Collected Short Fiction, page 94
That night, the three of us stood guard in the control room together. The drive was smashed, anyway. The wires were soldered in so many places by now that the control panel was a mass of shining alloy, and I knew that a few more such sabotagings and it would be impossible to patch it together any more—if it wasn’t so already.
The next night, I just didn’t knock off. I continued soldering right on after dinner (and a pretty skimpy dinner it was, now that we were on close rations) and far on into the night.
By morning, it was as if I hadn’t done a thing.
“I give up,” I announced, surveying the damage. “I don’t see any sense in ruining my nerves trying to fix a thing that won’t stay fixed.”
Holdreth nodded. He looked terribly pale. “We’ll have to find some new approach.”
“Yeah. Some new approach.”
I yanked open the food closet and examined our stock. Even figuring in the synthetics we would have fed to the animals if we hadn’t released them, we were low on food. We had overstayed even the safety margin. It would be a hungry trip back—if we ever did get back.
I clambered through the hatch and sprawled down on a big rock near the ship. One of the furless dogs came over and nuzzled in my shirt. Davison stepped to the hatch and called down to me.
“What are you doing out there, Gus?”
“Just getting a little fresh air. I’m sick of living aboard that ship.” I scratched the dog behind his pointed ears, and looked around.
The animals had lost most of their curiosity about us, and didn’t congregate the way they used to. They were meandering all over the plain, nibbling at little deposits of a white doughy substance. It precipitated every night. “Manna,” we called it. All the animals seemed to live on it.
I folded my arms and leaned back.
We were getting to look awfully lean by the eighth day. I wasn’t even trying to fix the ship any more; the hunger was starting to get me. But I saw Davison puttering around with my solderbeam. “What are you doing?”
“I’m going to repair the drive,” he said. “You don’t want to, but we can’t just sit around, you know.” His nose was deep in my repair guide, and he was fumbling with the release on the solderbeam. “Gus?”
“Yeah?”
“I think it’s time I told you something. I’ve been eating the manna for four days. It’s good. It’s nourishing stuff.”
“You’ve been eating—the manna? Something that grows on an alien world? You crazy?”
“What else can we do? Starve?” I smiled feebly, admitting that he was right. From somewhere in the back of the ship came the sounds of Holdreth moving around. Holdreth had taken this thing worse than any of us. He had a family back on Earth, and he was beginning to realize that he wasn’t ever going to see them again.
“Why don’t you get Holdreth?” Davison suggested. “Go out there and stuff yourselves with the manna. You’ve got to eat something.”
“Yeah. What can I lose?” Moving like a mechanical man, I headed toward Holdreth’s cabin. We would go out and eat the manna and cease being hungry, one way or another.
“Clyde?” I called. “Clyde?”
I entered his cabin. He was sitting at his desk, shaking convulsively, staring at the two streams of blood that trickled in red spurts from his slashed wrists.
“Clyde!”
He made no protest as I dragged him toward the infirmary cabin and got tourniquets around his arms, cutting off the bleeding. He just stared dully ahead, sobbing.
I slapped him and he came around. He shook his head dizzily, as if he didn’t know where he was.
“I—I——”
“Easy, Clyde. Everything’s all right.”
“It’s not all right,” he said hollowly. “I’m still alive. Why didn’t you let me die? Why didn’t you——”
We had Holdreth straightened around by evening. Davison gathered as much manna as he could find, and we held a feast.
“I wish we had nerve enough to kill one of the local fauna,” Davison said. “Then we’d have a feast—steaks and everything!”
“The bacteria,” Holdreth pointed out quietly. “We don’t dare.”
“I know. But it’s a thought.”
“No more thoughts,” I said sharply. “Tomorrow morning we start work on the drive panel again. Maybe with some food in our bellies we’ll be able to keep awake and see what’s happening here.”
Holdreth smiled. “Good. I can’t wait to get out of this ship and back to a normal existence. God, I just can’t wait!”
“Let’s get some sleep,” I said. “Tomorrow we’ll give it another try. We’ll get back,” I said with a confidence I didn’t feel.
The following morning I rose early and got my tool kit. My head was clear, and I was trying to put the pieces together without much luck. I started toward the control cabin.
And stopped.
And looked out the viewport.
I went back and awoke Holdreth and Davison. “Take a look out the port,” I said hoarsely.
They looked. They gaped.
“It looks just like my house,” Holdreth said. “My house on Earth.”
“With all the comforts of home inside, I’ll bet.” I walked forward uneasily and lowered myself through the hatch.
“Let’s go look at it.”
We approached it, while the animals frolicked around us. The big giraffe came near and shook its head gravely. The house stood in the middle of the clearing, small and neat and freshly-painted.
I saw it now. During the night, invisible hands had put it there. Had assembled and built a cozy little Earth-type house and dropped it next to our ship for us to live in.
“Just like my house,” Holdreth repeated in wonderment.
“It should be,” I said. “They grabbed the model from your mind, as soon as they found out we couldn’t live on the ship indefinitely.”
Holdreth and Davison asked as one: “What do you mean?”
“You mean you haven’t figured this place out yet?” I licked my lips, getting myself used to the fact that I was going to spend the rest of my life here. “You mean you don’t realize what this house is intended as?”
They shook their heads, baffled.
I glanced around, from the house to the useless ship to the jungle to the plain to the little pond. It all made sense now.
“They want to keep us happy,” I said. “They knew we weren’t thriving aboard the ship, so they—they built us something a little more like home.”
“They? The giraffes?”
“Forget the giraffes. They tried to warn us, but it’s too late. They’re intelligent beings, but they’re prisoners just like us. I’m talking about the ones who run this place. The super-aliens who make us sabotage our own ship and not even know we’re doing it, who stand some place up there and gape at us. The ones who dredged together this motley assortment of beasts from all over the galaxy. Now we’ve been collected, too. This whole damned place is just a zoo—a zoo for aliens so far ahead of us we don’t dare dream of what they’re like.”
I looked up at the shimmering blue-green sky, where invisible bars seemed to restrain us, and sank down dismally on the porch of our new home. I was resigned. There wasn’t any sense in struggling against them.
I could see the neat little placard now:
EARTHMEN. Native Habitat, Sol III.
Choke Chain
They had no trouble in getting food and clothing and shelter—but what was the price of air?
CALLISTO was supposed to have been just a lark for me, a pleasant stopoff where I could kill time and work up the courage to tackle the big task—Jupiter. I felt that exploring the big, heavy planet was, well, maybe not so grand a thing as my destiny, but yet something I had to do.
There was only one trouble: the immenseness of Jupiter’s unknown wastes scared me. Fear was a new sensation for me. I got as far as Jupiter’s moon Ganymede, a thriving world bigger than Mercury, and suddenly, with great Jupiter looming overhead in the sky like a bloated overripe tomato, I knew I wasn’t ready for it. I’ve been to a lot of places and done a lot of things, and this was the first time I’d ever drawn back from an adventure.
I dallied on Ganymede for a couple of days, not knowing quite where to turn. Then one night in a bar someone hinted to me that something funny might be going on on Jupiter’s largest moon, Callisto, and I set my sights there.
It seemed Callisto had recently clamped down on tourists, had booted out a couple of newspapermen, and had done some other mighty peculiar things, and rumors were spreading wildly about what might be taking place there.
It looked like a fine idea, at the time: go to Callisto, find out what the trouble was, spend a few days putting things in order. It was the kind of jaunt I thrive on, the sort of thing that’s been my specialty since I began roaming the spaceways. By the time I was through on Callisto, I thought I’d have the blood flowing smoothly in my veins again, and I’d feel more like tackling the Big Project: Jupiter.
Only Callisto wasn’t the picnic I thought it would be. It turned out to be something more than a refresher for weary adventurers. I found that out as soon as I got there.
It had been rough to get a passport, but I finally signed on a slow tug as a mechanic, and that was good enough to get me a landing permit for Callisto.
I helped pilot a tugload of heavy crates from Ganymede to its nearby twin moon, Callisto. I didn’t know what was in the crates, I didn’t ask, and I didn’t care. The job was getting me to the place I wanted to get to, and that was what counted.
We reached the satellite in a couple of days, and the skipper put the ship down in a vast, windswept desert of blue-white ammonia snow. As soon as we were down, the captain radioed Callisto City to let them know we were here.
Callisto City is a giant dome, a plastine bubble that covers a fair-sized chunk of Callisto and houses several tens of thousands of colonists. We were outside it, in the snow.
I waited impatiently, staring out the port of the ship at the empty swirls of snow, watching a little convoy of trucks come crawling out of Callisto City like so many black bugs and go rolling through the snow to meet us.
Then they arrived. A gong sounded, and I heard the captain yell, “Into your spacesuits, on the double! Let’s get the cargo loaded extra quick.”
We suited up, and by that time the trucks had arrived. We loaded our cargo aboard them, and one by one they started back to the dome. That was all there was to it. No contact between Callistans and outsiders at all.
When the last crate was swung aboard the last truck, the captain said, “Get back in and let’s blast off!”
I turned to him. “I’m not going. I’m resigning, sir.”
He looked at me blankly, as if I’d just said, “I’m dead, sir.” Finally he said, “You’re what?”
I nodded. “I’m quitting? Right here and now. I’m going to grab one of these cargo trucks back to Callisto City.”
“You can’t leave in the middle of the trip!” he protested. He went on objecting, violently, until I quietly told him he could pocket the rest of my uncollected wages. At that he shut up in a hurry, and gestured for me to get going. These guys are all alike.
I climbed into the rear truck of the convoy, and the startled driver looked at me wide-eyed.
“What the hell are you, buddy? There’s nothing about you on my cargo invoice.”
“I’m just going along for the ride, friend,” I told him softly. “I’m a sightseer. I want to get a look at your fair city.”
“But you can’t—” he objected. I jabbed him in the ribs, once, in exactly the right place, and he subsided immediately.
“Okay, buddy,” he grunted. “Lay off. I’ll take you—but remember, it’s only because you forced me.” He wrinkled his brow in puzzlement. “But it’s beyond me why in blazes anyone would want to get to Callisto that bad—when we’d all give our left ears to get away.”
“It’s my business,” I said.
“Sure, sure,” he said placatingly, afraid of another poke. “Do whatever you damned please. But it’s your funeral—remember that.”
I smiled to myself, and watched the shining dome of Callisto City grow nearer. I was wondering what was going on beneath that peaceful-looking arc of plastine. It didn’t sound very good.
Finally we reached the city, and the truck edged carefully into the airlock. My helmet-window went foggy as the icy air of outside was replaced by the warm atmosphere of Callisto City, and then I saw my fellow truck-drivers climbing down and getting out of their spacesuits, in obvious relief at being able to shuck the bulky, uncomfortable things.
As I slid out of mine, I noticed one very strange thing. All the truck-drivers—every last one—wore curious golden collars around their necks. The collars were almost like dog-collars, thick, made of what looked like burnished bronze. They seemed oddly flexible and solid at the same time, and set in the middle of each was a little meter that kept clicking away, recording some kind of data.
I looked around. There were twenty or thirty Callistans near me, and they all wore the collar. And they all wore the same facial expression, too. The best way to describe it is to call it a beaten look. They were all beaten men, spiritless, frightened—of what?
The intense fluorescent lights from above glinted brightly off the collars. Was wearing them some kind of local custom, I wondered? Or a protection against something?
I heard low whispering coming from them as they stowed their spacesuits in dull-green lockers ranged along the side of the airlock, and headed back toward their trucks. They were all looking at me, and obviously they were commenting on the fact that I didn’t have any collar. They seemed shocked at that, and very worried.
“What’s this collar business?” I asked the driver of my truck, as we moved through the inner lock and into the city proper.
“You’ll find out, chum. Just make sure you can run fast when they spot you, though.”
“When who spots me?”
“The guards, dope. The Tax Agents. You don’t think you can breathe for free on Callisto, do you?”
“You mean they tax your breathing?” I asked, incredulously, and before I could get an answer I saw a cordon of guards forming around our truck.
There were half a dozen of them, burly men in blue uniforms, all of them wearing the ubiquitous metal collar. They had halted our truck, which had been last in the procession. I saw the other trucks in the convoy rolling on toward their destination somewhere in the city.
“Don’t make trouble for me,” my driver said pleadingly. “I’ll be docked if I don’t get my cargo back on time.”
One of the men in uniform reached up and opened the cab of the truck. “Come on out of there, you.”
“Who, me?” I asked innocently. “What for?”
“Don’t play games,” he snapped. “Get out of that truck.” He waved a lethal-looking blaster at me, and I decided not to argue with it. I leaped lightly to the ground, and as I did so the uniformed man signalled to my driver that he could go ahead.
The six men ringed threateningly around me. “Who are you?” the leader demanded. “Where’d you come from?”
“That doesn’t matter,” I said belligerently. He put his hand on my arm, and I jerked away. “I’m a tourist. Want to see my landing permit?”
“Landing permits don’t mean a thing here,” he said. “Where’s your respirometer?”
“My what?”
“According to statute 1106A, Book Eleven, Civil Code of the Principality of Callisto City,” he reeled off, “all inhabitants of the Principality of Callisto City are required by law to wear respirometers at all times, whether they are transients or permanent inhabitants.” He finished his spiel and gestured boredly to one of his assistants. “Give him the collar, Mack.”
The man named Mack opened a wooden box and revealed one of those metal collars, the kind that seemed to be all the rage in Callisto just then. He held it out invitingly.
“Here you are, dear. The finest model in the house.”
I drew back. “I don’t want your goddam collar,” I snapped hotly.
“You’ve heard the regulation,” the head man said. “Either you put the collar on or you turn around and walk out the way you came.”
I turned and looked through the translucent airlock out at the barren wastes of frozen ammonia. “I’m staying here, for the time being. And I don’t plan on wearing any collars.”
He frowned. I was being particularly troublesome, and he didn’t like it. He waved his blaster in an offhand gesture. “Put the collar on him, boys.”
Mack and one of the others advanced toward me, holding the gleaming metal circlet. I took one look at it, smiled, and said, “Okay. I know when I’m licked. I can’t fight all of you.”
They relaxed visibly. “Good to see you cooperate. Put it on him.”
I let them come close, and Mack was starting to lower the thing over my head when I went into action. I batted the collar out of his hands and heard it go clanging across the floor, and at the same time I lashed out with my foot and nipped the boss’ blaster right out of his amazed hand. The gun went flying thirty feet or more.
Then they were all on me at once. I pounded back savagely, feeling solid flesh beneath my knuckles and occasionally the unyielding coldness of someone’s collar as I drove a fist past it into his jaw.
Some picnic, I thought, as I waded gleefully in, flattening Mack with a poke in the stomach and sending another one reeling to the ground with a swift kick. Luckily for me, the head man had been the only one wearing sidearms—and apparently some street urchin had made off with the blaster before he could find it again, because I wasn’t getting cooked.
I crashed two of them together, pushed the remaining two aside, and dashed away toward the entrance to the city. I heard them pounding after me in hot pursuit.
It was about a hundred yards to the edge of the city. I made the dash in a dozen seconds and found myself in a crowded thoroughfare, with a number of people watching my fight with evident interest.
