Robert Bloch

by Atoms

  The maw was closing over him.

  The doorway ahead of him disappeared, and the slanting slope moved beneath his feet. It contracted in a series of ripples, convulsing like a throat in the act of swallowing. Wayne gasped, the stench suddenly stronger in his nostrils. He clawed out at the walls, dropping his weapon as the slope tilted, pushing him back. And now a wave of nauseous liquid gushed out from the floor, and Wayne felt himself forced back, thinking idiotically, salivation, that’s what it is, and wondering why there were no teeth in the house.

  The odor was overpowering, and he felt the slimy waves wash over him as he retreated, forcing his way along the narrow passage toward the second chamber.

  It squeezed him clammily, and all too late he realized that this must be the esophagus.

  Snakes. Nora had said. The thing smelled like a snake, it looked like a snake, it was a snake. A snake that devours its victims whole and alive. And then digests them in its stomach.

  Wayne clawed the constricting walls of the narrow passage, trying to hold himself back. But the creature was moving and shuddering all around him, and then it gave a great gulp and swallowed. Wayne fell into the second compartment, and the bubbling liquid surged and seared....

  When daylight came, the hut was sluggish and quiescent. The dark doorway opened once more, but there was no other sign of movement.

  The hut belched once, then settled back to wait.

  CONSTANT READER

  ONCE upon a time they were called strait jackets.

  When you put one on, you were “in restraint” according to the polite psychiatric jargon of the day. I know, because I’ve read all about it in books. Yes, real books, the old-fashioned kind that were printed on paper and bound together between leather or board covers. They’re still available in some libraries, Earthside, and I’ve read a lot of them. As a matter of fact, I own quite a collection myself. It’s a peculiar hobby, but I enjoy it much more than telolearning or going to the sensorals.

  Of course, I admit I’m a little bit maladjusted, according to those same psychiatric texts I mentioned. That’s the only possible explanation of why I enjoy reading, and why I pick up so many odd items of useless information.

  This business about strait jackets and restraint, for example. All I ever got out of it was a peculiar feeling whenever we hit grav, on a Rec. Flight.

  I got it again, now, as Penner yelled, “Act alert, Dale—put down that toy and strap up!”

  I dropped my book and went over to the Sighter Post. Already I could feel the preliminary pull despite the neutralizer’s efforts. I strapped up and hung there in my cocoon, hung there in my strait jacket.

  There I was, nicely in restraint, in our own little private asylum—Scout #3890-R, two months out of Home Port 19/1, and now approaching 68/5 planet for Reconnaissance.

  Before looking out of the Sighter, I took another glance at my fellow inmates. Penner, Acting Chief, Temp., was strapped in at Mechontrol; all I could see of him was the broad back, the bullet head bent in monomaniac concentration. Swanson, Astrog., 2nd Class, hung at his side, cake-knife nose in profile over the Obsetape. Little Morse, Tech., was stationed at my left and old Levy,Eng., hung to my right. All present and accounted for—Penner, Swanson, Morse, Levy and myself. George Dale, Constant Reader and erstwhile Service Observer, hanging in his strait jacket after two months in a floating madhouse.

  Two months of anything is a long time. Two months of Rec. Flight is an eternity. Being cooped up with four other men in a single compartment for that length of time is no picnic, and our strait jackets seemed singularly appropriate.

  Not that any of us were actually psycho; all of us had a long record of similar missions, and we managed to survive. But the sheer monotony had worn us down.

  I suppose that’s why Service gave us the extra seven pounds per man—Lux. Allotment, it was called. But the so-called luxuries turn out to be necessities after all. Swanson usually put his poundage into solid food; candy, and the like. Chocolate capsules kept him sane. Morse and Levy went in for games—cards, dice, superchess and the necessary boards. Penner, amazingly enough, did sketching on pads of old-fashioned paper. And I had this habit of my own—I always managed to bring three or four books within the weight limit.

  I still think my choice was the best; candy-munching, free-hand sketching and the delights of dicing and superchessmanship palled quickly enough on my four companions. But the books kept me interested. I had a peculiar background—learned to read as a child rather than as an adult—and I guess that’s why I derived such queer satisfaction from my hobby.

  Naturally, the others laughed at me. Naturally, we got on each other’s nerves, quarreled and fretted and flared up. But now, resting quietly in our strait jackets as we entered grav, a measure of sanity returned. With it came anticipation and expectation.

  We were approaching 68/5 planet.

  New worlds to conquer? Not exactly. It was a new world, and therein lay the expectation. But we weren’t out to conquer, we on Rec. Flight merely observed and recorded. Or, rather, our instruments recorded.

  At the moment we slid in on Mechontrol, about five hundred miles above the surface. 68/5 was small, cloud-wreathed; it had atmosphere apparently, as did its companions. Now we were moving closer and we peered through the Sighters at a dull, flat surface that seemed to be rushing towards us at accelerating speed.

  “Pretty old,” little Morse grunted. “No mountains, and no water, either—dried up, I guess.”

  “No life.” This from old Levy. “That’s a relief.” Levy was what the books would have called a misanthrope. Although his mis wasn’t confined to anthropes. He seemed to have a congenital aversion to everything that wasn’t strictly mechanical—why he didn’t stick to robotics, I’ll never know.

  We came down faster. Fifty miles, forty, thirty. I saw Swanson making arrangements to drop the roboship. Penner gave the signal as he righted us above the surface. The roboship glided away, guided by Swanson at the Obsetape. It drifted down, down, down. We followed slowly, dropping below the cloud barrier and following it closely.

  “Hit!” snapped Swanson. “Right on the button.” We waited while the roboship did its job. It was our star reporter, our roving photographer, our official meteorologist, our staff geologist, our expert in anthropology and mineralogic, our trusted guide and—most important, on many occasions—our stalking-horse.

  If there was life present on a planet, the landing of the roboship generally brought it forth. If there was death on a planet, the roboship found it for us. And always, it recorded. It was, in a way, a complete expedition encapsulated, a non-human functional without the human capability of error or terror.

  Now it went into action, cruising over the surface, directed by Swanson’s delicate manipulation of the Obsetape unit controls. We waited patiently, then impatiently. An hour passed, two hours.

  “Bring it in!” Penner ordered. Swanson moved his fingers and the roboship returned.

  Penner snapped on the Temporary Balance. “Everybody unstrap,” he said. “Let’s take a look!”

  We went down the ramp to the lower deck and Swanson opened the roboship. The photos were ready, the tapes were spooled. We were busy with findings for another hour. At the end of that time we had all the preliminary data necessary on 68/5 planet.

  Oxygen content high. Gravity similar to Earthside—as seemed constant in this particular sector and system. No detectable life forms. But life had existed here, once, and life of a high order. The photos proved that. City ruins galore.

  And the planet was old. No doubt about that. Morse had been right; mountains were worn away to dust, and the dust did not support vegetable life. Strange that the oxygen content was still so high. I’d have supposed that carbonization—

  “Let’s snap out,” Penner said. “We don’t need Temporary Balance or straps according to the gravity reading. Might as well go in for a landing right away. The day-cycle here is 20.1 hours—computer gives us a good 5 hours to go,
right now. So we can all take a look around.”

  We filed back upstairs and Swanson brought us in.

  It was only a dead planet, a desert of dust without trees or grass or water; a flat, slate-colored surface where everything was the same, same, same. But it was solid, you could put your feet down on it, you could walk across the sand for miles and feel the air flow against your face.

  And there were ruins to explore. That might be interesting. At least, it was a change.

  I could feel the tension and excitement mount; it was as palpable as the momentary shock and shudder of landing. We crowded around the lock, struggling out of our suits and putting on the light plastikoids, buckling on the gear and weapons as prescribed by regulation. Morse handed us our equipment and we zipped and strapped and adjusted in a frenzy of impatience. Even Penner was eager, but he remembered to grab his sketch-pad before the lock was opened.

  Normally, I suppose he would have insisted on maintaining a watch on board, but in the absence of life it didn’t really matter. And after two months, everybody wanted out.

  The lock opened. The ladder went down. We inhaled, deeply, turned our faces to the warmth of the distant orange sun.

  “Single file—keep together!” Penner cautioned.

  It’s the last day of school, and dismissal is sounded, and the boys rush out onto the playground. So the teacher warns, “Single file—keep together!” and what happens?

  Just what happened now. In a moment we were racing across the soft sand, grinning and tossing handfuls of the fine grains high into the clean, dry air. We ran across the brand-new world on our brand-new legs.

  We moved in the direction we couldn’t help thinking of as west—because the orange sun hung there and we turned to the sun as naturally as flowers recently transplanted from a hothouse.

  We moved buoyantly and joyfully and freely, for this was vacation and picnic and release from the asylum all in one. The smiles on the faces of my companions bespoke euphoria. It was all good: the gritty, sliding sand under our feet, the pumping of legs in long strides, the grinding ball-and-socket action of the hips, the swinging of the arms, the rise and fall of the chest, the lungs greedily gasping in and squandering recklessly, the eyes seeing far, far away. Yes, it was good to be here, good to be alive, good to be free.

  Once again we measured minutes in terms of movements, rather than abstract units of time-passage we must endure. Once again we consciously heightened our awareness of existence, rather than dulled it to make life bearable.

  It seemed to me that I’d never felt so completely alive, but I was wrong. I was wrong, because I didn’t notice the blackout.

  None of us were aware of it: even now, I can’t begin to comprehend it. I don’t know what happened. It was just that—blackout.

  Before it happened, we marched towards the sun—Penner, Swanson and Morse a little in the lead, Levy and I a pace or two behind, all of us trudging up a slight incline in the sand.

  And then, without any seeming transition at all, we were marching in darkness—Penner, Swanson, Morse, Levy and I in a solid group, trudging down into a valley.

  “What happened?”

  “Eclipse?”

  “Where’s the sun?”

  “Where are we?”

  “How long we been walking? I feel like I passed out.”

  We halted and exchanged comments.

  “Something wrong here. We’re going back. Get out the beamers.” Penner issued orders swiftly.

  We broke out the beamers, adjusted the slow-strobes, put pathways of light before us. There was nothing to see but slaty sand. Only Swanson’s bearings with the scope guided us in retracing our steps. We moved swiftly through the pall of a purple night. A mist shrouded the stars; a mist mantled our memories.

  That’s when we compared notes, realized for the first time that the phenomenon had occurred to all of us simultaneously. Gas, shock, temporary dislocation—we argued about the cause for hours, and all the while we marched on the alert, up hummocks and down into little valleys between the dunes.

  And we were tired. Unused muscles strained, hearts pumped, feet blistered, and still we marched. I was hungry and thirsty and tired; more than that, I was puzzled and a little bit afraid. I didn’t understand just what had happened—how could we, all of us, go on walking that way while we were out on our feet? How could we lose almost four hours? And what did it mean?

  At the moment we were in no danger of being lost, and it was more and more obvious that this planet contained no life, hostile or otherwise. But why the blackout? It puzzled me, puzzled all of us.

  Swanson took the lead. His beak-like profile loomed on a rise in my beamer’s path. He turned and yelled, “I can see the ship now!”

  We toiled up the slope and joined him. Yes, the ship was there, snug and safe and secure, and the adventure was over.

  Or—was it?

  “Look down there!” Levy swivelled his beamer to the left. “We must have missed it on the way out.”

  Five rays played, pooled, pointed in a single beam. Five rays found, focussed and flooded upon the objects rising from the sand. And then we were all running together towards the ruins.

  Just before we reached them, Penner yelled, “Stop!”

  “What’s wrong?” I said.

  “Nothing—maybe. Then again, you never know. That blackout bothers me.” Penner put his hand on my shoulder. “Look, Dale, I want you and Morse to go back to the ship and wait. The three of us will take a trip through the ruins. But I want at least two men on ship at all times, in case there’s any trouble. Go ahead, now—we won’t move until we see you’re on board. Flash us a signal to let us know everything’s all right when you get there.”

  Morse and I trudged off.

  “Just my luck,” little Morse grumbled under his breath and waved his beamer in disgust. “Run around for hours in the sand and then when we finally hit something it’s back to the ship. Huh!”

  “He’s right, though,” I answered. “Got to be careful. And besides, we can eat and take our shoes off.”

  “But I want to see those ruins. Besides, I promised my girl some souvenirs—”

  “Tomorrow we’ll probably get our turn,” I reminded him. He shrugged and plodded on. We reached the ship, boarded, and took a quick look around. All clear.

  Morse went over to the panel and pushed the blinker. Then we sat down next to the Sighter and stared out. All we could see at this distance was a purple blur, through which three beams moved and wavered.

  I opened foodcaps and we swallowed, still straining to see. The lights moved separately at first, then coalesced into a single unit.

  “Must have found something,” Morse speculated. “Wonder what?”

  “We’ll find out soon enough,” I predicted.

  But they didn’t come back, and they didn’t come back—we sat for hours, waiting.

  Finally the beams moved our way. We were waiting as Penner, Swanson and Levy boarded. An excited babble wavered into words and the words became sentences.

  “Never saw anything like them—”

  “Smaller than dwarfs; couldn’t be, but I’d swear they were human.”

  “Gets me is the way they disappeared, just like somebody had scooped them all up at once.”

  “Wasn’t their city, I’m sure of that. First of all, it was ages old, and secondly it wasn’t built to their size-scale at all—”

  “Think we just imagined the whole thing? That blackout was peculiar enough, and then, seeing them this way—”

  I raised my voice. “What’s all this about? What did you find?”

  The answer was more babbling in unison, until Penner signalled for silence.

  “See what you make of this, Dale,” he said. He pulled out his sketch-pad and went to work, swiftly. As he worked, he talked. Story and sketches emerged almost simultaneously.

  He passed the first drawing to me.

  “Ruins,” he said. “Ruins of a city. All we really saw were the ro
oftops, but they’re enough to give you some idea of the probable size of the place. You’ll note everything was solid stone. Plenty of broad, flat surfaces. Here’s a sketch of me standing between two rooftops. Probably a street in between, at one time. What do you make of it?”

  I studied his sketch; it was crude, but graphically explicit. “They must have been humanoid,” I said. “If we accept functionalism in architectural representation—”

  “Never mind the book words,” Penner interrupted. “Look at the width of that street. Would you say that the inhabitants were large or small?”

  “Large, of course.” I looked at the sketch again. “Must have been much taller than we are, perhaps seven or eight feet if they worked according to our proportions. Of course, that’s just a rough guess.”

  “Good enough. And we geigered the stones a bit. Levy, here, places them at fourteen thousand years.”

  “The very least,” Levy broke in. “Possibly older than that.”

  Penner was sketching again. He passed the second drawing over to me. “Here’s what we found wandering around in the ruins,” he told me. “I’ve shown two of them standing next to me, but there must have been hundreds.”

  I looked. There stood Penner, and—at his feet—two tiny man-like beings.

  “You actually saw these things?”

  “Of course. We all did, there’s no doubt about it. One minute we were climbing around among the stones, and then they appeared. Just like that, out of nowhere, you might say. And not one or two, but hundreds of them.” He turned. “Isn’t that right, Swanson?”

  “Correct.”

  I gazed at the sketch again. Penner had an eye for detail. I was particularly impressed with the way the creatures were dressed.

  “These look like ancient earth-garments,” I said. “They’re wearing little armored breastplates, and helmets. And they carry spears.”

  “That’s exactly how they looked,” Levy corroborated. “Some of them had those—what were they called?—bows and arrows.”