The 13th Science Fiction MEGAPACK®: 26 Great SF Stories!

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The 13th Science Fiction MEGAPACK®: 26 Great SF Stories! Page 49

by Lake, Jay


  He patted the small instrument as he spoke, as if he took a certain pride in finding so novel a use for it in a situation that called for quick thinking.

  “What makes you so sure it would have harmed you?” Sandaling asked. “Didn’t it occur to you that it might have been so glad to see you that it came bounding toward you in exuberant friendliness? You can be quite sure it had never set eyes on our kind before. It could hardly have regarded you as a natural enemy.”

  Just a trace of dismay had crept into Dakson’s eyes. “Surely you can’t be serious,” he said. “Despite its comparatively small size, it has sharp teeth and claws. If it had buried its teeth in my throat—”

  Sandaling descended from the instrument board, and stood for a moment staring down at the slain animal. There was something so unmistakably sorrowful about his silence, his bent head, his every aspect that it prompted Dakson to say, “You’re behaving like an idiot, if you’ll forgive my mentioning it. We’re sure to find another one and capturing it alive will be no problem.”

  When Sandaling said nothing, the other’s protest became more vehement. “We do what we have to do when our lives are threatened, unless death is more to our liking. It’s as simple as that.”

  Sandaling straightened abruptly. Without a word or gesture of warning he lashed out at Dakson, striking him squarely on the jaw. So great was his rage that it had gone completely out of control and there was a strength behind the blow that would have been exceptional in a man half his age. It sent Dakson reeling backwards and dropped him to his knees.

  He stood very still, waiting for Dakson to regain his feet and knowing full well that Dakson could—and probably would—come close to demolishing him if an exchange of more than two or three blows ensued. No man of forty-seven of slender build, regardless of his strength, could hope to outbox a near-giant in his first youth who had kept himself at the peak of physical fitness. But so great was his anguish at what Dakson had done that he found himself not caring very much.

  A surprise awaited him. Dakson arose swayingly, a thin trickle of blood running from his mouth, and looked at him steadily for a moment. At first there could be no doubting Dakson’s rage. It was mirrored in his eyes and it certainly matched, if it did not surpass, his own. But gradually it was replaced by another look. Although a slight tinge of anger remained, there was a sudden, unmistakable understanding in his gaze.

  “You must have had a reason for that, Zeig,” he said. “I think I know what brought it on—or I can make a good guess. I destroyed an animal that would have been a hundred times as valuable to the Survey if we could have brought it back alive. I said there must be more of them. But it could be so close to extinction on Froma we may not find another.”

  Dakson paused an instant to wipe the blood from his mouth, then went on quickly. “That is something I can understand, Zeig. If you’d made how you felt a little plainer I wouldn’t have spoken as I did. Nothing equals in importance our labors for the Survey.”

  Sandaling felt his anger dissolving and draining away, even though Dakson couldn’t have been more mistaken as to the reason for his rage. For a man without a trace of cowardice in his nature—he had no doubts on that score—to display such magnanimity after being knocked down, when he could so easily have scored a combat victory, made Sandaling feel ashamed.

  “It was a rotten thing I did,” he said. “I’ll make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

  “Oh, forget it,” Dakson said, his own anger clearly gone. “When you’re under a great strain some foolish, small thing can play havoc with your nerves. And this wasn’t a small thing. The first living, mammal-like—”

  He stopped when he saw that Sandaling wanted to say some thing more.

  “It was just that I—”

  Sandaling shook his head and started again, feeling a need to weigh each word with care. “Look,” he went on slowly. “I’ve got to be completely honest about this. We both know there are few human emotions that are as simple as we’d like to believe. Sometimes they are of a contradictory nature, but more often they stem from two or more separate trains of thought existing side by side. Not actually in opposition, understand. They arise simultaneously, under pressure of circumstances.”

  “I’m not sure I understand exactly what you’re driving at,” Dakson said, lowering his gaze for an instant. A slight uneasiness deepened the furrow in the middle of his brow when his eyes came to rest on the slain animal. “It might help a little if you put it in a less roundabout way.”

  “I’ll try,” Sandaling said. “Two separate things can make us behave in a certain way. That double impulse, as I stressed, need not be contradictory. Each can exist independently of the other. There is no inconsistency involved. What I said about trains of thought may be a little misleading. Conscious thought may be nine-tenths absent. The two impulses may arise swiftly, almost instinctively, in a matter of seconds.”

  “But I was aware of only one impulse when that animal flung itself at me,” Dakson said. “If I hadn’t blasted it down instantly I might not be here now discussing it.”

  “That thought was present, of course,” Sandaling said. “I’m not doubting what you say. But I think there was more to it than that. You may kill to protect yourself and experience at the same moment the terrible, inward joy of being a great hunter, and returning home with a trophy.”

  For the barest instant Dakson’s anger seemed on the verge of returning. A steely glint came into his eyes and a dark flush began to creep up over his cheekbones. Then, so abruptly that even Sandaling was taken by surprise, he regained complete mastery of himself.

  “I’ve been trying very hard to conceal that from myself,” he said. “It’s true, of course. It’s vestigial in all of us. But I fought against accepting it. You must believe me when I say that when I lied to you it was only myself I was desperately attempting to deceive.”

  Sandaling nodded. “I’ve many times tried to deceive myself to the same extent about a number of things,” he said. “You owe me no apology.”

  Dakson seemed suddenly weighed down by an immense weariness.

  “I’d better get some sleep,” he said. “The Survey would want me to set about preserving that animal immediately but just the thought now of lifting it up and putting it into a cylinder—”

  “I’ll take care of it,” Sandaling said, before he could go on. “Get some sleep, by all means. You must be out on your feet. Put a cylinder just outside the partition before you close it.”

  Sandaling had no intention of putting the animal into the cylinder. But he waited until he was sure Dakson had had more than enough time to fall asleep at the opposite end of the projectile before he activated the entrance panel and waited for the humming to subside.

  When the observation section became quiet again he bent down, lifted the animal into his arms and carried it out on the plain. Even a lowly creature of the wild, he felt, slain through no fault of its own, deserved a reverent burial under the stars on the planet of its birth.

  When Sandaling returned to the projectile he was at peace with himself again, and his anger at Dakson had vanished. The change in the way he felt might have surprised him more if he hadn’t known that a necessary task, well completed, could make much of the strain and tension go out of a man, even under the most trying of circumstances.

  He had needed no tools to raise a medium-sized boulder and deposit his small burden in a hollow sufficiently deep to provide it protection from the elements. The replaced boulder seemed a fitting monument, for it bore a striking resemblance to the small white tombstones Man had once erected to mark the graves of the unjustly slain.

  He ascended into the slightly elevated observation chair, but he did not reactivate the entrance panel. It was close, he knew, to the right time to leave it open. The hunger time.

  While he waited his mind went back across wid
e wastes of years. The dug-up records were sparse, but that was less true of the oral ones, handed down from generation to generation by lips describing a wonder that must have once been actually seen.

  How could it be doubted when the memory had persisted so long, despite relics buried deep and lost forever amidst the dust and emptiness of ages remote in time?

  The long-deserted Earth, a desolate planet destitute of all life had once teemed with animals of every shape and size. Gorgeously plumaged birds had arisen in flight from its towering trees, in such numbers they had darkened all of the sky, and great shaggy antelope-like beasts had gone thundering across the open plains.

  And what of the sea and its denizens and the shining wonder of coral reefs in the dawn? Yes, what of the sea with its high-leaping waters, now for long ages replaced by breaking bubbles of poisonous fumes?

  Most important of all to Man had been creatures of the mammalian breed and those, too, had vanished from his old homeland under the stars. Mammals both large and small—big-brained dolphins and whales and great shaggy-browed apes.

  It was as if they had never been, and with their vanishment, Man the Great Hunter had felt lonely and lost, with no creature even remotely resembling himself to share the mystery and the wonder and the strangeness in the old homeland, where birth and death and the changing seasons and all that was central to his existence lost much of its meaning if it could not be to some extent shared. And when he had gone out into space in search of companions like those his own folly had destroyed, he had found—on no more than a few scattered planets that had given birth to life at all—no living creature as highly evolved as a worm. To some men even a blob of sentient jelly or a flowering shrub had established the universality of life in the universe of stars and taken a little of the curse off and made them feel less totally alone. But Sandaling had always been a perfectionist, and only now, for the first time—

  One by one they crept into the projectile, ascended to the observation chair, and settled down at his side. It was partly a new and, to them, delicious kind of food he would soon be offering them that had first drawn them to his side from ravines and gullies and chiefly underground burrows in the vicinity of the projectile. He had very quickly discovered that the laboratory-synthesized foods that had supplied all of Man’s nutritional needs for countless generations had the appeal of a “special treat” for them, sparing them the need of foraging for the less enticing edibles natural to their environment.

  But it was not that alone that had drawn them from the semiarid waste into the projectile at hunger time. It was the strange, incredible delight they seemed to take in being petted and fussed over. It was as if they had also discovered that their close kinship to Man was a source of unfailing delight to them, affording them the kind of pleasure that satisfied the deepest instincts of their nature.

  Their friendliness was almost unbelievable, perhaps because they, had never before met Man. But almost from the start of Dakson’s absence, Sandaling had put that thought from him as unworthy. Why dwell on something that was, at most, problematical?

  Mammal-like they unmistakably were—warm-blooded, heavily furred, with soft moist snouts and ears that stood straight up, and wagged a little under stress of emotion. Speculations as to the precise origin of so highly evolved and intelligent a creature on one small planet light years distant from Man’s old homeland Sandaling was content to drop into the lap of the Survey.

  Parallel evolution seemed the most likely possibility, for it had been established beyond dispute that certain lowly life forms, far below the vertebrate level, could be close to identical on planets of somewhat similar geological formation, so distant from one another that communication between them would have been inconceivable.

  When the Survey explored every last rock crevice on Froma he had little doubt that the evolutionary predecessors of its present animal inhabitants would be found in the form, at least, of fossilized fragments. Fishes, reptiles, and amphibians had proceeded the emergence of the mammals on Man’s old homeland and it seemed extremely likely that a closely similar upward climb had occurred on Froma.

  But even of that Sandaling could not be completely certain, for three or four vast mutational leaps could not be ruled out amidst the twin mysteries of time and space in a universe mysterious beyond belief.

  Man had many more giant steps to take before even one small part of that mystery came clear and enabled him to take such pride in his discoveries that he could continue on without a faltering step or backward glance of sorrow and despair.

  They were clustering very close to him now, some rubbing against him in a clear desire to have him go on petting them and others making impatient guttural sounds of short duration which he had come to think of as meal-anticipatory.

  No two of them were exactly alike, and just the fact that each was so pronounced an individual in his or her own right—some of them were females—made him feel, for that moment at least, that no greater wonder could await him in the gulfs between the stars until his exploring time ran out. No greater wonder...

  Segalis—he had given names to them all a short while after Dakson’s departure—was the leanest and the longest, as measured from the tip of his snout to its curious, almost wire-thin tail. He had the largest, most liquid pool-like eyes, and the most silky-textured fur. He became a little more impatient than the others while awaiting his turn when the food was brought out.

  Drugar had more wiry hair and a much longer snout, and when he sat up straight with his short paws in rapid motion in what seemed to be a begging attitude he looked distinctly grotesque.

  Tiliran liked to play and romp, and race around the observation compartment from time to time between the sampling of her meals.

  Danaling was the smallest and his fur the heaviest, so that when he sat hunched at Sandaling’s side he looked like nothing so much as an animated puffball that had blown in through the entrance panel and might at any moment be wafted out again.

  There were three others present now to whom Sandaling had given names, and two newcomers he was quite sure would not remain strangers for long.

  They all liked to nuzzle him, or glide around him in the friendliest imaginable way.

  Suddenly, as he’d done a dozen times between Dakson’s departure and return, he found himself talking to each of them in a slightly bantering, very personal way, as if there was no language barrier that could not be broken down and lead to some sort of understanding if you used just the right tone of voice.

  “Try to be a little less impatient, Segalis, when I set out the food this time. There’s someone you’ve never met asleep in the opposite end of the projectile who’ll come storming out here if the amplifiers should pick up a sound or two. There’s a high-pitched kind of wailing that might just get through to him.” And to Mogor: “It’s a little hard for me to understand how you could have so big an appetite and be so small. Your very smallness could have helped you, I suppose, in getting at food that’s none too plentiful between narrow rock crevices, while Segalis has to do all of his searching on the open plain. But I doubt if you stayed small for that reason alone. “

  They weren’t as big-brained as the whales and dolphins and great apes had been before Time’s tyranny, with the help of Man, had had its way with them. But just talking to them as if they were brought sweeping back into Sandaling’s mind the imperishable legends that had always seemed a part of himself, despite the long drumbeat of the years.

  It was as if Man was being given another chance to recover what should never have been lost—a hunger time, a discovery time and a shining time of sharing, of togetherness, with every other wayfarer throughout the universe of stars. And with the resurgence of that ancient memory flood he saw an ancestral part of himself walking along a winding country lane in the old homeland, with a companion not too unlike Segalis or Drugar trotting along at his side and leapin
g up occasionally in boundless joy as he went striding on.

  A HITCH IN SPACE, by Fritz Leiber

  Originally published in Worlds of Tomorrow, August 1963.

  Once, when I was doing a hitch with the Shaulan Space Guard out Scorpio way, my partner Jeff Bogart developed just about the most harmless psychosis you could imagine: he got himself an imaginary companion.

  And the imaginary companion turned out to be me.

  Well, I’m a pretty nice guy and so having two of me in the ship didn’t seem a particularly bad idea. At first. In fact there’d be advantages of it, I thought. For instance, Jeff liked to talk a weary lot ... and the imaginary Joe Hansen could spell me listening to him, while I projected a book or just harkened to the wheels going around in my own head against the faint patter of starlight on the hull.

  I met Jeff first at a space-rodeo, oddly enough, but now the two of us were out on a servicing check of the orbital beacons and relays and rescue depots of the five planets of the Shaulan system. A completely routine job, its only drawback that it was lengthy. Our ship was an ionic jeep that looked like a fancy fountain pen, but was very roomy for three men—one of them imaginary.

  I caught on to Jeff’s little mania by overhearing him talking to me. I’d be coming back from the head or stores or linear accelerator or my bunk, and I’d hear him yakking at me. It embarrassed me the first time, how to go back into the cabin when the other me was there. But I just swam in, and without any transition-strain at all that I could observe Jeff looked around at me, smiling sort of glaze-eyed, and said warmly, “Joe. My buddy Joe. Am I glad they paired us.”

  If Jeff had a major fault, as opposed to a species of nuttiness, it was that he was strictly a speak-only-good, positive-thinking guy who always deferred to me. Even idolized me, if you can imagine that. He’d give me such fulsome praise I’d be irked ten times an orbit.

 

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