Time to Come

by August Derleth (ed)

  “The agreement has been codified,” he said briefly, “and is now in force. Congratulations, Commander. All luck on the return flight.” From Marker’s view, Whitsey was a most unhappy man.

  It was Marker’s triumphant decision to lift for Earth immediately, but at that moment Jorey appeared on the Apollo-1 with Fashono in tow. Jorey was a little drunk. Fashono excitably stated that a grand village entertainment, consisting of a parade, of music, of folk-dancing, of a delightful drink called f’has, had been planned.

  “Already,” cried Fashono happily, “your men have approved of f’has—especially Mr. Jorey! In fact the supply is running so low that a neighboring village is sending quantities more. What a time will be had by all!”

  All except Marker. After the shindig broke its own back in the little hours of the Lainian morning, Marker was the only conscious intelligence in the village. His men were snugly drunk in their' houses, the villagers- equally drunk in theirs. It had been a fine celebration—for everybody except Marker.

  As he glumly paced the dirt just beyond the airlock opening, he noted that the air, which was blowing quite forcefully, was filled with flying particles. He brushed them off his coat, and escaped into the ship. Several hours later when he awoke, a casual glance outside his cabin port showed a startling thing. The ground, the village street, the shrubby jungle beyond was solid with the wild purple of the gorgeous gitso-flower.

  GITSO-FLOWERS!

  Almost tottering with shock, Marker shrugged on his coat and, jittering, went to the airlock. No sooner was he outside, than he began to rage internally. The Apollo-1 Was garlanded, but much less thickly than the terrain. Febrile rootlets were thinly imbedded in the very hull of the ship.

  Gitso-flowers could eat metal. Ergo, no metal-work on Lain. Ergo, no Earth culture! At Fashono’s house, it took some time before Fashono’s inebriated third wife would consent to waken the master. The deed was accomplished, however. Fashono came out, rubbing his great eye-sockets, and with no appearance of inebriation cried out his enthusiastic gladness at seeing Marker so soon again.

  “What is this?” cried Marker, dragging the Lainian to the doorway and making a violent gesture that took in all of Lain. “You said the plant was extinct!”

  “No, no,” cried Fashono. “I beg you. My words—I recall them well—were ‘virtually extinct’ As they still are. The plant is a great rarity. Of course, every nine days they do cover the temperate zones—but is absolutely nothing to what they used to be, Commander! Nothing. Once these nearly extinct plants covered all Of Lain every- three days. It has been said by historians that the blanketing effect of these plants on our world was the main cause of our pitiful lack of development.” —.

  Marker’s blood turned to liquid helium. He let Fashono talk. Soon the gos/ie-birds would come, said Fashono, .gobble up the blooming gitso-flowers until few were left, and then would retire to their hibernaculums at North and South poles respectively. Of course, they remained aloft during this sleeping period; this required little effort, considering the virulence of the planet’s wind system. At the end of six days the gitso-seeds would be voided, and the planetary winds would consume three days depositing them again in temperate zones, lateral winds shunting them away from the rest of the planet “At one time,” continued Fashono, nervously puffing and accidentally sending out unwanted stalks and legs, “we had a campaign to kill the goshe-bird as a species. This proved impossible. Now they have worked themselves in as a main item of our food-supply.”

  Hollowly, Marker understood. There was a three-way ecology here, gitso-flower to goshe-bird to Lainian. For awhile his mind roved frantically through various levels. He ended up by muttering an insult at Fashono and then hurrying back to the ship, where he got Whitsey on the Leaper. Luckily, Whitsey had just arrived at the Office from his home. He listened impassively, then shook his head.

  “The agreement, as I told you, cannot be rescinded on short notice. Furthermore, if I called an immediate Board meeting, I’d have to explain how your stupidity resulted in this impasse.”

  “Never mind,” snarled Marker. “You could help if you wanted to. But you won’t, so I’ll use my own measures.” “Commander.”

  i Whitsey spoke the word, softly, to get Marker’s attention. “You’ve gotten yourself into a hole, Commander,” he continued, leaning close to the Leaper screen at his end. “You -don’t have a planet at all, not if the gitso-flowers are considered sacrosanct, which they are by agreement.”

  “What’s your solution?” snarled Marker.

  “Forget Lain. Go out and get another planet.”

  Marker exploded. When he finished, Whitsey was sitting back in his chair, drumming with his fingers, and smirking.

  “My advice remains the same in spite of that childish outburst,” he remarked. “Look here, Commander. You’ve been duped and don’t know it. Remember I warned you against this thing called ‘identifying’? Fashono’s a liar. When he roved around in your mind picking up the language he picked up a lot beside.”

  Whitsey began ticking off points on his fingers.

  “First, he hustled half the native population out of the village. This was a plain sympathy gag, Commander, designed to strike at your emotional make-up. After a three-year absence, you identified your emotions and desires and thoughts so thoroughly with Earth that any vague similarity between something on Earth and something on an alien planet became identical. You became sorry for those Lainians. Great Heavens!

  “The Lainians are not human, Commander. I doubt if they cared if they had to sleep in the jungle. Maybe they didn’t even care if they died, because, by telepathy, or something, / they live in each other to some extent. And I doubt if the Lainians give one damn about machines or ‘progress.’

  “Nor is a gtao-flower one of the violets in your nostalgic back yard! But Fashono played on your tendency to identify, and got you to protect a lively plant which is fifteen times as big as a violet.

  “Similarly, your tendency to identify Lainians with. Earth humans led you to put that so-called Holy Land—an area that is six percent of the planet!—out of our hands completely. So if you add the temperate zones as another land-loss because of the gtao-flower, we can say that, roughly, we have fifty percent of the planet remaining That’s good batting—for the Lainians!

  “My suggestion stands. Get off the planet Let somebody else come out there and clean up the mess. But if you let yourself get in any deeper we’ll lose the planet the rest of the way.”

  Marker stood trembling with anger. He saw the plot And it had been double-edged. Whitsey, from his vantage on Earth, had seen Fashono’s subtleties from the first; he had let Marker sink in the mire, or had hoped that he was sinking. All this so that Marker would be kept from returning from a successful trip, and so oust Whitsey from his soft job.

  “I know how I’m going to handle this,” Marker growled. “Just keep out of it Whitsey.” He signed off, called the engineer, and ordered immediate lift

  Marker sighed his relief when the last of the goshe-birds was slaughtered. The creatures, floating in a dark shifting cloud with great shaggy wings outstretched above North and South poles, apparently were dead asleep when the Apollo-1 came upon them. The Apollo-1, using broad fanning beams of sub-molecular force, drifted above the cloudy masses, sweeping them with broad lines of roasting destruction. The corpses fell by the thousands. The goshe-birds would never again distribute gitso-seeds.

  Back at the village, Marker gloatingly sought out Fashono. Fashono listened politely, and then made large blowing sounds of happiness.

  “This is fine,” he cried. “Of course, by destroying the goshie-birds you have drastically reduced our food supply. But when the Earth peoples arrive with their machines, I am sure this lack will be remedied.”

  He thought a moment, then sighed heavily.

  “But I am afraid another mistake has been made, Commander! May I tell you about it over a glass of f’has at my disagreeable home?”

  A
slow crawling started under Marker’s skin. He towered over the treacherous Lainian. “Tell me about it now!”

  But Fashono escaped toward his home on pretext of beckoning both Marker and Jorey after him. At Fashono’s home, fully two hours passed as Fashono meticulously observed certain social customs. Then he dove for the heart of the matter, as if the important moment had arrived.

  “By now,” he explained, “the gas/ie-birds would be awake and the air would be thick with them as they settled to their feast Fortunately—or unfortunately!—they have been slaughtered and thus cannot again distribute g/Yso-flower seeds. But the gitso-flowers were not the goshe-biids' - only food. They also consumed the porbo-flies!”

  “Oh-oh,” said Jorey, hiding his eyes from Marker.

  Marker braced himself. “And these porbo-flies? What are they?”

  “Listen and you shall hear,” said Fashono.

  Marker heard; a droning, an ascending, distant roar.

  “Watch and you shall see,” added Fashono. He led them to a tetrahedral window which had been set into the wall by the rules of no known mathematics. Sweeping from the north came a fiery red, surging cloud of activity that blocked out half of the sky’s light. The cloud thundered, droned, began to split up into its components as it swept down on the village. Marker saw scarlet butterflies.

  Obviously, the lower part of the cloud was rubbing off on the ubiquitous gitso-flowers. The diminishing cloud rolled on, porbo-insects, landing and splattering against ship and village dwelling. For several minutes this continued. The cloud then passed into the distance. Fashono began his nervous puffing when Marker turned on him.

  “If only you had listened to me,” he complained, “or at least told me your intention to slaughter the goshie-birds. For, you see, the honey-gathering time of the porbo-flies corresponds with the eating*time of the goshe-birds. The goshe-birds arrive for their meal a few moments after the porbo-flies have begun their task of gathering honey. The goshe-birds, in their great hunger, eat porfio-flies and gitso-flowers at the same time! But now there are no goshe-birds!”

  “So then what?”- said Marker very mildly.

  Fashono miserably clasped his fragile hands, playing his part to the last.

  “The porbo-flies unwittingly shall carry gitso-seeds to all areas of the planet. Again our poor world will be covered with these weeds as the porfto-flies flutter madly in their undiminished, growing numbers.”

  “And then?” asked Marker in a voice that emerged from a drum of doom.

  “Then the porbo-flies retire to their breeding place to lay their eggs.”

  “Breeding place?"

  Gently Marker grabbed the Lainian’s tenuous shoulders in his knobby hands. He shook Fashono a little. “ Where do they lay their eggs?” He shook a little harder.

  “In the pibber-tree,” Fashono cried. “Under the "bark of the mighty pibber-tree. And how beautiful and stately those trees are, Commander Marker! They rise to the clouds in their kingly beauty! Some are ten thousand years old! Some have ancient rooms carved into their bases—-our historic shrines!”

  “I see. As I recall, these pibber-trees grow exclusively in your so-called Holy Land.”

  “Yes, yes! The park you agreed to protect. But I beg you to ignore this, Commander! How can the people of Earth come to us with their superior culture if you do not destroy these mighty creations of nature? I beg you not to leave our poor people so stupidly content with their miserable lot!” Marker cast him a pale, unnerved smile. “Good-bye, Fashono,” he said, and immediately went to the Apollo-1, Jorey waddling behind him. “Have the hatches closed,” Market told Jorey. “We’re getting out of here before we lose our shirts.” “We’ve lost them,” observed Jorey. “In fact I felt chilly the minute we landed.”

  Marker was "beyond reacting to Jorey’s offstage comments. He got Whitsey on the Leaper, and fully described the new circumstances.

  Whitsey said mildly, “So you’ve lost the planet.”

  “For good,” said Marker. “You’ve failed at your job, Whitsey. You’re going to be kicked out on your ear. It was your responsibility to see that nothing was loused up. I’m going to tell the Office the story.”

  “Nothing was loused up—except by you,” Whitsey said smoothly. “I’ll overlook that, however, if you head on out and find another planet. As for Lain, the planet will be reclaimed. I’ll call a meeting of the Board in a few weeks and have the agreement rescinded and then send a more capable Survey man out to force the Lainians to sign another agreement permitting the destruction of the pibber-trees."

  “The pibber-trees will not be destroyed,” said Marker flatly. “Why not?” Whitsey sneered. “Identifying again, Marker? Thinking of Earth and Sequoia trees maybe?—when pibber-trees aren’t Sequoias?”

  “All right,” said Marker doggedly. “I identify. So will the rest of humanity on all the human-populated worlds. There’s something real sentimental about Sequoias, Co-ordinator. So I’ll publicize those trees to the press. I’ll bring back pictures. I’ll expose Colonial Survey. The press and newscasters will raise a stink about a bunch of money-mongers who are willing to destroy what only God can make etc., etc. What do I care? I’m out of a job—just like you.”

  Whitsey bit his Up. “You’re a fool. Fashono planned this reaction too.”

  “So he did,” said Marker unhappily. “As Mr. Jorey happened to remark a short time ago to me, The customer kept on saying “yes” until the salesman got sucked up in his own vacuum cleaner.’ That was me. So I’m coming home, Whitsey. The only winners in this deal are the Lainians!”

  THE END

  Table of Contents

  PARADISE II

  PHOENIX

  BUTCH

  THE PAUSE

  NO MORNING AFTER

  HOLE IN THE SKY

  JON'S WORLD

  THE WHITE PINNACLE

  WINNER TAKE ALL