Big Book of Science Fiction

by Groff Conklin

  Waiting for Towser, Fowler flexed the muscles of his body, amazed at the smooth, sleek strength he found. Not a bad body, he decided, and grimaced at remembering how he had pitied the Lopers when he glimpsed them through the television screen.

  For it had been hard to imagine a living organism based upon ammonia and hydrogen rather than upon water and oxygen, hard to believe that such a form of life could know the same quick thrill of life that humankind could know. Hard to conceive of life out in the soupy maelstrom that was Jupiter, not knowing, of course, that through Jovian eyes it was no soupy maelstrom at all.

  The wind brushed against him with what seemed gentle fingers and he remembered with a start that by Earth standards the wind was a roaring gale, a two-hundred-mile an hour howler laden with deadly gases.

  Pleasant scents seeped into his body. And yet scarcely scents, for it was not the sense of smell as he remembered it. It was as if his whole being was soaking up the sensation of lavender—and yet not lavender. It was something, he knew, for which he had no word, undoubtedly the first of many enigmas in terminology. For the words he knew, the thought symbols that served him as an Earthman would not serve him as a Jovian.

  The lock in the side of the dome opened and Towser came tumbling out—at least he thought it must be Towser.

  He started to call to the dog, his mind shaping the words he meant to say. But he couldn’t say them. There was no way to say them. He had nothing to say them with.

  For a moment his mind swirled in muddy terror, a blind fear that eddied in little puffs of panic through his brain.

  How did Jovians talk? How—

  Suddenly he was aware of Towser, intensely aware of the bumbling, eager friendliness of the shaggy animal that had followed him from Earth to many planets. As if the thing that was Towser had reached out and for a moment sat within his brain.

  And out of the bubbling welcome that he sensed, came words.

  “Hiya, pal.”

  Not words really, better than words. Thought symbols in his brain, communicated thought symbols that had shades of meaning words could never have.

  “Hiya, Towser,” he said.

  “I feel good,” said Towser. “Like I was a pup. Lately I’ve been feeling pretty punk. Legs stiffening up on me and teeth wearing down to almost nothing. Hard to mumble a bone with teeth like that. Besides the fleas give me trouble. Used to be I never paid much attention to them. A couple of fleas more or less never meant much in my early days.”

  “But . . . but—” Fowler’s thoughts tumbled awkwardly. “You’re talking to me!”

  “Sure thing,” said Towser. “I always talked to you, but you couldn’t hear me. I tried to say things to you, but I couldn’t make the grade.”

  “I understood you sometimes,” Fowler said.

  “Not very well,” said Towser. “You knew when I wanted food and when I wanted a drink and when I wanted out, but that’s about all you ever managed.”

  “I’m sorry,” Fowler said.

  “Forget it,” Towser told him. “I’ll race you to the cliff.”

  For the first time, Fowler saw the cliff, apparently many miles away, but with a strange crystalline beauty that sparkled in the shadow of the many-colored clouds.

  Fowler hesitated. “It’s a long way—”

  “Ah, come on,” said Towser and even as he said it he started for the cliff.

  Fowler followed, testing his legs, testing the strength in that new body of his, a bit doubtful at first, amazed a moment later, then running with a sheer joyousness that was one with the red and purple sward, with the drifting smoke of the rain across the land.

  As he ran the consciousness of music came to him, a music that beat into his body, that surged throughout his being, that lifted him on wings of silver speed. Music like bells might make from some steeple on a sunny, springtime hill.

  As the cliff drew nearer the music deepened and filled the universe with a spray of magic sound. And he knew the music came from the tumbling waterfall that feathered down the face of the shining cliff.

  Only, he knew, it was no waterfall, but an ammonia-fall and the cliff was white because it was oxygen, solidified.

  He skidded to a stop beside Towser where the waterfall broke into a glittering rainbow of many hundred colors. Literally many hundred, for here, he saw, was no shading of one primary to another as human beings saw, but a clear-cut selectivity that broke the prism down to its last ultimate classification.

  “The music,” said Towser.

  “Yes, what about it?”

  “The music,” said Towser, “is vibrations. Vibrations of water falling.”

  “But, Towser, you don’t know about vibrations.”

  “Yes, I do,” contended Towser. “It just popped into my head.”

  Fowler gulped mentally. “Just popped!”

  And suddenly, within his own head, he held a formula—the formula for a process that would make metal to withstand the pressure of Jupiter.

  He stared, astounded, at the waterfall and swiftly his mind took the many colors and placed them in their exact sequence in the spectrum. Just like that. Just out of blue sky. Out of nothing, for he knew nothing either of metals or of colors.

  “Towser,” he cried. “Towser, something’s happening to us!”

  “Yeah, I know,” said Towser.

  “It’s our brains,” said Fowler. “We’re using them, all of them, down to the last hidden corner. Using them to figure out things we should have known all the time. Maybe the brains of Earth things naturally are slow and foggy. Maybe we are the morons of the universe. Maybe we are fixed so we have to do things the hard way.”

  And, in the new sharp clarity of thought that seemed to grip him, he knew that it would not only be the matter of colors in a waterfall or metals that would resist the pressure of Jupiter, he sensed other things, things not yet quite clear. A vague whispering that hinted of greater things, of mysteries beyond the pale of human thought, beyond even the pale of human imagination. Mysteries, fact, logic built on reasoning. Things that any brain should know if it used all its reasoning power.

  “We’re still mostly Earth,” he said: “We’re just beginning to learn a few of the things we are to know—a few of the things that were kept from us as human beings, perhaps because we were human beings. Because our human bodies were poor bodies. Poorly equipped for thinking, poorly equipped in certain senses that one has to have to know. Perhaps even lacking in certain senses that are necessary to true knowledge.”

  He stared back at the dome, a tiny black thing dwarfed by the distance.

  Back there were men who couldn’t see the beauty that was Jupiter. Men who thought that swirling clouds and lashing rain obscured the face of the planet. Unseeing human eyes. Poor eyes. Eyes that could not see the beauty in the clouds, that could not see through the storms. Bodies that could not feel the thrill of trilling music stemming from the rush of broken water.

  Men who walked alone, in terrible loneliness, talking with their tongue like Boy Scouts wigwagging out their messages, unable to reach out and touch one another’s mind as he could reach out and touch Towser’s mind. Shut off forever from that personal, intimate contact with other living things.

  He, Fowler, had expected terror inspired by alien things out here on the surface, had expected to cower before the threat of unknown things, had steeled himself against disgust of a situation that was not of Earth.

  But instead he had found something greater than Man had ever known. A swifter, surer body. A sense of exhilaration, a deeper sense of life. A sharper mind. A world of beauty that even the dreamers of the Earth had not yet imagined.

  “Let’s get going,” Towser urged.

  “Where do you want to go?”

  “Anywhere,” said Towser. “Just start going and see where we end up. I have a feeling . . . well, a feeling—”

  “Yes, I know,” said Fowler.

  For he had the feeling, too. The feeling of high destiny. A certain sense of great
ness. A knowledge that somewhere off beyond the horizons lay adventure and things greater than adventure.

  Those other five had felt it, too. Had felt the urge to go and see, the compelling sense that here lay a life of fullness and of knowledge.

  That, he knew, was why they had not returned.

  “I won’t go back,” said Towser.

  “We can’t let them down,” said Fowler.

  Fowler took a step or two, back toward the dome, then stopped.

  Back to the dome. Back to that aching, poison-laden body he had left. It hadn’t seemed aching before, but now he knew it was.

  Back to the fuzzy brain. Back to muddled thinking. Back to the flapping mouths that formed signals others understood. Back to eyes that now would be worse than no sight at all. Back to squalor, back to crawling, back to ignorance.

  “Perhaps some day,” he said, muttering to himself.

  “We got a lot to do and a lot to see,” said Towser. “We got a lot to learn. We’ll find things—”

  Yes, they could find things. Civilizations, perhaps. Civilizations that would make the civilization of Man seem puny by comparison. Beauty and more important—an understanding of that beauty. And a comradeship no one had ever known before—that no man, no dog had ever known before.

  And life. The quickness of life after what seemed a drugged existence.

  “I can’t go back,” said Towser. “Nor I,” said Fowler.

  “They would turn me back into a dog,” said Towser.

  “And me,” said Fowler, “back into a man.”

  <>

  ~ * ~

  MEWHU’S JET

  by Theodore Sturgeon

  “WE INTERRUPT this program to announce—”

  “Jack! Don’t jump like that! And you’ve dropped ashes all over your—”

  “Aw, Iris, honey, let me listen to—”

  —at first identified as a comet, the object is pursuing an erratic course through the stratosphere, occasionally dipping as low as—”

  “You make me nervous, Jack! You’re an absolute slave to the radio. I wish you paid that much attention to me.”

  “Darling, I’ll argue the point, or pay attention to you, or anything in the wide world you like when I’ve heard this announcement; but please, please LET ME LISTEN!”

  “—dents of the East Coast are warned to watch for the approach of this ob—”

  “Iris, don’t—”

  Click!

  “Well, of all the selfish, inconsiderate, discourteous—”

  “That will do, Jack Garry! It’s my radio as much as yours, and I have a right to turn it off when I want to!”

  “Might I ask why you find it necessary to turn it off at this moment?”

  “Because I know the announcement will be repeated any number of times if it’s important, and you’ll shush me every time. Because I’m not interested in that kind of thing and don’t see why I should have it rammed down my throat. Because the only thing you ever want to listen to is something which couldn’t possibly affect us. But mostly because you yelled at me!”

  “I did not yell at you!”

  “You did! And you’re yelling now!”

  “Mom! Daddy!”

  “Oh, Molly, darling, we woke you up!”

  “Poor bratlet. Hey—what about your slippers?”

  “It isn’t cold tonight, Daddy. What was that on the radio?”

  “Something buzzing around in the sky, darling, I didn’t hear it all.”

  “A spaceship, I betcha.”

  “You see? You and your so-called science-fiction!”

  “Call us a science-faction. The kid’s got more judgment than you have.”

  “You have as little judgment as a seven-year-old child, you mean. And b-besides, you’re turning her a-against me!”

  “Aw, for Pete’s sake, Mom, don’t cry!”

  At which point, something like a giant’s fist clouted off the two-room top story of the seaside cottage and scattered it down the beach. The lights winked out, and outside, the whole waterfront lit up with a brief, shattering blue glare.

  ~ * ~

  “Jacky, darling, are you hurt?”

  “Mom, he’s bleedin’!”

  “Jack, honey, say something. Please say something.”

  “Urrrrgh,” said Jack Garry obediently, sitting up with a soft clatter of pieces of falling lath and plaster. He put his hands gently on the sides of his head and whistled. “Something hit the house.”

  His red-headed wife laughed half-hysterically. “Not really, darling.” She put her arms around him, whisked some dust out of his hair, and began stroking his neck. “I’m . . . frightened, Jack.”

  “You’re frightened!” He looked around, shakily, in the dim moonlight that filtered in. Radiance from an unfamiliar place caught his bleary gaze, and he clutched Iris’ arm. “Upstairs . . . it’s gone!” he said hoarsely, struggling to his feet. “Molly’s room . . . Molly—”

  “I’m here, Daddy. Hey! You’re squeezin’!”

  “Happy little family,” said Iris, her voice trembling. “Vacationing in a quiet little cottage by the sea, so Daddy can write technical articles while Mummy regains her good disposition—without a phone, without movies within miles, and living in a place where the roof flies away. Jack—what hit us?”

  “One of those things you were talking about,” said Jack sardonically. “One of the things you refuse to be interested in, that couldn’t possibly affect us. Remember?”

  “The thing the radio was talking about?”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised. We’d better get out of here. This place may fall in on us, or burn, or something.”

  “An’ we’ll all be kilt,” crooned Molly.

  “Shut up, Molly! Iris, I’m going to poke around. Better go on out and pick us a place to pitch the tent—if 1 can find the tent.”

  “Tent?” Iris gasped.

  “Boy oh boy,” said Molly.

  “Jack Garry, I’m not going to go to bed in a tent. Do you realize that this place will be swarming with people in no time flat?”

  “O.K.—O.K. Only get out from under what’s left of the house. Go for a swim. Take a walk. Or g’wan to bed in Molly’s room, if you can find it. Iris, you can pick the oddest times to argue!”

  “I’m not going out there by myself!”

  Jack sighed. “I should’ve asked you to stay in here,” he muttered. “If you’re not the contrariest woman ever to— Be quiet, Molly!”‘

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  Meeew-w-w!

  “Aren’t you doing that caterwauling?”

  “No, Daddy, truly.”

  Iris said, “I’d say a cat was caught in the wreckage except that cats are smart and no cat would ever come near this place.”

  Wuh-wuh-muh-meeee-ew-w-w!

  “What a dismal sound!”

  “Jack, that isn’t a cat.”

  “Well, stop shaking like the well-known aspen leaf.”

  Molly said, “Not without aspen Daddy’s leaf to do it.”

  “Molly! You’re too young to make bad puns!”

  “Sorry, Daddy. I fergot.”

  Mmmmmew. Mmm—m-m-m.

  “Whatever it is,” Jack said, “it can’t be big enough to be afraid of and make a funny little noise like that.” He squeezed Iris’ arm and, stepping carefully over the rubble, began peering in and around it. Molly scrambled beside him. He was about to caution her against making so much noise, and then thought better of it. What difference would a little racket make?

  The noise was not repeated, and five minutes’ searching elicited nothing. Garry went back to his wife, who was fumbling around the shambles of a living room, pointlessly setting chairs and coffee tables back on their legs.

  “I didn’t find anyth—”

  “YIPE!”

  “Molly! What is it?”

  Molly was just outside, in the shrubbery. “Oh . . . oh— Daddy, you better come quick!”

  Spurred by the u
rgency of her tone, he went crashing outside. He found Molly standing rigid, trying to cram both her fists in her mouth at the same time. And at her feet was a man with silver-gray skin and a broken arm, who mewed at him.