Space On My Hands

by Fredric Brown

  “Oh, certainly. I’ve been studying them. They look horribly different from us, but I think they have about the same metabolism we have, the same type of circulatory system, and probably the same type of digestive system. I think that anything that would kill one of us would kill one of them.”

  “But you said —”

  “Oh, there are differences, of course. Whatever factor it is in man that ages him, they don’t have. Or else they have some gland that man doesn’t have, something that renews cells.”

  She had forgotten her anger now. She leaned forward eagerly. She said, “I think that’s right. And I don’t think they feel pain.”

  “I was hoping that. But what makes you think so, my dear?”

  “I stretched a piece of wire that I found in the desk on my cubicle across the door so my Zan would fall over it. He did, and the wire cut his leg.”

  “Did he bleed red?”

  “Yes, but it didn’t seem to annoy him. He didn’t get mad about it; didn’t even mention it. When he came back the next time, a few hours later, the cut was gone. Well, almost gone. I could see just enough of it to be sure it was the same Zan.”

  Walter Phelan nodded slowly.

  “He wouldn’t get angry, of course,” he said. “They’re emotionless. Maybe, if we killed one, they wouldn’t even punish us. But it wouldn’t do any good. They’d just give us our food through a trap door and treat us as men would have treated a zoo animal that had killed a keeper. They’d just see that he didn’t have a crack at any more keepers.”

  “How many of them are there?” she asked.

  “About two hundred, I think, in this particular space ship. But undoubtedly there are many more where they came from. I have a hunch this is just an advance guard, sent to clear off this planet and make it safe for Zan occupancy.”

  “They did a good —”

  There was a knock at the door, and Walter Phelan called out, “Come in.” A Zan stood in the doorway.

  “Hello, George,” said Walter.

  “Hel-lo, Wal-ter,” said the Zan.

  It may or may not have been the same Zan, but it was always the same ritual.

  “What’s on your mind?” Walter asked.

  “An-oth-er crea-ture sleeps and will not wake. A small fur-ry one called a wea-sel.”

  Walter shrugged.

  “It happens, George. Old Man Death. I told you about him.”

  “And worse. A Zan has died. This morning.”

  “Is that worse?” Walter looked at him blandly. “Well, George, you’ll have to get used to it, if you’re going to stay around here.”

  The Zan said nothing. It stood there.

  Finally Walter said, “Well?”

  “About wea-sel. You ad-vise the same?”

  Walter shrugged again. “Probably won’t do any good. But sure, why not?”

  The Zan left.

  Walter could hear his footsteps dying away outside. He grinned. “It might work. Martha,” he said.

  “Mar — My name is Grace, Mr. Phelan. What might work?”

  “My name is Walter, Grace. You might as well get used to it. You know, Grace, you do remind me of Martha. She was my wife. She died a couple of years ago.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Grace. “But what might work? What were you talking about to the Zan?”

  “We’ll know tomorrow,” Walter said. And she couldn’t get another word out of him.

  That was the fourth day of the stay of the Zan.

  The next was the last.

  It was nearly noon when one of the Zan came. After the ritual, he stood in the doorway, looking more alien than ever. It would be interesting to describe him for you, but there aren’t words.

  He said, “We go. Our coun-cil met and de-ci-ded.”

  “Another of you died?”

  “Last night. This is pla-net of death.”

  Walter nodded. “You did your share. You’re leaving two hundred and thirteen creatures alive, out of quite a few billion. Don’t hurry back.”

  “Is there a-ny-thing we can do?”

  “Yes. You can hurry. And you can leave our door unlocked, but not the others. We’ll take care of the others.”

  The Zan left.

  Grace Evans was standing, her eyes shining.

  She asked, “What —? How?”

  “Wait,” cautioned Walter. “Let’s hear them blast off. It’s a sound I want to remember.”

  The sound came within minutes, and Walter Phelan, realizing how rigidly he’d been holding himself, relaxed in his chair.

  “There was a snake in the Garden of Eden, too, Grace, and it got us in trouble,” he said musingly. “But this one made up for it. I mean the mate of the snake that died day before yesterday. It was a rattlesnake.”

  “You mean it killed the two Zan who died? But —”

  Walter nodded. “They were babes in the woods here. When they took me to look at the first creatures who ‘were asleep and wouldn’t wake up,’ and I saw that one of them was a rattler, I had an idea, Grace. Just maybe, I thought, poisonous creatures were a development peculiar to Earth and the Zan wouldn’t know about them. And maybe their metabolism was enough like ours so that the poison would kill them. Anyway, I had nothing to lose trying. And both maybes turned out to be right.”

  “How did you get the snake to —”

  Walter Phelan grinned. He said, “I told them what affection was. They didn’t know. They were interested, I found, in preserving the remaining one of each species as long as possible to study and picture and record it before it died. I told them it would die immediately because of the loss of its mate, unless it had affection and petting — constantly. I showed them how with the duck. Luckily it was a tame one, and I held it against my chest and petted it a while to show them. Then I let them take over with it — and the rattlesnake.”

  He stood up and stretched, and then sat down again more comfortably.

  “Well, we’ve got a world to plan,” he said. “We’ll have to let the animals out of the ark, and that will take some thinking and deciding. The herbivorous wild ones we can let go right away. The domestic ones, we’ll do better to keep and take charge of; we’ll need them. But the carnivora — Well, we’ll have to decide. But I’m afraid it’s got to be thumbs down.”

  He looked at her. “And the human race. We’ve got to make a decision about that. A pretty important one.”

  Her face was getting a little pink again, as it had yester-dav; she sat rigidly in her chair.

  “No!” she said.

  He didn’t seem to have heard her. “It’s been a nice race, even if nobody won it,” he said. “It’ll be starting over again now, and it may go backward for a while until it gets its breath, but we can gather books for it and keep most of its knowledge intact, the important things anyway. We can —”

  He broke off as she got up and started for the door. Just the way his Martha would have acted, he thought, back in the days when he was courting her, before they were married.

  He said, “Think it over, my dear, and take your time. But come back.”

  The door slammed. He sat waiting, thinking out all the things there were to do, once he started, but in no hurry to start them; and after a while he heard her hesitant footsteps coming back.

  He smiled a little. See? It wasn’t horrible, really.

  The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door …

  all good bems

  The spaceship from Andromeda II spun like a top in the grip of mighty forces. The five-limbed Andromedan strapped into the pilot’s seat turned the three protuberant eyes of one of his heads toward the four other Andromedans strapped into bunks around the ship. “Going to be a rough landing,” he said. It was.

  *

  ELMO Scott hit the tab key of his typewriter and listened to the carriage zing across and ring the bell. It sounded nice and he did it again. But there still weren’t any words on the sheet of paper in the machine.

  He lit another ci
garette and stared at it. At the paper, that is, not the cigarette. There still weren’t any words on the paper.

  He tilted his chair back and turned to look at the sleek black-and-tan Doberman pinscher lying in the mathematical middle of the rag rug. He said, “You lucky dog.” The Doberman wagged what little stump of tail he had. He didn’t answer otherwise.

  Elmo Scott looked back at the paper. There still weren’t any words there. He put his fingers over the keyboard and wrote: “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party.” He stared at the words, such as they were, and felt the faintest breath of an idea brush his cheek.

  He called out “Toots!” and a cute little brunette in a blue gingham house dress came out of the kitchen and stood by him. His arm went around her. He said, “I got an idea.”

  She read the words in the typewriter. “It’s the best thing you’ve written in three days,” she said, “except for that letter renewing your subscription to the Digest. I think that was better.”

  “Button your lip,” Elmo told her. “I’m talking about what I’m going to do with that sentence. I’m going to change it to a science-fiction plot idea, one word at a time. It can’t miss. Watch.”

  He took his arm from around her and wrote under the first sentence: “Now is the time for all good Bems to come to the aid of the party.” He said, “Get the idea, Toots? Already it’s beginning to look like a science-fiction send-off. Good old bug-eyed monsters. Bems to you. Watch the next step.”

  Under the first sentence and the second he wrote. “Now is the time for all good Bems to come to the aid of —” He stared at it. “What shall I make it, Toots? ‘The galaxy’ or ‘the universe’?”

  “Better make it yourself. If you don’t get a story finished and the check for it in two weeks, we lose this cabin and walk back to the city and — and you’ll have to quit writing full time and go back to the newspaper and —”

  “Cut it out, Toots. I know all that. Too well.”

  “Just the same, Elmo, you’d better make it: ‘Now is the time for all good Bems to come to the aid of Elmo Scott.’ ”

  The big Doberman stirred on the rag rug. He said, “You needn’t.”

  Both human heads turned toward him.

  The little brunette stamped a dainty foot. “Elmo!” she said. “Trying a trick like that. That’s how you’ve been spending the time you should have spent writing. Learning ventriloquism!”

  “No, Toots,” said the dog. “It isn’t that.”

  “Elmo! How do you get him to move his mouth like —” Her eyes went from the dog’s face to Elmo’s and she stopped in mid-sentence. If Elmo Scott wasn’t scared stiff, then he was a better actor than Maurice Evans. She said, “Elmo!” again, but this time her voice was a scared little wail, and she didn’t stamp her foot. Instead she practically fell into Elmo’s lap and, if he hadn’t grabbed her, would probably have fallen from there to the floor.

  “Don’t be frightened, Toots,” said the dog.

  Some degree of sanity returned to Elmo Scott. He said, “Whatever you are, don’t call my wife Toots. Her name is Dorothy.”

  “You call her Toots.”

  “That’s — that’s different.”

  “I see it is,” said the dog. His mouth lolled open as though he were laughing. “The concept that entered your mind when you used that word ‘wife’ is an interesting one. This is a bisexual planet, then.”

  Elmo said, “This is a — uh — What are you talking about?”

  “On Andromeda II,” said the dog, “we have five sexes. But we are a highly developed race, of course. Yours is highly primitive. Perhaps I should say lowly primitive. Your language has, I find, confusing connotations; it is not mathematical. But, as I started to observe, you are still in the bisexual stage. How long since you were mono-sexual? And don’t deny that you once were; I can read the word ‘amoeba’ in your mind.”

  “If you can read my mind,” said Elmo, “why should I talk?”

  “Consider Toots — I mean Dorothy,” said the dog. “We cannot hold a three-way conversation since you two are not telepathic. At any rate, there shall shortly be more of us in the conversation. I have summoned my companions.” He laughed again. “Do not let them frighten you, no matter in what form they may appear. They are merely Bems.”

  “B-bems?” asked Dorothy. “You mean you are b-bug-eyed monsters? That’s what Elmo means by Bems, but you aren’t —”

  “That is just what I am,” said the dog. “You are not, of course, seeing the real me. Nor will you see my companions as they really are. They, like me, are temporarily animating bodies of creatures of lesser intelligence. In our real bodies, I assure you, you would classify us as Bems. We have five limbs each and two heads, each head with three eyes on stalks.”

  “Where are your real bodies?” Elmo asked.

  “They are dead — Wait, I see that word means more to you than I thought at first. They are dormant, temporarily uninhabitable and in need of repairs, inside the fused hull of a spaceship which was warped into this space too near a planet. This planet. That’s what wrecked us.”

  “Where? You mean there’s really a spaceship near here? Where?” Elmo’s eyes were almost popping from his head as he questioned the dog.

  “That is none of your business, Earthman. If it were found and examined by your creatures, you would possibly discover space travel before you are ready for it. The cosmic scheme would be upset.” He growled. “There are enough cosmic wars now. We were fleeing a Betelgeuse fleet when we warped into your space.”

  “Elmo,” said Dorothy. “What’s the beetle juice got to do with it? Wasn’t this crazy enough before he started talking about a beetle juice fleet?”

  “No,” said Elmo resignedly. “It wasn’t.” For a squirrel had just pushed its way through a hole in the bottom of the screen door.

  It said, “Hyah dar, yo-all. We uns got yo message, One.”

  “See what I mean?” said Elmo.

  “Everything is all right, Four,” said the Doberman. “These people will serve our purpose admirably. Meet Elmo Scott and Dorothy Scott; don’t call her Toots.”

  “Yessir. Yessum. Ah’s sho gladda meetcha.”

  The Doberman’s mouth lolled open again in another laugh; it was unmistakable this time.

  “Perhaps I’d better explain Four’s accent,” he said. “We scattered, each entering a creature of low mentality and from that vantage point contacting the mind of some member of the ruling species, learning from that mind the language and the level of intelligence and degree of imagination. I take it from your reaction that Four has learned the language from a mind which speaks a language differing slightly from yours.”

  “Ah sho did,” said the squirrel.

  Elmo shuddered slightly. “Not that I’m suggesting it, but I’m curious to know why you didn’t take over the higher species directly,” he said.

  The dog looked shocked. It was the first time Elmo had ever seen a dog look shocked, but the Doberman managed it.

  “It would be unthinkable,” he declared. “The cosmic ethic forbids the taking over of any creature of an intelligence over the four level. We Andromedans are of the twenty-three level, and I find you Earthlings —”

  “Wait!” said Elmo. “Don’t tell me. It might give me an inferiority complex. Or would it?”

  “Ah fears it might,” said the squirrel.

  The Doberman said, “So you can see that it is not purely coincidence that we Bems should manifest ourselves to you who are a writer of what I see you call science-fiction. We studied many minds and yours was the first one we found capable of accepting the premise of visitors from Andromeda. Had Four here, for example, tried to explain things to the woman whose mind he studied, she would probably have gone insane.”

  “She sho would,” said the squirrel.

  A chicken thrust its head through the hole in the screen, clucked, and pulled its head out again.

  “Please let Three in,” said the Doberman. �
��I fear that you will not be able to communicate directly with Three. He has found that subjectively to modify the throat structure of the creature he inhabits in order to enable it to talk would be a quite involved process. It does not matter. He can communicate telepathically with one of us, and we can relay his comments to you. At the moment he sends you his greetings and asks that you open the door.”

  The clucking of the chicken (it was a big black hen, Elmo saw) sounded angry and Elmo said, “Better open the door, Toots.”

  Dorothy Scott got off his lap and opened the door. She turned a dismayed face to Elmo and then to the Doberman.

  “There’s a cow coming down the road,” she said. “Do you mean to tell me that she —”

  “He,” the Doberman corrected her. “Yes, that will be Two. And since your language is completely inadequate in that it has only two genders, you may as well call all of us ‘he’; it will save trouble. Of course, we are five different sexes as I explained.”

  “You didn’t explain,” said Elmo, looking interested.

  Dorothy glowered at Elmo. “He’d better not. Five different sexes! All living together in one spaceship. I suppose it takes all five of you to — uh — ”

  “Exactly,” said the Doberman. “And now if you will please open the door for Two, I’m sure that —”

  “I will not! Have a cow in here? Do you think I’m crazy?”

  “We could make you so,” said the dog. Elmo looked from the dog to his wife.

  “You’d better open the door, Dorothy,” he advised.

  “Excellent advice,” said the Doberman. “We are not, incidentally, going to impose on your hospitality, nor will we ask you to do anything unreasonable.”

  Dorothy opened the screen door and the cow clumped in.

  He looked at Elmo and said, “Hi, Mac. What’s cookin’?”

  Elmo closed his eyes.

  The Doberman asked the cow, “Where’s Five? Have you been in touch with him?”

  “Yeah,” said the cow. “He’s comin’. The guy I looked over was a bindlestiff, One. What are these mugs?”