I Am Crying All Inside and Other Stories (28 page)

And now, speed reduced, dropping in a long slant toward the glass-smooth landing field, he huddled over the controls, keyed to a free-fall landing, always dangerous at best. But it would be as dangerous, he sensed, to advertise his coming with another rocket blast. The field was long and smooth. If he hit it right and not too far out, there would be plenty of room.

The almost nonexistent atmosphere was a point in favor. There were no eddies, no currents of air to deflect the ship, send it into a spin or a dangerous wobble.

Off to the right he caught a flash of light and his mind clicked the split-second answer that it must be the laboratory.

Then the ship was down, pancaking, hissing along the landing strip, friction gripping the hull. It stopped just short of a jumbled pile of rock and West let out his breath, felt his heart take up the beat again. A few feet more …

Locking the controls, he hung the key around his neck, pulled down the visor of his space gear and let himself out of the ship.

Across the field glowed the lights of the laboratory. He had not been mistaken, then. He had seen the lights … and men were here. Or could he be mistaken? Those lights would have continued to function even without attention. The fact that they were shining in the building was no reason to conclude that men also were there.

At the far end of the field loomed a massive structure and West knew that it was the shops of the Alpha Centauri expedition, where men had labored for two years to make the Henderson space drive work. Somewhere, he knew, in the shadow of the star-lighted shops, was the ship itself, the
Alpha Centauri,
left behind when the crew had given up in despair and gone back to Earth. A ship designed to fly out to the stars, to quit the Solar System and go into the void, spanning light years as easily as an ordinary ship went from Earth to Mars.

It hadn't gone, of course, but that didn't matter.

“A symbol,” West said to himself.

That was what it was … a symbol and a dream.

And something, too, now that he was here, now that he could admit it, that had lain in the back of his mind all the way from Earth.

West shucked his belt around so that the pistol hung handy to his fist.

If men were here … or worse, if that message hadn't been a phony, he might need the pistol. Although it was unlikely that the sort of thing that he then would face would be vulnerable to a pistol.

Shivering, he remembered that terse, secret report reposing in the confidential archives back on Earth … the transcription of the tense, rasping voice that had come over the radio from Pluto, a voice that told of dreadful things, of dying men and something that was loose. A voice that had screamed a warning, then had gurgled and died out.

It was after that that the ban had been put on the planet and the space patrol sent out to quarantine the place.

Mystery from the first, he thought … beginning and the end. First because the commission was seeking a hormone to effect controlled mutations in the human race. And the race would resent such a thing, of course, so it had to be a mystery.

The human race, West thought bitterly, resents anything that deviates from the norm. It used to stone the leper from the towns and it smothered its madmen in deep featherbeds and it stares at a crippled thing and its pity is a burning insult. And its fear … oh, yes, its fear!

Slowly, carefully, West made his way across the landing strip. The surface was smooth, so smooth that his space boots had little grip upon it.

On the rocky height above the field stood the laboratory, but West turned back and stared out into space, as if he might be taking final leave of someone that he knew.

Earth, he said. Earth, can you hear me now?

You need no longer fear me and you need not worry, for I shall not come back.

But the day will come when there are others like me. And there may be even now.

For you can't tell a mutant by the way he combs his hair, nor the way he walks or talks. He sprouts no horns and he grows no tail and there's no mark upon his forehead.

But when you spot one, you must watch him carefully. You must spy against him and set double-checks about him. And you must find a place to put him where you'll be safe from anything he does … but you must not let him know. You must try him and sentence him and send him into exile without his ever knowing it.

Like, said West, you tried to do with me.

But, said West, talking to the Earth, I didn't like your exile, so I chose one of my own. Because I knew, you see. I knew when you began to watch me and about the double-checks and the conferences and the plan of action and there were times when I could hardly keep from laughing in your face.

He stood for a long moment, staring into space, out where the Earth swam somewhere in darkness around the star-like Sun.

Bitter? he asked himself. And answered: No, not bitter. Not exactly bitter.

For you must understand, he said, still talking to the Earth, that a man is human first and mutant after that. He is not a monster simply because he is a mutant … he is just a little different. He is human in every way that you are human and it may be that he is human in more ways than you are. For the human race as it stands today is the history of long mutancy … of men who were a little different, who thought a little clearer, who felt a deeper compassion, who held an attribute that was more human than the rest of their fellow men. And they passed that clearer thinking and that deeper compassion on to sons and daughters and the sons and daughters passed it on to some—not all—but some of their sons and daughters. Thus the race grew up from savagery, thus the human concept grew.

Perhaps, he thought, my father was a mutant, a mutant that no one suspected. Or it may have been my mother. And neither of them would have been suspected. For my father was a farmer and if his mutancy had made the crops grow a little better through his better understanding of the soil or through a deeper feeling for the art of growing things, who would there be to know that he was a mutant? He would simply have been a better farmer than his neighbors. And if at night, when he read the well-worn books that stood on the shelf in the dining room, he understood those books and the things they meant to say better than most other men, who was there to know?

But I, he said, I was noticed. That is the crime of mutancy, to be noticed. Like the Spartan boy whose crime of stealing a fox was no crime at all, but whose cries when the fox ripped out his guts were a crime indeed.

I rose too fast, he thought. I cut through too much red tape. I understood too well. And in governmental office you cannot rise too fast nor cut red tape nor understand too well. You must be as mediocre as your fellow office-holders. You cannot point to a blueprint of a rocket motor and say, “There is the trouble,” when men who are better trained than you cannot see the trouble. And you cannot devise a system of production that will turn out two rocket motors for the price of one in half the time. For that is not only being too efficient; it's downright blasphemy.

But most of all you cannot stand up in open meeting of government policy makers and point out that mutancy is no crime in itself … that it only is a crime when it is wrongly used. Nor say that the world would be better off if it used its mutants instead of being frightened of them.

Of course, if one knew one was a mutant, one would never say a thing like that. And a mutant, knowing himself a mutant, never would point out a thing that was wrong with a rocket engine. For a mutant has to keep his mouth shut, has to act the mediocre man and arrive at the ends he wishes by complex indirection.

If I had only known, thought West. If I had only known in time. I could have fooled them, as I hope many others even now are fooling them.

But now he knew it was too late, too late to turn back to the life that he had rejected, to go back and accept the dead-end trap that had been fashioned for him … a trap that would catch and hold him, where he would be safe. And where the human race would be safe from him.

West turned around and found the path that led up the rocky decline toward the laboratory.

A hulking figure stepped out of the shadows and challenged him.

“Where do you think you're going?”

West halted. “Just got in,” he said. “Looking for a friend of mine. By the name of Nevin.”

Inside the pocket of his suit, he felt Annabelle stirring restlessly. Probably she was getting cold.

“Nevin?” asked the man, a note of alarm chilling his voice. “What do you want of Nevin?”

“He's got a painting,” West declared.

The man's voice turned silky and dangerous. “How much do you know about Nevin and his painting?”

“Not much,” said West. “That's why I'm here. Wanted to talk with him about it.”

Annabelle turned a somersault inside West's zippered pocket. The man's eyes caught the movement.

“What you got in there?” he demanded, suspiciously.

“Annabelle,” said West. “She's—well, she's something like a skinned rat, partly, with a face that's almost human, except it's practically all mouth.”

“You don't say. Where did you get her?”

“Found her,” West told him.

Laughter gurgled in the man's throat. “So you found her, eh? Can you imagine that?”

He reached out and took West by the arm.

“Maybe we'll have a lot to talk about,” he said. “We'll have to compare our notes.”

Together they moved up the hillside, the man's gloved hand clutching West by the arm.

“You're Langdon,” West hazarded, as casually as he could speak.

The man chuckled. “Not Langdon. Langdon got lost.”

“That's tough,” commented West. “Bad place to get lost on … Pluto.”

“Not Pluto,” said the man. “Somewhere else.”

“Maybe Darling, then …” and he held his breath to hear the answer.

“Darling left us,” said the man. “I'm Cartwright. Burton Cartwright.”

On the top of the tiny plateau in front of the laboratory, they stopped to catch their breath. The dim starlight painted the valley below with silver tracery.

West pointed. “That ship!”

Cartwright chuckled. “You recognize it, eh? The
Alpha Centauri.”

“They're still working on the drive, back on Earth,” said West. “Someday they'll get it.”

“I have no doubt of it,” said Cartwright.

He swung back toward the laboratory. “Let's go in. Dinner will be ready soon.”

The table was set with white cloth and shining silver that gleamed in the light of the flickering dinner tapers. Sparkling wine glasses stood in their proper places. The centerpiece was a bowl of fruit—but fruit such as West had never seen before.

Cartwright tilted a chair and dumped a thing that had been sleeping there onto the floor.

“Your place, Mr. West,” he said.

The thing uncoiled itself and glared at West with an eye of fishy hatred, purred with lusty venom and slithered out of sight.

Across the table Louis Nevin apologized. “The damn things keep sneaking through all the time. I suppose, Mr. West, you have trouble with them, too.”

“We tried rat traps,” said Cartwright, “but they were too smart for that. So we get along with them the best we can.”

West laughed to cover momentary confusion, but he found Nevin's eyes upon him.

“Annabelle,” he said, “is the only one that ever bothered me.”

“You're lucky,” Nevin told him. “They get to be pests. There is one of them that insists on sleeping with me.”

“Where's Belden?” Cartwright asked.

“He ate early,” explained Nevin. “Said there were a few things he wanted to get done. Asked to be excused.”

He said to West, “James Belden. Perhaps you've heard of him.”

West nodded.

He pulled back his chair, started to sit down, then jerked erect.

A woman had appeared in the doorway, a woman with violet eyes and platinum hair and wrapped in an ermine opera cloak. She moved forward and the light from the flaring tapers fell across her face. West stiffened at the sight, felt the blood run cold as ice within his veins.

For the face was not a woman's face. It was like a furry skull, like a moth's face that had attempted to turn human and had stuck halfway.

Down at the end of the table, Cartwright was chuckling.

“You recognize her, Mr. West?”

West clutched the back of his chair so hard that his knuckles suddenly were white.

“Of course I do,” he said. “The White Singer. But how did you bring her here?”

“So that's what they call her back on Earth,” said Nevin.

“But her face,” insisted West. “What's happened to her face?”

“There were two of them,” said Nevin. “One of them we sent to Earth. We had to fix her up a bit. Plastic surgery, you know.”

“She sings,” said Cartwright.

“Yes, I know,” said West. “I've heard her sing. Or, at least the other one … the one you sent to Earth with the made-over face. She's driven practically everything else off the air. All the networks carry her.”

Cartwright sighed. “I should like to hear her back on Earth,” he said. “She would sing differently there, you know, than she sang here.”

“They sing,” interrupted Nevin, “only as they feel.”

“Firelight on the wall,” said Cartwright, “and she'd sing like firelight on the wall. Or the smell of lilacs in an April rain and her music would be like the perfume of lilacs and the mist of rain along the garden path.”

“We don't have rain or lilacs here,” said Nevin and he looked, for a moment, as if he were going to weep.

Crazy, thought West. Crazy as a pair of bedbugs. Crazy as the man who'd drunk himself to death out on Pluto's moon.

And yet, perhaps not so crazy.

“They have no mind,” said Cartwright. “That is, no mind to speak of. Just a bundle of nervous reactions, probably without the type of sensory perceptions that we have, but more than likely with other totally different sensory perceptions to make up for it. Sensitive things. Music to them is an expression of sensory impressions. They can't help the way they sing any more than a moth can help killing himself against a candle-flame. And they're naturally telepathic. They pick up thoughts and pass them along. Retain none of the thought, you understand, just pass it along. Like old fashioned telephone wires. Thoughts that listeners, under the spell of music, would pick up and accept.”