Assignment in Tomorrow

by Anthology

  I looked down. He had an anthill. They weren’t like Earth ants. These were bigger, slower, blue, and they had eight legs. They built nests of sand tied together with mucus, and tunneled under them so that the nests stood up an inch or two like on little pillars.

  “They look the same, they act the same, but you’ll see,” said Mr. Costello.

  Pie opened a synthine pouch that lay in the sand. He took out a dead bird and the thorax of what looked like a Carànho roach, the one that grows as long as your forearm. He put the bird down here and the roach down yonder.

  “Now,” he said, “watch.”

  The ants swarmed to the bird, pulling and crawling. Busy. But one or two went to the roach and tumbled it and burrowed around. Mr. Costello picked an ant off the roach and dropped it on the bird. It weaved around and shouldered through the others and scrabbled across the sand and went back to the roach.

  “You see, you see?” he said, enthusiastic. “Look.”

  He picked an ant off the dead bird and dropped it by the roach. The ant wasted no time or even curiosity on the piece of roach. It turned around once to get its bearings, and then went straight back to the dead bird.

  I looked at the bird with its clothing of crawling blue, and I looked at the roach with its two or three voracious scavengers. I looked at Mr. Costello.

  He said raptly, “See what I mean? About one in thirty eats something different. And that’s all we need. I tell you, Purser, wherever you look, if you look long enough, you can find a way to make most of a group turn on the rest.”

  I watched the ants. “They’re not fighting.”

  “Now wait a minute,” he said swiftly. “Wait a minute. All we have to do is let these bird-eaters know that the roach-eaters are dangerous.”

  “They’re not dangerous,” I said. “They’re just different.”

  “What’s the difference, when you come right down to it? So we’ll get the bird-eaters scared and they’ll kill all the roach-eaters.”

  “Yes, but why, Mr. Costello?”

  He laughed. “I like you, boy. I do the thinking, you do the work. I’ll explain it to you. They all look alike. So once we’ve made ’em drive out these”—he pointed to the minority around the roach—“they’ll never know which among ’em might be a roach-eater. They’ll get so worried, they’ll do anything to keep from being suspected of roach-eating. When they get scared enough, we can make ’em do anything we want.”

  He hunkered down to watch the ants. He picked up a roach-eater and put it on the bird. I got up.

  “Well, I only just dropped in, Mr. Costello,” I said.

  “I’m not an ant,” said Mr. Costello. “As long as it makes no difference to me what they eat, I can make ’em do anything in the world I want.”

  “I’ll see you around,” I said.

  He kept on talking quietly to himself as I walked away. He was watching the ants, figuring, and paid no attention to me.

  I went back to Barney. I asked, sort of choked, “What is he doing, Barney?”

  “He’s doing what he has to do,” Barney said.

  We went back to the mono wheel and up the hill and through the force-gate. After a while, I asked, “How long will he be here?”

  “As long as he wants to be.” Barney was kind of short about it.

  “Nobody wants to be locked up.”

  He had that odd look on his face again. “Nightingale’s not a jail.”

  “He can’t get out.”

  “Look, chum, we could start him over. We could even make a purser out of him. But we stopped doing that kind of thing a long time ago. We let a man do what he wants to do.”

  “He never wanted to be boss over an anthill.”

  “He didn’t?”

  I guess I looked as if I didn’t understand that, so he said, “All his life he’s pretended he’s a man and the rest of us are ants. Now it’s come true for him. He won’t run human anthills any more because he will never again get near one.”

  I looked through the windshield at the shining finger that was my distant ship. “What happened on Borinquen, Barney?”

  “Some of his converts got loose around the System. That Humanity One idea had to be stopped.” He drove awhile, seeing badly out of a thinking face. “You won’t take this hard, Purser, but you’re a thick-witted ape. I can say that if no one else can.”

  “All right,” I said. “Why?”

  “We had to smash into Borinquen, which used to be so free and easy. We got into Costello’s place. It was a regular fort. We got him and his files. We didn’t get his girl. He killed her, but the files were enough.”

  After a time I said, “He was always a good friend to me.”

  “Was he?”

  I didn’t say anything. He wheeled up to the receiving station and stopped the machine.

  He said, “He was all ready for you if you came to work for him. He had a voice recording of you large as life, saying ‘Sometimes a man’s just got to be by himself.’ Once you went to work for him, all he needed to do to keep you in line was to threaten to put that on the air.”

  I opened the door. “What did you have to show him to me for?”

  “Because we believe in letting a man do what he wants to do, as long as he doesn’t hurt the rest of us. If you want to go back to the lake and work for Costello, for instance, I’ll take you there.”

  I closed the door carefully and went up the ramp to the ship.

  I did my work and when the time came, we blasted off. I was mad. I don’t think it was about anything Barney told me. I wasn’t especially mad about Mr. Costello or what happened to him, because Barney’s the best Navy psych doc there is and Nightingale’s the most beautiful hospital planet in the Universe.

  What made me mad was the thought that never again would a man as big as Mr. Costello give that big, warm, soft, strong friendship to a lunkhead like me.

  Mr. Costello, Hero by Theodore Sturgeon. Copyright, 1953, by Galaxy Publishing Corp.; reprinted by permission of the author.

  JEROME BIXBY

  There’s nothing wrong with Jerome Bixby—if you like talent. Editor, artist, pianist, and writer, Bixby in full-velocity hyperspace drive shows some of the characteristics of an old-time one-man band; and if he absent-mindedly applies to one field the skills belonging to another, who are we to complain? He is widely known to typesetters for the exquisite calligraphic art of his proofreading; and to see what happens when he confuses the keyboard of his typewriter with the keyboard of his piano, observe the scherzo in words called——

  Angels in the Jets

  It was chemically very similar to Earth, but much smaller. It circled a nameless Class K sun in Messier 13, showing its one Y-shaped continent to the morning every sixteen-odd hours. It had mile-high green flora, hungry fauna, a yellowish-red sky that often rained, grey rivers that wound smoothly to a tossing grey sea. It had a perfectly breathable atmosphere—except for one thing. Because of that one thing, Captain Murchison G. Dodge had named the planet “Deadly.”

  Interstellar Investigation Team 411 had been on one of the seacoasts of Deadly for three days when Mabel Guernsey tripped over a huge, half-buried clam-like shell. In falling, she struck her head on the point of a huge conch-like shell. Her oxy-mask was torn off, and Mabel Guernsey got the madness.

  They locked her up. They walked her over to the Lance that stood like a shining three-hundred-foot trophy on its sloping base of brown-black obsidian, created from sand by landing-blasts. They took her inside and put her in an extra storage compartment, and stacked crates in front of the door, and put a twenty-four-hour guard on duty to see that she didn’t get away. For it became swiftly apparent that the one thing in the world—or, rather, on Deadly—that Mabel wanted to do, wanted most terribly to do, was to take off everybody else’s mask so that they would all be like her.

  Murchison Dodge, who was the Lance’s physiologist-biologist as well as its captain, went off searching the surrounding ecology for some cure for the malady, whi
ch was in many ways similar to ergot poisoning. Like ergot, the condition was caused by the sclerotium of a fungus—airborne and inhaled, in this case, as a curious microscopic unit which Murchison Dodge thought of as a sclerotioid spore. Like ergot, it brought itching and twitching and numbness at extremities; but these were short-lived symptoms, and there was no ergotlike effect upon the involuntary muscles, so the victims didn’t die. They only went mad, and stayed mad. From Mabel Guernsey’s behavior, Rupert, the psychologist, judged it to be an especially manic form of insanity. Mabel seemed very happy. She wished they could all be as happy as she. She was still trying to grab off oxy-masks when they closed the door on her.

  So Dodge went searching for an antidote. He was gone for two days. And while he was gone, the night guard at Mabel’s storage-room prison—a spacehand named Kraus, whom nobody liked, and who found himself stimulated by the proximity of a fairly attractive and provocatively irresponsible woman—pushed aside the crates, opened the door, and went in to do some tax-free tomcatting.

  When Dodge returned, in the little one-man crewboat, the Lance was gone.

  Far below, a patch of bright color—red, blue, yellow, purple, with the tiniest glimmer of steel to one side—told Dodge that he had at last found his wayward spaceship.

  So they hadn’t gone interstellar, thank God, or suicidally run the Lance into the local sun. That had been his first terrified thought upon finding the note they’d left and realizing what must have happened.

  The note had been formed by large shells in the sand. It had been a hundred feet long. It had said: YOU’RE CRAZY. WE’RE GOING. YOU’LL NEVER FIND US.

  And beneath, in smaller shells carefully selected for size and color, the names of the sixty-three spacehands and Team-members of the Lance.

  Dodge sighed and cut the jets. He pulled the crewboat up into a stall. Its airfoils whined in atmosphere that was like Earth’s, but almost twice as heavy. The green horizon of Deadly slid smoothly from the round noseport, to be replaced by copper sky and yellow clouds and a hazy orange glow that was the sun, and at the moment of immotion Dodge released the chute. It whipped out, obscuring sky, clouds, sun. It billowed and boomed open. Dodge’s couch and its empty companion pistoned back deeply at the jar, slowly rose. Dodge half-sat, half-lay, his weight on his shoulders, looking straight up into the stiff white underside of the chute with eyes that were feathered with red and burning under dry lids. His hand went out to the button that would right the couch, but he pulled it back. The lying-down position was too comfortable after eighty foodless and sleepless hours at the controls.

  The little boat drifted down, swaying on its lines, the apex of each swing allowing him a view around the edge of the chute. Copper sky. Yellow clouds. Hazy sun.

  Back and forth, back and forth; and suddenly glimpses of green replaced glimpses of copper and yellow; the crewboat was among the giant trees. Each swing now revealed a wall of green and brown sliding evenly, silently, up past the port. Behind Dodge the cyclodrive hummed mezzo piano, out of circuit; Dodge’s hand rested on the board, ready to drop the boat on its jets should the chute tangle or be torn.

  He started the gyro, and the swinging stopped.

  He switched on the rear-vision screen. He blinked in astonishment at what he saw, down among the giant roots of giant trees, though he had been prepared for just about anything. He commenced to push buttons that controlled slip-strings. The boat’s downward course altered, drifting left toward the clearing in the forest.

  A last-moment adjustment brought it to rest on its fins in the center of a village square.

  Wearily, he heeled the pedal that would draw the chute back into its cubby, automatically repacking it as it came.

  Then he turned on the side-view screens, one after another, leaving them on to get a panorama.

  They were all grouped around in a wide circle, looking up at the boat. They were smiling. They were carrying guns. Even little Jansen, the bacteriologist, who had often professed a hatred of guns, had a brace of handblasts on his pudgy hips. There had been dangerous animals howling along the seacoast; Dodge supposed there must be just as many back here in Deadly’s vast forests. So the guns argued that the madmen were at least able to recognize that menace, and were ready to fight it for their lives.

  The glimmer of steel to one side of the colors was no longer tiny; it was huge and high—and not complete. The proud Lance had been partially stripped of her skin. There were ragged, gaping holes the length of her, with skeletal framework showing through, where great curving plates had been removed. Most of them cut out, Dodge saw dully, with torches. The Lance would never leave Deadly.

  And the bright colors themselves . . .

  Dodge felt a cold prickling back of his ears. The colors were giant fifteen-by-fifteen pine crates from the Lance’s hold, a dozen or so of them, and the tarnished plates from the Lance’s hull along with some shining new ones from her repair stock—all broken-down, sawed-up, bent, buckled, leaned-together, bolted, welded, nailed, glued, painted and arranged in a mad travesty of a village.

  Holes—windows and doors—had been sawn or battered in the crates; and judging by the array of bolts and stays visible on their outsides, some had two stories. They sat on the thick green grass like giant children’s blocks thrown helter-skelter on a lawn. All colors and crazy angles; frills and frippery; scallops and gingerbread, ju-jubes and toyland, polka-dots and peppermint stripes and bright checked patterns like gingham. Raggedy curtains in the windows, moving with the breeze, and a doormat, formerly a seat cushion in the Lance’s main lounge, with WELCOME in drying orange. The walls of one crate-house were covered with purple and green and yellow murals whose jumbled, whirling ugliness could have meaning only to their mad creator.

  The paint, Dodge thought, must be the petrolatum vehicle for the Lance’s fuel, pigmented with vivid days which abounded on Deadly. It was splotchy, and most of it had run badly.

  A little grey stream ran through the clearing—Dodge had found the Lance by following waterways methodically up and down the continent—and several slapdash garden plots were already under way. Beyond, at the edge of the clearing, was the heavy glass and metal heap of machinery that had been in the crates.

  Dodge turned the gyro off, but left the slower-starting cyclodrive on as precaution; he might want to get away in a hurry. His trembling, dirty hands found another control. The couch turned slowly vertical; the straps that had held him tight demagnetized, retreated into slots. He got up, swaying a moment on the spider platform beneath the couch, took a deep breath that had acrid jet-odor in it. Then he stepped over to the shaft, found the ladder with his feet. He descended to the airlock.

  Through the transparent port he could look down fifteen feet to the ground and see them staring up at him . . .

  Jansen, Goldberg, Chabot, de Silva, Mabel Guernsey, young Jones, Marian—his heart ached as he saw Marian’s face in the crowd, lovely as ever and smiling vapidly—Strickland, the four wide-eyed children, all the others. Standing in a wide circle whose center was the boat, and whose radius was the sharp-nosed shadow of the boat. Some presentably clothed, others incongruously clothed—like de Silva, who wore women’s silk stockings and bathing trunks beneath the dress coat he’d affected for social gatherings aboard ship—and many not clothed at all. Dodge saw old, dignified Rupert, who had evidently not elected to come watch the crewboat; Rupert stood nude some distance off in front of a crate-house, facing away from crowd and crewboat, posing motionless with wrists crossed over his head and back arched. There was a puddle at his feet. Rupert was being a fountain.

  Dodge worked the airlock mechanism, left the lock open a few inches, stopped it there; he had little assurance that they wouldn’t blow his head off if they got the chance. First, of course, he put on his oxy-mask.

  Looking out through the partly open lock, his voice nasal through the mask, he said, “You poor, poor devils.”

  “It’s Dodge, all right,” said Chabot, the Lance’s Chief Engineer
. He stood on the grass with his head just out of the shadow the boat cast, his body in it.

  “It’s God!” cried Mabel Guernsey, and prostrated herself. Several others did likewise.

  “It is not!” said Chabot scornfully over his shoulder. “It’s only the captain!”

  Dodge looked at Marian. She had moved to the fore of the crowd where he could see her fully. She wore a halter affair, probably because her breasts had begun to sunburn, and nothing else except the Mercury-diamond engagement ring Dodge had given her. It glinted in the saffron sunlight as she stirred. She was looking, eyes sleepy, at his masked face in the airlock. He wondered bleakly if she even knew who he was. Her hair, unlike the matted dirty mops of several of the other women, appeared well tended; but her body was filthy, streaked with perspiration. Marian had always taken pride in her hair.

  Dodge lowered his gaze to the sparkling black eyes of Chabot, who had come forward from the crowd and stood directly beneath the airlock. The man, Dodge remembered, had been a bit of a glad-hander aboard ship, always organizing and taking command of trivial activities; it was likely that this bent had led him to a kind of pro tern mayoralty here, for he seemed to be without dispute the spokesman. Dodge began searching for something useful to say.

  Mabel Guernsey lifted her face from the grass and peeped up at Dodge. Then she got to her feet, apparently having lost her awe of God. She began to walk around the boat, within the circle of the crowd, staring up at the sleek metal sides. Several of the children followed her, singing nonsense in small piping voices.

  Dodge decided that formality might be best. He put his captain’s crispness into his voice. “You remember me, then, Chabot?”

  “Sure, I remember you,” said Chabot, smiling up. His hair was curly and as black as his eyes, with large flakes of dandruff in it. “You’re crazy. You’re crazy as a coot! You were going to try to make us crazy too!”

  Dodge made his eyes icy, trying to frown Chabot down; then he remembered he was wearing a mask, and it didn’t show. The frown remained, as he again tried to think of something to say.