Gordon R. Dickson's SF Best

by Gordon R. Dickson

  "Monster!" screamed the transceiver tinnily. faithfully translating the gabbling of the Communicator, who was following a few steps behind like a small dog barking behind a larger. "Brute! Savage! Unclean . . ." It kept up a steady denunciation.

  Jerry turned to face Communicator, and the native tensed for flight.

  "You know what I'm waiting for," said Jerry, almost smiling, hearing the transceiver translate his words into gabbling – though it was not necessary. As he had said, Communicator knew what he was waiting for.

  Communicator cursed a little longer in his own tongue, then went off into one of the structures, and returned with a handful of what looked like lengths of green vine. He dropped them on the ground before Jerry and backed away, cautiously, gabbling.

  "Now will you go? And never come back! Never . . ."

  "We'll see," said Jerry. He picked up the lengths of green vine and turned away up the path to the ship.

  The natives he passed on his way out of the clearing huddled away from him and gabbled as he went.

  When he stepped back into the clearing before the ship, he saw that most of the vegetation touching or close to the ship was already brown and dying. He went on into the ship, carefully avoiding the locked sick-bay door, and wound lengths of the green vine around the wrists of each of the men in restraints.

  Then he sat down to await results. He had never been so tired in his life. The minute he touched the chair, his eyes started to close. He struggled to his feet and forced himself to pace the floor until the green vines, which had already sent hair-thin tendrils into the ulnar arteries of the arms around which they were wrapped, pumped certain inhibitory chemicals into the bloodstreams of the seven men.

  When the men started to blink their eyes and look about sensibly, he went to work to unfasten the homemade straitjackets that had held them prisoner. When he had released the last one, he managed to get out his final message before collapsing.

  "Take the ship up," croaked Jerry. "Then, let yourself into the sick bay and wrap a vine piece around the wrists of Milt, and Art, and Ben. Ship up first – then when you're safely in space, take care of them, first – then the sick bay. Do it the other way and you'll never see Earth again."

  They crowded around him with questions. He waved them off, slumping into one of the abandoned bunks.

  "Ship up –" he croaked. "Then release and fix the others. Ask me later. Later –"

  . . . And that was all he remembered, then.

  IV

  At some indefinite time later, not quite sure whether he had woken by himself, or whether someone else had wakened him, Jerry swam back up to consciousness. He was vaguely aware that he had been sleeping a long time; and his body felt sane again, but weak as the body of a man after a long illness.

  He blinked and saw the large face of Milt Johnson, partly obscured by a cup of something. Milt was seated in a chair by the side of the bunk Jerry lay in, and the Team captain was offering the cup of steaming black liquid to Jerry. Slowly, Jerry understood that this was coffee and he struggled up on one elbow to take the cup.

  He drank from it slowly for a little while, while Milt watched and waited.

  "Do you realize," said Milt at last, when Jerry finally put down the three-quarters empty cup on the nightstand by the bunk, "that what you did in locking me in the sick bay was mutiny?"

  Jerry swallowed. Even his vocal cords seemed drained of strength and limp.

  "You realize," he croaked, "what would have happened if I hadn't?"

  "You took a chance. You followed a wild hunch –"

  "No hunch," said Jerry. He cleared his throat. "Art found that growth on Wally's brain had quit growing before Wally killed himself. And I'd been getting along without tranquilizers – handling the nightmares better than I had with them."

  "It could have been the growth in your own brain," said Milt, "taking over and running you – working better on you than it had on Wally."

  "Working better – talk sense!" said Jerry, weakly, too pared down by the past two weeks to care whether school kept or not, in the matter of service courtesy to a superior. "The nightmares had broken Wally down to where we had to wrap him in a straitjacket. They hadn't even knocked me off my feet. If Wally's physiological processes had fought the alien invasion to a standstill, then I, you, Art, and Ben – all of us – had to be doing even better. Besides – I'd figured out what the aliens were after."

  "What were they after?" Milt looked strangely at him.

  "Curing us – of something we didn't have when we landed, but they thought we had."

  "And what was that?"

  "Insanity," said Jerry, grimly.

  Milt's blond eyebrows went up. He opened his mouth as if to say something disbelieving then closed it again. When he did speak, it was quite calmly and humbly.

  "They thought," he asked, "Communicator's people thought that we were insane, and they could cure us?"

  Jerry laughed; not cheerfully, but grimly.

  "You saw that jungle around us back there?" he asked. "That was a factory complex – an infinitely complex factory complex. You saw their village with those tangles of roots inside the big whitish shells? – that was a highly diversified laboratory."

  Milt's blue eyes slowly widened, as Jerry watched. "You don't mean that – seriously?" said Milt, at last.

  "That's right." Jerry drained the cup and set it aside. "Their technology is based on organic chemistry, the way ours is on the physical sciences. By our standards, they're chemical wizards. How'd you like to try changing the mind of an alien organism by managing to grow an extra part on to his brain – the way they tried to do to us humans? To them, it was the simplest way of convincing us."

  Milt stared again. Finally, he shook his head.

  "Why?" he said. "Why would they want to change our minds?"

  "Because their philosophy, their picture of life and the universe around them grew out of a chemically oriented science," answered Jerry. "The result is, they see all life as part of a closed, intro-acting chemical circuit with no loose ends; with every living thing, intelligent or not, a part of the whole. Well, you saw it for yourself in your nightmare. That's the cosmos as they see it – and to them it's beautiful."

  "But why did they want us to see it the way they did?"

  "Out of sheer kindness," said Jerry and laughed barkingly. "According to their cosmology, there's no such thing as an alien. Therefore we weren't alien – just sick in the head. Poisoned by the lumps of metal like the ship and the translator we claimed were so important. And our clothes and everything else we had. The kind thing was to cure and rescue us."

  "Now, wait a minute," said Milt. "They saw those things of ours work –"

  "What's the fact they worked got to do with it? What you don't understand, Milt," said Jerry, lying back gratefully on the bunk, "is that Communicator's peoples' minds were closed. Not just unconvinced, not just refusing to see – but closed! Sealed, and welded shut from prehistoric beginnings right down to the present. The fact our translator worked meant nothing to them. According to their cosmology, it shouldn't work, so it didn't. Any stray phenomena tending to prove it did were simply the product of diseased minds."

  Jerry paused to emphasize the statement and his eyes drifted shut. The next thing he knew Milt was shaking him.

  ". . . Wake up!" Milt was shouting at him. "You can dope off after you've explained. I'm not going to have any crew back in straitjackets again, just because you were too sleepy to warn me they'd revert!"

  ". . . Won't revert," said Jerry, thickly. He roused himself. "Those lengths of vine released chemicals into their bloodstreams to destroy what was left of the growths. I wouldn't leave until I got them from Communicator." Jerry struggled up on one elbow again. "And after a short walk in a human brain – mine – he and his people couldn't get us out of sight and forgotten fast enough."

  "Why?" Milt shook him again as Jerry's eyelids sagged. "Why should getting their minds hooked in with yours shake them u
p so?"

  ". . . Bust – bust their cosmology open. Quit shaking . . . I'm awake."

  "Why did it bust them wide open?"

  "Remember – how it was for you with the nightmares?" said Jerry. "The other way around? Think back, about when you slept. There you were, a lone atom of humanity, caught up in a nightmare like one piece of stew meat in a vat stewing all life together – just one single chemical bit with no independent existence, and no existence at all except as part of the whole. Remember?"

  He saw Milt shiver slightly.

  "It was like being swallowed up by a soft machine," said the Team captain in a small voice. "I remember."

  "All right," said Jerry. "That's how it was for you in Communicator's cosmos. But remember something about that cosmos? It was warm, and safe. It was all-embracing, all-settling, like a great, big, soft, woolly comforter."

  "It was too much like a woolly comforter," said Milt, shuddering. "It was unbearable."

  "To you. Right," said Jerry. "But to Communicator, it was ideal. And if that was ideal, think what it was like when he had to step into a human mind – mine."

  Milt stared at him.

  "Why?" Milt asked.

  "Because," said Jerry, "he found himself alone there!"

  Milt's eyes widened.

  "Think about it, Milt," said Jerry. "From the time we're born, we're individuals. From the moment we open our eyes on the world, inside we're alone in the universe. All the emotional and intellectual resources that Communicator draws from his identity with the stewing vat of his cosmos, each one of us has to dig up for and out of himself!"

  Jerry stopped to give Milt a chance to say something. But Milt was evidently not in possession of something to say at the moment.

  "That's why Communicator and the others couldn't take it, when they hooked into my human mind," Jerry went on. "And that's why, when they found out what we were like inside, they couldn't wait to get rid of us. So they gave me the vines and kicked us out. That's the whole story." He lay back on the bunk.

  Milt cleared his throat. "All right," he said.

  Jerry's heavy eyes closed. Then the other man's voice spoke, still close by his ear.

  "But," said Milt, "I still think you took a chance, going down to butt heads with the natives that way. What if Communicator and the rest had been able to stand exposure to your mind. You'd locked me in and the other men were in restraint. Our whole team would have been part of that stewing vat."

  "Not a chance," said Jerry.

  "You can't be sure of that."

  "Yes I can." Jerry heard his own voice sounding harshly beyond the darkness of his closed eyelids. "It wasn't just that I knew my cosmological view was too tough for them. It was the fact that their minds were closed – in the vat they had no freedom to change and adapt themselves to anything new."

  "What's that got to do with it?" demanded the voice of Milt.

  "Everything," said Jerry. "Their point of view only made us more uncomfortable – but our point of view, being individually adaptable, and open, threatened to destroy the very laws of existence as they saw them. An open mind can always stand a closed one, if it has to – by making room for it in the general picture. But a closed mind can't stand it near an open one without risking immediate and complete destruction in its own terms. In a closed mind, there's no more room."

  He stopped speaking and slowly exhaled a weary breath.

  "Now," he said, without opening his eyes, "will you finally get oot of here and let me sleep?"

  For a long second more, there was silence. Then, he heard a chair scrape softly, and the muted steps of Milt tiptoeing away.

  With another sigh, at last Jerry relaxed and let consciousness slip from him.

  He slept.

  – as sleep the boar upon the plain, the hawk upon the crag, and the tiger on the hill . . .

  A strikingly different view of mankind, and a most unusual story for Gordy, the greatest discovery-delight I had in reading these pages. And I'm not sure I can explain why without creating the wrong impression.

  You see, I have read a lot of slushpile – the technical term for unsolicited manuscripts, sent to magazines or writers' workshops by aspiring amateurs. And the theme of this story is a slushpile regular – second in popularity only to the one about the only two survivors of a planetary disaster who ground their lifeship safely on a habitable new planet and it turns out their names are Adam and Eve. For some reason beyond my grasping, God in His Downtown Providence ordained that everyone who ever tried to write, tried to write this story. They are, invariably, awful.

  Well, everybody makes an ashtray their first week in shop class (and sometimes their last), and they always stink too. Here's the ashtray the shop teacher made.

  How terrible (goes the ubiquitous theme) it must be to be a god . . . and be cursed with empathy. It wouldn't be so bad if you could just hate the little buggers!

  But to be a god is, by definition, to be . . .

  OF THE PEOPLE

  But you know, I could sense it coming a long time off. It was a little extra time taken in drinking a cup of coffee, it was lingering over the magazines in a drugstore as I picked out a handful. It was a girl I looked at twice as I ran out and down the steps of a library.

  And it wasn't any good and I knew it. But it kept coming and it kept coming, and one night I stayed working at the design of a power cruiser until it was finished, before I finally knocked off for supper. Then, after I'd eaten, I looked ahead down twelve dark hours to daylight, and I knew I'd had it.

  So I got up and I walked out of the apartment. I left my glass half-full and the record player I had built playing the music I had written to the pictures I had painted. Left the organ and the typewriter, left the darkroom and the lab. Left the jammed-full filing cabinets. Took the elevator and told the elevator boy to head for the ground floor. Walked out into the deep snow.

  "You going out in January without an overcoat, Mr. Crossman?" asked the doorman.

  "Don't need a coat," I told him. "Never no more, no coats."

  "Don't you want me to phone the garage for your car, then?"

  "Don't need a car."

  I left him and set out walking. After a while it began to snow, but not on me. And after a little more while people started to stare, so I flagged down a cab.

  "Get out and give me the keys," I told the driver.

  "You drunk?" he said.

  "It's all right, son," I said. "I own the company. But you'll get out nonetheless and give me the keys." He got out and gave me the keys and I left him standing there.

  I got in the cab and drove it off through the nightlit downtown streets, and I kissed the city good-by as I went. I blew a kiss to the grain exhange and a kiss to the stockyards. And a kiss to every one of the fourteen offices in the city that knew me each under a different title as head of a different business. You've got to get along without me now, city and people, I said, because I'm not coming back, no more, no more.

  I drove out of downtown and out past Longview Acres and past Manor Acres and past Sherman Hills and I blew them all a kiss, too. Enjoy your homes, you people, I told them, because they're good homes – not the best I could have done you by a damn sight, but better than you'll see elsewhere in a long time, and your money's worth. Enjoy your homes and don't remember me.

  I drove out to the airport and there I left the cab. It was a good airport. I'd laid it out myself and I knew. It was a good airport and I got eighteen days of good hard work out of the job. I got myself so lovely and tired doing it I was able to go out to the bars and sit there having half a dozen drinks – before the urge to talk to the people around me became unbearable and I had to get up and go home.

  There were planes on the field. A good handful of them. I went in and talked to one of the clerks. "Mr. Crossman!" he said, when he saw me.

  "Get me a plane," I said. "Get me a plane headed east and then forget I was in tonight."

  He did; and I went. I flew to New York and chang
ed planes and flew to London; and changed again and carne in by jet to Bombay.

  By the time I reached Bombay, my mind was made up for good, and I went through the city as if it were a dream of buildings and people and no more. I went through the town and out of the town and I hit the road north, walking. And as I walked, I took off my coat and my tie. And I opened my collar to the open air and I started my trek.

  Illustration by RICK BRYANT

  I was six weeks walking it. I remember little bits and pieces of things along the way – mainly faces, and mainly the faces of the children, for they aren't afraid when they're young. They'd come up to me and run alongside, trying to match the strides I'd take, and after a while they'd get tired and drop back – but there were always others along the way. And there were adults, too, men and women, but when they got close they'd take one look at my face and go away again. There was only one who spoke to me in all that trip, and that was a tall, dark brown man in some kind of uniform. He spoke to me in English and I answered him in dialect. He was scared to the marrow of his bones, for after he spoke I could hear the little grinding of his teeth in the silence as he tried to keep them from chattering. But I answered him kindly, and told him I had business in the north that was nobody's business but my own. And when he still would not move – he was well over six feet and nearly as tall as I – I opened my right hand beneath his nose and showed him himself, small and weak as a caterpillar in the palm of it. And he fell out of my path as if his legs had all the strength gone out of them, and I went on.

  I was six weeks walking it. And when I came to the hills, my beard was grown out and my pants and my shirt were in tatters. Also, by this time, the word had gone ahead of me. Not the official word, but the little words of little people, running from mouth to mouth. They knew I was coming and they knew where I was headed – to see the old man up behind Mutteeanee Pass, the white-bearded, holy man of the village between two peaks.