Collected Short Fiction, page 231
“Get out of here,” he muttered.
The Shaulan rose and departed, limping a little, but still intact. Those aliens were more solid than they seemed.
“I guess you’re going to put me in the brig,” Murchison said to me. “Okay. I’ll go quietly.”
WE DIDN’T brig him, because there was nothing to be gained by that. He got the silent treatment instead. The men at the base would have nothing to do with him whatsoever because, in their year on Shaula, they had developed a respect for the aliens not far from worship, and any man who would actually use physical violence—well, he just wasn’t worth wasting breath on.
The men of our crew gave him a wide berth, too. He wandered among us, a tall, powerful figure with anger and loneliness stamped on his face, and he said nothing to any of us and no one said anything to him. Whenever he saw one of the aliens, he went far out of his way to avoid a meeting.
Murchison got another X on his psych report, and that second X meant he’d never be allowed to visit any world inhabited by intelligent life again. It was a BuSpace regulation, one of the many they have for the purpose of locking the barn door too late.
Three days went by this way on Shaula. On the fourth, we took aboard the twenty-eight departing men, said good-by to Gloster and his staff and the twenty-eight we had ferried out to him, and—somewhat guiltily—good-by to the Shaulans, too.
The six of them showed up for our blastoff, including the somewhat battered one who had had the run-in with Murchison. They wished us well, gravely, without any sign of bitterness. For the hundredth time, I was astonished by their patience, their wisdom, their understanding.
I held Azga’s rough hand in mine and finally managed to tell him what I had been wanting to say since our first meeting—how much I hoped we’d eventually reach the mental equilibrium and inner calm of the Shaulans. He smiled warmly at me and I said good-by again and entered the ship.
We ran the usual pre-blast checkups and got ready for departure. Communications was working well—Murchison had none of his usual grumbles and complaints—and we were off the ground in record time.
A couple of days of ion-drive, three weeks of warp, two more of ion-drive deceleration, and we would be back on Earth.
THE three weeks passed slowly, of course; when Earth lies ahead of you, time drags. But after the interminable grayness of warp came the sudden wrenching twist and the bright slippery sliding feeling as our Bohling generator threw us back into ordinary space.
I pushed down the communicator stud near my arm and heard the voice of Navigator Henrichs saying, “Murchison, give me the coordinates, will you?”
“Hold on,” came Murchison’s growl. “You’ll get your coordinates as soon as I got ’em.”
There was a pause; then Captain Knight said, “Murchison, what’s holding up those coordinates? Where are we, anyway? Turn on the visiplates!”
“Please, Captain.” Murchison’s heavy voice was surprisingly polite. Then he ruined it. “Please be good enough to shut up and let a man think.”
“Murchison—” Knight sputtered, and stopped. We all knew one solid fact about our signalman: he did as he wanted. No one ever coerced him into anything.
So we waited, spinning end-over-end somewhere in the vicinity of Earth, completely blind behind our wall of metal. Until Murchison chose to feed us some data, we had no way of bringing the ship down.
Three more minutes went by. Then the private circuit Knight used when he wanted to talk to me alone lit up, and he said, “Loeb, go down to Communications and see what’s holding Murchison up. We can’t stay here forever.”
I pocketed a blaster—I hate making mistakes more than once—and left my cabin. I walked to the companionway, turned to the left, hit the drophatch and found myself outside Murchison’s door.
I knocked.
“Get away from here, Loeb!” Murchison bellowed from within.
I had forgotten that he had rigged a one-way vision circuit outside his door. I said, “Let me in, Murchison. Let me in or I’ll blast out the lock.”
I heard a heavy sigh and the whisper of the lock contracting. “Come on in, then.”
Nervously I pushed the door open and poked my head and the blaster snout in, half expecting Murchison to leap on me from above. But he was sitting at an equipment-jammed desk, scribbling notes, which surprised me. I stood waiting for him to look up.
And finally he did. I gasped when I saw his face: drawn, harried, pale, tense. I had never seen an expression like that on Murchison’s face before.
“What’s going on?” I asked. “We’re all waiting to get moving and—”
He turned to face me squarely. “You want to know what’s going on, Loeb? Well, listen: the ship’s blind. None of the equipment is reading anything. No telemeter pickup, no visual, no nothing. You scrape up some coordinates, if you can.”
HE HELD a little meeting half an hour later, in the ship’s Common Room. Murchison was there, and Knight, and myself, and Navigator Henrichs, and three representatives of the cargo.
“How did this happen?” Knight demanded.
Murchison shrugged. “It happened while we were in warp.”
Knight glanced at Henrichs. “You ever hear of such a thing happening before?” He seemed to suspect Murchison of funny business.
But Henrichs shook his head. “No, Chief. And there’s a good reason why, too. If this happens to a ship, the ship doesn’t get back to tell about it.”
Captain Knight looked gray-faced. He asked worriedly, “What could have caused this?”
“No one knows what subspace conditions are like,” Henrichs said. “It may have been a fluke magnetic field, as Murchison suggests. Or anything at all. The question’s not what did it, Captain—it’s how do we get back.”
“Murchison, is there any chance you can repair the instruments?”
“No.”
“Just like that—flat no? Hell, man, we’ve seen you do wonders with instruments on the blink before.”
“No,” Murchison repeated stolidly. “I tried. I can’t do a damned thing.”
“That means we’re finished, doesn’t it?” asked Carney, one of our returnees. His voice was a little wild. “We might just as well have stayed on Shaula! At least we’d still be alive!”
“It looks pretty lousy,” Henrichs admitted. The thin-faced navigator was frowning blackly. “We don’t dare try a blind approach. There’s nothing we can do. Nothing at all.”
“There’s one thing,” Murchison said.
All eyes turned to him.
“What’s that?” Knight asked. “Put a man in a spacesuit and anchor him to the skin of the ship. Have him guide us in by voice—he’ll be able to see, even if we can’t.”
“He’d incinerate once we hit Earth’s atmosphere,” I said. “We’d lose a man and still have to land blind.”
Murchison puckered his thick lower lip. “You’ll be able to judge the ship’s height by hull temperature when you’re that close. Besides, as soon as the ship’s inside the ionosphere, you can use ordinary radio for the rest of the way down. The trick is to get that far.”
“I think it’s worth a try,” Captain Knight said. “I guess we’ll have to draw lots. Loeb, get some spaghetti from the galley to use as straws.” His voice was grim.
“Never mind,” Murchison said.
“How’s that again?”
“I said never mind. Forget about drawing straws. I’ll go.”
“Murchison—”
“Skip it!” he barked. “It’s a failure in my department, so I’m going to go out there. I volunteer, get it? If anyone else wants to, I’ll wrestle him for it.” He looked around at us. No one moved. “I don’t hear any takers. I’ll assume the job’s mine.” Sweat streamed down his face.
There was a startled silence, broken when Carney made the lousiest remark I’ve ever heard mortal man utter. “You’re trying to make it up for hitting that defenseless Shaulan, eh, Murchison?
Now you want to be a hero to even things up!”
But the big man only turned to Carney and said quietly, “You’re just as blind as the others. You don’t know how rotten those defenseless Shaulans are, any of you. Or what they did to us.” He spat. “You all make me sick. I’m going out there.”
He turned and walked away—out, to get into his spacesuit and climb onto the ship’s skin.
MURCHISON’S explicit instructions, relayed from the outside of the ship, allowed Henrichs to bring us in. It was quite a feat of teamwork.
At 50,000 feet above Earth, Murchison’s voice suddenly cut out. We were able to pick up ground-to-ship radio by then and we taxied down. Later, they told us it seemed like a blazing candle riding the ship’s back. A bright, clear flame flared for a moment when we cleaved the atmosphere.
And I remember the look on Murchison’s face as he left us to go out there. It was tense, bitter, strained—as if he were being compelled to go outside—as if he had no choice about volunteering for martyrdom.
I often wonder about that now. No one had ever made Murchison do anything he didn’t want to do—until then.
We think of the Shaulans as gentle, meek, defenseless. Murchison crossed one of them, and he died. Gentle, meek, yes—but defenseless?
Maybe they sabotaged the ship somehow and forced Murchison into self-martyrdom because he knew he’d been the cause. I don’t know.
It sort of tarnishes his glorious halo.
But sometimes I think Murchison was right about the Shaulans, after all. In any case, I’ve never been back there. And I don’t intend to, even if the computer picks me to go.
Call Me Zombie!
Phil Marsh came home to find a new set of laws. No man his own master; no freedom; no individuality. A world of puppets. So Phil had a mission—to find the puppeteer.
THE troop-train let Phil Marsh off at Grand Central, and he stood in the midst of a jostling mob of his ex-buddies, wondering whether to call Marylin or not. She wasn’t expecting him until Friday; it was only Wednesday, now.
Someone nudged him. Harry Davenport. “Let’s go get a beer,” Davenport said. “Our first as civilians again.”
“No. My wife—”
“Your wife can wait. She isn’t figuring on having you come home till Friday, anyway. Give the gal a decent amount of time to say goodbye to her boy friends, huh? What’s a few more minutes?”
Marsh scowled. “I don’t like jokes like that—”
“Jakes? Who knows?” Davenport said. “Strange are the ways of servicemen’s wives.”
Marsh heaved his duffel-bag higher on his shoulder and glared coldly at Davenport. He and Davenport had been drafted around the same time and had spent two years in the same outfit; still, Marsh felt he hardly knew the tall, hard-faced man at his side. And suddenly he didn’t want to know him any more. There was something about Davenport—
“So? You coming for a beer with me?”
“The hell with a beer. I’m going home. I haven’t seen my wife in two years, and I can’t get home soon enough.”
Davenport’s cold eyes twinkled. “I’m warning you, you better call first. You never can tell what you’ll find if you come popping in on her like that!”
There wasn’t room in the crowd for Marsh to hit him. Angry, he shouldered his way through the mob, went past the cotton-candy booths and the newsstands, found fifteen cents in his pocket and bought a token. At least that hadn’t changed; they were talking about raising the fare to twenty cents, but they hadn’t.
The new fluorescents made the IRT track incredibly bright and airy, though they showed up all the dirt. Marsh stood all the way into Brooklyn, got off at his old station, walked the familiar five-block walk to his house. It all looked pretty much the same, though he didn’t recognize any of the kids playing out in front.
He paused for a moment outside the house, fumbling through his civilian belongings for his house-key, still angered at what Davenport had said.
He knew Marylin better than that. Grinning in anticipation of her surprise, he ran up the stairs, jiggled the key into the lock, and opened the door.
“Hey! Guess who’s home, Marylin! I—” His voice died away.
She was standing in the middle of the floor, stock-still, eyes open, mouth gaping, looking very much like a department-store-dummy version of herself. Marsh had never seen anyone so dead-looking and yet so alive.
It was as if she had been turned off when he went away—and hadn’t been turned back on yet.
No more than a fraction of a second passed before she was awake and smiling warmly, but that fraction of a second was enough. Life flowed back into her; the change was apparent. But Marsh felt a cold chill as she skipped across the floor to wrap herself jubilantly around him.
“Phil! Phil! You said Friday, and it’s only Wednesday! Darling, I was going to have the place all fixed up to surprise you, with ribbons and streamers and things—but I guess this is a much better surprise—isn’t it?”
“Of course,” he said, without any warmth at all. His mind kept going back to the thing he’d seen when he opened the door—the puppet-Marylin who’d awakened into the real one when she realized he was watching her.
He couldn’t help thinking of Davenport’s warning—you never can tell what you’ll find if you come popping in on her like that. Maybe, Marsh thought, Davenport hadn’t been talking about possible infidelity. Maybe it was something uglier and deeper and more horrible than that.
Marylin’s hand brushed his cheek lightly. “I can’t believe you’re really back. My mind is sort of geared to Friday—I was counting the days and the hours and tomorrow I was going to start counting the minutes.”
“They processed us through quicker. That was all there was to it. The Friday discharges gained two days—and we even get paid for them!” Marsh tried to smile, but the thought of—that—dampened his lightheadedness.
“You seem strange,” Marylin said. “Cold . . . almost frightened. Is there something wrong? Darling, two years . . . I hope they didn’t do anything to you!”
He jerked out of his strange mood with an effort. “No—it’s just being home, that’s all. And thinking.” He looked around. “The place is fixed up nice. You’ve been taking care of it for me.”
And it looks just the way it did when I went away. Complete to the cigarette-ashes in the ashtray, and the dishes in the sink. Like a stage-set, he thought weirdly. Stage-sets don’t change unless someone changes them.
“There’s beer in the icebox,” Marylin said. “Your favorite brand. I was stocking up for Friday.”
“Let’s go have some, then. My throat feels pretty dry.”
He followed her into the kitchen. He was remembering something else, now—a long discussion he had had with Harry Davenport, a year or so back. He had forgotten about it. But now, as if triggered, it rose to the front of his mind.
It wasn’t long after Basic, and they had been stationed in Germany on a do-nothing post where the chief activity was drinking the dark German beer (very tasty) and ogling the passing German frauleins (very hefty).
Marsh and Davenport had had an afternoon to kill in Hamburg; they were serving as chauffeurs for some of the brass, and while the high-level conference went on across the street the chauffeurs were free to cool their heels until wanted.
They were in one of those German combination hotel-bars and pickup-joints, drinking authentic Bock beer and saying very little. Marsh hadn’t been in the Army long enough to be used to the idea of being separated from his wife, and he was lonely and not very talkative. Being with Davenport didn’t help; the big man always seemed half a million miles away and frosty as the top of Everest. Marsh knew hardly anything about him, despite constant contact with him.
But then a German girl came waddling along, the kind who looked to have grown fat and healthy on a diet of sauerbraten and beer. She was young—twenty-five or thereabouts—and might have been pretty with fifty less pounds aboard. Marsh stared broodingly at her. Her fat smiling face bore no sign of intelligence.
And after her came another, and another. Pleasant plump girls who seemed to be cut from a cookie-tin.
“Look at them,” he said. “Waddling along ten or twenty an hour, and all of them alike. Like so many puppets without strings, moving along a fixed path and not knowing what the hell for. Damn, I’m getting philosophical in my old age, huh?” He swilled down more of the dark, rich beer.
But Davenport looked at him, cold amusement in his face. “Maybe they are.”
“Huh? Are what?”
“Puppets. Like you said.”
Marsh shook his head in confusion. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“It’s an old theory of mine. That most of the world’s people are golems—dummies, with no real life of their own. That just a few of us are really alive, and the rest of us just toys, playthings to give an appearance of reality to the world surrounding the real few.”
A gust of cold wind blew suddenly into the streetside cafe. Marsh shivered a little. “Dummies? Puppets?”
“Yeah. Why not?”
“Of course,” Marsh said, “We’re among the real people, you and me. Or else we would never be talking about it like this.”
Davenport chuckled. “I don’t know about you. But I’m real.”
That conversation, nothing but a beery bit of time-passing speculation then, now took on a sharp-focussed immediacy.
Marylin was bustling around the kitchen, taking two cans of beer from the refrigerator, opening them (a little spray of beer frothed up at her, the way it always did), pouring them carefully, so as not to put heads on them, into the tall pilsner glasses Marsh had bought one day about three years before.
She looked real.
The freshness of her smile, the whiteness of her teeth, the trim little figure and the yellow-brown hair—
Real?
Or the work of an ingenious puppet-master?
Sweat beaded Marsh’s face. He said, “Marylin—when I came through the door a little while ago—I thought there was something funny about the way you looked.”
