A MATTER OF MONSTERS, by Manly Banister
Originally published in Astounding Science Fiction, November 1954.
He was the most wretched looking being I ever saw. It was a cold, rainy night, and he slouched down the street five paces ahead of me. He had hunched his shoulders under his threadbare jacket, thrust hands deep into the pockets of his baggy pants. He had turned his coat collar up as an ineffective shield against the drizzle, and the brim of his hat was pulled down so that everything under it, down to his shoulders, was in deep shadow. The battered crown of his hat and his shoulders glistened wetly with rain and neon light.
He stopped just ahead of me and looked into the steaming glass of Dan’s Chili Parlor. His head was lifted, and the profile toward me. That was what stopped me. I’ve seen hungry tramps before—but I had to get a better look at this one. At first, I thought it could have been a chromatic trick of the colored neon lights in Dan’s window, but then I knew what it was—the guy’s head was purple. More than that, it wasn’t a head such as you are accustomed to. It was a great blotchy thing, puffed and rift-ridden. It wasn’t recognizable as a human head, and it was purple—brilliant purple. I knew what I had to do.
I stepped up to him.
“Hungry, fella?”
He recoiled. He turned his face toward me. I almost vomited. The eyes were spongy yellow puffs in that hideously purple visage. He looked me over.
He saw a rather tall guy, thirtyish, with a floppy brown hat drenched with rain and pulled down low. I had on a tightly belted trench coat, and the light glinted oil my rain-spattered specs. I’m not much to look at, but at least my head doesn’t look like a rotten purple cabbage!
He nodded. His thin tongue—it was purple, too—licked tentatively from a slit in the purple horror of his face.
“Yeah,” he said dully, and if I ever heard a purple syllable, that one was it.
I jerked my head.
“Come on. Let’s put on the feed bag.”
There was nothing bashful about him, purple head or not. While we were waiting for our chili, I deliberately avoided looking at the guy. He was a monster, and the sight of him made me want to jump up and run. But there was another reason for not looking at him. He would be sensitive about that purple toadstool that masqueraded as his head. Under the pretext of wiping my specs with a handkerchief, I adjusted them just so, and I could see him fairly well without looking directly at him.
He wasn’t over twenty—a hell of an age to be afflicted with a knob like that on his shoulders! I knew that if he had any folks, they didn’t know he looked like this; he would never have let them know. They probably thought he was dead. And if he had ever had a girl, he didn’t have one now. He would know she couldn’t look at him, with his head all purple and puffed—and she wouldn’t know who he was, even if she saw him. That was the only merciful part of it. If he ever saw her on the street, he could walk right on by, and she would never know. But he would—
I knew what the purple knob was—and I knew who this boy was, too. That’s why I hadn’t walked on by. He wasn’t a tramp—far from it. He was what was left of a man who had been to the Venusian swamps, in the name of humanity—trying to clear the place for settlers from the over-populated Earth. He had been a spaceman and a member of the Planetary Frontier Corps, until he contracted the purple stuff that was a Venusian fungus disease—non-communicable but incurable.
He ate like a stranger to food—fast and gobbling. It seemed to me that the chili turned purple, too, as fast as he shoveled it into his mouth. I felt a queasy pitch and roll in the region of my stomach.
Sure the guy was hungry—he’d been out of the service at least two years. And it doesn’t take long to eat up the lousy three hundred bucks severance pay that goes with a medical discharge. He’d probably been eating out of garbage cans. What housewife could even look at him long enough to hand a sandwich out the kitchen door? What kind of a job could he take, with a head like that?
If he didn’t starve first, he could look forward to living maybe ten years—on the shots the medicos handed out at the spaceport sick bay. It took guts to report regularly for those—knowing that if you didn’t report, you’d die and be out of this rotten mess!
I felt a sudden warm thankfulness that I wasn’t like this poor kid. It helped to feel that way, with what I had to say to him.
He finished the last of his chili, gulped down a cup of steaming coffee and looked around like he was still hungry. I held up a finger to Dan.
“Pie!” I looked back at the purple-headed kid. “With ice cream—and bring some more coffee.”
When the kid finally wiped pie crust off his purple phiz on the back of his hand and leaned back in his chair, I offered him a cigarette. He took it with fingers that shook. Moisture oozed out of the yellow fungoid blobs of his eyes.
“Been having it tough, haven’t you?” I remarked lighting up for him.
“Tough enough.” He froze on those syllables and turned his head away.
“Can’t get a job, can you?” I continued callously.
He didn’t answer.
“Can you?”
He still didn’t answer.
I said, “Where you been getting your shots?”
“I’ve been getting them.”
“Not at the sick bay. You haven’t showed there for six months.”
“I got a friend—a doctor. He gives me the shots. I don’t need no space navy medico—”
I saw how he felt, and my heart bled.
I said, “Don’t blame the Navy doctors for that knot of yours. It don’t make no difference where you get your shots—you’ve just been holding me up, is all.”
He jerked up from the table, knocking his chair backward.
“Look—thanks for the meal. I’m going now.”
“You haven’t anywhere to go,” I said. “Sit down.”
The kid was in awful trouble with that head of his. I treated him rough, because he wouldn’t even have heard me if I’d used any other approach. He’d had that ugly purple head just long enough to realize the full depth of degradation it could bring him to, the full limit of utter aloneness to which he was subject—an outcast, unwanted by an uncaring world.
He scared you to look at him. Not scared as if you were afraid he might attack you—you knew he wouldn’t. It was a deeper fright than that you felt—a fright that rocked the underpinnings of your psychological makeup; that made your very mind want to curl up and go back to the womb for a fresh start.
I looked straight into his swollen, purple visage.
“You think you can’t share a table with me, because you’re prettier than I?” I asked. “You got to jump and run as soon as you’ve eaten? Sit down!”
He sat down. I was going to bust him wide open and he knew it, and somehow he was eager for it to happen. He didn’t know exactly how I’d do it, but I’d gotten that much across to him anyhow—that I would. I’d bust him wide open—and when I did, it would mean a lot to him. And he fell it coming.
I don’t mean I was going to hit him. What do you think I am? I was going to bust him wide open from that prison—that damnable purple prison—he’d locked himself into, and he was almost neighing with hope and anticipation.
“You got something for me!” He croaked.
“A job.”
He shrank inside his sodden, worn-out clothes. He dropped his purple head into his hands and sobbed. I waited until his shoulders stopped shaking.
“You won’t like this job,” I said.
He threw his head back, peered at me out of those frightful eyes of his.
“If it’s crooked—keep it!”
I grinned. I took a small notebook out from under my trench coat. I thumbed over a few pages.
“Huysman, George,” I read slowly. “Engine Cadet First Class. Is that you?”
The purple scab twitched and fluctuated. He nodded.
“Serial Number S778—that’s a mighty low number, George!”
He gripped the table until his knuckles glowed white. He relaxed slowly.
“That was three years ago—when the Frontier Corps was just getting started.”
I said, “There’s almost a million in the Corps now. You were one of the first, George. That ought to mean something to you.”
The yellowish fungus of his eyes scrunched up into pulpy masses and oozed, so help me, purple tears—or maybe it was just because they were transparent they looked purple.
I added, “How long you been…purple, George?”
His voice was a low mumble. “Two years—three. Since my first trip.” He stared blindly at me from inside that disgusting purple fungoid growth. “One trip…that’s all I got out of it—one trip!”
His voice began to rise and I shushed him.
“Would you like to make another trip, George—one more trip?”
He was quiet a long moment. “So that’s the job. But why just one more trip?”
“Because this is a trip you can’t come back from, George.”
The purple fungus of his face writhed hideously. I tensed with anxiety, then relaxed. That frightful expression was the kid’s version of a smile!
He said, “Where and when do I sign on?”
“You’re on, George,” I grinned. “You can go with me now. But first, I want you to do me a favor—”
I carefully manipulated the locks and disengaged the tri-dimensional anastigmat lenses of my specs from their seat in the front half of my solid silver cranium—the “seeing” part of my electronic eyes, without which I was blind as a bat. I passed them to him with my handkerchief.
“Before we go out, I’d appreciate your cleaning these up for me so I can see, George.”
* * * *
My boys welcomed George into our select little group. But from the first introduction, he was George Huysman no longer. He was Purple Top, and he liked that better—none of us wanted to be reminded of our names. Names meant we could have kinfolks, but our kinfolks didn’t have us. We were living dead—dead to the world that didn’t want us, or wouldn’t want us if it knew.
There were five of us—five broken jugs that had gone to the well too often. Iron Head—that’s what they call me, in spite of the fact my head’s made of silver, not iron. Iron rusts and the water on my brain would raise merry hell with an iron skull. I stuck my head into the flareback of an atomic converter. After that, I suffered what seemed like years of agony until I woke up with a brand-new, silver skull. It don’t hurt to have a silver head—after you get used to the idea you can’t grow hair on it.
I was to be pilot of our ship on this one-way trip.
Then there was Pat Rourke, the Plastic Man. He’d cracked up a scout on one of the unnamed asteroids He came out of it alive—but the medicos gave him a face, a right arm, a right leg, and a large part of his back muscles of plastic. Sure, he can use the plastic parts, after a fashion. They do marvelous things with the new bioplastics—but it isn’t flesh, and that says a lot.
The Plastic Man was our engineer, he was now training to operate the new DC-3 Converter—a top military secret.
After Pat, there was Jimmy Sidel. The medicos had saved his life, too, but not much else. From the moment Jimmy came off the operating bench, he was known as Bottle Bottom—Bottle for short. That’s what Jimmy was—a living bottle, just like a regular Coca Cola bottle, except for size. Bottle was man-size, and transparent—not made of glass. That would be too fragile. He was transparent plastic, and you could see the amazing innards working inside of him. Up at the top, where you’d expect a crinkly-edged cap to be, Bottle just rounded off in a frosted plastic dome. Under that dome lay Bottle’s brain—all that was left of Space Pilot Jimmy Sidel after the heater in his spacesuit went out of whack and he went into quick-freeze in the hard vacuum of space.
Bottle had electronic eyes, but no hands, no legs. He could see. He could talk. And hook him up to the right kind of machinery, he could operate it like it was his own body. Machinery like that was being developed for us to take along on our trip. Bottle was transparent to make it easy to study him—that’s what the docs had been doing. But now, nobody studied Bottle any more. He had been the best navigator who ever look a ship into the sky—and he got to be one of my boys. I had use for him. And priority counts.
The last of our group, Henry Jones, was the only one of us who still looked remotely human. All Henry’s changes were inside and you couldn’t tell it, unless you saw him in the shower. Then you saw the up and down and side to side scars the surgeon’s knife had left in his breast and belly.
Hank was Gutsy to us—he hadn’t a vital organ left inside him. The medicos had cured him of cancer, but they left him with insides that were a dream of Rube Goldberg mechanics—a nightmare, that is. But Gutsy was still alive, and he still had plenty of what it takes to be my copilot on this last, lone flight we were about to take together.
Purple Top, of course, was our jetman. To judge from his record, he had been a good one. Thai’s why I had chosen him.
If collecting bric-a-brac had been my aim, I could have had a thousand monsters. But I just went after the best. One by one, I had tracked them down, found where they hid out, and I dragged them back into the service. Bottle had been easiest to find. He couldn’t have gone anywhere had he tried. Purple Top had been the toughest, and he was the last. I had them all now.
And I didn’t tell any of them why I had brought them together. Mainly, because I didn’t know myself. One last trip—that’s all any of us knew. I didn’t even know when we would blast off. That had to be decided by the brass. All we could do was wait.
Oh, we lived like kings during that waiting. Our quarters were the best in the service. Each of us had a private suite of his own. If there’s one thing a monster can’t stand, it’s looking at four other monsters twenty-four hours out of every day.
That’s why, I told them, the ship was designed the way it was—each man at a separate station in a different part of the ship. Each man had private quarters at his station. There was an intercom hook-up to keep us in touch.
None of us had seen the ship yet, of course, though the Plastic Man and Bottle were undergoing daily training in their specialties; but that’s the way it was designed, so I told them.
I had seen the plans of our ship-to-be, and in a lot of ways it wasn’t like any ordinary ship. Once I had seen a mock-up of it, and it looked even more unusual. The colonel showed it to me in his office one day, when I had “one over to attend a meeting” of high brass. I was supposed to be not only pilot but commander of the expedition. I went to the meetings so I’d know what it was all about. All I heard was a lot of gum-beating, and nothing ever came out of it that made sense to me. I figured that was the way they wanted it, so it was O.K. I’d find out soon enough, anyway.
* * * *
All summer the five of us lived the life of Riley, except for the time we had to spend in class on ship operations. We got together when we felt like it in our communal recreation room. When we didn’t, we retired to our private quarters.
We could read, watch TV, pursue hobbies—anything we wanted to do. But we couldn’t leave our quarters unless to go to school or when summoned by higher authority. Not only were we not allowed off the base, we couldn’t even wander around on it. That suited us—we didn’t like people staring at us.
They fed us on the fat of the land—real “condemned man ate a hearty meal” stuff. The food was sent over from the commissary cafeteria, three times a day without a miss, and it was the best to be had anywhere. Each of us was served separately in his quarters—except Bottle.
Bottle never ate. They had “fed” him when they made him, on a tiny speck of radioactive material that kept his artificial innards going. That bottle-shaped body of his would live on a thousand years after his brain died and dissolved into gray slime.
We lifted ship in the cheerless dawn of a chill, drizzly October day. I still hadn’t told my boys anything, though I had finally been briefed the night before. Only the Plastic Man knew. He had to know. It was a part of the training he had put in on the DC-3 Converter. Not even I knew what that was at the time.
The colonel had discussed the advisability of briefing the crew as a unit when he told me when we were going, and what we were going to do when we got there. I advised against it. The men, I told him, had been having a lot of fun guessing. Each had built an elaborate thesis in defense of his own guesswork. None of us were anywhere near with our guesses, of course—the engineers who had made this last flight of ours possible were farther ahead in the field of spatial science than we could have known.
So we blasted out into space and no one but I and the Plastic Man knew where we were going or how we intended to get there.
We had transferred Bottle to the ship in a covered van and had wheeled him on a dolly to his station. A pair of metal straps held Bottle rigid between two stanchions. He’d stay there until we got to where we were going.
After he was securely in place, a couple of engineer-medicos came in to fix him up. They worked for hours. When they left. Bottle was equipped with a special plug-in switchboard with outlets for all the instruments he would use on the voyage, plus a few more for the different machines we carried in the hold, and others that would let him take advantage of our recorded entertainment facilities.
We drove straight out into space after cutting orbit, straight out and away from the sun. There wasn’t any moon to flag us on as we went by—it was on the other side of old Earth. There weren’t any planets in this direction, either. I knew my boys were burning with curiosity. They had to know. I’d better tell them.
* * * *
I flipped the toggle on the Attention All Stations buzzer. The boys reported in—“Gutsy!” “Bottle!” “Plastic!” “Purple Top!”
“O.K.,” I said. “So nobody got left behind. This is Iron Head. Everybody comfy?”
There was a moment of silence, as if each waited for another to speak first.
Bottle said, “I’m laughing.”
That was a standard phrase with Bottle. He couldn’t laugh, of course. That mechanical yakker of his didn’t know what it was to laugh. Whenever Bottle felt amusement, ironic, sardonic, perhaps bitter—one never knew what it was with Bottle—Bottle said, “I’m laughing.”
Gutsy spoke up. “I’m not laughing. I’m sad, and I’m up in the air. All of us are, including Bottle. Give us the scoop, Iron Head.”
“You’ve been waiting,” I said. “You deserve it. Here it is. You all guessed—I did, too—that we were going somewhere among the outer planets. We aren’t.”
Again that moment of silence. Purple Top groaned.
“Why keep us in suspense?”
I laughed, but there was no humor in it. It hurt to tear my thoughts away from Earth—the world we were leaving forever.
“I said, “You fellows know this is a one-way trip. I’ve been able to tell you that much. Now I can tell you why.” I paused. My mouth felt suddenly dry. I went on, “Maybe all of you know what the astronomy professors have been doing the past few years with their big telescopes. Maybe you don’t. But the fact is, they’ve been locating more planets. Not in the neighborhood of Sol, but out in space, circling our nearest neighbors among the stars.”
“We are going to the stars,” Bottle said flatly. “I really guessed that, but I hadn’t guts enough to say it. That’s a joke. I’m laughing.”
Nobody else laughed.
“Correct,” I said.
“Which one?” Purple Top wanted to know.
They took it calmly, those boys.
I said, “Alpha Centauri. That’s a binary, and there are planets circling both those stars. Maybe, among the half dozen the astronomers have located, there is one we can land on.”
“If there isn’t?” That was Plastic, who knew all about where we were going.
“We’ve had it,” I said succinctly, drew in my breath. “On the other hand, the chance is equally good that there is. The probability is that there are even more planets there than the professors have been able to discover. Isn’t anyone even interested in how we’re going to get there?”
“I figure that’s been taken care of,” said my co-pilot.
“O.K., Gutsy, it has,” I replied.
“Not on jets,” Purple Top averred. “We wouldn’t get there in a million years!”
“It’s the new engine,” Bottle put in. “A sub-spatial energy warp.”
“You’ve been talking to Plastic,” I accused.
“The hell I have.” That was Bottle again, toneless, flat. “What have I got to do but think. I haven’t any fingers to twiddle. I figure it has to be something like that. I can just figure it, vaguely.”
“How about that, Plastic?” I asked. The Plastic Man’s nasal tones took over.
“Bottle’s got it—backwards. It’s a space warp on the sub-energy level.” He launched into a discussion of the DC-3 Converter. I heard his words, if you get what I mean, but I didn’t know what he was saying. He wound up, “The source of power for our converter is a very special alloy, you might call it, of radioactive materials. Our converter contains just one charge—enough to get us where we’re going. That is why we can’t count on coming back.”
Gutsy exploded. “Why couldn’t we carry an extra charge to come back on?”
I could visualize the Plastic Man’s stiff, unsmiling face.
“Our journey will last for twelve years—and so will the charge that is in the machine. The charge lasts twelve years, whether it is inside or outside the machine. We could carry an extra charge, but it would exhaust itself in the course of the trip. And we’d all be dead in three weeks from radiation disease.”
“Twelve year!” yelped Purple Top. “I’ll be dead in less than that!”
“It’s up to you to stay alive,” I snapped at him. “We got plenty of shots aboard for you. You can die after we get there.”
“Thanks,” Purple Top acknowledged.
I went on brusquely. “So we’ll spend twelve years in space. What’s the difference, how long it takes? That’s only part of it. As soon as we land, we’re going to set up a radio beacon that will contact Earth. We’ll use it to report on the conditions we find. It will take four years for our carrier wave to reach Earth. That will add up to sixteen years. Four years later—twenty years from now—we’ll hear the first broadcast sent back to us from Earth. Meantime, we’ll have plenty to do, mapping the planet and getting a space cleared out and built up for future settlers. A lot of that Bottle can handle by himself with the special machines he’s been training on—”
I went on, told them a lot of things. I reminded them of the acutely critical population congestion on Earth. The governments knew that something had to be done about it within the next century. Mars had turned out to be a lousy place to colonize, and Venus was even worse. What had been tried there, on both planets, wasn’t going over so well.
The plan was, if our converter did not fail and we safely made a planet-fall, other expeditions would be sent out, to other stars. Somewhere, habitable planets must be found to relieve Earth’s growing congestion.
“It’s a toss-up whether we get there,” I told them flatly, “or, having got there, whether we’ll find a planet fit to land on. Hadn’t you wondered why a bunch of monsters like us were assembled to make this trip? Who else could stand twelve years in this can without going off his rocker? The fact that we are still sane, after what happened to us, shows we can take it—take it better than all the thousands of A-l, physically fit young bucks who would have gladly volunteered for this job. Are you beginning to get it? I’ll repeat it—frankly, the chances of our ever getting a radio message back to Earth are remotely small. And who would miss us if we failed? And who else would be as glad to get away from Earth?”
I told them a lot more to whip up their morale—in case it needed whipping up. I wound up speaking directly to Bottle.
“It’s yours from here on. You plot the course for me and Gutsy to steer her by. When you’ve got it. Plastic will give her the gun. Check it out.”
* * * *
Twelve years is a long time to live with four other monsters. In less than a twelfth of that time, you don’t think of them as monsters any more. You don’t hate to look at them. You even crave their company. Underneath, these so-called monsters are like people you’ve known all your life—like you think you are yourself. It gets so you look at them and you don’t see monsters—you see people…friends…buddies. That’s how it was with us.
We got together in our rec room more and more often for games, for bull sessions, for any purpose at all to avoid being alone. You got so you felt the vastness and emptiness of space right down to the middle of your guts, and the loneliness of being alone scared hell out of you.
How do you keep your sanity throughout twelve years in a metal vacuum bottle? Bottle, maybe, can answer that better than I can. He’s been in a bottle even longer.
We had plenty to do, just running the ship. There was the hydroponics garden that had to have regular care—it furnished part of our food and kept our air oxygenated. No kind of machinery will run for twelve years without a breakdown, either—except the DC-3 Converter, and it functioned beautifully. But the other stuff kept going to pieces, especially after a few years. If we weren’t tinkering with the refrigerator, it was the air purifier, or the laundry machines. Or maybe the tape projector would take on a case of electronic gastritis. Twelve years is a long time, but it goes fast when you’ve adopted it as a way of life.
We celebrated all the holidays, like the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s. We even made a holiday of our own and called it D.D.—Date of Departure.
We didn’t miss the things you might think we missed. We didn’t miss crowds, or the neon lights of Earth. What we did miss was new things to see and new things to hear about. I would have given my silver skull to know what was going on, back on Earth.
After about eight years in space, Purple Top began to change. He had to take his shots regularly, of course, to stay alive. But he got so that he’d miss a shot for a long time, he felt so good. And that purple knot of his seemed to be shriveling and turning a pale lavender.
Within two years, Purple Top wasn’t Purple Top any more. And he deliberately smashed his hypo on the deck. He wouldn’t be needing it. He was cured of the Venusian fungus disease. Incredible, isn’t it? He was cured of an incurable disease.
We discussed the phenomenon with great interest among ourselves. Was it the steady storm of cosmic rays hurtling through our ship that had effected the cure? Or was it some other unguessable radiation that abounded in the deeps of space? We couldn’t tell, and I wished to hell there was a radiation that would change a silver skull back into flesh and bone. What wouldn’t I give to be able to weep decent tears again!
It was a bitter thing to contemplate—bitter for the slowly dying victims of the Venusian fungus disease back on Earth. They were kicked out of the space service for it—given a lingering death-sentence on Earth, when a few years in space might cure them completely. Well, you live, you know—and while you live, you learn things.
Anyway, we couldn’t rightly call him Purple Top any more, so we called him George. And for a while, George was the same as the old Purple Top we had known.
The change in George was subtle at first, but one thing about being a monster, it makes you sensitive to people’s reactions. We all sensed the change in George from the beginning. He took to shunning us, like we made him sick, or something. We saw less and less of George. He got moody.
I knew what was going on inside George’s mind. Wouldn’t any of us know? He was beginning to miss those things I said monsters couldn’t miss. He knew that if he were back on Earth right now, he’d have opportunities again—opportunities to work for a living among other human beings, to marry and have kids. That’s what was eating the heart out of George.
But nothing could be done about it now.
He had to take the situation or go over the line. He didn’t go over, but I think he came very close to it.
What saved us all about then was the fact that we were nearing the end of our journey. That was the one focus strong enough to bring us together and outweigh any psychological factors of hurt feelings or under-the-surface frictions.
Even Bottle was excited. He kept saving he was. You couldn’t tell it from the sound of his voice.
* * * *
We decelerated on the Alpha Centauri system, looking for a likely planetfall. It didn’t take us more than a week to find it, and it was good—too good, almost, to be true.
We checked the planet out with our instruments, and she was Earth-type, within the tolerance allowed. That dazed us all—made us quiet and filled us with renewed purpose. Really, we hadn’t expected it.
So the planet checked out good. We couldn’t set our ship down fast enough.
The blue air looked good around us, and the fleecy clouds when we got down low enough to pass through them. We could see the map of the new world spread out below us, all green and wrinkled up with mountains, and flat stretches that could only be plains, and seas and rivers.
Except for the shape of the continents, it was as much like Earth as any planet we could ever hope to see again. And it was ours—all ours.
We landed on a plateau that ended in a vertical precipice falling off into the sea. The sky was blue. Twin suns swam overhead in it, and it was spring in that hemisphere. White birds fluttered over the cliff and the singing sea, and there were trees and shrubs growing right up to the edge of the cliff. Our observations had shown us no signs of civilized life whatever.
We set our ship down in a clearing a half mile from the sea, where a small stream burbled through a field of grass—the ideal spot for our Earth-ranging radio beacon.
Suddenly a warning whistle cut across the tense bustle of our landing.
“What the hell—?” I said.
We had never thought we’d use our radio apparatus—ship’s radio, that is—except for local contact with our own exploring parties. Now it was sounding the warning that it had picked up a carrier wave. The light on the control panel blinked the code signal for the carrier’s kilocycle range.
Dread froze my hand for an instant, then I moved and tuned the set.
A voice filled our ship with sound—was carried by intercom to every station on our ship.
I can’t remember what the voice said. Docs it matter now? More important, I think, is the effect the voice had on us. It wasn’t the fact that the voice spoke English that stunned us, nor the knowledge that a spaceship from Earth rode the sky a mile above us.
What killed our souls, was the knowledge that we had been beaten—we had failed.
Of course, it wasn’t our fault. Twelve years is a long time. Science can advance a lot in twelve years—when it has a good start like the DC-3 Converter. You see what I mean? Our whole spaceship—crew included—had been obsolete from the moment we left Earth. New techniques had created a better machine—and better men were available to man it.
We learned about it from Commander Halloran as we gathered that evening around the first campfire that had ever been lit on this new world—and we named it then and there New Earth, in memory of the old Earth.
The other vessel had landed a short distance away, and Commander Halloran came over with a few of his officers. He had a crew of five hundred men on that ship of his.
We were all at the campfire, save Bottle. We hadn’t had time to unship him yet. And Commander Halloran knew how we felt. He was very delicate about the situation. But I only half heard his words, I was so taken up with my own thoughts. But I noticed George. He was changed from the surly, uncommunicative fellow he had become on the latter part of the voyage. He was leaning with interest on the commander’s words, and his eyes shone in the light of the campfire.
“…Made the trip in less than thirty days,” the commander was saying. “We can go anywhere in the galaxy in less than a year. We calculated to get here just before you arrived—we wanted you boys to be first to make a planetfall here. It was your right. You had it coming to you. We waited and picked you up with our detectors as you came in on the system. We followed you in to your landing.” He smiled. “I understand how you feel. You feel like we’ve taken your triumph and your glory away from you. We can’t help that—even though it isn’t so. What you did was plenty more than what we had to go through. Your names will go down in history as the first Earthmen to set foot on New Earth.
It was small consolation to me.
George said, excitement tingeing his voice, “Less than thirty days!” He looked at me. “In a month, I could be back on Earth, if I went back with them. Couldn’t I, Iron Head?”
My thoughts focused again. I thought of George, his restored manhood—the hope that was offered him after years of hopelessness.
Why was I griping?
“I think it would be a great thing for you to go back with us,” Commander Halloran said, taking the words out of my mouth. “Think what a sensation you’ll make among sufferers of the Venusian fungus disease!”
I knew that wasn’t what George was thinking. He was picturing to himself the sensation he’d make among the girls of Earth.
There isn’t much of my face left to show feelings, but what little there is must have shown something. Plastic, of course, was expressionless all the time, and Gutsy kept his thoughts to himself.
* * * *
Later, after the commander and his group had gone back to their ship, we went back inside our own. But not until I had stopped a moment and searched the star-blazing sky for old Sol. I saw my native sun—a pale flicker of yellow light, and abruptly followed the others inside.
The others had gone to their quarters, and as I came in, I ran into George coming out of his. He had a packed duffle bag on his shoulder.
“Thought I’d take my stuff over to the other ship—”
“Sure,” I said. “Go ahead, George, and say—”
He turned at the air lock door.
“…Good luck,” I finished.
I heard his hard shoe soles ring on the air lock floor, then the sound fell away to a chink, chink, chink as he descended the landing ramp.
Gutsy came out into the alleyway.
“George gone?”
I nodded.
“Guess he couldn’t stand us monsters any more.”
There was bitterness in his tone.
“No…you’re wrong, Gutsy. George couldn’t stand himself any more.”
The Plastic Man ducked out of Bottle’s quarters.
“So what if he’s gone?”
“I wonder if that’s the best thing?” I returned.
Bottle’s mechanical voice floated eerily out of his little chamber.
“You wouldn’t stop him, would you. Iron Head?”
I went in to get closer to Bottle. The others crowded after.
I said, “The matter with George is he thinks he’s useless. He thinks we all are. I saw it in his face out there by the campfire, when Halloran was spouting about the wonderful new ship they’ve developed. He figures none of us is needed any more, so he’s going back to Earth, because he’ll be needed there. Well, all right—let him go. But there’s plenty of work to be done here. We may be a bunch of monsters, but humanity still needs us. We’ve got to get this place ready to receive people when they start arriving. We’ve got to clear land, put up houses—”
I heard the chink, chink, chink on the ramp, but somehow it didn’t penetrate. I kept on talking.
“We’ve got the equipment and the guts to do the job. That’s why I think it’s a mistake to let George go back. He just thinks he’s needed back on Earth—”
The ring of hard shoe soles had sounded the length of the alleyway and stopped outside the door. I felt the tension in the air. I babbled aimlessly a moment more, then turned with a sick grin. George stood in the doorway.
“Go on, Iron Head,” he said softly, face pale. “Say the rest of it.”
“Look, George—” I protested.
“If you don’t, I will,” he went on, just as quietly. “I thought I could find a place where I was needed back on Earth. We’ll start from there. I admit it. That’s what I thought. I thought about the guys with the purple heads and I thought I was the hope they were looking for. But it came to me, all of a sudden, when I was about halfway to the other ship. They don’t need me either. Just knowing they can be cured will be enough for them.
“You know what I’m thinking,” he went on after a moment. “We were all monsters, until we lived together long enough none of us was a monster any more. And we had a job to do. That made life worth living and looking forward to. But suppose I did go back? Everybody would come for miles to look at me. Newsmen would chase me around with cameras. I could be turning video offers down left and right. Why all the excitement? Because the world needed me?” He grinned suddenly, wryly. “Hell, no! Because I was a monster—which just means somebody different.”
He stepped completely into Bottle’s little room.
George said, “I’ve come back, fellows, to help you do the job that I suddenly realize needs to be done.” He stopped and then went on doubtfully, peering at each of us in turn, “If you’ll have me back.”
Nobody said anything. I took George’s hand and shook it. The Plastic Man grabbed him around the waist and hugged. Gutsy hammered him on the back.
We had been like a sick organism, with one of its members out of function. Now we were whole again and feeling it. We were ready to whip this world—any world—into shape.