First of all, there was the bug-eyed monster. The thing was green and had two snapping claws, either one of which could have broken the ship in two like a spyrogyra straw. Its eyes were black and globular, on the ends of short columns, and its long feelers were as thick through as a plant-bole. It passed in a kicking fury of motion, however, never noticing the ship at all.
“Is that—a sample of the kind of life we can expect in the next world?” Lavon whispered. Nobody answered, for the very good reason that nobody knew.
After a while, Lavon risked moving the ship forward against the current, which was slow but heavy. Enormous writhing worms, far bigger than the nematodes of home, whipped past them. One struck the hull a heavy blow, then thrashed on obliviously.
“They don’t notice us,” Shar said. “We’re too small. Lavon, the ancients warned us of the immensity of space, but even when you see it, it’s impossible to grasp. And all those stars—can they mean what I think they mean? It’s beyond thought, beyond belief!”
“The bottom’s sloping,” Lavon said, looking ahead intently. “The walls of the canyon are retreating, and the water’s becoming rather silty. Let the stars wait, Shar; we’re coming toward the entrance of our new world.”
Shar subsided moodily. His vision of space had disturbed him, perhaps seriously. He took little notice of the great thing that was happening, but instead huddled worriedly over his own expanding speculations. Lavon felt the old gap between their two minds widening once more.
Now the bottom was tilting upward again. Lavon had no experience with delta-formation, for no rivulets left his own world, and the phenomenon worried him. But his worries were swept away in wonder as the ship topped the rise and nosed over.
Ahead, the bottom sloped away again, indefinitely, into glimmering depths. A proper sky was over them once more, and Lavon could see small rafts of plankton floating placidly beneath it. Almost at once, too, he saw several of the smaller kinds of protos, a few of which were already approaching the ship—
Then the girl came darting out of the depths, her features blurred and distorted with distance and terror. At first she did not seem to see the ship at all. She came twisting and turning lithely through the water, obviously hoping only to throw herself over the mound of the delta and into the savage streamlet beyond.
Lavon was stunned. Not that there were men here— he had hoped for that, had even known somehow that men were everywhere in the universe—but at the girl’s single-minded flight toward suicide.
“What—”
Then a dim buzzing began to grow in his ears, and he understood.
“Shar! Than! Stravol!” he bawled. “Break out crossbows and spears! Knock out all the windows!” He lifted a foot and kicked through the big bull’s-eye port in front of him. Someone thrust a crossbow into his hand.
“Eh? What’s happening?” Shar blurted.
“Eaters!”
The cry went through the ship like a galvanic shock. The rotifers back in Lavon’s own world were virtually extinct, but everyone knew thoroughly the grim history of the long battle man and proto had waged against them.
The girl spotted the ship suddenly and paused, obviously stricken with despair at the sight of the new monster. She drifted with her own momentum, her eyes alternately fixed upon the ship and jerking back over her shoulder, toward where the buzzing snarled louder and louder in the dimness.
“Don’t stop!” Lavon shouted. “This way, this way! We’re friends! We’ll help!”
Three great semi-transparent trumpets of smooth flesh bored over the rise, the many thick cilia of their coronas whirring greedily. Dicrans—the most predacious of the entire tribe of Eaters. They were quarreling thickly among themselves as they moved, with the few blurred, pre-symbolic noises which made up their “language.”
Carefully, Lavon wound the crossbow, brought it to his shoulder, and fired. The bolt sang away through the water. It lost momentum rapidly, and was caught by a stray current which brought it closer to the girl than to the Eater at which Lavon had aimed.
He bit his lip, lowered the weapon, wound it up again. It did not pay to underestimate the range; he would have to wait until he could fire with effect. Another bolt, cutting through the water from a side port, made him issue orders to cease firing.
The sudden irruption of the rotifers decided the girl. The motionless wooden monster was strange to her, but it had not yet menaced her—and she must have known what it would be like to have three Dicrans over her, each trying to grab away from the others the largest share. She threw herself toward the bull’s-eye port. The three Eaters screamed with fury and greed and bored in after her.
She probably would not have made it, had not the dull vision of the lead Dicran made out the wooden shape of the ship at the last instant. It backed off, buzzing, and the other two sheered away to avoid colliding with it. After that they had another argument, though they could hardly have formulated what it was that they were fighting about. They were incapable of saying anything much more complicated than the equivalent of “Yaah,” “Drop dead,” and “You’re another.”
While they were still snarling at each other, Lavon pierced the nearest one all the way through with an arbalesk bolt. It disintegrated promptly—rotifers are delicately organized creatures despite their ferocity—and the surviving two were at once involved in a lethal battle over the remains.
“Than, take a party out and spear me those two Eaters while they’re still fighting,” Lavon ordered. “Don’t forget to destroy their eggs, too. I can see that this world needs a little taming.”
The girl shot through the port and brought up against the far wall of the cabin, flailing in terror. Lavon tried to approach her, but from somewhere she produced a flake of stonewort chipped to a nasty point. Since she was naked, it was hard to tell where she had been hiding it, but its purpose was plain. Lavon retreated and sat down on the stool before his control board, waiting while she took in the cabin, Lavon, Shar, the other pilots, the senescent Para.
At last she said: “Are—you—the gods—from beyond the sky?”
“We’re from beyond the sky, all right,” Lavon said. “But we’re not gods. We’re human beings, just like you. Are there many humans here?”
The girl seemed to assess the situation very rapidly, savage though she was. Lavon had the odd and impossible impression that he should recognize her: a tall, deceptively relaxed, tawny young woman, someone from another world, but still ...
She tucked the knife back into her bright, matted hair— aha, Lavon thought confusedly, that’s a trick I may need to remember—and shook her head.
“We are few. The Eaters are everywhere. Soon they will have the last of us.”
Her fatalism was so complete that she actually did not seem to care.
“And you’ve never co-operated against them? Or asked the protos to help?”
“The protos?” She shrugged. “They are as helpless as we are against the Eaters. We have no weapons which kill at a distance, like yours. And it is too late now for such weapons to do any good. We are too few, the Eaters too many.”
Lavon shook his head emphatically. “You’ve had one weapon that counts, all along. Against it, numbers mean nothing. We’ll show you how we’ve used it. You may be able to use it even better than we did, once you’ve given it a try.”
The girl shrugged again. “We have dreamed of such a weapon now and then, but never found it. I do not think that what you say is true. What is this weapon?”
“Brains,” Lavon said. “Not just one brain, but brains. Working together. Co-operation.”
“Lavon speaks the truth,” a weak voice said from the deck.
The Para stirred feebly. The girl watched it with wide eyes. The sound of the Para using human speech seemed to impress her more than the ship itself, or anything else it contained.
“The Eaters can be conquered,” the thin, burring voice said. “The protos will help, as they helped in the world from which we came. The protos
fought this flight through space, and deprived Man of his records; but Man made the trip without the records. The protos will never oppose Man again. I have already spoken to the protos of this world, and have told them that what Man can dream, Man can do, whether the protos wish it or not.
“Shar, your metal records are with you. They were hidden in the ship. My brothers will lead you to them.
“This organism dies now. It dies in confidence of knowledge, as an intelligent creature dies. Man has taught us this. There is nothing that knowledge ... cannot do. With it, men ... have crossed ... have crossed space ...”
The voice whispered away. The shining slipper did not change, but something about it was gone. Lavon looked at the girl; their eyes met. He felt an unaccountable warmth.
“We have crossed space,” Lavon repeated softly.
Shar’s voice came to him across a great distance. The young-old man was whispering: “But—have we?”
Lavon was looking at the girl. He had no answer for Shar’s question. It did not seem to be important.
Tomb Tapper, by James Blish
The distant glare of the atomic explosion had already faded from the sky as McDonough's car whirred away from the blacked-out town of Port Jervis and turned north. He was making fifty m.p.h. on U.S. Route 209 using no lights but his parkers, and if a deer should bolt across the road ahead of him he would never see it until the impact. It was hard enough to see the road.
But he was thinking, not for the first time, of the old joke about the man who tapped train wheels.
He had been doing it, so the story ran, for thirty years. On every working day he would go up and down both sides of every locomotive that pulled into the yards and hit the wheels with a hammer: first the drivers, then the trucks. Each time, he would cock his head, as though listening for something in the sound. On the day of his retirement, he was given a magnificent dinner, as befitted a man with long seniority in the Brotherhood of Railway Trainmen—and somebody stopped to ask him what he had been tapping for all those years.
He had cocked his head as though listening for something, but evidently nothing came. "I don't know," he said.
That's me, McDonough thought. I tap tombs, not trains. But what am I listening for?
The speedometer said he was close to the turnoff for the airport, and he pulled the dimmers on. There it was. There was at first nothing to be seen, as the headlights swept along the dirt road, but a wall of darkness deep as all night, faintly edged at the east by the low domed hills of the Neversink Valley. Then another pair of lights snapped on behind him, on the main highway, and came jolting after McDonough's car, clear and sharp in the dust clouds he had raised.
He swung the car to a stop beside the airport fence and killed the lights; the other car followed. In the renewed blackness the faint traces of dawn on the hills were wiped out, as though the whole universe had been set back an hour. Then the yellow eye of a flashlight opened in the window of the other car and stared into his face.
He opened the door. "Martinson?" he said tentatively.
"Right here," the adjutant's voice said. The flashlight's oval spoor swung to the ground. "Anybody else with you?"
"No. You?"
"No. Go ahead and get your equipment out. I'll open up the shack."
The oval spot of light bobbed across the parking area and came to uneasy rest on the combination padlock which held the door of the operations shack secure. McDonough flipped the dome light of his car on long enough to locate the canvas sling which held the components of his electroencephalograph, and eased the sling out on to the sand.
He had just slammed the car door and taken up the burden when little chinks of light sprang into being in the blind windows of the shack. At the same time, cars came droning out on to the field from the opposite side, four of them, each with its wide-spaced unblinking slits of paired parking lights, and ranked themselves on either side of the landing strip. It would be dawn before long, but if the planes were ready to go before dawn, the cars could light the strip with their brights.
We're fast, McDonough thought, with brief pride. Even the Air Force thinks the Civil Air Patrol is just a bunch of amateurs, but we can put a mission in the air ahead of any other C.A.P. squadron in this county. We can scramble.
He was getting his night vision back now, and a quick glance showed him that the windsock was flowing straight out above the black, silent hangar against the pearly false dawn. Aloft, the stars were paling without any cloud-dimming, or even much twinkling. The wind was steady north up the valley; ideal flying weather.
Small lumpy figures were running across the field from the parked cars towards the shack. The squadron was scrambling.
"Mac!" Martinson shouted from inside the shack. "Where are you? Get your junk in here and get started!"
McDonough slipped inside the door, and swung his EEG components on to the chart table. Light was pouring into the briefing room from the tiny office, dazzling after the long darkness. In the briefing room the radio blinked a tiny red eye, but the squadron's communications officer hadn't yet arrived to answer it. In the office, Martinson's voice rumbled softly, urgently, and the phone gave him back thin unintelligible noises, like an unteachable parakeet.
Then, suddenly, the adjutant appeared at the office door and peered at McDonough. "What are you waiting for?" he said. "Get that mind reader of yours into the Cub on the double."
"What's wrong with the Aeronica? It's faster."
"Water in the gas; she ices up. We'll have to drain the tank. This is a hell of a time to argue." Martinson jerked open the squealing door which opened into the hangar, his hand groping for the light switch. McDonough followed him, supporting his sling with both hands, his elbows together. Nothing is quite so concentratedly heavy as an electronics chassis with a transformer mounted on it, and four of them make a back-wrenching load.
The adjutant was already hauling the servicing platform across the concrete floor to the cowling of the Piper Cub. "Get your stuff set," he said. "I'll fuel her up and check the oil."
"All right. Doesn't look like she needs much gas."
"Don't you ever stop talkin'? Let's move!"
McDonough lowered his load to the cold floor beside the plane's cabin, feeling a brief flash of resentment. In daily life, Martinson was a job printer who couldn't, and didn't, give orders to anybody, not even his wife. Well, those were usually the boys who let rank go to their heads, even in a volunteer outfit. He got to work.
· · · · ·
Voices sounded from the shack, and then Andy Persons, the commanding officer, came bounding over the sill, followed by two sleepy-eyed cadets. "What's up?" he shouted. "That you, Martinson?"
"It's me. One of you cadets, pass me up that can. Andy, get the doors open, hey? There's a Russki bomber down north of us, somewhere near Howells. Part of a flight that was making a run on Schenectady."
"Did they get it?"
"No, they overshot, way over—took out Kingston instead. Stewart Field hit them just as they turned to regroup, and knocked this baby down on the first pass. We're supposed to—"
The rest of the adjutant's reply was lost in a growing, echoing roar, as though they were all standing underneath a vast trestle over which all the railroad trains in the world were crossing at once. The 64-foot organ-reeds of jets were being blown in the night zenith above the field—another hunting pack, come from Stewart Field to avenge the hydrogen agony that had been Kingston.
His head still inside the plane's greenhouse, McDonough listened transfixed. Like most C.A.P. officers, he was too old to be a jet pilot, his reflexes too slow, his eyesight too far over the line, his belly muscles too soft to take the five-gravity turns; but now and then he thought about what it might be like to ride one of those flying blowtorches, cruising at six hundred miles an hour before a thin black wake of kerosene fumes, or being followed along the ground at top speed by the double wave-front of the "supersonic bang." It was a noble notion, almost as fine as that of piloti
ng the one-man Niagara of power that was a rocket fighter.
The noise grew until it seemed certain that the invisible jets were going to bullet directly through the hangar, and then dimmed gradually.
"The usual orders?" Persons shouted up from under the declining roar. "Find the plane, pump the live survivors, pick the corpses' brains? Who else is up?"
"Nobody," Martinson said, coming down from the ladder and hauling it clear of the plane. "Middletown squadron's de-activated; Montgomery hasn't got a plane; Newburgh hasn't got a field."
"Warwick has Group's L-16—"
"They snapped the undercarriage off it last week," Martinson said with gloomy satisfaction. "It's our baby, as usual. Mac, you got your ghoul-tools all set in there?"
"In a minute," McDonough said. He was already wearing the Walter goggles, pushed back up on his helmet, and the detector, amplifier and power pack of the EEG were secure in their frames on the platform behind the Cub's rear seat. The "hair net" —the flexible network of electrodes which he would jam on the head of any dead man whose head had survived the bomber crash—was connected to them and hung in its clips under the seat, the leads strung to avoid fouling the plane's exposed control cables. Nothing remained to do now but to secure the frequency analyzer, which was the heaviest of the units and had to be bolted down just forward of the rear joystick so that its weight would not shift in flight. If the apparatus didn't have to be collimated after every flight, it could be left in the plane—but it did, and that was that.
"O.K," he said, pulling his head out of the greenhouse. He was trembling slightly. These tomb-tapping expeditions were hard on the nerves. No matter how much training in the art of reading a dead mind you may have had, the actual experience is different, and cannot be duplicated from the long-stored corpses of the laboratory. The newly dead brain is an inferno, almost by definition.
"Good," Persons said. "Martinson, you'll pilot. Mac, keep on the air; we're going to refuel the Airoknocker and get it up by ten o'clock if we can. In any case we'll feed you any spottings we get from the Air Force as fast as they come in. Martinson, refuel at Montgomery if you have to; don't waste time coming back here. Got it?"
Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume One Page 281