by Damon Knight
“Did you get that chart straightened out?” the Intercom demanded.
“No, but—”
“You’re on extra duty as of now. Take a pill. Is Alvarez here?”
“Yes,” said Womrath resignedly.
“Both of you come in, then. Leave George outside.”
“Hello, Doctor,” the spheroid piped. “Are you panga to me?”
“Don’t let’s go into that,” said Womrath, twitching, and took Alvarez by the sleeve. They found the chief of the Xenology Section, Edward H. Dominick, huddled bald and bearlike behind his desk. The cigar in his hand looked chewed. “Womrath,” he said, “when can you give me that chart?”
“I don’t knew. Never, maybe.” When Dominick scowled at, him irritably, he shrugged and lit a sullen cigarette.
Dominick swiveled his gaze to Alvarez. “Have you,” he asked, “heard about what happened at the banquet in George’s honer yesterday?”
“No, I have not,” said Alvarez. “Will you be so kind as to tell me, or else shut up about it?”—
Dominick rubbed his shaven skull, absorbing the insult. “It was during the dessert,” he said. “George was sitting opposite Mrs. Carver, in that little jump seat. Just as she get her fork into the pie—it was lemon meringue—George rolled up over the table and grabbed the plate away. Mrs. Carver screamed, pulled back—thought she was being attacked, I suppose—and the chair went out from under her. It—was—a—mess.”
Alvarez ended the awed silence. “What did he do with the pie?”
“Ate it,” said Dominick glumly. “Had a perfectly good piece of his own, that he didn’t touch.” He popped a lozenge into his mouth.
Alvarez shook his head. “Not typical. His pattern is strictly submissive. I don’t like it.”
“That’s what I told Carver. But he was livid. Shaking. We all sat there until he escorted his wife to her room and came back. Then we had an interrogation. All we could get out of George was, “I thought I was panga to her.”
Alvarez shifted impatiently in his chair, reaching automatically for a bunch of grapes from the bowl on the desk. He was a small, spare man, and he felt defensive about it. “Now what is all this panga business?” he demanded.
Womrath snorted, and began to peel a banana.
“Panga,” said Dominick, “would appear to be some kind of complicated authority-submission relationship that exists among the gorgons.” Alvarez sat up straighter. “They never mentioned it to us, because we never asked. Now it turns out to be crucial.” Dominick sighed. “Fourteen months, just getting a three-man base down on the planet. Seven more to get the elders’ permission to bring a gorgon here experimentally. All according to the book. We picked the biggest and brightest-looking one we could find: that was George. He seemed to be coming along great. And now this.”
“Well, chief,” said Womrath carefully, “nobody has any more admiration than I have for Mrs. Carver as a consumer—she really puts it away, but it seems to me the question is, is George damaged—”
Dominick was shaking his head. “I haven’t told you the rest of it. This panga thing stopped Carver cold, but not for long. He beamed down to the planethead and had Rubinson ask the elders. ’Is George panga to the Commandant’s wife?’ ”
Alvarez grinned mirthlessly and clicked his tongue.
“Sure,” Dominick nodded. “Who knows what a question like that may have meant to them? They answered back, in effect, ‘Certainly not,’ and wanted to know the details. Carver told them.”
“And?” said Alvarez.
“They said George was a shocking criminal who should be appropriately punished. Not by them, you understand—by us, because we’re the offended parties. Moreover—now this must make sense to their peculiar way of looking at things—if we don’t punish George to their satisfaction, they’ll punish Rubinson and his whole crew.”
“How?” Alvarez demanded.
“By doing,” Dominick said, “whatever it is we should have done to George—and that could be anything.”
Womrath pursed his lips to whistle, but no sound came out. He swallowed a mouthful of banana and tried again. Still nothing.
“You get it?” said Dominick with suppressed emotion. They all looked through the open doorway at George, squatting patiently in the other room. “There’s no trouble about ‘punishment’—we all know what it means, we’ve read the books. But how do you punish an alien like that? An eye for a what?”
“Now let’s see if we have this straight,” said Dominick, sorting through the papers in his hand. Womrath and Alvarez looked on from either side. George tried to peek, too, but his photoceptors were too short. They were all standing in the outer office, which had been stripped to the bare walls and floor. “One. We know a gorgon changes color according to his emotional state. When they’re contented, they’re a kind of rose pink. When they’re unhappy, they turn blue.”
“He’s been pink ever since we’ve had him on the Satellite,” said Womrath, glancing down at the gorgon.
“Except at the banquet,” Dominick answered thoughtfully. “I remember he turned bluish just before… If we could find out what it was that set him off—Well, first things first.” He held down another finger. “Two, we don’t have any information at all about local systems of reward and punishment. They may cut each other into bits for spitting on the sidewalk, or they may just slap each other’s—um, wrists—” He looked unhappily down at George, all his auricles and photoceptors out on stalks.
“—for arson, rape and mopery,” Dominick finished. “We don’t know; we’ll have to play it by ear.”
“What does George say about it?” Alvarez asked. “Why don’t you ask him?”
“We thought of that,” Womrath said glumly. “Asked him what the elders would do to him in a case like this, and he said they’d quabble his infarcts, or something.”
“A dead end,” Dominick added. “It would take us years…” He scrubbed his naked scalp with a palm. “Well, number three, we’ve got all the furniture out of here—it’s going to be damned crowded, with the whole staff working in my office,but never mind… Number four, there’s his plate with the bread and water. And number five, that door has been fixed so it latches on the outside. Let’s give it a dry run.” He led the way to the door; the others followed, including George. “No, you stay in here,” Womrath told him. George stopped, blushing an agreeable pink.
Dominick solemnly closed the door and dropped the improvised latch into its socket. He punched the door button, found it satisfactorily closed. Through the transparent upper pane, they could see George inquisitively watching.
Dominick opened the door again. “Now, George,” he said, “pay attention. This is a prison. You’re being punished. We’re going to keep you in here, with nothing to eat but what’s there, until we think you’re punished enough. Understand?”
“Yes,” said George doubtfully.
“All right,” said Dominick, and closed the door. They all stood watching for a while, and George stood watching them back, but nothing else happened. “Let’s go into my office and wait,” said Dominick with a sigh. “Can’t expect miracles, all at once.”
They trooped down the corridor to the adjoining room and ate peanuts for a while. “He’s a sociable creature,” Womrath said hopefully. “He’ll get lonesome after a while.”
“And hungry,” Alvarez said. “He never turns down a meal.”
Half an hour later, when they looked in, George was thoughtfully chewing up the carpet. “No, no, no, no, George,” said Dominick, bursting in on him. “You’re not supposed to eat anything except what we give you. This is a prison.”
“Good carpet,” said George, hurt.
“I don’t care if it is. You don’t eat it, understand?”
“Okay,” said George cheerfully. His color was an honest rose-pink.
Four hours later, when Alvarez went off shift, George had settled down in a corner and pulled in all his appendages. He was asleep. If anything, he look
ed pinker that ever.
When Alvarez came on shift again, there was no doubt about it. George was sitting in the middle of the room, photoceptors out and waving rhythmically; his color was a glowing pink, the pink of a rose pearl. Dominick kept him in there for another day, just to make sure; George seemed to lose a little weight on the austere diet, but glowed a steady pink. He liked it.
II
Goose Kelly, the games instructor, tried to keep up a good front, but he had the worst case of wheel fever on SAPS 3107A. It had got so that looking out of that fat, blue-green planet, swimming there so close, was more than he could bear. Kelly was a big man, an outdoorman by instinct; he longed for natural air in his lungs, and turf under his feet. To compensate, he strode faster, shouted louder, got redder of face and bulgier of eye, bristled more fiercely. To quiet an occasional trembling of his hands, he munched sedative pills. He had dreams of falling, with which he bored the ship’s Mother Hubbard and the Church of—Marx padre by turns.
“Is that it?” he asked now, disapprovingly. He had never seen the gorgon before; Semantics, Medical and Xenology Sections had been keeping him pretty much to themselves.
Dominick prodded the pinkish sphere with his toe. “Wake up, George.”
After a moment, the gorgon’s skin became lumpy at half a dozen points. The lumps grew slowly into long, segmented stems. Some of these expanded at the tips into “feet” and “hands”; others flowered into the intricate patterns of auricles and photoceptors—and one speech organ, which looked like a small trumpet. “Hello,” said George cheerfully.
“He can pull them back in any time?” Kelly asked, rubbing his chin.
“Yes. Show him, George.”
“All right.” The feather stalks became blank-tipped, then rapidly shrank, segment by segment. In less than two seconds, George was a smooth sphere again.
“Well, that makes for a little problem here,” said Kelly. “You see what I mean? If you can’t get a grip on him, how are you going to punish him like you say?”
“We’ve tried everything we could think of,” said Dominick. “We locked him up, kept him on short rations, didn’t talk to him… He doesn’t draw any pay, you know, so you can’t fine him.”
“Or downgrade him on the promotion lists, either,” said Womrath gloomily.
“No. And it’s a little late to use the Pavlov-Morganstern treatments we all had when we were children. We can’t prevent a crime he’s already committed. So our thought was, since you’re the games instructor—”
“We thought,” Womrath said diplomatically, “you might have noticed something that might be useful. You know, rough-housing and so on.”
Kelly thought this over. “Well, there’s low blows,” he said, “but I mean, hell—” He gestured futilely at George, who had just decided to put his auricles out again. “What would you—”
“No, that’s out of the question,” Dominick said heavily. “Well, I’m sorry, Kelly. It was nice of you to help out.”
“No, now, wait a minute,” said Kelly. “I got something coming to me, maybe.” He nibbled a thumbnail, staring down at the gorgon. “How would this be. I was thinking—sometimes the boys in the pool, they get kind of frisky, they take to ducking each other. Under the water. Now what I was thinking, he breathes air, doesn’t he? You know what I mean?”
Dominick and Womrath looked at each other. “It sounds possible,” said Dominick.
, “Out of the question. We don’t know what his tolerance is. Suppose Kelly should damage him severely, or even—”
.. “Oh,” said Dominick. “No, you’re right, we couldn’t take a chance.”
“I’ve been a games instructor for seventy-three years—two rejuvenations—” Kelly began, bristling.
“No, it isn’t that, Kelly,” said Womrath hastily. “We’re just thinking, George isn’t human. So how do we know how he’d react to a ducking?”
“On the other hand,” Dominick said, “gorgons do turn blue when they’re not happy—we have Rubinson’s assurance for that. It seems to me George wouldn’t be happy when smothering; that would be the whole point, wouldn’t it? Dr. Alvarez would supervise closely, of course. Really, Alvarez, I don’t see why not. Kelly, if you’ll tell what time would be most convenient for you—”
“Well,” said Kelly, looking at his thumbwatch, “hell, the pool is empty now—it’s ladies’ day, but all the girls are down in Section Seven, hanging around Mrs. Carver. I hear she’s still . hysterical.”
Struck by a thought, Alvarez was bending over to speak to the gorgon. “George, you breathe by spiracles, is that correct? Those little tubes all over your skin?”
“Yes,” said George.
“Well, do they work under water?”
“No.”
Dominick and Kelly were listening with interest.
“If we held you under water, would it hurt you?”
George flickered uncertainly, from rose to pale magenta. “Don’t know. Little bit.”
The three men leaned closer. “Well, George,” said Dominick tensely, “would that be a punishment?”
George flickered again, violently. “Yes. No. Maybe. Don’t know.”
They straightened again, disappointed; Dominick sighed gustily. “He always gives us those mixed-up answers. I don’t know. Let’s try it—what else can we do?”
Kelly found himself paired off with George,following Dominick and Dr. Alvarez, and preceding Womrath and an orderly named Josling who was wheeling one of the dispensary pul-motors. The up-curving corridors were deserted. Kelly lagged a little, adjusting his pace to George’s waddling steps. After a moment, he was surprised to feel something small and soft grip his fingers. He looked down; George the gorgon had put one seven-fingered “hand” into his. The gorgon’s flowerlike photoceptors were turned trustfully upward.
Kelly was taken by surprise. No children were allowed on the Satellite, but Kelly had been the father of eight in a previous rejuvenation. The confiding touch stirred old memories. “That’ll be all right,” said Kelly gruffly. “You just come along with me.”
The pool, as he had predicted, was empty. Ripples reflected faint threads of light up the walls. “The shallow end would be better,” said Kelly. His voice was hollow, and echoed back flatly. Pausing to peel off his coverall, he led George carefully down the steps into the pool. Half submerged, George floated. Kelly drew him gently out into deeper water.
Dominick and the others arranged themselves along the brink in interested attitudes. Kelly cleared his throat. “Well,” he said, “the way it generally happens, one of the boys will grab ahold of another one, like this—” He put his hands on the smooth floating globe, and hesitated.
“Go ahead now, Kelly,” called Dominick. “Remember, you have a direct order to do this.”
“Sure,” said Kelly. “Well—” he turned to the gorgon. “Hold your breath now!” He pressed downward. The gorgon seemed lighter than he had expected, like an inflated ball; it was hard to force it under.
Kelly pushed harder. George went under briefly and slipped out of Kelly’s hands, bobbing to the surface. The gorgon’s speaking trumpet cleared itself of water with a phonk and said, “Nice. Do again, Kelly.”
Kelly glanced over at Dominick, who said, “Yes. Again.” Dr. Alvarez stroked his thin beard and said nothing.
Kelly took a deep sympathetic breath, and shoved the gorgon under. A few bubbles came to the surface; George’s speaking trumpet broke water, but made no sound. Down below, Kelly could see his own pale hands gripping the gorgon’s body; the water made them look bloodless; but not George; he was a clear, unblemished pink.
There was a discouraged silence when Kelly brought him back up.
“Listen,” said Dominick, “I’ve got another idea. George, can you breathe through that speaking trumpet, too?”
“Yes,” said George cheerfully.
There was a chorus of disgusted “Oh, wells.” Everybody brightened perceptibly. Josling polished his pul-motor with a ra
g. “Go ahead, Kelly,” said Dominick. “And this time, you hold him under.”
George went down for the third time. The bubbles swirled upward. The gorgon’s speaking trumpet swayed toward the surface, but Kelly leaned farther over, blocking it with his forearm. After a moment, all of George’s appendages began to “contract. Kelly craned his neck downward anxiously. Was a hint of blue beginning to show?
“Keep him down,” said Alvarez sharply.
George was a blank sphere again. Then one or two of the limbs began to reappear; but they looked different somehow.
“Now?” said Kelly.
“Give him a second more,” said Dominick, leaning over precariously. “It seems to me—”
Kelly’s back muscles were knotted with tension. He did not like the way George’s new limbs seemed to be flattening out, trailing limply—it was as if something had gone wrong in the works.
“I’m bringing him up,” he said hoarsely.
To Kelly’s horror, when he lifted his hands. George stayed where he was. Kelly made a grab for him, but the gorgon slipped out from under his fingers. The new limbs stiffened and sculled vigorously; George darted away, deep under the water.
Leaning, open-mouthed, Dominick slipped and went into the pool with a majestic splash. He floundered and rose up, a moment later, streaming with water like a sea lion. Kelly, wading anxiously toward him, stopped when he saw that Dominick was safe. Both men looked down. Between them and around them swam George, darting and drifting by turns, as much at home in the pool as a speckled trout.
“Fins!” said Dominick, stack-jawed. “And gills!”
It may as well be said that Dr. Walter Alvarez was a misanthrope. He did not like people; he liked diseases. Down there on Planet Seven, once the trade mission was established, he could confidently expect enough new and startling ailments to keep him happy as a lark for years. Up here, all he got was sprained ankles, psychosomatic colds, hives and indigestion. There was one cook’s helper named Samuels who kept coming back every Wednesday with the same boil on the back of his neck. It got so that in spite of himself, Alvarez spent the whole week dreading Wednesday. When he saw Samuels’s earnest face coming through the door, something seemed to wind itself a little tighter inside him.