by Carol
And out of the bubbling welcome that he sensed, came words.
“Hiya, pal.”
Not words really, better than words. Thought symbols in his brain, communicated thought symbols that had shades of meaning words could never have.
“Hiya, Towser,” he said.
“I feel good,” said Towser. “Like I was a pup. Lately I’ve been feeling pretty punk. Legs stiffening up on me and teeth wearing down to almost nothing. Hard to mumble a bone with teeth like that. Besides, the fleas give me hell. Used to be I never paid much attention to them. A couple of fleas more or less never meant much in my early days.”
“But…but—” Fowler’s thoughts tumbled awkwardly. “You’re talking to me!”
“Sure thing,” said Towser. “I always talked to you, but you couldn’t hear me. I tried to say things to you, but I couldn’t make the grade.”
“I understood you sometimes,” Fowler said.
“Not very well,” said Towser. “You knew when I wanted food and when I wanted a drink and when I wanted out, but that’s about all you ever managed.”
“I’m sorry,” Fowler said.
“Forget it,” Towser told him. “I’ll race you to the cliff.”
For the first time, Fowler saw the cliff, apparently many miles away, but with a strange crystalline beauty that sparkled in the shadow of the many-colored clouds.
Fowler hesitated. “It’s a long way—”
“Ah, come on,” said Towser and even as he said it he started for the cliff.
Fowler followed, testing his legs, testing the strength in that new body of his, a bit doubtful at first, amazed a moment later, then running with a sheer joyousness that was one with the red and purple sward, with the drifting smoke of the rain across the land.
As he ran the consciousness of music came to him, a music that beat into his body, that surged throughout his being, that lifted him on wings of silver speed. Music like bells might make from some steeple on a sunny, springtime hill.
As the cliff drew nearer the music deepened and filled the universe with a spray of magic sound. And he knew the music came from the tumbling waterfall that feathered down the face of the shining cliff.
Only, he knew, it was no waterfall, but an ammonia-fall and the cliff was white because it was oxygen, solidified.
He skidded to a stop beside Towser where the waterfall broke into a glittering rainbow of many hundred colors. Literally many hundred, for here, he saw, was no shading of one primary to another as human beings saw, but a clearcut selectivity that broke the prism down to its last ultimate classification.
“The music,” said Towser.
“Yes, what about it?”
“The music,” said Towser, “is vibrations. Vibrations of water falling.”
“But Towser, you don’t know about vibrations.”
“Yes, I do,” contended Towser. “It just popped into my head.”
Fowler gulped mentally. “Just popped!”
And suddenly, within his own head, he held a formula—the formula for a process that would make metal to withstand the pressure of Jupiter.
He stared, astounded, at the waterfall and swiftly his mind took the many colors and placed them in their exact sequence in the spectrum. Just like that. Just out of blue sky. Out of nothing, for he knew nothing either of metals or of colors*
“Towser,” he cried. “Towser, something’s happening to us!”
“Yeah, I know,” said Towser.
“It’s our brains,” said Fowler. “We’re using them, all of them, down to the last hidden comer. Using them to figure out things we should have known all the time. Maybe the brains of Earth things naturally are slow and foggy. Maybe we are the morons of the universe. Maybe we are fixed so we have to do things the hard way.”
And, in the new sharp clarity of thought that seemed to grip him, he knew that it would not only be the matter of colors in a waterfall, or metals that would resist the pressure of Jupiter. He sensed other things, things not quite clear. A vague whispering that hinted of greater things, of mysteries beyond the pale of human thought, beyond even the pale of human imagination. Mysteries, fact, logic built on reasoning. Things that any brain should know if it used all its reasoning power.
“We’re still mostly Earth,” he said. “We’re just beginning to learn a few of the things we are to know—a few of the things that were kept from us as human beings, perhaps because we were human beings. Because our human bodies were poor bodies. Poorly equipped for thinking, poorly equipped in certain senses that one has to have to know. Perhaps even lacking in certain senses that are necessary to true knowledge.”
He stared back at the dome, a tiny black thing dwarfed by the distance.
Back there were men who couldn’t see the beauty that was Jupiter. Men who thought that swirling clouds and lashing rain obscured the planet’s face. Unseeing human eyes. Poor eyes. Eyes that could not see the beauty in the clouds, that could not see through the storm. Bodies that could not feel the thrill of trilling music stemming from the rush of broken water.
Men who walked alone, in terrible loneliness, talking with their tongue like Boy Scouts wigwagging out their messages, unable to reach out and touch one another’s mind as he could reach out and touch Towser’s mind. Shut off forever from that personal, intimate contact with other living things.
He, Fowler, had expected terror inspired by alien things out here on the surface, had expected to cower before the threat of unknown things, had steeled himself against disgust of a situation that was not of Earth.
But instead he had found something greater than Man had ever known. A swifter, surer body. A sense of exhilaration, a deeper sense of life. A sharper mind. A world of beauty that even the dreamers of the Earth had not yet imagined.
“Let’s get going,” Towser urged.
“Where do you want to go?”
“Anywhere,” said Towser. “Just start going and see where we end up. I have a feeling…well, a feeling—”
“Yes, I know,” said Fowler.
For he had the feeling, too. The feeling of high destiny. A certain sense of greatness. A knowledge that somewhere off beyond the horizons lay adventure and things greater than adventure.
Those other five had felt it, too. Had felt the urge to go and see, the compelling sense that here lay a life of fullness and of knowledge.
That, he knew, was why they had not returned.
“I won’t go back,” said Towser.
“We can’t let them down,” said Fowler.
Fowler took a step or two, back toward the dome, then stopped.
Back to the dome. Back to that aching, poison-laden body he had left. It hadn’t seemed aching before, but now he knew it was.
Back to the fuzzy brain. Back to muddled thinking. Back to the flapping mouths that formed signals others understood. Back to eyes that now would be worse than no sight at all. Back to squalor, back to crawling, back to ignorance.
“Perhaps some day,” he said, muttering to himself. “We got a lot to do and a lot to see,” said Towser. “We got a lot to learn. We’ll find things—”
Yes, they could find things. Civilizations, perhaps. Civilizations that would make the civilization of Man seem puny by comparison. Beauty and, more important, an understanding of that beauty. And a comradeship no one had ever known before—that no man, no dog had ever known before.
And life. The quickness of life after what seemed a drugged existence.
“I can’t go back,” said Towser.
“Nor I,” said Fowler.
“They would turn me back into a dog,” said Towser. “And me,” said Fowler, “back into a man.”
1944
THE MAD MOON
Stanley G. Weinbaum
One of the best things that ever happened to science fiction was when Stanley Weinbaum began to write it. as a young man In his twenties some forty years ago. One of the worst things that ever happened was his sudden and premature death, after less than three fu
ll years of writing. Weinbaum all by himself changed the concept of the “alien being” from the sort of mindless monster of Wells’s War of the Worlds to the fanciful and delightful creatures—Tweel, in “A Martian Odyssey.” was the first of them—that populate his stories. It is tempting, and poignant, to speculate on what he might have done if he had survived to a normal writing age. but even in his short career he opened up new worlds for all of us.
I
“Idiots!” howled Grant Calthorpe. ’Fools—nitwits—imbeciles!” He sought wildly for some more expressive terms, failed, and vented his exasperation in a vicious kick at the pile of rubbish on the ground.
Too vicious a kick, in fact; he had again forgotten the one-third normal gravitation of Io, and his whole body followed his kick in a long, twelve-foot arc.
As he struck the ground the four loonies giggled. Their great, idiotic heads, looking like nothing so much as the comic faces painted on Sunday balloons for children, swayed in unison on their five-foot necks, as thin as Grant’s wrist.
“Get out!” he blazed, scrambling erect. “Beat it, skiddoo, scram! No chocolate. No candy. Not until you learn that I want ferva leaves, and not any junk you happen to grab. Clear out!”
The loonie—Lunae Jovis Magnicapites, or literally, Bigheads of Jupiter’s Moon—backed away, giggling plaintively. Beyond doubt, they considered Grant fully as idiotic as he considered them, and were quite unable to understand the reasons for his anger. But they certainly realized that no candy was to be forthcoming, and their giggles took on a note of keen disappointment So keen, indeed, that the leader, after twisting his ridiculous blue face in an imbecilic grin at Grant, voiced a last wild giggle and dashed his head against a glittering stone-bark tree. His companions casually picked up his body and moved off, with his head dragging behind them on its neck like a prisoner’s ball on a chain.
Grant brushed his hand across his forehead and turned wearily toward his stone-bark log shack. A pair of tiny, glittering red eyes caught his attention, and a slinker—Mus Sapiens—skipped his six-inch form across the threshold, bearing under his tiny, skinny arm what looked very much like Grant’s clinical thermometer.
Grant yelled angrily at the creature, seized a stone, and flung it vainly. At the edge of the brush, the slinker turned its ratlike, semihuman face toward him, squeaked its thin gibberish, shook a microscopic fist in manlike wrath, and vanished, its batlike cowl of skin fluttering like a cape. It looked, indeed, very much like a black rat wearing a cape.
It had been a mistake, Grant knew, to throw the stone at it. Now the tiny fiends would never permit him any peace, and their diminutive size and pseudo-human intelligence made them infernally troublesome as enemies. Yet, neither that reflection nor the loony’s suicide troubled him particularly; he had witnessed instances like the latter too often, and besides, his head felt as if he were in for another siege of white fever.
He entered the shack, closed the door, and stared down at his pet parcat. “Oliver,” he growled, “you’re a fine one. Why the devil don’t you watch out for slinkers? What are you here for?”
The parcat rose on its single, powerful hind leg, clawing at his knees with its two forelegs. “The red jack on the black queen,” it observed placidly. “Ten loonies make one halfwit”
Grant placed both statements easily. The first was, of course, an echo of his preceding evening’s solitaire game, and the second of yesterday’s session with the loonies. He grunted abstractedly and nibbed his aching head. White fever again, beyond doubt.
He swallowed two ferverin tablets, and sank listlessly to the edge of his bunk, wondering whether this attack of blancha would culminate in delirium.
He cursed himself for a fool for ever taking this job on Jupiter’s third habitable moon, Io. The tiny world was a planet of madness, good for nothing except the production of ferva leaves, out of which Earthly chemists made as many potent alkaloids as they once made from opium.
Invaluable to medical science, of course, but what difference did that make to him? What difference, even, did the munificent salary make, if he got back to Earth a raving maniac after a year in the equatorial regions of Io? He swore bitterly that when the plane from Junopolis landed next month for his ferva, he’d go back to the polar city with it, even though his contract with Neilan Drug called for a full year, and he’d get no pay if he broke it. What good was money to a lunatic?
II
The whole little planet was mad—loonies, parcats, stinkers and Grant Calthorpe—all crazy. At least, anybody who ever ventured outside cither of the two polar cities, Junopolis on the north and Herapolis on the south, was crazy. One could live there in safety from white fever, but anywhere below the twentieth parallel it was worse than the Cambodian jungles on Earth.
He amused himself by dreaming of Earth. Just two years ago he had been happy there, known as a wealthy, popular sportsman. He had been just that, too; before he was twenty-one he had hunted knife-kite and threadworm on Titan, and triops and uniped on Venus.
That had been before the gold crisis of 2110 had wiped out his fortune. And—well, if he had to work, it had seemed logical to use his interplanetary experience as a means of livelihood. He had really been enthusiastic at the chance to associate himself with Neilan Drug.
He had never been on Io before. This wild little world was no sportsman’s paradise with its idiotic loonies and wicked, intelligent, tiny slinkers. There wasn’t anything worth hunting on the feverish little moon, bathed in warmth by the giant Jupiter only a quarter million miles away.
If he had happened to visit it, he told himself ruefully, he’d never have taken the job; he had visualized Io as something like Titan, cold but clean.
Instead it was as hot as the Venus Hotlands because of its glowing primary, and subject to half a dozen different forms of steamy daylight—sun day, Jovian day, Jovian and sun day, Europa light, and occasionally actual and dismal night. And most of these came in the course of Io’s forty-two-hour revolution, too—a mad succession of changing lights. He hated the dizzy days, the jungle, and Idiots’ Hills stretching behind his shack.
It was Jovian and solar day at the present moment, and that was the worst of all, because the distant sun added its modicum of heat to that of Jupiter. And to complete Grant’s discomfort now was the prospect of a white fever attack. He swore as his head gave an additional twinge, and then swallowed another ferverin tablet. His supply of these was diminishing, he noticed; he’d have to remember to ask for some when the plane called—no, he was going back with it.
Oliver rubbed against his leg. “Idiots, fools, nitwits, imbeciles,” remarked the parcat affectionately. “Why did I have to go to that damn dance?”
“Huh?” said Grant. He couldn’t remember having said anything about a dance. It must, he decided, have been said during his last fever madness.
Oliver creaked like the door, then giggled like a loony. “It’ll be all right,” he assured Grant. “Father is bound to come soon.”
“Father!” echoed the man. His father had died fifteen years before. “Where’d you get that from, Oliver?”
“It must be the fever,” observed Oliver placidly. “You’re a nice kitty, but I wish you had sense enough to know what you’re saying. And I wish father would come.” He finished with a suppressed gurgle that might have been a sob.
Grant stared dizzily at him. He hadn’t said any of those things; he was positive. The parcat must have heard them from somebody else—Somebody else? Where within five hundred miles was there anybody else?
“Oliver!” he bellowed. “Where’d you hear that? Where’d you hear it?”
The parcat backed away, startled. “Father is idiots, fools, nitwits, imbeciles,” he said anxiously. “The red jack on the nice kitty.”
“Come here!” roared Grant. “Whose father? Where have you—Come here, you imp!”
He lunged at the creature. Oliver flexed his single hind leg and flung himself frantically to the cowl of the wood stove. “It mus
t be the fever!” he squalled, “No chocolate!”
He leaped like a three-legged flash for the flue opening. There came a sound of claws grating on metal, and then he had scrambled through.
Grant followed him. His head ached from the effort, and with the still sane part of his mind he knew that the whole episode was doubtless white fever delirium, but he plowed on.
His progress was a nightmare. Loonies kept bobbing their long necks above the tall bleeding-grass, their idiotic giggles and imbecilic faces adding to the general atmosphere of madness.
Wisps of fetid fever-bearing vapors spouted up at every step on the spongy soil. Somewhere to his right a slinker squeaked and gibbered; he knew that a tiny slinker village was over in that direction, for once he had glimpsed the neat little buildings, constructed of small, perfectly fitted stones like a miniature medieval town, complete to towers and battlements. It was said that there were even slinker wars.
His head buzzed and whirled from the combined effects of ferverin and fever. It was an attack of blancha, right enough, and he realized that he was an imbecile, a loony, to wander thus away from his shack. He should be lying on his bunk; the fever was not serious, but more than one man had died on Io in the delirium, with its attendant hallucinations.
He was delirious now. He knew it as soon as he saw Oliver, for Oliver was placidly regarding an attractive young lady in perfect evening dress of the style of the second decade of the twenty-second century. Very obviously that was a hallucination, since girls had no business in the Ionian tropics, and if by some wild chance one should appear there, she would certainly not choose formal garb.
The hallucination had fever, apparently, for her face was pale with the whiteness that gave blancha its name. Her gray eyes regarded him without surprise as he wound his way through the bleeding-grass to her.