Falkner said: “There is nothing strange about me. Nothing different than any other man.”
“There must be,” insisted Warren. “You survived the virus. It hit you and you came out alive. There must be a reason for it.”
“You two,” said Falkner, “never even got it. There must be some reason for that, too.”
“We can’t be sure,” said Chaplain Barnes, speaking softly.
Warren rustled his notes angrily.
“We’ve covered it,” he said. “Covered everything that you can remember—unless you are holding back something that we should know.”
“Why should I hold back anything?” demanded Falkner.
“Childhood history,” said Warren. “The usual things. Measles, a slight attack of whooping cough, colds—afraid of the dark. Ordinary eating habits, normal acceptance of schools and social obligations. Everything as if it might be someone else. But there has to be an answer. Something that you did…”
“Or,” said Barnes, “even something that he thought.”
“Huh?” asked Warren.
“The ones who could tell us are out there on the slope,” said Barnes. “You and I, Warren, are stumbling along a path we are not equipped to travel. A medical man, a psychologist, even an alien psychologist, a statistician—any one of them would have had something to contribute. But they are dead. You and I are trying to do something we have no training for. We might have the answer right beneath our noses and we would not recognize it.”
“I know,” said Warren. “I know. We only do the best we can.”
“I have told you everything I can,” said Falkner, tensely. “Everything I know. I’ve told you things I would not tell under any other circumstances.”
“We know, lad,” said Barnes gently. “We know you have.”
“Somewhere,” persisted Warren, “somewhere in the life of Benjamin Falkner there is an answer—an answer to the thing that Man must know. Something that he has forgotten. Something that he has not told us, unintentionally. Or, more than likely, something that he has told us and we do not recognize.”
“Or,” said Barnes, “something that no one but a specialist could know. Some strange quirk in his body or his mind. Some tiny mutation that no one would suspect. Or even…Warren, you remember, you talked to me about a miracle.”
“I’m tired of it,” Falkner told them. “For three days now you have gone over me, pawed me, questioned me, dissected every thought…”
“Let’s go over that last part again,” said Warren wearily. “When you were lost.”
“We’ve gone over it,” said Falkner, “a hundred times already.”
“Once again,” said Warren. “Just once again. You were standing there, on the path, you say, when you heard the footsteps coming up the path.”
“Not footsteps,” said Falkner. “At first I didn’t know they were footsteps. It was just a sound.”
“And it terrified you?”
“It terrified me.”
“Why?”
“Well, the dark and being lost and …”
“You’d been thinking about the natives?”
“Well, yes, off and on.”
“More than off and on?”
“More than off and on,” Falkner admitted. “All the time, maybe. Ever since I realized I was lost, perhaps. In the back of my mind.”
“Finally you realized they were footsteps?”
“No. I didn’t know what they were until I saw the native.”
“Just one native?”
“Just one. An old one. His coat was all gray and he had a scar across his face. You could see the jagged white line.”
“You’re sure about that scar?”
“Yes.”
“Sure about his being old?”
“He looked old. He was all gray. He walked slowly and he had a limp.”
“And you weren’t afraid?”
“Yes, afraid, of course. But not as afraid as I would have expected.”
“You would have killed him if you could?”
“No, I wouldn’t have killed him.”
“Not even to save your life?”
“Oh, sure. But I didn’t think of that. I just…well, I just didn’t want to tangle with him, that is all.”
“You got a good look at him?”
“Yes, a good look. He passed me no farther away than you are now.”
“You would recognize him again if you saw him?”
“I did recognize…”
Falkner stopped, befuddled.
“Just a minute,” he said. “Just a minute now.”
He put up his hand and rubbed hard against his forehead. His eyes suddenly had a stricken look.
“I did see him again,” he said. “I recognized him. I know it was the same one.”
Warren burst out angrily: “Why didn’t you tell…”
But Barnes rushed in and headed him off:
“You saw him again. When?”
“In my tent. When I was sick. I opened my eyes and he was there in front of me.”
“Just standing there?”
“Standing there and looking at me. Like he was going to swallow me with those big yellow eyes of his. Then he…then he…”
They waited for him to remember.
“I was sick,” said Falkner. “Out of my head, maybe. Not all there. I can’t be sure. But it seemed that he stretched out his hands, his paws rather—that he stretched them out and touched me, one paw on each side of my head.”
“Touched you? Actually, physically touched you?”
“Gently,” said Falkner. “Ever so gently. Just for an instant. Then I went to sleep.”
“We’re ahead of our story,” Warren said impatiently. “Let’s go back to the trail. You saw the native—”
“We’ve been over that before,” said Falkner bitterly.
“We’ll try it once again,” Warren told him. “You say the native passed quite close to you when he went by. You mean that he stepped out of the path and circled past you…”
“No,” said Falkner, “I don’t mean that at all. I was the one who stepped out of the path.”
You must maintain human dignity, the manual said. Above all else, human dignity and human prestige must be upheld. Kindness, yes. And helpfulness. And even brotherhood. But dignity was ahead of all.
And too often human dignity was human arrogance.
Human dignity did not allow you to step out of the path. It made the other thing step out and go around you. By inference, human dignity automatically assigned all other life to an inferior position.
“Mr. Barnes,” said Warren, “it was the laying on of hands.”
The man on the cot rolled his head on the pillow and looked at Warren, almost as if he were surprised to find him there. The thin lips worked in the pallid face and the words were weak and very slow in coming.
“Yes, Warren, it was the laying on of hands. A power these creatures have. Some Christ-like power that no human has.”
“But that was a divine power.”
“No, Warren,” said the chaplain, “not necessarily. It wouldn’t have to be. It might be a very real, a very human power, that goes with mental or spiritual perfection.”
Warren hunched forward on his stool. “I can’t believe it,” he said. “I simply can’t. Not those owl-eyed things.”
He looked up and glanced at the chaplain. Barnes’ face had flushed with sudden fever and his breath was fluttery and shallow. His eyes were closed and he looked like a man already dead.
There had been that report by the third expedition’s psychologist. It had said dignity and an exact code of honor and a rather primitive protocol. And that, of course, would fit.
But Man, intent upon his own dignity and his own prestige, had never accorded anyone else any dignity. He had been willing to be kind if his kindness were appropriately appreciated. He stood ready to help if his help were allowed to stand as a testament to his superiority. And here on Landro he had scarcely both
ered to be either kind or helpful, never dreaming for a moment that the little owl-eyed native was anything other than a stone age creature that was a pest and nuisance and not to be taken too seriously even when he turned out, at times, to be something of a menace.
Until one day a frightened kid had stepped out of a path and let a native by.
“Courtesy,” said Warren. “That’s the answer: courtesy and the laying on of hands.”
He got up from the stool and walked out of the tent and met Falkner coming in.
“How is he?” Falkner asked.
Warren shook his head. “Just like the others. It was late in coming, but it’s just as bad.”
“Two of us,” said Falkner. “Two of us left out of twenty-six.”
“Not two,” Warren told him. “Just one. Just you.”
“But, sir, you’re all…”
Warren shook his head.
“I have a headache,” he said. “I’m beginning to sweat a little. My legs are wobbly.”
“Maybe…”
“I’ve seen it too many times,” said Warren, “to kid myself about it.”
He reached out a hand, grasped the canvas and steadied himself.
“I didn’t have a chance,” he said. “I stepped out of no paths.”
NIGHTMARE BROTHER
ALAN E. NOURSE
★ ★
This is not a comforting story to read. The vast gulfs of space in which the Earth swims are alien to Man. They may well hold dangers too great for any human being to overcome, and even if they do not, the very difference between what is there and what is here will be terrifying to the first travelers who land on worlds beyond any present imagining. One thing seems fairly certain—no matter how many other worlds there may be, and no matter how many of them human beings manage to reach, they will all be different from the Earth and from each other. The men who go to them will be aware of these differences, or at least of some of them, and that awareness will be, at the start, a panicky one.
Every living person has experienced terror in his own life. The most familiar example is in nightmares, which are made up of bits and pieces of the real world and real life, all jumbled and twisted and warped by the sleeping mind into shapes of fear. What is so frightening about nightmares is exactly what the explorers of worlds in outer space may also experience—the sense of the differences and the sense of the dangers.
The first spacemen will have to have a special kind of strength. Athletes’ muscles and co-ordination, swiftness of body and mind will not be enough, even when supplemented by power of endurance and the willingness to accept pain, loneliness, monotony and the knowledge that they may never come home again. The first spacemen will need, also, the inner strength that comes from the mind. They will need every scrap of will power, every pattern of discipline over their own minds and thoughts which the human race can produce. A single member of an expedition whose mind is not as trained and ready as his body may bring disaster to himself and his companions.
How are the people who select the members of the first space explorations going to locate men with the mental strength to stand up under the experience? It will not be easy—much more is known about the human body than about the human mind. In this story, Mr. Nourse proposes an answer to this problem of selection in terms of a test stranger than any ever given in a college or laboratory. It is a story written with great skill. The fears through which its central character passes are fears that everybody has known sometime in one form or another. What happens when a man is subjected to these fears—his own fears and those of everybody else as well—horrifyingly intensified?
Only the men and women who can react as Robert Cox does in this story have much hope of surviving the first phase of space exploration.
★ ★
He was walking down a tunnel.
At first it didn’t even occur to him to wonder why he was walking down the tunnel, nor how he had got there, nor just what tunnel it was. He was walking quickly, with short, even steps, and it seemed, suddenly, as if he had been walking for hours.
It wasn’t the darkness that bothered him at first. The tunnel wasn’t bright, but it was quite light enough, for the walls glowed faintly with a bluish luminescence. Ahead of him the glowing walls stretched as far as he could see. The tunnel was about ten feet wide, and ten feet high, with smooth Walls arching into a perfectly smooth curve over his head. Under his feet the floor seemed cushiony, yielding slightly to the pressure as he walked, and giving off a soft, muffled sound in perfect measure to his tread. It was a pleasant, soothing sound, and he hardly thought to wonder at all just what he was doing. It was quite obvious, after all. As simple as simple could be. He was walking down a tunnel.
But then little tendrils of caution and question crept into his mind, and a puzzled frown crossed his quiet face. He stopped abruptly, standing stock-still in the tunnel as he squinted at the glowing walls in growing confusion. What a very odd place to be, he thought. A tunnel! He glanced about him, and cocked his head, listening for a long moment, until the stark silence of the place chilled him, forced him to sniff audibly, and scratch his head, and turn around.
My name is Robert Cox, he thought, and I am walking down a tunnel. He pondered for a moment, trying to remember. How long had he been walking? An horn:? He shook his head. It must have been longer than that. Oddly, he couldn’t remember when he had started walking. How had he got here? What had he been doing before he came into the tunnel? A chill of alarm crept up his spine as his mind groped. What had happened to his memory? Little doors in his mind seemed to snap quickly shut even as his memory approached them. Ridiculous, he thought, to be walking down a tunnel without even knowing where it was leading—
He peered forward in the silence. Quite suddenly he realized that he was absolutely alone. There was not a sound around him, not a stir, no sign of another human being, not even a flicker of life of any kind. The chill deepened, and he walked cautiously over to one wall, tapped it with his knuckles. Only a dull knock. For the merest fraction of a second an alarm rang in his mind, a cold, sharp intimation of deadly danger. He chuckled, uneasily. There was really no reason to be alarmed. A tunnel had to have an end, somewhere.
And then he heard the sound, and stared wide-eyed down the tunnel. It came to his ears very faintly, at first, the most curious sort of airy whistling, like a shrill pipe in the distance. It cut through the stillness cleanly, like a razor, leaving a strange tingle of dread in his mind. He listened, hardly breathing. Was the light growing fainter? Or were his eyes not behaving? He blinked, and sensed the light dimming even as the whistling sound grew louder and nearer, mingling with another, deeper sound. A throbbing roar came to his ears, overpowering the shrillness of the whistle, and then he saw the light, far down the tunnel, a single, round, yellow light, directly in the center of the passage, growing larger and larger as the roar intensified. A sharp wind suddenly stirred his dark hair as he stared fascinated by the yellow light bearing down on him. In a horrible flash, an image crossed his mind—the image of a man trapped on a railroad track as a dark engine approached with whistle screaming, bearing down like some hideous monster out of the night.
A cry broke from the man’s lips. It was a train! Roaring down the tunnel toward him, it was moving like a demon, with no tracks, screeching its warning as it came, with the fight growing brighter and brighter, blinding him. Relentlessly it came, filling the entire tunnel from side to side, hissing smoke and fire and steam from its valves, its whistle shrieking—
With a scream of sheer terror, Cox threw himself face down on the floor, trying frantically to burrow deeper into the soft mat of the tunnel floor, closing his mind down, blanking out everything but horrible, blinding fear. The light blazed to floodlight brilliance, and with a fearful rush of wind the roar rose to a sudden thundering bellow over his head. Then it gave way to the loud, metallic clak-clak-clak of steel wheels on steel rails beside his ears, and faded slowly into the distance behind him.
Trembling uncontrollably in every muscle, Cox stirred, trying to rise to his knees, groping for control of his mind. His eyes were closed tightly, and suddenly the floor was no longer soft matting, but a gritty stuff that seemed to run through his fingers.
He opened his eyes with a start, and a little cry came to his lips. The tunnel was gone. He was standing ankle-deep in the steaming sand of a vast, yellow desert, with a brassy sun beating down from a purple sky. He blinked, unbelieving, at the yellow dunes, and a twisted Joshua tree blinked back at him not ten feet away.
Two men and a girl stood in the room, watching the motionless body of the dark-haired man sprawled on the bed. The late afternoon sun came in the window, throwing bright yellow panels across the white bedspread, but the man lay quite still, his pale eyes wide open and glassy, oblivious to anything in the room. His face was deathly pale.
The girl gasped. “I think he’s stopped breathing,” she whispered.
The taller of the men, dressed in white, took her by the shoulder, gently turning her face away. “He’s still breathing,” he reassured her. “You shouldn’t be here, Mary. You should go home, try to get some rest. He’ll be all right.”
The other man snorted, his pink face flushed with anger. “He shouldn’t be here either,” he hissed, jerking a thumb at the man on the bed. “I tell you, Paul, Robert Cox is not the man. I don’t care what you say. He’ll never get through.”
Dr. Paul Schiml drew a deep breath, turning to face the other. “If Cox can’t get through, there isn’t a man in the Hoffman Medical Center who can—or ever will. You know that.”
“I know that there were fifty others in the same training program who were better fitted for this than Bob Cox!”
“That’s not true.” Dr. Schiml’s voice was sharp in the still room. “Reaction time, ingenuity, opportunism—not one in the group could hold a candle to Bob.” He stared down at the red-faced man, his eyes glittering angrily. “Admit it, Connover. You’re not worried for Bob Cox’s sake. You’re worried for your own neck. You’ve been afraid since the start, since the first ships came back to Earth, because you’ve been in charge of a program you don’t believe in, and you’re afraid of what will happen if Bob Cox doesn’t come through. It wouldn’t matter who was on that bed—you’d still be afraid.” He sniffed in disgust. “Well, you needn’t worry. Bob Cox will do it, if anyone can. He has to.”
Space, Space, Space - Stories about the Time when Men will be Adventuring to the Stars Page 16