comfortably in his seat, and carefully put the helmet
on, pulling it down firmly until it was properly seated. For a moment,
he could see nothing.
Then his hand moved up and, with a flick of the wrist, lifted the visor.
Ahead of him, in serried array, with lances erect and pennons flying,
was the forward part of the column. Far ahead, he knew, were the Knights
Templars, who had taken the advance. Behind the Templars rode the mailed
knights of Brittany and Anjou. These were followed by King Guy of
Jerusalem and the host of Poitou.
He himself, Sir Robert de Bouain, was riding with the Norman and English
troops, just behind the men of Poitou. Sir Robert turned slightly in his
saddle. To his right, he could see the brilliant red-and-gold banner of
the lion-hearted Richard of England—
gules, in pale three lions passant
guardant or
. Behind the standard-bearer, his great war horse moving
with a steady, measured pace, his coronet of gold on his steel helm
gleaming in the glaring desert sun, the lions of England on his
firm-held shield, was the King himself.
Further behind, the Knights Hospitallers protected the rear, guarding
the column of the hosts of Christendom from harassment by the Bedouins.
"By our Lady!" came a voice from his left. "Three days out from Acre,
and the accursed Saracens still elude us."
Sir Robert de Bouain twisted again in his saddle to look at the knight
riding alongside him. Sir Gaeton de l'Arc-Tombé sat tall and straight in
his saddle, his visor up, his blue eyes narrowed against the glare of
the sun.
Sir Robert's lips formed a smile. "They are not far off, Sir Gaeton.
They have been following us. As we march parallel to the seacoast, so
they have been marching with us in those hills to the east."
"Like the jackals they are," said Sir Gaeton. "They assail us from the
rear, and they set up traps in our path ahead. Our spies tell us that
the Turks lie ahead of us in countless numbers. And yet, they fear to
face us in open battle."
"Is it fear, or are they merely gathering their forces?"
"Both," said Sir Gaeton flatly. "They fear us, else they would not dally
to amass so fearsome a force. If, as our informers tell us, there are
uncounted Turks to the fore, and if, as we are aware, our rear is being
dogged by the Bedouin and the black horsemen of Egypt, it would seem
that Saladin has at hand more than enough to overcome us, were they all
truly Christian knights."
"Give them time. We must wait for their attack, sir knight. It were
foolhardy to attempt to seek them in their own hills, and yet they must
stop us. They will attack before we reach Jerusalem, fear not."
"We of Gascony fear no heathen Musselman," Sir Gaeton growled. "It's
this Hellish heat that is driving me mad." He pointed toward the eastern
hills. "The sun is yet low, and already the heat is unbearable."
Sir Robert heard his own laugh echo hollowly within his helmet. "Perhaps
'twere better to be mad when the assault comes. Madmen fight better than
men of cooler blood." He knew that the others were baking inside their
heavy armor, although he himself was not too uncomfortable.
Sir Gaeton looked at him with a smile that held both irony and respect.
"In truth, sir knight, it is apparent that you fear neither men nor
heat. Nor is your own blood too cool. True, I ride with your Normans and
your English and your King Richard of the Lion's Heart, but I am a
Gascon, and have sworn no fealty to him. But to side with the Duke of
Burgundy against King Richard—" He gave a short, barking laugh. "I
fear no man," he went on, "but if I had to fear one, it would be Richard
of England."
Sir Robert's voice came like a sword: steely, flat, cold, and sharp. "My
lord the King spoke in haste. He has reason to be bitter against Philip
of France, as do we all. Philip has deserted the field. He has returned
to France in haste, leaving the rest of us to fight the Saracen for the
Holy Land leaving only the contingent of his vassal the Duke of Burgundy
to remain with us."
"Richard of England has never been on the best of terms with Philip
Augustus," said Sir Gaeton.
"No, and with good cause. But he allowed his anger against Philip to
color his judgment when he spoke harshly against the Duke of Burgundy.
The Duke is no coward, and Richard Plantagenet well knows it. As I said,
he spoke in haste."
"And you intervened," said Sir Gaeton.
"It was my duty." Sir Robert's voice was stubborn. "Could we have
permitted a quarrel to develop between the two finest knights and
warleaders in Christendom at this crucial point? The desertion of Philip
of France has cost us dearly. Could we permit the desertion of Burgundy,
too?"
"You did what must be done in honor," the Gascon conceded, "but you have
not gained the love of Richard by doing so."
Sir Robert felt his jaw set firmly. "My king knows I am loyal."
Sir Gaeton said nothing more, but there was a look in his eyes that
showed that he felt that Richard of England might even doubt the loyalty
of Sir Robert de Bouain.
Sir Robert rode on in silence, feeling the movement of the horse beneath
him.
There was a sudden sound to the rear. Like a wash of the tide from the
sea came the sound of Saracen war cries and the clash of steel on steel
mingled with the sounds of horses in agony and anger.
Sir Robert turned his horse to look.
The Negro troops of Saladin's Egyptian contingent were thundering down
upon the rear! They clashed with the Hospitallers, slamming in like a
rain of heavy stones, too close in for the use of bows. There was only
the sword against armor, like the sound of a thousand hammers against a
thousand anvils.
"Stand fast! Stand fast! Hold them off!" It was the voice of King
Richard, sounding like a clarion over the din of battle.
Sir Robert felt his horse move, as though it were urging him on toward
the battle, but his hand held to the reins, keeping the great charger in
check. The King had said "Stand fast!" and this was no time to disobey
the orders of Richard.
The Saracen troops were coming in from the rear, and the Hospitallers
were taking the brunt of the charge. They fought like madmen, but they
were slowly being forced back.
The Master of the Hospitallers rode to the rear, to the King's standard,
which hardly moved in the still desert air, now that the column had
stopped moving.
The voice of the Duke of Burgundy came to Sir Robert's ears.
"Stand fast. The King bids you all to stand fast," said the duke, his
voice fading as he rode on up the column toward the knights of Poitou
and the Knights Templars.
The Master of the Hospitallers was speaking in a low, urgent voice to
the King: "My lord, we are pressed on by the enemy and in danger of
eternal infamy. We are losing our horses, one after the other!"
"Good Master," said Richard, "it is you who must sustain their attack.
No one can be everywhere at once."
The Master of the Hospitallers nodded curtly and charged back into the
fray.
The King turned to Sir Baldwin de Carreo, who sat ahorse nearby, and
pointed toward the eastern hills. "They will come from there, hitting us
in the flank; we cannot afford to amass a rearward charge. To do so
would be to fall directly into the hands of the Saracen."
A voice very close to Sir Robert said: "Richard is right. If we go to
the aid of the Hospitallers, we will expose the column to a flank
attack." It was Sir Gaeton.
"My lord the King," Sir Robert heard his voice say, "is right in all but
one thing. If we allow the Egyptians to take us from the rear, there
will be no need for Saladin and his Turks to come down on our flank. And
the Hospitallers cannot hold for long at this rate. A charge at full
gallop would break the Egyptian line and give the Hospitallers breathing
time. Are you with me?"
"Against the orders of the King?"
"The King cannot see everything! There are times when a man must use his
own judgment! You said you were afraid of no man. Are you with me?"
After a moment's hesitation, Sir Gaeton couched his lance. "I'm with
you, sir knight! Live or die, I follow! Strike and strike hard!"
"Forward then!" Sir Robert heard himself shouting. "Forward for St.
George and for England!"
"St. George and England!" the Gascon echoed.
Two great war horses began to move ponderously forward toward the battle
lines, gaining momentum as they went. Moving in unison, the two knights,
their horses now at a fast trot, lowered their lances, picking their
Saracen targets with care. Larger and larger loomed the Egyptian
cavalrymen as the horses changed pace to a thundering gallop.
The Egyptians tried to dodge, as they saw, too late, the approach of the
Christian knights.
Sir Robert felt the shock against himself and his horse as the steel tip
of the long ash lance struck the Saracen horseman in the chest. Out of
the corner of his eye, he saw that Sir Gaeton, too, had scored.
The Saracen, impaled on Sir Robert's lance, shot from the saddle as he
died. His lighter armor had hardly impeded the incoming spear-point, and
now his body dragged it down as he dropped toward the desert sand.
Another Moslem cavalryman was charging in now, swinging his curved
saber, taking advantage of Sir Robert's sagging lance.
There was nothing else to do but drop the lance and draw his heavy
broadsword. His hand grasped it, and it came singing from its scabbard.
The Egyptian's curved sword clanged against Sir Robert's helm, setting
his head ringing. In return, the knight's broadsword came about in a
sweeping arc, and the Egyptian's horse rode on with the rider's headless
body.
Behind him, Sir Robert heard further cries of "St. George and England!"
The Hospitallers, taking heart at the charge, were going in! Behind them
came the Count of Champagne, the Earl of Leister, and the Bishop of
Beauvais, who carried a great warhammer in order that he might not break
Church Law by shedding blood.
Sir Robert's own sword rose and fell, cutting and hacking at the enemy.
He himself felt a dreamlike detachment, as though he were watching the
battle rather than participating in it.
But he could see that the Moslems were falling back before the Christian
onslaught.
And then, quite suddenly, there seemed to be no foeman to swing at.
Breathing heavily, Sir Robert sheathed his broadsword.
Beside him, Sir Gaeton did the same, saying: "It will be a few minutes
before they can regroup, sir knight. We may have routed them
completely."
"Aye. But King Richard will not approve of my breaking ranks and
disobeying orders. I may win the battle and lose my head in the end."
"This is no time to worry about the future," said the Gascon. "Rest for
a moment and relax, that you may be the stronger later. Here—have an
Old Kings
."
He had a pack of cigarettes in his gauntleted hand, which he profferred
to Sir Robert. There were three cigarettes protruding from it, one
slightly farther than the others. Sir Robert's hand reached out and took
that one.
"Thanks. When the going gets rough, I really enjoy an
Old Kings
."
He put one end of the cigarette in his mouth and lit the other from the
lighter in Sir Gaeton's hand.
"Yes, sir," said Sir Gaeton, after lighting his own cigarette, "
Old
Kings
are the greatest. They give a man real, deep-down smoking
pleasure."
"There's no doubt about it,
Old Kings
are a
man's
cigarette." Sir
Robert could feel the soothing smoke in his lungs as he inhaled deeply.
"That's great. When I want a cigarette, I don't want just
any
cigarette."
"Nor I," agreed the Gascon. "
Old Kings
is the only real cigarette when
you're doing a real
man's
work."
"That's for sure." Sir Robert watched a smoke ring expand in the air.
There was a sudden clash of arms off to their left. Sir Robert dropped
his cigarette to the ground. "The trouble is that doing a real he-man's
work doesn't always allow you to enjoy the fine, rich tobaccos of
Old
Kings
right down to the very end."
"No, but you can always light another later," said the Gascon knight.
King Richard, on seeing his army moving suddenly toward the harassed
rear, had realized the danger and had charged through the Hospitallers
to get into the thick of the fray. Now the Turks were charging down from
the hills, hitting—not the flank as he had expected, but the rear!
Saladin had expected him to hold fast!
Sir Robert and Sir Gaeton spurred their chargers toward the flapping
banner of England.
The fierce warrior-king of England, his mighty sword in hand, was
cutting down Turks as though they were grain-stalks, but still the
Saracen horde pressed on. More and more of the terrible Turks came
boiling down out of the hills, their glittering scimitars swinging.
Sir Robert lost all track of time. There was nothing to do but keep his
own great broadsword moving, swinging like some gigantic metronome as he
hacked down the Moslem foes.
And then, suddenly, he found himself surrounded by the Saracens! He was
isolated and alone, cut off from the rest of the Christian forces! He
glanced quickly around as he slashed another Saracen from pate to
breastbone. Where was Sir Gaeton? Where were the others? Where was the
red-and-gold banner of Richard?
He caught a glimpse of the fluttering banner far to the rear and started
to fall back.
And then he saw another knight nearby, a huge man who swung his
sparkling blade with power and force. On his steel helm gleamed a golden
coronet! Richard!
And the great king, in spite of his prowess was outnumbered heavily and
would, within seconds, be cut down by the Saracen horde!
Without hesitation, Sir Robert plunged his horse toward the surrounded
monarch, his great blade cutting a path before him.
He saw Richard go down, falling from the saddle of his charger, but by
that time his own sword was cutting into the screaming Saracens and
they had no time to attempt any further mischief to the King. They had
their hands full with Sir Robert de Bouain.
He did not know how long he fought there, holding his charger motionless
over the inert body of the fallen king, hewing down the screaming enemy,
but presently he heard the familiar cry of "For St. George and for
England" behind him. The Norman and English troops were charging in,
bringing with them the banner of England!
And then Richard was on his feet, cleaving the air about him with his
own broadsword. Its bright edge, besmeared with Saracen blood, was
biting viciously into the foe.
The Turks began to fall back. Within seconds, the Christian knights were
boiling around the embattled pair, forcing the Turks into retreat. And
for the second time, Sir Robert found himself with no one to fight.
And then a voice was saying: "You have done well this day, sir knight.
Richard Plantagenet will not forget."
Sir Robert turned in his saddle to face the smiling king.
"My lord king, be assured that I would never forget my loyalty to my
sovereign and liege lord. My sword and my life are yours whenever you
call."
King Richard's gauntleted hand grasped his own. "If it please God, I
shall never ask your life. An earldom awaits you when we return to
England, sir knight."
And then the king mounted his horse and was running full gallop after
the retreating Saracens.
Robert took off his helmet.
He blinked for a second to adjust his eyes to the relative dimness of
the studio. After the brightness of the desert that the televicarion
helmet had projected into his eyes, the studio seemed strangely
cavelike.
"How'd you like it, Bob?" asked one of the two producers of the show.
Robert Bowen nodded briskly and patted the televike helmet. "It was
O.K.," he said. "Good show. A little talky at the beginning, and it
needs a better fade-out, but the action scenes were fine. The sponsor
ought to like it—for a while, at least."
"What do you mean, 'for a while'?"
Robert Bowen sighed. "If this thing goes on the air the way it is, he'll
lose sales."
"Why? Commercial not good enough?"
"
Too
good! Man, I've smoked
Old Kings
, and, believe me, the real
thing never tasted as good as that cigarette did in the commercial!" | [
"monitors",
"envies",
"ignores",
"respects"
] | 3 |
23960_9R8L8U1B_7 | What would have happend if Sir Robert had not disobeyed orders? | ... After a Few Words ...
by Seaton McKettrig
Illustrated by Summer
This is a science-fiction story. History is a science; the other
part is, as all Americans know, the most fictional field we have
today.
He settled himself comfortably in his seat, and carefully put the helmet
on, pulling it down firmly until it was properly seated. For a moment,
he could see nothing.
Then his hand moved up and, with a flick of the wrist, lifted the visor.
Ahead of him, in serried array, with lances erect and pennons flying,
was the forward part of the column. Far ahead, he knew, were the Knights
Templars, who had taken the advance. Behind the Templars rode the mailed
knights of Brittany and Anjou. These were followed by King Guy of
Jerusalem and the host of Poitou.
He himself, Sir Robert de Bouain, was riding with the Norman and English
troops, just behind the men of Poitou. Sir Robert turned slightly in his
saddle. To his right, he could see the brilliant red-and-gold banner of
the lion-hearted Richard of England—
gules, in pale three lions passant
guardant or
. Behind the standard-bearer, his great war horse moving
with a steady, measured pace, his coronet of gold on his steel helm
gleaming in the glaring desert sun, the lions of England on his
firm-held shield, was the King himself.
Further behind, the Knights Hospitallers protected the rear, guarding
the column of the hosts of Christendom from harassment by the Bedouins.
"By our Lady!" came a voice from his left. "Three days out from Acre,
and the accursed Saracens still elude us."
Sir Robert de Bouain twisted again in his saddle to look at the knight
riding alongside him. Sir Gaeton de l'Arc-Tombé sat tall and straight in
his saddle, his visor up, his blue eyes narrowed against the glare of
the sun.
Sir Robert's lips formed a smile. "They are not far off, Sir Gaeton.
They have been following us. As we march parallel to the seacoast, so
they have been marching with us in those hills to the east."
"Like the jackals they are," said Sir Gaeton. "They assail us from the
rear, and they set up traps in our path ahead. Our spies tell us that
the Turks lie ahead of us in countless numbers. And yet, they fear to
face us in open battle."
"Is it fear, or are they merely gathering their forces?"
"Both," said Sir Gaeton flatly. "They fear us, else they would not dally
to amass so fearsome a force. If, as our informers tell us, there are
uncounted Turks to the fore, and if, as we are aware, our rear is being
dogged by the Bedouin and the black horsemen of Egypt, it would seem
that Saladin has at hand more than enough to overcome us, were they all
truly Christian knights."
"Give them time. We must wait for their attack, sir knight. It were
foolhardy to attempt to seek them in their own hills, and yet they must
stop us. They will attack before we reach Jerusalem, fear not."
"We of Gascony fear no heathen Musselman," Sir Gaeton growled. "It's
this Hellish heat that is driving me mad." He pointed toward the eastern
hills. "The sun is yet low, and already the heat is unbearable."
Sir Robert heard his own laugh echo hollowly within his helmet. "Perhaps
'twere better to be mad when the assault comes. Madmen fight better than
men of cooler blood." He knew that the others were baking inside their
heavy armor, although he himself was not too uncomfortable.
Sir Gaeton looked at him with a smile that held both irony and respect.
"In truth, sir knight, it is apparent that you fear neither men nor
heat. Nor is your own blood too cool. True, I ride with your Normans and
your English and your King Richard of the Lion's Heart, but I am a
Gascon, and have sworn no fealty to him. But to side with the Duke of
Burgundy against King Richard—" He gave a short, barking laugh. "I
fear no man," he went on, "but if I had to fear one, it would be Richard
of England."
Sir Robert's voice came like a sword: steely, flat, cold, and sharp. "My
lord the King spoke in haste. He has reason to be bitter against Philip
of France, as do we all. Philip has deserted the field. He has returned
to France in haste, leaving the rest of us to fight the Saracen for the
Holy Land leaving only the contingent of his vassal the Duke of Burgundy
to remain with us."
"Richard of England has never been on the best of terms with Philip
Augustus," said Sir Gaeton.
"No, and with good cause. But he allowed his anger against Philip to
color his judgment when he spoke harshly against the Duke of Burgundy.
The Duke is no coward, and Richard Plantagenet well knows it. As I said,
he spoke in haste."
"And you intervened," said Sir Gaeton.
"It was my duty." Sir Robert's voice was stubborn. "Could we have
permitted a quarrel to develop between the two finest knights and
warleaders in Christendom at this crucial point? The desertion of Philip
of France has cost us dearly. Could we permit the desertion of Burgundy,
too?"
"You did what must be done in honor," the Gascon conceded, "but you have
not gained the love of Richard by doing so."
Sir Robert felt his jaw set firmly. "My king knows I am loyal."
Sir Gaeton said nothing more, but there was a look in his eyes that
showed that he felt that Richard of England might even doubt the loyalty
of Sir Robert de Bouain.
Sir Robert rode on in silence, feeling the movement of the horse beneath
him.
There was a sudden sound to the rear. Like a wash of the tide from the
sea came the sound of Saracen war cries and the clash of steel on steel
mingled with the sounds of horses in agony and anger.
Sir Robert turned his horse to look.
The Negro troops of Saladin's Egyptian contingent were thundering down
upon the rear! They clashed with the Hospitallers, slamming in like a
rain of heavy stones, too close in for the use of bows. There was only
the sword against armor, like the sound of a thousand hammers against a
thousand anvils.
"Stand fast! Stand fast! Hold them off!" It was the voice of King
Richard, sounding like a clarion over the din of battle.
Sir Robert felt his horse move, as though it were urging him on toward
the battle, but his hand held to the reins, keeping the great charger in
check. The King had said "Stand fast!" and this was no time to disobey
the orders of Richard.
The Saracen troops were coming in from the rear, and the Hospitallers
were taking the brunt of the charge. They fought like madmen, but they
were slowly being forced back.
The Master of the Hospitallers rode to the rear, to the King's standard,
which hardly moved in the still desert air, now that the column had
stopped moving.
The voice of the Duke of Burgundy came to Sir Robert's ears.
"Stand fast. The King bids you all to stand fast," said the duke, his
voice fading as he rode on up the column toward the knights of Poitou
and the Knights Templars.
The Master of the Hospitallers was speaking in a low, urgent voice to
the King: "My lord, we are pressed on by the enemy and in danger of
eternal infamy. We are losing our horses, one after the other!"
"Good Master," said Richard, "it is you who must sustain their attack.
No one can be everywhere at once."
The Master of the Hospitallers nodded curtly and charged back into the
fray.
The King turned to Sir Baldwin de Carreo, who sat ahorse nearby, and
pointed toward the eastern hills. "They will come from there, hitting us
in the flank; we cannot afford to amass a rearward charge. To do so
would be to fall directly into the hands of the Saracen."
A voice very close to Sir Robert said: "Richard is right. If we go to
the aid of the Hospitallers, we will expose the column to a flank
attack." It was Sir Gaeton.
"My lord the King," Sir Robert heard his voice say, "is right in all but
one thing. If we allow the Egyptians to take us from the rear, there
will be no need for Saladin and his Turks to come down on our flank. And
the Hospitallers cannot hold for long at this rate. A charge at full
gallop would break the Egyptian line and give the Hospitallers breathing
time. Are you with me?"
"Against the orders of the King?"
"The King cannot see everything! There are times when a man must use his
own judgment! You said you were afraid of no man. Are you with me?"
After a moment's hesitation, Sir Gaeton couched his lance. "I'm with
you, sir knight! Live or die, I follow! Strike and strike hard!"
"Forward then!" Sir Robert heard himself shouting. "Forward for St.
George and for England!"
"St. George and England!" the Gascon echoed.
Two great war horses began to move ponderously forward toward the battle
lines, gaining momentum as they went. Moving in unison, the two knights,
their horses now at a fast trot, lowered their lances, picking their
Saracen targets with care. Larger and larger loomed the Egyptian
cavalrymen as the horses changed pace to a thundering gallop.
The Egyptians tried to dodge, as they saw, too late, the approach of the
Christian knights.
Sir Robert felt the shock against himself and his horse as the steel tip
of the long ash lance struck the Saracen horseman in the chest. Out of
the corner of his eye, he saw that Sir Gaeton, too, had scored.
The Saracen, impaled on Sir Robert's lance, shot from the saddle as he
died. His lighter armor had hardly impeded the incoming spear-point, and
now his body dragged it down as he dropped toward the desert sand.
Another Moslem cavalryman was charging in now, swinging his curved
saber, taking advantage of Sir Robert's sagging lance.
There was nothing else to do but drop the lance and draw his heavy
broadsword. His hand grasped it, and it came singing from its scabbard.
The Egyptian's curved sword clanged against Sir Robert's helm, setting
his head ringing. In return, the knight's broadsword came about in a
sweeping arc, and the Egyptian's horse rode on with the rider's headless
body.
Behind him, Sir Robert heard further cries of "St. George and England!"
The Hospitallers, taking heart at the charge, were going in! Behind them
came the Count of Champagne, the Earl of Leister, and the Bishop of
Beauvais, who carried a great warhammer in order that he might not break
Church Law by shedding blood.
Sir Robert's own sword rose and fell, cutting and hacking at the enemy.
He himself felt a dreamlike detachment, as though he were watching the
battle rather than participating in it.
But he could see that the Moslems were falling back before the Christian
onslaught.
And then, quite suddenly, there seemed to be no foeman to swing at.
Breathing heavily, Sir Robert sheathed his broadsword.
Beside him, Sir Gaeton did the same, saying: "It will be a few minutes
before they can regroup, sir knight. We may have routed them
completely."
"Aye. But King Richard will not approve of my breaking ranks and
disobeying orders. I may win the battle and lose my head in the end."
"This is no time to worry about the future," said the Gascon. "Rest for
a moment and relax, that you may be the stronger later. Here—have an
Old Kings
."
He had a pack of cigarettes in his gauntleted hand, which he profferred
to Sir Robert. There were three cigarettes protruding from it, one
slightly farther than the others. Sir Robert's hand reached out and took
that one.
"Thanks. When the going gets rough, I really enjoy an
Old Kings
."
He put one end of the cigarette in his mouth and lit the other from the
lighter in Sir Gaeton's hand.
"Yes, sir," said Sir Gaeton, after lighting his own cigarette, "
Old
Kings
are the greatest. They give a man real, deep-down smoking
pleasure."
"There's no doubt about it,
Old Kings
are a
man's
cigarette." Sir
Robert could feel the soothing smoke in his lungs as he inhaled deeply.
"That's great. When I want a cigarette, I don't want just
any
cigarette."
"Nor I," agreed the Gascon. "
Old Kings
is the only real cigarette when
you're doing a real
man's
work."
"That's for sure." Sir Robert watched a smoke ring expand in the air.
There was a sudden clash of arms off to their left. Sir Robert dropped
his cigarette to the ground. "The trouble is that doing a real he-man's
work doesn't always allow you to enjoy the fine, rich tobaccos of
Old
Kings
right down to the very end."
"No, but you can always light another later," said the Gascon knight.
King Richard, on seeing his army moving suddenly toward the harassed
rear, had realized the danger and had charged through the Hospitallers
to get into the thick of the fray. Now the Turks were charging down from
the hills, hitting—not the flank as he had expected, but the rear!
Saladin had expected him to hold fast!
Sir Robert and Sir Gaeton spurred their chargers toward the flapping
banner of England.
The fierce warrior-king of England, his mighty sword in hand, was
cutting down Turks as though they were grain-stalks, but still the
Saracen horde pressed on. More and more of the terrible Turks came
boiling down out of the hills, their glittering scimitars swinging.
Sir Robert lost all track of time. There was nothing to do but keep his
own great broadsword moving, swinging like some gigantic metronome as he
hacked down the Moslem foes.
And then, suddenly, he found himself surrounded by the Saracens! He was
isolated and alone, cut off from the rest of the Christian forces! He
glanced quickly around as he slashed another Saracen from pate to
breastbone. Where was Sir Gaeton? Where were the others? Where was the
red-and-gold banner of Richard?
He caught a glimpse of the fluttering banner far to the rear and started
to fall back.
And then he saw another knight nearby, a huge man who swung his
sparkling blade with power and force. On his steel helm gleamed a golden
coronet! Richard!
And the great king, in spite of his prowess was outnumbered heavily and
would, within seconds, be cut down by the Saracen horde!
Without hesitation, Sir Robert plunged his horse toward the surrounded
monarch, his great blade cutting a path before him.
He saw Richard go down, falling from the saddle of his charger, but by
that time his own sword was cutting into the screaming Saracens and
they had no time to attempt any further mischief to the King. They had
their hands full with Sir Robert de Bouain.
He did not know how long he fought there, holding his charger motionless
over the inert body of the fallen king, hewing down the screaming enemy,
but presently he heard the familiar cry of "For St. George and for
England" behind him. The Norman and English troops were charging in,
bringing with them the banner of England!
And then Richard was on his feet, cleaving the air about him with his
own broadsword. Its bright edge, besmeared with Saracen blood, was
biting viciously into the foe.
The Turks began to fall back. Within seconds, the Christian knights were
boiling around the embattled pair, forcing the Turks into retreat. And
for the second time, Sir Robert found himself with no one to fight.
And then a voice was saying: "You have done well this day, sir knight.
Richard Plantagenet will not forget."
Sir Robert turned in his saddle to face the smiling king.
"My lord king, be assured that I would never forget my loyalty to my
sovereign and liege lord. My sword and my life are yours whenever you
call."
King Richard's gauntleted hand grasped his own. "If it please God, I
shall never ask your life. An earldom awaits you when we return to
England, sir knight."
And then the king mounted his horse and was running full gallop after
the retreating Saracens.
Robert took off his helmet.
He blinked for a second to adjust his eyes to the relative dimness of
the studio. After the brightness of the desert that the televicarion
helmet had projected into his eyes, the studio seemed strangely
cavelike.
"How'd you like it, Bob?" asked one of the two producers of the show.
Robert Bowen nodded briskly and patted the televike helmet. "It was
O.K.," he said. "Good show. A little talky at the beginning, and it
needs a better fade-out, but the action scenes were fine. The sponsor
ought to like it—for a while, at least."
"What do you mean, 'for a while'?"
Robert Bowen sighed. "If this thing goes on the air the way it is, he'll
lose sales."
"Why? Commercial not good enough?"
"
Too
good! Man, I've smoked
Old Kings
, and, believe me, the real
thing never tasted as good as that cigarette did in the commercial!" | [
"The king would not have been pinned down so quickly",
"He would not have had time for a smoke break",
"A group of soldiers would have been left exposed",
"He would've been captured by the enemy"
] | 2 |
Subsets and Splits