The Big Book of Science Fiction

by The Big Book of Science Fiction (retail) (epub)

  “Of course,” John went on—quite smoothly now—and lighting yet another cigarette, “your scientists, if I may apply the word to them, belatedly discovered that they could not simply isolate a man, or a man and a woman, in a steel hut on an alien world and go off and leave him for six months or a year, to employ your ethnocentric time scale. A man is so constituted that he is naked and defenseless without his culture, something he can live by and believe in.”

  Gordon Collier gripped his empty glass until he thought the glass would shatter. Could this man be reading his thoughts? A word came to him: hypnosis. It sounded nice. He tried to believe in it.

  “In the long run, you see,” John continued, “it is the totality of little things that goes to make up a culture. A man such as yourself does not simply sit in a room; he sits in a room of a familiar type, with pictures on the walls and dust in the corners and lamps on the tables. A man does not just eat; he eats special kinds of food that he has been conditioned to want, served as he has been trained to want them to be served, in containers he is accustomed to, in a social setting that he is familiar with, that he fits into, that he belongs to. All intelligent life is like that, you see.”

  Gordon waited, trying to think. He had almost had something there, but it was slipping away….

  “Someone had to stay in space, of course,” John said, dropping more ashes on the rug. “Someone had to man the stations and look after the equipment, and there was a more subtle reason; it was a distinct psychological advantage to have men already in space, to prove that it could be done. The machines couldn’t do everything, unfortunately for you, and so someone had to stay out here, and he had to stay sane—sane by your standards, of course.”

  Gordon Collier looked across at the three people who sat as though frozen around the forgotten bridge table, staring at him with blank dead-fish eyes. Helen, his wife. Bart and Mary. Sane? What did that mean? What was the price of sanity?

  “And so,” John continued in a bored voice, “man took his culture with him—the more provincial and reassuring and fixed the better. He took little white cottages and neighborly customs, rooted them up out of their native soil, sealed them in cylinders of steel, and rocketed them off to barren little worlds of ice and darkness. I must say, Collier, that your mind has a frightfully melodramatic way of looking at things. Perhaps that was why the little white cottages and the neighbors were not enough; in any event, conditioning was also necessary. No person operating at his full level of perception could possibly enact this farce you are living out here. And yet, without the farce you go mad. It is difficult to imagine a people less suited to space travel, don’t you agree?”

  Gordon Collier shrugged, feeling the cold sweat gathering in the palms of his hands.

  “And there you are,” John said, lighting another cigarette. “They are much milder. I have tried to demonstrate projection to you, on several different levels. I hope you will excuse the scattered editorial comments?”

  Gordon Collier defensively reached out for a single line of reasoning and clung to it. If this were an alien, and the news got back to Earth, then the dream of space travel was finished. An advanced race already in space, added to all the other perils, would be the last straw. He, Gordon Collier, had dedicated his life to the dream. Therefore, it could not end. Therefore, John was human. It was all a trick.

  His mind screamed its warning, but he thrust it aside.

  He leaned forward, breathing hard. “I’ll excuse them,” he said slowly, “but I’ll also call you a liar.”

  Outside, the night was still.

  The sound had been turned off.

  There was no storm now—no rain, nor thunder, nor lightning. There was no wind, not even whispers of a summer breeze. There were no crickets, and no night rustlings in the stuff that looked like grass.

  Bart and Mary and Helen sat uncertainly at their bridge table, trying to somehow adapt themselves to a situation that they were in no way prepared to face. It wasn’t their fault, Gordon knew. They had not been conditioned to handle new elements. That was his job. That was what he had been chosen for. He was the change factor, the mind that had been left free enough to function.

  But not wholly free. He felt that keenly, here in the room with the man called John. He was fuzzy and approximate. He needed to be clear and exact. He tried to believe he had figured it all out. Hypnosis. That was a good word.

  He hoped that it was good enough.

  “A liar?” The man who looked like Grandfather Walters laughed in protest and blew smoke in Collier’s eyes. “The projection was incorrect?”

  Collier shook his head, ignoring the smoke, trying not to be distracted. “The information was correct. That proves nothing.”

  John arched his bushy eyebrows. “Oh? Come now, my man.”

  “Look here,” Gordon Collier said decisively, believing it now. “You look like a man to me. All I have to contradict my impression is your unsupported statement and some funny tricks that can be explained in terms of conditioning and hypnosis. If you came from Earth, as you obviously did, then you would know the story as well as I do. The rest is tricks. The real question is: who sent you here, and why?”

  It was cold in the room. Why was it so cold?

  John deftly added more ashes to the small mountain at his feet. “Your logic is excellent, if primitive,” he said. “The trouble with logic is that its relationship with reality is usually obscure. It is logical that I am from Earth. It is not, however, true.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Gordon Collier said.

  John smiled patiently. “The trouble is,” he said, “that you have a word, alien, and no concept to go with it. You persist in reducing me to non-alien terms, and I assure you that I will not reduce. I am, by definition, not human.”

  The doubt came again, gnawing at him. He fought himself. He felt an icy chill trip along his spine. He tried to convince himself and he said: “There is a reason for the storms and the buildup and the screams. I think it is a human reason. I think you have been sent here by the interests on Earth who are fighting space expansion, to try to scare us off. I think you’re a good actor, but I don’t think you’re good enough.”

  The thought came again: If this is an alien…

  Nonsense.

  Helen, at the bridge table, suddenly stirred. She said, “My, but it’s late.” That was all.

  John ignored her. “I assure you,” he said, “that I have not the slightest interest in whether your little planet gets into space or not. Your ethnocentrism is fantastic. Can’t you see, man? I don’t care, not at all, not in any particular. It just isn’t part of my value system.”

  “Go back and tell them it didn’t work,” Gordon Collier said.

  “Oh, no,” John said, shocked. “I’m spending the night.”

  The silence tautened.

  Mary moved at the bridge table. The button had been punched, and she tried to respond. “Bart,” she said, “set up the spare bed for the nice man.”

  Bart didn’t move.

  “You’re not staying,” Gordon Collier said flatly. He shook his head. He was so confused. If only—

  John smiled and lit another cigarette from his endless supply. “I really must, you know,” he said cheerfully. “Look at it this way. The star cluster to which you refer as the galaxy—quaint of you—is inhabited by a multitude of diverse cultural groups. A moment’s reflection should show you that uniformity of organization over so vast a territory is impossible. The problem of communications alone would defeat such a plan, even were it desirable, which it isn’t.

  “One of these cultures, of which I happen to be a member, has no territorial identification, except with space itself. Our ship is our home. We are, in a manner of speaking, nomads. Our economy, since we produce nothing, is based upon what we are able to extract from others.”

  Gordon Collier listened to his heart. It drummed liquidly in his ears.

  “The closest similarity I can find in your mind is that of th
e ancient Plains Indians in the area you think of as North America,” John continued, his blue eyes sparkling. “How charming that you should regard them as primitive! Sedentary economies are so dull, you know. We have become rather highly skilled, if I do say so myself, at imitating dominant life-forms. Contacting aliens for preliminary ‘typing’ is a prestige mechanism with us, just as counting coup served an analogous purpose among your Plains Indians, when a brave would sneak into an enemy camp at night and touch a sleeping warrior or cut loose a picketed horse. This gave prestige in his tribe, and without it he was nothing; he had no status. With us there is a further motive. Suppose, to extrapolate down to your level, you wish to pick apples. It will be to your advantage, then, to try to look and act like the farmer who owns them, will it not? Our culture has found it expedient to ‘type’ members of an alien culture in a controlled situation, before setting out to, so to speak, pick apples in earnest. The individual who does the ‘typing’ gains prestige in proportion to the danger involved. Am I getting through to you?”

  Gordon Collier got to his feet, slowly. He could not think, not really. In a way, he realized this. He tried to go ahead regardless, to do what he could. His brain supplied a thought: What would the ship from Earth pick up five months from tonight in this silent cottage? Would it be human beings—or something else?

  Of course, John was a human being.

  A hypnotist, perhaps.

  Why was it so cold in the house?

  He started for the man called John, slowly, step by step. He did not know why he did it; he only knew that he had to act, act now, act before it was too late, act despite the cost. The impulse came from down deep, beyond the conditioning.

  “You’re a liar,” he said again, biting the words out thickly, believing in them. “You’re a liar. We don’t believe in you. Get out, get out, get out—”

  If this is an alien, the dream is ended. Unless—

  The man called John slid out of his chair and backed away. His blue eyes glittered coldly. The cigarette between his fingers shredded itself to the floor, squeezed in two.

  “Stop,” said John.

  Gordon Collier kept on coming.

  The man called John—changed.

  Gordon Collier screamed.

  It was an animal scream.

  He staggered back, back against the wall. His eyes were shut, jammed shut as tightly as he could force them. His mouth was open, to let the endless scream rip and tear itself out from the matrix of his being. He cowered, crouched against the wall, a creature in agony.

  He was afraid that he would not die.

  His hands shook, and they were clammy with the cold sweat that oozed from his palms. A white flash of indescribable pain seared up from his toes, burned like molten lead through his body. It hissed along his naked nerves and howled into his cringing brain with the numbing, blinding impact of a razor-sharp chisel on a rotten tooth. Blood trickled wetly from his nostrils.

  He clawed the floor, not feeling the splinters in his nails.

  The scream screeched to a piercing climax that bulged his eyes from their sockets.

  Something snapped.

  His body relaxed, trembling quietly. His mind was clean and empty, like a flower washed with the summer rain. He breathed in great choking mouthfuls of air. He remembered—

  It had bubbled.

  He shut it out. He lay quite still for a long minute, letting the life wash warmly back through his veins. His breathing slowed. He felt a tiny thrill of triumph course through his body.

  His mind was clean.

  He could think again.

  He took a deep breath and turned around.

  The cottage was still there. The Frigidaire wheezed in the kitchen. The living room was unchanged. There were chairs, the tri-di, the picture of Grandfather Walters, the ashes on the rug, the three motionless figures at the bridge table, Bart and Mary and Helen.

  They were very still.

  Yes, of course. Their conditioned minds had been strained past the tolerance point and they had blanked out. Short-circuited. The fuse had blown. They were out of it, for now.

  He was alone.

  The man called John was seated again in his armchair, blue eyes twinkling, moustache neat and prim, the pile of ashes at his feet. He had lit another cigarette. He was smiling, quite himself again.

  Or, rather, he was not himself again.

  Gordon Collier got to his feet. It took him a long time, and he did it clumsily. He was shaken and weak in the knees. He had lost the fuzziness which had partially protected him.

  But he had his mind back.

  It was, he thought, a fair trade.

  “I fear the shock has been too much for your dull friends,” John said languidly, crossing his legs carefully so as not to disturb the neat crease in his trousers. “I tried to warn you, you know.”

  Gordon said: “You can’t stay here.” The words were thick and he licked his lips with his parched tongue.

  John hesitated, but recovered quickly. “On the contrary,” he said, “I can and I will. A charming place, really. I’d like to get to know you better.”

  “I can imagine,” said Gordon Collier.

  The silence beat at his ears. It was uncanny. He had never heard no-sound before.

  Black despair settled within him like cold ink. The situation, he now saw, was frightening in its simplicity. He had to accept it for what it was. The thing was alien. It didn’t care what the effects of its visit would be on the future of Earth. Human beings were to it what pigs were to a man.

  Does the hungry man worry about whether or not pigs have dreams?

  “You’re going to get out,” he told it.

  The man called John raised an eyebrow in polite doubt.

  Gordon Collier was not sure, now, that man should leave the Earth. It was odd, he thought, that his concern was still with the dream. Regardless of his actions here, all the human beings would not be “eaten.” Many would escape, and the species would recover. But if this thing, or even any news of it, reached the Earth, then the dream was finished. The whole shaky, crazy structure that had put man into space would collapse like a card house in a hurricane. Man—or what was left of him—would retreat, build a wall around himself, try to hide.

  And if he did get into space to stay?

  Gordon Collier didn’t know. There were no simple answers. If the aliens, or even the intelligence that there were such aliens, reached the Earth, then man was through, dead in his insignificance. If not, he had a chance to shape his own destiny. He had won time. It was as simple as that.

  Gordon Collier again faced the man called John. He smiled.

  Two cultures, locked in a room.

  From the bridge table, three sluggish statues turned to watch.

  To Gordon Collier, the only sound in the room was that of his own harsh breathing in his ears.

  “As I was saying,” said the man called John, “I’m afraid I really must ignore your lamentable lack of hospitality and stay on for a while. I am, you might say, the man who came to dinner. You are quite helpless, Gordon Collier, and I can bring my people here at any time. Enough of them, you see, to fill both your houses and the air bubble beyond. It will be alive with my people. You are quite helpless, Gordon Collier, and I can bring my people here at any time. Enough of them, you see, to fill…”

  Gordon Collier refused to listen to the voice that tried to lull him back to sleep. He shut it out of his mind. He had but one weapon, and that was his mind. He had to keep it clear and uncluttered.

  John kept talking, melodically.

  Gordon Collier tried to think, tried to organize his thoughts, collect his data, relate it to a meaningful whole.

  Somewhere there is a pattern.

  Several pieces of information, filed away by his conditioned brain until it could assemble them, clicked into place parts of a puzzle. Now that the fog was gone, a number of facts were clear.

  He used his mind, exultantly.

  For one thing, of
course, the man called John had given him more information than was strictly necessary. Why? Well, he had explained about the prestige mechanism involved—and the more danger there was, the more prestige. An important fact followed: if he, Gordon Collier, were in fact utterly helpless, then there was no danger, and no prestige.

  And that indicated…

  “…lamentable lack of hospitality and stay on for a while,” the voice droned on in his ears. “I am, you might say, the man who came to dinner. You are quite helpless, Gordon Collier, and I can…”

  So John had armed him with information. He had been playing a game of sorts, a game for keeps. He had given his opponent clues. What were they? What were they?

  “…bring my people here at any time. Enough of them, you see…”

  “The trouble is,” John had said, “that you have a word, alien, and no concept to go with it.”

  Gordon Collier stood motionless, between John and the three immobile figures at the bridge table, looking for the string that would untie the knot. John’s voice buzzed on, but he ignored it.

  From the first, he remembered, John had kept himself apart from the human beings. He had walked in, hesitated, said his stilted tri-di-derived introductory remarks, and seated himself as Grandfather Walters. He had remained isolated. He had never come really close to any of the human beings, never touched them.

  And when Gordon Collier had advanced on him…

  Collier stared at the man called John. Was he telepathic, or had he picked up his story before he ever came through the door? Was he listening in on his thoughts even now?

  That was unimportant, he realized suddenly. That was a blind alley. It made no practical difference. What counted was a simple fact: the alien could not touch him. And, presumably, it wasn’t armed; that would have counterbalanced the danger factor.

  It was very cold in the room. Gordon Collier felt a sick thrill in the pit of his stomach.

  “…to fill both your houses and the air bubble beyond. It will be alive…”

  There was danger for the alien here. There had to be. Gordon Collier smiled slowly, feeling the sweat come again to his hands. There could be but one source for that danger.