“So it seems. But examine, Toms. Is it actually unflattering?”
Toms examined and found the compliment that lies beneath the insult, and so he learned another facet of the Language of Love.
Soon he was ready for the study of the Apparent Negations. He discovered that for every degree of love, there is a corresponding degree of hate, which is in itself a form of love. He came to understand how valuable hate is, how it gives substance and body to love, and how even indifference and loathing have their place in the nature of love.
VARRIS gave him a ten-hour written examination, which Toms passed with superlative marks. He was eager to finish, but Varris noticed that a slight tic had developed in his student’s left eye and that his hands had a tendency to shake.
“You need a vacation,” the old man informed him.
Toms had been thinking this himself. “You may be right,” he said, with barely concealed eagerness. “Suppose I go to Cythera V for a few weeks.”
Varris, who knew Cythera’s reputation, smiled cynically. “Eager to try out your new knowledge?”
“Well, why not? Knowledge is to be used.”
“Only after it’s mastered.”
“But I have mastered it! Couldn’t we call this field work? A thesis, perhaps?”
“No thesis is necessary,” Varris said.
“But damn it all,” Toms exploded, “I should do a little experimentation! I should find out for myself how all this works. Especially Approach 33-CV. It sounds fine in theory, but I’ve been wondering how it works out in actual practice. There’s nothing like direct experience, you know, to reinforce—”
“Did you journey all this way to become a super-seducer?” Varris asked, with evident disgust.
“Of course not,” Toms said. “But a little experimentation wouldn’t—”
“Your knowledge of the mechanics of sensation would be barren, unless you understand love, as well. You have progressed too far to be satisfied with mere thrills.”
Toms, searching his heart, knew this to be true. But he set his jaw stubbornly. “I’d like to find out that for myself, too.”
“You may go,” Varris said, “but don’t come back. No one will accuse me of loosing a callous scientific seducer upon the galaxy.”
“Oh, all right. To hell with it. Let’s get back to work.”
“No. Look at yourself! A little more unrelieved studying, young man, and you will lose the capacity to make love. And wouldn’t that be a sorry state of affairs?”
Toms agreed that it would certainly be.
“I know the perfect spot,” Varris told him, “for relaxation from the study of love.”
THEY entered the old man’s spaceship and journeyed five days to a small unnamed planetoid. When they landed, the old man took Toms to the bank of a swift flowing river, where the water ran fiery red, with green diamonds of foam. The trees that grew on the banks of that river were stunted and strange, and colored vermilion. Even the grass was unlike grass, for it was orange and blue.
“How alien!” gasped Toms.
“It is the least human spot I’ve found in this humdrum corner of the galaxy,” Varris explained. “And believe me, I’ve done some looking.”
Toms stared at him, wondering if the old man was out of his mind. But soon he understood what Varris meant.
For months, he had been studying human reactions and human feelings, and surrounding it all was the now suffocating feeling of soft human flesh. He had immersed himself in humanity, studied it, bathed in it, eaten and drunk and dreamed it. It was a relief to be here, where the water ran red and the trees were stunted and strange and vermilion, and the grass was orange and blue, and there was no reminder of Earth.
Toms and Varris separated, for even each other’s humanity was a nuisance. Toms spent his days wandering along the river edge, marveling at the flowers which moaned when he came near them. At night, three wrinkled moons played tag with each other, and the morning sun was different from the yellow sun of Earth.
AT THE end of a week, refreshed and renewed, Toms and Varris returned to G’cel, the Tyanian city dedicated to the study of love.
Toms was taught the five hundred and six shades of Love Proper, from the first faint possibility to the ultimate feeling, which is so powerful that only five men and one woman have experienced it, and the strongest of them survived less than an hour.
Under the tutelage of a bank of small, interrelated calculators, he studied the intensification of love.
He learned all of the thousand different sensations of which the human body is capable, and how to augment them, and how to intensify them until they become unbearable, and how to make the unbearable bearable, and finally pleasurable, at which point the organism is not far from death.
After that, he was taught some things which have never been put into words and, with luck, never will.
“And that,” Varris said one day, “is everything.”
“Everything?”
“Yes, Toms. The heart has no secrets from you. Nor, for that matter, has the soul, or mind, or the viscera. You have mastered the Language of Love. Now return to your young lady.”
“I will!” cried Toms. “At last she will know!”
“Drop me a postcard,” Varris said. “Let me know how you’re getting on.”
“I’ll do that,” Toms promised. Fervently he shook his teacher’s hand and departed for Earth.
AT THE end of the long trip, Jefferson Toms hurried to Doris’s home. Perspiration beaded his forehead, and his hands were shaking. He was able to classify the feeling as Stage Two Anticipatory Tremors, with mild masochistic overtones. But that didn’t help—this was his first field work, and he was nervous. Had he mastered everything?
He rang the bell.
She opened the door and Toms saw that she was more beautiful than he had remembered, her eyes smoky-gray and misted with tears, her hair the color of a rocket exhaust, her figure slight but sweetly curved. He felt again the lump in his throat and sudden memories of autumn, evening, rain, and candlelight.
“I’m back,” he croaked.
“Oh, Jeff,” she said, very softly. “Oh, Jeff.”
Toms simply stared, unable to say a word.
“It’s been so long, Jeff, and I kept wondering if it was all worth it. Now I know.”
“You—know?”
“Yes, my darling! I waited for you! I’d wait a hundred years, or a thousand! I love you, Jeff!”
She was in his arms.
“Now tell me, Jeff,” she said, “Tell me!”
And Toms looked at her, and felt, and sensed, searched his classifications, selected his modifiers, checked and double-checked. And after much searching, and careful selection, and absolute certainty, and allowing for his present state of mind, and not forgetting to take into account climatic conditions, phases of the Moon, wind speed and direction, Sun spots, and other phenomena which have their due effect upon love, he said:
“My dear, I am rather fond of you.”
“Jeff! Surely you can say more than that! The Language of Love—”
“The Language is damnably precise,” Toms said wretchedly. “I’m sorry, but the phrase ‘I am rather fond of you’ expresses precisely what I feel.”
“Oh, Jeff!”
“Yes,” he mumbled.
“Oh, damn you, Jeff!”
THERE WAS, of course, a painful scene and a very painful separation. Toms took to traveling.
He held jobs here and there, working as a riveter at Saturn-Lockheed, a wiper on the Helg-Vinosce Trader, a farmer for a while on a kibbutz on Israel IV. He bummed around the Inner Dalmian System for several years, living mostly on handouts. Then, at Novilocessile, he met a pleasant, brown-haired girl, courted her, and, in due course, married her and set up housekeeping.
Their friends say that the Tomses are tolerably happy, although their home makes most people uncomfortable. It is a pleasant enough place, but the rushing red river nearby makes people edgy. And who can get
used to vermilion trees, and orange-and-blue grass, and moaning flowers, and three wrinkled moons playing tag in the alien sky?
Toms likes it, though, and Mrs. Toms is, if nothing else, a flexible young lady.
Toms wrote a letter to his philosophy professor on Earth, saying that he had solved the problem of the demise of the Tyanian race, at least to his own satisfaction. The trouble with scholarly research, he wrote, is the inhibiting effect it has upon action. The Tyanians, he was convinced, had been so preoccupied with the science of love, after a while they just didn’t get around to making any.
And eventually he sent a short postcard to George Varris. He simply said that he was married, having succeeded in finding a girl for whom he felt “quite a substantial liking.”
“Lucky devil,” Varris growled, after reading the card. “Vaguely enjoyable’ was the best I could ever find.”
A WIND IS RISING
They knew how to survive—but what were the odds on a world where every good hurricane in the Galaxy went when it died?
OUTSIDE, a wind was rising. But within the station, the two men had other things on their minds. Clayton turned the handle of the water faucet again and waited. Nothing happened.
“Try hitting it,” said Nerishev.
Clayton pounded the faucet with his fist. Two drops of water came out. A third drop trembled on the spigot’s lip, swayed, and fell. That was all.
“That does it,” Clayton said bitterly. “That damned water pipe is blocked again. How much water we got in storage?”
“Four gallons—assuming the tank hasn’t sprung another leak,” said Nerishev. He stared at the faucet, tapping it with long, nervous fingers. He was a big, pale man with a sparse beard, fragile-looking in spite of his size. He didn’t look like the type to operate an observation station on a remote and alien planet. But the Advance Exploration Corps had discovered, to its regret, that there was no type to operate a station.
Nerishev was a competent biologist and botanist. Although chronically nervous, he had surprising reserves of calm. He was the sort of man who needs an occasion to rise to. This, if anything, made him suitable to pioneer a planet like Carella I.
“I suppose somebody should go out and unblock the water pipe,” said Nerishev, not looking at Clayton.
“I suppose so,” Clayton said, pounding the faucet again. “But it’s going to be murder out there. Listen to it!”
Clayton was a short man, bull-necked, red-faced, powerfully constructed. This was his third tour of duty as a planetary observer.
He had tried other jobs in the Advance Exploration Corps, but none suited him. PEP—Primary Extraterrestrial Penetration—faced him with too many unpleasant surprises. It was work for daredevils and madmen. But Base Operations was much too tame and restricting.
He liked the work of a planetary observer, though. His job was to sit tight on a planet newly opened by the PEP boys and checked out by a drone camera crew. All he had to do on this planet was stoically endure discomfort and skillfully keep himself alive. After a year of this, the relief ship would remove him and note his report. On the basis of the report, further action would or would not be taken.
BEFORE each tour of duty, Clayton dutifully promised his wife that this would be the last. After this tour, he was going to stay on Earth and work on the little farm he owned. He promised . . .
But at the end of each rest leave, Clayton journeyed out again, to do the thing for which he was best suited: staying alive through skill and endurance.
But this time, he had had it. He and Nerishev had been eight months on Carella. The relief ship was due in another four months. If he came through alive, he was going to quit for good.
“Just listen to that wind,” Nerishev said.
Muffled, distant, it sighed and murmured around the steel hull of the station like a zephyr, a summer breeze.
That was how it sounded to them inside the station, separated from the wind by three inches of steel plus a soundproofing layer.
“It’s rising,” Clayton said. He walked over to the wind-speed indicator. According to the dial, the gentle-sounding wind was blowing at a steady 82 miles an hour—
A light breeze on Carella.
“Man, oh, man!” Clayton said. “I don’t want to go out there. Nothing’s worth going out there.”
“It’s your turn,” Nerishev pointed out.
“I know. Let me complain a little first, will you? Come on, let’s get a forecast from Smanik.”
They walked the length of the station, their heels echoing on the steel floor, past compartments filled with food, air supplies, instruments, extra equipment. At the far end of the station was the heavy metal door of the receiving shed. The men slipped on air masks and adjusted the flow.
“Ready?” Clayton asked.
“Ready.”
They braced themselves, gripping handholds beside the door. Clayton touched the stud. The door slid away and a gust of wind shrieked in. The men lowered their heads and butted into the wind, entering the receiving shed.
The shed was an extension of the station, some thirty feet long by fifteen feet wide. It was not sealed, like the rest of the structure. The walls were built of openwork steel, with baffles set in. The wind could pass through this arrangement, but slowed down, controlled. A gauge told them it was blowing 34 miles an hour within the shed.
It was a damned nuisance, Clayton thought, having to confer with the natives of Carella in a 34-mile gale. But there was no other way. The Carellans, raised on a planet where the wind never blew less than 70 miles an hour, couldn’t stand the “dead air” within the station. Even with the oxygen content cut down to the Carellan norm, the natives couldn’t make the adjustment. Within the station, they grew dizzy and apprehensive. Soon they began strangling, like a man in a vacuum.
Thirty-four miles an hour of wind was a fair compromise-point for human and Carellan to meet.
CLAYTON and Nerishev walked down the shed. In one corner lay what looked like a tangle of dried-out octopi. The tangle stirred and waved two tentacles ceremoniously.
“Good day,” said Smanik.
“Good day,” Clayton said. “What do you think of the weather?”
“Excellent,” said Smanik.
Nerishev tugged at Clayton’s sleeve. “What did he say?” he asked, and nodded thoughtfully when Clayton translated it for him. Nerishev lacked Clayton’s gift for language. Even after eight months, the Carellan tongue was still an undecipherable series of clicks and whistles to him.
Several more Carellans came up to join the conversation. They all looked like spiders or octopi, with their small centralized body and long, flexible tentacles. This was the optimum survival shape on Carella, and Clayton frequently envied it. He was forced to rely absolutely on the shelter of the station; but the Carellans lived directly in their environment.
Often he had seen a native walking against a tornado-force wind, seven or eight limbs hooked into the ground and pulling, other tentacles reaching out for further grips. He had seen them rolling down the wind like tumbleweed, their tentacles curled around them, wickerwork-basket fashion. He thought of the gay and audacious way they handled their land ships, scudding merrily along on the wind . . .
Well, he thought, they’d look damned silly on Earth.
“What is the weather going to be like?” he asked Smanik.
The Carellan pondered the question for a while, sniffed the wind, and rubbed two tentacles together.
“The wind may rise a shade more,” he said finally. “But it will be nothing serious.”
Clayton wondered. Nothing serious for a Carellan could mean disaster for an Earthman. Still, it sounded fairly promising.
He and Nerishev left the receiving shed and closed the door.
“Look,” said Nerishev, “if you’d like to wait—”
“Might as well get it over with,” Clayton said.
Here, lighted by a single dim overhead bulb, was the smooth, glittering bulk of the Brute. That w
as the nickname they had given to the vehicle specially constructed for transportation on Carella.
The Brute was armored like a tank and streamlined like a spheric section. It had vision slits of shatterproof glass, thick enough to match the strength of its steel plating. Its center of gravity was low; most of its twelve tons were centered near the ground. The Brute was sealed. Its heavy diesel engine, as well as all necessary openings, were fitted with special dustproof covers. The Brute rested on its six fat tires, looking, in its immovable bulk, like some prehistoric monster.
Clayton got in, put on crash helmet and goggles, and strapped himself into the padded seat. He revved up the engine, listened to it critically, then nodded.
“Okay,” he said, “the Brute’s ready. Get upstairs and open the garage door.”
“Good luck,” said Nerishev. He left.
CLAYTON went over the instrument panel, making sure that all the Brute’s special gadgets were in working order. In a moment, he heard Nerishev’s voice coming in over the radio.
“I’m opening the door.”
“Right.”
The heavy door slid back and Clayton drove the Brute outside.
The station had been set up on a wide, empty plain. Mountains would have offered some protection from the wind; but the mountains on Carella were in a constant restless state of building up and breaking down. The plain presented dangers of its own, however. To avert the worst of those dangers, a field of stout steel posts had been planted around the station. The closely packed posts pointed outward, like ancient tank traps, and served the same purpose.
Clayton drove the Brute down one of the narrow, winding channels that led through the field of posts. He emerged, located the pipeline, and started along it. On a small screen above his head, a white line flashed into view. The line would show any break or obstruction in the pipeline.
A wide, rocky, monotonous desert stretched before him. An occasional low bush came into sight. The wind was directly behind him, blanketed by the sound of the diesel.
He glanced at the wind-speed indicator. The wind of Carella was blowing at 92 miles an hour.
Various Fiction Page 137