Baby Is Three (20 page)

“Now that’s not the way to look at it,” I began, but Riggs cut in, “You’re right, you’re right, Lorna. Unless we get them to cooperate, we’ll spend years in finding out how they make the crystals. Or where they mine them. And we haven’t got years. We’ve got about four more days.”

See, sixty years ago a ship could fuel for just so much blasting. A trip was timed for the closest transit of the planets. To leave Venus and chase after Earth as the planets drew apart again in space was out of the question. Now, of course, with power to throw away, it happens every day.

We got Purci out of his suit and revived him. We were all ready to swear that he’d had some secret weapon used on him. He didn’t scare easily. It was probably just his particular response to that
particular level of noise—a completely individual thing. But at the moment we were ready to believe anything of the Gabblers.

The ship began to tremble.

“They’re attacking us!” yelped Greaves.

But they weren’t. There were more than ever of them. The entire slope was covered with bulky, scaly, horribly manlike monsters. They were all gabbling away insanely, and in great numbers they’d squat down and pound on the ground with their mallet-like fists.

“Working theirselves up into a frenzy,” Zipperlein diagnosed. “Skipper, let’s blast off. We’re what you might call underequipped for this sort of stuff.”

Riggs thought. “We’ll stick it out for a while,” he said finally. “I’d like to feel I’d done everything I could—even if it’s just sitting here until we have to leave.”

I had my doubts, and from the looks of them, so had the others. But no one said anything. The ship trembled. We went and had chow.

About thirteen hours before blast-off time I was staring glumly into a screen at the swarm of Gabblers when I sensed someone beside me. It was Slopes. He’d been left pretty much alone in the past three days. I guess everyone was too depressed and nervous to want fun.

“Look at ’em,” I growled, waving at the screen. “I don’t know whether it’s the same ones or whether they’ve been working in relays to keep the hassle going all this time. You’d have to be a Venusian to tell one from another. I can’t tell ’em apart.”

He looked at me as if I’d just told him where the crown jewels were hid, and walked off without a word. He began pulling off his clothes. None of us paid any attention. If we thought anything at all, I guess we figured he was going to take a shower. Before any of us knew what was happening, he’d skinned into a space suit and was clamping on the helmet.

“Hey! Slopes! Where do you think you’re going?”

He said something but I couldn’t hear. I reached back and flipped on the intercom, which would pick up his suit radio. He repeated his remark, which was simply, “Out.” He stepped into the airlock and slid the door shut.

Riggs came pounding out of the control room. “Where’s that crazy fool go—” He went for the airlock, but the red light over it blazed, indicating that the chamber was now open to the outside, and Slopes was gone.

“Get on his beam,” Riggs snapped, and grabbed a mike from my bench. “Slopes!” he roared.

I punched buttons. Slopes’s voice came in, far more calm and clear than I had ever heard it before.

“Yes, Captain.”

“Get back in here!”

“I’m going to try for those crystals.”

“You’re trying for some suicide. Get back here. That’s an order!”

“Sorry, Captain,” said Slopes laconically. Riggs and I stared at each other, amazed. Slopes said, before the Captain could splutter out another word, “I have an idea about these Gabblers, and I’m the only one qualified to carry it out.”

“You’ll get killed!” Riggs bellowed.

“I will if I’m wrong,” said Slopes’s quiet voice. “Now, if it’s all the same to you, I’ll switch off. I have to think.”

Riggs was filling his lungs when he saw Slopes’s radio-response indicator wink out on the board. The breath came out in a single obscene syllable.

All hands went to the screens, in which Slopes was just visible walking away from the ship. “Qualified!” I snorted. “What the hell is
he
qualified for?”

“Humanity,” said Lorna. I didn’t know what she meant by that. Her face was white and strained as she watched the screen.

The Gabblers went into a flurry of activity when they saw him. They crowded forward, practically stepping on one another to get at him. Three or four of the fastest raced out to him, screaming and clashing their tusks. As if to gloat over his helplessness, they circled him, leaping and yammering, occasionally dropping to drum powerfully on the ground with their fists. Then suddenly one of them picked him up, held him high over its head, and raced up the slope with him. The mob parted and closed again behind the creature, and
the whole scaly crowd followed as Slopes was borne up out of sight in the blue underbrush.

“Of all the ways in the world to commit suicide,” breathed Purci. Honey Lundquist began to sob.

“It isn’t suicide,” said Lorna. “It’s murder. And you murdered him.”

“Who?” I demanded. “Me?”

“Yes, you,” she flared, “you and all the rest of you. That poor little tyke never hurt anyone. You did the rottenest thing that can be done to a human being—you persecuted him for what he was, and not for anything he’d done. And now he proves himself man enough—human enough—to give his life for the mission we’ve all failed on.”

“If he went out there to get killed,” said Betty Ordway with icy logic, “it’s suicide, not murder. And if his going out there had anything to do with getting the crystals, I don’t see it.”

“I didn’t see you giving him a tumble,” said Honey smugly.

Lorna didn’t try to fight back. “I didn’t really know what he was until just now,” she said ashamedly, and went to her quarters.

“We ought to go out after him,” said Greaves. Everyone just let that remark lie there. Riggs said, “We blast off in eleven-point-three hours, whatever,” and went into the chart room. The rest of us stood around trying not to look at one another, feeling,
Maybe we were a little hard on the guy
, and
damn it, we never did him any harm, did we?

It hit all of us at the same second, I think, that after three days of incessant babbling and ground-thumping, it was deadly quiet outside. Everybody started to talk and shut up after two syllables. And I think we all began to understand then what Lorna had been driving at.

It was Purci who said it for us, softly, “He didn’t want to come back into this ship. He didn’t want to go back to Earth. He didn’t belong anywhere, because no one ever bothered to take him in. And I guess he just naturally got tired of that.”

I don’t think fifty words were spoken—outside the line of duty—in the next ten hours.

It couldn’t have been more than ninety minutes before blast-off when we heard the Gabblers coming back. Heads came up one by one.

“They want another bite to eat,” someone said. Someone else—one of the girls—swore abruptly.

I threw power into the screens. The underbrush was alive with Gabblers, swarming toward the ship. “Skipper!” I called “blast off, huh? And singe the scales off’n them.”

“You could keep your big stupid fat mouth shut,” said Lorna. It was barely a whisper, but I’ll swear you could hear it all over the ship.
“They’re bringing back Slopes!”

She was right. She was so right. With his legs wrapped around the neck of a capering Gabbler, his face slightly blue because of a dwindling oxygen supply in his suit, and a wide grin, Slopes rode up to the ship, followed and surrounded by hundreds of the scaly horrors. The Gabbler he rode knelt, and Slopes climbed stiffly off. He waved his hand, and a full fifty of the creatures dropped to their haunches and began pounding the dirt with their fists. Slopes walked wearily toward the ship, and four Gabblers followed him, each carrying a bulky bundle on its head.

“Port open?” someone managed to say. I checked it. It was.

There were heavy thumps in the port, and a nerve-rackingly close blast of Gabbler chatter. Then the red light went out and we heard the whine of the air-transfer pump.

At last the door slid open. We fell all over each other to get his helmet and suit off. “I’m hungry,” he said. “And I’m awful tired. And I swear I’ll be deaf for life.”

We rubbed him down and wrapped him up and fed him hot soup. He fell asleep before he was half finished. About then it was blast-off time. We secured him in his bunk and lashed his four big bundles down and, after a couple of short puffs to warn the Gabblers back, we reached for the stars.

In the four bundles were eight hundred and ninety-two perfect Venus crystals. And on the return trip we tried so hard to make up to Slopes for what he’d been through all his life that we actually began to be jealous of each other. And Slopes—he was no longer an
Almost. He was very definitely an Altogether, with a ring to his voice, with a spring to his step.

He worked like a slave on those crystals. “They’ve
got
to be synthesized,” was all he’d say at first. “Humanity and the Gabblers must be kept apart.” So—we helped him. And bit by bit the story came out. The nearer he got to analyzing the complex lattice of those crystals, the more he’d say. So before we reached Luna we found out what he’d done.

“Those Gabblers,” he said. “You had them figured wrong. That’s the damn thing about a human being—anything he doesn’t understand, he fears. That’s natural enough—but why does he have to assume that every emotion he causes in a strange animal means the animal is going to attack?

“Just suppose you’re a small animal—say a chipmunk. You’re hiding under a table eating cake crumbs and minding your own business. There’s a half-dozen humans in the room and one of them is droning on about a traveling farmer and a salesman’s daughter. He reaches the punch line and everybody laughs. But what about Mr. Chipmunk? All he knows is that there’s a great, explosive roar of animal sound. He all but turns himself inside out with fright.

“That’s exactly what happened with human beings and the Gabblers. Only the humans were the chipmunks, for a change.”

Someone exploded, “You mean those lizard-apes was
laughing
at us?”

“Listen to him,” said the New Slopes. “How indignant can you get? Yes, I mean exactly that. Human beings are the funniest things the Gabblers have ever seen in their lives. When I went out to them they carried me off to their village, called in neighbors for miles around, and had themselves a ball. I couldn’t do anything wrong. Wave my arm—they roared. Sit on the ground—they doubled up. Run and jump—they lay down and died.”

Suddenly he shoved aside his work and spoke from down deep inside himself. “That hurts, somehow, doesn’t it? Humans shouldn’t be laughable. They’ve got to be the kings of creation, all full of dignity and power. It’s inexcusable for a human being to be funny unless
he tries to be. Well, let me tell you something—the Gabblers gave me something that no human being ever was able to give me—a sense of
belonging
to humanity. Because what you people went through when the Gabblers first rushed up to you, laughing, is what I’ve been going through all my life. And it’s never going to happen again. Not to me; for thanks to the Gabblers I know that all you superior joes are just as funny as I am.

“The Gabblers are gentle, grateful people. They enjoyed the show and they showered gifts on me. When I indicated that I liked crystals, they went out and got more crystals than I could carry.

“And I’m just as grateful, and that’s why these crystals are going to be manufactured so cheaply on earth that there will never be another Venus Expedition for them. Don’t you see? If mankind ever makes close contact with a race that laughs at them on sight—mankind will exterminate that race.”

On second thought, maybe they shouldn’t nominate Slopes as Man of the Century. Maybe he wouldn’t like for the Gabblers to get that much publicity. And besides, he’s a stinker. He married my girl.

“I
KNOW AGENTS
who can get work out of their clients,” said the telephone acidly.

“Yes, Nick, but—”

“Matter of fact, I know agents who would be willing to drop everything and go out to that one-shot genius’s home town and—”

“I did!”

“I know you did! And what came of it?”

“I got a new story. It came in this morning.”

“You just don’t know how to handle a real writer. All you have to do is—you what?”

“I got a new story. I have it right here.”

A pause. “A new Sig Weiss story? No kidding?”

“No kidding.”

The telephone paused a moment again, as if to lick its lips. “I was saying to Joe just yesterday that if there’s an agent in town who can pry work out of a primadonna like Weiss, it’s good old Crisley Post. Yes, sir. Joe thinks a lot of you, Cris. Says you can take a joke better than—how long is the story?”

“Nine thousand.”

“Nine thousand. I’ve got just the spot for it. By the way, did I tell you I can pay an extra cent a word now? For Weiss, maybe a cent and a half.”

“You hadn’t told me. Last time we talked rates you were overstocked. You wouldn’t pay more than—”

“Aw, now, Cris, I was just—”

“Goodbye, Nick.”

“Wait! When will you send—”

“Goodbye, Nick.”

It was quiet in the office of Crisley Post, Articles, Fiction, Photographs. Then Naome snickered.

“What’s funny?”

“Nothing’s funny. You’re wonderful. I’ve been waiting four years to hear you tell an editor off. Particularly that one. Are you going to give him the story?”

“I am not.”

“Good! Who gets it? The slicks? What are you going to do: sell it to the highest bidder?”

“Naome, have you read it?”

“No. I gave it to you as soon as it came in. I knew you’d want to—”

“Read it.”

“Wh—now?”

“Right now.”

She took the manuscript and carried it to her desk by the window. “Corny title,” she said.

“Corny title,” he agreed.

He sat glumly, watching her. She was too small to be so perfectly proportioned, and her hair was as soft as it looked, which was astonishing. She habitually kept him at arm’s length, but her arms were short. She was loyal, arbitrary, and underpaid, and she ran the business, though neither of them would admit it aloud. He thought about Sig Weiss.