“I’m Betty Jo Berm,” the plain, brownish girl said. “And this gentleman—” She directed his attention toward an elderly man with stooped, fatigue posture. “Bert Kosler, our custodian.”
“Glad to meet you, Mr. Kosler.” Vigorous handshake.
“I’m glad to meet you, too, Mr. Morley. And Mrs. Morley. I hope you will enjoy it here.”
“Our photographer and soil-sample expert, Tony Dunkelwelt.” Miss Berm pointed out a long-snouted teenager who glared sullenly and did not extend his hand.
“Hello,” Seth Morley said to him.
“Lo.” The boy glowered down at his own feet.
“Maggie Walsh, our specialist in theology.”
“Glad to meet you, Miss Walsh.” Vigorous handshake. What a really nice-looking woman, Morley thought to himself. And here came another attractive woman, this one wearing a sweater stretched tight over her peek-n-squeeze bra. “What’s your field?” he asked her as they shook hands.
“Clerical work and typing. My name is Suzanne.”
“What’s your last name?”
“Smart.”
“That’s a nice name.”
“I don’t think so. They call me Susie Dumb, which isn’t really all that funny.”
“I don’t think it’s funny at all,” Seth Morley said. His wife nudged him violently in the ribs and, being welltrained, he at once cut his conversation with Miss Smart short and turned to greet a skinny, rat-eyed individual who held out a wedge-shaped hand which appeared to have sharpened, tapered edges. He felt an involuntary refusal arise within him. This was not a hand he wanted to shake, and not a person he wanted to know.
“Wade Frazer,” the rat-eyed individual said. “I’m acting as the settlement’s psychologist. By the way—I’ve done an introductory T.A.T. test on everyone as they’ve arrived. I’d like to do one on both of you, possibly later today.”
“Sure,” Seth Morley said, without conviction.
“This gentleman,” Miss Berm said, “is our doctor, Milton G. Babble of Alpha 5. Say hello to Dr. Babble, Mr. Morley.”
“Glad to meet you, doctor.” Morley shook hands.
“You’re a bit overweight, Mr. Morley,” Dr. Babble said.
“Hmm,” Morley said.
An elderly woman, extremely tall and straight, came out of the group, moving with the aid of a cane. “Mr. Morley,” she said, and extended a light, limp hand to Seth Morley. “I am Roberta Rockingham, the sociologist. It’s a pleasure to meet you, and I do hope you had a pleasurable voyage here with not too much trouble.”
“We did fine.” Morley accepted her little hand and delicately shook it. She must be 110 years old, by the look of her, he said to himself. How can she function still? How did she get here? He could not picture her piloting a noser across interplanetary space.
“What is the purpose of this colony?” Mary asked.
“We’ll find out in a couple of hours,” Miss Berm said. “As soon as Glen—Glen Belsnor, our electronics and computer expert—is able to raise the slave satellite orbiting this planet.”
“You mean you don’t know?” Seth Morley said. “They never told you?”
“No, Mr. Morley,” Mrs. Rockingham said in her deep, elderly voice. “But we’ll know now, and we’ve waited so long. It’ll be such a delight to know why all of us are here. Don’t you think so, Mr. Morley? I mean, wouldn’t it be wonderful for all of us to know our purpose?”
“Yes,” he said.
“So you do agree with me, Mr. Morley. Oh, I think that’s so nice that we can all agree.” To Seth Morley she said in a low, meaningful voice, “That’s the difficulty, I’m afraid, Mr. Morley. We have no common purpose. Interpersonal activity has been at a low ebb but of course it will pick up, now that we can—” She bent her head to cough briefly into a diminutive handkerchief. “Well, it really is so nice,” she finished at last.
“I don’t agree,” Frazer said. “My preliminary testing indicates that by and large this is an inherently ego-oriented group. As a whole, Morley, they show what appears to be an innate tendency to avoid responsibility. It’s hard for me to see why some of them were chosen.”
A grimy, tough-looking individual in work clothes said, “I notice you don’t say ‘us.’ You say ‘they.’
“Us, they.” The psychologist gestured convulsively. “You show obsessive traits. That’s another overall unusual statistic for this group: you’re all hyper-obsessive.”
“I don’t think so,” the grimy individual said in a level but firm voice. “I think what it is is that you’re nuts. Giving those tests all the time has warped your mind.
That started all of them talking. Anarchy had broken out. Going up to Miss Berm, Seth Morley said, “Who’s in charge of this colony? You?” He had to repeat it twice before she heard.
“No one has been designated,” she answered loudly, over the noise of the group quarrel. “That’s one of our problems. That’s one of the things we want to—” Her voice trailed off in the general din.
“At Betelgeuse 4 we had cucumbers, and we didn’t grow them from moonbeams, the way you hear. For one thing, Betelgeuse 4 has no moon, so that should answer that.”
“I’ve never seen him. And I hope I never will.”
“You’ll see him someday.”
“The fact that we have a linguist on our staff suggests that there’re sentient organisms here, but so far we don’t know anything because our expeditions have been informal, sort of like picnics, not in any way scientific. Of course, that’ll change when—”
“Nothing changes. Despite Specktowsky’s theory of God entering history and starting time into motion again.”
“No, you’ve got that wrong. The whole struggle before the Intercessor came took place in time, a very long time. It’s just that everything has happened so fast since then, and it’s so relatively easy, now in the Specktowsky Period, to directly contact one of the Manifestations. That’s why in a sense our time is different from even the first two thousand years since the Intercessor first appeared.”
“If you want to talk about that, talk to Maggie Walsh. Theological matters don’t interest me.” “You can say that again. Mr. Morley, have you ever had contact with any of the Manifestations?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact I have. Just the other day—I guess it was Wednesday by Tekel Upharsin time—the Walker-on-Earth approached me to inform me that I had been given a faulty noser, the result of the using of which would have cost my wife and I our lives.”
“So it saved you. Well, you must be very pleased to know that it would intercede for you that way. It must be a wonderful feeling.”
“These buildings are built lousy. They’re already ready to fall down. We can’t get it warm when we need warm; we can’t cool it when we need cool. You know what I think? I think this place was built to last only a very short time. Whatever the hell we’re here for we won’t be long; or rather, if we’re here long we’ll have to construct new installations, right down to the BX cable.”
“Some insect or plant squeaks in the night. It’ll keep you awake for the first day or so, Mr. and Mrs. Morley. Yes, I’m trying to speak to you, but it’s so hard with all the noise. By ‘day’ of course I mean the twenty-four hour period. I don’t mean ‘daytime’ because it’s not in the daytime that it squeaks. You’ll see.”
“Hey Morley, don’t get like the others and start calling Susie ‘dumb.’ If there’s one thing she’s not it’s dumb.”
“Pretty, too.”
“And do you notice how her—”
“I noticed, but—my wife, you see. She takes a dim view so perhaps we’d better drop the subject.”
“Okay, if you say so. What field are you in, Mr. Morley?”
“I’m a qualified marine biologist.”
“Pardon? Oh, were you speaking to me, Mr. Morley? I can’t quite make it out. If you could say it again.”
“Yeah, you’ll have to speak up. She’s a little deaf.”
“What I said was—�
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“You’re frightening her. Don’t stand so close to her.”
“Can I get a cup of coffee or a glass of milk anywhere?”
“Ask Maggie Walsh, she’ll fix one for you. Or B.J. Berm.”
“Oh Christ, if I can just get the damn pot to shut off when it’s hot. It’s been just boiling the coffee over and over again.”
“I don’t see why our communal coffee pot won’t work, they perfected them back in the early part of the twentieth century. What’s left to know that we don’t know?”
“Think of it as being like Newton’s Color Theory. Everything about color that could be known was known by 1800.”
“Yes, you always bring that up. You’re obsessive about it.”
“And then Land came along with his two-light-source and intensity theory, and what had seemed a closed field was busted into pieces.”
“You mean there may be things about homeostatic coffee pots that we don’t know? That we just think we know?”
“Something along that order.” And so on.
Seth Morley groaned. He moved away from the group, toward a tumble of great water-smoothed rocks. A body of water had been here at some time, anyhow. Although perhaps by now it was entirely gone.
The grimy, lanky individual in work clothes broke away from the group and followed after him. “Glen Belsnor,” he said, extending his hand.
“Seth Morley.”
“We’re a friggin’ mob, Morley. It’s been like this since I got here, right after Frazer came.” Belsnor spat into nearby weeds. “You know what Frazer tried to do? Since he was the first one here he tried to set himself up as the group-leader; he even told us—told me, for example—that he ‘Understood his instructions to mean that he would be in charge.’ We almost believed him. It sort of made sense. He was the first one to arrive and he started giving those friggin’ tests to everybody and then making loud comments about our ‘statistical abnormalities,’ as the creep puts it.”
“A competent psychologist, a reliable one, would never make a public statement of his findings.” A man not yet introduced to Seth Morley came walking up, hand extended. He appeared to be in his early forties, with a slightly large jaw, ridged brows, and shiny black hair. “I’m Ben Tallchief,” he informed Morley. “I arrived just before you did.” He seemed to Seth Morley to be a little unsteady; as if, Morley reflected, he’s had a drink or three. He put out his hand and they shook. I like this man, he thought to himself. Even if he has had a couple. He has a different aura from the others. But, he thought, maybe they were all right before they got here, and something here made them change.
If that is so, he thought, it will change us, too; Tallchief, Mary and I. Eventually.
The thought did not please him.
“Seth Morley, here,” he said. “Marine biologist, formerly attached to the staff of Tekel Upharsin Kibbutz. And your field is—”
Tallchief said, “I am a qualified naturalist, class B. Aboard ship there was little to do, and it was a ten year flight. So I prayed, via the ship’s transmitter, and the relay picked it up and carried it to the Intercessor. Or perhaps it was the Mentufacturer. But I think the former, because there was no rollback of time.”
“It’s interesting to hear that you’re here because of a prayer,” Seth Morley said. “In my case I was visited by the Walker-on-Earth at the time in which I was busy finding an adequate noser for the trip here. I picked one out, but it wasn’t adequate; the Walker said it would never have gotten Mary and myself here.” He felt hungry. “Can we get a meal pried loose from this outfit?” he asked Tallchief. “We haven’t eaten today; I’ve been busy piloting the noser for the last twenty-six hours. I only picked up the beam at the end.”
Glen Belsnor said, “Maggie Walsh will be glad to slap together what passes as a meal around here. Something along the lines of frozen peas, frozen ersatz veal steak, and coffee from the goddamn unhomeostatic friggin’ coffee machine, which never worked even at the start. Will that do?”
“It will have to,” Morley said, feeling gloom. “The magic departs fast,” Ben Tallchief said. “Pardon?”
“The magic of this place.” Tallchief made a sweeping gesture which took in the rocks, the gnarly green trees, the wobble of low hut-like buildings which made up the colony’s sole installations. “As you can see.”
“Don’t sell it completely short,” Belsnor spoke up. “These aren’t the only structures on this planet.”
“You mean there’s a native civilization here?” Morley asked, interested.
“I mean there’re things out there that we don’t understand. There is a building. I’ve caught a glimpse of it, one time on a prowl, and I was going back but I couldn’t find it again. A big gray building—really big—with turrets, windows, I would guess about eight floors high. I’m not the only one who’s seen it,” he added defensively, “Berm saw it; Walsh saw it; Frazer says he saw it, but he’s probably horse-crudding us. He just doesn’t want to look like he’s left out.”
Morley said. “Was the building inhabited?”
“I couldn’t tell. We couldn’t see that much from where we were; none of us really got that close. It was very—” He gestured. “Forbidding.”
“I’d like to see it,” Tallchief said.
“Nobody’s leaving the compound today,” Belsnor said. “Because now we can contact the satellite and get our instructions. And that comes first; that what really matters.” He spat into the weeds once more, deliberately and thoughtfully. And with accurate aim.
Dr. Milton Babble examined his wristwatch and thought, It’s four-thirty and I’m tired. Low blood sugar, he decided. It’s always a sign of that when you get tired in the late afternoon. I should try to get some glucose into myself before it becomes serious. The brain, he thought, simply can’t function without adequate blood sugar. Maybe, he thought, I’m becoming diabetic. That could be; I have the right genetic history.
“What’s the matter, Babble?” Maggie Walsh said, seated beside him in the austere briefing hall of their meager settlement. “Sick again?” She winked at him, which at once made him furious. “What’s it now? Are you wasting away, like Camille, from T.B.?”
“Hypoglycemia,” he said, studying his hand as it rested on the arm of his chair. “Plus a certain amount of extrapyramidal neuromuscular activity. Motor restlessness of the dystonic type. Very uncomfortable.” He hated the sensation: his thumb twitching in the familiar pellet-rolling motion, his tongue curling up within his mouth, dryness in his throat—dear God, he thought, is there no end of this?
Anyhow the herpes simplex keratitis which had afflicted him during the previous week had abated. He was glad of that (thank God).
“Your body is to you like what a house is for a woman,” Maggie Walsh said. “You keep experiencing it as if it were an environment, rather than—”
“The somatic environment is one of the realest environments in which we live,” Babble said testily. “It’s our first environment, as infants, and then as we decline into old age, and the Form Destroyer corrodes our vitality and shape, we once again discover that it little matters what goes on in the so-called outside world when our somatic essence is in jeopardy.”
“Is this why you became a doctor?”
“It’s more complex than a simple cause-and-effect relationship. That supposes a duality. My choice of vocations—”
“Pipe down over there,” Glen Belsnor yapped, pausing in his fiddlings. Before him rested the settlement’s transmitter, and he had been trying for several hours to get it functioning. “If you want to talk clear out.” Several other people in the hail added noisy agreement.
“Babble,” Ignatz Thugg said from the seat in which he sprawled, “you’re well-named.” He barked a canine-like laugh.
“You, too,” Tony Dunkelwelt said to Thugg.
“Pipe down!” Glen Belsnor yelled, his face red and steaming as he poked the innards of the transmitter: “Or by God we’ll never get our poop-sheet from the friggin’
satellite. If you don’t shut up I’m going to come over there and take you apart instead of taking this mass of metallic guts apart. And I’d enjoy it.”
Babble rose, turned and left the hall.
In the cold, long sunlight of late afternoon he stood smoking his pipe (being careful not to start up any pyloric activity) and contemplated their situation. Our lives, he thought, are in the hands of little men like Belsnor; here, they rule. The kingdom of the one-eyed, he thought acidly, in which the blind are king. What a life.
Why did I come here? he asked himself. No answer immediately came, only a wail of confusion from within him: drifting shapes that complained and cried out like indignant patients in a charity ward. The shrill shapes plucked at him, drawing him back into the world of former times, into the restlessness of his last years on Orionus 17, back to the days with Margo, the last of his office nurses with whom he had conducted a long, inelegant affair, a misadventure which had ended up in a heap of tangled tragicomedy—both for him and for her. In the end she had left him … or had she? Actually, he reflected, everyone leaves everyone when something as messy and jury-rigged as that terminates. I was lucky, he thought, to get out of it how and when I did. She could have made a lot more trouble. As it was, she had seriously jeopardized his physical health, just by protein depletion alone.
That’s right, he thought. It’s time for my wheat germ oil, my vitamin E. Must go to my quarters. And, while I’m there, I’ll take a few glucose tablets to counterbalance my hypoglycemia. Assuming I don’t pass out on the way. And if I did, who would care? What in fact would they do? I’m essential to their survival, whether they recognize it or not. I’m vital to them, but are they vital to me? Yes, in the sense that Glen Belsnor is; vital because they can do, or allegedly can do, skilled tasks necessary for the maintenance of this stupid little incestuous small town that we’re running here. This pseudofamily that doesn’t work as a family in any respect. Thanks to the meddlers from outside.
I’m going to have to tell Tallchief and—what’s his name? Morley. Tell Tallchief and Morley and Morley’s wife—who is not bad-looking at all—about the meddlers from outside, about the building which I have seen… seen close enough to read the writing above the entrance. Which no one else has. Insofar as I know.
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