Collected Short Fiction, page 669
“That’s our mission—to build that terminal!” His lean face shone. “The grit was waiting for our fathers on the moon. If it was seed, they were the soil and we are the young plants. The grit made us like we are. We are part of a great plan that begins somewhere among the stars. It can’t end till the starships arrive on Earth.”
We were still up at three o’clock, debating the vast implications of that, when Kyrie took another break. Sudden clouds had veiled the moon and we walked back to the nursery against a dry wind that smelled of brush and dust.
Kyrie stood over Guy, gently stroking his gray-furred face. Tears filled her eyes, when he moved and whined in his sleep. Her face looked pinched and bleak, with none of Nick’s elation. He fixed her a tray when she came on to the kitchen, but she pushed it back untasted.
“What frets you, child?” Carolina asked. “Nick was so delighted with the message you were getting.”
“But I’m afraid.” She glanced anxiously at Nick. “Even if we get the terminal ready, I’m afraid our people will never come.”
“But Nick says they promised—”
“A long time ago,” Kyrie said. “When I’m reading the nexode, I forget how old the grit was. What it shows seems like now. But Nick says it lay on the moon sixty million years. He says it was old before men evolved on Earth.”
“Is that so bad?”
She looked uncomfortably at Nick.
“Ky’s a worryworm.” He made a face and gave her a playful push, but she refused to smile. “I thought she knew more about the grit. Now she’s afraid our people won’t know us after sixty million years.”
She nodded unhappily.
“Maybe they won’t.” Nick’s own face turned sober. “It is a long time. Perhaps they’re dead by now. Perhaps they’ve evolved so far they won’t care about us. Perhaps they’ve forgotten all about scattering the messenger missiles. Anyhow, no matter what, we’ve got to build the beacon and the terminal. That’s why we’re alive.”
“We must try,” she whispered. “But I’m so afraid.”
She reached for Nick to take her hand. They were trudging back through the dark toward the lab as we went off to bed.
GUY woke at noon next day. As slow and bearlike as if he had never touched the grit, he opened my office door and peered vacantly inside, whining Kyrie’s name. I called Carolina and we tried to distract him, but he wouldn’t eat and he wouldn’t come with me to the gym.
He shambled back to Kyrie’s empty room and prowled the nursery hall until he came to the kitchen. There he found the chair where she had sat. He snatched it up to sniff at it and blundered out of the room, moaning and twitching, stooping to scan the floor as if his yellow eyes could trace her footprints.
He paused outside as if to sniff the wind and ran lumbering toward the lab. We saw Nick dart out to stop him, as shrill and ineffectual as a small dog trying to intercept a charging bear.
“Wait! Please! Ky’s at work—”
Guy crumpled Nick with one careless slap and drove on through the doorway. Nick was flat on the concrete walk when we came up, a green fly buzzing around his head. Naked to the blazing sun, his pale body had failed to tan.
Carolina gathered him into her arms. I ran past them into the lab. Guy had stopped in the hall, shaking his head and peering about as if the decayed-hay reek of Carolina’s beta cultures had washed out Kyrie’s scent. His gray ears lifted searchingly. He turned, crouched and suddenly froze.
“Hold it, Guy—”
He ignored me. Somehow he had located Kyrie. His spread ears quivered. He plunged abruptly past me, toward the darkroom. I was close behind when he reached the door. Without pausing to try the knob, he went through it like a tank.
I followed him in, stumbling over the broken door. The rose-colored glow of the nexode was all I could see for a moment. Pushing into the dark, I found Kyrie’s golden form. She sat on a high stool, staring into the great tetrahedron as if unaware of Guy.
Whining like a starving beast, he snatched it out of her cupped hands. The stool tipped over with a crash, but she came down on bare cat feet. For a moment she stared up at him, the gold fading fast from her stricken face.
“Baby Guy!” she whispered. “What have you done?” She caught at his furry arm, her voice tremulous with terror. “What have you done to Nick?”
Guy swayed back and forth, clutching the rose pyramid in both gray paws. Peering into it, his eyes grew huge and dull, soot-black and yellow-rimmed. His breath became a heavy rasping.
“Guy, Guy!” she sobbed. “You’ve hurt little Nicky!”
She darted out, but I stayed to watch Guy with the nexode. His slow paws turned it. His blank eyes blinked at it. He bent to lick its shimmering faces with a pink, dripping tongue. At last he cocked a furry ear to listen while he shook it, like some bewildered savage with a clock.
Waiting for the glowing pyramid to transform him again, I saw no change. When he put it together, he must have served only as a temporary tool, energized for that special purpose. The task accomplished, he was not energized again.
Instead, he ran down now. His noisy breath grew quiet. His frantic movements slowed. He stood swaying, staring dimly at the pyramid. Slow tears traced black streaks in his fur. At last he shook his head and shambled away. I followed him over the splintered door and out of the building.
Outside, the blaze of sun hurt my eyes. Carolina stood swinging back and forth, crooning softly, rocking Nick in her arms. His thin arms hung limp and the green fly still droned around his head. Kyrie was hovering over him, brushing at the fly, but she turned to face Guy with a look of sick accusation.
“You’re bad,” she gasped. “You—beast!”
With a roar of sudden fury Guy threw the nexode at them. It might have struck Nick, but Carolina swung him out of the way. It grazed her arm with one keen point and spun across the lawn. With a cry almost of pain Kyrie darted to pick it up.
Trembling and sobbing, Guy shuffled after her. Turning her stricken face from him, she slipped around him and brought the nexode back to Nick. With a howl like a tortured animal’s Guy swung abruptly away. Staggering blindly, he tripped over the curb, picked himself up and reeled out of sight behind the gym. His agonized bellows thinned and faded away.
X
BY THAT time a security car had arrived. Nick’s thin limbs hung floppily as Carolina laid him on the rear seat, but I saw a faint color beginning to spread where the sun had washed his body. She examined him back at the nursery, while we waited breathlessly.
“He’s coming around.” She gave Kyrie a comforting smile and turned to me more gravely. “Better see about Guy.”
The security men had reported Guy running toward the open mesa. We followed in the car. He was far ahead when we saw him, a wild gray animal loping into a shimmering blue mirage. Bounding over boulders and juniper clumps, he almost outran us.
“Wait, Guy! Listen!”
I leaned from the jolting car to call when we were near enough, but he didn’t stop. Instead he swerved abruptly to attack an isolated clump of tall cactus. He dived into it, butting and slugging and kicking the spiny masses, finally embracing them, howling with self-inflicted pain.
His wild cries choked and died. He was asleep or unconscious when we reached him, lying flat beneath the thorny plant he had pulled down upon him. His arms and legs were locked around it, bristling with broken spines. His gray jaws were fixed upon a flaming purple bloom. All movement had ceased, but his barnyard scent hung in the heated air, stronger than any odor from the flowers.
We waited for an ambulance to take him back to the station hospital. Needing no anesthetic, he lay three hours on the operating table while the spines were removed. No sign of life appeared until Nick and Kyrie came to see him later, in his room.
They stood beside his bed until he moved and made some stifled sound. Kyrie reached to stroke his arm. His eyes came open then, yellow and empty, the pupils contracting at once to expressionless points.
“Guy!” Kyrie sobbed. “Dear Guy!”
His flat head turned. His gray ears rose and fell. His vacant eyes passed over her and Nick, without interest or even recognition. A dull growl came out of his throat. In a moment he sank laxly back, asleep again.
Kyrie crumpled into a quivering little heap and we had to carry her out of the room. Nick came with her to the nursery. He sat beside her all night. If he ever urged her to return to her work with the nexode, I didn’t hear him, but she was back in the darkroom next day, behind a new door.
Guy slept most of the time for many months. His body shrank to knobby bones and shabby fur. His illness and regression puzzled me. Building the nexode, Marko suggested, had somehow used him up. The loss of the precious pyramid, Carolina thought, had left him with a psychic trauma. I wondered if losing Kyrie had not hurt him more.
WHEN he began to recover—later during the winter—he wanted me with him. He used to lie watching me, hour after hour, with a dumb devotion. He liked to rub his fur against me and whined with delight when I scratched behind his ears.
Though Nick and Kyrie came several times to see him, he seemed not to know them. Kyrie brought the nexode once and held it toward him hopefully. His yellow eyes glanced blankly at it, drifted indifferently away. Kyrie was stricken and Nick begged her not to come back.
With Caolina’s help I taught Guy to speak again. We played with his educational toys and went to the gym and swam together. With food and exercise he slowly regained his lost vigor and suddenly began to grow again. By summer he was twice my weight.
An odd sense of humor came with his returning awareness. He used his physical power to tease me, letting me nearly win a tennis game or even a wrestling match before he beat me or pinned me down. He played alarming practical jokes on the security men.
He found other interests, besides. One was a dark sturdy girl who had been hired to wash glassware in the exobiology lab. The name on her security badge was Veronica Geronimo. She claimed the famous Apache raider for an ancestor, though security later informed me that she came from the Bronx.
We saw no probable harm in this affair. Apache or not, Veronica looked competent to protect herself even from Guy’s rather alarming sex equipment. Marko thought Guy needed an emotional outlet and Carolina seemed reluctant to inhibit the basic behavioral responses of a unique biological specimen.
I wasn’t much surprised when Veronica disappeared—Guy must have been a problem lover. But he was bewildered and dismayed. He wanted me to help him find her. When I went to security I learned that she had been thrown off the mesa for peddling marijuana without a federal license.
Guy’s distress produced a new crop of clinical symptoms for Carolina to record. For the first time in his life he couldn’t sleep. His fur lost color. His ammoniac odor grew sharper. He began breaking up furniture, absently twisting and snapping a lamp or a chair into fragments before he saw what he was doing.
He hadn’t learned to read and one day he brought me a note smuggled in by a cafeteria worker. The tinted paper reeked of cheap perfume. Veronica still loved her Papa Bear. She Had lost her badge and couldn’t come to see him, but she was working at the Thunderbird Bar, out on the Albuquerque road. She had a room at the Starways Flytel, if her Papa Bear remembered his teeny weeny Goldilocks.
I tried to decline when Guy wanted me to come with him to the security office, but he carried me there on his shoulder. The security men snorted with indignant scorn when he asked permission to visit Miss Geronimo. Though they were not explicit, they seemed to feel that any union between Guy and a human girl would be wickedly unnatural.
The acting chief did say he’d be damned if he compromised security just to coddle a hairy halfman. He refused Guy’s request and assigned special guards to keep him on the mesa.
Escorting us back to the nursery, those new guards wanted to know where Guy’s girl was shacking up, but he was more astute than I expected. Assuming a blank idiocy, he managed not to mention the Thunderbird Bar or the Starways Flytel.
In spite of security he left the mesa that night. How he went was never entirely clear. The guards put him to bed in a windowless room and stood their watch outside. Next morning they found a hole in the wall and an empty bed.
We were frightened for Guy. With his nonhuman look, he would be in danger everywhere. Though the government was suppressing news of the space invasion, facts enough were leaking out to kindle an anti-alien hysteria.
Carolina had kept us informed of what she knew about the invasion, which was enough to upset us all. As a distinguished exobiologist, she was on a special list to receive the classified reports. Low-ranking officials were streaming to Skygate to consult her about the dangers from space and she was often called away to advise those higher up. Even she was perplexed and disturbed.
The Earth platform had begun reporting anomalous fogs at sea. Shallow but oddly dense, they occurred unpredictably at points which made nonsense of the official theory that they were due to unexpected shifts in the cold ocean currents. Several fishing vessels were reported lost in them before the censors closed the lid on such unsettling facts.
The news about the flying snakes was equally disturbing. Following our rockets home, those remarkable space creatures had explored the moon and investigated the Earth platform and had now begun diving into our own atmosphere.
When their appearances became too frequent for the censors to deny them entirely, COSMOS released an official opinion that they meant no harm. Perhaps that was true. Certainly they seemed more playful than hostile, although their intentions were never quite clear. They were evidently interested in human activities and obviously attracted to heat—like Nick’s flying plank, they somehow converted thermal energy into motion. They began diving out of space to escort our aircraft, as dolphins used to escort ships. Whatever their motives, the results were unfortunate. Drained of heat and power, the escorted aircraft often crashed.
The word “otheron” had begun to spread that year on the waves of secrecy and rumor and unconvincing denial. It denoted anything from another biocosm, moon child or space snake, cultured beta-form or imagined invader. Guy was an otheron, and we were concerned for his life.
HE WAS gone two months. His disappearance was never widely advertised—for fear on the part of those concerned of touching off a panic—but Skygate security did organize an intensive secret search. Marko and I made several fruitless trips, following clues of our own and notions of Kyrie’s, but Guy wasn’t easy to find.
Our knowledge of his first seven weeks of freedom became mostly inference drawn from a trivee series screened the following year. Veronica Geronimo was the narrator of I Loved A Monster, and her lurid drama must have been at least partly true. Later I saw Guy himself watching the program, chuckling silently. He confirmed a few details for me, though he would never talk to security.
It seems that he and Veronica covered most of North America, living and traveling in a series of rented or perhaps stolen helicabins. To the confusion of security, it developed that Guy himself had been on trivee half a dozen times during the manhunt.
Disguised in tiger-skin shorts and stripes painted on his own fur, billed as Monk Tigerhide, he had competed as a professional wrestler, dutifully winning or losing as Veronica and her friends desired, until he had inadvertently damaged too many opponents.
In ways never revealed to Internal Revenue, the two had collected a considerable fortune. Tax officials intercepted Veronica as she attempted to leave the country the following year with nearly six and a half million in unexplained World Bank globals.
Abruptly, on the helistage of the Manhattan Hudson, that grotesque comedy had turned into disaster. Veronica must have been wearing too many jewels. A team of burglars broke into the helicabin. Guy collared one of them, but the other got away. He had seen Guy nude and he spread the news of a Moon Kid in town.
With her own sure instinct for survival Veronica escaped. The captured burglar seems to have gone along, replacing Guy as her consort. Guy himself was left to face the mob, naked and alone. Fighting bare-handed, he threw four men off the helistage and hurt a dozen others, but he was finally overcome.
Left for dead, if too tough to be dismembered, he was picked up by the riot police and finally sent back to Skygate nailed up in a guarded box. Though his odor was overwhelming when we opened it, Carolina decided that he was still alive. The space doctors disagreed, but she made them let her keep him in a hospital room. After long weeks of something between death and sleep, he sat up to beg for a steak.
XI
CAROLINA was gone three months from Skygate the next fall, on an unexplained assignment. Busy with security officials the day she returned, Marko asked me to meet her plane. She looked so tired and troubled that I asked what was wrong. She said nothing till we were alone in the car.
“It’s the fog,” she told me then. Anxious to know more, but diffident about prying into confidential matters, I drove on without comment. She frowned, hesitated.
“Don’t talk about it,” she said at last. “But the government is getting the jitters. I was called in to lead a secret research group. Our instructions were to learn what the fog is and what to do about it.” She drew a weary breath. “I’m afraid our report won’t cure any jitters.”
Again I waited while she stared at the desert moodily and as if each twisted juniper had been some kind of space alien in disguise. When I had to brake and swerve to avoid a speeding security airtrac, she looked absently back at me.
“We tried.” The flatness of her tone added that they had also failed. “The military called for an all-out effort. They gave us all the people and equipment we asked for and all the data anybody has. We tried everything. Mapped the fog. Photographed what we could. Tested the fog for every sort of radiation. Dropped telemetered instruments into them with rockets and parachutes. Towed scoops from aircraft to collect samples. Questioned every surviving observer and every crackpot with a theory.”
