Then and Now : A Collection of SF

by Raymond Z. Gallun

  “Bad, Cliff,” she answered, her voice somehow blurred. “The folks at least know that something is terribly wrong with me. They had Doc Heyward here. Pop doesn’t want me to leave the house ...”

  “Lotta good that’ll do, honey ... Jack and I are going for another look at the marsh. Meet us there, if you possibly can. We three have got to stick together, for whatever happens to us...”

  WITHIN an hour the Verden brothers and Mary Koven, having crossed fields afoot from their neighboring farms, met in the dreary swamp. Cliff kissed Mary; but he hardly looked at her—what he saw was hard to take. All three stared in fascination around them. This was early November, and the scrub growths that remained normal and Earthly, were, for the most part, bare of leaves. But some of them had changed; near the place where the metal thing from across space lay buried, stems and trunks had thickened and grown weirdly gnarled. Leaves were long and darkly green. The grass had ceased to be just grass; blades had widened, and grown hard as wood, and sharp as daggers. Trees had sprouted tendrils, that coiled and uncoiled visibly, under the lowering autumn sky...

  “Even in the dead of winter, with snow and ice all around, this stuff would keep actively alive,” Cliff Verden growled, as if he knew. “Hardy—generates its own heat, as warm-blooded animals do. Conditioned—as to another, bleaker world.”

  The patch of recently fresh-turned soil, where the wreckage of the cylinder lay hidden, was now completely covered with what looked like bluish moss. Out on an open patch of water, a lumpy black thing appeared for a second, at the center of widening ripples. It uttered a noise like the croaking of a gigantic frog, grown far beyond common limits. The creature might have been a frog, recently; but frog it was no longer. It was as if the spirit of another order of biology had intruded here, to shape Earthly fauna and flora by its own pattern, and by this process, to supplant it.

  CLIFF’S dread sharpened. Had he come here only to be more sure of horror? Maybe the additional strain of it made his mind waver—made that sense of double-identity clearer again. He seemed to remember a tremendous pit, where cold vapors coiled. From the one viewpoint in him, that pit was terror that promised to engulf him; yet from the other viewpoint, it was a refuge that must be left behind, because this eerie Earth—this place of danger to home—must be learned about, and dealt with, if possible. Earth, it was called—a strange grunt of a name. A planet of hideous, ambitious life.

  Cliff stared at Jack’s sweating face, and knew that Jack, too, was experiencing the same kind of phantasm. As for Mary, with her eyes shining huge with fear from above cheeks that were now rough and fuzzy, even under the heavy makeup she wore as a mask—well, could it be any different with her? Cliff put his arm around her protectively.

  “The string holding us to all we know will snap any time, now,” Jack grated. “I’ll bet we don’t even make it back to the house...”

  It was then that three figures appeared suddenly from behind a nearby clump of scrub pines. Men. To Cliff Verden there was a shock in this development—an embarrassment, a guilt, as if at having been caught doing things which can never be approved.

  “What’s goin’ on here? What have you Verdens been up to? And what’s happened to my Mary? You told Link Pelhof that you had leprosy, Cliff! By God!—you’d better not kid about things like that. Mister!...”

  They stood in a row—big, stupid Link Pelhof; little, naive Doc Heyward; and massive Jake Koven in his checked blazer. He was Mary’s father. The grey stubble on Jake’s rocky chin, seemed to bristle far more than usual, and his knotty hands held a deer-rifle at ready. Cliff got the impression that Jake and his two companions were like a pack of Missouri hound dogs, bristling before a quarry as nameless to them, say, as a Bengal tiger loose in the woods.

  Fear was their main emotion. Fear of the unknown, the extra-ordinary. It had been in Jake’s trembling furious words. Yes, fear became fury by progression; it was buttressed by hate and prejudice against things far beyond understanding. And there it was transmuted into an animal urge to pounce, to strike, to bite and tear and kill, until a feeling of security was regained.

  Cliff Verden’s heart was in his throat. He and his companions were cornered quarry; he wanted to run, escape, avoid explanations that must make them all outcasts, fit only to be destroyed. But then his brother gave an inarticulate exclamation, and Mary, beside them, uttered a cornered cry which entirely normal human vocal cords could never have duplicated. There was no denying the alien timbre of that cry; there was no lie that could allay suspicion as to its meaning. Defiance was all that was left to use.

  “Okay,” Cliff snarled. “Put down that rifle, Jake—you damn fool! You got us treed; well, we ain’t possums! You want to know the truth about what’s happened to us, eh? You’re scared that your regular lives are being upset! Well—you’re right! Glory, how right you are! So—find out the facts for yourselves! Dig—there! But don’t touch what you find! Then, even if you don’t half understand what everything means, get in touch with Frankie Cramm! Do you hear what I say? Get in touch with him! Call it a matter of life and death—or whatever you like. He may be a stuffed shirt and a featherbrain; I don’t know. But he’s got experts behind him. Dough. The advantage of being known everywhere. So—that’s all I’ve got to say. Goodbye!—”

  Clutching Mary Koven between them, the two Verdens ran across the soggy ground toward the nearby woods, taking advantage of the befuddled surprise on the part of Jake Koven, Doc Heyward, and Link Pelhof, with whom they knew there could be no compromise, and no real cooperation. Not any more so than between rabbit and wolf. And the question was; which was which? But this was more than the flight of terrified humans that have become outcasts; it was also the flight of alien entities, lost and harried on a strange planet.

  For the duality—the double-viewpoint—was still more marked and frightening, now, in the retreating trio. They knew that by now they were not more than half Earthly; other minds than their own looked out of their eyes, and drove their hurrying feet, fearing the abhorrence of the Earthly strangeness all around, yet defiant.

  They stumbled on, deep into the forest.

  CHAPTER TWO

  WHEN THEY stopped at last, Jack Verden said drunkenly, blurredly, between gasps for breath: “We don’t live in our house any more; we hide in the woods. We try to keep safe, try to learn about our strange environment. Our names ain’t our own anymore. Mine is—”

  Jack uttered an eerie, long drawn trill. A night-bird might have made it—not a man. Yet it was a name. In a terrestrial alphabet it could be represented dimly: “Whr-r-r-r-a-ah-hh ...”

  Jack Verden, himself looked startled at the sound which had come so easily from his own throat. Then, as realization clicked in the still-human part of his brain, his roughened cheeks blanched, and he stood there under a tree, quivering and speechless.

  Mary Koven glanced upward; then, with her arms held in a gesture of protection over her head, she crowded against Cliff’s chest, and seemed to huddle away from the patch of murky sky. Now, for this brief moment, her sobs were completely those of an Earth-girl.

  “Cliff,” she choked. “You get to be afraid of the sky! Of what might be looking at you from out there where the stars and moon and planets are! Of what might come down from out there! The sky used to be safe! Certain things were impossible. But now that’s not so, any more! We’re caught, Cliff! By the moon-people, aren’t they? Glory—it’s the age we live in that’s to blame. Nineteen-fifty-six. Rocket experiments... Trips to other worlds about to happen! Contact with Lord knows what, already made... Oh, Cliff—how can anybody learn to stand it?...”

  He patted her shoulder. By a gigantic effort of will, he forced vagaries, that tried to congeal into reality, out of his consciousness—a vast, pit-like valley; the idea of having a barrel chest and great eyes that could see the rich colors of ultra-violet and infra-red; and a thousand thoughts that were not his own. He, too, for the moment, became almost completely Earthly, again.

  His con
sciousness remained dream-like. Still, what Mary had just said started in him a flow of lucid understanding that explained present days in the light of history, giving them a very special place. He began to speak, slowly, and almost without slang, as if he read italicized words from a book. But perhaps it was only his own good sense talking: “Sure, Mary... For billions of years, since it was created, the Earth has been completely separate from other worlds. But now is the time when human science has advanced just far enough to end that isolation—destroy that encasing chrysalis.

  “These are the most terrible, crucial days, full of wonder and dread and danger, and a million questions. Worst and most wonderful is that man faces a complete unknown, full of fascination, curiosity, dread, mistrust, yet hope of harmony. Maybe he dreams of friends on other planets—but he doesn’t know that they are there, or that he can even think very much like them. If there are enemies, they are of the worst kind—those who are hidden by the fact that even their existence can be in doubt—while their forms, their powers, their probable means of attack, are completely ungaugable ... It’s true that the three of us now know something about what we’re up against—but does it help us much? And how green were we a few weeks ago—when it might have mattered? And how green, still, is the rest of the human race?

  “Yep, these are the days of crossing a line, that something in our slow, primitive instinct for naturalness still calls impossible, dreads, revolts against, refuses to accept—though our intellects know that traffic between planets can be real. The refusal goes back to the fact that, through ages of conditioning, down to our beginnings as amoebae, the sky was always an impassable limit. Everything beyond it was a sort of dream—an ungraspable strangeness. It still is—at least partly.

  “So here we are, poised on the brink of one of the most significant incidents of human history—contact across the line. And things look bad. We’re elected for an honor... But can man ever really bridge the gulf of difference? Talk about tact, understanding—we’ll need it, now! We can’t hold on as we are, much longer. Easy, Mary...”

  CLIFF VERDEN’S voice died away.

  He clung to Mary Koven as if his arms could shelter her, somehow. She almost managed to smile. Cliff’s gaze wandered to his brother’s still, pasty face. But Jack, too, had found some courage.

  “So are the moon-people scared,” he rasped. “Long ago they knew that the Earth was inhabited—by observing with telescopes, or something. We’re as weird to them as they are to us. There are just a few hundred of them left. But they can guess that we number billions, by the way cities and stuff can be seen from the moon. They’re afraid we’ll come and overwhelm them. Sending scouts to Earth was to try to know better what they’re up against—and maybe how to fight back...”

  Cliff understood how his brother knew all this, for it was the same with himself. That duality was the answer—that rapport of minds that had to happen when an alien life-force had half succeeded in usurping a human body, changing it to match an intruding ego.

  From far off through the woods, Cliff heard the rough shouts of men. He thought he recognized Link Pelhof’s heavy voice, turned gruffer with fear, and the excitement of the chase. But distance blurred the words. Now there came the frantic baying of hounds. Could they be half as frantic if they scented mere wolf in country that had been free of wolves for a lifetime?

  Cliff half wished for human rescue, if it was possible—which it was not. But the puckering of his hide was not just the effect of an invading thought, and the desire of another frightened being to escape being destroyed. For he, as a man, was also the quarry; he was linked with circumstances too different for those pursuers to trust. Their brutality was terror.

  The familiar wood was becoming dream-like around Cliff. Yet one thought was clear: Get to the brook. Wade downstream. Throw the dogs off the scent.

  His arms still sheltered Mary. But as the scene shifted with the shifting of his ego to a far place that had been dim in his mind before, she vanished from his grasp. There was no way to prevent that shifting. It was as certain as death; it engulfed him like quicksand. As it must be engulfing his brother, and Mary.

  Then all philosophy, all determination to be courageous and cool, seemed without meaning; he was—there. Utter strangeness was as substantially real as the woods had been, minutes ago. He was prone. Stout metal bands confined him; crystal things gleamed near him. Apparatus. And the walls and roof, too, were crystal. He saw shifting colors that he had not had the eyes to see, as a man. There were layers of cold fog beyond the walls, and sluggishly writhing vegetation. Far off, yet titanicly towering, was the mountain barrier—the sides of the Pit. His mind translated other measurements. Two hundred and fifty miles across, the Pit was, and a hundred deep—at the center of the moon’s hidden hemisphere. The vast dimple produced when the Earth’s tidal attraction had pulled the lunar bulk out of shape. A vast cup to hold the moon’s only air and water. An island for bizarre life, amid stark desolation.

  Just knowing that he was really here, was a jolting shock to Cliff. Then he heard a twitter from beside him, saw great eyes with slitted pupils staring down at him. How could he know, and how could it matter, whether that stare was benign or hateful? Cold rough paws touched him. Shackled in a cave full of snakes, his terror could not have been as great. Cliff’s shrieks were not his own; he heard and felt the dry rustle of his great lungs, sucking in air too thin for human breathing. He saw the great, furry chest of the body that he now inhabited. Metal fabric clothed it, partly. His shrieking became a babble. He remembered that Mary and his brother must be in similar circumstances. Even his entrails seemed to writhe, but only for a moment. He was fairly rugged; but consciousness just faded away. Perhaps he had fainted.

  HE KNEW no more, perhaps for days. The biological exchange of identities proved to be not yet quite complete; for he regained a dim awareness in his familiar woods. A light snow had fallen, but the body that had once been fully his, was by now too changed—its flesh too full of cells enured to hardier conditions—for him to feel the cold. Crouching with him were the things that had been Jack and Mary.

  Passively, as if they belonged to someone else, he watched the paws that had been his hands, arrange fine copper wire around a bit of metal, intricately cut from an ordinary tin can. His attention and curiosity were both dull, as if his emotions were still asleep.

  But he felt the borrowed regret that it had not been possible to bring tools to Earth, by the method of transportation used—for tools were not alive. And other means—small rocket—had not been arranged for, because of the difficulties of damage by impact, and of finding such a missile after it had landed. It had been necessary to steal unfamiliar Earthly tools, and such materials as could be found... Cliff had the borrowed memory of invading his own house at night, like a prowler. The tin-shears, screw-driver, pliers, and hammer, on the snowy ground now before his vision, were his. It was a weapon that his paws were trying to make—something for defense in danger.

  Again he heard the ominous yelping of hounds. Then, like vapor, with no accompaniment of violent emotion—or like a dying dream—the view dissolved. Perhaps he slept.

  THE NEXT Cliff knew, an indefinite time later, was that he was back in—hell. Except for a soft artificial glow near at hand, darkness was all around; above, through crystal, icy stars blazed. This was the long lunar night.

  His great ears picked up wild babbling and screaming from close by. Those ears themselves must have changed and intensified his perception of sounds. But certainly the voices must be altered and unrecognizable, too. They sounded like those of parrots gone mad.

  “Cliff!... Cliff... Where are you, Cliff!...”

  The timbre was unhuman, but the pronunciation was curiously accurate. It was as if alien vocal organs, here in the Pit, had a skill at mimicry far beyond that of men, and probably far beyond that of most of the intelligent beings—varying evolutionary forces denied that they would ever be human—that might, or might not, exist on other stil
l mysterious spheres.

  The first voice died away as if strangled; but perhaps it had been silenced only by the unconsciousness produced by shock and fear.

  But a second voice yammered on: “Damnit—oh—damn! Cliff!... Mary! Oh—gosh! If I woke up and found myself turned into a toad, it would be better....”

  The words identified the raving as Jack’s, though the voice was not Jack’s, as it had been. Now, understandable speech gave way to babbling and yells, once more. But could loss of courage, here, when one’s form was not even like one’s own, be sneered at?

  CLIFF VERDEN joined in the yelling. He knew that the voice that had blanked out had been Mary’s. In parrot-like tones he shrilled her name, and Jack’s name. He writhed and struggled against the bands that held him hopelessly pinioned. Near him, prone and restrained like himself, he saw two barrel-chested, furry figures that he must have missed before. One was still; the other battled uselessly for freedom, as he, himself battled. Again Cliff heard his name called, and he looked into great eyes that now must be his brother’s. Beneath them he saw white hair in wide-flaring nostrils. The face, if such it could be called, was pinched and small.

  The Verdens engaged in no conversation that Cliff could have remembered later; their comments consisted of nothing but raving and curses. They struggled their way to the oblivion of exhaustion, but perhaps Cliff’s reaction to strangeness was a little less wild than it had been during his first awareness of being here. Perhaps a dim inkling—born of basic courage—that circumstances might be endurable in this place, came to him, creating a thread of hope.

  Before he blanked out, Cliff Verden again noticed the thing crouching in a corner. It was shaggier, more barrel-chested, more grotesque from an Earthly viewpoint, than even he and his brother had become. It did not move to touch them now; it only twittered faintly. Was the gleam in its huge intelligent orbs one of suspicious malice for all that was strange to it? Cliff wondered if such emotions were too terrestrial for a creature so different. But then, of course, suspicion was bound to the ancient law of self-preservation—which, because of the savage competitiveness of all life, must be universal.