by Dave Dryfoos
As he turned away, his attention was caught by a rapid motion seen in the corner of one eye. From halfway around the pool, a native waved its arms vigorously and looked straight at him.
It could have been the one he’d seen in the garden yesterday, Sam thought, but he wasn’t sure; all the creatures looked alike to him. Certainly this one displayed excitement, though; it seemed to be waving him away from the pool!
Well, to hell with that, Sam decided. This stuff seemed to be harmless—refreshing, in fact. Besides, if the beast wanted to communicate with him, it could damned well go jump. He’d promised Sally, and by golly he wasn’t going to have anything to do with them; defiantly, he took another drink.
By the time he’d risen and wiped his lips on his sleeve and his hands on his pants, the native was upon him, showing unmistakable agitation in the urgent way it waved its arms. Impulsively, Sam thrust out his hand, and mockingly said, “How do you do?”
There was no audible reply. The native stopped waving its arms, took Sam’s warm damp hand in a cooler, oily, hard one, and drew him away from the pool, scuttling backward. Mildly repelled, but not frightened, Sam disengaged his hand and followed freely.
He stumbled, though, and had to be helped by a renewed grip of that shell-coated hand. On his empty stomach the alcoholic fluid churned and burned; he was getting drunk, knew it, and was very much amused at the idea.
Sam permitted himself to be drawn into the shade of some trees. Then, suddenly obstinate, he balked. Instead of going further, he lay down, giggling.
Dizziness stopped the giggles, Sam felt dissociated from himself, as if floating free in space, whirling around and around like a planet in its orbit, except that he was sun as well as planet. The trees around him circled nauseatingly. The native wavered as if seen through heated air.
Sam shut out these sights by closing his eyes. Almost immediately, he was whirled off into sleep.
Evening’s chill awakened him.
His head ached. He was stiff from lying on the ground; he was dizzy; his stomach was upset. For a few seconds he not only forgot where he was, but feared to open his eyes and find out.
When he did open them, it was to squint at a gyrating world only now slowing down from the rotation that had sent him to sleep. As the speed decreased, he made out the sheltering vegetation, and what looked like several natives.
He’d never before seen several natives in a group. He thought he was deluded, and closed his eyes to shut out the hallucination. Then, captiously, he opened just one eye, and looked again.
No, by golly! He wasn’t suffering from double vision! Six unblinking natives stared in a row!
Carefully, Sam moved each aching limb in turn. They felt battered, but more or less whole. And they were unrestrained. He rolled over to his stomach and got slowly to hands and knees. The exertion made him violently ill.
It took five minutes to get to his feet. The natives offered helping hands, but he rudely brushed them off. He wished they’d do something he could blame them for; it would be nice to say this was all their fault.
But it wasn’t. He knew exactly where he was, now—and how he’d gotten there. He promised not to leave Sally alone, and had left her alone. He’d promised not to have anything to do with the natives, and had displayed obvious weakness before them. He had come out to find food, and had gotten drunk. He was, Sam felt, the lowest form of life that had ever fouled up an important assignment.
He must get control of himself. Those beasts were probably plotting some fiendish revenge for the one that had burned. And he could hardly stand without falling.
Maybe another drink would fix him, Sam felt vaguely. Sure—hair of the dog!
Ignorant of the proper direction to take, he staggered off in search of the pool, the natives following in a silent semicircle.
He found it. Guided by odor or submerged memory, he stumbled through the growth around it, flopped to his knees, blew some of the scum away, rested his hands on the bottom, and drank.
A native tugging at his jacket made him stop. He looked around, and saw that the other five were waving their arms frantically.
Sam didn’t care. The natives seemed suddenly ridiculous, like a team of cheerleaders from some school for defectives. He was going to settle his—urps!—settle his stomach. And then go home, s’help him.
But after he’d had another drink, and had gotten clumsily to his feet with only the native who clung to his jacket keeping him from falling into the pool, Sam decided he couldn’t go home yet, though it was almost dark. Nope! Dark or not, gotta have something to show for this little excursion. Gotta bring home some food!
Since the natives were gesturers, he gestured, making all the signs he could think of for eating, food, hunger, and weakness. They seemed mainly interested in edging him away from the pool. He gave up signaling, therefore, and plucked a lettuce-like leaf from a plant beside him, opening his mouth to eat it.
Instantly the natives closed in, tearing the leaf from his grasp, forcing him to wipe his hand on the ground. They had little regard for his thin skin—scraped some of it off on the twigs and pebbles underfoot, made it to blister.
Sam didn’t like that. He lurched away from them down the aisle of plantings to a bush with small berries on it, like pepper-corns. He plucked a few, and tried to eat them.
Again his find was knocked from his hand. This time, though, the natives didn’t damage his skin. They’d better not! Sam told himself fiercely.
He tried another plant, tearing a fleet of soft and rubbery bark from m tree nearby. Once more the material was taken violently from him; this time three of the natives grasped his clothing, trying to pull him in a specific direction.
Out of the garden, he thought. Away from their precious plants. But they had plenty—they could afford to share them!
“No, you don’t!” he muttered, and savagely beat them off.
What happened next was never clear to him. All six natives seemed to close in as if by signal. With horny hands they pounded at his legs. The more he struggled, the harder they hit.
Finally, he tripped. Then, with a single sharp blow to the base of his skull, one of them knocked him out.
* * * *
He came to with the sensation of being carried—horizontally, but face downward; his nose kept bumping something.
Opening his eyes, he found that his nose was bumping the back of a native. He was being carried feet first through the darkness on two of them, while others grasped him with painfully claw-like hands. He felt awful.
An overwhelming desire to escape surged through him. But it had been, he recalled, another overwhelming desire—to drink from that loathsome pool—that had gotten him into this mess. He lay still, letting consciousness return slowly but fully. He was almost sober, now; sober enough to feel both sick and sorry.
And helpless. He’d fought these natives once, and lost. Might lose again. And if he escaped, would they be far behind? He had no place to run but the shack, no desire to lead a group of irate captors to Sally.
Besides, it was dark, now. He couldn’t see where he was going. And it wouldn’t help anything if he found out. He decided to let them revenge themselves, satisfy themselves. As far from the shack as possible. It was the least he could do.
He was feeling quite heroic when they set him on his feet, but that pleasant sensation evaporated when he saw why he’d been released.
They wanted him to open the door of his shack. Obviously they had seen him pass through here, but apparently they didn’t know how to work the latch. He realized they must long have been aware that he’d regained consciousness.
What could he say to Sally? Sam wondered frantically. What could he do to avoid shocking her?
He’d never before been brought home drunk. Searching his mind for the right way to greet her, he called, “Company, honey,” and waited for her to an
swer.
Sally held a lamp in his eyes as she swung open the door. “Good grief!” she gasped. “Are you all right?”
“Fine,” he assured her, grinning as he swayed.
She moved closer, as if to kiss him, then sniffed suspiciously. She stepped back, and only then noticed the natives standing behind him in expressionless array. She nearly dropped the lamp.
“It’s all right, Sal,” Sam said, shuffling his feet. “These boys are friends of mine.” He was aware of thickness in his speech, but couldn’t seem to control it.
The impediment served a purpose, he observed. Sally’s initial shock gave way to indignation: she was much too angry to be frightened. “Your friends can put you to bed,” she sniffed, tossing her head. “I certainly won’t.” She stood aside. Without help, Sam managed to cross the threshold and sit on the cot. The natives stared through the doorway. Sam got up, took the hand of one, and led it within. The others followed, and he closed the door.
The natives huddled in the center of the floor, filling the room. Sally shrank into a corner by the stove.
“My own dear Trojan Horse,” she jeered. “Wooden head and all.”
“This is what we were sent here to do, Sal,” Sam said reasonably.
“It’s what you promised not to do,” she reminded him.
“I couldn’t help it,” he said. “They came to me. A good thing, too, come to think of it; I was trying to eat things in the garden, see? They wouldn’t let me, and now I’m getting the idea they’ve got nothing but poisonous plants there, probably to teach their young. Sure! That would explain why they got so excited. And see, I’ve got a little skin-allergy on my hand, like poison ivy.”
He held it up for her inspection.
A look of sympathy passed swiftly over her face, and was as swiftly repressed. “Do they have a bar up there, too?” she asked, much too sweetly.
“No. But alcohol is a poison, of sorts. So they have a fermenting pool up there. I didn’t drink very much, but I haven’t had anything to eat all day—”
“I’m not going to cook for you now,” Sally stated. “We can’t feed them all, and you can’t just eat while they watch; you’ll have to wait till they go.”
Resignedly, knowing she was right, Sam thrust his dirty hands into his jacket pockets. He felt something, fingered it, and recognized the chocolate bar. Just the thing!
Clumsily Sam took out the bar, wiped a few crumbs of dirt from it, and with his pocket-knife cut it into eight small but more or less equal parts. The natives watched fixedly.
He gave a piece to each of them, one to Sally, and kept one. The natives held theirs and watched him.
“This is to eat,” he said, and thrust his entire portion into his mouth. Sally did likewise. Hesitantly, looking from them to one another, the natives nibbled with chitinous mandibles at the small brown squares. One by one, their bits of chocolate disappeared.
“Sally, I think they like the stuff,” Sam said, pleased with himself; “I think they want some more.”
“Well, they can’t have any,” Sally said; “we can’t spare it.”
“‘All right.” Turning to the silent natives, Sam displayed empty hands, turned his pockets inside out, and shrugged. “No more,” he said, and shook his head. “And I’m still hungry, too.” He rubbed his belly, and pulled tight his jacket’s belt to show emptiness beneath it.
The natives looked at one another and seemed to commune. They turned to the door. Stepping carefully between them, Sam opened it. They marched out single file and disappeared into the night.
“Rude, aren’t they,” Sally said, grinning relievedly in spite of herself. “When the food runs out, they go home.”
“I don’t know,” Sam said. “All day I’ve been trying to show them we need something to eat. Maybe they have the idea, finally; maybe they’re going to get us something.”
“Yes?” Sally was staring out the shack’s rear window, her face shocked and pale. “Look! They’ve found the grave!”
They had indeed. Under the dim auroral light they’d already begun to burrow through the soft, recently-spaded dirt for the body of their comrade. Sam watched with bated breath as they recovered the corpse, loaded it onto the back of one of their number, and bore it away out of sight along the dark and rolling plain.
He reached out to grip his wife’s arm. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m a fool and I know it.”
“Maybe they do, too,” Sally said thoughtfully. She was silent a moment, her forehead puckered in thought.
“You know,” she went on, “seriously, Sam, that might be the key to this whole nightmare. I mean, look—the natives know about these ant-like social life-forms that live here. Those insect-things have a complicated social life, but all on the basis of built-in drives. They just react to endocrine secretions and the like, and don’t think the way we do. Their patterns of action are complicated, but unchanging.
“Maybe the natives ignored us because they thought we were just a pair of strange animals, of no interest since we’re neither enemies nor competitors—you yourself said they have none—going through our complicated, instinctive, unrationalized routine. Today, though, you proved them wrong by going out and acting foolishly, in a way that obviously was not built-in.”
“You’re sweet,” Sam said, “to try making yourself believe that everything I’ve done was for the best. But—”
“I’m not saying that! I’m only saying that rational beings are the ones with wills instead of drives; and it’s will and not instinct that gave you the capacity to go out and make a fool of yourself today. Animals never do so good a job. For instance, they usually leave alcohol alone unless first driven neurotic by artificial means—that’s been proved time and again, experimentally. Animals aren’t even likely to play around with something that’s none of their business—the way the native did last night trying to steal a piece of our fire. Maybe its mates recognize that we share its capacity for error.”
Another thing that rational beings have, Sam reflected briefly, is a conscience. He wondered if it was his feeling of guilt that kept him from accepting Sally’s theory. Still…no use eliminating all her hopes…
He said, slowly, “I guess every animal on this planet—except a very young one—knows better than to drink from that pool. And I guess it might be called a clincher that I got drunk, slept, woke, was sick—and then went right back for another drink.”
“Oh, you did!” Sally sounded genuinely shocked. “Well, I hope you feel as bad as you look!”
“Worse,” Sam assured her. He got up, slopped water into a basin, and washed, avoiding her troubled eyes.
Wouldn’t it be nice if she’d figured everything right, he told himself. Wouldn’t it be nice if the natives came back with a large supply of tasty and, nourishing food.
But what if they’d gone for their soldiers, or their weapons?
He didn’t want Sally to think of that. “You might as well turn in,” he said with elaborate casualness. “You’ve had a bad day. I’ll sit up a while, in case our guests come back. Have to be polite, you know.”
“I’ll sit up with you,” Sally said sharply. “You might need me to reload.”
Sam stared at her, wide-eyed and not wholly grateful that his mind had been so clearly read. But resentment gave way to affection. He kissed her, laid out his guns, and spent the rest of the night hauling in crated supplies and setting them around the interior walls to serve as breastworks.
* * * *
It was dawn, when the natives returned. By then, Sally was dozing in a chair, and Sam, the cabin crowded to the roof, had stopped work to thoughtfully watch Altair climb the sky in a blaze of scarlet and gold, painting the granite cliff with colors more striking than any that rational beings had ever devised.
“They’re coming,” he warned softly.
Sally awoke, and rose swiftly bu
t stiffly. “‘How close shall we let them come?” she asked.
Sam hesitated then squeezed her hand as he gave her a gun. “When you said they might understand us, didn’t you mean it?” he asked gently.
“I meant they might—yes.”
“Well, I’m going out to meet them,” Sam said.
“But—but they might kill you!”
“Honey, a while ago you came up with a beautiful theory that rational beings can be distinguished from beasts because rational beings make such dopey mistakes. Well, while you’ve napped I thought up another couple of distinctions to take into account. One is, that only the rational can theorize in the way you did. The other is that lacking those built-in drives, we rational ones can act in brand new ways when we want to, and actually adapt our behavior to our theories. And that’s what I’m going to do.”
“But Sam! My theory may be an awful mistake!”
“To err is human,” he said, grinning over his shoulder as he opened the door. “And human is what we’re trying to prove we are.”
But apparently Sam’s earlier blunderings had been enough to establish his rationality; for the natives brought nothing but food.
WASTE NOT, WANT
Originally published in If Worlds of Science Fiction, September 1954.
Panic roused him—the black imp of panic that lived under the garish rug of this unfamiliar room and crawled out at dawn to nudge him awake and stare from the blank space to his left where Tillie’s gray head should have been.
His fists clenched in anger—at himself. He’d never been the sort to make allowance for his own weakness and didn’t propose to begin doing so now, at age eighty-six. Tillie’d been killed in that crash well over a year ago and it was time he got used to his widowerhood and quit searching for her every morning.
But even after he gave himself the bawling out, orientation came slowly. The surroundings looked so strange. No matter what he told himself it was hard to believe that he was indeed Fred Lubway, mechanical engineer, and had a right to be in this single bed, alone in this house his Tillie had never seen.
