The Best of Margaret St. Clair

by Margaret St. Clair

  Wondering, he picked it up. It was, as usual, agreeably warm to the touch. Where had the cold come from? The ice in the glass of soma had melted long ago.

  He stood frowning at the edge of the bunk, feeling an impossible hypothesis beat at the threshold of consciousness. What could it be? Was it—what—To hell with it. But—He slipped between the sheets of his bunk at lights-out, expecting to turn and toss all night long, and was instantly asleep. He woke just at seven the next morning. He lit a smoke and lay on his back, one arm under his head, sorting out his ideas.

  In the first place, the pillows were sentient and intelligent. He would deal with that later.

  In the second place, they had some sort of mental reach. That was why everyone on the ship, except Toots (the psychology of darkside hexapods had not been much investigated, but it seemed that their mental abilities were parallel to those of dogs only up to a point, after which they went soaring off into some sort of high, supersensory cloudland), loved hunting them. That was why nobody had ever taken them seriously; the pillows didn’t want to be investigated. It was probable, too, that the pillows had some sort of control over events; else why the streak of luck that McTeague (and everyone else on board the Tryphe had similar experiences to relate) had enjoyed? The pillows wanted to be hunted and disseminated, and they had put a premium, in the form of pleasure and good fortune, on their dissemination.

  In the third place— This was where Kent’s mind jibbed. Really, it was no more fantastic than the assumption he had already made, without much mental discomfort, that they could influence the flow of events. But this was something that every human being, that every sentient being, takes for granted every moment of his life. To endow the pillows with this ability was to fracture the supporting column of the Universe.

  In the third place, the pillows could reverse entropy.

  A pillow could extract heat, as a man sucks milk through a straw, from a substance colder than itself. They were intelligent; they took care never to display their faculty where it could be observed.

  In the laboratory, they cooled gradually from forty-four degrees Celsius to room temperature. Otherwise, the difference between their fairly high temperature and the abnormal coolness of the objects around them might have been noticed even by the beglamored (it was the only word) wits of the indifferent scientists. But if a pillow were not on its guard (he had caught the one on McTeague’s bunk off guard last night when he had reached across it so suddenly), or if a pillow had nothing to fear, it would be possible to hold one of them in the hand, comfortably warm as usual, and feel the hand grow chill around it, feel the chill creep inward, have the hand freeze to the bone. That, on a larger scale, was what had happened to Edward Clutts.

  Make a hypothesis. Clutts had been landed on Triton, at his own request, to investigate the pillows on their home terrain. There had been a rendezvous appointed at some specific time. They had looked for him, of course, but a man is a small object, even on a pebble like Triton. Clutts hadn’t gone to the rendezvous because he was dead. The pillows didn’t like to be investigated.

  What did the pillows do with the heat? Kent rolled over on his side and lit another smoke. Presumably they needed it in their metabolism. Maybe they used it to make more pillows; no one had ever seen a pillow under the regulation sand-dollar size, and their reproduction and origin was a mystery in which no one had ever taken the slightest interest.

  What did the pillows want? It seemed to him there was only one answer possible. Kent shuddered and rubbed his eyes. They were the inheritors, the successors to the human race. Maybe in the near future, maybe not for billions of yea rs, they were going to run the show. It was probably a near threat rather than a remote one; the bribes they were paying to be disseminated now would indicate that they did not intend to wait for any long time, not until the Universe began to run down. No wonder Toots hated them.

  What was the Latin for pillow? Pul—pulvinus. They ought to be called Pulvinus victor.

  McTeague’s alarm clock went off. He yawned, stretched, and sat up in his bunk. “Time to get up,” he said to Kent. “Two days more, and we’ll be heading back for Terra. With all the holds full of pillows. Nice hot, tough, lucky pillows.”

  “McTeague…” Kent said.

  “Yes?”

  It was hard to tell McTeague what he had discovered, even harder than he had thought it would be. McTeague listened to him without interrupting him, sitting on the edge of his bunk, rubbing his reddish eyebrows now and then with his hands.

  “We mustn’t take them back,” Kent finished almost desperately. “We’ve got to tell the captain and the crew, have them dump the pillows out. No pillows must ever leave Triton again.”

  It sounded horribly weak. McTeague looked at him for a moment and then got up. st ill massaging his eyebrows. “I’ll have to tell the old man about this,” he said.

  * * *

  They put him into the navigator’s cabin—the navigator had to move in with the old man—and stationed a guard in front of the door. Kent sat on the edge of the bed, his hands between his knees, and stared down at the design of the eutex on the deck. He could hear Toots howling somewhere; it sounded a couple of compartments off.

  What was going to happen to him? When he got back to Terra, he supposed, there would be a commission in lunacy, and then a lot of little white buildings and occupational therapy. And meantime the pillows…

  The cabin was getting cold. He went over to the toggle in the wall to turn on more heat and then paused, his hand on it, realizing what was happening.

  He wasn’t going back to Terra.

  The pillows were intelligent, they were sentient, and they weren’t going to let him go back alive. He’d be buried on Triton, with Neptune glowering overhead. The thermometer on the wall registered twenty, but he was shivering, he was growing colder by the second. The heat was leaving him in great waves; it was being sucked from his body as a pump draws air from a jar.

  As the incredible coldness closed over him, he found time to wonder how the pillows could direct their force, what their method of operation was, and he felt a flash of triumph at the thought that this would show McTeague and the others. When they found him frozen to death in the warm cabin, surely they would wonder and remember what he had said. The pillows had overreached themselves.

  Just before he stopped thinking permanently, the fallacy came to him. The pillows knew what they were doing. They would let the heat flow back to him once he was dead; there would not be even an icicle to warn McTeague. It would be written down in the log as heart failure.

  * * *

  “Stow that noise, Toots,” McTeague said. They were at mess; he was holding a juicy chunk of berl meat before the hexapod’s sleek nose and waving it back and forth enticingly. “Be a good hexapod. Here.” He made another pass with the meat at the hexapod.

  “He’s not interested,” Willets said above the din of the creature’s howls. “It upset him, that young fellow dying that way.” He poured more cream on his frujuit.

  “Yeah, it’s too bad he had a bum pump and all that, but hell, he was nothing but a nut. Toots is a smart cookie. He oughtn’t to take on so over a guy like that.” He studied the hexapod thoughtfully an instant and then spread a piece of bread thickly with bollo tongue paste.

  Toots pushed the offering aside and howled again, a long, dismal howl, a very sad howl, that seemed to come from a long way off.

  “I don’t know what ails him, anyway,” said McTeague. He clicked his tongue against his teeth. “Something’s bothering him, that’s sure. The way he’s going on, you’d think it was the end of the world.”

  1950. Thrilling Wonder

  THE LISTENING CHILD

  It was not until after his first bad heart attack that Edwin Hoppier really noticed the child. He had long ago decided on the basis of his contacts with his married sister’s strident brood that he didn’t like children. But the doctor, after telling him roundly that he was lucky to be alive, had ordere
d at least a month’s rest in bed. Somebody had to bring the trays up from the boarding house dining room. Timmy was usually the one.

  Timmy’s grandmother dressed him in smocks and little breeches she cut out of discarded housedresses, and this costume, together with his long black cotton stockings and home-trimmed hair, gave him an odd resemblance to the kindergarten pupils of thirty years ago. After he had successfully negotiated the hazards of knocking, opening the door, and putting the tray down, he would linger, smiling shyly, until Hoppler began to eat. Hoppler always spoke to him, but Timmy never answered. One day Hoppler mentioned it to Mrs. Dean when she was straightening up his room.

  “Oh, didn’t you know?” she said, putting down her dust cloth and turning. “I thought I’d told you. Why, the poor little fellow had scarlet fever when he was a year old, just after his mother died. He’s deaf. He can’t hear a thing.

  “He goes to the deaf school, but he hasn’t learned to lip-read yet. The teacher says it’s hard to teach them, when they can’t hear at all. And of course he can’t talk.”

  “That’s too bad,” Hoppler said with an effort. He had the invalid’s dislike for hearing about other people’s troubles. “Are you sure he’s entirely deaf, though? I thought I’d noticed him listening to things.”

  Mrs. Dean shook her head. “You mean that way he has of putting his head on one side and listening to something you can’t hear yourself? That doesn’t mean anything. I asked the doctor at the clinic about it, and he said Timmy couldn’t possibly be hearing anything. It gives you the creeps to watch him, though, doesn’t it? I used to get the shivers every time, until I got used to it. But he’s just like his ears were filled with concrete, he’s that deaf. Poor little thing.”

  The next time Timmy brought up a tray, Hoppler motioned him over to the bed and folded a paper boat for him. Timmy hung back, smiling shyly. At last he almost snatched the paper and ran out of the room with it. And after that he stayed longer when he brought the tray, and his smiles grew less shy.

  Once in a while Edwin caught him “listening.” He would cock his head to one side and hearken, while his eyes grew bright. Edwin did not find it as disconcerting as Mrs. Dean had pictured it. It was not until the day before Timmy’s birthday that it actually bothered him.

  The day was sunny and fairly warm. Children were playing outside in the street, and Edwin’s open window let in plenty of noise. When Timmy first began to “listen,” tippng his head farther than usual, attentive and concentrated, the pantomime was so vivid that Hoppler was sure some of the sound from outside must have got through to the boy’s dulled nerves. A dog was barking, children called to each other, somebody was trying to start a car. Timmy must have heard some of it.

  The boy relaxed. His attention came back to the picture Edwin was drawing for him. Seconds later there came a burst of shrill, agonized yelping that ended abruptly on a high note. There was a babble of children’s excited voices, fright growing in them. Windows went up. And then, cutting across the confusion, a little girl’s shriek, “He’s dead! Oooh, oooh, that car ran over him. Blackie’s dead!”

  Hoppler put down his pencil and looked at Timmy’s face. The boy’s gray eyes were fixed intently—there was always something bird-like and intense about him—on the drawing. Now he looked up at Edwin and smiled rather uncertainly.

  It was a normal response. Timmy plainly hadn’t heard the commotion in the street and couldn’t imagine what his friend was stopping for. But Edwin pleated his lower lip with his fingers and frowned. Timmy hadn’t heard the dog’s yelps, the cries, when they occurred. Had he, somehow, heard them ahead of time? It was beyond belief. But it had looked like that.

  Hoppler finished the picture—two children wading in a scratchy brook—and gave it to Timmy. Timmy folded it up carefully, making the chuckling sound that with him indicated pleasure. He started toward the door and then came back to run one finger tightly over the back of Edwin’s hand. It was one of the mannerisms, half engaging, half pathetic, which made Hoppler fond of him. This time he found himself wincing a little from the touch. When Timmy had gone out, Hoppler pressed his hands nervously to his chest.

  It was nearly a month later that Timmy “listened” again. Hoppler was sitting up in an armchair and Timmy, lying on the floor, was drawing a panoramic street scene on a large piece of butcher paper he had brought up from the kitchen. He was drawing with great verve, making out-sized pedestrians and dogs and small, very bustle-backed automobiles. Now and then he frowned as his pencil went through the paper to the soft carpet beneath. The boarding house was quiet except for a distant clatter from the kitchen where the pans and dishes from supper were being washed up.

  Timmy got to his feet. He looked sharply at Hoppler for a moment and then fixed his eyes on a spot four or five feet above his head. His lips parted. His head tipped. His eyes grew wide.

  Hoppler watched him uneasily. He had almost forgotten his speculations when the dog had been killed—it was the kind of idea a sensible person will try to dismiss—but now it recurred to him. Was something going to happen? What foolishness! But was Timmy, somehow, listening to the elsewise inaudible footsteps of disaster drawing near?

  Gradually the tension ebbed away from Timmy’s face. He drew a deep breath. He tossed the pale brown hair back out of his eyes. He squatted down on the floor again and picked up his pencil. On a still-empty portion of the paper he began to draw some birds. He had just started the wings of the third one when the familiar a gonizing pressure began in Hoppler’s chest.

  The attack was going to be a bad one, Edwin saw. He felt the familiar fright at the way breath was being remorselessly crushed out of him.

  He groped wildly after the bottle of amyl nitrate pearls that sat on the little stand beside his chair, and overset it. Pain flooded through his chest and ran out terrifyingly along his left arm. He couldn’t stand it. His chest was turning to a brittle box which they—the forces that tormented his elderly body so wantonly—were splintering inward with the reverberating turns of a fiery vise. With his last strength he tried to cry out, to get help. He was going to die.

  When Hoppler came to himself again, he was lying flat in bed with a hot water bottle over his heart. The doctor, looking very serious, was folding up his stethoscope. Mrs. Dean, pale and distracted, hovered in the background.

  “That was a near thing, young fellow,” Dr Simms said severely when he saw Edwin’s eyes fixed on him. “If I’d got Mrs. Dean’s call five minutes later—well! Have you been putting any strain on yourself?”

  Hoppler searched his memory. From the knowledge he had painfully acquired of his disease, he didn’t honestly think his momentary uneasiness at Timmy’s “listening” could be classed as strain. And he had been getting up a good deal lately. Today he’d been sitting up almost the whole day.

  “You’ll have to learn to take this seriously.” Dr. Simms said when he had finished his confession. “Angina’s no picnic. I should think your first attack would have taught you that. But there’s no use crying over spilt milk. I want you to go back to bed for at least a week, and then I’m going to try a new treatment on you. The clinical report on it is encouraging. You mustn’t worry. Keep in a pleasant frame of mind.”

  He went out. There was an inaudible colloquy in the hall between him and Mrs. Dean. The landlady came back and began tidying up the disordered room. Hoppler watched her quick movements with a touch of jealousy. She was older than he, and she was on the go all day. Heart trouble? She didn’t know she had a heart. Simms had told him once that angina preferred its victims male.

  She felt the water bottle for warmth and drew the cover up more snugly about his neck. “You know, Mr. Hoppler,” she said impressively, “Timmy saved your life. He really did. He came running down the stairs while I was putting the silver away, and began pulling at my arm. I tried to shake him off—you know how children are—but he held on and jabbered away at me until I realized something was wrong. You were all slumped over in your chair, faint
ed, when I found you. Of course I called the doctor then. But you heard what he said about five minutes more.”

  Edwin Hoppler nodded. “Timmy’s a good boy, a very good boy,” he said faintly. He wished Mrs. Dean would finish and go. He wanted to rest.

  Timmy poked his head around the door jamb. He was pale and subdued. His eyes were so large they seemed to have eaten up his face. As he caught sight of his friend he smiled uncertainly, but his expression slipped back quickly into anxiousness.

  Hoppler looked away from him and then up at the ceiling. He was grateful to Timmy, he was fond of him, but he didn’t want to see him now. In a sense, he didn’t want ever to see him again. The child—why make any bones about it?—frightened him. Timmy himself was quiet, touching, innocent. The dark faculty for which he appeared to be the vehicle, which he embodied, was otherwise. It was impossible to think of Timmy’s “listening” without a flutter of uneasiness. And the doctor had told him to keep in a pleasant frame of mind. Perhaps he ought to ask Mrs. Dean to keep the boy out of his room, at least for a while. Hoppler licked his bluish lips.

  But was that sensible? Suppose, for the sake of argument, that Timmy actually was able, in some super-normal way, to hear the approach of… of death (Edwin thought grimly). Wouldn’t the sensible thing be to keep Timmy with him as much as possible? If he had realized that Timmy’s uncanny listening this evening portended a heart attack, he could have had the amyl nitrate pearls in readiness for the first pangs. The attack need not have been serious. And he was fond of the boy.

  Hoppler looked toward the door where Timmy was still patiently standing. He raised one hand and beckoned to him. When the child was within reach he gave the grimy little hand a squeeze.

  Dr. Simms’ new treatment did Hoppler a great deal of good. He put on weight, rapidly at first and then more slowly, until he had gained eighteen pounds. Mrs. Dean told him he looked ten years younger.