Worst Contact

by Hank Davis

  There was an air of embarrassment about the pair of them as they stood there, each with his fists hanging at his sides.

  Each seemed to be regretting that matters had come to such a pass.

  “Go on!” screamed Mary Hart at last. “Don’t you want me? You’ll live to a ripe old age here—and it’ll be lonely with no woman!”

  “They can always wait around until your daughters grow up, Mary!” shouted one of her friends.

  “If I ever have any daughters!” she called. “I shan’t at this rate!”

  “Go on!” shouted the crowd. “Go on!”

  Fennet made a start. He stepped forward almost diffidently, dabbed with his right fist at Clemens’ unprotected face. It wasn’t a hard blow, but it must have been painful. Clemens put his hand up to his nose, brought it away and stared at the bright blood staining it. He growled, lumbered forward with arms open to hug and crush. The cadet danced back, scoring twice more with his right.

  “Why doesn’t he hit him?” demanded the fat man.

  “And break every bone in his fist? They aren’t wearing gloves, you know,” said Hawkins.

  Fennet decided to make a stand. He stood firm, his feet slightly apart, and brought his right into play once more. This time he left his opponent’s face alone, went for his belly instead. Hawkins was surprised to see that the prospector was taking the blows with apparent equanimity—he must be, he decided, much tougher in actuality than in appearance.

  The cadet sidestepped smartly . . . and slipped on the wet grass. Clemens fell heavily on to his opponent; Hawkins could hear the whoosh as the air was forced from the lad’s lungs. The prospector’s thick arms encircled Fennet’s body—and Fennet’s knee came up viciously to Clemens’ groin. The prospector squealed, but hung on grimly. One of his hands was around Fennet’s throat now, and the other one, its fingers viciously hooked, was clawing for the cadet’s eyes.

  “No gouging!” Boyle was screaming. “No gouging!”

  He dropped down to his knees, caught Clemens’ thick wrist with both his hands.

  Something made Hawkins look up then. It may have been a sound, although this is doubtful; the spectators were behaving like boxing fans at a prizefight. They could hardly be blamed—this was the first piece of real excitement that had come their way since the loss of the ship. It may have been a sound that made Hawkins look up, it may have been the sixth sense possessed by all good spacemen. What he saw made him cry out.

  Hovering above the arena was a helicopter. There was something about the design of it, a subtle oddness that told Hawkins that this was no Earthy machine. Suddenly, from its smooth, shining belly dropped a net, seemingly of dull metal. It enveloped the struggling figures on the ground, trapped the doctor and Mary Hart.

  Hawkins shouted again—a wordless cry. He jumped to his feet, ran to the assistance of his ensnared companions. The net seemed to be alive. It twisted itself around his wrists, bound his ankles. Others of the castaways rushed to aid Hawkins.

  “Keep away!” he shouted. “Scatter!”

  The low drone of the helicopter’s rotors rose in pitch. The machine lifted. In an incredibly short space of time the arena was to the first mate’s eyes no more than a pale green saucer in which little white ants scurried aimlessly. Then the flying machine was above and through the base of the low clouds, and there was nothing to be seen but drifting whiteness.

  When, at last, it made its descent Hawkins was not surprised to see the silvery tower of a great spaceship standing among the low trees on a level plateau.

  The world to which they were taken would have been a marked improvement on the world they had left had it not been for the mistaken kindness of their captors. The cage in which the three men were housed duplicated, with remarkable fidelity, the climatic conditions of the planet upon which Lode Star had been lost. It was glassed in, and from sprinklers in its roof fell a steady drizzle of warm water. A couple of dispirited tree ferns provided little shelter from the depressing precipitation. Twice a day a hatch at the back of the cage, which was made of a sort of concrete, opened, and slabs of a fungus remarkably similar to that on which they had been subsisting were thrown in. There was a hole in the floor of the cage; this the prisoners rightly assumed was for sanitary purposes.

  On either side of them were other cages. In one of them was Mary Hart—alone. She could gesture to them, wave to them, and that was all. The cage on the other side held a beast built on the same general lines as a lobster, but with a strong hint of squid. Across the broad roadway they could see other cages, but could not see what they housed.

  Hawkins, Boyle and Fennet sat on the damp floor and stared through the thick glass and the bars at the beings outside who stared at them.

  “If only they were humanoid,” sighed the doctor. “If only they were the same shape as we are we might make a start towards convincing them that we, too, are intelligent beings.”

  “They aren’t the same shape,” said Hawkins. “And we, were the situations reversed, would take some convincing that three six-legged beer barrels were men and brothers . . . Try Pythagoras’ Theorem again,” he said to the cadet.

  Without enthusiasm the youth broke fronds from the nearest tree fern. He broke them into smaller pieces, then on the mossy floor laid them out in the design of a right-angled triangle with squares constructed on all three sides. The natives—a large one, one slightly smaller and a little one—regarded him incuriously with their flat, dull eyes. The large one put the tip of a tentacle into a pocket—the things wore clothing—and pulled out a brightly colored packet, handed it to the little one. The little one tore off the wrapping, started stuffing pieces of some bright blue confection into the slot on its upper side that, obviously, served it as a mouth.

  “I wish they were allowed to feed the animals,” sighed Hawkins. “I’m sick of that damned fungus.”

  “Let’s recapitulate,” said the doctor. “After all, we’ve nothing else to do. We were taken from our camp by the helicopter—six of us. We were taken to the survey ship—a vessel that seemed in no way superior to our own interstellar ships. You assure us, Hawkins, that the ship used the Ehrenhaft Drive or something so near to it as to be its twin brother. . . .”

  “Correct,” agreed Hawkins.

  “On the ship we’re kept in separate cages. There’s no ill treatment, we’re fed and watered at frequent intervals. We land on this strange planet, but we see nothing of it. We’re hustled out of cages like so many cattle into a covered van. We know that we’re being driven somewhere, that’s all. The van stops, the door opens and a couple of these animated beer barrels poke in poles with smaller editions of those fancy nets on the end of them. They catch Clemens and Miss Taylor, drag them out. We never see them again. The rest of us spend the night and the following day and night in individual cages. The next day we’re taken to this . . . zoo . . .”

  “Do you think they were vivisected?” asked Fennet. “I never liked Clemens, but. . .”

  “I’m afraid they were,” said Boyle. “Our captors must have learned of the difference between the sexes by it. Unluckily there’s no way of determining intelligence by vivisection—”

  “The filthy brutes!” shouted the cadet.

  “Easy, son,” counseled Hawkins. “You can’t blame them, you know. We’ve vivisected animals a lot more like us than we are to these things.”

  “The problem,” the doctor went on, “is to convince these things—as you call them, Hawkins—that we are rational beings like themselves. How would they define a rational being? How would we define a rational being?”

  “Somebody who knows Pythagoras’ Theorem,” said the cadet sulkily.

  “I read somewhere,” said Hawkins, “that the history of Man is the history of the fire-making, tool-using animal . . .”

  “Then make fire,” suggested the doctor. “Make us some tools, and use them.”

  “Don’t be silly. You know that there’s not an artifact among the bunch of us. No false teeth even�
��not even a metal filling. Even so . . .” He paused. “When I was a youngster there was, among the cadets in the interstellar ships, a revival of the old arts and crafts. We considered ourselves in a direct fine of descent from the old windjammer sailormen, so we learned how to splice rope and wire, how to make sennit and fancy knots and all the rest of it. Then one of us hit on the idea of basketmaking. We were in a passenger ship, and we used to make our baskets secretly, daub them with violent colors and then sell them to passengers as genuine souvenirs from the Lost Planet of Arcturus VI. There was a most distressing scene when the Old Man and the mate found out . . .”

  “What are you driving at?” asked the doctor.

  “Just this. We will demonstrate our manual dexterity by the weaving of baskets—I’ll teach you how.”

  “It might work. . . .” said Boyle slowly. “It might just work. . . . On the other hand, don’t forget that certain birds and animals do the same sort of thing. On Earth there’s the beaver, who builds quite cunning dams. There’s the bower bird, who makes a bower for his mate as part of the courtship ritual . . .”

  The head keeper must have known of creatures whose courting habits resembled those of the Terran bower bird. After three days of feverish basketmaking, which consumed all the bedding and stripped the tree ferns, Mary Hart was taken from her cage and put in with the three men. After she had got over her hysterical pleasure at having somebody to talk to again she was rather indignant.

  It was good, thought Hawkins drowsily, to have Mary with them. A few more days of solitary confinement must surely have driven the girl crazy. Even so, having Mary in the same cage had its drawbacks. He had to keep a watchful eye on young Fennet. He even had to keep a watchful eye on Boyle—the old goat!

  Mary screamed.

  Hawkins jerked into complete wakefulness. He could see the pale form of Mary—on this world it was never completely dark at night—and, on the other side of the cage, the forms of Fennet and Boyle. He got hastily to his feet, stumbled to the girl’s side.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “I . . . I don’t know . . . Something small, with sharp claws . . . It ran over me . . .”

  “Oh,” said Hawkins, “that was only Joe.”

  “Joe?” she demanded.

  “I don’t know exactly what he—or she—is,” said the man.

  “I think he’s definitely he,” said the doctor.

  “What is Joe?” she asked again.

  “He must be the local equivalent to a mouse,” said the doctor, “although he looks nothing like one. He comes up through the floor somewhere to look for scraps of food. We’re trying to tame him—”

  “You encourage the brute?” she screamed. “I demand that you do something about him—at once! Poison him, or trap him. Now!”

  “Tomorrow,” said Hawkins.

  “Now!” she screamed.

  “Tomorrow,” said Hawkins firmly.

  The capture of Joe proved to be easy. Two flat baskets, hinged like the valves of an oyster shell, made the trap. There was bait inside—a large piece of the fungus. There was a cunningly arranged upright that would fall at the least tug at the bait. Hawkins, lying sleepless on his damp bed, heard the tiny click and thud that told him that the trap had been sprung. He heard Joe’s indignant chitterings, heard the tiny claws scrabbling at the stout basketwork.

  Mary Hart was asleep. He shook her.

  “We’ve caught him,” he said.

  “Then kill him,” she answered drowsily.

  But Joe was not killed. The three men were rather attached to him. With the coming of daylight they transferred him to a cage that Hawkins had fashioned. Even the girl relented when she saw the harmless ball of multi-colored fur bouncing indignantly up and down in its prison. She insisted on feeding the little animal, exclaimed gleefully when the thin tentacles reached out and took the fragment of fungus from her fingers.

  For three days they made much of their pet. On the fourth day, beings whom they took to be keepers entered the cage with their nets, immobilized the occupants, and carried off Joe and Hawkins.

  “I’m afraid it’s hopeless,” Boyle said. “He’s gone the same way . . .”

  “They’ll have him stuffed and mounted in some museum,” said Fennet glumly.

  “No,” said the girl. “They couldn’t!”

  “They could,” said the doctor.

  Abruptly the hatch at the back of the cage opened.

  Before the three humans could retreat to the scant protection supplied by a corner a voice called, “It’s all right, come on out!”

  Hawkins walked into the cage. He was shaved, and the beginnings of a healthy tan had darkened the pallor of his skin. He was wearing a pair of trunks fashioned from some bright red material.

  “Come on out,” he said again. “Our hosts have apologized very sincerely, and they have more suitable accommodation prepared for us. Then, as soon as they have a ship ready, we’re to go to pick up the other survivors.”

  “Not so fast,” said Boyle. “Put us in the picture, will you? What made them realize that we were rational beings?”

  Hawkins’ face darkened.

  “Only rational beings,” he said, “put other beings in cages.”

  SHADOW WORLD

  by Clifford D. Simak

  The survey mission had reported the planet as idyllic, uninhabited, and perfect for a human colony. But when the construction crew arrived, there were bizarre creatures waiting for them who seemed unthreatening, very curious—and completely inexplicable. If the planet was too good to be true, maybe the same was true of the shadow-creatures.

  ***

  Clifford D. Simak (1904-1988) published his first SF story, “The World of the Red Sun” in 1931, and went on to become one of the star writers during John W. Campbell’s Golden Age of Science Fiction in the 1940s, notably in the series of stories which he eventually combined into his classic novel, City. Other standout novels include Time and Again, Ring Around the Sun, Time is the Simplest Thing, and the Hugo-winning Way Station. Altogether, Simak won three Hugo Awards, a Nebula Award, and was the third recipient of the Grand Master Award of the Science Fiction Writers of America for lifetime achievement. He also received the Bram Stoker Award for lifetime achievement from the Horror Writers Association. He was noted for stories written with a pastoral feeling, though he could also turn out a chilling horror story, such as “Good Night, Mr. James,” which was made into an episode of the original Outer Limits. His day job was newspaperman, joining the staff of the Minneapolis Star and Tribune in 1939, becoming its news editor in 1949, and retiring in 1976. He once wrote that “My favorite recreation is fishing (the lazy way, lying in a boat and letting them come to me).”

  I rolled out early to put in an hour or so of work on my sector model before Greasy got breakfast slopped together. When I came out of my tent, Benny, my Shadow, was waiting for me. Some of the other Shadows also were standing around, waiting for their humans, and the whole thing, if one stopped to think of it, was absolutely crazy. Except that no one ever stopped to think of it; we were used to it by now.

  Greasy had the cookshack stove fired up and smoke was curling from the chimney. I could hear him singing lustily amid the clatter of his pans. This was his noisy time. During the entire morning, he was noisy and obnoxious, but toward the middle of the afternoon, he turned mousy quiet. That was when he began to take a really dangerous chance and hit the peeper.

  There were laws which made it very rough on anyone who had a peeper. Mack Baldwin, the project superintendent, would have raised merry hell if he had known that Greasy had one. But I was the only one who knew it. I had found out by accident and not even Greasy knew I knew and I had kept my mouth shut.

  I said hello to Benny, but he didn’t answer me. He never answered me; he had no mouth to answer with. I don’t suppose he even heard me, for he had no ears. Those Shadows were a screwy lot. They had no mouths and they had no ears and they hadn’t any noses.

  But they
did have an eye, placed in the middle of the face, about where the nose would have been if they’d had noses. And that eye made up for the lack of ears and mouth and nose.

  It was about three inches in diameter and, strictly speaking, it wasn’t built exactly like an eye; it had no iris or no pupil, but was a pool of light and shadow that kept shifting all around so it never looked the same. Sometimes it looked like a bowl of goop that was slightly on the spoiled side, and at other times it was hard and shining like a camera lens, and there were other times when it looked sad and lonely, like a mournful hound dog’s eyes.

  They were a weird lot for sure, those Shadows. They looked mostly like a rag doll before any one had gotten around to painting in the features. They were humanoid and they were strong and active and I had suspected from the very first that they weren’t stupid. There was some division of opinion on that latter point and a lot of the boys still thought of them as howling savages. Except they didn’t howl— they had no mouths to howl with. No mouths to howl or eat with, no nose to smell or breathe with, and no ears to hear with.

  Just on bare statistics, one would have put them down as plain impossible, but they got along all right. They got along just fine.

  They wore no clothes. On the point of modesty, there was no need of any. They were as bare of sexual characteristics as they were of facial features. They were just a gang of rag dolls with massive eyes in the middle of their faces.

  But they did wear what might have been a decoration or a simple piece of jewelry or a badge of Shadowhood. They wore a narrow belt, from which was hung a bag or sack in which they carried a collection of trinkets that jingled when they walked. No one had ever seen what was in those sacks. Cross straps from the belt ran over the shoulders, making the whole business into a simple harness, and at the juncture of the straps upon their chest was mounted a huge jewel. Intricately carved, the jewel sparkled like a diamond, and it might have been a diamond, but no one knew if it was or not. No one ever got close enough to see. Make a motion toward that jewel and the Shadow disappeared.