The great blazing sun was almost gone, spraying the sky with the blood of its cyclic dying. Soon the three moons would rise; guaranteed to drive insane a man looking for a shadow to call his own.
Lindell sat at the living room window gazing out over the countryside. You couldn’t beat it, he thought; for air or climate or all the things that grew in Earth’s paling technicolor. Nature had outdone herself in this tucked away corner of the galaxy. He sighed and stretched, wondering about supper.
Drink?
He started, chopping a yawn in half, and drew his fingers together so fast that the knuckle bones crackled.
He saw her standing at his side, proffering a tray with a glass on it. He reached for it, feeling his heart placate itself after the initial jolt.
“I’d knock or something,” he suggested. The big eyes were elliptical now. They stared at him without comprehension.
“Well, let it go,” he said, after a sip of the warm tangy liquid. He smacked his lips and took another sip, a long one.
“Damn good,” he said. “Thanks, Lover.”
He blinked at himself. That brings a guy up short, he decided. Lover? Of all the unlikely names in the universe—He glanced at her with a chuckle bubbling up in his throat.
She hadn’t moved. Her face was screwed up into what he assumed was a smile. But her mouth wasn’t designed for smiling.
“Hey, when are we eating?” he asked, feeling an edge uncomfortable under the unmoving gaze of her watery eye globes.
She turned and hurried to the door. There she turned.
All ready already, he got the message.
He grinned, downed the drink, got up and followed her eager shuffle down the dim hallway.
He pushed away the plate with a sigh and leaned back in the chair.
“That’s what I call good,” he said.
Like a hidden spring, he felt her pleasure well up in his mind. Lover thanks you. She certainly picked up the name fast, he thought. She looked at him, eyes wide. Was she trying to smile again, he wondered? To him the expression looked like all her others; the facial poses of an idiot. He thought she was smiling though because of the thoughts that accompanied the expression.
Then he found his eyes watering in empathy and he turned his head, blinking. A trifle nervously, he dumped a teaspoon of sugar in his coffee and stirred. He could feel her eyes on him. A twinge of displeasure marred his thoughts and she turned away abruptly. That’s better, he thought, and felt all right again.
“Hey, tell me Lover,” he started to say. Well, might as well get used to it, he figured. You have a husband? Her returned thoughts were confused.
A mate? he reworded.
Oh, yes.
In the workers’ village?
They have no mates, she answered and he thought he sensed a note of hauteur in her reply.
He shrugged and took a sip of coffee. “Well,” he said to himself, “one satisfied worker would drive the rest of ’em crazy anyway. They’d be biting their nails if they had nails. And on that note, good night.”
In bed he sat writing in his much-used diary. Between its beat-up covers were inscribed the sparse comments he had made on half a dozen different planets. This was his seventh selection. My lucky number, he paragraphed in blue ink.
Again no sound. To sleep? His pen skidded and spit out three fat blots. He looked up and saw her with the tray again.
“Yeah,” he said. Yeah. Thanks, Lover. But, look, will you just let me know when you … .
He stopped, seeing it was hopeless.
“This will make me sleep?” he asked. Oh, yes, was the reply.
He took a sip, looking down at the ink-blotted page. Just started it anyway, he thought, no loss of priceless literature. He ripped out the page and crumpled it in one hand.
“This is good stuff,” he said, nodding his head toward the glass. He held up the paper. Throw it away, haah? Throw away? she asked.
“That’s right,” he said. “Now clear out. What in ’ell are you doing in a gent’s boudoir anyway?”
She scuttled across the floor and he grinned as she closed the door quietly behind herself.
Finishing the drink, he set the glass down on the bedside table and turned off the lamp. He settled back on the soft pillow with a sigh. Some critter, he thought in drowsy satisfaction.
Good night.
He opened his heavy-lidded eyes and looked around. There was no one in the room. He sank back.
Good night.
He raised up on one elbow, squinting into the darkness.
Good night. “Oh,” he said. “Good night yourself.” The thoughts abated. He fell back again and made his mouth a tooth-edged cave with yawning.
“How ‘bout that?” he muttered, thickly, turning on his side. “Absolutely no mirrors. See? Nothin’ up my sleeves. Howboutha—”
He had a dream. The dream covered him with sweat.
After breakfast, he left the house with her farewells tugging at his brain and headed across for the warehouse. Already, he saw, the Gnee men were formed in a moving line, carrying bundles on their heads. They marched into the warehouse, deposited their burden on the concrete and had it checked off by a Gnee foreman who stood in the center of the floor holding a clipboard thick with tissue-thin vouchers.
As Lindell approached, the men all bowed and looked more subservient as they continued on their rounds. He noticed that their heads were flatter than Lover’s, a little more darkly tinted with smaller eyes. Their bodies were broad and thick-muscled. They do look stupid, he thought.
As he came up to the man who was doing the checking and sent out an unanswered thought, he saw that they weren’t telepathic either; or didn’t want to be.
“How doody,” said the man in a squeaky voice. “I check. You check?”
“That’s okay,” Lindell said, pushing back the clipboard. “Just bring it into the office when the first batch is all in.”
“What, haah?” said the man. Jeez, are you a case, Lindell thought.
“Bring this,” he said, tapping the clipped sheaf of paper. “Bring to office.” He pointed again. “Bring to me—me. When goods all in.”
The man’s splotchy face lit up with a look of vibrant stupidity and he nodded sharply. Lindell patted his shoulder. Good boy, rasped his mind, I bet you’re dynamite in a crisis. He headed for the office, gritting his teeth.
Inside, he shut the plastiglass door behind him and looked around the office. It was the same as he remembered from other stations. Except for the cot in one corner. Don’t tell me I have to sleep out here nights?—he thought with a groan.
He moved closer. On the flat soil-cased pillow was the imprint of a head. He picked up a light brown hair. And what the hell is this? he wondered.
Under the cot he found a buckleless belt. On the wall by the cot there were violent scratches as though a man in fever had tried to get out of the office the hard way. He stared at them.
“This joint is haunted,” he concluded with a vague shake of his head. Then he turned away with a shrug. No use worrying myself, he thought. I got six months to go and nothing’s going to get me down.
He sat down quickly before the desk and dragged the heavy station log before himself. With a shrug he flipped open the heavy cover and started reading from the beginning.
The first entries were twenty years dry. They were signed Jefferson Winters, or, a little later, a hasty Jeff. At the end of six months and fifty-two closely packed pages, Lindell found page 53 covered with a floridly penned message—Station Four, goodbye forever! Jeff didn’t seem to have had any difficulties adjusting to the life there.
Lindell shifted back in the creaking chair and pulled the heavy book on his lap with a sigh of boredom.
It was after the first replacement’s second month that the entries started to get ragged. There were blurred words, hurried scrawling, mistakes deleted and re-done. Some of the errors apparently had been corrected much later by still another replacement.
It w
as that way through the next four hundred or so sleep-inducing pages; a sorry chain of flaws and eventual corrections. Lindell flipped through them wearily, without the slightest interest in their content.
Then he reached entries signed Bill Corrigan and, with a blinking yawn, he straightened himself up, propped the book on the desk and paid closer attention.
They were the same as in every case before, excluding the first one; efficient beginnings declining markedly to increased wildness, the penmanship erring more extravagantly with each month until, at last, it became almost illegible. He found a few blatantly miscalculated additions which he corrected in his careful hand.
Corrigan’s writing, he noted, broke off in the middle of a word one afternoon. And, for the last month and a half of Corrigan’s stay, there were nothing but blank pages. He thumbed through them carelessly, shaking his head slowly. Have to admit it, he thought, I don’t get it.
Sitting in the living room through twilight, and later at supper, he began to get the sensation that Lover’s thoughts were, somehow, alive; like microscopic insects crawling in and out among the fissures of his brain. Sometimes they barely moved; other times they leaped excitedly. Once, when he became a little irritated with her staring, the thoughts were like invisible suppliants pawing clumsily at his mind.
What was worse, he realized later while reading in bed, the sensation occurred even when she wasn’t in the same room with him. It was disconcerting enough to feel an endless stream of thoughts flowing into him while she was close; this remote control business was just a little too much for his taste.
Hey, how about it? he tried to reason her away good naturedly. But all he got back was the picture of her looking at him wide-eyed and uncomprehending.
“Aah, nuts,” he muttered and tossed his book on the bedside table. Maybe that’s it, he thought, settling down for the night. This telepathy gimmick, maybe that was what got the other men. Well, not me, he vowed. I just won’t worry myself about it. And he turned out the lamp, said good night to the air and went to sleep.
“Sleep,” he muttered, unaware, only half conscious. It wasn’t sleep; not deep enough by half. A cloudy haze submerged his mind and filled it with the same detailed scene. It telescoped and sank away in a burst. It magnified, welling up and swallowing him and everything.
Lover. Lover. Echo of a shriek in a long black corridor. The robe fluttering close by. He saw her pale features. No, he said, stay away. Far—close—beyond—upon. He cried out. No. No. NO!
He jolted up in the darkness with a choking grunt, eyes full open. He stared groggily around the empty bedroom, his thoughts roiling.
He reached out in the darkness and flicked on the lamp. Hurriedly he stuck a cigarette between his lips and lay slumped against the headboard blowing out clouds of curling smoke. He raised his hand and saw that it shook. He muttered words without sense.
Then his nostrils twitched and his lips drew back in revulsion. What the hell died? he thought. There was a heavy saccharine odor in the air, getting worse every second. He tossed off the covers.
At the foot of the bed he found them; a thick pile of livid purple flowers arranged there.
He looked at them a moment and then bent over to pick them up and throw them away. He drew back gasping as a thorn punctured his right thumb.
He pressed out fat blood drops and sucked the wound, his brain assailed by the thickening smell.
It’s very nice of you, he sent her the message, but no more flowers.
She looked at him. She doesn’t get it, he knew.
“Do you understand?” he asked.
Floods of affection gurgled over the layers of his brain like syrup. He stirred his coffee restlessly and the transfer eased as though she were determined not to offend him. The kitchen was silent except for the clink of his silver on the breakfast dishes and the slight whispering rustle of her robe.
He gulped down coffee and stood to leave. I’ll eat lunch around …
I know. Her thought cut into his, mildly commanding. He grinned a little to himself as he headed down the hall. Her telepathied message had come with an almost mother-like chiding.
Then, crossing the grounds, he recalled the dream again and the departing grin emptied his features of amusement.
All morning he wondered irritably what made the Gnee men so stupid. If they dropped a bundle it was a project to pick it up again. They’re like brainless cows, he thought, watching them through the office windows as they plodded through their tasks, eyes dull and unblinking, their thick shoulders sloping inward.
He knew definitely now that they weren’t telepathic. He’d tried several times to give them orders with his mind alone and there was no receipt of message. They only reacted to loudly repeated words of two, or preferably less, syllables. And they reacted moronically at that.
In the middle of the morning he looked up from the backlog of paper work that Corrigan had left and realized, with some shock, that her thoughts were reaching him all the way from the house.
And yet they weren’t thoughts he could translate into words. They were sensations, amorphously present. He got the feeling that she was checking, sending out exploratory beams now and again to see if all were well with him.
The first few times it did no worse than amuse him. He chuckled softly and went back to his work.
But then the proddings assumed an annoyingly regular time pattern and he began to squirm in his chair. He found himself becoming rigidly erect and anticipating seconds before they came.
By late morning he was repulsing them consciously; tossing his pen on the desk and ordering her angrily to leave him alone when he worked. Her thoughts would break off penitently. And soon come back again, like creeping things that stole upon him, insinuating and beyond insult.
His nerves began to fray a little. He left the office and prowled the warehouse floor, tearing open bundles and checking goods with impatient fingers. The thoughts followed him around faithfully. “How doody,” said the Gnee foreman every time Lindell passed, making him angrier yet.
Once he straightened up suddenly over a bundle and said loudly, “Go away!”
The foreman jumped a foot in the air, his pencil and clipboard went flying and he hid behind a pillar and looked fearfully at Lindell. Lindell pretended not to notice.
Later, back in the office, he sat thinking, the open log book before him.
No wonder the Gnee men didn’t telepathize, he thought. They knew what was good for them.
Then he looked out the window at the plodding line of workers.
What if they weren’t just avoiding telepathy? What if they were incapable of it; had once held the ability and, because of it, had been broken to their present state of hopeless stolidity.
He thought of what Martin had said about the women outnumbering the men. And a phrase entered his mind—matriarchy by mind. The phrase offended him but he was suddenly afraid it might be true. It would explain why the other men had cracked. For, if the women were in control, it might well be that, in their inherent lust for dominance, they made no distinction between their own men and the men from Earth. A man is a man is a man. He twisted angrily at the idea of possibly being considered on a level with the dolts who lived in the village.
He stood up abruptly. I’m not hungry, he thought, not at all. But I’m going back to the house and order her to make me lunch and let her know I’m not hungry either. I’ll make her used to being dominated herself and then she’ll get no chance to pick at me. No bug-eyed Gnee woman, by God, is going to get me down.
Then he blinked and turned away quickly when he realized that he was staring at the wild pattern of scratches on the far office wall. And the belt without a buckle that still curled limply underneath the cot.
The dream again. It tore at his brain tissues with claws of razor. Sweat covering him. He tossed on the bed with a groan and was suddenly awake, staring into the darkness.
He thought he saw something at the foot of the bed. He closed his eyes
and shook his head and looked again. The room was empty. He felt mind-drenching thoughts recede like some alien tide.
His fists contracted angrily. She’s been at me while I slept, he thought, Goddamn her hide, she’s been at me.
He pushed aside the covers and crawled to the foot of the bed nervously.
He couldn’t see them. But the cloying fumes undulated up from the floor like erected serpents slithering into his nostrils. Gagging, he slumped down on the mattress, his stomach wrenched. Why? his brain mumbled over and over.
My God, why?
Angrily, he threw the flowers away in her sight and the thoughts pleaded and showered over him like raindrops.
“I said no, didn’t I?” he yelled at her.
Then he sat down at the table and controlled himself as well as he could. I’ve a long way to go, he told his will, ease off, ease off.
Now he was sure he knew why it was only six months. That would be more than enough. But I won’t crack. He commanded himself. It’s a cinch she isn’t going to crack so conserve yourself. She’s too stupid to crack, he thought deliberately, hoping she’d pick it up.
She apparently did for her shoulders slumped dejectedly all of a sudden. And during breakfast, she circled him like a timorous wraith, keeping her face averted and her thoughts aloof. He found himself almost sorry for her then. It probably wasn’t her fault, he thought, it was just an inborn trait among Gnee women to dominate men.
Then he realized that her thoughts were at him again, tender and gratefully maudlin. He tried to neutralize himself and ignore them as they sought to break through his apathy like honeyed picks.
All day he worked hard and made payments in spices and grain to the Gnee foreman to be forwarded to the workers. He wondered if the payments would go eventually to the women. Wherever they were.
“I’m taping my voice,” he dictated later that night. “I want to hear myself talking so I can forget her. There’s no one else to talk to so I’ll have to talk to myself. A sad case. Well, here goes.