Christmas on Ganymede and Other Stories Read online

  Benson spat and scowled through the stringy hair over his eyes.

  “What’s the idea, Commander?”

  Pelham’s laughter came in short, harsh barks. “Those Ossies are expecting reindeer, and reindeer they’re going to have. Those animals will have to stand on something, won’t they? ”

  “Sure... But wait, hold on! There aren’t any reindeer on Ganymede. ”

  Commander Pelham paused on his way out. His eyes narrowed unpleasantly as they always did when he thought of Olaf Johnson.

  “Olaf is out rounding up eight spinybacks for us. They’ve got four feet, a head on one end and a tail on the other. That’s close enough for the Ossies. ” The old engineer chewed this information and chuckled nastily.

  “Good! I wish the fool joy of his job. ”

  “So do I,” gritted Pelham.

  He stalked out as Benson, still leering, slid underneath the sleigh.

  The commander’s description of a spinyback was concise and accurate, but it left out several interesting details. For one thing, a spinyback has a long, mobile snout, two large ears that wave back and forth gently, and two emotional purple eyes. The males have pliable spines of a deep crimson color along the backbone that seem to delight the female of the species. Combine these with a scaly, muscular tail and a brain by no means mediocre, and you have a spinyback— or at least you have one if you can catch one.

  It was just such a thought that occurred to Olaf Johnson as he sneaked down from the rocky eminence toward the herd of twenty-five spinybacks grazing on the sparse, gritty undergrowth. The nearest spinies looked up as Olaf, bundled in fur and grotesque with attached oxygen nosepiece, approached. However, spinies have no natural enemies, so they merely gazed at the figure with languidly disapproving eyes and returned to their crunchy but nourishing fare.

  Olaf’s notions on bagging big game were sketchy. He fumbled in his pocket for a lump of sugar, held it out and said:

  “Here, pussy, pussy, pussy, pussy, pussy!”

  The ears of the nearest spinie twitched in annoyance. Olaf came closer and held out the sugar again. “Come, bossy! Come, bossy! ”

  The spinie caught sight of the sugar and rolled his eyes at it. His snout twitched as he spat out his last mouthful of vegetation and ambled over. With neck stretched out, he sniffed. Then, using a rapid, expert motion, he struck at the out-held palm and flipped the lump into his mouth. Olaf’s other hand whistled down upon nothingness.

  With a hurt expression, Olaf held out another piece. “Here, Prince! Here, Fido! ”

  The spinie made a low, tremulous sound deep in his throat. It was a sound of pleasure. Evidently this strange monstrosity before him, having gone insane, intended to feed him these bits of concentrated succulence forever. He snatched and was back as quickly as the first time. But, since Olaf had held on firmly this time, the spinie almost bagged half a finger as well.

  Olaf’s yell lacked a bit of the nonchalance necessary at such times. Nevertheless, a bite that can be felt through thick gloves is a bite!

  He advanced boldly upon the spinie. There are some things that stir the Johnson blood and bring up the ancient spirit of the Vikings. Having one’s finger bitten, especially by an unearthly animal, is one of these.

  There was an uncertain look in the spinie’s eyes as he backed slowly away. There weren’t any white cubes being offered any more and he wasn’t quite sure what was going to happen now. The uncertainty vanished with a suddenness he did not expect, when two glove-muffled hands came down upon his ears and jerked. He let out a high-pitched yelp and charged forward.

  A spinie has a certain sense of dignity. He doesn’t like to have his ears pulled, particularly when other spinies, including several unattached females, have formed a ring and are looking on.

  The Earthman went over backward and remained in that position for a while. Meantime, the spinie backed away a few feet in a gentlemanly manner and allowed Johnson to get to his feet.

  The old Viking blood frothed still higher in Olaf. After rubbing the hurt spot where he had landed on his oxygen cylinder, he jumped, forgetting to allow for Ganymedan gravity. He sailed five feet over the spinie’s back.

  There was awe in the animal’s eye as he watched Olaf, for it was a stately jump. But there was a certain amount of bewilderment as well. There seemed to be no purpose to the maneuver.

  Olaf landed on his back again and got the cylinder in the same place. He was beginning to feel a little embarrassed. The sounds that came from the circle of onlookers were remarkably like snickers.

  “Laugh!” he muttered bitterly. “I haven’t even begun to fight yet.”

  He approached the spinie slowly, cautiously. He circled, watching for his opening. So did the spinie. Olaf feinted and the spinie ducked. Then the spinie reared and Olaf ducked.

  Olaf kept remembering new profanity all the time. The husky “Ur-r-r-r-r” that came out the spinie’s throat seemed to lack the brotherly spirit that is usually associated with Christmas.

  There was a sudden, swishing sound. Olaf felt something collide with his skull, just behind his left ear. This time he turned a back somersault and landed on the nape of his neck. There was a chorused whinny from the onlookers, and the spinie waved his tail triumphantly.

  Olaf got rid of the impression that he was floating through a star-studded unlimited space and wavered to his feet.

  “Listen,” he objected, “using your tail is a foul!”

  He leaped back as the tail shot forward again, then flung himself forward in a diving tackle. He grabbed at the spinie’s feet and felt the animal come down on his back with an indignant yelp.

  Now it was a case of Earth muscles against Ganymedan muscles, and Olaf became a man of brute strength. He struggled up, and the spinie found himself slung over the stranger’s shoulders.

  The spinie objected vociferously and tried to prove his objections by a judicious whip of the tail. But he was in an inconvenient position and the stroke whistled harmlessly over Olaf’s head.

  The other spinies made way for the Earthman with saddened expressions. Evidently they were all good friends of the captured animal and hated to see him lose a fight. They returned to their meal in philosophic resignation, plainly convinced that it was kismet.

  On the other side of the rocky ledge, Olaf reached his prepared cave. There was the briefest of scrambling struggles before he managed to sit down hard on the spinie’s head and put enough knots into rope to hold him there.

  A few hours later, when he had corralled his eighth spinyback, he possessed the technique that comes of long practice. He could have given a Terrestrial cowboy valuable pointers on throwing a maverick. Also, he could have given a Terrestrial stevedore lessons in simple and compound swearing.

  ’Twas the night before Christmas—and all through the Ganymedan Dome there was deafening noise and bewildering excitement, like an exploding nova equipped for sound. Around the rusty sleigh, mounted on its huge platform of purplewood, five Earthmen were staging a battle royal with a spinie.

  The spinie had definite views about most things, and one of his stubbornest and most definite views was that he would never go where he didn’t want to go. He made that clear by flailing one head, one tail, three spines and four legs in every possible direction, with all possible force.

  But the Earthmen insisted, and not gently. Despite loud, agonized squeaks, the spinie was lifted onto the platform, hauled into place and harnessed into hopeless helplessness.

  “Okay!” Peter Benson yelled. “Pass the bottle.”

  Holding the spinie’s snout with one hand, Benson waved the bottle under it with the other. The spinie quivered eagerly and whined tremulously. Benson poured some of the liquid down the animal's throat. There was a gurgling swallow and an appreciative whinny. The spinie’s neck stretched out for more.

  Benson sighed. “Our best brandy, too.”

  He up-ended the bottle and withdrew it half empty. The spinie, eyes whirling in their sockets rapidly, did
what seemed an attempt at a gay jig. It didn’t last long, however, for Ganymedan metabolism is almost immediately affected by alcohol. His muscles locked in a drunken rigor and, with a loud hiccup, he went out on his feet.

  “Drag out the next!” yelled Benson.

  In an hour the eight spinybacks were so many cataleptic statues. Forked sticks were tied around their heads as antlers. The effect was crude and sketchy, but it would do.

  As Benson opened his mouth to ask where Olaf Johnson was, that worthy showed up in the arms of three comrades, and he was putting up as stiff a fight as any spinie. His objections, however, were highly articulate.

  “I’m not going anywhere in this costume!” he roared, gouging at the nearest eye. “You hear me?”

  There certainly was cause for objection. Even at his best, Olaf had never been a heart-throb. But in his present condition, he resembled a hybrid between a spinie’s nightmare and a Picassian conception of a patriarch.

  He wore the conventional costume of Santa. His clothes were as red as red tissue paper sewed onto his space coat could make it. The “ermine” was as white as cotton wool, which it was. His beard, more cotton Wool glued into a linen foundation, hung loosely from his ears. With that below and his oxygen nosepiece above, even the strongest were forced to avert their eyes.

  Olaf had not been shown a mirror. But, between what he could see of himself and what his instinct told him, he would have greeted a good, bright lightning bolt like a brother.

  By fits and starts, he was hauled to the sleigh. Others pitched in to help, until Olaf was nothing but a smothered squirm and muffled voice.

  “Leggo," he mumbled. “Leggo and come at me one by one. Come on! ”

  He tried to spar a bit, to point his dare. But the multiple grips upon him left him unable to wriggle a finger.

  “Get in!” ordered Benson.

  “You go to hell!” gasped Olaf. “I’m not getting into any patented short-cut to suicide, and you can take your bloody flying sleigh and—”

  “Listen,” interrupted Benson, “Commander Pelham is waiting for you at the other end. He’ll skin you alive if you don’t show up in half an hour. ”

  “Commander Pelham can take the sleigh sideways and—”

  “Then think of your job! Think of a hundred and fifty a week. Think of every other year off with pay. Think of Hilda, back on Earth, who isn’t going to marry you without a job. Think of all that! ”

  Johnson thought, snarled. He thought some more, got into the sleigh, strapped down his bag and turned on the gravo-repulsors. With a horrible curse, he opened the rear jet.

  The sleigh dashed forward and he caught himself from going backward, over and out of the sleigh, by two-thirds of a whisker. He held onto the sides thereafter, watching the surrounding hills as they rose and fell with each lurch of the unsteady sleigh.

  As the wind rose, the undulations grew more marked. And when Jupiter came up, its yellow light brought out every jag and crag of the rocky ground, toward every one of which, in turn, the sleigh seemed headed. And by the time the giant planet had shoved completely over the horizon, the curse of drink— which departs from the Ganymedan organism just as quickly as it descends—began removing itself from the spinies.

  The hindmost spinie came out of it first, tasted the inside of his mouth, winced and swore off drink. Having made that resolution, he took in his immediate surroundings languidly. They made no immediate impression on him. Only gradually was the fact forced upon him that his footing, whatever it was, was not the usual stable one of solid Ganymede. It swayed and shifted, which seemed very unusual.

  Yet he might have attributed this unsteadiness to his recent orgy, had he not been so careless as to drop his glance over the railing to which he was anchored. No spinie ever died of heart-failure, as far as is recorded, but, looking downward, this one almost did.

  His agonized screech of horror and despair brought the other spinies into full, if headachy, consciousness. For a while there was a confused blur of squawking conversation as the animals tried to get the pain out of their heads and the facts in. Both aims were achieved and a stampede was organized. It wasn’t much of a stampede, because the spinies were anchored tightly. But, except for the fact that they got nowhere, they went through all the motions of a full gallop. And the sleigh went crazy.

  Olaf grabbed his beard a second before it let go of his ears.

  “Hey!” he shouted.

  It was something, like saying “Tut, tut” to a hurricane.

  The sleigh kicked, bucked and did a hysterical tango. It made sudden spurts, as if inspired to dash its wooden brains out against Ganymede’s crust. Meanwhile Olaf prayed, swore, wept and jiggled all the compressed air jets at once.

  Ganymede whirled and Jupiter was a wild blur. Perhaps it was the spectacle of Jupiter doing the shimmy that steadied the spinies. More likely it was the fact that they just didn’t give a hang any more. Whatever it was, they halted, made lofty farewell speeches to one another, confessed their sins and waited for death.

  The sleigh steadied and Olaf resumed his breathing once more. Only to stop again as he viewed the curious spectacle of hills and solid ground up above, and black sky and swollen Jupiter down below.

  It was at this point that he, too, made his peace with the eternal and awaited the end.

  “Ossie” is short for ostrich, and that’s what native Ganymedans look like, except that their necks are shorter, their heads are larger, and their feathers look as if they were about to fall out by the roots. To this, add a pair of scrawny, feathered arms with three stubby fingers apiece. They can speak English, but when you hear them, you wish they couldn’t.

  There were fifty of them in the low purplewood structure that was their “meeting hall.” On the mound of raised dirt in the front of the room—dark with the smoky dimness of burning purplewood torches fetid to boot—sat Commander Scott Pelham and five of his men. Before them strutted the frowziest Ossie of them all, inflating his huge chest with rhythmic, booming sounds.

  He stopped for a moment and pointed to a ragged hole in the ceiling.

  “Look!” he squawked. “Chimney. We make. Sannycaws come in.”

  Pelham grunted approval. The Ossie clucked happily. He pointed to the little sacks of woven grass that hung from the walls.

  “Look! Stockies. Sannycaws put presets! ”

  “Yeah,” said Pelham unenthusiastically. Chimney and stockings. Very nice. ” He spoke out of the corner of his mouth to Sim Pierce, who sat next to him: another half-hour in this dump will kill me. When is that fool coming? ”

  Pierce stirred uneasily.

  “Listen,” he said, "I've been doing some figuring. We’re safe on everything but the karen leaves, and we’re still four tons short on that. If we can get this fool business over with in the next hour, so we can start the next shift and work the Ossies at double, we can make it. ” He leaned back. “Yes, I think we can make it. ”

  “Just about,” replied Pelham gloomily. “That’s if Johnson gets here without pulling another bloomer. ”

  The Ossie was talking again, for Ossie like to talk. He said:

  “Every year Kissmess comes. Kissmess nice, evvy-body friendly. Ossie like Kissmess. You like Kissmess? ”

  “Yeah, fine,” Pelham snarled politely. “Peace on Ganymede, good will toward men—especially Johnson. Where the devil is that idiot, anyhow? ”

  He fell into an annoyed fidget, while the Ossie jumped up and down a few times in a thoughtful sort of manner, evidently for the exercise of it. He continued the jumping, varying it with little hopping dance steps, till Pelham’s fists began making strangling gestures. Only an excited squawk from the hole in the wall dignified by the term “window” kept Pelham from committing Ossie-slaughter.

  Ossies swarmed about and the Earthmen fought for a view.

  Against Jupiter’s great yellowness was outlined a flying sleigh, complete with reindeers. It was only a tiny thing, but there was no doubt about it. Santa Claus wa
s coming.

  There was only one thing wrong with the picture. The sleigh, “reindeer” and all, while plunging ahead, at a terrific speed, was flying upside down.

  The Ossies dissolved into squawking cacophony.

  “Sannycaws! Sannycaws! Sannycaws! ”

  They scrambled out the window like so many animated dust-mops gone mad. Pelham and his men used the low door.

  The sleigh was approaching, growing larger, lurching from side to side and vibrating like an off-center flywheel. Olaf Johnson was a tiny figure holding on desperately to the side of the sleigh with both hands.

  Pelham was shouting wildly, incoherently choking on the thin atmosphere every time he forgot to breathe through his nose. Then he stopped and stared in horror. The sleigh, almost life-size now, was dipping down. If it had been an arrow shot by William Tell, it could not have aimed between Pelham’s eyes more accurately.

  “Everybody down!” he shrieked, and dropped.

  The wind of the sleigh’s passage whistled keenly and brushed his face. Olaf’s voice could be heard for an instant, high-pitched and indistinct. Compressed air spurted, leaving tracks of condensing water vapor.

  Pelham lay quivering, hugging Ganymede’s frozen crust. Then, knees shaking like a Hawaiian hula-girl, he rose slowly. The Ossies who had scattered before the plunging vehicle had assembled again. Off in the distance, the sleigh was veering back.

  Pelham watched as it swayed and hovered, still rotating. It lurched toward the dome, curved off to one side, turned back, and gathered speed.

  Inside that sleigh, Olaf worked like a demon. Straddling his legs wide, he shifted his weight desperately. Sweating and cursing, trying hard not to look “downward” at Jupiter, he urged the sleigh into wilder and wilder swings. It was wobbling through an angle of 180 degrees now, and Olaf felt his stomach raise strenuous objections.

  Holding his breath, he leaned hard with his right foot and felt the sleigh swing far over. At the extremity of that swing, he released the gravo-repulsor and, in Ganymede’s weak gravity, the sleigh jerked downward. Naturally, since the vehicle was bottom-heavy due to the metal gravo-repulsor beneath, it righted itself as it fell.