A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  But the sounds of the screaming birds still echoed in his memory, and he was not a man to imagine such elaborate monsters.

  I will go and discover what manner of creature it is that falls from the sky and makes such an awesome noise . . .

  Having made his decision, he packed up his fishing rod and proceeded to wade across the shallow section of the stream. He reached the other side, dried his feet on a deep patch of grass, pulled on his sandals and strode into the forest to locate the fallen object.

  His search took him some distance into the trees—somewhat further than he had expected—where the thick trunks pressed close together and the ground was always shrouded in a deep shadow. The undergrowth was sparse at this time of the year and he found no difficulty in making progress—yet he moved cautiously, having no idea what to expect.

  It took him some time to locate the object, mainly because it became difficult for him to hold to his original line of sight now that he was deep into the forest. But the deep, jagged cleft that the thing had carved down through the trees was a beacon to his questing eyes: through this tortured passageway the sunlight found ready access and Jarvis quickened his pace when he was near enough for the light to seem a ragged pillar, beckoning.

  Approaching the point of impact he slowed down and came to a halt. His listened, but could hear no sound. He summoned his courage and moved forward, wondering what he might find.

  The creature had fallen on its side and lay there staring at him like a crippled metal ogre. Its great legs were twisted underneath its massive trunk and its head was swung round at an incongruous angle. Instead of a face only a single polished disc stared back at him.

  Jarvis drew in his breath. The creature was at least three times bigger than a man and its body was covered with all manner of shiny protuberences, some of which had broken or been sheared off by its dreadful fall.

  He carefully made a wide circuit around the creature before he became emboldened enough to move closer and examine the lifeless humanoid in greater detail. He might be an old man but he was no superstitious fool. He recognized this creature as a machine, some sort of mechanical contrivance, the meaning of which was as yet lost to him. But he was determined to discover more.

  Why, here were massive arms of steel that could have crushed him like a cockroach. And these legs—what mighty engines drove them across the face of the earth?

  The creature still did not move. The fall had either killed it or knocked it senseless for a while.

  But from where had it fallen? And what was it doing here?

  Jarvis moved closer. He shook his head in amazement as he noted the immense girth of the creature and followed the line of one mighty shoulder until his eyes fastened upon the gigantic metal head. It was several times larger than a man’s and in the center was the bright circle that had first attracted his attention.

  The creature was lying on its side, its “face” pointing towards him. It took but a short step for him to be able to lean forward and peer down into that enigmatic pool of light. He looked past the grimy surface of the faceplate and at the pale white face on the other side. The creature’s eyes were closed and its mouth was open; a faint dribble of blood welled from its mouth and trickled down its chin. Its skin had the same pale, translucent quality as the belly of a fish.

  Jarvis recoiled in surprise and hastily crossed himself.

  He knew beyond doubt that he had looked down upon one of the space people.

  His legs began to shake. Without wasting another moment he backed away from the fallen spaceman and turned around and ran as fast as he could back to the village.

  MATTARO regained consciousness and thought, I’m alive! And felt the great waves of pain begin to eat away at his mind. He winced, closed his eyes and wondered how much of him had survived. He ached all over but none of his limbs fell broken: the webbing had held. His left leg was bent at a painful angle but he could, with very little effort, withdraw it from the exoskeleton and give it some ease. The rest of his body felt numb and bruised. His head ached abominably.

  He tasted blood in his mouth and ran his tongue quickly around inside. No broken teeth; just some torn sections of his cheek where he must have gripped them in agony during the final seconds of his fall. Nothing to worry about.

  He was alive!

  Happily, he began to explore the condition of his suit. He could get no sense out of the computer; it was sullen and silent. This caused him some concern. If the computer turned out to have been badly damaged he was as good as trapped. Only the computer could activate the suit and get it moving—or open the access gate in the back of the suit. And if his power reserves were negative . . .

  Had he come so far to find himself in a situation just as hopeless as the one he had fled?

  He tried to calculate how much air he had left. But with no idea how long he had been unconscious this was an impossible task. And the computer couldn’t help him.

  He knew some sort of settlement was nearby, otherwise the computer wouldn’t have chosen to set him down here. But how could he be sure that anyone had witnessed his hasty descent—and what would they make of it if they had?

  His mind—already accustomed to dealing with an impossible situation and dulled by the impact of his fall—tried to devise some worthwhile plan of action. He waited until a full measure of feeling had returned to his limbs, then flexed them experimentally. He thought that he could detect a faint murmur of activity inside the computer casing and this made him hopeful. He tried again to set the suit moving; he moved his legs about inside the exoskeleton but only found resistance. The suit refused to be budged.

  After a while he gave up and considered the alternative.

  “Open the access hatch,” he directed.

  No acknowledgment was forthcoming from the silent computer. The vital panel directly behind Mattaro didn’t budge an inch. Sweating, he repeated the command.

  “Open the access hatch.”

  For just a fraction of a second something stirred inside the damaged brain of the computer. Perhaps some last measure of residual energy prodded the machine into a simple gesture of assistance and, after this miserable erg of power had been dissipated, it slumped back into immobility.

  Behind Mattaro the access hatch had begun to move. It had swung open a fraction—and stayed so. The bitter alien air creeping into his suit confirmed the fact.

  Mattaro swore. He repeated the command over and over again and, when this proved ineffective, withdrew his arms from the exoskeleton and beat upon the weighty access hatch with what strength he could exert from his awkward reach. But it would not be moved any further.

  He could still hear a threshold whirr of activity inside the computer, but he wasn’t sure that the sound was genuine—it could have been a product of his own wishful thinking.

  He felt light-headed and slumped back into the webbing. Strange, but he couldn’t recall feeling like this before. Perhaps it was the fall—and the air. He could feel it stinging the inside of his nostrils and coursing down into his lungs.

  Of course—that would explain his peculiar light-headedness. It was the foul, unfiltered air of this damned planet that was making him feel so strange. But it was the only air he could depend on and it was better than none.

  He kept hoping that the computer might eventually reorganize itself and get him out of this mess. In the meantime he was alive and reasonably well off. The next misfortune he would have to face would be hunger—and to alleviate that he would have to find some way of getting out of his suit.

  “Open the access hatch,” he mumbled. “Open the access hatch—”

  But the hatch remained stubbornly at its fixed position.

  Through the dust-shrouded faceplate he could make out the wide trunks of the trees and, in the distance, some patched were the sunlight played on some branches in a clearing. The inside of the suit had cooled and that was something he could be thankful for. He could have come down in the tropics of the planet and might have had
to endure a slow roasting before nightfall—or he could just as easily have been dumped into the sea if the power had given out earlier. There were plenty of alternatives, all right. But here he was and, in one way or another, he was still alive.

  In one way or another . . .

  He kept talking to the computer, trying to cajole it back into some useful activity. He still wasn’t convinced that his cards had run out and he was determined to shake some life back into the stubborn little machine.

  It was some time before he noticed the dark faces peering down through his faceplate.

  AT FIRST the townspeople thought that Jarvis had been drinking too much, or had been taken by the sun; but when they saw that he was indeed sober and that it had been a vision and not the heat of the sun that had dazzled his mind, then some of his excitement began to carry over to them.

  Nobody had ever seen one of the space people—at least not for generations. The relatively short recorded history of their world was filled with the memory and mythology of the creatures who watched over them, but no one living had actually seen one of them at first hand, as Jarvis insisted he had.

  “It’s out there, in the forest just beyond the stream,” he told them. “It fell down out of the sky and—”

  “And there was a man inside, you say?” somebody asked.

  “No. I say there was a spaceman inside. He was all pale—kind of like a grub inside a shell.”

  They hastily crossed themselves and, forming a citizen’s committee, herded Jarvis off to meet the town council. These seven men were older and wiser than anyone else in the village and it fell to them to make all the important decisions.

  Jarvis faced the mayor unflinchingly and repeated his story in detail. The council listened attentively, prepared to be skeptical.

  “Could you describe this machine?”, the mayor asked. He was old and arthritic and often querulous, but his fancy had been captured by this loafer’s confession. “In detail, if you can.”

  “Well, it was shaped like a man, only much bigger.” Jarvis made an awkward diagram with his hands, a gesture that was meant to imply gigantic dimensions. “It had two arms and two legs and a monstrous head that—”

  The mayor swung around in his chair and conferred with his councilmen. An air of portentous gravity descended upon the dark-paneled room; Jarvis waited nervously for a decision. From the expressions of grave concern he could detect on the faces of the council, it seemed that they were prepared to accept his story at face value.

  “Wait outside, please, Jarvis,” the mayor requested. “We will join you in a moment and then you will take us to your discovery, so that we may all see this creature at close range.”

  Jarvis bowed respectfully and went back outside to where a great number of townspeople had already assembled around the humble civic center.

  Mayor Dunstable led his councilmen deep into the ancient cellars of the town hall. They paused outside a stout wooden door, crossed themselves three times, then held their positions while the mayor rose and unlatched the heavy wooden bar of the door and slipped softly inside. Once he had disappeared and the door had been discreetly closed behind him, the councilmen sat cross-legged and assumed a posture of silent meditation.

  It was dark inside the Shrine. The only light came from a solitary flame set in an ornate silver chalice upon the altar. The mayor kneeled just inside the threshold and offered up a few precious moments of his lifetime in respectful meditation. The appropriate ritual completed, he rose and walked boldly towards the altar.

  A half a dozen steps closed the distance. The Shrine was small and had never been intended to accommodate more than one man, and he the supreme arbiter of the township.

  Dunstable ascended the three short steps leading up to the altar and reached out for the deep glass case that rested immediately in front of the chalice. Underneath the dusty lid the faded face of the Handbook was kept securely locked away from prying eyes. Dunstable ran his arthritic fingers along one side of the case until the personality-keyed lock snapped open the glass lid. He sighed, whispered some appropriate words of thanks and raised the lid. The Handbook was exposed and his hands shook as he reached for it.

  He handled the ancient volume with reverence. In all his long period of office he had only had occasion to consult the holy tome thrice before. The book held all his people’s past and all their future—but its wisdom had to be used sparingly and only when all other knowledge failed or it would turn to poison. Its random and unrestricted use on other planets—including the place of human origins—had destroyed men’s minds and turned them against one another.

  BREATHING heavily, Dunstable consulted the index, turning the heavy textured pages of the Handbook with loving care. It was so quiet in the Shrine that the sound of his own excited breathing seemed monstrously loud and out of all proportion.

  He studied the relevant passages of the text for some time, reading slowly in order to impress each vital piece of information upon his no longer agile memory. Sometimes he nodded sagaciously to himself or smiled at some particularly enlightening snippet of information—on other occasions his eyes widened momentarily in shock and surprise. The Handbook held many dazzling secrets that were not destined for the simple minds of this world.

  When he had satisfied his curiosity he reverently closed the book and relocked the glass lid. He bowed and crossed himself three times to give himself time to erase irrelevancies from his mind, whispered a short word of prayer for the fallen spaceman and then went outside to rejoin his councilmen.

  He summoned them from their meditations briskly: “Very well, gentlemen, now we may proceed.”

  Jarvis led the way. He took them by way of the river road, the councilmen breathing heavily from the unaccustomed exertion. A small army of inquisitive townspeople followed at a respectful distance. News of Jarvis’ discovery had traveled fast.

  The machine had not moved from where Jarvis had found it. It lay at the bottom of the ragged shaft in the trees and faced them with its lifeless eye.

  The mayor drew in his breath sharply. He murmured the appropriate words prescribed by the Handbook and crossed himself three times. His councilmen stood silent and watchful. Behind them, clustered in small groups among the trees, the hundred or more curious onlookers kept a cautious distance and did not need to be dissuaded from coming any closer. The spaceman made no response to the mayor’s greeting.

  “You see,” Jarvis said, “it doesn’t move. Perhaps it can’t move.”

  The mayor nodded. “Very likely.” He moved closer and walked a careful circuit around the massive creature, drawing upon his recent reserves of memory of the Handbook to help him identify the exact nature of the fallen object.

  “It is a spaceman, isn’t it?” Jarvis asked.

  Dunstable waited until he had completed his study of the object before he commented. He looked up through the great, broken shaft in the forest towards the sunlit sky.

  “It is, Jarvis,” he agreed.

  There was no point in denying what was self-evident. He had stepped close and looked through the dusty faceplate and had seen the pale white face that Jarvis had spoken of. The eyes had been momentarily closed, but the identity of the creature had been unmistakable.

  By now the other councilmen had crowded close. “My friends,” Dunstable informed them, “Jarvis had indeed discovered one of the space people. How he came here we do not know. He has fallen from the sky and it has been our privilege to find him. Let us pray—”

  With one accord all bowed their heads while the mayor intoned words from the Handbook whose meaning he himself did not fully understand, though they should have evoked a response from the object on the ground.

  But the spaceman did not move and Dunstable began to wonder if the visitor from the skies were alive or if the terrible fall had killed him.

  His prayer completed, the mayor lifted his head with a slight suggestion of impatience. Around him the woods were alive with peering, frightened faces. He motion
ed them to come closer so that they might hear what he had to say.

  “My good friends, this is indeed a wondrous day for us. This—this machine you see here is what is known as a ‘space suit’. It is meant to protect the space people from all sorts of dangers—remember, their empire is vast and beyond our comprehension; it accommodates many thousands of worlds like ours and many more where environments are hostile and dangerous. They must protect themselves from inhospitable climates and even airlessness—and they have evolved these miraculous uniforms in order to move without difficulty from world to world.”

  While he spoke he moved closer to the fallen spaceman and indicated certain aspects of the massive space armor. “As you see, this suit is many times larger than the man inside, yet these great metal limbs respond effortlessly to his movements and endow him with the ability to perform prodigious feats that would otherwise be beyond his capabilities. In a sense the machine is alive and ordinarily should respond to—”

  “But how did he get here?” someone interrupted. It was a cry from among the many faces pressing closer through the trees.

  Dunstable hesitated. “We can’t be sure. Perhaps he was working somewhere in the sky.” He gestured overhead.

  “And he fell from there?” Another incredulous voice.

  Dunstable frowned. Just how much information might he safely—and with good intentions—divulge? The Handbook left much to his judgment. He knew from it that mighty ships moved between distant worlds and that some day—in an unimaginable distant future—the descendants of his people would evolve sufficiently in knowledge to lay claim to a similar heritage. It seemed quite likely that one of these wondrous sky chariots might have been passing nearby when the spaceman fell. Dunstable had used the prescribed words to arouse the visitor, but perhaps there was a limit to what he could tell his people. The words, of course, hadn’t worked.

  “He fell—and that is all we know,” he replied.

  “But is he alive?” another asked.

  The mayor raised both hands in a gesture for silence. “That we must now ascertain.” He nodded towards Jarvis. “Perhaps you found him for a reason. He may respond to you. Take a closer look, will you?”