Return to Otherness (1962) SSC

by Henry Kuttner

  He stopped on the threshold of the storage room. Benjy White was solving nothing by twisting his hands together in an agonized way above the spindle-legged control carriage. The robot-cradle, of course, was empty. Martine wore the transmitter helmet, and by the look on his face Dyson knew the robot’s activation directions were coming in clear and strong. Martine knew everything.

  His eyes met Dyson’s.

  Dyson turned and ran.

  A doll-sized Johnny Dyson ran across the contours of a doll-sized chart away from a doll-sized vinylite spaceship. He didn’t dare look up because in the sky the face of a gigantic Johnny Dyson might be looking down at him. Time had slipped back fifteen minutes and he had fallen into the microcosm, and somewhere up there, enormous in an inconceivably vast spaceship, the whole scene was playing itself over again, from the moment Martine’s voice had snapped an order-to-report into the intercom.

  The vast, invisible finger of giant Johnny Dyson, fifteen-minutes-ago-Johnny-Dyson, had traced his trail in advance. He knew where to run. He knew the route the robot would have followed. But the time-factor was unknown.

  The fuel might already be stored in the cache and camouflaged. Even if it had, still he had failed. For White hadn’t erased the robot’s memory track and Martine could follow every step of the way through the path of the metal mind.

  Martine was running behind him now. So was White, he thought. But he didn’t look back. He was running from more than Martine, more than men. He ran from the power and tyranny of a suicidal and homicidal Earth. Under his feel the ground rang hollow, as though his subterranean palace were already built, and waited, a hollow Eden, for its inheritor.

  Then on the hillside ahead he saw a flicker of moonlight on metal and in the grey pallor of the night the robot came ponderously into his range of vision, toiling mindlessly under its fuel load toward the cave.

  A shout sounded behind him, ringing thinly in the cold air. Glancing back, Dyson saw the dwarfed figures still running behind him. The ship looked doll-sized beyond.

  Elusion persisted. Everything had gone small. Ahead of the minimized White came marionette Martine, the transmitter gleaming on his head, while he guided a puppet’s puppet, the control box, at a grotesque rocking run across the plain. All of them, pursuers and pursued, moved with the nightmare slowness and lightness that Martian gravity induces.

  Dyson’s head start - for he had plunged headlong out of the ship, and the others had lost time searching for him in the corridors - was a totally useless thing. He knew it. But he could not yet give up the faint hope that somehow, somehow, a way would be revealed to him at the last crucial moment.

  There was a white flash in the dark, and the thin report of a revolver behind him. Probably it was a warning only, for he heard no whine of a bullet going by. He looked up, meeting the crooked gaze of the two moons like two uneven eyes - eyes in the face of giant Johnny Dyson. The sky around him was rilled with conflict. Orion’s club was lifted, Taurus’ horns were lowered, Andromeda struggled in her chains, Sirius was a bared and gleaming fang. And bright among them hung a blue-green planet - blue for purity, green for peace …

  Dyson’s vision telescoped through a dizzy spiral, down diminishing vortices of time and space. At the end was the blue-green world and ten-years-ago Johnny Dyson, fifteen-years-ago Johnny Dyson, quite ignorant and quite safe. The world was his parents’ responsibility in those golden days. Not his. Oh youth, youth, lovely and lost and safe.

  Martine fired again.

  Here-and-now Johnny Dyson ran on toward the robot, which was in the act of vanishing into the dark mouth of the cave. The cave was only an ant-burrow and the robot was a shining pale ant with a grain of sand clutched in its mandibles. Spatial dimensions had lost all importance along with the rest of the natural laws. Only in dreams did you seem to float like this when you leaped, running as if through glue from pursuing dangers.

  Directly ahead was a pile of shielded canisters, damper-hooks in place. Dyson slowed to study them, trying confusedly to estimate how many foot-pounds or tons of lifting pressure they represented. Not enough to lift the ship. There were only eight. If the robot had hidden all the rest, then Mars’ apron-strings would still be strong enough to tie the ship down forever. If - if … of course! If the rest were in the cave, and if he could get there first, then the answer was childishly easy. How could he have missed it? Exultation boiled up in him, filling his throat with triumph.

  He heard his name shouted, and he sprinted, bending low at each jump so the thrust of his toe would carry him forward and not up against the easy gravity of Mars.

  He reached the cave mouth just as the robot’s emerging thorax caught light from the rolling moons. It did not pause, but its false pupils examined him, the radio-atomic brain analyzed him as a mobile obstacle, and the great worker-ant walked straight ahead. Dyson got out of the way. The worker-ant moved majestically downhill toward the remaining fuel-canisters.

  Dyson paused at the cave mouth, peering in. It was so dark in there. He hesitated for a moment, knowing the solution to his problem was waiting for him in the dark, but feeling a curious reluctance to enter that black enclosure.

  He glanced back. Martine and White were much closer, running silently, and the robot was moving down the slope toward them ahead of its twin shadows. There were more shadows than men moving toward him up the hill, twice as many shadows, in twinned pairs, one black and one gray on the purple mosses. Deimos and Phobos spun through the emptiness overhead, pale silver shaping the ghosts of all moving things behind them on the ground. But it was Phobos that guided them. Phobos, who is Fear.

  Dyson turned his back on them. They were still far enough away to look tiny. He could reach across the vinylite map and take the control box away from Martine between his thumb and finger …

  Instead he took out a pocket fluorescent and shook it alight. With an uncomfortable feeling that he was somehow violating a sanctuary, he stepped into the cave. There were the canisters, row upon row against the rocky wall.

  This was the mouth of Eden. He had chosen this site for his underground palace, hidden safely away in case after all rescue ships did come from Earth. But he hadn’t really expected rescue ships. The spreading cloud of his childhood had gradually swelled until Earth was scarcely visible to him any more. It was a shadow cast before the flash of the Blow-Up.

  Working quickly, with both hands, he stripped the damper-hooks from the canisters …

  A few minutes afterward he ran out of the cave and down the slope toward the approaching men with their escort of nervous shadows. His shout broke on a high-pitched note of triumph.

  “Walk right in!” he cried across the plain. “It’s all there, Martine! It’s all in the cave! Go and get it!”

  Then the thunders began.

  There wasn’t any real danger. Not as long as they stayed out of the cave. The fuel was blowing off canister by canister, not all at once, because each was a unit and constructed with every safety precaution mankind knew how to apply. Each one had a half-life of sixty-five seconds. They weren’t blowing all at once because Dyson hadn’t activated them all at once. He had only two hands.

  One canister blew. Eight seconds later another one blew. The power that should have lifted a spaceship was going into light and sound and radiation too subtle to look dangerous. A man could walk into the cave and right up to the canisters, if he wanted. And he could walk out again.

  What would happen to his cells, his marrow, his blood and bones, later, was another matter. Radium can be leached from the human body. But the invisible poisons in the cave couldn’t be, ever. Gamma radiation leprosy, quite incurable, was pouring out of the canisters into the alternate white glare and blind darkness of the cave.

  Before that threat human conflicts altered.

  But not quite instantly. There was a brief, stunned interval in which Martine struggled with the readjustment of his own mind, changing rage over into terror, triumph into the awareness of defeat.


  He pointed his revolver.

  “Go back in,” he said. “Turn it off.”

  “No,” Dyson said.

  “I’ll count three.”

  “I’d rather be dead.”

  Martine hesitated a moment. Then, “White,” he said.

  White was staring at the bright mouth of the cave. It blinked and went dark. He licked his lips.

  “No, sir,” he said.

  “Go in yourself,” Dyson said to Martine, grinning, seeing the older man’s face lighted again by the renewed glare from the cave. He waited until the thunder ceased briefly to vibrate, and said, “It’s easy, you know. Just push the dampers in again. Either way, you lose. Stay where you are and you’re washed up as a commander. Or go in the cave. You’ll get back to Earth with the cargo and maybe you’ll wear more stars on your shoulders - only you won’t have any shoulders.”

  “Shut up,” Martine said crisply.

  The thunders rolled.

  Martine drew a noisy breath and yanked the control-carriage toward him. It came on its spindling legs, like a dog. He turned a dial. There was a clank of metal on rock and the robot moved slowly into sight toward them. He had cancelled its commands, then, and Dyson’s orders were erased from its mind. But too late. Much too late.

  Now it began to move mindlessly toward the cave.

  “Fine,” Dyson jeered. “That’s the way to save the fuel, all right. It’ll ruin the robot, of course, so it can’t pilot the ship. But what of it? Mars is a nice place to live!”

  Martine began to curse him.

  “Oh shut up,” Dyson said. “You’re through. So’s Earth. When the Blow-Up comes, we’ll be out of it right here in our Ark, watching the Deluge from a nice safe distance.”

  The thunders rolled.

  Martine made his mistake. He fell back on argument. His voice was still firm, but what he said was, “Earth needs our cargo -”

  Dyson took a long chance and swung his arm. The revolver sailed out of Martine’s grip and thudded softly on the moss at Benjy White’s feet. That meant Martine’s finger hadn’t been inside the guard, on the trigger. And that meant many things …

  “Our cargo?” Dyson echoed, poised on his toes and watching Martine intently, ready to forestall the slightest move toward the revolver. He wanted to pick it up himself, but that would instantly change the plane of conflict from moral to physical, and on the moral plane he knew he was already the winner.

  Why didn’t White pick it up? Why had White come along, anyhow? Whose side was he on? Probably he didn’t know himself. Dyson grimaced angrily at him. But he kept on talking:

  “We haven’t got the cure for the Blow-Up in our cargo, Martine. There isn’t any cure. And for one reason - just one. That’s people. Men and women. They’re no good, Martine. So they’re going to die. All of them.” He nodded toward the roaring cave. “This is the way the world ends,” he said.

  Martine looked up the slope, listened to the thunder. He didn’t move. He had nothing to say. Watching him, Dyson realized that he didn’t care whether White picked up the gun or not. He had won without guns.

  “All right, Martine,” he said, almost casually. “Let’s have the helmet. You won’t be needing the transmitter anymore.”

  There was a pause. The thunders rolled. Dyson glanced at White, who was stating at the pale eye of the cave. Dyson stooped swiftly and picked up the gun.

  “Johnny.”

  It was White, still looking as if hypnotized into the cave-eye.

  “Well?”

  “Listen.”

  The thunders rolled.

  “I hear it,” Dyson said. Martine neither moved nor spoke.

  “Pint-sized Blow-Up,” White said. “The real one would be a lot worse. Noisier. Somehow I never thought of that before. The noise.”

  “We won’t hear it.”

  “We’d see it, though. I’d see it. I’d know.” He wrenched his gaze away from the glare of the cavern and looked up into the dark, toward the blue-green star of Earth. “Poochie,” he said slowly, “was always afraid of thunder.”

  Dyson felt the bottom of his stomach drop out. He didn’t know why yet, not with his mind. But there was some danger approaching that had taken the lead away from him, out of his control. It was coming closer and closer, with every word White spoke and every slow thought that took shape in his brain.

  “I told you about Poochie,” White said. “She used to be my wife, once. And the only thing that ever scared her was thunder. Used to hang on to me when -”

  The thunders rolled.

  “Benjy,” Dyson said, his mouth dry. “Benjy -”

  “So I’m crazy,” White said. “Can’t help what you think, lad. I never thought the Blow-Up would sound like this. I think I ought to be around where Poochie could find me, if she wanted, in case the Blow-Up comes.”

  He started up the slope toward the cave.

  “Benjy!” Dyson said. His voice trembled. “You’d be dead in six months. And what good would it do? Our cargo can’t stop the Blow-Up.”

  “How do you know?” White asked over his shoulder. “It’s not for us to say. Our job wasn’t to stop the Blow-Up. It was to get some Martian ores back home. A man ought to do his job if he takes the pay for it.”

  “Benjy! Don’t move! I tell you, you can’t stop the Blow-Up!”

  “I sure as hell can stop this one,” White said, and went on up the slope.

  “Benjy, if you take another step I’ll shoot!”

  White glanced over his shoulder.

  “No you won’t, Johnny,” he said. “No, you won’t.”

  Dyson tried to squeeze the trigger.

  He couldn’t.

  He concentrated on White’s silhouetted back and sighted along the revolver, and he forced a command down his arm, into his index finger. But the message never got through. Martine moved faster.

  Martine took the long, quick forward step and slammed the edge of his palm down on Dyson’s wrist. The gun exploded in mid-air as it spun away.

  The thunders rolled.

  “Benjy!” Dyson shouted. It came out a thin whisper. He had to stop Benjy. He had to. Benjy mustn’t go into that cave. It was very, very wrong, somehow, for anyone but Johnny Dyson to go into that cave. He took a step forward, but Martine, revolver ready, blocked his path. Martine, the truant officer, ready to collar him and drag him back to Earth. Back to work, discipline, responsibility.

  Work. Discipline. Responsibility -

  “Oh, no, no!” Johnny Dyson whispered. In his mind’s eye he saw his fragile Martian Eden glisten under the moons, all its palaces and shining towers beginning to dissolve around him.

  A Geiger began to tick in his brain.

  It ticked faster and louder.

  It roared.

  Then he felt the flash. He felt the top of his head open and the bursting nova explode and the ballooning black cloud spurt upward through the sutures of his skull. The cloud rolled out enormously, its edges curling over and under in the familiar, the terrible shape of doom. He looked up to see it …

  He saw the Earth-star, blue-green against the dark. He saw it change. He saw it change …

  The explosion in his head must have been only a faint and remote echo, he thought, of that other and larger and farther nova-burst. For an instant half the sky was blotted out in the white glare of exploding Earth. He saw it happen.

  Then the glare receded and condensed. The Earth-star took shape again, no longer blue for purity and green for peace, but a dreadful, shaking, unstable glow. This is the way the world ends … Not with a bang, but a whimper. He heard himself laughing. He stumbled up the slope after White.

  “Benjy!” he yelled. “Benjy, wait! It’s happened! Didn’t you hear? Look up - it’s happened!”

  White slogged on, not turning. Dyson labored after him, seized his shoulder. White paused and looked uncertainly into his face. Dyson couldn’t stay still. He couldn’t stop laughing. He danced - the old, old dance of triumph. When Martine reache
d the spot he danced around Martine too.

  “What’s happened?” Martine shouted at him.

  “The end of the world!” Dyson shrilled. “This is the way, all right. You must have heard it! Earth’s gone. We’re safe. Safe in Eden. Look up, you dopes, look up!”

  Two of the men looked up, while the third danced. Danced and laughed. Johnny couldn’t stop laughing, even when Martine and White lowered their gaze and stared at him.

  “Dyson,” Martine said hi a curious, low voice. “Dyson. Listen. Nothing’s happened. You must have - imagined it. Look up, see for yourself.”

  Johnny looked. It was still there, all right. A trembling white glare in the sky. He laughed more shrilly than ever.

  “But Dyson -” Martine said. White shook his head at him, reached out and took Johnny by the arm, stopping his dance.

  “It’s all right, Johnny,” he said. “You’re safe now. Everything’s fine. Now you just take it easy and wait for me. I’ll be back in a little while.” He whispered something to Martine. Then he started up the slope again, toward the cave.

  Johnny stared after him.

  “Benjy!”

  There was no answer.

  “Benjy, what’s the matter with you? You don’t need to save the fuel now. Earth’s gone. We’re safe. We don’t have to go back. Don’t you understand -”

  “Easy,” Martine said. “It’s all right.”

  White went on slowly up the hill, his shoulders hunched as if against a wind that was now blowing. He was getting smaller, and smaller, vanishing into the microcosm. Johnny Dyson blinked into the white eye of the cave. Then the rolling thunders swallowed Benjy.

  After a while they were in the ship again, ready for the take-off. And, after that, Martine and White talked as if they had actually left Mars, headed back toward - well, not Earth, because obviously there was no Earth. Where, then?

  Johnny tried to figure it out. When he asked questions the answers he got were so irrational that he had to translate them into his own terms; but presently he found a solution that satisfied him. When they said “Earth” they meant it only as a symbol. They were, logically enough, going to try to locate another habitable planet somewhere, a planet even better than Mars, where they could rebuild Eden.