The First Science Fiction Megapack

by Reginald Bretnor

  In short, it meant that Riya Sair, granddam times over, spurned by every male on the old range, was willing to cross the gray mountains and risk death from the resentful wild dams for the thin hope that there was a male among the wildlings who would sire her calf.

  She turned her head back to the path and hurried on, cringing in inward self-reproach at her speed.

  Except for her age, Riya presented a perfect average of her people. She stood two yards high and two wide at the shoulders, a yard at the haunches, and measured three and a half yards from her muzzle to the rudimentary tail. Her legs were short and stumpy, cloven-hooved. Her massive head hung slightly lower than her shoulders, and could be lowered to within an inch or two of the ground. She was herbivorous, ruminant, and mammalian. Moreover, she had intelligence—not of a very high order, but adequate for her needs.

  From a Terrestrial point of view, none of this was remarkable. Many years of evolution had gone into her fashioning—more years for her one species than for all the varieties of man that have ever been. Nevertheless, she did have some remarkable attributes.

  It was one of these attributes that now enabled her to sense what happened on the path ahead of her. She stopped still, only her long fur moving in the breeze.

  * * * *

  Phildee—five, towheaded, round faced, chubby, dressed in a slightly grubby corduroy oversuit, and precocious—had his attributes, too. Grubby and tousled; branded with a thread of licorice from one corner of his mouth to his chin; involved in the loss of his first milk-tooth, as he was—he nevertheless slipped onto the path on Riya’s world, the highest product of Terrestrial evolution. Alice followed a white rabbit down a hole. Phildee followed Reimann down into a hole that, at the same time, followed him, and emerged—where?

  Phildee didn’t know. He could have performed the calculation necessary to the task almost instantly, but he was five. It was too much trouble.

  He looked up, and saw a gray slope of rock vaulting above him. He looked down, and saw it fall away toward a plain on which were scattered pairs of foraging animals. He felt a warm breeze, smelled it, saw it blow dust along the path, and saw Riya:

  B is for big brown beast.

  L is for looming large, looking lonely.

  B? L? Bull? No—bison.

  Bison:

  bison (bi’sn) n. The buffalo

  of the N. Amer. plains.

  Phildee shook his head and scowled. No—not bison, either. What, then? He probed.

  Riya took a step forward. The sight of a living organism other than a person was completely unfamiliar to her. Nevertheless, anything that small, and undeniably covered—in most areas, at least—with some kind of fur, could not, logically, be anything but a strange kind of calf. But—she stopped, and raised her head—if a calf, then where was the call?

  Phildee’s probe swept past the laboring mind directly into her telepathic, instinctual centers.

  Voiceless, with their environment so favorable that it had never been necessary for them to develop prehensile limbs, female people had nevertheless evolved a method of child care commensurate with their comparatively higher intelligence.

  Soft as tender fingers, gentle as the human hand that smooths the awry hair back from the young forehead, Riya’s mental caress enfolded Phildee.

  Phildee recoiled. The feeling was:

  Warm Not candy in the mouth

  Soft

  Sweet

  Candy in the mouth Familiar

  Good

  Tasty

  Nice

  The feeling was Not Familiar

  Not Good

  Not Tasty

  Not Nice

  WHY?:

  M is for many motionless months.

  T is for tense temper tantrums.

  R is for rabid—NO!—rapid rolling wrench.

  MTR. Mother.

  Phildee’s mother wanted Phildee’s father. Phildee’s mother wanted green grass and apple trees, tight skirts and fur jackets on Fifth Avenue, men to turn and look, a little room where nobody could see her. Phildee’s mother had radiation burns. Phildee’s mother was dead.

  He wavered; physically. Maintaining his position in this world was a process that demanded constant attention from the segment of his mind devoted to it. For a moment, even that small group of brain cells almost became involved in his reaction.

  It was that which snapped him back into functioning logically. MTR was Mother. Mother was:

  Tall “In Heaven’s Name, Doctor,

  Thin when will this thing be over?”

  White

  Biped

  BL was Riya. Riya was:

  Big brown beast, looming large, looking lonely.

  BL=MTR

  Equation not meaningful, not valid.

  Almost resolved, only a few traces of the initial conflict remained. Phildee put the tips of his right fingers to his mouth. He dug his toe into the ground, gouged a semicircular furrow, and smoothed it over with his sole.

  Riya continued to look at him from where she was standing, two or three feet away. Haltingly, she reached out her mind again—hesitating not because of fear of another such reaction on Phildee’s part, for that had been far beyond her capacity to understand, but because even the slightest rebuff on the part of a child to a gesture as instinctive as a Terrestrial mother’s caress was something that none of the people had ever encountered before.

  While her left-behind intellectual capacity still struggled to reconcile the feel of childhood with a visual image of complete unfamiliarity, the warm mind-caress went gently forth again.

  Phildee made up his mind. Ordinarily, he was immune to the small emotional problems that beclouded less rational intellects. He was unused to functioning in other than a cause/effect universe. Mothers were usually—though sometimes not—matronly women who spent the greater part of roughly twenty years per child in conscious pre-occupation with, and/or subconscious or conscious rejection of, their offspring.

  In his special case, Mother was a warm place, a frantic, hysteric voice, the pressure of the spasmodically contractile musculature linked to her hyperthyroid metabolism. Mother was a thing from before birth.

  Riya—Riya bore a strong resemblance to an intelligent cow. In any physiological sense, she could no more be his mother than—

  The second caress found him not unaccustomed to it. It enfolded his consciousness, tenderly, protectingly, empathetic.

  Phildee gave way to instinct.

  * * * *

  The fur along the ridge of Riya’s spine prickled with a well-remembered happiness as she felt the hesitant answering surge in Phildee’s mind. Moving surely forward, she nuzzled his face. Phildee grinned. He ran his fingers through the thick fur at the base of her short neck.

  Big warm wall of brown fur.

  Cool, happy nose.

  Happy, happy, eyes.

  Great joy welled up in Riya. No shameful trot across the mountains faced her now. No hesitant approach to the huddled, suspicious wildlings was before her. The danger of sharp female hooves to be avoided, of skulking at the edge of the herd in hope of an anxious male, was a thing no longer to be half-fearfully approached.

  With a nudge of her head, she directed Phildee down the path to the old range while she herself turned around. She stood motionless for a sweeping scan of the plain below her. The couples were scattered over the grass—but couples only, the females as yet unfulfilled.

  This, too, was another joy to add to the greatest of all. So many things about her calf were incomprehensible—the only dimly-felt overtones of projected symbology that accompanied Phildee’s emotional reactions, the alien structure—so many, many things. Her mind floundered vainly through the complex data.

  But all that wa
s nothing. What did it matter? The Time had been, and for another season, she was a dam.

  Phildee walked beside her down the path, one fist wrapped in the fur of her flank, short legs windmilling.

  They reached the plain, and Riya struck out across it toward the greatest concentration of people, her head proudly raised. She stopped once, and deliberately cropped a mouthful of grass with unconcern, but resumed her pace immediately thereafter.

  With the same unconcern, she nudged Phildee into the center of the group of people, and, ignoring them, began teaching her calf to feed.

  Eat. (Picture of Phildee/calf on all fours, cropping the plains grass.)

  Phildee stared at her in puzzlement. Grass was not food. He sent the data emphatically.

  Riya felt the tenuous discontent. She replied with tender understanding. Sometimes the calf was hesitant.

  Eat. (Gently, understandingly, but firmly. [Repetition of picture.]) She bent her head and pushed him carefully over, then held his head down with a gentle pressure of her muzzle. Eat.

  Phildee squirmed. He slipped out from under her nose and regained his Feet. He looked at the other people, who were staring in puzzlement at Riya and himself.

  He felt himself pushed forward again. Eat.

  Abruptly, he realized the situation. In a culture of herbivores, what food could there be but herbiage? There would be milk, in time, but not for—he probed—months.

  In probing, too, he found the visualization of his life with her ready at the surface of Riya’s mind.

  There was no shelter on the plain. His fur was all the shelter necessary.

  But I don’t have any fur.

  In the fall, they would move to the southern range.

  Walk? A thousand miles?

  He would grow big and strong. In a year, he would be a sire himself.

  * * * *

  His reaction was simple, and practiced. He adjusted his reality concept to Reimannian topology. Not actually, but subjectively, he felt himself beginning to slip Earthward.

  Riya stiffened in alarm. The calf was straying. The knowledge was relayed from her mother-centers to the telepathic functions.

  Stop. You cannot go there. You must be with your mother. You are not grown. Stop. Stay with me. I will protect you. I love you.

  * * * *

  The universe shuddered. Phildee adjusted frantically. Cutting through the delicately maintained reality concept was a scrambling, jamming frequency of thought. In terror, he flung himself backward into Riya’s world. Standing completely still, he probed frantically into Riya’s mind.

  And found her mind only fumblingly beginning to intellectualize the simple formulization of what her instinctive centers had computed, systematized, and activated before her conscious mind had even begun to doubt that everything was well.

  His mind accepted the data, and computed.

  Handless and voiceless, not so fast afoot in their bulkiness as the weakest month-old calf, the people had long ago evolved the restraints necessary for rearing their children.

  If the calf romped and ran, his mother ran beside him, and the calf was not permitted to run faster than she. If a calf strayed from its sleeping mother, it strayed only so far, and then the mother woke—but the calf had already long been held back by the time her intelligence awoke to the straying.

  The knowledge and computations were fed in Phildee’s rational centers. The Universe—and Earth—were closed to him. He must remain here.

  But human children could not survive in this environment.

  He had to find a solution—instantly.

  He clinched his fists, feeling his arm muscles quiver.

  His lower lip was pulled into his mouth, and his teeth sank in.

  The diagram—the pattern—bigger—stronger—try—try—this is not real—this is real: brown earth, white clouds, blue sky—try—mouth full of warm salt…

  F is for Phildee!

  O is for Out!

  R is for Riya!

  T is for Topology!

  H is for happiness and home!

  Riya shook herself. She stood in the furrows of a plowed field, her eyes vacant with bewilderment. She stared uncomprehendingly at the walls and the radar tower, the concrete shoulders of the air raid bunkers. She saw antiaircraft quick-firers being hastily cranked around and down at her, heard Phildee’s shout that saved her life, and understood none of it.

  But none of it mattered. Her strange calf was with her, standing beside her with his fingers locked in her fur, and she could feel the warm response in his mind as she touched him with her caress again.

  She saw the other little calves erupting out of the low dormitory buildings, and something within her crooned.

  Riya nuzzled her foundling. She looked about her at the War Orphans’ Relocation Farm with her happy, happy eyes.

  ACCIDENTAL DEATH, by Peter Baily

  The wind howled out of the northwest, blind with snow and barbed with ice crystals. All the way up the half-mile precipice it fingered and wrenched away at groaning ice-slabs. It screamed over the top, whirled snow in a dervish dance around the hollow there, piled snow into the long furrow plowed ruler-straight through streamlined hummocks of snow.

  The sun glinted on black rock glazed by ice, chasms and ridges and bridges of ice. It lit the snow slope to a frozen glare, penciled black shadow down the long furrow, and flashed at the furrow’s end on a thing of metal and plastics, an artifact thrown down in the dead wilderness.

  Nothing grew, nothing flew, nothing walked, nothing talked. But the thing in the hollow was stirring in stiff jerks like a snake with its back broken or a clockwork toy running down. When the movements stopped, there was a click and a strange sound began. Thin, scratchy, inaudible more than a yard away, weary but still cocky, there leaked from the shape in the hollow the sound of a human voice.

  “I’ve tried my hands and arms and they seem to work,” it began. “I’ve wiggled my toes with entire success. It’s well on the cards that I’m all in one piece and not broken up at all, though I don’t see how it could happen. Right now I don’t feel like struggling up and finding out. I’m fine where I am. I’ll just lie here for a while and relax, and get some of the story on tape. This suit’s got a built-in recorder, I might as well use it. That way even if I’m not as well as I feel, I’ll leave a message. You probably know we’re back and wonder what went wrong.

  “I suppose I’m in a state of shock. That’s why I can’t seem to get up. Who wouldn’t be shocked after luck like that?

  “I’ve always been lucky, I guess. Luck got me a place in the Whale. Sure I’m a good astronomer but so are lots of other guys. If I were ten years older, it would have been an honor, being picked for the first long jump in the first starship ever. At my age it was luck.

  “You’ll want to know if the ship worked. Well, she did. Went like a bomb. We got lined up between Earth and Mars, you’ll remember, and James pushed the button marked ‘Jump’. Took his finger off the button and there we were: Alpha Centauri. Two months later your time, one second later by us. We covered our whole survey assignment like that, smooth as a pint of old and mild which right now I could certainly use. Better yet would be a pint of hot black coffee with sugar in. Failing that, I could even go for a long drink of cold water. There was never anything wrong with the Whale till right at the end and even then I doubt if it was the ship itself that fouled things up.

  “That was some survey assignment. We astronomers really lived. Wait till you see—but of course you won’t. I could weep when I think of those miles of lovely color film, all gone up in smoke.

  * * * *

  “I’m shocked all right. I never said who I was. Matt Hennessy, from Farside Observatory, back of the Moon, just back from a proving flight cum astronomical survey in the starship Whal
e. Whoever you are who finds this tape, you’re made. Take it to any radio station or newspaper office. You’ll find you can name your price and don’t take any wooden nickels.

  “Where had I got to? I’d told you how we happened to find Chang, hadn’t I? That’s what the natives called it. Walking, talking natives on a blue sky planet with 1.1 g gravity and a twenty per cent oxygen atmosphere at fifteen p.s.i. The odds against finding Chang on a six-sun survey on the first star jump ever must be up in the googols. We certainly were lucky.

  “The Chang natives aren’t very technical—haven’t got space travel for instance. They’re good astronomers, though. We were able to show them our sun, in their telescopes. In their way, they’re a highly civilized people. Look more like cats than people, but they’re people all right. If you doubt it, chew these facts over.

  “One, they learned our language in four weeks. When I say they, I mean a ten-man team of them.

  “Two, they brew a near-beer that’s a lot nearer than the canned stuff we had aboard the Whale.

  “Three, they’ve a great sense of humor. Ran rather to silly practical jokes, but still. Can’t say I care for that hot-foot and belly-laugh stuff myself, but tastes differ.

  “Four, the ten-man language team also learned chess and table tennis.

  “But why go on? People who talk English, drink beer, like jokes and beat me at chess or table-tennis are people for my money, even if they look like tigers in trousers.