Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by Robert Abernathy

  He floated to the doorless port and looked out into the starry gulf—no longer terrifying now, but a challenge, a sea of unguessable shores.

  The world he had left behind him hung there as before, an immense half-moon, blue-green and mottled, blotting out a whole sector of the diamond-and-black sky. As spatial distances go it was near—so near, indeed, that he could reach out and touch it with his mind. The voices were always there at the back of his head, to be listened to if he willed—a tremendous medley rising unendingly from the darkening and lightening hemispheres, from the murky bottom of the sea of air. Voices of joy and grief, of beauty and evil; abysmal choruses of hatred and fear, bright notes of courage and compassion. . . .

  Soon he would be going and would hear the voices of Earth no longer. Where, he did not know yet; perhaps Sunward, to look unblinded into the furnace where the secrets of matter lie naked; perhaps outward, past the orbits where Jupiter, ignoring the pebble-worlds of the Inner System, looks toward the Sun and calls it brother, where Saturn travels with its strange rings and many moons, to the frozen night of the utmost planets beyond which are only the stars. There were innumerable questions. Was Earth unique in the Universe, and the rest—the vast wheel of the Milky Way, the blazing abundance of the globular clusters, the crowding spiral galaxies with their billion billion stars—were these only waste matter, lifeless and dead, whirling away to the rim of space . . . or were there other breeding-places, other lives? Perhaps—the thought disturbed and allured him—there were others who had gone before him. . . .

  But first he must provide for those who would come after.

  His new sense was not yet sharp and selective enough to pick out and hold contact with individuals down there on Earth; the apparatus he had built was intended to remedy this shortcoming. He switched it on resolutely; he had no assurance that it would work, only the instinctive confidence that had guided all his actions for the past days.

  With the instrument’s aid he scanned an area on the rim of the night hemisphere, searching for familiar thought-patterns.

  At the bench where he was working late over a new control device, Marty dropped a screwdriver and swore. His eyes peered hauntedly from under down-drawn brows, and he whispered, “Have I gone crazy, or are there ghosts?”

  “Listen closely, Marty. I have two messages for you, and they’re both important.”

  “But you’re dead. The servos must have failed—but, damn it, they couldn’t have!—and you’re up there in a magnesium coffin going round the Earth for the rest of time. Dead . . . instead of me.”

  “Your servos didn’t fail; I stopped them myself, in the first hours, when I still thought I was dying or going mad, when only my instincts realized what was happening to me. But I’m not coming back; I’m going on. Pay close attention, Marty. It’s possible to improve the design of the nuclear power plant. I can explain it to you, and you can show other people, because you have the understanding of inanimate matter, the ability to project yourself into it, where I couldn’t explain it in the language the physicists use, because I don’t know the symbols, the mathematics. But when I looked at the physicists’ design out here in space, I saw the will to fail that they’d built into it, the fear they unconsciously had, I think, of going too far into the atom. If you take out the will to fail, the power output is increased about two thousand times. The ships can be built to climb at only one or two gravities and still have plenty of power, so that anybody—not just the exceptionally strong and healthy—can go out into space. Here’s how you do it—”

  What followed was pictures, kinesthetic impressions, whole operations, rather than verbalized thought. It took seconds only.

  Marty rubbed the back of his head. “Might work,” he said aloud in the empty laboratory. “On that business with the dampers, it might be easier to—”

  “That’s one message, the one you’re to give them if you can make them listen. The other—perhaps you’d as well keep to yourself for the time being. It’s this: the goal isn’t what we thought it was, not the conquest of space as a road to the planets. The goal is the conquest, of space itself! Space isn’t empty or barren; it’s flooded with energy, with the dust of old suns and the raw stuff of new matter. The planets are cold, dark, dying islands in a seething ocean that can be rich with life. Space is waiting!”

  Marty stared before him, oblivious to the smell of burning insulation from the layout on his bench. Abruptly he burst out, “Hold on! Don’t go yet. . . .”

  Thousands of miles above him the being that Linden had become floated in the vacuum beside his queer apparatus, tuning it again with prehensile fingertips.

  She sat bolt upright from sleep, crying, “Jim!” Her hands dug convulsively into her rumpled pillow. She sobbed, “Another dream . . .”

  “You aren’t dreaming. If later you wonder, talk to Marty; I’ve spoken with him. . . . Ruth, I love you.”

  “Where—where are you?” Her eyes strained fearfully into the darkness of the room.

  “I’m beyond the Jumping Off Place, and I find it’s only a new Jumping Off Place.”

  “Jim, come back! I don’t care if . . . Oh, what’s the use? It’s too late, now that you’re dead.”

  The voice in her mind seemed to chuckle softly. “I’m very much alive, Ruth. But . . . I’m afraid I can’t return to Earth. Space has changed me.”

  She shivered. “Changed . . .?”

  “I’ve grown up, darling, as you will if you follow me. For a long time the biologists have been telling us that man is a fetal throwback, a sort of embryo that grows old without ever truly maturing. Now I’ve found out why: the conditions of maturity, the destiny that we are created for, don’t exist on Earth. . . .

  “But as I am now, I might be smothered down there under Earth’s thick atmosphere; or human beings, seeing me, might tear me to pieces as something not human. Even you . . . might recoil from me.” In her mind a picture formed, photographically clear.

  She was very still for a moment, breathing rapidly; then she smiled tremulously and stretched out open arms in a gesture that needed no words or thoughts.

  “Beloved!” The voice out of space was a silent shout of exultation. “Come out to me! In a year, two years, there’ll be new ships, far better than any before—I’ve seen to that. Then you’ll join me. Don’t worry about how we’ll find one another—when you come, when you grow up, too, you’ll understand. We’ll meet beyond the Moon, and all the stars of space will be around us. Our children will have suns for playthings—”

  His voice faded briefly and grew hurried. “The Earth’s curvature is coming between us, but it won’t be for long. If you can’t come, if you won’t, it’s all the same—I’ll find means of reentering the atmosphere, and take you with me.”

  “I’m coming!” she cried.

  The ghost-touch of a kiss brushed over her lips. Then silence. The girl sat motionless, staring into the darkness and beginning to believe.

  THE RECORD OF CURRUPIRA

  From ancient Martian records came the grim song of a creature whose very existence was long forgotten.

  This story contains what is, to us, at any rate, a novel idea—that when we of Earth finally reach Mars we may find there records of prehistoric Earth far surpassing those of our paleontologists. Or, in other words, that creatures of Mars may have visited this planet tens of thousands of years ago and returned home with specimens for their science. A nice idea well told.

  JAMES DALTON strode briskly through the main exhibit room of New York’s Martian Museum, hardly glancing to right or left though many displays had been added since his last visit. The rockets were coming home regularly now and their most valuable cargoes—at least from a scientist’s point of view—were the relics of an alien civilization brought to light by the archeologists excavating the great dead cities.

  One new exhibit did catch Dalton’s eye. He paused to read the label with interest—

  MAN FROM MARS:

  The body here preserved was
found December 12, 2001, by an exploring party from the spaceship NEVADA, in the Martian city which we designate E-3. It rested in a case much like this, in a building that had evidently been the municipal museum. Around it, in other cases likewise undisturbed since a period estimated at fifty thousand years ago, were a number of Earthly artifacts. These finds prove beyond doubt that a Martian scientific expedition visited Earth before the dawn of our history.

  On the label someone had painstakingly copied the Martian glyphs found on the mummy’s original case. Dalton’s eyes traced the looping ornamental script—he was one of the very few men who had put in the years of work necessary to read inscriptional Martian—and he smiled appreciation of a jest that had taken fifty thousand years to ripen—the writing said simply, Man From Earth.

  The mummy lying on a sculptured catafalque beyond the glass was amazingly well preserved—far more lifelike and immensely older than anything Egypt had yielded. Long-dead Martian embalmers had done a good job even on what to them was the corpse of an other-world monster.

  He had been a small wiry man. His skin was dark though its color might have been affected by mummification. His features suggested those of the Forest Indian. Beside him lay his flaked-stone ax, his bone-pointed spear and spear thrower, likewise preserved by a marvelous chemistry.

  Looking down at that ancient nameless ancestor, Dalton was moved to solemn thoughts. This creature had been first of all human-kind to make the tremendous crossing to Mars—had seen its lost race in living glory, had died there and became a museum exhibit for the multiple eyes of wise grey spiderish aliens.

  “Interested in Oswald, sir?”

  Dalton glanced up and saw an attendant. “I was just thinking—if he could only talk! He does have a name, then?”

  The guard grinned. “Well, we call him Oswald. Sort of inconvenient, not having a name. When I worked at the Metropolitan we used to call all the Pharaohs and Assyrian kings by their first names.”

  Dalton mentally classified another example of the deep human need for verbal handles to lift unwieldy chunks of environment. The professional thought recalled him to business and he glanced at his watch.

  “I’m supposed to meet Dr. Oliver Thwaite here this morning. Has he come in yet?”

  “The archeologist? He’s here early and late when he’s on Earth. He’ll be up in the cataloguing department now. Want me to show you—”

  “I know the way,” said Dalton. “Thanks all the same.” He left the elevator at the fourth floor and impatiently pushed open the main cataloguing room’s glazed door.

  Inside cabinets and broad tables bore a wilderness of strange artifacts, many still crusted with red Martian sand. Alone in the room a trim-mustached man in a rough open-throated shirt looked up from an object he had been cleaning with a soft brush.

  “Dr. Thwaite? I’m Jim Dalton.”

  “Glad to meet you, Professor.” Thwaite carefully laid down his work, then rose to grip the visitor’s hand. “You didn’t lose any time.”

  “After you called last night I managed to get a seat on the dawn-rocket out of Chicago. I hope I’m not interrupting?”

  “Not at all. I’ve got some assistants coming in around nine. I was just going over some stuff I don’t like to trust to their thumb-fingered mercies.”

  Dalton looked down at the thing the archeologist had been brushing. It was a reed syrinx, the Pan’s pipes of antiquity. “That’s not a very Martian-looking specimen,” he commented.

  “The Martians, not having any lips, could hardly have had much use for it,” said Thwaite. “This is of Earthly manufacture—one of the Martians’ specimens from Earth, kept intact over all this time by a preservative I wish we knew how to make. It’s a nice find, man’s earliest known musical instrument—hardly as interesting as the record though.”

  Dalton’s eyes brightened. “Have you listened to the record yet?”

  “No. We got the machine working last night and ran off some of the Martian stuff. Clear as a bell. But I saved the main attraction for when you got here.” Thwaite turned to a side door, fishing a key from his pocket. “The playback machine’s in here.”

  The apparatus, squatting on a sturdy table in the small room beyond, had the slightly haywire look of an experimental model. But it was little short of a miracle to those who knew how it had been built—on the basis of radioed descriptions of the ruined device the excavators had dug up on Mars.

  Even more intriguing, however, was the row of neatly labeled boxes on a shelf. There in cushioned nests reposed little cylinders of age-tarnished metal, on which a close observer could still trace the faint engraved lines and whorls of Martian script. These were the best-preserved specimens yet found of Martian record films.

  Sound and pictures were on them, impressed there by a triumphant science so long ago that the code of Hammurabi or the hieroglyphs of Khufu seemed by comparison like yesterday’s newspaper. Men of Earth were ready now to evoke these ancient voices—but to reproduce the stereoscopic images was still beyond human technology.

  Dalton scrutinized one label intently. “Odd,” he said. “I realize how much the Martian archives may have to offer us when we master their spoken language—but I still want most to hear this record, the one the Martians made right here on Earth.”

  Thwaite nodded comprehendingly. “The human race is a good deal like an amnesia patient that wakes up at the age of forty and finds himself with a fairly prosperous business, a wife and children and a mortgage, but no recollection of his youth or infancy—and nobody around to tell him how he got where he is.

  “We invented writing so doggone late in the game. Now we get to Mars and find the people there knew us before we knew ourselves—but they died or maybe picked up and went, leaving just this behind.” He used both hands to lift the precious gray cylinder from its box. “And of course you linguists in particular get a big charge out of this discovery.”

  “If it’s a record of human speech it’ll be the oldest ever found. It may do for comparative-historical linguistics what the Rosetta Stone did for Egyptology.” Dalton grinned boyishly. “Some of us even nurse the hope it may do something for our old headache—the problem of the origin of language. That was one of the most important, maybe the most important step in human progress—and we don’t know how or when or why!”

  “I’ve heard of the bowwow theory and the dingdong theory,” said Thwaite, his hands busy with the machine.

  “Pure speculations. The plain fact is we haven’t even been able to make an informed guess because the evidence, the written records, only run back about six thousand years. That racial amnesia you spoke of.

  “Personally, I have a weakness for the magical theory—that man invented language in the search for magic formulae, words of power. Unlike the other theories, that one assumes as the motive force not merely passive imitativeness but an outgoing will.

  “Even the speechless subman must have observed that he could affect the behavior of animals of his own and other species by making appropriate noises—a mating call or a terrifying shout, for instance. Hence the perennial conviction you can get what you want if you just hold your mouth right, and you know the proper prayers or curses.”

  “A logical conclusion from the animistic viewpoint,” said Thwaite. He frowned over the delicate task of starting the film, inquired offhandedly, “You got the photostat of the label inscription? What did you make of it?”

  “Not much more than Henderson did on Mars. There’s the date of the recording and the place—the longitude doesn’t mean anything to us because we still don’t know where the Martians fixed their zero meridian. But it was near the equator and, the text indicates, in a tropical forest—probably in Africa or South America.

  “Then there’s the sentence Henderson couldn’t make out. It’s obscure and rather badly defaced, but it’s evidently a comment—unfavorable—on the subject-matter of the recording. In it appears twice a sort of interjection-adverb that in other contexts implies revulsion�
��something like ugh!”

  “Funny. Looks like the Martians saw something on Earth they didn’t like. Too bad we can’t reproduce the visual record yet.”

  Dalton said soberly, “The Martian’s vocabulary indicates that for all their physical difference from us they had emotions very much like human beings’. Whatever they saw must have been something we wouldn’t have liked either.”

  The reproducer hummed softly. Thwaite closed the motor switch and the ancient film slid smoothly from its casing. Out of the speaker burst a strange medley of whirrings, clicks, chirps, trills and modulated drones and buzzings—a sound like the voice of grasshoppers in a drought-stricken field of summer.

  Dalton listened raptly, as if by sheer concentration he might even now be able to guess at connections between the sounds of spoken Martian—heard now for the first time—and the written symbols that he had been working over for years. But he couldn’t, of course—that would require a painstaking correlation analysis.

  “Evidently it’s an introduction or commentary,” said the archeologist. “Our photocell examination showed the wave-patterns of the initial and final portions of the film were typically Martian—but the middle part isn’t. The middle part is whatever they recorded here on Earth.”

  “If only that last part is a translation. . . .” said Dalton hopefully. Then the alien susurration ceased coming from the reproducer and he closed his mouth abruptly and leaned forward.

  For the space of a caught breath there was silence. Then another voice came in, the voice of Earth hundreds of centuries dead.

  It was not human. No more than the first had been—but the Martian sounds had been merely alien and these were horrible.

  It was like nothing so much as the croaking of some gigantic frog, risen bellowing from a bottomless primeval swamp. It bayed of stinking sunless pools and gurgled of black ooze. And its booming notes descended to subsonic throbbings that gripped and wrung the nerves to anguish.