“Sure,” Cliff Verden answered. “Cramm—I like the idea of rocketing to other unknown planets myself. In fact, when I was a kid in Missouri, I kind of loved the idea. Maybe I do, yet. But maybe designing and building the drive-jets that are successful, and navigating across the millions of miles, is the easiest part. Sometimes I wonder how the rest is done. Do you just barge in, against danger, and all the things that you can’t possibly know beforehand, like a Nineteenth Century Admiral taking over some dumpy island in the name of his flag? It sounds screwy to me, Cramm—especially when there are—‘natives.’ Unhuman ones, with a psychology far different from your own...”
CLIFF VERDEN felt the heavy stuffiness of the Earth air around him in the ship. Soon it might kill him and his companions; but for now he was able to talk and observe. Under the impact of a half-lunar thing speaking English with a familiar and mild sarcasm, Cramm’s cheeks became whitened, and dewed with sweat.
“This is stupid,” he mumbled. “Insane!...”
Jack Verden took up the argument at this point. “Sure,” he said roughly. “Stupid—like the way you look, now, Frankie Boy! Insane—like the way things that happen on other worlds can seem. Okay—let’s make matters easier for you: Want me to guess what your plans are? Yeah. Take over the valley; establish a base; begin running things. Like as if you knew every danger at a glance. Well, let me point out that we think we just saved your life—for a little while! And all of a sudden I get another idea. We’re good American citizens from Missouri; we got here before you did. So, if there’s any taking-over to be done, don’t you think we got claim-priority over you? We should have homestead rights. So maybe we should contest intrusion in the Supreme Court, eh? Or even sue you for trespassing...”
The situation was so grotesque that it was almost funny; but nobody laughed.
Stung by insult, Frankie Cramm showed anger. It helped clear some of the fuddled confusion from his mind and face. “Oh—” he growled. “I get it. That night in the woods! You’re the other side of the biological exchange. Lunarians into men—here!”
It was Mary Koven who answered this time. But her words seemed to hit the same mood as those of the Verden brothers, as if they were all one: “To the head of your class, Mr. Cramm! You handled that woods incident with nice, blunt efficiency! Bridge a gulf of difference with a gun—because you’re scared! Because you let your nerves get the best of you, before the unknown! Assuming that you faced an enemy, before you even took the trouble to find out! Because anything so strange has to be an enemy, eh?
“And you’re the man who wants to be the first to visit the planets! Oh, boy—it’s pathetic! No—it’s gruesome! But don’t get me wrong. I don’t say that any other uninformed Earthman would have done any better than you—or even as well. But the unknown, on a strange world, just can’t be simple. And a mistake could be horrible, involving the whole human race...”
As she spoke, Cliff Verden watched Mary. She was rather splendid. And, aside, he wondered if his ideas of beauty hadn’t drawn something from lunar concepts. He remembered a revived movie he’d seen long ago. A woman made from a black panther; feminine beauty emerging from a sleek and dangerous ugliness, that still had always been beautiful. In Mary’s still half-lunar form, did he now suddenly notice the same thing happening in her—without any abrupt physical change in the body itself?
Now Cliff’s attention was drawn back to Cramm, who stood fuddled again before this last onslaught of words.
The clatter of an airlock valve jarred the spell. In a moment a young crewman in a space suit was reporting. “We have collected eight natives, all stunned, from beside their broken weapons, sir,” he told Cramm. “We have them outside—shackled.”
This news seemed to start Cramm’s mind to working again. A light of grudging comprehension came into his eyes. “Thanks, Savrin,” he growled. Then he turned back to the Verdens and Mary. “Also—thank you!” he grated. “For being of material assistance. But the arguments that have been brought up here, are pure, farcical nonsense! I had a job to do, and I did it the best way I knew how! I think danger is past. If they’re wise, these lunar devils won’t start anything. According to plan, by now our other ship has landed men with heavy weapons all around the rim of this valley, and commanding every part of it! And the ship, itself, is now patrolling overhead. And—yes—there will be a military base! We can’t take any chances with treachery! Are you satisfied?”
CLIFF VERDEN and his companions all felt the return of a pompous officiousness to Frankie Cramm. Cocky insistence on being always, perforce, right. Their hearts sank as they realized that Cramm had probably, by luck, established his dominance here.
The sequel was not hard to visualize: Other tough egocentric men with imperialistic ideas would follow Cramm, here. By the science and the drives they brought, the valley might become truly verdant again. But the lunarians would either be forced into extinction, or practical slavery by the type of Earthling who never tried to understand that they, too, possessed culture, science, greatness, which they might have shared for mutual benefit, but which now might be turned by bitterness into a deadly, hidden danger.
Suddenly, in defeat, Cliff Verden wanted to hit that angry face before him. “No!” he said. “I’m not satisfied! We're all alive just by good fortune, which is not your fault, Cramm! This valley could be a smoking ruin—the last of a race gone, and with it a biological science that would certainly be useful in medicine on Earth—just for example!... But the moon is an easy place to grab, with only three hundred inhabitants. Look, everybody! Here’s the guy who wants to go to Mars and Venus! The greenhorn! I wonder what he thinks he’ll find there? And what he will find there? There have always been signs on Mars; it’s not dead like most of the moon. And we know that, with knowledge, life can go on even after a planet dies. What kind of life? How does anybody know? But something, certainly, to be handled with care....”
Cramm’s jaw was hard with rage. “I hope you’ve said your piece,” he snapped. “Because I’m going to put all three of you outside....”
It was then that it happened. There was a faint scraping and tapping at the airlock; then a mewling cry. Crewmen opened the lock cautiously, and seized the lunarian who had entered it. T’chack. He gasped and choked in the dense Earth-air, but his glazing eyes searched quickly around him. Maybe his motive was already revenge. He struggled. Then, with small, yellow teeth he bit the hands that held him, and lunged straight for Cramm, whom he must have sensed was the leader. Cramm’s faults did not include a tendency to run away; he grappled with the lightly built monster.
The Verdens and Mary saw the tiny metal cylinder in T’chack’s gloved paw. It touched Cramm’s bare arm. There was even a tiny spark. Cramm recoiled slightly.
“You—learn,” T’chack chirped in English. “I go—Earth. You change—lunarian...” Then he collapsed, half smothered.
But the meaning of what he had said was plain, not only to the three to whom this same thing had happened, but to Cramm as well. For on Earth he had heard how a process worked.
In that little piece of metal T’chack had concentrated a molding biological force—a driving pattern of his own shape. Now it had passed into Cramm’s flesh. And into his own tissues T’chack must have let flow a similar though opposite kind of energy, to aid in the change and exchange between himself and the Earthian adventurer.
CLIFF VERDEN was almost sympathetic to Cramm’s reaction to terrible knowledge; for he had been through this ordeal himself. In a matter like this, no courage was any shield from fear. To realize suddenly that you have been bitten by a cobra, can be only a feeble comparison. For here was slow, grinding horror, that warps limbs and bone and skin and muscle to a form where one can scarcely know himself.
Cramm’s jaw dropped, and his cheeks seemed to cave in. “Damn—I’ll kill you!” he growled at T’chack’s inert figure.
“Don’t,” Cliff snapped, protecting the lunarian with what was probably just a bluff—in one way or an
other. “He’s the one that knows about this sort of thing—the only one who can turn the process back—if it can be done. Besides, what happened serves you right... Get us all out of here—outside where we can breathe—and where I can talk to T’chack....”
Under the pressure of events, Cliff and his companions had hardly realized how groggy the air in the ship was making them. But now, as they were hustled out into the stinging cold of a semi-vacuum, and shackled against the side of the ship, the blurry weakness left them. But their lungs, in chests that had grown smaller than those of the lunarians, labored heavily.
In a moment, all was quiet again. A guard in a spacesuit paced back and forth, his form limned against the glittering stars. In a long row, against the flank of the ship, which, of course, was sealed and dark, were the other lunarian captives. Regaining consciousness after having been stunned, they had covered themselves with desert sand, as a protection against the cold. The Verdens and Mary—and T’chack, who had now also recovered his senses—did the same.
Now Cliff addressed T’chack, who lay between himself and Mary. “Can the process be reversed, T’chack—for Cramm?” he asked. “You know—can Earthling stay Earthling—not lunarian—after—” Cliff stopped, aiding his effort to make his question clear a moment later, with a few halting, musical syllables.
There was a long pause. Then T’chack said, “Yes.”
“Good,” Jack commented. “We’ve got Cramm in a nutcracker. We got something to sell him now, that he can’t help but want—his own identity! He’ll give up—come our way—running!”
Right then Cliff was sure that this was right. So his thoughts wandered. “That apparatus— T’chack,” he said. “Those slabs where we were fastened down. You’re not on one. Don’t you have to be—to change—bodies?” Again he resorted to a few lunarian words to help out.
“Not—all—time.” T’chack answered. “Not—first—part...”
Now Mary had a question, a feminine one: “T’chack,” she began very slowly and carefully. “Will we—will Cliff, Jack, and I—Mary—really become Earth-people again—completely—in time? With the same—faces—that we had—on Earth?...”
Again there was an interval—an eerily tense one—before T’chack replied: “Yes—completely—almost—in time. A year—maybe. Bones—different. Many things—different. But flesh—change... Bones—change. Things—change. Faces. All...”
CLIFF VERDEN and the others felt drowsy. It was the cold that did it; they covered even their faces with sand, leaving only tiny spaces through which to breathe. It seemed that, in doing all this, they followed a lunar instinct. Their self-radiant clothing helped keep them warm in the awful chill. The sleep that was coming over them was probably like hibernation.
Cliff thought of the farm, of the green hills in the springtime. He yearned for Earth, to be back there, and to have Mary as his wife. But to retain so much of the old life was now an impulse that was obscured, too, by other yearnings. Far, far overhead, moments ago, he had glimpsed the tiny dart of radioactive fire from the jets of the circling spaceship. And now, with this memory, and with much of the tension of recent events quieting toward better solutions, his mind soared more vividly toward a boyhood dream. High romance across the void. The unfathomed mysteries of Mars and Venus. Danger. The infinite caution and judgment needed in handling enigma—which could never be a simple thing, that could be dealt with so bluntly as a human affair.
Oh, no!... But didn’t that, of itself, mean a more magnificent destiny, not only for mankind, but for whatever other comparable forms of life that might come within their sphere of knowledge? The lunarians were not human—yet even their shapes might be far more human than the beings that might have to be understood, farther out. After all, by some parallel of evolution, the lunarians had arms, legs—and a skeleton and flesh comparable to the human. It might not be the same, elsewhere. But now the shell of isolation of one world from all the others was breaking. It was like a strange, thrilling dawn. Adventurous. But maybe something splendid, instead of a debacle of confusion and horror....
Cliff Verden’s awareness slipped away from him. He awoke to noise and bustle and dazzling daylight—which of itself was a surprise, meaning that his sleep of hibernation had lasted for all of two Earth-weeks! But that was not all of the surprise.
Cliff stumbled erect out of his bed of sand. Near him were Mary and Jack. Instantly, Cliff’s thoughts leapt into the groove of a previous hope that had seemed almost a certainty. “Cramm—” he gasped. “What happened? Didn’t he come—to ask if his body could be kept from—changing? Didn’t he come—not in two weeks?...”
There was worry in Cliff Verden’s voice, and in the faces of his companions....
“We don’t know—anything,” Mary stammered. “Cliff—what can it ever mean?...”
Space-armored crewmen, who had already freed Mary and Cliff from their shackles, were doing the same for the captive lunarians, most of whom burst from their sleep to hurry away, twittering, still gripped by horror of the strange intruders from Earth.
Cliff was about to make inquiries of one of the crewmen, when another man stepped toward him. It was Frankie Cramm. His face, inside the transparent bubble of thin plastic, that was his oxygen helmet, looked terribly haggard. And already the skin of his cheeks seemed slightly odd. And the marks of worry were deep around his eyes. He must have had some tremendous battle with himself.
Now he spoke, his voice coming, thin and muffled, through his helmet. “I heard what you just said,” he growled at Cliff. “One thing you don’t seem to realize is that I really like the idea of making a success of interplanetary contacts, too. Well—I know what you meant, when last we talked. All right, damn you—maybe I've gained some humbleness and insight since! As maybe you did, yourself, not so long ago! By the change you’ve been through! Well, if that kind of a change—giving two viewpoints—is the key to a better insight, I guess I can stand it, and keep my sanity, as well as you can! No—I didn’t come to find out if the change could be stopped. You see, I’m not going to have it stopped!”
CRAMM’S tone was defiant, his square jaw hard. And Cliff Verden and his companions, in their surprise, realized what they had sometimes sensed before. Frankie Cramm had been crude, blundering, untaught; but under all that there had been strength, potentials, and a savage will to realize to the best of his ability, the dream that was his, too.
“Good. I admire you—honestly,” Cliff said. “My apologies wherever necessary. What now?”
There still was a coldness between them.
“Whatever you advise—if I think it reasonable, myself,” Cramm answered. “No military base here, and my ships will leave as soon as possible. To show good faith. The rest—well—what do you think? We could leave certain Earthly products behind, for the lunarians to examine. Maybe, in return they would give us examples of their inventions, art-work, and so on. All right?”
“It sounds very reasonable,” Cliff replied. “We’ll see.” But deep down he felt humble and a little errant, himself.
“Do you want to come back to Earth with us?” Cramm demanded.
Cliff Verden looked at his brother, and at Mary. It was a hard question to answer abruptly.
“Maybe we’d better stay here,” Mary said. “We’re not so very Earthly—yet. Though I guess we could disguise ourselves a little. But, for the time being we’d better stay—be ambassadors of good-will. Okay, boys?”
Cliff and Jack both nodded.
“Thanks,” Cramm said. “Work out the details you like, and let me know.” He paused for only a moment more to exchange fascinated stares with T’chack, who had stood quietly near, abhorrent and shaggy. Then Cramm turned on his heel, and reentered the ship.
“Everything’s fine for your people, T’chack,” Jack Verden said. “Tell ’em they can stop being afraid of Earth. Tell ’em that Earthians are their friends... Only, I’m worried about you; maybe you want to back out from going to Earth, now that the revenge motive is
gone. Maybe you won’t like being half Earthling for a while.”
This time T’chack grasped the general meaning of the English words without difficulty. His eyes glowed. Maybe it was the questing eagerness of the scientist. “Not—back—out,” he trilled.
The four started across the valley toward the lunar buildings. During the next few hours, much happened. Young men took many pictures of lunarians and their way of life. The strange became more familiar, from two viewpoints; barter began. A cigarette lighter might be traded for a weirdly-tooled ornament of black enamel, or a bit of radiant fabric.
Among the lunarians, sullenness gave way to a strange excitement, which might mean a renaissance among them, in time to come. Did they also have a sense of wonder? Did it kindle in them a spark that might prompt them to use their science to rejuvenate and repeople their valley?
CLIFF TALKED a second time with Cramm. As a result, two young Earthmen, a physician and a biologist, decided to remain on the moon, to conduct studies. Supplies for them, and a special, airtight space-tent, were unloaded from the ship. Also, three space suits, for the time, not too far off, when Mary Koven and the Verdens, becoming more and more Earthly, could no longer breathe the thin atmosphere of the lunar valley.
Also, Mary and Cliff had a private talk. Mary answered Cliff’s question with the hint of the smile that had been hers before they had ever tangled with moon-mysteries. Her brows were shaping. Her eyes were turning from yellow to blue, again. And there was short blonde hair, with a suggestion of a wave, on her head, showing amid fading alien fuzz. He thought, again of that old movie—the black panther becoming a pretty girl.
“I don’t see why we should wait until we are completely human, either, Cliff,” she said softly. “Or until we go back to Earth. Will we ever be more sure? As a ship captain, Cramm has certain official powers.”
Then and Now: Another Collection of Science Fiction Page 29