"But yesterday you said fissure was your method."
"Yes. The spores lodge against our bodies and there is a—" Again the voice died.
"A fertilization?" suggested the girl.
"No."
"Well, a—I know! An irritation!" "Yes."
"That causes a tumorous growth?"
"Yes. When the growth is complete, we split."
"Ugh!" snorted Ham. "A tumor!"
"Shut up!" snapped the girl. "That's all a baby is—a normal tumor."
"A normal—well, I'm glad I'm not a biologist! Or a
woman!"
"So'm I," said Pat demurely. "Oscar, how much do you
know?"
"Everything."
"Do you know where my people come from?" "From beyond the light." "Yes, but before that?" "No."
"We come from another planet," said the girl impressively. At Oscar's silence she said, "Do you know what a planet is?"
"Yes."
"But did you know before I said the word?" "Yes. Long before."
"But how? Do you know what machinery is? Do you know what weapons are? Do you know how to make them?" "Yes."
"Then—why don't you?" "There is no need."
"No need!" she gasped. "With light—even with fire—you could keep the trioptes away. You could keep them from eating youl"
"There is no need."
She turned helplessly to Ham.
"The thing's lying," he suggested.
"I don't think so," she murmured. "It's something else-something we don't understand. Oscar, how do you know all those things?"
"Intelligence."
At the next cave another pod popped sullenly. "But how? Tell me how you discover facts." "From any fact," clicked the creature on the ice, "intelligence can build a picture of the—" There was silence. "Universe?" she suggested.
"Yes. The universe. I start with one fact and I reason from it. I build a picture of the universe. I start with another fact. I reason from it. I find that the universe I picture is the same as the first. I know that the picture is true."
Both listeners stared in awe at the creature. "Say!" gulped Ham. "If that's true, we could find out anything from Oscar! Oscar, can you tell us secrets that we don't know?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"You must first have the words to give me. I cannot tell you that for which you have no words."
"It's true!" whispered Pat. "But, Oscar, I have the words time and space and energy and matter and law and cause. Tell me the ultimate law of the universe?"
"It is the law of—" Silence.
"Conservation of energy or matter? Gravitation?"
"No."
"Of-of God?"
"No." "Of-life?"
"No. Life is of no importance." "Of—what? I can't think of another word." "There's a chance," said Ham tensely, "that there is no word!"
"Yes," clicked Oscar. "It is the law of chance. Those other words are different sides of the law of chance."
"Good Heavenl" breathed Pat. "Oscar, do you know what I mean by stars, suns, constellations, planets, nebulae, and atoms, protons, and electrons?"
"Yes."
"But—how? Have you ever seen the stars that are above these eternal clouds? Or the Sun there beyond the barrier?"
"No. Reason is enough, because there is only one possible way in which the universe could exist. Only what is possible •is real; what is not real is also not possible."
"That—that seems to mean something," murmured Pat. "I don't see exacdy what. But, Oscar, why don't you use your knowledge to protect yourselves from your enemies?"
"There is no need. There is no need to do anything. In a hundred years we shall be—" Silence.
"Safe?"
"Yes-no."
"What?" A horrible thought struck her. "Do you mean-extinct?" "Yes."
"But—oh, Oscar! Don't you want to live? Don't your people want to survive?"
"Want," shrilled Oscar. "Want—want—want. That word means nothing."
"It means—it means desire, need."
"Desire means nothing. Need? No. My people do not need to survive."
"Oh," said Pat faintly. "Then why do you reproduce?"
As if in answer, a bursting pod sent its pungent dust over them. "Because we must," clicked Oscar. "When the spores strike us, we must."
"I see," murmured Pat slowly. "Ham, I think I've got it. I think I understand. Let's get back to the ship."
Without farewell she turned away and he followed her thoughtfully. A strange listlessness oppressed him.
They had one slight mishap. A stone flung by some stray trioptes sheltered behind the ridge shattered the left lamp in Pat's helmet. It seemed hardly to disturb the girl; she glanced briefly aside and plodded on. But all the way back, in the gloom to their left now illumined only by his own lamp, hoots and shrieks and mocking laughter pursued them.
Within the rocket Pat swung her specimen bag wearily to the table and sat down without removing her heavy outer garment. Nor did Ham; despite the oppressive warmth of it, he, too, dropped listlessly to a seat on the bunk.
"I'm tired," said the girl, "but not too tired to realize what that mystery out there means."
"Then let's hear it."
"Ham," she said, "what's the big difference between plant and animal life?"
"Why—plants derive their sustenance directly from soil and air. Animals need plants or other animals as food."
"That isn't entirely true, Ham. Some plants are parasitic, and prey on other life. Think of the Hotlands, or think, even, of some terrestrial plants—the fungi, the pitcher plant, the Dionaea that trap flies."
"Well, animals move, then, and plants don't."
"That's not true, either. Look at microbes; they're plants, but they swim about in search of food."
"Then what is the difference?"
"Sometimes it's hard to say," she murmured, "but I think I see it now. It's this: Animals have desire and plants necessity. Do you understand?"
"Not a damn bit."
"Listen, then. A plant—even a moving one—acts the way it does because it must, because it's made so. An animal acts because it wants to, or because it's made so that it wants to."
"What's the difference?"
"There is a difference. An animal has will, a plant hasn't. Do you see now? Oscar has all the magnificent intelligence of a god, but he hasn't the will of a worm. He has reactions, but no desire. When the wind is warm he comes out and feeds; when it's cold he crawls back into the cave melted by his body heat, but that isn't will, it's just a reaction. He has no desires!"
Ham stared, roused out of his lassitude. I'll be damned if it isn't true!" he cried. "That's why he—or they—never ask questions. It takes desire or will to ask a question! And that's why they have no civilization and never will have!"
"That and other reasons," said Pat. "Think of this: Oscar has no sex, and, in spite of your Yankee pride, sex has been a big factor in building civilization. It's the basis of the family, and among Oscar's people there is no such thing as parent and child. He splits; each half of him is an adult, probably with all the knowledge and memory of the original.
"There's no need for love, no place for it, in fact, and therefore no call to fight for mate and family, and no reason to make life easier than it already is, and no cause to apply his intelligence to develop art or science or—or anything!" She paused. "And did you ever hear of the Malthusian law, Ham?"
"Not that I remember."
"Well, the law of Malthus says that population presses on the food supply. Increase the food and the population increases in proportion. Man evolved under that law; for a century or so it's been suspended, but our race grew to be human under it."
"Suspended! It sounds sort of like repealing the law of gravitation or amending the law of inverse squares."
"No, no," she said. "It was suspended by the development of machinery in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which shot the food supply so far ahead that population hasn
't caught up. But it will, and the Malthusian law will rule again."
"And what's that got to do with Oscar?"
"This, Ham. He never evolved under that law. Other factors kept his numbers below the limit of the food supply, and so his species developed free of the need to struggle for food. He's so perfecdy adapted to his environment that he needs nothing more. To him a civilization would be superfluous!"
"But—then what of the trioptes?"
"Yes, the trioptes. You see, Ham, just as I argued days ago, the trioptes are newcomers, pushed over from the twilight zone. When those devils arrived, Oscar's people were already evolved, and they couldn't change to meet the new conditions, or couldn't change quickly enough. So—they're doomed.
"As Oscar says, they'll be extinct soon—and—and they don't even care." She shuddered. "All they do, all they can do, is sit before their caves and think. Probably they think godlike thoughts, but they can't summon even a mouse-like will. That's what a vegetable intelligence is; that's what it has to be!"
"I think—I think you're right," he muttered. "In a way it's horrible, isn't it?"
"Yes." Despite her heavy garments she shivered. "Yes, it's horrible. Those vast, magnificent minds and no way for them to work. It's like a powerful gasoline motor with its drive shaft broken, and no matter how well it runs it can't turn the wheels. Ham, do you know what I'm going to name them? The Lotophagi Veneris—the Lotus Eatersl Content to sit and dream away existence while lesser minds—ours and the trioptes'—battle for their planet."
"It's a good name, Pat." As she rose he asked in surprise, "Your specimens? Aren't you going to prepare them?"
"Oh, tomorrow." She flung herself, parka and all, on her bunk.
"But they'll spoilt And your helmet light—I ought to fix it."
"Tomorrow," she repeated wearily, and his own langour kept him from further argument.
When the nauseous odor of decay awakened him some hours later, Pat was asleep, still garbed in the heavy suit. He flung bag and specimens from the door, and then slipped the parka from her body. She hardly stirred as he tucked her gendy into her bunk.
Pat never missed the specimen bag at all, and, somehow, the next day, if one could call that endless night a day, found them trudging over the bleak plateau with the girl's helmet lamp still unrepaired. Again at their left, the wildly mocking laughter of the night dwellers followed them, drifting eerily down on the Underwind, and twice far-flung stones chipped glittering ice from neighboring spires. They plodded listlessly and silently, as if in a sort of fascination, but their minds seemed strangely clear.
Pat addressed the first Lotus Eater they saw. "We're back, Oscar," she said with a faint rebirth of her usual flippancy. "How'd you spend the night?"
"I thought," clicked the thing.
"What'd you think about?"
"I thought about—" The voice ceased.
A pod popped, and the curiously pleasant pungent odor was in their nostrils.
"About—us?"
"No."
"About-the world?"
"No."
"About—what's the use?" she ended wearily. "We could keep that up forever, and perhaps never hit on the right question."
"If there is a right question," added Ham. "How do you know there are words to fit it? How do you even know that it's the kind of thought our minds are capable of conceiving? There must be thoughts that are beyond our grasp."
OS to their left a pod burst with a dull pop. Ham saw the dust move like a shadow across their beams as the Under-wind caught it, and he saw Pat draw a deep draft of the pungent air as it whirled around her. Queer how pleasant the smell was, especially since it was the same stuff which in higher concentration had nearly cost their lives. He felt vaguely worried as that thought struck him, but could assign no reason for worry.
He realized suddenly that both of them were standing in complete silence before the Lotus Eater. They had come to ask questions, hadn't they?
"Oscar," he said, "what's the meaning of life?"
"No meaning. There is no meaning."
"Then why fight for it so?"
"We do not fight for it. Life is unimportant."
"And when you're gone, the world goes on just the same? Is that it?"
"When we are gone it will make no difference to any except the trioptes who eat us." "Who eat you," echoed Ham.
There was something about that thought that did penetrate the fog of indifference that blanketed his mind. He peered at Pat, who stood passively and silently beside him, and in the glow of her helmet lamp he could see her clear gray eyes behind her goggles, staring straight ahead in what was apparently abstraction or deep thought. And beyond the ridge sounded suddenly the yells and wild laughter of the dwellers in the dark.
"Pat," he said.
There was no answer.
"Patl" he repeated, raising a listless hand to her arm. "We have to go back." To his right a pod popped. "We have to go back," he repeated.
A sudden shower of stones came glancing over the ridge. One struck his helmet, and his forward lamp burst with a dull explosion. Another struck his arm with a stinging pain, though it seemed surprisingly unimportant.
"We have to go back," he reiterated doggedly.
Pat spoke at last without moving. "What's the use?" she asked dully.
He frowned over that. What was the use? To go back to the twilight zone? A picture of Erotia rose in his mind, and then a vision of that honeymoon they had planned on the Earth, and then a whole series of terrestrial scenes—New York, a tree-girt campus, the sunny farm of his boyhood. But they all seemed very far away and unreal.
A violent blow that stung his shoulder recalled him, and he saw a stone bound from Pat's helmet. Only two of her lamps glowed now, the rear and the right, and he realized vaguely that on his own helmet shone only the rear and the left. Shadowy figures were skittering and gibbering along the crest of the ridge now left dark by the breaking of their lights, and stones were whizzing and spattering around them.
He made a supreme effort and seized her arm. "We've got to go back!" he muttered.
"Why? Why should we?"
"Because we'll be killed if we stay."
"Yes. I know that, but-"
He ceased to listen and jerked savagely at Pat's arm. She spun around and staggered after him as he turned doggedly toward the rocket.
Shrill hoots sounded as their rear lamps swept the ridge, and as he dragged the girl with infinite slowness, the shrieks spread out to the right and left. He knew what that meant; the demons were circling them to get in front of them where their shattered forward lamps cast no protecting light.
Pat followed listlessly, making no effort of her own. It was simply the drag of his arm that impelled her, and it was becoming an intolerable effort to move even himself. And there direcdy before him, flitting shadows that howled and hooted, were the devils that sought their lives.
Ham twisted his head so that his right lamp swept the area. Shrieks sounded as they found shelter in the shadows of peaks and ridges, but Ham, walking with his head sidewise, tripped and tumbled.
Pat wouldn't rise when he tugged at her. "There's no need of it," she murmured, but made no resistance when he lifted her.
An idea stirred vaguely; he bundled her into his arms so that her right lamp shot its beam forward, and so he staggered at last to the circle of light about the rocket, opened the door, and dumped her on the floor within.
He had one final impression. He saw the laughing shadows that were the trioptes skipping and skittering across the darkness toward the ridge where Oscar and his people waited in placid acceptance of their destiny.
The rocket was roaring along at two hundred thousand feet, because numberless observations and photographs from space had shown that not even the vast peaks of the Mountains of Eternity project forty miles above the planet's surface. Below them the clouds glistened white before and black behind, for they were just entering the twilight zone. At that height one could even see
the mighty curvature of the planet.
"Half cue ball, half eight ball," said Ham, staring down. "Hereafter we stick to the cue-ball half."
"It was the spores," proceeded Pat, ignoring him. "We knew they were narcotic before, but we couldn't be expected to guess that they'd carry a drug as subde as that—to steal away your will and undermine your strength. Oscar's people are the Lotus Eaters and the Lotus, all in one. But somehow I'm sorry for them. Those colossal, magnificent, useless minds of theirs!" She paused. "Ham, what woke you up to what was happening? What snapped you out of it?"
"Oh, it was a remark of Oscar's, something about his being only a square meal for a triops."
"Well?"
"Well, did you know we've used up all our food? That remark reminded me that I hadn't eaten for two days!"
by Leigh Brackett
Lundy was flying the aero-space convertible by himself. He'd been doing it for a long time. So long that the bottom half of him was dead to the toes and the top half even deader, except for two separate aches like ulcerated teeth; one in his back, one in his head.
Thick pearly-grey Venusian sky went past the speeding flier in streamers of torn cloud. The rockets throbbed and pounded. Instruments jerked erratically under the swirl of magnetic currents that makes the Venusian atmosphere such a swell place for pilots to go nuts in.
Jackie Smith was still out cold in the copilot's seat. From in back, beyond the closed door to the tiny inner cabin, Lundy could hear Farrell screaming and fighting.
He'd been screaming a long time. Ever since the shot of avertin Lundy had given him after he was taken had begun to wear thin. Fighting the straps and screaming, a hoarse jarring sound with no sense in it.
Screaming to be free, because of It.
Somewhere inside of Lundy, inside the rumpled, sweat-soaked black uniform of the Tri-World Police, Special Branch, and the five-foot-six of thick springy muscle under it, there was a knot. It was a large knot, and it was very, very cold in spite of the sweltering heat in the cabin, and it had a nasty habit of yanking itself tight every few minutes, causing Lundy to jerk and sweat as though he'd been spiked.
Lundy didn't like that cold tight knot in his belly. It meant he was afraid. He'd been afraid before, plenty of times, and he wasn't ashamed of it. But right now he needed all the brains and guts he had to get It back to Special headquarters at Vhia, and he didn't want to have to fight himself, too.
Donald A. Wollheim (ed) Page 14