The Mammoth Book of 20th Century SF II (22 page)

“You always did make the best stew,” he said.

“Thank you. I’m glad you’re eating again, Son. I am surprised. I thought you’d be sick about all this.”

He waved vaguely but energetically.

“The challenge of the unknown. I have a sort of feeling this is going to turn out much better than we thought. Much better.”

She came close and sniffed his breath. It was clean, innocent even of stew. That meant he’d taken Nodor, which probably meant he’d been sampling some hidden rye. Otherwise, how to
explain his reckless disregard of the possible dangers? It wasn’t like him.

She said nothing, for she knew that if he tried to hide a bottle in his clothes or field sack while they were tracking down the radio signals, she would soon find it. And take it away. He
wouldn’t even protest, merely let her lift it from his limp hand while his lips swelled with resentment.

They set out. Both wore knapsacks and carried the panrads. He carried a gun over his shoulder, and she had snapped onto her sack her small black bag of medical and lab
supplies.

High noon of late autumn was topped by a weak red sun that barely managed to make itself seen through the eternal double layer of clouds. Its companion, an even smaller blob of lilac, was
setting on the northwestern horizon. They walked in a sort of bright twilight, the best that Baudelaire ever achieved. Yet, despite the lack of light, the air was warm. It was a phenomenon common
to certain planets behind the Horsehead Nebula, one being investigated but as yet unexplained.

The country was hilly, with many deep ravines. Here and there were prominences high enough and steep-sided enough to be called embryo mountains. Considering the roughness of the land however,
there was a surprising amount of vegetation. Pale green, red, and yellow bushes, vines, and little trees clung to every bit of ground, horizontal or vertical. All had comparatively broad leaves
that turned with the sun to catch the light.

From time to time, as the two Terrans strode noisily through the forest, small multicolored insect-like and mammal-like creatures scuttled from hiding place to hiding place. Eddie decided to
carry his gun in the crook of his arm. Then, after they were forced to scramble up and down ravines and hills and fight their way through thickets that became unexpectedly tangled, he put it back
over his shoulder, where it hung from a strap.

Despite their exertions, they did not tire quickly. They weighed about twenty pounds less than they would have on Earth and, though the air was thinner, it was richer in oxygen.

Dr. Fetts kept up with Eddie. Thirty years the senior of the twenty-three-year-old, she passed even at close inspection for his older sister. Longevity pills took care of that. However, he
treated her with all the courtesy and chivalry that one gave one’s mother and helped her up the steep inclines, even though the climbs did not appreciably cause her deep chest to demand more
air.

They paused once by a creek bank to get their bearings.

“The signals have stopped,” he said.

“Obviously,” she replied.

At that moment the radar-detector built into the panrad began to ping. Both of them automatically looked upward.

“There’s no ship in the air.”

“It can’t be coming from either of those hills,” she pointed out. “There’s nothing but a boulder on top of each one. Tremendous rocks.”

“Nevertheless, it’s coming from there, I think. Oh! Oh! Did you see what I saw? Looked like a tall stalk of some kind being pulled down behind that big rock.”

She peered through the dim light. “I think you were imagining things, Son. I saw nothing.”

Then, even as the pinging kept up, the zzting started again. But after a burst of noise, both stopped.

“Let’s go up and see what we shall see,” she said.

“Something screwy,” he commented. She did not answer.

They forded the creek and began the ascent. Halfway up, they stopped to sniff in puzzlement at a gust of some heavy odor coming downwind.

“Smells like a cageful of monkeys,” he said.

“In heat,” she added. If his was the keener ear, hers was the sharper nose.

They went on up. The RD began sounding its tiny hysterical gonging. Nonplused, Eddie stopped. The DF indicated the radar pulses were not coming from the top of the hill they were climbing, as
formerly, but from the other hill across the valley. Abruptly, the panrad fell silent.

“What do we do now?”

“Finish what we started. This hill. Then we go to the other one.”

He shrugged and then hastened after her tall slim body in its long-legged coveralls. She was hot on the scent, literally, and nothing could stop her. Just before she reached the bungalow-sized
boulder topping the hill, he caught up with her. She had stopped to gaze intently at the DF needle, which swung wildly before it stopped at neutral. The monkey-cage odor was very strong.

“Do you suppose it could be some sort of radio-generating mineral?” she asked, disappointedly.

“No. Those groupings were semantic. And that smell . . .”

“Then what – ?”

He didn’t know whether to feel pleased or not that she had so obviously and suddenly thrust the burden of responsibility and action on him. Both pride and a curious shrinking affected him.
But he did feel exhilarated. Almost, he thought, he felt as if he were on the verge of discovering what he had been looking for for a long time. What the object of his search had been, he could not
say. But he was excited and not very much afraid.

He unslung his weapon, a two-barreled combination shotgun and rifle. The panrad was still quiet.

“Maybe the boulder is camouflage for a spy outfit,” he said. He sounded silly, even to himself.

Behind him, his mother gasped and screamed. He whirled and raised his gun, but there was nothing to shoot. She was pointing at the hilltop across the valley, shaking, and saying something
incoherent.

He could make out a long slim antenna seemingly projecting from the monstrous boulder crouched there. At the same time, two thoughts struggled for first place in his mind: one, that it was more
than a coincidence that both hills had almost identical stone structures on their brows, and, two, that the antenna must have been recently stuck out, for he was sure he had not seen it the last
time he looked.

He never got to tell her his conclusions, for something thin and flexible and irresistible seized him from behind. Lifted into the air, he was borne backward. He dropped the gun and tried to
grab the bands or tentacles around him and tear them off with his bare hands. No use.

He caught one last glimpse of his mother running off down the hillside. Then a curtain snapped down, and he was in total darkness.

Eddie sensed himself, still suspended, twirled around. He could not know for sure, of course, but he thought he was facing in exactly the opposite direction. Simultaneously,
the tentacles binding his legs and arms were released. Only his waist was still gripped. It was pressed so tightly that he cried out with pain.

Then, boot-toes bumping on some resilient substance, he was carried forward. Halted, facing he knew not what horrible monster, he was suddenly assailed – not by a sharp beak or tooth or
knife or some other cutting or mangling instrument – but by a dense cloud of that same monkey perfume.

In other circumstances, he might have vomited. Now his stomach was not given the time to consider whether it should clean house or not. The tentacle lifted him higher and thrust him against
something soft and yielding – something fleshlike and womanly – almost breast-like in texture and smoothness and warmth and in its hint of gentle curving.

He put his hands and feet out to brace himself, for he thought for a moment he was going to sink in and be covered up – enfolded – ingested. The idea of a gargantuan amoeba-thing
hiding within a hollow rock – or a rock-like shell – made him writhe and yell and shove at the protoplasmic substance.

But nothing of the kind happened. He was not plunged into a smothering and slimy jelly that would strip him of his skin and then his flesh and then dissolve his bones. He was merely shoved
repeatedly against the soft swelling. Each time, he pushed or kicked or struck at it. After a dozen of these seemingly purposeless acts, he was held away, as if whatever was doing it was puzzled by
his behavior.

He had quit screaming. The only sounds were his harsh breathing and the zzts and pings from the panrad. Even as he became aware of them, the zzts changed tempo and settled into a recognizable
pattern of bursts – three units that crackled out again and again.

“Who are you? Who are you?”

Of course, it could just as easily had been, “What are you?” or “What the hell!” or “Nov smoz ka pop?”

Or nothing – semantically speaking.

But he didn’t think the latter. And when he was gently lowered to the floor, and the tentacle went off to only-God-knew-where in the dark, he was sure that the creature was communicating
– or trying to – with him.

It was this thought that kept him from screaming and running around in the lightless and fetid chamber, brainlessly seeking an outlet. He mastered his panic and snapped open a little shutter in
the panrad’s side and thrust in his righthand index finger. There he poised it above the key and in a moment, when the thing paused in transmitting, he sent back, as best he could, the pulses
he had received. It was not necessary for him to turn on the light and spin the dial that would put him on the 1000 kc band. The instrument would automatically key that frequency in with the one he
had just received.

The oddest part of the whole procedure was that his whole body was trembling almost uncontrollably – one part excepted. That was his index finger, his one unit that seemed to him to have a
definite function in this otherwise meaningless situation. It was the section of him that was helping him to survive – the only part that knew how – at that moment. Even his brain
seemed to have no connection with his finger. That digit was himself, and the rest just happened to he linked to it.

When he paused, the transmitter began again. This time the units were unrecognizable. There was a certain rhythm to them, but he could not know what they meant. Meanwhile, the RD was pinging.
Something somewhere in the dark hole had a beam held tightly on him.

He pressed a button on the panrad’s top, and the built-in flashlight illuminated the area just in front of him. He saw a wall of reddish-gray rubbery substance. On the wall was a roughly
circular, light gray swelling about four feet in diameter. Around it, giving it a Medusa appearance, were coiled twelve very long, very thin tentacles.

Though he was afraid that if he turned his back to them the tentacles would seize him once more, his curiosity forced him to wheel about and examine his surroundings with the bright beam. He was
in an egg-shaped chamber about thirty feet long, twelve wide, and eight to ten high in the middle. It was formed of a reddish-gray material, smooth except for irregular intervals of blue or red
pipes. Veins and arteries?

A door-sized portion of the wall had a vertical slit running down it. Tentacles fringed it. He guessed it was a sort of iris and that it had opened to drag him inside. Starfish-shaped groupings
of tentacles were scattered on the walls or hung from the ceiling. On the wall opposite the iris was a long and flexible stalk with a cartilaginous ruff around its free end. When Eddie moved, it
moved, its blind point following him as a radar antenna tracks the thing it is locating. That was what it was. And unless he was wrong, the stalk was also a C.W. transmitter-receiver.

He shot the light round. When it reached the end farthest from him, he gasped. Ten creatures were huddled together facing him! About the size of half-grown pigs, they looked like nothing so much
as unshelled snails; they were eyeless, and the stalk growing from the forehead of each was a tiny duplicate of that on the wall. They didn’t look dangerous. Their open mouths were little and
toothless, and their rate of locomotion must be slow, for they moved like snails, on a large pedestal of flesh – a foot-muscle.

Nevertheless, if he were to fall asleep they could overcome him by force of numbers, and those mouths might drip an acid to digest him, or they might carry a concealed poisonous sting.

His speculations were interrupted violently. He was seized, lifted, and passed on to another group of tentacles. He was carried beyond the antenna-stalk and toward the snail-beings. Just before
he reached them, he was halted, facing the wall. An iris, hitherto invisible, opened. His light shone into it, but he could see nothing but convolutions of flesh.

His panrad gave off a new pattern of dit-dot-deet-dats. The iris widened until it was large enough to admit his body, if he were shoved in head first. Or feet first. It didn’t matter. The
convolutions straightened out and became a tunnel. Or a throat. From thousands of little pits emerged thousands of tiny, razor sharp teeth. They flashed out and sank back in, and before they had
disappeared thousands of other wicked little spears darted out and past the receding fangs.

Meat-grinder.

Beyond the murderous array, at the end of the throat, was a huge pouch of wafer. Steam came from it, and with it an odor like that of his mother’s stew. Dark bits, presumably meat, and
pieces of vegetables floated on the seething surface.

Then the iris closed, and he was turned around to face the slugs. Gently, but unmistakably, a tentacle spanked his buttocks. And the panrad zzzted a warning.

Eddie was not stupid. He knew now that the ten creatures were not dangerous unless he molested them. In which case he had just seen where he would go if he did not behave.

Again he was lifted and carried along the wall until he was shoved against the light gray spot. The monkey-cage odor, which had died out, became strong again. Eddie identified its source with a
very small hole which appeared in the wall.

When he did not respond – he had no idea yet how he was supposed to act – the tentacles dropped him so unexpectedly that he fell on his back. Unhurt by the yielding flesh, he
rose.