by Jerry
The final week had to be devoted to reconstituting the skin and to growing the sensory apparatus. The flexible fluorosilicon isotactic material that formed the basis of the skin was very difficult to handle, even under the ideal conditions that existed in the theater. The fluid in the great room was no longer a clear, light-pink liquid. It was heavy brown in color, and the liquid in the little sphere was thick and hot and jet black. These conditions were the worst of all for the surgeons, for they could see only by short-wave radiation. Finally, the blood that was not really blood was introduced, and the operation was over.
Case looked down at Cooper as the surgeons washed him off. “When will he recover consciousness?” he asked.
“In the morning, about three hours from now.”
“Is he right?”
“He’s what we set out to do, if that’s what you mean.”
“Will he return to us so we can put him back the way he was?”
“I hope so. Oh, I hope so. A self-willed man with capabilities like this. . . .” The surgeon shook his head and sponged off a recalcitrant stain and stepped back and continued, “He’s ready. We will take him back to his room, although it doesn’t matter where he wakes up. You will be there, I guess?”
Case nodded. He was sitting alongside Cooper when he woke up.
COOPER’S eyes opened, and there was the barest flash of panic at the strangeness, brought instantly under control by a total awareness of the situation. Yet that barest flash was too much for Case. The surge of power from Cooper toppled Case unconscious from his chair. Cooper mentally dipped into him and found the trouble and righted it and then helped him back into the chair. Then Cooper sat up and swung his legs off the bed and looked at Case, and said, “I see.”
“Everything?”
Cooper nodded and stood up. “Everything you know, as well as everything known about the Magellians by Jarge and Hennder in the next building. Thank you for putting them there so I could learn from them. I will go now.”
He went out to where the ship was, and put his hand on the sleek moly-steel side. It was a good ship, well equipped, but not overdone. He let his senses range through it. Ah, he chuckled. An oxide film coated one of the electrical jacks—poor connection. From where he stood with his hand on the side he tried to remove the oxide, but he could feel the control begin to slip away from him, and the traces of oxide in the metal crystals themselves began to migrate. He stopped and boarded the ship and went to the secondary control panel and pulled the jack and removed the oxide coat with his fingernail. He put it back thinking how remarkable it was that a ship could be readied and have so little wrong with it. These were good men on Knaol.
He took off using the jets, although he did not have to. Cooper wanted to do some practicing before he got too gay with his abilities. And there was some thinking to do, too. Out of Case’s mind, and out of the minds of the two others, he had seen the concern about these people from the Large Magellanic Cloud. It was a concern based primarily on lack of knowledge; no understanding had yet been established between the two races.
For a moment Cooper dwelled on the shadow he had seen in Case’s mind, a shadow of doubt about Cooper. It was a dangerous thing to provide a man with the facilities that had been provided Cooper. Despite the great care with which Cooper had been chosen, one never really knew where it all would lead. All his abilities and potentialities could be calculated. Yet there are times when the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and this might be one of them. The men of Knaol could not be certain how it would work out. A moment of doubt passed over Cooper. In their place, he would take steps to make certain that a reconstituted Cooper could do no harm once his work was done. It occurred to him that he might have more trouble with his own people when this was over than with the Magellians, but he put the thought out of his mind, and turned to more productive thinking.
PUTTING his mind to his engines, Cooper began to feel out his abilities. In an hour his ship was travelling at better than a thousand times rated velocity, and in four days he arrived in the region of the Large Cloud. He quickly reviewed what he had learned from the minds of the two men, Jarge and Hennder, who knew as much as anyone about the Magellians. Cooper directed his ship toward what seemed one of the most important of the planets in the system. As he drew near, he reviewed his behavior, remembering that he was a bearing salesman, nothing more—unless it became necessary to protect himself.
At a distance of two planet diameters, Cooper’s ship suddenly lurched, faltered, and then headed off on a new course toward the rim of the planet. Cooper swiftly checked for a malfunction, but there was none on the ship. For a moment he was stunned; there seemed no reason for the unaccountable behavior of the ship. Then he reached outside and groped blindly in the region in space surrounding the ship. There it was. A series of bands of magnetic flux reached up from the planet, terminating at the ship, some stronger than others, the relative strengths controlling the direction in which the ship was urged. It was clear as to what was happening: Magellians on the planet below were somehow yanking the ship down to a place of their own choosing. “Well,” thought Cooper to himself, “we might just as well establish right at the outset who is going to push who around in space.”
He gathered himself. The best source of power were the beams themselves, and he swung through them a series of tiny conductive beams built from the power in the drive tanks of the ship. As the conductors sliced through the magnetic fields, Cooper drew the resulting current toward the bow of the ship and accumulated it there for several seconds. Using a part of the accumulated charge to lift half an inch of metal from the forward part of the ship, Cooper converted the metal to an ionized state, a plasma, and then drove a stream of it in the direction opposite that in which he wanted the ship to move. It was an ion drive of enormous power. The great beam stretched in a glowing arc across a hundred miles of sky, fanning out as it left the ship, pulled out of shape at its very origin by the power of the magnetic beams pulling at the ship from the ground.
The ship began to accelerate under the power of the plasma beam, but then it jarred to a halt. As the magnetic beams tightened, Cooper drew more power from them and accelerated his ions to ever greater speeds. The ship moved in jerky fashion, now faster now slower, but inexorably toward the rim of the planet. Sweat broke out on Cooper’s forehead. He pulled harder, and threw out more conductors, some of them sweeping out well beyond the ship to pick up additional current from the interception of the planet’s weak magnetic field. Frantically Cooper sought additional power He found it in the heat of the planet as the ship drew near, but he couldn’t handle it. He groped toward the sun, but couldn’t reach it. He strained, and pulled, and his entire body was bathed in sweat from the effort, but he could not stop the fall of the ship.
WHEN, finally, it came to a heavy landing in the center of a large spaceport near one of the planetary poles, Cooper was exhausted. He was so tired he could hardly lift his arms. He sat motionless in the pilot’s seat, breathing heavily, waiting for a pounding in his head to stop. It was a full minute before he recovered sufficient awareness to become alarmed. He had put out the best he had, and it had not been good enough. He had used every resource he could muster, and they had dragged him down willy nilly. The best that Milky Way science could put together had been ignominiously hauled out of the sky. Cooper grew afraid.
He ranged outside the ship while sitting in the pilot’s chair. Nothing moved. He wondered if something was trained on him. ready to volatilize him and the ship. It was apparent to him that he could do nothing to stop it, not when they had the kind of power that had just been demonstrated. But it was not fitting that he sit here and wait for it, if that was what they had in store. Cooper got up and left the ship.
He stood outside on the ground, and then walked toward a pointed structure a mile away. Nothing moved as he walked, nothing showed itself. He walked in an unhurried manner, in long easy strides. Halfway there he saw a group of figures come out of an o
pening in the ground and begin to move toward him. He recognized the odd figures of Magellians. The stench of them reached his nostrils.
They had the shape of a man. They walked on two limbs, but there were no joints. There was an erect torso, but it was uniformly cylindrical. They had two upper limbs, but they protruded from the center of the body rather than the upper section, and they, too, were jointless. They had a head, but no neck, and the nose consisted of slits located under the ears which were positioned at the sides of the heads at the normal site. There was a skin, but it was not smooth and taut as in a man; it hung in rows that looked as if they would flip in a wind. There was a mouth, but it was a vertical slit that ran from the lower jaw on up to a point between the eyes.
Knowing in advance what the Magellians looked like did little to ease the shock as Cooper walked closer. Their appearance was unrelated to anything in human experience, and Cooper’s present facilities were of little aid to him in facing the situation. A certain toughness of mind and a resilience of viewpoint allowed him to stand his ground and give no outward indication of his inward turmoil. As he stood and stared at them, his composure returned to the extent that he appreciated what must be the discomfiture of the Magellians in facing him, he who was as totally alien to them as they were to him. He looked carefully for some indication of distaste on their part, but he could see none. He briefly wondered if their composure might be an indication of their superiority, and while so thinking, he mentally dipped into the nearest one.
IT WAS as if his mind had slipped into a deep black, fathomless pit, unrecognizable and featureless. He was unable to gather a single datum that was of any use to him. The mind of a Magellian was unreachable, unrecognizable, so totally outside of human experience that not the slightest meaningful contact could be made. Cooper began to feel helpless, and the panic began. But he brought it under control simply by recognizing that panic could not help him. One of the Magellians began to speak.
The vertical slit that was the mouth moved, and high-pitched, whining sounds issued. The skin on the face rippled and flowed in a series of complex patterns. Cooper was unable to understand it, but he knew what was happening. The spoken language of the Magellians was not formed by sound alone; facial expressions had to be read, too. Cooper shook his head and said, “I do not understand.” The words had no effect on the whining sounds made by the Magellian. It took Cooper several minutes to realize that the head shake—that supposedly universal expression of negation—meant nothing here; the Magellian head apparently did not shake, or nod, or move at all. Cooper’s problems were multiplying fast.
He began to walk toward the opening in the ground from which they had emerged. Instantly two of them hurled themselves at him. Almost without thought he drew on the heat in the ground and raised their internal temperatures to the point where part of the moisture in their bodies flashed into steam, and they fell over. He waited for the remaining ones to try to seize him, but they did not. Cooper again started toward the opening, and this time no one interfered.
He looked down the opening and saw a slanted plane leading down a tunnel lined with a brownish material. He looked at the Magellians gathered around him, and they stared silently back. Cooper said out loud, “Well, there’s no getting around it. I’ve got to learn to talk to you before anything else. If we can’t communicate, we’ll always be at each others’ throats, it if isn’t tee late already.” Cooper glanced at the two bodies, still lying back where they had fallen. No one seemed concerned about them.
Several of the Magellians began making the whining sounds and causing the facial ripples, Cooper held up his hands in an effort to stop them. It had no effect—another gesture meaningful only to the culture that had spawned it. He raised his voice to shout them down, but only succeeded in shutting off most of the sounds they made while increasing the activity of the facial tissues. Cooper almost lost his temper; he began to gather power before he really knew what he was going to do with it. He released it overhead, raising the air temperature a few degrees. This the Magellians noticed, and it silenced them. They looked at Cooper, walking around him to see what was there. It was the first thing they had done so far that made any sense. Cooper started the laborous process of trying to learn the language by pointing to his chest and saying “Cooper”. They seemed not to understand. He tried pointing to them and saying, “Magellian”. No reaction. In five minutes time two of the Magellians drifted away, and three more joined the group. Cooper sensed heat at his back.
He turned quickly. A quarter of a mile back a Magellian stood with a cylindrical object in his hand, playing a stream of white fire over the two bodies on the ground. In a moment they were gone, and the Magellian walked away. The rest with Cooper took no notice. In fact, several more walked away to be replaced by still different ones.
ALARM began to build in Cooper. He now had some information on a few behavior characteristics of the Magellians, and out of these data nothing even slightly recognizable had emerged. Cooper was a highly intelligent man reinforced with extra computing abilities and logical facilities. His ability to grasp and solve a problem was extraordinary, far greater than that of any other man in the Milky Way system. What he saw here he did not like.
There was no sense continuing to try to communicate with the Magellians under these conditions. None of the original ones remained, and there was clearly nothing to be gained in running through the chest-beating phases again. He turned and walked toward the low pointed structure beyond the opening in the ground. A Magellian jumped on him, and he killed it and walked on, ignoring it. The remainder of the Magellians walked with him, paying no attention to the dead one. Cooper walked through the door-like opening into the building. Inside there were banks of equipment massed against all three walls, interconnected with four great spheres in the center of the building. Wide sheets of a metallic substance ran from the spheres to two large flat plates positioned near openings in the roof. The equipment was not familiar to Cooper, but he reasoned that it must be the power source that had pulled his ship down from space. He looked around, and he felt better when he saw what was going on.
Magellians swarmed over the equipment, many of them carrying parts to be inserted. As the replaced parts were passed down Cooper could see that many of them were charred or warped. As he looked more closely he could see that the symmetrical design of many portions of the massive equipment was marred by sagging casings and twisted conduits. They had pulled him out of the sky, but it had not been easy for them. They had almost failed. Cooper felt better.
He looked for a Magellian that had the appearance of being in charge, but there seemed to be no such person; each one did what had to be done without direction from anyone else. Cooper dipped into many of them, one after another, but he found nothing but the engorging blackness. He expanded his sensitivity to sweep the entire building, but detected nothing but the same featureless morasse.
Near the door-like opening a Magellian was busy, replacing the bent needles in a series of dials. Cooper dipped into the blackness of the creature, and while maintaining the mental contact, stepped over and lifted a needle from the end of its armlike appendage. The Magellian flung itself on him, and Cooper killed it, feeling the blackness collapse without change into nothingness. In awe Cooper looked down at the body; this creature had died with no detectable emotion—-no pain, no fear, no regret. It died as casually as a man might scratch his head.
COOPER laid a hand on the face of the bank of instruments, and his senses raced through the metallic structure. Only part of it came through to him. Iron is iron, and its crystal structure remains recognizable throughout the galactic systems, but its arrangement into physical shapes and conformations was something else again. Again, a total failure to comprehend even the smallest part of this culture acted to bar his grasp of the meaning of most of the equipment or other expressions of the intellect. Cooper shook his head and walked out into the open to breathe the clean air. There, that was something they all had in common
: they were all air-breathers. But that seemed to be the beginning and the end of it. These creatures were not interested in anything in the same way that human beings were. They had not bothered with Cooper’s ship; it sat out on the field alone. Cooper stretched to it and checked it, and found it completely undisturbed. He looked around. He had to find a settlement, a city. Maybe there he could find some way to make intelligent contact. If he could find a manufacturing or production center, he might be able to take up his role of a bearings salesman.
Cooper stretched far out, seeking gathering of large numbers of Magellians. At first he had trouble bending his sense beams to the large curvature of the planet, but he quickly found how to render them subject to gravitation. Thereafter, he had no difficulty. He chuckled to himself as he scanned. “Got a lot to learn yet about myself. Wonder if there’s anything I can’t do.” He stopped chuckling, for he knew there was; he was unable to make any headway with these creatures.
There was a concentration of Magellians about one-quarter of the way around the planet, and it seemed to be the only concentration of the creatures there was. Cooper resolved to go there, but there remained the question of lifting his ship off the ground in opposition to the magnetic beams that had dragged him here. Cooper reentered the building, just in time to see one Magellian fling itself on another. There was a brief struggle, and then one of them lay dead while the other got back to work. Cooper grunted to himself. They apparently attacked one another with the same sudden ease that they attacked him. The great power in those sinuous upper limbs quickly snapped bone and cartilage in Magellian bodies; the fights were swiftly over.