The original animal, unchanged in form, developed an appetite for electrical insulation. There was no protection except to keep the power on at all times. Even then there were unwelcome interruptions until the short was located and the charred carcass was removed. Vehicles were kept tightly closed or parked only in verminproof buildings. While the plague didn’t increase in numbers, it couldn’t be eliminated, either.
There was a flurry of tigers, but they were larger animals and were promptly shot down. They prowled at night, so the colonists were assigned to guard the settlement around the clock. Where lights failed to reach, the infra-red ’scope did. As fast as they came, the tigers died. Except for the first one, not a single dog was lost.
The tigers changed, though not in form. Externally, they were all big and powerful killers. But as the slaughter went on, Marin noticed one astonishing fact—the internal organic structure became progressively more immature.
The last one that was brought to him for examination was the equivalent of a newly born cub. That tiny stomach was suited more for the digestion of milk than meat. How it had furnished energy to drive those great muscles was something of a miracle. But drive it had, for a murderous fifteen minutes before the animal was brought down. No lives were lost, though sick bay was kept busy for a while.
That was the last tiger they shot. After that, the attacks ceased.
The seasons passed and nothing new occurred. A spaceship civilization or even that fragment of it represented by the colony was too much for the creature, which Marin by now had come to think of as the “Omnimal.” It had evolved out of a cataclysmic past, but it could not meet the challenge of the harshest environment.
Or so it seemed.
* * * *
Three months before the next colonists were due, a new animal was detected. Food was missing from the fields. It was not another tiger: they were carnivorous. Nor rats, for vines were stripped in a manner that no rodent could manage.
The food was not important. The colony had enough in storage. But if the new animal signaled another plague, it was necessary to know how to meet it. The sooner they knew what the animal was, the better defense they could set up against it.
Dogs were useless. The animal roamed the field they were loose in, and they did not attack nor even seem to know it was there.
The colonists were called upon for guard duty again, but it evaded them. They patrolled for a week and they still did not catch sight of it.
Hafner called them in and rigged up an alarm system in the field most frequented by the animal. It detected that, too, and moved its sphere of operations to a field in which the alarm system had not been installed.
Hafner conferred with the engineer, who devised an alarm that would react to body radiation. It was buried in the original field and the old alarm was moved to another.
Two nights later, just before dawn, the alarm rang.
Marin met Hafner at the edge of the settlement. Both carried rifles. They walked; the noise of any vehicle was likely to frighten the animal. They circled around and approached the field from the rear. The men in the camp had been alerted. If they needed help, it was ready.
They crept silently through the underbrush. It was feeding in the field, not noisily, yet they could hear it. The dogs hadn’t barked.
They inched nearer. The blue sun of Glade came up and shone full on their quarry. The gun dropped in Hafner’s hand. He clenched his teeth and raised it again.
Marin put out a restraining arm. “Don’t shoot,” he whispered.
“I’m the exec here. I say it’s dangerous.”
“Dangerous,” agreed Marin, still in a whisper. “That’s why you can’t shoot. It’s more dangerous than you know.”
Hafner hesitated and Marin went on. “The omnimal couldn’t compete in the changed environment and so it evolved mice. We stopped the mice and it countered with rats. We turned back the rat and it provided the tiger.
“The tiger was easiest of all for us and so it was apparently stopped for a while. But it didn’t really stop. Another animal was being formed, the one you see there. It took the omnimal two years to create it—how, I don’t know. A million years were required to evolve it on Earth.”
Hafner hadn’t lowered the rifle and he showed no signs of doing so. He looked lovingly into the sights.
“Can’t you see?” urged Marin. “We can’t destroy the omnimal. It’s on Earth now, and on the other planets, down in the storage areas of our big cities, masquerading as rats. And we’ve never been able to root out even our own terrestrial rats, so how can we exterminate the omnimal?”
“All the more reason to start now.” Hafner’s voice was flat.
Marin struck the rifle down. “Are their rats better than ours?” he asked wearily. “Will their pests win or ours be stronger? Or will the two make peace, unite and interbreed, make war on us? It’s not impossible; the omnimal could do it if interbreeding had a high survival factor.
“Don’t you still see? There is a progression. After the tiger, it bred this. If this evolution fails, if we shoot it down, what will it create next? This creature I think we can compete with. It’s the one after this that I do not want to face.”
* * * *
It heard them. It raised its head and looked around. Slowly it edged away and backed toward a nearby grove.
The biologist stood up and called softly. The creature scurried to the trees and stopped just inside the shadows among them.
The two men laid down their rifles. Together they approached the grove, hands spread open to show they carried no weapons.
It came out to meet them. Naked, it had had no time to learn about clothing. Neither did it have weapons. It plucked a large white flower from the tree and extended this mutely as a sign of peace.
“I wonder what it’s like,” said Marin. “It seems adult, but can it be, all the way through? What’s inside that body?”
“I wonder what’s in his head,” Hafner said worriedly.
It looked very much like a man.
THE IMPOSSIBLE VOYAGE HOME
Originally published in Galaxy Science Fiction, August 1954.
“Space life expectancy has been increased to twenty-five months and six days,” said Marlowe, the training director. “That’s a gain of a full month.”
Millions of miles from Earth, Ethan also looked discontentedly proud. “A mighty healthy-looking boy,” he declared.
Demarest bent a paperweight ship until it snapped. “It’s something. You’re gaining on the heredity block. What’s the chief factor?”
“Anti-radiation clothing. We just can’t make them effective enough.”
Across space, on distant Mars, Amantha reached for the picture. “How can you tell he ain’t sickly? You can’t see without glasses.”
Ethan reared up. “Jimmy’s boy, ain’t he? Our kids were always healthy, ’specially the youngest. Stands to reason their kids will be better.”
“Now you’re thinking with your forgettery. They were all sick, one time or another. It was me who took care of them, though. You always could find ways of getting out of it.” Amantha touched the chair switch.
The planets whirled around the Sun. Earth crept ahead of Mars, Venus gained on Earth. The flow of ships slackened or spurted forth anew, according to what destination could be reached at the moment:
“A month helps,” said Demarest. “But where does it end? You can’t enclose a man completely, and even if you do, there still is the air he breathes and food he eats. Radiation in space contaminates everything the body needs. And part of the radioactivity finds its way to the reproductive system.”
* * * *
Marlowe didn’t need to glance at the charts; the curve was beginning to flatten. Mathematically, it was determinable when it wouldn’t rise at all. According to analysis, Man someday might be able to endure the radiation encountered in space as long as three years, if exposure times were spaced at intervals.
But that was in the future.
“There’s a lot you could do,” he told Demarest. “Shield the atomics.”
“Working on it,” commented Demarest. “But every ounce we add cuts down on the payload. The best way is to get the ship from one place to another faster. It’s time in space that hurts. Less exposure time, more trips before the crew has to retire. It adds up to the same thing.”
On Mars, Amantha fondled the picture. “Pretty. But it ain’t real.” She laid it aside.
Ethan squinted at it. “I could make you think it was. Get it enlarged, solidified. Have them make it soft, big as a baby. You could hold it in your lap.”
“Outgrew playthings years ago.” Amantha adjusted the chair switch, but the rocking motion was no comfort.
Ethan turned the picture over, face down. “Nope. Hate to back you up, ’Mantha, but it ain’t the same. There’s nothing like a baby, wettin’ and squallin’ and smilin’, stubborn when it oughtn’t to be and sweet and gentle when you don’t expect it. Robo-dolls don’t fool anybody who’s ever held the real thing.”
In the interval, Earth had drawn ahead. The gap between the two planets was widening.
“That’s another fallacy,” objected the training director. “The body can stand just so much acceleration. We’re near the limit. What good are faster ships?”
“That’s your problem,” said Demarest. “Get me tougher crewmen. Young, afraid of nothing, able to take it.”
It always ended here—younger, tougher, the finest the race produced—and still not good enough. And after years of training, they had twenty-five months to function as spacemen. It was a precious thing, flight time, and each trip was as short as science could make it. Conjunction was the magic moment for those who went between the planets.
It was the heredity block that kept Man squeezed, confined to Earth, Mars and Venus, preventing him from ranging farther. The heredity block was a racial quantity, the germ plasm, but not just that. Crew and passengers were protected as much as possible from radiation encountered in space and that which originated in the ship’s drive. The protection wasn’t good enough. Prolonged exposure had the usual effects, sterilization or the production of deformed mutations.
Man was the product of evolution on a planet. He didn’t step out into space without payment.
* * * *
The radiation that damaged genes and chromosomes and tinier divisions also struck nerve cells. Any atom might be hit, blazing, into fission and decaying into other elements. The process was complicated. The results were not: the nerve was directly stimulated, producing aural and visual hallucinations.
Normally, the hallucination was blanked out. But as the level of body radioactivity increased, so did the strength of the vision. It dominated consciousness. The outside world ceased to have meaning.
The hallucination took only one form, a beautiful woman outside the ship, unclad and beckoning.
It was the image of vanished fertility that appeared once the person was incapable of reproducing as a human.
Why this was so hadn’t been determined. Psychologists had investigated and learned only that it invariably occurred after too great exposure. There was another thing they learned. No, that had come first. This was the reason they had investigated.
In the Solar System, the greatest single source of radiation, including the hard rays, was the Sun. It was natural that the siren image should seem stronger in that direction, that it should fade or retreat toward its origin. No one had ever returned from compulsive pursuit of the illusionary woman, though in early days radio contact had been made with ships racing toward the Sun.
The heredity block was self-enforcing.
Deviously, the race protected itself, or something higher watched over it to assure human continuity. Marlowe wasn’t sure which, but it was there.
“I think you’re on the wrong track,” he said. “Shield the ship completely and it won’t matter how long the trip takes. The crew can work in safety.”
Demarest grunted. “Some day we’ll have an inertia-free drive and it won’t matter how much mass we use. It does now. Our designs are a compromise. Both of us have to work with what’s possible, not what we dream of. I’ll build my ship; you find the right crew to man it.”
Marlowe went back to his graphs. Machines could be changed, but the human body clung stubbornly to the old patterns. He couldn’t select his crews any younger—but was there perhaps a racial type more resistant to radiation? Where? No place that he knew of. Maybe the biologists could produce one, he thought hopefully, and knew he was fooling himself. Human beings weren’t fruit flies; by the time enough generations rolled around for the resistant strain to breed true—and leave a surplus to man the ships—he would be long dead and the problem solved.
The best of humanity would be dead, too, wiped out by sterilization.
Or the Solar System would be peopled by mutant monstrosities.
* * * *
Far away, and not concerned with the problem, Ethan shrugged resignedly. “Guess we’ll have to get used to the idea—we just won’t see him till he grows up—if we’ll still be around.”
“You’ve got years and years ahead of you, and not worth a thing the whole time!” Amantha snapped.
“Damnation,” said Ethan wistfully, “I’d like to dandle him.”
“Won’t be the same when he grows up and comes here,” Amantha conceded. “There I go agreein’ with you! What’s got into me?”
“Maybe we can get on the next slow ship. They run them once in a while for people with weak hearts.” He considered. “Don’t know whether Retired Citizens’ Home will let us go, though.”
“Retired Citizens!” She blew her nose scornfully. “They think we don’t know it’s just a home for the aged!” She threw away the tissue. “Think they’ll let us?”
“It won’t be them so much that’ll stop us. Our hearts ain’t too good and we haven’t got much space time to use. We shouldn’t have gone to Venus.”
“We had to see Edith and Ed and their kids and we had to come back to Mars so we could be near John and Pearl and Ray. Let’s not regret what we’ve done.” She picked at the chair arm. “We’ve been here a long time, ain’t we?”
Ethan nodded.
“Maybe they’ve forgotten we’ve only got a month left,” she said eagerly.
“You sure it’s a month?”
“Figure it out. It took longer when we went.”
“Then it’s no use. A slow ship is all we’d be allowed to take—and we wouldn’t be allowed because it’d be more than a month.”
“They won’t remember every last minute we spent in space.”
“They will, too,” he stated. “They’ve got records.”
“Maybe they lost them.”
“Look, we’ve got kids and grandchildren here. They come around and see us. Do we have to go to Earth, ’specially when it’d be against the law?”
“That’s just it,” she argued. “We’ve seen all our other kids’ kids. Ain’t we going to see the youngest? How do we know his wife can take care of a baby? I can’t sleep nights, thinking of it.”
“Try catnaps during the day, like I do.”
Amantha touched the button and the automatic chair stopped abruptly. “Are you going to try to get tickets or aren’t you?”
“I’ll think about it. Go ahead and rock.”
“I won’t,” she said obstinately, “not even if it was the kind of chair you can rock yourself. I thought I married a man who’d make me happy.”
“I’ve always done my best. Go ahead and rock.”
“But will you try to get the tickets?”
Ethan nodded resignedly and felt better when the chair began to swing back and forth. There was no living with a woman when she didn’t have peace of mind.
* * * *
Amantha lay in bed, listening. Sometimes her hearing was very good, the way it used to be. Other times, it wasn’t worth a thing. The way it came and went reminded her of when she was young and used to
wonder why old folks couldn’t hear. Now she could often lie next to Ethan and not even notice whether he was snoring. Tonight her hearing was good.
Footsteps came from the hall, creaky noises of someone trying not to make a sound. She’d lain awake many nights, hearing him come home. She knew who it was and for once she didn’t mind. The Home for Retired Citizens had rules.
Careful, she thought. There’s the bad spot where the floor’s thin and bends when you step on it. Then when your foot comes off it, it goes ploinnnnng. They don’t build right any more. Skimping and trying to save.
But there wasn’t a sound. Ethan avoided it. When she thought of it, she realized he had a suspicious amount of skill—the skill of practice.
Ethan was fumbling at the door and she forgot her irritation. She slipped out of bed and swung the door open. He stumbled in against her. “’Mantha, they laughed—”
“Did you have anything to eat?” she broke in.
“Cup of that Mars coffee. But—”
“Don’t talk till you get something hot inside. Empty belly, empty head.”
“Can’t eat stuff that comes out of the wall. I’ll wait till breakfast.”
She flicked the light on low and punched the selector. She took the glow-plate from under the bed and set it on the table. As the food arrived, she heated it and began adding spices. “There—it ain’t real food, but you can pretend.”
Ethan pretended and, when the food was gone, wiped his lips and looked at her.
She nodded. “Now you can tell me—but keep your voice low. Don’t wake anyone up.”
Ethan stretched and creaked. “Went down to the Interplanet office and they wouldn’t talk to me. Said there wasn’t any ship leaving for the next ten months and they didn’t sell tickets in advance. I kept pestering them and they got mad. They looked up our records and said we couldn’t go anytime, except on a fast ship, and, considering our age, it was doubtful they’d let us. Didn’t give up, though, and finally they said we might get a release from the man who’d take us. Maybe they wanted to get rid of me. Anyway, they sent me down to talk with one of the pilots.”
The Eleventh Golden Age of Science Fiction Megapack Page 25
