The Ninth Golden Age of Science Fiction Megapack

by Dave Dryfoos

  Sally waited at the door, dark hair carefully brushed, disposable dress new, full lips brightly tinted. These past few months she’d seemed to grow even prettier than she’d been before.

  But her eyes were heavy. Sam often felt—and often said—that his wife’s blue eyes were so big, anybody could see through them and tell what she was thinking. Right now, he was sure, she shared his sense of failure.

  He kissed her without a word. Then he admitted, “No luck, hon… Anything new here?”

  “Ants,” she said, closing the door behind him. “Not real ones, but something like. I followed their trail back to the nest. It was like an anthill, more or less. Social. Cooperative. They seem to like sweets and dislike water. Anyhow, I swept them out and set the table-legs in water filled cans.”

  “Lifted the table? In your condition?”

  “Exercise is good for expectant mothers,” Sally said, somewhat mockingly. “I can show you where it says in the book.”

  Suddenly she cast herself heavily to the cot. “But,” she said. “But, Sam—worry isn’t good for me…”

  “No.” Sam walked up and down, accurately gauging his stride to the tiny room. “No, worry isn’t good, and you know that; so not only do you worry, but you worry about worrying. And I worry about your worrying about your worrying. Where does it get us?”

  “No place,” Sally said flatly. “That’s why I’ve quit; I’m through worrying about our mission here, our careers, or anything else except our baby.”

  Sam tried not to show how disturbed he felt. “That’s normal, dear,” he said. “They probably expected this would happen to you; that’s why they’re bringing the ship back in another four months. I’ll attend to everything, meanwhile—you can just take it easy.”

  “No, Sam. You don’t know what it’s like, to be left alone all day. Suppose those ant-things had been poisonous?”

  “But they weren’t! You’re borrowing trouble, Sal.”

  “You mean you don’t care what happens to me?”

  “Of course I care, damn it! That’s why I’m working so hard! You know perfectly well that the discovery of this planet will be announced before the ship comes back here. Traders and explorers will be here long before substitutes can be found for us. If we don’t do the job we were sent here to do, nobody will—and maybe you don’t think we won’t be fired for that! I’d be lucky to wind up in a dull, routine, underpaid rut as a terrestrial school-teacher, or something!”

  “I don’t care! I don’t want to be left alone here ever again! And I can’t go walking all over the place, either!”

  No, of course she couldn’t… And it was, Sam thought, normal for an expectant mother to make unexpected demands. Should he humor her till the storm blew over? Or put his foot down now? He tried a compromise—reasonableness.

  “If we don’t make friends with the natives,” he said, keeping his voice low and earnest, “they may decide we’re enemies.”

  “Maybe they already have,” Sally burst out; “maybe their ignoring tactics are just a blind, while they gather forces. Maybe—maybe if you knew what it’s like, puttering around here all alone every day, you’d stay home once in a while.”

  She began to sob, and Sam tried to comfort her, sitting beside her on the cot, stroking and kissing her, murmuring reassurance into her pretty pink ear.

  But tenderness was not enough. The flow of tears would not stop till after he found himself promising to stay home and let the natives go hang.

  “And I mean it!” Sally insisted, sitting up and pushing damp hair out of her eyes. “Let them come to us, if they’re interested.”

  “Sure, Sal. Whatever you say,” Sam answered. Anything to make her quit crying. Anything! “Tell you what,” he added. “I’ll build a fire outside and cook up a barbecue. How’d you like that, for a change?”

  “Don’t go too far away after fuel,” Sally said dully.

  He didn’t. He made a point of bustling into the shack every few minutes on some inconsequential errand, loudly whistling and singing as he trotted around.

  But Sally was having none of his elaborate good cheer. She lay on the cot and stared at the ceiling, movingly pale and listless.

  Sam could think of nothing to do but keep busy. Besides, the day’s activity had given him an appetite.

  He started a fire, using a chopped-up crate as kindling, and threw on some dried-out local vegetation to make coals. From the cases of food, piled next to the shack for want of space within it, he dug out a tinned ham that had been saved for a holiday treat. Then, while the fire burned down, he concocted a spicy barbecue sauce and got the side dishes ready.

  When finally prepared, dinner included soup made of local water and a dried mix; broiled dehydrated potatoes; ham, and the remains of a prepared-mix cake Sally’d made the day before. Sam found he’d forgotten the vegetables Sally needed, and shamefacedly made up for them by giving her an extra vitamin-pill.

  Even without vegetables, the meal was a feast, compared to their usual fare; to top off the occasion, Sam had put decorative candles on their small folding table, and set the places nicely. But Sally ate only enough to be polite, and then, complaining of a headache, went right to bed.

  Her apathy was infectious. Sam washed the utensils in a bucket at the nearby creek, sloppily, and dried them over the fire to kill any strange organism picked up in the washing. Chores finished, he didn’t know what to do with himself. The meal, he felt, had been as much of a failure as the rest of the day’s efforts.

  For lack of anything better to do, he got out a flashlight, and in its brightness extracted a chocolate-flavored ration-bar from an opened case. Then, after unwrapping it, he found he had no appetite for chocolate, after all. He stuffed the bar uneaten into a pocket of his jacket and wandered aimlessly up and down in front of the shack, staring at the strange constellations overhead, and testing how far he could see along the moonless landscape under the faintly-glowing permanent aurora, so much brighter here than on Earth.

  Back toward the granite cliff, whose top, a good mile off, showed dark and jagged above the plain, was a moving shape; a native. Sam had never before seen one at night, and watched closely to determine if it were approaching the house.

  It wasn’t, he decided; it was circling the place. A sign of curiosity, he thought vaguely, and felt faint stirrings of hope. But soon the buglike figure disappeared, and Sam lost interest. He flung a few more sticks onto the fire, and groped his way to bed.

  He fell asleep as soon as his ear nestled into the pillow. He awakened feeling he’d never slept at all.

  Sally was shrieking at him. “Sam!” she cried, shaking his shoulder. “Sam! Get up! Sam! The house is burning!”

  Dazedly climbing from bed, stumbling out the door in bare feet and pajama-bottom, Sam felt again that congealing sense of failure. Everything was going wrong—even the barbecue he’d staged to amuse Sally.

  He discovered the fault wasn’t his, this time. The cooking fire was down to embers—it was the stack of crated supplies that burned so luridly and smokily. A trail of smoldering moss led from the barbecue pit to the pile of cased goods, and from there—he ran to see—went out fifty feet from the house. At the end of the singed trail lay a native, his oily surface ablaze, his body shriveling as it writhed.

  The native made no sound, but his searing agony was plain to see. Sam dashed for the bucket, dumped the dishes from it, and raced to the creek. Three times he flung a bucketful of water over the native’s carapace before the flames were smothered. By then it was too late; the creature’s life had guttered out.

  And the priceless supplies were going! The pile was afire along its outer border, as if the native had tried to scrape out the flames he bore on projecting cases.

  And Sally? She was running around barefoot, carrying things from the threatened house.

  “Get some clothes on!” Sam shout
ed. “And don’t lift anything heavy!”

  He dug into the piled goods like a small insect boring through sand, carrying the innermost cases away from the shack’s wall where they’d been stacked. Then, with the hopelessly inadequate bucket, he wet down roof and walls, trying to keep them from burning, putting out the sparks that conspired to leave him homeless.

  Time itself seemed to be caught up in the blaze. Sam never knew how often he rushed back and forth from house to creek, flinging water, carrying crates, filling the bucket, glancing occasionally at Sally, then rushing to the creek again for still more water.

  Altair was half way between horizon and zenith before the last wisp of smoke had died down. The shack was intact, but its salvaged contents lay strewn over an acre of landscape. Sam was burned, bruised, blistered, and exhausted. And Sally was once more on the verge of hysteria.

  “What do we do now?” she wailed.

  He kissed her. “Well, that fire’s out,” he said, smiling wanly. “I guess the first thing we do is light another—in the stove.”

  Sally made breakfast as if under opiates, while Sam washed, dressed, and hauled back to the shack a few of the things she’d just carried out. It was a dismal meal, eaten in silence. As soon as it was over, Sally got sick. Sam put her to bed, and spent the day trying to bring order out of the chaos that surrounded him.

  Disposing of the corpse—simple enough, so far as the work of it went—gave him the most trouble. Sam buried his hopes with those charred remains. On Altair 3 as elsewhere, he decided gloomily, there must certainly be taboos concerning the dead. In the light of native customs that he’d so miserably failed to learn, he was very probably mishandling the body. And even if he weren’t, the natives most likely considered him a murderer…

  As he re-piled crates, carried personal effects back into the shack, fixed lunch, cleaned, swept, and tried to make a few essential repairs, Sam kept looking over his shoulder. It was, ho told himself derisively, as if he had a nervous tic.

  But he couldn’t stop. He couldn’t help wondering when the natives would descend upon him; to demand their comrade’s body and take revenge for his death.

  They didn’t come all that day. When, having made a light supper and cleaned up after it, Sam felt free to crawl between the sheetless blankets on the cot, he had decided these bug-things must be trying to ignore death itself.

  The thought gave him no pleasure. He’d promised Sally not to seek out the natives; he knew that if he did so, he might well be punished as a criminal. But, lying there in the darkness, Sam found himself face to face with a fact he’d been avoiding all day.

  He absolutely must get hold of those creatures, now. He’d lost too much food in the fire, was no longer self-sufficient enough to get by without their help. Sally would starve if he continued to fail.

  “But you promised!” she said at breakfast next morning. “Besides, they’ll probably kill you!”

  “I don’t believe so,” he hedged. “I’ll bet they have no enemies of any kind, and don’t even know what an enemy is. We’ve never seen a single predator here, remember; there probably aren’t any. I suspect that all the local animals are vegetarians—all we’ve seen eating were. And with the native population as low as it seems to be, I doubt they have to compete for food, either. Most likely the lack of both enemies and competitors is what makes these painters ignore us—we’re just nothing for them to worry about.”

  “They’re probably worried now,” Sally objected. “One of them died here, and the way he died makes me think he didn’t know what fire is. So they can’t be very far advanced—not worth investigating, Sam.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he argued. “They seem to be highly inflammable—on account of their oily surface, most likely. Man could experiment with fire because a minor mistake meant only a minor burn but maybe these creatures can’t touch fire without being burned to death.”

  “They must be awfully stupid, then, because one of them did touch fire.”

  “He was a painter, maybe. At least, he almost certainly appreciated form and color. Flame and coals are beautiful, and probably were unfamiliar to him. So he picked up a pretty bauble that was a hot coal—”

  “You promised! You could at least try to find some local foodstuffs without wandering off after natives. They won’t help you. And if they never cook anything, they probably have a lot of foods we couldn’t eat.”

  “All right,” Sam said resignedly. “I’ll do it your way. But I’ve got to get out and around. I’ll try to see what the local animals eat that looks possible for us, maybe find some berries I can experiment with…”

  He pushed back his folding chair, anxious to get away before Sally pursued his plans to their ultimate implications, saw the hazards of his simple scheme.

  On the one hand, he remembered that most things poisonous to terrestrial man were also poisonous to other terrestrial life-forms. Sprays and baits harmless to man and fatal to vermin, for instance, were few, and artificially developed. In theory, he might be able to eat what other animals ate.

  But if this were a vegetarian world, as he suspected, then toxic secretions would have special survival-value for plants provided with them. There were probable plenty of poisonous plants here. Plenty! He’d have to be awfully careful…

  “I don’t want you horsing around, Sal,” he said from the doorway. “I’ll do all the experimenting, understand? And from now on, I’ll fix my own meals—the remaining supplies are for you.”

  “But that’s not fair!”

  “Well, you’ve got more than just yourself to be fair to.”

  “Oh, Sam!” She rose and clung to him. “Don’t be gone long, darling.”

  “Oh, no,” he assured her. “I’m just out for a little walk.” And to prove it, he left without the belt holding his canteen and emergency rations.

  He missed the weight around his hips. Passing the creek, he felt suddenly thirsty, yet hesitated to drink water that he’d never tasted undistilled. No use experimenting with it, he decided; the still was undamaged.

  But thirst grew as he wandered on. He knew it was psychological—a trick of his vagrant mind. He put a pebble under his tongue.

  Without conscious thought, he’d started in his usual direction, toward the garden and the cliff behind it. Carefully he observed the small animal-forms that crawled, wriggled, ran, and flew out from under his feet. None of them seemed to be eating at the moment.

  Well, if he couldn’t eat what they ate, he could possibly eat some of them. American Indians, he remembered, had liked grasshoppers; he was himself fond of shrimp.

  But if there were no predators here, it might be a mistake for him to act like one—to make himself feared. Not, of course, that the natives’ reactions would matter. He had no intention of getting in touch with them, Sam reminded himself.

  Certainly not! He’d only chosen this particular direction to walk in because he knew the way. He was going to the garden as a matter of course, because its obviously artificial plantings might be crops. There wasn’t the slightest chance, Sam emphatically told himself, that he’d break his promise to Sally.

  But when he got to the garden, Sam could clearly see, as he’d seen many times, before, that it wasn’t a farm; the several acres contained too wide a variety of plants. The place was, more like a horticultural museum than a food-growing area.

  Whether the plants were of types selected for food or for ornamentation, he couldn’t tell. They were all sizes and shapes—lichens as big as pines, shrubs that looked like miniature hardwoods, flowering plants, and some that seemed downright ugly.

  He looked among them for fruits and berries, handicapped by the fact he was not a biologist but a sociologist—remorseful because he’d never before searched out local food-resources. Painstaking effort redoubled his thirst—made him hungry despite the short time since breakfast. And, as Altair rose higher and higher,
his appetite acquired a genuine excuse for its clamor.

  Regularly, every fifteen minutes, he told himself he must go back before Sally got upset again, just as regularly, he assured himself that in another fifteen minutes he’d find manna.

  Under the influence of hunger, his sense of smell became more active. He sniffed the wind like a hound—and found a message in it. There was an odor borne on the light breeze—something he couldn’t place, though it seemed familiar. Something pleasant; he decided to trace the scent to its source.

  The source was a pool in a corner of the garden—slightly scummy, bubbling occasionally, clouded, and brownish. The tall vegetation that grew all around had concealed it from his earlier, more casual inspections.

  Leaning over the pool, he recognized its odor, or thought he did. It was yeasty, like a bakery. Or—that was it—a brewery! Something was fermenting here.

  He felt an overwhelming desire to taste the product of that fermentation. Thirst, in the back of his mind for hours, now became a sharp-nailed hand, clawing at his throat. Alcohol was a disinfectant, he assured himself; this would be safer to drink than water.

  Kneeling, he thrust a hand beneath the scummy surface, finding the fluid warmish, slightly viscid. He cupped his fingers and drew out a small amount. It smelled good.

  His hand didn’t cool very rapidly in the air—not the way it would have if the fluid had been high proof. There couldn’t be enough alcohol in it to hurt him, he decided; he thrust out his tongue and licked up the few drops that had not yet dribbled through his fingers.

  They tasted sweetish, as if the fluid were high in sugar content. Perhaps it might give him a little quick energy, stave off hunger as well as thirst. He cupped both, hands together, plunged them into the pool, drew out a fairish quantity, and gulped it down.

  The drink gave him no pleasure. A sense of guilt had touched his mind before the fluid touched his stomach. He became fully aware that this was an unnecessary risk—mentally acknowledged that, for Sally’s sake, he should have been more careful. Furtively he rose to leave.