All Flesh Is Grass and Other Stories

by Clifford D. Simak

  A thousand years. And if Caroline Martin had left this diploma here a thousand years ago, where was Caroline Martin now? What had happened to her? Dead in what strange corner of the solar system? Dead in this very ship?

  He swung about and strode toward the door that led into the living quarters. His hand reached out and seized the door and pushed it open. He took one step across the threshold and then he stopped, halted in his stride.

  In the center of the room was the oblong box that he had seen from the port. But instead of a box, it was a tank, bolted securely to the floor by heavy steel brackets.

  The tank was filled with a greenish fluid and in the fluid lay a woman, a woman dressed in metallic robes that sparkled in the light from the single radium bulb in the ceiling just above the tank.

  Breathlessly, Gary moved closer, peered over the edge of the tank, down through the clear green liquid into the face of the woman. Her eyes were closed and long, curling black lashes lay against the whiteness of her cheeks. Her forehead was high and long braids of raven hair were bound about her head. Slim black eyebrows arched to almost meet above the delicately modeled nose. Her mouth was a thought too large, a trace of the patrician in the thin, red lips. Her arms were laid straight along her sides and the metallic gown swept in flowing curves from chin to ankles.

  Beside her right hand, lying in the bottom of the tank, was a hypodermic syringe, bright and shining despite the green fluid which covered it.

  Gary's breath caught in his throat.

  She looked alive and yet she couldn't be alive. Still there was a flush of youth and beauty in her cheeks, as if she merely slept.

  Laid out as if for death and still with the lie to death in her very look. Her face was calm, serene… and something else. Expectancy, perhaps. As if she only waited for a thing she hoped to happen.

  Caroline Martin was the name on the diploma out in the laboratory. Could this be Caroline Martin? Could this be the girl who had graduated from the college of science at Alkatoon ten centuries ago?

  Gary shook his head uneasily.

  He stepped back from the tank and as he did he saw the copper plate affixed to its metal side. He stooped to read.

  Another simple message, etched in copper… a message from the girl who lay inside the tank.

  I am not dead. I am in suspended animation. Drain the tank by opening the valve. Use the syringe you find in the medicine cabinet.

  Gary glanced across the room, saw a medicine chest on the wall above a washbowl. He looked back at the tank and mopped his brow with his coat sleeve.

  "It isn't possible," he whispered.

  Like a man in a dream, he stumbled to the medicine chest. The syringe was there. He broke it and saw that it was loaded with a cartridge filled with a reddish substance. A drug, undoubtedly, to overcome suspended animation.

  Replacing the syringe, he went back to the tank and found the valve. It was stubborn with the years, defying all the strength in his arms. He kicked it with a heavy boot and jarred it loose. With nervous hands he opened it and watched the level of the green fluid slowly recede.

  Watching, an odd calm came upon him, a steadying calm that made him hard and machine-like to do the thing that faced him. One little slip might spoil it. One fumbling move might undo the work of a thousand years. What if the drug in the hypodermic had lost its strength? There were so many things that might happen.

  But there was only one thing to do. He raised a hand in front of him and looked at it. It was a steady hand.

  He wasted no time in wondering what it was about. This was not the time for that. Frantic questionings clutched at his thoughts and he shook them off. Time enough to wonder and to speculate and question when this thing was done.

  When the fluid was level with the girl's body, he waited no longer. He leaned over the rim of the tank and lifted her in his arms. For a moment he hesitated, then turned and went to the laboratory and placed her on one of the work tables. The fluid, dripping off the rustling metallic dress, left a trail of wet across the floor.

  From the medicine chest he took the hypodermic and went back to the girl. He lifted her left arm and peered closely at it. There were little punctures, betraying previous use of the needle.

  Perspiration stood out on his forehead. If only he knew a little more about this. If only he had some idea of what he was supposed to do.

  Awkwardly he shoved the needle into a vein, depressed the plunger. It was done and he stepped back.

  Nothing happened. He waited.

  Minutes passed and she took a shallow breath. He watched in fascination, saw her come to life again… saw the breath deepen, the eyelids flicker, the right hand twitch.

  Then she was looking at him out of deep blue eyes.

  "You are all right?" he asked.

  It was, he knew, a rather foolish question.

  Her speech was broken. Her tongue and lips refused to work the way they should, but he understood what she tried to say.

  "Yes, I'm all right." She lay quietly on the table. "What year is this?" she asked.

  "It's 6948," he told her.

  Her eyes widened and she looked at him with a startled glance. "Almost a thousand years," she said. "You are sure of the year?"

  He nodded. "That is about the only thing that I am really sure of."

  "How is that?"

  "Why, finding you here," said Gary, "and reviving you again. I still don't believe it happened."

  She laughed, a funny, discordant laugh because her muscles, inactive for years, had forgotten how to function rightly.

  "You are Caroline Martin, aren't you?" asked Gary.

  She gave him a quick look of surprise and rose to a sitting position.

  "I am Caroline Martin," she answered. "But how did you know that?"

  Gary gestured at the diploma. "I read it."

  "Oh," she said. "I'd forgotten all about it."

  "I am Gary Nelson," he told her. "Newsman on the loose. My pal's out there in a spaceship waiting for us."

  "I suppose," she said, "that I should thank you, but I don't know how. Just ordinary thanks aren't quite enough."

  "Skip it," said Gary, tersely.

  She stretched her arms above her head.

  "It's good to be alive again," she said. "Good to know there's life ahead of you."

  "But," said Gary, "you always were alive. It must have been just like going to sleep."

  "It wasn't sleep," she said. "It was worse than death. Because, you see, I made one mistake."

  "One mistake?"

  "Yes, just one mistake. One you'd never think of. At least, I didn't. You see, when animation was suspended every physical process was reduced to almost zero, metabolism slowed down to almost nothing. But with one exception. My brain kept right on working."

  The horror of it sank into Gary slowly. "You mean you knew?"

  She nodded. "I couldn't hear or see or feel. I had no bodily sensation. But I could think. I've thought for almost ten centuries. I tried to stop thinking, but I never could.

  I prayed something would go wrong and I would die. Anything at all to end that eternity of thought."

  She saw the pity in his eyes.

  "Don't waste sympathy on me," she said and there was a note of hardness in her voice. "I brought it on myself. Stubbornness, perhaps. I played a long shot. I took a gamble."

  He chuckled in his throat. "And won."

  "A billion to one shot," she said. "Probably greater odds than that. It was madness itself to do it. This shell is a tiny speck in space. There wasn't, I don't suppose, a billion-to-one chance, if you figured it out on paper, that anyone would find me. I had some hope. Hope that would have reduced those odds somewhat. I placed my faith on someone and I guess they failed me. Perhaps it wasn't their fault. Maybe they died before they could even hunt for me."

  "But how did you do it?" asked Gary. "Even today suspended animation has our scientists stumped. They've made some progress but not much. And you made it work a thousand years
ago."

  "Drugs," she said. "Certain Martian drugs. Rare ones. And they have to be combined correctly. Slow metabolism to a point where it is almost non-existent. But you have to be careful. Slow it down too far and metabolism stops. That's death."

  Gary gestured toward the hypodermic. "And that," be said, "reacts against the other drug."

  She nodded gravely.

  "The fluid in the tank," he said. "That was to prevent dehydration and held some food value? You wouldn't need much food with metabolism at nearly zero. But how about your mouth and nostrils? The fluid…"

  "A mask," she said. "Chemical paste that held up under moisture. Evaporated as soon as it was struck by air."

  "You thought of everything."

  "I had to," she declared. "There was no one else to do my thinking for me."

  She slid off the table and walked slowly toward him.

  "You told me a minute ago," she said, "that the scientists of today haven't satisfactorily solved suspended animation."

  He nodded.

  "You mean to say they still don't know about these drugs?"

  "There are some of them," he said, "who'd give their good right arm to know about them."

  "We knew about them a thousand years ago," the girl said. "Myself and one other. I wonder…"

  She whirled on Gary. "Let's get out of here," she cried. "I have a horror of this place."

  "Anything you want to take?" he asked. "Anything I can get together for you?"

  She made an impatient gesture.

  "No," she said. "I want to forget this place."

  CHAPTER Three

  The Space Pup arrowed steadily toward Pluto. From the engine room came the subdued hum of the geosectors. The vision plate looked out on ebon space with its far-flung way posts of tiny, steely stars. The needle was climbing up near the thousand-miles-a-second mark.

  Caroline Martin leaned forward in her chair and stared out at the vastness that stretched eternally ahead. "I could stay and watch forever," she exulted.

  Gary, lounging back in the pilot's seat, said quietly:

  "I've been thinking about that name of yours. It seems to me I've heard it somewhere. Read it in a book."

  She glanced at him swiftly and then stared out into space.

  "Perhaps you have," she said finally.

  There was a silence, unbroken except by the humming of the geosectors.

  The girl turned back to Gary, chin cupped in her hands. "Probably you have read about me;" she said. "Perhaps the name of Caroline Martin is mentioned in your histories. You see, I was a member of the old Mars-Earth Research commission during the war with Jupiter. I was so proud of the appointment. Just four years out of school and I was trying so hard to get a good job in some scientific research work. I wanted to earn money to go back to school again."

  "I'm beginning to remember now," said Gary, "but there must be something wrong. The histories say you were a traitor. They say you were condemned to death."

  "I was a traitor," she said and there was a thread of ancient bitterness in the words she spoke. "I refused to turn over a discovery I made, a discovery that would have won the war. It also would have wrecked the solar system. I told them so, but they were men at war. They were desperate men. We were losing then."

  "We never did win, really," Gary told her.

  "They condemned me to space," she said. "They put me in that shell you found me in and a war cruiser towed it out to Pluto's orbit and cut it loose. It was an old condemned craft, its machinery outmoded. They ripped out the rockets and turned it into a prison for me."

  She made a gesture of silence at the shocked look on their faces.

  "The histories don't tell that part of it," said Herb.

  "They probably suppressed it," she said. "Men at war will do things that no sane man will do. They would not admit in peace the atrocities that they committed in the time of battle. They put the laboratory in the control room as a final ironic jest. So I could carry out my research, they said. Research, they told me, I'd not need to turn over to them."

  "Would your discovery have wrecked the system?"

  Gary asked.

  "Yes," she said, "it would have. That's why I refused to give it to the military board. For that they called me traitor. I think they hoped to break me. I think they thought up to the very last that, faced with exile in space, I would finally crack and give it to them."

  "When you didn't," Herb said, "they couldn't back down. They couldn't afford to let you call their bluff."

  "They never found your notes," said Gary.

  She tapped her forehead with a slender finger. "My notes were here," she said.

  He looked amazed.

  "And still are," she said.

  "But how did you get the drugs to carry out your suspended animation?" Gary asked.

  She waited for long minutes.

  "That's the part I hate to think about," she said. "The part that's hard to think about. I worked with a young man. About my age, then. He must be dead these many years."

  She stopped and Gary could see that she was trying to marshal in her mind what next to say.

  "We were in love," she said. "Together we discovered the suspended animation process. We had worked on it secretly for months and were ready to announce it when I was taken before the military tribunal. They never let me see him after that. I was allowed no visitors.

  "Out in space, after the war cruiser left, I almost went insane. I invented all sorts of tasks to do. I arranged and rearranged my chemicals and apparatus and then one day I found the drugs, skillfully hidden in a box of chemicals. Only one person in the world besides myself knew about them. I found the drugs and two hypodermic syringes."

  Gary's pipe had gone out and now he relit it. The girl went on.

  "I knew it would be a gamble," she said. "I knew he intended that I should take that gamble. Maybe he had a wild scheme of coming out and hunting for me. Maybe something happened and he couldn't come. Maybe he tried and failed. Maybe the war… got him. But he had given me a chance, a desperate chance to beat the fate the military court had set for me. I removed the steel partition in the engine room to make the tank. That took many weeks. I etched the copper plate. I went outside on the shell and etched the lines beside the lock. I'm afraid that wasn't a very good job."

  "And then," said Herb, "you put yourself to sleep."

  "Not exactly sleep," she said. "Because my brain still worked. I thought and thought for almost a thousand years. My mind set up problems and worked them out. I developed a flair for pure deduction, since my mind was the only thing left for me to work with. I believe I even developed telepathic powers."

  "You mean," asked Herb, "that you can read our thoughts?"

  She nodded, then hastened on. "But I wouldn't," she said. "I wouldn't do that to my friends. I knew when Gary first came to the shell. I read the wonder and amazement in his thoughts. I was so afraid he'd go away and leave me alone again. I tried to talk to him with my thoughts, but he was so upset that he couldn't understand."

  Gary shook his head. "Anyone would have been upset," he said.

  "But," exploded Herb, "think of the chances that you took. It was just pure luck we found you. Your drug wouldn't have held up forever. Another few thousand years, perhaps, but scarcely longer than that. Then there would be the chance that the atmosphere generators might have failed. Or that a big meteor, or even a small one, for that matter, might have come along. There were a thousand things that could have happened."

  She agreed with him. "It was a long chance. I knew it was. But there was no other way. I could have just sat still and done nothing or gone crazy, grown old and died in loneliness."

  She was silent for a moment.

  "It would have been easy," she said then, "if I hadn't made that one mistake."

  "Weren't you frightened?" Gary asked.

  Her eyes widened slightly and she nodded.

  "I heard voices," she said. "Voices coming out of space, out of the void that
lies between the galaxies. Things talking over many light-years with one another. Things to which the human race, intellectually, would appear mere insects. At first I was frightened, frightened at the things they said, at the horrible hints I sensed in the things I couldn't understand. Then, growing desperate, I tried to talk back to them, tried to attract their attention. I wasn't afraid of them any more and I thought that they might help. I didn't care much what happened any more just so someone, or something, would help me. Even take notice of me. Anything to let me know that I wasn't all alone."

  Gary lit his pipe again and silence fell for just a space. "Voices," said Herb.

  They all stared out at that darkness that hemmed them in. Gary felt the hairs bristle at the nape of his neck. Some cold wind from far away had brushed against his face, an unnamable terror out of the cosmos reaching out for him, searching for him with dirty-taloned thoughts. Things that hurled pure thought across the deserts of emptiness that lay between the galaxies.

  "Tell me," said Caroline, and her voice, too, seemed to come from far away, "how did the war come out?"

  "The war?" asked Gary. Then he understood.

  "Oh, the war," he said. "Why, Earth and Mars finally won out. Or so the histories claim. There was a battle out near Ganymede and both fleets limped home badly beaten up. The Jovians went back to Jupiter, the Earth-Mars fleet pulled into Sandebar on Mars. For months the two inner planets built up their fleets and strengthened home defenses. But the Jovians never came out again and our fleets didn't dare carry the war to the enemy. Even today we haven't developed a ship that dares go into Jupiter's atmosphere. Our geosectors might take us there and bring us back, but you can't use them near a planetary body. They work on the principle of warping space…"

  "Warping space?" asked the girl, suddenly sitting upright.

  "Sure," said Gary. "Anything peculiar about it?" "No," she said, "I don't suppose there is."

  Then: "I wouldn't exactly call that a victory."

  "That's what the histories call it." Gary shrugged. "They claim we run the Jovians to cover and they've been afraid to come out ever since. Earth and Mars have taken over Jupiter's moons and colonized them, but to this day no one has sighted a Jovian or a Jovian ship. Not since that day back in 5980.