In Deep (5 page)

George stared at him suspiciously, without relaxing his grip. “What’s the matter with you?”

“I tell you I’m done,” said Gumbs pettishly. “Paralysed. I can’t move.”

They had fallen, George saw, onto a small boulder, one of many with which the river bed was strewn. This one was roughly conical; they were draped over it, and the blunt point was directly under Gumbs’s spinal cord, a few centimeters from the brain.

“Gumbs,” he said, “that may not be as bad as you think. If I can show you it isn’t, will you give up and put yourself under my orders?”

“How do you mean? My spine’s crushed.”

“Never mind that now. Will you or won’t you?”

“Why, yes,” said Gumbs. “That’s very decent of you, Meister, matter of fact. You have my word, for what it’s worth.”

“All right,” said George. Straining hard, he managed to get their body down off the boulder. Then he stared up at the slope down which they had tumbled. Too steep; he’d have to find an easier way back. He turned and started off to eastward, paralleling the thin stream that still flowed in the center of the watercourse.

“What’s up now?” Gumbs asked after a moment.

“We’ve got to find a way up to the top,” George said impatiently. “I may still be able to help Vivian.”

“Ah, yes. Afraid I was thinking about myself, Meister. If you don’t mind telling me—”

She couldn’t still be alive, George was thinking despondently, but if there were any small chance—“You’ll be all right,” he said. “If you were still in your old body that would be a fatal injury, or permanently disabling, anyhow, but not in this thing. You can repair yourself as easily as you can grow a new limb.”

“Good Lord,” said Gumbs. “Stupid of me not to think of that. But look here, Meister, does that mean we were simply wasting our time trying to kill one another? I mean to say—”

“No. If you’d crushed my brain, I think the organism would have digested it, and that would be the end of me. But short of anything that drastic, I believe we’re immortal.”

“Immortal,” said Gumbs. “Good Lord… That does rather put another face on it, doesn’t it?”

The bank was becoming a little lower, and at one point, where the raw earth was thickly seeded with boulders, there was a talus slope that looked as if it could be climbed. George started up it.

“Meister,” said Gumbs after a moment.

“What do you want?”

“You’re right, you know-I’m getting some feeling back already… Look here, Meister, is there anything this beast can’t do? I mean, for instance, do you suppose we could put ourselves back together the way we were, with all the appendages, and so on?”

“It’s possible,” George said curtly. It was a thought that had been in the back of his mind, but he didn’t feel like discussing it with Gumbs just now.

They were halfway up the slope.

“Well, in that case—” said Gumbs meditatively. “The thing has
military
possibilities, you know. Man who brought a thing like that direct to the War Department could write his own ticket, more or less.”

“After we split up,” George said, “you can do whatever you please.”

“But, dammit,” said Gumbs in an irritated tone, “that won’t do.”

“Why not?”

“Because,” said Gumbs, “they might find you.” His hands reached up abruptly, grasped a small boulder, and before George could stop him, pried it sidewise out of its socket in the earth.”

The larger 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 straight under it.

At the last possible instant he moved them to the left, away from the center of the toppling gray mass.

It struck.

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

He heard a splattering sound.

And he was still alive. That astonishing fact kept him fully occupied for a long time after the boulder had clattered its way down the slope into silence. Then, finally, he looked down to his right.

The resistance of his stiffened arms, even while they broke, had been barely enough to lever the falling body 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 mass flowed slowly together again.

In twenty minutes the last remains of a superfluous spinal cord had been reabsorbed, the monster had collected itself back into its normal lens shape, and George’s pain was diminishing. 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 circumstances this discovery 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 in the dry grass.

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 toward 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 for certain.

There was only one way to find out. George moved closer, hoping fervently that the something
meisterii
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 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 lighter and larger than his, the outline a trifle sharper.

“Vivian?” he said doubtfully. “Is that you?”

No answer. He tried again; and again.

Finally:

“George! Oh dear—I want to cry, but I can’t seem 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 mean, what happened?”

“I don’t know. She’s gone, isn’t she? I haven’t heard her for a long time.”

“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 dazedly,
didn’t I think of that?
“And then?” he said.

“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 here and thought how wonderful it would be if she weren’t in here with me. And then, after a while, she wasn’t. 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 enlightenment, he caught sight of something that had escaped his notice before. Two meters to his left, just visible in the grass, was a damp-looking grayish lump, with a suggestion of a stringy extension trailing off from it…

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

Somehow, Vivian had managed to stimulate that mechanism—to convince the organism that McCarty’s brain was not only superfluous but dangerous—“poisonous” was the word.

Miss McCarty—it was the final ignominy—had not been digested, but 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; and, for divergent reasons—on George’s side because the monster’s normal metabolism was grossly inefficient 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 surprisingly easy. Again and again they had to let themselves collapse back into amoeboid masses, victims of some omitted or malfunctioning organ; but each failure smoothed the road; eventually they were able to stand breathless but breathing, swaying but erect, face to face—two protean giants in the fortunate dimness, two sketches of self-created Man.

They had also put thirty kilometers between themselves and the Federation camp. Standing on the crest of a rise and looking southward across the shallow valley, George could see a faint funereal glow: the mining machines, chewing out metals to feed the fabricators that would spawn a billion ships.

“We’ll never go back, will we?” said Vivian.

“No,” said George soberly. “They’ll come to us, in time. We have lots of time. We’re the future.”

And one thing more, a small thing, but important to George; it marked his sense of accomplishment, of one phase ended and a new one begun. He had finally completed the name of his discovery—not, as it turned out, anything
meisterii
at all.
Spes hominis:

Man’s hope.

On his way across the wheel one morning, Dr. Walter Alvarez detoured down to C level promenade. A few men were standing, as usual, at the window looking out at the enormous blue-green planet below. They were dressed alike in sheen-gray coveralls, a garment with detachable gauntlets and hood designed to make it convertible into a spacesuit. It was uncomfortable, but regulation: according to the books, a Survey and Propaganda Satellite might find itself under attack at any moment.

Nothing so interesting had happened to SAPS 3107A, orbiting the seventh planet of a G-type star in Ophiuchus. They had been here for two years and a half, and most of them had not even touched ground yet.

There it was, drifting by out there, blue-green, fat and juicy—an oxygen planet, two-thirds land, mild climate, soil fairly bursting with minerals and organics.

Alvarez felt his mouth watering when he looked at it. He had “wheel fever”; they all did. He wanted to get
down
there, to natural gravity and natural ailments.

The last month or so, there had been a feeling in the satellite that a break-through was coming. Always coming: it never arrived.

A plump orthotypist named Lola went by, and a couple of the men turned with automatic whistles. “Listen,” said Olaf Marx conspiratorially, with a hand on Alvarez’s arm, “that reminds me, did you hear what happened at the big banquet yesterday?”

“No,” said Alvarez, irritably withdrawing his arm. “I didn’t go. Can’t stand banquets. Why?”

“Well, the way I got it, the Commandant’s wife was sitting right across from George—”

Alvarez’s interest sharpened. “You mean the gorgon? What did he do?”

“I’m
telling
you. See, it looked like he was watching her all through dinner. Then up comes the dessert—lemon meringue. So old George—”

The shift bell rang. Alvarez started nervously and looked at his thumbwatch. The other men were drifting away. So was Olaf, laughing like a fool. “You’ll die when you hear,” he called back. “Boy, do I wish I’d been there myself! So long, Walt.”

Alvarez reluctantly went the other way. In B corridor, somebody called after. him, “Hey, Walt? Hear about the banquet?”

He shook his head. The other man, a baker named Pedro, grinned and waved, disappearing up the curve of the corridor. Alvarez opened the door of Xenology Section and went in.

During his absence, somebody had put a new chart on the wall. It was ten feet high and there were little rectangles all over it, each connected by lines to other rectangles. When he first saw it, Alvarez thought it was a new table of organisation for the Satellite Service, and he winced: but on closer inspection, the chart was
too
complex, and besides, it had a peculiar disorganised appearance; Boxes had been white-rubbed out and other boxes drawn on top of them. Some parts were crowded illegibly together and others were spacious. The whole. thing looked desperately confused; and so did Elvis Wemrath, who was en a wheeled ladder erasing the entire top right-hand corner. “
N
panga,” he said irritably. “That right?”

“Yes,” a voice piped unexpectedly. Alvarez looked around, saw nobody. The voice went on, “But he is
R
panga to his cousins and all their
N
pangas or bigger, except when—”

Alvarez leaned over and peered around the desk. There on the carpet was the owner of the voice, a pinkish-white spheroid with various appendages sprouting in all directions, like a floating mine: “George” the gorgon. “Oh, it’s you,” said Alvarez, producing his echo sounder and humidometer. “What’s all this nonsense I hear—” He began to prod the gorgon with the test equipment, making his regular morning examination, It was the only bright moment of his day; the infirmary could wait.

“All right,” Womrath interrupted, scrubbing furiously. “
R
panga to cousins—wait a minute, now.” He turned with a scowl, “Alvarez, I’ll be through in a minute.
N
panga or bigger, except when…” He sketched in half a dozen boxes, labeled them and began to draw connecting lines. “Now is that right?” he asked George.

“Yes, only now it is wrong panga to
mother
’s cousins. Draw again, from father’s cousins’
N
pangas, to mother’s cousins
O
pangas or bigger… Yes, and now from father’s uncles’
R
pangas, to mother’s uncles’ pangas
cousins
—”

Womrath’s hand faltered. He stared at the chart; he had drawn such a tangle of lines, he couldn’t tell what box connected with which. “Oh, God,” he said hopelessly. He climbed down off the ladder and slapped the stylus into Alvarez’s palm. “
You
go nuts.” He thumbed the intercom on the desk and said, “Chief, I’m going off now.
Way
off.”

“
Did you get that chart straightened out?
” the Intercom demanded.

“No, but—”

“
You’re on extra duty as of now. Take a pill. Is Alvarez here?
”

“Yes,” said Womrath resignedly.

“
Both of you come in, then. Leave George outside
.”

“Hello, Doctor,” the spheroid piped. “Are you panga to me?”

“Don’t let’s go into
that
,” said Womrath, twitching, and took Alvarez by the sleeve. They found the chief of the Xenology Section, Edward H. Dominick, huddled bald and bearlike behind his desk. The cigar in his hand looked chewed. “Womrath,” he said, “when can you give me that chart?”

“I don’t knew. Never, maybe.” When Dominick scowled at, him irritably, he shrugged and lit a sullen cigarette.

Dominick swiveled his gaze to Alvarez. “Have you,” he asked, “heard about what happened at the banquet in George’s honer yesterday?”

“No, I have not,” said Alvarez. “Will you be so kind as to tell me, or else shut up about it?”—

Dominick rubbed his shaven skull, absorbing the insult. “It was during the dessert,” he said. “George was sitting opposite Mrs. Carver, in that little jump seat. Just as she get her fork into the pie—it was lemon meringue—George rolled up over the table and grabbed the plate away. Mrs. Carver screamed, pulled back—thought she was being attacked, I suppose—and the chair went out from under her. It—was—a—mess.”

Alvarez ended the awed silence. “What did he do with the pie?”

“Ate it,” said Dominick glumly. “Had a perfectly good piece of his own, that he didn’t touch.” He popped a lozenge into his mouth.

Alvarez shook his head. “Not typical. His pattern is strictly submissive. I don’t like it.”

“That’s what I told Carver. But he was livid. Shaking. We all sat there until he escorted his wife to her room and came back. Then we had an interrogation. All we could get out of George was, “I thought I was panga to her.”

Alvarez shifted impatiently in his chair, reaching automatically for a bunch of grapes from the bowl on the desk. He was a small, spare man, and he felt defensive about it. “Now what is all this panga business?” he demanded.

Womrath snorted, and began to peel a banana.

“Panga,” said Dominick, “would appear to be some kind of complicated authority-submission relationship that exists among the gorgons.” Alvarez sat up straighter. “They never mentioned it to us, because we never asked. Now it turns out to be crucial.” Dominick sighed. “Fourteen months, just getting a three-man base down on the planet. Seven more to get the elders’ permission to bring a gorgon here experimentally. All according to the book. We picked the biggest and brightest-looking one we could find: that was George. He seemed to be coming along great. And now this.”

“Well, chief,” said Womrath carefully, “nobody has any more admiration than I have for Mrs. Carver as a consumer—she really puts it away, but it seems to me the question is, is
George
damaged—”

Dominick was shaking his head. “I haven’t told you the rest of it. This panga thing stopped Carver cold, but not for long. He beamed down to the planethead and had Rubinson ask the elders. ’Is George panga to the Commandant’s wife?’ ”

Alvarez grinned mirthlessly and clicked his tongue.

“Sure,” Dominick nodded. “Who knows what a question like that may have meant to them? They answered back, in effect, ‘Certainly not,’ and wanted to know the details. Carver told them.”

“And?” said Alvarez.

“They said George was a shocking criminal who should be appropriately punished. Not by them, you understand—by us, because we’re the offended parties. Moreover—now this must make sense to their peculiar way of looking at things—if we don’t punish George to their satisfaction, they’ll punish Rubinson and his whole crew.”

“How?” Alvarez demanded.

“By doing,” Dominick said, “whatever it is we should have done to George—and that could be anything.”

Womrath pursed his lips to whistle, but no sound came out. He swallowed a mouthful of banana and tried again. Still nothing.

“You get it?” said Dominick with suppressed emotion. They all looked through the open doorway at George, squatting patiently in the other room. “There’s no trouble about ‘punishment’—we all know what it means, we’ve read the books. But how do you punish an alien like that?
An eye for a what?
”

“Now let’s see if we have this straight,” said Dominick, sorting through the papers in his hand. Womrath and Alvarez looked on from either side. George tried to peek, too, but his photoceptors were too short. They were all standing in the outer office, which had been stripped to the bare walls and floor. “One. We know a gorgon changes color according to his emotional state. When they’re contented, they’re a kind of rose pink. When they’re unhappy, they turn blue.”

“He’s been pink ever since we’ve had him on the Satellite,” said Womrath, glancing down at the gorgon.

“Except at the banquet,” Dominick answered thoughtfully. “I remember he turned bluish just before… If we could find out what it was that set him off—Well, first things first.” He held down another finger. “Two, we don’t have any information at all about local systems of reward and punishment. They may cut each other into bits for spitting on the sidewalk, or they may just slap each other’s—um, wrists—” He looked unhappily down at George, all his auricles and photoceptors out on stalks.

“—for arson, rape and mopery,” Dominick finished. “We don’t know; we’ll have to play it by ear.”

“What does George say about it?” Alvarez asked. “Why don’t you ask him?”

“We thought of that,” Womrath said glumly. “Asked him what the elders would do to him in a case like this, and he said they’d quabble his infarcts, or something.”

“A dead end,” Dominick added. “It would take us years…” He scrubbed his naked scalp with a palm. “Well, number three, we’ve got all the furniture out of here—it’s going to be damned crowded, with the whole staff working in my office,but never mind… Number four, there’s his plate with the bread and water. And number five, that door has been fixed so it latches on the outside. Let’s give it a dry run.” He led the way to the door; the others followed, including George. “No, you stay in here,” Womrath told him. George stopped, blushing an agreeable pink.

Dominick solemnly closed the door and dropped the improvised latch into its socket. He punched the door button, found it satisfactorily closed. Through the transparent upper pane, they could see George inquisitively watching.

Dominick opened the door again. “Now, George,” he said, “pay attention. This is a
prison
. You’re being
punished
. We’re going to keep you in here, with nothing to eat but what’s there, until we think you’re punished enough. Understand?”

“Yes,” said George doubtfully.

“All right,” said Dominick, and closed the door. They all stood watching for a while, and George stood watching them back, but nothing else happened. “Let’s go into my office and wait,” said Dominick with a sigh. “Can’t expect miracles, all at once.”

They trooped down the corridor to the adjoining room and ate peanuts for a while. “He’s a sociable creature,” Womrath said hopefully. “He’ll get lonesome after a while.”

“And hungry,” Alvarez said. “He never turns down a meal.”

Half an hour later, when they looked in, George was thoughtfully chewing up the carpet. “No, no, no, no, George,” said Dominick, bursting in on him. “You’re not supposed to eat anything except what we give you. This is a
prison
.”

“Good carpet,” said George, hurt.

“I don’t care if it is. You don’t eat it, understand?”

“Okay,” said George cheerfully. His color was an honest rose-pink.

Four hours later, when Alvarez went off shift, George had settled down in a corner and pulled in all his appendages. He was asleep. If anything, he looked pinker that ever.

When Alvarez came on shift again, there was no doubt about it. George was sitting in the middle of the room, photoceptors out and waving rhythmically; his color was a glowing pink, the pink of a rose pearl. Dominick kept him in there for another day, just to make sure; George seemed to lose a little weight on the austere diet, but glowed a steady pink. He liked it.

Goose Kelly, the games instructor, tried to keep up a good front, but he had the worst case of wheel fever on SAPS 3107A. It had got so that looking out of that fat, blue-green planet, swimming there so close, was more than he could bear. Kelly was a big man, an outdoorman by instinct; he longed for natural air in his lungs, and turf under his feet. To compensate, he strode faster, shouted louder, got redder of face and bulgier of eye, bristled more fiercely. To quiet an occasional trembling of his hands, he munched sedative pills. He had dreams of falling, with which he bored the ship’s Mother Hubbard and the Church of—Marx padre by turns.

“Is that it?” he asked now, disapprovingly. He had never seen the gorgon before; Semantics, Medical and Xenology Sections had been keeping him pretty much to themselves.

Dominick prodded the pinkish sphere with his toe. “Wake up, George.”

After a moment, the gorgon’s skin became lumpy at half a dozen points. The lumps grew slowly into long, segmented stems. Some of these expanded at the tips into “feet” and “hands”; others flowered into the intricate patterns of auricles and photoceptors—and one speech organ, which looked like a small trumpet. “Hello,” said George cheerfully.