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.
<
~ * ~
MATURITY .... By Theodore Sturgeon
Dr. Margaretta Wenzell, she of the smooth face and wise eyes and flowing dark hair, and the raft of letters after her name in the medical “Who’s Who,” allowed herself to be called “Peg” only by her equals, of whom there were few. Her superiors did not, and her inferiors dared not. And yet Dr. Wenzell was not a forbidding person in any way. She had fourteen months to go to get to her thirtieth birthday; her figure hadn’t changed since she was seventeen, and her face, while hardly suited for a magazine cover, was a natural for a salon study. She maintained her careful distance from most people for two reasons. One was that, as a gland specialist, she had to make a fetish of objectivity; and the other was the fact that only by a consistent attitude of impersonality could she keep her personal charm from being a drawback to her work. Her work meant more to her than anything else in life, and she saw to it that her life stayed that way.
And yet the boy striding beside her called her “Peg.” He had since he met her. He was neither her superior nor her inferior, and he was certainly not her equal. These subconscious divisions of Dr. Wenzell’s’ had nothing to do with age or social position. Her standards were her own, and since Robin English could not be judged by any of them—or by anyone else’s standards, for that matter—she had made no protest beyond a lift of the eyebrow. It couldn’t be important.
He held her arm as they crossed the rainy street. He always did that, and he was one of the half-dozen men she had met in her life who did it unconsciously and invariably.
“There’s a taxi!” she said.
He grinned. “So it is. Let’s take the subway.”
“Oh, Robin!”
“It’s only temporary. Why, I’ve almost finished that operetta, and any day now I’ll get the patent on that power brake of mine, and—” He smiled down at her. His face was round and ruddy, and it hadn’t quite enough chin, and Peg thought it was a delightful face. She wondered if it knew how to look angry or—purposeful.
“I know,” she said. “I know. And you’ll suddenly have bushels of money, and you won’t have to worry about taxis—”
“I don’t worry about ‘em anyhow. Maybe such things’ll bother me when your boy friend gets through with me.”
“They will, and don’t call him my boy friend.”
“Sorry,” he said casually.
They went down the steps at the subway terminal. Sorry. Robin could always dismiss things with that laconic expression. And he could. Whether he was sorry or not wasn’t important, somehow; it was the way he said it. It reduced the thing he was sorry for to so little value that it wasn’t worth being sorry about.
Peg stood watching him as he swung up to the change booth. He walked easily, with an incredible grace. As graceful as a cat, but not at all like a cat. It was like the way he thought—as well as a human being, but not like a human being. She watched the way the light fell on his strange, planeless, open face, and his tousled head of sandy horsehair. He annoyed her ever so much, and she thought that it was probably because she liked him.
He stood aside to let her through the turnstile, smiling at her and whistling a snatch of a Bach fugue through his teeth. That wa
s another thing. Robin played competent piano and absolutely knocked-out trumpet; but he never played the classics. He never whistled anything else.
~ * ~
There was no train in. They strolled up the platform slowly. Peg couldn’t keep her eyes off Robin’s face. His sensitive nostrils dilated, and she had the odd idea that he was smelling a sound—the echoing shuffle of feet and machinery in the quiet where there should be no quiet. As they passed the massive beam-and-coil-spring bumper at the fold of the track, Robin paused, his eyes flicking over it, gauging its strength, judging its materials. It had never occurred to her to look at such a thing before. “What does that matter to you, Robin?”
He pointed. “First it knocks the train pigeontoed. Then she’ll nose into the beam there and the springs behind it will take up the shock. Now why do they use coils?”
“Why not?”
“Leaf springs would absorb the collision energy between the leaves, in friction. Coil springs store the energy and throw it right back… oh! I see. They took for granted when they designed it that the brakes would be set. Big as those springs are, they’re not going to shove the whole train back. And then, the play between the car couplings would—”
“But Robin—what does it matter? To you, I mean. No,” she said quickly as a thick little furrow appeared and disappeared between his eyes. “I’m not saying you shouldn’t be interested. I’m just wondering exactly what it is about such devices that fascinates you so.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “The… the integration, I suppose. The thought that went into it. The importance of the crash barrier to Mrs. Scholtz’s stew and Sadie’s date, and which ferry Tony catches, and all the other happenings that can happen to the cattle and gods that use the subways.”
Peg laughed delightedly. “And do you think about all of the meanings to all of the people of all of the things you see?”
“I don’t have to think of them. They’re there, right in front of me. Surely you can see homemade borscht and a good night kiss and thousands of other little, important things, all wrapped up in those big helical springs?”
“I have to think about it. But I do see them.” She laughed again.
“What do you think about when you listen to Bach?”
He looked at her quickly. “Did I say I listened to Bach?”
“My Gestapo told me.” She looked at him with puzzlement. He wasn’t smiling. “You whistle it,” she explained.
“Do I? Well, all right then. What do I think of? Architecture, I think. And the complete polish of it. The way old J. S. burnished every note, and the careful matching of all those harmonic voices. And… and—”
“And what?”
He laughed, a burst of it, a compelling radiation which left little pieces of itself as smiles on the faces of the people around them. “And the sweating choirboys who had to pump the organ when he composed. How they must have hated him!”
~ * ~
A train came groaning into the station and stopped, snicking its doors open. “Watch them,” said Robin, his quick eyes taking inventory of the people who jostled each other out of the train. Not one in fifty is seeing anything. No one knows how far apart these pillars are, or the way all these rivets are set, or the cracks in the concrete under their feet. They’re all looking at things separated from them in space and time—the offices they have left, the homes they’re going to, the people they will see. Hardly any of them are consciously here, now. They’re all ghosts, and we’re a couple of Peeping Toms.”
“Robin, Robin, you’re such a Child!”
“To you, of course. You’re older than I am.”
“Four days.” It was a great joke between them.
“Four thousand years,” he said soberly. They found a seat. “And” I’m not a child. I’m a hyper-thymus. You said so yourself.”
“You won’t be for very much longer,” said Dr. Margaretta Wenzell. “Dr. Warfield and I will see to that.”
“What are you doing it for?”
“You’ll find out when we send the bill.”
“I know it isn’t that.”
“Of course not,” she said. Her remark tasted badly in her mouth. “It’s just… Robin, how long have you had that suit?”
“Uh… suit?” He looked vaguely at the sleeve. “Oh, about three years. It’s a good suit.”
“Of course it is.” It was, too. She remembered that he had gotten it with prize money from a poetry contest. “How many weeks room rent do you owe?”
“None!” he said triumphantly. “I rewired all the doorbells in the apartment house and fixed Mrs. Gridget’s vacuum cleaner and composed a song for her daughter’s wedding reception and invented a gadget to hold her cook book under the kitchen shelf, with a little light that goes on when she swings it out. Next thing I knew she handed me a rent receipt. Wasn’t that swell of her?”
“Oh,” said Peg weakly. She clutched grimly at the point she was trying to make. “How much are you in debt?”
“Oh, that,” he said.
“That.”
“I guess ten-twelve thousand.” He looked up. “Kcans Yppans. What are you driving at?”
“What did you say?”
He waved at the car card opposite. “Snappy Snack. Spelled backwards. Always spell things backward when you see them on the car cards. If you don’t, there’s no telling what you might miss.”
“Oh, you blithering idiot!”
“Sorry. What were you saying?”
“I was getting to this,” she said patiently. “There doesn’t seem to be anything you can’t do. You write, you paint, you compose, you invent things, you fix other things, you—”
“Cook,” he said, as she stopped for breath; and he added idly, “I make love, too.”
“No doubt,” said the gland specialist primly. “On the other hand, there doesn’t seem to be anything you’ve accomplished with all of these skills.”
“They’re not skills. They’re talents. I have no skills.”
~ * ~
Peg saw the distinction, and smiled. It was quite true. One had to spend a little time in practice to acquire a skill. If Robin couldn’t do promisingly the first time he tried something, he would hardly try again. “A good point. And that is what Dr. Warfield and I want to adjust.”
“Adjust, she says. Going to shrivel up all the pretty pink lobulae in my thymus. The only thymus I’ve got, too.”
“And about time. You should have gotten rid of it when you were thirteen. Most people do.”
“And then I’ll be all grim and determined about everything, and generate gallons of sweat, and make thousands of dollars, so that at age thirty I can go back to school and get that high school diploma.”
“Haven’t you got a high school diploma?” asked Peg, her appalled voice echoing hollowly against her four post-graduate degrees.
“As a senior,” smiled Robin, “I hadn’t a thing but seniority. I’d been there six years. I didn’t graduate from school; I was released.”
“Robin, that’s awful!”
“Why is it awful? Oh—I suppose it is.” He looked puzzled and crestfallen.
Peg put her hand on his arm. It had nothing to do with logic, but something in her was wrenched when Robin looked hurt. “I suppose it doesn’t matter, Robin. What you learn, and what you do with it, are really more important than where you learn.”
“Yes… but not when. I mean, you can learn too late. I know lots of things, but the things I don’t know seem to have to do with getting along in the world. Isn’t that what you mean by ‘awful’? Isn’t that what you and Dr. Warfield are going to change?”
“That’s it. That’s right, Robin.
Oh, you’re such a strange person!”
“Strange?”
“I mean… you know, I was sure that Mel Warfield and I would have no end of trouble in persuading you take these thymus treatments.”
“Why?”
With a kind of exasperation she said, “I don’t think you fully
realize that the change in you will be drastic. You’re going to lose a lot that’s bad about you—I’m sure of that. But you’ll see things quite differently. You… you—” She fought for a description of what Robin would be like without his passionate interest in too many things, and her creative facilities bogged down. “You’ll probably see things quite differently.”
He looked into her eyes thoughtfully. “Is that bad?”
Bad? There never was a man who had less evil about him, she thought. “I think not,” she said.
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