Selected Stories (6 page)

Tod looked up at him. “There’s one more, I think.”

There was—another girl. Moira brought it over in the sixth box. “Sweet,” April breathed, watching them. “They’re sweet.”

Moira said, wearily, “That’s all.”

Tod looked up at her.

“Alma … ?”

Moira waved laxly toward the neat stack of incubators. “That’s all,” she whispered tiredly, and went to Carl.

That’s all there is of Alma,
Tod thought bitterly. He glanced across at Teague. The tall figure raised a steady hand, wiped his face with his upper arm. His raised hand touched the high end of the Coffin, and for an instant held a grip. Teague’s face lay against his arm, pillowed, hidden and still. Then he completed the wiping motion and began stripping the sterile plastic skin from his hands. Tod’s heart went out to him, but he bit the insides of his cheeks and kept silent.
A strange tradition,
thought Tod,
that makes it impolite to grieve….

Teague dropped the shreds of plastic into the disposal slot and turned to face them. He looked at each in turn, and each in turn found some measure of control. He turned then, and pulled a lever, and the side of Alma’s Coffin slid silently up.

Good-bye….

Tod put his back against the bulkhead and slid down beside April. He put an arm over her shoulders. Carl and Moira sat close, holding hands. Moira’s eyes were shadowed but very much awake. Carl bore an expression almost of sullenness. Tod glanced, then glared at the boxes. Three of the babies were crying, though of course they could not be heard through the plastic incubators. Tod was suddenly conscious of Teague’s eyes upon him. He flushed, and then let his anger drain to the capacious inner reservoir which must hold it and all his grief as well.

When he had their attention, Teague sat cross-legged before them and placed a small object on the floor.

Tod looked at the object. At first glance it seemed to be a metal spring about as long as his thumb, mounted vertically on a black base. Then he realized that it was an art object of some kind, made of a golden substance which shimmered and all but flowed. It was an interlocked double spiral; the turns went round and up, round and down, round and up again, the texture of the gold clearly indicating, in a strange and alive way, which symbolized a rising and falling flux. Shaped as if it had been wound on a cylinder and the cylinder removed, the thing was formed of a continuous wire or rod which had no beginning and no end, but which turned and rose and turned and descended again in an exquisite continuity…. Its base was formless, an almost-smoke just as the gold showed an almost-flux; and it was as lightless as ylem.

Teague said, “This was in Alma’s Coffin. It was not there when we left Earth.”

“It must have been,” said Carl flatly.

Teague silently shook his head. April opened her lips, closed them again. Teague said, “Yes, April?”

April shook her head. “Nothing, Teague. Really nothing.” But because Teague kept looking at her, waiting, she said, “I was going to say … it’s beautiful.” She hung her head.

Teague’s lips twitched. Tod could sense the sympathy there. He stroked April’s silver hair. She responded, moving her shoulder slightly under his hand. “What is it, Teague?”

When Teague would not answer, Moira asked, “Did it … had it anything to do with Alma?”

Teague picked it up thoughtfully. Tod could see the yellow loom it cast against his throat and cheek, the golden points it built in his eyes. “Something did.” He paused. “You know she was supposed to conceive on awakening. But to give birth—”

Carl cracked a closed hand against his forehead. “She must have been awake for anyway two hundred and eighty days!”

“Maybe she made it,” said Moira.

Tod watched Teague’s hand half-close on the object as if it might be precious now. Moira’s was a welcome thought, and the welcome could be read on Teague’s face. Watching it, Tod saw the complicated spoor of a series of efforts—a gathering of emotions, a determination; the closing of certain doors, the opening of others.

Teague rose. “We have a ship to inspect, sights to take, calculations … we’ve got to tune in Terra Prime, send them a message if we can. Tod, check the corridor air.”

“The stars—we’ll see the stars!” Tod whispered to April, the heady thought all but eclipsing everything else. He bounded to the corner where the door controls waited. He punched the test button, and a spot of green appeared over the door, indicating that with their awakening, the evacuated chambers, the living and control compartments, had been flooded with air and warmed. “Air okay.”

“Go on then.”

They crowded around Tod as he grasped the lever and pushed.
I won’t wait for orders,
Tod thought.
I’ll slide right across the corridor and open the guard plate and there it’ll be—space, and the stars!

The door opened.

There was no corridor, no bulkhead, no armored port-hole, no—

No
ship
!

There was a night out there, dank, warm. It was wet. In it were hooked, fleshy leaves and a tangle of roots; a thing with legs which hopped up on the sill and shimmered its wings for them; a thing like a flying hammer which crashed in and smote the shimmering one and was gone with it, leaving a stain on the deck-plates. There was a sky aglow with a ghastly green. There was a thrashing and a scream out there, a pressure of growth, and a wrongness.

Blood ran down Tod’s chin. His teeth met through his lower lip. He turned and looked past three sets of terrified eyes to Teague, who said, “Shut it!”

Tod snatched at the control. It broke off in his hand….

How long does a thought, a long thought, take?

Tod stood with the fractured metal in his hand and thought:
We were told that above all things we must adapt. We were told that perhaps there would be a thin atmosphere by now, on Terra Prime, but that in all likelihood we must live a new kind of life in pressure-domes. We were warned that what we might find would be flash-mutation, where the people could be more or less than human. We were warned, even, that there might be no life on Prime at all. But look at me now—look at all of us. We weren’t meant to adapt to this! And we can’t …

Somebody shouted while somebody shrieked, each sound a word, each destroying the other. Something thick as a thumb, long as a hand, with a voice like a distant airhorn, hurtled through the door and circled the room. Teague snatched a folded cloak from the clothingrack and, poising just a moment, batted it out of the air. It skittered, squirming, across the metal door. He threw the cloak on it to capture it. “Get that door closed.”

Carl snatched the broken control lever out of Tod’s hand and tried to fit it back into the switch mounting. It crumbled as if it were dried bread. Tod stepped outside, hooked his hands on the edge of the door, and pulled. It would not budge. A lizard as long as his arm scuttled out of the twisted grass and stopped to stare at him. He shouted at it, and with forelegs much too long for such a creature, it pressed itself upward until its body was forty-five degrees from the horizontal, it flicked the end of its long tail upward, and something flew over its head toward Tod, buzzing angrily. Tod turned to see what it was, and as he did the lizard struck from one side and April from the other.

April succeeded and the lizard failed, for its fangs clashed and it fell forward, but April’s shoulder had taken Tod on the chest and, off balance as he was, he went flat on his back. The cold, dry, pulsing tail swatted his hand. He gripped it convulsively, held on tight. Part of the tail broke off and buzzed, nipping about on the ground like a click-beetle. But the rest held. Tod scuttled backward to pull the lizard straight as it began to turn on him, got his knees under him, then his feet. He swung the lizard twice around his head and smashed it against the inside of the open door. The part of the tail he was holding then broke off, and the scaly thing thumped inside and slid, causing Moira to leap so wildly to get out of its way that she nearly knocked the stocky Carl off his feet.

Teague swept away the lid of the Surgery
Lambda
kit, inverted it, kicked the clutter of instruments and medicaments aside and clapped the inverted box over the twitching, scaly body.

“April!” Tod shouted. He ran around in a blind semicircle, saw her struggling to her feet in the grass, snatched her up and bounded inside with her. “Carl!” he gasped. “Get the door …”

But Carl was already moving forward with a needle torch. With two deft motions he sliced out a section of the power-arm which was holding the door open. He swung the door to, yelling, “Parametal!”

Tod, gasping, ran to the lockers and brought a length of the synthetic. Carl took the wide ribbon and with a snap of the wrists broke it in two. Each half he bent (for it was very flexible when moved slowly) into a U. He placed one against the door and held out his hand without looking. Tod dropped the hammer into it. Carl tapped the parametal gently and it adhered to the door. He turned his face away and struck it sharply. There was a blue-white flash and the U was rigid and firmly welded to the door. He did the same thing with the other U, welding it to the nearby wall plates. Into the two gudgeons thus formed, Moira dropped a lux-alloy bar, and the door was secured.

“Shall I sterilize the floor?” Moira asked.

“No,” said Teague shortly.

“But—bacteria … spores …”

“Forget it,” said Teague.

April was crying. Tod held her close, but made no effort to stop her. Something in him, deeper than panic, more essential than wonderment, understood that she could use this circumstance to spend her tears for Alma, and that these tears must be shed now or swell and burst her heart.
So cry,
he pled silently,
cry for both of us, all of us.

With the end of action, belated shock spread visibly over Carl’s face. “The ship’s gone,” he said stupidly. “We’re on a planet.” He looked at his hands, turned abruptly to the door, stared at it and began to shiver. Moira went to him and stood quietly, not touching him—just being near, in case she should be needed. April grew gradually silent. Carl said, “I—” and then shook his head.

Glick. Shh. Clack, click.
Methodically Teague was stacking the scattered contents of the medical kit. Tod patted April’s shoulder and went to help. Moira glanced at them, peered closely into Carl’s face, then left him and came to lend a hand. April joined them, and at last Carl. They swept up, and racked and stored the clutter, and when Teague lowered a table, they helped get the dead lizard on it and pegged out for dissection. Moira cautiously disentangled the huge insect from the folds of the cloak and clapped a box over it, slid the lid underneath to bring the feebly squirming thing to Teague. He studied it for a long moment, then set it down and peered at the lizard. With forceps he opened the jaws and bent close. He grunted. “April….”

She came to look. Teague touched the fangs with the tip of a scalpel. “Look there.”

“Grooves,” she said. “Like a snake.”

Teague reversed the scalpel and with the handle he gingerly pressed upward, at the root of one of the fangs. A cloudy yellow liquid beaded, ran down the groove. He dropped the scalpel and slipped a watch-glass under the tooth to catch the droplet. “Analyze that later,” he murmured. “But I’d say you saved Tod from something pretty nasty.”

“I didn’t even think,” said April. “I didn’t … I never knew there was any animal life on Prime. I wonder what they call this monster.”

“The honors are yours, April. You name it.”

“They’ll have a classification for it already!”

“Who?”

Everyone started to talk, and abruptly stopped. In the awkward silence Carl’s sudden laugh boomed. It was a wondrous sound in the frightened chamber. There was comprehension in it, and challenge, and above all, Carl himself—boisterous and impulsive, quick, sure. The laugh was triggered by the gush of talk and its sudden cessation, a small thing in itself. But its substance was understanding, and with that an emotional surge, and with that, the choice of the one emotional expression Carl would always choose.

“Tell them, Carl,” Teague said.

Carl’s teeth flashed. He waved a thick arm at the door. “That isn’t Sirius Prime. Nor Earth. Go ahead, April—name your pet.”

April, staring at the lizard, said, “
Crotalidus,
then, because it has a rattle and fangs like a diamondback.” Then she paled and turned to Carl, as the full weight of his statement came on her. “Not—
not Prime
?”

Quietly, Teague said, “Nothing like these ever grew on Earth. And Prime is a cold planet. It could never have a climate like that,” he nodded toward the door, “no matter how much time has passed.”

“But what … where …” It was Moira.

“We’ll find out when we can. But the instruments aren’t here—they were in the ship.”

“But if it’s a new … another planet, why didn’t you let me sterilize? What about airborne spores? Suppose it had been methane out there or—”

“We’ve obviously been conditioned to anything in the atmosphere. As to its composition—well, it isn’t poisonous, or we wouldn’t be standing here talking about it. Wait!” He held up a hand and quelled the babble of questions before it could fully start. “Wondering is a luxury like worrying. We can’t afford either. We’ll get our answers when we get more evidence.”

“What shall we do?” asked April faintly.

“Eat,” said Teague. “Sleep.” They waited. Teague said, “Then we go outside.”

There were stars like daisies in a field, like dust in a sunbeam, and like flying, flaming mountains; near ones, far ones, stars of every color and every degree of brilliance. And there were bands of light which must be stars too distant to see. And something was stealing the stars, not taking them away, but swallowing them up, coming closer and closer, eating as it came. And at last there was only one left. Its name was Alma, and it was gone, and there was nothing left but an absorbent blackness and an aching loss.

In this blackness Tod’s eyes snapped open, and he gasped, frightened and lost.

“You awake, Tod?” April’s small hand touched his face. He took it and drew it to his lips, drinking comfort from it.