Binder1, p.19
Binder1, page 19
I pushed my sleep-stuck eyes open and blinked. “Huh? What’s going on?”
Holdreth leaned down and shook me savagely. “Get up, Gus!”
I struggled to my feet slowly. “Hell of a thing to do, wake a fellow up in the middle of the—”
I found myself being propelled from my cabin and led down the corridor to the control room. Blearily, I ;followed where Holdreth pointed, and then I woke up ;in a hurry.
The drive was battered again. Someone—or something—had completely undone my repair job of the night before.
If there had been bickering among us, it stopped. This was past the category of a joke now; it couldn’t be ;laughed off, and we found ourselves working together ;as a tight unit again, trying desperately to solve the ;puzzle before it was too late.
“Let’s review the situation,” Holdreth said, pacing nervously up and down the control cabin. “The drive ;has been sabotaged twice. None of us knows who did it, ;and on a conscious level each of us is convinced he ;didn’t do it.”
He paused. “That leaves us with two possibilities. Either, as Gus suggested, one of us is doing it unaware ;of it even himself, or someone else is doing it while ;we’re not looking. Neither possibility is a very cheerful ;one.”
“We can stay on guard, though,” I said. “Here’s what I propose: first, have one of us awake at all times— ;sleep in shifts, that is, with somebody guarding the ;drive until I get it fixed. Two—jettison all the animals ;aboard ship.”
“What?"
“He’s right,” Davison said. “We don’t know what we may have brought aboard. They don’t seem to be intelligent, but we can’t be sure. That purple-eyed baby ;! giraffe, for instance—suppose he’s been hypnotizing us ;j into damaging the drive ourselves? How can we tell?”
“Oh, but—” Holdreth started to protest, then stopped and frowned soberly. “I suppose we’ll have to admit the ;possibility,” he said, obviously unhappy about the prospect of freeing our captives. “We’ll empty out the hold, ;and you see if you can get the drive fixed. Maybe later ;we’ll recapture them all, if nothing further develops.”
We agreed to that, and Holdreth and Davison cleared the ship of its animal cargo while I set to work determinedly at the drive mechanism. By nightfall, I had ;managed to accomplish as much as I had the day before.
I sat up as watch the first shift, aboard the strangely quiet ship. I paced around the drive cabin, fighting the ;great temptation to doze off, and managed to last through ;until the time Holdreth arrived to relieve me.
Only—when he showed up, he gasped and pointed at the drive. It had been ripped apart a third time.
Now we had no excuse, no explanation. The expedition had turned into a nightmare.
I could only protest that I had remained awake my entire spell on duty, and that I had seen no one and ;nothing approach the drive panel. But that was hardly a ;satisfactory explanation, since it either cast guilt on me ;as the saboteur or implied that some unseen external ;power was repeatedly wrecking the drive. Neither hypothesis made sense, at least to me.
By now we had spent four days on the planet, and food was getting to be a major problem. My carefully ;budgeted flight schedule called for us to be two days out ;on our return journey to Earth by now. But we still ;were no closer to departure than we had been four days ;ago.
The animals continued to wander around outside, nosing up against the ship, examining it, almost fondling it, with those damned pseudo-giraffes staring soul-fully at us always. The beasts were as friendly as ever, ;little knowing how the tension was growing within the ;hull. The three of us walked around like zombies, eyes ;bright and lips clamped. We were scared—all of us.
Something was keeping us from fixing the drive.
Something didn’t want us to leave this planet.
I looked at the bland face of the purple-eyed giraffe staring through the viewport, and it stared mildly back ;at me. Around it was grouped the rest of the local ;fauna, the same incredible hodgepodge of improbable ;genera and species.
That night, the three of us stood guard in the control room together. The drive was smashed anyway. The ;wires were soldered in so many places by now that the ;control panel was a mass of shining alloy, and I knew ;that a few more such sabotagings and it would be impossible to patch it together anymore—if it wasn’t so ;already.
The next night, I just didn’t knock off. I continued soldering right on after dinner (and a pretty skimpy ;dinner it was, now that we were on close rations) and ;far on into the night.
By morning, it was as if I hadn’t done a thing.
“I give up,” I announced, surveying the damage. “I don’t see any sense in ruining my nerves trying to fix a ;thing that won’t stay fixed.”
Holdreth nodded. He looked terribly pale. “We’ll have to find some new approach.”
“Yeah. Some new approach.”
I yanked open the food closet and examined our stock. Even figuring in the synthetics we would have ;fed to the animals if we hadn’t released them, we were ;low on food. We had overstayed even the safety margin. It would be a hungry trip back—if we ever did get ;back.
I clambered through the hatch and sprawled down on a big rock near the ship. One of the furless dogs came ;over and nuzzled in my shirt. Davison stepped to the ;hatch and called down to me.
“What are you doing out there, Gus?”
“Just getting a little fresh air. I’m sick of living aboard that ship.” I scratched the dog behind his pointed ears, ;and looked around.
The animals had lost most of their curiosity about us, and didn’t congregate the way they used to. They were ;meandering all over the plain, nibbling at little deposits ;of a white doughy substance. It precipitated every night. ;“Manna,” we called it. All the animals seemed to live ;on it.
I folded my arms and leaned back.
We were getting to look awfully lean by the eighth day. I wasn’t even trying to fix the ship anymore; the ;hunger was starting to get me. But I saw Davison ;puttering around with my solderbeam.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m going to repair the drive,” he said. “You don’t want to, but we can’t just sit around, you know.” His ;nose was deep in my repair guide, and he was fumbling ;with the release on the solderbeam.
I shrugged. “Go ahead, if you want to.” I didn’t care what he did. All I cared about was the gaping emptiness in my stomach, and about the dimly grasped fact ;that somehow we were stuck here for good.
“Gus?”
“Yeah?”
“I think it’s time I told you something. I’ve been eating the manna for four days. It’s good. It’s nourishing stuff.”
“You’ve been eating—the manna? Something that grows on an alien world? You crazy?”
“What else can we do? Starve?”
I smiled feebly, admitting that he was right. From somewhere in the back of the ship came the sounds of ;Holdreth moving around. Holdreth had taken this thing ;worse than any of us. He had a family back on Earth, ;and he was beginning to realize that he wasn’t ever ;going to see them again.
“Why don’t you get Holdreth?” Davison suggested. “Go out there and stuff yourselves with manna. You’ve ;got to eat something.”
“Yeah. What can I lose?” Moving like a mechanical man, I headed toward Holdreth’s cabin. We could go ;out and eat the manna and cease being hungry, one ;way or another.
“Clyde?” I called. “Clyde?”
I entered his cabin. He was sitting at his desk, shaking convulsively, staring at the two streams of blood that trickled in red spurts from his slashed wrists.
“Clyde!"
He made no protest as I dragged him toward the infirmary cabin and got tourniquets around his arms, ;cutting off the bleeding. He just stared dully ahead, ;sobbing.
I slapped him and he came around. He shook his head dizzily, as if he didn’t know where he was.
“I—I—”
“Easy, Clyde. Everything’s all right.”
“It’s not all right,” he said hollowly. “I’m still alive. Why didn’t you let me die? Why didn’t you—”
Davison entered the cabin. “What’s been happening, Cus?”
“It’s Clyde. The pressure’s getting him. He tried to kill himself, but I think he’s all right now. Get him ;something to eat, will you?”
We had Holdreth straightened around by evening. Davison gathered as much of the manna as he could ;find, and we held a feast.
“I wish we had nerve enough to kill some of the local fauna,” Davison said. “Then we’d have a feast—steaks ;and everything!”
“The bacteria,” Holdreth pointed out quietly. “We don’t dare.”
“I know. But it’s a thought.”
“No more thoughts,” I said sharply. “Tomorrow morning we start work on the drive panel again. Maybe with some food in our bellies we’ll be able to keep awake ;and see what’s happening here.”
Holdreth smiled. “Good. I can’t wait to get out of this ship and back to a normal existence. God, I just ;can’t wait!”
“Let’s get some sleep,” I said. “Tomorrow we’ll give it another try. We’ll get back,” I said with a confidence ;I didn’t feel.
The following morning I rose early and got my toolkit. My head was clear, and I was trying to put the pieces ;together without much luck. I started toward the control cabin.
And stopped.
And looked out the viewport.
I went back and awoke Holdreth and Davison. “Take a look out the port,” I said hoarsely.
They looked. They gaped.
“It looks just like my house,” Holdreth said. “My house on Earth.”
“With all the comforts of home inside, I’ll bet.” I walked forward uneasily and lowered myself through ;the hatch. “Let’s go look at it.”
We approached it, while the animals frolicked around us. The big giraffe came near and shook its head gravely. ;The house stood in the middle of the clearing, small ;and neat and freshly painted.
I saw it now. During the night, invisible hands had put it there. Had assembled and built a cozy little ;Earth-type house and dropped it next to our ship for us ;to live in.
“Just like my house,” Holdreth repeated in wonderment.
“It should be,” I said. ‘They grabbed the model from your mind, as soon as they found out we couldn’t live ;on the ship indefinitely.”
Holdreth and Davison asked as one, “What do you mean?”
“You mean you haven’t figured this place out yet?” I licked my lips, getting myself used to the fact that I was ;going to spend the rest of my life here. “You mean you ;don’t realize what this house is intended to be?”
They shook their heads, baffled. I glanced around, from the house to the useless ship to the jungle to the ;plain to the little pond. It all made sense now.
“They want to keep us happy,” I said. “They knew we weren’t thriving aboard the ship, so they—they ;built us something a little more like home.”
“They? The giraffes?”
“Forget the giraffes. They tried to warn us, but it’s too late. They’re intelligent beings, but they’re prisoners just like us. I’m talking about the ones who run this ;place. The super-aliens who make us sabotage our own ;ship and not even know we’re doing it, who stand ;someplace up there and gape at us. The ones who ;dredged together this motley assortment of beasts from ;all over the galaxy. Now we’ve been collected too. This ;whole damned place is just a zoo—a zoo for aliens so far ;ahead of us we don’t dare dream what they’re like.”
I looked up at the shimmering blue-green sky, where invisible bars seemed to restrain us, and sank down ;dismally on the porch of our new home. I was resigned. ;There wasn’t any sense in struggling against them.
I could see the neat little placard now:
EARTHMEN. Native Habitat, Sol III.
Harlan Ellison got his start as a writer in the hardboiled mystery and science fiction digests of the 1950s. My reading was almost entirely limited to science fiction for some years after they let me have a card to the adult section of the public library in 1958. Reasonably I should have run into Harlans work immediately.
I didn’t. The only decent newsstand in town was nowhere near either my home or school. I didn’t start reading the SF magazines until about I960, and Harlan didn’t have any hardcover books available until the late ’60s. My first contact with Harlan’s fiction was through my American Literature class when I was a junior in high school.
Through, not in. The Iowa school systems have a deservedly fine reputation. At the time I lived there, Iowa had the highest literacy rate and the highest average level of education in the United States. (I have no reason to believe that has changed; I just don’t have the figures before me to check.)
While Iowans take education seriously, they’re a conservative lot. Farmers who take chances go bankrupt even faster than farmers who try to play it safe; and that’s saying a lot. Clinton High School was privileged to have on its faculty a young English teacher, Eugene Olsen, who was a professional writer on the side. The school board was aware of the situation and approved, to the extent of renting him a writing office downtown in order to keep him from leaving.
But they expected Mr. Olsen to avoid making waves that would embarrass them; and he was very careful to keep his end of the bargain.
There’s nothing you can write that won’t be offensive to somebody, generally for reasons that would never occur to the writer. (I was once attacked for maligning mastiffs.) Mr. Olsen’s writing, fiction and non-fiction both, was done under a pseudonym. He kept it secret from all but the three or four students he most trusted not to start a scandal.
It was to the same not-handful of us in 1961 that he loaned the tremendous discovery he’d made, a book of mainstream stories titled Gentleman Junkie—by Harlan Ellison, a young writer who also wrote SF.
It was a stunning volume. I read it only once before returning it, and I’ve never seen another copy; but not only did the general impact stay with me, two of the individual stories are still bright in my mind. I immediately bought all the Ellison I could find.
My initial contact with Harlan’s work had a funny side-effect, though: it almost didn’t occur to me that he was a natural for this volume. This is a science fiction anthology—and I don’t think of Harlan as a science fiction writer.
“Blind Lightning’’ certainly is SF; is an excellent story; and isn’t quite what you might expect of an Ellison piece, either.
But if I weren’t keeping this book pretty close to genre, I’d sure have used “No Game for Children" instead. . . .
BLIND LIGHTNING
Harlan Ellison
When Kettridge bent over to pick up the scurrying red lizard, the thing that had been waiting, struck.
Thought: this is the prelude to the Time of Fast. In bulk this strangely-formed will equal many cat-litters. It is warm and does not lose the essence. When the Essence-Stealer screams from the heavens, this strangely-formed will be many feastings for me. Safety and assured essence are mine. O boon at last granted! To the Lord of the Heaven I turn all thought! Lad-nars essence is yours at ending!
The thing rose nine feet on powerfully-muscled legs; it had a sheened, glistening fur. It resembled a gorilla and a Brahma bull and a Kodiak bear and a number of other Terran animals, but it was none of them. The comparison was as inaccurate and brief as the moment Kettridge half-turned. He saw one of the thing’s huge paws crashing toward him. The brief moment ended and Kettridge lay unconscious.
The huge beast bent from the waist and scooped up the man in the form-fitting metallic suit, brushing in annoyance at the belt of tools around the human’s waist.
Lad-nar looked over one massive shoulder at the sky.
Even as he watched, the roiling dark clouds split and a forked brilliance stabbed down at the jungle. Lad-nar squinted his eyes, unconsciously lowering the thin secondary lids over them, filtering out the worst of the light.
He shivered as the roar screamed across the sky.
Off to his left another blast of lightning fingered down, struck a towering blue plant with a shower of sparks and a dazzling flash. Thunder bubbled after it. The jungle smoked.
Thought: many risings and settings of the great warmer it has taken this Time of Fast to build. Now it will last for many more. The great warmer will be hidden and the cold will settle across the land. Lad-nar must find his way to the Place of Fasting. This strangely-formed will be many feastings.
He shoved the man under one furry arm, clasping his unconcious burden tightly. Lad-nar’s eyes were frightened. He knew the time of death and forbidden walking was at hand.
He loped off toward the mountains.
The first thing Kettridge saw when he awoke was the head of the beast. It was hanging suspended in the light from the storm. The roar of the rain pelting down in driving sheets, the brilliant white light of the lightning, all served as background for the huge beast’s head. That wide, blunt nose, three flaring nostrils. The massive double-lidded eyes—light from the fires outside blazing up in them like twin flickering comets. The high, hairy brow. The deep-black half-moons under the cheekbones.
The mouth of ripping, pointed teeth.
Kettridge was a man past the high tide of youth. He was not a strong man. At the beast’s snort, the white-haired Earthman fainted.
It was a short stretch of unconsciousness. Kettridge blinked several times and tried to push himself up on elbows alarmingly weak. The sight that greeted him was substantially the same as before.
Lad-nar was still sitting, powerfully muscled legs crossed, inside the mouth of the small cave, staring at him. Only the monstrous, frightening head, with pointed ears aprick, hanging there immobile.
