Big Book of Science Fiction

by Groff Conklin

  ~ * ~

  “—Guard and Navy Department have withdrawn their warnings. The pilot of a Pan American transport has reported that the object disappeared into the zenith. It was last seen eighteen miles east of Normandy Beach, New Jersey. Reports from the vicinity describe it as traveling very slowly, with a hissing noise. Although it reached within a few feet of the ground several times, no damage has been reported, Inves—”

  “Think of that,” said Iris, switching off the little three-way portable. “No damage.”

  “Yeah. And if no one saw the thing hit, no one will be out here to investigate. So you can retire to your downy couch in the tent without fear of being interviewed.”

  “Go to sleep? Are you mad? Sleep in that flimsy tent with that mewing monster lying there?”

  “Oh heck, Mom, he’s sick! He wouldn’t hurt anybody.”

  They sat around a cheerful fire, fed by roof shingles. Jack had set up the tent without much trouble. The silver-gray man was stretched out in the shadows, sleeping lightly and emitting an occasional moan.

  Jack smiled at Iris. “Y’know, I love your silly chatter, darling. The way you turned to and set his arm was a pleasure to watch. You didn’t think of him as a monster while you were tending to him.”

  “Didn’t I, though? Maybe ‘monster’ was the wrong word to use. Jack, he has only one bone in his forearm!”

  “He has what? Oh, nonsense, honey! ‘Tain’t scientific. He’d have to have a ball-and-socket joint in his wrist.”

  “He has a ball and socket joint in his wrist.”

  “This I have to see,” Jack muttered. He picked up a flash lantern and went over to the long prone figure.

  Silver eyes blinked up at the light. There was something queer about them. He turned the beam closer. The pupils were not black in that light, but dark-green. They all but closed— from the sides, like a cat’s. Jack’s breath wheezed out. He ran the light over the man’s body. It was clad in a bright-blue roomy bathrobe effect, with a yellow sash. The sash had a buckle which apparently consisted of two pieces of yellow metal placed together; there seemed to be nothing to keep them together. They just stayed. When the man had fainted, just as they found him, it had taken almost all Jack’s strength to pull them apart.

  “Iris.”

  She got up and came over to him. “Let the poor devil sleep.” >

  “Iris—what color was his robe?”

  “Red, with a ... but it’s blue!”

  “Is now. Iris, what on earth have we got here?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know. Some poor thing that escaped from an institution for . . . for—”

  “For what?”

  “How should I know?” she snapped. “There must be some place where they send creatures that get born like that.”

  “Creatures don’t get born like that. Iris, he isn’t deformed. He’s just different.”

  “I see what you mean. I don’t know why I see what you mean, but I’ll tell you something.” She stopped, and was quiet for so long that he turned to her, surprised. She said slowly, “I ought to be afraid of him, because he’s strange, and ugly, but—I’m not.”

  “Me, too.”

  “Molly, go back to bed!”

  “He’s a leprechaun.”

  “Maybe you’re right. Go on to bed, chicken, and in the morning you can ask him where he keeps his crock of gold.”

  “Gee.” She went off a little way then stood on one foot, drawing a small circle in the sand with the other. “Daddy.”

  “Yes. Molly-m’love.”

  “Can I sleep in the tent tomorrow, too?”

  “If you’re good.”

  “Daddy obviously means,” said Iris acidly, “that if you’re not good he’ll have a roof on the house by tomorrow night.”

  “I’ll be good.” She disappeared into the tent.

  “For kids,” Jack said admiringly, “it never rains tomorrow.”

  ~ * ~

  The gray man mewed.

  “Well, old guy, what is it?”

  The man reached over and fumbled at his splinted arm.

  “It hurts him,” said Iris. She knelt beside him and, taking the wrist of his good arm, lifted it away from the splint, where he was clawing. The man did not resist, but lay and looked at her with pain-filled, slitted eyes.

  “He has six fingers,” Jack said. “See?” He knelt beside his wife and gently took the man’s wrist. He whistled. “It is a ball and socket.”

  “Give him some aspirin.”

  “That’s a good . . . wait.” Jack stood pulling his lip in puzzlement. “Do you think we should?”

  “Why not?”

  “We don’t know where he comes from. We know nothing of his body chemistry, or what any of our medicines might do to him.”

  “He . . . what do you mean, where he comes from?”

  “Iris, will you open up your mind just a little? In the face of evidence like this, are you going to even attempt to cling to the idea that this man comes from anywhere on this earth?” Jack said with annoyance. “You know your anatomy. Don’t tell me you ever saw a human freak with skin and bones like that! That belt buckle—that material in his clothes . . . come on, now. Drop your prejudices and give your brains a chance, will you?”

  “You’re suggesting things that simply don’t happen!”

  “That’s what the man in the street said—in Hiroshima. That’s what the old-time aeronaut said from the basket of his balloon when they told him about heavier-than-air craft. That’s what—”

  “All right, all right, Jack! I know the rest of the speech. If you want dialectics instead of what’s left of a night’s sleep, I might point out that the things you have mentioned have all concerned human endeavors. Show me any new plastic, a new metal, a new kind of engine, and though I may not begin to understand it, I can accept it because it is of human origin. But this . . . this man, or whatever he is—”

  “I know,” said Jack, more gently. “It’s frightening because it’s strange, and away down underneath we feel that anything strange is necessarily dangerous. That’s why we wear our best manners for strangers and not for our friends—but I still don’t think we should give this character any aspirin.”

  “He seems to breathe the same air we do. He perspires, he talks ... I think he talks—”

  “You have a point. Well, if it’ll ease his pain at all, it may be worth trying. Give him just one.”

  Iris went to the pump with a collapsible cup from her first-aid kit, and filled it. Kneeling by the silver-skinned man, she propped up his head, gently put the aspirin between his lips, and brought the cup to his mouth. He sucked the water in greedily, and then went completely limp.

  “Oh, oh. I was afraid of that.”

  Iris put her hand over the man’s heart. “Jack!”

  “Is he . . . what is it, Iris?”

  “Not dead, if that’s what you mean. Will you feel this?”

  Jack put his hand beside Iris’. The heart was beating with massive, slow blows, about eight to the minute. Under it, out of phase completely with the main beat, was another, an extremely fast, sharp beat, which felt as if it were going about three hundred.

  “He’s having some sort of palpitation,” Jack said.

  “And in two hearts at once!”

  Suddenly the man raised his head and uttered a series of ululating shrieks and howls. His eyes opened wide, and across them fluttered a translucent nictitating membrane. He lay perfectly still with his mouth open, shrieking and gargling. Then, with a lightning movement, he snatched Jack’s hand to his mouth. A pointed tongue, light-orange and four inches longer than it had any right to be, flicked out and licked Jack’s hand. Then the strange eyes closed, the shrieks died to a whimper and faded out, and the man relaxed.

  “Sleeping now,” said Iris. “Oh, I hope we haven’t done anything to him!”

  “We’ve done something. I just hope it isn’t serious. Anyhow, his arm isn’t bothering him any. That’s all we were worri
ed about in the first place.”

  Iris put a cushion under the man’s oddly planed head, touched the beach mattress he was lying on to see that he would be comfortable. “He has a beautiful mustache,” she said. “Like silver. He looks very old and wise, doesn’t he?”

  “So does an owl. Let’s go to bed.”

  Jack woke early, from a dream in which he had bailed out of a flying motorcycle with an umbrella that turned into a candy cane as he fell. He landed in the middle of some sharp-toothed crags which gave like sponge rubber. He was immediately surrounded by mermaids who looked like Iris and who had hands shaped like spur gears. But nothing frightened him. He awoke smiling, inordinately happy.

  Iris was still asleep. Outside, somewhere, he heard the tinkle of Molly’s laugh. He sat up, looked at Molly’s camp cot. It was empty.

  Moving quietly, so as not to disturb his wife, he slid his feet into moccasins and went out.

  Molly was on her knees beside their strange visitor, who was squatting on his haunches and—

  They were playing patty-cake.

  “Molly!”

  “Yes, Daddy.”

  “What are you trying to do? Don’t you realize that that man has a broken arm?”

  “Oh gosh. I’m sorry. Do you s’pose I hurt him?”

  “I don’t know. It’s very possible,” said Jack Garry testily. He went to the alien, took his good hand.

  The man looked up at him and smiled. His smile was peculiarly engaging. All of his teeth were pointed, and they were very widely spaced. “Eeee-yu mow madibu Mewhu,” he said.

  “That’s his name,” Molly said excitedly. She leaned forward and tugged at the man’s sleeve. “Mewhu. Hey, Mewhu!” And she pointed at her chest.

  “Mooly,” said Mewhu. “Mooly—Geery.”

  “See, Daddy?” Molly said ecstatically. “See?” She pointed at her father. “Daddy. Dah—dee.”

  “Deedy,” said Mewhu.

  “No, silly! Daddy.”

  “Dewdy.”

  “Dah-dy!”

  Jack, quite entranced, pointed at himself and said, “Jack.”

  “Jeek.”

  “Good enough. Molly, the man can’t say ‘ah.’ He can say ‘oo’ or ‘ee’ but not ‘ah.’ That’s good enough.”

  Jack examined the splints. Iris had done a very competent job. When she realized that instead of the radius-ulna development of a true human, Mewhu had only one bone in his forearm, she had set the arm and laid on two splints instead of one. Jack grinned. Intellectually, Iris would not accept Mewhu’s existence even as a possibility; but as a nurse, she not only accepted his body structure but skillfully compensated for its differences.

  “I guess he wants to be polite,” said Jack to his repentant daughter, “and if you want to play patty-cake, he’ll go along with you, even if it hurts. Don’t take advantage of him, chicken.”

  “I won’t, Daddy.”

  Jack started up the fire and had a green-stick crane built and hot water bubbling by the time Iris emerged. “Takes a cataclysm to get you to start breakfast,” she grumbled through a pleased smile. “When were you a boy scout?”

  “Matter of fact,” said Garry, “I was once. Will modom now take over?”

  “Modom will. How’s the patient?”

  “Thriving. He and Molly had a patty-cake tournament this morning. His clothes, by the way, are red again.”

  “Jack—where does he come from?”

  “I haven’t asked him yet. When I learn to caterwaul, or he learns to talk, perhaps we’ll find out. Molly has already elicited the information that his name’s Mewhu.” Garry grinned. “And he calls me ‘Jeek.’”

  “Can’t pronounce an ‘r,’ hm?”

  “That’ll do, woman. Get on with the breakfast.”

  While Iris busied herself over breakfast, Jack went to look at the house. It wasn’t as bad as he had thought—a credit to poor construction. Apparently the upper two rooms were a late addition and had just been perched onto the older, comparatively flat-topped lower section. The frame of Molly’s bed was bent beyond repair, but the box spring and mattress were intact. The old roof seemed fairly sound, where the removal of the jerry-built little top story had exposed it. The living room would be big enough for him and Iris, and Molly’s bed could be set up in the study. There were tools and lumber in the garage, the weather was warm and clear, and like any other writer, Jack Garry was very much attracted by the prospect of hard work for which he would not get paid, as long as it wasn’t writing. By the time Iris called him for breakfast, he had most of the debris cleared from the roof and a plan of action mapped out. It would only be necessary to cover the hole where the stairway landing had been, and go over the roof for potential leaks. A good rain, he reflected, would search those out for him quickly enough.

  “What “about Mewhu?” Iris asked as she handed him an aromatic plate of eggs and bacon. “If we feed him any of this, do you think he’ll throw another fit?”

  Jack looked at their visitor, who sat on the other side of the fire, very close to Molly, gazing big-eyed at their breakfasts.

  “I don’t know. We could give him a little, I suppose.”

  Mewhu inhaled his sample, and wailed for more. He ate a second helping, and when Iris refused to fry more eggs, he gobbled toast and jam. Each new thing he tasted he would nibble at, blink twice, and then bolt down. The only exception was the coffee. One taste was sufficient. He put it down on the ground and very carefully, very delicately overturned it.

  “Can you talk to him?” Iris asked suddenly.

  “He can talk to me,” declared Molly.

  “I’ve heard him,” Jack said.

  “Oh, no. I don’t mean that,” Molly denied vehemently. “I can’t make any sense out of that stuff.”

  “What do you mean, then?”

  “I ... I dunno, Mommy. He just—talks to me, that’s all.”

  Jack and Iris looked at each other. “Must be a game,” said Iris. Jack shook his head, looking at his daughter carefully as if he had not really seen her before. He could think of nothing to say, and rose.

  “Think the house can be patched up?”

  “Oh sure.” He laughed. “You never did like the color of the upstairs rooms, anyway.”

  “I don’t know what’s gotten into me,” said Iris thoughtfully. “I’d have kicked like a mule at any part of this. I’d have packed up and gone home if, say, just a wall was gone upstairs, or if there were just a hole in the roof, or if this . . .this android phenomenon arrived suddenly. But when it all happens at once—I can take it all!”

  “Question of perspective. Show me a nagging woman and I’ll show you one who hasn’t enough to worry about.”

  “You’ll get out of my sight or you’ll have this frying pan bounced off your yammering skull,” said Iris steadily. Jack got.

  ~ * ~

  Molly and Mewhu trailed after him as he returned to the house, stood side by side goggling at him as he mounted the ladder.

  “Whatsha doing, Daddy?”

  “Marking off the edges of this hole where the stairway hits the place where the roof isn’t, so I can clean up the edges with a saw.”

  “Oh.”

  Jack roughed out the area with a piece of charcoal, lopped off the more manageable rough edges with a hatchet, cast about for his saw. It was still in the garage. He climbed down, got it, climbed up again, and began to saw. Twenty minutes of this, and sweat was streaming down his face. He knocked off, climbed down, doused his head at the pump, lit a cigarette, climbed back up on the roof.

  “Why don’t you jump off and back?”

  The roofing job was looking larger and the day seemed warmer than it had. Jack’s enthusiasm was in inverse proportion to these factors. “Don’t be funny, Molly.”

  “Yes, but Mewhu wants to know.”

  “Oh, he does. Ask him to try it.”

  He went back to work. A few minutes later, when he paused for a breath, Mewhu and Molly were nowhere to be seen. Probably o
ver by the tent, in Iris’ hair, he thought, and went on sawing.

  “Daddy!”

  Daddy’s unaccustomed arm and shoulder were, by this time, yelling for help. The dry soft-wood alternately cheesed the saw out of line and bound it. He answered impatiently, “Well, what?”

  “Mewhu says to come. He wants to show you something.”