The Big Book of Science Fiction

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

  He leaned his back against the wall of the house once more. His son appeared again, with more questions.

  “Dad, where does it all come from? The trees, the houses, the air, the people? Where does it come from?”

  He started to tell the boy about the evolution of creation, then something seemed to jab him in the heart and Betly woke up.

  The moon had gone. But the sky was still fairly light.

  The horses were no longer in the clearing. Or rather, one was gone, and the other was lying on the grass, with three gray shadows crouching over it. One of them stretched up, and the journalist saw a huge otark with a large heavy head, grinning jaws, and large eyes that glinted in the half darkness.

  Then a whisper came from nearby.

  “He’s asleep.”

  “No, he’s woken up already.”

  “Go to him.”

  “He’ll shoot.”

  “He’d have shot earlier, if he could. He’s either asleep, or else he’s petrified with fear. Go to him.”

  “You go.”

  The journalist was petrified. It was like a dream. He understood that there was no way out of this, that the catastrophe had arrived, but he could not move a muscle.

  The whisper continued:

  “But what about the other one? He’ll shoot.”

  “He’s ill, he won’t wake up…go, I say!”

  With a huge effort Betly managed to move his eyes. An otark appeared from around the corner of the hut. But this one was small, like a pig.

  Overcoming his state of shock, the journalist pulled the trigger of his rifle. Two shots boomed out one after the other, two cartridge cases were expelled into the air.

  Betly scrambled to his feet, the rifle fell from his hands. He rushed into the hut, shaking, slammed the door behind him, and put the latch down.

  The forester was waiting with his rifle cocked. His lips moved, and the journalist felt rather than heard the question:

  “The horses?”

  He shook his head.

  There was a scratching at the door. The otarks were propping something up against it.

  A voice spoke:

  “Hey, Meller! Hey!”

  The forester rushed to the window and would have stuck his rifle out. But at that moment a black paw flashed past against the starry background; he scarcely pulled his gun back in time.

  There was satisfied laughter outside.

  The gramophone voice, stretching out its words, said:

  “Your time is up, Meller.”

  Other voices interrupted:

  “Meller, Meller, come and talk to us….”

  “Hey, forester, say something clever. You’re a man, you’re supposed to be clever….”

  “Meller, say something and I’ll tell you it’s wrong….”

  “Speak to me, Meller. Call me by my name. I’m Philip….”

  The forester said nothing.

  The journalist walked over to the window with uncertain steps. The voice was very close, just past the log wall. There was an animal stench—blood, dung, something else.

  The otark who had said his name was Philip spoke right under the window.

  “You’re a journalist, right? You, by the window.”

  The journalist cleared his throat. His throat was dry. The same voice continued:

  “Why did you come here?”

  There was a silence.

  “Did you come here to destroy us?”

  There was another pause, then other voices started to speak:

  “Of course, of course they want to wipe us out….First they made us, now they want to destroy us….”

  There was a chorus of growls, then another noise. The journalist had the impression that the otarks were fighting.

  Over the top of all this noise came the voice of the one who had said he was called Philip:

  “Hey, forester, why don’t you shoot? You always shoot. Come and speak to me now.”

  Somewhere above them a shot suddenly rang out.

  Betly turned around.

  The forester had climbed on top of the fireplace, had moved aside the thin poles with straw on top that made up the roof, and had opened fire.

  He fired twice, paused to reload, and fired again.

  The otarks ran away.

  Meller jumped down from the fireplace.

  “We need to get some horses. Or it’ll be tough for us.”

  They looked at the three dead otarks.

  One of them, a youngster, was practically naked, with hair only growing on the back of his neck.

  Betly nearly vomited when Meller turned the creature over on the grass. He managed to contain himself, holding his mouth shut.

  The forester said:

  “Remember, they are not people. Even though they can speak. They eat people. They eat each other.”

  The journalist looked around. It was already dawn. The clearing, the field, the dead otarks—everything seemed at that moment to be unreal.

  Could it really be so? Was he, Donald Betly, standing here?

  —

  “This is where the otark ate Klein,” Meller said. “One of the locals told us all about it, a man from around here. He worked as a cleaner, when the laboratory still existed. And that evening he just happened to be in the next room. He heard everything….”

  The journalist and the forester were now on the island, in the main building of the Science Center. That morning they had taken the saddles from the dead horses and had crossed to the island over the dam. They only had one rifle now, because Betly’s had been taken by the otarks as they ran away. Meller’s plan was to get to a nearby farm while it was still light and take some horses there. But the journalist had talked him into allowing half an hour to look over the abandoned laboratory.

  “He heard everything,” the forester continued. “It was in the evening, around about ten o’clock. Klein had some kind of contraption that he was taking apart, connecting to electric wires, and the otark was sitting on the floor, and they were chatting. They were talking about physics. This was one of the first otarks they had bred and he was considered the most intelligent. He could even speak foreign languages….This guy was cleaning the floor and could hear them chatting. Then there was a silence, then a thud. And suddenly the cleaner heard a voice saying, ‘Oh God!’ It was Klein, and there was so much terror in his voice that his knees bent under him. Then there was a gut-wrenching scream of ‘Help me!’ The cleaner looked into the room and saw Klein lying on the floor and writhing, with the otark chewing at him. This guy was so frightened that he couldn’t do anything and just stood there. And it was only when the otark came for him that he shut the door.”

  “And then?”

  “Then they killed two other laboratory workers and ran away. And five or six stayed on as though nothing had happened. And when the commission from the city came, they talked to the otarks. Then they took them away. We found out later that they’d eaten another person on the train.”

  Everything had been left untouched in the large laboratory. The flasks and dishes were on the long benches, covered with a layer of dust, and spiders had spun their webs through the cables of the X-ray machine. The glass in the windows was broken, and the branches of wild, uncropped acacias came through the empty frames.

  Meller and the journalist left the main building.

  Betly wanted very much to look at the radiation apparatus, and he asked the forester for five more minutes.

  The asphalt on the main road of the abandoned village had been broken through by grass and young strong shoots. It was autumnal and you could see a long way. It smelled of rotting leaves and damp trees.

  On the village square Meller stopped unexpectedly.

  “Did you hear something?”

  “No,” Betly replied.

  “I was thinking about how they came as a group to besiege us in the watchman’s hut,” the forester said. “They never used to do anything like that. They always acted alone.”

  He listened
again.

  “It’s as if they were planning a surprise for us. Let’s get out of here as fast as we can.”

  They went over to the low-slung round building with its narrow barred windows. The massive door was half open, the concrete floor by the doorway was covered with a thick layer of forest debris—reddish pine needles, dust, the wings of midges.

  They went carefully into the first room with its hanging ceiling. Another massive door led into a low-roofed room.

  They peered in. A squirrel with a fluffy tail like a flame rushed across the wooden table and leaped through the wooden slats covering the window.

  The forester looked around quickly. He listened, holding his rifle tight, then said:

  “No, this is no good.”

  And he hurried back the way they had come.

  But it was too late.

  There was a rustling noise and the outside door clanged shut. Then there was a noise as if something heavy were being placed against it.

  For a second Meller and the journalist looked at one another, then they rushed to the window.

  Betly took one glance, then stepped back.

  The square and the wide dry pool, which had been built there for no obvious reason, were filled with otarks. There were dozens and dozens of them, and new ones kept appearing as if they were coming out of the ground. A noise rose from this crowd of non-humans and non-beasts, a mixture of cries and growling.

  In shock, the forester and Betly stood silently.

  A young otark near to them stood up on its back paws. There was something round in its front paws.

  “A stone,” the journalist said, still unable to believe what was happening. “He wants to throw a stone….”

  But it was not a stone.

  The round object flew through the air, by the window it burst with a blinding light, and a bitter smoke came into the room.

  The forester stepped back from the window. He looked confused. His rifle fell from his hands and he grasped at his chest.

  “Damn it!” he said, and lifted up a hand, looking at his bloody fingers. “The bastards! They’ve got me.”

  Turning pale, he took two uncertain steps, then sank to his heels, then sat against the wall.

  “They got me.”

  “No!” Betly cried. “No!” He shook as though with fever.

  Meller, biting his lips, turned his pale face to him.

  “The door!”

  The journalist ran to the exit. There was already something heavy propped against it from the outside.

  He went back to the forester.

  Meller was lying down now against the wall, holding his hands to his chest. A damp patch spread over his shirt. He wouldn’t let the journalist bind the wound.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I can feel that this is the end. There’s no point causing any more pain. Don’t touch me.”

  “But I can get help!” Betly cried.

  “Who from?”

  The question was so bitter, so open and so hopeless, that the journalist grew cold.

  They were quiet for a while, then the forester said:

  “Do you remember the rider we saw the first day?”

  “Yes.”

  “He was most likely running to tell the otarks that you were here. They work together, the city bandits and the otarks. That’s why the otarks were able to band together. You shouldn’t be surprised. I’m sure that if octopuses came here from Mars, they’d find people willing to side with them.”

  “Yes,” whispered the journalist.

  The time until evening passed without anything happening. Meller grew weaker quickly. He stopped bleeding. Even so he wouldn’t let anyone touch him. The journalist sat next to him on the stone floor.

  The otarks left them alone. They made no attempt to break through the door, or to throw another grenade. The chattering outside the building grew faint, then rose again.

  When the sun went down and it started to get colder, the forester asked for something to drink. The journalist gave him water from his flask and wiped his face as well.

  The forester said:

  “Maybe it’s a good thing that the otarks have appeared. Now it will become clear what it means to be a man. Now we will all know that to be a man it is not enough to be able to count and to study geometry. There’s something else. And the scientists are proud of their work. But that’s not everything.”

  —

  Meller died that night, and the journalist lived another three days.

  The first day he only thought about saving himself, moving from despair to hope, shooting a few times through the window with the idea that someone would hear the shots and come to help him.

  Toward nighttime he realized that all his hopes were illusory. His life seemed to be divided into two halves that were impossible to reconcile in any way. He was mostly agitated by the fact that there was no logical connection or continuity between them. One life was the happy intellectual life of a highly successful journalist, and that life had finished when he and Meller had ridden down from the mountainside into the thick forests of the Main Range. This first life had given him no indication that he was destined to die here on this island, in an abandoned laboratory.

  In the second life everything was possible and impossible. It was entirely made up of coincidence. And really, it could not be happening. He had been free not to come here, to refuse this call from his editor and take another job. Instead of studying the otarks, he could have flown to Nubia to write about the protection of the ancient monuments of Egyptian art.

  An unlucky chance had brought him here. That was the cruelest blow. A couple of times he had almost stopped believing in what had happened to him, and had walked around the room touching the sunlit walls and the dusty tables.

  For some reason or other the otarks had lost all interest in him. There were only a few of them left in the pool and on the square. Sometimes they would fight among themselves, and once Betly saw with heart-stopping horror how they threw themselves on one of their own, tore him to pieces, and settled down to eat.

  At night he suddenly decided that Meller was guilty of his death. He felt disgusted by the dead forester and dragged his body into the next room and put it by the door.

  For a couple of hours he sat on the floor, hopelessly repeating:

  “Lord, why me? Why me?”

  On the second day his water ran out and he started to be tormented by thirst. But he had already understood that there was no way he would be saved, and he remained calm and started to think about his life again—it already seemed like someone else’s. He remembered how, right at the beginning of the journey, he had argued with the forester. Meller had told him that the farmers wouldn’t talk to him.

  “Why?” Betly had asked.

  “Because you live in the warm, with all your comforts,” Meller replied. “Because you are one of the people at the top. One of the ones who betrayed them.”

  “What do you mean, I’m at the top?” Betly said, refusing to accept what he was told. “I only earn a little bit more than they do.”

  “So what?” the forester said. “Your work is light, fun almost. They have been dying here for years, and you’ve written your little articles, you’ve gone to restaurants, you’ve had your intellectual conversations….”

  He realized that all this was true. His optimism, which he had been so proud of, was in the final analysis the optimism of an ostrich. He had just buried his head when it came to the bad news. He read about executions in Paraguay in the newspapers, or about famine in India, but spent his time thinking about how to get money to buy new furniture for his large five-room apartment, or how he might be able to win the good opinion of some important person or other. The otarks—the otark-people—shot crowds of protesters, speculated on the price of bread, prepared wars in secret, and he turned away from it all, pretending that nothing of the kind ever happened.

  From this point of view, all of his past life suddenly seemed strongly connected with
what was now happening to him. He had never spoken out against evil, and now the time had come for payback.

  On the second day the otarks came and spoke with him by the windows a couple of times. He didn’t reply.

  One of the otarks said:

  “Hey, come on out, journalist! We won’t hurt you.”

  And another one, standing next to him, laughed.

  Betly thought about the forester once again. But his opinion had changed. He thought that the forester had been a hero. To tell the truth, the only real hero that Betly had ever encountered. Alone, without any kind of assistance, he had fought against the otarks, had struggled with them and died undefeated.

  On the third day the journalist started to fall into delirium. He imagined that he had returned to his newspaper and was dictating an article to the stenographer.

  The article was called “What Is a Man?”

  He dictated out loud.

  “In our century of astounding developments in science one might be forgiven for concluding that science is all-powerful. But let us imagine for a moment that an artificial brain has been created, twice as powerful as the human brain and possessing twice the capacity for work. Would a creature with a brain of this type really be allowed to call itself a man? What is it that makes us what we are? The capacity to perform sums, to analyze, to make logical deductions; or is it something else, which arises with the development of society, which is to do with an individual’s relation to others and with the relation of the individual to the collective? If we take the otarks as an example…”

  And here his mind started to wander.

  On the third day there was an explosion in the morning. Betly woke up. He thought that he had stood up and was holding his rifle at the ready. In fact he was lying helpless by the wall.

  The muzzle of a wild animal appeared before his eyes. With an agonizing effort of thought, he remembered what Fidler had looked like. Like an otark!

  Then his thoughts lost their focus again. He could not feel how his flesh was being torn at, and for a tenth of a second Betly was able to think that the otarks were not really so terrible, that there were only a couple of hundred of them in this abandoned region. They could be dealt with. But the people…The people!