The Abominal Earthman (1963) SSC

by Frederik Pohl

Brabant sighed and rubbed his head. The trouble was you couldn’t understand them in terms of human referents. They were aliens, the only living, intelligent race of aliens that the human race had ever discovered—to its cost—and he had to try to school his mind to think of them that way.

  “Cigarette, Doc?”

  Brabant shook his head, surprised. Why, de Jouvenel was getting positively chummy. Let the alien make another note about that: Subject No. 2 does not display smoke-tropism of Subject No. 1.Maybe it would confuse them, however minutely, and confusing them was probably the only chance the colonizing party had.

  “How does it feel, Doc?” Brabant looked up.

  De Jouvenel grinned wolfishly. “I mean how does it feel to be the bug this time, instead of the eye in the microscope? You spent enough time watching us. I wondered if you liked it the other way around.”

  “That’s my job, de Jouvenel!”

  “Oh, sure, Doc. And you just love your work.”

  Brabant said harshly: “Evidently I’m not good at it. What did I do to bring out hostility at a time like this?”

  “You didn’t have to do a thing,” de Jouvenel said seriously. “Not a thing. You think we like having somebody like you poke into our heads once a week for seven years? No offense, but a man could be a lot more charming than you, Doc, and we still wouldn’t like him. Oh,” he said, holding up his hand, “sure, we have to have somebody like you to keep us from blowing up. But we don’t have to like it.”

  He came over closer, lowering his voice. “Forget it. Talk about something more important. That fellow over there, he’s built pretty funny, but he can only look one way at a time, right? Well, how about if we work over close to him? You keep his eye on you and maybe I’ll get a chance to kick hell out of him from behind.”

  “No.”

  De Jouvenel nodded. “That’s what I thought, Doc, that’s what I thought.” He looked at Brabant for a moment, his little ape face perfectly serious, and then he strolled away.

  But it was foolish—they wouldn’t have a chance!

  Brabant forced himself to take his mind off it. It didn’t matter what De Jouvenel thought of him, at least it didn’t right at this moment; what was important was that they were in trouble—not just the three of them, but the whole ship, and perhaps more than the ship.

  He checked Marne’s pulse and respiration, guessed they were all right, and sat back against a wall.

  Here was a planet that had been perfectly empty not fifteen years before. The first expedition had checked it carefully, had found thousands of cities and villages, and not a sign of life on any of them. The first expedition had taken a long conscientious year at its job, with cameras and tape recorders and every known recording and observing device to help them out.

  Nothing.

  There were the cities, but not even an animal to prowl their streets. There were forests, with a few insects, and there were fish in the sea. But the cities had been built by neither fish nor bugs, but by warm-blooded bipeds who had known engineering and electronics, who had sailed its seas and mined its ores. Of them there was no survivor. The planet was clean.

  Brabant looked around the little room. It was a dollhouse, by human standards, but the people who built it hadn’t been dolls; dolls can’t be murdered, as they had been. There was no doubt of that now. Even when the first expedition returned to Earth, the theory had been put forth that it was the Gormen who had done it, and the only reason to doubt it was that the Gormen didn’t seem to have visited that section of space. But here they were, and there was no possibility that they were here by accident. They had known.

  The scout rocket, navigating by computer-directed charts, had come down exactly where the permanent party was supposed to meet them—the permanent party, those three volunteers who had remained on Aleph Four to await Explorer’s return. But the permanent party wasn’t there. Then—wham-bam, the scout rocket landed, the Gormen came pouring out of the buildings.

  It hadn’t been a fight. It had hardly been an ambush. They Were simply overpowered. One moment they were walking toward an empty building in a deserted city and the next moment scores of fast, fast creatures with thick skins and small pig eyes had been all over them. Resistance had been futile. But they had tried all the same, of course. It cost Lieutenant Marne a broken femur, compounded. It had cost Crescenzi and Clites, the other two men in the landing party, a great deal more than that.

  Brabant roused himself and went over to de Jouvenel. At the door, the Gorman turned his head alertly to follow.

  “Look,” said Brabant, “I don’t want you to think I’m being arbitrary.”

  “Sure not, Doc,” de Jouvenel grunted.

  Brabant tried to be persuasive. “Maybe we’ll come to a physical attack sooner or later. I don’t know. But right now, no. For one thing, I’m not sure the two of us together could do him any damage.”

  “Oh, cut it out, Doc!” The little ape face was scowling now.

  “No, I mean it. What do we know about them? How do we know what to go for? They move quick and they take a lot of punishment. Remember when we landed? Marne shot one. He shot the leg right off it, but the thing hobbled away without making a sound. It’s conceivable they don’t feel pain. And if they don’t, their nervous system must be— Well. What I’m trying to say is, what makes you think a Gorman can be knocked out?”

  De Jouvenel said mildly: “I bet they can be killed.”

  “Friend, I don’t think you could even kill me with your bare hands.”

  De Jouvenel shrugged and lit another cigarette.

  Brabant persisted: “Anyway, there’s a chance that the captain won’t send the other rocket down, since we didn’t signal an all-clear. And that means we’re in trouble. But if Explorer opts to turn around and head for Earth, at least the rest of the ship is safe. And—”

  He stopped. Both of them stood up straight.

  The Gorman had moved.

  There was no special threat in its movement, but it was a sort of threat merely to see the thing move at last. For hours it had been standing there, its stubby little hands gripping silvery objects that might have been weapons and might have been recording devices, but were certainly unfamiliar to the men. And then, without warning, blur and it was halfway across the room, looking out a window, and blur again and it was back, opening the door.

  “Steady,” Brabant warned. De Jouvenel glanced at him without expression.

  The Gorman held the door, and in a moment another alien came in. And behind the second Gorman, something else—a figure, bent and shambling…

  A human figure.

  “Good merciful God,” whispered Brabant, and even de Jouvenel beside him said something sharp and prayerful.

  It was a human being, all right—but just barely. The man in the doorway was a million years old; he had been dying for all of those years, and it had been at least half that long since he was fed or watered, or had been allowed rest. It was impossible that he could walk, although he was walking; it was unbelievable that he could speak. A slim fringe of filthy hair surrounded a red and crusted scalp. There was a beard, ragged and stained. He was nearly naked.

  The man shambled forward, within arm’s-length of Brabant and de Jouvenel, and looked blearily at them out of eyes that were red-rimmed with weeping. He opened his mouth and tried to speak.

  “Ka-ka-ka-ka—” It was a stuttering babble, fighting to break through the hateful, opaque curtain that lay between himself and the sane. “Ka-ka-ka—”

  De Jouvenel whispered urgently: “Doc, do you think he might be one of the guys that were left from the first trip?”

  Brabant shook his head, not to say no but to say: I can’t believe it.

  True, it had been fifteen years since the first ship left. True, captivity in Gorman hands would probably be no rest cure. But this decrepit, destroyed hulk?

  “Ka-ka-ka—” choked the stranger, weeping in rage and fear. And then he reeled closer, the wrecked eyes on them with a watery stare.r />
  He wiped his wet beard and took a deep, sobbing breath, and forced himself to speak. “Captain Fa-Farragut?” be croaked.

  Carefully, Brabant put out a hand to support the scarecrow. He said, forming huge round words with his lips as one who speaks to a retarded child: “Captain Farragut is not here. He is back on Earth. This is the second expedition, not the first.”

  The old man stared and began to sway. “Too late!” he screamed appallingly, and fell like an ancient brittle doll to the floor in front of Brabant.

  III

  Rocket number two ripped into the air of Aleph Four with eleven persons aboard, three of them children.

  Computerman Hibsen, strapped in the padded bucket before the controls, shouted and sang along with the enormous racket of the splitting air. He was enjoying himself. He had very little else to do. Piloting a rocket under power is a job for machines, not for men. The speeds were too fast; the decisions had to come too quickly. A machine could react fast enough to make the minute adjustments that meant the difference between landing and catastrophe, but not the burdened, cogitative human mind.

  “Sailor, beware!” sang Hibsen; “Sailor, lake care! Many brave hearts Lie asleep in the deep.”

  He didn’t have the voice for it, either—he was a flat and nasal baritone at best—but the rockets covered all. And, as mentioned, there wasn’t much else to do. There was very little to see, even, though as the rocket sliced out through the bottom of the cloud cover at the end of its thousand-mile curve, he, and he alone, caught kaleidoscope glimpses of brown and green and dirty blue. But that wasn’t enough to pilot by.

  In the rocket’s plastic nose the only eyes that mattered, the spinning radar plates, felt the landscape below for bumps and ridges, and compared them with its built-in pattern of course and destination, constructed from the first expedition’s maps. Digital relays took the signal from the radar eyes, counted briskly on their winking electronic fingers, and selected the exact increments of course and speed that would poise them, butt down, over the selected landing area.

  The jets flared, flared again; the jolt set all the spring cocoons bouncing, bouncing.

  “Everybody up!” brayed Hibsen, clawing at the buckles that held him in. The eight adults began to do the same.

  Rae Wensley, strapped in an acceleration cocoon next to the Marne baby, reached for the little thing crying feebly.

  “That’s a good fellow,” she crooned, unbuckling straps. “Good little fellow. Oh, nothing to cryabout”

  She never stopped talking to the child, though probably he couldn’t hear—and wouldn’t care if he could—and she never looked up, until she had found the sterile squeeze bottle, prepared at cast-off time and still warm enough. She uncapped it, popped up the nipple with one quick squeeze, and cradled the baby.

  It stopped crying in order to feed.

  Then she leaned forward to look out of the opening port, to see just where they were.

  Hibsen was outside already, skipping and swearing on the smoking ground.

  “Retty!” he yelled, and the red-haired crewman dropped gingerly out of the port, yowled and jumped off the area the jets had charred. “Retty, you climb a hill or a tree and look around. Colaner, stay in the ship. Try to contact Captain Serrel and report safe landing. Leeks! You and Cannon start unloading. And you girls get the kids out of the way, will you?”

  Oh, it was a good time for Computerman Hibsen, with orders to give and ten persons to obey them.

  Carefully, Rae Wensley handed the baby down to Mary Marne, dancing impatiently on the hot sand; and then she followed, and, for the first time in her nineteen years, she stood on soil that had never circled Sol.

  It was hot.

  She hurried off it.

  They were on a beach, a gray and grimy one, with water raising a small pattern of surf twenty yards away. It was hot, not just the burned sand, but the air. Aleph Four’s primary radiated largely at the red end; there was heat enough, and perhaps more than enough, but the light was hardly more than a twilight sky. They should be very near to one of the deserted cities, Rae knew, but there wasn’t any sign of it, only a wood of greasy, pendulous trees that came down to the sand itself.

  It was Rae who counted, and Hibsen, joyously bellowing orders, and Brabant crouched over the waking, feverish husband of Mary Marne hardly a mile away, but some of the others counted a little too. Mary Marne herself was one.

  Time was when Mary Marne had been Mary Davison, twenty-nine years old, a typist for the United Nations Exploration Commission and engaged to a hero of interstellar flight. The engagement was very real to her, although it had been entered into when she was only sixteen. A girl who chose to get engaged to a member of an interstellar exploration party had surely a decade of waiting to look forward to, perhaps several. It was an unrewarding prospect, but that is not an argument persuasive to sixteen-year-old minds.

  So young Mary kissed her Florian good-by at the spaceport and returned to school. Time passed. School ended. Mary reached the age of twenty-two. She attended the bridal showers of her classmates, caught the bouquet at her sister’s reception, practiced baby-sitting on her first two nephews. Florian’s ship was then halfway through its deceleration period, on the outward leg of its trip.

  Mary went to work for the Commission. It helped her to remember Florian. She became a typist and remained one; it was not her intention to make a career, only to mark time for her fiancé‘s return. Other girls in the secretarial pool dated and married, one by one, but not Mary. What had started as a teen-ager’s fierce attempt to mark out a claim on a grownup way of life became a matter of obstinate pride, then of habit. Other girls had been engaged to spacemen and, in the long years, forgot their engagements. Not Mary. Some went through an entire marriage—engagement, wedding, childbirth, divorce. Some went through more than one. But not Mary. She had promised. It did not become easier.

  It became harder, for as the thirteen years dragged by, toward the end a new disturbance began to be felt; besides the mating thrust of her glands and the pressure of her fellows, there came fear. Who was this Florian whose photograph on her desk was a yellowing lie? Who was this man of thirty-one who must by now have replaced the eighteen-year old she had pledged to marry?

  The thirteen years ended.

  Radar sweeps from the satellites of the methane giants hunted ceaselessly for the returning ship, and they found it, a decelerating blip that took shape as the familiar tractor-trailer. Chemical rockets leaped out from them and touched it. Radio carried the message back to Earth.

  Mary Marne, eight years later, cradling her baby on a stranger planet than ever Florian had seen, remembered how they had brought her the news. Before they said a word, she knew, though no one had heard of the Gormen then. That was the first brush, orbiting around a star a dozen light-years from where she stood; the exploring rocket had been destroyed, and Florian was on that rocket. The eighteen-year-old had never reached thirty-one at all.

  Young Mary was hardly heartbroken—thirteen years is a long time—but she wept. She cried for nearly a month, while every TV station carried the tapes that the shattered survivors had managed to bring back, tapes of the Gorman rockets— great, squat, hideous things—tapes of Gorman weapons, and, most chilling of all, the tapes that showed the Gormen themselves.

  Gormen—where had the name originated? It was as familiar throughout Earth as though that race had always been known, needing only the fact of meeting to bring the word leaping to the tongue. There was a David Gorman on that poor, dead ship—had he named them, or had they been named for him, perhaps their first victim? Had the Gormen communicated with a crew and given their own name for themselves? There were other guesses, but none of them mattered now, even the possibly right ones. Man and Gorman had met, and met again, and each encounter was a bloody clash, and then Explorer II was ready to receive its crew, and she passed the test.

  It wasn’t, for Mary, an attempt to strike back at those who had killed her lover, for Ex
plorer IIwas going in the opposite direction. It wasn’t a desire for adventure. It was a flight. Mary fled, light-years away.

  It was ironical, what there was for her at the end of the fleeing.

  Rae Wensley finished helping to offload supplies. Colaner was still trying to reach the mother ship by radio, but without success. Retty had returned from his hill to report that he had spotted the city, but nothing else, and had gone back again. Hibsen, his gem-studded tunic dark with sweat, was blowing heavily, leaning against a tree.

  Rae came to help Mary with the baby. Already Gia Crescenzi, whose two children were the rest of the complement of the rocket, had found something to feed them and had brought them to join Mary and the baby. The three women watched the child, concerned.

  The baby was not aware that he was on a strange planet, he only knew that something was squeezing and pressing him, in a way that had never happened before, and he didn’t like it He cried fretfully and forever, now that he had finished his bottle. He slept briefly, and waked to try to lift his tiny arms, to turn his wobbly head.

  Rae said sympathetically: “He isn’t used to gravity, poor kid.”

  “Poor kid,” echoed Gia Crescenzi, but she was looking at her own two.

  The girl was five, the boy a year younger; in spite of the sternly enforced hours each day with the exercising machines, they were making heavy going of trying to walk and run and jump on a planet. It didn’t matter to them that the gravity that had pulled down Alexander and Napoleon alike had never touched them, that the sun that Joshua had stopped had become a dwindled and unfindable star among millions beyond the cloud cover. It mattered to them, as to the baby, that they had unwelcome weight. It was troublesome for a mother, but Gia Crescenzi was troubled enough already; her husband had gone with the first rocket, like Mary Marne’s, the rocket that had not been heard from.

  Rae thought rebelliously: At least they have a right to worry about their men. Brabant won’t even give me that right. He thinks I’m just a child.