A Way Home

by Theodore Sturgeon

  So for a fuel-hungry Earth, these crystals were top priority. And the only thing that stood in our way—aside from getting to Venus—was the Gabblers.

  The First Venus Expedition discovered the Gabblers, and left them respectfully alone. The Second Expedition discovered that the Gabblers had a stock of the precious crystals—and got chased the hell out after picking up two. It was our job to bring back a whole slew of the crystals, Gabblers or no Gabblers. Although our orders ran to a bucketful of fine detail, the essence of them was: “Treat with the Gabblers and get crystals. If the Gabblers won’t play—get the crystals anyway.”

  “I hope we can get them peacefully,” Loma would say. “Humans have destroyed and killed enough.”

  And I’d tell her, “It don’t matter one way or the other, kid. Gabblers aren’t people.”

  “They’re civilized, aren’t they? Almost?”

  “They’re savages,” I’d snort. “And monsters as well. Keep your sympathies for nice smooth hungry human beings like me.”

  Then she’d slap my hands away and go back to her computers.

  Once Slopes asked me about the Gabblers. “Are they really humans?”

  “Humanoids,” I told him shortly. He made me a little uncomfortable to talk to. somehow. I mostly enjoyed his comedy. “They walk on two legs, and they have hands with an opposed thumb, and they wear ornaments. That’s all they use the crystals for. But they breathe ammonia instead of oxygen and have Lord knows what kind of metabolism. Why, Slopesy? Figuring on rootin’ in their garbage?”

  “I was just asking,” he replied gently. He put on his timid almost-smile and went aft. I remember laughing at the thought of him up against a couple of Gabblers—the most terrifying object in history since some ancient tale-teller dreamed up the Gryphon. All but two of the crew of the Starbound, the Expedition Two ship, had thrown down their packs and run for their lives at the very sight of a Gabbler. The other two had faced them out until the Gabblers started to scream. The psychologists had a lot to say about that noise. It was too much for any normal human being. One of the two men broke and ran, and no shame attaches to him for that. The other was cut off from the ship, and stood paralyzed with fear while the Gabblers screamed and trumpeted and pounded the earth with their scaly fists until it shook. He fired one shot in the air—he had sense enough not to risk wounding one of the enraged creatures—to frighten them off. Perhaps it did. All he remembers is a redoubled bedlam—such a gush of furious animal noise that he passed out cold on the spot. When he came to they’d gone. The two crystals were lying near him; he picked them up and ran blindly for the ship. It took eight months of the world’s most advanced psychotherapy to straighten him out, and they say he’s not quite normal yet, though he’s lived to be an old man. What fantastic psychic emanations the Gabblers used as weapons was not known, but the idea of Slopes up against them really tickled me.

  The watches passed quickly enough with him aboard to keep us amused. I’ll never forget the night Greaves slipped a spoonful of head-mastic, the damnedest adhesive that has ever been developed, into one of his sandwiches. Slopes bit into it and right then his upper teeth were welded to his lower teeth. He ran around in circles, whimpering, with half a sandwich sticking out of his face, flapping his hands uselessly. It was a riot. The stuff was quite harmless—it’s chemically inert, and it yields readily to a little low-grade beta radiation, which breaks down the molecular cohesion. But we didn’t radiate him until we were good and ready. I wish you could have seen the fun.

  We forgot about Slopes when we broke atmosphere on Venus, though I rigged the infrared view-screens for Lorna—they’re a little cleaner than radar in ammonia fog—and she took us in as neat as you please. We located the spot where the Star-bound had landed by feeding a photo-map of the scene into the automatic pilot and matching it to the view screen.

  Lorna threw the nose up and flipped the controls to the gyros. Tail-first we drifted down, sitting on a diminishing pillar of fire, while Loma’s eyes were glued to the echo-gauge which indicated the solidity of the footing under the ship. Once let one of these space-hoppers fall on its side and you could call yourself marooned. We didn’t have antigravity drive in those days. It was real primitive stuff. All the dash and daring’s gone from you young ‘uns.

  There’s not much to tell about Venus. It was as unappetizing and useless then as it is now—except that somewhere out there were the crystals we had come for. Through the ports we could see nothing but fog. Through the radar and infrared screens we saw rolling country, crags, pale blue vegetation, and an occasional treelike growth far larger than such things ought to be.

  We had to sit tight for twelve hours or so white the ground under us cooled and the chemical mish-mash of fixed and unfixed nitrogen, nitric acid, ammonium nitrate, ozone, and water stirred up by our landing worked itself out. Most of us slept. I don’t think Slopes did, though. He traveled from the infrared to the radar apparatus, fore, aft, right, left, above, and below screens. He even haunted the blank, fog-frosted portholes, peering into that swirl of heat and chemical reaction, straining his eyes and his heartbeat for little glimpses of that meaningless Venusian landscape. And it was Slopes who roused us.

  “Gabblers!” he jittered. “Come look! Captain Riggs! Captain Riggs!”

  He was as excited as a ten-year-old, and I’ve got to admit it was catching. We crowded around the screens.

  Out among the rocks and pale blue bushes two hundred meters from the ship were moving things which, in spite of our careful indoctrination, made us gasp and turn away. They were bigger than men—I hadn’t figured on that, for some reason. They were much bigger. As for the rest...I have a vision of yellow fangs, angry red eyes, and gray-green scales that is vivid enough—I’d as soon not talk much about it.

  “Let’s have some sound,” said the skipper. I went into the communications shack and cranked up an amplifier. I switched in an exterior microphone and plugged the output into the intercom. The ship filled with the background noises of an alien planet—a hollow wind-sound, startling because the fog seemed so still; bird-like squeaks and screams, distant and different; and over it all, the repulsive chatter and back-chatter of the Gabblers—the sound that had given them their name. It was an insane sound, hoarse and seemingly uncontrolled. It ranged harshly up and down the scale, and it differed rather horribly from the yammering of apes in that it seemed to carry consistent intelligence.

  “Tubes!” barked the Captain. “Break out the suit stores and walkie gear. Sparks, stand by your shack. I want separate recordings of each suit transmitted. Navigator, tend the screens.’ Four volunteers here by the exit port. Jump.”

  Now, I don’t want to run down the courage of the Space Service. It might be nice to say that everyone aboard clicked his heels and said “At your command, sire!” On the other hand, when I was telling you about the Starlure men who broke and ran when they saw the Gabblers, I think I made it clear that under the circumstances they carried no shame with them. Riggs asked for four volunteers; he got two: Purci, who, without dramatics, genuinely did not give a damn, and Honey Lundquist, who I suppose wanted to be noteworthy for something besides being as homely as a blue mud fence. Me, I was glad I’d been assigned to my communications equipment and had no decision to make. As for the rest who didn’t volunteer, I don’t blame them. Not even Slopes, though I still thought it a fine idea for him to face up a couple of hungry Gabblers, just for the comedy of contrast.

  Riggs made no comment. He just stripped and got into space harness, the other two following. The rest of us helped them pull on the skin-tight rig and clamp down the globular transparent helmets. They tested their air and their communications, and then went to the inside gate of the airlock. I opened it for them.

  “We’re going to make contact,” said Riggs stonily. His voice came from the intercom speakers rather than directly from him. It was eerie. “We’ll try to make it peaceful first. So no side arms. I’m taking a pencil gun, just in case. You two
stay close together and behind me. We’ll stay hard by the ship, and under no circumstances let ourselves get cut off. Check communications.”

  “Check!” yelped Purci.

  “Check!” whispered Honey Lundquist.

  The skipper marched into the lock with the other two close behind him. I rumbled the gate shut behind them, and opened the outer lock with the remote control. All hands left aboard dived for the view-screens.

  The Gabblers, twenty or thirty of them, stuck close to the bush. Although we could not see the skipper and his volunteers yet, it was immediately evident that they had been seen. The Gabblers came out with a rush, and a more terrifying spectacle these old eyes have not seen. In the intercom, I heard Purci say, “Ugh!,” and Honey say, “Eeek!” The Captain said, “Steady in an unsteady voice. Behind me, there was a faint thunk as Betty Ordway passed out. I let her lie and went back to my screen.

  As if by common agreement, the bulk of Gabblers halted at the crest of the gentle slope between us and the brush, and three of them came forward together, one ahead and two behind. The rest set up such a-roaring that the giant trees visibly quivered. It was just about then that the skipper moved far enough out to be visible, with Honey and Purci close behind him. They stopped, and the three advancing Gabblers stopped, and, incredibly, the crowd at the top of the hill doubled its noise. I couldn’t help it—I turned down the gain control on the outside mike. I couldn’t stand it. Lorna thanked me. Slopes wiped his face, working the handkerchief around his eyes so he wouldn’t miss anything.

  There was a moment’s tension—I don’t mean silence; the gabbling kept up at that astounding volume, but nothing moved. When movement started, it was awfully fast.

  The Captain raised both arms in what he obviously felt was a gesture of peace. Judging by what happened the Gabblers took it as a deadly insult. They went straight up in the air, all three of them, and hit the ground running. They traveled in great bounds, yowling and roaring as they came, and behind them the mass of their followers started down the slope. Over the racket I heard Honey Lundquist scream. The three space-suited figures looked very tiny down there at the approach of that wave of bellowing giants. I saw one of the three go down in a faint. Riggs yelled a futile, “Halt or I fire!” and aimed the pencil gun. One volunteer scooped up the limp form of the’ other, draped it across the shoulders of the space suit, and began lumbering toward the ship. Riggs aimed, fired, turned, and ran without waiting to see what his shot had accomplished.

  It was Slopes who leaped to the lock control and pressed his nose to the vision port to make sure all three were safely inside, and then slammed the outer door. He switched on the air-replacement pump that would get rid of the ammonia gas in the lock, and dived back to the screens.

  There was a cluster of Gabblers around the one Riggs had shot. The noise was fiendish. I went to the shack and turned down the volume again, but you could actually hear that racket through your feet on the deck plates.

  The inner-lock gate slid open, and a very pale-faced skipper stepped out. Behind him were his volunteers—Honey Lundquist looking winded, and Purci draped over her shoulders. “He fainted,” she said unnecessarily and dumped him in our arms.

  We rolled him into a corner and kept our eyes on the screens. “Anyway, I got one of them,” breathed Riggs.

  “No, you didn’t, Captain,” said Slopes. Sure enough, the prostrate Gabbler was sitting up, weaving his massive tusked head from side to side and shrieking.

  “Are they bullet-proof?” Greaves mouthed.

  “No,” Slopes said devastatingly. “The skipper shot him smack on that crystal he had around his neck.”

  Captain Riggs groaned: “And that’s about as close as we’ll get to those crystals this trip,” he predicted morosely. “They never told me it was going to be like this. Why in time didn’t they send a battle cruiser?”

  “To kill off these creatures and loot their bodies for their ornaments?” asked Lorna scornfully. “We’ve come a long way in the last thousand years, haven’t we?”

  “Now that’s not the way to look at it,” I began, but Riggs cut in, “You’re right, you’re right, Lorna. Unless we get them to cooperate, we’ll spend years in finding out how they make the crystals. Or where they mine them. And we haven’t got years. We’ve got about four more days.”

  See, sixty years ago a ship could fuel for just so much blasting. A trip was timed for the closest transit of the planets. To leave Venus and chase after Earth as the planets drew apart again in space was out of the question. Now, of course, with power to throw away, it happens every day.

  We got Purci out of his suit and revived him. We were all ready to swear that he’d had some secret weapon used on him. He didn’t scare easily. It was probably just his particular response to that particular level of noise—a completely individual thing. But at the moment we were ready to believe anything of the Gabblers.

  The ship began to tremble.

  “They’re attacking us!” yelped Greaves.

  But they weren’t. There were more than ever of them. The entire slope was covered with bulky, scaly, horribly manlike monsters. They were all gabbling away insanely, and in great numbers they’d squat down and pound on the ground with their mallet-like fists.

  “Working theirselves up into a frenzy,” Zipperlein diagnosed. “Skipper, let’s blast off. We’re what you might call underequipped for this sort of stuff.”

  Riggs thought. “We’ll stick it out for a while,” he said finally. “I’d like to feel I’d done everything I could—even if it’s just sitting here until we have to leave.”

  I had my doubts, and from the looks of them, so had the others. But no one said anything. The ship trembled. We went and had chow.

  About thirteen hours before blast-off time I was staring glumly into a screen at the swarm of Gabblers when I sensed someone beside me. It was Slopes. He’d been left pretty much alone in the past three days. I guess everyone was too depressed and nervous to want fun.

  “Look at ’em,” I growled, waving at the screen. “I don’t know whether it’s the same ones or whether they’ve been working in relays to keep the hassle going all this time. You’d have to be a Venusian to tell one from another. I can’t tell ’em apart.”

  He looked at me as if I’d just told him where the crown jewels were hid, and walked off without a word. He began pulling off his clothes. None of us paid any attention. If we thought anything at all, I guess we figured he was going to take a shower. Before any of us knew what was happening, he’d skinned into a space suit and was clamping on the helmet.

  “Hey! Slopes! Where do you think you’re going?”

  He said something but I couldn’t hear. I reached back and flipped on the intercom, which would pick up his suit radio. He repeated his remark, which was simply, “Out.” He stepped into the airlock and slid the door shut.

  Riggs came pounding out of the control room. “Where’s that crazy fool go—” He went for the airlock, but the red light over it blazed, indicating that the chamber was now open to the outside, and Slopes was gone.

  “Get on his beam,” Riggs snapped, and grabbed a mike from my bench. “Slopes!” he roared.

  I punched buttons. Slopes’s voice came in, far more calm and clear than I had ever heard it before.

  “Yes, Captain.”

  “Get back in here!”

  “I’m going to try for those crystals.”

  “You’re trying for some suicide. Get back here. That’s an order!”

  “Sorry, Captain,” said Slopes laconically. Riggs and I stared at each other, amazed. Slopes said, before the Captain could splutter out another word, “I have an idea about these Gabblers, and I’m the only one qualified to carry it out.”

  “You’ll get killed!” Riggs bellowed.

  “I will if I’m wrong,” said Slopes’s quiet voice. “Now, if it’s all the same to you. I’ll switch off. I have to think.”

  Riggs was filling his lungs when he saw Slopes’s rad
io-response indicator wink out on the board. The breath came out in a single obscene syllable.

  All hands went to the screens, in which Slopes was just visible walking away from the ship. “Qualified!” I snorted. “What the hell is he qualified for?”

  “Humanity,” said Lorna. I didn’t know what she meant by that. Her face was white and strained as she watched the screen.

  The Gabblers went into a flurry of activity when they saw him. They crowded forward, practically stepping on one another to get at him. Three or four of the fastest raced out to him, screaming and clashing their tusks. As if to gloat over his helplessness, they circled him, leaping and yammering, occasionally dropping to drum powerfully on the ground with their fists. Then suddenly one of them picked him up, held him high over its head, and raced up the slope with him. The mob parted and closed again behind the creature, and the whole scaly crowd followed as Slopes was borne up out of sight in the blue under-brush.