First Command

by A Bertram Chandler

  The bright beam of the flashlight played over the nude bodies sprawled in their obscene postures, over the clumps of fungus that looked almost like growths of coral—or naked brains. These glowed more brightly after the light of his flashlight had passed over them.

  Carefully picking his way through the sleepers he made his way deeper into the cave. He was watching for the glint of gems, of bright metal. He did not see the slim arm that extended itself from an apparently slumbering body, the long-fingered hand that closed about his ankle. He fell heavily. His flashlight was jolted from his grasp, flared briefly as it crashed onto the rock floor, went out. His face smashed into something soft and pulpy. He had opened his mouth to cry out as he was falling and a large portion of the semi-fluid mess was forced into it. He gagged—then realized that the involuntary mouthful was not what, at first, he had thought that it was. The fungus, he realized . . . It tasted quite good. It tasted better than merely good.

  There was a meatiness, a sweetness, a spiciness and, he thought, considerable alcoholic content. He had been chivvied out from the yacht to search for that blasted watch without being allowed time to enjoy a drink, a meal. It would do no harm, he decided, if he savored the delicious taste a few seconds more before prudently spitting it out. After all, he rationalized, this was scientific research, wasn’t it? And Big Sister had given the fungus full marks as a source of nourishment. He chewed experimentally. In spite of its mushiness the flesh possessed texture, fibres and nodules that broke between his teeth, that released aromatic oils which were to the original taste as a vintage burgundy is to a very ordinary vin ordinaire.

  Before he realized what he was doing he swallowed. The second mouthful of the fungus was more voluntary than otherwise.

  He was conscious of a soft weight on his back, of long hair falling around his head. Languidly he tried to turn over, finally succeeded in spite of the multiplicity (it seemed) of naked arms and legs that were imprisoning him.

  He looked up into the face that was looking down into his. Why, he thought, she’s beautiful . . . He recognized her.

  She was the woman whom he and the Baroness had seen emerge briefly from the caves. Then her overall filthiness had made the biggest impression. Now he was quite unaware of the dirt on her body, the tangles in her hair. She was no more (and no less) than a desirable woman, an available woman. He knew that she was looking on him as a desirable, available man. After all the weeks cooped up aboard The Far Traveler with an attractive female at whom he could look, but must not touch, the temptation was strong, too strong. She kissed him full on the mouth. Her breath was sweet and spicy, intoxicating. She was woman and he was man, and all that stood in the way of consummation was his hampering clothing. Her hands were at the fastenings of his trousers but fumbling inexpertly. Reluctantly he removed his own from her full buttocks to assist her, was dimly conscious of the cold stone under his naked rump as the garment was pushed down to his knees, was ecstatically conscious of the enveloping warmth of her as she mounted him and rode him, not violently but languorously, slowly, slowly . . .

  The tension releasing explosion came. She slumped against him, over him, her nipples brushing his face. Gently, reluctantly she rolled off his body. He felt her hand at his mouth. It held a large piece of the fungus. He took it from her fingers, chewed and swallowed. It was even better than his first taste of it had been. He drifted into sleep.

  Chapter 19

  He dreamed.

  In the dream he was a child.

  He was one of the Lode Venturer survivors who had made the long trek south from the vicinity of the north magnetic pole. He could remember the crash landing, the swift and catastrophic conversion of what had been a little, warm, secure world into twisted, crumpled wreckage.

  He remembered the straggling column of men, women and children burdened with supplies from the wrecked gaussjammer—food, sacks of precious Terran seed grain, sealed stasis containers of the fertilized ova of Terran livestock, the incubators broken down into portable components, the parts of the solar power generator.

  He was one of Lode Venturer’s people who had survived both crash landing and long march, who had found the valley, who had tilled the fields and planted the grain, who had worked at setting up the incubating equipment. Although only a child he had shared the fears of his elders as the precious store of preserved provisions dwindled and the knowledge that, in spite of strict rationing, it would not last out until the harvest, until the incubators delivered progenitors of future herds of meat animals.

  He remembered the day of the drawing of lots.

  There were the losers—three young men, a middle-aged woman and another one who was little more than a girl— standing there, frightened yet somehow proud, while further lots were drawn to decide who would be executioner and butcher. A fierce argument had developed—some of the women claiming, belatedly, that females of child-bearing age should have been exempt from the first lottery. While this was going on another boy—the son of the middle-aged woman, came down from the caves to which he had run rather than watch his mother slaughtered. He was bearing an armful of the fungus.

  “Food!” he was shouting. “Food! I have tasted it and it is good!”

  They had all sung a hymn of thanksgiving then, grateful for their delivery from what, no matter how necessary to their survival, would have been a ghastly sin.

  Bread of Heaven, bread of Heaven,

  Feed me till I want no more, want no more,

  Feed me till I want no more . . .

  He awoke then, drifting slowly up from the warm, deep sleep. He did what he had to do, relieving the pressure on bowels and bladder as he lay there. He wondered dimly why people ever went to the trouble of fabricating elaborate sanitary arrangements. The fungus needed his body wastes. He needed the fungus. It was all so simple.

  He reached out and grabbed another handful of the satisfying, intoxicating stuff. He became aware that the woman—or a woman—was with him. While he was still eating they coupled.

  He slept.

  He dreamed.

  He was the Pastor, the leader of the people of the settlement.

  He had looked over the arrangements for the feast and all was well. There was an ample supply of the strong liquor brewed and distilled from grain—the last harvest had been a good one, surplus to food requirements. Pigs had been slaughtered and dressed, ready for the roasting. Great baskets of the fungus had been brought down from the caves. Since it had been discovered that it thrived on human manure it had proliferated, spreading from the original cavern through the entire subterranean complex. Perhaps it had changed, too. It seemed that with every passing year its flavor had improved. At first—he seemed to remember—it had been almost tasteless although filling and nutritious.

  But now . . .

  The guests from the ship, clattering through the night sky in their noisy flying boats, were dropping down to the village. He hoped that there would not be the same trouble as there had been with the guests from that other ship, the one with the odd name, Epsilon Pavonis. Of course, it had not been the guests themselves who had made the trouble; it had been their captain. But this captain, he had been told, was himself a True Follower. All should be well. All was well.

  The love feast, the music, the dancing, the singing of the old, familiar hymns . . .

  And the love . . .

  And surely the manna, the gift from the all-wise, all-loving God of the True Followers, was better than it ever had been. What need was there, after all, for the corn liquor, the roast pig?

  Bread of Heaven, bread of Heaven,

  Feed me till I want no more . . .

  He walked slowly through and among the revelers, watching benevolently the fleshly intermingling of his own people and those from the starship. It was . . . good. Everything was good. He exchanged a few words with the Survey Service petty officer who, dutifully operating his equipment, was making a visual and sound recording of the feast. He wondered briefly why the man was amused
when he said that the pictures and the music would be acclaimed when presented in the tabernacles of the True Followers on Earth and other planets. He looked benignly at the group at which the camera was aimed—a plump, naked, supine crewman being fondled by three children. It was a charming scene.

  And why the strong sensation of déjà vu?

  Why the brief, gut-wrenching disgust?

  He heard the distant hammering in the still, warm air, growing louder and louder. More airboats—what did they call them? pinnaces?—from the ship, he thought. Perhaps the captain himself, Commander Belton, was coming after all. He would be pleased to see for himself how well his fellow True Followers on this distant world had kept the faith . . .

  Then the dream became a nightmare.

  There was shouting and screaming.

  There was fighting.

  There were armed men discharging their weapons indiscriminately, firing on both their own shipmates and the colonists.

  There was his confrontation with a tall, gaunt, stiffly uniformed man.

  (Again the flash of déjà vu.)

  There were the bitter, angry words.

  “True Followers, you call yourselves? I understood that my people had been invited to a religious service . . . And I find a disgusting orgy in progress!”

  “But we are True Followers! We were saved. God Himself sent his manna to save us from committing the deadliest sin of all. Here! Taste! Eat and believe!”

  And a hand smashed viciously down, striking the preferred manna from his grasp, as Belton shouted, “Keep that filthy muck away from me!”

  He saw the muzzle of a pistol pointing at him, saw the flare of energy that jolted him into oblivion.

  He slowly drifted up to semi-consciousness. There was a woman. There was more of the manna. Again he slept.

  Chapter 20

  He dreamed.

  He dreamed that a bright, harsh light was beating through his closed eyelids, that something hard was nudging him in the ribs.

  He opened his eyes, immediately shut them again before he was blinded.

  A voice, a somehow familiar female voice, was saying, “Captain Grimes! Captain Grimes! Wake up, damn you!” And then, in an intense whisper, “Oh! If you could only see yourself!”

  He muttered, “Go ‘way. Go ‘way.”

  “Captain Grimes! John!” There was a hand on his shoulder, shaking him. He opened his eyes again. She had put her flashlight on the ground so that now he saw her by its reflected light. She was a woman. She was beautiful—but so was everybody in this enchanted cavern. He dimly recognized her.

  She said, “I must get you out of here.”

  Why? he wondered. Why!

  She got her hands under his naked shoulders, tried to lift him. He got his hands about her shoulders, pulled her down. She struggled, kneeing him in the groin. He let go and she stood up, stepping back from him. The shirt had been torn from her upper body. In spite of the pain that she had inflicted on him he felt a surge of desire, reached out for her exposed breasts. She stepped back another pace.

  He wanted her—but to get up to go after her was too much trouble.

  But he muttered, “Do’n’ go . . . Do’n’ go . . . I . . . want . . . you . . . always . . . wanted . . . you . . .”

  Her face was glistening oddly. Dimly he realized that she was weeping. She said, “Not here. Not now. Pull yourself together. Come back to the ship.”

  He said—the words were coming more easily now, but were they his? “I . . . hate . . . ships . . . All . . . True . . . Followers . . . hate . . . ships . . . Stay . . . here . . . Be . . . happy . . .”

  Her face and voice hardened. She said, “I’ll get you out of here by force!”

  He was fast losing interest in the conversation. He reached out languidly from the omnipresent manna, chewed and swallowed.

  He muttered, “Try . . . this . . . Make . . . you . . . human . . .”

  But she was gone.

  It did not matter.

  The warmth of the communal life of the cavern surrounded him.

  There were women.

  And always there was the manna.

  He slept.

  He dreamed.

  He was one of the crowd being harangued by the Pastor.

  “We must sever all ties with Earth!” he heard. “We are the true, the real True Followers! Were we not saved by God himself from death and from deadly sin? But these Earth-men, who have intruded into our paradise, who have strayed from the true path, refuse to believe . . .”

  “So burn the houses, my people! Destroy everything that links us to faithless Earth, even our herds and our crops!

  “God’s own manna is all that we need, all that we shall ever need!”

  And somebody else—Grimes knew that it was one of the community’s physicians—was crying over and over, in a sort of ecstasy, “Holy symbiosis! Holy symbiosis!”

  Crackling flames and screaming pigs and the voices of the people, singing,

  Bread of Heaven, bread of Heaven,

  Feed me till I want no more, want no more . . .

  Again the too bright light and again the hand shaking his shoulder . . .

  “Wake up, John! Wake up!”

  “Go ‘way . . .”

  “John! Look at me!”

  He opened his eyes.

  She had placed her torch on a ledge so that it shone full upon her. She was naked. Diamonds gleamed in the braided coronet of the hair of her head and even in the heart-shaped growth at the scission of her thighs. She was a spaceman’s pin-up girl in the warm, living flesh.

  She said softly, “You want me. You shall have me—but not here, among these degenerates, this filth.” She turned slowly, saying, “Follow . . .”

  Almost he made the effort to get to his feet but it was too much trouble. With faint stirrings of regret he watched her luminous body swaying away from him. Once she turned and beckoned. He wondered vaguely why she should be wearing such an angry expression. And before she reached the mouth of the cave he had fallen back into sleep.

  A long while or a little while—he had no way of knowing—later he awoke. After a few mouthfuls of manna he crawled until he found a woman.

  And slept again.

  And dreamed.

  Subtly the dreams changed.

  There were, as before, memories from the minds of the colonists who had long lived in symbiosis with the fungus but there were now other memories—brief flashes, indistinct at first but all the time increasing in clarity and duration. There were glimpses of the faces and the bodies of women whom he had known—Jane Pentecost, Maggie Lazenby, Ellen Russell, Una Freeman, Maya . . .

  The women . . .

  And the ships.

  Lines from a long-ago read and long-ago forgotten piece of verse drifted through his mind:

  The arching sky is calling

  Spacemen back to their trade . . .

  He was sitting in the control room of his first command, the little Serpent Class courier Adder, a king at last even though his realm, to others, was a very insignificant one. Obedient to the touch of his fingers on the console the tiny ship lifted from the Lindisfarne Base apron.

  All hands! Stand by! Free Falling!

  The lights below us fade . . .

  And through the dream, louder and louder, surged the arhythmic hammering of a spaceship’s inertial drive.

  He awoke.

  He scooped a handful of manna from a nearby clump.

  He chewed, swallowed.

  Somehow it was not the same as it had been; there was a hint of bitterness, a rancidity. He relieved himself where he lay and then crawled over and among the recumbent bodies until he found a receptive woman.

  Like a great, fat slug . . . he thought briefly.

  (But what was a slug? Surely nothing like this beautiful creature. . .)

  After he was finished with her and she with him he drifted again into sleep, even though that mechanical clangor coming from somewhere outside the cave was a growi
ng irritation.

  He dreamed more vividly than before.

  He had just brought Discovery down to a landing in the Paddington Oval on Botany Bay. His officers and the Marine guard behind him, he was marching down the ramp to the vividly green grass. Against the pale blue sky he could see the tall, white flagstaffs, each with its rippling ensign, dark blue with the cruciform constellation of silver stars in the fly, with the superimposed red, white and blue crosses in the upper canton.

  There was a band playing.

  He was singing in time to the familiar tune:

  Waltzing Matilda, Waltzing Matilda,

  You’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me . . .

  He awoke.

  There was still that arythmic hammering, drifting in from somewhere outside—but the music, vastly amplified, almost drowned the mechanical racket.

  Up jumped the swagman, sprang into the billabong,

  “You’ll never catch me alive!” cried he . . .

  And what was this noisome billabong into which he, Grimes, had plunged? Would his ghost still be heard after he was gone from it? Would his memories of Deep Space and the ships plying the star lanes remain to haunt the swinish dreamers of Farhaven? Would that honest old national song replace the phoney piety of the True Followers’ hymn?

  Manna! he thought disgustedly, kicking out at a dim-glowing mass. It splattered under his bare foot and the stench was sickening. He was seized with an uncontrollable spasm of nausea. Drained and shaken he stumbled toward the cave entrance, the music luring him on as though he were one of the Pied Piper’s rats. He tripped over sleeping bodies. A woman clutched his ankle. He looked down at her. He could not be sure but he thought that she was the one responsible for his original downfall. Almost he brought his free foot smashing down on to her sleepily smiling face but, at the last moment, desisted.