Stranger in a Strange Land (2 page)

“Rocket Ship
Envoy
located. No survivors.”

The second was: “Mars is inhabited.”

The third: “Correction to despatch 23-105: One survivor of
Envoy
located.”

CAPTAIN WILLEM VAN TROMP was a man of humanity. He radioed ahead: “My passenger must not be subjected to a public reception. Provide low-gee shuttle, stretcher and ambulance, and armed guard.”

He sent his ship's surgeon to make sure that Valentine Michael Smith was installed in a suite in Bethesda Medical Center, transferred into a hydraulic bed, and protected from outside contact. Van Tromp went to an extraordinary session of the Federation High Council.

As Smith was being lifted into bed, the High Minister for Science was saying testily, “Granted, Captain, that your authority as commander of what was nevertheless a scientific expedition gives you the right to order medical service to protect a person temporarily in your charge, I do not see why you now presume to interfere with my department. Why, Smith is a treasure trove of scientific information!”

“I suppose he is, sir.”

“Then why—” The science minister turned to the High Minister for Peace and Security. “David? Will you issue instructions to your people? After all, one can't keep Professor Tiergarten and Doctor Okajima, to mention just two, cooling their heels.”

The peace minister glanced at Captain van Tromp. The captain shook his head.

“Why?” demanded the science minister. “You admit that he isn't sick.”

“Give the Captain a chance, Pierre,” the peace minister advised. “Well, Captain?”

“Smith isn't sick, sir,” Captain van Tromp said, “but he isn't well. He has never before been in a one-gravity field. He weighs two and a half times what he is used to and his muscles aren't up to it. He's not used to Earth-normal pressure. He's not used to
anything
and the strain is too much. Hell's bells, gentleman, I'm dog-tired myself—and I was born on this planet.”

The science minister looked contemptuous. “If acceleration fatigue is worrying you, let me assure you, my dear Captain, that we anticipated that. After all, I've been out myself. I know how it feels. This man Smith must—”

Captain van Tromp decided that it was time to throw a tantrum. He could excuse it by his own very real fatigue, he felt as if he had just landed on Jupiter. So he interrupted. “
Hnh
! ‘This man Smith—' This ‘
man
!' Can't you see that he is
not?”

“Eh?”

“Smith . . . is . . . not . . . a . . .
man.”

“Huh? Explain yourself, Captain.”

“Smith is an intelligent creature with the ancestry of a man, but he is more Martian than man. Until we came along he had never laid eyes on a man. He thinks like a Martian, feels like a Martian. He's been brought up by a race which has
nothing
in common with us—they don't even have
sex
. He's a man by ancestry, a Martian by environment. If you want to drive him crazy and waste that ‘treasure trove,' call in your fat-headed professors. Don't give him a chance to get used to this madhouse planet. It's no skin off me; I've done my job!”

The silence was broken by Secretary General Douglas. “And a good job, Captain. If this man, or man-Martian, needs a few days to get adjusted, I'm sure science can wait—so take it easy, Pete. Captain van Tromp is tired.”

“One thing won't wait,” said the Minister for Public Information.

“Eh, Jock?”

“If we don't show the Man from Mars in the stereo tanks pretty shortly, you'll have riots, Mr. Secretary.”

“Hmm—You exaggerate, Jock. Mars stuff in the news, of course. Me decorating the Captain and his crew—tomorrow, I think. Captain van Tromp telling his experiences—after a night's rest, Captain.”

The minister shook his head.

“No good, Jock?”

“The public expected them to bring back a real live Martian. Since they didn't, we need Smith and need him badly.”

“Live Martians?” Secretary General Douglas turned to Captain van Tromp. “You have movies of Martians?”

“Thousands of feet.”

“There's your answer, Jock. When the live stuff gets thin, trot on the movies. Now, Captain, about extraterritoriality: you say the Martians were not opposed?”

“Well, no, sir—but they were not for it, either.”

“I don't follow you.”

Captain van Tromp chewed his lip. “Sir, talking with a Martian is like talking with an echo. You don't get argument but you don't get results.”

“Perhaps you should have brought what's-his-name, your semantician. Or is he waiting outside?”

“Mahmoud, sir. Doctor Mahmoud is not well. A—A slight nervous breakdown, sir.” Van Tromp reflected that dead drunk was the moral equivalent.

“Space happy?”

“A little, perhaps.” These damned groundhogs!

“Well, fetch him around when he's feeling himself. I imagine this young man Smith will be of help, too.”

“Perhaps,” van Tromp said doubtfully.

 

This young man Smith was busy staying alive. His body, unbearably compressed and weakened by the strange shape of space in this unbelievable place, was at last relieved by the softness of the nest in which these others placed him. He dropped the effort of sustaining it, and turned his third level to his respiration and heart beat.

He saw that he was about to consume himself. His lungs were beating as hard as they did at home, his heart was racing to distribute the influx, all in an attempt to cope with the squeezing of space—and this while smothered by a poisonously rich and dangerously hot atmosphere. He took steps.

When his heart rate was twenty per minute and respiration almost imperceptible, he watched long enough to be sure that he would not discorporate while his attention was elsewhere. When he was satisfied he set a portion of his second level on guard and withdrew the rest of himself. It was necessary to review the configurations of these many new events in order to fit them to himself, then cherish and praise them—lest they swallow him.

Where should he start? When he left home, enfolding these others who were now his nestlings? Or at his arrival in this crushed space? He was suddenly assaulted by lights and sounds of that arrival, feeling it with mind-shaking pain. No, he was not ready to embrace that configuration—back! back! back beyond his first sight of these others who were now his own. Back even before the healing which had followed first grokking that he was not as his nestling brothers . . . back to the nest itself.

None of his thinkings were in Earth symbols. Simple English he had freshly learned to speak, less easily than a Hindu used it to trade with a Turk. Smith used English as one might use a code book, with tedious and imperfect translation. Now his thoughts, abstractions from half a million years of wildly alien culture, traveled so far from human experience as to be untranslatable.

In the adjoining room Dr. Thaddeus was playing cribbage with Tom Meechum, Smith's special nurse. Thaddeus had one eye on his dials and meters. When a flickering light changed from ninety-two pulsations per minute to less than twenty, he hurried into Smith's room with Meechum at his heels.

The patient floated in the flexible skin of the hydraulic bed. He appeared to be dead. Thaddeus snapped, “Get Doctor Noel-son!”

Meechum said, “Yessir!” and added, “How about shock gear, Doc?”

The nurse rushed out. The interne examined the patient, did not touch him. An older doctor came in, walking with labored awkwardness of a man long in space and not readjusted to high gravity. “Well, Doctor?”

“Patient's respiration, temperature, and pulse dropped suddenly about two minutes ago, sir.”

“What have you done?”

“Nothing, sir. Your instructions—”

“Good.” Nelson looked Smith over, studied instruments back of the bed, twins of those in the watch room. “Let me know if there is any change.” He started to leave.

Thaddeus looked startled. “But, Doctor—”

Nelson said, “Yes, Doctor? What is your diagnosis?”

“Uh, I don't wish to sound off about your patient, sir.”

“I asked for your diagnosis.”

“Very well, sir. Shock—atypical, perhaps,” he hedged, “but shock, leading to termination.”

Nelson nodded. “Reasonable. But this isn't a reasonable case. I've seen this patient in this condition a dozen times. Watch.” Nelson lifted the patient's arm, let it go. It stayed where he left it.

“Catalepsy?” asked Thaddeus.

“Call it that if you like. Just keep him from being bothered and call me if there is any change.” He replaced Smith's arm.

Nelson left. Thaddeus looked at the patient, shook his head and returned to the watch room. Meechum picked up his cards. “Crib?”

“No.”

Meechum added, “Doc, if you ask me, that one is a case for the basket before morning.”

“No one asked you. Go have a cigarette with the guards. I want to think.”

Meechum shrugged and joined the guards in the corridor; they straightened up, then saw who it was and relaxed. The taller marine said, “What was the excitement?”

“The patient had quintuplets and we were arguing about what to name them. Which one of you monkeys has a butt? And a light?”

The other marine dug out a pack of cigarettes. “How're you fixed for suction?”

“Just middlin'.” Meechum stuck the cigarette in his face. “Honest to God, gentlemen, I don't know anything about this patient.”

“What's the idea of these orders about ‘Absolutely No Women'? Is he a sex maniac?”

“All I know is they brought him in from the
Champion
and said he was to have absolute quiet.”

“ ‘The
Champion!' ”
the first marine said. “That accounts for it.”

“Accounts for what?”

“It stands to reason. He ain't had any, he ain't seen any, he ain't touched any—for months. And he's sick, see? If he was to lay hands on any, they're afraid he'd kill hisself.” He blinked. “I'll bet I would.”

 

Smith had been aware of the doctors but had grokked that their intentions were benign; it was not necessary for the major part of him to be jerked back.

At the morning hour when human nurses slap patients' faces with cold, wet cloths Smith returned. He speeded up his heart, increased his respiration, and took note of his surroundings, viewing them with serenity. He looked the room over, noting with praise all details. He was seeing it for the first time, as he had been incapable of enfolding it when he had been brought there. This room was not commonplace to him; there was nothing like it on all Mars, nor did it resemble the wedge-shaped, metal compartments of the
Champion
. Having relived the events linking his nest to this place, he was now prepared to accept it, commend it, and in some degree to cherish it.

He became aware of another living creature. A granddaddy longlegs was making a journey down from the ceiling, spinning as it went. Smith watched with delight and wondered if it were a nestling man.

Doctor Archer Frame, the interne who had relieved Thaddeus, walked in at that moment. “Good morning,” he said. “How do you feel?”

Smith examined the question. The first phrase he recognized as a formal sound, requiring no answer. The second was listed in his mind with several translations. If Doctor Nelson used it, it meant one thing; if Captain van Tromp used it, it was a formal sound.

He felt that dismay which so often overtook him in trying to communicate with these creatures. But he forced his body to remain calm and risked an answer. “Feel good.”

“Good!” the creature echoed. “Doctor Nelson will be along in a minute. Feel like breakfast?”

All symbols were in Smith's vocabulary but he had trouble believing that he had heard rightly. He knew that he was food, but he did not “feel like” food. Nor had he any warning that he might be selected for such honor. He had not known that the food supply was such that it was necessary to reduce the corporate group. He was filled with mild regret, since there was still so much to grok of new events, but no reluctance.

But he was excused from the effort of translating an answer by the entrance of Dr. Nelson. The ship's doctor inspected Smith and the array of dials, then turned to Smith. “Bowels move?”

Smith understood this; Nelson always asked it. “No.”

“We'll take care of that. But first you eat. Orderly, fetch that tray.”

Nelson fed him three bites, then required him to hold the spoon and feed himself. It was tiring but gave him a feeling of gay triumph for it was his first unassisted action since reaching this oddly distorted space. He cleaned the bowl and remembered to ask, “Who is this?” so that he could praise his benefactor.

“What is this, you mean,” Nelson answered. “It's a synthetic food jelly—and now you know as much as you did before. Finished? All right, climb out of that bed.”

“Beg pardon?” It was an attention symbol which was useful when communication failed.

“I said get out of there. Stand up. Walk around. Sure, you're weak as a kitten but you'll never put on muscle floating in that bed.” Nelson opened a valve, water drained out. Smith restrained a feeling of insecurity, knowing that Nelson cherished him. Shortly he lay on the floor of the bed with the watertight cover wrinkled around him. Nelson added, “Doctor Frame, take his other elbow.”

With Nelson to encourage and both to help Smith stumbled over the rim of the bed. “Steady. Now stand up,” Nelson directed. “Don't be afraid. We'll catch you if necessary.”