The Ninth Golden Age of Science Fiction Megapack

by Dave Dryfoos

  The youngsters felt cold but happy. The old man shivered and coughed.

  He’d kept moving till the tea was made. He sat still to drink it, and couldn’t get up.

  “Go to bed,” Annie told him. “Ham will get on one side of you and I’ll get on the other. We’ll keep you warm.”

  Old Arch tried to protest but was almost beyond speech. The youngsters didn’t know enough to brush the snow off him or themselves. They helped him roll up in his bedding and crawled under the lean-to after him. There they all lay in a heap, getting colder and damper and more miserable, till finally my grandfather couldn’t stand it any more.

  He got up and looked around. The inverted cup of visibility was smaller. Darkness fell like a dye-stuff, turning the white snow to gray, to black.

  It was a bitter night. The first he’d ever had outdoors. It was the first Annie’d ever had. The first either had ever spent at the futile task of holding off death.

  They knew Old Arch was dying. As the night wore on he sank into semi-consciousness. They hugged him and rubbed his lean old limbs.

  Just before morning the snow stopped. The old man roused a little, became gradually aware of his surroundings.

  “Go look at the sun,” he murmured. “Go see the sunrise.”

  They went out to look. Neither had ever seen a sunrise before. It was mauve first, then red, then gold, then blue. Venus led the way, and the sun followed. The moon, deep in the west, was like a tombstone to the dead night.

  A bird chirruped. A clot of snow fell from a tree with a soft ruffle of cottony drums.

  My grandfather held his sister’s hand and looked and sniffed at the great Earth from which he’d been separated by the fear-inspired plastic over his City, so near, now, in the clear morning night. He climbed with Annie up the side of the draw and looked out over snow-covered plains stretching to a horizon farther away than the longest distance he’d ever imagined.

  He went back and took Old Arch’s head up on his knees and said, “Is it like this every day?” And the old man said, “No, each day is different.”

  And my grandfather said, “Well, I’ve seen one, anyhow.”

  “That’s what I’ve lived for,” said Old Arch. And he smiled and stopped living.

  Annie and my grandfather left him there and went back to the City and told the guards and their family. A burial party was sent out; guards, in their helmeted space-suits.

  People heard about it and followed. Everyone was curious because they’d all seen Old Arch and wondered about him.

  Hundreds of people went out the gate—so many, the guards couldn’t stop them. They saw the lean-to and the open fire and the woods and the snow and the frozen creek. They smelled the air and the smoke. They heard a bird. They tossed snowballs.

  And then they went back and flung rocks through their City’s Dome.

  SOMETHING FOR THE BIRDS

  Without remembering exactly how he’d gotten there, Evan Haines found himself lurking behind a pillar at one of those small, select art galleries in mid-town Manhattan. A man and a girl strolled up, the girl all curved and soft, the man straight and hard. Awed, they stopped before the nearest canvas, a colorfully-complex abstraction. “Genius!” the man murmured.

  “Pure emotion!” the girl sighed. “Doesn’t it make you feel good?”

  To make her feel even better, Haines emerged from his lurking-place and admitted having painted that picture—and all the others in this, his first one-man show. Promptly the soft curved girl flung herself into his arms. The straight hard man bellowed in rage, and from behind Haines’ back clawed at the girl’s clinging arms. Haines awoke.

  Without remembering exactly how he’d gotten there, Haines found himself face-down on the warm soft sand of the planet, imprisoned within a globular plastic helmet and spun-glass body armor. From behind his back, hard straight Oscar Garston, leader of this First Stellar Expedition, clawed at the clinging arms of sleep.

  “Get up!” Garston roared, apparently not for the first time. “Get on your feet, Eightball!”

  Haines scrambled erect. “I’m sorry, sir,” he sputtered; “has anything happened?”

  “Has anything happened?” Garston mocked. “Only that some of these bird-things came and hoisted the roof off my shack. Merely that the wind has scattered my papers all over the landscape. But it’s nothing to worry about, this business of sleeping on guard.”

  Appreciative snickers formed an obbligato to Garston’s tirade. Haines felt sure the entire twelve-man crew was awake, and listening through their helmet-sets.

  “As long as the crew’s alert, sir,” he said, “don’t you think I might as well pick up those papers.”

  “Go ahead,” Garston told him. “Desert your guard-post; you’re no use here, anyhow.”

  Haines hesitated, confused by the sarcasm.

  “Don’t stand there!” Garston shouted. “Get those papers before the birds do!”

  Vacantly, Haines stared upward at the sentinels soaring over the camp. They numbered about a dozen—huge, scaly flying lizards, hovering and circling on fifteen-foot wings.

  Already one had swooped for a fluttering, windborne paper. While Haines gaped, the thief seized its trophy in a six-toed talon and carried it aloft.

  Haines ran under the bird, waving his arms and shouting impotently into his throat-mike. Anonymous mockery stabbed through the earphones, urging him on.

  “Faster, Eightball!” someone shouted.

  Another was more critical: “Let’s have more grace in those movements. Art-Boy.”

  Haines decided not to be urged on; the stolen paper was irretrievable, anyhow. He stopped, switched off his communications-set, and went rapidly to work gathering the other records from where they drifted over the bare red sand or fluttered against the barbed-wire barricade.

  He knew that the boys were right, for once; this time he’d really been an eightball. Sleeping on guard, of all things…

  Maybe he’d always been an eightball. Maybe he deserved to be everybody’s butt.

  Busily picking up documents, Haines shook his head, wondering how things could have gone so wrong. Here he’d spent nearly all this twenty-four years dreaming and scheming for a chance to paint the scenery and catch the feeling of unexplored Space. He’d studied every photograph taken by the one ship that had preceded them to this Earth-type planet, till he could reproduce each from memory. He’d known more about Space-travel than any other graphic artist in the USA—had made himself a natural for this job. But it wasn’t working out…

  Sighing, he acknowledged that lack of social skills had something to do with his failure—painting was a solo performance, while most of the others had always worked in groups. But it wasn’t his fault that none of them understood Art, nor wanted to.

  Like right after Brennschluss, when he’d set to work to show how he felt about the stars as they’d appeared in the ship’s observation-ports. The men had cared nothing for his feeling—had derisively agreed his work didn’t look like the stars, and, when he’d tried to explain it wasn’t supposed to, had contemptuously forbidden him to paint with oils en route, on the flimsy ground that the fumes fouled up the air-conditioning. As if anyone could catch the brilliance of a sun in pastels or water-color!

  He’d never been listened to, after that—had never had a chance, for instance, to explain how Art could be a point of contact with the beings they’d come to study. Yet it could be—and of all arts, painting was the most universal; it had certainly transcended the barriers of time, space, and language down on Earth!

  But these fellows just didn’t know that; and they didn’t know what to expect from him, either, he decided bitterly. Take that last trip to those sandstone cliffs now stabbing ragged spires at the setting sun. Garston hadn’t meant to be cruel, Haines admitted inwardly, but the demand had meant use of a rest-period to get the sketches in shap
e, and guard-duty’d followed without any chance for sleep…

  But that wasn’t an excuse! There was no excuse—except this damned planet, with its cloud-canopy that distorted all colors by adding jaundiced shades of yellow. Everything was distorted here—even a fellow’s personality.

  Trotting tiredly after an especially-elusive bit of paper, Haines thought of how tiredly he had trotted from the cliff-dwellings. They’d shown up in pictures taken by the unmanned ship. Under the cliffs they clung to, were a half-dozen geometrically-laid-out fields of what looked like grain, each in a different stage of ripening, as if planting had been timed to assure a continuous harvest. Naturally, everyone had assumed some sort of neolithic culture to exist here; the Expedition had been formed to contact it.

  And what had they found, that made them trot back so tiredly? Birds’ nests! The supposed cliff-dwellings were the nests of these huge and fearsome bird-things—the fields, unexplained oases in the bone-dry desert.

  Of course, the birds could have planted those crops…but no one knew; no one knew anything that was applicable to this world. The Expedition was completely frustrated in its efforts to contact native life-forms. Yes—and as always, frustration had given rise to the need for a scapegoat.

  Impulsively, Haines opened his transmitter, and said, “Baaaah!” When he’d snapped the switches shut again, he felt much better.

  The men re-roofing Garston’s shack gave Haines some ugly black glares when he returned with his armload of papers. Their resentment added much to his burden of guilt: the time they’d spent on this unexpected job had come out of a badly-needed rest-period.

  Much seemed to have been added to Garston’s burden of anger, too—he was nearly beyond speech. Still, he appeared anxious to be fair. “All right,” he grunted. “I suppose you want a chance to explain.”

  Explain why he’d slept on guard? Say he’d been tired, with the whole crew obviously exhausted? Hardly!

  Dredging his mind for an evasion, Haines dragged up the subject of Art, that he’d been trying for so long to broach. “Sir,” he said slowly, trying to keep his thoughts ahead of his words, “I think the birds took your roof off because they feel the shack is ugly.”

  “Oh, you do! You think your refined esthetic sense that sets you apart from us Philistines is shared by the birds, do you?”

  He was set apart, Haines realized. The muttered jeers now growling through his earphones seemed anonymous because the jeerers lacked individuality for him. He was Eightball—they were They. Only Garston counted with him, and that largely because Garston was Boss—the first boss he’d ever had.

  He had to go on—had to prove to this boss that he wasn’t wholly an eightball, after all.

  “Look,” he said, speaking now with desperate haste, “flowers attract birds and insects by their form and color—and Man finds flowers pretty, too. Birds get their mates through the display of plumage, and Man collects this plumage, and wears it. Doesn’t it seem as if many forms of life share the same sense of beauty?”

  “Maybe,” Garston grumbled; “but what’s that got to do with sleeping on guard?”

  “Nothing, sir. But—well, I’d like to try attracting natives by painting for them. You’ve tried every way you could think of to get a spark of intelligence out of one or another of the living things we’ve seen around here—and those we assume to exist but haven’t seen. You’ve appealed to curiosity, by displaying tools and equipment; challenged the sense of property by harvesting some of those crop-like plants; sent us wandering around with silly, welcoming smiles on our faces. Yet the only interest displayed in us comes from these gruesome bird-things overhead—and they seem like so many vultures, interested in a sick lamb.”

  “Oh, now I get the connection,” Garston said bitingly. “You don’t do your job very well, so you want a crack at mine.” He smiled toothily. “Brother! Now I’ve heard everything.”

  Haines kept quiet, waiting. Everyone had tuned in—he could hear them breathing. Garston toed some sand into a pile, then suddenly kicked the pile aside.

  “All right,” he said, “I’ll take you up on your idea—if you take me up on this: if you don’t want to go back to work, just put down those papers and leave; go and paint. If you make any kind of a contact at all in the twenty hours between now and nightfall, I’ll personally tout you as a hero. But if you refuse to work with the rest of us, and nothing comes of your solo efforts, when we get back to Earth I’ll have you tried.”

  The tacit offer of forgiveness was tempting to Haines. He stood silent, nearly ready to give up his painting project and join in fixing the shack.

  Then someone muttered, “See? All talk and no guts.”

  Haines handed his papers to Garston. “I think I’ll gamble,” he said.

  The mutterer chanted, “You’ll be sorry!”

  With communications-switches closed against interrupting sound, Haines carried camp-stool, easel, paint-box, and a couple of prepared canvases up a small knoll just outside the barbed-wire barricade surrounding ship and camp. The load taxed his strength; at the top, he paused for breath.

  The ship was to the east, a truncated cone. To the west were the cliffs—and the setting sun. Forested hills closed in the northern horizon; hills so steeply broken and so heavily matted with vegetation that Garston had kept clear of them, choosing the bare desert as their first subject of study because it offered less cover for anything hostile.

  Garston had chosen the desert in fear, Haines suddenly decided. Everyone in the crew suffered from the same feeling—fear of the unknown. Each could conceal it only from himself.

  They’d come to contact alien life-forms, yet had avoided the forest that could logically be expected to support the most life. They had come to contact the natives, yet dressed to avoid contact with even the air of this world. They’d collected no specimens because they couldn’t safely handle them—couldn’t bring to Earth materials that might harbor strange diseases.

  They could only look at this still-unnamed world, and they didn’t know what they were looking at. Everything was like these little pits, here in the red sand at his feet. The pits could be lairs, or tracks, or some unfamiliar property of the sand itself. No one knew.

  Just looking at those pits made Haines’ stomach churn, but he forced himself to stay—to use them, in fact, as his inspiration.

  He would paint the fear that ate within him, depict in oils the surrounding landscape as seen through the haze of horror that blurred his vision. A nonobjective painting, that would make it—a picture of how he felt, not what he saw.

  Wouldn’t it be a laugh if the birds could understand what the crew could not?

  To work, then. A small canvas, so there’d be some hope he might accomplish in two hours what few could do in two months. For speed, one already started, with a dull light yellow ground on which darker features could be made to grow in a frenzy that reversed the medieval process of putting light colors on a dark background.

  A frenzy that became the more frantic as its futility became the more evident. A frenzy that aroused no more interest in the soaring bird-things than it did in the soaring cliffs that looked down his neck from three miles away.

  When he quit, after the self-allotted two hours Earth time were an hour past, Haines liked his work. The frenzy showed, but was suited to a portrait of fear. Never had he worked so well so fast.

  Never had he worked to less point. The painting pleased him, but that fact was immaterial; it didn’t please anything else on the surface of this planet.

  He propped it up in the sand, a hundred yards away from the easel, hoping its isolation there might overcome any shyness that kept the soaring bird-things from swooping low to view it, knowing his hope was futile.

  But then, maybe the bird-things weren’t the highest life-form here. Maybe there was some other sort of being he should try to attract. How did one know? And how
could one paint, knowing nothing of the tastes of the viewer?

  He went back to the easel and pressed a gadget at his neck that brought a Benzedrine pill within reach of his lips. Chewing its bitterness without water, he wondered how many Earthdays had passed since he’d last slept.

  Never mind. Work to be done. Nonobjective painting didn’t go, here—he’d have to try a recognizable planetary landscape.

  This time he started more soberly, trying to catch the yellow, cloud-palled sunlight’s effect on the jagged pinnacles of multi-colored sandstone, and on the reddish sand that swelled to their base, devoid of vegetation, but scarred by freshets and bruised under rock-falls.

  The work didn’t go very well. He took more Benzedrine—two, this time.

  Soon he began to jitter. Careful brushwork gave way to smears of color squeezed from the tubes and carved with the palette-knife. He worked like a madman for an additional hour, and then, calling the job completed, looked up as if to take a bow.

  Only the rising wind peered over his shoulder. It pointed grit-laden fingers at his work, dotting the sticky pigments with dirt as if trying to help.

  The experiment was a failure—no native life-form took the slightest interest in what he’d been doing.

  Carefully, fighting down an urge to erratic motion that was born of Benzedrine, Haines folded and stacked his equipment. He paid pedantic attention to each detail of stowage, giving the simple operations as much concentration as a savant might bestow on a complex and crucial experiment.

  But he couldn’t stall forever; with paint box closed, easel folded, and other materials arranged for carrying, he had to consider the consequences of failure.

  Discipline here had grown from the laws of the sea—a quasi-military regime imposed on civilians in the face of a common danger. Haines could be put in irons; he wouldn’t be, though—his labor was needed and no one could be spared to guard him.

  What Garston had said, he meant: punishment would come when they’d returned to Earth.