I felt the sunlight on me and I soaked it up and I knew about the sunlight, how it came about—the proton-proton reactions that brought about the rapid shuffling of subatomic particles from one form to another, releasing in the process the flood of energy which poured out from the star. I’d known all this before, of course, in my human form. But I had learned it once and then had never thought of it again. This was different. This was not a matter of simple learning, of an intellectual knowledge. Now I felt it, saw it, sensed it. I could, without half trying, imagine myself a hydrogen nucleus within that place of energy and pressure. I could hear the hissing of the gamma rays, glimpse the giddy flight of new-born neutrinos. And I knew it was not the star alone—I could probe, as well, into the secret of a plant, seek out the microbes and other tiny life forms that swarmed deep within the soil, trace the processes by which a geologic formation had come into being. Not only knowing, but being one with any of it, sharing with it, understanding far better than it (whatever it might be) could understand itself.
I was cold with a coldness that sunlight could not warm. My mind was frozen hard.
I wasn’t human any more at all. I wasn’t thinking human. My mind and thinking, my senses and my viewpoints had been tinkered with. I had been edited and only now was the editing beginning to take effect. It was not only my body, it was all of me. I was turning into something I didn’t want to be, that no human would ever want to be.
This thinking of the proton-proton business was all damn foolishness. There were more important things I should be thinking, of a plan to force my way into the ship, of how to cash in on this planet. There was a mint to be made out of this planet, more money than I could ever spend. But now, I thought, what did I need the money for? Certainly not for drink or food or clothes or women—and I wondered a bit about that woman business. I was, I suspected, the only thing of my kind existing in the galaxy and what about the reproductive process? Would there be just the one of me and not be any more? Or could I be bisexual and bear or spawn or hatch others of my kind? Or could I be immortal? Was there such a thing as death for me? Was there, perhaps, no need of reproduction? Was there just the one of me and no need of any more? No room for any more?
If that should be the case, why all this worry over money? And, thinking that, I didn’t seem to care as much about the money as I had at one time.
That was the hell of it—the human hell of it. I didn’t care. Not about the money, nor the lobsters nor what they’d done to me, nor about the humanity I’d lost. Perhaps that was the way I had been engineered, maybe it was the only way I could survive, the shape that I was in.
I fought against the great uncaring with all the bitterness I had. So you did it, I said to those lousy lobsters. So you pulled it off. You scratched one human who could have been a threat, who would have exploited you down to skin and bones. And you built a model of a new experimental life form you’d been aching to try out, but didn’t have the guts to try on one of your own people. You had to wait until someone else showed up. And now you’ll watch me all the time to see how I’m doing, to figure out the bugs and miscalculations, so that sometime in the future you can build a better one.
I hadn’t known of it before but there it was, naked, in my mind, as naturally in my mind as if I’d always known it, as if from the very beginning I had known I was no more than an experimental model.
They’d taken away my humanity and added a great uncaring, and that uncaring had been the gadget they had thought would be the final factor. But there was some stubbornness still left in me from the almost-vanished humanity of which they’d tried to rob me, so sneakily and smoothly that I never would suspect that it was gone until it was too late to do anything to save it.
Frantically, with panic rising in me, I went hunting down inside myself, scrabbling like a dog digging out a gopher, seeking for any fragment of humanity that might be left to me. Down into the dark, sniffing out the secret places where a fragmented piece of humanity might hide.
And I found it! A nasty piece of me hiding deep and dark, and yet a piece of me that was quite familiar, that I was well acquainted with, that in other times I had hugged close against me for the vicious comfort it had given me.
I found hatred.
It was tough and hard to kill. It resisted routing out. It still clung tenaciously.
As I clasped it hard inside my mind and hugged it close against me, as an old friend, an ancient weapon, I wondered vaguely if the reason it had been left was that the race of lobsters had no concept of hatred, that it might be something of which they were unaware, that what they had done to me might have been done for many reasons, but that hatred of me for what I meant to do to them was not one of the reasons.
That made me one up on them, I thought fiercely as I clutched the hatred at the core of me. It gave me an advantage they would never guess. With hatred to bolster and sustain me, I could hope and wait and plan and the time would never seem too long if revenge could be at the end of it.
They’d taken away my body, my motives, almost all my humanity. They had tinkered with my thinking and my values and my viewpoints. They had taken me; they had taken me but good. They had outfoxed me on every point but one and on that one point they had, unknowingly, outfoxed themselves as badly. Maybe they had seen that little piece of hatred as no more than a minor biochemical imperfection. After all, as the lobster had pointed out, I had been badly made. But in mistaking it, or neglecting it, they had fouled up their project. With a piece of hatred still left in him, a man would never utterly lose his hold upon humanity. What a wondrous thing it is to be a hating creature!
I held the hatred and could feel it turning cold—and cold hatred is the best of all. I know. It drives you, it never lets you be, it keeps on nagging you. Hot hatred flashes up and is over in a moment, but cold hatred lies there, at the heart and gut of you, and you know it all the time. It niggles at your brain and it clenches up your fists even when there is no one there to hit.
But I hadn’t any fists, I thought, I hadn’t any arms. I was just an armor-plated oval with silly caterpillar legs and eyestalks sticking up into the air.
Then, on schedule, as if there might be some sort of biological computer tucked away inside me, feeding in the data that was me, feeding it in slowly so I wouldn’t be overwhelmed by a rush of data, not overloading me, I knew about the arms.
I didn’t have them yet and I wouldn’t have them for a while. But they were there and growing underneath my shell, waiting to be freed. I would have to moult before I had the arms. It wasn’t only arms. There were other things as well—other appendages, other budding senses, other extensions of new abilities, all of them only dimly sensed, fogged in the mist of things-to-come. But the arms I knew about because arms were not new to me. I had had arms before and I knew about them. These other things I didn’t know about, but in time I would. Marvelous additional adjuncts to the performance of a life form’s full abilities, planned most carefully by the lobsters, to be tried out in an experimental model before the lobsters made such bodies for themselves.
They had planned long and hard. They had figured out the angles and then had engineered them. They were aiming at an ideal body. And I would take all that planning and all the engineering and all their dirty scheming and I’d shove it down their throats. As soon as I had arms and all those other appendages and senses and God knows what, I’d cram it down their throats.
I couldn’t go back to the human race, nor to women, nor to money, nor to food and drink. But I didn’t need them any more. I had never needed them—really needed them. The one thing I did need I had, the one last thing that was left to me. It seemed sheer cosmic justice that the one thing that I needed was the one thing I had left—the capacity to get even with the ones who’d done me dirt, to cram it down their throats, to make them mourn the day that saw their spawning.
I was different and I would be more different still. I wou
ld, in the end, be human in only one regard. And the important thing, the most important thing of all, was that in this one regard my one remnant of humanity was stronger than all the rest of it. It had come from the bowels of time. It came from that never-dated day when a certain little primate, with a new-found cunning that was stronger than the jungle’s tooth-and-claw, remembered an anger that should have been over in a moment and had waited for a chance to act upon that remembered anger, nursing that cooling anger as a comfort and a prop to dignity, changing it from anger into hatred. Long before anything that could have been called Australopithecine walked the earth, the concept of revenge had been forged and in those millennia it had served the vicious little strain of primates well. It had made them the most deadly creatures that had ever come to life.
It would serve me well, I told myself. I would make it serve me well. It would give me purpose and a certain kind of dignity and self-respect.
A figure came to mind, another piece of information spewed into me from the biochemical computer. A thousand years, it said. A thousand years to moult. A thousand years to wait.
A long time. Ten centuries. Thirty human generations. Empires rose and fell in a thousand years. Were forgotten in another thousand. A thousand years would give me time to think and plan, to harden the coldness of the hatred, to realize and examine the new abilities and capacities that would evolve with moulting.
It called for planning. No simple, easy revenge. No mere physical torture, no killing. By the time I got through with them death would be the height of kindness, physical torture a mere inconvenience. Nor would it merely be an exploitation of them to harvest the resources of the planet. It was the worst day they’d ever known when they had taken from me the need (or desire) for those resources. If I still held that need, normal human greed might have stayed my hand. But now, nothing would stay my hand.
I had them, I thought. Thinking coldly and with calculation. With no anger. With no urgency. With no mercy in me. Mercy was a human trait made to balance revenge and now the balance had been wiped out and I had only hatred left.
How it might be done I did not know. I would not know until I had explored to the limit the capacity of the abilities that waited upon moulting. But I knew this: they would live out their lives in ever-mounting terror; they would seek for hiding places and there’d be no hiding places; each day they would face new horrors and their nerves would strain and their brains would turn to water, then congeal again to face another fear. They would be allowed, at times, a slender hope so the agony would be the greater when the tiny hope had failed. They would run in the hopeless circles of their panic, they would squeal with an insanity which would never reach the point where it might offer refuge, and while they might pray for surcease, I would most tenderly see that they stayed alive and capable of fear. Not just a few of them, but all of them, every stinking soul of them. And I would keep it up, I would never tire. I would never have enough, I would feed upon my hatred of them. It would be the breath of life to me. It would be my only purpose, taking the place of all the other purposes they had taken from me. It was the one last shred of humanity I had left and I would never let it go.
I hugged the hatred and thought of a thousand years. A long, long time. Empires totter, technologies change, religions shift their forms, social mores undergo revisions, ideas blossom and have their day and die, stars slide down just a little toward stellar death, light travels a hundredth of the way across the galaxy. So long a span of time that the mind of man quails before the prospect of it.
But not me. I do not quail before a thousand years.
I can use those thousand years. I can study the lobsters and see what makes them tick. I can learn their purposes, their philosophies, their dreams—learning all the things to strip away from them, giving them instead the things they fear and loathe and sicken at the sight and feel of.
I’ll enjoy it, every minute of it.
I am in no hurry.
I can wait.
The alien wind blows cool and sweet around Charlie Tierney as he sits drinking sunlight. He remembers and remembers, playing it over and over in his mind: a mind growing more acute every moment. He clings to the last vestige of his humanity, the greatest gift handed down to him from his ape ancestors: a desire for killing, torturing, never-ending revenge. He sits and is content in his hatred. It will sustain him.
It will keep him in check, as no bonds or fetters ever could.
The lobster creatures in their burrows understood that from the moment they rebuilt him. Necessary, yes, very necessary for Charlie Tierney to stay the thousand years, to evolve through those thousand years so they could evaluate the viability of what they had created, for their own purposes. But without something to distract him, with only the helplessness and despair of knowing he would never again be human, Charlie Tierney might have destroyed himself. And that they could not permit. The experiment had to run its course.
They had left him a distraction, something useless he could hold close to placate him while the evolutionary experiment ran its course. A thousand-year toy for an alert laboratory animal.
Charlie Tierney holds close the hatred, examines with pathological attention the concept of revenge. He can wait. He has a thousand years to grow until he can wreak revenge on the damned lobster things.
What he does not know is that even before he came to them, the lobster creatures had learned all there was to know about waiting. They had waited for a Charlie Tierney, and now they could wait for the results of the experiment.
And they had no need of thousand-year toys.
Small Deer
Originally published in the October 1965 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction, which by then had long supplanted Astounding as Cliff Simak’s main market, this story is one of those that really stuck in my youthful memory. That was because it scared the hell out of me …!
—dww
Willow Bend,
Wisconsin
June 23, 1966
Dr. Wyman Jackson,
Wyalusing College,
Muscoda, Wisconsin
My dear Dr. Jackson:
I am writing to you because I don’t know who else to write to and there is something I have to tell someone who can understand. I know your name because I read your book, ‘Cretaceous Dinosaurs,’ not once, but many times. I tried to get Dennis to read it, too, but I guess he never did. All Dennis was interested in were the mathematics of his time concept—not the time machine itself. Besides, Dennis doesn’t read too well. It is a chore for him.
Maybe I should tell you, to start with, that my name is Alton James. I live with my widowed mother and I run a fix-it shop. I fix bicycles and lawn mowers and radios and television sets—I fix anything that is brought to me. I’m not much good at anything else, but I do seem to have the knack of seeing how things go together and understanding how they work and seeing what is wrong with them when they aren’t working. I never had no training of any sort, but I just seem to have a natural bent for getting along with mechanical contraptions.
Dennis is my friend and I’ll admit right off that he is a strange one. He doesn’t know from nothing about anything, but he’s nuts on mathematics. People in town make fun of him because he is so strange and Ma gives me hell at times for having anything to do with him. She says he’s the next best thing to a village idiot. I guess a lot of people think the way that Ma does, but it is not entirely true, for he does know his math.
I don’t know how he knows it. He didn’t learn it at school and that’s for sure. When he got to be 17 and hadn’t got no farther than eighth grade, the school just sort of dropped him. He didn’t really get to eighth grade honest; the teachers after a while got tired of seeing him on one grade and passed him to the next. There was talk, off and on, of sending him to some special school, but it never got nowhere.
And don’t ask me what kind of mathematics he knew. I tried to read
up on math once because I had the feeling, after seeing some of the funny marks that Dennis put on paper, that maybe he knew more about it than anyone else in the world. And I still think that he does—or that maybe he’s invented an entirely new kind of math. For in the books I looked through I never did find any of the symbols that Dennis put on paper. Maybe Dennis used symbols he made up, inventing them as he went along, because no one had ever told him what the regular mathematicians used. But I don’t think that’s it—I’m inclined to lean to the idea Dennis came up with a new brand of math, entirely.
There were times I tried to talk with Dennis about this math of his and each time he was surprised that I didn’t know it, too. I guess he thought most people knew about it. He said that it was simple, that it was plain as day. It was the way things worked, he said.
I suppose you’ll want to ask how come I understood his equations well enough to make the time machine. The answer is I didn’t. I suppose that Dennis and I are alike in a lot of ways, but in different ways. I know how to make contraptions work (without knowing any of the theory) and Dennis sees the entire universe as something operating mechanically (and him scarcely able to read a page of simple type).
And another thing. My family and Dennis’s family live in the same end of town and from the time we were toddlers, Dennis and I played together. Later on, we just kept on together. We didn’t have a choice. For some reason or other, none of the kids would play with us. Unless we wanted to play alone, we had to play together. I guess we got so, through the years, that we understood each other.
I don’t suppose there’d have been any time machine if I hadn’t been so interested in paleontology. Not that I knew anything about it; I was just interested. From the time I was a kid I read everything I could lay my hands on about dinosaurs and saber-tooths and such. Later on I went fossil hunting in the hills, but I never found nothing really big. Mostly I found brachiopods. There are great beds of them in the Platteville limestone. And lots of times I’d stand in the street and look up at the river bluffs above the town and try to imagine what it had been like a million years ago, or a hundred million. When I first read in a story about a time machine, I remember thinking how I’d like to have one. I guess that at one time I thought a little about making one, but then realized I couldn’t.