Perilous Planets Part 31

'Because,' said Gumbs, 'they might find you.' His hands reached up abruptly, pried out a small boulder before George could stop him.

The large boulder above it trembled, dipped and leaned ponderously outward.

George, directly underneath, found that he could move neither forward nor back.

'Sorry again,' he heard Gumbs saying, with what sounded like genuine regret. 'But you know the Loyalty Committee. I simply can't take the chance.'

The boulder seemed to take forever to fall. George tried twice more, with all his strength, to move out of its path. Then, instinctively, he put his arms up straight under it.

It struck.

George felt his arm breaking like twigs, and saw a looming grayness that blotted out the sky; he felt a sledge impact that made the ground shudder beneath him.

He heard a splattering sound.

And he was still alive. That astonis.h.i.+ng fact kept him fully occupied for a long time after the boulder had clattered its way down the slope into silence. Then, at last, he looked down to his right.

The resistance of his stiffened arms, even while they broke, had been enough to lever the falling boulder over, a distance of some thirty centimeters. The right half of the monster was a flattened, shattered ruin. He could see a few flecks of pasty gray matter, melting now into green-brown translucence as the ma.s.s flowed slowly together again.

In twenty minutes, the last remnants of a superfluous spinal cord had been absorbed, the monster had collected itself back into its normal lens shape, and George's pain was diminis.h.i.+ng. In five minutes more, his mended arms were strong enough to use.

They were also more convincingly shaped and colored than before, - the tendons, the fingernails, even the wrinkles of the skin were in good order. In ordinary circ.u.mstances this dis-covery would have left George happily bemused for hours.

Now, in his impatience, he barely noticed it. He climbed to the top of the bank.

Thirty meters away, a humped green-brown body like his own lay motionless on the dry gra.s.s.

It contained, of course, only one brain. Whose?

McCarty's, almost certainly; Vivian hadn't had a chance. But then how did it happen that there was no visible trace of McCarty's arm?

Unnerved, George walked around the creature for a closer inspection.

On the far side, he encountered two dark-brown eyes, with an oddly unfinished appearance. They focused on him after an instant and the whole body quivered slightly, moving to-ward him.

Vivian's eyes had been brown; George remembered them distinctly. Brown eyes with heavy dark lashes in a tapering slender face. But did that prove anything?

What color had McCarty's eyes been? He couldn't remember.

George moved closer, hoping fervently that the Something-or-other meuterii was at least advanced enough to conjugate, instead of trying to devour members of its own species...

The two bodies touched, clung and began to flow together. Watching, George saw the fissioning process reverse itself. From paired lenses, the alien flesh melted into a slipper-shape, to an ovoid, to a lens-shape again. His brain and the other drifted closer together, the spinal cords crossing at right angles.

And it was only then that he noticed an oddity about the other brain. It seemed to be more solid and compact than his, the outline sharper.

'Vivian?' he said worriedly. 'Is that you?'

No answer. He tried again; and again.

Finally: 'George! Oh dear - I want to cry, but I don't seem able to do it.'

'No lachrymal glands,' George said automatically. 'Uh, Vivian?'

'Yes, George?' That warm voice again...

'What happened to Miss McCarty? How did you-'

'I don't know. She's gone, isn't she? I haven't heard her for a long tune.'

'Yes,' said George, 'she's gone. You mean you don't know? Tell me what you did.'

'Well, I wanted to make an arm, because you told me to, but I didn't think I had time enough. So I made a skull instead and those things to cover my spine-'

'Vertebrae.' Now why, he thought discontentedly, didn't I thing of that? 'And then?'

'I think I'm crying now,' she said. 'Yes, I am. It's such a relief- And then, after that, nothing. She was still hurting me, and I just lay still and thought how wonderful it would be if she weren't in here with me. After a while, she wasn't. And then I grew eyes to look for you.'

The explanation, it seemed to George, was more perplexing than the enigma.

Staring around in a vague search for en-lightenment, he caught sight of something he hadn't noticed before. Two meters to his left, just visible in the gra.s.s, was a damp-looking grayish lump, with a suggestion of a stringy ex-tension trailing off from it.

There must, he decided suddenly, be some mechanism in the Something-or-other meisterii for disposing of tenants who failed to adapt themselves - brains that went into catatonia, or hysteria, or suicidal frenzy. An eviction clause in the lease.

Somehow, Vivian had managed to stimulate that mechanism - to convince the organism that McCarty's brain was not only superfluous but dangerous - 'Toxic'

was the word.

It was the ultimate ignominy. Miss McCarty had not been digested. She'd been excreted.

By sunset, twelve hours later, they had made a good deal of progress. They had reached an understanding very agreeable to them both. They had hunted down another herd of the pseudo-pigs for their noon meal. They had not once quarreled or even irritated each other. And for divergent reasons - on George's side because the monster's normal metabolism was unsatisfactory when it had to move quickly, and on Vivian's because she refused to believe that any man could be attracted to her in her present condition - they had begun a serious attempt to reshape themselves.

The first trials were extraordinarily difficult, the rest sur-prisingly easy. Again and again, they had to let themselves collapse back into an ameboid shape, victims of some omitted or malfunctioning organ, but each failure smoothed the road. They were at last able to stand breathless but breathing, sway-ing but stable, face to face - two preliminary sketches of self-made man.

They had also put thirty kilometers between themselves and the Federation camp.

Standing on the crest of a rise and look-ing southward across the shallow valley, George could see a faint funereal glow: the mining machines, chewing out metals to feed the fabricators that would sp.a.w.n lethal s.p.a.ces.h.i.+ps.

'We'll never go back there, will we?' begged Vivian.

'No,' said George confidently. 'We'll let them find us. When they do, they'll be a lot more disconcerted than we will. We can make ourselves anything we want to be, remember.'

'I want you to want me, so I'm going to be beautiful.'

'More beautiful than any woman ever was,' he agreed, 'and both of us will have super-intelligence. I don't see why not. We can direct our growth in any way we choose. We'll be more than human.'

'I'd like that,7 said Vivian.

They won't. The McCartys and the Gumbs and all the rest would never have a chance against us. We're the future.'

There was one thing more, a small matter, but important to George, because it marked his sense of accomplishment, of one phase ended and a new one begun. He had finally completed the name of his discovery.

It wasn't Something-or-other mehterii at all.

It was Spes hominis - Man's hope.

With a reckless laugh, Norman Spinrad here kicks aside the debris of misinformation surrounding Primitive Man, bores to the very roots of civilization, and gives a brief and funny insight into the way it really was, and is, and will be.

THE AGE OF.

INVENTION.

by Norman Spinrad One morning, having nothing better to do, I went to visit my cousin Roach. Roach lived in one of those lizard-infested caves on the East Side of the mountain. Roach did not hunt bears. Roach did not grow grain. Roach spent his daylight hours throwing globs of bearfat, bison-chips and old rotten plants against the walls of his cave.

Roach said that he was an Artist. He said it with a capital 'A'. (Even though writing has not yet been invented.) Unlikely as it may seem, Roach had a woman. She was, how-ever, the ugliest female on the mountain. She spent her day-light hours lying on the dirty floor of Roach's cave and staring at the smears of old bearfat, moldy bison-chips and rotten plants on the wall.

She used to say that -this was Roach's Soul. She would also say that Roach had a very big soul.

Very big and very smelly.

As I approached the mouth of Roach's cave, I smelt pungent smoke. In fact, the cave was filled with this smoke. In the middle of the cave sat Roach and his woman.

They were burn-ing a big pile of weeds and inhaling the smoke.

'What are you doing?' I asked.

'Turning on, baby,' said Roach. 'I've just invented it.'

'What does "turning on" mean?'

'Well, you get this weed, dig? You burn it, and then you honk the smoke.'

I scratched my head, inadvertently killing several of my favorite fleas.

'Why do that?' I asked.

'It like gets you high.'

'You don't seem any further off the ground than I am,' I observed. 'And you're still kinda runty.'

Roach snorted in disgust. 'Forget it, man,' he said. 'It's only for Artists, Philosophers and Metaphysicians, anyway. (Even though Philosophy and Metaphysics have not yet been in-vented.) Dig my latest!'

On the nearest wall of the cave, there was this big blob of bearfat. In the middle of it was this small piece of bison-chip. Red and green and brown plant stains surrounded this. It smelt as good as it looked.

'Uh... interesting..." I said.

'Like a masterpiece, baby,' Roach said proudly. 'I call it "The Soul of Man".'

'Uh... "The Sole of Man"? Er... it does sort of look like a foot.'

'No, no, man! Soul not sole!'

'But Roach, spelling hasn't been invented yet.'

'Sorry. I forgot.'

'Anyway,' I said, trying to make him feel a little better, 'it's very Artistic.

(Whatever that meant.) 'Thanks, baby,' Roach said sulkily.

'What's the matter, Roach?' I asked. He really looked awful.

'We haven't eaten in a week.'

'Why don't you go out and kill a bear or something?' I suggested.

'I don't have the time to waste on hunting.' Roach said in-dignantly. 'I must live for Art!'

'It appears that you are dying for Art,' I replied. 'You can't do very much painting when you are dead.'

'Well, anyway,' said Roach, in a very tiny voice, Tm a pretty lousy hunter in the first place. I would probably starve even if I spent the whole day hunting. Or maybe a bear would kill me. This way, I'm at least like starving for a Reason.'

I must admit it made a kind of sense. Roach is terribly near-sighted. Also amazingly scrawny. The original 90 pound weakling.

'Mmmmmmm...' I observed.

'Mmmmmmm... what? asked Roach.

'Well, you know old Aardvark? He can't hunt either. So what he does is he makes spearheads and trades them for bears. Maybe you could...?'

'Go into business?' Roach cried. 'Become bourgeois? Please! I am an Artist.

Besides,' he added lamely, 'I don't know how to make spearheads.'

'Mmmmm...'

'Mmmmm...'

'I know!' I cried. 'You could trade your paintings!'

'Cool, baby!' exclaimed Roach. 'Er . . . only why would anyone want to trade food for a painting?'

'Why because... er... ah ..."

'I guess I'll just have to starve.'

'Wait a minute," I said. 'Er... if I can get someone to trade food for your paintings, will you give me some of the food, say... oh, one bear out of every ten?'

'Sure,' said Roach. 'What've I got to lose?'