The planet was nearly barren. No great forests, no streams or oceans, no plains with grain standing on them, no birds, and no other life but mine and When I first saw them, I was certain they were trumpet flowers, for they had the characteristic bell-shaped perianth with delicate stamen projecting slightly from the cup. But as I drew nearer I realized nothing so Earthlike-- even in outward appearance--could occur here. These were not flowers, and on the spot, in the m.u.f.fled breathing of my helmet, I called them Fluhs.
They were a brilliant orange on the outside of the bell, fading down into a bluish-orange and then a simple marine blue on the stem. Inside the cups they seemed not so much orange as golden, and the blue of the pistils was topped by anthers of orange. Quite colorful they were, and pleasant to look upon.
There were perhaps a hundred of these plants, growing at the base of rock formations that were highly unnatural: tall and leaning at angles, and all smooth and sharp-edged, like spikes, flattened off at the tops. Not so much like rocks, but like the image of salt crystals or gla.s.s, under ultramagnification. The entire area was covered with these formations, and with an instant"s loss of reality, I seemed to see myself as a microscopic being, surrounded by great flat-edged, flat-topped crystals that were in reality merely dust or microspecks.
Then my perspective returned, and I stepped closer to the Flubs, to examine them more closely, for this was the only other life that had managed to exist on h.e.l.l, apparently, drawing sustenance from the thin, nitrogen-laden atmosphere.
I leaned over to stare deeper into the trumpet-blossoms, resting on one of the slanting pillars of pseudo-rock for support. That was one of my first mistakes, nearly fatal, and to color my life on h.e.l.l.
The pillar crashed--it was a semiporous volcanic formation, almost scorialike in composition--and loosened other rocks that had rested on it. I fell forward, directly atop the Flubs, and the last thing I felt was my oxygen helmet shattering about my head.
Then the blackness that was not as deep as s.p.a.ce slid down over me.
I should have been dead. There was no reason why I should not have been dead. But I was living; I was...breathing! Can you understand that? I should have been with my wife, but I was alive.
My face was pressed into the Flubs.
I was drawing oxygen from them.
I had stumbled and fallen and cracked open my helmet, and should have died, but because of strange plants that sucked the nitrogen from the thin atmosphere, circulated it and cast it back out as oxygen, I was still alive. Icursed the Fluhs for depriving me of quick, unknowing surcease. I had come so close to joining her, and had lost the chance. I wanted to stagger away from the Fluhs--out into the open where they could not give me air--and gasp away my stolen life. But something stopped me. I was never a religious man, and I am not now. But there seemed to be something miraculous in what had happened. I can"t explain it. I just knew there was a Chance that had thrown me down into that patch of Flubs.
I lay there, breathing deeply.
There was a soft membrane around the base of the pistils that must have held in the oxygen, allowing it to leak out slowly. They were intricate and wonderful plants.
...and there was the smell of midnight.
I can"t describe it any more clearly. It was not a sweet smell, nor was it a sour smell. It was a tender, almost fragile odor that reminded me of one midnight when I had first married her, and we were living in Minnesota. Crisp, and pure and uplifting that midnight had been, when our love had transcended even the restrictions of marriage, when we first realized we were more in love than in love with love itself. Does that sound foolish or confused? No, to me it was perfectly clear. And so was the smell of midnight from the Flubs.
It was the smell perhaps, that made me go on living.
That, and the fact that my face had begun to drain.
As I lay there, I had time to think about what this meant: the bottleneck in oxygen-lack is the brain. After five minutes of oxygen starvation, the brain is irreversibly damaged. But with these Flubs, I could wander about my planet without a helmet--were I able to find them everywhere in such abundance.
As I lay there thinking, gathering strength for the run back to the ship, I felt my face draining. It was as though I had a great boil or pus-sac on my right cheek, and it was sucking blood down into it. I felt my cheek, and yes, even through the glove I could feel a swelling. I grew terrified then, and plucking a handful of Fluhs--close to the bottom of their stems--I thrust my face into them and ran frantically back to the ship.
Once inside, the Fluhs wilted and falling down over my fist, they shriveled. Their brilliant colors faded, and they turned gray as brain matter. I threw them from me and they lay on the deckplate for a few minutes, then they crumbled to a fine ash.
I pulled off my air-suit and my gloves, and ran to the recirculator that was constructed of burnished plasteel; my reflection lived there clearly. My right cheek was terribly inflamed. I gave a short, sharp squeal of terror and pawed at my face, but unlike a pimple or boil, there was no soreness, no pain. Just the constant draining feeling.
What was there to do? I waited.
In a week, the sac had taken shape almost completely. My face was like no human face, drawn down and puffed out on the right side so that my eye had been pulled into a mere slit of light shining through. It was like a gigantic goiter, a goiter that was not on the neck, but the face. The sac ended just at the jawbone, and it did not impair my breathing a bit. But my mouth had been dragged down with it, and when I opened it, I found I had a great cavernous maw instead of the firm lips that had formed my mouth. Otherwise, my face was completely normal. I was a half-beast. My left side was normal, and my right was grotesquely pulled into a drooping, rubbery parody of humanity. I could not bear to look at myself for more than an instant or two, each "day." The flaming redness of it had gone away, as had the draining, and I did not understand it for many weeks.
Until I ventured once more onto the surface of h.e.l.l.
The helmet could not be repaired, of course, so I used the one that my wife had used when she was with me.
That set me thinking again, and later, when I had steadied myself, and stopped crying, I went out.
It was inevitable that I should return to the spot where my deformity had first occurred. I reached the spikes- -as I had now named the rock formations--without event, and sat down among a patch of Flubs. If I had drawn off their life-giving oxygen, they seemed no worse for it, for they had continued to grow in brilliance and were, if anything, even more beautiful.
I stared at them for a long time, trying to apply what smattering of knowledge I had about the physics and chemistry of botany to what had happened. One thing, at least, was obvious: I had undergone a fantastic mutation.
A mutation that was essentially impossible from what Man knew of life and its construction. What might, under exaggerated conditions, have turned out as a permanent mutation, through generations of special breeding, had happened to me almost overnight. I tried to reason it out: Even on a molecular level, structure is inextricably related to function. I considered the structure of proteins, for in that direction, I felt, lay at least a partial answer to my deformity.
Finally, I removed the helmet, and bent down to the Fluhs once more. I sucked air from them, and this time felt a great light-headedness. I continued drawing, first from one flower and then the next, till I knew. My sac was full. It all became reasonably clear to me, then. The smell of midnight. There was more than just odor there. I hada.s.similated bacteria from the Fluhs; bacteria that had attacked the stabilizing enzymes in my breathing system.
Viruses perhaps, or even rickettsiae, that had--for want of a clearer term--softened my proteins and reshaped them to best allow me to make use of the Fluhs.
To allow me to oxygen-suck, as I had been doing, developing a bigger chest or larger lungs would have done me no good. But a balloon-like organ, capable of storing oxygen under pressure...that was something else again. When I sucked from the plants, oxygen bled slowly from the blood haemoglobin into the storage sac, and after a while I would be oxygen-full.
I could then proceed without air for short periods, even as a camel can go without water for periods of greater duration. Of course I would have to have an occasional suck to restore what I had used up in between; in an emergency, I could go without for a long while, but then I would need a long suck to replace completely.
How it had occurred, down on the nucleoprotein level, I was not that much of a biochemist to understand.
What I knew, I knew via hypno-courses I had taken many years before in Deimos University"s required cla.s.ses. I knew these things, but had never studied enough to be able to a.n.a.lyze them. Given time and sufficient references, I was sure I could unravel the mystery; unlike Earth scientists, who discounted almost-instantaneous mutation as a fantasy, I had to believe...it had happened to me. I had only to feel my face, my puffed and now ballooned face, to know it was true. So I had more to work with than they did.
At that moment, I realized I had been standing erect for some minutes, my face nowhere near the Fluhs. Yet I was breathing comfortably.
Yes, I had something to work with, where they did not, for I was living the nightmare fantasy they said was impossible.
That was six months ago. Now it is well into night, and judging from the way the Flubs are dying, there will be nothing when light comes. Nothing left to breathe. Nothing for my noon meal.
It was so dark. The stars were too far off to care about h.e.l.l or what lived there. I should have known, of course. In the eternal darkness of twelve months" night, the Flubs died. They didn"t gray-ash as did the ones I first picked. No, instead they retreated into the ground. They grew smaller and smaller, as though they were a motion picture being run backward. They got tinier and finally disappeared entirely. Whether they incysted themselves, or just died completely, I never knew, for the ground was much too hard to dig in, and what little I"d been able to sc.r.a.pe away, where the scorialike formations extended onto the ground, revealed nothing but small holes where the blossoms descended.
My head was starting to hurt again, and my sac was emptying out all the faster, because my breathing-- which I had learned to draw shallowly--was deepening with effort. I started back toward the ship.
It was many miles around the planet, for I had been living in caves and subsisting on the rations brought with me, for the past three "days." I had been trying to track down a thriving patch of Fluhs, not only to get oxygen to replenish my emptying sac, but to further study their strange metabolism. My oxygen supply in the hutch was fast diminishing; something had gone broke in the system when I had landed...or perhaps the same particles that had caused the ship"s reactors to explode, had caused invisible damage in the oxygen recirculator. I didn"t know. But I did know I had to learn to live on what h.e.l.l could give me...or die.
It had been a difficult decision. I had wanted very much to die.
I was standing in the open, with the heated cowl of my airsuit grotesquely drawn about my head and sac, when I saw the flickering in the deep. It burned steadily for an instant, then continued to flicker as it fell toward the tiny planet.
I realized almost at once that it was a ship. Unbelievable, unbelievable, but somehow, in some manner I could never understand, G.o.d had sent a ship to take me from this place. I started running, back toward my hutch, what was left of my ship.
I stumbled once, and fell, only to scramble along on all fours till I could get my balance. I continued running, and by the time I had reached the hutch, my sac was nearly empty, and my head was splitting. I got inside and dogged the lock, then leaned against it in exhaustion, drawing deeply, deeply for the air inside.
I turned toward the radio gear, even before the ache was gone from my head, and threw myself roughly into the plotseat. I had almost forgotten how valuable the set could be; lost out here, so far over the Edge, I had never even given serious consideration to the possibility of being found. Actually, had I stopped to consider, a visit was not so unbelievable after all; my ship had not exploded all that far off the trade routes. True, I was far out, but any number of circ.u.mstances could combine to bring another ship my way.
And they had.
And it had.
And it was.I flipped on the beacon signal, and set it to all-bands, hearing the bdeep-bdeep-bdeep of it in the hutch, going out, I knew, to that ship circling the planet. That done, I turned slowly in the plot chair, hands on my knees-- only to catch sight of myself in the burnished wall of the recirculator. I saw my sac, grotesque, monstrous, hideous, covered with a week"s growth of spikey beard stubble, my mouth drawn down in a gash. I was hardly human any longer.
When they came, I would not open the lock for them.
Finally, I allowed them in. There were three of them, young, clean-limbed, trying to hide their horror at what I had become. They came in and stripped out of their bulky pressure-suits. The hutch was crowded, but the girl and one of the men squatted on the floor and the other man perched on the plot tank"s edge.
"My name--" I didn"t know whether to say "is" or "was" so I slurred it, easily, "Tom Van Home. I"ve been here about four or five months, I"m not sure which."
One of the young men--he was staring at me openly, he could not take his eyes off me, in fact--replied, "We belong to the Human Research Foundation. Expedition to evaluate some of the worlds out past the Edge for colonization. We--we--saw the other half of your ship. There was a worn--"
I stopped him. "I know. My wife." They stared at the port, the deckplate, the bulkhead.
We talked for some time, and I could see they were interested in my theories of near-instantaneous mutation. It was their field, and soon the girl said, "Mr. Van Home, you have stumbled on something terribly vital to us all. You must come back with us and help us to get to the heart of--of--your, uh, your change." She blushed, and it reminded me a little of my wife.
Then the other two started in. They used me as a buffer, asking questions and answering them, and making me warmer and warmer to the prospect of returning. I was caught up in a maelstrom of enthusiasm. A feeling of belonging stole over me, and I forgot. I forgot how the ship had gone out like a match; I forgot how she had stood there frozen in the companionway, blue and strange; I forgot all the years I had spent burning in s.p.a.ce; I forgot the months here; and most of all I forgot the change.
They pleaded with me, and said we should go right now. I hesitated for an instant, not even knowing why, but unconsciously crying to myself not to listen. Then I relented, and got into my air-suit. When I pulled the heated cowl up about my sac, they all stared for a long moment, until the girl nudged one of the fellows, and the other broke into a nervous t.i.tter.
They jollied me, telling me how important my discovery would be to mankind. I listened; I was wanted. It was good, so good, after what seemed an eternity on h.e.l.l.
We left my hutch, and started across the short s.p.a.ce between their ship and my life cubicle. I was pleased and surprised to see how shining their ship was; they were proud of it, they took good care of it. They were the new breed--the high-strung, intelligent scientists with the youthful ideas and the glory in them. They weren"t tired old folks like me. The ship was lighted by automatic floods that had come out on the hull, and the vessel shone in the night of h.e.l.l like a great glowing torch. It would be good to go to s.p.a.ce once more.
We came up to the ship, and one of the men depressed a stud that started a humming inside the ship. A landing ramp slid down from far above as the outer lock opened, and I knew this was a more recent model than my ship had been. But then, that didn"t disturb me; I had been a poor s.p.a.ce b.u.m before I met her. She had been all the drive I"d ever needed.
I took a step forward, up the ramp, and two things happened, almost simultaneously: I caught a glimpse of myself in the glowing sh.e.l.l of the ship. It was not a pretty picture. My ghoul"s mouth, drawn down and to the side like a knife wound. My eye, a mere slit of brightness, the sac so hideous and vein- streaked. I stopped on the ramp, with them directly behind me.
And the second thing happened.
I heard her.
Somewhere...far off...in a bright amber cavern hung down with scintillant stalact.i.tes...swathed in a shimmering aura of goodness and cleanliness and hope...younger than the next instant...radiantly beautiful and calling to me...calling with a voice of music that was the sound of suns flaring and stars twinkling and earth moving and gra.s.s growing and small things being happy...it was she!
I listened there for a moment that spanned forever.
My head tilted to the side, I listened, and I knew what she said was truth, so simple and so pure and so real, that I turned and edged past them on the ramp, and returned to h.e.l.l again.
Her voice stopped in the moment of my touching ground.
They stared at me, and for a short time they said nothing. Then one of the men--the short, blond fellow with alert blue eyes and hardly any neck--said, "What"s the matter?""I"m not going," I said. The girl ran down the ramp to me. "But why?" She almost sounded tearful.
I couldn"t tell her, of course. But she was so small, so sweet, and she reminded me of my wife, when I had first met her, so I answered, "I"ve been here too long; I"m not very nice to look at--"
"Oh--" and she tried to stop me, but it was a sob, so it did not interfere.
"--and you may not understand this but I--I"ve been well, content here. It"s a hard world, and it"s dark, but she"s up there--" I looked toward the black sky of h.e.l.l, "--and I wouldn"t want to go away and leave her alone. Can you understand that?"
They nodded slowly, and one of the men said, "But this is more than just you, Van Horne. This is a discovery that means a great deal to everyone on Earth.
"It"s getting worse and worse there every year. With the new antiaging drugs people just aren"t dying, and they"ve still got the Catho-Presbyte Lobby to keep any really effective birth control laws from being enacted. The crowding is terrible; that"s one of the chief reasons we"re out here, to see how Man can adapt to these worlds. Your discovery can aid us tremendously."
"And you said the Fluhs were gone," the other man said. "Without them, you"ll die." I smiled at them; she had said something, something important about the Flubs.
"I can still do some good," I replied quickly. "Send me a few young people. Let them come here, and we"ll study together. I can show them what I"ve found, and they can experiment here. Laboratory conditions could never match what I"ve found on h.e.l.l."
That seemed to do it. They looked at me sadly, and the girl agreed...the other two matched her agreement in a moment.
"And, and--I couldn"t leave her here alone," I said again.
"Goodbye, Tom Van Home," she said, and she pressed my hand between her mittened ones. It was a kiss on the cheek, but her helmet prevented it physically, so she clasped my hand.
Then they started up the ramp.
"What will you do for air, with the Fluhs gone?" one of the men asked, stopping halfway up.
"I"ll be all right, I promise you. I"ll be here when you return." They looked at me with doubt, but I smiled, and patted my sac, and they looked uncomfortable, and started up the ramp again.
"We"ll be back. With others." The girl looked down at me. I waved, and they went inside. Then I loped back to the hutch, and watched them as they shattered the night with their fire and fury. When they were gone, I went outside, and stared up at the dim, so-faraway points of the dead stars.
Where she circled, up there, somewhere.
And I knew I would have something for my noon meal, and all the meals thereafter. She had told me; I suppose I knew it all along, but it hadn"t registered, so she had told me: the Fluhs were not dead. They had merely gone down to replenish their own oxygen supply from the planet itself, from the caves and porous openings where the rock trapped the air. They would be back again, long before I needed them.
The Fluhs would return.
And someday I would find her again, and it would be an unbroken time.
This world I had named, I had not properly named. Not h.e.l.l.
Not h.e.l.l at all.There really isn"t much to say about this next story, save that I"ve tried to make a bit of a caustic comment on the "faithful" and their faith. I have no quarrel with those who wish to believe--whether they believe in a flat Earth, the health-giving properties of sorghum and blackstrap mola.s.ses, Dianetics, the Hereafter, orgone boxes, a ghostwriter for Shakespeare, or that jazz about the manna in the desert--except to point out that nothing in this life (and presumably the next) is certain; and faith is all well and good, but even the most devout should leave a small area of their thoughts open for such possibilities as occur in
Hadj
It had taken almost a year to elect Herber. A year of wild speculation, and a growing sense of the Universe"s existence. The year after the Masters of the Universe had flashed through Earth"s atmosphere and broadcast their message.
From nowhere they had come down in their glowing golden s.p.a.ceship--forty miles long--and without resistance shown every man, woman, and child on Earth that they did, indeed, rule the Universe.
They had merely said: "Send us a representative from Earth." They had then given detailed instructions for constructing what they called an "invers.p.a.ce" ship, and directions for getting to their home world, somewhere across the light-galaxies.
So the ship had been constructed. But who was to go? The Earthmen who pondered this question knew the awesome responsibility of that emissary. They had to be careful whom they picked. So they had reasoned it was too big a problem to lay in the hands of mere humans, and set the machines on it. They had set the Mark x.x.x. the UniCompVac, the Brognagov Master Computer and hundreds of the little brains to the task.
After sixteen billion punched cards had gone through three times, the last card fell into the hopper, and Wilson Herber had been elected. He was the most fit to travel across the hundred galaxies to the home world of the Masters of the Universe, and offer his credentials to them.
They came to Wilson Herber in his mountain retreat, and were initially greeted by threats of disembowelment if they didn"t get the bell away and leave him in his retirement!
But judicious reasoning soon brought the ex-statesman around. Herber was one of the wealthiest men in the world. The cartel he had set up during the first fifty-six years of his life was still intact, run entirely now by his lieutenants. It spanned every utility and service, every raw material and necessity a growing Earth would need. It had made Wilson Herber an incalculably wealthy man. It had led him into the World Federation Hall, where he had served as Representative for ten years, till he had become Co-Ordinator of the Federation.
Then, five years before the golden Masters had come, he had completely retired, completely secluded himself. Only a matter of such import could bring the crusty, hardheaded old pirate out of his sanctuary--and throw him into the stars.
"I"ll take the credentials," he advised the men who had come to him. He sat sunk deep in an easy chair, a shrunken gnome of a man with thinned grey hair, piercing blue eyes, and a chin sharp as a diamond facet.