The Classic Sci-Fi Collection

by Ayn Rand

  “I’m Brucco, in charge of the adaptation clinic. Kerk told me who you were. I’m sorry you’re here. Now come along, I want some blood samples.”

  “Now I feel right at home,” Jason said. “The old Pyrran hospitality.” Brucco only grunted and stamped out. Jason followed him down a bare corridor into a sterile lab.

  The double gravity was tiring, a constant drag on sore muscles. While Brucco ran tests on the blood sample, Jason rested. He had almost dozed off into a painful sleep when Brucco returned with a tray of bottles and hypodermic needles.

  “Amazing,” he announced. “Not an antibody in your serum that would be of any use on this planet. I have a batch of antigens here that will make you sick as a beast for at least a day. Take off your shirt.”

  “Have you done this often?” Jason asked. “I mean juice up an outlander so he can enjoy the pleasures of your world?”

  Brucco jammed in a needle that felt like it grated on the bone. “Not often at all. Last time was years ago. A half-dozen researchers from some institute, willing to pay well for the chance to study the local life forms. We didn’t say no. Always need more galaxy currency.”

  Jason was already beginning to feel light-headed from the shots. “How many of them lived?” he mumbled vaguely.

  “One. We got him off in time. Made them pay in advance of course.”

  At first Jason thought the Pyrran was joking. Then he remembered they had very little interest in humor of any kind. If one-half of what Meta and Kerk had told him was true, six to one odds weren’t bad at all.

  There was a bed in the next room and Brucco helped him to it. Jason felt drugged and probably was. He fell into a deep sleep and into the dream.

  Fear and hatred mixed in equal parts and washed over him red hot. If this was a dream, he never wanted to sleep again. If it wasn’t a dream, he wanted to die. He tried to fight up against it, but only sank in more deeply. There was no beginning and no end to the fear and no way to escape.

  When consciousness returned Jason could remember no detail of the nightmare. Just the fear remained. He was soaked with sweat and ached in every muscle. It must have been the massive dose of shots, he finally decided, that and the brutal gravity. That didn’t take the taste of fear out of his mouth, though.

  Brucco stuck his head in the door then and looked Jason up and down. “Thought you were dead,” he said. “Slept the clock around. Don’t move, I’ll get something to pick you up.”

  The pickup was in the form of another needle and a glassful of evil-looking fluid. It settled his thirst, but made him painfully aware of gnawing hunger.

  “Want to eat?” Brucco asked. “I’ll bet you do. I’ve speeded up your metabolism so you’ll build muscle faster. Only way you’ll ever beat the gravity. Give you quite an appetite for a while though.”

  Brucco ate at the same time and Jason had a chance to ask some questions. “When do I get a chance to look around your fascinating planet? So far this trip has been about as interesting as a jail term.”

  “Relax and enjoy your food. Probably be months before you’re able to go outside. If at all.”

  Jason felt his jaw hanging and closed it with a snap. “Could you possibly tell me why?”

  “Of course. You will have to go through the same training course that our children take. It takes them six years. Of course it’s their first six years of life. So you might think that you, as an adult, could learn faster. Then again they have the advantage of heredity. All I can say is you’ll go outside these sealed buildings when you’re ready.”

  Brucco had finished eating while he talked, and sat staring at Jason’s bare arms with growing disgust. “The first thing we want to get you is a gun,” he said. “It gives me a sick feeling to see someone without one.”

  Of course Brucco wore his own gun continually, even within the sealed buildings.

  “Every gun is fitted to its owner and would be useless on anyone else,” Brucco said. “I’ll show you why.” He led Jason to an armory jammed with deadly weapons. “Put your arm in this while I make the adjustments.”

  * * *

  It was a boxlike machine with a pistol grip on the side. Jason clutched the grip and rested his elbow on a metal loop. Brucco fixed pointers that touched his arm, then copied the results from the meters. Reading the figures from his list he selected various components from bins and quickly assembled a power holster and gun. With the holster strapped to his forearm and the gun in his hand, Jason noticed for the first time they were connected by a flexible cable. The gun fitted his hand perfectly.

  “This is the secret of the power holster,” Brucco said, tapping the flexible cable. “It is perfectly loose while you are using the weapon. But when you want it returned to the holster—” Brucco made an adjustment and the cable became a stiff rod that whipped the gun from Jason’s hand and suspended it in midair.

  “Then the return.” The rod-cable whirred and snapped the gun back into the holster. “The drawing action is the opposite of this, of course.”

  “A great gadget,” Jason said, “but how do I draw? Do I whistle or something for the gun to pop out?”

  “No, it is not sonic control,” Brucco answered with a sober face. “It is much more precise than that. Here, take your left hand and grasp an imaginary gun butt. Tense your trigger finger. Do you notice the pattern of the tendons in the wrist? Sensitive actuators touch the tendons in your right wrist. They ignore all patterns except the one that says hand ready to receive gun. After a time the mechanism becomes completely automatic. When you want the gun—it is in your hand. When you don’t—it is in the holster.”

  Jason made grasping motions with his right hand, crooked his index finger. There was a sudden, smashing pain against his hand and a loud roar. The gun was in his hand—half the fingers were numb—and smoke curled up from the barrel.

  “Of course there are only blank charges in the gun until you learn control. Guns are always loaded. There is no safety. Notice the lack of a trigger guard. That enables you to bend your trigger finger a slight bit more when drawing so the gun will fire the instant it touches your hand.”

  It was without a doubt the most murderous weapon Jason had ever handled, as well as being the hardest to manage. Working against the muscle-burning ache of high gravity, he fought to control the devilish device. It had an infuriating way of vanishing into the holster just as he was about to pull the trigger. Even worse was the tendency to leap out before he was quite ready. The gun went to the position where his hand should be. If the fingers weren’t correctly placed, they were crashed aside. Jason only stopped the practice when his entire hand was one livid bruise.

  Complete mastery would come with time, but he could already understand why the Pyrrans never removed their guns. It would be like removing a part of your own body. The movement of gun from holster to hand was too fast for him to detect. It was certainly faster than the neural current that shaped the hand into the gun-holding position. For all apparent purposes it was like having a lightning bolt in your fingertip. Point the finger and blamm, there’s the explosion.

  * * *

  Brucco had left Jason to practice alone. When his aching hand could take no more, he stopped and headed back towards his own quarters. Turning a corner he had a quick glimpse of a familiar figure going away from him.

  “Meta! Wait for a second—I want to talk to you.”

  She turned impatiently as he shuffled up, going as fast as he could in the doubled gravity. Everything about her seemed different from the girl he had known on the ship. Heavy boots came as high as her knees, her figure was lost in bulky coveralls of some metallic fabric. The trim waist was bulged out by a belt of canisters. Her very expression was coldly distant.

  “I’ve missed you,” he said. “I hadn’t realized you were in this building.” He reached for her hand but she moved it out of his reach.

  “What is it you want?” she asked.

  “What is it I want!” he echoed with barely concealed anger. “
This is Jason, remember me? We’re friends. It is allowed for friends to talk without ‘wanting’ anything.”

  “What happened on the ship has nothing to do with what happens on Pyrrus.” She started forward impatiently as she talked. “I have finished my reconditioning and must return to work. You’ll be staying here in the sealed buildings so I won’t be seeing you.”

  “Why don’t you say ‘with the rest of the children’—that’s what your tone implies? And don’t try walking out, there are some things we have to settle first—”

  Jason made the mistake of putting out his hand to stop her. He didn’t really know what happened next. One instant he was standing—the next he sprawled suddenly on the floor. His shoulder was badly bruised, and Meta had vanished down the corridor.

  Limping back to his own room he cursed women in general and Meta in particular. Dropping onto his rock-hard bed he tried to remember the reasons that had brought him here in the first place. And weighed them against the perpetual torture of the gravity, the fear-filled dreams it inspired, the automatic contempt of these people for any outsider. He quickly checked the growing tendency to feel sorry for himself. By Pyrran standards he was soft and helpless. If he wanted them to think any better of him, he would have to change a good deal.

  He sank into a fatigue-drugged sleep then, that was broken only by the screaming fear of his dreams.

  * * *

  VII.

  In the morning Jason awoke with a bad headache and the feeling he had never been to sleep. As he took some of the carefully portioned stimulants that Brucco had given him, he wondered again about the combination of factors that filled his sleep with such horror.

  “Eat quickly,” Brucco told him when they met in the dining room. “I can no longer spare you time for individual instruction. You will join the regular classes and take the prescribed courses. Only come to me if there is some special problem that the instructors or trainers can’t handle.”

  The classes—as Jason should have expected—were composed of stern-faced little children. With their compact bodies and no-nonsense mannerisms they were recognizably Pyrran. But they were still children enough to consider it very funny to have an adult in their classes. Jammed behind one of the tiny desks, the red-faced Jason did not think it was much of a joke.

  All resemblance to a normal school ended with the physical form of the classroom. For one thing, every child—no matter how small—packed a gun. And the courses were all involved with survival. The only possible grade in a curriculum like this was one hundred per cent and students stayed with a lesson until they mastered it perfectly. No courses were offered in the normal scholastic subjects. Presumably these were studied after the child graduated survival school and could face the world alone. Which was a logical and cold-hearted way of looking at things. In fact, logical and cold-hearted could describe any Pyrran activity.

  Most of the morning was spent on the operation of one of the medikits that strapped around the waist. This was a poison analyzer that was pressed over a puncture wound. If any toxins were present, the antidote was automatically injected on the site. Simple in operation but incredibly complex in construction. Since all Pyrrans serviced their own equipment—you could then only blame yourself if it failed—they had to learn the construction and repair of all the devices. Jason did much better than the child students, though the effort exhausted him.

  In the afternoon he had his first experience with a training machine. His instructor was a twelve-year-old boy, whose cold voice didn’t conceal his contempt for the soft off-worlder.

  “All the training machines are physical duplicates of the real surface of the planet, corrected constantly as the life forms change. The only difference between them is the varying degree of deadliness. This first machine you will use is of course the one infants are put into—”

  “You’re too kind,” Jason murmured. “Your flattery overwhelms me.” The instructor continued, taking no notice of the interruption.

  “... Infants are put into as soon as they can crawl. It is real in substance, though completely deactivated.”

  * * *

  Training machine was the wrong word, Jason realized as they entered through the thick door. This was a chunk of the outside world duplicated in an immense chamber. It took very little suspension of reality for him to forget the painted ceiling and artificial sun high above and imagine himself outdoors at last. The scene seemed peaceful enough. Though clouds banking on the horizon threatened a violent Pyrran storm.

  “You must wander around and examine things,” the instructor told Jason. “Whenever you touch something with your hand, you will be told about it. Like this—”

  The boy bent over and pushed his finger against a blade of the soft grass that covered the ground. Immediately a voice barked from hidden speakers.

  “Poison grass. Boots to be worn at all times.”

  Jason kneeled and examined the grass. The blade was tipped with a hard, shiny hook. He realized with a start that every single blade of grass was the same. The soft green lawn was a carpet of death. As he straightened up he glimpsed something under a broad-leafed plant. A crouching, scale-covered animal, whose tapered head terminated in a long spike.

  “What’s that in the bottom of my garden?” he asked. “You certainly give the babies pleasant playmates.” Jason turned and realized he was talking to the air, the instructor was gone. He shrugged and petted the scaly monstrosity.

  “Horndevil,” the impersonal voice said from midair. “Clothing and shoes no protection. Kill it.”

  A sharp crack shattered the silence as Jason’s gun went off. The horndevil fell on its side, keyed to react to the blank charge.

  “Well ... I am learning,” Jason said, and the thought pleased him. The words kill it had been used by Brucco while teaching him to use the gun. Their stimulus had reached an unconscious level. He was aware of wanting to shoot only after he had heard the shot. His respect for Pyrran training techniques went up.

  Jason spent a thoroughly unpleasant afternoon wandering in the child’s garden of horror. Death was everywhere. While all the time the disembodied voice gave him stern advice in simple language. So he could do unto, rather than being done in. He had never realized that violent death could come in so many repulsive forms. Everything here was deadly to man—from the smallest insect to the largest plant.

  Such singleness of purpose seemed completely unnatural. Why was this planet so alien to human life? He made a mental note to ask Brucco. Meanwhile he tried to find one life form that wasn’t out for his blood. He didn’t succeed. After a long search he found the only thing that when touched didn’t elicit deadly advice. This was a chunk of rock that projected from a meadow of poison grass. Jason sat on it with a friendly feeling and pulled his feet up. An oasis of peace. Some minutes passed while he rested his gravity-weary body.

  “ROTFUNGUS—DO NOT TOUCH!”

  The voice blasted at twice its normal volume and Jason leaped as if he had been shot. The gun was in his hand, nosing about for a target. Only when he bent over and looked closely at the rock where he had been sitting, did he understand. There were flaky gray patches that hadn’t been there when he sat down.

  “Oh you tricky devils!” he shouted at the machine. “How many kids have you frightened off that rock after they thought they had found a little peace!” He resented the snide bit of conditioning, but respected it at the same time. Pyrrans learned very early in life that there was no safety on this planet—except that which they provided for themselves.

  While he was learning about Pyrrus he was gaining new insight into the Pyrrans as well.

  * * *

  VIII.

  Days turned into weeks in the school, cut off from the world outside. Jason almost became proud of his ability to deal death. He recognized all the animals and plants in the nursery room and had been promoted to a trainer where the beasts made sluggish charges at him. His gun picked off the attackers with dull regularity. The constant, daily c
lasses were beginning to bore him as well.

  Though the gravity still dragged at him, his muscles were making great efforts to adjust. After the daily classes he no longer collapsed immediately into bed. Only the nightmares got worse. He had finally mentioned them to Brucco, who mixed up a sleeping potion that took away most of their effect. The dreams were still there, but Jason was only vaguely aware of them upon awakening.

  By the time Jason had mastered all the gadgetry that kept the Pyrrans alive, he had graduated to a most realistic trainer that was only a hair-breadth away from the real thing. The difference was just in quality. The insect poisons caused swelling and pain instead of instant death. Animals could cause bruises and tear flesh, but stopped short of ripping off limbs. You couldn’t get killed in this trainer, but could certainly come very close to it.

  Jason wandered through this large and rambling jungle with the rest of the five-year-olds. There was something a bit humorous, yet sad, about their unchildlike grimness. Though they still might laugh in their quarters, they realized there was no laughing outside. To them survival was linked up with social acceptance and desirability. In this way Pyrrus was a simple black-and-white society. To prove your value to yourself and your world, you only had to stay alive. This had great importance in racial survival, but had very stultifying effects on individual personality. Children were turned into like-faced killers, always on the alert to deal out death.

  Some of the children graduated into the outside world and others took their places. Jason watched this process for a while before he realized that all of those from the original group he had entered with were gone. That same day he looked up the chief of the adaptation center.

  “Brucco,” Jason asked, “how long do you plan to keep me in this kindergarten shooting gallery?”

  “You’re not being ‘kept’ here,” Brucco told him in his usual irritated tone. “You will be here until you qualify for the outside.”