Spectrum 5 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Kingsley Amis

  The creature sat quietly on its big leaf as he approached, with no sign of having noticed him. Now it was just within his reach if he stretched up. One more step and he would be right under it - ahhhh!

  He had only begun to grab when Big Sword bounced over his head, landed lightly on the ground behind him and leaped sideways into another tree.

  Ricky turned, slowly, and began his careful stalk again. He was murmuring softly to himself, coaxing words derived from rabbit- and guinea-pig owners of his acquaintance: ‘Come on, come on! Come to uncle. He won’t hurt you. Nothing to be afraid of. Come on, you little brute. Come—’

  Big Sword sailed away from his grasping hand to land on a branch ten feet farther into the forest.

  Ricky had entirely forgotten the prohibition on leaving the clearing; he had forgotten everything except the desire to get hold of this creature, to have it close enough to examine, to hold it gently in his hand and get it tame. His stick lay forgotten on the earth outside the forest.

  Big Sword was getting irritated and slightly flustered. It was easy enough to avoid getting caught, but he didn’t wish to play tag with this creature, he wanted to tame it, to make it understand him. And its mind seemed to be shut. What was more, every so often it would begin that infuriating blowing process which seemed to drain away its thoughts out of his reach. To know when it was going to grab he had to watch it the whole time. Finally he took refuge on a branch ten feet above its head and sat down to consider.

  Ricky, at the bottom of the tree, was experiencing all the emotions of a dog which has treed a squirrel and now has to persuade it to come within reach. Apparently he was licked. If only the little beast would drop on to that branch there -where that applelike object was - and begin to eat it, perhaps, so that it could forget he was there ...

  Suddenly, the little brute did. At least it dropped to the lower branch and put its long-fingered hands on the round knob. Ricky’s mouth opened in amazement.

  His hands itched, but he kept them firmly at his sides. Perhaps he had been standing there so long that it had forgotten about him and thought he was part of the landscape. Perhaps if he spread his arms out very, very slowly it would take them for branches and—

  Something like a small explosion happened inside his head. He blinked and gasped, forgetting all about immobility. He froze again hastily, expecting the creature to be out of sight. But it was still there.

  Big Sword observed this reaction to his vehement negative with stirrings of hope. The idea of doing what this creature wanted, as a means of starting communication by demonstration, had seemed a singularly forlorn one. But the Big Creature had clearly noticed something.

  Big Sword decided that it was time to try a suggestion of his own. He thought - hard - on the proposition that the Big Creature should turn around and look the other way.

  The Big Creature ducked its head and blinked its eyes again. Big Sword got the impression that these reactions were caused by the strength of his thought. He tried again, gently.

  Something was getting through. Weakly, faintly he felt a negative reply. The Big Creature refused to turn its back.

  Big Sword put out another suggestion. Let the Big Creature take one step sideways, away from him.

  Hesitantly, the Big Person did. Big Sword copied its direction in a joyful leap and ended on a level with the creature’s head.

  The next thought reached him, fuzzy but comprehensible. ‘If you understand me, put your hands on top of your head.’

  Watching suspiciously for any sudden move, Big Sword obeyed. The posture was not one he could keep up for long without losing his balance, but he felt the sudden surge of excitement in the Big Creature and was encouraged.

  ‘Now watch! I shall sit down on the ground. Do you understand what that means? I’m going to sit down.’

  The Big Creature folded up in an awkward way; its knees were on the wrong side of its body, but Big Sword recognized the operation. He followed it with a thought of his own.

  ‘I will spread my membranes out.’

  The Big Creature’s astonishment was a dazzling shock and he put out a protest. In reply came something which could be an apology. He sharpened his thoughts and put out the next one with all the clearness at his command.

  ‘We have proved that we can make contact. Now we have to practise thinking to and fro until we understand clearly.’

  He had just felt the other’s incoherent agreement when the interruption began. Another of the Big Creatures came lumbering between the trees.

  * * * *

  ‘Ricky! Scatter my stuffing, what are you doing here? You’ll be in the doghouse for sure. Do you want Barney’s little black devils to carry you away?’

  Ricky scrambled to his feet in alarm.

  ‘Sorry, Dr Woodman, I forgot. I was ... looking at things and I came in here without thinking. I’m awfully sorry.’

  ‘No harm done. Come out before we have any more alarms and excursions.’

  Big Sword felt an impulse of despair from the Big Creature which he had at last succeeded in taming; it seemed to regret this interruption even more than he did. It was anxious that the second Big Creature should not see him, so he remained still, one dark shape among many and effectively invisible; but he sent a thought after the tame one: ‘Come again! I will be on the edge of the clearing. Come again!’ and was nearly knocked over by the energy of its reply.

  Woodman marched Ricky firmly out of the forest.

  ‘Now you’re here you may as well be useful. I want to go up to my pet pool and I can’t find a chaperone. If I’ve timed it rightly, we should find something interesting up there.’

  Ricky summoned up a show of polite interest. Normally he would have been delighted.

  ‘Is it the pseudohydras again?’

  ‘That’s right. Remember when we saw them catching those things like two-tailed torpedoes?’

  ‘Yes, but you said all the ones in the pool had been eaten now.’

  ‘They have. Here we are. Don’t lean over like that - they won’t like your shadow. Lie down. So!’

  Ricky lay on his belly and stared down into the transparent water. Except where it was shadowed it reflected the brilliant blue of the sky; the only thing on Lambda that had a familiar colour. He felt, suddenly, stirrings of homesickness, but they vanished quickly. Homesick, when the most wonderful thing possible had just happened? Nonsense!

  He concentrated on the pseudohydras. They lived just where the pool overflowed into a small brown stream. Each consisted mainly of a network of branching white threads, up to six inches long, issuing from a small blobby body anchored on the stones. There were perhaps fifty of them, and together their tentacles made a net across the mouth of the stream which nothing larger than a wheat-grain could escape. The sluggish waters of the stream must all pass through this living mesh, carrying anything unlucky enough to swim out of the pool; the tentacles were immensely sticky and could hold struggling creatures several times the size of the pseudohydra’s own body, until the flesh of the tentacles had flowed slowly around them and enclosed them in a capsule whose walls slowly digested them away.

  ‘See there?’ whispered Woodman.

  Here and there one of the tentacles ended in a transparent, hard-edged blob. Small dark cigar-shaped objects jerked uneasily within it, perhaps a dozen in each little case.

  ‘It’s caught some more torpedoes!’ whispered Ricky. ‘Little tiny ones this time.’

  ‘Not caught,’ answered Woodman. ‘I thought they’d be ripe today! Watch that one - it’s nearly ready to split.’

  A few minutes later the capsule indicated did split. The tiny torpedo shapes, three or four millimetres long, spilled out into the water. They hovered uncertainly, veering here and there under the uneven propulsion of the water-jets emerging from the two-pronged hind end. Ricky gasped.

  ‘It’s let them go! And look - there’s one rubbing against a tentacle and not getting caught. What’s happened?’

  Two of the little
torpedo shapes came together. They jerked uncertainly round each other, then swivelled to lie parallel. They moved off together.

  Others were paired already. One pair separated as Ricky watched them. The two little torpedoes shot off crazily. One came right under his eyes and he saw that it was emitting a faint milky stream.

  Woodman’s hand came down, holding a pipette. The torpedo veered off. Woodman sucked up a drop of water and held out the pipette.

  ‘There,’ he said softly. Tiny specks, barely visible, floated in the drop.

  ‘Eggs,’ said Woodman.

  ‘Eggs! But - these are babies. The other ones were much bigger.’

  ‘So they were, Ricky. Do you know what these are going to hatch into? More torpedoes? Not on your life! Unless there’s something else crazy about the life cycle, these will hatch into little pseudohydras.’

  Ricky rolled over to stare at him. ‘But what are the big torpedoes, then?’

  ‘This is how I see it. You know about the reproductive cycles in Coelenterates, back on Earth? Especially hydroids like Obelia and so on? The sessile ones reproduce by budding for a while. Then they start to produce buds which don’t turn out like the parents. Those break off and go swimming away on their own. They feed and get big and in the end they produce eggs or sperm, and the fertilized eggs produce a new sessile generation. Well, here the free-living forms - the torpedoes -are ready to lay eggs as soon as they’re released. They mate a few minutes after hatching and lay eggs as soon as they’re fertilized. But after that they aren’t finished. They go swimming around the pool and feed and get fat. And when they’re full grown, they come swimming back to the old pseudohydras, and the pseudohydras eat them and use the food to produce a whole new crop of little torpedoes. Get it?’

  Ricky scowled. ‘What a disgusting animal.’

  ‘Nonsense! It’s a beautiful piece of natural economy. Don’t be a snob, Ricky. Just because no terrestrial organism evolved this way you think it’s unethical. Some Earth creatures beat pseudohydra hollow for nastiness - think of some of the parasites. Think of the barnacles, degenerate male parasitic on the female. There just aren’t any ethics in evolution except that the species shall survive, if you call that an ethic’

  Ricky looked at him doubtfully. ‘We’ve evolved. And we bother about other species, too.’

  Woodman nodded. ‘We try to - some of us. But our survival has meant that a good many other species didn’t.’

  Something else occurred to Ricky. ‘This sort of whatsit -alternate generations - has evolved lots of times on Earth, hasn’t it?’

  ‘Sure. Dozens of different lines evolved it independently, not to mention all the Lambdan forms that have it, and a few on Arcturus III, and some on Roche’s - it’s one of the basic dodges, apparently. One stage makes the most of the status quo and the other acts as an insurance against possible changes. Once a well-balanced set of hereditary characters has appeared it can repeat itself fast by asexual reproduction, without the disorganization of chromosome reassortment and so on. On the other hand, should conditions change, a sexually produced population has a much better chance of showing up a few adaptable forms. Some lines of life have dropped the sexual stage, just as some have dropped the asexual, but it probably doesn’t pay in the long run.’

  ‘How does a stage get dropped?’

  Woodman considered. ‘I suppose the first stage might go like this: one single asexual stage - one of these pseudohydras, for instance - happens to get isolated. Say all the rest in the pool die off. It can produce its little torpedoes, but there are no mates for them. The pseudohydra goes on reproducing asexually - you’ve seen how they split down the middle - and in the end a mutant form occurs which doesn’t waste its substance producing useless torpedoes and that breeds faster than the others and in the end replaces them. That’s just one way it could happen. In one of the African lakes there used to be annual swarms of jellyfish, all male. One single asexual stage must have got trapped in that lake, God knows how long ago, and it went on producing those useless male jellyfish century after century, while asexual reproduction kept the species going.’

  ‘What happened to it?’

  Woodman scowled. ‘Silly fools polluted the lake with industrial waste and the jellyfish died out. Come on, it’s time for lunch.’

  * * * *

  Ellen Scott put away the last of her soil samples and scowled thoughtfully at her apparatus. Tensions in the camp were mounting and everyone was snapping at everybody else. One party had decided that Barney’s adventure was somehow due to Ricky, and wanted to call off the precautions that hindered their work. The other stuck to it that Ricky could not have organized it and that precautions were still necessary. Anyway, who in the other party was prepared to tell Doc that there was no danger in the forest except for his son?

  Ellen told herself that she was neutral. She didn’t know whether or not Ricky was behind their troubles and didn’t much care, if only he would leave off tearing his father’s nerves to pieces. She had heard a little gossip about him on Earth after it had been announced that he was to join the expedition, and though she had discounted it at the time, after the business of Cartwright’s report she was inclined to believe it.

  People whose work lay in space had no business with marriage and children. She had decided that for herself years ago. You could run planetary research properly, or you could run a family properly. Not both. Children were part of life on Earth; the settled pattern of security, with which she had grown so bored, was necessary to them. When they were older, perhaps - Ricky had seemed perfectly happy at first.

  But what on Lambda was the matter with him now? He’d been going around in a dream ever since the night of Barney’s adventure. Starting suddenly to talk to himself, breaking off with equal suddenness and an air of annoyance. He didn’t seem now to be particularly worried by the suspicions floating around the camp, although he seemed the sort of sensitive boy to be desperately upset by them. In fact, over that affair with Cartwright he had been upset, and this affair was worse.

  And Jordan was obviously heading for a nervous breakdown if this went on much longer.

  Ricky, lying in his cabin and theoretically taking his afternoon rest - imposed because of Lambda’s longer day - had come to the conclusion that it was time to tell his father about his Research. Despite his absorption in his overwhelming new interest, he was vaguely aware that the grown-ups were getting bothered. For another he could now ‘talk’ fluently with Big Sword and haltingly with the rest of the People; he knew what they wanted and there was no excuse for delaying any longer. Besides, the results of Research were not meant to be kept to oneself, they were meant to be free to everyone.

  He allowed himself to think for a moment about the possibilities of his newly discovered power. Of course, people had been messing about with telepathy for centuries, but they had never got anywhere much. Perhaps only a fully developed telepath, coming of a race to which telepathy was the sole method of communication, could teach a human being how to control and strengthen his wayward and uncertain powers. Or perhaps, thought Ricky, the people who were really capable of learning the trick got into so much trouble before they could control it that they all simply shut it off as hard as they could, so that the only ones who tried to develop it were those in whom it never became strong enough to do anything useful. He himself had now, at last, learned how to shut off his awareness of other minds; it was the first necessity for clear reception that one should be able to deafen oneself to all minds except one. It occurred to him that he’d better make that point clear straight off: that he was not going to eavesdrop on anyone else’s thoughts. Never again.

  But obviously the thing had terrific potentialities for research, not only into the difficult and thorny problem of the connection between mind and matter, or into contact with alien races. Why, he could probably find out what really went on in the minds of terrestrial animals, those that had minds; and he could find out what it was that people experienced i
n a Mass-Time field, which they could never properly remember afterwards, and - oh, all sorts of things!

  * * * *

  Ricky got up from his bunk. His father ought to be free at this moment; it was the one time of day he kept to himself, unless an emergency happened. Quite unconsciously, Ricky opened his mind to thoughts from that directions to see whether it was a good time to visit his father’s cabin.

  The violence of the thought he received nearly knocked him over. What on Lambda was stirring old Doc J. up to such an extent? And - bother, he was talking to somebody - Woodman, apparently. Ricky, unlike Big Sword, could still pick up thought at the moment when it drained into the level of speech, but even for him it was highly indistinct. He strained, trying to catch the cause of all this commotion. Woodman had found something - something unpleasant - something—