by Jerry
A minute passed, two minutes—three. Out of much confusion a thought came. “I have killed it!”
THE dreadful certainty that he was going to die went out of Warder, and for an instant a wild joy took possession of his mind. Despite his torment, despite the dryness in his throat, a wild joy that he had possessed the courage to risk permanent blindness by intensifying the beam.
Then—his shoulders jerked, and an agonized cry tore from his lips.
The tearing claw feeling was back inside his head, but now there was a toothed beak feeling acompanying it. Deep inside Warder’s skull a scaly, reptilian thing with a birdlike head tore and plucked at his brain, and wiped its wet claws on its breast.
Screaming, digging with his fists into the sand in a futile attempt to alleviate his torment, Warder dragged himself along the sand.
After a moment the clawing stopped. “You must die,” came mercilessly. “There is nothing but hate in your mind.”
He staggered back to the ship.
A look of horror came into Jane Warder’s face when she saw her husband in the airlock.
He was standing perfectly motionless and behind him through the circular port loomed a tumbled wilderness of sand. His hands were clenched, and against the patches of light and shadow on the sand his pallor stood out the way a white goose feather on a checkerboard would have done.
Goose feather? For an instant she thought it an image without meaning, an exaggeration of some terrible dark fear of childhood, or innermost wish on a through-the-looking glass plane. Then—she remembered. Feather—quill—pen.
Free association had brought that image into her mind. In that curious way women have of anticipating the worse she’d written and sealed a letter, and placed it in his stateroom where he could not fail to find it.
She’d decided to go out into the desert and—just keep on walking. The poor fellow would know how much she’d loved him when he read the letter. But she just didn’t want to be around when the sands ran out. She never could stand scenes, such as going in his arms, and knowing he’d be around a day or two longer, with that terrible dryness in his throat.
Warder was oddly conscious of his wife’s presence before he advanced a foot into the ship. It wasn’t necessary for him to draw close to her, and hold on tight to her. He had only a look at her. Just looking at her drove all the harshness from his mind.
He’d returned across the tumbled sand to the ship a dozen times, though much of what had happened the last few days seemed like a book from which most of the pages had been torn. There were fears he couldn’t shake out of his mind, fears that mocked and shrieked at him, and then his brain would begin to function in an integrated way again, and he’d come stumbling back to the ship to plan a new campaign.
A book from which the pages had been torn! Even the dialogue was tormentingly incomplete, so that the words Jane had uttered yesterday, or the day before, came back to him like a faulty recording monotonously repeating itself.
“Jim, we’ve enough food—rescue ship—to keep us alive—we could hold out—if we just had—some water—if we just had—some water—if we just had some water.”
In one sentence which broke off abruptly he was moving forward into the lock chamber and examining his wife’s hands. Pellagra? He knew that it showed first as an erythema, irregular in outline, involving the dorsal aspect of the hands.
“Darling, hold me close. I haven’t got it yet.”
But despite his torment there were moments when his brain would become wholly clear, and remain clear for several hours, and he knew now that he had himself under control. He knew because his voice was under control and there was no longer any vagueness or haziness in his mind. Though Jane’s face was strained he knew that she, too, was holding herself well under control.
He stumbled across the chamber and took her into his arms. Now she was sitting beside him on one of the narrow spring-bunkers opposite the airlock, and his hand was stroking her hair.
“Jane, I’ve discovered why it fears us,” he could hear himself saying. “The devilish thing is en rapport with our subconscious minds. Oh, that’s a ridiculous word to use. You’d think I was a French dancing master, or a teacher of Romance languages. I mean it can feel what’s deep in our minds.”
Now there was a moment’s stillness. He had expected that Jane would speak, but she did not.
He moistened his lips.
“It had got inside my brain and it was so bad I knew I had to find the answer, or go mad,” he continued. “What puzzled me was that I didn’t hate it the way it thought I did. Hate is a continued, intense aversion. It involves an active intent to injure and is quite different from resentment, even rage.” Warder was conscious of raising his eyes, and staring across the chamber at a brightness that hurt his eyes. Inanely the thought came that the desert beyond the airlock, the intolerable dryness and brightness of the tumbled sand, would have had a paralyzing emotional effect on the brain of a scorpion.
“It’s hard for us consciously to hate a creature that resembles a mammal, no matter how alien it is. That’s because mammals appeal to our parental instincts. All hairy mammals do, and so do big, grotesque hairless animals. They remind us of clumsy human infants.”
Warder’s eyes were shadowed with the knowledge that had come into his brain. “I didn’t consciously hate it, Jane. Not at first anyway, not with the superficial skin of my mind. But the subconscious can hate in a way the conscious mind can’t. It can hate anything that walks or crawls.”
Jane spoke for the first time.
“You mean you’d have a deep instinctive hatred of anything you couldn’t reach in a human way, even if you wanted to be friends with it?” she said.
Warder nodded. “Deep in my mind there would be an instinctive fear and loathing. And if the creature opposed its will to mine, if it tried to prevent me from eating or—”
“Drinking,” Jane said, moistening her lips. “If it tried to bar my way suspicion would turn into a red, killing rage. Subconsciously I’d want to stamp on it.”
“It’s pretty big to stamp on,” Jane said. Warder stared out of the port that framed the red desolation of Rigel’s seventh planet.
“Yes, big. But deep in my mind something has been stamping on every inch of it, Jane. I’m sure it knows that it is being stamped on.”
Warder paused, as though seeking for words that would not send a surge of horror through his wife’s mind.
“There’s no way I can stop it from knowing. Psychiatrists get brief, terrifying glimpses of what human beings are capable of when something rubs the fur on their buried selves the wrong way. Psychologists tell us what’s deep in our minds would drive us mad if it wasn’t for the barrier we’ve erected between our hidden selves, and our rational, social selves. We’ve erected floodgates, but they’re usually closed.”
He shuddered, as though his thoughts were making his scalp crawl.
“The subconscious mind is a repository of instincts and attitudes inherited from our barbarian ancestors. To a creature that has never had a struggle for survival the dark complex of repressed, anti-social strivings behind the floodgates might well seem as alien and hideous as a—well, a bodiless soul screaming in the void.”
Warden made an abrupt, savage gesture, as though brushing away a sharp-taloned horror that was flying straight at him.
“The subconscious can release a rage as remorseless as the black night of space. Thirst can be more tormenting than hunger, and when a man has to endure unimaginable torments everything civilized and decent and kindly in him is in deadly danger of being swept away. When a dry rot demoralization set in, all is lost.”
He looked down at her hand trembling on his arm.
“Dry rot spreads, Jane. I didn’t hate it at first, I fought against the spreading demoralization, but now the blind black rage in the depths of my mind has coalesced into a tight, hard little knot at the end of a whipcord. A dry rot demoralization. I want to lash out at it, to lash out with that w
hipcord, Jane.” He wet his lips. “It’s like the sort of thing children experience when—”
He hesitated. “Did you ever hear of night terrors?”
“Night terrors?”
“The psychologist Jung believes that the explanation of the night terrors of children lies in a revival of ancient jungle fears and hates. The child fears tearing claws, sharp beaks, the clutching horrors of the dark. That’s because in sleep a very primitive layer of its mind awakes and remembers its remote ancestors had to flee for their lives from savage beasts.
“The subconscious goes very deep, so deep that part of it consists wholly of what psychologists call the archaic strata of the mind. That strata would be stirred to a deep instinctive hate of anything alien, a hate akin to primitive man’s fear of the evil demons of myths and folk lore. There would be an individualized subconscious hate, springing from torment and frustration, and a still more primitive kind of hate.”
“You mean if it could creep under the floodgates,” Jane said, moistening her lips. “Are you sure it can?”
WARDER ran his tongue over his lips.
“No, I’m not sure. Maybe it’s just aware of what’s behind the floodgates a little more intensely than we are. If it were an animal I’d say that what’s behind the floodgates raises its harls. But it isn’t an animal.”
A bodiless soul screaming? Warder shook his head, as though to dislodge the thoughts that were tormenting him.
He was suddenly aware that Jane’s fingers were biting into his wrist.
“Jim, isn’t there something you could do about that? Isn’t there a drug which prevents the brain from functioning below the level of consciousness?”
Warder’s throat felt suddenly more parched than it had been. There was such a drug, of course. Exalophene. But he’d always had a horror of drugs which affected the brain, and exalophene was much more than an hypnotic. It could knock out all the primitive pathways within the brain and spinal column, so that the impulses arising from the subconscious could not gain an ascendancy over the mind.
No one really knew just how the drug worked, for the subconscious was not a structural unit within the cerebrum, but a physiological complex spread thin over a dozen areas, some deep down in the thalamus and brain stem, and others fairly recent critical areas within the cortex itself.
Not one really knew, but if the strange beast could be made to believe that its human enemy had undergone a change of heart was it important to know? In minute doses exalophene was a specific for migraine, neuralgia. It was a specific for many maladies, and Warder suddenly remembered that there was a phial of the stuff in the sick bay.
“Jim, I remember now! It’s called exalophene! Exalophene! It’s used for a lot of things, it’s used as a medicine, Jim!” . . .
Later with the bottle in his grasp, Warder felt as though a force had been released within him which he was powerless to resist. He was walking straight toward the beast’s burrow across the sand, a hypodermic gleaming in his hand.
Having removed a labeled phial from a still-intact aluminum rack in the sick bay, filled the hypodermic and tested the keenness of the needle with his thumb he was advancing now in bright sunlight with the slow, remorseless stride of a pallbearer carrying his own coffin toward an invisible hearse.
He hadn’t wanted to fill the hypodermic and kiss Jane once fiercely on the lips. He hadn’t wanted to leave the ship and walk out into the desert with the hypodermic in his hand. But what distinguishes man from the lower animals is his capacity to do not what pleases him, but what has to be done.
In some respects it was a trivial distinction, and it was certainly not an enviable one.
The heat was intolerable, and it seemed to fill all space about Warder. He could hear the sand crackling beneath his boots, and the sunlight on the needle was a splotch of light blinding him.
He wished the horizon wouldn’t widen to an immense, furnace-red semi-circle only to contract so tightly about him that he could scarcely breathe. He wished the beast were not squatting in its burrow watching him.
He wondered how much the beast suspected. Did the monstrous creature know that he was going to inject into his veins a massive dose of a drug that would put an end to his torment?
He halted abruptly, his eyes on the great creature’s stationary bulk.
“If you would know me better than you do, you must watch what I am about to do,” he called out. “There must be no barrier between my mind and your mind. Watch me, reply if you are puzzled. I want you to see deep into my mind.”
Could Warder have read, the beast’s thoughts he would have known that it had eavesdropped on his conversation in the airlock chamber, and was wondering what he could hope to gain by putting only a part of his mind to sleep.
The man was going to put a part of his mind to sleep. It was hard to understand how only a part of the mind could be put to sleep, and what the man could hope to gain by it. The man’s mind would not change in sleep, and there was nothing but hate in the man’s mind.
As the great beast sniffed the thin, dry air it suddenly saw that Warder had finished injecting the drug and was staring down at his arm. For an instant there was no change in the man’s expression, and then the skin seemed to whiten over the man’s cheekbones, and the beast saw that his body was casting a more angular shadow.
It was as though the muscles of the man’s back and stomach had contorted, causing him to assume a posture so rigid he seemed less like a living creature than an image carved from the brittle “tikil” of the slope eaves.
FOR an instant the man remained as rigidly motionless as a “tikil” carving. Then there came into being on his face bulges and ridges, and he came convulsively back to life again. So swiftly, so hideously back to life that the beast had no time to blank out its thoughts or defend itself against the all-obliterating horror of that which came from the man’s mind.
Clashing, tearing, rolling, there swept into the beast’s mind a something that was partly stillness and partly screaming chaos. But it was not a stillness like the stillness of the desert at dawn and at nightfall and it was not a screaming that carried with it a sense of rightness, like the birth pangs of a youngling. It was not a screaming that could be endured!
No, it wasn’t a screaming, either. It was a pulsing—a steady, black pulsing—wave of a something that was like a swelling explosion, and the great beast knew that it was going mad.
Warder had fallen to the sand, and was dragging himself toward the burrow with convulsive contractions of his entire body. But the beast did not see the twisted features of its enemy, or hear the harsh, unintelligible sounds from its enemy’s throat.
For an instant madness came sweeping toward it across the desert with red talons hovering, and then straight down into it madness plunged, and it thought about itself in a way that was horrible and went zigzagging backwards across the mouth of its burrow with its long snout dangling, and shrill ululations gurgling from its throat . . .
AFTER Warder had passed the canteen to his wife, and she had drained the sweet, slightly fragrant water to the last drop, he walked over to the airlock and stood staring out across the tumbled red wilderness of sand. There was wet sand on the back of his head, and he was blinking like a man who had come up out of a deep dark cave into the blinding glare of Sol. He had come up out of a cave, but the sun was Rigel, and it was hotter than Sol, much hotter.
He had never fully realized just how hot.
“Jim, what drove it mad?”
Warder shivered, and returned across the narrow chamber to stand beside his wife. He put an arm about her, drew her close.
“Jane, if I had used a drug to blot out the hatred and black, killing rage deep in my mind don’t you suppose it would have known? It could read my thoughts, remember. It could fathom my intentions, and it wouldn’t have been deceived for an instant. It would have known I’d merely put a part of my mind to sleep.”
He nodded grimly. “But I suddenly realized I did have a weapon,
Jane. A much more powerful weapon than a hand blaster or annihilation ray—a much deadlier weapon—the subconscious itself!”
Warder was swept by a complexity of emotions as he spoke the last words. Having gone down into the valley of the shadow the horror of the ordeal had left its mark upon him, and it was difficult for him to go on.
“I knew if I injected exalophene, I’d lose that weapon, Jane. So I didn’t inject exalophene. I searched around instead for another phial, and snatched the phial down, and filled the hypodermic with a shaking fear inside of me. There was fear because, although exalophene knocks out all the lower centers within the brain, the drug I poured into the hypodermic has an exactly opposite effect. It knocks out all the higher centers.”
“Jim!”
“Psychiatrists call it archaic regression. The mind retraces the entire course of human evolution, the body assumes a distorted, brutish, almost apelike posture. Unintelligible syllables come from the lips and there are—convulsions.”
As though from force of habit Warder moistened his lips. When he spoke again his voice was like a whisper from the tomb.
“That’s what drove it mad, Jane. It couldn’t endure the suspicion and hatred and red, killing rage in my mind when the floodgates were up. When my mind regressed to a still more primitive level, and all the floodgates went down, the beast was finished.”
Jane was breathing hard, and a little shudder had gone through her. “Floodgates—went—down?”
Warder nodded. “All the floodgates. Ironically enough, the drug I did inject was once used to cure insanity. Human insanity—schizophrenia. It was called the shock treatment for insanity.”
Warder opened his hand.
Jane looked down at the phial glittering on his palm, her eyes dilating in sudden horror.
INSULIN, the label read.
MYSTERIOUS CRATER
Leroy yerxa
