Honeymoon in Hell

by Fredric Brown

  It reached the end of the rope, and he was jerked forward by the pull on his wrist. It dragged him a few feet and then stopped. Carson kept on going, pulling himself toward it hand over hand along the rope.

  It stopped there, writhing tentacles trying in vain to pull out the harpoon. It seemed to shudder and quiver, and then it must have realized that it couldn’t get away, for it rolled back toward him, clawed tentacles reaching out.

  Stone knife in hand, he met it. He stabbed, again and again, while those horrid claws ripped skin and flesh and muscle from his body.

  He stabbed and slashed, and at last it was still.

  A bell was ringing, and it took him a while after he’d opened his eyes to tell where he was and what it was. He was strapped into the seat of his scouter, and the visiplate before him showed only empty space. No Outsider ship and no impossible planet

  The bell was the communications plate signal; someone wanted him to switch power into the receiver. Purely reflex i action enabled him to reach forward and throw the lever.

  The face of Brander, captain of the Magellan, mother-ship of his group of scouters, flashed into the screen. His face was pale and his black eyes glowing with excitement.

  “Magellan to Carson,” he snapped. “Come on in. The fight’s over. We’ve won!”

  The screen went blank; Brander would be signaling the other scouters of his command.

  Slowly, Carson set the controls for the return. Slowly, unbelievingly, he unstrapped himself from the seat and went back to get a drink at the cold-water tank. For some reason, he was unbelievably thirsty. He drank six glasses.

  He leaned there against the wall, trying to think.

  Had it happened? He was in good health, sound, uninjured. His thirst had been mental rather than physical; his throat hadn’t been dry. His leg—

  He pulled up his trouser leg and looked at the calf. There was a long white scar there, but a perfectly healed scar. It hadn’t been there before. He zipped open the front of his shirt and saw that his chest and abdomen were criss-crossed with tiny, almost unnoticeable, perfectly healed scars.

  It had happened.

  The scouter, under automatic control, was already entering the hatch of the mother-ship. The grapples pulled it into its individual lock, and a moment later a buzzer indicated that the lock was air-filled. Carson opened the hatch and stepped outside, went through the double door of the lock.

  He went right to Brander’s office, went in, and saluted. Brander still looked dizzily dazed. “Hi, Carson,” he said. “What you missed! What a show!”

  “What happened, sir?”

  “Don’t know, exactly. We fired one salvo, and their whole fleet went up in dust! Whatever it was jumped from ship to ship in a flash, even the ones we hadn’t aimed at and that were out of range! The whole fleet disintegrated before our eyes, and we didn’t get the paint of a single ship scratched!" We can’t even claim credit for it. Must have been some unstable component in the metal they used, and our sighting shot just set it off. Man, oh man, too bad you missed all the excitement.”

  Carson managed to grin. It was a sickly ghost of a grin, for it would be days before he’d be over the mental impact of his experience, but the captain wasn’t watching, and didn’t notice.

  “Yes, sir,” he said. Common sense, more than modesty, told him he’d be branded forever as the worst liar in space if he ever said any more than that. “Yes, sir, too bad I missed all the excitement.”

  KEEP OUT

  Daptine is the secret of it. Adaptine, they called it first; then it got shortened to daptine. It let us adapt.

  They explained it all to us when we were ten years old; I guess they thought we were too young to understand before then, although we knew a lot of it already. They told us just after we landed on Mars.

  “You’re home, children,” the Head Teacher told us after we had gone into the glassite dome they’d built for us there. And he told us there’d be a special lecture for us that evening, an important one that we must all attend.

  And that evening he told us the whole story and the whys and wherefores. He stood up before us. He had to wear a heated spacesuit and helmet, of course, because the temperature in the dome was comfortable for us but already freezing cold for him and the air was already too thin for him to breathe. His voice came to us by radio from inside his helmet.

  “Children,” he said, “you are home. This is Mars, the planet on which you will spend the rest of your lives. You are Martians, die first Martians. You have lived five years on Earth and another five in space. Now you will spend ten years, until you are adults, in this dome, although toward the end of that time you will be allowed to spend increasingly long periods outdoors.

  “Then you will go forth and make your own homes, live your own lives, as Martians. You will intermarry and your children will breed true. They too will be Martians.

  “It is time you were told the history of this great experiment of which each of you is a part.”

  Then he told us.

  Man, he said, had first reached Mars in 1985. It had been uninhabited by intelligent life (there is plenty of plant life and a few varieties of non-flying insects) and he had found it by terrestrial standards uninhabitable. Man could survive on Mars only by living inside glassite domes and wearing space suits when he went outside of them. Except by day in the warmer seasons it was too cold for him. The air was too thin for him to breathe and long exposure to sunlight—less filtered of rays harmful to him than on Earth because of the lesser atmosphere—could kill him. The plants were chemically alien to him and he could not eat them; he had to bring all his food from Earth or grow it in hydroponic tanks.

  For fifty years he had tried to colonize Mars and all his efforts had failed. Besides this dome which had been built for us there was only one other outpost, another glassite dome much smaller and less than a mile away.

  It had looked as though mankind could never spread to the other planets of the solar system besides Earth for of all them Mars was the least inhospitable; if he couldn’t live here there was no use even trying to colonize the others.

  And then, in 2034, thirty years ago, a brilliant biochemist named Waymoth had discovered daptine. A miracle drug that worked not on the animal or person to whom it was given but on the progeny he conceived during a limited period of time after inoculation.

  It gave his progeny almost limitless adaptability to changing conditions, provided the changes were made gradually.

  Dr. Waymoth had inoculated and then mated a pair of guinea pigs; they had borne a litter of five and by placing each member of the litter under different and gradually changing conditions, he had obtained amazing results. When they attained maturity one of those guinea pigs was living comfortably at a temperature of forty below zero Fahrenheit, another was quite happy at a hundred and fifty above. A third was thriving on a diet that would have been ' deadly poison for an ordinary animal and a fourth was contented -under a constant X-ray bombardment that would have killed one of its parents within minutes.

  Subsequent experiments with many litters showed that animals who had been adapted to similar conditions bred

  true and their progeny was conditioned from birth to live under those‘conditions.

  “Ten years later, ten years ago,” the Head Teacher told us, “you children were born. Born of parents carefully selected from those who volunteered for the experiment. And from birth you have been brought up under carefully controlled and gradually changing conditions.

  “From the time you were born the air you have breathed has been very gradually thinned and its oxygen content reduced. Your lungs have compensated by becoming much greater in capacity, which is why your chests are so much larger than those of your teachers and attendants; when you are fully mature and are breathing air like that of Mars, the difference will be even greater.

  “Your bodies are growing fur to enable you to stand the increasing cold. You are comfortable now under conditions which would kill ordinary p
eople quickly. Since you were four years old your nurses and teachers have had to wear special protection to survive conditions that seem normal to you.

  “In another ten years, at maturity, you will be completely acclimated to Mars. Its air will be your air; its food plants your food. Its extremes of temperature will be easy for you to endure and its median temperatures pleasant to you. Already, because of the five years we spent in space under gradually decreased gravitational pull, the gravity of Mars seems normal to you.

  “It will be your planet, to live on and to populate. You are the children of Earth but you are the first Martians.”

  Of course we had known a lot of those things already.

  The last year was the best. By then the air inside the dome—except for the pressurized parts where our teachers and attendants live—was almost like that outside, and we were allowed out for increasingly long periods. It is good to be in the open.

  The last few months they relaxed segregation of the sexes so we could begin choosing mates, although they told us there is to be no marriage until after the final day, after our full clearance. Choosing was not difficult in my case. I had made my choice long since and I’d felt sure that she felt the same way; I was right.

  Tomorrow is the day of our freedom. Tomorrow we will be Martians, the Martians. Tomorrow we shall take over the planet.

  Some among us are impatient, have been impatient for "i weeks now, but wiser counsel prevailed and we are waiting. 1 We have waited twenty years and we can wait until the final ! day.

  And tomorrow is the final day.

  Tomorrow, at a signal, we will kill the teachers and the other Earthmen among us before we go forth. They do not suspect, so it will be easy.

  We have dissimilated for years now, and they do not know how we hate them. They do not know how disgusting and hideous we find them, with their ugly misshapen bodies, so narrow shouldered and tiny chested, their weak sibilant voices that need amplification to carry in our Martian air, and above all their white pasty hairless skins.

  We shall kill them and then we shall go and smash the other dome so all the Earthmen there will die too.

  If more Earthmen ever come to punish us, we can live and hide in the hills where they’ll never find us. And if they try to build more domes here we’ll smash them. We want no more to do with Earth.

  This is our planet and we want no aliens. Keep off!

  FIRST TIME MACHINE

  Dr. Grainger said solemnly, “Gentlemen, the first time machine.”

  His three friends stared at it.

  It was a box about six inches square, with dials and a switch.

  “You need only to hold it in your hand,” said Dr. Grainger, “set the dials for the date you want, press the button—and you are there.”

  Smedley, one of the doctor’s three friends, reached for the box, held it and studied it. “Does it really work?”

  “I tested it briefly,” said the doctor. “I set it one day back and pushed the button. Saw myself—my own back—just walking out of the room. Gave me a bit of a turn.”

 
  Dr. Grainger laughed. “Maybe I couldn’t have—because it would have changed the past. That’s the old paradox of time travel, you know. What would happen if one went back in time and killed one’s own grandfather before he met one’s grandmother?”

  Smedley, the box still in his hand, suddenly was backing away from the three other men. He grinned at them. “That,” he said, “is just what I’m going to do. I’ve been setting the date dials sixty years back while you’ve been talking.”

  “Smedley! Don’t!” Dr. Grainger started forward.

  “Stop, Doc. Or I’ll press the button now. Otherwise I’ll explain to you.” Grainger stopped. “I’ve heard of that paradox too. And it’s always interested me because I knew I would kill my grandfather if I ever had a chance to. I hated him. He was a cruel bully, made life a hell for my grandmother and my parents. So this is a chance I’ve been waiting for.”

  Smedley’s hand reached for the button and pressed it.

  There was a sudden blur . . . Smedley was standing in a field. It took him only a moment to orient himself. If this spot was where Dr. Grainger’s house would some day be built, then his great-grandfather’s farm would be only a mile south. He started walking. En route he found a piece of wood that made a fine club.

  Near the farm, he saw a red-headed young man beating a dog with a whip.

  “Stop that!” Smedley yelled, rushing up.

  “Mind your own damn business,” said the young man as he lashed with the whip again.

  Smedley swung the club.

  Sixty years later, Dr. Grainger said solemnly, “Gentlemen, the first time machine.”

  His two friends stared at it.

  AND THE GODS LAUGHED

  You know how it is when you’re with a work crew on one of the asteroids. You’re there, stuck for the month you signed up for, with four other guys and nothing to do but talk. Space on the little tugs that you go in and return in, and live in while you’re there, is at such a premium that there isn’t room for a book or a magazine nor equipment for games. And you’re out of radio range except for the usual once-a-terrestrial-day, system-wide newscasts.

  So talking is the only indoor sport you can go in for. Talking and listening. You’ve plenty of time for both because a work-day, in space-suits, is only four hours and that with four fifteen-minute back-to-the-ship rests.

  Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that talk is cheap on I one of those work crews. With most of the day to do nothing 'I else, you listen to some real whoppers, stories that would make the old-time Liars Club back on Earth seem like Sunday-school meetings. And if your mind runs that way, you’ve got plenty of time to think up some yourself.

  Charlie Dean was on our crew, and Charlie could tell some dillies. He’d been on Mars back in the old days when there was still trouble with the holies, and when living on Mars was a I lot like living on Earth back in the days of Indian fighting. The holies thought and fought a lot like Amerinds, even though they were quadrupeds that looked like alligators on stilts—if you can picture an alligator on stilts—and used blow- 1 guns instead of bows and arrows. Or was it crossbows that I the Amerinds used against the colonists?

  Anyway, Charlie’s just finished a whopper that was really too good for the first tryout of the trip. We’d just landed, you see, and were resting up from doing nothing en route, and usually the yams start off easy and believable and don’t work up to real depth-of-space lying until along about the fourth week when everybody’s bored stiff.

  “So we took this head bolie, Charlie was ending up, “and you know what kind of flappy little ears they’ve got, and we put a couple of zircon-studded earrings in its ears and let it go, and back it went to the others, and then darned if—” Well, I won’t go on with Charlie’s yarn, because it hasn’t got anything to do with his story except that it brought earrings into the conversation.

  Blake shook his head gloomily and then turned to me.

  He said, “Hank, what went on on Ganymede? You were on that ship that went out there a few months ago, weren’t you—the first one that got through? I’ve never read or heard much about that trip.”

  “Me either,” Charlie said. “Except that the Ganymedeans turned out to be humanoid beings about four feet tall and didn’t wear a thing except earrings. Kind of immodest, wasn’t it?”

  I grinned. “You wouldn’t have thought so if you’d seen the Ganymedeans. With them; it didn’t matter. Anyway, they didn’t wear earrings.”

  “You’re crazy,” Charlie said. “Sure, I know you were on that expedition and I wasn’t, but you’re still crazy, because I had a quick look at some of the pictures they brought back. The natives wore earrings.”

  “No,” I said. “Earrings wore them ”

  Blake sighed deeply. “I knew it, I knew it,” he said. “There w
as something wrong with this trip from the start. Charlie pops off the first day with a yam that should have been worked up to gradually. And now you say—Or is there something wrong with my sense of earring?”

  I chuckled. “Not a thing, Skipper.”

  Charlie said, “I’ve heard of men biting dogs, but earrings wearing people is a new one. Hank, I hate to say it—but just consider it said.”

  Anyway, I had their attention. And now was as good a time as any.

  I said, “If you read about the trip, you know we left Earth about eight months ago, for a six-months’ round trip. There were six of us in the M-94; me and two others made up the crew and there were three specialists to do the studying and exploring. Not the really top-flight specialists, though, because the trip was too risky to send them. That was the third ship to try for Ganymede and the other two had cracked up on outer Jovian satellites that the observatories hadn’t spotted from Earth because they are too small to show up in the scopes at that distance.

  “When you get there you find there’s practically an asteroid belt around Jupiter, most of them so black they don’t reflect light to speak of and you can’t see them till they hit you or you hit them. But most of them—”

  “Skip the satellites,” Blake interrupted, “unless they wore earrings.”

  “Or unless earrings wore them ” said Charlie.

  “Neither,” I admitted. “All right, so we were lucky and got through the belt. And landed. Like I said, there were six of us. Lecky, the biologist. Haynes geologist and mineralogist. And Hilda Race, who loved little flowers and was a botanist, egad! You’d have loved Hilda—at a distance. Somebody must have wanted to get rid of her, and sent her on that trip. She gushed; you know the type.

  “And then there was Art Willis and Dick Carney. They gave Dick skipper’s rating for the trip; he knew enough astrogation to get us through. So Dick was skipper and Art and I were flunkies and gunmen. Our main job was to go along with the specialists whenever they left the ship and stand guard over them against whatever dangers might pop up.”