The thing then said slowly and flatly, “Death is an experience I shall never have at your hands. That is a warning. I shall respond to no more of your threats. I shall answer no more questions.
“Instead, I shall tell you what will occur now. I shall inform my companions that you are as we judged you to be—foolish, limited, incapable of harming the least of us. Your world and civilization are of very moderate interest. But they are a novelty which many will wish to view for themselves. We shall come here and leave here, as we please. If you attempt to interfere again with any of us, it will be to your own regret.”
“Will it?” the major shouted, shaking. “Will it now?”
The professor jerked violently at the quick successive reports of a gun in the young officer’s hand. Then there was a struggling knot of figures around the major, and another man’s voice was shouting hoarsely, “You fool! You damned hysterical fool!”
The Wac captain had dropped her notebook and clasped her hands to her face. For an instant, the professor heard her crying, “Jack! Jack! Stop—don’t—”
But he was looking at the thing that had fallen on its back in the cage, with the top of its skull shot away and a dark-brown liquid staining the cage floor about its shoulders.
What he felt was an irrational satisfaction, a warm glow of pride in the major’s action. It was as if he had killed the thing himself.
For that moment, he was happy.
BECAUSE he stood far back in the room, he saw what happened then before the others did.
One of the Personages and two of the scientists were moving excitedly about the cage, staring down at the thing. The others had grouped around the chair into which they had forced the major. Under the babble of confused, angry voices, he could sense the undercurrent of almost joyful relief he felt himself.
The Wac captain stood up and began to take off her clothes.
She did it quickly and quietly. It was at this moment, the professor thought, staring at her in renewed terror, that the height of insanity appeared to have been achieved in this room. He wished fervently that he could keep that sense of insanity wrapped around him forevermore, like a protective cloak. It was a terrible thing to be rational! With oddly detached curiosity, he also wondered what would happen in a few seconds when the others discovered what he already knew.
The babbling voices of the group that had overpowered the major went suddenly still. The three men at the cage turned startled faces toward the stillness. The girl straightened up and stood smiling at them.
The major began screaming her name.
There was another brief struggling confusion about the chair in which they were holding him. The screaming grew muffled as if somebody had clapped a hand over his mouth.
“I warned you,” the professor heard the girl say clearly, “that there was no death. Not for us.”
Somebody shouted something at her, like a despairing question. Rigid with fear, his own blood a swirlipg roar in his ears, the professor did not understand the words. But he understood her reply.
“It could have been any of you, of course,” she nodded. “But I just happened to like this body.”
After that, there was one more shot.
THE professor turned off the radio. For a time, he continued to gaze out the window.
“Well, they know it now!” he said. “The world knows it now. Whether they believe it or not—At any rate . . .” His voice trailed off. The living room had darkened and he had a notion to switch on the lights, but decided against it. The evening gloom provided an illusion of security.
He looked down at the pale oval of his wife’s face, almost featureless in the shadows.
“It won’t be too bad,” he explained, “if not too many of them come. Of course, we don’t know how many there are of them, actually. Billions, perhaps. But if none of our people try to make trouble—the aliens simply don’t want any trouble.”
He paused a moment. The death of the young Intelligence major had not been mentioned in the broadcast. Considering the issues involved, it was not, of course, a very important event and officially would be recorded as a suicide. In actual fact, the major had succeeded in wresting a gun from one of the men holding him. Another man had shot him promptly without waiting to see what he intended to do with it.
At all costs now, every rational human being must try to prevent trouble with the Visitors from Outside.
He felt his face twitch suddenly into an uncontrollable grimace of horror.
“But there’s no way of being absolutely sure, of course,” he heard his voice tell the silently gathering night about him, “that they won’t decide they just happen to like our kind of bodies.”
CARETAKER
If you look hard enough, you can usually find what you’re seeking—or trying to avoid!
“WELL him,” said Commander Lowndes’ voice, speaking from the great exploration ship stationed on the other side of the world, “that we’re recording it officially as Hulman’s Planet. I think that might please him.”
Marder hesitated with his reply. Through the viewport of the parked little scout flier, he looked out at the vast, shadowy valley before him, at green and scarlet swamps, at gleaming dark waters threaded through them. A huge, blue-wooded wave of mountains rose beyond, the setting sun just touching their crest. In a quarter of an hour, it would be completely dark. His glance turned, almost reluctantly, to the substantial but incongruous reality of Hulman’s house nearby, its upper story and roof mirrored in the tiny swamp lake.
“No, it wouldn’t please him,” he said. “Boyce suggested it during our first visit with Hulman today. He wants us to record it instead as—I’ll spell it—C-r-e-s-g-y-t-h. Cresgyth. That’s his phonetic interpretation of the name given it by the people here.”
“Fair enough,” Commander Lowndes agreed, “if that’s how he wants it.” He inquired whether Marder had anything to add to the present report.
“Not now,” Marder said. “I’ll call you back after we’ve met his woman.”
“HIS wife,” Lowndes corrected him carefully. “I’m glad it happened to be you and Boyce who found Hulman. You’re reliable men; you in particular, Marder. I don’t need to emphasize that Hulman’s chance discovery of what appears to be the first genuine human race ever encountered outside of Earth is of primary importance . . .” He continued to emphasize that obvious fact at some length. “Boyce might be inclined to hurry through the—ah, diplomatic overtures,” he concluded. “You’ll be careful about that part of it, Marder?”
“Very careful,” Marder promised.
“On the two continents we’ve scanned so far, we’ve found no traces of human inhabitants, present or past. It’s possible that Hulman’s acquaintances are the sole survivors of humanity here. If we frighten the tribe into hiding, there may never be another contact—and within a hundred years or less, they may have become extinct.”
“I understand.”
“Fine. Now, then—what about these other creatures? What did Hulman have to say about them?”
“In the twenty years he’s been marooned in this valley, he’s had only three or four actual encounters with them—rather violent encounters, on his side. Apparently, they learned to avoid him after that. He seems,” Marder added thoughtfully, “to have an almost psychopathic hatred for them.”
“Not very surprising!” Lowndes’ tone was reproving, reminding Marder that Hulman had been, for the past forty years, one of the great, legendary names of stellar exploration. “Deems’ scout reports it bagged a couple of specimens a few hours ago and is bringing them in. The description checks with what Hulman gave you—a wormlike, blue body with a set of arms, legs, and a head. Out of water, they appear to wear some kind of clothes, presumably to conserve body moisture.”
Marder agreed that it checked.
“We’ve found them remarkably elusive otherwise,” Lowndes went on. “There seems to have been a widespread rudimentary civilization along the seas and major lake coasts—amph
ibious cave-builders is what they were originally. But all the Caves we examined have been deserted for centuries, at least, which indicates major migratory movements of the species inland. The seas and lakes are almost completely barren of life above the plankton level.”
There had been, according to Hulman, some kind of planetary catastrophe, Marder said. Hunger had driven the “snakes,” as he called them, out of the great lake chains of their origin, up into the valley swamp lands and along the river courses, forcing the remnants of the mysterious human race ahead of them in their slow migration and gradually reducing the human living area. Hulman had killed six of the bluish, wormlike creatures in this section of the valley, in the first few years after he had crashed on the planet; after that, they had ceased to show up here. But, until now, he had been unable to give the humans more effective help.
AFTER Lowndes cut contact, Marder remained sitting in the scout for a time, gazing out at the vast, darkening valley with troubled, puzzled eyes. For twenty-two years after the destruction of his ship, Hulman had lived here, separated from the humanity of his origin by an enormity of light-years, by the black abyss of space, but in the company of a woman who was of an alien, dying race.
“My wife!” Hulman had said, not defiantly but proudly, in speaking of her. “I called her Celia from the start, and she liked the name.”
Hidden somewhere in the shadowed swamps, the woman he’d called Celia was watching Hulman’s great log house until she could overcome her timidity of the visitors from space.
“She’ll show up some time during the night,” Hulman had laughed. “I’m leaving the doors open for her. I’ll talk to her a little first, to reassure her, and you can meet her then. Meanwhile, why don’t you have a look at her picture.”
Years ago, as a boy, Marder had first seen Hulman’s early paintings of the outer worlds and, like countless thousands of others before and since, he had felt his imagination swell and grow wide with the cosmic grandeur of Hulman’s vision of universal life.
In the fifty or so paintings he had seen in the log house that day, the great sweep of space had dwindled to something apparently much more commonplace. Hulman’s imagination seemed to have shrunk to correspond to the physical limitations of the valley that confined him. However, he had retained a characteristic and extraordinary precision of lifelike detail, particularly in regard to the human beings he had found here.
They were beautiful creatures; but the paintings aroused a revulsion in Marder, in which he recognized a vague flavoring of terror. In the one painting Hulman showed them of the woman Celia, that effect was particularly pronounced. Marder found it difficult to explain to himself. Boyce seemed insensitive to it, and there was nothing in Hulman’s words or attitude to provide additional clues.
Re-entering the house, Marder glanced back with more than a trace of uneasiness at the swamp from the doors Hulman had left open. After twenty years, Hulman should know whether danger threatened him from there; but for a visitor on a strange world, “it” and “they” were always present in the unknown dark outside—fears that usually were imaginary, but sometimes were not.
Marder smiled a little grimly at his own present apprehensions and went in.
HE found Hulman and Boyce in a cavernous cellar level beneath the house itself. It was well lit and showed familiar and reassuring features; power plants, storage rooms, even a hydroponic garden. The two men stood beside the opening of a deep fresh-water well, twenty feet across, which took up the left side of the main cellar hall.
“Sixty feet down, it’s ten degrees Fahrenheit,” Hulman was stating, with a disarming houseowner’s pride. He was a big man, rather heavy now, with a square-cut brown beard that showed only a few traces of gray. “I got the idea from Celia’s people. Swamp water’s none too healthy here at various seasons, but the well taps an underground river that’s as pure as you could wish—” He caught sight of Marder. “Any news?” His face had become suddenly anxious.
“They’re going to wait over there with the ship,” Marder said, “a week or more, if required. We’re to follow your judgment in every way in establishing contact with the Cresgythians.”
“Good!” Hulman was obviously relieved. “We can’t do anything till Celia comes in—and we’ll have to be very tactful then. But I’m sure it won’t take a week.”
“What makes them so shy of us?” Boyce inquired.
A shadow passed over Hulman’s face. “It’s not you,” he said. “It’s me . . . Or it’s an impression I gave them of the Earth kind of human beings.”
Back upstairs, with the three of them settled comfortably in the big living room, he explained. He’d given Boyce and Marder a room together on the top floor of the house, across a small hall from his own room and that of his wife.
“I’ve never asked Celia much about her people,” he said. “There’s some kind of very strong taboo that keeps her from talking about them. When I tried to press her for details at first, it was almost as if I were committing some sort of gross indecency. But I do know they hate violence, insanity—anything unbeautiful! And, you see . . .”
When his ship crashed into the valley, he was the only man left alive on her out of the original crew of four. “Banning went insane two days before that and killed Nichols and Dawson,” he said, his face drawn and taut, remembering it again over a period of twenty-two years. He paused. “And so I killed Banning before he could wreck the ship completely.” He looked from one to the other of them. “It was unavoidable. But they never understood that, these people of Celia’s.”
“How did they find out?” Marder stirred uncomfortably.
Hulman shrugged. “I was unconscious for about a month and completely blind for six months afterward. They got me out of the wreck and nursed me back to life, but as soon as I was out of danger, only Celia would stay with me. She and I were alone for weeks before I regained my sight. How did they find out? They’re sensitive in a number of ways. And there were those bodies in the ship. They—withdrew from me,” he said with a grimace, “as soon as I no longer needed their help.”
“Then in all this time,” Marder said slowly, “you never were able to gain their confidence?”
Hulman stared at him a moment, apparently weighing the words. “It’s not a question of confidence,” he said finally. “It’s a question of—well, I’m trying to tell you! I didn’t mind being alone with Celia.” He grinned suddenly, almost boyishly. “The others stayed in a small lake village they had a couple of miles up the valley, across the swamps. Celia went up there every few days, but she never brought anyone back with her. I suspected it was simply because I was an alien. I thought they’d get over that in time. Celia seemed happy enough, so it wasn’t a very acute problem—”
He paused a few seconds, frowning. “One day, when she’d slipped away again, I remembered a pair of field glasses I’d taken off the ship, and I got them and trained them on the village. That was a very curious experience—I never have found a complete explanation for it. For just one instant, I had everything in the clearest possible focus. There were children playing on the platforms above the water; a few adults standing in the doorway of a house. And, suddenly, everything blurred!” Hulman gave a short hacking laugh. “Can you imagine that? They didn’t want me to look at them, so they just blurred my vision!”
“Eh?” Boyce was frowning.
Marder sat still, startled, feeling the uneasiness growing up in him again.
Hulman smiled crookedly. “That’s all I can tell you. The glasses had a four-mile range and they were functioning perfectly, but the instant I turned them on the village, the field blurred. I’d never felt so wholeheartedly—and successfully—snubbed before.”
BOYCE laughed uncomfortably and glanced at Marder. He was still more than a little in awe of Hulman, of the shining legend miraculously resurrected from the black tomb of space; but he, too, Marder decided, had the vague sense of something disturbing and out of order here. Well, so much the better. There woul
d be two of them to look out for trouble, if trouble came.
“I’ll admit the trick annoyed me,” Hulman said, “as soon as I’d got over my first surprise at it. Next day, I announced to Celia that I was going over to the village. She made no objection, but she followed me at a distance—probably to make sure I didn’t drown on the way. It’s wet going around here. At last I came over a rise and found myself a hundred yards from the village, on the land side. Almost immediately, I realized they had abandoned it. I walked around it a while and found cooking fires still glowing; but nobody had waited to receive me. So I went home, insulted and very sulky—I wouldn’t even talk to Celia until the next morning!”
He laughed. “I got over that in a hurry. And then I settled down to building us a house of our own, much bigger and better than anything they had in the village; and that took up all my time for several months. For that whole period, I ignored our neighbors quite as thoroughly as they had ignored me.”
He grinned at his guests a little shamefacedly. “But you know, I couldn’t keep it up then. There was something so curiously happy and peaceful about them, even if they were giving me the cold shoulder. And the one good look I’d had of them had showed me they were physically the most beautiful people I’d ever seen. One day, when Celia was gone, I made another trip to the village—with exactly the same results as the first one. So I decided to look around for a less exclusive neighborhood.
“I’d got the little flier of my ship repaired enough to take it off the ground and set it down again; and I calculated I’d salvaged enough fuel for at least one twenty-four-hour trip. Celia watched me take off. I flew high over the village and could see them down there, ignoring me as usual. Then I flew down the valley for almost fifty miles before I came across the first colony of the other ones—the snakes!”
Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 42