Perilous Planets

by Brian Aldiss

  There was no question about it: none of that tissue could possibly be human; it was all counterfeit, produced by the monster from its own substance according to the structural ‘blue-prints’ in the nearest genuine cells. And it was a perfect counterfeit: the new tissues knit with the old, axones coupled with dendrites, muscles contracted or expanded on command.

  And therefore, when nerve cells wore out, they could be replaced. Eventually the last human cell would go, the human tenant would have become totally monster—but ‘a difference that makes no difference is no difference.’ Effectively, the tenant would still be human and he would be immortal.

  Barring accidents.

  Or murder.

  Miss McCarty was saying, ‘Major Gumbs, you are being ridiculous. The explanation is quite obvious. Unless you are deliberately deceiving me, for what reason I cannot imagine, then our efforts to move in opposing directions must be pulling this creature apart.’

  McCarty was evidently confused in her geometry. Let her stay that way—it would keep her off balance until the fission was complete. No, that was no good. George himself was out of her reach already and getting farther away, but how about Bellis? Her brain and McCarty’s were, if anything, closer together…

  ==========

  What was he to do? If he warned the girl, that would only draw McCarty’s attention to her sooner.

  There wasn’t much time left, he realized abruptly. If some physical linkage between the brains actually had occurred to make communication possible, those cells couldn’t hold out much longer; the gap between the two pairs of brains was widening steadily. He had to keep McCarty from discovering how the four of them would be paired.

  ‘Vivian!’ he said.

  ‘Yes, George?’

  ‘Listen, we’re not pulling this body apart. It’s splitting. That’s the way it reproduces. You and I will be in one half. Gumbs and McCarty in the other,’ he lied convincingly, ‘If they don’t give us any trouble, we can all go where we please.’

  ‘Oh, I’m so glad!’ What a warm voice she had…

  ‘Yes,’ said George nervously, ‘but we may have to fight them; it’s up to them. So grow an arm, Vivian.’

  ‘I’ll try,’ she said uncertainly.

  McCarty’s voice cut across hers. ‘Major Gumbs, since you have eyes, it will be your task to see to it that those two do not escape. Meanwhile, I suggest that you also grow an arm.’

  ‘Doing my best,’ said Gumbs.

  Puzzled, George glanced downward, past his own half-formed arm. There, almost out of sight, a fleshy buljjp appeared under Gumbs’s section of the rim! The Major had been working on it in secret, keeping it hidden… and it was already better-developed than George’s.

  ‘Oh-oh,’ said Gumbs abruptly. ‘Look here, Miss McCarty, Meister’s been leading you up the garden path. Deceiving you, you understand. Clever, I must say. I mean you and I aren’t going to be in the same half. How could we be? We’re on opposite sides of the blasted thing. It’s going to be you and Miss Bellis, me and Meister.’

  The monster was developing a definite waistline. The spinal cords had rotated now, so that there was clear space between them in the center.

  ‘Yes,’ said McCarty faintly. ‘Thank you, Major Gumbs.’

  ‘George!’ came Vivian’s frightened voice, distant and weak. ‘What shall I do?’

  ‘Grow an arm!’ he shouted.

  There was no reply.

  ==========

  IV

  Frozen, George watched McCarty’s arm, the rock-fragment still clutched at the end of it, rise into view and swing leftward at full stretch over the bubbling surface of the monster He had time to see it bob up and viciously down again; time to think. Still short, thank God—that’s McCarty’s right arm, it’s farther from Vivian’s brain than it was from mine; time, finally, to realize that he could not possibly help Vivian before McCarty lengthened the arm the few centimeters more that were necessary. The fission was only half complete, yet he could no more move to where he wanted to be than a Siamese twin could walk around his brother.

  Then his time was up. A flicker of motion warned him, and he looked back to see a lumpy, distorted pseudo-hand clutching for his eye-stalks.

  Instinctively he brought his own up, grasped the other’s wrist and hung on desperately. It was half again the size of his, and so strongly muscled that although his leverage was better, he could not force it back or hold it away. He could only keep the system oscillating up and down, adding his strength to Gumbs’s so that the mark was overshot.

  Gumbs began to vary the force and rhythm of his movements, trying to catch him off guard. A thick finger brushed the base of one eye-stalk.

  ‘Sorry about this, Meister,’ said Gumbs. ‘No hard feelings, you understand. Between us (oof) I don’t fancy that McCarty woman much—but (ugh! almost had you that time) way I see it, I’ve got to look after myself. Mean to say (ugh) if I don’t, who will? See what I mean?’

  George did not reply. Astonishingly enough, he was no longer afraid, either for himself or for Vivian; he was simply overpoweringly, ecstatically, monomaniacally angry. Power from somewhere was surging into his arm. Fiercely concentrating, he thought Bigger ! Stronger ! Longer ! More arm !

  The arm grew. Visibly, it added substance to itself, it lengthened, thickened, bulked with muscle. So did Gumbs’s, however.

  He began another arm. So did Gumbs.

  All around him the surface of the monster was bubbling violently. And, George realized, the lenticular bulk of it was perceptibly shrinking. Its curious breathing system was inadequate; the thing was cannibalizing itself, destroying its own tissues to make up the difference.

  How small could it get and still support two human tenants?

  And which brain would it dispense with first?

  He had no leisure to think about it. Scrabbling in the grass with his second hand, Gumbs had failed to find anything that would serve as a weapon. Now, with a sudden lurch, he swung their entire body around.

  The fission was complete.

  That thought reminded George of Vivian and McCarty. He risked a split-second’s glance behind him, saw nothing but a featureless ovoid mound, and looked back in time to see Gumb’s half-grown right fist pluck up a long, sharp-pointed dead branch and drive it murderously at his eyes.

  ==========

  The lip of the river-bank was a meter away to the left. George made it in one abrupt surge. Their common body slipped, tottered, hesitated, hands clutching wildly—and toppled, end over end, hurtling in a cloud of dust and pebbles down the breakneck slope to a meaty smash at the bottom.

  The universe made one more giant turn around them and came to rest. Half-blinded, George groped for the hold he had lost, found the wrist and seized it.

  ‘Oh Lord!’ said Gumbs. ‘I’m hurt, Meister. Go on, man, finish it, will you? Don’t waste time.’

  George stared at him suspiciously, without relaxing his grip. ‘What’s the matter with you?’

  ‘Paralyzed. I can’t move.’

  They had fallen onto a small boulder, George saw, one of many with which the river-bed was strewn. This one was roughly conical; they were draped over it, and the blunt point was directly under Gumbs’s spinal cord, a few centimeters from the brain.

  ‘Gumbs, that may not be as bad as you think. If I can show you it isn’t, will you give up and put yourself under my orders?’

  ‘How do you mean? My spine’s crushed.”

  ‘Never mind that now. Will you or won’t you?’

  ‘Why, yes,’ agreed Gumbs. ‘That’s very decent of you, Meister, matter of fact. You have my word, for what it’s worth.’

  ‘All right,’ said George. Straining hard, he managed to get their body off the boulder. Then he stared up at the slope down which they had tumbled. Too steep; he’d have to find an easier way back. He turned and started off to eastward, paralleling the thin stream that flowed in the center of the watercourse.

  ‘What’s up now?’ Gumbs a
sked after a moment.

  ‘We’ve got to find a way up to the top,’ George said impatiently. ‘I may still be able to help Vivian.’

  ‘Ah, yes. Afraid I was thinking about myself, Meister. If you don’t mind telling me, what’s the damage?’

  ==========

  She couldn’t still be alive, George was thinking despondently, but if there were any small chance—

  ‘You’ll be all right,’ he said. ‘If you were still in your old body, that would be a fatal injury, or permanently disabling, anyhow, but not in this thing. You can repair yourself as easily as you can grow a new limb.’

  ‘Stupid of me not to think of that,’ said Gumbs. ‘But does that mean we were simply wasting our time trying to kill one another?’

  ‘No. If you’d crushed my brain, I think the organism would have digested it and that would be the end of me. But short of anything that drastic, I believe we’re immortal.’

  ‘Immortal? That does rather put another face on it, doesn’t it?’

  The bank was becoming a little lower, and at one point, where the raw ground was thickly seeded with boulders, there was a talus slope that looked as if it could be climbed. George started up it.

  ‘Meister,’ said Gumbs after a moment.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘You’re right, you know—I’m getting some feeling back already. Look here, is there anything this beast can’t do? I mean, for instance, do you suppose we could put ourselves back together the way we were, with all the—appendages, and so on?’

  ‘It’s possible,’ George said curtly. It was a thought that had been in the back of his mind, but he didn’t feel like discussing it with Gumbs just now.

  They were halfway up the slope.

  ‘Well, in that case,’ said Grumbs meditatively, ‘the thing has military possibilities, you know. Man who brought a thing like that direct to the War Department could write his own ticket, more or less.’

  ‘After we split up,’ George offered, ‘you can do whatever you please.’

  ‘But dammit,’ said Gumbs in an irritated tone, ‘that won’t do.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because,’ said Gumbs, ‘they might find you.’ His hands reached up abruptly, pried out a small boulder before George could stop him.

  The large boulder above it trembled, dipped and leaned ponderously outward. George, directly underneath, found that he could move neither forward nor back.

  ‘Sorry again,’ he heard Gumbs saying, with what sounded like genuine regret. ‘But you know the Loyalty Committee. I simply can’t take the chance.’

  ==========

  The boulder seemed to take forever to fall. George tried twice more, with all his strength, to move out of its path. Then, instinctively, he put his arms up straight under it.

  It struck.

  George felt his arm breaking like twigs, and saw a looming grayness that blotted out the sky; he felt a sledge impact that made the ground shudder beneath him.

  He heard a splattering sound.

  And he was still alive. That astonishing fact kept him fully occupied for a long time after the boulder had clattered its way down the slope into silence. Then, at last, he looked down to his right.

  The resistance of his stiffened arms, even while they broke, had been enough to lever the falling boulder over, a distance of some thirty centimeters. The right half of the monster was a flattened, shattered ruin. He could see a few flecks of pasty gray matter, melting now into green-brown translucence as the mass flowed slowly together again.

  In twenty minutes, the last remnants of a superfluous spinal cord had been absorbed, the monster had collected itself back into its normal lens shape, and George’s pain was diminishing. In five minutes more, his mended arms were strong enough to use.

  They were also more convincingly shaped and colored than before,—the tendons, the fingernails, even the wrinkles of the skin were in good order. In ordinary circumstances this discovery would have left George happily bemused for hours. Now, in his impatience, he barely noticed it. He climbed to the top of the bank.

  Thirty meters away, a humped green-brown body like his own lay motionless on the dry grass.

  It contained, of course, only one brain. Whose?

  McCarty’s, almost certainly; Vivian hadn’t had a chance. But then how did it happen that there was no visible trace of McCarty’s arm?

  Unnerved, George walked around the creature for a closer inspection.

  ==========

  On the far side, he encountered two dark-brown eyes, with an oddly unfinished appearance. They focused on him after an instant and the whole body quivered slightly, moving toward him.

  Vivian’s eyes had been brown; George remembered them distinctly. Brown eyes with heavy dark lashes in a tapering slender face. But did that prove anything? What color had McCarty’s eyes been? He couldn’t remember.

  George moved closer, hoping fervently that the Something-or-other meuterii was at least advanced enough to conjugate, instead of trying to devour members of its own species…

  The two bodies touched, clung and began to flow together. Watching, George saw the fissioning process reverse itself. From paired lenses, the alien flesh melted into a slipper-shape, to an ovoid, to a lens-shape again. His brain and the other drifted closer together, the spinal cords crossing at right angles.

  And it was only then that he noticed an oddity about the other brain. It seemed to be more solid and compact than his, the outline sharper.

  ‘Vivian?’ he said worriedly. ‘Is that you?’

  No answer. He tried again; and again.

  Finally:

  ‘George! Oh dear—I want to cry, but I don’t seem able to doit.’

  ‘No lachrymal glands,’ George said automatically. ‘Uh, Vivian?’

  ‘Yes, George?’ That warm voice again…

  ‘What happened to Miss McCarty? How did you—’

  ‘I don’t know. She’s gone, isn’t she? I haven’t heard her for a long time.’

  ‘Yes,’ said George, ‘she’s gone. You mean you don’t know? Tell me what you did.’

  ‘Well, I wanted to make an arm, because you told me to, but I didn’t think I had time enough. So I made a skull instead. and those things to cover my spine—’

  ‘Vertebrae.’ Now why, he thought discontentedly, didn’t I thing of that? ‘And then?’

  ‘I think I’m crying now,’ she said. ‘Yes, I am. It’s such a relief—And then, after that, nothing. She was still hurting me, and I just lay still and thought how wonderful it would be if she weren’t in here with me. After a while, she wasn’t. And then I grew eyes to look for you.’

  The explanation, it seemed to George, was more perplexing than the enigma. Staring around in a vague search for enlightenment, he caught sight of something he hadn’t noticed before. Two meters to his left, just visible in the grass, was a damp-looking grayish lump, with a suggestion of a stringy extension trailing off from it.

  There must, he decided suddenly, be some mechanism in the Something-or-other meisterii for disposing of tenants who failed to adapt themselves—brains that went into catatonia, or hysteria, or suicidal frenzy. An eviction clause in the lease.

  Somehow, Vivian had managed to stimulate that mechanism—to convince the organism that McCarty’s brain was not only superfluous but dangerous—‘Toxic’ was the word.

  It was the ultimate ignominy. Miss McCarty had not been digested. She’d been excreted.

  ==========

  By sunset, twelve hours later, they had made a good deal of progress. They had reached an understanding very agreeable to them both. They had hunted down another herd of the pseudo-pigs for their noon meal. They had not once quarreled or even irritated each other. And for divergent reasons—on George’s side because the monster’s normal metabolism was unsatisfactory when it had to move quickly, and on Vivian’s because she refused to believe that any man could be attracted to her in her present condition—they had begun a serious attempt to
reshape themselves.

  The first trials were extraordinarily difficult, the rest surprisingly easy. Again and again, they had to let themselves collapse back into an ameboid shape, victims of some omitted or malfunctioning organ, but each failure smoothed the road. They were at last able to stand breathless but breathing, swaying but stable, face to face—two preliminary sketches of self-made Man.

  They had also put thirty kilometers between themselves and the Federation camp. Standing on the crest of a rise and looking southward across the shallow valley, George could see a faint funereal glow: the mining machines, chewing out metals to feed the fabricators that would spawn lethal spaceships.

  ‘We’ll never go back there, will we?’ begged Vivian.

  ‘No,’ said George confidently. ‘We’ll let them find us. When they do, they’ll be a lot more disconcerted than we will. We can make ourselves anything we want to be, remember.’

  ‘I want you to want me, so I’m going to be beautiful.’

  ‘More beautiful than any woman ever was,’ he agreed, ‘and both of us will have super-intelligence. I don’t see why not. We can direct our growth in any way we choose. We’ll be more than human.’

  ‘I’d like that, said Vivian.

  They won’t. The McCartys and the Gumbs and all the rest would never have a chance against us. We’re the future.’

  There was one thing more, a small matter, but important to George, because it marked his sense of accomplishment, of one phase ended and a new one begun. He had finally completed the name of his discovery.

  It wasn’t Something-or-other mehterii at all.

  It was Spes hominis— Man’s hope.

  * * *

  With a reckless laugh, Norman Spinrad here kicks aside the debris of misinformation surrounding Primitive Man, bores to the very roots of civilization, and gives a brief and funny insight into the way it really was, and is, and will be.

  THE AGE OF INVENTION

  by Norman Spinrad

  ==========