American Science Fiction Five Classic Novels 1956-58 (55 page)

There was a brief chain of footsteps, like chestnuts dropping on a roof, and then a hollow noise of something hitting the floor near his head.

“Cleaver, are you sick? Here, lie still a minute and let me get your feet free. Mike—Mike, can’t you turn the gas up in this jug? Something’s wrong back here.”

After a moment, yellow light began to pour from the glistening walls, and then the white glare of the mantles. Cleaver dragged an arm across his eyes, but it did him no good; it tired too quickly. Agronski’s mild face, plump and anxious, floated directly above him like a captive balloon. He could not see Michelis anywhere, and at the moment he was just as glad he couldn’t. Agronski’s presence was hard enough to understand.

“How . . . the hell . . .” he said. At the words, his lips split painfully at both corners. He realized for the first time that they had become gummed together, somehow, while he was asleep. He had no idea how long he had been out of the picture.

Agronski seemed to understand the aborted question. “We came in from the Lakes in the ’copter,” he said. “We didn’t like the silence down here, and we figured we’d better come in under our own power, instead of registering in on the regular jet liner and tipping the Lithians off—just in case there’d been any dirty work afloat—”

“Stop jawing him,” Michelis said, appearing suddenly, magically in the doorway. “He’s got a bug, that’s obvious. I don’t like to feel pleased about misery, but I’m glad it’s that instead of the Lithians.”

The rangy, long-jawed chemist helped Agronski lift Cleaver to his feet. Tentatively, despite the pain, Cleaver got his mouth open again. Nothing came out but a hoarse croak.

“Shut up,” Michelis said, not unkindly. “Let’s get him back into the hammock. Where’s the Father, I wonder? He’s the only one capable of dealing with sickness here.”

“I’ll bet he’s dead,” Agronski burst out suddenly, his face glistening with alarm. “He’d be here if he could. It must be catching, Mike.”

“I didn’t bring my mitt,” Michelis said drily. “Cleaver, lie still or I’ll have to clobber you. Agronski, you seem to have dumped his water bottle; better go get him some more, he needs it. And see if the Father left anything in the lab that looks like medicine.”

Agronski went out, and, maddeningly, so did Michelis—at least out of Cleaver’s field of vision. Setting his every muscle against the pain, Cleaver pulled his lips apart once more.

“Mike.”

Instantly, Michelis was there. He had a pad of cotton between thumb and forefinger, wet with some solution, with which he gently cleaned Cleaver’s lips and chin.

“Easy. Agronski’s getting you a drink. We’ll let you talk in a little while, Paul. Don’t rush it.”

Cleaver relaxed a little. He could trust Michelis. Nevertheless, the vivid and absurd insult of having to be swabbed like a baby was more than he could bear; he felt tears of helpless rage swelling on either side of his nose. With two deft, noncommittal swipes, Michelis removed them.

Agronski came back, holding out one hand tentatively, palm up.

“I found these,” he said. “There’s more in the lab, and the Father’s pill press is still out. So are his mortar and pestle, though they’ve been cleaned.”

“All right, let’s have ’em,” Michelis said. “Anything else?”

“No. Well, there’s a syringe cooking in the sterilizer, if that means anything.”

Michelis swore briefly and to the point.

“It means that there’s a pertinent antitoxin in the shop someplace,” he added. “But unless Ramon left notes, we’ll not have a prayer of figuring out which one it is.”

As he spoke, he lifted Cleaver’s head and tipped the pills into his mouth, onto his tongue. The water which followed was cold at the first contact, but a split second later it was liquid fire. Cleaver choked, and at that precise instant Michelis pinched his nostrils shut. The pills went down with a gulp.

“There’s no sign of the Father?” Michelis said.

“Not a one, Mike. Everything’s in good order, and his gear’s still here. Both jungle suits are in the locker.”

“Maybe he went visiting,” Michelis said thoughtfully. “He must have gotten to know quite a few of the Lithians by now. He liked them.”

“With a sick man on his hands? That’s not like him, Mike. Not unless there was some kind of emergency. Or maybe he went on a routine errand, expected to be back in just a few minutes, and—”

“And was set upon by trolls, for forgetting to stamp his foot three times before crossing a bridge.”

“All right, laugh.”

“I’m not laughing, believe me. That’s just the kind of damn fool thing that can kill a man in a strange culture. But somehow I can’t see it happening to Ramon.”

“
Mike
. . . .”

Michelis took a step and looked down at Cleaver. His face was drifting as if detached through a haze of tears. He said:

“All right, Paul. Tell us what it is. We’re listening.”

But it was too late. The doubled sedative dose had gotten to Cleaver first. He could only shake his head, and with the motion Michelis seemed to go reeling away into a whirlpool of fuzzy rainbows.

Curiously, he did not quite go to sleep. He had had nearly a normal night’s sleep, and he had started out his enormously long day a powerful and healthy man. The conversation of the two commissioners, and an obsessive consciousness of his need to speak to them before Ruiz-Sanchez returned, helped to keep him, if not totally awake, at least not far below a state of light trance. In addition, the presence in his system of thirty grains of acetylsalicylic acid had seriously raised his oxygen consumption, bringing with it not only dizziness but also a precarious, emotionally untethered alertness. That the fuel which was being burned to maintain it was in part the protein substrate of his own cells he did not know, and it could not have alarmed him had he known it.

The voices continued to reach him, and to convey a little meaning. With them were mixed fleeting, fragmentary dreams, so slightly removed from the surface of his waking life as to seem peculiarly real, yet at the same time peculiarly pointless and depressing. In the semiconscious intervals there came plans, a whole succession of them, all simple and grandiose at once, for taking command of the expedition, for communicating with the authorities on Earth, for bringing forward secret papers proving that Lithia was uninhabitable, for digging a tunnel under Mexico to Peru, for detonating Lithia in one single mighty fusion of all its lightweight atoms into one single atom of cleaverium, the element of which the monobloc had been made, whose cardinal number was Aleph-Null. . . 

agronski: Mike, come here and look at this; you read Lithian. There’s a mark on the front door, on the message tablet. 

(
Footsteps.
)

michelis: It says “Sickness inside.” The strokes aren’t casual or deft enough to be the work of the natives. Ideograms are hard to write rapidly without long practice. Ramon must have written it there.

agronski: I wish we knew where he went afterwards. Funny we didn’t see it when we came in.

michelis: I don’t think so. It was dark, and we weren’t looking for it.

(
Footsteps. Door shutting, not loudly. Footsteps. Hassock 
creaking.
)

agronski: Well, we’d better start thinking about getting up a report. Unless this damn twenty-hour day has me thrown completely off, our time’s just about up. Are you still set on opening up the planet?

michelis: Yes. I’ve seen nothing to convince me that there’s anything on Lithia that’s dangerous to us. Except maybe Cleaver in there, and I’m not prepared to say that the Father would have left him if he were in any serious danger. And I don’t see how Earthmen could harm this society; it’s too stable emotionally, economically, in every other way. 

(Danger, danger,
said somebody in Cleaver’s dream.
It will explode. It’s all a popish plot.
Then he was marginally awake 
again, and conscious of how much his mouth hurt.
) 

agronski: Why do you suppose those two jokers never called us after we went north?

michelis: I don’t have any answer. I won’t even guess until I talk to Ramon. Or until Paul’s able to sit up and take notice. 

agronski: I don’t like it, Mike. It smells bad to me. This town’s right at the heart of the communications system of the planet—that’s why we picked it, for Crisake! And yet— no messages, Cleaver sick, the Father not here. . . . There’s a hell of a lot we don’t know about Lithia, that’s for damn sure.

michelis: There’s a hell of a lot we don’t know about central Brazil—let alone Mars, or the Moon.

agronski: Nothing essential, Mike. What we know about the periphery of Brazil gives us all the clues we need about the interior—even to those fish that eat people, the what are-they, the piranhas. That’s not true on Lithia. We don’t know whether our peripheral clues about Lithia are germane or just incidental. Something enormous could be hidden under the surface without our being able to detect it. 

michelis: Agronski, stop sounding like a Sunday supplement. You underestimate your own intelligence. What kind of enormous secret could that be? That the Lithians eat people? That they’re cattle for unknown gods that live in the jungle? That they’re actually mind-wrenching, soul-twisting, heartstopping, blood-freezing, bowel-moving superbeings in disguise? The moment you state any such proposition, you’ll deflate it yourself; it’s only in the abstract that it’s able to scare you. I wouldn’t even take the trouble of examining it, or discussing how we might meet it if it were true. 

agronski: All right, all right. I’ll reserve judgment for the time being, anyhow. If everything turns out to be all right here, with the Father and Cleaver I mean, I’ll probably go along with you. I don’t have any reason I could defend for voting against the planet, I admit that.

michelis: Good for you. I’m sure Ramon is for opening it up, so that should make it unanimous. I can’t see why Cleaver would object.

(
Cleaver was testifying before a packed court convened in 
the UN General Assembly chambers in New York, with one 
finger pointed dramatically, but less in triumph than in sorrow, at Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez, S. J. At the sound of his name 
the dream collapsed, and he realized that the room had grown 
a little lighter. Dawn—or the dripping, wool-gray travesty of 
it which prevailed on Lithia—was on its way. 
He wondered what he had just said to the court. It had been 
conclusive, damning, good enough to be used when he awoke; 
but he could not remember a word of it. All that remained of 
it was a sensation, almost the taste of the words, but nothing of 
their substance.
)

agronski: It’s getting light. I suppose we’d better knock off. michelis: Did you stake down the ’copter? The winds down here are higher than they are up north, I seem to remember. agronski: Yes. And covered it with the tarp. Nothing left to do now but sling our hammocks—

(
A sound
)

michelis: Shhh. What’s that?

agronski: Eh?

michelis: Listen.

(
Footsteps. Faint ones, but Cleaver knew them. He forced his 
eyes to open a little, but there was nothing to see but the ceiling. 
Its even color, and its smooth, ever-changing slope into a dome 
of nowhereness, drew him almost immediately upward into the 
mists of trance once more.
)

agronski: Somebody’s coming.

(
Footsteps.
)

agronski: It’s the Father, Mike—look out here and you can see him. He seems to be all right. Dragging his feet a bit, but who wouldn’t after being out helling all night? 

michelis: Maybe you’d better meet him at the door. It’d probably be better than our springing out at him after he gets inside. After all he doesn’t expect us. I’ll get to unpacking the hammocks.

agronski: Sure thing, Mike.

(
Footsteps, going away from Cleaver. A grating sound of 
stone on stone: the door wheel being turned.
)

agronski: Welcome home, Father! We just got in a little while ago and—My God, what’s wrong? Are you ill too? Is there something that—Mike!
Mike!

(
Somebody was running. Cleaver willed his neck muscles to 
lift his head, but they refused to obey. Instead, the back of his 
head seemed to force itself deeper into the stiff pillow of the hammock. After a momentary and endless agony, he cried out
): 

cleaver: Mike!

agronski: Mike!

(
With a gasp, Cleaver lost the long battle at last. He was 
asleep.
)

As the door of Chtexa’s house closed behind him, RuizSanchez looked about the gently glowing foyer with a feeling of almost unbearable anticipation, although he could hardly have said what it was that he hoped to see. Actually, it looked exactly like his own quarters, which was all he could in justice have expected—all the furniture at “home” was Lithian, except of course for the lab equipment and a few other terrestrial trappings.

“We have cut up several of the metal meteors from our museums, and hammered them as you suggested,” Chtexa was saying behind him, while he struggled out of his raincoat and boots. “They show very definite, very strong magnetism, as you predicted. We now have the whole of our world alerted to pick up these nickel-iron meteorites and send them to our electrical laboratory here, regardless of where they are found. The staff of the observatory is attempting to predict possible falls. Unhappily, meteors are rare here. Our astronomers say that we have never had a ‘shower’ such as you describe as frequent on your native planet.”

“No; I should have thought of that,” Ruiz-Sanchez said, following the Lithian into the front room. This, too, was quite ordinary by Lithian standards, and empty except for the two of them.