by Dave Dryfoos
The astro-geographers had warned us that the dawn we now saw would be followed by three weeks of continuous daylight. But they hadn’t told us to expect the greeting Terra-nu sent out.
My partner didn’t even see it. He was Myron Hines, an old-fashioned spaceman. Myron was too busy with his fruitless searching for some sign of intelligent life down below us to see the golden, twelve-foot fireball that danced on our ship’s twin noses. Back and forth that fireball flitted in lazy, graceful arcs from the drive-hull to our own operations-hull, then to the drive again, as if trying to see which was the higher.
I shifted controls to drop the drive-hull low. The fireball bounced to our operations-hull and hovered just in front of the dorsal periscopes, within fifteen feet of me. I thought the shift to the higher point meant the fireball was a corposant, or St. Elmo’s Fire—a form of electrical brush-discharge that on Earth has been given many names, though no real explanation.
A corposant is supposed to be harmless so I saw no reason to call the fireball to Myron’s attention. He wasn’t seeking oddities, but humanoids; besides, we weren’t speaking.
That wasn’t my fault. Myron was apparently neurotic. For instance, people sometimes eat a lot to ease a sense of insecurity; Myron ate much and often. Excessive sleep can be an escape; Myron Hines was forever sleeping. Extreme romanticism can be schizoid; he was always reading either poetry or fiction.
But I’d never said a thing. It was he who, after complaining of loneliness, had one day brought our talking to an end. “Cousin John,” he growled, “your jabber wearies me. Let me hear your silence for a while.”
Up to a point I could have argued, but in a showdown I had to take his orders. So for the past month he’d heard only my silence and the few sounds of our travel: the faint hum transmitted along the hundred-foot boom from the gravitronic drive to our operations-hull; the squeaky pinging of ceramic-clad alloys under stress; the hiss-clang-hiss of passage through a dust cloud; the siren’s warning scream when we swerved in automatic evasive action to clear larger chunks of interstellar matter.
If he’d been listening then, while that fireball grew from twelve to fifty feet in diameter, Myron might have heard the faint crackle of electricity—a sound like paper rattled, or autumn leaves tossed in the wind. But he was humming in a monotone; he heard nothing but himself.
I could feel the growth of that fireball through the handles I had to manipulate in controlling this final, atmospheric portion of our flight. Electricity flowed through me so that I jittered; my coordination seemed affected.
I was about to call Myron when suddenly the ship lurched. Instrument-needles danced drunkenly. Atmosphere-operative control surfaces contorted limply, yet resisted all my jerks and pressures. Metal grated on metal with skirling shrieks.
Myron rushed to my aid, but stumbled repeatedly as our gyrations flung him off balance. When he reached me his cheeks had paled beneath their freckles, and his blue eyes were narrowed. “Move over, Coz,” he ordered. “Let a man take charge.”
I moved. He reached for the controls; but before he actually touched a switch or handle, he felt the fireball’s electricity. His russet hair and copper beard rose as if blasted with air. His eyes popped wide. Sparks snapped from his extended fingers.
Myron collapsed with a faint cry. His skull thudded against the deck and he lay there twitching. I took over again and switched for emergency chutes. Nothing happened; I had to leave the pilot’s position and crank out the chutes by main strength.
Meanwhile the ship fluttered downward like a molted feather. Myron’s limp body slewed around the compartment, leaving shreds of skin from his exposed face and hands sticking to irregular surfaces. He had acquired a well-bloodied nose and a gashed cheek before the chutes took hold.
Even with their help, we crashed. I blacked out.
Myron was poking at me when my consciousness returned. He had a badly-marked face and an awkward stoop, as if his back were lame. But he could smile. “Hiya, Coz,” he said. “Are you in working order?”
“More or less,” I said tentatively, after checking to see if I could move. “And you?”
“More or less.”
“How’s the ship?”
“Bad! This hull’s half torn off the boom. The plates are cracked clean through where the twist came. And there’s other damage where the hull hit the ground.”
“Oh? And where does this warm air come from?”
“Terra-nu,” Myron said. “I feel all right so far.” He grinned at me like a death’s-head. “Just think of all the time I saved by breathing this air before we tested it.”
“You haven’t saved an instant,” I said, getting up. “‘With alien air in here, we’ll be in Decontamination on the moon for a year. If we get back, that is. And—”
“When we get back, Coz; don’t be depressingly literal. And tell me what made us crash. That fireball that’s out on our boom?”
“‘Apparently,” I said. “It’s electrical, and it fouled up our circuits. If it were on our highest point it might be the harmless discharge I originally thought, but—”
“‘But it’s not. We’re in the middle of a park-like forest, with tree-things towering over us all around. And the boom isn’t even the high point of the ship—the drive-hull’s higher.”
“So the fireball’s a Terra-nuvian. And it’s already caused us to crash; it must be our enemy. Let’s get the ship spaceborne and go tell Earth this is an unsafe place. We can—”
“If we’re going to get spaceborne we’d better get acquainted with that thing,” Myron said. “Maybe it can tell us whether Man could live here. Maybe it will help us fix the ship.”
“Yes,” I said. “But maybe it’s waiting out there to kill you. And why waste time? We can do a lot from inside the ship while we wait for that thing to go away.”
“And if it doesn’t go away? No, Coz, if we’re in its power, we’re in its power, so let’s see what it wants. I’m going out there.”
And he did. Not just then, because the hatch was sprung and required much prying. But as soon as we got it open he went through. I closed it after him and watched through periscopes.
The ground under his feet was red and moist. Covering it in fifty-foot circular patches about three hundred feet apart was a soft mossy carpeting of blue. From the center of each blue circle rose a huge corrugated yellow column, nine feet thick at the base and two hundred fifty feet high. The lower hundred feet were bare. The top hundred fifty feet looked like an immense green ostrich-feather.
The drive-hull lay against a tree that had been half stripped of branches by our fall. The operations-hull had landed in the open, but should have been shadowed like the surrounding ground by the high, feather-topped trees.
It wasn’t. The whole area was lighted by the fireball perched on—or, rather, an inch or two above—the center of our boom. Myron walked smiling up to the boom and extended to the fireball a hand that hardly trembled. Instantly he was flat on his back on the damp red soil. The fireball had left its perch and hovered over his head.
I went for the hatch. It had stuck again; I couldn’t budge it by myself.
I watched Myron under magnification. His eyelids fluttered; his chest rose and fell. Vagrant smiles flitted across his face. His hands jerked occasionally. Once his feet made a few running motions. He certainly seemed to be dreaming. And the fireball hovered over his head.
After several minutes, it darted to its former perch on the boom. Hissing, it returned to Myron. Crackling, it went back to the boom.
Myron’s eyes opened. He sat up, yawned, and stared vacantly around. He smiled stupidly. Then looking vaguely pleased with himself, he shambled over to the hatch. Together, we opened it. He tumbled casually in and left it open. I shut it after him quickly. He gaped at me with a moronic grin I couldn’t decipher.
“The ground here seems damp,” I said finall
y. “You’d better go change your clothes.”
“Yup.” He stared at me drunkenly.
“You’ve had two bad electric shocks,” I went on. “Have they made you ill?”
“Nope.” He grinned at me a little more alertly, and added, “Stop worrying, Coz; I’m on the right track. I was asleep out there. Asleep, and dreaming; and the fireball somehow communicated with me during that dream.”
“The fact of communication was what you dreamed,” I stated. “No doubt it was all in perfect English?”
“No. Wordless. Sort of like a mood. I felt good. I still feel good. I swear that thing is friendly, Coz.”
“Change your clothes,” I said. “‘You should have changed outside. It’s the ultimate contamination of the ship to come in with clothing stained by the native soil. One would think—”
“We were contaminated by our crash. And there are no more degrees of contamination than there are degrees of pregnancy,” Myron said, laughing at me. “Fix some food while I change, will you, Coz.”
He ate slowly, reflectively, untastingly. Finished, he pushed aside his plate and said, “I wonder if they have thunderstorms here.”
“I don’t know. Why?”
“Just before I woke up, I dreamed of a thunderstorm. I think I was supposed to—that the dream was a query. So I’m going out and try to let the fireball know that I think thunderstorms are impressive spectacles. Maybe it will exhibit one.”
“If you’re not all wet now, you soon will be,” I scoffed. “The fireball won’t entertain you with an act of suicide, though I wish it would. If it were to consume itself as a thunderstorm, we might get the ship fixed.”
“Oh, it wouldn’t have to become a storm,” Myron said thoughtfully. “It might just exhibit one. Or even merely start one, like silver iodide. I doubt it would be the storm and I doubt that it is the fireball. These things are just manifestations of organized energy.”
“What object isn’t a manifestation of organized energy?” I said. “Only thing is, the fireball’s not an object, because it’s disembodied.”
“There may be similar organizations of disembodied energy down on Earth,” Myron said.
“Like what?”
“Like the soul.” He reached over and gave me a sympathetic pat. “You have no idea what I experienced, asleep out there.”
“What you experienced out there was a nice hoggish wallow in the mud,” I said. “But wallow again. Maybe this time you can dream up a beautiful sow.”
He laughed and went out, leaving the hatch open. I climbed half way through to watch.
Before Myron lay down, I could catch glimpses between the tree-tops of a clear blue sky. Five minutes after he closed his eyes, it was pouring. The rain awakened him. He jumped up and ran for the hatch, climbed through and helped me close it against the storm. Lightning played on our hull. The thunder was so loud we couldn’t converse till we’d shut out the storm.
Grinning then, he turned to me and said, “Next time, the sow.”
“You mean—”
“Exactly. A girl. The Presence here can use me for a model. The differences between a man and a girl are relatively few, and in my next dream, I’ll concentrate on those differences.”
“That I can believe,” I said. “But I’ll bet there’s no more fireball.”
There was, though. And Myron was out communing with it before the steaming ground had dried. He took a poncho to lie on, and the mud under the moss must have made a nice soft bed. But he seemed too excited to sleep, and soon returned, demanding sleeping pills.
It seemed to me time to call a halt. I said, “You’re acting much too youthful, with this concentration on a dream girl while your ship stands in need of repair. A little work will help you sleep. And—”
“Why shouldn’t I act youthful?” he said teasingly.
“Well,” I said, “figuring from Earth’s space-time coordinates, you’re a hundred twenty-nine years old, just about.”
“Oh; don’t be so literal-minded; besides, we’re not in Earth’s space-time coordinates now.”
He jumped up and clicked his heels in midair to prove his point, though the effect of his coltishness was to prove mine. He took his pill and went out. I watched through the periscope, afraid there’d be more rain.
Soon he slept. The fireball came and hovered over him, gradually swelling till it touched two trees that were three hundred feet apart.
There was a sudden sharp crack!—a blinding flash. When the light died away, a nude girl stood over Myron. She had the same sort of red hair and blue eyes that he did, and the same quickness of decision. Without a moment’s hesitation, she grabbed the corner of his poncho, and tugged vigorously to get it out from under him. He remained in deep sleep and didn’t budge.
She seemed to be having a lot to say, but I couldn’t hear her voice. Every radiation detector in the ship chattered its fastest. The combined rattle drowned out all other sounds.
I cranked the hand-hooter for battle-stations. The girl shrieked an echo to its horrendous howl. Myron jumped up, seized the poncho in one hand and the girl’s wrist in the other, and dashed for the hatch.
“Don’t bring her here,” I shouted. “Don’t bring her here!”
He forced her into the ship and swiftly followed. As soon as he’d slammed the hatch, the counters lessened their rate of chatter.
The girl cowered in a corner, trying to cover her nudity with hands and arms in a gesture as old as Eve. Myron flung the poncho to her and jumped to his battle-station at the combat controls. There he waited tensely for the scanner’s vocalizer to give him target coordinates and description so he could choose which weapon to fire.
Nothing happened, of course. The drive was completely shut down, so none of the fire-control equipment would even operate.
Myron blazed with fury when he realized that. “What’s the idea?” he demanded of me. “Where’s the target?”
“Right behind you,” I said. “The girl is a source of massive radiation.”
Hearing no great amount of chatter from the counters; seeing, when he scanned them, only moderate readings on the indicators, he flushed with rage. “There’s no source of heavy radiation here, and there probably never was,” he shouted. “What’s the matter with you, anyway? First you pilot us into a crash, and then you—”
“I—I’m sorry to have been so much trouble,” the girl broke in to say. She now wore the green poncho, with her tawny red-haired head poked through the central slit and the sides tucked around her some way that formed the plastic sheet into a garment. Its color made her eyes look green.
“It was my fault,” she went on, staring down at her own bare toes. “I—well—materialized from the fireball, by changing the energy-level of all my electrons. And of course they gave off radiation when changing energy-level.”
“A flash of light to brighten my life,” Myron said. He stepped quickly down from his battle station and with a gentle finger lifted her chin. Their identical-looking eyes met. Each blushed faintly.
“Didn’t Bishop Berkeley have something to say about materialization?” Myron asked her. “I mean, didn’t he say that reality is the dream perceived?”
“Something like that,” she said, smiling vaguely. “I don’t know any more about it than you do, though. My knowledge is your knowledge—I have only a copy of your mind.”
“But then you must know the danger to him of a massive dose of radiation.” I said. “You should never have materialized while he was outside the ship. You may have—”
“Cut it out, Coz,” Myron warned.
“Wait, Myron,” she said. “I do know, now, that I did the wrong thing. I didn’t know, though, before I existed in this form, because I didn’t have a copy of your mind, before. I’d never have done it, if I’d known…though all I did was give reality to your dream…and I’m not dangerous no
w—”
“Of course not,” Myron said stoutly. “And I’m glad you didn’t know, if there’s a chance the knowledge might have made you hesitate.” He slipped an arm around her waist and glared fiercely at me over the top of her head. She let her hair brush his shoulder a second before deftly slipping away from him. They had no eyes for me.
“This is serious!” I insisted. “Myron, take a glance at your pocket radiation indicator.”
He got it out, and the girl crowded close to peer over his shoulder at it. “Oh!” she gasped, hand over mouth.
The indicator showed total exposure—a dosage greater than it could measure.
Big tears formed in the girl’s eyes. “I don’t want to harm you, Myron,” she said. “I’ll go away.”
Myron pulled her to him gently and buried her face on his chest. Out of the corner of his mouth he growled, “Coz, if you drive her to dematerialize—”
“Wouldn’t think of it,” I said hastily. “Another dose of radiation would really fix you. She’d better stay here till we see how sick you’re going to be from the first one. Time’s getting shorter all the while, and there’s probably more work to fixing the ship than I can handle alone—particularly if I have to take care of you, so—”
“You haven’t even looked at the ship,” Myron sneered. “All you’ve managed to do is steer into a crash and sound a false battle-stations alarm and argue.”
“Have you checked the ship?” I asked. “Have you been getting the feel of this planet, as you’re supposed to—or of this lady, merely?”
“The lady is the planet’s most important manifestation,” he snarled. “You’ve got your wires crossed!”
The girl stepped behind Myron and peered at me from around him. I could see he thought it was my fault that she’d disengaged herself from his embrace. I said, “You’re the one who’s getting crossed, not me. Anyhow, there’s no point studying Terra-nu’s manifestations if we can’t get the information back to Earth, so suppose we start fixing the ship.”
