The Abominal Earthman (1963) SSC

by Frederik Pohl

  The pilot looked at him, licked his lips, sat in the webwork chair. The straps and spring metal fitted themselves easily around his lean body; they were planned for a Gorman, but they would have fitted a skeleton as easily, for they were designed to fit whatever they were given to hold.

  “Rae, you and de Jouvenel lie down. Anywhere. These ships have plenty of power, according to Jaroff, so we won’t have to pile on too much G at first—but it won’t be comfortable.”

  He stretched himself on the bare floor near Hibsen and glanced around. The remote rasp, raspwas louder, but that menace would be at an end in a second.

  “Hibsen,” said Brabant conversationally, “you know how to operate this ship. All right, take it off.”

  With a tranced expression, Hibsen put his fingers into the Gorman controls.

  He glanced at Brabant for reassurance, sighed, licked his lips again, closed his eyes—

  Gently, his fingers moved in the rings.

  Red roaring flame leaped out below them.

  Brabant found himself letting go, slumping, his rigid self-control no longer needed. It was all up to Hibsen now. If the thing worked, fine. If not, they were all dead. There were no other alternatives.

  The ship shook. It leaped a fraction of an inch and settled, leaped again, hesitated, and at last stood free of the soil of Aleph Four.

  Faintly, over the roar of the power plant, Brabant could hear Hibsen sobbing. Brabant glanced at him. Hibsen’s face was the face of a man in mortal terror; his mouth twisted and his eyes blinked with a rapid tic.

  But he was flying the ship.

  It did not crash. It hardly faltered. Every faint motion was translated instantly into a quick, gentle and sure manipulation of the rings. Hibsen’s eyes, open now, were fixed absently on the altitude jet of mercury, but it was his body as much as his eyes that told him what he needed to know; the forces that might tug the ship off its center of gravity tugged also at the tiny otoliths in his ear and he felt a change of altitude as soon as it happened, before it mattered. There was no loss of control, not even for a fraction of a second. The ship gained all its ponderous power and began to climb.

  (Down below, thirty Gormen lay dead and a score more dying. It no longer mattered—their ship was gone; whatever might happen, that ship had got away.)

  Grinding heels of acceleration crushed Brabant and all of them.

  Even so, Hibsen’s control did not waver. The others sat or lay while the floor and the webwork chairs heaved against them, but Hibsen kept the ship secure—up—up and out, up and out—

  In three minutes, they were clear of the atmosphere. The great primary burned at them. Stars flamed in a black sky. There were no more clouds and no more air. And Hibsen, shaking himself like a man coming out of a dream, cut the power by withdrawing his fingers from the rings.

  “We—did it,” he whispered, staring at his hands. “Brabant. How?”

  Brabant moved from the floor and floated free. All the weight was gone from him—not merely the hundred and seventy pounds of his flesh and bone, but the greater weight that had been on his mind. He was free! Almost, like Hibsen, he sang.

  Instead, he said: “Take a look below, de Jouvenel. See how the others made out.”

  The little dark man, looking horribly confused, propelled himself to the rounded spikes and down. Hibsen and the girl were looking at Brabant and their eyes were large with questions, but just at this moment Brabant couldn’t answer questions. He didn’t trust his voice.

  All the weeks of painfully demonstrating the simple truths of psychology before the impassive Gormen, and the carefully planned conditioning that underlay those weeks as a secret message lies under a printed page—they had paid off. What the subconscious mind could always do—act! without delay! —he had made them do then. The days in the Gorman building, the scant hours he had had for the finishing touches, yesterday, in the Gorman ship—these had been enough. They were free.

  He tried to tell them.

  “But,” said Hibsen, “but…” And he paused. He said fretfully: “But you betrayed us!”

  “No,” said Brabant, “I only kept you out of trouble. You didn’t have a chance with your plans of catching the Gormen off guard and I couldn’t afford to let you fail. One failure was too many and—”

  “But you could have told me, Howard,” the girl objected, hurt.

  Brabant looked at her. “I’m sorry,” he said after a moment.

  “Oh, no! You don’t have to apologize! But—we wronged you. I more than anyone else, I suppose, because I should have known.”

  Brabant said: “I couldn’t tell you. That building was bugged; there was no word that any of you said, ever, that they didn’t hear. But even if they hadn’t, how could I risk getting you overconfident? My plan wasn’t that sure of working, believe me.”

  De Jouvenel floated up out of the hatch, asprawl, catching at a spike and missing. “They’re all right, Brabant,” he said, upside down.

  “Then let’s get out of here! I want to get back to Explorer II right away—before anything goes wrong.”

  De Jouvenel said patiently: “But we don’t have its coordinates.”

  “You do,” said Brabant. “You’re the navigator. You put it in orbit.”

  “But—good Lord, Brabant! I can’t remember—” “Trance state, please. Now.”

  The little man tensed slightly. No glassy look to his eyes, no melodramatic flopping to the floor—nor would there have been even if they had not been in free-fall.

  De Jouvenel frowned. He caught absently at a corner of Hibsen’s webwork seat as he floated past and moored himself. He was thinking.

  The question had been asked: What were the coordinates of Explorer II’s present position? To answer it involved knowing its exact speed and distance from the primary at the time of entering free-fall, the perturbations of Aleph and its satellites, the smaller, more remote perturbations of every other astronomical body within a certain mass-over-distance parameter. It was not a question that de Jouvenel could answer. Certainly not.

  But the mind that slept under the skin of de Jouvenel woke to answer for him, the mind that received all and forgot nothing, the sleeping subconscious mind that is in every human. That mind remembered every digit of every number it had conceived—it counted pulse-beats when it had to, measured the intervals between sunset and sunset, though its owner took no notice.

  It was, in a word, a computer.

  De Jouvenel writhed and strained, and—abruptly—spouted a string of course coordinates. It was an amazing experience for him. He found his own mouth, in his own voice, answering Brabant’s question. It was the queerest of all sensations for him; it was like nothing that had ever happened to him before. The numbers meant nothing to him. He would have sworn, and believed it to be true, that he had forgotten every datum and that the numbers were random, wrong.

  But something inside him had never forgotten, and the numbers were not wrong. With Hibsen’s help, they became a course and gently, surely, the captured rocket swung into orbit after the mother ship.

  Less than two hours later, they were decelerating gently, and the long swinging bolo that wasExplorer II’s tractor and trailer lay waiting in the emptiness before them.

  Brabant clung to Rae, soft and silent next to him, and his thoughts were all triumph. The questions that had yet to be answered were beyond counting. What were the Gormen doing on Aleph Four? Was it rockets alone that carried them on interstellar flight? What were their objectives in attacking the human race? Was peace possible, or an armed truce?

  But all those questions had an answer, somewhere, sometime, and by their bringing to Earth a Gorman ship, armed with Gorman arms, surely someone would be able to deduce the answers they needed. It was only a matter of going now. Give them a chance to build up speed, and no vessel, Gorman or other, could catch them, and they had that chance. The little Gorman craft on Aleph Four could do them no harm, and Bes was too far away.

  Rae Wensley stirred co
ntentedly in his arm, then straightened. “Howard, what are they doing?”

  She was looking at Explorer II. Before their eyes, the long kinked tow line began to straighten; a thin violet haze was spraying back from the tractor.

  “Why—” Brabant laughed. “They’re trying to get away!”

  They could see the periscopes on their side of the trailer, fixed rigidly on the Gorman rocket. Almost they could see Captain Serrell’s anxious face as he watched this strange craft floating in on him.

  Brabant said with a gentle grin: “Hibsen, better stick your ugly mug out that port and wave to him. Put yourself in the captain’s place—he waits and waits, and when somebody finally shows up, it’s a Gorman ship. He’s going to need some reassurance!”

  THREE PORTRAITS AND A PRAYER

  Howard Chandler Christy:

  The Lovely Young Girl

  • • •

  When Dr. Rhine Cooperstock was put under my care I was enlarged with pride. Dr. Cooperstock was a hero to me. I don't mean a George Washington, all virtue and no fire. I mean he was a dragon killer. He had carried human knowledge far into the tiny spaces of an atomic nucleus. He was a very great man. And I was his doctor and he was dying.

  Dr. Cooperstock was dying in the finest suite in the Morgan Pavilion and with all the best doctors. (I am not modest.) We couldn't keep him alive for more than a matter of months, and we couldn't cure him at all. But we could make him comfortable. If round-the-clock nurses and color television constitute comfort.

  I don't ask you to understand technical medical terms. He was an old man, his blood vessels deteriorating, and clots formed, impeding the circulation. One day a clot would form in heart, brain or lungs and he would die. If it was in the lung it would be painful and slow. In the heart, painful and fast. In the brain most painful of all, but so fast that it would be a mercy.

  Meanwhile we fed him heparin and sometimes coumarol and attempted by massages and heat and diet to stave off the end. Although, in fact, he was all but dead anyway, so little freedom of movement we allowed him.

  "Martin, the leg hurts. You'd better leave a pill," he would say to me once or twice a week, and I would hesitate. "I don't know if I can make it to the bathroom tonight, Martin," he would say, his tone cheerfully resigned. Then he would call for the bedpan while I was there, or mention casually that some invisible wrinkle in the sheet caused him pain and stand by bravely while the bed was remade, and say at last, self-deprecating, "I think I will need that pill, Martin." So I would allow myself to be persuaded and let him have a red-and-white capsule and in the morning it would be gone. I never told him that they contained only aspirin and he never admitted to me that he did not take the pills at all but was laboriously building up a hoard against the day when the pain would be really serious and he would take them all at once.

  Dr. Cooperstock knew the lethal dose as well as I did. As he knew the names of all his veins and arteries and the chemistry of his disease. A man like Rhine Cooperstock, even at seventy, can learn enough medicine for that in a week.

  He acquired eleven of the little capsules in one month at the Pavilion; I know, because I counted them after he left. That would have been enough for suicide, if they had not been aspirin. I suppose he would have stopped there, perhaps beginning to take a few, now and then, both to keep me from getting suspicious and for the relief of the real pain he must have felt. But he did leave. Nan Halloran came and got him.

  She invaded the Pavilion like a queen. Expensive, celebrated hospital, we were used to the famous; but this was Nan Halloran, blue-eyed, black-haired, a face like a lovely child and a voice like the sway of hips. She was a most remarkable woman. I called her a queen, but she was not that; she was a goddess, virgin and fertile. I speak subjectively, of course, for in medical fact she was surely not one and may not have been either. She breezed into the room, wrinkling her nose. "Coopie," she said, "what is that awful smell? Will you do me a favor, dear? I need it very much."

  You would not think that a man like Dr. Cooperstock would have much to do with a television star; but he knew her; years before, when he was still teaching sometimes, she had somehow wandered into his class. "Hello, Nan," he said, looking quite astonished and pleased. "I'll do anything I can for you, of course. That smell," he apologized, touching the leg with its bright spots of color and degenerated tissues, "is me."

  "Poor Coopie." She looked around at me and smiled. Although I am fat and not attractive and know in my heart that, whatever long-term wonders I may work with the brilliance of my mind and the cleverness of my speech, no woman will ever lust for me on sight, I tingled. I looked away. She said sweetly, "It's about that fusion power thing, Coopie. You know Wayne Donner, of course? He and I are good friends. He has these utility company interests, and he wants to convert them to fusion power, and I told him you were the only man who could help him."

  Dr. Cooperstock began to laugh, and laughed until he was choking and gagging. I laughed too, although I think that in all the world Dr. Cooperstock and I must be two of the very few men who would laugh at the name of Wayne Donner. "Nan," he said when he could, "you're amazing. It's utterly impossible, I'm afraid."

  She sat on the edge of his bed with a rustle of petticoats. She had lovely legs. "Oh, did that hurt you? But I didn't even touch your leg, dear. Would you please get up and come now, because the driver's waiting?"

  "Nan!" he cried. "Security regulations. Death. Lack of proper engineering! Did you ever think of any of those things? And they're only a beginning."

  "If you're going to make objections we'll be here all day, darling. As far as security is concerned," she said, "this is for the peaceful use of atomic power, isn't it? I promise you that Wayne has enough friends in the Senate that there will be no problem. And the engineering's all right, because Wayne has all those people already, of course. This isn't any little Manhattan Project, honey. Wayne spends money."

  Dr. Cooperstock shook his head and, although he was smiling, he was interested, too. "What about death, Nan?" he said gently.

  "Oh, I know, Coopie. It's terrible. But you can't lick this thing. So won't you do it for me? Wayne only needs you for a few weeks and he already talked to some doctors. They said it would be all right."

  "Miss Halloran," I said. I admit I was furious. "Dr. Cooperstock is my patient. As long as that is so, I will decide what is or is not all right."

  She looked at me again, sweetly and attentively.

  I have now and had then no doubt at all; I was absolutely right in my position. Yet I felt as though I had committed the act of a clumsy fool. She was clean and lovely, her neck so slim that the dress she wore seemed too large for her, like an adorable child's. She was no child; I knew that she had had a hundred lovers because everyone knows that, even doctors who are fat and a little ugly and take it all out in intelligence. Yet she possessed an innocence I could not withstand. I wanted to take her sweetly by the hand and shelter her, and walk with her beside a brook and then that night crush her and caress her again and again with such violence and snorting passion that she would Awaken and then, with growing abandon, respond. I did know it was all foolishness, I did. But when she mentioned the names five or six doctors on Donner's payroll who would care for Dr. Cooperstock and suggested like a child that with them in charge it would really be all right, I agreed. I even apologized. Truth to tell, they were excellent men, those doctors. But if she had named six chiropractors and an unfrocked abortionist I still would have shrugged and shuffled and stammered, "Oh, well, I suppose, Miss Halloran, yes, it will be all right."

  So we called the nurses in and very carefully dressed the old man and wheeled him out into the hall. I said something else that was foolish in the elevator. I said, because I had assumed that it was so, that she probably had a cab waiting and a cab would not do to transport a man as sick as Dr. Cooperstock. But she had been more sure of herself than that. The driver who was waiting was at the wheel of a private ambulance.

  A TIME cover,


  attributed to Artzybasheff,

  with mosaic of dollar signs.

  I did not again hear of Dr. Cooperstock for five weeks. Then I was telephoned to come and get him, for he was ready to return to the Pavilion to die. It was Wayne Donner himself who called me.

  I agreed to come to one of Donner's New York offices to meet him, for in truth I was curious. I knew all about him, of course—rather, I knew as much as he wished anyone to know. I have seen enough of the world's household names in the Pavilion to know what their public-relations men can do. The facts that were on record about Wayne Donner were that he was very rich. He had gone from a lucky strike in oil and the twenty-seven and a half per cent depletion allowance to aluminum. And thence to electric power. He was almost the wealthiest man in the world, and I know his secret.

  He could afford anything, anything at all, because he had schooled himself to purchase only bargains. For example, I knew that he was Nan Halloran's lover and, although I do not know her price, I know that it was what he was willing to pay. Otherwise he would have given her that thin, bright smile that meant the parley was over, there would be no contract signed that day, and gone on to another incredible beauty more modest in her bargaining. Donner allowed himself to want only what he could get. I think he was the only terrible man I have ever seen. And he had nearly been President of the United States! Except that Governor Hewlett of Ohio spoke so honestly and so truthfully about him in the primaries that not all of Donner's newspapers could get him the vote; what was terrible was not that he then destroyed Hewlett, but that Hewlett was not destroyed for revenge. Donner hated too deeply to be satisfied with revenge, I think; he was too contemptuous of his enemies to trouble to crush them. He would not give them that satisfaction. Hewlett was blotted out only incidentally. Because Donner's papers had built the campaign against him to such a pitch that it was actually selling papers, and thus it was profitable to go on to ruin the man. When I saw Donner he had Hewlett's picture framed in gilt in his waiting room. I wondered how many of his visitors understood the message. For that matter I wondered how many needed it.