Here Comes Civilization: The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn Volume II (32 page)

"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—"

It was as if there was a definite
click
in the back of his brain. His mind churned away the clouds, tore into full wakefulness. "Hallock! Does he say she's eaten the Fruit?"

"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.

Ransom knelt and began to tear the wrappings off the weapons. He stared up at Hallock, smiling from the bed. "I'm ready. Map it out."

"Good," came the whispered reply. "I'm sorry I had to talk Miss Budd into danger, my boy, but I'm getting desperate. I spend more and more time in my dreams now, with greater risk of never returning. I counted on you to act immediately so that the nurse wouldn't spend too much time alone, but I swear I never intended for her to eat that much of the Fruit. I swear I intended for her to come back."

"It's done now. Doctor, give him a sedative. Don't look at me like that—
give him a sedative
!"

As the doctor unfastened the blanket and swabbed Hallock's arm, Morrow asked, "What do I have to do to get Nila back? And Dr. Risbummer?"

"I'll tell you; I'll be with you... there. We must kill the mother—the Brood Mother of Fancies and Horrors. You have the weapons?"

"Everything short of a portable hydrogen bomb. Rifle—high-powered Winchester—Tommy gun, two machetes, and a batch of hand grenades. Manage?"

The old explorer lay back and stared at the ceiling. "Wonderful! If only I'd had the sense years ago, myself... None of this would have happened. I'd never have reached this helpless, horror-ridden state." His whispers became almost inaudible as his mind wandered under the influence of the sedative.

"In Mesopotamia, far south of Dinra, where the desert turns to broken rock that looks like rubble left over from the making of the world... None of the native guides will go there, although there is a legend that the Garden of Eden and that treasure unheard of...
Treasure!
There is nothing but the tree—you pick through the sharpest rocks... and there is the tree—"

"The tree?" It was the doctor, breaking his staring silence.

"The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil," Hallock said softly, without lowering his gaze. "Not the way it is in the Bible... although some ancestor of man must have eaten of its fruit... it grows in a deep, rocky cleft where the sun cannot reach it and where no water flows... and yet it thrives... the summit is a magnificent crown of large feather-shaped leaves—purple, red and gold—and the Fruit... dozens of species of fruit, over a half of them unrecognizable, all on the same tree... not of this earth, that tree—yet who knows what creatures have eaten of it in the past, and what the Fruit eaten by a hairy Adam and his Eve. I could not know, God help me.

His voice stopped. Dr. Pertinnet tiptoed over to see if he was asleep. Suddenly, the whispers began again. The old explorer's eyes bulged, and he licked his dry lips.

"I could not know... and I didn't care... I picked the dates from the top because I recognized them, and I thought I would be safe... I thought I would be safe!... How was I to know which fruit had already been eaten by man... and then it began!... I lived in my own dreams, the dreams of my past... but only for a moment... it was pleasant... then... but when I gave some to the camel driver, and he disappeared into the dream... then when I saw the Brood Mother and what she sent forth in my mind... I could not know which fruit was already eaten by man... I could not know... what kind of men we would be... what kind if a different fruit had been eaten then... if the one I picked had been eaten... a race living in its dreams... strange powers... what some races have eaten... a dinosaur nibbling at the top... monstrosities of all geologic time eating of it... how was I to know which... which fruit..."

He was asleep.

Morrow said "Whew!" He glanced at the doctor, who was licking his lips and staring at the man on the bed.

"Coming with me?"

The doctor was startled. "Where? How?"

"Into Hallock's madness, or his mind. Comes to the same thing. Want to come along? I need a gun bearer."

"Now look here, Morrow! I've stood around and let this foolishness go on—"

"It's not foolishness," Morrow interrupted. "You should know that by now. You can't find Nila, and I can. You can't give an adequate reason for Hallock's disappearances, and I can. You don't dare taste any of that fruit which your lab says is chemically pure, while I—"

"Oh, all right. All right. I'll admit this situation has its unusual side..."

"The understatement of the millennium. Now wrap this grenade belt around your waist and pick up those cartridge boxes. See if you can slip a machete under your right arm—tha-a-at's right. I'll carry the guns and the other machete." Morrow pulled two dates out of the ivory chest on the night table.

He grinned at the doctor, who was bent almost double under the weight of the armament. "How do you know," the old man grumbled, "that, assuming we go anywhere, we will arrive with this—this confounded arsenal?"

"Don't know. I just assume it from Hallock's instructions and the fact that I carried all my clothes with me on my last visit. Here, have a date. Go on, take it!"

The psychiatrist took the fruit, turned it around doubtfully, and finally, following Ransom Morrow's example, popped it in his mouth.

"Mmmm, good," he said. "Tastes just like—"

—|—

They were falling. Down and down, around and around. All about them, the curiously shifting darkness. Morrow felt the pressing fear, the screaming desire to run away and panic.

"—just like a fruitcake the hospital dietician makes when she's in a good mood," the doctor was saying. His voice was quite calm, with the slightest edge of wonder to it. "Interesting that this should begin by a falling sensation. I think that the most reasonable explanation may be—"

They had landed. Again there was no memory of the actual moment of contact. The doctor rose and brushed nonexistent dust from his white hospital gown. He looked around nearsightedly and continued.

"The most reasonable explanation may be found in Freud. Not the Freud of declining mental powers, but the earlier, more acute scientist."

Ransom Morrow shook his head and began to divest the doctor of his weapons. "Doc," he said, "you are one nerveless wonder."

"Eh? Quite. Now on the subject of a falling sensation, Freud would have it that—
Risbummer!
"

He had turned and noticed the old man in tattered gown, who stood watching him fearfully. "Risbummer! So this is where you've been keeping yourself! Where are your notes, man?"

"My—notes?"

"Yes, your notes on the Hallock case. Come, come, we need them badly. Inexcusable to go away without leaving your notes available to the staff. I've been through the hospital files three times and your office twice. Where did you put them?"

The other passed his hand through his sparse hair. "My notes. Did—did you look in my cigar box? I seem somehow—I—I think I left them in the cigar box. I'm—I'm sorry for the trouble you've had."

"That's quite all right," Pertinnet told him magnanimously. "Just so we get them into the files eventually." The two men moved off to one side, conversing in low tones, for all the world like two physicians at a sickbed. Risbummer
did
have a nose-burn.

"Old home week in Hallock's subconscious," Ransom said to himself. He finished loading the rifle and stood up. "Nila," he called. "Hey, Nila!"

He was surprised at the speed with which his call was answered. A hysterical figure in white dashed out of the darkness and flung herself against his chest. He held her, soothed her, kissed her. "You aren't hurt?" he asked anxiously.

"No, I'm not hurt. But this place—this awful,
awful
place!" She stopped sobbing and straightened her hair. "I must look—
oh!
As bad as Risbummer. He ran away when he first saw me, but the cat was friendly and after a while so was he. He was in a broken state when I arrived: it's wonderful what a little human conversation will do."

"Well, you aren't merely human," Morrow assured her. He glanced over her head and stiffened. That pith helmet, those tropical shorts, that flowing black hair—it was Wells W. Hallock, but the Hallock of fifteen, of twenty years ago. The cat rubbed affectionately against his khaki wool socks.

"Some tableau!" Hallock said in the booming voice of youth. "Pertinnet and Risbummer are holding a consultation; Budd and Morrow are holding each other. All the stuff come through?" He walked forward briskly.

While the two doctors came up to watch, he selected a machete and loaded the submachine gun; he hung two grenades from his belt.

"Don't mind if I take the Tommy?" he asked. "I know the vulnerable spots better than you. Let the docs carry the ammo."

He moved off into the lifting gloom, and Morrow hurried up beside him. "Where are we going? I don't want to take Nila where there's any danger."

"Well, the location keeps changing, but we'll get there soon. And don't worry about Nila: she's safest with you. You two, along with Pertinnet and Risbummer, are stuck here, by the way: you've all eaten too much of the Fruit. Your only hope is to wipe out the Brood Mother. From what I've seen, all this stuff will dissolve with her. I don't know whether we have enough equipment to sock it to her, but if we haven't—" He shrugged.

Nila walked directly behind them, looking about fearfully at the uglinesses slipping by in the darkness. The doctors brought up the rear, struggling under the heavy boxes of ammunition. The cat roamed on the outskirts of their little group, never moving off too far.

"How is it that you keep your youth?" Morrow asked.

"I don't know. It's one of the things I don't understand about this whole affair: I'm always as young as when I first tasted the Fruit. But that's just one puzzler. Another is why everyone who eats the Fruit winds up in my dream rather than in their own. Possibly because I was the first to eat it, and when it was fresh from the plucking at that. It's convenient to stay young, though, and I've often thought that if it weren't for these horrors barging about—Hello!"

A tiny, red head supported on a flexible stalk of a neck waved down out of the gray shadow. There were three eyes in the head and a kind of sucking proboscis for a mouth. The other end of the stalk protruded from a bulging red mass some ten yards away.

As the head descended lazily, Ransom pumped a shot into the center eye. He heard Hallock let go with a burst from the machine gun, and the head, severed from the neck, fell and dissolved into red liquid as it fell. Almost immediately, a new head began to take form on the thin, twisting neck.

"Get the body—there!" Hallock was yelling.

Ransom pulled a grenade from his belt, ripped the pin out with his teeth, and lobbed it at the main body of the creature. Then—"Drop!" he yelled.

They all fell flat as the terrific concussion sent bits of steel and red, writhing flesh over their heads. When they rose, the monstrosity was gone.

"You fool!" Hallock was raging. "You wild-eyed, trigger-happy fool! Wasting good grenades on a creature like that when we could have finished it with cartridges. We'll need all of our grenades for the Brood Mother." He took stock morosely. "Only five left. They'll have to do."

"Wasn't that the Brood Mother?" Morrow asked. He was still unsteady, but he put a reassuring arm around Nila.

"That? The Brood Mother? Why, that was just one of her minor offspring—part of a nightmare I had ten years ago in Tunis. When you see the Brood Mother—
you'll recognize her!
"

"How?"

"She just couldn't be anything else! Let's go."

Nila walked up and slipped her arm on Ransom's shoulder. "If we meet one of mama's bigger boys, I want to be as close to you as I can get, Ran," she whispered.

"Steady," Ransom warned. "I'm about ready to go off the deep end myself. But we've got to hold steady." He followed Hallock.