Star Science Fiction Stories No. 2

by Frederik Pohl

  I don’t know whether I heard Mavra say “Oh dear God . . . !” or felt it coming through our palms.

  Laus had dropped the pebbles and got out his strings. As Laus spread the long one on the grass to make the circle, the Giant approached hesitantly. I didn’t get the other game, but this looks simple. He lifted the string and held it at arm’s length, above even his head and far out of Laus’s grasp. He dangled it tantalizingly as Laus tried desperately to snatch it. The Giant began to smile. Fine; this is what it likes. He began backing away, Laus jumping and snatching after him. Then sharply Laus stopped and reached over for more pebbles.

  Back to that routine, I thought; but Mavra was ahead of me. Her hand wasn’t in mine, and when I turned she was half out of her workclothes.

  “Look,” I glugged. “I know I’ve been patient a long time, but is this quite the moment-”

  “Damn this zipper!” she said intently. “Give me a hand.” And she went on peeling.

  I needed two sets of eyes. Through the camouflage-bushes I could see that I’d been all wrong about Laus’s use for the pebbles.

  And him without even a slingshot.

  The first stone smote the Giant in the forehead all right, but the rest of the sequence didn’t follow. All it did was to irritate the hell out of him. He lashed out with one backhand blow and Laus was stretched on the grass.

  Then the Giant backed away in consternation. My God! another one! But he didn’t back fast, and Mavra’s light on her feet. There she was, curving against him, looking up at him with soft wide eyes. And as his face relented and the old grin came back, he reached out for her and she dropped lithely, rolled over, and contemplated that mirror up there.

  In vague general design, I suppose, she wasn’t too different from his Giantess, but the size and the hair and the breasts would all be enough to keep any such thoughts out of his mind. Gently, soothingly, happily he stroked her, exactly as I was stroking Bast, who had just jumped into my lap with an ill-tempered remark about people who spend their time staring at unimportant things and neglect the comfort of cats.

  * * * *

  It all seems obvious when you look back on it from the vantage of God knows how many years; and up till the day he died, some three here-years ago, Laus was always ready with a speech on why the BLAM boys should have foreseen it.

  “The science fiction writers seemed to be a step ahead,” he’d say, “and the scientists followed their line. It seemed so logical. This was how to communicate with any intelligent being. But practically it meant ‘any intelligent being with a Copernican view of his own world and an understanding of the mathematical use of zero.’ In other words, nobody in the highest civilizations of our own earth up until only a few hundred years ago. The noblest Roman of them all couldn’t have understood my planetary diagram. The finest Greek mind would have been confused by my system of numbers. From what we know now, the best men here would understand about pi and about the square of the hypotenuse; with such an architectural culture it’s inevitable. But what chance contact would? Even in our own contemporary earth?”

  And Mavra would always cut him off, eventually, by saying, “But isn’t it better this way? If you had made contact, we’d simply have been lost aliens, trapped in a civilization that could never help us home. As it is,” and she’d yawn and stretch gracefully, “we’ve conquered the planet.”

  Which we have, of course. Like I said, I don’t know how long it’s been. At the rate my great-great-(I think)-grandchildren are growing up, I must be pushing a hundred, which is the expectancy the actuaries gave me when last heard from; but I feel good for maybe another fifty.

  There are hundreds of us by now, and we’re beginning to spread into the other continents. Give us another generation or two, and there’ll be thousands. It isn’t hard to teach the kids something that combines duty and pleasure to such an extraordinary degree as multiplying. (Though I always doubt that Laus had his proper share of descendants; he took his crash-landing harder than I did mine.) And we teach them other things too, of course, all that we can remember of what all three of us knew.

  (Funny: it still seems trine even with Laus gone . . .and by now even I know a fair amount of BLAM to pass on.)

  And we teach them what Bast knew, and never meant to teach us. We still miss her. It’s sad that she had a much shorter lifespan and no mate. But then otherwise she and her tribe would have been competition—and pretty ruthless, considering how much their long training would make them better at it.

  But we learned enough from her. We know how to make the Giants feel that it’s a pleasure to give pleasure to us, and a privilege to provide us with food and shelter. No clothes, since we saw they puzzled the one I still think of as Our Giant (Mavra still lives in his home). We don’t need them much in this climate (I wonder if we ever needed them as much as we thought we did on earth?), and besides our genes seem to have learned something from Bast too. Our great-greats are hairier than the hairiest earth man, even a white. (This was a blow to Laus; he never quite got over having to stop scraping his face.)

  The Giants obey well, for a race new to the custom. (Oh, sure they had pets before, but the type of pets that obey them.) Their medical science isn’t bad; they’ve been training special doctors for us for some time, and this year they’re building a hospital. There are farmers making a good living out of foods which we like but which never had much market before. They’ve even started cultivating that weed I accidentally discovered which is so much like tobacco and makes such a fine chaw.

  The camouflage-bushes have grown naturally (with a little irrigation and fertilization when there were no Giants around). They have no idea where we came from, and since they have no notion of evolution or the relation of species, they’ve decided it doesn’t matter. When they do reach that point, their paleontologists can undoubtedly knock up a few fossil reconstructions near enough to suffice as our ancestors.

  And meanwhile we’re ready, whenever our people land, to hand over to them a ready-conquered planet.

  But it’s been a long time. In all these years, wouldn’t a scoutship have . . . ?

  Sometimes I can’t help wondering:

  Have Bast’s people landed on earth?

  <>

  * * * *

  FLETCHER PRATT

  It is not true that Fletcher Pratt is a marmoset (although it is true that he breeds them in his New York apartment). Having said that, however, you have said all that can be said about what Fletcher Pratt is not. This ex-reporter, ex-prizefighter, ex-librarian, currently combines within himself such diverse occupations as historian (Ordeal by Fire, for instance, the finest one-volume history of the Civil War in print), critic and reviewer (for The New York Times and the Saturday Review, among others), novelist (The Undying Fire, most recently), anthologist and editor (with a product too numerous to mention) and concocter of the most various array of cocktails and most appetizing spread of foods ever served in the town of Highlands, New Jersey, where he makes his part-time home. Mr. Pratt is also a story-story writer of distinction, but that need hardly have been mentioned when you have right before your eyes his subtly sly bit of japery entitled-

  Hormones

  Dear Will:

  You may think it queer to be hearing from me after we’ve been out of touch for so long— since the day after graduating from Hobart, wasn’t it? when you were going on to take your divinity degree and I pushed you into commerce—but I’ve gotten myself into a situation where only someone with a divinity degree can help me. That is, I think so. If I’m wrong, tell me, will you?

  The jam I’m in started with—wait, I’ll go back and put in the background. I’m working for Dunham and Barrington in New York, an advertising agency. I’m what they call a junior accountant executive; we handle mostly textile and clothing accounts, and the big wheel in the agency is a dame named Mrs. Beirne. I do not know what happened to Mr. Beirne. I can guess, though.

  She looks like a grenadier, over six feet tall and
with a good deal of a voice. You could call her a well-preserved forty. She works hard at it, and the beauty parlors keep her pretty well in line, except for the mustache. It’s not very big, though.

  The other element is Mrs. Herbert J. Schofield. Yes, I’m married now, but I wasn’t when this began, and you can save the congratulations until you hear the rest. Her name is Laura. I began dating her about a year ago and kept right on. Now I want you to get this straight; I wasn’t the only one she dated, and although she let me kiss her good night, she probably did the others, too. And there wasn’t anything in her actions to make me think she’d be willing to make it permanent. Only I wanted it to be— definitely.

  I didn’t dare ask her for two reasons. One is that she obviously wasn’t ready to tie herself down to one man until she’d looked around a little more. The other is that her family is pretty well fixed. The few times I was there they made it pretty clear that they wanted Laura to marry a man who could pay her bills.

  Well, a junior account executive’s salary doesn’t go too far toward meeting bills. I used to lie in bed and worry about it after a date with her, and think there was practically nothing I wouldn’t do to get Laura and enough of an income to keep her on at the same time.

  Maybe I thought wrong or somebody overheard me thinking. You figure that out.

  Anyway, on this particular night I had been out with some of the gang playing poker, and we tipped over quite a few, and when I got back about two in the morning I felt that old uncertain feeling. There’s an all-night drug store around the corner on Third Avenue, so I figured I’d drop in and get me some vitamin B-1 tablets. It maybe wouldn’t interest anyone in your business, but if you can keep enough sense to take aboard about five of them on the night before, you don’t have a hangover the morning after.

  This is what makes me write to you. I remember thinking, rather fuzzily, how I wished I could call up a devil or something to get what I wanted.

  Then I went into the store.

  Now I don’t want to give the impression there was anything in the least like a demon about the clerk who waited on me. He was short and fat, with hair plastered back on his forehead and a round face. In fact, he looked like a shaved pig. I asked for my vitamin B-l and he said eighty-eight cents, and when he handed me my change, he said:

  “If you used the right kind of hormones, you wouldn’t have to buy these.”

  I said: “Huh?”

  “Sure,” he said. “You drink because you got an emotional problem. If you use hormones right the problem goes away.”

  I laughed. “The only trouble with that,” I said, “is that I don’t want my emotions to go away. I want the girl to feel a little emotion for me.”

  He nodded and stared at me with big pop eyes. “That we can do too,” he said.

  I laughed again. “I’ve heard of love philters before,” I said. “I suppose you have a hormone that will make the boss give me a better job, too?”

  He shrugged. “If you can administer it. Give it to him, and then place a definite proposition before him. That’s what we call a consent hormone.”

  I was still skeptical. “And the price will be a mere six hundred dollars, payable in easy installments.”

  “No.” He reached under the counter and took out a piece of wrapping paper to figure on. “The affection hormone can be produced very cheaply because it’s merely the emphasis of a natural tendency. . . . Let’s see. That would be one-eighty. . . . Say six-eighty for the two of them.”

  Well, I was a little ahead on the poker game, so I thought —what could I lose? “All right,” I said. “I’ll take a chance. Give me a dose of each.”

  “Just a minute,” he said, and went into the back, bringing back a lancet and a little porcelain dish. “I’ll have to have a drop or two of your blood to mix in to furnish some of your own hormone pattern, and personalize the effect. Otherwise she’d feel affectionate toward everybody.”

  (I hope I’m not boring you, Will, by repeating everything. It all makes part of the picture, do you see?)

  The clerk swabbed a place on my wrist with alcohol, stabbed me a little, extracted a few drops of blood, put a Band-Aid over the place and went to the back again. After a while he came back with two little vials, one blue and one red.

  “Here you are,” he said. “Easy to keep them separate; blue for boys, pink for girls. You administer the blue one to your boss—” (I hadn’t told him it was a woman) “— and the red one to your girl friend. Now you don’t have to be melodramatic about it. For instance, if you put the contents of that red one in some perfume and let her smell of it, it will be quite adequate. The hormone is very volatile. And another thing: the effect of the hormones wears off after a while, and they tend to be exhausted by their own operation. What was it I said? Six-eighty.”

  He wrapped up the vials and I put them in my pocket without thinking of asking him whether he didn’t have a hormone to cure hangovers, too. The next day I called up Laura and asked her for a date, and after she said yes, I went out and bought her a bottle of perfume. Just like the clerk said.

  I poured out a little of it and emptied in the contents of the red vial. There weren’t more than two or three drops and it was colorless.

  Will, you must know how it is. You want to ask a girl something and a lump gets in your throat and you don’t quite dare. I spent all evening at the movie with Laura with that little bottle of perfume burning a hole in my pocket, afraid to give it to her. It wasn’t till we were on the steps of her house and I put my arm around her to kiss her good night that I got up nerve enough to say: “Oh, I forgot. I brought you something,” and handed her the bottle.

  She uncorked it and sniffed. “Oh, what lovely perfume,” she said, and kissed me.

  That was enough to touch it off. I grabbed her and said: “Laura, I love you. Why don’t you marry me?”

  She held her breath for a minute, and then said: “Of course. Why didn’t you ask me before?”

  I want to tell you just how this went, Will, so you can see. I remembered what the clerk said about the effect of the hormones wearing off, so I crowded my luck and said let’s get married right away and without all the chichi, and she said yes. She started to say something about money. I was feeling pretty happy about the hormones by that time, so I told her I was going to get a promotion and a big raise. Then she took me in the house and woke her mother up and told her we were going to get married.

  The thing I didn’t get about it was how easily and calmly she took the whole business. Most girls would be excited. At least I thought so. But we agreed we’d be married at her home the following Tuesday and have a cocktail party afterward. I had a reason for that. I wanted to invite Mrs. Beirne, and slug her cocktail with the other hormone, and then suggest that as a married man I was more responsible than before, and could handle a bigger job.

  Well, Will, things worked out just dandy. There was only a small crowd, and old Beirne came, and I got at where the liquor was and mixed her a cocktail myself. Nobody saw me slip the hormone into it, and I saw that she drank it. The only thing was that Laura came and got me and I didn’t have a chance to speak to Beirne about a promotion. But I was taking only a week off for a honeymoon, and I figured that the hormone would keep that long, and anyway, I was so happy by that time that I didn’t much care, and I could always go back and get some more of the hormone if necessary.

  We went to Arlington Beach for the honeymoon.

  Will, if I could talk to you in person, or maybe if you were one of these head-shrinkers, I could explain what I mean so you’d understand it. The first two days the honeymoon wasn’tright, somehow.

  Laura was perfectly sweet, perfectly nice, she never said a cross word to me, but a lot of the time she just didn’t seem much interested. We went swimming, and when I left her alone for five minutes, I found her lying on the beach talking to some guy who had just wandered along. And then, the second night, in the dining room at the hotel, a fellow across the room gave her th
e eye, and she smiled back at him. Things like that.

  Then the third day, when we came down to breakfast, who should we see but old Beirne, sitting across the room, natural as life and twice as large.

  Of course, I had to go over and speak to her. She was all smiles. She said she just felt she had to get away from the office for a few days, and she thought the hotel at Arlington Beach would be a good place to do it. She said she had no idea we were there.

  I believed her at the time. But after lunch, Laura said she wanted to wander down to the beach with some girl friend she’d picked up at the place, so I went out to sit on the hotel porch and look at the ocean, and I hadn’t been sitting there for more than ten minutes when Beirne came out, looking as though she had been freshly varnished, and took the chair beside mine.

  Well, I figured this was my chance. We talked a little about things that didn’t really interest either of us, and then I got up courage enough to ask who was going to handle the Camsol account. That was a new one that had just come in, and it was a big one, and if I could get to handle it, it would make me a senior account executive, with salary accordingly.

  She smiled at me and said: “I’ve been thinking about that, and I’m glad we came to the same hotel, because I wanted to discuss it with-”