Foundations of Fear

by David G. Hartwell

  “For my children’s lives?”

  She would say something like that. She knew how to manipulate people, Terran and Tlic. But not this time.

  “I don’t want to be a host animal,” I said. “Not even yours.”

  It took her a long time to answer. “We use almost no host animals these days,” she said. “You know that.”

  “You use us.”

  “We do. We wait long years for you and teach you and join our families to yours.” She moved restlessly. “You know you aren’t animals to us.”

  I stared at her, saying nothing.

  “The animals we once used began killing most of our eggs after implantation long before your ancestors arrived,” she said softly. “You know these things, Gan. Because your people arrived, we are relearning what it means to be a healthy, thriving people. And your ancestors, fleeing from their homeworld, from their own kind who would have killed or enslaved them—they survived because of us. We saw them as people and gave them the Preserve when they still tried to kill us as worms.”

  At the word “worms” I jumped. I couldn’t help it, and she couldn’t help noticing it.

  “I see,” she said quietly. “Would you really rather die than bear my young, Gan?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Shall I go to Xuan Hoa?”

  “Yes!” Hoa wanted it. Let her have it. She hadn’t had to watch Lomas. She’d be proud . . . Not terrified.

  T’Gatoi flowed off the table onto the floor, startling me almost too much.

  “I’ll sleep in Hoa’s room tonight,” she said. “And sometime tonight or in the morning, I’ll tell her.”

  This was going too fast. My sister. Hoa had had almost as much to do with raising me as my mother. I was still close to her—not like Qui. She could want T’Gatoi and still love me.

  “Wait! Gatoi!”

  She looked back, then raised nearly half her length off the floor and turned it to face me. “These are adult things, Gan. This is my life, my family!”

  “But she’s . . . my sister.”

  “I have done what you demanded. I have asked you!”

  “But—”

  “It will be easier for Hoa. She has always expected to carry other lives inside her.”

  Human lives. Human young who would someday drink at her breasts, not at her veins.

  I shook my head. “Don’t do it to her, Gatoi.” I was not Qui. It seemed I could become him, though, with no effort at all. I could make Xuan Hoa my shield. Would it be easier to know that red worms were growing in her flesh instead of mine?

  “Don’t do it to Hoa,” I repeated.

  She stared at me, utterly still.

  I looked away, then back at her. “Do it to me.”

  I lowered the gun from my throat and she leaned forward to take it.

  “No,” I told her.

  “It’s the law,” she said.

  “Leave it for the family. One of them might use it to save my life someday.”

  She grasped the rifle barrel, but I wouldn’t let go. I was pulled into a standing position over her.

  “Leave it here!” I repeated. “If we’re not your animals, if these are adult things, accept the risk. There is risk, Gatoi, in dealing with a partner.”

  It was clearly hard for her to let go of the rifle. A shudder went through her and she made a hissing sound of distress. It occurred to me that she was afraid. She was old enough to have seen what guns could do to people. Now her young and this gun would be together in the same house. She did not know about our other guns. In this dispute, they did not matter.

  “I will implant the first egg tonight,” she said as I put the gun away. “Do you hear, Gan?”

  Why else had I been given a whole egg to eat while the rest of the family was left to share one? Why else had my mother kept looking at me as though I were going away from her, going where she could not follow? Did T’Gatoi imagine I hadn’t known?

  “I hear.”

  “Now!” I let her push me out of the kitchen, then walked ahead of her toward my bedroom. The sudden urgency in her voice sounded real.

  “You would have done it to Hoa tonight!” I accused.

  “I must do it to someone tonight.”

  I stopped in spite of her urgency and stood in her way. “Don’t you care who?”

  She flowed around me and into my bedroom. I found her waiting on the couch we shared. There was nothing in Hoa’s room that she could have used. She would have done it to Hoa on the floor. The thought of her doing it to Hoa at all disturbed me in a different way now, and I was suddenly angry.

  Yet I undressed and lay down beside her. I knew what to do, what to expect. I had been told all my life. I felt the familiar sting, narcotic, mildly pleasant. Then the blind probing of her ovipositor. The puncture was painless, easy. So easy going in. She undulated slowly against me, her muscles forcing the egg from her body into mine. I held on to a pair of her limbs until I remembered Lomas holding her that way. Then I let go, moved inadvertently, and hurt her. She gave a low cry of pain and I expected to be caged at once within her limbs. When I wasn’t, I held on to her again, feeling oddly ashamed.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

  She rubbed my shoulders with four of her limbs.

  “Do you care?” I asked. “Do you care that it’s me?”

  She did not answer for some time. Finally, “You were the one making choices tonight, Gan. I made mine long ago.”

  “Would you have gone to Hoa?”

  “Yes. How could I put my children into the care of one who hates them?”

  “It wasn’t . . . hate.”

  “I know what it was.”

  “I was afraid.”

  Silence.

  “I still am.” I could admit it to her here, now.

  “But you came to me . . . to save Hoa.”

  “Yes.” I leaned my forehead against her. She was cool velvet, deceptively soft. “And to keep you for myself,” I said. It was so. I didn’t understand it, but it was so.

  She made a soft hum of contentment. “I couldn’t believe I had made such a mistake with you,” she said. “I chose you. I believed you had grown to choose me.”

  “I had, but . . .”

  “Lomas.”

  “Yes.”

  “I have never known a Terran to see a birth and take it well. Qui has seen one, hasn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “Terrans should be protected from seeing.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that—and I doubted that it was possible. “Not protected,” I said. “Shown. Shown when we’re young kids, and shown more than once. Gatoi, no Terran ever sees a birth that goes right. All we see is N’Tlic—pain and terror and maybe death.”

  She looked down at me. “It is a private thing. It has always been a private thing.”

  Her tone kept me from insisting—that and the knowledge that if she changed her mind, I might be the first public example. But I had planted the thought in her mind. Chances were it would grow, and eventually she would experiment.

  “You won’t see it again,” she said. “I don’t want you thinking any more about shooting me.”

  The small amount of fluid that came into me with her egg relaxed me as completely as a sterile egg would have, so that I could remember the rifle in my hands and my feelings of fear and revulsion, anger and despair. I could remember the feelings without reviving them. I could talk about them.

  “I wouldn’t have shot you,” I said. “Not you.” She had been taken from my father’s flesh when he was my age.

  “You could have,” she insisted.

  “Not you.” She stood between us and her own people, protecting, interweaving.

  “Would you have destroyed yourself?”

  I moved carefully, uncomfortably. “I could have done that. I nearly did. That’s Qui’s ‘away.’ I wonder if he knows.”

  “What?”

  I did not answer.

  “You will live now.”
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br />   “Yes.” Take care of her, my mother used to say. Yes.

  “I’m healthy and young,” she said. “I won’t leave you as Lomas was left—alone, N’Tlic. I’ll take care of you.”

  Richard Matheson

  Duel

  Richard Matheson won instant notoriety in 1950 with his first short story, “Born of Man and Woman” published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. There followed a number of clean, sharp stories of dark fantasy and horrific science fiction, enough to fill several collections in the fifties alone. His first novel, I Am Legend (1954), the classic science fiction vampire story, and his second, The Shrinking Man (1956), basis for the popular fifties’ film, established him as the premier science fiction horror writer of the decade. He went on to a career In Hollywood and is recognized as scriptwriter of stories for “The Twilight Zone” and many television movies. His contemporary classic horror novel, Hell House (1971), was successfully filmed. Bid Time Return (1975) won the World Fantasy Award for best novel. “Duel” was the basis of a notable 1971 television movie directed by Steven Spielberg, for which Matheson wrote the teleplay. He is one of the finest living writers of horror. Without a hint of science fiction or an overt whiff of the supernatural, “Duel” manages to invoke both the science fiction tradition of the menace of the intelligent machine and the monster tradition of the horror genre. It is a psychological monster story, subtly shocking, compelling, fantastic.

  At 11:32 A.M., Mann passed the truck.

  He was heading west, en route to San Francisco. It was Thursday and unseasonably hot for April. He had his suitcoat off, his tie removed and shirt collar opened, his sleeve cuffs folded back. There was sunlight on his left arm and on part of his lap. He could feel the heat of it through his dark trousers as he drove along the two-lane highway. For the past twenty minutes, he had not seen another vehicle going in either direction.

  Then he saw the truck ahead, moving up a curving grade between two high green hills. He heard the grinding strain of its motor and saw a double shadow on the road. The truck was pulling a trailer.

  He paid no attention to the details of the truck. As he drew behind it on the grade, he edged his car toward the opposite lane. The road ahead had blind curves and he didn’t try to pass until the truck had crossed the ridge. He waited until it started around a left curve on the downgrade, then, seeing that the way was clear, pressed down on the accelerator pedal and steered his car into the eastbound lane. He waited until he could see the truck front in his rearview mirror before he turned back into the proper lane.

  Mann looked across the countryside ahead. There were ranges of mountains as far as he could see and, all around him, rolling green hills. He whistled softly as the car sped down the winding grade, its tires making crisp sounds on the pavement.

  At the bottom of the hill, he crossed a concrete bridge and, glancing to the right, saw a dry streambed strewn with rocks and gravel. As the car moved off the bridge, he saw a trailer park set back from the highway to his right. How can anyone live out here? he thought. His shifting gaze caught sight of a pet cemetery ahead and he smiled. Maybe those people in the trailers wanted to be close to the graves of their dogs and cats.

  The highway ahead was straight now. Mann drifted into a reverie, the sunlight on his arm and lap. He wondered what Ruth was doing. The kids, of course, were in school and would be for hours yet. Maybe Ruth was shopping; Thursday was the day she usually went. Mann visualized her in the supermarket, putting various items into the basket cart. He wished he were with her instead of starting on another sales trip. Hours of driving yet before he’d reach San Francisco. Three days of hotel sleeping and restaurant eating, hoped-for contacts and likely disappointments. He sighed; then, reaching out impulsively, he switched on the radio. He revolved the tuning knob until he found a station playing soft, innocuous music. He hummed along with it, eyes almost out of focus on the road ahead.

  He started as the truck roared past him on the left, causing his car to shudder slightly. He watched the truck and trailer cut in abruptly for the westbound lane and frowned as he had to brake to maintain a safe distance behind it. What’s with you? he thought.

  He eyed the truck with cursory disapproval. It was a huge gasoline tanker pulling a tank trailer, each of them having six pairs of wheels. He could see that it was not a new rig but was dented and in need of renovation, its tanks painted a cheap-looking silvery color. Mann wondered if the driver had done the painting himself. His gaze shifted from the word FLAMMABLE printed across the back of the trailer tank, red letters on a white background, to the parallel reflector lines painted in red across the bottom of the tank to the massive rubber flaps swaying behind the rear tires, then back up again. The reflector lines looked as though they’d been clumsily applied with a stencil. The driver must be an independent trucker, he decided, and not too affluent a one, from the looks of his outfit. He glanced at the trailer’s license plate. It was a California issue.

  Mann checked his speedometer. He was holding steady at 55 miles an hour, as he invariably did when he drove without thinking on the open highway. The truck driver must have done a good 70 to pass him so quickly. That seemed a little odd. Weren’t truck drivers supposed to be a cautious lot?

  He grimaced at the smell of the truck’s exhaust and looked at the vertical pipe to the left of the cab. It was spewing smoke, which clouded darkly back across the trailer. Christ, he thought. With all the furor about air pollution, why do they keep allowing that sort of thing on the highways?

  He scowled at the constant fumes. They’d make him nauseated in a little while, he knew. He couldn’t lag back here like this. Either he slowed down or he passed the truck again. He didn’t have the time to slow down. He’d gotten a late start. Keeping it at 55 all the way, he’d just about make his afternoon appointment. No, he’d have to pass.

  Depressing the gas pedal, he eased his car toward the opposite lane. No sign of anything ahead. Traffic on this route seemed almost nonexistent today. He pushed down harder on the accelerator and steered all the way into the eastbound lane.

  As he passed the truck, he glanced at it. The cab was too high for him to see into. All he caught sight of was the back of the truck driver’s left hand on the steering wheel. It was darkly tanned and square-looking, with large veins knotted on its surface.

  When Mann could see the truck reflected in the rearview mirror, he pulled back over to the proper lane and looked ahead again.

  He glanced at the rearview mirror in surprise as the truck driver gave him an extended horn blast. What was that? he wondered; a greeting or a curse? He grunted with amusement, glancing at the mirror as he drove. The front fenders of the truck were a dingy purple color, the paint faded and chipped; another amateurish job. All he could see was the lower portion of the truck; the rest was cut off by the top of his rear window.

  To Mann’s right, now, was a slope of shalelike earth with patches of scrub grass growing on it. His gaze jumped to the clapboard house on top of the slope. The television aerial on its roof was sagging at an angle of less than 40 degrees. Must give great reception, he thought.

  He looked to the front again, glancing aside abruptly at a sign printed in jagged block letters on a piece of plywood: NIGHT CRAWLERS—BAIT. What the hell is a night crawler? he wondered. It sounded like some monster in a low-grade Hollywood thriller.

  The unexpected roar of the truck motor made his gaze jump to the rearview mirror. Instantly, his startled look jumped to the side mirror. By God, the guy was passing him again. Mann turned his head to scowl at the leviathan form as it drifted by. He tried to see into the cab but couldn’t because of its height. What’s with him, anyway? he wondered. What the hell are we having here, a contest? See which vehicle can stay ahead the longest?

  He thought of speeding up to stay ahead but changed his mind. When the truck and trailer started back into the westbound lane, he let up on the pedal, voicing a newly incredulous sound as he saw that if he hadn’t slowed down, he w
ould have been prematurely cut off again. Jesus Christ, he thought. What’s with this guy?

  His scowl deepened as the odor of the truck’s exhaust reached his nostrils again. Irritably, he cranked up the window on his left. Damn it, was he going to have to breathe that crap all the way to San Francisco? He couldn’t afford to slow down. He had to meet Forbes at a quarter after three and that was that.

  He looked ahead. At least there was no traffic complicating matters. Mann pressed down on the accelerator pedal, drawing close behind the truck. When the highway curved enough to the left to give him a completely open view of the route ahead, he jarred down on the pedal, steering out into the opposite lane.

  The truck edged over, blocking his way.

  For several moments, all Mann could do was stare at it in blank confusion. Then, with a startled noise, he braked, returning to the proper lane. The truck moved back in front of him.

  Mann could not allow himself to accept what apparently had taken place. It had to be a coincidence. The truck driver couldn’t have blocked his way on purpose. He waited for more than a minute, then flicked down the turn-indicator lever to make his intentions perfectly clear and, depressing the accelerator pedal, steered again into the eastbound lane.

  Immediately, the truck shifted, barring his way.

  “Jesus Christ!” Mann was astounded. This was unbelievable. He’d never seen such a thing in twenty-six years of driving. He returned to the westbound lane, shaking his head as the truck swung back in front of him.

  He eased up on the gas pedal, falling back to avoid the truck’s exhaust. Now what? he wondered. He still had to make San Francisco on schedule. Why in God’s name hadn’t he gone a little out of his way in the beginning, so he could have traveled by freeway? This damned highway was two lane all the way.

  Impulsively, he sped into the eastbound lane again. To his surprise, the truck driver did not pull over. Instead, the driver stuck his left arm out and waved him on. Mann started pushing down on the accelerator. Suddenly, he let up on the pedal with a gasp and jerked the steering wheel around, raking back behind the truck so quickly that his car began to fishtail. He was fighting to control its zigzag whipping when a blue convertible shot by him in the opposite lane. Mann caught a momentary vision of the man inside it glaring at him.