Perilous Planets Part 33

She was looking out the window. I looked too.

And then we looked at each other. That fellow out of the strange Bug, he was as strange as his vehicle. He might be a mark or he might not; but of one thing I was pretty sure, and that was that he wasn't human.

No. Not with huge white eyes and a serpentine frill of orange tendrils instead of hair.

At once all my lethargy and weariness vanished.

'Tandy,' I cried, 'he isn't human!'

'I know,' she whispered.

'But don't you know what this means? He's an alien! He must come from another planet - perhaps frpm another star. Tandy, this is the most important thing that ever happened to us.' I thought fast. 'Tell you what,' I said, 'you let him in while I get around the side shaft - it's defrosted isn't it? Good I hurried. At the side door I stopped and looked at her affec-tionately. 'Dear Tandy,' I said. 'And you thought this was just an ordinary mark. You see? You need me.' And I was off, leaving her that thought to chew on as she welcomed her visitor.

I took a good long time in the stranger's Bug. Human or monster, I could rely on Tandy to keep him occupied, so I was very thorough and didn't rush, and came out with a splendid supply of what seemed to be storage batteries. I couldn't quite make them out, but I was sure that power was in them some-how or other; and if there was power, the heatpump would find a way to suck it out. Those I took the opportunity of tucking away in my own Bug before I went back in Tandy's place.

No use bothering her about them.

She was sitting in the wing chair, and the stranger was no-where in sight. I raised my brows. She nodded. 'Well,' I said 'he was your guest. I won't interfere.'

Tandy was looking quiet, relaxed and happy. 'What about the Bug?'

'Oh, lots of things,' I said. 'Plenty of metal! And food - a lot of food, Tandy. Of course, we'll have to go easy on it, till find out if we can digest it, but it smells delicious. And-'

Tumps?' she demanded.

'Funny,' I said. 'They don't seem to use them.' She scowled.

'Honestly, dearest! You can see for yourself - everything I found is piled right outside the door.'

'What isn't in your Bug, you mean.'

'Tandy!'

She glowered a moment longer, then smiled like the sun bursting through clouds on an old video tape. 'No matter, Howard,' she said tenderly, 'we've got plenty. Let's have an-other Martini, shall we?'

'Of course.' I waited and took the gla.s.s. 'To love,' I toasted. 'And to crime. By the way, did you talk to him first?'

'Oh, for hours,' she said crossly. 'Yap, yap. He's as bad as the feds.'

I got up and idly walked across the room to the light switch. 'Did he say anything interesting?'

'Not very. He spoke a very poor grade of English, to begin with. Said he learned it off old radio broadcasts, of all things they float around forever out in s.p.a.ce, it seems.'

I switched off the lights. That better?'

She nodded drowsily, got up to refill her gla.s.s, and sat down again in the love seat.

'He was awfully interested in the heat-pumps,' she said drowsily.

I put a tape on the player - Tchaikovsky. Tandy is a fool for violins. 'He liked them?'

'Oh, in a way. He thought they were clever. But dangerous, he said.'

'Him and the feds,' I murmured, sitting down next to her. Click-click, and our individual body armor went on stand-by alert. At the first hostile move it would block us off, set up a force field - well, I think it's called a force field. 'The feds are always yapping about the pumps too. Did I tell you? They're even cutting in on the RDF channels now.'

'Oh, Howard! That's too much.' She sat up and got another drink - and sat, this time, on the wide, low sofa. She giggled.

'What's the matter, dear?' I asked, coming over beside her.

'He was so funny. Ya-ta-ta-ta, ya-ta-ta-ta, all about how the heatpumps were ruining the world.'

'Just like the feds.' Click-click some more, as I put my arm around her shoulders.

'Just like,' she agreed. 'He said it was evidently extremely high technology that produced a device that took heat out of its surrounding ambient environment, but had we ever thought of what would happen when all the heat was gone?'

'Crazy,' I murmured into the base of her throat.

'Absolutely. As though all the heat could ever be gone! Absolute zero, he called it; said we're only eight or ten de-grees from it now. That's why the snow, he said.' I made a sound of polite disgust. 'Yes, that's what he said. He said it wasn't just snow, if was frozen air - oxygen and nitrogen and all those things. We've frozen the Earth solid, he says, and now it's so s.h.i.+ny that its libido is nearly perfect.'

I sat up sharply, then relaxed. 'Oh. Not libido, dear. Albedo. That means it's s.h.i.+ny.'

'That's what he said. He said the feds were right . . . Howard. Howard, dear. Listen to me.'

'Ssh,' I murmured. 'Did he say anything else?'

'But Howard! Please. You're-'

'Ssh.'

She relaxed, and then in a moment giggled again. 'Howard, wait. I forgot to tell you the funniest part.'

It was irritating, but I could afford to be patient. 'What was that, dearest?'

'He didn't have any personal armor!'

I sat up. I couldn't help it. 'What?'

'None at all! Naked as a baby. So that proves he isn't human, doesn't it? I mean, if he can't take the simplest care of himself, he's only a kind of animal, right?'

I thought. 'Well, I suppose so,' I said. Really, the concept was hard to swallow.

'Good,' she said, 'because he's, well, in the freezer. I didn't want to waste him, Howard. And it isn't as if he was human.'

I thought for a second. Well, why not? You get tired of rabbits and mice, and since there hasn't been any open sky for pasturing for nearly fifty years, that's about all there is. Now that I thought back on it, he was kind of plump and appetizing at that.

And, in any case, that was a problem for later on. I reached out idly and touched the b.u.t.ton that controlled the last light in the room, the electric fireplace itself. 'Oh,'

I said, pausing 'Where did he come from?'

'Sorry,' her m.u.f.fled voice came. 'I forgot to ask.'

I reached out thoughtfully and found my gla.s.s. There was a little bit left; I drained it off. Funny that the creature should bother to come down. In the old days, yes; back when Earth was open to the sky, you might expect aliens to come sky-rocketing down from the stars and all that. But he'd come all the way from - well, from wherever - and for what? Just to make a little soup for the pot, to donate a little metal and power. It was funny, in a way. I couldn't help thinking that the feds would have liked to have met him. Not only because he agreed with them about the pumps and so on, but because they're interested in things like that. They're very earnest types, that's why they're always issuing warnings and so on. Of course, no body pays any attention.

Still...

Well, there was no sense bothering my small brain about that sort of stuff, was there? If the heatpumps were dangerous, n.o.body would have bothered to invent them, would they?

I set down my gla.s.s and switched off the fireplace. Tandy was still and warm beside me; motionless but, believe me, by no means asleep.

Ultimately, we may have to invent the most perilously attractive planets...

SCHWARTZ BETWEEN.

THE GALAXIES.

by Robert Silverberg This much is reality: Schwartz sits comfortably coc.o.o.ned - pa.s.sive, suspended - in a first-cla.s.s pa.s.senger rack aboard a j.a.pan Air Lines rocket, nine kilometers above the Coral Sea. And this much is fantasy: the same Schwartz has pa.s.sage on a s.h.i.+ning stars.h.i.+p gliding silkily through the interstellar depths en route at nine times the velocity of light from Betelgeuse IX to Rigel XXI, or maybe from Andromeda to the Lesser Magellanic.

There are no stars.h.i.+ps. Probably there never will be any. Here we are, a dozen decades after the flight of Apollo II, and no human being goes anywhere except back and forth across the face of that little O, the Earth, for the planets are barren and the stars are beyond reach. That little O is too small for Schwartz. Too often it glazes for him, it turns to a nugget of dead porcelain; and lately he has formed the habit, when the world glazes, of taking refuge aboard that interstellar s.h.i.+p. So what JAL Flight 411 holds is merely his physical self, his sh.e.l.l, occupying a costly private cubicle on a slender 200-pa.s.senger vessel which, leaving Buenos Aires shortly after breakfast, has sliced westward along the Tropic of Capricorn for a couple of hours and will soon be landing at Papua's Torres Skyport. But his consciousness, his anima, the essential Schwartness of him, soars between the galaxies.

What a stars.h.i.+p it is! How marvelous its myriad pa.s.sengers! Down its crowded corridors swarms a vast gaudy heterogeny of galactic creatures, natives of the worlds of Capella, Arcturus, Altair, Canopus, Polaris, Antares - beings both intelligent and articular, methane-breathing or nitrogen-breathing or argon- breathing, spiny-skinned or skinless, many-armed or many-headed or altogether incorporeal, each a product of a distant and distinctly unique and alien cultural heritage. Among these varied folk moves Schwartz, that superstar of anthropologists, that true heir to Kroeber and Morgan and Malinowski and Mead, delightedly devouring their delicious diversity. Whereas aboard this prosaic rocket, this planetlocked stratosphere-needle, one cannot tell the Canadians from the Portuguese, the Portuguese from the Romanians, the Romanians from the Irish, unless they open their mouths, and sometimes not always then.

In his reveries he confers with creatures from the Fomal-haut system about digital circ.u.mcision; he tapes the melodies of the Achernarnian eye-flute; he learns of the sneeze-magic of Acrux, the sleep-ecstasies of Aldebaran, the asteroid-sculptors of Thuban. Then a smiling JAL stewardess, parts the curtain of his cubicle and peers in at him, jolting him from one reality to another. She is blue-eyed, frizzy-haired, straight-nosed, thin-lipped, bronze-skinned - a genetic mishmash, your standard twenty-first-century-model mongrel human, perhaps Melanesian-Swedish-Turkish- Bolivian, perhaps Pol-ish-Berber-Tartar-Welsh. Cheap intercontinental transit has done its deadly work: all Earth is a crucible, all the gene pools have melted into one indistinguishable fluid. Schwartz wonders about the recessivity of those blue eyes and arrives at no satis-factory solution. She is beautiful, at any rate. Her name is Dawn - O sweet neutral non-culture-bound cognomen! - and they have played at a flirtation, he and she, Dawn and Schwartz at occasional moments of this short flight.

Twinkling, she says softly, 'We're getting ready for our landing, Dr Schwartz. Are your restrictors in polarity?'

'I never unfastened them.'

'Good.' The blue eyes, warm, interested, meet his. 'I have a layover in Papua tonight,' she says.

'That's nice.'

'Lets have a drink while we're waiting for them to unload the baggage,' she suggests with cheerful bluntness. 'All right?'

'I suppose,' he says casually. 'Why not?' Her availability bores him: somehow he enjoys the obsolete pleasures of the chase. Once such easiness in a woman like this would have excited him, but no longer. Schwartz is forty years old, tall, square- shouldered, st.u.r.dy, a showcase for the peasant genes of his rugged Irish mother. His close-cropped black hair is fleck-ed with gray; many women find that interesting.

One rarely sees gray hair now. He dresses simply but well, in sandals and Socratic tunic. Predictably, his physical attractiveness, both within his domestk sixness and without, has increased with his professional success. He is confident, sure of his powers, and he radiates an infectious a.s.surance. This month alone eighty million people have heard his lectures.

She picks up the faint weariness in his voice. 'You don't sound eager. Not interested?'

'Hardly that.'

'What's wrong, then? Feeling sub, Professor?'

Schwartz shrugs. 'Dreadfully sub. Body like dry bone. Mind like dead ashes.' He smiles, full force, depriving his words of all their weight.

She registers mock anguish. 'That sounds bad,' she says. 'That sounds awful!'

'I'm only quoting Chuang Tzu. Pay no attention to me. Actually. I feel fine, just a little stale.'

'Too many skyports?'

He nods. 'Too much of a sameness wherever I go.' He thinks of a star-bright top- deck bubble-dome where three boneless Spicans do a twining dance of propitiation to while away the slow hours of nine-light travel. 'I'll be all right,' he tells her. 'It's a date.'

Her hybrid face glows with relief and antic.i.p.ation. 'See you in Papua,' she tells him, and winks, and moves jauntily down the aisle.

Papua. By c.o.c.ktail time Schwartz will be in Port Moresby. Tonight he lectures at the University of Papua; yesterday it was Montevideo, the day after tomorrow it will be Bangkok. He is making the grand academic circuit. This is his year: he is very big, suddenly, in anthropological circles, since the pub-lication of The Mask Beneath The Skin. From continent to continent he flashes, sharing his wisdom, Monday in Montreal, Tuesday Veracruz, Wednesday Montevideo. Thursday -Thursday? He crossed the International Date Line this morn-ing, and he does not remember whether he has entered Thursday or Tuesday, though yesterday was surely Wednesday. Schwartz is certain only that this is July and the year is 2083, and there are moments when he is not even sure of that.

The JAL rocket enters the final phase of its landward plunge. Papua waits, sleek, vitrescent. The world has a gla.s.sy sheen again. He lets his spirit drift happily back to the gleaming stars.h.i.+p making its swift way across the whirling constellations.

He found himself in the stars.h.i.+p's busy lower-deck lounge, having a drink with his traveling companion, Pitkin, the Yale economist. Why Pitkin, that coa.r.s.e, florid little man? With all of real and imaginary humanity to choose from, why had his unconscious elected to make him share this fantasy with such a boor?

'Look,' Pitkin said, winking and leering. 'There's your girl-friend.'

The entry-iris had opened and the Antarean not-male had come in.

'Quit it,' Schwartz snapped. 'You know there's no such thing going on.'

'Haven't you been chasing her for days?'

'She's not a "her",' Schwartz said.

Pitkin guffawed. 'Such precision! Such scholars.h.i.+p! She's not a her, he says!' He gave Schwartz a broad nudge. 'To you she's a she, friend, and don't try to kid me.'

Schwartz had to admit there was some justice to Pitkin's vulgar innuendos. He did find the Antarean - a slim yellow-eyed ebony-skinned upright humanoid, sinuous and glossy, with tapering elongated limbs and a seal's fluid grace - power-fully attractive. Nor could he help thinking of the Antarean as feminine. That att.i.tude was hopelessly culture-bound and species-bound, he knew; in fact the alien had cautioned him that terrestrial s.e.xual distinctions were irrelevant in the Antares system, that if Schwartz insisted on thinking of 'her' in genders, 'she' could be considered only the negative of male, with no implication of biological femaleness.

He said patiently, 'I've told you. The Antarean's neither male nor female as we understand those concepts. If we hap-pen to perceive the Antarean as feminine, that's the result of our own cultural conditioning. If you want to believe that my interest in this being is s.e.xual, go ahead, but I a.s.sure you that it's purely professional.'

'Sure. You're only studying her.'

'In a sense I am. And she's studying me. On her native world she has the status- frame of "watcher-of-life", which seems to translate into the Antarean equivalent of an anthro-pologist.'

'How lovely for you both. She's your first alien and you're her first Jew.'

'Stop calling her her,' Schwartz hissed.

'But you've been doing it!'

Schwartz closed his eyes. 'My grandmother told me never to get mixed up with economists. Their thinking is muddy and their breath is bad, she said. She also warned me against Yale men. Perverts of the intellect, she called them. So here I am cooped up on an interstellar s.h.i.+p with 500 alien creatures and one fellow human, and he has to be an economist from Yale.'

'Next trip travel with your grandmother instead.'

'Go away,' Schwartz said. 'Stop lousing up my fantasies. Go peddle your dismal science somewhere else. You see those Delta Aurigans over there? Climb into their bottle and tell them all about the Gross Global Product.' Schwartz smiled at the Antarean, who had purchased a drink, something that glittered an iridescent blue, and was approaching them. 'Go on,' Schwartz murmured.

'Don't worry,' Pitkin said. 'I wouldn't want to crowd you.' He vanished into the motley crowd.

The Antarean said, 'The Capellans are dancing, Schwartz.'

'I'd like to see that. Too d.a.m.ned noisy in here anyway.' Schwartz stared into the alien's vertical-slirted citreous eyes. Cat's eyes, he thought. Panther's eyes. The Antarean's gaze was focused, as usual, on Schwartz' mouth: other worlds, other customs. He felt a strange, unsettling tremor of desire. Desire for what, though? It was a sensation of pure need,, nonspecific, certainly nons.e.xual. 'I think I'll take a look. Will you come with me?'