The Day the Earth Stood Still: Selected Stories of Harry Bates

by Harry Bates

  "Not to miss anything she added, 'He embodies the extension of every quality that makes for civilization; he's reached the logical end of man's ambitious climb up from the monkey.'

  " 'My Lord!' I said. 'Here's a dead end!'

  " 'For myself, I sum it all in five words,' she went on nobly: 'He leads the mental life.'

  "After a little my emotions suddenly got out of control. 'Does–does he like it?' I blurted out. But that was a mistake. I tried, 'Do you mean to imply he spends his life sitting here and thinking?'

  " 'Pure living and high thinking,' she put it.

  " 'No living, I'm thinking!' I retorted. 'What does he think of?

  "He is probably our greatest esthetician,' she answered proudly. 'It's a pity you can't know the trueness and beauty of his formulations.'

  " 'How do you know they are beautiful?' I asked with my primitive skepticism.

  " 'I can hear his thoughts, of course,' was the answer.

  "This surprising statement started me on another string of questions, and when I got through I had learned the following: This old bird and the others could not hear me think because my intellectual wave length was too short for their receivers; that Pearl, when talking and thinking with me, was for the same reason below their range; and that Pearl shared with the old guys the power of tuning in or out of such private meditations or general conversations as might be going on.

  " 'We utilize this telepathic faculty,' Pearl added, 'in the education of our young. Especially the babies, while they are still unborn. The adults take turns in tutoring them for their cells. I, it happens, was a premature baby–only eleven months–so I missed most of my prenatal instruction. That's why I'm different from the others here, and inferior. Though they say I was bad material all the way back from conception.'

  "Her words made my stomach turn over, and the sight of that disproportioned cadaver didn't help it any, either. Still, I stood my ground and did my best to absorb every single detail.

  "While so engaged I saw one of the most fantastic things yet. The nasty little slit of a mouth under our host's head slowly separated until it revealed a dark and gummy opening; and as it reached its maximum I heard a click behind my back and jumped to one side just in time to see a small gray object shoot from a box fastened to the wall, and, after a wide arc through the air, make a perfect landing in the old gentleman's mouth!

  " 'He felt the need for some sustenance,' Pearl explained. 'Those pellets contain his food and water. Naturally he needs very little. They are ejected by a mechanism sensitive to the force of his mind waves.'

  " 'Let me out,' I said.

  "We went out into the clean, warm sunshine. How sweet that homely field looked! I sat down on the grass and picked a daisy. It was not one whit different from those of my own time, at home.

  "Pearl sat down beside me.

  " 'We now have an empty cell,' she said, 'but one of our younger men is ready to fill it. He has been waiting until we installed a new and larger food receptacle–one that will hold enough for seventy-five years without refilling. We've just finished. It is, of course, the young of our community who take care of the elders by preparing the food pellets and doing what other few chores are necessary. They do this until they outgrow the strength of their bodies and can no longer get around–when they have the honor of maturity and may take their place in one of the cells.'

  "'But how in the devil do creatures like–like that in there, manage to have children?' I had to ask.

  " 'Oh, I know what you mean, but you've got the wrong idea,' came her instant explanation. 'That matter is attended to while they are still comparatively young. From the very beginning the young are raised in incubators.'

  "I have always had a quick stomach–and she insisted on trying to prove it!

  " 'With us, it takes fifteen months,' she went along. 'We have two under way at present. Would you like to see them?'

  "I told her that I would see them, but that I would not like it. 'But first,' I asked, 'if you don't mind, show me one other of these adults of yours. I–I–I can't get over it. I still can't quite believe it.'

  "She said she would. A woman. And at that we got up and she led me to the next cell.

  "I did not go in. I stood outside and took one look at the inmate through the door. Horrible! Female that she was, it was at that moment I first thought what a decent thing it would be–yes, and how pleasant–to hold each one of the necks of those cartoons of humankind in the ring of my two strong hands for a moment–

  "But I was a trusted visitor, and such thoughts were not to be encouraged. I asked Pearl to lead on to the incubators.

  "We had left the block of cells and were rounding the corner of the building when Pearl stopped and pulled me back. Apparently she had gotten some thought warning just in time, for in a moment three outlandish figures filed out of the very door of the big building that we had been making for. All wore black shiny shifts like Pearl's, and they were, very obviously, young flowers of Genus Homo in full perfection.

  "The first was the size, but had not nearly the emaciated proportions, of the old esthetician, and his great bald head wobbled precariously on his outrageous neck as he made his uncertain way along. The second–a girl, I think–was smaller, younger, stronger, but she followed her elder at a respectful distance in the same awful manner. The third in the procession was a male, little more than a baby, and he half stumbled after the others in his own version of their caricature of a walk.

  "They walked straight out into the field; and do you know, that little fellow, pure monster in appearance, ugly as ultimate sin, did a thing that brought tears to my eyes. As he came to the edge of the walk and stepped off into the grass, he bent laboriously over and plucked a daisy–and looked at it in preoccupied fashion as he toddled on after the others!

  "I was much relieved that they had not discovered us, and so was Pearl. As soon as they were a safe distance away, she whispered to me, " 'I had to be careful. They all can see, and the two younger ones still can hear.'

  " 'What are they going to do out there?' I asked.

  " 'Take a lesson in metaphysics,' she answered, and almost with her words the first one sat down thoughtfully out in the middle of the field–to be followed in turn by the second and even the little fellow!

  " 'The tallest one,' Pearl informed me, 'is the one who is to take a place in the vacant cell. He had better do it soon. It's becoming dangerous for him to walk about. His neck's too weak.'

  "With care we edged our way up and into the building, but this time Pearl conducted me along the corridor on the other side. The dust there was as thick as in the first, except along the middle, where many footprints testified to much use. We came to the incubators.

  "There I saw them. I saw them; I made myself look at them; but I tell you it was an effort! I–I think, if you don't mind, I won't describe them. You know–my personal peculiarity. They were wonderful. Curvings of glass and tubes. Two, in them. Different stages. I left right away; went back to the front door; and in a few minutes felt better.

  "Pearl, of course, had to come after me and try to take me back; and I noticed an amusing thing. The sight of those coming babies had had a sort of maternal effect on her! I swear it! For she would talk about them; and before long she timidly–ah, but as dryly as ever!–suggested that we attempt a kiss!–only she forgot the word and called it a scrape. Ye gods! Well, we scraped-exactly as before–and that, my friends, was the incident which led straight and terribly to the termination of the genus Homo Sapiens!

  "You could never imagine what happened. It was this, like one-two-three: Pearl and I touched lips; I heard a soft, weird cry behind me; I wheeled; saw, in the entrance, side by side, the three creatures I had thought were safely out in the field getting tutored; saw the eldest's face contort, his head wobble; heard a sharp snap; and then in a twinkling he had fallen over on the other two; and when the dust had settled we saw the young flowers of perfect humanity in an ugly pile, and they lay still, quite
still, with, each one, a broken neck!

  "They represented the total stock of the race, and they were dead, and I had been the innocent cause!

  "I was scared; but how do you think their death affected Pearl? Do you think she showed any sign of emotion? She did not. She ratiocinated. She was sorry, of course–so her words said–the tallest guy had been such a beautiful soul!–a born philosopher!–but it had happened; there was nothing to do about it except remove the bodies, and now it was up to her alone to look after the incubators and that cemetery of thinkers.

  " 'But first,' she said, 'I'd better take you back to your time.'

  " 'But no,' I said, and I invented lots of reasons why I'd better stay a little. Now that there was no one to discover my presence I more than ever did not want to go. There were a hundred things I wanted to study–the old men, how they functioned, the conditions of the outside world, and so on–but particularly, I confess, I wanted to examine the contents of that building. If it could produce a time traveler, it must contain other marvels, the secrets of which I might be able to learn and take back home with me.

  "We went out into the sun and argued, and my guide did a lot of squatting and meditating, and in the end I won out. I could stay three days.

  "On the afternoon of the first day something went wrong with the incubators, and Pearl came hurrying to tell me in her abstracted fashion that the two occupants, the last hopes of the human race, were dead.

  "She did not know it, but I had done things to the mechanisms of the incubators.

  "I had murdered those unborn monsters. Charles, Miles, let's have some more tea."

  CHAPTER VII

  Frick went over to the thermos bottle, poured for us, returned it to the floor, and resumed his chair. We rested for several minutes, and my dictograph shows that again not a word was spoken. I will not try to describe my thoughts except to say that the break in the tension had found me in need of the stimulation I was given.

  When Frick resumed, it was suddenly, with unexpected bitterness and vehemence.

  "Homo Sapiens had become a caricature and an abomination!" he exclaimed. "I did not murder those unborn babies on impulse, nor did I commit my later murders on impulse. My actions were considered; my decisions were reached after hours of the calmest, clearest thinking I have ever done; I accepted full responsibility, and I still accept it!

  I want now to make a statement which above all I want you to believe. It is this. At the time I made up my mind to destroy those little monsters, and so terminate Genus Homo, I expected to bring Pearl back to live out her years in our time. That was the disposition I had planned for her. Her future did not work out that way. To put it baldly, Mother Nature made the most ridiculous ass of all time out of me; but remember, in justice to me, that the current of events got changed after my decision.

  "I have said that Pearl took the death of the race's only young stock in her usual bland manner. She certainly did; but, as I think back over those days, it seems to me she did show a tiny bit, oh, a most infinitesimal amount, of feeling. That feeling was directed wholly toward me. You may ask how she could differ temperamentally–and physically–from those others, but I can only suggest that the enigma of her personal equation was bound up in the unique conditions of her birth. As she said, she may have been 'bad material' to start with. Then, something had gone wrong with an incubator; she was born after only eleven months; was four months premature; had received remote prenatal tutoring for that much less time; and had functioned in a different and far more physical manner much earlier, and with fewer built-in restraints, than the others.

  "It was this difference in her, this independence and initiative, that caused her to find the time traveler, the unused and forgotten achievement of a far previous age. It was this difference that allowed her to dare use it in the way we know. And it was this difference–now I am speaking chiefly of her physical difference–that gave rise in me to the cosmic ambitions which took me from farce to horror, and which I will now try to describe.

  "Toward the evening of the second day we sat out on the wild grass before that corroboree of static philosophers and discussed the remaining future of the human race.

  "I argued, since there was no one else to look after them now, and since they could live only as long as she lived, it was clear that the best thing–and, in the event of accident to her, the most humane thing–would be for me to kill them all as painlessly as possible and take her back to my time to live.

  I need not mention the impossibility of there being any more descendants from them.

  "But for the only time during all the period I knew her she refused to face the facts. She wouldn't admit a single thing; I got nowhere; argue and plead as I would, all she would say, over and over, was that it was a pity that the human race had to come to an end. I see now that I was dense to take so long to get what she was driving at. When I did finally get it I nearly fell over backward in the grass.

  "My friends, she was delicately hinting that I was acceptable to her as the father of a future race!

  "Oh, that was gorgeous! I simply couldn't restrain my laughter; I had to turn my back; and I had a devil of a time explaining what I was doing, and why my shoulders shook so. To let her down easily, I told her I would think it over that night and give her my decision in the morning. And that was all there was to it at the time.

  "Now comes the joke; now comes the beginning of my elevation to the supreme heights of asshood, and you are at liberty to laugh as much as you please. That night, under the low-hung stars of that far future world, I did decide to become the father of a future race! Yes–the single father of ultimate humanity!

  "That night was perhaps the most tremendous experience of my life. The wide thinking I did! The abandoned planning! What were not the possibilities of my union with Pearl! She, on her side, had superb intellectuality, was the product of millions of years' culture; while I had emotion, vitality, the physicalness that she and the withered remains of her people so lacked! Who might guess what renaissance of degenerated humanity our posterity might bring! I walked, that night; I shouted; I laughed; I cried. I was to become a latter-day god! I spent emotion terrifically; it could not last till dawn; morning found Pearl waking me, quite wet with dew, far out in the hills.

  I had settled everything in my mind. Pearl and I would mate, and nature would take her course; but there was one prime condition. There would have to be a housecleaning, first. Those cartoons of humanity would have to be destroyed. They represented all that was absurd and decadent; they were utterly without value; they were a stench and an abomination. Death to the old, and on with the new!

  "I told Pearl of my decision. She was not exactly torrid with gratitude when she heard me say I would make her my wife, but she did give some severely logical approval, and that was something. She balked, however, at my plan to exterminate her redoubtable exponents of the mental life. She was quite stubborn.

  "All that day I tried to convince her. I pointed out the old folks' uselessness; but she argued they were otherwise; that usefulness gives birth to the notion of beauty; that, therefore, beauty accompanies usefulness; and that because the old gentlemen were such paragons of subjective beauty they were, therefore, paragons of usefulness. I got lost on that airy plane of reasoning. I informed her that I, too, was something of an esthetician, and that I had proved to myself they smelled bad and were intolerable; and how easy it would be to exterminate them!–how slender their hold on life!

  "Nothing doing. At one time I made the mistake of trying vile humor. Here's a splendid solution of the in-law problem! As if she could be made to smile! She made me explain what I had meant! And this seemed to give her new thinking material, and resulted in her going down into squat-thinks so often that I was almost ready to run amuck.

  I suppose there must be a great unconscious loyalty to race in humans, for even in that attenuated time Pearl, unsentimental as she always was, doggedly insisted that they be allowed to live out their unnatural
lives.

  I never did persuade her. I forced her. Either they had to go or I would. Late that night she gave me her permission.

  I awoke the morning of the fourth day in glorious high spirits. This was the day that was to leave me the lord of creation! I was not at all disturbed that it entailed my first assuming the office of high executioner. I went gaily to meet Pearl and asked her if she had settled her mind for the work of the day. She had. As we breakfasted on some damnable stuff like sawdust we talked over various methods of extermination.

  "Oh, I was in splendid spirits! To prove to Pearl that I was a just executioner, I offered to consider the case of each philostatician separately and to spare any for whom extenuating circumstances could be found. We started on the male monster of my first day. Standing before him in his cell I asked Pearl, " 'What good can you say of this alleged esthetician?'

  " 'He has a beautiful soul,' she claimed.

  " 'But look at his body!'

  " 'You are no judge,' she retorted. 'And what if his body does decay?–his mind is eternal.'

  " 'What's he meditating on?'

  "Pearl went into a think. After a moment she said, 'A hole in the ground.'

  " 'Can you interpret his thoughts for me?' I asked.

  " 'It is difficult, but I'll try,' she said. After a little she began tonelessly, 'It's a hole. There is something–a certain something about it–Once caught my leg in one–I pulled. Yes, there is something ineffable. So-called matter around-air within–Holes-depth-moisture-leaks-juice– Yes, it is the idea of a hole– Hole-inverse infinity-holiness–'

  " 'That'll do!' I said–and pulled the receptacle of all this wisdom suddenly forward. There was a sharp crack, like the breaking of a dry stick, and the receptacle hung swaying pendulously against his ribs. 'Justice!' I cried.

  "The old woman was next. 'What's there good about her?' I asked.

  " 'She is a mother,' Pearl replied.