by Anthology
“Certainly, I mean! I mean just that. Come here, my magnificent wench!”
“Oh . . .’Umphrey . . . beloved!” Queenie sobbed, her superb body nervously trembling, ” ’Ow could I keep up with all those fine ladies and gentlemen . . . those important people from Parliament and the court? I might disgryce you!” She dabbed at a tear that was trickling down her pertly beautiful nose. She wrung her hands and kerchief in pretty but sincere dismay.
Muffin was trembling too.
“To hades with all of them, blast them! You’re worth more to me than the whole damned pack of them put together. Didn’t you hear me say come here?”
But it was Muffin who went to her, not unwillingly, of course, but helplessly, nonetheless. He was swept, ecstatically, and for the first time, to the great, billowing white bosom of his heart’s ease; to those now-tumultuous parapets where no man had ever died a little before. Almost swooning, his senses faint, he was transported by the most passionately wonderful embraces that he, a not inexperienced man, had ever delighted in. The long years of anticipation were rewarded and their hollowness swept forever into unimportance by the flaming reality of the present. Meteors burst and stars exploded. A truly magnificent woman was afire. Suffocating with delight and frenzied with excitement over this long-postponed rapture, he finally came gasping to his senses in the straining arms of a deliriously happy Queenie.
He realized, with a momentary sinking sense, what a great fool he had been for wasting the years he had known her. But swift consideration of their marriage and the wondrous privileges of completion, so long denied him and so soon to be granted, soon restored his euphoric state. They sat back together, finally, hands clasped and hearts beating high.
“Tell me, kitten, what the personal thing was that Narko spoke of? No secrets from me now, you know!”
Queenie blushed and stammered. ” ’E said, ’e said you’d soon ask for me ’and in marriage . . . and ’e also said I’d be fool enough to give it,” she whispered.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” said Muffin, “Anything else?” he asked.
She hesitated in sweet embarrassment.
“ ’E said there’d be lots of nippers . . . lots of little Muffins running around.”
“Ah,” said Muffin, “So?”
He reached for the brandy. A toast to their future was in order.
“I can find little or nothing offensive in that. For once I’m in agreement with the brute. What else did he have to say?”
Queenie took the brandy from him and put it firmly to one side.
“That was really all, M’lord. ’E said good-by.” Her voice dropped.
“ ’E did seem awfully sad. Then ’e just fyded awye.”
Muffin snorted.
“Good riddance to him,” said he.
“Oh, ’Umphrey, I don’t want to think about ’im any more. That part was just a dream, dearie. Let’s think about our own dream . . . the dream that’s just come true!”
He sighed and leaned back contentedly.
“Maybe the whole business about that rotter Narko was just a dream . . . or a nightmare, I should say. Maybe my fatheaded nephew Chester and his dunce friends have been right all along. Maybe those were only rabbit tracks, after all!”
Sir Flinders Tupwell sat on a stump in a field near Twiggers Corners. The intense cold bothered him not at all. Wellington, the mastiff, bellowed happily in the woods nearby. He had raised a cony and although he had little chance of taking it, he was having the time of his life.
It was fortunate, Tupwell reflected, that he hadn’t been forced to take direct action. Queenie had solved several problems, all unknowing, bless her. War with France might well have followed with Muffin in the Cabinet. He smiled as he remembered Queenie’s soft “Ah, coo, Sir Flinders” when he had chucked her under the chin tonight. His action had been parental, of course. It was far, far too late for any other attitude from him with any woman—even the wondrous Queenie—he thought without bitterness.
He stuffed his pipe with aromatic Bru, a puff of which would induce narcosis in the average man. Tupwell teleported this regularly from Therios, a small, warm planet in the great nebula of Andromeda, from which he came.
Narko had made a bad mistake and would suffer for it. The Venusian leaders had discovered long before that Earth wasn’t ready for the space peoples yet . . . particularly for physical variants of their type. He chuckled amiably as he thought of the proud lecher, Narko, toiling in the mines on Sol’s cold ninth planet. There would always be throwbacks like Narko, he thought. They never should have entrusted him with a ship, however. Someone would have to look into their conditioning methods again.
He realized with a start that he would have to do a little conditioning of his own on Muffin and Queenie. It would be unwise to allow them to remember about Narko. They’d either end in Bedlam or start riots on the earth. Undoubtedly it would be wise to induce the partial amnesia right now.
His body relaxed completely as the psionic factor took command. Moments later he stiffened and rose. He willed the dog to his side. Wellington came frisking and bounding out of the woods and gamboled about him adoringly as they started back toward the inn.
In a somber mood, he brooded about earth’s probable future for the next few centuries. Only one knew all the factors—all the answers. But the Therions were privileged to see a great deal. Unhappy though the choice was, earth’s scientists would have to be steered subtly toward atomics and away from the magnetics they were already theorizing about—and the results would be explosive and horrible. But with magnetics they’d be out to the stars too soon and that would be even worse.
It was difficult to make such a decision because such interference was basically wrong in theory even though it was sometimes necessary in practice. But there were others to be protected, particularly from these people whose brief life span burned so fiercely.
Imagine considering it unusual to survive for one of earth’s brief centuries! He smiled ruefully as he thought of Muffin, a man who would almost achieve this feat. Psionically, he had already seen him, in his middle nineties, struck crisply on the head by a poorly bowled cricket ball and dying of a stroke as he rushed at the offending bowler in a rage.
Curiously typical of the man, he mused . . . violent and indomitable. Fairly typical, too, of Homo sapiens Terrae who had to work out his dark destiny in blood and anguish. Poor devils, he thought.
ANTHONY BOUCHER
8
BALAAM
Anthony Boucher, editor, writer, and critic, has contributed much to science fiction. With J. Francis McComas, he founded and edits The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Under the pseudonym of H. H. Holmes he reviews science fiction for the New York Herald Tribune, and under his Boucher by-line he is mystery critic for the New York Times. His enormous energy apparently unquenched by these multiple functions, he is also a frequent and outstanding contributor to science-fiction publications.
Boucher, along with this and some other editors, has held radical views about science fiction for some time now. For one thing, he believes in the “upbeat” type of story, and surely this is a salutary rebellion against a pattern which has obtained for far too long. But what is more, he has brought intriguing theological opinions to a market long dominated by a materialistic philosophy.
His “The Quest for Saint Aquin,” which we had the privilege of publishing in our previous volume, New Tales of Space and Time, was hailed by readers and critics alike as sounding a convincing and important note in the development of a relatively new literary form. In “Balaam,” its worthy successor, we find once more a theological theme. Readers familiar with the work of the late Anglo-Catholic writer-theologian, C. S. Lewis (The Screwtape Letters, etc.), may recall that he presented the doctrine of the so called hnaus, intelligent beings with souls and children of God, no mattter what their shape or physiology and no matter what planet they come from. With this theme in mind, Boucher projects the reader to Mars and the delightful company of two you
ng chaplains of Earth’s garrison there —a Catholic priest and a rabbi. These men like and respect one another; but in a touching parallel to a famous biblical incident, Boucher shows how others of God’s children can misunderstand their parts in the tremendous universal theme.
8
BALAAM
“WHAT IS A ‘MAN’ ?” RABBI CHAIM ACOSTA DEMANDED. TURNING his back on the window and its view of pink sand and infinite pink boredom. “You and I, Mule, in our respective ways, work for the salvation of man—as you put it, for the brotherhood of men under the fatherhood of God. Very well, let us define our terms: Whom, or more precisely what, are we interested in saving?”
Father Aloysius Malloy shifted uncomfortably and reluctantly closed the American Football Yearbook which had been smuggled in on the last rocket, against all weight regulations, by one of his communicants. I honestly like Chaim, he thought, not merely (or is that the right word?) with brotherly love, nor even out of the deep gratitude I owe him, but with special individual liking; and I respect him. He’s a brilliant man—too brilliant to take a dull post like this in his stride. But he will get off into discussions which are much too much like what one of my Jesuit professors called “disputations.”
“What did you say, Chaim?” he asked.
The Rabbi’s black Sephardic eyes sparkled. “You know very well what I said, Mule; and you’re stalling for time. Please indulge me. Our religious duties here are not so arduous as we might wish; and since you won’t play chess . . .”
“. . . and you,” said Father Malloy unexpectedly, “refuse to take any interest in diagraming football plays . . .”
“Touché. Or am I? Is it my fault that as an Israeli I fail to share the peculiar American delusion that football means something other than rugby and soccer? Whereas chess—” He looked at the priest reproachfully. “Mule,” he said, “you have led me into a digression.”
“It was a try. Like the time the whole Southern California line thought I had the ball for once and Leliwa walked over for the winning TD.”
“What,” Acosta repeated, “is man? Is it by definition a member of the genus H. sapiens inhabiting the planet Sol III?”
“The next time we tried the play,” said Malloy resignedly, “Leliwa was smeared for a ten-yard loss.”
The two men met on the sands of Mars. It was an unexpected meeting, a meeting in itself uneventful, and yet one of the turning points in the history of men and their universe.
The man from the colony base was on a routine patrol—a patrol imposed by the captain for reasons of discipline and activity-for-activity’s-sake rather than from any need for protection in this uninhabited waste. He had seen, over beyond the next rise, what he would have sworn was the braking blaze of a landing rocket—if he hadn’t known that the next rocket wasn’t due for another week. Six and a half days, to be exact, or even more exactly, six days, eleven hours, and twenty-three minutes, Greenwich Interplanetary. He knew the time so exactly because he, along with half the garrison, Father Malloy, and those screwball Israelis, was due for rotation then. So no matter how much it looked like a rocket, it couldn’t be one; but it was something happening on his patrol, for the first time since he’d come to this Godforsaken hole, and he might as well look into it and get his name on a report.
The man from the spaceship also knew the boredom of the empty planet. Alone of his crew, he had been there before, on the first voyage when they took the samples and set up the observation autoposts. But did that make the captain even listen to him? Hell, no; the captain knew all about the planet from the sample analyses and had no time to listen to a guy who’d really been there. So all he had got out of it was the privilege of making the first reconnaissance. Big deal! One fast look around reconnoitering a few googols of sand grains and then back to the ship. But there was some kind of glow over that rise there. It couldn’t be lights; theirs was the scout ship, none of the others had landed yet. Some kind of phosphorescent life they’d missed the first time round . . .? Maybe now the captain would believe that the sample analyses didn’t tell him everything.
The two men met at the top of the rise.
One man saw the horror of seemingly numberless limbs, of a headless torso, of a creature so alien that it walked in its glittering bare flesh in this freezing cold and needed no apparatus to supplement the all but nonexistent air.
One man saw the horror of an unbelievably meager four limbs, of a torso topped with an ugly lump like some unnatural growth, of a creature so alien that it smothered itself with heavy clothing in this warm climate and cut itself off from this invigorating air.
And both men screamed and ran.
“There is an interesting doctrine,” said Rabbi Acosta, “advanced by one of your writers, C.S. Lewis . . .”
“He was an Episcopalian,” said Father Malloy sharply.
“I apologize.” Acosta refrained from pointing out that Anglo-Catholic would have been a more accurate term. “But I believe that many in your church have found his writings, from your point of view, doctrinally sound? He advances the doctrine of what he calls hnaus—intelligent beings with souls who are the children of God, whatever their physical shape or planet of origin.”
“Look, Chaim,” said Malloy with an effort toward patience. “Doctrine or no doctrine, there just plain aren’t any such beings. Not in this solar system anyway. And if you’re going to go interstellar on me, I’d just as soon read the men’s microcomics.”
“Interplanetary travel existed only in such literature once. But of course if you’d rather play chess . . .”
“My specialty,” said the man once known to sports writers as Mule Malloy, “was running interference. Against you I need somebody to run interference for ”
“Let us take the sixteenth psalm of David, which you call the fifteenth, having decided, for reasons known only to your God and mine, that psalms nine and ten are one. There is a phrase in there which, if you’ll forgive me, I’ll quote in Latin; your Saint Jerome is often more satisfactory than any English translator. Benedicam Dominum, qui tribuit mihi intellectum.”
“Blessed be the Lord, who schools me” murmured Malloy, in the standard Knox translation.
“But according to Saint Jerome: I shall bless the Lord, who bestows on me—just how should one render intellectum?—not merely intellect, but perception, comprehension . . . what Hamlet means when he says of man: In apprehension how like a god!”
Words change their meanings.
Apprehensively, one man reported to his captain. The captain first swore, then scoffed, then listened to the story again. Finally he said, “I’m sending a full squad back with you to the place where—maybe—you saw this thing. If it’s for real, these mother-dighting bug-eyed monsters are going to curse the day they ever set a God-damned tentacle on Mars.” The man decided it was no use trying to explain that the worst of it was it wasn’t bug-eyed; any kind of eyes in any kind of head would have been something. And they weren’t even quite tentacles either . . .
Apprehensively too, the other man made his report. The captain scoffed first and then swore, including some select remarks on underhatched characters who knew all about a planet because they’d been there once. Finally he said, “We’ll see if a squad of real observers can find any trace of your egg-eating limbless monsters; and if we find them, they’re going to be God-damned sorry they were ever hatched.” It was no use, the man decided, trying to explain that it wouldn’t have been so bad if it had been limbless, like in the picture tapes; but just four limbs . . .
“What is a man?” Rabbi Acosta repeated, and Mule Malloy wondered why his subconscious synapses had not earlier produced the obvious appropriate answer.
“Man,” he recited, “is a creature composed of body and soul, and made to the image and likeness of God”
“From that echo of childish singsong, Mule, I judge that is a correct catechism response. Surely the catechism must follow it up with some question about that likeness? Can it be a likeness in”—
his hand swept up and down over his own body with a graceful gesture of contempt—“this body?”
“This likeness to God,” Malloy went on reciting, “is chiefly in the soul.”
“Aha!” The Sephardic sparkle was brighter than ever.
The words went on, the centers of speech following the synaptic patterns engraved in parochial school as the needle followed the grooves of an antique record. “All creatures bear some resemblance to God inasmuch as they exist. Plants and animals resemble Him insofar as they have life . . .”
“I can hardly deny so profound a statement.”
“. . . but none of these creatures is made to the image and likeness of God. Plants and animals do not have a rational soul, such as man has, by which they might know and love God.”
“As do all good hnaus. Go on; I am not sure that our own scholars have stated it so well. Mule, you are invaluable!”
Malloy found himself catching a little of Acosta’s excitement. He had known these words all his life; he had recited a moment how often even his Jesuit professors, in their profound consideration of the xn,s of theology, had ever paused to reconsider these childhood ABC’s.
“How is the soul like God?” He asked himself the next catechistic question, and answered, “The soul is like God because it is a spirit having understanding and free will and is destined . . .”
“Reverend gentlemen!” The reverence was in the words only. The interrupting voice of Captain Dietrich Fassbander differed little in tone from his normal address to a buck private of the Martian Legion.
Mule Malloy said, “Hi, Captain.” He felt half relieved, half disappointed, as if he had been interrupted while unwrapping a present whose outlines he was just beginning to glimpse. Rabbi Acosta smiled wryly and said nothing.
“So this is how you spend your time? No Martian natives, so you have to keep in practice trying to convert each other, is that it?”
Acosta made a light gesture which might have been polite acknowledgment of what the captain evidently considered a joke. “The Martian day is so tedious we have been driven to talking shop. Your interruption is welcome. Since you so rarely seek out our company, I take it you bring some news.
