by Jerry
breathed and slept surrounded by sheets of paper. He took to writing his wife short letters, telling her in substance that everything she had said was absolutely right. In what free time he had, he requisitioned a stopwatch and tried to figure out his discharge date in terms of minutes, seconds and fifths of seconds.
Then, at the beginning of the first summer, the First Sergeant had his second and final stroke of luck, and it looked for a long while as if everything had worked out for the best after all. He stopped writing letters to his wife almost immediately after the Captain was called back to headquarters and a new, a younger Captain was assigned to the command. This new Captain was not at all interested in communications; he told the First Sergeant the first day he was in that before he got involved in a flow of messages, he had first to become acclimated to the situation. That was perfectly all right with the First Sergeant; immediately he saw the change working through in other things; it was magical. Messages from headquarters seemed to diminish; there were days when they could be numbered in the tens, and the First Sergeant found that he had more time to himself; he started to write a short novel about his combat experiences in four wars and eight limited actions. Also, his role in combat had shifted drastically. Perhaps because of the new Captain’s familiarization policy, he was permitted to carry a rifle with him, and now and then, he even took a cautious shot, being careful to point the instrument in the air, so that there would be no danger of hitting anyone on his own side. Once, quite accidentally, he hit one of the enemy’s trees (they were attacking the forest that day) and destroyed a shrub; it was one of the most truly important moments of his life. Meanwhile, the new Captain said that he would contact headquarters eight times a day and that would be that.
The First Sergeant moved into one of the most wholly satisfactory periods of his life. His wife’s letters stopped abruptly after she said she had been promoted to the position of hostess, and he quietly cut his allotment to her by three dollars a month; no one seemed to know the difference. He went to bed early and found that he slept the night through, but often he was up at four o’clock because starting each new day was such a pleasure. Then, just as the First Sergeant had come to the amazed conviction that he was not by any means an accursed man, Hastings came acutely to his consciousness.
Hastings, who was some kind of Private, had put in for convalescent leave months before, during the bad time of the First Sergeant’s life, but the old Captain had handled the situation very well. Now, the new Captain said that he had to be acclimated to the situation, and so it was the First Sergeant’s responsibility to deal with Hastings, to tell him that the Captain could not be distracted at this time. For a while, Hastings listened to this quietly and went, but suddenly, for no apparent reason, he submitted another request for leave. From that moment, the difficult peace of the First Sergeant was at an end. Hastings insisted that this message had to reach the Captain, and the First Sergeant told him that it would be forwarded, but the Captain refused to take it because he said that he was in an adjustment stage. So, the First Sergeant kept the request in his desk, but then Hastings began coming into the tent every day to ask what action the Captain had finally taken. The First Sergeant knew right away that Hastings was crazy because he had a wild look in his eye, and he also said that the Captain was a coward for not facing him. In addition to that, Hastings began to look up the First Sergeant at odd times of the day to say that the Captain was functioning in a very unusual way; something would have to be done. When the First Sergeant finally decided that he had had enough of this, he went to the Captain and told him what was going on and asked him if he would, at least, look at this crazy Hastings’ request, but the Captain said that it would take him at least several months to be acculturated to the degree where he would be able to occupy a judgmental role; in the meantime, he could not be disturbed by strange requests. Then, the Captain leaned over his desk and said that, just between them, he felt that Hastings was crazy: he was not functioning like an adult in a situation made for men. When he heard this, the First Sergeant laughed wildly and relayed this message to Hastings, hoping that it would satisfy him and that now the man would finally leave him alone, but Hastings said that all of this just proved his point: the Captain was insane. Hastings asked the First Sergeant if he would help him to get the Captain put away. All of this was going on then; the Captain saying one thing and Hastings another, both of them insane; and in addition to this, the limited war was still going on; it was going on as if it would never stop which, of course, it would not. The First Sergeant would have written his wife again if he had not completely forgotten her address and previously thrown away all of her letters.
Hastings and the Captain were on top of him all the time now, and neither of them had the faintest idea of what they were doing. Only a man who had been through four wars and eight limited actions could comprehend how serious the war effort was. Three days a week the company had a forest to capture; three days a week they had the cliffs to worry about, and on Mondays they had all of the responsibility of reconnoitering and planning strategy, and all of this devolved on the First Sergeant; nevertheless, neither of them would leave him alone. The First Sergeant had more duties than any man could handle: he supervised the officers’ tents and kept up the morale of the troops; he advised the officers of the lessons of his experience, and he had to help some of the men over difficult personal problems; no one, not even a combat veteran such as himself, could handle it. He slept poorly now, threw up most of his meals, found his eyesight wavering so that he could not handle his rifle in combat, and he decided that he was, at last, falling apart under the strain. If he had not had all of his obligations, he would have given up then. They were that ungrateful, the whole lot of them. Hastings, the Captain; the Captain, Hastings: they were both lunatics, and on top of that, there was the matter of the tents and the communications. One night, the First Sergeant had his penultimate inspiration. In an agony of wild cunning, he decided that there was only one way to handle things. And what was better, he knew that he was right. No one could have approached his level of functioning.
He got up at three o’clock in the morning and crept through the forest to the communications tent and carefully, methodically, lovingly, he tore down the equipment, so that it could not possibly transmit, and then he furiously reconstructed it so that it looked perfect again. Then, he sat up until reveille, scribbling out headquarters communiques, and he marked DELIVERED in ink on all of the company’s messages to headquarters. After breakfast, he gave these messages to the Captain, and the Captain took them and said that they were typical headquarters crap; they were the same as ever. The Captain said then that sometimes, just occasionally, you understand, he thought that Hastings might have a point, after all. The First Sergeant permitted himself to realize that he had stumbled on to an extremely large concept; it was unique. Nothing that day bothered him at all.
The next morning, he got up early again and crept through the cliffs to the communications tent and wrote out three headquarters messages advising the Captain to put his First Sergeant on the point. When the Captain read these, he looked astonished and said that this had been his idea entirely; the First Sergeant led the column that day, firing his rifle gleefully at small birds overhead. He succumbed to a feeling of enormous power and, to test it, wrote out no messages at all for the next two days, meanwhile keeping the company’s messages in a DELIVERED status. The Captain said that this was a pleasure, the bastards should only shut up all the time like this. On the third day, the First Sergeant wrote out a message ordering that company casualties be made heavier to prove interest in the war effort; two men were surreptitiously shot that day in combat by the Junior-Grade Lieutenants. By then, the First Sergeant had already decided that, without question, he had surpassed any of the efforts of western civilization throughout five hundred generations of modern thought.
Headquarters seemed to take no notice. Their supply trucks came as always; enlisted men looked around and c
ursed with the troops and then went back. They did not even ask to see the First Sergeant because he had let it be known that he was too busy to be bothered. The First Sergeant got into schedule, taking naps in the afternoon so that he could refer daily stacks of headquarters messages in the early morning. One morning, he found that he felt so exceptionally well that he repaired the equipment, transmitted Hastings’ request for convalescent leave without a tremor, affixed the Captain’s code countersignature, and then destroyed the radio for good. It seemed the least that he could do in return for his good luck.
This proved to be the First Sergeant’s last error. A day later, a Corporal came from headquarters to see the Captain, and later the Captain came looking for the First Sergeant, his white face stricken with confusion. He asked who the hell had allowed that Hastings to sneak into the tent and thus get hold of the equipment? The First Sergeant said that he did not know anything about it, but it was perfectly plausible that this could happen; he had other duties and he had to leave the radio, sometime or other. The Captain said that this was fine because headquarters had now ordered Hastings’ recall and had arranged for him to be put in a hospital. The Corporal had come up to say something about a psychiatric discharge. The First Sergeant said that he would handle this, and he started to go to the Corporal to say that Hastings had just died, but the Captain followed and said that this was not necessary because he himself had had Hastings’ future decided; he would take care of things now. The Captain said that Hastings was not going to get out of any damned company of his any way at all; he would make things so hot for that lunatic now that it would not be funny for anyone at all. The Captain said that he was in control of the situation and there was no doubt about that whatsoever. The Sergeant left the Captain’s presence and went outside to cry for half an hour, but when he came back, he found the space empty, and he knew exactly what he was going to do. He stayed away from the Captain until nightfall and, as soon as it was safe, dictated a total war communique. In the morning, breathing heavily, he delivered it to the Captain. The Captain read it over twice and drooled. He said that this was the best thing that had ever happened to anyone in the entire unfortunate history of the Army. He said that he would go out immediately and make a speech to his troops. The First Sergeant said that he guessed that this would be all right with him; if he inspired them, it could count for something in combat.
The First Sergeant did not even try to listen to the mad Captain’s idiotic speech. He only stood behind and waited for it to finish. When Hastings came over after it was done and cut the Captain’s rear end harmlessly with a bayonet, the First Sergeant laughed like hell. But later, when he went to the broken equipment, wondering if he could ever set it up again, he was not so sure that it was funny. He wondered if he might not have done, instead, the most terrible thing of his entire life. Much later and under different circumstances, he recollected that he had not.
FLOWERS IN HIS EYES
Claus Felber
My son Ricky was born three months after our arrival on Altair IV. He looked like any other newborn baby. His skin was reddish and full of wrinkles.
He had two legs, two arms, on each hand were five fingers, and on each foot five toes. His head was covered with thick, black hair. Mouth, nose, ears were normal, yet he had . . . .
. . . no eyes!
Ruth had given birth without medical help. I had stayed by her side, holding her clenched hands, looking into the deep glow of her eyes in her distorted face, wiping the perspiration from her forehead, and I had suffered along with her.
When she learned that our son had no eyes, a change seemed to come over her. Her lips pressed together, her face was cold and unfeeling. She stood at Ricky’s cradle, staring at him, and passed her hand slowly across his face, over the eye-coverings. She pulled her hand back slowly and stared at me.
Her eyes didn’t see me—they had died.
She treated Ricky like a lifeless object, as a person takes care of an auto, washes dirty dishes or dusts the furniture. She fed him, clothed him, carried him in her arms. Impersonally, without real interest, nothing to indicate the existence of love, such as a mother normally feels for her child.
A year before we went roving toward Altair IV, I had made her acquaintance. She was a British girl who had been working in a large chemical industry in a seashore city. I was working on a big farm.
We were barely acquainted when we got married. I knew nothing about her, and she knew even less about me.
I felt lonely in those days and hated life on Earth. Ever since I was a tiny boy, any place where great crowds of men and women thronged was unpleasant to me. And Earth was overpopulated. I love the solitude, the tranquility, the sunsets here on Altair IV.
The thing that brought Ruth and me together cannot be termed love. Even sexual attraction played no part in it. She was not very attractive, a big rawboned woman with a striking face but colorless hair.
So marriage had arisen from a mutual loneliness, simply as a means of finally getting away from the rat race. and crowds of Earth. After our marriage, we went to a travel bureau and went to Altair IV.
I grew accustomed to the alien, chilly climate of Altair IV, and the planet showed no objections to my presence. I also resigned myself to the differentness of my son, but my wife could not get used to the planet and her child.
Ricky was remarkable. He couldn’t be compared with any other child. He slept constantly, except for the short intervals that were necessary for his feedings. At the beginning, I believed that he was also deaf and dumb, but this suspicion was unjustified.
In his third month, he began to utter noises, noises that sounded so strange and peculiar that they frightened me. The eye hollows, which some kindly fate had provided with eyelids, remained empty.
Frequently, my wife caused me to think that her mind was failing. She spoke little, did all her work in a mechanical fashion, hummed softly to herself, looked at me with wide eyes—incredulously and thoughtfully.
We spent most of our time in leisure. She lay back in a soft chair, her hands clasped in her lap, a glassy expression in her eyes. Often she spent an entire afternoon outside the house, letting the slight breeze slip past her emptied face and breathing the intoxicating odor of plants that resembled sword lilies.
I often watched Ruth, as she got up slowly, as if obeying some strange compulsion, and with puppetlike steps went toward the many-colored lilies, bent over them and inhaled the scent. The plants seemed to stretch up toward her, twist about, and whisper secret things to her.
She loved these remarkable plants. These flowers were her only friends. She was constantly planting more of these alien things in the yard. She would kneel beside them, would even lie down beside them. Her thin hands slipped along the long stems and caressed the blossoms. Under her tender hands, the blossoms changed colors. I got the impression that the plants were bewitching my wife.
Ruth was growing constantly more distant to me. When she was around the flowers, her face was rosy, her expression relaxed and her eyes gleamed. When she was not around the flowers, she gave the impression of a cadaver. Her face was pale, dark rings appeared under her eyes, the cheeks were sunken and wrinkles formed.
The day came when she no longer paid any attention to Ricky and me. She ate nothing; she did no more work. When the sun set, she no longer wanted to come into the house. I was forced to shut her up in her bedroom by force. She beat her fists against the paneling of the door, and her sobbing could be heard all over the house. Restlessly, she paced for hours back and forth in her room.
The flowers seemed to complain when Ruth left them. At the outset, I assumed that the wind created these noises, but even on nights when the air was calm, the plaints of the lilies reached my ears. I didn’t know what to do next. Derkalto, the next village, was nearly a hundred miles from our home. I tried to get Ruth into the jeep, but it was useless. She clung to me like a madwoman, pulled free and swung her arms wildly about.
One morning, whi
le dawn was breaking, I arose and went into the supply shed. I picked up a scythe. I had again locked my wife in her room.
I went to the lilies.
They were damp with dew, very beautiful, in gaudy colors. They swayed slightly in the morning breeze, and their buds were starting to open.
I chopped them all down.
I worked as if I were out on a spree. I swung the scythe untiringly. The flowers groaned and tried to evade my destructive Washes. Sticky juice ran like green blood from the shattered stems. The green juice sank into the ground. Breathing heavily, I stopped and looked at the scene of destruction.
No lily remained standing.
I threw the scythe away from me, half-sick. My stockings were soaked with the reeking juice.
The sun was bringing strangely formed cloud banks into colors as I entered the house. I knocked on Ruth’s bedroom door, but she didn’t answer.
I broke down the door.
She was lying on the bed, or more precisely, that which once was her body was lying there. The sight was horrible. Her body was chopped into tiny pieces, as if a madman had minced it with a sharp scythe. The bed clothing was covered with blood, blood that was no longer red but as green as the juice of the flowers that lay scattered on the soft ground outdoors.
Hours later, after I had pulled myself together a little, I dug a grave behind the house for her.
I burned the plants and searched daily all around the house, to determine if one of the devilish flowers had shown up.
With the death of my wife and the disappearance of the plants, things seemed to go better with my son. The strange noises stopped and contented, gurgling baby cries took their place. I was happy then.
