The Perfect Host (13 page)

“Right.”

“Then where on earth have you been all this time?”

“Not on Earth.”

“Oh—ho! The Man from Mars!”

“Not Mars,” said the specter seriously. “Not a planet of this sun. Human can not live on this sun’s planets except this one.”

“Where is it, then?”

It tried; he could see it trying. Suddenly he understood the searching process; the creature could get a word, or an idea, more easily if he brought it up to the surface of his mind. He visualized a star map; the ghost made an impatient sound. Warner’s lips twitched; he had always had a very bad memory. He visualized the night sky.

“Yes,” said the glowing man.

Warner thought of constellations; of the Cross, and Lyra, Scorpio, Sirius, and the Hyades. And when he visualized the Seven Sisters, the Pleiades, the ghost exclaimed. Warner could not remember how the Pleiades were placed, exactly, but he knew that five of the major stars were easily visible, the sixth fainter, and the seventh invisible except to the very best eyesight.

“Yes. Faint one,” said the ghost. “But is not one star. Is many. Is not one group of stars; you see through stars near a line from here to there. My planet is not of faint Pleiades Sister; is through it, far away on other side. You are thinking about the gun again. Do not touch it.”

Warner swore.

“Your dog is dead,” said the glowing man. “I did not want to dead … to kill your dog. You are the first man for me here. I not … did not know you can … could not hear-receive me. I heard you. I talked-thought to you. I told you to meet me. I told you not
to touch me. Your dog flew to me. I not … did not want your dog to touch me. He would dead himself if he touch me. You will dead yourself if you touch me. Your dog is dead. I am sorry. I do not want you to be dead. I will be too sorry if you are dead. When I understand that you can not hear me except me … I speak, I went … dark and took away gun. Human with weapon never think.”

Now I get sociological truths
, thought Warner wryly. “Why will you kill me if I touch you?” he asked.

“Kill,” said the other, and looked at his face. “Kill, die, murder, execute, slaughter. No. I will not kill you if you touch me. Kill is what you do with … with desire, yes. I say a different thing. I say if you touch me you will die. I am sorry your dog is dead. I am more sorry if you are dead. I do not desire you dead. My … me … I am—”

“Poison?”

“Yes, poison. Poison. Almost all Earth things I poison. Very … fast.” And again came that surge of tragedy across the strange, tall face. “All things of Earth. All living things—” It still held the forked twig; it looked at it sadly and, without throwing it, with a gesture of willlessness, let it slip from between its fingers to the ground. “That would be dead now, without … even … even if I did not break and pull away leaves. Just to touch it—My … my feet … footprints are dead places.”

“But why? Why do you do it?”

“Why? I do not do it! I do not make and spread poison! I
am
poison!”

“I don’t understand. What are you doing here? Why stay here if you kill everything you touch?”

“I will … try. If you do not understand, tell me to … to stop.

“We are different humans, and this is our place where we began … this, this planet. We grew fast and got … gained—”

“Evolved?”

“Evolved very fast, yes. We made a … tools … machines … Think of men building. Think of what men must have to build. Yes!
Yes. Intelligence. Logic. Intuition? Yes, intuition? Yes, intuition too. We understood each other well. You do not understand each other. You work with you, he works with he. If you work together, you will build, but you are … important. Or he is important. With us, the building was important. Thirty generations made us free from … from things outside us.”

“Environment?”

“Yes. Free. To have a … problem was to find the way … the way to solve it. It was … different evolution. Evolution in plants, in animals, is try this, try that, this is good, that is no good, what is no good dies. We were different. We tried only what would be good, what would build. Understand?”

“I think so,” said Warner. “We have built more in the last three hundred years than we did in the three thousand before that.”

“Yes. It was the way, the way we began. We lived in a valley. We lived long, each of us, and very close. We were always few. We did not go to all the earth, like you-men. We stayed in our warm valley bottom and built. We did not build cities like you-men. We did not need them. We built inside”—it touched its head—“and a few machines, when we needed them. Then came a time when we knew our valley would be killed by the sea. It was below the sea. There was a thin mountain at the end, and it would break and the sea would come in.

“Some did not care. Some moved farther inland to be saved, and we never heard about them again. A few made a machine, and left this planet.”

“A spaceship!”

“Not a ship. Not like the picture you are thinking. It would be good if you could hear … see my thinks. No, it was a machine. It made … solid things not-solid, and then made them solid again somewhere else. The me-men, and some women, went in the machine and the machine went away from this planet.

“The machine was built to … to seek a planet like this one; this heavy, this warm, with this air. It went far.”

“Did it take long?”

“There is no take-long in such a machine. It is not understood. No man has gone in the machine for a little way. Only a long way. I am the first to go away and to come back. To be in the machine is to set the part which seeks, and to start the machine. Then the machine is there. To be outside the machine is to watch it … disappear. It is not known if it will come back soon, or fast, or not. Or not come back. I may come back when and where I left. Or later … large later.”

“Why have you come?”

“When me-men left this planet, the machine found another. It was like this and not like this. It was more warm. It was more dark. The sun had more … more—”

“Radiation?”

“Not more. Different. We had mutation, some mutation. Not much. This—” and, shockingly, the light went out again. And came back. “Like small animal … insect … like firefly. Cold light. At will. But that was many generations.

“A thing happened. The machine came to that planet and broke. It is not understood what happened. Some dies then. The others made a place to live. Many more died. The plants were not right. The plants were the same building … the same … the same chemically as here. The animals were the same.” A questing pause. “Colloidal. Carbohydrates. Yes. But a small different—

“Think of a thing, to give me the words … a thing you eat, or you put inside you, and it makes you happy, or it makes you move fast, or it is a poison, or you sleep.”

“Drugs?”

“Yes. Drugs. Not drugs. Like drugs. What can you make inside you that will do these things?”

“I don’t think I … hold on! Hormones?”

“Yes, yes, hormones. Plants make poisons to make animals sick, so the animals will not eat the plants. Some plants are always poison because no animal can make the same poison or the … the … antidote? Yes, antidote, but also the thing that makes the animal strong to the poison.”

“You mean the animal gets a high enough tolerance for the poison so that the poison is harmless.”

“Yes. Plants make hormone poisons; animals make hormones for tolerance. Yes. When me-men lived first on that planet they had no tolerance. Many died. Grass, trees, common, just like this”—the luminous hand waved—“were poison. Animals which ate those plants were poisoned. Most of the me-men died. Some did not.”

“Survival of the fittest,” said Warner unnecessarily.

“Not a law,” said the creature, as if it had found a blue cigarette in a box of white ones. “A balance. A balance in fluxes.

“What was left was few, sick, weak. Necessary to fight hard to live. They became fewer every generation for too long. They lost the … the … thinks, the way to make machines, the big simple thinks behind the way to make machines, the big simple thinks behind the way to make machines. A long time before they were strong again, and when they were strong they were different.

“They knew they changed. But they knew where they came from, and that they were once strong, and they cared for the strength. For the many generations they were weak and sick and few, they held to one big thing—this planet, this Earth. This was the Beginning, this was the Source. For long, long, they had nothing great but this one think. They felt hard about it. They—”

“A religion?”

The other studied the word as it flowed from the convolutions of Warner’s brain. “Like religion. You have in you some … things—Think of the things you can not touch with your hands, things which are big. Yes. Yes—Religion, and more. Love. Pride. Courage. What is this one? Self-respect? Yes, we have that, but not self … selves … the thing me-men had was like all those in one central feeling, and all felt the same and could share. Earth was our greatness, and it would be our goal. A man, any kind of man, builds on a simple strong thing—an idea or a rock or a natural force. Earth was the thing of greatness to us, the source of our strength and the strength that we held when we were weak. We are strong again; we built strong, and we built around the idea of Earth. The thing we worked for was to be wise enough again to build another traveling machine.
We did. A small one. Big for one. Big enough for—me.”

“We have had civilizations like that,” said Warner thoughtfully. “Civilizations in which the government and the religion was the same, where customs and laws all sprang from worship.”

“Worship. This was not worship.”

“It wasn’t? Sounds like Shinto to me,” said Warner bluntly. “Ancestor-worship.”

“Wrong,” said the other, just as bluntly. “When we were weak, we were great, because we were great when we were strong. We were same thing, weak or strong, before and now. We were … are great. Ancestor worship is all in the past. We were … are … will be great. And Earth is at the beginning, and Earth is at the end.” And again the tragedy swept that strange face.

“We have had trouble with races which thought they were better than any other,” said Warner, his distaste evident.

“Better? You understand small things only. No me-man compares with other groups. A tree is a great tree because it does the most a tree can do, and it is no greater than a great grass. I hear … see a thing in you … yes. I see it. We do not fight against ourselves. Is the difference between us.”

Warner’s fear had long been replaced by curiosity, and then by wonder. For the first time he began to feel a respect. After a time he asked: “What are you going to do?”

“I shall go back,” said the creature. “I shall go back and tell them that Earth is here, and that it is as the legends and records say, and that we can never come back. When I tell them that it will melt the … bones of our building.”

Warner said: “For years many of us have worshiped in a way which includes a Paradise, a Heaven; and along with it the conviction that we can never achieve it in the flesh. That is, we go there when we die.”

“That is not for us. Earth is our Paradise, I think; but it is one to be reached by us with our hands and legs and shoulders, to walk on, to live in, to be a part with. And if we come we must kill it.”

Warner’s mouth was dry. “The poison—it doesn’t work both ways? The plants of your planet killed you. Now you have changed. Wouldn’t Earth kill you?”

“No. We were harmless to our plants, but they killed us. We kill Earth things, but they can not harm us.”

“Then why can’t you come?”

“Because Earth is Earth, and we can not kill it.”

“You mean you are not strong enough to kill it?”

“No. We are strong enough. We are a terrible enemy. We are like you, but we are like you thinking alike, and together. We could come and kill everything, and bring our plants and animals, and have the Earth.”

“I don’t understand. You seem to be difficult to stop once you want something. Why don’t you come?”

The glowing stranger looked at him for a long time, quietly. “We rule our planet, and we despise it. When we lived on Earth, we were a part of Earth. We do not want Earth as a part of us; and we may have it no other way.”

“Your tradition is that strong?”

“The bones of our building,” said the creature again. “The base, the core, the beginning, the end, and the goal.”

Warner shrugged. “You will have to find something new, then.”

“We will die first.”

And Warner knew that that was not a figure of speech.

Warner came back the next morning, to bury his dog. He concentrated on the things he was doing; the steps he took, the bite and lift and throw of his shovel, the gloved meticulousness with which he sponged off his carbine with a rag soaked in the bottle of bleach he brought with him. He was aware that he had given and received a farewell last night, and that he had been told about the bleach, and that, to the stranger, it simply did not matter whether he told his story or not. It could not matter.

These things were too much a part of that other experience, the thing which happened after the stranger’s light went out, after five
quiet minutes during which Warner sat in the blackness thinking nothing, nothing at all, just watching his etched memory of the shining, grieving face.

Then there had been that glare of red, and he had floundered and stumbled to it, to see the stranger sitting in a simple chair, clean-lined, hooded, with some barely-glimpsed controls on one desklike arm. The stranger was distorted, spread, flattened and—curved, curved like the surface of a sphere, going back and away, but in directions which could not be followed. Then the light was a whirlpool of incandescent blood, its inner surface dwindling away like a Dalinese perspective, its remote convergence a speck of glittering scarlet shaped like the stranger and his chair, tiny, or distant. Warner was numb, shocked, blasted by the enormity of that indescribable
direction
.

Therefore he concentrated on the simple, solid things he had to do—burying, cleaning, walking. His separation by a few hours from that vertiginous red distance was no separation at all, and perhaps it never would be. At the moment he watched it, he knew his consciousness could have gone down into it, or
—out
into it. And now, this morning, he felt that he could still lose himself in it if he let go.