Margaret St. Clair (12 page)

The earth, the horizon, the air, twanged like a plucked bowstring. In the most horrible moment of the afternoon, Henry perceived that everywhere about him were slowly opening doors. Convulsively he shut his eyes.

When he opened them again Hathor had put down her hands. The air was calm and untroubled. All around the party the grass lay as fresh, as green, as unbroken as it had been before the matter canker was set up. The only sign of its existence that the canker had left was an exceptionally heavy coating of dew. But the laboratory wa s gone.

Hathor fixed her impassive eyes on Henry. Her face had resumed its ordinary inexpressiveness, but he felt the fright that always came over him at mental contact with her. A huge voice began to print itself awesomely in his brain —“DON’T EVER DO THAT AGAIN.”

It hadn’t worked. Hathor had neither punished them nor got rid of them. And now what were they to do? The laboratory was gone. They had no way of annoying Hathor with another matter canker even if they had been minded to try it. All that was left them was to try to be unsatisfactory pets.

They discussed it night after night as they sat around the coals of their fire. They could decide on nothing. It was not until Hathor, coming to get Henry for the third installment of his training, took Den is along too, that a definite program emerged.

Denis was shaken by his experience. It amused Henry, who was becoming accustomed to the horror that Hathor’s training involved, to see how shaken he was. Denis’ tight little mouth was as firm as ever when he remembered to keep it firm, But in moments of inattention his jaw hung slackly and his lips had a tendency to shake.

“This can’t go on,” he said, pacing up and down on the grass. “Vela’s not well —haven’t you noticed? She needs medical attention but I wouldn’t trust Hathor to prescribe for her. It’s not myself I’m thinking of, it’s her. We’ve got to get home.”

“It would be nice if we could,” Henry replied warily. “But —”

“But what?”

“Nothing. Do you have a plan?”

“Yes. We’ll run away.”

“Run away? Hathor can bring us back in ten seconds as soon as she notices we’re gone.”

“Yes, of course she can,” Denis replied. “But if we keep on running away and she has to keep on bringing us back —you see what I mean. She only comes to visit us ever y four or five days, but if every time she comes we’ve run away, she’ll soon get tired of it. Bringing us back will be so annoying she’ll send us home to get rid of us.”

Henry was silent.

“What’s the matter?” Denis asked challengingly. “Don’t you think it would work? We could save up our supplies and take food with us. Besides, there’s a lot of wild fruit.”

“Oh, I think it would work. That’s what’s bothering me.”

Denis’ back stiffened. For a moment he was again the martinet. “Explain yourself,” he r apped out.

“I’m afraid.” Henry swallowed. “Afraid to annoy her. Afraid of what she’d do.”

Denis looked relieved. “Nonsense,” he said heartily. “If she didn’t do anything to us for setting up the matter canker she won’t do anything to us no matter what we do. That’s obvious. Besides, what could be worse than what she does when she’s training us? That —that almost makes me sick.”

Henry let his hands dangle down between his knees. His eyes had taken on an odd bright look. “That’s pretty bad, isn’t it?” he said. He managed a smile. “Pretty bad. But maybe something could be worse.”

“Rot! I’m going to talk to Vela and her mother about it. If they agree will you come along with us? After all, you’re in this too.”

There was a pause. “All right,” Henry replied at last. “As you say, I’m in this with you. If you go I’ll go with you.”

Hathor had made one of her visits only the day before. She made them at irregular intervals but it was probable that three or four days would elapse before she would visit Henry and the others again. On the third day, carrying what supplies they had been able to accumulate, the party escap e d.

The escape was unspectacular. They walked for a mile or two through the rolling parkland where Hathor had established them, turned to the right and were on a road that was no more than a grassy track. Once in the distance they saw a pair of Hathor’s p eople walking slowly along. Sometimes the big mammals walked, instead of simply materializing where they wished to be.

Denis made the party hide beside the road until the big people were safely out of sight. Later the party passed a lonely building whose walls were shimmering gray webs. Henry identified it to himself as a place where a dimension-spanning vortex, like the one which had brought them thither, was being made. By noon the party was in a rather open wood. They decided to stay there for the nig h t.

Hathor came for them on the second day. She did not seem angry, only more than usually remote. She set them down on the sward beside the open stoa in the park where they slept, and gazed at them. Then she disappeared.

Denis was jubilant. “It’s working!” he said, very pleased with himself. “The next time we run away or maybe the time after that she’ll send us home to get rid of us. You’ll see, old chap.”

“Will she?” Henry answered with a sigh. “Well, I hope you’re right.”

-

The second attempt at escape was not very successful. Hathor came for them when they had been gone no more than a couple of hours. The third time …

Denis was in the lead when they reached the boundary of the park. He was talking cheerily to Vela, his head turned, as they wa lked along. When he faced about once more, Hathor was standing there. Her crimson-tipped crest waved gently in the breeze as she bent over and picked up Denis.

The action itself was ordinary enough but Henry felt a sickening pang of apprehension. He pluc ked at Vela’s arm. “Run,” he said hoarsely, “you and mother run and hide.”

“But — what’s the matter? What’s she doing with her hands?” Vela’s eyes were round. “Why is she holding him so tight?” Her voice went up. “Is she —he said s he wouldn’t hurt us. Oh!
Oh!”

Hathor’s hands were slipping smoothly in and out of the web of invisibility. Now she put one of them up to Denis’ head. Eerily, unbelievably , her fingers slid inside the skull.

Denis began to scream. It was a horrible high squeal like a frightened rabbit’s. At the sound Vela pressed her fists to her ears and started to run. Mrs. Pettit hesitated, looking after her. Then, moaning and slobbering, she bobbed after the girl. Henry s t ayed behind, until he was sure what was going on. Then he too turned and ran.

There was little cover in the rolling park. The women were cowering behind a big granite boulder and there Henry joined them. Denis gave scream after shattering scream.

The screams stopped. Henry looked over the top of the rock.

Tears were still flowing down Denis’ cheeks but the convulsed terror had gone out of his face. It had been replaced with a vegetable imbecile calm.

Hathor put him down very gently on the grass. He walked eight or ten paces uncertainly and then sat down on the sward. He pulled up a handful of grass and examined its roots.

Vela tugged desperately at the hem of Henry’s sleeve. “What’s she done to him?” she demanded in an agonized whisper. “Oh what it it? Henry, Henry, Henry —what’s she done?”

Henry turned to face her. “We geld domestic animals to make them better pets, don’t we?” he answered. His mouth twisted shockingly to one side. “Hathor’s done something to his brain to make a better pet out of him. So he’ll stay here always without wanting to get away, so he won’t be a nuisance any more. That’s what she’s doing. She’s making us better pets.
Better pets! Better pets!”

He was still shrieking the words when Hathor picked him up.

1949.
Startling Stories -

The Pillows

They’re lucky,” McTeague said with emphasis. “I told Thelma —she’s secretary to one of the big shots in the company —they ought to bring that out more in the advertising, stress it, li ke, and she said nobody had ever written in about it. People just buy the pillows for novelties, and once in a while to keep their hands warm.

“But anybody that works around the pillows knows that they’re the luckiest damn’ things in the Universe. Look a t me. Before I got this job with Interplanetary Novelties, I’d just spent three months in the hospital with a fractured pelvis. Lolli and I were quarreling all the time, and I was sure she was planning to leave me. I just got out of the hospital when Lott i e, that’s our kid, came home from school with a stiff neck and a sore throat, and two days later the clinician said it was almost certain to be infantile paralysis, the third type. They’ve never found a cure for that. That really broke me up. I spent most of the first leg of the trip taking soma and trying not to think about things.

“Listen, when we hit Aphrodition there was a ‘gram from Lolli telling me not to worry, Lottie was better and it seemed to be type one after all. Lottie was all over it in a mo nth, and she’s never been sick, not even the sniffles, since. For that matter, none of us have. I don’t even cut myself or get hangovers any more. And Lolli and I get along like —like a couple of Venusian quohogs.”

“Then you think the pillows aren’t fakes?” Kent asked. They were two days out from Terra, on board the Tryphe, traveling at one sixtieth the velocity of light. He leaned back in his bunk and drew deeply on the tube of cocohol-cured tobacco.

“Fakes? How do you mean, fakes? I know they’re lucky —ask anyone on the ship —and I know they stay hot. Lottie’s had one I brought her from Triton, on that first voyage out to Neptune’s moon, sitting on the shelf in her bedroom ever since, and it’s still as hot as it was when I dug it out.”

Kent sighed. He rumpled up his blond hair and frowned. Here it was again, the evidence, so utterly at variance with what he’d been able to get in the laboratory. Stick a thermometer near one of the pillows, and it registered forty-four degrees Celsius at first, then showed a very gradual cooling until the pillow reached room temperature, where it remained. And yet everyone who’d ever handled a pillow or bought one at a novelty store knew they stayed hot.

“Maybe there’s some kind of gimmick in it,” he suggested, “som ething like those Mexican jumping beans my grandfather used to tell me about. Or maybe it’s something the company rigged up, a little atomic motor, say.”

McTeague snorted. “Anytime you can make an atomic motor to sell for six bits,” he said, “let me know . I’ll buy ‘em up, sell ‘em on the open market for five dollars, and become a millionaire. I never heard of Mexican jumping beans before, so for all I know they’re the same sort of thing. All I know is, you dig the pillows up out of the rock on Triton, wh i ch the long-hairs say is probably the coldest spot in the known universe, and they’re hot, nice and hot. You can dig up some in a few days and see for yourself.”

“How do you locate them?”

“Oh, we’ve got a darkside Mercurian hexapod. He hates hunting th em. Sits down and shivers when he finds a colony. That’s how we know where to dig.”

“What do you use to dig with?”

“Atom blast, special design.”

“Ever damage the pillows with it?”

“Naw, you have to train one right on them for about fifteen minutes to make a dent in them. They’re not only hot, and lucky —they’re tough.”

Kent was thoughtful. “You know, that’s really remarkable.”

“Hell, they’re just novelties.” McTeague spat into the incinerator, reached for the cards, and began to lay out an ela borate three-deck solitaire. Kent went on thinking.

It was that attitude, that “hell, they’re just novelties,” that had made him decide to spend his vacation working for the Interplanetary Novelty Company. He’d brought four or five of the pillows (they w ere a couple of inches in diameter —about the size of sand dollars —and black and puffy) into the laboratory and thrown a bunch of experiments at them; his fellow workers had kidded him both ways from the abscissa, and Dr. Roberts had called him into th e office and told him gently that he really wasn’t employed to investigate —ah —children’s toys, and that there was a group of very interesting experiments he’d like him to try on the low radioactives. So now he was an A.B.S. on the S.S.
Tryphe, bound for Triton.

“Anything else on Triton?” he asked.

“Nope. Not another blasted thing. We bring back some of that greenish rock, though —it works up into nice paperweights.” McTeague moved a long column of cards to a pile headed by a purple ace, and went on playing.

Ten days later they landed on Triton —a routine landing, but interesting to Kent, who had done little space traveling. The ship had gone into snail-slow planetary drive hours before. Now he watched with fascination through the bow visiplates wh ile the navigator snaked the ship expertly thr ough a long spiral down to Trit on’s surface. The cloudy aquamarine of Neptune, half occluded by the little world, shone palely bright.

“Getting an eyeful?” McTeague said, joining him. “If you’d landed here as often as the rest of us have, you’d want to look the other way. Neptune gives me the grue, and Triton stinks. Except for the pillows —and I consider myself honored to be on the same satellite with them —I hate the place. A lousy little pebble, so damn c old you’d be understating grossly if you said it was frozen.” He started to bite a chew of tobacco from the hunk in his hand, and then checked himself. “No spitting in pressure suits,” he said morosely. “That, and the dampness, are the worst things about s uits.”

Overhead, the bull horn began: “Phweet! Phweet! Break out pressure suits. Break out pressure suits. A working party consisting of McTeague, Willets, Abrams, Kent will leave ship at 1630 to hunt pillows. A working party consisting of … Atom blast s in Number Five locker. Atom blasts in Number Five locker.”

As Kent climbed stiffly into his pressure suit, he saw McTeague, already hardly human in the florid bulges of his own suit, inserting the protesting hexapod into a special job for hexapods. It must have been fifty inches long. Kent switched on his suit’s radio.

“… Look at the poor little tyke shiver,” McTeague said. “He hates this hunting worse than pulling teeth.” Then, to the hexapod, “Never mind, Toots. When we get back you can have a nic e bowl of vitamush and berl steak.”