Earth Is The Strangest Planet

by Robert Silverberg

  Bates’s smile was a bit apologetic. “I’ve had no opportunity to examine her, Professor. You have had half the day. Surely you can speak for what you have found.”

  This time Clements’ thunder carried through. “There was nothing with her? No offerings of any kind? Then study her closely, now, before you ask us anything more—you too, gentlemen. There will be time enough for discussion afterward.”

  I stared again at those lovely features, framed in their mist of spun gold. Mann had cleaned the clay from her, and she lay like a girl asleep, long dark lashes upcurved on high, white cheeks, red lips parted—it was impossible that she should be dead! And dead for thirty thousand years!

  I touched her, and again I sensed that curious roughness as of old parchment, that radiant, vibrant inner warmth. It was not like dead flesh, nor was it like the flesh of any mummy I had ever seen. It was rigid—hard—like stone, almost, yet without the coldness of stone.

  Bates was examining her closely, his face for once expressionless. His fingers traced the contours of the gently swelling muscles under her white skin. His eyes devoured every inch of her beauty, stretched there before him, but they were a scientist’s eyes, reading the story hidden in those matchless lineaments.

  He took her hair in his hands and let it ripple slowly through his fingers in a curling yellow foam. He touched her eyelids, gently, and her full lips, and peered, frowning at the tiny ovals of her nails. He looked up, past me at the others, and there was blank bewilderment in his eyes.

  “What does it mean? What is she? I—I don’t understand.”

  Clements shrugged hugely, his hairy face smug. Little Breen’s eyes glittered and his voice was shrill with excitement.

  “You see? Her lips—her eyes—her fingers—did you see them? It is impossible! No scientist could do it today. And ten—twenty—thirty thousand years ago— It is impossible!”

  Mann saw my bewilderment. “Her fingers are grown together,” he explained, “her toes also. You can see that they do not separate. The skin is continuous, and her eyelids seem welded to the cheeks. That could be if she was abnormal—a cripple—in life. But her lips, too— Look closely. Touch them.”

  I laid my hot fingers upon their full, crimson curve. The glistening enamel of her perfect teeth showed between them. I tried to press them back, as I had seen Bates do. They were like wood! They would not move!

  “Flesh welded to flesh is not strange, but flesh grown to the enamel of her teeth!” It was Clements speaking. “And look closely—there is a meniscus, a serif, where they join.”

  It was true. It was as though that marvelous body were cast in wax, all in one piece. Under her nails the flesh curved up with the same little concave meniscus, and when Clements gave me a lens I saw that at the base of each golden hair the skin rose in a tiny cone, shading gradually from ivory to shimmering yellow. Every tiny wrinkle— every whorl and ridge of her palms and fingertips was plainly marked, but nowhere were the tiny pits of pores.

  Nowhere was there any opening in that strange, hard membrane that covered her entire body in place of normal human skin.

  Bates had been examining her with that stolid thoroughness that is so characteristic of him. Now he stood staring into vacancy, oblivious of everything.

  I knew what thoughts were passing through his mind. What was she, this woman out of the past? What manner of creature could live as she must have lived, sealed away from the world and everything in it? How did she eat— drink—breathe? Was it like a plant, absorbing moisture and food through that unnatural skin—feeding on light itself? Was she, in fact, some superplant from an age when plants were lords of Earth and all that lived on it—the culmination of a line of evolution longer and greater than that which had given rise to the human form she mimicked?

  She was no plant! The man in me, surging up at the vision of her slim, white loveliness, knew that. She was all woman—a woman such as history and the races of history had never known—a woman of that elder, godlike race whose vague traditions filtering through the ages had been preserved in the myths of the earliest known men.

  Men of her own race had laid her where we found her —or was it men of another blood, living centuries after the last of her own kind had vanished from the Earth, and ministering to her as the goddess that her beauty proclaimed her? Was it the forgotten science of her ancient race that had preserved her, immune and inviolate, through the ages?

  I heard Bates’s voice, strained and unreal: “You’re sure she’s dead?”

  What if she were not dead? What if she were in some hypnotic, trancelike state of suspended animation, preserved by the magic of her ancient science until the day when men should be ready to receive her again and with her rule the world in godlike power? What if we should wake her—now—after thirty thousand years?

  Mann answered him. “We have found no evidence of life, and we were as thorough as the time allowed. I would swear that she is dead, if she were a normal being. But—”

  “We are not sure!” boomed Clements. “Because our tests show no life we cannot swear that she is dead. Because she had been buried in the earth since the days of the ice age, we cannot assume that life could not remain in her. There have been other instances—of other forms of life, preserved in clay or stone for months and years. I tell you, we are not sure—and we must be!”

  Bates nodded thoughtfully. His emotions were no longer overbalancing his better judgment. “What records have you made?” he asked.

  Breen gestured impatiently. “The usual things. Her weight—the standard measurements of the body—photographs and molds with Negacoll. Clements has samples of her hair and microphotographs of her skin. We have done what we could, without dissection. An expert craftsman, such as you have in this museum, could make her live again as you see her now.”

  Bates bit his lip. It was a difficult decision to make. “Then there is only—dissection?”

  Breen nodded: “Yes.”

  A thin line of worry had appeared between his eyes. “Suppose she’s alive,” he protested. “We’d kill her. And we don’t know that she’s dead, we can’t be sure!”

  Breen snorted. “Of course, she’s dead! Why talk madness? This perfect preservation—who knows what natural chemistry of the body, and of the soil in which she was buried, might not have preserved the flesh and cause this hornlike hardening of the skin? Mammoths have been found with everything intact. We must examine her, thoroughly, and we must be quick. Decomposition begins suddenly in these cases, and in an hour—poof!—there may be nothing left! We are scientists. Never has there been such an opportunity. Of course, we will dissect!”

  He was right, of course, but Clements, I think, felt something of what we did. There was more of the romantic in him than in Breen. He interrupted: “One moment, Professor. This hardening of the skin has undoubtedly resulted in the wonderful preservation which we have seen, but— does it extend to the vital organs which we cannot see? We must not expose them to the effects of the air until we are certain that they will not be destroyed.”

  Breen stared at him. “What do you suggest?” he demanded.

  “The ray, first. It will show us what we want to know as well as dissection—the details of the skeleton, and the nature of the vital organs. Then refrigeration—as soon as possible, to be safe—and injection of preservatives. The tissues will not be in danger of destruction, then, and we can complete our examination without the need of this mad haste.”

  Breen stood for a moment with pursed lips, nodding slowly. Then he swung to Mann. “You have an X ray?” he asked curtly.

  “There is one downstairs,” Mann told him. “One of our research staff is using it in his study of pottery. But we use only the small-sized plates. We can arrange with the hospital to take a full-length picture.”

  Breen’s hand shot up impatient negation. “Later, if need be—not now. You have a fluoroscope? Then we will begin with that—the photographs afterward. There is no need of depending upon hospital routine wh
en we can do the work ourselves—and trust it when it is done. Will you bring the apparatus up here?”

  “Yes,” Mann assented. “There is no room downstairs. We can set it up over there, under the skylight. Open it, please, Mr. Bates—it is too warm here. We must be more careful of that. And I will need help with the equipment.” Bates and I went down with him to get the X ray, leaving the others to rig an adjustable canvas framework on which to place the body when it was photographed. The apparatus was infernally heavy, and it took the three of us the better part of an hour to get it set up and working properly.

  Meanwhile, Clements was deep in another examination of her skin and hair, and little Breen was bounding back and forth between him and Michaelson, who had completed the stretcher and was making a simple holder for the plates.

  We laid her carefully on the taut canvas and buckled two broad straps across her flawless body, holding it in place. Breen was tinkering fussily with the transformer of the X-ray generator while Mann held the fluoroscope, As I stood by the door, watching them, a breath of air from the open skylight ruffled the curling golden wave that lay heaped against her cheek, and I could have sworn that her rounded bosoms rose and fell gently with the regular breathing of deep sleep. I looked again, and it was illusion.

  Breen finished his adjustments, and I snapped off the lights. There was the click of a tumbler switch, and the dull violet glow of the ray illuminated the faces of the five men bending over that still, white form on the stretcher. The drone of the transformer was the only sound in all the room.

  Breen’s heels rasped on the concrete floor. He was going around behind the stretcher. Clements had lifted it with both hands and was moving it into the direct path of the ray. Then Breen reached over and took the fluoroscope from Mann.

  He took it—I saw that—and he must have lifted it into place behind the frame. Michaelson stepped back into my view, and all that I could see was the carved, white face dimly lighted by the ghastly glow of the X-ray tube. I stepped away from the switch, to one side, to get a better view.

  Breen shouted.

  I saw him bob up from behind the stretcher, choppy sounds pouring from his mouth. There was a dry, brittle rending and Michaelsoh leaped back as though shot.

  And then I saw!

  A great black gash split that matchless body. It lay in halves—halves that were moving, separating, straining at the canvas straps that held it. They burst with a rotten snap and then slid down against the cross brace at the bottom of the frame. Then out of that cloven gap rose a thing out of madness!

  Faceted eyes as huge as a man’s two fists glittered in the wan light. A black, humped form rose from between the tilted breasts, higher, higher—dragging itself out of the riven husk that had been a woman—towering on fragile, jointed legs—dwarfing the men who stood beneath it.

  Two wings began to grow from its sides, like shimmering disks of fire. Colors rippled through them—colors that paled and waxed and paled again in pulsing waves of radiance. Light poured out of the thing’s warped body, making it a transparent, crystal shell. Light blazed from the myriad facets of its glittering eyes. And then it straightened its bent back.

  It stood erect, like a man, on two legs. Its wings enveloped it like a gauzy veil of light, fluted and laced and ruffled, creeping with colored fire. A mass of feathery tendrils stirred uneasily between its eyes, where a mouth should be.

  Its wings were swelling, as a moth’s wings do. They spread until the whole room blazed with their glory. They swept up and forward until they shrouded the four men who stood motionless beneath it—Clements, Michaelson, Bates, and Breen. Mann had stumbled closer to me, outside of their gossamer spread. For a moment those two great compound eyes regarded us over that curtain of living flame, and then the oval head sank slowly down, its mouth parts palpitating—spreading—

  Neither of us knows what time passed then. As we gazed, the color of those vast, encircling wings deepened and brightened, until all the room was filled with a splendor of violet flame. It seemed to grow—visibly—until its bent head towered inches from the open skylight and its throbbing wings pulsed within a yard of Mann’s rapt, rigid body. Warmth flooded from them—radiation—like the warmth that had emanated from the naked woman form that had been its chrysalis. And then, somehow, I found my fingers on the light switch. Somehow they moved—somehow the lights went on.

  And there was nothing there!

  Nothing? The thing had weight and substance, for I had lifted it in my own two arms, and seen it crush the bodies of our men into its embrace. But it was transparent—invisible. A shimmering violet haze hung between me and the opposite wall, above it the flicker of watching, many-faceted eyes. And in the midst of that haze, crumpled and shrunken by whatever awful force had blasted the life out of them, stood the four men.

  Light hurt it. For a moment that cold gaze rested on us. A moment it stood there, staring at us from above its enshrouding, fiery wings. Then, like a whisk of fleeting shadow, it was gone, out into the empty night, and we were alone with the shriveled husks of the men who had been our friends.

  What was it? How can I tell you, who know no more than you do? It was a thing that lived in the days of the great ice age, when savage men hunted the mammoth and the giant sloth where our American cities now stand. It was a thing of many shapes, like a mighty butterfly, making its chrysalis in the image of a beautiful woman—a goddess of utter loveliness.

  Those forgotten savages worshipped it, and built it a crypt, a shrine of smoothed stone and massive logs as their fathers had done, and their fathers before them, since there were men who loved beauty. And in time it crept out of that lovely, treacherous shell and blasted the life and soul from those who tended it.

  Where has it gone? The world is different now, and there are none of its kind to mate with it and preserve its hellish breed. Perhaps it died, as moths die, within an hour or a day, and lies invisible in some field or forest nook, the blazing light of its unnatural life gone out of it. Perhaps it still lives, somewhere in the north where the ice still lingers, and will somehow multiply and return to scourge the Earth as it was scourged in the days before history, by a hell of utter beauty that drains men of their very souls.

  Perhaps—but shall we ever know?

  THE ROTIFERS

  Robert Abernathy

  The name of Robert Abernathy does not strike the same sort of resonant chords in the minds of most science-fiction readers as do, say, the names of Robert Heinlein or Isaac Asimov or Theodore Sturgeon. But connoisseurs of the genre are apt to nod sagely when his name comes up in conversation, for Abernathy’s contribution, though small, has been of the highest quality. Beginning as a very young man in 1942 with the well-remembered t(Peril of the Blue World,” he has produced some three dozen short stories in about as many years—“The Canal Builders,” “The Dead-Star Rover,” “Axolotl,” “Pyramid,” and “The Rotifers,” which you are about to read, being the ones that come most readily to mind. By profession Abernathy, a quiet, mild-mannered man, is a linguist specializing in Slavic languages. For the past decade or so he has been a member of the faculty at the University of Colorado, where he teaches, among other things, a course in Soviet and other East European science fiction.

  * * *

  Henry Chatham knelt by his garden pond, a glass fishbowl cupped in his thin, nervous hands. Carefully he dipped the bowl into the green-scummed water and, moving it gently, let trailing streamers of submerged water weeds drift into it. Then he picked up the old scissors he had laid on the bank, and clipped the stems of the floating plants, getting as much of them as he could in the container.

  When he righted the bowl and got stiffly to his feet, it contained, he thought hopefully, a fair cross-section of fresh-water plankton. He was pleased with himself for remembering that term from the book he had studied assiduously for the last few nights in order to be able to cope with Harry’s inevitable questions.

  There was even a shiny black water beetle doing insane
circles on the surface of the water. At sight of the insect, the eyes of the twelve-year-old boy, who had been standing by in silent expectation, widened with interest.

  “What’s that thing, Dad?” he asked excitedly. “What’s that crazy bug?”

  “I don’t know its scientific name, I’m afraid,” said Henry Chatham. “But when I was a boy we used to call them whirligig beetles.”

  “He doesn’t seem to think he has enough room in the bowl,” said Harry thoughtfully. “Maybe we better put him back in the pond, Dad.”

  “I thought you might want to look at him through the microscope,” the father said in some surprise.

  “I think we ought to put him back,” insisted Harry.

  Mr. Chatham held the dripping bowl obligingly. Harry’s hand, a thin boy’s hand with narrow, sensitive fingers, hovered over the water, and when the beetle paused for a moment in its gyrations, made a dive for it.

  But the whirligig beetle saw the hand coming, and, quicker than a wink, plunged under the water and scooted rapidly to the very bottom of the bowl.

  Harry’s young face was rueful; he wiped his wet hand on his trousers. “I guess he wants to stay,” he supposed.

  The two went up the garden path together and into the house, Mr. Chatham bearing the fishbowl before him like a votive offering. Harry’s mother met them at the door, brandishing an old towel.

  “Here,” she said firmly, “you wipe that thing off before you bring it in the house. And don’t drip any of that dirty pond water on my good carpet.”

  “It’s not dirty,” said Henry Chatham. “It’s just full of life, plants and animals too small for the eye to see. But Harry’s going to see them with his microscope.” He accepted the towel and wiped the bowl; then, in the living room, he set it beside an open window, where the summer sun slanted in and fell on the green plants.

  The brand-new microscope stood nearby, in a good light. It was an expensive microscope, no toy for a child, and it magnified four hundred diameters. Henry Chatham had bought it because he believed that his only son showed a desire to peer into the mysteries of smallness, and so far Harry had not disappointed him. Together they had compared hairs from their two heads, had seen the point of a fine sewing needle made to look like the tip of a crowbar, had made grains of salt look like chunks of glass brick, had captured a housefly and marveled at its clawed hairy feet, its great red-faceted eyes, and the delicate veining and fringing of its wings.