A Galaxy Of Strangers

by Lloyd Biggle Jr

  “Certainly.”

  Dudley closed the door after them. It was the first time he’d ever been able to face McGivern without being afraid of him, and he’d looked forward to this moment with intense pleasure. The expected blast of anger did not materialize, however. McGivern said quietly, “You’re out of your mind.”

  “On the contrary, the longer I stay on Maylor the saner I seem to get.”

  “I suppose you realize that you’re fired.”

  “I’ve already sent my resignation to the Indemnity.”

  “I won’t accept it. You’re fired. I feel a little sorry for you, Dudley. You’ve ruined what might have been a brilliant career. You’ll never hold another job with an insurance company—I can promise you that.”

  “I already have one,” Dudley said. “You’re speaking with the new president of the about-to-be-chartered Maylorian Insurance Company. Since I’ll have an absolute monopoly of this world’s insurance business, I expect to do rather well. I also expect to create an insurance industry aimed at serving the people instead of itself.”

  “If there was a psychiatrist available I’d have you examined,” McGivern said bitterly. “But I don’t suppose this damned planet has one. You’re sick. Something’s happened to you.”

  Dudley nodded. “You’re right. Something did happen to me. Today, for the first time in my entire career, you gave me your wholehearted approval for something I’d done. And all I had to do to get that approval was to ruthlessly exploit a double murder. The more I thought about it, the more I wondered what sort of business this is that downgrades my real accomplishments and rewards me for the worst thing I’ve ever done. Up to that moment I certainly needed a psychiatrist, but since then I’ve made a remarkable improvement. Perhaps it’s the result of associating with people who aren’t greedy or afraid and who have healthy minds.” Dudley smiled complacently. “They’re so grateful for this exposure of the infamous Galactic Insurance plot that they’ve given me a public appointment. I’m a member of a committee charged with the guardianship of public morals and customs, and I’ve already squelched the recommendation by an Alien engineer that Maylor City install one-way streets and traffic lanes.” McGivern glared at him tight-lipped.

  “I’m not—really—being too ruthless,” Dudley murmured as he turned him over to the police.

  They took McGivern away, and Dudley left immediately afterward and walked through the crush of rush-hour traffic toward the restaurant where Bakr had taken them that first night. The atmosphere would be sterile, and the food would be disgustingly bland, and this time Dudley expected to enjoy it.

  page 67

  FIRST LOVE

  Walt Rogers laid aside his brush, pushed back the easel, and switched off the dim light. The storm had faltered momentarily, and now it surged back with a pounding torrent of rain. Walt stepped to the open window and stood there, oblivious of the water that flooded against his eager young face.

  Flashes of lightning ripped aside the darkness and laid bare a familiar landscape twisted strangely. Towering trees bowed submissively before the angrily moaning wind. Water veiled the accumulated filth of the barnyard, and cattle huddled pathetically under a shelter. The rain blurred the outlines of the barn and gave it a somber loveliness.

  Lightning flashed again, and thunder snapped and rumbled after it, and Walt leaned forward with his elbows on the windowsill and whispered, “Beautiful! Beautiful!”

  But how to paint it?

  Of course he could paint how it looked. Any darned fool could paint that. But how to paint the sound of it, and the feel of it, and the wonderful, glorious, fresh-breathing smell of it?

  He turned away and kicked disgustedly at the easel, and at that moment the thunder struck. It came with a thickening roar that impaled him in clinging fright against the windowsill. As he stood crouched in numbed astonishment, it swelled to a bloated, consuming agony of sound until he winced in pain and clapped his hands to his ears, and still it grew and crescendoed until, at the instant it seemed no longer bearable, it exploded.

  He was lying on the floor under the window, in the full blast of the driving rain. Glass tinkled as he moved, and cascaded from his back as he got to his feet. His first thought was to close the window, and he cut his hand on a sliver of glass that remained attached to the empty frame. His ears rang painfully, and the wild roar of the

  storm now seemed only a subdued mutter. As he stared into the night, fire glowed in the distance, sent an exploring tongue of flame up into the rain, and suddenly leaped skyward.

  He ran from his room and down the hallway. As he reached his parents’ room his father opened the door, flashlight in hand.

  “The lights are out,” his father said. “Did your window break? Ours did.” He flashed the light into a spare bedroom. ‘That one’s broken, too.”

  “Dad,” Walt said breathlessly, “something happened over by the quarry. There’s a big fire. The flames are shooting way up.”

  “Damn the flames. What happens at the quarry is Zengler’s business, not ours.” He was looking into the bathroom. “Every window in the house is broken. In this storm, too. We’ll be flooded out. Mother, get some plastic, or oilcloth, or anything you can dig up. Get a hammer and some tacks, Walt. We’ll have to work fast.”

  “Shouldn’t we telephone?” Walt asked. “About the fire, I mean.”

  “I’ve tried the telephone,” Walt’s mother called from the bedroom. “It’s out of order.”

  Walt turned obediently to go for a hammer and tacks. His father’s sharp exclamation halted him. “Walt, your back is cut. It’s covered with cuts. What were you doing? Standing by the window?”

  “I-yes-“

  “What on Earth for?”

  “I was watching the storm.”

  “Good God! At three in the morning—fix him up, Mother. I better get started on those windows.”

  There was no more sleep for the three of them that night. They covered windows, and swept up broken glass, and mopped. Walt slipped away once to open a door a crack and peer out into the continuing storm. “The quarry—” he began.

  “Damn the quarry!” his father said.

  “It’s still burning.”

  By the time they finished their cleaning, the storm had passed and a pink dawn was staining the horizon. Walt went out with his father, and they walked across the yard with the water-soaked grass squishing underfoot. Before they entered the barn to check for damage there, they stood looking toward the quarry.

  “Whatever it was,” Jim Rogers said, “it’s burned out now. I’ll go take a look. Maybe Zengler had some gasoline stored over there— though I wouldn’t know why. But if he’s responsible for this, he’s going to pay for these windows or he’ll never get another lease.”

  But it seemed that Zengler was not responsible. The fire had burned out a corner of the north pasture, where Zengler certainly had nothing stored. The quarry, and Zengler’s property, were undamaged. Neighboring farmers had heard the explosion as a distant roar, and it had done no damage except to their sleep. No one but the Rogers family had seen the fire.

  The net result was a brief item in that week’s edition of the Harwell Gazette, under “Local Briefs.” “A mysterious explosion, which might have been a clap of thunder, broke windows at the James Rogers farm during the storm last Monday night.”

  On the Saturday following the storm, Walt helped his father with the morning chores, as he usually did, and then he took the cows to the pasture. As they lurched away, he cut diagonally across the pasture toward the quarry. The morning was warm, even for early June. White wisps of cloud drifted serenely across the purest of blue skies.

  “Beautiful,” Walt whispered and wished he had brought his paints.

  The mysterious fire had scarred a circle almost a hundred yards in diameter. At the point nearest the quarry it had ruined the fence, and Walt had come out with his father on Tuesday after school to string new strands of barbed wire. The haste had been unnecessary. The c
ows, for strange cow reasons comprehensible only to themselves, refused to approach the burned area.

  Walt climbed through the fence and walked over to the quarry. Water filled a vast hollow that had been excavated long before Walt’s birth. The little lake was said to be fifty feet deep at its deepest point. Beyond it, the hill had been sliced away neatly where Zengler’s men were blasting out the rock.

  Walt sat down by the water and amused himself with the reflections, imagining how he would put them on canvas. The clouds overhead, the one towering oak tree, the mass of the hill beyond—all were mirrored splendidly in the dark, still water. His own image had an amusing, elongated perspective.

  He seized at an inspiration. “I’ll come this afternoon,” he thought, “and do a self-portrait, using the water instead of a mirror. I wonder if it’s ever been done.”

  He felt gloriously happy. School had ended the day before, and he had the entire summer before him. There would be the farm work, of course, but he’d be able to find plenty of time to paint, and paint, and—

  He looked longingly at the water. The morning was warm, but it was too early in the year for swimming. The water would be icy. His mother was waiting breakfast for him.

  He was out of his clothes in an instant, carelessly dropping them on the rocky bank, and he turned and stepped off into ten feet of water. The chilling shock spurred him to a frantic churning of arms and legs. He broke water, wiped his eyes, and turned to strike out for the opposite side.

  Suddenly he whirled and threshed wildly for the bank. He pulled himself out and turned to stare at the water. He could see nothing but his own reflection, peering back at him quizzically.

  But he had seen something, something long and dark, drifting up out of the deepest water and nosing purposely toward him. A fish? But there never had been any fish in that water, and a fish of that size would be a monster.

  Then he saw it again, a long, sinister-looking shadow that drifted slowly toward the bank and then hung motionless, too deep for him to see it clearly. He waited breathlessly. It tilted and slowly coasted toward the surface, and he found himself gazing into the face of a girl.

  He sucked his breath in sharply, and it was seconds before he realized that she was staring at him, too, and that he was nude. Moving slowly, he got to his knees and stretched out on a flat rock, moving his face close to the water.

  She remained well below the surface, but by watching her intently he began to make out her features. Her dark mass of hair swayed gently in the water, stretching back the length of her body. A smooth material, greenish even in the dark water, covered her body, molding the contours of her small breasts so distinctly that he felt himself blushing. The water gave her face a curiously flattened appearance, but he measured its perfect oval with an artist’s eye and wondered what mysterious color her eyes might have.

  Then he noticed the gills.

  One of her hands, with delicately webbed fingers, made a circle and pointed to her open mouth. It circled and pointed again. The third time he understood. She was hungry.

  Even as he watched, his alert sixteen-year-old mind was probing the imponderable with relentless logic. She was hungry. Of course she was hungry. The storm had been Monday night, so whatever it was that had brought her had crashed and burned Monday night, and this was Saturday. She must be starved. There was nothing in that water for her to eat.

  He had read of flying saucers and possible life on other worlds, and he did not pause to speculate. He knew. She could not be of this world, so she must have come from another world. How had she come? The charred edge of the pasture was a mere two hundred yards from the water. Could her people, water people, have mastered the intricacies of space flight? She was here. That was answer enough. She was here, and her ship had consumed itself in that mysterious fire that had tossed flames high but seemed to have produced relatively little heat.

  He extended one hand slowly, toward her face. She darted backward in alarm, approached again as he withdrew his hand, and repeated her signal. Her webbed hand moved toward her mouth. She was hungry.

  Walt leaped to his feet and pulled on his clothing. With one last glance at the face in the water, he started back across the pasture, running.

  Edna Rogers took in her son’s disheveled appearance and wet mop of curly hair and exclaimed, “What have you been doing?”

  “Dad,” Walt said breathlessly, “I’d like to go fishing. Could I take the car?”

  “By yourself?”

  “Why-yes.”

  “Well,” Jim Rogers said easily, “I guess summer’s officially here. Things are pretty well in hand, and a mess of fish would taste good. Where are you going?”

  “I know some good places,” Walt said evasively.

  Fishing had never interested him. Nothing had interested him except painting and drawing, but he remembered a submerged tree stump in the river south of town. Once when he was out sketching he had seen a boy catch several sunfish there. It was as good a place to start as any.

  The girl was hungry. But what could she eat? Raw meat or fresh? What about fruit and vegetables? She lived in the water, so he would get her some fish, if he could. And then he could try some other things.

  He left the car parked by the road and cut across the Malloy farm to the river. No one was about, which pleased him. Tense with excitement, he baited his hook and dropped it into the water.

  Nothing happened. The bobber drifted idly with the current and eventually snagged Walt’s hook on the stump. He freed it and tried again, impatiently counting the minutes. The girl was starving. He told himself that he should have taken her something else. His mother wouldn’t miss one steak from the deep freezer. He had to do something quickly, and if the fish weren’t going to co-operate—

  He whipped his line from the water and ran back to the car. Two miles down the road he pulled in at Marshall’s Service Station. Old Ed Marshall sat by the door of the weathered frame building, tilted back in a chair, reading and enjoying the sunshine.

  “Minnows?” he said. “I can let you have some. But if you’d rather get your own, you know where the net is. Take it any time you want it. And say—Sadie’d like another of those pictures of yours. She wants to put it in the guest room.”

  “She’ll get one,” Walt said fervently.

  He found the neatly folded net in the shed behind the station. He was on his way back to his car when Old Ed called after him, “Sure you can manage by yourself?”

  “I can manage,” Walt said.

  The net was twenty-five feet long and a rather large-meshed affair for capturing minnows. There were those who thought maybe Old Ed used it on larger prey, and Walt, who had seen him in action one morning, was certain of it. And everyone knew about the way the Marshall family lived on fish during the summer.

  Old Ed got to his feet and walked over to the car. “I’ll tell you, Walt,” he said with a confidential grin. “It’s a little late in the morning to start out with that thing. And you have to know where to go. If you want fish, why don’t you come with me tomorrow?”

  “I’d like to give it a try,” Walt said.

  “I could let you have a few for today.”

  “And—tomorrow?”

  “I go every morning. You’re welcome to come along any time you like.”

  “Thanks,” Walt said.

  Minutes later he was driving wildly toward the quarry with three healthy-sized bass splashing in a bucket.

  Fortunately Zengler’s men did not work on Saturday. The quarry was deserted, the water dark and lifeless. Walt leaned over and splashed frantically with his hand. Then he saw her, gliding swiftly toward him. She halted well below the surface.

  He caught one of the fish and held it low over the water. She did not move until he lowered it into the water, and then she backed slowly away. Suddenly the fish jerked and slipped from his clutching fingers. He gasped in dismay as it darted away.

  But in a flash the girl was after it. She overtook it with dazzling sp
eed, captured it deftly, and with a graceful twist headed downward and disappeared. It all happened in an instant—a blur of movement in the water directly below him, and then he saw only her long, shapely legs receding as she sped away from him.

  He waited for a time, and then, when she did not reappear, he released the other fish. It would be humiliating for her, he thought, to be summoned for her food like a trained animal. And if the fish were there, he now had no doubt that she could catch them.

  Then, off to one side, he saw the dark form lying motionless in the water. She was watching him. He stretched out on the bank, his face close to the water, and looked at her.

  “Beautiful,” he murmured.

  There was a strange, unearthly loveliness about that water-shrouded face, and in the blurred gracefulness of her slender figure, and in the long, flowing hair. The hair fascinated him. Most of the girls of his acquaintance were wearing their hair in disturbingly short, boyish styles. He considered girls formidable enough when they looked like girls.

  He wondered how he appeared to her through the shimmering veil of water. Did he possess an alien ugliness that fascinated her? Suddenly the question became very important. He told himself bitterly that he was only her provider, her meal ticket, and she could not possibly have any interest in him beyond that; but he lingered long that morning, and he was back again after the evening chores, lying on the bank as the sun vanished and the shadow of the scraggly old oak tree that lay quietly on the water sank into invisibility. He stayed on until the dusk deepened and her face was no longer visible.

  He remembered a poem he had once seen in an old schoolbook of his mother’s when he went through it looking for subjects to draw. It suggested rich colors and strange scenes to him, but he had not understood it. Now he found it again.

  Come live with me, and be my love, And we will some new pleasures prove, Of golden sands, and crystal brooks. With silken lines, and silver hooks.