by Dave Dryfoos
Take the way Bert’s Adam’s apple bobbed so excitedly. From handholding he’d progressed to waist-encircling; and now, though it seemed to require more courage than a take-off into space, he thought he’d try for a kiss.
“Sex, sex, sex,” said Martha, pushing him away. “That’s all you biologists think about. I knew this would happen when you set the ship down. Please don’t be a nuisance, Bert; you’re acting compulsively.”
“Compulsively, hell” he snorted. “I want to marry you!”
“Well,” she mocked. “That’s interesting news. And how sentimentally you put it, dear!”
“Well…”
“Well, we’re not married and there’s nobody here to marry us and we’re not going to act as if we were married. Some other time, Bert!”
“Aw, for pete’s sake!”
“You sound neurotic! If either off us has to become a martyr to convention, it isn’t going to be me! Mother said it was disreputable when I signed up for this trip—I intend to return able to prove she was wrong!” Intriguing, this—our cells reproduce by budding; we didn’t know what a mother was, and our lack of knowledge went on from there.
So, while Bert got up and tramped in futile, murderous circles, our Mind investigated his.
We didn’t get far; he was supposed to be a biologist; but biology is the science of life, and his ideas on “what life is” were anything but scientific. And that wasn’t the only gap in his knowledge. We thought he should understand how his own kind had evolved, at least; but his ignorance of man’s evolution was much more extensive than his understanding of it.
What reason he possessed seemed to be far outweighed by his emotionality. His whole brain was in an angry ferment; he didn’t even try to hold Martha’s hand when, in sullen silence they trudged back to their landing-place.
They gasped when the wreckage came into view. They stared at it, at one another. Then, finding nothing to say they ran frantically down to the ship.
The vessel sprawled on its back with landing-gear pointing skyward like the feet of a dead chick. The hull was crushed and wracked—equipment lay scattered around.
Bert thrust his head through a shattered port, surveyed the jumbled interior, and withdrew, searching for something hopeful to say. The best he could think of was a noncommittal, “No tracks.”
“If no tracks, then tricks,” Martha said. She essayed a giggle, but it came out off-key and she stopped in the middle.
“Wind, maybe,” Bert offered, winning the reluctant respect of our Mind with his good guess. “See how things are scattered!”
“Let’s unscatter them,” said Martha, practically; “we’ve supplies, except not much water. And tents.”
“Let’s not use tents,” said Bert. “Rather a sod hut—a dugout with a well-anchored canvas roof. The wind might blow again.”
“Why didn’t we feel it and hear it, if it was a wind? Could it have been so minutely localized?”
It could have been, and was; but then, it was a psychic wind, not an atmospheric one.
Bert didn’t know that, and said so. “But I go for the dugout idea anyhow,” he added.
“I don’t,” said Martha. “Not one dugout, surely; I go for two. You hear?”
“Double work? For what?”
Martha put her hands on her hips.
“Think my reputation isn’t worth a hole in the ground?”
“Sex, sex, sex,” he mocked. “That’s all you psychologists ever think about!” But he dug two holes in the hillside, and covered each with a weighted tarp.
They didn’t talk-over the possibility of rescue—each knew the planned routine. The Big Ship, that had brought them to our System from yours, would continue to cruise in satellitic motion begun when the side-trips had started. From it would issue a smaller vessel, similar to the one we’d wrecked, but heavily-armed and mannered by a trained rescue-squad.
A man with the planet-wide intelligence of our Mind could seize that rescue-ship; with it, surprise and capture the larger one. With that—well, the possibilities opened up in geometric progression. Provided, of course, that our Mind evolved a man from the ooze. Which seemed possible; according to Bert’s system of learning, it had happened on Earth.
We immediately tried to duplicate the process. Some of our cell-groups gave up all leisure, and formed themselves into balls; the balls subdivided, working out the key to the next stage of development—secretions that influenced the form and position of their multiplying cells.
Meanwhile, paving the way, our Mind tried to impress Bert and Martha with our psychic powers, so they would defer to our man when he’d evolved.
We started with telepathy because it’s our normal mode of expression. But here we ran into difficulties. Martha had an ability, absolutely new to us at the time, of simply closing her thoughts to things she didn’t wish to believe—and, like most psychologists, she didn’t choose to believe in psychic powers.
Bert, though he harbored the notions we planted in his brain, had no desire to act on them; he devoted his time to making Martha comfortable and to thinking up things for the two to do, so that neither would have time for brooding.
And Martha responded to his efforts. Painfully she cultivated a blithe and lighthearted manner, and tried to act as if she and Bert were on a camping trip together. In two days, they’d built themselves an elaborate camp, spread signal-panels visible from the air, and spent fruitless hours trying to rebuild their ruined microwave set. When that proved impossible, Bert gathered up some optical instruments and made a crude, low-power microscope.
We were delighted. The possibilities inherent in a pair of hands were spread before us in a display the more striking because it was improvised; our Mind pressed vigorously forward in our attempt to develop a man.
In those two days, we’d evolved a primitive fish. Bert missed this, but next day he did see and try to capture our amphibian stage—it was the first animal life he’d seen on Septimo.
Meanwhile, our efforts to impress them had gone on to psychokinesis. We’d been a wind—they were prepared for that. Now we became a sigh in the night, an invisible nuisance that tripped unwary feet, a remembered bird-call lifted from Bert’s memory and shrilled in the predawn cold.
We dripped water on sleeping faces, hid necessary objects; we kissed Martha when she slept, so that she awoke, went to Bert’s hut, kicked him in the ribs, and argued. In broad daylight we pinched Martha till she slapped him.
To defend himself, he had to mention poltergeists.
“‘Ghosts are supposed to have no feeling,” Martha retorted; “this one does nothing else but!”
She drowned out his fervent denials with the first human song ever heard on Septimo: “Ghoul days, ghoul days, good old gory drool days…”
But she was more frightened than he.
That is, Martha was more frightened than Bert till, on the fourth thirty-hour day he’d spent on our planet, Bert saw the shrew.
The little mammal—it wasn’t exactly like any shrew you’ve ever seen—entered Bert’s tent, where it shredded a few papers, ruined some opened rations, and messed up his bed.
With this physical manifestation added to his telepathic impressions, Bert began to worry. We succeeded in turning his mind toward a matter that had been lifted from it in the first place—the story of Man’s origin. He recognized the evolutionary possibilities in the stages he’d seen: primitive cell-colonies, amphibian, mammal.
Of course it never occurred to him that these life-forms hadn’t existed before he landed; he under-estimated the physical power of our Mind, and even of his own.
He knew, but refused to consider even with our prompting, that from time immemorial there have been men who claimed the ability to predict the future: he knew that long ago, a “Dr. Rhine” had proved the power of prediction does exist.
He never permitted him
self to realize that prediction foreshortens time. But a prediction exists—and, existing, brings the future into the present.
He found out when he saw the primate—a furry, cuddly, affectionate little monkey-like creature. It was I, as were all the other life-forms; that is, it was of our Mind—and so am I.
Needless to say, I didn’t spring as a primate directly from the shrew; our Mind had killed the shrew, as we’d killed each of the other forms of life created from the ooze. Each sprang directly from a cell-colony.
We’d learned from Bert the biogenetic rule that every individual re-enacts the history of his kind; we were advancing, stage by stage, from the cell to Man. But we didn’t bring two individuals together to produce a third. Bert’s mind contained information along these lines, of course, but the only life-form we were interested in was Man. And our purely rational Mind—which has no need for emotion, and experiences none—simple couldn’t untangle the emotional skeins that, despite their scientific training, surrounded the word “sex” in the thoughts of Bert and Martha. Our Mind didn’t know what “sex” might be; we wanted to find out.
Indirectly, we were learning. I’d been directed by our Mind into Martha’s path. Bert, who sat in his hut’s entrance, fooling with the microscope, didn’t see me till after Martha and I had made friends.
“This is my new playmate,” she announced, carrying me over for him to see, “my ’ittle Zyttl.”
“Well” he said, getting up from his work and coming out to us. “Interesting! Some name you’ve give him, too; we’ll have to study the beast—he’s the highest form of life to turn up here.”
“Please don’t talk like a book,” she said, hugging me tight. “He’s a pet, not a problem.”
Bert was under enough strain to show annoyance. “Don’t be a sentimental dope,” he said tartly. “You know it’s not safe to play with a strange life-form!”
“No?” Martha retorted. “What do you call your business with the slime?”
“Investigation; and I want to investigate your little ape.”
“I know your investigations! You’ve got to find out if he’s got the same sort of nervous, and digestive, and reproductive system that’s common to vertebrates on Earth. But you’re not going to hurt him, see!”
He saw; he saw I was pillowed on Martha’s hard round breast—and emoted over the sight. Martha emoted, too.
“See?” she repeated. “And I suppose you want to dissect the poor thing.”
“I just don’t want you to handle it,” he said angrily; “it could have parasites, or something.”
“There’s nothing wrong with my Zyttl,” she stated. “But there is with you! You probably suffered a childhood shock that aroused primitive fears of animals!”
“Nonsense,” he said, stealing a page from her book. “But I’ll bet you felt unloved in childhood and are using that beast to compensate.”
“Love, again!” she jeered. “Sex stuff! You’re probably jealous—jealous of a fuzzy little animal!”
Jealousy was something I’d never experienced as part of our Mind, but I experienced it then—for with a sudden snatch, Bert grabbed me from Martha and began to throttle me.
Violence was new to me, too: I lay limp in his arms, without enough experience to try biting him, even.
But Martha came to my rescue. “You sadist!” she cried. “You leave my Zyttl alone!” She pummeled his ribs till Bert handed me over and walked off muttering.
I’d come between them. That was our Mind’s purpose; we would divide and conquer—and learn, as well.
Consider what we had to find out. Everything about Man that’s concerned with emotion was novel to us. Sex—which Martha and Bert had been taught by their respective studies to consider the most important single drive in Man—was strange to our Mind. Only by creating a man for itself, could our Mind experience those things.
But everything had to be timed right; it takes time to recapitulate the phylogeny of so complicated a species as Man. Our Mind would know when the rescue-ship reached our atmosphere, though, and I would evolve from primate to man the night before it landed.
Then, in the morning, I’d enlist the help of Martha.
In the two days that followed, obtaining Martha’s help seemed increasingly easy. She would no longer speak to Bert—he’d put the finishing touches on their quarrel with some remarks about Martha’s sublimated sex-drive. Because she suspected he was right, she was enraged beyond reconciliation; she spent her days petting and cleaning and feeding me, and teaching me tricks—which, of course, I learned easily.
Martha lived during those times in a flickering daydream. Often, while she petted me, she was picturing a baby; but more often she thought of a man—tall and muscular and golden of skin and well filled-out—as different from Bert as could be. Our Mind analyzed those daydreams, and decided to fulfill them.
Then our Mind would get the experience it wanted. For if Martha loved me when I was a hairy little monkey, she’d certainly love me when I became her dream-man.
And dream-man I did become—when the time came. A combination of something called “Tarzan” and the “Belvedere Apollo”.
It was early in the morning when I went to Martha’s hut. She was still asleep—didn’t know her pet had gone during the night.
Bert was up. His mind, possibly stimulated to think of flight by hope for rescue, had been dwelling on butterflies, so our Mind conceived a reasonable facsimile of one and decoyed him over a hill.
Perhaps things would have been different if I’d knocked before entering Martha’s hut—or if I’d stolen a pair of pants to wear. But I had one advantage: because he was the only man we’d ever heard, my voice was exactly like Bert’s.
“Good morning, Martha,” I said softly.
She stirred in her sleep.
“Good morning, dear,” I said again, and stroked her hair, as yesterday, she’d stroked mine.
She rolled over in her sleeping-bag and smiled; she was waking up, now. “If this is a dream, it’s a nice one,” she murmured. “Or have you finally got up cour—” She opened her eyes and screamed.
The sound distressed my humanoid ears. “Stop that,” I said, “You know me! I’m Zyttl, your pet monkey!”
“Then I am dreaming?”
“No, I’ve just changed my form; how do you like me this way?”
“I’ll show you,” she said, “if you’ll please hand me that boot.” I did, and she broke my nose with the heel of it.
“Don’t do that!” I objected reasonably. “Even when I was a stinking little monkey—you cuddled me, and held me, and—”
I stopped talking and began to duck—things were flying through the air at me. Words, too. “Make a fool of me, will you? Rubbing your hairy little paws… Watching… I could kill…”
I was in a very unfortunate position. Still, our Mind was getting what we wanted—a knowledge of sex.
However, our Mind lacked combative instincts. So first Martha beat me up; then Bert came, summoned by her scream, and beat me some more.
By the time I’d been trussed up and dumped on the floor, they could hear the rescue-ship approaching.
“We’ll keep him as a hostage,” Bert said, “and get his story later; meantime he’d better prevent further manifestations, if he knows what’s good for him!”
“He looks secured,” said Martha. “But I must look a sight.” Her lacy nightgown was a rag, her brown hair tousled wantonly.
“It’ll be hours before they land,” Bert said with a funny look on his face. “Come on over to my hut and I’ll help you get fixed up.”
They gathered up some clothes and left me there. They thought they’d defeated our Mind.
But they hadn’t. True, they never did set me free—and our Mind, wondering what would happen next, didn’t rescue me. That’s why they were able to take me with them back to
Earth, where I have to live in the lab and give this lecture twice a day.
And it’s a fact that our Mind got subdivided by my leaving, so even if I’m no smarter than anyone else down here, there was a slight loss.
But all that’s a small and reasonable price to pay. Because, by the time they went to Bert’s hut—hours before the rescue ship had even landed, much less taken off again—our superhuman Mind knew it had accomplished its purposes.
That’s why we paid so little attention to the activities in Bert’s hut that brought them out to meet the rescue party in an oddly glowing condition; we couldn’t see much point to their ritual.
But they were leaving, and that’s the main thing our Mind wanted.
And also, we’d found out what “sex” is. From Martha, the psychologist, we’d learned the great biological secret: “sex” is what makes a woman cuddle a stinking little ape, and scratch a man’s eyes out for touching her.
PREFERRED POSITION
The bed woke them. “Time to get up, dears,” it cooed. “Time to get up and greet the sun…time to get up…” Then the supporting magnetism faded and let their mattress drift gently to the soft warm floor.
Janet turned and opened her eyes, pouting at Les. He scowled back, grumbled something, and rolled away. She shook his film-coated shoulder.
“Come on, Les. Come on, you’ll feel better after coffee.”
“Don’t want any,” he snarled.
But the damage had been done. At the word “coffee” a grotesque marionette opened the bedroom door and minced in with two steaming cups of a tray, swinging them artfully so that they appeared likely to spill, but didn’t.
For some years now, that dance had left Janet unamused. She was about to say so when Les growled, “These darned dolls are a nuisance. I wish you’d order a plain, automatic dispenser!”
