Here Comes Civilization: The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn Volume II
Page 24
"She may be wrong. And she may be right. There are those among us who walk wide arcs around horror, who obey the simpler, more important precepts of their religion. And then, Morrow, there are the whistling fools who rush in where even fallen angels fear to tread. People like you and people like me, may the gentle God have mercy on us."
His voice was so hoarse that hardly one recognizable sound broke the rhythmic, rustling sentences. Ransom found himself leaning close to the tough, wrinkled face framed on three sides by long white hair.
"I'm sorry," the old explorer chuckled somewhere in his throat. "My voice is hard to hear. You see, I—well, I scream too much."
There was a brief silence while he breathed heavily and fidgeted his head about on the pillow. Down the hall, a clock ticked in regular hammer-strokes.
"You're an explorer because you have a curiosity that eats at your insides night and day. But how much curiosity do you really have, Ransom Morrow? Enough to wander willingly through a land that has never been mapped, through a land never meant to be mapped? A land filled with creatures that are unfortunately not inconceivable, whose greatest horror is that they have been conceived and exist in the mind of an imaginative, foolhardy idiot! Have you the curiosity to do that and come to the rescue of a pitiful hulk whom only you can save before the ministrations of kindly doctors and sympathetic nurses send him stumbling forever into the abyss of the unutterable?" He paused, coughed soundlessly, smiled. "I'm sorry. To leave out the drama, have you the curiosity to eat a slightly mildewed dried date?"
"From there?" Morrow jerked his fascinated eyes to where the white envelope reposed on the ivory chest.
"Yes. From there. It's the Fruit, Morrow, the Fruit of the Tree. Only you must be careful—you mustn't, like Risbummer—a little—a taste—" His eyes closed as his voice trailed away. Suddenly they opened again, and he whispered rapidly, as if each word were measured in years of life. "Must help me, Morrow—knives—guns. Gets worse each time. Fools gave—me sedative. Can't fight—tied down—but dangerously close—dangerous—must get help—some way—some—way—" This time his lids slid shut, and his breathing slowed to a sleeping regularity.
Ransom watched the determined muscles of his face relax and grow gentle. Then he rose and tiptoed to the small table.
The chest was well known to any reader of Hallock's books. Given to him by a Buddhist lama for services rendered and friendship tendered, the hard yellow box had once contained the crowning, though fragmentary, jewels of every expedition. It had once held that bit of stone from Java—the earliest artifact definitely known to have been made by human hands; the tiny, primitive steam engine assembled by the priests of ancient Egypt had once rattled against its hard corners. Now?
Morrow picked up the envelope and flipped back the cover of the chest.
A handful of dry, olive-shaped objects lay on the creamy surface of the bottom. Dr. Pertinnet's dates! Ransom smiled. Outside the room, the little doctor's voice was detailing dreary instructions to Nila's occasional bubble of assent.
Slowly he reached for the envelope, pried it open with thumb and forefinger, and peered inside.
More dates. No, only one this time. Rather, what was left of the one used in the analysis.
A black powder residue of the brittle fruit streaked the lower edge of the envelope. Ransom dug his finger into it idly. Some powder wedged into the nail. He brought his hand up and sniffed the stuff.
Strange! He felt—dizzy. What a—a warm odor!
He steadied himself against the table and reached for a pinch of the powder. He brought it near his nostrils. He paused for a moment, then shrugged his shoulders and inhaled deeply.
The lights went out and the floor dissolved.
He was falling, falling through endless space and eternal twilight. Fear swathed itself about him like an oversized blanket. He beat his arms frantically against the dark as he somersaulted slowly.
—|—
Round and round he went; round and round and down. Always down into the hungry gloom. He was startled to find that he was screaming; he closed his mouth with difficulty.
There he was sitting on the bottom. Bottom of what? And when had he hit? There hadn't even been a thud; at the rate he was falling—what was it: thirty-two feet per second?—he should have broken at least every other bone. He felt his body carefully; nary a bone.
But when had he hit?
He rose on the hard, gray surface and stared into the shifting darkness. Something—something was moving.
A camel with a long, scaly tail that ended in a human head broke from the shadows and raced past him. Ransom whirled in time to see it disappear into the dark again, the smiling head bumping evenly against its shanks.
"Sqgg," breathed Ransom Morrow.
As if in answer, he heard a musical whine on his right. He turned. A cat! Nothing else? No saber-teeth, no pink worms instead of hair? Nope, just an every-blessed-day ordinary cat! A snow-white cat with the tiniest black saddle.
It lay on its belly, all four feet braced, regarding him intently. "Miauu?" it questioned.
Ransom knelt and snapped his fingers at it. "Here, puss," he called. "Here, puss, puss, puss."
Red gums rolled back to display a lion's maw in miniature. It lunged forward and snapped. Ransom jerked his hand away and leaped to his feet. "You are certainly one suspicious feline," he said, examining his fingers ruefully. "Not that I blame you—here!"
He jumped as two sets of voices—one human—began screaming.
The camel had wandered into what appeared at first to be a bramble patch. Only, as Ransom squinted ahead desperately, he saw it wasn't brambles that curled round it with hairy strength and dragged it to a many-eyed darker blot of head in the center. It was a huge spider—or a collection of fantastically large spiders with only one head but with the slavering evil and obscene legs of them all.
Long neck distended, the camel was bellowing its terror deafeningly, while, at the other end, the human head screamed almost recognizable words as it bit and tore at the extremities of the incredible arthropod.
Ransom backed away slowly, his hands slipping the leather belt off his waist. Not much of a weapon in this place, but he had to have something in his hands!
As the great dripping mouth in the center took its first bite of the camel, a bluish light began to break. Ransom looked around for the cat.
It was rubbing against the scrawny legs of an old man dressed in the flapping rags of a once-white laboratory smock.
The old man placed a hand foolishly against the side of his face. "Y-you aren't Hallock," he mumbled.
"No," Ransom told him. "But I'm not one of the citizens of this place, either." He stepped toward him.
With a look of complete fear, the old man moved back a few steps. Then he turned and ran. The cat loped after him easily, its smooth stride contrasting with his determined staggering.
Ransom cursed and began to follow. The old man and the cat grew fainter, though the light was much stronger now. After a moment, they had disappeared. The multilegged spider had also vanished. He was alone in a well lit emptiness.
"Now what?" he asked himself.
"Now what what?" Nila's voice questioned. He spun around. She was bending over Hallock's sleeping head on the hospital pillow. The severe room was back, white and reassuringly normal. Down the corridor, the noisy clock still ticked.
"Where have you been? You know my patients can't be left alone. We just stepped outside the door for a moment, and you took it into your head to go sightseeing. Can't you forget that explorer's itch long enough to do an old man a simple human kindness? And while I'm on the subject, how did you get out of here? The doctor and I were standing right against the door all the time."
He braced himself against her words. The ivory chest still sat heavily on the small night table; the envelope hung precariously over one edge, a tiny trace of powder oozing out of it. Ransom adjusted the envelope and noticed that his belt was in his hands.
&n
bsp; Slowly he threaded it back around his waist. "You say I wasn't in the room when you got back?" he asked at last. "Then where was I?"
"That's the point; the door's the only exit, the windows are all barred, and I looked under the bed and behind the screen. Where did you go?"
He smiled bleakly. "Oh, somewhere east of the sun and west of the moon. Pretty goshawful place. Has the doctor left?"
"Yes. He looked in to make certain that Hallock was asleep, couldn't find you, and toddled off to his lab. Ran," she moved close to him, "you look upset. I've never seen such strain on your face. Maybe you better wait for me downstairs."
"Check." He stopped at the door. His right hand was scratched. "That cat," he asked, "the one Pertinnet fed some of Hallock's fruit. The one that disappeared. Was it mostly white with a tiny black saddle near the tail?"
"Yes." He was upset at the sudden whiteness of her face. "Did you see it?"
"Um-m-m. Sorta. Kinda." He went downstairs.
When she joined him a half-hour later, trim in her blue nurse's coat, he had transferred the bulk of a pack of cigarettes from his pocket case to several ashtrays, charring them only slightly in transit. She glanced deductively at his face, then linked her warm arm to his. "Come on, Ran. Let's get out of this place. I want to play."
So they played. At a good restaurant, in the balcony of the best musical comedy of the season, around the dance floor of a dimly lit night club. "Some playing," she commented while a white-coated band stuttered suave music. "When we came in, I almost told the head waiter, 'Pardon my corpse.'"
"I'm sorry. Just not up to snuff tonight, Nila. Would you like to go home?"
She turned to him at the door of her apartment hotel. "All right, Ran, so you saw the cat. Did you see Risbummer, too?"
He spread his feet apart and took a deep breath. "What—what did Risbummer look like?"
"About the same size and weight as Dr. Pertinnet. Old, a little helpless, as if he had reached enough of a second childhood to need a mother again. He had a small acid burn on the tip of his nose."
Ransom blinked his eyes and tried to remember. Did the old man have a small burn on his nose? Maybe. Maybe not.
"I don't know; I really couldn't say. Look here, you and the doctor, you really believe Hallock's story! You don't think he's insane!"
Nila looked down at her shoes, considered. "This is top-secret, Ran; but I'll tell you. We have to believe Hallock to a certain extent. His mind is definitely affected—that we know—but how much is traumatic, induced by his strange experiences, and how much is the strange experience itself...? Dr. Pertinnet has his scientific reputation to consider: he can't go off quarter-cocked until he is absolutely certain of his facts. Meanwhile, we've been treating Hallock as a regular patient and keeping our suspicions from everybody, even you. We feel there may be some other explanation for Hallock vanishing so frequently—"
"Vanishing? You mean he disappears from the bed?"
She nodded. "And reappears on it again ten or fifteen minutes later, right inside his straitjacket. The first time it happened, Jenny, the night nurse, threw a fit up and down the corridor. Dr. Pertinnet smoothed her down and told me to take over till morning. It happened twice while I was on duty. We've managed to keep it quiet; Jenny takes it in her stride now. You see, Hallock only disappears when he's had a sedative. At all other times, he lies fairly still and chatters about his dates."
"I know," Ransom brooded. "They aren't. Dates, I mean. I tasted a bit of one, or rather, I smelled at it. That's what sent me to—wherever I went."
"You didn't! Why, Ran, that's crazy; it's dangerous! We don't know exactly—but Dr. Risbummer is supposed to have eaten one, and he—we only wanted you to get some information from Hallock, to—"
"Sort of a scientific stool pigeon," he snarled. "That gallant old codger is battling something infernally alien and ugly with every ounce of his used-up strength, and all you can do is shoot sedatives in him so he'll perform some more intriguing tricks. No. From here on out, I play Hallock's ball. If he wants guns and knives, he gets 'em; though I can't quite see—"
"But, Ran! You'll ruin everything. At first, we thought the Fruit had something—but since Dr. Pertinnet had it analyzed, we've been forced to drop that line. But if you show Hallock you believe him, we'll never find out what causes his disappearances, what brought on his neurosis. Don't you see what I mean?"
"No, I don't. First, you can get negative analyses a hundred times from Sunday, but it still is the Fruit which somehow activates the whole situation. If either you or Dr. Pertinnet had submitted it to the most elementary analysis of all, you'd have found it to be so, if only you'd have done what Risbummer did—tasted it! Now—well, now you've called me in, and I'm going to do my gosh-damned best to help the old guy. I don't know how exactly, not yet, but I'm going to hit it realistically, honestly."
She laughed at him. "Realistically! The greatest romantic of them all talking about realism! Ransom Morrow, who goes trotting off into the African equivalent of a haunted house because the ordinary, adult world doesn't give him enough thrills. Don Quixote tilted at windmills, but you—you make them up!"
"Now, look, Nila. There's no call—"
"Yes, there is," she told him fiercely. "You insist on slandering the only realism I'll accept, the realism of science, which must be skeptical if it's to be of any use. Perhaps you've discovered something of value by your reckless experiment; perhaps we've overlooked an important item in limiting ourselves to a chemical investigation of the Fruit. Perhaps, I say. But you are still a layman, whom we called in as a layman, and not as a research director. You're worse than the average at that because of your tendency to fly off the handle. In the future, you'll be barred from the hospital—and from Hallock. I'll convey your experiences to the doctor and let him make what he can of them." She paused with her hand on the door. "And perhaps I'll see what I can make of them."
Ransom grabbed her shoulders. "What do you mean? What will you do?"
She shook his arm away. "I don't know yet. But as a nurse, it's my case. I'll do as I think best for the patient."
Then she stepped resolutely away from him and into the lobby. He watched her cross into an elevator and move to the rear without once looking back at him.
—|—
White glare from the street light made him conspicuous and awkward. He walked for half a block talking to himself, and finally called a cab.
This was the nastiest quarrel he'd had with Nila. Of course, it hadn't been the one incident; it was the whole pattern of his coming jaunt to Uganda and her unquenchable opposition.
But Hallock! Poor, poor Hallock. Trapped by a misstep in the suddenly-become-reality of his own nightmares and held there by a series of stumbling, peering psychiatrists. And what nightmares! None of the humdrum kind that brought you awake in a fog of fear and the desperate desire to flick on the light switch, but nightmares filled with incredibly nasty monstrosities whose abilities to inflict injury and even death were disturbingly possible.
And Risbummer? And the cat? What invitation had they answered to find themselves in this world of half-tone horror? And the others—all the others there must have been who nibbled at the Fruit...
Dawn chilled outside his bedroom window before Ransom Morrow finally, reluctantly fell asleep. He had no dreams, but he slept late. He would have slept later, had not the telephone awakened him.
"Morrow? This is Dr. Pertinnet. I'm at the hospital. Uh—did Miss Budd discuss our patient with you last night? Did she mention any specific plans relative to him?"
"Discuss patient?" Ransom yawned a thick gob of sleep out of his mouth. "What you talking about?"
"She can't be found anywhere. First time it's happened. She's a very conscientious nurse. The night nurse said she took over in the morning, while Hallock was still sleeping off his sedative. I came in an hour ago and found Hallock awake, Miss Budd gone. There's no sign of her at all, just a half-eaten date on the floor which Hallock says—"
"Ye-e-es." The doctor's voice had uncertain edges. "He says she was curious about it when he woke this morning, and he persuaded her to eat a date. He claims she's eaten so much that she's now a permanent part of his nightmares, and only you can get her out. Of course, it's all preposterous, but since I can't find her anywhere, and since you and she—"
"Yeah! Well, hold on to your stethoscope: I'll be right over!" He slammed down the phone and dressed with flying fingers.
All the tightly packed equipment for his expedition into the African wilderness was in the next room. Ransom thanked a dozen minor deities that he was the youngest member of the group and as such was burdened with most of the armament, which covered every imaginable emergency. He telephoned for a taxi, selected three awkwardly shaped, oilskin-wrapped bundles, and staggered downstairs with them.
The cabbie helped him tug them into the car. His eyes grew round when he felt the muzzle of a submachine gun and the pointed ends of cartridges through one set of wrappings. They grew rounder when Ransom slammed the door and yelled out the hospital address. "First time," he muttered as he settled behind the wheel, "first time I ever seen an accident go to the right place to happen."
Dr. Pertinnet met him in the corridor as he dragged the heavy bundles behind him. "Why, wh-what's that?"
"Pills and poultices," Ransom told him. "Tincture of nitroglycerine. Nice strong medicine that's good for what ails Hallock. I think it may cure him. Here, Doc, take this one. It's bulky and keeps getting in my way."
He pushed into the old explorer's room with the doctor laboring and protesting behind him. A plump nurse blocked his way to the bed.
"Shoo, girl. Go away. Scat. This is man's work. Take yourself a toddle." He pushed past her determined opposition. At a signal from the doctor, she left the room, her nose high and her shoulders shrugging.