Earth Is The Strangest Planet

by Robert Silverberg

  “Something’s gone wrong!” he exclaimed. “It’s that guy Smith. I’ll dial him straightaway. I’ll shoot him!”

  But when Smith’s face floated up in the vision tank, it was as bland as ever.

  “The fault’s not mine, Mr. Fevertrees. As a matter of fact, one of my men just dialed me to say that there’s trouble at the Rouseville time works, where your pipe joins the main supply. Time gas is leaking out. I told you this morning they were having some bother there. Go to bed, Mr. Fevertrees—that’s my suggestion. Go to bed, and in the morning all will probably be fixed again.”

  “Go to bed! How dare he tell us to go to bed!” Fifi exclaimed. “What an immoral suggestion! He’s trying to hide something, that man. I’ll bet this is some mistake of his and he’s covering up with this story about a leak at the time works.”

  “We can soon check on that. Let’s drive down there and see!”

  They caught the elevator down to the ground floor and climbed into their land vehicle. City folk might laugh at these little wheeled hovercraft, so quaintly reminiscent of the automobiles of bygone days, but there was no doubt that they were indispensable in the country outside the domes, where free public transport did not reach.

  The doors opened and they rolled out, taking off immediately and floating forward a couple of feet above the ground. Rouseville lay over a low hill, and the time works was just on the far fringe of it. But as they sighted the first houses, something strange happened.

  Though all was quiet, the land vehicle began to jerk around wildly. Fifi was flung about, and the next moment they were stuck in a hedge.

  “Heck, these things are heavy! I must learn to drive one sometime!” Tracey said, climbing out.

  “Aren’t you going to help me down, Tracey?”

  “Aw, I’m too big to play with girls!”

  “You gotta help me! I lost my dolly!”

  “You never had no dolly! Nuts to you!”

  He ran on across the field and she had to follow him, calling as she ran. It was just so difficult trying to control the clumsy, heavy body of an adult with the mind of a child.

  She found her husband sitting in the middle of the Rouseville road, kicking and waving his arms. He giggled at her. “Tace go walkey-walkey!” he said.

  But in a few moments they were able to move along again on foot, though it was painful for Fifi, whose mother had been lame toward the end of her life. Together they hobbled forward, two young things in old postures. When they entered the little domeless village, it was to find most of the inhabitants about, and going through the whole spectrum of human age-characteristics, from burbling infancy to rattling senility. Obviously, something serious had happened at the time works.

  Ten minutes and a few generations later, they arrived at the gates. Standing below the Central Time Board sign was Smith. They did not recognize him; he was wearing an anti-time gas mask; its exhaust spluttering as it spat out old moments.

  “I thought you two might turn up!” he exclaimed. “Didn’t believe me, eh? Well, you’d better come in with me and see for yourselves. They’ve struck a major gusher and the cocks couldn’t stand the pressure and collapsed. My guess is they’ll have to evacuate the whole area before they get this one fixed.”

  As he led them through the gates, Tracey said, “I just hope this isn’t Ruskie sabotage!”

  “Rusty what?”

  “Ruskie sabotage. The work of the Russians. I presume this plant is secret?”

  Smith stared at him in amazement. “You gone crazy, Mr. Fevertrees? The Russian nation got time mains just the same as us. You were on honeymoon in Odessa last year, weren’t you?”

  “Last year I was on active service in Korea, thank you!”

  “Korea?!”

  With mighty siren noises, a black shape bearing red flashing lights above and below its bulk settled itself down in the Time Board yard. It was a robot-piloted fire engine from the city, but its human crew tumbled out in a weird confusion, and one young fellow lay yelling for his pants to be changed before the Time Board men could issue them anti-time gas masks. And then there was no fire for them to extinguish, only the great gusher of invisible time that by now towered over the building and the whole village, and blew to the four corners, carrying unimagined or forgotten generations on its mothproof breath.

  “Let’s get forward and see what we can see,” Smith said. “We might just as well go home and have a drink as stand here doing nothing.”

  “You are a very foolish young man if you mean what I suppose you to mean,” Fifi said, in an ancient and severe voice. “Most of the liquor currently available is bootleg and unsafe to consume—but in any case, I believe we should support the President in his worthy attempt to stamp out alcoholism, don’t you, Tracey darling?”

  But Tracey was lost in an abstraction of strange memory, and whistling “La Paloma” under his breath to boot.

  Stumbling after Smith, they got to the building, where two police officials stopped them. At that moment a plump man in a formal suit appeared and spoke to one of the police through his gas mask. Smith hailed him, and they greeted each other like brothers. It turned out they were brothers. Clayball Smith beckoned them all into the plant, gallantly taking Fifi’s arm—which, to reveal his personal tragedy, was about as much as he ever got off any pretty girl.

  “Shouldn’t we have been properly introduced to this gentleman, Tracey?” Fifi whispered to her husband.

  “Nonsense, my dear. Rules of etiquette have to go by the board when you enter one of the temples of industry/’ As he spoke, Tracey seemed to stroke an imaginary side whisker.

  Inside the time plant chaos reigned. Now the full magnitude of the disaster was clear. They were pulling the first miners out of the hole where the time explosion had occurred; one of the poor fellows was cursing weakly and blaming George III for the whole terrible matter.

  The whole time industry was still in its infancy. A bare ten years had elapsed since the first of the subterrenes, foraging far below the Earth’s crust, had discovered the time pockets. The whole matter was still a cause for wonder, and investigations were as yet at a comparatively early stage.

  But big business had stepped in and, with its usual bigheartedness, seen that everyone got his fair share of time, at a price. Now the time industry had more capital invested than any other industry in the world. Even in a tiny village like Rouseville, the plant was worth millions. But the plant had broken down right now.

  “It’s terrible dangerous here—you folks better not stay long,” Clayball said. He was shouting through his gas mask. The noise here was terrible, especially since a news commentator had just started his spiel to the nation a yard away.

  In answer to a shouted question from his brother, Clay-ball said, “No, it’s more than a crack in the main supply. That was just the cover story we put out. Our brave boys down there struck a whole new time seam and it’s leaking out all over the place. Can’t plug it! Half our guys were back to the Norman Conquest before we guessed what was wrong.” He pointed dramatically down through the tiles beneath their feet.

  Fifi could not understand what on earth he was talking about. Ever since leaving Plymouth, she had been adrift, and that not entirely metaphorically. It was bad enough playing Pilgrim Mother to one of the Pilgrim Fathers, but she did not dig this New World at all. It was now beyond her comprehension to understand that the vast resources of modern technology were fouling up the whole time schedule of a planet.

  In her present state, she could not know that already the illusions of the time gusher were spreading across the continent. Almost every communication satellite shuttling above the world was carrying more or less accurate accounts of the disaster and the events leading up to it, while their bemused audiences sank back through the generations like people plumbing bottomless snowdrifts.

  From these deposits came the supply of time that was piped to the million million homes of the world. Experts had already computed that at present rates of cons
umption all the time deposits would be exhausted in two hundred years. Fortunately, other experts were already at work trying to develop synthetic substitutes for time. Only the previous month, the small research team of Time Pen Inc., of Ink, Penn., had announced the isolation of a molecule nine minutes slower than any other molecule known to science, and it was firmly expected that even more isolated molecules would follow.

  Now an ambulance came skidding up, with another behind it. Archibald Smith tried to pull Tracey out of the way.

  “Unhand me, varlet!” quoth Tracey, attempting to draw an imaginary sword. But the ambulance men were jumping out of their vehicles, and the police were cordoning off the area.

  “They’re going to bring up our brave terranauts!” Clay-ball shouted.

  He could hardly be heard above the hubbub. Masked men were everywhere, with here and there the slender figure of a masked nurse. Supplies of oxygen and soup were being marshaled, searchlights swung overhead, blazing down into the square mouth of the inspection pit. The men in yellow overalls were lowering themselves into the pit, communicating to each other by wrist radio. They disappeared. For a moment a hush of awe fell over the building and seemed to spread to the crowds outside.

  But the moment stretched into minutes, and the noise found its way back to its own level. More grim-faced men came forward, and the commentators were pushed out of the picture.

  “It thinks me we should suffer ourselves to get gone from here, by God’s breath!” Fifi whispered faintly, clutching at her homespun with a trembling hand. “This likes me not!”

  At last there was activity at the head of the pit. Sweating men in overalls hauled on ropes. The first terranaut was pulled into view, wearing the characteristic black uniform of his kind. His head lolled back, his mask had been ripped away, but he was fighting bravely to retain consciousness. Indeed, a debonair smile crossed his pale lips, and he waved a hand at the cameras. A ragged cheer went up from the onlookers.

  This was the intrepid breed of men that went down into the uncharted seas of time gas below the Earth’s crust, risking their lives to bring back a nugget of knowledge from the unknown, pushing back still further the boundaries of science, unsung and unhonored by all save the constant battery of world publicity.

  The ace commentator had struggled through the crowd to reach the terranaut and was trying to question him, holding a microphone to his lips while the hero’s tortured face swam before the unbelieving eyes of a billion viewers.

  “Hell down there… . Dinosaurs and their young,” he managed to gasp, before he was whisked into the first ambulance. “Right down deep in the gas. Packs of ’em, ravening… . Few more hundred feet lower and we’d have fetched … fetched up against the creation … of the world…

  They could hear no more. Now fresh police reinforcements were clearing the building of all unauthorized persons before the other terranauts were returned to the surface, although of their earth capsule there was as yet no sign. As the armed cordon approached, Fifi and Tracey made a dash for it. They could stand no more, they could understand no more. They pelted for the door, oblivious to the cries of the two masked Smiths. As they ran out into the darkness, high above them towered the great invisible plume of the time gusher, still blowing, blowing its doom about the world.

  For some while they lay gasping in the nearest hedge. Occasionally one of them would whimper like a tiny girl, or the other would groan like an old man. Between times, they breathed heavily.

  Dawn was near to breaking when they pulled themselves up and made along the track toward Rouseville, keeping close to the fields.

  They were not alone. The inhabitants of the village were on the move, heading away from the homes that were now alien to them and beyond their limited understanding. Staring at them from under his lowering brow, Tracey stopped and fashioned himself a crude cudgel from the hedgerow.

  Together, the man and his woman trudged over the hill, heading back for the wilds like most of the rest of humanity, their bent and uncouth forms silhouetted against the first ragged banners of light in the sky.

  “Ugh glumph hum herm morm glug humk,” the woman muttered.

  Which means, roughly translated from the Old Stone, “Why the heck does this always have to happen to mankind just when he’s on the goddam point of getting civilized again?”

  DAVY JONES’ AMBASSADOR

  Raymond Z. Gallun

  No collection of stories about the wonders of this planet would be complete without one that ventures into the dark, enigmatic world of the ocean—which, after all, occupies most of the surface of our globe. This one, first published in 1935, is a classic—a moving, evocative tale of an alien civilization dwelling not on Mars or Venus but on this very world, hidden from us, unknown to us— and desperate for knowledge about us. Raymond Z. Gallun, one of science fiction’s true pioneers, won a lasting reputation a generation ago with this story and such others as “Old Faithful,” “The Magician of Dream Valley,” and “Seeds of the Dusk.” Though little was heard from him after the early 1950’s, Gallun made a surprising and welcome reappearance in science fiction in 1974 with a novel, “The Eden Cycle,” and another book is reported to be on the way.

  * * *

  I

  It didn’t look like a jet of water at all. It seemed too rigid, like a rod of glass; and it spattered over the instruments with a brittle, jingling sound, for such was the effect of the pressure behind it: more than four thousand pounds per square inch—the weight of nearly two and a half miles of black ocean.

  Cliff Rodney, hunched in the pilot seat, stared at the widening stream. It made him see how good a thing life was, and how empty and drab the alternative was going to be. Cliff Rodney was young; he did not wish to die.

  A few seconds ago all had been normal aboard the bathyspheric submarine. The velvet darkness of the depths, visible beyond the massive ports of the craft, had inspired awe in him, as it always would in human hearts; but to Cliff it had become familiar. The same was true of the schools of phosphorescent fish shining foggily through the gloom, and of the swarms of nether-world horrors that had darted into the bright golden path of the search beam.

  Clifford Rodney, during his explorations, had grown accustomed to these elements of the deep-sea environment, until they had assumed an aspect that was almost friendly.

  But the illusion that it was safe here had been abruptly broken. Sinuous, rusty shadows, which bore a suggestion of menace that was new to him, had surged toward the submarine from out of the surrounding murk and ooze.

  Attenuated, spidery crustaceans with long feelers had burrowed into the shelter of the mud beneath them. Little fish, some of them equipped with lamplike organs, some blind and lightless, all of them at once dreadful and comic with their needle-fanged jaws and grotesque heads, had scattered in terror.

  Bulbous medusae, contracting and expanding their umbrella-shaped bodies, had swum hurriedly away. Even the pallid anemones had displayed defensive attitudes in the guarded contraction of their flowerlike crowns.

  With canny craft the unknowns had avoided the search beam. Cliff had glimpsed only the swift motion of monstrous, armored limbs, and the baneful glitter of great eyes. Then the blow had fallen, like that of a battering ram. It had struck the forward observation port with a grinding concussion.

  A crack, looking like a twisted ribbon of silver, had appeared in the thick, vitreous substance of the pane. From it, water had begun to spurt in a slender, unstanchable shaft that grew ominously as the sea spread the edges of the crevice wider and wider apart.

  Automatically Cliff had done what he could. He had set the vertical screws of his craft churning at top speed to raise it toward the surface. But, in a moment, the blades had met with fierce resistance, as though clutched and held. The motors had refused to turn. The submarine had sunk back into the muck of the Atlantic’s bed. An SOS was the last resort.

  Cliff had sent it out quickly, knowing that though it would be picked up by the Etruria, the surface
ship that served as his base of operations, nothing could be done to help him. He had reached the end of his resources.

  Now, there was a breathless pause. The blackness without was inky. Cliff continued to gaze impotently at that slim cylinder of water. Ricocheting bits of it struck him, stinging fiercely, but he did not heed. It fascinated him, making him forget, almost, how it had all happened. His mind was blurred so that it conceived odd notions.

  Pretty, the way that jet of water broke apart when it hit the bright metal of the instruments. You wouldn’t think that it was dangerous. Flying droplets scattered here and there like jewels, each of them glinting in the shaded glow of the light bulbs. And the sounds they made resembled the chucklings of elves and fairies.

  A small creature of the depths, sucked through the breach, burst with a dull plop as the pressure of its normal habitat was removed.

  He and that creature had much in common, Rodney thought. Both were pawns which chance had elected to annihilate. Only he was a man; men boasted of their control over natural forces. And he himself was a blatant and ironic symbol of that boast: They had sent him here in the belief that even the bed of the Atlantic might soon yield to human dominance!

  The submarine gave a gentle lurch. The youth’s eyes sharpened to a keener focus. A yard beyond the fractured port a pair of orbs hung suspended. Beneath them was a fleshy beak that opened and closed as the creature sucked water through its gills. Black, whiplike tentacles swarmed around it like the hairs of a Gorgon beard. And the flesh of the monster was transparent. Cliff could see the throbbing outlines of its vital organs.