Possible Worlds of Science Fiction

by Groff Conklin

  Maxwell shot a glance at the temple. Its doors were closed and barred. It was that way also in the glade. The huts were empty, the celebrants gone. The festival was over. Now everything was taboo. Maxwell’s wrist watch said it was late afternoon. He had slept more than the night.

  Then his heart jumped as he belatedly remembered Parks. Parks said he would come back. Where was he? Had Shan Dhee assaulted him, too? Maxwell looked around, but there was no sign of him. He started off across the glade in great strides.

  Before the hut he was brought to an abrupt stop. Another taboo tripod stood there. But there was more besides. On a stake nearby there was the grinning, newly severed head of a Tombov, and scattered about the foot of the stake were freshly picked bones—near-human bones. The head was Shan Dhee’s head. It meant that Shan Dee had transgressed somehow, and Shan Dhee had paid the penalty. It was ominous. Maxwell feared to think of what he might find inside.

  ~ * ~

  What was inside was bad enough. Both rooms were a shambles of smashed possessions. Most of the scientific equipment was hopelessly ruined, and food pellets were mixed indiscriminately with spilled chemicals. Every scrap of tobacco was gone. But far worse, the whole interior reeked of paracobrine. Shattered ampules and broken syringes explained that readily enough. The looters, Nazi-like, had destroyed what they did not value themselves.

  At the moment none of that bothered Maxwell overmuch. It was Parks he wanted to find. And find him he did, half hidden beneath a pile of torn clothes. Maxwell uncovered him and knelt beside him, staring at him in bitter dejection. He felt like a murderer, for Parks had never been keen about this wild-goose expedition. It was Maxwell who insisted on playing the hunch. Now Parks’s tense face had a deathly pallor, and the few weak tremors were eloquent of the complete exhaustion that must follow a night and day of uncontrolled convulsions. Parks had been late for his shot and must have fallen, out of control. Maxwell should have foreseen that, and returned with him. Now it was too late. There was no more paracobrine. By morning Parks would be dead.

  Maxwell sat for minutes, torturing himself. Then, of a sudden, a great light dawned on him. Why, he himself had missed at least two shots, and he felt fine! Unbelieving, he stretched out his arm. There was not so much as a hint of a tremor. What . . . why . . .

  In another instant Maxwell was outside, ransacking abandoned huts. In a little while it would be deep twilight, and he had no time to lose. In the third hut he found a kankilona net. In another a broken cage, which he speedily repaired. Then he set off for the swamp’s edge.

  Maxwell quickly discovered that catching wily kankilonas alive was work that required men in gangs. The first several he spotted eluded him. The fourth one squared off and circled, warily fighting back. Maxwell was in no mood to quibble. Did kankilona venom lose its potency when the spider died ? He couldn’t know. But he knew he had to have some—of any strength—and quickly. He hurled his knife into the monster and watched it die. Then, lacking any kind of container, he tore off part of his shirt and dipped it into the dripping poison. He ran back to Parks with that.

  “Open your mouth, old man,” he coaxed, but there was no response. Maxwell pried the jaws apart and blocked them. Then, drop by drop, he wrung nauseous oil out of the rag. Parks winced and tried to avert his head, but he was too weak. He gulped the stuff down, perforce. Maxwell fed it all, then waited.

  The reaction was mercifully quick. Within seconds, Parks’s almost imperceptible breathing deepened and his absent pulse returned. Slowly the iron-set neck muscles softened, the face relaxed, and there was a show of warming pink. In a little while Parks was sleeping peacefully. Maxwell examined him carefully from head to foot. There were no tremors. Not any. Maxwell heaved a big sigh of relief. Then he lit a torch. He had to do something about retrieving those food pellets.

  Miraculous as the new-found remedy was, Parks’s convalescence was slow, either because he was so far gone in the beginning or because the venom was not strictly fresh. His complete recovery was a matter of weeks, not hours or days, and in that time Maxwell had the opportunity to observe many things.

  He kept a sharp watch on the swamp. He wanted to see what happened to the crystalline spheres which Shan Dhee had said would vanish after a while. He put on mudshoes and gathered a few and stored them in the hut. Then he maintained a vigil at the hummock’s edge.

  Nothing whatever happened for almost a week, and when it did happen, it happened at night. It was by the purest chance that Maxwell couldn’t go to sleep and walked out into the glade for more air. It was then he saw the shimmering violet light that seemed to pervade the entire swamp area. It was as if the mud flats were a bed of smoldering anthracite dimly lit by flickering bluish flame. Maxwell went back to the hut for the torch and mudshoes. Then he investigated.

  What he discovered was a horde of sluggish crawlers, creatures not too distantly related to the queer Australian platypus. Many were feeding noisily on the lily stubble, but most just lay, as if entranced, staring at the crystalline spherelets. It was the light of their violet eyes that furnished the illumination, a fact that did not astonish Maxwell. The majority of Venusian fauna had luminous eyes. What did bowl him over was what the light did to the shimmering balls. They shrank and shrank. They dwindled to mere pellets, hard and relatively heavy. Then they were no more. There were only bubbles to mark the spot where they had sunk into the mire. Maxwell pocketed several of the shrunken balls just before they disappeared.

  The next day he dissected one. It was now obviously a seed, perhaps a lily seed. It was one more curious example of the deviousness of Nature. Apparently in its first state it was infertile and therefore of a shape and weight which would keep it on the marsh surface. Then, perhaps by symbiotic impulse, the platypus creatures were attracted to it, gazed upon it with their violet rays, and somehow fertilized it. Whereupon it planted itself by gravity.

  Maxwell followed through on that theory. That night he went into the swamp differently armed. He carried a bundle of dry sticks and the spectrographic camera. He recorded the exact composition of the violet light and noted the duration of exposure. Then he marked a number of the bubbly places with his sticks. If lilies came up there, the spheres were lily seeds.

  The next day he reversed his camera, making it a projector. He duplicated the platyputian light and shed it on the crystalline balls he first retrieved. They did shrink into seed. He had at least one bit of positive proof. Then he planted them at a marked spot.

  ~ * ~

  Slowly Parks improved. For several days Maxwell sought and found more spiders, but each day they grew scarcer. There came a day when there were none at all. The festival apparently had been timed to coincide with their greatest density. When would the new crop of them come, and from where? Maxwell thought about that, and began the study of the small pile of carcasses piled outside the hut. He hoped to learn something about the reproduction methods of the kankilona.

  All but one of his dissections were negative. In that one he found an object that definitely jolted him. It was obviously an egg. But the kankilona egg was one of those crystalline balls! He now had one more link in its life cycle. He would have to wait for the rest of it to

  He had to wait for another reason. Parks was gaining, but he would not be able to travel under his own steam for some time to come. On the way back they would not have the assistance of Shan Dhee. Maxwell wondered whether the angry priests had left them the canoe. He dashed off worriedly to investigate.

  The dugout was safe where they had left it. Maxwell eased it into the water and tried it out. And while he was learning the trick of handling it, he paddled it part way down the lagoon. He backed water vigorously as he neared the tripod taboo signs that marked the boundary of the lily reservation. Just beyond, there was an encampment of Tombov braves. It was a troubling discovery.

  But a moment later he was a little bit relieved. A Tombov had spotted him just as he sighted them, and for a long minute both men stared at each other. Oth
er Tombovs got up and looked, stolidly inexpressive. They made no outcry or hostile gesture, and as Maxwell turned the dugout about and headed back toward the temple clearing, the savages sat down again, as if the incident was closed.

  It was Parks who guessed the purpose of the outpost. He was strong enough to talk, then, and was following Maxwell’s theories with great interest.

  “This kankilona business is the Tombov’s big secret. They know by now how selfish the Earthman is and how ruthlessly and wastefully he exploits. They don’t want to kill us—if they had, they would have done it the night they left. But they are not going to let us get back to Angra with a live spider, or its egg, or any other thing they value. If we leave here alive, it will have to be barehanded.”

  “I get it,” said Maxwell gloomily. “They know, as you and I do, that if our race learned about spider venom, swarms of humans would invade these swamps and exterminate the genus in a single season. There just aren’t enough kankilona. They would go the way of the bison and the dodo. And then we would be in a fix.”

  “Right,” agreed Parks. “What we ought to do, of course, is analyze that poison and see what ingredient makes it work. But our stuff is smashed. If we can’t take back a specimen of it, all this has gone for nothing.”

  “We’ll see,” said Maxwell.

  Meantime lily plants were sprouting where the ball-seeds had sunk. Soon the plants would be maturing. Then it would be time for another festival. They wanted to leave before that came, and they had to leave for a still more urgent reason. If they did not get back to Angra soon, their stay would overstretch the six-month time limit. Nothing would convince stupid quarantine officials that they weren’t crawling with every variety of Venusian virus.

  The first lilies were well in bloom the day they climbed into the dugout for the trip back. Maxwell shunted the canoe over close to a stand of the flowers and plucked one. It was a very curious blossom, lacking both stamen and pistil. It was a sexless plant. But he observed a fatty swelling in one of the lush petals. He slit it open and laid bare a small tumor. He cut into that. Dozens of tiny black objects scuttered out, like ants from a disturbed hill. They were baby kankilona!

  “Well, that’s that,” said Maxwell, dropping the torn lily into the lagoon. “Now we have the whole story. Lilies beget spiders, spiders lay eggs, friend platypus comes along, and the egg becomes a lily seed. That is where we came in.”

  “And,” supplemented Parks, “kankilonas are health-giving, so after they have laid their eggs, the Tombovs come and eat them. The so-called temple jewels, I suppose, are simply a reserve seed crop in case of a drought.”

  “Drought on Venus,” laughed Maxwell. “You’re crazy.” But he got the idea.

  At the edge of the lily swamp the Tombovs looked them over. They were grave and silent and offered no violence, but they were thorough. Their search of the boat revealed no contraband. A surly chieftain waved in the general direction of Angra. Maxwell dipped his paddle in and thrust the dugout ahead.

  “It’s tough,” remarked Parks regretfully, “but at least you and I are cured. On another trip we may have better luck.”

  “We’re not cured,” said Maxwell grimly. “Our cases are arrested, that’s all. The Tombovs do this twice a year, you know. But we have succeeded better than you know. The proof of it is here.”

  He tapped the notebook where he had noted the spectrum of the platypus gaze.

  “At home,” he said, “we have a lot of kankilona eggs, and we know how to activate them. We can start in a properly humidified hothouse for our first few batches. After that we’ll expand. The world need never know that what they’re taking is a distillation of kankilona poison. They’ll probably label it Nixijit, or something cute like that.”

  “Oh, well,” said Parks irrelevantly, “I suppose the Congo valley won’t be so bad.”

  “Nothing is ever as bad as it seems,” said Maxwell.

  A month later he made the same observation in a different form. They were on the homebound liner and were among the few well enough to sit up and enjoy the lounge. A pest of a missionary came over and dropped into a seat beside him.

  “It’s great to be getting back to God’s footstool,” he wheezed. “What a cross I’ve had to bear working with those beastly Tombovs. Ugh! A race of brutes, steeped in the vilest superstitions and practicing the most abominable rites. Our own primitives had some horrible customs, but the Tombov culture hasn’t a single redeeming feature.”

  “Oh,” said Maxwell, screwing up one eye and smiling faintly, “I wouldn’t say that.”

  <>

  ~ * ~

  Ray Bradbury

  ASLEEP IN ARMAGEDDON

  Here on an asteroid, one of over fifteen hundred minute, airless rocks tumbling around orbits between Mars and Jupiter, we find fearful evidence of what was once a magnificent and martial civilization. There can be no normal life now existing on these planetoids, even science-fiction writers agree, for the most part; the largest of them is only 480-odd miles in diameter, certainly too small for the development of any sort of complex civilization.

  But what of the past? Astronomers suspect that the asteroids are remnants of a much larger planet that once sailed the skies in that region of space—a planet destroyed countless eons ago either by some cosmic catastrophe or by the superscience of its own highly “civilized” people. In any event, we are asked to imagine in this story that some of these ancient beings are still able to make themselves known—in a peculiarly horrible way—to the sleeping mind of a human whose spaceship is wrecked on its inhospitable boulders.

  ~ * ~

  YOU don’t want death and you don’t expect death. Something goes wrong, your rocket tilts in space, a planetoid jumps up, blackness, movement, hands over the eyes, a violent pulling back of available power in the fore-jets, the crash . . .

  The darkness. In the darkness, the senseless pain. In the pain, the nightmare.

  He was not unconscious.

  Your name? asked hidden voices. “Sale,” he replied in whirling nausea. “Leonard Sale.” Occupation, cried the voices. “Spaceman!” he cried, alone in the night. Welcome, said the voices. Welcome, welcome. They faded.

  He stood up in the wreckage of his ship. It lay like a folded, tattered garment around him.

  The sun rose and it was morning.

  Sale pried himself out of the small airlock and stood breathing the atmosphere. Luck. Sheer luck. The air was breathable. An instant’s checking showed him that he had two months’ supply of food with him. Fine, fine! And this—he fingered at the wreckage. Miracle of miracles! The radio was intact.

  He stuttered out the message on the sending key. crashed on planetoid 787. sale. send help. sale. send help.

  The reply came instantly: hello, sale, this is addams in marsport. sending rescue ship logarithm. will arrive planetoid 787 in six days. hang on.

  Sale did a little dance.

  It was simple as that. One crashed. One had food. One radioed for help. Help came. La! He clapped his hands.

  The sun rose and was warm. He felt no sense of mortality. Six days would be no time at all. He would eat, he would sleep. He glanced at his surroundings. No dangerous animals; a tolerable oxygen supply. What more could one ask? Beans and bacon, was the answer. The happy smell of breakfast filled the air.

  After breakfast he smoked a cigarette slowly, deeply, blowing out. He nodded contentedly. What a life! Not a scratch on him. Luck. Sheer luck.

  His head nodded. Sleep, he thought.

  Good idea. Forty winks. Plenty of time to sleep, take it easy. Six whole long, luxurious days of idling and philosophizing. Sleep.

  He stretched himself out, tucked his arm under his head, and shut his eyes.

  Insanity came in to take him. The voices whispered.

  Sleep, yes, sleep, said the voices. Ah, sleep, sleep.

  He opened his eyes. The voices stopped. Everything was normal. He shrugged. He shut his eyes casually, fitfully. He settled hi
s long body.

  Eeeeeeeee, sang the voices, far away.

  Ahhhhhhhh, sang the voices.

  Sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep, sang the voices.

  Die, die, die, die, die, sang the voices.

  Oooooooooo, cried the voices.