by Earl
“So I simply transferred that reflex up here,” chimed in Ellyn, following his thought.
“A sort of mental optical illusion,” Jahn expanded, seeing the relief in her eyes at the matter-of-fact psyching of her troubled mind. “Your mind keeps saying, ‘Something has to be moving’. Like on Earth. Yet nothing does here, on this lifebare world. And since there are no birds, insects, critters at all, your mind fashions the optical illusion that the rocks are moving. Lecture over. Tell me to shut my big slobbering mouth.”
“Don’t ever, when I need it.” Ellyn squeezed his arm. “Thanks, love. I feel free now. I can look back at those rocks, knowing nothing will mo—” She choked for a moment. Peered. Then braced her shoulders and turned back.—“move. Optical trick, that’s all. I’ll remember. Keep drilling myself. Nothing moved. Nothing.”
Tantho groaned, silently. He had no powers of making speech, or any sounds. He had no mouth or eyes or any external appendages or organs. His outward surface was smooth and brown, like the smooth and brown rocks. He could not call them back in any way.
Tantho was blind, in the Earthly sense, but yet could see. Patterns of mental waves constantly shot out from his brain and bounced back, forming a radaric mental picture of the outside world. He could thus detect them easily, their forms. But always they were so quick, not waiting to see him move right in front of their eyes.
And he could not reach them with telepathy. He groaned again at the stark dilemma.
But their dwelling. He could see it with his longer range mental radar. He must try to reach that now. Slowly he began to roll and move toward the dwelling.
It was not far. He should reach it in a short time.
With the passing days, Ellyn kept dutifully repeating the saving thought in her mind. Rocks, rocks, rocks. Nothing but unliving, unmoving rocks.
Besides, now there was movement for her demanding eyes, when she looked out the kitchen window. The fields of green grain were tall enough now to wave and undulate in the breeze.
She did not have to imagine rocks moving anymore, to satisfy the reflexes of her brain.
Nothing but dead rocks.
“Tantho!” came the telepathic call from his mate, in the cave. “Where are you? Come to the cave before it’s too late.”
“No,” radiated back Tantho. “There is only one hope, to reach the dwelling of those people. I just have to cross their fields.”
“But there will be no shade, Tantho. No big rocks to protect you from the sun, across the open field. You will die before you reach them. Come to the cave.”
“To die there instead?” returned Tantho rather sharply. “How many of you are left now?”
“Only a dozen. The warm air creeps in, more and more all the time.”
“Thus the caves save us not,” pointed out Tantho. “Here and there, in caves around our world, a few miserable thousands huddle like you, awaiting the end.”
“But what good will it do to reach the ruthless barbarians who stole our world away without mercy?”
“No, that is wrong,” said Tantho. “I have read their thoughts. I have found, through one, that they are not a ruthless people. They did not steal our world away, wantonly. They thought it dead, uninhabited. They did not know of us at all. They never conceived of our type of life, encased in a thick hard shell like rock. We just look like other rocks to them. They do not know we feed on them, being alive.”
Tantho paused. Then, with an uplift in his radiations, he said, “But when I reach their dwelling, prove I’m alive, they’ll leave our world and move it back. I’m sure of it.”
“Then hurry, Tantho!”
“I’m going at my greatest speed now. I’ll be there in just a few more moments.”
“How the days fly by,” said Ellyn. “Two months. We’ve been on Ganymede two whole months already.”
“And ready to harvest our first big grain crops soon,” said Jahn “We’re not homesteaders anymore. We’re bonafide farmers now. Or Basic Agriculturists, as the Agency always puts it, as though the good old word farmer is some sort of slur.”
“And we’re really Ganymedes now,” marvelled Ellyn. “Not Terrans. Over the radio from Earth, that’s how they refer to us, the Ganymedes. We’re making this world ours.”
They were sitting out on the air-conditioned porch, cool and breezy, with green fields rippling under the sun, feasting their eyes. Jahn also feasted his eyes on his wife, in the briefest of shorts and halter. And he was most pleased at her new vivacity. Her release from a mental incubus.
Ellyn’s eyes were clear now. The strain had gone from her face. It had helped in the past weeks to keep that refrain dancing through her mind—“Nothing but rocks, rocks, rocks. Dead dead rocks.”
She had seen no more optical illusions, at the rock pile a hundred yards off. No more hallucinations.
She could even laugh now as Jahn said gravely.
“A rock came up and bit me today, out in the north forty. You see, it was a form of life with a rocky outer skin, eating rocks. He offered me a bite of a nice juicy chunk of granite, and I politely chewed it down. Wasn’t bad, with salt and pepper.”
“Stop it, Jahn,” choked Ellyn, wiping her eyes. “I’ll get one of my giggling fits. Now I can see how ridiculous it is. Rocks living and moving. What a silly I was.”
Tantho hurried more, straining his utmost. Not a moment must be lost in reaching the dwelling. Around him now was the tall green grain, hiding him. They would not see him until he reached the cleared yard around their dwelling.
“Tantho!” come his mate’s call. “What is this dwelling they live in? Why do they need it?”
“They are strange fragile creatures,” answered Tantho. “They are of a different and much more delicate protoplasmic structure than we are. As our Thinkers sometimes theorized, they are probably carbon-base life, instead of silicon-base like we. Thus, being soft, they need clothing and dwellings and tools to help their weak hands. We need none of those, and thus we leave, no real clues around for them to even notice. No dwellings, clothing, machines. We live just as ourselves, attuned completely to elemental nature.”
“But why didn’t they notice from the start that we move, and are therefore alive?”
“That is the strangest part,” mused Tantho, as he rolled over again on his steady course. “To them, our movement is infinitely slow. Even as I try to move before their eyes, they pause only a flashing micromoment and are gone like a ghost. To me they move with blurring speed, you see. Our time senses, obviously, are vastly different. It takes me a dark-and-light period combined to roll over once. In short, just an instant.
“But that instant, to them, seems to be a vast stretch of time, in which they move and live and do countless tasks, all in a flashing high-speed blur of motion.”
“Why do they move at this incredible speed?”
“I think,” ventured Tantho, “it is due to their living under a hot near sun, increasing the tempo of all living things, of the carbon type. Whereas our life, when orbiting around the giant belted planet, was governed by what to them would be unthinkable cold. In that cold, normal to us, we lived and moved a hundredfold more slowly than they.”
The sun rose and the sun set, over and over.
Jahn prepared for the harvest. Ellyn used no more frozen vegetables from the deep freeze, when their own homegrown products were so much fresher.
The twins romped around a big oblong stone in the fields and when it seemed to move, ever so slightly, they yelled “bang, bang” at it and then went on to other games.
“That was why those first visitors, exploring our world before they moved it, never noticed us?”
“Exactly,” returned Tantho. “In fact, if you’ll remember, we pretty much ignored them too, those swift blurred shapes that wandered briefly among us. We thought nothing of it. In turn, not noticing us, not finding any carbon life as they know it, they pronounced our world lifeless. And took it away.”
“A horrible day! Only yesterda
y it was. The stars wheeled, our world spun and moved, and the sun grew into a huge ball of flame. But how could they move our world so swiftly across space, in one short day between sleeps?”
“Come,” said Tantho impatiently. “That day was a hundred times longer to them, obviously. Time enough for them to tow us across space. But they can tow it back too. The key to our salvation.”
“But will they, even knowing of us?”
“I’m sure of it!” Tantho was grimly excited. “They are not cruel. In the mind of one—Ellyn, she is called—I have read of their strict code, never to wrest worlds away from native inhabitants. They will give own world back.”
“You’re all over it now, Ellyn,” Jahn said, pleased. “I can tell. Steady, calm, non-neurotic. But tell me just out of curiosity. What if we had found life here? What then?”
“We’d leave, Jahn.”
Ellyn said it quietly. But with the quiet force of purring atomic dynamos. About a dozen of them.
“Even after all this?” explored Jahn, fascinated. “All our work? All our uprooting from Earth, our striving, our hard-earned crops growing? All that wiped out? Cancelled? Left behind?”
“Certainly,” said Ellyn. “We’d leave, Jahn. Even though I love Ganymede now, and its future promise. And the others would have to leave too. I’d see to that, if nobody else did. I’d go straight to the Space Reclamation Board and raise a stink and make them tow Ganymede back where it belonged.”
“You mean that, Ellyn,” marvelled Jahn. “You really mean it. With all your heart and soul and a million nerve ganglia. You’d become Carrie Nation, hacking down all opposition, wiping out a shameful blot on human honor, if we tried to keep Ganymede after finding life. You’d screech and scream and fight till we untangled the whole mess, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes.”
Jahn almost shivered at the implacable finality of that one word. “I’d pity the army that tried to stand in your way, my sweet little lovable tigress. They wouldn’t stand a chance unless they had something better than the helium bomb.”
“Tantho! Can you make it?”
“I must, even though the sun scorches fiercely now, and I grow weak. I must.”
“Yes, you must, Tantho. You are our only hope. If you can reach them, contact them, make them move our world back home, we are saved. Some few thousands of us.”
“I will get there,” radiated back Tantho, and then fell silent, conserving all his energy in the task of moving, as the sun blistered down hellishly on him.
He was close now, to the dwelling. It had only been a short distance, really, from the rock pile, no more than a hundred times his diameter. Some thirty dark-and-light periods had flashed by. Not a long time.
But the sun. The burning sun. Luckily, there had been a gradual downward slope from the rock pile to the dwelling, making his roll easier.
Still, Tantho was in agony. He was weak from the beating sun. He had not eaten at all. No rocks in that soft new loam, for him to absorb by silicon osmosis. He ached and burned, his brain on fire. But he kept on.
Close now.
Close.
Ellyn looked out the window at the green fields dancing. She was smiling.
Suddenly her face froze.
“Jahn, that rock,” she pointed. “How did that rock get there, through the fields, close to the house?”
Startled, they ran out to it. The large oblong rock lay on its long side, at the edge of the oat field, where it broke off at the lawn’s border. It was the only rock around.
Ellyn stared stricken.
“Moving rocks,” she whispered. “Was I right all the time? Jahn, moving rocks. It came all the way here from the rock pile, a hundred yards off. Followed us. It was hidden by the tall oats and we didn’t see it till it got to the cut lawn. Jahn, it moved here.”
“Sure it did,” said Jahn easily, gulping his lungs full again, after a squint. “Ever hear of rooks rolling downhill, Ellyn? See that slope from the rock pile to here? It’s as simple as that.”
“But what started it moving?”
“Ellyn, please. What starts avalanches? Rocks just slip, at times. Maybe this one was unbalanced and needed only a slight push by a gust of wind. And look how round and symmetrical it is, perfect for rolling down a slope. By gravity.”
Ellyn still stared in stark indecision.
“All you say may be true, Jahn. Or it may not. There’s one sure test. I’m going to sit and watch this this rock. For hours or days, if need be. If it moves in the slightest . . .”
Ellyn watched all night, under the Earthshine and multiple moon-glow. Her eyes grew bleary but she never once took them away.
Jahn watched with her, silently. One slightest move. And that was that.
And that was—what? Jahn’s face was drawn. He grew haggard within and finally came out with it. “Ellyn, listen carefully. What if it moves?”
She spoke in surprise, without turning her eyes from the rock. “We tell the authorities, of course.”
“Why?”
This time Ellyn’s eyes did jerk away, to lock with Jahn’s brooding intensity.
“Jahn, what do you mean?”
Jahn measured out the words icily. “I mean it would be so easy to just . . . forget to report it.”
“Jahn—no!”
“Yes,” he snapped, in a more violent tone than he had ever used before with her. “Would you place them above us? Above all us farmers? Above Earth’s desperate moon-moving needs for food? And Ellyn—above me and the twins, and our dreams? Think, Ellyn. It would be brutal.”
“Not as brutal as committing world larceny, compounded by race murder.”
“But, Ellyn—”
“Jahn! You’re talking crazy. I don’t know you this way. What has this brought out in you—what? Nothing will change my mind. But you, Jahn. Answer me straight. You must, now. You would not want to report it?”
Jahn grew more haggard. The night wind blew cold, but drops fell glistening from his chin.
“I don’t know, Ellyn. I just don’t know.”
They were close, just a few feet apart. But they looked across a chasm now, at each other, as if they had been whisked to the opposite ends of infinity.
Neither could summon up a word to bridge the chasm.
Their eyes swung back to the rock.
If it moved.
Tantho strained to move. Now was the time, before their fixed eyes. They could not jail to see, even if to them, it was the merest tremor. For once they did not come like flitting ghosts and whirl away at blurring speed. They sat still, for long moments, watching for him to move.
Yes, they would notice before long how he moved slightly. Tantho’s agony eased, from his previous ordeal. In a moment they would realize there was native life, that Ganymede was not freely theirs. In the next brief moment, with their swift manner of doing things, they would evacuate. Not many moments later, they would be towing Ganymede back to the sunless places.
The blessed cool!
Tantho’s thoughts already basked under cold starshine. Back in the heatless outer dark, they could resume their lives, the few thousands that were fortunately left. They could go back to their . . .
Tantho’s thoughts paused.
Back to . . . what?
Back to the browsing among the choice rocks, for the tasty ones. Back to drowsing under somber Jupitershine for somnolent hours. Thinking of . . . nothing. Browsing and drowsing. Was that their life, in essence? Nothing else?
Browsing and drowsing . . .
Tantho faced it then, because he had to. Age upon age, browsing and drowsing. As the Thinkers had often preached in sad bitterness, they were at the end of a long evolutionary decline. They were useless in the scheme of things, the more rabid Thinkers had self-denounced. Rutted, buried alive, pursuing no arts, sciences, philosophies. Having no goal. Waiting for oblivion. Apathetically. The sum total of their existence.
Tantho tried to stop the thoughts but they ground on.
Ages
ago, said the Thinkers, in youthful race vigor, they had used then-existing appendages to build and make and achieve. Great temples, roadways, tunnels. Exquisite art, stirring music, immortal writings. They had reached a peak of fine living.
Then, decay. Time was spent too much in the mind, not enough in the balancing physical world. Blind, perhaps mocking evolution took away their forfeited limbs. They retreated into smooth rock forms, attuned to elemental nature in the way vegetables were, with vegetative penalties. They sank into indolence. Into spirtual bankruptcy. Into what was left, browsing and drowsing.
Their civilization jell to ruin, to dust, to atoms. Not a painting, arch, tool was left. How could the exploring Earthmen be blamed, seeing no evidence of thinking life?
What else could they do but declare Ganymede dead? How could they know of creatures, slothful as true rocks, who only browsed and drowsed . . . browsed and drowsed . . .
The shame burned Tantho more than the sun had. And the thoughts of the silent two watching him with big wondering eyes burned more.
Please don’t move, thought Ellyn. Please, please. Please just be a rock. A rock that rolled down the slope by sheer accident.
Jahn! My Jahn. My Jahn? Not if it moves. He’ll turn from me coldly, when I report it. Hate me. Leave me. It will smash us apart, break us, I know . . . yet . . .
It must be. I must report it. Heaven help me but that can’t change. If the rock moves, Ganymede is not ours. Never was. Never can be. If only Jahn could feel as I do. As a woman does, thinking of their children dying. And the many unborn robbed of their divine right to live. Yes, divine. That’s written in the planetary code those same words. By scientific minds. Humbly.
Jahn, can’t you see? If only I could put it in words that would get through. But I can’t do your thinking for you. Can’t step in between your soul and yourself. Think, Jahn. Think of creatures yanking Earth a billion miles away, carelessly, into freezing cold. What then, Jahn? What bitter curses would you heap upon them as the twins died and the human race was snuffed out? Why is it different the other way around? How can it be?