The Best of Margaret St. Clair

by Margaret St. Clair

  It wasn’t so much that we felt depressed at first, though we certainly did. But we could stand it; the depression wasn’t as bad as it had been when we first came to Hidden Valley. I guess that was because the things in the egg were more spread out now. Whether that was the reason or not, most of the phenomena were physical.

  You could hardly get into the living room. It was like pushing your way through big wet bladders to go into it. If you sat on the sofa you had a sense of being crowded and pushed, and pretty soon you’d find yourself down at the far end of it, squeezed into a corner. When Mom struck matches to make a fire for lunch, the matches were twitched out of her hand and went sailing around the room. We had to eat cold things; she was afraid of burning down the place.

  At first Mom tried to pretend there was nothing wrong; after all, you couldn’t see anything. But I went out in the kitchen at suppertime and found her crying quietly. She said it was because she’d been trying to cut bread for sandwiches and the knife in her hand kept rising up toward her throat. I knew that if Mom was crying it had been pretty bad. So I told her about the egg in the cave and all that.

  “They’re out of the egg now,” she said unhappily when I had finished. “My burning out the tubes this morning let them out. We’ve got to go back to the city, Eddie. It’s the only thing to do.”

  “And leave them loose?” I said sharply. “We can’t do that. If it was just a case of deserting the valley and having them stay here, it would be all right. But they won’t stay here. They came to Earth to colonize. That means they’ll increase and spread out.

  “Remember how it was when we came here? Remember how we felt? Suppose it was like that over most of the Earth!”

  Mom shook her head till her gray curls bobbed. “This can’t be real, Eddie,” she said in a sort of wail. “We must be having hallucinations or something. I keep telling myself, this can’t be real.”

  Donnie, outside, gave a sudden horrible shriek. Mom turned as white as a ghost. Then she darted out, with me after her.

  Donnie was standing over Fluffie’s body, crying with rage. He was so mad and so miserable he could hardly talk. “They killed her! They killed her!” he said at last. “She was way up in the air, and they pushed her down hard and she squashed when she hit the ground. She’s all mashed flat.”

  There wasn’t anything to say. I left Mom to try to comfort Donnie, and went off by myself to try to think.

  I didn’t get anywhere with my thinking. How do you fight anything you can’t see or understand? The things from the egg were immaterial but could produce material phenomena; Donnie had said they were like electricity or radio. Even if that were true, how did it help? I thought up a dozen fragmentary schemes, each with some major flaw, for getting rid of them, and in the end I had to give up.

  None of us went to bed that night. We stayed up in the kitchen huddled together for comfort and protection, while the house went crazy around us. The things that happened were ridiculous and horrible. They made you feel mentally outraged. It was like being lowered down into a well filled with craziness.

  About three o’clock the light in the kitchen went slowly out. The house calmed down and everything got quiet. I guess the things from the egg had revenged themselves on us enough for having tried to get rid of them, and now they were going about their own business, perhaps beginning to increase. Because from then on the feeling of depression got worse. It was worse than it had ever been before.

  It seemed like years and years until four o’clock. I sat there in the dark, holding Mom’s and Donnie’s hands and wondering how much longer I could stand it. I had a vision of life, then, that people in asylums must have, an expanse filled with unbearable horror and pain and misery.

  By the time it was getting light I couldn’t stand it any longer. There was a way out; I didn’t have to go on seeing Hell opening in front of me. I pulled my hands from Mom’s and Donnie’s and stood up. I knew where Uncle Albert had kept the dynamite. I was going to kill myself.

  Donnie’s eyes opened and he looked at me. I’d known he wasn’t asleep. “Don’t do it, Eddie,” he said in a thread of a voice. “It’ll only give them more juice.”

  Part of my mind knew dimly what he meant. The things from the egg weren’t driving me to suicide deliberately; they didn’t care enough about me for that. But my death—or any human’s death—would be a nice little event, a tidbit, for them. Life is electrical. My death would release a little juice.

  It didn’t matter, it wasn’t important. I knew what I was going to do.

  Mom hadn’t moved or looked at me. Her face was drawn and gray and blotched. I knew, somehow, that what she was enduring was worse than what I had endured. Her vision was darker than mine had been. She was too deep in it to be able to think or speak or move.

  The dynamite was in a box in the shed. I hunted around until I found the detonator and the fuse. I stuffed the waxy, candlelike sticks inside the waistband of my trousers and picked up the other things. I was going to kill myself, but part of me felt a certain compunction at the thought of blowing up Mom and Donnie. I went outside and began to walk uphill.

  The sun was coming up in a blaze of red and gold and there was a soft little breeze. I could smell wood smoke a long way off. It was going to be a fine day. I looked around me critically for a good place to blow myself up.

  They say suicides are often very particular; I know I was. This spot was too open and that one was too enclosed; there was too much grass here and not quite enough at the other place. It wasn’t that I had cold feet. I hadn’t. But I wanted everything to go off smoothly and well, without any hitches or fuss. I kept wandering around and looking, and pretty soon, without realizing it, I was near the hillside with the cave.

  For a moment I thought of going down in the cave to do what I had to do. I decided against it. The explosion, in that confined space, might blow up the whole valley. I moved on. And suddenly I felt a tug at my mind.

  It wasn’t all around, like the feeling of depression was, something that seemed to be broadcast generally into the air. And it wasn’t like the voice inside my head I’d heard in the cave. The best way I can express the feeling is by saying that it was like walking past a furnace with your eyes shut.

  I hesitated. I was still feeling suicidal; I never wavered in that. But I felt a faint curiosity and something a lot fainter that you might call, if you exaggerated, the first beginnings of hope.

  I went to the mouth of the cave and let myself down through the opening.

  The egg, when I reached it, was different from the way I remembered it. It was bigger and the edges were misty. But the chief difference was that it was rotating around its long axis at a really fancy rate of speed. It reminded me of the rotation of a generator. The sensation I felt was coming out from it.

  Watching the thing’s luminous, mazy whirling, I got the idea that it and the things which had come out of it represented opposite poles. It was as alive as they were, though in an opposite way, and its motion provided the energy for them to operate.

  I pulled the sticks of dynamite out of my belt and began setting them up. There really wasn’t much danger of blowing up the valley, and as long as I was going to do away with myself, I might as well take the egg with me, or try to. That was the way I looked at it.

  No attempt was made to stop me. This may have been because the things from the egg weren’t interested in human beings, except spasmodically, but I think it more likely was because they, being polar opposites from the egg, had to keep their distance from it. Anyhow, I got my connections made without interference. I stood back a foot or two.

  I closed the switch.

  The next thing I knew, my head was on Mom’s lap. She was shaking me desperately by the shoulders and crying something about fire.

  Now, I don’t see how I could have been responsible for the fire. The earthquake, possibly. Apparently when the dynamite exploded, the egg tried to absorb the energy. (That’s why I wasn’t hurt more.) It got an overlo
ad. And the overload, somehow, blew it clean out of our space. I got a glimpse of the space it was blown into, I think, just before my head hit the rock. But anyhow, a thing like that might possibly have caused an earthquake. All the country around Hidden Valley is over a fault.

  Anyhow, there’d been earthquakes, several of them. Mom and Donnie had gone out hunting me as soon as the worst shocks were over, and found me lying at the mouth of the cave. They got me up somehow; I don’t weigh much. Mom was nearly crazy with worry because I was still unconscious. For the last two hours or so she’d been smelling the smoke and hearing the crackling of the fire.

  Some camper up in the mountains, I guess, started it. It was an awfully dry year. Anyhow, by the time I was conscious and on my feet again, it was too late to think about running. We didn’t even have time to grab a suitcase. Mom and Donnie and I went down the flume.

  That was some trip. When we got to Portsmouth, we found the whole town ready to pick up and leave, the fire was that close. They got it out in time, though. And then we found out that we were refugees.

  There were pieces about the three of us in the city papers, with scareheads and everything. The photographers took pictures of all of us, even me, and they tried to make out we were heroes because we’d gone down the flume and hadn’t got burned up in the fire. That was a lot of foolishness; there isn’t anything heroic in saving your own life. And Mom hated those pictures. She said they made her look like she was in her seventies and heading for the grave.

  One of the papers took up a collection for us, and we got a couple of hundred dollars out of it. It was a big help to us, because all we had in the world was the clothes we were standing in. After all, though, we hadn’t really expected to live. And we’d got rid of the things from the egg.

  As Mom says, we have a lot to be thankful for.

  I could be more thankful, though, if I didn’t have Ischeenar. I’ve tried and tried to figure out why he didn’t die when the rest of the things did, when the egg was blown into another space. The only thing I can think of is that maybe, having been born here on Earth, he’s different from the rest of them. Anyhow, he’s here with us. I’ve managed to keep Mom from finding out, but, as I say, he lives in my big toe.

  Sometimes I feel almost sorry for him. He’s little and helpless, and alone in a big and hostile world. He’s different from everything around him. Like us, he’s a refugee.

  But I wish I could get rid of him. He’s not so bad now while he’s young. He’s really not dangerous. But I wish to God I could get rid of him.

  He’s going to be a stinker when he grows up.

  1949. Super Science Stories

  HATHOR’S PETS

  “I won’t have my baby born here among a lot of lizards!” Vela said passionately. “I just won’t! Henry, you’ve got to help us get out of here!”

  Henry Pettit sighed. Would it do any good to try to tell his sister a gain that Hathor and her fifteen-foot congeners were not lizards? No, it would not. Vela was never very logical and the fact that she had violated the cult of feminine delicacy sufficiently to mention her coming child to him showed how excited she was. Arguing with her in this mood would be wasted breath.

  “Why don’t you ask your husband to help you?” he said pointedly.

  Vela drew herself up. Her small hard face softened momentarily. “Denis doesn’t know how to get things out of the Scalies the way you do,” she said. “He isn’t—Denis has principles. Denis has ideals.”

  (“Denis is too all-fired good and noble to butter up to the lizards in the disgusting way that you do,” Henry translated silently.) Aloud, he said, “He’s your husband, though. It’s his responsibility.”

  Vela stared at him reproachfully for a moment. Then she burst into tears. Ever since her child had been on the way she had been indulging in orgies of tears. Anything was apt to send her off into a crying jag.

  Henry, who was some five years older than his sister, could remember, very dimly, back to the end of the era of feminine freedom, the time when women had been encouraged, nay, expected, to be intelligent.

  The girls had been in the saddle then—they had ridden high, wide and handsome. But the rise of the government-sponsored cult of feminine modesty, chastity and brainlessness in the late 1980’s had put an end to all that. Nowadays a woman was a cross between a dripping sponge and a vegetable.

  Mrs. Pettit came waddling up. She had been lingering within earshot behind a tree in the park. “What have you been saying to Vela, son?” she demanded. “The poor girl! I won’t have you upsetting her.”

  “I’m not upsetting her,” Henry replied morosely. “She’s upsetting herself. Excuse me. I’m going over to the laboratory.”

  He got up and started rapidly across the grass.

  “Henry, wait!” his mother shrilled after him. Fortunately he was walking so fast that it was possible for him to pretend that he had not heard.

  After lunch his brother-in-law, Denis Hardy, began on him. Denis went over the history of the last few months relentlessly, from the time the stratoliner Pelican’s life boat had been trapped in the vortex and whirled into Hathor’s universe until the present. He even made a digression to consider whether the vortex had been deliberately created or not.

  “Don’t you see,” he finished, “Vela can’t have her baby here. Why, she might—might even have to feed it herself.”

  “Well, what of it?” Henry replied abstractedly. “Women used to do it all the time.” He had had a most interesting morning. He wanted to get back to the laboratory.

  Denis turned an angry red. “You’re disgusting!” he said sharply. “Can’t you keep a civil tongue—” lie bit off the words and made an obvious effort at conciliation.

  “Why don’t you want to go home, Pettit? There’s nothing here for a man.”

  “I like it,” Henry answered simply. “Grass, flowers, air—it’s a beautiful place.”

  “That’s not the reason,” Denis replied nastily. His little ramrod of a back grew straighter. “I know what you’re up to in the laboratory. Forbidden research.”

  “Everything was forbidden at home,” Henry answered reasonably. “But we’re not home now. It’s not forbidden here.”

  “Right’s right and wrong’s wrong, no matter where—” Once more Denis controlled himself. The gold braid on his shoulders quivered with effort. “Stay here yourself if you want, then,” he snapped. “But the rest of us don’t share your peculiar tastes. We want to get back to decency, normality. Is there any reason why you shouldn’t use your influence with your scaly friends to have them send us back to Earth?”

  There was—but how could he explain it to Denis? Denis had a mind which, even for the second officer of a stratosphere liner, was limited. How could Henry make him understand how horrible mental contact with Hathor was?

  It was not that Hathor was malignant or even unkind. Henry had a faint but positive impression of benignity in his dealings with her. But the words with which the human mind bridges gulfs—when, who, where—became, when one was in contact with Hathor, the gulfs themselves.

  To ask her when something had happened was to reel dizzily into the vastest of all enigmas for humanity—the nature of time itself. The question, “What is it?” forced the questioner to contemplate the cloudy, chilling riddle of his own personal identity. And even, “Where?” brought up a panorama of planes of being stretching out to infinity.

  In between times it was not so bad. When Henry had not seen Hathor for several days he was almost able to convince himself that he was not afraid of her. Then he would need something in the laboratory, go to see her to ask for it and come back from the interview sick and shaking, swearing that nothing—nothing—would induce him to plunge once more into the vast icy reaches of her inhuman intelligence.

  He hunted for a reason Denis would understand. “It’s no use asking her,” he said finally. “Vela is going to have a child now and so Hathor would never let you go.”

  “But that’s jus
t why we want to go home.”

  “I know.” Henry swallowed. “But Hathor and the others look on us as—you might say—pets. Whether or not they brought us here deliberately—myself, I think it was an accident—“that’s how they feel about us. And nobody ever turned a pet loose when it was going to have young.”

  There was no use in telling Denis that Hathor was responsible for Vela’s child in the same way that a dog breeder is responsible for the birth of pups. It would only offend Hardy’s dignity.

  “Pets!” Denis answered, staring. “What are you talking about? They’re nothing but lizards. They haven’t got stereo, stratoliners, A-bombs, anything. We’re their superiors in every way.”

  “They’re not lizards,” Henry replied. “They’re very highly evolved mammals. That crest down the back of their heads is just an accident.

  “The reason they don’t have those material things is that they don’t need them. Haven’t you ever seen Hathor materialize things for my laboratory? She does it by moving her hands. She could turn a rubber ball inside out without making a hole in it.

  “As far as that goes, if you think they’re nothing but lizards, why are you trying to get them to send you back to your own time and space? No lizard I ever heard of could do that sort of thing.”

  * * *

  Hathor appeared. One moment the air was empty—the next it thickened and condensed, and there she was. As always when he first saw her Henry was divided between a wild desire to run for cover and an almost equally strong impulse to prostrate himself in awe at her feet.

  He glanced about to see how the others were taking it. Denis, for all his bravado, was turning slowly white. And Vela, trying hard to be supercilious, was arranging the folds of her mantilla with shaking hands.

  Not that there was anything especially horrible about Hathor to casual viewing. Though she was over fifteen feet tall, and so strong that she could have picked up any of the humans in the park with one hand, her body was slender and well-proportioned.