Time to Come

by August Derleth (ed)

  “What the hell do you think you’re-treating him for?” I snapped. I’m always irritable in the morning.

  “I wish I knew,” said Moran frankly. “It isn’t a human behavior pattern—not even an abnormal one. The passivity alternating with sudden rages suggests manic-depression; but then again, it could be paranoia, ordinarily showing as aloofness but becoming murderous at some fancied threat or insult. But there’s the amnesia too, those scientific data that he simply didn’t recognize.” His gaunt keen face took on a stubborn look. “All in all, though, it looks as if the insanity ;is due more to psychic factors than to gross lesions. Possibly the terror of the crash landing. ... If that’s correct, then shock treatment is indicated.”

  I bit back my reply, but it was harsh inside me: Yeah, that’s right. Charge on into something you don’t know, destroy brain cells right and left, and probably you’ll end up destroying the whole life of that being from the stars. After which you can forget he ever came to us.

  Communication with Butch was so much more than just the data he could give. That alone might be enough to jump man a thousand years ahead, to enforce peace and nourish the world and wipe out the disease and poverty and misery which have haunted us through all our days. Butch was more, even, than the knowledge we had to have about his own civilization: where were they, who were they, what were they, what did they intend for us? Before all else, to me, Butch was the stars.

  My sons could ride across the universe.

  But Butch was crazy.

  Or was he?

  As we went up the stairs—Doc, Moran, myself, and a couple of Army medical technicians—I tried again to make another pattern out of the facts. Items: murder, intransigence, bursts of rage, blank silence, apparent failure to recognize scientific diagrams, an irrational suspiciousness so great that he* wouldn’t even point to the direction in the sky he’d come from. To Moran, it all added up to insanity. Doc Urquhart was more than half convinced, and only dubious about the prospects of a cure. Or even of knowing if the cure had worked.

  But if all this was a normal pattern for Butch’s race and culture—God in heaven, if we started tampering with his brain we were throwing away the universe! If we could figure out the—the soul of Butch, if we could make sense out of what he had been doing, then we might figure out how to talk to him.

  Of course, a race whose norm included tearing open the bellies of children would not make very pleasant company; but if there were such creatures, then we had to know about them.

  “Dr. Moran,” I asked, “wouldn’t it be wiser, if we can’t establish communication, just to keep Butch the way he is? Maybe something will turn up later.”

  “And maybe Butch will die,” said Moran. “Or break loose, which is worse. No, Mr. Muir, the first surgery will be performed in a week.” He gave me a frosty smile. “Unless you have thought of an alternative-before then.”

  I wished again that Valerie were here. That girl had a mind like a whip. But more than that, she had a humanness— Yes, I thought, that's what’s lacking here. We’re all thinking of Butch as an enemy, a problem, a chance for fame and power and wealth. We’re none of us trying to put ourselves in his place. We don’t really believe, down inside of us, that Butch can have his own hopes and fears and dreams and loves. I wonder how lonely he is?

  We came to the cell and went past the guards. One or the medical techs got out a pair of handcuffs welded to a long light chain. “What’s that for?” asked the other. I gathered that he was new to the job, like me.

  “Precaution, Jones,” said the first. “We’ve been shackling him for every test, ever since he killed that one man. He usually submits without giving any trouble.” He slapped the forty-five at his hip. “He’d better.”

  “I—see—” The second doctor, Jones, licked his lips. “Christ! He’s a big brute, isn’t he?”.

  Doc unlocked the cell door and we stepped inside. The padded floor felt springy under my feet. I wasn’t afraid of Butch myself, not when we were five armed men with more on call. For a moment I looked into his yellow eyes and tried to think at him. Maybe he was telepathic—Hello, Butch. Hi, stranger. I’d like to be your friend, if you’ll let me.

  I had only a minute, then, to see the sudden glazing in those eyes. The huge form trembled, muscles knotting as it warred with itself, and something like a groan came anguished from the opening lips. There was barely time for me to wonder, with a sharp dismay, if he had been taken ill.

  Then something knocked me aside. I hit the floor, gasping, and Butch’s spurred heel raked my cheek as he leaped over me. Moran yelled, and one powerful arm batted him aside, into Doc. Jones screamed when those claws tore at his face.

  The guards outside burst in. Butch hissed and sprang between them. One raised his rifle. Butch hooked claws into his wrist and caught the gun as he let if. go. Whirling, the alien clubbed the gun butt into the other soldier’s jaw.

  Jones was down under Butch’s tearing feet. The unhuman face was a frightful thing to watch. The other tech had his automatic out, but it’s a clumsy weapon. He fired and missed. Butch stuck the rifle almost into his belly and squeezed the trigger.

  Two soldiers and two techs down now! Butch paused only to shoot poor Jones in the head. Then he turned and leaped from the cell, out into the hallway.

  I scrambled after him, in time to see him mixing it up with the guards on the landing. He threw one down the stairs. A rifle bullet ripped along his left shoulder, but he didn’t seem to notice. He knocked the other man to the floor and plunged beyond him—out through the second-story window.

  I didn’t see what followed. They told me later that Butch landed on his feet and made a break for the gate. He didn’t reach it, of course. He took three slugs in his body before falling to the ground. Then they lashed him tight and carried him back into the house. He was conscious, but had suddenly become quiet. Now and then he mewed a little with pain.

  “Eight men injured, one with a bullet through his stomach,” said Moran bleakly. “And one more man dead. Do you still think Butch is sane?” -

  “I don’t know,” I said. My own tom cheek hurt like the devil. “What is sanity?”

  “Comprehension of and appropriate adjustment to reality,” snapped Moran, “and I’m not in a mood to argue philosophy, Mr. Muir.”

  “If Butch’s kind of sanity includes shooting Sergeant Jones in cold blood,” said Leslie heavily, “then he’s probably better off without it.”

  We sat in the waiting room of the institute’s surgery. It was a quiet, coldly lighted place, with the sharp hospital smell that I’ve always hated. It doesn’t make sense that idoform should annoy me that way, I realize it’s there for my own good, but I can’t help my feeling.

  Butch was beyond the door, having three bullets cut out of him. Doc Urquhart was acting as assistant to a man sent down by the Surgeon General of the United States. The wounded humans were getting routine treatment in a jerry-rigged hospital tent.

  “Look,” I said, “for some reason, Butch has to kill, or try to kill a certain kind of people. He can’t help himself. In this case, the victim was Jones. In the course of the hassle, Butch saw a chance to escape, and took it. I wouldn’t call that insane. How did he know what revenge we might take?”

  “If he thinks he can escape, alone and on foot, on an alien planet, then he is mad,” said Moran. He .shot me a glance of dislike.

  “Maybe he prefers death,” I said. “It can’t be very pleasant for him, locked up here.”

  “Then he can talk to us and explain himself,” answered Moran. “We’ve surely taught him some basic English by now. He was watching our instructors all the time. He must have learned something, if he’s capable of it.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Quite possibly he’s gathered what your own cute little plan Is. Would you want your brain carved up by somebody who didn’t even know its anatomy?”

  “Let him ask me to refrain, then,” said Moran testily. “And let him stop trying to kill people who’
ve done him no harm.” “How do you know they haven’t?” I asked. “Jones had red hair. Maybe red hair is physically painful to him.”

  “None of the other dead people did,” said Leslie.

  “Well, what did they have in common, then?”

  Leslie gave me a puzzled look. “I’m damned if I know,” he said. “They were all just—people. I’d thought of that angle too, and checked up, but there’s nothing I can see.” “I’m trying to put myself in Butch’s skin,” I said. “It’s the only way we’ll ever understand him. Look, he’s a stranger in a strange land, shipwrecked, surrounded by he knows not what For some reason, he has a run-in with various of the natives and kills them. Naturally, when he’s captured he’ll expect retaliation. So he won’t be especially co-operative.” ' “How dumb does he think we are?” clipped Moran.

  “Let me finish,” I said impatiently. The psychiatrist bridled, and I wondered if I was going to get myself fired. “For some reason, Butch must occasionally commit murder and cannot talk to us. Let’s assume that he’s rational but that those compulsions exist for him. All right In that case, he’ll be able pretty well to guess what we think of him. He knows we think he’s nuts. Possibly he knows we intend to try a cure that will only wreck his mind. So why should he stick around? Why shouldn’t he take any chance to escape—even to escape into death?”

  “If he fa under compulsions such as you postulate,” said Moran with strained politeness, “then he is not rational. Most schizophrenics think perfectly logically; it’s their basic postulates that are wrong, and they have to build up more and more elaborate fictions to rationalize the facts. Which is what you’re doing, by the way, Mr. Muir.”

  “So you’re really going through with your shock treatment,” I said.

  “Since no workable alternative has been offered me—yes.” I thought that the most practical course of all was open to us—simply waiting and thinking some more on the problem. But it wouldn’t do any good to repeat that to Moran. I know when a man has his mind locked tight

  The door opened and Doc Urquhart came out. He looked like another being in his gown and mask, something more and less than human. We got up and stood waiting, not saying anything.

  Doc nodded tiredly. “Butch will live,” he said. “The injuries aren’t too bad-. There was an internal hemorrhage, but we’ve stopped that now.”

  Will live—I tamed away. What did it matter if he lived or not? He was done. We were all done for. We had never really tried to understand, and now it was too late; now Butch’s suspicion of us must have hardened into something that only death could break.

  One last try: Two days later, I went to see him. The intervening time had been pretty rough for all of us. It wasn’t that we’d been working hard. In Project Wizard, you wanted to work your guts out. The thing which made it a small hell was that there was really nothing we could do. We just sat around, argued endlessly and ferociously, broke into petty /little fits of temper. General Leslie had to crack down with a stiff order to all personnel, which didn’t make him any more popular. ‘The military mind,” I grunted. “It is a mind, isn’t it?”

  “He’s doing his best,” said Doc gently.

  “Such as it is,” I snorted.

  I couldn’t even write home about my troubles. Mail was censored, and all of it was sent off from New York City. I could only drop Valerie a meaningless little note.

  To keep from going crazy, or from being fired, I busied myself studying the reports. There were a lot of them, but they added up to a blank. I considered the FBI investigations of the people whom Butch had attacked. Those were thorough indeed, in the search for some common factor, but there was nothing. The two men in Maine—both ordinary farmers who’d happened to be out late; the boy was only a farm kid coming home at night from a neighbor’s. The men whom Our alien had assaulted here had nothing special about them that I could discover, just plain Americans. And in his furtive night wanderings before being captured, Butch could only have seen a few humans in brief glimpses, not enough to give him any real basis for conclusions about us.

  I remembered how he had stood trembling in the cell. Fighting against his own uncontrollable berserkergang? Probably. But lots of homicidal maniacs do that. When they’re hauled in, they cry and ask why somebody didn’t stop them. Damnation! It looked more and more as if Moran was right. Only his notion didn’t feel right.

  So I went up to the hospital room where Butch was recovering. Time was terribly short. The doctors said he could take trepanning in a week or so without serious injury. At least, he could if he were human.

  My badge got me past the guards at the entrance to the surgery wing. Butch had a room to himself, with a-sentry outside the door and a medical orderly always present. I walked into the room and the orderly looked up from his magazine. He was a big, placid non-com, bored by now like -most of the men, but he got up with an air of relief at having some company. “May I see your permit, sir?” he asked.

  I handed him the one which Doc had scribbled for me and he nodded. “Okay, sir. But damn if I know what you expect to find out, just watching him.”

  “Look,” I said, “I want to be alone with Butch for a few minutes.”

  “Sorry, sir. I’ve got orders—”

  “So have I. Just go out in the corridor.”

  It was pure bluff, but when he tried to protest again I shouted him down. “Dammit, this is direct from the general. Want to call up and bother him about it? Okay, soldier, go ahead, and I hope he puts you to cleaning bedpans for the rest of your hitch.”

  “Well, all right, sir. Five minutes.” He went outside with an uncertain glance at me.

  I walked up-to the bed. The alien lay in it with a metal collar and chain to keep him there. He’d tried to attack one orderly, but it had been a feeble attempt in his weakened condition, and he’d done nothing against the other men. The room was clean and bleak, full of sunlight but otherwise barren.

  “Hello, Butch,” I said. The yellow eyes looked back up at me, a glance of suffering, but nothing came from the broad tusked mouth.

  “I brought you a magazine,” I went on, and put a copy of Life on the table. “The pictures might interest you.” I sat down on the chair beside him. “Nobody else thought you might get bored lying here, did they?”

  He turned his head to watch me, the ears cocked forward and the nose-antennae curled over in my direction. One gray-furred hand lay on the sheet, strong and big and strangely helpless.

  “I don’t know what the devil I expect to gain by seeing you,” I told him softly. “I don’t even know if you understand me, though I suspect you get the drift of it. Maybe it’s just for myself. Here you are, the most wonderful thing that’s happened in all our history, and they’ve chained you up like this. I’d like to be friends, Butch.”

  The hand doubled up into a fist, and the claws leaped out, but he didn’t slash at me. It was only a gesture.

  “That’s right,” I said. “You can’t trust us any more. Let’s look at it from your angle for a while. You’ve had rotten luck, haven’t you? First the crash of your ship, the being stranded here God knows how many light-years from home. Then something which made you attack us, willy-nilly, and something else which made it impossible for you to talk to us. So naturally, you think, we believe you’re mad. We’ll never trust you. And therefore you’ll never trust us. You’ve no way of knowing whether I really mean this or whether it’s just an attempt to gain, your confidence; so you’ll never have faith in any of our species.”

  I shook my head. “Damn it, Butch, can’t you make even one friendly move? Can’t you do something to show us you’re rational, that you want to be accepted as an ambassador instead of an enemy? If you’d only behave yourself better, and draw us a few pictures or—anything— Well, hell, all you have to do is make your sanity look a little more probable. Then they’ll at least delay the things they’re going to do to you. It’ll buy you time in which to work out a real understanding with us.”

&nb
sp; Those eyes never blinked, watching me, but the only sound from him was the slow deep breathing. I sighed. “Is it that you don’t trust us?” I asked. “Is it that you fear us—or, perhaps, fear our fear of you? You’d rather die than enter into communication with a species you’ve wronged and that may want revenge? You imagine us thinking that since we can’t get along with your kind, we’d better wipe you all out? Hell, Butch, aren’t that dumb. Believe me, we aren’t.”

  He turned his face away from me.

  “If that’s how you want it—” I got up, feeling wholly

  beaten. “If you just won’t talk to mankind, I can’t make you. Man isn’t such a bad sort, and you’ve hit one of the most decent groups 'of our race. But you don’t leave us much choice. Our best bet would be just to save you, but that’s apparently not going to be allowed. Some men are so impatient to get at your knowledge that they’ll destroy it in their hurry.”

  Was that an answering sigh, low in his throat? But he wasn’t even looking at me any more. There was something utterly defeated about the way he lay there. I thought of him locked inside his own skull, wanting home and security and love as all life wants them, but he couldn’t get free of himself. He probably hated himself just then. Maybe he would be glad to escape his body, through death’ or the ruining of his mind.

  “Well,” I said, feeling the same darkness in my own heart, “well, if you won’t talk to man, then man can’t talk to you. Goodbye, Butch.”

  It was then that the idea came to me. It didn’t come all at once, nor did it leave me gasping at my over-brilliance. I stood there for a long while, not moving, and the thing grew within me. Crazy, sure. Crazy as a loon. But—

  What did we have to lose?

  I snatched back the magazine and went out of that room shivering. When I got downstairs, I began to run.

  “Sorry, sir,” the orderly in the outer office told me. “The general’s in conference.”

  I had half a mind to brush him aside and burst in. It would have been the dramatic thing to do. But I found a chair instead and sat down and tried to read. I’d gone through nearly a pack of cigarettes before I realized that I’d been reading the same page over and over.