The Abominal Earthman (1963) SSC

by Frederik Pohl

  She corralled the two older children and started teaching them the fine points of walking. Then—

  “What was that?” cried Gia, her voice thin with fear.

  It had been a sound from the hanging trees.

  Hibson jumped up. Colaner’s face appeared at the rocket’s port. Rae, a child at each arm, swept them close to her protectively; it had been a frightening sound.

  And frightening in fact.

  Mary Marne screamed.

  Something was coming out of the greasy forest—a good many somethings, elephantine and gray. They came down on the party with incredible speed, a score of them in the first bunch and many more thrusting through the trees behind.

  “Gormen!” bellowed Hibsen, scrabbling for a stick, a knife, anything that would be a weapon.

  But there was no weapon. The tractor-trailer had had few, and all of them had gone with the first rocket.

  Hibsen lunged at the Gormen barehanded, checked himself, whirled. “Colaner!” he shouted. “Blast off!”

  It was a triumph of reason over instinct. Instinct said Fight! but there was no hope in a fight. The only hope was that miraculously the rocket might get safely off.

  But it wasn’t a day for miracles. The Gormen were all around now, not brutal, not cruel, merely invincible; there was a knot of them around every human, even the children. Colaner had heard, and he did his best. Red fire roared from the rocket But no man could balance that ship, only the computer, and that had not been programmed for the return trip. Whatever Colaner did, it was not enough. The rocket danced and wobbled, painfully climbing. It hung crookedly overhead, singeing them all; it was like a shower of acid. The smell of crisping hair—and flesh—filled their nostrils.

  And the Gormen had them all.

  All but two. Not Colaner, who somehow got the rocket slashing waveringly out to sea. And not Leeks, who had been closest to the rocket and would never need to fear capture again. His cindered body flopped to the gray sand, scratched against it, lay still.

  Half a mile out to sea, the rocket plunged into the water with a plume of steam and, moments later, a wild roar, as the children began to shriek.

  IV

  Rae Wensley limped along a resilient street between empty buildings, in darkness. She ached and she was frightened, but it was queerly exciting, all the same, to be walking through a city that had been built by a dead race. Beside her, Hibsen stalked angrily along, carrying one of Gia Crescenzi’s children. The boy was whimpering softly. The sound caught at Rae’s heart, for the child was fretfully repeating, “Mommy! Mommy!”

  And his mother had made the mistake of attacking one of the Gormen.

  Mary Marne panted from behind: “Look! Isn’t that the other rocket?” It was something, certainly enough, something that was tall enough to loom over the rather low buildings and metallic enough to catch a few glints of light from somewhere.

  “That’s it,” snapped Hibsen, straining to see.

  They rounded a corner and there it was—the rocket, all right, squatting silently on its skids in a broad plaza. From one of the buildings, light streamed out, but the Gormen hurried them past it, not even pausing, though one of the Gormen that had captured them shouted something in their high-pitched quacking and was answered from inside. Another building, this one smaller and isolated from those around it, showed fainter, bluer light as they approached. They were hustled inside.

  Rae stumbled past a motionless Gorman at the door, blinked and cried: “It’s them! Mary, your husband’s here!” It was a little room, with a flaring blue light dangling from the ceiling, and Marne lay propped on one elbow, blinking up at them, in a corner of it. De Jouvenel squatted beside him, his dark face comically surprised. No one else.

  Rae said to Lieutenant Marne urgently: “Where’s Dr. Brabant?” But Marne had no patience for that sort of question, not just then. He pushed himself up, and Rae saw that one arm was in a sling.

  “Mary!” he shouted and rushed toward them, half-crouched; be was not a tall man, but his head brushed the ceiling of that room. His wife ran to him. The baby was in one arm, but the other arm was free and she wrapped it around him in a great soundless passion of relief. Rae, watching, felt something inside her move oddly.

  She caught de Jouvenel’s arm. “Where’s Brabant?” He looked at her and his face went all stiff and opaque. “Please!” she begged.

  “He’s alive,” de Jouvenel said unwillingly. “Or he was an hour ago.”

  “Then where—”

  The man’s voice was hostile. “I don’t know,” he snapped, and brushed past her to join the others.

  She wandered through the house that the Gormen had turned into a prison for them. She had seen photographs of the desecrated buildings on Aleph Four; all of the colonists had. But the photographs didn’t show scale, didn’t show the finicky smallness of the rooms, didn’t show the delicate daintiness of the furnishings.

  There was nothing left of the builders of the houses but a few pictures, pictures of frail bipedal creatures with lemur’s eyes. But they had not been gone long. Even in this damp climate, wood and paperlike objects had not had time to decay. The house they were in was three stories high, each story less than six feet from floor to ceiling, except for a few larger rooms at the back of the ground floor. All the rooms were free to the captured humans, but nothing outside. The Gorman at the door by which they had entered was only one guard; there were others, outside and on the tough but yielding roof.

  But, in all truth, that was not the major preoccupation of Rae Wensley’s mind. She was beginning to form a most peculiar notion of the previous inhabitants of Aleph Four. Plumbing was not a feature of their architecture. The marks of gracious living were in the rooms, but grace for them consisted in things that looked beautiful and served beautiful functions.

  There was statuary—it might have been statuary, anyway. There were musical instruments—one a sort of tuned drum, with a molded head that produced a diatonic scale around the rim. There were pictures, some representational, some perhaps pot—it was hard to tell. But there was very little else that, to Rae Wensley, marked the difference between civilization and animal existence. It was, she thought, torn between discomfort and giggling, not one of the more easily accepted hardships of space flight that nowhere in sight was there a door marked “Powder Room.”

  It wasn’t until Mary Marne found her wandering, listened, laughed, and showed her the astonishingly convenient vegetative arrangements in the cellar that Rae’s spirits improved enough to let her worry about Brabant.

  When she got back to the main room, where the silent Gorman guard still stood, there was a stranger.

  “Rae!” cried Hibsen. “Where’ve you been? Never mind! This is Sam Jaroff, Rae—from the first expedition!”

  They pushed her forward. Obviously, this man needed help, and she was the nearest thing left to a doctor, having had the practice of caring for babies in the trailer. Rae poked around in the emergency kit while the old man did his choking best to answer a thousand questions.

  He was frightening, she thought, frightening! He had eaten poorly for a long time. Massive diet deficiencies were obvious in his sparse hair, his dry and crusted skin, even the weeping old eyes. The only cure for that was rest and food, Rae thought worriedly, reading labels, but probably some vitamin concentrates would help.

  While she was working, the Marne baby woke long enough to scream.

  Mary hurried to feed it; the Gorman at the door looked silently and, blur, he was standing over them to peer down at the little red face. It was like a carved thing, watching; then, without a sign, it went blur to the door again and stood waiting.

  Sam Jaroff twisted restlessly under Rae’s hands, saw the Gorman and screamed thinly. It paid no attention. He gasped: “Sorry, miss!”

  Hibsen looked at the girl and shook his head. “He’s had it rough,” he said without humor.

  But the old man heard. “Rough?” He sat up. “Every day I wished I was dead. Skinner
was the lucky one.”

  “Ssh,” soothed Rae, pressing him down, but the man shook her off; he wanted to talk.

  Hibsen and de Jouvenel helped him to lean against a wall. He said: “There were the three of us, Chapman, Skinner and me. We were here a year and a half. Then we saw the ship.”

  He breathed hard for a moment, the rheumy old eyes blinking. “Skinner saw it,” he said. “He was the radioman and he picked something up that he couldn’t read. Well, he said so—but we didn’t believe him, you know, not at first. We never heard of Gormen. I never heard the name until Dr. Brabant said it. We didn’t know there was anything alive in space except people, and—

  “Well, we learned.” He coughed hoarsely, looked up into Rae’s eyes and quickly covered his mouth. “Sorry,” he mumbled. “Anyway, after Skinner claimed he got these signals, we kept a watch and maybe we saw the ship. I guess we did. There was something, and we thought it might be a meteorite, but it must have been a Gorman rocket. But we didn’t know for sure, and then nothing happened. For a long time. It’s all in the log, in case you want to read it. I guess it’s still around someplace. Not in this building, of course. But the Gormen have that log now, and—

  “Well, anyway. Nothing happened, like I say, for a long time. Two years. We put crops in, down by the creek, but they didn’t do well. Root vegetables died. Carrots, potatoes, turnips—the carrots would grow down about an inch and a half, and then nothing. By the time they were big enough to eat, they were all knotted up, not worth eating. It was like the topsoil was too thin, you know? Like somebody living in a development house where the builder just put in enough to make the first spring’s lawn and— But it wasn’t that, though. There’s plenty of topsoil, but below the surface, nothing lived. I thought about it for years,” he said earnestly, “and, you know, I’m damned if I understand it. At first I thought it was too much moisture, but—

  “Sorry,” he said, coughing and wiping his face. “I kind of forgot how to talk. Anyway, the crops didn’t work out so well. Well, then. The aliens came back. That thing we saw, it must’ve been a ship, and they must’ve spotted us. Where were they those two years? I don’t know. They’ve got a kind of a camp on Bes. That’s where I was for a couple years. Maybe they were there all the time, even when Captain Farragut was here. But we didn’t see them, until—”

  Jaroff stopped and wept silently.

  Hibsen said harshly: “Look, you don’t have to tell us all this right now! There’s plenty of time!”

  “I want to,” said Jaroff, rubbing his watery eyes. “And are you sure about plenty of time? I’m not. There might not be any time at all.” He twisted uncomfortably against the wall, his eyes on the silent Gorman at the door.

  He said: “They came at night. We were all asleep. No guards, nothing like that. Well, who would think we needed them? But the noise should have woke us up. It didn’t, though. What woke me was—was Chapman screaming.

  “He wasn’t in the house with Skinner and me,” Jaroff explained carefully. “We’d had a kind of—not a fight, but we weren’t getting along so well. He’d lost one of Skinner’s books, see, and so Skinner wouldn’t lend him the ukulele and Chapman—

  “It doesn’t matter. But Chapman moved out and set up his own place in one of the buildings across the street. The red one. We called it the House of Morgan. There was a little inlaid thing on the ceiling and it was gold, and Skinner called it that, and—

  “The Gormen went there first. We woke up, hearing him screaming, and we came running—

  “Chapman was still alive,” Jaroff said slowly. “Oh, he lived about two years after that. He even went to Bes with me. I didn’t see him much, but after he died I saw him. They used him for dissection. I guess they wanted to—to—”

  Jaroff stopped and looked at the floor for a moment. Then, “They hurt me a lot,” he said, very softly, “testing my reflexes and like that. But they didn’t kill me, although I asked them. I begged them.

  “Skinner they killed, right there in the House of Morgan. He had a gun, and he shot six of them first.

  “So then I was on Bes for—Dr. Brabant figured it out for me. About ten years, after Chapman died. Eating mush, and all the time they were watching me. Sometimes they wouldn’t bother me for a couple of weeks, and sometimes the mush tasted funny and I got sick. They were trying things, you see. They tried a lot of things. Sometimes they hurt me.” He rubbed the fine lacework of white scar tissue on his arm.

  “And then they brought me back here. It was about a month ago, and I didn’t know why, but maybe I know why now. I guess they saw Explorer II on their radar, if they have radar. Or perhaps you sent a message and they got it. I don’t know.

  “But I’m pretty sure they knew you were coming, and that’s why they brought me right back here. I think they were going to use me for bait, maybe. Put me out in the open, with a lot of them all around, hiding. But they didn’t have to. They—” He began to sob.

  Hibsen stood up. “That’s enough,” he growled. “Let him alone.” He turned to the Gorman guard.

  But de Jouvenel’s hand was on his arm and, after a moment, Hibsen looked down at the little dark man and nodded.

  “All right,” Hibsen said. “I’m not going to do anything.”

  Rae was half asleep on the floor, the baby snoring in quick light breaths beside her, when she felt Hibsen’s hand on her shoulder.

  “Council of war,” he said. “Come on, Rae, wake up. The Gorman’s gone.”

  She looked at the door; it was true. The room was almost completely dark, but enough light flickered in from the Gorman buildings across the square to show shadowy figures, the walls, the scant furnishings. The Gorman wasn’t there.

  “Wake up,” said Hibsen more loudly, stirring Mary Marne and her husband with his toe as they lay side by side nearby. “De Jouvenel, you awake? Retty?”

  They all came awake at once.

  Hibsen said: “Retty, stay by the door. We don’t know how long that thing’s going to be away. Keep an eye open.” He turned to Marne. “Lieutenant, you rank me. Do you want to take charge?”

  Marne shook his head. “I’m not much use with this arm. Anyway, it doesn’t matter right now, does it?”

  “It might,” said Hibsen. “There’s our ship out there and we’re not guarded. Well? What about it?”

  Rae caught her breath. “But it can’t carry all of us!”

  “It can carry some of us,” Hibsen corrected. Sam Jaroff, propped on his elbow at the fringe of the group, moaned softly. “That’s right,” Hibsen brutally clarified. “Some of us would have to stay behind.”

  Rae Wensley said sharply: “That’s not fair! What about the children?” Hibsen shook his head. “And Sam Jaroff? And what about Dr. Brabant? He isn’t even here—how can we go off and leave him?”

  “He left us.”

  “Now that’s a—”

  “Shut up, Rae!” Hibsen’s voice snapped like a mule-skinner’s whip. “Don’t talk about what’s fair. This is a matter of survival.” He moved quickly to the window, nodded and returned. “The rocket’s right there. There’s no Gorman in sight, though I can hear them across the square. I can get into that rocket without being seen, I promise. Five minutes and I’ll have a course set on the computers that will take us close enough to Explorer’s orbit. But it won’t be accurate, so I’ll need reserve power for maneuvering. That means—” he hesitated—“not more than three people.”

  “Three—”

  “Three people alive,” he cut in grimly, “is better than all of us right here dead! And Captain Serrell hanging up there, fat and happy—until the Gormen get around to locating him and knocking the whole ship off!”

  “No,” said Rae Wensley positively. “Not without Brabant.”

  “The devil with Brabant! He went off with the Gormen. If he likes them so well, he can stay!”

  She shook her head. Her mind was closed; she wasn’t prepared to listen. She said: “Don’t you see? When he comes back, he’ll
have more information for us. What right have you to think he had anything to say about whether he went with them or not? And certainly he’ll use every chance he gets to find out their weak spots. They—”

  “They haven’t got any,” said Sam Jaroff’s hoarse, thin voice, and he caught her arm. “Listen to him, girl! I’m scared, but it doesn’t matter how scared I am—he’s right. Let him get away! We’re all dead here anyway.”

  “Right,” said Hibsen. “Now let’s get down to it. Rae, you’re overruled. De Jouvenel, stand by while I try to make it to the scout rocket. Once I’m inside, if any Gormen wander along, you’ll have to—”

  “Hibsen!” hissed Retty piercingly from the door. “Come here and take a look!”

  All of them came crowding around the windows and the open door, looking out onto the little square.

  Gormen were out there.

  There were at least a dozen of them, and they were moving around the first scout rocket, crouched cold and silent on its skids.

  “We’ll have to wait,” said Hibsen, his eyes fixed on the aliens. “Maybe they’ll go away.”

  “They’re not going to go away,” whispered Rae. “Look, Hibsen! What are they doing?”

  The squat quick things were in and out of the rocket’s port. Like ponderous jack rabbits, they hopped up into the belly of the little ship and those inside began handing things out to those on the ground. And the things they were handing out— Glittering metal instrumentation. Black slabs of panel mounting. Copper entrails of wire.

  “They’re taking out the computers!” cried Lieutenant Marne, holding his splinted arm. “Hibsen, do you know what that means? We wouldn’t be able to fly the rocket now, even if we could get to it!”

  “That’s right,” snarled Hibsen. “Pretty clever, eh? And what do you suppose gave them that idea?”

  He turned a face of fury on Rae Wensley. She couldn’t help it; she recoiled from the rage he showed.

  “That’s pretty smart,” he said. “They know a lot about us, don’t they? And there’s only one place they could have learned it—from your pet headshrinker, Brabant!”