by Joe Haldeman
Braxn made no comment. He hadn’t bothered to form a speech organ for the interview. He knew Llarvl would do all the talking anyway.
But he had been studying, under stasis, for several hours. Knowing exactly what needed to be done, he let half his body disintegrate into its component parts and started to remold them.
First the skeleton, bone by thousandth bone; the internal organs, in logical order, glistening, throbbing, functioning; wet-red muscle, fat, connective tissue, derma, epidermis; smooth and olive, fingernails, hair, small mole on the left cheek.
Vocal cords, virgin, throb contralto: “Mammalian enough?”
“Speak Galactic!”
“I said, ‘Mammalian enough?’ I mean, would you like them bigger,” she demonstrated, “or smaller?”
“How would I know?” snapped Llarvl, trying to hide his disgust. “Pick some sort of statistical mean.”
Braxn picked a statistical mean between the October and the November Playmate of the Month.
With what he thought was detached objectivity, Llarvl said, “Ugly bunch of creatures, aren’t they?” About one hundred million years ago, Llarvl’s race had one natural enemy—a race of biped mammals.
With a silvery laugh, Braxn left to prepare for planetfall.
Braxn had studied the Earth and its people for some ten thousand hours, subjective time. She knew about clothes, she knew about sex, she knew about rape.
So she appeared on Earth, on a dirt road in South America, without a stitch. Without a blush. And her scholastic observations were confirmed, in the field, so to speak, in less than five minutes. She learned quite a bit the first time; less the second. The third time, well, she was merely bored.
She made him into a beautiful…poem?
She made him into a mouse-sized, shriveled brown husk, lying dead by the side of the road, his tiny features contorted with incredible agony.
She synthesized clothes, grey and dirty, and changed herself into an old, crippled hag. It was twenty minutes before she met another man, who…
Another dry husk.
Braxn was getting an interesting, if low, opinion of men, Bolivian farmers in particular; so she changed herself into one. The shoe on the other foot, she found, made things different, but not necessarily better. Well, she was gathering material. That’s what Llarvl wanted.
She waited for a car to come by, reverted to the original voluptuous pattern, disposed of the driver when he stopped to investigate, took his form and his car, and started on her world tour.
Braxn tried to do everything and be everyone.
“He” was, in turn, doctor, lawyer, fencing coach, prostitute, auto racer, mountain climber, golf pro. He ran a pornography shop in Dallas, a hot dog stand at Coney Island, a death-sleep house in Peking, a Viennese coffeehouse, the museum at Dachau. He peddled Bibles and amulets, Fuller brushes and heroin. He was a society deb, a Bohemian poet, a member of Parliament, a cul-de-jatte in Monaco.
For operating expenses, when he needed small sums, he wove baskets, sold his body, dived for pennies, cast horoscopes.
Hustled pool.
The sweat drop had moved a hundredth of an inch. Must stop wasting time, but it’s so hard to concentrate when it feels like you have all the time in the universe.
Braxn knew that he could remain in this state only a few more minutes (subjective) before he was stuck in it permanently. On the ship he could spend as much time as he wanted in mental acceleration, but here there was no apparatus to shock him out of it before trance set in. The trance would go on for more than a thousand years, such was his race’s span of life. But to the six hoods he would age and die in a few seconds, reverting to his original form for an invisible nanosecond before dissolving into a small grey mound of dust.
He was seeing in the far infrared now, and definition was very poor. He switched to field recognition. The dull animals confronting him had dim red psionic envelopes, except for the one in agony, whose aura was bordered with coruscating violet flashes.
Electromagnetic. The ion fog around the leader’s watch glowed pale blue. Leakage from the telephone and power lines made kaleidoscopic patterns in the sky. His back felt warm.
Warm?
He switched to visual again and searched the people’s eyes for reflections. There—the little scared one—his eyes mirrored the fence, the Hurricane fence. Spaced with ceramic insulators…
He started to slow down his mind, speed up the world. The drop inched, fell to the ground with slow purpose; struck and flowered into tiny droplets.
Sound welled up around him.
“—eezuz Christ, he must be scared stiff!”
Braxn stumbled back toward the electrified fence, manufacturing adrenaline to substitute for his spent strength. His stomach knotted and flamed with impossible hunger. He received the pain and cherished it.
The leader advanced for the kill, bold and cocky, switchblade in his right hand, his left swinging a bicycle chain like a stubby lariat.
Braxn secreted a flesh-colored, rubbery coating over his body and, on top of that, a thin layer of saline mucus.
“Come, Retiarius!” he croaked.
“Huh?” The leader faltered in his advance, too late.
Braxn grabbed the bicycle chain and the fence simultaneously. There was a low, sixty-cycle hum, and the hood crumpled to the ground. He looped the chain around the scared one’s neck and pulled him into the fence. Three to go.
The others had stopped, bewildered. Braxn, gaining strength at the expense of his temporary body, snatched the nearest one and hurled him into the fence. Another started to run, but Braxn used the chain as a bolo and brought him down. He dragged him screaming to the fence and shoved his face into it.
The only one left was Jimmy.
“Jimmy-baby!” The dim giant stood his ground, trying to understand what had happened, too sure of his own strength to be really afraid. He took a tentative step forward.
Now. The more fantastic, the better. He could do anything in front of this oaf.
Braxn kept the rubbery coating, but altered its reflective properties. Now it was flesh-colored to Jimmy. He kinked his hair, flattened his nose, broadened his lips, started to swell in height and breadth.
He was becoming a carbon copy of Jimmy—more true in the man’s eyes than any photograph could be, for the specifications were coming from his own dim brain.
Thus the biceps were a bit larger, the face a little meaner, than a lying mirror would reflect. The teeth were square and white, and instead of the ugly mole on his cheek there was an incredibly virile scar that lanced down to his chin, catching the corner of his mouth in a perpetual arrogant sneer. He laughed, deep and hollow, mirthless.
“Whassa matter, you? Y’seen me before?”
Jimmy stood transfixed, a bewildered smile decorating his vacant face.
“Nuthin’ faze you, Jim?” Braxn looked at the big Negro and cracked his knuckles. He let one finger fall off. It hit the ground, changed into a centipede, and scurried off. Jimmy followed its progress with awe. He looked up to his double again, smile gone, eyes narrowing.
Braxn dropped the patois. “Watch closely, Jimmy. You’ve got fear in you, like anybody else, and I think I know where to find it.”
The strong, manly face blurred for an instant and came back into focus. The scar was a puffy infected seam that defiled a face no longer vigorous or handsome. It pulled down the lower lip to expose a yellow canine. The face was lined with a delicate tracery of worry and pain, the grooves growing deeper and more complex in front of Jimmy’s horrified eyes.
The hair, sprinkled with grey, grew white and was gone except for a dirty stubble on the twisted, knobby chin. Face as body wasted away; wrinkled parchment stretched tight over a leering death mask.
Bloodshot eyes clot with rheum, cataracts cloud and blind them, the lids close and collapse inward and the body—real only in the minds of two disparate creatures—was mercifully dead.
The brown skin darkened further and rel
eased its life grip on the ancient body; the body puffed up again in macabre burlesque of its younger brawn. It lived again for a short time as maggots fed on its putrescence.
Then a dry, withered husk again, still standing upright; the last vestiges of skin and flesh sloughed off to reveal a brown-stained skeleton filled with nameless cobwebs. It collapsed with a splintering clatter.
On top of the pile of grey dust and bones, the yellow skull glared balefully at Jimmy for a long moment, and then, piece by piece, the whole grisly collection started to reassemble itself.
Before the clatter of Jimmy’s footstep’s had faded, his alter ego was whole and well again. The black-skin molecules had become charcoal-grey-Brooks-Brothers-suit molecules and Braxn, the very model of the young man on his way up.
Braxn scanned the still forms around him and found that they were all still unconscious. One, the little one, was dead. Probing further, Braxn dissolved a blood clot, patched an infarction, and shocked the still heart back into action. Pity to spoil good art—he liked the combination of cause and effect and dumb luck causing only the harmless one to die. Survival of the fittest, eugenics will out, and all that. With a mental shrug, Braxn walked off to find a cab.
“Oh, enter, by all means.” Llarvl slipped into the Survey Chief’s cabin with trepidation. He was in for a bad time.
The chief, who looked like a cross between a carrot and a praying mantis, got right to the point. “Llarvl, your reports stopped coming in several cycles ago. From this I infer that either a.) your scout is dead, not likely; b.) he got disgusted with your asinine questions, rather more likely; or c.) he went on one of his blasted binges and is busily turning the autochthones into quatrains and limericks. I find this last alternative the most probable, if the least palatable. He is a G’drellian, an adolescent at that. Do you know what that means?”
“Yes, sir, it means that he’s in the aesthetic stage of…”
“It means he should have been locked up before we got within a parsec of this primitive world.”
“But, sir, after his initial experiments he stopped killing them. Why, I made him stop. He might have drawn attention to himself.”
“Your devotion to objectivity is most commendable.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“It shows that you know and appreciate the first rule of contact.” He pressed a stud, and one wall became transparent. He gestured at the busy scene beneath them. “Are they aware of our presence?”
“Of course not, sir. That is the first law.”
“Tell me, Llarvl. What sort of radiation would you suppose their eyes are sensitive to?”
The captain’s addiction to obliqueness was most exasperating. “Well, sir, since their planet goes around a yellow star, their organs of vision are sensitive to a narrow band of radiation centered around the ‘yellow’ wavelengths.”
The captain scraped his thorax with a claw. Llarvl interpreted this as applause. His race had forgotten sarcasm eons before the captain’s had invented fire.
“You are a good study, Llarvl.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“So we make our ship transparent in these wavelengths, at great expenditure of power.”
“Yes, sir. So the natives’ development won’t be influenced by premature knowledge of…”
“…and with similar expenditure of power, we extend this transparency down into the longer wavelengths. Why do we do this, Llarvl?”
The little ethnologist was perplexed. Even the lowliest cabin boy could answer these questions.
“Why, of course, sir, it’s to make the ship invisible to radar detection. Only it’s not really invisible, it’s just that the local implicit coefficient of absorption becomes asymptotic with…”
“Llarvl”—the captain sighed—“I learned one of those creatures’ words the other day; and I suppose you’ve run into it now and then: catechism.
“Yes, sir.” Llarvl squirmed.
“Now as far as I can tell, though I’m not a man of learning myself, this is a form of stylized debate; wherein one person asks a series of questions, whose answers are so simple that they brook no disagreement or misinterpretation. These answers, forced, as it were, upon the hapless interrogatee, lead to an inevitable conclusion, which gains a spurious validity through sheer tautological mass. Is that fairly accurate?”
Llarvl paused a second to retrieve the sentence’s verbs, as the captain had mischievously, if appropriately, switched from English to Middle High German.
“Yes, sir, very accurate.”
“Well, then”—the captain gave a gleaming metallic smile—“to borrow another of their delightfully savage concepts, the coup de grâce: How did we know that they had radar, long before we came into its range?”
“Radio broadcasts, sir, and television.”
“Which means?”
“Mass communications, sir.”
“Which means?”
“Sir, I’m aware of…”
“You’re aware of the fact that our arty friend could gain control of this planetwide network, and, in a matter of seconds, destroy almost every intelligent being on the planet. Or worse, reduce them to gibbering animals. Or perhaps worse still, increase their understanding of themselves beyond the threshold…”
“Yes, sir.” Llarvl could fill in the blanks.
“Then get out of here and let more capable minds deal with the situation.”
“Yes, sir.” The ethnologist started to scuttle toward the door.
“And Llarvl…remember that your captain, like most of the members of this expedition, normally communicates mind to mind, and can read your surface thoughts even when they are not verbalized.”
“Yes, sir,” he said meekly.
“Your captain may be a ‘pompous martinet,’ yes, but really, Llarvl: a ‘vegetable that walks like a man’? Racism is, I think, singularly inappropriate in an ethnologist. Make an appointment with the psychiatric staff.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And on your way down, check at the galley and see if Troxl has a couple of years’ work for you to do.”
The captain watched the disconsolate creature scurry out, and settled down at his desk. He passed a claw over a photosensitive plate.
“Computer,” he thought.
“Here, Captain.”
“Where the hell is that G’drellian poet?”
The machine thought a low hum. “I can’t find him. He must be generating a strong block. You know a G’drellian can synthesize ‘dummy’ thought waves exactly out of phase with his natural pattern, and by combining the two patterns…”
“How do you know he isn’t just on the other side of the planet?” A computer will talk on one subject forever, if you let it.
“Using the planet’s satellites as passive reflectors, I can cover 80 percent or more of the planet’s surface, and by integrating the fringe effects from…”
“I believe you. Then tell me; where is his old goat of a father?”
“Meditating in the meat locker, in the form of a large stalagtite, as he has been, I might add, ever since you…”
“All right! Have Stores send me up a winter outfit. I’ll have to go and try to blackmail him into telling me where his blasted progeny is.”
Give me a thousand humorless ethnologists, thought the captain to himself; give me a thousand garrulous computers, but spare me the company of G’drellians. Even on G’drell, they confine the adolescents to one island, to work out their poetry on worms and insects and each other.
A survey expedition needs a G’drellian, of course; a mature one to solve problems beyond the scope of the computer, but—
Damn that Brohass! He must have known he was gravid when he volunteered for the trip. How do you deal with these creatures, who seem to live only to torment other people with their weird, inscrutable sense of humor? Brohass knew he would undergo fission, knew his offspring would reach adolescence in midvoyage, and probably contrived to send the ship to a planet where…
> The captain’s reverie was broken by the robot from Stores. “The clothing you requested, sir.”
“Put it on the hook there.” The robot did so and glided out of the room.
I should have had it delivered to the locker, thought the captain; clothing was tantamount to obscenity to many of the crew members, and one must maintain dignity…
“Yes, one must, mustn’t one,” thought the computer.
“Will you go do something useful?” The captain threw up a block in time to miss the reply. He jerked the clothes off the hook and strode out of his cabin, letting out occasional thoughts about the ancestry, mating habits, etc., of the machine that was the ship’s true captain.
“Fasten your seat belts, please.” The slender stewardess swayed down the aisle, past a young man with a handsome, placid face and a Brooks Brothers suit. “Landing at Kennedy International in three minutes.”
Braxn did as told, shifting the heavy attaché case from his lap to the floor. Two hundred pounds of gold bullion would buy a great deal of prime time.
They landed uneventfully. Braxn took a helicopter to the Pan American Building, went down to the 131st floor, and into an office with gold leaf on the frosted-glass entrance, proclaiming Somebody, Somebody, and Somebody, Advertising Counselors.
He came out two hundred pounds lighter, having traded the gold for one minute of time, nine o’clock Saturday night (an hour away), on all of the major radio and television networks. A triumph of money over red tape, his commercial would be strictly live, with no chance of FCC interference. And his brand of soap would certainly make the world a cleaner place for a person to live in.
Alone.
The captain donned his thermal outerwear and entered the massive locker. Sure enough, there was a huge blue stalagtite suspended from the ceiling. He addressed it.
“Brohass,” he thought obsequiously, “would you serve your captain?”
The huge icicle fell and splintered into several thousand pieces. They reassembled into a creature who looked rather like the captain.
“What would you do to me if I said ‘no’?”