“After a few moments, the creatures came rushing back—first one, then another. Their pushcarts were full of stones, sand, chunks of rubbery plants, and such rubbish as that. They droned out their friendly greeting, which didn’t really sound so friendly, and dashed on. The third one I assumed to be my first acquaintance and I decided to have another chat with him. I stepped into his path again and waited.
“Up he came, booming out his ‘We are v-r-r-riends’ and stopped. I looked at him; four or five of his eyes looked at me. He tried his password again and gave a shove on his cart, but I stood firm. And then the—the dashed creature reached out one of his arms, and two finger-like nippers tweaked my nose!”
“Haw!” roared Harrison. “Maybe the things have a sense of beauty!”
“Laugh!” grumbled Jarvis. “I’d already had a nasty bump and a mean frostbite on that nose. Anyway, I yelled ‘Ouch!’ and jumped aside and the creature dashed away; but from then on, their greeting was ‘We are v-r-r-riends! Ouch!’ Queer beasts!
“Tweel and I followed the road squarely up to the nearest mound. The creatures were coming and going, paying us not the slightest attention, fetching their loads of rubbish. The road simply dived into an opening, and slanted down like an old mine, and in and out darted the barrel-people, greeting us with their eternal phrase.
“I looked in; there was a light somewhere below, and I was curious to see it. It didn’t look like a flame or torch, you understand, but more like a civilized light, and I thought that I might get some clue as to the creatures’ development. So in I went and Tweel tagged along, not without a few trills and twitters, however.
“The light was curious; it sputtered and flared like an old arc light, but came from a single black rod set in the wall of the corridor. It was electric, beyond doubt. The creatures were fairly civilized, apparently.
“Then I saw another light shining on something that glittered and I went on to look at that, but it was only a heap of shiny sand. I turned toward the entrance to leave, and the Devil take me if it wasn’t gone!
“I suppose the corridor had curved, or I’d stepped into a side passage. Anyway, I walked back in that direction I thought we’d come, and all I saw was more dimlit corridor. The place was a labyrinth! There was nothing but twisting passages running every way, lit by occasional lights, and now and then a creature running by, sometimes with a pushcart, sometimes without.
“Well, I wasn’t much worried at first. Tweel and I had only come a few steps from the entrance. But every move we made after that seemed to get us in deeper. Finally I tried following one of the creatures with an empty cart, thinking that he’d be going out for his rubbish, but he ran around aimlessly, into one passage and out another. When he started dashing around a pillar like one of these Japanese waltzing mice, I gave up, dumped my water tank on the floor, and sat down.
“Tweel was as lost as I. I pointed up and he said ‘No—no—no!’ in a sort of helpless trill. And we couldn’t get any help from the natives. They paid no attention at all, except to assure us they were friends—ouch!
“Lord! I don’t know how many hours or days we wandered around there! I slept twice from sheer exhaustion; Tweel never seemed to need sleep. We tried following only the upward corridors, but they’d run uphill a ways and then curve downwards. The temperature in that damned ant hill was constant; you couldn’t tell night from day and after my first sleep I didn’t know whether I’d slept one hour or thirteen, so I couldn’t tell from my watch whether it was midnight or noon.
“We saw plenty of strange things. There were machines running in some of the corridors, but they didn’t seem to be doing anything—just wheels turning. And several times I saw two barrel-beasts with a little one growing between them, joined to both.”
“Parthenogenesis!” exulted Leroy. “Parthenogenesis by budding like les tulipes!”
“If you say so, Frenchy,” agreed Jarvis. “The things never noticed us at all, except, as I say, to greet us with ‘We are v-r-r-riends! Ouch!’ They seemed to have no home-life of any sort, but just scurried around with their pushcarts, bringing in rubbish. And finally I discovered what they did with it.
“We’d had a little luck with a corridor, one that slanted upwards for a great distance. I was feeling that we ought to be close to the surface when suddenly the passage debouched into a domed chamber, the only one we’d seen. And man!—I felt like dancing when I saw what looked like daylight through a crevice in the roof.
“There was a—a sort of machine in the chamber, just an enormous wheel that turned slowly, and one of the creatures was in the act of dumping his rubbish below it. The wheel ground it with a crunch—sand, stones, plants, all into powder that sifted away somewhere. While we watched, others filed in, repeating the process, and that seemed to be all. No rhyme nor reason to the whole thing—but that’s characteristic of this crazy planet. And there was another fact that’s almost too bizarre to believe.
“One of the creatures, having dumped his load, pushed his cart aside with a crash and calmly shoved himself under the wheel! I watched him being crushed, too stupefied to make a sound, and a moment later, another followed him! They were perfectly methodical about it, too; one of the cartless creatures took the abandoned pushcart.
“Tweel didn’t seem surprised; I pointed out the next suicide to him, and he just gave the most human-like shrug imaginable, as much as to say, ‘What can I do about it?’ He must have known more or less about these creatures.
“Then I saw something else. There was something beyond the wheel, something shining on a sort of low pedestal. I walked over; there was a little crystal about the size of an egg, fluorescing to beat Tophet. The light from it stung my hands and face, almost like a static discharge, and then I noticed another funny thing. Remember that wart I had on my left thumb? Look!” Jarvis extended his hand. “It dried up and fell off—just like that! And my abused nose—say, the pain went out of it like magic! The thing had the property of hard ex-rays or gamma radiations, only more so; it destroyed diseased tissue and left healthy tissue unharmed!
“I was thinking what a present that’d be to take back to Mother Earth when a lot of racket interrupted. We dashed back to the other side of the wheel in time to see one of the pushcarts ground up. Some suicide had been careless, it seems.
“Then suddenly the creatures were booming and drumming all around us and their noise was decidedly menacing. A crowd of them advanced toward us; we backed out of what I thought was the passage we’d entered by, and they came rumbling after us, some pushing carts and some not. Crazy brutes! There was a whole chorus of ‘We are v-r-r-riends! Ouch!’ I didn’t like the ‘ouch’; it was rather suggestive.
“Tweel had his glass gun out and I dumped my water tank for greater freedom and got mine. We backed up the corridor with the barrel-beasts following—about twenty of them. Queer thing—the ones coming in with loaded carts moved past us inches away without a sign.
“Tweel must have noticed that. Suddenly, he snatched out that glowing coal cigar-lighter of his and touched a cart-load of plant limbs. Puff! The whole load was burning—and the crazy beast pushing it went right along without a change of pace! It created some disturbance among our ‘v-r-r-riends,’ however—and then I noticed the smoke eddying and swirling past us, and sure enough, there was the entrance!
“I grabbed Tweel and out we dashed and after us our twenty pursuers. The daylight felt like Heaven, though I saw at first glance that the sun was all but set, and that was bad, since I couldn’t live outside my thermo-skin bag in a Martian night—at least, without a fire.
“And things got worse in a hurry. They cornered us in an angle between two mounds, and there we stood. I hadn’t fired nor had Tweel; there wasn’t any use in irritating the brutes. They stopped a little distance away and began their booming about friendship and ouches.
“Then things got still worse! A barrel-brute came out with a pushcart and they all grabbed into it and came out with handfuls of foot-long c
opper darts—sharp-looking ones—and all of a sudden one sailed past my ear—zing! And it was shoot or die then.
“We were doing pretty well for a while. We picked off the ones next to the pushcart and managed to keep the darts at a minimum, but suddenly there was a thunderous booming of ‘v-r-r-riends’ and ‘ouches,’ and a whole army of ’em came out of their hole.
“Man! We were through and I knew it! Then I realized that Tweel wasn’t. He could have leaped the mound behind us as easily as not. He was staying for me!
“Say, I could have cried if there’d been time! I’d liked Tweel from the first, but whether I’d have had gratitude to do what he was doing—suppose I had saved him from the first dream-beast—he’d done as much for me, hadn’t he? I grabbed his arm, and said ‘Tweel,’ and pointed up, and he understood. He said, ‘No—no—no, Tick!’ and popped away with his glass pistol.
“What could I do? I’d be a goner anyway when the sun set, but I couldn’t explain that to him. I said, ‘Thanks, Tweel. You’re a man!’ and felt that I wasn’t paying him any compliment at all. A man! There are mighty few men who’d do that.
“So I went ‘bang’ with my gun and Tweel went ‘puff’ with his, and the barrels were throwing darts and getting ready to rush us, and booming about being friends. I had given up hope. Then suddenly an angel dropped right down from Heaven in the shape of Putz, with his under-jets blasting the barrels into very small pieces!
“Wow! I let out a yell and dashed for the rocket; Putz opened the door and in I went, laughing and crying and shouting! It was a moment or so before I remembered Tweel; I looked around in time to see him rising in one of his nosedives over the mound and away.
“I had a devil of a job arguing Putz into following! By the time we got the rocket aloft, darkness was down; you know how it comes here—like turning off a light. We sailed out over the desert and put down once or twice. I yelled ‘Tweel!’ and yelled it a hundred times, I guess. We couldn’t find him; he could travel like the wind and all I got—or else I imagined it—was a faint trilling and twittering drifting out of the south. He’d gone, and damn it! I wish—I wish he hadn’t!”
The four men of the Ares were silent—even the sardonic Harrison. At last little Leroy broke the stillness.
“I should like to see,” he murmured.
“Yeah,” said Harrison. “And the wart-cure. Too bad you missed that; it might be the cancer cure they’ve been hunting for a century and a half.”
“Oh, that!” muttered Jarvis gloomily. “That’s what started the fight!” He drew a glistening object from his pocket.
“Here it is.”
TWILIGHT
by John W. Campbell
First published in 1934, under the pseudonym, “Don A. Stuart”
“Speaking of hitch-hikers,” said Jim Bendell in a rather bewildered way, “I picked up a man the other day that certainly was a queer cuss.” He laughed, but it wasn’t a real laugh. “He told me the queerest yarn I ever heard. Most of them tell you how they lost their good jobs and tried to find work out here in the wide spaces of the West. They don’t seem to realize how many people we have out here. They think all this great beautiful country is uninhabited.”
Jim Bendell’s a real estate man, and I knew how he could go on. That’s his favorite line, you know. He’s real worried because there’s a lot of homesteading plots still open out in our state. He talks about the beautiful country, but he never went farther into the desert than the edge of town. ’Fraid of it actually. So I sort of steered him back on the track.
“What did he claim, Jim? Prospector who couldn’t find land to prospect?”
“That’s not very funny, Bart. No; it wasn’t only what he claimed. He didn’t even claim it, just said it. You know, he didn’t say it was true, he just said it. That’s what gets me. I know it ain’t true, but the way he said it—Oh, I don’t know.”
By which I knew he didn’t. Jim Bendell’s usually pretty careful about his English—real proud of it. When he slips, that means he’s disturbed. Like the time he thought the rattlesnake was a stick of wood and wanted to put it on the fire.
Jim went on: And he had funny clothes, too. They looked like silver, but they were soft as silk. And at night they glowed just a little.
I picked him up about dusk. Really picked him up. He was lying off about ten feet from the South Road. I thought, at first, somebody had hit him, and then hadn’t stopped. Didn’t see him very clearly, you know. I picked him up, put him in the car, and started on. I had about three hundred miles to go, but I thought I could drop him at Warren Spring with Doc Vance. But he came to in about five minutes, and opened his eyes. He looked straight off, and he looked first at the car, then at the Moon. “Thank God!” he says, and then looks at me. It gave me a shock. He was beautiful. No; he was handsome.
He wasn’t either one. He was magnificent. He was about six feet two, I think, and his hair was brown, with a touch of red-gold. It seemed like fine copper wire that’s turned brown. It was crisp and curly. His forehead was wide, twice as wide as mine. His features were delicate, but tremendously impressive; his eyes were gray, like etched iron, and bigger than mine—a lot.
That suit he wore—it was more like a bathing suit with pajama trousers. His arms were long and muscled smoothly as an Indian’s. He was white, though, tanned lightly with a golden, rather than a brown, tan.
But he was magnificent. Most wonderful man I ever saw. I don’t know, damn it!
“Hello!” I said. “Have an accident?”
“No; not this time, at least.”
And his voice was magnificent, too. It wasn’t an ordinary voice. It sounded like an organ talking, only it was human.
“But maybe my mind isn’t quite steady yet. I tried an experiment. Tell me what the date is, year and all, and let me see,” he went on.
“Why—December 9, 1932,” I said.
And it didn’t please him. He didn’t like it a bit. But the wry grin that came over his face gave way to a chuckle.
“Over a thousand—” he says reminiscently. “Not as bad as seven million. I shouldn’t complain.”
“Seven million what?”
“Years,” he said, steadily enough. Like he meant it. “I tried an experiment once. Or I will try it. Now I’ll have to try again. The experiment was—in 3059. I’d just finished the release experiment. Testing space then. Time—it wasn’t that, I still believe. It was space. I felt myself caught in that field, but I couldn’t pull away. Field gamma-H 481, intensity 935 in the Pellman range. It sucked me in, and I went out.
“I think it took a short cut through space to the position the solar system will occupy. Through a higher dimension, effecting a speed exceeding light and throwing me into the future plane.”
He wasn’t telling me, you know. He was just thinking out loud. Then he began to realize I was there.
“I couldn’t read their instruments, seven million years of evolution changed everything. So I overshot my mark a little coming back. I belong in 3059.”
“But tell me, what’s the latest scientific invention of this year?”
He startled me so, I answered almost before I thought.
“Why, television, I guess. And radio and airplanes.”
“Radio—good. They will have instruments.”
“But see here—who are you?”
“Ah—I’m sorry. I forgot,” he replied in that organ voice of his. “I am Ares Sen Kenlin. And you?”
“James Waters Bendell.”
“Waters—what does that mean? I do not recognize it.”
“Why—it’s a name, of course. Why should you recognize it?”
“I see—you have not the classification, then. ‘Sen’ stands for science.”
“Where did you come from, Mr. Kenlin?”
“Come from?” He smiled, and his voice was slow and soft. “I came out of space across seven million years or more. They had lost count—the men had. The machines had eliminated the unneeded service. They
didn’t know what year it was. But before that—my home is in Neva’th City in the 3059.”
That’s when I began to think he was a nut.
“I was an experimenter,” he went on. “Science, as I have said. My father was a scientist, too, but in human genetics. I myself am an experiment. He proved his point, and all the world followed suit. I was the first of the new race.
“The new race—oh, holy destiny—what has—what will—
“What is its end? I have seen it—almost. I saw them—the little men—bewildered—lost. And the machines. Must it be—can’t anything sway it?
“Listen—I heard this song.”
He sang the song. Then he didn’t have to tell me about the people. I knew them. I could hear their voices, in the queer, crackling, un-English words. I could read their bewildered longings. It was in a minor key, I think. It called, it called and asked, and hunted hopelessly. And over it all the steady rumble and whine of the unknown, forgotten machines.
The machines that couldn’t stop, because they had been started, and the little men had forgotten how to stop them, or even what they were for, looking at them and listening—and wondering. They couldn’t read or write any more, and the language had changed, you see, so that the phonic records of their ancestors meant nothing to them.
But that song went on, and they wondered. And they looked out across space and they saw the warm, friendly stars—too far away. Nine planets they knew and inhabited. And locked by infinite distance, they couldn’t see another race, a new life.
And through it all—two things. The machines. Bewildered forgetfulness. And maybe one more. Why?
That was the song, and it made me cold. It shouldn’t be sung around people of today. It almost killed something. It seemed to kill hope. After that song—I—well, I believed him.
When he finished the song, he didn’t talk for a while. Then he sort of shook himself.
The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One 1929-1964--The Greatest Science Fiction Stories of All Time Chosen by the Members of the Science Fiction Writers of America Page 4