Kornbluth, Mary (Ed) Read online

  JAMES E. TANNER

  NATIVE OF EARTH.

  Falk stood up, blinded by the glory of the vision that grew in his mind. He thought he understood now why the Doorways were not selective and why their makers no longer used them.

  Once - a billion years ago, perhaps - they must have been uncontested owners of the galaxy. But many of their worlds were small planets like Mars - too small to keep their atmospheres and their water forever. Millions of years ago, they must have begun to fall back from these. And meanwhile, Falk thought, on the greater worlds just now cooling, the lesser breeds had arisen: the crawling, brawling things. The lizards. The men. Things not worthy of the stars.

  But even a man could learn if he lived long enough, journeyed far enough. James Tanner had signed himself not “TERRAN SPACE CORPS” or “U.S.A.” but “NATIVE OF EARTH.”

  So the way was made long, and the way was made hard; and the lesser breeds stayed on their planets. But for a man, or a lizard, who would give up all that he called “life” for knowledge, the way was open.

  Falk turned off the beam of his head lamp and looked up at the diamond mist of the galaxy. Where would he be a thousand years from today? Standing on that mote of light, or that, or that... ?

  Not dust, at any rate. Not dust, unmourned, unworthy. He would be a voyager with a destination, and perhaps half his journey would be done.

  Wolfert would wait in vain for his return, but it would not matter; Wolfert was happy - if you called that happiness. And on Earth, the mountains would rise and fall long after the question of human survival had been forgotten.

  Falk, by that time, perhaps, would be home.

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  * * * *

  that low

  theodore sturgeon

  There was a “psychic” operating on Vince Street. Fowler went to see her. Not that he had any faith in mumbo-jumbo: far from it. He had been told that this Mrs. Hallowell worked along strictly logical lines. That’s why he went. He liked the sound of that, being what he was. He went to her and asked her about killing himself. She said he couldn’t do it. Not “You won’t” or “shouldn’t”. She said, “You can’t.”

  This Fowler was a failure specialist, in the sense that a man is a carburetor specialist or a drainage specialist or a nerve specialist. You don’t get to be that kind of specialist without spending a lot of time with carburetors or sewers or nerves. You don’t stay nice and objective about it either. You get in it up to the elbows, up to the eyeballs. Fowler was a man who knew all that one man could know about failure. He knew all of the techniques, from the small social failure of letting his language forget what room of the house his mouth was in, through his declaration of war on the clock and the calendar (in all but style he was the latest), to the crowning stupidity of regarding his opinions as right purely because they were his opinions. So he had fallen and floundered through life, never following through, jumping when he should have crept, and lying down at sprintingtime. He could have written a book on the subject of failure, except for the fact that if he had, it might have been a success... and he hated failure. Well, you don’t have to love your speciality to be a specialist. You just have to live with it.

  It was understandable, therefore, that he should be impressed by Mrs. Hallowell’s reputation for clarity and logic, for he truly believed that here was a kindred spirit. He brought his large features and his flaccid handshake to her and her office, which were cool. The office was Swedish modern and blond. Mrs. Hallowell was dark, and said, “Sit down. Your name?”

  “Maxwell Fowler.”

  “Occupation?”

  “Engineer.”

  She glanced up. She had aluminium eyes. “Not a graduate engineer.” It was not a question.

  “I would have been,” said Fowler, “except for a penny-ante political situation in the school. There was a fellow—”

  “Yes,” she said. “Married?”

  “I was. You know, the kind that’ll kick a man when he’s down. She was a—”

  “Now, Mr. Fowler. What was it you wanted here?”

  “I hear you can foretell the future.”

  “I’m not interested in gossip,” she said, and it was the only cautionary thing she said in the entire interview. “I know about people, that’s all.”

  He said, “Ever since I could walk and talk, people have been against me. I can whip one or two or sometimes half a dozen or more, but by and large I’m outnumbered. I’m tired. Sometimes I think I’ll check out.”

  “Are you going to ask me if you should?”

  “No. If I will. You see, I think about it all the time. Sometimes I—”

  “All right,” she said. “As long as you understand that I don’t give advice. I just tell about what’s going to happen.”

  “What’s going to happen?”

  “Give me a check.”

  “What?”

  “Give me a check. No - don’t write on it. Just give it to me.”

  “But—”

  ‘You wouldn’t pay me afterward.”

  “Now look, my word’s as good as—” and then he looked into the eyes. He got out his checkbook. She took a pen and wrote on the check.

  She gave it back to him and he looked at it and said, “That’s foolish.”

  “You have it, though.”

  “Yes, I have, but—”

  “Sign it then,” she said casually, “or go away.”

  He signed it. “Well?”

  She hesitated. There was something—

  “Well?” he rapped again. “What’ll I do? I’m tired of all this persecution.”

  “I take it you’re asking me what you shall do - not what you should or will do.”

  “Lawyer’s talk, huh.”

  “Laws,” she said. ‘Yes.” She wet her lips. ‘You shall live a long and unhappy life.” Then she put away the check.

  Maxwell looked after it, longingly. “It can’t be unhappier than it is.”

  “That may well be.”

  “Then I don’t want to live a long life.”

  “But you shall.”

  “Not if I don’t want to,” he said grimly. “I tell you, I’m tired.”

  She shook her head. “It’s gone too far,” she said, not unkindly. ‘You can’t change it.”

  He got up. “I can. Anytime, I can. Then you’ll be wrong, won’t you?”

  “I’m not wrong,” said Mrs. Hallowell.

  “I’ll kill myself,” said Maxwell, and that was when she told him he couldn’t. He was very angry, but she did not give him back his check. By the time he thought of stopping payment on it, it had cleared the bank. He went on living his life.

  The amount of money he had paid Mrs. Hallowell dug quite a hole, but for a surprisingly long time he was able to walk around it. However, he did nothing to fill it up, and inevitably he had the choice of facing his creditors or killing himself. So he got a piece of rope and made a noose and put it around his neck. He tied the other end to the leg of the radiator, and he fell six stories. He hit a canvas marquee, tore through it, and fell heavily to the sidewalk. There was quite a crowd there, after a while, to listen to the noises he made because of what was broken.

  Fowler took a while to mend, and spent it in careful thought. He took no comfort from his thoughts, for they were honest ones, and he did not care at all for his conclusions, which drafted a portrait no one would admire and an insight no one would want as a bedfellow. He got through it, though, and put a list of his obligations down on paper and drew up a plan for taking care of things. It was a plan that was within his capabilities and meant chip, chip, chip for a long, long, time before he could ever call himself honestly broke again. The first person he tried it out on was the business manager of the hospital, and to his immense surprise it worked: that is, he wouldn’t get sued for the bill, and the hospital would go along with him until it was all straightened out. Nobody had ever given him that much of a break before; but then, he had never tackled a problem this way before.


  He got out of the hospital and began chipping.

  * * * *

  Mrs. Hallowell had a bad moment over Fowler. She started up out of her sleep one night, thinking about him.

  “Oh, how awful,” she said. “I made a mistake!”

  She phoned in the morning. Fowler was not there. Mrs. Hallowell phoned and phoned around until she got someone who could tell her about Fowler. The tenant in the apartment next to Fowler’s had made a mistake about a gas heater, and had a bad cold, and lit a match, and blew the end of the building out. Fowler had been picked up from the wreckage, bleeding. The someone said, “Is there any message I could send to him?”

  “No,” said Mrs. Hallowell. “No. Not... now.”

  They saved Fowler that time, too. It was a lot of trouble. They had to take this and that off, and the other out. He was put, finally, in a very short bed with a mass of equipment beside him, humming and clicking. It circulated fluids, and another part of it dripped into a tube, and there was a thing that got emptied a couple of times a day without Fowler’s worrying about it.

  That was the trouble with Mrs. Hallowell’s talent. It lay in such broad lines. A mistake could cover a lot of territory. Fowler gradually became aware of her mistake. It took him about two months.

  People came by and clucked their tongues when they saw him. There was a bright-eyed, dry-faced old lady who put flowers near him every week or so. He didn’t have to go on with that chip, chip, pay, pay any more. Everybody was sorry for him, and everybody always would be, as long as he lived, which would be very nearly as long as the equipment could be kept running. A long time. A long life. Mrs. Hallowell had been right, dead right, about the long life.

  Where she made her mistake was in thinking that he would be unhappy.

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  * * * *

  or the grasses grow

  avram davidson

  About halfway along the narrow and ill-paved county road between Crosby and Spanish Flats (all dips and hollows shimmering falsely like water in the heat till you get right up close to them), the road to Tickisall Agency branches off. No pretense of concrete or macadam - or even grading - deceives the chance or rarely purposeful traveler. Federal, state, and county governments have better things to do with their money: Tickisall pays no taxes, its handful of residents have only recently been accorded the vote, and that grudgingly: an out-of-state judge unexpectedly on the circuit. Man had no idea of the problem involved. Courts going to hell anyway.

  The sun-baked earth is cracked and riven. A few dirty sheep and a handful of scrub cows share its scanty herbage with an occasional sway-backed horse or stunted burro. Here and there a gaunt automobile rests in the thin shadow of a board shack and a child, startled doubtless by the smooth sound of a strange motor, runs like a lizard through the dusty wastes to hide, and then to peer. Melon vines dried past all hope of fruit lie in patches next to whispery, tindery cornstalks.

  And in the midst of all this, next to the only spring which never goes dry, are the only painted buildings, the only decent buildings, in the area. In the middle of the green lawn is a pole with the flag, and right behind the pole, over the front door, the sign: U. S. BUREAU OF INDIAN AFFAIRS. TICKISALL AGENCY. OFFICE OF THE SUPERINTENDENT.

  Before Uncle Fox-Head sat a basket with four different kinds of clay, and next to the basket was a medicine gourd full of water. The old man rolled the clay between his moistened palms, singing in a low voice. Then he washed his hands and sprinkled them with pollen. Then he took up the prayer sticks, made of juniper (once there had been juniper trees on the Reservation, once there had been many trees) and painted with the signs of Thunder, Sun, Moon, Rain, Lightning; with the feathers tied to them - once there bad been birds, too . . .

  Oh, people-of-the-Hidden-Places,

  Oh, take our message to the Hidden Places,

  Swiftly, swiftly, now,

  the old man chanted, shaking the medicine sticks.

  Oh, you Swift Ones, People-with-no-legs,

  Take our message to the People-with-no-bodies,

  Swiftly, swiftly, now . . .

  The old man’s skin was like a cracked, worn moccasin. With his turkey-claw hand he took up the gourd rattle, shook it: west~ south, up, down, east north.

  Oh, people-of-the-hollow-Earth,

  Take our message to the hollow Earth,

  Take our song to our Fathers and Mothers,

  Take our cry to the Spirit People,

  Take and go, take and go,

  Swiftly, swiftly, now . . .

  The snakes rippled across the ground and were gone, one by one. The old man’s sister’s son helped him back to his sheepskin, spread in the shade, where he half sat, half lay, panting.

  * * * *

  His great-nephews, Billy Cottonwood and Sam Quarterhorse, were talking together in English. “There was a fellow in my outfit,” Cottonwood said; “a fellow from West Virginia, name of Corrothers. Said his grandmother claimed she could charm away warts. So I said my great-uncle claimed be could make snakes. And they all laughed fit to kill and said, ‘Chief, when you try a snow job, it turns into a blizzard!’ . . . Old Corrothers,” be reflected. “We were pretty good buddies. Maybe I’ll go to West Virginia and look him up. I could bitch, maybe.”

  Quarterhorse said, “Yeah, you can go to West Virginia, and I can go to L.A. - but what about the others? Where they going to go, if Washington refuses to act?”

  The fond smile of recollection left his cousin’s lean, brown face. “I don’t know,” be said. “I be damned and go hell if I know.” And then the old pickup came rattling and coughing up to the house, and Sam said, “Here’s Newton.”

  Newton Quarterhorse, his brother Sam, and Billy Cottonwood were the only three Tickisalls who bad passed the physical and gone into the Army. There weren’t a lot of others who were of conscripting age (or any other age, for that matter), and whom TB didn’t keep out, other ailments active or passive did. Once there had been trees on the Reservation, and birds, and deer, and healthy men.

  The wash-faded Army sun tans bad been clean and fresh as always when Newt set out for Crosby, but they were dusty and sweaty now. He took a piece of wet burlap out and removed a few bottles from it. “Open these, Sam, will you, while I wash,” be said. “Cokes for us, strawberry pop for the old people . . . How’s Uncle Fox-Head?”

  Billy grunted. “Playing at making medicine snakes again . Do you suppose, if we believed him - that he could?”

  Newt shrugged. “Well, maybe if the telegram don’t do any good, the snakes will. And I’m damned sure they won’t do no worse. That son of a bitch Easly,” he said, looking out over the drought-bitten land. “ ‘Sending a smoke signal to the Great White Father again, Sitting Bull?’ he says, smirking and sneering. ‘You just take the money and send the wire,’ I told him . . . They looked at me like coyotes looking at a sick calf.” Abruptly, he turned away and went to dip his handkerchief in the bucket. Water was hard come by.

  The lip of the bottle clicked against one of Uncle Fox-Head’s few teeth. He drank noisily, then licked his lips. “Today we drink the white men’s sweet water,” he said. “What will we drink tomorrow?” No one said anything. “I will tell you, then,” he continued. “Unless the white men relent, we will drink the bitter water of the Hollow Places. They are bitter, but they are strong and good.” He waved his withered hand in a semicircle. “All this will go,” he said, “and the Fathers and Mothers of the People will return and lead us to our old home inside the Earth.” His sister’s son, who had never learned English nor gone to school, moaned. “Unless the white men relent,” said the old man.

  “They never have,” said Cottonwood, in Tickisall. In English, he said, “What will he do when he sees that nothing happens tomorrow except that we get kicked the hell out of here?”

  Newt said, “Die, I suppose . . . which might not be a bad idea. For all of us.”

  His brother turned and looked at him. “If you’re planning Quarterhorse�
��s Last Stand, forget about it. There aren’t twenty rounds of ammunition on the whole Reservation.”

  Billy Cottonwood raised his head. “We could maybe move in with the Apahoya,” be suggested. “They’re just as dirt-poor as we are, but there’s more of them, and I guess they’ll hold on to their land awhile yet.” His cousins shook their heads. “Well, not for us. But the others . . . Look, I spoke to Joe Feather Cloud that last time I was at Apahoya Agency. If we give him the truck and the sheep, he’ll take care of Uncle Fox-Head.”

  Sam Quarterhorse said be supposed that was the best thing. “For the old man, I mean. I made up my mind. I’m going to L.A. and pass for Colored.” He stopped.

  They waited till the now shiny automobile had gone by toward the Agency in a cloud of dust. His brother said, “The buzzards are gathering.” Then he asked, “How come, Sam?”