Return to Otherness

by Henry Kuttner

  THE SKY IS FALLING

  Johnny wondered when the spaceship would get there. He didn’t know where “there” was - nobody knew. But he was anxious for landing-day to come. It would give day a real meaning, after the endless artificial days and nights of the ship.

  Not that the ship wasn’t comfortable, and not that there wasn’t purpose in that comfort. Johnny would have to be in perfect shape when the hour of landing finally came and his job would begin. Because he wanted to be in condition to do the job, he had trained his mind to complete relaxation.

  So he lay back in his deep chair and watched the viziports with their troubling tri-dimensional visions of what no longer existed. Blue sky, white clouds, birds, the tops of buildings - he closed his eyes. Perhaps it had been a mistake, after all, this hiding the blackness of space by camouflage. He didn’t want to remember Earth. There was no Earth. There was a shaking white blaze among the stars, somewhere a long way back now, and that was all. No Earth.

  All that remained of it was himself, this ship, the robot that took care of them both, and the images that filled the viziports with nostalgic pictures.

  The rest was over, finished. He didn’t often let himself think about the unpleasant past, or how, for himself, the beginning of the end had happened …

  Leaning back against the bulkhead, Johnny Dyson smiled. “Go on,” he said to the hooked fish named Benjy White.

  White tipped his head back cautiously because of the cumbersome helmet he wore, sprouting wires like Medusa-hair. He looked at his own foreshortened image reflected dimly in the steel ceiling and nodded sagely at himself. “Yeah,” he said, “I learned about women from her. I sure did. Toughest tomato I ever met, then or since. Only one thing ever scared Poochie - I called her Poochie -”

  Beyond the steel walls lay the endless red hills of Mars. Beyond the steel ceiling hung Orion in a blue-black sky lighted by tumbling moons. Somewhere between here and Orion rolled a time-bomb called Earth with its fuse set and lighted and the hours ticking along toward Blow-Up.

  “I called her Poochie,” White said. “If I told you her real name you’d be surprised. After she swiped my dough and divorced me she went right on to the top. What a woman. Now she owns half of -”

  Johnny Dyson thought of the take-off, scheduled for noon tomorrow. Back to Earth. Back to the eve of Armageddon. “Back to the world I never made,” he thought fiercely. ”’- I, a stranger and afraid -’”

  Well, he had a right to be afraid. He knew what was coming. He thought:

  Problem: To keep the ship on Mars.

  Method: To steal the atomic fuel.

  It was perfectly simple. All good plans were simple. Unfortunately it depended on the simple mind of White whether or not the plan worked out. And White was a well-hooked fish, all right, but he wasn’t landed yet. He wore the transmitter that controlled the ship’s robot. And the robot was the key to the fuel supply which could bridge the long jump between Mars, where life could be an Eden, and Earth, where life was doomed. Sooner, or later, sooner or later …

  “Oh, well,” White was saying, “Funny thing is, there’s a warrant out for my arrest back on Earth, and the company that issued it belongs to Poochie lock, stock and barrel. She don’t know about it, of course.” He chuckled sardonically.

  “Think I could get her to quash that warrant? No, sir. Only one thing ever scared that woman. Thunder. If I went to Poochie right now - only it’d be a long walk - if I went to her and said, ‘Poochie, remember how you used to try to crawl in my pocket whenever it thundered? Well, now, for old time’s sake -’”

  He grinned, shaking his head until the Medusa-wires whined against each other.

  “That woman,” he said admiringly. “That woman. She’d put the cuffs on me herself. Tough as pig-iron. Never was very pretty, but she looks like a hippo these days. My opinion, if she ever got the idea of conquering the world, she’d do it. Oh well. She went up. I didn’t.”

  “What’s the warrant for?” Dyson asked, not caring.

  “Larceny. I guess I sort of miscalculated there.” White grinned again. “Not so good, is it? I look older than I am, the life I led, but I’m under fifty. And I always felt I had my best years ahead. Still feel that way. I’d hate to waste ‘em in jail. I’ll tell you, Johnny, I kind of like your idea of staying on here. Not going back. Nobody to say, ‘Move along, bud.’ And then there’s lots of things I always wanted to do, never been let. Lots of things. On Earth, I’d never get a chance.”

  Now they were getting to it. Dyson kept the eagerness out of his voice with rigid control. All he said was, “We’re in Eden, Benjy. We’ve got all the power we need in the batteries - safe power. Safe atomic power. We’ve got the robot. People were right when they said heaven was in the sky, Benjy. Mars is heaven.”

  “Mm-m. Sometimes Mars is underneath, too. Still, the closer I get to that larceny rap, the more I like your idea. Just like Paradise. Milk and honey for free. All we’d need is some houris,” White said, mispronouncing it.

  “You can’t have everything.”

  “Guess not. Still, it almost seems like in this set-up you got planned, I could wish for anything and just get it. If I wished for a woman -” He snorted. “I might get Poochie, come to think of it. Oh, Lord. Maybe later we could put the robot to work on quasi-biology. I recollect something about surrogate plasms. If I could rig the genes in advance I could maybe work out a nice, comfortable little lady and speed up her growing time. Wonder how long it’d take her to hit biological twenty? It’s an idea, Johnny, it’s an idea.”

  “Sure, why not? Wish on a star. All you need’s to be on the right star. This is it. We can do anything we want, and there’s nobody to stop us.”

  “Martine,” White said.

  “Two against one. Benjy?”

  “Yeah?”

  “We can do it. Right now.”

  White’s brows lifted.

  “What’s happened? Not -” His face changed. He tilted his head to stare at the dull reflection in the ceiling. Beyond it he was seeing the night sky and the blue-green star of Earth.

  “Oh no, no,” Dyson said quickly. “Not the Blow-Up. Not yet, anyhow.”

  White shrugged. “May never come,” he said, and stretched his arm out for a cigarette on the table beside him. “May never come at all.”

  “It’ll come,” Dyson said quietly. “It doesn’t matter a hoot whether or not our cargo gets back to Earth. Ever since the Forties physicists have been looking for an atomic safety, and if they couldn’t even find it through artificial radio-elements, what good can Martian ores do? We’ve wasted six months mining junk.”

  “Can’t tell that,” White said, blowing smoke. “We got no equipment for refining and testing. All we do is hunt, dig and load. The rest is up to the physics boys.”

  Dyson shook his head.

  “It’ll come,” he insisted. “Ever since Alamogordo it’s been coming. So I say, what’s the use of going back? All you’ll get out of it’s jail. All I’ll get is - oh, I don’t know. More hard work, more worries, the same old routine. And for what? The Blow-Up. That’s all. Why work?”

  White, sitting on the edge of the bunk, humped himself forward, elbows on knees, cigarette dangling from his lips. The wires of the helmet cast complex shadows over his face. He didn’t answer.

  Dyson said eagerly, “We can pull our plan right now, Benjy. Martine’s micro-photographing the log. He’ll be busy for a couple of hours more anyway. We’ll have all the time we need to hide the fuel.”

  White tried absently to scratch his head and tangled his fingers in a maze of insulated wiring.

  “Not so fast,” he said. “What’s the big rush? We got to think this over. I’m not going to haul that fuel around. Even if I had lead skin, I’d still say no thanks.”

  “Who’s asking you to haul fuel? All you’ve got to do is hand over that transmitter.”

  White looked at him sidewise. His eyes grew slightly glassy. “Hold on there. The robot’s got t
o stay energized. It takes somebody’s mind to do that. If I took it off -”

  “I’d put it on.”

  “Yes, but - look here, there might be trouble if I -”

  “Martine’s busy, I tell you.”

  “I mean robot trouble. Suppose we need the critter in an emergency? After all, the robot’s the lad who’s got to pilot us home.”

  “Not if we don’t go. Look, Benjy. We won’t be leaving Mars. Got that?”

  White screwed up his face dubiously. “Yeah,” he said.

  “Okay. That means the ship will be immobilized. Got that too?”

  White blew smoke and studied it, squinting.

  “Sure.”

  “So we don’t have to worry about the robot. All it’s going to do is take the fuel out and hide it where Martine can’t find it. Got that?”

  White snorted and inhaled smoke.

  “Sure I got it. I ain’t dumb. Even if they did pick three beat-up techs like us for this crazy trip, that don’t mean my head’s soft yet. I get it, all right. Only, I got my orders about this robot. Martine would blow his top if he caught you with the helmet on.”

  “I know how to handle the thing. I’ve done it before.”

  “Not since the Chief caught you passing the buck to the robot,” White said with the air of one capturing a minor pawn.

  That had happened a month before when Dyson, wearing the transmitter, had sent the robot down a deep crevasse to test rock strata. Martine had objected violently. While the robot was far stronger and more agile than a man, it was also much heavier and more fragile, even in the decreased gravity of Mars. Obviously too, Martine considered the robot much less expendable than Johnny Dyson. Insofar as this argument applied to the social unit it was true, since the piloting of the ship depended on the precision, memory and integration of the robot. Dyson, however, remained unconvinced.

  Now he grinned. “You learn by experience,” he said. “This time he won’t catch me. Just hand the transmitter over. I know what I’m doing.”

  “Well,” White said, “well - of course if we do it at all, the robot’s the boy to send. If a shield or a damper should slip I’d rather the robot was carrying the stuff than me. I’d hate to get my bones sunburned. Only, what about afterwards?”

  “Martine? Oh, he’ll come around. He’ll have to. He can’t get away without fuel. He’ll find out Mars is a nice place to live - not to visit.”

  “I wonder about that,” White murmured, and Dyson’s eyes narrowed. He drew a deep breath. So much depended on this fool, this fool -

  “I thought you were convinced,” he said, after a safe interval.

  “Take it easy. I didn’t say no, did I? I got that larceny rap to think of. But -” he made a wrinkled grimace of indecision and touched the control button at his forehead with a hesitating hand.

  “Go on,” Dyson urged. “Take it off. From now on you can relax. You’re free. You can do anything you want. Only give me the helmet.”

  White put both hands to the steel crown of the thing, lifted it a little, rolled frightened eyes at Dyson and then suddenly, with a gesture of abnegation, raised it from his head and held it out. The white line its pressure had left on his forehead turned pink. He wrinkled his brow anxiously.

  “Careful, now, careful,” he said unnecessarily. “Look out for that cord. And cut down to minimum before you put it on. Easy, now. Turn it up easy, Johnny.”

  Dyson paid no attention to him. This was his moment of triumph, and Benjy White had ceased to exist. A slow warmth seeped through his skull from the contact of the helmet, and the remote vibrations he felt were like the vibrations of music heard from far away. The music of the spheres, he thought. With this on his head he could control a planet - if Martine gave him another five minutes of freedom.

  “We’ll have to take the robot outside,” he said. “Got a control unit on a portable?”

  “Sure have.” White did things to a wall panel and a square box slid out and cradled itself on a carriage with flexible telescoping legs.

  “Two miles of wire will do,” Dyson said. “I’ve got the place for the cache spotted.”

  “Two miles … mm-m. Two … got it. Johnny, you really figure there won’t be rescue ships sent out for us?”

  “Not a chance. Millions for defense, but try to get a few bucks spent on an expedition like ours, once our work’s done. Rescue ships, ha. Rescue ships take expensive equipment. They take man-hours. You can’t waste stuff like that, Benjy. Ask the Energy Allocation Board. It took a miracle to get this ship out and another to keep it from going for military defense.”

  Dyson was talking with the topmost level of his mind, waiting for enough power to accumulate, listening to the music grow stronger and stronger in his skull.

  “Maybe so,” White said doubtfully. “What if the Chief sends out a signal, though? He might do it somehow. He might mark a big SOS out on the desert.”

  Dyson considered the possibility, weaving it in and out of that beautiful, distant vibration of music. Martine was a problem, of course. But any problem could be solved, if you approached it the right way.

  “He’ll come around,” he said. “It’s two against one, remember. Once he knows he can’t ever get back to Earth, he’ll come around. Once he knows our plans … Who’d turn down Eden?”

  “Oh, it sounds like a lazy man’s paradise, all right,” White said. “That’s for me. Little streams of whiskey come trickling down the rocks. Just the same, I’d kind of like to see our cargo get back home.”

  “What for? It’s no good.”

  “Can’t tell. It might be. All I’m saying is, I wish I could kick the ship on the rump and send her back to Earth.”

  “How can the ship get back without the robot to guide it?” Dyson asked in a too-patient voice, his eyes unfocused as he concentrated on the gathering power in the helmet.

  He touched it with a tentative finger and then bent to the mirror set on the wall to read the reversed image of the dial set in the helmet’s front. “Won’t be long now,” he murmured. “We’re going to need the robot, Benjy. Just remember that. Unless you want to work like a dog.”

  “I been working like a dog all my life,” White said. “And all the bones had the meat chawed off before I got ‘em. Oh, I’m convinced, Johnny, but I can’t help thinking about Poochie.”

  “You’d have plenty of time to think about her in jail.”

  “Guess so. Tell you what. Maybe later we can figure a way to get the cargo home. If we built another robot - it might take quite a while, but if we managed it - we could spare the one we got now.”

  “Why not?” Dyson agreed quickly. “Plenty of time to work that out later on.”

  “Plenty. We’ll want something to keep us busy, after Eden’s all built. I just -” He grinned a little sheepishly. “I don’t know, I guess I just hate to give up without a struggle.”

  “We aren’t!” Dyson was stung. “There’s no use struggling when you haven’t got a chance. If there was a chance I’d be the last man to give up, Benjy. I’d fight to the last ditch. But Earth’s as good as gone, and … oh, shut up. Don’t think about it.”

  But he could feel it and see it - the solid planet shuddering underfoot, buckling above hollow emptiness, and the mushroom cloud rolling majestically toward the sky. Was it Man’s fault? He’d picked up that fatally sharp knife of his own volition, but who gave Man the knife in the first place? God? It was the fruit of the tree of knowledge, all right, and to taste it was to die. God’s fault, then, not Adam’s.

  “Let’s go,” he said abruptly. “We haven’t got all the time in the world. Where’s the robot?”

  “Storage. Johnny, you thought how a court of law might feel about this?”

  “The same way they’d feel about larceny, maybe,” Dyson said, and walked the control carriage out the door. As he tip-toed it along the passage he could hear White padding after him, worrying softly under his breath.

  Luckily they didn’t have to pass Martine’s
door. Dyson urged the carriage faster, watched the trundling box rock hastily along before him like a dog on a leash. A plump Scotty, perhaps, with greyhound legs. He squeezed the bulb at the leash’s end and the Scotty sprinted.

  Its radioactive sodium battery had a half-life of three years. After that, the battery could be recharged, but not without a pile to produce the right isotope. And there were no atomic piles on Mars. And there never would be. Plenty of storage batteries in the ship, but all of those, even hooked up in series, couldn’t throw enough power into the ship to overcome Martian gravity. No, Mars hugged the ship to her bosom now with an unbreakable grip. Mars the mother, restraining it with strong apron strings, however foolishly it might try to plunge back across space to the world where doom awaited it. Mars would receive and hide the fuel and hold the ship to her bosom forever.

  The batteries would be useful, though. They’d help provide all the comforts of home. This world, Dyson assured himself, was going to be a perfect Eden, an Eden with modern plumbing.

  He reined the control carriage to a halt and opened the door at his shoulder. There was the robot, waiting in storage. It hung cradled in a resilient mould that rocked occasionally as balances automatically shifted and compensated inside the grey, gleaming body.

  Gigantic and inhuman. Segmented like an ant, thorax and abdomen linked by a universal joint. Many specialized limbs. That was the robot. It had bulb-shaped eyes set in its abdomen, for underwater vision. A turret-tower of mosaic eyes, some for day and some for night, rose from the top of the thorax.

  Lion-yellow, these eyes looked at Dyson.

  Urging the carriage before him, he stepped quickly into the room and moved to one side uneasily, trying to elude that steady stare. But he could not, of course. There were always facets whose optic axes faced the observer accurately enough to reveal the dark pigments around the visual sense-cells. Any spider can do the same trick. But the false pupils’ stare unnerved Dyson.