The Frank Belknap Long Science Fiction MEGAPACK®: 20 Classic Science Fiction Tales

by Frank Belknap Long

  “You’ll never know how unlike till you’ve sat down to eat with them,” the girl interposed, with passionate conviction. “Eat, carouse with them. You’ll find out.”

  “Will I?”

  “That’s what they wanted Jim to do. If he had, we’d have something more valuable to pack and ship back to Terra than a few wretched crockery fragments. Earthern potsherds are a credit a dozen. Oh, the company can sell this rubbish to the Institute of Galactic Archaeology for enough fluid currency to pay your salary and mine. But Jim could have filled the sheds with jeweled ornaments and urns of beaten gold. Once he went just far enough to—”

  She shuddered, and stared at him out of eyes that seemed to fill her face. “Jim told me about it. It was a ghastly, a completely sobering experience. You were just now talking about clocks. Suppose you were to open up a big, old grandfather clock—just to see what makes it tick, just to steady the winding mechanism. Your hands are inside and you are fumbling around and suddenly—it grabs hold of you! Instead of wheels and pulley something reaches out and grabs you. Suppose it is all alive inside, and not even three-dimensional.”

  “It was as bad as that, was it?”

  “It was worse than that, a simplicity of evil beyond anything I could have imagined. I can’t even—talk about it.”

  Bosworth stared at her levelly. “You mean you don’t want to talk about it.”

  “I can’t, I won’t. Jim knows what may happen to you, and in a way, he’d give his right arm to prevent it. But right now his decent human instincts an waging a terrible struggle with his loyalty to the company. He knows how kind the natives would be; how generous they’d be. They wouldn’t haggle with you for wretched potsherds. Oh, no—they’d shower you with presents.”

  “And Griscom knows what that could mean to the company?”

  She nodded. “He can’t go native himself,” she said firmly. “His pride, his inner integrity would be outraged. The shame would never wear off. But when you volunteered, when the home office beamed you were young and confident and eager he O.K.’d your appointment.”

  “Go on.”

  “You know how company reprimands creep into your skin when you’re talking into a sidereal communication disk. The light-years fall away, and you feel you’re actually on Terra. Yet just talking across such a vast distance makes you unsure of yourself, makes you…well, it warps your perspective.”

  “I get it. Griscom wants the natives to trot out their best silverware. So I stick my neck out, I put my head on the chopping block, and he looks the other way. He’s a grand guy—but squeamish. He doesn’t want to watch the blade descend.”

  “You didn’t have to stick your neck out!” the girl retorted, her color rising. “You didn’t have to, you didn’t—”

  Bosworth narrowed his eyes. “No-o,” he said slowly, “I suppose not.” Clumping away from the trading post over the moistdry plain Bosworth found himself wondering why his thoughts kept fluttering back and forth like prismatic mayflies over the stagnant marsh-moss inside his head.

  He was feeling the strain now, he told himself grimly. Rigel wasn’t exactly an easy sun to get to, and the long journey through space had strained his nerves to the breaking point.

  His eyes swept the arid plain, roamed over everything. The frown on his face showed the uneasiness he felt. Space-warp travel had an advantage over mere planet-hopping in a rocket-driven ship, but when a man came out through the yawning gravity-port of a spiral-nosed sidereal cruiser he had to expect to feel shaken up a bit.

  It was curious, but his brain felt limpid somehow, as though the long journey had melted it down and catalyzed it with little floating grains of lunacy. Everything about the Rigel System planet seemed off key and subtly out of alignment. What was even more disturbing, he couldn’t seem to shake off an inner sense of foreboding, as though something he couldn’t even begin to visualize were getting ready to lay an egg directly in his path. An egg filled with explosive possibilities, an egg—He checked himself abruptly. What was the matter with him? Was he running a fever, or was it just the effect of the harsh, bright sunlight slanting down through rifts in the clouds, and glittering in crazy-quilt patches on the moistdry soil?

  There were no winds to dispel the intermittent humidity, but off to his left the receding company buildings were smoldering in a deep, purple haze which was soothing to his vision. With a shudder he fastened his gaze on the distant, metal-sheeted walls of the compound, and plunged on doggedly. He wasn’t going to allow himself to think such thoughts, he told himself grimly. Not while his strength held out, and he could keep on walking.

  He knew that natives would seek him out if he just kept on walking. They were probably watching him now from a distance, for their telescopic eyes could discern a walking human before their sensitive nostrils could detect one.

  Somehow the thought rankled. They were watching him, and he couldn’t watch back. He couldn’t even smell back. He couldn’t—there it was again—that light-headed feeling, as though he’d been given a thousand nursery rhymes, a thousand meaningless jingles to repeat with Socratic inflections. Don’t stop, don’t leave out a single line, or you’ll be sorry!

  Suddenly—Bosworth caught on! Griscom had warned him to anticipate this. They were feeling out his thoughts from a distance! His light-headedness was caused by a stream of almost formless thoughts flowing into his brain, and mingling with the thoughts already there. Thoughts like fluid scalpels, twisting, turning—setting up a mental whirring.

  He wished they’d stop. They were violating the privacy of his mind in a very disturbing way, because he had no way of knowing just how deeply they could probe. He wondered a little wildly how much Griscom knew. How much had Griscom kept back, how much—Thoughts couldn’t hurt him. After all, he wasn’t a child. Sticks and stones could break his bones, but thoughts couldn’t touch him. They’d have to stop soon because they were drawing closer, and he was sure the instant he saw them the probing would stop. They’d know by then why he had walked out to meet them.

  Griscom had warned him he’d get a shock when he saw them. He’d looked at a few photographs and returned them to Griscom with a slight shrug, as though he hadn’t been at all put out.

  Actually, he’d been shocked, and—revolted? No, that was too strong a word. Square the shade of difference between repulsion and revulsion, and the right word would emerge. It wasn’t disgust, exactly, but the human race has never quite reconciled itself to exposed digestive organs. Perhaps it would be more correct to say it has never overcome a deep, instinctive horror, shared by all primates, of unsanitary housing facilities.

  In appearance the Rigel System planetarians were close enough to humanity to be repulsive on that account alone. Griscom had warned him there were aspects of skin texture and expression which no photograph could capture, but—the photographs had been the opposite of vague.

  It was curious, but when he shut his eyes he could see them now, stalking the gray tundra like Fuseli nudes, their owlish faces thrust sharply forward, and their skeleton-thin bodies glinting in the harsh sunlight.

  The visualization seemed as natural as breathing. What he did not know was that he was seeing them in his mind’s eye when he might just as well have been staring straight before him.

  Like most contagious diseases, fear has a brief incubation period.

  Even when Bosworth opened his eyes and saw them squatting on the moist-dry soil in a semicircle about him his immediate reaction was merely one of surprise.

  Though a dark current was sweeping into his mind he told himself simply that they were much uglier than he’d imagined they would be. Much, much uglier. Their flesh was caked with dust, their lips were cracked and blistered, and the series of collapsing lenses which enabled them to telescope their vision at will overlapped in concentric ridges, giving to their faces in repose a distinctly goggle-eyed
appearance.

  For the barest instant fear convulsed Bosworth, and then—ceased to have an influence over him. There swept in upon him instead an immense calmness, a feeling of gratitude and deliverance. It was like—being intoxicated. It was even partly physical. He could feel a warmth creeping up inside him—bridging a gap, breaking down a barrier.

  Surely there could be very little difference between a human and the creature who sat directly in his path, regarding him with an expression vaguely reminiscent of—a stuffed pig’s head, he thought idiotically. How could there be, when he could share that creature’s inmost thoughts and emotions?

  “You are the new young proctor?” the creature asked, elevating its haunches and waving its claw-like hands at him.

  “I am nothing if I am not your friend,” Bosworth heard himself replying.

  “Then you will feed with us?” the creature asked.

  “Yes. I…I would be honored.”

  “Then come, my friend, my brother. We will feast together.”

  The food gagged Bosworth, but he forced himself to eat it. Everything else was so agreeable it wouldn’t have seemed right to refuse the food. Thick chunks of something that certainly wasn’t meat, floating in an evil-smelling gravy, had been set before him in a shallow earthen pan, and he was doing his best to ladle it up, plunk it in his mouth, and forget about it.

  He couldn’t quite forget the taste, which had a way of lingering on despite a fluid intake far in excess of his customary drinking habits.

  The beverage certainly wasn’t bad. It set up a wet tingling on his palate, and brought a glow to his vision when he raised his eyes to the sloping stone roof of the hut.

  Phonetically his host’s name was Glu-gub-gun, but Bosworth had found it more convenient to slur the middle syllable, and address the dear chap merely as Glugun. There was no way of evading the friendliness which Glugun exuded. There flowed from him a continuous solicitude which took the form of replenishing the earthen platter with more chunks of the unsavory goulash, and refilling Bosworth’s goblet till a giddiness swept over him.

  He looked at Glugun across the eating board, noticed how emaciated he seemed, and felt an overwhelming pity for him.

  “You don’t eat enough, Glugun,” he wanted to say.

  It was curious how many things he wanted to tell Glugun. Things he wouldn’t have dreamed of confiding to Joan Mallory, and certainly not to Griscom. Things all humans would like to confide to other humans, but didn’t dare for fear of something which was a little difficult to define.

  In general all humans shared the same frailties, but if you let down your hair and the other chap didn’t you were at a disadvantage. With Glugun he just didn’t feel that way at all. Was it because he felt so superior to Glugun that no advantage which the Rigel System planetarian might snatch could alter the nature of their relationship? Was it because he just couldn’t imagine Glugun assuming a gloating, superior attitude?

  It wasn’t so much the really bad things about themselves that humans kept from one another. It was all the little, fleeting mean thoughts and inane thoughts which surged through their minds in a continuous stream from dawn to dusk. All humans were zanies in their thoughts, but that was all right so long as nobody got caught with his mental pants down.

  If you were feverish and babbled, or became intoxicated and babbled, you were just out of luck. Humans lived and breathed and had their beings behind a triple-piled barrier of deceit, a smokescreen which had to be maintained, or else—Even the little ridiculous posturings which all humans struck in the privacy of their homes couldn’t be exposed to public view without provoking mirth, astonishment or a lifting of eyebrows. That inane little song you sang while shaving. Suppose you had to repeat it before an audience? Or the way you hogged your food when you thought no one was looking.

  Or the time you spanked the cat, not cruelly, but a little more vigorously than the offense warranted, and with appropriate expletives. Or the scribblings you made on the margins of a book while waiting for a shuttle-plane—meaningless little curlicues with just enough symbolism in the twists and turns to damn you in the eyes of a psychiatrist.

  With Glugun he just didn’t feel that way. With Glugun there was no need for secrecy—He was suddenly aware that the Rigel System planetarian was leaning sharply toward him. There was a bright and shining something in Glugun’s taloned clasp, and the thin lips were moving.

  “Now we shall feast in a different way. Stare steadily, and tell me what you see!”

  The crystal cube was about eight inches square, and just holding it made Bosworth feel strange. It had passed so unobtrusively from Glugun’s claw-like hands to his own trembling ones that it was hard for him to realize he was staring into it with an insistence that seemed to pluck at his eyeballs and draw his vision down—and down.

  “Stare steadily,” he heard Glugun reiterating, as though from a great distance.

  At first there was nothing but a milky opacity in the depths of the cube. Then the milkiness cleared a little and he saw—something that glittered. The cube grew brighter, and the glitter resolved itself into a line of metal-sheeted poles, very tiny and far away, as though he were staring down at them through the wrong end of a telescope.

  For a fractional second Bosworth thought that his temples would burst. Standing in front of the compound shading her eyes, was a tiny human figure. There was no longer any opacity inside the cube, and he could see the sunlight glinting in Joan Mallory’s hair, and the thin film of dust which had swirled up about her knees. After a moment Griscom came clumping out to stand beside her.

  Bosworth squeezed the cube between his palms, and as he did so it seemed to contract a little. He could make out the girl’s troubled frown, the tilt of Griscom’s pipe. The girl’s head was sun-aureoled, and a thin ribbon of smoke—he wrinkled his nose—was arising from the bowl of Griscom’s pipe into the moist-dry air.

  Suddenly Joan Mallory moved her head a little, and her brow seemed to take on a deeper redness, as though a crimson desert flower had blossomed in the tangled wilderness of her hair.

  “Draw them closer, draw them toward you!” a far-off voice urged. It wasn’t difficult: it was not even necessary for Bosworth to increase the intensity of his stare. About the two tiny figures there had crept a translucent glimmering, and they swayed in it like—the image came unbidden into his mind—two minikin corpses afloat in a luminous tide.

  Abruptly as he stared the stockade seemed to recede, and they were swirling up toward him over a tilted plain. Larger they grew and larger, swirling up as though propelled by an invisible wind. They hardly seemed to move their limbs as they drew near, and their faces were no longer mobile.

  Suddenly they were quite astonishingly large, as though a magnification had taken place inside the cube. Their eyes were closed, and they appeared to be asleep. There was a pulsing at the girl’s temples, and a brightening and a dimming of the glowing dottle in Griscom’s pipe.

  He saw them for an instant and then—he didn’t see them. His faculties seemed to expand, and into him there swept a vitality such as he had never known. He wasn’t staring into the cube any more. He wasn’t staring at anything at all.

  There was a darkness in his brain—a vast, tumultuous pulsing which filled him with a soaring sense of power. The darkness and the pulsing were like a carousal. Winey was the darkness, bubbling and intoxicating, and with all his senses he drank deep of it until his temples swelled and something seemed to burst in his brain.

  When he opened his eyes he seemed to be outside his own body. Remote and cold his body seemed—no longer a part of himself. He could look down over his drawn-up legs, could see also his hands which were folded in front of him. But a gray opacity swirled where his chest should have been, and he felt that he could not move his head. There was a sucked-in feeling about his eyes, and he couldn’t—seem
to—blink them.

  Then he saw Glugun. The Rigel System planetarian was slumped down opposite him, his spindly legs drawn up grasshopper fashion on both sides of his thin body, his anemone-like digestive orifice concealed by the cube which he was clasping to his chest with rigidly contracted talons. He eyes were lidded and upon his owlish face there was a slumberous expression.

  Bosworth thought he knew what his mind had done to the minikins in the crystal. He was a bright boy—bright enough to pry out the ghastly rind of the fruit which Glugun had offered him. He’d taken a mental bite, and it had—intoxicated him. Glugun had then snatched the cube back, and was now intoxicated himself.

  Cold sweat oozed out on Bosworth’s brow, and his teeth came together. He’d feasted on—human vital energies? Astral images? Occultism? Vampirism? On Terra crystal spheres and cubes were associated with the trappings of occultism. But on a Rigel sun planet—Might there not be something entirely physiological in the human body, some as yet undetected vital emanation which could be trapped and imprisoned? If the cube were a kind of magnetized flytrap, composed of matter so sensitized it could absorb protoplasmic auras, and release them to a mind craving nourishment—

  He stopped, appalled by the direction his thoughts were taking. Were the trappings and legends of occultism—crystal balls, abnormal mental states, the vampire and werewolf myths—simply the expression of a kind of psychic cannibalism, innate in humanity, but denied fulfillment on Terra, and groping blindly for the right answer?

  Humans fashioned little wax figurines and pierced them with nails. Humans looked into crystals. An organism with an innate but unsatisfied craving would be guided by intuition, for evolution had a mysterious way of transforming blind drives into hunches.