It hadn’t, of course.
But there were things in Chapel Grove that year that did upset me. Most nights I saw the fiery cross burning on schoolhouse hill. Grandfather went about tight-lipped and angry, cursing “flap-mouthed fools.” I lay awake sometimes and listened to the hounds baying down in the bottom lands, and I wished with all my heart for money enough to ride the Katy every day, up and back, till I found the halt called B R O, There, I’d run, run and be gathered to Mr. Sakrison’s heart. . . and Miss Mattie’s.
The Katy local was retired years ago. There’s a fine highway now to the city, and they say everybody in Chapel Grove drives there often, since it’s so near. I hear everything has changed. But I read in my newspaper last week how they’ve locked the doors to the schoolhouse and barred with guns and flaring anger the way to the hill, and I realize how terribly far Chapel Grove still is from Mr. Sakrison’s halt.
<
~ * ~
JAY WILLIAMS
Jay Williams spent his twenties as a night club comic, a theatrical press agent, a stage manager and a soldier. When he finally turned to writing, he rapidly made up for lost time: in a little over thirteen years he has published thirteen books, ranging from a songbook through juvenile mysteries to historical novels which Samuel Shellabarger has called “authentic and memorable”; he has sold countless stories and articles to the best slick and quality markets; he has written the narrative and lyrics for thirteen discs by Young Peoples’ Records ... in short, I don’t know when I’ve had the occasion to introduce quite such a versatile creator to the readers of these collections. Mr. Williams lists as one of his chief interests “anthropology, of which I have only a layman’s smattering but that smattering is enough to enable him to create a fresh and convincing picture of a possible Martian culture in a story serious in theme but captivatingly lighthearted in its telling.
THE ASA RULE
They had anticipated everything for the first man on Mars, except the widgits. They had made preparations for communication with any intelligent beings, for contact with strange bacteria or viruses, for food and water and air and transportation and a thousand other things. But they had never thought of the ouljit-li, a name which in the speech of the aboriginal Asa meant simply nuisances, and which, in its transformation into widgit meant, for men, exactly the same thing.
“The trouble was,” said Commissioner Eisenstein, heaving his two hundred pounds about until the sturdy chair beneath him crackled warningly, “we had thought of Mars as a planet, and not as a world.”
The earnest young man seated opposite nodded intelligently.
The Commissioner put the tips of his fingers together and peered over them. “I don’t know how it happened. The result of oversimplification, I suppose. But we had always thought of Mars as homogenous: one large sandy desert dissected by canals, one unvarying type of Martian sapiens. It’s as if we should conceive of our earth as looking like New England and populated only by Yankees. A conception,” he added, with a sigh, “all too frequently encountered in some circles, I might add. However.”
He picked up his glass, swirled it once or twice, and drank from it. In spite of the other man’s alert expression, it was clear to the Commissioner that his thoughts were elsewhere. An odd type, Eisenstein said to himself. What in the theatrical world would be known as a shnook, a gentle, sweet, mild person who wouldn’t hurt a fly. Which made it difficult to think of him being sent here, hardly a gentle or mild place. However, the World Office for Martian Relations had a way of knowing its business; strangely enough, in the midst of what appeared to be bumbling bureaucracy, things got done and often done right. As witness Eisentein’s own appointment to this post, from the relative quiet of an academic chair of Anthropology, a seeming piece of folly which had turned out to be rewarding both to the Commissioner and to WOMR.
Eisenstein shook his head and followed the young man’s gaze. “Ah, yes,” he said drily, “that’s right. You haven’t met my secretary yet. Come in, Lucy. This is Leonard Jackson. Mr. Jackson, Lucy Ironsmith.”
Leonard sprang to his feet, something a man of his composition never should have done, for he was tall, loose-jointed and awkward and his feet were very large. There was an uncomfortable pause while the service unit rolled out, righted the small table, sucked up the broken glass, and with its air hose dried the floor and Leonard’s front. When it had returned to its position in the corner, he stammered, “I’m awfully sorry. I’ve always, been—I mean, I ought to watch what I’m doing. I wasn’t’ looking, I mean.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” the Commissioner rumbled comfortably. “You were looking, and I’m sure I can’t blame you.”
Lucy Ironsmith—the name was a translation for convenience’s sake—was worth looking at. She was not beautiful as a model or an actress is beautiful, but she was a slender and tough, a striking and capable woman. She had the clear, pale green skin and silvery hair so typical of the equatorial Martians, and her eyes, oval and dark crimson, were quick to sparkle with anger or pleasure.
She slapped the Commissioner familiarly on the shoulder, and said, in pleasantly accented English, “Enough, Sam. Mr. Jackson will think we have no manners whatever here.” She touched arms with Leonard and threw herself into a seat “WOMR?” she asked.
“Mr. Jackson has been sent to study the ecology of the tundra,” the Commissioner said. “With especial reference to possible parasites of the widgit.”
“Widgit control? That sounds to me like one of the Tasks of Var-am.”
“Eh?” said the Commissioner. “Oh yes. We have a parallel myth. The Labors of Hercules. Quite true, it does. It is a fascinating thing to me,” he went on, reaching for another drink as the service unit silently answered his beckoning finger, “how in some ways the same myths have appeared on both our worlds. I have found this to be the case where parallel rituals arose, as a result of certain similarities in group responses to environ—Oh, please excuse me, Mr. Jackson. I have not yet succeeded in shaking off my past.”
“Not at all,” Leonard said. “I’m really very interested in all sorts of things, and particularly in getting to know as much as I can about Mars. I wanted to ask Miss Ironsmith—er—by the way, is it Miss? I mean, are you married?”
Lucy blushed at delicate brown, and for a moment her lips were pressed tight together. Then her face cleared, and she laughed.
But the Commissioner, obviously very upset, had wallowed up out of his chair and said to her, “I abase myself— Un llam deolg. Please forgive his impertinence.” And to Leonard he said sternly, “You must apologize. Your question, I know, was lightly meant by our standards, but by the standards of Miss Ironsmith’s people it was in shocking taste. It was the equivalent of asking a well-brought-up young lady from, say Akron, Ohio, whether she is a prostitute.”
“Oh, my God!” Leonard cried. “I didn’t—I’m sorry. I’m really terribly sorry, Miss Ironsmith.”
“It was nothing. You have not been long in our world, and I certainly couldn’t expect you to learn all the customs of all the peoples of Earth.” She caught herself. “Ah! You see? Now it’s my turn to ask forgiveness. For we call our world Earth in our language, and often forget when I translate.”
“Well, then we’re all friends,” the Commissioner said, puffing out his cheeks. “Now then, Mr. Jackson. You said you plan to be here for several months, collecting and surveying. I must ask you to spend your first few weeks, at least, learning the customs and a little of the language of the Asa, the people of the tundra. You evidently have a deep-rooted investigatory streak, and it is just possible that you may offend without meaning to. And the Asa, I must tell you, are in some ways a grim and severe people.”
Leonard sighed. “I’ll do the best I can,” he said.
Lucy, with a smile, made the little gesture which among her people signified reconciliation. “And I,” she said, “will be your teacher.”
Leonard went off to the rooms assigned to him, a corner apartment w
ith two large windows looking towards the low, humpbacked hills. The sun was setting, and the slender, glossy brown leaves of the stunted trees that covered the plains for a hundred miles around were snapping shut, revealing patches of ocherous earth beneath. He was a tangle of emotions, chiefly self-condemnation, annoyance, and curiosity; he was wondering just how old Miss Ironsmith was, and whether her affections were unattached.
That overwhelming curiosity of his was responsible for his being on Mars in the first place.
He was walking with Lucy, the following afternoon, along the stream that flowed near the WOMR establishment—a five-foot fissure in the earth, at the bottom of which a thread of water, almost invisible in the shade of the mosses, tinkled and chuckled—and quite without self-consciousness he explained. “I was always asking questions, when I was a kid: ‘Why is this?’ ‘How does this work?’ I grew up with the feeling that if you liked people and were decent to them, and just asked them what you wanted to know, you’d get answers.”
“A naive point of view.”
“I guess so. Still, most of the time it worked. So one day, at a reception at the university, I was introduced to a man whose name I didn’t catch, but I gathered he had something to do with extraterrestrial zoology. He told me about the problem here in the tundra, how the regions of the North Plain, Imun-Asa, were useless to most Martians but valuable to Earth—I’m sorry, I mean our Earth—as a field of research. And under the contract with your United Nations—what is it called, again?”
“Dat-elughar, the Ten-Fingered Hand.”
“Yes, under contract with them we were permitted to set up commissions for study. But we had discovered that the widgits made such study exceedingly difficult. Of course, you know all this. I’m sorry.”
“You mustn’t be sorry always,” Lucy said. “You are weighing yourself down with unnecessary guilt. Oh, I see. It was a form of speech, yes?”
“Yes. Well, I said to him, ‘It seems to me you’re going about it the wrong way. If you exterminate the widgits it may very well turn out that you’ll exterminate something else you don’t intend, or somehow upset the balance of things.’ He said, ‘You just don’t understand. It would be like exterminating houseflies. Or mosquitoes.’ I said, ‘If you succeeded in exterminating all of those, you’d lose many fly-catching birds, bats, and other insects.’ He began to get angry, I guess, and shouted something like, “You just haven’t the faintest conception of the problem! and I said, ‘I wish I could take a look at it,’ and he suddenly became very calm and quiet, and said, ‘Oh? Would you like to do that?’ and I said, ‘I’ve always been intensely curious about Mars.’ And he said, ‘Very well, I think it can be arranged.’ “
“Don’t tell me his name,” said Lucy. “I think I can guess. When he became angry, did his face grow even redder and his white eyebrows clash together like shields? Am I right? Andrew Bulsiter, yes?”
“It was Bulsiter all right. I had to pick the Chief of WOMR for my speeches. Still,” and he looked a little more cheerful, “I did get to Mars, which was what I wanted to do.”
They left the stream and climbed a little rise. Before them, half a mile away perhaps, were the mounds of the Asa houses, rounded skin tents over the entrances to the underground chambers. A thread of smoke rose in the clear pale sky, and they could hear the bleating of the small goatlike animals the Asa herded.
Lucy said, “But I suppose you must—produce something, hm? Or he will have the upper laugh. Oh dear, I sometimes get my colloquialisms mixed.”
“I know what you mean,” Leonard said. “He certainly will.”
“But you still feel as you did about people? And you are still curious, in spite of the trouble it got you into?”
“I like everything,” said Leonard. He struck his hands together. “I want to know—everything I can find out. In our world there was so much hatred and suspicion, so much that was just the product of people refusing to look each other in the face, honestly and simply, wanting to find out about each other—we are just emerging from that time. On your world you didn’t have so much of that. Martians are simpler than we are in many ways. Take this question of the widgits. Your people in the south, the Hvor, and the other nations, the Garamids, the Osjena, and so on, all had everything they needed in their own regions. They never seemed to have any desire to subjugate other places.”
“Oh, in our distant past we fought bitterly.”
“Yes, I have read your history. But the Ten-Fingered Hand has been in existence for how long?”
“Two thousand years or so.”
“You see? And our United Nations for less than a hundred. Even so, it still has many problems. And none of your people ever tried to do any thing about the widgits because you never had any desire to live in the tundra, or conquer it.”
“There was nothing here for us,” Lucy protested, with a shrug. “The Asa live here and they are happy. The ouljit-li don’t seem to disturb them; I suppose they have learned how to live with them. Perhaps they even need them. But it is the land of the Asa, not ours, nor the Osjenok, nor anyone else’s. Why should we leave our own meadows and ravines?”
“That’s what I mean. And biologically there’s very little difference between your species and ours; there has even been a certain amount of interbreeding . . . er—well, in any case. Yes. What I’m getting at is that there’s no reason why the people of our earth can’t learn the same kind of friendly, civilized behavior. Some of them did, as a matter of fact: the Hopi, the Navaho, some Polynesian people, some of the Africans—and we are all learning it, by degrees.”
Lucy put her hands behind her back. Against the dark red collar of her coveralls, her verdigris skin glowed. She said, “I understand you, Mr. Jackson. I think you are right. And brave, too, to believe as you believe, judging by what I have read of your Earth’s history, which is to our mind bloody, senseless, and disagreeable.” Impulsively, she turned to face him, and in a softer voice she said, “I am without a house, too.”
“What?” Leonard said, genuinely puzzled.
“Oh. Of course, you don’t know. I am—what you asked me yesterday. Not married.”
She turned away from him to hide the blood rising in her cheeks. Before he could answer, she cried, “Your pack!”
He could only gape at her.
She caught his arm. “Quick! The pack you took this morning.”
Then he remembered. When they had left the commission bubble, Eisenstein had buckled a small rucksack over his shoulders, saying, “This is your widgit pack. Lucy will show you what to do with it.”
Ineffectually, he tried to reach it. At the same time, he was aware of a faint humming in the air and stopped to stare across the tundra. There was a thin, pale violet cloud, like a dust cloud of an impossible color, spinning over the tops of the foot-high trees.
Lucy clawed his pack off and shook herself out of her own. She snapped open both packs and whipped out two heavy plastic suits. He roused himself sufficiently to put one on. There were gloves that snapped tight around the wrists, and a hood with a fine-mesh respirator. Lucy was already wearing hers. She put her head close to his and in a muffled voice said, “We’d better walk on to the Asa village. The widgits won’t come there.”
“Why?” Leonard asked.
“I don’t know.”
“You mean you’ve never asked the Asa?”
“Oh yes, we have asked them. Many investigators have asked them. They only laugh, and reply, “We are their enemies.’ “
They plodded on, and all at once the cloud was all about them. It was no longer a cloud, however, but had resolved itself into a myriad tiny insect like creatures, pink, pale blue, and violet for the most part, with gauzy small wings and round faces on which, curiously enough, the eyes were set together in the front over a small pointed snout. Their bodies were thin and soft and translucent, and when they crawled about they had the habit of stretching themselves out so that it was apparent they could penetrate very small spaces. They buzzed a
nd hummed incessantly, and crept about over the surfaces of the plastic suits, tapped against the hoods, clung to the respirators. They were so thick it was almost impossible to see the path, and yet they were, each no larger than a housefly. In spite of the suit Leonard found himself slapping at them, trying to brush them away.
He and Lucy stumbled along the narrow path, catching the stout plastic of their suits against branches, slipping in the yellow earth. Once Lucy went to her knees. Leonard yanked her up. The high-pitched, insistent whinning of the creatures, even through the hoods, made conversation impossible, and indeed, made even coherent thought difficult. Through the transparent material of his hood, Leonard saw them clustered on his arms and legs like swarming bees; they crawled over the hood and stared round-eyed into his face. He caught himself staring back, and blundered into the tree-shrubs.
He had reached the point where he was beginning to convince himself that he could feel them tickling his arms and legs in spite of the suit—indeed, his whole body itched and tingled, as one does when someone says he has just killed a flea—when, without warning, the widgits were gone, every one; in the distance, behind him, the violet cloud vanished over the horizon. Leonard found himself at the edge of the Asa village with Lucy holding his arm, whether to support him or herself wasn’t clear.
The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction Sixth Series Page 5
