And when Hibsen flung himself, heart pounding, lungs agonized, to the ground, the Gorman stood stock-still above him. And, without pausing to catch a breath, made notes.
Hibsen lay there, sobbing. It was infuriating and humiliating, but he made himself do it. He lay there at the alien’s feet, face to the ground, only one eye open just enough to gauge the creature’s mood and stance.
Then, without warning, he flung himself up and at the gray shape.
No warning—or none that Hibsen himself could measure, but there must have been some, for the Gorman was ready. Some insignificant tightening of a muscle, something hardly noticeable, but enough. Before Hibsen was fully on his feet, the Gorman had put his metallic “notebook” in the fleshy pouch that might have been skin and might have been a garment, and before Hibsen had quite turned to face him, the Gorman’s arms were cocked like a boxer’s. Too late, too late, Hibsen sobbed silently, but he flung himself on the alien anyway—and was knocked across the sidewalk.
It was as easy as that.
All the way back to their common jail, Hibsen clutched his aching face and swore to himself. He didn’t look around. He didn’t have to. He knew what was there. He knew it was always going to be there, as long as they were on this planet, and maybe Brabant was right: maybe—in some ways, at least—the Gormen were better men than the humans were.
VIII
Rae Wensley sat restive in Brabant’s laboratory, waiting for Brabant to get to her. At the moment, he was busily conferring with one of the Gormen—the old one, the one that seemed to be in charge of Keeping an Eye on Brabant. She was glad for the chance to sit and watch Brabant, for there were many questions in her mind about him. But she couldn’t sit still all the same. Too much was happening.
Brabant had deliberately cut himself off from contact with the rest of the humans. There was no other explanation. She had tried to talk to him and he wouldn’t talk. She had tried to defend him, but Devil’s Advocate is a thankless job when the Dev—when Brabant wouldn’t lift a finger in his own defense.
She had no reason to defend him, no reason at all to care.
But how worn and haggard he looked!
He came over to her at last and said shortly: “All right, Rae, let’s get going. Same as before. Put on the earphones.”
“Again? We’ve done this fifty times—”
“And we’ll do it fifty more if i say so! Hurry up, Rae.”
Stiffly she sat down, not looking at him. It was a wearisome, nonsensical business! How childish of him to carry on with it —and how childish of the Gormen to continue to be interested. Or amused. Or whatever it was they were that made them go on watching and taking their interminable notes. True, Brabant did have the wit to vary the procedure from day to day, so that sometimes she was asked to repeat the letters she heard aloud, sometimes to write them, sometimes merely to sit and listen, and suffer the mild electric tingle of the band on her knee. But it had been some days since he had bothered to give her shocks.
“Today,” he said, “I’ve got a treat for you.” She looked at him warily. “I want you to repeat every letter you hear, and I’ll let you watch your foot.”
Rae looked away hotly.
“You understand?” he demanded.
“Certainly I understand.” She had, after all, a higher I.Q. than a rhesus monkey, and those had been given similar tests, she knew; Brabant had told her that.
“Right,” he beamed. “You hear an A, you say A. That’s all.” He seemed almost happy. Happy!Everything he did, she thought miserably, was an affront.
Perhaps it was only the detached attitude of the scientist, she told herself, but without conviction. And in any case, as Brabant had not failed to remind her—often—there wasn’t any choice. If the trained seals wanted fish, they would have to snort out Yankee Doodle on the pipes.
Rae sat somnolently in her chair, watching her own toe, as the tape began to whisper in her ear. “A,” it said, and “A,” she repeated obediently, while the toe danced an inch.
“Good enough,” said Brabant, nodding. “Now we lower the volume. Keep going, Rae.”
“All right.”
The little voice in her ear whispered fainter and fainter. It began to be hard to hear. She forgot her toe, staring into space, straining to get it right. “R … L … D—no. T, I think.”
“Just say the first letter that comes to you!” he ordered impatiently. “But—”
“Do as I say! If you aren’t sure, guess!”
“All right.” She was angry now. “Y … A … P—oh! That’s funny!” Quickly her mind scanned the sentence: Mary had a little lamb. There was no P in the sentence.
But her foot had twitched.
“I told you,” Brabant crowed.
She stared. He was looking, not at her, but at the Gorman, which made rapid notes.
“What—what’s going on? Did the conditioning blow a gasket?”
He told her with self-satisfaction: “Not at all.” “But that last letter was a P and—”
“It was a B. You were sure, but you were wrong! Consciously you heard P; that’s what you said. But your subconscious—it was sure, too, only it was right. Your subconscious hears better than the front of your mind, Rae.”
She said worriedly: “I don’t know what that proves.”
“It proves,” said Brabant, “the existence of the subconscious —which hears with its own ear, sees with its own eye—and is not disturbed by the errors of the conscious mind.”
“Proves it to me, to you, or to the Gormen?” she asked.
“Why, to all of us,” he answered enthusiastically. “Can’t you realize what a challenge it is to have to demonstrate the existence and functions of a subconscious to a race that doesn’t have any? The concept doesn’t mean a thing to them. All they can understand is proof, concrete proof, as tangible as it can possibly be. And with them checking me every inch of the way—Lord, what an opportunity! Don’t you see?”
She stared at him.
Weeks and weeks of this—not merely the tape-recorder chanting the alphabet, but hypnosis, deep recall, heaven knew what; not only for her, but for nearly every member of the human party. And for what?
She said tightly, furiously: “What do you think you’re doing?” Her own voice surprised her. It rasped with harsh emotion.
It surprised Brabant, too. “But I’ve already told you.”
She said: “Look at that thing! It’s taking everything in, everything you can give it—more than they could hope to learn in a dozen years, starting from scratch! Brabant, don’t you know what the Gormen are doing to do with the knowledge you give them?”
The alien made a slight movement. Brabant looked at it and shook his head. Then he turned back to the girl.
“Why, yes,” he said, “I suppose I do.”
“They want it to—”
“You don’t have to tell me. They want to use it to conquer Earth.” He grinned self-consciously. “As the old psychiatry joke put it—that’s their problem.”
She couldn’t help herself; the instant she was back with the others she told them, every word. It was like trying to vomit up a poison, cast it out, get rid of it, but merely saying it didn’t get it out of her system; it continued to stay inside her and burn.
“Council of war,” said Hibsen dangerously. “Mary, you and the kids stay here.”
They trooped into one of the back rooms, the silent Gorman at the door remaining uncaring behind. Hibsen, grimfaced, laid the proposition before the house: “He has no right to live.” Hibsen muted his voice with a powerful effort. His jaw was still painful, but he was past caring about that, though it hurt him especially much to talk. “Brabant’s gone over to the Gormen—he admits it! Treason is a capital crime. Brabant’s got to die.”
Rae listened through a fog of weariness. She had been up with the children that morning; she had gone through a grueling hour with a demanding Brabant and a stolid, worrisome Gorman; and she had felt terror inside her when
Brabant admitted he knew what the Gormen planned. It had been a wearing day, but, more than that, there was a pain and anger inside her more than she could bear.
This was Brabant they were talking about. Brabant, whom she loved—or had once loved—or wished to love, if only things could be smoothed out so that it was just the two of them. Love is many things; it is a biological call and also a Gestalt of social attitudes and standings; and whatever the biology between them might have been, however fine and good, or crushing and destroying, it was the certain fact that every person in that room but her wanted to see Brabant dead.
Every person but her?
But she was the one who had brought them the one bit of evidence they needed. And what did she want? Rae looked around the room at the others, hotly arguing in undertones. They were a queer lot, she thought regretfully; it was hardly fair that eight billions of mankind on the rich and teeming Earth should depend for their future security on what action this handful of people here might take to muzzle one person across the square.
In spite of the Qualifying Tests, in spite of Brabant’s care, those who voyaged between the stars were likely to develop strange cancers of the personality. Half the people in the room, she counted, had been up and down like yo-yos during the voyage—manic, and then tranquillized; depressive, and then stimulated. Chemistry did it—part of it; Brabant, with his tests and his therapy, did the rest.
But now they were going to kill Brabant, weren’t they? And maybe, she thought wearily, there was something to think about there. Brabant had kept them all in one piece. …
But who had kept Brabant from chaos?
Not herself, she thought, aching, though she had been more than willing. (But Brabant had explained that to her, tenderly enough. He couldn’t. Alone among the ship, he couldn’t become emotionally involved. He couldn’t make close friends, even, not until the trip was over; to do so would destroy his usefulness.)
And now it was too late, of course, because they had already passed sentence. The decision was to execute. The problem was only one of ways and means.
“Not a chance,” Hibsen was saying. “You can’t get him alone to do it, de Jouvenel. He wouldn’t trust you or me. Marne?”
The lieutenant rubbed his splinted arm. “All right.”
“Do you think you can manage it?” Marne grunted. “Good enough,” said Hibsen, satisfied. “Then all we need is a weapon. Who’s got anything we can use?”
Silence for a moment. Then, slowly, Rae Wensley felt herself raising her hand.
Hibsen started. “You, Rae?”
“It’s sewing scissors, really,” she said faintly. “But sharp.”
Hibsen grinned with lean approval. Almost she saw tufts of hair at the tips of his ears and needle teeth dripping saliva. Undoubtedly it was giving Hibsen a lot of pleasure to hear her volunteer to help remove the man she had turned him down for.
But de Jouvenel said abruptly: “Never mind, Rae. I’ve got the real thing.” They looked at him. The little dark man said without emphasis: “I was here before most of you. I had an idea something like this would come up. So … Anyway, it’s my own knife, and right at the moment it’s under the Marne baby’s mattress.”
Rae stared. She had wondered why the little man had been so solicitous of the child. The plaited cradle was his; many times he had helped her change the bedding, pet the baby to sleep, and for what warped and lethal reasons, she was just now able to know. But at least, she thought with gratitude, it would not be her weapon that killed Brabant.
Hibsen said: “That’s good. Fine. Now how do we work it? Rae, it never occurred to me that you’d help, because— Never mind. Since you’re willing, maybe you can help get him alone with Marne. Got any ideas on how we can arrange that?”
She stood numbly, trying to think. Ideas? Oh, she was full of ideas, but not the sort Hibsen had in mind. Her ideas were pictures and memories and dreams, and she had to leaf them over in her mind—now—because soon they would be gone, or spoiled.
Marne said, scratching his jaw: “How about this? I’ll wait upstairs. Rae tells him she wants to talk to him or something —maybe acts a little affectionate, you know? And then I’ll be waiting. We can tell the Gormen we were fighting over her. Maybe that will confuse them a little. We owe it to Earth to try to mix them up as much as we can.”
He was discussing the thing quite reasonably, she thought in frozen distress, like a man planning an evening of bridge rather than a prospective murder. No, execution. That was the word, since they had calmly and reasonably passed sentence. It was all very reasonable, she thought drearily; there wasn’t any point at which a person could stop and cry out: This is all wrong! You’re proposing to destroy a human life!
Hibsen was saying: “The Gormen will take it hard, of course, so maybe Marne’s idea is a good one. But let’s not kid ourselves. They won’t be easy to fool. But we’ll have to face that when we come to it. I don’t think they’ll do anything about hostages or reprisals—they don’t seem to think along those lines. Still, Brabant is the only person who has established real contact with them, and we ought to consider what they’re likely to—”
From the other room, Mary Marne warned: “Watch it! They’re coming!”
In came a party of Gormen, six of them, armed, moving along like ice skaters, without fuss or noise. And with them was Dr. Brabant.
Rae stepped back involuntarily. Brabant had been harried and worn, on the edge of desperation, that afternoon; now he had passed the edge. His face was sallow. His hands twitched. His eyes were the eyes of crucified Christ; but what he said could have come only from the lips of Judas. In a voice of torment, he said: “You’ll have to give your plan up. Sorry, but the Gormen and I know what you’re up to, and they won’t let you.”
Silently, the aliens fanned out, surrounding the humans, forcing them toward the front room.
Brabant said: “Those of you who have managed to keep weapons, you’ll have to turn them over now.”
And he knew where to look. They went into the room where the children were sleeping and turned back the thin soggy mattress under the baby, and there was de Jouvenel’s knife.
“Rae,” said Brabant commandingly, and two of the Gormen advanced toward her.
“Never mind,” she said hastily, and fumbled in her clothes for the sewing scissors.
Brabant accepted them and passed them to one of the aliens.
He looked around. “That’s it,” he said at last, still in that torn and inwardly raging tone.
He didn’t look at Rae, but he met the eyes of the others easily enough.
“From now on,” he said, “there won’t be any more chances for any of you—either to kill me or to escape. Sony,” he added politely, “but that’s the way it is. We’re leaving here.”
“What the devil are you talking about?” Hibsen demanded, his voice cracking.
“We’re leaving in two days,” said Brabant, nodding slightly, like a professor glad a student has asked a question that helps him to move a discussion along. “The Gormen have been waiting for a big ship that will hold all of us. It’s on its way. They’re going to take us—I don’t know where, ultimately.
Maybe Bes. Maybe farther. But the first stop, I think, is Explorer II.”
He paused, in the sudden absolute stillness. “Yes,” he said thoughtfully, “that’s what they’re going to do … Rae.” She jumped.
“Will you come outside with me for a moment?”
She glanced instinctively at Hibsen for orders—then quickly away. That was cruel. Conspiring to execute Brabant was one thing, but asking another man’s permission to walk with him was, somehow, worse.
For reasons she couldn’t have elucidated and didn’t stop to think out, she said: “All right.”
They went out into the street, she and Brabant and the Gormen. Brabant said, oddly diffident: “Let’s go for a walk.” “A walk?”
He nodded, avoiding her eyes. They were never allowed to walk outside at night.
“With one of them for a chaperon?”
Brabant shook his head, and, true enough, all of the Gormen were moving away, swiftly and without a backward glance.
“Ah,” she said, suddenly enraged, “I see! You betray your companions, and your payoff is a longer leash to your collar. I suppose it’s worth it!”
“Rae.”
His voice was dull, not begging, hardly even protesting, but she wouldn’t listen. She shrugged and walked slowly down the street. The darkness was nearly absolute. It was impossible to see even the outlines of the buildings ahead, but she could see lights behind them from the human quarters.
When she could no longer make out Brabant’s face, she said: “All right, we’re walking. What do you want?”
“A fair break,” Brabant said immediately.
“You fool!”
“No, wait! I—” But the time had passed, if ever there had been a time. Rae couldn’t stand it. No, she told herself, agonized, this is wrong. And she turned and ran headlong back through the dark streets.
Out of nowhere, a Gorman materialized to follow her.
Brabant hesitated.
He glanced at the vague silhouette of the remaining Gorman—out of earshot but, he had always known, not out of sight. No, they didn’t trust him that much. He squared his shoulders and returned—not to the house where the others were quartered, of course; not even to his laboratory, where he had been permitted to sleep for a while, but to a thin pad on an upper floor of the Gorman barracks. He had been sleeping there for three nights now, on orders, and he didn’t like it. It represented a deterioration in his relationship with the Gormen.
If things went on this way, he thought wildly, he wouldn’t have a friend in either camp.
And time passed, and time passed. Rae went through the hours without seeing faces or hearing words. Brabant came and went, more tired every time, more remote, selecting his guinea pigs with a jerk of a thumb, and the Gormen who were with him always now obligingly formed guard and marched his chosen subjects away. Rae found it impossible to sleep. Merely to try was punishment, for the moment the head went down and the eyes closed, then tears started. But time passed.
The Abominal Earthman (1963) SSC Page 12
