The Ninth Golden Age of Science Fiction Megapack

by Dave Dryfoos

  Soon, then, he’d be disgraced. Ruined. Finished.

  Everyone else on this First Expedition would become an authority on extra-stellar travel; everyone who wanted to could take subsequent trips, make a career of exploration. Knowing that in advance, Haines had fought for his place in the crew.

  But now he’d go down as a misfit; an eightball; a man who wouldn’t do his share; a traitor to the rest of the team. No one would want him around.

  No one wanted him now…

  He glanced at the second painting, face up on the sand. It was almost obscured by blown dirt. The wind outside his suit must be getting quite strong, now that the sun was nearly down.

  The first painting would be in even worse shape-—he could see from where he stood that it directly faced the wind. And no doubt it was still as tacky as flypaper.

  Flypaper. He felt all balled up in yards and yards of flypaper. Benzedrine drummed through his head, and phantasms of fatigue danced to the drums.

  He wandered off from the work he’d sweated to accomplish, knowing it to be wrecked, feeling a kinship with all forms of wreckage, but irresistibly drawn toward the longest shadows now darkening the sand—those of the sandstone spires.

  Blindly, Haines trudged—through sand that turned from yellowish red to yellowish black as he entered the shadows, from black to red as he emerged. Sometimes he stumbled down a draw, only to scramble up and out again. Occasionally he reached areas of bareness, where rocky outcroppings jabbed at his boots.

  He didn’t know where he was going, nor why. He was purposeless, directionless, unobserving—prodded by his overdose of Benzedrine to unthinking restlessness, self-isolated by failure, self-deafened by the closed switches in his helmet. He stopped only when the never-used emergency signal, that could not be shut off, suddenly jarred him with its warning beep.

  He switched on his transmitter-receiver, and heard Garston calling, “Haines? Haines? Haines? Come in, Haines! Come in, Haines!”

  To leave this conflict-free solitude was like leaving the warm security of sleep. But Garston was as insistent as a prodding mother. “Haines? Haines? Haines?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Where are you?”

  Haines stared vacantly around. “I don’t know, sir; been wandering.”

  A groan. “All right, we’ll find you. Keep your set open, hear? Keep your set open and don’t wander any more—the men are tired enough.”

  He didn’t doubt it. This would be the last straw—this unnecessary, exhausting chase at dusk, with the risk of being caught out on the cloud-canopied, moonless, totally dark, fearsomely strange planet. And all because the expedition eightball had wandered off, contrary to standing orders and plain commonsense.

  “Never mind,” he said. “I’ll come back; track myself.”

  “You’ll do what you’re told! There’ll be no tracks, on account of the wind.”

  “I’ve got emergency equipment,” Haines argued. “I’ve taken too much Benzedrine—that’s why I wandered. But at least there’s no chance I’ll go to sleep on the way. Why not let me try to make it back alone, sir?”

  “I don’t care how much Benzedrine you’ve had—stop arguing! I can’t put off a search without taking a chance on having to do it in the dark. I won’t have any wandering in the dark, because I want the group to return to Earth intact. I want no fatalities on this trip—and especially, no suicides. You can’t make yourself a hero that way, Haines.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Set your automatic location-transmitter to ‘on’. We’ll take a bearing from the ship—I’m there now. But stay where you are, so the bearing will have some meaning when we come after you.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Sitting in the sand, listening through his earphones for further instructions, Haines heard little but the sound of hoarse breathing. Three men were in the party, he decided—doubtless the two crewmen who’d seemed least exhausted, and Garston himself. Between themselves, they spoke occasionally in monosyllabic grunts—to him they said nothing.

  Too tired to talk, Haines decided. Too tired—and nothing pleasant to say, either. Certainly not to him. Yet all of them together could hardly hate him as much as he hated himself, just then.

  Trying to make things easier for Garston he looked around for landmarks to describe. But the distorting shadows and yellowed, muted colors, made meaningful description difficult.

  Anyhow, he couldn’t see very far. He stood in a swale at the base of a variegated sandstone cliff. He couldn’t see the cliff’s top—within the limited area of his vision was nothing that might seem prominent from the route. An uncalled-for verbal description of the place would only produce confusion.

  Yet he couldn’t just sit there and wait. He was still over-stimulated from the drug, still possessed of the pointless urge to activity that had driven him into these shadows.

  He ought to have brought his sketch-pad, Haines decided. Sketching would take the restlessness out of him. And overhead were now a couple of the large bird-things that hovered over the camp. Wryly he thought of them as his public, grinned at the need to disappoint them.

  Come to think of it, he needn’t disappoint them. There was plenty of sand here. The region was something like the Southwestern United States—and in the Southwest, he remembered, sand-painting had been the aboriginal vogue.

  The deadening effect of dusk made useless any widespread search for the soft reds and yellows and browns of a Navaho painting. They wouldn’t show in this light, even if he’d felt like going after them, in direct disobedience of orders.

  But there was a stratum of crumbly white sandstone at the base of the cliff fifty yards away. It would contrast well with the dark-shadowed red sand under foot. He could make a design like the one in the worn black-and-white bedroom rug his grandfather had bought in some National Park.

  Gathering sand at the base of the weathered cliff was easy, but Haines found it hard to remember the design of the old rug. His mind seemed dominated by the present—obsessed with the guilty knowledge that he’d gotten himself lost. He felt compelled to do something about it. He decided that with his trained pictorial memory he might be able to make a map of his half-remembered wanderings—orient himself by reconstructing his route.

  Beginning was easy. With the red sand smoothed to form a six-by-nine-foot frame, he started with the knoll, putting it at the right-hand, eastern edge of his map. He used relief—the knoll was a sculptured mound; the ship, a cone of weathered sandstone. Rocks represented the cliffs as seen from the knoll. Between knoll and cliffs, though, was a five-foot stretch of blankness.

  Years of painting had given him the habit of thinking in pictures, and Benzedrine now helped. He was able to remember a few half looked-at features that he’d passed along the way. But only a few.

  He concentrated, his mind closed to the labored breathing of the search-party. Kneeling, eyes on the ground, he worked himself into an almost trance-like state, trying to remember, remember…

  Crash! A sudden sharp blow on the helmet slammed his face-piece to the sand. Impact sounded like the crack of lightning; he lay prone a few seconds, unconsciously waiting for thunder.

  The silence was more profound than before—he could hear nothing, not even the search-party.

  With head hunched as close to his shoulders as the helmet would allow, Haines looked up. Before his face, a rock rolled over and came spinning to rest.

  Someone—something—had thrown that rock. Haines froze, staring at it, awaiting a second blow. Then, getting a grip on himself, he said into the throat mike, “All right; now quit it, before you bust something.”

  The words sounded dead in his ears as if the blow had deafened him.

  Cautiously he felt over his helmet. The antenna was bent, some wires loosened. The rock had put his receiving equipment out of business. Transmitting, too, he decided.

/>   He sat up and looked around for the men. They were not in sight. Slowly at first, but more and more anxiously, he searched with his eyes every visible foot of terrain—first the sandy rim of the swale, then the cliffs. Nothing! No one!

  His eyes ranged higher—to the bird-things. As he watched, one swooped, let fall a rock, and soared away. The rock landed two feet from Haines—within the frame of his map.

  A chill swept over him—a shivering coldness so intense that for a moment he thought the first rock had cracked his helmet, exposed him to the atmosphere, insured his immediate death.

  His heart pounded. Sweat poured itchily down his back.

  He couldn’t scratch. Tormented, he threw himself face up on the sand to writhe within his armor.

  That didn’t help; it did, he suddenly realized, lay him open to further attacks from the birds.

  Two of them, each bearing a rock the size of his head, swooped low, braking their descent as if to insure accuracy. Then, with a flirt of scaly wingtips, each dropped his rock—within the area of the map.

  They didn’t seem scared, Haines decided. They could certainly have clipped him as he lay spread-eagled. Most likely they hadn’t tried to. They must have aimed where they hit—at the map.

  Slowly Haines got to his feet. Carefully, with an eye on the birds, he walked a hundred feet away, and sat on an outcropped ledge.

  A bird landed in the middle of the map, scratched at it, stared at him warily with vulturous eyes, and soared away. Another bird brought down a small stone, set it within the map’s frame, moved it a few inches to the right with a prehensile talon, shoved it a few inches to the left with a nudge from its reptilian head, and flapped away.

  The number of birds circling overhead had increased. They were apparently trying to destroy the map, just as they’d tried to destroy the shack. Wondering why, Haines could only sit and watch, fighting to remain motionless so as not to frighten them off, tormented by itchings and a cramp that twisted like a knife-blade in his right thigh.

  With increasing boldness the birds pecked at, clawed into, and dropped rocks on his map. With increasing insistence, his aches and pains demanded he shift his position. But even a single new fact, learned in the course of his stupid wanderings, might help repay the men who were struggling to reach him. Besides, Haines told himself, his flesh deserved a little mortification. He must sit still and watch—the more so for the very reason that the effort seemed a torture, and one that would never end.

  It did end—and as suddenly as it had begun. With simultaneous jerks the grounded birds raised their heads, rotated them in complete circles, ran with clumsy steps into the wind, and took off together. Watching them, hoping to get from their movements some clue to the cause of their flight, Haines nearly fainted when Garston tapped his shoulder.

  Confusion followed: shouting and arm-waving till the search-party got it through their heads that the damaged helmet prevented communication; a half hour of impatient sitting-still while young Milton, working without tools or spare parts, made emergency repairs. Meanwhile Haines got no opportunity to inspect his map, much less explain it to Garston.

  But there wasn’t any cross-examination. Instead, Garston came over to the ledge where Haines sat, and stretched out his hand to be shaken. “Congratulations, Haines,” he said.

  Sarcasm again! Disregarding it, Haines said, “I don’t suppose it’ll do any good, but I’d like to say I’m sorry to have brought you out here, like this.”

  “Well, if we hadn’t come—and if we hadn’t been able to observe the bird-things for a minute or two before they took flight—we might not have believed you. And after all, this is what we came for.”

  “What is?”

  Garston looked at him searchingly. “You haven’t seen for yourself?” he asked. “You don’t know that the birds have made a perfect map of this area?”

  Haines was dumbfounded. “Perfect? I thought they were wrecking it, the way they tried to wreck your shack…”

  “Go and look. It’s a beauty; your theory really worked!”

  Puzzled, Haines got up and walked the hundred feet to the site. Within the frame he’d smoothed—while leaving knee and hand marks that the others must have seen—traced in rocks and pebbles and white sand, was a relief-map.

  The camp, the knoll—the parts he knew best—were perfectly represented.

  The swale and cliffs at his present location were recognizable. Of the many other details, he couldn’t be sure, till Carno silently handed him an aerial photograph, taken before they’d landed.

  The comparison was too close for coincidence. There was no doubt of it: the birds had completed the map he’d begun, applying knowledge of the terrain that he simply didn’t have.

  “What do you think now?” Garston asked gleefully.

  “It looks like we’ve made contact with the natives, all right,” Haines admitted slowly. “But I still think I owe you an apology. It was wrong of me to wander off, even if it did turn out all right. And then, my theory was haywire, because what made the contact wasn’t Beauty, but a simple map that I got up more or less by accident.”

  “What the hell, boy,” Milton said admiringly. “It worked!”

  “But, Milt—it worked in reverse!” Haines insisted plaintively. “I set out to make contact by expressing myself in pictures, and wound up interesting the birds with a map. And a map, after all, is a bird’s-eye view. I wanted to create something they’d recognize as the work of an intelligent mind, but came out with something they did, that shows they’re intelligent. So you have to give the birds most of the credit for making this contact. It certainly wasn’t my work—at best, it was co-operative…”

  “Well, what did you expect?” Garston demanded. “Cooperation in the face of a brand-new situation is the hallmark of intelligent beings. But the way you talk, Haines, it certainly doesn’t sound as if you want to be treated like a hero, as I promised.”

  “No, sir,” said Haines promptly, “I don’t. But what I do want,” he went on, looking wistfully from Garston to the others, and back again into his boss’ eyes, “what I do want, sir, is to be a member of your team.”

  FACTS OF LIFE

  On our planet Septimo there was the ooze and our Mind—and eternal, intelligent tranquility; then a woman came from Earth, and stepped on us, and we found out all about sex.

  The woman—her name was Martha Cotton; she was young, brown-eyed, and a psychologist—came in a ship. Not alone—she brought Bert Sommers, a skinny lad and a head full of undigested biological theory.

  They braked with the usual spirals and circled our planet a few times to look it over, so our Mind had penetrated their thoughts and speech—widely different—by the time they were ready to land.

  Physically ready, that is; Martha had mental reservations. “I don’t know,” she said, long fingers hesitant among the co-pilot’s controls. “I think maybe we should go back to the Big Ship and get a larger party…”

  “Don’t be chicken,” Bert argued. “There’s no sign of life except that green scum; the air tests o.k.; gravity’s close to one—”

  “But—”

  “Look. Between the Big Ship and this runabout, we’ve been inside metal hulls for over a year. If we go back to headquarters, they’ll send someone else in your place for sure—and probably chain me at a desk, too. So let’s send no signal and just go down for a few minutes and have some fun; it’ll be like getting out of jail!”

  “I wouldn’t know!” Martha grinned. Then she frowned. “‘That feeling of release, though…it scares me, Bert. I mean—well—here on the ship, one or the other of us is busy every minute. But down there, excited and all… Besides, people will talk… I’m afraid—”

  “Of me?”

  “Noooo…”

  She wouldn’t admit she was afraid of herself, so they landed.

  * * * *

 
; Our air smelled good to them. Our green-clad, rolling hills, and greener swampy lowlands, were more different from their metal ships than from their native Earth; they got out, laughing.

  At first they shouted and ran aimlessly around like a couple of pups released from the kitchen. Then, swinging joined hands, they walked up and over the nearest hill, too excitedly breathless to talk till they got over the crest.

  But when Bert wanted to rest and enjoy the view, Martha objected. “Look at my boots,” she pouted. “All smeared with this green slime. We can’t sit down, Bert; it’ll get all over ourself.”

  “I’ll scrape off a patch of ground,” he said, after exploratory nudgings with his toe. “It’s dry underneath; and the ooze won’t hurt you even if it touches your skin. See?”

  He held up a slimy finger. “Dirty stuff, but harmless.”

  Had our Mind been emotional, that would have insulted us. The green ooze was us—the living substance of our Mind—billions of trillions of tiny cell-colonies, each just large enough to support a few members in leisured freedom from food-making.

  From the leisured cells had evolved our collective Mind, a single mentality for an entire planet—endowed, of course, with far more intelligence than can be possessed by any fractionated individual, human or other. And we needed no physical body, either; we used our collective psychic power to travel through time and space—within our planet and its atmosphere—collect facts and influence matter.

  By clairvoyance we saw Bert and Martha; by telepathy we read; by intelligence we understood their thoughts and words. And by psychokinesis we would halt their adventure before they’d walked all over us—they were killing thousands of cells with every step.

  But our intellectual interest was so great that we wanted to study these humans before removing them—and to be sure they remained available for study. They were strange to us, with many individual quirks we didn’t understand, and a curiously irrational interrelation.

  The way they looked at each other, for instance, and fell silent in the middle of a sentence; the way they’d walked together, practically dancing. The way they sat now on the hilltop, half uplifted by excitement, half sunk into a dream. The way Martha would reach out unconsciously for Bert’s hand, but withdraw from his clasp whenever she noticed it. Hardly rational, to say the least. Far beyond our experience.