Collected Short Fiction, page 15
George opened one of the packing cases, found the little folding bed he had brought along, and installed it in one comer of the little house. As he went back outside, he was startled to hear a pleasant voice call to him, breaking the silence.
“George? Come here, George,” the voice said, half-purring. Slowly, only partly believing, he turned, and saw what seemed to be a lovely female figure stretched out in the soft grass about twenty yards away. She was beckoning to him.
Hallucination, he thought, as he approached, nibbling his lips nervously. She was blonde, and young, and well-built; she looked almost like Miss Robbins from the bank, but her hair was blonder, her bosom was bosomier. and her teeth were straight and even, unlike Miss Robbins’.
“I’m so glad you’re here, George,” the figure said, wriggling voluptuously. “I’ve been waiting so long for you.”
George stared. She beckoned with her arms; he drew so close he could detect her gentle perfume, could see the colour of her lovely eyes——
One was blue, one was brown.
The instant he noticed the discrepancy, the brown eye immediately turned blue.
He noticed she was not breathing. At once, her breast began to rise and fall visibly.
There was a fairly strong breeze blowing, but her hair remained as motionless as if it were made of copper wire. As George observed this, her hair began to move with the wind.
“Come here, George,” she said, and the appeal was hard to resist.
But he moved a few feet back instead. There were legends of this sort of thing—sirens, space loreleis. Strange extra-terrestrial monsters that cast telepathic projections to lure unsuspecting Earthmen to their dooms. None of these legends had ever been documented; they were only tales told by grizzled space-hands. He felt a hot burst of anger that this should happen to him, on his planet, the planet he had been told was uninhabited, the planet that was his kingdom, his private world.
“George?” The figure stretched, leaned back, almost writhed with impatience.
“You’re a monster!” he said. A vivid picture leaped into his mind of some grey reptilian thing, oozing out of the ground, with a horde of squid-like tentacles and great bulging eyes, with the stale coffin-smell of an incredibly ancient being.
The girl suddenly melted and the monster he had pictured took shape before his eyes. His reaction was instantaneous and instinctive. “Mother!” he yelled, closing his eyes and throwing his arm in front Of his face. “Mother!”
When he looked up the figure was still there, smiling sweetly, wearing the old lavender dress his mother had worn just before her death. Her hair was slightly disarranged, as usual, and altogether it was a perfect likeness of the old woman. George stared, feeling a mixture of terror and rage, and then broke and ran for his house.
“George, dear! Why are you running away from me?”
George dashed through the open doorframe of the house—he hadn’t attached the door yet—and fumbled through the opened packing-case till he came across the Webley blaster he had stowed there. He widened it to lethal range and came to the door. The image of his mother was standing there.
“Let me come in, George,” it said. “I’ll help you unpack.” She smiled again. It was her voice, George thought. Her voice exactly. He shivered and shook at the sight of his mother come to life again.
“Get away or I’ll shoot,” he said coldly. “Back up or I’ll blast you whatever you are.” He gestured with the Webley, and drew his finger tighter on the stud. He wondered for a moment if the figure might actually be his mother; she had said to him, on her deathbed. “I’ll always be with you, George, darling. Always. Wherever you go, your old mother will protect you.” But then he remembered the lovely girl with the mismatched eyes, and the monster, and jolted back to reality.
“Get back into your own form or I’ll cook you,” he called out. He pulled the trigger back tighter, tighter, wondering what would happen when the beam of the Webley shot out and blasted the old lavender dress and the crinkly lace around her throat, and then wondering if he would be able to shoot the figure at all, even though he knew it was not his mother but only a blasphemous copy picked from his brain. He broke into a sweat and started to draw back the trigger. At the last second, the form of his mother swirled and changed.
“You win,” said a tiny, wizened, rubbery, gnome-like figure. It was roughly humanoid in shape, with a pair of thick, long, powerful-looking arms and a subsidiary pair much thinner, culminating in delicate, tapering fingers. “You’d never have shot at the mother-image anyway, but I thought I’d save you the trouble of trying. This is my real form. Can I come in now?”
“No,” George said. “You stay where you are and tell me what you want. How do I know if this is your true form?”
“You’ll just have to take my word, I suppose. But look: I drew the other three forms right out of your mind, didn’t I? What was the first thing on your mind? Admit it? That girl from the bank. You didn’t picture her too clearly, though, which is why I botched the eye-colors. Then you thought of that monster, clear and vivid, and I produced that image. And finally you called on your mother, and I turned into her. But this is a new form; you didn’t have it on your mind at all, did you?”
“No,” George admitted. “But what do you want?”
The little old creature sat down on the edge of a packing case. “Why don’t you put your gun away first? I don’t mean to harm you, George. Quite the opposite, really. Believe me. I only want your love. That’s why I took the first shape. The monster was an accident.
I want you to love me, and I want to love you. Please believe me, George.”
George licked his lips. “This is fantastic,” he said, stepping cautiously out of the doorframe. “Explain yourself. Who are you, where do you come from, what do you want. Quickly and concisely, or I’ll blast you.”
“You know you don’t mean that, George. I see it in your mind; you’re just saying it to be brave. But I’ll tell you who I am. I’ve been living on this little planet for centuries, or maybe millenia. My race discovered the secret of immortality ages ago, and I was stranded here more years ago than I can remember, unable to reach a rescue party. We’re telepathic, as you see, but only over short distances. I’ve lost all hopes of ever being found. My people come from far off, too far off for you to know what star I mean. It’s been very lonely here, and I’ve had a lonely life. My people voluntarily gave up childbearing when our planet began to get overpopulated—immortality and children don’t go together on a small world—and I’ve never known what it is to love, or to be loved. And I’m an old woman, George, old and terribly lonely.”
“You’re a woman?” He stared at the small, gnarled, green-skinned body. “A woman?”
“Yes,” the alien said. “A functional female. But an old one, George. And when you landed I saw how lonely you were, and I wanted to help you. We need each other, George. Can’t you see how badly we need each other?”
She wavered, flickered, and turned back into the image of his mother for a moment, and reached out a wrinkled hand to him.
“Accept me this way, George. Pretend that I’m your mother come back to life again. After a while the pretence will become reality. We can live together the way we did in the old days, with the little old clock on the wall and the bridge game after dinner and——”
“Keep out of my mind!” He drew the blaster again. “The answer is no!” A wave of fear went through him. The alien was surely dangerous, whatever its—her—story. He had heard the old tales of the incubi of space which lure men into yielding up their minds to them. He fired a blaster shot suddenly at the little alien, but she leaped nimbly to one side.
“You won’t be able to hit me,” she said, taking once again his mother’s shape. “I can always see one step ahead of you. But why do you fear me, George? Let me be your mother. I’ll always be with you, George, darling. Wherever you go, your old mother will protect you.
Always. I still mean that.”
“No!” he screamed. He fired again, and a third time, but missed.
“I’ll leave you now, then,” she said. “But I’ll be back, when you need me. I’ll always be with you, George, darling. Always.”
George watched the figure of his mother stride off into the jungle, walking with all the old jauntiness, and, as soon as she was gone, let himself sink limply down on a packing case. After a while, he got the radio going, and tuned in to the Procyon II operator.
He explained who he was, and his predicament.
“What’s that? Mindreading extraterrestrial?” the operator said. “No such thing.”
“Look,” George said, “I didn’t ask for your opinion. I just want you to send a ship and get me off this planet before something happens to me. There’s a dangerous alien roaming around near here, and I’m in a serious position.”
“All right,” came the voice of the operator. “I’ll have a rescue ship sent Out as soon as possible. We’re a little short-handed just now ourselves. It may take a little while. Over and out.”
The contact broke, and George held the dead transmitter for a moment, then replaced it. There was no point in unpacking, he decided, staring glumly at the packing cases. He’d return to Earth, sell the planet—he would have been happier if he’d done that in the first place, he realized—and retire on the money he’d get. He would forget all thoughts Of leaving Earth. Let someone else come out here and play with this maternal monster.
In the meantime, it might be a day or two before the Procyon II people got the ship out. He set to work putting up defences against the alien.
He dug a pit and started to conceal it with leaves and branches, hoping the alien was not listening to his mind as he worked. And then he realised the futility of trying to decoy a telepathic alien into the pit, and stopped working.
There was no way of setting up an electrified fence, which seemed to him the most efficient way of keeping the alien away. He put the packing cases in a ring around his door as a next best resort, and sat behind them, holding the Webley. The only thing he could think of was to sit tight without sleeping until the rescue ship arrived.
Once during the next day George saw the figure of his mother looking at him sadly from the edge of the clearing; she said something, as if in reproach, but he was unable to hear it. He unleashed a bolt from the blaster, aiming low so it would pass, not through the tall illusory body of his mother but through the real short body of the alien. He narrowly missed; he thought he might just have singed her, but he wasn’t sure. She turned into her true form before disappearing into the forest.
He sat there resignedly as night started to fall—the days on this planet were long, George noted, feeling a touch of sadness at the way his plans for a kingdom had been ruined. He could have enjoyed life here, he thought ruefully, really enjoyed it.
Suddenly, as if from nowhere, the ship from Procyon II dropped from the sky and came to rest in the clearing. He noted happily that it was a large ship, almost identical to the one that had brought him; that meant he’d be able to take all his possessions off the planet at once. A man clambered down the catwalk of the ship and looked around.
“Here I am,” George shouted. “Over here.” He stood up and waved, but the man from the ship failed to notice him. George leaped agilely over the barrier of packing cases and ran towards the ship. The spaceman still didn’t seem to hear his calls, and George began to sense that something was wrong. He drew close to the other, almost close enough to touch him, and still he peered out in the other direction, and then abruptly the ground opened under George, ship and spaceman vanished, and George, with the sudden chilling feeling that he had been tricked, dropped heavily into his own pit, landing crumpled on his left leg. He felt the bone bend, and, almost coolly and detachedly, heard the loud cracking noise which followed, before sinking into unconsciousness.
Strong hands lifted him out of the pit, but he barely felt them. Powerful arms dragged him inside the house, stretched him on the bed, soothed his fever-hot forehead, set and bound the broken leg. Days and nights passed, dragged on slowly and George was conscious only of a silent, sweet-smelling figure that went quietly back and forth, ministering to his needs. The pain in his leg was a steady red beat of agony, except when the silent figure took his head in her lap and rocked back and forth, crooning a soft, wordless tune.
He slept for a long while, a long grey succession of days and nights, while the leg slowly healed. Finally, one day he woke up and looked around. All of his packing cases had been opened; the antique Swiss clock ticked away on one wall, the little bookcase was filled with books, everything was arranged just the way it had been on Earth, so long ago. Sitting quietly in one corner, knitting, was the lavender-clad figure of his mother.
“How do you feel, dear?” she asked. “Has the fever gone down any?” She crossed over and gently felt his forehead. Her hand was cool and soothing.
“My leg . . .”
“Just about set,” she said. “I think we can take the splint off today. It’s too bad there’s no doctor, but I guess we can manage just by ourselves, can’t we?”
He rolled over and looked at her. “You’re dead,” he said. “Roselawn Cemetry. I bring flowers to you every Thursday.”
“Poor boy,” she said. “Still delirious. Rest now, George; we can talk some other time.”
“No,” he said, sitting half up in the bed. Suddenly he realised where he was, what had happened. “You tricked me!” he said accusingly. “You led me right into my own pit with the illusion of that ship.”
“It was for your own good, dear,” she said.
“What happened to the real ship from Procyon II? Have they landed yet?”
“They were here a long time ago,” she said, “but I sent them away. I told them everything was all right.”
George slumped back in bed. “And I suppose you broke the radio, too, for my own good.”
“That was an accident, George. You know the way I always am with machinery of any sort.”
He closed his eyes. “That means I’m stuck here, doesn’t it?” The throbbing in his leg grew stronger. “Stranded for good.”
“Why do you say that? We have each other, don’t we? We can play bridge, and read, and talk, and when I have my strong days I can help you with the farm. I’ve always wanted to work on a farm; it seems like such fun! Back on Earth you only had the bank, but here we’ll be out of doors all the time, in the fresh air. And fresh air was always what you needed so badly, dear.”
His leg was pounding furiously. “After you tricked me into falling into the pit——”
“Must we talk about that, George?”
“After you tricked me,” he repeated, “you nursed me back to health, didn’t you? You saved my life.”
“It was the least I could do, George. But why talk about that? Once you’re well we can get started with our farm, and fix up the house——we can make it just like the one we had on Earth, and it’ll be just as it was in the old days together. Won’t it, George?”
“Yes,” he said dully. “Just as it was in the old days.” He started to rise from the bed; then he realised than any action would be futile, and sank back, deadly calm. His leg throbbed fiercely. Suddenly he saw before him the great empty sea of miles that stretched out between here and Earth, and the other great sea of years before him on Procyon VI. Well, why not, he thought, thinking of the sturdy, beloved old woman, why not? “I’m sure we’ll be very happy together, very happy—mother,” he said, quietly, through the red haze of pain. “Just as it was in the old days.”
“It’s wonderful to hear you say that,” she said. She bent down and kissed him on the forehead, and her lips were cool, and it seemed to George that a teardrop fell from her eye and trickled down to his cheek. “I’ll always be with you, George, darling. Always. And you’ll always love your old mother, won’t you—son?”
Feeling like a figure trapped in a nightmare, he reached out and squeezed her hand. She allowed her shape to waver a little in her joy, but she quickly regained control and fondly grasped George’s hand, and at last, after millenia of lonely emptiness, she began to feed.
To Be Continued
Could be there’s an important difference between a long life, and a slow rate of living. The latter could turn out to be highly impractical . . .
Gaius Titus Menenius sat thoughtfully in his oddly-decorated apartment on Park Avenue, staring at the envelope that had just arrived. He contemplated it for a moment, noting with amusement that he was actually somewhat perturbed over the possible nature of its contents.
After a moment he elbowed up from the red contour-chair and crossed the room in three bounds. Still holding the envelope, he eased himself down on the long green couch near the wall, and, extending himself full-length, slit the envelope open with a neat flick of his fingernail. The medical report was within, as he had expected.
“Dear Mr. Riswell,” it read. “I am herewith enclosing a copy of the laboratory report concerning your examination last week. I am pleased to report that our findings are positive—emphatically so. In view of our conversation, I am sure this finding will be extremely pleasing to you, and, of course, to your wife. Sincerely, F.D. Rowcliff, M.D.”
Menenius read the letter through once again, examined the enclosed report, and allowed his face to open in a wide grin. It was almost an anticlimax, after all these centuries. He couldn’t bring himself to become very excited over it—not any more.
He stood up and stretched happily. “Well, Mr. Riswell,” he said to himself, “I think this calls for a drink. In fact, a night on the town.”
He chose a smart dinner jacket from his wardrobe and moved toward the door. It swung open at his approach. He went out into the corridor and disappeared into the elevator, whistling gaily, his mind full of new plans and new thoughts.
It was a fine feeling. After two thousand years of waiting, he had finally achieved his maturity. He could have a son. At last!
