Fletcher Pratt

by Alien Planet

  Besides, it was dizzying to sit up.

  Through the light, now foggy, of the room two figures swam toward us, women with the thin, triangular faces and regular, delicate features one sees in the paintings of the pre-Raphaelites. I noted with a mild surprise that their shoulders bore not the circles of the Thutiya Volva but a tiny representation of a human figure on the background of a fan, but it was almost too much effort to conjecture that they must be Thutiya Bunyo. And for them, too, the effort of movement seemed considerable. The odor in the room was permeating everything, and it was a delight merely to breathe it.

  One of the girls seated herself by Ang Redike, the other by me. The mist in the room became thicker and thicker, the odor more permeating, till one sank in a delicious languor in which one could not see one's hand before one's ' face. A throaty gurgle dying out into a sigh of pleasure rose somewhere in the room. The girl beside me flung an arm around me, laid her face close to mine. I looked for Ang Redike, six feet away, but the mist was too thick, I could not see him. Again the throaty - gurgle of pleasure somewhere in the room.

  The light was streaming through the opened shutters. I moved slightly, trying to remember, then did remember and sat up with a jerk, feeling the back of my neck where the headache ought to be. To my surprise there was no headache at all. I felt glorious as though I had energy enough for anything. I looked about. Mist and people were gone—the room was empty save for the huge divans, a couple of articles of clothing on one of them and Ang Redike standing over me, smiling.

  "Come," he said. "I must continue my work and there are probably calls waiting for you also."

  I looked around again. "Where has everyone gone?"

  "To their places. I allowed you to sleep."

  "You needn't really have bothered.... Tell me, what made that mist in the room last night and the odor?"

  "The gas. You do not know the gas?"

  "No, we have nothing like it but alcohol. Doesn't it have any after-effects? I don't notice any."

  "You mean ill after-effects? Certainly not. The Scientific Board would not permit it to be used. Let us go."

  XVIII

  So THERE (I meditated when I had reached my apartment) were the Thutiya Bunyo. And this was the class I was escaping by the ignorance of the Murashemans and the grace of Ashembe.... And the Associations of the Grehm....

  My thoughts were interrupted by a shout from the television-phone, which proved, when answered, to be the secretary of the local Scientific Board with the information that since I had not called on a philosopher for three periods they were sending one around.

  It proved to be the same thin and theatrical gentleman who had visited me before.

  "Man of another universe," he said, as he entered, "I have read the secrets of your heart. You have not sent for me. Therefore your mind is troubled with some unnameable trouble. I admit it is difficult for us to understand one another, but such as we are, voices calling feebly across vast spaces, let us try to arrive at a communion of minds. I implore you to open your full heart."

  My heart misgave me at the thought of trusting this sententious sounding board of a philosopher with my secret. "There are some things I wish to know," I admitted with a show of reluctance, "and my friend Koumar Ashembe seems unwilling to aid me."

  "No true man is unwilling to aid another," the philosopher answered, pat as you please. "The truth makes free by slaying errors of mind with its intense white light. Yet all men know that day is hard and twilight comfortable, and one who has climbed the difficult heights to understanding is loath to draw his comrades from the pleasant dusk of their little vices and ignorances. Hence your friend is not to be blamed that he did not earn your hatred by rousing you from a sleep you find so, pleasing."

  Words, words—as bad as any Dr. Frank Crane of Earth. However, one more try before I tossed him out, I thought. Aloud I said, "The specific question is this.... it's a little hard to put into words ... It's a general question. Why, in a civilization that has progressed as far as yours, do you allow such a class as the Thutiya Bunyo?"

  "Ah!" said the philosopher. He swung an accusatory arm at me. "You have been attending an artistic gathering and inwardly are somewhat ashamed of your attendance, and of the attraction that the Thutiya Bunyo, or some one of them, holds for you. You are also slightly desirous of a recurrence of the incident, shameful but pleasant. Do not fear on this account, you are yourself of the Thutiya, and no odium attaches to you for this.... But—

  "I would judge that you have no similar class in your own planet or that you did not belong to it if you do have such a class. But let me assure you that in the eyes of the divine Beyarya you need not fear. You are exempt from mean scruples, which are for a range of men far below the attainments of the creative artist. You belong to an exalted class which demands great passions and fiery reliefs from those passions, and any amount of license is permitted to you. Your only care should be to produce your art."

  I started in amazement. Too late, I remembered Ashembe's remark to me, so long ago, that the philosophers of Murashema were also its psychologists, and that psychology had been reduced to an exact science. Stripped of the flowery language, the philosopher had, in fact, given me a most accurate reading of my own psychology.

  The philosopher lifted a supercilious nose. "You are thinking that I have talked to your friend, the Koumar Ashembe Acle," he said. "It is not so. Your psychology is of a simplicity absurd. All artists are either excessively simple or complex of mentality. Sometimes both are combined in one individual. But never are they of the puzzling average. The springs of your being lie close to the surface. But pause!" He pointed one hand toward the ceiling and shaking the skinny forefinger of the other under my nose with a theatrical gesture, continued, "There are indications that you were only recently raised to the state of the Thutiya. In the name of the divine Beyarya, I abjure you— is this not true?"

  If I told him, would I not be degraded to the ranks of the Thutiya Bunyo?

  "No-no," I told him.

  His head jerked back in surprise; the pointing fingers came down—but even here his movement was smoothly theatrical. "You are to be felicitated," he said, "upon an extraordinary prudery of mind in that case. You will become a very great artist, or at least a very original one, with so remarkable an equipment. It will give you a singular, if not attractive, outlook on existence. But as for your question the reason I have stated. You are half ashamed and half delighted with the gathering you have been attending."

  "True," I said, "in all probability. But why do you tell me this?"

  An expression of surprise spread over his features. "Is it possible that you do not know? You are here to be assisted. I am here to give assistance. The need for philosophical assistance is caused by a condition of mental stress. The assistance of a philosopher is given by analyzing the reasons behind the stress. When they are found and their triviality is made apparent, the stress disappears. Under such conditions the question you ask becomes academic and unimportant."

  "But as a matter of interest," I persisted, "why do you have the Thutiya Bunyo?"

  He struck an attitude of intense thought almost grotesque in its likeness to Rodin's famous statue. "The deepest reason is their usefulness to the Thutiya Volva and to a lesser degree to the more intense spirits among the Bodrog.

  There are certain types of workers who require violent passional activity as a relief to the intensity of their mental labors and who are yet so unsocial they cannot tolerate permanent alliances.... The Hetheleg Arboath are at work on a modification of the tensal treatment that will preserve artistic tendencies unimpaired while removing unsocial qualities ... But," and he fixed me with his eyes, "there is still something unsettled in your mind or you would not have asked that. Tell me, I implore you, why you thus seek to turn the conversation from your own case, which is the reason for my presence? Between us, you and me, there can be nothing hidden."

  "Well," I admitted, "there is something..." I groped for word
s. "From what I know of your astronomy—I don't see why, if there is a controlling intelligence in the universe, it causes such a vast waste of material and time in producing ... so insignificant an animal as man. Think of all the dead worlds and those on which life was never born."

  He regarded me for a moment from bright, bird-like eyes. "You are oppressed by the smallness and hopelessness of life?" he inquired, and then with a quickness that showed the question was rhetorical, "That is because you are homesick for your own backward planet. I should say also ... hm, hm ... that you are withholding facts of importance from me, since you are convinced of your failure in this environment. A man who is happy and successful in his world is troubled by no such doubtings. Do not be so. Every man has within him the seeds of his own success. The Scientific Board will find the proper soil in which they may grow. But I cannot say more to you. A man who withholds facts from me is denying my mission, and for such I can do nothing."

  He rose. "Farewell," he said, "until that happier day when you will see fit to give me your full confidence."

  And he left me to my thoughts.

  XIX

  I WENT to the ball game a day or so later with Ang Redike, who was much interested in that form of sport. A Murasheman ball game is played by players harnessed under their shoulders with small helium-filled balloons that serve to just lift them free of the ground. The ball is propelled with an instrument resembling a force-pump. With the aid of the balloons, the players can jump as much as forty feet into the air, and it requires considerable skill to control one's leaps and at the same time to strike the ball in the desired direction. An expert player can follow it through the wildest gyrations, however, somersaulting over and under it in all directions.

  I noted, when I sat down to watch the game, that a young man bearing the ideograph of the Hetheleg Arboath had seated himself beside me. He seemed to be trying to attract my attention, but I was interested in the game and did not respond to his advances, until, in an interval of the game, he whispered in my ear, "See me after the game."

  I turned toward him; but he glanced quickly at me and then away, evidently not wishing to give my companion a clue to any connection between us. When the crowd began to leave the place after the game, I turned toward him again. "Coming tonight," he whispered quickly. "Turn off your television and lights."

  Mystified, but willing to learn what he wanted, I let down my shutters early that night and disconnected the television-phone (a privilege, by the way, allowed only to artists—all other persons being required to leave their sets, on at all times to allow the Scientific Board to inspect their doings). After a wait of about half an hour there was a discreet tap at the door. I opened it to the young man, who slipped in quickly, looked around, and announced his name in a whisper. "Poran Tiali," he said, "I wish to speak to you. Dule Jujuk told me you might Wish to see me."

  "Dule Jujuk?" I asked, mystified.

  He looked about apprehensively; I could just catch the flicker of his movement in the velvet black of the darkened apartment. "The philosopher," he whispered.

  "Oh," I said. "Well?"

  He did not reply for a moment, and I guessed he was gathering his nerve for the next remark whatever it was.

  "Dule Jujuk informs me that you are in despair with life," he said.

  "Not exactly in despair," I disagreed, "but I don't see why the divine Beyarya should go to so much trouble to produce such insects as we are.... But what the devil! That was some time ago and a part of a conversation. Why should he send you to me because of it? Tell me."

  "I belong to a body which is unjustly accused of subversive ideas," said he, "whereas we only see things in their true light.... We are called the Giehm...."

  I started. "The suicide associations!"

  "So we are called. But you believe as we do in all essentials, and it is my mission to lay our program before you.... Do you know they dare not put the truth in the museum machines? They dare not tell the truth anywhere, these precious scientists of ours, who set so much store by truth. They dare not because we would all cease from this insect-like labor and live the only life of a true man, free and open, like the people of the hunting ground."

  "Yes," I said. "Go on."

  "I will go on. I will tell you the truth—the truth you will never learn with these scientists with their serums and tensals. But they would send me to the farms for it if they knew."

  "Really?" I asked.

  He paid no attention, but warmed to his subject and went on. "Do you know what the truth is that does not appear in their museum machines? Do you know what our life on this planet and yours on yours really is? It means that our planets are approaching the end of their history and that all life on them is a disease indicative of the old age of the system, like wrinkles in the faces of men or the diseases of old age. It is a mere surface manifestation. Do you know that the stars have a life of their own? Do you know that they are sentient bodies? Our philosophers would tell you this if they dared. They all know it. The scientists will not let them. They are satisfied with the botched world they have made."

  He paused for breath. "Well—" I began, but he interrupted me.

  "Let me tell you the truth. Life, as the divine Beyarya sees it, is concerned with His stars. We are insects, parasites, forms of disease. We are not life. We are the negation of life. The divine Beyarya would willingly see us exterminated. Constantly he strives to wipe out this little life from the planets surrounding His suns so that they may live their great life undisturbed.

  "We have no purpose here. That much is obvious, is it not?" A pointed finger struck me suddenly on the chest in the dark, a finger fairly trembling with the passion of its owner's utterance.

  "Why, I don't know," I temporized, willing to admit the force of his arguments, but not quite seeing where he was leading. (It all fitted in—the unwillingness of the Scientific Board to permit movies of interplanetary travel until Ashembe's great success, the tyranny over every act of life.)

  "Grant me that we have no purpose here. What follows then? This follows, that our only purpose should be to amuse ourselves. And how can man amuse himself under so bitter a tyranny over thought and action? Do you know what the Scientific Board does with members of the Associations of the Grehm it catches? It gives them a tensal treatment that reduces them to idiots and sends them to the farms—the farms, mind you!"

  His voice had risen almost to a scream.

  "Well, what of it?"

  "Believing as you do, you must join us. We have plans in train for the overthrowing of this tyranny and the substitution of a reign of reason in which there shall be no more overstuffed civilization—just the free life of natural man in the hunting grounds."

  "And what if I refuse and report you to the Scientific Board?"

  "You condemn me to the farms. I do not think you would willingly do that. But you would also condemn yourself to the tensal and the farms as well as the serum. For Dule Jujuk would include in his report the undoubted fact that you have withheld information from him. He thinks that the information is that you are not an artist at all. A philosopher's report would carry more weight than anything you could possibly say. You must be one of us. Anyone who withholds information is of necessity."

  I saw the point. A species of blackmail. And yet—

  "What do you want me to do?" I asked.

  "Come with me to the next meeting of the Association of the Grehm and I will tell you. At 77 Farm this side of Idon. I will have one of our Thutiya members call for you. You had best go to bed at once now to cover my visit."

  A moment more and he was gone.

  Two days later, just at evening, my door .was opened on a member of the Thutiya I did not know. "To take you to the gathering my friend spoke of the other night," he said briefly as he came in, and closing my shutters I went with him.*

  * Throughout the whole of this chapter, the handwriting of the mss. is execrable, in places so nearly unreadable that it was only after some guessing I was able
to piece it together at all. The above paragraph is a case in point; in its final state, it is mostly mine. This portion of the mss. was evidently written in a great hurry and under pressure of strong emotion.

  It was my first experience of a trip outside a Murasheman city. We descended to a level below the lower street level where a station with platforms would have reminded any visitor from Earth of a subway station, save for the better lighting. At the side of the platforms a number of cars stood. They were about thirty feet long and their cross-section would have been round. At the front end they tapered like a fish's head, at the rear the superstructure was expanded to a rocket-like tail and the whole end was surrounded by a heavy ring of atotta.

  Within, the cars held seats arranged in no particular order, and each car bore a number on its side. The one we were to travel in was numbered 77 in large characters. We stepped in through the side (the whole side was opened out) and sat down. A moment later a bell tinkled in warning, the curved sides slid up automatically in grooves from somewhere below the car body and closed above our heads. A few moments later we moved gently past the platform with a hum of motors into a darkened tube. There we paused. And then a moment later we started (I could tell the difference only by the tiniest shifting of my position) and in hardly a moment it seemed stopped again.

  "This is the place," said my companion. I looked up. "How far have we come?"

  "About eighty miles," he said.*

  *The figure is either eighty or eight hundred. Illegible. I have adopted the more conservative figure.

  All Murasheman travel is done by this means, the propulsive force being compressed air, like the pneumatic tubes familiar on Earth for carrying messages and change in department stores. Several of the round cars travel in a single tube....*