The center ring of planets — fifteen of them — was not as worthwhile. There were three desert worlds (too much harsh silicon), seven barren rock worlds without atmosphere, and ignored by the hand of God (nothing grew there, nothing of value), four jungle planets (one with technicolored tyrannosauri), and one oddity.
They saved the oddity for last.
Before they would catalogue the inner round of worlds — there appeared to be nineteen, though one of those they credited as being a moon of a blue and white planet might have had an atmosphere of its own — they would set down and explore the oddity.
The oddity was a pale silver globe without ground feature and without atmosphere. It was a great ball of smooth tinfoil set in the black of space, a featureless plain without hump or depression, mountain or valley, stream or even rock formation. No grass and no clouds. In fact, nothing.
They stared down at the planet inching its way to greatness in the ports. It was as though they were settling toward a gigantic beachball.
“That’s impossible!” Dembois gasped.
“How can it be impossible, you clown? It’s there, isn’t it?” Kradter was spoiling for another fight. The pains in his stomach had not yet completely left him.
“Break!” Calk snapped. “Not this close to landfall, you two. And it may be impossible, but it’s there, and we have to check it out. No telling what a planet like that might have beneath the surface.”
Dembois cast a sharp glance at the potentiometer and the gauging devices for composition. “They say you’re wrong, Captain.”
Calk turned to the dials and studied them at length. They read zero. Not negative, as they read in space, but zero. But that, too, was impossible. The planet had to be made of something.
They looked at each other, and said nothing, for there was nothing to say. They had encountered a phenomenon. “Could it be contra–terrene?” The question hung unasked in the air of the control room. The only way to answer it was to test.
They shot out the missile when they were still ten miles above the smooth silver surface, and it sped down down down without hindrance of air or course correction. It hit, and exploded. But its indestructible plasteel devices continued to register on the Circe‘s banks, so it was apparent the planet was of matter, not the anti–matter that would disintegrate the rocket on contact.
They landed.
When the three men emerged from the ship, sliding down the landing ramp as children on a playground slide, they were encased in bulky pressure suits and clear bubble helmets. Each carried a triple–thread stun–rifle, for despite the utterly safe appearance of the planet, there was no question as to carrying weapons. Space was deep and angry at Man. Its creatures were varied and utterly unpredictable. So they never took a chance.
As they walked out across the featureless plain, their chest–consoles humming and gauging and studying, they moved in a tight triangle.
Calk, in the front, as the apex of the triangle, cast about warily, his triple–threader swinging in lazy arcs.
“Have you noticed the ground?” Kradter asked, his voice hushed and solemn as a man in a cathedral, transmitted over the intercom system.
Calk nodded, but Dembois put it into words.
“It’s spongey. Springy. Like the ‘giving’ floors back at SeekServ Central. What’s it made of?”
“I don’t know,” Calk answered, and that was the final word any of them said.
There was a shivering in the planet. A soft trembling, like a bowl of jelly. It shivered and pulsed and seemed to deepen as they stopped.
Then, through their intercoms, they heard a distinct crunch and clang, and as one they spun around. Half a mile behind them the Circe was trembling, tottering, falling, and then —
The planet swallowed the ship.
They screamed. Each of them, and the pitch was the same. The meaning behind the screams was the same. They were lost, stranded out here, somewhere out in the nowhere, with only the oxygen in their tanks to sustain them, and their transportation gone!
Then . . . they realized the greater danger. The planet was carnivorous!
They realized it too late.
Beneath their feet, the ground swelled, like a bubble bursting, and abruptly opened with a wet, smacking sound . . .
Their screams were cut short as they fell fell fell — and the silver, featureless, spongey ground closed without a break. Without an indication that a ship of space and three men had been there.
In the syrup. Gray and all–consuming. Heaving, tumbling, dragged deeper and deeper, thrust into the maw of a force without form. The allness was about them; they were being . . .
EATEN ALIVE!!
The gray substance held them in a rubbery grip. They could move but slightly. Gray and sparkling, coating their helmets. Breathing was clear, but seemed so oppressive. The planet of gray featurelessness was alive, the entire world was a creature, an entity, and they were in its gut. They turned over and over wishing knowing hoping not caring but knowing that this was all of it down to the bottom without end and without hope and hands out and legs out and their fingers spread and their eyes wide as their throats tensed and tore at the screams that rattled within their helmets . . .
Overhead, the Circe swam into view, was there a moment, no longer, and gone out out and out gone again in the silver nothingness that lived held would not release them goodbye.
The trembling was coming again. Suddenly. Then they felt the planet around them heaving, tremors starting low and roiling, spilling, sucking upward. They had no hope. In a few minutes the air must surely give out, for they had been down in the heart of this living world for eons, centuries, eternities, and when the air went, they would die. The pricklings at their skin told them the digestive fluids of the planet were even now trying to assimilate the fabric of the bulky pressure suits. But there was the heaving . . .
And they felt themselves rising, speeding as they rose, and the silver was growing lighter and lighter and with no warning they were
POP!
thrown up and out of the planet, like corks shooting to the surface of a lake, and they fell back to the sponged surface. They were free.
The planet trembled violently, agitated beyond belief. Like pebbles they were flipped and tossed and hurled and thrown, bouncing bouncing bouncing. The Circe emerged from the planet, two hundred feet away, lying on its side, being jostled and caromed as they were.
Without hesitation they scrambled madly for the ship, and threw themselves through the lock. Fighting the unending bouncing and jostling movement of the mad planet they got to the controls and the dampers went in and the fire chambers spurted —
The Circe blasted off without care of course, the men thanking God for their lives, thanking Providence for the inexplicable release from sure death.
Behind them, the silver planet settled slowly, and the trembling ceased. It was silent and solid once more.
Kradter was still sheet–white.
“We’ve got to get back into contact with Earth!”
Dembois’s voice quavered. “That thing is a horror! A menace! We’ve got to get Earth to burn it out of space!”
Calk’s laughter stopped them. They stared at him, for the first real signs of emotion were contorting the Captain’s face. His roars of mirth broke against the bulkheads and tinkled like dust motes about them. For a second they thought of hysteria and slapping him, but when Kradter took a step forward, Calk waved him away with a mirth– weakened hand.
Finally, he stopped, sucking in breath, and clutching his sides. “Oh, you two give me such a pain in the ass!” he laughed. Then his face went rigid again. His voice steadied and he looked at them. “Don’t you know even yet? Don’t you understand what’s happened?” They stared at him, uncomprehending.
“All the way out here,” he said, bitterness living in his words, “you’ve been te
lling me how great and wonderful man is. How he rules the universe, how it’s his job to show eetees the way, or destroy them. As though Man were the end–product of the life race, as though we were at the pinnacle of development. You never could have considered that there was a higher life–form than us.”
“What are you talking about,” Dembois snapped. “Are you crazy?”
Calk’s face was angry, really angry, as he said: “You asses! You conceited, self–important asses. Don’t you understand what I’m saying? Homo superior, ha! That’s the joke of the century. You fools, can’t you see . . .
“Man has just had the greatest insult of all thrown at him!
“That planet vomited us up!”
You know the world is going to end. There’s no question about it, no supposition, no ravings from a bushy–bearded fanatic that may prove false . . . this is the real thing, we all go splat a week from next Wednesday. What do you do? What if you were a young man who had never enjoyed the manifest pleasures of a woman’s body? What if you had been hidebound and stultified all your days, when you got wind of the coming Boom? What then? Why, perhaps you would follow a course of action similar to the hero of this little piece, in which I tried to say that everything is relative, and even dross, under the proper conditions, can be as good as gold. And you know, it’s indicative of our current Clipster Culture that very often the ones who would rob are the ones who get robbed, the fleecers get fleeced, and hyprocrisy counts for nothing when the chips are down. In other words, the love of a less than kindly creature can be the single most important possession in the universe, on
The Very Last Day of a Good Woman
Finally, he knew the world was going to end. It had grown in certainty with terrible slowness. His was not a perfect talent; but rather, a gem with many small flaws in it. Had he been able to see the future clearly, had he not been a partial clairvoyant, his life might not have come to what it had.
His hunger would not have been what it was.
Yet the brief, fogged glimpses were molded together, and he knew the Earth was about to end. By the same rude certainty that told him it was going to end, he knew it was not self–deception — it was not merely his death. It was the final, irrevocable finis of his world, with every life upon it. This he saw in a shattered fragment of clarity, and he knew it would come in two weeks, on a Thursday night.
His name was Arthur Fulbright, and he wanted a woman.
How strange or odd. To know the future. To know it in that most peculiar of fashions: not as a unified whole, as a superimposed something on the image of now, but in bits and snatches, in fits and starts. In humming, deliberate quicknesses (a truck will come around the corner in a moment) making him (Carry Back will win) almost a denizen of two worlds (the train will leave ten minutes early) he saw the future through a glass darkly (you will find your other cuff link in the medicine cabinet) and was hardly aware of what this power promised.
For years, a soft, brown shambling man all hummed words and gentle glances, living with his widowed mother in an eight room house set about with honeysuckle and sweet pea. For years, to work in a job of unidentifiable type and station; for years, returning to the house and the comforting pastel of Mother.
Years that held little change, little activity, little of note or importance. Yet good years, smooth years, and silent.
Then Mother had died. Sighing in the night, she had slowed down like a phonograph, like the old crank phonograph covered under a white sheet in the attic, and had died. Life had played its melody for her, and just as naturally, ended.
For Arthur it had meant changes, and most of all, it had meant emptiness.
Now no more the nights of sound sleep, the evenings of quiet discussion and backgammon or whist, the afternoons of lunch prepared in time for a return to the office, the mornings with cinammon toast and orange juice ready. Now it was a single lane highway, that he had to travel alone.
Learning to eat in restaurants, learning where the fresh linens were kept, sending his clothes out to be mended and cleaned.
And most of all, coming to realize in the six years since Mother’s death, that he could see the future once in a while. It was in no way alarming, nor even — after living with it so long — surprising. The word terrifying, in connection with his sight of the future, would never have occurred to him, had he not seen that night of flame and death, the end of the world.
But he did see it, and it made a difference.
Because now that he was about to die, now that he had two weeks and no more, he had to find a purpose. There had to be a reason to die without regret. Yet here he sat, in the high–backed wing chair in the darkened living room, with the empty eight room house around him, and there was no purpose. He had not considered his own demise; Mother’s going had been hard enough to reconcile, but he had known it would come some day (though the ramifications of her death had never dawned on him). His own death was something else.
“How can a man come to forty–four years old, and have nothing?” he asked himself. “How can it be?”
It was true, of course. He had nothing. No talent, no mark to leave on affairs, no wake, no purpose.
And with the tallying of his lacks, he came to the most important one of all. The one marking him as not yet a man, no matter what he thought. The lack of a woman. He was a virgin, he had never had a woman.
With two weeks left on Earth, Arthur Fulbright knew what he wanted, more than anything, more than fame or wealth or position. His desire for his last days on Earth was a simple one, an uncluttered one.
Arthur Fulbright wanted a woman.
There had been a little money. Mother had left over two thousand dollars in cash and savings bonds. He had been able to put away another two thousand in his own account. That made four thousand dollars, and it became very important, but not till later.
The idea of buying a woman came to him after many other considerations. The first attempt was with a young woman of his acquaintance, who worked as a stenotypist in the office, in the billing section.
“Jackie,” he asked her, having passed time on occasion, “would you — uh — how would you like to go to a — uh — show with me tonight . . . or something?”
She stared at him curiously, seeing a cipher; and having mentally relegated the evening to Scrabble with a girl friend, accepted.
That evening she doubled her fist and gave him such a blow beneath his rib cage, that his eyes watered and his side hurt for almost an hour.
The next day he avoided the girl with the blond, twirled pony–tail who was browsing in the HISTORICAL NOVELS section of the Public Library. He had had a glimpse often enough — of the future — to know what this one meant. She was married, despondent, and did not wear her ring through hostility of her husband. He saw himself in an unpleasant situation, involving the girl, the librarian, and the library guard. He avoided the library.
As the week wore through, as Arthur realized he had never developed the techniques other men used to snare girls, he knew his time was running out. As he walked the streets, late at night, passing few people, but still people who were soon to perish in a flaming death, he knew his time was slipping away with terrible swiftness.
Now it was no mere desire. Now it was a drive, an urge within him that consumed his thoughts, that motivated him as nothing else in life ever had. And he cursed Mother for her fine, old Southern ways, for her white flesh that had bound him in umbilical attention. Her never– demanding, always–pleasant ways, that had made it so simple to live on in that pastel world of strifeless, effortless complacency.
To die a–flaming with the rest of the world . . . empty.
The streets were chill, and the lampposts had wavering, unearthly halos about them. From far off came the sound of a car horn, lost in the darkness; and a truck, its diesel gut rumbling, shifted into gear as a stoplight changed, and coughed away. The pavement h
ad the sick pallor of rotting flesh, and the stars were lost in inkiness on a moonless night. He bunched himself tightly inside his topcoat, and bent into the vague, leaf–picking breeze slanting toward him. A dog somewhere howled briefly, and a door slammed on another block. Abruptly, he was ultra–sensitive to these sounds, and wanted to be part of them, inside with the love and humor of a home. But had he been a pariah, a criminal, a leper, he could not have been more alone. He reviled the inhumanity of his culture, that allowed men such as himself to mature without direction, without hope, without love.
At the intersection, halfway down the block, a girl emerged from shadows, her high heels tock tock tocking rhythmically on the sidewalk, then the street, as she stepped across, and went her way.
He was cutting across the lawn of a house, and converging on her from right angles before he realized what he was doing, what his intentions were. By then, his momentum had carried him.
Rape.
The word flowered in his mind like a hot–house flower, with blood– red petals, grew to monstrous proportions, and withered, black at the edges, even as he scooted briskly, head down and hands in coat pockets, in her direction.
Could he do it? Could he carry it off? She was young and beautiful, desirable, he knew. She would have to be. He would take her down on the grass, and she would not scream, but would be pliant and acquiescent. She had to be.
He raced ahead of where she would meet him, and he lay down on the moist, brown earth, within the cover of bushes, to wait for her. In the distance he could hear her heels counting off the steps till he was upon her.
Then, even as his desire ate at him, other pictures came. A twisted, half–naked body lying in the street, a mob of men screaming and brandishing a rope, a picture of Mother, her face ashen and transfigured with horror. He crammed his eyes shut, and pressed his cheek to the ground. It was the all–mother, consoling him. He was the child who had done wrong, and his need was great. The all–mother comforted him, directed him, caressed him with propriety and deep devotion. He lay there as the girl clacked past.
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