(He stopped abruptly. Cullinan glanced at Warshow and said, “He’s warmed up now, and we’re ready to strike paydirt, to mangle a metaphor.” To Falk, he said, “Tell us how you met Thetona.”)
I’m alone in Kollidor and wandering around alone. It’s a big sprawling place with funny-looking conical houses and crazy streets, but deep down underneath I can see it’s just like Earth. The people are people. They’re pretty bizarre, but they’ve got one head and two arms and two legs, which makes them more like people than some of the aliens I’ve seen.
Warshow gave us an afternoon’s liberty. I don’t know why I’ve left the ship, but I’m here in the city alone. Alone. Dammit, alone!
The streets are paved, but the sidewalks aren’t. Suddenly I’m very tired and I feel dizzy. I sit down at the edge of the sidewalk and put my head in my hands. The aliens just walk around me, like people in any big city would.
Mama, I think.
Then I think, Where did that come from?
And suddenly a great empty loneliness comes welling up from inside of me and spills out all over me, and I start to cry. I haven’t cried—since—not in a long time. But now I cry, hoarse ratchety gasps and tears rolling down my face and dribbling into the corners of my mouth. Tears taste salty, I think. A little like raindrops.
My side starts to hurt where I had the accident aboard ship. It begins up near my ear and races like a blue flame down my body to my thigh, and it hurts like a devil. The doctors told me I wouldn’t hurt any more. They lied.
I feel my aloneness like a sealed spacesuit around me, cutting me off from everyone. Mama, I think again. Part of me is saying, act like a grownup, but that part of me is getting quieter and quieter. I keep crying, and I want desperately to have my mother again. I realize now I never knew my mother at all, except for a few years long ago.
Then there’s a musky, slightly sickening smell, and I know one of the aliens is near me. They’re going to grab me by the scruff and haul me away like any weepy-eyed drunk in the public streets. Warshow will give me hell.
You’re crying, Earthman, a warm voice says.
The Kollidorian language is kind of warm and liquid and easy to learn, but this sounds especially warm. I turn around, and there’s this big native dame.
Yeah, I’m crying, I say, and look away. Her big hands clamp down on me and hang on, and I shiver a little. It feels funny to be handled by an alien woman.
She sits down next to me. You look very sad, she says.
I am, I tell her.
Why are you sad?
You’d never understand, I say. I turn my head away and feel tears start creeping out of my eyes, and she grabs me impulsively. I nearly retch from the smell of her, but in a minute or two I see it’s sort of sweet and nice in a strange way.
She’s wearing an outfit like a potato sack, and it smells pretty high. But she pulls my head against her big warm breasts and leaves it there.
What’s your name, unhappy Earthman?
Falk, I say. Matthew Falk.
I’m Thetona, she says. I live alone. Are you lonely?
I don’t know, I say. I really don’t know.
But how can you not know if you’re lonely? she asks.
She pulls my head up out of her bosom and our eyes come together. Real romantic. She’s got eyes like tarnished half dollars. We look at each other, and she reaches out and pushes the tears out of my eyes.
She smiles. I think it’s a smile. She has about thirty notches arranged in a circle under her nose, and that’s a mouth. All the notches pucker. Behind them I see bright needly teeth.
I look up from her mouth to her eyes again, and this time they don’t look tarnished so much. They’re bright like the teeth, and deep and warm.
Warm. Her odor is warm. Everything about her is warm.
I start to cry again—compulsively, without knowing why, without knowing what the hell is happening to me. She seems to flicker, and I think I see a Terran woman sitting there cradling me. I blink. Nothing there but an ugly alien.
Only she’s not ugly any more. She’s warm and lovely, in a strange sort of way, and the part of me that disagrees is very tiny and tinny-sounding. I hear it yelling, No, and then it stops and winks out.
Something strange is exploding inside me. I let it explode. It bursts like a flower—a rose, or a violet, and that’s what I smell instead of her.
I put my arms around her.
Do you want to come to my house, she asks.
Yes, yes, I say. Yes!
Abruptly, Falk stopped on the ringing affirmative, and his glazed eyes closed. Cullinan fired the stunner once, and the boy’s taut body slumped.
“Well?” Warshow asked. His voice was dry and harsh. “I feel unclean after hearing that.”
“You should,” the psychman said. “It’s one of the slimiest things I’ve uncovered yet. And you don’t understand it, do you?”
The commander shook his head slowly. “No. Why’d he do it? He’s in love with her—but why?”
Cullinan chuckled. “You’ll see. But I want a couple of other people here when I yank it out. I want the girl, first of all—and I want Sigstrom.”
“The doctor? What the hell for?”
“Because—if I’m right—he’ll be very interested in hearing what comes out.” Cullinan grinned enigmatically. “Let’s give Falk a rest, eh? After all that talking, he needs it.”
“So do I,” Warshow said.
(Four people watched silently as Falk slipped into the drug-induced trance a second time. Warshow studied the face of the alien girl Thetona for some sign of the warmth Falk had spoken of. And yes, Warshow saw—it was there. Behind her sat Sigstrom, the Magyar’s head medic. To his right, Cullinan. And lying on the cot in the far corner of the cabin, eyes open but unseeing, was Matt Falk.)
(“Matt, can you hear me?” Cullinan asked. “I want you to back up a little…you’re aboard ship now. The time is approximately one month ago. You’re working in the converter section, you and Dave Murff, handling hot stuff. Got that?”)
(“Yes,” Falk said. “I know what you mean.”)
I’m in Converter Section AA, getting thorium out of hock to feed to the reactors; we’ve gotta keep the ship moving. Dave Murff’s with me.
We make a good team on the waldoes.
We’re running them now, picking up chunks of hot stuff and stowing them in the reactor bank. It’s not easy to manipulate the remote-control mechanihands, but I’m not scared. This is my job, and I know how to do it.
I’m thinking about that bastard Warshow, though. Nothing particular against him, but he annoys me. Funny way he has of tensing up every time he has to order someone to do anything. Reminds me of my uncle. Yeah, my uncle. That’s who I was trying to compare him with.
Don’t much like Warshow. If he came in here now, maybe I’d tap him with the waldo—not much, just enough to sizzle his hide a little. Just for the hell of it: I always wanted to belt my uncle, just for the hell of it.
Hey, Murff yells. Get number two waldo back in alignment.
Don’t worry, I say. “This isn’t the first time I’ve handled these babies, lunkhead.”
I’m shielded pretty well. But the air smells funny, as if the thorium’s been ionizing it, and I wonder maybe something’s wrong.
I swing number two waldo over and dump the thorium in the reactor. The green light pops on and tells me it’s a square-on hit; the hot stuff is tumbling down into the reactor now and pushing out the neutrons like crazy.
Then Murff gives the signal and I dip into the storage and yank out some more hot stuff with number one waldo.
Hey, he yells again, and then number two waldo, the empty one, runs away from me.
The big arm is swinging in the air, and I see the little fingers of delicate jointed metal bones that so few seconds ago were hanging onto a chunk of red-hot Th-233. They seem to be clutching out for me.
I yell. God, I yell. Murff yells too as I lose control altogether, and he tries to
get behind the control panel and grab the waldo handle. But I’m in the way, and I’m frozen so he can’t do it. He ducks back and flattens himself on the floor as the big mechanical arm crashes through the shielding.
I can’t move.
I stay there. The little fingers nick me on the left side of my jaw, and I scream. I’m on fire. The metal hand rakes down the side of my body, hardly touching me, and it’s like a razor slicing through my flesh.
It’s too painful even to feel. My nerves are canceling out. They won’t deliver the messages to my brain.
And now the pain sweeps down on me. Help! I’m burning! Help!
(“Stop there,” Cullinan said sharply, and Falk’s terrible screaming stopped. “Edit out the pain and keep going. What happens when you wake up?”)
Voices. I hear them above me as I start to come out of the shroud of pain.
Radiation burns, a deep crackly voice is saying. It’s Doc Sigstrom. The doc says, he’s terribly burnt, Leon. I don’t think he’ll live.
Dammit, says another voice. That’s Commander Warshow. He’s got to live, Warshow says. I’ve never lost a man yet. Twenty years without losing anybody.
He took quite a roasting from that remote-control arm, a third voice says. It’s Psych Officer Cullinan, I think. He lost control, Cullinan goes on. Very strange.
Yeah, I think. Very strange. I blanked out just a second, and that waldo seemed to come alive.
I feet the pain ripping up and down me. Half my head feels like it’s missing, and my arm’s being toasted. Where’s the brimstone, I wonder.
Then Doc Sigstrom says, We’ll try a nutrient bath.
What’s that? Warshow asks.
New technique, the doc says. Chemotherapeutic incubation. Immersion in hormone solutions. They’re using it on Earth in severe cases of type one radiation burns. I don’t think it’s ever been tried in space, but it ought to be. He’ll be in free fall; gravity won’t confuse things.
If it’ll save him, Warshow says, I’m for it.
Then things fade. Time goes on—an eternity in hell, with the blazing pain racing up and back down my side. I hear people talking every now and then; feel myself being shifted from one place to another. Tubes are stuck in me to feed me. I wonder what I look like with half my body frizzled.
Suddenly, cool warmth. Yeah, it sounds funny. But it is warm and nourishing, and yet cool too, bathing me and taking the sting out of my body.
I don’t try to open my eyes, but I know I’m surrounded by darkness. I’m totally immobile, in the midst of darkness, and yet I know that outside me the ship is racing on towards Kollidor, enclosing me, holding me.
I’m within the ship, rocking gently and securely. I’m within something within the ship. Wheels within wheels; doors inside doors. Chinese puzzle-box with me inside.
Soft fluid comes licking over me, nudging itself in where the tissue is torn and blasted and the flesh bubbled from heat. Caressing each individual cell, bathing my body organ by organ, I’m being repaired.
I float on an ocean and in an ocean. My body is healing rapidly. The pain ceases.
I’m not conscious of the passage of time at all. Minutes blend into minutes without joint; time flows unbreakingly, and I’m being lulled into a soft, unending existence. Happiness, I think. Security. Peace.
I like it here.
Around me, a globe of fluid. Around that, a striated webwork of metal. Around that, a spheroid spaceship, and around that a universe. Around that? I don’t know, and I don’t care. I’m safe here, where there’s no pain, no fear.
Blackness. Total and utter blackness. Security equals blackness and softness and quiet. But then—
What are they doing?
What’s happening?
Blue darts of light against the blackness, and now a swirl of colors. Green, red, yellow. Light bursts in and dazzles me. Smells, feels, noises.
The cradle is rocking. I’m moving.
No. They’re pulling me. Out!
It’s getting cold, and I can’t breathe. I’m choking! I try to hang on, but they won’t let go! They keep pulling me out, out, out into the world of fire and pain!
I struggle. I won’t go. But it doesn’t do any good. I’m out, finally.
I look around. Two blurry figures above me. I wipe my eyes and things come clear. Warshow and Sigstrom, that’s who they are.
Sigstrom smiles and says, booming, “Well, he’s healed wonderfully!”
A miracle, Warshow says. “A miracle.”
I wobble. I want to fall, but I’m lying down already. They keep talking, and I start to cry in rage.
But there’s no way back. It’s over. All, all over. And I’m terribly alone.
Falk’s voice died away suddenly. Warshow fought an impulse to get violently sick. His face felt cold and clammy, and he turned to look at the pale, nervous faces of Sigstrom and Cullinan. Behind them sat Thetona, expressionless.
Cullinan broke the long silence. “Leon, you heard the earlier session. Did you recognize what he was just telling us?”
“The birth trauma,” Warshow said tonelessly.
“Obviously,” Sigstrom said. The medic ran unshaking fingers through his heavy shock of white hair. “The chemotherapy…it was a womb for him. We put him back in the womb.”
“And then we pulled him out,” said Warshow. “We delivered him. And he went looking for a mother.”
Cullinan nodded at Thetona. “He found one too.”
Warshow licked his lips. “Well, now we have the answer. What do we do about it?”
“We play the whole thing to him on tapes. His conscious intellectual mind sees his relationship with Thetona for what it is—the neurotic grasping of a grown man forced into an artificial womb and searching for a mother. Once we’ve gotten that out of his basement and into the attic, so to speak, I think he’ll be all right.”
“But the ship was his mother,” Warshow said. “That was where the incubation tank—the womb—was.”
“The ship cast him out. You were an uncle-image, not a mother-substitute. He said so himself. He went looking elsewhere, and found Thetona. Let’s give him the tapes.”
Much later, Matt Falk faced the four of them in the cabin. He had heard his own voice rambling back over his lifetime. He knew, now.
There was a long silence when the last tape had played out, when Falk’s voice had said, “All, all over. And I’m terribly alone.”
The words seemed to hang in the room. Finally Falk said, “Thanks,” in a cold, hard, tight, dead voice.
“Thanks?” Warshow repeated dully.
“Yes. Thanks for opening my eyes, for thoughtfully giving me a peek at what was behind my lid. Sure—thanks.” The boy’s face was sullen, bitter.
“You understand why it was necessary, of course,” Cullinan said. “Why we—”
“Yeah, I know why,” Falk said. “And now I can go back to Earth with you, and your consciences are cleared.” He glanced at Thetona, who was watching him with perturbed curiosity evident on her broad face. Falk shuddered lightly as his eyes met the alien girl’s. Warshow caught the reaction and nodded. The therapy had been a success.
“I was happy,” Falk said quietly. “Until you decided you had to take me back to Earth with you. So you ran me through a wringer and combed all the psychoses out of me, and—and—”
Thetona took two heavy steps towards him and put her arms on his shoulders. “No,” he murmured, and wriggled away. “Can’t you see it’s over?”
“Matt—” Warshow said.
“Don’t Matt me, cap’n! I’m out of my womb now, and back in your crew.” He turned sad eyes on Warshow. “Thetona and I had something good and warm and beautiful, and you busted it up. It can’t get put together again, either. Okay. I’m ready to go back to Earth, now.”
He stalked out of the room without another word. Grey-faced, Warshow stared at Cullinan and at Thetona, and lowered his eyes.
He had fought to keep Matt Falk, and he had won—or had he? In
fact, yes. But in spirit? Falk would never forgive him for this.
Warshow shrugged, remembering the book that said, “The relation of commander to crewman is that of parent to child.”
Warshow would not allow Falk’s sullen eyes to upset him any longer; it was only to be expected that the boy would be bitter.
No child ever really forgives the parent who casts him from the womb.
“Come on, Thetona,” he said to the big, enigmatically frowning alien girl. “Come with me. I’ll take you back down to the city.”
Sunrise on Mercury
The fine old custom of having writers construct stories around cover paintings—now, I believe, probably extinct—brought “Sunrise On Mercury” into existence in what was for me the hyperactive month of November, 1956. In that vanished era, the pulp-magazine chains found it efficient and economical to print their covers in batches of four, well in advance of publication date, which meant that there was usually no time to go through the process of buying a story, farming it out to an artist to be illustrated,making plates from the artist’s painting, etc. Instead the artists would think up ideas for illustrations—some sort of vivid and dramatic scene, often cheerfully depicting some highly improbable event that was designed to tax a writer’s ingenuity to the limit—and it went to press right away, while some reliable writer was hired to put that scene, by hook or by crook, into a story that could be published to accompany it. It’s a measure of how far I had come by this time that I was already being given such assignments, here in the second year of my career. But the editors knew I could be depended on to utilize the illustration in some plausible way and to turn my cover story in on time.
The editor for whom I did more of these than for any other was Robert W. Lowndes of Science Fiction Stories and Future Science Fiction, who had been a prominent figure in the science fiction field as reader, writer, and editor for the past two decades. Bob Lowndes and I had become close friends by now, despite an age difference of nearly twenty years. He was a charming man, scholarly by nature, somewhat awkward and shy, and, since we had many interests in common—among them, classical music, cats, and the collecting of old science-fiction magazines—we swiftly took to each other. My wife and I began to be frequent weekend guests at Lowndes’ small but pleasant country home about an hour’s drive outside New York City; I explored his huge record collection, he and I argued amiably over our favorite stories and books, and I played with his cats. (And took a kitten home for Christmas in 1956.)