“So it’s convoluted like a human brain.”
Why, so it was. Like a human brain, and a tnuctip brain, and a thrint brain, for that matter. Now why—
Kzanol/Greenberg cracked his knuckles, then hurriedly separated his hands so that he couldn’t do it again. The mystery of the intelligent “bandersnatch” bothered him, but he had other things to worry about. Why, for example, hadn’t he been rescued? Three hundred years after he pushed the panic button, he must have struck the Earth like the destroying wrath of the Powergiver. Someone on the moon must have seen it.
Could the lunar observation post have been abandoned?
Why?
Garner crashed into his thoughts. “Maybe something bigger than a cosmic ray made the mutations. Something like a machine-gun volley or a meteor storm.”
Kzanol/Greenberg shook his head. “Any other evidence?”
“Oh, hell yes. Greenberg, what do you know about Jinx?”
“A good deal,” said Kzanol/Greenberg. Larry’s knowledge of Jinx had been as thorough as any colonist’s. The memories clicked into place, unbidden, at the sound of the word. Jinx…
Moon of Binary, third planet out from Sirius A. Binary was a banded orange giant, bigger than Jupiter, and much warmer. Jinx was six times as big as Earth, with a gravity of one point seven eight, and with a period of rotation more than four days long. Of all the factors which had shaped Jinx, the most important had been its lack of radioactive materials. For Jinx was solid all through its rocky lithosphere and halfway to the center of its nickel-iron core.
Long ago—before even his time, Kzanol’s time—Jinx had been much closer to Binary. So close that the tides had stopped her spin and pulled her into an egg shape. Later, those same tides had pushed her outward. Not unusual. But, though the atmosphere and ocean assumed a more spherical shape, Jinx did not. The body of the moon was still egg shaped.
Jinx was an Easter egg, banded in different colors by the varying surface pressures.
The ocean was a broad ring of what must be extremely salty water running through the poles of rotation. The regions which the colonists called the Ends, marked by the points nearest to and furthest from Binary, were six hundred miles “higher” than the ocean: six hundred miles further from the moon’s center of mass. They stuck right out of the atmosphere. In the photographs masered in from the first expedition, the Ends had shown bone white, with a tracery of sharp black shadows. Further from the Ends the shadows disappeared beneath the atmosphere, and clouds began to appear. The clouds became thicker and thicker, with brown-and-gray earth showing more and more rarely, until suddenly the clouds were in full control. The ocean was forever hidden beneath a band of permanent fleecy cloud thousands of miles wide. At sea level the air was terrifically dense, with a constant temperature of two hundred and seventy degrees Fahrenheit.
The colony of Sirius Mater was on the Eastern continent, three thousand miles east of the ocean, a triangle of cultivated land and inflatable buildings at the fork of two rivers. The first colonists had picked a landing place with a high surface pressure, knowing that the denser atmosphere would help protect them from the temperature changes during the long days and nights, and from the ultraviolet scourge of blue-white Sirius A. Sirius Mater now boasted a population of almost two hundred punsters of all ages…
“Good,” said Garner. “Then I won’t have to explain anything. Can I borrow the phone, Lloyd?”
“Sure.” Lloyd hooked a thumb at one wall.
The phone screen was a big one; it covered half the wall. Luke dialed thirteen quick motions of the forefinger. In a moment the screen cleared to reveal a slender young woman with wavy brunette hair.
“Technological Police, Records Office.”
“This is Lucas Garner, operative-at-large. Here’s my ident.” He held a plastic card up to the camera. “I’d like the bandersnatchi sections from the Jinx report of 2106.”
“Yes sir.” The woman rose and walked off camera.
Kzanol/Greenberg leaned forward to watch. The last report from Jinx had arrived only two months ago, and most of it had not been made public. He remembered seeing stills of the bandersnatchi, but no more. Now, with new eyes eager to compare, he would see whether a bandersnatch was really a whitefood.
It should not have mattered. By all rights he should have felt as he had when Masney’s sonic sleeping pill first wore off. Friendless, homeless, disembodied, defeated past all hope. But a prisoner’s first duty is always to escape: by collaboration, by treachery, by theft and murder, by any means at all. If he could lull these arrogant slaves into thinking he would cooperate, would give information freely—
And he had to know. Later he would decide why the question seemed so important. Now he only knew that it was. The suggestion that a whitefood might be intelligent had hit him with the force of a deadly insult. Why? But never mind why. Was it true?
The girl was back, smiling. “Mr. Garner, I’ll now turn you over to Mayor Herkimer.” She touched something below the edge of her desk.
The picture dissolved and reformed, but now it was ragged, shot with random dots of colored light. A maser beam had crossed nine light years to bring this picture and had been somewhat torn up on the way, by dust and gee fields and crossing light waves.
Mayor Herkimer had brown hair and a bushy brown beard over a square jaw. His voice was ragged with interference, but his enunciation was clear and careful—and twisted by an unknown accent.
“—Since everything that wasn’t welded down had long since been removed from the Lazy Eight II, and since the fusion plant in the Lazy Eight I was not damaged in the original landing and will give us power for a god-dam century, and since there was little work to be done until spring in any case, the Authority voted to risk the Lazy Eight II in exploring Jinx’s oceanic regions. Accordingly six of us red-hot explorers, namely—” Herkimer named names, “took the ship up and went west. A circular flying wing isn’t exactly a goddam airplane, but the ship was lighter than during first landing, and we had enough power to stay up forever or to make a straight-up landing anywhere we could find flat land.
“One problem was that the goddam visibility kept dropping—”
Garner whispered, “Their slang seems to have changed somewhat since they moved to Jinx.”
“Oh, you noticed that?”
Kzanol/Greenberg twitched in annoyance at the interruption. That would have marked him for an alien anywhere! In 2106 you learned not to hear extraneous noises before you went insane.
“—Couldn’t see at all. The light from the fusion drive didn’t show us the ground until we were two hundred feet up. We landed on the solid jets, near the shoreline, and started the cameras. Right away we were surrounded by—these.”
Mayor Herkimer had a sense of drama. As he stopped talking, the scene jumped to a sandy, sloping beach. The sand in the foreground was blackened and blown into a curving wall. Beyond, the ocean. There were no waves on that ocean. The water seemed—thick. Thick and gray and living.
Something moved into view. Something white; something like an enormously magnified slug, but with a smooth, slick skin. From the front of the beast reared a brontosaur neck with no head at all. At its base the neck was as wide as the animal’s shoulders. It rose in a conical slope. The tip was thick and rounded, featureless but for two tufts of black bristles.
The camera watched as the beast approached; saw it stop at the scorched sand. Others of its kind came out of the mist. The camera swept a full circle, and everywhere there were enormous white bulks like albino sperm whales swimming through sand.
Their rounded tips swung back and forth; the tufted bristles blew without wind. Of course the bristles were sense organs; and of course the mouths were invisible because the mouths were all closed. Unusual in a whitefood. But they were whitefoods, and no mistake.
Mayor Herkimer spoke. “These pictures were taken in visible light, but with a long exposure, which accounts for the damn blurring. To us it was like night. Winst
on Doheny, our biologist, took one look at these monsters and dubbed them Frumious bandersnatch. This species name is now in the goddam log. Harlow went out in a segmented armor suit and shot a bandersnatch for dissection, and the rest ran off. Fortunately the suit stood up to the heat and pressure.”
Films showed the action. Tracer bullets stitching six lines from off-camera through the bulky front of a bandersnatch. The silent death, evidenced only by a suddenly drooping tip. White shapes fading ghostlike into the mist. Herkimer continued, “They run on a rippling belly foot, and as you can see, they move goddam fast.
“According to Doheny this animal is one big cell. Nerves are similar to human nerves in structure, but have no cell body, no nuclei, nothing to separate them from other specialized protoplasm. The brain is long and narrow, and is packed into a bone shell at the elevated tapering tip. This skull is one end of a jointless, flexible, very strong internal cage of bone. Apparently God never intended the beast to shift position.” Garner winced at the unconscious blasphemy. “The mouth, which was closed in the film, is just ahead of the belly foot, and is good for nothing but scooping up yeast from the ocean.”
The film showed details from the dissection of the bandersnatch. Evidently the two cops at the door had decided not to look; but Masney and Garner watched in keen interest. Autopsies were nothing new to them. The beast was turned on its side to expose the belly foot, and its jaws were opened with a pulley. Slides were shown of tissue sections. There was a circulatory system, with six hearts weighing eleven pounds apiece; there were strange organs in the left side, which only Kzanol/Greenberg recognized as budding apparatus. He watched with manic concentration as the brain case was opened to show the long, narrow brain, gray and deeply convoluted, in its canoe of a skull. The form was familiar in detail, though he’d never seen one raw. Then it was over, and Mayor Herkimer was back.
“The ocean is a uniform foot thick in some unknown breed of yeast. Herds of bandersnatchi move along the shoreline, feeding continuously. The shore is no goddam tourist trap. It’s always dark, the waves are smothered by the yeast and the gravity, and the banderanatchi wander along the shore like the lost souls of worn-away mountains. We’d have liked to leave right then, but Doheny couldn’t find the sex organs, and he wanted to make a few more dissections.
“So we sent out the copters to find another specimen. But no bandersnatch ever came close enough to be shot from a copter. The banderanatchi had been curious and unafraid. Now they ran whenever a copter got close. All of them. They couldn’t possibly have all known about us, unless they were either telepathic or had a language.
“Yet at least one goddam bandersnatch was always within sight of each copter. They seemed to know the range of our guns.
“On the third day of the hunt Doheny got impatient. He assumed that it was the copters that the bandersnatchi were afraid of, and he landed his goddam copter and went hunting on foot. The moment he was out of shooting range of the copter, a bandersnatch charged in and flattened it like a goddam freight truck running down a pedestrian. Doheny had to walk back.
“Several hundred miles east of the shore, we found other forms of native—”
Mayor Herkimer was cut off in midsentence. The slender brunette’s voice came from a blank screen: “Mr. Garner, there is another section of the report listed under ‘bandersnatchi.’ Do you want it?”
“Yes, but just a minute.” Garner turned to face Kzanol/Greenberg. “Greenberg, were those whitefoods?”
“Yes.”
“Are they telepathic?”
“No. And I’ve never heard of them avoiding a meat packer’s ship. They just go on eating until they’re dead.”
“Okay, miss, we’re ready.”
Again there was the square, bearded face of the mayor. “We returned to Sirius Mater five Jinx days after our departure. We found that Frumious bandersnatch had preceded us. A single specimen. It must have traveled three thousand miles without yeast, and without any other food source that it could use, just to visit our settlement. To do this it must have gorged itself for months, maybe years, in order to build up enough fat for the trip.
“The colonists let it alone, which was goddam sensible of them, and the bandersnatch didn’t come too close. By this time its skin, or its cell wall, was light blue, possibly for protection from sunlight. It went straight to Northwest Cultivation Area, spent two hours running tracks across it in what Vicemayor Tays claims was the damnedest dance he ever saw, then moved off toward the ocean.
“Since we had both copters, we were the first to see the tracks from above. These are films of the tracks. I am convinced that this is a form of writing. Doheny says it can’t be. He believes that a bandersnatch could have no use for intelligence, hence would not develop it. I have to admit the sonofabitch has a good argument. The bandersnatch makes a beached dolphin look like a miracle of dexterity. Would you please analyze this and let us know whether we share this world with an intelligent species?”
“The machines couldn’t make anything out of this,” Garner put in. “Concepts were too alien, maybe.”
From the phone screen came kaleidoscopic color static, then a fuzzy picture. Curved lines, like snail tracks, on brown earth. The earth was plowed in mathematically straight furrows, but the lines were broader and deeper. Hillocks and tree stumps distorted them. A helicopter had landed among the wavy tracks; it looked like a fly on a printed page.
Kzanol/Greenberg choked, gurgled, and said, “‘Leave our planet at once or be obliterated, in accordance with the treaty of—’ I can’t read the rest. But it’s tnuctip science language. Could I have some water?”
“Sure,” Masney said kindly. He jerked a thumb at the cooler. After a moment Kzanol/Greenberg got up and poured his own water.
Lloyd went over to Garner’s chair and began talking in a low voice. “Luke, what was that all about? What are you doing?”
“Just satisfying curiosity. Relax, Lloyd. Dr. Snyder will be here in an hour, then he can take over. Meanwhile there are a lot of things Greenberg can tell us. This isn’t just a man with hallucinations, Lloyd.
“Why would the ET’s race have thought that the bandersnatch was just a dumb animal? Why does he react so violently when we suggest that the thing might be sentient? Greenberg thinks he’s the prisoner of aliens, he thinks his race is billions of years dead and his home lost forever, yet what is it that really interests him? Frumious bandersnatch. Did you see the way he looked when the dissection was going on?”
“No. I was too interested myself.”
“I get almost scared when I think of what’s in Greenberg’s brain—the information he’s carrying. Do you realize that Dr. Snyder may have to permanently repress those memories to cure him?
“Why would a race as sophisticated as the tnuctipun must have been”—he pronounced the word as Kzanol/Greenberg had, badly—“have worked for Greenberg’s adapted race? Was it because of the telepathy? I’m just—”
“I can tell you that,” Kzanol/Greenberg said bitterly. He had drunk five cups of water, practically without a breath. Now he was panting a little.
“You’ve got good ears,” said Masney.
“No. I’m a little telepathic; just enough to get by on. It’s Greenberg’s talent, but he didn’t really believe in it so he couldn’t use it. I can. Much good may it do me.”
“So why did the tnuctipun work for you?” Masney messed up the word even worse than Garner had.
The question answered itself.
Everyone in the room jerked like hooked fish.
There was no fall. An instant after he put out his arms, Kzanol was resting on his six fingertips like a man doing pushups. He stayed there a moment, then got to his feet. The gravity was a little heavy.
Where was everybody? Where was the thrint or slave who had released him?
He was in an empty, hideously alien building, the kind that happen only on free slave worlds, before the caretakers move in. But…how had he gotten here, when he was aimed at
a deserted food planet? The next sight he had expected was the inside of a caretaker’s palace. And where was everybody? He badly needed someone to tell him what was going on.
He Listened.
For some reason, neither human nor thrintun beings have flaps over their ears resembling the flaps over their eyes. The thrintun Power faculty is better protected. Kzanol was not forced to lower his mental shield all at once. He chose to do so, and he paid for it. It was like looking into an arc lamp from a foot away. Nowhere in the thrintun universe would the telepathic noise have been that intense. The slave worlds never held this heavy an overpopulation; and the teeming masses of the thrintun worlds kept their mind shields up in public.
Kzanol reeled from the pain. His reaction was immediate and automatic.
STOP TRINKING AT ME! he roared at the bellowing minds of Topeka Kansas.
In the complex of mental hospitals still called Menninger’s, thousands of doctors and nurses and patients heard the command. Hundreds of patients eagerly took it as literal and permanent. Some became stupid and cured. Others went catatonic. A few who had been harmlessly irresponsible became dangerously so. A handful of doctors became patients, a mere handful, but the loss of their services compounded the emergency when the casualties began pouring in from downtown. Menninger’s was miles from Topeka Police Headquarters.
In the little room, everyone jerked like hooked fish. Then, all but Kzanol/Greenberg, they stopped moving. Their faces were empty. They were idiots.
In the first instant of the mental blast, Kzanol/Greenberg’s mental shield went up with an almost audible clang. A roaring noise reverberated through his mind for minutes. When, he could think again, he still didn’t dare drop the mind shield.
There was a thrint on Earth.
The guards at the door now squatted or sat like rag dolls. Kzanol/Greenberg pulled cigarettes from a dark blue shirt pocket and lit one, from the burning butt between Masney’s lips, incidentally saving Masney a nasty burn. He sat and smoked while he thought about the other thrint.