Assignment in Tomorrow

by Anthology

  He did not cry over Neddie. She wished he would. He had been so apathetic during the voyage. Nothing, not even the unparalleled splendor of the naked stars nor the inexpressible alienness of strange planets had seemed to lift him very long. If he would only weep or laugh loudly or display some sign that he was reacting violently to what was happening. She would even have welcomed his striking her in anger or calling her bad names.

  But no, not even during the gathering of the mangled corpses, when he looked for a while as if he were going to vomit, would he give way to his body’s demand for expression. She understood that if he were to throw up, he would be much better for it, would, as it were, have gotten rid of much of the psychic disturbance along with the physical.

  He would not. He had kept on raking flesh and bones into the large plastic bags and kept a fixed look of resentment and sullenness.

  She hoped now that the loss of his piano would bring the big tears and the racked shoulders. Then she could take him in her arms and give him sympathy. He would be her little boy again, afraid of the dark, afraid of the dog killed by a car, seeking her arms for the sure safety, the sure love.

  “Never mind, baby,” she said. “When we’re rescued, we’ll get you a new one.”

  “When—!”

  He lifted his eyebrows and sat down on the bed’s edge.

  “What do we do now?”

  She became very brisk and efficient.

  “The ultrad was set working the moment the meteor struck. If it’s survived the crash, it’s still sending SOS’s. If not, then there’s nothing we can do about it. Neither of us knows how to repair it.

  “However, it’s possible that in the last five years since this planet was charted, other expeditions may have landed here. Not from Earth, but from some of the colonies. Or from nonhuman globes. Who knows? It’s worth taking a chance. Let’s see.”

  A single glance was enough to wreck their hopes about the ultrad. It had been twisted and broken until it was no longer even recognizable as the machine that sent swifter-than-light waves through the no-ether.

  Dr. Fetts said with false cheeriness, “Well, that’s that! So what? It makes things too easy. Let’s go into the storeroom and see what we can see.”

  Eddie shrugged and followed her. There she insisted that both take a panrad. If they had to separate for any reason, they could always communicate and also, using the DF’s—the direction finders built within it—locate each other. Having used them before, they knew the instrument’s capabilities and how essential they were on scouting or camping trips.

  The panrads were lightweight cylinders about two and a half feet high and eight inches in diameter. Crampacked, they held the mechanisms of two dozen different utilities. They never ran out of power, because their batteries could be recharged from the body electricity of their owners, and they were practically indestructible and worked under almost any conditions, even under water or in extreme cold or heat.

  Dr. Fetts insisted they handcuff their left wrists to the cylinders as long as they were outside the yacht. That way, they couldn’t drop them and thus have no chance of keeping in touch. Eddie thought such precaution was ridiculous, but he said nothing.

  Keeping away from the side of the ship that had the huge hole in it, they took the panrads outside. The long wave bands were searched by Eddie while his mother moved the dial that ranged up and down the shortwaves. Neither really expected to hear anything, but their quest was better than doing nothing.

  Finding the modulated wave-frequencies empty of any significant noises, he switched to the continuous waves. He was startled by a dot-dashing.

  “Hey, mom! Something in the 1000 kilocycles! Unmodulated!”

  “Naturally, son,” she said with some exasperation in the midst of her elation. “What would you expect from a radiotelegraphic signal?”

  She found the band on her own cylinder. He looked blankly at her. “I know nothing about radio, but that’s not Morse.”

  “What? You must be mistaken!”

  “I-I don’t think so.”

  “Is it or isn’t it? Good God, son, make up your mind fast about something you should be sure of.”

  She turned the amplifier up. Though it wasn’t necessary, she cocked her head to listen. As both of them had learned Galacto-Morse through sleeplearn techniques, she checked him at once.

  “You’re right. What do you make of it?”

  His quick ear pounced on the pulses.

  “No simple dot and dash. Four different time-lengths.”

  He listened some more.

  “They’ve got a certain rhythm, all right. I can make out definite groupings. Ah! That’s the sixth time I’ve caught that particular one. And there’s another. And another.”

  Dr. Fetts shook her ash-blonde head. She could make out nothing but a series of zzt-zzt-zzt’s. There was a rhythm to it, she admitted, but even after trying hard to identify certain units, she didn’t recognize them when they repeated. Well, she shrugged, she was as tone-deaf and non-musical as they came. Eddie took after his father in that trait.

  He glanced at the DF needle.

  “Coming from NE by E. Should we try to locate?”

  “Naturally,” she replied. “But we’d better eat first. We don’t know how far away it is, or what we’ll find there. While I’m getting a hot meal ready, you get our field trip stuff ready.”

  “O.K.,” he said with more enthusiasm than he had shown for a long time.

  When he came back he ate all of the large dish his mother had prepared on the unwrecked galley stove.

  “You always did make the best stew,” he said.

  “Thank you. I’m glad you’re eating again, son. I am surprised. I thought you’d be sick about all this.”

  He waved vaguely, but energetically.

  “The challenge of the unknown, you know. I have a sort of feeling this is going to turn out much better than we thought. Much better.”

  She came close and sniffed his breath. It was clean, innocent even of stew. That meant he’d taken chlorophyll, which probably meant he’d been sampling some hidden rye. Otherwise, how explain his reckless disregard of the possible dangers? It-wasn’t like his normal attitude.

  She said nothing, for she knew that if he tried to hide a bottle in his clothes or field sack while they were tracking down the radio signals, she would soon find it. And take it away. He wouldn’t eyen protest, merely let her lift it from his limp hand while his lips swelled with resentment.

  They set out. Both wore knapsacks and carried cuffed panrads. He had slung a gun over his shoulder, and she had snapped onto her sack her small black bag of medical and lab supplies.

  High noon of late autumn was topped by a weak red sun that barely managed to make itself seen through the eternal double layer of clouds. Its twin, an even smaller blob of lilac, was setting on the northwestern horizon. They walked in a sort of bright twilight, the best that Baudelaire ever achieved. Yet, despite the lack of light, the air was too warm. That was a phenomenon common to certain planets behind the Horsehead Nebula, one being investigated but as yet unexplained.

  The country was hilly and had many deep ravines. Here and there were prominences high enough and steep-sided enough to be called embryo mountains. Considering the roughness of the land, however, there was a surprising amount of vegetation. Pale green, red, and yellow bushes, vines, and little trees clung to every bit of ground horizontal or vertical. All had comparatively broad leaves that turned with the sun in hopes to catch the most of the light.

  From time to time, as the two Terrans strode noisily through the forest, small, multi-colored, insect-like and mammal-like creatures scuttled from hiding place to hiding place. Eddie decided to unsling his gun and carry it in the crook of his arm. Then, after they were forced to scramble up and down ravines and hills and fight their way through thickets that became unexpectedly tangled, he put it back over his shoulder, where it hung from a strap.

  Despite their exertions, they did not
tire fast. They weighed about twenty pounds less than they would have on Earth, and, though the air was thinner, it was, for some unknown reason, richer in oxygen.

  Dr. Fetts kept up with Eddie. Thirty years the senior of the twenty-three-year-old, she passed even at close inspection for his older sister. Longevity pills took care of that. However, he treated her with all the courtesy and chivalry that one gave one’s mother and helped her up the steep inclines, even though the climbs did not appreciably cause her deep chest to demand more air.

  They paused once by a creek bank to get their bearings.

  “The signals have stopped,” he said.

  “Obviously,” she replied.

  At that moment the radar-detector built into the panrad began a high ping-ping-ping. Both of them automatically looked upwards.

  “There’s no ship in the air.”

  “It can’t be coming from either of those hills,” she pointed out. “There’s nothing but a boulder on top of each. Tremendous rocks.”

  “Nevertheless, it’s coming from there, I think. Oh! Oh! Did you see what I saw? Looked like a tall stalk of some kind being pulled down behind that big rock.”

  She peered through the dim light. “I think you were imagining things, son. I saw nothing.”

  Then, even as the pinging kept up, the zzting started again. But after a burst of noise, both stopped.

  “Let’s go up and see what we shall see,” she said.

  “Something screwy,” he commented. She did not answer.

  They forded the creek and began the ascent. Halfway up, they stopped to sniff puzzledly at a gust of some heavy odor coming downwind.

  “Smells like a cageful of monkeys,” he said.

  “In heat,” she added. If he had the keener ear, hers was the sharper nose.

  They went on up. The RD began sounding its tiny hysterical gonging. Nonplused, Eddie stopped. The DF indicated the radar pulses were not coming from the top of the hill up which they were going, as formerly, but from the other hill across the valley. Abruptly, the panrad fell silent.

  “What do we do now?”

  “Finish what we started. This hill. Then we go to the other.”

  He shrugged and then hastened after her tall slim body in its long-legged coveralls. She was hot on the scent, literally, and nothing could stop her. Just before she reached the bungalow-sized boulder topping the hill, he caught up with her. She had stopped to gaze intently at the DF needle, which swung wildly before it stopped at neutral. The monkey-cage odor was very strong.

  “Do you suppose it could be some sort of radio-creating mineral?” she asked, disappointedly.

  “No. Those groupings were semantic. And that smell . . .”

  “Then what—?”

  He didn’t know whether to feel pleased or not because she had so obviously and suddenly thrust the burden of responsibility and action on him. Both pride and a curious shrinking affected him. But he did feel exhilarated. Almost, he thought, he felt as if he were on the verge of discovering what he had been looking for for a long time. What the object of his search had been, he could not say. But he was excited and not very much afraid.

  He unslung his weapon, a two-barreled combination shotgun and rifle. The panrad was still quiet.

  “Maybe the boulder is camouflage for a spy outfit,” he said. He sounded silly, even to himself.

  Behind him, his mother gasped and screamed. He whirled and raised his gun, but there was nothing to shoot. She was pointing at the hilltop across the valley, shaking, and saying something incoherent.

  He could make out a long slim antenna seemingly projecting from the monstrous boulder crouched there. At the same time, two thoughts struggled for first place in his mind: one, that it was more than a coincidence that both hills had almost identical stone structures on their brows, and, two, that the antenna must have been recently stuck out, for he was sure that he had not seen it the last time he looked.

  He never got to tell her his conclusions, for something thin and flexible and manifold and irresistible seized him from behind. Lifted into the air, he was borne backwards. He dropped the gun and tried to grab the bands or tentacles around him and tear them off with his bare hands. No use.

  He caught one last glimpse of his mother running off down the hillside. Then a curtain snapped down, and he was in total darkness.

  Before he could gather what had happened, Eddie sensed himself, still suspended, twirled around. He could not know for sure, of course, but he thought he was facing exactly the opposite direction. Simultaneously, the tentacles binding his legs and arms were released. Only his waist was still gripped.

  It was pressed so tightly that he cried out with pain.

  Then, boot-toes bumping on some resilient substance, he was carried forward. Halted, facing he knew not what horrible monster, he was suddenly assailed—not by a sharp beak or tooth or knife or some other cutting or mangling instrument—but by a dense cloud of that same monkey perfume.

  In other circumstances, he might have vomited. Now his stomach was not given the time to consider whether it should clean house or not. The tentacle lifted him higher and thrust him against something soft and yielding—something fleshlike and womanly—almost breastlike in texture and smoothness and warmth, and its hint of gentle curving.

  He put his hands and feet out to brace himself, for he thought for a moment he was going to sink in and be covered up—enfolded—ingested. The idea of a gargantuan amoeba-thing hidden within a hollow rock—or a rocklike shell—made him writhe and yell, and shove at the protoplasmic substance.

  But nothing of the kind happened. He was not plunged into a smothering and slimy featherbed that would strip him of his skin and then his flesh and then either dissolve his bones or reject them. He was merely shoved repeatedly against the soft swelling. Each time he pushed or kicked or struck at it. After a dozen of these seemingly purposeless acts, he was held away, as if whatever was doing it was puzzled by his behavior.

  He had quit screaming. The only sounds were his harsh breathings and the zzts and pings from the panrad. Even as he became aware of them, the zzts changed tempo and settled into a recognizable pattern of bursts—three units that crackled out again and again.

  “Who are you? Who are you?”

  Of course, it could just as easily have been “What are you?” or “What the hell!” or “Nov smoz ka pop?”

  Or nothing—semantically speaking.

  But he didn’t think the latter. And when he was gently lowered to the floor, and the tentacle went off to only-God-knew-where in the dark, he was sure that the creature was communicating—or trying to—with him.

  It was this thought that kept him from screaming and running around in the lightless and fetid chamber, brainlessly, instinctively seeking an outlet. He mastered his panic and snapped open a little shutter in the panrad’s side and thrust in his right-hand index finger. There he poised it above the key and in a moment, when the thing paused in transmitting, he sent back, as best he could, the pulses he had received. It was not necessary for him to turn on the light and spin the dial that would put him on the 1000 kc. band. The instrument would automatically key that frequency in with the one he had just received.

  The oddest part about the whole procedure was that his whole body was trembling almost uncontrollably—one part excepted. That was his index finger, his one unit that seemed to him to have a definite function in this otherwise meaningless situation. It was the section of him that was helping him to survive—the only part that knew how—at that moment. Even his brain seemed to have no connection with his finger. That digit was himself, and the rest just happened to be linked to it.

  When he paused, the transmitter began again. This time the units were unrecognizable. There was a certain rhythm to them, but he could not know what they meant. Meanwhile, the RD was pinging. Something somewhere in the dark hole had a beam held tightly on him.

  He pressed a button on the panrad’s top, and the built-in flashlight illuminated the a
rea just in front of him. He saw a wall of reddish-gray rubbery substance and on the wall a roughly circular and light gray swelling about four feet in diameter. Around it, giving it a Medusa appearance, were coiled twelve very long and very thin tentacles.

  Though he was afraid that if he turned his back to them, the tentacles would seize him once more, his curiosity forced him to wheel about and examine with the bright beam his surroundings. He was in an egg-shaped chamber about thirty feet long, twelve wide, and eight to ten high in the middle. It was formed of a reddish-grey material, smooth except for irregular intervals of blue or red pipes. Veins and arteries, obviously.

  A door-sized portion of the wall had a vertical slit running down it. Tentacles fringed it. He guessed it was a sort of iris and that it had opened to drag him inside. Starfish-shaped groupings of tentacles were scattered on the walls or hung from the ceiling. On the wall opposite the iris was a long and flexible stalk with a cartilaginous ruff around its free end. When Eddie moved, it moved, its blind point following him as a radar antenna pursues the thing it is locating. That was what it was. And unless he was wrong, the stalk was also a C.W. transmitter-receiver.

  He shot the light on around. When it reached the end farthest from him, he gasped. Ten creatures were huddled together facing him! About the size of half-grown pigs, they looked like nothing so much as unshelled snails; they were eyeless, and the stalk growing from the forehead of each was a tiny duplicate of that on the wall. They didn’t look dangerous. Their open mouths were little and toothless, and their rate of locomotion must be slow, for they moved, like a snail, on a large pedestal of flesh—a foot-muscle.

  Nevertheless, if he were to fall asleep, they could overcome him by force of numbers, and those mouths might drip an acid to digest him, or they might carry a concealed poisonous sting.

  His speculations were interrupted violently. He was seized, lifted, and passed on to another group of tentacles. He was carried beyond the antenna-stalk and toward the snail-beings. Jpst before he reached them, he was halted, facing the wall. An iris, hitherto invisible, opened. His light shone into it, but he could see nothing but convolutions of flesh.