Unearthly Neighbors

by Chad Oliver

  He waited for a moment, letting his eyes accustom themselves to the darkness. His suit dripped in little puddles on the floor. He heard Charlie’s labored breathing and realized that Charlie had gone to sleep without his helmet. That could be dangerous if the Merdosini came back. He started toward Charlie’s cot.

  Charlie sat up suddenly, his eyes wild.

  “You!” Charlie pointed a trembling finger. “Keep away from me!”

  Monte heard his own voice speaking. It was definitely his own voice, but it was alienated from him. It was very much like hearing a playback of his voice from a recording machine. It said: “Your helmet. You can’t sleep without your helmet.”

  Charlie lurched to his feet, monstrous in his swollen suit. His breathing was harsh in the confinement of the tent. “Get out, get away! I know you now. You can’t fool me any longer.”

  “You can’t sleep without your helmet.” (Why did he keep saying that?)

  “Don’t touch my helmet, let it alone!”

  “You can’t sleep—”

  “Shut up!” Charlie tried to back away, but there was no place to go. “It’s all your fault—everything is your fault! If it hadn’t been for you, I wouldn’t be here. If it hadn’t been for you, we wouldn’t have made so many stupid mistakes. If it hadn’t been for you, Helen would still be alive!”

  The words slashed through the fog in Monte’s brain like a knife. “Charlie, I lost my wife too—”

  “Clever! Oh, you’re clever, no doubt about that. You wanted to get rid of her! You dirty murderer…”

  “Charlie—”

  “Get away! Get back, I warn you…”

  Monte tried to turn, but he was rooted to the spot. This was insane. If only he could think, if only he could free his mind from whatever it was that held him in thrall.

  “I can’t stand it!” Charlie crouched down: he was squat and ugly like some prehistoric beast with a scaly reptilian skin. “I won’t just stand here and take it!”

  “Wait, Charlie.” (Charlie? No, surely this was not the Charlie Jenike he had known. What was happening?)

  The thing that had been Charlie Jenike attacked.

  The sheer hurtling fury of his rush knocked Monte from his feet. He fell heavily to the floor of the tent, he felt immensely strong hands closing about his throat, he heard Charlie snarling like a wild animal in his face.

  “Kill you, kill you, kill you!”

  Monte doubled his gloved fist and swung a short chopping blow at Charlie’s exposed head. There was a crunching thud as he connected. The clutching hands relaxed their pressure against his throat. With a wild surge of power, he heaved the robot-body away from him.

  Monte leaped to his feet, ignoring the weight of the suit he wore. His lips curled back in a smile. He walked over and kicked Charlie in the head with his boot.

  Charlie began to scream. The sound was very unpleasant. Monte decided to cut it off. He knelt down beside Charlie, reached out, and got him around the neck. He started to squeeze.

  The screaming stopped.

  “Call me a murderer, will you? You miserable excuse for a human being…”

  He tightened his grip. Charlie’s eyes were bulging.

  Then Monte heard his other voice, the one that whispered inside his brain—a voice miraculously insulated, protected, preserved.

  Call me a murderer…

  Miserable excuse for a human being…

  A wave of revulsion washed over him. He jerked his hands away from Charlie’s throat as though they had touched the fires of hell.

  My God, what have I done?

  “Charlie! Charlie!”

  Charlie gasped for breath. He looked up with the most bewildered, tortured eyes that Monte had ever seen. The eyes were wild and stricken, but there was the light of sanity in them.

  “Help me,” Charlie whispered hoarsely. “Help me!”

  Monte pulled him into a sitting position, then threw his arm across his shoulder and hauled him to his feet.

  “Charlie! I don’t know what’s going on, I can’t think. But we have to get out of here! Now, this minute!”

  “Yes, help me…”

  Together, they staggered out of the tent into the gray hiss of the rain. They didn’t know where they were going, or why. They had lost everything, even their hope.

  They knew only that they had to get away.

  Fast. Before it was too late. Before it was all over.

  They stumbled through the rain, two shapeless monsters spawned in a nightmare of desolation. They walked and crawled into the dark, dripping forest and disappeared.

  Where the men from Earth had been, there was only an empty clearing in the rain.

  An empty clearing and a dead fire and two sagging tents and two forgotten spacesuit helmets…

  12

  Run!

  Monte felt the blood pounding in his head. The very air that he breathed seared his lungs; his chest heaved in shuddering gasps inside the prison of his suit. He slipped and fell sprawling in the mud. He lurched back to his feet and kept on going.

  Run!

  He had no destination: he was running away from something, not toward something. He was running away from the rain-soaked clearing, running away from the dark long-armed shadows of the Merdosi, running away from the wolf-things that prowled in the night.

  And he was running away from himself.

  Run!

  The jungle of trees around him became an impenetrable wall; he had to fight for light, for air. Creepers and vines and thickets snatched at his boots. He could see nothing clearly. Even the leaden gray sky was invisible. There was nothing in all the world but the fury of flight, nothing but the mindless command to keep on going, always, forever.

  Dimly, he was aware of the crashing of a heavy body behind him, a sound of boots sucking at the mud, a sound of shallow choking gasps for air.

  Come on, Charlie! Don’t give up! Run!

  He crashed out of the trees into the half-light of the fading day. Through a screen of silver rain he saw a brown, swollen river. It gushed between eroding banks and foamed against glistening upthrust boulders. The water was as black as dirty oil, except where the surface was cut by rocks and the white spray leaped into the air. The booming of the river filled the world; there was nothing else.

  He knew that he had to cross the river. It was desperately important to him that he get to the other side. But how? Swimming in the spacesuit was out of the question; he would sink like a stone. Even if he threw away the suit he could never swim in that rushing water.

  Reluctantly, he stopped. He fell to his knees, fighting for breath. Charlie staggered out of the forest behind him and fell full-length on the ground, sobbing.

  There had to be a way.

  Somehow, he got to his feet. He walked upstream, staring at the thrust of the water. Behind the gray curtain of the rain, the boulders in the river bed glistened like naked primordial islands. A wall of sound beat at his ears. But every atom of his being was bent toward a single goal:

  Run!

  Get across the river!

  He kept on going, his eyes narrowed against the rain. He hauled the senseless spacesuit with him as thoughtlessly as a turtle carries the shell upon his back.

  There. He blinked his eyes. The river widened, fanning out between crumbling banks of yellow mud. Massive rocks loomed up out of the foaming water like a chain of battered islands that stretched from bank to bank. The river ran fast and rough in silver-laced rapids, but it was not deep. He could walk across on the boulders if he didn’t slip. If he did miss his footing…

  Well, that would be that.

  He didn’t look back; he simply assumed that Charlie was there. His boots squished through the sticky mud and he scrambled out upon the first rock. It was slippery with slime; he had to keep moving or fall. The spray drenched his face, making it hard for him to breathe. But the noise was the worst. The nameless river roared at him with an ancient chant of malevolent fury.

  Like some mis
shapen, unrecorded beast from a forgotten era, he scrambled along from rock to rock. He could hardly see where he was going and he was driven on by a mad, unreasoning will that had possessed his body. He clawed at the slick rocks with his thick-gloved fingers, kicked at them with his boots, hugged them with his arms. He cursed them, reviled them, screamed at them.

  He fell the last few feet, fell into dirty rushing water that rolled him over like a log. He crawled to the shore and flopped out of the water like the first amphibian groping for the land.

  The river was behind him. He had crossed the river. He was too weak to stand. He lay in the mud, smiling insanely.

  He heard someone screaming hysterically. He twisted around and saw Charlie’s bloated body doing a crazy tight-rope dance across the chain of boulders. He wanted to help him but he could hardly move. He slithered around in the mud until he was facing the river again and stretched out his hands. When Charlie fell from the last rock he caught him and pulled him out of the water.

  Charlie lay face-down in the yellow mud, his body heaving convulsively. Gradually, his movements subsided. He turned his mud-streaked face toward Monte and tried to smile.

  “We made it,” he whispered. “I don’t believe it.”

  Monte took a deep breath; his demon was driving him on. “Can’t stay here.”

  “Good a place as any. We’re through.”

  “Find a dry place. Hole up.”

  “What for?”

  Monte was impatient with talk. Didn’t the man know that they had to keep on going? Couldn’t he see that they had to get away from the river? Didn’t he understand that they had to find…

  What?

  Monte pulled himself slowly to his feet. A part of him was amazed that he could stand, but another part of him knew that there were dark reservoirs of strength in his body that no machine could ever measure, no man could ever comprehend.

  For a moment, he blacked out. Then the blood came back to his head and he swayed with dizziness. Despite the mud and the rain he felt hot.

  Probably burning up with fever. But what does that mean? What is fever? Just a word. Words can’t help me now. There are no words.

  “Come on, Charlie,” he said. “Get up.”

  “Can’t.”

  “You can. Get up. It won’t be far.”

  “We’re beaten.”

  Monte reached down, caught Charlie under the arms, and heaved him to his feet. “You can’t stay here.”

  Charlie shook his head. “I can’t go on.”

  “You can. Just do it.”

  Monte turned and started away from the river. He concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other. He did not look back. He did not think. He just kept walking beneath a weeping sky, drawn as a metal filing is drawn toward a magnet that it cannot see.

  The country was open now, exposed to the sweep of the rain. He walked through tall grass, trampling down the wet spears with his boots. He could feel the land rising under him, and far ahead, masked by the gray curtain of the rain, he saw the high horizon. A jagged and dark horizon that held the edge of the coming night.

  Mountains.

  He did not know how long it took him to reach the foothills; time had lost its meaning. He might have walked forever under the alien sky with the night wind in his face. But he did not stop. He simply endured. He kept on going.

  It was quite dark and the rain still fell. He looked up at banks of cliffs and saw it there. A deeper blackness against the single shadow of the night. A doorway of darkness…

  A cave.

  He smiled. He had not known what it was that he was searching for, but he knew it when he saw it. A cave. That was it. That was the answer.

  It had to be.

  He climbed a twisting trail up the face of the cliff. He could hear Charlie behind him, dislodging rocks with his boots. He reached the mouth of the cave. He did not hesitate. He bent down and edged inside. It was black, black as midnight in a land that had never known the light of the stars, but it was warm and dry.

  He was safe. He knew he was safe.

  He moved back from the entrance and fell on the floor. He found a flat rock to use for a pillow. He closed his eyes.

  He knew somehow that a cycle had ended. He had come full circle.

  Charlie collapsed beside him, gasping with exhaustion. Monte’s brain tried to tell him that he should not sleep, but it was no use.

  It did not matter.

  Nothing mattered.

  He was safe, safe in the cave that was the beginning of all men, hidden from the world beyond.

  He slept.

  The strange, twisted dreams did not return. He slept the heavy sleep of complete and utter weariness. Gradually, his breathing became regular. The lines in his face smoothed and softened. His body relaxed.

  When he woke up, Monte saw a golden haze at the mouth of the cave. The sun was up and the rain had stopped. Even inside the cavern, the air smelled fresh and fragrant. At first, he did not move. He just lay where he was, rejoicing in the simple pleasure of being alive.

  No, it was more than that. He was not only alive. He was well. The fevered sickness that had chained his mind was gone, washed away. He felt cleansed and happy. It was perhaps the oldest and most fundamental of all human joys: I have been sick, and now I am well. I have stood on the brink of the black pit, and I have come back.

  Sanity. It was something that Monte had always taken for granted. Madness had never been something that could happen to him. Others, yes. But not to him.

  Now, he knew better. He was thankful just to be himself.

  But what had happened to him—and to Charlie? Was it possible that they had been on Sirius Nine for just two nights? It seemed to him that those few hours had been an eternity, longer than all the rest of his life. He could not even remember them clearly. It was all so jumbled, so confused…

  And there was something about the whole experience, something that he could not quite remember. A quality of desperate urgency, of testing, of menace. It had not been natural. It was somehow intimately bound up with the incomprehensible Merdosi, and with the wolf-things, and with the dark shadows of the unsuspected…

  He got to his feet, moving quietly so as not to disturb Charlie. He crouched down and walked to the mouth of the cave. He stepped outside.

  The white furnace of Sirius struck him like a blow, but he welcomed it—welcomed the heat and the light and the purity of it. He reveled in the sweep of the blue sky, the rain-washed green of the grasses, the flame of the red leaves on the trees. The fresh air kissed his face. Even the distant river was peaceful, winding its way between yellow banks, gleaming like glass in the hot rays of the sun.

  He looked at himself, fingered the tangle of his matted beard. His suit was caked with mud. There was a great jagged tear in his left leg. His gloves were scratched and stiff. His body felt damp and infested with filth.

  Slowly, Monte began to remove the spacesuit. The gloves went first, and he noticed that his hands were white and clammy, as though they had been too long away from the light of the sun. He struggled with the suit, taking it off section by section. It wasn’t an easy job. When he had finished, the suit lay crumpled on the rocks like a discarded serpent skin.

  He took off the rest of his damp clothing and stretched it out on a flat stone to dry. The heat of the sun felt wonderful, and it was with reluctance that he moved back into a shadow to get out of the glare. He knew that Sirius could blister his naked skin in a few short minutes. Still, it was a real temptation to linger awhile in the bright light.

  He wanted a bath. A bath, he decided, was one of the great unappreciated blessings of civilization. A bath and a good meal and a cool drink…

  Well, all that would have to wait. It was something just to get rid of the spacesuit. He looked at the thing with active dislike. The whole idea of the spacesuits, which had seemed so logical on the ship, was utterly wrong. It was wrong, and yet it was completely characteristic of the mistakes that he had made. How co
uld you expect to contact a people by insulating yourself from them?

  Somehow, he needed a new way of thinking. He needed a fresh approach. He needed to think the whole thing out with an uncluttered mind.

  He sat down on a rock, cupping his bearded chin in his hands. He looked out at the panorama of the world below him. It was hard to believe that there was ugliness in all that beauty, hard to believe that evil could exist in such a place.

  There had to be an answer somewhere. There had to be a key that would unlock Sirius Nine. There had to be some path that he could follow, a path that would lead not only to an understanding of the Merdosi but also to an understanding of himself and what he represented…

  That was when he heard the terrible sound.

  He leaped to his feet, his reverie forgotten.

  Inside the cave, Charlie was screaming.

  13

  For a moment a pang of despair shot through him and he abandoned himself to it. He had assumed that Charlie too would be free of the sickness, although there was no real reason for thinking so. It seemed to him that he was miserably alone, miserably helpless. He was faced with a task that was beyond his powers. He was making no progress at all.

  The awful screaming continued. There were no words in it; it wasn’t human. It was a naked animal cry of agony.

  Monte pulled himself together. He didn’t know how he did it, just as he didn’t know what it was that had carried him through the past night of horror. He only knew that he was an actor in some vast and terrible drama and that he must play his part until he dropped.

  He ducked down and went into the cave. There was plenty of light and he could see clearly. Charlie was on his back, his swollen arms sticking straight up into the air, his gloved fists tightly clenched. His dirty face was contorted and sweating, his mouth loose and trembling.

  The screams filled the cave.

  Monte knelt down, ready for anything. He felt as though he were caught up in some endlessly repeating cycle with no way out, no way to break the chain. He slapped Charlie’s face, hard.