The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s

Bringing out a mescahale packet, Anderson lit one and insultingly offered his opponent one.

‘Is Frank Arlblaster in trouble?’

‘There is some sort of trouble on Nehru II,’ the Investigator agreed cautiously. ‘You are going there in order to find out just what sort of trouble it is.’

‘Well, I’ll have to go if I’m ordered, of course. But I still can’t see why you want to send me. If there’s trouble, send a robot police ship.’

The Investigator smiled. Very lifelike.

‘We’ve already lost two police ships there. That’s why we’re going to send you. You might call it a new line of approach, Mr Anderson.’

A metal Tom Thumb using blood-and-guts irony!

The track curved and began to descend into a green valley. Swettenham’s settlement, the only town on Nehru II, lay dustily in one loop of a meandering river. As the nose of his tourer dipped towards the valley, K. D. Anderson felt the heat increase; it was cradled in the valley like water in the palm of the hand.

Just as he started to sweat, something appeared in the grassy track ahead of him. He braked and stared ahead in amazement.

A small animal faced him.

It stood some two feet six high at the shoulder; its coat was thick and shaggy, its four feet clumsy; its long ugly skull supported two horns, the anterior being over a foot long. When it had looked its fill at Anderson, it lumbered into a bush and disappeared.

‘Hey!’ Anderson called.

Flinging open the door, he jumped out, drew his stun-gun and ran into the bushes after it. He reckoned he knew a baby woolly rhinoceros when he saw one.

The ground was hard, the grass long. The bushes extended down the hill, growing in clumps. The animal was disappearing round one of the clumps. Directly he spotted it, Anderson plunged on in pursuit. No prehistorian worth his salt would have thought of doing otherwise; these beasts were presumed as extinct on Nehru II as on Sol III.

He ran on. The woolly rhino – if it was a woolly rhino – had headed towards Swettenham’s settlement. There was no sign of it now.

Two tall and jagged boulders, twelve feet high, stood at the bottom of the slope. Baffled now his quarry had disappeared, proceeding more slowly, Anderson moved towards the boulders. As he went, he classified them almost unthinkingly: impacted siltstone, deposited here by the glaciers which had once ground down this valley, now gradually disintegrating.

The silence all round made itself felt. This was an almost empty planet, primitive, spinning slowly on its axis to form a leisurely twenty-nine-hour day. And those days were generally cloudy. Swettenham, located beneath a mountain range in the cooler latitudes of the southern hemisphere, enjoyed a mild muggy climate. Even the gravity, 0.16 of Earth gravity, reinforced the general feeling of lethargy.

Anderson rounded the tall boulders.

A great glaring face thrust itself up at his. Sloe-black eyes peered from their twin caverns, a club whirled, and his stun-gun was knocked spinning.

Anderson jumped back. He dropped into a fighting stance, but his attacker showed no sign of following up his initial success. Which was fortunate; beneath the man’s tan shirt, massive biceps and shoulders bulged. His jaw was pugnacious, not to say prognathous; altogether a tough hombre, Anderson thought. He took the conciliatory line, his baby rhino temporarily forgotten.

‘I wasn’t hunting you,’ he said. ‘I was chasing an animal. It must have surprised you to see me appear suddenly with a gun, huh?’

‘Huh?’ echoed the other. He hardly looked surprised. Reaching out a hairy arm, he grabbed Anderson’s wrist.

‘You coming to Swettenham,’ he said.

‘I was doing just that,’ Anderson agreed angrily, pulling back. ‘But my car’s up the hill with my sister in it, so if you’ll let go I’ll rejoin her.’

‘Bother about her later. You coming to Swettenham,’ the tough fellow said. He started plodding determinedly towards the houses, the nearest of which showed through the bushes only a hundred yards away. Humiliated, Anderson had to follow. To pick an argument with this dangerous creature in the open was unwise. Marking the spot where his gun lay, he moved forward with the hope that his reception in the settlement would be better than first signs indicated.

It wasn’t.

Swettenham consisted of two horse shoe-shaped lines of bungalows and huts, one inside the other. The outer line faced outwards on to the meandering half-circle of river; the inner and more impressive line faced inwards on to a large and dusty square where a few trees grew. Anderson’s captor brought him into this square and gave a call.

The grip on his arm was released only when fifteen or more men and women had sidled out and gathered round him, staring at him in curious fashion without comment. None of them looked bright. Their hair grew long, generally drooping over low foreheads. Their lower lips generally protruded. Some of them were near nude. Their collective body smell was offensively strong.

‘I guess you don’t have many visitors on Nehru II these days,’ Anderson said uneasily.

By now he felt like a man in a bad dream. His space craft was a mile away over two lines of hills, and he was heartily wishing himself a mile away in it. What chiefly alarmed him was not so much the hostility of these people as their very presence. Swettenham’s was the only Earth settlement on this otherwise empty planet: and it was a colony for intellectuals, mainly intellectuals disaffected by Earth’s increasingly automated life. This crowd, far from looking like eggheads, resembled apes.

‘Tell us where you come from,’ one of the men in the crowd said. ‘Are you from Earth?’

‘I’m an Earthman – I was born on Earth,’ said Anderson, telling his prepared tale. ‘I’ve actually just come from Lenin’s Planet, stopping in here on my way back to Earth. Does that answer your question?’

‘Things are still bad on Earth?’ a woman enquired of Anderson. She was young. He had to admit he could recognise a sort of beauty in her ugly countenance. ‘Is the Oil War still going on?’

‘Yes,’ Anderson admitted. ‘And the Have-Not Nations are fighting a conventional war against Common Europe. But our latest counter-attack against South America seems to be going well, if you can believe the telecasts. I guess you all have a load of questions you want to ask about the home planet. I’ll answer them when I’ve been directed to the man I came to Nehru to visit. Dr Frank Arlblaster. Will someone kindly show me his dwelling?’

This caused some discussion. At least it was evident the name Arlblaster meant something to them.

‘The man you want will not see you yet,’ someone announced.

‘Direct me to his house and I’ll worry about that. I’m an old pupil of his. He’ll be pleased to see me.’

They ignored him for a fragmentary argument of their own. The hairy man who had caught Anderson – his fellows called him Ell – repeated vehemently, ‘He’s a Crow!’

‘Of course he’s a Crow,’ one of the others agreed. ‘Take him to Menderstone.’

That they spoke Universal English was a blessing. It was slurred and curiously accented, but quite unmistakable.

‘Do you mean Stanley A. Menderstone?’ asked Anderson with sudden hope. The literary critic had certainly been one of Swettenham’s original group that had come to form its own intellectual centre in the wilds of this planet.

‘We’ll take you to him,’ Ell’s friend said.

They seemed reluctant to trade in straight answers, Anderson observed. He wondered what his sister Kay was doing, half-expecting to see her drive the tourer into the settlement at any moment.

Seizing Anderson’s wrist – they were a possessive lot – Ell’s friend set off at a good pace for the last house on one end of the inner horseshoe. The rest of the crowd moved back into convenient shade. Many of them squatted, formidable, content, waiting, watching. Dogs moved between huts, a duck toddled up from the river, flies circled dusty excreta. Behind everything stood the mountains, spurting cloud.

The Menderstone place did not look inviting. It had been built long and low some twenty years past. Now the stresscrete was all cracked and stained, the steel frame windows rusting, the panes of glass themselves as bleary as a drunkard’s stare.

Ell’s friend went up to the door and kicked on it. Then he turned without hurry or sloth to go and join his friends, leaving Anderson standing on the step.

The door opened.

A beefy man stood there, the old-fashioned rifle in his hands reinforcing his air of enormous self-sufficiency. His face was as brown and pitted as the keel of a junk; he was bald, his forehead shone as if a high polish had just been applied to it. Although probably into his sixties, he gave the impression of having looked just as he did now for the last twenty years.

Most remarkably, he wore lenses over his eyes, secured in place by wires twisting behind his ears. Anderson recalled the name for this old-fashioned apparatus: spectacles.

‘Have you something you wish to say or do to me?’ demanded the bespectacled man, impatiently wagging his rifle.