by Jerry
He fought to rise and fell again when the ankle collapsed under him.
“Hell,” he said, just before blackness claimed him for the second time. “I’ve broken my leg!”
His twelve minutes had dwindled to seven when Ellis roused. He tried to stand, his twisted ankle momentarily forgotten, and gave it up when the mangroves spun dizzily before his eyes. He couldn’t afford to pass out again.
He made one last-ditch bid for help.
“My leg’s broken,” he yelled up at old Charlie Trask. “Get down here and lend a hand!”
Charlie glowered and said nothing.
Max bounded down the ladder, tail stiffly erect and scarred ears cocked at the underbrush in baleful curiosity.
“The thing is coming this way,” Ellis called. “Your cat scents it. Will you let us all be killed?”
Charlie Trask graded another shrimp.
Swearing bitterly, Ellis caught up his Telethink helmet and slid it over his head. He found the net in a welter of confusion. Washington demanded further information; Vann, at the station, was calling him frantically. His own scramble for help-images only added to the mental babel.
On the Federation ship, confusion was nearly as rampant.
Xaxtol’s dilemma still held: he could not make planetfall—time was too short for aid now, in any case—but neither could he, with clear Galactic conscience, desert the harried primitives below while hope remained.
Ellis’ predicament forced Xaxtol to decision; he could only follow the Morid’s aura and relay its progress.
It could not be helped that the relayed image was blurred of definition and weirdly askew; the Morid’s visual and auditory range differed so sharply from either human or Galactic that even over the ship’s wonderfully selective telecommunicator little of the Morid’s immediate surroundings came through clearly. Its aura arrived with a burning intensity that turned Xaxtol and his group faint with empathetic horror, but the fact that the Morid had just made its first kill obliterated all detail for the moment beyond a shocking welter of blood and torn flesh.
Ellis fared a little better under the second telepathic blast than under the first—he managed to snatch off his Telethink helmet just in time.
“The thing just killed something out there,” he yelled at Charlie Trask. “It’s coming this way. Are you going to sit there and—”
Charlie graded his last edible shrimp, took up his bucket and went inside. The leisurely clinking of homebrew bottles drifted after him, clear and musical on the still, hot air.
Ellis looked at his watch and considered prayer. He had three minutes left.
When the Morid came, Ellis was sitting dumbly on the sand, nursing his broken ankle and considering with a shock-detached part of his mind a fragmentary line of some long-forgotten schooldays poem.
What rough beast is this . . . the rest eluded him.
The underbrush beyond the shack rustled and the Morid’s ravening image sprang to Ellis’ mind with a clarity that shook his three net-participants to the core—one of them past endurance.
Vann, in the station, said “Dear God,” and braced himself for the end. In Washington, the operator fainted and had to be dragged from his console.
Aboard the Federation ship, Xaxtol radiated a shaken “Enough!” and tentacled a stud that sent his craft flashing on its way through subspace.
At Charlie Trask’s shack, Max bounded across the clearing and into the brush. There followed a riot of squalling and screaming that brought Charlie out of his shack on the run. Ellis sat numbly, beyond shock, waiting for the worst.
Unaccountably, the worst was delayed.
Charlie came back, clutching a protesting Max by the scruff of the neck, and threw down something at Ellis’ feet. Something small and limp and magenta-furred, smeared with greenish blood and very, very dead.
“There’s your varmint,” said Charlie.
With one minute remaining before the promised bombers roared over, Ellis, with a frozen clarity he had not dreamed he possessed, radiated a final message before he fainted again.
“Call off the jets,” he said, in effect. “It’s over. The beast is dead. The hermit’s cat killed it.”
An hour later at the station, his ankle bandaged and his third cup of coffee in hand, Ellis could review it all with some coherence.
“We didn’t consider the business of relative size,” he said. “Neither did our Galactic friends. Apparently they’re small, and so are all the species they’ve met with before. Maybe we’re something unique in the universe, after all. And maybe it’s a good thing they didn’t land and learn how unique.”
“It figures,” Weyman said. “Washington let it out on the air that DF stations made a fix on the spaceship before it jumped off. It measured only twenty-two feet.”
Vann said wonderingly, “And there were hundreds of them aboard. Gentlemen, we are Brobdingnagians in a universe of Lilliputians.”
“I’ve been trying,” Ellis said irrelevantly, “to recall a poem I read once in school. I’ve forgotten the author and all the verse but one line. It goes—”
“What rough beast is this,” Vann quoted. “You were thinking about it hard enough when the debacle in the brush took place. The image you radiated was rough enough—it shocked the pants off us.”
“And off the Galactics,” Weyman said. “The shoe is on the other foot now, I think.”
He went to the quonset door and looked out and up, listening. “Jets. The Washington brass on its way to cross-examine us.”
“The other foot?” Vann said. “Don’t be cryptic, man. Whose foot?”
“Theirs,” Ellis said. “Don’t you see? One of these days we’ll be going out there to make our own place in the galaxy. With our size and disposition, how do you think we’ll seem to those gentle little people?”
Vann whistled in belated understanding.
“Rough,” he said.
THE END
THE LONG SILVERY DAY
Magnus Ludens
It was one of those days—perhaps you’ve had them—when everything went right!
“LET’S go slumming,” said Powers-of-pearl. “Let’s give an earthman his wish for a day. We haven’t played that game in ages.”
“How do we pick him?” Firepride asked indulgently. “Phone book?”
“Intensity’s more fun. But no more nomads, I got so bored putting connoisseur features on synthetic camels!”
Peter Stone put on his hat and started for the station. Every third step he inhaled and told himself: “It isn’t that bad.” Peter had a good job, a good wife, and commuting was wearing him down to a twitch. Sooty teeth-rattling train, Penn Station’s steaming caverns, a soggy lurching bus, lunch down in sun-seared, exhaust-ventilated streets and the ride home . . . as the hated maroon dot of his train appeared, a convulsion of revulsion shook him.
“I wish it weren’t that bad!” he thought with every fiber. And Powers-of-pearl, suffused with the glow of challenge, laughed.
Peter Stone, fighting at the newsstand, noted with annoyance that a crew of maintenance men swarmed about the train. “Broke down again,” he thought bitterly. Halfway down his car two men ran a vacuum cleaner over the tired plush. Keeping pace behind them, two others aimed wide-mouth silver hoses upwards, spreading thick sheets of foam on the ceiling. It wasn’t until Peter Stone unfolded his newspaper that he noticed how quiet had spread with that foam. Next, his ears registered with surprise the purr of freshly-oiled machinery, and his eyes the sight of a tree, for once without its double window screen of hair-oil and dried grime droplets.
When he boarded his bus, a maintenance man was just hanging a sign over the gagged fare box:
Due to Tax Readjustment,
Urban Transportation Free.
The driver, liberated from change-making and police duties, smiled a greeting at him. No crush in the bus, perhaps because there seemed so many about. The silver one coming towards him had a big green and white sign: DOWN FIFTH TO 33rd. WEST ON 33
rd TO SEVENTH. PENN STATION LAST STOP. It was the first readable bus sign he remembered seeing.
Whenever the light turned red, he found, squads of maintenance men darted about the stopped cars and trucks, slapping silver cylinders over each exhaust pipe. He could hear snatches of explanations: “City ordinance,” “Free service.” As soon as a cylinder was in place, smoke and noise stopped coming out of the exhaust.
WHEN his hat sailed gaily towards the hook. Peter Stone realized that, incredibly, he wasn’t tired. Work flowed through his fingers, his secretary smiled, his boss looked in once and whistled. At noon only the thought of paraffined carton coffee restrained him from staying in.
“Coming right up, Seventeen!” said the new silver grille next to the elevator button. Cheered, he clove the mindless rush downstairs and pushed inside a luncheonette where maintenance men were finishing the removal of every second stool and the reupholstery of the remainder with foam cushions. A smiling waitress brought him a menu and a pencil. Opposite each item was a small circle, and a line at the top explained: THIS IS YOUR MENUCHECK. PLEASE MARK WANTED ITEMS, DROP MENUCHECK IN SLOT.
Served incredibly fast, Peter Stone ate in blissful peace. On his way out he saw that the cashier’s cage had been replaced with three silver cabinets with hoppers for Menuchecks and money, recessed cups for change and a turnstile each. When he walked through he found that he still had forty minutes of his lunch hour left.
Forty minutes! He could walk to a bookshop, or the park . . . walk, through exhaust fumes and the belches of airconditioner waste? But silver mesh covered the noissome vents. A cautious sniff assured him it worked.
He decided to walk to the Library newsstands for a foreign magazine. As he reached 42nd and Fifth an army of workmen were putting the last touches on a structure of dull silver that spanned the four sides of the intersection. Airy and elegant, with faint echoes of Library style, the quadruple arch provided the perfect finishing touch for the square. Each side was composed of three escalators and moving platforms in both directions, with a set of stairs and a promenade.
Timidly, he set foot-on the silver filigree. He was wafted up, across and down. Beneath him flowed a brilliant river of quiet cars. Fascinated, he took the trip back, then stood on the promenade watching the pattern, breathing in incredulous lungfuls of clean air.
The afternoon fled on newly silent feet. Once more he put on his hat to face the ride home.
HIS small, air-conditioned silver bus reached Penn Station ten minutes earlier than usual. By now Peter Stone was not overly surprised to see silver moving ways disappearing into the Station’s maw, nor, once inside, to feel breezes that blew silently from silver gadgets like jet engines. He also accepted the waiting passengers dancing in the great lobby—the piped music there had long been excellent.
A low, pleasant voice announced his train in diamond-cut syllables that floated from silver-dollar speakers spangling the walls. Silver escalators swept to a bright platform covered in springy non-skid green plastic.
One wall of his train was made up of clear plastic sliding doors. Inside, there were deep pile carpets, reclining chairs, low blue overheads and movable reading lights. As the doors slid softly shut, Peter Stone remembered as usual the letter he’d forgotten to mail for his wife; but this time he could see a stamp machine and mail box at the end of the car. When he got up he saw that there were also milk, coffee, soda, fruit, cigarette, aspirin and newspaper vending machines, and three telephone booths.
The train glided to a hushed halt three minutes after a speaker at his elbow had murmured the name of his station. Before his wife’s goggling eyes, Peter Stone bonded down the steps and ran to their car. She remembered that evening the rest of her life.
Powers-of-pearl let the silver evaporate, and with it the memory of it. “The best game yet,” she smiled, leaning in happy exhaustion against Firepride’s shoulder.
“You were magnificent,” laughed Fire-pride. “One step ahead of an entire city!” Powers-of-pearl blushed radiantly.
No trace of their game remained. But for some obscure reason, Peter Stone decided that one day he would run for Mayor.
THE HOPLITE
Richard Sheridan
They were the mightiest warriors the universe had ever known. All they lacked was—something to live for!
JORD awoke to the purr of the ventilators billowing the heavy curtains at the doorway. Through them, from the corridor, seeped the cold, realistic, shadowless light that seemed to sap the color from man and matter and leave only drabness and emptiness.
His eyes were sandy with sleep. He blinked. The optic nerves readied for sight, pupils focused, retina recorded. The primordial fear of unfamiliar things disappeared as he recognized the objects in the room, identified waking as a natural phenomenon and remembered the day’s objectives.
He lay quietly on the pallet; dimly conscious of identity, clinging physically to the temporal death vanishing behind his opened eyes. Pale light, swollen bladder, sticky throat, quiescent body, unimportant hunger, dim fear of incipient living.
He felt for the cigarettes on the floor beside his bed. His careful, sleepy fingers passed lightly over the ashy ashtray and fell on wrinkled cellophane. Dry tubes from a synthetic Virginia. He shook a cigarette from the pack and lay with it jutting from his lips. The steady, filtered, odorless breeze centered on his senseless frontal lobes and whispered down his silver cheeks.
A light. His hand crawled, finger walking across the crimson carpet to the grouping, found the metal tube and flew back to his chest. He fumbled with the trigger. His muscles were lethargic and he pressed it hard with a childish impatience.
Perseverance.
Now the metal tip glowed orange as the radioactive motes in the tube destroyed themselves with rigid selfcontrol. Careful suction, then, and a cubic foot of tobacco smoke howled down his esophagus into his lungs, examined each feathery cranny and left by muscular contraction.
It tasted bad, but he’d expected that it would.
He didn’t have to smoke all of it. The habit decently required only that he take a puff, leave it smolder, take another, allow himself to be scorched and futilely try to set the bed afire.
He watched the smoke being plucked from the air by the purifiers to be expelled with other smokes, smells and gases into an atmosphere that consisted of little else.
HIS last night’s pleasure stirred, vainly fought the inevitable and fluttered its hands. “You awake, Soldier?”
The room glowed with a rosy light.
“Approximately.”
The woman uncoiled herself and lay flat. Through the tangle of bronzed hair, one ear shone whitely. She brushed the hair from her eyes and her scarlet mouth opened in a feline yawn. The woman was pink and white; she quivered in voluptuous ecstasy and slithered on the satin with her own satiny, round and naked flesh.
“I didn’t hear the alarm,” she said, her voice thick with the residue of sleep. Her body pressed warm to his as she slid his cigarette from his fingers.
He shared the cigarette, thinking of the distance between the bed and the bathroom. The clock told him he had eight minutes to wait for maximum emission. His physiological chart showed a tolerance of nine and one-third hours.
Eight minutes to wait. Then he would have twenty minutes in which to shower, and fifteen to clothe himself in the shimmering, clinging opaque that, like the casing on a sausage, would cover him, leaving only his eyes, ears and mouth. These the neurologist would take care of before the mechanics fitted him into his machine for his next tour of duty.
There was a time for eating, time for a last cigarette, time for briefing and a long, long time for the Galbth II.
Time for everything but living.
Gently he kissed the woman’s soft neck. “What’s your name?” he asked wistfully, his attention divided between the short gold hairs at the base of her head and the all important clock.
The woman chuckled chidingly and toyed with his hands, tracing the veins tha
t stood rigid on their backs where the tortured nerves had forced them to the surface like a maze of pale blue pipes.
She did not answer. He could no more know her name than he could know her face behind the silver opaque—than he could know her voice behind the vocal distorter—no more than he could know anyone, or that anyone could know him.
Three times a week the Sex-Dispatcher sent him a woman. For all he knew it could be the same woman, or three different women.
“Can I tell the dispatcher that I pleased you?” The voice distorter had shifted and made her sound as though she had a cold. It was, of course, impossible. That scourge hadn’t attacked the fortress in thirty years. In all probability it would never attack it again.
He nodded, grinding the cigarette into the ashtray. “It would be nice,” he said, “if we could know one another.”
She smiled. “Some day.”
The clock gave warning, counting backwards through thirty seconds. Jord patted the woman’s thigh in dismissal. “You may as well go now.”
SHE slid from the bed, neither reluctant nor impatient. Her simple tunic lay on the crimson rug where she had dropped it nine hours before. “Good-by, Soldier,” she said.
He was already on his way to the bathroom. If he should see her again, her voice would be different, her hair would be different. She had no scars or physical aberrance that he could recognize her by. She was healthy, intelligent and normal, and therefore selected for breeding. So was he. Ask the geneticists. He had.
In the bathroom, the clock told him to wash his face. Carefully he rubbed desensitizer on his mask, on the ten thousand artificial nerve endings that transcribed every motion of the living tissue it encased and magnified that motion a thousand times to the mightier motions of the machine.
The desensitizer entered the porous material; the mask sagged and became transparent like a cellophane sack. He lifted it from his face.