Then and Now : A Collection of SF

by Raymond Z. Gallun

  Brenda and he were among the others, as the ship curved around colossal Saturn, only twenty thousand miles away. The Rings, composed of countless small meteors circling the planet at high speed, made the most splendid spectacle in the solar system. Yet it looked repellent and cold, and almost hideous. His feeling was that people could not belong anywhere near it.

  Brenda was silent beside him, her lower lip trembling, her eyes bright with angry tears. Yes, he'd brought her into all this, hadn’t he? Besides he felt the first sharp regret for things left behind. Things he had hated so recently. He wondered who’d be living in his house now. And in spite of knowledge that he was following a proven pattern toward peace of mind, still he thought bitterly of the conflicts and contradictions in man. It was as if there was never anything to grasp and hold for very long. It was as if life was a series of bright illusions that turned into the same stone wall as soon as you lunged at them.

  The liner swung outward to Titan, largest of Saturn’s numerous satellites. There it landed. Its passengers fell in line to disembark, and to meet the other thousands already here. The metal buildings of the camp were harshly utilitarian. Here was the frontier, the fringe of expanding civilization, where pioneering could go on and on. Here were the people who, tiring of one side of living, were reaching for something else. Yet in many sober faces, as in his own heart, he saw the question of what had been gained. It was homesickness for an idyll that had been given up for this.

  Instructions and equipment were issued. There was time for rest. Then various courses of training began.

  Titan was no longer cold and lifeless. Ten years ago the great air-machines had been set up. Torrents of oxygen had already been wrested from the frozen strata of carbon-dioxide, and from the silicates of the rocks—even the silicon itself was transmuted—to decompose the poisonous methane and ammonia gases of the original atmosphere, and to make breathing possible here without space armor. And there was artificial sunlight, now, supplementing the weak rays of the distant sun. For a large man-made moon of a moon already swung steadily around Titan two thousand kilometers above its mountains and plains. The surface of this sphere was metal, kept incandescent by a slow atomic process.

  Five hundred hours after the landing, Brenda and he drove an ato-truck along a valley to an assigned area far out in the wilderness. Here a stream that had been ice for eons now flowed into a new lake. In the volcanic ash, seeds specially cultured for Titan had been scattered by planes. Along the lake, they had already grown into low bushes.

  But the scene was still utterly dreary, matching his own bitter frustration and nostalgia. Once, in an effort to build Brenda and himself up, he preached a little from the philosophy of the times:

  "Life is movement, Brenda. It is restless and primitive. It is never crystallized perfection. The shifts and changes and surprises are what we are designed to enjoy. The lifting from the dumps to the clouds. It’s the contrasts that count. There’s a rough drama in people. They have to accept the fact of it...."

  Now it sounded trite, silly—a feeble attempt to explain the relationship of man to a universe that was too enormous. Yet he had to believe it, didn’t he?

  But the barren grey hills spread around him. And the only sounds were the rustle of the wind and the lap of water. He had dragged himself out here. And Brenda—so used to other things. It was his doing, his fault. He had left the rich, mellow Earth for this.

  "Let’s get to work," he growled, because there was nothing else to say.

  Brenda’s face was set and grim. Toiling doggedly and without comment, she helped unload the truck and to bolt together the small, prefabricated dwelling. He wondered if, like a caveman’s mate, she was enjoying a martyrdom to his folly. It angered him, for he wanted a friend, not a slave. Relationship of man to woman had many conflicting facets.

  He found himself admiring her toughness and courage. From this beginning his feelings changed slowly, like a dawn breaking. The taste of his own sweat on his lips was a good taste. The ache in his muscles was satisfaction. The house was up. Here was reality, solid purpose, and toil with one’s simple hands. It was like it was supposed to be.

  Brenda was in coarse blue jeans, like she used to wear under her space armor on Mars. From a supply chest she had taken small, tinted curtains. She was putting them up on the windows, scowling with concentration, but humming absently to herself. Here at the end of a long journey, she was in a new home, a new castle of security. She was over the hump, too, and at peace. Domesticity had her in its primitive clutches. No—he wouldn’t tease her, now, for her change of view.

  "We’ll go back someday, Brenda," he chuckled. "When the tide turns. Those days were wonderful, too. And they’ll take on the charm of old times."

  "Shut up, Ben," she ordered softly, and laughed.

  It was as though she wanted to deny their past confusions. He caught a motherly look in her eye, as if she thought him partly a child. Yet there was worship of strength, too, just for a second.

  "So all of a sudden we’re not phony anymore, Ben," she mused. "It feels good. Back on Earth I was trying to hang onto some small limitations too—to keep from getting lost ..."

  He grinned. Women were deep. More than ever he suspected that—subconsciously—she had challenged and egged him on, back into space.

  They ate supper, cooked on a small atomic stove. "Tomorrow I’ll start the garden," he said. "This’ll be a settlement, soon."

  It seemed that for now they had won a vast reward. Newness was all around them, and they were together again as pals and equals. They did not even have to talk to understand each other. They had the present, but they had rich memories as well. They had known contentment, luxury, pain, struggle, beauty, achievement. Life in past ages had never been so complete. It made a balanced and colorful mosaic, with a barbaric tone. Mystery, curiosity, and recklessness were in it.

  For a while, with both the incandescent orbiter and the real sun beneath the horizon, it was night. Clouds obscured part of huge Saturn. In the atmosphere, expanded and thin because of the low gravity, but rich in oxygen, lightning flashed and thunder rolled. Warm rain pelted down. But in the far third of the sky stars still blazed in the fearsome distance.

  Lying in the darkness, Brenda spoke whimsically: "Ben ... Will people always be half-wild nomads? Will they ever change?"

  "How should I know?" he said.

  Yet his mind clutched with both pleasure and fright at a far future which he could not imagine. Somewhere there the phantom of Nirvana still taunted him.

  "People always reached for the stars, figuratively, Ben," Brenda pursued. "When all the useful worlds of the solar system are colonized and beautiful and crowded, I wonder if a way will somehow be found to cross the light-years to other systems. Will a shortened interdimensional path somehow be blasted across those distances? Maybe that’s utterly impossible. Or will the trip be made at a crawl of a few thousand kilometers per second, in ages of time? Or is interstellar space a barrier that will never be broken?"

  He thought of the impossibility of remaining static, and of the need for a challenge that really matched increasing powers. He remembered how he had looked on New York before he had left Earth, and how senselessly he had beaten his neighbor. Mankind was like a rough, sturdy plant, growing, thrusting; crude but magnificent, and caught between rot and fire.

  Sombreness entered his mood. It thrilled and scared him. His throat tightened.

  "I guess folks will have to reach the stars sometime," he said. "Or die."

  The End

  *********************************

  Double Identity,

  by Raymond Z. Gallun

  Dynamic Science Fiction June 1953

  Novelette - 14984 words

  There was fear and bitterness, when three humans

  found themselves caught in an alien life-form's

  desperate bid for survival. But the greatest fear

  was of what other humans would do. . .

  CHAPT
ER ONE

  COME HELL and high water, the Verden brothers still had to drive into the village some time for supplies. It was in Kline’s Grocery that Link Pelhof spotted Cliff Verden. Link was big and mean and dumb; and he had a pathological hatred for anything out of the ordinary. “What’s the matter with your face?” he growled at Cliff.

  Cliff Verden gulped in honest fear. So the trouble was beginning to show—even through flesh-colored cosmetic paint. “Eczema,” he said.

  “Eczema don’t look like that, Dopey,” Pelhof growled back.

  “Okay—call it what you want,” Cliff snapped at the bigger youth sarcastically. “So I got leprosy.”

  In his heart he wished mightily that his, and his brother Jack’s trouble was something simple and fairly familiar, like leprosy.

  Cliff got out to his jalopy with his bags of stuff as fast as he could, without drawing more unwelcome attention. He didn’t have to tell his brother about the stares he’d got in Kline’s. Jack started driving as if they were a couple of bank-robbers making a getaway.

  “So folks are smellin’ a rat,” Jack snapped. “We can’t make as if everything’s normal much longer, Cliff.”

  “Guess not, Jack. But I still look more or less like me, don’t I? Except for the thickening skin, which don’t hurt, and which ain’t disease. And the fuzz ...”

  “Sure you do, Cliff. Me, too, I guess, eh? Hell, though, I’m scared of looking at myself in mirrors. Got to get over that... Cliff, you know what? I’m glad it’s both of us. If it was just me alone, without any companionship, you could shoot me for a maniac.”

  “Bum!” Cliff snapped, almost grinning. “What a load that would be off my chest if it was only you! But it ain’t just us, even. How about Mary Koven? She was out in the marsh, meteorite-hunting with us, that Saturday afternoon. Just six weeks and five days ago. What’ll her folks think when they find out what’s happening to her—and to us? Poor Mary! Poor me and you! ...”

  Cliff Verden was in love with pretty Mary Koven. At least she had been pretty—pale hair, blue eyes, a swell smile.

  “Listen, Cliff,” Jack urged again. “We’ve got to tell Doc Heyward ...”

  “That horse-quack? Nuts! If anybody told him what was the matter with us—and if he believed it—he’d drop dead from fright. We know ten times the science he does; and about this particular thing, I’ll bet we know as much as the best big shot professors would ever find out—almost! ...”

  The two Verdens conversed in the slang of their region, as they drove on home, across the dreary, lonely countryside, that could have hidden many a mystery. They were a pair of young farm boys—orphans—and the tinkery kind, the reclusive kind. Maybe like the Wright Brothers. Their inaccurate grammar didn’t match the magazines and the scientific reports they were accustomed to read—stuff that tried to keep pace with new developments toward a great dream, which was now just short of having been realized: Space travel. Journeys to other worlds.

  Almost every day the newspapers told something new: “White Sands probe-rocket ascends five thousand miles...” Or: “Franklin Cramm’s specialists develop improved hydrogen-to-helium reaction-motor ...” Or: “Cramm’s unmanned space-ship circles moon. Photographs of hidden lunar hemisphere, brought back to Earth by robot craft, kept secret. Cramm silent but jubilant ...”

  Yes, that last item brought things up to date—as of yesterday’s paper. It was the saga of young Frankie Cramm, heir to a food-products fortune. The fair-haired boy who gave up tennis, polo, and big-game hunting, for a larger sport....

  “Cramm rhymes with damn,” Jack Verden growled. “Still, maybe we ought to send him a telegram, or write him a letter. What is happening to us and to Mary, seems to be along his lines of purpose, though the means is a lot different ...”

  Cliff scowled. There was fine fuzz on his forehead—like the beginnings of soft, grey fur. “Nuts,” he said. Sometimes he wondered if his voice was really changing, too. Awful panic was rising in him; and that panic itself built more panic—because, to express it, his throat was trying to make some inhuman whine!

  DESPERATION cowed him.

  “Yeah—I guess we’d better write that letter to Cramm, Jack,” he said thinly. “Or even try to see him. If young Cramm investigates, at least our trouble will get a lot of publicity. It won’t do us any good—we’re past being helped. I guess we should have told long ago—instead of trying to make believe nothing was changed. Because it’s not just us; everybody’s in danger. And the danger, itself, is full of unknowns, Jack...”

  The Verden brothers arrived home; around them spread the acres where they made their living, farming. But around the big, unpainted farmhouse, were the crude, glass-roofed sheds where, formerly, they’d spent much time experimenting with nursery stock, trying to develop better fruits. That project was forgotten, now.

  The inside of the house smelled as old houses smell. Jack Verden put coffee on the stove, for lunch. Cliff sat with tablet and pencil at the kitchen table, and tried writing notes for the letter to Cramm. His literary style was more elegant than his speech:

  “... On Earth we think of space travel in terms of rocket ships... Seems as though some other-world science can accomplish it in another way... Biology... Something to do with basic vital force shaping—changing—the physical form of a plant or animal to match the form of another. At least that is my guess... Because I feel some outside dominance creeping into me... Another personality... No—not human... Especially at night... I suppose that’s natural... Because one’s ego goes to sleep, relaxes control over one’s body—and somehow seems to wander to alien places itself...

  “But to get down to facts... On the evening of September 18th, last, we saw a small meteor fall. Its light was red—showing that it was comparatively cool, and hence slow. It seemed to land in a marsh, nearby... So, the next day three of us went to look for it. It wasn’t a meteor... Yes—we found it. In a little crater. Smashed. A mass of hooks and metal foil on its nose, kept it from burying itself deep in the ground... It was metal, all crumpled up. We made the mistake of touching it—of trying to lift it. It was very heavy. We didn’t notice the tingling in our fingers till later. Some force came out of that metal, and into us. That the thing was broken didn’t kill that force. We left the thing there... Weeks later we came back, after we knew that we were somehow changing. Life in the marsh was changing, too. We buried that lump of metal, thinking that it would help. It had been, I think, something atomically propelled. A cylinder, maybe two feet long.

  “Now, matters are worse. I don’t like to take off my clothes. I see how much I’m becoming—something else, to match some unknown pattern, slowly. The body aches, as bone-structure is altered. The shape and form of the skull—not even to mention the brain within. The shape and form of rib and leg-bones... And I wish I were skillful enough to make microscope slides of the flesh of my hands, to see how cell-structure must be changing... I suppose it’s all reasonable enough, biologically. A familiar force—if you can call it that—has been isolated and directed. The same force which molds a human baby, or a seedling plant, after the form of its ancestors. The same force which enables a salamander, losing a leg, to grow a new leg in the proper shape.

  “And, likewise, my brain—our brains—must be changing, becoming adapted to another kind of identity... Sometimes it’s a little like double vision—one side of which you can hardly describe. But it makes you sweat to think about it. And I know I walk in my sleep. But it’s not really me. It’s something else, exploring an unknown place—somewhat fearfully, I believe. In the morning I find the stove taken apart... Is it my hands that do that, or my brother’s? Does it matter, since it’s the same for both of us? And only the night before last, our small electric power plant, here at the farm, must have been partly dissembled. I know, because it was rather crudely put together again.

  “How long will it be before those other entities take over what used to be our human bodies, completely? And I have a feeling that our identities
will be going some place, too. I seem to remember it. Murky. Nowhere for a man to be. Some disembodied pattern of ourselves is being sent somewhere, or drawn—by the cylinder we touched, and, or, by some force acting from far-away. So—do you want to call what is happening space travel? The trading of forms and minds across spacial distance. Space is involved, for the place I’ve seen in my mind can’t be on Earth.”

  CLIFF VERDEN threw down his pencil angrily; cold sweat streamed down his back—the droplets there finding their way past the little hills of the goose-pimples that could still form in the cells of his skin that remained human. Writing the facts down in his own square hand—pointing them out to himself like that—brought him a panic the like of which no Earthly cause could have given.

  Jack Verden, peering over Cliff’s shoulder at the writing, was no better off. “I’ll type the letter up on our old Oliver later, Cliff,” he rasped. “But let’s drop it for now, for Lord’s sake! Let’s get out of this house for a while—so we don’t go nuts! Go to the Marsh again to see what’s happening ...”

  “Yeah—let’s run,” Cliff growled bitterly. “Run, run, run! As if we could get away! Maybe if we don’t do it now, we’ll never even get a chance to finish this letter!” He paused; his ragged sigh was a little like paper tearing. “Well—okay,” he said wearily. “Running at least gives the relief of an illusion that escape is possible ...”

  A moment later he was on the phone. “Mary, honey—how is it?” he demanded.