Possible Worlds of Science Fiction

by Groff Conklin

  Jenner listened for a while and then, with abrupt excitement, realized the truth. This was a substitute for the whistling—the village had adjusted its music to him!

  Other sensory phenomena stole in upon him. The dais felt comfortably warm, not hot at all. He had a feeling of wonderful physical well-being.

  Eagerly he scrambled down the ramp to the nearest food stall. As he crawled forward, his nose close to the floor, the trough filled with a steamy mixture. The odor was so rich and pleasant that he plunged his face into it and slopped it up greedily. It had the flavor of thick, meaty soup and was warm and soothing to his lips and mouth. When he had eaten it all, for the first time he did not need a drink of water.

  “I’ve won!” thought Jenner. “The village has found a way!”

  After a while he remembered something and crawled to the bathroom. Cautiously, watching the ceiling, he eased himself backward into the shower stall. The yellowish spray came down, cool and delightful.

  Ecstatically Jenner wriggled his four-foot-tail and lifted his long snout to let the thin streams of liquid wash away the food impurities that clung to his sharp teeth.

  Then he waddled out to bask in the sun and listen to the timeless music.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  Malcolm Jameson

  LILIES OF LIFE

  The next planet after Mars to be invaded by man, most experts agree, will be Venus—mysterious globe which, from Earth, is eternally concealed behind immense roiling layers of cloud. We do not know a single useful fact about the surface conditions on this planet, and consequently we have had stories describing it as everything from a desert-dry waste to a completely ocean-covered ball. The late Malcolm Jameson, who was one of modern science fiction’s most graphic and effective writers, has made some highly plausible guesses along a different line of development in this richly variegated picture of extraordinary life forms on a supertropical planet.

  ~ * ~

  THE test tube dropped to the floor with a crash. A wisp of acrid vapor trailed up from it.

  Parks, ignoring it and gripping the edge of the table, moaned, “Something’s happened to my schedule—this isn’t due for an hour yet—”

  He broke off, shivering.

  Maxwell looked sharply at him from where he sat, and then glanced at the clock. It was only two. Their next shots were due at three o’clock. But there was no doubt that Parks was working himself into a seizure. Already his hands were twitching and jumping convulsively, and the telltale tics of the deadly Venusian swamp jitters were commencing to go to work. Parks’s face was no longer his own, but a travesty of a human countenance—a wildly leering, alternately staring and squinting, mask of agony.

  With a sigh, Maxwell rose and pushed back his chair. If Parks was going that way, so would he, soon. Unhurriedly he walked to the medicine cabinet and took out two shiny syringes. He filled them both from their supply of ampules. Paracobrine was not much good, but it was the best men knew. Then he laid them by the “wailing wall”— an iron railing firmly secured to heavy stanchions—and went to where the now whimpering Parks huddled on his stool.

  “Come on, old man,” he said gently, “let’s get it over with.”

  Parks allowed himself to be led to the place, and long practice did the rest. By the time Maxwell had the needle in and the plunger thrust home, Parks was gripping the rail as if he meant to squeeze it flat. Maxwell took a deep breath. It was his turn. He rolled up his sleeve and forced the amber liquid into his own veins.

  For five interminable minutes the two men clung there, writhing and sobbing as the fiery stuff coursed through their bodies—molten iron, searing acid, soul-destroying agony. And then it passed. Fingers relaxed their deathlike hold, muscles untensed, and their gasping again became breathing.

  “I . . . won’t go . . . through . . . this . . . again—” began Parks through clenched teeth, “I—”

  “Oh, yes you will,” said Maxwell grimly. “We always say that . . . everybody says it . . . but still we go on. You know the alternatives don’t you?”

  “I know them,” said Parks dully. Without paracobrine the jitters became a permanent condition, not a recurrent one, and one that ended necessarily in madness. The other course was the rope, or the jump from a high place, or a swifter poison.

  “All right, let’s get back to work then. What was in that tube?”

  “Experiment eleven-o-four. It doesn’t matter now. I used the last of the snooker bark. We haven’t the stuff to duplicate it with. Not unless Hoskins smuggles in another supply.”

  “Forget it, then. Let’s have a look in the ward. Maybe eleven-o-three did the trick.”

  Parks followed silently, gradually pulling himself back into his normal self. Next time he would know enough to advance the clock. Paracobrine was no fun, but it was less hard to take in a calm mood then after the attack had begun.

  The ward brought the usual disappointment. The monkey in the victim cage was gibbering hideously in his last convulsions. Within a minute it would be as dead as the limp piles of inoculated guinea pigs in the pens beyond. The last try at the formula had not worked. Two thirds of the human race would have to go on suffering for a while, for a better answer to the swamp jitters than paracobrine was not yet invented.

  Maxwell looked at the other cages. There were still some monkeys and guinea pigs, and there were a few other combinations yet to try. Men in vital research must be resilient. A thousand or so failures was nothing. It is a part of the business.

  “I think,” he started to say, “that we had best—”

  “I’ll get the door,” Parks interrupted, as a discreet tapping broke in on them. “Sounds like Hoskins.”

  ~ * ~

  It was Hoskins, Hoskins the interplanetary smuggler. He carried a heavy satchel and wore a sour grin.

  “Bad news, fellows,” he said, setting down his bag. “No more stuff out of Venus from now on. They’ve trebled the off-planet patrol and tightened up on port inspection. Tony was pinched, and his ship and the stuff for you with it. They threw him in the clink, of course, and burned the cargo. That means you won’t get any more snooker bark, or gizzle bugs, twangi-twangi, melons, or any other of that stuff. Shan Dhee has chucked his job, which leaves me without a buyer. I’m going out of business. Sorry.”

  “There’s nothing for us?” asked Parks, aghast. He clung fiercely to his theory that the specific for the jitters would be found only in some organic product of Venus, where the disease originated. It would be there, if anywhere, that the virus’s natural enemies would have evolved. But lately other Venusian maladies had been turning up, and the quarantine authorities must have ordered a stricter embargo. Without smuggled organics, his and Maxwell’s hands would be tied.

  “I’ve got this stuff,” said Hoskins, opening the bag. “It’s not the sort you usually order, but I happen to have it on hand and want to close it out. It’s loot Shan Dhee got out of a Tombov temple he once robbed. It ought to go to a museum, but the stuff’s hot and they ask too many questions. Could you use it?”

  He dug into the bag and came up with a figurine. It was a piece of the curious coffee-colored semi-jade regarded as a sacred stone by the savage Tombovs, and, considered as Tombov work, was extraordinarily well executed. Its subject was a rotund, jolly old Tombov godlet, sitting comfortably on a throne with his pudgy hands clasped across his belly. About his neck hung a rope of what appeared to be large pearls, and he was crowned with a chaplet of swamp lilies. Lily plants grew all about the throne, and there the jade had been cunningly colored green by the application of a kind of lacquer—the pale-yellow lilies being similarly tinted.

  “Shan Dhee says it is the Tombov God of Health, and the temple was the big one in Angra Swamp where the Angra tribes hold their orgies.”

  “Ugh!” shuddered Parks. Those who had seen them reported the Tombov ritual was not a pretty thing to watch. “No, it’s no good to us.”

  “I don’t know,” said Maxwell slowly. �
�God of Health, you say? M-m-m. Come to think of it, most Tombovs are immune to the jitters, or were until our pioneers went there. Maybe we ought to study it. How much?”

  “Nothing, to you,” said Hoskins. “You’ve been good customers. Take it for cumshaw. But I’ll have to ask money for these.”

  He dug again into the bag and came out with a double handful of beautiful, iridescent spherelets. They were each about the size of a golf ball, and looked for all the world like so many soap bubbles—thin, fragile, and shimmering. Yet when Maxwell examined one he found it to be exceedingly hard, though almost weightless, and it appeared to be made of the toughest imaginable crystal.

  “What are they?”

  “Gems, I guess,” shrugged Hoskins. “They came out of the temple, too. Shan Dhee said they hung around the neck of the big idol like a necklace—roped together with wisps of grass. See, the little idol wears a replica of it.”

  Maxwell considered the jewels, frowning. Hoskins added that the price would be a thousand for the lot. That was a lot of money, but what was money to men doomed to a lingering, fearful death? The baubles were somehow linked to the Tombov health rites, and the wild Tombov—though a filthy beast—was notoriously healthy. It was only the civilized ones who withered and died. It was doubtful that the gems themselves had any therapeutic value, but they came out of a temple. Therefore they were symbolic of something or other, a possible clue to the real secret.

  Maxwell hauled a drawer open and swept the glistening spheres into it.

  “Make out a check, Parks. I’m going to play a hunch.”

  ~ * ~

  Parks, still dazed from his premature seizure, nodded dumbly. And after Hoskins had gone, they took out the spheres again and huddled over them. Then they divided up the work and went at it.

  Tests were applied, with results that were largely negative. The iridescent balls were acidproof, shatterproof, and exceedingly hard. But Maxwell managed to saw one in half, and found it empty, though as the saw first bit through the thin shell there was a sharp hissing as trapped inner gases escaped into the room. Parks was quick to catch a sample of the foul-smelling stuff, only to be baffled by the analysis. The organic gases of Venus have most complex molecular structures.

  “Hey,” yelled Maxwell a little later, taking his eye away from the microscope. “I have some of that sawdust here. It isn’t crystalline at all. It’s definitely a cellular structure. These balls are certainly not minerals, but they are not plant or animal tissue, either—not as we know them. They’re just—”

  “Just Venusian,” Parks completed for him, sighing. Anything that lived on Venus was a headache to the investigator. There was no perceptible borderline between flora and fauna, and there were times when both encroached into the mineral zone. Venusian life cycles made those of such devious transformations as the human tapeworm on Earth seem as bleakly simple as the reproductive processes of the amoeba. Parks knew of a sort of aquatic ant, to name just one, that was fertilized by clinging to the skin of eels, and which then crawled ashore and laid its eggs, the eggs subsequently growing up into masses of moss. Weird, featherless birds ate that moss and developed intestinal parasites. Those, upon deserting their host, became crawling ants, sprouted wings, and then took off for the ocean. It was merely the usual Venusian complicated symbiotic setup: the ants being somehow necessary to the survival of the eels, and, in their later forms, to the birds, both as food and as digestive enzymes. Scientists who attempted to follow through lost themselves in a maze of still other ramifications.

  Maxwell and Parks stared at one another.

  “There’s only one thing to do,” said Maxwell. “Hoskins can’t bring any more stuff to us; we’ll have to go to it. I want to know why wild Tombovs don’t have jitters, and why lilies are sacred to them, and what these things are. We’re going to Venus.”

  Their arrival at Port Angra was not a cheerful occasion. Their arms and legs were puffed and aching from scores of prophylactic shots. Moreover, they had had to sign away most of their civil rights. Despite all precautions, white men rarely could remain more than three months on Venus without picking up one or more virulent infections, any of which would prevent his ever returning to sanitary Earth. People therefore went there at their own risk, absolving in advance the government and all others concerned.

  There was also nothing reassuring about their fellow passengers. A few were desperate scientists like themselves, stragglers in the procession that had been going by for years. Others were missionaries, gone to relieve brothers whose three months were about up. For similar reasons there were relief quarantine-enforcement officers along, and representatives of the Radioactive Syndicate, come to take their turn at keeping the uranium mines going. Most regarded their assignments with unalloyed distaste.

  They came down in the inevitable sticky, yellow, hot mist and landed in a clearing made in a lush jungle. Awaiting them was a pathetic sight—rows and rows of grounded palanquins with the weathered and mildewing white and red insignia of the Red Cross. In litters lay the men they were coming to relieve, mere wrecks of what they had been a few short weeks before. For not a few of them, their coming to the port was no more than a hopeless gesture. Whether they were accepted for the passage home would depend upon the doctors.

  “This is some place,” growled Parks.

  “When the jitters hit you again,” reminded Maxwell grimly, “it won’t matter. Any place you happen to be in will be that.”

  He studied the ranks of tamed Tombovs standing patiently beside the grounded chairs. They were the bearers, the helots of this hole. They stood gaunt and shivering, for they were sick men, too, sicker even than the whites. It was thought profitable to keep Earthmen alive by periodic doses of paracobrine, but a waste of good drugs when it came to natives. The swamps were full of them, and the promise of tobacco—the one nonnative commodity valued by the savages— always filled up the ranks again. As Maxwell looked, one of the chair bearers jerked into violent convulsions and fell writhing and howling to the muddy ground. No one noticed. It was too routine. Tomorrow, maybe, the scavengers would attend to it.

  The Tombov was remarkably humanoid, grotesquely so, more so than the great apes of Earth. The salient difference was in the feet, huge splayed pedals that served as mudshoes, distributing the body weight over a larger area so that the Tombov could walk safely on the thin crust that topped the viscous mire of the swamplands. They were ducklike feet, mostly membrane spread between long, tapering toes.

  The port captain came up and called litters for the new arrivals, one each for the men, and additional ones for their equipment. Then he barked out an order in the harsh Tombov tongue, and the bearers picked up their loads and went on splashing away.

  Despite the poor visibility, Maxwell found it an interesting ride. There was a feeling of luxuriousness in being carried along over impossibly sloppy ground on the bare shoulders of a half-dozen jogging slaves. And he was interested and at the same time appalled at the riot of vegetation he glimpsed on all sides. There was an infinitude of species of every kind of living thing, an overwhelming field for scientific study. With human mortality rates what they were, man would probably never know much about Venusian life forms. For the animals, if they were animals, that peered out from time to time were as weird and incredible as the fantastic flowering lianas, smoking bushes, and trees that gave off metallic, cracked-bell, clanking sounds.

  His momentary sense of well-being abruptly departed from him as their caravan hove into a clearing and moved past a low mud wall. Over the group of buildings beyond the wall flew the drab banner of the U.M.—United Missions. He saw the corrals into which newly arrived Tombovs were being herded preparatory to their being “processed” for the slave market. For since Earthmen could not work and survive in that vile climate, they had to have natives as the beasts of burden. It was natives who dug the uranium, who did the building and the hauling. And heathen Tombovs would not do. They were too intractable.

  Maxwell thou
ght cynically of the conversion statistics, of the thousands run through the salvation mills each year. It was not basically an evangelical proposition. It was an economic necessity. For all Earthmen, whatever their faith, agreed on one point—the Tombov in the raw was a lazy, lascivious, irresponsible rascal. The wild native was a chronic liar, a congenital thief, and what displeased him he was prone to kill out of hand, and his means of doing it were rarely nice. He saw no point in working, for natural food was on every hand. He was tough; therefore physical punishment meant nothing. His philosophy was virtually nil, so he was deaf to abstract appeal. In short, to be useful, he had to be Christianized.

  ~ * ~

  A turn of the road put behind them the mission and its hateful appendage—the labor mart. Ahead were the first straggling huts of An-gra. They passed the inevitable dispensary, with its white-coated attendants and wailing wall. Then they stopped beyond at a low building whose sign read:

  Bureau of Research Coordination