The Abominal Earthman (1963) SSC

by Frederik Pohl

  So ends the story of the Martian star-gazers. Requiescat in pace. It is a tragic and ironic story, a world destroying itself. How superior we Terrestrials, in our greater wisdom, are well entitled to feel.

  WHATEVER COUNTS

  I

  There were fifty-eight of them on the trailer. Fifty—eight of them, and they had been together for a long time. But fifty-five didn’t count. Only three counted, three who stood at the center of it. Hibsen was one of the ones that counted, Hibsen with the diamond epaulettes and the rope of matched rubies. And Brabant counted, Brabant and his blots of ink. And there was Rae Wensley. She may have counted the most.

  But the others didn’t count, however much they suffered. It was only those three.

  One of the ones who didn’t count was screaming. He was the littlest of them, very small and very new. Off at the outer shell of the trailer, where the scout rocket was getting ready to go, Brabant could hear him scream. Hibsen, hauling himself along a corridor with squidlike bounds, could hear him very well, and Rae could hear him even better, being closer. The littlest of them screamed because he was in agony. It was a very great pain—the greatest he had ever experienced in his life—except, perhaps, the great pain that had begun it, in the act of being born five weeks and three days before.

  Rae Wensley hooked a toe under his bassinet, now standing sterile and empty because there was no need for bassinets where they were, and slapped at a wall switch.

  “Mary!” she called urgently.

  In a moment, there was a sleepy “M-m-m?” from the grille over the switch.

  “Better come and help me, Mary,” said Rae Wensley, and left the switch open while she went back to tending the baby. Mary was the baby’s mother; the baby’s screams would bring her faster than anything Rae could say over the intercom.

  They had been going on for nearly an hour.

  Rae, her hair net brushed askew and her golden hair beginning to creep out, found herself pleading with the baby as she slapped it, patted it, squeezed its back. “Come on, honey. Please! Get the bubble up for Rachel.”

  She held the child away from her searchingly; the senseless little face screwed up its eyes the tighter, and the long, hairless little head wobbled the more wildly on its gelatine neck. If they hadn’t been in free-fall, she couldn’t have done that, for the tiny new muscles could not have held the head. But if they hadn’t been in free-fall, the little swallowing apparatus could have rid itself of the bubble of gas that brought the pain—if gravity had been there to help it. But there wasn’t any gravity, not with the trailer in orbit. It was a perfectly normal baby—and a perfectly normal bubble of gas; it was only the situation that wasn’t normal.

  That was Rae Wensley. She was nineteen years old and had been in space for seven years.

  And then there was Computerman Hibsen. Hibsen was no colonist—no, not he! Hibsen shut his ears to the screams from the nursery, though it was getting closer and the screams were getting louder. Computerman Hibsen was all gold and gems: fine gold traceries festooned his blue silk jacket; his buttons were great pink pearls; blue diamonds winked from his fingers. He flashed and glowed in the light from the tubelamps recessed in the corridor walls as he propelled himself by handholds; and he also sang: “Three little spacemen Lived on Aleph Four— Along came the Gormen, And they were seen no morel”

  It was not a popular song with the rest of the crew and the colonists, but Hibsen himself was not popular. He didn’t think that was odd. He was used to it.

  He had applied for crew status on Explorer II out of defiance and anger, because a girl had told him he could never pass. Interstellar flight demanded more than technical skill. Hibsen had that, of course. But it also demanded—well, it demanded the qualities that were required of each person in a group of some fifty-odd who would be confined for more than seven years in a space about the size of a three-story apartment house.

  Nobody would have guessed that Hibsen would pass, least of all Hibsen. It was a shock to him when Brabant, the psychologist, accepted him.

  Hibsen reacted, as most of the fifty-odd candidates had, by drawing his salary for the eighteen-year voyage in advance, and spending it. For Hibsen, the money went into gold and gems, and every last bit of that went into all of the uniforms he took along.

  He flaunted the jewel-studded uniforms for every day of those seven years, until the joke would have worn thin even to him—if it had been a joke. It wasn’t. It was what he had always wanted, and now that he had it, he was satisfied: the tangible proof that he was a success.

  The baby was now purple. It was the free-fall, beyond doubt. Colic? On Earth it would have been called colic, so perhaps that was the right name.

  There’s an old prescription for colicky babies: Take one thick, soundproof door; close it upon the child.

  That was a pretty good joke, Rae thought distractedly. There weren’t enough walls in the whole trailer to shut out the sound of one screaming child. And where was Mary?

  She forced herself to put the baby down. To do that, she attached dog-leash snaps to the little harness that held the baby’s diaper; the leashes were fastened to the walls, and they would keep him from drifting helplessly into something. She left him hanging like Mohammed between earth and sky, and kicked herself to the corridor.

  And there was Mary coming—and far behind her, just turning in from a lateral traverse, Hibsen.

  “Mary, thank heaven!” Rae stopped the other woman with one hand and the two of them clung at the door of the nursery, looking inside. Rae’s heart was wrung by every gasping cry. “The poor thing! He’s been like this for an hour!”

  “I know.” Mary Marne stared in at her baby, writhing and kicking his lean, ruddy little legs. She said rebelliously: “If the baby and I could go along, this wouldn’t happen any more. It isn’t fair, Rae! I had everything all set up. There was plenty of room for us in the rocket until Dr. Brabant pushed in. We could all go together down to Four, and the baby would have decent gravity, and—”

  She stopped short, because the screams stopped short.

  There was a strangling noise from the baby. He kicked and jerked with all his arms and legs at once. A blob of whitish-yellow frothy liquid appeared at his mouth; it broke into globules and clung to his face as he tried to inhale.

  “He’s spitting up!” Rachel Wensley was a few inches the closer. She leaped in first, caught at the harness straps and unsnapped the child. Mary was beside her at once, trying to help.

  This was, again, a perfectly normal phenomenon. Babies with bubbles of gas in their digestive tracts need to get rid of the gas, because it’s painful. Eventually they manage to expel it. Sometimes the gas comes up alone, sometimes it brings an ounce or so of milk with it. This is perfectly normal—in a normal environment.

  But without gravity to clutch the milk down and away from the untutored little mouth, it becomes abnormal, and unless the breathing passages are promptly cleared, it becomes, in fact, fatal.

  In the corridor outside, Hibsen, a few yards away, heard the screams change to odd choking and bubbling noises. He caught himself by a handhold and listened, swinging like a helium balloon on a string. Then he scrambled down the lateral corridor and gaped in at the nursery door.

  There was Rachel Wensley, her blonde hair floating about her head like weeds under water, braced with both legs and one arm against a changing table. Her free hand had a grip on Mary Marne’s belt, and she appeared to be trying to swing the other woman around her head. Mary in turn was holding the baby with both hands, one clutching his middle, the other supporting his forehead. The baby himself, flailing around like the tip of a whip, was choking and gasping—and, in a moment, screaming again. Centrifugal force had flung the choking fluids out of his little mouth and cleared the breathing passages, which had been the idea.

  Mary gasped, triumphant and relieved: “That does it, Rae! Let go!”

  The acrobatic group broke up, and the two woman consulted over the baby. His screams dwindled
and became grunts, then something resembling small snores. His mother held him at her shoulder, patting him gently.

  Rae automatically took a spare hair net out of her pocket and began to fix her hair. “Hi,” she said breathlessly as she noticed Hibsen staring in.

  He came cautiously in, trying to shield his pearly-gold finery from the small floating drops of spit-up formula. “What a mess. Everything all right?”

  “It is now.” Rae helped the baby’s mother snap him back into the floating harness arrangement again. He was sound asleep. “Well, he got it up. But I hate this.”

  “You asked for it,” chortled Computerman Hibsen, and he added: “Colonist!”

  And colonist was what Rachel Wensley was. So were the Marnes. So were forty-one of the trailer’s complement, and they were the whole reason for the trip.

  For seven years, the round steel ball that was Explorer II’s tractor had spat faint quick streams of electrons backward from its magnetic throats, and for all of those years it had looked like a child’s tinker-toy, jammed together any-old-fashion.

  It was an ugly spectacle of a ship. There was the tractor sphere itself, with its flaring blunderbuss exhausts. There were the long parallel strands of steel cable that linked tractor to trailer. Finally there was the trailer, shaped more or less like a can of soup, but with lumps and cobwebby masses of wire projecting from it at odd angles in odd places.

  There were, for example, the two shuttle rockets. In flight, they were a part of the trailer’s living space, though they were attached to it in the ungainly fashion of a child’s doll carried by one heel.

  There were the forty-three separate radar, radio and radiation-sensing antennae, plus the periscopes that worked with visual light.

  There was the grappling unit that stuck out precariously from the cylinder’s forward end.

  It was impossible to believe that so clumsy and square-cornered a construction would fly. It would break to pieces, obviously. If by some fantastic mischance it didn’t fall apart at the first surge of power, the protruding sections would be snatched off by the rush of air.

  But this was not so.

  Explorer II from the moment of its first assembly had never felt air, and it never would. It was never, from first to last, meant to accelerate fast enough to cause any strain. It was never to operate so close to any astronomical object that gravity would have an effect. It could afford to look clumsy and to be clumsy. For clumsiness carried no penalties in interstellar space. At its peak velocity, just before turnaround, Explorer II shot through the void at more than half the speed of light itself, so fast that mass increased minutely and the equation MV = M1V1 no longer quite held good, but the force that accelerated it on its way was like the pat from a loving hand.

  Explorer II had a captain, a good man named Serrell, though he didn’t much matter. He had taken tractor and trailer to the place they had aimed for, a planet that had been located nineteen years before.

  The name of the planet—the satellite, rather, for it circled an object that was itself a planet as huge as Jupiter—was Aleph Four. There was a standby party somewhere on its surface, or so they believed. At least there had been three men left by the first expedition, awaiting the relief that this present voyage was planned to supply.

  So the captain’s job was done. It was now only a matter of keeping the cables unsnarled andExplorer II in orbit, and waiting for the scout rocket to report back, and seeing that the colonists with all their goods were shuttled down to the surface that lay hidden, under heavy cloud cover and a punishingly thick ionosphere that blanketed radio waves, a hundred thousand miles below.

  That was all there was to it.

  Captain Serrel (though what he did now didn’t matter) stayed by his conn room and cranked the periscope to try to see what he couldn’t see. There should have been some signal from the scout rocket. Voice would be unrecognizable and even code would garble unless you were very lucky, and they hadn’t been lucky. But why wasn’t there some sort of signal, however faint or garbled?

  Captain Serrell hooked one toe under the corner of his desk and lit a cigarette.

  The blowers were going, but he automatically waved the cigarette back and forth, back and forth, in the old spaceman’s gesture—a habit that clung from the days when free-fall meant that an unwaved cigarette would go out, drowned in its own CO2—the days when every man’s bunk had a little fan blowing day and night on his face.

  Those were the days before first contact with the Gormen and its consequent rapid advances in spaceship design, when Captain Serrell was no captain but a young pilot-officer and fresh to space.

  Now things were better arranged, with a free flow of air impelled by a hundred precisely located fans; but problems remained. There was, for example, the problem of the Gormen.

  It was foolish to imagine that they could have had anything to do with the failure of the shuttle rocket to report—so Captain Serrell argued to himself. The first contact had occurred in quite another volume of space; so had the second, and so had the bloody third and fourth.

  But five men had gone down in the rocket and there wasn’t any response, not even a corrupt radio signal, not even the return of the rocket itself.

  It was foolish to imagine that Gormen might be there. The first expedition would have found them if they were.

  But when you believed that it was just barely possible that Gormen might, it made it bard to order the second rocket to go down.

  II

  Finally, last of the three, there was Dr. Brabant.

  Howard Brabant was thirty-eight years old, not very tall, not very good-looking. He was crew, not colonist; he was a psychologist by profession, and what would the colony need psychology for? But he had been thinking, all the same, of changing over.

  Now—maybe nobody would change over. Maybe there would be no colony. Because Explorerhad come a little late.

  Brabant, sweating more than his patient, said sharply: “I don’t care how much it hurts, Marne—smile! If you can’t smile, at least keep your mouth shut!”

  The lieutenant stared blankly up at him. Brabant braced himself and tugged quickly on Lieutenant Marne’s fractured arm.

  The lieutenant grunted once, sighed and went unconscious.

  Brabant wiped his forehead. All right, let him be unconscious; it was better that way. At least that way he wouldn’t yell—and that might be helpful. (Or might not.) But Brabant didn’t have time to follow the thought through, because he had a compound fracture to set, and not much skill at it.

  He tugged again, and saw the jagged white end of bone slip out of sight. Good. So much for that. As delicately as he could, he poked and palpated the flesh of the arm where the fracture had occurred. As far as he could tell, the bone ends were lined up. There was no chance of getting an X ray, of course, but it felt all right. Bones had been set without X rays, for endless centuries before Roentgen. It would have to do.

  He found an antibiotic powder, shook it on the wound and began the tedious task of splinting and bandaging. It was too bad about Marne’s arm, but the lieutenant was not the worst off of any of the first rocket’s crew. There was Crescenzi, who was dead; and there were de Jouvenel and himself, who were —temporarily—alive, and perhaps that was the worst of all, because they hadn’t the comfort of unconsciousness.

  Because they were not alone in the tiny, ancient room.

  There was an audience observing every move, taking what looked to be notes; an audience of one, but looming large in Brabant’s mind. He glanced at it under his eyebrows, then looked away.

  It was a hideous thing.

  It wasn’t tall—not more than four feet—but it was chunky. Flesh hung from it in folds, like the hide of a rhinoceros. It had a head, and it had two eyes, and probably the horny structure at the base of its “chin” was a breathing apparatus.

  It fitted the scale of the tiny chamber they were in a lot better than the humans did. But that was accident. Aliens had built this city, but not th
ese aliens. The observer that silently noted every move of Brabant and de Jouvenel was in no way related to the race that had constructed their jail.

  That race was dead—gone without a hope of revival, leaving a planet of vacant cities. But the race to which the rhinoceroid creature belonged was very much alive, as the human race had cause to know. It was a Gorman.

  The other survivor of the five men who had come down in the landing party was de Jouvenel, a dark, tiny man who kept to himself. He was watching Brabant with a face like a little monkey, absolutely blank, waiting.

  When Brabant looked up, de Jouvenel said: “Finished? Tell me somethings—why do you want Marne to smile? Matter of principle, show the aliens how brave us Earthmen are?”

  Brabant said regretfully: “I don’t know. It was just a thought. But the less the Gormen know about us, the better chance we have to surprise them later on.”

  De Jouvenel looked doubtful. “What about Marne’s arm?”

  “I haven’t set a bone in a long time, but it looks all right.”

  De Jouvenel nodded and, before Brabant could stop him, took out a cigarette and lit it Brabant scowled, but it was too late to say anything and, anyway, it was still just an idea. But Brabant observed that as the match flared, the Gorman at the door made a quick motion of some sort. Maybe he was making a note of some kind; it stood to reason that anything as curious as inhaling smoke would be worth noting. So probably it was, though the creature carried nothing that looked like pencil, paper, or any other kind of note-taking equipment.