Worst Contact

by Hank Davis

  Gracelessly yet without jerking the wounded boy, Womble and a third-platoon tanker pressed into service as stretcher-bearer rose and started toward the bird. As soon as the slick touched down, its blades set to idle, the crew chief with his Red Cross armband jumped out. Holtz and the stretcher with the newbie reached the helicopter an instant after the two nearer stretchers.

  “Where’s the prisoner?” the crew chief shouted over the high scream of unloaded turbines.

  “Get my men aboard first,” Holtz ordered briefly.

  “Sorry, Captain,” the air medic replied, “with our fuel load we only take two this trip and I’ve got orders to bring the prisoner back for sure.”

  “Stuff your orders! My men go out first.”

  The crew chief wiped sweat from the bridge of his nose; more trickled from under his commo helmet. “Sir, there’s two generals and a bird colonel waiting on the pad for me; I leave that—” he shook his head at the makeshift stretcher— “that back here and it’s a year in LBJ if I’m lucky. I’ll take one of your—”

  “They’re both dying!”

  “I’m sorry but . . .” The medic’s voice dried up when he saw what Holtz was doing. “You can’t threaten me!” he shrilled.

  Holtz jacked a shell into the chamber of the .45. None of his men moved to stop him. The medic took one step forward as the big captain fired. The bullet slammed into the alien’s forehead, just under the streaky gray bristles of his hairline. Fluid spattered the medic and the side of the helicopter behind him.

  “There’s no prisoner!” Holtz screamed over the shuddering thunder inside his skull. “There’s nothing at all, do you hear? Now get my men to a hospital!”

  Hauley tried to catch him as he fell, but the officer’s weight pulled them both to the ground together.

  The snarl of a laboring diesel brought him out of it. He was on a cot with a rolled flak jacket pillowed under his head. Someone had removed his chicken vest and bathed away the crusts of dried blood.

  “Where are we?” Holtz muttered thickly. His vision had cleared and the chipped rubber of the treads beside him stood out in sharp relief.

  Hauley handed his CO a paper cup of coffee laced with something bitter. “Here you go. Lieutenant Paider took over and we’re gonna set up here for the night. If it clears, we’ll get a chopper for you too.”

  “But that . . . ?” Holtz gestured at the twilit bulk of a tank twenty feet away. It grunted to a halt after neutral steering a full 360 degrees.

  “That? Oh, that was four-four,” Hauley said in a careless voice. “Greiler wanted to say thanks—getting both his buddies dusted off, you know. But I told him you didn’t want to hear about something that didn’t happen. And everybody in the company’ll swear it didn’t happen, whatever some chopper jockey thinks. So Greiler just moved four-four up to where the bird landed and did a neutral steer . . . on nothing at all.”

  “Nothing at all,” Holtz repeated before drifting off. He grinned like a she-tiger gorging on her cubs’ first kill.

  THE FLAT-EYED

  MONSTER

  by William Tenn

  Trapped on an alien planet, surrounded by the obligatory bug-eyed monsters, a lone Earthman must somehow escape and return to Earth. If you think you’ve already read that story far too many times—not so. And consider just who the monster is here.

  ***

  William Tenn (1920-2010) was the pen name of Philip Klass (not to be confused with Philip J. Klass, the aerospace writer) who began writing SF and fantasy in the late 1940s, and was one of the brightest writers of the 1950s, particularly with his stories in Galaxy (where this story originally appeared). Along with other irreverent writers (notably Robert Sheckley, Fritz Leiber, and Evelyn E. Smith), Tenn set the tone of Galaxy as a home for wit and satire. During World War II, he served in the U.S. Army as a combat engineer in Europe, and later was a technical editor with the Air Force radar and radio laboratory, though if he was somehow teleported to an alien planet as part of his job, at least he got back all right, or we would have missed a lot of great stories, such as this one. Written during a dire time in the author’s life, he wrote it under an editor’s instruction to be “very, very funny.” Mr. Tenn, you didn’t know your own strength!

  For the first few moments, Clyde Manship—who up to then had been an assistant professor of Comparative Literature at Kelly University—for the first few moments, Manship tried heroically to convince himself that he was merely having a bad dream. He shut his eyes and told himself chidingly, with a little superior smile playing about his lips, that things as ugly as this just did not occur in real life. No. Definitely a dream.

  He had himself half-convinced, until he sneezed. It was too loud and wet a sneeze to be ignored. You didn’t sneeze like that in a dream—if you sneezed at all. He gave up. He’d have to open his eyes and take another look. At the thought, his neck muscles went rigid with spasm.

  A little while ago, he’d fallen asleep while reading an article he’d written for a scholarly journal. He’d fallen asleep in his own bed in his own apartment in Callahan Hall—“a charming and inexpensive residence for those members of the faculty who are bachelors and desire to live on campus.” He’d awakened with a slightly painful tingling sensation in every inch of his body. He felt as if he were being stretched, stretched interminably and—and loosened. Then, abruptly, he had floated off the bed and gone through the open window like a rapidly attenuating curl of smoke. He’d gone straight up to the star-drenched sky of night, dwindling in substance until he lost consciousness completely.

  And had come to on this enormous flat expanse of white tabletop, with a multi-vaulted ceiling above him and dank, barely breathable air in his lungs. Hanging from the ceiling were quantities and quantities of what was indubitably electronic equipment, but the kind of equipment the boys in the Physics Department might dream up, if the grant they’d just received from the government for military radiation research had been a million times larger than it was, and if Professor Bowles, the department head, had insisted that every gadget be carefully constructed to look substantially different from anything done in electronics to date.

  The equipment above him had been rattling and gurgling and whooshing, glowing and blinking and coruscating. Then it had stopped as if someone had been satisfied and had turned off a switch.

  So Clyde Manship had sat up to see who had turned it off.

  He had seen all right.

  He hadn’t seen so much who as he had seen what. And it hadn’t been a nice what.

  In fact, none of the whats he had glimpsed in that fast look around had been a bit nice. So he had shut his eyes fast and tried to find another mental way out of the situation.

  But now he had to have another look. It might not be so bad the second time. “It’s always darkest,” he told himself with determined triteness, “before the dawn.” And then found himself involuntarily adding, “except on days when there’s an eclipse.”

  But he opened his eyes anyway, wincingly, the way a child opens its mouth for the second spoonful of castor oil.

  Yes, they were all as he had remembered them. Pretty awful.

  The tabletop was an irregular sort of free-form shape, bordered by thick, round knobs a few inches apart. And perched on these knobs, about six feet to the right of him, were two creatures who looked like black leather suitcases. Instead of handles or straps, however, they sported a profusion of black tentacles, dozens and dozens of tentacles, every second or third one of which ended in a moist turquoise eye shielded by a pair of the sweepingest eyelashes Manship had ever seen outside of a mascara advertisement.

  Embedded in the suitcase proper, as if for additional decorative effect, were swarms of other sky-blue eyes, only these, without eyelashes, bulged out in multitudes of tiny, glittering facets like enormous gems. There was no sign of ear, nose or mouth anywhere on the bodies, but there was a kind of slime, a thick, grayish slime, that oozed out of the black bodies and dripped with a steady splash-splash-s
plash to the floor beneath.

  On his left, about fifteen feet away, where the tabletop extended a long peninsula, there was another one of the creatures. Its tentacles gripped a pulsating spheroid across the surface of which patches of light constantly appeared and disappeared.

  As near as Manship could tell, all the visible eyes of the three were watching him intently. He shivered and tried to pull his shoulders closer together.

  “Well, Professor,” someone asked suddenly, “what would you say?”

  “I’d say this was one hell of a way to wake up,” Manship burst out, feelingly. He was about to go on and develop this theme in more colorful detail when two things stopped him.

  The first was the problem of who had asked the question. He had seen no other human—no other living creature, in fact—besides the three tentacled suitcases anywhere in that tremendous, moisture-filled room.

  The second thing that stopped him was that someone else had begun to answer the question at the same time, cutting across Manship’s words and ignoring them completely.

  “Well, obviously,” this person said, “the experiment is a success. It has completely justified its expense and the long years of research behind it. You can see for yourself, Councilor Glomg, that one-way teleportation is an accomplished fact.”

  Manship realized that the voices were coming from his right. The wider of the two suitcases—evidently “the professor” to whom the original query had been addressed—was speaking to the narrower one, who had swung most of his stalked eyes away from Manship and had focused them on his companion. Only where in blazes were the voices coming from? Somewhere inside their bodies? There was no sign anywhere of vocal apparatus.

  AND HOW COME, Manship’s mind suddenly shrieked, THEY TALK ENGLISH?

  “I can see that,” Councilor Glomg admitted with a blunt honesty that became him well. “It’s an accomplished fact, all right, Professor Lirld. Only, what precisely has it accomplished?”

  Lirld raised some thirty or forty tentacles in what Manship realized fascinatedly was an elaborate and impatient shrug. “The teleportation of a living organism from astronomical unit 649-301-3 without the aid of transmitting apparatus on the planet of origin.”

  The Councilor swept his eyes back to Manship. “You call that living?” he inquired doubtfully.

  “Oh, come now, Councilor,” Professor Lirld protested. “Let’s not have any flefnomorphism. It is obviously sentient, obviously motile, after a fashion—”

  “All right. It’s alive. I’ll grant that. But sentient? It doesn’t even seem to pmbff from where I stand. And those horrible lonely eyes! Just two of them—and so flat! That dry, dry skin without a trace of slime. I’ll admit that—”

  “You’re not exactly a thing of beauty and a joy forever yourself, you know,” Manship, deeply offended, couldn’t help throwing out indignantly.

  “—I tend to flefnomorphism in my evaluation of alien life-forms,” the other went on as if he hadn’t spoken. “Well, I’m a flefnobe and proud of it. But after all, Professor Lirld, I have seen some impossible creatures from our neighboring planets that my son and other explorers have brought back. The very strangest of them, the most primitive ones, at least can pmbff! But this—this thing. Not the smallest, slightest trace of a pmb do I see on it! It’s eerie, that’s what it is—eerie!”

  “Not at all,” Lirld assured him. “It’s merely a scientific anomaly. Possibly in the outer reaches of the galaxy where animals of this sort are frequent, possibly conditions are such that pmbffing is unnecessary. A careful examination should tell us a good deal very quickly. Meanwhile, we’ve proved that life exists in other areas of the galaxy than its sun-packed core. And when the time comes for us to conduct exploratory voyages to these areas, intrepid adventurers like your son will go equipped with information. They will know what to expect.”

  “Now, listen,” Manship began shouting in desperation. “Can you or can you not hear me?”

  “You can shut off the power, Srin,” Professor Lirld commented. “No sense in wasting it. I believe we have as much of this creature as we need. If any more of it is due to materialize, it will arrive on the residual beam.”

  The flefnobe on Manship’s left rapidly spun the strange spheroid he was holding. A low hum, which had filled the building and had been hardly noticeable before, now died away. As Srin peered intently at the patches of light on the surface of the instrument, Manship suddenly guessed that they were meter readings. Yes, that’s exactly what they were—meter readings. Now, how did I know that? he wondered.

  Obvious. There was only one answer. If they couldn’t hear him no matter how loudly he shouted, if they gave no sign that they even knew he was shouting, and if, at the same time, they seemed to indulge in the rather improbable feat of talking his native language—they were obviously telepaths. Without anything that looked like ears or mouths.

  He listened carefully as Srin asked his superior a question. It seemed to sound in his ears as words, English words in a clear, resonant voice. But there was a difference. There was a quality missing, the kind of realistic bite that fresh fruit has and artificial fruit flavoring doesn’t. And behind Srin’s words there were low, murmuring bubbles of other words, unorganized sentence fragments which would occasionally become “audible” enough to clarify a subject that was not included in the “conversation.” That, Manship realized, was how he had learned that the shifting patches of light on the spheroid were meter readings.

  It was also evident that whenever they mentioned something for which no equivalent at all existed in English, his mind supplied him with a nonsense syllable.

  So far so good. He’d been plucked out of his warm bed in Callahan Hall by a telepathic suitcase named something like Lirld which was equipped with quantities of eyes and tentacles. He’d been sucked down to some planet in an entirely different system near the center of the galaxy, clad in nothing but apple-green pajamas.

  He was on a world of telepaths who couldn’t hear him at all, but upon whom he could eavesdrop with ease, his brain evidently being a sufficiently sensitive antenna. He was scheduled shortly to undergo a “careful examination,” a prospect he did not relish, the more so as he was evidently looked upon as a sort of monstrous laboratory animal. Finally, he was not thought much of, chiefly because he couldn’t pmbff worth a damn.

  All in all, Clyde Manship decided, it was about time that he made his presence felt. Let them know, so to speak, that he was definitely not a lower form of life, but one of the boys. That he belonged to the mind-over-matter club himself and came of a long line of IQ-fanciers on both sides of his family.

  Only how?

  Vague memories of adventure stories read as a boy drifted back to him. Explorers land on a strange island. Natives, armed with assorted spears, clubs and small boulders, gallop out of the jungle to meet them, their whoops an indisputable prelude to mayhem. Explorers, sweating a bit, as they do not know the language of this particular island, must act quickly. Naturally, they resort to—they resort to—the universal sign language! Sign language. Universal!

  Still in a sitting position, Clyde Manship raised arms straight up over his head. “Me friend,” he intoned. “Me come in peace.” He didn’t expect the dialogue to get across, but it seemed to him that voicing such words might help him psychologically and thus add more sincerity to the gesture.

  “—and you might as well turn off the recording apparatus, too,” Professor Lirld was instructing his assistant. “From here on out, we’ll take everything down on a double memory-fix.”

  Srin manipulated his spheroid again. “Think I should modulate the dampness, sir? The creature’s dry skin seems to argue a desert climate.”

  “Not at all. I strongly suspect it to be one of those primitive forms which can survive in a variety of environments. The specimen seems to be getting along admirably. I tell you, Srin, we can be very well satisfied with the results of the experiment up to this point.”

  “Me friend,” Manship w
ent on desperately, raising and lowering his arms. “Me intelligent entity. Me have IQ of 140 on the Wechsler-Bellevue scale.”

  “You may be satisfied,” Glomg was saying, as Lirld left the table with a light jump and floated, like an oversized dandelion, to a mass of equipment overhead, “but I’m not. I don’t like this business one little bit.”

  “Me friendly and intelligent enti—” Manship began. He sneezed again. “Damn this wet air,” he muttered morosely.

  “What was that?” Glomg demanded.

  “Nothing very important, Councilor,” Srin assured him. “The creature did it before. It is evidently a low-order biological reaction that takes place periodically, possibly a primitive method of imbibing glrnk. Not by any stretch of the imagination a means of communication, however.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of communication,” Glomg observed testily. “I thought it might be a prelude to aggressive action.”

  The professor skimmed back to the table, carrying a skein of luminescent wires. “Hardly. What could a creature of this sort be aggressive with? I’m afraid you’re letting your mistrust of the unknown run away with you, Councilor Glomg.”

  Manship had crossed his arms across his chest and subsided into a helpless silence. There was evidently no way to make himself understood outside of telepathy. And how do you start transmitting telepathically for the first time? What do you use?

  If only his doctoral thesis had been in biology or physiology, he thought wistfully, instead of The Use of the Second Aorist in the First Three Books of the Iliad. Oh, well. He was a long way from home. Might as well try.

  He closed his eyes, having first ascertained that Professor Lirld did not intend to approach his person with the new piece of equipment. He wrinkled his forehead and leaned forward with an effort of extreme concentration.