The Best of Hal Clement

by Hal Clement

  Unquestionably it could have used some form of sugar; perhaps dextrose, such as Thrykar himself could digest—perhaps levulose or fructose or even starch. That was something that Thrykar could have learned for himself, even though the book contained no information on the matter; for he was a chemist, and a good one.

  But he didn’t dare take another blood sample from those veins, even for a test. And he didn’t dare resort to trial and error; there would probably be only a single error.

  A saliva test would have given him the answer, had he dreamt that an important digestive juice could be found so high in any creature’s alimentary canal. He didn’t; and the afternoon passed at a funereal tempo, with the faint breathing of the victim of his carelessness sounding in his too-keen ears.

  It must have been about sunset when Tes spoke to him.

  “Thrykar, it’s changing a little. The heart seems stronger, though it’s still very fast; and the blood temperature has gone up several degrees. Maybe it will recover without help.”

  The chemist whirled toward the table. “Gone up?” he exclaimed. “It was about where it should be before. If that thing is running a fever—” He did not finish the sentence, but checked Tes’ findings himself. They were correct; and looking again at the figures in the book, he lost all doubt that the creature was suffering from a fever which would have been dangerous to a member of Thrykar’s own race and was probably no less so to his. He stood motionless beside the metal table, and thought still more furiously.

  What had caused the fever? Certainly not loss of blood—not directly, at least. Had the creature been suffering from some disease already? Quite possible, but no way to make sure. An organic tendency peculiar to the race, resulting from lowered blood pressure, prolonged unconsciousness, or similar unlikely causes? Again, no way to prove it. A previously acquired injury? That, at least, gave hope of providing evidence. He had noted no signs of physical disrepair during the few moments he had seen the creature conscious, but it was more or less covered with artificial fabric which might well have concealed them. The exposed portion of the skin showed nothing—or did it? Thrykar looked more closely at the well-tanned legs, left bare from ankle to just below the knee by the corduroy knickers.

  One—the right—was perceptibly larger than its fellow; and touching the brown skin, Thrykar found that it was noticeably hotter. With clumsy haste he unlaced and removed the sneakers, and peeled off the socks; and knew he had the source of the trouble. On the right foot, at the joint of the great toe, was an area from which the skin appeared to have been scraped. All around this the flesh was an angry crimson; and the whole foot was swollen to an extent that made Thrykar wonder how he had managed to get the shoe off. The swelling extended up the leg, in lesser degree, almost to the knee; the positions of the veins in foot and ankle were marked by red streaks.

  Ignorant as he was of human physiology, Thrykar could see that he had a bad case of infection on his hands; taken in connection with the fever, it was probably blood poisoning. And, even more than before, there was nothing he could do about it.

  He was right, of course, on all counts. Jimmy, in replacing his sock over the scrape the day before, had assured himself of trouble; the iodine had come far too late. By the next morning a battle royal was raging in the neighborhood of the injury. His healthy blood had been marshaling its forces all night and day, and struggling to beat back the organisms that had won a bridgehead in his body; it might possibly have won unaided had nothing further occurred; but the abrupt destruction of his powers of resistance by the removal of nearly half a liter of blood had given the balance a heavy thrust in the wrong direction. James Wade was an extremely ill young man.

  Tes, looking on as her husband uncovered the injured foot, realized as clearly as he the seriousness of the situation. The fear that she had been holding at bay for hours—an emotion composed partly of the purely selfish terror that they might do something for which the law could punish them, but more of an honest pity for the helpless little being which had unwittingly aided her husband—welled up and sought expression; Thrykar’s next words set off the explosion.

  “Thank goodness for this!” was what he said, beyond any possibility of doubt; and his wife whirled on him.

  “What can you mean? You find yet another injury you’ve caused this poor thing, and you sound glad of it!”

  Thrykar gave a negative flip of his great fins. “I’m sorry; of course my words would give that impression. But that was not what I meant. I am powerless to help the creature, and have been from the first, though I stubbornly refused to admit the fact to myself. This discovery has at least opened my eyes.

  “I wanted to treat it myself before, because of the law against making our presence known; and I wasted my time trying to figure out means of doing so. I was attacking the wrong problem. It is not to cure this being ourselves, so that our presence will remain unsuspected; it is to get it to the care of its own kind, without at the same time betraying the secret. I suppose I assumed, without thinking, that the latter problem was insoluble.”

  “But how can you know that the human race has a medical science competent to deal with this problem?” asked Tes. “According to the handbook, their science is practically nonexistent; they’re still in the age of superstition. Now that I think of it, I once read a story that was supposed to take place on Earth, and the men treated some member of our own race on the assumption that he was an evil, supernatural being. Whoever wrote the story must have had access to information about the planet.” Thrykar smiled for the first time in hours as he answered.

  “Probably the same information used by whoever compiled the Earth digest in this handbook. Tes, my dear, can’t you see that whoever investigated this world couldn’t have stirred a mile from the spot he landed—and must have landed in a very primitive spot. He made no mention of electrical apparatus, metallurgical development, aircraft—all the things we’ve seen since we got here. Mankind must be in the age of scientific development. That investigator was criminally lax. If it weren’t for the letter of the law, I’d reveal myself to a human being right now.

  “All sciences tend to progress in relation to each other; and I don’t believe that a race capable of creating the flying machine we saw two days ago would be lacking in the medical skill to treat the case we have here. We will figure out a means to get this being into the hands of its own people again, and that will solve the problem. We should be able to get away some time tonight.”

  Tes felt a great weight roll from her mind. There seemed little doubt that the program her husband had outlined was practical.

  “Just how do you plan to approach a man, or group of them, carrying an injured member of their own race—a child, at that—and get away not only unharmed, but unobserved?” she asked, from curiosity rather than destructive criticism.

  “It should not be difficult. There are several dwelling places not far down the road. I can take the creature, place it in plain sight in front of one of them, then withdraw to a safe distance, and attract attention by throwing stones or starting a fire or something of that sort. It must be dark enough by now; we’ll go up right away, and if it isn’t we can wait a little while.”

  * * *

  It was. It was also raining, though not heavily; the boy’s prediction of the morning had been fulfilled. Tes maneuvered the little ship as close as possible to the quarry’s edge, while Thrykar once again transferred his burden across the short but unavoidable stretch of water. He pulled it out on dry, or comparatively dry, land, and signaled Tes to close the hatch and submerge. She was to wait for him just below the surface, ready to depart the moment he returned.

  That detail attended to, he turned, straightened up, and coiled and uncoiled his tentacles two or three times after the manner of a man flexing his muscles for a severe task. He realized that, in the transportation of a one-hundred-fifteen-pound body some three-quarters of a mile, he had taken on a job to which his strength might barely be equal; but the alterna
tive of bringing the ship closer to the town was unthinkable as yet. He bent over, picked Jimmy up, and started toward the road, keeping to the right side of the drive that led to the quarry.

  It was even harder than he had expected. His muscles were strained and sore from the unaccustomed exertion earlier in the day; and by the time he was halfway to the road he knew that some other means of transportation would have to be found. He let his supple body curve under its load, and gently eased his burden to the ground.

  Whether he had grown careless, or the rain had muffled the scuffling sound of approaching human feet, he was never sure; but he was unaware of the fact that he was not alone until the instant a beam of light lanced out of the darkness straight into his eyes, paralyzing him with astonishment and dismay.

  Jackie Wade had heard nothing, either; but that may be attributed to Thrykar’s unshod feet, the rain, and Jackie’s own preoccupation with the question of his brother’s whereabouts. He was not yet actually worried, though his parents were beginning to be. Once or twice before, one or the other of the boys had remained at a comrade’s home for supper. They were, however, supposed to telephone in such an event, and the rather stringent penalties imposed for failure to do so had made them both rather punctilious in that matter.

  Jackie had not told about his brother’s sore foot; he had simply offered, after supper, to go looking for him on the chance that he might be at the home of a friend who did not possess a telephone. He had no expectation that Jimmy would be at the quarry; he could think of no reason why he should be; but in passing the drive, he thought it would do no harm to look. Jimmy might have been there, and left some indication of the fact.

  He knew the way well enough to dispense with all but occasional blinks of the flashlight he was carrying; so he was almost on top of the dark mass in the drive before he saw it. When he did he stopped, and, without dreaming for a moment that it was more than a pile of brush or something of that sort, left, perhaps, by one of the other boys, turned the beam of his light on it.

  He didn’t even try to choke back the yell of astonishment and terror that rose to his lips. His gaze flickered over, accepted, and dismissed in one split second the body of his brother stretched on the wet ground; he stared for a long moment at the object bent over it.

  He saw a black, glittering wet body, wide and thick as his own at the upper end, and tapering downward; a dome-shaped head set on top of the torso without any intermediary neck; great, flat appendages, suggestive in the poor light of wings, spreading from the sides of the body; and a pair of great, staring, wide-set eyes that reflected the light of his flash as redly as do human optics.

  That was all he had time to see before Thrykar moved, and he saw none of that very clearly. The alien straightened his flexible body abruptly, at the same time rocking backward on his short legs away from Jimmy’s body; and the muscles in his sinewy, streamlined torso and abdomen did not share any part of the feebleness inherent in his slender tentacles. When he straightened, it was with a snap; he did not merely come erect, but leaped upward and backward out of the cone of light, with his great fins spread wide for all the assistance they could give. He completely cleared the enormous block of stone lying beside the drive, and the sound of his descent on the other side was drowned in Jackie’s second and still more heartfelt yell.

  For a moment Thrykar lay where he had fallen; then he recognized his surroundings, dark as it was. He was in the space he had used that afternoon for an operating theater; and with that realization he remembered the path among the rocks and bushes which he had used in carrying the boy to the ship. As silently as he could, he crept along it toward the water; but as yet he did not dare signal Tes.

  Behind him he heard the voice of the creature who had seen him. It seemed to be calling—“Jimmy! Jimmy! Wake up! What’s the matter!”—but Thrykar could not understand the words. What he did understand was the pound of running feet, diminishing along the drive and turning down the road toward the town. Instantly he rapped out an urgent signal to Tes, and abandoning caution made his way as rapidly as possible to the quarry’s edge. A faint glow a few feet away marked the hatch in the top of the hull, and he plunged into the water toward it. Thirty seconds later he was inside and at the control board, with the hatch sealed behind him; and without further preamble or delay, he sent the little ship swooping silently upward, into and through the dripping overcast, and out into the void away from Earth.

  * * *

  Jackie, questioned by his father while the doctor was at work, told the full truth to the best of his ability; and was in consequence sincerely grieved at the obvious doubt that greeted his tale. He honestly believed that the thing he had seen crouched over his brother’s body had been winged, and had departed by air. The doctor had already noted and commented on the wound in Jim’s throat, and the head of the Wade family had been moved to find out what he could about vampire bats. In consequence, he was doing his best to shake his younger son’s insistence on the fact that he had seen something at least as large as a man. He was not having much luck, and was beginning to lose his temper.

  Dr. Envers, entering silently at this stage and listening without comment for several seconds, gleaned the last fact, and was moved to interrupt.

  “What’s wrong with the lad’s story?” he asked. “I haven’t heard it myself, but he seems to be sure of what he’s saying. Also,” looking at the taut, almost tearful face of the boy sitting before him, “he’s a bit excited, Jim. I think you’d better let him get to bed, and thrash your question out tomorrow.”

  “I don’t believe his story, because it’s impossible,” replied Wade. “If you had heard it all, you’d agree with me. And I don’t like—”

  “It may, as you say, be impossible; but why pick on only one feature to criticize?” He glanced at the open encyclopedia indicated by Wade. “If you’re trying to blame Jimmy’s throat wound on a vampire bat, forget it. Any animal bite would be as badly infected as that toe, and that one looks as though it had received medical treatment. It’s practically healed; it was a clean puncture by something either surgically sterile, or so nearly so that it was unable to offer a serious threat to the boy’s health even in his present weak condition. I don’t know what made it, and I don’t care very much; it’s the least of his troubles.”

  “I told you so!” insisted Jackie. “It wasn’t one of your crazy little bats I saw. It was bigger than I am; it looked at me for a minute, and then flew away.”

  Envers put his hand on the youngster’s shoulder, and looked into his eyes for a moment. The face was flushed and the small body trembling with excitement and indignation.

  “All right, son,” said the doctor gently. “Remember, neither your father nor I have ever heard of such a thing as you describe, and it’s only human for him to try to make believe it was something he does know about. You forget it for now, and get some sleep; in the morning we’ll have a look to find out just what it might have been.”

  He watched Jackie’s face carefully as he spoke, and noted suddenly that a tiny lump, with a minute red dot at the center, was visible on his throat at almost the same point as Jimmy’s wound. He stopped talking for a moment to examine it more closely, and Wade stiffened in his chair as he saw the action. Envers, however, made no comment, and sent the boy up to bed without giving the father a chance to resume the argument. Then he sat in thought for several minutes, a half-smile on his face. Wade finally interrupted the silence.

  “What was that on Jackie’s neck?” he asked. “The same sort of thing that—”

  “It was not like the puncture in Jimmy’s throat,” replied the doctor wearily. “If you want a medical opinion, I’d say it was a mosquito bite. If you’re trying to connect it with whatever happened to the other boy, forget it; if Jackie knew anything unusual about it, he’d have told you. Remember, he’s been trying to put stuffing in a rather unusual story. I’d stop worrying about the whole thing, if I were you; Jimmy will be all right when we get these strep bugs
out of his system, and there hasn’t been anything wrong with his brother from the first. I know it’s perfectly possible to read something dramatic into a couple of insect bites—I read Dracula in my youth, too—but if you start reading it back to me I’m quitting. You’re an educated man, Jim, and I only forgive this mental wandering because I know you’ve had a perfectly justifiable worry about Jimmy.”

  “But what did Jackie see?”

  “Again I can offer only a medical opinion; and that is—nothing. It was dark, and he has a normal imagination, which can be pretty colorful in a child.”

  “But he was so insistent—”

  The doctor smiled: “You were getting pretty positive yourself when I walked in, Jim. There’s something in human nature that thrives on opposition. I think you’d better follow the prescription I gave for Jackie, and get to bed. You needn’t worry about either of them, now.” Envers rose to go, and held out his hand. Wade looked doubtful for a moment, then laughed suddenly, got to his feet, shook hands, and went for the doctor’s coat.

  * * *

  Like Wade, Tes had a few nagging worries. As Thrykar turned away from the controls, satisfied that the ship was following the radial beam emanating from the broadcaster circling Sol, she voiced them.

  “What can you possibly do about that human being who saw you?” she asked. “We lived for three Earth days keyed up to a most unpleasant pitch of excitement, simply because of a law which forbade our making ourselves known to the natives of that planet. Now, when you’ve done exactly that, you don’t seem bothered at all. Are you expecting the creature to pass us off as supernatural visitants, as they are supposed to have accounted for the original surveyors?”