Collected Short Fiction, page 668
There was a long sticky silence. Muller revolved a maze of thoughts. To leave Lemnos? To have the curse lifted? To hold a woman in his arms again? Breasts like fire against his skin? Lips? Thighs? To rebuild his career? To reach across the heavens once more? To shuck nine years of anguish? To believe? To go? To submit?
“Is there a cure?”
“The medic says there is.”
“I think you’re lying to me, boy;” Rawlins glanced away. “What do I have to gain by lying?”
“I can’t guess.”
“All right, I’m lying,” Rawlins said brusquely. “There’s no way to help you. Let’s talk about something else.”
“Why did you tell me that story if it wasn’t true?”
“I said we’d change the subject.”
“Let’s assume for the moment that it is true,” Muller persisted. “That if I go back to Earth I can be cured. I want to let you know that I’m just not interested, not even with a guarantee. I’ve seen Earthmen in their true natures. They kicked me when I was down. Not sporting, Ned. They stink. They reek. They gloried in what had happened to me.”
“That isn’t so!”
“What do you know? You were a child. Even more then than now. They treated me as filth because I showed them what was inside themselves. A mirror for their dirty souls. Why should I go back to them now? I saw them as they really are, those few months I was on Earth after Beta Hydri IV. The look in the eyes, the nervous smile as they back away from me. Yes, Mr. Muller. Of course, Mr. Muller. Just don’t come too close, Mr. Muller. Boy, come by here some time at night and let me show you the constellations as seen from Lemnos. I’ve given them my own names. There’s the Dagger, a long keen one. It’s about to be thrust into the Back. Then there’s the Shaft. And you can see the Ape too, and the Toad. They interlock. The same star is in the forehead of the Ape and the left eye of the Toad. That star is Sol, my Mend. An ugly little yellow star, the color of thin vomit. Whose planets are populated by ugly little people who have spread through the universe.”
“Can I say something that might offend you?” Rawlins asked. “You can’t offend me. But you can try.”
“I think your outlook is distorted. You’ve lost your perspective, all these years. You’re blaming humanity for being human. It’s not easy to accept someone like you. If you were sitting here in my place, and I in yours, you’d understand that. It hurts to be near you. It hurts. Right now I feel pain in every nerve. If I came closer I’d feel like crying. You can’t expect people to adjust quickly to somebody like that. Not even your loved ones could—”
“I had no loved ones.”
“You were married.”
“Terminated.”
“Friends?”
“They ran,” Muller said. “On all six legs they scuttled away from me.”
“You didn’t give them time.”
“Time enough.”
“No,” Rawlins said. He shifted about uneasily on the chair. “Now I’m going to say something that will really hurt you, Dick. I’m sorry, but I have to. What you’re telling me is the kind of stuff I heard in college. Sophomore cynicism. The world is despicable, you say. Evil evil evil. You’ve seen the true nature of mankind and you don’t want anything to do with mankind ever again. Everybody talks that way at eighteen. But it’s a phase that passes. We get over the confusions of being eighteen, and we see that the world is a pretty decent place, that people try to do their best, that we’re imperfect but not loathsome—”
“An eighteen-year-old has no light to those opinions. I do. I come by my hatreds the hard way.”
“But why cling to them? You seem to be glorying in your own misery. Break loose! Shake it off! Come back to Earth with us and forget the past. Or at least forgive.”
“No forgetting. No forgiving.” Muller scowled. A tremor of fear shook him, and he shivered. What if this were true? A genuine cure? Leave Lemnos? He felt a trifle embarrassed. The boy had scored a palpable hit with that line about sophomore cynicism. It was. Am I really such a misanthrope? A pose. He forced me to adopt it. Now I choke on my own stubbornness. But there’s no cure. The boy’s transparent; he’s lying, though I don’t know why, wants to trap me, to get me aboard that ship of theirs. What if it’s true? Why not go hack? Muller could supply his own answers. It was the fear that held him. To see Earth’s billions. To enter the stream of life. Nine years on a desert island and he dreaded to return.
Rawlins said, “I can feel the flavor of your thoughts changing.”
“You can?”
“Nothing specific. But you were angry and bitter before. Now I’m getting something—wistful.”
“No one ever told me he could detect meanings,” Muller said in wonder.
“Why did you go wistful just then, though? If you did. Thinking of Earth?”
“Maybe I was.” Muller hastily patched the sudden gap in his armor. His face darkened. He clenched his jaws. He stood up and deliberately approached Rawlins, watching the young man struggling to hide his real feelings of discomfort. Muller said, “I think you’d better get about your archeologizing now, Ned.”
“I still have some time.”
“No you don’t. Go.”
XVI
Against Charles Boardman’s express orders, Rawlins insisted on returning all the way to the Zone F camp that evening. He found Boardman at dinner. A polished dining-board of dark wood mortised with light woods set before him. Out of elegant stoneware he ate candied fruits, brandied vegetables, meat extracts, pungent juices. A carafe of wine of a deep olive hue was near his fleshy hand. Mysterious pills of several types rested in the shallow pits of an oblong block of black glass; from time to time Boardman popped one into his mouth. Rawlins stood at the sector opening for a long while before Boardman appeared to notice him.
“I told you not to come here, Ned,” the old man said finally.
“Muller sends you this.” Rawlins put the flask down beside the carafe of wine.
“We could have talked without this visit.”
“I’m tired of that. I needed to see you.” Boardman left him standing and did not interrupt his meal. “Charles, I don’t think I can keep up the pretense with him.”
“You did an excellent job today,” said Boardman, sipping his wine. “Quite convincing.”
“Yes, I’m learning how to tell lies. But what’s the use? You heard him. Mankind disgusts him. He’s not going to cooperate once we get him out of the maze.”
“He isn’t sincere. You said it yourself, Ned. Cheap sophomore cynicism. The man loves mankind. That’s why he’s so bitter: because his love has turned sour in his mouth. But it hasn’t turned to hate.”
Rawlins bent into a crouch to get on Boardman’s level. Boardman nudged a candied pear onto his fork, equalized gravity, and flipped it idly toward his mouth. He’s intentionally ignoring me, Rawlins thought. He said, “Charles be serious. I’ve gone in there and told Muller some monstrous lies. I’ve offered him a completely fraudulent cure, and he threw it back in my face.”
“Saying he didn’t believe it existed. But he does believe, Ned. He’s simply afraid to come out of hiding.”
“Please. Listen. Assume he does come to believe me. Assume he leaves the maze and puts himself in our hands. Then what? Who gets the job of telling him that there isn’t any cure, that we’ve tricked him shamelessly, that we merely want him to be our ambassador again, to visit a bunch of aliens twenty times as strange and fifty times as deadly as the ones that ruined his life? I’m not going to break that news to him!”
“You won’t have to, Ned. I will.”
“And how will he react? Are you simply expecting him to smile and bow and say, very clever, Charles, you’ve done it again? To yield and do whatever you want? No. He couldn’t possibly.”
“That isn’t necessarily true,” said Boardman calmly.
“Will you explain the tactics you propose to use, then, once you’ve informed him that the cure is a lie and that there’s a dangerous new job he has to undertake?”
“I prefer not to discuss future strategy now.”
“I resign,” Rawlins said.
Boardman had been expecting something like that. A noble gesture; a moment of headstrong defiance; a rush of virtue to the brain. Abandoning now his studied detachment, he looked up, his eyes locking firmly on Rawlins’s.
Quietly Boardman said, “You resign? After all your talk of service to mankind? We need you, Ned.”
“My dedication to mankind includes a dedication to Dick Muller,” Rawlins said stiffly. “I’ve already committed a considerable crime against him. If you won’t let me in on the rest of this scheme, I’m damned if I’ll have any part in it.”
“I admire your convictions.”
“My resignation still stands.”
“I even agree with your position,” said Boardman. “I’m not proud of what we must do here.”
“How are you going to get Muller to cooperate? Drug him? Torture him? Brainblast him?”
“None of those.”
“What, then? I’m serious, Charles. My role in this job ends right here, unless I know what’s ahead.”
Boardman coughed, drained his wine, ate a peach, took three pills in quick succession. Rawlins’s rebellion had been inevitable, and he was prepared for it, and yet he was annoyed that it had come. Now was the time for calculated risks. He said, “I see that it’s time to drop the pretenses, then, Ned. I’ll tell you what’s in store for Dick Muller—but I want you to consider it within the framework of the larger position. Don’t forget that the little game we’ve been playing on this planet isn’t simply a matter of private moral postures.”
“I’m listening, Charles.”
“Very well. Dick Muller must go to our extragalactic friends and convince them that human beings are indeed an intelligent species. Agreed? He alone is capable of doing this, because of his unique inability to cloak his thoughts.”
“Agreed.”
“Now, it isn’t necessary to convince the aliens that we’re food people, or that we’re honorable people, or that we’re lovable people. Simply that we have minds and can think. That we feel, that we sense, that we are something other than clever machines. For our purposes it doesn’t matter what emotions Dick Muller is radiating, so long as he’s radiating something.”
“I begin to see.”
“Therefore, once he’s out of the maze, we can tell him what his assignment is to be. No doubt he’ll get angry at our trickery. But beyond his anger he may see where his duty lies. I hope so. You seem to think he won’t. But it makes no difference, Ned. He won’t be given an option once lie leaves his sanctuary. He’ll be taken to the aliens and handed over to them to make contact.”
“His cooperation is irrelevant, then,” said Rawlins slowly. “He’ll just be dumped. Like a sack.”
“A thinking sack. As our friends out there will learn.”
“I—”
“No, Ned. Don’t say anything now. I know what you’re thinking. You hate the scheme. You have to. I hate it myself. Just go off, now, and think it over. Examine it from all sides before you come to a decision. If you want out tomorrow, let me know and we’ll carry on somehow without you, but promise me you’ll sleep on it, first.”
Rawlins’s face was pate a moment. Then color flooded into it. He damped his lips. Boardman smiled benignly. Rawlins clenched his fists, squinted, turned, went hastily out.
A calculated risk.
Boardman took another pill. Then he reached for the flask Muller had sent him. He poured a little. Sweet, gingery, strong. An excellent liqueur.
XV
Muller had almost come to like the Hydrans. What he remembered most clearly and most favorably about them was their grace of motion.
He had landed in a damp, dreary part of the planet, a little to the north of its equator, on an amoeboid continent occupied by a dozen large quasi-cities, each spread out over several thousand square kilometers. His life-support system, specially designed for this mission, was little more than a thin filtration sheet dinging to him like a second skin. It fed air to him through a thousand dialysis plaques. He moved easily if not comfortably within it.
He walked for an hour through a forest of the giant toadstool-like trees before he came upon any of the natives. The trees ran to heights of several hundred meters; perhaps the gravity, five-eighth Earthnorm, had something to do with that. Their curving trunks did not look sturdy. He suspected that an external woody layer no thicker than a fingertip surrounded a broad core of soggy pulp. The cap-like crowns of the trees met in a nearly continuous canopy overhead, cutting almost all light from the forest floor. Since the planet’s cloud layer permitted only a hazy pearl-colored glow to come through, and even that was intercepted by the trees, a maroon darkness prevailed below.
When he encountered the aliens he was surprised to find that they were about three meters tall. He stood ringed by them, straining upward to meet their many eyes. In a quiet voice he said, “My name is Richard Muller. I come in friendship from the peoples of the Terran Cultural Sphere.”
Dropping to his knees, Muller traced the Pythagorean Theorem in the soft moist soil.
He looked up. He smiled. “A basic concept of geometry. A universal pattern of thought.”
Their vertical slitlike nostrils flickered slightly. They inclined their heads. He imagined that they were exchanging thoughtful glances. With eyes in a circlet entirely around their heads, they did not need to change posture to do that.
He sketched a line on the ground. A short distance from it he sketched a pair of lines. At a greater distance he drew three lines. He filled in the signs 1 plus 11 equals 111.
“Yes?” he said. “We call it addition.”
The jointed limbs swayed. Two of his listeners touched arms. Muller remembered how they had obliterated the spying eye as soon as they had discovered it, not hesitating even to examine it. He had been prepared for the same reaction. Instead they were listening. A promising sign. He stood up and pointed to his marks on the ground.
“Your turn,” he said. He spoke quite loudly. He smiled quite broadly. “Show me that you understand. Speak to me in the universal language of mathematics.”
After a long pause one of the Hydrans moved fluidly forward and let one of its globe-like foot-pedestals hover over the lines in the soil. The leg moved lightly, and the lines vanished as the alien smoothed the soil.
“All right,” said Muller. “Now you draw something.”
The Hydran returned to its place in the circle.
“Very well,” Muller said. “There’s another universal language. I hope this doesn’t offend your ears.” He drew a soprano recorder from his pocket and put it between his lips. Playing through the filtration sheet was cumbersome. He caught breath and played a diatonic scale. Their limbs fluttered a bit. They could hear, then, or at any rate could sense vibrations.
“Does that get to you?” he asked.
They appeared to be conferring.
They walked away from him.
He tried to follow. He was unable to keep up, and soon he lost sight of them in the dark, misty forest; but he persevered and found them clustered as if waiting for him, farther on. When he neared them they began to move again. In this way they led him, by fits and starts, into their city.
He subsisted on synthetics. Chemical analysis showed that it would be unwise to try local foods.
He drew the Pythagorean Theorem many times. He sketched a variety of arithmetical processes. He played Schonberg and Bach. He constructed equilateral triangles. He ventured into solid geometry. He sang. He spoke French, Russian and Mandarin, as well as English, to show them the diversity of human tongues. He displayed a chart of the periodic table. After six months he still knew nothing more about the workings of their minds than he had an hour before landing. They tolerated his presence, but they said nothing to him.
Eventually they wearied of him and came for him.
He slept.
He did not discover until much later what had been done to him while he slept.
He had had nine years to sharpen his memories. He had filled a few cubes with reminiscences, but that had mainly been in the early years of his exile, when he worried about having his past drift away to be lost in fog. He discovered that the memories grew keener with age. Perhaps it was training. He could summon sights, sounds, tastes, odors. He could reconstruct whale conversations convincingly. He was able to quote the texts of several treaties he had negotiated.
He admitted to himself that, given the chance, he would go hack. Everything else had been pretense and bluster. He had fooled neither Ned Rawlins nor himself, he knew. The contempt he felt for mankind was real, but not the wish to remain isolated. He waited eagerly for Rawlins to return. While he waited, he drank several goblets of the city’s liqueur; he went on a killing spree, nervously gunning down animals he could not possibly consume in a year’s time; he conducted intricate dialogues with himself; he dreamed of Earth.
Rawlins was running. Muller, standing a hundred meters deep in Zone C, saw him some striding through the entrance, breathless, flushed.
“You shouldn’t run in here,” Muller said. “Even in the safer zones. There’s absolutely no idling—”
Rawlins sprawled down beside a flanged limestone tub, gripping its sides and sucking air. “Get me a drink, will you?” he gasped. “That liqueur of yours—”
Mailer went to the fountain nearby and filled a handy flask with the sharp liqueur. Rawlins did not wince at all as Muller drew near to give it to him. He seemed altogether unaware of Muller’s emanation. Greedily, sloppily, he emptied the flask, letting driblets of the gleaming fluid roll down his dun and onto his clothes. Then he closed his eyes.
“Wait. Let me get my breath. I ran nil the way from Zone F.”
“You’re lucky to be alive, then.” Muller studied him, perplexed. The change was striking and unsettling, mid mere fatigue could not account for it all. Rawlins was bloodshot, fluted, puffy-faced; his facial muscles were tightly knit; his moved randomly, seeking and not finding. Drunk? Sick? Drugged?
“Is there a cure?”
“The medic says there is.”
“I think you’re lying to me, boy;” Rawlins glanced away. “What do I have to gain by lying?”
“I can’t guess.”
“All right, I’m lying,” Rawlins said brusquely. “There’s no way to help you. Let’s talk about something else.”
“Why did you tell me that story if it wasn’t true?”
“I said we’d change the subject.”
“Let’s assume for the moment that it is true,” Muller persisted. “That if I go back to Earth I can be cured. I want to let you know that I’m just not interested, not even with a guarantee. I’ve seen Earthmen in their true natures. They kicked me when I was down. Not sporting, Ned. They stink. They reek. They gloried in what had happened to me.”
“That isn’t so!”
“What do you know? You were a child. Even more then than now. They treated me as filth because I showed them what was inside themselves. A mirror for their dirty souls. Why should I go back to them now? I saw them as they really are, those few months I was on Earth after Beta Hydri IV. The look in the eyes, the nervous smile as they back away from me. Yes, Mr. Muller. Of course, Mr. Muller. Just don’t come too close, Mr. Muller. Boy, come by here some time at night and let me show you the constellations as seen from Lemnos. I’ve given them my own names. There’s the Dagger, a long keen one. It’s about to be thrust into the Back. Then there’s the Shaft. And you can see the Ape too, and the Toad. They interlock. The same star is in the forehead of the Ape and the left eye of the Toad. That star is Sol, my Mend. An ugly little yellow star, the color of thin vomit. Whose planets are populated by ugly little people who have spread through the universe.”
“Can I say something that might offend you?” Rawlins asked. “You can’t offend me. But you can try.”
“I think your outlook is distorted. You’ve lost your perspective, all these years. You’re blaming humanity for being human. It’s not easy to accept someone like you. If you were sitting here in my place, and I in yours, you’d understand that. It hurts to be near you. It hurts. Right now I feel pain in every nerve. If I came closer I’d feel like crying. You can’t expect people to adjust quickly to somebody like that. Not even your loved ones could—”
“I had no loved ones.”
“You were married.”
“Terminated.”
“Friends?”
“They ran,” Muller said. “On all six legs they scuttled away from me.”
“You didn’t give them time.”
“Time enough.”
“No,” Rawlins said. He shifted about uneasily on the chair. “Now I’m going to say something that will really hurt you, Dick. I’m sorry, but I have to. What you’re telling me is the kind of stuff I heard in college. Sophomore cynicism. The world is despicable, you say. Evil evil evil. You’ve seen the true nature of mankind and you don’t want anything to do with mankind ever again. Everybody talks that way at eighteen. But it’s a phase that passes. We get over the confusions of being eighteen, and we see that the world is a pretty decent place, that people try to do their best, that we’re imperfect but not loathsome—”
“An eighteen-year-old has no light to those opinions. I do. I come by my hatreds the hard way.”
“But why cling to them? You seem to be glorying in your own misery. Break loose! Shake it off! Come back to Earth with us and forget the past. Or at least forgive.”
“No forgetting. No forgiving.” Muller scowled. A tremor of fear shook him, and he shivered. What if this were true? A genuine cure? Leave Lemnos? He felt a trifle embarrassed. The boy had scored a palpable hit with that line about sophomore cynicism. It was. Am I really such a misanthrope? A pose. He forced me to adopt it. Now I choke on my own stubbornness. But there’s no cure. The boy’s transparent; he’s lying, though I don’t know why, wants to trap me, to get me aboard that ship of theirs. What if it’s true? Why not go hack? Muller could supply his own answers. It was the fear that held him. To see Earth’s billions. To enter the stream of life. Nine years on a desert island and he dreaded to return.
Rawlins said, “I can feel the flavor of your thoughts changing.”
“You can?”
“Nothing specific. But you were angry and bitter before. Now I’m getting something—wistful.”
“No one ever told me he could detect meanings,” Muller said in wonder.
“Why did you go wistful just then, though? If you did. Thinking of Earth?”
“Maybe I was.” Muller hastily patched the sudden gap in his armor. His face darkened. He clenched his jaws. He stood up and deliberately approached Rawlins, watching the young man struggling to hide his real feelings of discomfort. Muller said, “I think you’d better get about your archeologizing now, Ned.”
“I still have some time.”
“No you don’t. Go.”
XVI
Against Charles Boardman’s express orders, Rawlins insisted on returning all the way to the Zone F camp that evening. He found Boardman at dinner. A polished dining-board of dark wood mortised with light woods set before him. Out of elegant stoneware he ate candied fruits, brandied vegetables, meat extracts, pungent juices. A carafe of wine of a deep olive hue was near his fleshy hand. Mysterious pills of several types rested in the shallow pits of an oblong block of black glass; from time to time Boardman popped one into his mouth. Rawlins stood at the sector opening for a long while before Boardman appeared to notice him.
“I told you not to come here, Ned,” the old man said finally.
“Muller sends you this.” Rawlins put the flask down beside the carafe of wine.
“We could have talked without this visit.”
“I’m tired of that. I needed to see you.” Boardman left him standing and did not interrupt his meal. “Charles, I don’t think I can keep up the pretense with him.”
“You did an excellent job today,” said Boardman, sipping his wine. “Quite convincing.”
“Yes, I’m learning how to tell lies. But what’s the use? You heard him. Mankind disgusts him. He’s not going to cooperate once we get him out of the maze.”
“He isn’t sincere. You said it yourself, Ned. Cheap sophomore cynicism. The man loves mankind. That’s why he’s so bitter: because his love has turned sour in his mouth. But it hasn’t turned to hate.”
Rawlins bent into a crouch to get on Boardman’s level. Boardman nudged a candied pear onto his fork, equalized gravity, and flipped it idly toward his mouth. He’s intentionally ignoring me, Rawlins thought. He said, “Charles be serious. I’ve gone in there and told Muller some monstrous lies. I’ve offered him a completely fraudulent cure, and he threw it back in my face.”
“Saying he didn’t believe it existed. But he does believe, Ned. He’s simply afraid to come out of hiding.”
“Please. Listen. Assume he does come to believe me. Assume he leaves the maze and puts himself in our hands. Then what? Who gets the job of telling him that there isn’t any cure, that we’ve tricked him shamelessly, that we merely want him to be our ambassador again, to visit a bunch of aliens twenty times as strange and fifty times as deadly as the ones that ruined his life? I’m not going to break that news to him!”
“You won’t have to, Ned. I will.”
“And how will he react? Are you simply expecting him to smile and bow and say, very clever, Charles, you’ve done it again? To yield and do whatever you want? No. He couldn’t possibly.”
“That isn’t necessarily true,” said Boardman calmly.
“Will you explain the tactics you propose to use, then, once you’ve informed him that the cure is a lie and that there’s a dangerous new job he has to undertake?”
“I prefer not to discuss future strategy now.”
“I resign,” Rawlins said.
Boardman had been expecting something like that. A noble gesture; a moment of headstrong defiance; a rush of virtue to the brain. Abandoning now his studied detachment, he looked up, his eyes locking firmly on Rawlins’s.
Quietly Boardman said, “You resign? After all your talk of service to mankind? We need you, Ned.”
“My dedication to mankind includes a dedication to Dick Muller,” Rawlins said stiffly. “I’ve already committed a considerable crime against him. If you won’t let me in on the rest of this scheme, I’m damned if I’ll have any part in it.”
“I admire your convictions.”
“My resignation still stands.”
“I even agree with your position,” said Boardman. “I’m not proud of what we must do here.”
“How are you going to get Muller to cooperate? Drug him? Torture him? Brainblast him?”
“None of those.”
“What, then? I’m serious, Charles. My role in this job ends right here, unless I know what’s ahead.”
Boardman coughed, drained his wine, ate a peach, took three pills in quick succession. Rawlins’s rebellion had been inevitable, and he was prepared for it, and yet he was annoyed that it had come. Now was the time for calculated risks. He said, “I see that it’s time to drop the pretenses, then, Ned. I’ll tell you what’s in store for Dick Muller—but I want you to consider it within the framework of the larger position. Don’t forget that the little game we’ve been playing on this planet isn’t simply a matter of private moral postures.”
“I’m listening, Charles.”
“Very well. Dick Muller must go to our extragalactic friends and convince them that human beings are indeed an intelligent species. Agreed? He alone is capable of doing this, because of his unique inability to cloak his thoughts.”
“Agreed.”
“Now, it isn’t necessary to convince the aliens that we’re food people, or that we’re honorable people, or that we’re lovable people. Simply that we have minds and can think. That we feel, that we sense, that we are something other than clever machines. For our purposes it doesn’t matter what emotions Dick Muller is radiating, so long as he’s radiating something.”
“I begin to see.”
“Therefore, once he’s out of the maze, we can tell him what his assignment is to be. No doubt he’ll get angry at our trickery. But beyond his anger he may see where his duty lies. I hope so. You seem to think he won’t. But it makes no difference, Ned. He won’t be given an option once lie leaves his sanctuary. He’ll be taken to the aliens and handed over to them to make contact.”
“His cooperation is irrelevant, then,” said Rawlins slowly. “He’ll just be dumped. Like a sack.”
“A thinking sack. As our friends out there will learn.”
“I—”
“No, Ned. Don’t say anything now. I know what you’re thinking. You hate the scheme. You have to. I hate it myself. Just go off, now, and think it over. Examine it from all sides before you come to a decision. If you want out tomorrow, let me know and we’ll carry on somehow without you, but promise me you’ll sleep on it, first.”
Rawlins’s face was pate a moment. Then color flooded into it. He damped his lips. Boardman smiled benignly. Rawlins clenched his fists, squinted, turned, went hastily out.
A calculated risk.
Boardman took another pill. Then he reached for the flask Muller had sent him. He poured a little. Sweet, gingery, strong. An excellent liqueur.
XV
Muller had almost come to like the Hydrans. What he remembered most clearly and most favorably about them was their grace of motion.
He had landed in a damp, dreary part of the planet, a little to the north of its equator, on an amoeboid continent occupied by a dozen large quasi-cities, each spread out over several thousand square kilometers. His life-support system, specially designed for this mission, was little more than a thin filtration sheet dinging to him like a second skin. It fed air to him through a thousand dialysis plaques. He moved easily if not comfortably within it.
He walked for an hour through a forest of the giant toadstool-like trees before he came upon any of the natives. The trees ran to heights of several hundred meters; perhaps the gravity, five-eighth Earthnorm, had something to do with that. Their curving trunks did not look sturdy. He suspected that an external woody layer no thicker than a fingertip surrounded a broad core of soggy pulp. The cap-like crowns of the trees met in a nearly continuous canopy overhead, cutting almost all light from the forest floor. Since the planet’s cloud layer permitted only a hazy pearl-colored glow to come through, and even that was intercepted by the trees, a maroon darkness prevailed below.
When he encountered the aliens he was surprised to find that they were about three meters tall. He stood ringed by them, straining upward to meet their many eyes. In a quiet voice he said, “My name is Richard Muller. I come in friendship from the peoples of the Terran Cultural Sphere.”
Dropping to his knees, Muller traced the Pythagorean Theorem in the soft moist soil.
He looked up. He smiled. “A basic concept of geometry. A universal pattern of thought.”
Their vertical slitlike nostrils flickered slightly. They inclined their heads. He imagined that they were exchanging thoughtful glances. With eyes in a circlet entirely around their heads, they did not need to change posture to do that.
He sketched a line on the ground. A short distance from it he sketched a pair of lines. At a greater distance he drew three lines. He filled in the signs 1 plus 11 equals 111.
“Yes?” he said. “We call it addition.”
The jointed limbs swayed. Two of his listeners touched arms. Muller remembered how they had obliterated the spying eye as soon as they had discovered it, not hesitating even to examine it. He had been prepared for the same reaction. Instead they were listening. A promising sign. He stood up and pointed to his marks on the ground.
“Your turn,” he said. He spoke quite loudly. He smiled quite broadly. “Show me that you understand. Speak to me in the universal language of mathematics.”
After a long pause one of the Hydrans moved fluidly forward and let one of its globe-like foot-pedestals hover over the lines in the soil. The leg moved lightly, and the lines vanished as the alien smoothed the soil.
“All right,” said Muller. “Now you draw something.”
The Hydran returned to its place in the circle.
“Very well,” Muller said. “There’s another universal language. I hope this doesn’t offend your ears.” He drew a soprano recorder from his pocket and put it between his lips. Playing through the filtration sheet was cumbersome. He caught breath and played a diatonic scale. Their limbs fluttered a bit. They could hear, then, or at any rate could sense vibrations.
“Does that get to you?” he asked.
They appeared to be conferring.
They walked away from him.
He tried to follow. He was unable to keep up, and soon he lost sight of them in the dark, misty forest; but he persevered and found them clustered as if waiting for him, farther on. When he neared them they began to move again. In this way they led him, by fits and starts, into their city.
He subsisted on synthetics. Chemical analysis showed that it would be unwise to try local foods.
He drew the Pythagorean Theorem many times. He sketched a variety of arithmetical processes. He played Schonberg and Bach. He constructed equilateral triangles. He ventured into solid geometry. He sang. He spoke French, Russian and Mandarin, as well as English, to show them the diversity of human tongues. He displayed a chart of the periodic table. After six months he still knew nothing more about the workings of their minds than he had an hour before landing. They tolerated his presence, but they said nothing to him.
Eventually they wearied of him and came for him.
He slept.
He did not discover until much later what had been done to him while he slept.
He had had nine years to sharpen his memories. He had filled a few cubes with reminiscences, but that had mainly been in the early years of his exile, when he worried about having his past drift away to be lost in fog. He discovered that the memories grew keener with age. Perhaps it was training. He could summon sights, sounds, tastes, odors. He could reconstruct whale conversations convincingly. He was able to quote the texts of several treaties he had negotiated.
He admitted to himself that, given the chance, he would go hack. Everything else had been pretense and bluster. He had fooled neither Ned Rawlins nor himself, he knew. The contempt he felt for mankind was real, but not the wish to remain isolated. He waited eagerly for Rawlins to return. While he waited, he drank several goblets of the city’s liqueur; he went on a killing spree, nervously gunning down animals he could not possibly consume in a year’s time; he conducted intricate dialogues with himself; he dreamed of Earth.
Rawlins was running. Muller, standing a hundred meters deep in Zone C, saw him some striding through the entrance, breathless, flushed.
“You shouldn’t run in here,” Muller said. “Even in the safer zones. There’s absolutely no idling—”
Rawlins sprawled down beside a flanged limestone tub, gripping its sides and sucking air. “Get me a drink, will you?” he gasped. “That liqueur of yours—”
Mailer went to the fountain nearby and filled a handy flask with the sharp liqueur. Rawlins did not wince at all as Muller drew near to give it to him. He seemed altogether unaware of Muller’s emanation. Greedily, sloppily, he emptied the flask, letting driblets of the gleaming fluid roll down his dun and onto his clothes. Then he closed his eyes.
“Wait. Let me get my breath. I ran nil the way from Zone F.”
“You’re lucky to be alive, then.” Muller studied him, perplexed. The change was striking and unsettling, mid mere fatigue could not account for it all. Rawlins was bloodshot, fluted, puffy-faced; his facial muscles were tightly knit; his moved randomly, seeking and not finding. Drunk? Sick? Drugged?
