The 18th Golden Age of Science Fiction MEGAPACK ™: Jerome Bixby

by Jerome Bixby

  Their average lifespan had been 12,000 years or a little over. So the Zen before me was, by our standards, about twenty-five years old. Nothing at all strange about remembering, when you are twenty-five, the things that happened to you when you were seven ...

  But the Zen's question, even my rationalization of my reaction to it, had given me a chill. Here was no cuddly teddy bear.

  This creature had been born before Christ!

  She had been alone for three thousand years, on a chip of bone from her dead world beneath a sepulchre of stars. The last and greatest Martian civilization, the L'hrai, had risen and fallen in her lifetime. And she was twenty-five years old.

  "How do I live here?" she asked again.

  I got back into my own framework of temporal reference, so to speak, and began explaining to a Zen what a Zen was. (I found out later from Yurt that biology, for the reasons which follow, was one of the most difficult studies; so difficult that nuclear physics actually preceded it!) I told her that the Zen had been, all evidence indicated, the toughest, hardest, longest-lived creatures God had ever cooked up: practically independent of their environment, no special ecological niche; just raw, stubborn, tenacious life, developed to a fantastic extreme—a greater force of life than any other known, one that could exist almost anywhere under practically any conditions—even floating in midspace, which, asteroid or no, this Zen was doing right now.

  The Zens breathed, all right, but it was nothing they'd had to do in order to live. It gave them nothing their incredible metabolism couldn't scrounge up out of rock or cosmic rays or interstellar gas or simply do without for a few thousand years. If the human body is a furnace, then the Zen body is a feeder pile. Maybe that, I thought, was what evolution always worked toward.

  "Please, will you kill me?" the Zen said.

  * * * *

  I'd been expecting that. Two years ago, on the bleak surface of Eros, Yurt had asked Engstrom to do the same thing. But I asked, "Why?" although I knew what the answer would be, too.

  The Zen looked up at me. She was exhibiting every ounce of emotion a Zen is capable of, which is a lot; and I could recognize it, but not in any familiar terms. A tiny motion here, a quiver there, but very quiet and still for the most part. And that was the violent expression: restraint. Yurt, after two years of living with us, still couldn't understand why we found this confusing.

  Difficult, aliens—or being alien.

  "I've tried so often to do it myself," the Zen said softly. "But I can't. I can't even hurt myself. Why do I want you to kill me?" She was even quieter. Maybe she was crying. "I'm alone. Five hundred years, Eert-mn—not too long. I'm still young. But what good is it—life—when there are no other Zen?"

  "How do you know there are no other Zen?"

  "There are no others," she said almost inaudibly. I suppose a human girl might have shrieked it.

  A child, I thought, when your world blew up. And you survived. Now you're a young three-thousand-year-old woman ... uneducated, afraid, probably crawling with neuroses. Even so, in your thousand-year terms, young lady, you're not too old to change.

  "Will you kill me?" she asked again.

  And suddenly I was having one of those eye-popping third-row-center views of the whole scene: the enormous, beautiful sky; the dead clod, Vesta; the little creature who stood there staring at me—the brilliant-ignorant, humanlike-alien, old-young creature who was asking me to kill her.

  For a moment the human quality of her thinking terrified me ... the feeling you might have waking up some night and finding your pet puppy sitting on your chest, looking at you with wise eyes and white fangs gleaming ...

  Then I thought of Yurt—smart, friendly Yurt, who had learned to laugh and wisecrack—and I came out of the jeebies. I realized that here was only a sick girl, no tiny monster. And if she were as resilient as Yurt ... well, it was his problem. He'd probably pull her through.

  But I didn't pick her up. I made no attempt to take her back to the ship. Her tiny white teeth and tiny yellow claws were harder than steel; and she was, I knew, unbelievably strong for her size. If she got suspicious or decided to throw a phobic tizzy, she could scatter shreds of me over a square acre of Vesta in less time than it would take me to yelp.

  "Will you—" she began again.

  I tried shakily, "Hell, no. Wait here." Then I had to translate it.

  * * * *

  I went back to the Lucky Pierre and got Yurt. We could do without him, even though he had been a big help. We'd taught him a lot—he'd been a child at the blow-up, too—and he'd taught us a lot. But this was more important, of course.

  When I told him what had happened, he was very quiet; crying, perhaps, just like a human being, with happiness.

  Cap Feldman asked me what was up, and I told him, and he said, "Well, I'll be blessed!"

  I said, "Yurt, are you sure you want us to keep hands off ... just go off and leave you?"

  "Yes, please."

  Feldman said, "Well, I'll be blessed."

  Yurt, who spoke excellent English, said, "Bless you all."

  I took him back to where the female waited. From the ridge, I knew, the entire crew was watching through binocs. I set him down, and he fell to studying her intently.

  "I am not a Zen," I told her, giving my torch full brilliance for the crew's sake, "but Yurt here is. Do you see ... I mean, do you know what you look like?"

  She said, "I can see enough of my own body to—and—yes ..."

  "Yurt," I said, "here's the female we thought we might find. Take over."

  Yurt's eyes were fastened on the girl.

  "What—do I do now?" she whispered worriedly.

  "I'm afraid that's something only a Zen would know," I told her, smiling inside my helmet. "I'm not a Zen. Yurt is."

  She turned to him. "You will tell me?"

  "If it becomes necessary." He moved closer to her, not even looking back to talk to me. "Give us some time to get acquainted, will you, Dave? And you might leave some supplies and a bubble at the camp when you move on, just to make things pleasanter."

  By this time he had reached the female. They were as still as space, not a sound, not a motion. I wanted to hang around, but I knew how I'd feel if a Zen, say, wouldn't go away if I were the last man alive and had just met the last woman.

  I moved my torch off them and headed back for the Lucky Pierre. We all had a drink to the saving of a great race that might have become extinct. Ed Reiss, though, had to do some worrying before he could down his drink.

  "What if they don't like each other?" he asked anxiously.

  "They don't have much choice," Captain Feldman said, always the realist. "Why do homely women fight for jobs on the most isolated space outposts?"

  Reiss grinned. "That's right. They look awful good after a year or two in space."

  "Make that twenty-five by Zen standards or three thousand by ours," said Joe Hargraves, "and I'll bet they look beautiful to each other."

  We decided to drop our investigation of Vesta for the time being, and come back to it after the honeymoon.

  Six months later, when we returned, there were twelve hundred Zen on Vesta!

  Captain Feldman was a realist but he was also a deeply moral man. He went to Yurt and said, "It's indecent! Couldn't the two of you control yourselves at least a little? Twelve hundred kids!"

  "We were rather surprised ourselves," Yurt said complacently. "But this seems to be how Zen reproduce. Can you have only half a child?"

  Naturally, Feld got the authorities to quarantine Vesta. Good God, the Zen could push us clear out of the Solar System in a couple of generations!

  I don't think they would, but you can't take such chances, can you?

  THE SLIZZERS

  Originally published in Science Fiction Stories, June 1953.

  They're all around us. I'll call them the slizzers, because they sliz people. Lord only knows how long they've been on Earth, and how many of them there are....

  They're all a
round us, living with us. We are hardly ever aware of their existence, because they can make themselves look like us, and do most of the time; and if they can look like us, there's really no need for them to think like us, is there? People think and behave in so many cockeyed ways, anyhow. Whenever a slizzer fumbles a little in his impersonation of a human being, and comes up with a puzzling response, I suppose we just shrug and think. He could use a good psychiatrist.

  So ... you might be one. Or your best friend, or your wife or husband, or that nice lady next door.

  They aren't killers, or rampaging monsters; quite the contrary. They need us, something like the way we'd need maple trees if it came to the point where maple syrup was our only food. That's why we're in no comic-book danger of being destroyed, any more than maple trees would be, in the circumstances I just mentioned—or are, as things go. In a sense, we're rather well-treated and helped along a bit ... the way we care for maple trees.

  But, sometimes a man here and there will be careless, or ignorant, or greedy ... and a maple tree will be hurt....

  Think about that the next time someone is real nice to you. He may be a slizzer ... and a careless one....

  How long do we live?

  Right. About sixty, seventy years.

  You probably don't think much about that, because that's just the way things are. That's life. And what the hell, the doctors are increasing our lifespan every day with new drugs and things, aren't they?

  Sure.

  But perhaps we'd live to be about a thousand, if the slizzers left us alone.

  Ever stop to think how little we know about why we live? ... what it is that takes our structure of bones and coldcuts and gives it the function we call "life?"

  Some mysterious life-substance or force the doctors haven't pinned down yet, you say—and that's as good a definition as any.

  Well, we're maple trees to the slizzers, and that life-stuff is the sap we supply them. They do it mostly when we're feeling good—feeling really terrific. It's easier to tap us that way, and there's more to be had. (Maybe that's what makes so-called manic-depressives ... they attract slizzers when they feel tip-top; the slizzers feed; and floo-o-m ... depressive.)

  Like I say, think about all this next time someone treats you just ginger-peachy, and makes you feel all warm inside.

  So see how long that feeling lasts ... and who is hanging around you at the time. Experiment. See if it doesn't happen again and again with the same people, and if you don't usually end up wondering where in hell your nice warm feeling went off to....

  * * * *

  I found out about the slizzers when I went up to Joe Arnold's apartment last Friday night.

  Joe opened the door and let me in. He flashed me his big junior-exec's grin and said, "Sit, Jerry. I'll mix you a gin and. The others'll be along in awhile and we can get the action started."

  I sat down in my usual chair. Joe had already fixed up the table ... green felt top, ashtrays, coasters, cards, chips. I said, "If Mel—that's his name, isn't it, the new guy?—if he starts calling wild games again when it comes his deal, I'll walk out. I don't like 'em." I looked at the drink Joe was mixing. "More gin."

  Joe crimped half a lime into the glass. "He won't call any crazy stuff tonight. I told him that if he did, we wouldn't invite him back. He nearly ruined the whole session, didn't he?"

  I nodded and took the drink. Joe mixes them right—just the way I like them. They make me feel good inside. "How about a little blackjack while we're waiting?"

  "Sure. They're late, anyway."

  I got first ace, and dealt. We traded a few chips back and forth—nothing exciting—and on the ninth deal Joe got blackjack.

  He shuffled, buried a trey, and gave me an ace-down, duck-up.

  "Hit me," I said contentedly.

  Joe gave me another ace.

  "Mama! ... hit me again."

  A four.

  "Son," I told him, "you're in for a royal beating. Again."

  A deuce.

  Joe winced.

  I turned up my hole ace and said, "Give me a sixth, you poor son. I can't lose."

  A nine.

  "Nineteen in six," I crowed. I counted up my bets: five dollars. "You owe me fifteen bucks!"

  Then I looked up at him.

  I'll repeat myself. You know that hot flush of pure delight, of high triumph, even of mild avarice that possesses you from tingling scalp to tingling toe when you've pulled off a doozy? If you play cards, you've been there. If you don't play cards, just think back to the last time someone complimented the pants off you, or the last time you clinched a big deal, or the last time a sweet kid you'd been hot after said, "Yes."

  That's the feeling I mean ... the feeling I had.

  And Joe Arnold was eating it.

  I knew it, somehow, the moment I saw his eyes and hands. His eyes weren't Joe Arnold's blue eyes any longer. They were wet balls of shining black that took up half his face, and they looked hungry. His arms were straight out in front of him; his hands were splayed tensely about a foot from my face. The fingers were thinner and much longer than I could recall Joe's being, and they just looked like antennae or electrodes or something, stretched wide-open that way and quivering, and I just knew that they were picking up and draining off into Joe's body all the elation, the excitement, the warmth that I felt.

  I looked at him and wondered why I couldn't scream or move a muscle.

  "Guess I made a boo-boo," he said. He blinked his big black globes of eyes. "No harm done, though."

  His head had thinned down, just like his fingers, and now came to a peak on top.

  He had practically no shoulders. He smiled at me, and I saw long black hair growing on the insides of his lips.

  What are you? I screamed at him to myself.

  Joe licked his hairy lips and folded those long inhuman hands in front of him.

  "It hurts like hell," he said in a not-human voice, "to be slizzing you and then have you chill off on me that way, Jerry. But it's my own fault, I guess."

  * * * *

  he door-bell rang—two soft tones. Joe got up and let in the other members of our Friday night poker group. I tried to move and couldn't.

  Fred raised his eyebrows when he saw Joe's face and hands. "Jerry isn't here yet? Relaxing a little?" Then he saw me sitting there and whistled. "Oh, you slipped up, eh?"

  Joe nodded. "You were late, and I was hungry, so I thought I'd go ahead and take my share. I gave him a big kick, and he really poured it out ... radiated like all hell. I took it in so fast that I fluhped and lost my plasmic control."

  "We might as well eat now, then," Ray said, "before we get down to playing cards." He sat down across the table, his eyes—now suddenly enormous and black—eagerly on me. "I hate like hell waiting until you deal him a big pot—"

  "No," Joe said sharply. "Too much at one time, and he'd wonder what hit him. We'll do it just like always ... one of us at a time, and only a little at a time. Get him when he rakes in the loot. They never miss it when they feel like that."

  "He's right," Fred said. "Take it easy, Ray." He went over to the sideboard and began mixing drinks.

  Joe looked down at me with his black end-of-eggplant eyes.

  "Now to fix things," he said.

  ... I blinked and shook my head. "You owe me fifteen bucks!" I said.

  "Lord," Joe wailed, "did this gonif just take me!"

  Ray groaned sympathetically from the chair across the table, where he'd been watching the slaughter. "And how!"

  Joe pushed fifteen blue chips at me. I began stacking them. "Well, that's life," I grinned. Then I shook my head again. "It's the damnedest thing...."

  "What?" Fred asked. He'd been over at the sideboard mixing drinks for the gang while I'd taken Joe over the bumps. Now he brought the tray over and shoved a tall one into Joe's hand. "Don't cry, Joe. What's the damnedest thing, Jerry?"

  "You know ... that funny feeling that you've been some place before—the same place, the same people,
saying the same things—but you can't remember where the hell or when, for the life of you. Had it just a moment ago, when I told Joe he owed me fifteen bucks. What do they call it again?"

  "Déjà vu," said Allen, who's sort of the scholarly type. "Means 'seen before' in French, I think. Or something like that."

  "That's right," I said. "Déjà vu ... it's the damnedest funniest feeling. I guess people have it all the time, don't they?"

  "Yes," Allen said.

  Then he paused. "People do."

  "Wonder what causes it?"

  Joe's blue eyes were twinkling. "Dunno. The psychologists have an explanation for it, but it's probably wrong."

  "Wrong why?" Knowing Joe, I expected a gag. I got it.

  "Well," Joe said. "Let me make up a theory. H'm ... hoo, hah ... well, it's like this: there are monsters all around us, see, but we don't know they're monsters except that every once in a while one of them slips up in his disguise and shows himself for what he really is. But this doesn't bother our monsters. They simply reach into our minds and twiddle around and—zoop!—you're right back where you were before the slip was—"

  "Very funny," Fred said boredly. "Maybe losing fifteen bucks made you lose a little sense, Joe. You wouldn't want to lose more than fifteen bucks, would you? You need some caution in the games we play, no? So cut the nonsense and let's run 'em."

  Ray licked his lips. "Yeah. Let's play, huh, fellows?"

  Ray's always eager to get started.

  * * * *

  We played until 3 A. M. I won forty-six dollars. (I usually do win ... I guess over a period of six months or so I'm about five-hundred bucks ahead of the game. Which is why I like to play over at Joe's, even though I am always so damned tired when I leave. Guess I'm not as young as I was.)

  Sometimes I wonder why the odds go my way, right down the line. I almost never lose. But, hell, it must be an honest game ... and if they're willing to go on losing to "Lucky" Bixby, I'm perfectly willing to go on winning.

  After all, can you think of any reason that makes any sense for someone to rig a game week after week to let you win?

  * * * *

  Oct. 20

  Frederik Boles, Author's Agent