He Who Shrank: A Collection of Short Fiction

by Henry Hasse

  Dr. Rahm stopped there. The horror of events as telepathed by Aiiko were still mirrored in his eyes.

  Lawton was silent too, but he looked sadly at the heap of ashes that had been the work of so many months, even years.

  “You should never had done this, Dr. Rahm. Earthmen could have tried for other planets! Venus . . .”

  “No, Lawton. For ages Mars has been a challenge. It’s the first logical space-step. And who would believe Aiiko’s story? In their colossal confidence Earthmen would try for Mars anyway. Their lives and minds would be forfeit as that mad intellect on Mars grew stronger. Already it had conquered a world! And it still lives! Our first spacer wouldn’t return, and others would go—and others and others. We would be feeding it!

  “Aiiko foresaw all this. He knew that intellect might conceive a spaceship of its own, if we sent it a model! But Lawton . . . if we leave it alone, for a few years at the most, it will die for lack of mental sustenance! There are no more minds on Mars.”

  Lawton nodded solemnly, accepting this truth. But his mind was wry with bitter thoughts.

  “I know,” Rahm went on. “You worked hard with me on this, but it isn’t as though it were lost. No knowledge is ever lost. Others are working on the problem and they’ll find the way; perhaps better than we. Let us only hope, not too soon!”

  Wistfully he stirred the ashes, all that was left of his work. They eddied and drifted gently up.

  The End

  ******************************

  Ultimate Life,

  by Albert de Pina and Henry Hasse

  Science-Fiction Plus Aug. 1953

  Short Story - 6316 words

  People tend to think of things in the terms of the familiar. When a layman speaks of "life on other worlds" he actually means something recognizably human. But the facts indicate that intelligence in one form or another may be found everywhere. The humble ant has a complex social structure, including extreme specialization of types for certain functions; it tends its "milk-producing cattle" and even organizes and conducts real wars. Yet no beginning has been made by man at communicating with the ants. Our chances of recognizing intelligent life on another world, particularly in alien guise, is remote. Our chances of communicating with them are fainter still. An intergalactic alien, then, might be forgiven if he needed a lot of convincing before he was certain that man fulfilled his own definition of intelligence.

  BOLIVAR rested the nozzle and hose connected to the insecticide cylinder on the bright, blue-green grass. He raised his head and gazed at the sky as he wiped the sweat from his brow with the sleeve of the synthetic silk shirt he wore; it was an all-purpose material, easy to produce and marvelously long-wearing.

  A short distance away, Gus stopped too, and the acrid, blinding fumes of the chemical swirled about them as it was dispersed by a slight breeze which gently swayed the stand of chestnut-like trees in the background.

  "So we've sterilized this section," Gus grinned, as he spat with accuracy at an inch-long varihued worm which had been laboriously crawling toward him. The strong tobacco juice stopped the insect in its track; it writhed, curled and lay still.

  "It'll stay lousy for a week." Bolivar stooped down and began to coil nozzle and hose, then carried it back to the portable cylinder.

  From the clump of trees, the sound of a gong reverberated through the vast stillness. After the overcrowded cacaphony of Earth, this virgin world, with its immense desolate expanses and primeval silence, was something they had not become accustomed to.

  But this planet had its compensations. No one could suffer from claustrophobia here; the silence would eventually be conquered by the beneficial insects and harmless birds which the government of Terra had provided.

  In any event, although they were in a sense outcasts, no criminal stigma had been attached to the order for their relocation.

  The surging billions of Terra had achieved a delicate balance where excesses—even emotional ones—could not be tolerated. It was too dangerous to allow uncontrollable psychological factors to alter established patterns.

  The two thousand families which had finally been relocated on the deserted planet had been carefully screened for precisely those factors which in the dim past had been considered virtues, but which in the highly sophisticated and regimented Terran social order, were considered dangerous survivals from another age.

  In short, although the word was never used, they were classified as Class A atavisms.

  When Bolivar arrived at the plastic prefabricated dwelling which was his home, Stella had supper on the table. He kissed her warmly, tenderly, for the wonder and ecstasy of their honeymoon still lingered, touching even the loneliness of this new world with the miracle of its happiness.

  It was a simple, frugal meal of Terran vegetables and proteinates which had the taste and texture of flesh. They had to be frugal. The newly planted crops and grains had yet to germinate and be harvested; the dairy and food animals must be preserved until their multiplication would reach the point where their consumption was feasible.

  And the spaceship which had brought them, along with all the imperatives for colonization had gone, its dwindling fire becoming a shooting star in the heavens and finally disappearing in the endless void. It left behind a world of loneliness, but not before it had given these strong, resourceful Terrans the incentive of creating a new world. The crew of the spaceship might have spared itself the twinges of conscience they had felt on leaving the colonists behind.

  They didn't quite understand, on viewing the desolate expanse of the new planet, that its very primitive grandeur had not only provided the colonists with a creative challenge—a new incentive—but with something more which belonged in all truth to another age.

  Bolivar sat down at the table and smiled whimsically at the way Stella had managed to find blue flowers in the forests to decorate the table.

  He gazed at her and for a moment it seemed to him as if he were viewing the future, when their plastic home would be alive with children. The long afternoons would resound the lowing of cattle. There would be birds nesting in the trees, endlessly bickering, or soaring in streams of song. And the fields, golden with ripening grain, would sweep in shining waves to the very shores of the one placid ocean.

  He remembered his last year on Earth. The stifling monotony of his days as a minor agricultural engineer. Stifled by the sameness which condemned him with millions of others to a changeless security which allowed for no promotion just as it regarded as unthinkable any retrogression. The miniscule alcove which served as his home; the rigidly rationed food, clothing, and necessities—and the crowds, always the inescapable tidal wave of humanity which suffocated every moment of his life.

  "Dreaming of Earth?" Stella inquired gently, and there was a nostalgic expression in her eyes.

  He shook his head and smiled. "No, my dear. I was dreaming of what our new world will be like. Think of it, we can literally build a world to our heart's desire. We'll be not only existing, like on Earth, but living and growing!"

  THEY BEGAN to eat, wrapped in the silence of the lengthening shadows, as the pale yellow sun sank into the calm blue waters.

  "I'll be glad when you've finished sterilizing," Stella spoke. "We might have a garden of our own. It's a wonderful feeling to see growing things. On Earth, all I ever saw from the windows of the hospital where I worked were the rearing buildings, and the gray-black pavements." She laughed happily. "I've never even seen a garden. May I have one now?"

  Bolivar smiled tenderly. Flowers, fragile things all beauty and color. On Earth only eating things could be grown. But here, a whole planet awaited a new rebirth—the song of birds; the travail of the harvests; and for the first time the sound of laughter. "Won't be long now, this whole sector will be cleared of those stubborn pests. The more we try to sterilize, the deeper they burrow into the ground. It's uncanny the way they put up subsurface defenses. One would think they had human intelligence!"

  "Is it
so critical?" Stella inquired innocently.

  Bolivar shrugged. "It is, if we're to be sure of having crops. They're like politicians ... undermining everything. This world's like a door to life, Stella. We can't risk having it closed on us."

  The Genserians

  IT HAD been eons since their lives had been ruled by self-interest, passions, or sentiment.

  They were a race so old that all the changes of passion, heartbreak, and adventure had been wrung from their souls.

  Only loneliness remained.

  Among the thousands—millions, even—of stars, theirs had given birth to a planet that bore life. And that life was their race. The irony was that except for them, their galaxy was sterile. So they thought!

  Alone, in their own eternity of space, they had gradually passed through all the stages of savagery, barbarism, wars, and finally the beginnings of true civilization. But all of that had been immeasurable ages ago, until even the memory of past wars had ceased to be a legend, and the legends themselves had grown dim and ceased to exist.

  Throughout millenia, conflict among themselves had become impossible, and violence an impossible psychological aberration. Even science had ceased to be an adventure.

  At first, as the virus of their galactic boredom became more and more intense, their starships roamed the limitless reaches of their galaxy, searching, always searching for some form of life that might offer the kinship of intelligence. But it was the irony of their destiny that among the thousands of stars and their planetary systems, the only forms of life they had found were either so brutish and bestial, or so utterly alien, that not even their extraordinary science could hasten their evolution toward intelligence.

  The Genserians were fated, it seemed, to an eternity of killing time instead of employing it creatively as the very substance of life lived to its fullest.

  More and more their life had become devoid of wonder. Steeped in melancholy and lacking incentive, it had become a grey transition between birth and extinction. Little by little their literature, their magnificent arts—even their music—began to sink into the background and to disappear along with innumerable variations of pleasure they had long since invented.

  They could not even pass on to a younger race the treasury of inventions and discoveries which enriched their world. Thus they were denied that final meaning which lies in parenthood—galactic parenthood was their lot.

  And then, in one of those scout trips to the limits of their galaxy—more to commune with the eternal melancholy silence of space than anything else—they had discovered the planet Rima. It had suited their mood, for it was desolate like their minds—barren of intelligent life like their galaxy. And yet, like a nostalgic reminder of their ancient dreams, it was verdant and aglow with the golden wash of a beneficent sun.

  Varona had commanded the scout ship. The crew, which was not a crew—for any of its members could have filled any position on the ship except one—had kept up the illusion of its being a flight of exploration. They were all aware, of course, that it would be as sterile as previous ones. So that when they landed, it was more to break the monotony of space flight, than to try to confirm any possible hope.

  For a moment, as they first breathed the clean fragrant air, and trod fastidiously on the lush grass, something of the very primitiveness of the uninhabited planet seemed to touch them. They even speculated what it would be like to begin all over again in this new world, and build it anew. And then they saw the futility of such an idea. They had become too utterly removed from the realities of pioneering.

  They stood silent, their ten-feet-tall incredibly thin and fragile bodies slightly translucent, scarcely casting a shadow on the blue-green turf. There were no signs of life. And then, Varona had kicked over a large clod of soil, revealing the small mouth of a subsurface chamber.

  There was life! But to their chagrin, so inconceivably non-Genserian that they did not even betray their thought-processes. Whatever the fundamental structure of their minds was, there seemed to be no way of contacting them. But it was intelligent life, there could be no question about that!

  To the Genserians, it became an enormous incentive. Here was a challenge, and a promise, and a confirmation of their hopes.

  These subsurface dwellers of a primitive planet, whose soft white bodies were not more than an inch long, became all of a sudden the center of attention of Genserian culture. Scientists theorized and even argued for the first time in thousands of orbitemps [1] concerning the aliens' social structure; for they had one!

  They had vastly more than that, in the complex yet rigid matriarchy which ruled their dark world. It was discovered that they had evolved a complicated, yet utterly functional type of architecture; their social classes, which included the workers, warriors, and matriarchs, were born of identical eggs hatched in an identical way, but organically modified by miracles of diet.

  One Genserian scientist had earned the highest honor, and what was more, the gratitude of his world, by discovering that these aliens not only were capable of flight, but once an orbitemp performed a dramatic ritual of mating and death in midflight! Another discovered their telepathic means of communication, and that they had a system of husbandry and even suffered parasites to find shelter in their cities—and that they had pets.

  This last finding brought the aliens a little closer to the Genserians, for they themselves sheltered and protected huge quadruped pets, hairy, long-toothed, and fierce but completely loyal and devoted animals of a very low order of intelligence, which they called savjers.

  But centuries of investigation, experiments, and efforts to bridge the abyss that separated them from the subsurface inhabitants of Rima, had been unavailing.

  The tiny Rimans remained as alien as ever. And thus, another great hope had finally dwindled and died. So reluctant were the Genserians to give up even this forlorn hope, that it was decided to wait five centorbitemps before visiting them again, in the hope that evolution might make them more accessible.

  FOR hundreds of orbitemps, the problem presented by the Rimans had kept alive speculative science and had given a new impetus to exploration, in the hope of finding other worlds with intelligent life. And now, the date of the return to Rima had come.

  There was a touch of excitement in the rarified atmosphere of the Genserian minds. They were all scientists. All of them were convinced that this trip would bring no greater results than the previous ones. And yet, some stubborn hope that refused to die, brought back to life the forgotten and faint memory of ancient emotions.

  They clustered around Varona in the control room, as he powered the screen to full magnification, and into the field of their vision a solitary planet floated slowly, touching with shadow the golden glare of the alien sun. They had seen it happen a hundred thousand times, and yet it always stirred them a little.

  The patrol ship flashed over the planet's pole, then swung in a parabolic arc toward the southern hemisphere. Varona brought the ship in silently, and landed it within two hundred yards of where originally he had made the epochal discovery.

  Soon they had all left the ship, and let their huge savjers run and romp and chase imaginary shadows in the warm invigorating sun; attenuated as their physical reactions were, they could not but feel the indescribable sensation of this burgeoning and fertile soil, with its young jungles and unsullied virginity. They breathed deeply of the fresh dew-laden air, and watched whimsically for a moment as Perra, Varona's pet female savjer, snarled at her mate and romped away into a field of golden grain.

  Strange, Varona thought inwardly, I never noticed a field of grain before. Could it have evolved from primitive grasses in a mere five centorbitemps? And then it occurred to him how long he had lived, and that in another couple of hundred years or so rejuvenation therapy would not work any longer.

  Suddenly he hoped with an intensity that startled him, that they might be able to contact these alien intelligences, that he might take with him into oblivion the memory o
f success.

  But he had no more time for idle speculation. At the far end of the field Perra's casual barking had suddenly become an ominous growl; then there was a series of snarls, and a voice tinged with fear.

  The tremendous outpouring of emotional energy struck them telepathically like a blast. They had never experienced signals of that kind! They hurried toward the point of disturbance.

  They found Perra in mortal combat with a strange biped, slightly less than two-thirds their size. The creature, whatever it was, had a curling mat of black fur on its head, beneath which two luminous grey eyes were wide with fear and rage. They thrashed violently among the golden grain. As the Genserians stood transfixed, buffeted by the maelstrom of primitive emotions, they were even more astonished to see a smaller and slighter replica of the creature, with yellow fur on its head, come flying from among the trees and join the death struggle.

  They saw the larger of the two creatures raise one of its powerful appendages on which something metallic gleamed, and plunge it into Perra's body.

  Perra slid to the ground with a howl of pain.

  They stood facing each other across the crimson-stained grasses of an alien world. They stared at each other in the silence of absolute astonishment.

  None of the Genserians had ever witnessed a kill. They were too numb and startled to feel horror; they could only gaze at these savage creatures, and blank their minds against the barrage of psychic vibrations.

  Varona recovered first. He had been trying to send powerful telepathic thought-patterns to the creatures. But they seemed utterly incapable of receiving them.

  He wondered with a sense of futility if the strange and alien planet could only produce such unGenserian types of intelligence that it was useless even to try to contact them. The first life-form had proven a complete failure. These, although a travesty of their own physical appearance, seemed even lower in the intelligence scale than the wormlike matriarchs who lived beneath the surface crust. They were dangerous, too! He suddenly realized.