Adventures on Other Planets Page 6

  The blue haze thickened, became a ball a foot in diameter.

  “What is that thing?” Doak said.

  The Martians did not answer. Their gaze was concentrated on the ball with a steadiness that nothing seemed capable of penetrating. The ball lifted a foot in the air. It was above the heads of the squatting Martians.

  From his pocket, Doak jerked the flat automatic. It spouted three shots at the ball. The blue haze flickered with three tiny points of glistening light.

  Doak looked at the ball and then looked beyond it, trying to see where his bullets had struck the wall of the room.

  "They went in,” he said slowly. “But they didn't come out.”

  He seemed to be trying to grasp the significance of something that went in but didn't come out. With a slow, almost imperceptible drift, the ball began to move toward him.

  “Keep that thing away from mel” he shouted.

  The squatting Martians seemed not to hear him. The ball continued to move. The pistol in his hand swung to cover Tryor.

  “I'll shoot you!” Doak yelled.

  The ball darted toward him. He pulled the trigger of the gun. In the quiet room the roar was thunderous. The bullets went into the ball. Turning, Doak fled through the door.

  Like a maddened bull, Doak plunged from the dome. Kennedy got quickly out of his way. Behind Doak, moving far faster than he could move, came the blue ball. After he left the open doorway, it caught him.

  He screamed, a sound wrenched from a throat in mortal pain and fear, as the ball touched him, then he was gone.

  Gone in a direction that no eye could follow, gone from the space he had occupied to some other space, perhaps gone from something tangible to the senses to something intangible to them.

  Kennedy thought he saw coruscating pinpoints of light flare in the outlines of Doak’s body, he believed he saw the mouth gulp once, like a frog going hastily and unwillingly under water. Then the frog mouth was gone and Doak was gone and there was nothing in the doorway of Tryors dome except a floating ball of blue haze.

  “AhI” one of Doak’s men gasped. They ran, like crazy men, and they looked back over their shoulders as they ran, to see if the ball was following them. It floated serenely in the doorway. The running footsteps died in the silence of the Martian night.

  “Come," Tryor whispered. “Come, friend.”

  Kennedy went into the dome. The ball preceded him. It took up its position again above the circle of squatting Martians.

  “Tryor?” Kennedy said, huskily.

  “No talk,” Tryor answered. “Listen.”

  On the Martians face, the lines of concentration deepened. The seven stared at the ball. There was silence in the room. The silence grew. There was a click, as of a door being unlocked somewhere.

  “What is it?” Kennedy whispered. Somewhere a child was crying.

  A man was trying to comfort her. The sobs turned into words.

  “Where’d the man go?” the child's voice came. ‘He was here just a minute ago. You're a policeman, aren't you?” “I'm a policeman,” the man's voice said.

  “I want my daddy,” the child's voice said. “I want my auntie. I want to go home.”

  From Kennedy's throat came wild words. “Joan! Joaniel I’m here, Joan. Are you all right, Joan?”

  “Daddy!” the child's voice was a shout of glee. ‘Tm all right, Daddy. Where are you? I can hear you but I can't see you!”

  The gruff voice spoke again. “Now, now, child. Your daddy ain't here. He's on Mars. But I'm here and everything will be all right. Don't you worry none. I'll take care of you.” A gruff but soothing voice, it was, a kindly voice, but a startled voice too.

  “But my daddy is here,” the child protested. “I just heard him. Daddy!”

  “Go with the policeman, Joanie,” Kennedy said in choked tones. “Go with the policeman. I’ll be home by the next space ship. Go with him.”

  “What the devil is that?” the startled policeman gasped. “Who are you? Where are you?”

  The blue ball vanished. It went into nothingness, vanished into nowhere. The voice of the policeman was-* silent.

  The squatting Martians relaxed. The concentration disappeared from their faces. Tryor smiled.

  “That was my childl” Kennedy whispered. "I heard her.” Tryor waved his hand in a little gesture that indicated the spot the blue haze had occupied. "Through that we reach all space,” he said.

  Kennedy sighed. "I knew you had machines, somewhere,” he said. He did not in the least understand how this squatting group had reached the operators of the machines or how they had made their wishes known or how they had translated their wishes into effective action across even the void of space. But it was not too important to know, now. Later he could learn.

  Tryor shook his head. “No machines,” he said, smiling. “It is here.” He tapped his forehead and groped for words. “A something you have not yet, a piece of tissue, a lobe—” The faltering words went into silence. “Here, through this lobe, we touch all things, change all things. How say? How say?”

  The words groped into silence.

  “Good griefl” Kennedy whispered. A piece of tissue, a brain lobe, that was the ultimate machine. No spinning generators or grunting atom giants. No wheels, no cogs, no levers. Moving atoms, shifting bits of ultimate matter. The lobe of a brain.

  “But how did you develop such a thing?5'

  Tryor knew the answer. Tryor tried to explain. When in the long ago the clouds had stopped forming and the reservoirs had stopped filling, when the desert had come up over the fat farmlands, when the Martians had faced death and extinction, there had been bom a mutation, with the extra lobes.

  “We are his sons," Tryor said, smiling. . . .

  Outside, in the star-bright Martian night, Kennedy tried to understand what he had learned. In an extra brain lobe, the Martians had found the secret of Paradise.

  It was a secret the human race could probably never probe, and almost certainly could never duplicate. A freak, a sport, a mutation. The chances of nature ever duplicating it again were ten times ten high ten—against.

  For a moment, he was sad. Then the sadness was gone.

  He straightened his shoulders. For one race there was one destiny, for another race there was another destiny. What the Martians had received as a gift of the gods, humans would have to achieve with the work of their own calloused hands.

  Ahead of him, ahead of all men, were bugles blowing.

  THE END

  OGRE

  Clifford D. Semak

  The moss brought the news. Hundreds of miles the word had gossiped its way along, through many devious ways. For the moss did not grow everywhere. It grew only where

  the soil was sparse and niggardly, where the larger, lustier, more vicious plant things could not grow to rob it of light, or unroot it, or crowd it out, or do it other harm.

  The moss told the story to Nicodemus, life blanket of Don Mackenzie, and it all came about because Mackenzie took a bath.

  Mackenzie took his time in the bathroom, wallowing around in the tub and braying out a song, while Nicodemus, feeling only half a thing, moped outside the door. Without Mackenzie, Nicodemus was, in fact, even less than half a thing. Accepted as intelligent life, Nicodemus and others of his tribe were intelligent only when they were wrapped about their humans. Their intelligence and emotions were borrowed from the things that wore them.

  For the aeons before the human beings came to this twilight world, the life blankets had dragged out a humdrum existence. Occasionally one of them allied itself with a higher form of plant life, but not often. After all, such an arrangement was very little better than staying as they were.

  When the humans came, however, the blankets finally clicked. Between them and the men of Earth grew up a perfect mutual agreement, a highly profitable and agreeable instance of symbiosis. Overnight, the blankets became one of the greatest single factors in galactic exploration.

  For the man who wore one o
f them, like a cloak around his shoulders, need never worry where a meal was coming from; knew, furthermore, that he would be fed correctly, with a scientific precision that automatically counterbalanced any upset of metabolism that might be brought about by alien conditions. For the curious plants had the ability to gather energy and convert it into food for the human body, had an uncanny instinct as to the exact needs of the body, extending, to a limited extent, to certain basic medical requirements.

  But if the life blankets gave men food and warmth, served as a family doctor, man lent them something that was even more precious—the consciousness of life. The moment one of the plants wrapped itself around a man it became, in a sense, the double of that man. It shared his intelligence and emotions, was whisked from the dreary round of its own existence into a more exalted pseudo-life.

  Nicodemus, at first moping outside the bathroom door, gradually grew peeved. He felt his thin veneer of human life slowly ebbing from him and he was filled with a baffling resentment.

  Finally, feeling very put upon, he waddled out of the trading post upon his own high lonesome, flapping awkwardly along, like a sheet billowing in the breeze.

  The dull brick-red sun that was Sigma Draco shone down upon a world that even at high noon appeared to be in twilight, and Nicodemus' hobbling shape cast squirming, unsubstantial purple shadows upon the green and crimson ground. A rifle tree took a shot at Nicodemus but missed him by a yard at least. That tree had been off the beam for weeks. It had missed everything it shot at. Its best effort had been scaring the life out of Nellie, the bookkeeping robot that never told a He, when it banked one of its bulletlike seeds against the steel-sheeted post.

  But no one had felt very bad about that, for no one cared for Nellie. With Nellie around, no one could chisel a red cent off the company. That, incidentally, was the reason she was at the post.

  But for a couple of weeks nows, Nellie hadn’t bothered anybody. She had taken to chumming around with Encyclopedia, who more than likely was slowly going insane trying to figure out her thoughts.

  Nicodemus told the rifle tree what he thought of it, shooting at its own flesh and blood, as it were, and kept shuffling along. The tree, knowing Nicodemus for a traitor to his own, a vegetable renegade, took another shot at him, missed by two yards and gave up in disgust.

  Since he had become associated with a human, Nicodemus hadn’t had much to do with other denizens of the planet—even the Encyclopedia. But when he passed a bed of moss and heard it whispering and gossiping away, he tarried for a moment, figurative ear cocked to catch some juicy morsel.

  That is how he heard that Adler, minor musician out in Melody Bowl, finally had achieved a masterpiece. Nicodemus knew it might have happened weeks before, for Melody Bowl was half a world away and the news sometimes had to travel the long way round, but just the same he scampered as fast as he could hump back toward the post.

  For this was news that couldn’t wait. This was news Mackenzie had to know at once. He managed to kick up quite a cloud of dust coming down the home stretch and flapped triumphantly through the door, above which hung the crudely lettered sign: galactic trading co.

  Just what good the sign did, no one yet had figured out. The humans were the only living things on the planet that could read it.

  Before the bathroom door, Nicodemus reared up and beat his fluttering self against it with tempestuous urgency.

  “All right,” yelled Mackenzie. “All right. I know I took too long again. Just calm yourself. I’ll be right out.”

  Nicodemus settled down, still wriggling with the news he had to tell, heard Mackenzie swabbing out the tub.

  With Nicodemus wrapped happily about him, Mackenzie strode into the office and found Nelson Harper, the factor, with his feet up on the desk, smoking his pipe and studying the ceiling.

  “Howdy, lad," said the factor. He pointed at a bottle with his pipestem. “Grab yourself a snort.”

  “Nicodemus has been out chewing fat with the moss,” he said. “Tells me a conductor by the name of Alder has composed a symphony. Moss says it’s a masterpiece.”

  Harper took his feet off the desk. “Never heard of this chap, Alder,” he said.

  “Never heard of Kadmar, either,” Mackenzie reminded him, “until he produced the Red Sun symphony. Now everyone is batty over him. If Alder has anything at all, we ought to get it down. Even a mediocre piece pays out#

  People back on Earth are plain wacky over this tree music of ours. Like that one fellow . . . that composer—”

  "Wade,” Harper filled in. "J. Edgerton Wade. One of the greatest composers Earth had ever known. Quit in mortification after he heard the Red Sun piece. Later disappeared. No one knows where he went.”

  The factor nursed his pipe between his palms. "Funny thing. Came out here figuring our best trading bet would be new rugs or maybe some new kind of food. Something for the high-class restaurants to feature, charge ten bucks a plate for. Maybe even a new mineral. Like out on Eta Cassiop. But it wasn’t any of those things. It was music. Symphony stuff. High-brow racket.”

  Mackenzie took another shot at the bottle, put it back and wiped his mouth. “I’m not so sure I like this music angle,” he declared. “I don’t know much about music. But it sounds funny to me, what I’ve heard of it. Brain-twisting stuff.”

  Harper grunted. "You’re O.K. as long as you have plenty of serum along. If you can’t take the music, just keep yourself shot full of serum. That way it can’t touch you.”

  Mackenzie nodded. “It almost got Alexander that time, remember? Ran short on serum while he was down in the Bowl trying to dicker with the trees. Music seemed to have a hold on him. He didn’t want to leave. He fought and screeched and yelled around ... I felt like a heel, taking him away. He never has been quite the same since then. Doctors back on Earth finally were able to get him straightened out, but warned him never to come back.”

  “He’s back again,” said Harper, quietly.

  “What’s that?”

  "Alexander’s back again,” said Harper. "Grant spotted him over at the Groombridge post. Throwing in with the Groomies, I guess. Just a yellow-bellied renegade. Going against his own race. You boys shouldn't have saved him that time. Should have let the music get him.”

  “What are you going to do about it?” demanded Mackenzie.

  Harper shrugged his shoulders. “What can I do about it? Unless I want to declare war on the Groombridge post. And that is out. Haven’t you heard it’s all sweetness and light between Earth and Groombridge 34? That’s the reason the two posts are stuck away from Melody Bowl. So each one of us will have a fair shot at the music. All according to some pact the two companies rigged up. Galactic’s got so pure they wouldn’t even like it if they knew we had a spy planted on the Groomie post.”

  But they got one planted on us/' declared Mackenzie. “We haven’t been able to find him, of course, but we know there is one. He's out there in the woods somewhere, watching every move we make,”

  Harper nodded his head. "You can’t trust a Groomie.

  The lousy little insects will stoop to anything. They don’t want that music, can’t use it. Probably don’t even know what music is. Haven’t any hearing. But they know Earth wants it, will pay any price to get it, so they are out here to beat us to it. They work through birds like Alexander. They get the stuff, Alexander peddles it.”

  “What if we run across Alexander, chief?”

  Harper clicked his pipestem across his teeth. “Depends on circumstances. Try to hire him, maybe. Get him away from the Groomies. Hes a good trader. The company would do right by him.

  Mackenzie shook his head. “No soap. He hates Galactic. Something that happened years ago. He’d rather make us trouble than turn a good deal for himself.”

  “Maybe he’s changed,” suggested Harper. “Maybe you boys saving him changed his mind.”

  “I don’t think it did,” persisted Mackenzie.

  The factor reached across the desk and, drawing a humido
r in front of him, began to refill his pipe.

  “Been trying to study out something else, too,” he said. “Wondering what to do with the Encyclopedia. He wants to go to Earth. Seems he’s found out just enough from us to whet his appetite for knowledge. Says he wants to go to Earth and study our civilization.”

  Mackenzie grimaced. “That baby’s gone through our minds with a fine-toothed comb. He knows some of the things weve forgotten we ever knew, I guess it's just the nature of him, but it gets my wind up when I think of it.” "Hes after Nellie now/' said Harper. “Trying to untangle what she knows.”

  “It would serve him right if he found out.”

  “IVe been trying to figure it out,” said Harper. “I don’t like this brain-picking of his any more than you do, but if we took him to Earth, away from his own stamping grounds, we might be able to soften him up. He certainly knows a lot about this planet that would be of value to us. He’s told me a little—”

  “Don't fool yourself,” said Mackenzie. “He hasn't told you a thing more than he's had to tell to make you believe it wasn't a one-way deal. Whatever he has told you has no vital significance. Don't kid yourself he'll exchange information for information. That cookie s out to get everything he can get for nothing.”

  The factor regarded Mackenzie narrowly. “I’m not sure but I should put you in for an Earth vacation,” he declared. “You’re letting things upset you. You're losing your perspective. Alien planets aren't Earth, you know. You have to expect wacky things, get along with them, accept on the basis of the logic what makes them the way they are.” “I know all that,” agreed Mackenzie, “but honest, chief, this place gets in my hair at times. Trees that shoot at you, moss that talks, vines that heave thunderbolts at you—and now, the Encyclopedia.”

  “The Encyclopedia is logical,” insisted Harper. “He's a repository for knowledge. We have parallels on Earth. Men who study merely for the sake of learning, never expect to use the knowledge they amass. Derive a strange, smug satisfaction from being well informed. Combine that yearning for knowledge with a phenomenal ability to memorize and co-ordinate that knowledge and you have the Encylo-pedia.”