Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by Fox B. Holden

  “Hey, hey—they’re wearing suits and helmets themselves. What the hell . . . you don’t suppose you-know-who has us beat—”

  “Nuts, you owe me eight bucks! Come on, let’s get out of here.”

  We climbed down out of the track.

  And there we were, facing them, wondering a little foolishly what the intelligent thing was to do.

  All three were taller than Max’s six-one by several inches. Thinner, too. Their skin was whiter, and they looked smarter. Aside from that they might have been a welcoming committee from home. Except that there were no weapons at their sides, and as far as Kruger and I could see, none dangling from their vehicle.

  There were three of them, and all at once I could see one of them move his mouth, and quite fantastically heard his deep-throated voice in my ear-plugs. Fantastically, that is, in German.

  “Wir—wir sind nicht Deutsch—” I heard Max stammer. He was turning a pale shade of mauve.

  “Français, peut-être?”

  “Non—” I managed. “Americaine—nous parlons anglais—”

  “Excellent! And we welcome you, men of Earth, United States of America, and trust you had a pleasant voyage! We must apologize for our inability to have distinguished your nationality at once. But our records have never been as complete as we might wish.” And then the three of them made gracious little bows, and Kruger and I just stood there like a couple of clowns. “I am called Kell-III, and to my right and left respectively are Ghoro Elder and Juhr-IV.” And then there was a little pause . . . Kruger and I got the drift that it was our turn after a while.

  “Dr. Max Kruger, Washington, and my technician, Wesley LaTharn, gentlemen. We hope you forgive our—our awkwardness, but I think you will understand our amazement. To be frank, we had not expected to find life on the fourth planet. And I’m afraid even less, had we expected such intimate knowledge of ourselves to exist beyond our own sphere. We are—we are greatly appreciative of your cordiality, gentlemen.”

  AND that, for Kruger, was a speech.

  For me it would have been a major oration under the circumstances, but I felt a little better when I detected the hint of a smile at the corners of Kell-III’s thin, sensitive-looking lips.

  “Allow us to escort you to the Primary Enclosure, gentlemen. We wish to see to your comfort, following which, if it is your pleasure, we shall be more than happy to summon a quorum of the Teachers to assist you in launching the preliminary stages of your research. If you will follow our vehicle, gentlemen.” They bowed again, and waited until we had clambered aboard our track before turning and re-entering their own.

  Kruger fumbled around for the ignition-switch, mauled the gears and made a mess of getting us started up.

  “I don’t believe it,” was all I could get out of him for a full two minutes.

  “The University of California must have a new expansion program going,” I said. “And you don’t get your money back.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “That’s been our trouble all along, back home,” I said. “We’ve got all the capacity anybody needs to believe anything. We just use it on the wrong stuff. Give this thing a boot, doc. We don’t want them to think we’re slow . . .”

  THE magnificent structure which Kell-III had called the Primary Enclosure was perhaps five full miles in diameter and little less than one at its maximum height. Inside it there was a city that only poets could have designed; men of practical science, perhaps never. Art and life had never been so exquisitely blended on Earth.

  And about it all there was an aura of the perfect peace that the city itself bespoke—and a quietness. It was the quietude, I think, that kept Kruger and myself from taking deeper breaths. People thronged the deep green of the generous parks, the flaring sweep of the overhead ramps that twined fantastically between this towering spire and the next, the wide, immaculate thoroughfares. They were everywhere, clad in colorful toga-like garments, and each, it seemed, with a gentle manner. They would halt briefly as we walked among them behind Kell-III and his aides, but there were the same gentle, courteous bows that we’d met out on the desert; not stares, not shouts, not the mobbing so often bred by unbridled curiosity.

  But even with the pleasant murmur of their low, soft voices there was the quietness, and I asked Kruger if he noticed it too. It was awkward, carrying our bulging helmets beneath our still-suited arms, but having them off at least gave us back the individuality of our voices, and that helped a little. We had to work to breathe; it was evident that the people here had adapted down to a bare minimum of oxygen before resorting to the Enclosures, but their artificial atmosphere had an invigorating tang, and that helped, too.

  “They’re just a little surprised, I guess,” Kruger said in his best sotto voce. “Either that, or—well, hell, I guess we can allow for a few little differences from ourselves! They could as easily have been bug-eyed octopods with soul-tearing screams for normal voices, after all. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

  “I wish we’d get to it, though. These—these Teachers, whoever they are. I’ve got questions—”

  “You and the big rush! But I’ve got a few of my own. Better do it their way, though. It’ll be good for your ulcers, Wes.”

  “Believe that when I see it,” I answered him.

  Our panorama of the city widened as we started up the gently-inclining ramp that circled the tower-like structure in which Kell-III and the others apparently intended to billet us. Here Kruger voiced a thought that had just started whipping around in my own head. “Not many vehicles,” he said. “Either they’re conserving power and fuel to beat the devil, or else they just don’t gad about very much . . .”

  “Maybe they’re not the type,” I said. “Maybe that track of theirs is a special-occasions-only affair—you notice we didn’t drive over here. Parked as soon as we got inside. It could answer a lot of my worries.”

  “About their quietness, is that what you mean?”

  “Yeah. It gets me, Max.”

  “Relax—pass the salt or something . . .”

  BUT I couldn’t relax, even after we’d been left to ourselves about five stories tip in one of the most gracefully appointed suites I’d ever been in. I could only think of the way the ancient Britons must have felt in their first contact with the civilization of old Marco Polo’s discovery—their first sight of fine glassware, their first touch of silk, first scent of delicate perfume . . .

  Kell-III told us he’d he hack after we’d had food and sleep, and Max was saying if the sleeping period was as generous as the portions of food that had been sent in, we might come out of the whole thing alive after all. “But I didn’t think it’d he anything like this,” he sighed. Pie already was stripped to the waist and stretched out on one of the low, wide couches, rubbing his eyes.

  “You liked it better when we were the only frogs in the pond!”

  “Oh, go to sleep! And if you can’t do that, think of me—at least pity a man who had his five bucks all counted. You don’t snore, do you?”

  “Softly, but not well.”

  “G’night, kid,” he said, and I let it go at that. I told myself this was the Mark Hopkins in San Francisco, and that everything would he put hack together the way I’d left it four months ago when I woke up, and tried one of the couches for size. It fit, and if Max snored louder than I did, I didn’t hear him for ten hours.

  II

  ACTUALLY, the Teachers would have made a complete area of study in themselves. The civilization and culture they represented would have made a hook of history for every page of Earth’s, and would have been a lifetime’s work without the kind of co-operation they gave Kruger and myself. Without their help, we’d have had to stick out our full five-year limit before leaving it to the others who would follow us in the successive voyages of the E-M-1.

  But as it was, the Teachers were more than ready for us. It was almost as though they had been ready for a long time.

  The quorum summoned to help us numbered el
even, and each had a full research staff ready and waiting to go to work on any of our more involved questions that required more than a series of simple statements for accurate answer.

  They were continually with us—in the conference chambers to which we had been assigned, in the laboratories, in the libraries, and there was never so much as an indulgent smile whenever Max or myself had trouble keeping our poise upon initial entry into one of their institutions. Believe me, you couldn’t take it all in a single swallow. In the laboratories, especially, Max just stood and looked around for a solid quarter of an hour without saying a word; he couldn’t have said a word for the life of him anymore than I could. But to Max it was a different sight—it all was, I think, as I look back—than it was to me. To Max their laboratories were all. the dreams of science come true at once. And to me . . .

  That’s too hard to explain. Sort of an extension in all directions, I think, of the first feelings I’d had about Kell-III, and then more intensely, about the Teachers themselves. They were men and women who had achieved full maturity, like the culture and heritage they represented. They were, I liked to think, what my great-great-grandchildren might one day be.

  In short, they were mature human adults.

  And, as the Teachers—that group of men and women whose collective specialty was detailed knowledge in all the known sciences for the express purpose of its continuous promulgation among their fellow creatures—they enjoyed the highest respect their civilization could pay them. They were workers on Mars as there were anywhere else. And there were the students, the technicians, the professionals, the government administrators, the men of art and science, and the mentors of the spirit. And then there were the Teachers themselves.

  I don’t know what it meant to Kruger beyond the fact of pure accomplishment in itself; and at first, it had meant an annoying little feeling of suspicion to me—I’ll admit that. To me, a pretty representative product of a way of life that took a certain pleasure in resisting any inclination to give the benefit of the doubt to the good and the simple, things seemed at first too pat—and like the not-born-yesterday creature that I was, I was looking for the joker, the strings.

  Whatever it was that kept me from making a damn fool of myself—what it was in me that finally got me awake to the reality that among such people as these there could be no joker, could be no strings, I don’t know. Read a little hope into it for me and for the rest of my kind if you want to. It’s pleasantest that way.

  But it was the quietness about them—a sad kind of quietness—that had me; I wasn’t built for that, and it kept needling me in spite of Kruger’s objective speculations. I wanted to ask them to what they attributed that almost-haunting quality. It was information they had not offered, and I decided to leave my questions unasked. Max had given me an answer, anyway.

  But it made me wonder if Max had noticed something else, and I asked him about that. We’d been there almost two months, and I had talked him into a day’s holiday in one of the resort Enclosures. We were both tired, and the cool, carefully-nutured beach of green grass felt good beneath our bared backs. There was a wide, artificial lake—shallow, of course, but in every respect representative of Martian adeptness at bringing beauty to places where before there had been no beauty—and it was one of a scant half-dozen which served the few who yet lived beneath the life-sustaining Enclosures; there were less than five million, the Teachers had said.

  “Max,” I asked, “how about a snappy answer to this one . . . yes or no. How’ve they been supplying the information you’ve wanted? Have they ever volunteered anything?”

  “Look, when are you going to begin leaving well enough alone? It’s a good thing you weren’t a cop, or your grandmother wouldn’t have known a day out of jail in her life . . .”

  “Yes or no, Max. Humor me.”

  “Hell, I don’t know. The last sixty days have just been one big quiz program—have been for you, too, if you haven’t been goldbricking over in the art galleries again! But if it means anything to your counterspy mind, as far as I can think back, no. No, they just wait until you ask something, and then they break their backs to give you an answer down to the last little detail.”

  HE ROLLED over on his stomach and said something else into the grass and I only half caught it.

  “Naturally, it’s good enough for me,” I answered. “I’d say too good if—if they weren’t what they are. But I want to know more about them non—the way things are this minute. My dicto’s got about three tons of tape on their early socio-technological history, its check-and-balance development, and how they worked out space travel and began watching us from the time we started hammering tools out of flint—but dammit, they’ve got so much history.”

  “Always in a hurry, that’s my boy! Six months and we’ll have the works at the rate we’re going, then you’ll be happy. Better than five years, isn’t it? And who was the guy hollering about taking a day to catch our breaths? Roll over, will you?”

  “First things first, I suppose.”

  “Figures, doesn’t it?”

  “That’s a naughty word. Got to keep our minds on the job, remember?” Max grunted, didn’t move a muscle. “Though you liked redheads, anyway . . .”

  “Don’t let a guy get thinking about it, will you?” I must have let the words come out a little too hard, a little too sharply.

  “Sorry, kiddo.”

  “Oh, it’s okay.” But it wasn’t okay, and I guess Max knew it better than I did. It didn’t make sense, of course—a Martian, and a Teacher to boot. All Martian women weren’t beautiful, you see, any more than all Earth women are—but when one is, it makes you wish, if you’re not a Martian, that none of them were.

  Don’t think I’m a complete fool. I hadn’t given Lya-Younger more than ten words other than questioning since she’d been assigned to work with me and the other four Teachers I had borrowed from Max. She didn’t know what had happened inside me, and she wouldn’t ever know, either. It was just something not to think about, and if that, then immediately forgotten.

  IT WOULDN’T have been so tough if it had been just the physical beauty of her; her hair, like a dark coronet of silk framing her thin-oval face with its china-doll delicacy of feature and the porcelain whiteness. Her almost too-large eyes were the color of one of the emerald lakes at its deepest part . . . a young, supple body of vibrant life held in restraint by the graceful quietness that typified her people. All of her, so gently beautiful a thing; it seemed that no second glance could ever measure up to the first, yet each second glance by some miracle transcended the first . . .

  And if that had been all—and I say “all” with full knowledge of the epitome Martian beauty can reach—it wouldn’t have been so tough. Even with the additional fact that she was of another race and of a higher order of being than myself.

  But for Lya-Younger, the daughter of a race so far removed from its adolescence, beauty only began with her physical being. It was in all the others, this inner thing that Earth’s poets and her singers of songs had for so long seen, however obscurely, as the true measure of human fulfillment—it was in them all, but in Lya-Younger, it was at its height.

  Yet these people were not gods—they were not to Kruger nor were they to me—nor was Lya a goddess; among gods, there is no humility, and gods’ eyes reflect omnipotence, not the deep warmth and joy of living that can only generate in the human heart.

  “Let’s go,” I said to Kruger. “I got questions.”

  “You got ulcers.”

  “You were the guy who hated to leave that twenty-volume analysis on wave propagation, son.” I got up. “And I’ve got trouble with first things first. There is a dusky Martian in the wood-pile. I got a feeling, Max, one of those eight-to-five feelings—”

  “And it has convinced you beyond all scientific doubt that—?”

  “These people—they’re in some sort of jam. They’ve got bad trouble, and they aren’t telling us, for some reason. Pride or something maybe. With
them that’s how it would be—pride, wouldn’t it? If they ever cry, it would be on their own shoulders . . .”

  “You, Mr. LaTharn, are beginning to read like the Great American Novel. Spare me.”

  “I should pass the salt.”

  “You should.”

  From then on when I talked to Kruger I kept it the way he wanted it, to help him as much as myself. More interested, maybe, in what we had come for than I, he was making the “detached, scientific” approach as prescribed by Space Medicine work out fine. But I wasn’t. The quietness, Lya-Younger, the given-but-never-proffered information . . . somehow it all tied up together. In an inexplicable knot that wasn’t meant for us to untie.

  But it was there. It was there . . .

  The Teachers had retired for the day, and I was cleaning up a couple of odds and ends on my dicto and getting ready to leave the conference chamber when the messenger came. I was beat, wondering how many more months of this I could take, and a little less gracious than I might have been.

  The young Martian had a message from Max. It was short and to the point, very Kruger-like.

  “I’m busy,” the thing read. “Know it’s my turn to track back to ship for contact home, but wish you’d do it. They’ll be sore if we miss one. Tell them we’re about half finished, be home in eight months. Thanks.”

  “Why that damn—”

  “Any reply, sir?”

  I turned, feeling the sudden color at the back of my neck. I got out a weak little smile. “No—no, and thank you very much for your trouble.” The messenger bowed and left, and I fumed inside for a few minutes at Kruger’s scientific tenacity and then got up and left, myself.

  III

  I KNEW my way to the track, and as I approached it a couple of service engineers hopped into it and had it started up and warming for me by the time I reached it. They helped me into my suit, and with pretty abrupt thanks I clambered in behind the wheel, revved her up like a noise-happy hot-rod and tore out into the desert.