The Abominal Earthman (1963) SSC

by Frederik Pohl

  “I thought,” he said chattily, “that we were going to have to hear Jaroff’s entire life history among the Gormen, second by second. Thank heaven they got tired.” He nodded toward the silent watchers.

  “What do you want me to do?” she asked coldly.

  “Why,” he said, “suit yourself. It doesn’t much matter; this is learning time, Rae.” He hesitated. “Come to think of it, yes, there is something I want you to do on the conscious level. The subconscious will take care of itself.”

  He slipped a reel onto the tape recorder.

  “Here,” he said, “is a reading of letters of the alphabet, read by me. They aren’t in A-B-C order but random, or as random as I could make them. What I intend to do with you is conditioning.”

  “How?”

  “The key sentence,” he said, “is ‘Mary had a little lamb.’ I want you to respond to the letters in that sentence with a knee-jerk, not to any other. Simple? You’ll listen to my voice on the recorder, and every time I say one of the letters in that sentence, you’ll get a little patellar shock. Not much, but enough to make you twitch. It’s elementary enough—Pavlov was doing much more complicated things with dogs a long time ago. And what I want you to do is to repeat the letter you hear, out loud.” “I don’t like it.”

  Brabant grinned tightly. “This is orders from headquarters,” he said, and nodded at the six Gormen. “But it won’t be painful. Now—”

  He turned the switch.

  The tape recorder obediently began to whisper the garbled alphabet in her ear. “K … “Z …

  “R.” Brabant, listening on another set, pressed a switch. It was only a little tickling tingle. It startled the girl, but she had to admit that Brabant was right—it didn’t hurt. It was, if anything, even less painful than the tap of a doctor’s rubber mallet; but it served the same purpose. The toe of her crossed leg involuntarily twitched an inch and a half.

  “Good girl,” Brabant applauded quickly, as the tape continued to spin.

  “D,” she heard in the earphones. Shock. Again the quick involuntary twitch. “S … “U … “M.”Shock.

  It went on like that for a good many minutes. Then there was a quick squealing sound from one of the Gormen. Brabant snapped the switch.

  “All right,” he said, suddenly morose, “the peanut gallery is getting tired of this particular entertainment. We’ll do more of this some other time. Right now—” he hesitated again. “Right now, I think we’d better put you under. Lean back, Rae.”

  “Hypnosis?” She was startled and fearful. “But—wait a minute! I don’t like—”

  “Easy,” he soothed. “I give you my word, nothing’s going to happen. It’s just the same sort of thing Jaroff was doing, that’s all. So relax, Rae. Relax and rest. Your eyes are getting heavy. …

  Rae Wensley swam up out of a confused dream. “All right, girl,” Brabant was saying, “time to wake up. It’s all over.”

  She sat up quickly, staring around, her mind chaotic. Five of the Gormen were gone; the sixth, or perhaps it was a totally new one, stood idly near them, patiently waiting.

  “Let’s go,” said Brabant. “You’re through for the day. I want to get back to the others.”

  Rae pulled herself together and went out of the room with Brabant, stooping slightly to avoid the lintel of the door. She was confused, full of puzzlement, and oddly tired. Hypnosis was nothing new to her; it was one of the tools of Brabant’s trade. But she wondered what the purpose of the demonstration had been … what the silent watching Gormen had made of it … and, most of all, what was going on in Brabant’s mind.

  “All right, we’re ready,” said Brabant to one of the Gormen below, and the creature glided silently close to them, dogging them out of the building and across the square toward the human jail … or cage. It was a gray day, damp and hot.

  Brabant said, glancing at the girl: “Thanks. You did fine.”

  “What did I do?”

  He grinned. “Well,” he said, guiding her across the threshold of the Gorman headquarters, “you are helping me prove a point. You see, the Gormen don’t have any subconscious.”

  Rae asked stiffly: “So?”

  “So they’re a very different breed indeed, Rae. There isn’t anything that sinks down into the Gorman almost-forgotten, and then turns up as a neurosis, or tic, or deja vu. A Gorman doesn’t say: ‘It’s on the tip of my tongue, but I can’t quite get it out.’ It’s always there for him.”

  “Is that why you told Hibsen they were better than we are?”

  “In that sense, yes, they are. Without a subconscious, they don’t have most of the other trappings that go with a multi-layered mind. They respond fast because there’s nothing to get in their way. They don’t have a psychic censor. There isn’t anything in their minds that interrupts the thought-and-action sequence. They don’t question, they don’t doubt, they aren’t built to do anything like that. If they knew a thing, they know it; if they don’t, they just find it out. Oh, they’re curious —that, my dear, is why we’re still alive.”

  “Thank heaven for that much,” said the girl, and frowned. “Then does that have something to do with the way their ships are built?”

  Brabant nodded. “We need computers for rocket piloting —we aren’t fast enough to make the split-second, always-right little decisions that mean the difference between a routine landing and a gory explosion. Computers are fast enough to handle the load. And so are those boys. I’d say,” he went on earnestly, “that if our friend here—” he nodded at the silent gray alien pacing them—“wanted to hop in that rocket right now and take off, he could do it, given about a minute to figure out the controls. Of course, someone would have to make sure the tanks were filled and so on—and if anything went wrong with the automatic mixers and the other stuff in the combustion system, he wouldn’t be any better at fixing them than you or I. He isn’t smarter than we.

  “But he is faster,” said Brabant, and checked himself.

  Behind them, soft footsteps were rapidly shuffling across the deserted square. Rae turned, and Brabant caught her hand.

  “Careful,” he warned, and she could see that he was worried. It was surprising, but almost pleasurable; at least he wasn’t on totally easy terms with the Gormen! But Rae was worried too, at the same time; six Gormen were coming toward them at a sort of high-speed waddle, the shambling, distance-devouring gait of the elephant in a hurry. The aliens passed Rae and Brabant by without a glance and disappeared into the jail.

  “Come on,” said Brabant urgently, and hurried after them. Their own Gorman guard easily kept pace with them, without the appearance of hurry and without a sound. They reached the door and looked inside…

  Mary Marne knelt bent over her baby, asleep in a crude plaited cradle de Jouvenel had made. She looked up, sprang to her feet.

  Twittering faintly to each other, two of the Gormen grabbed her.

  Mary gasped with fear. “Please!” she moaned, but they held her fast, and another Gorman’s squat hands reached out for her. Snap, snap; it opened the fasteners of her blouse; skillfully, almost cruelly, it slid the zipper of her shorts. It was assault; it was like a crude and perverted rape, the three of them, nothing like human, disrobing the blonde Earth girl —it was a tradition of literature; and, for Mary Marne, it was terror and shame. They stripped her naked as a newborn in less time than Rae, standing helplessly by, could believe; and they poked her, palpated her, prodded her and scrutinized every pore.

  The Crescenzi children began to scream, and Mary’s husband heard. He came running from the back room.

  “Sweet heaven!” he yelled and, hardly pausing at the door, threw himself on the Gormen. But fast as he was, the Gormen were sufficiently faster—more than sufficiently; he didn’t have a chance. They were between him and his writhing wife before he was through the door; there were six of them, and though three were busy with Mary, the other three were more than enough to handle Marne, and Rae Wensley, and the others who came racing into
the room. Marne shouted frantic oaths; they had as much effect as his fists and teeth.

  Rae felt Brabant grab her, draw her back. “Marne!” he yelled. “Get a grip on yourself, man! They’re not hurting Mary!”

  Marne screamed incoherently. He kicked futilely at the alien who had him, sobbed, and glared at Brabant. “You rat! What the devil do you mean, they’re not—”

  And then he stopped, panting for breath. He saw it was true, or true enough. Shame her, discomfort her, strip her naked for everyone to see—yes, all of those things; but that was the extent of the menace in what the Gormen did. They were like children with a kitten. They poked and felt and flexed, but if they gave pain, it was not for the sake of the pain, but an accident of curiosity.

  Marne bellowed: “Mary, are you all right?”

  The girl suddenly relaxed. “I—think so. It’s kind of—ouch, they pinch—embarrassing. But I don’t think they’re going to —to kill me or anything.”

  Marne howled without words. But it was only his husbandly pride and anger now; it was clear that the Gormen’s purpose, for the moment at least, was limited to examination.

  Brabant said: “That’s better, Marne. I rather thought that sooner or later they would want a good look at the comparative anatomy of the female of the species. Though I didn’t think it would be quite so public.”

  Marne cried hoarsely: “Damn you, Brabant! Which side are you on?”

  Brabant only nodded, his expression opaque and suddenly absent-minded, like a man not bothering to hear something that doesn’t really matter. “I only came around to pick out another subject for my own little studies. Let’s see,” he said, looking casually around the room. “I think I’d better take—”

  But he didn’t get to say, just then, who it was he had selected. The Gormen finished with the person of Mary Marne. They set here down on her feet—not roughly, not gently, merely quickly—and returned her clothes. Then, ignoring her, they twittered briefly at each other and started without pause for her baby.

  It was the first time a human had ever caught a Gorman off guard.

  The little knot of men, already on edge, didn’t stop to think or argue. They jumped, without warning. And the first Gorman was bowled over before he could raise his stubby hands to protect himself. There was a loud, shrill twittering from all the aliens, the most noise Rae had ever heard them make, and roars of sudden rage and triumph from the men. The other Gormen, the ones not immediately involved, reached quickly into pouches in their thick skins—for what, Rae could only guess, but the guess was frightening. It might have been death and devastation right then, if those stubby hands had come out with guns—

  Brabant shouted frantically: “Wait, you fools! Hold it! They won’t hurt the baby! They only want to examine it!”

  Maybe it wouldn’t have stopped the men, but it slowed them down. The Gormen needed no more.

  The alien that had been hurled to the floor bounced up again like a ball; the others knotted together, poised.

  The men drew back.

  The brief rebellion was over. But all the humans stood there, eyes burning with anger, while the Gormen picked the child up, stripped it as quickly and efficiently as they had its mother.

  The baby screamed. Well, babies do scream when they are awakened suddenly; it doesn’t mean pain, only surprise. And indeed the aliens were oddly gentle with him. Where they had left purplish bruises on Mary’s pale skin, they were tender with the infant.

  Aliens, monsters, call them whatever you like, Rae Wensley thought, it was clear that they knew the difference between an adult and a newborn.

  It took very little time; then he was back in his plaited crib, still naked but no longer crying very much, and the Gormen, with a few twitters among themselves, were gone.

  The atmosphere around Dr. Brabant had turned ugly.

  He didn’t seem to notice. He was staring thoughtfully at a blank wall, as though all of this were really not happening, as though he were pondering ink-blots in a study back on Earth. He seemed preoccupied, Rae thought, and somehow faintly pleased.

  But all he said at last was: “Well, so much for that. Meanwhile, I’ve got work to do for our friends. Oh, one thing. You aren’t restricted to this place any more. You can wander around outside if you like—though you’ll have company, of course.”

  VII

  Several light-seconds away, and getting farther all the time, Captain Serrell hung at the conn-room periscope, watching the tangled cocoon of steel cable that linked the trailer to its tractor.

  Steel is elastic. In free-fall, the stretched cables had a tendency to snap back, not much, but enough to start the nine-hundred-foot tractor and the larger, lighter trailer moving slowly back toward each other, kinking the cables, bringing the radioactive reactor nozzles dangerously close.

  “Take it easy, Lanny!” the captain ordered impatiently. “You’re getting too damned close to tie hot zone!”

  Young Lanny, aggrieved, said over the radio: “Sorry, Captain.” But he had known perfectly well what he was doing. Captain Serrell, through the periscope, watched the space-suited boy swing his pusher around and ease the ponderous mass out again, toward the limit of its tether. His very posture showed annoyed dignity.

  Captain Serrell sighed and cranked the periscope around again to look at Aleph Four. His nerves were on edge. Lanny Davis was a good boy—man, the captain corrected himself; Lanny was twenty-one now. He had been only twelve when Explorer II began to swim slowly away from its orbit around the orbiting Earth, untangling its nearly Ptolemaic web of cycles and epicycles by craft and immaculate navigation as it set course for the star system that included the habitable satellite, Aleph Four. But now he was a man, and Explorer II circled Aleph’s primary itself.

  It was a singularly helpless feeling, Captain Serrell told himself, scanning the featureless clouds, to be drawing farther and farther away from his two scout rockets down there. It couldn’t be helped.Explorer didn’t have the massive thrust it would have needed to risk an orbit around the satellite itself, or even around Aleph, the Jupiter-sized planet that was first out from its primary.

  Too crowded, too many bodies clutching at the weak tractor-trailer combination. If incautiously they had blundered too close to one of them, that might have been the end for the whole ship. And therefore, doubtless, of the colony, for without the vast stores aboard the mother ship, yet to be ferried down, the colonists would have terribly rough going.

  And what, Serrell asked himself, do they have now?

  He kicked back to his desk, pulled himself into his seat, made a mark on his calendar with a tethered pencil. Four days. No word. No radio. No returning rocket. And Explorer spinning hourly farther away.

  What in the name of heaven was going on?

  The microphone on his desk buzzed. “Captain Serrell, navigation room.”

  He snapped a switch. “What is it?”

  The voice from the navigation room said doubtfully: “Captain, we hooked up a photocell trigger system with the scanning scopes, to look for rocket exhausts, just like you said. And it went off a couple of seconds ago. Andy’s tracking down the tapes now.”

  Serrell’s heart gave an enormous leap. Rocket exhausts! If the alarm had spotted rocket exhausts, it would mean—it had to mean!—that at least one of the scouts was on its way back!

  “Hurry up!” he yelled, past caring that he was giving superfluous orders; the news was too good to wait. “How long’s it going to take? I’ve got Aleph Four in the periscope now—think I can see them?”

  “Well,” said the voice, puzzlingly worried, and faded away. Then it came back, stronger and—more worried.

  “No, Captain,” apologized the voice from the navigation room, “I’m afraid you can’t. Andy’s got the tapes now. The rockets—well, they aren’t coming from Aleph Four, Captain. They’re coming from the other planet, Bes.”

  Down below, Hibsen tested his freedom. He nodded to de Jouvenel, who got up and followed him out the door.
“Let’s see how far we can go. Suppose we take a look around the rocket, for a starter.”

  “All right.” But that was a little more than they were allowed. Two Gormen swooped silently after them, and though Hibsen and de Jouvenel walked rapidly enough, the Gormen were at the rocket before them, solid chunks of gray flesh barring the port.

  Hibsen said: “Okay, we’ll try something else. Let’s wander off. Maybe only one of them will follow. Then we can split up and—”

  But both Gormen followed. The two men walked over the softly bouncing paving, turned a corner, walked a few squares, turned again. The rocket was out of sight: the sound of the Gormen moving about, their voices, their machines, had all faded. Apart from their own muted footsteps and a faint whisper of motion from the trailing Gormen, the world was empty of sound.

  “Split,” whispered Hibsen harshly, and obediently the little dark man chose a street at random and disappeared into it. The Gormen split too, one after de Jouvenel, one trailing Hibsen.

  Hibsen rubbed his star sapphire angrily. The confounded things, if only they’d get rough, shout, show anger, act human. But they weren’t human, and perhaps they showed it most in the utter dispassionate coolness of their surveillance. They didn’t seem to care how far their charges led them. They didn’t object to what must obviously be an attempt to lose them.

  They only followed.

  “Then follow, damn you!” Hibsen whispered, and lengthened his stride.

  When Hibsen strolled, the Gorman strolled. When Hibsen moved faster, the Gorman, tied to an invisible, inelastic string, moved exactly as fast, stayed exactly as close.

  Hibsen, anger seething in him, began to run. The Gorman —no, not ran—but shuffled faster, as fast as Hibsen, an even five yards behind, no matter how Hibsen forced his wearying legs and struggled for every burning breath. He broke into a dead gallop and kept it up for two hundred yards—and the Gorman stayed that same five yards behind.