No Sharks in the Med and Other Stories (47 page)

“Okay, that’s it. But always remember: safety first! Suits, masks, equipment—check ’em all out. And tomorrow morning let me see all your ugly faces looking right back at me, just like today.”

They began to leave, some faster, more eager, than others. The eager ones would be new to this…they wouldn’t be quite so eager tomorrow. And I knew I wouldn’t be seeing
all
of their ugly faces.

That thought was like an invocation.

The man in the front row, the squad leader—the man with the crisped hair and gnarly hands, whose coughing had made me think his lungs were suffering from the blown-back heat of the flame-throwers—had lurched to his feet. He coughed yet again, gurgling at me like a drain, and stumbled forward. I saw that his eyes were starting out, his hands clawing at thin air.

I jumped down off the podium, but too late to catch him as he fell over. He writhed on the floor, almost vibrating there, but only for a moment or two. And then he lay still.

Some of his men had come forward, staring transfixed, babbling half-formed questions. Waving them back, I got down on my knees beside the fallen man. He wasn’t breathing. I put my ear to his chest. Nothing.

Then something:

A hooked green tendril with a bud at its tip uncurled from his right nostril! It elongated vertically to about six inches in length, swaying there. Then the bud turned in my direction where I lay frozen, with my head on the dead man’s chest. And the damned thing opened and
hissed
at me!

Someone cried out, stepped forward with clippers, snipped the bud off so that it fell on the floor. As it writhed there, other men came forward and dragged me away. More tendrils were emerging from his ears, his mouth; there was nothing for it but to hose him down with sulphuric acid spray, reducing everything to slop…

There may be survivors. Maybe the Green won’t go into the cold places, maybe it won’t invade the deserts. Who can say but that an oasis pool, or perhaps the pack ice, or a black smoker down on the sea-bed, may well be the last refuge of animal life?

Or there again, maybe sixty million years from now another space rock will come hurtling from the sky, and this time it’ll kick-start, revitalize the vertebrates…though it’s possible it could just as easily announce the rise of the insects!

Who can say?

But I have remembered the name of that American author who wrote about a terrible colour out of space: he was called H. P. Lovecraft, and tonight when I go out and look at the sky, I may have a word with him. I may say, “Well, Mr. Lovecraft, wherever you are now, I just want you to know that the stars don’t leer. But on the other hand, looking at them and wondering what else is out there, I’m pretty sure I know what you meant…”

Voice Journal of Greg Griffiths,

3rd Engineer on the
Albert Einstein

out of the Greater Mars Orbital Station.

Day One:

Probably the 24th Feb 2198 Earth Standard, but I can’t be sure. The ship’s chronometer is bust—like everything else except me—and I don’t know how long I’ve been out of it. Judging by the hair on my face, my hunger, the bump on the back of my head and the thick blood scab that’s covering it, it could have been two or three days. Anyway and as far as I can tell it’s now morning on whichever day, which I’m going to call Day One…

What I remember:

We passed through the fringes of an old nebula; a cloud of gas that looked dead enough, but it seems there was some energy left in it after all: weird energy that didn’t register on instrumentation. Then the drive started acting up and quit entirely maybe four or five light-years later. When we dropped back into normal space I put on a suit, went out and for’ard to check the fuel ingestors. They were clogged with this gas that was almost liquid, and dust that stuck like glue; it couldn’t be converted into fuel and had hardened to a solid in the scoops…weird as hell, like I said. Ship’s Science Officer, Scot Gentry, said it could well be “proto-planetary slag”—whatever the hell that’s supposed to be!—and a total pain in the backside. And down in engineering we scratched our heads and tried to figure out some way to shift this shit.

Then the sub-light engines blew up and we saw that the dust was into everything. The anti-gravs were on the fritz but still working, however sporadically, and by some miracle of chance we were just a cough and a spit off a planet with water and an atmosphere: a couple trillion to one chance, according to Gentry. But by then, too, we knew we were way off course—light-years off course—because this proto-crap had got into the astronavigator, too.

As for the planet: it had continents, oceans, but there was no radio coming up at us, no sign of cities or intelligent life-forms. Well, if there had been, it would have been a first. The universe has been looking like a pretty lonely place for a long time now. And to me,
right
now, it looks lonelier than ever.

Coming in to make landfall the anti-gravs gave up the ghost…so much for a soft landing. Six thousand tons of metal with nothing holding us up, we fell from maybe a hundred feet in the air. Higher than that and I probably wouldn’t be recording this. I was in a sling in a gravity tube, trying to burn slag off the gyros, when this uncharted planet grabbed us; the sling’s shock absorbers bounced me around but saved my life.

As for the other crew members, all fifteen of my shipmates, they weren’t so lucky—

—Or maybe they were. It all depends on what this place has in store for me. But right now I have to fix my head, eat, give myself shots, then get all the bodies off the ship or the place won’t ever be liveable…

Day Two: (morning.)

Yesterday was a very strange day…and by the way, I think the days here are just an hour or two longer than Earth standard. I reckon I was right about coming to fairly early in the morning, because it seemed like one hell of a long strange day; but then again—considering what I was doing—it would.

I had started to move the bodies out of the ship.

No easy task, that. And not only for the obvious reasons. I cried a lot, for the obvious reasons. But with the old
Albert E
. lying at thirty degrees, and her (or his) once round hull split at all the major seams, buckled and now oblate, and leaking all kinds of corrosives, lubricants and like that…no, it was no easy task. Don’t know why I bothered, really, because I see now there’s no way I can live in the
Albert E
. Ship’s a death trap! Perhaps I should have left the bodies as they were, sealed them in as best I could right there where they died; the entire ship with all these bodies—my buddies—in it, like some kind of big metal memorial. Rust in peace…

But it’s way too late now, and anyway there’s lots of stuff I have to get out of there. Medicines and such; ship’s rations; a big old self-inflating habitat module from the emergency survival store; tools; stuff like that. A regular Robinson Crusoe, I be—or maybe a marooned Ben Gunn, eh, Jim lad? Oh,
Ha-harr
! But at least there’s no sign of pirates.

I thank God for my sense of humour. Just a few days ago on board the
Albert E.
, why, I would crack them up so hard—they would laugh so hard—they’d tell me I’d be the death of them! Well, boys, it wasn’t me. Just a fucking big cloud of weird gas and dust, that’s all. But it cracked us up good and proper…

Later:

I managed to get more than half of them out of there before the sun went down, and I’ll get the rest tomorrow. But tonight will be the
last
night I’ll spend on board ship. It’s nightmarish on the
Albert E.
now. Tomorrow I’ll fix up the habitat I unloaded, get a generator working, power some batteries, set up a defensive perimeter like the book says. And whatever those things are I hear moving around out there in the dark—probably the same guys who were watching me from the forest while I worked—fuck ’em! I do have a reliable sidearm. Shouldn’t need to use it too much though; once they’ve had a taste of the electric perimeter—that’s assuming they’re the overly curious kind—they won’t be in too much of a hurry to come back for more.

As for tonight, I have to hope they’re not much interested in carrion, that’s all…

Day Three: (midday.)

I feel a lot better in myself, not so knocked about, no longer down. Well,
down
, naturally, but not all the way. I mean, hell, I’m alive! And just looking at the old
Albert E.
I really don’t know how. But the air is very good here; you can really suck it in. It’s fresh, sweet…unfiltered? Maybe it’s just that the air on the ship, always stale, is already starting to stink.

I got a generator working; got my habitat set up, electric perimeter and all. Now I’ll bring out all the ship’s rations I can find, and while I’m at it I may come across the two bodies I haven’t found yet. One of them is a dear pal of mine, Daniel Geisler. That will hit me hard. It’s all hitting hard, but I’m alive and that’s what matters. Where there’s life there’s hope, and all that shit…

I’ve been finding out something about the locals who I was listening to last night. I was in a makeshift hammock that I’d fixed up in an airlock; left the airlock open a crack, letting some of this good air in. Part way into the night I could hear movement out in the darkness. After an hour or so it got quiet, so it seems they sleep, too. Could be that night and sleep are universally synonymous. That would make sense…I think.

But how best to describe them? Now me, I’m not what you’d call an exobiologist, Jim, lad, just a grease monkey; but I’ll give it a try. From what I’ve seen so far, there appears to be three kinds of what is basically one and the same species. See what I mean about not being an exobiologist? Obviously they’re
not
the same species; and yet there’s this peculiar similarity about them that…well, they’re very
odd
, that’s all…

Anyway, let me get on.

There’s the flying kind: eight foot wing span, round-bodied and skinny-legged; like big, beakless, stupid-looking pale-pink robbins. They hang out in the topmost branches of the trees and eat what look like fist-sized yellow berries. Paradoxically and for all their size they appear to be pretty flimsy critters; no feathers, they’re more like bats or maybe flying squirrels than birds, and they leap and soar rather than fly. And when they’re floating between the sun and me I see right through their wings. But they’re not the only flying things. There are others of approximately the same size and design but more properly birdlike. And this other species—very definitely a separate, different species—they stay high in the sky, circling like buzzards. I kept an eye on these high-flyers because of what I was doing. I mean, I was laying out my dead shipmates, and buzzards and vultures are carnivores. On Earth they are, anyway…

Then there’s the landlubbers or earth-bound variety. These are bipedal, anthropoid, perhaps even mammalian or this world’s equivalent, though as yet I’ve seen no sign of tits or marriage tackle. Whatever, I reckon it’s probably these man-like things—this world’s intelligentsia?—that I heard bumping around in the darkness. But since they’re the most interesting of the bunch I’ll leave them till last, get back to them in a minute.

And finally there’s the other land variety, the hogs. Well, I’ll call them hogs for now, if only for want of a better name. They’re some four or five feet long, pale-pink like the soaring things and the bipeds, and they rustle about in the undergrowth at the fringes of the forest eating the golfball-sized seeds of the big yellow berries. But they, too, have their counterparts. Deeper in the woods, there are critters more properly like big, hairy black hogs that snort and keep well back in the shadows.

And there you have it. But the “Pinks”—as I’ve started to call all three varieties of these pale-pink creatures: the quadrupeds, bipeds, and flyers—it’s as if they were all cut from the same cloth. Despite the diversity of their design there’s a vague similarity about them; their drab, unappealing colour for one thing, and the same insubstantial sort of flimsiness or—I don’t know, wobbliness? Jellyness?—for another.

Fascinating really…
if
I was an exobiologist. But since I’m not they’re just something I’ll need to watch out for until I know for sure what’s what. Actually, I don’t feel intimidated by any of these critters. Not so far. Not by the Pinks, anyway.

More about the man-likes:

When I opened up the airlock this morning there was a bunch of them, maybe thirteen or fourteen, sitting in a circle around the remains of my shipmates. I’ve been laying my ex-friends out in their own little groups, their three main shipboard cliques, but all of them pretty close together with their feet in toward a common centre. Ended up forming a sort of three-leafed clover shape with four or five bodies to a leaf.

The aliens (yeah, it’s a cliche, I know, but what are these things if not aliens? They’re alien to me, anyway—though it’s true that on this world I’m the only real alien—but anyway:) the
locals
were sitting there nestling the heads of the dead in their laps. And I thought what the hell, maybe they’d spent the whole night like that! Well, whatever, that’s how it struck me.

So then, what were they doing? Wondering if these dead creatures were edible, maybe? Or were they simply trying to figure out what these things who fell from the sky were; these vaguely familiar beings, whose like they’d never known before? They did seem briefly, particularly, almost childishly interested in the difference between the
Albert E.
’s lone female crew member’s genitalia and the rest of the gang’s tackle, but that didn’t last. Which was fine because she—a disillusioned crew-cut exobiologist dike called Emma Schneider—wouldn’t have much liked it.

Anyway, there they were, these guys, like a bunch of solemn mourners with my old shipmates…

After I tossed down a spade and lowered a rope ladder, however, they stood up, backed off, and watched me from a distance as I came down and began to dig graves in this loamy soil. With so many holes to dig, even shallow ones, I knew to pace myself, take breaks, get things done in easy stages: a little preparatory digging, then search for usables in the ship, more digging, fix up my habitat, make another attempt at finding my two missing buddies, dig, set up my generator—and so on. And that’s pretty much how it’s been working out…