Astounding Science Fiction Stories: An Anthology of 350 Scifi Stories Volume 2 (Halcyon Classics)

by Various

  In the midst of the confusion of rescuing babies and herding everyone in doors, I noticed that all the natives had disappeared into the forest. Everyone had suffered a hundred bites or more, and we were sorry, swollen sights. Sue insisted that I cover myself and make a run for the clinic to see if Dr. Bailey had any remedies for the bites. Richard Joseph was crying loudly from the irritation, so I agreed.

  It was only 75 yards to the clinic, and I made it without collecting many more stings. But the doctors had nothing to offer. They were dabbing various salves, astringents and pastes on test patches of their own skin, but nothing seemed to have any effect at all.

  "All we hope," said Sorenson, "is that the flies aren't microbe-carriers."

  I started out the door to return then stepped back and peered through the screen. The forest was erupting with natives. They staggered into the clearing, headed for the center of it and sank down as if with great weariness. On and on they came until the ground among our buildings was literally paved with their prone bodies.

  "Poor devils." Bailey murmured as the clouds of flies continued to sweep through our village. "Nothing we can do, though. I wonder why they come out in the open? You'd think they had better protection in the trees."

  I had no answers, so I covered my head again and made a dash for my own hut. Inside I brushed off the clinging flies and stamped on them. "The medics don't have any help for us," I said. Then I saw him.

  Sue was struggling to hold Joe on his feet. His arms were draped loosely over her shoulders, and for a second I couldn't decided whether he was ill or making a pass at Sue.

  I pulled him off her by one shoulder. He swung around and toppled into my arms. Remarkably few insect bites showed under the transparent haze of golden hair, but he reeked of tala.

  "You're drunk," I yelled at him. "A lot of help you are at a time like this!"

  "Tala," he said from loose lips. "Much tala."

  "You've had much tala, all right!" I said disgusted.

  Sue said, "We've got to let him stay in here, Sam. The flies will eat him alive out there." She went to the window and knocked the flies from the outside of the screen. Then she screamed. I thought she had just discovered the massed natives, but she kept on screaming until I went to her and looked out.

  In the late afternoon sun, fuzzy little brown animals were waddling out of the forest, closing in on the 900 or more natives lying senseless in the clearing. Koodi! Dozens of them.

  I forgot my screaming wife, my crying infant, the drunken wife-stealer slumped on the floor. I forgot the torture of my own stings. All I remember is snatching my pistol from its holster that hung by the door and plunging out and pulling the trigger until fire ceased to come out of it. Then I was kicking and smashing with a tree limb, and every blow smashed one of the vile little ghouls into the grass. I thought I saw Benson firing and kicking, but I blacked out before I could be sure.

  I regained consciousness with the flies still keening in my ears. Sue was calling my name and slapping me sharply in the face. Joe was trying to pull me to my feet, but the last thing I remember is the both of us collapsing to the ground.

  * * * * *

  I awoke days later with a burning fever and gloriously drunken sensation of floating. Joe brought a fruit to me when he saw I was stirring. I drank the thin, tangy juice in one breath and sank back into a deep sleep again.

  My next drink came from the long, slender fingers of a pretty little female native. This time it was water, and I stayed awake. Joe came in, saw I was awake and came back in a few minutes with Benson and Dr. Bailey.

  They both looked terrible, Benson especially. Bailey said, "Take it easy. Sue's at the clinic. She and the baby are all right, but you damned near didn't make it."

  Benson said, "Can you talk?"

  I cleared my throat and decided I could. He waved Joe and the female out. Then he and Bailey sat down beside me. I asked, "Any casualties?"

  "Two of our babies and thirty-six native babies. Some of the koodi came in after dark."

  It sounded strange, Benson's listing native casualties with our own.

  The memory of the koodi attack brought a wave of nausea over me. I said, "Benson, I'm sorry, but I'm all done trying to murder Joe's race. I want no further part of it."

  Benson's face was thin and drawn, and he stared at the floor. "If we haven't murdered it already," he said, "there will be no more attempts while I am in charge." He covered his face with his hands. "Bailey. Tell him, Bailey."

  The doctor's voice was gravelly and weak. "If it hadn't been for the natives we'd all have died. The venom from the flies paralyzed everyone the second day after the swarm hit us. The flies were gone the next morning, but every soul in the colony passed out. Joe and his friends took care of us, poured tala down our throats and fed us."

  "But they were soused," I said.

  "Their only defense against the flies. The little black devils left the natives pretty well alone, and it appears that the tala was responsible. Could be that the stuff is what neutralized the toxin, too. They must have poured a gallon of it down me, judging from the empty skins by my bed. At any rate, they kept us alive until we could get up and feed ourselves."

  "Why did they come into the clearing when they drank the tala?" I asked.

  Bailey said, "Joe told us that the day he saw Sue kill the koodi that was attacking you, he got the idea that he should do something about them himself. Through his efforts the natives no longer take the little devils as an inevitable evil. They kill them wherever they find them now. And when they had to get drunk to save themselves from the flies, Joe passed the word for them to head for the clearing. The koodi usually avoid the sunlight, but it was late in the afternoon. They came anyway."

  "Phil," I said, "did I see you out there with me, killing the little bastards?"

  He nodded silently.

  "You had changed your mind about the natives at that time?"

  "I--I suppose so. Don't rub it in, Sam. It's hard enough to live with the thought of how wrong I was. All I can do now is pray that whatever failed in our first try failed again. Joe's people have made the human race look pretty dismal. They have every right to their planet, and if we are foolish enough to go native, well--at least we have a stronger survival instinct."

  At that point Susan came in carrying Richard. He had the hiccoughs. Sue kissed me. "Richard just drew his ration of sterile tala from the clinic. He still has a slight fever. But thanks to Joe and Harmony--"

  "Harmony? Who's that?"

  "The native girl who helped Joe nurse us. Her name is really Hah-ah-arm-ig-hin-ih-hee, or something like that. She answers to Harmony, though."

  And she did. Hearing her name the little golden girl came through the door towing Joe by one hand.

  I said, "One of your favorites, Joe?"

  He ran a caressing, four-fingered hand over her shoulder. "I like her," he admitted. "She wants to call me husband like Sue calls you."

  Bailey smiled. "It seems there is a new fad among the natives. Something like monogamy, I understand."

  I said, "What do you think of the idea, Joe?"

  He thought it over. "I have not made up my mind."

  Sue pressed him, "Why not marry Harmony, Joe?"

  In the blunt manner in which he so often made his curious revelations, Joe blurted out, "Because I am in much demand among all the females. It is--very pleasant."

  Bailey's eyes widened. He ordered, "Bend over, Joe."

  Joe obliged so we could all examine his back. There were two brown stains on his shoulder blades as there should be, but Bailey was not satisfied. He poked a finger into them and examined the skin under the hair. "Mango pitch!" he announced. "Stained clean down to the skin. Did you do that, Joe?"

  "Yes."

  "Why?"

  "I knew you would force me to go into the ship with the others if I didn't have the stain."

  Benson looked up, shocked. "Then you--you knew what we were trying to do?"

  "Yes. You
and Samrogers spoke of it outside the hut one day. You thought I was asleep. Some of your words puzzled me, so I stayed away from the ship. Then I found out what they meant."

  "But you helped us get the others to go into the ship!"

  "It was what you wanted," Joe said simply. "Later, when we went south, the females saw that only Joe's favorites continued to have babies. So Joe became very--popular."

  I said, "You mean they figured it out?"

  Joe smiled. "Did you think we do not know about--" he paused to dredge among his amazing store of human idioms, "--the facts of life?"

  Bailey shook his head. "What a man! What a race! Think what they would be if they had a human's survival instinct!"

  "And thumbs," I added.

  * * *

  Contents

  THE WATER EATER

  By Winston Marks

  Most experiments were dropped because they failed--and some because they worked too well!

  I just lost a weekend. I ain't too anxious to find it. Instead, I sure wish I had gone fishing with McCarthy and the boys like I'd planned.

  I drive a beer truck for a living, but here it is almost noon Monday and I haven't turned a wheel. Sure, I get beer wholesale, and I have been known to take some advantage of my discount. But that wasn't what happened to this weekend.

  Instead of fishing or bowling or poker or taking the kids down to the amusement park over Saturday and Sunday, I've been losing sleep over an experiment.

  Down at the Elks' Club, the boys say that for a working stiff I have a very inquiring mind. I guess that's because they always see me reading Popular Science and Scientific American and such, instead of heading for the stack of Esquires that are piled a foot deep in the middle of the big table in the reading room, like the rest of them do.

  Well, it was my inquiring mind that lost me my wife, the skin of my right hand, a lot of fun and sleep--yeah, not a wink of sleep for two days now! Which is the main reason I'm writing this down now. I've read somewheres that if you wrote down your troubles, you could get them out of your system.

  I thought I had troubles Friday night when I pulled into the driveway and Lottie yelled at me from the porch, "The fire's out! And it's flooded. Hurry up!"

  Trouble, hah! That was just the beginning.

  * * * * *

  Lottie is as cute a little ex-waitress as ever flipped the suds off a glass of beer, but she just ain't mechanically minded. The day Uncle Alphonse died and left us $2500 and I went out and bought a kitchen and shed full of appliances for her, that was a sad day, all right. She has lived a fearful life ever since, too proud of her dishwasher and automatic this and that to consider selling them, but scared stiff of the noises they make and the vibrations and all the mysterious dials and lights, etc.

  So this Friday afternoon when the oil-burner blew out from the high wind, she got terrified, sent the kids over to their grandmother's in a cab and sat for two hours trying to make up her mind whether to call the fire department or the plumber.

  Meanwhile, this blasted oil stove was overflowing into the fire pot.

  "Well, turn it off!" I yelled. "I'll be in right away!"

  I ducked into the garage and got a big handful of rags and a hunk of string and a short stick. This I have been through before. I went in and kissed her pretty white face, and a couple of worry lines disappeared.

  "Get me a pan or something," I said and started dismantling the front of the heater.

  These gravity-flow oil heaters weren't built to make it easy to drain off excess oil. There's a brass plug at the inlet, but no one in history has been able to stir one, the oil man told me. I weigh 200 pounds stripped, but all I ever did was ruin a tool trying.

  The only way to get out the oil was to open the front, stuff rags down through the narrow fire slot, sop up the stuff and fish out the rags with the string tied around one end of the bundle. Then you wring out the rags with your bare hands into a pan.

  "Hey, Lottie," I yelled, "this is your roaster! It'll be hard to clean out the oil smell!"

  But, of course, it was too late. I had squeezed a half-pint of oil into it already. So I went on dunking and wringing and thinking how lousy my cigarettes were going to taste all evening and feeling glad that I delivered beer instead of oil for a living.

  * * * * *

  I got the stove bailed out and lit with only one serious blast of soot out the "Light Here" hole. Then I dumped the oil out in the alley and set the roaster pan in the sink. Lottie was peeling potatoes for dinner, and she snuggled her yellow curls on my shoulder kind of apologetically for the mess she had caused me. I scrubbed the soot and oil off my hands and told her it was all right, only next time, for gosh sakes, please turn the stove off at least.

  The water I was splashing into the roaster gathered up in little shrinking drops and reminded me that the pig-hocks I brought home for Sunday dinner were going to rate throwing out unless we got the oil smell out of the pan.

  "Tell you what you do," I said to Lottie. "Get me all your cleaning soaps and stuff and let's see what we got."

  Lottie is always trying out some new handy-dandy little kitchen helper compound, so she hefted up quite an armload. Now, when I was in high school, I really liked chemistry. "Charlie, Boy Scientist," my pals used to sneer at me. But I was pretty good at it, and I been reading the science magazines right along ever since. So I know what a detergent is supposed to do, and all about how soaps act, and stuff that most people take the advertisers' word for.

  "This one," I told Lottie, "has a lot of caustic in it, see?"

  She nodded and said that's the one that ruined her aluminum coffee pot. She remembered it specially.

  I poured some very hot tap water into the roaster and shook in the strong soap powder. "This is to saponify the oil," I explained.

  "What's saponify?" Lottie asked.

  "That means to make soap. Soap is mainly a mixture of some caustic with fat or oil. It makes sudsy soap."

  "But we got soap," she said. "Why don't you just use the soap we got?"

  We went into the business of soap-making pretty deep. Meanwhile, I read some more labels and added pinches of this and that detergent and a few squirts of liquid "wonder-cleaners" that didn't say what was in them.

  In her crisp Scotch way, Lottie got across to me that she thought I was wasting soap powder and my time and cluttering up the sink while she was busy there, so I wound up with half a cup of Doozey soap flakes, filled the pan to the brim and set the concoction at the back of the drain board to do its business.

  * * * * *

  When dinner was over, I was in the living room reading the paper when I heard Lottie muttering at the sink. Lottie doesn't usually mutter, so I went out to see what was wrong.

  "Nice mess," she said and pointed at the roaster. The stuff had cooled and jelled into a half-solid condition.

  "Hah!" I said. "We had a supersaturated solution. When it cooled off, it coagulated."

  Lottie scowled. It makes her nervous when I use big words which I only do when I'm talking about chemistry and the like.

  "Well, uncoogalate it and dump it out of my roaster," she told me.

  My scientific inquiring mind was stirred as I lifted the pan over to the table under the center light. We had here a gelatin of various cleaners, and every one of them claiming to be best ever. What would this new combination do?

  I grabbed a pan off the stove that had a mess of scorched carrot leavings in the bottom. Lottie had been soaking it with about a half inch of water. As I reached for a tablespoon, Lottie objected. "Look, now, if you are going to start another experiment, dump that mess out first and let me work on the roaster."

  I saved about a cupful of the slimy gunk and she went back to her dishes.

  "You'll be sorry," I said under my breath, "if this turns out to be the only batch of the finest cleaner in the whole world. And us with only a cupful."

  A minute later, I was glad she hadn't heard me. When I dropped a little glob of the stuff into th
e carrot pan and stirred it around a bit, instead of dissolving and diluting in the extra water, the mixture seemed to stay the same density after swallowing up the water.

  "Give me a pie tin," I demanded.

  Lottie sighed, but she got a shallow pan out of the pantry and handed it to me. Then I poured the jelly out of the carrot pan and I made my first important discovery.

  The stuff was not good for cleaning out scorched carrots.

  The pot was bone-dry. So were the carrots. They had a desiccated look and were stuck worse than ever to the bottom. I brushed them with my finger and the top layers powdered to dust. Then I noticed that not a droplet or smidgin of the jelly remained in the pot. When I had poured it out, it had gone out all at the same time, as if it was trying to hang together.

  The carbonized carrots at the very bottom were hard and dry, too. A scrape job if I ever saw one.

  * * * * *

  The pie tin was now full almost to the rim. The globby stuff sort of rolled around, trying to find a flat condition, which it finally did. The motion was not as startling as the sudden quiet that settled over the surface after a last ripple.

  The stuff looked like it was waiting.

  The temptation was worse than a park bench labeled "wet paint," so I stuck my finger in it. Right in the middle of it.

  A ripple flashed out from the center like when you drop a pebble in a pool, and the ripple hit the brim and converged back to my finger. When it hit, the surface climbed up my finger about an eighth of an inch. Another ripple, another eighth of an inch, and about now I felt something like a gentle sucking sensation. Also, another feeling I can only tell you was "unclammy."

  I jerked away fast and shook my finger hard over the pan, but it wasn't necessary. None of the stuff had stayed with me. In fact, my finger was dry--powdery dry!

  Then I got the feeling that someone was staring over my shoulder. There was. It was Lottie, and she had a look of horror on her face that didn't help my nerves a bit.