Classic PJ Farmer

by Philip José Farmer

  The ripples caused by her son’s marriage were scarcely a week old before they were followed by even bigger ones. They bore the news of the separation of Eddie and his wife. A fortnight later, Polina applied for divorce on grounds of incompatibility. Eddie was handed the papers in his mother’s apartment. He had come back to her the day he and Polina had agreed they “couldn’t make a go of it,” or, as he phrased it to his mother, “couldn’t get together.”

  Dr. Fetts was, of course, very curious about the reason for their parting, but, as she explained to her friends, she “respected” his silence. What she didn’t say was that she had told herself the time would come when he would tell her all.

  Eddies “nervous breakdown” started shortly afterward. He had been very irritable, moody, and depressed, but he got worse the day a so-called friend told Eddie that whenever Polina heard his name mentioned, she laughed loud and long. The friend added that Polina had promised to tell someday the true story of their brief merger.

  That night his mother had to call in a doctor.

  In the days that followed, she thought of giving up her position as research pathologist at De Kruif and taking all her time to help him “get back on his feet.” It was a sign of the struggle going on in her mind that she had not been able to decide within a week’s time. Ordinarily given to swift consideration and resolution of a problem, she could not agree to surrender her beloved quest into tissue regeneration.

  Just as she was on the verge of doing what was for her the incredible and the shameful, tossing a coin, she had been vised by her superior. He told her she had been chosen to go with a group of biologists on a research cruise to ten preselected planetary systems.

  Joyfully, she had thrown away the papers that would turn Eddie over to a sanatorium. And, since he was quite famous, she had used her influence to get the government to allow him to go along. Ostensibly, he was to make a survey of the development of opera on planets colonized by Terrans. That the yacht was not visiting any colonized globes seemed to have been missed by the bureaus concerned. But it was not the first time in the history of a government that its left hand knew not what its right was doing.

  Actually, he was to be “rebuilt” by his mother, who thought herself much more capable of curing him than any of the prevalent A, F, J, R, S, K, or H therapies. True, some of her friends reported amazing results with some of the symbol-chasing techniques. On the other hand, two of her close companions had tried them all and had gotten no benefits from any of them. She was his mother; she could do more for him than any of those “alphabatties”; he was flesh of her flesh, blood of her blood. Besides, he wasn’t so sick. He just got awfully blue sometimes and made theatrical but insincere threats of suicide or else just sat and stared into space. But she could handle him.

  2

  So now it was that she followed him from the backward-running clock to his room. And saw him step inside, look for a second, and then turn to her with a twisted face.

  “Neddie is ruined, mother. Absolutely ruined.”

  She glanced at the piano. It had torn loose from the wallracks at the moment of impact and smashed itself against the opposite wall. To Eddie it wasn’t just a piano; it was Neddie. He had a pet name for everything he contacted for more than a brief time. It was as if he hopped from one appellation to the next, like an ancient sailor who felt lost unless he was close to the familiar and designated points of the shoreline. Otherwise, Eddie seemed to be drifting helplessly in a chaotic ocean, one that was anonymous and amorphous.

  Or, analogy more typical of him, he was like the nightclubber who feels submerged, drowning, unless he hops from table to table, going from one well-known group of faces to the next, avoiding the featureless and unnamed dummies at the strangers’ tables.

  He did not cry over Neddie. She wished he would. He had been so apathetic during the voyage. Nothing, not even the unparalleled splendor of the naked stars nor the inexpressible alien-ness of strange planets had seemed to lift him very long. If he would only weep or laugh loudly or display some sign that he was reacting violently to what was happening. She would even have welcomed his striking her in anger or calling her “bad” names.

  But no, not even during the gathering of the mangled corpses, when he looked for a while as if he were going to vomit, would he give way to his body’s demand for expression. She understood that if he were to throw up, he would be much better for it, would have gotten rid of much of the psychic disturbance along with the physical.

  He would not. He had kept on raking flesh and bones into the large plastic bags and kept a fixed look of resentment and sullenness.

  She hoped now that the loss of his piano would bring tears and shaking shoulders. Then she could take him in her arms and give him sympathy. He would be her little boy again, afraid of the dark, afraid of the dog killed by a car, seeking her arms for the sure safety, the sure love.

  “Never mind, baby,” she said. “When we’re rescued, we’ll get you a new one.”

  “When-!”

  He lifted his eyebrows and sat down on the bed’s edge.

  “What do we do now?”

  She became very brisk and efficient.

  “The ultrad automatically started working the moment the meteor struck. If it’s survived the crash, it’s still sending SOS’s. If not, then there’s nothing we can do about it. Neither of us knows how to repair it.

  “However, it’s possible that in the last five years since this planet was located, other expeditions may have landed here. Not from Earth but from some of the colonies. Or from nonhuman globes. Who knows? It’s worth taking a chance. Let’s see.”

  A single glance was enough to wreck their hopes. The ultrad had been twisted and broken until it was no longer recognizable as the machine that sent swifter-than-light waves through the no-ether.

  Dr. Fetts said with false cheeriness, “Well, that’s that! So what? It makes things too easy. Let’s go into the storeroom and see what we can see.”

  Eddie shrugged and followed her. There she insisted that each take a panrad. If they had to separate for any reason, they could always communicate and also, using the DF’s—the built-in direction finders—locate each other. Having used them before, they knew the instruments’ capabilities and how essential they were on scouting or camping trips.

  The panrads were lightweight cylinders about two feet high and eight inches in diameter. Crampacked, they held the mechanisms of two dozen different utilities. Their batteries lasted a year without recharging, they were practically indestructible and worked under almost any conditions.

  Keeping away from the side of the ship that had the huge hole in it, they took the panrads outside. The long wave bands were searched by Eddie while his mother moved the dial that ranged up and down the shortwaves. Neither really expected to hear anything, but to search was better than doing nothing.

  Finding the modulated wave-frequencies empty of any significant noises, he switched to the continuous waves. He was startled by a dot-dashing.

  “Hey, mom! Something in the 1000 kilocycles! Unmodulated!”

  “Naturally, son,” she said with some exasperation in the midst of her elation. “What would you expect from a radio-telegraphic signal?”

  She found the band on her own cylinder. He looked blankly at her. “I know nothing about radio, but that’s not Morse.”

  “What? You must be mistaken!”

  “I —I don’t think so.”

  “Is it or isn’t it? Good god, son, can’t you be certain of anything!”

  She turned the amplifier up. As both of them had learned Galacto-Morse through sleeplearn techniques, she checked him at once.

  “You’re right. What do you make of it?”

  His quick ear sorted out the pulses.

  “No simple dot and dash. Four different time-lengths.”

  He listened some more.

  “They’ve got a certain rhythm, all right. I can make out definite groupings. Ah! That’s the sixth time I’ve ca
ught that particular one. And there’s another. And another.”

  Dr. Fetts shook her ash-blonde head. She could make out nothing but a series of zzt-zzt-zzt’s. Eddie glanced at the DF needle. “Coming from NE by E. Should we try to locate?”

  “Naturally,” she replied. “But we’d better eat first. We don’t know how far away it is, or what we’ll find there. While I fix a hot meal, you get your field trip stuff ready.”

  “O.K.,” he said with more enthusiasm than he had shown for a long time.

  When he came back he ate everything in the large dish his mother had prepared on the unwrecked galley stove.

  “You always did make the best stew,” he said.

  “Thank you. I’m glad you’re eating again, son. I am surprised. I thought you’d be sick about all this.”

  He waved vaguely but energetically.

  “The challenge of the unknown. I have a sort of feeling this is going to turn out much better than we thought. Much better.”

  She came close and sniffed his breath. It was clean, innocent even of stew. That meant he’d taken Nodor, which probably meant he’d been sampling some hidden rye. Otherwise, how explain his reckless disregard of the possible dangers? It wasn’t like him.

  She said nothing, for she knew that if he tried to hide a bottle in his clothes or field sack while they were tracking down the radio signals, she would soon find it. And take it away. He wouldn’t even protest, merely let her lift it from his limp hand while his lips swelled with resentment.

  3

  They set out. Both wore knapsacks and carried the panrads. He carried a gun over his shoulder, and she had snapped onto her sack her small black bag of medical and lab supplies.

  High noon of late autumn was topped by a weak red sun that barely managed to make itself seen through the eternal double layer of clouds. Its companion, an even smaller blob of lilac, was setting on the northwestern horizon. They walked in a sort of bright twilight, the best that Baudelaire ever achieved. Yet, despite the lack of light, the air was warm. It was a phenomenon common to certain planets behind the Horsehead Nebula, one being investigated but as yet unexplained.

  The country was hilly, with many deep ravines. Here and there were prominences high enough and steep-sided enough to be called embryo mountains. Considering the roughness of the land, however, there was a surprising amount of vegetation. Pale green, red, and yellow bushes, vines, and little trees clung to every bit of ground, horizontal or vertical. All had comparatively broad leaves that turned with the sun to catch the light.

  From time to time, as the two Terrans strode noisily through the forest, small multicolored insect-like and mammal-like creatures scuttled from hiding place to hiding place. Eddie decided to carry his gun in the crook of his arm. Then, after they were forced to scramble up and down ravines and hills and fight their way through thickets that became unexpectedly tangled, he put it back over his shoulder, where it hung from a strap.

  Despite their exertions, they did not tire quickly. They weighed about twenty pounds less than they would have on Earth and, though the air was thinner, it was richer in oxygen.

  Dr. Fetts kept up with Eddie. Thirty years the senior of the twenty-three-year-old, she passed even at close inspection for his older sister. Longevity pills took care of that. However, he treated her with all the courtesy and chivalry that one gave one’s mother and helped her up the steep inclines, even though the climbs did not appreciably cause her deep chest to demand more air.

  They paused once by a creek bank to get their bearings.

  “The signals have stopped,” he said.

  “Obviously,” she replied.

  At that moment the radar-detector built into the panrad began to ping. Both of them automatically looked upward.

  “There’s no ship in the air.”

  “It can’t be coming from either of those hills,” she pointed out. “There’s nothing but a boulder on top of each one. Tremendous rocks.”

  “Nevertheless, it’s coming from there, I think. Oh! Oh! Did you see what I saw? Looked like a tall stalk of some kind being pulled down behind that big rock.”

  She peered through the dim light. “I think you were imagining things, son. I saw nothing.”

  Then, even as the pinging kept up, the zzting started again. But after a burst of noise, both stopped.

  “Lets go up and see what we shall see,” she said.

  “Something screwy,” he commented. She did not answer.

  They forded the creek and began the ascent. Halfway up, they stopped to sniff in puzzlement at a gust of some heavy odor coming downwind.

  “Smells like a cageful of monkeys,” he said.

  “In heat,” she added. If his was the keener ear, hers was the sharper nose.

  They went on up. The RD began sounding its tiny hysterical gonging. Nonplussed, Eddie stopped. The DF indicated the radar pulses were not coming from the top of the hill they were climbing, as formerly, but from the other hill across the valley. Abruptly, the panrad fell silent.

  “What do we do now?”

  “Finish what we started. This hill. Then we go to the other one.”

  He shrugged and then hastened after her tall slim body in its long-legged coveralls. She was hot on the scent, literally, and nothing could stop her. Just before she reached the bungalow-sized boulder topping the hill, he caught up with her. She had stopped to gaze intently at the DF needle, which swung wildly before it stopped at neutral. The monkey-cage odor was very strong.

  “Do you suppose it could be some sort of radio-generating mineral?” she asked, disappointedly.

  “No. Those groupings were semantic. And that smell…”

  “Then what—?”

  He didn’t know whether to feel pleased or not that she had so obviously and suddenly thrust the burden of responsibility and action on him. Both pride and a curious shrinking affected him.

  But he did feel exhilarated. Almost, he thought, he felt as if he were on the verge of discovering what he had been looking for for a long time. What the object of his search had been, he could not say. But he was excited and not very much afraid.

  He unslung his weapon, a two-barreled combination shotgun and rifle. The panrad was still quiet.

  “Maybe the boulder is camouflage for a spy outfit,” he said. He sounded silly, even to himself.

  Behind him, his mother gasped and screamed. He whirled and raised his gun, but there was nothing to shoot. She was pointing at the hilltop across the valley, shaking, and saying something incoherent.

  He could make out a long slim antenna seemingly projecting from the monstrous boulder crouched there. At the same time, two thoughts struggled for first place in his mind: one, that it was more than a coincidence that both hills had almost identical stone structures on their brows, and, two, that the antenna must have been recently stuck out, for he was sure he had not seen it the last time he looked.

  He never got to tell her his conclusions, for something thin and flexible and irresistible seized him from behind. Lifted into the air, he was borne backwards. He dropped the gun and tried to grab the bands or tentacles around him and tear them off with his bare hands. No use.

  He caught one last glimpse of his mother running off down the hillside. Then a curtain snapped down, and he was in total darkness.

  4

  Eddie sensed himself, still suspended, twirled around. He could not know for sure, of course, but he thought he was facing in exactly the opposite direction. Simultaneously, the tentacles binding his legs and arms were released. Only his waist was still gripped. It was pressed so tightly that he cried out with pain.

  Then, boot-toes bumping on some resilient substance, he was carried forward. Halted, facing he knew not what horrible monster, he was suddenly assailed—not by a sharp beak or tooth or knife or some other cutting or mangling instrument—but by a dense cloud of that same monkey perfume.

  In other circumstances, he might have vomited. Now his stomach was not given the time to consider
whether it should clean house or not. The tentacle lifted him higher and thrust him against something soft and yielding—something fleshlike and womanly—almost breastlike in texture and smoothness and warmth and in its hint of gentle curving.

  He put his hands and feet out to brace himself, for he thought for a moment he was going to sink in and be covered up—enfolded—ingested. The idea of a gargantuan amoeba-thing hiding within a hollow rock—or a rocklike shell—made him writhe and yell and shove at the protoplasmic substance.

  But nothing of the kind happened. He was not plunged into a smothering and slimy jelly that would strip him of his skin and then his flesh and then dissolve his bones. He was merely shoved repeatedly against the soft swelling. Each time, he pushed or kicked or struck at it. After a dozen of these seemingly purposeless acts, he was held away, as if whatever was doing it was puzzled by his behavior.

  He had quit screaming. The only sounds were his harsh breathing and the zzzts and pings from the panrad. Even as he became aware of them, the zzzts changed tempo and settled into a recognizable pattern of bursts—three units that crackled out again and again.

  “Who are you? Who are you?”

  Of course, it could just as easily have been, “What are you?” or “What the hell!” or “Nov smoz ka pop?”

  Or nothing—semantically speaking.

  But he didn’t think the latter. And when he was gently lowered to the floor, and the tentacle went off to only-God-knew-where in the dark, he was sure that the creature was communicating—or trying to—with him.

  It was this thought that kept him from screaming and running around in the lightless and fetid chamber, brainlessly seeking an outlet. He mastered his panic and snapped open a little shutter in the panrad’s side and thrust in his right-hand index finger. There he poised it above the key and in a moment, when the thing paused in transmitting, he sent back, as best he could, the pulses he had received. It was not necessary for him to turn on the light and spin the dial that would put him on the 1000 kc. band. The instrument would automatically key that frequency in with the one he had just received.