“In a minute,” Josh said.
Matt went down the steps, his shoes thumping on the wooden treads. They had not turned on the lights, and what came through the small dusty windows was only enough to show the dim outlines of things. He banged his head on a heating duct and swore, and Barbie said rather impatiently, “We said we’d be up in a minute.”
“What’s the matter?” Matt demanded, blundering around the furnace. “Am I not supposed to come down here any more?”
“Sh-h!” Josh told him. “There, he’s just coming out. Don’t scare him back in again!”
The door of the root cellar was open. The children were crouched inside it, by the earthen rampart John Carter had constructed with such labor. In the circle of the rampart was a dark hole, and from it John Carter was emerging, very slowly, his eyes luminescent in the gloom. Barbie put two ice cubes on the ground before him, and he set his muzzle against them and lay panting, his flanks pulsing in a shallow, uneven rhythm.
“You’ll be all right,” Josh told him, and stroked his head. To Matt he said, “You don’t understand how important he is. There isn’t another kid anywhere around who has a real genuine Martian for a pet.”
“Come on,” said Matt harshly. “Upstairs.” The clammy air was making him shiver. Reluctantly the children rose and went past him. John Carter did not stir. He looked at Matt, and Matt drew back, slamming the door shut. He followed the children out of the cellar, but in his mind’s eye he could still see John Carter crouched behind his wall in the dark, tortured by a world that was not his, a world too big, too hot, too heavy.
Crouched behind his wall in the dark, and thinking.
No. Animals do not think. They feel. They can be lost, or frightened, or suffering, or a lot of things, but they’re all feelings, not thoughts. Only humans think.
On Earth.
Matt went out in the yard again. He went clear to the back of it where the fence ran along the alley, and took hold of the pickets in his two hands. He stood there staring at the neighbors’ back fences, at their garages and garbage cans, not seeing them, feeling the vague conviction that had been in the back of his mind grow and take shape and advance to a point where he could no longer pretend he didn’t see it.
“No,” he said to himself. “Fred would have known. The scientists would know. It couldn’t be, and not be known.”
Or couldn’t it? How did you measure possibility on another world?
The only mammal, Fred had said, and almost the only vertebrate. Why should one sole species survive when all the others were gone, unless it had an edge to begin with, an advantage?
Suppose a race. Suppose intelligence. Intelligence, perhaps, of a sort that human men, Earthly men, would not understand.
Suppose a race and a world. A dying world. Suppose that race being forced to change with its dying, to dwindle and adapt, to lose its cities and its writings and inventions, or whatever had taken the place of them, but not its mind. Never its mind, because mind would be the only barrier against destruction.
Suppose that race, physically altered, environmentally destitute, driven inward on its own thoughts. Wouldn’t it evolve all kinds of mental compensations, powers no Earthman would suspect or look for because he would be thinking in terms of what he knew, of Earthly life-forms? And wouldn’t such a race go to any lengths to hide its intelligence, its one last weapon, from the strangers who had come trampling in to take its world away?
Matt trembled. He looked up at the sky, and he knew what was different about it. It was no longer a solid shell that covered him. It was wide open, ripped and torn by the greedy ships, carrying the greedy men who had not been content with what they had. And through those rents the Outside had slipped in, and it would never be the same again. Never more the safe familiar Earth containing only what belonged to it, only what men could understand.
He stood there while a shower of rain crashed down and drenched him, and he did not feel it.
Then again, fiercely, Matt said, “No. I won’t believe that, it’s too—it’s like the lads believing their games while they play them.”
But were they only games?
He started at the sound of Lucille’s voice calling him in. He knew by the sound of it she was worried. He went back toward the house. She came part way to meet him, demanding to know what he was doing out in the rain. He let her chivvy him into the house and into dry clothes, and he kept telling her there was nothing wrong, but she was alarmed now and would not listen. “You lie down,” she said and covered him with a quilt, and then he heard her go downstairs and get on the telephone. He lay quiet for a few minutes, trying to get himself in hand, frightened and half ashamed of the state of his nerves. Sweat began to roll off him. He kicked the quilt away. The air inside the room was thick with moisture, heavy, stale. He found himself panting like—
Hell, it was no different from any summer heat wave, the bedroom was always hot and suffocating. It was always hard to breathe.
He left it and went downstairs.
Lucille was just getting up from the phone. “Who were you calling?” he asked.
“Fred,” she said, giving him that no-nonsense look she got when she decided that something had to be done. “He said he’d be here in the morning. I’m going to find out what’s the matter with you.”
Matt said irritably, “But my doctor—”
“Your doctor doesn’t know you like Fred does, and he doesn’t care as much about you, either.”
Matt grumbled, but it was too late to do anything about it now. Then he began to think that maybe Fred was the answer. Maybe if he told him—
What?
All right, drag it out, put it into words. I think John Carter is more than a harmless little beast. I think he’s intelligent. I think that he hates me, that he hates this Earth where he’s been brought so casually as a pet. I think he’s doing something to my children.
Could he say that to Fred?
Lucille was calling the children for supper. “Oh lord, they’re down in that damp cellar again. Josh, Barbie, come up here this minute!”
Matt put his head between his hands. It hurt.
He slept downstairs that night, on the living-room couch. He had done that before during heat waves. It gave the illusion of being cooler. He dosed himself heavily with aspirin, and for a time he lapsed into a drugged slumber full of dark shapes that pursued him over a landscape he could not quite see but which he knew was alien and hateful. Then in the silent hours between midnight and dawn he started up in panic. He could not breathe. The air was as thick as water, and a weight as of mountain ranges lay along his chest, his thighs, his shoulders.
He turned on a lamp and began to move up and down, his chest heaving, his hands never still, a glassy terror spreading over him, sheathing him as a sleet storm sheathes a tree.
The living room looked strange, the familiar things overlaid with a gloss of fear, traces everywhere of Josh and Barbie, of Lucille and himself, suddenly significant, suddenly sharp and poignantly symbolic as items in a Dali painting. Lucille’s lending-library novel with the brown paper cover, Lucille’s stiff Staffordshire figures on the mantel staring with their stiff white faces. An empty pop bottle, no, two empty pop bottles shoved guiltily behind the couch. Small blue jacket with the pocket torn, a drift of comic books under the lamp, his own chair with the cushion worn hollow by his own sitting. Patterns. Wallpaper, slipcovers, rug. Colors, harsh and queer. He was aware of the floor beneath his feet. It was thin. It was a skim of ice over a black pool, ready to crack and let him fall, into the place where the stranger lay, and thought, and waited.
All over Mars they lie and wait, he thought, in their places under the ground. Thinking back and forth in the bitter nights, hating the men, human men who pull them out of their burrows and kill them and dissect them and pry at their brains and bones and nerves and organs. The men who tie little strings around their necks and put them in cages, and never think to look behind their eyes and see what lurks there
.
Hating, and wanting their world back. Hating, and quietly driving men insane.
Just as this one is doing to me, he thought. He’s suffering. He’s crushed in this gravity, and strangling in this air, and he’s going to make me suffer too. He knows he can never go home. He knows he’s dying. How far can he push it? Can he only make me feel what he’s feeling, or can he…?
Suppose he can. Suppose he knows I’m going to tell Fred. Suppose he stops me.
After that, what? Josh? Barbie? Lucille?
Matt stood still in the middle of the floor. “He’s killing me,” he thought. “He knows.”
He began to shake. The room turned dark in front of him. He wanted to vomit, but there was a strange paralysis creeping over him, tightening his muscles, knotting them into ropes to bind him. He felt cold, as though he were already dead.
He turned. He did not run, he was past running, but he walked faster with every step, stiffly, like a mechanical thing wound up and accelerating toward a magnetic goal. He opened the cellar door, and the steps took him down. He remembered to switch on the light.
It was only a short distance to the north corner, and the half-open door.
John Carter made a sound, the only one Matt had ever heard him make. A small thin shriek, purely animal and quite, quite brainless.
It was the next morning, and Fred had come on the early train. They were standing, all of them, grouped together on the lawn near the back fence, looking down. The children were crying.
“A dog must have got him,” Matt said. He had said that before, but his voice still lacked the solid conviction of a statement known and believed. He wanted to look up and away from what lay on the ground by his feet, but he did not. Fred was facing him.
“Poor little thing,” said Lucille. “I suppose it must have been a dog. Can you tell, Fred?”
Fred bent over. Matt stared at his own shoes. Inside his pockets, his hands were curled tightly into fists. He wanted to talk. The temptation, the longing, the lust to talk was almost more than he could endure. He put the edges of his tongue between his teeth and bit it.
After a minute Fred said, “It was a dog.”
Matt glanced at him, and now it was Fred who scowled at his shoes.
“I hope it didn’t hurt him,” Lucille said.
Fred said, “I don’t think it did.”
Miserably, between his sobs, Josh wailed, “I used the biggest stone I could find. I never thought he could have moved it.”
“There, now,” said Lucille, putting her arms around the children. She led them away toward the house, talking briskly, the usual mixture of nonsense and sound truth that parents administer at such times. Matt wanted to go away too, but Fred made no move, and somehow he knew that it was no use going. He stood with his head down, feeling the sun beat on the back of it like a hammer on a flinching anvil.
He wished Fred would say something. Fred remained silent.
Finally Matt said, “Thanks.”
“I didn’t see any reason to tell them. They’d find it hard to understand.”
“Do you understand?” Matt cried out. “I don’t. Why did I do such a thing? How could I have done such a thing?”
“Fear. I think I mentioned that once. Xenophobia.”
“But that’s not—I mean, I don’t see how it applies.”
“It’s not just a fear of unknown places, but of unknown things. Anything at all that’s strange and unfamiliar.” He shook his head. “I’ll admit I didn’t expect to find that at home, but I should have thought of the possibility. It’s something to remember.”
“I was so sure,” Matt said. “It all fitted together, everything.”
“The human imagination is a wonderful thing. I know, I’ve just put in ten months nursing it. I suppose you had symptoms?”
“God, yes.” Matt enumerated them. “Last night it got so bad I thought—” He glanced at the small body by his feet. “As soon as I did that it all went away. Even the headache. What’s the word? Psycho-something?”
“Psychosomatic. Yes. The guys out there developed everything from corns to angina, scared of where they were and wanting to leave it.”
“I’m ashamed,” Matt said. “I feel…” He moved his hands.
“Well,” said Fred, “it was only an animal. Probably it wouldn’t have lived long anyway. I shouldn’t have brought it.”
“Oh for Chrissake,” Matt said, and turned away. Josh and Barbie were coming out of the house again. Josh carried a box, and Barbie had a bunch of flowers and a spade. They passed by the place on the lawn where the big stone had been moved and the hole opened up again—only part way, and from the outside, but Matt hoped they would not know that. He hoped they would not ever know that.
He went to meet them.
He kneeled down and put an arm around each of them. “Don’t feel bad,” he said desperately. “Look I’ll tell you what we’ll do. We’ll go and find the best place in the country to buy a pup. Wouldn’t you like that, a fine new puppy, all your own?”
The Queer Ones
I ran down Buckhorn Mountain in the cloud and rain, carrying the boy in my arms. The green lightning flashed among the trees. Buckhorn is no stranger to lightning, but this was different. It did not come from the clouds, and there was no thunder with it. It ran low, searching the thickets, the brush-choked gullies, the wet hollows full of brambles and poison ivy. Thick green hungry snakes looking for something. Looking for me.
Looking for the boy who had started it all.
He peered up at me, clinging like a lemur to my coat as I went headlong down the slope. His eyes were copper-colored. They had seen a lot for all the two-and-a-half years they had been open on this world. They were frightened now, not just vaguely as you might expect from a child his age, but intelligently. And in his curiously sweet shrill voice he asked:
“Why mus’ they kill us?”
“Never mind,” I said, and ran and ran, and the green lightning hunted us down the mountainside.
It was Doc Callendar, the County Health Officer, who got me in on the whole thing. I am Hank Temple, owner, editor, feature writer, legman, and general roustabout of the Newhale News, serving Newhale and the rural and mountain areas around it. Doc Callendar, Sheriff Ed Betts and I are old friends, and we work together, helping out where we can. So one hot morning in July my phone rang and it was Doc, sounding kind of dazed.
“Hank?” he said. “I’m at the hospital. Would you want to take a run up here for a minute?”
“Who’s hurt?”
“Nobody. Just thought something might interest you.”
Doc was being cagey because anything you say over the phone in Newhale is public property. But even so the tone of his voice put prickles between my shoulder blades. It didn’t sound like Doc at all
“Sure,” I said. “Right away.”
Newhale is the county seat, a small town, and a high town. It lies in an upland hollow of the Appalachians, a little clutter of old red brick buildings with porches on thin wooden pillars, and frame houses ranging from new white to weathered silver-gray, centered around the dumpy courthouse. A very noisy stream bisects the town. The tannery and the feed-mill are its chief industries, with some mining nearby. The high-line comes down a neat cut on Tunkhannock Ridge to the east and goes away up a neat cut on Goat Hill to the west. Over all towers the rough impressive hump of Buckhorn Mountain, green on the ridges, shadowed blue in the folds, wrapped more often than not in a mist of cloud.
There is not much money nor any great fame to be made in Newhale, but there are other reasons for living here. The girl I wanted to marry couldn’t quite see them, and it’s hard to explain to a woman why you would rather have six pages of small-town newspaper that belong to you than the whole of the New York Times if you only work for it. I gave up trying, and she went off to marry a gray flannel suit, and every time I unlimber my fishing rod or my deer rifle I’m happy for her.
The hospital is larger than you might expect, since
it serves a big part of the county. Sitting on a spur of Goat Hill well away from the tannery, it’s an old building with a couple of new wings tacked on. I found Doc Callendar in his office, with Bossert. Bossert is the resident doctor, a young guy who knows more, in the old phrase, than a jackass could haul downhill. This morning he looked as though he wasn’t sure of his own name.
“Yesterday,” Doc said, “one of the Tate girls brought her kid in, a little boy. I wasn’t here, I was out testing those wells up by Pinecrest. But I’ve seen him before. He’s a stand-out, a real handsome youngster.”
“Precocious,” said Jim Bossert nervously. “Very precocious for his age. Physically, too. Coordination and musculature well developed. And his coloring—”
“What about it?” I asked.
“Odd. I don’t know. I noticed it, and then forgot it. The kid looked as though he’d been through a meat-grinder. His mother said the other kids had ganged up and beaten him, and he hadn’t been right for several days, so she reckoned she’d better bring him in. She’s not much more than nineteen herself. I took some X-rays—”
Bossert picked up a couple of pictures from the desk and shoved them at me. His hands shook, making the stiff films rattle together.
“I didn’t want to trust myself on these. I waited until Callendar could check them, too.”
I held the pictures up and looked at them. They showed a small, frail bony structure and the usual shadowy outline of internal organs. It wasn’t until I had looked at them for several minutes that I began to realize there was something peculiar about them. There seemed to be too few ribs, the articulation of the joints looked queer even to my layman’s eyes, and the organs themselves were a hopeless jumble.
“Some of the innards,” said Doc, “we can’t figure out at all. There are organs we’ve never seen nor heard of before.”
“Yet the child seems normal and perfectly healthy,” said Bossert. “Remarkably so. From the beating he’d taken he should have had serious injuries. He was just sore. His body must be as flexible and tough as spring steel.”
The Best of Leigh Brackett Page 41
