Space, Space, Space - Stories about the Time when Men will be Adventuring to the Stars

by William Sloane

  That was the start. They played together, day after day and sometimes a little into the night, while almost imperceptibly the distance between them was reduced. Finally they sat together, side by side, and the boy had not yet learned to laugh but no longer did he show unease. He could now extract a simple tune from the instrument and was pleased with his own aptitude in a solemn sort of way.

  One evening as darkness grew, and the things that sometimes howled at the Moon were howling again, Fander offered his tentacle-tip for the hundredth time. Always the gesture had been unmistakable even if its motive was not clear, yet always it had been rebuffed. But now, now, five fingers curled around it in shy desire to please.

  With a fervent prayer that human nerves would function just like Martian ones, Fander poured his thoughts through, swiftly, lest the warm grip be loosened too soon.

  “Do not fear me. I cannot help my shape any more than you can help yours. I am your friend, your father, your mother. I need you as much as you need me.”

  The boy let go of him, began quiet, half-stifled whimpering noises. Fander put a tentacle on his shoulder, made little patting motions that he imagined were wholly Martian. For some inexplicable reason, this made matters worse. At his wits’ end what to do for the best, what action to take that might be understandable in Terrestrial terms, he gave the problem up, surrendered to his instinct, put a long, ropy limb around the boy and held him close until the noises ceased and slumber came. It was then he realized the child he had taken was much younger than he had estimated. He nursed him through the night.

  Much practice was necessary to make conversation. The boy had to learn to put mental drive behind his thoughts, for it was beyond Fander’s power to suck them out of him.

  “What is your name?”

  Fander got a picture of thin legs running rapidly.

  He returned it in question form. “Speedy?”

  An affirmative.

  “What name do you call me?”

  An unflattering montage of monsters.

  “Devil?”

  The picture whirled around, became confused. There was a trace of embarrassment.

  “Devil will do,” assured Fander. He went on. “Where are your parents?”

  More confusion.

  “You must have had parents. Everyone has a father and mother, haven’t they? Don’t you remember yours?”

  Muddled ghost-pictures. Grown-ups leaving children. Grown-ups avoiding children, as if they feared them.

  “What is the first thing you remember?”

  “Big man walking with me. Carried me a bit. Walked again.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “Went away. Said he was sick. Might make me sick too.”

  “Long ago?”

  Confusion.

  Fander changed his aim. “What of those other children—have they no parents either?”

  “All got nobody.”

  “But you’ve got somebody now, haven’t you, Speedy?”

  Doubtfully. “Yes.”

  Fander pushed it further. “Would you rather have me, or those other children?” He let it rest a moment before he added, “Or both?”

  “Both,” said Speedy with no hesitation. His fingers toyed with the harp.

  Would you like to help me look for them tomorrow and bring them here? And if they are scared of me will you help them not to be afraid?”

  “Sure!” said Speedy, licking his lips and sticking his chest out.

  “Then,” said Fander, “perhaps you would like to go for a walk today? You’ve been too long in this cave. Will you come for a walk with me?”

  “Y’betcha!”

  Side by side they went for a short walk, one trotting rapidly along, the other slithering. The child’s spirits perked up with this trip in the open; it was as if the sight of the sky and the feel of the grass made him realize at last that he was not exactly a prisoner. His formerly solemn features became animated, he made exclamations that Fander could not understand, and once he laughed at nothing for the sheer joy of it. On two occasions he grabbed a tentacle-tip in order to tell Fander something, performing the action as if it were in every way as natural as his own speech.

  They got out the load-sled in the morning. Fander took the front seat and the controls; Speedy squatted behind him with hands gripping his harness-belt. With a shallow soar, they headed for the glade. Many small, white-tailed animals bolted down holes as they passed over.

  “Good for dinner’’ remarked Speedy, touching him and speaking through the touch.

  Fander felt sickened. Meat-eaters! It was not until a queer feeling of shame and apology came back at him that he knew the other had felt his revulsion. He wished he’d been swift to blanket that reaction before the boy could sense it, but he could not be blamed for the effect of so bald a statement taking him so completely unawares. However, it had produced another step forward in their mutual relationship—Speedy desired his good opinion.

  Within fifteen minutes they struck lucky. At a point half a mile south of the glade Speedy let out a shrill yell and pointed downward. A small, golden-haired figure was standing there on a slight rise, staring fascinatedly upward at the phenomenon in the sky. A second tiny shape, with red but equally long hair, was at the bottom of the slope gazing in similar wonderment. Both came to their senses and turned to flee as the sled tilted toward them.

  Ignoring the yelps of excitement close behind him, and the pulls upon his belt, Fander swooped, got first one, then the other. This left him with only one limb to right the sled and gain height. If the victims had fought he would have had his work cut out to make it. They did not fight. They shrieked as he snatched them and then relaxed with closed eyes.

  The sled climbed, glided a mile at five hundred feet. Fander’s attention was divided between his limp prizes, the controls and the horizon when suddenly a thunderous rattling sounded on the metal base of the sled, the entire framework shuddered, a strip of metal flew from its leading edge and things made whining sounds toward the clouds.

  “Old Graypate,” bawled Speedy, jigging around but keeping away from the rim. “He’s shooting at us.”

  The spoken words meant nothing to the Martian and he could not spare a limb for the contact the other had forgotten to make. Grimly righting the sled, he gave it full power. Whatever damage it had suffered had not affected its efficiency; it shot forward at a pace that set the red and golden hair of the captives streaming in the wind. Perforce his landing by the cave was clumsy. The sled bumped down and lurched across forty yards of grass.

  First things first. Taking the quiet pair into the cave, he made them comfortable on the bed, came out and examined the sled. There were half a dozen deep dents in its flat underside, two bright furrows angling across one rim. He made contact with Speedy.

  “What were you trying to tell me?”

  “Old Graypate shot at us.”

  The mind-picture burst upon him vividly and with electrifying effect: a vision of a tall, white-haired, stern-faced old man with a tubular weapon propped upon his shoulder while it spat fire upward. A whitehaired old man! An adult!

  His grip was tight on the other’s arm. “What is this oldster to you?”

  “Nothing much. He lives near us in the shelters.”

  Picture of a long, dusty concrete burrow, badly damaged, its ceiling marked with the scars of a lighting system which had rotted away to nothing. The old man living hermitlike at one end; the children at the other. The old man was sour, taciturn, kept the children at a distance, spoke to them seldom but was quick to respond when they were menaced. He had guns. Once he had killed many wild dogs that had eaten two children.

  “People left us near shelters because Old Graypate was there, and had guns,” informed Speedy.

  “But why does he keep away from children? Doesn’t he like children?”

  “Don’t know.” He mused a moment. “Once told us that old people could get very sick and make young ones sick—and then we’d all die. Maybe he
’s afraid of making us die.” Speedy wasn’t very sure about it.

  So there was some much-feared disease around, something contagious, to which adults were peculiarly susceptible. Without hesitation they abandoned their young at the first onslaught, hoping that at least the children would live. Sacrifice after sacrifice that the remnants of the race might survive. Heartbreak after heartbreak as elders chose death alone rather than death together.

  Yet Graypate himself was depicted as very old. Was this an exaggeration of the child-mind?

  “I must meet Graypate.”

  “He will shoot,” declared Speedy positively. “He knows by now that you took me. He saw you take the others. He will wait for you and shoot.”

  “We will find some way to avoid that.”

  “How?”

  “When these two have become my friends, just as you have become my friend, I will take all three of you back to the shelters. You can find Graypate for me and tell him that I am not as ugly as I look.”

  “I don’t think you’re ugly,” denied Speedy.

  The picture Fander got along with that gave him the weirdest sensation of pleasure. It was of a vague, shadowy but distorted body with a clear human face.

  The new prisoners were female. Fander knew it without being told because they were daintier than Speedy and had the warm, sweet smell of females. That meant complications. Forthwith he cut another and smaller cave for Speedy and himself.

  Neither of the girls saw him for two days. Keeping well out of their sight, he let Speedy take them food, talk to them, prepare them for the shape of the thing to come. On the third day he presented himself for inspection at a distance. Despite forewarnings they went sheet-white, clung together, but uttered no distressing sounds. He played his harp a little while, withdrew, came back in the evening and played for them again.

  Encouraged by Speedy’s constant and self-assured flow of propaganda, one of them grasped a tentacle-tip next day. What came along the nerves was not a picture so much as an ache, a desire, a childish yearning. Fander backed out of the cave, found wood, spent the whole night using the sleepy Speedy as a model and fashioned the wood into a tiny, jointed semblance of a human being. He was no sculptor, but he possessed a natural delicacy of touch, and the poet in him ran through his limbs and expressed itself in the model. Making a thorough job of it, he clothed it in Terrestrial fashion, colored its face, fixed upon its features the pleasure-grimace which humans call a smile.

  He gave her the doll the moment she awakened in the morning. She took it eagerly, hungrily, with wide, glad eyes. Hugging it to her, she crooned over it—and he knew that the strange emptiness within her was gone.

  Though Speedy was openly contemptuous of this manifest waste of effort, Fander set to and made a second mannikin. It did not take quite as long. Practice on the first had made him swifter, more dexterous. He was able to present it to the other child by midafternoon. Her acceptance was made with shy grace; she held the doll close as if it meant more than the whole of her sorry world. In her thrilled concentration upon the gift, she did not notice his nearness, his closeness, and when he offered a tentacle, she took it.

  He said, simply, “I love you.”

  Her mind was too untrained to drive a response, but her great eyes warmed.

  Fander sat on the grounded sled at a point a mile east of the glade and watched the three children walk hand in hand toward the hidden shelters. Speedy was the obvious leader, hurrying them onward, bossing them with the noisy assurance of one who has been around and considers himself sophisticated. In spite of this, the girls paused at intervals to turn and wave to the ropy, bee-eyed thing they’d left behind. And Fander dutifully waved back, always using his signal-tentacle because it had not occurred to him that any tentacle would serve.

  They sank from sight behind a rise of ground. He remained on the sled, his multi-faceted gaze going over his surroundings or studying the angry sky now threatening rain. The ground was a dull, dead gray-green all the way to the horizon. There was no relief from that drab color, not one shining patch of white, gold or crimson such as dotted the meadows of Mars. There was only the eternal gray-green and his own brilliant blueness.

  Before long a sharp-faced, four-footed thing revealed itself in the grass, raised its head and howled at him. The sound was an eerily urgent wail that ran across the grasses and moaned into the distance. It brought others of its kind, two, ten, twenty. Their defiance increased with their numbers until there was a large band of them edging toward him with lips drawn back, teeth exposed. Then there came a sudden and undetectable flock-command which caused them to cease their slinking and spring forward as one, slavering as they came. They did it with the hungry, red-eyed frenzy of animals motivated by something akin to madness.

  Repulsive though it was, the sight of creatures craving for meat—even strange blue meat—did not bother Fander. He slipped a control a notch, the flotation-grids radiated, the sled soared twenty feet. So calm and easy an escape so casually performed infuriated the wild dog pack beyond all measure. Arriving beneath the sled, they made futile springs upward, fell back upon one another, bit and slashed each other, leaped again and again. The pandemonium they set up was a compound of snarls, yelps, barks, and growls, the ferocious expressions of extreme hate. They exuded a pungent odor of dry hair and animal sweat.

  Reclining on the sled in a maddening pose of disdain, Fander let the insane ones rave below. They raced around in tight circles shrieking insults at him and biting each other. This went on for some time and ended with a spurt of ultra-rapid cracks from the direction of the glade. Eight dogs fell dead. Two flopped and struggled to crawl away. Ten yelped in agony, made off on three legs. The unharmed ones flashed away to some place where they could make a meal of the escaping limpers. Fander lowered the sled.

  Speedy stood on the rise with Graypate. The latter restored his weapon to the crook of his arm, rubbed his chin thoughtfully, ambled forward.

  Stopping five yards from the Martian, the old Earth-man again massaged his chin whiskers, then said, “It sure is the darnedest thing, just the darnedest thing!”

  “No use talking at him,” advised Speedy. “You’ve got to touch him, like I told you.”

  “I know, I know.” Graypate betrayed a slight impatience. “All in good time. I’ll touch him when I’m ready.” He stood there, gazing at Fander with eyes that were very pale and very sharp. “Oh, well, here goes.” He offered a hand.

  Fander placed a tentacle-end in it.

  “Jeepers, he’s cold,” commented Graypate, closing his grip. “Colder than a snake.”

  “He isn’t a snake,” Speedy contradicted fiercely.

  “Ease up, ease up—I didn’t say he is.” Graypate seemed fond of repetitive phrases.

  “He doesn’t feel like one, either,” persisted Speedy, who had never felt a snake and did not wish to.

  Fander boosted a thought through. “I come from the fourth planet. Do you know what that means?”

  “I ain’t ignorant,” snapped Graypate aloud.

  “No need to reply vocally. I receive your thoughts exactly as you receive mine. Your responses are much stronger than the boy’s and I can understand you easily.”

  “Humph!” said Graypate to the world at large.

  “I have been anxious to find an adult because the children can tell me little. I would like to ask questions. Do you feel inclined to answer questions?”

  “It depends,” answered Graypate, becoming leery.

  “Never mind. Answer them if you wish. My only desire is to help you.”

  “Why?” asked Graypate, searching around for a percentage.

  “We need intelligent friends.”

  “Why?”

  “Our numbers are small, our resources poor. In visiting this world and the misty one we’ve come near to the limit of our ability. But with assistance we could go farther. I think that if we could help you a time might come when you could help us.”

  Graypate pondered it
cautiously, forgetting that the inward workings of his mind were wide-open to the other. Chronic suspicion was the keynote of his thoughts, suspicion based on life experiences and recent history. But inward thoughts ran both ways, and his own mind detected the clear sincerity in Fander’s.

  So he said, “Fair enough. Say more.”

  “What caused all this?” inquired Fander, waving a limb at the world.

  “War,” said Graypate. “The last war we’ll ever have. The entire place went nuts.”

  “How did that come about?”

  “You’ve got me there.” Graypate gave the problem grave consideration. “I reckon it wasn’t just any one thing; it was a multitude of things sort of piling themselves up.”

  “Such as?”

  “Differences in people. Some were colored differently in their bodies, others in their ideas, and they couldn’t get along. Some bred faster than others, wanted more room, more food. There wasn’t any more room or more food. The world was full and nobody could shove in except by pushing another out. My old man told me plenty before he died, and he always maintained that if folk had had hoss-sense there might not—”

  “Your old man?” interjected Fander. “Your father? Didn’t all this occur in your own lifetime?”

  “It did not. I saw none of it. I am the son of the son of a survivor.”

  “Let’s go back to the cave,” put in Speedy, bored with this silent contact-talk. “I want to show him our harp.”

  They took no notice, and Fander went on, “Do you think there might be a lot of others still living?”

  “Who knows?” Graypate was moody about it. “There isn’t any way of telling how many are wandering around the other side of the globe, maybe still killing each other, or starving to death, or dying of the sickness.”

  “What sickness is this?”

  “I couldn’t tell what it is called.” Graypate scratched his head confusedly. “My old man told me a few times, but I’ve long forgotten. Knowing the name wouldn’t do me any good, see? He said his father told him that it was part of the war, it got invented and was spread deliberately—and it’s still with us.”