by Various
Len poured two cups and carried them in. Moira was still sitting poised in front of the typewriter, with a curious half-formed expression on her face.
Abruptly the carriage whipped over, muttered to itself briefly and thumped the paper up twice. Then it stopped. Moira's eyes got bigger and rounder.
"What's the matter?" said Len. He looked over her shoulder.
The last line on the page read:
TO BE CONTINUED IN OUR NEXT
Moira's hands curled into small helpless fists. After a moment, she turned off the machine.
"What?" said Len incredulously. "To be continued--what kind of talk is that?"
"He says he's bored with the novel," Moira replied dully. "He says he knows the ending, so it's artistically complete; it doesn't matter whether anybody else thinks so or not." She paused. "But he says that isn't the real reason."
"Well?"
"He's got two reasons. One is that he doesn't want to finish the book till he's certain he'll have complete control of the money it earns."
"Yes," said Len, swallowing a lump of anger, "that makes a certain amount of sense. It's his book. If he wants guarantees...."
"You haven't heard the other one."
"All right, let's have it."
"He wants to teach us--so we'll never forget--who the boss is in this family."
* * * * *
"Len, I'm awfully tired," Moira complained piteously, late that night.
"Let's just go over it once more. There has to be some way. He still isn't talking to you?"
"I haven't felt anything from him for the last twenty minutes. I think he's asleep."
"All right, let's suppose he isn't going to listen to reason--"
"I think we'd better."
Len made an incoherent noise. "Well, okay. I still don't see why we can't write the last chapter ourselves. It'd only be a few pages."
"Go ahead and try."
"Not me. You've done a little writing. Damned good, too. And if you're so sure all the clues are there--Look, if you say you can't do it, all right, we'll hire somebody. A professional writer. It happens all the time. Thorne Smith's last novel--"
"It wasn't Thorne Smith's and it wasn't a novel," she said dogmatically.
"But it sold. What one writer starts, another can finish."
"Nobody ever finished The Mystery of Edwin Drood."
"Oh, hell."
"Len, it's impossible. It is! Let me finish--if you're thinking we could have somebody rewrite the last part Leo did--"
"Yeah, I just thought of that."
"--even that wouldn't do any good. You'd have to go all the way back, almost to page one. It would be another story when you got through. Let's go to bed."
"Moy, do you remember when we used to worry about the law of opposites?"
"Mm?"
"The law of opposites. When we used to be afraid the kid would turn out to be a pick-and-shovel man with a pointy head."
"Uh. Mm."
He turned. Moira was standing with one hand on her belly and the other behind her back. She looked as if she were about to start practicing a low bow and doubted she could make it.
"What's the matter now?" he asked.
"Pain in the small of my back."
"Bad one?"
"No...."
"Belly hurt, too?"
She frowned. "Don't be foolish. I'm feeling for the contraction. There it comes."
"The--but you just said the small of your back."
"Where do you think labor pains usually start?"
* * * * *
The pains were coming at twenty-minute intervals and the taxi had not arrived. Moira was packed and ready. Len was trying to set her a good example by remaining calm. He strolled over to the wall calendar, gazed at it in an offhand manner, and turned away.
"Len, I know it's only the fifteenth of July," she said impatiently.
"Huh? I didn't say anything about that."
"You said it seven times. Sit down. You're making me nervous."
Len perched on the corner of the table, folded his arms, and immediately got up to look out the window. On the way back, he circled the table in an aimless way, picked up a bottle of ink and shook it to see if the cap was on tight, stumbled over a wastebasket, carefully up-ended it, and sat down with an air of Ici je suis, ici je reste.
"Nothing to worry about," he said firmly. "Women have kids all the time."
"True."
"What for?" he demanded violently.
Moira grinned at him, then winced slightly and looked at the clock. "Eighteen minutes this time. They're getting closer."
When she relaxed, Len put a cigarette in his mouth and lighted it in only two tries. "How's Leo taking it?"
"Isn't saying. He feels--" she concentrated--"apprehensive. He tells me he's feeling strange and he doesn't like it. I don't think he's entirely awake. Funny--"
"I'm glad this is happening now," Len announced.
"So am I, but--"
"Look," said Len, moving energetically to the arm of her chair. "We've always had it pretty good, haven't we? Not that it hasn't been tough at times, but--you know."
"I know."
"Well, that's the way it'll be again, once this is over. I don't care how much of a superbrain he is, once he's born--you know what I mean? The only reason he's had the edge on us all this time is he could get at us and we couldn't get at him. If he's got the mind of an adult, he can learn to act like one. It's that simple."
Moira hesitated. "You can't take him out to the woodshed. He's going to be a helpless baby, physically, like anybody else's. He has to be taken care of."
"All right, there are plenty of other ways. If he behaves, he gets read to. Things like that."
"That's right, but there's one other thing I thought of. You remember when you said suppose he's asleep and dreaming, and what happens if he wakes up?"
"Yeah."
"That reminded me of something else, or maybe it's the same thing. Did you know that a fetus in the womb only gets about half the amount of oxygen in his blood that he'll have when he starts to breathe?"
Len looked thoughtful. "I forgot. Well, that's just one more thing Leo does that babies aren't supposed to do."
"Use as much energy as he does, you mean. What I'm getting at is, it can't be because he's getting more than the normal amount of oxygen, can it? I mean he's the prodigy, not me. He must be using it more efficiently. And if that's it, what will happen when he gets twice as much?"
* * * * *
They had prepared and disinfected her, along with other indignities, and now she could see herself in the reflector of the big delivery-table light--the image clear and bright, like everything else, but very haloed and swimmy, and looking like a bad statue of Sita. She had no idea how long she had been here--that was the dope, probably--but she was getting pretty tired.
"Bear down," said the staff doctor kindly, and before she could answer, the pain came up like violins and she had to gulp at the tingly coldness of laughing gas.
When the mask lifted, she said, "I am bearing down," but the doctor had gone back to work and wasn't listening.
Anyhow, she had Leo. How are you feeling?
His answer was muddled--because of the anesthetic?--but she didn't really need it. Her perception of him was clear: darkness and pressure, impatience, a slow Satanic anger ... and something else. Uncertainty? Dread?
"Two or three more ought to do it. Bear down."
Fear. Unmistakable now. And a desperate determination--
"Doctor, he doesn't want to be born!"
"Seems that way sometimes, doesn't it? Now bear down good and hard."
Tell him stop blurrrr too dangerrrr stop I feel worrrr stop I tellrrrr stop
"What, Leo? What?"
"Bear down," the doctor said abstractedly.
Faintly, like a voice under water, gasping before it drowns: Hurry I hate you tell him sealed incubator tenth oxygen nine-tenths inert gases hurry hurry hurry
"An incubator!" she panted. "He'll need an incubator ... to live ... won't he?"
"Not this baby. A fine, normal, healthy one."
He's idiot lying stupid fool need incubator tenth oxygen tenth tenth hurry before it's
The pressure abruptly ceased.
Leo was born.
The doctor was holding him up by the heels, red, wrinkled, puny. But the voice was still there, very small, very far away: Too late same as death
Then a hint of the old cold arrogance: Now you'll never know who killed Cyrus.
The doctor slapped him smartly on the minuscule behind. The wizened, malevolent face writhed open, but it was only the angry squall of an ordinary infant that came out.
Leo was gone, like a light turned off beneath the measureless ocean.
Moira raised her head weakly.
"Give him one for me," she said.
* * *
Contents
THE WORSHIPPERS
By Damon Knight
Destiny reached out a hand to Algernon Weaver—but he was a timid man, at first. But on the strange world of Terranova, there was much to be learned—of destiny, and other things....
It was a very different thing, Algernon Weaver decided, actually to travel in space. When you read about it, or thought about it in terms of what you read, it was more a business of going from one name to another. Algol to Sirius. Aldebaran to Epsilon Ceti. You read the names, and the descriptions that went with them, and the whole thing—although breathtaking in concept, of course, when you really stopped to meditate on it—became rather ordinary and prosaic and somehow more understandable.
Not that he had ever approved. No. He had that, at least, to look back upon; he had seen the whole enterprise as pure presumption, and had said so. Often. The heavens were the heavens, and Earth was Earth. It would have been better—much better for all concerned—if it had been left that way.
He had held that opinion, he reminded himself gratefully, from the very beginning, when it was easy to think otherwise. Afterward, of course—when the first star ships came back with the news that space was aswarm with creatures who did not even resemble Man, and had never heard of him, and did not think much of him when they saw him.... Well, who but an idiot could hold any other opinion?
If only the Creator had not seen fit to make so many human beings in His image but without His common sense....
Well, if He hadn't then for one thing, Weaver would not have been where he was now, staring out an octagonal porthole at an endless sea of diamond-pierced blackness, with the empty ship humming to itself all around him.
It was an entirely different thing, he told himself; there were no names, and no descriptions, and no feeling of going from one known place to another known place. It was more like—
It was like standing outdoors, on a still summer night, and looking up at the dizzying depths of the stars. And then looking down, to discover that there was no planet under your feet—and that you were all alone in that alien gulf....
It was enough to make a grown man cry; and Weaver had cried, often, in the empty red twilight of the ship, feeling himself hopelessly and forever cut off, cast out and forgotten. But as the weeks passed, a kind of numbness had overtaken him, till now, when he looked out the porthole at the incredible depth of sky, he felt no emotion but a thin, disapproving regret.
Sometimes he would describe himself to himself, just to refute the feeling that he was not really here, not really alive. But his mind was too orderly, and the description would come out so cold and terse—"Algernon James Weaver (1942- ) historian, civic leader, poet, teacher, philosopher. Author of Development of the School System in Schenectady and Scoharie Counties, New York (pamphlet, 1975); An Address to the Women's Clubs of Schenectady, New York (pamphlet, 1979); Rhymes of a Philosopher (1981); Parables of a Philosopher (1983), Reflections of a Philosopher (1986). Born in Detroit, Michigan, son of a Methodist minister; educated in Michigan and New York public schools; B.A., New York State University, 1959; M.A., N.Y.S.U. Extension, 1964. Unmarried. Surviving relatives—"
That was the trouble, it began to sound like an obituary. And then the great humming metal shell would begin to feel like a coffin....
Presumption. Pure presumption. None of these creatures should have been allowed to get loose among the stars, Man least of all. It cluttered up the Universe. It undermined Faith. And it had got Algernon Weaver into the devil of a fix.
It was his sister's fault, actually. She would go, in spite of his advice, up to the Moon, to the UN sanatorium in Aristarchus. Weaver's sister, a big-framed, definite woman, had a weak heart and seventy-five superfluous pounds of fat. Doctors had told her that she would live twenty years longer on the Moon; therefore she went, and survived the trip, and thrived in the germ-free atmosphere, weighing just one-sixth of her former two hundred and ten pounds.
Once, she was there, Weaver could hardly escape visiting her. Harriet was a widow, with large resources, and Weaver was her only near relative. It was necessary, it was prudent, for him to keep on her good side. Moreover, he had his family feeling.
He did not like it, not a minute of it. Not the incredible trip, rising till the Earth lay below like a botched model of itself; not the silent mausoleum of the Moon. But he duly admired Harriet's spacious room in the sanatorium, the recreation rooms, the auditorium; space-suited, he walked with her in the cold Earthlight; he attended her on the excursion trip to Ley Field, the interstellar rocket base on the far side of the Moon.
The alien ship was there, all angles and planes—it came from Zeta Aurigae, they told him, and was the second foreign ship to visit Sol. Most of the crew had been ferried down to Earth, where they were inspecting the people (without approval, Weaver was sure). Meanwhile, the remaining crewman would be pleased to have the sanatorium party inspect him.
They went aboard, Harriet and two other women, and six men counting the guide and Weaver. The ship was a red-lit cavern. The "crewman" turned out to be a hairy horror, a three-foot headless lump shaped like an eggplant, supported by four splayed legs and with an indefinite number of tentacles wriggling below the stalked eyes.
"They're more like us than you'd think," said the guide. "They're mammals, they have a nervous organization very like ours, they're susceptible to some of our diseases—which is very rare—and they even share some of our minor vices." He opened his kit and offered the thing a plug of chewing tobacco, which was refused with much tentacle-waving, and a cigar, which was accepted. The creature stuck the cigar into the pointed tip of its body, just above the six beady black eyes, lit it with some sort of flameless lighter, and puffed clouds of smoke like a volcano.
"—And of course, as you see, they're oxygen breathers," the guide finished. "The atmosphere in the ship here is almost identical to our own—we could breathe it without any discomfort whatever."
Then why don't we? Weaver thought irritably. He had been forced to wear either a breathing mask or a pressure suit all the time he had been on the Moon, except when he had been in his own sealed room at the sanatorium. And his post-nasal drip was unmistakably maturing into a cold; he had been stifling sneezes for the last half hour.
He was roused by a commotion up ahead; someone was on the floor, and the others were crowding around. "Help me carry her," said the guide's voice sharply in his earphones. "We can't treat her here. What is she, a heart case?... Good Lord. Clear the way there, will you?"
Weaver hurried up, struck by a sharp suspicion. Indeed, it was Harriet who was being carried out—and a good thing, he thought, that they didn't have to support her full weight. He wondered vaguely if she would die before they got her to a doctor. He could not give the thought his full attention, or feel as much fraternal anxiety as he ought, because—
He had ... he had to sneeze.
The others had crowded out into the red-lit space of the control room, where the airlock was. Weaver stopped and frantically tugged his arm free of the rubberoid sleeve. The repressed spasm was an acut
e agony in his nose and throat. He fumbled the handkerchief out of his pocket, thrust his hand up under the helmet—and blissfully let go.
His eyes were watering. He wiped them hurriedly, put the handkerchief away, worked his arm back into the sleeve, and looked around to see what had become of the others.
The airlock door was closed, and there was no one in the room but the hairy eggplant shape of the Aurigean, still puffing its cigar.
"Hey!" said Weaver, forgetting his manners. The Aurigean did not turn—but then, which was its front, or back? The beady black eyes regarded him without expression.
Weaver started forward. He got nearly to the airlock before a cluster of hairy tentacles barred his way. He said indignantly, "Let me out, you monster. Let me out, do you hear?"
The creature stood stock-still in an infuriating attitude until a little light on the wall changed from orange to red-violet. Then it crossed to the control board, did something there, and the inner door of the lock swung open.
"Well, I should think so!" said Weaver. He stepped forward again—But his eyes were beginning to water. There was an intolerable tickling far back in his nostrils. He was going to—he was—
Eyes squeezed shut, his whole body contorted with effort, he raised his arm to begin the desperate race once more. His hand brushed against something—his kit, slung just above his waist. There were handkerchiefs in the kit, he recalled suddenly. And he remembered what the guide had said about Aurigean air.
He tugged the kit open, fumbled and found a handkerchief. He zipped open the closure of his helmet and tilted the helmet back. He brought up the handkerchief, and gave himself over to the spasm.
He was startled by a hoarse boom, as if someone had scraped the strings of an amplified bull fiddle. He looked around, blinking, and discovered that the sound was coming from the Aurigean. The monster, with its tentacles tightly curled around the tip of its body, was scuttling into the corridor. As Weaver watched in confusion, it vanished, and a sheet of metal slid across the doorway.
More boomings came shortly from a source Weaver finally identified as a grille over the control panels. He took a step that way, then changed his mind and turned back toward the airlock.