The Best of Margaret St. Clair

by Margaret St. Clair

  He was still shrieking the words when Hathor picked him up.

  1949. Startling Stories

  THE PILLOWS

  They’re lucky,” McTeague said with emphasis. “I told Thelma—she’s secretary to one of the big shots in the company—they ought to bring that out more in the advertising, stress it, like, and she said nobody had ever written in about it. People just buy the pillows for novelties, and once in a while to keep their hands warm.

  “But anybody that works around the pillows knows that they’re the luckiest damn’ things in the Universe. Look at me. Before I got this job with Interplanetary Novelties, I’d just spent three months in the hospital with a fractured pelvis. Lolli and I were quarreling all the time, and I was sure she was planning to leave me. I just got out of the hospital when Lottie, that’s our kid, came home from school with a stiff neck and a sore throat, and two days later the clinician said it was almost certain to be infantile paralysis, the third type. They’ve never found a cure for that. That really broke me up. I spent most of the first leg of the trip taking soma and trying not to think about things.

  “Listen, when we hit Aphrodition there was a ‘gram from Lolli telling me not to worry, Lottie was better and it seemed to be type one after all. Lottie was all over it in a mo nth, and she’s never been sick, not even the sniffles, since. For that matter, none of us have. I don’t even cut myself or get hangovers any more. And Lolli and I get along like—like a couple of Venusian quohogs.”

  “Then you think the pillows aren’t fakes?” Kent asked. They were two days out from Terra, on board the Tryphe, traveling at one sixtieth the velocity of light. He leaned back in his bunk and drew deeply on the tube of cocohol-cured tobacco.

  “Fakes? How do you mean, fakes? I know they’re lucky—ask anyone on the ship—and I know they stay hot. Lottie’s had one I brought her from Triton, on that first voyage out to Neptune’s moon, sitting on the shelf in her bedroom ever since, and it’s still as hot as it was when I dug it out.”

  Kent sighed. He rumpled up his blond hair and frowned. Here it was again, the evidence, so utterly at variance with what he’d been able to get in the laboratory. Stick a thermometer near one of the pillows, and it registered forty-four degrees Celsius at first, then showed a very gradual cooling until the pillow reached room temperature, where it remained. And yet everyone who’d ever handled a pillow or bought one at a novelty store knew they stayed hot.

  “Maybe there’s some kind of gimmick in it,” he suggested, “something like those Mexican jumping beans my grandfather used to tell me about. Or maybe it’s something the company rigged up, a little atomic motor, say.”

  McTeague snorted. “Anytime you can make an atomic motor to sell for six bits,” he said, “let me know. I’ll buy ‘em up, sell ‘em on the open market for five dollars, and become a millionaire. I never heard of Mexican jumping beans before, so for all I know they’re the same sort of thing. All I know is, you dig the pillows up out of the rock on Triton, which the long-hairs say is probably the coldest spot in the known universe, and they’re hot, nice and hot. You can dig up some in a few days and see for yourself.”

  “How do you locate them?”

  “Oh, we’ve got a darkside Mercurian hexapod. He hates hunting them. Sits down and shivers when he finds a colony. That’s how we know where to dig.”

  “What do you use to dig with?”

  “Atom blast, special design.”

  “Ever damage the pillows with it?”

  “Naw, you have to train one right on them for about fifteen minutes to make a dent in them. They’re not only hot, and lucky—they’re tough.”

  Kent was thoughtful. “You know, that’s really remarkable.”

  “Hell, they’re just novelties.” McTeague spat into the incinerator, reached for the cards, and began to lay out an elaborate three-deck solitaire. Kent went on thinking.

  It was that attitude, that “hell, they’re just novelties,” that had made him decide to spend his vacation working for the Interplanetary Novelty Company. He’d brought four or five of the pillows (they were a couple of inches in diameter—about the size of sand dollars—and black and puffy) into the laboratory and thrown a bunch of experiments at them; his fellow workers had kidded him both ways from the abscissa, and Dr. Roberts had called him into the office and told him gently that he really wasn’t employed to investigate—ah—children’s toys, and that there was a group of very interesting experiments he’d like him to try on the low radioactives. So now he was an A.B.S. on the S.S. Tryphe, bound for Triton.

  “Anything else on Triton?” he asked.

  “Nope. Not another blasted thing. We bring back some of that greenish rock, though—it works up into nice paperweights.” McTeague moved a long column of cards to a pile headed by a purple ace, and went on playing.

  Ten days later they landed on Triton—a routine landing, but interesting to Kent, who had done little space traveling. The ship had gone into snail-slow planetary drive hours before. Now he watched with fascination through the bow visiplates while the navigator snaked the ship expertly through a long spiral down to Triton’s surface. The cloudy aquamarine of Neptune, half occluded by the little world, shone palely bright.

  “Getting an eyeful?” McTeague said, joining him. “If you’d landed here as often as the rest of us have, you’d want to look the other way. Neptune gives me the grue, and Triton stinks. Except for the pillows—and I consider myself honored to be on the same satellite with them—I hate the place. A lousy little pebble, so damn cold you’d be understating grossly if you said it was frozen.” He started to bite a chew of tobacco from the hunk in his hand, and then checked himself. “No spitting in pressure suits,” he said morosely. “That, and the dampness, are the worst things about suits.”

  Overhead, the bull horn began: “Phweet! Phweet! Break out pressure suits. Break out pressure suits. A working party consisting of McTeague, Willets, Abrams, Kent will leave ship at 1630 to hunt pillows. A working party consisting of… Atom blasts in Number Five locker. Atom blasts in Number Five locker.”

  As Kent climbed stiffly into his pressure suit, he saw McTeague, already hardly human in the florid bulges of his own suit, inserting the protesting hexapod into a special job for hexapods. It must have been fifty inches long. Kent switched on his suit’s radio.

  “…Look at the poor little tyke shiver,” McTeague said. “He hates this hunting worse than pulling teeth.” Then, to the hexapod, “Never mind, Toots. When we get back you can have a nice bowl of vitamush and berl steak.”

  They started out. McTeague, by right of seniority, was in the lead. He held the hexapod by a leash of psychroplex. Kent, walking beside Willets, felt a flash of pleasure at being out in the open again, though the visible curvature of Triton’s surface made him move unsteadily. He looked up and ducked involuntarily. Neptune’s blue-green disk, now directly overhead, filled half the sky.

  “Watch out for low grav, Kent,” McTeague’s voice said in his ear. “Don’t worry, old Nept won’t fa ll on you. All you men, set your object comps on the ship.”

  “Don’t you have a map or chart?” Kent asked.

  “Nope. The navigator keeps a record, of course, and sets us down on a different spot each time. He and the old man are doing it methodically… Look at Toots! We must be getting near a colony.”

  The hexapod was pulling back on the lead and struggling. McTeague took a firmer grip on the leash and began to tug him along. Three or four hundred yards farther the hexapod sat down and refused to move. Kent could see him shivering inside his pressure suit. His purplish fur was fluffed out like chenille. McTeague snapped the creature’s lead into a chock on his suit.

  “This is it,” he said. “Kent, this is for you. The others have dug lots of pillows. Set your atom blast to three, and cut out a section of rock about two feet square. Use your blast to pry it up with—I’ll show you how—and then cut it cross-ways twice so it’s in fours. By then you ought to be able to see the pillo
ws—they’re in cells, sort of, in the rock. If it is rock.”

  They began work. Kent found a weird fascination in seeing the rock curdle and flow in the unearthly glare of his atom blast. “When you see the pillows,” McTeague said over the suit radio, “take your blast and sort of flick down the edges of the cells, see, like this, and pick up the rock and shake them out. They come out easy.”

  He fitted action to his words. Kent, imitating him, began to make good progress. “Cute little things, aren’t they?” commented McTeague. Out of his shoulder pack he drew a shapeless bundle and pressed a button on its side. It began to expand.

  “When you got enough pillows,” McTeague ordered, “take the scoop hanging on the left side of your suit and shovel them into the sled. Those inflators are certainly a bright idea. Oh, an’ if your suit gets too damp, shove the dryer up. It helps.”

  “How do you like it?” he asked Kent when the party had been working for three or four hours.

  The question took Kent somewhat by surprise. He straighten ed in his pressure suit. He hadn’t, he found, been thinking about much of anything; he had been cutting out pumice-like rock and extracting pillows from it in a mindless trance that was definitely tinged with pleasure.

  “It’s nice, somehow,” he answered.

  “I thought you’d like it,” McTeague answered, pleased. “Everybody on the ship does, even the old man.”

  “Except Toots.”

  “Yeah, except Toots.”

  They finished with the colony of pillows; further investigation with the blasts showed only one or two isolated specimens. Neptune was beginning to set.

  “Might as well hunt another spot,” McTeague said. “Look at Toots—see how he’s pulling back toward the ship, and at the same time’s got a sort of list to the right? That means there’s probably another colony off to the left. Let’s go.” He started off to the left, pulling the big, inflated sled and tugging the reluctant Toots after him.

  They had gone four or five kilometers, vapor trails from their suit vents floating behind them, when Toots suddenly reared back and began fighting the leash enthusiastically.

  “What’s got into him?” McTeague said. “He doesn’t usually act like that even when it’s a big colony. Abrams, you take his lead and the sled; I’ll go ahead and see what’s doing.”

  “I might have known it was a stiff,” he said when he returned. “Toots hates dead bodies worse than hunting pillows, even. Abrams, you hold on to Toots, and I want you other two men to come help cut a grave for whoever it is.”

  “I thought nobody except us ever visited Triton,” Kent said as they walked along. “Did he have a ship?”

  “Not around within seeing range. I suppose he could have come here on a life craft, after a wreck, or maybe he was marooned; it’s been done. We’ll get his identity badge and look through his sack before we bury him. Too bad we can’t take him back to Terra, but it’s too long for him to keep, and the old man hates dead bodies, anyhow. Jonahs, he says.”

  They came upon the body. The man had died in a pressure suit, on his feet, with an atom blast of recent design in his hand. His face was intelligent and young. “Looks like he was fixing to dig for pillows,” McTeague said. “Maybe Venus Novelties sent him out. I hate to say it, but in that case he deserved what he got. Anybody that would work for a scab outfit like that—!”

  “What killed him, do you think?” Kent asked.

  “Hard to say. His shoulder tanks had plenty of oxy. They say death is always heart failure in one way or another… Get busy with that grave. I want it about two meters by one by one.” McTeague took the dead man about the waist and put him down on the stony surface of the satellite. He opened the psychroplex helmet and fumbled around the man’s neck for the identity disk.

  “Edward Clutts,” he read with the aid of his suit light. “The serial’s K20-4340. What’s K20, anyhow?”

  “Scientific worker,” Kent replied.

  “Uh. Then I doubt Venus Novelties sent him. The disk was issued four years ago, so he hasn’t been here less than two years or more than four… Funny he’s not decayed at all; the suit heater usually keeps running long enough for them to spoil some.”

  “That’s only if the oxy runs out,” Willets said. “He probably froze to death.”

  “Could be. Let’s see what he’s got in his sack.” McTeague turned the body over and opened the container on the back of the suit.

  “He’s got a lot of stuff. Thermometers and all sorts of things. What’s this gadget?”

  “Geiger counter,” Kent replied. He had been watching with intense, strained attention.

  “Hm. Looks like he was trying to investigate Triton. The poor chump, he might as well have investigated Nereid. There’s nothing here at all. Except the pillows, I mean. Have you got the grave ready yet?”

  “Yeah, but there’re a lot of pillows in the slab we just levered up,” Willets replied. “You want we should just leave them, or can we break down the cell walls and shake them out?”

  McTeague considered. “No reason why we shouldn’t get as many out as we can,” he said. “He’ll never know the difference. We’re bound to leave a good many in the rock anyhow.”

  Obediently, Kent and Willets began flicking their blasts back and forth over the cell walls and shaking the pillows out. When they had finished McTeague put the body down gently in the hole they had left, and the slab was replaced. Then McTeague called Abrams to come up with the hexapod, and they all began digging pillows again. At the end of the shift, the sled was nearly full.

  “Good day’s work,” McTeague said with approval. “Don’t let me forget to tell the old man about the stiff and give him the identity disk and stuff. It’s got to go in the log.”

  “Will there be an investigation?” Kent queried.

  “Nothing to investigate. His heater stopped.”

  “I suppose.” Kent was far from convinced, and yet he had to admit that McTeague was probably right. Edward Clutts had died when his suit heater stopped running. “It—could it have had anything to do with the pillows?” he said.

  McTeague turned and stared at him. “With the pillows} Why, the pillows don’t do anything at all except keep hot.”

  “On Triton.”

  “Well, Triton’s their home. If they’re going to keep warm any place, it’s got to be there.”

  They reached the ship, Toots leaping and frisking around them. Sometimes he got all six legs off the ground at once. The sled was taken up the gangplank and its burden of pillows emptied into Number One hold. Kent held one of them in his ungloved hand, and it was hot. And not eight hours ago he had himself dug it out of Triton’s rock. The coldest spot in the known universe…

  After supper— Toots messed with the spacemen, and they all broke the old man’s orders by slipping the hexapod bits of berl meat and gravy-sticks under the table—McTeague came up to where Kent was sitting and began to talk.

  “Kent,” he said, “I think finding that man’s body upset you more than you realize. You don’t want to let it get you down. A spaceman has to get used to things like that. That idea of yours about the pillows, for instance—that’s the kind of crazy thing only a green hand would think of. The pillows! Why, they’re just novelties, that’s all.”

  Kent nodded and leaned back in his bunk, trying to appear relaxed. McTeague watched him. After a moment he looked relieved. “Well—that’s that. Want to play some bizareque?”

  Kent nodded. While McTeague was shuffling and dealing the cards, he went on thinking. What was it about the pillows that bemused everyone, put a glamor on them? There was some excuse for scientists such as Dr. Roberts; they had to consider the whole range of the fascinating phenomena that the last twenty years had opened up for investigation. And besides, most of them suffered from a form of scientific snobbery, a human desire not to make fools of themselves by investigating something that was only a novelty, a child’s toy. But what about men like McTeague? Did no one besides himself, Kent, find
anything odd in the continued heat of the pillows? Presumably Edward Clutts had. Edward Clutts was dead.

  McTeague’s voice broke in on his thoughts. “Do you mean to lead a trump?” He pointed to the purple knight Kent had just laid down.

  “Oh. No. Thanks.”

  Before he went to bed that night, Kent put a thermometer by one of the pillows he had dug up. It registered forty-four Celsius, as he had known it would.

  By morning it had dropped a degree or two, and it went on dropping slowly for the next few days until it reached room temperature, twenty Celsius, where it remained.

  The holds were beginning to fill up. Toots had been dragged out on eight or ten pillow hunts, McTeague said there must be nearly a million and a half pillows on the ship and they’d be heading back to Terra pretty soon, and still Kent was baffled by the pillows. Every time he dug pillows he felt the blank euphoria which possessed the others, and it was only when he got back to the ship that he could even wonder about them. What had Edward Clutts been doing with his thermometers and his sackful of gadgets? Why had he died?

  He might never have guessed if he had not happened to upset the glass.

  He had been reaching into McTeague’s bunk for a magazine the big man had discarded, and his left elbow had struck against the long lap board on which McTeague laid out his solitaire when he was in his bunk. Kent hadn’t seen the glass of soma and ginger ale, which was sitting on the end of the board, until it started to fall over. He grabbed at it quickly—his reflexes were considerably faster than average—and set it upright again before more than a drop or two had spilled, feeling, as he moved, a sharp sensation of cold against his wrist.

  He looked down, surprised. It was as if he had passed his arm above a large piece of dry ice. There was nothing in the bunk except the magazine, the glass of soma, the lap board, and, under its edge, one of the pillows.