Astounding Science Fiction Stories: An Anthology of 350 Scifi Stories Volume 2 (Halcyon Classics)

by Various

  He wandered out into the backyard again, carrying the glass.

  "Bang," he said deceptively, pointing with his hand in case his mother was looking. "Bang." Everything had to seem usual; he was sure of that. This was too big a thing, and too private, to tell a grownup.

  On the way back from the sink, Dr. Purcell slipped and fell and hit his head against the edge of the iron cot. Ronny felt the edge gashing through skin and into bone, and then a relaxing blankness inside his head, like falling asleep suddenly when they are telling you a fairy story while you want to stay awake to find out what happened next.

  "Bang," said Ronny vaguely, pointing at a tree. "Bang." He was ashamed because he had fallen down in the cell and hurt his head and become just Ronny again before he had finished sending out his equations. He tried to make believe he was alive again, but it didn't work.

  You could never make-believe anything to a real good finish. They never ended neatly--there was always something unfinished, and something that would go right on after the end.

  It would have been nice if the jailers had come in and he had been able to say something noble to them before dying, to show that he was brave.

  "Bang," he said randomly, pointing his finger at his head, and then jerked his hand away as if it had burned him. He had become the wrong person that time. The feel of a bullet jolting the side of his head was startling and unpleasant, even if not real, and the flash of someone's vindictive anger and self-pity while pulling a trigger.... My wife will be sorry she ever.... He didn't like that kind of make-believe. It felt unsafe to do it without making up a story first.

  Ronny decided to be Indian braves again. They weren't very real, and when they were, they had simple straightforward emotions about courage and skill and pride and friendship that he would like.

  * * * * *

  A man was leaning his arms on the fence, watching him. "Nice day." What's the matter, kid, are you an esper?

  "Hul-lo." Ronny stood on one foot and watched him. Just making believe. I only want to play. They make it too serious, having all these troubles.

  "Good countryside." The man gestured at the back yards, all opened in together with tangled bushes here and there to crouch behind, when other kids were there to play hide and seek, and with trees to climb. It can be the Universe if you pick and choose who to be, and don't let wrong choices make you shut off from it. You can make yourself learn from this if you are strong enough. Who have you been?

  Ronny stood on the other foot and scratched the back of his leg with his toes. He didn't want to remember. He always forgot right away, but this grownup was confident and young and strong-looking, and meant something when he talked, not like most grownups.

  "I was playing Indian." I was an old chief, captured by enemies, trying to pass on to other warriors the wisdom of my life before I died. He made believe he was the chief a little to show the young man what he was talking about.

  "Purcell!" The man drew in his breath between his teeth, and his face paled. He pulled back from reaching Ronny with his feelings, like holding his breath in. "Good game." You can learn from him. Don't leave him shut off, I beg you. You can let him influence you without being pulled off your own course. He was a good man. You were honored, and I envy the man you will be if you contacted him on resonant similarities.

  The grownup looked frightened. But you are too young. You'll block him out and lose him. Kids have to grow and learn at their own speed.

  Then he looked less afraid, but uncertain, and his thoughts struggled against each other. Their own speed. But there should be someone alive with Purcell's pattern and memories. We loved him. Kids should grow at their own speed, but.... How strong are you, Ronny? Can you move ahead of the normal growth pattern?

  Grownups always want you to do something. Ronny stared back, clenching his hands and moving his feet uneasily.

  The thoughts were open to him. Do you want to be the old chief again, Ronny? Be him often, so you can learn to know what he knew? (And feel as he felt. It would be a stiff dose for a kid.) It will be rich and exciting, full of memories and skills. (But hard to chew. I'm doing this for Purcell, Ronny, not for you. You have to make up your own mind.)

  "That was a good game. Are you going to play it any more?"

  * * * * *

  His mother would not like it. She would feel the difference in him, as much as if he had read one of the books she kept away from him, books that were supposed to be for adults only. The difference would hurt her. He was being bad, like eating between meals. But to know what grownups knew....

  He tightened his fists and looked down at the grass. "I'll play it some more."

  The young man smiled, still pale and holding half his feelings back behind a dam. Then mesh with me a moment. Let me in.

  He was in with the thought, feeling Ronny's confused consent, reassuring him by not thinking or looking around inside while sending out a single call, Purcell, Doc, that found the combination key to Ronny's guarded yesterdays and last nights and ten minutes agos. Ronny, I'll set that door, Purcell's memories, open for you. You can't close it, but feel like this about it--and he planted in a strong set, questioning, cool, open, a feeling of absorbing without words ... it will give information when you need it, like a dictionary.

  The grownup straightened away from the fence, preparing to walk off. Behind a dam pressed grief and anger for the death of the man he called Purcell.

  "And any time you want to be the old chief, at any age he lived, just make believe you are him."

  Grief and anger pressed more strongly against the dam, and the man turned and left rapidly, letting his thoughts flicker and scatter through private memories that Ronny did not share, that no one shared, breaking thought contact with everyone so that the man could be alone in his own mind to have his feelings in private.

  * * * * *

  Ronny picked up the empty glass that had held his chocolate milk from the back steps where he had left it and went inside. As he stepped into the kitchen, he knew what another kitchen had looked like for a five-year-old child who had been Purcell ninety years ago. There had been an iron sink, and a brown-and-green-spotted faucet, and the glass had been heavier and transparent, like real glass.

  Ronny reached up and put the colored plastic tumbler down.

  "That was a nice young man, dear. What did he say to you?"

  Ronny looked up at his mamma, comparing her with the remembered mamma of fifty years ago. He loved the other one, too.

  "He tol' me he's glad I play Indian."

  * * *

  Contents

  THE CARNIVORE

  By Katherine MacLean

  Why were they apologetic? It wasn't their fault that they came to Earth much too late.

  The beings stood around my bed in air suits like ski suits, with globes over their heads like upside-down fishbowls. It was all like a masquerade, with odd costumes and funny masks.

  I know that the masks are their faces, but I argue with them and find I think as if I am arguing with humans behind the masks. They are people. I recognize people and whether I am going to like this person or that person by something in the way they move and how they get excited when they talk; and I know that I like these people in a motherly sort of way. You have to feel motherly toward them, I guess.

  They all remind me of Ronny, a medical student I knew once. He was small and round and eager. You had to like him, but you couldn't take him very seriously. He was a pacifist; he wrote poetry and pulled it out to read aloud at ill-timed moments; and he stuttered when he talked too fast.

  They are like that, all fright and gentleness.

  I am not the only survivor—they have explained that—but I am the first they found, and the least damaged, the one they have chosen to represent the human race to them. They stand around my bed and answer questions, and are nice to me when I argue with them.

  All in a group they look half-way between a delegation of nations and an ark, one of each, big and small, thick and
thin, four arms or wings, all shapes and colors in fur and skin and feathers.

  I can picture them in their UN of the Universe, making speeches in their different languages, listening patiently without understanding each other's different problems, boring each other and being too polite to yawn.

  They are polite, so polite I almost feel they are afraid of me, and I want to reassure them.

  But I talk as if I were angry. I can't help it, because if things had only been a little different ... "Why couldn't you have come sooner? Why couldn't you have tried to stop it before it happened, or at least come sooner, afterward...?"

  If they had come sooner to where the workers of the Nevada power pile starved slowly behind their protecting walls of lead—if they had looked sooner for survivors of the dust with which the nations of the world had slain each other—George Craig would be alive. He died before they came. He was my co-worker, and I loved him.

  We had gone down together, passing door by door the automatic safeguards of the plant, which were supposed to protect the people on the outside from the radioactive danger from the inside—but the danger of a failure of politics was far more real than the danger of failure in the science of the power pile, and that had not been calculated by the builders. We were far underground when the first radioactivity in the air outside had shut all the heavy, lead-shielded automatic doors between us and the outside.

  We were safe. And we starved there.

  "Why didn't you come sooner?" I wonder if they know or guess how I feel. My questions are not questions, but I have to ask them. He is dead. I don't mean to reproach them—they look well meaning and kindly—but I feel as if, somehow, knowing why it happened could make it stop, could let me turn the clock back and make it happen differently. If I could have signaled them, so they would have come just a little sooner.

  They look at one another, turning their funny-face heads uneasily, moving back and forth, but no one will answer.

  The world is dead.... George is dead, that thin, pathetic creature with the bones showing through his skin that he was when we sat still at the last with our hands touching, thinking there were people outside who had forgotten us, hoping they would remember. We didn't guess that the world was dead, blanketed in radiating dust outside. Politics had killed it.

  These beings around me, they had been watching, seeing what was going to happen to our world, listening to our radios from their small settlements on the other planets of the Solar System. They had seen the doom of war coming. They represented stellar civilizations of great power and technology, and with populations that would have made ours seem a small village; they were stronger than we were, and yet they had done nothing.

  "Why didn't you stop us? You could have stopped us."

  A rabbity one who is closer than the others backs away, gesturing politely that he is giving room for someone else to speak, but he looks guilty and will not look at me with his big round eyes. I still feel weak and dizzy. It is hard to think, but I feel as if they are hiding a secret.

  A doelike one hesitates and comes closer to my bed. "We discussed it ... we voted...." It talks through a microphone in its helmet with a soft lisping accent that I think comes from the shape of its mouth. It has a muzzle and very soft, dainty, long nibbling lips like a deer that nibbles on twigs and buds.

  "We were afraid," adds one who looks like a bear.

  "To us the future was very terrible," says one who looks as if it might have descended from some sort of large bird like a penguin. "So much— Your weapons were very terrible."

  Now they all talk at once, crowding about my bed, apologizing. "So much killing. It hurt to know about. But your people didn't seem to mind."

  "We were afraid."

  "And in your fiction," the doelike one lisped, "I saw plays from your amusement machines which said that the discovery of beings in space would save you from war, not because you would let us bring friendship and teach peace, but because the human race would unite in hatred of the outsiders. They would forget their hatred of each other only in a new and more terrible war with us." Its voice breaks in a squeak and it turns its face away from me.

  "You were about to come out into space. We were wondering how to hide!" That is a quick-talking one, as small as a child. He looks as if he might have descended from a bat—gray silken fur on his pointed face, big night-seeing eyes, and big sensitive ears, with a humped shape on the back of his air suit which might be folded wings. "We were trying to conceal where we had built, so that humans would not guess we were near and look for us."

  They are ashamed of their fear, for because of it they broke all the kindly laws of their civilizations, restrained all the pity and gentleness I see in them, and let us destroy ourselves.

  I am beginning to feel more awake and to see more clearly. And I am beginning to feel sorry for them, for I can see why they are afraid.

  They are herbivores. I remember the meaning of shapes. In the paths of evolution there are grass eaters and berry eaters and root diggers. Each has its functional shape of face and neck—and its wide, startled-looking eyes to see and run away from the hunters. In all their racial history they have never killed to eat. They have been killed and eaten, or run away, and they evolved to intelligence by selection. Those lived who succeeded in running away from carnivores like lions, hawks, and men.

  I look up, and they turn their eyes and heads in quick embarrassed motion, not meeting my eye. The rabbity one is nearest and I reach out to touch him, pleased because I am growing strong enough now to move my arms. He looks at me and I ask the question: "Are there any carnivores—flesh eaters—among you?"

  He hesitates, moving his lips as if searching for tactful words. "We have never found any that were civilized. We have frequently found them in caves and tents fighting each other. Sometimes we find them fighting each other with the ruins of cities around them, but they are always savages."

  The bearlike one said heavily, "It might be that carnivores evolve more rapidly and tend toward intelligence more often, for we find radioactive planets without life, and places like the place you call your asteroid belt, where a planet should be—but there are only scattered fragments of planet, pieces that look as if a planet had been blown apart. We think that usually ..." He looked at me uncertainly, beginning to fumble his words. "We think ..."

  "Yours is the only carnivorous race we have found that was—civilized, that had a science and was going to come out into space," the doelike one interrupted softly. "We were afraid."

  They seem to be apologizing.

  The rabbity one, who seems to be chosen as the leader in speaking to me, says, "We will give you anything you want. Anything we are able to give you."

  They mean it. We survivors will be privileged people, with a key to all the cities, everything free. Their sincerity is wonderful, but puzzling. Are they trying to atone for the thing they feel was a crime; that they allowed humanity to murder itself, and lost to the Galaxy the richness of a race? Is this why they are so generous?

  Perhaps then they will help the race to get started again. The records are not lost. The few survivors can eventually repopulate Earth. Under the tutelage of these peaceable races, without the stress of division into nations, we will flower as a race. No children of mine to the furthest descendant will ever make war again. This much of a lesson we have learned.

  These timid beings do not realize how much humanity has wanted peace. They do not know how reluctantly we were forced and trapped by old institutions and warped tangles of politics to which we could see no answer. We are not naturally savage. We are not savage when approached as individuals. Perhaps they know this, but are afraid anyhow, instinctive fear rising up from the blood of their hunted, frightened forebears.

  The human race will be a good partner to these races. Even recovering from starvation as I am, I can feel in myself an energy they do not have. The savage in me and my race is a creative thing, for in those who have been educated as I was it is a controlled savagery
which attacks and destroys only problems and obstacles, never people. Any human raised outside of the political traditions that the race inherited from its bloodstained childhood would be as friendly and ready for friendship as I am toward these beings. I could never hurt these pleasant, overgrown bunnies and squirrels.

  "We will do everything we can to make up for ... we will try to help," says the bunny, stumbling over the English, but civilized and cordial and kind.

  I sit up suddenly, reaching out impulsively to shake his hand. Suddenly frightened he leaps back. All of them step back, glancing behind them as though making sure of the avenue of escape. Their big luminous eyes widen and glance rapidly from me to the doors, frightened.

  They must think I am about to leap out of bed and pounce on them and eat them. I am about to laugh and reassure them, about to say that all I want from them is friendship, when I feel a twinge in my abdomen from the sudden motion. I touch it with one hand under the bedclothes.

  There is the scar of an incision there, almost healed. An operation. The weakness I am recovering from is more than the weakness of starvation.

  For only half a second I do not understand; then I see why they looked ashamed.

  They voted the murder of a race.

  All the human survivors found have been made sterile. There will be no more humans after we die.

  I am frozen, one hand still extended to grasp the hand of the rabbity one, my eyes still searching his expression, reassuring words still half formed.

  There will be time for anger or grief later, for now, in this instant, I can understand. They are probably quite right.

  We were carnivores.

  I know, because, at this moment of hatred, I could kill them all.