Is That What People Do? Page 8

  “That’s right!” the voice within his head screamed “Nothing!”

  But stars, Anders thought. How can one believe—

  The stars disappeared. Anders was in a gray nothingness, a void. There was nothing around him except shapeless gray. Where was the voice? Gone.

  Anders perceived the illusion behind the grayness, and then there was nothing at all.

  Complete nothingness, and himself within it.

  Where was he? What did it mean? Anders’ mind tried to add it up.

  Impossible. That couldn’t be true.

  Again the score was tabulated, but Anders’ mind couldn’t accept the total. In desperation, the overloaded mind erased the figures, eradicated the knowledge, erased itself.

  “Where am I?”

  In nothingness. Alone.

  Trapped.

  “Who am I?”

  A voice.

  The voice of Anders searched the nothingness, shouted, “Is there anyone here?”

  No answer.

  But there was someone. All directions were the same, yet moving along one he could make contact...with someone. The voice of Anders reached back to someone who could save him, perhaps.

  “Save me,” the voice said to Anders, lying fully dressed on his bed, except for his shoes and black bow tie.

  THE NATIVE PROBLEM

  Edward Danton was a misfit. Even as a baby, he had shown pre-antisocial leanings. This should have been sufficient warning to his parents, whose duty it was to take him without delay to a competent prepubescent psychologist. Such a man could have discovered what lay in Danton’s childhood to give him these contra-group tendencies. But Danton’s parents, doubtless dramatizing problems of their own, thought the child would grow out of it.

  He never did.

  In school, Danton got barely passing grades in Group Acculturation, Sibling Fit, Values Recognition, Folkways Judgment, and other subjects which a person must know in order to live serenely in the modern world. Because of his lack of comprehension, Danton could never live serenely in the modern world.

  It took him a while to find this out.

  From his appearance, one would never have guessed Danton’s basic lack of Fit. He was a tall, athletic young man, green-eyed, easygoing. There was a certain something about him which considerably intrigued the girls in his immediate affective environment. In fact, several paid him the highest compliment at their command, which was to consider him as a possible husband.

  But even the flightiest girl could not ignore Danton’s lacks. He was liable to weary after only a few hours of Mass Dancing, when the fun was just beginning. At Twelve-hand Bridge, Danton’s attention frequently wandered and he would be forced to ask for a recount of the bidding, to the disgust of the other eleven players. And he was impossible at Subways.

  He tried hard to master the spirit of that classic game. Locked arm in arm with his teammates, he would thrust forward into a subway car, trying to take possession before another team could storm in the opposite doors.

  His group captain would shout, “Forward, men! We’re taking this car to Rockaway!” And the opposing group captain would scream back, “Never! Rally, boys! It’s Bronx Park or bust!”

  Danton would struggle in the close-packed throng, a fixed smile on his face, worry lines etched around his mouth and eyes. His girl friend of the moment would say, “What’s wrong, Edward? Aren’t you having fun?”

  “Sure I am,” Danton would reply, gasping for breath.

  “But you aren’t!” the girl would cry, perplexed. “Don’t you realize, Edward, that this is the way our ancestors worked off their aggressions? Historians say that the game of Subways averted an all-out hydrogen war. We have those same aggressions and we, too, must resolve them in a suitable social context.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Edward Danton would say. “I really do enjoy this. I—oh, Lord!”

  For at that moment, a third group would come pounding in, arms locked, chanting, “Canarsie, Canarsie, Canarsie!”

  In that way, he would lose another girl friend, for there was obviously no future in Danton. Lack of Fit can never be disguised. It was obvious that Danton would never be happy in the New York suburbs which stretched from Rockport, Maine, to Norfolk, Virginia; nor in any other suburbs, for that matter.

  Danton tried to cope with his problems, in vain. Other strains started to show. He began to develop astigmatism from the projection of advertisements on his retina, and there was a constant ringing in his ears from the sing-swoop ads. His doctor warned that symptom analysis would never rid him of these psychosomatic ailments. No, what had to be treated was Danton’s basic neurosis, his antisociality. But this Danton found impossible to deal with.

  And so his thoughts turned irresistibly to escape. There was plenty of room for Earth’s misfits out in space.

  During the last two centuries, millions of psychotics, neurotics, psychopaths, and cranks of every kind and description had gone outward to the stars. The early ones had the Mikkelsen Drive to power their ships, and spent twenty or thirty years chugging from star system to star system. The newer ships were powered by GM subspatial torque converters, and made the same journey in a matter of months.

  The stay-at-homes, being socially adjusted, bewailed the loss of anyone, but they welcomed the additional breeding room.

  In his twenty-seventh year, Danton decided to leave Earth and take up pioneering. It was a tearful day when he gave his breeding certificate to his best friend, Al Trevor.

  “Gee, Edward,” Trevor said, turning the precious little certificate over and over in his hands, “you don’t know what this means to Myrtle and me. We always wanted two kids. Now because of you—”

  “Forget it,” said Danton. “Where I’m going, I won’t need any breeding permit. As a matter of fact, I’ll probably find it impossible to breed,” he added, the thought having just struck him.

  “But won’t that be frustrating for you?” Al asked, always solicitous for his friend’s welfare.

  “I guess so. Maybe after a while, though, I’ll find a girl pioneer. And in the meantime, there’s always sublimation.”

  “True enough. What substitute have you selected?”

  “Vegetable gardening. I might as well be practical.”

  “You might as well,” Al said. “Well, boy, good luck, boy.”

  Once the breeding certificate was gone, the die was cast. Danton plunged boldly ahead. In exchange for his Birthright, the government gave him unlimited free transportation and two years’ basic equipment and provisions.

  Danton left at once.

  He avoided the more heavily populated areas, which were usually in the hands of rabid little groups.

  He wanted no part of a place like Korani II, for instance, where a giant calculator had instituted a reign of math.

  Nor was he interested in Heil V, where a totalitarian population of 342 was earnestly planning ways and means of conquering the Galaxy.

  He skirted the Farming Worlds, dull, restrictive places given to extreme health theories and practices.

  When he came to Hedonia, he considered settling on that notorious planet. But the men of Hedonia were said to be short-lived, although no one denied their enjoyment while they did live.

  Danton decided in favor of the long haul, and journeyed on.

  He passed the Mining Worlds, somber, rocky places sparsely populated by gloomy, bearded men given to sudden violence. And he came at last to the New Territories. These unpeopled worlds were past Earth’s farthest frontier. Danton scanned several before he found one with no intelligent life whatsoever.

  It was a calm and watery place, dotted with sizeable islands, lush with jungle green and fertile with fish and game. The ship’s captain duly notarized Danton’s claim to the planet, which Danton called New Tahiti. A quick survey showed a large island superior to the rest. Here he was landed, and here he proceeded to set up his camp.

  There was much to be done at first. Danton constructed a house out of branches a
nd woven grass, near a white and gleaming beach. He fashioned a fishing spear, several snares and a net. He planted his vegetable garden and was gratified to see it thrive under the tropic sun, nourished by warm rains which fell every morning between seven and seven-thirty.

  All in all, New Tahiti was a paradisical place and Danton should have been very happy there. But there was one thing wrong.

  The vegetable garden, which he had thought would provide first-class sublimation, proved a dismal failure. Danton found himself thinking about women at all hours of the day and night, and spending long hours crooning to himself—love songs, of course—beneath a great orange tropic moon.

  This was unhealthy. Desperately he threw himself into other recognized forms of sublimation; painting came first, but he rejected it to keep a journal, abandoned that and composed a sonata, gave that up and carved two enormous statues out of a local variety of soapstone, completed them and tried to think of something else to do.

  There was nothing else to do. His vegetables took excellent care of themselves; being of Earth stock, they completely choked out all alien growths. Fish swam into his nets in copious quantities, and meat was his whenever he bothered to set a snare. He found again that he was thinking of women at all hours of the day and night—tall women, short women, white women, black women, brown women.

  The day came when Danton found himself thinking favorably of Martian women, something no Terran had succeeded in doing before. Then he knew that something drastic had to be done.

  But what? He had no way of signaling for help, no way of getting off New Tahiti. He was gloomily contemplating this when a black speck appeared in the sky to seaward.

  He watched as it slowly grew larger, barely able to breathe for fear it would turn out to be a bird or huge insect. But the speck continued to increase in size and soon he could see pale jets, flaring and ebbing.

  A spaceship had come! He was alone no longer!

  The ship took a long, slow, cautious time landing. Danton changed into his best pareu, a South Seas garment he had found peculiarly well adapted to the climate of New Tahiti. He washed, combed his hair carefully, and watched the ship descend.

  It was one of the ancient Mikkelsen Drive ships. Danton had thought that all of them were long retired from active service. But this ship, it was apparent, had been traveling for a long while. The hull was dented and scored, hopelessly archaic, yet with a certain indomitable look about it. Its name, proudly lettered on the bow, was The Hutter People.

  When people come in from deep space, they are usually starved for fresh food. Danton gathered a great pile of fruit for the ship’s passengers and had it tastefully arranged by the time The Hutter People had landed ponderously on the beach.

  A narrow hatch opened and two men stepped out. They were armed with rifles and dressed in black from head to toe. Warily they looked around them.

  Danton sprinted over. “Hey, welcome to New Tahiti! Boy, am I glad to see you folks! What’s the latest news from—”

  “Stand back!” shouted one of the men. He was in his fifties, tall and impossibly gaunt, his face seamed and hard. His icy blue eyes seemed to pierce Danton like an arrow, his rifle was leveled at Danton’s chest. His partner was younger, barrel-chested, broad-faced, short, and very powerfully built.

  “Something wrong?” Danton asked, stopping.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Edward Danton.”

  “I’m Simeon Smith,” the gaunt man said, “military commander of the Hutter people. This is Jedekiah Franker, second-in-command. How come you speak English?”

  “I’ve always spoken English,” said Danton. “Look, I—”

  “Where are the others? Where are they hiding?”

  “There aren’t any others. Just me.” Danton looked at the ship and saw the faces of men and women at every port. “I gathered this stuff for you folks.” He waved his hand at the mound of fruit. “Thought you might want some fresh goods after being so long in space.”

  A pretty girl with short, tousled blonde hair appeared in the hatchway. “Can’t we come out now, Father?”

  “No!” Simeon said. “It’s not safe. Get inside, Anita.”

  “I’ll watch from here, then,” she said, staring at Danton with frankly curious eyes.

  Danton stared back and a faint and unfamiliar tremor ran through him.

  Simeon said, “We accept your offering. We will not, however, eat it.”

  “Why not?” Danton reasonably wanted to know.

  “Because,” said Jedekiah, “we don’t know what poisons you people might try to feed us.”

  “Poisons? Look, let’s sit down and talk this over.”

  “What do you think?” Jedekiah asked Simeon.

  “Just what I expected,” the military leader said. “Ingratiating, fawning, undoubtedly treacherous. His people won’t show themselves. Waiting in ambush, I’ll bet. I think an object lesson would be in order.”

  “Right,” said Jedekiah, grinning. “Put the fear of civilization into them.” He aimed his rifle at Danton’s chest.

  “Hey!” Danton yelped, backing away.

  “But, Father,” said Anita, “he hasn’t done anything yet.”

  “That’s the whole point. Shoot him and he won’t do anything. The only good native is a dead native.”

  “This way,” Jedekiah put in, “the rest will know we mean business.”

  “It isn’t right!” Anita cried indignantly. “The Council—”

  “—isn’t in command now. An alien landfall constitutes an emergency. During such times, the military is in charge. We’ll do what we think best. Remember Lan II!”

  “Hold on now,” Danton said. “You’ve got this all wrong. There’s just me, no others, no reason to—”

  A bullet kicked sand near his left foot. He sprinted for the protection of the jungle. Another bullet whined close and a third cut a twig near his head as he plunged into the underbrush.

  “There!” he heard Simeon roar. “That ought to teach them a lesson!”

  Danton kept on running until he had put half a mile of jungle between himself and the pioneer ship.

  He ate a light supper of the local variety of bananas and breadfruit, and tried to figure out what was wrong with the Hutters. Were they insane? They had seen that he was an Earthman, alone and unarmed, obviously friendly. Yet they had fired at him—as an object lesson. A lesson for whom? For the dirty natives, whom they wanted to teach a lesson....

  That was it! Danton nodded emphatically to himself. The Hutters must have thought he was a native, an aboriginal, and that his tribe was lurking in the bush, waiting for a chance to massacre the new arrivals! It wasn’t too rash an assumption, really. Here he was on a distant planet, without a spaceship, wearing only a loincloth and tanned a medium bronze. He was probably just what they thought a native should look like on a wilderness planet like this!

  “But where,” Danton asked himself, “do they think I learned English?”

  The whole thing was ridiculous. He started walking back to the ship, sure he could clear up the misunderstanding in a few minutes. But after a couple yards, he stopped.

  Evening was approaching. Behind him, the sky was banked in white and gray clouds. To seaward, a deep blue haze advanced steadily on the land. The jungle was filled with ominous noises, which Danton had long ago found to be harmless. But the new arrivals might not think so.

  These people were trigger-happy, he reminded himself. No sense barging in on them too fast and inviting a bullet.

  So he moved cautiously through the tangled jungle growth, a silent, tawny shape blending into the jungle browns and greens. When he reached the vicinity of the ship, he crawled through the dense undergrowth until he could peer down on the sloping beach.

  The pioneers had finally come out of their ship. There were several dozen men and women and a few children. All were dressed in heavy black cloth and perspiring in the heat. They had ignored his gift of local fruit. Instead, an aluminum table had
been spread with the spaceship’s monotonous provisions.

  On the periphery of the crowd, Danton saw several men with rifles and ammunition belts. They were evidently on guard, keeping close watch on the jungle and glancing apprehensively overhead at the darkening sky.

  Simeon raised his hands. There was immediate silence.

  “Friends,” the military leader orated, “we have come at last to our long-awaited home! Behold, here is a land of milk and honey, a place of bounty and abundance. Was it not worth the long voyage, the constant danger, the endless search?”

  “Yes, brother!” the people responded.

  Simeon held up his hands again for silence. “No civilized man has settled upon this planet. We are the first and therefore the place is ours. But there are perils, my friends! Who knows what strange monsters the jungle hides?”

  “Nothing larger than a chipmunk,” Danton muttered to himself. “Why don’t they ask me? I’d tell them.”

  “Who knows what leviathan swims in the deep?” Simeon continued. “We do know one thing: There is an aboriginal people here, naked and savage, undoubtedly cunning, ruthless and amoral, as aboriginals always are. Of course we must beware. We will live in peace with them, if they will let us. We will bring to them the fruits of civilization and the flowers of culture. They may profess friendship, but always remember this, friends: No one can tell what goes on in a savage heart. Their standards are not ours; their morals are not ours. We cannot trust them; we must be forever on guard. And if in doubt, we must shoot first! Remember Lan II!”

  Everybody applauded, sang a hymn, and began their evening meal. As night fell, searchlights came on from the ship, making the beach bright as day. The sentries paced up and down, shoulders hunched nervously, rifles ready.

  Danton watched the settlers shake out their sleeping bags and retire under the bulge of the ship. Even their fear of sudden attack couldn’t force them to spend another night inside the ship, when there was fresh air to breathe outside.

  The great orange moon of New Tahiti was half-hidden by highflying night clouds. The sentries paced and swore, and moved closer together for mutual comfort and protection. They began firing at the jungle sounds and blasting at shadows.